By the time she got out of the bath, all the dozens of candles she had lit, covering every free surface in the flat, were beginning to gutter, pools of hot wax dripping from them, deforming them and making them overflow their saucers. There were no spares left to replace them with, and the electric light seemed discordant, too unmagical in comparison.
She tried Ian on his mobile phone again, but as before, it had been switched off. Then, to cap it all, she noticed a strange smell, and she inhaled deeply, trying to identify it, uncertain what it could be. A loud bleeping began as the smoke alarm went off. Feeling slightly dizzy between the drink and tiredness, she walked slowly to the kitchen.
The pastry on the butcher’s steak pie was burnt black, and the baked potatoes were no more than carbonised shells, crumbling when touched. She tossed the lot into the bin, thinking the evening could still be saved if she rushed to the nearby Indian takeaway for a banquet, but first of all the alarm would have to be silenced.
Standing on a chair she prodded the white plastic casing with a broom handle, trying to locate an ‘off’ button with it, but becoming impatient, she thumped it over-vigorously and part of the casing broke. It hung uselessly from the ceiling, showering her with a fine spray of black dust as it fell. But its innards continued to flash and shriek.
Hearing a loud knocking at the door, Alice leapt off the chair, believing it to be Ian, thinking that perhaps he had left without his keys that morning. Instead she was greeted by Mrs Foscetti, her sister peeping wide-eyed out of the nearby, half-closed door of their flat.
‘We’ve had smoke coming into our house, and the alarm’s gone off. Perhaps there’s a fire here? Hadn’t we all better evacuate the building, dear?’ Mrs Foscetti asked, calmly.
‘It’s in my house, the fire… except it’s not,’ Alice said, coming out onto the landing and beginning to explain.
‘In your house? Then for Heaven’s sake, get Quill!’ Miss Spinnell shouted, gesturing impatiently with her good hand for her neighbour to go back into the burning flat. Alice explained again that it was a false alarm, that they were not all at risk of imminent immolation, and apologised profusely. Then she turned, intending to go back in, snatch her wallet and rush off to the Taj Mahal.
‘We’ve a window pole. That might do the trick and incapacitate the alarm,’ said Mrs Foscetti, jabbing an imaginary pole at an imaginary ceiling.
‘What’s happened to your face?’ Miss Spinnell asked, bemused, coming nearer and pointing at Alice, ‘you look like a darkie!’
‘Sshh’ Mrs Foscetti said sharply, embarrassed both by her sister’s use of the term, and her frankness in making such a personal comment.
‘A blackie…’ Miss Spinnell murmured to herself, ‘inky… a coalface,’ her voice petering out in thought.
Alice put her hand up to her cheek, and when she examined her fingers she found they were thickly covered in soot.
‘Listen,’ Miss Spinnell said mysteriously.
‘To what?’ her sister asked.
‘The silence…’
The alarm had switched itself off.
Once in the flat again, disconsolate that everything was going so wrong and desperate for something to eat, Alice washed her face in the basin, producing black smears on it as she did so. And while she was trying to clean herself, Ian Melville walked in, a huge bunch of freesias in his hand.
‘I’m so sorry…’ she began, knowing before she had even started speaking that as she explained all the mishaps, the candles going out, the burnt food, the alarm going off and everything else, all of them would, even in combination, sound inadequate, an insufficient excuse for a presentless, celebrationless birthday. Even pleading the pressures of a murder investigation seemed too tired, too weak an explanation in her own ears, never mind his. If only he had been on sodding time though, she thought, but it seemed a churlish justification, better left unexpressed. He had red paint on the side of his face, and, as was often the case, on his hands too.
‘So we’ve nothing to eat, eh… Sooty?’
‘I think perhaps you mean Black Beauty…’ she stopped, suddenly remembering that Black Beauty was a horse. She racked her brain to think of a suitable insult in return, but, drink-befuddled and exhausted, found all inspiration gone.
‘Perhaps we should be flexible, change the plan, and just have a bath instead?’ he said, smiling, his red fingers already hovering over the top buttons of her blouse. She nodded, only too pleased at the suggestion.
As she lay down in the warm water, letting it lap over her and beginning to relax, he disappeared, returning with a single candle. Just as he climbed in beside her, soap in hand, intoxicated by the thought of their evening together, the ring-tone of her phone shattered their peace.
‘Leave it,’ he said.
She looked at him and shook her head.
‘Please, Alice, just this time. It is my birthday. Please, please, don’t answer.’
‘I have to.’ It was pointless to explain. There would be nothing new to say, nothing that she had not said too many times before. By now he should understand.
DI Manson walked into his own front hall. He threw his overcoat over the banisters, his body aching, feeling work-soiled and drained. Glancing through the living-room door, he was dazzled by the blue and red lights blinking on the Christmas tree, then noticed a partly completed jigsaw on a tray on the coffee table. The radio was broadcasting a carol service from somewhere, and a woman’s low voice, emanating from the kitchen, was accompanying the choir in ‘Oh Come All Ye Faithful’. He entered the warm room, hoping that Margaret would be there and on her own, but instead he found one of her friends, singing to herself, busy removing his dinner from the oven.
‘Where’s Margaret?’ he asked, feeling too tired to face any food.
‘Upstairs with the girls.’
‘What’s she doing?’
‘Never you mind, love. Just get that down you,’ she answered, placing a plate of some green tagliatelle mixture in front of him. ‘I’ll keep you company, while you eat.’
He rose from the table, pushing the dish to one side, determined to see his wife and to rid his house of the coven that seemed to have taken up residence in it for the last few days. Suddenly, Margaret came racing into the room, his mobile clamped to her ear.
‘It’s Elaine,’ she whispered. ‘You left your phone in your coat. Here you are…’
‘Ma’am,’ he said, trying to force himself back into work-mode and summon some vitality from somewhere.
‘Go to Saxe-Coburg Street now. Someone from Criminal Intelligence has just been in contact. There’s been an incident there, a sort of break-in, I don’t have all the details, except that it’s an invalid’s house. I’ll tell you when I see you there, OK? Alice is already on her way. A constable’s just picked her up.’
‘Right,’ he replied, moving towards the door.
‘You don’t have to go now, do you pet? What about your tea?’ a concerned voice asked. But he did not feel the need to respond, because it was not Margaret speaking.
The man was chittering, trembling like a frightened dog, his whole body convulsed by continuous wave after wave of involuntary movement, as if it no longer belonged to him, but had been possessed by fear. Elaine Bell pulled up a seat opposite his wheelchair, looking into his anguished face, her eyes now level with his own.
‘Can you tell us what happened, Mr Anderson?’
He said nothing, then his lower lip jutted out as if he was about to burst into tears, and he gave a low, vulpine moan. His carer leant over him and took one of his hands in hers, squeezing it gently between her fingers.
‘Come on, pal, just tell them what you told me.’
The man nodded, lip still protruding, then began to speak, a slow babble of sounds issuing from his mouth, each word slurred and jostling with the next to form a single stream of incomprehensible noise.
Alice caught the DCI’s eye and Elaine Bell shook her head, her expression one of bafflement. Eric Manson w
as staring at the man’s mouth as if by looking at it for long enough, or hard enough, he might somehow acquire the art of lip reading. After speaking for a further thirty seconds or so, the man fell silent. His carer sighed and said, ‘See? Just like what I told the constable earlier. What a bastard! You wouldn’t believe it, would you?’
‘Sorry. Sorry…’ Elaine Bell replied. ‘I’m afraid I didn’t catch a single word he said. Could we try again?’
The invalid repeated his story, pausing every so often to look quizzically at the police officers, checking whether they could understand him. But again the noise that he made sounded entirely alien, reminiscent of a record playing at the wrong speed, far too slowly.
‘Dreadful, eh?’ the carer said, an expression of outrage on her face and her hands clenched pugnaciously on her broad hips.
‘Diane, perhaps, just for the moment, you could translate for us, tell us what he said?’ the DCI asked, rubbing her eyes with her fingers, desperate to find out what had happened and to be able to start the investigation.
‘Well…’ Diane began, ‘Ron said that he was in his bed – he goes early like, I put him into his bed – he was in it, nearly asleep, and he heard a noise so he opened his eyes. He’d had a pill…’
‘A sleeping pill, you’d given him a sleeping pill?’
‘Aye. He opened his eyes and saw a man in his room, prowling about like. Picking up his things, even had a wee go in his wheelchair, using the joystick and everything. Well, the man comes over…’
A strange honking sound drowned out her voice, as the invalid joined in, gesticulating excitedly and jabbing the air with his right hand. Just at that moment the spin cycle on the washing machine started up, drowning their words with a high pitched whine.
‘Unbelievable, eh?’ Diane said, her eyes wide.
‘What – what’s unbelievable?’ Elaine Bell asked, trying to control her impatience with the woman and the background noise.
‘To do that – to do that to anybuddy.’
‘To do what! You’ll have to tell us, we can’t understand him, remember,’ the DCI snapped, her voice raised, ensuring she was audible over the loud whine, losing the battle for manners.
‘Oh, aye. Right. The man came over and he’d a long knife in his hand.’ Diane stopped speaking as the racket from the machine continued, now punctuated by an occasional clicking sound as a loose coin revolved in the drum.
‘Then what? Then what?’ Elaine Bell almost screamed.
‘Then… well, I must have come in, I think, back into the flat. I’d left my bag behind in the kitchen so I came back for it. The key had gone from under the mat but the door was still open. I came in, picked it up, then I heard Ron shouting, shouting my name, shouting out what had happened to him. I was the one dialled 999.’
‘Did you check the flat to make sure he’d gone?’ Eric Manson enquired, looking all around the room, and then, with a sigh of irritation, turning off the switch for the washing machine.
‘It’d no’ quite finished,’ Diane said, looking annoyed.
‘Did you check…’ the Inspector repeated, his hand still on the switch.
‘Oh, aye. Looked a’ ower the place, but the man had gone. Out the door, I suppose.’
‘What did he look like?’ Elaine Bell asked.
Immediately, Ron Anderson began to speak again, his head moving excitedly. Diane made no attempt to translate, so the DCI said, ‘Well, what did he say?’
‘He said it was dark, and he was half asleep, but it was a big fellow, heavy-made like.’
‘Did the man say anything?’ Alice asked.
Once again the invalid replied, his eyes darting from one to the other, as if expecting that they would understand the language of his eyes, if not his mouth.
‘Diane? Translate for us, for Christ’s sake!’
‘He said… the man talked a lot – not really to him, though, more mutterin’ to himself.’
‘Anything else?’
‘Ron said he stank. Reekin’ like bath-time, or a baby or something.’
‘It’s him,’ Alice said, ‘it must be.’
‘Who?’ the DCI demanded.
‘Norman Clerk. It must be him. Fat, arguing with himself, with the voice in his head. And when Tom and I saw him, in his flat, he smelt – I can smell it in here, now, too. Baby powder. It must be him.’
While Eric Manson searched Clerk’s odiferous bedroom, she scurried around the rest of the flat, looking behind curtains, into cubby-holes, anywhere and everywhere that anyone could hide. In the bathroom, through her haste, she accidentally pulled down the shower curtain, exposing an array of tall cannabis plants in the old enamel bath, each flowerpot resting on a layer of damp newspaper. Spiders’ webs hung from the bath taps and a chain dangled against the side, plugless and rusty. On the nearby cistern were the man’s toiletries: a tin of Johnson’s Baby Powder, a razor and dusty toothbrush. Four unopened packets of Risperdal lay beside them.
‘There’s a loft, I’m going into it,’ Manson shouted, followed by the sound of a Ramsay ladder being unlatched and hauled down.
Alice returned to the kitchen, pulling open the doors of the units and peering inside a musty-smelling broom cupboard, double-checking the places she had already looked in her desperation. Suddenly she remembered that Clerk’s brother lived on the bottom floor of the tenement. Maybe he was hiding down there.
‘Sir – Sir, I’m going to check flat number three on the ground floor, Clerk’s brother’s place.’
There was no answer, but she could hear her colleague’s heavy footfalls above her, see the plaster vibrate slightly as he clambered about on the rafters.
After racing down the three flights of stairs, she arrived out of breath in the entrance hall, pressed the bell marked ‘R. Clerk’ and waited for someone to answer it. Nothing happened, so she pressed again, harder this time, keeping her finger on it to produce a single continuous, insistent ring. Once more there was no response. In her impatience, she gave the scuffed grey door a slight push and it opened. In less than a second she had decided to go in, search warrant or no search warrant.
The place was in darkness, lit only by the faint orange glow of the streetlights outside. She padded about, going from room to room and giving each a hasty check. Finally, only one door remained, and from behind it came loud, intermittent snores which vibrated in the air and sounded like a chainsaw starting, revving up and then cutting out.
As she came in she was able to make out the vast bulk of Robert Clerk on a brass bedstead, his barrel-like torso rising and falling with each noisy breath and one pale foot protruding from below his duvet. The space under the bed was hidden by a thick, candlewick bedspread which lay in folds on the carpeted floor. Just as Alice was about to tiptoe away, one of the corners of the bedspread moved slightly, as if a mouse was trying to escape from beneath it.
Holding her breath, she waited and watched, and once again the material twitched. Her heart now racing, she stepped towards the bed, and as she did so, Robert Clerk let out a loud groan, startling her and stopping her in her tracks. Trying to keep calm, she stared at him, but he remained fast asleep.
Very carefully, she picked up one of the bottom edges of the bedspread and began to raise it. As she bent forward to look underneath the bed, a sweet smell hit her nostrils. Just as she realised what it was, a hand shot out, grabbing her hair, wrenching its roots and pulling her towards the ground. As she fell forward, Norman Clerk hooked his arm around her neck, pulling her face towards him, pressing her hard against his chest and suffocating her in the folds of his flesh.
She cried out but nothing came, her voice absorbed, muffled by his solid bulk. Keeping his grip with one arm despite her scrabbling hands trying to break it, he used his left hand to grind his knuckles back and forth in her eye-socket. The pain was excruciating, like a red-hot arrow piercing her eyeball. Its sharpness shocked her, revitalised her.
Suddenly, the thought that she might die by the hands of a creature such a
s him, an unwashed, pink Buddha-like thing, infuriated her. It seemed like a grotesque impertinence. Enraged at the very idea, and using every ounce of her remaining strength, she smashed her thigh up between his legs, her hard flesh hitting his soft flesh, feeling him instantly loosen his hold on her.
He groaned, recoiling from her, fell and doubled up, foetus-like, on the ground beside her, his hands now protecting his battered genitalia from any further attack. Aware once more of the sharp pain in her eye, her bruised scalp and with the disgusting scent of his rank, powdered flesh in her nostrils, she was sorely tempted to give him another kick for good measure. But the sound of a prolonged, pig-like grunt distracted her, and as Eric Manson strode in she watched Robert Clerk’s eyelids flutter as he snored on, oblivious to everything around him in his untroubled, drugged sleep.
The young psychiatrist who arrived from the Royal Edinburgh had never had to carry out such an assessment before, but he was secretly pleased to be called upon to do it. Seeing his smooth, rosy cheeks and bright eyes, Elaine Bell’s spirits rose too. This beginner should pose no problems.
‘It’s largely a formality. We just need you to speak to the man, check him out, make sure he’s fit for interview. He was in Carstairs and he may have committed a murder, so there’s a degree of urgency about the business as you’ll appreciate.’ She spoke conspiratorially to him as if he would, indeed, understand the need for urgency, looking him directly in the eye to emphasize the point. And the young man nodded, saying nothing by way of reply but seeming gratifyingly eager to please her.
The social worker who had picked the short straw and found himself allocated to assist Clerk as an ‘appropriate adult’, passed them in the corridor, making his way to the interview room in the company of a WPC. Recognising him, the DCI knew that their luck was holding, because the man was an unashamed time-server, his ideals lost long ago along with most of his hair. He was one of those raw-boned, denim-clad, northern Irishmen who had seen it all, tried to mend the world, failed, and finally discovered that their well of compassion was not quite bottomless after all. So, Pat could be relied upon. Usually he sat quietly in interviews, filling in the forms, no longer even attempting to hide his impatience, his desire to get back to the office to ‘process’ his remaining cases. His attitude was commendably simple: if they were fit to interview, they were fit to interview, and therefore his presence was a mere formality. This time, all he would be thinking about would be getting back to his bed.
No Sorrow To Die Page 7
