Lawless

by Alexander McGregor

  ‘Okey-dokey. Why all the mystery? What’s all this about?’ She hesitated for all of a second before adding, ‘Why did I say that? There’s not a chance you’re going to tell me, is there?’

  ‘Of course I will … but not right now. When I take you to dinner, I’ll give you complete chapter and verse – well, more or less. Anyway, you’ll be first to know.’

  Both of them laughed as they hung up.

  15

  He promised himself he would give the magnificent Gwen two hours to fulfil her promise to have the cuttings waiting for him. But an hour later McBride was behind the wheel of his car doing his best to impersonate Michael Schumacher as he cut through the heavy afternoon traffic that was pouring in and out of the city centre.

  At the crowded roundabout where the Kingsway city bypass converged with half a dozen other roads, he gunned the silver Mondeo through the junction, ignoring the fury of other drivers.

  Moments later, he arrived at the imposing red-brick home of The Courier. Few strangers to the town would have recognised it as the print headquarters of one of Britain’s most successful publishing empires. There were no illuminated signs or boastful banners. Just discreet lettering above the main entrance announcing the company name – DC Thomson & Co Ltd – only just enough to let the postman know where to drop the mail. McBride smiled as he suddenly remembered the name it had been given by a forgotten former colleague – ‘the Red Lubyanka’, a reference to its position on the outskirts of the city which, the cynic said, ‘made prisoners’ of the reporters who might otherwise have been interrogating ‘contacts’ in the city centre bars. There was nobody as economical with the truth as a journalist in search of a drink.

  McBride screeched to a halt, taking up two parking spaces in his thoughtless haste. He strode swiftly into the building and looked at once to see if one of the large buff envelopes always used by Cuttings had been placed on the desk at reception. The memory woman of Kingsway had not let him down. Gwen’s precise handwriting in her hallmark heavy black ink jumped out at him from a bulging packet – ‘To Await Mr Campbell McBride’.

  Bloody marvel, he thought as he identified himself to the receptionist, picked it up and walked just as quickly back to the car park, hoping none of the reporters inside had spotted him from their ‘cell’ windows. He resisted the temptation to rip the envelope open as soon as he was back in his car, knowing his search of the thick bundle of newspaper clippings would not be brief or easy to conduct from the confines of the Mondeo.

  His journey back through the city was no less impatient. He drove on the brakes and horn, wondering, as he always did, why his fellow motorists seemed to resent his presence. McBride had an uncomplicated view of other road-users – those who drove slowly in front impeding his progress were idiots; those who overtook were morons; and those who sat behind at precisely the same speed as himself were a combination of the two. It seemed a reasonable enough appraisal of all those inconsiderate enough to want to make a journey at the same time as himself.

  When he at last reached the privacy of his new flat, McBride paused only long enough to throw off his jacket and shoes. Then he sat on the floor, slid an impatient finger along the seal of the packet and tipped the contents out in front of him. There was much to scrutinise. More than a hundred cuttings had tumbled from the envelope, each of them carefully dated and bearing the name of the paper it had been snipped from and a special file reference number. Gwen had taught her assistants well.

  Journalists spend much of their life browsing clippings and, very early in their careers, they acquire the art of rapidly recognising and dispensing with those they know will be of no value. McBride employed his talent and, in very little time, he had divided the old news articles into two groups. The largest pile was swiftly eliminated and he pushed it out of the way. He studied the remainder for the best part of an hour before discarding all but three of them. What was left were the accounts of how a trio of women, apparently unknown but with a number of things in common, had met their maker in circumstances that were not dissimilar.

  One, a twenty-five-year-old call-centre worker, had been discovered in an upstairs bedroom of her semi-detached home on the outskirts of Dundee some six years earlier. Nicola Cassidy had lived there alone after parting from her husband the previous year. She had not been known to have formed any other relationship and had apparently led a quiet, uneventful life until her murder. She had been choked to death, probably manually, and had apparently lain in the house for some four days before concerned colleagues alerted police to her non-appearance at work. The husband, who would inevitably have been the initial prime suspect, had been able to prove he was 300 miles away in Birmingham at the time of her death.

  The few leads that had appeared promising petered out after a couple of months and her killer had never been traced. Police had announced that several items of modest value were missing and hinted that intercourse had taken place around the time of her death. McBride knew that attempts to find a match on the national DNA database must have drawn a blank – otherwise there would have been an arrest, even if it hadn’t led to a conviction.

  ‘That’s another bastard who’ll spend the rest of his life shitting himself in case he has to get his mouth swabbed for some minor misdemeanour,’ McBride muttered. He finally laid the clippings down, all of the relevant details subconsciously stored away.

  He turned to another, smaller bundle of yellowing cuttings, opening them out again from the deep creases that had formed during their life in the buff envelope. The tale they told was of an attractive young mother found dead in her bed by a neighbour who lived in the same block of flats in Brechin, a small country town only twenty miles from Dundee. The two communities, however, were a million miles apart in terms of lifestyle. This victim had also experienced her last moments on earth fighting for breath, before expiring as a result of sustained strangulation. Reading between the lines, there seemed to be an absence of a ligature, meaning it had been a pair of powerful hands that had brought her short existence to a brutally premature conclusion. Her name was Roberta Kerr and she had apparently enjoyed a night out with a group of female friends before making her way home alone, slightly the worse for drink, some time after midnight. That evening, her two small children had been cared for by her parents in nearby Montrose and it seemed she had returned by herself to an empty apartment.

  However, she had evidently encountered a man at some stage because the clippings quoted the senior investigating officer as saying, ‘We know she must have been in the company of a male at some stage during the evening,’ police-speak for evidence of sex having taken place. Her purse and some other items of limited value had been stolen. Like the unfortunate Nicola Cassidy, her murderer had not been traced in the five years that had elapsed. It was another cold trail awaiting the kick-start of a DNA match that could happen tomorrow or maybe never.

  McBride scanned the clippings for several more minutes until he was satisfied he had missed nothing of importance. Then he placed them on top of the impersonal, clinical particulars recounting the sad life and death of the quiet call-centre employee.

  Almost two hours had passed since McBride had started to examine the results of Gwen Kissock’s meticulous research and he became aware of a growing stiffness in his lower back – the kind of warning sign he usually experienced when he had spent too long in the saddle of his Trek. He rose from the floor and executed a short series of stretching exercises, which were the closest he ever allowed himself to come to performing yoga. The pain slowly subsided and he crossed the room to change the three CDs which had played repeatedly since he had settled in the room. The replacements were almost an exact replica of the genre of those being removed. He slid Rod Stewart, Elton John and Simply Red into the waiting trays, eager for the room to be filled again with music. McBride was aware that his musical tastes might be ridiculed so he would never admit to them in public but, for reasons he never fully understood, he always wrote – and thought – best
when some dated middle-of-the-roader was singing invisibly in the background. Not that he could ever recall much of what he had heard – unless it was Don McLean’s rendition of ‘Vincent’, the lyrics of which always managed to move him.

  He returned to sit on the floor and removed the paperclip holding the final batch of cuttings together, once more beginning to read how life had ended cruelly for someone who was entitled to believe her best days were still ahead of her.

  Ginny Williams had come to Scotland from New Zealand to live in the midst of academia. She also died there, about a year after the murder of Alison Brown. The young lawyer’s journey from the other side of the world had taken her to St Andrews where she was midway through a postgraduate course at the famous university. Tall, blonde and striking, she had taken occupancy of a furnished ground-floor house at Clay Braes, an easy ten-minute walk down Largo Road and along South Street to her place of study.

  She apparently adored good books, fine food and even better wine. Ginny did not appear to have much in common with her sister corpses, those of Nicola Cassidy and Roberta Kerr. She was neither separated from her husband nor a mother living in a small town. The trio had shared the same ultimate fate, however, for the stunning Kiwi had also been throttled into perpetual silence in her home – although, in her case, the precise nature of the ligature that had been used was not disclosed.

  McBride reread the news reports of her murder several times, aware that the absence of precise detail was a deliberate act by the police who invariably withheld the kind of information that only the killer could be aware of. It helped eliminate the nutters who couldn’t wait to confess to murders they had never committed.

  You did not require to be any kind of genius, however, to appreciate that the killer had obviously left traces of himself behind. After weeks of going nowhere, the inquiry had attracted world headlines when Fife Police announced there had been some sexual element to the killing and declared their intention to seek DNA samples from every male under the age of fifty who lived in and around St Andrews. It was specifically directed at the significant male student population but not particularly at the ancient university’s most famous undergraduate of all, Prince William.

  The student prince had joined his peers in having his DNA taken. His discreetly conducted test meant he did not have to queue up with the general population but that did not stop the headlines from proclaiming ‘Prince William Leads the Way’. McBride shook his head in wonder at the feeble attempt to pass off the prince’s public duty as some kind of act of benevolence. ‘Christ sake,’ he sighed, ‘he could hardly have done otherwise.’ He imagined the field day the media would have had if he’d declined the test – ‘Future King Refuses to Co-operate with Murder Cops’.

  Not all that unexpectedly, the sample taken from the heir to the throne was not a match. At any rate, he had not been arrested. Surprisingly, no headline along the lines of ‘Prince Cleared of Murder Rap’ had appeared anywhere. The tabloids must be losing their touch, McBride mused.

  The prince, who shared a cottage on the edge of town with a select handful of friends, was not the only one to have been ruled out of the exhaustive inquiry. Hundreds of others had also had the inside of their mouths painstakingly swabbed, without the remotest sign of a lead emerging. Like the murder hunts that had so hopefully been launched after the untimely deaths of Nicola Cassidy and Roberta Kerr, the inquiries had trailed off before grinding to a halt. Officially the investigations remained ‘open’ but the dedicated teams had been stood down and the frustrated officers had redeployed to normal duties.

  McBride returned the clippings to their envelope and finally rose from his awkward position on the floor. Rod Stewart was on a ‘Downtown Train’ for the fourth time, darkness had descended outside and the central heating had infuriatingly switched itself off. But McBride barely noticed any of this – he was starting to sift what he had learned and replaying in his head the anchor points of all the text he’d studied that afternoon. He searched for the similarities and differences that might exist between the trio of murders and that of Alison Brown.

  What it amounted to was this – over a six-year period, three women in their twenties had died after some form of strangulation, all of them in their own home. There was evidence of sexual activity in each case. All of them had probably been drinking to varying degrees. No one had been arrested for any of the killings and all had occurred within a twenty-mile radius of Dundee. In two of the cases, robbery had taken place – though it may not have been the motive. Although a few thousand pounds’ worth of household items had been stolen from the home of Nicola Cassidy, it would not have warranted her murder.

  Apart from the lack of arrests, the death of Alison Brown might have fitted very neatly into the pattern that had emerged.

  OK, he admitted to himself, women being strangled wasn’t exactly unique and maybe there were more differences than similarities but there was enough there to make him want to dig deeper.

  McBride felt satisfied with his afternoon’s work. He mentally noted that Gwen should be encouraged to have the most expensive dessert on the menu when he eventually took her to dinner.

  16

  The doors of the Central Library had been unlocked and open to the public for all of two minutes when McBride strode briskly through them and headed, once more, for the local studies section.

  Elaine with the breasts was nowhere to be seen. In her place behind the counter was a male in a badly ironed shirt and tie that was too tight. His hair was greasy and needing cut and, although he appeared to be in his mid thirties, his pockmarked face still bore traces of acne. An unpleasant mix of body odour and cheap deodorant rose from him.

  McBride was the only other person in the room but he might as well have been invisible while he waited for the assistant to acknowledge his presence by raising his head from the computer printout he was apparently studying. Nothing happened for at least twenty seconds. McBride shuffled his feet and cleared his throat. Still nothing. He was seriously contemplating making the slimeball’s tie even tighter when there was a flicker that his existence had been recognised.

  An expressionless face with dead eyes looked up at him. Although the heating system in the library had still some work to do to warm the place, sweat glistened on the forehead of the man gazing sullenly at him. The badge on the crumpled shirt identified him as ‘Brad’. McBride found himself transfixed by the word and the inappropriateness of it. Christ sake – nobody was ever going to mistake him for Brad Pitt. He controlled an urge to laugh. ‘Brad’, as though reading his thoughts, stared defiantly back.

  McBride knew things were not going to go well. He resolved to be polite … and for ten seconds he succeeded. ‘Can you help me find some back editions of The Courier, please? I need to go back eight years. Are they beside the more recent ones?’

  ‘Over there.’ The limp hair nodded vaguely in the direction of the other side of the room.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘There.’ Another inclination of the greasy head, this time barely discernible and towards no particular part of the premises.

  McBride’s jaw tightened and he was aware that the fingers of his left hand were drumming on the countertop while his right fist was starting to clench. He marvelled at his own restraint. ‘I don’t know where you mean. Take me there, please. And, if you don’t, “Brad”, I’m going to write down your name and complain about you all the way to Number Ten Downing Street. I’m also going to squeeze you by the neck until your eyes bulge.’ McBride instantly regretted the remark. He knew instinctively that Brad would have learned the book on employees’ rights off by heart, particularly the chapter about being intimidated by customers. He waited for the outraged response. At the very least he would be asked to leave, more probably he would be threatened with the police.

  Neither happened. The hunched figure of the surly assistant rose from his seat and walked slowly from behind the counter. If he had dropped his pace by a fraction, he would have ground
to a halt. But he was moving and in the direction of a rank of bound files. He motioned McBride to follow. The journey across the room took an eternity but finally they arrived at a section covering a ten-year period.

  ‘The more recent ones are round the corner. You’ll have to get them down yourself.’ Then, as he sniffed and turned away, the man whose smell was now almost one hundred per cent body sweat, added over his shoulder, ‘No cutting anything out.’

  ‘Thanks, you’ve been extremely helpful.’

  McBride had no idea if the sarcasm had been noted. Nothing seemed to penetrate Brad’s air of implacability and he shuffled off without giving any sign that he had even heard the remark. Moments later, he was back at his desk, crouched, once more, over the computer printouts.

  After locating the files of six years earlier, McBride hastily turned the pages of the old newspapers until he found the one chronicling the death of Nicola Cassidy. He was not looking for additional information – he wanted less than was already contained in the cuttings dug out for him by Gwen. He hoped the report of the call-centre worker’s untimely death would be at least a sentence short of what had originally been there. He needed it to be telling him something, even if he could not understand what it was. He wanted a ‘message’ like the one left behind after the trial of Adam Gilzean.

  He did not receive it. Every word detailing the murder of the twenty-five-year-old was as intact as the moment it had been printed. He repeated his search another two times to be certain but the file was as complete as the day it had been stored away. He doubted if anyone had even read it, far less approached it with a razor. McBride knew he should be glad but a rush of disappointment spread through him.

  He replaced the file, aware that Brad had lifted his gaze from his printouts and was watching his every move from the other end of the room. He resisted the urge to fix him with a stare in return and instead pulled down the bound volume of newspapers for the year when Roberta Kerr had perished and left her two little girls motherless.