Alex Gray - Five ways to kill a man

Kate Clark flopped on to her side. It had been a good day, the baby kicking strongly, reminding her of his imminent arrival. A wee boy, they’d seen him at the time of her scan. Not sure what to call him yet, but Gregor was at the top of her own list of favourites. Funny case today, though, she mused, remembering DI Martin’s report to them all. It seemed that the old lady had slipped down a flight of steps at her back door. Killed instantly when her head struck the concrete, so the doctor reckoned. But Kate Clark wasn’t so sure. It reminded her far too much of that other accident a couple of months back, just along the road in Port Glasgow. Wee woman who’d been killed on Boxing Day. At her back door. Down a flight of steps. Coincidence? Or not? Kate rolled on to her back. She remembered something that Lorimer had said way back in her training days about coincidences. He didn’t believe in them. Said they were one of the first signs of a pattern, or something like that. Kate yawned. He was right enough. Just look at the HOLMES database. They were forever trawling through that to look for precedents in cases of serious crime.

What had that other old lady’s name been? Kate couldn’t remember. And she wasn’t going to task her brain with this right now when she’d been sent upstairs by her husband for a rest. His way of celebrating Valentine’s Day had been to give Kate a break from making dinner. She’d sleep on it. Tomorrow she’d look up the old case file and see if Lorimer was right. About not believing in coincidences.

‘It’s so nearly the same MO,’ Kate insisted. ‘Look at it. Almost in the same street as Mary MacKintyre as well.’

DI Martin rolled her eyes. ‘It’s only an MO if there’s any reason to believe the women were deliberately murdered,’ she told Kate.

Aye but, Lorimer… Kate had almost said the words aloud when she bit them back. There was a feeling of tension between the DI and the review Detective Super that she had sensed. Whenever she spoke Lorimer’s name in front of Rhoda Martin it was like she was walking on eggshells.

‘I just think it’s too much of a coincidence, that’s all,’ Kate said mulishly. ‘And the son is so sure about his mum’s death, isn’t he?’ she continued.

‘Okay, I’ll have a look at the other death. See if there had been a mysterious cyclist following that old lady.’ DI Martin’s voice came out as a sneer and Kate stepped back, face red.

But at least the DI was taking it kind of seriously, Kate told herself, wasn’t she? For two pins she would have walked into Lorimer’s room and run it past him, but a sense of loyalty to her fellow officers stopped her. Handing him the odd cuppa was one thing but seeking out his opinion on an ongoing case that had nothing to do with him was surely not on. No, if there was really any link between the deaths of these old ladies, Kate Clark might well have to dig around to find it for herself.

Mary MacKintyre’s death had taken place on the night of Boxing Day last year. Eighty-seven years old and not in the best of health, she’d fallen down her back steps and been killed instantly. There had been no reason whatsoever to suspect anything malicious about the death. But now, with another elderly woman falling to her death just two streets away, Kate was beginning to have doubts. The houses were almost identical, too. They’d been built in the seventies by a housing association that had won awards for good architectural design. Rows of nice split-level terraced houses overlooking woods on one side and the older council houses of Upper Port Glasgow on the other, they’d been popular with families wishing to rent. Now most of that housing stock had been bought up and only a few residents still paid their rent to the Housing Association.

Both of these two elderly ladies had been living there from the time the first houses had been let, probably much fitter then to cope with the steep steps down to their neat patches of garden. And they had chosen to remain in a three-bedroom house after each of their families had left the nest. Kate’s mouth gave a twist. Her own granny was in a great wee sheltered place down in Greenock where a warden looked in every day to see that her charges were okay. Mind you, she remembered her mum and dad having to do a lot of sweet talking to get her in there. But now she loved it. Perhaps these old ladies had been the same: reluctant to leave their homes.

DC Clark sat back, a sudden kick in her abdomen taking her breath away. A new wee life was in there, demanding her attention. But somehow she felt strongly drawn to the notion of death; those two old ladies who had perished just yards from their own back doors seemed suddenly more real to her than her unborn son. Lorimer had suggested a friendly drink. Maybe it was time to take him up on that. It couldn’t do any harm to tell him what she was thinking once they were off duty, could it?

Sir Ian Jackson and Lady Pauline were two intriguing characters, Lorimer thought, tapping his foot absently against the side of the desk. He’d been a boy from the Port, she an upper class lassie from Kilmacolm — that much he knew through the station gossip. Wonder how they met? he asked himself softly. It was one of those mysteries that would probably never come to light. Not his business. But it was his business to make sense of how they had died and sometimes it paid dividends to find out how a victim had lived. Especially if their deaths had any whiff of violence or malice. Why would anyone torch that big house and leave its occupants to burn? Sir Ian had been the poor boy who’d done good, as the ungrammatical saying went. And it was apt, wasn’t it? The man had lacked his wife’s polish but had made up for it with his apparent skills in making money. Lots and lots of money. The beginnings of Jackson’s career were a bit hazy and that was where he’d gained his reputation as a wheeler-dealer. But the man had no police record. Good at ducking and diving, some might say. But was that cynicism and Schadenfreude speaking? It was an unattractive Scottish trait of envious longing that sought to bring a successful and wealthy person down to disgrace and serve them right anyway. And sometimes it muddied the waters when a true opinion was sought about folk way up the social scale. Like now.

Maybe Sir Ian had been as pure as the driven snow. A good man who’d worked hard to achieve his millions. Multi-millions, a wee voice corrected Lorimer. But if that had been the case, who’d have wanted him dead? Years of experience had taught the Detective Superintendent that certain victims were never completely innocent when it came to a deliberate killing. There was always a something, as his old man had been fond of saying. And right now Lorimer was keen to find out what that something was. DI Martin might supply a little background knowledge, but then, if she really knew the family well, surely she would have made some sort of contribution before now? Okay, she’d been at that private school with the children, but ‘moving in the same social circles’ hadn’t exactly rung true. Rhoda Martin had merely been trying to impress him that she’d come from a similar wealthy background, Lorimer told himself, that was all. Had she been a real friend of Serena and Daniel she would have had to put such information into a written report.

Like many men of vast wealth, Jackson had donated generously to charity, hence his knighthood. And that had certainly gained him respect. The few personal testimonials contained within the file were all warm in their praise of the man. But, Lorimer told himself with a bitter twist to his mouth, wasn’t that the norm after someone had been killed? Nobody wanted to bad-mouth a victim. It was just too much like stepping across an unseen boundary between right and wrong, tempting a primeval sense of fate. No, to find out the truth about Ian Jackson, he’d have to ask those who had known him well and who weren’t afraid to give a real portrait, warts and all. And who better than his own children?