See That My Grave Is Kept Clean

by Douglas Lindsay

  ‘I was sitting on the grave, leaning back against the headstone.’

  ‘Jesus, Hutton.’

  ‘Drinking wine.’

  She puts her hand to her face. There’s something of the Emma Thompson concern about her when she does that – you know, Emma Thompson’s concerned face, she uses it in every movie – and I get to see it rather often from Eileen.

  ‘Not from the bottle?’

  ‘Oh no, I had a glass. Two glasses.’

  ‘You poured Philo a glass.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Did you have a picnic?’

  ‘Just a bag of crisps.’

  ‘Classy.’

  ‘Hey, they were Kettle Chips.’

  ‘Ah, right. Quality. You weren’t naked, were you?’

  ‘If I had been, I think it would’ve been on the news.’

  ‘OK, right, we’ve established the scene. What happened?’

  ‘He was upset.’

  ‘No kidding?’

  ‘No idea how long he was standing there listening. I mean, cheeky bastard, it was none of his business. Then he storms up, kicks over the wine, stands over me calling me a fucking, cheating, marriage-breaking cunt. Those were his words.’

  ‘Cheating, marriage-breaking cunt?’

  ‘Yes. I mean, technically the guy who broke up his marriage was the bastard who killed his wife, not me.’

  ‘Technically. What did you do?’

  ‘I sat and let him rant for a while, then I thought we were getting to the stage where he was going to kick me in the face, so I got up.’

  ‘What was he saying?’

  ‘Oh, you know, the kind of things you’d expect. Who the fuck was I, how dare I...blah blah blah. Called me a cunt several times. I’d thought him a fairly mild-mannered chap, but seems I was wrong.’

  ‘I think maybe he was provoked.’

  ‘Mmm.’ Take another bite of muffin. ‘I didn’t react to him, although I suppose that might’ve made it worse. He was looking for a fight, and he didn’t get it. But it’s a fair cop. It’s just about the most intimate situation in which he’s ever going to find us. It’s the one-of-you-is-dead equivalent of being caught fucking on the kitchen table.’

  ‘How’d it end?’

  ‘Not so well. I apologised, which he didn’t seem keen on hearing. I didn’t apologise again. Didn’t, in fact, really feel like doing it at all by the end, because I have to say he was pissing me off. I loved his wife, she loved me, and he was a pussy. That’s just how it is, it’s not officially my fault. Nevertheless, I have some sympathy for him under the circumstances. But the whining... Anyway, when I wasn’t rising to the bait, he finally pushed me. He pushed me and took a step back at the same time. I haven’t seen someone do that since primary school.’

  ‘And you?’

  ‘I successfully fought the basic urge to fuck him one in the face. Didn’t say anything, turned and walked away. Was prepared to run because I know the shit would’ve hit the fan if I’d got into a fight. I don’t mind leaving the police, as you know, but I’d rather do it with a redundancy payment, than out on my arse.’

  ‘He didn’t come after you?’

  ‘I expect he thought about it, but no. Lets me get so far then shouts, ‘You left your cheap bloody plonk, you bastard!’’

  She laughs again.

  ‘And you know what? It was a Chablis! Fucking Chablis. Cheeky bastard. And he’d kicked the bottle over ‘n’ all, so there was hardly any left anyway.’

  She’s still laughing behind her coffee cup.

  ‘Well, well done for walking away. You took the moral high ground. Apart from the fact you shagged his wife and drank wine on her grave.’

  Nearly finished the muffin. As usual, at such times, one begins to accept it won’t be long before one has to return to work.

  ‘Your teeth look great, by the way,’ I say.

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Makes you look younger.’

  ‘Thanks. That’s what I thought, until Saturday night.’

  ‘Doesn’t sound like she was looking at your teeth.’

  ‘Hilarious.’

  5

  WHEN I GET BACK TO the station Morrow still isn’t as his desk, then I notice him in with Taylor. I’m about to sit down when I get the shout of ‘Hoy!’ from the office. Marginally better than being whistled at. Maybe. Take a second, salvaging some self-respect about being treated like a sheepdog by not immediately responding, lift a piece of paper, toss it back on the desk without looking at it, and then walk into the room.

  Morrow nods at me, Taylor indicates his computer screen.

  ‘We got this from the station’s CCTV footage.’

  ‘What are we talking about?’

  ‘The suicide,’ says Morrow.

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Which wasn’t,’ he adds.

  The usual crappy grey film runs. There aren’t many people on the platform. North side of the station, where the southbound trains stop. Or fly by, incredibly quickly, in the case of the London-bound Virgin trains. There are five people in all. One sitting in the shelter, looking at her phone. Another older guy reading a newspaper standing at the far end. There’s a teenager holding a skateboard. I’m assuming he’s a teenager, actually, because of the skateboard, but who knows? Then there’s a woman standing more or less on the yellow line running a couple of feet from the edge of the platform, her phone in her hand. You can’t really tell just from this footage, but we’ve all seen her. The totally absorbed woman. Headphones in, lost in her own world, music on, either texting or scrolling through Tumblr.

  Fucking Internet.

  Then there’s a guy, walking towards her, just behind, about five yards away. Short coat, beanie, longish hair sticking out from beneath it. The coat and the beanie immediately make him stand out on a warm day like this.

  When the film starts there’s no sign of a train, even though you can see a hundred yards of track, but these fellows come quickly.

  And then there it is, the Euston express, whizzing towards us. When it’s fifty yards short of the station the guy in the beanie comes alongside the woman with the phone, pushes her in the back, and she’s falling over the edge just as the train passes the station.

  Perfect timing.

  Hard to watch something like that and not wince. The first time you see it at any rate.

  It only just happens in frame, so we don’t really see the aftermath. Something flies in the air, and the front of the train and the body are gone, the carriages hurtling past. The guy in the beanie turns, looking after her, shouting. The other three passengers seem to wake up to what’s happened. The beanie guy is pointing after the train, as though alerting people. The footage ends.

  Taylor clicks it back to the start and we watch it again. The same thing plays over, not revealing anything new on the second viewing. It is definitely apparent what we’re watching is no accident, no inadvertent stumble.

  ‘Murder,’ I say, mundanely.

  ‘Aye,’ says Taylor. He clicks the computer screen back to his wallpaper, a dramatic low moon over the Canadian Rockies scene. Very nice.

  ‘What happened to the guy in the beanie?’ I ask.

  ‘Gone gone gone,’ says Morrow. ‘The other three were still there when we got there. They said he was screaming, like, oh fuck, I tried to save her. Said he was going mental. The station guy comes down, but there’s not exactly pandemonium, because by the time the train’s stopped it’s halfway to England it’s going so fast, and there are only the three people, and since they didn’t see anything...’

  ‘Why d’you think he made the fuss if no one saw anything anyway? He had nothing to cover up.’

  ‘Not sure,’ says Morrow.

  ‘Maybe it was part of the plan,’ says Taylor. ‘He was always going to do it to cover himself, and didn’t want to risk looking to see if anyone was watching him. All part of the same flowing movement as tossing her under the train.’

  ‘The driver?’

&
nbsp; ‘Still waiting to speak to him,’ says Morrow. ‘The rail people came in and whisked him off. Said their people had to speak to him first, which I didn’t think was an issue. Didn’t think he’d have anything to tell us. Then I saw this.’

  ‘OK,’ I say, ‘we need to get on to him. Who’s the victim?’

  ‘Tandy Kramer,’ says Morrow.

  ‘Tandy Kramer?’

  ‘Tandy Kramer.’

  Whatever.

  ‘Have we notified –’

  ‘We’re only just getting started.’

  ‘Right, gentlemen,’ says Taylor, ‘time to get into this, all hands. Sergeant, speak to the driver, and don’t take any of their shite. We need to him to talk. Constable, get back down there with a couple of guys, look at CCTV from other angles, speak to anyone you can find, wrap the joint up even more tightly than it is already. Before you go, get me her next of kin and I’ll get round there. And I’ll speak to Ramsay, see who else we can rope in. Get one of the rooms set up. Let’s see if we can get this one someway towards a conclusion before Connor gets to hear about it and has us running in circles.’

  Not entirely impossible. But then, let’s take a walk down to the shops with realism here. We’re looking for a guy wearing a beanie with a wig sticking out from beneath, who then vanished. There’s a decent chance Connor’s going to be dead by the time we even know who we’re looking for.

  6

  8:17 PM, MURDER INQUIRY in full swing. And by full swing, I mean the media has got hold of it.

  They say it ain’t murder until somebody’s dead. It also ain’t murder until there’s a journalist asking you stupid questions.

  Have taken a break with Taylor to come to look at Tandy Kramer’s body. Sure enough, with a name like Tandy, she’s American. Student, studying at Glasgow Uni. We still don’t know what she was doing out our way. Parents back in California have been notified, the father is coming over to collect the body. We’re not really going to need to argue any odds about hanging onto her for any length of time. Cause of death is unlikely to be in question, although of course our good friend Balingol, the most miserable fucker to ever slice into a stiff with a scalpel, has to help out the investigation by extracting everything he can from the cadaver.

  And on this occasion, he comes up trumps, right from the off, and he has more to work with than could have been expected under the circumstances.

  When Miss Kramer hit the train, she wasn’t plastered over the front, like Wily Coyote attached to a bomb or anything. It smacked into her and tossed her aside like a dead badger. Her body landed entirely in one piece, in the trees, about seventy yards further down the station.

  And now, lying there before us, covered bar the head, she looks like she could be sleeping. Apart from the complexion. Her complexion is terrible.

  ‘So, as you can see,’ says Balingol, about to give us a tour, ‘remarkably the head is unscathed. The train caught her in the side of the abdomen. Naturally, though, when you get an unblemished face like this in such a case, there’s an opposite effect elsewhere. Sometimes it might just be on the inside, and sometimes it’s like this...’

  He pulls the sheet away, revealing the crushing of her body. Always have to take a moment when looking at something like that. No blood, no breaking of the skin, just her entire body bruised up to the neck, the abdomen crushed and distorted. One of those injuries resulting in a person being so grotesque and misshapen, it looks like a movie special effect. Like you’re staring at a prosthetic.

  Taylor doesn’t look for long, then indicates for him to pull the sheet back up, which he does, once again leaving the face uncovered. She can be a witness to the discussion.

  ‘So, she was killed by the train,’ says Balingol, getting the obvious out of the way first. ‘There was nothing to indicate she might have had trouble stopping herself falling over. A little alcohol, some indication of marijuana use, but nothing today. Probably last night. What she had been doing today was having sex, and I’m going to say with an older man.’

  I let out an involuntary groan, and the two of them look at me. I catch Taylor’s eye, but don’t say anything.

  ‘Out with it,’ he says.

  ‘It’s going to be one of those granddad porn rings again, isn’t it? Does no one have sex with someone their own age anymore?’

  Taylor, unexpectedly, doesn’t rebuke me for the line, perhaps indicating he’s thinking the same thing, and we look at Balingol for confirmation.

  ‘You can relax,’ he says. ‘I’m thinking maybe forty, forty-five. Nothing too outlandish.’

  Taylor looks back at me, questioning.

  ‘Any thoughts?’

  ‘Still haven’t got anything on why she was in Cambuslang,’ I say, answering the question prosaically, ‘but I guess now we know.’

  ‘Aye,’ he says.

  Heavy sigh, a somewhat deflated, helpless hand gesture.

  ‘Anything else to report?’ he asks.

  ‘She was pregnant,’ says Balingol, with the casual, throwaway tone he might have used to tell us her height.

  ‘Better and better,’ says Taylor. ‘Would she have known?’

  Balingol makes the universal gesture of ignorance, for all the world like he’s an Italian New Yorker or something.

  ‘I’d say four weeks. Borderline. Maybe she did, maybe...’

  And he leaves the rest of the sentence unsaid.

  SITTING IN THE PUB with Taylor, after going back to the station and running through everything we know.

  We haven’t got very far, and certainly tomorrow morning we’re going to be presenting Connor with an unsolved murder, heading as yet in no particular direction, with a list of people still to talk to, and wondering if it might have had something to do with the fact she was pregnant, when the people we’ve spoken to so far didn’t think she was in a relationship.

  Two middle-aged, tired police officers in the pub. Just like the old days. We don’t do this so much anymore, but Taylor must have decided he needed to wind down. Asked Morrow if he wanted to join us, but he excused himself. It might just have been me, but I couldn’t help thinking he had a look on his face to say, ‘On you go, granddad, I’m hitting the cool bars.’

  More likely, he’s probably going home to study for his sergeant’s exam, whilst eating salad.

  ‘If it’s voluntary, are you going to apply for it?’ asks Taylor, breaking into a five-minute silence.

  ‘Redundancy, you mean?’

  ‘No,’ he says, dryly, ‘the free rectal exam that’s going round.’

  ‘Funny.’

  Long sigh.

  ‘I’ll look at the terms,’ I say, ‘but you know, it probably doesn’t matter. That would just be giving myself more time to make the decision.’

  ‘What would you do if you left?’

  Take another drink, listen to the great sound of the ice in the glass, although it does herald the need to go and get another one shortly. Taylor’s nearly finished his pint, and I’m hoping he’s not about to hit the road when he’s done.

  ‘Become a football manager,’ I say.

  He laughs.

  ‘Nice. You’re going for that, rather than rock god, gigolo or President of Space?’

  ‘I’m going to use the redundancy cash to do the courses, work my way up.’

  He looks curiously at me.

  ‘You’ve given it some thought?’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘That what you’ve been doing while you’ve not been sleeping with women?’

  ‘One of the many things.’

  ‘Well, at least you’ve got a plan,’ he says. ‘More than I can say. So what sort of manager are you going to be? Brian Clough or Ally McLeod?’

  Drain the glass.

  ‘I’m going to be a civilising influence on the world of football.’

  He laughs.

  ‘It’s not like it doesn’t need it,’ he says. ‘Go on.’

  ‘The trouble with football is, it’s full of fucktards. Diving and whinin
g little bastards with their tattoos and their stupid fucking haircuts, moaning at the referee, mobbing the referee, faking this, cheating about the next thing. And then when they score, you can tell they’ve spent more time in training perfecting their fucking dumbass, thumb-sucking, baby-rocking celebration than they did controlling the ball or passing to one of their own fucking teammates. But why do they do all that shit?’

  ‘Because they’re wankers?’

  ‘Because they’re empowered by their managers. That’s where it starts. I’m going to be different. Day One, I’m getting rid of everybody on the team. Everybody. I don’t want anybody there who’s not one of my people. Then I’m going to bring in my own people. Youngsters I can mould. I’ll civilise them. Tell them there’ll be none of that shit. Soon as I see any of them do it, they’re off. They’ll play with dignity. They’ll be no drinking during the season. My team won’t be about how they look, with the hair and the boots and the whatever, but how they play the game. We’ll do the training in the morning, and then in the afternoon they’ll do stuff like learn French, play chess and practice kung fu techniques. I mean, for the meditative, life balance aspects, rather than the kicking shit out of people. It’s good for overall health and fitness.’

  ‘Great plan. Who are you managing here? Real Madrid, or a team of ten year-olds at a boarding school, who are going to have no choice?’

  ‘Thought I’d start with Cowdenbeath or Albion Rovers. Someone like that. I’m going to create a new breed of thinking, balanced footballer. They’ll be like Jedis. They’ll be able to feel where opponents are, they’ll be able to seek out teammates with a long through ball without even looking up. But more than that, they’re going to be decent, non-fuckwitted, sensible lads, playing a fair game. We’ll be successful, our guys will go to other clubs, and this dogma of decency and fair play will spread. I’ll be remembered as the man who civilised football, and society along with it.’

  ‘Fine words for a fucked up, sex addicted, chain smoking alcoholic. I’m sure you’ll inspire a generation.’