Lorimer gave the card a perfunctory glance and pocketed it. It would be counterproductive to alienate Mrs Baillie, no matter what police time she had wasted. There was Kirsty’s murder to solve and she was in a position to help them.
‘Kirsty MacLeod. She was a psychiatric nurse, wasn’t she?’
Mrs Baillie shook her head. ‘Kirsty had specialised in neural disorders, Chief Inspector. Her background was Care in the Community so she had worked with many patients who had illnesses of a psychiatric nature. However, the main reason for employing her was her experience with multiple sclerosis patients.’
‘Do you have many of those sorts of patients here?’ Cameron asked.
‘No, just the one. Phyllis Logan.’
Lorimer nodded. Of course. That explained the woman down in that back room away from all the other patients. He recalled those bright eyes and that sepulchral moan. That was one resident who wouldn’t be answering any questions.
‘Isn’t that rather unusual,’ Cameron persisted. ‘After all, this is a clinic specialising in psychiatric cases.’
‘We prefer to call them neural disorders. And MS is a neural disease,’ Mrs Baillie chided him. ‘But it’s not unusual for Phyllis to be here. Not at all.’ She paused, glancing from one man to the other, a sudden twinkle in her eye. ‘You see, Phyllis Logan is the owner of the Grange. It really is her home.’
Chapter Eleven
Lorimer had to hand it to them. They’d organised the interview schedule perfectly. Alistair Wilson had taken possession of the large lounge to the front of the house that was now their incident room. The minimum disruption to patients had been Mrs Baillie’s priority. He wondered about that lady: a cool customer, but there had been something in her manner that the Chief Inspector had found disquieting. Maybe she’d been in denial, but he’d found the woman’s detached, clinical manner rather off-putting. He thought over their recent conversation.
‘She was a capable nurse. No problem to us at all.’ That was how she’d answered when Lorimer had tried to elicit information about the murder victim. Not ‘Poor girl’ or, ‘I can’t believe this is happening’ which would have been understandable under the grim circumstances. Why might Nurse Kirsty MacLeod have been a problem to the clinic anyway? Or had there been staffing problems in the past? Lorimer picked up such nuances with his policeman’s ear for detail. It wouldn’t be a bad idea to investigate the staffing over the past twelve months. ‘All of our residential patients had retired for the night. Only the night staff were on duty. I was in bed myself.’
In bed, mused Lorimer, but had she been asleep? And who else might have been lying awake staring at the ceiling, counting the hours till an uncertain dawn? He’d know soon enough.
The residents were to be made available to them after breakfast. That was exactly how Mrs Baillie had put it. And this morning she had shown no trace of sorrow for the sudden death of one of her staff. Her starched white collar and black jacket bore testimony to a careful toilette. There was nothing hasty or flung together about this lady. Lorimer had stared at her earlier, mentally contrasting her with the image of his wife flying out of the house that morning, hair tousled and jacket pushed anyhow into her bulging haversack.
Dark circles showed under Maggie’s lovely eyes but Lorimer wasn’t about to waste too much sympathy on a self-inflicted hangover.
He’d dropped officer Lipinski at HQ for her scheduled lecture before setting off for the Grange. That was one talk he’d be missing. He grinned to himself. What a pity! The squad at Pitt Street would just have to get on with it without him. All in all, Lorimer doubted if he’d had three full hours sleep himself. Mitchison would be banging on about Working Time Regulations before he was much older.
Lorimer was sitting at a table that had been pushed up near the huge bay window that overlooked the gardens. The morning light streaming in would show Lorimer and DS Wilson the full face of whoever came to sit on the other side of that table. Each person was going to be confronted by a pair of steely blue eyes that brooked no nonsense. It was just as well that Alistair Wilson was on duty. His sergeant’s knack of showing deferential politeness would be especially soothing to the damaged souls in this place.
‘Ready, sir?’ Wilson had brought in the file of current residents’ names.
‘If they’ve all had their breakfasts,’ Lorimer growled.
He hadn’t even had a cup of coffee and no one seemed to be interested in offering him one. He looked at the annotated list. There were red asterisks against certain names. These belonged to residents whose rooms looked out to the front of the house. Mrs Baillie’s was amongst them. Her bedroom was right above this lounge.
‘Eric Fraser?’ Lorimer read aloud, ‘Let’s have him in first.’ The uniformed officer by the door disappeared.
‘D’you want to start, Alistair?’ Lorimer turned to his colleague. Wilson just smiled and shrugged. ‘Butter him up, you mean?’ Detective Sergeant Alistair Wilson was no stranger to his superior’s strategies.
The uniform returned. ‘Mr Fraser,’ he said, retreating immediately to his post by the lounge door.
Eric Fraser was a young man of medium height dressed in navy jogging pants and a matching hooded sweatshirt. As he approached, he ran one hand over his cropped bullet head and stared right at Lorimer with small, intense eyes. He hadn’t shaved for days, by the look of him, and his clothes hung loosely over a thin frame.
‘Mr Fraser, I’m Sergeant Wilson, and this is Chief Inspector Lorimer,’ Wilson had risen to his feet, come around the table and was shaking Fraser’s hand. ‘Thank you for coming in to talk to us. Please sit down.’ Wilson’s voice was all solicitousness. They didn’t yet know the nature of these patients’ illnesses. That was confidential, Mrs Baillie had insisted. ‘Meantime,’ had been Lorimer’s terse reply.
‘They told me about Kirsty,’ the young man began without any preamble. ‘She was nice. She listened to me. Not all of them take the time to listen,’ his voice held a querulous note and he looked accusingly at Lorimer although it was Wilson who’d begun the interview.
‘We’d like to know if you heard anything unusual last night, Mr Fraser,’ Wilson spoke firmly, trying to draw the man’s attention back.
Fraser made a derisory noise. ‘You mean all that screeching and carrying on?’
‘What screeching was that, Mr Fraser?’ Wilson put in. Lorimer pretended to scribble something on a pad in front of him, avoiding eye contact.
If Wilson could capture his attention then he’d be free to observe the patient’s body language. Right now he was sitting, hands clasped between his knees as if, despite the sun’s heat through the glass, he was feeling cold.
‘Mrs Duncan. She raised the roof with her racket. Came right up the stairs to fetch Mrs Baillie. I think anyone would’ve heard it through the partition walls. I certainly could.’
‘You don’t have any sleeping medication, then, Mr Fraser?’
‘Not at the moment,’ he replied, sitting up a bit straighter as he spoke.
Lorimer nodded to himself. A patient on his way to recovery, perhaps?
‘How well did you know Nurse MacLeod?’
Fraser shrugged, crossing one leg over the other. ‘Not that well. She was nice. Nice looking too. She always made sure we were comfortable at bedtime. She’d go to the bother of bringing me up a hot water bottle. That sort of thing.’
‘Did she ever talk about herself?’
‘No. Not really. I’d asked where she was from. The accent made me curious. But she didn’t really tell me much about herself.’ Fraser looked hard at Alistair Wilson. ‘We’re a pretty self-absorbed lot in here, you know. Fragile psyches and all that,’ he sneered. Lorimer watched as his foot began to tap rapidly up and down, an involuntary movement, agitated. He wondered what the man’s blood pressure would be if he had it taken right now. A worm-coloured vein on Fraser’s temple stood out and Lorimer could imagine the beat of a pulse.