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<h2>7</h2>
<p>Jack had been back up to Marta Herkik's house again. He was
convinced he must have missed something, some tiny clue which would
give him something of a lead. His mind was tugged in two
directions, because of the Timmy Doyle abduction, and he could have
done without that. Angus McNicol had insisted on it, although Jack
had protested that it would stretch his own resources too far, but
there was no gainsaying the Chief Superintendent, who also carried
the rank of Commander in the regional force. Jack was the man for
the job, mostly because of his years of experience in the city's
murder squad, and also because he was the best qualified man on the
local force. Angus sidestepped the protests from Ronald Cowie, the
second in command who technically should have been in charge of at
least one investigation. McNicol did not rate Cowie's ability, and
he did rate Jack Fallon. That was another problem, he knew, for the
man now hunting a killer and an abductor who was also potentially a
killer. Cowie had friends inside and outside of the force. Angus
hoped he wouldn't have to slap the man down. He also knew that Jack
did not care a tuppeny damn if he made enemies or not. Everybody
knew he had very little to care about except for his work.</p>
<p>For half an hour, sitting alone beside the table that still bore
the black traces of dried blood, Jack sat, huddled in his big coat,
trying to think, trying to imagine what had happened on the night
Marta Herkik had been mutilated.</p>
<p>The clues were many and various, but their significance
obscure.</p>
<p>The killer, from all the evidence, must have had plenty of time
to operate. He'd taken down two strips of wallpaper - a bizarre act
in itself - so carefully the neighbouring strips hadn't been torn
or scratched, and he'd daubed two words, both of them obscure, in
that oddly slanted writing, smeared in now-caked blood.</p>
<p><em>Heteros</em>: The Other. Straight from the Greek. Jack had
found that easily by asking the classics teacher at Castlebank
Academy. <em>Etheros</em>. That was more of a conundrum. There was
no such word, not in any language. He'd checked with the languages
department in the University. But there were pointers. It could, he
was told, have something to do with <em>ether</em> as in air, or
<em>ethereal</em>,like a phantom or a wraith. Or maybe, Professor
Walker had pointed out, it was simply a mis-spelling.</p>
<p>"Anagram possibly," the academic, who was a lot younger than
Jack would have expected, said from behind a plume of cigarette
smoke.</p>
<p>"Like in a crossword. I do the Times every morning on the train.
Never finished it on the journey yet, but I'm still hoping."</p>
<p>Jack smiled along with him.</p>
<p>"It's got all the same letters, so maybe they're just a jumble.
Perhaps even the first one is an anagram of something."</p>
<p>"Like what?"</p>
<p>The professor took another draw of his cigarette and scratched
his head. "I dunno. Maybe <em>The Sore,</em> or <em>The Rose.</em>
It could even be a woman's name, Hortense."</p>
<p>"That would need another letter," Jack pointed out. Walker
nodded amiably.</p>
<p>"Word blindness, that's my trouble. A real pain in a job like
mine. Anyway, I can't see too many words you could form out of it.
Just an idea. Etheros isn't quite a word, but if it's no anagram,
I'd lean towards the phantasm idea."</p>
<p>"Any reason?"</p>
<p>"Just the fact that the first word means <em>an other,</em> or
<em>the other</em>. Like in terms of something other worldly.
That's what you'd take <em>ethereal</em> to mean."</p>
<p>"Could it be indicating that it's an indication of being
heterosexual?"</p>
<p>"Could be anything. But if etheros means airy, it could indicate
<em>fairy</em>. There's a million choices, well, at least a dozen,
depending on how you look at it."</p>
<p>Jack had sat looking at the words, wondering what had been used
to write them. It could have been a finger, a very narrow finger,
but there were no prints. There was nothing left behind that had
been used to daub them. That meant the killer had taken it with
him. He'd also taken whatever he'd used to strip the wallpaper.
That was a real puzzle. Nobody yet, nobody in forensics, even at
the central lab, had any suggestions as to how it had been done.
there was no sign of commercial stripper, not even hot water or
detergent.</p>
<p>He looked at the column of writing again, cocking his head to
read them properly. Each of the letters were about equal in size,
though obviously written in haste. They were all canted over on the
right side. It looked to Jack as if the killer had started up high
on the wall, but hadn't been standing upright. It seemed as if he'd
been bent across, somehow perched horizontally to daub each letter.
Jack couldn't figure how that had been done either, not without a
ladder and a platform. If anybody had left the building with a
ladder, or some scaffolding, no matter what time of night or day it
had been, someone would have seen him, and no-one had.</p>
<p>The scratch marks on the table were an easier proposition. They
had been caused by Marta Herkik herself. The blood was hers and two
of her nails were embedded right under the thin veneer, stopped at
the ends of the grooves in the wood. She had done it alright, but
why she had done it was a mystery. Possibly her killer had come up
behind her and dragged her backwards. She could have tried to pull
away, scratching at the table, been hauled back with her nails
digging for purchase. He tried to picture it in his mind's eye, but
the image wouldn't come. It wouldn't have happened like that. The
instinctive reaction would be to pull the hands away, to twist and
turn, not to plough up the veneer of the table.</p>
<p>There were several other options for some of the damage. One was
that the killer had gripped her by the throat, which might account
for some of the damage to the windpipe, no matter what Robbie
Cattenach's report said. Perhaps she'd tried to get away, to
<em>claw</em> herself away from the murderer. Or maybe the pressure
on her neck had made her muscles go into a kind of spasm. Robbie
had said that was possible, not likely, but he couldn't discount
it.</p>
<p>If that had been the case, then the old woman had been slung
against the fireplace. The crystal ball, or whatever it was had
been smashed and then the splinters driven into her head by some
unknown means, and them the woman had been beaten with a very heavy
instrument, breaking several of her bones and rupturing most of her
insides. The blunt instrument had also been removed from the
scene.</p>
<p>Whoever had done this, Jack agreed with himself, had taken
plenty of time. That meant he was no ordinary killer, no
opportunist. He had been in a frenzy, of that there was no doubt,
but he hadn't been panicked. He had to be some kind of psychopath,
and there hadn't been one of them around in Levenford for a while.
It would make him even more difficult to catch.</p>
<p>Jack had spent days trying to get into the man's mind and had
failed completely. He could find no motive. The method was clear
enough, even if half the evidence was missing. Why anybody would
have wanted to kill the old Hungarian woman and then mutilate her
so obscenely, was as yet beyond him.</p>
<p>The room was still lined with books, despite the numbers that
had been torn from the shelves and shredded like confetti. Almost
all of them had something to do with the occult. There was an old
copy of Friel's <em>Ley Lines,</em> and a big illustrated edition,
leather-bound and well thumbed, of Crowley's <em>Goetia</em> lying
open on a small table next to the central one. Some of the
paragraphs in the page had been marked off in black ball-point, and
there was a long pencilled notation in the margin. The other books
gave explanations of tarot cards, instructions on the use of ouija
boards, old directories of palmistry and phrenology along with
dozens on astrology. None of the books made any sense to Jack
Fallon, though he thumbed through a few of them. Marta Herkik, he
knew, charged a few pounds for palm readings and tarot divination,
none of it declared on any in her tax return. There were a few
spey-wives around. The local newspaper even used one of them in its
weekly star-gazing column. All of the advice was ambiguous. Jack
considered them all charlatans, but harmless enough at that.</p>
<p>So she had been an old Hungarian woman reading futures. That was
hardly a reason for dying like that. And she obviously wasn't so
good at reading her own, or she might have seen this coming, Jack
thought, remembering what Ralph Slater had said.</p>
<p>There was no rhyme or reason. Nothing. Not even a <em>feel</em>
about the case, except for a cold, baffling sensation of
<em>wrongness</em> as Jack sat alone in the room where the woman
had met her death. He did not jump at shadows, he did not believe
in ghosts. In fact Jack Fallon believed in very little and hadn't
for some time when his faith in anything had fragmented in the time
it took a window to shatter. Yet there was something out of kilter
about Marta Herkik's death. He told himself there was no normality
about <em>any</em> killing, and he'd seen more than his share, but
it was more than that. He tried to dredge up what his intuition was
trying to tell him, the little unseen observer inside his mind that
managed to pick out seemingly random and unconnected facts and
string them together like beads on a thread until he got the spark
of an idea that would take him in the right direction.</p>
<p>Nothing came, except a cold shiver.</p>
<p>"Been sitting too long," Jack muttered to himself. The case was
going nowhere, and that angered him. He got to his feet, pulled his
collar up, and with a quick motion swept back the hank of black
hair that had flopped down over his brow. He opened the door and
let himself out of the flat. The fresh air gusting up the circular
stairwell was cold and sharp in his nose. He breathed deeply,
clearing out the <em>death</em> smell, and started to walk down the
stairs to the street door.</p>
<p>Jack crossed the road, feeling the bite of the west wind numb
his left ear, and went into Dickson's newsagent's shop where the
old fellow behind the stacked counter remembered him from his
younger days.</p>
<p>"Heard you were back again Jackie," he said as he counted out
the change coin by coin. "Get fed up with the big city?"</p>
<p>"Something like that."</p>
<p>Old Wattie Dickson looked him up and down. "Grown about three
feet since I last saw you. Bigger than your faither was an'
all."</p>
<p>Jack smiled. His father had been a huge man with iron-grey hair
cropped in a short spike. He'd been a sergeant for twenty years at
College Street station and had never seemed to have any ambition to
claw his way up the promotional ladder, though he'd been proud as a
peacock over his son's progress. He had looked as hard as nails, a
big craggy face on a mountain of a frame, but the looks had belied
his appearance. John Fallon had been the fairest, most gentle and
patient man Jack had ever known. He'd never once in his career used
the black truncheon, and if there was a disturbance down in Mac's
Bar or the Castlegate round at the quay where Friday night fights
were par for the course, John could joke and cajole a violent drunk
out into the street and persuade him up to the station to sleep it
off. There was hardly a need for charging a hungover man in the
morning, he always told his son. Jack had only seen his father
fight once, when some of the Buist clan had come out of the bushes
in Clydeshore Road, out for a reckoning over one of their number
who had been banged up in Drumbain jail for three months over an
aggravated assault, following an arrest by big John.</p>
<p>Jack had been seven years old at the time, on his way up the
road with a jar full of small fish he'd caught in the tidal pools
down on the foreshore. He'd turned the corner and stopped dead when
he saw the six Buist brothers with their backs to him, all standing
in an arrogant line in front of the big man in the dark
uniform.</p>
<p>His father had spotted him the moment he'd come round the bend
and had given a tiny jerk of his head, telling Jack to be off about
his business. The boy had backed away, a little scared, but more
curious and then he'd crawled behind the thick privet hedge,
peering between the branches.</p>
<p>"Right boys," John had said. "I know you're a wee bit upset, and
all, but let's keep it peacable now."</p>
<p>"You put our Billy in the jail."</p>
<p>"No Bobby, he did that to himself all right. Let his temper run
away with him, instead of taking a bit of a breath first. Now, why
don't you all just go home and take deep breaths yourselves,
eh?"</p>
<p>"Why don't you take a flying fuck to yourself!"</p>
<p>"Now, now boys. I'll ignore the language. But here I am keeping
the peace on a nice morning."</p>
<p>"You'll get no peace from us," Bobby Buist slung back.</p>
<p>"Well, I'll have to caution you against anything you might be
thinking of."</p>
<p>"What, going to sling all of us in Drumbain?"</p>
<p>"Och, I don't think it should come to that. Not if you're
sensible," big John had said in calm and measured tones. The
Buist's were well known in town. They were of farming stock, but
they'd come off the land. Now there was a squad of them, big broad
men with sandy hair and hands like hams. They operated on the
fringes on the east of town. Odd jobs, scrap cars and the
occasional pit-bull fight.</p>
<p>"It'll come to it all right," Bobby Buist said, moving two steps
closer. His two brothers and three cousins sidled out in a flanking
motion. John Fallon stood stock still, eyes still calm.</p>
<p>"So is it six to one, or are you Buist boys man enough to
shorten the odds."</p>
<p>"Like you did for Billy?" This from one of the men circling to
the policeman's left. Without warning, he swung his hips and aimed
a kick at John's crotch. The big man's hand snapped down on the
ankle six inches before the toe of the boot connected. He took one
step with his left, in towards the man, stamping down hard with the
edge of his policeman's boot to rake it down the fellow's shin. The
foot crunched the other man's toes and stayed there. In the same
movement, John Fallon raised the attacker's leg by the ankle in a
swift jerk. From his hiding place, young Jack heard a sound like a
greenwood branch twisted from the trunk. The man screamed and John
dropped him just as the others lunged in. The policeman's fist shot
out and slammed against Billy Buist's cheek and the man fell like a
sack. The punch sounded like a mallet on wood. John took two steps
forward. Gave a right and a left so quickly his immense hands were
like blurs and another two went down.</p>
<p>The final pair stood hesitantly, fists raised.</p>
<p>"Now which is first, or are we going to have a peaceful
morning?"</p>
<p>They had turned and ran, tackety boots sending sparks up from
the cobbles. On the ground around John, three of the Buist boys
were rolling or groaning. Bobby Buist was out for the count.</p>
<p>John had straightened his tunic and rubbed a palm across his
knuckles.</p>
<p>"Right boy, you can come out now," he called over to the hedge.
Young Jack, with his jar of tiny fish, came slowly out from the lee
of the hedge. He walked up to his father, admiration written all
over his face.</p>
<p>The big policeman had bent down from an immense height, hands on
his hips.</p>
<p>"Now young feller. When I give you the nod to be off about your
business, I mean it, eh?"</p>
<p>Jack had nodded.</p>
<p>"That way you don't have to see any of this nonsense." He had
stuck out a hand and clapped it on his son's shoulder and walked
him up Clydeshore Road, leaving the straggle of men on the road.
Two years later, big John had dived into the Leven after a spring
thaw when the river was in spate and had hauled out Tommy Buist,
who was then ten, and the bane of Jack's life at school, risking
his life for the son of one of the men who had ambushed him down
the Clydeshore. That was the kind of man he'd been.</p>
<p>When old Wattie Dickson had told him he was even bigger than his
father had been, the memory of that day had come back to him in a
flash of real pleasure. Nobody had ever been bigger than his
father. Despite his rank, Jack Fallon did not think he could truly
fill his old man's boots. It was not a thought that concerned him
unduly. He wouldn't even have tried.</p>
<p>"I read it in the paper," Wattie said, indicating the stack of
gazettes piled on the old wooden counter. Very little about the
shop had changed since Jack was small, except for the fact that
there were fewer home-made sweets in the sugar-dusted glass jars,
and along the top shelf, there were a selection of glossy
biological magazines positioned out of reach of the young.</p>
<p>Jack pocketed his cigarettes. He'd managed to give up a few
years before, and had started again. He knew he shouldn't have, but
the past while had not been easy. He fumbled in his pocket for
change and took one of the papers from the pile.</p>
<p>"Sounds like a lot of trouble in the old town," Wattie said.
"That poor old biddie across the road. Always came in every morning
at eight for a bag of mints. Who would ever want to kill her?"</p>
<p>"I don't know Wattie. There's a lot of bad folk around."</p>
<p>"Aye, and more and more the older I get. They're all at the drug
taking up by Overwood. Wee kiddies of school age too. World's gone
to hell if you ask me."</p>
<p>Jack didn't ask him, but he tended to agree. There had been a
time, when he was young, when the local policeman would give a boy
a boot on the arse, an experience likely to make the lad think
twice before stealing apples, or hoisting a bar of chocolate from
the counter when old Wattie had his back turned. Not any more, and
the place was worse for it in Jack's opinion.</p>
<p>"Well I hope you get the bugger who did this. He should be
hung."</p>
<p>"I'll do my best," Jack promised him as he folded his paper and
jammed it in the pocket of his coat. He crossed the road again,
walking about fifty yards along River Street and took a right turn
down Quay lane to where somebody had opened a coffee shop on the
site where the old brewery store had stood twenty years before. The
bell clanged above the door when Jack walked in. There were two old
women in hats sitting in the far corner. They looked up when jack
came in. He chose a seat next to the curtained window where a
pretty girl with a short spiky haircut took his order for a coffee,
and brought if a few minutes later. It was hot and strong and very
very good.</p>
<p>Jack unfolded the Levenford Gazette and saw himself staring out
from the front page.</p>
<p><em>Triple Tragedy!</em> The black headline didn't so much blare
as shout at the top of the Gazette's voice. Jack had spoken to the
young reporter who looked as if he'd just left school and from the
questions he'd asked, probably just had.</p>
<p>He read the story:</p>
<p><em>Levenford was rocked this week by three separate tragedies
which claimed the lives of five people in four days.</em></p>
<p><em>On Monday, elderly Marta Herkik, a former bakery worker and
amateur astrologer was found bludgeoned to death in her third floor
home in River Street.</em></p>
<p><em>A day later, nine-month-old baby Timothy Doyle was abducted
while he slept in his pram on a tenth-floor balcony in Latta Court
on Towpath Way.</em></p>
<p><em>And last night a fire claimed a father and three children in
Murroch Street.</em></p>
<p><em>The town was in a state of shock at the death toll. Provost
Stanley Moor said: "I'm stunned. It is a tragedy."</em></p>
<p>Jack smiled and read on. The young reporter managed to get as
much shock, horror and drama into the story as he could. To a
certain extent, it was no exaggeration, although as yet, Jack had
seen no evidence of the townsfolk rocking and reeling. The young
reporter had attributed Jack with a couple of words he hadn't quite
said, but not enough to change the meaning. Police were
investigating. The Gazette said they were working round the clock,
which was fair enough. The picture of him had been one of the press
office send-outs when he transferred from the city back to his home
town three months before. It made him look five years older, and
his hair was shorter. The caption read: <em>Inspector John
Fallon...leading the murder hunt</em>.</p>
<p>The story went into the kind of detail small town newspapers
revelled in. Jack knew, before he even turned to it, that the back
page would be a solid block of births, deaths and marriages. The
police court section would be filled with dross, like drunks having
a pee in public, drunks being locked up or being incapable, and
drunks breaching the peace. Jack learned nothing new.</p>
<p>He flicked through the paper, got to the centre pages which
showed some blurry photographs of the local theatre group strutting
the boards, when his eye caught a heading and he began to read.</p>
<p><em>Cairn House: - A History of Violence</em>. The by-line named
Blair Bryden, the newspaper editor. He'd been in the class above
Jack at school, and they'd played football together in their teens.
Jack had spoken to him several times since he'd come back to work.
Blair was smart, and he knew his town. Jack read on:</p>
<p><em>History has repeated itself in Levenford's oldest known
building, with the brutal death of Marta Herkik.</em></p>
<p><em>Older readers will remember a similar tragedy in 1965 when
the body of a young man was discovered in a back room on the third
floor of Cairn House. This was part of the apartment where Marta
Herkik had lived for the past fourteen years following the death of
her brother Sandor, the well known cobbler.</em></p>
<p><em>A mystery still surround the death of Neil Hopkirk who had
been missing for three months in the summer of '65. He was later
discovered bound and gagged under the sink. Police at the time said
he had died of starvation and thirst, although he too had been
badly beaten and also sexually assaulted.</em></p>
<p><em>But even that was not the first tragedy of Cairn House,
which records show was built in 1462, about the time of the
extension to the Burgh Charter, and partially rebuilt in the
eighteenth century, adding the upper storeys. The building was the
original Tollbooth in town, where prisoners were jailed pending and
after trial. Those guilty prisoners were hanged from a gibbet
attached to its east gable wall, and records show sixteen such
hangings in 1532 alone. After reconstruction, the house became
church property for two decades, until the minister, the Rev Andrew
Scally hanged himself from a beam...again on the third floor in
1807. Three decades later, a bolt of lightning struck the
chimney-stack which fell through the roof and crushed to death
council leader Provost Thomas Latta and a seamstress who lived in a
room in the rear of the building.</em></p>
<p><em>After World War I young officer Wallace MacNicol was found
shot to death in the same room. Gazette records show that he died
of six bullet wounds in his head. This caused intense speculation
and the mystery of how he was able to shoot himself so many times -
the gun was found in his hand, and the room was locked from the
inside - was never solved.</em></p>
<p><em>In 1948, another clergyman, the Rev Alistair Conn, who was
visiting a young sick girl in Cairn House fell to his death after
crashing through a sash window into River Street. The girl, whose
family later left Levenford, was never able to fully explain what
had happened.</em></p>
<p><em>Now, the death toll of Cairn House continues. Professor
Andrew Toye, head of the Paranormal Studies at Glasgow University
said: "These things could very well be co-incidences. Some
buildings do gather unfortunate reputations over the years. One
wouldn't like to volunteer an explanation without more
evidence.</em> "</p>
<p>The story ran on for a few more paragraphs, and Jack smiled at
Blair Bryden's quotes from Andy Toye, whom Jack knew from his law
studies at the university. He had even considered calling on the
professor himself, to get some hint of what might have taken place
at Cairn House before the old woman died. He read on and something
else caught his attention. It was a simple ten paragraphs about a
young girl who had foretold the fire at Murroch Street.</p>
<p>Jack raised his eyebrows and sipped his coffee slowly as he read
the account of the librarian at a party who had been reading
tea-leaves. One of the guests, the paper said, claimed she had gone
into some kind of seizure and then told another woman to get home
because her house was on fire. It had turned out to be true. The
girl named in the story had refused to comment on the matter. Jack
smiled again. There was always somebody trying to make a few
pennies, even out of tragedy.</p>
<p>He closed the paper, finished his coffee and left some coins
under the saucer rim. The bell clanged again as he went out and
turned into River Street.</p>
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