A Small Weeping by Alex Gray Page A

been thoroughly unpleasant. None of the staff had known much about the nurse’s background or else they weren’t letting on. The auxiliary who’d found her, Mrs Duncan, had been in a state of shock and could barely verbalise. Lorimer had been given a full list of all members of staff. It was a long list, given the staffing requirements for a twenty-four hour day to care for a number of vulnerable people. Still,records would be crosschecked on the computer and that might throw something up.
    Those patients who’d emerged from their rooms last night had been surprisingly calm. Though perhaps some of them were sedated at night, anyway. They would all be interviewed at greater length this morning. Lorimer hadn’t forgotten all those lights switched on upstairs.
    Now, in the spring morning, it was hard to imagine that a murder had taken place in such a pleasant spot. The sky was clear and blue although there was still a chill in the air. Above him a blackbird was whistling unseen in the trees. Lorimer stepped back out onto the front lawn and walked as far as a curve of rhododendron bushes. Turning, he looked back at the house. It had a pleasing aspect from the front. Two enormous bay windows flanked the front entrance. The huge storm doors were fastened back and Lorimer could see shadowy shapes moving beyond the frosted glass. The clinic’s employees were already having to go about the business of caring for their patients, after all. Some of the upstairs windows showed drawn curtains still, though it was past nine o’ clock. Whose sleep had been disturbed during the night, he wondered?
    Lorimer looked around him. The drive looped all round the grounds. To the rear were trees, more shrubbery and a high, stone wall. Beyond that was farmland. Could anyone have vaulted that wall and made off over the fields in darkness? Or, indeed, arrived from that very direction. An outsider. A nutter. That was the theory he was working on, anyway. Some creep who had a fetish about dead women and flowers. Brightman would surely have an opinion to offer. It was time he called him up.
    The front drive gave on to an avenue of Victorian villasthen a row of solid tenement houses on each side. There was a main road at right angles to the avenue, a mere hundred yards away.
    One thing Lorimer had noticed as he’d turned the car into this narrow avenue: there was barely room to swing a cat because of the double-parking by residents. Maybe someone might have noticed a car in a hurry last night? That was just one of the questions his team of officers would be asking. Over the hill beyond the Langside Monument lay the Victoria Infirmary. Queen’s Park stretched out the whole length of the main road right up to Shawlands. Another possible escape route for a killer. Lorimer grinned to himself, realising that he was already tuning into Solly’s way of thinking. The psychologist liked to pore over maps relating to the locus of a crime as he began his search into the criminal mind.
    Lorimer thought back to the long drawn-out investigation into the Saint Mungo’s murders. That Glasgow park had been scoured from end to end. The Dear Green Place, folk liked to call their city. And so it was. He’d read somewhere that they had more parks than any other city in Europe. A source of pride to some, maybe, but a right bugger when you were trying to track a killer.
    ‘Sir.’
    Lorimer’s mind came back to the present. Detective Constable Cameron was standing in the porch and with him was the very lady that Lorimer wanted most to see. Mrs Baillie was the woman in charge here, her official designation being director of the Grange, a clinic that specialised in neural disorders.
    As he walked towards the steps, he could see a tall,angular woman dressed in black shading her eyes from the morning sun.
    ‘Good morning Mrs Baillie,’ Lorimer shook a hand that was damp with sweat.
    As they turned away from the dazzle of light that bounced off the open glass door,