Long Day Monday

by Peter Turnbull

  ‘So who are you, little one?’ Sussock spoke to the modelled clay as he laid the folder on Galley’s workbench, ‘What is your name, pretty one?’

  ‘She is rather, isn’t she?’ said Galley, sensing Sussock beginning to drift into a world of his own. ‘Or was. She was pretty, I mean. I’ve guessed at the lips and the nose. Thicker lips and a larger nose would have made her less pretty despite her bone structure. I may have been generous there, I gave her a lovely mouth and a neat nose, but I don’t think I was. The nose and mouth are as they ought to have been given the overall thinness of the face. If her mouth or nose were any larger she was served a rough deal in life.’

  ‘Well, let’s see.’ Sussock opened the folder.

  ‘The reconstructed skulls are used like Photofits,’ Galley said, to Sussock’s ears somewhat defensively, ‘in that they don’t purport to be an exact likeness, just a suggestion of the likely appearance.’

  ‘I see,’ Sussock mumbled as he held up the first photograph and cast his eyes backwards and forwards between it and the head on the pedestal.

  ‘You’ll have to make allowances.’

  ‘Uh-huh,’ as Sussock held up the second photograph. He laid it down again and picked up a third photograph, this time a full missing persons poster and held it at arm’s length.

  He continued to hold it.

  He handed it to Galley.

  ‘Could be,’ said Galley. ‘Could very well be. The cheekbones and chin and forehead look right. The lips are the same as I thought they might be, the nose is a little longer than I have made it.’ He paused and considered the poster. ‘It’s certainly possible,’ he said.

  ‘We’ll lay that one on one side,’ Sussock said, reading the legend beneath the photograph. ‘Could very well be that one, she went missing in June of that year; that’s when I was chasing rabbits.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Nothing. It’s just that we know that the girl whose face you have reconstructed probably disappeared in the summer months. It doesn’t mean that we can discount the girls who might have disappeared in the winter months, but the summer is a good pointer. Let’s press on. Three more to go.’

  They pressed on. Quickly. Rapidly. And dismissed all three.

  Sussock picked up the missing persons poster, the one he had put on one side. ‘So, here you are, Mary Manning, after all these years. Nineteen years old on the day you died.’

  ‘She’d have been a woman in her mid-forties now,’ said Galley, a little unnecessarily thought Sussock, who did not yet feel brain dead, and was still well able to do his sums. ‘At least her family will know.’ Galley took off his smock. ‘Late in the day but better than never knowing.’

  ‘We won’t know it’s her for certain for a wee while yet,’ Sussock told him. ‘We’ll have to check the dental records. Can’t do that until tomorrow. Thanks for your help, sir.’

  ‘Pleased to be of assistance.’ Galley slung his smock over the back of a chair. ‘I’ll rescue what’s left of Saturday.’

  Sussock returned to P Division at Charing Cross. Yes, it was Saturday wasn’t it?

  It could be eye-shadow. It could equally be a fading bruise. King thought probably the latter because the other eye was not marked. And because the woman looked timid. She reported that she had told the other officer. ‘The older gentleman, sir, I told him I’d seen nothing.’

  ‘Is your husband in?’

  ‘Sleeping, sir. He came home with a good drink in him. Best not to wake him.’ She spoke in hushed tones.

  ‘I see.’

  ‘But no, I didn’t see anything, the house is in a hollow as you can see, as you’ll have noticed, but no, I didn’t see anything.’

  There was a low howl from deep within the house, as if from a mortally wounded animal.

  The woman seemed embarrassed. ‘That’s my man. He’s asleep, he does that in the drink, even when he’s asleep.’

  ‘If you should hear neighbours speak of anything…’

  ‘I don’t see neighbours, sir,’ said Linda McWilliams. ‘I go to the shops in Carluke once a week and that’s it. Apart from that the only person I see is my man.’

  ‘Thanks anyway,’ said King and turned back from the door. It was shut softly behind him.

  He drove to the next farm. It was larger than the McWilliams’s. It was easily visible from the road, it was more like a country house with a farm attached than it was like a conventional working farm in Lanarkshire.

  ‘Didn’t see anything,’ said the man, calm, assured, clean shirt, flat cap, outdoor complexion, healthy but not weather-beaten, no sense of struggle about him that King could detect. The man seemed to King to be making much more of a success of tenant farming than McWilliams appeared to be making; or perhaps. King wondered, was this gentleman a successful and fortunate owner of his land.

  ‘I’ve heard about it, of course, heard the scuttlebutt, also heard about the other body that was exhumed yesterday. The name’s Farmer, by the way,’ said with a flash of white teeth. ‘Mr Farmer the farmer.’

  ‘Mr Farmer,’ King repeated. ‘We tried to keep the exhumation yesterday as much of a secret as we could.’

  ‘Farming country, Mr King. Not a lot goes unnoticed. You may not see anybody, but rest assured there are eyes on you, from a distance maybe, but they are on you. Night time it may be different, somebody buried two bodies without being seen, but they most likely did that at night. Besides which, the scuttlebutt’s rife. Hasn’t been better gossip for years.’

  King’s eye was caught by the graceful flight of a swan close to trees by the river.

  ‘The cygnets are doing well,’ said Farmer the farmer, catching King’s gaze. ‘I’m keeping an eye on them, there are some bandits about; lads from the estate in Carluke, not proper country boys, but small town lads who come out and rampage around, but the swan and her cygnets are well hidden. They haven’t found her yet. I chase them off, the lads, if they get too close. Saw a fox close to the cygnets early one morning, had my gun, not supposed to interfere with nature, but what the hell. Besides, a fox had been at my chickens. So tell me, the scuttlebutt says that one corpse was fresh and the other was a skeleton and that there are more buried. Is that so?’

  ‘Scuttlebutt may have a point. Tell me, how long would a fresh dug grave be noticeable to a countryman?’

  Farmer shrugged. ‘In rough pasture, in the summer, away from road or track, only a matter of days, before it grassed over or the cattle trampled it.’

  ‘Days,’ echoed King.

  ‘That’s all the time that would be needed. But while I didn’t see anything, I wonder would a roll of carpet interest you?’

  ‘It might indeed,’ said King. ‘It might indeed.’

  In the outhouse Farmer lifted up the carpet and unrolled it.

  ‘Nothing in it or on it,’ said Farmer. ‘Found it by the side of the road; hadn’t heard of the body in the McWilliams’s pasture at the time I picked it up, it seemed a useful bit of padding for one of the sheds, you can always find a use for a bit of carpet.’

  King lifted it up. ‘Can we take it outside?’

  Out in the yard, under the mid-afternoon sun. King examined the carpet, looking at it sideways with Farmer watching, square foot by square foot. Then he stopped, supported a portion of the carpet with one hand and with the finger of the other, plucked a long human hair from the fibre, but did not dislodge it completely.

  ‘Well done,’ said Farmer.

  ‘It’s a human hair.’ King replaced the strand, letting it fall back on the fibre. ‘That’s all we can say at present, but it’s long enough to be a female hair. I’ll have the carpet down to the Forensic Science Lab.’ King folded the carpet. ‘I’m sorry, but you’ve lost your treasure trove. Can you show me where it was found?’

  ‘I’ll take my Land-Rover. If you’d like to follow me in your car.’

  The roll of carpet proved to have been found by the side of the road, adjacent to an area of long grass. King pondered the location. To
his right, the McWilliams farm. To his left, in the distance, the town of Carluke.

  ‘He went thataway,’ Farmer said, evidently. King thought, reading his mind.

  King glanced towards Carluke, grey roofs lying between a fold of green hills. ‘You reckon?’

  ‘I reckon. Strange behaviour: carry a body out here that’s wrapped in a carpet, bury it and then not only do you leave the car but you carry the carpet for more than quarter of a mile before you discard it.’

  ‘As you say.’ King wanted to give little away.

  A Land-Rover drove past, hood down, windscreen flattened on the bonnet, the owner naked to the waist. He and Farmer nodded to each other. ‘My neighbour,’ said Farmer. ‘Or rather, his son. A long way for a bloke to walk with a carpet for no good reason that I can see. Tell me, have you found the spade?’

  ‘The spade?’

  ‘The spade he used to dig the hole.’

  King conceded that they had not.

  ‘Has to be around somewhere.’ Farmer raised his eyebrows. ‘Unless he carried it all the way home with him, which would draw a lot of attention to himself. I mean, who carries a spade at dawn? He left the car, scuttlebutt says so, he walked a quarter of a mile carrying the carpet he’d wrapped the body in, he probably carried the spade about the same distance.’

  ‘It’s not beyond the bounds of possibility.’

  ‘Well, do you want assistance or do you want to do it alone?’

  ‘Do what alone?’

  ‘Cut back all this long grass. I think there’s a spade in there somewhere.’

  King nodded. ‘All right. If we don’t find it on the first sweep we’ll organize a proper search later.’

  ‘You’re the boss.’ Farmer advanced on a small tree, a young plant but well beyond being a sapling, and snapped two sinewy branches at the roots. He took them in his hands, each about four foot long, and shredded the leaves from them. He tossed one over to King. ‘Just swipe away,’ he said. ‘Cut the grass back; if the stick breaks you know where to get another. If you go to the McWilliams’s gate and start there, I’ll go to my gate and work towards you. If we meet half way without finding anything we’ll have done all we can.’

  ‘Public spirited of you,’ said King. ‘If you find it don’t touch it, or anything else that looks out of place, suspicious, or foreign.’

  ‘Foreign?’

  ‘As in a foreign object, foreign to the locality.’

  ‘Understood. You know, I should pay you for this, at least for doing the stretch that’s on my land. McWilliams can look after his own.’ Farmer put the branch over his shoulder and walked jauntily down the road. A man, thought King, very much at home in the country.

  Sussock entered his reasoned belief that the identity of the deceased female whose skeleton had been exhumed and whose head and face had been constructed by Daniel Galley, who had then left his studio to rescue what was left of his Saturday, was one Mary Manning, nineteen years old when she died, and whose home address at that time, twenty-five years previously, had been in Rawyards, Airdrie. He lodged a request for the missing person file to be signed out to him, reference to Sandra Shapiro murder inquiry, and he returned the other files to the collator.

  There was no other readily identifiable task for him to address. No loose end he could quickly and neatly tie. He went home, strolling home in the calm summer evening.

  He loved this city.

  Malcolm Montgomerie strolled along the pathway in the grounds of Gartnavel General Hospital. The heat of the day had subsided, the early evening was comfortably warm without being oppressive. In the distance near the railway line, a group of children played with a ball. He approached a wooden bench and succumbed to the desire to sit down. There was a chunk missing from his life; it seemed a weight pressing on his stomach, and yet he had also felt strangely enriched and ennobled by the affair. He felt also a sense of anger, but it was anger directed at himself He felt that for the first time in his life he had failed to come up with the goods, or was it, he wondered, simply that he had found the ceiling in his sex life.

  Theirs had been a short relationship, unique in his experience in that she seemed to have called the shots, she held the initiative from day one, from their first meal where she had pushed his glass of grappa towards him and said, ‘Come on, drink up, if we’re going to sleep together tonight.’ She was a product of her background, educated at the most prestigious girls’ school in England, where she had kept wicket in the cricket friendlies against Cirencester Agricultural College, and where she had double-somersaulted with pike in the school diving team. She had, he found, matured into a sexually confident young woman of grace and beauty, courage and integrity; and a slimness which belied physical strength.

  Finally, in the vegetarian restaurant of pine tables and climbing plants she had said, ‘We won’t be sleeping together any more.’ She held the pause. Long hair about her shoulders, a lilac scarf about her slender neck. She held his stare. ‘The spark just isn’t there, Malcolm. I still would like your friendship, but we won’t be doing “it” any more.’

  He had seen her into a taxi and forced the smile as they said farewell. He walked in the still city, a city in the lull when the Saturday shopping had been done and before the Saturday revelries began, and found himself, both enriched and self-reproachful, in the grounds of the hospital. He sat on a bench, the hum of the traffic on Great Western Road reached him from one direction, the excited cries of children with a ball from the other, and in front of him, across the car park, the concrete edifice of the hospital.

  He drew a deep breath and stood and walked towards his future. The vision in front of him was pleasant, of lushness and foliage: of life, and the sun was setting behind him.

  But hey, her name was Pippa Scott. Five foot five inches tall and she didn’t miss and hit the wall.

  The sun, too, was setting behind Richard King when he found the spade. He found it after laying the grass low on a hundred yard stretch of bank, he found it when, despite cooling evening breezes, sweat poured from his brow and soaked his shirt under his armpits. He wiped his brow and found himself reluctant to relinquish the branch which had served him so well. He hailed Farmer, who turned and began to walk towards him, joining King as King lifted the spade by the shaft, avoiding the handle or the blade which might, he thought, hide fingerprints.

  ‘Brand new,’ said Farmer as King turned the tool, the blue of the blade and the varnish on the handle glinting in the evening sun.

  ‘Used recently,’ King added, nudging the dirt on the blade with his knuckles.

  ‘It will have been used to dig the grave.’ Farmer spoke with quiet authority, ‘For a start, it’s too narrow for farm work. It’s not a farmer’s tool. Secondly, it’s not purchased locally.’

  ‘No?’

  Farmer shook his head. ‘The only place to buy tools in Carluke is Beer’s—they retail top of the range stuff like Spear and Jackson. That spade is junk. You found it just here?’

  ‘Just here.’

  ‘You know, this doesn’t make sense. First he wraps her in a carpet, drives her in a stolen car to this field, buries her in a grave dug with a newly purchased spade. Then he leaves the car; that’s madness itself—did he never hear of a quick getaway? Then he walks towards Carluke, carrying the carpet and the spade, probably counting the stars as he walks, then gets tired of carrying the spade and the carpet so he tosses them into the long grass. He could have launched the spade into the river, you might never have found it. Talk about being off your head, this guy’s in a world of his own. No attempt to cover his tracks. Frightening.’

  King could only nod. But he thought: This guy’s a woman, friend, and that to my mind makes it even more terrifying. And she began to see double at some point in the evening because one of the lenses popped out of her spectacles and she didn’t find it because we did.

  ‘I’d be obliged if you’d keep this to yourself, Mr Farmer.’

  ‘Oh, of course.’ But King sensed some rar
e scuttlebutt in the Dadas Bar, Carluke, that evening; in the next few hours, in fact. The sort of scuttlebutt that would keep the smiling Mr Farmer the farmer well plied with the bevvy.

  ‘The spade wasn’t bought locally.’

  ‘No chance,’

  ‘The car was “liberated” in Glasgow.’

  ‘Was it?’

  ‘Yes.’ That information was harmless. King let Farmer have it. ‘So the culprit, I would assume, would make his way back to Glasgow from here. How would he do that?’

  ‘Bus or train,’ said Farmer. ‘But he’d use the train.’

  ‘He would?’ King raised his eyebrows in a manner nakedly borrowed from DI Donoghue when he requested information.

  ‘For sure.’

  A pause.

  ‘Well,’ said Farmer, ‘this business had to be done at night. Just had to be. Things start early outdoors around here and nobody saw anything suspicious.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘The first train into Glasgow leaves before the first bus.’

  That’s hardly a full argument.’

  ‘Well, this was planned, the stolen car, the spade purchased for the objective of digging the grave, the carpet purchased with the object of wrapping the body in to conceal it. All three discarded when the deed was done. I’d say it was planned, oddball, mad as a hatter, harebrained as it might be, but it was planned. If he plans like that he also plans his escape. I reckon he would have checked the bus and rail timetables and gone for the first transport out.’