Lorimer looked around him. The drive looped all round the grounds. To the rear were trees, more shrubbery and a high, stone wall. Beyond that was farmland. Could anyone have vaulted that wall and made off over the fields in darkness? Or, indeed, arrived from that very direction. An outsider. A nutter. That was the theory he was working on, anyway. Some creep who had a fetish about dead women and flowers. Brightman would surely have an opinion to offer. It was time he called him up.
The front drive gave on to an avenue of Victorian villas then a row of solid tenement houses on each side. There was a main road at right angles to the avenue, a mere hundred yards away.
One thing Lorimer had noticed as he’d turned the car into this narrow avenue: there was barely room to swing a cat because of the double-parking by residents. Maybe someone might have noticed a car in a hurry last night? That was just one of the questions his team of officers would be asking. Over the hill beyond the Langside Monument lay the Victoria Infirmary. Queen’s Park stretched out the whole length of the main road right up to Shawlands. Another possible escape route for a killer. Lorimer grinned to himself, realising that he was already tuning into Solly’s way of thinking. The psychologist liked to pore over maps relating to the locus of a crime as he began his search into the criminal mind.
Lorimer thought back to the long drawn-out investigation into the Saint Mungo’s murders. That Glasgow park had been scoured from end to end. The Dear Green Place, folk liked to call their city. And so it was. He’d read somewhere that they had more parks than any other city in Europe. A source of pride to some, maybe, but a right bugger when you were trying to track a killer.
‘Sir.’
Lorimer’s mind came back to the present. Detective Constable Cameron was standing in the porch and with him was the very lady that Lorimer wanted most to see. Mrs Baillie was the woman in charge here, her official designation being director of the Grange, a clinic that specialised in neural disorders.
As he walked towards the steps, he could see a tall, angular woman dressed in black shading her eyes from the morning sun.
‘Good morning Mrs Baillie,’ Lorimer shook a hand that was damp with sweat.
As they turned away from the dazzle of light that bounced off the open glass door, Lorimer could see the director’s face more clearly. Mrs Baillie would be somewhere in her early fifties, he surmised, though she’d looked a lot older last night.
Her dark hair showed not a hint of grey but this was belied by the network of tiny lines around her eyes and mouth, a mouth that was turned down as if in an expression of permanent disapproval.
‘Come through to my office, please, gentlemen,’ she said and immediately turned right, opening a door set into the wood panelling. At once Lorimer noticed how the old house had been altered to form the present day clinic as vinyl floors gave way to thick patterned carpet. Light filtered from a landing window where a broad staircase swept upwards. An open door to the front showed them a huge bay-windowed lounge where uniformed officers were already setting out tables and chairs. Across the hall a curved desk wrapped itself around two angles of the walls, segmenting the corner into a reception area. A young woman in a dark suit and white shirt glanced up at them unsmilingly then continued with whatever she had been doing behind the desk, out of sight behind her computer screen.
‘That’s Cathy. You’ll want to talk to her later, I suppose.’
‘We’ll be talking to all the staff, ma’am,’ Cameron replied, glancing at Lorimer who had wandered towards the stair and was peering upwards.
‘There are private rooms on that floor,’ Mrs Baillie snapped, making Lorimer turn back suddenly. ‘The patients are restricted to the west and south wing and use both upstairs and down. We have the administration down here.’ She strode ahead of them, ignoring the girl at the desk, and opened a door leading to the back of the building.
Lorimer and Cameron followed her down a set of four stairs that led into another corridor. Here windows to one side gave a view of shrubbery and an expanse of kitchen garden where a man in brown overalls was digging with a spade, his back to the house. A patient, Lorimer wondered, or one of the staff? Shadows thrown onto the garden made him press his head against the glass and look along the side, seeing angles of pebble-dashed walls masking the original contours of the house. A modern extension had been built onto this part of the Grange, he realised. Lorimer ran his hand along a grey painted radiator as Mrs Baillie unlocked a door opposite the window. It was cold to his touch.
‘This is my office. Please sit down,’ Mrs Baillie had already taken her place behind an antique desk. Two upright chairs with carved backs sat at angles in front of her. The wood panelled ceiling of the office sloped into a deep coomb showing that the room was positioned immediately under the main stairs. There were no windows and so Lorimer left the door deliberately ajar. Claustrophobic at the best of times, he wasn’t going to let his discomfort show in front of this woman.
‘Who has access to this part of the house?’ Lorimer asked.
‘Oh, it’s not kept locked, Chief Inspector, except my private office, of course. But only the staff would come through here. The patients have their own rooms.’
‘And is there any other way to reach this part of the building?’
‘We have a back door that leads into the garden. It can only be accessed from this side of the house.’
‘Not from the clinic?’
‘No.’
‘And it’s kept locked at night?’
‘I do the lockup myself. It’s my home too, you know,’ Mrs Baillie gave a twisted smile and Lorimer found himself suddenly curious about the director. He inclined his head questioningly.
‘My flat is upstairs. Part of my remit here is to act as a nursing director. Yes, I’m a fully qualified psychiatric nurse,’ she said, lifting her chin. ‘I run the clinic but I also have a say in the overall medical policy.’
‘I’m afraid we will have to interview the patients who were here last night,’ Lorimer told her.
Mrs Baillie hesitated then shuffled at some papers on her desk. Then she raised her head and regarded Lorimer steadily. ‘I’m afraid that won’t be possible.’
‘This is a murder inquiry. The feelings of your patients simply don’t come into the question.’
‘I hope you will respect their feelings, Chief Inspector. Many of our patients are seriously ill people and interrogation could do some of them untold damage.’
‘We quite understand.’
‘No, Chief Inspector, you don’t. When I said it would be impossible to interview everybody, I meant just that,’ Mrs Baillie answered him defiantly. ‘You see, two of our patients left for respite care early this morning.’
‘But that’s preposterous! You can’t just let them walk out of here like that!’
‘I didn’t. In fact I took them to the airport myself.’
‘Where were they going?’ Cameron asked.
The woman tilted her head and gave him the ghost of a smile. ‘Your part of the world, by the sound of it. A little place called Shawbost. It’s on the Island of Lewis.’
‘But why on earth couldn’t they stay here? And who are they anyway?’ Lorimer protested.
‘Sister Angelica and Samuel Fulton. Their plane tickets were paid for. And they were ready to go. I couldn’t see any point in keeping them here.’
For a moment Lorimer was speechless at the woman’s audacity. And Lewis? Could there be some link between the victim and this respite centre?
‘Give me the details of this place, please,’ he asked.
‘Certainly,’ She pulled a card from a file on her desk and handed it to him.
‘And, Mrs Baillie, no further patients will leave here without our knowledge. Do I make myself clear?’
‘Perfectly, Chief Inspector,’ the woman folded her hands together meeting his angry glare with a cool gaze of her own.