Anders shook his head sadly. ‘I’ll never know now, will I?’
‘Tell me,’ Lorimer asked, ‘why did she keep you a secret from the rest of her flatmates?’
‘Oh, that’s easy enough,’ Anders told him. ‘There was no way she wanted Daddy finding out I was in Scotland. Besides’ — he gave a nonchalant shrug — ‘she wanted to screw these boys one after the other and having me around would’ve messed that up for her.’ He looked up at a clock behind the counter. ‘Look, I really have to get back, Brigitte isn’t going to be able to stay much longer.’ He stood up. ‘You’ve got my number, haven’t you?’
‘Yes,’ Lorimer told him, looking up at his earnest young face. ‘And you will answer if I call you, won’t you?’
Anders had the grace to blush and nod before standing up and turning to walk away.
Lorimer looked down at the table. His black coffee was cold and the pastry lay untouched on his plate. He sighed, wondering if his journey had yielded anything of importance that would help to free Colin Young or if what he had learned about Eva might simply reinforce his DI’s suspicions.
CHAPTER 39
‘The table next to the vending machine,’ Sam had told him. ‘That’s where they’ll be sitting. Just go up and say “Billy says next Tuesday”.’
Colin stood with the other prisoners waiting in the cold corridor between the main prison and the annexe that held the visiting room. It was deliberately designed to disorientate the men, he had decided; a maze of narrow corridors twisting this way and that between lots of locked doors. And the visiting room itself was windowless, not allowing anyone to get their bearings at all. Despite the chill in the air he could feel sweat trickling through his hair and down the side of his face. He glanced behind him but the prison officer wasn’t looking his way so he gave the offending wetness a swipe with his sleeve.
Then the doors were opened and the men trooped into the large colourful room. Colin ignored the smile from his father who was half out of his own chair as soon as he spotted his son and headed instead as if to make a purchase from the machine that held all sorts of crisps and chocolate bars.
‘Billy says next Tuesday.’ He bent forward suddenly, whispering the words to the man and woman sitting by the machine, then, patting his pockets as though to find them empty, he turned back and strode across to his father, heart pounding, afraid to glance up at any of the officers who might have been watching his little performance.
‘Colin, how are you, son? Here, I got you some sandwiches for later.’ Alec Young pushed the packet across the table. He must have been here early, Colin thought, rushed to the front of the vending queue and back to wait for his son.
‘Well done, Dad, you’re learning.’ Colin tried to grin at his father, though he was finding it hard not to look across at the other table.
‘Well, maybe we won’t have to go through all this for much longer, son,’ Alec Young said. ‘Here, I’ve been thinking. Soon as you’re out of this place why don’t you and me and Thomas go for a wee holiday? Somewhere you can get a bit of sun about you.’
Colin saw the look of anxiety cloud his father’s face.
‘You’re that peely-wally from being in here,’ Alec added. ‘Maybe we could get a wee break to Mallorca. Or Tenerife?’
‘Aye, Dad.’ Colin smiled at him, determined not to spoil the older man’s hopes. ‘Surely won’t be too long till I’m out of here, eh?’
I had always imagined us on a sunny beach, somewhere like you see in these fancy travel brochures; lying under a thatched beach umbrella, miles of endless sand and blue ocean and skies as far as you can see. Just me and Eva…
Colin’s pen hovered above the notebook. Pipe dreams, he should add. Just a lad’s fantasy of being with a beautiful girl. Eva had been everywhere, of course. She’d told him about the holidays in the Seychelles, the luxury yacht. Maybe that was why he’d had such a vision of them together, cast away on their very own desert island.
And what would Eva have made of his plight now? He imagined her face — with the smooth skin that glowed in a certain light — distorted into anguish as she looked down from wherever she was. The image vanished in an instant. At this moment Colin didn’t believe in any sort of afterlife. It was here today and into a nothingness tomorrow. That was what he believed now despite the years of goodly priests feeding him their dogma along with the wine and the wafers.
If there was a God, why had he allowed this to happen? Colin thought, a sudden fury coursing through his veins. And now he was in thrall to one of the invisible men over in E Block, Billy Brogan, wheeler and dealer extraordinaire. If the passing on of that message should get back to the prison officers… Colin shuddered. Perhaps there was no easy way out of here at all, just an endless series of events that could conspire to keep him here for years.
He looked back at what he had written, then, face twisting into rage, he ripped out the page and crushed it into his fist.
The January day was fading into darkness as the hooded man stepped out from the bushes in the park. Jogging towards him, the blonde woman ran to one side of the path, never changing her stride.
The slap slap of her trainers on the hard tarmac was the only sound as he approached. His fingers curled over the club hidden inside the heavy overcoat, his eyes fixed on the pale golden hair bobbing up and down on her shoulders as she came nearer and nearer.
The woman’s scream as the heavy stick felled her made a blackbird fly upwards. Its warning cry echoed in the frosty air.
Then it was all over, just the single white cloud of breath issuing from his open mouth as he stood over her, panting, stick in hand. He turned his face up to the heavens, and, as he gazed at the first stars wheeling overhead, the world tilted suddenly into a thousand fragments, a dizzying glimpse of something like eternity.
He stopped, frozen, as other footsteps sounded around the bend on the path. Glancing to his right and left, the hooded figure slipped back into the shrubbery and forced his way back into the depths of the woodland beyond.
‘Kelvin walkway,’ Jo Grant told her detective sergeant as they headed away from Stewart Street. ‘Woman was found badly beaten.’
‘Strangled?’
Jo shook her head. ‘No, not this time.’ She grimaced. ‘Another jogger came by pretty soon after the assault. Called 999.’
‘She’s dead?’
Jo nodded miserably. ‘Died on the way to hospital. Massive brain haemorrhage.’
‘But you think it’s the same guy?’ DS Wilson continued.
The DI raised her eyebrows speculatively. ‘Could be. We’ve got a description of the man from Lesley Crawford and there are CCTV cameras near the locus so let’s see what they can give us.’
Wilson’s stomach rumbled noisily, reminding him of the half-eaten sandwich and mug of tea he’d left on his desk. He screwed up his face and gave a despondent sigh. ‘Any joy on the medical front?’ he asked as they crossed the city and headed west.
‘Maybe,’ Jo nodded. ‘There have been a few patients that didn’t turn up for their regular visits at both Leverndale and Dykebar. We’re still doing house checks on them all.’
‘Any of them got form?’
Jo shook her head. ‘That’s not relevant, Alistair. Remember we don’t have this guy’s DNA on our database so we can rule him out as ever having been an offender.’
DS Alistair Wilson sighed again. A dangerous nutter running around Glasgow on the loose had already elevated this into a grade A case, one that the Fiscal wanted Lorimer to oversee. And where was his boss while all this was going on? Wilson raised his eyes to the heavens. With a bit of luck the detective superintendent would be somewhere in the air between Stockholm and Glasgow.
A thin-faced man of about forty was sitting in a small room at Gartnavel hospital, a blanket draped around his shoulders and a cup of tea held unsteadily in his hands, when the two detectives arrived. The uniformed officer stood up as soon as they entered the room, laying down his own mug on a work surface.