See That My Grave Is Kept Clean

by Douglas Lindsay

  There’s rarely a day when it sounds like a bad idea. At the moment I don’t feel horribly depressed. Just dead. Just like it wouldn’t matter.

  I wonder if I can go back and see Philo today. Will she have forgiven me yet?

  Probably not. And she might not have approved of last night either.

  Run into Sgt Harrison at the coffee machine. We smile.

  ‘You look better than anticipated,’ she says.

  ‘I shaved and drank three flagons of water.’

  ‘That’ll be it.’

  ‘You managed to put yourself together all right too.’

  ‘Same routine,’ she says. ‘Minus the shaving.’

  The coffee machine spurts and coughs and gargles. It’s kind of a pain in the arse listening to it sometimes when it’s other people standing here getting a drink, but I like it when it’s me. I suspect everyone feels like that.

  ‘Thank you,’ I say.

  I wondered if there’d be some awkwardness this morning. I mean, it was made for awkward, after all. Eight hours ago we were sitting together on a sofa, legs touching, naked from the waste down, masturbating together to lesbian porn. That’s not the kind of thing one generally does with one’s best bud. I don’t think. Anyway, it was a first for me.

  It was an innately tough situation, of course. Because there was Eileen, naked, turned on, very horny, and right next to me. At that point, I wasn’t caring she was a lesbian. I was drunk, and I’d have given anything to be able to fuck her. Eileen, though... Well, she’s a lesbian. The thought of having sex with me would be on a par with the idea of me having sex with Morrow or Taylor. And that, my friends, is something no one wants to think about.

  So I did my thing, and Eileen did her thing, and beyond the pressing together of the legs, nothing else happened. Which was weird, right enough, but on the other hand, it means we’re standing having a nice chat this morning over the coffee machine, and I like her even more than I did yesterday, rather than the alternative, which would have been the two of us barely speaking to each other again, which is the case with me and virtually every other woman in this place.

  ‘That’s all right,’ she says. She knows what I’m thanking her for. ‘You too.’

  The coffee machine spits and gurgles. We stand in companionable silence.

  The warm feeling of early morning coffee machine good humour lasts all the way back to my desk, and then, as I sit down, I see the next e-mail in the series.

  He brought you Have you worked it out yet? He followed that with the record-breaking If you work it out, I’ll stop, and the one the critics loved, You seem stressed. Relax. Maybe turn on the news. Something I prepared earlier. Now, in conjunction with Microsoft and whichever fucking server he’s using this time, the cunt who’s messing with your shit brings you:

  The first one didn’t quite work out the way I intended, so I had to do it over. That’s all.

  That’s all.

  The boss is in his office, but that’s not my first move. Lift the phone, straight on to the transport police. I have the number sitting there from having called them the previous day.

  I get the same guy in the same office in Glasgow.

  ‘It’s Detective Sgt Hutton, Cambuslang...’

  That’s as far as I get.

  ‘I was just about to call you,’ says the constable whose name I don’t recall, the same sense of urgency in his voice.

  THE FRESHNESS OF MORNING has yet to disappear. The sky is grey, but the clouds high. The sun will appear at some point, and soon enough this freshness will vanish, and the day will be just another mild to warm miserable, crappy day in the west of Scotland. With a chance of rain.

  Victim number six of the week lies dead on the tracks, in a small siding near Dalmarnock, train tracks all around, but most of them obviously no longer in use.

  Head severed.

  She’d been dressed in black, and tied to the tracks. Interestingly, though, not in the traditional old western movie way. Her body had been pinned down, perpendicular to the track, with her head placed in between the two rails, her neck tied down onto a single rail. When the train came slowly along, as it would have done so close to the end of the line, the wheels ran over her neck, but not the rest of her body. She would have died instantly, and then the repeated running of sets of wheels over her neck eventually decapitated her.

  She looks no more than twelve years old, which makes this even more shit and, of course, even more newsworthy.

  ‘So what happened,’ says Morrison, the guy who seems to be in charge around here, ‘is that Big Mac would have run over the girl’s neck –’

  ‘Big Mac being the driver of the train?’ asks Taylor.

  The guy gives him a bit of a, well it’s not a fucking burger, mate, look.

  ‘Obviously he’s going slowly at this stage, so he’s like that, notices something, notices, you know, like a blip on the line. But it’s late, he hasn’t seen anything. And it’s... you know, this is the kind of thing that happens, you know. Branches on the line, you know. People just use train tracks as fucking dumping grounds, man. We get all sorts, man, all sorts of shit on the lines. Those people, you know the jokes they make, leaves on the line, the wrong kind of rain...’ Shakes his head, spits. ‘They should fucking see it, man, see the shit we have to put up with. Fucking tampons, fucking everything, man.’

  ‘And Big Mac’s over in the office?’

  Morrison turns and looks over at the small grey building, the windows dirty and cracked, paint peeling on the frames.

  ‘Aye. The other guy’s talking to him at the moment.’

  The transport police are all over the place, including the inspector who’s going to be in charge of the investigation. He’s already spoken to Morrison, before passing him onto us. Now he gets Big Mac before we do.

  Morrison looks like the kind of guy who’s going to be happy speaking to anyone. The television crews will be along shortly, and he’ll speak to them too. He’s probably already thinking about how this will play on Facebook.

  ‘So, as a murder, it was intended to cause minimum disruption,’ I say. Not asking any questions, just trying to keep focused. ‘Middle of the night, no rail services affected, she was tied in such a way the train driver would barely notice he’d run over anything...’

  ‘Never seen that done to a young girl,’ Morrison throws in, as if that’s going to help anyone, as if he’s seen it done to adults and pet dogs. Just never a child.

  ‘Thanks,’ says Taylor, ‘we’ve got everything we need now.’

  Morrison looks surprised, grunts, glances at me, then turns and walks away. He pauses, wondering how he can possibly regain the initiative of the situation – he is supposed to be the one in charge, after all – and then decides it can best be done by sticking his nose into the Big Mac interview.

  Taylor and I look back down at the scene, as officers start to place the tent around the victim. Last look at the sad, bloody, mangled face, and then she’s gone. We step away from the edge of the track and look around.

  ‘Tell me what the e-mail said again,’ he says.

  ‘The first one didn’t quite work out the way I intended, so I had to do it over. That’s all. The ‘that’s all’ was his.’

  Taylor lets out a long sigh, hands are thrust into his pockets. The tent continues to go up, and he turns away, looks up at the sky. Head back down, stares around the grim surroundings of post-Commonwealth Games Dalmarnock.

  ‘You know the worst thing about this,’ he says. ‘We’ve been here twenty minutes already, and we haven’t asked if anyone knows who she is. She’s a young girl, she’s dead, and her identity barely even matters. She’s just another victim, we presume, of whoever’s been killing people this week. Does it matter if she’s a runaway, whether she’s a kid on the game, a junky, a Ukrainian refugee, or the daughter of some stockbroker living in Bearsden? We won’t care, will we? It won’t be us telling her parents. She’s just another victim along the way, like the unidentifie
d woman in the basement, like the victims of the Plague of Crows...’

  Another mumbled curse.

  ‘Fuck it, let’s get back to the station. Get Morrow in, get our heads together, try and sort out where this fucking thing is going.’

  We stare down, one last time, at the scene of the crime, now covered by a white tent. For a moment one of the SOCOs holds the entrance to the tent to the side, and we get a final look inside at the girl, her head bloody and crushed, lying detached in between the two rails. A single eyeball, slightly removed from its socket, looks up at us.

  28

  WE’RE SITTING IN THE small room we’ve set up for the investigation. Just Taylor, Morrow and me. Taylor has cleared the whiteboard on the middle of the front wall and written simply: The first one didn’t quite work out the way I intended, so I had to do it over. That’s all.

  None of us are sitting down, we’re not in a teacher/pupil formation.

  ‘So what could it have been that didn’t quite work the first time round?’ he says. ‘What’s different this time?’

  Well, we may not be sitting in your classic teacher/pupil formation, but clearly our business is going to be conducted along those lines, except in this case the teacher doesn’t know any more than the pupils.

  Maybe that’s usually the case. I certainly thought it often enough. Especially with that prick Herring.

  Concentrate!

  ‘On Tuesday he shut down the line,’ says Morrow. ‘Caused massive disruption, all day. This time it looks like he went out his way to make sure that didn’t happen.’

  ‘Yep,’ says Taylor.

  He writes disruption on the board.

  ‘However,’ says Morrow, just before either Taylor or I say it, ‘he would surely have known on Tuesday it was going to cause disruption when he pushed someone onto the line in the first place. It was never not going to cause disruption.’

  Taylor adds a question mark.

  ‘The same goes for the driver knowing what happened,’ I say. ‘This time the driver didn’t realise he’d killed anyone, but again, when our guy pushed someone in front of the train, the driver was always going to see it.’

  Taylor writes driver unaware, again adding the question mark.

  ‘This victim is a young girl,’ says Morrow, ‘but again, the previous one obviously wasn’t, so that surely wasn’t an example of it not working out right.’

  Taylor writes young girl, again without comment and again adding the question mark.

  He clips the lid back on the marker pen, taps it against the fingers of his left hand.

  ‘This one was much more visceral,’ I say. ‘I mean, there was a lot more blood, if not the actual viscera.’

  Taylor unclips the lid again, writes blood on the board. This time there’s no immediate question mark.

  ‘That could be it,’ Morrow says straight away. ‘I mean, he would have expected there to be blood the first time, wouldn’t he? Someone pushed in front of a train, you’d think that’s going to be pretty grotesque, yet she kind of bounced off.’

  ‘She did,’ says Taylor.

  Another moment, then he looks at the two of us, away from the board. A small, hopeless movement of the shoulders.

  ‘Why would he want there to be blood? Why would it be a problem if there wasn’t any blood? Enough of a problem he’d need to go to all the trouble of killing someone else?’

  Morrow doesn’t have anything. I immediately start thinking of Clayton. Could this really have been him? Taylor and I were with him yesterday evening. While we came back to work, and I ended up slinking home and drowning myself in wine and porn, did Clayton immediately head out and arrange this? Did he already have the girl locked up somewhere?

  For those kinds of questions, we really need to find out who she was and establish how long she’d been missing.

  ‘You’re thinking about Clayton,’ says Taylor. ‘Don’t worry about that.’

  Morrow glances at me then looks back at the board.

  ‘Whoever this is,’ says Taylor, ‘he’s given us a clue to what’s going on, and we need to work it out. He said he’d stop if we did. And yes, it sounds like Clayton, I know, just the kind of fucked up shit he’d come up with. But whoever it is, maybe they’re playing to some sort of code. Maybe they really do stop if we work it out.’

  ‘But there wasn’t blood with all of the others,’ says Morrow, ‘that’s the odd thing. Obviously there was with the double beheading, but the guy who was knocked out and pumped full of crap? I mean, there might have been a little blood, I don’t remember. But there definitely wasn’t with the woman left in the basement. And it’s not as though that one looked like it might not have gone to plan. It was... meticulous in its planning.’

  Taylor turns back to the board. We all look at the single word up there, the one without a question mark against it. Blood.

  ‘Could be he wants to see blood, but the woman in the basement wasn’t one of his,’ says Morrow.

  ‘He sent me the here’s one I prepared earlier text,’ I say.

  Morrow grunts.

  Taylor thrusts his hands further into his pockets. Takes a pace or two to the side.

  ‘I feel like it’s right there,’ he says.

  Taps himself on the side of the head, hand goes back into his pocket.

  Knock at the door, Constable Ablett sticks her nose into the room.

  ‘Call for you, Sir. A Dr Brady?’

  Taylor snaps his fingers.

  ‘The shrink,’ he says. ‘Right, I need to speak to her, so we’ll just leave this for now. But don’t... just, you know, keep this in mind, let’s think of something.’

  He leaves the room, Morrow and I follow.

  Back out into the open plan, the usual hum of activity. Morrow goes straight to his desk, I stand looking around. Sunday morning, most of us still clearing up the remnants of whatever business came our way the night before, ninety-seven per cent of which will have been alcohol-related.

  On the far side of the room DI Gostkowski is talking to Constable Adams, leaning across the desk pointing something out on an image on the computer screen. I watch her, not really thinking anything in particular. Mind wanders. Finally manage to shake myself out of it.

  Back to the desk, look around at the paperwork, stare blankly at the screen, an almost unconscious check to see if there are any more anonymous e-mails, and then I pick up the phone to this agent of Clayton’s.

  Sunday morning, not really expecting to get anywhere, but the phone is answered immediately.

  ‘Hey.’

  She’s young. Everybody’s getting to sound too bloody young.

  ‘I’m looking for Davina Rockwell.’

  ‘You’ve found her!’

  Jesus, she sounds enthusiastic about just being who she is. How utterly depressing. Immediately I know my voice will plummet several points on the enthusiasm scale to compensate.

  ‘This is Detective Sgt Hutton, Police Scotland...’

  ‘Right. Thought you sounded Scottish. Cool... Wait! Yes, yes, of course, you sent me an e-mail. I meant to call you, just totally snowed just now off the back of London.’

  ‘London?’

  ‘The Book Fair.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘Complete bedlam as always, and I don’t just mean the amount of work. And this year it seemed even more bonkers than usual. I mean, God, it was like seven weeks ago now, and we’re still chasing our tails. Seven weeks! Anyway... let’s see, I’m just bringing up your e-mail. Wait for it, wait for it...’

  Fuck. It would be nice if everyone on the planet was in their forties and sensible. That’s probably asking too much.

  ‘Ah, yes, of course, you wanted to talk about Michael Clayton’s memoir. Awesome. Did you want to make an offer, because we haven’t actually gone out yet?’

  ‘What?’

  I’m looking down the phone at her like she’s an idiot.

  ‘I wondered if you wanted to make a publishing offer?’

  ‘Of
course not,’ I say, feeling rather good about myself for not peppering that very short sentence with the word fuck. ‘I’m from the police. Why would I make an offer?’

  ‘Well, that’s what the police usually do.’

  To be fair to the girl Davina, she sounds like she’s looking down the phone at me like I’m the idiot.

  ‘What is?’

  ‘When someone who’s been the victim of police harassment is writing a book about it, the police often offer alongside publishing companies. Obviously they’re looking to tie up the rights to the book to prevent publication.’

  ‘No they don’t!’

  ‘Sure they do. Happens all the time. The police bid is always included. Usually serves to push the price up too. We love it.’

  ‘Police Scotland doesn’t have that kind of money,’ I argue. She’s got me believing her, though, even as I argue the point.

  I can see the shrug at the other end of the phone.

  ‘Far as I know it was brought in as a money-saving measure,’ she says.

  ‘Jesus, what? I don’t understand.’

  ‘If someone, some innocent victim of police harassment, and let’s be honest, they are, frankly, legion, is about to publish a memoir, frequently you’ll find the police going to court to stop publication. Invariably they’ll a) lose, and b) end up with an enormous legal bill. Somebody, at some point, no idea who, decided it was more cost effective to buy up the book, put in some clause about the author being unable to publish his story in any other form anywhere else on the planet, then they stick the manuscript in the same warehouse they put the Ark of the Covenant at the end of the first Indiana Jones.’

  I let the phone drop a little, and stare across the desk at Morrow. He gives me a inquisitively raised eyebrow, then realises I’m more just idly staring into space, and once more bows his head to whichever part of our business he’s currently working on. Phone back up to my ear, elbow on the desk, forehead planted into the palm of my hand.

  I hate the police sometimes. I hate the fact this shit happens, and not for a moment do I think she’s pulling my chain.