Long Day Monday

by Peter Turnbull

  He submitted his report, as yet still handwritten, to the internal mail system—Inspector Donoghue, P Division, Charing Cross. He then made two phone calls; first home to his anxiety-ridden parent, yes, yes, he was quite safe, just had to work late. Home in an hour. The second to the secretary of the Bowling Club, and transmitted his apologies for his absence owing to unforeseen obligations at his place of employment.

  He left the premises. It was a calm, pleasant evening, warm still air and high cloud. He decided to walk home. Why not? He got little exercise these days.

  ‘It’s going to mean late working.’ Donoghue lit his pipe. ‘I know it’s Friday evening. Richard, you’re on duty anyway, but WPC Willems and DC Abernethy, you’re day shift. I’d like you to hang on a wee while longer.’

  Abernethy and Willems nodded. A ‘wee while’: Abernethy thought that to be a little rich. His shift had finished at 14.00. It was already close to 20.00, a wee six hours longer already.

  ‘It may be that you can’t get home at a reasonable time, but we have two major inquiries at the present and as usual we are understaffed. I’ll be coming in tomorrow so rank has no privileges.’ He paused, took his pipe from his mouth and placed it in the ashtray. ‘Two major inquiries pressing. I received a report from Both well just before you came in, he’s taken a few items from the car and sent them to Dr Kay. She’s giving up her Friday evening to help us, so we must not appear to be idle. So let’s see where we are: WPC Willems, anything on the house-to-house in respect of Tim Moore?’

  ‘Nothing, sir.’ Elka Willems shuffled in her seat. ‘But in instances like this, all we can say is “nothing yet”. People’s memories sometimes have a delayed reaction.’

  ‘Agreed.’ Donoghue nodded. ‘We can still hope that you and Abernethy might have triggered something. What’s the next step?’

  ‘Enlist the help of the media, sir,’ Abernethy said hesitatingly. ‘Run off the MP posters we have mocked up, ask the newspapers to print it. Get it shown on television. Blanket coverage, go nationwide, police stations, bus stations, railway stations, London Underground. I can get on to that this evening.’

  ‘Good man.’ Donoghue drummed his fingers on the desktop. ‘Richard.’

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘Your plans?’

  ‘Continuing with the Sandra Shapiro inquiry. I intend to visit her flat in Hillhead. I’ll do that this evening.’

  ‘Good. WPC Willems, if you’ll assist Abernethy with the posters. Tomorrow, Abernethy, tomorrow I’d like you to go round the toy shops.’

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘The furry rabbit found at the locus of Sandra Shapiro’s grave. We must try to identify the outlet. Take it out of productions and go down Argyle Street and Sauchiehall Street tomorrow. A retailer might be able to identify it. It’s a long shot but it might tell us something.’

  ‘Very good, sir.’

  ‘Meanwhile we won’t wait with bated breath for anything that Dr Kay can tell us. Any points that I’ve missed?’

  ‘Was there a spade in the car, sir?’

  ‘No.’ Donoghue shook his head and then saw what King was driving at. ‘No, Bothwell made no mention of it, but you’re right, he didn’t dig the grave with his bare hands.’

  ‘Light’s all but gone.’ King glanced out of the window. ‘Not enough daylight left, not by the time we get out there.’

  ‘But somewhere there’s a spade or a pick or similar. And someone may have seen the murderer walk from the field and leave the area.’

  ‘Second car or public transport?’

  Donoghue shook his head. ‘Either, though a second car would imply a conspirator. Somehow I think that that is unlikely. There was no reason why the first car wasn’t used to escape, no reason that I can see, and that’s a puzzle in itself On balance my guess would be public transport. If you’d get on to that, Richard.’

  ‘Tomorrow, sir, first thing.’

  Pippa Scott was naked. Malcolm Montgomerie was naked. The flame behind them was naked; a candle burning in a metal tray on a low table. Also on the table were empty plates, a bottle of wine and two wine glasses.

  ‘It’s better this way,’ she said, nestled back against his chest. ‘I prefer it. Do it first and eat and drink afterwards. If you wine and dine first you dull the sensations.’

  He had picked her up from school. He had watched her as she walked away from the building, a beautiful carriage, her long hair about her shoulders. She was a woman whom Montgomerie had found had benefited from a privileged education at one of the most prestigious public schools in England, but whose socialist convictions and family connections with Scotland had brought her to teach in Govan, and it was on that level that they had reached each other. He had given up a promising career in the law, he had felt ill at ease with the smug, self-satisfied undergraduates in the Faculty of Law at Edinburgh University: young men who said things like, ‘I did law because you never meet a poor solicitor,’ and who scoffed at his idea of being a ‘people’s lawyer’. He left after his first year, returned to his native Glasgow and volunteered for the police. Montgomerie found Pippa Scott to be a strongly confident young woman, handsome in a very feminine way, who had taken him by surprise on their first date by pushing his glass of grappa towards him at the end of the meal and saying, ‘Drink up if we’re going to sleep together tonight.’ They did, a little clumsily, being unused to each other’s bodies, but not at all unsuccessfully.

  She had friends in teaching whom he liked. She had friends in the media, on the strength of a few scripts for a soap opera, whom he didn’t like. He felt they had smirked when he had to apologize for leaving the soiree early, to go on duty.

  That evening he had driven to Govan to pick her up and returned with her to her Fiat on Hyndland. Afterwards they had bathed together and she pampered him with herbal shampoo.

  King climbed the common stair. The building was dark and damp. Even now, in midsummer, it was dark and damp. They were narrow stairs, worn down with age, winding in a high spiral, with rusted railings which seemed too frail to be able to withstand human weight. The stairs of the tenement seemed to King to be straining on the verge of collapse. Many of the doors had Asian surnames written on them, some hastily scribbled with pen on a scrap of paper and Sellotaped to the door, or pencilled on the flaking plaster beside the door. Others had names embossed on plastic nameplates. The stair was filled with the smell of curry and Indian music, monotonous to King’s ears.

  At the top of the stair, on a landing of uneven flagstones beneath a dirty skylight which had been meshed over with chicken wire, were two doors. One was locked with a padlock and hasp and did not appear to King to have been opened for some months, if not years. By the side of the second door a sheet of A4 paper had been Sellotaped to the wall. Ten names had been written on the paper. Some had been scored out. One name was Shapiro. It was also one of the names with a decisive pencil line running through it. King wondered if she had quit the address some time earlier and not informed her parents. Or perhaps someone reading of her death in the newspaper had crossed her name off’ the list in a callous gesture of dismissiveness and thoughtlessness for any next of kin who might want to collect her possessions.

  King rapped on the door. The sound echoed down the stair.

  No reply.

  He knocked again, harder.

  The door was opened eventually and uninterestedly. A girl, early twenties, thought King, lost-looking, bleary-eyed, stood in the doorway, one hand on the door, the other on the frame. ‘What?’

  ‘Police.’ King flashed his ID.

  ‘So?’

  ‘I’d like to come in.’

  She began to shut the door.

  King pushed it open and stepped into the hall. It was dimly lit, cluttered with bric-a-brac and piles of old newspapers.

  ‘You got a warrant?’

  ‘Do I need one? Have you got something to hide?’

  ‘Hasn’t everybody?’

  ‘Tell me about Sandra Shapiro.’


  ‘The late Sandra Shapiro. I read the papers, early edition, read it today, so I scored her name from the list of names on the door. There’s only me here now.’

  ‘So who are all those names on the door?’

  ‘Some of them are made up. Keeps the burglars out. One or two are there as mail drops for drifters with no fixed abode, as I believe is the phrase. Others are mail drops for guys on the run from the law. Anyway, I read about Sandra so I crossed her name off the list.’

  ‘Considerate of you.’

  ‘She wasn’t anything to me. She was just a girl who had a room here, she was a wee turk with an attitude.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘She came, she went, she lifted anything that wasn’t nailed down and now she’s dead.’

  ‘So what’s your name?’

  ‘Do I need to tell you?’

  King remained silent.

  ‘Valerie Lambie. I was a nurse and now I’m not.’

  ‘Probably a good job, with your attitude.’

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

  ‘You can take that any way you like, Valerie Lambie. Which is Sandra’s room?’

  Valerie Lambie nodded over her left shoulder. As she did so King caught a glimpse of track marks in her neck.

  ‘Did Sandra shoot up too?’

  Valerie Lambie’s hand went up to her neck. She shrugged her shoulders. ‘It’s the only place I’ve got veins left. I’m not proud. I’m not apologetic either. Sandra?’ The girl shook her head. ‘No, I don’t think she did, but she was on her way there. She’d watch me shoot up and you could see the fascination in her eyes. If she hadn’t been topped she would have been a smackhead in a matter of weeks, days maybe, I don’t know.’

  King Stepped towards the door to Sandra Shapiro’s room. He pressed it. It was locked. He put his shoulder to it and nudged it open. The small lock in rotten wood offered no resistance.

  ‘I have a key for it,’ said Valerie Lambie with a sneer as King examined the damage to the wooden frame. ‘All you had to do was ask.’

  King ignored her and turned his attention to Sandra Shapiro’s room. He was too experienced to be goaded into police brutality by Valerie Lambie, but the possibility of a compulsory detoxification by means of a bust for possession began to loom as a very interesting prospect.

  Sandra Shapiro’s room was small, a bed, a wardrobe, a threadbare carpet, a grimy window. King stepped up to the window: it looked out on a back court of sheer-sided black tenements, tipped-over dustbins, cats on the walls menacing each other. He stepped back and opened the wardrobe. Sandra Shapiro’s clothes were old and tattered.

  ‘It went on the drink.’ Valerie Lambie stood in the doorway.

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Her money. That’s what you are thinking, isn’t it? Are you or are you not standing there thinking to your little self, where, oh where, did all her dosh go? Well, it went on the drink. When she came here she was on the vodka, a refined taste too, only blue label was good enough for her. By the time she’d been here for a couple of months she was into the Thunderbirds, the Buckfasts, you name it, her head was blown apart and her brains had been clawed out. She was one step away from the hair lacquer and the brass polish. She was some mess. That’s why I said I thought she was close to mainlining smack. See me, I’d rather be a smackhead than a crucial bevvy merchant like she was. See her sometimes, I’d go for a drink with her, she’d persuade me and if I was fed up with my own company I’d go, and pretty soon she’d sort of leer at me, she only ever needed topping up, you see, and she’d say things like, “Which pub are we in?” She was in the gutter all right.’

  ‘She get her money on the street?’

  ‘Are you asking or telling?’

  ‘Both.’

  ‘That’s a contradiction, but yes, she worked the street. But not like I work the street, not every night winter and summer. She went down there twice a week, turned a few tricks until she had enough for a three-day bender. Then she’d come home with a brown paper bag full of bottles and cans and disappear into her room and she’d stagger out again three days later and go to the corner for a kebab. That was her food for the three days: a kebab. She’d spend a day recovering and then go back to the street for a couple of nights and earn enough for another carry-out. When she was working she could look quite smart, and it was at those times when she went to see her parents. They fed her a meal, and she said they’d see her off on the bus home. She was going home, but via the street.’

  ‘Any friends?’

  Valerie Lambie shook her head. Her sudden helpfulness, cynical as it may have been, had succeeded in making King rethink the heroin bust. He saw her as a victim. ‘None to speak of,’ she said. ‘None in fact. Just winos, men and women with red faces and laser beams for breath. They’d come up in their droves when the word spread that she had been seen with a carry-out. Sometimes they got in, sometimes they didn’t. That was Sandra Shapiro and now she’s not.’

  King left the flat, tripping lightly down the winding close and into Gibson Street. A group of students walked towards the University Union, an orange bus whined towards the city. He wondered if that was how one reacted against a dull, prim and unimaginative upbringing in Egypt. You leave and seek a gutter in any man’s language. Maybe she drank because a chemical imbalance prevented her from resisting it; maybe Shapiro’s house contained a dark secret and Sandra was fighting a deeply buried trauma? Whatever the reason, King was certain that the Shapiros did not need to see their only daughter’s last resting-place save one.

  Sussock sat in the deep armchair and looked about the room. An old wardrobe, a narrow divan bed, a small dark desk and then just enough room for the chair in which he sat, his long thin legs bent at the knee. There was a small window which looked out on to an elevated back lawn over which someone’s washing hung in the still evening air. He watched a pair of swallows dive and spin: he heard a blackbird singing. All was quiet in the house, but only for the present. Later, when the pubs had shut, it would become noisy, later the boys whose floor was his ceiling would stamp home from the bar and switch on their hi-fi with the volume turned up to maximum and their music would boom-boom down into his boxroom. Through the wall, which wasn’t a wall but a partition, he would soon hear the grunts of homosexual coupling, so close that it seemed as if he were in the same bed. That, he felt, was not too much of an exaggeration because when it came to it his bed and theirs were separated by a sheet of plywood about half an inch thick, if that, which had been covered in cheap wallpaper. The Polish landlord had divided up the huge rooms in the large old house in that manner, and as a consequence of the noise pollution the sense of personal space did not exist, except at times like this when it was quiet. In the room off the half-landing where the stair divided into two, the couple would doubtless soon be screaming either in orgasmic pleasure or murderous hatred: Sussock had noted that their emotions seemed to alternate nightly. Across the landing the young man who had been discharged and re-admitted and discharged from psychiatric hospitals as he wandered around Scotland, and who had by then fetched up in the same bedsitter address as Sussock, would be sitting on the edge of the bed, water pistol in hand, awaiting the Martians. He would sit there, fighting off sleep, sometimes for days, until he finally slumped backwards.

  This was Sussock’s home: he was a cop with thirty years’ service, he was close to retirement, and this was his home.

  He left his room and locked the door, it was not wholly secure, a grown man leaning on it could force the lock to give. He stepped lightly down the wide stairway and entered the small kitchen he shared with six or seven other residents. Somebody, he discovered, had taken his last can of beans, his last milk, his last teaspoonful of coffee. So he stole a teabag from somebody else’s larder and some powdered milk from another person’s foodstore. It was, he had found, how one survives in bedsit land. He sat in the kitchen sipping the tea. Adjacent to the kitchen was the landlord’s lair and on one occasion Sussock had had call to go there
to request a light bulb and he had seen how the man and his wife lived. He so lean and she so fat, like Jack Spratt and his wife. By day they lived in a room of upright chairs around a table, a sink under the window and a television on the draining-board. By night they evidently retired into a room which contained nothing but a double bed. They lived frugally, as if survival itself was a luxury, and they evidently expected their tenants to do the same. Sussock did not like them, he found them cold and distant and exploitative, they had a permanently resentful look about them and probably had a horrific tale of displaced persons and Nazi atrocities to tell, but no one could ever accuse them of hypocrisy. Not for them the Rolls-Royce and fabulous home of the traditional slum landlord; they lived in a basement with a television next to the sink.

  Steeling himself for the ordeal he anticipated, he left the building and coaxed life into his old Ford. He drove to the south side, to Rutherglen, and stopped outside a prim bungalow. He noticed with a certain spiteful pleasure that the garden had grown wildly feral. Not coping, he said to himself Not coping any more.

  He left the car and walked to the side door of the building and hammered on it with the palm of his hand. It was opened slowly and eventually.

  A young man stood there. He wore a black T-shirt, which he wore tucked into light trousers and open sandals. He had rings in both ears and wore his hair preened backwards. His hands were smooth and hairless. He held an embroidered handkerchief up to his face as he looked down at Sussock and smiled a transparently insincere smile. ‘Daddy,’ he said. ‘We’d recognize that gentle tap on the door every time, Mummy and I.’

  Sussock stormed up the steps and barged past his son.

  ‘Get him out, Sammy.’ A thin, highly pitched woman’s voice shrieked from the dull recesses of the bungalow and Sussock pictured her sitting there in her chair, in the corner, small pinched face, scowling and demanding, demanding, demanding. ‘Get him out, tell him to go and chase robbers, he was never any good to us, never here, always out, so tell him…’