David drove through the winter fog to the office, thinking about the woman and trying to shake off the strange feeling of apprehension that had hung around him since he'd awoken from the dream. Donal Bulloch was down in London for a conference so he reported to Scott Cruden, the inspector who worked directly to the boss.
"I'll have to check with the landlord this morning and maybe have a word with the neighbours," he said. "We still don't know who she is, but we should get a positive line on it today."
Cruden thought it was time wasted on a natural causes death, but if it had been sanctioned from higher up than his altitude, then he declined to argue, at least for today.
"Quick as you can, but you can't have Lamont, not for this morning and probably the next day or so," the inspector said, without rancour. "She's checking out a missing person up in Whitevale. Girl's done a runner, so it seems."
David shrugged nonchalantly, but he knew he was disappointed. He told himself it was because Helen Lamont was a good partner, someone he could rely on. An image flitted across his mind, though not the brutal one he'd imagined in the dead woman's house. He just got a picture of him smiling up at him she he stood with his hand on the mantelpiece. Had he read something in her look? He shook his head, shaking the thought away. He needed no further complications in his life.
A word with the Rachman who rented out the crumbling property and a knock on a few doors wouldn't take much time. He went to his desk and wrote out an information request which he passed through to records office. It was a simple file check on Thelma Quigley, the dead woman who, it seemed had died twice. The run down of the neighbouring tenants might make that request redundant, he knew, but it would save time if he drew a blank.
Helen passed him in the corridor along with two uniformed policemen. "Going back out?"
He nodded and she shrugged apologetically. "I should be back in an hour or so. I got a missing girl in her twenties, but it's very early days yet and it's ten to one she'll turn up, so give me a call if you need a hand."
He gave her a silent okay sign with his middle finger and thumb and went out into the cold. He did not see her watch him from behind the glass as he walked down the steps towards the car park.
The landlord was an estate agent in Miller Street beside the canal which skirted the north side of the city and wended its way towards the river much further down towards the firth, near Barloan Harbour or Levenford. He was out, but his son was in the office, a young man in a fairly well-cut suit, but with an accent rough enough to grind glass.
"Old Thelma? Been there for years," he said, after David flashed his warrant card. "Rent paid by benefit. Never bothers a soul."
"Have you had a look inside the place?"
"My old man maybe looked in once in a while, I believe. She's quiet enough. No loud parties, no pets. No trouble. That's all you want in this line of business."
The young man, somewhere in his mid twenties and with the cocky kind of arrogance of those raised to money-grub, couldn't say anything much more. He checked the records and confirmed that Thelma Quigley had been a tenant for five years. That was it. She was a name on a register and social security money in the bank and as long as she didn't party down until the small hours, then the landlord couldn't give a damn. David felt the swell of anger again then forced it down. There was no point. There were a million Thelma Quigleys in a million houses in a thousand towns. Nobody gave a damn about anybody these days. Money talked louder than ever.
Old Mrs Whalen who lived three doors down was stout and motherly and had a face that was laced by a filigree of wrinkles. Her husband Bob was huddled by a coal fire, still wearing a flat cap and with an ancient army overcoat draped across his shoulders. He coughed gratingly from deep down inside himself and hawked a gob of something putrid into the fire where it hissed and sizzled for a few moments. Mrs Whalen gave him a nonchalant slap on the shoulder and told him to mind his manners while the police were in the house.
"Asbestosis," she said. "Been bringing that stuff up for years, poor old soul. I tell him he should get out in the fresh air, but he can't walk the length of the room now."
Despite the gloom in the little flat where a damp patch was curling the wallpaper down from close to the ceiling and the flat smell of plaster that was never going to dry out, the place was clean. The furniture was old and scarred from long use, but polished and there was a line of photographs on the mantel that showed the up and coming generation of Whalen grandchildren. The old couple had lived a full life.
"Twenty one wee'uns and four great grandchildren. I need to rob a bank every Christmas," she said, bending over arthritically to pour a cup of tea. David felt a roll of weary sadness for them, old Bob with his asbestosis filing up his lungs to drown him in his own mucus and the little lady with the job of looking after him and the line up of grandchildren on the mantel. He forced himself to stop once more. It was not his fight and she was not complaining.
"Thelma? Oh, she kept herself to herself, you know. I only ever saw her down at the shops and she'd say hello. Sometimes she'd hang out the sheets. She was forever hanging them out on the line when it was warm. That was the only time you ever saw her without the babies?"
"Babies?" he asked.
"Oh, she always had babies. "Don't know whose they were, but she looked after them the whole time she lived here. Real shame about what happened to her. I heard it from Mrs Corrigan who got it down at the post office. Amazing how word always gets around, eh?"
David conceded that it was. He was interested in the babies. A bad feeling was trying to insinuate itself into his mind and he clamped it away. He'd read all the papers on the Dennis Nilson case, the bodies buried under floorboards and cut up and dumped down the drain-pipes. He'd studied the Frederick West case with the corpses in the garden and mummified in concrete.
There had been a smell in the flat. He tried to recall it, but couldn't quite. If it had been the smell of a decomposing corpse, a rotting human, he'd have known it from experience. He shook his head absently, shaking the thought away. He wouldn't have missed it, surely. The thought nagged at the edge of his mind.
"Were they her grandchildren?"
"Don't think so. She never had a wedding ring, though that stands for nothing these days. Maybe she was child-minding or something. One thing was for certain, she was always talking baby-stuff, leaning over the pram and goo-ing and gaa-ing, the way people talk if they want the kids to grow up doo-lally, but if you ever went near to have a look, she'd put the cover up quick as a flash. I always thought that was funny. Funny peculiar that is. Most people can't wait to show a baby off, even if it isn't theirs. And everybody puts a coin in for the baby's luck. You would never have thought Thelma was rich enough to turn her nose up at some extra money. She never looked as if she had two pennies to rub together."
Old Mrs Whalen insisted David had a biscuit and said it was all right if he dunked them in his tea. She acted as if he was one of her grandchildren and when he thought about it, he probably was young enough. Old Bob hawked again and stared at the flames, his seemed face bracketed by long lines in leathery skin. He'd worked a hard life, that was for sure. His hands were big and gnarled and looked as if they'd one been strong enough to swing a pickaxe or build ships, but his eyes were old and tired and burned out.
"How many babies?" David finally asked.
"Oh, couldn't say. I never really got a look at one, but there must have been different ones. Maybe four, perhaps five over the years. Sometimes you wouldn't see her for a month or so, mostly in the summertime when it was hot. I think she must have gone away on holiday. But then she'd be back with another one in a different pram. That's how we could tell. Maybe that's how she paid the rent, but she didn't act like a child minder. They've always got five or six to look after and that's too many in my book. That's just being greedy."
"Nonsense, woman," Bob finally spoke up. His voice sounded like boots on gravel. "You had eight yourself."
"That's because he was a dirty-minded old besom," Mrs Whalen told David with a crinkly smile of genuine mirth. "And anyway, they were my babies. All steps and stairs, one after the other with hardly a break to get my breath back, and every one of them loved to death."
David snapped back, almost spilling his tea.
I take care of Baby Grumpling better than anyone could and I love him to death. Really I do.
"It was a happy home," Mrs Whalen said, unaware that David was recollecting the words in the diary. "That's the pleasure babies bring and once you have one, you want another, like chocolates. Mind you, there was no room at all swing a cat in here and never a spare penny either, but we got by, we did and that's because they were all loved. There was always the sound of kids in this house until they grew up, and whenever they come to visit, it's like being young again."
"Och, don't talk rubbish woman," the old man growled in a dry wheeze. "You'll put the young fella off his tea."
"Never pay no heed to him," the old lady said. "He was never home, always out earning and he loved them just the same. You should have seen his face the first time he held one of them in his big rough hands to know he'd have fought the world for them.
David got the picture. The old man turned to the fire and went back into his memories, chest heaving like bellows, breath hissing like a punctured tyre.
"But you don't know where Thelma got the babies?"
"No. Nobody knew where she came from herself. Around here everybody knows something about everybody else's business, but Thelma was different. A real mystery. Oh, she was polite enough. Always said hello, but she'd never stop and pass the time of day. Only ever spoke to the babies, really. I suppose she always had somebody to listen to her."
She turned and gave her husband a hearty slap on the shoulder.
"Not like around here, you ould bugger," she cajoled, but the laugh was in her voice and the old man ritually ignored her.
The other neighbours told the same story. The woman who had lived in the shabby little apartment had bothered no one and had wanted to be left alone. Nobody had intruded. They all mentioned the babies in the prams, how the woman was hardly ever seen without a child. Apart from that, they knew nothing more.
Thelma Quigley was a mystery.
David did not tell them that she was not Thelma Quigley. Of that he was almost certain, from what she had written in her diaries, unless she was schizophrenic and had twin personalities. He didn't think so.
But she was indeed a mystery. Almost everything about her was a puzzle. Where she had come from, the babies she looked after, Something else was nagging at the edge of David's thoughts and he couldn't quite put his finger on it.
It was only on the way back to the station, that it struck him quite forcibly. She hadn't been with a baby when she died. Yet she'd spoken of a baby with her last dying breaths while the blood drained away from her burst heart and pooled in the pit of her belly.
Records had left a sheaf of papers on his desk. Among them was a photocopy of a woman's face. Thelma Quigley smiled out from the page and despite the grainy quality David could see the life sparkle in the woman's eyes. She had dark hair caught up casually on top of her head, some if it tumbling down to the left, finely arched eyebrows and a dazzling smile that showed perfect teeth. Her skin was clear and unblemished.
She looked nothing at all like the elderly woman who had collapsed in the Waterside mall.
And it came as no surprise to David to read that Thelma Quigley had been stabbed to death in a frenzied attack way back in the free love days of the sixties. The knife had gone through jugular vain and her windpipe, severed her carotid artery. The attacker had plunged it so many times into her chest and belly that there was hardly piece of skin left uncut. The file showed a set of picture copies from the shallow grave, done in the harsh light of the camera flashgun. The puncture wounds were twisted and shredded at the edges, the flesh macerated and grey. She had not been found for almost two weeks.
The diaries had not lied. The woman who had been living as Thelma Quigley, who had brought babies home to he dingy little apartment, had been somebody else entirely. David's mind was whizzing and whirling with possibilities. Finally he shook the jumbled thoughts away and sat down to read the report.
Thelma Margot Quigley. B. June 22 1940. Parents: John and Louise Quigley.
The first few lines were statistics, the when's and the where's of a girl's life printed out on the lines of an official form. School, national insurance number. Date of birth, date of death, estimated to the nearest two days. A bright girl who worked as a secretary in a whisky brokerage in Edinburgh and dreamed of becoming an actress. The words conveyed little except the cold flesh round bare bones. The report went into detail, as police reports do, still stark on the odd tinted sheets rolling from the fax machine, sheets first printed from the old microfiche files in the dead store. The killer had never been caught, David noticed, again mentally tallying this with the hand-written words in the old diary. The detectives had interviewed more than a thousand people, many of them friends or boyfriends of the outgoing girl who had been brutally and inexplicably murdered.
"Anything good on the go?"
David turned in his seat. Helen Lamont was passing by, dressed for the cold weather in a padded coat and a beret which made her look less than ever like a policewoman.
"Still on our flake-out in the mall," he conceded.
"Don't tell me you've got to go through old records. Maybe you should knock on a few doors, lazy bugger." She winked and gave him a wide smile.
"Done that all morning," David said, trying not to read anything into the smile. "This whole thing just got a whole lot wierder." One of the other detectives looked up from his desk and David changed the subject. "How about you. Scott said you were chasing a runner."
"If she really is a runner," Helen said. "I'm hoping she might just be an overnighter with a bad case of embarrassment. She's been missing thirty six hours, so it's a bit early to say. The Inspector wants a bulletin printed out for all the cars."
Helen held up a picture of a fair-haired, intelligent looking girl in her early twenties, not quite smiling, but close enough to it to give the impression that she might be about to burst into laughter. There was intelligence in the blue eyes, and the photograph conveyed the impression of someone who was capable and fit.
"Ginny Marsden. She never came home from work night before last. Hasn't been seen since. Usual story." The curious detective got up and strolled out of the room with a bundle of files under his arm. Helen turned the subject back. "So what's happening with the creepy lady?"
"As our brothers across the water would say, there's some weird shit happening. Firstly, Thelma Quigley's not her real name. The real Thelma died thirty years ago, near enough. That's what's in here." He indicated the sprawl of papers spread across the desk.
"So who the hell is she?"
"That's what I'm trying to find out. Fancy a trip to Edinburgh?"
"Love to, but I'm tied up." Helen said, pulling her lips down in an expression of disappointment. "I have to start moving on our runner before the trail gets cold, just in case she hasn't done a flit. Ask me in a couple of days and make sure you've got tickets for anything not written by Lloyd-Webber. Then you've got a date for definite." She gave him another wide smile and was gone before he realised what she'd said.
David turned back to the old files on Thelma Quigley. He had just bent his head and focused on the first page when the phone rang. He thought it might be Helen, but it was June and she was far from happy. He pulled the receiver away from his ear and listened to the tinny squeak, unable to comprehend a syllable of the unbroken stream. After a while she stopped and he could make out the staccato Hello? Hello? He thought about simply cutting her off and he realised that he really had to do something about this.
Finally the sound began to falter and he brought the receiver back to his ear. "Hi June," he said. "I'm fine. How was your day?"