Alex Gray - Five ways to kill a man

For a moment the female police officer excused herself and Gary’s eyes wandered over the room. Mum’s coffee table with its lace cover, a new pile of library books, her laptop over there on the desk with some papers to one side. Gary set down the mug on the carpet, his fingers brushing against a hard, leather-covered book. Bending over, he saw what it was. Mum’s diary. It was almost a standing joke that Mum could tell you what the weather had been like years back, since she’d kept her diary for as long as he could remember. Carefully, almost reverently, Gary Wilson lifted the little book and opened it.

There was no entry for February fourteenth. Saint Valentine’s Day, Gary thought with a pang. What a day to die! Now it would be forever associated with Mum’s passing. Drawing the diary towards him, Gary began reading the last entry. Then the one before that. Leaning forward, he skimmed over the pages, his eyes widening as he read his mother’s words.

The family liaison officer came into the sitting room, another mug of tea in her hand. Gary Wilson looked up at her and held the diary aloft.

‘I think someone better have a look at this,’ he told her.

‘She wasn’t a frail old lady,’ Gary Wilson insisted. ‘Ask anyone. She was old, aye, and had rheumatism, but she got around just fine. I don’t think this was an accident,’ he said, his mouth closing in a firm line.

DI Martin sat beside the man, his mother’s diary in her hand. She’d read the entries but she’d also seen other books lying on top of the coffee table. The old lady was into crime, it seemed. The made-up sort. And she was a member of a writers’ workshop. So did these diary entries bear any resemblance to facts or were they, too, a bit of fanciful fiction?

As if reading Rhoda’s thoughts, Gary Wilson turned sideways in his chair to face her. ‘Mum’s diaries were totally factual,’ he said. ‘We always knew what had happened on a day-to-day basis. You could depend on her diary.’ He smiled a little, his eyes looking into the distance as if remembering. ‘If you wanted to know what happened on any given day a couple of years back, Mum’s diaries would tell you. She even kept a note of what we had for Christmas dinner.’

‘So this cyclist…?’

‘Was real,’ Gary told her, his fist thumping the arm of the chair. ‘She made stuff up for the writers’ group, but it was mostly articles she wrote. And sold,’ he added, the tinge of pride unmistakable in his voice. ‘She wouldn’t invent this man, whoever he was.’

DI Martin nodded. It did look as if the old lady had been stalked. The mentions of the cyclist and the old lady’s additional observations were pretty clear. A hooded man, riding so slowly I thought he might fall off that fancy bike of his, Jean Wilson had written. Back again, today, she’d put in another entry. Is he following me??? In all, the cyclist had been mentioned five times, too many for it to have been a mere coincidence, a fact that the victim had also been shrewd enough to set down in her final entry.

‘We’ll certainly follow this up, Mr Wilson,’ DI Martin assured him. ‘But we also have to wait for other evidence like the pathologist’s report and the forensic reports.’

‘They take time to come through, you see,’ the family liaison officer added as gently as she could.

Gary Wilson looked from one woman to the other. Did they believe him when he’d insisted that this was no accident? Or was it just a bit convenient that Mum had been an old lady of eighty-one out on her back steps in a thunderstorm? He shook his head, a cynical expression hardening around his eyes. They weren’t going to bother, were they? All this talk of forensics was just to placate him. Wasn’t it?

Maggie Lorimer sank into her favourite armchair. A wee cup of coffee and a bit of caramel shortcake from the school charity’s tuckshop and she’d be as right as rain. With a purr, Chancer, her orange cat, jumped lightly on to her knee. Maggie stroked his fur, noting how wet his tail was. Had he been caught out in the storm too? The walk to the staff car park had soaked her almost to the bone, the wind whipping the hailstones against her as she’d struggled to her car, opening the back door and shoving in her bags full of Higher prelim papers. With a wry smile Maggie recalled one head teacher she’d taught with years ago who had opened his car door on a windy day and let loose all the department’s Fifth year exam papers to a west coast gale. Every one of her colleagues had suspected the man had done it deliberately, his wide smile showing only glee that he hadn’t marked them before they’d taken off towards the Arran hills.

She’d have to find time later on to mark these, though. Once she’d seen how Mum was today. It was Valentine’s Day and the First years had had a great time with versifying. (Maggie couldn’t bring herself to call it poetry.) The whole school had been tingling with an atmosphere of excitement, her Fourth years gossiping and giggling behind their hands. And tomorrow would be just as bad once they’d gone home to see what their postmen had delivered. She’d neither written a card nor expected to receive one. She and Bill weren’t like that, though he’d given her red roses on the occasions when he remembered their wedding anniversary.

Kicking off her damp shoes, Maggie curled up on the chair, disturbing Chancer who protested by pushing his claws into her lap. This was the time of day she valued most. A little respite from the noise of the kids and the ringing of interminable bells before she set about making an evening meal was as welcome to Maggie Lorimer as the whisky nightcap her husband often enjoyed at the end of his day. It was funny, she thought, how this secondment had given her more of his time. Away down the coast in Greenock, he seemed to be keeping regular hours instead of the endless working days that solving crimes often demanded. Lorimer hadn’t said much about this job and Maggie was sensible enough not to push it, but he didn’t seem altogether contented about being in this promoted post.

‘Not a happy lad, is he, Chancer?’ Maggie said, stroking the cat’s fur. Possibly it was because of Colin Ray’s bereavement. And he had hinted that nobody really enjoyed a new face from a different division telling them they’d got a case all wrong. Still, there was that nice girl, Kate something, who’d remembered him from way back. Married now and pregnant, Maggie told herself, recalling her husband’s words. Lucky woman, she thought. Her own future didn’t include the patter of tiny feet and she was probably destined to be one of those teachers who became more and more out of touch with the kids, simply because she had none of her own to tell her what was hip and what wasn’t. God knows, it wasn’t from choice, or from trying, that they had no children. Suffering several miscarriages had proved that, all right. But they were resigned to the fact that she couldn’t carry a child to full term and Maggie had learned to be reasonably content with their lot.

‘You’re my baby, aren’t you, Chancer?’ she crooned, smiling at herself for being so daft. The cat purred under the motion of her fingers and Maggie sighed again. Och, it wasn’t too bad. And anyway, if she’d had kids how would she have coped right now with Mum in hospital?

Maggie remembered her mother’s expression on that half-frozen face, appealing and sad at the same time; she was the responsible adult now and her mum was the vulnerable one. Thank God she’d managed to get her out of that awful ward and into a nicer one. ‘If you don’t ask, you won’t get,’ she’d told her Mum. It was a mantra she seemed to be using a lot these days. And it had been working. The hospital staff really did seem to have taken her mother’s care to heart. Maggie believed she could see a real improvement in her condition. That was good news, of course, but what was going to happen next? Would the hospital expect Maggie and Bill to take Mum home and care for her here? Part of her longed for the chance to show her filial duty, but another part dreaded the very idea. Perhaps they’d been on their own too long, used to one another’s ways and maintaining a sort of independence within their marriage. If so, would her mother’s arrival change all of that? Hating herself for the thought, Maggie finished her coffee, brushed crumbs from her jumper and swept the cat off her knee. Mum was welcome here any time, she told herself. They’d just need to make adjustments; that was all.