Singing to the Dead

by Caro Ramsay

  ‘My dear Lynne, the one thing your sister cannot and will never be able to do, is walk away.’

  15

  Vik Mulholland slipped his arm from underneath Fran’s neck, slowly and carefully so as not to disturb her. She shivered slightly in her sleep, murmured something he could not make out, then turned over, long dark hair spilling on to her bare shoulder. He pulled the duvet up to cover her, wondering how the hell she kept warm in this ice house. Easing himself up the bed, he rested his head on the wall behind him, missing the big leather headboard of his bed at home. He pulled the pillow from underneath him and placed it behind his head – he wasn’t convinced this wall wasn’t damp – and let his eyes adjust to the intermittent light that filtered through the thread-bare curtains, from the security lights in the back court he presumed; they would be flicking on and off with the movements of foxes, rats and God knew what else that lived out there.

  Vik yawned, a yawn of tiredness and contentment. Sleep seemed to be an elusive friend these days. But to sleep was to lose some of the enchantment of the witching hours.

  It was pain that kept Fran awake. He had noticed the little segmented box of capsules and tablets beside her bed – one to sleep, and four to control the pain that attacked her face with such ferocity that she would cry out with no warning, abruptly flinching as though she had been slapped. Tonight, he had held her as her face contorted and silent tears poured down her cheeks. Later, in answer to his questions, she had said it was like a red hot poker being thrust into your eye. And twisting. He imagined he understood. But for now she was asleep and at peace. And he was at peace, if not asleep. He had a big day tomorrow; he knew he had broken the back of the tampering case, and he was going to revel in his moment. DCI Quinn would be impressed, then a quiet word about his application for promotion would follow. He smiled to himself, imagining he heard a baby cry, a quiet mewling. The door opened slightly and Yoko the cat walked in, regarding him haughtily, and meowed before walking out again in distaste. Mulholland stuck two fingers up at it. Yes, he had the bed, he had the warm spot beside Fran, and the cat could bugger off.

  Mulholland stretched. Looking round the room, he had a sense of impermanence, as if she were just passing through. Her bedroom looked like a room in one of the cheap hotels in the West End where they rent by the hour, just a bed, a carpet, a chest of drawers and small wardrobe. He thought about other girlfriends he had known, and all that female stuff they had lying about. Fran had none of that. He made a mental list of things to buy her for Christmas. They were going to spend their first Christmas together, he was determined.

  Eve was listening to the birds singing. It was a clear sunny evening, not warm, but the early spring light was spectacular. She heard the call of a collared dove in the tree above her and looked round for its mate – it would not be far away. She opened the car door and put her camera on the roof, thinking about the light and the fall of the shadow, looking at the silhouette of branches on the pale sky, wondering if she could line up a good picture. She lifted her camera, standing between the door and the body of the car, one foot on the running board, steadying her elbows on the roof, as she adjusted the focus. She waited until the collared dove turned its head and…

  Eve woke in a sweat. She always woke up just before the impact, yet somehow the memory ran on. She could see herself turning at the noise of the car engine, too close. A shattered windscreen beyond it, and behind that – the face. The bit in between – the impact itself – was mercifully blank, but she would always remember that face, the mouth open in horror like a gaping fish, before the car was slammed into reverse and roared away, leaving her for dead. Yeah, she would remember that drunken bastard’s face for ever.

  Eve Calloway stared into the darkness. Being powerless was not for her; she had tried it once and it had left a bitter taste. Being the fat kid at school, having the shit kicked out of her, her lunch money stolen. And Lynne never ever standing up for her. So she’d learned to stand on her own two feet – she smiled at the irony.

  Of course, the experts on spinal paralysis could all walk perfectly well. They were very good at telling her how to look after her skin, her feet and her bladder. At telling her to test bath water with her hand, not her feet. Never to sit close to the fire, as she’d smell her flesh burning before she would feel it. And this is what gangrene smells like… if you smell that, phone. But the worst thing for Eve was being ignored. She could just about put up with spending her life staring into people’s groins. In fact, when talking to Douglas Munro she liked to remind him that that was exactly what she was doing. If you considered the domino effect of causality, it was his bloody fault she was in the chair. That was good enough for her. And it wound up her bloody sister.

  She decided to lie on the floor of the bedroom. The red figures on the clock glowed 11.55 p.m.

  She was quite content, lying in the dark, watching the minutes flash past, listening to somebody park badly, kerbing the wheel, and to the hypnotic click of the central heating. She sighed in the silence, enjoying the wait. At least she wasn’t lying under a pile of rubble in Pakistan for the third freezing night running, and she wasn’t some wee kid who had been abducted. She was warm and comfortable, and the bits that weren’t comfortable were numb.

  She opened her eyes, allowing herself a little shuffle for comfort. Lynne had ignored her phone calls. So, she must be made to feel guilty. Which meant Eve had to stay awake and be shouting for help when Lynne came in. Lynne would call on the gold-digger for help, as Eve was way too heavy for Lynne to lift on her own. A whole tin of Jaffa cakes… Eve sniggered to herself. She couldn’t feel her left buttock but sensed that the floor was pressing into it, right where her ulcer had been. It had taken seven months of some graduate from the Eva Braun School of Nursing poking at her arse to get that healed, the skin coming off in layers with the plasters. It was still as thin as parchment, and puckered at the healthy edges as if pulled far too tight in the middle. She could imagine it opening up again like the San Andreas Fault. She began to sing ‘These Boots Are Made For Walkin’’. Or not, as the case may be. The clock had just flashed 12.15 when she heard the Audi pull up, bloody Céline Dion on the car stereo. The engine was turned off. It was 12.27 when she heard the snick of the gate, then the click of Lynne’s kitten heels on the pavement, a little conversation, then the rattle of the door, open, shut, the bolt ramming home. Eve started to roll around, contorting her body into the most uncomfortable-looking position she could manage, and then, only then, did she start shouting for help.

  Friday, 22 December

  16

  It was eight thirty in the morning, still dark and the day looked as though it wasn’t going to make much of an effort to get any lighter. Fine flakes of snow danced in the air and whipped the faces of the unwary, stinging warm flesh and bringing tears to unprotected eyes. The temperature outside was minus two, and it wasn’t much warmer in the station. The non-accidental meeting in the corridor between DCI Rebecca Quinn and DI Colin Anderson only served to drop the temperature even further.

  Anderson was polite, but firm. He blocked her way, forcing her to a halt. ‘I want a word with you.’

  ‘I’m busy, DI Anderson, and we have a meeting, now. There is a time and a place…’

  ‘Yes, and it’s here and now. This meeting is about the cyanide, isn’t it? Not about the boys?’

  DCI Quinn bit her lip but didn’t answer.

  ‘The search teams are in disarray and nobody cares, nobody is checking, least of all you, which makes me think that you are, to put it politely, merely going through the motions on one case. All the intelligent resources are going to the other. So, what’s going on?’

  ‘DI Anderson, I can appreciate your point. But five people have died from cyanide poisoning, the source of which has not yet been confirmed. Five people. If that was a series of murders, with visible blood and guts, we would not be standing here having this conversation, would we? Just because the method is subtle does not mean they ar
e any less dead; it does not mean the victims or their families suffered any less.’ She hissed the last words under her breath as a cleaner walked by. ‘As for the children, we are following leads, you know that.’

  ‘What leads?’

  ‘Leads. The biggest lead we have is being followed up, I assure you. We are doing everything we can. But you are not doing it.’

  ‘So, who is?’

  Quinn betrayed herself by a little sideways glance through the glass wall of her office. ‘I need to go.’ She walked away, sidestepping him, her heels clicking efficiently on the lino.

  ‘It’s difficult to run two parallel enquiries. It could be dangerous. If your big lead is wrong, if you get found out…’ Quinn stopped in her tracks and turned. ‘We need to be squeaky clean on this – you said so yourself.’

  ‘And if my hands are tied?’

  ‘Untie them. Give me PC Smythe.’

  ‘PC Smythe? Don’t know him.’

  ‘So, you won’t miss him. And give me Wyngate for the IT. Give me the original search team back. A vehicle on site. A civilian who knows their way around a Home Office database. Let me do it properly.’

  Quinn looked thoughtful.

  Anderson pressed the point. ‘Then if the shit hits the fan, it won’t land on us. Not on our shift.’

  Quinn nodded slowly. ‘OK.’ And turned away.

  Anderson followed the line of her earlier glance. DS Littlewood was on the phone, eyes closed, his thumb and forefinger pinching the bridge of his nose. He looked as though he had been there all night and Anderson had no reason to believe otherwise. Littlewood’s computer was locked; he was working on his own… Then Anderson remembered Littlewood’s years on Vice.

  The dirty squad.

  Paedophiles.

  Anderson leaned back against the wall and cursed.

  ‘Right, you lot, important developments.’ DCI Quinn tapped the edge of a file against the edge of the desk, waiting for silence. ‘Can we have some more lights please?’ She waited until the fluorescent strips flickered into life with their low, steady hum. ‘Right, Lewis, do you want to take them through this? The tampering?’

  Almost as one, the squad shifted a little in their seats. Costello looked at Anderson who was staring out of the window, looking at the dark clouds gathering, his thoughts miles away. He wasn’t paying one bit of attention. He wasn’t pointing out this was hers… her investigation…

  Lewis handed a set of photographs to Mulholland, and gestured to a gap that had been cleared on the wall.

  ‘The first victim that we found was Barbara Cummings. She worked up at Rowanhill Library. She was forty-six, divorced, with three kids who all stayed at home. She worked full-time and travelled every day by public transport, which took her up Byres Road. She collapsed at home on Saturday, 9th December, sometime in the afternoon. There was nobody in the house at the time. She was found dead in her armchair. The PM report was unremarkable, the slight red flush was noted but ascribed to her previous alcohol dependency. No Toxicology report was requested, so she was cremated exactly one week later. She was in the habit of using over-the-counter medication for the headaches she put down to eye strain, and in the past she had used a tablet called Headeze. She shopped at Waldo for odds and ends that she could carry on the bus.’

  Mulholland hung up a photograph of a woman, dark-haired, with a wide smile showing very uneven teeth.

  Costello thought she looked familiar. Rowanhill Library? She thought she had spoken to her, maybe earlier in the year. There’d been a vandalism problem up at the library, and she remembered a small, broad woman with thick glasses and quiet, librarian shoes. Yes, it was definitely her. The photograph had a new hairdo but it was definitely the same woman.

  ‘Chronologically, however, the first was Duncan Thompson, who lived up in Novar Drive.’ Another photo went up – a young man with a wide smile, number one haircut, and a small stud in his nose. ‘He was twenty-eight, worked at the Department of Work and Pensions or whatever it’s called these days. He was found dead in his bed on the evening of Monday, 4th December. He had been last seen at his office Christmas night out at the Marriott on the Saturday night, where he had got very drunk. He didn’t make it to work on the Monday. So, a colleague tracked down his sister, who called round and found him dead. He had choked on his own vomit sometime on the Sunday morning. That seemed like a pretty clear cause of death, so – again – no Tox report was done. The sister said that he’d had a packet of Headeze on the worktop beside his kettle and a glass of water beside the bed, as you would if you were expecting a monumental hangover, but neither item is still around to be examined. He was buried on Friday, 8th December.’

  Lewis turned to another photograph. ‘Moira McCulloch collapsed at her mother’s flat, and died in the ambulance on the way to the Western. There was some cause of doubt re the death certificate – it was noted she was red-faced with blue fingertips and extremities, and her brain was very swollen. All that might point to cyanide. However, because of the impossibility of establishing cause of death, her body is still available for testing. We’ve asked for a Tox report to be done as a matter of some urgency, and we’re awaiting results.

  ‘John Campbell and Sarah McGuire, we are familiar with. And lastly, Nessie Faulkner.’ Mulholland pinned up his last picture; a small grey-haired lady, with small round glasses under a white bowling hat, smiling for the camera in triumph. She looked like everybody’s favourite granny. ‘We know from her son that she definitely did purchase Headeze capsules, probably on Wednesday, 13th December, from Waldo in Byres Road.’

  Costello noticed that Lewis hadn’t acknowledged Wyngate or Anderson for their hard work. The hyena was reverting to type. She decided to step in.

  ‘I’ve had an e-mail from Malin Andersson, two s’s. She was the nurse who was on duty while Lars Lundeberg was in hospital. Being Swedish herself she got to know quite a few of his visitors during his five-day hospital stay. She did a bit of asking around for me. Well, Lars’s flatmate Shona remembers giving him a Headeze for a hangover. He was always on the scrounge for them, apparently. As you know, the flat is at Peel Street, and Shona shops at Waldo. Over and out.’

  ‘Thank you for that, Costello,’ Lewis said, the words almost choking her.

  ‘Well, we are a team,’ Costello smiled sweetly.

  ‘There’s no widespread pattern, no other cases reported by the Poison Unit,’ Lewis resumed, almost as though she regarded Costello’s information as an unwelcome interruption. ‘All products have been removed from shelves nationwide and a recall put out: Do not use under any circumstances. As yet, we can’t find anybody who is that pissed off with that branch of Waldo. Or indeed, any branch of Waldo. In the meantime anybody admitted to A&E with symptoms of high colour and difficulty in breathing will get red-flagged on arrival – oxygen, clothes off, skin washed, stomach pumped, all to slow absorption, because the test can take longer than the cyanide takes to kill you.’ She turned to Mulholland. ‘Vik? Any news?’

  Mulholland smiled, like the cat that got the cream. ‘Well, listen to this. The obvious place is the Uni, but as there are no students in at the moment the labs were quick to tell me no cyanide has gone missing. They assured me their systems are foolproof. Even so, they’re sending us a list of students and staff who have access, just in case somebody has approached them, in the pub – you know the kind of thing.’

  Quinn pressed her hands to pursed lips as though praying. ‘So far, so good. What else?’

  ‘There are three chemical plants within a thirty-mile radius that use sodium and potassium cyanide,’ Mulholland resumed. ‘But again, it’s carefully regulated. They have to record any loss, and there’s been no spillage to account for the amount our tamperer would have required. I’ve thought about printers’ labs, et cetera, but the guy at the Poison Unit says that’s not the right stuff.’

  ‘Schools don’t use it?’

  ‘No, ma’am; too risky, apparently.’ He flipped over a page in his notebook,
checking he had missed nothing, then smiled again, this time like the cat that got the cream of the cat next door as well. ‘Then I tried the internet, and within four minutes I could have bought any amount from the States, and it would have been here within the week. And as this type of criminal is organized and patient, the psychology of waiting wouldn’t be an issue.’

  Quinn looked at him. ‘And?’

  ‘Texas. The fourth one down was St Andrew’s Pharmaceuticals, so I thought I’d try them first – the name, you know…’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And they acknowledged an order from Scotland – a recent order – but refused to go any further without authorization.’

  ‘I’ll get clearance. Christ – Texas! Texas! Do they really have such lax drug laws? Wyngate, you get a list of all companies that sell on the net, and start asking if any of them have had a recent enquiry from Scotland. If there was a purchase made, it would be by credit card and therefore traceable. Get on to it. And get back to me within twenty-four hours.’

  ‘There’s a time difference,’ said Wyngate cautiously.

  ‘Twenty-four hours is twenty-four hours; it doesn’t matter which side of the bloody Atlantic you’re on. Tomorrow, nine thirty, get to it. I’ll give you both the clearance you need to obtain the bank card details.’

  The laser eyes of DCI Rebecca Quinn fired round the room. ‘I don’t need to tell you how carefully we are going to have to play this.’ She glanced at her watch. ‘I have a meeting with Peter Moss of Waldo at ten and I’m requesting advice from the Serious Crime Squad – the next logical step is a blackmail demand, and we’re not equipped to deal with that. Forensics are awaiting the recovered boxes of tampered capsules from Sarah McGuire’s place, so if they can be brought to my desk asap, Irvine…?’