Alex Gray - Never Somewhere Else

‘Could she have killed Lucy?’ asked Maggie then bit her lip as Lorimer flashed her a look of annoyance.

‘I think this woman is capable of anti-social behaviour. Murder?’ Solomon shook his head and sipped absently at the camomile tea. ‘She cherished Lucy. But I don’t believe she killed her. Solomon’s voice was sad and soft, as if remembering something Janet Yarwood had told him. ‘No. We’re looking for a man. The man Alison Girdley saw. The question that vexes me now is, was he — or is he — known to Janet Yarwood?’

‘And?’

Lorimer leaned forward to place his mug on the coffee table. Solomon pointed at the mess of papers on the floor.

‘I’ve made notes about most of the men known to Ms Yarwood and Lucy. Or at least the ones she’s telling me about. That’s what I was doing when you … or rather when my attacker arrived,’ Solly smiled weakly.

‘Right. Let’s get a move on.’ Lorimer knelt down swiftly, gathering up the papers and shuffling them into a neat pile. ‘You start with this lot.’ He handed them up to Solly then turned his attention to the tumbled drawers and their contents strewn further into the room.

Despite his aching head, the young psychologist leafed patiently through the sheaf of documents, sorting them into piles.

It was some time later that the three finished searching through all the papers, Solomon having checked and double-checked for missing information.

‘I can’t find that list of names. Male acquaintances of Janet’s. Doesn’t matter, though. It should be on the computer,’ he said at last. ‘Unless …’

He rose painfully to his feet and stepped across to his desk, switching on the word processor. Lorimer stood behind him, eyes fixed to the screen as Solly scrolled up the notes he had so recently typed in. It made interesting reading to the DCI. Solly’s scientific observations were peppered with comments which showed a deep understanding of the human condition. Reading the comments, Lorimer suddenly felt an overwhelming sense of pity for the woman who had lost her young friend.

‘Let’s see that list. It should be … oh, dear.’ He turned to Lorimer. ‘Deleted, I’m afraid. However, all is not lost.’ He pressed a tiny button on the side of the machine and when nothing happened he turned to Lorimer with an apologetic smile. ‘My back-up disk. He’s taken it.’

‘Hell’s teeth!’

Solomon swung round and gave his familiar shrug.

‘Now we know why I was mugged, at any rate. Someone knew what Janet Yarwood was telling me. Or she went on to let them know what she’d said.’ He frowned and looked up at Lorimer. ‘It must be someone who knows we are working together.’ He paused to let the implication of his words sink in. ‘She may well know who our killer is, without realising it. But,’ he added seriously, ‘he must also know that she could give us a lead.’

‘If it is him,’ Lorimer began then added impatiently, ‘- and we don’t know that yet — then he’s closing the net around himself. We narrow things down to those around the Art School who were close to both these women.’

Lorimer stood up suddenly, a frozen look on his face.

‘Do you have the Yarwood woman’s home phone number?’

‘Yes. Why?’ ‘Phone her.’

Solomon searched back through the piles of notes then pulled out a handwritten sheet. Maggie watched the two men intently as the number was dialled. Time seemed to stand still as the phone rang on and on.

‘Maybe she’s out,’ she suggested hopefully, looking at her husband’s grave expression. But even she was shivering with apprehension as Lorimer reached for his mobile to call Headquarters.

Janet Yarwood had lived alone in a block of new flats five minutes’ walk from Glasgow School of Art. Now the entrance to the street was jammed with police vehicles and already some residents were finding it difficult to gain access to their own flats. Uniformed police officers were firm but polite with curious passers-by who had been drawn towards the street cordoned off from the adjoining main road.

Inside, DCI Lorimer and Dr Solomon Brightman waited for the arrival of the pathologist. Lorimer’s phone call had triggered off a chain of events leading up to the forced entry into Janet Yarwood’s flat. Her body, still clothed in the t-shirt and jeans which she had worn at her meeting with Solly, lay on the hall carpet. Blood had leached out in a huge stain, mainly from the gory mess of her scalp, and the white walls were spattered in dark red like some obscene action painting.

‘Guess what colour I’m going to have next?’

The voice on the tape echoed in Lorimer’s mind as he looked at the remains of the artist. Had he anticipated this killing even as he’d spoken? Somewhere, if he really did keep them, a grey scalp was now added to his collection.

Solly, still weak from his own ordeal, had covered his mouth and turned away from the horror on the floor. He had written about murder, thought about it, theorised, but he hadn’t expected it to be like this in reality, Lorimer thought wryly. There was a smell, almost a taste to it, as if the brutal act had left traces of death swirling unseen in the air around the mutilated corpse. Lorimer found him in the artist’s sitting room, arms clasped around his body, rocking back and forth as if trying to relieve a pain deep within. He put a hand on his shoulder but said nothing. His sudden fear about Janet Yarwood had been horribly realised. Swift enquiries had shown that after Solly’s visit to the House for an Art Lover, the woman had failed to turn up next day as usual. Lorimer had spoken to one of the postgraduates, a Christopher Inglis. He’d been a bit puzzled that Janet hadn’t turned up, he’d said, but it hadn’t worried him. Inglis thought someone had phoned her home to see if she was sick. But if she was ill in bed maybe she just didn’t want to answer the phone? After all, it was only a day since they’d seen her.

‘Hi, Bill.’ Rosie Fergusson’s voice broke into his thoughts as the blonde pathologist appeared in the doorway. ‘Just fill me in on this one, will you?’

She made a pointing gesture at Solomon, mouthing ‘Who’s that?’ but Lorimer steered her by the elbow away from the lounge and back into the hallway.

‘I’ll make the introductions later,’ he whispered, then began to run through the details about the body on the floor that had been Janet Yarwood, aspiring portrait painter.

‘Twenty-nine. Single. Lived alone. Bed hadn’t been slept in. Last seen by her colleagues the day before yesterday. Chap upstairs heard her radio on that night, so we might assume she was home. Over to you.’

Already the pathologist had pulled on gloves and was kneeling by the corpse. A few minutes later Lorimer had the answer he was looking for.

‘Yes. She’s been dead about forty-eight hours or so.’

‘But you can’t be sure until you’ve done more tests,’ Lorimer mimicked the young woman’s voice and she grinned suddenly, recognising the banter that often occurred on these occasions, lightening the grimmer reality of their respective jobs.

‘Well, one thing we can be sure of, and that’s the nature of the killing.’

‘And?’

‘She was stabbed several times. Look. See here and here.’

Rosie pointed with a pencil to areas on the corpse which were heavily bloodstained.

‘But her neck?’

Lorimer crouched over, indicating the wounds he had seen three times before in recent months. Rosie shook her head.

‘I can’t be certain yet but the scatters of blood look like she was alive when she was stabbed. Let’s see.’ She flipped back the dead woman’s eyelids. ‘No sign of any haemorrhaging.’ The mouth was examined gently. ‘There you are. Strangulation was post-mortem. That tell you anything?’