The Road to Hell

by Gillian Galbraith

  ‘That had nothing to do with it, honestly.’

  ‘You would tell me – if things are getting on top of you?’

  ‘Yes. I am fine, and “things” had nothing to do with it.’

  ‘OK. OK. Now, from what you’ve told me, it sounds as if that doctor, Alton, is definitely off the hook. So what’s the likely verdict?’ The DCI picked up her discarded sandwich, noticing that part of it had gone soggy due to tea spilt in the saucer.

  ‘Probably no fault anywhere. Just a mishap like you thought. An aged drunk falling and hurting herself, dying in the cold. No one will be found responsible now. The Professor gave a long, involved explanation about paradoxical undressing and terminal burrowing, and judging by all the scribbling the Sheriff was doing as she was listening, I reckon she was persuaded by it. After all, all the forensic evidence, or lack of it, pointed in the same direction, didn’t it?’

  ‘Do you think that the Reverend McPhee succumbed to the same paradoxical urges?’ said DCI Bell.

  ‘Maybe, but it’d be a bit of a coincidence. I don’t know . . .’ Alice hesitated for a second, thinking. ‘Moira Fyfe’s clothes were found round about her, near her body, weren’t they? All of them. Yet despite all the searches we carried out there were no signs of his anywhere.’

  ‘True,’ Elaine Bell mused, breaking her sandwich in two and preparing to take a bite out of the dry bit, ‘but somebody could have taken them, after he had removed them himself. Perhaps they checked the pockets for valuables and then threw them into the nearest bins. I know we found nothing in them but they’d been emptied earlier that same morning. Eric confirmed that with the Council yesterday.’

  ‘Somebody could have taken them, granted, but surely they’d go through the pockets there, in the gardens, and leave them there. And, don’t forget, Dean Gardens are private, you need a key to get into them.’ She paused again to think about it. ‘Vandals could get over the railings, I suppose. They’ve done it before. But would they bother checking out the old man’s clothes? I don’t think so. They’d be far too busy smoking grass in the Pavilion or burning trees. Only this morning . . .’

  ‘What about the dog?’ the DCI interrupted her, finally taking a bite out of her sandwich.

  ‘That’s another mystery, if you ask me. If it was in the garden with the man, and that’s where he usually walked it, how did it get out?’

  ‘You said “Only this morning . . .”’ DCI Bell prompted, her cheeks bulging with the bread she was chewing.

  ‘Yes, this morning, at the FAI, something happened. There were a number of people at the back of the court – they’d been there since the inquiry began and on odd occasions they got quite rowdy. All of them were down-and-outs, I think. One of them, I’m fairly certain, is the man who tried to sell McPhee’s signet ring up near Lauriston Place.’

  ‘Have you brought him in, then?’ the DCI said excitedly.

  ‘No. He left before I’d managed to place him, but I think I know who he is.’

  ‘Who is he?’

  ‘Taff’

  ‘Taff who?’

  ‘Just Taff. No-one seems to know his surname. He was a friend of Moira’s.’

  The phone rang and DCI Bell picked it up. After a short pause, she fixed Alice in the eye and said, ‘Yes, Sir. I’ve heard all about it from Sergeant Rice. A very unfortunate mistake for the Crown Office to have made, I must say. They’ll surely have to review their procedures. I understand that Sean Lyle may be involved. Up to his neck.’

  Still holding the receiver to her ear, she mouthed to Alice, ‘Find Taff’, and then, pointedly, returned her attention to the Superintendent.

  Ringing round the drop-in centres in the city produced no sightings. From a hurried conversation with the manager of the Bread Street Hostel, and a more leisurely one with the manager at Ferry Road, she learned that Taff occasionally spent the night in Greyfriars churchyard. Alice decided to wait until after dark and then try to find him there. If all else failed she could check out the care shelter for the night at St Cuthbert’s Church.

  Sitting at her desk, staring blankly at her computer, it gradually occurred to her that she had no real picture of McPhee’s character, no feel for him as a living, breathing individual. But he had been found stark-naked, as well as dead. If there was some strange sexual element involved in his death, it would be useful to have some understanding of him and of his foibles. His wife might be aware of any kinkiness, of any exotic predilections; on the other hand she might well be entirely in the dark about them. Even if she knew, she might be reluctant to speak. She could take offence, possibly. He had been a Church of Scotland minister, after all, and she a minister’s wife. Both of them, superficially at least, were pillars of respectability.

  However, an old and trusted male friend might prove more forthcoming. Hurriedly collecting her coat from the back of her chair, she rose, determined to go and speak to Timothy Dawson, Duncan McPhee’s old pal, in the remaining hours of daylight.

  With little traffic on the road, the drive from St Leonard’s to the man’s address on the edge of the city took less than twenty minutes. Every traffic light, even the final, unending series at Barnton, turned to green at her approach as if to speed her passage towards him. Shortly before the Cramond Brig turn-off, the wind rose, rippling through the trees on the edge of the gorge and tearing off any remaining leaves, sending them spiralling high in the air like motes of dust in sunlight.

  On Dawson’s Crescent, parking was easy. The force of the gale had ripped a branch off a nearby fir. Jinking onto the road to avoid it, she ran towards his house. ‘The Larches’, like the rest of the houses in the street, was a white-harled bungalow, topped with red tiles and enclosed within a high holly hedge.

  Dressed in dark-brown corduroys and a green turtle-necked jersey with frayed sleeves, the man himself showed her into his small hallway. It smelt strongly of burnt toast. As he led the way he apologised profusely for the mess everywhere. Oily car parts rested against the chipped skirting boards in the hallway, and old newspapers occupied the three hard chairs in his study. Moving one pile onto the floor to free a seat for her, he said, in a deep, patrician voice, ‘Take a pew, officer.’

  He was a tall man, well over six foot, but it was not his height that caught Alice’s eye. It was his perfect hairlessness. Neither eyebrows nor eyelashes shadowed his bright eyes, and all available light seemed to be reflected off his glistening, bald pate. As he bent over to clear more papers so he could sit opposite her on a stool, she noticed that he was wearing odd socks, one black and one green. Once he was seated, a sinuous Siamese cat appeared from nowhere and leapt onto his lap, arching its back and rubbing itself against him. His large hands stroked it and he beamed at her as she began to purr. Alice noticed, looking at the pair of them together, that their eyes were an identical shade of blue.

  ‘Despite what you said on the phone, I’m not sure I’m the right person to help you,’ the man said, looking anxiously at Alice and pulling the cat closer as if it was a shield.

  ‘But you’re a friend of Duncan McPhee, the Reverend McPhee?’

  ‘I was. A very close friend.’

  ‘Then can you tell me a little about him? What sort of a man he was?’

  ‘You don’t know, do you?’ Dawson said, sighing deeply and shifting uneasily on his seat, but keeping the cat cradled on his lap.

  ‘Don’t know what?’

  ‘Anything. Anything important, at least. Juliet didn’t tell you, did she?’

  ‘Tell me what exactly?’

  ‘I’ll tell you and then you can decide whether you still want to hear from me about Duncan, OK?’ The man’s naked brow was furrowed, two neat perpendicular grooves forming at his nose where the ends of his eyebrows should have been.

  ‘OK.’

  ‘He and I go back a long way. We first came across each other in our early twenties when we were both reading theology at Glasgow University. We come from very different backgrounds. I went to Harrow, you see. But
we found we got on. I don’t know exactly why we did . . . but we just did. You know how it is?’

  Alice said nothing but nodded.

  ‘We both married at about the same time. Had our children at about the same time, too. Flora and Imogen are the best of pals to this day. But, gradually, as the years passed our careers diverged. You see, as a minister I was content, happy even, simply attending to my parish work, but he had set his sights on other things.’

  ‘Other things?’

  ‘“Higher” things, “better” things, he would have thought, if not actually said. He wanted to advance up the hierarchy of the Church, whereas I was quite happy with my parish, with my lot.’ He hesitated again, his fingers caressing the cat’s fur and making it close its eyes in ecstasy.

  ‘So, what happened?’

  Alice shivered in the unheated, spartan room, desperately prodding him to answer the questions so that the interview would come to an end as soon as possible. The window was wide open, letting in a howling draught, but he seemed oblivious to the cold, to any discomfort.

  ‘So, he became increasingly involved in committee work, getting to know the right people, people in high places.’ He stopped speaking, his expression mournful. ‘Do you really want me to go on? Is this really the sort of thing you want to know?’

  ‘Yes. Why did you fall out – because your careers diverged?’

  ‘No,’ he replied, fixing her with his round, candid, cornflower-blue eyes, ‘that wasn’t it, dear. It was much more basic, much simpler than that. That’s just the backdrop, the background to everything.’

  He hesitated briefly, looking at her as if trying to catch a glimpse of her soul, took an audible breath and then began to speak more quickly.

  ‘What happened was that I had an affair with a parishioner of mine. That was the real catalyst for everything. It did not last – as, perhaps, you can divine . . .’ He allowed his eyes to rove around the room, stopping briefly on a long-dead pot plant and the stained carpet, witnesses to the lack of a female touch in his life.

  ‘There was a complaint, it was upheld and I was suspended from my parish for three years. I appealed it, and at the hearing at the General Assembly – that was how it used to be done – I expected Duncan, if nobody else, to support me. He knew me, after all. He knew it was a temporary, uncharacteristic lapse, a silly, trivial . . . infatuation. But he chose not to do so because, and I hesitate to say this about anyone, I think he put his career before me, before our friendship. Fortunately, enough of my brethren took a different, more compassionate view, and after debate my sentence was reduced from three years to one year. And, for a bit, a short while, I managed to keep my parish.’

  ‘So you no longer consider the Reverend McPhee as your friend?’

  ‘Correct. He dropped me like a stone,’ the man replied, looking fixedly down at the cat on his knee.

  ‘Are you his enemy, then?’

  ‘Oh, no,’ he said, lifting his head up quickly with a shocked expression on his face, ‘not that. What a black-and-white view of life you must have! Of course not. I’m not his friend, but I’m not his enemy either. However, I lost my wife, my faith . . . and my hair . . . and he had a part to play in all of that.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Despite my alopecia, Fu Manchu didn’t desert me,’ he said, playing with the cat’s chocolate-coloured ears.

  ‘What sort of man was Duncan McPhee?’ she asked.

  ‘In a way I think I’ve given you a clue already, haven’t I? A man who put his own preferment above everything else. Ruthless, in his way. A man who has climbed and climbed – I expect I helped him on his way in the early days – but not for the view from the top. He climbed as if driven by some strange fear, some strange compulsion to escape from the “bottom”, as he would have described it. I should feel sorry for him . . . but I don’t any longer.’

  ‘Was he a happily married man?’

  ‘To the best of my knowledge. Why?’

  Alice hesitated, reluctant to reveal too much. But something would have to be said to nudge him in the right direction.

  ‘When his body was found in Dean Gardens, he was completely naked.’

  ‘Gracious! What are you suggesting?’

  ‘Nothing. I’m simply reporting a fact. I’m just trying to find out anything I can about the man.’

  ‘I know nothing whatsoever about that side of his life. He wasn’t some sort of Tom Jones type, a “swinger” or anything like that. In fact, he was rather prudish as a young man.’

  ‘Can you think of anyone who’d wish him ill?’

  ‘Mild ill, slight ill? Too many to count. You don’t climb as high as he’s done without alienating people along the way. By blocking someone’s preferment, “stealing” a position someone has earmarked for himself or herself, slighting people by picking them up and putting them down to suit yourself and your needs. It happens in every area of life, doesn’t it? And the Church is no different from the rest in that respect.’

  ‘But no one in particular springs to mind?’

  ‘I can think of no one who wanted him dead, if that’s what you are hinting at. There are a fair few, I suspect, who would have gloried in his fall. I hope I wouldn’t be amongst them, but that’s a different thing, isn’t it? Many might have paid to see him humbled – but not injured, let alone killed.’

  Crossing from the end of Chambers Street, Alice saw the heavy iron gates of Greyfriars Churchyard before her. Little illumination from the streetlights penetrated the gateway. As she glanced up, the moon’s light seemed to be fading before her eyes. An endless stream of clouds scudded across its face, driven by the same wind that was now lashing her cheeks and trying to pull her coat off her back. Unsure which path to take, she started off to the left to avoid having to head into the icy gusts.

  By the light of her torch, she peered into a succession of low-walled grave enclosures. Those with roofs had padlocked gratings to prevent the living from camping inside them, but the few which remained open to the heavens were ungated and provided shelter of a sort. There was a terrace of them, stretching into the distance southwards like a street constructed for a race of midgets or children.

  As she approached one particularly ornate memorial, something moved inside its four walls. The thing rustled a few dead leaves before squeezing through the railings and scampering over her feet. Involuntarily, she gasped, frantically dancing from one foot the other to shake it off.

  Shuddering with revulsion, she scanned the walls of the mausoleum with her torch, revealing the relief of a skull with a fat cherub lounging below on a pile of fleshless bones. As she shone the torch downwards, a hunchbacked rat on a recumbent effigy came into view, its eyes reflecting the light back to her. For a moment they stared at one another, the rat immobilised in the beam.

  ‘Boo!’ a loud voice said behind her. She whirled round, suddenly terrified, finding herself inches away from an unshaven face peering out of a hoodie. In the obscurity he appeared ghostly, like a medieval monk in a cowl. As if aware of the impression he was making, he raised his hands and released a long, low howl.

  Brandishing her torch as a weapon, she raised it above her head ready to strike. Immediately, he stopped and backed away.

  ‘OK – OK, calm doon. It wis just a joke! Nae harm meant!’

  ‘Well, it wasn’t bloody funny,’ she replied, aware that her whole body was now trembling. Slowly lowering the torch she kept its beam shining in the man’s eyes, until he said plaintively, ‘Could ye no’ move it just a wee bit, hen. You’re blindin’ me.’

  Trying to sound calm and in control, she said, ‘Police. I’m looking for Taff. Is he here tonight?’ Her voice sounded unnaturally high, like a choirboy’s treble.

  ‘I dae ken. But if he is, he’ll be under yon scaffolding – through the Flodden Wall. Everyin’s there. Sleepin’ below the wooden boards.’ He pointed in a vaguely downhill direction, then, looking her in the eyes and smiling winningly, he added, ‘Can you spare some
change, hen? It’s awfy chilly, an’ I’m needin’ a cup o’ tea.’

  Alice handed him a pound coin. As he palmed it he said, as if he had had a change of mind, ‘Tell ye whit, dearie. I’ll save ye the bother. It’s a wild night. Taff’s no there, right? I seen him earlier and he was complaining aboot the cauld. He’s chicken-hearted. He’s away fer the free grub at the night shelter.’

  ‘Sure about that?’

  ‘Scout’s honour. Would I lie tae you?’

  Distrusting his reliability, she checked out the scaffolding and found a couple of homeless men bedded down underneath it, both cocooned in blankets and polythene sheeting. The ends of the polythene flapped noisily in the gale, adding to the sounds made by the creaking metal and producing a constant cacophony which was loud enough to wake the dead. One of the men was lying on a mattress of planks and the other was huddled close to the boundary wall, a lining of old newspaper insulating him from the cold, wet stone.

  Shining her torch on their faces, apologising as she did so, she examined them. Neither of them was Taff. One, his hand protecting his eyes from the glare, let out a stream of foreign-sounding invective at her but his companion told him off, calling her ‘Petal’ and apologising to her in a melodic Geordie accent.

  Hurrying back towards the gate with her torch in her hand, now desperate to leave the dark, windswept place, she wove in and out of the tombstones, trying to avoid any that had fallen. Through the moans of the wind, she heard the ringtone of her phone. Putting it to her ear, she heard a breathless, male voice.

  ‘Is that you?’ The inquiry sounded urgent.

  ‘I don’t know. Who do you want to speak to?’ She racked her brain, trying desperately to put a name or face to the voice, but nothing came.

  ‘You, Alice.’

  ‘Who are you?’

  ‘Are you scared?’

  ‘No, I’m not,’ she lied instinctively, a shiver passing through her body as she pleaded again for an answer, ‘but who are you?’

  She looked round, trying to catch a glimpse of him, overwhelmed by the conviction that he was close by and could see her as he spoke. Her fear made her nauseous.