‘Unbelievable, eh?’ Diane said, her eyes wide.
‘What – what’s unbelievable?’ Elaine Bell asked, trying to control her impatience with the woman and the background noise.
‘To do that – to do that to anybuddy.’
‘To do what! You’ll have to tell us, we can’t understand him, remember,’ the DCI snapped, her voice raised, ensuring she was audible over the loud whine, losing the battle for manners.
‘Oh, aye. Right. The man came over and he’d a long knife in his hand.’ Diane stopped speaking as the racket from the machine continued, now punctuated by an occasional clicking sound as a loose coin revolved in the drum.
‘Then what? Then what?’ Elaine Bell almost screamed.
‘Then… well, I must have come in, I think, back into the flat. I’d left my bag behind in the kitchen so I came back for it. The key had gone from under the mat but the door was still open. I came in, picked it up, then I heard Ron shouting, shouting my name, shouting out what had happened to him. I was the one dialled 999.’
‘Did you check the flat to make sure he’d gone?’ Eric Manson enquired, looking all around the room, and then, with a sigh of irritation, turning off the switch for the washing machine.
‘It’d no’ quite finished,’ Diane said, looking annoyed.
‘Did you check…’ the Inspector repeated, his hand still on the switch.
‘Oh, aye. Looked a’ ower the place, but the man had gone. Out the door, I suppose.’
‘What did he look like?’ Elaine Bell asked.
Immediately, Ron Anderson began to speak again, his head moving excitedly. Diane made no attempt to translate, so the DCI said, ‘Well, what did he say?’
‘He said it was dark, and he was half asleep, but it was a big fellow, heavy-made like.’
‘Did the man say anything?’ Alice asked.
Once again the invalid replied, his eyes darting from one to the other, as if expecting that they would understand the language of his eyes, if not his mouth.
‘Diane? Translate for us, for Christ’s sake!’
‘He said… the man talked a lot – not really to him, though, more mutterin’ to himself.’
‘Anything else?’
‘Ron said he stank. Reekin’ like bath-time, or a baby or something.’
‘It’s him,’ Alice said, ‘it must be.’
‘Who?’ the DCI demanded.
‘Norman Clerk. It must be him. Fat, arguing with himself, with the voice in his head. And when Tom and I saw him, in his flat, he smelt – I can smell it in here, now, too. Baby powder. It must be him.’
While Eric Manson searched Clerk’s odiferous bedroom, she scurried around the rest of the flat, looking behind curtains, into cubby-holes, anywhere and everywhere that anyone could hide. In the bathroom, through her haste, she accidentally pulled down the shower curtain, exposing an array of tall cannabis plants in the old enamel bath, each flowerpot resting on a layer of damp newspaper. Spiders’ webs hung from the bath taps and a chain dangled against the side, plugless and rusty. On the nearby cistern were the man’s toiletries: a tin of Johnson’s Baby Powder, a razor and dusty toothbrush. Four unopened packets of Risperdal lay beside them.
‘There’s a loft, I’m going into it,’ Manson shouted, followed by the sound of a Ramsay ladder being unlatched and hauled down.
Alice returned to the kitchen, pulling open the doors of the units and peering inside a musty-smelling broom cupboard, double-checking the places she had already looked in her desperation. Suddenly she remembered that Clerk’s brother lived on the bottom floor of the tenement. Maybe he was hiding down there.
‘Sir – Sir, I’m going to check flat number three on the ground floor, Clerk’s brother’s place.’
There was no answer, but she could hear her colleague’s heavy footfalls above her, see the plaster vibrate slightly as he clambered about on the rafters.
After racing down the three flights of stairs, she arrived out of breath in the entrance hall, pressed the bell marked ‘R. Clerk’ and waited for someone to answer it. Nothing happened, so she pressed again, harder this time, keeping her finger on it to produce a single continuous, insistent ring. Once more there was no response. In her impatience, she gave the scuffed grey door a slight push and it opened. In less than a second she had decided to go in, search warrant or no search warrant.
The place was in darkness, lit only by the faint orange glow of the streetlights outside. She padded about, going from room to room and giving each a hasty check. Finally, only one door remained, and from behind it came loud, intermittent snores which vibrated in the air and sounded like a chainsaw starting, revving up and then cutting out.
As she came in she was able to make out the vast bulk of Robert Clerk on a brass bedstead, his barrel-like torso rising and falling with each noisy breath and one pale foot protruding from below his duvet. The space under the bed was hidden by a thick, candlewick bedspread which lay in folds on the carpeted floor. Just as Alice was about to tiptoe away, one of the corners of the bedspread moved slightly, as if a mouse was trying to escape from beneath it.
Holding her breath, she waited and watched, and once again the material twitched. Her heart now racing, she stepped towards the bed, and as she did so, Robert Clerk let out a loud groan, startling her and stopping her in her tracks. Trying to keep calm, she stared at him, but he remained fast asleep.
Very carefully, she picked up one of the bottom edges of the bedspread and began to raise it. As she bent forward to look underneath the bed, a sweet smell hit her nostrils. Just as she realised what it was, a hand shot out, grabbing her hair, wrenching its roots and pulling her towards the ground. As she fell forward, Norman Clerk hooked his arm around her neck, pulling her face towards him, pressing her hard against his chest and suffocating her in the folds of his flesh.
She cried out but nothing came, her voice absorbed, muffled by his solid bulk. Keeping his grip with one arm despite her scrabbling hands trying to break it, he used his left hand to grind his knuckles back and forth in her eye-socket. The pain was excruciating, like a red-hot arrow piercing her eyeball. Its sharpness shocked her, revitalised her.
Suddenly, the thought that she might die by the hands of a creature such as him, an unwashed, pink Buddha-like thing, infuriated her. It seemed like a grotesque impertinence. Enraged at the very idea, and using every ounce of her remaining strength, she smashed her thigh up between his legs, her hard flesh hitting his soft flesh, feeling him instantly loosen his hold on her.
He groaned, recoiling from her, fell and doubled up, foetus-like, on the ground beside her, his hands now protecting his battered genitalia from any further attack. Aware once more of the sharp pain in her eye, her bruised scalp and with the disgusting scent of his rank, powdered flesh in her nostrils, she was sorely tempted to give him another kick for good measure. But the sound of a prolonged, pig-like grunt distracted her, and as Eric Manson strode in she watched Robert Clerk’s eyelids flutter as he snored on, oblivious to everything around him in his untroubled, drugged sleep.
The young psychiatrist who arrived from the Royal Edinburgh had never had to carry out such an assessment before, but he was secretly pleased to be called upon to do it. Seeing his smooth, rosy cheeks and bright eyes, Elaine Bell’s spirits rose too. This beginner should pose no problems.
‘It’s largely a formality. We just need you to speak to the man, check him out, make sure he’s fit for interview. He was in Carstairs and he may have committed a murder, so there’s a degree of urgency about the business as you’ll appreciate.’ She spoke conspiratorially to him as if he would, indeed, understand the need for urgency, looking him directly in the eye to emphasize the point. And the young man nodded, saying nothing by way of reply but seeming gratifyingly eager to please her.