Absolution

by Caro Ramsay

  He could not remember a time before Christopher Robin. And now, just as they thought they could see light at the end of the tunnel, it was probably that of an oncoming train.

  Red.

  Nothing but red.

  It was all he could see, on the floor. The life pouring out of her.

  Nothing.

  Then breathing.

  Rhythmic breathing.

  Nothing more than the tranquil ebb and flow of life.

  Her eyes were open. There was no response. Nothing. In there, in the bloodied mess of her white dress, Sean could sense the rise and fall of her breath. He put his finger between his teeth to stop himself crying and stood up, stepping over the man stretched out on the floor. He ignored the standing knife, its tip embedded in the floorboard, and reached for the abandoned mobile sitting in its little pool of blue light.

  Saturday, 7 October

  She was lying in a white tomb, staring at the ceiling with unseeing eyes, bathed in an eerie light, so small and thin on the bed she seemed hardly there at all. A halo of blonde hair curled round her perfect face, the beautiful profile spoiled only by the tube that ran from her nose to the drip stand. Across her stomach a set of wires coiled from her heart to the monitor that caged one weak, thin line, peaking every now and again. Her heart was still beating.

  Sean was standing, wearing a white paper gown, leaning his forehead against the window, his eyes closed.

  ‘You left this. You might need it,’ said Anderson, his voice cracking. He handed the young man his jacket.

  ‘Is there any news?’

  ‘Nothing yet, but don’t worry, we’ll get him.’ His voice more assured now.

  ‘You had better get him before I do.’

  ‘Don’t worry, every hour that passes builds the case against him. His fingerprint was on the picture at the house, a thumbprint on the phone, his knife is covered in blood. We just have to find him now.’ Anderson watched the thin line race across the screen, such a thin line, a fine balance. He swallowed hard. ‘How is she?’

  Sean shook his head, not trusting his voice to speak. For a moment they shared a silence, while a nurse fussed around the room for a minute.

  ‘She’s in the best place.’ Anderson waited until the nurse had walked away. ‘This might not seem the time or the place, but we are alone and you can deny everything afterwards.’ Sean gave no response. ‘I’ve been wondering about something,’ Anderson said. ‘And I’d like my curiosity satisfied.’

  Sean imperceptibly moved away, but Anderson kept talking. ‘Suppose your girlfriend inherited some diamonds. Suppose somebody else thought they had a right to them. I imagine you’d have to keep it a secret, wouldn’t you?’ Anderson stopped, as if thinking the problem through. ‘Bit awkward, as you couldn’t sell them – the money would attract all kinds of attention. So what would you do? What would you do, Sean?’

  Sean didn’t move. Only the weary sag of his slender body stiffened slightly.

  Not looking at the boy, Anderson said, ‘Help me out here.’

  There was a long silence before Sean spoke. ‘You know how there’s no such thing as magic? By the time the trick’s seen to be done, it’s already been done? I’m a great believer that if you show something, you’ll get away with not showing much.’

  Anderson frowned.

  ‘She’s a good artist, Truli. She makes a lot of money. We can sell those paintings all over the world to tourists. A painting is really only worth the price of a canvas and the frame, but sometimes they have deeper … value. A small diamond is untraceable. And very small,’ he added unnecessarily.

  Anderson felt a slow penny drop, and nodded. ‘A trickle of money.’

  ‘Self-employed artist, tax paid, earned income. Nothing illegal in that, if anybody asked.’

  ‘I get your point.’ Anderson leaned his back against the glass, neither man looking at the other. ‘How the hell did you set that up? Who do you sell to? Who knows? Without exposing it, I mean?’

  Sean bit the corner of his lip, stopping the smile before it got any further. ‘You can make useful contacts in jail. Diamonds are, in a strange way, respectable. Gentle crime.’

  ‘Until folk like Malkie Steele get involved.’

  ‘Indeed.’ It was hardly more than a whisper.

  ‘And you were happy to do the time for killing him.’

  ‘I was. I’ve spent all my bloody life in institutions, and this time I had something to come out to.’

  ‘But you had to keep Trude safe. She and Nan together.’

  ‘That’s how that woman – Costello? – found us, wasn’t it?’ Sean smiled, biting his own tongue.

  ‘Sean, how did you get hold of the diamonds in the first place? The entire might of Interpol only got as far as her mother coming from Amsterdam to here … but then nothing. She died, and the trail ended. How did Trude end up with the stuff?’

  Sean sighed. ‘The two years we were together in Ayr were perfect, just me and her. Then a letter arrived, a few days after her eighteenth birthday – just a few lines on a white page. From a lawyer. That lawyer sent us to another, somebody up in Edinburgh. He had a photograph, and it was obvious Trude was exactly who she said she was. She and her mum are like peas in a pod. That done, he just hands over an envelope. Trude opened it, and cried and cried.’ Sean smiled, pinching the tears from his eyes. ‘She ripped it up. Then we were sent to a bank, and they treated us like royalty, ushered us into a small room, and they walked out and left us alone … with a little metal box on the table and a key. They wouldn’t let us open it until they had all gone. It was only a collection of stones, just a handful of little stones. It was only then Trude told me what was in the letter.’

  ‘I’ve heard enough,’ said Anderson. ‘You don’t need to tell me any more.’

  ‘No, I want you to understand. She wouldn’t touch them. She never has.’

  ‘If I’m thinking right, she’s happy to live off the spoils of the crime, though.’

  ‘She’s lost enough, don’t you think? You should have seen the way she held on to that photograph, as if she would never let it go. She knew what was important to her. I think she thought the diamonds – knew the diamonds – were a curse right from the start.’ McTiernan smiled. ‘Even more so when I blagged my way into the Mitchell Library, and they had all these newspapers on these small rolls of film.’

  ‘Microfiche?’

  Sean nodded. ‘And there it was, all the details about the theft. Just the theft, nothing about the killings that followed. That’s when I realized what we had. And Trude was right. From that moment he was on to her.’

  ‘Malkie Steele?’ Anderson prompted.

  Sean nodded. ‘He was the one who came after her. I thought he would be the first of many, and if we could just get away, live in a remote place, drop out and disappear, we would be safe. But Malkie was the only one who ever came. The real threat – this – came from … well, another source altogether.’

  ‘How did Malkie know? A long time had passed.’

  ‘I can only think he was involved in the original … incident. He would only have to pay attention to Trude at – what? Eighteen? Twenty-one? Even if he lost sight of her, people are not hard to find, if you know where to look.’ The boy shrugged and turned to face Anderson. He looked pinched and deathly tired under the midnight fluorescent lighting. ‘But when no one else came after us, I reckoned he’d decided not to tell them he’d found her, to keep everything for himself. But I really don’t know.’

  ‘And when you decided to do away with Malkie Steele, she disappeared from sight; you made a good job of that.’

  ‘That was the worst day of my life. Closing up the flat in Ayr. She left, dressed as a boy. I didn’t think I would ever see her again.’ Sean pressed his hands to his face. For a moment Anderson thought he was going to cry.

  ‘And she went to live in your cottage by the sea until you came back.’

  Sean nodded. ‘Nan had to pay the deposit, money laundering and all
that. She had to keep them going until I got out of jail, but they sorted things out themselves pretty good. They started trading without me.’ Suddenly, Sean cried out with agonized desperation, ‘I would have done anything – anything – to keep her safe!’

  Anderson moved to put an arm round the slender shoulders. ‘I know,’ he said. ‘I know. I hope I’d have the courage to do the same. But I don’t think I would.’

  ‘Oh, you would. If a guy like Steele came round your daughter, you’d kill him. You would.’

  Anderson gave him a squeeze on the arm, turning to lean against the wall, keeping an eye on the green line. ‘I should warn you, there’s no statute of limitation on stolen goods over a certain value. On the other hand, it’s nothing to do with me; it wasn’t my case. And I don’t imagine anyone’s going to be interested in digging it all up again now.’

  ‘We just want to be left alone. She’s suffered enough.’

  ‘Look, anything we could do to you now would be a walk in the park after everything you’ve been through.’

  Sean nodded again. ‘All those years I worried about Trude, looked out for her. Yet the bigger threat came out of the blue.’ Sean turned to watch the green line chase itself from left to right, left to right. ‘They said Leask knew her mother?’

  ‘It seems so. She lived upstairs from him when she came to Glasgow. He might have liked her face, her quiet manner, the fact that she was foreign and alone. But he was a theological student, and she was unmarried and pregnant, so it would have torn him in different directions. I think he probably mistook her secretiveness for rejection and that just burned him for years. Our psychologist thinks he loved her, in a weird sort of way. If Trude looks like her mother, I can see why. She’s very beautiful, beguiling.’

  They both looked at the figure in white, the green line still moving, and shared another silence.

  ‘Mr Anderson?’ said Sean.

  ‘Colin.’

  ‘I’m truly sorry.’

  Anderson nodded slightly and walked away, leaving the swing doors to close quietly behind him.

  Anderson tried not to think, but his brain was moving at the speed of a runaway train.

  He had been sitting in the incident room for half an hour, maybe an hour. After an initial burst of frantic activity, time had compressed itself into deep thought and strong coffee. He put the cold coffee down on the desk and sat, cradling his head in his hands, the palms against his eyes, pressing so hard that he could see stars dance on his eyelids.

  There was a discreet knock at the door. He shook his head, trying to get his thoughts together.

  ‘Hello, Colin, how are you?’ It was Costello. ‘Sorry to interrupt.’

  ‘I wasn’t really doing anything.’

  Costello sat down on the desk opposite him. She looked wrung out. ‘I’m just here to pick up my stuff. I’m off on the sick for a week. With all this I don’t think I can cope with – ’

  ‘Quite right,’ Anderson interrupted, not wanting her to push that conversation to its natural conclusion.

  ‘Well, I just need some sleep. I seem to have lost the ability to put my head on a pillow and fall asleep. So the Doc said take a week off. I’ve cleared my desk. I think Quinn is reorganizing everything anyway.’

  ‘Good for her.’

  ‘Helena McAlpine and her friend are downstairs talking to somebody about clearing out Alan’s stuff. Bit awkward, as I think Quinn’s filed most of it in the bin. I thought you might like to deal with that one. How was she when you – ’

  ‘Don’t talk about that. It was awful,’ Anderson said slowly, biting his lip.

  ‘I thought I should start putting the report together. We’ve put Leask in the cottage at Culzean, we’ve got the Leask knife with’ – she paused – ‘two sets of blood. The ADW knife has blood-type matches to the victims, but we’ve sent it away for DNA. Quinn insisted.’

  ‘Fair enough.’

  ‘Burns traced the maker of the knives, hand-made in Back, one for each boy, presents from their mother on their twenty-first birthday, and the maker can ID his own work easily. So we have him. We just need to find him.’

  ‘And I got these from the fax machine.’ She handed him three typed pages, still curled. ‘Quinn requested a brief background report on Leask. The local police sent some official stuff through, but they sent another copy. They’d a bit to add on a more personal level, seemingly. The signature looks like the Gaelic spelling of Macdonald. And the report we requested on the brother has come through.’

  ‘Mr A.D.W.?’

  ‘I think you should look at this; it makes some kind of sense of it all.’ Costello slithered from the desk and pulled out a chair. ‘Leask’s story is not pretty. Will I condense it for you or do you want to read it?’

  ‘Just tell me please.’

  ‘Brought up on a remote croft they had, miles out of Back, a long walk to school, a long walk home, usually just him and his mum. His dad was dour, depressive, used to beat his wife senseless. Wee George used to try getting between them and would go to school covered in bruises. Once his dad let him rear a lamb, which followed him all over the place. Then he slaughtered it, in front of him. He was six years old, poor wee sod.’

  ‘God’s sake, I phoned every bloody pet shop on the south side when Peter’s goldfish died, to find a match so he wouldn’t notice.’ Anderson shook his head. ‘Some folk.’

  ‘He’d be sent to bed on a Sunday for laughing, often going hungry for misbehaving. OK, things were like that in those days, but Leask senior took it all a wee bit too far.’

  ‘Is that all in the official report?’

  ‘No, in the margins of this one. I don’t think the local police were too surprised when they heard what had happened. Batten was quite interested when he read in there that when Leask was ten, he saw his dad gored by a cow, right in the stomach. He was in such shock he didn’t go for help. He basically stood there and let his dad bleed to death.’

  Anderson nodded with some understanding.

  ‘Leask had gone on to the Nicholson Institute in Stornoway by then, but was still totally devoted to his mother.’

  ‘And then the mum remarried and had Alasdair, a sibling rival?’

  ‘The new husband was charming but the marriage didn’t last. He was good-looking but not much use in the way of family duties. George took on himself the role of the good father, the man of the house. The new husband legged it pretty quickly. Couldn’t cope with George’s closeness to his mum. George helped bring up the younger one; little Alasdair apparently adored his big brother. Then, when the mother died back in the spring, some batty old cousin at the funeral kept saying how alike the brothers were, with their “lovely blue eyes”. Turned out the whole of Back had realized George Leask wasn’t his father’s son, but no one had said. That was when George first knew that he and Alasdair were full brothers. Nice, eh? What a fall from grace for womankind. That coincided with Alasdair having trouble with his sanity; later he was flipped over the edge by Christina.’

  ‘I don’t believe all that is in here.’ Anderson was trying to decipher the cramped, scarcely legible writing.

  ‘A lot of it is. Also, DC Burns’s family is from Stornoway, don’t forget. And don’t dismiss his Auntie Dolina as a source of local knowledge. She was the one who said, and I paraphase, he could accept it when Alasdair was a half-brother but not when he was a full-brother.’

  ‘Meaning?’

  ‘Alasdair’s fall from grace was now definitely down to the influence of a bad woman.’

  ‘And bearing in mind he now knew his mother had been having an affair all along …’

  ‘And wee George had been getting the shit kicked out of him for a mother who didn’t deserve such devotion. It all starts to add up. He put his career, his whole life, on hold to keep the croft going – ’

  ‘He looked after his mum and did all kinds of stuff around the farm, which was how he came to be so handy with a knife?’

  ‘A present from his mother.�
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  ‘Only to be repaid with dishonesty, and the knowledge that all the good he’d tried to do had been useless, a lie.’

  ‘Batten was right – you can see where it all comes from, can’t you?’

  ‘So he came down here, and Leeza believes he came down to live among these women to try to help them, but it just all went wrong in his head. It wasn’t just the girlfriend’s fault or Arlene’s fault. It all went back much further. If it weren’t for the fact that he’d left three women dead, he’d be more to be pitied than scorned, as my granny used to say.’ Anderson flicked through the papers. ‘Do we give this to Quinn as it is?’

  ‘We can give her this copy.’ Costello handed over another set of papers, the official version, devoid of the gossip in the margins.

  ‘Nowhere near as enlightening as that.’ He nodded towards the annotated report.

  ‘She can have this. It’s the medical report on Alasdair Donald Wheeler. It shows quite clearly the downward spiral of a healthy young man into depression, neurosis, suicidal tendency, hospitalisation for chronic depression … all stemming from his girlfriend taking him for every penny and then aborting their baby. He died less than a year later.’

  ‘What of this do we take credit for?’

  ‘I’ll wait and see what we have to carry the can for. You’re the senior officer. I leave it to you.’

  ‘Ta, matey.’

  She stood up. ‘I’ll see you, then.’

  ‘Try to get a good rest, Costello. We’ve all been through a lot.’

  ‘You should take your own advice.’ Costello caught a movement in the room outside. ‘I’m out of here. Quinn’s on her way.’

  ‘Just what I need.’

  Costello left quietly, leaving Anderson feeling worse than he would have thought possible. So much they hadn’t known, couldn’t have known. They were all going to be tormented by if only for a while to come.

  He could block out the images, but music was playing in his head, worming in his brain. A tune he could not quite identify, annoying him, distracting him. He knew it was a tune he liked, but he would for ever associate it with this moment.