Troubled Waters

by Galbraith, Gillian

  ‘I appreciate that, but Miranda Stimms is no longer your client since, as I explained, unfortunately, she’s dead.’ Alice said. Her firm tone should have made it clear that she would get the information she had come for.

  ‘Still . . . I’m still not sure. The bond must not be broken. Trust is the cornerstone of everything we do,’ Aileen Tennant reiterated, her face reddening as she tried to tread water, wondering what her duty might be in these unexpected circumstances. The handbook, inadequate document that it was, would not cover it. None of her clients had, as far as she was aware, died before. A dreadful thought suddenly struck her.

  ‘Was it suicide?’ she demanded.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Thank God!’ she murmured, sighing out loud with relief. A client’s suicide was, obviously and as everyone said, not the hallmark of failed counselling, but it must be hard in the deep, dark depths of the night not to view it as such.

  ‘No, it was murder. That’s why I need your help.’

  ‘I see,’ Mrs Tennant replied, feeling almost faint at the news, unreal, conscious as she looked at the policewoman that by giving such help she might be dragged into her life, a life lived faster, a life incalculably more dangerous than her own. This inspector person inhabited a world where things, bad things, not only happened, but had to be dealt with by her. She picked up the pieces with her own hands, got them dirty. Got them cut and bleeding, quite possibly. This woman did not just listen and then go home.

  ‘Was she referred by her GP here? How did you come to see her?’

  ‘No. I asked her that, how she came to us. She told me she picked up a leaflet, one of ours, in a doctor’s surgery. She went in to make an appointment but never actually had any contact with the GP, any GP, she said. People do that sometimes – it’s easier for them. That’s why we leave our leaflets in these sorts of places.’

  ‘Why did she come and see you?’

  ‘She’s only been once. She needed help, someone to talk to, someone to listen to her . . . to be a witness, you could say.’

  ‘To be a witness to what?’

  ‘To her story . . .’

  ‘What story?’

  ‘To affirm her survival.’

  ‘What ordeal exactly had she survived?’ the police-woman asked, failing to conceal the irritation she felt in the face of the counsellor’s evasive replies.

  ‘As I recall, she was experiencing . . . difficulties, relationship difficulties . . . sexual difficulties within her relationship. Nightmares, she had them too. She had anger issues as well.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because of the damage . . .’

  ‘What damage?’

  ‘The damage to her psyche – to herself.’

  ‘I note that your clinic specialises in cases of child abuse, helping the victims get on with their lives – focusing on the fact that they have survived their ordeal.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Was that her problem? Sexual abuse? Had someone abused her sexually when she was a child?’

  The woman hesitated, before committing herself and answering, ‘Yes. It was. If you need to know more I’d have to consult my notes.’

  ‘On you go,’ Alice said, sitting back in her chair and looking properly around the room for the first time. Apart from posters giving the address of various genito-urinary clinics within the capital, nothing decorated the green-painted walls except for a child’s drawing of a snowman and a snow-woman, their gloved hands linked as if they were about to dance. No clinics required for them, she mused. Breathing in, she smelt the heavy scent of the lilies, and wondered if they had been chosen for their perfume, specially selected to obliterate any underlying human notes arising from repressed emotions, panic or anxieties felt by the countless clients seen within those four walls.

  Less than a minute later the woman closed the file in front of her and, brows still furrowed, said, ‘What else do you want to know?’

  ‘Anything and everything. Please.’

  ‘There really isn’t much. She’d only come here once.’

  ‘Whatever you have will be fine,’ the policewoman said, trying to sound reassuring, encouraging. Surely the need for such information was obvious?

  ‘We’d other sessions planned. She didn’t say much at our first meeting . . . and I have to go with that, accept that, allow her to move on when she’s comfortable with that.’

  ‘I understand.’

  ‘All I can tell you from our meeting is that she was abused, sexually, from about the age of fourteen onwards. From puberty. Hence her sexual difficulties, her low self-esteem, anger and so on.’

  ‘Do you know who was responsible?’ Alice asked. At that moment, her phone rang and, gesturing an apology, she answered it, hearing DC Cairns’ voice at the other end. The constable’s words tumbled out in her enthusiasm. ‘I’ve got an address for William Stobbs, and his mother, Margaret Stobbs, is at home there just now and will be for the rest of the afternoon. She’s due to get a hairdo, at home. The son’s away at his work.’

  ‘Well done, text it to me and I’ll meet you there in, say, half an hour?’

  Putting down her mobile, she looked expectantly at Aileen Tennant, eager to get an answer to her last question. But the woman’s attention appeared to have drifted, seemed focused on something outside in the square. She had, in fact, taken in every word of the phone call, and was pleased to know that her ordeal was all but over.

  ‘Do you know who was responsible?’ Alice repeated.

  ‘For what?’ Mrs Tennant asked, managing to sound startled, as if her reverie had been disturbed.

  ‘For the sexual abuse of Miranda Stimms.’

  ‘No. I never ask,’ she replied, slightly condescendingly. ‘If my client wants to tell me I listen and react accordingly – but I never ask. They’ll tell me if they want to. Some do, some don’t. It’s not necessary for healing to take place. Could have been a family friend, a teacher, a parent, the family doctor, a brother . . . They tell me sometimes.’

  ‘Child abuse is a crime. Did you have any suspicions, from anything she said?’

  ‘It’s not my place . . . as a counsellor – to have “suspicions”, I mean. Who the abuser was matters to me only because it matters to my client. Because it matters to them, sometimes they tell me. That’s really all I can say…’

  ‘You’d tell us if anyone came to mind?’

  ‘Of course – but I can’t tell unless I know.’

  Two worlds, Aileen Tennant sensed, were colliding within her office. In hers, the counselling world, the victim was genuinely of paramount importance, all that really mattered. The perpetrator of the abuse had, at best, a walk-on part and then only if he, or she, was invited. But to the policewoman and her kind, once a crime had been committed, the victim became a means to an end. Everything might be done in their name, but what counted, really counted, was catching and prosecuting the criminal. Miranda Stimms as Miranda Stimms no longer counted.

  ‘Did you know that she had a boyfriend?’

  ‘Yes,’ she hesitated for a second, returning her thoughts to the particular, to her own client, ‘I did. I assumed he was the catalyst, part of the reason, certainly, that she decided to come here – the sexual difficulties, fears and so on, I assumed that was with him. Hamish, I have noted he was called. Someone, him presumably, wouldn’t understand. Not that she’d said anything to anyone, but she didn’t want to lose him, or whoever it was. She was afraid of that, I know that much. She was, as she put it, “trying to sort herself out”.’

  ‘Did she tell you that she was pregnant?’

  Looking alarmed, the woman shook her head. ‘Maybe . . . maybe that’s what he wouldn’t understand. Maybe she thought she’d lose him?’

  ‘Because of the baby?’

  ‘It would make sense, wouldn’t it?’

  ‘What about a girlfriend?’

  ‘Girl friends?’

  ‘A girlfriend – did she mention a girlfriend? It appears she may have been in a lesb
ian relationship, too.’

  ‘She didn’t tell me that. She could have been, I suppose. I can’t say one way or the other. It’s not uncommon in her situation. Sometimes victims of abuse are confused about their sexuality but, in her case . . . well, I have no way of knowing. Why do you ask?’

  ‘She never mentioned anyone called Anna to you?’

  ‘No. Why do you ask?’

  ‘What sort of person was she?’ Alice persisted, ignoring the woman’s questions. Catching Aileen Tennant’s exasperated sigh, she added, ‘I know, you only saw her once . . .’

  ‘From memory . . . I was impressed by her. Anyone would be. A survivor. That’s how I’d describe her. She was, genuinely, trying to sort herself out, and she was very, very young. Seventeen, I see I’ve noted down. Not many come to us that young.’

  A survivor. An odd choice of words for a dead girl, Alice thought.

  William Stobbs’ flat in Cockenzie faced the harbour which, like many on the east coast of Scotland, became a sad sight when the tide went out, reduced to a field of stinking, grey-brown mud within crumbling, guano-streaked stone walls. Its air of quiet desolation was reinforced by the presence of a wrecked fishing boat, barnacle-encrusted and with a gaping wound in its side, propped up against the sea wall; a reminder of a more prosperous past. Fifty years earlier, the quay there had been alive with a cacophony of sounds: the thuds made by heavy fish-boxes landing on stone, the shouts of the men as they hosed down the decks, and the cries of the gulls as they swooped around the vessels, desperate to catch any discarded entrails in their beaks before they sank into the oily, black water. However, in one respect at least, Cockenzie Harbour, along with the rest of the sleepy village attached to it, was unique. They were all dwarfed, miniaturised, by the gigantic geometry, largely rectangles and squares, of the power station that stood, incongruously, a little distance from the end of the Hawthorn Bank road. This monumental, sculptural presence on the skyline, with its cloud-stroking twin chimneys, skewed perspectives for miles around and made the whole of Cockenzie look like a toy town.

  Watching from her own car as the inspector parked her Escort opposite Dickson’s, the fish merchant’s shop, DC Cairns got out and crossed the road to meet her.

  ‘How did you get on?’ she asked.

  ‘Alright. But, if anything, the waters are further muddied. She was sexually abused as a child, as an adolescent. That’s why she went to the Sanctuary, for counselling.’

  ‘Who by?’

  They had begun walking towards the two-storey white-painted building in which William Stobbs had his flat.

  ‘I don’t know. Counselling by a Mrs Aileen Tennant – abuse by a person, or persons, currently unknown. The woman treating her never found out who was responsible for it, so for the present we’ve drawn a blank. How did you get on, hassling the lab?’ Alice asked, her finger poised over the doorbell.

  ‘The same prints from the photo, Hamish Evans’ prints, presumably, are all over her flat. Just as you might expect. He took a flight from Heathrow back to Edinburgh, arriving at about ten-thirty. He was definitely back in the city on the night that she died, but we’ve still not found him or his vehicle, and everybody’s looking. And I mean everybody. He must, I reckon, have gone into hiding.’

  ‘Like Anna,’ Alice replied, ‘and her prints must be all over the place too, if they were living together there. If so, that’s two of the three sets identified.’

  ‘One other thing . . .’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘There was a message from Dr Cash, apologising for the delay. The alcohol level showed she’d had a couple of glasses of wine, something like that, shortly before she died. Pregnancy or no pregnancy. I wonder if she even knew she was expecting? At seventeen, you might not.’

  Inside the warmth of the flat, an eighty-five-year-old lady was bending over her eighty-seven-year-old sister, attempting to roll a curler through her thin white locks. Margaret Stobbs, the elder of the two, resembled a bulldog, being squat with powerful shoulders and a couple of pointed incisors in her bottom jaw, visible due to her massive underbite. Her sister, Jessie, cursed with similar, though slightly less pronounced, features, had never rid herself of the unfortunate maiden name they had both been born with: Bottom.

  ‘How’s that feel, Maggs?’ Jessie asked, peering through her pebble thick glasses at the large mirror to see her sister’s response to her ministrations.

  ‘A wee bit over-tight, Jessie,’ the answer came back, accompanied by a delayed grimace of pain as she tried to raise and lower her eyebrows, feeling the skin of her forehead tighten and loosen with each movement. The half-smoked cigarette in the corner of her mouth waggled up and down as she did so.

  ‘I’ll try again, give it a wee tweak,’ Jessie said, pulling out the grip, unrolling the hank of hair and gathering up another one. In passing, she adjusted the pink towel over her sister’s beefy shoulders, retying it under her ample chins, while skilfully avoiding falling over the two crossed walking sticks which rested on her sister’s lap.

  ‘I’m going out for my tea, officer, so I need my hair done,’ Margaret Stobbs said. ‘It’s a Golden Wedding celebration – old, old friends of mine in the village. But you just ask away. Take no notice of Jessie. She’s not going, not been invited although they know her too. Do you want any tea or coffee? She’ll get it for you, won’t you, Jessie? She knows where everything’s kept in my son’s house, in my William’s house.’

  ‘Mmm,’ replied Jessie, lips pursed, not bothering to hide her annoyance at being asked.

  ‘I understand, Mrs Stobbs,’ Alice began, ‘that recently you overheard an argument on the stair of your flat in Casselbank Street. Is that right?’

  ‘Did you, Margaret? You never told me!’ Jessie said, her previous grievance replaced by this one.

  ‘I don’t have to tell you everything, dear! You’ve got your own life, haven’t you? I did, yes, officer. A man was bawling the place down – shouting away. He sounded furious.’

  ‘When did you hear it, the argument?’ Alice asked.

  ‘Oh, I don’t know. Monday night? Aye, it was the night before I came here. When did I come here, Jessie?’

  ‘Tuesday morning,’ her sister replied, concentrating on unfankling the next curler, which had somehow caught its spikes in the neck-fastening of Margaret’s Alarmaid.

  ‘Careful!’ the old woman hissed, aware of a sudden strangulation.

  ‘What time was it when you heard the argument?’ DC Cairns interjected.

  ‘Late. It must have been late, I’d been asleep in my chair . . . after nine, ten, eleven. Something like that. He was mad, shouting at the top of his voice, screaming at . . . Well, it was more of a wee nap, I’d just had . . .’

  ‘Who was the man shouting at?’ DC Cairns interrupted, leaning forward, her curiosity getting the better of her manners.

  ‘That’s what I’m trying to tell you, lass. At Mandy or . . .’ she paused for dramatic effect, ‘her Fancy Woman.’ Having dropped her bombshell, she raised her eyebrows impishly, knowing that her sister would be electrified by her words. As if to underline their importance she removed her cigarette, holding it between her forefinger and her middle finger in a rather louche fashion.

  ‘Mandy! That Mandy! You never told me that either, that she had a fancy woman!’ Jessie said, now openly peevish, placing a roller on the crown of her sister’s head and tugging none too gently at another lock of hair.

  ‘Jessie!’ Margaret moaned.

  ‘Sorry, dear, I’m a bit out of practice.’

  ‘The argument in the stair,’ Alice prompted, ‘what was it about, Mrs Stobbs?’

  ‘You’re more than a bit out of practice. That hurt, Jessie! Be careful! Well, the man, he was shouting, saying that she’d no right, no right at all – that the girl should not be with her, that she had no business having her there – that – I think he called her, or one of them, an unnatural cow or something like that, too.’

  The roar of a hairdryer startin
g up drowned out the rest of her words.

  ‘Turn it off, Jessie, for pity’s sake, turn it off! I’m trying to speak here. The police have come here, all the way out here, specially, to speak to me,’ Margaret shouted, determined to be heard, whatever the cost. Jessie, giving her sister’s reflection a malevolent glare, grudgingly obeyed and laid the dryer down.

  ‘So, what did Miranda say?’ DC Cairns chipped in, once more unable to contain herself.

  ‘She said,’ came the slightly hoarse reply, ‘that she loved Anna. That Anna was her life, that she was not giving her up, that he should go and never come back. She said, actually, that he was a monster . . .’

  ‘A monster!’ Jessie repeated, hands now on her hips, enthralled by the description.

  ‘Do you know her surname?’ Alice asked.

  ‘Stimms.’

  ‘Anna’s surname,’ Alice clarified.

  The woman shook her head, watching herself intently in the mirror as she did so and then answered, ‘I heard her called Anna. I heard her name being called once or twice in the stair.’

  ‘How often is the stair cleaned?’ Alice asked.

  Eyes narrowing, flummoxed at this unexpected question, Mrs Stobbs said, ‘Cleaned? Never! The woman from number three was supposed to arrange it and I’ve seen once, mind, just the once, a Polish girl with a mop on the steps. It’s filthy. I’m ashamed if I have guests. If I was younger, if my legs worked, I’d do it myself. But nobody cares nowadays, do they?’

  ‘Did you see the man – do you have any idea who he is?’ Alice asked.

  ‘Nope, I never seen him,’ Margaret replied, gazing at her own reflection and patting the curlers on her head with one hand, adding, ‘he’d be her boyfriend, I expect.’ Having dropped that further morsel, she carefully reinserted her cigarette into the side of her mouth. There it rested secure, wedged between her lips and one prominent fang.