Night Watcher
Page 32
‘Just one more thing,’ Sue said. ‘Where do we look?’
Julie raised her head. ‘The back corridor, Harry’s in the porters’ room. The sub-basement, there’s a door leading off the back corridor that takes you down. Scott’s down there.’ Her body shook. ‘The other one was right behind me when I came through the window. That’s when I saw his eyes. I don’t know where he is now.’
Sue patted Julie’s hand. ‘We’ll find him, don’t worry. And we’ll get help for Harry.’
Sue organized the search of the store. They soon found Harry who was suffering from a severe concussion, but not able to find any keys, the ambulance men had to stretcher him out through the broken window. Julie was taken to hospital, in the same ambulance, suffering from shock.
Scott’s body lay in the sub-basement. The police surgeon certified his death, apparently by stabbing, although no knife was found. His body was removed to the police mortuary.
No trace was found of the mystery man.
Patrick was informed and asked to come to the store, but he delegated the task to Ken who made his reluctance plain to everyone who was there. ‘Sulky bugger,’ Sue said to Bill later when she was reporting back. ‘I don’t know what the women see in him.’
***
Hospital sheets, white, cold and unnaturally smooth, never felt like any other kind of sheets. That and the myriad of hospital sounds, scurrying feet, swishing doors, trolley wheels and the muted sounds of nurses chatting and comparing notes, meant that Julie’s sleep was fitful. There was also the smell, a mix of antiseptic, cleaning fluids, and that other indefinable smell peculiar to all hospitals.
She woke to a bleak, grey day, but Julie’s private room overlooked an inner courtyard with a square of sparse grass, so even the brightest sunshine would have looked grey in this room. She closed her eyes trying to remember her dreams, confused dreams where she was running away from Dave through interminable corridors. There was something or someone, which she could never quite reach, just out of sight.
The door creaked open. ‘You’re awake then.’ The nurse approached the bed, her white uniform straining tightly over her hips. The nurse’s fingers were short and fat, but they held Julie’s wrist in a professional grip while she checked her pulse rate. ‘You’ll do,’ she said, a smile breaking the severity of her features. ‘I’ll ask your visitor to come in. He’s been waiting quite a long time for you to wake up.’
Julie pulled herself up in the bed, pushing one of the pillows into a more comfortable position, and wishing the nurse had given her the opportunity to comb her hair.
Bill tentatively peeked round the door. It was as if he expected her to tell him to go. ‘I would have got you flowers,’ he said, entering the room, ‘but it’s Sunday and the florist in the hospital concourse isn’t open yet.’
Flowers reminded her of hospitals and death and Dave. She did not want to be reminded of these things and she would be out of this place as soon as she could escape. ‘What would I want with flowers?’ she said. ‘They’re not really my scene.’
Bill pulled a chair close to her bed. ‘I don’t really know a lot about you,’ he said.
‘That’s not what I heard,’ she said, a bitter tone in her voice, ‘when you were giving me my life history the other night.’
‘Ah, that, yes.’
The silence that descended was oppressive. Julie stared out of the window, wrestling with her feelings for Dave and her feelings for Bill. The two men were so unlike each other, but then that was a good thing because she knew that Bill would never be simply a replacement for Dave.
‘You asked me why,’ she said after a time, ‘and I never gave you an answer.’
‘It’s not important,’ Bill said. ‘It was just that I couldn’t get my head round it because of Nicole’s murder.’
Julie hooked herself up on a pillow with her elbow. ‘Did you think I murdered Nicole?’ Her voice was very quiet.
‘It was a possibility,’ he said, not looking at her, ‘but in my heart I knew you could never do such a thing.’
‘I’m not sure I deserve that,’ Julie sank back onto the pillow. ‘You see the reason I came to Dundee . . .’
‘I don’t want to know.’
‘You need to know because I don’t think I’m the nice person you think I am.’ She looked away from him. ‘It was revenge,’ she said. ‘I wanted to punish Nicole for taking Dave away from me and for making him do what he did.’ I should not have told him, she thought, he won’t want me now. ‘I had to be honest with you,’ she said. ‘Although God only knows I haven’t been honest with myself. If you want to leave I’ll understand.’
‘I don’t want to leave, Julie. What’s in the past is in the past and I know you couldn’t have done anything really bad. The only thing I want to know now is where do we go from here?’ He reached over and clasped her hand in his.
‘You have to give me time, Bill. It’s too soon.’
She saw him smile. ‘Anything you want. And Edinburgh’s not too far away.’
CHAPTER SIXTY-TWO
Wind whistled along the platform at Dundee Railway Station, but he did not feel the cold. There were other passengers, but they paid no heed to him, a shabby man with a backpack, waiting for a train. No doubt they would keep their distance. People seemed to do that with him. Not that he minded for he was a solitary man.
His mission was complete, maybe not in the way he originally planned it, but it was complete nonetheless.
To begin with he thought he had failed. The death of the woman had been unexpected. He should have been the one to strike her down, but that was not to be. Someone else had a prior claim – someone who was more of a devil than she was. Only he had not seen it right away.
He knew he was there for a purpose. To strike down Satan’s chosen one. He was God’s tool. If he was unable to deliver the woman to God then there had to be another. He had to identify the one that God wanted.
God was testing him.
The chosen ones had always been women. That was what led him astray. He had been looking in the wrong place, and that was why he had tried to mould the other one into becoming Satan’s chosen one.
He should have listened to his inner voice. The one that told him she was kind and good. Instead he had looked for all the evil aspects in her character. And he had found them.
It was only at the final moment that he had come to understand. The moment after he struck down the man. The moment when his hand had been raised to strike her down.
The flash had almost blinded him and he’d had to close his eyes. The gift had already been given. It had not been a woman who was Satan’s chosen one this time. It had been a man.
God was testing him.
And so he had let her live. It would have been easy to end it for her in the seconds before the window crashed out onto the street, but he had held back. He had watched her go in a blinding flash of light.
God had been testing him.
It had been easy to slip away. He had left Neil’s boiler suit hanging on a hook in the basement, donned his tramp’s rags, crept out of the store by his secret way and sat in the alley until the police moved him on.
Neil would not be missed. They would simply replace him with someone else and it would be as if Neil never existed. Well, in a way he had not.
The tramp would not be missed either. No one misses a tramp.
The train drew into the platform. He got on and settled in a corner seat. Glasgow was a big city. There were bound to be many of Satan’s chosen ones there.
It was time to continue with God’s work.
* * *
Also by Chris Longmuir
Dundee Crime Series
NIGHT WATCHER, Kindle and Smashwords Editions
DEAD WOOD, Print edition published by Polygon
Historical Sagas
A SALT SPLASHED CRADLE, Kindle and Smashwords Editions
Short Stories
GHOST TRAIN & OTHER STORIES, Kindle and Smashwords
Editions
OBSESSION & OTHER STORIES, Kindle and Smashwords Editions
About the author
Chris Longmuir was born in Wiltshire and now lives in Angus. Her family moved to Scotland when she was two. After leaving school at fifteen, Chris worked in shops, offices, mills and factories, and was a bus conductor for a spell, before working as a social worker for Angus Council (latterly serving as Assistant Principal Officer for Adoption and Fostering).
Chris is a member of the Society of Authors, the Crime Writers Association and the Scottish Association of Writers. She writes short stories, articles and crime novels. Her first book, Dead Wood, won the Dundee International Book Prize and was published by Polygon. She designed her own website and confesses to being a techno-geek who builds computers in her spare time.
www.chrislongmuir.co.uk