A Small Weeping (7 page)

‘It struck you as odd?’ Lorimer asked quietly, confirming the tone in the woman’s voice.

She nodded, ‘Aye. Odd. You could say that. Anyway she didn’t come back and the cocoa was getting cold so I thought I’d better go and find her. She wasn’t in the loo and she wasn’t in either of the residents’ lounges.’ Brenda Duncan bit her lip. ‘I don’t know what made me go along the back corridor. Maybe it was when the light came on.’

‘What light?’ Lorimer demanded.

Brenda Duncan frowned. ‘It was funny, now I come to think of it. The back corridor light just came on. I hadn’t noticed it was off until I was through the swing-doors then it just came on.’

Wilson scribbled something on his notepad.

‘Go on, please,’ Lorimer pressed her.

‘I didn’t see anything at first. I just walked along the corridor. It was that quiet. Then I heard a noise. A kind of scraping sound. It was the door down to the basement. Someone had left it open and it was creaking in the wind. I pushed it open and switched on the light. And then I saw her.’

This time the pause was for real. Lorimer could see fear loom large in the woman’s widening eyes and he could easily imagine her screams. But now her voice sank to a whisper as she stared past them.

‘She was lying on her back. I thought at first she’d fallen, so I hurried down the stairs.’ She swallowed hard. ‘Then I saw it. That flower. I knew then. I just knew she was dead.’

‘Did you feel for a pulse?’ Wilson asked.

She shook her head and Lorimer saw her eyes staring into space, mesmerised by that image fixed in her brain.

‘Kirsty was dead and all I could think of was that she hadn’t had her cocoa!’ Brenda Duncan suddenly burst into tears. The woman PC who had accompanied her into the lounge was by her side now and looking quizzically at Lorimer for instructions. No doubt she was expecting him to terminate the interview. Spare the poor woman any further suffering. Well, that wasn’t always Lorimer’s way. There were still things he needed to know.

‘How long was it between the time you saw Nurse MacLeod alive and the discovery of the body?’ The question brought a halt to the flow of tears. There was a wiping of eyes and the WPC retreated to her post by the lounge door. Brenda Duncan looked distractedly around her for a moment.

‘I’m not sure, really. I remember it was after midnight on the alarm clock in one of the rooms. I’d seen Kirsty about quarter-past eleven, maybe. She’d been writing up some paperwork before she went upstairs. I went through the front to check the rooms. I put fresh loo rolls in, give the basins a wipe, that sort of thing.’ She looked nervously at Lorimer. ‘I don’t know what time it was when I made the cocoa. Not long after.’

‘So that was the last time you saw her alive. At approximately eleven-fifteen?’

The woman’s lip trembled. ‘I just made her cocoa. We’d always have a blether. But she never came. She never came.’ Brenda Duncan clutched herself with both arms rocking back and forwards, whimpering softly.

‘Thank you, Mrs Duncan.’ Lorimer was finished with her for the moment. He nodded to Wilson who rose and helped the woman to her feet. ‘If you would just follow the officer out. We have a car to take you home,’ Lorimer’s detective sergeant reassured her. ‘There will be a statement to sign later on but we’ll let you know about that.’

‘Oh, just one more thing,’ Lorimer’s voice stopped them in their tracks. ‘What about the patient whose room is at the back of the nursing home?’

Brenda Duncan looked nonplussed. Then she gave a small shake of the head. ‘Oh. You mean Phyllis? She’s an MS patient. Totally paralysed. Can’t speak. Poor thing. Mrs Baillie can tell you more, I’m sure.’ She looked uncertainly at Lorimer then added, ‘Can I go now?’

‘Of course. Thank you for your help.’

Lorimer stood looking out as the police car drove off. She hadn’t mentioned seeing to Phyllis Logan that night. Had anybody spoken to the owner of the Grange? Was
she even aware that a murder had taken place under her own roof?

Sometimes he let his mind wander back to the time when he’d been happiest. In his memory the days were always sunny, the cloisters full of friendly shadows. The work had been hard, especially all the studying, but the compensations of having his own vocation made up for everything. There were days like today when the wind blowing from the west reminded him of the gardens with their high walls clad with espaliers and creeping vines. If he closed his eyes he was back there once more, the mumbling sound of bees as they staggered from one lavender bush to the next making his head feel drowsy. The soil had been fine and black beneath his fingernails, a joy to cultivate. And they’d been so pleased with him, hadn’t they?

A cold shadow crossed his face, making him look up as the sun disappeared for some moments. The nights, too, had been his. He’d plundered the hours of darkness, his footfall a bright echo on the stones of the chapel. A candle. He remembered there had been a candle, tall, the colour of
honey, its flame bent side ways by the draught of his passing. The candle had stood for a sentinel on these special nights between midnight and dawn, flickering its pinpoint lights against the metal cross that lay within the coffin.

The bodies were always carefully dressed in white robes, the faces of the deceased facing skywards. Sometimes, watching them for long hours at a time, he wondered if their eyes would open and see him staring. In dreams he saw their dead eyes glaze like pale gobs of jelly, their heads turn accusingly in his direction. Perhaps that’s why he had given them the flower, to appease them, stop their looks of disdain. They seemed to know everything, to understand his innermost thoughts. He’d decided that they were dangerous, these dead people, especially the very old ones with their wrinkled flesh hanging in folds, the candlelight magnifying each crease on the tallow skin.

The first time he had placed a red flower between the praying hands the wind had sighed outside the chapel door like a benediction. Then he knew it was all right. He had a blessing. The priests had sounded their delight. Bells had rung in his honour and the clever boys had lifted him shoulder-high through the college gates. He’d been feather-light, a wisp on the air, able to float down into the coffin and embrace the cold figures lying there so stiff, so stately. Death was sweet. Couldn’t they understand that? Death released them all. He released them now, these women, from their hateful lives. Better to be dead and in a clean white coffin. Clean and cool with the flicker of candle-flame.

He groaned as the pain filled his thighs. Would they never leave him alone, these waking dead? Was he burdened with this task for all eternity?

Number twenty-eight Murray Street was one in a row of faded red sandstone tenements, once the glory of the tobacco merchants who had helped the city to prosper, but now split into a mismatch of bedsits and small flats. Kirsty MacLeod had rented one of the basement rooms.

Lorimer had spoken to the landlady briefly on the telephone. Now their feet thudded on the uncarpeted wooden stairs that led them in a spiral down to the lower level. Lorimer took in the landlady’s scuffed leather shoes and much-washed cardigan as she turned the stairs below him. Her clothes were covered in an old-fashioned overall, the kind his granny had worn to the steamie to wash the household linen, but he noticed the hem of her skirt was unravelling at the edge. Whatever rent her tenants were paying, it didn’t seem to make a fortune for the woman.

‘How long had Miss MacLeod been renting from you?’

‘Well, let me see,’ the woman turned her head towards Lorimer. ‘She’s been here about eighteen months.’ Lorimer
caught a glimpse of tears start in her eyes. They had reached the bottom of the stairs and stopped outside a door marked 3B.

‘I can’t believe she’s dead,’ her words fell in a whisper and she looked away, suddenly embarrassed at her own emotion. She fiddled with the key in the lock. Lorimer cast his eyes over the green painted walls. The place reminded him of an institution rather than a warren of bedsits, although the faint smell of joss sticks lingering in the corridor spoke of a student life he remembered well. Lorimer stood on the threshold of the room. The dark green curtains were still drawn and his eyes took a few blinks to adjust to the dim light.

‘Have you been into this room since Miss MacLeod left for work on Thursday?’

The landlady looked fearfully at him, shaking her frizzed grey hair.

‘Oh, no, Chief Inspector. I didn’t like…Well. You know. it didn’t seem decent,’ she trailed off, her hands wringing the flowered cotton overall. She hovered in the doorway, uncertain.

‘You don’t need to stay if you have other things to get on with. I’ll bring the keys when I’m done. All right?’ His face creased into the reassuring smile that he brought out of his stock expressions for the old and vulnerable. The woman nodded and disappeared along the corridor. He waited a moment until he could hear the sound of doors banging and pots being clattered before turning into the room once more.

Kirsty MacLeod would have kept the curtains shut whenever she’d had a night shift, he told himself. Security-conscious. Even when the windows looked out onto a brick
wall, he mused, leaning over a wide desk and drawing the heavy folds aside to let in the daylight. He stood with his back to the desk taking in the contents of her room.

The neatly made up bed was up against one wall, a scattering of soft toys over the pillow. Lorimer recognised a rabbit with floppy ears and a stupid grin embroidered onto its face. It was a Disney character but he couldn’t remember which one. There was the usual tired-looking furniture that every city bedsit seemed to afford: dark varnished wardrobe, chest of drawers, bedside cabinet. At least they matched, he thought. A stereo system had been rigged up in one corner on top of a steel cabin trunk. Lorimer looked at the walls, expecting to see the usual wallpapering of pop posters but there was only one of a Runrig concert dating from several years back and a travel poster depicting the standing stones of Callanish.

Lorimer flicked on an angle-poise lamp that stood on the desk and gazed at the picture. The stones seemed to heave out of the Lewis earth as if they’d grown there from ancient roots. So, Kirsty had reminders of home. That was hardly surprising. Lorimer’s gaze continued along the line of photo frames on the mantelpiece. There was one of a laughing girl with her arms around an older, white-haired woman. It took him a moment to realise that it was Kirsty. Images of her body sprawled across that concrete floor flicked through his brain. He’d only seen her once, dead at the Grange. This was a younger, carefree teenager and the old lady might be a relative, the aunt, he thought, taking in the background of hills and sea. The other photos included one of her graduation, a close up of a collie dog, its tongue lolling, and an old black and white photograph of a man and woman outside a cottage. Her parents, probably. No
young men were included in the line-up. A surprise, really, given that she’d been such a pretty girl.

An empty coat hanger swung from a discoloured brass hook on the back of the door. Her personal clothing had been taken from the nursing home to forensics for examination. Lorimer turned suddenly at the noise of a bluebottle buzzing at the closed window. It heightened his awareness of the silence in the room. No hands would come to switch on the stereo. Nobody would sing a Gaelic song as they tidied or made up the single bed. There was a feeling of utter emptiness, as if the room itself knew that Kirsty was never coming back. Remembering the landlady, Lorimer supposed that another tenant would eventually move in. He sighed, shoving his hands into his pockets. Life went on. It had to. Someone would come to take the girl’s personal effects away later in the day. More forensics. More grief for the relatives, wherever they were. For now Lorimer had to gauge the sort of girl Kirsty had been and hopefully find some helpful documentation. A neat, tidy person; from the look of the room, she would have her paperwork somewhere to hand, collated and sorted.

The desk drawer was the obvious place and Lorimer was not disappointed. A red leather five-year diary sat on top of a sheaf of papers. He rustled through them. Payslips were clipped together, a plastic bag contained a pile of receipts and a guarantee for the stereo. Bank statements lay in order in a blue ring binder. Lorimer flicked through them. Nothing obviously wrong there. A floral paper file held letters with a Lewis postmark. It would all have to be taken away for close perusal. Suddenly it all seemed so intrusive to Lorimer. It didn’t stop with the killing. Even
after death, the girl’s private life had to be dissected as thoroughly as her cold corpse.

His fingertips brushed against a small, metal object in a corner of the drawer and Lorimer pushed it into sight. It was a tiny key. Lorimer picked it up. Her key to the diary, surely? He fitted it into the lock and turned. The red book sprung open as if someone had breathed life into its pages. Flicking from the back, Lorimer noticed that the diary had spanned all of the last five years, its tightly written pages giving details of Kirsty’s life.

The final entry had been 31 December last year. Starting at the top of that page he read of five different sorts of Hogmanays.

1999 Ceilidh at the Halls. Didn’t get in till after two.
What a night!!!!

2000 Working tonight. Watched the Rev. I. M. Jolly on
TV. A good laugh. Wish Aunty Mhairi had the phone.

2001 George Square for the bells. Millions of mad folk
but it was great fun. Bitter cold. Went to someone’s party
in Hyndland afterwards.

2002 Great to be home. Chrissie and I stayed in with
Mhairi as she had a bad cold. Loads of neighbours came in
after the bells. Malcolm’s black bun went down a treat.

2003 Last New Year in Glasgow. Hope next year brings
better luck.

Lorimer gritted his teeth. What bloody irony. All this year
had brought her was a grisly death at the hands of some lunatic. He glanced over the five entries again, turning back to confirm his first impressions. Yes, she’d been back to Harris twice in those five years. Had she intended to go back for good?
Last year in Glasgow.
What had her plans been for the future? And with whom? Who was Malcolm?

He flicked back through the pages until the diary fell open of its own accord. Lorimer frowned. Cut neatly out of the centre of the little book were several pages, the remaining thatch of paper left to prevent the diary falling apart at its stitched seam. What had taken place to make Kirsty MacLeod obliterate several weeks out of a record of her life? And in which year had this event happened? A love affair gone wrong? Something so embarrassing that she couldn’t bear to reread it in the following years? Lorimer closed the diary, weighing it in his hand. He’d have to read the whole thing. Then ask even more questions. Slipping the diary into his pocket, Lorimer let his eyes rove around the room once more.

He’d had enough. The place gave him an impression of girlish innocence, of a Kirsty MacLeod who was doing her best to survive in this alien environment. As he looked again at the picture of the standing stones, Lorimer couldn’t help feeling that the nurse would have gone back to the islands eventually.

He turned on his heel. The boys would be back later to strip the place. For now, all Lorimer wanted was to leave the airless room to the fly trapped against the dusty windowpane.