In My Time Of Dying: DS Hutton Book 5

by Douglas Lindsay

  ‘No!’

  ‘Do you know who did kill Mr Lord?’

  ‘Of course not!’

  ‘Guess what? We don’t either. So, you know what we have to do? Investigate every aspect of Mr Lord’s life until we find out who did kill him. And this is us, investigating his life, because you may be outraged at the suggestion anyone would want to kill him, but he’s dead, slashed to death, every inch of his body covered in cuts, chunks of skin cleaved off, so much blood it pooled beneath his body, so much blood it poured through the ceiling and dripped onto his wife’s face.’

  His eyes are wide, he swallows, he backs off a moment, a slight look of panic crosses his face, and then Acting Assistant Secretary Anderson bends over and vomits into his mug of coffee.

  The mug is still two-thirds full. Coffee and vomit splash over the floor. Kallas, having seen it coming because she’s more or less Wonder Woman, had already taken a pre-emptive step away, and so avoids getting either coffee or vomit on her clothes. Me, I’m not so quick thinking. I mean, what kind of lame-ass fuck vomits at the mention of blood and chunks of flesh?

  The second heave just sends vomit over the carpet, but from the point of view that this is entirely about me, there’s already vomit all over my trousers.

  Jesus.

  12

  ‘I do not think Mr Anderson vomited to avoid answering any more questions.’

  Kallas and I are standing on the beach. Bright day, chill in the air, yet barely a breath of wind, looking out over a flat calm to Arran, the hill of the Holy Isle before it. The tide is high, the beach at its narrowest.

  No wind? In Ayrshire. In October.

  How can this be?

  My life is a lie.

  ‘Yep,’ I say. ‘We can look into those other names he gave us, the quick entry club, but I don’t get any particular feeling about it. Feels more likely we’ll get something from the list of Lord’s playing and dining partners.’

  ‘I believe so too. You did well not getting out of the way of his sick,’ she continues. ‘He was embarrassed that he vomited on you, it made him more agreeable to giving up information.’

  ‘I didn’t do it intentionally.’

  ‘I know.’

  She nods, then she turns and starts walking away from where we parked the car. I wondered if she might allow me a quick breath of air, but she seems happy to embrace the sea for a little longer. Obviously not anticipating anyone else getting murdered in the next couple of hours.

  She slips her shoes off, and suddenly, out of nowhere, she’s walking barefoot in the sand, which seems utterly incongruous. Here I am, in a suit and shoes, dull as ever, except I no longer have my suit trousers on, because they’re washed through and damp in a bag in the boot, while I’m wearing a pair of random breeks a steward at the club dug out of lost property.

  ‘I miss the beach,’ she says.

  ‘You grew up by the coast?’

  ‘We lived on the outskirts of Tallinn. Every weekend we would go to Pirita beach. In the winter the sea froze, not so far out as it used to, and they say it barely freezes at all anymore, but you could walk on the ice.’ A moment, then she adds, ‘You had to walk quite a way on the ice sometimes before you could go swimming,’ as though that’s a normal thing to say.

  I give her a glance.

  ‘You used to swim in the Baltic in the middle of winter?’

  ‘It is not really the Baltic. Tallinn Bay. Very shallow by the beach, a very different sea climate.’

  ‘But there was ice.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So, it was freezing. Literally.’

  ‘When you go swimming every weekend, your body is used to it.’ She walks on. Her sergeant looks at her like she’s mental. ‘I miss that. And the feel of sand on my feet. I swim in the Clyde every weekend, but it is not the same.’

  I give her the appropriate look. Who, in the name of all fuck, swims in the Clyde every weekend?

  She stops, staring out to sea. There’s snow on the top of the Arran hills, just a dusting, no more, but beautiful nevertheless. And so I stop beside her, and we stand there long enough in silence, that I finally switch my brain off, and I stop thinking about the case, and I stop thinking about swimming in ice water, I stop thinking about being thrown up on and pouring wine down the sink, I stop judging other people, and I stop judging myself.

  High clouds going nowhere, blue sky, the sun glinting off the flat sea, the sound of waves treading lightly upon the beach, and every now and again the cry of a gull, the ululation travelling far in the still air, bringing tales of lands beyond Arran and Kintyre and Islay, away across the ocean, far beyond the horizon.

  The sounds of the sea blend with the stoppage of time, that impossible concept, to create a vacuum. Everything slows to nothing.

  Maybe it’s just for a minute. Maybe it’s half an hour. I lose track, and then it’s gone. Time is gone. Like falling into a deep sleep and waking up at what the clock says is only twenty minutes later, but what feels like an hour, a day, a lifetime later. Who decided that interval was twenty minutes?

  ‘The first day is always the worst in this kind of case,’ says Kallas suddenly.

  The words penetrate slowly, like the six a.m. alarm call, and from nowhere I’m dragged back to the beach, and the sea, and the cry of the gulls.

  ‘This kind of case?’

  ‘We usually know. Straight off, we know. But in this one, where we have little to go on, then we must first put together the pieces of the victim’s life. So, here we have family, we have friends, we have business, we have money, we have golf, the church perhaps, and we have lovers. There are myriad roads, but we can only start discarding some of them when we know which ones we should be following.’

  I nod. Nothing else to say to that. In fact, it seems kind of weird that she said it at all, because it didn’t need to be said.

  Hmm. It’s like space-time was inverted or something while I was daydreaming. We’ve come out of that, and she’s talking unnecessarily and I’m not responding, because there’s nothing that needs saying.

  ‘We shall divide calls when we get back to the station, and then later this afternoon we should get the team together. Maybe you could message them, let them know. Room C, five o’clock. Sorry, it is beneath your position, but could you check if the room is available?’

  ‘Sure.’

  Beneath my position. Jesus, Taylor never said anything was beneath my position. Kallas is beginning to sound like a keeper.

  She glances at me, nods and almost smiles in that kind of confirmatory way of hers, then she looks past me along the beach, and back along in the other direction.

  ‘The beach is deserted,’ she says, and I can’t help glance in either direction to confirm this assertion, another line that seems kind of pointless. I don’t even know who she is anymore.

  ‘I will go for a swim,’ she says.

  She places her shoes in the sand, takes off her jacket and lays it neatly down beside them, then she starts to unbutton her white blouse.

  ‘You may want to look away, although I do not mind if you do not,’ she says.

  What is happening? I mean, is this what happens in Estonia normally? You’re just walking along the beach with women, and suddenly they’re whipping their clothes off and diving into the sea?

  I can’t stop looking at her. She did say she didn’t mind, after all.

  ‘I don’t expect you to join me,’ she says, as she removes her slim, calf-length trousers, ‘that would be inappropriate. You will watch my clothes.’

  Camisole off, now she’s left wearing the smallest pair of knickers in the catalogue and a white bra. I can hold them for you, if you like, comes into my head, but really, I’m more or less struck dumb.

  Then she removes her bra, slips the panties off, and places them neatly on top of the small pile.

  Holy shit, she’s gorgeous. Slim, small breasts, long hair tied up, pale pink lipstick. She smiles in an I’ll be off now, I think this has gone well ki
nd of a way, and I suddenly imagine her swimming out to sea, not stopping, cutting round the bottom of Arran and Kintyre, hoofing it out to the Atlantic and never being seen again.

  She starts to walk naked into the water. The Clyde, sports fans, is not warm this time of year. That, to be honest, applies to all times of the year. From the back she looks stunning. That is as close to the most perfect naked body I’ve ever seen in my life.

  And then, without fuss or screaming, short, loud, gasping breaths, or any palaver whatsoever, she eases herself into the sea, and swims away from shore with a smooth breaststroke, her head above the water.

  No one, absolutely no one, saw that coming.

  13

  Kallas is by the whiteboard, and there are five of us around the table. Me and Eileen Harrison, dragged into the investigation because really this has the potential to throw so much shit at the fan, DC Ritter, and Constables Ablett and Milburn.

  Kallas has drawn up the board with immaculate neatness. Two pictures of Harry Lord in the centre, the before and after, and around it the areas of his life which she identified previously as requiring investigation. Friends/family, work/money, lovers, outside interests including, but not necessarily limited to, golf and the church. There is already a line drawn from golf to work/money.

  ‘Covid,’ I say, as she pauses, her back turned to the room.

  ‘Yes, of course,’ says Kallas. ‘Mask season,’ she adds, as she’s writing Covid. Neat, ordered words written as though placed by a computer’s hand, then she turns to the room.

  ‘You were investigating his family, Emma?’ she says to DC Ritter.

  Ritter has a slight build, shoulder-length dark hair tied back, pale, slender face. There’s something insignificant about her, as though she could make herself invisible if she wanted. Perhaps she’s in the room sometimes, sitting across from me at the desk, and I don’t even notice.

  I heard she was making an arrest at a pub a couple of months ago. Not breaking up a fight or anything, she’s a detective not a beat copper after all. She was arresting the landlord, who’d been working some sort of scam selling under-the-counter booze and pocketing the cash. I don’t know the details. The tough guy did a runner. Well, he tried to do a runner. Ritter rugby tackled him before he got to the door, he threw a punch, she took it on the cheek then broke his nose with the palm of her hand.

  Her pale face was lit up by a bruise for a few weeks, but the arrest was witnessed by a couple of our guys, and the word was out. Insignificant? Not a bit of it. Ritter’s tough as fuck.

  ‘Yes. The eldest, Liam, is in his final year at Edinburgh, reading history. The daughter, Bethany, is a second-year psychology student at Durham. Liam came home yesterday, Bethany came up this morning. I spoke to them both. They have that teenage reserve... I know, neither of them are teenagers, but they haven’t moved on yet. The teenager is still inside them. I’d say they were largely brought up by the mother, a little more detached from the dad. He and the boy used to go to Ibrox, seven or eight times a year. They had sport in common, that was all. Went to Twickenham last year to watch American football, went to the Open a couple of times, Murrayfield a couple of times.

  ‘The daughter seemed a little more distant. Tough to say what their relationship was. Nothing in common with the dad. She doesn’t play sport, she’s interested in K-pop, Buzzfeed Unsolved and Love Island.’

  ‘Any hint they were unsurprised the dad had been murdered?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Any sign of malice towards the dad?’

  ‘No, not malice. They were both reserved, like I said. But you never can tell, perhaps the reserve was one of them nervously covering up complicity. Guilt. Though it would be possible to feel guilt about his death, while having had nothing to do with it.’

  ‘Nothing brings home the pain of an incomplete relationship with a parent than the parent dying,’ tosses in Harrison, and Ritter nods.

  ‘Any other family members we should know about? Anyone resentful of Harry Lord’s money?’

  ‘There’s a brother. I didn’t get to talk to him today, meeting him after breakfast tomorrow. Lives in Hamilton, works from home. Writes some sort of romantic fiction. I don’t know any more yet. Mrs Lord said that Harry had set him up in a house, you know, bought him a house. Beyond that, they don’t appear to have had much of a relationship.

  ‘The brother has no family. Harry’s mother is dead, has been for some time, his father had been in a nursing home up the Clyde Valley. Not far from Garrion Bridge. He died in July. Suspected Covid, but one of those that never made the official statistics.’

  ‘July? The same time as Harry and Victoria had symptoms?’

  ‘Yes. And they did see him in the weeks before he died.’

  Kallas nods. I can see her thinking, and they still didn’t isolate.

  ‘Perhaps that will be relevant. We should hang on to that information. That is good. Any other family connection of which we should be aware?’

  ‘That’s all I’ve got for the moment. I’ll let you know in the morning how it goes with the brother.’

  ‘Good.’ And now she looks at Ablett, eyebrows raised.

  ‘Constable?’

  Ablett, tasked with trawling the Internet for all things Harry Lord, glances at her notes, takes a moment, nods to herself, and then starts speaking.

  And so it goes, the round table, round and round, the investigation kicking in to gear.

  NINE-THIRTY, HARRISON and I still at the station, sharing a Domino’s pizza, drinking Coke Zero. We’re likely not going to do any more work, but we wanted the chat, and what were we going to do if we left here to get something to eat? Sit in a bar? Sit in a house? Sit in the presence of alcohol? With words unspoken, we stay at work to break bread and chew the fat of the day. And not for the first time.

  ‘How are you coping?’ she asks, with something of a mischievous look about her.

  I sigh a little, take a bite of Extra Spicy Meat Feast Bonanza, or something like that. No idea what it’s actually called. Give her the eyebrow as I look at her, take a drink of Coke.

  ‘How d’you mean that, exactly?’ I say, finally. She’s smiled at me all the way through.

  ‘All these women. The men of the station have gone, stage left, and in their place... women, everywhere. It’s like you’ve been beamed onto the set of First Wives Club. Or Mean Girls.’

  I’m still giving her the eyebrow. Take another bite of pizza, this time getting a nugget of kangaroo.

  ‘I mean,’ she continues, ‘I hadn’t even thought about it. People are just people, ‘n’ all. Then I was sitting at the round table, and there’s me and you and the Inspector and three female constables. And the boss is a woman, and the pathologist. The victim might be a man, but that means there’s a widow, and even the minister you went to talk to is a woman.’

  ‘And my mum,’ I throw in, ‘don’t forget her.’

  ‘You’re surrounded by them,’ she says, not letting me away with being glib. ‘And weirdly, as if you’ve landed on your own personal fantasy planet, most of them are pretty attractive.’ A beat, then she smiles. ‘Not as nice as me, obviously, but there are some good-looking women in your life now. Wide span of ages to choose from, too.’

  ‘Are you finished?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she says, smiling, ‘think I might run with this one for a while.’

  ‘Really? The boss thinks I’m addicted to sex...’

  ‘You are.’

  ‘OK, so how is you taunting me with all these women any different from you whipping a bottle of vodka from your desk drawer and insisting on me having a swig?’

  Well, there goes the smile, and she nods.

  ‘Brutal, Sergeant,’ she says. ‘But effective.’

  Can’t help smiling, taking away any notion that I might actually have been serious about that, and she shakes her head.

  ‘Anything to report from your romantic getaway to the seaside,’ she asks. ‘You two talk up a storm in the car?�
�

  ‘Conversation was... sporadic.’

  ‘I’m shocked. Did you get ice cream and walk barefoot in the sand after you’d been to the golf club?’

  Can’t help smiling again, and she perks up. ‘Ooh, this sounds interesting. Go on.’

  Take a moment, wondering how to frame it. Don’t want to sound too gossipy, or judgy, or anything really. It was just a bit weird.

  ‘The inspector said she missed living by the sea. Said she used to go swimming, every weekend, year-round, in the Baltic.’ Harrison shivers. ‘And she says she goes swimming in the river every weekend now.’

  ‘The river?’

  ‘Clyde.’

  ‘Where it runs through Uddingston?’

  ‘Yes.’

  She stares blankly across the desk.

  ‘So, we’re standing there for a while looking wistfully at the sea, then she takes her clothes off and goes for a swim. Just for a couple of minutes. Then she comes out again.’

  Harrison is giving me the appropriate, wait what? look, then she says, ‘Wait, what?’

  ‘So, that happened.’

  I shrug.

  ‘She took all her clothes off?’

  ‘All of them.’

  ‘She went swimming naked, at Troon beach, in October?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Did you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Were you tempted?’

  ‘No. Even if I had been, she told me just before she got in that it would be inappropriate for us to swim naked together.’

  ‘This is the weirdest thing I’ve ever heard. Was there anyone else around?’

  ‘Beach was deserted. I think that was why she took the opportunity.’

  A beat. The next hundred questions formulate on Harrison’s face.

  ‘Did you watch?’

  ‘She said she didn’t mind if I looked at her, it was of no concern.’

  ‘So you looked at her?’

  I shrug apologetically.

  ‘I guess there was some part of me wanted not to, but...’

  Another moment, then she says, ‘And?’