presence.
‘Oh. Right. Och, she’ll never know. Will you, darling?’ she smiled a pasted-on smile in Phyllis’s direction.
Phyllis closed her eyes as the hook pulled up the sling and raised her off the bed. Below her the two women pulled at the sheets, dashing the soiled linen onto the floor then smoothing on the fresh bedding with an expertise born of much practise. At last she was lowered back onto the cool sheet and the perpetually moving mattress. The ritual was completed by the auxiliary spraying the air with the scent of roses.
For a while this would serve to mask the unpleasant smell of human urine. Left alone, Phyllis watched the spray, like mist catching the light as it fell. Her day could now begin. The sky with its ever-shifting shapes was there to see; and imagination, if not memory, would people her hours.
Now she could banish the memory of that nightmare in the dark. She closed her eyes but heard again the cry that had left her shivering. Had she really seen that shadow of malice falling against the cupboards outside her room? And those hands reaching to pluck a flower from her vase? No one would ever know what she had seen.
Chapter Ten
Lorimer stood outside the front entrance to the Grange, watching as Niall Cameron approached, recalling their conversation of the night before. He had found the detective constable leaning against the side of the building, head pressed against his arms. Lorimer had wondered at the sound in the dark until he realised the young man was sobbing quietly.
‘I knew her, sir. She’s a girl from back home,’ Cameron had told him, his face streaked with tears. ‘She’s Kirsty MacLeod. We grew up together. She was in my wee sister’s year at the Nicholson.’
Lorimer had guided him towards the car where he’d heard the rest of the story. How Niall Cameron had left Lewis to join the police force against his family’s wishes. How they’d wanted him to take over his late father’s fishing boat but Niall hadn’t seen a future there anymore. Now there was only his mother at home with the youngest one. All the others had left. Kirsty had come to the city too, but he’d never seen her. Until now.
‘Should I come off the case, sir?’ Cameron had wanted to know. But Lorimer had shaken his head. Some background knowledge would be useful.
Now the DC was closer Lorimer could see his bloodshot eyes, signs of a sleepless night. Well, it happened to them all in this profession. Young Niall Cameron had better get used to it.
‘OK?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Talk to anyone from home yet?’
Cameron nodded. ‘There’s only one next of kin, the old auntie who lives in Harris. Kirsty’s mother died of cancer when the lassie was twelve. Her dad was drowned some time back.’
‘Right. We’ll probably find out more now from the director, Mrs Baillie. She lives on the premises. We only took a preliminary statement last night but there’ll have to be proper interviews this morning. Alistair’s here already, setting up an incident room.’
Some things were better done in daylight, thought Lorimer. There was a team of uniformed officers doing a house-to-house inquiry along the road. It was a residential district with not a close circuit television camera in sight. They’d have to rely on the local insomniacs for any sighting of the killer. Last night had been thoroughly unpleasant. None of the staff had known much about the nurse’s background or else they weren’t letting on. The auxiliary who’d found her, Mrs Duncan, had been in a state of shock and could barely verbalise. Lorimer had been given a full list of all members of staff. It was a long list, given the staffing requirements for a twenty-four hour day to care for a number of vulnerable people. Still, records would be crosschecked on the computer and that might throw something up.
Those patients who’d emerged from their rooms last night had been surprisingly calm. Though perhaps some of them were sedated at night, anyway. They would all be interviewed at greater length this morning. Lorimer hadn’t forgotten all those lights switched on upstairs.
Now, in the spring morning, it was hard to imagine that a murder had taken place in such a pleasant spot. The sky was clear and blue although there was still a chill in the air. Above him a blackbird was whistling unseen in the trees. Lorimer stepped back out onto the front lawn and walked as far as a curve of rhododendron bushes. Turning, he looked back at the house. It had a pleasing aspect from the front. Two enormous bay windows flanked the front entrance. The huge storm doors were fastened back and Lorimer could see shadowy shapes moving beyond the frosted glass. The clinic’s employees were already having to go about the business of caring for their patients, after all. Some of the upstairs windows showed drawn curtains still, though it was past nine o’ clock. Whose sleep had been disturbed during the night, he wondered?
Lorimer looked around him. The drive looped all round the grounds. To the rear were trees, more shrubbery and a high, stone wall. Beyond that was farmland. Could anyone have vaulted that wall and made off over the fields in darkness? Or, indeed, arrived from that very direction. An outsider. A nutter. That was the theory he was working on, anyway. Some creep who had a fetish about dead women and flowers. Brightman would surely have an opinion to offer. It was time he called him up.
The front drive gave on to an avenue of Victorian villas then a row of solid tenement houses on each side. There was a main road at right angles to the avenue, a mere hundred yards away.
One thing Lorimer had noticed as he’d turned the car into this narrow avenue: there was barely room to swing a cat because of the double-parking by residents. Maybe someone might have noticed a car in a hurry last night? That was just one of the questions his team of officers would be asking. Over the hill beyond the Langside Monument lay the Victoria Infirmary. Queen’s Park stretched out the whole length of the main road right up to Shawlands. Another possible escape route for a killer. Lorimer grinned to himself, realising that he was already tuning into Solly’s way of thinking. The psychologist liked to pore over maps relating to the locus of a crime as he began his search into the criminal mind.
Lorimer thought back to the long drawn-out investigation into the Saint Mungo’s murders. That Glasgow park had been scoured from end to end. The Dear Green Place, folk liked to call their city. And so it was. He’d read somewhere that they had more parks than any other city in Europe. A source of pride to some, maybe, but a right bugger when you were trying to track a killer.
‘Sir.’
Lorimer’s mind came back to the present. Detective Constable Cameron was standing in the porch and with him was the very lady that Lorimer wanted most to see. Mrs Baillie was the woman in charge here, her official designation being director of the Grange, a clinic that specialised in neural disorders.
As he walked towards the steps, he could see a tall, angular woman dressed in black shading her eyes from the morning sun.
‘Good morning Mrs Baillie,’ Lorimer shook a hand that was damp with sweat.
As they turned away from the dazzle of light that bounced off the open glass door, Lorimer could see the director’s face more clearly. Mrs Baillie would be somewhere in her early fifties, he surmised, though she’d looked a lot older last night.
Her dark hair showed not a hint of grey but this was belied by the network of tiny lines around her eyes and mouth, a mouth that was turned down as if in an expression of permanent disapproval.
‘Come through to my office, please, gentlemen,’ she said and immediately turned right, opening a door set into the wood panelling. At once Lorimer noticed how the old house had been altered to form the present day clinic as vinyl floors gave way to thick patterned carpet. Light filtered from a landing window where a broad staircase swept upwards. An open door to the front showed them a huge bay-windowed lounge where uniformed officers were already setting out tables and chairs. Across the hall a curved desk wrapped itself around two angles of the walls, segmenting the corner into a reception area. A young woman in a dark suit and white shirt glanced up at them unsmilingly then continued with whatever she had been doing behind the desk, out of sight behind her computer screen.
‘That’s Cathy. You’ll want to talk to her later, I suppose.’
