5
Joe used to marvel that she slept so peacefully, motionless with her head invariably turned to the left. Like she was already dead, he’d once observed. Not tonight, though. Alice could not keep still, she could feel herself tossing and turning, now one arm above her head, now to the side, now one hand under the covers, now on top. No position was comfortable, no position brought sleep any closer. The sheets themselves seemed to be made of sandpaper, abrading her face and bare arms. She needed to talk to someone, to unburden her mind of the thoughts that were chasing each other, exhausting her. Two am. But there were no friends good enough for that any more, and no lover to be roused in extremis like this. If Joe had been beside her she could have touched his shoulder or whispered his name, confided in him the troubles that now wracked her. But he was the trouble, or a big part of it, the one who had explained that dependence was attractive, that independence was not always viewed as a virtue in women. It was Joe who had planted the seed of doubt in her mind, now a full-canopied tree, and then gone away. At four am Alice gave up the unequal struggle, turned on the light and finished the bottle of wine in the fridge. If nothing else could bring about slumber, alcohol certainly would, even if her return to consciousness would be accompanied by a hammer and anvil of a headache.
She woke four hours later, unrefreshed, nauseous and feeling that her age had doubled overnight. Her bedroom mirror, ruthless in its honesty, reflected a sallow-skinned, red-eyed stranger sitting up in her bed. Quill slipped off his chair in one fluid movement, stretched, wagged his tail and bounded, bright-eyed, into the kitchen as if it was the first morning of creation. He knew the routine, and in anticipation of his walk raced round the flat while his mistress dressed with care, preparing herself for the cold world outside-the cold, still dark, world. Twenty minutes later the pair set off towards Canonmills, the dog straining on the lead, pulling his reluctant owner with him from lamppost to lamppost, zigzagging all the way to the park.
Alastair was already at his desk by half past eight, phone clamped to his ear, when Alice arrived at the station. He looked her up and down and then scribbled a note, displaying it to her as he continued to speak into the receiver.
‘ROUGH NIGHT, EH?’ She nodded meekly, preferring the picture of her carousing with friends until the early hours to any explanation, or exploration, of the real cause of her sleeplessness. Eric Manson approached their desks and then, on seeing her, started back theatrically as if encountering some horrible vision. She could not be bothered to smile but managed to manufacture a weak rictus, sufficient to communicate her appreciation of his tired joke and send him, contented, on his way. The blacksmith in her head had begun to pound away again, blow after blow to the left temple, undeterred by the aspirin she’d forced down with her coffee. Another sleepless night, another ruined day, and all because Joe could not handle her as she was, as she wanted to be. And now the sod was even muscling in on her waking hours, not content with destroying her nights.
‘That was a Mr Burns,’ Alastair said, interrupting his companion’s thoughts. ‘He lives in Lennox Street and has just returned from holiday. He saw a report about Dr Clarke’s death in the Evening News and has remembered that on the night of the killing he saw a group of three people, a man and two women, patrolling the area. Lennox Street is no distance from Bankes Crescent. We’d better go and speak to him.’
The Burns’ house presented a neat exterior to the neighbourhood: trimmed hedge, gravelled path and a garden bereft of flowers and weeds. The cement patio that had replaced the lawn sported a collection of brightly coloured, glazed pots, each containing tufts of dry grasses or other architectural plants. Jack Burns had no time for cultivation, he was a golfing man and his home was a shrine dedicated to the ancient sport, hung with tinted prints of its holy places, St Andrews and Muirfield, and bedecked with glistening trophies, usually depicting rigid figures in plus fours swinging clubs. He exuded confidence, the confidence of the law-abiding citizen who has no concern about faulty tail-lights or an out-of-date tax disc. For him the police were simply public servants employed to assist righteous taxpayers, like himself, in their eternal struggle against the great unwashed. As Alice and Alastair took their seats in the immaculate sitting room, Mrs Burns, a timid, downtrodden-looking creature, entered bearing a tray laden with fine china, tea and biscuits for the guests. She lowered her load onto the coffee table nervously, looked up at her husband and was dismissed, with a grimace, from the meeting.
‘Could you describe for us the individuals that you saw?’ Alastair began.
‘As I said on the phone, Officer, a man and two women. I saw them as I was parking the car. They all appeared respectable, the man in a suit and tie and the ladies both in skirts and car coats.’ Mr Burns’ voice was surprisingly high, almost a treble. Alice had expected a baritone to come from the corpulent man. His intonation betrayed his Morningside origins, no need to conceal them in the West End.
‘Can you give us any clue as to their ages?’ Alastair asked.
‘I didn’t get a close view, but middle-aged, I’d say.’
‘What were they doing?’
‘I only saw them for a minute, if that. They were calling at my neighbours, the Osbornes, and getting no answer they moved to the next house, Mrs Morris’s. No Mr Morris now, if there ever was, and frankly I doubt it. She let them in. They were all back in the street about forty minutes later. I had to collect something from my car which was parked outside our house.’
‘What time was it when you first saw them?’
‘I’d just got back from work, so maybe six-thirty pm.’
‘So when you went out to your car later, it would be about seven-ten or seven-twenty, something like that?’
‘Yes, that’s correct, Officer.’
‘What were they doing then?’
‘They were knocking on someone else’s door.’
‘Whose door?’
‘Mrs Jarvis’s, but they’d have no luck there whatever they were up to.’ Mr Burns pursed his lips, blatantly inviting further questions.
‘Oh?’ Alice enquired, an unwilling participant in the man’s breathless game.
‘Another neurotic female. Her husband left her about a year ago for a younger model, and no surprise there since she’d let herself go completely, no face-paint whatsoever and she lived in trousers. Since he left she’s become a virtual recluse, peering out of her curtains occasionally, but no one darkens her door except her son, poor brute. His life’s not his own any more. No chance of any strangers being allowed over that threshold.’
If like-minded people are attracted to the same places, then Mrs Morris had no business living in Lennox Street. She answered the door clad in a paint-streaked boiler suit and old plimsolls, the whole ensemble being set off by a peroxide-blond crew cut. In the privacy of her studio she explained that the three visitors had been Jehovah’s Witnesses, intent upon converting her until she had explained to them that she was a practising Nichiren Buddhist, evangelical in her own way, and currently engaged on a thesis entitled ‘The History of the Lotus Sutra’. Their departure had been hastened by her offer to teach them a chant central to her belief, and she laughed out loud remembering the alacrity with which they collected their umbrellas, pamphlets and papers as soon as she began to intone ‘Nam myok…’.