The Blood That Stains Your Hands (27 page)

Taylor again indicates Connor's office.

'It's all on him, Sergeant. Just following orders. He told me to make the arrest. I outlined, at as much length as he would allow, why I thought that was at best premature, and at worst, unbelievably stupid. He ordered me again to make the arrest. I asked if he could give me that in writing. He obliged.'

'You're covered?'

'Yes, Sergeant, I am. I even noted my objections in writing, and he replied to that. So, I'm doubled covered. I hate this sort of political shit that you get when your boss is someone like him, but you just have to get on with it and do what needs to be done. If, against all our expectations, it turns out Cartwright is guilty, then the superintendent gets to go and lick his own balls in front of the media. Never been much of a one for ball-licking myself.'

'Is it possible Cartwright's guilty?'

A dismissive wave of the hand. 'Who knows? I mean, at this stage it's more or less impossible to rule anyone out, and the field is still wide open for new entries. This guy, however, at least had motive for two of the four killings, because both Maureen and Agnes were a pain in his arse, and he's a known covert collaborator with them. So, there's as much chance it's him as anyone. In fact, quite possibly a little more.'

'Did you do an interview before you nicked the bastard?'

'Well, obviously I did Lorraine and Jeremy Kyle...'

'Funny.'

'We brought him in. We interviewed him. He called his little ragtag collection of amateur conspiracists, his War Room II.'

'Yeah, he said he convened a war room in order to win the contest in the first place. Hey, and that's something else. According to Agnes Christie's daughter, her mum always said their church should have had a war room.'

Hand across his chin, your classic detective's pose.

'Suppose it's not that unusual a phrase. A decent thought, but in tying them together we have Cartwright's admission in any case. Anyway, the superintendent watched the interview. Or, at least, enough of it to be convinced. When Mr Cartwright was not immediately able to provide an alibi for any of the four murders, the super seemed to find this compelling.'

'Ah, so we have at least coincidence on our side.'

He nods, smiles ruefully. 'Now we're at the case-building stage, and we're full-on with that.'

'Oh, Cartwright did tell me that he'd had nothing to do with Maureen, had never replied to her letters, no contact ever.'

'Always good to catch them in a lie,' says Taylor. 'And it does explain why she stopped writing to him.'

Nod in agreement, decide to ask the question that I probably ought not to.

'You speak to Tony Stewart?'

Shadow across his face, lowers his head slightly. It's all right to feel slightly upbeat about making a false arrest, especially when it's your boss who's making a dick of himself, but it's a tough copper who's chipper about anyone finding out their wife has had her head spiked.

'Aye. Poor bastard. Hadn't been able to get in touch with her for about twenty-four hours before he got on the plane, so he was shitting himself anyway. We got someone to meet him off the plane at Heathrow. He went to pieces down there. Met him at this end as well, and he was still in pieces.'

Nothing to say. I was right, I shouldn't have asked the question in the first place. Don't want to think about some guy whose wife I slept with being in pieces. Don't want to think about the fact that he wouldn't have been able to get in touch with her for some of that twenty-four hours because she was in bed with me.

I'm not in pieces. I'm not. But that's a bucketload of denial keeping me together.

'I take it you're responsible for some of that time he couldn't get hold of her?'

A moment, then I nod. He exhales a long breath. Checks his watch.

'We'll talk again in the morning. It's not out of the question that you'll be temporarily suspended pending further investigation, but at the best, I'll need to remove you from this investigation.'

'Of course.'

Been a while since I managed to see a big investigation all the way through to the end.

'How'd you get on up north?'

'I could have stayed,' I say. I could too. I could move up there and clean toilets.

Hey, if I'm kicked off this case, then I can at least go back to the toilet guy. Maybe helping him will give me some level of job satisfaction akin to what he manages to achieve.

'I bet. You talk to the minister?'

'Aye. A decent old sort, out walking his dog, worried about his piles sitting on a wooden bench. Didn't have a lot to say, except surprise that it was happening now and not previously. In fact...' Pause to think about the old fellow, and the nuance of his words. Nuance? I don't think so. I think he was quite straightforward. 'No, he was pretty clear. Said it was extremely nasty before, and that he wouldn't have been surprised if there had been murder back then. That it's happening now surprised him. So he wondered if the merger ultimately might be a red herring. Not, obviously, an intentional red herring, but something that's distracting us from the case.'

'Possible,' he says. Another check of the watch, then he waves his hand towards the door.

'You should go home. Write up your interview with the minister in the morning, ping it over. I'll tell Ramsay just to get you back onto the usual thing. We'll talk when I get the time.'

Nothing else to say. The situation does not allow that I let the conversation turn to anything else. He's being unusually polite about it, but the bottom line is I'm getting my due.

Kicked off the case, with the not entirely outside possibility of being kicked out of the police.

*

N
evertheless, I don't leave work just yet. The thought of going home is too awful. Just too awful. She'll still be there, sitting at the small dining table, smiling at me as I walk in the door.

It didn't go so well when I went home last night, after all.

Find the girl, that's what Reverend Baxter said. So I go down to records, make myself known to the woman on duty – who just so happens to be Cheryl, with whom I had the brief fling until our passion crashed and burned on the unsavoury matter of anal sex – we exchange barely a word, and I find a computer to sit at.

I could do the first part of it, checking back over missing persons from the last few years, at my desk, but Taylor doesn't want me there, which is fine. I just need to hope that I don't walk into him on the way out. He'll likely be working much later, so I'll give it half an hour or an hour and then head off.

Sit for a moment staring at a blank screen. Haven't been thinking of the reality of this until now. Searching for missing or dead children is awful. There's a lot of shit in this job, but Jesus, this is right there at the top. Out in front. The shittiest thing any of us ever has to do. So, here I am, voluntarily giving myself the task of searching through one tragic story after another.

And what is it I'm hoping to find? Who, or what, is this strange little girl who keeps speaking to me?

My thoughts are too prosaic for that. Can't think about it. I just know that what Baxter said makes sense. I need to find the girl, and this is as good a place to start looking as any.

––––––––

A
n hour, all I could stand. Such an overwhelming feeling of sadness. So many lives lost or ruined.

Out the station, do my best to shove everything that I've just read into the necessary compartment. No sign of my girl, whoever she is. If she went missing in the last few years, it wasn't from around here. Or, indeed, anywhere in Strathclyde.

I don't go home. I get in the car, start to head in that direction, but then I see Philo sitting at the table, and I smell her scent on the sheets on the bed, and I can't go there. I just can't. Yes, I need to face this grief at some point. Everybody has to face grief. But I need to be in a better place before it happens.

Where do I end up? In the car park at Morrison's down by the river. Somewhere to sit and think. It'd be good to have someone to talk to. Perhaps I shouldn't have left the station so quickly, because that's the only place I'm going to find anyone. But then who would it be? My new pal, Eileen? Someone I've known and more or less ignored for the last six or seven years.

I contemplate, seriously, going to see Peggy. Turning up on my ex-wife's door, needing to talk. She'd love that. Might actually let me in, as I don't think she has anyone else on the go at the moment. But what then? What would I say?
Hey, Peg, you know how for all those years I was keeping some dark secret that I just never got close enough to you to tell you? Well, I found someone I could confide in, someone I'd only known a few days, but who I quickly realised I loved more than I ever loved you. But now she's dead. You got a couple of hours to chat?

I think of Margaret Christie, my doctor from three nights ago. Just three nights. What do you think? My last ever casual shag? That's what it feels like at the moment. She was staying at the Premier Inn at the Black Bear. Wonder if she's still up here. I could probably talk to her. But then, if I called her, she's going to think I'm looking for something more than conversation, and I won't be.

I end up driving to the Black Bear anyway. Sitting in the bar. Watching Sky Sports. Eating a gammon steak and pineapple, drinking two glasses of wine. She's not in the bar. Why should she be?

I should go home, but I can't. It's as though there's a wall up. I walk next door to the Premier Inn and book myself a room. Pay for a toothbrush and toothpaste.

Go to the room, turn on the news. Brain in neutral. I'm here now. I can stop thinking about going home.

The news leads with our story beneath the wonderful graphic:
Bible Paul?
Watch the media scrum in front of the station. A press conference in which Connor, unusually, takes the lead. Obviously wanting to be the face of the arrest. Nice for him, his brief moment in the sun. Possibly doesn't understand that no one ever remembers the police officer on these occasions. They watch the news item, the basic facts of the case might stick with the viewer, but all they will have seen is the uniform. No one remembers the face of the officer.

Fuck, I don't know him. Perhaps he fully understands that, but it's not about public perception for him. It's about positioning himself so that he looks good in front of his superiors, attempting to regain some of the reputation that he will think he lost during the Plague of Crows debacle. He must be confident, because he's going to look like a total cock if he's wrong.

And I think we all know he's wrong.

After the news I find a documentary on Egyptian treasures on BBC4, which I manage to watch in its entirety without falling asleep, as some young academic chap strides around ancient monuments in his pale blue shirt, talking excitedly to the camera.

Where do they get these people? What is the genesis of these random three-part series that crop up continuously on BBC4? Do people sit around in an office and come up with titles for new shows, such as
What The Ancient Greeks Taught Us
or
Who The Fuck Were The Phoenicians?
or
How Many Visigoths Did It Take To Change a Light Bulb?
after which they put the idea out to tender? Or do academics like this guy sit in the bath and think up a show such as
The Mongols Invented Golf And Other Astonishing Facts Of The Ancient World
and then take it to the BBC?

If it's the latter, I could do that. It'd give me something to do when I leave the police. Make a documentary for BBC4.

My imagination wanders, Mitty-esque, as I watch the show. I struggle to think what it is that I'd have the expertise to discuss other than Dylan, Thistle and my own fucked-up life. Decide on a TV series entitled
Echoes Of Dylan, From Firhill to Mesopotamia
, and then the show is over and I take myself off to bed.

I lie there, trying not to think about Philo Stewart, painfully thinking about her in my attempts not to.

I think about her husband, the guy in a suit, in tears. The guy I had cuckolded the night before. He hadn't heard from her for twenty-four hours before he returned. Some of it he was on the plane, some of it she was in bed with me, making love, sleeping. We ate dinner the night before, breakfast the following morning. But it doesn't all add up to twenty-four hours.

Why didn't she text him when she got home from my house? And now, thinking about it, I realise of course, that I have no idea when she left my house. Why have I only just thought of that? Because you were trying not to think about it at all.

She would have had no reason to linger, so I don't suppose that she did. Why did she not call, or at least text her husband when she got back home? It would have been mid-afternoon with him. He must have been texting, calling. Maybe beginning to pull his hair out.

The sorrow floods in with the thought that she couldn't bring herself to do it, because she knew. She knew she'd found someone else, and that the someone else was going to bring an end to her marriage.

How much conceit is there in that thought? It doesn't matter. It's there, it's in my head, it won't leave.

The thought that I could have had someone. Someone to really talk to, someone who understood, someone with whom the sex was unbelievable, someone with whom I could share. Someone to whom, at last, I could actually give something of myself.

The inevitable tears on my pillow. Fuck. I don't move. I don't get up to get something with which to drown out the pain. Eventually the tiredness takes over and I fall asleep.

*

'I
'm pure like that, by the way, she can go and take a fuck tae hersel', so she can.'

10.23 a.m. Head has been swirling since just after six. Woke up with the image of Philo sitting in that chair, in my head. Her face streaked with blood, her head pierced with spikes. Eyes open.

Yes, great romance has to be doomed. If it's not, you end up sitting together watching TV. For the romance to last, there has to be separation and pain. No greater separation than one of you being dead.