The Bird That Did Not Sing (DCI Lorimer) (17 page)

T
he email from Solly had not gone unnoticed. Lorimer’s frown had turned to a smile as he imagined the psychologist poring over the computer screen, anxious not to overstep the bounds of their friendship. I hope you don’t mind, Solly had begun, showing a deference to Lorimer’s authority that had not always manifested itself in the early days of their association. The detective superintendent read on with interest. A colleague of Solly’s had some misgivings about a girl in the detention centre where she worked.
Think
you
ought
to
speak
to
her
, Solly had written.
Here’s
her
number.
And Lorimer jotted it down on a page torn from the notebook he had been using earlier that day. It was the sort of detail that might or might not lead to something concrete, he mused, tapping his lips with the pencil.

Minutes later he was picking up his jacket from the back of the chair and heading out of the room. Yes, the psychologist at the detention centre had agreed, it would be better if he came down, though it was highly doubtful that the girl would talk to him. She was terrified of men.

As he drove away from Stewart Street, Lorimer felt his spirits lifting. It was one of those days in May when the morning clouds had cleared, the outlines of landmark buildings silhouetted against skies of perfect blue. Tonight he would be returning home to Maggie and it would be just the two of them now that Vivien had flown back to London, no other person there to disturb the peace of their suburban home. As he drove through the city streets, Lorimer imagined sitting out in the garden, Chancer curling around his legs, a glass of something tawny in his hand. It wasn’t a bad life; he had a wife he loved, a house with no mortgage and the best job in the world. What more could he ask for?

A lopsided grin formed on the policeman’s face. There were always going to be things he wanted, answers to all those difficult questions. Like this case now: who was the African girl who had been found out at Cathkin? And was there any significance in that Pictish shape tattooed on to her thigh? None of the missing persons enquiries had turned up a girl connected with the Commonwealth Games, but that did not mean that she had nothing to do with the events unfolding around this city. If Solly’s idea about trafficking was correct, the body now lying in the mortuary might well be that of a girl brought into the country specifically to service the needs of men willing to pay for sexual gratification; men who would come to Glasgow for a while and leave again, their lusts for sport and sex equally satisfied.

‘She won’t see you,’ Dr Jones warned him.

Lorimer nodded, stifling a sigh of exasperation. He was sitting in the psychologist’s tiny office, no more than a glorified cupboard with one high barred window to let in the daylight. The window was shut fast, making the place stuffy, a desk fan moving slowly in a constant arc, the tiny breeze doing little to rob the room of its sultry atmosphere. Dr Jones was a thin woman of around fifty, he reckoned, short grey hair curled behind her ears, a pair of reading glasses perched on her nose, and a manner that brooked no nonsense from anyone in her domain whether he were a senior police officer or not.

‘What can you tell me, then?’

Dr Jones thought for a moment before answering, reminding him suddenly of Solly Brightman, a man of many considered pauses in his speech.

‘She spoke about a big man, a white man,’ the woman began at last. ‘With lots of hair on his face, red hair, she told me. And many shapes tattooed on his arms.’ She swept her fingers across her sleeve as though to illustrate this point.

‘What sort of shapes?’ Lorimer asked.

‘I asked her that after you called,’ Dr Jones said. ‘Curled shapes, like hissing snakes, she told me. But not snakes. Does that make any sense?’

‘Perhaps,’ Lorimer replied. ‘Can you show her these.’ He drew out a folded sheet of paper from his notebook and flattened it on the desk between them, turning it towards the woman so that she could see the designs that Wrigley had given them.

Dr Jones studied them carefully, one finger tracing the intricate whorls and curls.

‘Pictish,’ she said at last, looking up.

‘You know about stuff like that?’

She smiled. ‘It might surprise you, but many psychologists begin their careers with studies into anthropology. The fascination with the human condition,’ she added, her grey eyes lighting up with an enthusiasm that Lorimer found infectious.

‘Yes, I’ll show her these, shall I?’ The woman rose from her desk, taking the paper with her, and left him in the room, closing the door behind her.

Lorimer sat on the edge of his seat, the walls of the overheated office suddenly seeming to close in on him, a sure sign of the claustrophobia that had haunted him for most of his life. Hoping that he was not breaking any sort of rule, he stepped to the door and opened it wide.

The sounds of life were not from human voices but machines: a vacuum cleaner’s drone, the shrill ring of a telephone somewhere down the corridor and the whirring of the electric fan on the psychologist’s desk. What the hell must it be like to live in a place like this day after day? Adrift in a no-man’s-land between the place you thought was safe and the threat of being deported back to wherever it was you’d fled from, waiting for the wheels of bureaucracy to turn. He could well understand why the young girl would not see him: he represented the very authority that posed such a threat. And more: he was a man and it was at the hands of men that girls like this had suffered.

At last Lorimer heard the woman’s footsteps return along the corridor and he breathed a sigh of relief.

As she entered, the psychologist paused, one hand ready to close the door again, but one look at the tall man sitting back from her desk made her stop.

‘You’d rather I kept this open a little?’ she asked, settling her spectacles on to her nose again.

Lorimer nodded, too ashamed of his weakness to confess it to this woman, guessing that those shrewd grey eyes could see his discomfort anyway.

She settled herself behind the desk once more. ‘Yes,’ Dr Jones began briskly. ‘It was indeed tattoos like that. Blue and green, she says. However, the man she describes did not have that one.’ She turned the paper towards him, one finger on the triple spiral. ‘Though she has seen it before.’

Lorimer suddenly wanted to tell this woman all about the black-skinned girl they had taken from the edge of that pond, tell her everything about the case. But it was impossible without breaching the same code of confidentiality that was imposed on the rest of the investigation team. She was looking at him, her clear eyes waiting for his response.

‘There is a tattoo like this that interests us,’ he began carefully. ‘And not on the arm of a man.’

‘Our detainee tells me that it was given to another girl, one she met before coming here. She won’t say any more.’ Dr Jones shook her head slightly. ‘I am sorry.’

Lorimer thought about the bloated face back in the mortuary and the predations of the water creatures that had eaten away at her flesh. Who now would recognise the dead girl?

‘It’s important that we know where she met this other girl,’ Lorimer insisted. ‘Can you try to persuade her to tell you?’

Dr Jones smiled suddenly, a sad smile, then another regretful shake of the head. ‘I can try, certainly, but I cannot guarantee that my question will be met with any degree of success.’

‘It really is important,’ Lorimer told her. ‘Other girls may be harmed, like the one here. Tell her we only want to stop that happening, will you?’

‘Look at this!’ Kirsty exclaimed aloud so that several heads in the room turned her way.

‘Sorry.’ She blushed. ‘Just found something…’ Her voice fell to a mumble. She caught the expression of amusement on one female officer’s face as she turned back to her own desk:
the
rookie
cop
at
it
again,
overenthusiastic.
And the blush deepened as she wondered what else they said about her.
Wilson’s
daughter,
getting
preferential
treatment
just
because
Lorimer’s
a
family
friend.
Was that strictly true, though? Kirsty had been given the same routine sort of jobs that any probationer would expect and Lorimer had never once shown her any special favours. His manner was completely professional whenever he was speaking to the team, concentrating their minds on the case in hand, explaining the reasons behind the need for each and every action. The occasional wry remark that would make them smile, a nod when an officer had achieved something worthwhile, and above all, the sense that he trusted them to do a good job; these were all attributes that PC Wilson was finding out about Detective Superintendent Lorimer here at Stewart Street. She had known him for most of her life and it was Lorimer, not her own father, who had inspired her to join the police after all, wasn’t it?

Kirsty looked back at the email from the Royal Infirmary that had been forwarded to the team. No doubt everyone involved in the case had seen it by now, her exclamation of discovery quite redundant. The notes from the hospital were quite specific: the patient’s birth date was given as 1 April and the address as Yoruba Street, a place Kirsty knew simply did not exist. The girl’s name had been given as Asa Okonjo. Mrs.

Kirsty nodded. It all tallied with the same girl Stuart Wrigley had tattooed. Would he remember a wedding ring? she wondered.

There had been sufficient concern to alert the authorities, the email continued. The patient did not seem to be comfortable with the man who had brought her to the hospital and the nurse in A&E had suspected that he was not in fact her husband. Further suspicions arose when the psychologist had been called to have a look. She had seen the man’s behaviour; was sure he was hiding something and in a very big hurry to leave. And there was more. Kirsty’s eyes widened as she read on. The nurse in the plaster room had been embarrassed when the girl had lifted her skirt and pointed towards her inner thigh, the psychologist had written. But the nurse had remembered the tattoo all right. The three curled shapes revealed as the girl had taken her hand away.

‘So we’re looking for a black girl with a broken arm now,’ Lorimer said.

The detective superintendent nodded at the officers assembled in the incident room. He had already reported back from his visit to the detention centre. ‘We know the girl’s identity tallies with that of the girl in Terry’s Tattoo Studio. Same false address. We do, however, have a lead on the pair of them after they left the hospital. CCTV footage shows them getting into a car, and we have a partial on the rear number plate.’

What Lorimer did not tell them was that Professor Brightman had been instrumental in directing them to the detention centre, his concern that there was a ring of child traffickers at work in the city something that the police already shared. Nor did the detective superintendent dwell overlong on the big white man whose arms were covered in green and blue Pictish shapes. Lorimer had been sworn to secrecy over the matter of the terrorist cell. But it was too much of a coincidence that the description that Connor Drummond had given him tallied with the one from the girl in the detention centre.

And William Lorimer was not given to a strong belief in coincidences.

M
aggie opened the front door and bent down to retrieve the day’s mail. The ginger cat appeared at her side, rubbing his flank against her leg, the purring a welcome-home sound that immediately lifted her spirits. She breathed out a sigh, feeling her body relax. It had been a hard day waiting for her seniors to finish their exam, having them come into her classroom afterwards eager to share what they had written, eyes hopeful that they had chosen the best questions to answer. But it was over now and there would be other teachers marking their scripts, those external examiners who determined the fate of so many young folk. The rest of the term was not so difficult: the seniors were on exam leave until June, when the new timetable would kick in, and Maggie’s workload would be diminished till after the holidays.

She sat on the old rocking chair, opening the mail, casting aside the flyers to be recycled in the bin outside the back door, putting the bills into a neat pile. There was one stiff envelope that looked like a card. Maggie’s brow furrowed, puzzled for a moment. Neither she nor Bill had a birthday coming up, so what could this be?

She slit the envelope with her paper knife, a souvenir from one of their trips to Skye, the handle a slim greyish-green marble. The card portrayed a garden full of flowers, an empty deckchair in the centre, a discarded book on the grass.

Opening the card, Maggie’s eyes immediately fell on the signature.
Vivien
Gilmartin.
Not just
Vivien
. It was a thank-you letter, then, Maggie supposed. And so it was.