Condition Purple

by Peter Turnbull

  Montgomerie grunted and twisted himself out of his seat and walked up to the gantry. He brought a whisky back and handed it to Tuesday Noon. The glass didn’t touch the table. Tuesday Noon threw the wee goldie back in one and then sat back cradling the glass with a gleam of satisfaction in his eyes.

  ‘Keep your ears to the ground, Tuesday.’ Montgomerie remained standing. ‘It was a nasty attack, just last night, stabbed in the throat, girl in her early twenties, frightened of a guy who drives a tarted-up car and knew somebody called Dino.’

  ‘Dino?’

  ‘Dino. She was also a smackhead.’

  ‘Drug scene is too tight for me to get near, you know that, Mr Montgomerie.’

  ‘I know that, but you know the users, the guys and chicks at the bottom end of the ladder. See if they knew this girl, Stephanie Craigellachie, see if they know of a Dino—maybe there’s a pusher called Dino, see if they know of a guy who drives a flash motor. Just ask around, Tuesday, keep sniffing. You know all the rat holes in this town, so go to work. You know the number to call when you’ve got gold dust to trade.’

  Ray Sussock had driven home. Home, his ‘temporary accommodation’ as he called it, although he began to feel a nagging fear, something that he couldn’t easily define or recognize, but a feeling akin to despair as he realized that ‘temporariness’ had succeeded in dragging itself from deep midwinter well into summer. Autumn was on the horizon and with it the prospect of wintering over in the present accommodation until the arrival of the property buoyancy which came with each spring. He pulled his car up to the kerb and got out of the vehicle feeling tired, heavy-eyed, grimy, not at all able to enjoy the fresh July morning. He let himself into the large house, once the immense home of a wealthy family, now broken up into a warren of bedsitters run by a Polish landlord, resident of the basement flat. He checked the table in the hall, plenty of mail, but none for him. Nothing unusual in that. The house was at that moment quiet, those residents who worked would be long gone, those who didn’t work would be still in bed. What’s the point in getting up if there’s nothing to get up for, fresh July morning or not?

  Sussock went into the kitchen he shared with three other flats. A small kitchenette, a gas cooker, some shelves, a fridge. Below the kitchen, down a turning stair, was the landlord’s flat. Sussock had been there once, he went there to ask tor a light bulb, he had been refused, been told coldly and briskly by the small man to get his own. He was surprised by the landlord’s accommodation, having always assumed that the massive sum of rents generated by the old house must have gone towards the upkeep of a lavishly decorated flat, but in the event the thin gaunt landlord and his enormous cold-eyed wife, both of whom never failed to remind Sussock of Jack Spratt and spouse, lived in an icy cramped kitchen, where they sat during the day and the evening with their television perched on the sink unit and beyond that was their bedroom with a bed and a wardrobe and nothing else. Following the eye-opening surprise of their standard of living Sussock liked them no more but he did find a sense of respect for them growing, in that they lived in spartan accommodation and expected their tenants to do the same. After that it was easier for him to accept his own dingy ‘temporary accommodation’.

  That morning, in the kitchen, he found that someone had pilfered his last remaining teabag: low trick, that, even for the bedsits. He also discovered that his shelf in the fridge had been raided and that someone with a missing top incisor, he noted with a professional eye, had taken a bite out of his Scottish Cheddar. So he raided someone else’s coffee. It was by such means, he had learned, that one survives in bedsit land.

  He carried the steaming mug of coffee upstairs continuing to enjoy the silence of the house. The original large rooms had been divided by wretchedly thin room dividers and sound polluted badly from flat to flat. He entered his own room and sat in the armchair and kicked his shoes off and toyed with the idea of grabbing the golden opportunity to sleep before the couple upstairs commenced their daily screaming sessions. They were a couple who clearly, to Sussock, had a relationship which thrived on conflict and which would probably escalate and escalate until one knifed the other and the knifer would then sit sobbing over the corpse of the knifed protesting love of the purest and Undying kind. Sussock was also acutely aware that soon the boys in the next room would be very likely to begin their morning coupling, the grunts of which were even more distasteful a sound to have to sit and listen to than the gasps and sighs of the sexual activity of the more mainstream kind which came through the other wall of his room. It was also quiet from directly above but only until the young office worker came home and stamped across his floor, Sussock’s ceiling, and switched on his hi-fi, and sent the base notes boom, boom, booming downward into Sussock’s flat.

  But at that moment it was quiet. The birds sang outside; they made the only sound. It was tempting. The bed in the corner looked tempting and he was tired. She’d understand, even though he’d said that he’d see her later in the morning she knew fine well that if he wasn’t round by 11.00 he wouldn’t be coming until much later, after a kip, after a few ‘Zs’. He could phone but that would involve having to go down to Byres Road and if he was going out at all he might as well drive over to Langside. He unbuttoned his cuffs and tugged off his tie. No contest, really.

  ‘Got to be a scratcher, Jim,’ said the man, well built, stocky, dark hair. Serious hard eyes.

  ‘A scratcher?’ said King.

  ‘What we call “scratchers” in the trade—bungling cowboys, get them everywhere.’ The man studied the photograph. ‘Aye, we get them everywhere, prisons, backyards, dodgy studios. You want AIDS or Hepatitis B, go to a scratcher. See me, I use clean needles, clean tubes, clean tubs, fresh ink and fresh pair of surgical gloves with each client and that’s why I cost. I also test for pigmentation allergy.’

  ‘Pigmentation allergy?’

  The man shrugged. ‘Pigmentation allergy. Some people are allergic to tattoo artists’ ink, usually the colour red for a reason I don’t understand, but it’s almost always red which brings them out in a rash so severe that they want to sit up at night trying to scratch the tattoo off. But see, me, I test for it. It’s a simple five-minute test, but I do it for each patient, that’s why I cost too. I do the test for each and every client.’

  The man glanced at the photograph again. He stood at the entrance to his studio. A client, a customer, a man in his early thirties with a pencil line moustache sat patiently in the chair which reclined like a dentist’s chair. Tubs of various coloured inks stood on the table beside the chair, in front of him was the tattooist’s chair, vacant, and beside which the tattooist’s instruments were arranged in a rack, all shiny and chrome. The walls of the studio were covered in an impressive collage of examples of the tattoos available.

  King had entered the studio, first a waiting-room just off a side street off Duke Street. The walls of the waiting-room were covered in a similar collage of tattoos to those which decorated the surgery, the rooms being separated by a pane of glass. Two young women sat in the waiting-room, or rather they sat on the hard bench which ran round the walls of the room. King pondered on the design and location of their tattoos. A man sat in the corner of the room patiently leafing through a magazine. The girls glanced at each other and giggled. Their first visits, thought King, though the man seems quite at home and was perhaps calling to have another design added to what might already be an impressive piece of body art. There were notices on the wall, refreshingly breaking up the collage. ‘Ass or Arse, Bum or Buttock, we don’t tattoo, nor stomachs, nor genitalia. We just don’t, so don’t ask.’ Another poster showed a young man with a dotted line tattooed round his neck, under which the words ‘cut here’ had been tattooed. The caption read: ‘Nothing stupid done, what may be funny at eighteen when you’re drunk is not so funny twenty-four hours later, still less twenty-four years later. So don’t ask.’ Another poster showed modification work, how clumsy amateurish tattoos could be transferred into more presentable exam
ples of the art.

  King had stood at the entrance to the studio. The tattooist had glanced at him and then returned his concentration to his customer’s arm and seemed to King to be alternating the needle between a series of fine sharp pecking movements, and a series of gentle down strokes. There was no smell. That had surprised King. He had expected the studio of a tattooist to smell, he didn’t know what of, but he had expected a smell of some kind but there was nothing, no sweat, no disinfectant smell, no ink odour, nothing. Arid. Again the tattooist had looked at King.

  ‘Can’t you read, Jim?’ he said.

  King looked to one side and read. The sign said: ‘If you’ve got nothing to do, don’t do it here.’

  ‘Police,’ said King and flashed his identification.

  The tattooist seemed to growl and then added a few more downward strokes to his customer’s arm and having timed King’s patience span to a millisecond, managed to put the needle down just before King was going to suggest that he might like to shut down for the rest of the day and have a cosy chat at the police station.

  ‘Yes?’ The man walked across the studio floor to where King stood at the doorway.

  King showed him a photograph of Stephanie Craigellachie’s tattoo.

  ‘Oh,’ said the man, not shaken, not surprised.

  ‘Recognize the work?’

  The man shook his head. He pointed to the sign which made reference to buttocks, stomachs and genitalia.

  ‘I don’t know whether you’d call this genitalia or not,’ he said, ‘but it’s close enough for me to back off. I wouldn’t do anything like it. That goes for every reputable artist that I know. Has to be the work of a scratcher.’

  ‘A scratcher?’

  ‘What we call scratchers in the trade, bungling cowboys, get them everywhere, prisons, backyards, dodgy studios…’

  King was impressed that the man seemed to be genuinely looking at the tattoo and not a close-up photograph of the sort that could easily circulate in grimy bars.

  ‘See—’ he ran his hand along the photograph of the tattoo—‘it’s blurred, soft at the edges, poor spacing, it’s the sort of thing that school kids do to each other with pins.’

  ‘Pins?’

  ‘Take one ordinary pin, a ball of cotton wool, ordinary ink, soak a small wad of cotton wool in the ink, wrap it round the point of the pin and tap the needle into the skin. The pin pricks the skin and the ink runs off the cotton wool and remains under the skin. It’s a simple and crude tattoo, works as well in that it doesn’t wash off, and doesn’t distort too much over time.’

  ‘So we’re looking for a scratcher?’

  ‘If you’re looking for the man or woman who did that, then yes, you’re looking for a scratcher.’

  ‘Tell me,’ said King, recovering the photograph, ‘how long would a tattoo like that take to apply?’

  ‘Two hours, three at the outside.’

  ‘As long as that?’

  ‘Yes,’ said the man, glancing wonderingly at the two young females who continued to glance at each other and giggle. ‘It’s a rough piece of work, I can’t see sign of any sophisticated instrument being used if any instrument was used at all. Tell you something else: it would have been painful for the girl.’

  ‘It would?’

  ‘Aye. Doesn’t take much imagination to think of the discomfort of a few thousand pin jabs in that part of your body. I’d say it was done over two or three or four sittings. It wouldn’t have been comfortable. Tattooing isn’t comfortable. It’s not uncomfortable if it’s done properly, but it’s not comfortable either. This would have been very uncomfortable.’

  ‘Could it be self-inflicted?’

  The man shook his head. ‘Can’t see it,’ he said. ‘It’s possible in that you can reach that part of your body quite easily, but it would be too prolonged and painful to be a self-tattoo. “I belong to Dino.” It’s more like she lay back, bit the bullet, thought long and hard of Scotland and let somebody, maybe Dino, go to work on her.’

  ‘You don’t know of a scratcher called Dino by any chance?’

  The man didn’t. Said he had a customer waiting if that was all.

  Did he know of any scratchers, period?

  Anyone with a pin and wad of cotton wool is a scratcher, period.

  ‘There’s one, though, just off London Road, got a sign in the window of his house, “Tattoos done”. I only heard about him. I don’t know him. It’s the only one I’ve heard of. They tend to be underground.’

  King said, ‘Thanks.’

  Chapter 4

  Wednesday, 11.30-15.30 hours

  Donoghue sifted the items found in Stephanie Craigellachie’s handbag. All had been dusted for prints and all had revealed nothing but the prints of the dead girl. Spur on whorl of right aspect of right thumb, read Bothwell’s report. The items had all been exposed to the meticulous attention of Dr Jean Kay of the Forensic Science Laboratory at Pitt Street along with the dead girl’s clothing. Dr Kay’s report and findings lay at the side of Donoghue’s desk. The handbag and items it contained had been ‘processed’ and he could handle them as he wished, yet for some reason he held the handbag as though it might crumble to his touch and he sifted the items by moving them on his desktop with the tip of his ballpoint.

  The bag was of cheap patent leather, torn here and there, with a long strap enabling it to be worn at the shoulder. Donoghue had hoped that the tacky smooth surface of the bag might have revealed interesting fingerprints, hopefully of her attacker who might have tried to snatch the bag from her. But as in the case of the items the bag contained, the only latents to be lifted were those belonging to the deceased whose next of kin, he reminded himself, had still to be informed and who had still to make a formal identification of the body. It was an important step because Donoghue knew fine well that the real Stephanie Craigellachie could be alive and well and living in happy retirement in Partick, and she could be known to the deceased girl in some capacity who was using her name as a nom de rue. It was a possibility but, he conceded, not by any means a likely one. His ‘inner voice’, as he called it, and to which he had long learned to listen, told him that he was dealing with the murder of Stephanie Craigellachie and with no other, that the handbag belonged to Stephanie Craigellachie and no other, and that the contents summed up the empty, bleak, desperate existence that had been the life of Stephanie Craigellachie and the life of no other.

  He sifted the items, continuing to use his ballpoint pen to do so. There was the purse, cheap, red, a subway ticket, some loose change, he counted seventy-three pence. And therein lay the first mystery. She had been murdered at approximately 22.30 hours and was known to be on the streets from approximately 17.00 hours each night. She was doing good business, there ought to have been a wedge in the handbag, a substantial wad, rolled tight and held with a rubber band perhaps, not just a lousy seventy-three pence.

  So, he thought, it would be not unreasonable to assume that the motive for the murder was robbery. It was, he told himself, an assumption, to bear in mind, to keep in play, but not to the exclusion of other motives because it was a dangerously inviting conclusion to leap towards.

  He took his pipe from the ashtray and lit it with his lighter and leaned back in his chair. He glanced out of his window at the funnel that was Sauchiehall Street, concrete and glass buildings mixed with old stonework, the sun played on the glass and the car windscreens, buses stood bumper to bumper. He glanced up into the blue, near-cloudless sky and wondered why it was that he was not prepared to accept readily that the murder of Stephanie Craigellachie was a question of a mugging which went too far.

  If, he pondered, a man was going to rob a girl like Stephanie, then surely he would do it by enticing her into his car, drive her some place quiet, produce a knife and say ‘pay and get out’. He would not attack her in Blythswood Street where there is a lot of traffic, both vehicular and pedestrian, where there would be girls to come and help out, cops patrolling, men looking for business who hopefull
y would not stand by to see a girl rolled for her wad. Yet he attacked her in the street. If, of course, it was a man.

  Point two—Donoghue’s eye was caught by a gull swooping and soaring over Strathclyde House—point two, if the attacker hadn’t got a car into which he or she could entice her, how did he make her retreat into the alley? If the attacker’s approach was threatening, then she would have stepped into the brighter lights of Blythswood Square or St Vincent Street at the intersection of Blythswood Street. Yet it seemed she was forced to run into the alley.

  Or was she enticed into the alley?

  Donoghue sucked and blew his pipe. Blue smoke hung in layers in his room. It was clear in Dr Reynolds’s report that Stephanie Craigellachie was stabbed where she was found, one blow, or thrust, immediately fatal, and she slumped to the ground. So she entered the alley either to meet someone whom she trusted or to escape someone she feared. Someone perhaps who knew where to find her?

  So where was ail her money? Had she given it all willingly to the person who enticed her into the alley? Did the person who stabbed her snatch the money to make the murder look like a cheap and grubby ‘accident’, whereas the real intention was to snuff out her life all along for a motive yet to be determined?

  Or—and Donoghue began to warm to this notion—did she see someone, someone she recognized, turn into Blythswood Street, someone in a black car perhaps, turn down the one-way street from the Square. Had she hoped to avoid him by darting into the alley before he saw her, and thrown her wad away before he caught her, if he caught her? But caught her he evidently and eventually had. Donoghue tried to recall what was on either side of the alley, high walls and the back of buildings on one side, on the other, a wooden fence and then a building site where the façade of a Victorian building was being retained but the interior being demolished for complete rebuilding. It would have been very easy for her to reach into her bag and toss her money over the fence as she ran into the alley, hoping perhaps to recover it at a later stage.