In My Time Of Dying: DS Hutton Book 5

by Douglas Lindsay

  ‘You need to go to meetings,’ she says.

  ‘There’s no point.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘You need to want to go to meetings. You need to be driven to it. You need to have something to lose.’

  ‘Your career.’

  ‘Don’t care.’

  ‘Your life.’

  I leave it a moment. The don’t care is so mundanely predictable that I don’t even bother with it.

  ‘Why are you still here if you don’t care about your career?’ she asks, as if reading the questions in my head. Of course, it’s hardly a superpower, it’s an obvious question. There’s no judgement in it, however, rather Nordic-Baltic practicality.

  Fuck do I know about Nordic-Baltic practicality? One just assumes they’re practical, right? They have Ikea, and they say ‘of course’ a lot, and their houses are much warmer than ours in the winter even though they have wooden floors and the temperature’s about fifteen degrees colder than Britain.

  Of course, we’re just shite at everything. Look at us. How in the name of all fuck did we ever rule anything, never mind the world?

  Another quick drink, a small, calculated head shake to clear my mind, take the well-practiced punt of the self-pity to the sidelines. Jesus, when you feel sorry for yourself as often as I do, you get used its occasional practical ejection.

  ‘It sounds glib to say I can’t think of anything else to do, but that’s the answer. Before I got called back this summer... what was I doing with myself? I read a couple of books. My daughter bought –’

  ‘What books did you read?’

  ‘Really?’

  She stares at me. The look that says, I am Estonian, why in the name of fuck would I ask you what books you read if I did not want to know the answer?

  ‘Fair enough. Hemingway. I thought, there was a heavy-drinking, cantankerous sod who killed himself, maybe I’ll learn something. So, I read The Old Man And The Sea, and learned nothing. I mean, I could’ve looked it up and read what it was I was supposed to learn, and I could read about why he won the Nobel for it, because it said on the back of the book that he was given the Nobel after writing this, but I thought, what’s the point, I’m not doing Higher English or anything? Then I read A Farewell To Arms, but that just contained endless pages of really terrible dialogue between him and the nurse, and I thought, this is awful, so I didn’t learn anything from that either. But everyone says Hemingway’s a thing, right, so I thought, it must be me, not him.’

  ‘For Whom The Bell Tolls might have been a better choice, but you sound like you have had enough of Hemingway.’

  ‘I have. I read something else that I forget the name of. It was too long, that’s all I really remember. And my daughter gave me a jigsaw. Said it would be good for me. Absorbing. So, there was that. And before the lockdown started, I got out on the hills a couple of times, had a weekend away with Eileen.’

  ‘You were in a relationship?’

  ‘Just friends. Then the lockdown, and I just sat there like a lemon. Did my jigsaw, read Hemingway, went out for walks every day, made plans... Always making plans. Truth was, when the police called, I couldn’t come back quickly enough.’

  ‘If you like going out on hills, why not plan a long walking expedition? Give yourself some focus.’

  ‘That’s what I was doing. There I was, getting up in the morning with nothing to do and all day to do it in, and I thought, let’s get out. Walk across Canada, or walk across the Silk Road, or walk the length of Africa or something. All plans, no action...’

  ‘It probably would not take you very long to walk across the Silk Road.’

  Her delivery is so perfectly dry that I stare at her for a moment, trying to recapture the words I just said, and then I realise, and I roll my eyes, say, ‘You know what I meant,’ and in very minor embarrassment lift the coffee cup for a drink.

  ‘I like you, Tom,’ she says, and she probably notices my eyes widening at the thought of where this is going. Unlikely to be good. ‘But investigations cannot be about the officers. We are ciphers. We are facilitators. We are not the story, we unravel the story. Too often, your files suggest, you become part of the story. That cannot continue to happen if we are to work together.’ She holds my gaze across the table, the words having been delivered in pretty much the same tone as she ordered the coffee, and in which she’ll tell her kids to eat their dinner, or her husband to lie back so she can go on top.

  ‘You need to start going to meetings, you need to stop drinking. Today you are OK, but we both know it will not last. If you do not want to go to meetings, you will have to leave the police service. I cannot mandate this, I should not even be saying it, but I am being practical. The combination of your drinking and your job is a bad one.’

  I’m nodding along at the Estonian pragmatism of it all. Jesus, this woman holds me in the palm of her hand. Not that I’m about to rush off to a meeting. Maybe it’s time I seriously planned to walk across the Silk Road. That would be the adventure of a minute. I could write a book about it.

  ‘You had sex last night, too?’

  ‘No.’

  She holds my gaze, a couple of feet away across the small table, our hands on our coffee cups, and she knows I’m lying, and she knows I know she knows, and I’m thinking, Jesus fucking Christ, do I have last night’s orgasms stamped on my forehead, but really it’s just her, just Kallas, who reads everything about me, and who will know the order of the drinking and the sex, who will know about me waking up early, and about standing twice in the shower, and about getting on the bike purely as a means of expunging the alcohol fumes, and if she pushes me now I know I’ll tell her everything, even though she likely already knows it, then she says, ‘OK. It is not my business. Be careful, Tom, that is all. We should get back to work.’

  She takes another drink of coffee, then sets the mug down. She pauses, thinking about something, I wonder what further devastation she will lay calmly at my doorstep, then she lays her hand on mine, I feel the shock of the unexpected touch, the touch as exhilarating and warm as it was previously, she squeezes my hand, has no words, and then stands.

  ‘We should go.’

  I dissolve in her presence.

  What a fucking clown I am.

  I need to look at flights to Samarkand when I get home.

  31

  Sometimes leads come quickly. Sometimes not at all. Anything in between. Some leads might not be leads, and you’ll never know until you’ve followed it to its very end, like the source of the Nile.

  Now, Kallas and I on a small film set on the Gallowgate, where they’ve closed down the road for a day’s filming around Barrowlands.

  We spent the morning on the life of Margaret Malone, with a focus on any potential Covid connection. That’s the clear assumption we’re working to here. The death masks placed on the door of the care home, and the one in the personal things of the dead wife of the second victim, seem to clearly indicate these are revenge killings, related to the spread of Covid. Of course, we don’t know if that’s a cover, the carefully laid red herring. That the killer would want to throw us off course, is just as possible as the killer leaving the message for others. Beware all you who perhaps unwittingly, but foolishly and unthinkingly spread the illness.

  There are going to be an awful lot of people to kill.

  From what we picked up so far, that was one hell of a depressing life Margaret Malone was leading. Well, it’s not like we’re not used to investigating the depressing life. For a kick-off, most lives have taken a depressing turn when we get involved, and these ones, the ones that begin in squalor, with abuse and drugs and alcohol and pain, they tend to continue in such a vein.

  As the victims grow in number, you need to know the link, because if you can’t find it, then you’re scrabbling around, investigating every aspect of their life, and you never know which one is going to present the bullseye. Here, however, almost straight off the bat, we have a hit.

  Not Covid, but the other Hol
y Grail of this particular investigation. A connection between this woman, who had nothing, and whose life was a complete mess, with the two previous victims, livers at the top of the town in the large, old Victorian houses where the money is.

  Last autumn, in a lifetime before the virus, before the lockdown, David Cowal produced a small movie entitled His Grey Return. I mean, that’s a shit name for a movie, but it is what it is, and it was His Grey Return. Filmed in Strathclyde Park, amongst other places around here, with some filming in the Trossachs. Lake of Menteith area. Funding for the movie came from a variety of sources, but one of the principals was Harry Lord. And that shittily-titled movie, about a prodigal son returning to Glasgow after having run away from home aged fifteen, featured a character he meets in a bar with the name on the cast list, Fat Whore.

  Fat Whore. Someone might have objected to that somewhere, if anyone had ever actually seen the film.

  The film has all the hallmarks of being, like, a proper film. One that got made, packaged, released. It has its IMDb page, it has its cast and crew list, and its release date. The release date was sometime in May. Well, the cinemas were closed in May, of course, not that this small piece of arthouse domestic grievance-cinema would have made it anywhere near a picture house in any other May, not when it had to compete with Mission Impossible 11 and The Avengers Tight End and God knows what piece of Hollywood garbage, three seconds of which was filmed in George Square doubling for Philadelphia, so we can pretend it’s actually got something to do with Scotland, and by showing it fifteen times a day at the multiplex they’re somehow supporting the local film business more than if they showed a small budget Scottish movie with which people might connect.

  Maybe it made it to Netflix or Amazon Prime? Definitely not. The BBC? Nowhere near it. So it’s just there, existing in the ether, unwatched by anyone. Wasn’t issued as a DVD, isn’t available on any platform, from iTunes to YouTube.

  But it has its IMDb page, so at least there’s that. The actors and crew involved can put it on their CVs, and perhaps there’s a clip or two circulating between them they can use in a highlight reel.

  We’ve come to talk to the director of His Grey Return. Between cast and crew and producers, there are twenty-seven names listed. Could be any one of them we need to speak to. Or it could be none of them. The director seems like an important enough person with whom to start, so we’ll speak to him, see where it takes us.

  They’re filming a scene with two guys having an argument outside one of the Celtic pubs, across the road from Barrowlands. The scene is painted in tidy shades of green and blue, one guy in a Celtic strip, the other in Rangers.

  Maybe it’s a metaphor.

  The director calls cut after they’ve been shouting fuck at each other for a while, and the Rangers lad has the Celtic lad by the neck up against a wall, and the actors fist bump as they pull apart, someone else from the crew clapping as the director says, ‘We’re good. Matt, can you get to work on twenty-six, please?’ and indicates for a young woman wearing a multi-coloured face covering, a tablet in her hand and earphones on, to follow him to a small area set up in the building next to the Barrowlands, from which the film crew are operating.

  They’re just starting to talk when Kallas cuts them off, and the director, James Crawford, gives her a classic shit-on-my-shoes look.

  ‘Mr Crawford?’

  ‘God, we’re trying to work here, where’s security?’ looking over her shoulder.

  She produces her ID, his brow furrows, and he regards her contemptuously.

  ‘Jesus, what? The police scenes aren’t until, what... next week some time, is it, Jenny?’

  He looks at Jenny, Jenny clearly understands the situation better than James Crawford, so she indicates the badge and says, ‘I think this might be the actual police.’

  ‘What? Seriously, what? We got the bloody permits three weeks ago. Where’s Roger?’

  HE KEEPS HIS ARMS FOLDED, no relaxing into the situation for this prick, even though when he writes his shitty autobiography, he can have a paragraph or a page or a fucking chapter, depending on how it works out, on the time his shitty movie got shut down for twenty minutes while he got interviewed by the police.

  ‘We’ve got Martin for three days. Three days. So, you know, this is a nightmare. Can we just get this over with as quickly as possible?’

  ‘Who is Martin?’ asks Kallas.

  ‘Compston,’ he says, in that way that suggests she’s supposed to know who he’s talking about. Kallas, not being a watcher of television, has no idea.

  That explains why I thought I recognised him. That was him in the Rangers jersey. Funny.

  ‘He’s a more famous copper than you’ll ever be, darling,’ says Crawford, as though that’s supposed to be a thing. What a prick.

  ‘This is a murder enquiry,’ says Kallas. ‘A real one. We will take as long as it needs, while being sympathetic to your requirements. Perhaps, if this takes too long, you could get your AD to take over for a couple of takes.’

  AD? No idea.

  ‘Oh, could I? You know who my AD is on this movie?’

  ‘Her name is Geraldine Colquhoun, and this is the first film she has worked on. I presume this is a small production, and you have had to cut corners.’

  ‘Well, you seem to know what you’re talking about, at least, but then you should also know it’s completely unrealistic to think that we have one of the most famous UK TV actors in our fucking midst, and you want me to put a twenty-one year old who doesn’t know which way to point a fucking camera in charge.’

  ‘We need to talk about a film you made last autumn, His Grey Return.’

  There’s a look. Interesting. The very mention of the movie casts a grim shadow across his face. You can see his shoulders relax, although the arms stay firmly folded across his chest.

  ‘What about it?’

  ‘You’ll have seen on the news that one of the producers of the film, David Cowal, was found murdered yesterday.’

  ‘Jesus.’

  ‘You heard?’

  ‘Yes. Look, he was an exec producer, don’t go getting the two mixed up.’

  Keep the eye roll to yourself.

  I know fuck all about movies. Spent fifty years looking at lists of producers and executive producers without having a Scooby.

  ‘Did you hear about the death of a man named Harry Lord on Monday?’

  ‘Of course. You people are conflating the two.’

  ‘Connecting, not conflating. We are entirely confident the murders were committed by the same person. Was Mr Lord involved in the filming of that picture at all?’

  ‘Mr Lord? Of course not. Neither was Mr Cowal involved, for that matter.’

  ‘If a financier took the opportunity to visit the set of a production he had helped make happen, it would surely not be the strangest event in the world of film.’

  ‘I never met Lord, never saw him, never talked to him.’

  ‘A third body was found this morning in Cambuslang. The woman’s name was Margaret Malone.’

  ‘I don’t know her.’

  ‘She played a small part in His Grey Return.’

  ‘Which part?’

  ‘Fat Whore,’ says Kallas, investing the character name with zero judgement.

  I’ll give him his blank stare. Don’t think he’s putting it on.

  He takes a few moments, he starts nodding, he remembers the scene, he remembers the woman, he thinks on it some more before finally shaking his head.

  ‘What?’ he says.

  ‘Three people involved in the making of that picture have now been murdered, Mr Crawford. Looking at the cast and crew list available online, it was not big. There were only twenty-seven names. Since Mr Lord wasn’t one of them, that means that two of the twenty-seven, or seven-point-four-o-seven per cent, plus one other individual, have now been murdered.’

  A beat. His eyes widen a little. Mine too, at the seven-point-four-o-seven thing. Maybe the inability to have normal conve
rsations isn’t just because she’s Estonian. Maybe she’s on the maths-genius-but-also-a-bit-weird spectrum.

  Maybe it’s just not that difficult to work out two as a percentage of twenty-seven. I have trouble working out two as a percentage of four.

  ‘Wait, d’you think I could be in danger?’

  Oh, here we go. The selflessness of the true leader.

  ‘Yes,’ says Kallas, and I almost laugh.

  I mean, fucking nailed it. The guy’s going to stop giving a fuck the minute she tells him he’s got nothing to worry about. But let him think his neck might be on the line, and the clown is going to be all in.

  Truth is, of course, we have no idea whether he’s in danger. Maybe he is, maybe he’s not, and that’s all. The narcissist needs to believe, however.

  ‘What happened to the movie?’ ask Kallas.

  ‘What d’you mean?’

  ‘Internet Movie Database states that its release was five months ago, but there’s no sign of it actually being available anywhere.’

  ‘Oh, that. It was never happening.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘It was a business film. People needed to use budgets, people needed do favours for people, people needed to meet targets. What does it matter if anyone actually ever sees it, right? I mean, seriously, what difference does it make? It’s kind of scream in the forest territory. Wait, no, I’m getting crossed, a tree falling in the forest territory, right?’

  Where we’re standing, I get a waft of booze from across the road, as a guy comes out the door of one of the pubs. He’s wearing an old, tight-fitting Celtic t-shirt, he’s carrying a half-full pint glass, and he bares his gums and squints as he looks around at the film set, experiencing broad daylight for the first time in forever. He has a trickle of dried-in blood on his face, and three teeth.

  But the smell of the booze. Stale and depressing, yet with the hint of sweetness that makes it a siren’s call.

  The three-toothed guy lights up a fag, holding the pint glass clumsily as he does so.