Authors: Michael J. Malone
‘Strange isn’t it,’ Harky said as we passed over her doorstep. ‘Just like
CSI
. Real life comes to your living room.’
‘Aye,’ she answered oblivious to his sarcasm. ‘It’s just as good as the telly. You fine people investigating a murder right on our doorstep.’
The bottle finished, Allessandra picks up her mobile and examines the screen. Nothing. She checks the time. 8:30pm. She knows how pissed off Roberto gets if she pesters him to find out when he will be back home so she resists the impulse to send him a text. She reconsiders and sends one anyway:
… when you coming home? xxx
She waits a few minutes. No reply. Then, feeling a twist of loneliness, she scrolls down her contact list. Drinking too much wine is not a good idea when you’re on your own, she tells herself. Makes you needy. The high she’d been on after her day’s work had completely dissipated. Mum’s number comes up first and she thinks, God no. Sheila’s next and is also dismissed as she’ll be watching her soaps. Then she scrolls through her other contacts and dismisses them one by one. They are all women she’s worked with in the past, but what do you talk about to people who don’t understand what you go through on a day-to-day basis? She faces sex crimes, violence and murder; the most important decision they’ve made that day is what to have for lunch or whether to end a letter with “faithfully” or “sincerely”.
At the end of her contact list she comes across the numbers of Ray and Daryl. They are the only two worth talking to. And she’s just going to come across as Ali Nae Pals if she phones either of them. With a sigh she closes down her phone and makes her way to her kitchen. She opens the fridge door and peers in. It’s empty apart from a clove of garlic and some goat’s milk.
She closes it and opens what Roberto calls with a hint of irony and a touch of dashed expectations, the food cupboard. Apart from a tin of alphabet spaghetti — Roberto’s — and a jar of honey — hers — it’s also empty. Note to self, thinks Allessandra; do a proper food shop. Just as soon as you can be arsed.
With a sigh, she walks down the long hallway to her bedroom, taking her clothes off and dropping them on the floor as she walks. That’ll really piss Roberto off. He has a typical Italian view of how houseproud a woman should be and she delights in proving him wrong at every opportunity.
In her bedroom she closes the thick, red velvet drapes — being married to a high-achiever has its perks — and puts on her pyjamas. The ones that tell Roberto he needs to keep his hands to himself.
She flicks off the switch on the lamp, curls into the foetal position under the quilt and sends a silent prayer that sleep comes quickly.
The door had to be here. Somewhere along this length of wall. A thick coat of ivy hampered his progress. An ivy he’d never seen before. Green with yellow braid. A gust of wind. Leaves lifted along the wall. Giving the impression that the wall lives, moves with each inhalation.
He fought for breath. The air that reached his lungs is sweetened with incense. He pushed a hand through the leaves, hoping for the wood of a door. He looked down at the other hand. It held a small rusted key. Rust leaked on to his skin. He felt it stain the three deep lines; love, life and heart.
His pulse jumped in his throat. Shoulders rose and fell as he worked air into his body, energy into his limbs. Fingers raced along stone, their sensitive pads replacing eyes. Where’s the gate?
He punched a toe on the root of a tree. The pain was sharp, almost pleasurable. He leaned forward to nurse his foot. It was bare. Where were his shoes? Where were his clothes? He was naked and unaccountably hard. Shame at his arousal turned his head. He looked in every direction. What if anyone saw him like this?
There was a building behind him. A memorial to the lost lives of a thousand boys. Its shadow reached almost to his feet and he felt the touch of countless eyes from behind sightless windows. His scrotum shrunk. Sweat broke out down the cold length of his spine. Someone was watching him. Laughing at his nakedness, his pathetic nakedness. And laughing at his fear.
I’m in front of a mirror. A stage mirror. The table top is covered with a veil of tiny, white feathers. People are dancing behind me. In the corner a nun sits in a bath, fully clothed. Her face is arctic white, her lips blue.
Now I’m being chased through unfamiliar streets. I run in one door and come out the back door of another house. My limbs are heavy, my feet sticking on the ground, but I need to get away. I’ve never known fear like it. Every hair on my body is erect.
I’m running down a dead-end. I have a small blade of some sort in my hand. It glints in the moonlight. Before me is a white wall. It has two windows halfway up, shaped like a semicircle. Like a pair of eyes. Red liquid wells up on the sill of one and begins its slow slide down the wall. I know with the certainty of the devout, if the blood reaches the floor, I die.
‘Ray, Ray, wake up,’
‘Wha…’ I sit up. I remember instantly. I had come to Theresa’s straight from work. After a hard day I needed her particular brand of attention. I feel wet hair line my forehead.
‘Will you sleep somewhere else if you’re going to have nightmares? Man, that was scary.’
‘Nightmares,’ I say unconvincingly, ‘I don’t have nightmares.’ The dream fades, leaving an aftertaste. I can hear my pulse thump in my ears. ‘What are you on about?’ I reach over and switch on a bedside lamp.
‘Ray, that was scary.’ Theresa is sitting up, her knees pulled up to her chest.
‘Hey. It was only a dream.’
‘A bloody scary one. Your voice. It was weird. Didn’t sound like you.’
‘Who did it sound like then?’
‘A wee boy.’
‘Eh? You sure you’re no’ the one that was having the bad dream?’
‘Christ, how could anyone sleep through that? No, you were having the dream. I was sitting here terrified to leave you. Terrified to stay.’ She ran a hand through her hair. Fighting back tears. ‘And you wouldn’t wake up.’
‘Oh, sweetheart,’ I slide across the bed and put an arm over her shoulder, ‘It was only a dream.’
‘If that was only a dream, I’m never going to sleep again.’ She pushes me away.
‘What was so scary then?’
‘You… your voice, what you were saying.’
‘What was my voice like? What was I saying?’
‘It was like a wee boy. I told you that.’
‘What was I saying?’
‘Nothing.’
‘But…’
‘Nothing, all right? Just my vivid imagination.’ She moved as if she was leaving the bed. ‘I’m going for a cuppa. You want one?’
‘Theresa, tell me. Why won’t you tell me?’
She turned her face to mine, her lips tight, and her pupils large. Whatever she heard really freaked her out. She took a steadying breath, ‘Okay, here’s what you said…’ she shook her head, ‘what the boy said. It was only a short phrase, but you… he, I refuse to believe that was coming out of your mouth. He… it was like a mantra, over and over and over again.’
‘Theresa, for fuckssake will you tell me what I said.’
‘But it was said with such… relish. Over, and over and over again.’
‘THERESA!’
‘Jesus doesn’t save, you said. He kills.’
I’m at a gym. One of these big fancy new ones that’s been springing up around the city. Glasgow has another class division: the fat and the fit. The place is a triumph of chrome and mirrors. Everything looks brand new. I’m here for an assessment, to see how unhealthy I am.
The sight accosting me in the mirror has become too much to bear. Need to do something about it. Needed to do something about it a long time ago.
The place is quiet. Mind you, it would be quiet at ten o’clock at night. But it’s the only time I can get here. Only a few people are sweating at the variety of machines that populate the floor. Gratifying to see that they are almost as out of shape as I am.
While I wait for the instructor to put me through my paces, I review the day’s information. A bottle of sleeping pills was found in the bathroom cabinet. Prescribed to Miss Connelly, and apparently of a strength to knock out a rhinoceros. The amount of planning it would have taken to inflict those wounds on the deceased suggests that the killer would have left nothing to chance, and might have known of Miss Connelly’s sleeping habits. Someone close to the family, perhaps? I suppress a shudder; whoever it was, we have a determined man here. A man with a plan. A man on a mission. The clichés are pouring into my mind, but they appear apt.
‘Mr McBain?’ A smiling child who looks as if she’s been scrubbed with a wire brush dipped in Dettol stands before me. ‘I’m Yvonne and I’m your instructor. Would you come with me?’ The smile doesn’t dim in wattage. Used to be that folk would say, you know you’re getting old when the police are looking younger than you. Let’s change that profession to Gym Instructor. I feel I should ask if her parents know where she is.
Yvonne takes a few measurements with a variety of instruments that look vaguely medical. Yvonne talks and I listen. My seat is uncomfortable. I’m squirming, getting red in the face. Perhaps it’s not the chair that’s the problem.
‘You’re edging into the medical category of obese, Mr McBain,’ she says cheerfully. I want to pencil in some of her teeth. No, make it indelible black ink. ‘But with a programme of regular exercise and calorie reduction, we’ll get you back into shape.’
She must have read the look of disbelief on my face, ‘You’ve taken the hardest step, Mr McBain. To realise there’s a problem and to do something about it. Lots of people don’t get that far. So well done you.’
My hand grips the arm of the chair: by now I want to chip away at her smile with a toffee hammer.
On the way home, I stop off for pie and chips. Well, I’ve had nothing to eat all day, there must be some calories in the bank. Besides, my body can only take so much of a shock at the one time.
I’m sitting on my couch in front of the telly. The news is on. I hold the first chip in front of my mouth, let the saliva start to flow, smell the vinegar and fat. Yes. Life doesn’t get much better than this. The diet can start tomorrow.
Mouth full, I look around the flat. Not bad for a solitary male. All creams and browns, leather and wood. Very Scandinavian. Might even lend credence to the rumours of my homosexuality, if it weren’t so masculine. Or is that what gays go for?
Ignoring the TV, I look out of the large window over the park, towards the steeple that’s scratching at the sky. For someone who’s sworn off religion, I’ve chosen to live in an area of the city that’s plagued with them. What would a psychologist say about that?
I break a piece of crust off the pie. This is part of the ceremony. Eat the circular crust first and then the meat. Chewing, I take a pad from my pocket and read.
Connelly was indeed Victor Meldrew made flesh, it would seem. Nobody had a good word to say about the man. They didn’t have a bad word to say either, but the protestations of sorrow at the news had no basis in honest emotion. The most honest person was the barmaid at the bowling club.
‘Horrible to get murdered, right enough,’ she shuddered. ‘But maybe noo that he’s deid, he’ll be happy,’ she said.
The team’s digging around did throw up a couple of interesting facts though. The deceased was seen with a woman on the eve of the murder. This was sufficiently odd to cause a few comments. I’m going to interview the barman at that particular establishment tomorrow. This has already been done, but there are some things I like to do myself.
The most interesting fact, though, came from the deceased’s employment history. He’d been a caretaker at quite a few children’s homes over the years. Seemed to stay at one place for only a few years at a time. Did he get bored? Or was he forced to move on each time?
The bar is one of those wee rooms that proliferate in Glasgow. Short on aesthetics, big on good-sized measures. A quarter-gill, no less. By the look on the face of the barman, he’s not too pleased by our entry. Might frighten the punters to have cops in their midst. Tough.
The barman has a body that’s been well lived in and a strawberry-shaped nose that hints at what he might do with his profits. He pulls up his waistband with hands that could hold three full pint glasses at a time, ‘What can I do for youse?’ His tone is at odds with his words.
‘I’m DI McBain and this is DS Drain. We’re here to ask you about Paddy Connelly.’
‘Your guys were here yesterday. I told them all I know, mate.’
‘We’d like to hear it again, mate.’ I smile, ‘If you don’t mind.’ I try the good cop approach.
‘Can I get youse something to drink?’ He puts his hand on the till to let us know the house won’t be paying.
‘No thanks.’ I see a couple of guys drain their pints. They suddenly have an appointment elsewhere. I fix their faces in my mind. Keep them in my scrapbook. Scanning the room, I spot a familiar face. One that looks as out of place as a blue sock in a barrel of green ones, despite the fact that he’s trying to dumb down his appearance. A blue skip hat, with the skip pulled forward to hide part of his face, covers his normally perfectly blond hair and his trademark camel coat is nowhere to be seen. Instead he’s wearing a dark blue Harrington jacket over a dark blue turtle-neck sweater. I pretend I don’t see him. If he’s here incognito, I don’t want to spoil it for him. He may be a criminal and a highly successful one at that, but he doesn’t murder anyone, at least not to my knowledge, and that means I leave him alone. Besides, outside of work, he’s the closest thing I have in this world to a friend. I swing my line of vision back to the barman.
‘Do you know anyone that might want to kill Mr Connelly?’ I ask.
‘Only if being a miserable bastard has become a capital offence, mate.’
‘Not as far as I’m aware,’ still smiling. ‘Who did he drink with?’
‘Look around you, officer.’ I do. ‘Guys don’t come here for the chat.’ He’s right. The room is dotted with men and a couple of women all staring purposefully at their drinks.
Wondering if he serves razors with his drinks I ask, ‘So what about this woman he was with on the night of his death?’