Keep The Midnight Out (William Lorimer) (11 page)

L
orimer was sitting beside the man and woman on a bench outside their hotel, saddened that the view of the gardens sweeping down to the shore and the hills beyond was lost to these grief-stricken parents. Would they always associate this island with death and despair? They had urged him to sit with them during this interview with the reporter from Glasgow:
He’s known to you
, Rory’s mother had said.
And we don’t know what to expect.

‘He’s late,’ Douglas Dalgleish grumbled, looking at his watch.

‘No, dear, we’re early,’ Pamela chided. ‘Look, here he is now.’

The three people turned as one at the reporter’s approach. McGarrity gave a slight bow in the direction of Mrs Dalgleish; it was not an ostentatious gesture, just a brief courtesy and Lorimer knew that the man was prepared to be as sympathetic to these bereaved folk as he could be. Today he had discarded his tweeds and was wearing a light linen jacket over an immaculately pressed shirt that was open at the neck, a concession to the sunshine that was blazing down from an azure sky.

‘Thanks for agreeing to see me,’ McGarrity said, offering a hand to each of them in turn. ‘I understand how hard it must be.’

‘Do you?’ Pamela Dalgleish blurted out then gazed at her lap.

‘It’s part of my job to talk to people who have experienced some terrible things,’ McGarrity said gently. ‘Part of being a crime reporter.’

‘Suppose someone’s got to do it,’ Douglas Dalgleish grumbled, making it sound as though the reporter was little better than the lowliest street sweeper. ‘Well, let’s get it over with,’ he added testily.

Lorimer watched as McGarrity picked up a metal chair that was nearby, angling it so that he was near enough to the trio but not invading their space. He was being sensitive towards these poor people, but Lorimer knew that he was also a consummate professional who would not leave until he had all the information he wanted.

‘Let’s start with Rory,’ the reporter began. ‘Tell me about him. What he did at school, his friends, his hobbies, the things he excelled in.’ He smiled at them encouragingly. ‘Readers always like to think of the life that a young person has enjoyed. It helps to make them more real in their eyes,’ he explained.

Pamela Dalgleish stared at him then nodded. ‘Hard to know where to begin,’ she whispered.

‘Just take your time,’ McGarrity told her.

A shuddering sigh went through her body then she straightened her shoulders as though preparing for a hard physical task.

‘Rory was our youngest,’ she began. ‘He was at Hutchie like the rest of the children, but he didn’t particularly shine at school. Not like his siblings.’

‘Too many things had changed since they’d been there,’ Dalgleish put in. ‘Too much choice. All that extra-curricular nonsense.’

‘Rory did like to go to the after-school clubs,’ Pamela agreed. ‘Computer club was his favourite.’

‘Never away from the blasted thing!’ her husband retorted.

‘Well, he was good at it, dear. He could always show me what to do if anything went wrong with mine.’

‘What was he going to study at university?’ McGarrity asked, as though sensing that this line of questioning was not particularly fruitful.

Dalgleish cleared his throat noisily. ‘Ah,’ he said, then stopped.

The two parents looked at one another then Pamela nodded as though there had been an unspoken agreement.

‘He hadn’t exactly been accepted for a course,’ she said. ‘He was going to travel first then apply later on.’

‘And had he any course of study in mind?’

‘Media studies,’ Dalgleish said, shaking his head. ‘Fat lot of good that would have done him in the job market. Oh well, not a problem now —’ He broke off, his hand across his mouth, sudden tears filling his eyes. He rummaged in a pocket and took out a handkerchief then blew his nose as the reporter looked on, an expression of utter contrition in his eyes.

‘Is this too hard for you?’ McGarrity asked.

‘Sorry, sorry, no, please go on. It’s just…’ He stopped and swallowed hard.

‘Phillip and Jennifer chose such traditional professions,’ Pamela explained. She’s a doctor in Edinburgh Royal Infirmary and Phillip’s a lawyer.’

‘And Rory had his own ideas about what he wanted to do?’

‘Something like that.’ She attempted a tremulous smile. ‘He was good at designing things.’ She looked up as though she had suddenly remembered. ‘Games for the computer, I mean. He could have made a career out of that, couldn’t he?’ She turned towards her husband, a mother protesting her son’s worth.

‘Plenty of youngsters have made a fortune from the internet,’ Lorimer agreed.

McGarrity nodded. ‘Shall I say then that Rory had advanced IT design skills? That he hoped might lead to greater things?’

As the two parents nodded as one, Lorimer hid a sardonic smile. McGarrity would have the dead boy as some sort of technical genius who was a loss to the modern world. His piece would be exaggerated, as they all were, but hopefully harmless. Still, it was an interesting bit of information and he wondered just what the police had turned up on the dead boy’s laptop.

‘Any girlfriends?’

Lorimer saw the dark look that passed between the Dalgleishes. It was a small enough thing but in that momentary exchange the senior detective suddenly understood.

‘No,’ Douglas said, a shade too firmly.

McGarrity smiled. ‘Lots of pals, though, I suppose.’

A momentary look of relief swept across Pamela Dalgleish’s face.

‘Oh, yes, lots,’ she agreed swiftly. ‘The house will be so quiet now without them all there,’ she added, biting her lip.

Lorimer sat back, watching and listening, forming his own opinions and wondering if the reporter had also picked up on the parents’ body language. Probably. McGarrity was no fool.

If he was not mistaken, here was a secret that the Dalgleishes wanted to die with their boy. Had it been a secret kept from others, though? Had Rory, the loud lad, shared the fact of his sexuality with his schoolfriends? Or had the shame that emanated from his own parents made him more reticent about the fact that he was gay? It didn’t explain the boy’s death but perhaps it would make things more complicated.

And, for the first time since he had discovered the body, Lorimer allowed himself to speculate about the marks around the wrists and ankles.

‘What do you reckon?’

‘I would have said wire.’ Rosie peered more closely at the ankles where some form of binding had cut into the boy’s flesh. ‘But it hasn’t left the sort of impression you would expect. Maybe some sort of binding twine.’ She paused, examining the surface wounds with a magnifying glass. ‘There’s a definite pattern. Won’t be any traces after being so long in the water, but I want some photos sent to our friends down in Glasgow. Chap I know there is a whizz with this sort of thing.’

Grace MacMillan angled the camera carefully, zooming in on the spot that Rosie was indicating with a scalpel blade, the ruler next to the boy’s ankle to give an idea of scale. Despite the tragic circumstances of Rory Dalgleish’s death, the older woman found that she was enjoying this. Having her former protégée undertake the post-mortem was hugely gratifying; it was something that she and Martin would talk about over an evening whisky for years to come.

Stevie Crozier stood as far away from the two doctors as she could manage, DS Langley by her side. It was not out of any sense of nausea at watching a PM, rather a desire to give the medics as much space as possible. There was no viewing platform here, as in a city morgue, and so the police officers had donned scrubs and slunk against a wall, angling themselves to see what was happening as Rosie moved around the stainless steel table. The harsh lights beamed down to illuminate the pathologist’s work, a necessity in this windowless room. She felt a strange sensation, as though they were all cut off from the real world, adrift in some timeless place where death ruled supreme. She watched as Rosie opened the boy’s body, revealing the internal organs.

Was that all a person amounted to in the end? A load of dark red pieces being weighed on the scales, facts and figures about them written down in a notebook? Where was the loud boy she had heard so much about? Where was his laughter, the exuberance of a young life?

Stevie sensed Langley shifting uncomfortably by her side and she glanced at him, hoping that the detective sergeant wasn’t going to disgrace her and throw up.
He’d
have told her that Rory’s spirit was elsewhere. In heaven, whatever that meant, she thought sourly. Langley was a churchgoer of the traditional sort but he had surprised her when she had remarked on the waste of a young life being cut short.

We can’t know why it’s their time
, Langley had said, looking obliquely at his boss,
we can only trust that their spirit is safe in the arms of God.

Somehow, watching the small blonde woman at work, Stevie found it hard to imagine a spirit of any sort. It was all flesh and bones, nothing more. Wasn’t it?

Rosie turned and looked at the two police officers. ‘You’ve been very patient,’ she smiled. ‘And I know you want as much information as possible, so here’s what we have.’ She turned back to indicate the neck area. ‘Broken hyoid bone suggests that some person has inflicted this injury. It cannot have happened during his passage at sea and the cause of death was most certainly not drowning. The lungs and air passages confirm that,’ she continued. ‘He was dead before he hit the water.’

‘So they tried to dispose of the body by chucking it into the ocean?’ Crozier said, not masking the bitterness in her tone.

‘That is a likely scenario,’ Rosie agreed, ‘but not my part of the ship. All I can tell you is how he died as far as the injuries on his body will show. Whether it’s a they or a he or even a she that put him into the water is not my call, Detective Inspector.’

‘Can you tell if he was tied up before or after he died?’

Rosie shook her head. ‘That’s a bit harder. But he was still warm when he was trussed up. Rigor setting in established the shape of his limbs like that,’ she said, nodding at the bent knees where the bonds had pulled his lower limbs back.

‘But he might have been restrained while he was still alive?’

Rosie nodded. ‘Might have been, but I would never categorically state that he
was
, not here nor in a court of law. We deal in possibilities.’ She smiled, exchanging a knowing look at her former tutor who smiled back as though the phrase was something that had been learned and passed on from Dr Grace MacMillan years before.

‘We’ll have to send all the photographic material to Pitt Street but I can do the toxicology here. See what his bloods and the stomach contents reveal.’

‘D’you mind if I go out for a bit?’ DS Langley said suddenly. ‘Bit stuffy in here.’

‘No, that’s fine, we’re almost done so no need to come back in if you don’t want to,’ Rosie said.

Langley slipped out of the room, closing the door almost reverently as he left, as though to disturb the dead was some sort of sacrilege.

‘Sorry about that,’ Crozier apologised. ‘Didn’t know he was the squeamish sort.’

‘Can’t be too many post-mortems for a police officer to see in this part of the world,’ Rosie said sympathetically. She glanced back at the cadaver, the flaps of skin that lay open, exposing the workings of the human body. It was a sight she was used to seeing in her job, but for a moment she saw Rory’s body through the eyes of the policeman and shuddered. It was fascinating to her, as a pathologist, but pretty grim, perhaps, if you weren’t used to it.

Jim McGarrity was waiting for her as Rosie emerged into the sunshine.

‘Oh, it’s you,’ she said. ‘Lorimer didn’t mention that they’d sent you this far north.’

‘Big story.’ McGarrity shrugged. ‘Bad thing to happen on a place as nice as this,’ he said, spreading his arms wide to encompass the hills, sky and sea around them.

Rosie followed his gesture. It was a lovely place, too lovely for such a death to have been committed here and she could see why the chief crime reporter at the
Gazette
had wanted to come to see it all for himself.

‘I’ve spoken to his parents,’ McGarrity continued. ‘And now I wonder, Dr Fergusson, if you could give me any indication of the cause of the poor boy’s death?’

‘Och, you know I can’t do that yet,’ Rosie protested. ‘It’ll have to be done through the proper channels.’

‘Did he drown?’ McGarrity persisted. ‘Was it an accident?’

Rosie shook her head. ‘You’ll know soon enough,’ she said. ‘The police press office will let you know by the end of today, I would think.’

McGarrity grinned. ‘Thanks, Doc,’ he said.

‘What for? I haven’t told you a thing!’ Rosie protested, but McGarrity was already walking away, one finger tapping against his nose as though he had read what he wanted to know in her unspoken words.

Martin Goodfellow’s hand pushed the tiller to starboard, feeling the tension on the sheet as the yacht cut through the waves. He bent low as the boom came around, feeling the boat swing beneath him like a living creature. Then, as he steered his course across the Sound of Mull, the photographer lifted his face to the afternoon sun, feeling the sharpness of the wind against his stubbled cheeks. It was a perfect day for sighting the minkes, a perfect day to leave the little village behind with all its talk of death and despair.

His eyes caught sight of the fish box tucked neatly to one side, wrapped in several strands of plastic twine. There was a fishing line in there, the one with nine hooks that was called a ‘murderer’
.
Maybe he would head later to the buoy for a spot of fishing. The ling were supposed to be plentiful at this time of year and Grace might like to invite her young friends back for dinner.

He smiled to himself, feeling the field glasses bump against his chest as the yacht swept up and over a wave. It was good to keep an eye on these people from the mainland. So many of them meant well; but occasionally something like the death of the red-haired boy would happen to wreak havoc in their peaceful lives. The man’s smile faded as he faced the sun, his eyes half closed as he remembered his wife’s words and the bleak expression on her face. He would do
anything
, Martin thought fiercely, anything at all to protect his Grace from the world she had left behind all these years ago.