Condition Purple

by Peter Turnbull

  ‘She was torn apart,’ said Sussock as the scene of crime officer pressed the camera flash. ‘It’s as though someone threw her to the wolves: she was more than murdered.’

  ‘Has to be more than one assailant,’ said Hamilton, still shaken by his discovery. The incident had leapt to the forefront of his ‘worst things I ever saw’ anecdotes and had done so by a length and a half.

  ‘No, it hasn’t,’ said Sussock. ‘This is the work of one man. I’ve been this way before.’

  ‘He’s a State Hospital number, then.’

  ‘Certainly is. And if we’d have been able to prove that twenty years ago this lassie would still be alive.’

  The camera flashed again. A constable, white-faced and agitated, approached Sussock. ‘Police surgeon is here, sir.’

  Sussock turned. ‘Very good,’ he said. ‘Escort the gentleman up the stair, please, laddie, advise him that the stair is dark and slippery.’

  The duty police surgeon was Dr Chan. Sussock was pleased that the duty surgeon was Chan, he had always found Dr Chan to be polite, unhurried, but efficient, a calm presence, very professional, willing to put himself out, willing to stretch the remit of his job if he felt it would benefit the police and the public. He appeared in the doorway of the room in which lay the remains of Toni Durham. ‘Oh my,’ he said, ‘oh my.’

  In a house in the south side of the river a telephone rang. It was an old solid carbon-black phone which stood on a bedside cabinet, one of four phone extensions in the vast house, and it rang as it always did with a soft warbling purring note. A man reached a long sinewy arm out from the sheets, and extended it sleepily towards the phone, picking it up before it had rung three times. He spoke into the receiver. ‘Reynolds,’ he said.

  Beside him his wife lay awake, stirred from her sleep by her husband speaking softly rather than by the ringing of the telephone. She lay still. She heard him replace the receiver and slide gently out of the bed, moving lightly for a tall man. She listened as he gently and quietly took clothing from the wardrobe and drawers so as to dress outside the room. He opened their bedroom door and shut it quietly behind him. Only then did Janet Reynolds open her eyes. She knew that her husband had done everything he could to prevent her sleep from being disturbed and she did not wish to disappoint him by letting him know that she had in fact woken. She looked at the luminous blue digits on the clock on the bedside cabinet. It was 02.14. She moaned, feeling a small measure of cause for complaint but largely managed to resist the feeling of having been cheated of sleep. She had retired early, at 10.00 p.m., had fallen asleep quickly and was now awake. She had still had four hours; more than enough for her. If her body didn’t need sleep, it didn’t need it, simple as that, and it was something she no longer felt unsettled about. Once it had occurred to her, as it did in a momentous flash of realization while she was shopping one day, years ago, that insomnia meant she was getting many more active waking hours in her lifespan of three score and ten than the average person, once she had accepted the notion that her insomnia effectively lengthened her life, if not in terms of years yet in terms of measurable periods of consciousness, then it became a privilege to be an insomniac. It was a stroke of good fortune. She was, she told herself, a woman who had everything, a wonderful, successful husband, two beautiful children, a fabulous house and five hours in each twenty-four hours that were hers and hers alone to do with as she pleased. It was, she convinced herself, really a question of attitude. Once she had stopped seeing herself as weird or as being some kind of freak just because she didn’t sleep nights, once she had stopped lying in the darkness turning, tossing, trying to sleep, once she had stopped trying to knock herself out with sleeping pills or alcohol and sometimes, in dangerous desperation, both sleeping pills and alcohol combined, once she realized she could make her insomnia work for her, then from that point her whole life changed. She became more confident, she began to like herself, she went out more and eventually met a man who became her husband and now, in her late thirties, because of the extra five hours a day, not only was she running a home and successfully raising her children, but she had studied for a higher degree at Glasgow University, had learned three foreign languages and had devoured an enormous amount of literature.

  She lay on her back looking at the ceiling, just able to make out the ornamental plasterwork in the gloom. She listened to her husband descend the stair, hiss ‘Quiet!’ as Gustav the St Bernard barked as he entered the kitchen. Sounds, she had noticed, tend to carry at night, even in such a huge house as hers. She heard the gentle ‘clink’ of a teaspoon stirring in a mug as her husband made himself a cup of instant coffee which she knew he would be drinking with the lump of cheese he would be eating. ‘Never,’ Dr Reynolds had impressed on his family, ‘never go out without something in your stomach. Your body is an engine. It needs fuel. Food and drink is your body’s fuel. In winter you keep the cold out with food. In summer keep the heat out with hot, not cold, drink, hot tea is more cooling on a summer’s day than chilled lemon juice, and never drink alcohol if you feel dehydrated.’ And not being the hypocrite in any aspect of his life, she knew that her husband would not leave the house at this hour without a fresh intake of both fluid and food, no matter how urgently the police required his presence. She lay in bed and heard the front door open and shut, the Volvo start up and the whine of the reverse gear as it was backed down the drive and on to the road. She listened as he drove away, first, second, third, then top gear and was again astounded for how long in a still night she could hear her husband’s car. Finally it faded from her hearing. She switched on the light, dressed, went downstairs. She let Gustav out into the rear garden, percolated some coffee and then curled up in her husband’s favourite chair with holiday brochures and planned her family’s winter break: sun or snow? Life’s all right, really.

  Reynolds took the Clydeside Expressway exit from the Kingston Bridge, pulled over, consulted his copy of the street atlas and drove into Finnieston, turning right and left down dark streets until he came across a scene of police activity.

  Minutes later Reynolds looked on horrified as Sussock played the beam of a torch over the mutilated corpse and around the room, the blood on the floor and the walls, the ceiling, good God in heaven there was even blood on the ceiling. ‘How many attacked her?’ he asked.

  ‘Just one, sir,’ said Sussock, switching off his torch. ‘Just one.’ He spoke softly, calmly yet his voice carried as clear as a tolling bell on a still night. ‘I met him once.’

  ‘Well, I can’t do anything here. I’ll have the body removed to the mortuary. I’ll take a few maggots as well.’

  ‘Maggots, sir?’

  ‘Maggots, Sergeant. They’ll help me determine the time of death.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘One other thing. Sergeant, I couldn’t help noticing syringes lying in some of the rooms—the building is probably moving with the AIDS virus. You’d better warn your men to be careful if touching anything sharp—treat syringes, broken bottles, torn cans, old razors, etcetera with the utmost respect.’

  ‘I’ll pass the word, sir. Thank you.’

  The harsh ringing of the phone woke Elliot Bothwell. He rolled over, twisted, curled up into a ball but the phone wouldn’t stop ringing. Eventually he extended a flabby arm and groped for the phone and succeeded in knocking it on to the floor. He searched the floor, feeling with his hand, located the cord and pulled the receiver towards him, taking it deep into the recesses of the sheets. ‘Yes,’ he said. Then: ‘OK, I’ll be right there.’

  He pushed the sheets back, it being high summer he needed no other bedding, and wiped the sleep from his eyes. He rolled out of bed, washed and returned to his room to dress.

  His mother called from her room, ‘Elliot, Elliot…that you?’

  ‘Yes, Mother,’ he said automatically while dressing. He was thirty-six years old, awkward in movement, and bespectacled. He felt gauche in every waking moment and wanted to be married. He wanted that very badly. He
opened the curtains and looked out on to the backs, grey and shadowy, the cats creating dark mounds which moved along the walls and were still again.

  He left the flat, pulling the heavy dark-stained door behind him, went down the common stair still reeking with disinfectant from the previous day’s wash, and went out into the street. A milk-float rattled past. Dawn was rising in Queen’s Park. Elliot Bothwell drove to Finnieston in his beat-up Fiat. By the time he arrived the body had been removed and most of the cops had left. Just two officers remained, one at the entrance of the close, one at the top of the stair outside the locus of the offence.

  ‘It’s all yours,’ said the cop at the top of the stair, ‘and welcome to it.’

  ‘Bad?’ Bothwell shuffled through the doorway, carrying his case.

  ‘Bad enough, friend,’ said the cop. ‘And I’ve to tell you to be careful of any sharp edges—the doctor said the building is probably alive with AIDS.’

  Bothwell muttered a ‘thanks for the warning’ and stepped into the room, where the scene of crime officer had left lamps burning to assist Bothwell’s work. He found that the floorboards, the walls and even the ceiling were stained with a dark brown, almost black substance. He was surprised that the human body could hold so much blood and that it could be spread so liberally. It was as if a bucket of blood had been sloshed about the room. And the maggots didn’t help, fat bloated maggots, crawling about the floor, chewing on the dried blood. He saw that one corner of the room seemed to have been undefiled by blood and bits of gore. He crossed to it and laid his case down. The room was bare of furnishings, no flat surface at all save for the floor and walls, so he decided, dust for prints on the bottles and cans, photograph the fingerprints on the wall, photograph the footprints and fingerprints on the floor, in fact there’s one I can see it from here, get the lamp down low, cast a long shadow…

  To the constable who stood at the entrance of the flat Elliot Bothwell presented a strange figure. Short, overweight, hurriedly dressed, his tie trapping one side of his shirt collar, he ‘bumbled’ about the room, occasionally muttering, comical in an unkind sort of way. If Bothwell was aware of the constable looking at him and concealing mirth he was unconcerned by it. He just got on with his job: looking for fingerprints in dried blood in derelict houses at 3.30 in the morning. It certainly wasn’t everybody’s idea of easy money but it was better than the alternative, that being the job he had previously held as a chemistry assistant in a secondary school. Year in, year out, he mixed the same calm chemicals for a class of adolescents and saw no result except the steady greying of the chemistry teacher’s hair. Then he noticed a post advertised in the Regional Council internal vacancy bulletin: a forensic assistant’s post with the Strathclyde Police, attached to P Division at Charing Cross, was vacant. He applied, got the job, and never looked back. Now no jobs were ever the same. So he still wasn’t paid much but he saw life in all its rawness.

  An hour and a half after Elliot Bothwell had entered the room in the derelict tenement he stood and glanced about him, turning through three hundred and sixty degrees. Done that, that surface, that surface, photographed that, that, that and that. Got that there on the wall, that on the floor, that by the door handle. It was the scene of crime officer’s responsibility to record the locus, the body in situ, the overview, before and after the removal of the body. It was his job as forensic assistant to record the details, the fingerprints, the footprints, the details on which a successful prosecution often depends. It was not his job to identify them, it was his job to lift them, record them, mount them and then pass them on to the next square in the procedural diagram. He was keenly aware that a successful identification of a latent depended on patience and diligence on his part. A smudged lifting, an unswept surface, could mean the grinding to a halt of the police machine, it could mean a killer walking or an innocent man thrown in the slammer. Here, here in this death room, this sweetly smelling, bare-floorboarded, chipped plaster-walled box, where a young woman’s blood had been spilled, here was where he had to exercise his responsibility, just him and him alone. His was a responsibility he found awesome and the more he thought about it, the more awesome it became.

  He tried not to think about it, he just did his job as diligently and methodically as he could. Satisfied that he had diligently and methodically recorded and lifted all evidence there was to record and lift, he knelt down, closed his plastic case and snapped the clasps shut. He’d been able to lift prints from bottles and cans, doubtless belonging to the down-and-out whose home this had been, prints on the wall which might be his too, but the prints in the blood including whole palm prints had to be the prints of the deceased or of the killer. These he recorded with special care. The killer or the killers? Judging by the amount and extent of dark brown substance dried to the floor and the walls and the ceiling, Bothwell felt it would be reasonable to assume the killers in this case to have been a pack of hunting dogs. He’d shot off three rolls of film and lifted an additional six latents with iron filings, spreading the filings over the prints, sweeping them with a squirrel-hair brush and revealing an impression of the fingerprint by dint of those filings which adhered to it. This he transferred on to a roll of adhesive paper. He glanced out of the grimy window. It was getting light with just a few high white clouds to be seen. It would soon be another hot dry day in a hot dry summer. Pretty soon the room would be black with flies.

  Time to go, Elliot.

  ‘Well, it was a frenzied attack.’ Reynolds had switched off the microphone and spoke directly to Ray Sussock. The two men were alone in the room, thankfully, from Sussock’s point of view, free of the presence of the mortuary assistant. On this occasion Reynolds conducted the post mortem without assistance. Reynolds leaned over the tattered and twisted remnants of Toni Durham’s body, resting both hands on the ‘lip’ of the stainless steel table. ‘At a conservative estimate I’d say she sustained seventy to eighty stab wounds.’

  ‘A conservative estimate?’ Sussock echoed Reynolds’s words. The pathologist nodded. ‘Could be over one hundred in fact, anything from a superficial scratch to deep penetration, particularly around her intestines, she looks as though she’s been gutted. Butchered like an animal, probably after all the fight had been spilled from her and she lay dying. You can never get used to this, can you?’

  ‘Never.’ Sussock meant it. Even with thirty years at the coal face of police work, and having seen Jimmy ‘the Rodent’ Purdue’s handiwork before, he still found the remains of Toni Durham a distressing spectacle.

  ‘I suppose that when you get used to it, then that’s the time to give up and breed sheepdogs for a living. Cause of death, you name it, major trauma, multiple lacerations causing massive if not near-total loss of blood, shock, she died the death of one thousand cuts. If you want the coup de grace it could be the puncture of the aorta but that wound could have been sustained after death, there’s no way of telling. In layman’s terms she was ripped open. That’s the long and the short of it.’

  ‘The murder weapon, sir?’

  ‘Well, a knife, narrow five, six-inch blade, one sharp edge; a strong blade because there’s evidence of a ripping motion. Some of the wounds give the impression of her having been mauled by a clawed creature.’

  ‘Time of death, sir?’

  Reynolds shrugged. ‘Ten days perhaps, the decay is well advanced as one would expect from the hot airless room in which she was found. I’ve collected some maggots, there’s a method I can use to determine the probable time of death from those wee beasties, but I would think that their growth would indicate putrefaction of seven days, which would indicate death some two or three days prior to that.’

  ‘I see, sir.’

  ‘Have you made any identification,’ Reynolds asked. ‘I mean, you’re not going to ask the next of kin to identify the body in this condition?’

  ‘I really haven’t thought so far ahead,’ Sussock conceded. ‘Mind you, the relatives may wish to view the body, the head at least. They ha
ve the right.’

  ‘I’m aware of that. I could tidy her face up, shampoo the blood from her hair. The nose and cheekbones have been broken—I can make her clean but I can’t hide the damage. Fortunately they won’t want to see the rest of her body. I can kill the smell for long enough with alcohol. That’s if they want to see the body, or if it’s necessary for them to do so. I would have thought that dental records or fingerprinting would be a more appropriate form of verifying her identity.’

  ‘I think you’re right, sir,’ said Sussock. ‘I think you’re right.’

  He forced himself to look at the corpse, carved open in one hundred places, stiff and rigid, bloated, the intestines hanging out. God in heaven, she was a mess.

  Sussock drove across the city from the GRI to P Division Police Station at Charing Cross. Dawn had broken, an hour to go before rush hour began but already the sky was high and blue. Milk roundsmen whistling in shirtsleeves dropped cartons of milk at the doorways of offices and shops, newspaper vans drove to deserted streets delivering early editions to vendors who waited at their street-corner pitches. He drove along Bath Street, up and over the hump, solid buildings on either side of him, and into the car park at the rear of the police station. He signed in, checked his pigeonhole, went up to the CID corridor to his office and hung his hat on the hat-stand. He left his office and went to where Abernethy sat alone at a desk, his being the only occupied desk in a room of four desks. Abernethy was working a double shift at short notice.

  Abernethy was sifting through the contents of Toni Durham’s handbag, just as hours earlier Donoghue had sifted through the contents of Stephanie Craigellachie’s handbag.