2007 - A tale etched in blood and hard black pencel (3 page)

Mrs Murphy writes Martin’s name on one of the dotted lines, then points to the line below it and tells him that if he is a good boy and pays attention, he will soon be able to write his name underneath by himself.

Martin gets scared and excited at the same time when she says this, because he can already write his name and he wants to tell her but is a bit feart that the teacher will be angry with him if he says he can do it then doesn’t get it right, which sometimes happens because the letter ‘M’ is tricky. He remembers his mum telling him he should never hold back from trying something or giving an answer just because he is afraid it might be wrong, but she also told him not to talk back to the teacher unless she asks a question first, so he doesn’t really know what to do.

He has just about decided it will be safer all round simply to keep his mouth closed when Mrs Murphy points out to him that it is already hanging open. “Is there something you want to say, Martin?” she asks. “Don’t be afraid.”

“I can write ‘Martin’,” he tells her. “But I sometimes make a mistake with the ‘M’ at the start.”

“Well, that’s excellent, Martin. Why don’t you show me?” And she hands him a pencil.

He feels a bit sick now and wishes he had said nothing so that he could already be away back to his desk with the carton of milk.

Martin takes a deep breath and grips the pencil extra tight, concentrating hard and hoping the ‘M’ comes out right. It doesn’t. He looks at the one above, written by Mrs Murphy, and sees it doesn’t have as many wiggles. He stops and looks at her, feeling himself getting ready to greet.

“I’m sorry,” he says. “I know how to draw a ‘M’. I just don’t know when to stop.” And then he does start crying. He just can’t help it.

“Never mind, Martin. That’s almost there. Let’s see you do the rest, shall we?”

Martin wonders if the ‘shall we?’ is an escape option, a chance to say ‘no’ and retreat from the chance of further disaster, but can tell from a feeling in his throat that it will make him cry all the more if he takes that route. He nods and sniffs back some tears and snorters, then applies pencil to paper once again.

“Very good,” Mrs Murphy says. “
Very
good, Martin.”

Martin is happy again, the choking, crying feeling instantly gone. He lifts his jotter and clutches it like a prize, so proud of it that he is already halfway back to his desk before Mrs Murphy reminds him that he has forgotten to take his milk.

He climbs on to the bench again and examines the carton. Turning it over in his hands, he notices a small circular indentation with a thin film of plastic stretched across its base. He stabs it and a small jet of milk spurts from the top of the straw, which he instinctively covers with his mouth. He hears a giggle and turns to his left. There is a boy across the row and one seat back grinning.

“That came oot goin’ the nineties,” he says approvingly.

Martin smiles back and feels as pleased as he did when he was able to demonstrate to Scot his knowledge of the belt.

Mrs Murphy calls out Helen Dunn next, and some of the children look to that girl Karen to see if she will come out at the same time. She doesn’t, but she looks like she really wants to.

Martin hears a tut and looks forward, where a few desks in front Zoe is still struggling with her carton. The teacher looks up too, and says: “No, no, dear, you need to jag it through the wee hole. Dear, pet, don’t pull the sides or you’re going to…Pet, dear, hello…”

But Zoe is concentrating too hard on her task to realise the teacher is talking to her, and Mrs Murphy can’t remember her name. The teacher looks at her list and calls out, “Zoe!” just as Helen Dunn is approaching Zoe’s desk. Helen stops in her tracks, maybe not sure now whether it’s still her turn after almost being usurped the last time. Zoe, meanwhile, gets a fright at the sound of her name and in her surprise flips the carton into the air. It spins the few short feet across the aisle to land on another girl’s desk, where it bursts open with a milky splat, some of which hits Helen. The girl goes to jump out of the way but bangs her knees on the underside of the desk, then slaps an elbow into the puddle.

There are screams and shrieks from all around. Zoe, Helen and the splattered girl all start greeting, and so do a few others around the room. Martin wants to laugh but thinks his mum would say it’s wrong, like when someone does a pump in church. He thinks the teacher will say it’s wrong too, as she doesn’t look very pleased. He hears the breathy, muted sniggering of someone who is trying to keep it in but just can’t help himself. Martin looks around and sees that it is the boy who giggled before, and once they have seen each other it becomes impossible to stop.

The teacher says ‘shhh’ a lot and tells everybody to calm down. “There’s no use crying over spilt milk,” she says, and Martin notices her smile a wee bit as she does so. He now knows it’s all right to laugh, knowledge that strangely makes the giggles subside. The crying doesn’t stop, though. The three girls involved are all bubbling away, but not as much as that girl Karen, who is doubled over her desk, shuddering and taking big loud gasps of breath in between. It is only when she lifts her head and suddenly stops that Martin realises she wasn’t crying, she was laughing, but he doesn’t understand why—or indeed how—she has so instantly ceased.

Then the girl behind her, Joanne who gave out the jotters, shoots her hand triumphantly into the air and makes everything clear.

“Please miss, please miss, please miss, Karen’s peed herself.”

Martin looks to Mrs Murphy to see whether it’s all right to laugh at this one, but he doesn’t think it will be, because he hears her saying a prayer, and prayers are never funny. She closes her eyes for a wee while, and when she opens them again she is staring upwards, like the priest sometimes does during Mass.

“Jesus Christ Almighty, give me strength,” she says.

T
here’s no more space in the clearing, so Karen leaves her car tucked in as far off the track as she can manage without pranging a tree and walks the short distance to the late Colin Temple’s woodland lodges. She doesn’t know whether it normally accommodates block bookings, but today it looks like the place is hosting a small-scale polis convention. Alex and the other men in white coats appear to be in charge of the asylum, their activities centred on one lodge, second from the far end of the shallow arc of buildings. Karen has to laugh at the sight of one particular Dibble earnestly engaged in applying police tape to the exterior. This is not the kind of place you’re likely to find a lot of curious passers-by. It’s about five miles from the nearest pavement. Karen grew up in Braeside and was only vaguely aware the fishing loch existed, far less where to find it. She kind of wishes she had; it would have been a great spot for a picnic, the ideal destination for a walk with her pals on one of those precious few summer days worth the description. On the other hand, had that been the case, it would now be about to get crossed off: another romantic location forever violated by other people’s horrors.

She stops and looks around for a few moments, trying to filter out the sounds of radios squelching from open car doors and jacket pockets. She wants to picture the place without polis motors and Forensics vans, see it as it looked to the people who died here and to those who walked away.

Of those, Turbo’s immediate destiny is in the hands of a surgeon at the Southern General, while they’ve got Noodsy safely locked up in Braeside nick. She’s going to interview him later, but not before she’s developed her own picture of what they’re dealing with, in order to see how his version holds up; and not before she’s let him sweat a while. Noodsy never was much good under pressure back when she knew him. He was so used to getting caught that the mere sight of an authority figure accusing him was usually enough to elicit a resigned acceptance of his fate.

Alex emerges on to the wooden-decked patio at the focal lodge’s entrance. He notices Karen’s approach and gives her an amused smile. More criminal masterclass stuff to be found within, then. He hands her a spare face-mask, but mercifully not for the reason she anticipated. The fumes hit her as soon as she steps on to the decking.

“Sainsbury’s must have been fresh out of Shake ‘n’ Vac,” Alex says. “They’ve been using drain cleaner to get rid of the bloodstains from the carpet.”

“Should I pick some up the next time I spill red wine?”

“Does the trick, aye. As long as you don’t mind your carpet looking like this.”

Alex ushers her inside with a wave of his left arm and she gets an instant eyeful of what he means. There’s no obvious trace of blood, but the otherwise brown carpet looks like it’s gone down with a bad case of vitiligo. The largest of the bleached—nay, scorched—patches are both in the centre of the floor, though there are plenty of others between there and what she learns is the door to the bathroom.

“I’d posit that they had a go at dissolving the bodies with the drain cleaner and then used it on the bloodstains some time after they had their change of plan. Covered up the fact that the stains were made by blood, but not exactly inconspicuous, is it? Specially if they were hoping to make it look like this Temple guy just disappeared.”

“How do you know it was drain cleaner? Can you tell just by the smell?”

Alex gives her that smile again. “Found the receipt. It was folded over umpteen times and twisted back and forth—by the fingers of a very nervous individual needing to keep his hands occupied—but it was perfectly legible. Dates, times, it all fits. B&Q Darnley—for all your corpse-disposal needs. Typical DIY store, though. The stuff you buy never quite does the job when it’s not in the hands of a professional. And these were definitely not the hands of a professional. The receipt was in the bin, for Christ’s sake.”

“The bin?” she asks, barely able to believe the criminal ineptitude until she casts her mind back and remembers the only thing either Noodsy or Turbo was good at was getting into trouble.

“Amazing, isn’t it? In my experience, it’s the mark of the true numpty that he can create almost as much new evidence in his attempts to cover his tracks as he actually removed from the scene of the crime.”

“Which will be your way of saying you don’t have a weapon.”

Alex shrugs apologetically. “Or shell cases.” He laughs a little. Found out. “It’s early days, but I’d have expected to find some rope fibres by this stage too,” he confesses.

“Rope fibres?”

“Aye, going by the locations of these two big stains. They were both shot point blank in the head only feet apart in the same room. Can’t see how you can do that to two people without restraints. One, sure, element of surprise, but not two.”

“That’s assuming they were both killed by the same gun.”

“Which we are going to be lucky to establish without bullets.”

“Well, as you say, it’s early days.”

Alex shakes his head, then points to fist-sized marks in two of the walls. “Something’s been dug out of those and the holes filled in with Polyfilla. Also on the B&Q receipt, by the way. They’ve obviously watched enough telly to know to get rid of the dramatic stuff. The plan must have been to make the victims vanish and dispose of the ballistic evidence. Not entirely stupid in theory, just badly lacking in the concept-execution part.”

Karen looks again at the filled marks and the stains on the carpet. “I don’t know about concept, but I think Johnny Turner and Colin Temple might argue they managed the execution part just fine.”

I
t’s playtime and Golin is on the loo, something he had been looking forward to since shortly after drinking his milk. He had asked Mrs Murphy if he could go out to the toilet, like a few of the other children had been allowed to after that skinny girl Karen wet herself, but had been told just to wait because it would ‘soon be the interval’. He didn’t know what the interval was, though it sounded like that thing his mum had gone to Glasgow for recently. Mummy had been really pleased when she came back, so it must have been something good, but he didn’t understand why you wouldn’t be allowed to do a pee before it. Fortunately, the bell rang a wee bit later to signal playtime, so he had the chance to relieve himself before whatever the interval turned out to be.

He had seen toilets like this when his dad took him to the baths. As well as the normal toilets and sinks, there was a row of white things stuck to one wall, like teardrops cut in half. These were what Dad peed into, standing up, but Colin wasn’t big enough to reach, and the one time Dad held him up, he went all over his trousers and they had to go right home to change instead of to the canteen for chips. The same thing had happened at home when he tried to do it standing up. His mum had told him he’d have to wait until he grew a bit and got trousers with flies, and Dad said he’d soon have flies on all his trousers if he kept getting pee on them. The teardrop things at school were much lower down than at the baths and Colin wouldn’t need lifted up to use one, but elevation hadn’t helped at the swimming, and he really didn’t want to end up with pee—and flies—all over his trousers. Lots of people had laughed at that girl Karen and she’d had to wear a spare skirt that the teacher got from a cupboard, with
no pants\

Colin had gone straight to the toilets as soon as the teacher told them they could leave the classroom, and found himself the first one there. This was just as well, as there were only two cubicles to have a sit-down in like at home. It felt good, like that time they’d been in the car on the motorway and he had to hold it in for ages until they got to Uncle Jim’s house. There wasn’t as much wee this time, but the feeling of relief was just as great.

Another boy comes in just as Colin is exiting the stall. He looks about the same size as Colin, so must also be a Primary One, but Colin didn’t see him before, so maybe he is in the other teacher’s class. He goes into the cubicle next to the one Colin was using and locks the door. Colin walks over to one of the sinks and turns on the taps to wash his hands. He usually only gives them a quick skoosh if it’s just a pee, but he likes the look of the big pink blocks of soap that are next to each basin.