in reply.
'Well, maybe we should look at the house with different eyes. As if it's a place we would want to buy. What d'you think?'
Fathy shrugged. Whatever the DS wanted was fine with him.
The main living room had been split into two distinct areas, one with a two-seater settee and a matching easy chair facing a large screen television and the other housing a small square dining table with four chairs. The furnishings were fairly bland, to Fathy's eye; mid-brown laminate flooring and a marled beige throw over the darker brown sofa. Everywhere he looked it was the same; plain tones of beige or brown except for the black television screen dominating one corner of the room.
'And no plants. Nothing living here at all,' Fathy remarked as he moved from the main room into a kitchen that was almost clinical, the cupboards a stark white against dark grey granite worktops. !
'Kept the place really tidy, so maybe he didn't have much time for plants and stuff cluttering it up,' he murmured to himself. 'What's in the cupboards?' he asked himself, opening one after the other.
The detective constable raised his eyebrows as he caught sight of the contents; rows of jars neatly labelled, tins of food stacked in perfect symmetry. He wiped a latex-covered finger across the floor of one cupboard and was unsurprised to see it come away with not a trace of dirt or dust.
Kenneth Scott had been a fairly young man, he reminded himself.
Most of the young men Fathy knew were too busy enjoying themselves to become obsessed with having a perfectly neat and tidy home. The young officer felt a sudden sadness for the victim: what sort of life had he had? Too much time on his hands by the looks of it, if he'd always kept things in such meticulous order. He hadn't had much of a life at all, it seemed. No wife to clutter the place up with knick-knacks, no sign of any bottle racks full of booze to entertain pals of a Friday night.
'Come on upstairs,' he heard Cameron calling. 'See if you can make head or tail of this.'
Fathy left the kitchen and took the few steps through the living room back into the hall then climbed the steep staircase to the upper level. A single window at the top should have let the light in but the blind had been kept closed for some reason. Fathy stretched out one hand and pulled on the blind cord, letting in a stream of sunshine. Dust motes hovered in the air as though suddenly released and the young detective stopped for a moment, considering the man who had been killed. He'd been in his pyjamas, hadn't he? He would have stood on the very step Fathy was standing on now, making his way downstairs to answer the front door. Was that how it had happened? Fathy gave himself a shake as he entered the victim's bedroom.
'Look at this,' Cameron declared, standing beside a neatly made bed.
Fathy stared at his DS then looked around the room. What was it he was supposed to be looking at? The place was as tidy as the rooms downstairs. No clothes were lying on the back of the chair by the window, not even a dressing gown. That was hanging on a hook behind the door, he saw as he continued to turn around, examining the room. 'Tidy beggar, wasn't he?' he offered.
'You don't see it, do you?' Cameron said at last. 'Think back to all the scene of crime photographs you've seen so far.'
The young detective constable frowned in concentration then shook his head.
'The bed,' Cameron said at last, an eager light in his eyes.
'Look at it.'
Fathy looked, thinking about the night Scott had been killed.
Then it dawned on him.
'It's made.' He looked up, bewildered. 'Someone's made the bed!' he exclaimed.
'Aye, took your time to see it, though, didn't you?' Cameron smiled ruefully. 'Entire crime scene's supposed to be left exactly as it was found. Any copper knows that. So, who's been in to do a wee bit of housekeeping?'
Fathy stared at the bed. Not only was the coverlet smooth, but there was a crease folded under the bump where the pillow lay.
'You think someone has been in?'
'Certain of it. We're going to have to get the fingerprint lads back here pronto. And see if we can find out from the neighbours who else had a key to this house.'
'Maybe he's got a cleaner who comes in,' Fathy suggested.
'Could be. I'm reasonably tidy but I can't say it's anything like my own place,' Cameron said ruefully. 'Never seem to have the time to keep it as orderly as this. Maybe you're right. Maybe someone does come in. But why wouldn't any of the neighbours have told us?'
'And if he didn't have a cleaner, if he kept the place as spick and span as this, maybe it tells us something about him.'
'Aye,' Cameron agreed. 'If he was ex-navy or something you might understand it. Someone who was used to keeping things in a really meticulous fashion. But maybe it says something about his personality. I don't know…' he tailed off thoughtfully. 'Point is, someone's been in here without our authority and we'll need to find out who that was.'
'True, but let's not abandon this till we've seen the rest of upstairs,' Fathy answered, moving towards the doorway. 'I'm willing to bet that the bathroom and the spare bedroom are equally shipshape, but maybe we should take a minute to see if there's anything else unusual. Like Lorimer said, look for what should be there but isn't.'
'Already looked in the bathroom and guess what I didn't find?'
Fathy looked blank.
'No condoms. No spare toothbrush. Nothing. It's as if the bloke had been a hermit.'
'But he had a relationship with that woman, Frances Donnelly,' Fathy said.
'Aye, but it doesn't look as if he ever brought her back home, does it?'
'Weird,' Fathy said at last. 'Unless she only came round to do a bit of housework?' he added.
'You think the girlfriend would come round and make up his bed after he'd been killed here?' Cameron's tone was sceptical.
'No, suppose not. But it seems odd that anyone would do a thing like that, doesn't it? 1 mean, it doesn't fit with what we know about him.'
'And what's that?' Cameron asked, folding his arms and looking at the younger man with interest. 'What sort of a person do you think he was?'
'Frighteningly tidy, and I'm willing to bet he suffered from obsessive compulsive disorder. And he was a very private person,'
Fathy decided. 'Doesn't that make you wonder if there was something he wanted to hide from the outside world?'
Annie Irvine stood outside the high-rise flat, wondering how often she had been in this situation before. Send Irvine, she could hear the voice clearly. Any voice. It didn't really matter who was in authority, they seemed to recognise that here was a woman who would be useful in keeping a veneer of calm whilst distraught relatives gave vent to their emotion. The front door that had once been some shade of red was scuffed from repeated kicks and knocks and there was a faint smell in the corridor that might have been cat pee. The whole place was redolent of despair and neglect, she thought. Lorimer had often ranted about the iniquity of the skyscraper flats, wondering why on earth these planners from the sixties had thought it a good idea to upend streets and leave them hanging in the air like this.
She looked up at DS Alistair Wilson, seeing more than the thinning dark hair and the worn leather jacket. He was a middle-aged cop, a family man whose years in the force had given him a hard bitten edge. But Annie had always known Wilson as a policeman whose humanity lay just under the surface of that outward gruffness.
Too many cops became inured to the suffering of others, but, like Lorimer, Wilson wasn't one of them. `Whityewantini?' A large woman had suddenly appeared in the doorway, eyeing them suspiciously. Her wild shock of grey hair looked as though several birds might have roosted in it overnight and her pink T-shirt hung loosely over a pair of unsupported breasts. Annie stared for a moment then realised that the woman had probably just got out of bed even though it was early in the afternoon.
'Mrs Galbraith?' Wilson was proffering his warrant card for her to examine and, as the woman peered at it short-sightedly, he took a step towards her. 'Detective Sergeant Wilson, Detective Constable Irvine. We're here to
