Robertson, Craig - Witness the Dead by Robertson Craig

Author:Robertson, Craig [Robertson, Craig]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780857204219
Publisher: Simon & Schuster UK
Published: 2013-07-03T23:00:00+00:00

Chapter 31

1972

It sounds awful, but when you go into the station on a Sunday morning, probably nursing a head from the night before, the last thing you need to be told is that some wee lassie has been murdered. Actually, the last thing you need is to be told that you’re the one that’s been landed with investigating it.

Look, it’s human nature. Maybe not exactly at its best but it’s the way it is. You’ve already got enough on your plate, maybe juggling fifty cases, and there’s a good chance there’s already a murder or two among them. It’s Glasgow, those are the odds. Then the CID clerk welcomes you through the door and hands you another one.

You might huff, probably sigh, complain about the lazy sods on the night shift or moan about why some other bugger couldn’t do it. Anything, everything, except thinking what you should think. A wee lassie’s been murdered.

You become hardened to bad news in the morning so that even such a terrible thing becomes another number, a form 3:24:1 to be filled in and handed over. A crime that will become a 3:24:2 if it’s cleared. One piece of paper that gets turned into another.

The CID clerk tells you that the wee lassie has been raped and strangled. God help you but the first thing you think isn’t that it’s the end of the world. Of course, inside, you know that it’s the end of someone’s world and those who knew her. But, outside, those pieces of paper have to keep getting filled in.

You tell yourself that wee lassies get killed in big cities and you can’t save the world by treating each one as if she’s your daughter or sister. That can only lead to the nuthouse or the bottom of a bottle. You give them your best. Everything else you keep for the people at home. Those are the rules for survival.

And sometimes you break them.

Sometimes they sneak past your defences, coming to whisper to you in the night. Not ghosts as such but just as capable of haunting you. They get under your skin, smiling up at you from collect photographs, calling out to you in the voice of their mother or sister, demanding justice. Demanding that you deliver it.

That’s how it was with him and Brenda MacFarlane. Eventually.

Looking back, of course, there was guilt at the indifference he felt when George Scott, the CID clerk, first handed her over to him. The old boy stood at the uniform bar and called him over with a conspiratorial wave, as if he were doing him a favour. And he probably thought he was. In the morning, the clerk was armed with every crime that’s happened on the night shift – maybe thirty or forty in a city-centre station like Cranstonhill – and, if he liked you, he might just give you the good stuff to work on. If he didn’t like you or you’d pissed him off, you’d get the crappy jobs that no one wanted.

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