“She just fell down,” Carol Padden said. “I was right at the front of the shop. It sounded dreadful, just a terrible thud and all her breath came out.”
David Harper nodded. He was sipping a cup of tea in the back shop, his fourth of the morning and he knew he should refuse any other offers or he’d start to choke. Either that or he’d be jangling by nightfall.
“And that’s when you and your friend, what’s her name, Jeanette, went out to help?”
“Yes. But there was nothing we could do.”
“Did you see anybody with the woman?”
The girl shook her head. “No. She was on her own. I’m sure of that.”
It was going to be a slog, David knew. The uniforms had already been round asking the questions and had got nowhere. Normally the beat teams who patrolled the Waterside Mall and the whole of the shopping centre of the town would be enough, but he’d been sent along to lend his weight and that was odd enough. It was just a sudden death. No suspicious circumstances. A middle-aged woman who had upped and died in public. A Jane Doe. Ordinarily , she was of no great account in the scheme of things. People died when they got to their time and the world still turned and it wasn’t a job for a detective sergeant to be wasting his time on.
The nameless woman had spun round, fallen and died of natural causes.
Except that the natural causes were a puzzle.
There had been something wrong with her that the experts at St Enoch’s hospital couldn’t figure out and that’s why he’d been sent out to root around. David didn’t know what it was that they’d discovered. Nobody knew, or at least nobody was saying, not yet. He’d find out in time, that was for certain.
“We need a name and an address,” Donal Bulloch said. He was the CID head for the city centre division and everybody said he’d be the Chief before long. “Don’t ask me why, for I don’t know yet. Professor Hartley tells me there are some anomalies they’re having a problem with.”
“Is she infectious? Contagious?”
“Your guess is as good as mine, David. They don’t know yet. No, only kidding. They don’t believe she’s infectious but they think she might have picked something up from somewhere, and they want to find out what. Hartley says there’s something in her blood they haven’t come across before. Anyway, if they’re puzzled, then I’m puzzled and we’d better get a handle on this. The beat boys have come up with nothing at all, so you can do me a favour and get a name and address and a background I can give the sawbones. If you need help, just shout and you’ll get it, okay?”
David shrugged. It was a beat job, door knocking and asking questions and he had better things to do. The previous night’s grab had in itself been an interruption to something more important, but he’d worked it because it had come down his own line from a good source. He’d been spending most of the week with the team on the Tollcross post office raid, sifting through all the statements, and the scene of crime evidence, piecing together the clues, building them up bit by bit, and he’d felt the pattern emerging. It was a talent he had and his bosses knew it. Now they’d taken him off the team when he was getting that little tickle of certainty and they’d asked him to check out a sudden death in the mall.
Bulloch looked at him. “Good collar the other night.” David nodded appreciation.
“Is that a bruise there?” the boss asked, pointing to a mark just under David’s hairline. He smirked. Kenny Lang had been charged with police assault and they could have jacked that up to attempted murder, but there was no point. He was just a small timer who panicked. He would not try to run a policeman down again, not ever. Bulloch grinned. The bruise was familiar. Anybody on the force recognised the imprint of a Glasgow kiss.
“How is Lamont?”
“She’s got bruised ribs. A bit sore. She’s getting checked out later so she’ll be back tomorrow probably.”
“Good. Take her out with you if she’s free. She’s got promise.”
The dead woman had to be important. David he had figured that out already. They wanted to find out who the woman was, where she came from, and from the sound of it, what had killed her. Down in the mall, David sipped his tea.
“Had you ever seen her before? Maybe she’s bought something before?
Carol Padden shook her head. “I don’t think so. She didn’t look like she used Body Shop. Didn’t smell like it either.”
“Smell?”
“Horrible. Really disgusting. Like she hadn’t washed for ages. It was really weird. Would make you sick. But it was worse than that. It was, like, sick. No, wrong. It just smelled all wrong. It made me think of nightmares. I don’t know why. When I smelt her everything went dark for a minute and I thought I was going to faint, but I was dead scared as well, like I was in some kind of danger. For a minute everything looked really different, all the people crowding in. But I think it was just because I got such a fright seeing the woman fall like that. I never saw anybody dying before. She was making a terrible noise in her throat as if she couldn’t breathe and she was trying to say something, but I couldn’t hear it.” Carol’s eyes were focused on the distance, in her memory.
“The woman from Rolling Stock. I’ve seen her before. She tried to give her restitution.”
“Resuscitation?”
“Yes. That. Pressing down on her chest. And she grabbed her hand and said something about a baby. That’s what it sounded like. But she never had a baby. I think it must have been something else.”
Jenny McGill was more positive.
“Definitely she said baby. Clear as daylight. She grabbed a hold of my arm, look, there’s the bruises to show you. I thought the bones were going to crack and it gave me a right scare I can tell you.”
Jenny rubbed at her wrist where the bruises were purpling up well. “Get the baby was what she said. Get my baby. But she was so far gone I think she was delirious, or hallucinating or something. I tried by best to give her heart massage, but it was no good. She was dying. I could hear her heart running riot in there. The only thing that will stop that are the electrical pads.”
“You seem well up on it.”
“I did two years night school in first aid. I’ve got certificates.”
“Somebody mentioned she didn’t smell very clean,” David said. Jenny’s eyes widened.
“You can say that again. Worse than unclean. When I got home I soaked myself for hours. It was awful. If I hadn’t been all worked up with her dying right there in front of everybody, I’d have been sick. But it was more than just somebody that’s not been washing herself. Some of these buskers could do with a scrub with carbolic, but this was a lot worse than that. It was a rotten smell. I don’t know, like the way you’d imagine gangrene smelled. Or something gone off. It just didn’t smell natural. When I got close to her it was really bad. Made me feel all shivery inside and I could feel myself get all hot and clammy. I nearly threw up. For a minute I nearly passed out. She’s not diseased or anything, is she? I haven’t caught anything off her, have I?”
“No, I think it’s all right. We just have to find out who she is.” He took her address and phone number. He still didn’t know what was puzzling the medical men at St Enoch’s, but if there was some sort of disease, then they’d want to find everybody who’d been in contact.
“Had you ever seen her before?”
Jenny shrugged. “Maybe. There was something familiar about her, but when you work in here, right on the main walk in the mall, you see hundreds of faces, thousands of them every day. I probably saw her passing, but I don’t think she was a customer. Somebody in the other shops might know.”
She leaned forward. “Do you want a cup of tea?”
David’s bladder told him he didn’t.
It was late that afternoon before paramedic Phil Coulter and his partner got off duty. David went through it again with them. Phil was reluctant to talk at first, but James Bradley started describing what happened and that got Phil going.
“Swear to God, she scared the living daylights out of me. Twice I knew she was dead and then she came back to life. I told Brendan Quayle, he’s the resident on casualty, and he looked at me as if I was daft. But it’s true. She had no heartbeat at all, but she fell off the trolley and started crawling away. Ten, maybe twenty seconds before she dropped. Like a puppet with its strings cut. When we got her back, on again, there was no sign of life.”
“That’s true,” James agreed. “I checked the pulse in her neck and there was nothing.”
“But it was in the ambulance that she really scared the life out of me,” Phil continued. “Jim was driving and I was in the back. I gave her two hits with the pads, juiced right up to four hundred, and I got nothing but a flat line and a punch right in the balls.”
David raised his eyebrows. “She attacked you?”
“Galvanic jerk, that was all, but I won’t be having any fun for a day or two.”
“Only way he’ll get a woman to feel him up,” James mocked. “I prefer to get them drunk, myself. Nothing better than a Carlsberg leg-opener. Works every time.”
Phil ignored him, though his mouth twitched in a half smile and David could tell that they were pretty close as partners. They’d seen a lot together, and probably saved many a life in the process.
“I gave her adrenaline, injected straight into the heart muscle, and sometimes that kicks everything up again, but nothing happened. Not for a minute, maybe two. Then she comes round, opens her eyes and stares right at me. I can tell you now it gave me a real fright. It wasn’t right. I’ve seen corpses come back to life before, but this was different. It was as if she was dead, but there was something making her keep going.”
“I’ve told him that’s a lot of crap,” James butted in. “We probably missed the heartbeat.”
Phil shook his head. “There was nothing. The ECG was dead. But there was something trying to keep her alive. Like willpower, or some sort of after-death thing, maybe even after-life. Whatever it was, she opened her eyes and looked right at me and started babbling on about a baby.”
“A baby?” David asked, for the third time that day.
“That’s what she said, and her voice sounded awful. Like it was coming from down a well. Honest, she was dead, but she was still talking. She was dead, but she crawled off that trolley and along the floor in the mall. I know what I’m talking about, sergeant.”
“And what do the doctors say?”
“They say there must have been something we missed. There’s no trouble or anything. Prof. Hartley, the consultant, he’s given the okay to everything we did. Can’t fault us on procedure, but I know there’s something wrong. And now you’re round asking questions and that makes me even more convinced.”
David shrugged. “Just trying to find out who she was.”
“Something else though.” Phil stopped and looked at James who seemed to think for a second, then gave a small nod.
“When we got back later, they’d taken her out of the crash and down to the mortuary and after that they got her out of there. One of the nurses says she was up in microbiology, and that doesn’t normally happen. The crash cubicle was sealed off for a while, though nobody knew why. So now I known there was something funny going on.”
“If there was anything dangerous, they’d have let us know,” James said. “We’d have been the first to be called in for checks. If they haven’t done that, then it can’t be infectious.”
“I don’t know what it was,” Phil replied. “All I know is that she was trying to talk to me, and she was bloody dead. I’ll never forget that, swear to God.”
David found a bathroom and got rid of the tea before deciding to go back to the mall. The ambulance drivers were a long shot, and there was an even longer shot back in the central concourse, but he thought it might be worth a try. What Jenny McGill and Phil Coulter had told him was odd enough to make him think.
It wasn’t just the scare the paramedic had got that niggled at him. Maybe he had seen plenty of things, but there was always one more surprise round the corner. David himself had been in on the Toby Cannel capture after the Waterside bank raid that had happened only a block away from the mall in October. Toby had not come quietly. He’d fired three rounds and then he’d taken six shots, two of them through the heart and he’d kept on running, a hundred yards or more down the alley with exit holes the size of fists in his back. A seventh shot had shattered the thigh bone and Toby had crashed and rolled and yet he’d still tried to get up. When David and big Jock Lewis had reached him he was trying to get to his feet, spraying blood like a pig on a shambles-hook and swearing to Christ that he’d kill them all. It had taken three of them to get him down and take the gun from him and Toby had fought like a madman. He had collapsed ten minutes later and a post mortem showed that the shots had shattered his spine and completely destroyed the left ventricle of his heart and that he couldn’t have walked a yard, never mind run a hundred, and he couldn’t have fought three big policemen. That’s what the pathologist had said, but it had happened. David was sure something similar had taken place here. Some people just didn’t die so easily. Some had a hold on life that you had to pry off with a crowbar.
David knew it wasn’t just the scare they’d had that niggled and itched at him. It was not just the scare, nor the unexplained resurrection. It was the baby.
Both Jenny and Phil had mentioned the baby. The dying woman had been trying to tell them something. Even young Carol Padden had thought she heard the word, though she couldn’t be sure.
A baby.
That didn’t seem to make much sense, but it could mean anything. The unknown woman could have been remembering something from her past, and that, David knew was not an uncommon event in close proximity to death. She could have been minding a baby for someone, and had possibly come out to the shops for a quick errand, though that too seemed unlikely. The only houses in a quarter of a mile were in the Merchant City where the old offices had been converted into flats for young lawyers and media folk. The dead woman was not among their ranks, that was certain.
Back at the mall, the choristers were still twisting their heads mechanically as they sang Jingle bells and David wondered how the shop assistants stood the constant barrage of fake merriment. The incessant noise only reminded him of how close Christmas was and that he’d better find a spare half hour to get his shopping done. June would already have his gifts wrapped and ribboned, a sweater, same as last year and the year before. Two shirts. After shave and talc. He needed a new zoom lens for his camera to get up on the hill lochs to take shots of the snow geese flighting in, but he knew he’d have to buy that for himself. June faintly disapproved of his weekend trips. Down in the mall, the shoppers browsed and the choirboys urged them on. David wished he’d done his festive buying in the summer and got it over with. Christmas was not his favourite time of the year.
John Barclay, known to his former colleagues as Jab, thanks to his middle name of Anthony, and the fact that he had been a fair boxer in his day, had an office on the first floor, built on to a corner and with windows on either side which gave him a vantage down the entire main section of the mall. He welcomed David with a brusque, but friendly handshake and offered him a seasonal whisky which made a change from the tea. David sipped the malt slowly, savouring the peaty backtaste.
“So there is life after the D-Division,” David said. Jab grinned and raised his glass.
“Could be worse.” He said. “Full pension and criminal injuries and I walked straight in to this. There is a God and he smiles warmly down on me, for which I am eternally in his debt.”
“How’s the hip?” Barclay had taken a crowbar blow that had shattered the bone when he’d tried to arrest a hit-and-run driver who turned out to be a thief on his way home from a job on a jeweller’s safe. David and he had worked together on a couple of cases.
“Still gives me gyp, but I’m not on my feet all day long, like some folk.” He smiled over the lip of his glass and gave David a wink.
“Surprised they sent CID out on this. Looks like a natural causes job.”
“That’s most likely. They just want a name.”
“Can’t help you here,” Jab said, “But I’ve got the tape from yesterday. I’ve been over it a couple of times and I’ve record-protected it so it won’t wipe.”
“Can I see it now?”
“Sure. I thought you’d want to.” The office had a bank of monitors, all of them flickering that blue-grey colour that security screens emit. They covered every angle, showing all the store fronts. Some of the larger departments had their own security cameras which fed here too. Barclay used a remote to fire up a set in the corner. It clicked twice and the screen came alive. At the top end, the day, date and time showed in white numerals and letters. The seconds scrolled up mesmerically. The ex-policeman leaned forward and pointed.
“There she is. Coming out on the left.”
David watched. On screen the woman came angling across the concourse, past the escalators and the bench seats where throngs of teenagers gathered in a crowd. She moved slowly along, tired and shabby looking, shoulders hunched. Past the glassy observation elevator she stopped and leaned against one of columns that supported the high roof. Off to the left, the little plastic choirboys swung their heads from side to side.
“She’s carrying something,” David said. He moved closer. The woman had a white carrier bag in one hand. When she turned slightly, it was clear that she held a smaller handbag which had been hidden by the other one.
“Mothercare,” Barclay said.
A baby...
On screen, the woman, tall and angular, spare and skinny-shanked but strangely buxom, paused and bent down as if she was out of breath. “Watch this now,” Jab told David.
The woman convulsed. There was no other way to describe it. Her head and shoulders had lowered, as if she was crumpling to the floor. Her face must have been only feet from the tiles and then suddenly she snapped straight back up again. David had seen the motion before, a couple of times, but only in brawls. It looked exactly as if she’d been punched in the belly, making her swing down, and then kicked in the face, throwing her back up again.
“Heart attack,” Barclay said. “Seen it happen before. I’d stake my ex-career on it.”
“Big gambler,” David murmured, but his attention was on the motion on the screen. “Can we get sound?”
“What do you think this is? Universal Studios?”
The woman’s hands jerked up. The carrier bag flopped against the pillar. The handbag went spinning away to the left and out of sight. She stumbled forward, tottering from side to side into the clear space between Rolling Stock and Body Shop. Her arms raised right up to the side in a crucifixion pose and she spun slowly. For an instant, she stopped, one hand came clamping in against her chest and the other went down to grab at her belly. Her head went back until she seemed to be staring right up at the roof and she fell like a sack, hitting the floor with obvious force. The picture fuzzed out right at that moment, as if a sudden discharge of electricity had jammed the reception, then it came back on again. The shape on the floor jerked violently, the back arching right up from the tiles. Despite the poor resolution of the distance, they could see her mouth wide open in a silent scream.
People passing by just looked at her, in that curious but uninvolved way. A pair of boys almost fell over the skinny, splayed legs and swerved to avoid the obstruction.
“Heartless little bastards,” Jab muttered.
Jeanette and Carol came hurrying over from Body Shop. The taller girl held back, but the other one went right down, obviously trying to help. A small crowd began to form. The red-head - her hair looked fair in monochrome - pushed her way back to the shop. Jenny McGill came from the other direction. The two men watched as she opened the blouse and bent to listen, then saw her shoulders heave as she tried the heart massage procedure.
The movement at the edge of the screen caught David’s eye. A small woman in a grey coat bent forward at the side of the pillar, slowly and casually picked up the Mothercare bag and stuffed it inside a shopping bag of her own. She turned and disappeared. David asked Barclay to rewind the scene and when it came back on, with Jenny McGill desperately thumping at the woman’s chest, he pointed out the slick snatch.
“Bloody ghoul,” Barclay said.
“Do you know her?”
The ex-cop shook his head. “One of millions. Just an opportunist.”
“But we know the woman was in Mothercare. I can check there. Maybe find out what she bought.”
He turned, thinking. Something was nagging at him. The Mothercare bag wouldn’t necessarily give any clue about the woman’s identity. But there had been another bag. David looked back at the screen. He reached forward and pointed to the left of the screen where the walkway took a dog-leg turn towards the west entrance.
“Her handbag went flying over there. Can we find out where it went?”
“I never saw that,” Barclay conceded. “I only thought the main action was important. The tape might have been wiped already. I can have a look. It could take some time.”
“If you don’t mind,” David said. He knew he could instruct the other man to give him everything, but it was better to play it nice and soft.
“Sure,” Jab said agreeably. He poured out two more scotch whiskies in the heavy handed way that Scots men do, despite the fact that David had hardly touched the first one. He crossed to a tall cabinet, opened the door and showed David the stack of tapes. There were dozens of them.
“Got them colour marked,” Barclay said, “so it might be quicker.” He checked with a small chart taped to the back of the cabinet door, and brought out about a dozen video cassettes each bearing a red sticker. He put the first one in the machine, let it run for a few moments, then ejected it. It took five more tries before he sat back.
“I think we could be in luck.” He thumbed the fast forward, let the tape whirr for several minutes, pressed play. It took him several tries, running the cassette back and forth until they got close.
“There,” David said. There were a number of people in the picture, two coming out of a confectioners shop and the others standing in front of the chemists. As one, they turned to face the right of the picture. Over by the wall, there was a line of supermarket trolleys. Two women started to move closer to the camera, foreshortening as they approached, then walked out of sight.
“They were in the crowd,” David said. “The one with the hat was there.”
They watched the scene. Right at the far edge of the picture, the small woman in the grey coat moved towards the pillar.
A sudden blur flashed across the screen.
“That’s it,” David said. Barclay stopped the picture and the screen jittered to a blur. He rewound for several seconds and replayed the scene. It wasn’t pin-sharp, but it was the handbag. It came flying in from the right, hit the ground and skidded on the smooth tiles. They watched it slide right to the far wall and hit against the wheels of the trolley. It lay there, black and shapeless but still clearly a bulky handbag. For more than a minute nothing happened.
Then a girl walked into the picture. She was thin and dark haired, wearing jeans and a long flapping coat. She looked over her shoulder, turned to watch down the length of the concourse, then very quickly she stooped and lifted the bag from the floor. Cleverly she kept walking, not opening the bag to check of the contents. She put the strap across her shoulder, held her head up and walked casually towards the exit. She just looked like a girl out shopping.
“Carrie McFall,” both men said almost exactly at the same time.
“Theft by finding,” Barclay said. “She won’t be handing it in to the station.”
“I’d better find her. If she’s still got the bag, it’ll be a miracle, but I’ve worked longer odds than that.”
He turned to the mall’s security chief. “If I don’t get anything, I’ll have to come back and go through all of these tapes.” His own sentence surprised him because it just sprung to his mind and was spoken before he’d even thought about it, but it was out and it was right. Sometimes he was lucky enough to get a hunch and he’d worked them long enough to go with the flow.
“Jeez David, that could take a while. And I need them, to keep these cameras running.”
David shrugged. The sudden intuition was buzzing at the back of his head. “You know how it is. I’ll make it as short as possible, but don’t wipe any of them.”
“Come on man. The firm’ll go crazy if I lay out on new ones. You know what the guards get paid an hour here? The company doesn’t exactly throw money around.”
“Have to insist Jab, and I’m really sorry, but Donal Bulloch put me on this one, and neither of us wants to give that big highlandman a bad time or he’ll do our arms and our legs.” The importance of saving all the tapes was somehow sharp and clear. “So let’s not fiddle with big Donal’s evidence. Eh?”
He didn’t like doing it to Barclay, especially when he was ex-job, but it had to be done. It was just a little lean, nothing heavy. Jab looked him in the eye, realised the score, and gave in gracefully.
“I suppose you’re right. Donal’s done me a good turn in the past. Couldn’t let him down.” He grinned to let David know there were no hard feelings, turned and locked the cabinet door. “Want another?” he asked, indicating the bottle. David shook his head. He hadn’t touched the second one. Barclay saw him to the door, limping hard on his left side where the hip had smashed, as if he was still in some pain.
“I’ll be back quick as I can. Thanks for the hospitality, and the help. Once I find young Carrie I’ll give you a call and we can all stand down.”
“Make it fast then,” Jab urged. “This is a nice little number. I’d hate to lose it.”
INCUBUS : Chapter 3 47 Joe Donnelly Page INCUBUS Joe Donnelly Page 1