Alex Gray - Glasgow Kiss

Slipping all three photographs into his wallet, Lorimer walked out of the room to join Irvine in the search for a laptop. If they found one, it could be a big help. He had a sense that some of the pieces in this jigsaw were beginning to fall into place. But right now they needed more clues about the missing man and where he could have gone.

I t was never quiet here, but that was all right. The rumbling from the Glasgow Underground like subterranean thunder reminded him that there were others, like him, deep below the surface of things, travelling into the night.

It was always night here, the constant darkness a cloak to protect him from prying eyes. Sometimes the scutter of tiny feet would alert him to the rats whose habitat he shared, but they didn’t bother him and he had no reason to go after them. The tunnel bent away from the daylight after only a few yards, any residual light fading from the slime-covered walls and plunging into a blackness that was thick with soot. Deep within this place, the earth smelled cold and lifeless; denied the essential light, nothing here could grow, not even an etiolated weed searching through a crack in the bricks.

He was safe. A sigh broke from his chest and he leaned his back against the tunnel wall, reassured to feel its solid surface. In a few minutes he would walk deeper into the tunnel until he came to his secret place, but for now simply being here away from the brightness of the day was enough. Besides, what was happening out there in the world no longer mattered to him.

Except, a little voice told him, that elusive girl, the one whose lovely eyes haunted his dreams. The one that he still had to find.

Kyle took the paper in his hand, eyes following the lines of printing, lips parted in concentration. Then he looked up. ‘It’s right enough then?’

The registrar’s clerk nodded her head, folding her arms across a minuscule bosom in a gesture that still managed to express disapproval.

Kyle turned away. ‘Right. Thanks.’

As he walked away from the imposing building there was so much more that he wished people could say, like he’s been a father figure to you or he’s been the one who brought you up, looked after you , but he would never hear anyone utter phrases like that, especially when they were so blatantly untrue. Tam Kerrigan was a thug and a brute. His constant denial of parental care towards Kyle didn’t even give him the right to be called his father, despite the fact that the charade had been played out over fifteen years.

‘Wonder who he is?’ the boy muttered, looking down at the words ‘Father unknown’.

Kyle nodded to himself. Was there someone he could ask? Gran, maybe? And what would he do now, move back in with her? Probably. But there was something else he would have to do first.

‘We do have their permission,’ Solly told him. ‘Unusual, I’ll admit, given the patient confidentiality that normally surrounds these cases, but I managed to persuade them that there were sufficient grounds for releasing his entire file.’ He coughed and gave a little smile. ‘Actually it turns out that I know Russell’s psychiatrist. Gave him some help when he was researching a book,’ Solly added.

Lorimer was sitting beside the psychologist in his West End home, the evening sun pouring through the huge bay windows that looked down over the city. Solly had been busy, it seemed, since they had found Russell’s out-of-date appointment card tucked away in a bedside drawer.

‘Adam Russell has been attending this particular psychiatrist as an outpatient for several years,’ he told Lorimer. ‘He was first treated the year after dropping out of university.’ He turned to look into the detective’s sharp blue eyes as he paused. ‘The same year that both his parents died.’

‘Ah.’ Lorimer’s eyebrows rose as he digested the significance of that statement. ‘Do we know what happened to them?’

‘According to the notes, the Russells were both alcoholics. He’d been treated for depression and she had a heart condition,’ Solly said. ‘They were found dead in their car somewhere down the Ayrshire coast. Let me see.’ He frowned, turning over a page in the document he had laid upon his lap. ‘Yes. Outside a town called Ard-rossan.’

‘Ardrossan,’ Lorimer said, automatically correcting Solly’s pronunciation of the word.

‘The verdict was suicide. They’d both inhaled carbon monoxide. Hellish thing to lose both your parents like that,’ he added thoughtfully.

‘Are you saying that was what tipped Russell over the edge? Living with two confirmed alcoholics can’t have been easy. Maybe the strain of it all got to him eventually.’

‘Or perhaps he had a biological predisposition to self-destruction,’ Solly sighed. ‘That’s one of the theories attached to his earlier notes. There was some evidence of self-harming after his first stint as a patient.’ He frowned. ‘My friend confided in me that he’d been a bit suspicious of the patient’s motivation. Wasn’t at all convinced he was the genuine article. Might have been faking it, he said. But that was never actually written down in the notes.’

‘How did his referral to a psychiatrist come about?’

Solly shrugged. ‘No record of that, I’m afraid. We’d have to find his original GP and ask.’

Lorimer took the file from Solly. The police had been given only the rudimentary facts on Adam Russell on a need-to-know basis but now that Solomon Brightman had managed to winkle out the man’s entire case history they had much, much more to go on. DC Irvine had discovered the laptop shoved under Russell’s bed, its tangle of wires concealed under a dusty sheet. Back in HQ all its secrets would soon be revealed. But now he had to read the history of a man who was out there in the city somewhere, a man who might well be guilty of much more than stalking an attractive teenage girl.

Eric was praying. The room was still warm from the late afternoon sun and there was a rosy glow washing the cream-painted walls of the nursery. He’d chosen to come up here as a way of being closer to Ruth and Ashleigh and now he was kneeling beside the nursing chair where mother and baby had spent long hours together. Sometimes Eric had come upon them quietly, lingering in the doorway as Ruth sang to her tiny daughter, rocking the chair back and forth, a pang of wonder in his heart that these two people were his family. He’d stand still, listening, before slipping away undetected, leaving them to those special moments that seemed to enclose them in a little world of their own.

His prayers were for them, of course, and for all helpless creatures that needed the Lord’s protection, a list that went on for so long that sometimes Eric felt a kind of despair at this world with all its ills and troubles. But tonight he must not weaken. He must be strong for what lay ahead.

She’d come home late from school, wearied by classes who had decided to act up all afternoon. Sometimes, Maggie thought, it was a conspiracy they all hatched during lunchhour to be as bad as they possibly could. Or, then again, maybe it was simply too many E-numbers wreaking havoc with young systems already full of swirling hormones. Whatever the reason, she was tired and had wanted nothing more than to run a bath and soak away the day’s irritations.

Chancer had rubbed himself all over her ankles, almost tripping her up until she’d emptied some food into his supper bowl. Now he was washing his orange fur, perched daintily on the edge of the bath, seemingly impervious to the steam that rose from the water’s surface. Lying back into the warmth, Maggie sighed. Jessica had gone to stay with Manda and her parents so that was one less thing to worry about. The day’s events slowly disappeared as she let her thoughts drift.