Absolution (32 page)

Then something warmer, firmer, taking hold of him. Warm fingers stroked his hair, the scent of seawater filled his senses, he saw tendrils of blonde hair dance in front of his eyes as he imagined soft lips being pressed against his. Loving words spoken in quiet ghostly whispers, carried with the lapping of the water.

With this kiss, I shall wake you.

What the fuck are you doing here?’

Anderson got up from the chair at the kitchen table. ‘I’ve been here for hours,’ he said. ‘Your wife was attacked just a few hours ago, if you remember.’ Not ‘Helena’.
Your wife.
‘I didn’t think the house should be left. Quite apart from some drunken bastard nicking my car.’

‘Is she –’

‘She’s fine. The hospital say she’s fine. She’s asleep. I’d suggest you leave her to rest, at least until you’ve cleaned yourself up. She’s talking about going back to the gallery this afternoon. There’s no telling her.’ Anderson deliberately turned his back, checked there was some water in the kettle and switched it on. ‘You need some coffee in you,’ he said. Then he turned round, leaning against the kitchen unit as though he were in his own house, and folded his arms.

‘So where have you been? You’re soaking wet.’

‘This is quite dry; you’ve a good heater in that Astra, I’ll tell you that. And the driver’s seat is soaked.’ The kettle boiled and clicked off, and Anderson started opening and closing cupboards, looking for mugs. McAlpine slumped down at the kitchen table. ‘I was thinking.’

‘Thinking? Drinking’s more like it. Alan, get a grip! I’ve seen stiffs with more life in them. What’s going on? What was going on this morning?’

‘I stopped at Peckham’s… bought myself a bottle…’

‘And you left that one at the house, empty.’

McAlpine dropped his face into his hands and started to rub his eyes, trying for recall. ‘Christ! After… well after…’

‘After the attack on Helena, you went to the hospital, you went back to the terrace, you necked a half-bottle of whisky and gave Costello the slip and then nicked my car. It’s after that I want to know about,’ Anderson demanded.

‘I drove down the Ayr Road… I needed some sea air, I needed to think, and that’s the truth. I think I took a bottle with me.’

‘Think? Think about what, precisely?’

‘About Robbie, my mum, Anna…’

‘Anna who?’

‘Just Anna. Who’s dead. Who’s lying in an untended grave in the Western Necropolis.’

‘Anna who had acid thrown in her face? That Anna?’

McAlpine nodded distractedly. ‘Helena… I’ll go to the hospital to see her now. I might run her to the gallery if she’s ready, then I can keep an eye on her,’ he said, trying and failing to get the papers back into his wallet. The photograph of Helena fell out on to the table. He turned it deliberately to look at it. ‘The thing about women like my wife is, nothing defeats them. Nothing! She just gets up, dusts herself down and keeps going.’ McAlpine went on, ‘They can emasculate you just by breathing. But you’d know all about that, wouldn’t you?’

‘I do, right enough. Which is why I envy you being married to a woman like Helena.’ Anderson sat down opposite McAlpine and leaned forward on folded arms. ‘Look, Alan, the man who attacked Helena…’

The clouded, tortured eyes hardened. ‘Of course. Christopher Robin?’

‘Think,’ Anderson said urgently. ‘He kills women he perceives as immoral. I suppose he must think that of Helena. That piece in yesterday’s
Gazette
might have triggered him in some way, that’s all.’ Anderson got up and poured a mug of coffee for himself. ‘And the one thing Batten will ask is: why you? Why her? We are assuming all other victims are connected in some way to Christopher himself. Is Helena too? We’ll be going through her life with a fine-tooth comb, and if DCI Quinn is put in charge she’ll start with you. Did anyone see you after you left Peckham’s? Christ, do you even
remember
when you left Peckham’s?’

‘What are you saying?’ The pain in the dark eyes had been replaced by steely fury. ‘That I attempted to kill Helena? To
murder my own wife? And I suppose you want me for the other three too.’

‘You’ve no alibi for any of it,’ Anderson persisted doggedly. ‘No
reliable
alibi. I have to make sure. If it goes to court, I’m not leaving any loopholes for some wanker to find. Helena’s your wife. If you weren’t a DCI, you’d be first suspect, you know that. Do you have any witnesses at all?’

McAlpine thought of the rain-sodden tartan blanket, the thin hand groping for the change. Not exactly what you’d call a witness. Nope, you’re out of luck. Case solved. Because nobody saw me.’
Except my guardian angel.
‘Except my guardian angel,’ he said out loud.

Anderson smiled for the first time. ‘You’ve no right to be home in one piece. Look at the state of you. Guardian angel, eh? That I can believe.’

Outside the back door of Partickhill Station DI Anderson was sipping coffee from a polystyrene cup. He had stuffed a full cooked brunch down his throat at the University Café, but his sleep-starved brain demanded yet more caffeine. Costello’s car swung into the car park, and he waited until she had finished fiddling with the key and run across the yard before he caught her by the elbow.

‘Freddie?’

‘Yes?’ She was always suspicious at the use of her first name.

‘I want you to do a couple of things for me, and I don’t want you to ask why.’

‘Hmm.’ Costello folded her arms. ‘What?’

‘Talk to whoever’s in charge of the burial register at the Western Necropolis. Find out if anyone was buried there – I’m guessing about twenty-two years ago, but it was during
the summer she died, it would be the year the McAlpines married. Check for a young female, death certificate signed at the Western. Traumatic cause of death. Might be a slightly foreign name. Dutch or Dutch origin. First name might be Anna.’

Curiouser and curiouser.
‘I can find that out. Anything more on the name?’

Anderson sighed, ‘That’s the best I can do.’

‘OK, what’s the other thing?’

‘Get on to central records and dig out whatever you can find about the death of Robert McAlpine.’

‘Robert
McAlpine?’

‘Yeah. I’ve no idea when he died, but I guess also about twenty-two, maybe twenty-three years ago. And he would have been – say, twenty, twenty-five. Strathclyde, probably. I’d check that first.’

‘How did he die?’

Anderson shrugged. ‘No idea. Not peacefully in his sleep anyway.’

‘So what are you thinking?’

‘I don’t know what I’m thinking. The Boss rolled home this morning with a skinful and a sore head. All the while I was with him, it wasn’t Helena on his mind. He was thinking about something else… somebody else. The DCI’s not an idiot. Somewhere in his mind, I’m pretty certain, a connection’s been made between his brother’s death and the attack on Helena. Something he’s been aware of since all this started.’

‘So why hasn’t he said?’ Her hand rested on her hip, and her head was cocked to one side; she was thinking she knew where this conversation was going.

‘I’m not sure he knows himself. But the thing is: Helena thinks he’s flipped since he came back to this station. He’s
been looking out old photographs and stuff, brooding over them. He was here about twenty-odd years ago, when his brother died, and his mother too, come to think of it. So, if Robbie was murdered, then maybe – ’

‘Maybe what?’ Costello started to flick little stones with her foot; one of them hit its target, twanging against the drainpipe. What are you saying?’ she asked petulantly.

‘That’s what I don’t know. Maybe the Boss has buried something so deep in his subconscious that he doesn’t even know it’s there.’

‘And Batten would say that’s a self-protection thing – something too painful to surface on its own.’

‘And that’s why we have to find out. The Boss is back at his own house, stinking and soaking wet, barely coherent. He was a gibbering mess when he arrived back in the wee small hours, talking about angels. I took a strand of his hair and O’Hare’s doing a DNA test on it. Sorry, but there it is. I said I wanted a comparison on hand. I’d expect the Boss’s DNA to be all over his wife’s clothes, but just in case we find anybody else’s…’

‘You checking out Terry Gilfillan?’

‘That’s not funny, Costello, not funny at all. Get back to me, and only me.’

‘Touchy!’

Anderson glared at her and walked away.

‘Colin?’ She trotted after him, catching him before he entered the swing doors of the station. ‘I’m sorry, but it’s the way you talk about her sometimes.’

‘You should have seen the state of her last night – this morning, I mean – after she was attacked,’ Anderson said, his voice breaking. ‘And Alan could hardly bring himself to comfort her. I don’t get it.’

‘Other people’s marriages, Colin – don’t get involved,’
Costello advised. ‘Come on, before Wyngate starts lip-reading through the glass.’

‘I asked you this morning, where have you been? If I asked you again now, would I get a sensible reply?’ asked Anderson. ‘You do look better now.’

‘Had a bath and a sleep. Well, I tried to. Had a word with Helena on the phone. She seems OK.’ McAlpine was sitting at the dining table, a cigarette hanging out of the corner of his mouth, looking like death slightly warmed over. His eyes were red and swollen, his nose and cheek grazed and pitted with dried blood. A copy of the
Daily Record
lay open, his own picture staring back at him. They were marking off a calendar, one set of crossed bones for every day the killer remained at large.

‘Bloody tabloids!’ he muttered.

‘Could be worse.’ Anderson dumped in front of him a mug of coffee so strong the spoon almost stood up in it unaided. McAlpine ignored it, so Anderson lifted it up and slammed it back down again, accompanied by two dihydrocodeine.

‘I went for a walk, tried to clear my head.’

‘A walk on water, was it?’

‘In it, more like.’

‘And that’s what I have to tell DCI Quinn?’

‘I’ll tell her myself. Any further forward with the attack on Helena?’

‘Quinn has been talking to her. I think the new DCI knows we are all too pally to look on it objectively. And she does have Helena’s safety right at the front of her mind.’

‘You mean she suspects it might be one of us?’

‘You were stinking of drink that night. Helena couldn’t smell anything off Christopher Robin. And don’t look at me
like that, it’s not me you have to convince; while Quinn is talking to Helena, I think we’re taking our eye off the ball. Batten has been right so far. He thinks somebody already in the field went for Helena on your behalf, so to speak, but it could just as easily have been at Brenda on my behalf. You happen to have the high-profile wife.’

‘Yeah.’ McAlpine was contemplating the coffee steaming in front of him, tumbling the tablets between thumb and forefinger, gathering the effort to wash them down. ‘I’ll come in to work.’

‘You can’t do that.’ Anderson took a deep breath. ‘This attack on Helena means you have a personal interest now. You know you’re off the case.’ Anderson sighed and hung his head in his hands, wishing he smoked. This would seem like a good time to start.

‘Is Quinn definitely taking over? The whole thing? She can’t take this case, bossy wee shitbag. She’d put a match to the Phoenix as soon as look at it. You’re going to need people like Leeza to help crack O’Keefe; he’s a very tough cookie, that one. And I don’t think Quinn’s the man for that.’ McAlpine swirled the tablets down with a mouthful of coffee.

‘She’s not a man at all.’

‘More balls than you and me put together, though, eh?’

‘That wouldn’t be difficult.’

By the time Costello got back to her flat it was half past five, and she was so groggy she had to look at the paper put through her door to confirm it was still Wednesday. She had been on her feet for thirty-two hours: crime scene to briefing, briefing to central records, central records to station, station to headquarters, headquarters to Paisley, Paisley to Arlene’s flat, then a brief phone call to Arlene’s
mother, which caught the woman in a brief moment of sobriety. The only thing Costello gained out of that was a tasty titbit about Arlene and a priest, and the distinct feeling that Arlene’s mum was so sectarian she would not have been happy about her daughter being friendly with any clergyman who was
not
a Roman Catholic priest.

In the shower Costello tumbled the relationships of all three girls with O’Keefe and Leask around in her head. After thirty minutes she emerged, much cleaner but no further forward.

She put some bread in the toaster straight out of the freezer. But the cheese, two weeks past its sell-by date and mouldy, ended up in the flip-top. She forgot all about her toasted cheese and put the kettle on instead.

The answering machine winked at her, over and over. She knew it was the records office, and she didn’t want to hear what it was going to tell her, not on an empty stomach anyway.

She settled down in her favourite chair, feet up on the footstool, a cup of tea, two slices of warm bread and a packet of broken HobNobs to hand. She flicked the remote control for her Bang and Olufsen stereo, and let Julie London take the edge off the silence as she called some lady a tramp. Peace, perfect peace.

After a few minutes the constant winking of the answering machine started to play on her conscience. She pressed ‘Play’ for the first message, noted the number and called back. The call took all of two minutes. A Robert McAlpine from Skelmorlie had been killed while in the service of HM Customs and Excise. The cutter HMS
Alba
had engaged a yacht called
Fluisteraar. Fluisteraar
had been holed, her crew had gone overboard, and James Weir and Robert McAlpine had jumped in to their rescue. Nobody knew exactly what
happened in the darkness, noise and confusion. Weir had been pulled from the water immediately, and a Dutchman’s body had been retrieved by the
Alba
within the hour. They had to wait three days for Robert McAlpine to be washed up at Bowling on the Clyde estuary. The PM showed his skull had been smashed between the two hulls. Death might have been instantaneous, but there had been water in his lungs. No matter how, he had died in the course of duty. Both he and Weir had received the Queen’s Commendation for Bravery. Reports that
Fluisteraar
was smuggling had turned out to be groundless.