The Blood That Stains Your Hands (7 page)

The board at the entrance to the construction site promises
a beautiful development of exceptional four and five bedroomed homes in a stunning location
. I pull into the small car park beside the temporary office, take a moment to stand looking at the view, and then walk inside.

There's a woman sitting behind a desk, a few seats, and everywhere lavish brochures, shiny with pictures of the view, artist's impressions of the houses, and polished off with an air of desperation.

The receptionist is young and beautiful. Not much make-up, long hair tied back, a meticulously uneven fringe, dark-rimmed glasses. Looks as though she doesn't realise she's as attractive as she is, which is unusual these days.

I know, I'm terribly old-fashioned – or, if you prefer, a sexist dinosaur – but when I see someone this good-looking behind a desk, I always think, Jesus, darling, you are way too gorgeous to be doing this. At the very least, go out with a footballer. Spend all his money.

She smiles.

Here's a top tip. I know she's just smiling because that's what she's supposed to do. She's paid to be nice. Receptionists are the whores of the business world. Wait a minute, I probably ought to re-word that. Anyway, you know what I'm trying to say. They're kind of paid to be nice, it's their job. So, of course she smiled at me. But here, at last, is the top tip. Ignore that shit. Ignore the fact that she would have smiled at the Shoe Bomber if he'd walked in. Ignore it all, and just imagine that she's smiling at me because she wants to. She doesn't have to. It's a smile born of pure attraction. She's young, and she recognises an experienced guy with that look about him. The look of wisdom, mixed with a melancholic other-worldliness.

'Good afternoon,' she says. Nice voice. Goes well with the rest of her.

I turn and glance over my shoulder. Sitting at that desk of hers, she has a great view, out of two large windows, of the Clyde and Cumbrae and the rest of it.

'Nice place to spend your days,' I say.

'Thanks,' she says. 'It's better when the sun shines.'

'That was three weeks ago on Saturday, wasn't it?'

She smiles again. That there is a great smile. From nowhere I suddenly get a sense of dreadful middle-age, and a wish that I was at least twenty years younger so that there was some worthwhile reason to be flirting with her. Yes, I feel myself lurching uncontrollably towards flirtation.

And just like that, it transpires that my flirtation isn't uncontrolled, and it leaves in a snap of the fingers.

'Would it be possible to speak to Mr Cartwright?' I ask.

She holds my gaze for a moment, glances at her computer screen – currently showing the building company's home page – then turns back with a questioning look.

'Mr Cartwright?'

'The architect. I was told he was on-site today.'

'Of course,' she says. 'Mr Cartwright. I'll just put a call out to the site manager. Who shall I say is here?'

This is the point where, if I hadn't already given up, I'd likely lose the girl.

'Detective Sergeant Hutton,' I say, dipping my hand into my jacket pocket and showing my ID.

'Of course,' she says again, with another smile, as though they'd been expecting me.

*

A
s we talk we look down over the view. The cloud has shifted in the last ten minutes, and the ever-changing landscape looks a little brighter. There's a ferry in the middle of the channel, making the short trip between Largs and the Cumbrae slip.

'I'm getting one of the properties myself,' he says. 'Won't live in it for another ten years yet, but Jean and I will come down here when I retire. Already a member of the golf club, aiming to get my handicap into single figures by this time next year.'

He's already talking a lot, and I haven't even asked him anything.

'You could move now, couldn't you?' I say. 'Pretty short commute up to Glasgow these days.'

'Look at that,' he says, and he throws his hands over the vista. 'I'd never get anything done. No, no, I'm aiming to retire here, when I'll have time to sit in the conservatory and watch the ferry. Back and forth, back and forth. You should see it on stormy days. Like a week last Thursday. Why was it you wanted to see me?'

This guy is smooth.

'The suicide of Mrs Henderson. Did you know her?'

'Bah!' he barks. Yep, I think bah! just about covers the weird noise that he ejaculates. 'Crazy old bitch. Never spoke to her, never wrote to her, never had anything to do with her. She wrote to me often enough.'

'How many times?' I ask.

Being in possession of all the crazy old woman's correspondence, I already know the answer.

'Seventeen,' he says, which is bang on.

I give him a glance.

'Can you believe it?' he adds.

'That seems a lot,' I say. 'Also seems odd that you can remember the exact number.'

'Got a head for detail,' he says. 'Jean says I'm on the spectrum, you know, that I've got no empathy, don't understand people or how my actions impact on them. And that I've got this extraordinary awareness and recall of detail. She's right about that, at least. Seventeen. At least she'd stopped.'

That, too, I know. She'd finally given up on him, for some reason, if not most other people.

'What made her so keen to write to you?'

He takes a deep breath, but it's an ostentatious breathing in of the autumnal sea air, a gesture to indicate just how fucking great it is to even think about living in this spot where he's designed an elegant scrotum of enchanting homes for rich people.

'I pissed her off. I pissed them all off, all those ruddy wankers up the hill.'

He barks out another laugh, then shoves his hands in his pockets. Lord of the fucking manor.

'Listen, Sergeant, don't go thinking that there's anything Christian about the running of the church. It's politics, pure and simple. Sunday morning, hymns, prayers and the sermon, yes, yes, religion. Christianity. The essence of what we are, kneeling before Jesus and before God. Trusting in him, believing in him. But the rest of it, it's all political. I'm not going to apologise because I recognised that and they didn't, because I had a war room and they didn't.'

'A war room?' Nice.

'Yes, Sergeant, a ruddy war room. You must do it yourselves, when you have a big investigation.'

'I guess we do.'

'Every organisation that succeeds needs one. A war room, where men sit down and plot and plan, down to the merest detail. If there's something you can take control of, you work out how to do it. You own it. If something's out of your hands, you establish how to minimalize it, or how to fight it. That's what we did. We had a war room, and what did they do? They walked into the merger and thought everything would be fine. Well, more ruddy fool them. I'm not going to apologise for my due diligence towards my church when they weren't prepared to do the same for themselves.'

Weirdly, I don't dislike this bloke anything like as much as I thought I would. One might not associate a war room with the church – apart from, you know, all those wars that have been fought in the name of Christianity through the centuries – but it's hard to fault him. Most of human interaction is a game; he played it, and they didn't. No wonder they all hate him.

'I spoke to someone from the Old Kirk in the last couple of days who called you a cunt.'

I thought that might get the laugh barking out again, but he just continues to stare contemptuously out over the sea and the islands and the hills.

'You know,' he says eventually, 'Mrs Henderson might have been an appalling irritant to me, and to many of us, but if the Old Kirk had had her as part of their team from the start, things might have turned out differently. Instead, they chose to never use her particular talents. She was always the outsider, always the irritating old woman who wouldn't shut up, who wouldn't accept defeat. I admired her. I won't say I'm not glad she's dead, but I admired her all the same.'

'You think she killed herself?'

'Didn't she?' he says, looking round, surprise in his voice. 'You think she was murdered?'

'I didn't say that,' I lie. Shut up, you dick. Have never lost the tendency to say too much. Some women find it endearing.

He gauges me for a moment and then turns back to his precious view, which I'm starting to believe he thinks he owns.

'So you're not questioning me as part of a murder investigation, then?'

'No,' I say. 'We're just following up on Mrs Henderson, to establish her state of mind before she died.'

'She was ruddy miserable,' he says, 'but I doubt that's so different from how she spent her last eighty-odd years.'

'Why did she stop writing to you?' I ask. 'She was still bugging plenty of other people.'

He looks imperiously over his land and his sea.

'God knows, Sergeant,' he says. 'Maybe she was beginning to see sense.'

*

D
riving home I have a brief interlude of road rage. In my head I don't consider it road rage though. It's just rage to me, regular rage, the same kind of thing resulting from impatience that I'm liable to feel in the supermarket or watching TV when there are too many adverts. Road rage has a specificity to it that I don't feel is appropriate.

Nothing more than the usual, stuck behind a slow-moving vehicle. A Peugeot 206 or something. I can see the sprouting of grey hair above the driver's seat headrest. An old woman driving, the kind who I would test every couple of years after the age of seventy, so we could get the licence off them and make the roads safer. Not that my ensuing actions are liable to make any road safer.

Try to control it for a while, then I start to go. Drive up really close behind her. She's doing thirty-four in a sixty zone. No long straights, too many cars coming from the other direction, no chance to overtake. My presence close to her rear end is enough to make her slow down even more. As her speed drops below thirty I have a brief contemplation of pulling her over, producing my ID and telling her I'm an unmarked traffic cop, and booking her for driving liable to cause an accident. The thought is brief indeed.

Instead I lean on the horn, then start jabbing it repeatedly. My head is exploding with instant, uncontrollable fury, the kind of fury that you can unleash from behind a wheel.

'Fucking move!' I'm screaming at her. 'Fuck! Fucking move, you old fucker!'

Punching the horn. Punching the horn so hard it hurts. Spittle flying onto the plastic of the centre of the steering wheel.

We approach a parking place. She slows down even more, then pulls in. I don't turn and stare at her, just gun the accelerator. Ultimately, of course, I'm not in a rush. I've no intention of thrashing the speed limit into non-existence. Within about a hundred yards, I hit a thirty zone, and I slow right down and am now driving more slowly than I was previously. The guy behind catches me and we mince along, bang on thirty miles an hour.

My rage passes. I forget that I was angry. I forget about the old woman, and do not wonder how long she sits in the parking area recovering her equilibrium.

––––––––

'H
ow's this?' I say. Taylor's office, me and Morrow, coffee and doughnuts. Yes, coffee and doughnuts. We're all Americans now, as the Muppet Blair said. 'There's a correlation between the sleeping drug and the semen, but not directly with the death. Someone drugged her and raped her. Maureen, unable to cope, killed herself.'

'Hmm...' begins Taylor. 'Not bad. I know, just because a woman is raped, doesn't mean she's going to commit suicide, and you'd think that an older woman might be able to handle the situation better than someone much younger, but then... what do any of the three of us dicks know?'

'I'll check it out,' says Morrow. 'Speak to some people. Rates of rape amongst the over-60s, the victims' psychology. Like you say, everyone's different, but there might be some sort of pattern of behaviour.'

'Have we established her whereabouts on her final evening?'

Shake of the head from Morrow and me.

'OK, well that's something we really need to find out. Did she go anywhere, did anyone come to her house, did she have any clubs or other regular Monday evening activity?'

'On it,' I say.

'I've been hearing a lot about Paul Cartwright,' says Taylor. 'We need to get along to see him.'

'Me too,' says Morrow. 'There's a general feeling that he's a nasty piece of work.'

'Interviewed him yesterday afternoon,' I say.

'Good man,' says Taylor. 'How was that?'

'There's something about him,' I say. 'I can see why everyone hates him, and I can see why his church won out in the end. Very focussed. He set out to achieve something, and he did it. People in his church will have been pleased, those in the others pissed off. What are you going to do?'

'He know Mrs Henderson?'

'Just from the letters, which he was happy to talk about. Recalled every one...'

'Quite a few people said he has a freakish memory.'

'Yep, happy to admit it. Before this is out I think we'll be talking to him again, and I think there's a lot to learn from him, if we can work out how to get him to say the right things... but I don't think he had anything to do with her death. Not directly, at any rate.'

'OK, we'll leave him for the moment, but keep tabs on him. Once we get to second interviews, that's when people start to think, hang on a second, isn't this something more than a suicide enquiry?'

'And Cartwright's the kind of dude that Connor will be hanging with. Written all over him.'

'Well, I'm sure you were your usual discreet self,' says Taylor.

Morrow even laughs at that. Fucking hilarious.

'The fact is,' continues Taylor, 'we've yet to come up with proof of anything suspicious, so we have to continue to be careful. The superintendent is going to be shutting us down first opportunity he gets, so no mention of a murder investigation until such times as we know for definite.'

A couple of raised eyebrows dispatched across the table, and Morrow and I take the signal to leave.

*

I
find myself back at the Old Kirk. No reason. I just felt drawn here for the silence. I parked in the small area between the church and the halls, noticed that the gates were unlocked. I'd been intending knocking on the gatekeeper's door and asking in some sort of small voice if she wouldn't mind me sitting in the church again. I wasn't going to have a reason. There was a fair possibility that in fact I was going to sit in the car park for ten minutes, not get out of the car, and then drive off.