The Road to Hell (18 page)

‘It is Moira Fyfe, isn’t it?’ Alice asked.

‘Oh yeah. It’s her all right, but she looks – old, bloody awful. She’s only about my age, you know. I’ve never seen her with grey hair, but yes, it’s her all
right. Poor thing, she looks as if she’s been battered.’

As they were leaving through the canteen swing doors, Alice asked the constable whether she had ever worked in the hospital.

‘Oh yes,’ she replied airily.

‘So Mrs Baird probably did recognise you?’

‘I certainly recognised her, but I wasn’t letting on. I had my hair dyed black then, when I was a student, so that may have confused her. I couldn’t let her know though, could
I? I couldn’t help her to recognise me.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because,’ the young constable said, striding onwards, ‘I’d have no authority left, would I? Don’t forget, she used to tell me what to do – in another life
– but now it’s me asking her the questions and,’ she giggled at the thought, ‘she’s the one who’s got to answer.’

With the woman’s full name it proved easy. A few well-placed calls from the hospital car park established that Moira Fyfe had been living at a hostel in Bread Street
immediately before she died.

Her room there, number 14, was small and windowless, more like a monk’s cell than a bedroom. The worn trainers of its current occupant lay at the end of the narrow bed, and a dark blue,
pinstriped jacket with elbow patches hung from a coat-hanger on the back of the only chair. On a wooden table lay a cigarette lighter and a broken plastic razor.

‘This was her room?’ Alice asked, looking round and thinking how austere it seemed despite still being occupied. The air stank of Dettol. The manager, Jack Imrie, a tall, thin man
with intense, deep-set eyes and a gold stud in one nostril, nodded his head but said nothing. The owner of the jacket stood behind him in the open doorway, and he, too, nodded as if the question
had been addressed to him.

‘Have you still got her stuff?’

‘We will have it. We keep it for about 28 days. It’ll probably be in the storeroom.’

‘Can we see it?’

‘No problem, I’ll take you there,’ the manager answered, gesturing to the resident that he could return to his room and then closing the door quietly behind him.

Moira Fyfe’s entire worldly possessions fitted in to a single, scuffed holdall. A couple of changes of clothes, a pair of trainers, a few toiletries, a coloured photograph of a bearded man
holding a baby and a worn, bedraggled, red toy elephant with one button-eye missing.

‘That’s it?’ DC Cairns said, in a tone of disbelief.

‘She’s got more than some,’ the manager replied, bundling her things back into the bag and then searching in a cupboard for the book they would have to sign to take them
away.

‘When you last saw her, on the night of the 13th of January, how did she seem?’ Alice asked.

‘She was much as usual. Maybe a wee bit more crabby. After she got back from A&E she calmed down and went off to bed. I didn’t see her the next morning. My shift was
over.’

He pointed to the line on the form where the signature was to be written.

‘Why did she have go to A&E?’ Alice asked handing the biro back to him.

‘There was a scuffle between her and another woman. Nothing much, but she fell over and complained afterwards that she felt dizzy. Our procedures leave nothing to chance, so one of the
staff went with her in the ambulance to the Infirmary. They didn’t keep her in or anything, but even then they didn’t get back until after midnight.’

‘Who’s her GP?’

‘She went to the one-stop shop near the St James’ Centre. She’s one of Susan Shaw’s patients.’

‘Why didn’t you report her missing?’

‘Because,’ he said, closing the book with a snap, ‘that’s not the way it works, is it? Our service-users come and go as they please, free as birds, with or without their
things. We’d never be off the phone to you otherwise, and, mostly, wasting your time.’

‘What are you doing in here?’ a female voice inquired. A little woman with sparse, frizzy black hair and the pencilled-on arched eyebrows of an aged chanteuse had entered the
storeroom. She was looking intently at the two police officers as if they were unauthorised intruders.

‘It’s OK, Maggie,’ the man said, going over towards her, ‘they’re with me.’

‘Maybe they are, Mr Imrie,’ she said hotly, ‘but I’m supposed to be in charge of the store. Not you. No one should be in here without my say-so.’

‘Have you checked that out?’ she inquired of Alice, touching the sleeve of the navy jacket she had on and adding, ‘I happen to know that one of our other residents had her
hopes set on it.’

‘No, I haven’t,’ Alice replied, ‘but I don’t need to – you see, it’s mine.’

‘Not until I sign it out, it isn’t, young lady,’ the woman corrected her, looking down at the policewoman’s feet and adding, ‘I see you’ve not helped yourself
to any of our new shoes, yet, at least.’

‘Well done, Alice,’ Elaine Bell said, taking a seat on the edge of her sergeant’s desk. She crossed her arms and looked out of the window, staring across at
Arthur’s Seat and the dark clouds gathering around the summit.

‘I’m getting her records from Doctor Shaw, and once we’ve got them, Professor McConnachie can take a look at them, see what he makes of them.’

‘Fine. So, in summary . . .’

‘In summary, her name was Moira Ellen Fyfe and she was aged 59. Her last known address was at the Friends of Galilee place on Bread Street.’

‘She’s a down-and-out,’ DC Cairns added, uninvited, from the far end of the room, leaving her seat and coming to stand beside her colleague.

‘Forensics haven’t reported yet, so we still don’t know if she was sexually assaulted,’ Alice continued, ‘but when she was discovered she was partially undressed.
No possessions were found near her, and a pair who travelled on the bus with her reported that she was drunk before she got off the bus. The Prof told us she was an alcoholic. She was covered in
scratches, particularly on her hands and arms, as if she had been running from somebody . . . trying to escape from somebody.’

‘So, it’s still a murder hunt?’

‘Of course it is, she’d been practically stripped, Ma’am!’ DC Cairns blurted out, shocked that there could be any doubt about the matter.

‘Alice?’ the DCI asked, pointedly ignoring the constable. The sergeant nodded. ‘Yes, for the moment. We’ve got statements from as many of her friends, colleagues, or
whatever you’d call them, as we could find in the hostels, drop-in centres, settlement flats and so on. For all the use they are. With the exception of that man.’

‘Yes, except for bloody Taff, of course,’ DC Cairns interrupted.

‘Taff?’ the DCI said.

‘Apparently he was her best friend,’ Alice replied, ‘None of her so-called pals have been exactly falling over themselves to talk to us, and even if they do it’s
difficult to tell how reliable they are. But one name, his name, keeps popping up. Otherwise it’s pretty hopeless. Three people at number 194 claimed to know her just to get a cup of tea off
us, drank it down and then immediately confessed to their “mistake”. Another one assured us that Moira died last winter, and yet another had a theory that Taff was her son.’

‘OK. You can go home now, Liz,’ the DCI said, jerking her head in the constable’s direction. The young woman collected her coat from the back of her chair and then waited,
looking towards Alice who was busy logging out of her computer. When the constable made no further move to leave, DCI Bell said impatiently, ‘Off you go, Elizabeth.’

Taken aback by her insistence, the constable said, ‘I’m just going, Ma’am. I was waiting for Sergeant Rice.’

‘No, on you go,’ the DCI said, deliberately catching Alice’s eye to let her know that she was to wait behind. Once the slightly puzzled constable had left the Murder Suite, DCI
Bell stood up and, looking out of the window again, she stretched.

‘It was just to let you know we’ve found the car.’

‘Where was it?’

‘In a back-street garage in Fountainbridge. The lab are pulling it to pieces now.’

‘Do we know who was driving it?’

‘No,’ the DCI said, ‘not yet. It’s yet another unlicensed banger. It probably rose, like Frankenstein, from some scrapyard or another. But it’s . . .’ She
turned to face her Sergeant.

‘Thanks, Ma’am,’ Alice said before she could finish the sentence, rising and walking towards the door, suddenly desperate to escape. Whoever had killed him, Ian was dead and
she did not want to talk about it, be reminded about it right here and right now. Finding out about Moira Fyfe had, like some wondrous drug, staved off all thoughts of him. But his death was not
just another case to her, and the wound was still too raw. She did not want to be overwhelmed, to break down in front of her Chief Inspector, and she could already feel the tears beginning to well
up. The slightest sign of fragility and she might find herself jobless and hopeless. She knew what would fill that particular vacuum, and dreaded it.

‘Alice!’

‘Yes, Ma’am?’ she replied, her head still turned away from her boss.

‘Are you all right?’ Elaine Bell asked, coming towards her.

‘Fine, thanks,’ she said, nodding, still heading for the door but then briefly turning and forcing her features into a smile.

In her flat, Alice spent a couple of hours sorting through Ian’s possessions, throwing out rubbish, putting his clothes into black bags, separating their books and
stacking his ready to be stored in the cardboard boxes that she planned to acquire from the friendly assistants in a nearby wine shop. Some objects defeated her. A photograph album, once hers
alone, had become a joint possession, recording their life together, and it was filled with images taken by him. A derelict boat in Dunbar harbour, a close-up of the prickles on a thistle, the
golden eyes of a half-submerged frog, so many things she would have overlooked without him beside her with his keen eye. Should the album go to his mother, or his son, or could she keep it?

It fell open on her lap and she looked down at a large photo on the left-hand page. It showed Ian in their kitchen. He was grinning widely, naked to the waist, his bottom half clothed in a
strange grey-and-white woollen garment. It had a wide waistband which he held out daintily on either side. Memories of the day she had taken the picture flooded back. They had returned from a
weekend away, cold and hungry, their clothes wet from an ill-judged, rainy, seaside walk taken on impulse, on the way home. Finding no trousers in the clean laundry basket, or in any of his
drawers, he had simply improvised and worn a favourite sweater as trousers. Amused at his own appearance in the mirror he had posed for her camera, his legs one in front of the other in a
flat-footed balletic pose.

Looking at the photo, she smiled. She would keep it and the rest of them for her and her alone. No captions would be necessary, because the album had recorded their life together.