Lorimer was sitting at a table that had been pushed up near the huge bay window that overlooked the gardens. The morning light streaming in would show Lorimer and DS Wilson the full face of whoever came to sit on the other side of that table. Each person was going to be confronted by a pair of steely blue eyes that brooked no nonsense. It was just as well that Alistair Wilson was on duty. His sergeant’s knack of showing deferential politeness would be especially soothing to the damaged souls in this place.
‘Ready, sir?’ Wilson had brought in the file of current residents’ names.
‘If they’ve all had their breakfasts,’ Lorimer growled.
He hadn’t even had a cup of coffee and no one seemed to be interested in offering him one. He looked at the annotated list. There were red asterisks against certain names. These belonged to residents whose rooms looked out to the front of the house. Mrs Baillie’s was amongst them. Her bedroom was right above this lounge.
‘Eric Fraser?’ Lorimer read aloud, ‘Let’s have him in first.’ The uniformed officer by the door disappeared.
‘D’you want to start, Alistair?’ Lorimer turned to his colleague. Wilson just smiled and shrugged. ‘Butter him up, you mean?’ Detective Sergeant Alistair Wilson was no stranger to his superior’s strategies.
The uniform returned. ‘Mr Fraser,’ he said, retreating immediately to his post by the lounge door.
Eric Fraser was a young man of medium height dressed in navy jogging pants and a matching hooded sweatshirt. As he approached, he ran one hand over his cropped bullet head and stared right at Lorimer with small, intense eyes. He hadn’t shaved for days, by the look of him, and his clothes hung loosely over a thin frame.
‘Mr Fraser, I’m Sergeant Wilson, and this is Chief Inspector Lorimer,’ Wilson had risen to his feet, come around the table and was shaking Fraser’s hand. ‘Thank you for coming in to talk to us. Please sit down.’ Wilson’s voice was all solicitousness. They didn’t yet know the nature of these patients’ illnesses. That was confidential, Mrs Baillie had insisted. ‘Meantime,’ had been Lorimer’s terse reply.
‘They told me about Kirsty,’ the young man began without any preamble. ‘She was nice. She listened to me. Not all of them take the time to listen,’ his voice held a querulous note and he looked accusingly at Lorimer although it was Wilson who’d begun the interview.
‘We’d like to know if you heard anything unusual last night, Mr Fraser,’ Wilson spoke firmly, trying to draw the man’s attention back.
Fraser made a derisory noise. ‘You mean all that screeching and carrying on?’
‘What screeching was that, Mr Fraser?’ Wilson put in. Lorimer pretended to scribble something on a pad in front of him, avoiding eye contact.
If Wilson could capture his attention then he’d be free to observe the patient’s body language. Right now he was sitting, hands clasped between his knees as if, despite the sun’s heat through the glass, he was feeling cold.
‘Mrs Duncan. She raised the roof with her racket. Came right up the stairs to fetch Mrs Baillie. I think anyone would’ve heard it through the partition walls. I certainly could.’
‘You don’t have any sleeping medication, then, Mr Fraser?’
‘Not at the moment,’ he replied, sitting up a bit straighter as he spoke.
Lorimer nodded to himself. A patient on his way to recovery, perhaps?
‘How well did you know Nurse MacLeod?’
Fraser shrugged, crossing one leg over the other. ‘Not that well. She was nice. Nice looking too. She always made sure we were comfortable at bedtime. She’d go to the bother of bringing me up a hot water bottle. That sort of thing.’
‘Did she ever talk about herself?’
‘No. Not really. I’d asked where she was from. The accent made me curious. But she didn’t really tell me much about herself.’ Fraser looked hard at Alistair Wilson. ‘We’re a pretty self-absorbed lot in here, you know. Fragile psyches and all that,’ he sneered. Lorimer watched as his foot began to tap rapidly up and down, an involuntary movement, agitated. He wondered what the man’s blood pressure would be if he had it taken right now. A worm-coloured vein on Fraser’s temple stood out and Lorimer could imagine the beat of a pulse.
‘Where were you last night, Mr Fraser, from midnight onwards?’
The foot tapping stopped abruptly and the man uncrossed his leg, looking towards Lorimer who had suddenly asked the question. For a moment he said nothing, simply stared at the Chief Inspector as if he had temporarily forgotten his presence.
‘In bed. In my bed in my room. All night.’
‘And can anybody verify this?’
Fraser looked from one man to the other, bewildered at this sudden change of tack.
‘I don’t know. Kirsty and Mrs Duncan were the only two who would have been able to say I was in my room. They were the night staff on duty.’ He twisted his face into a frown. ‘But that’s going to be the same for all of us. Except…’
He stopped, rubbing his hands up and down the thighs of his joggers.
‘Except?’ Lorimer prompted.
‘Some patients are on suicide watch. They have nurses posted along the corridor who sit there all night just in case.’
‘And you’d have had to pass them to reach the back of the clinic, I take it?’
‘Yes,’ Fraser replied, something like relief in his face. ‘Yes. Any of them would have seen me if I’d passed that way.’
‘Mr Fraser, you’ve been very helpful. I’m sorry we’ve had to disturb you but it is important that we have some sort of input from all the people who were here last night. Do you remember anything else, perhaps? A strange sound from outside?’ Wilson asked.
‘No. Nothing I can remember.’
‘Well, if there is anything at all, please get in touch with us. We’d be most grateful for anything you might recall later,’ DS Wilson rose to his feet and slid a card across the table.
‘That’s the number to ring. We’ll be issuing this to all of the staff and patients,’ he smiled warmly and Fraser nodded, glancing warily at Lorimer before standing up again.
‘I can go now?’
‘Of course, sir, and thank you once more for your cooperation,’ Wilson’s smile was positively beatific.
‘Constable, would you ask Jennifer Townslie to come in, please?’
At last Lorimer was downing a cup of coffee. The morning had been reasonably productive. They had been able to eliminate most of the residents from their inquiries. Some, as Lorimer had suspected, had been dead to the world having been given sleeping pills. These included a few women with eating disorders who were on the upper floor. None of them were currently on suicide watch. Some of the residents were pretty frail and Lorimer knew it would have taken someone of considerable strength to attack and strangle the young nurse.
What most of them had heard amounted to very little other than the furore caused by the auxiliary, Mrs Duncan. It was time to wheel her in. Lorimer wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. ‘OK?’
Alistair Wilson gave a brief nod. They’d discussed this at some length. This was one witness whose statement would be crucial to the investigation. He just hoped she was in a better state than she’d been the previous night.
Brenda Duncan was a portly woman in her fifties. She rolled slightly as she entered the room, a thick winter coat folded clumsily over one arm, her handbag clutched in two ungloved fists. As she sank into the chair in front of him, Lorimer could see that her eyes were heavy. It didn’t take much to guess that she’d been given some kind of medication after her trauma. She was smiling uncertainly and he wondered if she’d ever had to encounter the police before.
‘Mrs Duncan,’ Wilson’s voice was all concern, ‘thank you so much for coming back in. We realise how bad this has been for you.’ He gave his most encouraging smile as if to say there was nothing to worry about, they’d take care of it all. Lorimer could see the woman’s shoulders visibly relax.
‘Just take your time and tell us everything that happened yesterday evening.’
‘Well, when I found poor Kirsty…’
