He reached out his right foot, in its brightly shining shoe, and touched the ground: it was as if he was caressing it. ‘They never found her body, Mario,’ he murmured. ‘In a sense, we’re standing on her grave.’
‘Man, why didn’t you say?’ exclaimed McGuire. ‘I’d never have . . .’ He stopped, abruptly. ‘Come on, let’s get out of here.’
‘No, no,’ Mawhinney retorted. ‘Really, it’s all right. I come here often, and not just in uniform. Sometimes, like a lot of people, like those we saw earlier, I bring flowers. Maybe it’ll change in time, but right now, like many of the bereaved, I just don’t have anywhere else to go.’
2
They assembled in the centre of Brussels, all thirty-seven of them. All of the squad were men; even in the twenty-first century there were no women allowed among the ranks. Whenever they were challenged about this their stock excuse was that the uniforms just did not fit women properly. As they lined up for the photographers they stood smartly at attention, twelve of them with heavy ancient weapons shouldered.
The troop carrier, as they called it, stood ready and waiting, its engine running in the evening chill to charge the heating system. There was only one bus, for on this special journey there would be no camp followers; no wives, no lovers, and especially, no children. After all, as the colonel put it, they were setting out on a symbolic invasion.
‘They won’t know what hit them,’ said the commander, confidently, to the newspaper, radio and television reporters gathered in a group, looking across at his company, displaying them with pride in his eyes, and an outstretched arm.
‘How many stops will you make?’ asked a young woman, holding a microphone.
‘Five,’ replied the officer, a short man with white hair, a clipped moustache, and a slight paunch that pressed against the buttons of his heavily braided blue tunic, on each shoulder of which three crowns and a bar shone. ‘First in Hull, where we land tomorrow. Then we are on to Manchester, then Newcastle. But those are just training runs, you might say. The real invasion will begin at a town called Haddington. We complete our preparation there. And then,’ he paused, eyebrow raised dramatically, as if he had seen Robert Newton’s Long John Silver . . . and he looked almost old enough to have been at its première, ‘the final assault: Edinburgh itself. It’s an honour, a great honour.’
‘Indeed, Colonel. I imagine it’s the greatest honour you’ve ever had,’ the reporter ventured.
The other eyebrow rose, the forehead ridged, and the nose seemed to go a deeper shade of red. ‘I meant, young lady,’ the colonel boomed, theatrically, ‘that it is a great honour for the Scots. It’s time those brigands were taught a few lessons in the finer military arts.’
He turned his back on her, dismissed his troops and waved them towards the waiting bus.
The reporters watched, as the various implements were cased and loaded into the cavernous luggage space beneath the cabins of the long coaches. ‘He really means it, doesn’t he?’ the woman murmured to the man next to her.
‘Oh yes. He means it.’ The other reporter, old enough still to be using a notebook rather than a tape, scratched his chin with the end of his pen. He looked at his colleague. ‘You think he’s as mad as a wasp, don’t you?’
‘As a nestful,’ she said agreeably.
‘Maybe he is now, but he wasn’t always. Auguste Malou was a real soldier once, in the Royal Belgian Army.’
‘Do we have real soldiers in the Royal Belgian Army?’
‘Come on, girl, you know we have; though not like him, not any more. When our boys go abroad these days they’re usually wearing the blue UN cap. Malou’s from another era, forty years back. I believe he may have been infantry at one point, but he told me that the later part of his career was spent in the administration of the band of the First Guides Regiment. That’s no joke either; it’s world famous. When he retired, fifteen years ago now, he came upon this lot and decided to put a bit of discipline into them.’
‘What went wrong?’
‘Don’t be so bloody cynical, nothing went wrong . . . other than age, at both ends of the spectrum. A marching band has to be sharp. When Malou took over, he brought in some new faces, guys he had known in his army days. And he formed the Musket Platoon, to give them a bit of extra pizzazz. The Bastogne Drummers . . .’
‘Why are they called that?’ the woman interrupted. ‘They’re from Brussels, not Bastogne.’
‘They were named in honour of the fallen in the great siege of World War Two. They were famous at first, but they had fallen away, until Malou revitalised them.’
‘Revitalised? They look a little shop-soiled to me.’
‘He could only do it once. The men he brought in are in their forties now, and beyond, some of them; their crispness has gone, and the youngsters . . . some of them haven’t found theirs yet. But don’t be too hard on them; they’re still not bad, not when they’re fresh at any rate. They were invited to Edinburgh, remember.’
‘They were? I thought they volunteered.’
‘No, the trip is official. It may just be too long, though.’
‘Why? Won’t they get better with all these stops?’
The journalist grinned. ‘That’s the problem. Them getting better, that’s not how it works. You take a few dozen old soldiers, free of their wives and their fancy women, you put them on buses and you send them away for ten days; before you know it, well, they’re not as fresh as they might be.’
The woman looked puzzled. ‘Why?’
The veteran shook his head. ‘I have to spell it out? The baggage compartments on those buses are very large. There’s room for all the luggage, and the instruments, and the muskets, and for still more; so they fill it up with as many cases of Stella as they can get in.’
‘You mean they get drunk?’
‘They’re Belgians, aren’t they? Our country is proud of two things above all others: its chocolate and its beer. Those boys aren’t too keen on chocolate, that’s all.’
‘But can’t the colonel keep discipline?’
Her fellow journalist frowned. ‘He’ll try, I suppose, for a couple of days: this is an important trip, and it will reflect on Belgium, and on the army. But old Auguste isn’t in the army any more, and besides . . . Did you see the colour of his nose?’
3
Deputy Chief Constable Robert Morgan Skinner peered into the goblet that he held cupped in his big hands, swirling the sweet sticky Amaretto around the sides, then watching as it settled back at the foot. Finally, he took a sip, nodded and smiled at his hostess.
‘I like this stuff,’ he said. ‘I’m not a great one for liqueurs: your VSOP and your Armagnac would be wasted on me, and I positively dislike whisky, but I do like this.’
Louise McIlhenney, née Bankier, laughed. ‘You could have fooled me. You didn’t have any aversion to the hard stuff when I knew you at university. Whisky and dry ginger ale as I remember it.’
‘I was young then, though,’ he countered. ‘My dad took a nip now and again, so I did too, till it came to me that it didn’t make me a better person. When I realised that, I stopped.’
She looked across the space between them, her mind transporting them back twenty years and more. ‘You used to talk about your father all the time. You don’t any more. What happened?’
Bob sighed and let his head fall against the high back of the armchair. ‘He died,’ he said softly. ‘And I haven’t passed a day since then without missing him. It hurts too much to talk about him.’
‘It shouldn’t. You were so obviously proud of him.’
‘Still am. I’ll talk about him when it’s right, don’t worry. James Andrew and Seonaid . . . and Mark; even though he’s adopted and has a living granddad of his own . . . should know about him, about who he was and what he was. It concerns me when I hear of sections of family history dying with successive generations. Did I ever tell you I had an ancestor who was press-ganged to fight against Napoleon? That story was given to me by an aunt, b
ut she never wrote it down, so now even if I was inclined to try to trace him, I would have trouble.’
‘Come on, man,’ Neil McIlhenney chuckled. ‘You’re a detective.’
‘Maybe so, but you know as well as I do . . . or you bloody should, Inspector . . . that every investigation has to start somewhere. I don’t even have a name I can be sure of, never mind a place and year of birth.’ He grinned, laugh-lines crinkling round his eyes. ‘I might still write a book about him one day, though.’
‘How can you, if you can’t trace him?’
‘I might do what a few unscrupulous coppers have done before now: falsify the evidence.’
‘Eh?’
‘Make it up. I’m talking about fiction, Neil. It’s a long way off, though; writing’s one of my retirement dreams.’
McIlhenney frowned. ‘You’re not thinking about writing your memoirs, are you?’
‘No way! I’d have to leave too much out.’
‘How’s Sarah?’ Louise asked suddenly. ‘You haven’t mentioned her all evening.’
‘Fine,’ Bob replied absently. ‘She’s fine. So are the kids; the bold boy Jazz has started school now, God help them.’
‘Fine she may seem,’ his hostess interrupted, ‘but she must still be feeling the loss of her parents.’
‘Of course. It’s been a lousy year for her: for both of us, for that matter, with my health scare as well. We’ll be glad to see the back of it.’
She smiled. ‘Well, here’s something that might cheer you up. This old lady’s pregnant.’
Bob sat bolt upright in his chair. He stared at her, mouth agape, then at Neil. ‘You what?’ he exclaimed. ‘Congratulations. Nah, that doesn’t go far enough, at . . .’ He stopped abruptly.
‘At my age, were you going to say?’ Louise teased.
‘No, of course not!’
‘Of course yes, but it doesn’t matter. We’ve taken medical advice, I’ve had every physical you could imagine and we’ve been assured that everything’s fine. I’ve been told not to run any marathons this winter, but that wasn’t on my game plan anyway.’
‘Well, that’s just great. What do Lauren and Spence think of it?’ Neil’s children from his first marriage were watching television in the room that Lauren insisted on calling ‘the study’.
‘I suspect that my daughter thinks it’s disgusting,’ said her father. ‘Kids her age think that people our age are supposed to stop all that stuff, but they’re both acting pleased.’
‘Too right. Does anyone else know?’
Louise shook her head. ‘You’re the first other than them through the wall. We’re going to tell Mario once he gets back from his New York trip.’
‘I hope you ask him to be godfather. He’ll be great.’
‘He is,’ Neil reminded him. ‘He’s Spencer’s god-dad. But if he’s to do it again, we might need to put a word in for him with Jim Gainer. I don’t imagine he’s his Church’s favourite son at the moment, being separated and everything else.’
Bob shrugged. ‘That’s between him and his conscience . . . and Maggie to an extent, although I’ve spoken to both of them and their separation does seem amicable.’ He looked his friend in the eye. ‘Between you and me, is she involved with anyone else?’
McIlhenney hesitated. ‘She’s been out with Stevie Steele a couple of times, but just for dinner; no afters. They’re friends, and that’s all. Stevie’s got a girlfriend on the go just now, anyway.’
Skinner gave a snorting laugh. ‘Steele’s always got a girlfriend on the go: and I doubt if that would stop him.’
‘It won’t arise in this case.’
‘What won’t?’ Bob’s right eyebrow rose.
His friend caught his meaning. ‘Not that or anything else. Like I said, they’re pals, and that’s as far as it’ll go.’
‘You seem sure.’
‘I am. I know the whole story behind the split.’
‘Is it something I should know?’
McIlhenney smiled ‘No. It won’t be a problem for you. Maggie isn’t into men right now, and that’s all there is to it. She’s fully focused on her career.’
‘Okay,’ said Skinner. ‘That’s good enough for me.’ He finished his Amaretto, pushed himself out of his chair and peered through the curtains into the impenetrable murk. ‘Ouch!’ he murmured. ‘What a night. Thanks again, you two, for giving me a bed.’
‘That’s all right,’ Louise replied. ‘You have an important meeting tomorrow, I’m told. It would never do if you got lost in the fog on the way there!’
4
If wee Moash Glazier had been possessed of a slightly larger vocabulary than the one that he had picked up on his short, sad and furtive journey through life’s shady valleys, and across its rain-drenched plains, then he might well have agreed with the prosecutor who had once described him in the Sheriff Court as ‘an opportunist thief’.
As it was, he had understood the woman to have called him ‘an awfy stupid thief’, and had shouted, ‘Ah’m no’!’ across the room, to the immense displeasure of the Sheriff and at a consequent cost of a further thirty days for contempt, added to his six-month sentence for various offences.
Moash regarded himself as a working man. He supported himself, his greyhound, and his ferret, by stealing any everyday item that had been left unsecured and in his path by a negligent owner, and by selling it on at a knock-down price to unfussy buyers in the pubs that he frequented. He kept on the move; the speed with which he disposed of his haul, and the type of customer he found, meant that his arrest rate was relatively low.
He had a genuine dislike for the unemployed, or at least for those who made no attempt to find work, and he stole from them as readily as from anyone else within his field of vision. Moash applied a simple principle to his business life. He never lifted anything that was sufficiently unusual to attract attention, or so valuable that its owner became seriously excited about its loss. He was also circumspect about those from whom he stole, never forgetting a housebreaker acquaintance who had been unwise enough to have burgled the house of one Dougie ‘The Comedian’ Terry, and who had been the victim of a fatal fall from his own fourth-floor living-room window less than a week later.
His cautious approach did not always keep him out of trouble. Occasionally he would be caught in the act, or with goods still in his hands; he was familiar with the inside of the Sheriff Court and with the hotel accommodation in Saughton Prison. However, since he was never worth jailing for too long, he took such minor blips in his stride. His most serious and most embarrassing mistake came one evening in a bar in Newhaven where he attempted to sell a plumber the tools of which he had relieved him two hours earlier. That had earned him a kicking which he had found much harder to take than a few weeks’ jail time and which had kept him out of action for even longer.
He had not been deterred, though, and had continued to ply his trade, without further serious mishap.
Where others might have been reluctant to go to work in severe weather conditions, wee Moash regarded them as windows of opportunity. People were distracted and tended to be even more careless than usual. Frost made them bundle up in thick overcoats, which could be easily nicked from restaurant waiting rooms, while rain made them keep their heads down, and much less likely to notice him as he went about his business.
Where the sudden fog that had clamped down was nothing short of a public emergency to others, to him it was a gift from above. He had always been able to steal successfully in broad daylight, and a city where nobody could see him was a laden vine waiting to be stripped of its grapes.
Marchmont and its environs had always been one of his favourite pitches. Many of the tall grey terraces still lacked secure entrance doors, and people, especially those idle bloody students that seemed to inhabit the place like rabbits in a warren, were daft enough to think that if something was out of sight in a stairwell or back court, then it was out of the mind of someone like him. Wrong.
He had a girl-friend
in Lochview . . . Moash Glazier had no permanent address, but he had two lady acquaintances and split his nights between them, when not enjoying free board and lodging elsewhere. He crept from her house just after six a.m., made his way up across the Pleasance, being careful to give St Leonards police station a wide berth even in the fog, and made his way up Nicolson Street and Clerk Street towards his hunting ground.
He did not like to hang about: ‘in and out quick’ was his motto, in all things. That morning, he was especially lucky. In the first building he visited, he found a pair of almost new, if muddy, boots on a front step . . . ‘Thanks very much, yah daft radge’ . . . a case of tools . . . ‘Aye, that’ll be right’ . . . and an unsecured mountain bike . . . ‘Lady’s tae go by the size, even if it dis hae a crossbar.’
Sixty seconds later, wee Moash Glazier was pedalling along Warrender Park Road, the boots hung round his neck, with their laces knotted together. He knew better than to touch the tools. In any event what he had was easily saleable, and enough to keep his elbow on the bar top for a while. There was no need to hurry. No one was going anywhere that morning, so as soon as he was out of sight of the building . . . after a couple of seconds . . . he was safe. It was only when he started drawing deeper draughts of air that he realised how cold it was. The temperature was around freezing, but seemed much colder in the thick greyness. The roadway was treacherous too, so he took extra care, and went even more steadily than at the outset.
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