Jack in the box, p.7
Jack in the Box, page 7
While Slater followed these directions, taking care not to slip on the decking, Lomond said, ‘I understand the problem was with an extension, Mr Finch?’
‘Yes,’ Finch said, back straightening. ‘Simple matter, really. And it was all him.’
‘Him who?’ Lomond asked.
‘Symes, Ed, Eddie, whatever they call him. No one else objected to the plans until he did – at the last minute. After that, everyone piled in.’ Suddenly, Finch remembered himself. ‘Sorry. His wife’s dead. That was thoughtless. Last thing I want to be talking about.’
‘That’s all right,’ Lomond said equably.
‘It’s just . . . I had a suspicion about him.’
‘Oh aye?’
‘Yeah, he’s just . . . always on at you, you know? One of those people. Your bin, it doesn’t go there, he tells me. Knocked on my door, day after we moved in. It was on the pavement outside my house. I asked him what he was talking about. He says eventually, “My bin goes there – if you put yours there, the binmen might forget to take mine.” You know the type.’
Lomond said nothing.
‘Anyway. From there it’s “Don’t block my light at the front, if you have too many people round”. I wanted to tell him to piss off.’
‘Did you?’
‘No. I’m not a sociopath – you’ve got to live in the same street, even if the houses are this big.’ He paused a moment. ‘But I didn’t like the guy. His wee girl and mine, they’re of an age, but they don’t play together.’
‘Why is that?’
‘Beats me. Belinda, my other half, she sees the wee lassie and says, “Oh, that’s nice, a pal for you,” but that wee girl doesn’t give Kay the time of day. Didn’t even knock our door at Halloween, so there you are.’
Lomond noted this down. ‘And how did the extension thing come about?’
‘At the absolute last minute.’ Finch looked like he wanted to spit. ‘Got all the plans. Said nothing. It wasn’t overlooking his property. There may have been a slight issue with the setting sun, but nothing you’d notice. On the final day of the consultation among the neighbours, he knocks the door to let me know – we’ve all banded together, he says, and we reject your proposal. Then we’re going to court, I says. You’re out of order. He just laughs at me, sets the papers down on my doorstep and off he goes.’
‘And what happened then?’
‘Well, you tell me. Court decides in his favour. Well, his and the neighbours’. But it was down to him. Clennehan, up the street – he was out with his dog – told me one night, “He talked the rest of them into it. I didn’t agree, didn’t put my name to it.” Symes wanted to put my nose out of joint. Why? I honestly don’t know. Dominance. Being the big dog. Insecurity. Christ knows.’
‘And you hadn’t had a row, or anything? A falling-out?’
‘Nothing. That’s the only contact. We don’t go out, you know? We don’t have parties. We don’t play loud music. We’ve had one barbecue – that’s the one he complained about: too many folk parking and blocking his light, he said. That was it. You’d have to ask him what the problem is.’
Lomond spotted Slater poking around in the garden and looked away, keen not to draw Finch’s attention. ‘And is your wife around, Mr Finch?’
‘She’s gone out – over-fifties aqua-aerobics. She’ll be back in tonight.’
‘We’ll probably want to speak to her.’
Slater knocked on the patio door and came back inside, shivering. ‘Getting frosty out there,’ he remarked.
‘What were you looking for? Burned clothes and such?’ Finch said.
Slater was startled for a second. It did not happen often. ‘As a matter of fact I was admiring your – what did you call it? Chiminea? My old dear would love something like that.’
‘We have it on all the time. Summer, winter. Like an open fire, you know?’
‘It’s a cracker,’ Slater remarked.
‘Do you ever see anything weird out there?’ Lomond asked, remembering Daniel Laybourn’s dramatic announcement.
Finch tried to suppress a laugh, and failed. ‘What . . . you mean, like, killers roaming the forest at the back?’
‘I would hope you’d’ve already told us if that was the case.’
‘I’ve told you in some detail what I saw,’ Finch returned, sobering. ‘Which was nothing.’
‘How about anything really odd or unusual?’
‘Like . . . shooting stars? You see them, usually in August. Perseids. Some crackers last year, in fact. Got some good shots.’
‘Yeah, anything of that nature,’ Lomond said. ‘Anything strange at all.’
‘Next you’ll be asking me if I’ve seen wee green men in flying saucers.’
Lomond smiled benignly. ‘Just on the off chance. Every little detail can help. Speaking of which – do you mind if I talk to your daughter for a second?’
Finch shrugged. ‘Go ahead. Living room, first on your left there.’
*
The girl was on a mobile phone, to Lomond’s surprise, when he knocked and entered the living room. This was more of an adult’s space, cluttered with large untidy bookshelves and CD towers whose contents threatened to spill over into each other’s territory. Lomond was amused to see a wall of ancient VHS cassettes, and even more amused to see one spine denoted Close Encounters of the Third Kind, the black night on the box cover faded to denim blue in the sunlight, but the stars just as bright.
The girl didn’t look up as Lomond entered.
‘Hiya – Kay, is it?’
She didn’t say anything, or even acknowledge him. She blew her fringe away from her face, and her fingers and thumbs worked hard at the keypad. Lomond was reminded of a rat’s paws, and winced at the comparison. ‘Hope I’m not interrupting.’
‘I’m just speaking to my friend. She’s a bit freaked out.’
‘Oh?’
‘Just to do with a test. Well. Maybe she wants to know what’s been happening here.’
‘What did you tell her?’
‘Nosy.’ She smiled, and her face was transformed. That grin couldn’t have come from her father, Lomond thought.
‘It’s bad,’ he said. ‘Something very bad happened.’
‘I’m not a baby,’ Kay said.
‘I know. That’s why I want to ask you a grown-up question.’
Now he had her attention. She laid the phone aside. ‘OK.’
‘Have you ever seen anything like flying saucers outside?’
She shook her head slowly from side to side, maintaining eye contact with eerie equanimity. Then she chuckled. ‘You’re messing with me!’
‘I’m not. Anything like that? Anything unusual, especially out at the back of the house?’
The girl shook her head, then giggled again. Her cheeks were bright pink. ‘You’re going to think I’m messing with you!’
‘Ah, that’s my job in life, love,’ Lomond said, grinning. ‘My wife and my daughter – she’s about twice your age – that’s all they do. Mess with their poor old da. What’s on your mind, Kay? You know, what you tell me could be really important.’
‘It’s daft. In fact, it’s fine. I was getting mixed up. There’s nothing to say.’
‘Hey . . . that’s weird,’ Lomond said. He touched the back of his head.
‘What is?’
‘I could have sworn I buttoned up the back, here.’
‘Get away!’
‘Ah, c’mon now. You want to tell me something. You can tell me. I want to know about it.’
She covered her face. ‘It’s daft.’
‘I bet it isn’t. And, you know, things that seem daft can be really important later on. It’s true. That one wee detail can help crack a case.’
‘You catch murderers?’
Lomond nodded. ‘A few. I know what I’m talking about. So, c’mon – spill the beans. What is it you were going to say?’
She took a deep breath. ‘I haven’t seen UFOs. But I have seen a ghost.’
‘A ghost?’ Lomond raised his eyebrows.
‘You’re laughing at me!’
‘I absolutely am not. Lots of people think they’ve seen ghosts. What did it look like?’
‘It was kind of all weird.’
The light blinked on above Lomond’s head, far too late, really. ‘You could draw it, I bet.’
‘Oh, yeah. That’s a good idea.’
17
‘What the hell is that?’ Slater said, holding the A4 sheet up to the car’s interior light.
‘A ghost, I’m told.’ The last time Lomond had seen Slater look that disgusted, he had just dropped a full fern cake on the street. This included times Slater had seen dead bodies.
‘A ghost? It looks worse than a ghost. Can something be worse than a ghost?’
‘She’s quite good, isn’t she?’
‘What, the wife drew it?’
‘Nah, the daughter. Kay.’
‘Wowsers.’ Slater paused. ‘I mean, it’s good, you know. Call the school counsellor now, like, but she’s got some talent.’
The ghost had been sketched, freehand, with an HB pencil. Lomond hadn’t seen one of those since primary school. The girl had carefully selected it, and begun to draw with enviable control and economy. She’d made no amendments, had never once reached for the eraser, never expressed any frustration or started again. With her lips compressed and her eyes focused, she had transposed what she’d seen onto a page. She was a leftie, Lomond noticed. He’d read somewhere that left-handedness corresponded to a greater facility with art, though he expected there were all kinds of biases built into such studies.
He supposed the figure, and its clothing, had a lot to do with the somewhat airy style of the composition. It wore something like a poncho, draped over thin shoulders, and the arms were outstretched. The girl was good at drawing people: the joints, the Vitruvian proportions. ‘Have you been taking classes?’ Lomond had asked her. She had. Mummy had taken her.
The edges of whatever the figure was wearing were ragged, as if the fabric had been cut via shark bite. The face was non-descript, part of the effect, with no discernible eyes.
‘And she really saw this?’ Slater asked.
‘So she said.’
‘Whenabouts?’
‘Well, here’s the first Moment of Doubt. She says she first saw it at Halloween.’
Slater let the page fall with a theatrical pause; Lomond caught it before he did. ‘That’ll be that, then.’
‘Not so fast. She said she saw it again a week or two later, a wee bit after Bonfire Night. She was looking out for it at Christmas time, but no dice.’
‘She see it from her window?’
Lomond peered at the drawing again. ‘She said she saw it while she was playing in the woods. Alone.’
‘Vivid imagination.’
‘That’s what I thought.’
Slater gestured over his shoulder towards the crescent of houses. ‘This estate . . . it’s all very gate and fence, you know?’
‘I don’t know what you mean at all, Malcolm.’
‘I mean, there’s no kids out playing. And I don’t think it’s just to do with what happened at the top of the road. It’s not the sort of place where the kids are out playing football on a patch of grass. Mind you, I’m not even sure kids do that these days. They get ferried to soft play and whatnot by their folks.’
‘I think it can depend on how many kids you get on an estate, and how close they are in age. They’ll play together, usually, when the weather’s good.’
‘All I’m saying is . . . well, would you have let your daughter out to play by herself in the big scary woods when it was dark?’
‘You’ve got a point.’
‘So I reckon the junior artist has a vivid imagination.’
‘You’re probably right. I’ll ask about it, though. It’s incredibly detailed. You’d think someone else who lived here would have remembered a big scary ghost like that roaming about after dark, maybe called it in. Another kid. So far as we know, the only other wee lassie about Kay’s age is the victim’s daughter. According to the dad, they don’t play together, owing to the feud over the extension.’
‘Suppose we can ask. Looks like Mr Redley McHerring to me, though.’
‘We’ll see. Other thing is UFOs, according to Laybourn.’
Slater chuckled. ‘Aye, strange lights in the skies. Weird machines piloted by weird gadgies.’
‘IFOs, you mean.’
‘IFOs?’
‘Aye. Identified Flying Objects.’
‘Drones, you mean?’
‘Got it in one. We need to ask if anyone’s seen anything out there. Our man might have stalked Mrs Symes from on high.’
‘Maybe Laybourn was right,’ Slater said. ‘And maybe the thing Kay drew wasn’t a ghost. Maybe it was the pilot.’
‘Intergalactic or not, I want to know everything about Laybourn,’ Lomond said. ‘The full bhoona.’
‘No obvious suspects here,’ Slater said, suppressing a yawn. ‘No obvious evidence, either.’
Lomond said nothing. Outside, tiny flakes of snow began to fall. He checked his phone and grunted. ‘Funny one,’ he said, peering at the screen. ‘When these homes were built, they all went to one private developer. They sold them on.’
‘For a modest profit.’
‘Looks like it.’
‘What’s the builder?’ Slater asked.
‘Avalon King.’
‘Cracking name for a folk band. Mean anything to you, gaffer?’
‘Got a good name, so far as I know. You’ll have seen the signs, the logos. They usually turn round brownfield sites, put up poky wee houses and blocks of flats on top. But these ones look a cut above. No buy-to-lets on this road. I’ve heard the name mentioned. Read it in the paper. The same way people talk about single malts and fancy motors.’
‘Some people, you mean.’
‘Aye. The kind of folk who bang on about vintage gear. You know the type.’
Slater cinched the collar of his analogue-interferencescreen jacket with an exaggerated prissiness. ‘Some people just have no taste, gaffer. They’re not connoisseurs.’
‘They’re not daft, either.’
‘Who are we doing next, then?’
‘We need to talk to the mum.’
‘Going to be bad, eh?’
‘It’s going to be bad.’
18
Lomond took it like a boxer taking punches from a much younger, much faster opponent. You had to look carefully for an opening, and you also had to make sure that they played themselves out. That they’d slump, exhausted. At the moment, there was little chance of Corinne Bruce doing that.
‘I mean, my Gordon, right, was a big man, strong; he could have done it. Bent iron bars with his hands. He did it one time, there was this guy who wouldn’t move his car away from our house, and Gordon pulled him up for it, and he had this tyre iron, you know, for changing tyres, and–’
Slater got right out of his seat and stood up straight, hands raised, like Nosferatu sprung from the tomb. Lomond couldn’t stop him. Slater said, in a very high register, ‘That . . . is some view out this window, eh?’
‘Aye, it is,’ Mrs Bruce said, without pause, ‘I don’t like these windows, though . . . I reckon they have to do it to keep the heat in. A bit too warm . . . You’ll be warm in that jacket, mind you.’ Here she paused. ‘Where did you get it? Looks like something you’d see at the Klondyke.’
Lomond coughed into his hand.
‘Klondyke?’ Slater said, examining himself. ‘Goldminers and that? The wild west? Cold weather, I suppose. Keep you warm.’
‘Nah, the Klondyke was a nightclub, son. I went to it when I was a lassie. That wasn’t its real name, just what folk called it, cos . . . you know. Anyway. You used to see that kind of stuff on people then. Tartan ones as well – Bay City Rollers fans. I loved the Rollers. Everybody did. Didn’t see bald folk so much back then, mind. People did what they could to hang on to their hair. Hard for the young ones, like you – they’d have combovers, remember them? Like they’d glued bootlaces to their heads. They just whip it off now, like you. Much better, you ask me. I think you’d suit a jacket like that if you were a bit hairier, say if you had sideburns and a bit longer on top, you know . . .’
Slater sat down again, seemingly unable to speak.
They were in a waiting room at the private hospital. Mrs Bruce had been sent there by her son-in-law – ‘maybe he’s got a season ticket’, Slater had said – and checked over after taking what everyone had termed ‘a funny turn’. Understandably. She had been given no medication so far as Lomond or Slater had been told. An experienced nurse with kind, if tired, eyes had waited with her until the detectives had arrived, and had left with remarkable haste when the interview began.
‘I fancy another tea,’ Lomond said. He turned to Slater.
Before he said another word, Slater nodded. ‘That’s a cracking idea, gaffer. You fancy another one, Corinne?’
‘I will, son. Maybe put two sugars in it, give me a bit of pep.’
‘Pep,’ Slater said, blinking. He remembered to smile and withdrew about as fast as the kindly nurse.
‘Nice lad,’ Corinne said. ‘Goes on a bit though, eh?’
‘Can’t shut him up at the best of times.’ Lomond leaned closer. ‘How are you feeling now, Corinne?’
‘Good. Just want the paperwork signed and get up the road. Ed’s sister’s nice, met her a few times. But the wee yin needs to be with me, I think. I shouldn’t be away from her.’
‘You’ve done most of the heavy lifting today,’ Lomond said. He put a hand on her back, instinctively, and then he saw it coming. Some change in her chemical constitution, it might have been; a solid form becoming liquid, impossible to contain or suppress. She sagged against him, wheezing. In some alarm, Lomond looked around for the emergency buzzer.
‘It’s fine, it’s OK,’ Corinne said. ‘I just . . . it hit me, you know?’
‘You just take your time there.’
‘Why are you holding on to Ed? You don’t think he had anything to do with it? He’s a crabbit bugger but he wouldn’t . . . he couldn’t have . . .’
