The Harlequin

by Sinclair Macleod

  “I think we should go for a bite to eat,” he shouted into the curtained area.

  “After I try this last one,” she replied and Russell’s stomach gurgled its disapproval.

  He sat trying to ignore one more of the turgid tunes of another bland boy-band that seemed to be pumped into every store, when the distinctive ring of his mobile phone startled him.

  “Hello, Detective Inspector Tom Russell speaking.”

  “Tom, it’s Mark McLelland. I know it’s your day off and I’m sorry to disturb you but I need you to come in.”

  “That’s fine, sir. What’s up?”

  “The Harlequin’s back,” the chief superintendent said quietly.

  “First of April,” Russell muttered. He wasn’t really replying to McLelland, he was lost in his own initial horrified thoughts and the implications of those three words.

  There was a period of shocked silence, which was punctuated by McLelland saying, “Are you still there?”

  “Sorry sir, yes. What happened?”

  “It’s better if you see it for yourself. It happened in George Square just after twelve.”

  “I’m not far away, I’m in Debenhams in Argyle Street. I’ll be there in five minutes.”

  “OK. See you soon.”

  With his phone back in his pocket, he stood up and walked to the changing room. “Karen, I’m really sorry but I have to go to work.”

  “But you’re on holiday,” she replied with annoyance.

  “The Harlequin’s back.”

  She realised immediately what that meant to her husband and replied, “Oh. You better go then. I’ll see you later.” There were times when she hated her husband’s dedication but today was not one of them, she knew exactly what was at stake.

  “Sorry love. Bye.”

  His brisk walk up the length of Queen Street took him to the blue and white crime scene tape of an outer cordon that surrounded the whole of the square. He flashed his warrant card at the female constable who was on duty at the cordon and ducked under the flimsy barrier. A path had been marked out with more tape and Russell followed it to the inner cordon that surrounded the flashing lights, forensic tent and a crowd of busy people. He gave his name to a detective who was controlling access to the scene. Close to the edge of the cordoned off area Chief Superintendent Mark McLelland was waiting with an anxious expression on his face.

  “Thanks for coming, Tom. I thought you would want to be involved. We could do with some continuity.”

  “What happened?”

  McLelland gave him a brief report about what little they knew. “We’ve got a couple of eyewitnesses, but I don’t think they’re going to be much help. I’ll let you speak to Mr Gregson first; he was closest to the incident.

  Robert Gregson was sitting in an open ambulance just outside the inner cordon, a cup of sweet tea in his hand as McLelland and Russell approached. He was dressed in dark grey trousers, a white shirt that was stained with blood and a red tie that he had loosened at the neck. His suit jacket lay at his side scrunched into a ball, it had been dyed a dark maroon due to the amount of blood it had absorbed. The witness was in his late forties with receding hair and a greying goatee beard. He seemed calm but detached from his surroundings; judging by his pallor he was understandably suffering from shock.

  “Mr Gregson, this is Detective Inspector Russell. I would like you to tell him what you saw, if you don’t mind.”

  “Sure,” he replied softly. “I was out for lunch, I like to come to the square and sit and eat when the weather’s good. When I arrived, there was a crowd of people around a couple of the clowns who were doing a juggling act with rings and balls. They were good and they had attracted a fair number of people. Out of the corner of my eye I noticed another clown in the same costume at the edge of the crowd. I thought he was maybe collecting money for them. I turned back to watch the show when I heard a dreadful gurgling sound. A man close to me fell to the ground clutching his neck. Then I realised there was another guy behind him holding his stomach and then the clown drove the knife into the chest of the man who was standing next to me. I’m sorry but I froze, if I had been quicker I might have been able to catch him. He ran through the crowd and I lost sight of him, then I turned my attention to the injured to see if I could help. The gentleman next to me was dead and I didn’t think that I would be able to help the poor soul whose throat had been cut, so I tried to give some first aid to the older guy with the stomach wound. I pressed my jacket against the injury and tried talking to him but he slipped away very quickly.” He gulped as if choking back the emotion.

  “Mr Gregson, don’t worry about not catching the killer. You did the right thing, if you had tried to stop him, you may well have been his fourth victim of the day. What can you tell us about this man?” Russell asked.

  “Nothing really, he looked exactly like the other clowns. Sorry.”

  “Was he tall, short, fat, thin? Anything that might help us to identify him.”

  “I would say he was slightly shorter than average height, not sure about his build, the costumes were pretty loose fitting.”

  “I understand. Here’s my card. If you remember anything, even if it’s the middle of the night, just ring me.”

  “I will do inspector. I’m sorry I can’t be any more help.”

  Russell and McLelland left the man in the ambulance and walked back towards the main crime scene. They suited up in protective clothing, slipped on overshoes and gloves before moving towards the scene of the tragedy.

  Inside the cramped forensics tent, the bodies of the three men lay surrounded by a team of technicians and detectives. It was a sad tableau that looked like the victims had become the subject of some grisly performance art installation. Poised over one of the bodies was the duty pathologist, Doctor Lucy Thompson. She was talking quietly into a portable dictation machine, making her initial observations, oblivious to anything other than the victims and their wounds.

  Russell took in the diorama of death. As Mr Gregson had described, one of the men had been stabbed in the stomach, another in the heart and the third had been slashed in the neck. His mind drifted to that very first scene in the Blake’s flat, and how it had affected him. Was this a deliberate attempt by the Harlequin to evoke that very image? He wouldn’t put it past the sick bastard.

  “What do you think doctor?” he asked the pathologist when she had finished recording her notes.

  “All three died almost instantly, I believe. The neck and the heart are obvious; it looks like the third man’s liver was punctured. He would have bled out very quickly. The knife was quite narrow and extremely sharp judging by the depth of the wounds and how clean the cuts are but that’s about all I can tell you until I do the post mortem.” Her accent was English, although it was difficult to distinguish any particular regional inflection, there was the slightest hint of Lancashire in it.

  Russell had met Lucy Thompson a few times but found it difficult to build a relationship with her. She was always polite but very guarded in her dealings with him; she never gave anything of herself away. Russell didn’t even know where her home town was or whether she was married, engaged or single; those subjects either never came up or were rebuffed with a diplomatic charm when he tried to talk about anything other than her work. He wasn’t offended as she seemed to be the same with everyone.

  “What do you think? Same man?” McLelland asked his D.I.

  Russell nodded. “I’m pretty sure it is.”

  “You’ve come across this before?” the pathologist asked.

  “Ten years ago the Harlequin arranged for a cocktail of psychotropic drugs to be injected into some cakes. The drugs alone caused six deaths but that wasn’t enough for him. He then killed the woman who ran the bakery and her four-year old daughter. There were mistakes in the investigation and one of the detectives took his own life as a result.”


  “I have a vague memory of that, I was at university down south at the time.”

  “We caught the guy who laced the cakes but not the man who initiated the whole thing. It looks like he’s back with another sick April Fool’s Day joke.”

  “Have we got any I.D. on the victims?” McLelland asked Detective Sergeant McKinley who had been one of the first to attend the scene.

  “Yes, sir. The man whose throat was cut is Mehmet Ashad, a Turkish national according to his passport. The victim with the stomach wound is Martin Jenkinson who works at a local insurance firm and the third man is Jordan Callender who is a student at the College Of Building and Printing.”

  As McKinley identified them, Russell studied each of them in turn. Mr Ashad had the olive complexion that characterised many of his countrymen. Russell guessed that he would be in his early thirties. He had thick black hair that topped a handsome face. Above his thick lips he had a thin moustache and on his cheek there was a white scar. Martin Jenkinson was in his late fifties, he was tall and would have cut a debonair figure in a beautifully cut suit, but what had once been finery was now reduced to blood-drenched cloth. His silver-rimmed glasses lay beside his shoulder where they had fallen during the attack. The third victim was in his early twenties, dressed in a thin leather jacket, a designer T-shirt and expensive jeans. White earphones rested across him, and his bag filled with textbooks lay a couple of feet away. His face would never see wrinkles, it was already a cool white remnant of the life and the hope that had filled it earlier that day.

  Beside the bag was a little yellow board with a black number three on it. There were many more similar boards dotted around the scene and they would be used at a later date by the forensics team to reconstruct where the evidence they collected had been found.

  Russell pinched his nose and then rubbed his forehead. Here were three men; one on a break from work, one in the middle of studies with his whole life in front of him and the third, a visitor to the city. They had arrived at that particular place, at that specific time by a series of decisions and coincidences that had ushered them into the path of someone whose view of the world was so distorted that human life had become an irrelevance. Russell couldn’t help but wonder if there was more he and the team could have done to prevent this happening. He made a silent vow; this time the killer’s games would end.

  Chapter 12

  McLelland had offered to drive Russell up to the station but as he was still hungry, he told the senior officer that he would walk. It was about a mile up a steep hill from the scene to the station. He grabbed a sandwich and a coffee en route, consuming them as he walked.

  An hour after they had left the forensic technicians to continue gathering evidence in and around the locus, McLelland and Russell were standing in a briefing room in Stewart Street Station, a group of around twenty detectives and uniformed officers were waiting to begin the investigations. Many of the younger officers had no inkling of the details of the previous deaths, so it fell to Russell to fill in the gaps in their knowledge. They were astounded to hear the lengths that ‘The Harlequin’ had gone to initiate his sadistic games. When they were informed of the horrific murder of Deirdre Nichol and her daughter, the astonishment turned to anger. Russell was pleased to see their disgust at what had happened was hardening their resolve to make sure that he didn’t slip through the fingers of justice this time. Many of the assembled detectives asked pertinent questions, and some of the details the two senior officers had to recall brought back images from the worst period of their career.

  McLelland was granted permission from the assistant chief constable to be the senior investigation officer for the case. This was in spite of the fact that as a chief superintendent his daily role was strictly that of a manager. He hadn’t run an inquiry of this scale for over four years but the A.C.C. felt his connection to the original murders would provide a more consistent approach and McLelland was happy to oblige.

  When all the questions had been exhausted, McLelland told them, “The first thing we need is a victim profile for each of the three men. If any of these guys has a connection with Deirdre Nichol we need to find it, particularly if that connection relates in anyway to the first of April 1983.”

  There were nods of agreement and understanding from everyone.

  “The second thing is to find the murder weapon. It’s highly unlikely but maybe he left something of himself on it and we can use it to identify him. He was very careful to make sure there was no forensic evidence to link him the last time, but ten years have gone by and now we have DNA profiling to help us.”

  One of the detectives asked, “Sir, why do you think he has let ten years pass since the previous crimes?””

  Russell answered, “I think that the date might be a trigger. Somehow, when the clock ticks round to the year ending in three, it ignites something dark in him that he can’t resist. With someone this disturbed there’s no way to be sure but I think that’s a possible reason.”

  McLelland offered an alternative theory. “It’s not something I had considered last time round but what if Glasgow isn’t the only place that he has been active in when April Fool’s Day comes round. I want a thorough scan of the HOLMES database for any strange incidents on April the first within any jurisdiction across the whole of the U.K. If you have no luck there, check with Interpol. We’ve been working on the theory that this is a revenge mission but we can’t rule out the possibility that this is a nomadic, psychopathic serial killer.”

  “Wouldn’t we have connected the dots before now if that was the case?” D.S. McKinley asked. He was an experienced officer with a keen mind; only his own lack of ambition had prevented him rising further up the ranks of the service. He was both respected and liked by his colleagues and more senior officers always took his thoughts into account.

  McLelland conceded the point. “Andy, you’re probably right but if he’s killing in other countries we might not have made the connection. It’s just something to consider that might explain the long gap between crimes.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “The third thing is to get every one of those performers who were involved today in for an interview. Did we get all the names and addresses?”

  “Yes, sir the promotions company supplied them,” a young female D.C. said.

  “Organise as many interviews as you can today and we’ll pick up the rest tomorrow,” McLelland directed the comment to McKinley.

  “Yes, sir,” he replied

  “Anyone else got any questions or suggestions?”

  McLelland felt comfortable that Andy McKinley was a safe pair of hands and that he could be trusted to allocate the tasks to the people who had the appropriate skills. “Andy, can you co-ordinate the assignments please. D.I. Russell and I will need to speak to the press relations people about hosting a news conference. We will have to manage carefully the information we give out as the speculation is likely to be dramatic and probably inaccurate if we don’t get a grip of it quickly.”

  The two senior detectives left the briefing room as McKinley began to bark out orders.

  “We’ll go to Pitt Street and get this over with,” McLelland told Russell in the corridor. The detective inspector nodded reluctantly; if there was one part of his job he hated, it was communicating with the press. He realised that it was an important aspect of what he did, but he always felt the journalists were more interested in tripping up the police than helping to catch a killer.

  ***

  On the short car journey to the Strathclyde Police Headquarters the two men talked about the case. They voiced their thoughts and concerns about the task ahead, and discussed a strategy for the challenges they faced.

  Within fifteen minutes they were walking into the press officer’s room.

  Kelly Ingram was sitting behind her desk peering through a pair of expensive spectacles at an array of newspaper clippings that were strewn
across her desk. She remained focused on her task until McLelland coughed discreetly; she looked up and immediately jumped from her seat and rushed over to greet them. “Oh, sorry. I was miles away.”

  “Kelly this is D.I. Russell,” McLelland said.

  “Oh, hi. Please come in and have a seat. I believe we have quite the tragedy to deal with.”

  “I’m afraid so. We’re going to have to handle this one very cautiously,” McLelland replied.

  The two detectives had to remove further bundles of photocopied newspaper cuttings from the visitor’s chairs before they could sit down.

  “Sorry, we’ve been asked to compile an analysis of press reporting and reaction to house-breaking over the past three years. I’ve got cuttings from every local newspaper in Scotland to go through. It’s a bit tedious. I’m glad of something more important and interesting to do, even if it is in such terrible circumstances.”

  Russell had met the woman once before but it was obvious she didn’t remember him. She was in her early thirties with untidy fair hair. Her interesting and diverse taste in clothes hung from a tall, fine-boned frame. Her glasses rested on a sharp nose that sat in the centre of a face composed of delicate features. She gave off a nervous energy that some might take for weakness but Russell had heard from many sources that she had a fiery temper and on a bad day, could swear like a bricklayer.

  She took out a notebook and pen. “We’ve already had to field some questions from the press hounds about this. We’ve batted them away so far but we have to tell them something concrete or the speculation will run riot. With any luck it won’t make the evening paper but the television news are running something already. Fill me in,” she instructed while looking over her spectacles at the two men.

  McLelland began to recite the story, starting with the three bizarre drug-inspired incidents before progressing to the murders at the Nichol family home and the subsequent suicide of Detective Inspector Newman. He asked Russell to supply further detail when needed to ensure that the press officer had as full a picture as was possible in a short time.