Authors: Alex Gray
Glasgow University sat high above the west end of the city on Gilmour Hill, its spiked spire a landmark for miles around. To the south it overlooked the Art Galleries and the river Clyde beyond. That particular morning Tom Coutts felt real pleasure in the view.
‘Makes you feel good, doesn’t it?’ he smiled at Solomon. They were sitting on a wooden bench by a strip of grass, warmed by unexpected sunshine.
Solly smiled back. Tom hadn’t looked as relaxed as this for a long time. He nodded at his companion.
‘Coming back into work soon, then?’
Tom sighed. ‘I hope so. They tell me I’ve done well, whatever that means. Thought I knew all the psychobabble but it’s different when you’re on the receiving end,’ he grinned wryly. ‘But I can’t fault them. OK, it’s taken a while and you must be fed up with all the extra marking. Sorry about that,’ he added. ‘Still, I feel better than I’ve felt in ages. And this helps,’ he spread a hand over the banks of primulas spreading down towards Kelvin Way.
‘I wanted to ask you something, Tom. About the clinic.’
‘They using you as their profiler, are they? Good. I’m glad,’ Tom Coutts nodded approvingly.
‘I know DCI Lorimer’s spoken to you about the victim. Must have been hard when she was Nan’s nurse.’
‘One of Nan’s nurses,’ Tom corrected him gently. ‘Yes. It was a shock. I’d only seen her a few days before the murder. Hadn’t even realised she worked there. But then I didn’t keep in touch with any of them after the funeral.’
‘I wondered if you would help me. Give me some information about the clinic. From an insider’s view point, as it were.’
‘Listen, I’d be glad to. You’ve no idea how grateful I’ve been for all your help, Solly. Anything I can tell you, anything at all that might help build up a decent picture for you.’ Tom laid a hand on Solly’s arm as he spoke. ‘Mind you, I can’t fault the clinic. The therapists were very professional. I thought the place seemed well run.’
‘How about the other patients?’
Tom grinned. ‘Aha! Run into a problem over patient confidentiality, have you?’
‘Something like that,’ Solly replied blandly. Mrs Baillie had not been pleased at having to give her patient files to the police. She would be even less inclined to cooperate with a civilian, he thought.
‘Want to give me a grilling before I go up to Lewis?’
‘Lewis?’
Tom inclined his head. ‘Didn’t you know? They’ve got a respite centre on the island. Most of the longer term patients have a chance to go up there for a break at the end of their treatment. I was offered the chance and I
thought, well, why not. A few days with some clean air can only help. Then I’ll be ready for work again.’
Solomon shook his head. A respite centre. On Lewis? He wondered if Lorimer had any inkling of this. Kirsty MacLeod came from Lewis. This was an element that kept coming into the equation. A coincidence? Or was there something more sinister going on that they’d all missed?
‘Tell me a bit about the patients you met during your therapy sessions.’
‘What’s there to tell? These are folk who are part of a system, Solly. They’re more a danger to them selves than to anyone else. It’s the loose cannon you’re looking for. The one who’s never seen his GP. The one everyone sees as normal.
You
know that.’ Tom drew him a disapproving look.
Solly nodded and shrugged. ‘Perhaps. But just indulge me for a little. Tell me about the patients who were in your group.’
Tom took a deep breath. ‘Well. They weren’t the same for a start. I can remember one or two who came after I started, but to be honest I don’t have a lot of memory about who was there at the beginning of my treatment. Except the long termers, the residents.’
Solomon crossed one leg over the other, listening but not interrupting.
‘The Irish chap, Leigh, he’s been there all along. Eric came a couple of months back. Then there was an older man called Sam something. He’d been a shipyard worker. And the nun, of course. She’s been there for ages. How she can afford it, goodness knows. I thought they took a vow of poverty and that place doesn’t come cheap. Even with medical insurance.’
‘The nun. What was her name?’
‘Sister Angelica. Poor soul. She’d been displaced from her last convent when it was closed down. Had lived there all her professional life, I believe. She simply couldn’t come to terms with any change.’ Tom turned to Solly, his eyes suddenly hard. ‘Bereaved, really. Like me,’ he added. ‘People tell you to pull yourself together, you know. Think time will help, as if grieving should be contained in a respectable amount of time: so many months and no longer. It’s not like that, though. Not for some of us. Sister Angelica suffered from manic depression. She’d come into the Grange after an attempted suicide.’
‘When was this?’
Tom shrugged. ‘Don’t know. She was there when I started the sessions and she’s still there, as far as I know.’
‘Do you remember any of the patients who were given the chance to go to Lewis?’
‘No. You see, the makeup of the group changes so much from week to week. There were the ones, like me, who came in as outpatients and then there were the residents.’
‘But some of the residents would continue as outpatients for a while, surely?’
Tom frowned. ‘Yes, I suppose so, but you’d really need to check with the Baillie woman. She’ll have all that sort of thing in her files. Cathy, the girl on reception might be a better bet, mind you,’ he grinned conspiratorially at Solly.
‘Thanks, Tom. Would you do me another favour?’
‘Surely. Anything I can.’
‘Would you mind writing down everything you can remember about the residents in your therapy group? It might help me.’
‘Of course,’ Tom patted his arm. ‘In fact I’ll get on with that right away.’ He rose from the bench and flexed his shoulders. ‘Getting too old for sitting on park benches,’ he laughed. ‘Good hunting, Solly.’
Solomon stood on the platform of the bus, gripping the rail as it braked to a halt. The bus had taken him from University Avenue all the way over to the south side of the city. Now, according to his A to Z, there was only a short walk to the Grange. His mind was still buzzing with last night’s marking load. Final year exams were a headache for all the staff at this time of year and Solly found it one of the few times when he had to struggle to clear his mind and focus on other things. They were such a vulnerable lot, his students, under their guise of bravado. One girl in particular, bright, feisty and chasing a First for all her worth, seemed to have cracked under the strain. The psychologist had been saddened to read her scripts full of generalisations and glossed over statistics. Hannah was so much better than her results would suggest. The girl was one of a group who had failed to come to his exam preparation classes earlier in their course, he remembered now. Solly always made it his duty to give every student a chance to find out about the psychology of exam preparation. It had so much more to do with strategies and mental attitude than sitting up burning the midnight oil. Still, there were some kids, like Hannah, who would never be convinced.
Dismissing students from his mind, Solomon recalled the file on Kirsty MacLeod. His present remit was to the dead rather than to the living.
The road to the clinic ran slightly uphill and the
pavements were narrow on either side of the road where, as Lorimer had told him, there was extensive double parking. Even during the day, thought Solly. Perhaps a fair proportion of the residents were retired? An interesting thought. Would there be more eyes to see during the daytime? The psychologist had a list of local people who had been interviewed in the house-to-house enquiries following Kirsty MacLeod’s murder. These were so time-consuming for the police whose resources were often stretched to breaking point anyway.
Solomon stopped at the brow of the hill. The red sandstone tenements petered out here, giving way to a few solid Victorian villas at the end of the cul-de-sac. The Grange was just one of those that had undergone extensive renovation. Most had been divided into residential flats, a more marketable proposition these days, and certainly a saving on Community Charges. Opposite the Grange two houses had been given quite different makeovers, however. What at first appeared to be a large family home was in fact a dental surgery. Next door to that was a pub, the sort that could be found in any town the length and breadth of Britain. There was a poster outside advertising the weekly events along with its chips-with-everything bar menu. The psychologist crossed the road towards the surgery, noting the house name, Palmyra, still engraved in faded gold over the glass lintel. Standing back, he could see several cars nosing around the back of the building. The front gateway was only wide enough to admit pedestrians so there must be another entrance to the driveway, Solly thought, his feet taking him round the side of the old house.
There were four cars parked: two were BMWs with this year’s registration and one was a classic Jaguar, its racing
green bodywork sleek and polished. Dentistry was paying well in this part of the world, if appearances were to be believed, Solly smiled to himself. The fourth car was a Vauxhall, K656 BLS. He made a note of all their numbers, telling himself that Lorimer’s team had probably covered just such details already. He was aware of the need to tread carefully. There was no reason to fracture the relationship between the DCI and himself. What really interested him, though, was how the cars had come into the parking area. Sure enough there was a double wooden gate that had been fixed into the high stone walls. No moss was clinging to the stone posts either side of the gate, unlike the furred surface along the older section of the wall, suggesting that the entrance had been constructed in recent years. On closer inspection Solly could see trails of purple toadflax growing out of the crevices between the pitted stonework. The gate itself was a solid affair of thick timber, dark with creosote that had not yet weathered. He gave the latch a push and found himself in a cobbled lane running down the length of the street.
Solly shut the gate behind him. There was no sign of a padlock although there was a hasp attached to the left gate. He fingered the metal loop, checking for fresh scratches that might show if a padlock had been taken off recently. There were none that he could see. Did that suggest a laxity in the dentists’ security? Or was this a fairly low risk area? Solomon decided to walk back down the lane rather than retrace his steps through the grounds of the surgery.
Looking up and down he could see the black shapes of wheelie bins all along one side of the lane. A bin lorry could manoeuvre its way up here, then. The lane wasn’t as
narrow as it seemed. Solomon looked again at the wooden gates. Had the killer opened them and simply parked his car in the empty driveway, leaving quietly from the back lane? Was that a possibility Lorimer had considered? The wall ran all the way back down to the main road so Solomon headed towards the last building on the street.
At one time it may have resembled its neighbour but now several ramshackle extensions had transformed the house into a mock Tudor pub. The roof still had the same grey Welsh slate but there the similarity ended, the building having spawned a series of flat-topped, concrete extensions that almost reached the perimeter wall. Here, too, there was a back entrance, but this was a high narrow green door. Solomon tried turning the round handle but it was locked fast. There was no other exit that he could see. With a small sigh, he headed back to the surgery gate and slipped into the grounds. There was nothing to be gained from walking all the way back down the lane and up the road again.
As he made for the front gate, the door to the surgery opened and a woman appeared, buttoning her raincoat as she emerged. Solomon gave her his usual benign smile but she merely stared for a moment at him before crossing the road to the Grange. He watched her walk up the driveway until she was hidden from sight by the rhododendron bushes.
Solomon stood for a few minutes just outside the gate. From here the upper windows of the clinic were visible. Anyone standing at those windows could see into the grounds of the dental surgery, Solomon’s logical voice reasoned. It was time to have a look around the Grange itself. He rubbed his hands together. The residents might
prove to be quite fascinating.
Rosie washed her hands, noting where the sweat from her surgical gloves had left pink tinges along the palms. She dried them thoroughly on the paper towel then pressed the lever on the industrial-sized hand cream dispenser that sat over the basin. It was a routine she followed religiously after a PM. Your hands are your primary tools, she often told her students. The girls were the ones who usually followed her advice. It wasn’t a very macho thing for the boys to rub hand cream into their fingers. Body-piercing, dreadlocks, they were quite the thing, but hand cream?
Rosie smiled as she thought of her conversation with Solly on the subject. He’d made her laugh with his acute perception of their attention-grabbing strategies, showing her, even as he gently mocked their outward appearances, how sensitive he was to the students’ underlying vulnerability. At the time Rosie had found herself thinking what a great father Solomon Brightman would make. She had been immediately appalled at herself for the thought. Was she becoming broody or what?
Solomon was going to see the people at the Grange today, he’d told her. She’d likely see him in the staff club just around teatime. Sometimes she’d have a quick orange juice as she scanned the room for her dark, bearded friend. Other times he’d be there ahead of her reading the papers in what had become their favourite corner. Funny how he was a creature of habit in some ways when he was so unpredictable most of the time. They’d discussed the two murders, Rosie offering her professional opinion but sparing him the grislier pathological details when she remembered. Solly had a delicate stomach for such things.
The pathologist usually delighted in tormenting lay people with the finer points of her post-mortems but she’d made an exception with Solly.