Midnight.
My eyes were heavy, but my body refused to accept sleep. I’d tried turning in early. It hadn’t worked.
Soon enough I’d realised what it was that was keeping me up, whispering around inside my head, preventing me from drifting off.
I was still dressed, lying on top of the covers.
I guess I already knew where I’d be going.
At the bridge, the guy in the booth took my money with a bored, limp gesture. Night shift. Every worker’s bane.
There’s an old joke that Fifers tell about the toll on the Road Bridge: people are happy paying to get out of Dundee but there’s no way in hell they’d ever pay to go there.
I drove the back roads of Fife, my eyes focused on the roads ahead even though I could have made the journey blindfolded.
Some time later, I pulled the car over to the side of the road, two wheels up on the overgrown embankment. I climbed out, awkward, as always. Clambering like an idiot, my hands splayed on either side of the door for balance.
Tell me again that there’s nothing wrong with my leg. Tell me again I came out of the accident un-fucking-scathed.
They’d rebuilt the dyke. The stones were new; perfectly smooth. I stood on the overgrown verge, ran my hands across the fresh stonework.
On the other side of the road, the trees stood close together; thick trunks casting dark shadows in the spaces between. Small animals rustled among dead grass and leaves, the light from the moon failing to penetrate those dark spaces.
Out here, there was no feeling of the city across the waters. No sense of encroaching industrialisation. No constant rush of traffic.
I closed my eyes. There were sounds more urgent than the call of animals and the gentle rustle of disturbed vegetation. But these other noises were merely echoes in my head from another time that I had not entirely left behind.
Dean Martin sang it: memories are made of this.
Memories.
I couldn’t escape them.
Maybe I never really wanted to.
I opened my eyes again, blinked away the tears that had started to gather.
A voice in my head said: She’s gone.
I had to keep reminding myself of that one simple fact. So easy to forget if I didn’t keep thinking it: Elaine was dead.
Nothing could bring her back or atone for such a senseless fucking waste.
Something flitted in the shadows of the trees. Bats flew toward me from dark spaces. My muscles tensed, as if these tiny winged creatures might attack me. But they pulled away at the last instant, perfectly in control. They soared up above my head and circled in the sky, their forms silhouetted in the light of the moon, before returning to the trees.
I let out a long breath, watched it turn to mist.
I returned to the car, feeling sad but unburdened, as if something in that place had absorbed the pain that had been welling within me and preventing me from sleep.
My leg throbbed dully. When I pressed the accelerator, my calf muscles cramped.
Back home, I crashed on top of the bed again.
The flat was cold and empty. I had gone out to find her tonight, as though she would be waiting for me in that field. Telling me she was all right.
In the months after the accident I used to make that same journey, driving in a daze, half-asleep and functioning on auto-pilot. It was a wonder I never killed myself.
There were too many holes where memories used to be and I noticed every one of them. People told me I was maudlin to stay in the flat we had bought together, that I needed to move on.
I told them I would. When I was ready.
Chapter 7
Seven-fifteen a.m., I was dressed in dark jeans and a black t-shirt. Refreshed and ready for the day ahead.
My flat was to the west end of the city, in a refurbished tenement building. Close to a hundred years ago a one bedroom flat would have housed a whole family. Now even a two bedroom felt enclosed to a man who lived on his own.
The street itself was quiet enough. The neighbours, like me, kept themselves to themselves. Sometimes you saw kids from other buildings playing out on the streets. There’s something reassuring about that.
Outside, I booted a stray football back to two young lads who were kicking about near the bottom of the street. They shot me a thumbs up. I kept walking.
I climbed in the car, threw on a CD. Larry Love drawled about being too sick to pray. I gunned the engine, pulled out and drove east to the city centre.
Ten minutes later, I parked across from my offices in a car park that may as well have been dirt land. The land was due for renovation. Student accommodation. Once there had been division between the university and the town. Now it seemed as though one was taking over the other.
Progress. Even though I at least partially suspected the university admissions people had mistaken quantity for quality.
I locked the car, crossed the road. Bill was in at work already, sorting paperwork and making sure everything was shipshape.
He didn’t look up when I came in. “You went home last night, then?”
I nodded.
“First time in a while.” Refusing to look at me, seemingly intent on his work.
I didn’t say anything, went straight through to my office.
Looking out the window as I waited for the computer to boot and the kettle to boil, I saw a dark blue Citroen C5 pull in next to my car. A woman got out the passenger’s side, dressed in jeans and a thick jumper. Her dark hair was tied up and she wore thick, tortoise-shell glasses. I was too far away to make out intimate details but I knew the car. The woman, too.
Her husband climbed out. A small man, whose limbs twitched constantly as though he was wired up to the mains. He said something to her, and she shook her head, sadly. Then kissed him. Softly.
Some things never changed.
I thought about when I saw her in a hospital bed, her face pale and her eyes filled with mourning for a loss that I would never understand. How she had still seemed so much in control.
Like her sister. No mistaking that.
I walked away from the window, pressed my palms on the surface of the desk. Pushed all my weight down and took several deep breaths.
Why couldn’t she just leave me alone? Let me deal with this in my own way?
Two minutes later, Bill knocked on the door. Hesitant.
“Let her in.” As ready as I would ever be.
Rachel walked into my office. She was a small woman, slightly top-heavy, with sturdy legs. Dressed in thick clothes that swamped her frame. Her beauty was in her face; the skin perfectly smooth, the nose slim and petite, and the eyes a fragile shade of blue.
“We missed you,” she said.
It was a lie. The “we” part, at least.
I didn’t meet her gaze. “I’ve been busy. This whole business, you know, it’s all new to me. Need a bit of time to get used to it, figure out a routine, you know?” I walked over and shook her hand. Stiff and polite. Awkward.
She took advantage, pulled me in for a hug and kissed me on the cheek.
I recoiled.
Regretted it.
She said, “The leg’s looking better.” When I didn’t respond, she kept pressing. “Now you’re just walking like your shoes don’t fit properly.”
I smiled. “They don’t.” I turned to the kettle. “Just boiled.”
“If you’re drinking.”
I didn’t say anything, just started making coffee.
She pushed past the barrier of small talk. “You should talk to him. I mean face to face.” What the Americans would call a sucker-punch. Sneaked in when your guard is down. Guaranteed to knock you to the floor, keep you out for the count.
All the same, I retained my composure. At least, I tried. “I just don’t think it’s appropriate.”
“Why?”
“Rach, the man thinks I killed his daughter.”
Her face twitched as though she didn’t know what kind of expression to settle on. “He was ang
ry.”
I almost said, “And maybe he’s right,” but kept that particular thought to myself.
“He told the police that I was the one responsible for the accident.”
“He was looking for someone to—”
“Sure. We’re all looking for someone to blame.” Snapping it out there; enough force I could have knocked her out.
But Rachel was tough enough to take it. “If she was alive right now, she’d slap you silly.”
No sneak attack. That was a direct hit. I turned away to make the coffee. Desperate not to meet her eyes. “I could never figure why she said yes to me.” It sounded self-deprecatory even to my own ears.
“You came with her every year on her birthday. Five years, McNee. You were beginning to feel like family.” She grinned, relaxing in nostalgia. “Except you wouldn’t let us call you by your first name, huh, Ja—”
“Don’t.” I turned round, held up a warning finger. But found myself smiling all the same. Rachel did the same. I saw Elaine. The sly half grin and those sparkling eyes.
I passed her coffee. She took the cup in both hands, blew on the surface. Black liquid rippled. Waves crashed out to the lip of the mug. A storm in miniature.
“Elaine never called you by your first name? I find that hard to believe. Even if you asked her to, I mean…”
“She understood me.”
“She would have wanted you to talk to the old man.”
There was sadness in Rachel’s eyes, as though she thought there had been a terrible loss in this rupture between me and her father. “She wouldn’t have wanted this to come between the two of you.”
“Tell him that.”
Rachel shook her head. “You’re a cold bastard.”
A sharp pain stabbed behind my forehead. “Is this why you came by? To have a pop at me? Thought your dad seemed to enjoy it so much, you’d have a try?”
“I wanted you to come with me. To see her.”
“I can’t.”
“Why?”
Slamming the brakes on my anger, I found myself stuck with the same distance that I had greeted her with earlier.
“McNee, you’re a fucking selfish prick, sometimes.”
And she was gone, out the door and away.
I felt sick. Flopped into the chair she’d been using. Caught something faint in the air. A subtly sharp scent. My forehead was hot. That pain was getting worse; insistent. I wiped my head with the palm of my hand, felt the sweat slick away.
When I closed my eyes, ghosts danced indistinctly on the backs of my eyelids.
“You should be the one in the ground.”
Martin Barrow’s voice had been quiet, barely rising above the sound of the rain that battered on the mourners who had gathered that afternoon in the Balgay Cemetery to say their prayers for his daughter.
I had been standing at the rear of the assembled mourners. Hiding? And not just from him. But he’d been watching for me, I knew. He’d noticed the minute I slipped in.
People stepped away from us. Sensing his anger; maybe they even shared it.
I had thought about not attending. It would have been the easy option and who could have blamed me?
But I was there, and I had listened as the Reverend spoke softly about Elaine, and her mother held her husband’s arm as though she might topple forward into the grave without the support.
“If you weren’t the fuckin’ police, they would have banged you up.”
I tried not to respond.
“You killed her.”
And I might have believed it was the response of a grieving parent had there not been this tiny voice in my head that whispered, you know it’s true.
Chapter 8
I spent the afternoon buried in work. While there were other open cases, much of my time was consumed by Daniel Robertson.
The case fascinated me for many reasons. Not the least of which was the question of why Daniel had come home to kill himself. There was no emotional attachment left for him here. He had gone to great lengths to separate himself from his childhood and there was no reason why he would suddenly be overcome with a feeling of nostalgia.
I thought about the note he had written after his father’s heart attack: “no worse than the old cunt deserves.”
I asked myself: was his detachment an act?
There were other questions, too. Such as, why were the police treating an apparent suicide in such a hush-hush fashion?
But I typed up the report. There was no need for speculation in a professional investigation. James Robertson needed cold, hard facts. He was looking for closure. I wanted to deliver that.
It was early evening when the phone rang. Bill transferred it through from the front, telling me it was urgent.
“McNee.” Rachel’s voice was breathless. “It’s Harry.” Her husband. The ratty little man with the glasses who had been in the car with her that morning. “There was… Jesus, we were just having a drink and… he’s been arrested.” She didn’t give me a chance to respond. “I know things didn’t exactly go well this morning. But I could really do with someone here. And as selfish a fuck as I think you are at the moment, you’re the only person I could think of.”
It only took me two minutes to walk up the road. In the old days I would have entered through the main doors at the Marketgait, but I used the public entrance to the rear of the station. There was something intimidating about coming through that way. The shadow of FHQ fell accusingly and the entrance seemed hidden as though you wouldn’t find it any other way than by deliberately looking for it.
I wondered if, when the building had been built back in the sixties, they had seen this aspect to it. Deliberately designed the building to intimidate.
Maybe they had at that; the remnants of old school Calvinism still running through the architect’s genes, keeping their designs functional, joyless and overbearing.
If that was the case, why hadn’t I seen it before?
Maybe it just felt different because, these days, I was no longer part of the system. Maybe it wasn’t a Calvinist mindset so much as a copper’s that had played a hand in the building’s design.
Rachel was waiting outside, her arms folded across her stomach.
“Tell me,” I said.
“I don’t even… It was just meant to be a quiet couple of pints, you know?” Her face was pale, eyes turning bloodshot as she tried to hold back tears. “And then…”
“What happened?” Pressing her like I would a client, or a witness. Never mind what friendship we had, there was a reason she’d called me instead of someone else.
She looked at me with a hurt expression lurking behind her eyes. But it was gone in a moment. “We were just sitting there… and Harry… he went to get another couple of drinks. Knocked this guy at the bar.”
“Bumped into him?”
“Yes.”
“And he attacked Harry?”
“He said a few things. Harry told him to fuck off.”
“Glaswegian manners.” He’d been living in the city five years, but he always played his west coast hard man heritage to the hilt.
She managed to smile. “Says the man from Dundee, yeah?”
She looked away from me and ran a hand through her hair before wrapping her arms round her middle once more. She shifted her weight from foot to foot.
“Harry calls you Dundee McNee, you know that?”
“The name’s a curse.”
“Maybe.”
“At least the family name’s not Hunt.”
She nodded. Hadn’t heard me.
I realised, then, that she’d asked me here not for comfort but for distraction. To have someone to talk to. Not about this, of course. About anything but this.
All the same, I didn’t back down.
“Tell me what happened.”
“That should have been it, right? Harry telling him to fuck off. But he makes a deal out of it, you know? Keeps telling Harry he could have him in a fight.”
“So
Harry lamps him?”
“No. Not then.”
“But that’s why we’re here.”
“Do you want to know what happened or are you just going to make up your own mind?”
Recently, I didn’t seem to be able to help jumping to conclusions about people. I’d done it with James Robertson when I saw his flushed face and his large frame, and again to Kat when I saw her mutton-dressed-as-lamb fashion sense.
And now I was judging Harry on the man I knew he had been rather than on the man he had become. The man Rachel loved.
“Harry came back to the table. Just sat down, tried to enjoy his pint. But the man wouldn’t let up. Came over, taunting Harry. Then turned to me, said… some inappropriate things.”
“So Harry really did hit him.”
“You can’t say it was unprovoked.”
“Maybe.”
“Definitely.”
“It could happen anywhere…”
The doors opened. Someone came outside, lit from behind so that their features were obscured. “Excuse me, Rach…”
I tried to smile in greeting. Found it hard to even approximate.
Police Constable Susan Bright took a step backwards. Not a conscious move, but that didn’t make any difference. We hadn’t spoken in eight or nine months.
“Susan,” I said, making an attempt to be friendly.
“McNee… What are you…?”
“She’s Elaine’s sister.” They’d known each other in passing, Elaine and Susan.
Susan looked good. Not that I’d expected a matter of months to age her, but all the same she seemed in good shape and her new hairstyle — bobbed short, almost severe — gave her an air of confidence.
“I’m sorry, Steed, I didn’t think that…” For a second I saw something of the woman I used to know in her. The use of my old nickname was what did it, I suppose. Gave her words a kind of fondness I’d almost forgotten.
“So Harry’s in trouble?” I said.
“You know who he punched out? Frank Beaney.”
“Aye? That chancer?”
She laughed. “Guess Frank thought he was a hard man today.”
“How many pints convinced him of that?”
Susan’s stance changed suddenly, as though she’d remembered she was here in a professional capacity. She turned to Rachel, looking past me as though I no longer existed. “I’m sorry… We shouldn’t be laughing. I came out here to tell you we’ll be letting your husband go. With a caution, of course.”
The Good Son Page 4