‘We’ll be talking to all the staff, ma’am,’ Cameron replied, glancing at Lorimer who had wandered towards the stair and was peering upwards.
‘There are private rooms on that floor,’ Mrs Baillie snapped, making Lorimer turn back suddenly. ‘The patients are restricted to the west and south wing and use both upstairs and down. We have the administration down here.’ She strode ahead of them, ignoring the girl at the desk, and opened a door leading to the back of the building.
Lorimer and Cameron followed her down a set of four stairs that led into another corridor. Here windows to one side gave a view of shrubbery and an expanse of kitchen garden where a man in brown overalls was digging with a spade, his back to the house. A patient, Lorimer wondered, or one of the staff? Shadows thrown onto the garden made him press his head against the glass and look along the side, seeing angles of pebble-dashed walls masking the original contours of the house. A modern extension had been built onto this part of the Grange, he realised. Lorimer ran his hand along a grey painted radiator as Mrs Baillie unlocked a door opposite the window. It was cold to his touch.
‘This is my office. Please sit down,’ Mrs Baillie had already taken her place behind an antique desk. Two upright chairs with carved backs sat at angles in front of her. The wood panelled ceiling of the office sloped into a deep coomb showing that the room was positioned immediately under the main stairs. There were no windows and so Lorimer left the door deliberately ajar. Claustrophobic at the best of times, he wasn’t going to let his discomfort show in front of this woman.
‘Who has access to this part of the house?’ Lorimer asked.
‘Oh, it’s not kept locked, Chief Inspector, except my private office, of course. But only the staff would come through here. The patients have their own rooms.’
‘And is there any other way to reach this part of the building?’
‘We have a back door that leads into the garden. It can only be accessed from this side of the house.’
‘Not from the clinic?’
‘No.’
‘And it’s kept locked at night?’
‘I do the lockup myself. It’s my home too, you know,’ Mrs Baillie gave a twisted smile and Lorimer found himself suddenly curious about the director. He inclined his head questioningly.
‘My flat is upstairs. Part of my remit here is to act as a nursing director. Yes, I’m a fully qualified psychiatric nurse,’ she said, lifting her chin. ‘I run the clinic but I also have a say in the overall medical policy.’
‘I’m afraid we will have to interview the patients who were here last night,’ Lorimer told her.
Mrs Baillie hesitated then shuffled at some papers on her desk. Then she raised her head and regarded Lorimer steadily. ‘I’m afraid that won’t be possible.’
‘This is a murder inquiry. The feelings of your patients simply don’t come into the question.’
‘I hope you will respect their feelings, Chief Inspector. Many of our patients are seriously ill people and interrogation could do some of them untold damage.’
‘We quite understand.’
‘No, Chief Inspector, you don’t. When I said it would be impossible to interview everybody, I meant just that,’ Mrs Baillie answered him defiantly. ‘You see, two of our patients left for respite care early this morning.’
‘But that’s preposterous! You can’t just let them walk out of here like that!’
‘I didn’t. In fact I took them to the airport myself.’
‘Where were they going?’ Cameron asked.
The woman tilted her head and gave him the ghost of a smile. ‘Your part of the world, by the sound of it. A little place called Shawbost. It’s on the Island of Lewis.’
‘But why on earth couldn’t they stay here? And who are they anyway?’ Lorimer protested.
‘Sister Angelica and Samuel Fulton. Their plane tickets were paid for. And they were ready to go. I couldn’t see any point in keeping them here.’
For a moment Lorimer was speechless at the woman’s audacity. And Lewis? Could there be some link between the victim and this respite centre?
‘Give me the details of this place, please,’ he asked.
‘Certainly,’ She pulled a card from a file on her desk and handed it to him.
‘And, Mrs Baillie, no further patients will leave here without our knowledge. Do I make myself clear?’
‘Perfectly, Chief Inspector,’ the woman folded her hands together meeting his angry glare with a cool gaze of her own.
Lorimer gave the card a perfunctory glance and pocketed it. It would be counterproductive to alienate Mrs Baillie, no matter what police time she had wasted. There was Kirsty’s murder to solve and she was in a position to help them.
‘Kirsty MacLeod. She was a psychiatric nurse, wasn’t she?’
Mrs Baillie shook her head. ‘Kirsty had specialised in neural disorders, Chief Inspector. Her background was Care in the Community so she had worked with many patients who had illnesses of a psychiatric nature. However, the main reason for employing her was her experience with multiple sclerosis patients.’
‘Do you have many of those sorts of patients here?’ Cameron asked.
‘No, just the one. Phyllis Logan.’
Lorimer nodded. Of course. That explained the woman down in that back room away from all the other patients. He recalled those bright eyes and that sepulchral moan. That was one resident who wouldn’t be answering any questions.
‘Isn’t that rather unusual,’ Cameron persisted. ‘After all, this is a clinic specialising in psychiatric cases.’
‘We prefer to call them neural disorders. And MS is a neural disease,’ Mrs Baillie chided him. ‘But it’s not unusual for Phyllis to be here. Not at all.’ She paused, glancing from one man to the other, a sudden twinkle in her eye. ‘You see, Phyllis Logan is the owner of the Grange. It really is her home.’
Chapter Eleven
Lorimer had to hand it to them. They’d organised the interview schedule perfectly. Alistair Wilson had taken possession of the large lounge to the front of the house that was now their incident room. The minimum disruption to patients had been Mrs Baillie’s priority. He wondered about that lady: a cool customer, but there had been something in her manner that the Chief Inspector had found disquieting. Maybe she’d been in denial, but he’d found the woman’s detached, clinical manner rather off-putting. He thought over their recent conversation.
‘She was a capable nurse. No problem to us at all.’ That was how she’d answered when Lorimer had tried to elicit information about the murder victim. Not ‘Poor girl’ or, ‘I can’t believe this is happening’ which would have been understandable under the grim circumstances. Why might Nurse Kirsty MacLeod have been a problem to the clinic anyway? Or had there been staffing problems in the past? Lorimer picked up such nuances with his policeman’s ear for detail. It wouldn’t be a bad idea to investigate the staffing over the past twelve months. ‘All of our residential patients had retired for the night. Only the night staff were on duty. I was in bed myself.’
In bed, mused Lorimer, but had she been asleep? And who else might have been lying awake staring at the ceiling, counting the hours till an uncertain dawn? He’d know soon enough.
The residents were to be made available to them after breakfast. That was exactly how Mrs Baillie had put it. And this morning she had shown no trace of sorrow for the sudden death of one of her staff. Her starched white collar and black jacket bore testimony to a careful toilette. There was nothing hasty or flung together about this lady. Lorimer had stared at her earlier, mentally contrasting her with the image of his wife flying out of the house that morning, hair tousled and jacket pushed anyhow into her bulging haversack.
Dark circles showed under Maggie’s lovely eyes but Lorimer wasn’t about to waste too much sympathy on a self-inflicted hangover.
He’d dropped officer Lipinski at HQ for her scheduled lecture before setting off for the Grange. That was one talk he’d be missing. He grinned to himself. What a pity! The squad at Pitt Street would just have to get on with it without him. All in all, Lorimer doubted if he’d had three full hours sleep himself. Mitchison would be banging on about Working Time Regulations before he was much older.
