by Claire Askew
Birch’s eyes were still squeezed shut. She was glad McLeod couldn’t see her wincing.
‘And, for the record, I am not a huge fan of you going into vigilante mode and deciding you can fix everything on your own, either.’
‘Sir—’
‘However.’ There was an edge of something in McLeod’s voice, as though he were on the verge of laughter. He certainly seemed to be enjoying himself. ‘If I’m speaking off the record? I’m rather pleasantly surprised at you setting fire to the rule book and reverting back to some old-school policing. It isn’t like you at all, but I’m enjoying it. You’ll be beating up bad guys down dark alleyways next.’
Birch flinched.
‘Sir,’ she said. ‘Please don’t joke about it. I’m looking at a potential misconduct hearing here, and rightly so.’
McLeod huffed into the receiver again.
‘You’re a good girl, Helen,’ he said. ‘And you did good today – in the end, anyway. It’ll all come out in the wash, don’t you worry.’
Birch grimaced. She could hear McLeod’s wagons beginning to circle already, and wondered, for a moment, what Anjan might make of it all. She felt her heartbeat speed up, just a little.
‘I’ve decided,’ McLeod was saying, ‘that it’s important we keep you around.’
Birch sagged. He’s going to smooth it all over, isn’t he? she thought. He’s going to try and make it all go away.
‘Sir, I really don’t think that—’
But fatigue had risen up around her like flood water, as she stood there: she felt every moment of the last three and a half weeks, as though the weight of them had been dumped onto her shoulders, all at once.
‘Quiet, Helen,’ McLeod said. ‘For once, I strongly suggest that you do not argue.’
He wants this, she thought. It’ll end up with me owing him the most almighty favour, and then he’ll be able to lord it over me forever.
‘Sir—’
‘You just leave it with me,’ McLeod said. ‘And don’t worry about a thing.’
‘I’ve thought a lot about this,’ Moira Summers said. Ishbel was sitting across the room from her, on the sofa where Lockley had been until DI Birch led him out into the hall. A young uniformed officer had come inside, and Moira had instructed him to make them both a cup of tea. He complied without a word, and only once he’d gone into the kitchen did Ishbel realise the oddness of everything, and she’d begun to laugh, quietly, surprising herself. Now, she and Moira both sat with a steaming mug on their knees. The young policeman had retreated into the hall, and DI Birch was in the front garden, on the phone. They could hear the quiet rise and fall of her voice outside the front window.
‘I’ve thought about what I might say,’ Moira went on, ‘to you, or one of the other . . . relatives. I thought there were so many things. But now . . . I can’t think of anything. Except to say again how sorry I am. And that just doesn’t cut it, does it?’
Ishbel took a sip of her tea. They both sat in silence.
‘I know,’ Ishbel said, eventually, ‘what you mean, in a way. I’ve thought about meeting you, too. And I’ve thought about meeting your son, though I know that’s impossible. I’ve thought about everything I might say – and assumed I’d be angry, that I’d lash out. But it’s odd now, sitting here. It’s the oddest thing. I don’t feel like I expected to at all.’
Beyond the living-room curtains, they caught a snatch of DI Birch’s talk: Sir, I really don’t think that—
Moira frowned.
‘I hope they won’t be too hard on her.’
Ishbel nodded. DI Birch sounded agitated. They probably shouldn’t be listening in.
‘You . . .’ She’d begun speaking before she really knew what to say. ‘You don’t have any other children?’
Opposite her, Moira blinked. Something passed across her face – an expression Ishbel couldn’t identify.
‘No.’ It was almost a whisper. ‘For a while we thought we couldn’t – have children, I mean. At all. But things find a way of happening, don’t they?’
Ishbel said nothing. She found herself wondering what the past month might have been like, had she had another child to care for – a brother or sister of Abigail’s. Ishbel had been so keen to get back to work after her daughter was born, to get back to the slowly ascending career she loved and then came to loathe, that it had just never happened. Might they have helped, this past month, that ghost sibling? Or might they just have been another thing that Ishbel found herself neglecting, in favour of sleeping all day on the hard-sprung spare-room bed? Was it better to just be left alone, completely alone? She wanted to ask Moira Summers this question, but didn’t know if she could.
Around them, the house began to settle into evening: floorboards clacked as they cooled. From the kitchen, the distant buzz of the fridge.
‘He warned me,’ Moira said into the silence. ‘The night before the shooting, we talked, and . . . I said to you before that I knew, but I didn’t really, not exactly. I didn’t know what he was talking about. He didn’t tell me. But he said some things that . . . now, when I think about it, I think he wanted to tell me. I’d like to think, anyway, that really, he wanted me to stop him. But I was too stupid to catch on.’
Ishbel looked up. Tears glinted on Moira’s face.
‘I’m so sorry,’ she said, again. ‘I’m so sorry I couldn’t save your little girl.’
Ishbel looked down. In the cup on her lap, the dark tea reflected a flickery version of her own pale face. Right now, she thought, you have a choice. You can accept this apology, or not. Move on, or not. She thought about what Aidan would do, if he were here – something ugly, probably, she realised. Then, out of nowhere, she found herself wondering what Greg might do – what he’d advise her to do. Ishbel blinked several times, as though waking from a long sleep. Yes, she could choose. She looked up at Moira, whose head was curled over into her chest, and considered her options.
‘I thought,’ Ishbel said, slowly, ‘that I could save her. That morning, when I heard what was happening . . . I thought, if I could just drive fast enough, just get to her quickly enough, I’d be able to save her.’
Moira had looked up, her crying paused by surprise.
‘But now,’ Ishbel was saying, ‘I know that even before I got to my car, she was already lost. I’d lost her.’
Quiet fell again. Outside, DI Birch was ending her phone call.
‘She upset him, you know. They were in the student union together, and . . . oh God.’ Ishbel had begun to cry, too, and her words became spitty and slurred. She pushed on. ‘She had this awful boyfriend. Jack Egan, you might have seen him in the papers. He sold his story to Lockley, told him they’d got into drugs together – he got my Abigail into drugs. I had no idea. And in the midst of all this, your – Ryan . . .’ Ishbel stopped. Saying his name in front of his mother felt strange, like she’d realised for the first time that this name belonged to an actual human man – not just a shadow, not just a bad act that could never be taken back.
‘Ryan tried to help her,’ Ishbel said, her voice wet and rasping. ‘He tried to tell her that Jack was no good. But she didn’t listen. She reported him to the student union – said that Ryan Summers was being creepy around her. I guess . . . that must have made him angry enough, to . . .’ She couldn’t finish the sentence. From the look on Moira’s face, she didn’t want to hear it, either.
Moira opened her mouth as if to speak, but then sat that way for a while, as though thinking carefully. Ishbel watched her face: it was a white mask of weariness.
‘I think,’ Moira said, at last, ‘that probably wasn’t the reason – the reason. Or, it wasn’t the only reason. It wouldn’t explain . . .’ She faltered, but rallied again. ‘It wouldn’t explain all the other girls. I’ve read about these online posts, people’s theories about, what? MRA activity? I don’t know what’s true any more, and it’s the most frustrating feeling. But . . . you telling me that, it’s like . . .’
For a
moment, Moira seemed to want to stop talking. But then, carefully, she went on.
‘It’s like I’m fumbling around in this terrible darkness. I’m trying to find a lever, or a switch – something I can press that will flood everything with light, and make it all seem all right again. If I can just find that switch, I’ll find myself in a brightly lit room, and on the floor in the middle of it will be written the reason – the reason – why my son . . .’ Moira swallowed hard. ‘Why my son killed those thirteen women. The darkness is that question: why, why, why? And the light switch would give me the answer – an answer that I know for sure is true. But I don’t think I’ll ever find it. I think I’ll be staggering around in that darkness for . . . well, for the rest of my life.’
Ishbel was nodding, slowly.
‘But you telling me that,’ Moira said, ‘it’s as if the darkness doesn’t feel quite so dense as it did just before.’
For a moment, the two women held each other’s gaze. Something passed between them, like electric current.
‘So – thank you.’
Ishbel tried for a small smile, and found it came more easily than she’d expected.
‘You’re welcome,’ she said.
Moira sank back into her chair. With a shuffle of feet, DI Birch walked back into the room.
‘I owe you both an apology.’
Birch’s throat hurt. She felt hot. I’m coming down with something, she thought, and then tried to put out of her mind everything that she’d have to deal with in the near future. George Gulbraith, Lockley’s case, the endless Three Rivers paperwork. Misconduct hearings. Probably a public inquiry. Her vision swam, just thinking about it.
She tried to anchor herself in the room again: Moira’s living room. Ishbel was sitting on the couch beside her. Moira sat in the armchair opposite. They’d been talking, though Birch couldn’t think for the life of her what they might have said to each other while she was outside.
‘I need to apologise,’ she said, ‘for not having done things properly this evening. If you two wanted to talk, I should have set up proper mediation. There are channels for this kind of thing to be facilitated.’
Moira looked at Ishbel, and when she knew she’d caught the other woman’s gaze, shook her head slightly. Ishbel smiled.
‘You don’t have to apologise, DI Birch,’ Ishbel said. ‘I essentially blackmailed you into coming here, what with the video and everything. And I’m glad I did, and I’d do it again. What’s more, I’ll say that in front of any disciplinary panel that you have to face.’
Birch felt her face colour.
‘That’s kind,’ she said, ‘but probably not really appropriate.’
Ishbel looked down at her cup of tea, now cold, but still hugged between her hands.
‘I wasn’t really planning it,’ she said, almost to herself, ‘but I kept thinking of it at odd moments. That thing he’d said – Lockley – about the Telfords. My brain kept reminding me that he’d said it. It got to be quite annoying – I’d be trying to focus on something, and the thought would pop up again. I didn’t want to be thinking about him. He ruined everything, really. Lockley, I mean.’
Birch nodded.
‘If it wasn’t for him,’ Ishbel went on, ‘I would never have known about Abigail and the drugs. I would never have known she was in an awful relationship with that boy. I’d have been able to remember her the way I thought she was . . . the way I knew her. Now I feel like whenever I think of her, I’ll think of that, first.’
Birch put a hand on Ishbel’s arm.
‘You won’t,’ she said. ‘It feels like that. Right now you feel like you’re always going to be angry at her for those things she did that were weak, or wrong, or criminal. But after a while, that anger does fade. I promise you.’ Birch paused and took a deep breath, then added, ‘Mine did.’
Both women looked up at her. Moira’s head was cocked to one side, as though she were listening for a very faint, far-away sound.
‘What do you mean?’ Ishbel asked.
Birch took a deep breath.
‘My little brother,’ she said, ‘was Charlie Birch.’
She waited for a reaction. Ishbel’s face told her that she’d heard of Charlie, but Moira’s brow furrowed.
‘Charlie was a big missing-person case,’ Birch said. ‘Thirteen years ago, he went missing, and it was all over the news.’ She waited, to see if anything dawned on Moira.
‘Thirteen years ago,’ Moira said, slowly. ‘Ryan would have been seven. I don’t remember much from that time that wasn’t . . . well, Jackie was always busy with work. I was very wrapped up in motherhood, back then.’
‘Okay,’ Birch said. ‘Well, Charlie went missing, and at first he was just another missing young man. He was twenty.’ She paused, and then decided to say what she was thinking – what she’d been thinking endlessly, unbidden, these past three and a half weeks. ‘He was Ryan’s age.’
The two women nodded, as though this had helped them understand.
‘Then . . .’ Birch pulled herself up a little straighter. ‘We started hearing these rumours. This was before I joined the force, so we were just the family. There were no FLOs back then, and we weren’t kept in the loop all too well. But we learned that some local ex-cons were making noises about Charlie. It was implied that he’d been mixed up in some . . . illegal activities.’
Birch frowned, remembering.
‘At some point,’ she went on, ‘Lockley picked up the trail. He was just a kid reporter then, just an intern. But for some reason he really latched on to this idea that Charlie was a bad apple. He started to dig up dirt on him that I had no idea about, my mother had no idea about. He hired a PI, and found all this damning information, apparently out of nowhere.’
Ishbel raised an eyebrow, and Birch nodded.
‘Yeah . . . I guess now we know how he might have done that. Anyway, it turned out that Charlie had – well, fallen in with some really bad guys. I mean, I hesitate to use this word, but gangsters, basically. And – this is my theory, anyway – he’d got out of his depth. He owed people money, or favours, or something . . . and he couldn’t make good. So he disappeared, or more likely, he got disappeared. Lockley wrote some really lurid stuff at the time, all these theories about it. He linked Charlie to every unsolved crime that he possibly could. He turned my brother from a missing man into a wanted man. It nearly killed my mum.’
All three women were quiet for a moment.
‘I remember that,’ Ishbel said. ‘I remember reading some of those things. They were suggesting all sorts of . . . gangland-type things, weren’t they?’
Birch nodded, her mouth a hard line.
‘Some of the evidence pointed to an organised crime connection in Glasgow, yes,’ she said. ‘As you can imagine, Lockley had a field day.’
Moira’s eyes were very wide.
‘What happened?’ she asked. ‘Did they ever find him?’
Birch shook her head.
‘The trail went cold,’ she said. ‘I went into the force because I wanted to look for my wee brother. If I’d found him, I might have ended up putting him behind bars – or worse, putting him in the ground. But . . . that would have been worth it, just to get closure. Thirteen years on, and he’s still lost. It looks like he’ll always be lost.’
Moira let out a small sigh: a soft, deflating sound.
‘And your mother?’
Birch’s eyes stung.
‘She died,’ she said. ‘Cancer. Last year.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Moira whispered.
Birch straightened up, and turned back to Ishbel.
‘So you see,’ she said, pushing brightness back into her voice, ‘for a while, whenever I thought about Charlie, I could only think about those allegations. I could only think about the things he’d done, or been accused of. But these days, I remember things like . . .’ Birch laughed, surprising herself. ‘Well, just recently I’ve been thinking about these curries he used to make. He loved star anise – you kn
ow, the spice? He made these curries with so much of the stuff in that they were almost inedible. I’ve been . . . smelling them, just recently, in my mind, and thinking of him. So . . . the good memories do come back.’
Moira looked doubtful. Birch nodded at her.
‘It might take a while,’ she said, ‘but I truly believe – even for someone like you – they do.’
Ishbel climbed into the passenger seat of Birch’s big black car. It was getting dark now, and rain had begun to fall. In the distance, she could hear the endless shush of cars moving through the slick, wet streets. Through the car window, the dim outside light on the front of Moira Summers’ house refracted into a thousand raindrop sparks. The house’s open front door threw a long stripe of orange light along the wet garden path. In that stripe, DI Birch stood silhouetted, shivering slightly, saying things to Moira that Ishbel couldn’t hear.
While she waited, she watched the ghostly film-reel of Aidan – turning from his place at the vigil podium to take Netta’s hand – playing out again and again in her mind, as though projected weakly onto the inside of the filmy windscreen. The more she let herself think about it, the less it stung. Of course he had a mistress: the thought was so obvious to her now that she wondered how she’d never let it occur to her before. Ishbel realised that the reasons she was bothered by it were nothing to do with loving Aidan. She’d stopped doing that a long time ago. They were more to do with the secret kept, with the fact that they’d carried on living inside the collapsed lung of their marriage for as long as they had. There had been so many angry words, and for nothing. Had they split, might Abigail still be alive? Ishbel could have moved west, could have taken Abigail with her, so she’d have attended a completely different campus – she’d have come home shocked and pale but safe, that May afternoon. That thought hurt too much to be borne – it dwarfed the pain of Netta, the pain of Aidan’s long and pointless lie. Think about something else, Ishbel thought. Anything.
DI Birch’s words drifted through her mind then, as though bidden: the good memories do come back. She tried to think of a good memory of Abigail. It was tricky: she wanted a memory that didn’t also contain Aidan. In the end, she settled once again on the day they’d spent shopping for Abigail’s prom dress. Though some of that day was hazy – key details feeling just out of reach – Ishbel remembered the pride she had taken in marking what felt like a milestone. Abigail was officially becoming an adult woman, with her own thoughts and secrets and hurts and joys. She had made sure they did grown-up things: going out for brunch before they walked to the shop, accepting the offer of free champagne to drink in the huge boudoir of the changing room. She’d been complacent, she realised. She’d assumed that this milestone was just one of many, stretching out into a future that eventually would no longer contain her, Ishbel. A future that Abigail would walk on into alone, grown, and growing old herself. Ishbel remembered – watching Abigail preen and twirl in the changing room that day – imagining that one day they’d return there, this time for a wedding dress. And then later, that the wedding dress they bought together might be re-worn by Abigail’s own daughter, while Ishbel looked on proudly, bent and old though she may be. She had eyed this future lazily, never once considering all the million tiny things that would need to happen just so in order to make it come true. Now it was a fiction: one so painful that Ishbel found herself breathing hard thinking about it, as though she’d been kicked.