27
The midnight oil was burning in the Scottish Prison Service headquarters. Maggie Rose and Sammy Pye sat before computer terminals at adjacent desks, in a big open-plan office, lit only by neon tubes over each exit and by the glow from their screens.
They were finishing the third round of coffees provided by sympathetic security guards, surrounded by the remnants of Burger Kings fetched by Pye from the Gyle Centre four hours earlier.
‘You’d think, ma’am, wouldn’t you,’ said the Detective Constable, ‘that in this day and age there would be a simpler tracing system than going through every individual file.’
Rose groaned her agreement. ‘It would be nice, wouldn’t it, if we could just key “Vulture” into the system and press a button. But no, we have to open and read every file. It takes so much time. How far d’you think we’ve got?’
Pye pulled up a notepad window. ‘We’re a quarter of the way through, ma’am, that’s all.’
‘And that quarter has given us three possibles to be followed up, of men listed as having large tattoos on their bodies.’
The Chief Inspector leaned back and switched off her terminal. ‘That’s it for now, Sammy. I’m cross-eyed. Let’s knock off for tonight, and get back here for nine thirty tomorrow morning. The Cunningham woman was right. We are in for a long, boring weekend, and probably a fruitless one. I can see us slogging around those health clubs after all.
‘Maybe I’ll persuade my husband to come in to help us.’ She paused. ‘Wait a minute, I outrank him again. Stuff the persuasion, I’ll order him!’
28
Alex Skinner sat in the mingling glow of a large red candle and of the gas fire.
The trunk looked even bigger on the floor of the tiny living room in her flat in Glasgow’s University district. She stared at it, nursing a long-stemmed wine glass which she held pressed between her breasts.
She sat there for perhaps half an hour, motionless apart from occasional sips from the glass, doing her best to prepare herself mentally to lift the lid on her mother’s life, as Adam Duritz sang, unnoticed, from her stereo speakers.
She was alone, as her flatmate had left that afternoon for Easter vacation. The weekend was hers, if she chose. She had intended to spend it with Andy Martin, but he had warned her that he was heavily committed to the Charles investigation.
For most of the life that she could recall, her mother had been a misty, mystical figure. Unknown to Bob, she had begun to hold secret conversations with Myra only a few weeks after her death, as a means of consolation, and of keeping the pain of bereavement under control.
Over the years she had kept her mother alive in her heart, as best she could. Now she had seen her again for herself, she realised that the mother she had made into an imaginary friend had been no more than a candy floss fantasy beside the real Myra, a woman whose vitality had proclaimed itself like a fanfare, even from the flickery old cine film.
She had remembered her hair, her face, her soft breath, her smell, but the power of her mother’s personality had been beyond her comprehension at the time of her death. In the film shot on the beach, when she had taken over the camera, her father had seemed to be completely under her spell. Now so was Alex, once again.
She thought of the diaries. What would she see, through these windows into her dead mother’s soul?
For a while, she considered going to bed, and leaving her reading for the morning, like her father. But a mix of daring and curiosity overwhelmed her. She switched on the overhead light, and opened the box.
Everything inside was in brown paper parcels, save for a pair of black high-heeled shoes, and a maroon- coloured tube containing, Alex guessed, her mother’s College diploma.
She picked out one parcel. It rattled as she lifted it. She squeezed and shook it and felt the round surfaces of bracelets and necklaces. She replaced it and took out another which yielded to her touch, until she encountered a curving wire which she guessed to be the support of a brassiere cup.
She took out the biggest parcel of all. It was heavy and her touch told her that it contained a number of rectangular objects, tightly bound together. Eagerly she tore it open, and found inside a series of A4 hard-covered volumes, bound with yellow twine into two bundles. They were ordinary page-per-day, stationer’s desk diaries, some blue, some black, some red, some green, each with the year in gold lettering on the front.
She looked at the bundles and counted seven in each; fourteen diaries in all, bound together in chronological order. Her mother had been almost twenty-eight when she died; she had begun to keep her diaries in her fifteenth year.
Alex took a deep breath and refilled her glass with Fleurie. Picking up the first bundle, she slid the first volume out without untying the twine.
She settled into her comfortable armchair, opened the diary and began to read.
29
‘Some day this job might pay us back all the lost weekends it owes us,’ said Detective Chief Superintendent Martin.
‘Some day,’ said Dave Donaldson.
‘Some hope,’ said Neil McIlhenney. ‘Anyway, what if it did. Can you imagine a hundred and forty-two consecutive weekends, all strung together, of being dragged round the Gyle Centre by the wife, with the kids yapping at your feet?
‘That’s one thing about really bloody high-profile murders; they’re great for getting you out of the way of drudgery.’
Donaldson laughed. ‘How many kids do you have, Neil?’
‘Two. Lauren’s nine, and Spencer’s seven.
‘The things we do to kids, eh. Olive named the first one after a model, and she turned out to be wee and fat. The second one she named after a shop, believe it or not. We were rolling along Princes Street one day, with Lauren in the pram and Herself about ten months pregnant, when all of a sudden she stops. I thought she was starting there and then, like, but no, she was staring up at the Marks and Spencer sign with her mouth hanging open. “Look,” she says, “isn’t that a lovely name when you read it? That’s what we’ll call him.” “Mark?” says I. “Okay.” She looked at me as if I was daft.’ He paused with a slow smile.
‘I often think to myself how lucky it was that we’d made it that far along Princes Street. I’d have hated the poor wee bugger to go through life called Littlewood McIlhenney!
‘How about you, sir? How many kids have you got?’
‘Jane and I have four,’ said Donaldson. ‘Tony’s seven, like your lad, then there’s Janet, she’s five, Stephanie, just turned four, and Ryan, eighteen months.’
‘You should be on schedule for another quite soon,’ said Martin, grinning.
‘Don’t joke,’ muttered the Superintendent, sleek-haired and well-groomed even though it was just after eight o’clock on a Saturday morning. ‘Jane’s expecting in three months. Another boy, we’ve been told.’
‘Maybe you should call this one Luke,’ said McIlhenney. His companions stared at him, puzzled. ‘As in “Luke, enough’s enough, okay!”’
‘So it is,’ said Martin, laughing and shaking his head. ‘Now down to business.’ He glanced around the mobile incident room in which they sat. It had been set up in the car park alongside the block of flats in which Carl Medina had died. The Chief Superintendent looked across the table at the fourth man in the room. ‘Arthur, would you give us a summary of what you found at the scene, please.’
‘Yes, sir,’ said Inspector Dorward. ‘First of all, as you supposed, Medina was overwhelmed at once by an
