Where The Shadow Falls

by Gillian Galbraith

  I am still alive, he thought. He tried to open his eyes, to shout, call for help, but nothing happened. The blackness remained and no voice came from his lips. Blood trickling into his eye tickled the edge of his nose and, in his mind, he moved a hand to scratch it, but the itch remained and his fingers felt none of the warm, sticky fluid that was streaming from his forehead.

  Someone had come, was leaning over him, shouting, crying, and he recognised, in the warm breath on his face, the smell of alcohol mixed with perfume. Liv. She was speaking to him, pleading, sobbing, and in his head he answered her, comforted her, but it seemed to have no effect. She carried on, screaming now, shouting, inconsolable. Her hair brushed against his face, tickling it unbearably, and he strained to turn to his side, prevent it happening again, maybe even to scratch his skin on the road surface. But another strand swept his cheek.

  He shivered. When had it become so cold? The air had seemed kind earlier, hot in the late afternoon. Where had this chill come from? Seconds later he sensed a blanket being laid over him, rejoiced in its weight, waited for warmth that did not come. He could feel the woman close by, beside him, her hand in his below the rug.

  9

  DCI Bruce’s complexion, usually pale, was clay-coloured and his lips seemed to have been drained of blood. His tie had come loose and he was manically pacing up and down the murder suite. Once the entire squad had assembled, chattering together uninhibitedly, he stood stock still. The hum continued unabated.

  ‘Shut up, people!’ he commanded, and, electrified, every mouth closed.

  ‘Thank you and not before sodding time. I’ve just heard that last night, 5th July, probably at about nine o’clock or so, Nicholas Lyon was run down in Moray Place. The car driver didn’t stop and no accident’s been reported by any driver at that location. In other words, an effing hit-and-run, one likely to prove fatal to boot. An ambulance was called and he’s currently in the Western. The traffic department are still scouring the scene. We’ve no way of knowing, as yet, whether the Sheriff’s death and Mr Lyon’s accident are connected, but it would seem a remarkable coincidence if they weren’t. Accordingly, that probability needs to be considered. Alice, how did you get on with Major Freeman?’

  ‘OK, I think, Sir. He hadn’t any letters and seemed completely unaware that his brother had been subject to threats in any form…’

  The DCI interrupted her. ‘Eric. I want you to go and liaise with traffic. All information must be shared, chat up the redhead in charge-what’s her name-Yvonne something or other. Tell her all about the connection between the two victims.’

  ‘Aye, aye, Sir. Yvonne Woolman’s her name,’ DI Manson said, stirring his coffee but remaining seated.

  ‘Well, move your arse, Inspector, and get on to it now. This very minute, OK?’

  The policeman left the room, mug in hand, looking uncharacteristically chastened.

  ‘Alistair, how did you get on checking the stuff on the computer?’

  DS Watt shook his head. ‘I didn’t get much, I’m afraid. I’ve discovered that there are hundreds of environmental protection groups, landscape guardians and so on, some of them general and some of them associated with particular wind farms or wind farm clusters, but there are no organisations that I’ve been able to find connected exclusively to Scowling Crags. I don’t think we’re going to get anything much from that source.’

  ‘Bugger. Alice, go on with what you were saying about Major Freeman?’

  ‘Just that he hadn’t received letters or threats. However, I did get the Vertenergy stuff from Nicholas Lyon and I’ve made contact with one of the anti-wind farm activists, a chap called Angus Kersley. He doesn’t seem to think…’

  She stopped in mid-sentence noticing that DC Lowe had put up his hand.

  ‘Yes?’ the DCI said, looking menacingly at the constable.

  ‘Sir, I missed yesterday’s meeting, so I may be well out of order, but couldn’t the Sheriff’s murder and the hit-and-run on Nicholas Lyon be about… well, their homosexuality? Maybe someone’s got a grudge against gayboys. One of these fundamentalist Christians or something. That boy, Georgie…’

  ‘Thank you, Lowe,’ Bruce said coldly, cutting the man off mid-sentence, and then turning his attention back to Alice.

  ‘Go on then, Sergeant.’

  ‘He, Kersley, gave me the impression that he didn’t think that anyone in his group would have killed Freeman, but there’s a meeting on Sunday and I’m going to go and see what’s what.’

  ‘OK. I want DCs Lowe, McDonald and Trotter to go and help with the door to doors round about Moray Place. No doubt there’ll be uniforms there too. Someone must have bloody seen something. Speak to the officer in charge, Sergeant Joseph.’

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘Yes, Alice.’

  ‘Who reported the accident? Got the ambulance?’

  ‘That Nordquist woman. By the way, I want you to check on garages within the city. See if any vehicles have come in this morning, eh? Liaise with the traffic department.’

  Alice nodded her head.

  ‘Should we get protection for Mr Lyon, Sir?’

  ‘No. He’s past that I reckon, in intensive care, so never mind him. After I leave here I’m seeing the ACC and he’s not going to be pleased. Trust me. We’ve got nothing-except a second sodding body! You are all going to have to re-double your efforts… I’m not carrying the can for this one.’

  The intensive care unit was intimidating, leads and monitors beside each bed and frail lives depending upon them. The staff, however, seemed relaxed, busy measuring out the medications for the evening, so familiar with proximity to death as to be blasé about it. If they had been employed on a confectionery production line in a sweet factory they could not have looked less troubled, more at ease in their own environment. But the air was not scented with chocolate or peppermint, it had an astringent quality, the smell of disinfectant and mortality.

  Alice peered at the beds through the windows of the locked double doors, but was unable to make out Nicholas Lyon’s figure. Her view was obscured by two closed sets of curtains in the middle of the room. Like oversized shrouds, she thought. And suddenly, the sight of the whole set-up filled her with such despondency, such a feeling of leaden hopelessness that she weakened, and began searching for an Exit sign. As she was wandering down the corridor she noticed a single room opposite the ‘Care of the Elderly’ ward and decided to investigate it. If he was not there, then she would go, she had done her bit, done her best. Peering round the door gingerly, she recognised the old man in a solitary bed, accompanied only by a single monitor, and came to stand beside him. Little evidence of the injuries he had sustained was visible. One side of his face was livid with bruising, his temples sunken. And his complexion had become colourless, near translucent, as if he had been sculpted in pale marble. The only sign of life in the room was the flashing of a little red light monitoring the flow in a tube running between the patient’s hand and a drip pack. Briefly, she watched it pulse, mesmerised.

  ‘Who are you? Are you family? Only family are allowed now.’ A nurse had entered and looked disconcerted to find her charge with company.

  ‘Yes, Mr Lyon’s daughter.’

  On impulse it had emerged; a clear, conscious and defiant lie. But without her he would be alone, and she sensed that he was near journey’s end. The nurse left the room discreetly and Alice remained, on tenterhooks in case of her return, unwilling to leave him on his own whatever the proprieties might be. A few minutes later, Nicholas Lyon let out a deep sigh, as if of relief, and it was immediately followed by the mechanical scream of the monitor, signalling that his heart had ceased to beat.

  10

  The call to his flat had remained unanswered, but he had told her that she was free to come to his studio any time of the day or night. A visit from her would not constitute a disturbance whenever it took place. He would welcome it. And, anyway, where else could he be?

  She entered the crumbling building by the Hend
erson Row doorway, and feeling the cool air of the place she remembered the last time she had gone there, less than a year earlier. Then it had been in the depth of winter, early December, and the mist of her breath had been visible in its freezing interior and the space had seemed threatening, entirely alien to her. Ducking under the grimy bed sheets that formed a makeshift barrier between the two studios, she recognised Kathleen Ferrier’s low tones, singing Mahler’s ‘Das Lied von der Erde’. Nature would renew itself once more, she thought, but not for Nicholas Lyon to tend or tame, and a picture of the gardens at Geanbank, rank and overgrown, appeared before her eyes.

  The unplastered brick walls of the dilapidated studio were covered, as before, with sketches of human figures, cavorting at the circus, riding bareback, or performing exercises within a gymnasium. Her study of the drawings ended when her attention was caught by the sound of the hammer and she saw Ian Melville, seated on a sofa in the corner of the room, concentrating hard, absorbed in fashioning a picture frame and blithely unaware of her entrance. She began to move towards him, but stopped at an easel to view the drawing resting on it. A light pencil sketch of a naked woman reclining on a bed. The work betrayed tenderness; imperfections recorded but not dwelt upon; a portrait, not simply a ruthless exercise in observation. Looking at the head, she started on recognising her own face, felt momentarily rattled to find herself scrutinising someone else’s image of her, as if she was indulging in some form of extreme egoism.

  ‘When did you do it?’ she asked, her voice sharper than she had intended.

  The man looked up and she watched as his face reddened, suffused with blood, more embarrassed now than ever when naked, as if his drawing of her had exposed something far more personal than his own unclothed body. He recovered quickly.

  ‘When do you think? Early in the morning when you were still asleep. D’you mind? I’m just making a frame for it, to give it to you.’

  A quick succession of unwanted thoughts flitted through her head before she answered. Had he drawn all the other women that he had slept with? Was the picture a form of record of a conquest, like the notches on a Spitfire’s wing? Would it have been worse if he had photographed her, unconscious and asleep, instead? She glanced again at the picture and found that what she saw allayed the sudden panic that had risen within her. It was not some stolen glimpse of a meaningless encounter; rather a depiction that could only have sprung from genuine intimacy, true sympathy with the subject.

  ‘No, I don’t mind. I’ve just come from the hospital. Nicholas Lyon’s dead. He died less than an hour ago.’

  She had not expected his death to affect her as it had, but somehow in her mind his fate had become linked with that of her mother. If he could just survive, then she, too, would survive. And the sadness she had felt, gazing at the still, small figure in the hospital bed had, to her shame, expanded, swollen and consumed her, releasing all the anxieties she had been trying to control, to make her day-to-day life possible. But all she could think about then, and now, was her beloved mother in the shadow of that evil disease.

  The next morning Alice was swearing to herself, unable to find the paper copy of Doctor Zenabi’s report in among the midden of papers covering her desk. Alistair plonked a mug of tea on her diary.

  ‘You heard?’

  ‘Heard what?’ she asked, irritation at this interruption clear in her voice.

  ‘The Sheriff’s partner. He died last night.’

  ‘Yes, I know.’

  ‘How come? Anyway, apparently, he’s got a child. A grownup daughter actually. The boss wants us to spend the morning tracking her down.’

  ‘Well, Bingo!’ Alice said, abandoning the search and taking a sip from the mug, ‘we’ve done it already!’

  ‘What on earth are you going on about?’

  ‘Yesterday night… I spent some of it with the old fellow at the hospital. A nurse came in, just before he died. She would have shooed me away unless I claimed to be a family member. So I said I was. He couldn’t be left to meet his Maker on his own.’

  ‘Jesus Christ, Alice. You could have mucked things up nicely! Anyway, haven’t you got a home to go to?’

  She smiled at him. ‘I have, thanks, and I can do without the lecture. Don’t worry, pal, I’ll speak to the DCI about the phantom child. By the way, I’ve just been on the phone to traffic. Dan there says that they’ve found a few flakes of paint. It seems the car was white and, they reckon, probably, one of the smaller, cheaper makes. Some of the slivers are with the lab now, so they think they’ll have a better clue as to the exact type before too long. They’re attempting calculations on the tyre marks as well, and the photographers are busy at the scene. Dan also said that some uniforms brought in a few shards of broken glass but they’re not sure if they’ve come from the vehicle we’re looking for. Apparently, the fragments are dirty, as if they’d been at the locus for a while. After I’ve seen the boss and explained things, let’s go and see Mrs Nordquist again, eh?‘

  ‘Certainly. With you as my chaperone.’

  Beside her, as always, stood a small glass, filled to the brim with golden fluid. It rested within a hand’s reach of the striped deckchair, which sagged beneath the weight of the solid Swedish matron. She did not rise from it to greet the two detectives when they were shown into her paved back garden. Instead, she pulled up the rug that concealed her naked body until it almost reached her chin. On one side, however, an expanse of pink flesh was visible. Conscious of their surprise, she said to her visitors in a matter of fact tone: ‘…the sowna. I haff von in the basement.’

  Both officers towered over the seated figure, feeling awkward and ill at ease, unsure of the etiquette in this situation. Their hostess, in contrast, seemed unflustered, relaxed even, despite the unmistakeable tension of her visitors and her own relative undress. Eyes half closed, she said: ‘Why don’t you both jusst sit on the ground, officers,’ before adding, as an afterthought, ‘I haff only von deckchair ant I neet it.’

  And so the interview began with her interrogators squatting at her feet, each wishing that they had taken the initiative earlier and requested, or even demanded, that the session be conducted indoors. Alice, painfully conscious that any authority she might once have possessed had evaporated on finding herself at eye level to a bare knee, began: ‘I understand that you were the first one to find Mr Lyon on Wednesday night. Is that right?’

  ‘Yess.’

  From under the rug Mrs Nordquist found a cigarette, and endeavoured, ineffectually, to light it while preserving her decency.

  ‘Can you tell us how that came about, you finding him, I mean?’

  The remaining lobster-red arm extended itself to grasp the glass, and a large swig was consumed before any answer was forthcoming.

  ‘Waal, I wass upstairs in my betroom actually-it faces the street-ant I heard a car. The noiss of sutten acceleration… high speet. From nowhere. Then there was the sort of… thut… ant then the sount of the car drifing away. I looked out,’ she stopped momentarily and sighed before continuing, ‘ant there he wass. Nicholas, I mean, lying on the copples, blut all around him. Sso I put down my hairbrush ant ran out to see him. His eyes were clost. I shouted “Mrs McColl, Mrs McColl! Nine, nine, nine.” She gott the ambulance ant brought blankets to keep him varm. I state with him… but he nefer opened his eyes or spoke.’

  Alice looked up at Mrs Nordquist’s face. Her lower lip was trembling and she was blinking copiously, fighting to keep control of her emotions. Wordlessly, the policewoman passed her the glass of aquavit and wordlessly, she drank from it, draining every last drop.

  ‘And when did all this happen?’ Alistair asked.

  ‘The night before lasst. Oh… say, nine o’clock, possibly, a little after when I heard the noisses.’

  ‘But you didn’t see anything happen? The collision? The first thing you saw was Mr Lyon, injured on the street?’

  ‘Yess. I nefer saw the car. Most probably, it must have been parked in Moray Place or something. I
t wass the sutten acceleration that first… well, that seemed so ott.’

  Freya padded through the French doors to join her mistress, and stood expectantly in front of her. Gently, Mrs Nordquist raised both of the dog’s ears in her hands and then sank her face into its warm head. As the detectives began to rise from their prostrate position, it stared at them with its sinister yellow eyes and let out a long, low growl which stopped them in their tracks. The noise only ceased when Mrs Nordquist came up for air and relaxed back into her deckchair. And then, and only then, did her visitors exit her domain.

  Mrs McColl, an Aberdonian Scot and as conventional as her Scandinavian employer was unconventional, sat with her knees tight together on a leather-covered stool in the state-of-the-art kitchen. In fact, the place was more of a food laboratory than an ordinary, domestic kitchen, the stainless steel and glass units lending it an air of sterility. Oddly, the housekeeper was wearing a nylon housecoat, a garment completely at odds with her space-age workplace, an environment which would more harmoniously have suited a skin-tight silver one-piece rather than this incongruous throwback to a gentler age.

  ‘When did you first become aware of the accident, Mrs McColl?’ Alice enquired.

  ‘The time? Och, mebbe about half nine or thereabouts I’d say. I was doing the washing up-we’ve a Miele, quiet as a mouse you know-and I heard her shouting, screaming something. I ran upstairs, looked out the door and saw her in the street, bending over someone who’s been knocked down. I phoned the ambulance right away. Then, after that, for you… the polis, I mean.’