Long Day Monday

by Peter Turnbull

  In the mortuary a solemn attendant, with a nursing sister looking on, withdrew a drawer and parted a sheet, exposing the full face of a young girl. It was a small face, a pert nose, slightly protruding teeth, but not at all unattractive. King studied the features and then took a photograph from the envelope. It was the first photograph, but he looked at the other three anyway. Her name was Sandra Shapiro and she would have been twenty years old in three days’ time.

  King nodded his thanks and the drawer slid silently and solidly shut. He walked away from the mortuary, up a long, slightly inclined rubber-matted corridor and found himself wondering about the emotions that had been felt within this solemn place, this awful walk: the trepidation and the thread of hope on the decline, the devastation and shock and partner-clinging grief on the incline. It was a long corridor and King felt that to be a most sensitive gesture, it meant the dead house was far removed from the bustle of the main building, where people were repaired and discharged, of tea-rooms and notice-boards, of visiting hours and flowers for the sick. It was wholly fitting and proper to walk a long silent walk to the house of the dead, and to walk a long silent walk back.

  He emerged into the main rotunda of the GRI, went out by the swing doors and walked across the car park. It was a calm, warm night, a high cloud layer obscured the stars.

  He drove back across the city through the grid system. The pubs were turning out, street Turks jostled and shouted, some in good humour, some not. A man sat up against a wall, two cops in black trousers and white shirts stood over him, one talked on his radio, a small crowd had gathered. King drove on. He drove along Bath Street and hit a sequence of green lights. More revellers, cops with a high profile, two fire-appliances, klaxons and blue lights, a taxi screeching, hanging a U-turn. Glasgow. Night.

  King walked into P Division police station via the rear ‘staff only’ door. He went to the front of the building to the uniform bar and signed in the movements book. A man, a member of the public, stood at the uniform bar, a constable was speaking to the man. The duty officer sat at his desk struggling with a typewriter, slowly ‘hunting and pecking’ his way through an incident report. King checked his pigeonhole for messages. None. He went up the stairs to the CID corridor, taking them two at a time. He opened the file on the murdered girl, recorded his visit to the mortuary and entered his observation that the identity of the deceased appeared to be Sandra Shapiro, nineteen years and three hundred and sixty-two days old. He cross-referenced the murder file to the missing persons file of the same name. He stood and walked to the corner of the room and fixed himself a coffee. As he was spooning the granules into his mug he recalled with no little amusement the legendary report on a trainee police cadet at the end of a training placement: ‘he made himself coffee in the sergeant’s mug.’ The story had obscure origins and was certainly apocryphal but was none the less guaranteed to bring hoots of derisive laughter whenever it was recounted. Mug of coffee in hand, King returned to his desk and picked up the missing persons file on Sandra Shapiro.

  She had been reported as missing five days previously by her father, who had an address in Egypt. Interestingly, and probably not known by her father, Sandra Shapiro had a little track: two counts of reset and one of soliciting. This last King thought would certainly not be known to her father, not if King knew Egypt where roses grew on lattices on the walls of neat houses. The track was useful: very, very useful. It meant her fingerprints would be on file, which in turn meant that the identity of the corpse could be confirmed or otherwise. Her parents might of course view the body if they wished, but a formal, emotional, identification might not be necessary after all. King hoped so because such ordeals were never easy.

  Three males drank liquid.

  The first stood at the bar of the Inverleithen Hotel in Pollokshaws. He was a tall man, slender, a striking head of silver hair, a St Bernard lying patiently at his feet. He swilled the last of the whisky around his glass. He smiled to himself. About him, patrons were standing and helping each other into coats and nodding good-nights. Not here the mad stampede to the bar when the burglar alarm is switched on for a few seconds to announce last orders; here the patrons know when closing time falls, and drink up and slip away without fuss.

  ‘Another drink before I shut the bar, sir?’ The hotelier stood in front of Reynolds and slipped a starched teacloth over the beer pumps.

  ‘No, no, thanks,’ said Reynolds.

  ‘You look happy, sir, like the cat that got the cream.’

  ‘Do I?’ Reynolds continued to smile. He drained the glass and placed it on the polished mahogany bar. He shook the dog’s lead. ‘Come on, Gustav, home time.’ The St Bernard levered itself to its feet. ‘Something occurred to me,’ Reynolds explained. ‘The obvious. I couldn’t see it at first, came home, had dinner, took Gustav out for a stroll, had a nightcap, and standing here, I saw it as clear as daylight.’

  The second man sat in a huge room. He sat on the settee and gently and tenderly held the hand of the lady who sat beside him. He looked about him, a cavernous room in a cavernous West End tenement near Atholl Gardens, just behind Byres Road, and he sipped his drink, a tall glass containing mineral water with just a hint of white wine. Eight people were at the soiree, three couples were the guests, and the hosts made up the fourth couple. They were people in the media, in the main. They were unknown and wary of each other and had throughout the evening sat around the walls and corners of the room, talking softly and in a restrained, polite manner, and afforded each other a considerable amount of personal space. The music was soft and classical and came from another room in the tenement, a room at the far end of the hallway, at the opposite end of the flat. It was, thought the man, the device of someone who, if he owned a country estate instead of a Glasgow tenement, would have a lake constructed in the furthest reaches of his land, so that the water would glisten tantalizingly in the distance when viewed from the owner’s drawing-room.

  The man drained his glass and looked at his watch. He turned to his partner and said, ‘Duty calls,’ and then to his host, ‘I’m sorry, but I have to leave. It’s been a pleasant evening. Thank you.’

  ‘Duty calls,’ echoed the host.

  Malcolm Montgomerie stood, tall, chiselled features, downturned moustache. ‘That’s the long and the short of it,’ he said. He found the host’s attitude mocking and supercilious.

  ‘Thanks for coming.’ The host smiled but didn’t stand. ‘Going and the night’s so young.’

  The third male huddled in the darkness. His throat had constricted, his tongue felt too large for his mouth. He ached for water. He sat back against the wall of the room. It was cold. Very, very cold. Then he realized that it wasn’t cold; it was wet.

  It was wet.

  The wallpaper was damp. He turned. He pressed the paper with his palm and then took his palm away. His hand was moist. He licked the moisture from his hand and pressed the wallpaper again. More moisture glistened on his hand. He licked it off and then pressed the wallpaper with both hands.

  CHAPTER 4

  Friday, 04.30-1230 hours

  She had reached that poignant phase in life when for the first time she saw the young in the old. She saw the young man in the old man huddled over his watered down whisky, she saw the young woman in the old lady walking down the street with her white stick and shopping trolley. It had come to her quickly, overnight it seemed, and it had happened recently. Before that, she had never been able to see the young in the old, the old woman had in her eyes always been old, but now really, for the first time, she saw Sussock as a young man.

  Something that night had made her waken. No sound, no sense of ill health, but something, something akin to the way that one person can stand silently at the foot of the bed of a slumbering person and if he stands there long enough, but for a period measured only in minutes, then the sleeper will waken. And so it was that she woke, stirred, reached out a hand to rest on his thigh and, finding the bed empty, turned and shook herself into a sense
of alertness. She glanced around her room, softly illuminated by the street lamp just below the window, the double bed was in a recess of a sitting-room decorated in pastel shades with a Van Gogh print on the wall. It was her home, a room and kitchen, ideal for a single young person, but it had been built at the turn of the century for a family to occupy.

  Days of overcrowding, and no internal sanitation but a common toilet on the stair. Such living conditions were well within living memory. She slid silently from beneath the duvet and stood on the comfortable pile of the carpet, tall, statuesque, long of limb and slender of waist, with her blonde hair cascading over her shoulders. She walked gracefully around the foot of the bed on the balls of her feet and out of the room into the short corridor and stood on the threshold of the kitchen, with recently installed shower cubicle to her left.

  The light shone from the common stair, through the opaque glass above the door, sufficiently to illuminate the kitchen. Sussock sat at the kitchen table, also naked, comfortable to be so in the warm July night. She leaned against the frame of the door and looked at Sussock and as she stood and looked she saw a troubled man. He sat still, one leg slightly more extended than the other, a slightly protruding stomach, but far thinner and in better condition than many men of his vintage. His head was bowed forward and his hands clasped his face. He became aware of her presence. He took his hands from his face and turned to her, beautiful in his eyes. And she saw him, as a young man; it was as if, when her perception changed, he had shed years.

  ‘Ray?’ She approached him with soft slow feminine movements and knelt beside him and laid a slim hand of long fingers on his leg. ‘Ray. What’s wrong?’

  ‘So, I did wake you.’ Sussock sat back. He looked up at the ceiling and then lowered his gaze and looked at the lights from the tenements across the back courts. Elka Willems recognized the reaction. She had seen it so many times before, the grief reaction of the newly bereaved, the taking on board of an enormity so huge that one had no room for it in one’s life, yet one must find room because it is reality, the realization that struggling against it is futile.

  She squeezed his leg and he let his hand fall gently on her wrist. And she had seen this too; the need for human contact at such times is all-consuming. She had, often, ached for the suddenly widowed who had had to go home for the first time to a cold and empty house. She didn’t press him. He was squeezing her hand, he knew she was there, he’d tell her in his own time.

  ‘I woke up, shouting,’ he said. ‘I was pleased I hadn’t disturbed you, but I had. I’ve only just come through.’

  A pause. The sound of a motorbike driving along the road, behind the tenements whose lights shone over the back courts.

  ‘There’s another one,’ he said softly.

  ‘Another one?’

  ‘This afternoon, yesterday afternoon, I was late getting off, the murder.’

  ‘The body in the field?’

  ‘I’ve been there before.’

  A silence. He’d explain.

  ‘There was a child’s toy in a pathway next to the field, a furry toy, a rabbit, a blue rabbit, it’s been bagged and tagged, we have it safe in productions…’ He was beginning to ramble and stopped himself. He breathed deeply. ‘I’ve seen it before.’

  ‘A furry toy?’

  ‘At the same place, more or less, within a half mile I’d say, if I remember.’

  ‘So, a furry toy is found in a lane. A child has dropped it.’

  ‘A furry toy close to where we found an abandoned car which had been stolen, neatly parked and locked.’

  ‘Oh…’

  He squeezed her hand. ‘That was twenty-five years ago.’

  A silence. A resonance.

  ‘There’s a body out there, Elka, I know. You can call it what you like, the intuition of an old and jaded cop, but there’s a body in those fields and its been there for twenty-five years.’

  ‘Oh, Ray…’

  ‘I was a constable, considered experienced but still a constable, and I attended just like Hamilton and Piper attended this afternoon. We contacted the owner and he came out in his mate’s car and drove his own away, no damage to it, and nobody came by to point out a freshly dug grave in the field a few yards away and in fairness, I don’t recall seeing anything amiss, but I’m not a country man, signs like that would be lost on me. I can read a street but I’d trip over something out of the ordinary in the country and I’d still not notice it. But I remember clearly walking up and down near the car, waiting for the owner to arrive, it was just about this time of year, too, and I remember seeing a furry toy. It sticks in my mind because it was lifelike and lifesize, and in my naivety…seems so stupid, but I thought: What a brilliantly coloured rabbit and see how it’s standing still to avoid detection, playing possum. And that’s the reason I remember, not because of seeing it but because of the sense of embarrassment and also the relief that I had been alone when I realized that I’d been creeping up on a toy.’ He shook his head. ‘I wanted to see how close I could get before it bolted. I remember the incident clearly. Emotions, you don’t forget them as easily as sights. That’s why I woke, something was troubling me all evening, and that’s what it is, I’m sorry about earlier…I thought I was just tired.’

  ‘’S all right.’ She patted his thigh. ‘It doesn’t have to be perfect every time.’ She kissed his leg. ‘With you it’s beautiful most of the time and that’s good enough for this lady.’ He rested his hand on her head and let it run down her silk-like hair to the nape of her neck and then below to her muscular back and began to run his hand over her shoulder-blades in wide circular movements.

  ‘But that’s it, that’s what it was. That’s what was troubling me. I woke up, shot bolt upright, shouting. I couldn’t take it all in. I wanted to thrash my arms and legs about, you know the way. I didn’t want to wake you up and so I came in here. I wanted to bang on the tables and the walls.’

  ‘Well, I’m awake now.’

  He brought his fist down hard on the table. Twice. ‘Thanks,’ he said.

  ‘I know the feeling, but no more. I’ve got neighbours and we make enough noise as it is. I see the way they smile at me in the mornings.’

  ‘I’ll have to tell Fabian. I’ll have to tell him first thing.’

  ‘It’s your day off tomorrow.’

  ‘I could phone, but I’ll go in. Frankly, I’d rather go in than do what I intended to do, which was go to Shrew and collect my new summer raincoat and a few other odds and ends. I’ve been putting off doing it for a while. I’ll do both in the morning and then have the afternoon and evening free: we still have a dinner date, and I wouldn’t enjoy the meal if I hadn’t first disclosed to Fabian about the possibility of a second body being out there.’

  ‘Of course. I suppose that means the car is linked to the body?’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘You said that there was no direct link between the stolen motor and the body, but now you’ve recalled a similar incident twenty-five years ago, same place, a toy rabbit…’

  ‘Of course,’ he said again, as he continued to stroke her back. ‘We’ll still need more than that, but yes, you’re right, there now is a link between the car and the body. What a way to spoil a night’s sleep. But at least I can wake up.’

  Elka Willems stood and he sensed her body scent. She laid a hand on his shoulder.

  ‘You know,’ he said taking her hand in his, ‘that’s my greatest complaint about police work, that it deprives you of the luxury of self-pity.’

  ‘Come to bed, Ray,’ she said softly. ‘Come back to bed: now.’

  Fabian Donoghue drove his Rover into the car park at the rear of P Division police station. An observer, a pedestrian perhaps, would have noted a fluid, controlled, masterful handling of the controls. The journey from his bungalow in Edinburgh, his wife and two children, had taken just over an hour; not an impossible commuting time. He parked his car in his allotted parking space close to the ‘staff only’ door and pulled his gold hunte
r from the pocket of his waistcoat. It was 08.29. He slipped the watch back into the pocket and let the chain hang in a modest loop. He locked his car and walked towards the building. He enjoyed the air that morning, fine and sunny, even in the centre of the city the air still had a freshness about it. There was a spring in his step. He held his head high. He was ready for the world.

  He signed in, plucked two circulars from his pigeonhole and went upstairs to the CID corridor. He stopped at the doorway of the room occupied by the detective-constables. Malcolm Montgomerie sat back in his chair, eyes closed, feet on his desk. A pile of files stood on the edge of the desk.

  ‘Morning, Montgomerie.’

  Montgomerie sat bolt upright and slammed his feet on to the floor, as if jolted by a surge of electricity. ‘Morning, sir.’

  ‘About eight minutes, Montgomerie,’ Donoghue said coldly. ‘Give you time to wake up.’

  Donoghue went to his office, put his hat on the peg of the coat-stand and sat in his chair. He tore yesterday’s date from the calendar and read the legend that day: Those who give, get.

  Quite true, he said to himself.

  Settling in his chair, he took his pipe from his pocket, a briar with gently curving stem, and from his other pocket he took his tobacco pouch and began to knead the tobacco into the pipe bowl. His was a special mix; made up for him by a tobacconist in George Square, it had a Dutch base with a twist of dark shag to produce a deeper flavour and to slow the burning rate. He closed his tobacco pouch and laid it on his desk to the side of the ashtray; large enough, it had been quipped, to swim a couple of fish in. He held his pipe in one hand while ‘teasing’ the tobacco with the fingertips of the other. Putting the stem in his mouth, he took his gold-plated lighter and placed the flame over the bowl, sucking and blowing as he did so. It was, as usual, his first pipe of the day and was, as usual, by far the most enjoyable. He glanced out of the window as he slid the lighter back into his jacket pocket, saw the sun glinting off the square, angular steel and concrete buildings at the bottom end of Sauchiehall Street, on the pavement thronged with people, the street itself full of buses, of varying livery courtesy of the recent deregulation of the bus services. His particular favourite was the striking yellow on blue of the Kelvin Scottish bus company whose vehicles always seemed to be gleamingly clean.