Dying Of The Light

6

Miss Spinnell peeped timidly from behind her half-opened door, loosened the final chain and came out onto the landing. Quill, attached to an over-long lead, trailed behind her, wagging his tail slowly in appreciation of Alice’s arrival. The old lady’s head was down, her shoulders drooped, and, in some mysterious way, the dog seemed to have absorbed her desolate mood, showing little of the characteristic elation he normally displayed at the handover. A fleshless hand was extended and Alice took the lead from it, looking into Miss Spinnell’s face and noticing that the huge orbs of her eyes were now red-rimmed, swollen with recent tears. She seemed so pathetic, so small and dejected that the policewoman longed to put an arm around her shoulders to comfort her, but resisted the impulse. She knew that physical contact, never mind the familiarity it implied, was considered unwelcome and, in all probability, unpleasant. Any kind of human touch was anathema to the old woman, something to be endured and, in itself, a test of her good manners.

Miss Spinnell handling a dog, however, was quite different. On countless occasions Alice had surprised her neighbour cuddling the animal, kissing his soft muzzle or cradling his head in her lap. Even now, she was absent-mindedly squeezing Quill’s ear, easing it through her fingers. Between caresses she spoke: ‘Today… Ali… Alice, is my birthday.’ But her leaden tone suggested that the occasion was not one of celebration but of mourning instead, just another milestone on the way to dusty death.

‘How splendid… I must get you something. Is there anything that you would particularly like, Miss Spinnell?’

‘Yes,’ her neighbour replied forlornly, ‘A new self.’

‘What’s wrong with the old one?’ Alice asked brightly, unsure where the conversation was leading.

‘I don’t know… and that may, possibly, be part of the problem.’

Sodding, sodding Alzheimer’s, Alice thought. A fiend so skilled in cruelty as to leave odd, disturbing flashes of insight, but enough only to compound the anxiety it brought with it.

‘How about…’ she racked her brain for inspiration, ‘some… chocolates?’ A favourite treat, she knew, remembering the time her assistance had been required to catch imagined pilferers, supposedly bloated on Milk Tray and Black Magic. In fact, Quill himself had been the culprit, canine teeth shredding the cardboard packaging, but the marks attributed, by his devoted admirer, to the long nails of the criminal classes.

‘No.’

‘What about a book then, poetry if you like?’ She could still see, in her mind’s eye, the Poetry Society Medal collecting cobwebs on the shelf.

‘I do not like poetry any more. Stop guessing. I can tell you exactly what I want.’

‘Yes?’

‘My sister. I would like my sister.’

Alice discovered that Miss Spinnell had lost touch with her sibling well over fifty years earlier. She asked for any details that might assist with the search, and was surprised to find herself escorted into the old lady’s drawing room. A visit to the Holy of Holies was an unexpected privilege. On the floor by the bow window lay an assortment of unwashed soup plates, packets of cornflakes, half-empty tins of beans, Oxo cubes and a heap of dog biscuits. Evidently, the area was Quill’s kitchen-cum-dining room. The carpet was strewn with single, unmatched pop socks and, crossing it, Alice inadvertently stood on a wet sponge.

Once she was seated on the sofa, Miss Spinnell returned from a search in a chest of drawers, weighed down by an old photograph album. Inadvertently, she flopped down next to Alice, their thighs momentarily touching. Springing up instantly, she removed herself to the far end of the sofa and placed the open book between them. After much fumbling, a crooked finger was pointed at a black and white image.

‘Annabelle,’ she said, ‘my older sister… em… eight years older than me.’

‘And on this birthday, Miss Spinnell, if you don’t mind me asking, how old are you?’ Alice asked gently. A suitably oblique enquiry, surely.

‘Eighty… ninety, that sort of figure or thereabouts,’ the old lady said, before, seeing what Alice was getting at, she added crossly, ‘She is alive, you know. If not kicking.’

‘Excellent,’ Alice replied, ‘you’ve been in some sort of contact recently?’

‘Of course not! If I had I wouldn’t need you. No. But she is here, on this earth. I’ve been along to the Scarlet Lodge, you appreciate.’

‘The Scarlet Lodge?’ Alice enquired, bemused.

‘Our spiritualist meeting place, dear. I attempted to make contact and failed. So she cannot be in their world… the spirit world, I mean.’

‘Spiritualism?’ Alice exclaimed in wonderment. A new facet of her neighbour.

‘Yes, spiritualism,’ the impatient reply shot back, ‘Spiritualism! Good enough for Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, no less, so good enough – nay, too good – for you. Now, were I to entrust him with the case of the missing sister he’d be sure to come up with the goods! A real detective that one… unlike you, dear.’

Leaving the flat with the scant information she had been able to glean, Alice smiled to herself. Dealing with her neighbour was like trying to tame an ancient and confused stoat, an unlikely pet, and one which even in its dotage required to be treated with the utmost respect.

‘Four rolls. A Twix and a soup, if they’ve t… t… tomato.’

‘Four rolls!’ Alice repeated, astonished.

‘Yes. FOUR rolls, a Twix and a soup. Any kind of roll, by the way, ham, t… t… tomato, cheese, tuna. I’m not fussy and I’m still building up my strength after the accident,’ Simon answered, unabashed.

Chewing the dry pastry of her Scotch pie and feeling, for once, strangely virtuous in her comparative restraint, Alice decided to continue with her plan to get to know the new DS. If she said nothing the silence in the car would remain unbroken. Either he was shy or else conversation was not his forte.

‘In the accident, what happened?’

‘A car crash in 2007, on the bypass. I was in hospital for over three months… emergency transfusion after emergency transfusion. They didn’t think I’d pull through, actually. But here I am, and twice as large as life.’ He patted his ample belly, chuckling to himself.

‘Must have frightened your family?’

‘No. I never knew my dad, and my mum was d… d… dead by then.’

‘Sorry…’ An unexpected impasse.

‘Oh, don’t be. She and I never hit it off. But,’ he grinned, ‘the last laugh was mine!’

‘Oh?’

‘Well, the c… c… cussed old duck chose to die on my birthday! But I got my own back on her. In her w… w… will she directed that she was to be buried so I took her off to be burnt in the Mortonhall Crematorium. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust and… flames to flames for her.’ He laughed loudly, glancing at Alice’s face to see if she was shocked or, perhaps, shared his black sense of humour.

‘Where did you sprinkle her remains? A car park, perhaps, or maybe, a sewage farm?’

‘I didn’t. I never collected her ashes at all, so she’ll either have been scooped up with someone else or be residing permanently in the incinerator…’

If he was serious, pursuing revenge beyond the grave did seem a tad extreme, Alice thought. But since the topic (like Simon’s mother) seemed to have died a natural death, the only sound in the vehicle now that of the passing traffic, she racked her brain for something new to prolong their chat. With a lewd wink, Eric Manson had murmured to her that Simon was not married and was available, but otherwise nobody in the squad seemed to know anything much about him. If he had a girlfriend, then no doubt that would be disclosed by him in his own good time and she had no intention of attempting to winkle out any such information out of him. She had suffered enough enquiries into her own love life to ensure that she did not inflict that particular indignity on anyone else. Maybe, with his fondness for food, he liked cooking? Rick Stein, perhaps, or maybe Gordon? But before she had time to work out any other conversational openings, the car drew up outside Father McPhail’s tenement building.

On closer inspection, no-one would have mistaken his housekeeper, Mrs Donnelly, for a cleaner. Or for the priest’s floozy, as had been suggested by DCs Littlewood and Gallagher the previous evening. Celibacy, they argued, was a state proclaimed for public consumption but never, in fact, privately maintained. It was an unnatural condition abhorred by man and woman alike, and surely, by their creator too. And, indisputably, it was impossible to achieve.

In convents nuns seemed to manage it, Alice observed. These ‘Brides of Christ’, DC Littlewood shot back, rarely had any choice in the matter, being too fat, bearded or plug-ugly to attract any earthly suitors. And when eventually he conceded that his own experience of convent life might be inferior to her own, he had expressed frank disbelief when told that a few of her teaching order had been stunners. Recovering quickly, he had thrown a sly glance at DC Ruth Lindsay, and added that it was culpable, sinful, of the beautiful not to reproduce. The young policewoman raised her eyes from her nails only to reply, sotto voce, ‘In your dreams, Tom. And you’ll be the last in your line, for sure.’

Eric Manson, adopting the authoritative tone of an eminence gris, proclaimed that for the ordinary person, the ‘normal’ person, complete excess would invariably be preferable to complete abstinence. But, Alice, picturing the sad souls she had seen flitting in and out of the shadows at Seafield, selling sex indiscriminately to feed their habits, then the ancient and venerable virgins who had taught her, trilling innocently, joyfully in their choir stalls in the side chapel, shook her head.

The housekeeper, a grey plait coiled around the crown of her head like a torpid snake, led them into the kitchen and pulled out chairs for them. Her face remained unsmiling, intimidating even, and despite the steam billowing from the kettle she offered them neither tea nor coffee. In a voice which implied the impertinence of the question, she confirmed that she and Father McPhail had spent the early evening hours of the ninth of January giving his study a good spring clean. Sounding even more affronted, she told them that the priest had, indeed, gone to St Aloysius afterwards, but she was unable to say when he returned. However, she emphasised, he must have gone there; that was, after all, where he had said he was going. As she had gone to bed before his return from the church she was unable to ‘vouch’, as they put it, for the time of his arrival, other than to say that it must have been after 9.00 p.m. No doubt they would appreciate, she added reprovingly, that Father McPhail was an ordained Catholic priest, and thus a Man of his Word.

As they were tramping back to the car, their eyes smarting in the bitter wind, Alice telephoned the DCI to break the news that their suspect had no witness to support his alibi. In turn, she was told, between unpleasantly amplified bouts of liquid coughing, that they should bring him in, on a voluntary basis, if at all possible. He was currently to be found in Jerez Street, under surveillance by a constable borrowed temporarily from the drugs squad. There followed an explosive, mannish sneeze, and then, suddenly, the line went dead.

No sooner had Alice settled into the passenger seat than her phone rang and she picked it up, battling with her seatbelt while trying to listen. Everything had changed. They must go this very minute, pronto, to Cargill’s scrapyard on Seafield Road, Elaine Bell ordered, her voice periodically muffled as she continued to issue instructions to someone beside her in the office. The foreman of the yard had just reported the presence of a body in one of the wrecked cars. She would join them, if she could get away, within the next half hour or so.

The pale winter sun hung low in the sky and heavy clouds began to encircle it, gradually obscuring it, stealing precious daylight and imposing a premature dusk on the chill city. From nowhere, large flakes of snow appeared, an endless, hostile stream of them, choking the windscreen wipers and smothering the icy road.

At the scrapyard, a man waited for them, ill-dressed for the sudden blizzard, stamping his hob-nailed boots on the ground, trying to preserve any feeling in his feet. Seeing them he hurriedly pushed the heavy double gates open, gesticulating towards the north side of the yard, then jogged behind them to their parking place. As DS Oakley slammed the passenger door shut, he lost his balance on the snow-covered cement, falling forwards heavily and striking his right hand on a length of rusted, exhaust piping.

‘Oh, fuck!’ he bellowed on impact, kicking the tube as he lay, still spread-eagled on the ground like an overturned turtle. His thumb had a huge gash on it, running from the pulp down the front of the joint to the knuckle, and blood jetted from it, reddening his cuff as he held his bloody hand upwards, attempting to stem the flow. Taking Alice’s outstretched arm, he pulled himself up and examined his wound for a few seconds, then, grasping his injured hand in the other one, he smiled widely as if to signal that he was now all right. The two sergeants trailed behind their guide towards an untidy mound of skeletal, scrapped cars, smithereens of shattered windscreen glass crunching beneath their feet.

‘It’s in there,’ the foreman said, waving vaguely in the direction of a doorless Renault Clio which rested precariously on the burnt chassis of another vehicle.

‘I seen it when I wis liftin’ the car up wi’ the crane… so I jist dumped it oan the other wan, and called yous.’

‘You’re sure it’s a b… b… body?’ Simon Oakley asked, his thumb pressed hard against his mouth. Thin strands of his fair hair were being blown by the wind into his eyes, making them water.

‘No. But it looked like wan… less Andy’s up tae his games again.’

‘What do you mean?’ Alice asked.

‘A couple o’ months ago he got wan o’ they naked dummies, ken, and put it in a Jag. I nearly wet masel wi’ fright.’

From their viewpoint on the ground, nothing could be seen inside the Renault, so, exchanging nervous glances, they simultaneously began to climb up to it, Alice clambering onto the bonnet of the burnt hulk and Oakley stepping up onto its boot. He got up there first, bent his weighty torso through the gap on the driver’s side, and craned in.

‘It’s a body alr… r… right, Alice,’ he shouted, wobbling slightly on his makeshift platform, snowflakes starting to lie on his broad back as he continued looking inside. Half a minute later, as he remained motionless, gazing into the space, Alice said, ‘Come on, Simon! We’d better get going, eh? Start taping off the area. I’ll get the stuff from the car. The boss may be here any minute, and she’ll expect us at least to have made a start by the time she arrives.’

Immediately Oakley’s head re-emerged from the interior, and like a great lumbering bear he began slowly and carefully to descend, stepping warily along the curved surfaces until, in an undignified rush, he slid to the ground, bumping his buttocks and landing feet first, his balance saved only by Alice grabbing his arms.

‘Thanks, pal,’ he said, looking anxiously into her eyes.

‘Well?’ she asked, still holding onto him as if they were engaged in some kind of strange dance.

‘Well, what?’ he replied, bemused, blood from his injured thumb dripping on to the ground.

‘A man? A woman? The body. What was it?’

‘Female,’ he said wearily, ‘maybe thirty-five or forty. Arms across her chest like the other one. She had a gold chain around her neck and it looks as if she’s been s… s… stabbed, too.’

Sets of stepladders were produced for the Scenes of Crime officers and the photographers, together with halogen lamps from the garage. Throughout all their measured, meticulous activity, the snow continued to fall, thick and fast, coating everyone and everything. It laid a spurious mantle of innocence over the scene, disguising its real character beneath a spotless veneer.

Recognising one of the cameramen as he shook his head free of its white thatch, Alice asked to see the images that he had taken of the victim’s face. In the biting cold, he showed her, shivering theatrically to hurry her along. But it was academic. She knew, in her heart of hearts, before seeing a single picture, that the dead woman would be Annie Wright. And, sure enough, her pale features had been captured by the camera. Her soul, lost.

‘Seen enough?’ the man asked gently, brushing the snow from Alice’s shoulders as she continued to gaze at the face, deep in thought.

Walking down a corridor formed by parallel rows of rusting gas cylinders, the dismembered entrails of a digger littering her route, she spotted the DCI, tucked behind a skip, hugging herself, trying to keep warm in the raw wind. She was in conversation with someone, and every time she spoke a cloud of pale vapour billowed from her mouth like smoke from a small dragon, followed immediately by an answering puff from the other person. Suddenly catching sight of her sergeant, she hollered across, ‘What news?’

‘We can identify the victim, Ma’am,’ Alice called back, finding that even forming the words was an effort in the biting cold, her mouth numb, lips curiously inflexible. ‘It’s Annie Wright, the prostitute who was raped a couple of months ago. I told you about her, remember – the trial that went ahead not so long ago and we lost? I’ve just seen a photograph and it’s her.’

Elaine Bell closed her eyes. ‘Christ Almighty! All hell will be let loose now. They’ll think it’s another bloody Ipswich. And it can’t be the sodding priest this time, either, we’ve had him babysat ever since we let him go.’

‘Not necessarily,’ Dr Zenabi began, stepping away from the skip and finding himself interrupted instantly.

‘What d’you mean, Ahmed, ‘not necessarily?’ the inspector demanded.

Taken aback by her intensity, and with an uneasy smile on his face, he mumbled, ‘Nothing. Well, we’ll see at the PM, eh?’

The kitchen was tiny, lit by a single, bare light bulb, and smelt faintly of stale gas. Diane led her into it, puzzled that a policewoman should call on them at such an hour. But she showed no signs of concern, her fingers travelling deftly on her play station as she walked.

‘It’s about your mum,’ Alice said, already feeling sick to her stomach.

The girl looked up from the flashing screen and replied, in a matter-of-fact tone, ‘She’s oot the noo. I’ve been away at Aviemore on a school trip the last three days, got back at tea-time. She’ll no’ be hame till later, but I can phone her if it’s important, like.’

No, she won’t. No, you can’t, Alice thought, still saying nothing but preparing herself for her role as the bearer of bad news, the destroyer of happiness. And the task became no easier for her however many times it had been done, and practice did not seem to make perfect. Over her ten years in the force she had been chosen as the herald of death nineteen times, and remembered every single occasion. Each differed from the others, but they were all, without exception, horrible. Parents weeping over the loss of a child, husbands over wives, sisters over brothers. And most other combinations, too. All of them, when linked with the word ‘death’, bringing about the collapse of small worlds, the ending of any pure, unmingled joy.

Old Mrs Wilson had been no exception, her grief as real as all the rest. But this was the first time Alice had had to break the news to a ten-year-old, fatherless girl that her mother had been killed. Hearing her own voice, she felt that in telling the child she was, in some way, complicit, as if her hand, too, had been on the knife.

Paper crumples, she thought, not people, yet it was the word which came to mind on seeing the child’s reaction to the awful news. Looking at Diane’s tearful face, she wrapped her arms around the slight body, feeling her quivering like a frightened bird, aware that the protection she could give was illusory, shielded her from nothing. Tomorrow Diane would have to face the world alone, having lost the most precious person known to her; and her childish love had not yet curdled, become judgemental, still remained open and unashamed.

By the time the family liaison officer arrived, the girl had stopped crying and was drinking from a mug of hot chocolate, sniffing to herself between sips. Alice waved goodbye to her and then crept out, feeling drained and inadequate, worried now that her replacement had seemed so cool, detached, in her dealings with the child. Should the possibility of ‘care’ even have been mentioned, when there might be a relation somewhere or other, a grandparent unaware of the existence of a grandchild, or an uncle or aunt prepared to give her a home? Preoccupied, she almost walked past the mail she had seen stacked neatly on the hall table, remembering before crossing the threshold to check the most recent postmark on the letters. And the neighbours must be seen too, questioned as soon as possible while anything of any significance remained fresh in their memories.

Finding that all the flats in the tenement bar one were boarded up, she knocked on its scratched front door, getting no response. Then, noticing a gap in it where a spy hole once had been, she put her eye to it and found herself eyeball to eyeball with the occupant.

‘Ye’re lucky I didnae poke a sharp pencil right through it,’ an old voice croaked, and the door was opened a foot or two to reveal an unshaven little fellow, his pyjama top visible below his knitted jersey. Concluding that his visitor posed no threat, he said cheerily, ‘C’mon, hen, c’mon in.’

The sound of dozens of budgies cheeping and chirruping greeted her as they entered the kitchenette, making any conversation impossible until the old man turned on a tap, soothing or intriguing them into silence. Nonetheless, many of them continued to fly free, swooping from cage to cage, some now sitting on the mixer tap, heads bent to one side. Moving a soiled newspaper from a chair, their owner sat down and began to speak, cutting an apple into budgie-size bites as he did so.

‘The last time I seen Annie wid be oan the Friday night, eh… the twelfth, that’d be,’ he said, running his fingers up and down over the stubble on his cheek. ‘No since then, mind. Mebbe she’s been away or somethin’.’

‘Does she go away often?’

‘Naw. She’s nivver away. I seen her oan the stair, aboot the back o’ eight. She wis oan her way tae her work.’

‘Her work?’ Did he know that she was a prostitute?

‘Aha. She’s a cleaner, ken. Cleans nights at schools up the toon. Sleep a’ day, practically. Looks aifter the wee yin perfect, though,’ he added quickly, anxious not to create official suspicion about her child-care arrangements or anything else. She was much more than a neighbour to him, she was his friend.

‘So, sir, you’ve not seen her since the back of eight on Friday night. But have you maybe heard her? Coming up the stairs or in the flat or anywhere? Even the sound of a radio or TV?’

‘Naw. Not a cheep, darlin’.’

‘Get the fucking result and get it now!’

Elaine Bell banged down the phone and looked up at Alice from her desk.

‘Bloody lab,’ she said, by way of explanation. ‘We’ll see about that. I’ll have it in a couple of days or they’ll feel the Chief Constable’s hot breath on their collars. What do you want, Alice?’

‘Er…’ stammered the sergeant, confused, ‘DI Manson said you wanted me, had something in mind that I am to do – now.’

‘Right,’ the DCI said, trying to gather her thoughts as she spoke. ‘Quite right. I need you to go down to the Cowgate for 9.00 a.m. tomorrow. Professor McConachie’s going to do the PM and, if I can make it, I’m coming too. First, though, go back to S.P.E.A.R. and see who we should speak to about Annie Wright. Find out who’ll know her movements and so on.’

‘But it’s eight o’clock at night, ma’am. The office will be empty.’

‘Yes, the office will be empty but, for Christ’s sake, use your initiative! The van will likely be out and about. Check Carron Place and then any of its other stopping places. You said the Barbour woman usually mans it, so go and find them. Now!’

And, as was so often the case, DCI Bell turned out to be correct. The yellow van was parked on the cobbles in Salamander Street, beside a vacant lot. On the high mesh fencing surrounding the waste ground a sign swung creaking in the wind, bearing the words ‘Scheduled for Re-development’. Plumes of grey smoke curled from a few slush-dampened bonfires dotted about the site, their embers casting a tangerine glow on the snow surrounding them. Soon that area, too, of the ancient, venerable Burgh of Leith, with its winding streets and decayed grandeur, would be no more. Its place would be taken by comfortable and characterless flats interspersed with retail parks, the place’s independent status already no more than a fading memory.

Despite the harsh weather, a woman leant against the vehicle chatting to the driver. Snatches of their conversation reached Alice’s ears as she walked towards the van. Something about polis cars, lights, and the scrappy’s yard. Not surprising that the prostitutes know, she thought – another killing in the heart of their territory, they should be among the first to hear.

Sensing the approach of a stranger, and keen to avoid any confrontation, the woman slunk into the darkness, padding silently away on the compacted snow. Alice tapped on the window on the other side and watched a sleeve wipe away the condensation, to reveal the face of its owner. A jerk of the head was all that needed to communicate where the policewoman was to go and Alice climbed into the van, relieved to be out of the cold and heartened by the smell of coffee.

‘So, it’s true?’ Ellen Barbour said immediately.

‘What?’ Best give no information away yet.

‘Another murder!’ Barbour said crossly, aware that some sort of fencing was taking place and having no truck with it.

‘How do you know about it?’

‘Bush telegraph, so to speak. How d’ you think?’

‘We need your help, Ellen. It’s Annie Wright this time. She was found, as you’ve probably heard, in Cargill’s yard. Who would be able to tell me about her movements this evening and in general?’

‘Easy. She always works with Christine, they’re pretty inseparable. She’d be able to help.’

‘Christine?’

‘Christine Hunter.’

‘And where would I find her?’

‘Well, usually they work just up from the junction with Seafield Place, by General George’s car park. If I were you, that’s the place I’d try first.’

As the policewoman opened the car door to leave, Ellen Barbour added, angrily, ‘And that Guy Bayley, Alice, see him too – check him out.’

The name sounded familiar. ‘Why? Where would I find him?’

‘You’ll find him under ‘B’ for bastard in the phone book, or try the offices of Scrimegour and Woodward WS in Queen Street. That’s where he works, I gather.’

‘And why should I see him?’

‘Because he’s a fanatic, he started everything. He’s always on the phone, complaining to us, to the council. And he hates prostitutes, truly hates them – all of them. Sometimes I wonder if it’s because… well, maybe his mother was one or something.’