The DCI David Fyfe Mysteries

by William Paul

  It wasn’t right. It wasn’t decent. It would never last. But Gilchrist’s conviction that if he waited patiently she would eventually turn to him had been proved right. No coercion had been necessary. It had been her decision alone, and it was not based on pity or sympathy. Now she had called him to rescue her in her hour of desperate need. He was proud to answer the call.

  He would do as she wanted, he had decided, whatever it was. If she had committed murder he would help her cover it up. If she wanted him to kill on her behalf he would do so willingly. He had this idea in his mind that he was ashamed of because of its calculated cynicism, but if he helped Laura now he would have a firm hold over her. He would have the ability to control her, to demand sex on his own terms, to have her in his debt to do his bidding. It would be like having her on a leash.

  The music seemed to slow and quieten. His ears were adjusting to the volume as his eyes had done to the light. The words suddenly started to make sense. Lay lady lay, sang Bob Dylan. Lay across my big brass bed.

  Gilchrist took Laura’s hand. It was cold and unresponsive. He brushed her hair away from her face and touched something hard that was sticking to it. Still she kept her head bowed. He put his fingers under her chin and gently tilted it upwards.

  ‘What’s the matter Laura,’ he whispered. ‘You can tell me.’

  Her face came level with his. The whites of her eyes stared blankly into his. Reflections of the CD’s electronic lights squirmed inside them. He saw the streak of dried blood running like a scar down the side of her face and the necklace of ugly purple bruises round her throat.

  Fear of death seized his heart and squeezed unmercifully. The music swelled around him. The sound waves penetrated his body and entered his blood. He began to shake uncontrollably.

  Chapter Two

  Wednesday, 21.11

  Two guests tonight. Two ladies. Mrs Sutherland was one. An elderly grey-haired granny who had worn well and unexpectedly dropped dead at the age of ninety. Heart attack. Out like a light. ‘Best way to go,’ said her niece, an elderly woman herself with a pinched face and constant hacking cough that suggested her lights, too, might soon go out. Mrs Sutherland’s corpse was safely screwed down in her oak coffin in rest room number one. She had been old. Her funeral would be a social occasion. A stray tear here and there, maybe, but no great display of grief. It was time for her to go.

  The other guest was Miss Arnott. In rest room two, lying in the open silk-lined walnut coffin with her eyes closed and her hands folded neatly over her stomach. She had been an attractive young woman, mid-twenties, car crash victim in a nasty accident in the south of England, massive internal injuries, a week in coma as the life gradually leaked out of her. It had been a major job for the morticians to repair the facial damage and make Miss Arnott presentable for the procession of weeping friends and relatives. Her funeral would be a chaotic maelstrom of tortured emotions. She was too young. It was not her time to go.

  Douglas Lambert was restless. He had come downstairs from the flat where he lived alone above the funeral parlour to do his unnecessary nightwatchman’s rounds. There was, after all, nothing to steal and no possibility of escape for unsatisfied clients.

  He looked in briefly on Mrs Sutherland’s coffin in rest room one. He switched out the light and locked the door again behind him. He opened the door of rest room two. The scent of cut flowers took the edge off the chemical smell of air freshener. Miss Arnott was resting in peace under the chest-high concealed lighting on the wall. The expression on her face was somewhere between indifference and rapture. She was wearing a favourite dress, creamy ivory with a high neck and light blue piping on the sleeves. Her dark hair framed the chalk-white face which had just enough colour painted into it to make it seem half-alive. Diamond ear-rings sparkled. The lips were the palest of pinks. The merest touch of blusher on the cheeks, a hint of shadow on the closed eyelids. An overall puffiness of the skin was hardly noticeable. No scars were visible without inappropriately close scrutiny. She would not have looked out of place walking down a street among real live people.

  Lambert looked down on Miss Arnott and meditated, as he always did, on the nature of death. In almost a lifetime in the family business dealing with dead bodies, young and old, he had never shaken off the little shiver of impending mortality that came with each solemn new encounter. He was a past master at sympathizing with those left behind. Had he not suffered the same when his wife died? And his son? He knew when to speak and when to remain silent. With Miss Arnott’s bewildered parents all it had required was a quick explanation of the arrangements and a step back into obscurity. Others might have, but they did not want to be comforted by a stranger. They did not want words of pity or of support. All they wanted was to be left alone with their daughter.

  Lambert understood perfectly. He had seen every kind of reaction to untimely death, from meek acceptance to raging fury. It was never certain, never predictable, but experience had taught him it was always manageable. The funerals were prepared for the next day, limousines ready, intimations made. Mrs Sutherland went to the crematorium, Miss Arnott to St Andrew’s church and Trinity cemetery. Final farewells. Lambert didn’t do actual funerals any more. He left them to his staff, preferring to stay indoors in the background.

  He took a small plastic battery-operated fan from his pocket and flicked it on. The blades whirred into invisibility with hardly a sound. He placed it on the dead woman’s chest, pointing at her chin. Her hair shifted slightly in the stream of air. Miss Arnott’s parents would be back first thing in the morning to sit with their daughter. It would not be nice if a layer of dust had settled on her face overnight. The fan would keep it clear.

  He walked backwards to the door of the rest room. Upstairs in his home he would treat himself to some hot chocolate before retiring to bed with a good thriller. There it was again, the faint flutter of selfish fear in the pit of his belly. One day Lambert himself would lie in a coffin with a painted face while those left behind shuffled slowly past to pay their respects. His wife had gone before him. His son too, a boy so young and clean-limbed and full of potential. Then a second wife. And what about his daughter, his only daughter. An incongruous smile broke out on his face at the sight of Miss Arnott in front of him. She was a good job, a fine example of the mortician’s art.

  Ignore the inconvenient fact that she was dead and any parent would be proud of how she looked. The dead body was, to Lambert’s coldly professional eye, in the kind of condition that made his job worthwhile. She was sleeping pretty.

  Chapter Three

  Wednesday, 21.12

  Gilchrist was suddenly jerked to his feet. He had hold of Laura’s hand. She was dragged off the chair by his involuntary movement. The crack of her forehead as it struck the bare floorboards cleaved like a pistol shot through the total background of pervasive loud music.

  He would have screamed but a noose was tight around his neck silencing him. It pulled him up and swung him in a circle until he fell over. His glasses flew off. He caught a glimpse of two shadows struggling on the walls as he went down, arms flailing. One was his. The other belonged to his attacker. A third shadow lurked behind. The dancing coloured lights from the CD player were unnaturally elongated across his field of vision, a fairground streamer as though he was on a whirling roundabout. He spun helplessly in the centre of the room.

  His knees hit first, then a shoulder, and then his face smacked into the floor. It stayed like that, his nose pressed hard against the sanded boards. The grain of the wood had formed a remarkably beautiful pattern. There was a knot in one plank in the form of a perfect whirlpool.

  Gilchrist clawed at his throat but could not get a grip on the unforgiving noose that had encircled it. His oxygen supply was being shut off. He tried to move his head off the floor but it was clamped there and held by a tremendous weight. Somebody was kneeling on his neck. He couldn’t see them but he knew they were there. He could imagine the distorted face, the spittle-flecked lips, as th
e deadly noose was twisted tighter and tighter. There was absolutely nothing he could do to stop it. What would his wife think when she found out? She would discover that he and Laura were lovers. He wished he could be alive to see her face. What would she think of him then?

  He could just make out one of Laura’s feet behind him. It wasn’t her fault then. She hadn’t betrayed him. She remained gentle, considerate and loving to the end. She was dead too, a victim just like him.

  The foot was dainty and pink in the glow of the meagre firelight. The cat padded into sight and lay on its side on the floor at Laura’s feet, its green eyes watching him disinterestedly. Selina licked each front paw in turn as Gilchrist’s body jerked convulsively in its death spasms.

  His vision dimmed. Dylan loudly demanded to know: How d’ya feel? His hearing failed. The music faded into the distance. His brain gave up the struggle of commanding oxygen-deprived limbs to fight back.

  He thought of himself as a cat going to sleep in front of the fire, curled up and absorbed into Laura’s lap. It wasn’t painful. It wasn’t difficult. He merged into the fondest of memories. He just closed his eyes and quietly died.

  Chapter Four

  Wednesday, 21.25

  The hourglass was a Victorian folly, an egg-timer on steroids. It was four-foot tall and its huge glass bulbs were contained inside a mahogany framework of barley sugar legs and cross-struts carved with all sorts of queer cherubs, bunches of grapes and dragons’ heads. The sand contained in it was greyish brown and took ninety-six hours or four days to pass through the filament waist in an uninterrupted flow.

  Eddie Illingworth had found it in a junk shop when he was a teenager. He had made the mistake of appearing enthusiastic about buying it and had had to pay over the odds. It had accompanied him in his wanderings ever since, somehow surviving the worst excesses when other items he accumulated were broken or lost. It now stood on the floor of his bedroom at Tollcross in Edinburgh, gloriously out of place among the other flat-pack furniture, standing in splendid isolation on the azure blue carpet with bubble-mouthed fish woven into it that had been another impulse buy on a Canary Islands holiday during his recklessly indulgent youth.

  Illingworth was pleased with himself. Another month was safely behind him, another magazine successfully compiled and edited. The final proof copies had arrived that morning ahead of schedule and he had spent the day on the phone ironing out the last few minor production wrinkles. It had taken all day and most of the evening but he had stuck at it even though his staff had uncharacteristically abandoned him, pleading prior engagements.

  He couldn’t argue with his dear, spaced-out sister Norma or she would have flattened him. She took off before he had finished his first bacon roll. Neither could he argue with his advertising director Patricia. She was the boss’s wife, after all, and she wanted the afternoon off. The boss himself took a bundle of proof copies and disappeared without saying a word. He stayed on alone and did it all himself.

  Illingworth was in his late thirties but heart bypass surgery had aged him prematurely. He was a big, heavy man with unfashionably long hair and a still handsome but careworn face. He had held down good jobs in newspapers, but never for long. He had moved into public relations but that hadn’t really worked for him. The magazine job came as a life-saver when he believed he was on the scrap heap after his operation.

  He had never heard of the magazine, Ethereal. He knew nothing about reincarnation and even less about New Age philosophy but big sister Norma, who was the secretary in the office, kept him right. At least he had a healthy belief in the paranormal, was a professional bluffer and a good liar. He was given the editor’s job because the owner, who seemed a bit divorced from reality, liked him. It wasn’t a huge responsibility. There weren’t any staff to order about. Except Norma who knew more about the operation than he ever would. And Pat, the boss’s wife, who worked quietly away on her own and filled eighty per cent of the pages.

  He had been doing it for two years and his lack of detailed knowledge on the subject had proved a help rather than a hindrance. He had presided over a subscription rise of fifty per cent. He didn’t really know what he was doing right, but he kept doing it and taking the credit for it. What else were editors for?

  In his bedroom he took hold of the heavy wooden frame of the hourglass and hoisted it off the floor. Whenever a magazine was completed he went through the same ceremony, allowing himself a four-day binge to flush out his nervous system. It had become a tradition. He didn’t drink often but when he did, he did it with a vengeance. When the sand stopped running he would sober up. Until then he could be a different person.

  The hourglass somersaulted in his hands and went back down on the floor into the same four indentations in the carpet. For a few minutes he stood watching the thin stream of sand trickling through into the empty glass bulb. Then he went to get himself a drink.

  Chapter Five

  Wednesday, 21.56

  The rope was tied to the corner post of the black cast-iron fender in front of the smouldering fire. Individual loose strands of hemp were picked out in the halo thrown by the weak firelight. The rope ran diagonally up to a central roof beam, over it and vertically down to Ron Gilchrist’s neck. His body was standing on the seat of a chair in the middle of the room. It hung in a curve, bent at the knees and ankles like a parachutist frozen in the act of hitting the ground.

  The CD lights flickered and flashed as the music played loudly. Dylan sang how it was just like a woman.

  And she aches just like a woman,

  but she breaks just like a little girl.

  Laura’s lifeless body had been lifted from the floor where she had fallen. Her head lolled backwards on the armchair. Her sightless eyes were turned towards Gilchrist. Selina the cat was on the floor by the fire, watching too, its fur outlined in its own feline-shaped halo.

  The shadows on the wall copied the motion of a leg kicking out. The chair tumbled away, the sound of it making no impression on the music. Gilchrist spun and swung. His limp arms jumped and flapped until slowly, very slowly, the momentum faded and the body drooped in mid-air, the toes of its shoes almost scraping the ground.

  As the body stopped swinging the music track came to an end. A few seconds of silence was followed by the click of the random selector in operation. The rustle of an expectant crowd echoed out into the room. The twanging of a guitar and then the shrill notes of a harmonica. How many roads must a man walk down, Bob Dylan sang, and the applause was redoubled as the tune was recognized.

  Gilchrist’s hanging corpse gave a final twist to the left and back again. Then it was motionless. The black cat climbed into Laura’s lap and settled down, laying its head on its paws and curling its tail round.

  The answer, my friends, is blowin’ in the wind, Dylan roared. The answer is blowin’ in the wind.

  Chapter Six

  Wednesday, 22.30

  Another evening, another row. Ian Dalglish stood by the kitchen door putting on his coat. His bottom lip stuck out like a petulant child’s. God, he could be so infuriating. If anything had been to hand Moya McBain would have flung it at him.

  ‘I’m going then,’ he said.

  ‘Bloody well go,’ she replied.

  ‘I am. Thanks for a mediocre night out.’

  ‘I’d like to say the same only it wasn’t as good as that.’

  ‘You can be a thrawn bitch at times Moya.’

  ‘I try my best.’

  The evening had begun promisingly enough with pizza at a restaurant in Inverness, then a quiet drink at a country hotel on the way back to Moya’s house. It was a kiss-and-make-up occasion after their last argument. She had been expecting him to stay the night. The sheets were aired, the electric blanket was on, the sexy nightdress was ready. But somewhere along the line the niggling had started, backhanded insults had been traded, and the whole carefully constructed reconciliation collapsed around them. Dalglish was barely in the door at the house before he was on his way out
again.

  ‘I hope you and your career will be very happy together,’ he said.

  ‘At least the job is part of the twentieth century which is more than can be said for you.’

  ‘I’m going then.’

  ‘So go.’

  ‘And I won’t be coming back.’

  ‘Boo bloody hoo.’

  ‘You can only push me so far Moya.’

  ‘I’m pushing. I’m pushing and you’re still here.’

  ‘I’m going.’

  ‘Well bloody well go then.’

  Dalglish, at the age of fifty, was more than ten years older than her. His problem was that he desperately wanted to marry her. Moya’s problem was that she wanted to marry him, but on her own terms. She also wanted to continue rising through the ranks of the police force where she had just been promoted to the rank of inspector. Not bad for a former hippy wild-child and harassed single parent who had taken a five-year career break but was now secretly promising herself that she would become Big Mama Chief Constable one day. Dalglish wanted her to be a stay-at-home wife. He had his own haulage company. He could afford to keep her. She loved him dearly but she didn’t want to be kept. So they fought bitterly, tearing lumps out of each other at every opportunity.

  ‘What about our weekend in Paris?’

  ‘What about it?’

  ‘Are we still going this weekend?’