Alex Gray - Glasgow Kiss

That was a problem for their teacher, though. Both of her worlds were in collision: Muirpark and home. Despite the fact that his wife was a member of staff, DCI Lorimer was still the SIO on this murder case. He’d been told that Maggie’s inside knowledge might prove useful so there had been no expression of a conflict of interest. Well, that was Strathclyde Police’s take on the case, but it didn’t stop her feeling uneasy about her own husband coming into school. She was so engrossed in her thoughts that she hardly noticed the traffic being swallowed up by the Clyde Tunnel. The roar of cars echoed as they swept down under the river, the curving tunnel walls glistening like the innards of some ancient worm, its spine a white light against ribs of darkness. Then they were out again into a fresh morning, the sky bright above tree-lined avenues of red sandstone houses, the very air charged with respectability. Maggie preferred this route, winding in and out of these affluent West End terraces until she came back down to Partick and the bumpy ascent to the school gates. The Expressway might be quicker, but by now she’d had enough of being immersed in lanes of traffic. Besides, she liked to look at these houses with their neatly-trimmed hedges and twin bay trees either side of the front doors. She enjoyed this part of the journey best at Christmas, for all the residents appeared to purchase real fir trees, huge affairs placed in the windows and lit up for all to see.

The thought took her back to Jenkins’ The Cone-Gatherers and the spite and hurt that the book had contained. There had been a death in that story, too, and anger and grief. She had to stop at the lights and in those few moments her eyes fell on a billboard outside a newsagent’s shop. WHAT HAPPENED TO JULIE?The headlines shouted at her. Maggie bit her lip as she drove the final part of her journey. Would she really be able to give them something to take their minds off this tragedy?

‘Mr Chalmers would have wanted us to keep going,’ the Sixth Form girl said, her voice sweet with what she hoped was an understanding tone. The younger kids all gazed up at her, respecting her position as their House prefect. Mr Chalmers had been Head of Clyde House but now he wasn’t there and rumours were flying around the school about why he had gone.

‘You know we have all this fundraising to do and that our chosen topic this term is Malawi? Well, let’s show the other houses that we can do better than they can. Agreed?’

A faint chorus of ‘yes’ made the girl shake her head.

‘Come on, you can sound a bit more enthusiastic than that!’ She smiled, egging them on.

‘Yes!’ came back stronger this time, a few First Years sitting cross-legged at the front showing a genuine eagerness.

Maggie Lorimer, sitting at the back of the gym hall, nodded her approval. Frances Lane was doing a grand job with Clyde and she’d make sure that the girl’s efforts were recorded in any House report she’d be writing. Eric would have been proud of her, she thought wistfully. Muirpark was a product of the seventies’ expansion of comprehensive secondary schools when directives about what constituted good teaching practice had been implemented across the entire country. Successive head teachers had grafted on their own ideas, one of them being the House system. Each House had been named after Glasgow rivers: Clyde, Kelvin, the White Cart and the Molindiner Burn, though the latter was in truth a mere trickle under the necropolis. It had once been frowned upon by some parents as too middle class but the Harry Potter books had succeeded in popularising Muirpark’s arrangement of splitting the pupils into four different houses. One up for children’s literature, Maggie had thought, on overhearing a particularly enthusiastic Primary 7 boy during their orientation day before the summer holidays.

The bell rang just as Frances was ending her spiel about charities and several hundred feet clattered out of the gym hall towards the playground and the main building.

‘Walk!’ a voice commanded and Maggie glanced across at Jack Armour, the deputy head, who was covering Eric’s House duties. Things were settling down to a semblance of normality, she thought.

It could be just an ordinary day in any ordinary school were it not for the piles of shop-bought flowers heaped by the school gate and their hand-written messages of condolence. That was something none of them could pretend to ignore.

PC Brian Maxwell was almost enjoying the swishing sound of the damp grasses against his boots when his feet slipped and he had to throw out a hand to steady himself. They’d fanned out in a line again this morning, tracking an area near to the Vet School, uniformed officers with their heads down, still intent on their search for the missing girl. Maxwell stood up sharply, fishing around with his stick to see what had caused this sudden depression in the earth. They were trained to be alert to the least little difference in the terrain and although it was probably no more than a rabbit hole, he would look just to make sure.

At first sight it looked like a tree root exposed by an animal burrowing deep within the soil, but when he dropped to his knees for a closer look, PC Maxwell’s mouth dropped open in horror. There, at the end of what he’d taken to be a thin dark root, were smaller twig-like bits splayed out in the unmistakable shape of a human hand.

‘Hoi! Over here!’ His voice came out clear in the morning air despite a hoarseness that was clogging up his throat. They’d all been looking for a corpse but none of them wanted to be the one to make this discovery.

Dr Daniel Murphy crouched beside the area that had been excavated within the woods. It was not so very far from that other crime scene where Julie Donaldson’s body had been found, but one look at this showed that the victim had been placed into its grave years before. The forensic archaeologists and botanists were going to have a field day with this one, he told himself, scraping more dirt away from the skeletal remains. Two corpses found while looking for a missing toddler, Dan shook his head; what were the statistical chances of that happening? Still, it would make for an interesting real life story when it came his turn to lecture to Glasgow University’s evening course on forensic medical science. Rosie Fergusson usually took a couple of the classes but Dan was looking forward to filling in for her during her sick leave. Flashes popped around him as the SOCOs took photo after photo at the scene of crime manager’s direction; every image would be needed to build up a true account of the discovered corpse, especially if this new case ever made it into a court of law. Hours of work lay ahead of them even before the remains could be moved and so a large white tent had been erected, covering the site and its nearby surroundings. Overnight rain had left the grass sodden and there were puddles in the yellow mud where the heavy machinery from the construction of the new Vet School buildings now lay useless until the police were finished with this scene of crime. When that would be was anybody’s guess and there had been more than a few grumbles from the foreman in charge of the project.

Dr Murphy did not turn around as the man came into the tent and hunkered down beside him.

‘Lorimer? Aye, thought it’d be you. Bit of a coincidence, isn’t it?’ Dan glanced sideways at the shadowy figure next to him. ‘Mind you, our Rosie always tells us that you don’t like to believe in coincidences, isn’t that right?’ The Irishman’s voice had a hearty quality to it that was at odds with the macabre setting.

‘I don’t,’ Lorimer told him shortly. ‘And I’ll be much happier once you’ve taken this back to the mortuary and we can see everything more clearly.’