Alex Gray - Pitch Black

‘Look for someone who wanted rid of two footballers and a referee?’

The psychologist gave a sigh. ‘No, Lorimer, for someone who wanted rid of a referee and one football player, who had been making headlines for something other than his skills with a ball.’

‘But you will accept that there is a possibility that all three are linked?’

Solly smiled wryly. ‘When did you ever know me to have anything other than an open mind, my friend?’

‘There’s no direct correlation between them,’ Rosie said, waving the ballistics report for Solly to see. ‘Cartwright was killed with a shotgun, White was killed with a pistol,’ she continued. ‘Can’t determine the exact type of weapon from the injury itself but I reckon it’ll have been something like the MSP.’

‘What’s that?’

‘It’s one of these silent pistols. Its Russian nickname is groza , it means thunderstorm.’

‘And can you say that’s what caused this death?’ Solly shook his head in astonishment.

‘We can’t,’ Rosie replied. ‘This is just me ravelling a thread about what might have been used. Won’t bore you with the science, but actually it’s the injury itself that shows it wasn’t a rifle.’ Rosie turned her head away to conceal a smile. Her fiancé was squeamish about the finer points of her work. Rosie reckoned that was a true and certain mark of his love for her; to hitch yourself to a forensic pathologist for life was no mean feat when you had a stomach as weak as Solly’s. Suddenly a memory of the evening they’d met came back to her. She’d been in her white coveralls, examining a woman’s blood-soaked corpse and Solly had almost fainted at the sight. He hadn’t been the manly knight-on-a-white-charger sort, Rosie thought to herself, but there had been something about him that had warranted a second look. She smiled for a moment, grateful that her day job hadn’t driven him away.

‘Anyway, whatever type of pistol was used could well be an assassination weapon and Ballistics will love to have a look if Lorimer ever gets his hands on it.’

She watched as Solly merely nodded in reply. The report was fairly comprehensive and if ever they were to catch the perpetrator, the investigating team would want to see just where he’d obtained a firearm like that. Trouble was, her ballistics man had told her, the market was full of stuff the average career criminal could pick up in Pakistan or Eastern Europe. But the MSP was a bit specialised. If that had been his weapon of choice. Rosie looked again at the facts surrounding each of the shootings. Did a different weapon necessarily mean that a different finger had pulled the trigger? Or was Solly’s involvement justified? For a moment she looked at him, head bent over a paper of his own, and she longed to run her hands through his dark curls. Later, she thought, later. And with a little smile of satisfaction, Rosie Fergusson sat back and continued her own evening’s homework, wondering about these victims and her meticulous examinations of their remains.

‘So, you might have three different killers on the loose?’ Maggie said slowly, her fingers caressing Chancer’s golden fur as he lay curled on her lap, half-asleep.

‘No, I don’t think so,’ Lorimer replied. ‘Either it’s one man with a strange sort of vendetta against the club or, if Solly is correct, the same man plus Janis Faulkner.’

‘You don’t think she killed her husband, though, do you?’ Maggie asked, her eyes troubled.

Lorimer heaved a sigh and shook his head. ‘Don’t quite know what to believe right now. If there was some sort of logical pattern to it then I’d say no. But she’s well in the frame for it now it appears she has a motive as well. Battered wife,’ he added, glancing up to see what Maggie would make of it.

‘But why would she have to kill him? Why not simply walk out?’ Maggie bit her lip, suddenly wishing she hadn’t spoken those words. She’d walked out, hadn’t she? Well, sort of — those months away on that exchange programme in America had been a time of separation, a time to sort themselves out.

‘Hah! You should see the number of women who ask themselves that very question. Cornton Vale’s full of them. Think they’re somehow in the wrong, stay because of the kids, oh, all sorts of reasons but usually it’s because they’re in thrall to some bloke with a power complex.’

‘The Faulkners didn’t have kids, did they?’

‘No, but that’s not because she didn’t want any. Her lawyer tells us that Janis had several miscarriages following his brutality.’

‘I still can’t understand it. Why on earth would you stay with a horror like that?’

‘Hm.’ Lorimer sifted through a pile of papers until he came to a photocopy of a newspaper cutting. ‘Here. Take a look.’

Maggie studied the picture of the man and woman. They were laughing and having fun on some exotic beach somewhere. Janis Faulkner looked like something out of a fashion magazine, her tiny tanga showing off a gorgeous body, and as for that mane of glossy hair, well, there was nothing to show that the woman was unhappy with the man in the photograph or ill-treated by him.

‘You think she’s making it all up?’

Lorimer shook his head. ‘No. There were bruises all over her body when they brought her in. Marion Peters, her lawyer, has asked for them to be photographed as evidence.’

‘But that might just as easily go against her, surely?’

‘That’s a risk her defence counsel is going to have to take. If they decide that all three murders were committed by someone else then she may well get off scot-free.’

Maggie Lorimer put her hand on her husband’s shoulder. ‘And do you think she should?’ she asked softly.

Lorimer glanced at his wife. What was she really asking? Did she want his professional opinion or was she probing more deeply into a sensitive area that he didn’t want to acknowledge right now?

‘Not for me to decide,’ he mumbled vaguely then planted a swift kiss on her forehead as if to conclude the conversation.

Lock-up was the worst time of the day, especially during a summer that seemed to be lasting for ever. The thin green cotton curtains failed to conceal the brightness outside and Janis had stopped bothering to pull them shut. Now she sat cross-legged upon her narrow bed, gazing out at the sky. The last wisps of pink had vanished from the space between the heavens and a horizon that was framed by the prison window. A darker blue had swept in from the east and it would be a matter of minutes before the clouds gave way to deepening shades of sapphire.

Weren’t there fourteen different words in Gaelic for the colour blue? She couldn’t remember. Lachie would know. It was the sort of thing she could have asked him. For a long moment Janis visualised the man she had been trying to reach on that fateful day when the police had stopped her. There was something timeless about Lachie’s face, she thought: those twinkling blue eyes that could laugh or be so suddenly penetrating and that look he used give her that said so much more than words could ever say — that he understood her as no one else ever could. Janis breathed deeply, seeing again the hills behind the croft; they would be purple with heather now. She imagined herself there, turning to see the loch below, its fringes of grass and reeds alive with summer insects, the occasional ripple of a trout glistening in the day’s last light.

Suddenly she shivered and realised that her arms were cold from sitting so still. It was time now to close the window on these memories and to hope that the dreams that came would be as kind.

The reporters were all clustered around the main gate when Albert Little came to open up for the day.