by Geoff Small
Apart from learning that the deceased had actually been an apprentice at his beloved St. Clyde F.C before getting sacked for stealing from the senior players’ dressing room, that his bedroom wall was covered in flyers from the Ménage à Trance nightclub, and observing that the construction site across the road from his house had an abundance of bricks identical to those found in the backpack on his shoulders, their inquiries hit a buffer. Yes, they did have the name of his best friend, Craig Hunter, but he was of no fixed abode and, like the deceased, hadn’t been seen since Saturday night.
As can well be imagined of such a tight knit community, trying to get names from people, let alone information, had been virtually impossible. Of course, when they returned to the station that lunchtime and complained about the lack of cooperation from local tenants, Curzon blew his top.
“What?” He put on a whining baby’s voice to mock them: “They – won’t – speak – to – us!” Then he sighed furiously. “Jesus Christ man! Your job is to MAKE them speak to us! You’re not selling double glazing…this is a fucking murder inquiry!” He blew his cheeks out. “Has Craig Hunter got a record?” Deegan shook her head. “Did you check his extended family out on the computer?”
“Of course,” she snapped indignantly.
“Ah, well, I wonder sometimes. And?”
“Nothing.”
“So that’s that then is it? Case closed?” His nose was screwed up now in a snarl, facial muscles taught, teeth in a rictus of rage as he stared demandingly into Deegan’s eyes. “Have you not checked out his buddies list on Facebook?
“Yesss,” she hissed.
“What about girlfriends? Do we know if he has any?”
“I’ll get to it.”
Deegan, who was now imagining her inspector’s head on a pole, turned and stormed out of the room.
“So how’s the other stuff coming along?” Curzon asked McKay.
McKay, who was something of a narcissist, even though he had the face of a gurning Buzzard, ran his left hand through his combed-back brown hair and sighed.
“The initial results from the autopsy say it was a serrated bread knife that inflicted the fatal injury with an upwards thrust. The deceased’s also got a broken nose and a lot of bruising, though it’s impossible to know whether or not these were caused post-mortem by buffeting from waves or the violence of being swept ashore. As for forensics, they reckon there’s no chance of salvaging any evidence, not after a body’s been lying in salt water for that length of time. But Scenes of Crime have confirmed the old beach comber’s theory: that the corpse got entangled in the fishing net which had become attached to the log, before the log carried both back onto the shore.” Curzon furrowed his brow while trying to keep up with this exposition. “And of course, we’re examining CCTV footage on any routes Bobby McQueen might have taken about town…so that’ll probably take us about a year.”
Displeased with this attempt at levity, Curzon stared menacingly at McKay, before leaving the office without a word and walking across town to keep an appointment. Apart from emergencies or logistical necessities, Curzon went everywhere by foot or on public transport because, he argued, it was the only way to have any feel for the streets he was supposed to police. Not only that, but it was amazing what intelligence could be garnered simply by eaves-dropping conversations on a bus. His destination on this particular occasion was the Necropolis: Glasgow’s great city of the dead, on a hill east of the cathedral.
Chapter 3
Curzon entered the Necropolis through a gap in the railings, before scrambling up a grass slope, past ten foot high granite obelisks and sandstone burial chambers that resembled scaled down versions of Greek temples, all overlooked by John Knox on top of his column at the summit. Halfway up, he crept round to the east side of a tall monument where a skinny brunette wearing a white vest and blue, striped Adidas jogging bottoms was sat on the plinth, hugging herself with one arm, pulling and pushing on a cigarette with the other.
“Boo!”
The girl jolted back in terror, dropping her cigarette and banging the back of her head against the hard stone, the impact only softened by the spongy lichens which had grown there. She held a hand against her heaving, flat chest.
“What the fuck did you go and do that for?”
She had the dry croak of a heroin user and a wizened face that had once been attractive but now looked at least a decade older than its twenty-eight years.
“Well done with the phone call Jackie – went down a treat,” Curzon said, as he sat down on the ledge next to her.
She sniffed, “that mean we’re quits then?”
The detective carried on looking straight ahead.
“Jackie? Do you know why a dastardly deed is called a dastardly deed?”
“Eh?” She screwed her face up in bewilderment.
“It’s because it’s dastardly. And do you know what a dastard is?” She shrugged her shoulders. “It’s a dishonourable or despicable person…and that’s what you are, Jackie.” Jackie held her palm to her forehead and sighed dejectedly. “I’m your conscience and you’ll never get rid of me.”
“No you’re not, believe me. Do you not think I don’t suffer enough for what I did?”
“How do I know what to believe of someone who informs on her own husband in return for a ten pound bag of heroin…He served two years for your hour of pleasure.”
“That wasn’t evil on my part, you exploited my circumstances…I was rattling.”
“Aye, well, the only way to escape me is to confess to him, and that’s not a very good idea, not with his proven prowess with a craft knife. You need to get used to the fact that you’re my slave now forever, at least until the day someone inevitably finds you slumped dead in a close with a hypodermic needle sticking out of your groin…And besides, it’s not all bad news. You know that whenever you’re in trouble with the law you just ask to see me. I always keep you out of court don’t I? And make sure you speak to me and only me if anyone asks about Friday’s little piece of telephony. Understand?”
Jackie, who was now hugging herself with both arms while rocking back and forth, nodded, sniffling.
Talking of which, Curzon clicked his fingers three times demandingly, prompting Jackie to remove a phone from her pocket and hand it to him. In return, he produced two magazine paper wraps from the inside pocket of his suit jacket and held them out in an open, flat palm to the desperate young woman. She went to take them but he closed his hand into a fist at the last moment and snatched it away, obnoxiously. “Ah. Ah. Ah. I’ve got another wee job for you. How well do you know Castlemilk?”
“I’ve been there a few times to score…I’ve been everywhere to score at one time or another,” she joked, letting out a rasping, smoker’s cough of a laugh.
“Right then, today I want you to go on over there and hang about, the pubs, the shops, anywhere where there’s anyone. If someone asks just say you’re looking to score some heroin.”
“And the point is?”
“The point is, you just come back and tell me everything you overhear. I don’t care if it’s snippets of conversations about the local pigeon fancier’s sciatica, I want to know everything. I’ll meet you back here tomorrow morning at seven, so don’t go overdoing it on that shit…you don’t want to make me have to come looking for you, drawing attention to the fact that you associate with police officers now do you?”
“Nah.”
Curzon handed her the two wraps along with fifty quid in ten pound notes.
“Bloody hell, expenses eh?” Jackie gasped. “This must be important to you.”
“Never you mind. Just don’t go wasting any of it until the day’s up. It’s your cover remember? You’re up there to score, so you’ll need money to maintain your ruse. There’s no need to go blowing it on gear cos I’ll have some more for you tomorrow morning anyway.”
And with that the detective chief inspector got up and left.
Chapter4
On Curzon’
s return to the station, McKay was waiting with photographs of the bricks used to weigh Bobby McQueen’s body down, and an inventory of calls made to the young man’s phone in the days leading up to his death. Unsurprisingly, the last received call had come from the elusive best friend, Craig Hunter. But the last call out was intriguing to say the least, having been made to the landline of a certain Ms Matilda Fuchs of Westbourne Gardens in Hyndland, at nine-twenty p.m. the Saturday night just gone.
Finally they had something to work on and so, as Deegan and McKay returned to the pebble dashed council houses of Castlemilk, in another bid to find the whereabouts of Mr Hunter, Curzon made a teatime visit to the home of Ms Fuchs, who lived in a four-floored, blonde sandstone townhouse, complete with basement area railings and broad steps which took you from the roadside up to its shiny black, Georgian front door. From there you could hear that somebody was vacuuming inside and, as a consequence, Curzon had to press the big bell four times before anybody heard. When Ms Fuchs finally answered, he was doubled over her wrought iron balustrade, trying to get a better view of some cigarette butts which had been discarded in the area directly under the steps, their unusual, bright gold coloured filters having piqued his obsessive curiosity.
“Hello, can I help you?”
Aged about forty, Ms Fuchs had one of those authoritative German accents which Curzon found both aggressive and sexy at the same time. She must have been six foot tall, her long blonde hair tied back in a ponytail, giving full reign to a strong Teutonic face, featuring a prominent nose that he quite liked. Wearing a white vest and black trousers, she wiped her brow with her right hand – which contained a duster – drawing attention not only to her powerful, muscular arms but to her copious bosom as well. When Curzon flashed his ID, she squinted to examine it with her baby blue eyes, before deploying them on him.
“Inspector eh?” she said flirtatiously then laughed in a loud, Dracula-esque manner. “Please, come in…come in!” She turned and led the way into an extravagantly spacious, lily-white interior. “You must excuse the mess, only we had a party and barbeque on Saturday night and I’ve only just got round to cleaning up…too hungover yesterday.”
In the hallway which led to the kitchen, two guilty looking teenagers wearing jogging bottoms and sports shoes were mopping the chessboard tiled floor.
“Ok boys, I think you’ve done enough for today.” Frau Fuchs took two twenty pound notes from a leather purse on the phone table and handed one to each of them. “Don’t go spending it on anything naughty now.”
As they left, the detective noticed that one of them sneakily pinched the German’s backside, prompting her to playfully swat the back of his head with her duster.
Once the front door had boomed shut behind the boys, Curzon followed Frau Fuchs into a huge sitting room with a high ceiling, where four brown, leather three-seat couches were arranged in a quadrangle around a predominantly red Moroccan rug on a parquet floor, so shiny you could see your reflection in it. She sat down sideways on one of the couches, opposite Curzon, with one leg over the other, so that he was almost mesmerised by the firm black peach she was presenting to him.
“So tell me ‘inspector’, what seems to be the problem?”
And with that playful mockery she started laughing again, before closing her full lips once more so that her suppressed giggle sounded like a creaky door squeaking open. The more Curzon resisted reciprocating her good humour and stared impassively, the more amusing she seemed to find the whole situation.
“Ms Fuchs, have you watched the local news at all today?”
“I don’t watch news…too depressing.” She turned her head to the side and dismissively waved the idea away with her right hand.
“Only, an old lady found the body of a nineteen-year-old man down on Largs beach this morning. His name was Bobby McQueen.”
Immediately, Frau Fuchs seemed to shrink, her face lost its playfulness and aged by ten years right there and then. She sat up poker straight, tilted her head to one side and began to shake it.
“Really?” This sounded more like a plea than a question.
“Unfortunately, yes. And his last recorded phone call was to this house at nine-twenty p.m. last Saturday night.”
Curzon produced a photo of Bobby McQueen from the inside pocket of his suit jacket and handed it to her. As she took it her long fingers trembled slightly. After studying the picture she closed her eyes, as if trying to hide from the world, then handed it back.
“You know him then Ms Fuchs?”
“No. It’s just such a shame, that’s all.”
Curzon nodded slowly, disbelieving her.
“You say you had a party here on Saturday? Might he possibly have been one of the guests?”
He held the photograph up in front of her face.
“Possibly…we have many people coming and going…friends of friends, that sort of thing.”
“Do you remember taking a phone-call from anybody unusual?”
“There were lots of calls, not all of them taken by me.”
“Who else might have taken calls then?”
“Whoever was nearest the phone at the time I suppose…it was a party…there were a lot of people helping out,” she replied, irritably.
“Ok, so how many people would you say were here on Saturday night, roughly?”
At this point, Frau Fuchs seemed to have fallen into a trance and not heard the question, before she suddenly came to again.
“Erm…fifty…maybe a hundred overall, what with people coming and going, just popping their heads in to say hello, you know.”
While she was talking, Curzon had been eying a framed photograph on a little oak table in the corner, featuring a much younger blonde girl, probably in her late teens.
“Could your husband or anyone else in the family possibly have taken that phone call?”
“I’m divorced,” she said, almost spitting the words out.
Curzon always struggled to suppress a smug smirk when people told him they were divorced, because every failed marriage confirmed his cynical view that human beings could not be trusted and would always let you down.
“Who’s the attractive young lady in the photograph over there, your daughter?”
Frau Fuchs looked suddenly extremely frightened and snapped defensively:
“Yes…why?”
“Oh, nothing, I just thought that she might have taken the call, that’s all.”
“She’s not here at the moment…She’s over in Germany with her father.”
“Ah, so she wasn’t here on Saturday night then?”
Frau Fuchs hesitated before answering: “No.”
While asking the woman questions, Curzon had been fiddling with two stolen, reformatted phones in his pocket, so that one rang the other.
“Excuse me.”
He jumped to his feet pretending to answer and, talking loudly to no one, marched out of the sitting room, down the long hallway, its walls decorated to shoulder height with Spanish tiles, then across the chessboard floor of the kitchen – which was so large you could have built a small house in there – until he was in the back garden. Here, empty champagne and wine bottles stood in lines on every available ledge, most strikingly on the walls of the purpose built barbeque area, which had been constructed from the same bricks as those found in the backpack attached to Bobby McQueen’s body, with several spare one’s having been piled up in a wheelbarrow at the far end of the lawn. On the grill, among pale grey cinders, were burnt chops and blackened, expensive looking gourmet sausages, and, on the floor all about, ketchup and mustard stained white napkins. One napkin, though, on the patio in front of the barbeque area, aroused particular interest in Curzon. It was smeared in something that was, to him, by now, completely unmistakable. Crouching down, he removed a plastic evidence bag from his inside pocket, picked up a wooden kebab skewer from the floor and impaled the blood stained tissue, before shaking it into the container. Back when he’d been a rookie, his heart would hav
e been thumping at twenty beats a nanosecond now, adrenaline warming his every limb and sinew like eighteen-year-old single malt whisky hitting your oesophagus. But he’d learnt over the years to remain completely calm and objective and never to let any one clue take precedence in a case, because there was often a simple, innocent explanation for everyday things that had a habit of taking on a sinister appearance when viewed through the prism of a murder inquiry. More importantly, there were very few forensic scientists in the world and so they had to be deployed with surgical precision, while always minding not to bring the city to a standstill for white plastic tents, erected every time some neurotic detective got a hunch about something.
When Curzon returned to the sitting-room, Frau Fuchs was still sat staring into space.
“Ok Ms Fuchs, I’m sorry to have disrupted your cleaning…If I could just inconvenience you for one more thing, though?”
“Go on?”
“Overnight, could you maybe sit with a pen and paper and write down the names of as many guests as you can remember who attended on Saturday?” Frau Fuchs nodded in a resigned, tired fashion. “I’d be very grateful…I mean, the phone call may well turn out to be nothing in the end, but it’s a murder inquiry…I’m sure you understand.”
“Yes, yes of course.”
“Thank you. I’ll show myself out then.”
And so, Curzon left a demoralised, defensive woman in an evident state of shock who had, just minutes previously, been warm, forthcoming, coquettish and carefree. It was obvious that she had something to hide. That she knew Bobby McQueen, Curzon was in no doubt. But it was also obvious that she’d neither murdered nor conspired to murder anybody, so genuinely shocked was she at hearing of the young man’s death.
Chapter 5
It was about seven in the evening when Curzon got back to the station, from where he sent his newfound evidence off to the lab. Then he told Deegan and McKay to get off home, neither having managed to ascertain any new information during their trawls around Castlemilk.
