Alex Gray - Sleep like the dead

As soon as he saw her tense white face Lorimer knew something was wrong.

'Hey. What's happened?' He was at her side in two long strides, arms around her shoulders as Maggie began to weep silently.

A pot of tea and several man-sized Kleenex tissues were required before Maggie could explain her health problem.

'You have to do what you think is right for you, love,' Lorimer told her gently, stroking her hair back from the tear-stained cheeks. 'You know we'd given up any notion of a family,' he added quietly.

Maggie nodded and blew her nose again. Th-huh,' she gulped.

'I know. It's just…' Her voice disappeared in another swell of emotion and Lorimer held his wife close to his chest, patting her back, noting the irony as he did: it was a gesture a father might make to comfort a child.

'With Rosie… and everything… it's hard,' she sniffled.

'It'll always be hard, love. Other people's bairns will be like the gifts we've been denied. But we've got a lot to be thankful for, haven't we?' Lorimer turned her face to his, searching her eyes for answer.

A tremulous smile and a nod gave him what he'd wanted. They had one another. Okay, there had been periods of difficulty caused mainly by his work, but they'd weathered such storms and were still together, stronger for those times, Lorimer believed.

'What did the consultant say?' he asked eventually and Maggie told him, haltingly at first then with growing confidence as she began to see that her decision was the right one.

'No date yet, then?'

'Possibly just before the October break,' Maggie said. 'Mr Austen goes on holiday then and wants me done before that.' She giggled a little at her choice of words. 'Says I'll be off school for about three months, depending on what he finds inside.'

'So, a break till the end of the year? Manson won't like losing his favourite member of staff, will he?' Lorimer replied, referring to Maggie's head teacher.

'Plenty of teachers on the supply list,' she told him. 'He'll have no bother replacing me for a while. And I can visit Rosie and her new baby when it arrives,' she said, looking past her husband at a point in the distance.

Lorimer followed her glance but there was no indication what, if anything, his wife was seeing.

The wee small hours of the morning found Lorimer awake, his arm around a sleeping Maggie, her drowsy body curled into his side. Thoughts of her impending surgery had been supplanted by other notions. Sometimes in the cold hours before dawn his mind was suddenly alert, full of ideas. What had happened in the days before Ken Scott had been gunned down? That he had been stalking his ex-wife seemed almost definite, Lorimer reasoned, given the host of photos taken in the streets of Glasgow. A chilling thought had taken hold of the detective and he drew back slightly from his sleeping wife as though the very idea might contaminate her.

Stalkers had been known to become so obsessed by their victims that they eventually killed them. Nobody but the crazed killer knew just what took place on such occasions but psychologists and police officers had attempted to piece together the likely steps that had led to the stalker finally descending into that ultimate violence. Memories of high profile cases flooded back to him now; women who had been the object of someone's fantasy and desire and whose rebuffs had led to their slaughter.

Is that what had happened to Marianne Scott? Had she been killed by her ex-husband, a seemingly mild-mannered man who had given little indication of his obsession to those who claimed to know him best?

Marianne Scott was certainly missing and in Lorimer's experience that could mean one of two things. Either she was playing a very clever game at deliberately disappearing or she was dead, her body concealed somewhere. Now, as the grey light crept into his bedroom, Lorimer felt certain that the woman had been murdered.

It made sense of Scott's killing: could it have been an act of revenge for taking his ex-wife's life? Brogan might well have undertaken a hit against his former brother-in-law if he had any reason to believe the man had killed his sister. He'd had her picture in his flat, a sign of his fondness for her, surely? The man wasn't just a known drug dealer. He was ex-army, undoubtedly with contacts in the underworld where guns were readily available for the right money.

As he rolled onto his other side, Lorimer became more and more convinced that his theory would stand up in the light of day.

Why had Brogan done a runner? He grinned to himself. Maybe they'd find out today. The Spanish police might even have the man in their custody by now, he thought. And once they had Brogan extradited back home he might supply answers to all of these questions.

As the night clouds rolled away and a thin line of scarlet bled onto the horizon, Billy Brogan groaned with relief. Only half a day more and they would be free of this tumbling sea and the endless heave and swell that had turned his stomach inside out. He shivered, rubbing his arms in a vain attempt at making them warm again. He'd been awake most of the night, only dozing fitfully on the bench by the window. Carlos had thrown a blanket over him some time during the night and he had heard voices, speaking in Spanish, as he'd drifted in and out of sleep. Now, fully awake, Brogan knew that there were two men on board, not just the old man. It made sense, he supposed. Carlos had to rest some time during this voyage and he'd taken one of his crew with him. The Spaniard had never said they were sailing alone, had he? The other guy must have been down below when Billy had set foot on board the boat, doing whatever sailors did. But it had been done in a furtive sort of way that made Brogan uneasy. Why had Carlos not simply introduced the other man when he'd stepped down the gangway? Brogan tried not to let his ideas go any further. He was at the mercy of these Spanish seamen and sitting tight and not asking any questions until they had completed the journey was probably for the best.

Another massive wave made the boat rise high in the air and descend with a crash, sea spray flying past the window where Brogan was clutching the edge of his seat. All he could think about was his present condition; the bucket on the floor beside him skittering away from his hand as he reached out to grab it.

Whatever was going on up on deck or in the wheelhouse wasn't his affair. So long as the sun continued to rise and the boat was heading for land, that was all he cared about right now

F'ax from the Spanish police, sir,' the duty officer handed a sheet of paper to Lorimer as he walked along the corridor to his office. 'No sign of Brogan. He didn't return to his hotel room last night. And he wasn't on any of the flights leaving Palma yesterday.'

Lorimer nodded and took the fax into his room. Brogan would still be somewhere in Mallorca, then. And shouldn't be too hard to locate. The fax added that no hire car had been taken out in his name. And he'd have needed a valid driving licence for that, wouldn't he? Lorimer wasn't too worried. The local police would pick him up pretty soon, he reckoned. It was an island, after all, with few places for a Glasgow drug dealer to hide. Then a frown crossed Lorimer's face. They'd had that tip-off from this end. Did that mean Brogan had friends in Mallorca? But why check into a hotel if that were the case? No. The caller had mentioned that Brogan had been spotted by someone from back home. That had been unlucky for the drug dealer. And Lorimer hoped that was a sign that Brogan's luck was rapidly running out.

Meantime he had a pile of paperwork that would take most of the morning to sift through. He was quietly confident that by midday they'd have had news of Brogan's arrest.

But there was something else he wanted to do first. Opening up his laptop, he composed the message in his head. It wasn't anything official, nor something that could be seen as contravening the present command about using the services of a psychological profiler. It was just a friendly enquiry from his personal address, Lorimer reasoned, as he typed in the email for Doctor Solomon Brightman.