In My Time Of Dying: DS Hutton Book 5

by Douglas Lindsay

  ‘I know,’ says the killer, piercing the skin just beneath the right armpit with the pointed tip of the knife, enjoying the tensing of the muscle, the way the body reacted when the usual outlets were denied it. ‘I’m like a dentist, chatting away with my fingers in your mouth, and you unable to answer. Did you have a nice weekend, and where are you going on holiday, and did you lose anyone in the pandemic...? Such mindless questions. But actually, wait...’

  The killer stops, poised, the knife inserted in the skin, and now drives it in a little further, turning it slightly. Cowal’s muscles strain, his eyes scream, even if his gagged mouth can’t.

  ‘Did you lose anyone in the pandemic? Did you, David?’

  The killer looks curiously at him, trying to think what the tone of voice is reminiscent of. A smile, a shake of the head. Of course, the vicar at the end of Four Weddings.

  Do you love someone else? Do you, Charles?

  Maybe it’s the setting.

  ‘Oh, yes, you did, didn’t you?’

  The knife is jabbed in further, the pain sears across Cowal’s face, his eyes widening. Then the killer presses the knife into the skin, drawing it down sharply as it’s extracted from the flesh.

  The killer stands back. Don’t talk to him anymore. It just gets you annoyed. Annoyance leads to mistakes.

  A deep breath, a quick survey of the work done so far, much of it now obscured behind the mask of dark red blood.

  Still seven hundred and fifty-three cuts to go. There’s no way Cowal will survive as long as Lord. Lord had been tough. David Cowal, however, is small and weak and sad and useless. Funny, then, how the GHB had not had quite the same effect on him. The mysterious ways of the human body.

  There will likely be several hundred cuts administered to a corpse, so more pain will have to be inflicted earlier, even if it means the earlier death becomes something of a self-fulfilling prophecy.

  ‘That’s the way it crumbles, cookie-wise,’ says the killer, the words not really aimed at Cowal, turning to the small stone altar, where a few implements of torture are laid out. The good ones are the ones that cause pain, but do not speed the descent to death.

  Here lies the ninety-nine pence, plastic tub of table salt.

  ‘Very simple. Crude. But you know what...?’

  The killer pours an ample amount into their left hand, holds the hand over Cowal’s flayed penis, and lets the salt pour over the raw flesh.

  Cowal’s body squirms with the pain, his face flushes with it, his eyes pop and he yells, the muffled scream pointlessly juddering to a stop in his mouth.

  The killer watches him, eyes very accustomed now to the low light, no smile on the face, they rub the salt off their hands, and then the knife is lifted, to return once more to the fray.

  ‘Onwards and downwards.’

  20

  Can’t sleep, won’t sleep. A fine attitude from any brain.

  Maybe I just need something to help me switch off. One of those all-absorbing hobbies, where you can’t really think about anything else while you’re about it. I mean, sure, that description applies to masturbation, my usual night time sleep aid, but it never lasts long enough, and one never falls asleep while actually doing it.

  Had a brief affair a while back with a sergeant I met at a thing. A group counselling thing, when they thought I might be suicidal. I mean, they were bang on, I was suicidal. Still am, in my dark moments, though I think we all know I’m probably not going to do it. Not yet. Maybe I just tell myself not yet, because I want to be some kind of edgy fucker, always on the point of putting a gun at my own head. Such a wanker sometimes.

  The woman. We got an Airbnb near Aberfoyle. Three nights. I mean, it was decent enough, perfect in its way, in that we got each other out of our systems. The sex was good, and on the one fairweather day we got a walk up Schiehallion. Not bad up there. But by the end of it we were both ready to move on. And on each of those three nights she did some number puzzle. Not Sudoku, something else Japanese.

  She said it was absorbing, left her just tired enough at some point to turn out the light, and she’d be asleep within a minute every time.

  I was left lying there, those three nights, listening to her breathing. We hadn’t even had sex on the third night. We did again on the final morning, but it was, I don’t know what you’d call it, goodbye sex. Afterthought sex. What the hell, and might as well, sex. She came twice, (unless she was pretending, and I didn’t even care by then), I came once, we showered, we packed up, and off we went. We chatted all right in the car on the way down the road, like strangers stuck on a train, and then I dropped her off at her place, and I drove home, and all I took out of that weekend was doing number puzzles to try to get to sleep.

  So I bought a book of number puzzles, struggled to do one of the easy ones at the start, then never looked at it again. Finally tossed it in the bin a few weeks ago.

  The lesson we learn from this, sports fans, is that you have to find your own thing. Ashley had her number puzzles, and I’ve got my masturbation.

  Didn’t help that I came to bed with feelings of such self-contempt. Came home, made myself a cup of tea, stood at the window looking down on an empty street. The tea tasted weak as shit, and it was nothing to do with taking the bag out too soon. Nothing to do with anything, except a young officer had fake invited me to a bar, and the greater the distance it got from the invite, the less fake I persuaded myself it had been, and so I stood there talking myself into going. Tasting the alcohol, seeing the effects of the drink in their eyes, spinning my bullshit stories, reeling them in. Thinking about Ablett, thinking there might be possibilities.

  Got that feeling in the back of my throat.

  Got my shoes on, got to the door, checked the time as an afterthought.

  It was more than two hours since Ritter had extended the fake invitation. Two hours. Ritter and Ablett? You know, I’m sure they can have a far better time in a bar than I can, but on a Thursday evening, at the start of a major murder investigation, in the middle of a pandemic, there’s no way they were still going to be there.

  Now all I had was me turning up late at a bar, it having shut early, or it being not kicking the arse off closing time, in order to slam back a couple of vodkas before I got booted out, and then I’d be stopping at an off licence on the way home, drinking on my own until five a.m. and then going in to work, feeling as goddam awful as I looked.

  I boldly, and bravely, turned my back on the night, took my shoes off, tossed my jacket on the floor, and came to bed. And though no one else had witnessed my own trial and ultimate triumph – boo-fucking-yah – I felt utterly pathetic for even having started down the road in the first place.

  Since then I’ve been lying here naked, staring at the night, lost in a fug of depression. Or, you know, that poetic melancholy Kallas mistakenly thinks I possess.

  Don’t think about Kallas.

  21

  A morning of phone calls. Hello, this is the police about your dead mum, just checking whether or not you yourself might harbour a grudge against a man named Lord, to the extent that you would slice the shit out of the guy, slice ‘im ‘til he’s dead?

  No?

  Sorry to trouble you. And sorry for your loss.

  Next!

  This morning, there’s one woman who just straight out tells me to fuck off, then hangs up. Nice move. Trouble is, you have to call back. Have to. Even though you know – because of that honed gut instinct of yours that everyone talks about – that this is the most genuine call you’ve had all morning, and that this person really, really doesn’t want to talk about her dead mum to anyone, least of all you, you insensitive police prick, you just can’t know for sure. Because, of course, if you killed Harry Lord, and then out of nowhere you got a phone call from the police, wouldn’t the cleverest thing be to act like the very idea of it really upsets you?

  I mean, we know the killer telegraphed the connection between Harry Lord and the care home, so the bastard wants us to call h
im. He wants the challenge. He started the game, the last thing he’s going to do is throw us off when we come calling. He’s going to play until he’s caught, that’s who he is.

  Nevertheless, when someone tells you to fuck off, you have to dial straight back, even though you may want to fuck off just as much as the person on the other end of the phone wants you to. I finally got to say that at the third attempt, after pointing out that if she didn’t speak to me, I was going to have to go round there. And no one wanted that.

  Ritter’s out on a call, not sure where, or whether it’s related to this – after all, we’re still living in a shitshow of crime, it’s not like the merry-go-round stops for the murder investigation – and now Detective Inspector Kallas takes Ritter’s seat at the desk opposite.

  ‘How are things this morning?’ she asks, as ever, straight to business.

  ‘If we’re trying to be positive, I’m happily knocking the names of potential suspects off the list.’

  ‘Have you placed anyone on the list?’

  ‘Everyone’s on the list until they’re taken off.’

  ‘Yes, very good,’ she says. ‘Have you investigated anyone who you subsequently left on the list?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Very well. I have a list of Harry Lord’s most recent lovers, as well as more significant lovers from the past. It is not comprehensive, and of course, if it was one of his former lovers who killed him, why place the mask on the door of the home, other, obviously, than as a distraction? Nevertheless, we are sadly still at a stage where we do not have any idea why or by whom Harry Lord might have been killed. So this we do, because we can.

  ‘I prefer that we take these interviews together, as it is always good to get both a male and female perspective. However, given the current urgency of the situation, I think it might be better if –’

  There’s a phone ringing across the office somewhere, and Kallas obviously has the spider sense to know that it’s coming from her desk, even though all the phones sound the same.

  ‘Excuse me.’

  She lifts Ritter’s phone, presses a few numbers, says, ‘Kallas,’ in that way of hers that makes those two syllables sound the most efficient use of language anywhere in the world, and then she stares at me across the desk as she listens.

  Uh-oh.

  She’s not the only one with spider sense.

  ‘I will be right there. You will mobilise?’ She nods, she’s saying ‘thank you,’ as she’s hanging up the phone.

  ‘It would appear that this thing is not just limited to Harry Lord.’

  ‘Another murder?’

  ‘Yes. You will come with me.’

  And up she gets, her eager and trusty manservant in her wake.

  THE OLD ABANDONED CHURCH up on Stewart Street. Here we are, out in force, the road blocked off, public allowed no nearer than a hundred yards. A few of them gathered at the tape, but people have got used to not going anywhere, not assembling anywhere, and so the crowd is much sparser than it would’ve been in the past.

  The church was put into mothballs a few years back. I’ve no idea why the building wasn’t sold, I expect we can get into that. It’s an Episcopalian Church. The Church of Scotland sell their buildings off for biscuits, soon as they can get rid of them, they’re so desperate for money. Give it a couple of years, and there’ll be none left. I know nothing about the Episcopalians and why they wouldn’t have sold a building. More than likely, there’ll be some dispute over ownership, someone, somewhere arguing bloody-mindedly with someone else, because that’s what happens. The old People Are Assholes rule.

  The church has decent security. Solid fencing, topped with barbed wire around the perimeter, security cameras, good lighting, but not so good the neighbours would get upset. Consequently, the church hasn’t been trashed the way many others would have been. They must have plans.

  It does raise the question, of course, of how the killer got his victim inside the church unseen. More than likely, it’ll transpire the cameras were disconnected as a cost-saving measure some time in the last couple of years. Or even if the footage is being recorded, no one will be looking at it live. Best-case scenario is that we get to watch film of the hooded killer lugging his victim onto the premises. We’ll at least know what time it all started.

  The church was largely cleared out of stuff, so that the nave is empty, not an old wooden pew in sight. The windows are still in place, but they’re all plain glass, bar one long, thin stained glass window behind the altar. I don’t know if the others used to be stained glass, and were removed for use elsewhere, if that was possible, or maybe they were placed in storage to await judgement day.

  God knows if Episcopalians believe in judgement day. Do any of these people really believe any of the shit they bang on about?

  Aye, all right...

  The old wooden cross was left behind the altar, alongside an old stone table, which is physically attached to the floor. Would have been tough to move. As for the cross, someone could have had away with it at some point, I guess, but maybe no one ever got in through the front door before.

  There are fourteen of us inside the church. The body of David Cowal remains on the cross, though the blood has long since stopped dripping.

  Cowal was widowed – his wife died of the virus this summer – and he was living with his adult children. Two daughters. One of them is an asthmatic student, living the student dream of never having to get out of bed in the morning, and if we’d been counting on her for the discovery of the corpse, the dad would likely still be alone on the cross, his body left to ferment in the chill of a long October.

  The other daughter is a civil servant, works from home using a Samsung Galaxy she’s had since April. Her dad had texted in the evening saying he wouldn’t be home until late. Took the girl a while to realise he wasn’t there this morning. Tried calling, obviously didn’t get anywhere. Called his office in Baillieston, they said he wasn’t in. Alarm bells were ringing, but she didn’t want to call the police yet. I mean, can’t really blame her, right? Who the fuck ever actually wants to call the police, particularly when it might just be your dad got a shag the night before, and he didn’t want to tell his girls in case they were upset for the dead mum?

  Then at some point she remembered that since the height of the great death in the summer, they’ve had family tracking on their phones, and by that means, she found her dad here, in this church, because his killer had kindly left his Samsung in the nave, perhaps for that very reason.

  Cowal’s body hangs limp on the cross, bound at the hands and feet. Not nailed, interestingly. Seems like a wasted opportunity to me. Perhaps tying him up there was just easier.

  His corpse is covered in blood, head to foot. His toes, in fact, are only a few inches off the floor. Blood has pooled beneath him, bright red in the glare of the lighting which our team have set up inside, to the low hum of the small, mobile generator just outside the door.

  Kallas and I are standing a few feet from the corpse, observing Fforbes make her initial assessment.

  ‘A small man,’ says Kallas. ‘It would have been a tougher task to place the victim from Monday evening up there.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Do you think you could do it?’

  I glance at her, she’s staring at Fforbes, though the question was directed at me.

  ‘Hold that little guy up so I could tie his hands to the cross?’

  ‘Yes. You are of average build.’

  Totally average, in every respect.

  ‘Yes,’ I say, ‘I think so. I mean, like everyone bar the most emaciated old granny, he’s still going to be a dead weight to lift, but I suppose I could do it with a bit of effort. You’re wondering if it’s a two-man job?’

  ‘I do not think it is a two-man job. I think one person hauled this man up here. Hard, perhaps, but I do not think it would have taken exceptional strength.’

  ‘If I could do it, so could pretty much anyone?’ I say, unable to stop myself smil
ing grimly.

  She looks at me now, unsure if I’m being facetious, then says, ‘Yes, that is what I meant.’

  Of course.

  ‘You think you could do it?’ I ask.

  ‘I have been wondering. I am not sure. My upper body strength is not so great. I have never done the exercises.’

  We share a look. Now I’m thinking about watching her walk naked into the Clyde, which may not be entirely appropriate for the setting but she was the one who started talking about her upper body. But, she’s right. She didn’t look muscular and strong. Just slim and soft and gorgeous.

  For fuck’s sake.

  ‘What?’

  Ah. She can’t read my mind. That’s good. It’s probably because she’s got all that logical shit going on in her head, and logically a senior detective sergeant wouldn’t be thinking about his boss naked while standing beside a bloody corpse.

  ‘It could still have been done by a woman, though,’ I say.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Little guy,’ says Fforbes from beside the corpse, then she takes a step back, so that she’s standing beside Kallas and me. ‘Not a huge amount of muscular development going on there either, so I don’t think our victim did much in the way of working out. I reckon you might have been able to lift him up there, Kadri, but it would’ve been an effort, and we might wonder why you did it. So, I’d say your killer was either male, or a strong woman, who could do this without too much trouble, and I mean...’ I get the glance. ‘No offence, Sergeant, but probably stronger than you, unless he or she had a specific reason for putting him up here, in which case they might have been willing to make the effort. We know anything about him?’

  ‘Not yet,’ I say. ‘The daughter’s back down at the station.’

  ‘She knew to find her dad here?’

  ‘Used a phone tracking app. Didn’t want to break into the church, called the cops, we turned up surprisingly quickly, then the kid entered with one of our constables.’

  ‘That’s the kid’s vomit everyone’s having to step over just outside the front door?’