We'd stood on the bridge looking down at the woman for a while, and now we've been down below, looking back up at her for some ten minutes.
'You ever come here?' asks Taylor, breaking a long silence.
'Yep. Nice walk, up the gully, round the top, back down to the football fields. Not long, but on a sunny day, it's all right.'
'A lot of people around?'
'The usual array of dog walkers and runners. You?'
He thinks about it for a while, eventually says, 'There was a mugging a few years ago, was up here for that. Guy was in a coma for a while. Haven't been since.'
'Hmm,' I say.
The water cooler chat of your average police officers. A guy in a coma is no more interesting than a guy buying a new pair of socks.
'The wings give the scene a peculiar quality,' I say.
'Know what you mean.'
He gives a quick wave of the hand to signal that it's time to bring in the body.
The stream beneath the bridge is swollen and unusually fast-flowing, so there will be no letting her down. They've decided to manoeuvre her to the side of the bridge, rather than haul her clumsily over the railing.
A police constable unties the knot around the top of the railing, while another grips the rope, taking the weight of the body. As it swings free, the first polis reaches down and the two of them start to move her along to their right. There are another two coppers on the bank at the end of the bridge, waiting to receive the body.
As it gets there, they reach out to grab it and haul it in, all the time aware that the pathologist, and the principal investigating officer – Taylor – are watching them, wanting as little impact on the corpse and her clothing as possible.
Unfortunately, the two guys at the side used to be lesser well-known members of the Marx Brothers. As they reach out to receive the body, one of them slips a little. He regains his footing, but in doing so knocks the other guy, who then falls down the bank, grabbing at grass and roots on his way, before ending up in the mass of branches and litter that is collected in the burn beneath the bridge. In trying to quickly recover from the slip, he puts his foot through the makeshift dam and plunges, waist deep, into the water.
A couple of our lot laugh. The distant audience are howling. Taylor and I glance at each other. We're a much tougher audience.
'Fucking idiots,' is all he says.
The body is safely brought to the side of the bridge and laid down on a prepared mat on the path. PC Gummo crawls to the side of the stream, and starts to scramble up the bank.
'Get them out the way,' says Taylor. 'Stay with Balingol while he takes his initial look. See if there's anything on her person. A note, or some ID. I'm going to go and speak to the crowd, then I'll probably head back.'
BACK AT THE RANCH WITH Taylor, flicking through notes.
'Balingol thinks she's been there since late last night, early this morning. On the face of it, it looks like suicide. Funny it wasn't spotted earlier, but it was dark until eight, I suppose. Must have been folk walked across the bridge and didn't notice.'
'It was misty,' says Taylor. 'Hangs in the basin some days. Look on Tumblr or Facebook or whatever, and you'll likely find people were posting pictures of it two hours before anyone reported it to us.'
Hey, he's not kidding. That shit happens.
'You've got a name?' he says.
'Maureen Henderson. Eighty-one years old. Three kids, widowed.'
'Recently?'
'Seems to have been a while.' Quick notebook check. 'One of the kids is in Hamilton, one in Canada, one in the US. And obviously, when I say kids... they're our age.'
He checks his computer, looks back at me. We have the telepathic, who's-going-to-deliver-the-bad-news conversation.
'No problem,' I say. 'I'll go now.'
'Take Constable Grant,' he says.
'Yep.'
Always better to have a female presence when delivering shit news. That's not official policy, mind. Just common sense. Most male police officers join up so they can legally hit people; as a result, when they're delivering bad news, it's not completely unknown for it to come out as something along the lines of, 'Your mum's dead. I'm going for a sandwich.'
And it's always nice to spend some time alone in a car with Constable Grant. As time goes by, she's slowly recovering from the night she mistakenly ended up in bed with me. Not that I viewed it as a mistake, but you can see her point.
5
The daughter, Margaret Johnstone, has held it together pretty well. Under the circumstances. That your mother hung herself – or was murdered, which is just as shit – is a pretty brutal thing to hear out of the blue. Constable Grant has gone into the kitchen to make tea, leaving me in the high-ceilinged front room of the old Victorian house to talk about the deceased.
'Three weeks,' she says. 'That's terrible. It's just down the road. I was going to be seeing her this Sunday. We were going to church, then back to her place for lunch. John's away sailing. They're bringing the boat in this week.'
'Your husband?'
She nods. John Johnstone? Seriously? Perhaps his first name is Quentin or Ffarquhar and he prefers an abbreviation of his surname.
'Oh God.'
She takes a deep breath. Struggling. Maybe the middle-class upper lip isn't going to be as stiff as I thought. I glance at the door and hope that Grant gets a shift on.
'I was supposed to go on Sunday and I cancelled.' Another shake of the head. Not a lot to say to that one. Just something that's going to live with her. Cancelling what turns out to be the last time you'd ever see your mum. She's not getting that one back.
Keep her talking.
'You spoke to her?'
'Yes, yes.' Well, at least she didn't cancel the church trip by text. That would have been a killer. 'I called on Saturday evening to tell her I couldn't make it. She sounded upset, but then... she quite often... she could be difficult. Demanding.'
'Did you speak to her again?'
'I called her on Sunday evening. We spoke for about an hour. Maybe more.'
'And how did she sound?'
She shakes her head, stares at the ceiling.
'Just the same, you know, the same as always. Banging on about the church. She was a broken record...'
The voice starts to go, just as Constable Grant returns with a pot of tea and some biscuits on a plate. Oh happy day. I wonder why I didn't put up more of a telepathic struggle with Taylor.
'Thank you, Constable,' she says, managing to collect herself. She moves the coffee table a fraction of an inch as Grant sets down the tray. She pours three cups of tea. The liquid filling the mugs is the only sound in the room. Double glazing, nothing getting in from outside.
'What was the problem with the church?' I ask.
'Oh, God,' she says, 'if I start on that we'll be here until the middle of next year.'
She reaches forward and takes the tea. Has a large drink straight away, as if it's brandy. I lift my mug. It's steaming hot. She must have asbestos lips.
'Can you give us a two-minute outline?' I ask.
'I can try, though it'll be like giving a two-minute outline of the history of the Middle East.'
I take a sip of tea. Burn my lips, my tongue and the top of my mouth. Glance at Constable Grant.
RETURNED TO THE STATION and swapped Taylor for Grant. Now the two of us are on our way to see the minister. Driving, although it's not much further than the walk to the park where the body was discovered. Bob was playing when Taylor started up, but he must feel the need to talk as Another Self Portrait was quickly turned off.
Initial report from Balingol's lab threw up nothing new, no new marks on her body, no sign of a struggle. Mrs Johnstone told us enough to imply that her mother was prone to anger and depression and feeling sorry for herself. Not necessarily suicidal, but then she hadn't seen her for three weeks. So, at the moment, given the obvious lack of a struggle, suicide seems more of a favourite than murder.
No explanation for t
he wings. You could tell from the daughter that she just plain didn't believe it. It was such a bizarre thing that she sat there shaking her head and then moved the conversation on. Didn't know what to think about it, and so therefore didn't even try. Can't blame her.
We're on our way to the deceased's house, but have decided to stop off to see the minister beforehand. The Old Manse is up at the top of the town, about a mile away from where the body was found.
'You heard about the churches?' I asked.
'I know they amalgamated and no one was very happy,' he says. 'Read about it in the Reformer. What's the story? And remember, we'll be there in under a minute.'
'The Church of Scotland told the four churches they had to merge. Choose a minister out of the four, choose a building. Three of the ministers would go off and get other jobs, they'd sell the three spare buildings. Of course, everyone hates each other, so it's a total fucking bunfight.'
'When did this start?'
'Three years ago. Maybe four. She couldn't remember exactly when it all kicked off.'
'Jesus. We're lucky this is the first death. Might be time to start presuming the woman's been murdered.'
I laugh, but he's got a point.
'So, when did they choose, and which minister is it we're going to see?'
'Well, they chose several times. Every time they made a choice, someone would object and find a reason to overrule the decision and there would be another vote. It all got very nasty. They ended up with some absurd compromise where they used the building from St Mungo's down by the golf course...'
'The 1950's carbuncle?'
'Yep. While consigning the other three regular, older, better-built and more church-like buildings to the scrap heap. However, they decided to hang on to the Old Kirk up the hill so they can use its halls, and sell St Stephen's at the bottom of the Main Street and Halfway Church on the way out of town.'
He stops at a junction. A funeral cortege is going slowly by, and we pull up just in time to see the hearse, followed by the black limo containing the relatives of the dead. There are four people in the car. Two women wearing hats, and a guy in a suit – they're not talking – and in the middle of them a young lad wearing a shirt and tie but no jacket. They can't have been able to find anything for him to wear. Hope the little blighter doesn't have to go and stand by a graveside for half an hour.
The faces of the bereaved drive hauntingly by, one by one, the same silent expression on every countenance. So much of life is a façade. Not this, however. This is the real melancholy of death laid bare.
'Must have been young,' I say.
'What?'
'The funeral. Everyone looks so... sad. So much sorrow. You don't get that so much with an older, more natural death. Look at them.'
There are cars going by, a few with teenagers driving, four or five to a car, as if the cortege had suddenly decided to confirm my thought.
The melancholy envelops us for a moment. Settles over the car, like a sudden fall of snow, and then melts away as the final car passes by and Taylor pulls across the road.
'So what happened to the other congregations? Did they launch an insurrection? The Scottish equivalent of the Arab spring?'
'It didn't get that far, although she hinted at things being pretty ugly. In the end the Old Kirk and the Halfway congregations caved, and moved to St Mungo's. However, all along the St Stephen's people maintained that they owned their building, so they told the Church of Scotland that it could go and take a fuck to itself.'
'That the official biblical term?'
'Indeed. They went to court over it. The paperwork was all a bit vague, but eventually St Stephen's won. So they broke away from the other three and the Church of Scotland itself, and set up as an independent. The minister stayed as was, and his flock gathered round.'
He pulls up outside the Old Manse, kills the engine.
'Right,' he says, 'that makes sense. I thought there were still people going in and out of that place on a Sunday morning. And this guy, he was minister where?'
'He's new. That was one of the eventual compromises. They couldn't agree on it, so the other three buggered off. One of them retired up to the Highlands, one of them got a gig in Northern Ireland, the other's off walking in Nepal, some shit like that.'
'CALL ME BRIAN.'
Taylor gives him a short stare, has no intention, I know, of calling him fucking Brian.
'You'd already heard about Mrs Henderson?'
He looks troubled.
'Yes. News travels quickly, I'm afraid. At least, when it's this kind of news.'
Brian, the minister, can't be more than thirty-five. Not wearing a dog collar. I don't know if these people are supposed to wear them all the time, but I expect they're allowed to slum it when they're in their own home.
'Who told you?'
'Penny Jardine. She's been good friends with Maureen's friend, Kelda, for many years now, and they both kn—'
'OK,' says Taylor, cutting him off before he launches into some tortured connection involving Penny's mother's auntie's daughter's husband's sister's third cousin. 'Mrs Henderson was at church on Sunday?'
'Yes. Every week.'
Suddenly the words are more clipped. Obviously he'd thought he could be conversational, and now that he's discovered the opposite, he's flicked the switch.
'That hadn't changed with the merger?'
'Not as far as I know. She was a member of the Old Kirk, was always in attendance. Once the final decision had been taken, then she started coming to St Mungo's. Never missed a step.'
'Was she happy?'
'Quite the reverse,' he says.
'Had she spoken to you about it?'
'On many, many occasions.'
'What was her principal bone of contention?'
'Hard to know where to start.'
'Just throw them out there. The order doesn't matter.'
He makes a small throwaway hand gesture, which in other circumstances might have indicated that there were so many there was no point starting, but then he realises he's talking to the police and gets on with it anyway.
'She didn't like the building at St Mungo's, couldn't understand how you could elect to go there over the Old Kirk. Hated that all the money from the Old Kirk ended up being spent on St Mungo's. Hated that no one at the Old Kirk put up enough of a fight. She thought that the people at St Stephen's were prepared for a dirtier fight, and didn't like that no one at the Old Kirk would match them. Hated that ultimately St Stephen's got to keep their weekly services when the Old Kirk didn't.'
'What about Halfway?'
'She considered it a small church, with a small congregation, and therefore not worthy of particular consideration.'
'Sounds like she might have made some enemies in that time?' I throw in.
'No doubt she did,' says Brian, the minister. 'She did not suffer fools, nor adhere to much notion of Christian forgiveness and understanding.'
'Had anything happened recently to make matters worse? Had she said anything to you that might indicate that she'd had enough? That she was so fed up with it all, so miserable, that she might commit suicide?'
He stares at the floor in that slightly affected way that people do when they're talking to us coppers. Thinking things through, not giving the first answer that comes into their head.
'She must have been murdered,' he says finally, looking up.
Jesus.
Manage to keep that ejaculation to myself.
'Why do you say that?' asks Taylor calmly, as the vicar threatens to toss our straightforward, snappy wrap-up suicide in the bin.
'She was so full of fight. Listen, she was never in a position to actually influence the vote or influence the way this was carried out. She wasn't a church elder. She was on no committees. She was an outsider to the politics, but she loved her church. She loved the Old Kirk. I really think she'd been there every single Sunday since she'd been born, and I cannot believe for a moment that she would give up the fight quite
in this way.'
He looks between the two of us. Neither Taylor nor I immediately jump in, so he adds, 'She must have been murdered.'
'Everything about her death looks like suicide,' says Taylor.
'That's what these people do, isn't it?' he says.
'What people?'
'They fake suicides to cover up a murder.'
'Who does that?' asks Taylor.
'You see it on the TV all the time.'
'You mean like on NCIS and Lewis?'
The minister looks slightly sheepish at the direction the conversation has taken, which is at least some measure of self-awareness.
'And Poirot,' he adds, although he does it with almost comic timing. Funny guy. Cannot even remotely get a handle on him.
'You know how many fake suicide/murders I've seen in my thirty years in the police service?' asks Taylor.
'Nevertheless,' says Brian, 'you're here to get my opinion and to find out what I know, and I really do genuinely believe that Maureen would never, ever have killed herself.'
'And the wings, you heard about them?' asks Taylor.
He nods, but doesn't venture anything further.
'Any ideas?'
He sits back and makes a general, all-encompassing hand gesture. 'Given the church connection, it's easy to imagine that it was meant as an angel metaphor. Difficult, however, to think that anyone had that view of her. She certainly did not think that of herself. Perhaps her killer was being ironic.'
Irony and metaphor. Jesus.
The door opens. An older woman, wearing a pinny, for all the world with the word housekeeper tattooed on her forehead, smiles benignly upon us all.
'A cup of tea?' she asks.
6
Poirot. That's what the guy said, that was his reference for the potentially strange death, and possible suicide of this old woman. And in its way, Poirot is what it feels like.
Day-to-day police work is so often carried out at ground level. Poor people trying to get richer; drunks disturbing the peace and abusing the family; clubs and bars tipping out at 3 a.m.; drug addicts doing anything to score; the desperate and the down-on-their-luck fighting for their one and only chance. All of them trying to catch up.
DS Hutton Box Set Page 53
