Death's Door

Sixty-nine

It should have been the best day of Sammy Pye’s career. He had been sure that he would move up, one day, from being Mario McGuire’s sidekick, having followed him, as a sergeant, through two divisional commands and finally into the head of CID’s office.

For some time it had been a matter of when, not if, he would make detective inspector and occasionally he had let himself wonder where that might be. He had been a little hurt when McGuire had told him that he was moving Jack McGurk temporarily to Torphichen Place, with George Regan as acting DI, and it must have shown, for his boss had been moved to tell him in confidence that he was simply waiting for the Bandit Mackenzie situation to resolve itself, before sending him down to Leith.

The promised move had come about, but not in a way that anyone could have foreseen. Pye had felt uncomfortable from the moment he had settled in behind Stevie Steele’s old desk, as if there were two of them in the chair. The other three guys had done their best to make him feel welcome, but still the atmosphere had been awkward.

Finally, after Skinner and McGuire had visited and departed, Wilding had pulled his chair over towards him. ‘Listen, Sammy,’ he had said, ‘this is going to be a tough day for all of us, but it would be better for you if you moved into the DCI’s room. Stevie never did, because he didn’t want it to seem that he was jumping into Mackenzie’s shoes. But you never worked with the guy, so there’s no reason for you not to.’

Sometimes, Pye thought, as he looked through the Perspex wall, when he took off the ‘hail fellow, well met’ guise and turned serious, Ray Wilding was a pretty impressive bloke. He decided that it would be his practice to encourage him to do so more often.

His musing was interrupted when he saw Griff Montell rise from his chair, and head towards him. ‘Boss,’ said the South African, as he opened the door, ‘I’m into that disk that the fiscal’s office sent up, and there are some things on it you should see.’

‘Show me,’ Pye replied, rising to follow him back to his work station. A screen saver was active on the DC’s monitor; as soon as he touched the mouse it vanished and a folder headed ‘my documents’ appeared. ‘How does the calendar look?’ asked the inspector.

‘It has him in Edinburgh on the days of all three murders, but that’s not what I wanted to show you. Wait a minute.’ He clicked on a subfolder. It opened another series: Montell moved the cursor on to an icon marked ‘Les Girls’ and opened it. A strip of small images appeared. ‘Watch,’ he said, then hit the ‘view as a slideshow’ command. The screen went black for a second, and then was filled with a clear, sharp photograph of a woman, lying on her back on stony ground. ‘Stacey Gavin,’ the detective constable announced unnecessarily, as Pye had found himself gazing at her image on the wall, with the rest, for much of the morning since his arrival.

‘Jeez,’ he whispered.

The frame held for a few seconds until it was replaced by another, taken from a different angle, then by another, of Stacey’s pale face. The location moved, to a yellow beach, and another dead girl, the same sequence repeating until the naked form of Amy Noone was revealed. As they realised what was happening, Wilding and Singh stopped what they were doing and moved across the room to watch the display as it completed, then repeated, then ran again. There were no photographs of Harry Paul, only the three young women.

‘He loved them,’ said Pye, quietly. ‘Look at the way they’re photographed: it’s perfect, they’re beautiful. He killed them and yet he loved them. He loved them. . and yet he killed them.’