‘Afternoon, Bob,’ he said briskly, with the briefest of glances in my direction, then passed me by without breaking his stride.
Three
I pushed the mystery to the back of my mind for a few hours, devoting them to Sarah and the kids as I had planned. Dawn was teething and had given her mum, and Trish, the children’s carer, a tough day, but I have experience in such matters, and some skill; pretty soon she was back to her placid best. Smug, Skinner, smug.
I’d hoped to spend some time with Ignacio too, but he called from university to say that he needed to work late on a class end-of-session project and would be staying at Alex’s overnight. I didn’t mind that; he and his half-sister had bonded from the moment he appeared in our lives. My kid, as Alex has always been to me, is always great with the second family – she is James Andrew’s idol – but she liked having a sibling with whom she could speak as an adult. Ignacio, he just liked having a sibling, period.
A set routine is important for all children – when Alex was growing up, it was just the two of us, and that was difficult – but bedtime is a fluid affair in our house; homework is done after supper, and then they have some free time until it’s lights out. For Seonaid, that’s seven o’clock, for James Andrew it’s eight, although often he crashes early. Mark is old enough to set his own limits now, but he’s usually asleep by ten thirty.
Jazz had just disappeared upstairs with a mug of hot chocolate when I told Sarah I was going out for a while.
‘Where you off to?’ she asked.
I grinned. ‘I’m going to see a man about a dog.’
She raised an eyebrow, but said nothing. She assumed, I assumed, that I was going to the golf club or to the pub. I imagined her raising the other eyebrow a few seconds later when she heard me start the car.
Yellowcraigs Beach lies just outside Dirleton, the neighbouring village to Gullane; it’s also called Broad Sands Bay on some maps, but not many people know that. It’s a favourite spot of James Andrew and Seonaid, not so much for the sands, more for the children’s play park. It has a pirate ship theme, a reference to Fidra, the small island which is situated not far below the low-tide mark. Legend has it that Robert Louis Stevenson, a frequent visitor, drew inspiration from it in writing Treasure Island, which is in my eyes the greatest adventure story ever written in the English language.
Mark would go there too on occasion, but with less enthusiasm. The boy is a natural mathematician, with computer skills that I come nowhere near to understanding, but he doesn’t know his left hand from his right, nor does he have any interest in finding out which is which. The climbing frames and rope roundabouts in the playground never offered a challenge to him, only a hazard to be avoided.
That’s where Jimmy took me. He was waiting for me when I reached the car park, a couple of minutes after eight; Bowser, his springer spaniel, was still on its lead, tugging. Both of them looked impatient. The light of day was dying, but its warmth lingered. I’ve known many years when the Scottish summer has been over by the middle of May; I wondered if this would be another.
‘Sorry,’ I said as I climbed out of Sarah’s new car, a big Renault hybrid. She chose it because it has seven seats, a sign of the family times. ‘I got caught behind a cycling club,’ I added, by way of an excuse.
‘No matter,’ he grunted. He glanced around. We weren’t alone. Yellowcraigs is a popular dog-walker destination in an area where pooches seem to outnumber pigeons. I’ve never had a dog, but Seonaid is beginning to drop hints about puppies. Since she’s known how to push my buttons since she was a year old, I suspected that the household would soon hear the patter of tiny paws.
Sir James gave Bowser a quick tug. ‘Come this way,’ he said, to the dog and to me. ‘There are no kids around at this time of the evening, so it’ll be private through here.’
I followed him out of the car park, across the road and down the short tree-lined path that led to the Treasure Island mock-up. Last time I’d been there, four days earlier, I’d watched Jazz climb to the top of the rigging surrounding the tall pole that represented a mainmast, while Sarah called after him to be careful. I don’t think he’ll ever be that, but I don’t worry as she does, because he’s strong, agile and he knows his limits, as did I when I was his age. However, I do worry about his determination to join the military when he grows up. I don’t like the idea of any of mine in harm’s way.
I took a seat on a long, snake-like swing as Jimmy unclipped Bowser’s lead. The spaniel shook itself, then found its way through the rigging and lifted its leg against the Hispaniola’s mast. ‘Piss on you, Long John,’ I whispered, then looked up at my friend.
His silver hair was thinner after his course of chemotherapy, and he had lost some weight, but physically he looked okay. His expression suggested otherwise.
‘So, Jimmy,’ I exclaimed, breaking the silence. ‘What precisely the fuck is all this about?’
I must have sounded exasperated, for his immediate reaction was to whistle for his dog and snap his fingers. ‘Here, Bowser!’ he called out, fiddling with the clip of the lead. ‘I’m sorry, Bob, this is a mistake. I have no right to put this on you. You’ve got enough on your plate with the newspaper, the family and everything else in your life. It was thoughtless of me to call you.’
I glanced across at the simulation of the Hispaniola, where Bowser was ignoring his master and having a real good sniff.
‘Bollocks to that,’ I retorted. ‘You’ve looked out for me more often than I care to recall. If you’ve got a problem and you took it to anyone else, I’d be seriously, seriously pissed off. So come on, man, out with it.’
He seemed to sag, and lowered himself onto the circular perimeter of the enclosure, wincing as he settled on to it. He’d had surgery as well as the therapy.
For the first time since we’d come together, he looked me in the eye. ‘Does the name Matthew Ampersand mean anything to you?’ he asked.
I did a quick trawl through my memory; I can’t claim to recall every investigation during my career, but most of them left a mark. ‘I can’t say that it does,’ I admitted when I was done. ‘Professional?’
‘Yes, but this business happened before you joined the force. I thought you might have remembered the name from the newspapers of the time, but no matter. He was a murder victim whose body was found in the old quarry at Traprain Law, here in East Lothian, on a Wednesday three weeks before Christmas. It had been freezing hard for days, otherwise he’d have gone to the bottom of the quarry pond, but the ice was so thick he didn’t go through it, just landed on it very hard. At first they thought he was a suicide, but Joe Hutchinson, the pathologist, found injuries that were inconsistent with him having jumped.’
At the back of my mind, something stirred. A vague recollection of headlines about ‘The Body in the Quarry’ around the time I was completing my university degree. ‘Yes, maybe I do recall it,’ I murmured. ‘Why? Has he come back to haunt you?’
‘You could say that,’ he snorted. ‘I’m being accused of killing him.’
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A Brush With Death Page 36