In My Time Of Dying: DS Hutton Book 5

by Douglas Lindsay

  Unconscious bias in the workplace

  Mental health at work

  LGBT+ awareness

  Becoming disability confident

  Resilience and well-being

  Understanding the menopause

  I click my phone off and place it in the side pocket.

  What was that about being borderline suicidal?

  I’m still sitting in position, staring straight ahead, that creeping, growing, festering, ugly ball of resentment churning in my stomach, when the door opens and DI Kallas gets into the car.

  She’s carrying two thermos mugs of coffee, and places them in the cup holders in front of the gear stick.

  ‘Good morning,’ she says.

  ‘Hey,’ is all I manage back, then, ‘thanks,’ with a nod at the coffee.

  ‘You did not sleep at all,’ she says. ‘Are you all right to drive?’ A beat, while I look at her, then she says, ‘You will be fine on the way down. Perhaps later you will be tired. Perhaps I will drive home. Nevertheless, I am glad I brought coffee. You should drink.’

  I lay in bed until four-thirty. Didn’t come close to falling asleep. Mind all over the place. Finally dragged my sad ass out of bed. Stripped it – the bed, not my ass – stuck the wash on. Did the getting up routine. Had time to do some stretching – stopping well short of actual exercise – and even cleaned the bathroom. Stayed awake through the night, and by the time I was walking out the door, I was balls out, full of beans, chalking things off the to-do list like a hyperactive Mary fucking Poppins. I know that at some point I’ll crash, but I walked out that door and drove my car and was sitting here reading bullshit e-mails from the chief inspector, looking like I slept for Scotland, then Kallas sees right through me, as though my skin is pulled taught across my bones like a desiccated corpse in the desert.

  I look at her, my resentment likely shows on my face, then I take a drink of coffee and start the car.

  ‘You were unlikely to have been able to get enough sleep to catch up on all that you missed the previous evening, so even if you had slept well, you would have looked, and felt, tired. The study by Doctors Rubenstein and Klutz, Harvard University, published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2011, showed that total sleep deprivation can conversely lead to energy, alertness and an enhanced mood in the morning, due to an increase in serotonin, tryptophan and taurine. It is apparent from your bright eyes and more exuberant than normal demeanour that this is what you’re experiencing.’

  End of the road, slow, stop, cars go by, pull out into traffic, and now we’re turning onto the bridge across the motorway, and heading south-west. Cross country, hit the East Kilbride Road, then turn up towards Eaglesham, and likely go over the Fenwick moor for old times’ sake, before joining the M77.

  ‘Nothing like some in-depth psychoanalysis to crush a guy’s mood,’ I mutter.

  She drinks coffee, staring straight ahead. She’ll have heard that, but obviously has no rational, obvious comment to add.

  ‘Sorry I did not invite you in.’

  ‘It’s fine,’ I say, aware that already the vim has begun to seep away, the enthusiasm for the day, such as it was, duly lanced.

  ‘Things are not good in my home at the moment,’ says Kallas. ‘My husband lost his job in the lockdown, and has not been re-employed. He is drinking too much.’

  ‘I know all about that,’ I say, again at a mutter.

  ‘You, as far as I know, are a melancholic drunk. There is something of the poet in the melancholic drunk.’ She pauses, allows those words to hang there in the car, mixing in with Bob crooning – such as he does – his way through Moonlight. I’ll take that, of course. The poetic drunk. An illustration that she doesn’t know me, at all, but I’ll take it. ‘My husband is an angry drunk. It is not pleasant. The children do not like it. I do not like it.’

  Can’t help myself, and the words, ‘Too much information,’ are coming out my mouth, and I feel bad about them before they’ve touched my lips, but it’s too late to stop them.

  ‘Yes, you are correct. We should talk about the case. It is one of the reasons we are both travelling to the golf club. It is good to talk over the details of the investigation.’

  She takes a drink, I take a drink, we pass a golf club, trees shedding leaves in the wind as we go by.

  ‘I went to speak to Mrs Lord again yesterday evening,’ says Kallas. ‘I thought a little distance would be positive. One of her children has already arrived home. I managed to speak to her without the child in the room, though the child is not a child any longer. She said that her husband was a serial adulterer, and that she too was a serial adulterer.’

  ‘Did you tell her about the minister?’

  ‘I didn’t need to, so no, I did not. I suspect, however, that she already knows about the minister.’

  ‘Was he seeing anyone in particular at the moment?’

  ‘He did not see people as such. He slept with women, generally on a one-off basis. He had a way with them, that was how she described it. He talked smoothly and easily, made women feel comfortable. She said he would flirt with women and they would be won over before they had even realised he was flirting in the first place.’

  ‘And Mrs Lord? What about her serial adultery?’

  ‘She refused to give details, insisting it is not important. It could mean she is hiding something, but it could also mean she is protecting someone, or quite possibly, that she is lying. Perhaps she is not an adulterer. Perhaps she is making such claims so that she herself does not look weak and cheated upon. A marriage of equals.’

  ‘Why didn’t she give us any of this last night?’

  Kallas makes a small gesture, and it’s fair enough. There are a variety of mundane answers to that, but the most basic is, why should she have done?

  ‘Some people live lives of secrecy. Once one starts down that road, it is not necessarily addictive, it does not necessarily become second nature, but it happens again. It becomes a part of who you are. If you have one thing in your life you do not share, then where is the line drawn? Yes, she knew who he was, but these people hid things from each other. Therefore, what he did, and she did not know about, is a bottomless pit.’ A pause, then she pedantically adds, ‘Or a shallow one. It is too early to speculate.’

  ‘How about the Covid infection?’

  ‘She stuck to what she said last night. They had mild symptoms and a negative test. That is all.’

  ‘Did they isolate?’

  ‘They chose not to. That is who they are. Or were, in his case. We can make, for now, an assumption he was infected in July. Perhaps she is not hiding anything but let us not forget about it.’

  ‘You went into his office yesterday?’ I ask.

  ‘Yes. There are four women and one man, though two of the women had gone home when they heard the news. There was a feeling of shock with the other three. It seemed genuine.’

  ‘You think the women had been his lovers?’

  ‘I do not have sufficient information.’

  Can’t help smiling. I wonder if that’ll be a catchphrase. Might start using it myself.

  ‘What did your gut say?’ I ask, more out of curiosity as to how the theoretician will view the whims of the gut, something on which most of us rely.

  ‘I thought the older of the two women had a little more reserve. My guess, and it is nothing more than that, is that she has had romantic liaisons with Mr Lord some time in the past, and they had moved on. The younger woman held him in some awe, and therefore possibly had not yet slept with him. She is nineteen. We do not yet know enough about Mr Lord to understand if he is the kind of man in his fifties who would sleep with a teenager.’

  Haven’t we all?

  Stop it!

  ‘The man in the office was young, though not quite so young. He seemed more shocked than the women. I would say he held Mr Lord in some kind of elevated respect.’ A beat. Another. ‘A fanboy,’ she finally says, as though hesitating before using such a colloquialism. ‘Whenev
er one deals with issues related to hedge fund managers, or the stock market, anything that involves the transfer of money, one is inclined to invoke The Wolf Of Wall Street. In money trading, Glasgow might be a very small pond compared to Wall Street, and Canary Wharf, and Frankfurt, and Tokyo, but Mr Lord was a big fish in this very small pond. We will find out there is a lot of money in Mr Lord’s past, that much was evident from his house, and that there is a lot of money passing through that very small company in a small office on St Vincent Street. Now we have money and sex, and so the story begins to take shape.’

  ‘You’ve had a look at company records?’

  ‘I directed Detective Constable Ritter to look into it while we make this trip.’ A beat. There’s something about those little pauses, a cue that allows one to know she hasn’t finished. ‘What do you know of Constable Ritter?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘You have not worked with her?’

  ‘Nope. Only been together at the station for a few months. We face each other across the desk, but we’re both there so infrequently...’ I pause for a moment, try to think if Ritter and I have had any conversations of note, any at all, but there’s nothing. We’re not even on would you like a coffee terms. We say hello, that’s it. I believe Ritter is the kind of young officer who views people like me as dinosaurs. A moribund generation, both feet out the door, hanging on by the dead skin on the end of our fingers. I may have been a kid in the seventies, but in her eyes, I’m one of the asshole cops from Life On Mars. Sure, I’ve never even caught her looking at me disdainfully or anything, but she thinks she has nothing to learn from me.

  She may be right.

  Tell you what, though, once I’ve been on my hysterectomy awareness course, I’ll be teaching those young ‘uns all kinds of shit. Wait, not hysterectomy, the other one. Menopause. That was it.

  ‘Haven’t really talked to her,’ I add, finally. ‘Seems like a decent kid.’

  We drive on. Silence takes over. Up beyond Cambuslang, country lanes, then past Eaglesham, the golf course down on our right, and up over the Fenwick moor. Takes me back, but I don’t want to wallow in it. And it’s changed anyway, of course, with wind farms and the looming presence of the motorway, inexorably closing in from the north.

  ‘WE DIDN’T TALK ABOUT your alcoholism,’ she says out of the blue, sometime after a long silence.

  Sitting at seventy in the inside lane, about to have to move out to pass a Tesco lorry.

  Alcoholism? I prefer the term drinking. In fact, I prefer the term silence.

  ‘I poured a bottle of wine down the sink last night,’ I say, and I almost look curiously at myself in the mirror. Where did that come from?

  She’s using her powers. That’s it. She has powers. She’s so clinical and sensible and straightforward, one can’t help oneself. She says something, and it’s like Waterboy, or whatever the fuck he’s called in Justice League, when he touches Wonder Woman’s whip and can’t stop himself being truthful.

  Kallas is literally Wonder Woman.

  Ha!

  ‘You bought a bottle of wine and then poured it down the sink?’

  A beat. Having begun to open up, I instantly question my sanity. But she’s got the whip.

  ‘It was in the house.’

  ‘You said you hadn’t had alcohol since Saturday.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘So, you didn’t feel the need to pour it down the sink on Sunday or Monday, but you did last night.’

  A beat.

  ‘Yes.’

  Fuck it. I never had this kind of conversation with Taylor. This woman is opening me up like Fforbes with a murder victim.

  ‘This is because there has been a brutal murder and you are stressed. You had the urge to drink, but knew that once you started, you would continue, and you would be sitting here, in the car with me this morning, and you would have the stench of stale alcohol about you.’

  She’s not even asking questions, just rhyming off every thought that goes through my head. She can only be one step away from asking which one of my colleagues I masturbated over last night, while already knowing the answer.

  ‘Was it difficult?’

  Fuck me. Please, just leave me alone.

  ‘Yes.’

  Silence, but not for along. There’s another question there, the continuation of the inquisition, poised, as though the words have already been formed, but haven’t made any sound yet.

  ‘Did you try to recover any of it?’

  ‘Were you filming me?’

  ‘I know about addiction, that is all.’

  I don’t answer. Not straight away. Wait to see if she’s going to say something else. But if she doesn’t, I will. I’ll crack. The Wonder Woman whip of hers is more or less inserted in my arse.

  ‘It’s OK,’ she says, letting me off the hook, who knows how many seconds before I would’ve caved.

  I drive on, easing back into the inside lane, having not really been aware of the last mile or two of road, driving on automatic.

  We pass the sign that says Troon 5, and we both notice it, and it’s like a switch. Time to get back to the case in hand.

  11

  Standing by a window, looking out on the first tee, the beach barely more than fifty yards away, the blue-grey of the sea stretching away from behind the gorse bushes.

  There’s little more therapeutic in life than looking at the sea, and I wonder if Kallas will allow us a few minutes to wander down to the beach. Perhaps if she sounds keen to get back to the station, I can casually bring up licking the sink, and she’ll be like, Holy shit, Sergeant, you’re right, I forgot, you really need to stand on the beach, let’s get ice cream.

  ‘How was Mr Lord’s game?’ I ask, by way of an opener.

  We’ve been given time with the acting Assistant Club Secretary, Anderson. Hmm. Acting assistant club secretary doesn’t sound so far up the food chain, but this guy knows how to play the part of an asshole guy at a posh golf club, I’ll give him that.

  He nods at the question. Always good to start with the basics. Don’t come in here with questions about ego and money and expect anyone to open up about a fellow club member. Information will be given reluctantly, or not at all.

  We’re standing in formation by the window, the three of us in a line, mugs of coffee in hand. Kallas, as we entered the old place, casually informed me I’d be doing the questioning, on the cold, analytical basis that I would know more about golf than she would, and I would get further as a result. In such circumstances, the detective sergeant awaits the interfering questions from the detective inspector, when she feels he’s not pursuing the right course of interrogation.

  ‘He was good,’ says Anderson. ‘Very good. And look, I know how it is with clubs like ours, we have a waiting list of however long, a lot of names, an indeterminate number of years to work through it, and then we had the sheer hell of Trump buying Turnberry, and the knock-on effect on all the other old courses in Ayrshire.’

  ‘People were upset that someone like Harry Lord was just allowed to join straight off the bat?’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘How many Turnberry refugees did you accept?’

  Anderson smiles, takes some coffee. Always significant when the interviewee pauses to take coffee.

  We’re in the Smoke Room. God knows what happens in the Smoke Room, now that the fuckers can’t smoke in it. Maybe they smoke anyway, because they have the connections to not give a fuck. Maybe this is where they have their rich white man orgies.

  Keep that smile off your face, you cheeky bastard!

  Thick red drapes, wooden tables and chairs, rich carpet, black and white picture of some crusty old bearded fucker on the wall, large windows to our left, looking down the length of the course.

  Wonder who won the Open the last time it was here. I have no idea. I don’t follow golf. Don’t mind hacking my way around a course, but watching other people do it is like drinking a bottle of wine, popping a Xanax and settling yourself down in
front of Britain’s Lost Masterpieces in a warm room at eleven pm. Asleep in seconds.

  Maybe I should try that tonight.

  Wouldn’t work without the wine.

  Maybe I should just watch golf.

  Who am I kidding?

  ‘Straight off the bat, members like Mr Lord, only seven or eight. Another few have been fast-tracked since, a few others still waiting, but perhaps a little further up the list than they might have been.’

  ‘So, there was a hierarchy, and Mr Lord was in the elite?’

  A moment, and then he says, ‘Yes,’ because what else could he say?

  ‘And that was because of his money or because of his golf?’

  A small nod, as though giving his blessing to the question, then he says, ‘We’re all practical men, Sergeant Hutton. His golf was good. We always said he could be a scratch golfer if he had a little more time. As it was, he played off seven. I think he might have been five when he got here... However, it was, of course, his money that got him in.’

  ‘He bought his way in?’

  ‘Good grief, certainly not.’ I get the glance, the genuine outrage, quickly dismissed from his face, because really, I’m hardly worthwhile being outraged at. ‘We valued his connections, the quality he brought to the club. Every golf club wants members such as Harry. We were lucky to get him, and gosh, we weren’t going to let Prestwick get hold of him.’

  ‘So, what about these other six or seven who got in straight off the bat?’

  ‘What about them?’ he asks, tone a little tetchy.

  I look at him, and we share the unspoken glance. Kallas is standing on the other side of him, not a player, as yet, in the conversation. I must be behaving.

  ‘No,’ he says, picking up the gist, ‘none of them have been murdered.’

  ‘Are they all still members?’

  ‘Are you really implying that Mr Lord was murdered by someone at the club, or not yet at the club, with a vendetta against those who were given priority membership status? Apart from the utter preposterousness of the suggestion, it’s been six years, for goodness sake. Six.’

  ‘Do you know anyone who would want to kill Mr Lord?’