by Alex Gray
He heard his name spoken aloud, the words punctuated with a question mark, words spoken by the taller of the two men outside his door. They stood with polite expressions on their faces, betokening something other than the usual salesman trying to offer double-glazing or a new kitchen. And the other one, gazing keenly at his face, told him that it wasn’t the Mormons either. Besides, he knew exactly who they were. One of his neighbours, passing the ground-floor window, had caught sight of him then made a face, pointing a thumb upwards and mouthing the word, police. So he’d had to open the door to them after that. It just wouldn’t do to avoid being part of the normal run of things.
‘Strathclyde Police. We’re investigating the death of Julie Donaldson,’ the taller one said, flipping open his warrant card for him to see.
‘Terrible business,’ he replied, making his brow as furrowed with concern as he possibly could. ‘What must her parents be going through?’ he murmured, letting his voice mimic the words he’d heard over and over since the day the girl had been declared a murder victim.
‘Did you know the family, sir?’ This from the other one, who now nodded in the direction of the street where the tenement flats stopped and the row of terraced cottages began.
‘No, afraid not, but one can only imagine. .’ He gave a sigh and shook his head.
‘We’re trying to find anyone among her friends and neighbours who might help,’ the tall one explained, turning to leave.
‘If only there was something I could do.’ He smiled bleakly and sketched a small wave as he went to shut the door.
Once inside, he leaned against the door as if to keep them out. He listened as their footsteps faded away, taking them towards the close mouth; he must have been the last one in the tenement close to be door-stepped.
Julie Donaldson. He’d seen her photograph staring out at him from the front pages of every newspaper, from the TV evening news, from the homepage on his laptop. Julie Donaldson, a fifteen-year-old girl he’d met in Royal Exchange Square, not Juliet Carr, a student who’d leapt at the chance to take a film test.
His heart thudded within his chest. What were her parents going through? He’d asked but in truth he had never wondered about them, these anonymous people who lived just along his street. Had he ever met them? Somehow he couldn’t make himself care about these faceless parents.
‘See thon religious fella,’ Arthur Pollock began. Then, as he caught the look his wife shot at him, Arthur’s sense of self-preservation seemed to kick in and he ended his statement in a mutter before slugging the last drops of beer from the can.
‘We were hoping you might tell us a bit about your niece,’ Detective Sergeant Cameron said, trying to keep the disapproval out of his tone. What a man did in the comfort of his own home was none of his business; if Arthur Pollock wanted to drink himself stupid during daylight hours then that was his affair. Still, it was something to bear in mind, that and the reference to Eric Chalmers. Cameron hadn’t missed the man’s words. They were still looking for whichever vigilante had attacked the Chalmers’ home and the small man sitting opposite him fitted one of the descriptions Ruth Chalmers had given the police. But that could come later. What Cameron wanted now was something that might give a lead in this case.
‘What do you want to know, Sergeant?’ Mrs Pollock asked.
‘Information about Julie: who her friends had been, what her hobbies were, that sort of thing.’
‘Oh, we wouldn’t know things like that,’ the woman told him, shaking her head. ‘I mean, we’re a close family, but teenagers. . well, you kind of get out of the habit of seeing them at that age, don’t you?’
‘What was she like?’ Cameron tried again.
‘Oh, lovely girl, wasn’t she, Arthur?’
‘Aye, lovely girl,’ her husband echoed, nodding solemnly.
‘Just like her mother, God rest her soul,’ Mrs Pollock continued. ‘Always a wee smile for you, know what I mean?’
Cameron nodded. This was going nowhere fast. He’d seen it all before: the way death seemed to magically transform the personality of the deceased. No one wanted to speak ill of the dead, particularly someone young like Julie.
‘Well, thanks for your time.’ Cameron rose to go but as he was being shown out of the living room, he turned. ‘By the way, you don’t happen to know anything about whoever attacked the Chalmers’ house, do you?’ The Detective Sergeant stared right into Arthur Pollock’s face and the way the man’s eyes slid away told him he’d got it in one. He’d be coming back here again if there was any sort of evidence to bring a charge.
Mary Donaldson folded the towels neatly and laid them to one side. Hands trembling, she sorted through the other washing: Frank’s working trousers, her own overalls and the garment that had brought these sudden tears to her eyes, a pair of Julie’s skintight jeans. They’d cost her the best part of a week’s wages, Mary remembered. She and Julie had not quite come to a quarrel over them on the first floor of Fraser’s, the girl wheedling and complaining that everyone else had jeans like that; did Mary want her to be the odd one out? Mary had bitten her lip and given in as usual. Seeing Julie’s glee, however temporary, had been a relief compared to the huffiness that seemed to permeate the entire household whenever her stepdaughter had been thwarted. Now, sliding her hands over the dark blue denim, Mary would have paid a king’s ransom for the bloody things if it would have brought Julie back to them.
A wave of helplessness engulfed her; Frank would never be the same man again and she was more than ever an outsider in this marriage, Julie’s ghost haunting them from now till eternity.
What did happen after death? Was it all bright lights and a feeling of never-ending peace? They’d talked about it once, over dinner, just after Julie had come back from that Scripture Union camp. The girl had returned home full of a sort of joy in her spirit, Mary recalled, singing round the house, talking about all the things they’d done at camp. Being with that young man, Mr Chalmers, had brought the best out in the girl, Mary told herself. Then it had all changed again after Mr Wetherby had walked out on his family. Sam didn’t believe in God, Julie had admitted to them, and Frank had told his daughter not to shove her own beliefs down their throats. The poor folk had enough to upset them as it was. And, to give her stepdaughter her due, Mary thought, she had tried to be a good pal to the Wetherby lassie and her big brother.
So where was she now? Somewhere floating out there, invisible and in a different place from them all? Or lying cold and still in Glasgow City Mortuary, no more than the leftovers of a human being?
S4 was Maggie’s last class before lunch and, as the bell rang, she stepped quickly towards her door, ready to lay a hand on the girl’s shoulder before the mad dash to the school canteen took them all away.
‘Can I have a wee word with you, Samantha?’
The girl looking up at her English teacher was a shadow of her former self, Maggie thought with a sudden shaft of pity. Always slim and neat, Sam Wetherby looked as if she’d lost pounds in weight. Her thin face, accentuated by the curtain of long dark hair, had the sort of appearance one associated with heroin addicts: the bone structure a mere skeleton covered in bluish skin. For a moment Maggie’s resolve almost left her.
‘Can you spare a few minutes, pet? I wanted to talk to you about Julie.’
The hanging head and heaving shoulders were enough for Maggie to close her classroom door and to lead the girl gently over to her desk. Out came the box of Kleenex and then Sam was noisily blowing her nose and gulping for breath between tears that were streaming down her cheeks.
Maggie wanted to take the child in her arms, comfort her somehow and tell her in soothing words that everything was going to be all right. But it wasn’t. It never could be and the only comfort Maggie would be able to offer was the possible closure on her best friend’s death once her killer had been caught. So she would do her bit in this investigation if she could, starting with Samantha.
‘Take your time, love,’ she began. ‘I o
nly want to help.’
CHAPTER 30
The forensic biologist lifted up her head and smiled. That was better. One hair from the mass of evidence bags was caught between the two prongs of her tweezers, a brittle reminder of a life that had been snuffed out years ago. The mortuary might have the skeletal remains but the grave itself had yielded up much, much more. This hair, for instance, showed that this girl had been naturally dark-haired, but examination under the microscope had given away the fact that the hair had been repeatedly bleached to make it several shades lighter. But that wasn’t all the scientist had to make her smile.
When the report was finally typed out to send to the SIO, she would have a lot of satisfaction writing up the details of what flora had been discovered in and around the crime scenes. The usual specimens like rosebay willow herb and several species of fern were already there in abundance, cross referenced against the sort of soils found in the woods, but there had been a rogue among the traces taken from all three of the women’s graves. One that might have gone unseen, had it not been for her meticulous and painstaking work. Soil sifting had uncovered seeds from a species that simply didn’t exist in or around the park. Ulex europaeus, the thorny, yellow-flowering gorse, was more at home in acidic sandy heaths than in the dark shadiness of a place like Dawsholm Woods. Difficult to distinguish from whin or broom, but for someone who had made a study of these particular plants, well, the woman from GUARD knew exactly what it was she was looking at. The pods had burst on a hot dry day, probably in high summer, she thought absently, already composing the report in her head, though the plant actually can flower all throughout the year. Was this a clue as to where these victims had been prior to being killed under the shadow of these trees? Perhaps, but that wasn’t her job to find out. Once her report was done, she’d be happy to know how the triple murder investigation progressed, even to the extent of preparing herself to become an expert witness for the Crown.
Humming softly, the biologist laid aside the hair sample on a clean Petri dish, a vision of a hillside aglow with the prickly, evergreen shrubs and their acid-yellow flowers.
‘When gorse is out of bloom, kissing is out of season,’ she murmured, remembering the old saying.
Suddenly she had an image of a man embracing a woman just moments before he put his hands around her throat. And the sharp thorns of the sweet-smelling gorse seemed to be reminders of what pain could be inflicted even in a moment of pure, unadulterated pleasure.
‘They were possibly all taken for a walk by their killer before entering Dawsholm Woods,’ Lorimer told the team.
The faces that looked back at the SIO showed tell-tale signs of weariness; too much overtime, too little sleep and a withdrawal from the normal routine of family life took its toll on officers after a while. So any new information that helped push things along was welcome.
‘Forensic results show that both of the unknown victims were killed at a time of year when the weather was probably hot and dry; the gorse seeds in the grave soil are not native to the crime scene but may have been taken there on their clothes or shoes. And the seeds would only have been present at a time when the pods were ready to split open, again probably summer. We’re not known for hot dry days in Glasgow at other times of the year,’ he added wryly. ‘Now we’ve been given a proper sort of timescale for the women’s deaths; we know that Julie was killed in mid-August, victim number two was likely murdered last summer and the remains of our third woman have been dated as having been killed three years ago. Obviously they can’t be exact, but the soil evidence does point towards a similar sort of time.’
‘School holidays,’ someone murmured.
Lorimer’s head jerked up. The implication was clear: Eric Chalmers may well have had the opportunity to carry out these murders. But there was another consideration as well.
‘There is the possibility that all three victims were of school age,’ he told them. ‘Forensic examination identifies the bones as being young adults. So far we haven’t found any missing persons of that age who fit our two unknown victims.’
‘Might have been school leavers,’ Alistair Wilson offered. ‘They aim to go to college in another city then disappear off the radar.’ He shrugged. ‘It happens all the time.’
Lorimer nodded. ‘It certainly is a consideration. And that narrows our focus to a certain age group. More paperwork, I’m afraid,’ he said to a chorus of groans. ‘Find out who went missing around these times, concentrating on girls from sixteen to twenty. Then maybe we’ll come up with names to put to these,’ he pointed at the pictures of two sets of skeletal remains that adorned the wall, ‘and figure out just what happened to them.’
Lorimer gave each member of the team the benefit of his penetrating blue stare as he swept his eyes around them. ‘We have less than a fortnight to come up with more evidence,’ he told them. ‘After that, unless we are making real progress, we’ll be faced with the prospect of a review team coming in to crawl all over us. And I for one don’t relish that idea. So let’s find out who these girls really are.’
‘Kyle Kerrigan? That’s not the lad. . Oh, it is him. How strange,’ Rosie Fergusson mused as she listened to her friend’s request. The Fourth Year boy, the one whose own father had been convicted of murder, wanted to become a forensic scientist. Cathartic or what? Rosie thought, her natural cynicism asserting itself. But Maggie Lorimer sounded keen for the lad to pursue this notion and was asking Rosie for help.
‘Okay, why not?’ she decided. There was nothing to lose and maybe it would actually help the kid find closure from his friend’s murder. Something of Solly’s subject must be rubbing off on me. Rosie grinned as she flipped off her mobile. She’d have to speak to Dan, clear it with the mortuary supervisor, but it shouldn’t be too big a problem. A wee trip around the place might succeed in putting the boy off any romanticised notions he had about studying pathology. But was that what Maggie had in mind?
Kenny Turner looked down at his hands as soon as he saw the photograph. Hiding his blushes, Maggie told herself.
‘Quite a stunner, wasn’t she?’ Maggie remarked quietly. Only a brief nod came in response and, as she watched the boy’s reaction, she could see the heaving shoulders that told her he had begun sobbing. Silently she passed him the box of Kleenex tissues and waited until he’d blown his nose and gathered his emotions together.
‘Were you two a couple, then?’ she asked softly, her tone full of sympathy.
Kenny gave a brief, watery smile and shook his head. ‘I wish,’ he replied, meeting Maggie’s eyes for a second before looking down again. ‘There are a lot more better-looking guys in school than me. Anyway, she couldn’t see past Chalmers, could she?’ The voice that trembled with tears took on an edge of bitterness. ‘I mean,’ Kenny lifted his acne-scarred face and raised his hands towards it in a gesture of despair, ‘how could I compete?’
Maggie tried not to smile back. Young love could hurt so much and a teenage lad’s self-esteem might easily reach rock-bottom when he had been rejected in favour of an older man. And if that man had been Eric Chalmers, with his film-star good looks and natural charm, well, Kenny was spot on: how could he compete with that?
‘But Julie liked you, didn’t she? I mean, her expression in the photo. .’
Kenny’s mouth twisted into the semblance of a grin but his eyes were full of regret. ‘Ach, she put it on for anyone, Julie did. Not camera shy, know what I mean? Fantasised about being something she wasn’t.’
‘She flirted with you?’
Kenny snorted. ‘Mrs Lorimer, surely you knew how Julie was? She flirted with everything in trousers. Oh.’ His face fell suddenly. ‘I shouldn’t be talking about her like that, should I? Not now she’s dead.’
‘I think it’s more important to tell the truth about Julie than to mouth mere platitudes, don’t you, Kenny?’
‘Suppose so. Truth is, I really fancied her. Loads of the boys did.’
‘But did any of them act on their feelings, d’you
know?’
The boy shrugged. ‘Not so far as I know. None of the ones in Scripture Union did, anyway, or at least not that I could see. And I was around her most of the time at SU camp. I’d have noticed something.’
Maggie took a deep breath before asking her next question. ‘And Mr Chalmers? How did he behave around Julie?’
Kenny Turner sat up a little straighter at that, his hands suddenly clasped firmly together. ‘He didn’t do anything to Jules,’ the boy replied, his face losing any trace of his usual jaunty smile. ‘How can anyone say a bad word against him?’ Then a frown appeared on his brow as another thought dawned on the boy and he looked straight at his teacher as he asked, ‘Do the police think he hurt Julie?’
Maggie winced then, before she had time to respond, Kenny’s eyes narrowed.
‘Anyway, that’s all a load of crap what she said about Mr Chalmers. Julie was going out with a guy from her own year, wasn’t she?’
‘She was?’
Kenny looked at her pityingly. ‘Didn’t you know, then? And you’re their Year teacher as well.’ He paused as Maggie looked at him expectantly.
‘Julie was going out with Kyle Kerrigan.’
Maggie watched as the door to her classroom closed behind Kenny. His parting remark was still making her heart thump uncomfortably within her chest. Earlier, her chat with Samantha had meant a lot of listening as the girl spilled out her feelings between bouts of crying. She’d not believed her best pal at first and now she was racked with remorse, for surely Mr Chalmers must have had something to do with Julie’s death? She’d lifted a tear-stained face to Mrs Lorimer, expecting some kind of reassurance on that score, but Maggie had given her none, except to say that Sam would come to terms with things in time and that it was important to let the process of law take its course. She’d been surprised at the venom in the girl’s voice, though, as she’d countered that particular remark.
‘It won’t bring her back though, will it? She’s dead and whoever killed her will rot in jail if they find him, but they won’t take his life away, will they?’
