by Caro Ramsay
I shrug. This is a theme of Mary’s; the relationship between siblings holds fascination for an only child. ‘They were, once, but he just gets on her nerves now. Grant has always been self-centred, he loves winding Mum up. He was close to Dad, I suppose. Things change. We are all diminished without Sophie, every one of us.’ I tug the lace of my shoe really tight, tying it in a knot. For a minute I don’t look at Mary. ‘But nothing is going to happen to me, I am invincible.’
She shakes her head. ‘Nobody is invincible.’
‘Your son thinks he is when he’s on that swing.’
‘Oh God, he’s awful, isn’t he?’ She sighs. ‘I wish we weren’t going to this thing tonight, I really don’t feel like it. I never feel like it.’ She leans forward to the coffee table and pulls Catch-22 off my Krav Maga manual.
‘Is this the weird thing you do in the garden? It keeps you very fit.’ She flicks through the pages. ‘Oh, it’s self-defence. Is it vicious?’
‘It is the way I do it.’
She raises her eyebrows, then sees my battered Complete Poems of Christina Rossetti. ‘You never tire of reading this, do you? Goblin Market?’
‘I’ll never tire of it.’
‘They were lucky girls,’ she says. ‘Lizzie and Laura. To have each other.’
We were lucky girls.
‘I gave up my degree before we got to the Romantics. Alex got me a first edition of her collected works just because I mentioned this poem to him. Then he gave me a telling-off for reading it in case I mark it. It is that valuable. He bought it as an investment, so it has to sit on a stand in the living room and be admired, not read. He knows the cost of everything and the value of nothing. He thinks I’m bored up here.’
‘You are.’
She stands up and gives me a wry smile. Her hand goes to the top of her left thigh, another little rub, another little bruise. She walks towards the door, reluctant to leave.
I say, ‘I need to go to Glasgow now, so I’ll let you know once I’m free then we can hook up and I’ll take Charlie. I might even take him to the Goblin Market if we have time.’
‘So he gets to see the secret garden and I don’t?’ Her anxiety has passed.
‘He’ll like it.’
‘Tender Lizzie could not bear to watch her sister’s cankerous care, yet not to share … ’ Her hand sits on the handle of the door, her fingers curl round it and she looks down the stairs in that abstract way she has. ‘And I know that you do care. For Sophie. She’s very lucky.’ I cannot read her expression, there is nothing I can reference.
‘I feel a bit guilty that you’re paying me to look after him when I’m caught up in all this.’
‘I wouldn’t worry about it. Alex didn’t employ you to look after Charlie; he employed you to spy on me and he thinks you’re good at it. He likes the way you rarely let me out of your sight. He thinks that you can’t tell a lie because you lack imagination.’
‘Shows what a bad judge of character he is.’
Billy Hopkirk seems to be an expert at parking illegally and not being seen. First he double parked as we dropped Charlie off at the flat in Park Circus. Mary was back from a stressful trip to Buchanan Galleries to buy a new dress, one to cover the bruises, no doubt. I spent a couple of minutes reassuring Mary that the dress – a long, swirling black number – was fabulous and she believed me.
Now Billy is stuck in the car park at the Western Hospital, without a ticket. He keeps looking at his watch. He wants us to be a bit late so that ‘Jack’ will be in a hurry and want rid of us, but not so much of a hurry that he’ll blow us out altogether. So far he has refused to enlighten me about who ‘Jack’ actually is.
Billy is wearing the same clothes as yesterday and he smells as though he hasn’t washed them for a month. His perfume is chip fat and vinegar with a top note of fag ash.
We’ve been sitting here for about twenty minutes, stewing in the old Vectra with the sun beating in the open window, listening to the noise of the busy street. For the umpteenth time I lean forward in the seat to pull the sweaty shirt from my back. The heat is making my acne boil painfully. I am in a mood and the wait is not helping. I’ve already lied and told him that I have to be back at Park Circus at two. All he said was that we had better get on with it, without telling me what ‘it’ is.
‘Oh, look, we might be in business. Keep your gob shut, hen. If you can.’
I get out the car to stretch my legs. Billy eases his beer belly from the driver’s seat then waddles towards a grey-haired man in a grey suit with matching face. He is carrying a briefcase and a load of files under his arm.
‘Jack? Jack, just the man.’
The man stops and turns his eyes towards the sky. I’m not convinced that he is feigning his horror. ‘Well, well, Billy the Fox Hopkirk. How are you, you old …’ He stops when he clocks me. That look again, this time with a degree of medical assessment. ‘Fox?’ he finishes. His mind is moving quickly, I can see him making connections. ‘What do you want?’
‘You’ve just done the PM on Lorna Lennox.’
‘Maybe.’
‘That wasn’t a question, that was a statement. I was going to pull the old pals act so you can tell us what you found.’ Billy spreads his arms in mock endearment.
‘As a cop you were always just on the line, but as a retired cop you are now on the wrong side of it. No can do, even if I wanted to. And I don’t want to.’ The man in the grey suit with the grey hair reaches out to his car door. His grey car door.
‘Well, I’m now working privately for Gillian’s mother.’
‘And God forbid that the time ever comes when I have to deal with her. But if I have to, then I will.’ He tries to walk round Billy, who puts his beer belly to good use.
‘Oh, I know that.’ He is civility itself. ‘But at least you can let me know what you cannot tell me and let me draw my own conclusions. We’ve done that often enough in the past, you and me.’ He looks up at the man in grey, almost fluttering his eyelashes at him.
I stand in front of the car door. ‘When the times comes?’ I repeat back at him.
The grey-haired man stops his little dance with Hopkirk. ‘Sorry?’
‘You said, “When the time comes”. Which means when they’re dead. Lorna was still alive on Friday.’
He drops his briefcase down to rest at arm’s-length and looks away.
‘This is Sophie McCulloch’s sister,’ Billy mutters out the corner of his mouth. ‘She has issues.’ He touched his temple indicating that he thought I was not all there. ‘And if you don’t fall for the emotional blackmail, think about the rant she’s about to give to the press. You won’t come out of it well, Jack.’
‘I don’t give a f—’
‘Language in front of the lady!’ Billy turns to me. ‘Sorry, sweet cheeks, I was using the term loosely.’
‘No offence taken.’
Jack is wrong-footed by the familiarity of our exchange.
‘So come on, Jack, be nice, for old times’ sake.’
‘For Sophie’s sake …’ I keep my voice calm.
‘So, Jack, a wee favour, an off-the-record chat between old colleagues.’
‘He kept Lorna alive for a long time,’ I add for effect. ‘He might still have Sophie alive. You will help us.’ It wasn’t a question.
‘Do you hear that certainty in her voice? She knows you’ll help eventually, so you may as well tell us now and save time.’
The pathologist turns to Billy. ‘Why don’t you take it up with the SIO? My report is in the post to him.’
‘Why should we, when we can hear it from the horse’s mouth?’
Jack breathes in deeply; I think he’d like to punch that foxy look from Billy’s face. ‘I don’t think I can help you,’ he says to me directly. ‘There are proper channels.’
‘Lorna died in my arms.’
‘Yes, I know. I read the report. It will be public soon enough. The cage webcam on the rock was activated by her falling past it.’
> ‘So she was up on the hill.’ I take one step forward, invading his space. ‘I need to know if the same thing is about to happen to my sister.’ I sound as if I blame him. And he is intelligent enough to know that my logic is sound. He bites his lip slightly, unsure. The dead he can cope with. But whether Sophie lives or dies might be up to him now. I read his discomfort so I push the argument home. ‘The more knowledge we have, the more chance we have.’
‘I am sure you will be informed in due course.’
‘I want to be informed now.’ My voice is steady but insistent.
‘So where had Lorna come from?’ asked Billy, nonchalantly. He could have been asking who dived for the penalty.
‘Well, that’s in the public domain. She came from the top of the moor. She was naked and barefoot, and got caught in the lie of the land where the ground level dropped because of the landslide. She was exhausted, it was dark. She headed towards the cliff where she fell.’
‘No idea what she was doing up there?’
‘I’m a pathologist, not a cop.’ Jack looked at me. ‘But I don’t think they have any idea about that.’
‘Any evidence where she was running from?’ Billy asks.
‘She couldn’t have gone far, not in that state. She must have been taken by car and thrown out, which is a good theory except there’s no road.’
‘Could I have done anything to save her?’
‘Not at all, Miss McCulloch. She was bleeding internally. Keep that to yourself.’ His voice is quiet.
Billy speaks out the corner of his mouth. ‘She’s a medical student. She’ll get the big words and all the patient confidentiality stuff.’
‘She had an injury?’ I persist. ‘On her leg?’
‘Yes. A clean excision but badly healed.’
I nod. ‘Like a tattoo or something had been cut out? Or a birthmark, maybe?’ I am not looking at him. I am simply thinking out loud. ‘And she was so thin, emaciated.’
‘Undernourished but not starved in the medical sense of the word.’
‘Sexual assault?’
‘There seems to be no sexual motive,’ he said carefully.
‘Lorna’s fingertips were bloodied to the bone like she’d been scraping to get out.’ Now I put my fingers on his chest. His shirt is cool to my skin. I keep my eyes on the back of my hand. ‘Was there anything, any trace under her nails? Anything that might help us locate her?’
‘You are very observant. So you will also have noticed that she was clean. And there was nothing under her fingernails, what there was left of them. And she had been deprived of sunshine. Now, I really have to go.’ He casts me a look of pity, I step to one side. ‘And one more thing. Was that your jumper under her neck?’
‘Yes.’
‘Do you have close contact with a dog?’
‘No.’
He nods to me, grateful that I am going to ask no more.
Billy slapped his arm. ‘You see, fair exchange.’
Jack gets in his car and I think he is about to drive off. Then there is a slight turn of his head, as if he has caught sight of me in the rear-view mirror. The window drops with a funereal hum. ‘You should talk to DCI Anderson.’
The words were said to me but it was Billy who answered. ‘Colin? At Partickhill?’
‘One and the same.’
‘Is he working this case now? Anderson and Costello?’ Billy was leaning in at the car window, as if doing that would stop the pathologist driving off.
‘They were not on the Lennox case, were they? And I wasn’t speaking to you.’
‘We’re a team. I have the charm and she has the balls.’
‘Why do I not doubt that?’
‘So should I go and speak to this Anderson?’
‘He will find you when he’s ready.’ Billy is sitting in the car with two coffees and four jammy Yum Yums. ‘I’ll drink this coffee. Don’t touch yours if you’re not going to drink it, then I can have it.’ He slurps at the lip of his cup noisily. I begin to get that surge of uncontrolled adrenaline; the ice is starting in my veins. The frustration is getting to me. I’m going to be sick or hit Billy if I don’t get moving.
‘Do you mind if I go for a run?’
He frowns as if I have just asked him if I can shit in his car. ‘Whit?’
‘It’s when you put one foot in front of the other, quickly. Not a concept you’ll be familiar with. I need to get out of here. You smell.’
‘Well, I will sit here and enjoy my coffee and Smooth radio. And my Yum Yums.’ He sniffs annoyingly. ‘Then I’ll stick the car up that lane and go for a wee snooze, OK?’
‘I need a run, I need to think.’
‘You’re off your fucking head, but on you go.’ He looks straight ahead and sniffs again. ‘You up to anything tonight?’
‘Babysitting. That is my job now, technically.’
‘Why? Where are they going, Parnell and the lovely Mary?’
‘The Action Medical Research do, I think. At the Hilton.’
‘Oh that, I’ve been stung for that one myself a few times.’ He wipes his nose on the sleeve of his jacket. ‘Off you go then, you have ten minutes. Remember to run in a circle. I’m not coming to get you.’
I slide out the car, peeling my jumper off and tying it round my waist, clipping my phone to my waistband. I warm up on the jog past the Kelvin Hall to the park, and then I run free. I switch off everything but the thoughts in my head. I hear no traffic, only the slap of my feet on the path. I run easily, breathing effortlessly. The pain in my limbs eases with the movement, the blood flowing, my joints are fluid. It feels good. Air floats in and out of my lungs, infusing me with energy. There is nothing like this feeling in the world. My mind focuses on Lorna running through the dark, scared and naked. She is someone that I never knew, yet in a strange way she has become more significant than Soph. Her death was shocking, it really happened. It happened to a human being called Lorna. Lorna laughed and loved and danced and worked, and I owe her something to make it right. I try to empty my head, looking at the trees in full green, verdant and luscious. The oldest trees, the sentinels of the park, stand tall and silent, reaching into the sky. They have stood there for nearly a century, there is nothing new. The autumn will follow the summer, there is death after life. This cycle that we worry about so much is nothing to them.
A jogger runs past the trees on the lower path. She is out of condition, overworking her lungs. She jogs down on to the flat path towards the fountain and I slow my stride so that I don’t catch up. I am watching her but seeing Lorna. Further down the grassy slope the grey stone eyes of Thomas Carlyle stare out across the path. The returning glance of the soldier at the war memorial meets Carlyle’s gaze with a look of complete indifference. The infantryman looks at the philosopher, as they have looked at each other for three generations, and nothing at all passes between them.
A sleek, muscled Rottweiler sniffs the grass behind the war memorial looking for the scent of a squirrel. I look around for my jogging pal and she runs into view on her second circuit. The man with the Rottweiler clips its lead on its neck chain and starts back up the slope to the high path, his hand raised in some acknowledgement to the jogger, who replies with a slight wave and crosses to the other side of the path. The dog pulls hard on its lead, head down, powerful shoulders straining. It opens its jaws as it gets a knee in the guts from its owner. But I have a mental picture of those jaws now. I slow my pace, imagining a dog coming up behind me, thinking of wolves and how they bring down prey.
My calf twitches again. I know what Lorna was running from.
Back on the road I run smoothly, getting a bit of a kick on before slowing to jog up behind the Kelvin Hall and the Transport Museum towards where Billy had vaguely indicated he would be parked. My mobile rings; it’s Rod. He asks me how I am, then tells me the police have been back at the house. More questions but nothing new. The visit upset Grant, who has now locked himself in his bedroom. Rod wasn’t aware that he had put a lock on his door.
Rod is scared Grant will harm himself. I reassure him, thinking that it might be the best thing that he can do – then Mum would have to wake up and get him some help. I offer to kick the door in if he needs me to. Rod chuckles, thinking I am joking. We cut the call. I walk into the lane. A metal spike in the road prevents vehicle access. I hear a voice, Billy’s, telling someone to fuck off really loudly. I consider the tone – anger? But there is something else. I run round the corner of the block of flats and the Vectra is there, doors open. Billy is wrestling a teenager in a tracksuit. Another boy is rifling through the car. I nearly fail to see the third one who is right beside me, standing guard at the mouth of the lane. Luckily he totally fails to hear me, a benefit of silent footfall. I run past the first ned and kick the one who has Billy in the crotch. I sink my heel into the back of his knee and push hard. As he falls I spin so that my knee comes round and smacks him in the throat. I leave him to fall grunting and spluttering to the ground and tell Billy to get in the car. I jump over the bonnet while the second ned is still thinking what to do. Junkies do not think quickly. I slam the door on his arm; it bounces back and he falls to his knees. I give him a kick in the throat as I go past. I see Billy’s phone on the tarmac. The third junkie is on his way towards the car, a slim blade shining. I walk up to the skinny wee runt. His acne is not as bad as mine, and that incenses me more than anything. I am not scared of the knife in his hand. I walk up to him and bat his arm away from me so hard the knife goes flying, bouncing across the tarmac with the melody of a tubular bell. I grab him by the hair and slam his face into the wall of the flats. He is a featherweight. I hear his nose break, then his cheekbone. I stop. I pick up the knife and walk back round the car.
‘Just drive,’ I say.
‘But he’s in the way.’
‘Well, go over him or round him. Do you want me to drive?’ Now that I can see Billy’s face I know what the other intonation in his voice was: he was scared. He is quivering. He is an old man now, an old man who has had a bad fright. ‘You’ve hurt your wrist. Better go to the Southern and get it checked, old guy like you.’
