Deep and Crisp and Even

by Peter Turnbull

  'Sir? What time?'

  'All last night.'

  'In the refectory, the university folk club, the television room, then to a student-type pub.'

  'Yes, I can imagine. Where were you around midnight?'

  'In bed.'

  'So you'd left the West End by then?'

  Montgomerie didn't say anything.

  'Do you know where Otago Street is in Hillhead?'

  'Yes, sir. In fact, I'm phoning from the call box at the bottom of that street.' In fact he had spent the night in the basement of No. 86, sir.

  'A lady called Margaret Stewart, first floor, No. 88, had a visit from Slow Tom last night, about midnight, probably earlier. I gather you didn't see anything suspicious before you left for home?'

  'No, sir. Wild night, hardly saw anything.'

  'What are your movements today?'

  'Jazz club tonight. I'll spend the day in the library reading-room.'

  'And the pub, no doubt,' said Donoghue. 'Don't forget to charge it up.' He put the phone down.

  Montgomerie walked back up Otago Street and saw a constable standing at the close mouth of the stair neighbouring the one where Gillian had a flat. If he had looked round when he left the building he would've seen the constable, but he didn't, he had turned right and hurried to the call box because he knew he was late and didn't like angry Detective-Inspectors.

  'Morning, sir,' said the constable, grinning.

  'Sod you,' said Montgomerie.

  'Nice girl,' said the constable. 'The one that came out of 86 and stood in the snow watching you walk away. She walked past me with her head in the clouds, nice round eyes and a smile that would melt an iceberg.'

  'Didn't do much for the snow.'

  'Can't make the snow stand still.'

  'Listen, Phil,' said Montgomerie. 'I could argue I was integrating with the community but I don't fancy my chances. There's a whole bar full of lager for you and a crate of sherry for the good Lady Hamilton if this is the first time you've seen me today.'

  'Have a good journey in, sir,' said Hamilton. He raised his wrist. 'It's ten forty-five, sir, mind how you go, sir. Slippy underfoot.'

  Montgomerie walked into the wind-blown snow, chastened.

  The expert in regional accents from Sheffield University was shown into Donoghue's office by the bemused sergeant at one minute past eleven. He was twenty-eight and introduced himself as 'Sam Payne'. He wore a leather jacket, wide-bottomed denim jeans with cowboy boots for the snow. He carried recording equipment on his shoulder, he had a red and yellow Anti-Nazi-League badge clipped to his jacket zip, he sucked on an empty corncob pipe and had what Donoghue thought the ladies would call 'a beautiful smile.'

  'Good morning, Mr Payne,' said Donoghue, extending his hand.

  'Sam. Good morning, sir.' He had a firm but not an insensitively crushing grip.

  'Sam,' said Donoghue. He would remain either 'Inspector' or 'sir'. He definitely would not be 'Fabian'. This was office hours. 'Take a seat, Sam. I see you take a pipe.'

  'Aye, I bought it in a sale in Sheff. Paid 92p for it. Don't know why 92, 90 or a straight quid I could understand, but not 92.'

  'Will you try some of this?' Donoghue passed his tobacco across his desk. 'It's a special blend made up by a tobacconist in the city.'

  'Sweet-smelling,' said Sam Payne, running his fingers through the strands.

  'It has a Dutch base for taste, with a twist of dark shag to give a deeper flavour and slow the burning rate.'

  Donoghue watched Sam Payne clumsily fill his pipe. He guessed it was the young man's first pipe and he was reminded of his own first pipe, given to him at the age of fourteen shortly after his father had found a packet of cigarettes hidden in the garden shed.

  'You don't like the Nazis, Sam?' asked Donoghue, lighting his own pipe.

  'Never met any to dislike, sir.' Sam Payne struck a match adeptly and Donoghue guessed that Sam had recently switched from cigarettes to a pipe. He thought the change suited; he couldn't visualize Sam Payne with a fag in the corner of his mouth. 'Bit before my time, the war,' said Sam, 'but you don't have to go through a war to dislike Fascism.'

  'Are policemen Fascist, Sam?'

  'Probably not at the moment; I reckon we're both on the same side with this nutter, but next time there's a National Front rally in Sheff I'll be screaming along with the other thugs, layabouts, Bolsheviks, terrorists and no-good commies.'

  Donoghue grinned. 'What's in the bag?'

  'Recording equipment and some tapes of Clydeside accents. I thought I might need a comparison.'

  Donoghue grunted, reached into his desk drawer, and took out a piece of printed paper. 'Would your political point of view prevent you signing the Official Secrets Act, Sam?'

  'I've never done that before.'

  'It's the most widely signed Government form, every civil servant has to sign one and people who have access to Government secrets. It's had a lot of flak thrown at it in recent years because it makes people risk prosecution if they reveal something they morally feel that the public should know.'

  'Ah, ha,' said Sam Payne.

  'What it means is that any information you hear regarding these crimes must be kept to yourself until we close the case.'

  'Which may be never. You don't always catch nutters. I read it up before I came here, psychopaths mature at thirty-five, that means they stop killing and live normally, but don't feel any remorse because they haven't any guilt feelings.'

  Donoghue made no comment on this crash course in psychology.

  'It will be closed; if we don't catch him it'll be closed fifty years from now when his natural lifespan will be presumed to have run out. But anyway we never know, this one could be as old as sixty, although he doesn't sound it. All this form is is a deterrent to stop you printing an account of your trip to Glasgow in the Sheffield whatever-it-is.'

  'Star,' said Sam. 'OK, I'll sign it and put it down to an existentialist experience.'

  Donoghue pushed the pale yellow piece of paper across his desk and Sam Payne scribbled on it.

  'We have to censor the information in case we start a spate of ghost-crimes,' said Donoghue, slipping the paper back into the drawer. He brought up the cassette player and began pressing buttons.

  'Shall we put it in mine?' said Sam Payne. He lifted his machine on to the desk, dull chrome, knobs and dials. 'We'll get better reproduction.'

  Donoghue handed him the cassette.

  'Eight hundred pounds,' said Sam Payne, sliding the cassette into his machine.

  'What?'

  'That's how much it cost.' He spun the tape. 'You were looking gone-out, so I told you what I reckoned you must have been asking yourself.'

  'Thank you,' said Donoghue. He never knew his thoughts showed so clearly.

  Sam Payne pressed a button and the voice, richer than before, said, 'So it's Fabian, is it…?'

  The two men sat back, pulling on their pipes and listening to the tape. Donoghue moved only once; turning and inclining his head, he glanced out of the window. The blizzard had obliterated the skyline. When the tape finished Sam Payne reached forward and pressed another button.

  'Good guitar player,' he said, rewinding the spool. 'Immature, as well. Funny, that.'

  'Oh?'

  'Well, this is Sammy Payne's potted psychology, but I would reckon those two things don't usually go together.'

  'You mean good guitar playing is done only by those who are old enough to have put in the practice?'

  'That's one reason, but I was thinking that practising takes effort; immature personalities are not capable of effort, says I.'

  'Why do you think he's immature, Sam? Sorry, Sam, I take a cup of coffee at eleven. Would you care for a cup?'

  'Thank you. Well, again you'd have to check this with a psychologist, but have you noticed anything about his speech?'

  'Middle class, Scottish,' said Donoghue, picking up the telephone.

  'We'll come on to that, but this is off the top of my head a
nd might be bull, but have you noticed how slowly he talks? He's rolling those words round his mouth like he's having it off with them, he's not having any problems forming the words, he's not dim-witted, he just likes attention and one way of getting attention in speech if you haven't anything interesting to say is to take five times as long as everybody else to say each word. So, Sam Payne says he's immature.'

  'Hello, pot of coffee and two cups please, and the first edition if you've got it in yet.' Donoghue replaced the receiver. 'That's a sound theory. How do you account for the guitar-playing?'

  'He's a natural. I've been splitting my fingernails on guitar strings for six years now and I can't even dream about reaching his standard. He sounds young, so I presume he popped into this world with his left hand moving backwards and forwards and his right hand going up and down, just waiting for a guitar to be put in there. He plays superb twelve-bar blues.'

  'All right, that tells us something. How about the accent, Sam?'

  'Time to earn my keep, is it?' Sam Payne smiled. 'Well, I presumed you'd want an answer as soon as possible, so rather than listen to the tape and give my opinion and then take it back to rainswept Sheff for closer examination, I thought I'd bring my box of goodies to you.'

  'Thoughtful of you. Rainswept? It's not snowing down there?'

  'No. This is localized, thankfully.'

  'How long will you need, Sam?'

  'Two hours; I've got tapes of all the greater Glasgow accents, so I shall be able to identify his.'

  There was a knock at the door. A constable brought the coffee in. The first edition of the Evening Times lay on the tray. Sam Payne smiled at the constable.

  'He is Greater Glasgow, is he?'

  'I think so. But, like you said, he's middle-class modified accent.'

  'Like a first-generation graduate?'

  'Yes, or someone who's made it from the factory floor to the boardroom. We never quite make the transition, and so end up with a tongue in both camps. So with this nutter I've got to listen to what's behind the social climbing bit and try and pin down an area.'

  'How close can you get?'

  'With a good sample we could get down to a town, or a particular valley or coastal region for instance. A lot depends on words used, order of use, as well as pronunciation. But there's not a lot here and, like we've agreed, it's modified.'

  'I didn't know that there were so many different accents,' said Donoghue, pouring the coffee.

  'Aye, well, there are forty-four identifiable in Yorkshire alone. We don't know how many there are in Scotland because we keep discovering new ones in the Highlands and Islands and we also lose accents as communities die, but we think there're about a hundred and sixty. Also, they change through time. A Greenock accent now wouldn't be the same as a Greenock accent a hundred years back.'

  'Well, I'll let you get on with it, Sam.' Donoghue rose from his chair. 'If anyone looks in for me or phones me, I'm in the incident room.' He picked up the paper and held it up for Sam Payne to read the headlines.

  They read:

  SLOW TOM CLAIMS NUMBER FOUR

  Five More to go?

  'Doesn't mess around, this lad,' said Sam Payne, and slipped the headphones over his ears.

  CHAPTER 6

  If Ray Sussock thought he'd struck pay-dirt with his first call, he reckoned he'd found the mother-lode with his fourth. The route he had worked out in the canteen at P Division, after eating his toasted piece and before taking a nap, had concentrated on the West End of the city. In fact, discounting addresses in other parts of the country and overseas addresses, Margaret Stewart's social life seemed to have been contained in the square mile centering on Byres Road. This was good news for a policeman who had twenty-two calls to make and a bitch-of-a-dog day to make them in. Ordinarily he would have used his car but the weather being the weather, snow being snow, three feet deep in places and still coming, he reckoned his optimum form of transport would be horseback. The Strathclyde Police had horses, fine chestnut beasts, always finely groomed, but they were not up for grabs as far as the CID were concerned. Sussock fell back on his second optimum form of transport and parked his car near the Western Infirmary and began to walk. The snow had driven most people off the streets and he was alone on Byres Road save for two black figures far ahead of him, struggling against the inclement conditions.

  The first call was to a man named Max Gaffney. Max Gaffney was a student of divinity and lived in claustrophobic conditions in a sandstone terrace in the downmarket end of Byres Road. He sat looking at Sussock, holding a mug of coffee in his hands and with two textbooks open in front of him. Sussock evidently frightened him, he thought, either that or Max Gaffney usually talks to people with his knees tucked under his chin and his free hand trying to clasp both ankles. He wore black-framed spectacles with thin lenses.

  'Oh, her,' said Gaffney after Sussock, who had drawn a blank when telling him the name of the murdered woman, had described her as he thought she would have looked in life. 'Oh.'

  'You know her?'

  'Well, yes.'

  'Well?'

  'No.'

  'You said well.'

  'I didn't mean it like that.'

  'How did you mean it?'

  'Not like that—like, well, as an expression.'

  'How close were you?'

  'Not very.'

  'Is that why you're not upset, Max?'

  'I hardly knew the old dame.'

  'How did you know her?'

  'Through Amnesty International.' That was pay-dirt and Sussock took out his notebook. 'All right, Max, I want the names and addresses of all who were at the AI meeting last night.'

  'We must have been some of the last people to see her alive.'

  'That's right. The names, Max.'

  'Well there was me, and old Maggie Stewart, there was Dick Finlay, Ollie Grant, Anthea McCabe, Willie Wilson, some girl called Frances, first time I saw her was last night. I don't know where she lives.'

  'Last name?'

  Gaffney shook his head.

  'Carry on.'

  'Robin Graff and Marjorie Boyd.'

  'Four blokes,' said Sussock to himself.

  'Five.' Gaffney sounded hurt. 'I was there.'

  'I was discounting you, Max. What are the addresses? Start with Dick Finlay.'

  Gaffney reeled off the addresses from memory. Sussock thanked him and left. He didn't think Max Gaffney was the suspect: he was completely bald. What did surprise him about Gaffney was the man's reaction, or lack of it, to the news of the death of someone whose address book he had been in. Gaffney was surprised, a little shocked, but not unduly disturbed. He had the impression that as he shut the door Gaffney's nose would be buried in his books as though his visit had never occurred.

  Sussock was to find Gaffney's reaction to be typical and he soon reached the conclusion that Margaret Stewart, spinster, retired nursing sister, was a woman terrified of loneliness. He began to see her, sixty-two years old, sitting on the floor drinking coffee with undergraduates, an old lady telling her grandchildren where they were going wrong, and they listened because they were too polite to do anything else. She was probably so lonely that she invited Slow Tom up for a cup of Horlicks.

  In the close mouth of Max Gaffney's stairway Sussock worked through the list Gaffney had given him. Two of the names had been in Margaret Stewart's address book, the rest were new, but all thankfully, were in the West End. Sussock thought he was fortunate there; were it not for his frozen feet and his windblown face and the melting snow trickling down his neck and getting inside his shoes he would have reckoned that his luck was in.

  The fourth name on the list was a man called Oliphant Grant. He lived in a sandstone tenement block, similar to Max Gaffney's address. Sussock climbed the stone stairs and knocked the door marked 'Grant'. He knocked again and was about to write this one off as one to be revisited when he heard a sound inside the flat. Ten seconds later Oliphant Grant opened the door and Sussock's blood froze.


  Oliphant Grant was a goofy-looking guy with buck teeth. He had ginger hair and scratches on his forehead.

  The two men stood staring at each other for fifteen or twenty seconds. Sussock didn't know how to play it: he managed to stay cool. He couldn't have got much colder. He felt the skin on his temples grow taut as he looked at the man.

  'Police,' said Sussock. He flashed his ID.

  'I know,' said the teeth. 'You look like a pig.'

  'How do pigs look?'

  'Hard mean bastards with rings through their noses so they can get led around by the Tories.'

  'That right?'

  'That's right. What do you want, anyway?'

  'I want a few answers, Mr Grant. You going to invite me in?'

  'Supposing I say no?'

  'Then I'll come in anyway and you'll just be another name on the long list of people who've unsuccessfully sued the police for assault.'

  Grant eyed him coldly, and then stepped aside.

  It was dark inside Grant's flat. The wallpaper was brown and the light was dim. Snow had driven past the window. There was a desk, and a cigarette smouldering in the ashtray. 'So come on,' he said.

  'You know an old lady called Margaret Stewart?'

  'Yes.' He wasn't giving anything.

  'What do you know about her?'

  'What do you want to know for?'

  'I'm asking the questions.'

  'Not so easy, Porky. I'm not one of your Drumchapel drunks that doesn't know his rights.'

  'That right?'

  'That's right.'

  'Cocky bugger, aren't you?'

  'Civil liberty's my watchword. Why do you want to question me about old Maggie?'

  'That's what you call her, is it?'

  'We called her.'

  'When was the last time you saw her?'

  'Last night. We had a meet about innocents in the pigpens in South America.'

  'What time?'

  'From eight till ten. That's two hours.'

  Sussock let that go. 'Ten o'clock was the last time you saw her?'

  Grant nodded and inhaled the cigarette smoke deeply.

  'So she left at ten to go home.'

  'No, she left at ten to sell her tail in Blytheswood Square. Where the hell do you think she went?'