Alex Gray - Never Somewhere Else

Jayne smiled again and inclined her head knowingly.

It was unusually mild for the first day of March. Spring crocuses had responded to the sudden sunshine and Lorimer could see them beyond Police Headquarters, dappling the public gardens with colour. The midday sunlight had split his desk into halves of shade and dazzling brightness. Lorimer shifted the forensic report into the shade. It made interesting reading. What would the killer make of a list like this, Lorimer thought, running his eye down the names of fibres which had survived that terrible conflagration. Some of the names were unfamiliar, cloaked in scientific jargon, but the forensic biologist had appended his own translations. There were now blue ticks against several items in the list that had tallied with fibres provided by The Flesh Eaters. Lorimer’s eye paused on one item circled in purple: Kanekelon — Japanese hair fibre (manufactured).

What on earth did this mean? he wondered, reaching for the telephone.

A few minutes later he replaced the handset and sat motionless, fingertips together, staring unseeing at the drift of spring flowers outside. Forensics had not matched this particular fibre with any of those given by the boys in the band. Surprising, really, mused Lorimer, when the fibre had come from a wig. Performers might have been expected to dress up a bit. But no, the hair had come, like so many of the intact fibres, from beneath the corpse, whose dead weight had been instrumental in preserving these traces from the flames. Kanekelon was a fibre only manufactured in Japan and used in the most expensive of modern hairpieces and wigs. So. Was he to infer that the killer had used a disguise?

Lorimer frowned. Alison Girdley had given a reasonable description of a dark-haired man with close-cropped hair. It just didn’t make sense. There was something tickling the edges of his mind, an irritating tic that wouldn’t go away. From experience he knew that plodding routine work brought more results than flashes of brilliant insight. Nevertheless he kept going over the murder cases, visualising the girls’ last walks in their city, trying to see who had leapt out at them with that deadly chain. Lorimer closed his eyes, letting the heat from the window soak into his face, enjoying the sleepy peacefulness for a moment. Then with a sigh he stood up to twist the rod, closing the vertical blinds, and work once more in the shade. He looked back over the list and the purple-circled word.

Suddenly Lorimer recalled the locus of the burnt-out ambulance and his conversation with the Procurator Fiscal. Had there been an accomplice on that occasion effecting a get-away from that bleak spot? And had it been a woman, perhaps? Lorimer tried this possibility on for size and felt a frisson of excitement with the thought that it might just fit. During briefing sessions the team had thrown about the suggestion of an accomplice but this had been rejected on several counts. Added to that, Solomon Brightman had been most insistent that the killer worked alone. But what if he had used someone on only this occasion?

Lorimer replaced the report on his desk. Like most of the traces, this hair fibre would have to lie dormant until — or if — a suspect could be found.

Lorimer looked back at the calendar. Circled in black with felt-tip pen, like a bad omen, was the date of George Phillips’s party. The DCI was ambivalent about his superior’s retirement. There was a fair chance that he’d be in line for the job of Superintendent himself, and he didn’t know if that’s what he really wanted. When he had time to think about it, which wasn’t often, Lorimer knew he’d hate to be passed over for the job. And there was Maggie. She had always made a big thing of his promotions. All the same, it would take him further away from hands-on detective work and deeper into the world of management. His present job had plenty of that already, and Lorimer sometimes felt as if he were pulling against the forces that bound him to this office. The other circles on the calendar stared out at him. Red for murder. Red circles around these dates when three young women and an old derelict had met their untimely end. There was no way he’d even be considered for George Phillips’s job if they remained unsolved.

Solomon remembered his first trip to Glasgow when he had remarked with some surprise on how green it all was. His expectations had been limited to a city of brick and stone but now he was as proud of his adopted city as many of its lifelong citizens. He had quickly realised that although Glasgow’s accolade as European City of Culture had been thought risible by some envious cynics, that same city could well have won an award for being the greenest, having more parkland within its boundaries than any other in Europe.

St Mungo’s Park was only one of many large expanses where the public could stroll, walk dogs, listen to bands on a summer evening or bed down for the night, like Valentine and his fellow dossers. Solomon himself enjoyed the daily walk from Glasgow University, along Kelvin Way and across Kelvingrove Park on his journey home. The outrage of murdered girls being dumped in one of the city’s dear green places went deeper than simple horror at the killings. The concealment of these corpses in a public park had offended Glaswegians as strongly as if they had been left in their own back gardens.

Several times the psychologist had deliberately walked through St Mungo’s Park, squirrels rustling below the laurels and rhododendrons. A vehicular road ran through from west to east and Solomon had paced along the route that the ambulance must have taken, trying in his mind to locate its destination.

High-rise flats bent their shadows over the main road opposite the park gates. They were a legacy from the sixties: pre-stressed grey concrete towers, like streets up-ended. Other tower blocks had been obliterated by the demolition squads a mere three decades after they themselves had replaced streets of Victorian tenements.

The residents in St Mungo’s Heights had been questioned during a door-to-door exercise by Lorimer’s team but their responses had been fruitless. Despite this Solomon had found himself standing on the path by one particular clump of laurels, no longer cordoned off by police tape, staring at the high flats as if they held a secret. Their geography was right. With Lorimer, he had discussed the possibility that their killer could have been making for the flats after disposing of the bodies. Lorimer had been convinced enough by his argument that killers tend to live near the area where they leave their victims. There was plenty of statistical evidence to back this up. It was only later in the careers of multiple killers that they travelled further afield. Solomon felt certain that somewhere not too far away was home to the person who had taken the lives of those three girls.

One of Lorimer’s unanswered questions still plagued the psychologist, however.

‘Where did he park the ambulance?’

Nobody in St Mungo’s Heights admitted to any sight of the old vehicle and a thorough search of lock-ups had yielded nothing. Its whereabouts had remained a mystery until they had stood beside its blackened wreck miles away from the park and the city.

It was not to St Mungo’s Park that Dr Brightman directed his taxi cab that spring morning. Reading Week had given him the luxury of several hours to play truant from his office and he headed south of the river to the elegant suburbs of Pollokshields. The trees were still bare but colourful patches of polyanthus brightened the well-tended gardens and the daffodils were just beginning to nod yellow heads from the verges, coaxed by the unexpected warmth of the sun.

Solomon stood at the gates of Bellahouston Park where the pathway forked upwards. A sign indicated the dry ski centre to his left and another showed the way to the House for an Art Lover. Reflecting that the City Fathers catered for all tastes, Solomon made his way along the tree-lined path that curved up and around to reveal the house that Charles Rennie Mackintosh had never built. It was over a century since the celebrated architect had submitted his designs for that German competition. His submission had come too late for him to win the major award but he had been given a special prize nonetheless. Now the house was built, thanks to the efforts of a few determined men and women, and stood serenely looking towards the hills of the west.