Long Day Monday

by Peter Turnbull

  He transferred the impression of the tenth finger by firm steady pressure on to the card in the appropriate box, left index, and stood. He clamped his plastic work case shut and blinked at the nurse.

  ‘Finished?’ she asked, smiling.

  Bothwell nodded. ‘Uh-huh. That’s it. Doesn’t take long, really.’

  The nurse nodded at the mortuary assistant and then she and Bothwell left the mortuary and began the long walk back to the main building, the walk walked earlier by Richard King, and earlier than that by Ray Sussock. The nurse and he didn’t speak on the walk along the inclined corridor, save: ‘Busy these days?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Bothwell. ‘Always busy. Back to dust a car now, part of the same inquiry, I believe.’

  Mrs McWilliams sat in the kitchen of her home. She rubbed her ribs, massaging them, and gasped in pain.

  She found that it was his detached attitude that upset her the most, even in violence he was detached, as if doing a job, just another job about the home, going through motions, and that, she now realized, was how he saw her, and how he had seen her all along. He didn’t see her as a person, she was a component in the machine called ‘the farm’, she had her place, her function, like an animal in a stall. And the richest thing of all, she thought, is that it wasn’t her fault that he’d lost half a day yesterday because he’d been stupid enough to point out a freshly dug grave to the police. It wasn’t her fault that he didn’t keep his mouth shut, didn’t just let the police stand by in ignorance until the owner came and collected his car.

  ‘I don’t want to be unhelpful but there really isn’t such a profile. Not to my knowledge.’

  ‘No?’ Abernethy trapped the phone between his ear and shoulder while he held his pen poised to write.

  ‘I’m afraid not. People abduct children for a host of reasons.’ Cass spoke confidently and with authority. Abernethy felt soothed by his voice. ‘It isn’t as though a profile of a child abductor exists in much the same way as the profile of the serial killer exists. Really, your guess is as good as mine…I can’t give you much time, I’m teaching in ten minutes, but suspect the obvious…I mean, a household with healthy happy children is unlikely to be the domicile of a person who abducted this little boy…it is the little boy mentioned in this morning’s Herald, I assume?’

  ‘Yes, sir, the very one.’

  ‘I feel for his parents. But look for a single person: probably a woman, but not necessarily so—it’s just that women have stronger need for a child than a man, consider perhaps two people acting in consent as in Hindley and Brady.’

  Abernethy felt a chill shoot down his spine.

  ‘There just isn’t a model,’ Cass continued and Abernethy had the impression he was struggling. ‘The likely culprit could be anyone from a woman who has a desperate need for a child and in whose custody, unlawful as it may be, the child will be safe and unharmed to a male paedophile with rape and murder on his mind. I really can’t help. I would advise you to ask other children rather than adults, on the basis that they too might have been approached, but that’s common sense rather than applied psychology. I can’t be of further help, Mr Abernethy.’

  ‘Thanks anyway, Dr Cass.’ Abernethy replaced the handset gently.

  ‘I’m embarrassed,’ he said. He did not think that the phone call did the street credibility of the police any good at all. ‘I just don’t think that the phone call did our street cred any good. Any good at all.’

  ‘What did he say?’

  Abernethy told her.

  ‘Common sense, really,’ conceded Elka Willems. ‘Still, what Fabian wants, Fabian gets. Let’s go knock on a few doors.’

  ‘It was about here, sir.’ Sussock stood at the side of a narrow road. ‘I was here for about two hours. It’s a little different from how I remember it but this is the place all right.’ Sussock carried his jacket under his arm. Donoghue, walking behind him, kept his jacket on despite the heat. Six uniformed officers, a dog-handler and a sergeant stood by. ‘Where are we from the location at which the body was found yesterday, Ray?’ Donoghue loosened the knot in his tie. His one concession to the heat.

  ‘About a mile from here, sir, I should think. Same sort of country, narrow roads, fields, farming country.’

  ‘So twenty-five years ago the stolen vehicle was found here?’

  ‘Just where we are standing, sir.’

  ‘And the toy rabbit?’

  ‘Along there, by the shrubs. Same side of the road that the car was on.’

  ‘So if there is a body about here, and it is buried in the same relative position to where the car was parked and the rabbit dropped as the relative position to the car and rabbit yesterday, where would it be?’

  ‘In this field here, sir.’ Sussock nodded to a field of rough, uneven pasture.

  ‘It wouldn’t be too far from the car anyway.’ Donoghue pondered. ‘I’m assuming that the car was used to carry the body to the field for burial and once here it would be a dead weight, literally.’

  ‘Why leave the car, though?’ Sussock shook his head. ‘It would make more sense to use it to make good his escape.’

  ‘That’s a good point, Ray. I confess I’ve thought about it and the only deduction I can make is that we are not dealing with a rational mind. We’ll observe the procedures, but I can say now that if the girl in the GRI is Sandra Shapiro, all her known associates, even her enemies, will be able to account for themselves at the time of her disappearance, and at the assumed time of her death.’ Donoghue turned to the uniformed officer. ‘Sergeant.’

  ‘Sir!’

  ‘This field here. Not all of it, I would say no more than fifty feet from the fence.’

  ‘Very good, sir. We’ll let the dog go first.’

  ‘As you see fit.’

  The sergeant nodded to the dog-handler, who led the Alsatian to the edge of the field and slipped the leash. The animal swept over the fencing, as sleek and lithe as a puma, and began to criss-cross the field, snout down.

  It found nothing.

  ‘I’m sorry, sir.’ The dog-handler seemed to feel himself to be personally responsible, personally at fault. He slipped the leash back on the animal and patted its flank. ‘But after twenty-five years…you see, they smell decaying flesh all right but…’

  ‘It was worth a try,’ said Donoghue and again turned to the sergeant. ‘It’s got to be spadework I’m afraid, Sergeant. If you’d form a file, say about four feet apart, dig once over two feet down to…how deep was the grave yesterday, Ray?’

  ‘Ten inches should do it, sir.’

  ‘Ten inches, a depth of ten inches, please.’

  ‘Very good, sir.’ The sergeant addressed the group of constables. ‘Right, lads, grab a spade, we’ll be on this for the rest of the morning and into the afternoon, I’d say, so let’s take it steady. Pace yourselves.’

  They paced themselves for forty-five minutes until a young constable drove his spade vertically into the soil and found that the expected resistance wasn’t there. The spade slid deeply into unconsolidated earth. He dug further. He encountered a rock which dislodged easily. Under the rock was a bone. A human bone.

  CHAPTER 5

  Friday, 14.00-23.30 hours

  ‘It appears that the fair fields of Lanarkshire are giving up their dead.’ Reynolds crouched beside the shallow grave and considered the skeleton, hunched in the foetal position, on its side, hands tied behind the back.

  Donoghue stood behind and beside Reynolds. Both men were concealed by a screen which had been hastily erected as soon as the first of the bones had been exposed. ‘It so appears,’ he said.

  ‘Do you think that the two murders are connected?’

  ‘Sir? Two murders.’

  ‘I mean this one and the girl found yesterday.’

  ‘Possibly,’ Donoghue conceded. ‘Our minds are open to every possibility. Can you perhaps tell me why you ask?’

  Reynolds stood and brushed soil from his hands. ‘Well, over and above the fact that th
ey’re both buried in the same overall location, not above a mile apart, I should say they’re both with hands tied and in the foetal position, and both young women.’

  ‘How can you tell us that?’

  ‘Shape of the pelvis and the wide orbits of the eye cavity in the skull.’ Reynolds spoke matter-of-factly. ‘They confirm that this is a skeleton of an adult human female. The skull hadn’t fully knitted by the time of death, so we have a skeleton of someone, some girl, between the ages of sixteen and twenty when she died. It’s been buried a long time though, putrification is complete, very little flesh, she’s been here for twenty years, perhaps. Perhaps nearer thirty.’

  ‘We think twenty-five, sir,’ said Donoghue.

  Reynolds nodded. ‘So, they are connected, you think? Despite the time gap.’

  ‘Yes.’ Donoghue nodded. ‘We do in fact believe there’s a connection. Don’t know what or who as yet but the two bodies constitute a single line of inquiry.’

  ‘I find that a little unsettling.’ Reynolds glanced up and over the top of the screen at the rolling hills about him, cattle grazing, mountains in the distance, woodland interrupting the skyline. ‘I mean, what else has happened in the twenty-five-year interval? How many more skeletons are in these fields?’

  ‘I confess that that has occurred to us, sir.’

  ‘I’m sure it has.’ Reynolds looked downwards again. He looked particularly at the stones beside the excavation. ‘Tell me, did you find these stones on top of the body?’

  ‘Yes, and inside the skeleton too, but not completely covering it.’

  ‘The stones would have fallen into the skeleton, as you say, into the chest cavity and thighs as the flesh decomposed. That’s why you found them mixed up with the bones, but they would have been placed on top of the body. You know, he had more time to bury this victim.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘I would assume that the stones were put on the body to prevent foxes digging it up. He didn’t do that with the body we found yesterday. It never occurred to him to do it yesterday, or he hadn’t the time, or as the years have taken their toll on him, as years take toll on us all, then carrying the body, digging the grave and covering it, took all the stamina he could muster. He no longer had the stamina to collect and carry stones. But a quarter of a century ago he would have been a different man. I wonder, too,’ he continued, ‘just thinking aloud, you understand, whether he has some connection with the sea?’

  ‘How do you mean, sir?’

  ‘Well, yesterday the post-mortem revealed that the victim had died in a saline solution of three per cent, which at first I took to have been sea-water. Now, these rocks, note them, anything strike you about them?’

  Donoghue confessed they looked like ordinary rocks to him.

  ‘Ever noticed the difference between stones on the shore and stones inland?’

  Donoghue saw it then. The rocks that had been placed on top of the body were rounded, large pebbles. ‘Sea action,’ he said.

  ‘Wave action, I think is the term,’ said Reynolds. ‘These rocks have been taken from a coastal location. Rocks dug up from the fields would be jagged. It may be a red herring, it may be that if he wanted rocks in a hurry he thought— probably correctly—that he’d be quicker driving down to the coast and picking them up from the shore than he would be digging them out of the ground. But equally it may indicate where he lives.’

  ‘It’s worth considering,’ said Donoghue. ‘Might also be an attempt to throw us off the scent, like salting the drowning fluid.’

  ‘If that was deliberate. It may be an accidental indication.’ Reynolds turned to Donoghue.

  ‘Of?’

  ‘Of the sex of the perpetrator. This is something else that occurred to me last night. I’m just bouncing it off you, but supposing that the victim drowned in a bath, as opposed to another large container, and supposing that the water in which she drowned was not drawn for the purpose but was left over from a person having bathed, that is, using the container for the purpose for which it was intended, then what reason would one have for salting the bathwater?’

  ‘I haven’t a clue.’

  ‘Cystitis, Mr Donoghue, cystitis, suffered by women, it’s an infection of the urethra and/or bladder. Women have to live with it, but doctors often advise salting bathwater as a means of easing the discomfort. I’d have to say that three per cent salinity is a high concentration. For that purpose, doctors normally advise sufferers to sprinkle a handful of salt into the bathwater, which would be much less than three per cent volume in a normal bath, but if the woman concerned is suffering acutely from it, or if she is over-fastidious—’

  ‘The point is that the perpetrator might be a woman.’

  ‘Or a woman is involved, because the carrying of the body over the fence and into the field and the digging of the grave in a single night took real stamina. A very well-built woman could have done it, though.’

  ‘But it’s given us something to consider.’

  ‘Or just confused everything?’ The silver-haired pathologist smiled. ‘Tell me this, this skeleton here, was this the reason why yesterday, you asked if it was possible to identify a skull?’

  ‘It was.’ Donoghue nodded. ‘It was indeed. We had a notion that this might be the case.’

  King drove down the Gallowgate, down a canyon of black tenements, turned into Westmuir Street, factories, waste ground, Shettleston Road, shops, pubs, more black tenements, mixed in with new developments. He turned right at Shettleston Sheddings and entered Egypt.

  The house was classic Egypt, city-owned, semi-detached, whitewashed, glinting in the afternoon, lawns clipped low and neat, pink roses growing on the trellis by the door. The street was narrow and quiet. A few cars, polished, neatly parked. Pure Egypt: a pocket of squeaky clean in the sprawling East End.

  The inside of the house, King found, presented the same obsessive neatness and cleanliness as the outside, everything in its place, but it suffered from a lack of imagination and had the unmistakable stamp of a tight budget over the years.

  The man had stood and looked at King, and King had observed the look in the man’s eyes as emotion vacated to make way for shock as the latter eased into the man’s mind. The man who had opened the door at King’s polite but insistent knock, who stood on his threshold in a blue shirt and cream slacks, a gold watch on a thin arm, had looked questioningly at King and then, concerned as King flashed his ID, now stood reacting inwardly from shock. The man never showed any sense of fear, no sense of guilt, no hostility: King saw and recognized the sort of household he was paid to protect.

  The man had stepped backwards, had said yes, yes, of course he could come in, and as he did so he called to his wife, ‘Jessie, Jessie.’ King had followed the man and walked into a house that had been recently dusted and sprayed with airfreshener, and moments later the woman sat sobbing on the settee as the man stood, his hand on her shoulder, and remained standing even as a little moisture crept into the corner of his eye.

  ‘There’s no mistake, I’m afraid.’ King spoke slowly, with due gravity. He didn’t elaborate, he hoped that Mr and Mrs Shapiro, house proud, of Glenalmond Street, Egypt, didn’t press him, did not ask how he was certain there could be no mistake. He would then have been obliged to tell them about her fingerprints being on file and about the convictions for soliciting as a common prostitute which led to her prints being recorded. It would do little good for them to find out now. ‘There’s no mistake,’ he said again. He found that this was an aspect of police work which never got easier.

  ‘What happened, sir?’

  ‘Mr King,’ said King, who hated being called ‘sir’ by men old enough to be his father. ‘My name’s King. I’m afraid to tell you, sir, that we believe your daughter to have been murdered. That is as yet unproven, but we believe it to be the case.’

  ‘Oh…’ Mr Shapiro collapsed on to the settee next to his wife in a single fluid movement, like a statue suddenly turning to jelly.

  King turn
ed his head. Embarrassed, uncomfortable, he glanced out of the net curtains as a summer breeze entered the open window, fluttered the curtains, and let them fall again. A car, polished and clean, drove slowly down Glenalmond Street, its windscreen and chrome catching the sun as it passed. King turned away from the window. Inside the Shapiros’ home a budgerigar twittered from within its cage and a row of little glass animals marched across the mantelpiece. On the settee a middle-aged couple sat and gripped each other with trembling hands, the woman sobbing uncontrollably, unashamedly.

  ‘What happened, sir? Mr King. What happened?’

  ‘Well…’ King indicated the vacant armchair, good solid quality, but worn, the sort of item of furniture which had been purchased in the early days, the hopeful days, the it‘11-cost-but-it’ll-see-us-out-days. ‘Do you mind if…?’

  ‘No…please do, Mr King.’

  King sat thankfully. He thought it bad enough to bring news to their door like the news he had brought: he didn’t have to stand towering over them as well.

  ‘Can we see her?’ Mrs Shapiro seemed to be in a world of her own, King thought that she hadn’t heard her husband’s question.

  ‘Yes,’ said King, taking the woman’s question first and head on. ‘Yes, you have the right to view her, but I’d advise against it because it will be the way you will remember her. I’m led to believe that the final image of her will live in your mind more than any other image or memory. You may want to preserve some happier memory…’

  ‘What happened, sir?’ Mr Shapiro pressed.

  ‘We believe that she was drowned, sir,’ said King gently.