Tremor of Demons E-Book

Frederic Lindsay

• Herausgeber: Allison & Busby
• Kategorie: Krimi
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 345

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

In shock as they came down from the house in the hills, Meldrum pressed his hands together to hide their trembling from his detective sergeant. What motive could account for what they had seen? But then, what motive could explain Charles Manson and his followers, who had butchered film star Sharon Tate like a pregnant animal? Explain it by a brutalised convict's anger against the world? Explain it by a small-time crook's lust for power and his disciples' need for submission? And if every other explanation fails, why not fall back on the minister from the long-ago childhood pulpit and call it evil? But could a policeman settle for that? Racked by fears for his daughter and her young son, at odds with his detective sergeant, and haunted by the worry that he is losing his grip, DI Jim Meldrum has to draw on all his resources of integrity and courage as he seeks to find the connection between the death of a one-time Pentecostal minister and a call-girl.

Leseprobe

Tremor of Demons

FREDERIC LINDSAY

For Catriona

Contents

Title PageDedicationChapter OneChapter TwoChapter ThreeChapter FourChapter FiveChapter SixChapter SevenChapter EightChapter NineChapter TenChapter ElevenChapter TwelveChapter ThirteenChapter FourteenChapter FifteenChapter SixteenChapter SeventeenChapter EighteenChapter NineteenChapter TwentyChapter Twenty-OneChapter Twenty-TwoChapter Twenty-ThreeChapter Twenty-FourChapter Twenty-FiveChapter Twenty-SixChapter Twenty-SevenChapter Twenty-EightChapter Twenty-NineChapter ThirtyChapter Thirty-OneChapter Thirty-TwoChapter Thirty-ThreeChapter Thirty-FourChapter Thirty-FiveChapter Thirty-SixChapter Thirty-SevenChapter Thirty-EightChapter Thirty-NineChapter FortyChapter Forty-OneChapter Forty-TwoChapter Forty-ThreeChapter Forty-FourChapter Forty-FiveChapter Forty-SixChapter Forty-SevenChapter Forty-EightChapter Forty-NineChapter FiftyChapter Fifty-OneChapter Fifty-TwoChapter Fifty-ThreeChapter Fifty-FourChapter Fifty-FiveChapter Fifty-SixChapter Fifty-SevenChapter Fifty-EightChapter Fifty-NineChapter SixtyChapter Sixty-OneChapter Sixty-TwoChapter Sixty-ThreeChapter Sixty-FourChapter Sixty-FiveAbout the AuthorBy Frederic LindsayCopyright

Chapter One

In a small hour of the morning, Meldrum, that stolid policeman, had a waking dream in which his wife Carole lay covered in a cloak of bread. He had a notion that he had baked it himself and, having rolled it thin, covered her in a sheet of it from throat to thighs. When he put his lips on it, the bread smelled fresh and wholesome and the delicate fabric of it softened under his tongue until he could suck on her right nipple, the one nearest to the side on which he had been sleeping. He wondered then about going down between her legs, but he was six foot four and on a winter’s night it didn’t seem a good idea to have his legs sprawl out from under the warmth of the blanket. It was also the case, he reflected lazily, that it wasn’t something they had often done. In fact, he thought of it as an American obsession and had always wondered if men there had a problem with keeping an erection. In a book of poems given to him by an old man who had later been murdered, he’d found the image of a woman’s body as a country and just then that was how Carole seemed to him: a landscape of hills and a fertile plain and a junction like the secret inwardness of a fjord. It was natural to compare a woman who was loved to a place that was loved, though once he’d met an MP, who had been an advocate of using a site in Caithness in the North East as a dump for nuclear waste. In any country other than Scotland, the man would have been bribed and worked in darkness, hiding his corruption from the light. This was an honest man, however, no need to waste money on bribing him, arguing his case to anyone who would listen, and one who was re-elected time after time after time. How could that be? What was missing, in the man, in the country? What had happened?

Thinking about the strangeness of it, he must have slept. Just for an instant as he opened his eyes, he smelled the warmth of freshly baked bread, but the place beside him was cold. Carole and he had been separated for years, and she lay now beside a new husband in a bed on the other side of the city; and, as for his country, he had wakened to a grey drained light and a roaring of wind as it battered rain against the glass.

Chapter Two

A dead man who has lain undiscovered for some weeks smells nothing like fresh bread. Even in life, this body might have offended the nose, since the corpse was of a fat old man and the house, though well enough furnished, seemed none too clean.

The young constable who had found the body was pallid with a light sweat showing on her forehead and cheeks. When Meldrum arrived, he’d been annoyed to find she was still in the front room, staring at the corpse as if hypnotised. He’d taken her out through the hall and on to the common landing.

Staring at the stripes of dust picked out by the sun on the landing window, he asked her, ‘Sharon, isn’t it?’

‘Sharon Nisbet, Sir.’

‘And you found him?’ He watched muscles slither under the skin of her throat as she swallowed. ‘The first is always the worst.’

‘It wasn’t my first, sir.’ When he raised his eyebrows, she explained, ‘Just after I left College, I had to go to the morgue. We all had to do it. I didn’t want to, I couldn’t sleep for a week. I tried to make an excuse, but the big sergeant told me it had to be done. He said, one day you’ll lift a letter box and know by the smell there’s a body inside.’

‘Which is what happened?’

‘His neighbour was worried. She hadn’t seen him for weeks. We broke in and he was lying there in the middle of the floor. Just as if he’d been going to make himself a cup of tea and fallen over. Something sudden like a heart attack.’

‘But?’ Meldrum knew there had to be a reason for suspicion.

‘It was his slippers, sir. They were on the wrong feet.’

‘And who noticed that?’

McGuigan, Meldrum’s DS came out of the flat in time to hear her answer.

‘So you were the one,’ he said.

The girl cleared her throat and her cheeks reddened. With his boxer’s physique and dark good looks, McGuigan had that effect on a lot of women.

‘I just happened to notice,’ she said modestly.

The sergeant’s look of scorn suggested he hadn’t intended a compliment. ‘Don’t know how you managed that,’ he said. ‘They’re so old and bashed about probably wouldn’t matter which way they went on.’

When Meldrum went back into the house, he found Dr Fleming, ruddy cheeked and thick set, peeling the gloves from his hands as he rose from beside the body.

‘Nothing to say it wasn’t a natural death,’ he offered.

‘Hard to tell after so long,’ Meldrum said.

‘Aye, he’ll bubble when we cut him. I’ll let you know once I’ve had a proper look, but at the moment nothing.’

‘So far so good then.’

‘You’ve enough on your plate, eh?’

Meldrum nodded, his eyes on the carpet slippers on the corpse’s feet. The flies were crawling across them. A smell to sicken a slaughterman, and Fleming and him chatting on either side of the body. What’s happened to us? he thought. The slippers were very old, soft and crumpled; what his mother would have called ‘baffies’. It seemed likely the old man could have worn them wrong way round without discomfort.

Following his glance, the doctor smiled. With a nod at McGuigan, who was talking to the second constable who’d broken in to find the body, he said, ‘Your sergeant wasn’t amused at the girl playing detective.’

‘Was he not?’ Meldrum asked drily.

‘But then,’ the doctor speculated, ‘I doubt he laughs a lot.’ He laughed himself, and shook his head at Meldrum. ‘The two of you are well matched.’

Chapter Three

The first disciple had been given the name Cadoc. As a matter of security that was how he was referred to always within the group. With the other three it was the same and, with practice, they had broken themselves – when the Convenor was there – of the habit of using their real names.

He woke up reluctantly that morning, and lay for what felt like a long time with his eyes closed. When the alarm rang, he would have to get up. Get up at once and without hesitation. That was part of their training for what was to come. It was just that he knew this was the morning of a difficult day, one that he was dreading. He despised his own weakness, but he couldn’t help it. He had done harder things than today would demand of him. He told himself that, and stretched out, hands by his sides, feeling his face tighten around the clenching of his eyes. As he lay, he pictured the clock that sat on a wooden chair in the middle of the room. A cheap clock, bought for the purpose when it was decided they should all sleep in the same room, with a round face and big numbers like something made to help children tell the time. It wasn’t electric but had to be wound up every night to make sure that it would go off in the morning. Since he was the only man in the flat, that had been appointed as one of his tasks. Right now the hands would be moving to mark the hour of six. He imagined he could see them and counted down till the alarm went off, got it wrong and was half way through a second count when it rattled out its summons.

In a moment, he was standing beside his bed. Already the other three were up and ready. Although they weren’t allowed heating in the flat, no one was shivering. There was a late summer leniency in the air and the warmth of their bodies had heated the room during the night.

After the usual rituals and a bus journey across town, he went with dragging steps into the shop. As a student, he’d worked at a variety of weekend and holiday jobs. He’d even worked for a month in a shop not unlike this one and not minded it too much. The difference was that he had graduated since then, and entered a profession and obtained a different image of himself. Perhaps that was why he had been told to take the job here, a job he hadn’t applied for, somehow he had been given it, somehow it had been arranged, and so he would come here every morning until he was told it was over. Perhaps he had been too proud?

It felt as if the shopkeeper and the fat girl took pleasure in mocking his clumsiness and his mistakes until the long day ended with the man pressing some notes into his hand and sneering, ‘You needn’t come back. Haven’t you classes to take?’

In consolation, all day he gave no thought to the old man and the noise he had made as he died.

Chapter Four

Among the depressed, the bereaved and the lonely, suicide peaks at Christmas. Since New Year means more to Scots than other people, Hogmanay too is bad for self harm. This August, Meldrum added the annual Festival to such low points of the year. He went about his business doing his best to ignore the crowded streets, the grinning young people thrusting handfuls of playbills on passersby, the clowns and jugglers performing on the steps of the National Gallery. He wasn’t in a mood for celebration.

When he found the house, he was surprised to find it so large. Education must pay well, he thought sourly. His ex-wife had married an educational administrator, who had moved from local government into one of the universities. The city had three or four of them, it wasn’t easy to keep count, and he had no idea which one Don Corrigan graced with his oily charms.

When Carole opened the door, she stared in surprise.

‘I thought you were coming last night,’ she said.

‘The job. You know.’

Of course, she did. The demands of the job more than any other factor had brought about the breakdown of their marriage.

‘You might have phoned.’

No point in saying he’d been too busy. He could have found a moment, if he’d remembered. The demands of the job; some people kept them in check; for others like himself they were all absorbing.

In silence, he followed her inside. She led the way into the front room. Automatically he took in the surroundings, heavy arm chairs with bulging arms, polished floor with white rugs, pictures on the walls, the one above the fireplace of skyscrapers reflected in shaky swirls of bright colour in the water of a harbour.

‘How is she?’ he asked.

‘She’s coping. Just about.’

They were speaking softly, the same tones it struck him they would have used in discussing an invalid.

‘I’d like to speak to her,’ he said.

‘You should have come before. She’s been out of hospital for weeks.’

‘I think about her a lot.’ All the time, in fact; and he’d met her several times in town, but promised not to say.

‘Anyway, she’s out this evening.’

He stared in something like outrage.

Before he could say anything, Carole went on, ‘She has a meeting with her therapist. It should have been last night, but she got it moved.’

If it had been so that she could see him, he hadn’t turned up. Maybe if he’d phoned, Betty could have gone to the therapist last night and been here this evening. When she was a child and her mother needed him he had never been there, and now it was the same pattern. Nothing changed, it seemed. The demands of the job. University administrators no doubt kept office hours.

‘Don’s been wonderful with Tommy,’ Carole said. It was as if she had read his mind. She’d always been good at that.

‘Can I see the boy?’ When she seemed to hesitate, he said sharply, ‘I am his grandfather.’

‘How long is it since you saw him?’

‘I think,’ Meldrum said bitterly, ‘he’ll still recognise me. I’m the only grandpa he’s got.’

Maybe, he thought, Betty’s ex-husband Sandy wouldn’t have broken up his marriage if his father had still been alive. Some sons didn’t kick over the traces until their father died. Two live grandfathers might have made all the difference for wee Tommy.

‘He’s in bed,’ Carole said. ‘I’ll see if he’s still awake.’

When she came back, she led him upstairs, but stopped and pointed at a door instead of taking him in.

There was only a bedside lamp on, gathering two figures into its pool of light.

Meldrum said, ‘Hello, wee man.’

‘Hello, Grandpa,’ the boy said. In the shadowy light, he looked like his father and even more like his big brother, the one who had died.

Don Corrigan laid the book he was holding face down on the bed. ‘I try always to be here to read a story to the little chap at bedtime. He’d like it finished. If that’s all right with you?’

Thinking it must have only a little to go, Meldrum shrugged and took a seat on the other side of the bed.

‘It’s called,’ said Corrigan, ‘The Three Brothers and the Magic Axe.’

Twenty minutes later Meldrum was sure the boy was asleep but Corrigan kept on reading. He didn’t stop even when Meldrum grunted, though his voice faltered when the big man stood up.

Carole was standing in the hall as he came down the stairs.

‘Is everything all right?’

She sounded anxious. Her face was thinner than he remembered.

The anger went out of him and he said softly, ‘Everything’s fine.’

She relaxed. ‘You were so long.’

And he couldn’t stop himself from saying, ‘I was listening to a bedtime story.’

Her eyes flickered and went past him as if to see if someone else was coming down to join them.

After a pause, she said, ‘Tommy’s been upset. A story helps him to sleep.’

‘The Magic Axe,’ Meldrum said. ‘One brother cut off his arm with it. The other cut off his leg. But the third brother cut off his head. He was the one who got the treasure.’

‘Children need stories like that. It helps them to deal with anxiety. There’s so much they don’t understand.’

At one time, when they were married, she’d run a primary school. He didn’t argue with her; no doubt there would be research to prove she was right. He decided against telling her that he hadn’t been there the previous night because he had been at a murder. Four blows to the head with an axe. ‘It belonged tae my uncle,’ the teenage son had said, the sleeve of his jacket red with blood. ‘He was in the fire brigade, ken, and he kept it when he left.’ The last blow had been so hard that it had split the skull between the victim’s eyes.

‘You could be right,’ Meldrum said. ‘Do you know the story?’ She shook her head.

‘He claimed to be reading it. A hell of a long story. Maybe he was making it up as he went along.’

Chapter Five

Being tethered to his mobile had made it easy for Meldrum to be contacted. Still half asleep, he reached for it without opening his eyes. As he did, he touched the naked breasts of the woman beside him. The phone wasn’t where it usually was, laid on the table beside his bed, but then he realised more or less at once that the bed he was in wasn’t his.

As he listened to the phone, the woman sat up and yawned. She was in her thirties with a tangle of long blonde hair. Heavy make up round her eyes gave her a startled look. He answered McGuigan with a series of monosyllables that ended with a promise to meet him ‘there’, meaning the morgue, closed the phone and swung his feet out of bed. He found his clothes on a chair, neatly folded though he had no memory of putting them there. As he dressed, he remembered the previous night, leaving Carole’s house, going into the bar of a hotel. He remembered drinking. He didn’t remember meeting the woman.

Putting on his shoes, he asked, ‘Did I pay you?’

‘Oh, aye. I mean, there isn’t a problem, is there?’

‘No problem.’

‘If you want the money, you can have it back.’

He looked at her. ‘Why would you do that?’

‘You gave me it. I mean, I wasn’t asking for it.’

‘Fuck,’ he said. ‘You know who I am, don’t you?’

She thought about that, rubbing her hands slowly over her breasts. It was cold in the room and her nipples brushed back and forward as she rubbed. At last, she shook her head. ‘…No. I don’t know who you are. Honest.’

‘Aye, right,’ he said in disbelief. It was a long time since he had wakened up in a prostitute’s bed. Angry at his own stupidity, he said menacingly, ‘Just keep your mouth shut. If I hear you’ve been flapping your mouth about me, you’ll be sorry.’

Her look of fright disgusted him with himself.

‘Forget it,’ he said. ‘It doesn’t matter.’ No wife to distress. Not a chance in a million of anyone taking a whore’s word against his. Why should it matter? Fuck it. ‘If you knew who I was, why did you go with me?’

‘You asked,’ she said with a grin. After a hesitation, she added, ‘You were nice last night,’ she said. ‘Not like some.’

‘I don’t do favours,’ he said.

He put on his jacket and slipped the phone into its zipped inside pocket.

Behind him, she said, ‘You told me about your daughter. About her man leaving her.’

‘You talk too much,’ he said. ‘In your job, it doesnae do to talk too much.’

‘Sorry.’ She let the word out on a little gasping breath, as if it was one she often needed to use. ‘…You could have a cup of tea before you go. And I’ve got rolls.’

He looked at her and shook his head.

As he was opening the door, she said, ‘I’m Marie. You’ll know where to find me.’

Although with luck, he’d never see her again, policeman’s habit meant that as he walked blinking in the sunlight out from the close in the street behind Tollcross he automatically took note of the number.

Chapter Six

Dr Fleming had been right. The corpse had bubbled with maggots at the first cut into the chest. Meldrum regarded himself as fortunate for not having been there, and didn’t relish Fleming’s blow-by-blow description. What mattered was the evidence that the death in the flat the previous day had not been from natural causes. The news didn’t come entirely as a surprise. For no reason that Meldrum could put his finger on, the death of the old man had nagged at him.

‘It would have been easy to miss,’ Fleming said with satisfaction. ‘The state of the body meant that there was no way of making sure it really was a flesh wound. But when I peeled back to the bone to make sure, there it was. Just above the hairline.’ He was referring to a puncture punched through the bone at the base of the skull. ‘Through the cerebellum and up into the brain. Death would have been instantaneous. No way it could be accidental. Whoever did it was either knowledgeable or had been shown what to do. The old fellow – what was his name?’

Meldrum’s mind went blank. ‘Michael Thorne,’ McGuigan volunteered. The memory man. Clever bastard.

‘Right. No doubt about it, Mr Thorne was murdered.’

Meldrum sighed at the word. ‘You did a good job spotting it,’ he said grudgingly.

‘There was the clue of the slippers on the wrong feet.’ Fleming spoke with mock solemnity, then laughed at McGuigan.

McGuigan stared at him. ‘That sounds like a clue you might have noticed yesterday,’ he said unsmilingly.

A wave of tiredness washed over Meldrum.

‘Anything else?’ he forced himself to ask.

‘I’ll let you have what I can work out about the thickness and length of the blade. At the moment, think of something like an ice pick.’

‘An ice pick?’ McGuigan asked. ‘He’s seen too many old gangster films,’ he said to Meldrum, giving Fleming a sour glance. ‘Do they even make them any more?’

‘Something like one then.’ Fleming shrugged and laughed. ‘And one more thing. He’d three long red hairs caught in his fist. A woman’s by the look of them. Would you call that a clue, sergeant? They’ve gone to forensics.’

‘What now?’ McGuigan asked, as they left the building.

‘Put a team together. Door to door round the neighbours.’

‘And there’s the son,’ McGuigan said, his tone carefully casual.

‘What son?’ What fucking son?

‘After Fleming phoned, I checked with the boys in blue. They traced a son. Works at the university. They got him there and told him his father had been found dead.’ He paused. ‘Took it pretty calmly, apparently. Too calmly, one of the woolly suits thought.’

Chapter Seven

As they walked along the corridor, Meldrum said, ‘So the lassie was right after all.’

‘What?’

‘The wee police constable. She was right about the slippers. It was murder.’ He tried to remember her name. Sharon something. ‘A good head on her shoulders, she could go far.’

‘She got lucky,’ McGuigan said, curling his lip.

The sergeant wasn’t fond of hearing anyone else praised. Not only smart, but ambitious. Sometimes, though, the smartest thing was to hide how ambitious you were. Meldrum gave him a smile that to a casual glance might have seemed friendly. McGuigan looked away.

‘There we are. Beginning to think they’d sent us the wrong way. That’s his name on the door.’

A hand written note pinned to the door was signed: COLIN HALLIDAY.

As Meldrum raised a hand to knock, the door opened and three young people came into the corridor. A slim man in his late twenties followed them, clutching a sheaf of papers in his left hand.

‘Till next week,’ he told the group, all of them watching the two strangers as they milled past into the corridor.

‘Mr Halliday?’ Meldrum asked.

Waiting until the students had moved off, Halliday asked with a frown, ‘Police?’ and as they confirmed this, he added, ‘I’ve been told about my father.’

‘It would be better if we could have a word in private,’ Meldrum said.

‘You’d better come in here then.’

He led them into the room he’d just left. A blackboard that had been wiped clean in swirls of smeared chalk, a small table, a group of chairs arranged in a half circle. ‘I’ve just finished a seminar. No one else should be in for a bit.’ He took his place behind the table, leaning his hands on it. ‘Detective Inspector.’ He stressed the word as if just taking it in. ‘I can’t imagine why you’re here. The constable who told me about my father asked when I last saw him. I’ll tell you what I told him. My father was a difficult man. We didn’t get on terribly well. He left us when I was ten. My mother remarried and I took my stepfather’s name.’ He looked from one face to the other. Not finding perhaps what he searched for, he went on, ‘I’m sorry, of course, that his body lay for so long, if that’s what this is about. But I can’t see any point in your being here.’

‘There’s been a change since yesterday,’ Meldrum said. ‘We’ve discovered how your father died.’ And when the young man raised his eyebrows, went on, ‘His skull was punctured with some kind of instrument. We’re told death must have been instantaneous. It’s not the kind of injury that could have been self-inflicted.’

Halliday sat down slowly as if controlling his decline. After a moment, he asked, ‘Are you saying it was an accident?’

‘Your father was found lying on the floor of his kitchen. There wasn’t any obvious sign of an attack – or anything that could have been used as a weapon.’ Again Halliday kept silent as if waiting for something more. After a moment, Meldrum added, ‘That’s why the medical examiner thought it was a natural death. But when he conducted a proper examination, he found the wound.’ In illustration, he turned his head and laid the tip of a finger to the base of his skull.

‘Natural?’ Halliday asked. ‘How could he have thought it was natural? I mean, if there was a wound there must have been blood? Didn’t he see blood?’

‘He didn’t, I didn’t. Somebody must have wiped the floor. And the hair at the back of his head. Even a careful look wouldn’t have spotted blood. Anyway, I understand that there wouldn’t have been much.’

‘All the same, I’m not impressed.’

‘The body had been there for days. It wasn’t in a good state.’

As he spoke, it struck him the son of a victim deserved more sympathetic handling. It wasn’t an excuse that the overhead light put a halo round the cropped blond hair; or that he looked so clean his skin seemed to shine. Truth was Meldrum had reacted to him as a young man with an expensive look about him holding down a soft indoor job. A member of the pampered middle class. This despite the dead old man, shabbily dressed, lying in a sparsely furnished flat that was none too clean. Anyway, to Meldrum’s eye the son was a touch too unruffled for a man who had just learned his father had been murdered. Even an estranged father.

‘I’ve just been conducting a seminar on the problem of evil,’ Halliday said. ‘My father would have appreciated that.’

Was that the faintest trace of a smile on his lips?

‘Why would that be?’ McGuigan asked. The abruptness of the question suggested that something about Halliday was grating on him as well.

‘Appreciated the coincidence, I mean.’ And when they looked at him blankly, this time he gave a full smile as he explained, ‘That I should be talking about evil when you come to tell me he has been murdered. You do know that my father was a minister?’

‘No,’ Meldrum said.

We don’t know anything about him, he almost said, but we’ll have to find out now. A kind of weariness filled him at the thought. The process unfolded ahead of him as it had done so often before.

‘Oh, yes,’ the young man said. ‘In the Pentecostal church.’ He frowned as if in embarrassment. ‘But he’s been retired, of course, for a long time.’

‘Am I right in thinking you weren’t in close contact with him?’

Halliday gave a little nod.

‘When did you last see him?’

‘Months ago. February perhaps. I don’t really remember. It was a vile day. Very wet. I didn’t stay long.’

‘And before that?’

‘I called in just after the New Year. Took him a bottle of whisky.’ He shook his head. ‘I don’t drink myself. Since he didn’t open it there and then, I’m not sure whether he did at all. Perhaps he gave it away.’

‘Are you his only family?’ Meldrum asked.

‘Yes.’

‘I take it your mother is dead?’

Halliday stared. ‘What on earth makes you think that?’

‘You mean she isn’t?’

‘Of course not.’

‘I’d be grateful if you would let us have her name and an address where she could be contacted.’

‘Why would you want that?’ He sounded genuinely puzzled. Before Meldrum could respond, he continued, ‘As I said, they’ve been separated for years. Since I was ten. She won’t be able to tell you anything.’

‘All the same.’

Halliday shrugged and began to scribble on a sheet of paper. Upside down, it seemed to be a name with an address underneath.

As they waited, McGuigan chipped in. ‘Did she keep in touch with your father?’

Without looking up, Halliday said, ‘If she did, I’d be surprised. It wasn’t that kind of break up. There was another woman involved.’ He lifted his head and studied McGuigan for a moment. He gave the impression of weighing up a student out of his depth. ‘My father wasn’t cut out for marriage.’

‘Can you tell us who your father’s friends were?’ Meldrum intervened, only to be favoured with the same slow look of dismissal.

‘To the best of my knowledge, he hadn’t any.’

Thinking of the bare austerity of the flat in which the body had lain, Meldrum tried to remember if he had seen a television or any sign of books.

‘Do you know anything about how he occupied his time?’

‘I can’t think of any hobbies, if that’s what you mean,’ Halliday said. He smiled. ‘And certainly he’d no women friends, so you can rule out that as a way of filling his time.’

Chapter Eight

The youngest disciple, Emer, was only nineteen. Though the undemanding nature of the course she was following meant there was no external measure by which to compare her to the others, some intrinsic quality in her blue eyes and the broad forehead, skin like milk under the vibrant red of her hair, seemed to offer a promise that she might be the most intelligent of the four. Certainly, numbers of young men had found her so sympathetic a listener they had been in no doubt that she must be clever.

At least it could be said that apart from any need to study, she read for pleasure. The morning after the first execution, she had gone out as if to her classes, but then, unable to face some preening lecturer taking sly glances at her breasts, had sneaked back into the flat. Taking up a book of Chekhov stories at the point she had laid it down the day before, she found this passage and read it as she rested one hand on the warm mound between her legs: ‘Likharayov’s face darkened. “And I’ll tell you, women have always been and will always be slaves to men,” he said in his bass voice, striking the table with his fist. “A woman is a soft, delicate piece of wax from which man will make whatever he wants. Goodness me, for a man’s worthless passion a woman will be ready to cut her hair off, abandon her family, and die abroad… And among the ideas for which she will sacrifice herself there will not be one that she can call her own! She will be a selfless, devoted slave! I have not measured skulls, but I’m telling you this on the basis of my own hard and bitter experience. If I have managed to inspire them, the proudest and most independent women have followed me without a moment’s thought, asking no questions and doing everything I have wanted; there was a nun who I turned into a nihilist, who I later heard went and shot a policeman; my wife never left me in my wanderings for a minute, and changed her faith like a weather-vane whenever I changed mine.”’

She laid the book down on her knee and stared sightlessly at the lozenge of sunlight on the kitchen wall opposite the window. The passage seemed to describe her situation exactly, but knowing it was so made no difference. It seemed that a thing was so and having understanding of it, even insight into it, did not unmake its effect on her.

Until the worst happened, however, there had been a doubt at the heart of her submission, like a flaw in a precious stone. Until she saw the old man die, she hadn’t been sure, not certain into the deepest recess of her soul. But with his death she understood in the bright morning that all her doubts were gone. Apprehending the suck as the narrow blade was drawn out of the clasp of the skull, seeing the drops of red blood, hearing his sigh as life left him, how could what they had done not be about saving the world?

Chapter Nine

Detectives had talked to all the old man’s neighbours, and come up blank in every case. There was no gossip, no word of a quarrel, no real knowledge of who he was or what kind of man he had been. He had lived in the flat for almost ten years, but it was as if Michael Thorne had gone to earth like an animal determined to keep the world at bay. To Meldrum’s surprise, none of the neighbours even knew what his job had been before he retired.

‘A minister?’ Calum Grant said. ‘A man of the cloth? You really do surprise me.’

It was that note of animus that had made his an interview Meldrum thought might be worth following up in person.

‘Why would that be?’

Grant was a pale wrinkled man somewhere around seventy years of age. In the middle of the morning, he was still in his dressing gown and slippers. His first reaction at the sight of the two large men on his doorstep had been to take a step back ready to retreat inside as quickly as possible. Once reassured, he perched on the edge of a chair and said with the slow emphasis of a man sharing a valuable insight, ‘He was unsociable.’

‘Unsociable?’

‘Correct me if I’m wrong, but I always assumed that would be one of the qualifications for the job. Wouldn’t you think a clergyman of any kind would be interested in people? At the least, you’d be surprised if he didn’t like them.’

‘Mr Thorne didn’t like people?’

‘He didn’t.’

‘Your other neighbours only describe him as someone who kept himself to himself.’

Grant sniffed. ‘All of them do. But it was more than that with him. I should know, I made an effort to get to know him. More than any of them would ever do. He came to live downstairs about ten years ago. I’d lost my wife two years before that. I’d – what’s the phrase you used? – been keeping myself to myself. Two years for mourning, anyone ever tell you that’s the time it takes to get over a death? I wasn’t over my wife’s death, but I’d have welcomed a bit of company. I made some overtures. It made sense. Two widowers, why not share the loneliness? He was damned rude.’

‘Widower?’ McGuigan asked. ‘His ex-wife’s still alive. At least according to his son.’

‘Oh God, I’d just assumed – that makes it even worse. I was speaking to him about my dead wife. Got a little emotional, I’m afraid. It was too early for such a conversation, but I’d been bottling it up for a long time. I’d met him on the stairs. In retrospect, I can’t imagine why he accepted my invitation to come in for a cup of tea. He sat in that chair there and hardly said a word. And I found myself talking about Netta. He didn’t sympathise, nothing like that, but there was something in the way he listened that made me go on.’

‘If he was a minister,’ Meldrum said, ‘he must have heard a lot of talk about death.’

‘…I suppose. But he certainly didn’t offer a word of sympathy. If you’re going down that line, wouldn’t you expect him to have a few phrases to hand, however little he might have meant them? No, he just sat. And I went on and on. Silence implies consent kind of thing, I suppose. Makes me embarrassed to think of it, even now. Makes me angry, to be honest.’ He pursed his thin lips. ‘Anyway, when he did say something it was about himself.’

He paused long enough to make McGuigan, never a patient man, repeat, ‘About himself?’

‘Hmm. He said, I had someone I cared for like that – I still think about her. His wife, I thought, dead like my poor Netta. What else would I think? I asked him his wife’s name. Aileen, he said. I was ridiculously pleased to have him share that with me. I was ready, you see, to set out on the path of friendship. Two grieving old men. Then he said, But the woman I was talking about was called Bridget. And he started laughing. A sound like a gate creaking. At a guess, laughing wasn’t something he did often.’ The thin lips twisted. ‘I’ve never cared less for a man. But then he had made a fool of me, and no one cares for that.’

Chapter Ten

The flat in which the old man died had been taken apart, photographed, and searched for fingerprints, stains of blood or mucus. All the neighbours had been interviewed, some more than once, each time only reinforcing the impression of how little any of them had spoken to Michael Thorne in the ten years they had all lived under the same roof. On his part, it seemed, human contact had been kept to a minimum. Even the woman who had called the police had done so less from concern than curiosity. ‘I’d see him in the morning quite often, going out to get his paper, I suppose,’ she’d said, ‘and then a fortnight ago I realised I hadn’t, not for some time. When I thought of that, I knocked on his door. I did that for a week on and off. And then when my sister visited and I told her, she said, “Something’s wrong!”’

There had been no sighting of a stranger in the building on the day of the murder, and none of the neighbours, not even the acerbic Calum Grant, made for a plausible suspect.

Just before the morning conference, Meldrum had an idea.

‘Am I right in thinking there wasn’t any food in the flat?’ he asked the assembled detectives.

‘Milk in the fridge,’ Houston said.

‘Coffee? He’d coffee in a jar. Can’t remember tea.’

‘There was tea in a canister.’

‘Right,’ Meldrum said. ‘No bread, no eggs, no porridge or muesli or cheese.’

‘He ate out,’ McGuigan said, as if pointing out the obvious.

‘Houston and MacIntosh and Sharkey. Check the pubs and cafés round about.’

‘How far out do you want us to check?’ Houston asked.

‘Till you get a result.’

‘Maybe,’ McGuigan said, grinning at them, ‘he liked a walk before breakfast.’

Not a long one fortunately. The women behind the counter in the nearest café recognised the photograph. It had been lying in a drawer in the dead man’s bedroom, a ragged line indicating where it had been torn to leave him uncompanioned, and had been computer modified by some forty years into a good resemblance of the old man. Every weekday morning, Sharkey had been told, Thorne had eaten a bacon roll and drunk a cup of tea. ‘Came in about ten. Never missed.’ Whatever need he satisfied by having people around him while he ate, it hadn’t been for conversation. ‘Never got a word out of him. With him being so regular, some of us tried – you know since he was always on his own. He was quite rude to May. Can’t remember what he said exactly, I mean this was years ago, but she was offended. After that, he came in and ate and went off again. He didn’t speak, and none of us felt like trying. Not after he’d been rude. Every morning the same. We were always glad to see the back of him.’