Monday 24 August 2015
Lynda McMutrie woke from her sleep, her eyes sticky with tears and dirt. She was breathing in the moisture from the dirty carpet and it stunk of faeces. She lay with her head down trying to protect herself from the onslaught. Her ears were red raw, the skin of her nose was burning as if it was being peeled from her, layer upon layer. Her left foot was heavy, throbbing and hot. She could no longer feel her right leg. She nuzzled the floor, thinking that the pillow was hard, a little damp. Then she recalled she was on the carpet in her basement, any other memory was fuzzy round the edges. So she wasn’t at the Doon, and a great many vodkas had gone down her throat since she split up from her handsome beau in the photographs.
She looked round when she heard the gentle scuttling of the claws, the flashes of sleek black and brown, moving so fast she didn’t think she actually saw them at all. But she knew when the first of the blowflies arrived. They landed on her face so she closed her eyes and tried to ignore their hairy feet and the drone of their wings in her ears. She shook her head to keep them off, but when they returned there were more of them, clustering and feeding, humming and droning.
She began to recite the poem, recalling the odd line here and there. The saddest words, it might have been.
She spoke out loud but all that filled her ears was the roar of the blowflies. Then she realized the top of her forehead was getting wet, a gentle lapping from ice-cold water. It crept along to her face, moving like fingers through her scalp. It was working its way in small wave form across the floor, soaking the carpet and coming towards the underside of her ear, the side of her face, then her shoulder, along the side of her chest. By the time it was touching the top of her thigh she realized the water was deeper. She had to lift her head up as it was covering one eye now. Even holding her head against the strain of her neck, the water was then slipping round the bottom of her nostril. She kept trying to lift her head clear.
Thinking more clearly than she had done for years, she realized that she would drown. If she opened her eyes she could see the water deepen, an inch, and inch and a half, ever deeper. She tried again to get on her feet but failed, trying to get some leverage with the arm that was locked underneath her now. Five minutes later, all she could hear was her ears roaring with the pressure and the noises of the flies and the rats and the water itself as it spun into all the nooks and crannies on the floor, the eddies and vacuums of the incoming tide as it swept towards her, enveloping her. Then she heard a footstep on the stairs. Somebody was coming to rescue her.
She heard them moving towards her, stepping over her to get to her head. They tried to lift her up. She opened her eyes to see the bottom of the old Hunters, with the small white strip; she knew them. She closed her eyes and praised the Lord.
She heard her own voice saying, bubbling through the water, ‘Help me, please. Help.’
He bent over and pulled her arm out. Then he seemed to stand back up, as if he was thinking about what to do with her. Then she felt the weight on her back, the gentle pressure that increased steadily, forcing her head down.
She tried for one last lungful of air but got a mouthful of water instead.
Wyngate put the phone down. He had been on the line for over forty minutes to various people who considered it their duty to be obstructive. His ear was hurting. He examined the piece of paper in front of him, lined and pockmarked, crumbled and crisscrossed here and there, names written and crossed out. It had made some kind of sense when he was scribbling it down. Through the middle was a wavy line that was the ancient route of an underground river called the Dorcha, a river that might not be so ancient after all. Was it now nibbling its way back where it belonged, taking the foundation of the driveway at number 2 Altmore Road with it?
He logged on to Goggle maps and found the Greenside Reservoir. The old nutter had been talking about that when he had been in yesterday, wittering on about the good old days when he owned all the land, and the wood, and most of the Kilpatricks and, according to him, most of the west coast of Scotland. He had managed the wood and the grass and, again according to him, the wind and the water. Wyngate had nodded, pretended to take notes, and wondered how much his two-year-old’s birthday party was going to cost him. Why did Artie need a new outfit anyway? All he was going to do was cover it in jelly.
The old guy had droned on and on about what was built in the old Dorcha basin. Then there was the bit that Wyngate now, with the benefit of hindsight, wished he had listened really carefully to. Something about the woods should be flooding with all this weather, but they were not. The floor of the Pulpit was dry-ish. Wyngate understood what the old man was saying. The water was going somewhere else.
The civil engineer’s report said the water was coming into the sinkhole via some kind of culvert. The weight of rainwater had burst through an old drain to make a connection. Wyngate suspected the foot bones had been in the drain. The older bones could have been kicking around down there for a century or more. The engineers had packed their tools away and left with a recommendation that the Dirk-Huntleys should get in touch with their lawyer as the land search when they first purchased the house had been insufficient. The end result, one sinkhole had devalued number 2 Altmore Road by 70 per cent.
Wyngate was not an imaginative or an intuitive cop. He worked with facts and information. There was something prickling at the back of his mind, something that he had seen twice and not connected. He was on an internet trail that would take him somewhere, but he had no idea where he needed to be.
It would have something to do with the task that Anderson had set them: to track the ownership of the Dirk-Huntley house, and the other properties on Altmore Road and match that with the lists at the Land Registry. Who might have had access to the drain? Who might have had access to put the foot bones there, only for them to be washed twenty feet to the sinkhole?
The old guy had been talking about excess rain and how overflow gates come into use to protect the surrounding land, preventing too much stress on the walls of the reservoir, about the building site on the other side of the hill and the geographical pressure of landfill. The overspill of water would try to get back to the Clyde, down the old route of the rivers from before the days of the dam. They still worked fine.
Then Wyngate’s attention had wavered as his visitor had started ranting about green belt, the new build, and the way that might change the course of the river again. Not all of it, but too much water for the new watercourse to deal with, so the rainwater had traversed to its ancient route, the Dorcha. He looked again at the Google map of the area. He pulled his glasses from his forehead down on to his eyes and peered closely at the screen, reading the smallest, faintest words on the map. High on the hill, the notations of the burns and rivers that veined the land.
Cochno. The Humphrey. The Dorcha was not there, it was underground.
But that could have nothing to do with a single old drain filling up in a street down the hills, close to the river. That was a rain issue. Not a river issue. Water from above caused one problem, water coming up from below caused others.
He turned the thought over in his mind a few times, then scaled the map out. There was a river, a narrow ribbon that twisted and wound round the Kirkpatrick hills, on the verge of Hardgate, to come out at the Clyde; it travelled in a huge loop. And it must do that for a reason. The ground in the middle was too high, so the river went round it.
Not as the old guy had hinted, under it.
Wyngate looked out through the window into the rain, the endless downpour. The gutter above that window was overflowing and the water formed a silver curtain. Would that volume of water be enough to change the course of the river, the excess running down and round, cutting a straight path down to the river, if something else had tipped the balance? He looked back at the map on the wall, trying to find Altmore Road, nothing more than a tiny spur in low-lying land on a map of this scale. A few houses and a cross to mark the site of the ancient church.
He looked up the planning applications for the area. It took him another half an hour, but he found it in the end, a planning application from McGregor Homes for the development of twenty luxury homes to the north of Hardgate: rejected. Rejected due to lack of an adequate access road to the north. New plans were pending re the acquisition of more land so the road could come up from the south. And the obvious choice was Altmore Road, which at the moment was a dead end. All they had to do was knock down the Big House. And he couldn’t see Jock Aird agreeing to that, but it did give the old guy a reason to be on the doorstep of their station shouting the odds.
The old guy had said that something might have diverted the river, somebody who knows nothing about water and their ancient paths. Water might go up, down, round and about, but it would always go in the direction it wanted to; in this case, the shortest way to the river. He looked back at the map, wondering if some building work had already gone ahead. He could see no permissions for the landfill site his visitor had mentioned. It was too much of a coincidence that all this was happening at the same time.
A quick search into the Melrose file threw up the background check on Aird that had been carried out at the time. John ‘Jock’ McKenzie Aird, born in North Uist, had come south as a teenager to work on the land round Altmore, which was owned by his family. He had never married. He had no family. He had stayed with his relatives in Altmore House and inherited it on their death. Wealthy, gentleman farmer. There was a recent entry that he had threatened Esther Dirk-Huntley with a knife, but no further action had been taken. He had a licence for a shotgun. Wyngate requested permission to access his bank records. He was a good friend of Gyle, and his landlord. Was he still bankrolling his friend’s defence?
Altmore House, Road, Wood. The something that had been irritating the back of his mind jumped to the front, something he thought he recognized. Altmore. Alt more. Allt mohr.
He typed the word into Google translate, from Gaelic to English.
Big river.
Anderson was wondering what Wyngate was doing in the outer office. He had been on the phone for a long time, which is what Anderson would have expected, but then he started typing at speed, his glasses down then scribbling like a demon, looking up at the map and more scribbling. He was very interested in history all of a sudden.
Anderson left him to it and called up the report Costello had written for him. A brief history on Thomas Andrew Gyle, a man jailed for a murder so vicious that the first officer on the scene had been unable to continue in the job, despite all sorts of psychological support. Yet Gyle had not shown any violence at all while incarcerated. Except the one incident Costello had highlighted as he scrolled down; somebody had insulted Gyle’s daughter.
Anderson let his eyes scan over the words, most of the facts he knew. He was looking for any other nuance as to why Gyle had fallen so far, so quickly.
Some weird fascination in case he felt himself going the same way. Gyle was a vile and vicious murderer, killing wee boys. Anderson could see the axe raining down on them, cleaving their flesh again and again and … he stopped thinking about that, digging his nails into the palms of his hands until they bled. This was not good, not good for him, not good for anybody. He had to get this into perspective. They had found some bones. That was all, nothing to do with Gyle. He didn’t have to look at Gyle’s documentation, he didn’t have to, not until some link was proven.
But he just couldn’t help himself.
Andrew Taylor Gyle. A quiet-living, family man. Anderson had always thought of himself as a happily married, loving father. Maybe they were both wrong.
Anderson reached and picked up Costello’s notes, swirls of biro highlighting the bits she thought he should read. Gyle had been a security guard, well trusted but not very well paid. His hours had been cut, his wife was off work on the sick. There were copies of the bank statements for the year running up to the killing of the Melrose family. Costello had done her homework well, she had annotated the odd payment here and there. One to the Nuffield to see a private specialist about May’s leg. When they had barely enough money to pay the rent, the landlord waived it so they could pay a private orthopaedic consultant to review the treatment. She had also ringed a payment of five grand, which paid off their overdraft and put them on the straight and narrow. There was no note about where the money had come from. Five grand in debt was nothing to a lot of people, but Andrew Gyle was old school. He didn’t have a credit card. If he couldn’t pay, he didn’t get. It would have worried him, kept him awake at night, fretting. It might have been the start of the slide that had ended in the brutal slaughter of the Melrose family. From a quiet family man to a man who could lift an axe and put the blade through the body of a baby. Costello suggested putting Mulholland on the trail of the money.
The meeting with Griffin had been interesting and Anderson had enjoyed his company. There was a vague arrangement to meet up again when Griffin was back in the west. He had worked in the area around Altmore Wood at the time of the murders. There was a deeper well there to tap, especially the tension between the two houses. The house had been one dwelling at one point, as it was again now. The Gyle family lived in the smaller portion – Andrew, May and their daughter Lorna. The Melrose family next door, in the larger part of the conversion with the corner plot of the garden. The two couples were very different. Andrew and May were in their forties by the time their daughter arrived. May was a quiet woman who had suffered from bad health. Andrew enjoyed his garden, the woods and his Johnny Cash records. A normal family.
Costello had highlighted part of Griffin’s background statement. The story of May Gyle summed up the story of Andrew’s fall to notoriety. One incident started a chain of events that ended in three brutal murders. May had forgotten her purse. She had been going to work in the café in Debenhams. It was a long walk down Altmore Road to the bus stop on the parade. Anderson thought that this was the same walk that Jennifer Lawson had been faced with that morning in the teeming rain. When May realized she had forgotten her purse, she turned back, rushing so she would not miss the bus. She tripped up on the stone step of her front door and lacerated the skin on the front of her shin. The skin ripped badly, folded back almost to the bone.
Gyle had been at work so Aird had driven May to the hospital. And that had been the start of it – from there to a cellulitis, a septicaemia, and more and more housebound. It had ended up a lonely death by multiple organ failure in Gartnavel Hospital, just months after her husband had been sentenced to life and her daughter had been removed from her.
For all of that long hot summer, Gyle was overworking; stressed and underpaid. Looking after their five-year-old daughter, running back and forward to the hospital, struggling to keep his job. According to the statement, Gyle was devoted to his wife and considered his neighbours noisy and inconsiderate. May had started to come home from hospital on weekends then gradually increased her time at home to see how she coped. The Thursday of the incident was the first Thursday she was home for many weeks. Gyle had taken the day off work. He was going to chop logs, worried about the expense of heating the house during the long winter. May was going to have a lovely quiet day home in the sun. There was a shepherd’s pie ready to go in the oven. Gyle had made it before he went out to the wood.
May was dead, but her statement spoke for her. She knew Sue was waiting in for a roofer. The kids were stuck in the small back garden, but as Steven had banned them from playing where he kept his cars, the kids were playing right outside the French window where May was relaxing, trying to get some fresh air after being in hospital for weeks on end. She had asked Sue if she could keep the noise down.
And that was the nail in the coffin. Somebody had put in brackets that May was too distraught to continue her statement. After that, her opinion was considered so unimportant that nobody had bothered to follow it up.
Anderson went back to the file. Wyngate had collected – and Costello had collated – witness statements and supporting evidence. Taken singly they were meaningless, but they were greater than the sum of their parts. Tiny waves that formed a tsunami. Sue was always the one who called the police. May kept out of the way. Andrew shouted over the garden fence. Steven poured oil on troubled water. It was Steven who spoke about the wee chats over the car engine, the odd shared beer. Anderson turned the page, Costello’s biro, triple underlined. ‘Gyle was a nice bloke,’ Steven was quoted as saying. About the man who had killed his wife and sons. Anderson turned back, double checking. Melrose was always ‘Steven’, Griffin must have been a good friend to call him ‘Steve’, probably a habit from childhood, although if his memory served him right, they had only known each other vaguely at school. He made a mental note and read on.
That afternoon, Gyle had taken his axe to go and chop some wood deep in the forest. Sue Melrose and the boys had gone out for a walk deep in the woods.
Something terrible had happened.
But the mystery was about human nature.
Not about who had wielded the weapon.
He was still thinking about Gyle when his mobile rang.