Dying of the Light (10 page)

‘Can I look at my diary?’ he asked, removing a slim leather-bound pocket book from inside his jacket, and holding it unopened in his hands.

‘Yes.’

He flicked the diary open and examined an entry, before meticulously inserting the ribbon marker and
closing
it once more.

‘I helped Mrs Donnelly clear my study in the early evening and then, as far as I recollect, I went to church.’ He blinked at his interrogator.

‘Mrs Donnelly?’ the DCI enquired.

‘My housekeeper.’

‘And at about what time did you leave to go to the church?’

‘I can’t be exactly sure. It would probably be at about 8.30 p.m. or so.’

‘Was there anyone there with you at the same time?’

‘To begin with there was a boy. I didn’t recognise him though. He’s not one of mine.’

Now, apparently completely relaxed, the priest rested his face on his elbow, stroking his ear-lobe, his eyes never leaving the DCI’s face.

‘When did he leave?’ She asked, clearing a stray curl from her forehead.

‘Maybe about nine or thereabouts.’

‘And when did you leave?’

‘Well after him. I’d say at about 11.00 p.m.’

‘What were you doing in the place between 8.30 and 11.00 p.m.?’

‘Praying.’

‘Praying! For two and a half solid hours?’ Elaine Bell said, amused scepticism written on her face.

‘I am a priest, Chief Inspector. Most evenings I’m out and about visiting – the sick, the bereaved, anyone who needs me, really. I have to take my chances when I can.’ His unblinking, simian gaze did not leave hers until, put in her place, she flinched, lowering her eyes as if to check her script. Something about his presence disquieted her.

‘Mmm.’ The DCI cleared her throat, and Alice became aware of an uncharacteristic hesitancy in her questioning. The priest now stared expectantly at the Chief Inspector, but she remained silent. Perhaps she was unused to dealing with the clergy or, at least, had not met one quite like this.

‘Now, about Isobel Wilson,’ she started again, an
anxious
look on her face, ‘I assume you knew the woman?’

‘Should I?’ the priest replied instantly. ‘Who is she?’

It was a foolish error in the DCI’s approach, and one of which she was immediately conscious, the hint of a blush beginning to rise upwards from her neck to her already flushed cheeks.

‘Erm… she was a prostitute working in Leith, Seafield.’

Francis McPhail sat up straight, an amazed look on his face.

‘Why on earth would you assume that I would know her? Seafield’s not even within my parish boundary.’

‘No,’ the Chief Inspector said, trying to recover her lost momentum, ‘but you still might know her. To be clear on this matter, er… Father… are you telling us that you did not know her?’

‘I certainly am. I’ve never even heard the name.’

‘Well, they don’t always use their real names. So, do you know, or ever use, any of the working girls down there?’ Outrage, followed by anger, transformed the man’s features, and when he spoke his tone was emphatic, impressing upon all that no quibbling with his answer would be tolerated.

‘Let’s be clear about this, shall we? I do not “use” anyone. I have never “used” anyone or needed to. As far as I am aware I do not know, am not even acquainted with, any of the “working girls” in Leith or anywhere else. Perhaps you would now have the courtesy to tell me what this is all about?’

Having watched her superior conduct many interviews, Alice expected a terse response to the implied reprimand. After all, the man was being questioned because DNA from his blood had been found on the body. And the Chief Inspector’s mild-mannered reply, surprised her.

‘Of course,’ Elaine Bell began almost apologetically, ‘our enquiry is concerned with the murder of Isobel
Wilson
. A prostitute killed on the ninth of January. We are asking everyone, everyone we can think of anyway, to assist us to that end.’

‘And me,’ the priest said evenly, his anger now
controlled
if not yet expended, ‘what precisely makes you think that I could assist you “to that end”?’

But the tables were not to be turned this time, the
interrogated
becoming the interrogator. He had gone too far. Nothing would be allowed to compromise the
investigation
, not even the normal requirements of good manners.

‘I’d rather not answer that question at present, Father,’ the DCI said firmly, re-asserting her control over him, and this time he took it meekly, simply nodding his head.

The interview over, Elaine Bell returned to her room, closing the door slowly behind her. She leant against it and breathed out. The creep had fancied her! Clearly fancied her! And the way he had looked at her had temporarily unsettled her, making her lose the place, flustering her. Hopefully, no one else in the room would have noticed.

Then she shook her head as if shaking the very notion out of it, deciding that it was a ludicrous one anyway. She was a middle-aged woman in a crumpled suit with more grey than brown in her hair, unfanciable by anyone, including her own husband. And no doubt that fact, more than any other, accounted for her delusion, which was all it must have been. The man was a priest, for Heaven’s sake! Unlikely to be eyeing up anyone, far less a dowdy policewoman firing impertinent questions at him, in the course of a murder investigation. An investigation with him as the suspect.

‘Quite a delicate operation ahead, eh, sir?’

‘In what way, teddy?’

Alice and Eric Manson were travelling together in the Astra to number five Rintoul Place in order to check out Eddie Christie’s alibi, and the Inspector was at the wheel. Periodically, he lifted one hand off it to flex his fingers in and out in his immaculate leather driving gloves, like a cat extending and retracting its claws.

‘Smart, eh? A Christmas gift from the wife,’ he said, waving an arm in her direction.

‘Very lovely, sir. As I was saying though, a delicate operation, this morning’s task.’

‘As you said, but I have no idea what you are on about, Boo Boo.’

‘Could we stop this bloody bear nonsense, sir?’ she replied, annoyance surfacing at his prolonged joke.

‘Can’t “bear” it any longer, eh?’ he smirked. ‘Bit
grizzly
now, bi-polar even?’ He laughed uproariously at his own wit, and Alice could not help smiling, amused at his amusement.

‘OK, OK, so what exactly is the problem, dear, Bambi… Rudolph… Dum…’ his voice tailed off, unable to think of any other names to sustain the gag.

‘Well, asking Mrs Christie about her husband’s
whereabouts
. She’ll surely want to know why we’re interested in them?’

‘No problem. I’ll handle it, just leave it all to me. Man o’ the world stuff.’

Subtlety, Alice knew, did not form part of Eric
Manson’s
social repertoire, and as she walked behind him past a car with a disabled sticker towards a front door with a cement ramp, she stopped, a thought having crossed her mind. Meanwhile, the Inspector peered through the open front door, and when Alice caught up with him, it was to be greeted by a woman, past middle age, seated in a wheelchair.

In her sitting room Manson attempted to begin his interview but, being well acquainted with his ways, Alice could tell that he was feeling uneasy, and thus likely to flounder and cause needless offence.

‘Mrs Christie…’ he paused. ‘We simply need to ask you a few questions about your husband’s whereabouts on the ninth of January.’

‘Really!’ the woman said, surprised. ‘Well, I’ll help you if I can.’

‘Now, can you tell me where he was on the ninth of January between about 8.00 p.m. and 11.00 p.m.’

‘That would be a Tuesday, eh?’

‘Aha, yes.’

‘He’d be here with me. He has three sets of double French on Mondays, so Tuesday evenings are always devoted to marking. He does it in here, beside me. Nice to have company, as he’s out all day, you see.’

‘Sure about that, that he was here with you all evening?’

‘Yes. He made us our tea at six, he brings home salmon on Tuesdays, then he did the homework. He always does on Tuesdays. I’d have noticed if he hadn’t. Why do you need to know where he was then anyway?’

‘Er…’ Eric Manson hesitated, ‘to help us with our enquiries – a murder enquiry.’

‘A murder!’ the woman repeated, excitement
enlivening
her voice. ‘Whose?’

Instead of stopping the conversation and redirecting it, Manson seemed to feel compelled to answer.

‘Em… an Isobel Wilson. Just… eh… a woman in Edinburgh.’

‘The prostitute! You mean the prostitute! I read all about it in the
Evening News
. What’s Eddie to do with her, exactly?’

The Inspector swallowed, now looking rather pale, clearly in difficulty with the line of questioning but,
apparently
, unable to extricate himself from it. He threw Alice a pleading look.

‘Nothing,’ she cut in, ‘he’s nothing whatsoever to do with her – with it. He was here with you, after all. But, you see, we have to check up on the movements of anyone living nearby. Proximity, in itself, to the scene… we have to exclude neighbours and so on. Get assistance from anyone, really.’

‘But why do you need to know where he was, then?’

‘Routine enquiry,’ she lied, stonewalling the woman for her own sake. ‘Purely routine, Mrs Christie.’

Miss Spinnell peeped timidly from behind her
half-opened
door, loosened the final chain and came out onto the landing. Quill, attached to an over-long lead, trailed behind her, wagging his tail slowly in
appreciation
of Alice’s arrival. The old lady’s head was down, her shoulders drooped, and, in some mysterious way, the dog seemed to have absorbed her desolate mood, showing
little
of the characteristic elation he normally displayed at the handover. A fleshless hand was extended and Alice took the lead from it, looking into Miss Spinnell’s face and noticing that the huge orbs of her eyes were now red-rimmed, swollen with recent tears. She seemed so pathetic, so small and dejected that the policewoman longed to put an arm around her shoulders to comfort her, but resisted the impulse. She knew that physical
contact
, never mind the familiarity it implied, was considered unwelcome and, in all probability, unpleasant. Any kind of human touch was anathema to the old woman, something to be endured and, in itself, a test of her good manners.

Miss Spinnell handling a dog, however, was quite different. On countless occasions Alice had surprised her neighbour cuddling the animal, kissing his soft
muzzle
or cradling his head in her lap. Even now, she was absent-mindedly squeezing Quill’s ear, easing it through her fingers. Between caresses she spoke: ‘Today… Ali… Alice, is my birthday.’ But her leaden tone suggested that
the occasion was not one of celebration but of mourning instead, just another milestone on the way to dusty death.

‘How splendid… I must get you something. Is there anything that you would particularly like, Miss Spinnell?’

‘Yes,’ her neighbour replied forlornly, ‘A new self.’

‘What’s wrong with the old one?’ Alice asked brightly, unsure where the conversation was leading.

‘I don’t know… and that may, possibly, be part of the problem.’

Sodding, sodding Alzheimer’s, Alice thought. A fiend so skilled in cruelty as to leave odd, disturbing flashes of insight, but enough only to compound the anxiety it brought with it.

‘How about…’ she racked her brain for inspiration, ‘some… chocolates?’ A favourite treat, she knew,
remembering
the time her assistance had been required to catch imagined pilferers, supposedly bloated on Milk Tray and Black Magic. In fact, Quill himself had been the culprit, canine teeth shredding the cardboard packaging, but the marks attributed, by his devoted admirer, to the long nails of the criminal classes.

‘No.’

‘What about a book then, poetry if you like?’ She could still see, in her mind’s eye, the Poetry Society Medal
collecting
cobwebs on the shelf.

‘I do not like poetry any more. Stop guessing. I can tell you exactly what I want.’

‘Yes?’

‘My sister. I would like my sister.’

Alice discovered that Miss Spinnell had lost touch with her sibling well over fifty years earlier. She asked for any
details that might assist with the search, and was surprised to find herself escorted into the old lady’s drawing room. A visit to the Holy of Holies was an unexpected privilege. On the floor by the bow window lay an assortment of unwashed soup plates, packets of cornflakes, half-empty tins of beans, Oxo cubes and a heap of dog biscuits. Evidently, the area was Quill’s kitchen-cum-dining room. The carpet was strewn with single, unmatched pop socks and, crossing it, Alice inadvertently stood on a wet sponge.

Once she was seated on the sofa, Miss Spinnell returned from a search in a chest of drawers, weighed down by an old photograph album. Inadvertently, she flopped down next to Alice, their thighs momentarily touching. Springing up instantly, she removed herself to the far end of the sofa and placed the open book between them. After much fumbling, a crooked finger was pointed at a black and white image.

‘Annabelle,’ she said, ‘my older sister… em… eight years older than me.’

‘And on this birthday, Miss Spinnell, if you don’t mind me asking, how old are you?’ Alice asked gently. A
suitably
oblique enquiry, surely.

‘Eighty… ninety, that sort of figure or thereabouts,’ the old lady said, before, seeing what Alice was getting at, she added crossly, ‘She is alive, you know. If not kicking.’

‘Excellent,’ Alice replied, ‘you’ve been in some sort of contact recently?’

‘Of course not! If I had I wouldn’t need you. No. But she is here, on this earth. I’ve been along to the Scarlet Lodge, you appreciate.’

‘The Scarlet Lodge?’ Alice enquired, bemused.

‘Our spiritualist meeting place, dear. I attempted to
make contact and failed. So she cannot be in their world… the spirit world, I mean.’

‘Spiritualism?’ Alice exclaimed in wonderment. A new facet of her neighbour.

‘Yes, spiritualism,’ the impatient reply shot back, ‘
Spiritualism
! Good enough for Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, no less, so good enough – nay, too good – for you. Now, were I to entrust him with the case of the missing sister he’d be sure to come up with the goods! A real detective that one… unlike you, dear.’

Leaving the flat with the scant information she had been able to glean, Alice smiled to herself. Dealing with her neighbour was like trying to tame an ancient and
confused
stoat, an unlikely pet, and one which even in its dotage required to be treated with the utmost respect.

‘Four rolls. A Twix and a soup, if they’ve t… t… tomato.’

‘Four rolls!’ Alice repeated, astonished.

‘Yes. FOUR rolls, a Twix and a soup. Any kind of roll, by the way, ham, t… t… tomato, cheese, tuna. I’m not fussy and I’m still building up my strength after the
accident
,’ Simon answered, unabashed.

Chewing the dry pastry of her Scotch pie and feeling, for once, strangely virtuous in her comparative restraint, Alice decided to continue with her plan to get to know the new DS. If she said nothing the silence in the car would remain unbroken. Either he was shy or else conversation was not his forte.

‘In the accident, what happened?’

‘A car crash in 2007, on the bypass. I was in
hospital
for over three months… emergency transfusion after emergency transfusion. They didn’t think I’d pull
through, actually. But here I am, and twice as large as life.’ He patted his ample belly, chuckling to himself.

‘Must have frightened your family?’

‘No. I never knew my dad, and my mum was d… d… dead by then.’

‘Sorry…’ An unexpected impasse.

‘Oh, don’t be. She and I never hit it off. But,’ he grinned, ‘the last laugh was mine!’

‘Oh?’

‘Well, the c… c… cussed old duck chose to die on my birthday! But I got my own back on her. In her w… w… will she directed that she was to be buried so I took her off to be burnt in the Mortonhall Crematorium. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust and… flames to flames for her.’ He laughed loudly, glancing at Alice’s face to see if she was shocked or, perhaps, shared his black sense of humour.

‘Where did you sprinkle her remains? A car park,
perhaps
, or maybe, a sewage farm?’

‘I didn’t. I never collected her ashes at all, so she’ll either have been scooped up with someone else or be residing permanently in the incinerator..’

If he was serious, pursuing revenge beyond the grave did seem a tad extreme, Alice thought. But since the topic (like Simon’s mother) seemed to have died a natural death, the only sound in the vehicle now that of the passing traffic, she racked her brain for something new to prolong their chat. With a lewd wink, Eric
Manson
had murmured to her that Simon was not married and was available, but otherwise nobody in the squad seemed to know anything much about him. If he had a girlfriend, then no doubt that would be disclosed by him in his own good time and she had no intention of attempting to winkle out any such information out of
him. She had suffered enough enquiries into her own love life to ensure that she did not inflict that particular indignity on anyone else. Maybe, with his fondness for food, he liked cooking? Rick Stein, perhaps, or maybe Gordon? But before she had time to work out any other conversational openings, the car drew up outside Father McPhail’s tenement building.

On closer inspection, no-one would have mistaken his housekeeper, Mrs Donnelly, for a cleaner. Or for the priest’s floozy, as had been suggested by DCs Littlewood and Gallagher the previous evening. Celibacy, they argued, was a state proclaimed for public consumption but never, in fact, privately maintained. It was an unnatural
condition
abhorred by man and woman alike, and surely, by their creator too. And, indisputably, it was impossible to achieve.

In convents nuns seemed to manage it, Alice observed. These ‘Brides of Christ’, DC Littlewood shot back, rarely had any choice in the matter, being too fat, bearded or plug-ugly to attract any earthly suitors. And when
eventually
he conceded that his own experience of convent life might be inferior to her own, he had expressed frank disbelief when told that a few of her teaching order had been stunners. Recovering quickly, he had thrown a sly glance at DC Ruth Lindsay, and added that it was
culpable
, sinful, of the beautiful not to reproduce. The young policewoman raised her eyes from her nails only to reply,
sotto voce
, ‘In your dreams, Tom. And you’ll be the last in your line, for sure.’

Eric Manson, adopting the authoritative tone of an
eminence gris
, proclaimed that for the ordinary person,
the ‘normal’ person, complete excess would invariably be preferable to complete abstinence. But, Alice, picturing the sad souls she had seen flitting in and out of the
shadows
at Seafield, selling sex indiscriminately to feed their habits, then the ancient and venerable virgins who had taught her, trilling innocently, joyfully in their choir stalls in the side chapel, shook her head.

The housekeeper, a grey plait coiled around the crown of her head like a torpid snake, led them into the kitchen and pulled out chairs for them. Her face remained unsmiling, intimidating even, and despite the steam billowing from the kettle she offered them neither tea nor coffee. In a voice which implied the impertinence of the question, she confirmed that she and Father McPhail had spent the early evening hours of the ninth of January giving his study a good spring clean. Sounding even more affronted, she told them that the priest had, indeed, gone to St Aloysius afterwards, but she was unable to say when he returned. However, she emphasised, he must have gone there; that was, after all, where he had said he was going. As she had gone to bed before his return from the church she was unable to ‘vouch’, as they put it, for the time of his arrival, other than to say that it must have been after 9.00 p.m. No doubt they would appreciate, she added reprovingly, that Father McPhail was an ordained Catholic priest, and thus a Man of his Word.