Dying of the Light (21 page)

Jim Rose, the senior turnkey, blew out the candles on his birthday cake with a single breath. A polythene cup, lager spilling from it, was passed to him, and a deep chorus of ‘For he’s a jolly good fellow’ started up in the restroom, everyone joining in enthusiastically, fuelled by the many bevvies consumed earlier.

‘Any o’ yous fancy a piece of ma cake?’ Jim asked, stabbing the knife into the centre of the square,
extracting
it and then using it to point at each of the men around him.

‘Aye, I’ll take a wee slice.’ The voice came from an open doorway where a squat fellow leaned against one of the lintels, thick tyres of fat concertina-ed within his navy pullover, his trousers so tight they looked as if they might split if he flexed a knee.

‘Naw, Sean, no’ you. You’re oan a diet,’ Jim Rose said merrily, ‘an’ I promised Sheena I’d keep an eye oan you. What aboot anyone else though? It’s chocolate an’ –’ he took a large bite out of his own slice, ‘…absolutely lovely.’

Another man, clad in the regulation navy blue uniform, swaggered into the room and stood, beaming, with one of his hands behind his back in front of the observation screens. The monitors revealed two empty cells and one with a cleaner at work inside it, attempting to wipe graffiti off the ceiling with swipes from her mop, droplets of dirty water falling down onto her head.

‘Am I too late?’ the newcomer asked.

‘No, not at all, Norman,’ his host replied, picking up an empty mug and readying himself to pour the contents of a can into it.

‘Whoa, I’ll hae nane o’ that pish, Jim,’ Norman said, whipping his arm from behind his back to reveal a
bottle
of whisky in his hand. When the spirits were finished
they returned to the Tennants until, after a further forty minutes, empty tins littered the floor, screwed up and contorted, and the crisp plates were bare. The birthday cake remained largely intact on its foil-covered base, a few half-eaten slices in the wastepaper basket and one deposited in a pot plant.

‘You checked the cells yet, Sean?’ Rose asked,
sounding
uninterested and looking at his colleague benignly.

‘No.’ A simple statement of fact.

‘How do you mean “No”?’

‘No, boss. I’ve no’ checked the cells.’

‘When did you last look in on the bugger then?’

‘Eh… forty, fifty minutes ago, mebbe.’

‘And he was fine?’

‘And he was fine.’

‘You needn’t hae any worries, boss,’ Norman said, grinning and tipping his mug to drain it of its dregs, ‘they’re nae allowed tae dae awa’ wi’ themselves anyway. It’s against their law.’

‘Their religion,’ Sean corrected.

‘Aye,’ Norman agreed, ‘their religious law, ken.’

‘Naw,’ Jim Rose said bombastically, ‘that’s the
Catholics
. Papes cannae top themselves. Everybody else can!’

‘Christ!’ Norman shouted, ‘he’s a priest, man. A
Catholic
priest. What’s your intelligence quotient, boss?’

‘Ma whit?’ Jim asked, laughing uproariously.

In his cell the priest was lying spreadeagled on the cement floor. He had used one of his knee-length socks as a ligature but he had miscalculated, losing consciousness before complete asphyxiation occurred, releasing his grip as he passed out.

When Norman peeked through the spy-hole he thought, at first, that an escape had succeeded, as the cell appeared completely empty. Hurriedly, and gabbling excitedly to himself, he fumbled with the key in the lock, twisting it first one way in his panic and then the other until it turned, and he was able to open the door, finding it unaccountably heavy. As the body slid over the
glistening
floor, he put his shoulder against the metal, forcing the door further open to reveal the prostrate figure within. The dark-red, plethoric colour of the man’s face, fluid dripping from the nostrils, frightened the warder and he knelt close to the head, hearing a strange rasping sound coming from the mouth. But the bastard was alive, thank the Lord, their jobs would be safe.

Malcolm Starkie lived in a soot-blackened, Georgian
terraced
house in Sandford Gardens, a couple of minutes’ walk from his dental surgery. In his sitting-room he sat bolt upright in his armchair, unsmiling, displeased that the police sergeant had tracked him down to his home, not restricted herself and her enquiries to his professional premises in Rosefield Place. On the arm of the chair rested a piece of unfinished embroidery, a needle
dangling
loosely from it, suspended by a thread of red wool. On top of the dusty cloth, also dust-speckled, lay a pair of gold-rimmed, ladies’ spectacles.

‘I would prefer, Sergeant, that from now on you restricted your visits to my workplace.’

‘They told me you were here, sir. I just need to follow up one thing.’ Alice hesitated, oppressed by the gloomy atmosphere in the room and the forbidding expression on the dentist’s face. ‘Can you tell me where you were
on Friday night, the twentieth, from, say, seven p.m. onwards?’

‘This Friday?’

She nodded.

‘Yes. I was at the photographic club in Durham Terrace.’

‘On your own, or with others?’

‘It was, eh… a special night. Most of the members were there, they could… corroborate, if that’s the right word, what I’m telling you, if necessary.’

She had no doubt that he was speaking the truth, Bill Keane had mentioned the club in passing in his
statement
, specifically referring to the number of professionals among the membership.

‘By the way,’ the dentist added, intruding into her thoughts, ‘I think that I can prove that I wasn’t anywhere near the prostitutes or their stamping grounds on the ninth.’

‘Good,’ she said encouragingly.

‘I’d forgotten when I last saw you, in the surgery I mean. Tanya, my receptionist, insisted I go bowling with her. She told me,’ he looked sheepishly at Alice, ‘that I’ve to be “taken in hand, taken out of myself”. So, every so often, she makes me… well, takes me out, you could say. We’ve been to a film once, went to the ice rink in Princes Street Gardens too.’

Trying to imagine the stick-thin, pale creature behind the reception desk having the strength to lift, never mind bowl, a bowling ball without being pulled, helplessly, towards the skittles herself, or pirouetting on ice in skates, risking her bird-like bones in the cold, Alice marvelled at her kindness. Books should not be judged by their covers.

‘Fine. I’ll nip round to the surgery right now and speak to her,’ she said, rising, eager to leave.

The man looked surprised and then burst into laughter.

‘Not my current receptionist – Christ Almighty! My last one, Tanya. Norma’s not interested in sport… or men, for that matter.’

As she was leaving the house Alice caught a glimpse, through an open door, of the man’s bedroom. A
tangled
mess of clothes covered the floor and the curtains were closed. But within the chaos there was an island of order; a wooden chair on which a set of women’s clothes were laid out, including tights, a skirt and a cherry-red cardigan. Like a shrine.

When Alice broke the news to Father McPhail’s named next-of-kin of his hospitalisation, following his failed
suicide
attempt, Mrs Donnelly covered her mouth in shock and let out a heart-stopping wail, understanding more fully than most the depths of the man’s despair.
Unexpectedly
, she then grabbed both of Alice’s hands, clasping them tightly in her own.

‘You believe, Sergeant, that he didn’t do it, don’t you?’ she said earnestly.

Alice hesitated for a second or so before answering. As it happened, she did not feel that he was the killer, but the damning forensic evidence against him had never been satisfactorily explained away, and a hunch seemed too little to go on.

‘What I think doesn’t really matter, it’s what the
Detective
Chief –’ she began, non-committally.

‘Stop right there!’ Mrs Donnelly said, interrupting her angrily, still clutching Alice’s hands and drumming them on the table as she spoke. ‘Of course it matters. If you think he’s guilty, you won’t continue looking for
those women’s murderer, will you? And Father will try again, maybe succeed the next time. He must have lost all hope…’

The truthful answer would be short and simple. No. We won’t. But it sounded so final, likely to make the woman’s unhappy existence unhappier still, and so Alice found herself replying, ‘Actually, I do still harbour some doubts…’

I knew it – I knew it!’ the woman repeated,
exultantly
. ‘You’ve seen what Father’s really like. I’ve known him, been with him, for over two years, and there’s not a vicious bone in his body.’

Alice nodded, disconcerted by the situation and
unimpressed
by the length of time on which the housekeeper’s testimonial was based. If she’d known him over twenty years, maybe. Also, by admitting her doubt she might be, unintentionally, nurturing Mrs Donnelly’s false hopes, raising them higher yet before they were finally dashed. In all probability, they would be dashed.

‘I will keep trying,’ she said out loud, although
speaking
more for herself than the housekeeper. Mrs Donnelly smiled, finally releasing the policewoman’s captive hands, clearly embarrassed by her own reaction.

‘I don’t suppose,’ Alice said, the longest of long shots, ‘that Father was a bone-marrow donor – a kidney donor – anything like that?’

‘No. He is a blood donor, though, we both are.’

Gusts of wind gave the arctic air a razor’s edge, cutting Alice’s face as she fought her way up Broughton Street and making her eyes sting. Every few hundred yards she turned her back against the blasts, finding a temporary respite from their force before, with a sensation of dread, turning to brave their full fury once more. Throughout her slow ascent she fumed inwardly, thinking about Mrs
Donnelly
and the burden the woman had somehow managed to put on her shoulders, all hopes and expectations now resting on her. If Father McPhail was to try and kill
himself
again, never mind succeed, she would feel responsible – unless she had, whatever the rest of the squad thought, turned every remaining stone.

She rubbed her eyes, aching from lack of sleep. She had spent the early hours agonising over the woman and her concerns, frightening herself with visions of the priest swinging from some makeshift noose or blood-spattered, his wrists sliced to ribbons. After all, his ingenuity was not in doubt, and nor, it would appear, was his determination. So, long before the alarm went off, she had given up the losing battle and crept out of bed, dressing hurriedly in the dark, lingering only to brush her lover’s temples with her lips.

The icy silence of the tenement was broken by the sound of her footsteps on the stone stair, echoing in the lonely space as she took the steps two at a time with only
her shadow to accompany her descent. Frost had silvered the cobbles on Broughton Place, shafts of white light catching them each time the clouds raced past, revealing the face of the moon.

Overtaking a solitary old man, busy muttering to himself and tugging an aged spaniel behind him, the dog’s
barrel-chest
rolling from side to side as it made its bandy-legged way along the pavement, she attempted to focus on the case, hoping that the intense cold would help clear her head and sharpen her thoughts, rather than paralyse her brain.

All the evidence relating to the man must be
reconsidered
and she must reach her own conclusions. But, thinking about it, other than the forensic stuff there was nothing. Among the hundreds of witnesses questioned, not a single soul had identified him or spoken of his presence in the prostitutes’ territory. Of course, he had denied any involvement in either of the killings, and June Sharp had provided him with an alibi of sorts for the first one. And while he was out of circulation, twiddling his thumbs in Saughton, someone else had attacked another prostitute, and with a knife, the killer’s favoured weapon. Obviously, the city’s unofficial red-light district attracted a disproportionate number of its less well-intentioned citizens, creeps, perverts and pimps, but the selection of the same type of victim and the use of the same sort of weapon seemed an unlikely coincidence.

Her hair already flying about her face, unruly strands
lashing
her eyes and making her blink rapidly, Alice walked
along North Bridge, finding herself hit by cross-winds that blew, dust-laden, from the east, their eddies making the cigarette-ends and sweet-papers in the gutter waltz. Turning her collar up, she tried to concentrate, but found that she could not, a raw ache in her ears distracting her until she clamped her hands over them, trying to stop the pain.

Start from first principles, she told herself, consider everything anew and think the unthinkable. On each occasion on which the priest’s DNA had been found, it had come from blood that also contained some of Simon’s too. Suppose McPhail’s DNA had come, not from a mixture of two bloods but instead from a single sample containing the two types of DNA. Simon had told her that he had received multiple blood transfusions and Mrs Donnelly had said that the priest was a blood donor. Suppose Simon Oakley’s blood contained Francis McPhail’s DNA? It seemed a long shot, to put it mildly, but with nothing else left she would have to check it out. Another unpleasant vision of the man in his prison appeared, unbidden, before her eyes. A figure weeping and in despair, railing against the world and its works, a piece of broken glass hidden in his hand. And it would be her sodding fault this time.

Creeping past Elaine Bell’s closed door she noticed light spilling under it. She had taken up residence there, pushing herself to the limit and reducing the compass of her life to the confines of the station. A sheet of lined A4, with ‘Do Disturb’ written on it in biro, had been attached to the door handle, as if in supplication. And it was hardly surprising that her temper, never fully in check, now ran wild and free, or that the targets of her irritation were becoming increasingly arbitrary. The squad tiptoed around
her like well-intentioned Brownies humouring a
cantankerous
Brown Owl, desperate to avoid her attention. And while there were badges for following her instructions to the letter there were none for pursuing idiosyncratic, unauthorised lines.

As expected, the murder suite was empty, and Alice flopped down in front of her computer, beginning to tap its keys before she had even removed her coat or scarf. Typing in ‘Blood donor and alien DNA’ produced a number of possible entries. The first suggested that processed donated blood would be unlikely to yield any of the donor’s DNA, as very few of the donors’ white blood cells would remain in it post-transfusion, and only white blood cells contained nuclei from which the DNA could be extracted. Neither red blood cells nor platelets, the other constituent parts of blood, had nuclei. Any white blood cells remaining in the blood, after
processing
, would be destroyed either by the standard storage temperature used or, post-transfusion, by the recipient’s immune system.

The next hit initially gave her some hope, suggesting that if the recipient of donated blood left their blood at a crime-scene or wherever, it would contain ‘mixed’ DNA. However, the information was so poorly written and disorganised that any reliance on it seemed foolish. The last but one link led to a paragraph contributed by the National DNA Database of Canada, and it showed a markedly more sophisticated approach. It distinguished between types of fluid transfused, contrasting whole blood, containing red blood cells, platelets and white blood cells, and other fluids which included some but not
all of the mix. The author of the article asserted that if the donee received either white blood cells or platelets, or both, then the mixed blood would reveal, on analysis, two separate types of DNA, one attributable to the donor and the other to the donee. It also expressly stated that not only white blood cells, but also platelets, contained DNA. The final piece Alice looked at referred to two studies, one involving a woman who had received fourteen units of blood (four whole blood, ten red blood cells only) and a man transfused with thirteen units (four whole, nine red blood cells only). In both cases, neither individual had detectable levels of the donor DNA profile when tested the day after the transfusions.

As Alice was leaning back on her chair, lost in thought, and still staring at her screen, trying to reconcile the partially contradictory information, Elaine Bell swooped into the murder suite in search of her wandering coffee mug. Spotting it from afar on her sergeant’s desk, she had crossed the room before her colleague had even become aware of her presence. And the gasp Alice released on seeing the DCI betrayed her guilty secret. For a second, she wondered whether her adversary, the cleaner, had planted the mug on her desk from mischievous motives, before recognising the notion for what it was, the product of paranoia and sleeplessness. As Elaine Bell snatched the mug, hissing like a snake about to strike, Alice hurriedly returned to the Google page, hoping that the DCI, still preoccupied with her mug, might not have noticed her unusual research.

‘What on earth are you wasting your time on now,
Sergeant
? Our time, more accurately, when there are countless
things which still need to be done!’ the Chief Inspector thundered.

Still at a loss for words, Alice realised that her optimism had been misplaced. An exhausted, semi-addled Elaine Bell would still be sharper than a cat’s tooth, and that uncanny sixth sense of hers never failed, alerting her to any of her subordinates’ irregular activities.

And it was such a difficult question to answer. Alice had no idea where to start, particularly, as she had not satisfactorily resolved the matter in her own mind. In truth, she was simply dotting ‘i’s and crossing ‘t’s,
excluding
the improbable, making it the impossible. This had to be done even if it did involve wild speculation or worse. And whatever was left would yield the answer. After all, if Father McPhail was innocent, then they should still be hunting a double murderer, not just on the lookout for some low-life who had assaulted a prostitute. But, losing all confidence in her ability to make her activity sound anything other than madness, even to a well-rested Elaine Bell, never mind the frazzled reality confronting her now, she murmured something about ‘long shots’ and ‘
intellectual
curiosity’, and waited for the storm to break around her. And it did, its ferocity taking her by surprise until she remembered her own earlier, intemperate reaction to Mrs Donnelly and her concerns. That burden now rested on her lighter than feathers in comparison to the one carried by her tired superior.

‘That Guy Bayley man, have you spoken to him again?’ the Inspector demanded.

‘Not yet, Ma’am.’

‘Well, get a move on, for Christ’s sake!’

After her extended and apparently cathartic
outburst
, Elaine Bell patted the back of her unbrushed hair,
disconcerted to feel a pair of upstanding tufts, exhaled heavily and marched out of the murder suite with a spring in her step, empty-handed. Inspector Manson almost
collided
with her in the corridor, flattening himself against the wall to let her past. Still striding forwards, she said over her shoulder, ‘Have you checked up McNeice’s alibi, Eric?’ Getting no immediate response, she added, ‘Well, shift your arse then.’