Of course, the solution to the problem was easy, as a woman Alice knew that. If you are unable to find the place that you are looking for then you simply ask anyone you meet, particularly those in nearby premises. It stood to reason. Nevertheless, the next morning she found herself wandering past the first row of shops she came to, convincing herself that her destination would be just around the corner. Then again, the nearby office block would, she thought, probably be empty, and the group of young men by the bus stop were too busy talking to each other for her to interrupt them.
Walking past an old biddy, standing motionless as she fished in the depths of her carrier bag, Alice began to ask her for directions, only to find that she spoke only Polish, was lost and appeared to be furious with the world and all its works. Desperate now to find the S.P.E.A.R. office, she peered through the first open door in a row of industrial units and saw a pair of overalled legs projecting from beneath a car.
‘Excuse me?’ she said, her voice lost against the background of music emanating from a radio resting on the oil-blackened concrete.
‘Excuse me!’ she repeated loudly, but there was still no answer.
‘EXCUSE ME!’ she shouted, finally attracting the man’s attention as he wheeled himself out from under the chassis, switched off the radio and got up, wiping his hands on a soiled rag as he came towards her.
‘I just wondered…’ she paused momentarily, trying again to work out the best words for her enquiry, the least damning, which would get her the directions she wanted without having to mention the exact place she was looking for. But it was no use. She could not remember the name of the bloody street. The best she could recall was that it was off Restalrig Drive.
‘I’m looking for S.P.E.A.R.’s premises?’ she continued brightly.
‘Nae Spears round here, hen. There’s a shop, Sears, a bed shop at three doors along. Could that be it?’
‘Er… no. But thanks, anyway. I’m looking for the er… er… prostitutes’ office, their… er… resource centre?’
The man looked at her, brazenly scanning her figure, grinning broadly. ‘Like I said, dearie, there’s the bed shop. What other resource do yous need?’
In the face of defeat, she had to try again, although her cheeks were now burning and she had begun, foolishly she knew, to devise other questions, ones designed to find the sodding place without conclusions being drawn about her own profession. The next-door building turned out to be a dressmaker’s workshop, hand-made clothes displayed on a small crowd of dummies, each with an expensive price tag hanging below the hemline. With a sinking heart she approached a seamstress, head bent as she machined a seam, pins sticking menacingly from her wide mouth.
‘Sorry to bother you, but I’m looking for S.P.E.A.R.’s. premises?’
Please God, no further clarification needed. Concentrating on her sewing, and speechless due to her mouthful of pins, the woman jerked her head towards the door. On screwing up her eyes, Alice made out the words on the sign opposite: ‘The Scottish Prostitutes Education and Advice Resource’.
The squad meeting had been fixed for ten p.m. At five past, Alice edged through the half open door into the murder suite on tiptoe, hoping to slip into a seat at the back without her lateness being noticed. However, to her surprise, she found the room empty, lights off and computers still dormant.
While she was still wondering if she had misheard the appointed time, Eric Manson came into the room, sausage roll in hand, and slumped heavily onto the only seat softened by a cushion. Like the rest of the squad, he looked pale-faced, had only slept for a few hours, and his chin was bleeding from a botched attempt to shave in the poorly lit men’s toilet.
Just as she was about to ask him if the meeting had been postponed, three detective constables, Littlewood, McDonald and Galloway, arrived together, their conversation tailing off into a self-conscious mumble as they filed in. DC Ruth Lindsay trailed behind them, yawning and unbuttoning her coat. The remaining vacant chair was beside Alice, and she took it for granted that it would soon be occupied by her friend, Alistair Watt, ideally bearing coffee for them both. Instead, Simon Oakley deposited his heavy frame in it, inclining his head slightly in her direction and smiling in recognition.
Elaine Bell, cheeks strangely flushed and dressed in last night’s crumpled clothes, attempted to brief them, racked intermittently by paroxysms of sneezing, her eyes streaming throughout. She fired occasional questions at them with an air of exhausted irritability, becoming more tetchy with every answer.
Listening half-heartedly, Alice’s concentration slipped and she began to speculate, wondering idly whether her superior might be the source of all winter infections within the city, the Typhoid Mary of the common cold. She watched as paper hankie after paper hankie, used to dab the woman’s dripping nose, was screwed up and flung forcibly into a nearby wastepaper basket. Around it the floor was now littered with her misfires. If Avian flu were, finally, to breach the species barrier through the medium of a single infected human being, then Elaine Bell, surely, would be that one. A morsel of underdone Indonesian chicken entering her flu-ridden system and mankind’s nemesis was assured.
Alice’s rumination was interrupted when the Chief Inspector’s attention suddenly shifted onto her.
‘Alice… Alice! if you could just wake up, please? How did you fare at S.P.E.A.R. this morning?’
‘Fine,’ the sergeant answered, surprising herself by the crispness of her response. ‘Ellen Barbour, the manager of the Resource Centre, was able to identify the woman in our photograph. She’s an Isobel – known as Belle – Wilson, and I’ve got an address for her…’ She fumbled in her pocket and extracted a torn piece of paper, ‘…at Fishwives Causeway. it’s just off Portobello High Street. Ellen, er… Ms Barbour, says that Wilson’s a drug user, and has been for years despite whatever help they’ve been able to provide. The old chap in the S.P.E.A.R mugshot, he’s called Eddie Christie, but they’ve no address for him. Ms Barbour reckons the best way of tracing him now would be through another prostitute, Lena Stirling. She often worked in a pair with Isobel. And guess who reported Christie to the project, and got his face on the leaflet? Isobel Wilson. A couple of weeks ago he knocked her about in the General George car park when she, allegedly, gave him lip.’
Having methodically allocated the day’s tasks, Elaine Bell wiggled her toes back into her scuffed shoes and, moving stiffly, rose to her feet, signalling the end of the meeting. And then, finally, noticing the newcomer to St Leonard Street, she introduced him to the squad while she was leaving the room, his presence only noted as an obvious afterthought.
‘Oh, and the stranger in our midst, people, is DS Simon Oakley and he’ll be with us for the duration of the investigation. Unfortunately, Alistair Watt seems to have contracted some kind of dizzy-making virus. Labyrinthitis… vestibulitis… some kind of itis or other. Anyway, he’s off for the foreseeable future, at home, vomiting whenever he stands up. So let’s all hope it’s not catching.’
The old woman stroked the Siamese cat’s smooth, dark ears, watching entranced as it closed its blue eyes in ecstasy, webbed toes flexing in and out with pleasure, kneading the eiderdown like dough. Under the bed covers she tried to curl her body around it, resting her head beside its rounded skull, and the passage of time, briefly, stood still with her absorption in a perfect moment. The buzzing of a bluebottle, a few inches above them, started the clock once more. The excited cat sprang up, a long white streak leaping into the air, and landed silently on the quilt with the fly in its mouth, soon crunching it noisily in its delicate jaws. Brushing a single wing off the blanket, Mrs Wilson glanced at her watch. Eleven already. She would need to get up now if she was to make the doctor’s surgery by twelve.
Groaning inwardly, she pushed off the bed-clothes and began the long journey to the edge of the bed, grasping the side of an armchair to pull her unwieldy body the last few inches. With a loud bang her swollen feet landed on the bare floor boards. No bloody tea this morning, she thought to herself, wondering whether they had run out of teabags or whether, maybe, the milk was sour. Or, and most likely of all, Isobel had overslept as usual.
Having become breathless trying unsuccessfully to turn on a bath tap, she admitted defeat and gave her face a cursory wipe with an evil-smelling flannel before beginning the troublesome process of getting dressed. Buttons no longer fitted buttonholes; hooks, eyes and even zip fasteners seemed to have become smaller, impossible to grip, fiddly and frustrating. A final yank and her skirt was on, hem crooked but sitting below the line of her knee-length socks. Only the battle with her shoes remained, and she jammed the left one on, whimpering as her big toe hit the leather shoe-end unexpectedly. The right foot was a good size larger than the left, and she looked down at the misshapen flesh, noting the generous curve of a bunion and the clawed, gnarled toes. Hard to believe she had once favoured peep-toes in all weathers, scarlet nail varnish drawing attention to her best features. Time left nothing unchanged, and none of its changes were for the better.
Porridge today, she thought, a hot breakfast to keep out the cold, and fit for a king if topped with a little pinhead oatmeal. And then she remembered the milk crisis, and began to conjure up, instead, a picture of a slice of hot buttered toast awash with raspberry jam. Of course, the pips might get stuck in her dental plate, but by the time she reached the bread-bin she could feel her mouth watering.
When the doorbell rang she shouted, ‘Isobel! Get the door fer us, hen. I’m no’ dressed yet.’ Then she waited, expecting to hear the familiar, angry thuds as her daughter trudged across the floor. But when the ringing continued, and no-one stirred, she dropped the bread into the toaster, shuffled across the hall and undid the bolt, peeping timidly at her visitors.
Jane Wilson took the news of her only child’s death unnaturally well, Alice thought. She asked few questions and seemed neither dismayed nor surprised by the answers. It was as if she had been expecting just such news, had already grieved in expectation of it and had no tears left to shed when the moment actually arrived. She was like those wartime wives and mothers, nerves constantly stretched, waiting to read the worst in a telegram from the Front. As Alice spoke, the woman blinked hard and licked the corners of her mouth, shaking her head constantly, as if by disagreeing with what she was being told, she could change it.
While she was leaving the flat in the company of the two sergeants, the little Siamese cat slid through the opening door and strolled across the landing. The first time it happened DS Oakley managed to grab the animal and post it back into the flat, but as it came out again, it skittered past him and tiptoed down the stone stairs towards the open tenement door and the busy street outside. The old woman started to wail, crying out the cat’s name and hobbling ineffectually after it. And, miraculously, it stopped and began cleaning itself, licking its immaculate front paws and smoothing its face with them. The overweight policeman waited motionless on the step above it, breathing heavily, and then suddenly pounced, two podgy hands clamping around its waist, lifting it high in triumph. His complexion, usually high, was now ruddy with isolated pale patches around the nose and mouth, sweat shining on his brow. Unperturbed by its capture, the cat continued to groom itself and allowed itself to be deposited in the hallway, wandering off towards the kitchen, its kinked tail waving sinuously behind it.
Supported on either side at the elbow, Jane Wilson stumbled across the mortuary floor, her nostrils flaring in the presence of an unfamiliar, chemical odour. In the refrigeration area, the pathologist, Doctor Zenabi, was waiting for them beside a covered trolley and, slowly, the trio made their way towards him. On their arrival, he folded the sheet back, revealing Isobel Wilson’s pale, bloodless head. Alice gazed at it. It was a face in complete repose, all muscles relaxed, giving the middle-aged woman the lineless, unwrinkled appearance of a teenager. The kiss the old woman spontaneously bestowed on her daughter’s cheek confirmed the corpse’s identity, and her white hair remained against the cold flesh until Doctor Zenabi, kindly, eased her away, meeting only the slightest resistance. As if wishing her daughter farewell, she picked up a lifeless hand and stroked it, coming back time after time to a slight indentation on the ring finger.
‘What is it?’ Alice asked.
‘Someone’s ta’en oaf ma weddin’ ring. I gie’d it tae her an’ she aye wore it. Still, Belle’s at rest the now, eh? Nothin’ mair can hurt her.’
The others nodded, as the tears finally began to flow from the old woman’s cloudy eyes, rolling off her nose and dripping onto the shrouded form of her daughter.
‘So, Alice, loose words cost lives!’ DI Eric Manson said enigmatically, offering her a chocolate digestive and leaning across from his chair to hand it to her. Being hungry, she was tempted to accept the biscuit but hesitated, knowing that if she did so she would feel bound to take up his word-bait. Of course, even if she did there was every possibility, on past experience, that he would simply fob her off with another sphinx-like statement instead of an explanation. But, seeing the expectant look on his face, and the lack of any signs of curiosity from the rest of the squad, she decided to take pity on him and play the game.
‘What are you going on about, sir? Whose “loose words”, whose “lives”?’, she said, taking the digestive. The inspector pursed his lips, relishing the suspense he had created, and quite incapable of hiding the fact.
‘Well, since you ask…’ he hesitated for a few seconds, ‘our own Chief Inspector’s.’ Aware that he had not given a satisfactory answer, he then stared intently at his computer screen, knitting his brows theatrically, as if reading important news. No time left for idle chatter.
I could, Alice thought, just leave it at that, he’ll crack first on past form. But his ploy had worked, her curiosity was aroused, and she heard herself say, ‘Yes, sir, but what words? And to what effect, exactly?’
‘Mmmm…’ he replied, ponderously. Any delay could only further whet her appetite. ‘The words were “Chance would be a fine thing!” uttered by our very own Elaine Bell in response to a Leith resident’s query as to how she’d feel if she came across a used condom in her hallway. A rueful reflection on her own inadequate sex life, I suppose. Now, the effect – you’d like to know that too?’
‘Yes,’ she said evenly.
‘The effect is that a complaint, no less, has been lodged against her and is currently under investigation.’
‘And how exactly do you know about it all?’
‘Sir.’
‘And how exactly, do you know about it all, sir?’
‘Friends in high places,’ he smiled, unwrapping another packet of biscuits and decanting them into a tin.
‘Or, as you’ve just been in the boss’s office,’ she shot back, ‘a dramatic improvement in your already excellent upside-down reading skills, eh?’
‘Sir.’
‘Eh, sir?’
‘No comment,’ he answered, crunching another digestive.
Cursing the rain, Lena stepped gingerly towards the very edge of the kerb, unable to see properly through her streaked spectacles and blinded by the passing headlights. The first car to draw up contained three men and she knew better than to attract their attention, someone else can take the risk, she thought to herself, slipping back into the shadows. The second, a Volvo, seemed possible. But it drew close only to speed up in the flooded gutter, deliberately showering her with filthy water. She shook herself like a soaked dog, knowing as she was doing so that it was futile, rain having begun to cascade down, bouncing up off the pavement and splattering her bare legs.
Another vehicle slowed down and she peered, shortsightedly, into it, catching a glimpse of a male and female occupant. No dice. But the man tapped on his window to attract her attention and she sidled over, only to find a police identity card flashed in her face.
With ill grace, she climbed into the back seat, belligerent already, determined to get out as soon as possible. Time in the car was time wasted, and she needed a fix. Life had to go on, murder or no murder.
Shivering uncontrollably in her damp clothes, her impatience on display, she told the police officers the truth. That she and Isobel had been partners, looking out for each other, keeping tabs with their mobiles, ready to raise the alarm should the need arise. But last night, she paused for a second, they had fallen out. Over money, if they must know. So she had not kept watch and, yes, she was well aware that the woman was now dead. Got the Evening News like everyone else. The last she had seen of Isobel had been at about seven p.m. on the Tuesday night, the cow had nabbed her pitch at the Leith end of Salamander Street. She nodded her head on being shown the picture of Eddie Christie, swearing at the very sight, and confirming that Isobel had been assaulted by him, just as she had. All she knew was that he worked as a teacher at Talman Secondary. French, s’il-vous plait.
Unbidden, the prostitute opened the car door, feeling claustrophobic in its steamed-up interior, just as the sturdy police sergeant was lobbing another question at her. Looking in the mirror at the big blondie, she considered giving him a wink. He seemed vaguely familiar, and anyway, he was just another man, just another policeman, and they were no different under their clothes, plain or otherwise. Actually, there was nothing to pick between the lot of them, from the unemployed to the Members of the Scottish Parliament, except that politicians got a thrill from the risk of getting caught. Unlike those on the dole.
‘Lena,’ the policewoman said, ‘we don’t know who murdered Isobel. Whoever it is is still at large, might kill again. May even be on the lookout for prostitutes. Who are you working with tonight?’
‘I’m nae workin at a’,’ the prostitute lied.
‘Fine,’ Alice replied. ‘You’re not working, simply enjoying a stroll in the pouring rain where you would be working, if you were working. Anyway, should you consider returning to work, if you must, please don’t unless you’ve got yourself another partner? Ideally, keep off the street altogether until we’ve caught this nutter.’
‘Aye. But a’m nae workin’, see?’
She stepped out of the car, back into the downpour, her mind focussed on one thing and one thing alone. Smack. And until the needle had been plunged into the vein, and released its longed-for load, she could think of nothing else.
Lying contentedly in her bed that night, Alice began to look at the newspaper. The whole of the front page was again taken up with coverage of the abduction of a little boy, a huge colour photograph of the child staring back at her. Inside, three more pages were devoted to him, and the entire editorial. The story was considered from every possible angle: the nature of the police investigations and the particular difficulties encountered by them, profiles of any likely suspects, the precise circumstances leading up to the boy’s disappearance and so on. Even the psychological effects of the loss of a brother on a younger sister merited comment by a well-known child psychologist. Alice read it all, appalled, sympathising with the parents’ plight, recognising their utter desperation but deliberately choosing not to imagine herself precisely in their shoes. It would be a painful yet completely pointless exercise. Her heartache would assist no-one, remedy nothing. Below the rambling leader, her eyes were caught by a short paragraph headed ‘Yangtse River Dolphin Now Extinct’.
‘A rare river dolphin, the baiji, is now thought to be extinct. The species was the only remaining member of the Lipotidae, an ancient mammal family that separated from other marine mammals, including whales, dolphins and porpoises, about twenty-five million years ago. The baiji’s extinction is attributable to unregulated finishing, dam construction and boat collisions. The species’ incidental mortality results from massive-scale human environmental impact.’
Reading it, for a second she felt a wave of despair wash over her. The only supposedly rational species on the entire planet, the one with the fate of the rest of the natural world in its epicene hands, thought the matter so unimportant. The possible, not definite, loss of one of the billion upon billion of members of its own species merited four whole pages of newsprint, whereas humanity’s unthinking obliteration of an entire class of unique creatures deserved only a tiny footnote. Tomorrow more would be written about the boy’s abduction, but nothing further about the end of the baiji. Then again, tomorrow, like everyone else, she would consume the coverage avidly. Possibly she would read it while eating a yellow-fin tuna sandwich from a polythene carrier bag and, certainly, having done nothing for the next species perched precariously on the edge of extinction. Like everyone else, she was too busy living her day-to-day life, her good intentions simply paving on the road to hell.
Sleep was hard to come by, but just as she dropped off the phone rang. Alice woke, and in her dozy state hoped that Ian would answer it before remembering that he was away, visiting his mother. She clamped the receiver to her ear.
‘Ali… eh, Alice?’ Miss Spinnell, her neighbour, warbled. ‘I need your help. Can you come down straight away?’
The World Service was still on the radio. Six pips at two o’clock.
‘It’s only two, Miss Spinnell. It couldn’t possibly wait until the morning?’
‘No. It’s a drama… an emergy… a crisis. We may even need a doctor.’
Dragging herself out of bed, head still longing for the pillow, Alice shivered in the cold, searching around in the darkness for a jersey to put over her nightie. The recent spell of plain-sailing in her dealings with her elderly neighbour had seemed too good to be true. After all, Alzheimer’s did not stop, had no second thoughts about the casual destruction it wrought on its victim’s mind and personality. She had watched as, before her eyes, it had transformed a bright independent old lady into a suspicious eccentric, obsessed with the theft of her possessions by unseen intruders. Alice herself was now treated as a suspect, although her dog, Quill, remained the light of the old lady’s life.
The door had been left ajar by the time Alice reached her neighbour’s flat, but Miss Spinnell had returned to her bed and was sitting crouched on it, head down, knees against her chest, whimpering to herself. Alice came and sat on the edge of the bed. Seeing a wizened hand nearby she clasped it in her own, intending to comfort the distressed woman. Instantly the frail fingers were whipped away as if they had, inadvertently, touched lizard skin. The moaning, however, continued unabated.
‘What is it, Miss Spinnell?’
In response the crouched figure slowly straightened itself, and Alice was surprised to see that her neighbour was wearing dark glasses.
‘Blindness has come upon me! The lights have dipped… er, dimmed.’
Alice edged up the bed, watching Miss Spinnell recoil as she came closer, until she was able to lift the glasses off the ancient nose.
‘I think you have accidentally put on the wrong spectacles. You’ve been wearing dark ones,’ Alice said.
Miss Spinnell screwed up her eyes several times, as if accustoming herself once more to light and sight. She looked, briefly, sheepish before an expression of disdain transformed her face.
‘Accidentally! Accidentally! Ha! How simper… simplistic can it be. Can’t you grasp how they operate? Whilst I’ve been blind, blind I say, yet more of my artifice… arti… arti… things, will have been purloined. Kindly check the silver, Alice.’
‘But, Miss Spinnell, how could they have got in?’
‘Through the open door,’ the old lady said. ‘The door I opened…’ she looked hard at her visitor before continuing, ‘especially for you.’
To put her neighbour’s mind at rest, the tired policewoman opened drawers and dust-laden cupboards, all the while learning more about Miss Spinnell and the havoc the disease had left in its wake. On a high shelf, in among well-thumbed volumes of verse, were little reminders of the person she had once been. A medal dated 1995 from The Poetry Society, a barn owl’s wing wrapped carefully in tissue paper, and, most poignant of all, a faded photograph showing a young girl laughing uproariously with a boy in uniform, and an inscription on the back: ‘To Morag, the most beautiful of the Spinnell sisters, with all my love, Charlie.’ And over the writing in Miss Spinnell’s ancient trembling hand had been scrawled ‘PLEASE DO NOT TAKE’, a pitiful entreaty to a pitiless enemy.