The Blood That Stains Your Hands (30 page)

'Oh, it was nothing,' he says, then he smiles and indicates the room with a casually thrown hand. 'Look at all this. Can't say no to a beautiful ornament when I see one.'

'I'm going to have to ask you to accompany us down to the station,' says Taylor.

The Reverend Forsyth seems surprised at first, and then resignation takes hold of him as he realises he made a misjudgement.

One might also question his judgement of an ornament 'n' all.

*

B
ack at my desk. Looking through statistics on public toilet vandalism. Yes, I am. Has to be done. Not down interviewing with Taylor. He thought it best that my continued involvement on the case be kept at the unofficial level, and not paraded about the station.

It's nice that Connor hasn't come back to him on it, yet. He's obviously just completely forgotten about me. My superintendent makes me feel so warm. Of course, I got to shag the previous one, so on some sort of law of averages, I was bound to come up against someone who doesn't realise that I exist. Definitely for the best.

Just thinking that it might be time to head out and do a tour of the public toilets of the area – there's a job – without as yet getting back in touch with my erudite toilet cleaning officer, when Morrow's phone rings. I watch it for a few moments, not that a ringing phone looks so different from a silent one, the little red light aside, then lean over and lift the receiver.

'Morrow's phone.'

'Hutton,' says Ramsay. 'Morrow around?'

'Haven't seen him in twenty minutes.'

'Got someone for him at the front desk. Can you come down and show him to a room?'

'Sure beans,' I find myself saying, out of nowhere. Jesus. Must be the phone. It automatically translates you into the person whose call you've answered. The things they can do nowadays.

Ramsay hangs up without speaking, which is as appropriate a response to
sure beans
as you can get. Last look at toilet vandalism statistics, without any of it going in, and then out the office and down the stairs.

Into reception, and there he is. Fuck. Hadn't even thought about it.

Tony Stewart, standing a few feet away from the desk, swathed in misery, melancholy and self-loathing. Jesus, it's like looking in a fucking mirror.

He doesn't see me coming, he's so distracted. I'm up in front of him before he lifts his head.

'Mr Stewart,' I say. 'Thanks for coming in.'

The words feel like dirt in my mouth.

He looks pathetic. Acknowledges me standing there in front of him, but says nothing.

*

J
esus, I don't want to have anything to do with this guy, but it feels unbelievably cruel to leave him on his own. Stick him in a room and say, go on, my cuckolded friend, suffocate to death in your own misery, why don't you? We will provide the unutterable gloom of the setting, if you can bring along your own melancholy and suicidal depression.

I stick him in an interview room, one of the non-intimidating ones with a first floor window onto daylight, or what passes for daylight in November in the west of Scotland, nip out to get two cups of tea and instruct Constable Grant to briefly interrupt Taylor to let him know that his next in line is here. If the Reverend Forsyth is taking longer than expected, hopefully Taylor can park him for a bit and then come and deal with Stewart.

I walk back in, two cups of tea, place one on the table in front of him, sit down opposite.

Now, I'm nobody's conversational go-to guy at the best of times. No one ever thought,
fuck me but I need to be doing some small talk, where be Hutton
? No, conversation and I are uneasy bedfellows, and this situation is the Mount Doom of small-talk scenarios. Obviously there is serious interviewing to be done of the guy, establishing what he knew about his wife's involvement with Cartwright, but the interviewing isn't for me to do.

I'm here to stop him throwing himself out the window. You might think the bastard's not going to throw himself out the window, but sitting here, he sure as fuck looks as though that's what he wants to do.

'I'm afraid we need to wait for DCI Taylor. He's the lead officer on the case.'

He doesn't look at me, but there's a small movement of his head to indicate that he at least heard.

Feeling a tightness in my chest, which has been coming on since I saw him in reception. I want to apologise. That's nuts, isn't it? Why the fuck do I want to apologise? I never want to apologise to the husband. Ever. To me it's always about the women. If they didn't want to do it, then they wouldn't do it. I never force any of them to do anything. Why is it, and we see it often enough, that husbands get pissed off at the guy who sleeps with their wife, rather than the wife? As if the wife was not at all complicit.

I suppose if they feel the need to physically hurt someone, they're less likely to hit the woman. Not that you don't also get the beaten wife, so let's not get carried away.

I know what was different this time, of course.

Just like that, with that snap of the fingers – or the snap of the fucking heartstring! – I was in love with her. She felt the same. We were going to be together. Shit, there was a lot I didn't know about her, like what she was doing in this bizarre little group with Cartwright, but at some point in the near future, she was going to look at this man who's currently sitting across the table from me wearing his sorrow like a fucking death mask and say that she was leaving him, and that when he got back from Bishkek or Ashgabat or fucking Samarkand or wherever the fuck it was he was going next, she wasn't going to be there.

And I feel guilty.

'When was the last time you saw your wife?' I ask.

Can't help it. Have to say something.

He stirs, looks across the table. Eye to eye. That thing I thought earlier, Jesus Christ, I was right. Looking in the fucking mirror. That's what I'm doing. How many times have I crawled into the bathroom, thrown some water in my face, raised my head and seen those eyes looking back at me? How many fucking times?

That hand around my chest is squeezing ever more tightly.

'Last Sunday,' he says. His voice is ragged and small. 'At church. I travelled to Bishkek just after.'

I nod. He recognises the acknowledgement in my eyes.

'You knew I was in Bishkek,' he says.

'Philo told me,' I say.

What are you doing? Taylor knew the guy had been in Bishkek, and he'd never met the wife. The police met the guy off the plane, fucking Bishkek National Airlines Flight 101. I didn't need to go there.

His shoulders straighten a little. His eyes are slightly curious.

'When did you speak to my wife?'

Oh fuck. Here we go. I walked right into that, didn't I?

Speak to her, my sad sack friend? I fucked her! Ho ho ho!

'I saw her at church on the Sunday, then I spoke to her a couple of days later at the house. Just getting some background on the situation at St Stephen's and how the relationship with the churches had developed over time.'

'We were new to the church. We didn't really get involved,' he says. 'Why did you speak to her?'

Hesitate. I'm the police officer in the police interview room and I'm the one who's being put on the spot.

'Background,' is all I manage. Which isn't entirely inaccurate.

He looks hurt. I want to know why he looks hurt, but I can't ask. As it happens, I don't need to.

'She was Philomena.'

I don't say anything. A loud expletive of
fuck
explodes in my head.

'She was Philomena. She was always Philomena. She told everyone that was her name. She was proud of it. The only time...' Voice breaking, likelihood of tears, 78%. Crap. '...the only time she ever called herself Philo was when she met me. That was how she introduced herself...'

Voice breaks, he closes his eyes, fights to keep it together. Swallows, struggles his way through a few facial contortions.

'Why did you call her Philo?'

And you know, that should have the guilt and the fear and the self-loathing coming winging its way in on a grey fucking horse named Death, but it doesn't. Instead I sit there looking across the table at this poor fucking bastard, and all I can think is this. She knew. Right there at the church, walking up to me to introduce herself. She knew.

All right, maybe she did it all the time, and the sad sack knew nothing about it. But that wasn't it. She and I were perfect for each other, right from the off, right from that first damned minute.

I'll take your misery, my wretched friend, and raise you a thousand.

The door opens.

––––––––

W
alk out the station. Cold wind outside. Head thumping, hurt flowing like blood.

Hurt flowing like blood? Jesus, what a dick.

Look at my watch. 16:01. I stand there, looking down the road. It's an actual fact that wherever you are in the west of Scotland, you are never more than a hundred yards away from the nearest pub. Look at my watch again. I need a drink. I need lots of drinks. I need to drown myself. I need one of those garbage evenings soaked in alcohol that ends with me flat on my face in my sitting room in front of some bastard on BBC4. The thought of trawling through town looking for women doesn't even enter my head.

What are the odds of me making it into work tomorrow? Taylor's already going to be pissed off that he just walked in on me talking to Stewart; turning up hungover, or not turning up at all, is going to be one of those final straws they talk about.

How many chances is the guy going to give me? He keeps giving me them, and I keep drinking them down with a double shot of vodka, ice and lemon optional.

What was I doing? I need something to do. Need to pick up one of those strands that was lying around.

Baxter. I think of Reverend Baxter, the two of us sitting on that bench, looking out on that amazing sea, the water the most incredible colour.

Find the girl. That's what he said. Find the girl. Does she have anything to do with this? Really? Some strange recurring nightmare?

Did I feel, when I was making my previous check on on-going missing persons investigations and those from the recent past, that I was doing something useful? You know yourself, don't you? When you're doing anything in life, anything at all. You know whether what you're doing is of any value.

I don't know what I thought. I can barely think about anything. She's there, right in front of me. Philo Stewart. I'm looking over my shoulder at her as she sits at my small table. One last look.

Fuck.

Look up. Standing outside the pub. Hadn't even thought about it as I'd walked here. Like I'm drunk already, no control over my movements.

The girl. That's what Baxter said, and as soon as he'd said it, I knew he was right. That girl isn't springing in and out of my head for nothing.

I need to check open murder cases and archived missing persons. Neither makes sense, of course. She's not just in my dreams. How can she be? She gave me a book. I saw her at the graveyard. Constable Webb saw her too. How can she have been murdered? And if it's an archived missing persons report, she's not going to be this little girl. I already checked back fifteen years.

Yet I know that I need to go and do some more checking. Don't even look at the pub. Turn, walk back to the station. Don't go to the office. Round the back, into the car. The stuff I'll be checking is old enough that it likely won't be on computer. I need to look at files.

Maybe I'm being ridiculous. There's some sort of explicit acknowledgement in even looking at this stuff that the girl must be dead, in which case she's in my imagination or she's a ghost or some other inexplicable shit that I don't want to think about. So, I'm not going to think about it.

Off in to Glasgow to look at the old records.

*

I
t's apparent that I'm not currently fit for the job because this stuff is depressing the shit out of me. On the one hand, of course it's depressing. Endless reports of dead and missing children, ruined families, wasted lives. But that's policing every day, and the only way to do it, the thing that we all do, is not let it get to you. And this, this right here, is getting to me.

The dead two-year-old, the five-year-old who wandered off in the shopping centre, the young teenager who left one night and never came home. Story after story of heartache; sometimes it's laid out for all to see, and sometimes you can only read between the lines at the utter misery which led to the events.

Sitting at a desk in a storeroom in the basement, like every research scene in every movie you ever saw. Lighting isn't great, no windows.

There are three others down here with me. Three women. Two of them archiving, or doing whatever it is they're doing, working in this place. Another officer, searching through old documents.

Had a brief word or two with the archivists when I came in, established whereabouts I needed to be looking, and got on with it. Flicked through quickly at the beginning, taking no time at all with the boys, stopping to look at the photographs of the girls.

As I move through the boxes, and the dates pass further back into history, I start to come across the odd report with no pictures attached. What can I do then? Have a quick read through the report, establish if there might be some age connection with the girl I'm searching for, perhaps some geographical connection, and then move on.

Bob plays in my head. I put the tune there when I can.
You Ain't Going Nowhere
. What's it about? No idea. But it's a jaunty little tune, and I try to think about it sometimes. I try. Fight off the demons, such as those fuckers are. And the demons are on the move today.

Finish with the seventies, move back to the sixties.
You Ain't Going Nowhere
struggles on. Tapping a finger. Humming. Unaware if either of the archivists will be looking at me. Think the other officer might have left.

A report from 4
^th
August 1967 leaps out at me. No photograph. Daisy Compton. That's all. Daisy Compton. Missing, aged eleven. Last seen going to play in a park in Tollcross. She'd disappeared eleven months earlier. The first report I see is the one that basically admits defeat. I look back through the previous reports, nothing else of significance to be gleaned.