Glasgow Kiss

by Alex Gray

  Irvine was right beside him now. ‘Get on the radio, will you?’ Lorimer asked. ‘Put out a description of Russell. He can’t be that far away.’ Then he stopped, biting his lip as he made a mental map of the area. ‘Tell them he’s possibly heading in the direction of Dumbarton Road or back up to Jordanhill.’

  Immediately Irvine turned away, the radio already at her lips.

  Lorimer was back in the main living room now, looking out of the window fronting Crow Road. They had only the merest details about Adam Russell so far – a single photograph from Jessica’s camera that might be anyone. It would be nothing short of a miracle if he was spotted in the next few minutes.

  Straightening up, the DCI looked more closely at the room. It was something he had learned to do early on in his career as a detective. Reading the homes of people could give all sorts of clues as to their character as well as what they liked, and how they lived; things that might lead to building up a fuller picture.

  Everything in this room was old and worn out: the furniture was in a state of collapse, the curtains at the window looked as if they hadn’t been washed for years and as he put out a hand to shake the grey material, a cloud of dust rose into the air. Above him a pleated plastic lampshade hung at an angle, its edges nicotine-brown. There were burn marks on the carpet and worn patches near the edges of the chairs and settee. Lorimer moved towards an ancient sideboard, a cheap-looking piece of furniture that had a pair of ornate tarnished handles on either door.

  Pulling them open, he saw a mishmash of boxes sitting on top of a pile of table linen crammed up against an old sewing box, loose threads spilling from its bulging sides with a pile of papers pushed into the remaining space. Some of the boxes looked as though they had been there for decades, the cardboard curled at the corners and several layers of sellotape binding them together. Fingering them, he could feel how thin and papery the tape had become over the years and he guessed that these might have belonged to Russell’s parents. He’d start with them first. A label attached to the top of one box lid gave the address of a Glasgow department store long gone, the watery blue writing underneath addressed to Charles Russell Esq. Opening the box, Lorimer saw a heap of black and white photographs, reminding him with a pang of a similar cache stowed away in the attic of his own home, family stuff to be sorted out on the promise of a rainy day that had yet to come. His mum had always insisted on writing people’s names on the back with pencil, he remembered, turning the first photograph over in his hand.

  It was a portrait of a young woman looking towards the camera, sitting rigidly upright as if fearful that the felt hat decorated with a plethora of fruit and flowers might slip from her head. A studio portrait, he thought, seeing the sepia-coloured stamp on the back and the pencilled words, Wedding day, 1946. Russell’s grandmother, perhaps? Lorimer sifted through the rest, searching for an image of Adam Russell, something more up to date, though with the advent of digital photography anything he found here would still be a few years out. And he hadn’t noticed a computer in any of the rooms.

  Lorimer flicked through the heap of photographs, discarding them into the box lid, until he came to one that took his interest. It was a colour photograph of a small child wedged between a man and woman sitting on a beach towel. He turned it over to see the words, Ardrossan, 1984. He turned to look at the people on that beach, frowning. If it hadn’t been the Russells themselves, other names would have been pencilled in, wouldn’t they? And it fitted. Adam Russell had been born in 1979 so the little boy in the picture would have been about to begin school. He was smiling into the camera, hands clasped in front of him as if someone had instructed the boy to strike a pose. His parents (Lorimer assumed) had their arms around one another, little Adam squeezed between them, and were staring at whoever it was that had been taking the picture. The man had the look of someone who had been ill: the skin on his face hung from a slack jaw and the eyes were red-rimmed. The woman, however, was quite the opposite. A florid-faced female with ample bosoms rolling out from her print dress, Adam’s mother exuded the sort of jollity that Lorimer associated with naughty seaside postcards.

  He put the photograph to one side, sifting through what was left of the pile.

  ‘No joy, sir. They don’t think there’s sufficient description to identify him anyway,’ Irvine said, coming into the room.

  ‘Okay. Look, I want to see if we can find anything while we’re here,’ Lorimer began, looking up at his detective constable. Seeing the worried expression on her face he added, ‘We’ll have a search warrant by the end of play today. Russell must have seen us coming. He fair got off his mark. So until we catch up with him, I’m not about to waste a chance like this. See if you can find a computer or a laptop anywhere. Okay?’

  Irvine’s anxious expression was not lost on the DCI. She didn’t like anything that wasn’t strictly by the book. Lorimer grinned to himself, remembering the first time he’d seen one of his own senior officers take liberties with the rules.

  There! Lorimer picked up a photograph of an older Adam Russell and held it carefully between his fingertips. He was looking at a young man in his early twenties, Lorimer reckoned, turning to see what was written on the back, but for once the paper was blank, no date to verify the man’s age. Russell was standing on a pavement, his back against a black metal railing, part of a red sandstone building visible behind him. To his left Lorimer could see the edge of what looked like an academic gown and part of a man’s dark suit. And though the photographer’s own shadow was cast over the picture, he could read an expression of irritation on the man’s face as if he’d been a reluctant subject; in fact, one hand was slightly raised as if he had thought about obscuring his features from the camera. He was wearing a dark grey lounge suit and a white shirt, though the tie had been loosened and the top shirt button undone. Lorimer’s eyes fell again on the building and the railings, something gnawing at the edge of his mind. Then he had it. The Barony! It was the building near to Glasgow Cathedral where students from the city universities held their graduation ceremony, he remembered. Was that the reason for Russell’s apparent displeasure? He’d not graduated with his peers yet he’d gone along to see their success. And he’d kept that photograph. Why? Was it a reminder of what Russell himself had failed to achieve? Lorimer sat back on his heels, wondering. A graduation photo would have been something to have put on top of this sideboard by proud parents, but there were no framed portraits at all, just this box of snaps all mixed up together.

  There were a few more photos of Russell, showing a younger man in various poses, but none as striking as the one beside the Barony, nor as recent. But it was good enough to show to the girl in Maggie’s Fourth Year, just to confirm his suspicions that she had been stalked by this man. Lorimer rifled through the pile of photographs, almost discarding one of a class group taken in a school hall when something about it made him pause. That shield on the wall above the boys and girls standing facing the camera: he knew what it was. Holding the photograph a little way from him, Lorimer took a deep breath. It was the main hall of a place he’d been in very recently – Muirpark Secondary School. And if there was a group photo, perhaps there would also be a single one of the boy in his uniform? Sure enough there was a colour snap in a brown card frame of a young boy of around twelve, his blue eyes staring intently at the photographer.

  Slipping all three photographs into his wallet, Lorimer walked out of the room to join Irvine in the search for a laptop. If they found one, it could be a big help. He had a sense that some of the pieces in this jigsaw were beginning to fall into place. But right now they needed more clues about the missing man and where he could have gone.

  CHAPTER 38

  It was never quiet here, but that was all right. The rumbling from the Glasgow Underground like subterranean thunder reminded him that there were others, like him, deep below the surface of things, travelling into the night.

  It was always night here, the constant darkness a cloak to protect him from prying
eyes. Sometimes the scutter of tiny feet would alert him to the rats whose habitat he shared, but they didn’t bother him and he had no reason to go after them. The tunnel bent away from the daylight after only a few yards, any residual light fading from the slime-covered walls and plunging into a blackness that was thick with soot. Deep within this place, the earth smelled cold and lifeless; denied the essential light, nothing here could grow, not even an etiolated weed searching through a crack in the bricks.

  He was safe. A sigh broke from his chest and he leaned his back against the tunnel wall, reassured to feel its solid surface. In a few minutes he would walk deeper into the tunnel until he came to his secret place, but for now simply being here away from the brightness of the day was enough. Besides, what was happening out there in the world no longer mattered to him.

  Except, a little voice told him, that elusive girl, the one whose lovely eyes haunted his dreams. The one that he still had to find.

  Kyle took the paper in his hand, eyes following the lines of printing, lips parted in concentration. Then he looked up. ‘It’s right enough then?’

  The registrar’s clerk nodded her head, folding her arms across a minuscule bosom in a gesture that still managed to express disapproval.

  Kyle turned away. ‘Right. Thanks.’

  As he walked away from the imposing building there was so much more that he wished people could say, like he’s been a father figure to you or he’s been the one who brought you up, looked after you, but he would never hear anyone utter phrases like that, especially when they were so blatantly untrue. Tam Kerrigan was a thug and a brute. His constant denial of parental care towards Kyle didn’t even give him the right to be called his father, despite the fact that the charade had been played out over fifteen years.

  ‘Wonder who he is?’ the boy muttered, looking down at the words ‘Father unknown’.

  Kyle nodded to himself. Was there someone he could ask? Gran, maybe? And what would he do now, move back in with her? Probably. But there was something else he would have to do first.

  ‘We do have their permission,’ Solly told him. ‘Unusual, I’ll admit, given the patient confidentiality that normally surrounds these cases, but I managed to persuade them that there were sufficient grounds for releasing his entire file.’ He coughed and gave a little smile. ‘Actually it turns out that I know Russell’s psychiatrist. Gave him some help when he was researching a book,’ Solly added.

  Lorimer was sitting beside the psychologist in his West End home, the evening sun pouring through the huge bay windows that looked down over the city. Solly had been busy, it seemed, since they had found Russell’s out-of-date appointment card tucked away in a bedside drawer.

  ‘Adam Russell has been attending this particular psychiatrist as an outpatient for several years,’ he told Lorimer. ‘He was first treated the year after dropping out of university.’ He turned to look into the detective’s sharp blue eyes as he paused. ‘The same year that both his parents died.’

  ‘Ah.’ Lorimer’s eyebrows rose as he digested the significance of that statement. ‘Do we know what happened to them?’

  ‘According to the notes, the Russells were both alcoholics. He’d been treated for depression and she had a heart condition,’ Solly said. ‘They were found dead in their car somewhere down the Ayrshire coast. Let me see.’ He frowned, turning over a page in the document he had laid upon his lap. ‘Yes. Outside a town called Ard-rossan.’

  ‘Ardrossan,’ Lorimer said, automatically correcting Solly’s pronunciation of the word.

  ‘The verdict was suicide. They’d both inhaled carbon monoxide. Hellish thing to lose both your parents like that,’ he added thoughtfully.

  ‘Are you saying that was what tipped Russell over the edge? Living with two confirmed alcoholics can’t have been easy. Maybe the strain of it all got to him eventually.’

  ‘Or perhaps he had a biological predisposition to self-destruction,’ Solly sighed. ‘That’s one of the theories attached to his earlier notes. There was some evidence of self-harming after his first stint as a patient.’ He frowned. ‘My friend confided in me that he’d been a bit suspicious of the patient’s motivation. Wasn’t at all convinced he was the genuine article. Might have been faking it, he said. But that was never actually written down in the notes.’

  ‘How did his referral to a psychiatrist come about?’

  Solly shrugged. ‘No record of that, I’m afraid. We’d have to find his original GP and ask.’

  Lorimer took the file from Solly. The police had been given only the rudimentary facts on Adam Russell on a need-to-know basis but now that Solomon Brightman had managed to winkle out the man’s entire case history they had much, much more to go on. DC Irvine had discovered the laptop shoved under Russell’s bed, its tangle of wires concealed under a dusty sheet. Back in HQ all its secrets would soon be revealed. But now he had to read the history of a man who was out there in the city somewhere, a man who might well be guilty of much more than stalking an attractive teenage girl.

  Eric was praying. The room was still warm from the late afternoon sun and there was a rosy glow washing the cream-painted walls of the nursery. He’d chosen to come up here as a way of being closer to Ruth and Ashleigh and now he was kneeling beside the nursing chair where mother and baby had spent long hours together. Sometimes Eric had come upon them quietly, lingering in the doorway as Ruth sang to her tiny daughter, rocking the chair back and forth, a pang of wonder in his heart that these two people were his family. He’d stand still, listening, before slipping away undetected, leaving them to those special moments that seemed to enclose them in a little world of their own.

  His prayers were for them, of course, and for all helpless creatures that needed the Lord’s protection, a list that went on for so long that sometimes Eric felt a kind of despair at this world with all its ills and troubles. But tonight he must not weaken. He must be strong for what lay ahead.

  CHAPTER 39

  She’d come home late from school, wearied by classes who had decided to act up all afternoon. Sometimes, Maggie thought, it was a conspiracy they all hatched during lunchhour to be as bad as they possibly could. Or, then again, maybe it was simply too many E-numbers wreaking havoc with young systems already full of swirling hormones. Whatever the reason, she was tired and had wanted nothing more than to run a bath and soak away the day’s irritations.

  Chancer had rubbed himself all over her ankles, almost tripping her up until she’d emptied some food into his supper bowl. Now he was washing his orange fur, perched daintily on the edge of the bath, seemingly impervious to the steam that rose from the water’s surface. Lying back into the warmth, Maggie sighed. Jessica had gone to stay with Manda and her parents so that was one less thing to worry about. The day’s events slowly disappeared as she let her thoughts drift.

  Kyle Kerrigan seemed to be a bit happier now for some reason that she couldn’t fathom. He wasn’t the same boy she’d known last session, but then he’d been through so much, hadn’t he? And poor little Samantha Wetherby, Julie’s best pal; how was she coping? Maggie’s lips gave an ironic twist. Why was it she cared so much about the kids in her class? From their point of view, Mrs Lorimer probably ceased to exist once the final bell had sounded every day. Was it because she had never had children of her own? Was that it? Sinking further back into the soothing warmth of the bath, Maggie smiled at her own introspection. Sandie’s tales of her teenage son were designed to be completely off-putting, but a little baby . . . The memory of Ruth Chalmers and baby Ashleigh swam into her mind, the softness of the baby’s downy skin, her sheer vulnerability and Ruth’s protecting arms. That was what she had missed, wasn’t it: the desire to nurture, to care for another human being. Well, teaching gave her that opportunity, didn’t it? And now that she had taken over the Scripture Union club, wasn’t she in a position to look out for the kids a little bit more?

  The vision of Kenny Turner came to her then, making Maggie sit up, the water swishing around he
r waist, droplets streaming off her bare shoulders. Had she been right to delve into matters that were really none of her business? Finding out from him about Kyle and Julie had been a nasty shock. But was this feeling of unease caused by her suspicions about the boy’s relationship with Julie or guilt that she was dabbling in things best left to people like her husband?

  With a sudden shiver, Maggie recalled Eric’s face as she had come upon him that day, Julie tearing away from him. What had that all been about? And were her protestations about the innocence of the tall, handsome RE teacher really justified?

  ‘It won’t do, you know. Your reputation is going to be tainted for ever, let me tell you. And how you can expect to have the trust of parents again is beyond me.’

  Eric Chalmers sat gazing at the tall man in the wing chair whose eyes refused to meet his own. It had been a mistake to come over here, but he had never given up the hope that his father would see things from his point of view. Perhaps this time, he’d told himself, he’d show some sympathy. But as usual none had been forthcoming.

  ‘What do you suggest, then?’ Eric asked, trying to keep his voice as neutral as possible, hiding the thickness in his throat.

  ‘Take your wife and child as far away from here as possible. Start again somewhere else. If that Manson fellow is prepared to give you a decent reference then take up another teaching post. All you’re trained for, after all,’ the Rev Chalmers added, his bitter tone edged with spite.

  ‘Wouldn’t it have been worse right now if I had been an ordained minister?’ Eric asked quietly.

  ‘Hah!’ His father pointed the stem of his pipe towards Eric. ‘For the first time in my life I’m actually glad you never took up the ministry. Just think of the damage this would have done to the Church!’

  Eric sat silently, his eyes wandering over the man who sat before him. His thin craggy features still had a sort of classical refinement about them, though the tilt of his head was more haughty than noble. It could have been a Shakespearian actor sitting there, spouting his fine words. And hadn’t there always been a bit of that in his father? Wasn’t he known for some memorable sermons, words rolling off his lips as if he was inspired. But it had been an inspiration born of a love of the English language and the sound of his own remarkable voice rather than anything holy and sacred, Eric thought with a pang of sorrow. Rev Chalmers’ own reputation was based on a lifetime of Sunday morning performances, rather than any quiet, unseen pastoral work.