Alex Gray - Five ways to kill a man

It was another sort of death, wasn’t it? A different way to kill a man. This might even finish his police career. Or destroy his marriage.

Smiling to myself, I stripped off the leather gloves then the layer of latex below, feeling the sweat lingering on my fingers. It didn’t pay to be careless, even though nobody would ever suspect someone like me.

As I opened the car door I felt a rush of cool air. I would have to leave the Golf parked down in this concrete basement at least until nightfall. Then what? A sudden memory came to me of laughter and faces illuminated by firelight, the rush of excitement as the petrol tank had roared and the flames had soared into the darkened sky. Yes, I decided. That’s how I would do it; only I would be by myself this time.

With nobody to see me.

‘ Hello? Mr Lorimer? It’s Serena Jackson here. You asked me to call you.’

Lorimer’s voicemail recorded the woman’s husky tones then there was a pause before a click sounded, cutting the connection to the line in the detective’s empty room.

Lorimer was on his way home. Greenock could bloody well wait for his services for the rest of today. Being with Maggie was far more important than tyre treads or exploring some tenuous links between two different murder cases. The Lexus sped along the outside lane, the river to the left sparkling in the midday sunlight. But for once the detective was oblivious to the landscape around him, focusing only on the road ahead and what was waiting for him at home. There was only so much he could achieve from a distance. The south side force had put everything they could into motion and he’d been relieved to hear the report of what was happening. He glanced at his mobile phone slotted into its cradle. At the first ring he’d be able to click it into life and listen. Okay, so he could have done just that from K Division but right now he needed to be with Maggie.

DS Wainwright was officially in charge of things down in Greenock today. At least until Martin deigned to turn up for duty. He’d not shown much sympathy when Lorimer had decided to cut and run. Wish I could make my mother-in-law disappear, he’d said. But the joke had fallen flat and he didn’t want to think about what the officer had made of his responding scowl. He thought instead of the blonde woman, her moods vaccilating between over-friendliness and cool disdain. She was an odd one, right enough. With her privileged background and expensive education, she was not the average sort of entrant to the police force. But, he reasoned, such a person was surely all the more welcome into the Force. They needed a police service that reflected a good social mix. His thoughts drifted to the Chief Constable. He’d become a resident of Kilmacolm, too. And was highly regarded amongst his very wealthy neighbours. Isherwood had been quite defensive about his home village, hadn’t he? Warning off DCI Ray in the way he had and giving Lorimer that flea in his ear as well.

As the road took him towards Glasgow, Lorimer realised that he had absolutely no qualms about walking out on the situation in Greenock. They could demote him for all he cared. Everything else about this peculiar Monday was put to the back of his mind as he concentrated on what was happening in his own house in that quiet little residential street.

‘Solly? Have you time to talk right now?’

The psychologist heard the catch in Maggie Lorimer’s voice and listened as his friend poured out her story. She could not see the grave expression on his face or the way he nodded as she related the events of the morning.

‘Solly, I think someone’s taken her,’ Maggie was sobbing now and he felt an overwhelming pity for the woman. ‘I think she’s been abducted.’

Even as he tried to calm her down with soothing platitudes, Solly’s thoughts were racing.

Was this related to Lorimer’s involvement in one of those cases down in Inverclyde? As he took in all that Maggie was telling him about Mrs Finlay’s disappearance and what the police had already carried out in the hours since she had left the house, Solly began to wonder. Was this directed at William Lorimer, the senior investigating officer? Could it be a diversionary tactic to keep him from penetrating deeper into the murders? Or was it something more personal?

There was something wrong here, he told himself, something very wrong. And with a deep sense of foreboding, Dr Brightman realised that if Maggie’s mother had indeed been abducted then it was very much in keeping with the sort of person whose profile was emerging in his own mind.

As he put down the phone, the psychologist stroked his beard thoughtfully. Should he doubt his instincts? Or was he so currently obsessed by his research into female serial killers that his feelings were being warped? Poison was a woman’s weapon of choice, so said the old adage, but that was simply a way of expressing a deeper truth. Women were less inclined to be hands-on killers, preferring their victims to die off-scene, as it were. Like burning people to death in a fire. Or pushing old women down a flight of stone stairs.

Try as he might, Solly Brightman was more than ever convinced that there was a woman behind those killings in Kilmacolm and Port Glasgow. And that this same person might have inveigled their way into the Lorimers’ home. After all, Mrs Finlay might be far less suspicious of a woman coming to the door. Hadn’t she been expecting a health professional, most probably a female? It would be too easy, Solly thought to himself. Too easy by far.

Lifting the telephone again, he dialled Lorimer’s mobile number.

He was almost at Eastwood roundabout when the phone rang.

‘Lorimer.’ Surely it would be news of Alice?

But it was Solly’s English tones that came over the airwaves, not an officer from Glasgow, not Maggie with the words he was longing to hear.

‘I heard about your mother-in-law,’ Solly told him. ‘It’s a terrible thing to have happened.’

‘Christ knows what’s going on,’ Lorimer told him. ‘It’s been a hell of a morning as well. My DC gave birth this morning, earlier than she expected, poor girl. And DI Martin’s not turned up for her shift. Nobody seems to know where the hell she is,’ he added, venting his pent-up anger at the psychologist. ‘Goes out to a posh party at the Jackson woman’s house and then doesn’t show her face come Monday morning.’

There was the customary pause in the conversation that Lorimer was well used to and he had almost forgotten that Solly was on the line when the question was asked.

‘Is your DI Martin a cyclist by any chance?’

‘Yes, she is. Training for that charity race next weekend. The whole bloody world seems to be on their bikes right now. Hugh Tannock’s a member of a cycle club and so are the Jacksons; Serena and Daniel. Too many of them. It’s muddying the waters, if you want to know the truth.’

Solly felt a sudden chill that was nothing to do with Lorimer’s obvious anxiety. All his fears seem to have become crystallised into one dreadful pattern.

Even as he asked Lorimer to keep him informed about Alice Finlay, he was recalling his wife’s descriptions of the two young women, the police officer and the girl whose parents had perished so horribly in that fire.

And he knew now which one he would identify as a killer.

Strathclyde traffic police had their work cut out for them this Monday. CCTV footage from the area nearest the Lorimers’ residence showed the times of hundreds of vehicles passing each way along the main road and it was a task that took the utmost concentration to log them all, identify their registration numbers and look up the vehicles’ owners on the computer. Names were now emerging from all of that data, and one in particular made an officer lift the telephone to call his superior.