Singing to the Dead

by Caro Ramsay

  There were no other chairs, no visitors.

  Shit.

  He took a deep breath – So, how are things?

  But she got in first. ‘Hello, Colin.’ She sounded a little desperate, tearful even. Her hand stretched out to him, restricted by the attached drip; he didn’t know whether to reach for it, hold it, or ignore it. He put the card into it; her skin was cold and clammy, as if death had been there first. ‘I heard the news,’ she whispered. ‘I’m so sorry – so, so sorry.’

  ‘We’ve traced every movement she made, and pulled that place apart. No sign of the wee man. Back to the drawing board.’ He forced a tight smile. ‘How are you?’

  ‘Better than you, from the look of it. You’re absolutely worn out, I can tell.’

  Anderson looked down at his trousers and his shirt, both still stained with Troy’s dried blood. If only, if only…

  ‘What are they going to do now?’

  ‘I think Quinn is regrouping. There’s something we’re missing, and I just can’t see it.’ He looked at her levelly.

  Her gaze did not drop. ‘I don’t know what to say.’

  Anderson sat on the side of the bed. ‘Thanks. I’m getting a little pissed off with people telling me it will be fine. You know one of the boys didn’t make it?’

  ‘It’s all round the hospital. How’s the other boy?’

  ‘Wee Luca has hypothermia but he’s doing well. His mum isn’t well enough to come in to see him but all the nurses are making a huge fuss of him. He’s going to get more presents than anybody this year. And, you know, he still thinks of Frances as a lovely woman. She was just poorly, like his mum was poorly. I was sitting there on her settee, watching the telly, having a great time. It was the rat that killed Troy. He’s been telling the nurses all about it.’

  ‘So, why did she do it?’

  ‘Who knows? Quinn and Costello are turning over every stone on that one. Batten, the psychologist, would be the man to ask.’

  ‘Maybe because she was childless – that can play havoc with your emotions.’ Helena looked out the window again. ‘Maybe she wanted a child so badly, she just took one.’

  Anderson looked at her profile. He couldn’t help recalling Costello’s words, about Helena. ‘Why did you put Peter’s cartoon in the bin?’ he asked abruptly.

  ‘Why did I do what?’ she asked, turning to look at him.

  ‘I found his cartoon in your bin. It was lying on the top, covered in coffee grounds and potato peelings. Why did you do that?’

  Helena slowly raised her head from the pillow. ‘I didn’t, Colin. It must have been my cleaner.’ She put her hand in his; it was skeletally thin and cold, not the same loving hand that had caressed his on her doorstep. ‘Colin? I wouldn’t do that. Your kids mean a lot to me. I’m their Auntie Helena. Why did you even need to ask me that?’

  Colin didn’t reply.

  ‘I’m sure I left Peter’s drawing on my desk, but Harriet might have moved it…’ She shrugged. ‘Colin, your kids are the only young children in my life. You know I wouldn’t throw away Peter’s picture.’

  ‘No,’ said Colin, quietly. ‘Of course not.’

  Helena dropped her head back and looked at the ceiling.

  The group of visitors round the opposite bed burst out laughing. Helena did not seem to hear.

  ‘I changed my will before I came in here.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘I left some money in trust for Claire and Peter, just a little something, for their good education, maybe a wee car or something. And I’m sure they’ll both be around to get it. Peter has to be somewhere.’

  Colin couldn’t bring himself to say, I don’t quite believe you.

  Helena went on, ‘I’d like you to do something for me.’

  ‘Sorry, but I’m not doing anything but going back to the station and getting on with finding Peter.’

  ‘You’re worn out, Colin, and no use to anybody. I want you to go back to my house. The keys are in the drawer there. Have a shower, have a cup of coffee, there’s stuff in the freezer if you want something to eat. And feed Peter’s goldfish. The heating is still on. Lie down on the settee and think, like Alan used to. It worked for him. It might work for you.’ She looked him straight in the eye. ‘And you can search the premises if you’re so inclined. I wouldn’t blame you.’ With that, she turned her back on him.

  There can be few places as hopeless and depressing as the outer waiting room of a mortuary on Christmas Eve. To anybody waiting in the black plastic seats to identify the remains of their nearest and dearest, it was probably fitting that there was no acknowledgement of the festivities outside. It was oppressively warm, but a bitterly cold draught cut in each time the door opened, and a succession of wet feet shed a trail of slush in a narrow pattern from the outer doors and right through.

  In the inner office, behind the glass partition, the phones seemed to be ringing constantly. Even though it was Christmas Eve, the staff wouldn’t get away for a while yet. Two uniformed cops were hanging around, looking at the clock every two minutes, anxious to get back to the station Christmas party.

  ‘Just come straight through,’ said O’Hare, totally at home.

  Costello followed him, and stopped, feeling ambushed, when she saw DCI Quinn sitting behind O’Hare’s desk.

  ‘I did invite you to attend the PM,’ said O’Hare, indicating that she should sit down and join them.

  ‘But I knew her. I mean, I had seen her in the flesh, so I declined.’

  ‘How are you, Costello?’ asked Quinn. ‘Have you had any sleep?’

  ‘No,’ she answered quickly. Quinn was being friendly, and Costello found it unnerving. ‘I’m fine, ma’am. Any news of Peter?’

  ‘No. I’ll get back to the station once we’re through here.’ She sighed, something she’d been doing a lot lately. ‘Luca is making good progress. Miss Cotter has been up to the hospital, thinking she’s sitting outside Troy’s room with his teddy bear, hoping he’ll return from the dead. And nobody told her anything because she wasn’t a relative. Last we heard she was walking the corridors of the hospital. She says she has nowhere else to go. I think she’s a bit confused, and no wonder. Poor old dear.’

  ‘Oh, no, that’s terrible.’

  Quinn sighed again. ‘Anyway, Jack, what do you have for us? I’m not looking forward to writing this one up.’

  O’Hare put on the X-ray box and started clipping up transparencies. Quinn handed Costello a brown envelope. ‘Have a look at those.’

  Costello slid out a few black and white 8×10s of Frances Jayne Coia. Dead, she looked serene and beautiful, the contrast between her pale face and dark hair exaggerated by the camera. Her hair was wet, pulled back from her face by the mortuary assistant, and Costello could picture cold, gloved hands running through Frances’s long hair like a lover’s.

  ‘She looks very calm.’

  ‘It was cyanide, no doubt of that at all, but I have not changed my opinion. It looks as though she was just another victim of the tamperer.’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ Costello cut in sharply. ‘She was nicking folks’ kids, for heaven’s sake, and we were getting close – or Vik was getting close. I think she…’

  ‘But you are wrong, Costello. As I said at the time, if it was suicide she would have done it differently. Whoever is doing the tampering killed her, and in turn killed poor little Troy. This,’ he pointed to Frances’s picture as he looked at Costello, ‘was murder. And don’t contradict me. But the poisoner isn’t the only one guilty of this death.’

  Calming down, O’Hare looked at the X-rays again. ‘These bones tell a tragic story. Look at her skull – do you see anything?’

  Costello got up unsteadily and looked closely. ‘Looks like a normal skull to me.’

  ‘Look here.’ He pulled a pen from his breast pocket and ran it over the screen. ‘And here.’ He pointed to the white arc of the cheekbone. ‘And here.’ The nib of the pen moved down to the jaw. ‘I could go on for hours. Wha
t do you see?’

  ‘Fine white lines?’

  ‘Exactly. Old fractures; many old fractures, in fact, which have been left to heal on their own. They would have left a few black eyes at the time. And one of them… that one…’ he pointed, ‘… damaged a nerve and left her with terrible pain, which would have led to all sorts of psychological problems.’

  Costello had a sudden flash of Lauren McCrae’s drawn and nervous face. ‘So, you’re saying she was beaten up when she was younger. Could it have happened around the time she was with Rogan?’

  ‘I don’t have the specialized knowledge to date these things exactly,’ O’Hare replied. ‘But they are definitely years old. Look at this elbow; the fracture has interrupted the epiphyseal line, which means she was almost fully grown when it happened.’

  ‘Almost? Meaning she was still a child?’

  O’Hare shook his head slowly. ‘Some of them happened when she was a kid, some when she was adolescent. It looks as though she went from an abusive childhood to an abusive adulthood. And by that I mean a sexual, but probably not legal, relationship. Stripped of her youth, stripped of her well-being… how long had she been in that flat?’

  ‘Twenty years or so,’ offered Quinn. ‘Rogan always lied about his age, and he’s still doing it. He was twenty years older than Frances. She left home at fifteen to be with him. She was only sixteen when she wrote those songs.’ Quinn picked up the file. ‘Frances’s medical record – I’ll summarize. Trigeminal neuralgia caused by a blow to the face, and psychiatric support from the age of nineteen until the date of her death. Mostly due to the consequences of living with constant pain. And…’ she looked at O’Hare.

  ‘We found the mummified remains of a very small child, maybe a stillborn baby.’ O’Hare coughed slightly. ‘The woman lying on this table has given birth to a child. There is no record of her being pregnant in her notes. Absolutely nothing.’

  ‘Rogan was the father of the baby?’ asked Quinn.

  ‘I would imagine so. But we won’t get DNA from the remains.’

  ‘He beat up a pregnant woman? Did he beat her up so she lost the baby?’

  ‘It takes a lot to…’ O’Hare chose his words carefully. ‘Babies are not fragile. They need a fair bit of trauma to be damaged. But we will never know what power O’Neill held over her, or how the baby died. Many questions will probably remain unanswered.’

  ‘Poor Frances. But I can see it, you know. Him singing her songs round the pubs, getting some interest in his pathetic career for the first time, then she gets pregnant. He can see himself getting tied down. He beat and kicked her, she loses the baby, writes that song, he nicks the song and does a runner. Within months he’d signed a deal, didn’t seem to care what it cost her.’

  ‘If he did that to one pregnant woman, God help Lauren,’ Costello said bitterly. ‘What a bastard.’

  ‘So,’ Quinn resumed, thinking it through. ‘When Frances was sixteen, Rogan would have been in his mid-thirties, somewhere around there, but indecently older than her. They lived in his flat with the rehearsal studio in the basement. All those mattresses must have been for soundproofing. But then she got pregnant and… if he made her lose the baby…’ She put her hand to her mouth, unable to continue. ‘Sorry,’ she said, biting back tears.

  ‘We don’t know any of that,’ cautioned O’Hare gently.

  Costello ignored him. ‘Does it matter? She lost the baby, and wrote the song about it. Then Rogan legged it, leaving her in the flat, and took the song with him. Charming.’

  Quinn shook her head. ‘But he took all her songs with him, his biggest hits… which were all written…’

  ‘By her,’ Costello said thoughtfully, then added with some venom, ‘But why did she never go after him for what he owed her? I’d have sued the arse off the bastard.’

  ‘You might, Costello,’ O’Hare said. ‘But this poor girl, what he did to her probably crushed the life out of her. Putting a dead foetus into a glass case and writing poetry to it is not the act of a sane woman. Sane women go to hospital.’

  ‘He wouldn’t have got away with it, not if it had been me. I’d have chased him to the ends of the earth,’ she growled. ‘And back.’

  ‘I don’t doubt it,’ said O’Hare.

  Colin Anderson double-parked the Astra outside Helena’s house. He had stopped at McDonald’s and bought a chicken burger and a latte. He had nipped into Marks and Spencer’s on Byres Road and bought a change of clothes, trying three credit cards before he found one that Brenda had not maxed out with presents. And what was the use of that, he thought numbly, when Peter was not with them?

  It was getting dark again already. For a minute, Anderson sat with the engine running, heater on, the radio off in case that bloody song came on again. The press were going to have a field day when the story came out. He could see it now – Rogan publicly weeping crocodile tears over Frances, and vowing to donate yet another huge sum of money to something worthy so everybody would think better of him. The bastard was probably going to come out of this even more loved by the public.

  Anderson flicked the windscreen wipers off, letting a small fall of snow lie and melt, streaming down in a fine curtain of water in line with the heater. He downed the coffee in large gulps, and could feel it bringing his brain back to life.

  He finished his latte and picked up the carrier bag from the passenger seat. Helena was right; even thinking about standing under the shower, cleaning his teeth, washing his face, putting on fresh clothes, was making him feel better.

  He got out the car, pulling his anorak collar up round his ears. The wheelie bin had been emptied since his last visit, but it was still up on the pavement. He crumpled up the greasy smelly paper bag that had held his burger, crushed the cup, and popped them in the bin. He took hold of the handles, ready to bump it down the stairs to the basement. But he saw something trapped in the bottom of the wrought-iron fence, in among a sodden collection of leaves and litter driven there by the wind and left to rot, something that was bright green. He bent over and picked it up, letting it unfurl – five inches of bright green material, with a brown plastic hoof at the bottom.

  Peter had been here.

  ‘Can I have some water with them, please?’

  ‘Of course,’ said Lynne, handing over a glass, keeping the capsule in the curl of her palm. She watched Eve drink, washing the capsules down, the two pink ones, the brown one, and the white one that counteracted the constipation the pink ones caused. Lynne took the glass away when Eve had finished, and rinsed it in mild bleach, dropping her own capsule down the sink.

  ‘Lovely.’ Eve wiped her mouth with the back of her hand and burped noisily, before sticking her finger back in the mayonnaise.

  Lynne put a platter of garlic bread down in front of her, using a dishcloth to protect her hands, then dolloped the whole ramekin of garlic mayonnaise on top of the brown deep-fried mushrooms. ‘Thought I’d do that for you as well; I know you were going to.’

  ‘It’s been ages since I’ve had these.’ Eve rammed two mushrooms in her mouth sideways. ‘You’re being too nice. It’s not like you.’

  Lynne smiled back at her sister. ‘Eat up before they get cold.’

  Eve stuffed another huge mushroom in her mouth and bit down hard, and a dribble of grease appeared at the corner of her mouth and ran down her chin unchecked. Lynne watched, stony-faced, as Eve chewed sensuously, her tongue pulling the remnants off her teeth, missing nothing. Lynne was delicately nibbling her way round her own mushroom, her gaze fixed on Eve’s face.

  ‘Is this mayonnaise off?’ Eve said, pulling a face as if she might spit the chewed mushroom out again. ‘It tastes bitter.’

  ‘Mine’s fine,’ Lynne said evenly, never taking her eyes from her sister.

  ‘That’s because you’ve not got any mayonnaise on yours. How long has the jar been open?’

  ‘It’s a new one,’ Lynne said. ‘It’ll be the capsules, I expect. You always say they taste like a rusty can.’


  Suddenly Eve’s eyes opened wide, the creases on her face disappeared, and for a moment she looked vaguely surprised. She placed both hands palm down on the table, gripping the cloth, then her grip relaxed and she slumped forward, falling between the table and her wheelchair, a strange rasping sound emerging from deep within her throat.

  Like a quilt slowly unfolding, Eve turned on her side, choking and trying to retch but nothing came up, and all the time the dreadful rasping sound was coming from her. She lifted one hand slowly, trembling, as if attempting to claw her face.

  She looked up at Lynne, her brown cow eyes wide and frightened, but Lynne looked straight back, nibbling the batter off her mushroom with dainty teeth, and watched as saliva, then blood, started to drip from the corner of Eve’s mouth and her face went pink, then red. The whites of Eve’s eyes were slowly invaded by dark-red veins, like a rather pretty lily, thought Lynne, as Eve’s tongue grew rigid, then softened and relaxed as the rasping ceased.

  Lynne leaned over and straightened the tablecloth. She hated the way her sister made everything so untidy.

  O’Hare tapped the X-ray. ‘I didn’t need to scan her brain; the scars are so deep, I could see them with the naked eye when I lifted it out – clear as the veins on Danish Blue cheese. And look at these – chronologically grouped, defensive, tiny fractures all the length of her ulna, as if she were holding her hands up to protect herself – all indicative of an abusive relationship,’ O’Hare said. ‘Frances has fractures to the maxilla, the mandible, three on the skull. She has gaps in her teeth that have not been caused by dental extraction. Multiple fractures of the ribs – impact fracture, a typical feature of domestic abuse…’

  Costello dropped her head into her hands, suddenly tired.

  Quinn turned the last photograph to face her. ‘Scarcely surprisingly, she seems to have suffered from clinical depression for many years.’

  ‘Since she lost the child?’ asked Costello.

  ‘She lost the kid and then she lost Rogan. No one left to love her then.’