Never Somewhere Else (13 page)

He walked around reading what he saw like some familiar language. The proximity to the School of Art had added a dimension of creativity to this long-neglected area. On top of the lamp-posts squatted fat black metal pigeons looking as though they were quite capable of muting down the length of each tall, thin pole. In some ways, Solomon thought, this was typical of much of Glasgow’s urban regeneration where smart new developments in red brick with landscaped corners cocked a snook at their older, worn out neighbours. On the far side of the waste ground, tenements huddled together, some with neo-classical features still clinging to the stonework; a few still hopelessly grimy with more than a century’s dirt.

Continuing to walk round
the perimeter of the site, he came at last to where the killer must have taken Lucy. A narrow lane bounded the area on one side, flanked by a high brick wall. Uneven cobbles, which were more like bricks stuck haphazardly into the ground, caused him to stumble. Above the wall, branches of barbed wire swung menacingly on metal brackets. The psychologist shuddered. Even in broad daylight it felt unsafe to walk here. Suddenly he stopped and stared. Built directly into the wall was a strange house on two storeys, resembling the back portion of a warehouse. And then, just as he stood there, a young woman emerged from the front door, closed and locked it behind her, and marched purposefully down the lane. Solomon looked at the house again. There were two doors, one at street level and the other like the entrance to a store, set on the first floor. Each was painted a bright, defiant red. There were windows on this side. He presumed the police had questioned the residents to no avail and, with a resigned sigh, turned to the waste ground itself. The ashes of bonfire night were now only a black patch in the winter grass. A few scrawny ash trees would create a screen from the road in high summer, but as yet they were leafless.

Lucy had used this lane as a short cut to her friend’s flat. The killer knew that, Solomon told himself. He walked back up the lane then turned and strolled alongside an imaginary Lucy, engaging her in … what? Conversation? Argument? He stopped before reaching the red-doored house and tried to imagine the situation. Had her killer taken Lucy by the shoulder in an embrace that was meant to look protective but that was actually steering her towards her death? What had made the girl stop on her journey? The scalping had taken place in a corner of the ground where the shadows from the wall and trees were darkest. Yet the place would never have been discovered had Janet Yarwood not intimated that Lucy might have been on her way to see her: she often came that way. Painstaking police work, thought Solomon, ungrudging in his admiration for Lorimer’s team. The lane would have done just as well. In fact, it would have been a duplicate of Donna Henderson’s murder, and that, surely had been his intention? Had something gone wrong, then? Had Lucy struggled, run towards the waste ground in an attempt to break through the line of trees but been caught by the killer’s deadly chain?

Solomon was aware of
the silence. From where he stood, the city’s roar of traffic was muffled by the thick wall and there was not a soul in sight. The killer must have stood here, his victim at his feet, ready to transport this latest corpse by ambulance to St Mungo’s Park. The lane had a no parking sign at its entrance, Solomon had noted. Mon–Fri 8.15–5.15 p.m. Any vehicle outwith these hours would be legally parked and hardly noticed. Had he stopped in the ambulance and beckoned Lucy, the way he had with Alison Girdley? But Lucy knew this ambulance; she had been the one charged with its purchase in the first place. So. She knew her killer, maybe even liked him, and would wait patiently while he drew alongside her and called out her name. Or was he parked there already? One way or the other Solomon felt that there had been an implicit trust on the part of the girl. The killer had beguiled her somehow or else she was unaware of her danger. Why? To answer that, he must find out much, much more about Lucy Haining and every person she had known in her student life. It was not only a murderer he was looking to profile.

The lane took
Solomon back out to the street that ran downhill to the city centre. Here Garnethill overlooked the city from all points. To the west, the white spires of Trinity speared the sky. Beyond lay the university and Solomon’s own small patch of belonging. Down to the north the buildings faded into misty greys, the street lights beginning to cast a weak glow. South lay the river. As Solomon walked back along Scott Street, the Art School appeared like a safe canyon against the wilderness outside. Huddled into the steep incline was the side door to the Centre for Contemporary Arts. Even as he glanced that way a couple emerged from the building. The CCA was open late every evening, he knew; sometimes it hosted a club night but mostly it was simply a hang-out for students, art students in particular. Solomon wondered if the centre had been investigated in the course of Lorimer’s lengthy inquiries. He made a mental note to ask – tactfully.

Straight ahead the river Clyde lay hidden, caught between the amalgam of buildings sprawled on either bank. Traffic criss-crossed the intersecting streets like a never-ending game in an amusement arcade. Push in a coin, see the buses ride the grid. Buses, taxis, post office vans, cars, ambulances … Their dim roar was like an animal breathing in its sleep, unseen and languorous in daylight but lurking by every watering hole come sundown.

The ambulance would have slipped into the main stream of night-time traffic then crossed through the gates of St Mungo’s Park. On impulse Solomon hurried down the last few yards to Sauchiehall Street and hailed an approaching black taxi.

It was that half-light
of evening that motorists so dislike when the taxi drew up at the park gates, the evergreen bushes looking burnt orange in the glare of headlights. The park was no longer manned, though infrared detectors and closed circuit television cameras remained discreetly in place. But the gate was firmly shut. Solomon looked back at the retreating taxi that had swung an effortless u-turn and was now heading towards the city. The journey had taken sixteen minutes. What had been going through the killer’s mind during that journey? He had already made the dry run with poor little Donna Henderson, so he knew what to do here. But how could he be sure that a police presence would not disturb his activities? Even more so with Sharon Millen, he thought. Unless … Could the killer have had information about police movements? Or had he simply strolled around to check whether it was safe to repeat his original performance? Any cold-blooded murderer would seek to cover his tracks, but someone in the police force would have insider knowledge that could work to his advantage.

The photofit of the killer showed a trim, clean-cut individual. They had even made a joke about him looking like a copper. Yet so many men of this age group had that cropped hairstyle; defiant punk or a convenient attempt to disguise a receding hairline.

Solomon leaned against the park railings, forcing himself to consider this possibility. A sudden vision of Lorimer’s steely blue glare flashed across his mind. The Chief Inspector would not take kindly to this idea at all. Oh, no, indeed.

I
t was almost too easy
once he’d stopped to think about it. Martin had missed the black-bearded psychologist, who had not been at the School of Art after all, it seemed. The journalist had hung around watching the students come and go for a good half hour. He’d watched the entrance like a hawk, waiting to see whether Brightman would emerge, but the only figure he had recognised was Chris, the art student who’d bought that print at Davey’s exhibition. Martin had smiled as he passed him by on the street but the guy had just looked right through him as if he wasn’t there and walked on. Only minutes later a janitor from the School’s design workshop had strolled up and asked a few bland questions. The man’s meaningful look had almost encouraged Martin to whip out his Press card but, preferring anonymity, Martin had feigned the air of a tourist overawed by the sight of Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s great work. The janitor’s look had remained sceptical, though, so Martin had taken himself off, cursing the time wasted. Later, however, the way to weasel information out of the psychologist had come to him in a flash of brilliance.

Martin chuckled to himself as he slotted the cassette tape into his machine. Diane’s sexy voice made the hairs on his neck tingle and there was a growing warmth in his groin. A small involuntary sigh of pleasure escaped him as the thought of her flickered across his mind.

The preliminary
courtesies of the interview were coming to a close and Diane’s firmness of tone signalled the beginning of more interesting dialogue.

‘Tell me, Dr Brightman, what sort of response does psychological profiling receive from the police?’

‘In general, you mean?’

‘Well, I know it’s used a lot in the United States, but is it well thought of here in Britain?’

There was a pause in the conversation and Martin could imagine Diane, legs crossed, smiling in encouragement at Dr Brightman, researcher into what made murderers tick.

‘Yes and no,’ came the reply. Martin expected Diane to pounce on that prevarication but she kept a measured silence. ‘There have been cases in England where the techniques of criminal profiling have been used to great effect. The results are often surprising to the investigating officers when regular methods have drawn a blank.’

‘Do you feel that regular methods, as you call them, are outdated, then?’

‘Oh, no.’ His rejoinder was swift this time. ‘I have great respect for the methods used by the police. In many ways we follow similar lines of thought. We do not only ask why something like a murder took place but we try to stand in the murderer’s shoes. Like Father Brown.’

‘Pardon me?’

‘G.K. Chesterton.’ Martin and Solomon replied together, and Martin grinned. He must remember to tease Diane about that one. But Solomon was enlarging for her benefit. ‘The Father Brown stories. He was, in his way, the classic profiler. He put himself in the murderer’s shoes, so to speak: tried to think as he would. Clever, really. A priest, you know. The confessional and all that.’ The psychologist’s voice drifted away as if his thoughts had taken wing elsewhere.

‘So the police are
beginning to use psychological profiling here in Scotland?’

Diane was clever, thought Martin. Brightman had not actually mentioned Scotland yet.

‘Ah, yes. It is not only confined to their counterparts south of the border. Oh my, no.’

‘And the Scottish police value your services?’

There was another silence. Hello, thought Martin, anybody there?

‘I did not say that the Scottish police used my methods,’ the psychologist began slowly.

‘But they do?’

‘Yes.’

The admission seemed reluctantly drawn from him.

‘Will you use any of the cases in Scotland in your book, Dr Brightman?’

Clever girl, thought Martin, take him round the houses.

‘Ah, that depends.’

‘On what?’

‘Well. I think a certain case might generate much interest to readers. But then again I could not use it until there is a satisfactory outcome.’

‘You mean until a particular murderer is caught?’

‘That might not always be the same as a satisfactory outcome.’

‘But surely that’s what you are aiming for?’

‘Usually, yes.’

‘Tell me, Dr Brightman,
this particular case – has it anything to do with the St Mungo’s Murders?’

Diane’s voice was a mixture of innocence and guile. Martin recognised the ‘you can tell
me
all about it’ quality she so often employed. And exploited. Another silence followed. Martin was trying to picture the bearded psychologist, hand on chin, perhaps, considering. He wondered how much of Diane’s tactics he could see through. All of them, probably. He was a psychologist after all. Perhaps his answers were like police statements to the Press, carefully calculated to serve their own ends.

‘The St Mungo’s Murders should never have happened,’ Solomon said at last. ‘There is so much still to understand …’ There was another pause. Go on, urged Martin, listening to the tape whirring in the silence of the room. ‘I do hope to see a satisfactory end to it all. Sometimes I feel quite close to him, then it’s as if I never knew him at all.’

Martin held his breath. Was the psychologist thinking aloud, forgetting Diane’s presence?

‘And Lucy Haining?’ Diane’s question fell like a drop of water into a still pool.

‘They knew each other, of course. To know one may be the key to knowing the other …’ Martin imagined Diane scarcely daring to breathe, fearful of disturbing Brightman’s train of thought. But then the psychologist cleared his throat. ‘The book won’t be published for some time, of course. There are several cases to be examined as well as techniques to be explained.’

Was the change of tack deliberate? wondered Martin. Had he sensed that he was venturing into the heart of his case whence he would not let this young woman journalist follow?

‘Now I’d love to
hear about the techniques of criminal profiling,’ she exclaimed, as if that was her sole reason for interviewing Dr Solomon Brightman in his West End home. There was a short laugh from the psychologist before he continued.

‘Ah, the secret formula! I’m afraid you will be disappointed in me. The techniques are really no more nor less than studying the behaviour of individuals. It’s what psychologists do all the time.’

His voice sounded kindly.

‘But I thought…’

‘You thought we clever people had devised a bag of tools to unlock the brain of a killer? It’s just the tools of our trade put to a particular use.’ There was a pause during which Martin tried hard to picture Diane’s perplexity. Or was she merely stifling a yawn in the silence? Somehow he didn’t think so. He felt she must be drawn to Brightman, just as he himself was now drawn, fascinated by what would come next.

‘Did you enjoy your years at school, Miss McArthur?’

‘Well, yes, I suppose so.’ Diane sounded puzzled by this seeming digression.