‘ I’m telling you, it was murder!’ Sarah Smith pounded a tight little fist on the table top as nine pairs of eyes stared at her in amazement. ‘Jean’s daughter-in-law says her lad Gary’s been at the police station again. And,’ she added darkly, ‘they’ve found another body.’
There was a silent nodding from the other members of Port Glasgow Scribblers, the writers’ group that Jean Wilson had enjoyed for many years before her death.
‘My Andy won’t let me go out on my own now,’ one elderly lady confessed. ‘He’s picking me up after this. Any of you want a lift?’
‘Aye, hen, ah’ll come with you.’ Sarah nodded. ‘Cannae be too careful, what with a mad hoodie on the loose.’
‘Think the rest of us should all walk up the road together, eh? Just in case, I mean.’ A middle-aged woman by Sarah’s side bit her lip, trying not to voice what was on all of their minds.
‘She told us, didn’t she?’ someone else offered. ‘About the stalker, I mean.’
‘And we thought it was just her imagination running riot.’
‘Great at her stories, was Jean.’
‘Aye,’ Sarah sniffed into a handkerchief. ‘But she never expected to be the lead story in the local paper, did she?’
‘Good! That’s the stuff. At this rate we’ll have you out of here in no time!’
Alice Finlay stretched out to grasp the zimmer again. The first few steps were the hardest, the girl had told her. Now that she had managed to stand steady enough on that rubber mat, she was ready for the next important part of her physiotherapy.
The ward gym had plenty of equipment, like these huge footballs that the therapist made her catch so that they could test Alice’s balance. There were always two of them on hand, ready to grasp Alice’s arms if she wobbled and looked like falling. She gripped the metal edge of the zimmer, conscious of the strain on her shoulders. Oh, how weak she still was!
Alice Finlay gritted her teeth. This stroke thing was there to be beaten. And beat it she would.
‘That’s it, Mrs Finlay. Great!’ the girl encouraged. ‘Wait till your daughter hears how well you’re doing.’
Maggie waited by the lift. She recognised some of the other regular visitors standing around, looking at the red numbers flickering as they changed between floors. Her shoulders sagged as she stood there, mentally berating herself for being unable to drag her feet up those stairs. School had been particularly hard today, her five classes presenting her with differing challenges and her only non-teaching period being swallowed up by a ‘please take’ for an absentee teacher from their English department. Maggie was on her own for this evening’s visiting hour. Bill had left her a message to say he’d be late. Again. It was par for the course, she thought wearily, and when he did come home she’d be too full of her own misery over Mum’s condition to have much sympathy for a tired husband.
The lift clicked into life, the doors opening with a sigh, and Maggie followed the others in. She closed her eyes, remembering the words of MacCaig’s poem:
I will not feel, I will not feel, until
I have to.
Then the door opened again with a ping and the light from the corridors beckoned. Maggie blinked, the words of poetry dissolving as she entered the ward for a visiting hour of her own.
‘Mum!’ The sight of Alice Finlay sitting up in bed, hair brushed neatly back from her face, a proper smile reaching her mouth, made Maggie rush forwards and kiss her mother’s cheek.
‘Well, you look a hundred times better tonight. Can you tell me what you’ve been up to?’
Alice nodded and began to utter the words that were forming in her brain. Slowly she enunciated each one, pausing for breath and giving Maggie a grin at the astonished expression on her daughter’s face.
‘You can speak properly now!’
‘Had plenty… of… practisss… in my… life,’ Alice replied, giving a little nod.
Maggie heard the childlike treble in her mother’s voice. Suddenly Alice Finlay had become an old, frail woman and, despite this progress, Maggie wondered if she would ever see the strong, feisty woman she had once been.
Bit by bit the story of the day’s events unfolded and, by the time the bell signalled the end of visiting time, Maggie had learned that not only had her Mum begun to walk again, but that the regular speech therapy exercises had given her back that little voice.
‘Mrs Lorimer? Can you spare a minute, please?’ A figure in dark blue called to Maggie from the nurses’ station, coming swiftly round and indicating a side room.
‘Sister Kilbryde,’ she introduced herself. ‘Come in here, would you? I’d like a wee word about your mother.’
Maggie hardly saw the road as she drove home from the Southern General. It was good news, of course it was, but the problem of where her mother would go once discharged from hospital still remained. Maggie had fudged that particular issue with Sister Kilbryde and now her thoughts danced about between what she had been told and what was to come. Zimmers, walking sticks, a seat for the bath, a special easy chair: all the things her mother would need when she was finally ready to come home. But where home would actually be was the question uppermost in Maggie’s mind. Sister Kilbryde had been full of questions about her patient’s own little house. She’d shaken her head when Maggie had described the split-level design.
They could manage. Couldn’t they? A mental image of her downstairs dining room swam into Maggie’s mind. A bed settee would have to be purchased. They could put it against the far wall, away from any draughts, move some of the book cases upstairs. At least there was access to a loo and shower room. That bath seat would just have to wait. Maggie sent up a silent prayer of gratitude: thank goodness the previous owners of her home had built a little extension on at the rear of the building. It wasn’t perfect but it would have to do until such times as Alice Finlay could cope with the stairs.
Maggie had turned into the drive before she knew it. Bill’s ancient dark blue Lexus was parked to one side, facing the road as usual. A frisson of excitement (or was it fear?) coursed through Maggie’s body, making her shiver, and for a moment she sat in her car, the engine idling, thinking of how to break the news that her mother would be coming here to live with them.
Sportscene was showing the highlights of the weekend’s Scottish Premier Division game between St Mirren and Rangers. Lorimer knew the score already: five goals had thundered past the posts at Greenhill Road, leaving the Saints in a precarious position near the foot of the league table. But he wanted to watch the game for himself, try to take his mind off the day’s events and, besides, Maggie had specially recorded the programme for him. He was dimly aware of the sound of his wife’s key in the lock downstairs. Part of him wanted to heave his body out of this comfortable chair, go downstairs and offer to make a pot of tea but the lure of the game was just as strong and he sat on, torn guiltily between what he could and what he should be doing.
‘It’ll be all right,’ Lorimer told her, smoothing her dark curls that now tumbled over his chest. ‘She’ll be fine. Lots of folk get over strokes. Manage to live a normal life again.’ He could hear the muffled sob coming from Maggie’s throat, feel the rise and fall of her chest. With every cry all the pent-up fears and worries of the last few days were being let loose. ‘Anyway,’ he bent to kiss her forehead, ‘can you see someone like your mum giving in to this?’ The sobs turned into a gurgle of laughter and Maggie sat up, wiping her face then collapsing once more against the comfort of her husband’s body.
‘You’re all right, love. All right,’ he soothed, holding her closer to his body, as though she was a little child.
Maggie needed this, he realised. It was better to open the floodgates of emotion than to continue to bottle it all up. He’d not been much of a support lately. And she hadn’t complained about it, not once. Lorimer heaved a sigh. This feeling of being torn between duties, had it been like that for DCI Colin Ray? Cradling Maggie in his arms, Lorimer vowed to make it up to her. He’d telephone the social work people tomorrow, find out what steps he had to take to make their home safe for an old, infirm lady.
As her sobs subsided and he felt his wife’s body relax, Lorimer began thinking about three other old ladies who had lived on their own. How would he have felt if it had been Alice? And any misgivings he had about sharing their home with his mother-in-law suddenly vanished.
‘Three elderly ladies?’ Dr Solomon Brightman mused. ‘And they lived in the same estate? Interesting.’
‘I thought Lorimer might be in on the case but that woman DI didn’t as much as mention his name. Bit of a stuck up type, I thought. Good looking girl, though,’ Rosie told him.
‘And no defence wounds, you say,’ Solly continued, his dark eyes taking on that far away look that his wife knew so well.
The firelight that glinted off his horn-rimmed spectacles was burnishing a halo around his dark curls, making the psychologist resemble some Biblical prophet. He was young still, but there were times when Rosie thought her husband had been born a wise old man. She smiled at the whimsical notion before recalling Freda Gilmour’s post-mortem.
‘Yes. Poor old soul. Wish there had been a better report on the first two women but there’s nothing to give me a comparison. Just the technical details of time of death and suchlike.’
‘Interesting.’ Solly nodded into his beard again. ‘It’s just the sort of crime one might expect from a woman.’
‘Och, Solly! You’ve got female serial killers on the brain just now,’ Rosie protested, twisting round to admonish him. ‘Come on, admit it, this book’s taking over.’
Solly gave his wife an indulgent smile. ‘Well, let’s just say that it is the sort of methodology a woman might choose. As well as the type of victim.’
‘Oh?’ Rosie sat up a bit straighter, head to one side.
‘Mm,’ Solly said. ‘You don’t find female serial killers often. Statistically it’s almost always a male. Some of the more notorious ones are paired up with a man, of course,’ he added.
‘Ah, like Bonnie and Clyde?’
‘I was thinking more of Fred and Rosemary West, actually,’ Solly murmured. ‘But, yes, these two definitely come into that category.’
‘But you think something like this could have happened to these old ladies?’
Solly shrugged and spread his hands in a non-committal gesture. ‘Women tend to use a weapon like poison. You know the cases of nurses who have despatched their elderly patients with overdoses of insulin or potassium. They claim afterwards to have carried out mercy killings. Angels of death,’ he said, raising his eyebrows dramatically. ‘But here we have three killings that target vulnerable victims at their own homes and their killer uses minimum force. Could be a woman,’ he added lightly, as though to consider the possibility once more.
‘But why would anyone do that?’
‘A sense that the elderly are taking up too much space on Planet Earth? Or perhaps some sort of bitterness that each of them had a decent home to live in if the perpetrator was living in substandard accommodation? Who knows?’
Rosie’s mouth gave a twist of disgust. She was well used to the atrocities that human beings performed upon one another but the idea of the wilful and capricious murder of three old ladies was a little hard to swallow.
Leaning back against her husband’s knees, the pathologist wondered what Lorimer might make of Solly’s suggestions.
The pathologist did not have to wait too long for that question to be answered. It was as she opened up her Internet connection next morning that she saw the email waiting for her from Lorimer. So, she thought, reading the lines, he wasn’t involved in this case after all. But what was this about a possible link between the cyclist stalking that old lady and the fire in Kilmacolm? Tenuous was the word that immediately sprang to Rosie’s mind as she felt her eyebrows rise in surprise. Unless he had some very good reason for supposing the two cases to be… ah! She read on, nodding to herself at the mention of the man, McGroary, who had been a worker at Jackson Tannock. Now, that did make a little more sense. The fellow’s cycle had been impounded for detailed forensic examination as well. A silver racing job, Lorimer wrote. Like the one seen hurrying away from the Jackson fire that night. Rosie sat silently, letting her thoughts take her back.
It had been her first major case after the honeymoon. They had been in New Zealand for three glorious weeks, oblivious to the news back home, wrapped up in one another as only newly weds could be. It had been a holiday like no other. The memory of standing on the side of a windy hill one day towards the end of their trip came back to Rosie. ‘I wish it could last forever,’ she had told Solly. And she had meant it at the time. For that magical moment she had felt such a desire not to return to the world of corpses and psychopaths.
Now she read Lorimer’s note and wondered what he was really thinking. Had the Jacksons died at the hand of McGroary and Monahan? And if so, why had they also targeted three elderly women? Nodding to herself, Rosie saw what the detective was up to. She would pass this on to her husband who might take more than a fleeting interest in such an aberration. And, knowing Solly, she expected he would want to offer an opinion on the two cases. Lorimer’s hands must be pretty well tied down there, she realised. He couldn’t just appoint Solly as part of an investigative team when he had little control over the divisional budget. But friendship could well make up for that sort of deficit, she grinned to herself. It didn’t take a psychology degree to understand the policeman’s tactic. Okay, so she was being used as a sort of go-between, but that was all right. And there were other things she could do for him. The triple murder wasn’t his bag and so he couldn’t risk the ire of that female DI to go poking around in the forensic reports from these crime scenes. Rosie frowned thoughtfully, twin creases appearing between her eyebrows. She was owed one or two favours from certain forensic scientists at Gartcosh. Maybe it was time to call them in?
Then she remembered that day at the mortuary with Serena and Daniel Jackson. The girl had been really disturbed by the deaths of her parents, but in a way that had made her seem almost aggressive. And her brother, that breathtakingly handsome man, had been stricken not only by his own grief but by that of his sister. If Lorimer could find whoever had committed that dreadful act against the Jacksons then those two young people might be able to pick up the threads of their lives. Pressing the reply button, Rosie decided that she could make a few inquiries of her own from among her forensic chums and pass on any relevant information to Lorimer.
‘Youse’ll no get onythin frae me. Ah demand tae see ma lawyurr!’
DI Martin turned on her heel, leaving the interview room where Anne-Marie Monahan had succeeded in wearing her down over the last hour and a half. Apart from a repetitive demand to see the said lawyer, there had been very little information forthcoming from the woman and Martin’s reserves of patience had reached their limit. Anne-Marie had been charged with assaulting a police officer and they’d probably be able to have her for the drugs as well. But without sufficient evidence, there was no way on earth they could arrest the pair for murder. At least they hadn’t had to get them to sign Voluntary Statement forms, she thought: the drugs being there had been a stroke of luck since there was now a lawful reason to detain them.
The backyard outside the police building was in darkness, a light drizzle smirring down. The DI had hardly lit up the first cigarette before her blonde hair was plastered to her head. Muttering imprecations against the relentless night sky and all creatures sent to provoke her, she leaned against the wall by the door, forcing her shoulders down. The nicotine hit was like a sigh coursing through her body, finally allowing the knotted muscles around her neck to relax. A few minutes were all she would need to regain her perspective, then she could go back in there and try another tactic with the Monahan woman.
But, as Rhoda Martin gazed at the grey mist slanting against the beam of lamplight, she knew that the cause of her disquiet was not just the prisoner upstairs. Try as she might, she couldn’t forget the way Lorimer had looked at her, pityingly, as if she had no idea how to do her job. That was something she was finding hard to bear.
Still, he wasn’t going to be around for much longer, she reminded herself with the ghost of a smile. Not if she had anything to do with it.