Dying Of The Light

13

Everywhere stank, everywhere smelt. Nowhere felt clean. Wherever Francis McPhail went, his nostrils were filled with the same stale stench, a mixture of old urine, disinfectant and unwashed human flesh. Even in the prison van it was present, periodically obliterated by new smells, the tired scent of exhaust fumes, nicotine and the tang of spilt diesel. So when, finally, he climbed down the step onto the St Leonard’s Street car park he stood for a moment, motionless, on the tarmac and inhaled deeply, reviving himself with the purity of the cold air, ridding his lungs of the captive atmosphere of Saughton.

The blue of the sky above him had never seemed bluer, the white of the billowing nimbus clouds scudding past more startling or sun-filled in their brightness. If only time would stand still, here and now, he thought, then he would begin to feel what happiness was once more. Not in the old way, when he had been needed, respected, revered even – that belonged to the past – but in a cleaner, simpler way. Unencumbered and unregarded. Instead, somehow, he would have to try to store enough happiness in this single instant to sustain himself for a lifetime. The absence of male bodies crowding round about him, milling aimlessly at his elbow, felt like luxury, as did the near silence of the place. No incessant, foul-mouthed chatter or music on the radio to intrude into his thoughts, muscling their dreary way into his consciousness. And without the crowding, the noise and the smells, he could achieve a state of near serenity, sufficient peace to let his mind roam freely, wander to beloved people and places.

A flock of gulls flew overhead, the thick, white plumage on their breasts catching the light as they banked together before turning eastwards towards Duddingston Loch, crying like banshees as they left. And he craned his neck to see them, noticed everything about them, savoured everything he saw, like a man whose days are numbered.

Seconds later he was escorted into a dark basement area, the air foetid again, and bustled past the charge bar into a room with ‘Viper Suite’ stencilled on its only door. It was windowless and the walls and ceilings were painted a cement-grey colour with six foot of strip lighting illuminating the sober space. The same young solicitor stood inside, chatting to a bored-looking policeman, and he looked up on Francis McPhail’s entry. His shocked expression confirmed to the priest that his appearance had deteriorated since their last meeting. In less than a week he had acquired an institutional look, greasy hair crowning his ashen-hued complexion, and stained, rumpled clothes adding to the impression. And it went deeper than that; he no longer recognised himself.

Edging towards him, the lawyer attempted to explain the purpose of the procedure, referring vaguely, in a self-conscious whisper, to the fact that identification parades were on their way out and being replaced with this new video-clipping rigmarole. After his brief explanation, the young man looked at the inspector instead of his client, as if seeking an expression of approval, but got none. For a moment, the policeman met the priest’s eyes, but he did not address a word to him, turning his head disdainfully as soon as the AV Operator, Janice, beckoned her prisoner towards a revolving stool in the middle of the floor.

In the simplest language she instructed him to sit down and look straight ahead at the camera. Everything was translated into monosyllables in case she was addressing an idiot. But he heard little, distracted by her curves and the strong scent she was wearing.

‘His tee-shirt will not do, Janice,’ the Inspector said, in a tired voice.

‘Yeah,’ the solicitor agreed instantly. ‘It’s too bright. Far too red, too eye-catching. My client wants it changed.’

Harrumphing noisily to signal her displeasure, the AV Operator bent down to extract a white plastic crate from below the camera shelf and began looking through the items of clothing in it, discarding blouses and hats, and eventually selecting a plain, white tee-shirt which she lobbed, good-naturedly, at the priest.

‘Get your top off, Father, and put that one on for us, please.’

As ordered, Francis McPhail began to tug at the bottom of his tee-shirt, pulling it up his torso and exposing his plump, hairless belly to the gaze of all. As it came up over his head he blindfolded himself, finding that he preferred this eyeless state, whatever he might be exposing to the bright lights and unsympathetic company in the room. Seconds passed, but he did not emerge.

‘Get a move on!’ roared the Inspector, right next to his ear, and the priest clumsily peeled off the last of the garment. Obedient as a child, he put on the substitute that he had been given. It smelt strange, unfamiliar, imbued with a pungent odour from the innumerable bodies it had covered. Impregnated with their fear. Dressed, finally, in a stranger’s ill-fitting clothing, his midriff uncovered like that of a teenage girl, he faced the camera again, and tried to master his face.

‘Up a bit,’ the AV Operator said, and he noticed that she was looking at his image on her monitor, attempting to centre his head on a cross. The Inspector then adjusted the stool until the woman, checking and re-checking the screen, signalled her approval with a thumbs up.

‘OK, son,’ the Inspector began, himself young enough to be his prisoner’s child, ‘sit back on the seat, right, then look straight ahead, then slowly turn your head to the left, centre it again, then turn it to the right. Alright? Got that?’

The priest nodded and attempted to carry out the manoeuvre described, but was interrupted mid-way.

‘No. That’ll not do. Slowly, OK? I said slowly, son. Look straight ahead, then slowly move your head to the left, then slowly back to the centre then slowly to your right.’ As he was speaking he performed the required movements in a dumb show. Then he glanced at his watch, implying that his time was valuable and that he should have been elsewhere long ago. Mortified by his failure, Francis McPhail tried, once more, to obey the man’s commands, this time following them to the letter, and after a further thirty seconds the necessary video had been obtained and the camera switched off. Sensing that the operation was now over he walked towards the door, as if he was free to leave. He wanted to vacate the room to ensure that he caused no further delay, did not hold up their next assignment. They were busy people and his ineptitude had irritated them long enough.

‘Have you not forgotten something, Father?’ the Inspector said.

The priest looked blank. ‘Thank you?’ he said quickly, feeling like a child again, desperate to avoid any more open expressions of disapproval.

‘Your tee-shirt, eh? We need ours back.’

The floor of the cell was slippery, still wet to the touch, from being swabbed with a vinegary mop following the departure of the last occupant half an hour earlier. A metal toilet protruded from the wall, unflushed and uncleaned.

Curled up in a ball on the cement bed-shelf, the priest shivered with cold despite the prison-issue blanket he had wrapped around his body. He should try to pray, he thought, beginning to recite an ‘Our Father’, but found, to his distress, that he had reached the end before realising it, the familiar words now as meaningless to him as a reading of the football results. If his favourite childhood prayer had lost its power, then he no longer had any means of approaching his Saviour.

And yet his need was as great as it had ever been, all his hopes gone after reading yesterday’s newspapers. If the ‘Leith Killer’ was still at large, as the headlines had proclaimed, then why had he not been released? Why was he still being treated as if he was the Leith Killer? But he knew the reason only too well. It was because they continued to believe that he was the girls’ murderer, although someone, in his absence, had stolen his mantle. And his knowledge of his own blamelessness would not deliver him from this ordeal. No. That would only happen if he provided them with proof of his innocence. Otherwise he would grow old and end his days inside. The lab results, however misguided they were, would be more than enough for most juries. Never mind his lies.

He covered his face with his hands, clenching and unclenching his jaw until his molars ached, in torment, reminding himself that he could not afford to tell the truth however tempted he was. Not if the cost of saving himself was the destruction of June’s marriage and the children’s happiness. And he had not even touched her since the birth of their child, content just to look at her, be near her, although no-one would believe that after the last time.

He had cherished that little flaw of hers, her vanity, finding it appealing, endearing, recognising that without it he would never have been allowed through the door. A priest! A man sworn to chastity but unable to resist her singular charms, his vows making him a catch.

And, he castigated himself, it was not as if he was even a good priest in other ways. ‘Know thyself’ the oracle demanded, and he had not flinched from the task. But how could he be a good priest when celibacy was demanded, and he could not keep to it however hard he tried? Oh, but when he had someone to touch, to love, it was so much easier to be kind to the rest of mankind, to understand them. Because he did not love his fellow man, he simply tried, often unsuccessfully, to live as if he did so. And even if no-one else could see the difference, he could and was constantly aware of it: that between the naturally good man and his pale imitator, the difference between gold and fool’s gold. But he had, ironically, come closest to being gold, the real thing, when sinning on a daily basis, seeing a woman and being loved by her. With her by his side he could have been a good priest.

He smiled ruefully at his own perverse, unorthodox analysis, pulling the blanket tighter, his hip now beginning to ache on the unyielding bed. In this world, he mused, some were born good, drawn instinctively to the right path, naturally kind in thought and deed, not prone to judgement and compassionate in their conclusions. And then there were the others. The vast majority, people like him, born without that grace but trying to live as if they had been blessed with it; performing generous acts, not artlessly, but as a result of a calculation to ascertain what the ‘right’ thing to do was. The end result, of course, was the same in terms of the act performed, but one sprang from the heart and the other from the head.

Well, he comforted himself, he had done his best. Apart from the women, anyway. But who, dying of thirst, could think of anything other than water? Whereas with that thirst sated, there was nothing that he could not have accomplished. And as a result of his weakness June had suffered once before, but it would not happen again, he would not be responsible for her unhappiness this time, never mind the children’s or that husband of hers. Their son would have a father, even if it was not him. The other women had emerged relatively unscathed from their contact with him and she would too.

Anyhow, it must be faced, his days of being a priest were over whatever happened to him now, because he was no longer fit to be a servant or a leader. Even if they would let him, and they would not. He had been too frail a barque for the journey he had set himself, holed from the start. But any other life was unthinkable; he did not know himself without his dog collar.

Jim Rose, the senior turnkey, blew out the candles on his birthday cake with a single breath. A polythene cup, lager spilling from it, was passed to him, and a deep chorus of ‘For he’s a jolly good fellow’ started up in the restroom, everyone joining in enthusiastically, fuelled by the many bevvies consumed earlier.

‘Any o’ yous fancy a piece of ma cake?’ Jim asked, stabbing the knife into the centre of the square, extracting it and then using it to point at each of the men around him.

‘Aye, I’ll take a wee slice.’ The voice came from an open doorway where a squat fellow leaned against one of the lintels, thick tyres of fat concertina-ed within his navy pullover, his trousers so tight they looked as if they might split if he flexed a knee.

‘Naw, Sean, no’ you. You’re oan a diet,’ Jim Rose said merrily, ‘an’ I promised Sheena I’d keep an eye oan you. What aboot anyone else though? It’s chocolate an’ -’ he took a large bite out of his own slice, ‘…absolutely lovely.’

Another man, clad in the regulation navy blue uniform, swaggered into the room and stood, beaming, with one of his hands behind his back in front of the observation screens. The monitors revealed two empty cells and one with a cleaner at work inside it, attempting to wipe graffiti off the ceiling with swipes from her mop, droplets of dirty water falling down onto her head.

‘Am I too late?’ the newcomer asked.

‘No, not at all, Norman,’ his host replied, picking up an empty mug and readying himself to pour the contents of a can into it.

‘Whoa, I’ll hae nane o’ that pish, Jim,’ Norman said, whipping his arm from behind his back to reveal a bottle of whisky in his hand. When the spirits were finished they returned to the Tennants until, after a further forty minutes, empty tins littered the floor, screwed up and contorted, and the crisp plates were bare. The birthday cake remained largely intact on its foil-covered base, a few half-eaten slices in the wastepaper basket and one deposited in a pot plant.

‘You checked the cells yet, Sean?’ Rose asked, sounding uninterested and looking at his colleague benignly.

‘No.’ A simple statement of fact.

‘How do you mean “No”?’

‘No, boss. I’ve no’ checked the cells.’

‘When did you last look in on the bugger then?’

‘Eh… forty, fifty minutes ago, mebbe.’

‘And he was fine?’

‘And he was fine.’

‘You needn’t hae any worries, boss,’ Norman said, grinning and tipping his mug to drain it of its dregs, ‘they’re nae allowed tae dae awa’ wi’ themselves anyway. It’s against their law.’

‘Their religion,’ Sean corrected.

‘Aye,’ Norman agreed, ‘their religious law, ken.’

‘Naw,’ Jim Rose said bombastically, ‘that’s the Catholics. Papes cannae top themselves. Everybody else can!’

‘Christ!’ Norman shouted, ‘he’s a priest, man. A Catholic priest. What’s your intelligence quotient, boss?’

‘Ma whit?’ Jim asked, laughing uproariously.

In his cell the priest was lying spreadeagled on the cement floor. He had used one of his knee-length socks as a ligature but he had miscalculated, losing consciousness before complete asphyxiation occurred, releasing his grip as he passed out.

When Norman peeked through the spy-hole he thought, at first, that an escape had succeeded, as the cell appeared completely empty. Hurriedly, and gabbling excitedly to himself, he fumbled with the key in the lock, twisting it first one way in his panic and then the other until it turned, and he was able to open the door, finding it unaccountably heavy. As the body slid over the glistening floor, he put his shoulder against the metal, forcing the door further open to reveal the prostrate figure within. The dark-red, plethoric colour of the man’s face, fluid dripping from the nostrils, frightened the warder and he knelt close to the head, hearing a strange rasping sound coming from the mouth. But the bastard was alive, thank the Lord, their jobs would be safe.

Malcolm Starkie lived in a soot-blackened, Georgian terraced house in Sandford Gardens, a couple of minutes’ walk from his dental surgery. In his sitting-room he sat bolt upright in his armchair, unsmiling, displeased that the police sergeant had tracked him down to his home, not restricted herself and her enquiries to his professional premises in Rosefield Place. On the arm of the chair rested a piece of unfinished embroidery, a needle dangling loosely from it, suspended by a thread of red wool. On top of the dusty cloth, also dust-speckled, lay a pair of gold-rimmed, ladies’ spectacles.

‘I would prefer, Sergeant, that from now on you restricted your visits to my workplace.’

‘They told me you were here, sir. I just need to follow up one thing.’ Alice hesitated, oppressed by the gloomy atmosphere in the room and the forbidding expression on the dentist’s face. ‘Can you tell me where you were on Friday night, the twentieth, from, say, seven p.m. onwards?’

‘This Friday?’

She nodded.

‘Yes. I was at the photographic club in Durham Terrace.’

‘On your own, or with others?’

‘It was, eh… a special night. Most of the members were there, they could… corroborate, if that’s the right word, what I’m telling you, if necessary.’

She had no doubt that he was speaking the truth, Bill Keane had mentioned the club in passing in his statement, specifically referring to the number of professionals among the membership.

‘By the way,’ the dentist added, intruding into her thoughts, ‘I think that I can prove that I wasn’t anywhere near the prostitutes or their stamping grounds on the ninth.’

‘Good,’ she said encouragingly.

‘I’d forgotten when I last saw you, in the surgery I mean. Tanya, my receptionist, insisted I go bowling with her. She told me,’ he looked sheepishly at Alice, ‘that I’ve to be “taken in hand, taken out of myself”. So, every so often, she makes me… well, takes me out, you could say. We’ve been to a film once, went to the ice rink in Princes Street Gardens too.’

Trying to imagine the stick-thin, pale creature behind the reception desk having the strength to lift, never mind bowl, a bowling ball without being pulled, helplessly, towards the skittles herself, or pirouetting on ice in skates, risking her bird-like bones in the cold, Alice marvelled at her kindness. Books should not be judged by their covers.

‘Fine. I’ll nip round to the surgery right now and speak to her,’ she said, rising, eager to leave.

The man looked surprised and then burst into laughter.

‘Not my current receptionist – Christ Almighty! My last one, Tanya. Norma’s not interested in sport… or men, for that matter.’

As she was leaving the house Alice caught a glimpse, through an open door, of the man’s bedroom. A tangled mess of clothes covered the floor and the curtains were closed. But within the chaos there was an island of order; a wooden chair on which a set of women’s clothes were laid out, including tights, a skirt and a cherry-red cardigan. Like a shrine.

When Alice broke the news to Father McPhail’s named next-of-kin of his hospitalisation, following his failed suicide attempt, Mrs Donnelly covered her mouth in shock and let out a heart-stopping wail, understanding more fully than most the depths of the man’s despair. Unexpectedly, she then grabbed both of Alice’s hands, clasping them tightly in her own.

‘You believe, Sergeant, that he didn’t do it, don’t you?’ she said earnestly.

Alice hesitated for a second or so before answering. As it happened, she did not feel that he was the killer, but the damning forensic evidence against him had never been satisfactorily explained away, and a hunch seemed too little to go on.

‘What I think doesn’t really matter, it’s what the Detective Chief -’ she began, non-committally.

‘Stop right there!’ Mrs Donnelly said, interrupting her angrily, still clutching Alice’s hands and drumming them on the table as she spoke. ‘Of course it matters. If you think he’s guilty, you won’t continue looking for those women’s murderer, will you? And Father will try again, maybe succeed the next time. He must have lost all hope…’

The truthful answer would be short and simple. No. We won’t. But it sounded so final, likely to make the woman’s unhappy existence unhappier still, and so Alice found herself replying, ‘Actually, I do still harbour some doubts…’

I knew it – I knew it!’ the woman repeated, exultantly. ‘You’ve seen what Father’s really like. I’ve known him, been with him, for over two years, and there’s not a vicious bone in his body.’

Alice nodded, disconcerted by the situation and unimpressed by the length of time on which the housekeeper’s testimonial was based. If she’d known him over twenty years, maybe. Also, by admitting her doubt she might be, unintentionally, nurturing Mrs Donnelly’s false hopes, raising them higher yet before they were finally dashed. In all probability, they would be dashed.

‘I will keep trying,’ she said out loud, although speaking more for herself than the housekeeper. Mrs Donnelly smiled, finally releasing the policewoman’s captive hands, clearly embarrassed by her own reaction.

‘I don’t suppose,’ Alice said, the longest of long shots, ‘that Father was a bone-marrow donor – a kidney donor – anything like that?’

‘No. He is a blood donor, though, we both are.’