Long Day Monday

by Peter Turnbull

  ‘Aye.’ Sussock nodded. ‘I know it well enough.’ And he knew it fine well: low-rise, pebbled-dashed tenements, boarded-up houses, burnt-out cars, dogs in packs, litter-strewn streets, untidy gardens. The sort of scheme which comes alive only after dark. All that damp, and all that graffiti. Exist as well as you can until Thursday, that’s when the Giro comes, then you get smashed, then pick out a day-to-day existence again. Aye, he knew Garthamlock fine well.

  ‘What’s it like now?’ she asked again, urgently.

  ‘Same as ever.’

  ‘I haven’t been back for twelve years. My ma and my sister stay there.’

  ‘You don’t visit?’

  ‘No…my man…’ Her voice trailed away.

  ‘We are undertaking an inquiry,’ said Sussock. ‘We have found a body, a murder victim.’

  ‘Oh…’

  ‘She was buried in the field, just by the end of the lane. Maybe last night, perhaps the night before last.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘I wonder if you saw or heard anything?’

  The woman shook her head. ‘I don’t leave the farm much. I mean the house, once a week perhaps I go to Carluke for the messages.’

  ‘Don’t or can’t?’ said Sussock, and he saw the woman’s eyes narrow as a shaft of pain shot across them.

  ‘We don’t have a lot of money.’

  It was a lame excuse. He knew it and she knew he knew it. She didn’t care that he knew it, she had a sense that she and this tall man had been in similar places in life.

  ‘Any children?’

  She shook her head. ‘No, I’m not bothered in a way, not here. Ordinarily…’

  Sussock struggled to age her. Younger than her husband, significantly so, maybe ten to fifteen years. And she was frightened of something. Not just now, at this time and this place, nothing of relevance to the inquiry, but a fear which was constant and well established in her life, a fear which had worked its way to the core of her being. The darting alertness of her eyes told him so.

  ‘So you wouldn’t have heard or seen anything?’

  ‘No. You can see for yourself. Nobody can see this place from the road, and we can’t see anybody on the road. My man likes it that way.’

  ‘Do you?’

  The woman shrugged her shoulders as if to say, ‘What do you think, but what can I do about it?’ Then she said, ‘No, my man comes in at night and he shuts the door on the world. He doesn’t like people. He just wants his meals and his drink. He farms because it’s the only thing he can do.’

  ‘And you?’ Sussock prodded, ‘Do you like people?’

  The woman nodded. By now Sussock had the impression that he was speaking to a frightened child and he wondered when she had last seen a strange face. He noted no other vehicle in the yard, and wondered if she had use of the Land-Rover once a week to drive to Carluke for the messages. Or did he drive her there and back for the week’s groceries. ‘But you saw or heard nothing strange in the last two nights?’

  ‘Like I said.’

  Sussock stepped back, half turned, said, ‘Thanks,’ and then turned back. He looked into her eyes and held them for a few seconds. ‘There are places to go,’ he said. ‘All you have to do is get yourself to the nearest police station.’

  The woman nodded gently. ‘There’s one in Carluke,’ she said. ‘I think I know where it is.’

  Sussock nodded and turned away. He walked out of the yard and up the incline under the trees, following the path as it drove between fields and woods. She has been there for twelve years, she goes to Carluke weekly, and she thinks she knows where the police station is.

  At the end of the track McWilliams waited, still leaning on his Land-Rover. Sussock approached him.

  ‘What did she say to you?’ McWilliams asked.

  ‘Not a lot.’ Sussock didn’t look at McWilliams. ‘She didn’t see anything.’

  ‘I told you that.’ He spat into the grass.

  She looked at the album. She sat on the hard worn-down sofa, the sofa on which her parents had sat as long ago as she could recall, so long ago that she had once looked up at it wondering if she could climb on to it. Now she sat on it, wearing a long black dress she had bought in a cast-off shop. She sat with the curtains half drawn against the sun, ensuring a dim room despite bright daylight.

  The album. She moved her head from side to side scanning the open book, compensating for the temporary loss of sight in one eye. She had fabricated a rough patch, it worked, a single eye meant single vision. The album was a collection of photographs of her guests, the guests she had had over the years, all photographed with a Polaroid, couldn’t take photographs like these and send them to be developed, oh no, they’d come and take her away again and then where’d she be? But Polaroids, yes, made just for her, and people like her who want to keep little secrets safe.

  This one and this one. All naked, with hands and feet tied. All her guests down the years. It was the look in their eyes that fascinated her, that thrilled her. She traced the change in the look in the eyes of each guest as the days unfolded, the wide-eyed terror of the first two or three photographs, the slow softening of the look, so that in the last photographs taken towards the end of four or five food-less and sleepless days the eyes showed only resignation and helplessness. Then it was time for the band around the neck to end the misery and the stick to wind it with. Or the bath. Some she put in the bath. Or both, like the last one.

  She had had children once. Two, all her own. Her very own.

  One day they were there and the next they were gone. When she returned home they were gone. In the hospital they said, ‘Do you remember anything about it, Sara? Sara, do you remember? Do you remember your children, Sara?’

  ‘No, Doctor.’ Clutching the furry toy she found in the box under the window and which she claimed as her own. ‘No, I don’t remember…’

  ‘All right. Nurse will take you back to the ward now…Nurse! If you remember, Sara, if you do remember, tell nurse and I’ll talk to you again.’

  ‘Yes, Doctor.’ Clutching the toy.

  They walked back to the ward. Softly padding down brown corridors, locking and unlocking doors. White coats.

  The kindly-eyed, black-bearded old fool. Of course she remembered, of course she recalled—clearly, like yesterday—first one, then the other. ‘No, no. Mummy, please.’ A day between each, leaving the corpse of the first to keep the second company. ‘No, Mummy, please.’

  But she missed them, so she took guests. Now she had another child. A boy. She’d have preferred a girl but a boy would do. Next time it would be a girl.

  He’d be getting hungry.

  Tomorrow she’d photograph him. Then she’d take his clothes away.

  The less food they got the more cooperative they became. She had noticed that. Some even allowed their hands to be untied and tied again and would pose for the photographs, but they were women, the girls she brought from the street with the promise of easy money, girls who had been conditioned to please. Especially if they were hungry, or were shaking because they couldn’t puncture themselves.

  She’d keep him for a week.

  Perhaps less.

  CHAPTER 3

  Thursday, 18.00-23.00 hours

  She was somebody’s daughter. Somewhere a mother was fretting, continually going up to her daughter’s bedroom to see if she had returned, to see if she had slipped home quietly and gone straight upstairs to avoid the where-were-you-last-night rumpus; somewhere a father was walking the streets because he couldn’t sit still at home, he was exhausted, he would have been walking all day, still he kept going because his daughter might be round the next corner. But she wasn’t in her room, and she wasn’t round the next corner. She was lying on a stainless steel table, a table with a lip around the rim, a table mounted on a single central column, a hollow column so designed to allow the blood to drain away. She was on the table in a room in which stood a man dressed in a white smock. He had black, slicked-down hair and a gleam in his e
ye as he looked at the girl, washing her body with alcohol, doing his job diligently, thoroughly. The floor of the room was covered with industrial grade linoleum, carbolic clean. One wall of the room was given over to a huge sheet of glass, beyond which was a bank of seats, all at that moment empty. At the foot of the table on which the girl lay was a tray of stainless steel surgical instruments. The room was the post-mortem theatre in the basement of Glasgow Royal Infirmary.

  A second man stood in the room. He stood reverentially, dutifully, in the corner and watched the first man with distaste. He had met the mortician before, many times before, a man who loved his work, it seemed to the second man, in the most unhealthy way. The second man was Ray Sussock. He glanced at his watch just as the digital display went from 17.59 to 18.00 which was accompanied by an audible ‘peep’ sound. Four hours of overtime and still no end in sight. But that was nothing new, nothing unusual in that, not for a cop in this city.

  The door of the pathology lab opened. Both men looked sideways at the sudden click of the opening door. Dr Reynolds entered the room, a tall figure, his striking head of silver hair somewhat softening the effect, Sussock thought, of the white coat he was wearing. He held a small tape-recorder in his hands as he clipped the microphone to the lapel of his coat. He switched the machine on and slid it into the pocket of his coat. He walked towards the body which lay on the stainless steel table and smiled to both men as he did so. Sussock responded with a nod and a smile.

  The mortuary attendant said, ‘Just about finished, sir.’ He then withdrew to a respectful distance.

  ‘Thank you,’ said Reynolds. ‘The time is 18.02 on the seventeenth of July. The deceased is a Caucasian female—’ Reynolds paused and glanced up at Sussock; Sussock shook his head—‘whose identity is still to be ascertained.’ Reynolds attempted to move the legs of the deceased. ‘I find rigor to be established, but no evidence of the onset of decomposition. Death occurred within the last forty-eight hours. There are ligature marks around the neck and bruises similar to those caused by rope around the wrists and ankles.’ Reynolds paused. Sussock watched as the pathologist paid close attention to her wrists, which because of the rigor were still behind her back and so necessitated him turning the corpse half on its side. He let the body lie flat and examined the bruises on her neck. He looked up at Sussock. ‘The bruises on her wrists and neck are of different ages,’ he said.

  Sussock was unsure whether he was being addressed, or whether the pathologist was dictating to the tape-recorder. He said, ‘I see,’ anyway, softly, and in passing wondered what dreadful odour might be being smothered by the heavy scent of industrial grade disinfectant which hung in the laboratory.

  ‘And the bruising to the neck is lighter than it would be if it were the cause of death. I do not like this, Mr Sussock. All is not what it may first appear to be.’

  ‘No, sir?’

  ‘No, sir. The eyes are closed, not open and bulging as one would expect if she had been strangled, and as I said, the bruising around the neck is lighter than would be the case if strangulation had been the cause of death. Turning to the bruising on the ankles and wrists, I find they are anything up to a week old. The bruising about the neck is later, a few days old, two days at the most, and probably occurred at the time of death.’

  ‘She was kept trussed up for a week before being murdered?’ Sussock stepped closer to the table.

  ‘That’s not for me to say but it would certainly appear that way. It appears that she was restrained with rope for about one week, and then she died, the cause of death, however, I have still to ascertain. But it was not strangulation, despite the ligature; and despite the fact that the ligature was tightened and compressed her throat, it did not kill her.’ Reynolds tapped the tips of his long fingers on the lip of the dissecting table. ‘So what did?’ he said to himself ‘So what did?’

  ‘She drowned,’ Richard King repeated as he compressed the phone between his left shoulder and ear while he held his notepad with his left hand and scribbled notes with his right. He glanced up at the digital clock on the wall and wrote 21.30 and circled the time before continuing to note the flood of information from Dr Reynolds. ‘She drowned and was tied up and buried in a field.’ Reynolds continued: ‘I had a notion about this one. I knew it was going to be a long job, which is why I advised Mr Sussock that I could see no earthly reason for him to remain in the hospital. I did not, however, think it would take this amount of time. But I got there in the end.’

  ‘Which is that she drowned.’

  ‘That’s the nuts and bolts of it.’ Reynolds spoke calmly and unhurriedly. King knew Dr Reynolds and found the pathologist to be always calm, unhurried, meticulous and diligent: utterly professional. ‘I’ve got an array of papers here,’ he said. ‘I’ve roughed out some notes prior to writing my report which I’ll do tomorrow and have it faxed to you, once it has been typed. I hope you don’t mind waiting but it’s been a long day for me. Even if I did write it now there’s no one to type it, not until nine in the morning, or maybe not until after that, it takes my new typist about an hour to flush the previous night’s vodka from her system with black coffee. She has a problem which she has yet to confront. I digress. I can let you have the details now verbally, so you won’t be held up any.’

  ‘Of course, sir.’

  ‘Well, it’s a puzzle,’ Reynolds began and, listening, King had a sense of the man settling back in his chair, ‘and I confess I think that I’ve posed as many questions as I have answered. I’ll sleep on it, but I can’t come up with a solution at the moment. I’ve become too fogged; information overload I think you call it.’

  ‘I know the feeling,’ King said, smiling. From years of telephone work he knew that a smile can be heard.

  ‘Right, then, details of findings.’

  King flipped over a fresh sheet and held his ballpoint poised.

  ‘There was no loosening of hair, no swelling or bloating, no desquamation of the skin…’

  ‘Sorry, sir?’

  ‘Peeling. No peeling of the skin.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘So from that I can safely report that she was not immersed for any length of time. No more than an hour. Probably much less.’

  ‘Right, sir.’

  ‘So the next step was to determine whether she died by “wet” drowning or “dry” drowning.’

  ‘I didn’t know there was a difference.’

  ‘Simply put, in “dry” drowning the drowning fluid does not penetrate the lower respiratory tract. Death, in fact, is not due to drowning at all so it is a bit of a misnomer, death actually is caused by a cardiac arrest as the fluid penetrates the nostrils and airways, which leads to a panic attack in the victim. We usually associate this type of death with the presence of alcohol or sedative drugs. The young man on a package holiday in the Mediterranean who sinks ten pints of lager at the beach bar and then decides to swim out to the diving platform is often a victim of “dry” drowning.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘“Wet” drowning, on the other hand, is what might be thought of as the conventional or normal sort of drowning. Here there is actual aspiration of the drowning fluid, it’s drawn not only into the lungs but into the stomach and intestines as well. It was when I opened up the deceased to find out what she had had for her last meal and found not food traces but large traces of water still present in her stomach and intestines that I was put on the right track.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes, really. There are, just to be complicated because nothing is ever so simple, there are two further types of drowning and the mechanisms are quite different; they are salt water drowning and fresh water drowning. The different water has different effects on the body. In fresh water drowning the body chemistry is upset, there is a rise in the level of potassium and the levels of sodium chloride, calcium, and proteins are all reduced.’

  King was lost. He stopped writing but listened, dutifully.

  ‘Drowning in salt water causes
a rapid diffusion of salts into the blood vascular system and to compensate for this the body moves body fluids into the heart cavity. There is massive hypertension just before death.’

  Night was falling. The office lights were on. King could make out his reflection in the window.

  ‘The deceased,’ Reynolds continued, ‘died of primary rather than secondary drowning.’

  ‘I know the difference,’ said King, anxious to contribute, ‘let me see if I’m right. Primary drowning is death before resuscitation, or with no resuscitation possible. Secondary drowning is those instances where the victim has been resuscitated but dies subsequently because of an infection or pneumonia or some such, which was brought on directly as a result of the immersion.’

  ‘Yes. Good man. She was not resuscitated. There was a haemorrhage into the middle ear which, along with the fluid in the stomach and the lower respiratory system, meant she was alive and breathing when she was immersed.’

  ‘She went in alive and came out dead.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘It’s not an attempt to cover up murder by another means?’

  ‘It doesn’t appear to be. It appears that the ligature around the neck might have been done to cover up the drowning.’

  ‘But why conceal the body?’

  ‘That’s one of the points I had in my mind when I said that I thought I had posed as many questions as I have answered, and pleasingly, Mr King, pleasingly, that’s your job to find out. Now the fluid in the body, the drowning fluid that is, is salt water, about three per cent saline.’

  ‘Sea-water.’

  ‘Right. Gives you an indication of just how powerful salt is. We’ve all tasted sea-water, far too salty for human consumption yet only three parts in a hundred are salt. So we have a person who has been immersed in sea-water for up to an hour, about that, maybe less, who was alive when she was immersed and, as you so laconically put it, dead when she was taken out.’

  ‘So she drowned at sea, possibly the Clyde estuary, and was driven thirty miles inland and buried in a field?’