In My Time Of Dying: DS Hutton Book 5

by Douglas Lindsay

  Of course, Ramsay’s still there. Guy’s a rock. He’s been the sergeant on the front desk at Cambuslang police station since some time in the 1880s. Also seems to work twenty-four hour shifts, seven days a week. Maybe he’s just avoiding his wife.

  Squeeze my eyes shut, open them wide.

  ‘Address?’

  ‘Far end of Hunterfield. Hundred and forty-eight.’

  Take a moment as I emerge from the sleep. Head clearing quickly. Up that way doesn’t sound like the kind of place they’d have been having a party that went awry.

  ‘Domestic?’

  I put the phone on speaker, get up, head into the bathroom to throw cold water on my face, guzzle mouthwash.

  ‘Doesn’t sound like it. Body in the loft, blood dripping through the ceiling. Wife called it in. She lost her shit. Ablett and Milburn just got there. Husband’s dead, cut to ribbons.’ A beat. I don’t fill it. ‘That’s all I’ve got.’

  ‘You call Kallas?’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘K. Tell them I’ll be there in ten minutes.’

  We hang up.

  This sounds ugly, but it’s barely worth thinking about at the moment. Not enough information.

  Still, we’ve all got gut instinct in this job, that’s one of the things that allows you do to it for so long, even when you’re as much of a fuck-up as I am.

  A body cut to ribbons in the loft is not normal. It’s not domestic. It’s not alcohol-related. It transcends a regular case of revenge.

  I don’t know yet what it is, but my guts are screaming.

  4

  Half an hour later. The single loft light has been augmented by several others brought in by CSI. There are currently just three of those guys in the house. Two in the bedroom, and one of them up here in the loft, along with the pathologist, Dr Fforbes, DI Kallas and me. A small loft space for the four of us, not a huge amount of it floored.

  Kallas and I are standing back on the floored area, watching Fforbes, bent low over the body, supporting herself on two beams, one hand pressed against a diagonal strut. The SOCO – white suited and beyond my recognition – has his legs stretched between two beams, shining a torch into the far corners beneath the eaves.

  Kallas, as ever, looks like she got out of bed an hour ago, spending most of that time putting herself together. A little make up, hair tied back, a simple white surgical mask, the same suit she wears to the office, her permanent air of cold, northern-European efficiency.

  ‘Did you see the wife?’ she says, after we’ve been standing quietly for a few moments.

  I arrived with a blue non-surgical face-covering stuffed in my pocket, only pulling it on when I saw that everyone else was wearing one.

  ‘I glanced into the room. She was sobbing. Sounded like she could barely breathe.’

  ‘She needs to pull herself together,’ says Kallas.

  Brutal.

  I give her a look, which she picks up, even though she’s watching Fforbes.

  ‘Her husband is late home from work. Very late. She does not seem bothered. It gets to two in the morning, and she’s fast asleep. Most wives will notice. Some would be worried. She never called him. There’s a text on her phone that he sent, though we may well find it was not him who sent it. But I wonder...’

  She lets the thought drift away.

  ‘You think she’s crying for effect?’

  ‘One must always question strong displays of emotion in a northern European.’

  I smile at that, behind my blue mask.

  ‘There’s also the shock of it,’ I say, surprising myself with a defence of the weeping widow. ‘I mean, it’s one thing not giving a shit your husband’s having sex with his PA, or his boss, or some random woman he picked up in a bar. But slashed to death in the loft, so that the blood runs through the ceiling?’

  Kallas does not respond. Kallas joined the station, on promotion, about two months after I returned, and in these past few weeks we’ve been working together, there’s been very little that’s required both of us to be on the same case. Nevertheless, I’ve already got used to those silences. If she has nothing useful to say, she won’t say anything.

  I wish I knew such restraint. Can’t keep my damn mouth shut most of the time. Thing is, with her, it’s not restraint. It’s who she is. She doesn’t have to stop herself.

  ‘You were drunk last night?’ she asks.

  I give her the benefit of an eyebrow, though it’s wasted, as she doesn’t look at me. Not as though I can blame her for the assumption.

  ‘Haven’t had anything to drink since Saturday,’ I say, hating the defensiveness of it. Could just have said no. And yet, here I go, the talker saying too much. ‘I don’t still smell of drink?’

  ‘Mouthwash,’ she says. ‘Listerine Cool Mint. I presumed you were masking something.’

  ‘Oh.’ A beat. Hmm. Now we’re just getting into the small print of a gentleman’s toilet. Sleep, even just for ten minutes, makes me want to wash my mouth out, drink freezing cold water, clean myself through. Too much information for standing over a bloody corpse in the middle of the night. ‘Just waking myself up,’ I say.

  ‘That’s good,’ she says. ‘We should talk about your drinking.’

  Her voice is not soft, the exchange conducted for the benefit of the pathologist and the unknown CSI guy.

  ‘Sure,’ I say, drily. ‘We can livestream the conversation.’

  A moment, then she turns and looks at me curiously.

  ‘Why would we do that?’

  ‘I was kidding.’

  She nods, as though we’ve just had a worthwhile chat, and then turns away and looks back at the doctor leaning over the corpse.

  The body is covered in blood. The victim was bound, possibly sedated, we don’t yet know. But if the murder was carried out in situ, which presumably it was, then immobilisation by some means beyond tying his wrists and ankles seems likely, as presumably not a thump was heard below. He is naked, bar a mask that has been placed over his face. Full-face, plain white, cannot tell the substance it’s made of from back here. Blood has welled up, and out of the eyeholes. It doesn’t look as though the mask has been crying tears of blood, however. It looks like the blood has exploded out of the eyes, there’s so much of it.

  ‘You have initial impressions, Dr Fforbes?’

  The doc stays bent over the corpse, leaving us hanging for a few seconds before answering.

  ‘At first sight, there’s nothing to indicate cause of death as anything other than bleeding out. Obviously that may change. But this looks, on the face of it, like your classic death of a thousand cuts affair.’ A beat. Another. Kallas waits for it. Finally, Fforbes turns, looks at Kallas, and then chooses to direct the comment at me. ‘Perhaps you could run a book on how many cuts there’ll actually be.’

  ‘Why?’ asks Kallas.

  Fforbes smiles at me, then turns to Kallas.

  ‘The victim has not been dead long. You’ve got the issue of how the killer got the body up into the attic without the wife knowing, but equally, how did they get out of here without disturbing her?’

  ‘Expensive loft ladder,’ I say, nodding behind me. ‘Not that I’ve heard it being lowered and raised, but it didn’t creak, at all, walking up here.’

  ‘Yep, I noticed,’ says Fforbes. ‘Still, you might want to check in the far corners in case someone’s hiding.’

  Can’t help looking over my shoulder, as Kallas says, ‘I looked already. It is clear.’

  ‘Impossible to tell for now how he was kept still. Hopefully I’ll have that when I get the body on a slab. Other than that...’ and she shrugs in the glare of the intense lights illuminating the neat and orderly loft.

  ‘You can’t tell us anything about the mask?’

  ‘Not at the moment,’ says Fforbes. ‘I’ve had a quick look beneath it. The blood that soaked up through the eyeholes was from cuts in the face, rather than the eyes themselves being stabbed or cut. But that’s all I have for now.’

&
nbsp; ‘Thank you, Doctor,’ says Kallas. ‘Perhaps you could also check if Mr Lord had ever been infected with Covid.’

  ‘Will do.’

  ‘We will speak to the widow now,’ says Kallas to the room. ‘If she can speak.’

  Fforbes smiles at me, I return the look – there’s something guiltily naughty in it, like we’re quietly and Britishly amused by the blunt foreigner in our midst – and then I follow Kallas back down the steps.

  5

  One of those kitchens, given the same level of expenditure as the loft ladder. Sleek and expensive; bespoke design; an island, a KitchenAid, an Aga; utensils and pots hanging from the ceiling, double doors out to a garden, herbs in the window; everything reeking of order and convention, as though the room was only two days removed from a Country Life photoshoot.

  Lady Trumpington-Dumpington loves to pluck pheasants at her Versace-designed kitchen peninsular, while drinking home-brewed gin, flavoured with limes grown in the family’s 19th century orangery, where once King George IV banged three housemaids and a goat in a debauched, animalistic orgy.

  The widow has, thankfully, calmed the fuck down. She was still with heaving chest when we got in here, but Kallas has a calming effect on everyone. She herself is so calm, she exudes reserved chill like she’s made of it, that everyone else in her vicinity is quickly infected.

  I wonder what would happen if she walked into a riotous bar fight at eleven at night in the middle of Glasgow, Old Firm weekend, both sides going at it full pelt. She probably wouldn’t have to even speak.

  I don’t know any other Estonians, but they can’t all be like this. If they were, at the start of WWII, both the Russians and the Germans would have got to the border, there would have been a few thousand Kallas’s standing there looking stern, and Stalin and Hitler would have been like, yeah, all right, it’s cool, just leave us alone and we’ll leave you alone.

  But Estonia got fucked, same as everywhere else. I guess a stern look only gets you so far.

  We have coffee. Kallas and I, at the widow’s bidding, have removed our masks. One minute past four in the morning, dawn still some way off. Me, Kallas, and the widow, Victoria Lord, with Constable Bateman standing by the door. Bateman didn’t get coffee. Above her pay grade.

  Lord is wearing expensive-ass, silk pyjamas. Dark blue. One button undone at the neck. Hair down over her shoulders. Face devoid of makeup, but she’s going to have scrubbed that face to the bone after a drop of her husband’s blood landed on it.

  The circumstances might be completely different, but she’s going to be pulling that Lady Macbeth shit every time she looks in the mirror, never quite removing the bloody stain from her forehead.

  ‘Tell me about your husband,’ says Kallas.

  Kallas’s coffee sits untouched. She made three coffees, instinctively knowing how the widow and I would take ours – actually, she may have completely fucked the widow’s coffee, who knows, but she’s drinking it – but if she’s going to drink the one she made for herself, it will likely be at some perfectly timed moment.

  ‘He’s dead,’ says Lord, bluntly. She doesn’t lift her eyes.

  ‘We need to accept what we all know, and get onto information that you know and we don’t. Information that will help us identify his killer as quickly as possible.’

  Lord lifts a hand, a sad, desultory hand, and lets it flop back onto the table.

  ‘OK,’ she says, the voice heavy, the words forced. She takes a drink of coffee, a deep breath, takes another drink, sets the mug back down. The actions of preparation. ‘He made his money in the City. London, I mean. Hedge fund manager. I don’t need to tell you anything else about that. Then we came here when we had a family, and he’s been running his portfolios out of a small office in St Vincent Street. Small-time stuff compared to the old days, but given how things are now, or at least, were before the lockdown, he was still making more money than he was when he was working at Goldsborough.’

  That’s all very interesting, and raises a question or two, but I can’t help the obvious question that springs unbidden from my mouth.

  ‘You came back to Cambuslang to raise your family? Who does that?’

  She raises her eyes at last. This is a lovely house, but really, location, location, location and all that. I suppose, once dawn crawls upon the land, we’ll see they have a view out over the city to the Campsie Fells, which will be nice enough when the sun shines, and when the snow lies on the hills.

  ‘He grew up here. Had a connection to the place. I was ready to come back to Scotland, I didn’t mind where.’

  ‘Had the lockdown and the recession had a negative impact on the finances of his company?’

  The sensible, and relevant question, from Kallas.

  ‘Of course,’ says Lord. Still doesn’t look at her. I’m obviously the easier one to talk to. Always simpler to engage the fool.

  Kallas gives her a moment to expand, and when she doesn’t, she says, ‘What effect did that have on him? On his business? On your life here?’

  ‘The business overheads were low, he wasn’t in debt. Still isn’t in debt. There are only five staff in the office, and he kept them all going throughout, working from home. The house is paid off, we have a holiday house outside Ballater, and an apartment in London. We were safe from the...’ she tosses words around in her head, then says, ‘... the ravages of the downturn.’

  ‘Do you have any idea who killed him?’

  A tortured sound escapes her lips, her face briefly looks like it might crumple, then she steels herself, her shoulders straighten a little more, the British stiff upper lip gets an outing.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Had he fallen out with anyone over work in recent weeks or months?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What else did he have going on in his life, outside of family and business?’

  Deep breath, she holds it together.

  ‘We go to church on Sundays, he plays golf down at Troon.’

  ‘There are no closer golf courses?’

  A beat. Her fingers tap together.

  ‘It suited who he was. The moneyed executive. And look, I don’t mean... Golf on an Open Championship course worked for him. He’d have clients arrive at Prestwick in private jets. Troon’s right on the doorstep.’

  ‘How long had he been a member?’ I toss in from the sidelines.

  ‘Since Trump bought Turnberry. There was something of an exodus, and Troon’s much closer to the airport in any case.’

  ‘Wasn’t there a queue to get in?’

  She rubs her thumb and second and third fingers together, doesn’t bother looking at me.

  ‘How the world turns,’ she says.

  She lifts the cup, she takes another drink. And now, for whatever reason, Kallas judges it’s time to have a sip of coffee. Finally the widow lifts her eyes, and the two women engage each other for the first time.

  The widow’s shoulders straighten a little more. One look from Kallas, and a saint would be considering themselves guilty of something.

  Of course, the saint’s probably banging a choirboy, so that fucker deserves his guilt.

  ‘Did your husband catch the virus?’ asks Kallas.

  A moment, the wife looks as though she has to think about it, then she says, ‘Covid?’ as though there might have been some other virus on the front page of every newspaper in the world, every single day for the last eight months.

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘No. Harry did go down with something at one point. Me too. Early July some time. We both got tested, but it was negative.’

  ‘There were false negatives.’

  ‘What does Covid have to do with anything?’

  Kallas leaves it a moment, pausing with the finesse of Tendulkar waiting to late cut a short delivery down to third man.

  ‘The killer, for reasons we cannot yet know, placed a mask over your husband’s face. While it is obviously a different type of mask from the ones we’ve seen all year, it is not unreas
onable to think there might be a connection.’

  The widow stares across the table, as though not quite understanding.

  ‘It has been mask season, Mrs Lord,’ says Kallas, not letting the silence endure. ‘Now your husband is dead in a mask.’

  ‘We all wear masks, detective,’ says the widow, when she finally finds the words.

  6

  Morning upon the land. Crisp and fresh. One of those autumn mornings you remember happening when you were a kid, but only because the thought of a crisp morning sticks in the mind, not necessarily because they were any more prevalent.

  The leaves are yellow and red and brown, there’s a clear blue sky, a few clouds on what we can see of the horizon between city buildings. Car parked, and now Kallas and I are walking along deserted hospital corridors, going to conduct the regulation interview with the pathologist, over the body of the stiff, in the morgue.

  ‘The Chief spoke to you about your incident from the weekend?’ Kallas throws in unexpectedly.

  My incident. Those damned uniforms. They could’ve been cool about it, they could have let it the fuck go, but they had to punt it up the chain. Like I was the bad guy.

  Yeah, all right, I was the bad guy.

  ‘She did.’

  ‘Everything is OK?’

  ‘I got the speech. You know the one, the don’t do anything else stupid or you’re finished around here speech.’

  ‘No one has ever given me that speech,’ says Kallas.

  ‘I suppose not.’

  A beat. We walk along a disinfected white corridor, the walls dressed with public information notices and the remembrances of illness and death.

  ‘And she told me not to even think about getting her into bed.’

  Kallas stops dead, like I’ve just grabbed her by the shoulders as she’s about to stand on a land mine.

  ‘She said that?’

  She looks curious, her brow furrowed. That’s about as much expression as I’ve yet seen on her face.

  ‘She did.’

  ‘Had you been thinking about getting her into bed?’