Secret Sins: A Callie Anson (10 page)

Saturdays were problematical for Callie. Most people enjoyed Saturdays as days off, but Callie was always very much on duty, especially with Brian unavailable. And Saturday nights were even more difficult, with Sunday morning just over the horizon. This Sunday was worse than usual: she was scheduled to preach, and she hadn’t yet finished writing her sermon.

So although she was disappointed when Marco rang her on her mobile to say that he wouldn’t be able to see her that evening, a part of her was relieved. That would give her time to finish her sermon, even to polish it a bit. And it would give her some space to think.

Sitting in front of her computer, trying to come up with some fresh insights about Advent—the period of waiting, of expectation—she kept seeing the face of Morag Hamilton
floating
between her and the screen.

Morag was waiting, but not in expectation. In dread, and in loneliness.

Callie knew what it was to feel loneliness: in those dreadful weeks after her fiancé Adam had told her that he’d found
someone
else, she had lived through enough loneliness to last her a lifetime. But she had never faced the sort of ordeal that awaited Morag Hamilton: painful medical treatments with horrible side effects, and no guarantee at the end of the day that they would prolong her life by more than a few weeks or months.

And she, Callie, was involved. Like it or not, she was involved. It was something that none of her courses at theological college had prepared her for. She couldn’t just deal with her flock in a detached way, listening to their problems yet remaining unmoved by them. Already she had discovered that ministry meant
entering
into their pain, living it with them. Walking with them in places she would prefer not to walk, holding their hands.

It was a privilege; it was a responsibility so awesome that she wasn’t sure she was capable of carrying it out. Certainly not without God’s help.

It was also something that brought with it its own kind of loneliness. She was the recipient—the guardian—of people’s inmost secrets, of their fears and their guilt as well as their joys, and that in itself was a huge weight, a burden almost too great to bear. These things were not to be shared or discussed with anyone else. Not even with Brian. Not even with Marco.

She often wished that it were possible to use Marco as a sounding board when she had a particularly burdensome
problem
to deal with. He was wise, he was caring; he, too, had a job which involved listening to people and feeling their pain.

In fact, she sometimes thought, their jobs weren’t all that different from each other. Marco didn’t talk about his job much, but she’d gathered from what he did say that a Family Liaison Officer was in a unique position within the police force. Other CID officers’ responsibility for a case finished, for all intents and purposes, when they handed it over to the Crown Prosecution Service, but as an FLO his contact with the people in his care was more open-ended, lasting up till the trial and beyond. At any given time he could be involved with a number of families
on different levels, providing ongoing contact and support. Once Marco had said to her that their jobs were very similar, except that he worked for the Metropolitan Police, and she worked for God. When he’d said it, she’d found it very amusing, yet there was a great deal of truth in that flippant statement.

Neville was glad to get out of the Nortons’ house, and judging from the way his jaws were working on that piece of nicotine chewing gum, so was Sid Cowley. They’d called in a PC to carry the computer away, to take it to those mysterious experts whose task it was to dissect its hard drive, to find not only the things which were evident but the bits of data which had been trashed over the life of the machine. Trevor Norton might have been an IT expert, but Neville was willing to bet that even he had things on his computer which he would never have dreamed would be retrievable.

‘Not that it will amount to anything,’ he grumbled to Cowley. A cursory examination of Trevor Norton’s e-mails hadn’t revealed anything exciting or shocking. It was pretty much all business, and above-board business at that. No crooked dealing, no
obvious
enemies. No evidence of a secret girlfriend or mistress, at least not in the e-mails. ‘Though I suppose if there
was
another woman, he wouldn’t have been stupid enough to leave anything where his wife could see it,’ he allowed. ‘She did the books, after all. She had access to his computer.’

‘Barking up the wrong tree,’ muttered Cowley.

Neville was sure that he was right, that this crime would turn out to be completely unrelated to Trevor Norton’s personal life. Still, they had to go through the motions. Leaving no stone unturned—that was what it was all about. At the end of the day, if they were called to account and had to answer any
questions
about the enquiry, they would be able to say that they had investigated every possibility, likely or not.

And you never knew. Cowley could be wrong. Neville hoped that he was—at least it would give them somewhere to start,
someone to talk to. Something to do other than twiddling their thumbs while they waited for the DNA results to come in.

In spite of the distractions, Callie managed to finish her sermon. She printed it out, read through it, pencilled in a few corrections and improvements.

Dinner time, she realised as she saw Bella sitting patiently by her empty food bowl. Callie filled the bowl and Bella accepted it without hesitation, her whole body wagging with gratitude.

Callie herself didn’t have much of an appetite, but knew she’d need to eat something. The fridge yielded up a few leftovers: half a portion of lasagne, a bit of chicken, a container of soup. Though it wouldn’t be on a par with Marco’s home-made pasta, it would do, with the help of her trusty microwave.

She ate at the kitchen table, closely observed by Bella. Then she washed up and went back through into the sitting room.

The fireplace still held the remains of last night’s fire. If Marco had been here tonight as planned, he would have cleaned it out and built a new fire; though she felt chilled in the high-ceilinged room, Callie couldn’t be bothered. Instead she took the throw from the back of the sofa and wrapped herself in it, settling down in front of the television.

She consulted the listings and found nothing of interest. When, she wondered, had Saturday night television become so tedious? The hundred best something-or-others, a cringe-making reality show, a programme promising an evening of caterwauling talentless teenagers, and a tired old film which she’d already seen and hadn’t particularly enjoyed the first time round.

Bella jumped up beside her on the sofa and snuggled close. ‘Oh, Bella,’ Callie murmured. ‘What did I ever do without you?’

The black-and-white cocker spaniel, Callie had discovered, was a wonderful listener, and a discreet one. That was just what she needed this evening; she couldn’t get Morag Hamilton out of her mind. ‘Let me tell you about Morag and her family,’ she said, scratching behind Bella’s floppy ears.

The story, as Morag had related it to her, was a fascinating—if distressing—one. And at the centre of it all was Angus, Morag’s only child.

Angus Hamilton had, in spite of his parents’ best efforts, grown up as something of a young tearaway. He’d hung out with a fairly rough crowd, inasmuch as was possible in a town in the Highlands of Scotland, and had had a few minor scrapes with the law: underage drinking, fighting, damage to property. He’d left school at sixteen without any qualifications and seemed set on a course to waste his young life.

It was, needless to say, a cause of great concern for his parents, especially with his father’s position as the town’s doctor.

Then Angus had fallen under the spell of a woman who was several years his senior: Harriet Campbell, who ran the local pub. ‘I can’t say Donald and I were over the moon about that at first,’ Morag had confessed. ‘But we were proved wrong.’

Harriet had teaching qualifications. In fact, she’d left Gartenbridge some years earlier and had been teaching in Edinburgh when her publican parents were killed in an accident when on holiday in Spain. A sense of responsibility to them had brought her back to Gartenbridge to take over the family business.

The pub had never been so popular; the young men—and not a few of the older ones as well—hung round the place like bees round a honey pot, and not just for the drink. Harriet Campbell was beautiful, vivacious, sexy. Every young man’s dream.

But Harriet had seen something in Angus—something no one else had seen. The school teacher in her recognised his quick mind, his facility with numbers, and told him bluntly that he was wasting his life.

He listened to her as he had not listened to his parents. With her encouragement and help, he buckled down to study, to gain the qualifications he had scorned a few years earlier. Basic qualifications, followed by more study and advanced
accountancy
training.

Harriet Campbell had been the making of Angus Hamilton. Of that his mother had no doubt. ‘Without her,’ she’d told
Callie, ‘he’d still be in Gartenbridge. Or more likely in prison. He was that out of control.’

Instead he was in London, the Chief Financial Officer of a major firm in the City. Married to Jilly.

‘But what happened in between?’ Callie had wanted to know. ‘And what about Harriet?’ She remembered the haunting face in the photo: young Alex, in whom her grandmother Morag saw the promise of her mother’s beauty. A mother who wasn’t Jilly. ‘Is Alex Harriet’s daughter, then?’

What had begun as a mentoring relationship had inevitably developed into something more complex. It had happened when Angus was impossibly young, just barely nineteen. Harriet, then twenty-five, had fallen pregnant. A hasty wedding had followed.

‘Donald and I weren’t so thrilled at first, of course,’ Morag told her. ‘Angus was so young—we thought he couldn’t cope with it. But we were wrong. Having a family made him grow up. He and Harriet were so much in love—they adored each other. And when Alex came along, they were such a happy family.’

Callie had reached that point in recounting Morag’s story to Bella when the dog stirred restlessly, jumped off the sofa, and went to the door at the top of the stairs.

‘Do you have to go out, then?’ Callie asked.

Bella wagged her tail.

It was the one down side of having a dog and living upstairs: she couldn’t just open the door and let Bella out into a garden. Callie had to put a coat on, get Bella’s lead. She ought to change from her slippers into shoes, but she wasn’t planning to go far.

The temperature had fallen even further; Callie’s breath came out in frosty puffs. Unfortunately, though, Bella didn’t seem to feel the cold, and took her time in finding the perfect spot to do her business.

‘Hurry up,’ Callie muttered, hugging herself. She hadn’t put on her gloves and her hands were freezing. So were her feet, clad in her fuzzy slippers.

‘Hi, Cal,’ said a voice in the darkness.

Callie jumped, her heart pounding. She spun round,
yanking
on Bella’s lead.

There was only one person who called her Cal.

Adam.