Blood In The Water

by Gillian Galbraith

  ‘The train from Glasgow due to arrive on platform twelve at nine am has been delayed and is now expected at nine-fifteen am.’

  No more than a bland statement of fact. The bulletin tailed off without explanation or apology. While Alice was digesting this information and considering whether she could be bothered to put pen to paper to complain, a little man, smelling strongly of drink, sidled up to her. His clothes had ‘charity shop’ written all over them. Oversized black plastic shoes with pristine brown laces, ill-fitting sheepskin coat and fake cavalry twill trousers exposing nylon Argyll-patterned socks. One of the hopeless combinations of poverty, drink and middle age, to whom the capital could no longer offer a home. She became aware of the stench of warm lager fumes close to her face.

  ‘’Lo, hen,’ he exhaled into her breathing zone.

  She could have moved away, pretending to have heard nothing, but she chose instead to respond, thinking it would make the time pass more quickly.

  ‘Hello,’ she replied, smiling in a half-hearted fashion. Sensing a green light the drunk immediately launched into a practised monologue, something about Glasgow’s virtues and Edinburgh’s vices, meandering into the state of Scottish football and the Pope’s nazi past. He seemed to require only an occasional nod from Alice to keep up his inane patter. Before he could start on a new topic, Alice became aware of a train drawing up on the platform. She smiled politely at the little man and, intending to detach herself from him, began to move along the train looking for a less-crowded carriage near the front. A journey of over fifty minutes in his company, in a badly ventilated space, would be beyond the call of charity, duty or anything else. She settled down at a table for four, occupied only by an austere-looking woman wearing blue-tinted spectacles. She looked up from her newspaper momentarily to see who was intruding into her space. As Alice unfastened her briefcase and took a copy of a statement from it she became aware of the familiar scent of stale lager. She glanced up to see the grinning face of her small companion as he edged himself towards the vacant seat by her side. He flopped down into it noisily, introducing an additional smell, the sweet, sickly smell of the unwashed.

  ‘’Lo, hen.’

  This time the greeting was directed at the bespectacled lady passenger who, in an attempt to avoid engaging in conversation with anyone, seemed to have shrunk into herself. In response she smiled, with her mouth only, at the drunk, and then immediately lowered her eyes again. If she believed that the coolness of her response would stop any further unwelcome conversation she was wrong.

  ‘Hen. Hen!’ he persisted. ‘This lady…’-he gestured expansively towards Alice-‘…this lady’s ma wife, Mary. We’ve been married about ten years now. Oh, we’ve had our ups and doons, what couple’s no, but I’ve stuck by her through thick and thin and she’s always…’-he gazed at Alice fondly-‘been there for me…’

  Alice was paralysed by surprise into inaction. As the urge to dissociate herself from the drunk, even to a stranger, grew, she heard him say:

  ‘We’ve just been blessed with the one bairn. A wee boy. We cry him Jesus.’

  ‘Excuse me,’ Alice said to the woman opposite, ‘before this journey I’d never met this man. He is not my husband. We have no child.’

  The woman nodded her understanding and Alice found herself then smiling, weakly, at the little man. She wondered why on earth she was smiling at him. A desire to avoid hurting his feelings after this public rejection? No, more likely a concern to avoid any transition in him from affability to aggression. He was drunk and Scottish after all. Having successfully unnerved the two female passengers, the man closed his eyes and began, in what seemed to be seconds only, to snore loudly.

  Glasgow Sheriff Court was packed with people: a strange assortment of sharp-suited lawyers, anxious-looking litigants, police, social workers and sullen-faced criminals. As Alice was trying to find out from the reception desk which court she was due to attend, she was tapped on the shoulder. Turning, she recognised Anna O’Neil, Deputy Procurator Fiscal, and an old friend from university.

  ‘The trial’s off…’ Anna said. ‘The accused pled guilty to a lesser charge. You won’t be needed. The advocate depute’s released all the witnesses.’

  A broad grin spread across Alice’s face. She could have shouted for joy, the relief at not having to appear in court was so immense. She had prepared herself for the ordeal, felt ready for it, but experienced not a tinge of regret that she would be deprived of the opportunity to voice the testimony she had been rehearsing in her head for the last few days.

  Alice Rice had entered the police force, on the accelerated promotion scheme for graduates, in the belief that whatever else such a career could lack, it would, always, provide interest. A challenging job, not necessarily well paid but with endless variety and the chance to do something worthwhile. It had taken only a few months on the beat for her to realise that a great deal of the work was mundane, repetitious and thankless. Fortunately, she was an optimist, believing that as she progressed up the organisation the new horizons facing her would be stimulating and to some extent this had proved true.

  But there was a cost attached. She hated the process of giving evidence as a witness. Each time she had to do it she dreaded the next more, and yet the task was central to the job. There was no way of avoiding it, and bad luck seemed to arrange matters so that she spent hours being cross-examined when her colleagues were in and out of the box having given little more than their names. No-one could have been more meticulous in their preparation for court, but for all the hard hours spent, she invariably was left feeling that the accused’s lawyer, wily solicitor or new-born advocate, had got the better of her. How could she be so easily tripped up, when all she was doing was trying, to the best of her ability, to tell the truth?

  And there was another insidious effect of the job that she was becoming increasingly aware of and disconcerted by. She no longer seemed to be at home anywhere, at ease, anywhere. Her gender, resolute middle-classness and graduate status all marked her off as alien within the force, and now even in the civilian world she often found herself adrift. Her friends from university, with one exception, had all gone into either the law, publishing or business. None of them had ever had a handful of their hair wrenched out by a distraught female shoplifter, or been spat at by an irate protester. They would never have to tell the parents of a small child that he’d been killed by a drunken driver on his way home from school. The points of contact between her world and that of her friends seemed to be growing fewer as time passed.

  Also, and it was a big also, she was the only one to have remained unmarried, unpartnered and childless into her thirty-fifth year. Her single state was easily explained. It was not that she was unattractive, quite the reverse; she was positively good-looking, being tall, just over six feet, clear-skinned and with dark hair and hazel eyes. Men were attracted to her as wasps to jam on a late summer afternoon. The real problem, in her estimation at least, lay in her unashamed independence, which gave the impression of complete self-sufficiency. It was, in fact, a front created by her in childhood and which she had never since had the courage to discard.

  No vegetation adorned the stern lines of the St Leonard’s police station. Its dirty, yellow-ochre brick met the dull grey of the pavement seamlessly, and the only concession to the fad of landscaping community buildings had been the planting of a few rowan trees, now sickly and requiring the protection of metal grilles. Inside, the station was humming. News of a killing on the north side had just come in from the station at Gayfield Square and the chosen murder squad was assembling for its first briefing from Detective Chief Inspector Elaine Bell. Alice stuffed her bacon roll back into its brown paper bag while scanning the unoccupied seats for Alastair Watt’s friendly face. Back row, third from the left. The team could have been much worse, she decided. She would have to work with him, DCs Irwin, Littlewood, McDonald and Sinclair, and the only fly in the ointment was the inclusion of Eric Manson, Detective Inspector Manson
. She reached the vacant chair next to Alastair just as DCI Bell began her briefing.

  ‘As you will all know by now, there has been a murder in Bankes Crescent, and officers from Gayfield Square are in attendance at present. The victim is a Dr Elizabeth Clarke, a medical consultant, aged about forty-one. She was found in her flat at No. 1 Bankes Crescent this morning round about nine am by her cleaning lady, a Mrs Ross, when she let herself in. We don’t have much information so far, but it seems that she was killed by having her throat cut, probably some time about six to twelve hours ago. A little piece of lined paper with the word ‘unreliable’, written in green biro, was found at the victim’s feet. Gayfield have already taken some statements, but I’d like Alice and Alastair to interview Dr Clarke’s nearest neighbours. Get the usual stuff plus any information that you can about the victim. Eric can go to the Royal Infirmary, the new building, to speak to the doctor’s colleagues at work. I’ve already spoken to a Dr Maxwell, from her department, and I’d suggest beginning with him. He worked beside the victim for years…’

  DCI Bell looked pale, ivory white with blue-black rings bordering her eyes, unconcealable by any make-up. She was a workaholic, and her addiction, knowingly nurtured by her superiors, was destroying her health. The everyday business of the station overloaded her already frayed circuits, and the additional workload imposed by the killing would likely result in a burn-out of some kind. For the duration of the investigation she would become, like most of those involved, an occasional visitor to her own home and her husband provided scant sympathy, having long been disenchanted with ‘the force’ and its unreasonable demands. The woman he had married had yearned for a home and children and, in their absence as the years went by, had metamorphosed into an alien creature, more accustomed to giving orders than taking them.

  The location of Dr Clarke’s flat was obvious from the number of police vehicles parked outside the imposing stone building that began the crescent and abutted Eton Terrace. A young constable, still too thin for his uniform, was on duty logging movements in and out of the big black front door. The building was attached to its neighbour by a monumental screen wall with three blind arches, resembling three closed eyes. It overlooked the Dean Gardens, an area perfumed with the unlikely scent of beer from the Water of Leith that passed through it, having collected brewery effluent further upstream. Dressed in paper suit and bootees, Alice climbed the thickly carpeted stair that led to Elizabeth Clarke’s flat. The outer hall was painted a deep oxblood red, and a number of small watercolours of naval ships decorated its walls. Noting that photographers and other scene-of-crime officers were busy in the drawing room, she took a detour into the doctor’s study instead. It was dominated by a pair of large, shiny, black speakers. They were entirely out of keeping with the rest of the furniture in the room, all of which had been arranged to allow them pride of place. The floor was covered in neat piles of papers and copies of medical journals had been filed, by title, along the skirting-boards. A Georgian writing desk lay open with a set of original medical records on it, yellow post-it stickers protruding from some of the papers.

  She moved to the victim’s bedroom, on the upper floor, and found it almost monastic in its orderliness. The bedclothes had been turned back in expectation of the night to come, and on a bare table by the bed were three books, a novel by Lermontov and two textbooks: Fetal Monitoring in Practice and Obstetrics by Ten Teachers. The air was heavy with the scent of freesias: a huge vase of the yellow flowers had been placed on the windowsill and, as in the study, a pair of large black speakers was present. There was no other furniture in the room. A white panelled door led from it into an en suite bathroom, and all of the four walls within were composed of mirrors. Disconcertingly, on entering the bathroom, Alice found herself reflected from every angle, a few white hairs evident amongst the brown now. She wondered how anyone could endure, never mind enjoy, such unvarnished scrutiny every time they entered the place, far less undressed in it. The bath was still full, the water bluish with dissolved soap, and an opened copy of the Spectator lay discarded on the still wet bathmat. The room felt as if its occupant might return at any minute.

  Alice left and went downstairs to the living room, which bustled with professionals intent on doing their jobs, the victim’s body already having been removed. A huge area of pale carpet in front of a chintz-covered sofa, and the sofa itself, was suffused with dark blood. It had splattered onto the high ceiling, dripped onto the ornate cornice and one of the walls. Two large oil paintings, views of Edinburgh in the nineteenth century, had splashes on them as if Jackson Pollock had been let loose to improve them with a bucket of red paint. Aware that she was in the way of the fingerprint men, she moved into an ante-room and found every inch of wall space taken up by shelf after shelf of CDs. The size of the woman’s collection rivalled her own, and a cursory inspection suggested their tastes were similar too. A huge metallic CD player stood in the centre of the small room, like a silver idol, and a series of switches were labelled, in cramped, irregular handwriting, ‘bedroom’, ‘bathroom’, ‘study’ and ‘kitchen’. Elgar’s ‘Sea Pictures’ was in the machine.

  Alastair Watt entered the shrine, his large bulk suddenly making the space, or lack of it, feel claustrophobic. He made even Alice feel petite. As he was unable to stand upright in such a low ceilinged cupboard, he signalled her out into the living room. She followed him and they stood together by one of the large sash windows.

  ‘Dr Clarke doesn’t seem to have had many neighbours,’ he explained. ‘The flat below here is unoccupied, it was sold about two months ago, and the basement’s occupied by Mr Roberts, a deaf old codger unable to hear his own doorbell. I kept battering at his door until he finally appeared, but it seems he neither saw nor heard anything. Apparently, he hardly knew Elizabeth Clarke anyway, just about enough to say hello on the street. They’d never as much as visited each other’s flats.’

  ‘What about No. 2 Bankes Crescent?’ Alice asked.

  ‘I checked that out too. It’s been divided into student flats and they’ve all gone home for Christmas. Same with No. 1 Eton Terrace, except for one permanent resident on the second floor, an old lady, a Miss Penrose. I think we should go and speak to her. I’ve told her what’s happened here.’

  Miss Penrose’s flat was smelly, its air thick with a perfume-mix of wet dog, used cat litter and overcooked cabbage. A dark tunnel of a hall, containing an overflowing cat tray, led to an ill-lit poky sitting room. In among dilapidated pieces of furniture were five small wooden clothes-horses, each laden with a selection of irregularly-shaped bits of towel, dishcloths and strange yellowish undergarments. The only heat in the room came from an old-fashioned one-bar electric heater. Steam was rising from the clothes-horse closest to it and condensed on the tightly snibbed window. Miss Penrose, having welcomed her guests with complete composure, resumed her seat on a shabby, upright armchair with her dog, Piccolo, on her lap. She was stick-thin, with almost translucent skin, and fragile birdlike bones were visible in her tiny, liver-spotted hands. Standing upright she would only be about five foot tall, but she was bent double by osteoporosis, her face now held permanently parallel to the floor. Her sparse white hair revealed expanses of a baby-pink scalp. She was dressed in a strange assortment of hand-knitted things, a tracksuit bottom and an incongruously large pair of blue trainers. In recognition of her company she began to manhandle some cloudy glasses and a decanter on a tray, readying herself to offer sherry.

  ‘No drinks for either of us, but thank you very much. We’re on duty,’ Alice said, noticing the old lady’s crestfallen reaction as with trembling hands she replaced the stopper into the decanter.

  ‘Did you know Dr Clarke?’ Alastair asked quickly, as if inquisition was some sort of substitute for conversation.

  ‘Of course I did, quite well. Such a pretty woman. Kind too. She used sometimes to come along for a chat with me. She loved Pico, of course, even though he’d twice tried to bite her. No teeth, fortunately.’ She st
roked the toothless ball of matted grey fur on her lap, parting its mothy fringe to reveal two little black eyes gleaming malevolently below.

  ‘You’ll catch them, eh? He’s not much of a guard dog and I’m on my own too… and there’d not be much that I could do.’ It was a statement of the obvious; a snail without a shell on a scorching day would have had a better chance of survival.

  Alistair nodded, conscious of the thin reassurance, but unable to give more.

  ‘Had you known her long?’ he continued.

  ‘Ever since she moved into Bankes Crescent, and that must have been, maybe, ten years or so ago. She used to walk in the gardens, sometimes she even jogged, and that’s how I got to know her. Through Pico really. I used to make a lot of my friends through him. But not now, as he can only manage a few yards.’

  ‘Were you at home yesterday evening?’

  ‘Yes, I went to bed early as it was so cold, and I was feeling a bit stiff. Old bones. I fell asleep with the radio on and I didn’t wake up until that horrible medley at the end of the World Service transmission. It’s at about six am or so. I wasn’t aware of anything out of the ordinary until I heard the commotion caused by the arrival of all those police cars.’

  ‘Did you see anyone coming to the door at No. 1 Bankes Crescent yesterday evening?’

  ‘You know, I never saw a thing. I shut my curtains at about five o’clock. I took Pico to the park during the Archers and I was back just before they finished at seven-fifteen pm. Then I took myself off to bed.’