Alex Gray - Glasgow Kiss

So that was why he was standing inside the white tent with Dr Solomon Brightman by his side on this bright autumn morning.

‘All right?’ Lorimer asked quietly, seeing the psychologist put a folded handkerchief delicately to his mouth.

Solly nodded back, his eyes turned towards the hole in the ground that was becoming deeper by the minute as the white-suited woman below them carefully scraped away the mud and earth from around the body.

‘It’s more recent than the last one,’ Lorimer said, following Solly’s gaze. ‘Still has some remnants of clothing. That should be helpful.’

He noticed the man beside him swallow hard and knew that it was only by sheer effort of will that the psychologist was not throwing up outside in the bushes. That keen intellect was unfortunately combined with a weak stomach and Solly Brightman’s presence inside the tent was one more sign of how seriously he took his work, wanting to observe as much as he could before he began determining a profile.

‘We’ve not found any parallel in the entire UK for something like this,’ Lorimer told him. His team had already scoured HOLMES, the nationwide database that kept scrupulous details of murder cases on record, searching for a similar sort of MO in the hope that their killer could be identified. It was unlikely that any former killer would be at liberty to carry out these murders, though; most were either incarcerated in prisons or high-security mental hospitals, and there didn’t seem to be any unsolved cases that resembled this one.

‘Looks like she’s been strangled,’ Lorimer went on. ‘The position of the head. .’ He tailed off as Solly nodded again. They could see the open mouth; the woman’s last gasp could have been a scream cut off by vicious hands.

‘Like the others, there’s been no attempt to cover the body with anything else — no blanket or anything — only earth dug up from the forest floor. Just how prepared was he, I wonder?’ Lorimer said, thinking aloud for Solly’s benefit. ‘Must have had a spade ready at hand; see these marks on either side of the grave? Just like the last two. Can you imagine it?’ There was no reply from the psychologist, however. What was going on in that dark head bowed so silently beside him? Was Solly seeing the same scenario? A car somewhere, not too far away, a shovel or spade in its boot, the intention to kill and bury his victim all part of the killer’s pattern of behaviour.

‘There’s no easy access to a path,’ Lorimer continued. ‘He’d have had to walk back to his car from the Maryhill entrance or over at Switchback Road then return to bury the victim. Wonder if he did it straight away,’ he mused, glancing sideways at Solly. ‘Or would he wait until nightfall?’

‘It would be too much of a risk to leave the corpses exposed,’ Solly replied at last. ‘Your forensic people say that the murders took place in the woods and there’s no sign yet that this one will be any different.’

‘Not bringing them here in the boot of his car, then,’ Lorimer said.

The two men stood silently for a minute, each remembering the first case that had brought them together. Three young women had been brutally killed and mutilated then dumped in St Mungo’s park. But that killer was now in a secure unit and whoever had perpetrated these new crimes certainly wasn’t copying his MO.

‘No. It’s not like the St Mungo murders, is it? He simply dumped them; there was never any attempt at burial.’ Lorimer pointed towards the open grave. ‘If Julie Donaldson and the other two women had been killed elsewhere then their killer would have chosen a safer burial place. Think of the bodies found in the gardens or under the floorboards of the killers’ homes.’

‘And even though he’s buried them in out-of-the-way places within the wood, it’s still close to human habitation.’ Solly lifted his head and indicated the muted sound of traffic beyond the Vet School. ‘Anyone might have found those girls. And he didn’t want them found,’ Solly murmured to himself as if he was already trying to probe the killer’s mind.

‘Why use the same area, then? If he’s not a risk-taker?’

‘That’s what makes this so interesting,’ the psychologist replied, watching the slow progress of uncovering the human remains a few feet away. ‘He knows what he’s doing on one level; on another he may seem to display quite normal behaviour.’ He turned to look up at Lorimer. ‘How else would he be able to lure these young women to their deaths?’

‘So we’re dealing with a psychopath.’

Solly smiled sadly and gave a non-committal shrug, but the Senior Investigating Officer’s face had grown grimmer as the scenario played itself out in his imagination. Who was this killer: a madman with periods of lucidity or an apparently normal person with bouts of manic behaviour?

He shivered suddenly, wondering if the schoolteacher who was so loved by his pupils might actually be hiding a terrible secret. His mind ticked off the men who had got away with multiple murders in the past, men whose home lives had seemed quite normal on the face of it but whose actions betrayed the evil deep inside. At least, he thought, they should be able to eliminate Kyle Kerrigan; especially if the DNA from each body showed a common set of strands. Lorimer looked up as a gust of wind blew some dried leaves on to the roof of the tent. How long had this woman been lying here, surrounded by the elements? Had foxes smelt her decaying corpse? Or had they slunk past the hidden grave night after night, foraging for other food? And what was the story behind her death?

The statistics in the missing persons register made grim reading: every year in the Strathclyde region alone more than sixteen thousand people went missing. Some would have chosen it that way, deliberately cutting themselves off from their past for reasons of their own but many, he knew, must have met with tragedies that were still to be uncovered. The records were further complicated by so many foreign nationals coming to work or study in Scotland for relatively short periods of time, some of them slipping through the bureaucratic net that struggled to contain them all. Who were they, these two young women whose decomposed bodies now lay in Glasgow City Mortuary? The forensic pathologists were working their socks off trying to find identification that could match up with a woman whose relatives were anxious to find her. The third victim was, like the others, a young female, possibly around eighteen to twenty, maybe even younger. Each girl had been strangled and there were signs of compression on their rib cages, showing a similar MO. Not only that, but the way each grave had been dug indicated that it had been done by the same perpetrator. What was left of the latest body’s clothing was now undergoing intensive forensic examination and Lorimer fervently hoped that there would be something that would show who she had been and where she had come from.

His team’s actions today included a search of Eric Chalmers’ home and car as well as interviewing the close relatives and friends of the Donaldson family. Multiple killers were sometimes known to their victims and if Lorimer could find a link between anyone in Julie’s circle and these other murders, then this case could really be pushed forward. Meantime, Solly Brightman was looking for the type of criminal mind behind these acts of murder. Lorimer could only hope that the psychologist might come up with a profile that fitted someone who was already within the net he had cast around this area of Glasgow.

‘Do you realise just how much this is all costing us?’ Mitchison’s voice rose in a crescendo of disbelief, waving the figures for the ongoing case as close to Lorimer’s nose as he could. ‘Profilers don’t come cheap these days, you know.’