‘Yep. And when I say kid, she’s in her late twenties or something.’
Fforbes gives me a glance, let’s out a long sigh, turns back to the corpse.
‘I’ve got all I need here for the moment,’ she says. ‘When the lads have done their work, they can get the body back to my office. I suspect, as you can plainly see, the discussion we have over the corpse will not be too dissimilar to the one we had three days ago.’
She indicates his groin, which is, naturally, completely covered by blood.
‘Interesting to note that the penis has been flayed.’
Fuck me.
There’s the involuntary squirming that comes with any kind of mention of the genitals being manhandled in an unacceptable manner.
‘Is that the only area of flaying?’ asks Kallas, while I’m still shuddering.
‘There are four separate areas, so one more than the last time. The killer appears, however, for the most part to have followed the same process. Again, there would have been a lot of pain. Mr Cowal would have suffered.’
We look at his face, although, of course, we cannot see his face. Again, it has been covered by the same plain, white mask, the mask now, inevitably streaked with blood.
‘How is the mask attached?’ asks Kallas.
‘Not sure yet. There’s nothing obvious. It might just be the killer held the mask on the bloody face, and it wouldn’t have taken long for it to adhere to the skin. No more than a few seconds. I’ll be surprised if there’s anything else.’
She stops, she turns, she looks at what Kallas and I are looking at. For a moment, what will be no more than a fleeting second, the sun must have appeared in between the clouds, and the sunbeam perfectly catches the stained glass window, and falls directly onto the figure on the cross, casting the bloody corpse in an array of colours.
The others going about their business in the nave seem to notice it too, and for a second the activity stops as we look upon God’s light shining on the crucified corpse.
Then the sun vanishes, the magical coloured light disappears, the moment is lost.
With a footstep, a cough, the scrape of a piece of equipment, the noise resumes, and we’re back.
‘OK, thank you, Doctor Fforbes,’ says Kallas, with her familiar formality. Fforbes and I exchange our naughty glance, and then I turn away with Kallas and start walking back through the church, until we’re out into the dull November morning, rain in the air, due to kick off at any minute. It will, at least, help wash away the girl’s vomit.
‘Rain,’ says Kallas, stopping for a moment to look at the sky.
How British of her. She must have been assimilated to some extent these fifteen years.
‘We’ll need to come up with a plan for the mask,’ I say.
We haven’t revealed the existence of the mask to the public, so again there’s the possibility of someone, somewhere finding another mask, the mask that provides a link, and not making any connection, because why should they?
‘I know,’ she says, as we pick our way through our people, back to the road, for the ten-minute walk down to the station. ‘Let us see, first, if the mask presents itself in the course of events.’
And with that, as we begin our walk, the rain starts falling.
22
Here sit the sisters, grim, Anne and Samantha Cowal. Anne and Samantha, the parents were David and Mary, all very conventional and Scottish and middle class, living in their middle class home in Cambuslang, just off the Public Park, not so far from where Harry Lord lived.
Anne, the elder sister, the civil servant, turns out to be twenty-nine, and not, as you might suppose, living at home because of some Covid-related necessity. She just hasn’t moved out yet. Won’t need to now. She’s doing the talking. Samantha, twenty-six, was summoned from her bed to the police station by her sister to be told the news. She doesn’t appear to have spoken since.
‘Can you tell us about your mum?’ asks Kallas.
Anne looks at me, as she has done a few times, in that would it be possible to speak to someone Scottish way that people have, but really, anyone who thinks like that can calm the fuck down. Kallas is sharp as fuck, and it’s not as though a little bit of an accent takes anything away from her. So I blank her, and she turns back to Kallas.
‘She died in May,’ says Anne, as though that might do it.
‘Coronavirus?’
‘Yes.’
‘How did it happen?’
A beat, and then she lowers her eyes, her head shakes. ‘I don’t really want to talk about it.’
‘If you want to help us find your father’s killer, you are going to have to.’
‘What does it have to do with mum?’
‘We do not yet know. But there was a similar murder on Monday evening, and we believe it was related to coronavirus, so we have to give consideration to the possibility that your father’s may be too.’
‘He didn’t kill mum,’ she says, defensively.
Boy, that tone. Sounds like she thinks her dad killed her mum.
‘How did your mother contract the virus?’
Her lips purse, she stares at the table, her head moves a little from side to side.
‘Dad had mild symptoms,’ says the other one. Samantha. The twenty-six year-old student.
Anne doesn’t give Samantha the side-eye. Obviously accepts that it needed to be said, she just didn’t want to be the one saying it.
‘Continue,’ says Kallas, sounding robotic, as she can sometimes.
Samantha glances at her sister, either looking for the all clear, or just to establish how much trouble she’s going to be in later, but gets nothing in return.
‘He likely picked it up at the supermarket. We all said he should start shopping once every ten days or so, maybe once a week at most, and he argued some bullshit or other, that he didn’t want to be seen buying that much food with four adults in the house. But he was just going to the supermarket, that was all. It was what he did. Shopped on a daily basis. So he kept going. There was only one other person at his office, so it’s possible he got it off them, but he said they were staying well apart.’
‘Who was that?’
‘Gill Something. I don’t know, he just always called her Gill. She was kind of his work partn –’
‘Blair,’ says Anne, pitching in. ‘Like the asshole Prime Minister.’
Like the asshole Prime Minister... Ha! He may have been an asshole, yet he only scrapes into the Top 5 asshole British Prime Ministers of the twenty-first century because there haven’t been six of them. Not yet, anyway.
‘Did he self-isolate when he had the symptoms?’ asks Kallas, by the book as ever. I think we all know the answer that’s coming.
‘Said he’d be fine,’ says Samantha, ‘like he was a doctor or something. He didn’t go to work for a fortnight, protecting Gill obviously. And he stopped going to the supermarket, bully for him. But you know, he still sat and had dinner at the table. If we said anything, he’d grab us and jokingly give us a hug. Started kissing mum in front of us, just to wind us up. Thought it was funny... That changed, at least.’
‘You have asthma?’ I chip in from the sidelines.
‘Dad didn’t give a fuck,’ says Samantha.
‘Sam,’ says the sister, the elder, censorious voice from her left.
‘If he had given a fuck, he would have stayed in his room. The house is big enough, he had an en suite, he had a desk in there, mum could’ve slept in the spare room, and she’d still be alive.’
‘You don’t know that.’
The bloody-minded certainty of youth.
Samantha has her tail up. She’s talking now. We don’t need to ask anything else, and I just indicate with a small movement of my hand for her to continue.
‘I have asthma. When I realised how it was going to be with him, I stayed out of his way. I didn’t eat with him, I didn’t sit in the room with him watching TV. I basically sat in my room, which was fine, because, before my sister points i
t out, I spend most of my time in there anyway. Dad was pissed I refused to sit at the dinner table, but you know what, I didn’t care. Mum, on the other hand, didn’t have any option. Mum asked him to self-isolate, he refused, and there was nothing she could do, nowhere she could go. She was stuck, eating at the same table, sleeping in the same bed, breathing in his poisoned, virus-laden air. And dad, as previously mentioned, thought it was all a load of shit, and he could do what he liked.’
A beat. She holds my gaze across the table.
‘Mum died.’
‘Did your father take any responsibility?’
She laughs, bitterly, a snark of a sound. Anne stares at the table.
I ask the question, again, without speaking.
‘He said he felt responsible,’ Samantha begins, and her words have slowed, weighed down by sarcasm and resentment, ‘because if he hadn’t got the virus, then mum wouldn’t have had to go to the supermarket, which was where she obviously picked it up. Can you fucking believe it? He genuinely said that. He genuinely appeared to think it. He genuinely wrote to Tesco to complain about one member of staff that mum had said had been coughing, and he spoke to a lawyer friend of his about suing them. The lawyer friend, btw, told him he could fuck off and not be so stupid.’
‘That wasn’t what the lawyer said,’ says the sister from the cheap seats. Samantha, however, has taken the stage. Floodgates opened.
‘Did your dad get tested?’ I ask.
‘No,’ says Samantha. ‘Didn’t need to. He self-diagnosed. And you know, I admit it, I was kind of sceptical at first. I mean, he could be seriously full of shit...’
‘Sam!’
‘He could be full of shit. But I thought, well just in case you do have it, I’m staying the fuck out of your way. Anyway, then his temperature got bad for a day or two, and he never, like, got anywhere near needing hospitalised, but he had literally all the symptoms.’
‘Yes, he did,’ says Anne, sullenly from the sidelines, as though her sister needs verifying. Which she sounds like maybe she does.
‘Did anyone else blame your dad for your mum’s death?’
‘No one blamed him for mum’s death!’ says Anne, looking angrily at the sister.
Well, we all know that’s not true.
‘Some of us did,’ says Samantha to me.
‘Who else?’
She pauses now. The break. She glances at Kallas, and then back to me.
Well, look at that, I didn’t even notice the shift. At some point, Kallas interviewing Anne, has become me interviewing Samantha.
‘Yes, sis,’ says Anne, ‘who else?’
So now, there either is someone else, and she’s suddenly thinking, uh-oh, if I say so-and-so was pissed off at dad, it might be a motive for them to have committed murder. Or maybe she’s thinking that there really is no one else, so it’s only her with the motive for murder. Whichever it is, she’s thinking all right.
‘Who else?’ says Kallas, the third to ask the question, her voice much colder than either the sister or me.
That, at last, seems to put Samantha’s gas at a peep, and she lowers her eyes now, staring at the desk.
‘No one,’ she says. ‘It’s just me.’
Kallas has a steady gaze trained on her, such that Samantha has to finally lift her eyes to look back at the investigating officer.
‘Look,’ she says, ‘I was pissed off at dad. I’ve been pissed off at him all summer.’
She breaks off before she gets to the bit about being upset that she’s spent the last few months angry with him, and now he’s dead.
Kallas leaves the silence there for a while, allowing it to mature. A few seconds, a few seconds more. Samantha stares at the table, Anne stares at Kallas. The few seconds become an eternity, that may be less than a minute, but who knows? Time disappears in it.
I love it. The poise, the patience. I wonder if this is Kallas’s way of recapturing the initiative of the interview, with me having unintentionally snatched it away from her.
‘Do you know if there was any connection between your father and a man named Harry Lord?’
Samantha doesn’t lift her eyes, though there’s the tiniest movement in the muscles in her face to indicate that the interview has shifted back. Kallas asked the question, Anne can answer.
‘That’s the man who was murdered earlier this week?’ asks Anne.
‘Yes.’
It’s the talk of the town, she was bound to know the name.
‘What does that have to do with dad?’
‘They lived in the same town, they have been murdered within a few days of one another.’
‘Was he, this Harry Lord, was he also crucified?’
‘No.’
A beat. Anne looks a little lost, unsure what to say, which probably means she doesn’t actually have anything to say.
‘There are sufficient similarities in the method of murder,’ says Kallas, ‘for us to at least presume that the murders are linked. Do you know if there was a connection between your father and this man?’
‘No,’ says Anne. That’s it.
Samantha lifts her head, guessing it might be time for her to contribute again.
‘I’d never heard the name until I heard he was dead.’
‘Did your father go to church?’ asks Kallas.
Anne is about to say no, when Samantha cuts her off with that now familiar bitter laugh.
‘Right,’ she says.
‘Did he play golf?’
‘Doesn’t every boring middle aged man?’ she says, and Anne, once again, gives her the aggrieved sister look.
‘Do you have to?’ she says, and now her voice is breaking. ‘His body’s still warm!’ escapes her lips, somewhere between a wail and an ejaculation, and the tone cuts her sister in half, and I think that’ll do it.
And they both retreat now, staring at the desk, united at last in their sorrow and hurt.
23
Taking a short drive to Cowal’s house, where we’re going to set the team off in a thorough search of all the man’s things, and then Kallas and I are heading into the mortuary, to get the initial results from Fforbes’s scalpel. Totally unnecessary journey, as it could be done over the phone, or by video, or indeed, by e-mail, but it’s part of the process. Spending time with the dead.
‘Sorry about earlier,’ I say.
The drive from the station up to the top of the town is five minutes, so the conversation won’t get very far, and we’ve already spent the first three minutes in uncomfortable silence.
I mean, I say uncomfortable, but I think for a silence to be truly uncomfortable, both parties need to feel it as that, and I can’t imagine Kallas ever thinking a silence uncomfortable. Me, on the other hand, have been uncomfortable around her since I fell in love with her.
Yep, there, I said it.
‘What do you mean?’
‘I didn’t mean to take over the interview. When we were speaking to Anne and Samantha.’
‘You did not.’
A beat. I glance at her, but she, naturally, is not looking at me.
‘I thought I had. And I didn’t mean to. So, I’m so –’
‘I allowed it because I was quite happy for it to happen,’ she says. ‘You are a good officer, who asks good questions. You think, and you understand what motivates people.’
I give her another glance, but she still ain’t looking.
‘There is a reason, obviously, that you are still a detective sergeant at your age, but I’ve yet to see it.’
At your age. I’m going to give you a compliment, and then I’m going to ram it as hard as I can up your arse.
‘It is interesting,’ she says, then pauses.
I’m not sure that what she’s about to say will be interesting. Not if it involves me.
‘Your case file suggests that at some point you will go off the rails during this investigation, and I think it might have been better for you not to have been put on it in the first place.’ She pauses again,
as I turn on to the road, another couple of hundred yards to go. I think maybe we’ll be getting there just in time. ‘I wonder if perhaps the chief inspector gave you this assignment on the presumption you would mess up, intending to use that as a pretext to get rid of you? What do you think?’
Weird, isn’t it? If Taylor had said something like that, I would quite literally have told him to go and take a gigantic fuck to himself. There are a variety of other people who could’ve said it, and I would’ve been a bit pissed off, or I would have laughed, or I would have rolled my eyes, or fuck it, I don’t know. It would not have been a conversation.
But here I go, seriously answering the question.
‘I don’t know. Maybe she did,’ I say, bringing the car to a halt behind the small police van. ‘I don’t know her well enough to know if that’s the kind of thing she’d do.’
‘You will endeavour not to screw up,’ says Kallas.
I stare straight ahead. Hmm...
I already fell in love with the chief investigating officer. I’ve been fantasising about fucking the chief inspector on her desk. I damn near made an arse of myself over Constable Ablett last night, and although I never actually got anywhere near the bar, it was a much closer thing than it looked. And you know, there was something back in that room there, something uncomfortable going on, when the interview came to be between Samantha and me. Didn’t matter that she was young, didn’t matter that I was an old soak. She’s the rebellious one. She’s the one who doesn’t give a shit, she’s the one who will say what she thinks and do what she likes, smoke what she wants and bang who she wants to bang.
All of which describes me too. At least she’s only twenty-six. She has an excuse. Fucking granddad here...
And all of that is dwarfed, monstrously dwarfed, by the plague of alcohol, which sits in the middle of my head, growing day by day, screaming, buy me, you cunt, buy me and drink me. Only way to get through this. And one day when your liver gives out, won’t that be fine? Won’t that suit you, and everyone else, down to the ground?
Life insurance still in place, Penny and the kids would benefit. Chief Inspector Hawkins wouldn’t need to worry about her rogue, drunk, borderline useless detective sergeant. It might be a miserable death, sordid and sad and lonely and bad, but what the fuck will I know about it? I’ll be drunk. I’ll be filling my boots. I’ll be tasting the glory.
In My Time Of Dying: DS Hutton Book 5 Page 11
