least the schools would be back today and they could catch up with all the missed lessons. Padding quietly back to bed, she paused for a moment, looking down at her sleeping husband. He’d not missed a single day at work despite the dreadful weather. Crime didn’t take off snow days, did it? Especially crimes like the vicious murders that concerned Detective Superintendent William Lorimer.
Slipping into bed, Maggie let her thoughts wander. What would life be like if Bill hadn’t joined the police force? Would he have become an art historian as he had always intended? She closed her eyes, willing sleep to come, and drifted into a halfdream about pictures in a gallery, but they were all the same subject; a woman lying in the snow, blood spilled artistically from a wound beneath her curvaceous body. Then they were not flesh and blood people at all but pictures of a broken statue and the blood was not that bright red colour at all but a sickly brown as water coursed past, leaving the marble muddied and wet, its surface gleaming in a chiaroscuro light coming from somewhere that only the artist could see. Then she was falling off the edge of a pavement…
Maggie woke up suddenly, aware of the dream but with it already slipping from her consciousness. She heaved a sigh, turned on her side and let her head sink deeper into the pillow.
The Glasgow streets had been washed clean by the rain but there were still lumps of brown-tinged snow in car parks and untreated side roads where huge drifts had been piled up by the relentless snow ploughs. Lorries with their flashing lights had been a familiar sight, scattering their ever-diminishing supplies of grit like pebble dash onto the icy roads, sometimes flicking the tiny particles onto other vehicles as they made their lumbering night-time way along motorways and city streets alike.
Jim Blackburn was listening to the request programme from Radio Clyde as his gritting machine moved slowly along Sauchiehall Street. He signalled right as the pedestrian area loomed ahead, then turned the wheel and headed uphill, across Bath Street and upwards into the shadows of the buildings that lay on either side of Blythswood Street.
His eye caught the figure hovering near the corner of the pavement. She was not quite close enough to the kerb to be making a move to cross, yet neither was she lurking in the shadows, since the light from a street lamp let Jim see her clearly enough. In the moments it took for his gritter lorry to pass her by, he saw a skinny wretch of a girl. She was clad in a black jacket, a pale blue miniskirt that barely covered her decency (a phrase his granny had sometimes used in an offended Presbyterian tone) and kneelength boots. Jim’s glance took in the white of her bare legs. He swallowed, realising just what she was and why she was standing there at this hour of the morning. Not only would her legs be bare, he thought, but she wouldn’t be wearing knickers either. Somehow the thought did not arouse any other feeling than pity in the man; as he saw her in his wing mirror he realised she was about the same age as his own wee lassie, Kelly, a schoolgirl who was strictly forbidden from going into the town after a certain time of night. Jim’s mouth tightened in a grim line. What sort of life led a young lassie like that onto the streets? He sighed and gave a shake of his head at the thought, leaving the girl behind as he drove up to the square, letting the grit scatter over the icy tarmac.
Jim Blackburn did not think much more about the prostitute that night but later she was to haunt his dreams for many months to come.
Lily shivered as she stood on the pavement. It’ll be fine, the other girls had told her, you’ll make a fortune. For the first half-hour Bella had waited just across the road, nodding encouragement whenever she had looked up. Lily had smiled back but inside she’d been hoping against hope that it wasn’t really happening and that she might just be allowed to go back home again. But home wasn’t on the agenda any more, was it? Not since her mother’s boyfriend had come on to her…
This bit of pavement was special, one of the others had told her; it had been another girl’s pitch. Lily thought she