Keep The Midnight Out (William Lorimer) (14 page)

‘I
t’s a brown bag mo-rn-ing!’ someone sang to the tune of ‘Rhinestone Cowboy’, the man’s voice drowned in sudden laughter. Last night had been a busy one for the previous shift, the productions from several cases lying side by side in their brown paper bags. The level of humour was lost on the young officer who slid into his place in the CID room, however.

The boy’s mutilated body stopped DC Lorimer in his tracks every time he came into the large room in Stewart Street. The image was pinned up on the gallery board that held various pictures of victims whose cases were still ongoing and he wondered how long it would be until someone else’s fingers pulled out the green pin tacks and removed the photograph for good.

Immersion in water had taken its toll on that particular body, of course, several underwater creatures making their small marks on the flesh. But it was the wasted face that bothered Lorimer most, the boy’s eyes ravaged by marine creatures, no doubt, the way that he had seen crows peck out the eyes of dead lambs on snow-covered hillsides.

Looking at those empty sockets reminded him of the play that Maggie had been teaching to her sixth year kids. She’d taken them to see a performance of
King Lear
at the Citizens Theatre and he’d agreed to tag along. It was not one of Shakespeare’s works that he knew at all and the violence had astonished him, particularly the scene where the old Earl of Gloucester had been attacked and his eyes plucked out: several pupils had visibly winced at the action on stage. The line from the play came back to him as he looked at the unnamed boy in the photograph:
Out, vile jelly! Where is thy lustre now?

He sat down at his desk, glad that his chair was turned away from the board, though he could almost feel the image boring into his brain. The pathologist’s team had done an amazing job in stitching the body back up but even their skill had not managed to repair the damage done to the boy’s poor face. And so there was nothing to give to the press, no photographic image that would jolt someone’s memory and give a name to the dead boy. Perhaps a clever artist might be able to simulate an image? he suddenly thought. Wasn’t there a department at Glasgow School of Art that specialised in portraiture? Why not try to have an artist alter the photograph on the wall to make it presentable to the public eye? DI Phillips had more or less given him the task of finding the victim’s identity, so why not go down that route?

The thought was no sooner in his mind than he was gathering up his thin linen jacket and heading back out of the room. Nobody had pulled him out on another matter so far this morning and he just needed to let the desk sergeant know where he was going in case he was needed for anything else.

As he walked up towards the art school the sun slanted through the tall buildings; one minute he was in shadow, the next blinded by the morning light. It was important to look up in this city, he remembered his art teacher telling him at school, and she was right. The buildings were not just rows of tenements with shop fronts below, there were some real architectural gems to be found if you knew where to look; carvings on the edges of roofs, stained glass doors glimmering above a set of stone steps, the brass door handles lovingly polished. Glasgow School of Art was itself a testament to one man’s greatness. Charles Rennie Mackintosh, one of the pioneers of Art Nouveau, may not have received the accolades he had deserved in his own lifetime but he was now revered as one of Glasgow’s finest and the City Fathers were planning a worldwide exhibition of his work.

As he approached the towering building with its quirky design features – that metal arch with its dark purple eye suspended above the front steps – Lorimer felt a pang of regret. This was a place where he might have chosen to study; his grades had been good enough to try for entry rather than apply for History of Art at the University of Glasgow. Perhaps he might have completed a course here rather than dropping out and joining the police.
But then he’d never have met Maggie
, a jubilant inner voice reminded him.

Choices, he thought to himself. We make choices that can have such far-reaching consequences. What sorts of choices had led that nameless boy to his death and whose hands had bound him before strangling the life out of him then
chucking the body into the river?

Less than half an hour later the detective constable skipped down the front steps of the art school, a gleam in his eye.
It could be done
, the lady in reception had told him. She’d taken him to an upper corridor where there were examples of some of the students’ ongoing work, Lorimer looking suitably impressed at what the folk in the portraiture class could do. Yes, she would pass these copies of the photographs to the lecturer in portraiture when he came in, she promised.

But soon that won’t be the only route you will be able to go down. One of these days we’ll be able to recreate images on computers
, the woman had told him.
There are all sorts of things to be found on the
internet
, she had added with a smile.
Didn’t the police use it at all?
Lorimer had shaken his head. He’d heard of the internet, of course, but only a select few police officers were being sent on IT courses, the rest struggling on with what other technology was at their disposal.
You’ll soon be able to create a three-dimensional image of even the most wasted corpses
, the secretary had assured him and Lorimer had smiled politely, wondering just how true that might be. Still, he’d be glad of a humble pencil sketch to take to the newspapers, whenever anybody at the school could find the time to undertake that particular task.

He was just opening the back door to Stewart Street when DI Phillips came barging out, almost knocking him over.

‘You, Lorimer! Come with us. Another corpse has been fished out by our friend at the Humane Society and we need to see it.’

‘What…?’ Lorimer followed his boss out into the car park and into a waiting squad car where a uniformed officer ushered them into the back seats.

‘George Parsonage,’ Phillips continued, stretching out the rear seat belt as the car swung out of the police compound. ‘The Humane Society officer. You know him?’

‘The art teacher?’

‘Ben’s son, yes.’ Phillips nodded. ‘He’s taken more bodies out of that river than you or I will ever hope to see,’ he said grimly. ‘A riverman, just like his father. Anyway, George has found a young man, naked and badly knocked about.’ He gave Lorimer a meaningful look. ‘Sounds just like the lad they pulled out. Your unknown red-head.’

There was a small group around the body when they arrived, several police vehicles already barring the way of curious passers-by. Lorimer noticed at once that some of the figures were clad in regulation white coveralls: the scene of crime officers were already in attendance, the on-duty pathologist amongst them, no doubt. Glancing at the group he was surprised to see that two of them were women, the tall figure of Dr MacMillan kneeling by the spreadeagled body and a smaller, younger one whose blonde hair was escaping from her mob cap. As she glanced up at their arrival Lorimer recognised her as the student from the mortuary who had been asking so many questions.

‘Dr MacMillan, this is DC Lorimer. You’ll not have met before,’ Phillips said, crouching down beside the tall woman. Lorimer felt his face redden. He had watched this woman at work from his place behind the viewing screen but Phillips was quite correct, the pathologist had not been formally introduced to this lowliest member of his team.

Dr MacMillan gave him a brief smile before turning back to the dead man.

He was about the same age as their unknown victim, but instead of a thatch of red hair, this one was dark, as befitted his Asian origin, whatever that might be. Taking a step closer, Lorimer could see the fine cheekbones and sloping jaw, though at that moment he was more interested in whether the way the man’s head lay on the wet grass was indicative of a broken neck rather than if he were Indian or Pakistani. The arms had been tied behind his back, the ankles fixed with twisted wires, pulling the limbs backwards so that the torso appeared to bulge outwards. He blinked, trying to remember exactly how the previous victim had looked. There had been no visible bonds left and the pathologist had hinted at some sort of twine rather than a wire. So was this a second murder linked to the first? Was Phillips’s inkling correct that they were related to the gangland killings that sometimes erupted in this city?

The blonde girl stood up and took a few steps back to allow the pathologist more space for her examination, coming to stand next to Lorimer.

‘Hi, are you with the SIO?’ she asked softly.

Lorimer nodded. ‘DC Lorimer, Stewart Street,’ he replied.

The student grinned and stuck out a gloved hand. ‘Yeah, I caught your name. I’m Rosie Fergusson,’ she said, then turned back to the scene before them. ‘That’s my tutor, Dr MacMillan,’ she continued, a note of pride in her voice. ‘I’d like to be doing that some day.’

Lorimer raised his eyebrows then followed her gaze as the older woman went about her initial examination. The young student was quite intent on every single aspect of the proceedings, her head tilted to catch every word that the pathologist was telling Phillips. Lorimer smiled to himself. Who on earth would guess this girl’s chosen profession just by looking at her? Appearance and reality did not always match up, as he’d learned from experience. Now he knew that even criminals and their ilk often appeared just like anyone else. The trick was to identify them by their behaviour and by sifting through every bit of evidence surrounding a crime. It had been one of those moments of fate that had changed his own life, that day in the police line-up when he had been taken from his holiday job in the bank.

He’d been quite on his own in those days, rattling around in the small house where he had lived with Mum until her untimely death. There had been nobody then to thwart his decision to drop out of university and join these men and women who dedicated their time to catching criminals, nor any family member to applaud as he marched out of Tulliallan Police College many months later.

‘Probably before you have your dinner,’ Dr MacMillan was saying to DI Phillips. ‘We’ll give you a ring to firm up.’ She turned and looked at Lorimer as though seeing him for the first time and he was struck by the twinkle in her hazel eyes. ‘And you’ll be bringing this young man to the post-mortem with you?’

‘Aye, DC Lorimer,’ Phillips said. ‘We want to see if there’s any link between this one and the body that hasn’t been identified.’

Dr MacMillan nodded then strolled away, the girl giving Lorimer a brief smile before following in her tutor’s wake, leaving the SOCOs to photograph the body and the area around it before the men who waited patiently on the upper embankment could wrap it into a body bag and transport it to the city mortuary.

‘What are your thoughts on this one, son?’

Lorimer glanced at his boss who was looking at him with a faint grin.

‘Could be the same perpetrators,’ he began. ‘But why was the first lad not still bound up like this one?’

‘There’s a story in there somewhere,’ George Phillips agreed. ‘Something for us to untangle from whatever mess these bastards leave behind them.’ The DI’s face was suddenly grim. The older officers were forever remarking how things had changed in the city since they had joined the Force.

‘You think it’s drug related?’

Phillips shrugged. ‘There’s always that possibility after a sudden, violent death. These types don’t care what they do to people, even their own.’ He kicked a stone viciously with the toe of his boot, sending it flying down the embankment to land with a dull plop into the river. ‘Come on, I want to see if there’s been anyone missing a young Asian family member.’

The area around Byres Road was largely populated by students, the rental flats owned by a variety of landlords, many of them second-generation Asians. Since the troubled days of partition between India and Pakistan, Glasgow had become a safe haven for many Asian families seeking a new home and some of these hard-working men had climbed the ladder of prosperity via corner grocery stores and restaurants to the heights of property ownership. There had rarely been any racial tension in the city during Lorimer’s own boyhood; his classmates on the south side of the city had included several darker faces, clever kids whose aim was to become a doctor or lawyer, their quiet politeness and different religion simply accepted by their peers. Yet nowadays there was a feeling of resentment from some quarters that these successful businessmen had no right taking over swathes of property in certain parts of the city and this was something that DC Lorimer bore in mind as he walked up the hill of Great George Street to see a Mrs Singh whose telephone call had prompted his visit.

‘She was a bit hysterical on the phone,’ PC Winters told him. ‘I heard the tape. Had to listen to it twice to make out what she was saying.’ She made a face as she puffed uphill at Lorimer’s side; she had only recently returned from maternity leave, her rounded curves straining under the uniform dark skirt and jacket. Thinking of Maggie’s swollen belly, Lorimer felt a sudden sympathy for PC Winters. It couldn’t be easy coming back to work full-time in a job as a police officer with the sort of stresses that entailed. Winters had been given the task of speaking to the family members, something that the female officers were always unfairly landed with, Lorimer knew.

‘And she claims her son’s missing?’

‘Says he never came home last night and he has never done anything like this before. Come on,’ Winters scoffed, ‘a lad of nineteen staying out against his mammy’s wishes? Is that so unheard of?’