Dying Of The Light

4

As soon as the polythene bag had been removed the corpse resumed its human shape again. A boyish photographer began to prowl around the body, snapping it from every angle, issuing instructions as if at a fashion shoot and smiling ghoulishly at his own joke, until told off by the pathologist. Meanwhile, Alice eased the woman’s arms off her breast and down to her sides, lifting one of them up to remove the sleeve before rolling her over to release the material at the back. The final cuff peeled off without difficulty.

‘At least she’s cold,’ Doctor Zenabi said conversationally, while raising the body slightly to allow Alice to pull the coat from under it.

‘Does it make a difference?’ she replied, all her concentration on the task in hand.

‘Certainly does. Give me cold flesh, cold blood, anytime. I don’t like it when it’s still warm,’ he continued, ‘- the transitional phase. It’s horrid cutting them then. Far too close to life. I like my bodies to be… well, thoroughly chilled.’

Conversely, we want the body still warm, Alice thought. No time to have passed and the trail still hot. She felt in one of the woman’s coat pockets and pulled out its contents. A mobile phone, a purse and a packet of chewing gum. Putting her hand into the other pocket, she felt a sharp, stabbing pain and withdrew it instantly as if bitten by a cobra. She inspected her palm, and saw a single, tiny puncture mark, immediately below the crease of the little finger. Fighting to contain the panic she could feel rising within her, and cursing her own stupidity, she shook out the contents of the pocket onto a nearby table, and felt her heart sink as the rounded cylinder of a hypodermic syringe rolled across its surface. As she picked it up by the plunger, light glinted on the uncapped needle protruding from the barrel. Things like this were supposed to happen to other people. Not to her.

‘Ahmed,’ she said lightly, but he did not hear her, still busy wrestling an obstinate baseball boot free from a foot while humming to himself in an eerie falsetto.

‘Ahmed, I think I may have been jabbed by something. A needle-stick injury, or whatever it’s called,’ she shouted, holding up the syringe for him to see. Doctor Zenabi looked up, flung the boot he was holding to a technician and rushed over to her. He grasped the hand she was extending towards him and examined it for himself. Blood had begun to ooze from the pinprick and he hustled her towards the sink, ran the cold tap and plunged her hand under its stream. Ten minutes later, her palm and fingers now white and numb from the icy water, the pathologist allowed her to remove it, binding the injury for her in clean paper towelling.

‘You need to go to Accident and Emergency right now, Alice,’ he ordered.

Still feeling shocked, her bandaged hand tucked protectively under her other arm, she asked, ‘What may I have picked up… from the needle, I mean?’

‘Probably nothing,’ he reassured her.

‘Yes, probably nothing,’ she repeated. ‘But if I were to be unlucky, what would the something be?’

Doctor Zenabi sighed. ‘The main possibilities would be HIV, Hepatitis B, Hepatitis C, I suppose, but you’ll be OK. A and E will give you prophylactic treatment for the HIV. Preventative treatment.’

‘And for the Hepatitis B and C?’

He shook his head. ‘Nothing. Nothing’s available. But, don’t worry, I’ll take some blood from the body and get it cross-matched for infectious diseases. Much speedier than waiting for you to develop something. Which you won’t!’ he added quickly, his brown eyes fixed on her, no argument to be countenanced. As if the outcome of the risk has anything to do with our discussion, she thought bleakly.

‘How long before I’ll know… whether the body was clean or not?’

‘Two days at most. I’ll make sure the hospital gives it priority. And we’ll see if the woman’s medical records suggest she’s clean. And don’t forget, even if she isn’t clean, it doesn’t necessarily mean that you’ll have caught anything.’

Returning to Broughton Place from the Royal Infirmary in a taxi, plastic pill containers clinking in her bag, Alice found that she was no longer in control of her thoughts. They ran free, tormenting her, defining and refining her fears, exploring dreadful possibilities or, worse, probabilities, then ruthlessly following the chain of consequences to the most awful conclusions: chronic invalidity ending in premature death. She wondered what she should tell her parents, and Ian, before deciding that nothing should be said. Even if she was now on tenterhooks, there was no reason for them to join her swinging on them.

Examining his passenger’s anxious face in the rear-view mirror, the taxi driver said cheerily: ‘It may never happen, hen!’

Alice nodded, flashing a weak smile, unable to summon a suitably light-hearted response. It already had.

Back home in the flat, she rifled amongst her CDs for something to raise her spirits, lighten her mood, eventually settling on a collection of songs by Charles Trenet. The laughter smouldering in his voice would surely do the trick, and his French vowels would glide meaninglessly over her, soothing and relaxing as they flowed. Thinking about it coolly, dispassionately, here she was in the middle of a murder enquiry with two days off, and thus far, the threatened side-effects from the prophylactic drugs had not appeared. In fact, it was a perfect opportunity to take Quill for a walk, and in the high, blustery on-shore wind, the waves at Tantallon should be a sight to behold. And what could be more exhilarating, more life-affirming, than the sight of those endless breakers pounding the rocks, crashing skywards in all their bright majesty.

Pleased to have found a distraction, she walked towards the front door, intent on collecting Quill from Miss Spinnell, but found that she was bumping, unexpectedly, against the wall. She straightened herself up and took a few more steps, only to find herself colliding with it again. As she glanced down at the floor it began to incline upwards and then recede, then suddenly reared up once more. She shook her head forcefully, blinking hard, trying to restore normality and her balance with it. But the minute she opened her eyes again, the corridor began to revolve, enclosing her. She fell to her knees, edging on all fours towards the bedroom, stopping every so often to catch her breath, shoulders flat against the wall.

Once in bed, eyes tightly closed, she tried to calm herself, slow her own heartbeat, breathing in and out deeply and deliberately. The spinning sensation continued regardless, its rhythm now becoming disturbed, unpredictable, lurching her with dizzying speed first in one direction and then another. Bile flooded into her mouth and, in seconds, she was violently sick.

Eight hours later she was woken by the sound of a key in the lock, accompanied by a series of thuds as Quill pranced exuberantly around Ian, celebrating his release from his eccentric custodian and his return home.

Ian bent over her as if to plant a kiss on her cheek, but hesitated momentarily, taking in her pale face and exhausted eyes. Looking at him she mumbled something about a virulent sick bug at work, remembering to tell him to keep his distance in case he should catch it. At once he recoiled theatrically, taking a few steps back from the bed, and the loss of his presence by her side, fleeting as it had been, brought tears to her eyes. His joke was not funny. If she had caught HIV from the corpse then this might be the pattern for any future that they might share. The thought of losing him, of the closeness, the intimacy that they had so recently found, dismayed her, allowing a sob to escape. Any one of those alphabetical diseases, never mind death, could do that.

‘Christ, Alice,’ he said, surprised by her reaction. ‘What on earth’s the matter? I was just joking.’

‘Oh, just this sick bug thing…’ she replied, unable to say more. But however hard she tried, she could not halt the tears which continued to stream down her face, wetting the pillow and her hair on it.

‘Darling, it can’t just be that.’

Hearing the tenderness in his voice and the unfamiliar endearment, she sobbed again. He had never called her ‘darling’ before, and now joined the precious few she knew who meant the word. His concern undid her, crumbling her resolve so that when he repeated his question she told him the truth, managing a fairly clinical account of what had happened.

He listened, nodding occasionally, and then applied his mind to the problem. Doctor Zenabi had said he thought it improbable that she would catch anything, and he was the medical expert. He was the man they should trust and believe in. So she would not catch anything. But suppose, at the very worst, she had contracted HIV. Drugs were now available making the disease treatable, and its presence need make little difference to their lives. Couples all over the world lived with it. Also, he knew a few people with Hepatitis C and they appeared to lead completely normal lives too. He seemed so confident, so unperturbed, by her news that she began to wonder if it was, after all, so very serious. Perhaps she had been melodramatic, had overreacted. All might indeed, as he had predicted, be well; and they had faced the worst together and he had not run away.

With the subtlety of a practised butler, present but unobtrusive, he caused freshly laundered night clothes to appear, her jug of water was filled regularly and innocent enquiries from her parents were fended off. However, the lure of the studio proved as irresistible as ever, and once he returned from it clutching in his icy hands a sketch of Quill, done from memory, to appease her for his day-long absence. But when, early on Monday morning, the phone rang and Ahmed Zenabi broke the news that the victim’s blood had shown nothing, Ian jumped onto their bed and hugged her, laughing out loud and, she noted, every bit as relieved as she was herself.

With the car idling at a red light, Simon Oakley peeled the silver paper from around his packet of Polos, rested the now unstable column of sweets on the dashboard and put four of them into his mouth.

Alice did not like mints, but she watched with interest as he chewed them up methodically, then helped himself to another three, never offering one. And it seemed to her that some fundamental rule of hospitality or, perhaps, comradeship was being broken. After all, he did not know that she would have refused one had it been offered. He appeared, in his confectionary-crunching, simply unaware of her presence. Or, and worse yet, careless of it despite their proximity, like a stranger in a railway carriage. Alistair would not have done that, he would have offered her his last crisp, but then, they were friends. Unless it was cheese and onion, of course, or salt and vinegar or… She must try to get to know her new colleague.

‘Simon,’ she began, ‘who d’you think killed Isobel Wilson?’

‘Er…’ he swallowed his mouthful, ‘like a p… p… polo, Alice?’ Then he corrected himself, ‘No, no, of course, you don’t like mints.’

‘Quite right, but how on earth do you know that?’ she asked, disconcerted by his remark, blushing at the thought of her hasty judgement.

‘I don’t, really, but you did turn down the peppermints that Ruth was distributing in the office after the meeting.’

‘Well, thanks for the offer. Anyway, what do you think?’ An unusually observant colleague.

‘A disgruntled punter, maybe?’

‘Why?’

‘I don’t know. Perhaps, someone who needed her services but was r… r… revolted by his own need? Well, that it should be met in such a way? It would f… fit with the likely time of death Doctor Zenabi gave us. Some time between about 9.00 p.m. and 11.00 p.m. That would be office hours for her.’

‘And a punter who just happened to be carrying a knife?’

‘Possibly. A gangland type? Or maybe a married man lured of the s… s… straight and narrow by one of them?’

‘Like a hungry, obese person is lured off the straight and narrow by a chocolate gateau, cake-slice at the ready, you mean?’

They turned right onto a short drive, leading from Claremont Park to ‘Jordan’, a grand villa built of red sandstone and with an immaculate Jaguar parked on its gravel sweep. Bill Keane led them into his drawing-room, coffee already laid out on a tray for visitors, and stood with his back to a flame-effect gas fire, warming his mustard-coloured corduroys on the faint heat it provided. If the Wilson killing did not focus police attention on the residents’ clean-up campaign, then nothing would. That was surely the silver lining from that particular cloud.

‘Yes,’ he said, handing back the photograph of Isobel Wilson to Alice, ‘I’ve come across her. I know most of them by sight, although not by name, you’ll appreciate. She always wears a baseball cap, usually hangs about with another girl.’

‘Did you see her on Tuesday night?’ Alice asked.

‘No. We went out, straight after work, and had an early supper in the Grassmarket and then walked on to a concert at the Festival Theatre.’

‘What time did you get home?’

‘I can’t be sure, I’d guess maybe half eleven or later. After the performance we went on to the Dome for a drink.’

The door opened and a solid, middle-aged woman, spectacles suspended on a chain and bouncing off her pneumatic bosom as she walked, marched into the room bearing a large plate covered in shortbread pieces. Don’t take one, Alice willed Simon, looking at her own empty coffee cup and watching him drain the dregs from his own. She knew a trap when she saw one.

‘Yes, do take more than one, constable,’ Audrey Keane said acidly, watching with a fixed smile as the sergeant removed the two largest slabs, resting one on his saucer and starting to eat the other immediately, releasing showers of sugar to fall onto the deep pile of the beige carpet.

‘Since I have you here, officers,’ Mrs Keane said, ‘I’ll just take advantage of your visit to fill you in with what we have to put up with,’ and she smiled at her husband, who blinked at her on cue.

‘Yesterday, once more, I found two used condoms on our own little lawn, and I heard that Mrs Keir, at number thirteen, had the unpleasant experience of interrupting a fornicating couple at the bottom of her stair. Two days ago I myself, believe it or not, was accosted by a kerb-crawler who was abusive, obscene actually, when I put him right. Oh yes, and when I went onto the West Links on Thursday with my grand-daughter, Katie, I stopped her, in the very nick of time I might add, from picking up a used hypodermic syringe. I am, I have to admit, almost at the stage of thinking that one less – one less streetwalker, I mean – would be a good thing!’

DS Oakley, mouth still filled with shortbread, nodded as if sympathetically, and Mrs Keane, spurred on, continued to address her captive audience.

‘As for S.P.E.A.R., don’t get me started! The van attracts them, you know, like flies to… well, waste. If it parked somewhere else I’d bet my bottom dollar they would follow it and go somewhere else too. And we’ll have no more “tolerance” zones, thank you very much. All very well to impose them when it involves other people’s toleration rather than your own. Perhaps, they could be “tolerated” in the vicinity of Holyrood, somewhere by the new Parliament building. Save the MSPs a journey!’

‘Audrey!’ Bill Keane said, in a shocked tone.

‘Well,’ his wife continued, unabashed, ‘despite your valiant efforts, sweetheart, and I mean that, valiant efforts, the “problem” has not been solved. And for as long as it continues, Katie, and all the other small children we know, are at risk of jabbing themselves with needles, catching Aids and so on. And these constables need to understand how we feel…’

I understand only too well, Alice thought, unconsciously stroking the miniscule scab on her palm. And Ellen Barbour’s account of her career, with its high-living and free choices, seemed a million miles from the grubby world of prostitution on display in the dark, unsavoury crevices of the City. Places where the meter ran not by the hour but by the minute, and warm flesh could be bought for the price of a Chinese meal for two.

‘To get the full picture of what we have to bear, they should really speak to Guy, shouldn’t they, darling?’ Audrey Keane said, belatedly offering the shortbread to her husband.

‘Guy?’ Alice asked.

‘Guy Bayley, the head of our group. Our founder, in fact,’ Bill Keane replied, ignoring his wife’s outstretched arm and smoothing both his winged eyebrows with his fingertips, checking his reflection in the mirror above the mantelpiece as he did so.

Talman Secondary gave the impression that it had been formed by the occurrence of an earthquake at a trailer park. Portakabins had been attached to each other at unexpected angles, creating asymmetrical E or T shapes, some ornamented by tired graffiti, and the tarmac on which they rested had wide fissures, like the edges of tectonic plates They had an unsettled, temporary appearance as if their unfortunate inhabitants might be awaiting the clearance of the site followed by the construction of permanent school buildings.

The headmistress, a flustered Asian lady with ebony hollows below her tired eyes, directed them briskly towards the staff room, assuring them that Mr Christie would be in there and that they would not be disturbed before three o’clock. Knocking on the flimsy door, they entered to find an elderly man sitting gazing at a couple of lethargic goldfish in an aquarium, a rolled-up newspaper sticking out from his jacket pocket.

When he stood up, Alice was surprised to see how small he was, such height as he had being in his spine rather than his legs. From her own six-foot vantage point she found that she towered over him, overlooking the extensive bald patch on the crown of his head which was in a perfect pear-shape.

Until he was shown the photograph in the S.P.E.A.R. leaflet, Eddie Christie played dumb, firmly refuting any suggestion that he might have used prostitutes in Edinburgh or anywhere else. When confronted by his own picture, he stared hard at it as if in disbelief, and then a faint smile flitted across his lined features and was gone.

‘OK, sergeants, how can I help you?’

‘Our enquiry,’ Alice said, ‘is concerned with the death of Isobel Wilson, a prostitute working in the Leith area’.

‘And?’

‘We understand that you knew her?’

‘No, no, not… I don’t think so…’

‘It may s… s… save time,’ Simon Oakley interrupted, ‘for all of us, if we tell you that S.P.E.A.R., who produced the leaflet, informed us that the photo you are looking at was taken on Ms Wilson’s phone, and that she reported you to the centre shortly after you had b… b… beaten her up.’ He rested his heavy buttocks on the edge of a table and crossed his arms, glaring at the man, an expression of impatience on his face.

‘Well, I don’t accept any of that, obviously, but now you mention it she does seem familiar.’

‘You knew her?’ Alice asked.

‘“Know” might be putting it a bit strongly, other than in the bibli -’

‘Fine. You were acq… acq… acq… ac…’ Simon Oakley stammered uncontrollably, then shook his head in frustration and tried again. ‘You had m… m… met her before the occasion on which you hit her?’

‘Yes.’

‘Can you tell us where you were between, say, 5.00 p.m. and 10.00 p.m. on Tuesday night?’ he continued.

‘Last Tuesday?’

The policeman nodded.

‘Easy. With my wife at home, marking homework.’

‘And your wife’s name, and address?’

‘Rona Christie. We live at number five Rintoul Drive.’

‘We’ve got Isobel Wilson’s phone. The one she took the photo of you with. We’ll get the date off it. Why did you h… h… hit her on that occasion?’

‘You really want to know?’

Simon and Alice looked at each other in disbelief before answering ‘yes’, simultaneously.

‘Because she called me “Crocker”.’

‘So?’ Alice asked.

‘It’s part of a school chant, chanted by my pupils. Or, in this case, ex-pupil. “Who’s oaf his rocker, Crocker, Crocker…Crocker Christie!”’

‘She was an ex-pupil of yours?’

‘So I discovered.’