Alex Gray - The Riverman

Lorimer resisted the urge to meet Solly’s eyes. There might be nothing in this, but he would be intrigued to know just why Catherine Devoy had come across the river to lunch with Michael Turner.

‘We’d also like a look at your guest register, please.’ Lorimer kept his tone neutral, though he could feel his heart thumping with excitement. There was something worth investigating here after all.

It was late by the time Lorimer reached home. The hotel’s register had revealed nothing at all. No members of Forbes Macgregor’s staff had elected to stay over on that April night. At least not under their own names, he thought, his naturally suspicious mind ferreting into dark corners.

‘Hey, Mags. I’m home,’ he called out, opening the door of the living room to the brightness and warmth within.

‘Hey yourself.’ His wife smiled up at him. ‘Had anything to eat?’

Lorimer ducked his head and offered a sheepish grin. ‘Curry with Solly, actually. Sorry.’

Maggie rolled her eyes to heaven. ‘Just as well I hadn’t cooked anything special then, isn’t it?’ But her words became lost as Lorimer scooped her into his arms in a hug. Maggie felt the cold of his jacket sleeve as she stroked it in response to his hands circling the small of her back, a ploy guaranteed to weaken her defences.

‘Oh, that reminds me.’ She looked up, the smile dying on her lips. ‘I took your cashmere coat to the cleaners after school. How on earth did it get so mucky?’

Lorimer opened his eyes wide in feigned innocence and shrugged.

‘Och, you! Anyway, I found something in the pocket.’ Maggie leaned over and retrieved the tape from a side table.

‘Ah.’ Lorimer took the tape from his wife. ‘That’s a copy of the voice Jennifer Hammond said she didn’t recognize-’

‘And you didn’t believe her,’ Maggie finished for him.

‘Well, maybe we’ll never know now.’ He paused for a moment, turning the tape over and over in his fingers. ‘Don’t suppose you’d like to hear it?’

‘Is it scary?’

‘Not especially.’

‘Okay.’

Maggie watched as Lorimer slotted the tape into their machine, and sat back against the warmth of her husband’s shoulder. The machine whirred in silence then suddenly a woman’s voice uttered the panic-stricken words that had led Lorimer to look at Duncan Forbes’ death in a new light.

‘Play it again, would you?’ Maggie asked, her eyes fixed on the tape recorder.

Lorimer rewound the tape then watched his wife’s face as she listened once more. A tiny frown formed on her brow as the voice repeated the unfinished message. ‘She’s scared, isn’t she?’ Maggie remarked at last, moving closer. ‘A well-educated lady, by the sounds of her, not an old person either …’ She shivered suddenly, and laced her fingers through Lorimer’s. ‘What on earth did she really see, I wonder?’

The tape whirred silently in the machine as Lorimer felt her body rigid with tension; Maggie had a rare gift of empathy with people that could be a blessing or a curse. She could be reliving the unknown woman’s terror he thought, gently caressing her hair as if to erase the images inside her head.

‘I wonder where she is now,’ Maggie murmured. ‘Poor woman.’

‘Let me get you a drink,’ Lorimer suggested.

‘Sure. A whisky’d be grand,’ she replied, eyeing the decanter on the sideboard.

He dropped a swift kiss on the top of her head as he rose to fetch them both a glass. ‘What’re you going to do now?’ she asked.

‘We’ve set up another house-to-house inquiry, this time asking the neighbours if they saw anyone the same night as the Forbes Macgregor party. Don’t know if it’ll do much. People get sniffy when there’s a repeat visit. Think the police don’t believe whatever they told them the first time.’

‘What about the neighbour?’

Lorimer frowned. ‘Aye, we got a lot of grief from that guy downstairs who reported the water coming through his roof. Wee toerag. Thinks he’s God’s gift to the SFA.’

‘Who’s that?’

‘Davie McLaren,’ he replied, handing her the glass of whisky. ‘Heard of him?’

Maggie screwed up her brow. ‘Wasn’t he the boy wonder who was sent off five minutes after the kick-off when Scotland played Norway?’

Lorimer grinned. ‘Very same. Hasn’t learned anything from that incident either by the looks of it. Full of himself.’ Lorimer sipped his drink thoughtfully. Davie McLaren had appeared to be in shock, babbling on about wanting his agent with him, as if the young footballer needed a grown-up to hold his hand in a crisis. Which he probably did.

‘What we want is for someone to positively ID a visitor to Jennifer Hammond’s flat,’ Lorimer said. ‘On either of the nights,’ he added thoughtfully.

‘Don’t the flats have CCTV cameras?’

Lorimer shook his head. ‘No. There’s a security man around during the day but he’s only there to stop non-residents parking within the grounds. He goes off at five o’clock every night.’

‘So,’ Maggie began again slowly, ‘unless you have a witness who saw someone go into Jennifer’s flat, you’re not very much further forward, are you?’

Lorimer shrugged. ‘Solly’s nosing around a bit. And we’re running a check on the accounting firm itself.’

Lorimer drained his glass and stared into space. Wheels had been put into motion now that this was effectively being treated as a double murder. Someone had wanted Jennifer Hammond out of the way. Was that why she had been preparing to leave for the firm’s holiday villa in Cyprus? Well, he was due to see the Forbes Macgregor partners tomorrow. Maybe one of them would be able to enlighten him. And there was still the matter of an employee missing somewhere in the United States, an employee whose credit cards had been found on a dead man. Michael Turner’s farewell party had stirred up something murky, Lorimer mused to himself. But like the bottom of the river being scraped by a dredger, silt that had been disturbed was now fogging up the clearer waters.

‘So how do we know that Othello has reason to feel jealousy?’ Maggie looked around the class of sixteen-year-olds. A few tentative hands were up, but still she let her eyes roam over the others, giving them time to think through a response.

‘What d’you reckon, James?’ she finally asked a thin teenager slouching at the back of the classroom.

‘Don’t know. Maybe he was just like that?’ James shrugged and resumed chewing whatever he had in his mouth. Maggie ignored the exaggerated rhythm of his jaws. She’d had one confrontation too many with this lad and wasn’t about to let him disrupt her Shakespeare lesson.

‘What do the rest of you think? Yes, Lewis?’

‘He’d been warned by Brabantio though, hadn’t he Miss?’

‘Good, Lewis. What was it Desdemona’s father said again?’

There was a rustle as the students looked up the pages of their textbooks.

‘Yes? Kirstine?’

‘He says, “Look to her, Moor, have a quick eye to see: She has deceived her father, may do thee.” Is that it, Miss?’

‘Does that mean she’ll gie him a doin’, Miss?’ James called out to an undercurrent of sniggering.

Maggie shook her head, more in despair at the boy’s deliberate misinterpretation of the text than at his cheek.

‘Ah’d gie anyone a doin’ if they tried it oan wi’ ma burd. Know whit ah mean?’

Maggie sighed. The nature of Othello’s jealousy was rapidly going downhill, but maybe she could salvage something from the boy’s insolence.

‘You’ve got a jealous nature too then, James?’ she asked.

‘Oh, aye, Miss,’ he replied, then looked slyly at his neighbour before asking, ‘D’you not feel a bit thon way yourself?’