by Chris Dolan
The woman had taken to singing to her catatonic husband. Fair enough, but Elton John?
“I miss the earth so much, I miss my wife…” she half sang, half spoke it. “And I think it’s going to be a long, long time.” She played with his hair, but Alison felt it was just for something to do. She never looked at him. “Your eyes have died…” Alison was pretty sure that was from a completely different song.
Then Marion Miller arrived. All kitted up. Every single time she brought grapes and sweets which WPC Alison Morrison shared with the nurses afterwards. And books. One for herself and one for Bill, which she put on his chest then took away with her at the end. She never read her own book either, eventually picking up magazines – House & Garden, New Scientist, Heat – from the pile beside Alison’s chair. The two unread books, the policewoman noticed, were called On the Heroism of Mortals and Aliyyah. Marion also had her phone at the ready, texting in spurts over the two or three hours she stayed, alternating that with refreshing her make-up. The woman had an impressive arsenal of lipsticks, powders and creams. Unlike Clare she seldom ever spoke – and certainly never sang – to the man motionless on the bed.
It was the same rigmarole every time. Clare Crichton would be there first, from mid-morning. Marion would take over in the afternoon. Late evenings until after nightfall it was back to Clare again. And every time, at the changing of the guards, Mrs Crichton kept Mrs Miller waiting. The wife saw the floozy outside the door, made a point of hanging on for another half hour at least, while the bit on the side stood outside, pretending to text. When Clare finally did give ground they passed each other without a word or a glance.
Maddy sat in her kitchen, staring into space, coat still on. She’d been like that for nearly half an hour. She didn’t know which body blow to concentrate on. Her and Louis. Her dad suddenly threatening to pop up. Worst of all, getting the wrong end of the stick at work. If nothing else Alan Coulter will think less of her. Read everything carefully – it had always been a golden rule.
But what did it mean, Miller acting against Fulton? Maybe nothing in particular. It wasn’t unheard of, friendly solicitors who ended up on the other side of the table from their usual client. And did it shine any light on either the murder, or the pollution cases? Her brain went round in circles: Louis, Miller, Packie, Fulton.
She nearly jumped out her skin when her mobile rang. The Beach Boys’ “Barbara Ann” would have to go.
“It’s Alan.”
“Listen. I’m sorry. I’ve been thinking—”
“Forget that now. As representative of the Crown Office and Prosecution Service you have the right to come round here.”
“Where?”
“The Millers’ house. Killearn. I’m standing in the living room right now, looking at the dead body of Tom Hughes. He’s been shot through the heart.”
The night outside, for Maddy rushing to her car, felt distinctly nightmarish.
III
We all hide, don’t we? Hide from the world, behind a hundred masks. Who we are to our mothers is not the part we play for fathers. I am a completely different person with friends to the child the teacher once knew. We’re mysteries to ourselves: how many times a week, a day, do you tell a different story to yourself? About yourself.
We look back on our lives and can’t trace the journey that brought us here. What made us do the things we did.
But something drove us. Some self-regulating system that understands the whole of everything? Determined chaos. The butterfly effect.
We can’t know ourselves, so nobody knows us. You think you do. Your brother, colleague, friend. The man next door. To you, he’s a gent, picking up your post, always a smile on his face. To his neighbour on the other side he’s noisy, nosy, a peeping Tom.
Nobody knows me. They all think they do. Have me summed up. But where am I when they’re not around? A whole secret life they would never imagine – a lover, a spy, an Internet troll, closet drinker? Where do I go, when they’re not looking? Do I … lie out in the rain? Hide under the stairs? The bookworm in the library, reading, perhaps, about the Big Bang. Assignations in dark alleys, being instructed in the use of firearms?
I don’t know myself. But something does. Some innate force, maybe, a fundamental imperative. Not forcing me – I am not using that coward’s defence – but guiding me.
Each step is made clear to me, at the key moment.
It never failed to fill her with trepidation. The police cars and ambulance, lights flashing, the scurry of professionals and the rubberneckers gathering. Death was only a few feet away, inside that elegant, upmarket house. She had a feeling that one day it would be her, lying there, twisted and lifeless, terror etched on her face. Inspector Coulter came out to meet her, his finger lightly and briefly touching her arm.
“In the office, upstairs. I’ll show you.”
They stopped at the main door. A middle-aged man, with the look of a reformed villain about him, spoke to Coulter. “If he broke in, he knew what he was doing. Look. The wiring for the alarm’s been neatly detached. No cutting. He had precisely thirty-five seconds to find the box, open it, and disconnect the wires without setting it off.”
“How about the door? Doesn’t look as if he kicked it in.”
“No. Either someone opened it from the inside, or he had a key. Or,” the man, built like a tank, pointed at the Yale lock, “he picked it. Can’t be sure right now, but see they wee scrapes there? Again, skilful job.” The wee chunky man looked impressed.
“Tricks you learn in a lifetime in the building trade?”
On their way upstairs, joining the traffic of men and women going up and down, some with the spacesuits on, some in uniform, others in civvies with clipboards, or cameras, or talking urgently into mobiles, they passed the open door into a spacious lounge. Sitting on the couch, her head in her hands, coat still on, was Marion Miller. A uniformed policeman was offering her a cup of tea but she wasn’t hearing him.
“Have we confirmed what time she arrived home?” Coulter asked Amy Dalgarno, standing by the door.
“Her times match with WPC Morrison’s. She left the Royal at twenty past midnight. Got here just after one.”
Coulter nodded and continued on up the stairs. He hadn’t directly invited her but Maddy followed anyway.
SOCOs and forensics were still at work in the office. Maddy and Coulter could only peek in. She could just see, to one side of the room, the bulky cadaver of Tom Hughes. He, too, hadn’t got round to taking off his coat. He was lying among a guddle of papers, ring binders, books. Looking around she saw they’d been swept off shelves and the top of the large desk at the back wall.
“He was looking for something.”
“Or someone was,” Coulter corrected her. “We don’t know if the search was done before or after he was killed.”
“No sign of the gun this time?”
“It’ll turn up, and soon. It was left in plain view for us at the Crichtons’. Some bastard’s playing musical coffins.”
Bruce Adams came out to see them. He pushed up his goggles and unhooked his Piccola mask – Maddy thought that his face had more expression when it was covered – and spoke to Coulter, half turning his back on the fiscal.
“First impressions. He’s facing this way, right arm outstretched. I reckon he was over by the desk, heard the killer at the door, made a rush at him, trying to grab the gun.”
“How clean was the shot?” Maddy asked.
Adams answered Coulter. “Looks neat enough to me. Certainly close to the heart if not bullseye. Holloway thinks he died pretty quickly. No sign of scratching or shuffling.”
Holloway, police doctor and pathologist, was bent over Hughes’s body, getting a photographer to take close-ups of skin, hair, nails. Doc Holloway: in his mid fifties, balding and ruddy, he was the least likely gunslinger ever.
“No chance it could be the other way round?” Coulter was really just wondering out loud. “Someone else was doing the looking, pulling eve
rything off the shelves, he comes in … they dance around each other, swap positions…” He wasn’t even convincing himself. “Have any other rooms been ransacked?”
“No.” Adams’s words were like turds falling into a toilet. Thank God he had few of them. “This was Julian Miller’s home office.”
Maddy spoke the words that, this time, Coulter kept to himself. “So Hughes was looking for something work-related.”
They chimed in together: “The Abbott file.”
They made their way, like squeezing past late-night shoppers in a mall, down to the living room.
“How did he get here? Hughes. I didn’t see a car outside.”
“Left it out of view?”
As they were about to go in the living room Coulter tugged one of the constables’ arms. “You know Detective Sergeant Russell? Minute he gets here tell him to get every car within a half-mile radius checked. Registrations, makes, the lot. And a door to door – did anyone hear Mr Hughes arriving, or his car.”
Maddy thought that Marion Miller was still sitting there alone, the cup of tea still sitting untouched beside her. The room was so large it took her a moment to spot DS Dalgarno, almost swallowed up in a colossal couch. Dalgarno nodded to them both and gave Maddy a quick half-smile. She was less resistant to the PF’s presence, but not so bold as to let any of her colleagues know it. Quite right.
“Marion, you’ve met Detective Inspector Coulter.” Maddy hung back near the door and Amy took the hint not to introduce her. “Are you okay? Is there anything I can get you?”
Mrs Miller didn’t react to the question. Coulter took a different tack from his junior officer. He marched over and stood directly in front of her. “Mr Hughes a regular visitor is he?” His tone was cold, accusatory. It seemed to rouse Miller out of her stupor.
“What? I’m sorry. I…”
Maddy watched Coulter; he was pissed off. This case was having a bad effect on everyone.
“I hardly know the man.” Miller looked up at him, a slow and tired student struggling with the classwork. “But he has been here before, to see Julian.”
“Mrs Miller. Your husband’s been killed. Your boyfriend’s fallen out a window, and now a house guest has ruined the carpet. What was he doing here?”
If Coulter’s intention had been to rile her, it worked. Marion Miller shot up out of her chair. “I have no idea!”
“You just came back from the hospital and found him?”
The woman stomped off towards the door. “You think I did this? Killed Julian too? And, what, persuaded Bill to jump out his window? Maybe I assassinated JFK.”
“You’re up to your oxters in bodies, Mrs Miller!” She didn’t stop to answer but stormed out the room.
Maddy decided it was time for her to leave too. She’d been lucky Russell was late. No point in pushing it, best to leave the police to get on with their work. She slipped quietly out the room while Coulter and Dalgarno were deep in a confab. As she did, she noticed, because it looked out of place, a medal on a ribbon lying on an occasional table by the door. Odd, it was exactly the same as the one she had in her office, gifted her by some forgotten client. Marion and Julian didn’t have kids, though it was the kind of bauble you might give to children at a school sports day. Clare and Bill were childless too. All these people too caught up, like herself, in work, or too aware of their own inadequacies to want to reproduce themselves. She couldn’t imagine Marion Miller running races, even less so Jules. Yet there, in a room otherwise furnished in meticulous and expensive fashion, was a medal just like hers. There must be millions of these cheap trinkets littering most homes and offices she decided, as she slunk past the various professionals in the hall, and out into the night.
The rain had come on, her wipers clearing the windscreen of water but not her eyes. Glasgow at night, sleek and inky and not quite empty. She didn’t feel like driving straight home, so she turned up streets on a whim at the last moment. She wondered how many of the few cars she passed were doing the same. Going round in circles, heading nowhere in particular. Staying away from, rather than going to, some place. She thought of Stuart Anderson: it’s a risky thing to do, just roam. You may end up in the wrong place at the wrong time; you may do something you hadn’t intended to. Or people might think you have.
Back at the Miller house everything they were uncovering just begged more questions. Adams came out into the porch where Coulter and Dalgarno were bringing Russell up to speed. He’d dozed off watching a Rangers game on the telly, hadn’t heard the phone or the radio.
“Pack of fags, four left in it.” He held it up, bagged, for the others to see. “Lying under Hughes’s body. Looks like they fell out his pocket, but it could also be the killer’s.”
“Rothmans,” Russell peered at it in the meagre light. “Hughes was MD of a big construction company. Those are about the cheapest ciggies you can buy. Not his style, surely?”
“Let’s hope we get prints from it,” Coulter said.
“And soil,” Adams said. “Traces of it on the stairs and the office floor, by the door.”
“Gloves again.”
“Unless Mrs Miller was doing some gardening in the last couple of days.”
“And then went up to her dead husband’s office?” Coulter was sceptical. “Three men went out to dinner the Friday before last. Now two are murdered and the other one’s in a coma.”
“I’ve had nights out like that,” Dalgarno said.
Nobody had slept much, and tempers weren’t much better than they had been last night. The murder weapon had been found, early in the morning during the fingertip search, by a constable. It had been pushed down deep into branches of a bush in a garden three doors along.
“Glock 19?”
“From the same batch,” Russell said.
“What kind of murderer, with a long list, throws away his gun every time!”
“One who thinks each killing will be his last?” said Amy.
“So something’s actually happening out there, now, between these people? The shooter’s reacting to events? But we’ve had these people under our noses for the last fortnight.”
“We’re not actually surveilling them.” Russell felt they should have been. “Stuff could be happening under those noses of ours. In their houses, on the phone.”
Coulter turned to Amy. “First Glock was in a bin in the car park of Merchant’s Tower. We couldn’t miss it. The second was actually laid out for us—”
“Though it wasn’t actually used.”
“But making it clear it would have been? But this one… Pushed down into a shrub. That looks like some kind of attempt at concealment. Different MO?”
“Not a very great attempt,” Russell said.
“In which direction was this shrub? East, west, of the Millers’ house? Where was the killer heading, straight after? Back to a car?”
“He would have to, there aren’t any buses in and out of Killearn late at night. It’s not on a train line.”
“Unless, of course it was a local. Like Marion Miller.” Russell snarled her name. “Stirlingshire’s own Tina fucking Turner.”
“Her times fit, John.”
“Aye but do they, Amy? She floors it all the way back from the Royal. Does it in under half an hour. Plenty of time to pull a trigger, mess up a room, and phone us.”
“We’re all assuming here,” Coulter sat down, “that we’re looking for one killer. Maybe it’s not. Could be a game of pass the pistol.”
“In a prearranged order?” Amy subconsciously copied her boss and sat. “Or, like you say, each killing leads to the next—”
“—a different killer each time. Somebody, somewhere needs to talk. Christ they’re falling like flies and we’re nowhere!”
“Crichton,” Russell said.
“Amy, go see the doctors. Tell them we need to wake Rip Van Winkle out of his beauty sleep.”
Maddy had ended up at her mother’s house. She had no idea why. She’d parked, opened the door qui
etly with her key, taken off her coat and lain down on the couch. She’d woken a couple of hours later, the February early dawn pushing dingily against the window.
She’d made a pot of tea, not worrying about making a noise – Rosa di Rio had always slept the sleep of a cherub. She’d taken it in to her and finally, almost an hour later, Mamma emerged, in a green satin chemise, face shining with cream. How could it be that her sexagenarian mother looked more glamorous than she did, even first thing in the morning?
“Ai, Maddalena,” Rosa looked at her pityingly, “you need to get more sleep. Or something.”
Should she tell Rosa about Packie? Her parents hadn’t seen each other in twenty years, more. Since Dad walked out there had been virtually no communication, except through lawyers and third parties. Maddy had never told Rosa when Packie had got in touch with her. It had taken her mamma years to get over the hurt, the shock, and now, when the woman seemed to have nearly forgotten, he was threatening to turn up in Glasgow. He probably won’t, anyway, so no point in creating a fuss. And even if he did, and Maddy did see him, Rosa wouldn’t have to know.
“Dante has disappeared.”
“What do you mean, disappeared?”
“Disappeared. Gone. Hey presto, whoosh.”
Maybe she would send Mad Packie to her – God knows the woman loves bloody drama. “What, into thin air?”
“Exactly! Your cousin Gina says his house is like the Mary Celeste. No sign of packing a suitcase, but he’s not been home in weeks, doesn’t answer his phone. Puf!” She clicked her fingers. “Just like that. No more Dante.”
“Weeks, Mamma? You and I were with him last week.”
“Well, days.” Rosa poured herself another cup of tea.
“How many days?”
“I don’t know! I’m just telling you what your cousin Gina said.”
