A Small Weeping

by Alex Gray

  ‘Sure you’ve got everything you want?’ Lorimer asked anxiously.

  ‘I’m sure,’ Maggie replied, biting the flesh inside her mouth to stop the sudden tremor in her voice. It wouldn’t do to let tears spill at this stage.

  ‘Phone me when you get in. OK?’

  ‘I will. I promise,’ she said.

  Lorimer gave her a hug then Maggie turned away before he could see her face.

  The slope up towards Passport Control seemed to go on forever.

  ‘Don’t look back,’ she told herself. ‘Don’t look back.’

  At the desk, Maggie Lorimer handed over her passport to a woman in uniform. In front of her a queue was forming at the baggage x-ray. Most of them would be holidaymakers off to Florida for a fortnight of sunshine and Disney. She should feel so lucky, shouldn’t she? After all, she was going to spend the next ten months in the Sunshine State.

  Maggie took back her passport and hesitated, just for a moment, then turned her head to scan the crowds below her. The Costa Coffee seemed full of yuppies with mobile phones. Outside the avenue of shops, people were milling around, their holiday clothes bright splashes of colour against the cool airport interior.

  Maggie looked and looked, trying to see her husband among the crowd below.

  But he was gone.

  Acknowledgements

  I would like to thank the following for the help given to me in researching this novel: Jane Anderson, Superintendent Ronnie Beattie of Strathclyde Police, Dr Marjorie Black at the University of Glasgow Department of Forensic Medicine, Alison Cameron, Park Mains High School, Erskine, PC Leslie Duncan of the British Transport Police, the officers of Stornoway Police Station, Lewis, Douglas Harrison of The Multiple Sclerosis Society, Scotland, Suzanne McGruther, Father Michael McMahon, Brenda

  Mackay, the late Margaret Paton, Procurator Fiscal Depute of the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service, Tony Rennie and, most of all, the late Cathrene Anderson to whom this book is dedicated.

  About the Author

  ALEX GRAY was born and educated in Glasgow. She has worked as a folk singer, a visiting officer for the Department of Social Security and an English teacher. She has been awarded the Scottish Association of Writers’ Constable and Pitlochry trophies for her crime writing. Married with a son and daughter, she now writes full time.

  By Alex Gray

  A Small Weeping

  Shadows of Sounds

  Copyright

  Allison & Busby Limited

  13 Charlotte Mews

  London W1T 4EJ

  www.allisonandbusby.com

  Copyright © 2004 by ALEX GRAY

  Hardcover published in Great Britain in 2004.

  Paperback edition published in 2005.

  This ebook edition first published in 2011.

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  ‘Lucifer Falling’ from Collected Poems

  by Norman MacCaig, published by Chatto and Windus.

  Used by kind permission of Random House Group Ltd.

  All characters and events in this publication other than those clearly in the public domain are fictitious and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent buyer.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN 978–0–7490–0913–7