Dying of the Light (11 page)

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.