Deep and Crisp and Even Read online

  It was 6.30 a.m. when Sussock left the mortuary and walked across the car park of the Glasgow Royal Infirmary to his car. It was still dark and the thin air hurt his chest. It made him think of his wife. He went back to P Division station and began typing his preliminary report.

  Phil Hamilton was already at a typewriter, working furiously. He knew from experience to make his report as full as possible, to leave no question unanswered if he could answer it. It was as much for his sake as the force's, because he wanted bed and didn't want to be held back by questions. Davy Hamilton had worked as a welder with John Brown's; he wasn't an educated man but had a deep respect for wisdom and knowledge, and had taught his son a rhyme which was printed on a card he had found in a packet of tea. The rhyme was written by a man called Rudyard Kipling and ran:

  'I keep six honest serving men;

  they taught me all I knew.

  Their names are what and why and when

  and how and where and who.'

  The lesson had sunk in, and PC Hamilton wrote the six interrogatives at the front of each new notebook and used them in questioning, mentally ticking each one off as it was answered. He also used them in report-writing, which made his reports pedestrian, sometimes tedious, but always they were thorough. At the end of this morning's report he added a paragraph about the weather conditions, the time the snow started to fall and the time it stopped. He thought it might be important. He submitted the report to Sussock, who read it and told him to sign off. Hamilton was pleased, he'd be home earlier than he'd expected.

  Sussock added Hamilton's report to his own, and, together with photographs of the alley and of the deceased, made up a file which he laid on the DI's desk. He went to the front desk and read the incident book for the night and then made himself a coffee. He sat in the canteen with his feet on the seat of the opposite chair, knowing somehow that this would be the last opportunity he would get for a rest for some time. Murders are like that. It was 7.30 a.m.

  Detective-Inspector Donoghue came on duty at 8.30 a.m. The worst winter that the city had experienced for forty years didn't prevent him from being on time, and so no one else at the Division could avail themselves of that excuse. At 8.31 he was reading the file about the Argyle Street stabbing.

  'What do you think?' he asked, closing the file.

  'A mugging,' said Sussock, sitting in front of the grey steel Scottish Office issue desk. Donoghue wore expensive shirts, three-piece pinstripe suits with a gold hunter's chain slung across his waistcoat. He had a small moustache, an air of assured calm. He made Sussock feel uncomfortable.

  'Why?' Donoghue reached for his pipe.

  'No wallet,' said Sussock. He watched Donoghue flick his gold-plated lighter and knew that the DI would be surrounded by smoke for the next eight hours. 'He was stabbed for his wallet.'

  'What about the money in the pockets?'

  'Loose change.'

  'Mmm. Who was he, Ray?'

  'No idea.'

  'What have you done to find out?'

  'Nothing,' said Sussock. He hated prevarication both in himself and others. But, Christ, it was only a quarter to nine. Donoghue was silent, and Sussock felt three inches tall. 'I'll get on to it,' he said.

  'Have the face made up for photographs in case no one reports a missing middle-aged male.'

  Donoghue was referring to the process whereby a dead person's face can be made up with cosmetics, and the sunken eyes and cheeks artificially inflated, which has the effect of making the deceased appear more like a shop-window mannequin and less like a stiff. The result is close enough to the living and breathing version to have the photograph used on posters and for handouts at press conferences. Sussock thought that thinking of such things was the reason why Donoghue was a DI and he was still a sergeant. Sussock was older than Donoghue.

  'Prepare a press release,' said Donoghue sucking and blowing on his pipe. 'Nothing special. "A man was stabbed to death in Argyle Street in the early hours of the morning. The man has not been identified. Police are appealing for witnesses." That'll do.'

  Sussock said he knew the formula. He also said the lab reports and the post-mortem report would come in during the day.

  'Fingerprints?' asked Donoghue.

  'I'll get on to it.' Sussock winced inwardly.

  'Anything else happen last night?'

  'The rest was run of the mill. Five breaches of the peace, seven drunk and incapables, three assaults and one serious assault.'

  'Quiet night,' said Donoghue. 'Dare say the cold kept most people at home.'

  When Sussock had left his office Donoghue picked up the file and read it again. He didn't accept Sussock's theory that the attack was a mugging. The reasons why, he thought, were:

  (1) Very young people and very old people and very rich people are targets for muggers. Not middle-aged men who are tall and well built and do not appear to be particularly wealthy.

  (2) Mugging is out of character in Glasgow. It's a violent city but in 95% of the incidents of violence the victims and assailants are previously known to each other. Glaswegians use violence to settle disputes more readily than people in other cities. For a city of its size there are few acts of gratuitous violence. Your fourteen-year-old daughter is a lot safer in Glasgow then she would be in Liverpool or London. Whatever Glasgow women might think, they haven't got a serious rape problem, and Glasgow hasn't got a mugging problem.

  (3) If you are mugged you are threatened with violence, probably knocked to the ground; the violence used is that which is sufficient to make you relinquish your wallet, handbag, briefcase, carryout. You are not stabbed three times in the chest and stomach.

  (4) The muggings that do occur in Glasgow mostly take place in the schemes, and most victims are rumbled for their carryouts. They don't take place in the centre of the city, in the no-man's-land, where the lights are bright, where the mugger can't tell who's watching from where and can't tell who's round the next corner. Your mugger likes his own territory.

  Donoghue put the file down at the corner of the desk. He didn't like it. Over the years he'd learned to listen to what he called his 'inner voice', and his 'inner voice' told him that this was something nasty, something to be wary of. He couldn't even hope that it was a gangland revenge killing; it was too messy. The only thing he did like about the file was Hamilton's report, and he arranged for it to be photocopied and distributed to the cadets.

  By noon Sussock felt as though he had been on duty for a week. He'd arranged for the deceased's face to be treated and photographed and the result was a six-by-ten picture of a man whose eyes seemed to be staring in terror, but without the attendant facial expression; the lips were limp and the eyebrows low. But the photograph was good enough to use should the need arise. The fingerprints were taken and checked with the records held in the data banks of the National Police Computer.

  The N.P.C. identified the prints as belonging to one Patrick Duffy, aged forty-two, who had been paroled from Peterhead five years previously, after serving four years of a six-year stretch for robbery with violence. His discharge address was given as 278 The Hayes, Falkirk.

  Sussock telephoned the Central Region Social Work Department. They'd seen Duffy once, when he'd reported to his P.O. on the day of his release. 'You know how it is,' said the voice. 'Give us the staff, and we'll do the job.' So far as they knew he had no known relatives. 278 The Hayes was a lodging house.

  Sussock phoned Peterhead. They had no record of Duffy's relatives. His pre-admission address was given as 53 South Scott Street, Glasgow. Sussock didn't bother to write it down, he knew the address well—it was another lodging house. His one long-standing relationship seemed to be with a 'criminal accomplice', James Dolan. The voice from Peterhead said Dolan had died two years ago. Sussock checked the electoral register. Patrick Duffy hadn't registered to vote.

  The lab reports came in shortly after 1 p.m. Patrick Duffy's clothes were all old and of varying original quality, they came from a damp house and were infested.
There were two pound notes and thirty-seven pence in change in his pockets. There was a cigarette packet containing three cigarettes and a half-smoked butt. He was wearing odd shoes. The report from the G.R.I, confirmed everything that Sussock had put in his report and added that the deceased had advanced cirrhosis. It also added that there were traces of blood of AB-negative type under the fingernails, there were also fibres of the material used for donkey jackets and duffle coats, and a human hair, light-coloured and from a male scalp. Sussock checked the front sheet of the report. Patrick Duffy's blood group was O, and his hair was black.

  Sussock typed up an account of his morning's work and handed it to Donoghue with the two lab reports.

  Donoghue read over the reports. They gave a tragic story of a wasted life, a lost life—what Donoghue privately referred to as a 'twilight existence'. But he was more upset by the implication in the reports. Patrick Duffy had money in his pockets, he had cigarettes but no matches. He was a derelict alcoholic. This was no mugging.

  Donoghue sat back and pulled on his pipe. He saw a broken man shuffling down Argyle Street in the early hours of a snowy morning, shivering in damp secondhand clothes. He came upon somebody, a male, with light-coloured hair and wearing a donkey jacket or duffle coat who then proceeded to stab Patrick Duffy three times. It was a deliberate attempt to kill, with no obvious motive. Donoghue believed that motives for crimes against the person could be reduced to three: emotive, financial gain, and alcohol-related impulse. He couldn't see anyone being vengeful towards a pathetic figure like Patrick Duffy; there was no financial motive; and alcohol-related stabbings occur in or near the home when frenzied spouses reach for kitchen knives. He was then left with a chilling fourth possibility: the deranged mind, the criminally insane. The psychopath.

  He suddenly went very cold.

  Police Constable Phil Hamilton discovered the second body at approximately 1 a.m. on the seventeenth, only twenty-two hours after seeing Patrick Duffy fall.

  The body was that of a young woman who had been stabbed twice, once in the stomach and once in the jugular artery. She was lying in the middle of a building site near Anderston Cross, a site which was obscured from view by billboards lining the pavements. Her eyes were wide, and stared up at Hamilton, who turned away and vomited on to the iced snow. He thought it just had to be him that found the body.

  At 10 a.m. he walked out of the station and kicked at a mound of snow. He had just come out of Sussock's office, where he had been reprimanded for smoking on duty, because that was the only reason he would have gone on to the site.

  Hamilton thought the city was a bitch.

  CHAPTER 2

  A psychopath grips a city in a certain kind of fear. It is a stomach-wrenching, heart-stopping fear. It is a fear which brings suspicion and distrust. It is a fear which causes strangers to look at each other with narrowing eyes. There comes a danger in walking alone, especially in darkness, because you are then victim to:

  (a) the psychopath

  (b) suspicion of being the psychopath.

  Which of these two states is the least enviable is debatable. The consequence of one is obvious. The consequence of the other is being cornered by a group of thugs holding tyre levers, hammers, swords, pick-axe handles and a 'this is going to hurt you more than it's going to hurt us' look in their eyes. It's little use arguing the toss with a group like this, especially if you're the third loner to lay the patter on them that evening, because they're cleaning the city, and there've got to be casualties when you clean a city.

  It is a fear which creates spurious assumptions; it's safe up to midnight, it's safe if you're a man/woman, it's safe unless the moon is full, it's safe if you have a dog. Girls who might otherwise risk the walk home rush for the last bus, lenient fathers become forbidding; knives, sprays, metal combs will be discreetly carried for self defence. This certain type of fear takes a stranglehold, because it's a fear of the unknown and it's difficult to remember that the reality behind the awful myth is one man with a knife, because this certain type of fear is called terror.

  Donoghue stood at the window of his office and looked down on Charing Cross and the bottom end of Sauchiehall Street. He watched the people in the street, the men, the women, the office workers, the men in overalls, the drivers of the cars, the passengers on the buses. They were fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, they were happy and optimistic, they were dour and had problems to spare, they were wise and foolish, they were loaded and they owed plenty.

  They were the people of the city.

  Donoghue knew that he could send a panic like a demon from hell through a million people simply by turning and lifting the phone on his desk and arranging a press conference. 'Gentlemen,' he would announce, 'there is no connection between the two murdered people save to say that they were both killed by the same instrument in the same way and with no obvious motive.' Then a sharp hack with a taste for the sensational would interrupt and say, 'Does that mean a psychopath?' and Donoghue would say 'Yes, I'm afraid it does.' Some would rush for the door, others would stay for details, but either way the panic would start as the first editions hit the streets.

  The dead girl was called Lynn McLeod. It was still only 11.15 on the 17th of January and there was still hope, a faint hope, that somehow Patrick Duffy and Lynn McLeod had a link in their lives, no matter how far back or remote, which could lead, no matter how tenuously, to a man with light-coloured hair who had killed them both for a motive, no matter how twisted. Donoghue hoped for anything which would mean that there wasn't a man with a pathologically warped psyche walking the streets of Glasgow, anything which would mean the two murders were two murders which would be added to the year's total and nothing more sinister. But deep inside he knew that it wouldn't be so, he knew that the ghost of Bible John was rising to stalk and haunt the city. Deep inside he knew it would get worse before it got better.

  Already it had started. Behind him on his desk was the first edition of the Evening Times. It carried Patrick Duffy's photograph on the inside page, with the caption 'Do you know this man?' and then the telephone number of P Division police station if someone did. The write-up was an account of both murders, Patrick Duffy's and that of 'a twenty-year-old typist whose parents are being informed.' Her name and photograph would be in the later editions.

  The article finished with the sentence 'A police spokesman' (whom Donoghue knew to have been Frank Sussock) 'said' (as instructed) 'that the police are not able to say whether the two murders were linked'. It had been a response to a question put by a clever reporter who had printed the answer and left it up to the astute citizens of Glasgow to seize upon an implication that the police were very able to say that the murders were linked.

  Also on his desk was the file on the murder of Lynn McLeod; she was in fact twenty-three and lived with her parents in Easterhouse. Her parents had been 'informed' in the middle of the night. Mrs McLeod had fainted and Mr McLeod had sat in his chair and stared at the wall. When the constable had revived Mrs McLeod he summoned a neighbour and drove back to the police station, stopping at the presbytery on the way.

  Later Mr McLeod would be asked to identify the body (but Donoghue knew that it would be a formality). There was no doubt about the girl's identity. Her handbag was lying next to her, and in the handbag was a transport card on which was a photograph of the face of the body which now lay wrapped in a white sheet, in a drawer, in a cold vault.

  Donoghue found six interesting points to be drawn from the reports submitted by the G.R.I., Detective-Constable Richard King, and the luckless Hamilton.

  (1) The time of death coincided approximately with the time of Patrick Duffy's death on the previous night.

  (2) The cause of death was the same: stab wounds to two different parts of the body.

  (3) The wounds of Lynn McLeod were caused by a long thin-bladed instrument.

  (4) Lynn McLeod's purse, which was found inside the handbag, still contained nearly fifty pounds.

  (5) There w
as no evidence of sexual interference.

  (6) There was a human hair underneath one of her fingernails which matched that taken from underneath one of Patrick Duffy's fingernails.

  WPC Willems knocked and entered Donoghue's office and asked permission to take the reports for photocopying in preparation for the conference. Donoghue nodded.

  He leaned back in his chair and clasped his hands behind his head. The murders were undoubtedly committed by the same person, a man who had light-coloured hair, had AB-negative blood and wore a donkey jacket or duffle coat.

  He might be criminally deranged.

  Donoghue rose and refilled his pipe. He pulled on his overcoat and galoshes. The conference was at twelve. There was time to take a turn to the river and back. Clear air, clear mind.

  P Division police station had been built in 1926. It had had continual usage since then, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, for over half a century, and it had a team of maintenance workers for whom there was always work. The drains blocked, then the heating failed, the wiring burnt out and the drains blocked again. All had to be repaired immediately because the building could never close. Over the years the personnel complement had increased and space had had to be found for sophisticated radio communication equipment and latterly a computer terminal.

  The result of this was to effectively make the building smaller, and successive Chief Superintendents had had to improvise: officers doubled up and shared rooms, files were stacked three-deep on shelves, and the cells were overcrowded. The only room which retained its original function was the armoury. Really little more than a small anteroom in the basement, it had a double-locked steel door behind which were six Lee Enfield .303 rifles, which dated from the Second World War, and two .38 Webley revolvers. There were also two locked boxes containing the ammunition, thirty rounds for the rifles and twelve rounds for the revolvers. A small room on the first floor with dusty windows had no designated purpose: it was used severally as an interview room, a holding room, a store room, a planning room, and that particular afternoon it became a conference room.