In My Time Of Dying: DS Hutton Book 5

by Douglas Lindsay

  ‘Well, that’s good. I don’t have to feel bad. If you’d got there earlier in the evening when you were supposed to have done, who knows, it might have been three or four out of ten sex. But the wait was the clincher.’

  ‘Yes, thanks, Tom, you saved the day.’

  She rolls her eyes, she bounces the ball off the desk, sending it towards the wall.

  And that, right there, that moment sticks in my mind, as being one of the last good ones before the shit hit the fan, and the whole fucking thing spiralled downwards into such a shithole of awfulness, it could have been part of the Sharknado series.

  38

  While most of the cast and crew and subsidiary personnel attached to this movie that none of us have watched yet have been contacted, no one can get hold of the writer.

  Harrison was, unsurprisingly, already on to her. Fisher is a prolific writer and contributor to various websites; she has her own site to which she posts every single day; in the space of two and a half years, she’s published twenty-seven novels, novellas, blog collections and poetry collections on Amazon; she vlogs, TikToks, and in general pounds the streets of online desperation for many hours a day. That was, at least, until it all stopped one week ago.

  Ritter and Ablett went round to her address in Govan and got no answer. Ritter and Ablett effected entry to the property, and there was no one there. Nothing to indicate recent occupancy, as far as they could tell. A little dust on the kitchen worktop a clear sign. Everyone uses a kitchen worktop, even if it’s just to lay down the bowl to pour the cereal in, or to dollop the Chinese takeaway onto a plate.

  They noted, however, that there was no computer, there was no phone, there was no bag, no purse, no wallet. When she’d left the house, it was with intent. Impossible to tell if she’d packed a bag, and for all we know, she met a guy, she fell in love, she’s spent the last week shacked up in a hut in northern Sweden, having Swedish sex, drinking lingonberry juice and spit-roasting whole elk over an open fire.

  Nevertheless, we’re thinking Thunderbirds Are Go on the writer. And it turned out her grandfather had died of Covid. People have different relationships with their grandfathers, but we found the blog she’d written about his death, and she was steaming. Blaming a lot of people.

  You can see the problem. It’s all too neat. When something falls this perfectly into your lap, particularly when someone else places it there, you’d be a fool to fall for it. On the other hand... sometimes things fit perfectly into place, because that’s where they belong.

  Cautious, but hopeful, we spend several hours on Leia Fisher. Something unhinged about her. I love a nutjob. And every now and again, when she was in the appropriate mood, she posted topless selfies on her blog.

  Great tits. There, I said it. Might as well tell it how it is. And that, after all, was why she posted pictures of them on the Internet. Using everything she had to try to make the breakthrough.

  I wonder if it helped her career. Maybe she’s not currently shacked up in northern Sweden, but doing the movie sex party circuit in Hollywood – if Hollywood hasn’t burned down yet – the one Annabeth Blake frequented back in the day. In a week or two, she’ll resurface, up to her eyes in fabulous stories, which she’ll then tell breathlessly on her blog, with veiled references to such and such an actor, without naming names, and how he’s got an enormous cock, or how he likes anal, or how he likes to recreate Hieronymus Bosch paintings during sex parties.

  And, to be fair to the nutty girl, she can write. Has a turn of phrase about her. Prefer her to Hemingway to be honest, though I wouldn’t say that on, like, Front Row on Radio 4 or anything. I’d be scorned.

  Just after three in the afternoon. So far today, nine cups of coffee. Feeling good on it though, eyes racing across words on the screen, taking it all in, making notes, referencing items that might need looked at again, feeling like I’ve finally got last night completely out of my system, flushed out by caffeine, wondering if at last I smell more of coffee – man’s acceptable addiction – than booze, which is, rightly, one of the many unacceptable ones, when I find myself giving a small celebratory punch in the air, long before I finish an article, and then by the time I get to the end of it my brain is whizzing, I’ve got hands raised a little, gesticulating as I talk to myself, and then I lift them briefly in the air, in a restrained gesture of triumph. Yes, restrained. One must celebrate these small moments of lucid and cohesive thought.

  A scrunched-up piece of paper bounces off the back of my head and I turn to see Harrison looking at me with questioning shoulders raised. I look around the open-plan for Kallas, but I don’t see her, and I remember she had to go back in with the chief for the third time today, and I’ve been glad to get buried in work, because Kallas has been a little off all day, and I don’t know why, and then my phone pings as I gesture for Harrison to come over, and as she sits in Ritter’s seat across the desk, I make the mistake of reading the message that’s just come in.

  Boom!

  That pure, exhilarating joy of having a cogent thought is knocked out of me with a boot to the face and a boot to the stomach and a boot stamped into my balls as I lie on the ground, and suddenly, in the snap of a twisted finger, the buzz of nine cups of coffee, the buzz of actually enjoying my work for once, is extinguished.

  ‘What?’ she says, recognising that my mood changed as I looked at the phone.

  I read the message again. It’s short. Says what has to be said.

  ‘What?’

  I finally look up at Harrison.

  I need to tell her this, but she’ll be disappointed in me, and I don’t want to. Instead, clutching at yesterday’s news, I point at the screen.

  ‘I found an article Leia Fisher wrote for the Rutherglen Chronicle. It never got published in the Chronicle, maybe they were waiting for His Grey Return to actually be released, but then... well, someone on the paper thought it worthy of just sticking it on their own blog. They credited Fisher, but it kind of implies it was never getting published.’

  ‘What’d it say? And why did you look like Scotland had just won the World Cup, and now you look like England just won the World Cup?’

  I smile ruefully at that, can’t help it. Nice line. Perfect summation.

  ‘You know we found lots of articles about the movie she’d written, and obviously didn’t manage to place anywhere other than on her own blog. She must’ve realised the movie had a Cambuslang connection, that just by chance these various people from a fairly small town all ended up involved in it. But then I thought, what if that’s her only part to play? What if she wrote the article, but then someone else saw it, and that’s where they got the names? So, in fact, the killer himself has no connection to the movie. They have, however, the connection to Cambuslang. It is about Covid. The movie’s the cover.’

  ‘Why plant the masks, then? The masks are telling us it’s about Covid.’

  Shake my head.

  ‘Don’t have that,’ I said. ‘Maybe they want to instil the fear about Covid, so that people who did wrong, or who may have been considered to have wronged, are bricking it. Meanwhile, they throw the police the curve ball.’

  I shrug.

  ‘That’s all I’ve got.’

  ‘Not bad,’ says Harrison. ‘Forward the article to the ops file, make sure Kallas sees it.’

  ‘Already done it.’

  We do that staring across the desks thing that I do with so many different women.

  ‘Why the long face?’

  I don’t immediately answer. I don’t want to. Real life is about to insert itself in my shallow existence, and I hate it when that happens.

  From nowhere, as if apparating from inside the chief’s office, Kallas appears beside the desks. And now it’s Kallas and I staring at each other, and this time there ain’t no elephant. This thing is going to have to be said.

  I project disappointment onto her, because it’s impossible to tell what she’s actually thinking. Her face has gone full android.

  �
��You are wanted in the Chief Inspector’s office,’ she says.

  We hold the gaze. There’s nothing for me to say, nothing else for me to do other than get up and walk in there. And it’s not like I’m afraid of the chief, it’s not like I particularly care about getting my arse handed to me, but two minutes ago I was working, I was having one of those rare moments of coherent thought, the thrill of the chase in my blood, and now, from the moment I get up off this seat, the path from here to me slumped on my bathroom floor, blind drunk and vomiting, is short and straight.

  ‘What did the message say?’ asks Harrison.

  I hold Kallas’s look for another few moments, then turn to Harrison.

  ‘It’s from Samantha Cowal.’ I look at the message, reading in the mechanical voice of an Estonian. ‘Told sis we fucked. She’s pissed. Asked her to keep schtum, but she’s gone to your chief. Sorry. I’ll call later.’

  Lay the phone on my desk, look at Harrison. Boy, do I recognise that look on her face.

  ‘Friday?’

  ‘Yep.’

  She nods. We’ve been here before. When you’ve been somewhere because of addiction, it’s only a matter of time before you return to it. So she’s not disappointed, this was just what was going to happen. Sooner or later, round and round the maypole, the merry danse macabre, we all fall down.

  ‘Come and speak to me when you’re done.’

  I nod, a last look, then I’m up, can barely look at Kallas, and I’m walking into the chief’s office, Kallas beside me. So the interview is to be conducted beneath the watchful eye of my line manager. I have support.

  Hawkins is doing that thing where she’s looking at her computer screen, typing carefully, when I enter the room, and she takes a while before noticing I’m there.

  Kallas and I sit in the two chairs by the desk, opposite the young woman who is about to punt my sorry excuse for a police sergeant’s arse into the long grass.

  She tuts at herself, brow furrows, types something else, makes another mistake, then pushes the keyboard a centimetre away from her and turns to look at me.

  Well, at least my presence makes it hard for her to concentrate. I have that effect on women.

  ‘A vulnerable young woman, a young woman whose father had just been brutally murdered, came to see you, and you got her drunk and slept with her?’

  Not strictly accurate, of course. If I can read my women, and I’ll give myself that ability if no other, she was not, and never has been, vulnerable. And she definitely wasn’t drunk. And yes, I’m the officer and the older chap and all that, and I should have been the grown up, but that characterisation, quite possibly put in the chief’s head by the sister, is completely wrong.

  But all the caveats apply. Vulnerability, drunkenness and the very basic who started it, don’t matter. I was wrong. Full stop. End of, as the wankers say these days.

  ‘On what level is any of that acceptable?’

  Jesus.

  That’s the trouble. I came in here knowing I’m in the wrong, happy to sit down and take the shit on the chin, get the fuck out of Dodge and go home and slide weakly into obliteration. The path was laid out before me, and I was pencilled in to meekly follow it. And then she comes out with shit like on what level is any of that acceptable? Fuck off, you pious cunt.

  This, this is why Kallas is here. I wonder if she insisted she sit in on the interview. She’s here to protect me, to make sure I don’t say anything that’ll make it worse. Because, really, I’m more than happy to say something that’ll make it worse.

  But not with Kallas, that’s the thing. That still, calm presence beside me, the one with the beautiful eyes who I don’t want to disappoint, that’s what will keep the words buried, the hate and the bile and the anger, and will make me sit here in silence, not answering asinine rhetorical crap like on what level is any of that acceptable?

  ‘Nothing to say?’ she says. ‘Typical. Just typical, Sergeant Hutton. The amount of your type I’ve seen on the way up, passing me on their way down.’

  And here’s me thinking I might be the narcissistic one.

  ‘There will be proceedings, as ever. There are always proceedings with you, Sergeant, and for the life of me, reading your file, I have no idea how you’ve survived this long. Well, you cannot turn to DCI Taylor now, you cannot...’

  She keeps talking, but I shut out the words. I don’t want to hear them. I don’t want to hear that I can’t turn to DCI Taylor. I don’t want reminded of that. Not by her, sitting in here.

  The words stop abruptly, the flow of malicious, spiteful authoritarianism.

  ‘Will you look at me when I’m talking to you?’

  My eyes are closed. Clenched shut. Had done it without even noticing. I become aware of the tension in my hands, my fists, knuckles white, chest wound just as tight.

  Open my eyes, take a breath.

  ‘Go home. I’m suspending you without pay pending an investigation of your behaviour during the course of this investigation. I’m sure you are well aware of how the process will play out. For now, go home, do nothing, and wait to hear from PSD.’

  She holds my gaze. My moment has passed. I will not explode, I will not speak at all. There’s a twitch on her lips – I recognise that look in so many people – then she looks at Kallas.

  ‘Anything else?’

  Kallas too has nothing to say, and she shakes her head.

  ‘Accompany the sergeant to the door. Right now. Do not let him linger in the station, do not let him look at his work computer. He is suspended and cannot legally be in the building. Do not accompany him home, do not engage him any further than removing him from the building. This is now a legal matter.’ She pauses, she looks at me like a cross schoolteacher reprimanding the kid who inked half the class. ‘Consider yourself fortunate you’re not being defenestrated. Now get out.’

  And that’ll do it.

  Up, back turned, quickly across the office, and out the door, screaming fuck! loudly in my head as I go.

  Stop at my desk. Harrison hasn’t moved, still sitting in Ritter’s seat, waiting for me. Guess she would’ve known I wouldn’t be long.

  I grab my phone, put it in my pocket, and move away from the computer before Kallas feels she has to tell me I can’t look at it.

  ‘I’m off,’ I say to Harrison. My voice sounds funny. A weird, strained quality to it. ‘There’s something in that blog I didn’t mention. There’s a fourth person listed. You probably ought to get someone round there.’

  ‘I saw it.’

  ‘Right. I don’t know how that makes any sense.’

  ‘I guess the guy knew Harry Lord. Maybe they got talking, and he chose to get involved because of the producer being from Cambuslang. Small world and all that.’

  I shrug. Either a small world, or an utterly ridiculous, unlikely coincidence. Right at this moment, still reeling from the metaphorical kick in the balls, I have no interest either way. Someone else’s problem.

  Last look, oh so familiar in tone and longing and apology and sympathy and, for me at least, that feeling of stupidity, an awareness of my total lack of self-control.

  ‘See you.’

  I turn and leave. Can’t even look at Kallas, as she walks one step behind me. Past reception and good old Ramsey, ever present, jovially called a total cunt by everyone since his name was trashed on Game of Thrones, and I can’t look at him either, and then I’m out the door, into a chill, grey October, the rain falling, not heavy, not light, not drizzle, just Glasgow rain, wet and bleak and relentless.

  I stop, turn back to the door. I’m standing in the rain, feeling it on my head, and she stands in the dry, as still and composed and perfectly put together as always, her face similarly unreadable.

  ‘Sorry,’ finds itself to my lips.

  She lets the word hang there, floating between us for a moment, and then she makes the killer play, says the worst thing possible.

  ‘I’ll come and see you later.’

  She turns and walks quick
ly away, one second and she’s out of sight, and now I’m just a fucking lemon standing in the rain, feeling about as abject as possible, lost and alone, ejected from the building like the shittiest wasted drunk from the pub at eleven-thirty on a Friday evening.

  39

  I’ll come and see you later.

  Brutal. Just brutal. And she knew it, too.

  I sat in the room with that damned woman, the chief, and I thought, fine, do what you will. Throw me out. You think, you piece of shit in your Harvey Nichols, you think that two hours from now, when I’m fucking wasted, I’m going to give a shit about this? About you? About this job? About anything? You think I give a shit now?

  Like I said, the road was short and straight. I wouldn’t have thought there was an impediment that could be put in the way. And then Kallas tosses that into the mix. She’ll come and see me. Simple and brutal. I really don’t know what’s going on, but there’s something, and she’s stuck the boot in. And it didn’t need saying, of course, but it’s a very basic tenet of the circumstances. I will not want to be blind drunk when she turns up.

  And so now here I am, sitting by my jigsaw. Neptune. Average distance from earth, 4,459 billion km, temperature -220°C, length of year, 60,202 earth days. That’s a long year, by the way, albeit only about half the length of 2020. The bottle of vodka I bought on my way home is sitting there, unopened. Here, too, sits the glass. The ice is melting. I didn’t get as far as getting the tonic from the fridge.

  Spoiler alert: I bought three bottles of vodka.

  ‘Having a party the night?’ said the girl behind the counter, smiling.

  That conversation didn’t get very far.

  I swallow. The vodka, clear and crisp and expectant, calling out, the bottle glinting in the early evening streetlights, stares back at me.

  ‘The fuck are you doing?’ says the bottle of vodka. ‘I literally don’t understand what’s happening here.’

  ‘Fuck off.’

  Neptune, feeling awkward, remains silent.

  Close my eyes, lean forward, palm of the hand to my forehead. The tremble carries through my arm to the table.