Alex Gray - Pitch Black

Not for the first time DCI Lorimer wished he could talk things over with Dr Solomon Brightman.

Donnie slumped down beside the riverbank, his trainers sending up small puffs of dust as their heels skidded against the dried ground.

What had he done?

He recalled the way he had stormed around his room, smashing stuff in a fit of rage. It was like his old man all over again. He ’d smashed faces into walls, irrespective of whether they belonged to friend or foe. Even his family had come in for that sort of treatment. And violence had bred violence. That’s why he’d got out. Not just because the old man was in the nick. That was bad enough. But to stay, tainted with the name of being ‘one of those Douglas boys’ was more than he could stand.

He’d never minded that they called him the quiet one, the baby of the family; he’d been lucky, indulged as he was by his older brothers and protected from the worse excesses of their brutish father. They’d been proud of the way he’d shown talent from an early age, kicking a ball about the playground then being chosen for the school team. None of the Douglas boys had bothered with school except Donnie and it was the footie that had kept him there until the day a scout from Inverness Calley Thistle had spotted him in a schoolboys’ league cup-final. That had been his ticket to better days and he’d taken it without a backward glance. Being transferred to Kelvin had been a dream. Not only had it taken him away from the residual influence of his family, but it had been a new start of a different sort: nobody down here had known who he was. His teammates just thought of him as Donnie, the number eight mid-fielder. And if his accent wasn’t pure Glasgow, what did that matter? There were English boys and others from farther afield, like Leo. He’d been accepted for what he was and so far nothing but the game had really mattered.

Donnie heard a sound and lifted his head, suddenly aware that it was a groan escaping from his own lips. What had he done? He shook his head as if the memories could be as easily shaken from his mind. He’d run away from it all, terrified of the consequences, imagining the disgust on the faces of his mates when they found out.

And he’d compounded his sin by absenting himself from the squad. Mr Clark would never take him back. He’d ruined everything now. What was it they called it in the army? Going AWOL. That’s what he’d done.

He lifted his head at the sudden thought. Maybe he should join up? That’s what blokes did in this situation. They joined the French Foreign Legion. Or maybe he could simply disappear.

He looked up and down the riverbank. Masses of rosebay willow herb stained the slopes a bright pink and butterflies were dotting their way from bloom to bloom like drunken men on a pub crawl. Donnie envied the easy way they swayed from one flower to the next. He wouldn’t mind coming back as a butterfly if all that stuff about reincarnation were true.

Shading his eyes from the sun, he gazed at the shapes of houses on the southern bank of the river. There were rows and rows of white houses with dark sloping roofs and, here and there, a patch of grass between. People were going about their lives over there doing normal things. How did it feel to belong to one of those houses: to close your door knowing the next day you’d open it again and be able to go out, free as a bird without a care in the world? He’d been sleeping rough for several nights now, making his way steadily downriver with no clear idea of his eventual destination, just following the instinct that had told him to get away.

Donnie felt a lump gather in his throat. He missed his wee flat. It had been the first real place he’d had of his own. What he’d done had cost him that and so much more. He couldn’t go home. And he sure as hell couldn’t go back to Glasgow. So where on earth was he going to go?

SHOCK DISCOVERY AT KELVIN FC

The body of a dead footballer was what they saw on arrival at Kelvin Park this morning. But closer inspection revealed it to be a dummy figure dressed in the number eight strip, the one usually worn by missing player Donnie Douglas. Players and staff at the club are still recovering from shock at the discovery.

A large kitchen knife had been stuck into the ‘body’, a macabre reconstruction of the death of player Nicko Faulkner. The words ‘KILL KENNEDY’ were scrawled in red paint on the boot room wall. Douglas is still officially listed as a missing person and now there must be real concerns for his safety. It has also emerged that there have been other threats to Kelvin chairman Kennedy in recent days.

Sources close to the Gazette have been informed that Strathclyde Police are treating this as merely some sort of hoax. A possible reason for this is that the football team’s boot room is the source of alleged sightings of football legend Ronnie Rankin, or what some folk believe to be his ghost. Only last week one of the apprentices had to be taken off boot room duties after a scare.

‘It’s terrible that someone is trying to upset the team at a time when they are still struggling to get over the shock of the recent murder of their two teammates and the referee Norrie Cartwright,’ said manager Ron Clark.

Whether or not this is the work of the triple killer has been the question uppermost in players’ minds. And what Gazette readers must be wondering is what sort of sick mind is behind this latest development and how long it will take for an arrest to be made.

Jimmy Greer

The reporter leaned back, a small laugh escaping from his thin lips. Sick mind? Aye, well, he supposed that was true enough. Inventive, though. Surely they’d grant him that. He’d love to have been a fly on the wall when they’d found the dummy. Pity there was no chance of a photo, but, hey, you couldn’t have everything. At least this kept the story alive for a bit longer, just what his editor wanted. The public would lap this up like a cat drinking cream; they just loved sensation and Jimmy Greer was the wee boy to give it to them. He put his hands behind his head, chuckling to himself. This one would run and run. Janis Faulkner’s case would see to that. In a way, he told himself, it was no bad thing they hadn’t caught the killer yet. Speculation sold more papers. And he could take the occasional dig at DCI flamin’ Lorimer so long as the SIO was still apparently clueless. Sick mind? They didnae know the half of it!

Albert Little folded up the newspaper, heart thumping. Kelvin FC was looking like a laughing stock, now. There were all sorts of rumours flying around about one of the boys doing it as a joke. Clark and Stevenson had hauled them all up but not one of them had confessed to the mess in the boot room. He’d wanted to clean it up right away and had been horrified to find police photographers and forensic technicians crawling all over the place. Eventually, after much grumbling, he was being allowed to whitewash over the lurid red letters. For the first time since all those incidents, the groundsman felt a sense of unease as he filled the brush and swept it over the offending graffiti. He turned around more than once, the hairs on the back of his neck prickling, but there was nobody there, just a feeling of intense cold and the sense of being watched.

‘I don’t know. Either there’s a sick-minded bastard out there and he’s somehow been able to access the grounds, or there’s somebody in the club behind all of this,’ Lorimer growled, unconsciously echoing Greer’s own words. The tight security measures already in place would point to the latter. ‘Only someone from the club could get into the boot room.’