‘Spiritualism?’ Alice exclaimed in wonderment. A new facet of her neighbour.
‘Yes, spiritualism,’ the impatient reply shot back, ‘Spiritualism! Good enough for Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, no less, so good enough – nay, too good – for you. Now, were I to entrust him with the case of the missing sister he’d be sure to come up with the goods! A real detective that one… unlike you, dear.’
Leaving the flat with the scant information she had been able to glean, Alice smiled to herself. Dealing with her neighbour was like trying to tame an ancient and confused stoat, an unlikely pet, and one which even in its dotage required to be treated with the utmost respect.
‘Four rolls. A Twix and a soup, if they’ve t… t… tomato.’
‘Four rolls!’ Alice repeated, astonished.
‘Yes. FOUR rolls, a Twix and a soup. Any kind of roll, by the way, ham, t… t… tomato, cheese, tuna. I’m not fussy and I’m still building up my strength after the accident,’ Simon answered, unabashed.
Chewing the dry pastry of her Scotch pie and feeling, for once, strangely virtuous in her comparative restraint, Alice decided to continue with her plan to get to know the new DS. If she said nothing the silence in the car would remain unbroken. Either he was shy or else conversation was not his forte.
‘In the accident, what happened?’
‘A car crash in 2007, on the bypass. I was in hospital for over three months… emergency transfusion after emergency transfusion. They didn’t think I’d pull through, actually. But here I am, and twice as large as life.’ He patted his ample belly, chuckling to himself.
‘Must have frightened your family?’
‘No. I never knew my dad, and my mum was d… d… dead by then.’
‘Sorry…’ An unexpected impasse.
‘Oh, don’t be. She and I never hit it off. But,’ he grinned, ‘the last laugh was mine!’
‘Oh?’
‘Well, the c… c… cussed old duck chose to die on my birthday! But I got my own back on her. In her w… w… will she directed that she was to be buried so I took her off to be burnt in the Mortonhall Crematorium. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust and… flames to flames for her.’ He laughed loudly, glancing at Alice’s face to see if she was shocked or, perhaps, shared his black sense of humour.
‘Where did you sprinkle her remains? A car park, perhaps, or maybe, a sewage farm?’
‘I didn’t. I never collected her ashes at all, so she’ll either have been scooped up with someone else or be residing permanently in the incinerator…’
If he was serious, pursuing revenge beyond the grave did seem a tad extreme, Alice thought. But since the topic (like Simon’s mother) seemed to have died a natural death, the only sound in the vehicle now that of the passing traffic, she racked her brain for something new to prolong their chat. With a lewd wink, Eric Manson had murmured to her that Simon was not married and was available, but otherwise nobody in the squad seemed to know anything much about him. If he had a girlfriend, then no doubt that would be disclosed by him in his own good time and she had no intention of attempting to winkle out any such information out of him. She had suffered enough enquiries into her own love life to ensure that she did not inflict that particular indignity on anyone else. Maybe, with his fondness for food, he liked cooking? Rick Stein, perhaps, or maybe Gordon? But before she had time to work out any other conversational openings, the car drew up outside Father McPhail’s tenement building.
On closer inspection, no-one would have mistaken his housekeeper, Mrs Donnelly, for a cleaner. Or for the priest’s floozy, as had been suggested by DCs Littlewood and Gallagher the previous evening. Celibacy, they argued, was a state proclaimed for public consumption but never, in fact, privately maintained. It was an unnatural condition abhorred by man and woman alike, and surely, by their creator too. And, indisputably, it was impossible to achieve.
In convents nuns seemed to manage it, Alice observed. These ‘Brides of Christ’, DC Littlewood shot back, rarely had any choice in the matter, being too fat, bearded or plug-ugly to attract any earthly suitors. And when eventually he conceded that his own experience of convent life might be inferior to her own, he had expressed frank disbelief when told that a few of her teaching order had been stunners. Recovering quickly, he had thrown a sly glance at DC Ruth Lindsay, and added that it was culpable, sinful, of the beautiful not to reproduce. The young policewoman raised her eyes from her nails only to reply, sotto voce, ‘In your dreams, Tom. And you’ll be the last in your line, for sure.’
Eric Manson, adopting the authoritative tone of an eminence gris, proclaimed that for the ordinary person, the ‘normal’ person, complete excess would invariably be preferable to complete abstinence. But, Alice, picturing the sad souls she had seen flitting in and out of the shadows at Seafield, selling sex indiscriminately to feed their habits, then the ancient and venerable virgins who had taught her, trilling innocently, joyfully in their choir stalls in the side chapel, shook her head.
The housekeeper, a grey plait coiled around the crown of her head like a torpid snake, led them into the kitchen and pulled out chairs for them. Her face remained unsmiling, intimidating even, and despite the steam billowing from the kettle she offered them neither tea nor coffee. In a voice which implied the impertinence of the question, she confirmed that she and Father McPhail had spent the early evening hours of the ninth of January giving his study a good spring clean. Sounding even more affronted, she told them that the priest had, indeed, gone to St Aloysius afterwards, but she was unable to say when he returned. However, she emphasised, he must have gone there; that was, after all, where he had said he was going. As she had gone to bed before his return from the church she was unable to ‘vouch’, as they put it, for the time of his arrival, other than to say that it must have been after 9.00 p.m. No doubt they would appreciate, she added reprovingly, that Father McPhail was an ordained Catholic priest, and thus a Man of his Word.
As they were tramping back to the car, their eyes smarting in the bitter wind, Alice telephoned the DCI to break the news that their suspect had no witness to support his alibi. In turn, she was told, between unpleasantly amplified bouts of liquid coughing, that they should bring him in, on a voluntary basis, if at all possible. He was currently to be found in Jerez Street, under surveillance by a constable borrowed temporarily from the drugs squad. There followed an explosive, mannish sneeze, and then, suddenly, the line went dead.
No sooner had Alice settled into the passenger seat than her phone rang and she picked it up, battling with her seatbelt while trying to listen. Everything had changed. They must go this very minute, pronto, to Cargill’s scrapyard on Seafield Road, Elaine Bell ordered, her voice periodically muffled as she continued to issue instructions to someone beside her in the office. The foreman of the yard had just reported the presence of a body in one of the wrecked cars. She would join them, if she could get away, within the next half hour or so.
The pale winter sun hung low in the sky and heavy clouds began to encircle it, gradually obscuring it, stealing precious daylight and imposing a premature dusk on the chill city. From nowhere, large flakes of snow appeared, an endless, hostile stream of them, choking the windscreen wipers and smothering the icy road.
At the scrapyard, a man waited for them, ill-dressed for the sudden blizzard, stamping his hob-nailed boots on the ground, trying to preserve any feeling in his feet. Seeing them he hurriedly pushed the heavy double gates open, gesticulating towards the north side of the yard, then jogged behind them to their parking place. As DS Oakley slammed the passenger door shut, he lost his balance on the snow-covered cement, falling forwards heavily and striking his right hand on a length of rusted, exhaust piping.