Lorimer and Brightman - 08 - Sleep Like the Dead. By Alex Gray (14 page)

‘Love you,’ Lorimer whispered, turning his head to look at Maggie. Her naked body lay close to his, her limbs languid now and her hair tumbled out upon the crumpled pillow, a disarray that made his heart swell with renewed longing. He put out his hand and touched her cheek, feeling its warmth. He’d need to be up and about, should have been up and ready for work before now, but he had lingered, sensing an unspoken need to reach out to his wife.

‘Sorry to leave you, love. Must get up now,’ he murmured, sighing.

‘Mm,’ Maggie replied, her eyes still closed, a small cat-like smile hovering on her lips. ‘You stay in bed. May as well make the most of your last day of freedom,’ he told her.

Maggie put her hand on his arm and patted it gently. ‘Go,’ she said. ‘I’ll be fine.’

As the water cascaded down from the large shower head, Lorimer found his thoughts clearing and, as he washed Maggie’s scent from his body, he was already thinking ahead. Today they should have more reports to help them push the case forward. Brogan hadn’t been seen anywhere near his flat either that day or for several days before the shootings. And none of his known associates admitted to having seen him around lately. So where the devil was he? As he raised his head to let the hot water flow over his face, Lorimer closed his eyes. Had they sufficient manpower

on this one? Should he ask the super to put out for extra help? Fathy’s suggestion about tracing the ex-wife might not be such a bad idea, he mused, reaching out blindly and fumbling to turn off the shower.

He towelled his dark hair vigorously then glanced at the bathroom mirror, but it was quite steamed up and all he could see was a hazy reflection. ‘Want to try to catch up with SoIly and Rosie later on?’ he heard Maggie’s voice drift through from the bedroom next door. ‘If we can,’ he answered shortly. ‘See how today goes. Okay?’

There was no response. Maggie knew how these things panned out, she was well used to making arrangements that had to be subsequently cancelled. It went with the territory of being a policeman’s wife. So the silence from the bedroom was most likely an acknowledgement of that fact. If he could be home in time to socialise with their friends then he would. She knew that.

Flinging the towel down on the top of the linen basket, Lorimer strode into the bedroom, expecting to see his wife still curled under the duvet. But she was gone and he could make out the familiar morning sounds from the kitchen downstairs; the dishwasher being emptied, Chancer, the cat, yammering for his breakfast, a kettle being filled. Lorimer frowned, the earlier joy of their coupling vanishing as he considered why Maggie had decided not to lie in on her last morning off. Were these pots and pans being banged into the cupboard with unnecessary force? He listened, wondering. What had made his wife suddenly so annoyed? Maybe the thought of going back to school without the two of them having had a break together, he decided gloomily. He’d make an excuse to leave right away, avoid any confrontation.

Lorimer gave his tie a final tug against his collar and headed on downstairs.

‘Right, I’m off. Love you,’ he said, planting a kiss on Maggie’s mouth before she could speak. ‘See you later.’ Tut you’ve not had any breakfast,’ he heard her protest as he made for the front door.

‘You spoiled my appetite for food, wicked woman that you are!’ he grinned over his shoulder, gratified to see a smile appear reluctantly on her face.

Maggie listened as the door slammed behind him. Heaving a huge sigh, she stood, clutching the back of a chair as though for support. Another day gone and still she hadn’t told him. Why? What was it that was so difficult about this?

Wearily she pulled the chair to one side and sat down, burying her head in her hands. The doctor had said it was for the best, hadn’t she? And she had mentioned the consolation of being off school for several weeks. Though for Maggie it wasn’t really a consolation at all. She had smiled and put on a brave face but inwardly she had been in turmoil. After all these years of failed pregnancies she was not to be allowed one more chance. The scans had shown both ovaries full of tiny cysts. Nothing cancerous, but the perpetual bleeding twice monthly had been dragging down her general health and now Doctor Reynolds was advising a hysterectomy. They’d save her ovaries if they could, she had been told. Just so she wouldn’t begin an early menopause. Thirty-nine years old, Maggie told herself. Not that much older than Rosie who was to have her baby in a few weeks’ time.

Was that why she hadn’t mentioned a thing to her husband? Was it the sense that she was doomed for ever to be a barren wife? So many of her colleagues at school had wee ones to go home to. Her best friend, Sandy, had a teenager at home. More trouble than

they’re worth, Sandy often grumbled. But Maggie knew that was an exaggeration put on for her own benefit.

Maybe that was the problem. There hadn’t been anyone to talk to over the last few weeks. And somehow she’d been unable to confide in Bill. If only Mum … Maggie bit back the tears that threatened.

‘Stop it, woman!’ she said out loud. ‘Feeling sorry for yourself won’t solve a thing.’

He hadn’t said much about these shooting incidents and Maggie was experienced enough not to ask questions, but now her thoughts turned to those who might be left behind; parents, brothers and sisters, close friends … It was like seeing ripples emanate from a pool when a stone is suddenly cast into the water, Lorimer had once explained to her: a criminal act like murder created wave upon wave of victims.

Maggie Lorimer gave herself a mental shake. What was she worried about, after all? It was only an operation. There were far worse things going on in other people’s lives.

The young woman in Glasgow University’s registry office sat crouched over her computer screen, one hand upon her aching belly. If only she hadn’t had so much to drink last night… Joan screwed her face up at the pain. A couple of joints would have been so much nicer, but her friend, Billy, was nowhere to be found for that particular requirement. Joan bit her lip. Billy Brogan was a wanted man. Once that would have made her smile, the thought of him being one of the big men around town. But this was different. A couple of men had been found dead in Billy’s flat. She’d been there plenty of times, sleeping over after parties, sometimes sharing Billy’s bed.

A sudden thought came to the woman: would the police find

T

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traces of her DNA? Her stomach turned over in a moment of panic. But there wasn’t anything they could do, was there? After all, Joan Frondigoun didn’t have a police record, did she? Her eyes fell on to the list that she was typing out. Billy had given her loads of gear as well as nice presents to do him that favour, hadn’t he? All she’d had to do was make a few changes here and there, delete one particular name from the university records whenever it was necessary. But now it might be a little more difficult to keep up this pretence. Okay so Billy’s sister had changed her surname again, but that police officer had been asking about any students from a two year period whose forenames were Marianne. Had Billy’s sister done anything criminal? Was that why she’d been trying to cover her tracks? Joan Frondigoun sat still and thought carefully. If she were to reveal the extent of her cover up then she would not only lose her job, she might lose Billy as well. But what if Billy really had shot those men? Her lip began to tremble. He’d taken off somewhere, not told her anything about his plans. So perhaps he hadn’t intended to include her in his future after all? ‘You all right, Joan?’ her line manager looked up from an adjoining desk, a frown on her face.

‘Aye, a bit of stomach cramp. Need to go to the loo,’ she said and scurried out of the office, down a short corridor and into the relative cool of the ladies’ toilets.

Once inside the cubicle, Joan Frondigoun sat down and stifled a sob. It was no use kidding herself any longer. Billy Brogan had made promises that he would never keep and wasn’t it just like her to have believed them?

She blew her nose loudly before flushing the toilet. Stupid cow. Stupid, stupid cow, she told herself angrily. Then she gave herself a mental shake. Maybe it wasn’t too late

to get out of all this mess. Perhaps the best thing she could do now was to look for another job, leave the registry behind. She’d managed to hide Marianne Brogan from prying eyes. Now it was time she looked after herself.

octor Solomon Brightman lifted the pile of papers from his desk and shuffled them into a new card folder. This year’s student intake was still to be sent out to him once registry had satisfied itself that all the new applicants were processed and their classes finalised. The basic class in behavioural psychology had been oversubscribed last year and there were still some students entering their second year who wanted to add this to their timetables. Solly’s mouth turned up in a small smile of pleasure. His was a popular subject all right, and those students who passed through his department would benefit from the teaching in all sorts of ways, not just those who wanted to enter the profession. Being aware of certain things about human nature was always going to be an asset in life, he’d often told them.

Opening the top drawer of his filing cabinet, Solly pushed the folder into the relevant section then flicked across until he came to the subject he wanted.

`Ah, here we are,’ he murmured to himself, drawing out a green folder. ‘Dreams,’ he added, sitting down at his desk and opening the file. All of the psychologist’s notes were saved on his hard drive but he always kept a hard copy with a duplicate for the department’s files. It meant that any lecture could be given at a

moment’s notice, even if the member of the department who had written it was absent. He grinned. It was just as well. He’d be taking off the statutory two weeks’ paternity leave once the baby arrived and that was scheduled to be a few weeks after the start of term. Still, he enjoyed giving this particular lecture and he wanted to amend some of the contents before the new session began.

As he riffled through the documents he noticed that one page at the back had come adrift from its paperclip. SoIly pulled it out and glanced at the list of names that had comprised one of his tutorial groups. Eight names conjured up only a few faces. He shook his head, berating himself for having such a terrible memory. But then he stopped as he read the last but one name on the list. Scott. That was her name, the red-haired woman who had spoken to him in the bookshop. Marianne Scott. Now he remembered her. An older student, pale faced, with an air of defeat about her, he recalled. Hadn’t she always sat in a corner away from the others, as though she had wanted to fade into the woodwork? That alone had made her an interesting subject. It hadn’t just been the fact that she had been the only mature student in that particular group that had made him think about her. The aura of unhappiness around her had been almost palpable, if one believed in such things as auras, he chided himself. Whatever had been wrong must have sorted itself out, though, as she had seemed a different person that day in the children’s department of the bookstore.

Tucking the list more firmly in its place, Solly began to read his lecture notes on dreams and the preamble that always included the great twentieth century figures of Freud and Jung. Sitting back, the psychologist relaxed as he read his notes. Dreams are what pass through the human mind as we sleep. While they appear to us as pictures and may include other sensory input like sounds

they are usually associated with strong emotions and thoughts. Although there is no definitive reason for why we dream this is a topic that has fascinated mankind since the beginning of time. Solly read on, skimming the references to Biblical characters and those in various mythologies. He had included Joseph, of course, and had gone on to relate his own knowledge of the Judaic ceremony hatavat halom. This was a ceremony where through ritual a rabbi could transform bad dreams, making them good. Not a bad ceremony to have, Solly thought to himself. If he had long since given up being a practising Jew, he still retained a strong respect for the traditions and felt it was important to include this snippet in his lecture. He skipped the pages referring to REM sleep. Students new to the neurology of sleep and dreams loved this bit, especially those who craved empirical evidence. Solly chuckled, turning the pages until he came to the section on the psychology of dreams. So much of it was theory, of course, and students had to balance what many psychologists had said upon the subject, some of it quite contradictory. Were dreams an emotional preparation for solving problems? Did they create new ideas? Did they function as a mental dustbin for all the sensory input that had taken place before sleep? Solly read on, once again acknowledging his own fascination with the subject. Rosie had told him of the vivid dream she had experienced when she had been in hospital. She had felt as though she were leaving her own body. The memory of that time still had the power to disturb him. That she had hung between life and death following her terrible accident was never in doubt. But had she been given some sort of premonition of the afterlife in a dream? Or had the massive amounts of drugs been responsible for such pictures in her brain? It was interesting, he always told his students, that more women than men recalled their dreams. And also

that those remembered dreams were more often than not associated with anxiety rather than with a feeling of well being. Solly laid down the folder full of papers and gazed into space. To sleep, perchance to dream, Shakespeare had written. Distracted for a moment, he wondered if he ought to write a paragraph or two about characters from the plays. Undergraduates often combined the study of psychology with that of English literature. Hamlet was an obvious choice, of course. And Lady Macbeth, though she, poor woman, was often wrongly attacked as being a psychopath. Such persons did not experience her level of guilt, he would have to remind his students. And did psychopaths have the necessary mental equipment to be dreamers themselves? That was another interesting question that might be worth including. The better students would enjoy following up that one. A door closing shook Solly out of his reverie and he turned around to listen to the familiar sounds he held so dear; Rosie letting her keys fall into the porcelain dish on the hall table, then her voice calling him as she entered the lounge.