Gillian Galbraith - Blood In The Water

But there was a cost attached. She hated the process of giving evidence as a witness. Each time she had to do it she dreaded the next more, and yet the task was central to the job. There was no way of avoiding it, and bad luck seemed to arrange matters so that she spent hours being cross-examined when her colleagues were in and out of the box having given little more than their names. No-one could have been more meticulous in their preparation for court, but for all the hard hours spent, she invariably was left feeling that the accused’s lawyer, wily solicitor or new-born advocate, had got the better of her. How could she be so easily tripped up, when all she was doing was trying, to the best of her ability, to tell the truth?

And there was another insidious effect of the job that she was becoming increasingly aware of and disconcerted by. She no longer seemed to be at home anywhere, at ease, anywhere. Her gender, resolute middle-classness and graduate status all marked her off as alien within the force, and now even in the civilian world she often found herself adrift. Her friends from university, with one exception, had all gone into either the law, publishing or business. None of them had ever had a handful of their hair wrenched out by a distraught female shoplifter, or been spat at by an irate protester. They would never have to tell the parents of a small child that he’d been killed by a drunken driver on his way home from school. The points of contact between her world and that of her friends seemed to be growing fewer as time passed.

Also, and it was a big also, she was the only one to have remained unmarried, unpartnered and childless into her thirty-fifth year. Her single state was easily explained. It was not that she was unattractive, quite the reverse; she was positively good-looking, being tall, just over six feet, clear-skinned and with dark hair and hazel eyes. Men were attracted to her as wasps to jam on a late summer afternoon. The real problem, in her estimation at least, lay in her unashamed independence, which gave the impression of complete self-sufficiency. It was, in fact, a front created by her in childhood and which she had never since had the courage to discard.

No vegetation adorned the stern lines of the St Leonard’s police station. Its dirty, yellow-ochre brick met the dull grey of the pavement seamlessly, and the only concession to the fad of landscaping community buildings had been the planting of a few rowan trees, now sickly and requiring the protection of metal grilles. Inside, the station was humming. News of a killing on the north side had just come in from the station at Gayfield Square and the chosen murder squad was assembling for its first briefing from Detective Chief Inspector Elaine Bell. Alice stuffed her bacon roll back into its brown paper bag while scanning the unoccupied seats for Alastair Watt’s friendly face. Back row, third from the left. The team could have been much worse, she decided. She would have to work with him, DCs Irwin, Littlewood, McDonald and Sinclair, and the only fly in the ointment was the inclusion of Eric Manson, Detective Inspector Manson. She reached the vacant chair next to Alastair just as DCI Bell began her briefing.

‘As you will all know by now, there has been a murder in Bankes Crescent, and officers from Gayfield Square are in attendance at present. The victim is a Dr Elizabeth Clarke, a medical consultant, aged about forty-one. She was found in her flat at No. 1 Bankes Crescent this morning round about nine am by her cleaning lady, a Mrs Ross, when she let herself in. We don’t have much information so far, but it seems that she was killed by having her throat cut, probably some time about six to twelve hours ago. A little piece of lined paper with the word ‘unreliable’, written in green biro, was found at the victim’s feet. Gayfield have already taken some statements, but I’d like Alice and Alastair to interview Dr Clarke’s nearest neighbours. Get the usual stuff plus any information that you can about the victim. Eric can go to the Royal Infirmary, the new building, to speak to the doctor’s colleagues at work. I’ve already spoken to a Dr Maxwell, from her department, and I’d suggest beginning with him. He worked beside the victim for years…’

DCI Bell looked pale, ivory white with blue-black rings bordering her eyes, unconcealable by any make-up. She was a workaholic, and her addiction, knowingly nurtured by her superiors, was destroying her health. The everyday business of the station overloaded her already frayed circuits, and the additional workload imposed by the killing would likely result in a burn-out of some kind. For the duration of the investigation she would become, like most of those involved, an occasional visitor to her own home and her husband provided scant sympathy, having long been disenchanted with ‘the force’ and its unreasonable demands. The woman he had married had yearned for a home and children and, in their absence as the years went by, had metamorphosed into an alien creature, more accustomed to giving orders than taking them.

The location of Dr Clarke’s flat was obvious from the number of police vehicles parked outside the imposing stone building that began the crescent and abutted Eton Terrace. A young constable, still too thin for his uniform, was on duty logging movements in and out of the big black front door. The building was attached to its neighbour by a monumental screen wall with three blind arches, resembling three closed eyes. It overlooked the Dean Gardens, an area perfumed with the unlikely scent of beer from the Water of Leith that passed through it, having collected brewery effluent further upstream. Dressed in paper suit and bootees, Alice climbed the thickly carpeted stair that led to Elizabeth Clarke’s flat. The outer hall was painted a deep oxblood red, and a number of small watercolours of naval ships decorated its walls. Noting that photographers and other scene-of-crime officers were busy in the drawing room, she took a detour into the doctor’s study instead. It was dominated by a pair of large, shiny, black speakers. They were entirely out of keeping with the rest of the furniture in the room, all of which had been arranged to allow them pride of place. The floor was covered in neat piles of papers and copies of medical journals had been filed, by title, along the skirting-boards. A Georgian writing desk lay open with a set of original medical records on it, yellow post-it stickers protruding from some of the papers.

She moved to the victim’s bedroom, on the upper floor, and found it almost monastic in its orderliness. The bedclothes had been turned back in expectation of the night to come, and on a bare table by the bed were three books, a novel by Lermontov and two textbooks: Fetal Monitoring in Practice and Obstetrics by Ten Teachers. The air was heavy with the scent of freesias: a huge vase of the yellow flowers had been placed on the windowsill and, as in the study, a pair of large black speakers was present. There was no other furniture in the room. A white panelled door led from it into an en suite bathroom, and all of the four walls within were composed of mirrors. Disconcertingly, on entering the bathroom, Alice found herself reflected from every angle, a few white hairs evident amongst the brown now. She wondered how anyone could endure, never mind enjoy, such unvarnished scrutiny every time they entered the place, far less undressed in it. The bath was still full, the water bluish with dissolved soap, and an opened copy of the Spectator lay discarded on the still wet bathmat. The room felt as if its occupant might return at any minute.