by Alex Gray
The window was on Phyllis’s right. In the daytime she could see her lawns and flowerbeds, some shrubbery and the sky. Birds came pecking around the borders, friendly chaffinches or the robber magpies. Sometimes a robin trilled its distinctive note, and Phyllis tried to remember what cold, frosty days were like. The birds were highly satisfactory, but she liked the sky best of all. For hours she watched the cloud shapes slither and change; her imagination creating Gods and chariots, characters from mythology, maenads with streaming hair. She rarely saw the stars except in winter when Venus rose in late afternoon on a velvety blue sky. Then hands pulled the blind cord, shutting off her Outside with a sharp metallic snap. For now the sky was dark and shuttered from her sight.
In a corner of the room a small wardrobe held Phyllis’s few clothes. They were all cotton for she never left the heat of this room any more. In earlier days when she could still move her arms and turn her head the nurses would heave her into a wheelchair and push her down the corridor to what they now called the day room. There she had been parked in her old lounge with its egg and dart plaster coving around the ceiling. The other residents had upset her with their staring or feeble attempts at one-sided conversation and she’d always preferred the relative peace and quiet of her own room.
Nowadays there were directives about lifting patients. It took two nurses to sit her upright. And they were always short of staff. So Phyllis was left with the television for company. She rarely permitted the staff to switch it on these days. They always asked first, thank God, and her tiny shake of the head allowed her room to stay silent. Once, long ago, she had watched the quiz shows, but nobody came to switch the thing off and she had tired of the interminable soaps that followed, invading her space. The programmes had been punctuated by advertisements reminding Phyllis of so many things she would never need again.
The yellow light flooded across the linoleum floor as the nurse pushed open the door. It wasn’t Kirsty, her designated nurse, but one of the others whom she rarely saw.
‘Morning, Phyllis. Time for your pills.’ The nurse barely made eye contact with Phyllis, turning her attention instead to the glass of yellow goo and the plastic phial of assorted tablets. Phyllis watched her face as the woman concentrated on tumbling all the pills onto a spoonful of the thickened liquid. The nurse’s eyes never left the outstretched spoon on its journey to Phyllis’s open mouth. She felt the metal spoon then the saliva began to ooze from beneath her tongue. One swallow and it was over.
‘Right, then.’ The nurse flicked the residue from Phyllis’s lips, leaving a smear behind that would feel sticky and uncomfortable until someone else came to wash her face. It was strange, she reflected, that she could still swallow a mouthful of medication like that in one gulp when a few drops of water would have set her choking. This disease had taken its toll on her throat muscles as well as so much of the rest. Speech was impossible now, and she rarely tried to communicate beyond a shake or nod of the head.
With a clack, the blinds were opened and weak daylight fell onto the objects in the room. Now the daily routine began. The first nurse was joined by a small, stout auxiliary with dark hair.
‘Morning, Phyllis,’ she swept a practised eye over the bedclothes, resting for a moment on the patient’s face. Phyllis was heaved into a sitting position to participate in the ritual of blood pressure, temperature and removal of her bodily wastes. She watched, detached, as if it was happening to someone else. She endured the harsh wet flannel on her face and body while the two women carried on an earlier conversation as if she wasn’t there.
‘Did you see her being carried away?’
‘Sh!’ the nurse frowned at her, nodding her head towards Phyllis, belatedly acknowledging her presence.
‘Oh. Right. Och, she’ll never know. Will you, darling?’ she smiled a pasted-on smile in Phyllis’s direction.
Phyllis closed her eyes as the hook pulled up the sling and raised her off the bed. Below her the two women pulled at the sheets, dashing the soiled linen onto the floor then smoothing on the fresh bedding with an expertise born of much practise. At last she was lowered back onto the cool sheet and the perpetually moving mattress. The ritual was completed by the auxiliary spraying the air with the scent of roses.
For a while this would serve to mask the unpleasant smell of human urine. Left alone, Phyllis watched the spray, like mist catching the light as it fell. Her day could now begin. The sky with its ever-shifting shapes was there to see; and imagination, if not memory, would people her hours.
Now she could banish the memory of that nightmare in the dark. She closed her eyes but heard again the cry that had left her shivering. Had she really seen that shadow of malice falling against the cupboards outside her room? And those hands reaching to pluck a flower from her vase? No one would ever know what she had seen.
Chapter Ten
Lorimer stood outside the front entrance to the Grange, watching as Niall Cameron approached, recalling their conversation of the night before. He had found the detective constable leaning against the side of the building, head pressed against his arms. Lorimer had wondered at the sound in the dark until he realised the young man was sobbing quietly.
‘I knew her, sir. She’s a girl from back home,’ Cameron had told him, his face streaked with tears. ‘She’s Kirsty MacLeod. We grew up together. She was in my wee sister’s year at the Nicholson.’
Lorimer had guided him towards the car where he’d heard the rest of the story. How Niall Cameron had left Lewis to join the police force against his family’s wishes. How they’d wanted him to take over his late father’s fishing boat but Niall hadn’t seen a future there anymore. Now there was only his mother at home with the youngest one. All the others had left. Kirsty had come to the city too, but he’d never seen her. Until now.
‘Should I come off the case, sir?’ Cameron had wanted to know. But Lorimer had shaken his head. Some background knowledge would be useful.
Now the DC was closer Lorimer could see his bloodshot eyes, signs of a sleepless night. Well, it happened to them all in this profession. Young Niall Cameron had better get used to it.
‘OK?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Talk to anyone from home yet?’
Cameron nodded. ‘There’s only one next of kin, the old auntie who lives in Harris. Kirsty’s mother died of cancer when the lassie was twelve. Her dad was drowned some time back.’
‘Right. We’ll probably find out more now from the director, Mrs Baillie. She lives on the premises. We only took a preliminary statement last night but there’ll have to be proper interviews this morning. Alistair’s here already, setting up an incident room.’
Some things were better done in daylight, thought Lorimer. There was a team of uniformed officers doing a house-to-house inquiry along the road. It was a residential district with not a close circuit television camera in sight. They’d have to rely on the local insomniacs for any sighting of the killer. Last night had been thoroughly unpleasant. None of the staff had known much about the nurse’s background or else they weren’t letting on. The auxiliary who’d found her, Mrs Duncan, had been in a state of shock and could barely verbalise. Lorimer had been given a full list of all members of staff. It was a long list, given the staffing requirements for a twenty-four hour day to care for a number of vulnerable people. Still, records would be crosschecked on the computer and that might throw something up.
Those patients who’d emerged from their rooms last night had been surprisingly calm. Though perhaps some of them were sedated at night, anyway. They would all be interviewed at greater length this morning. Lorimer hadn’t forgotten all those lights switched on upstairs.
Now, in the spring morning, it was hard to imagine that a murder had taken place in such a pleasant spot. The sky was clear and blue although there was still a chill in the air. Above him a blackbird was whistling unseen in the trees. Lorimer stepped back out onto the front lawn and walked as far as a curve of rhododendron bushes. Turning,
he looked back at the house. It had a pleasing aspect from the front. Two enormous bay windows flanked the front entrance. The huge storm doors were fastened back and Lorimer could see shadowy shapes moving beyond the frosted glass. The clinic’s employees were already having to go about the business of caring for their patients, after all. Some of the upstairs windows showed drawn curtains still, though it was past nine o’ clock. Whose sleep had been disturbed during the night, he wondered?
Lorimer looked around him. The drive looped all round the grounds. To the rear were trees, more shrubbery and a high, stone wall. Beyond that was farmland. Could anyone have vaulted that wall and made off over the fields in darkness? Or, indeed, arrived from that very direction. An outsider. A nutter. That was the theory he was working on, anyway. Some creep who had a fetish about dead women and flowers. Brightman would surely have an opinion to offer. It was time he called him up.
The front drive gave on to an avenue of Victorian villas then a row of solid tenement houses on each side. There was a main road at right angles to the avenue, a mere hundred yards away.
One thing Lorimer had noticed as he’d turned the car into this narrow avenue: there was barely room to swing a cat because of the double-parking by residents. Maybe someone might have noticed a car in a hurry last night? That was just one of the questions his team of officers would be asking. Over the hill beyond the Langside Monument lay the Victoria Infirmary. Queen’s Park stretched out the whole length of the main road right up to Shawlands. Another possible escape route for a killer. Lorimer grinned to himself, realising that he was already tuning into Solly’s way of thinking. The psychologist liked to pore over maps relating to the locus of a crime as he began his search into the criminal mind.
Lorimer thought back to the long drawn-out investigation into the Saint Mungo’s murders. That Glasgow park had been scoured from end to end. The Dear Green Place, folk liked to call their city. And so it was. He’d read somewhere that they had more parks than any other city in Europe. A source of pride to some, maybe, but a right bugger when you were trying to track a killer.
‘Sir.’
Lorimer’s mind came back to the present. Detective Constable Cameron was standing in the porch and with him was the very lady that Lorimer wanted most to see. Mrs Baillie was the woman in charge here, her official designation being director of the Grange, a clinic that specialised in neural disorders.
As he walked towards the steps, he could see a tall, angular woman dressed in black shading her eyes from the morning sun.
‘Good morning Mrs Baillie,’ Lorimer shook a hand that was damp with sweat.
As they turned away from the dazzle of light that bounced off the open glass door, Lorimer could see the director’s face more clearly. Mrs Baillie would be somewhere in her early fifties, he surmised, though she’d looked a lot older last night.
Her dark hair showed not a hint of grey but this was belied by the network of tiny lines around her eyes and mouth, a mouth that was turned down as if in an expression of permanent disapproval.
‘Come through to my office, please, gentlemen,’ she said and immediately turned right, opening a door set into the wood panelling. At once Lorimer noticed how the old house had been altered to form the present day clinic as vinyl floors gave way to thick patterned carpet. Light filtered from a landing window where a broad staircase swept upwards. An open door to the front showed them a huge bay-windowed lounge where uniformed officers were already setting out tables and chairs. Across the hall a curved desk wrapped itself around two angles of the walls, segmenting the corner into a reception area. A young woman in a dark suit and white shirt glanced up at them unsmilingly then continued with whatever she had been doing behind the desk, out of sight behind her computer screen.
‘That’s Cathy. You’ll want to talk to her later, I suppose.’
‘We’ll be talking to all the staff, ma’am,’ Cameron replied, glancing at Lorimer who had wandered towards the stair and was peering upwards.
‘There are private rooms on that floor,’ Mrs Baillie snapped, making Lorimer turn back suddenly. ‘The patients are restricted to the west and south wing and use both upstairs and down. We have the administration down here.’ She strode ahead of them, ignoring the girl at the desk, and opened a door leading to the back of the building.
Lorimer and Cameron followed her down a set of four stairs that led into another corridor. Here windows to one side gave a view of shrubbery and an expanse of kitchen garden where a man in brown overalls was digging with a spade, his back to the house. A patient, Lorimer wondered, or one of the staff? Shadows thrown onto the garden made him press his head against the glass and look along the side, seeing angles of pebble-dashed walls masking the original contours of the house. A modern extension had been built onto this part of the Grange, he realised. Lorimer ran his hand along a grey painted radiator as Mrs Baillie unlocked a door opposite the window. It was cold to his touch.
‘This is my office. Please sit down,’ Mrs Baillie had already taken her place behind an antique desk. Two upright chairs with carved backs sat at angles in front of her. The wood panelled ceiling of the office sloped into a deep coomb showing that the room was positioned immediately under the main stairs. There were no windows and so Lorimer left the door deliberately ajar. Claustrophobic at the best of times, he wasn’t going to let his discomfort show in front of this woman.
‘Who has access to this part of the house?’ Lorimer asked.
‘Oh, it’s not kept locked, Chief Inspector, except my private office, of course. But only the staff would come through here. The patients have their own rooms.’
‘And is there any other way to reach this part of the building?’
‘We have a back door that leads into the garden. It can only be accessed from this side of the house.’
‘Not from the clinic?’
‘No.’
‘And it’s kept locked at night?’
‘I do the lockup myself. It’s my home too, you know,’ Mrs Baillie gave a twisted smile and Lorimer found himself suddenly curious about the director. He inclined his head questioningly.
‘My flat is upstairs. Part of my remit here is to act as a nursing director. Yes, I’m a fully qualified psychiatric nurse,’ she said, lifting her chin. ‘I run the clinic but I also have a say in the overall medical policy.’
‘I’m afraid we will have to interview the patients who were here last night,’ Lorimer told her.
Mrs Baillie hesitated then shuffled at some papers on her desk. Then she raised her head and regarded Lorimer steadily. ‘I’m afraid that won’t be possible.’
‘This is a murder inquiry. The feelings of your patients simply don’t come into the question.’
‘I hope you will respect their feelings, Chief Inspector. Many of our patients are seriously ill people and interrogation could do some of them untold damage.’
‘We quite understand.’
‘No, Chief Inspector, you don’t. When I said it would be impossible to interview everybody, I meant just that,’ Mrs Baillie answered him defiantly. ‘You see, two of our patients left for respite care early this morning.’
‘But that’s preposterous! You can’t just let them walk out of here like that!’
‘I didn’t. In fact I took them to the airport myself.’
‘Where were they going?’ Cameron asked.
The woman tilted her head and gave him the ghost of a smile. ‘Your part of the world, by the sound of it. A little place called Shawbost. It’s on the Island of Lewis.’
‘But why on earth couldn’t they stay here? And who are they anyway?’ Lorimer protested.
‘Sister Angelica and Samuel Fulton. Their plane tickets were paid for. And they were ready to go. I couldn’t see any point in keeping them here.’
For a moment Lorimer was speechless at the woman’s audacity. And Lewis? Could there be some link between the victim and this respite centre?
‘Give me the details of this place, please,�
�� he asked.
‘Certainly,’ She pulled a card from a file on her desk and handed it to him.
‘And, Mrs Baillie, no further patients will leave here without our knowledge. Do I make myself clear?’
‘Perfectly, Chief Inspector,’ the woman folded her hands together meeting his angry glare with a cool gaze of her own.
Lorimer gave the card a perfunctory glance and pocketed it. It would be counterproductive to alienate Mrs Baillie, no matter what police time she had wasted. There was Kirsty’s murder to solve and she was in a position to help them.
‘Kirsty MacLeod. She was a psychiatric nurse, wasn’t she?’
Mrs Baillie shook her head. ‘Kirsty had specialised in neural disorders, Chief Inspector. Her background was Care in the Community so she had worked with many patients who had illnesses of a psychiatric nature. However, the main reason for employing her was her experience with multiple sclerosis patients.’
‘Do you have many of those sorts of patients here?’ Cameron asked.
‘No, just the one. Phyllis Logan.’
Lorimer nodded. Of course. That explained the woman down in that back room away from all the other patients. He recalled those bright eyes and that sepulchral moan. That was one resident who wouldn’t be answering any questions.
‘Isn’t that rather unusual,’ Cameron persisted. ‘After all, this is a clinic specialising in psychiatric cases.’
‘We prefer to call them neural disorders. And MS is a neural disease,’ Mrs Baillie chided him. ‘But it’s not unusual for Phyllis to be here. Not at all.’ She paused, glancing from one man to the other, a sudden twinkle in her eye. ‘You see, Phyllis Logan is the owner of the Grange. It really is her home.’
