Keep The Midnight Out (William Lorimer) (3 page)

‘W
hat’s happened?’

Maggie stood at the side of the road, her dark curls blowing in the rising wind, as Lorimer strode across the last few yards towards her. The police cars were parked on a strip of turf and she could see two uniformed officers making their way back along the shoreline, their yellow rain jackets harsh statements against the sage greens and mossy browns of the marshy ground that lay between them.

‘I heard the birds making a racket,’ he replied at last, turning to look down towards the water’s edge. ‘Thought it was a dead animal that they’d found.’

Her husband stopped abruptly, shaking his head as though unable to put his feelings into words.

‘Oh, no!’ Maggie put a hand to her mouth as she caught sight of his expression. There was a tightness around his mouth that she had seen many times before, usually when something dreadful had happened.

‘Not… not that boy…?’

‘I think so. Fits his description. Red hair.’

He caught her hand as Maggie moved forward.

‘Don’t go down, Mags. You mustn’t see that…’

She stood still, letting him enfold her in his arms.

‘Come on,’ he said gently, turning her to head back towards the cottage.

The road was deserted apart from the two police vehicles stranded by the roadside, no early ferry traffic yet making its way between the port at Craignure and the towns further north. It was, Maggie thought, as if the world was holding its breath, the silence around them broken only by the cries of oyster catchers as they swept over the stony beach. She let herself be guided along the grass-covered path, feeling the dampness soak through her canvas shoes, her mind already wondering what had happened to the boy from the hotel.

Had it been the result of a boating accident, perhaps? The currents way out in the Sound could be unpredictable and if he had gone by boat from the little slipway at Kilbeg who knows what might have happened? Bodies could be lost at sea for weeks on end, washing up miles from where they had fallen into the waters.

Nobody had known what had become of the missing student from Glasgow, Mary Grant had told them just yesterday evening when she had called into the cottage. His folks were frantic with worry, it was said.

Maggie felt a sickness rise in her throat as she thought about these people who were strangers to her, whose lives would now be tenuously linked to her own. It was sometimes said that not knowing was the worst, fearing and hoping in equal measure. But was that really true? If so then these parents could be given a final answer and begin to grieve in earnest.

What was it like to lose a grown child? Maggie looked at the cottage where generations of children had played on the grass and guddled happily along the shore. Her own little ones had never taken a first breath, born too soon. The memory of these griefs had faded now, the possibility of children gone for ever. Yet somehow, Maggie could feel the pain deep within her, a knife low in her guts, at the thought of these other parents being told about their boy.

The willow gate creaked as her husband pushed it open and held it wide.

‘Come on, can you make some tea? And fill the pot. I guess we’ll be having visitors soon enough,’ he said, squeezing her hand.

She saw him hesitate, his head turned back towards the shore.

‘It’s okay. I’m fine,’ she said, forcing her mouth into a tight smile. ‘You go on back down.’

Maggie paused for a moment, watching as her husband strode away through the reeds and bog cotton. She had come out earlier, intent on suggesting a morning walk up the hill, her eyes drawn immediately to the police cars on the roadside and the uniformed figures by the shore. A sudden trembling seized her, making her wrap her arms around her chest. Tea, she needed hot tea, Maggie told herself. Tea was good for shock…

Yet it wasn’t the shock of having a body washed up on the shore here that troubled her, she realised, walking across the lawn towards the door of Leiter Cottage, but the thought that horror could visit this special place, their sanctuary from the outside world.

The two policemen were standing on either side of the body when Lorimer returned. As they looked up, the tall man from Glasgow thought he saw a flicker of resentment in the eyes of the older man, Sergeant McManus from Craignure. Calum Mhor.
Big Calum.
He was a broad-shouldered fellow, right enough, though he merited the name on girth rather than on height, his waterproof jacket straining across his stomach.

‘Need to get something to protect that from the rain. Preserve the scene,’ he muttered.

‘You don’t think he died here?’ Lorimer blurted out.

‘Well, nothing is certain, is it?’ The police sergeant turned and nodded at the wet stones lying against the grassy banks. ‘Tide’s going out now. You found him at high tide. So…’ He shrugged and pursed his lips as though he were a small boy trying to calculate a particularly difficult sum.

‘Wasn’t he washed ashore?’ Lorimer ventured.

‘Ach, must have been, eh?’ McManus shrugged again as though his brain could wrestle no further with the problem. ‘We’ll check the tide charts when we get back up the road, though.’

‘And now?’ Lorimer asked, nodding towards the body lying near their feet.

McManus looked at the detective superintendent through narrowed eyes. ‘You’ll be on holiday here…’ he began.

‘Yes.’ Lorimer frowned. Calum Mhor knew fine they were taking their annual break.

‘So you’ll have a camera with you?’

Lorimer’s face relaxed as he understood the question. ‘You need to take some photos of the body in situ,’ he said.

‘Aye. If it’s no trouble, sir,’ McManus replied, his eyes flicking back to the little house sheltered in the lee of the hill. ‘It’s not every day we find something like this on the island,’ he continued with a grimace. ‘And this wee mobile does not take a good picture. Jamie, away you go up and get the camera from Mrs Lorimer,’ he said, turning to the young police constable who was standing by their side, a bleak expression on his face.

The two men watched as the young man strode swiftly away, glad no doubt for an interlude away from the sight of the corpse, its damaged flesh exposed to the elements.

‘He’s no’ seen any sights like that,’ McManus said quietly as they watched the young constable cross the road and head towards Leiter Cottage. ‘No’ even in Inverness,’ he added wryly.

Lorimer did not reply. Part of him was remembering himself as a younger detective, standing beside the bloated body of an unidentified man. He felt a sudden sympathy for Police Constable Jamie Kennedy. Being a police officer in Tobermory was a far cry from the sorts of cases that he might have had to deal with in Scotland’s largest city had he been sent south to Glasgow.

The opening notes of ‘The Hen’s March to the Midden’ interrupted Lorimer’s thoughts and he smiled as the big police sergeant snapped open his mobile phone, cutting off the Scottish tune. Calum Mhor turned away as though not wishing to be overheard and Lorimer walked back along the shoreline, keeping a discreet distance between the officer and himself.

The waters were lapping against the coloured stones where tiny red fronds of sea anemones waved back and forth as the current took them. A whole miniature world continued down below the surface, oblivious to whatever was happening to the human race. Watching the pebbles roll beneath the tide’s swell, seeing a pale crab scuttle sideways under a dark rock was somehow comforting to Lorimer, hunkering at the sea’s edge. Life would go on in the world despite the vagaries of mankind.

The crunch of stones under the big sergeant’s boots made Lorimer stand up again.

‘We’ll be expecting a team from the mainland,’ Calum Mhor said, waving the mobile phone in his fist. ‘Probably on the afternoon boat,’ he added.

‘Anyone I might know?’

Calum McManus gave him a shrewd look. ‘Detective Inspector Stevie Crozier?’

Lorimer shook his head. It was not a name he had heard of before and McManus did not seem to want to enlighten him further. Whoever this guy was, he would be SIO as soon as he set foot on the island. And, despite Lorimer being the one to have found the body, Crozier would probably not want the senior officer from Glasgow interfering in his case.

‘Here’s Jamie with your camera,’ McManus said, nodding towards the approaching figure.

Lorimer bit his lip. There was something in the way McManus was standing, arms folded, as though he were barring the way back to the corpse on the grass.
You can go now
, his body language seemed to say.
We can take over from here
.

‘Will you come up for a cup of tea once the ambulance has been?’ Lorimer suggested.

McManus nodded. ‘Aye, and we’ll need a written statement from you. And permission to hold on to your camera.’

‘It’s digital,’ Lorimer told him as they watched the constable picking his way across the marshy ground, the camera slung over his shoulder. ‘There’s a printer at the cottage. We can run off copies for you.’

‘Right,’ McManus said shortly. ‘We’ll see you in a bit, then.’

The view of the Morvern shore was almost blotted out now by low rainclouds sweeping across the Sound of Mull, and the two figures heading back across the shore were bent against the sudden wind. It was the sort of rain that could soak a person in moments, soft and sweet-scented as it fell off the hillside, but persistent as a nagging wife.

Jamie Kennedy heaved a sigh, wishing he were anywhere else but on the island right now. Bad enough to have to be involved in a sudden death, but to have to talk to the senior policeman from Glasgow who was staying at Fishnish made him feel the weight of his years of inexperience on the Force. Coming back to Mull had been great after his training in Inverness.
No more violent clashes with
neds
in the wee small hours
, his mum had remarked with a note of triumph in her voice
. Better to be at home and see to things here
, she’d added. And it had been better, hadn’t it? Boring sometimes, but good fun, too, and on the island the uniform was given plenty of respect, not like the sneers and filthy looks that had sometimes come Jamie’s way in the city. Here they were
officers
, not just
your lot
, as the mainland neds were wont to say.

‘D’you think he’ll have spoken to anyone in Glasgow?’ he asked the man toiling at his side.

‘Not if he wants to act like a professional,’ the police sergeant retorted. ‘He’s on holiday. And I hope he’s not getting any ideas about sticking his nose in,’ he grumbled, as though he was already suspicious that the detective superintendent might wish to pull rank and leave the island officers adrift.

‘What d’you know about him?’ Jamie asked as they walked along the single track road that led to the whitewashed cottage.

‘He comes here a fair bit,’ McManus admitted. ‘Birdwatcher. Helps out the RSPB boys now and again. Mary Grant speaks highly of the pair of them,’ he added grudgingly. ‘Told DI Crozier as much when we called it in.’

‘No, I know all that,’ Kennedy said. ‘I mean, d’you know anything about what he’s done? Cases, I mean…’

‘Och, he’s aye on the telly, that one.
Crimewatch
and stuff. He’s been SIO in lots of big murder cases. DI Crozier’ll make sure he keeps his paws off this one though,’ McManus said, smiling grimly, holding his collar tighter in a vain effort to stop the trickles of water soaking his shirt.

‘What d’you mean?’ Kennedy stopped in astonishment. ‘The DI coming here? But…’ He stopped and stared at the older man. ‘The wee lad… you don’t think he was murdered?’

McManus gave the young cop a sharp look. ‘Did ye no’ see his hands and feet?’

Kennedy shook his head, ashamed. He’d not wanted to look long and hard at the dead body once he’d seen what the gulls had done to its face and genitals. And he was relieved that the paramedics were down there right now taking over, putting the lad on a stretcher, taking his corpse to the cottage hospital in Craignure.

‘He’s been tied up,’ McManus said quietly. ‘Someone did that to the boy, Jamie. It was no accident.’

They stepped along the road in silence, their boots making wet imprints and vanishing again on the narrow tarmac, each man wondering what the officer from Glasgow would say when they reached the little house that overlooked Fishnish Bay.

‘N
o missing persons fitting his description, sir,’ Detective Constable Lorimer said, looking up from the masses of lever arch files that were stacked on his desk. It had taken him days to trawl through the missing persons data, reading each and every description of men who had been reported missing over the last couple of weeks. The waterlogged body had been taken to Glasgow City Mortuary where the pathologist had confirmed what George Phillips had suspected: death had occurred prior to the man being put into the Clyde’s flowing waters. Asphyxiation was a possible cause of death, there being no signs of knife wounds or bullet holes, the more common method of dispatch used by some of Glasgow’s gangland fraternity.

‘How d’you think he died, sir?’

Phillips shook his head. ‘He’d been trussed up, possibly gagged as well,’ he shrugged. ‘Why, we don’t know. Did something to upset someone, obviously. Maybe it was a warning that went wrong? Maybe they didn’t mean to kill him, just give him a fright.’ He sighed heavily. ‘We’ll probably never know unless we find out who he was.’

‘Maybe if we ran it past the press office…?’

‘Aye, well, I’ll leave that with you to sort out. Let me see your written description of him first, okay?’

‘Yes, sir,’ Lorimer nodded, already imagining how he could phrase a short paragraph for the newspapers.

He glanced up at the DI as Phillips turned to leave. There was a gloomy cast to the older man’s countenance as though he had already given up hope of finding any clues that might help solve the case.

‘Hm.’ DI Phillips gave another sigh. ‘Don’t like it, young Lorimer, don’t like it at all.’ He paused as though he were about to say more, then, shaking his head, turned and left the CID room, leaving William Lorimer to stare after him.

Turning over a fresh page in his spiral-bound notebook, the detective constable began to write.
Missing person found
, he began, then scored it out.
Body of man found in River Clyde
. He stopped and frowned, twirling the pencil between his fingers. Maggie would know what to write, he thought. His wife was great at putting stuff into words; she spent her working life teaching kids how to do just that at the secondary school where she worked.

A smile crossed his face as he thought of his wife. Her once slim body was filling out now as she entered the third trimester of her pregnancy. Just another few weeks and she would be on maternity leave. Pity that didn’t extend to husbands, he thought, imagining the time when the baby arrived and they could begin life as a complete family. It would never happen, though, he told himself. And certainly not for serving police officers: they were perennially short on manpower in Strathclyde Region, as everywhere else in the country. Just as well Maggie’s mum would be round to help when the baby was born.

Funny how life worked out, he mused, looking at the lined notebook, the effort of juggling words and phrases temporarily forgotten. Had it not been for that identity parade, then William Lorimer might still be at the university and studying for his doctorate. While he was working during the holidays, a chance likeness between a bank robber and the student who was innocently counting notes in the bank’s own vault had brought Lorimer to be part of a line-up in one of the city’s police stations. Discouraging frowns from his manager and the alarming thought that he might be mistaken for a real criminal had given him quite a shake at the time. But then talking with the officers over a cup of tea – after he had been eliminated from that particular part of their inquiry – had intrigued the young man. Folk who committed criminal acts might be people who looked just like him. How did you tell the difference? He wanted to know and it was a question that was to begin the journey away from his studies in History of Art and take him into the role of a serving police officer.

At least his time at university had served some purpose, he thought, the smile lingering around his mouth as he brought an image of his wife to mind. Maggie and he had met at the University of Glasgow, after all. Maybe their kids would grow up to be students there one day.

He flicked the pencil back and forward in his fingers, remembering the lad that had lain on the grass beside the river. He’d looked in his late teens. What was his story? Had he ever had the chance to go to university? Or was he one of the unfortunates in the city who had slipped in with the wrong crowd? Whoever he was, his life had been cut short and he deserved the same amount of time and attention as any other murder victim to bring his killers to justice.