‘A bruise from a sharp whack, like maybe a kick to incapacitate him at the beginning, or –’
‘Nope, I’d say there was a slower process than that. There would have been plenty of pain, but it would have been drawn out.’
Let out a sigh, can’t help squirming a little.
‘Plus, there’s further evidence of pain being delivered just for the hell of it. Several cuts through the jaw, right to the nerves of the teeth for example. It was never going to kill Mr Lord off any more quickly, but it would certainly have hurt. I think what we likely had was pain rotated around the body, so that he never quite became used to it in any one particular place.
‘The killer, I think we can say without doubt, was exacting his or her revenge on Mr Lord, and it would have been a very, very painful one.’
She lifts her tea, she takes a bite of biscuit, then delicately licks a crumb off the side of her lips.
17
‘Hi, this is Detective Sergeant Thomas Hutton calling from Police Scotland...’
‘What d’you want?’
‘We’re investigating the murder of a Mr Harry Lord.’
Leave it the requisite couple of seconds to gauge if there’s any reaction. In this instance, nothing.
‘We believe there might be some connection between Mr Lord’s death, and his relationship with the Garrion Bridge care home, where his father died in the summer. Did you have any dealings with Mr Lord at th –’
‘Guy’s a cunt.’
Manage to stop myself laughing. Like I said, I’m here to do a good job, but I don’t particularly care either way how this pans out. On the one hand I find blunt statements like ‘guy’s a cunt’ pretty funny; on the other, laughing out loud isn’t too professional.
‘You knew him at least.’
‘Never met him, naw, but he phoned us up a few times. Always looking to get people jumping on whatever bandwagon he was pushing the fuck out of that week. He moaned about it taking too long to shut down, then the cunt moans about it taking too long to open back up again. And every time he wanted to make some change or other, he’d always try to rope in other people.’
‘Did you disagree with him?’
‘Usually not, to be honest. They bastards at the home did take too long to close down, then they’d fucking still be closed now, if they’d had their own way.’
By way of making the obvious point, I say, ‘Your mother died in August?’
‘Aye,’ he says. ‘They said she had this Covid crap, but I don’t know. She was old, right? I mean, she wouldn’t have been in there if she hadn’t been. They say a lot of people would’ve died anyway, and I reckon she was one of them.’
I nod down the phone. The man isn’t exactly inspiring sympathy, though neither is he looking for it. But there’s nothing to see here, one of those obvious ones. You don’t leave the calling card, and then sound like this guy. Wrap up the phone call, put a red line through the name, no need for a visit, and on to the next on the list.
‘HE WAS A RAT-FACED twat.’
Nice. From what we know of Harry Lord so far, I’d say he sounds far more of a cunt than a twat, it not being a particularly fine distinction, though perhaps the wording is more to do with the messenger than the message.
‘Go on.’
‘There was some cocktail up at the home last year... Christmas, it was Christmas. You know, some families invited, just a bit of an event. Guy was hitting on my wife. I mean, what was he doing? He was at an old people’s home, his own wife was there, I was there, and he was hitting on Abigail. What a twat.’
‘Did he pull it off?’
Couldn’t stop myself.
‘What?’
Don’t get much further with that phone call. Make a note that it’ll likely need a follow-up.
‘CALLED THEMSELVES THE Carluke Cowboys,’ says the woman, amused disdain in her voice. ‘They’d golf once in a blue moon, send each other jokes on WhatsApp all the time. Really filthy stuff. They always had these plans to take over the world. Just an in-joke they’d had since university, all those plans that were never going to happen. Not that it mattered, as they were both so damn rich. It gave them freedom to dream, because it wasn’t like they were failing in not pulling them off.’
‘So they’d known each other since university?’
‘Yep. Thirty-one years and counting. Well... no more counting.’
She swallows, I can see her pulling herself together at the other end of the phone.
Jennifer Royale, wife of one of Lord’s oldest friends, Sebastian Royale. Her husband is dead now, a Covid victim with no obvious underlying health conditions, early August this summer, when the deaths were low. Covid’s mid-career slump, before the autumn reboot.
‘That’s the way it goes, isn’t it?’ she forces across her lips.
‘So, how did it work with the home? Was it Sebastian or Harry who put the other onto it first?’
‘It was always one of those places they’d known about. I don’t think you could pin it to one or the other. But they egged each other on, or perhaps just encouraged each other gently when it came to their parents, and they put their fathers in there within about a month of each other a couple of years ago. I mean... well, I can’t speak for Harry, but Seb could certainly have afforded to set up his father in his own place with live-in help, but he decided dad would be better off with other people his own age.’
‘What did his dad think?’
‘That didn’t really matter with Seb, I’m afraid. I think Harry might’ve been the same.’
‘Did Sebastian lobby the home as much as Harry?’
‘Oh, Harry was always the leader. That was Harry. But Seb would go along, no question.’
The eleventh phone call. I have yet to make a mark against any as being truly worthy of a follow-up visit. It’s hard to tell over the phone, but there’s certainly no time to visit them all. Perhaps, as this drags on from one week to the next, we’ll get around to that. But at the moment, trying to get a jump on the investigation, this will have to do it, and we have to be able to pick up on the slip of the tongue, the inconsistency, the wavering tone.
There’s been nothing.
‘How did Sebastian catch the illness?’
She shakes her head down the phone. I can feel it. Then, ‘We never knew. Who did? Never knew, never will.’
‘Is it possible...’ and I naturally hesitate before planting my foot in it, but, for fuck’s sake, I have to ask the question, and she gives me the space to do it anyway, and then I say, ‘is it possible he caught it from the home?’ which really means, is it possible he caught it from Harry, so in fact, it would sort of be Harry who killed your husband and therefore you, even more than some of these others, would have a motive to kill Harry.
‘That, at least, is one thing that didn’t happen,’ she says. ‘We hadn’t been back there since before it was locked down. We joined in with the argument to get them to open up again, but Seb was travelling a lot at the time. You know, with everywhere opening up at the same time, and businesses not really knowing how long it’d be before they had to shut down again, he was always shooting off around the place. Hardly saw him the last few weeks, and then he was in hospital and... and I couldn’t see him at all.’
‘And you didn’t go to the home?’ I ask, sticking the knife in.
That one doesn’t get an answer, which is all the guilty answer I need. She didn’t go. The care home opened up, neither son nor daughter-in-law visited, then the dad died.
No getting rid of that memory, my sad and desperate witness. You’re fucked. And just as you were coming to terms with your father-in-law dying, unvisited in several months, your husband died. Rather than making you forget how shitty you previously felt, it just added to it, coming on top, compounding the shit, and now you’re buried beneath it.
AND SO IT GOES, ONE awful conversation after the next. Stupidly I blundered into it without much aforethought. But of course, here we are, us bold and uninvited polic
e officers, calling up to open a wound, and to invoke the crime, murder. More than one of the recipients of a call was suspicious, naturally, and few were talkative.
I’ve been doing this shit for thirty years, and rather fancy I’ve got a well-developed grasp of the liar and the thief, the fool and bullshitter. The young ‘uns, though, these constables with barely a year or two behind them, they came back with far more doubts, far more names they thought needed to be followed up, a lot more interviews requiring to be done.
Not surprised. No one wanted to have those conversations. Maybe I was slapdash, too willing to cast names aside, to put down someone’s reticence to ill feeling and depression. But I don’t think so. I’m not saying I’m not useless in all sorts of ways, but in this at least, I know what I’m doing.
18
End of the day. Harrison’s gone, don’t have my buddy to talk to. Domino’s pizza again. I don’t even like Domino’s pizza, but here we are. Me and my desk and a tonne of work and a giant-ass pizza.
We had our end of the day wrap-up, and we all fed in where we’d got to, and the sum total of it is that there’s a long way to go, a million people still to speak to. All we’ve got is a link to the home, but then it’s a link that someone wants us to make, so maybe it shouldn’t actually be a link we’re making at all.
Be wary of shit handed to you on a plate, as some famous detective or philosopher or someone must’ve said at some point.
Ritter’s still here, and Ablett, though they’re both currently in the ops room. My new crush left half an hour ago. I can’t say she looked tired, as she never looks anything. A beautiful portrait hanging in a gallery, the expression forever unchanging.
Kind of glad we didn’t spend too much time together today. From now on, any day when I don’t have to watch her get undressed on a beach will be a bonus. I mean, it was literally the most enjoyable thing that’s happened to me in my life, but God, the whole Troon escapade has completely fucked with my head.
Uh-oh. Incoming.
The Chief leaves her office, light off, starts to head towards the exit, then notices me sitting at my desk. Rats. Same thing happened last night, but she chose not to interrupt Harrison and I. Now that I’m on my own, I’m easy prey. Like the baby elk that loses the back of the herd and gets picked off by wolves.
‘Sergeant,’ she says, by way of starting off the evisceration.
I genuinely haven’t given the woman any thought whatsoever since I so easily dismissed that stupid list of courses she sent me.
‘Everything all right?’ she asks, when I substitute replying with staring dumbly across the desk.
‘Yep.’
‘I know we have a murder enquiry, but really, you should go home, eat at home, get an early night. I expect you’ll be in early tomorrow.’
I have a piece of pizza in my hand, the sixth of the eight, already gone cold, a can of Coke Zero to my left. The pizza is poised. The only thing I can do at times such as this is be honest, which is one hell of a failing.
‘If I eat here, I won’t drink,’ I say.
‘Oh.’
She looks concerned, her brow furrows, I can see her contemplating whether or not she should recommend that I go for emergency counselling, and then she says, ‘Well, that’s a positive start, Sergeant. It’s something. I do think we need to have a much longer conversation than we did the other day.’
‘Oh, I don’t think so,’ leaves my mouth, like a fucking boss.
Slightly taken aback by that unexpected candour – and so, after all, am I – she says, ‘Inspector Kallas is very impressed with your work on the case so far.’
I’ve got nothing to say to that. Just shocked silence, obviously.
She’s not the best when talking to a brick wall, looks kind of awkward, then she adds, ‘You never got back to me about the courses.’
‘Haven’t had a chance to look properly. I’ll, eh... I’ll take a look.’
‘OK, thank you, Sergeant.’ She nods, she runs her management-trained, heavily consulted brain through the past couple of minutes of conversation to see if there’s anything she’s missed, then she says, ‘You shouldn’t work too late. Maybe finish eating, then get on.’
‘Yes, ma’am,’ I say, and she smiles at that, as though I was trying to be funny, and off she goes, home to her new-build, one-bedroomed executive apartment, to have an avocado salad and one third of a glass of Muscadet.
I take a bite of pizza, there’s hardly any of that slice left, so I cram it into my mouth, lick my fingers as I do it, then I’m just taking a napkin to my lips, my cheeks bulging, when she’s standing next to me. We look at each other from two feet, her with that vaguely concerned look on her face, and me looking like Squirrel fucking Nutkin.
‘Sorry,’ she says.
I make a gesture to indicate it’s fine, and that she can go ahead. Wary of swallowing too quickly, so I don’t choke like a dick.
‘That thing I said the other day...’ I give her the wide eyes to indicate I probably know what she’s talking about. ‘It was unprofessional. It did not require to be spoken out loud, it was all about me attempting to impose myself, impose my will, some kind of alpha bullshit. Like I said, very unprofessional.’
I swallow. I make sure to have another elegant dab at my lips with the napkin. I stop myself saying something stupid, and instead go for the measured and respectful, ‘Really, it’s OK. I deserve everything I get.’
She smiles, she touches my shoulder – holy fuck, you’re not allowed to do that! haven’t you done the courses? – and then she turns and is gone, and I’m left to enjoy the last of my cold Domino’s pizza in peace.
Constable Ritter pulls the seat away from the desk opposite and sits down. She stares across at me. Constable Ritter never stares across the desk. She looks tired.
‘Bit of a day,’ she says.
I smile. It didn’t even make my top thousand bit of a days, but sure, it wasn’t the best.
‘Would you like a slice of cold pizza?’
‘You’re selling it,’ she says, smiling. ‘It’s OK. Gina and I are just about to hit Yo-Yo’s. Would you like to join us?’
Fucking hell, what a world. Hitting a bar with Ablett and Ritter. I mean, they’re both the respectable side of thirty years younger than me, that’s a positive, right? If one considers that Audrey Hepburn and Fred Astaire in Funny Face wasn’t creepy as fuck, I’m doing better than that.
And Ablett, in particular, has a way about her. A look.
Stop it!
‘I’m good, thanks, Emma. Just going to finish up here and head home.’
‘Oakie doakie,’ she says, and she smiles and turns away, and I know from the look that she really didn’t want me coming anyway, and I’m so relieved I wasn’t a dick about it.
19
This one struggled a bit more, the GHB not working so effectively from the start, and so the killer had had to employ rougher tactics. A disabling assault on the testicles was required much earlier in the process, a blow to the head, another dose of the drug administered. Naturally, having had to take such precautions in order to get the body safely into position, when it came to it, it proved much more difficult to revive the victim. No point in carrying out the execution, if he was to sleep through it.
In the end, he was roused by the deployment of extreme pain, his killer flaying the skin of his penis. Oh, he woke up then, all right. Eyes wide, consumed by terror. Didn’t know where he was, the strange lighting in the church confusing him.
The killer would have liked it if the victim could have talked. The one-sided conversation was always a little disappointing. One needed a bit of give and take, one needed to know the customer truly understood why they were suffering this mind-fuck of pain. And, of course, if they could talk back, the killer would be better able to understand how much they believed they could talk themselves out of it. It would be funny to listen to their let’s call the whole thing off speech. Once they’d decided that wasn’t working, they might s
witch to threats. A classic of the genre. To be in a position of such weakness, absolute vulnerability, and yet, to act as though holding all the cards. They’ve seen James Bond do it, so it must work, right?
Maybe some time in the coming weeks, the killer thinks. There will be some venue where such a murder can be carried out, the victim given free rein to voice their supine self-pity. And it would be a fun to hear the screams. But not here, in this deserted church, illuminated only by the lights of the streets outside.
David Cowal is tied to the cross that was left behind the altar. It’s not high, it’s not, to be honest, really big enough for a crucifixion. But it serves its purpose, after all, it supports his weight, the blood runs, dark black in this ill light.
‘How does it feel?’
The killer looks at him, standing back, staring at the blood running from the latest cut.
Some of the cuts, many of them, are small by necessity. If one truly wants one thousand distinct cuts in the human body, there’s no other option, particularly when the human body is slight, like this one.
The insignificance of David Cowal. Weak muscles, no fat on him, but not through exercise, not through diet or working out, just by a quirk of his genes. He’d got lucky, never having had to worry about weight. But Cowal never ran, he never lifted weights, he never sat on an exercise bike, he never went anywhere on foot when there was a car to hand, even if it was two hundred yards down the road.
‘You’re practically an American,’ his wife used to say.
She liked the joke. Cowal not so much.
Dead now, Mrs Cowal, so there was no need to hear that joke anymore.
In My Time Of Dying: DS Hutton Book 5 Page 9
