Alex Gray - Five ways to kill a man

With a sigh, she placed the Valentine’s card on top of the filing cabinet where she would be sure to see it the moment she returned from court.

No Valentine’s cards for me today. Not that I expected any. Once there had been a little flurry of them and that had been amusing for a time. This omission wasn’t something to worry me, though. My mind was occupied with far loftier things than teenage fantasies. School kids might be biting their nails, anxiously waiting for the bell to ring so they could rush home and see what the postman had left. In my day the mail had arrived before breakfast. Now it could be delivered at any old time at all; another thing that irked me about this changing world where outside forces determined parts of my existence.

That was why I could breathe easily in the knowledge that what I was going to put into motion would never rebound upon me. I would have it planned to the last detail just as I had planned every one of the other deaths. Nothing would be left to chance.

And, besides, who was going to suspect someone like me?

Jean Wilson loved crime. It was her favourite section in the local library and the assistant always gave her the nod whenever a new title came in. Not real-life crime, though she had dipped a tentative toe into those murky waters. No, for Jean the crime stories of folk like Ian Rankin and Val McDermid were her abiding passion. She was on her way to the library now. The writers’ group had focused on romance today, of course, since it was February fourteenth. She’d tried to pen a wee thing to read out, but had given up and crumpled it into her bin. Others had managed fine: lovely poems that made Jean sigh. Such talent among her friends down at the community centre! Every week she walked from her home to the writing group, nodding a greeting to the old folk who were downstairs at the elderly forum, a club where the seniors of the district could be entertained by visiting singers and other folk. The old folk, she called them, but most were in fact a deal younger than herself. At eighty-one, Jean was the oldest member of the writing group that met upstairs in the community education room but nobody knew that little fact since she chose to keep her age to herself.

It was a windy day today and the clouds were racing across a sky whose weak winter sun managed only a faint appearance from time to time behind a mass of leaden grey cumulus. Jean paused for a moment before she crossed the road. She needed more second-class stamps to send off the articles she had finished for those magazines. Looking left and right, she crossed over to the post office, noticing as she did so the now-familiar figure of the hooded cyclist.

Jean grinned to herself. She’d seen him every week and had woven him into a story in her imagination. Not that she’d actually written it yet but it was there, percolating away inside her head. He had managed to find his way into her diary, however. Jean always wrote a few sentences last thing at night, just to record the day’s events and, given that most were fairly humdrum, she added details of anything that seemed unusual just to spice things up. So the mysterious cyclist had been given some lines already.

The rain had begun to spit and there was a rumble of thunder as Jean came back out of the post office. She struggled with her black umbrella, the wind catching it and threatening to turn it inside out. As she made her way along to the corner of the street and the library, Jean saw him again. He was standing across the road and she could swear that he was watching her from under that dark hood of his. Shivering, the old woman hauled herself up the steps, glad of the automatic doors swinging outward to welcome her. Once inside the warmth of the library, Jean left all thoughts of the cyclist behind. Overactive imagination, she told herself, her eyes already feasting on the rows of novels under the heading CRIME.

Once out in the rain again, the old lady was buffeted along by the driving wind, holding on to her bag and umbrella so hard that she was unable to see the dark figure following her from a distance. Nor did she hear the swish of bicycle tyres on the wet road as the traffic splashed puddles of rainwater towards the pavements and the thunder grew louder. A flash of lightning made her hurry along the street; it wouldn’t do to be caught out with her brolly held aloft. You heard such awful things about men being struck by lightning on the golf course and places like that.

It was a relief to be home again. Jean shut the door and pulled the chain across, glad to shut out the miserable afternoon. She took off her wet coat, hanging it on the hook on the wall, deciding to change her shoes later. First she needed warmth and light. She’d switch on the lamps in the sitting room, plug in her electric fire then make a nice cup of tea before settling down with that new writer they’d recommended at the library. Jean groaned, the aches in her body a potent reminder of her eighty-one-year-old bones.

The old lady was filling her kettle when she heard the scuffling sound at her back door. Was it some animal? Jean stopped and listened. The scuffling sound continued and she set the kettle down beside the sink and headed towards the source of the noise.

The door was whipped out of her grasp as soon as she opened it and for an instant she thought it must be the wind.

Then she saw the figure standing there, an arm raised above its head.

Jean’s scream was lost in the sudden crash of thunder and, as the ground came up to meet her, she knew with a certainty that she was going to die.

Acting Detective Superintendent Lorimer frowned as he pored over the witness statements. At first glance the file was fine, nothing to worry anybody. But it was the lack of detailed information missing from these pages that gave him pause for thought. Dodgson’s own report had triggered off the initial visits to nearby properties (Lorimer noted the word properties: not neighbours or even neighbouring houses. Kilmacolm was famous for its huge mansions that, even during the years of financial uncertainty, had commanded millions on the open market.) It had been during the night that the fire had been started and the pattern of statements from those living within a mile or so of the Jacksons had been depressingly predictable. Nobody had seen anything that could have helped the police. Not until the fire service had made its noisy way along the drive had anyone even awoken to hear what was going on. Then, Lorimer read, the fire could be seen over the treetops, an open window giving the sounds of crackling mixed with the sirens screaming to a rescue that never happened. No dog walkers wandering past the drive, no night-time shift workers passing by, no sign of a car full of carousing louts fleeing the scene.

Yet that was exactly what had been suggested: the fire had been started by a bad crowd from down the hill in Port Glasgow. Okay, there had been a spate of burglaries a year or so previously and a local lad had been nabbed for them. So what? Fire-raising hadn’t been in that thief’s case history. It was simply the old story of guilt by association. Someone from the port had been sentenced for crimes against the good decent folk of Kilmacolm and so the finger was pointed at them (whoever they were, and why don’t the police investigate them?) He could almost hear the indignation in the voices of the outraged neighbours. And who could blame them? After all, the tragedy must have shocked local people. But these witness statements (if he could deign to call them that) were hardly more than a collection of opinions based on nothing more than anger and fear. The local crime prevention lads had been particularly busy in the week following the fire, Lorimer knew. And he would bet that the sale of electric gates and other security devices had rocketed in the wake of the Jacksons’ deaths.