Bustling angrily from the room, like a hen forcibly deprived of a tasty scrap, the DCI was now thinking hard, trying to work out in her own mind how she could best describe the latest development to the ACC, ensuring that it did not sound like a setback. Her colleagues, both weary after a long day’s work, remained seated, each now reluctant, although for different reasons, to go home. Alice was dreading a confrontation with Ian and its result, and Manson, though too fearful to risk a confrontation with Margaret, was unable to bear the uncertainty of the status quo.
‘Alice?’
‘Yes, Sir.’
He hesitated, trying to work out the best way, the most innocuous way, of introducing the subject, alerting no one. That Margaret should no longer love him was bad enough, but he was not, yet, the butt of office jokes, the object of ill-concealed sniggers, or worse still, sympathy.
‘I wondered,’ he continued ‘you know how Mrs Brodie, the old one, told me that Heather was, how should I put it… on the pull? That she had a “fancy” man,’ he added with distaste. Usually, his manner on discussing this kind of thing would be bantering, lewd and jocular, so Alice looked at him, her attention caught by his uncharacteristic diffidence, but he did not follow it up, sinking into silence. She rose, stretched, and lifted her coat from the back of her chair. Infidelity was not a subject she wanted to discuss with him now.
‘If she was unfaithful, how would you know?’ he enquired, after a long pause.
‘How d’you mean, Sir? How would you know? You’ve just told us that the old lady told you that Mrs Brodie was unfaithful.’
‘Yes,’ he hesitated again. ‘Yes, I did… but it’s only an inference drawn by her, by a mother-in-law, you understand. She doesn’t actually know, she hasn’t seen the man, or caught them together or anything. What I’m thinking is, is she – is she right? In the inference she’s drawing, I mean. About her daughter-in-law. You’re a woman, Alice, aren’t you?’
‘To the best of my knowledge. Of course, I haven’t been subject to any tests,’ she replied acidly.
‘Exactly. So, as a woman, what would make you draw the inference that another woman, a married woman, was having an affair?’
‘A number of things, I suppose,’ Alice said, her interest briefly kindled, finding herself entering the discussion almost against her will. ‘I suppose she might dress better, take more care with her appearance generally – her underwear in particular. Her mood, her behaviour might be different too, depending on things like her attitude to the adultery…’
‘Like what?’ the Inspector shot back, sounding anxious, then rephrasing the question in an attempt to sound less concerned. ‘Um… what d’you have in mind?’
‘It all depends. If the woman was in love, too, then she might be radiant, feel she’s walking on air, be unusually happy. On the other hand she could be tortured, as well, racked with guilt, unsure how to resolve things and more irritable as a result. She might be kinder to everyone, feeling benign, content with the world and her place in it, or she might appear to lose interest in things that had previously held her attention – things like their home, old hobbies shared with her husband… I don’t know, Sir. Perhaps you’re asking the wrong person!’
‘Oh, I didn’t mean to suggest…’ he began, briefly apologetic before adding, dismissively, ‘you’re not married anyway,’ as if sexual fidelity outside wedlock had no significance.
‘True,’ she answered, putting on her coat and starting to walk towards the door. She wanted no more of this discussion. It was far too close to the bone.
‘If she had started cooking dishes she particularly knew that her husband liked, fancy ones – ones she hadn’t cooked for years, then that could be indicative of her adultery, of a guilty conscience, you think?’
‘It could be.’ Alice shrugged her shoulders. ‘She might be compensating in some way, her new “interest” making her kinder, making her even pity her husband…’ Jesus, did Ian pity her?
‘Pity!’ he snorted, then nodded sagely to himself, muttering, ‘Pity… yes, I can see that.’
‘Or it might just mean that she loved him. Really loved him,’ she added quickly, a sudden doubt assailing her. How could she have been so slow in the uptake? It was obvious that his interest in the topic of adultery went far deeper than was required for the job. Glancing at his tired face, at his slumped posture, she knew what was worrying him, and felt nothing but sympathy for him. He must be on the rack, too. They were sparring partners of old, and more often than not his jabs irritated or annoyed her, but she took no pleasure seeing her old adversary like this. Off-balance, dancing on the canvas no more, supporting himself on the ropes and unable to conceal his injuries. She only hoped that her own had been better hidden.
Alice sat in the kitchen of their flat, a second glass of white wine by her hand. She had already consumed one to give her courage, stiffen her spine. Beside her on the floor Quill lay peacefully asleep, snoring gently, sated after his second dinner.
Throughout the entire journey home she had been rehearsing in her head what she would say, imagining Ian’s likely responses, sometimes scaring herself half to death. Now she could feel butterflies fluttering about in her stomach, she was anticipating the worst and trying to prepare herself to deal with it, or, at the very least, accept it. She looked down at the newspaper again but her eyes glided over the print, taking in nothing. Soon she found herself in the business section, where she finally gave up.
Restlessly, she rose and wandered over to the fridge, then moved away from it and went to look out of the window, watching for his familiar figure tramping homewards on the pavement below. Rain had fallen on the cobbles, making them glisten in the orange lamplight and shine in the headlights of each passing car. She let her nose rest against the cold glass pane, seeing her breath mist it up. Still unable to settle, she returned for no good reason to her seat at the kitchen table. A pile of old newspapers at one end of it caught her eye, and, for the first time, she noticed a sheet of A4 paper resting on top of them. It was a note from Ian.
‘Darling Alice,
Have caught the train to London. The owner of a Gallery saw my website and is very interested in my work. Am taking five of the wishbone lithographs with me for him to see in the flesh. Back late on Saturday.
Love
Ian.’
After she had read it she covered her face with her hands, her heart sinking, more anxious and even more unsettled. Why had he not phoned her to tell her about the trip in person? What was, could possibly be, so urgent that he had to leave her without saying anything. He hadn’t even said where he was staying. And, over a month ago, he had come home annoyed that he had cleaned the stone for the wishbone lithographs, had discovered that he had none left and now could produce no more. He was such a bad liar, and she forgot so little.
Her first reaction was to call him on his mobile, but he might lie again, and what would she say then? She did not want to listen to his disembodied voice making things up, conjuring some paper-thin untruths from the air while sweating at the other end of the line. No. This had to be done face to face. She had to look into his eyes, see him again, if the ‘him’ whom she had believed she knew and loved still existed.
Thinking about what she had lost, tears came to her eyes and rolled unchecked down her cheeks until she could taste the salt on her lips. She had to be a detective at work, but not, surely, at bloody home, too.
Her phone went and her DCI’s name and number came up, but this time she let it ring. Getting no reply, her caller did not bother to wait for the messaging service. Instead, Elaine Bell took another sip of her claret, placed her knife and fork neatly on her plate and looked round, hoping to attract a waiter’s attention and get her bill. But all of them were busy attending to the other diners, one scurrying into the kitchens, empty plates balanced on both forearms.
Her eye was caught by the sight of a large, red-faced man who had his arm around a woman. She was giggling loudly, and he, playfully, put his hand over her mouth, allowing his fingers to caress her full lips. The DCI, now even more painfully self-conscious than usual about her lone and unloved status, rose and went to pay at the till, eager to get back to her office. The Super, she thought, ruefully looking at him, might already have retired on the job and have plenty of time for play, but she had not.
Friday
At 9.30 that morning, the manageress of Abbey Park Lodge was deep in thought, trying to work out what to do next about the latest staff spat. One of her nursing auxiliaries, Agnes Cauld, a large West Indian lady with a fiery temper and a foul mouth, had just stormed out of her office. Her parting shot had been ‘… and don’t think I’ll not be taking this no further, because I bloody well will!’
So all the tea and sympathy she had lavished on the woman had failed to pacify her. And the Irish woman, another auxiliary who had visited her earlier, had been no more amenable to her blandishments, muttering darkly about racism and sizeism in the workplace and uttering the dreaded words, ‘Grievance’ and ‘Legal Advice’.
Perhaps, she wondered, the time had come to involve Julia from HR? No, all that would happen then was that she would be subjected to an earful of jargon about grievance procedures, appeal procedures, protocols and the like, and neither of them, Julia included, would have the faintest idea how to implement any of them. In fact, it was sheer gobbledygook, no more than a lot of meaningless incantations or spells. If only she had stayed within the NHS, then she could have availed herself of a proper, grown-up legal department instead of this tin-pot operation. Now, before you could say ‘Hobnob’, she would find herself on a witness list for an industrial tribunal!
She took a sip of her hot water, delicately removing a stray lemon pip from her mouth, consciously trying to rehydrate herself and enter a calm place. A beach, maybe, with turquoise waters and palm fronds overhanging the lazy surf… No! No, no. First she must sort out this business. The nature of the complaint must be recorded, that was surely the first step, and fortunately the accounts given by the two troublemakers had not really differed. It must all be written down now, while her recollection remained fresh. She held her pen ready.
Agnes had been moving an elderly patient from her bed to a nearby chair, assisted by her Irish colleague, Detta O’Hare. Allegedly, at some stage in the manoeuvre Detta had lost her grip, and Agnes had ended up bearing the patient’s whole twelve-stone weight. Consequently, Agnes had screamed, ‘Detta, you fuckin’ leprechaun, get a hold of her again!’
Detta, apparently deeply insulted, had simply crossed her arms and said ‘How now…’ seeing no need to complete her sentence.
Really, she thought to herself, putting down her Parker, the residents might have some excuse for occasional name-calling – dementia, loss of inhibition and so on – but what excuse was there for the staff? None whatsoever, the besoms! Oh, the complexity of it all, and still they had not managed to identify the prankster in the laundry responsible for putting raisins, which looked uncannily like rat droppings, in the freshly ironed underwear.
Her head now in a spin, the manageress was glad to hear the knock on the door and her own confident voice say, ‘Come in.’
Seeing the well-coiffured individual behind the desk, her gold-plated Parker lying centrally on a spotless pad of paper, Alice Rice was quite unaware of the inner turmoil in the manageress’s breast. However disturbed the woman was by events in her professional life she managed to convey an aura of perfect calm and tranquillity, the epitome of grace under pressure. Only her torn and bleeding fingernails would have alerted the shrewd observer to the difference between her inner and outer states.
In her reassuring mellow contralto, a voice that had clinched many a job interview for her, she explained to the policewoman that she had heard that Una was helping Dr Coates at this moment in time. As she, herself, was on her way to the Bluebell wing, she could take her there if that would be helpful?
As they passed through one of the many hallways, frenzied screaming broke the stale air of the place, and instantly attendants appeared from all directions, homing in on one room. After a strange thumping sound was heard emanating from it, the cries slowly died away like ripples on a pond, and the unnatural calm returned.
‘Old Mr Morris… we should have a vacancy there soon,’ the manageress said with a knowing look, gliding onwards through the next set of double doors. As she followed her, Alice suddenly felt that breathing the lifeless air of the place was dangerous, as deadly to its inmates as to a butterfly gasping in a killing jar. No one was safe in it. Her neighbour, Miss Spinnell, must never end up in a place like this, nor her feisty twin. It was no more than a waiting room for death, a place to store the elderly and infirm like unwanted luggage until the grim reaper finally turned his attention to them, or to what was left of them. And so the problem of the old would be solved.
‘Ah, Mr Braid,’ the manageress said, stopping in her stately progress to talk to a small overall-clad man who was pinning up a notice on a board.
‘Perhaps you’d be good enough to take this lady,’ she gestured to Alice, ‘to room 143. I’ve just remembered that I promised I’d look in on Sandra.’
‘No problem,’ he replied. As Alice fell into step beside him, he cupped her elbow as if she was another infirm resident, introducing himself in a sing-song voice as he did so. Resisting the impulse to shake him off, she walked beside him until, thankfully, they reached their destination and he went back to his notice-board. A black and white picture of a laughing woman, on her knees and surrounded by Border terriers, was pinned to the open door.
Inside a gaunt female figure was propped up, stiff and motionless as a log, her dead weight supported by the sides of a high-backed armchair. Her skin seemed shiny and unnaturally taut, and her head was tilted towards the window, which gave an unimpeded view of a tiny courtyard walled in brick, its pitted tarmac covered with recycling bins. Beside her, raising a spoonful of soup to her closed lips, sat Una Reid, coaxing her patient in her gravelly, twenty-a-day voice to ‘take a wee sip, just a wee sip for Una’.
As the policewoman came in, the patient’s eyes never so much as flickered. Though fixed on the drab outlook, they did not appear to be taking anything in. As if unaware of the presence of the spoon, never mind of anyone else in the room, she raised her hand and, uninhibitedly, felt along the edge of her tongue with her fingers. Then she let her arm drop back to her side, slamming into the spoon on the way down and spilling soup all over herself. Una wiped the woman’s bosom with a paper hankie, cleaning the broth from it, but the patient showed no sign of being aware that she was being cleaned or even that she was being touched. Suddenly her arm went up again and she fingered the sides of her tongue once more. Then, like a wounded animal, she let out a pathetic moan and slowly closed her unseeing eyes as if she was dying.
‘Mebbe she’ll sleep now,’ Una said, returning the spoon to the bowl and looking fondly at her.
‘Has she had enough?’ Alice asked, noting that the broth appeared virtually untouched.
‘No. But I’ll not get any more into her. She’s got Huntington’s, ken. Doesn’t know anyone or anything any more, not even that she needs to eat. I’m fighting a losing battle wi’ her,’ Una answered, sounding upset and surreptitiously wiping the corner of her eye with her finger.
‘You knew her – she’s a friend of yours?’ Alice asked gently.
‘Oh, aye. I worked wi’ her for years.’
‘Whereabouts?’
‘Here, in this place,’ she replied, as if it was obvious. ‘Doctor Coates was one of the resident doctors here when I first came and…’ she stopped momentarily to wipe away another tear, ‘and it was a very different place when she was in charge, I can tell you that.’
‘Was Mr Brodie in this sort of condition, unable to do anything for himself?’
‘No. He could dae a wee bit, lift a spoon and the like. He wis no’ as far gone as what she is.’
‘Could he take his own medicine, straight from the bottle, say?’
‘No’ really,’ she replied, putting the bowl on the trolley, where it joined an uneaten slice of buttered bread and an untouched glass of water.
‘Why not?’
‘He’d take anythin’, like, if you gave it him, but he didnae know anythin’ any more. So, he wouldnae have known whit wis in the bottle. Could have been juice, water, wine. He’d no’ ken that it wis his medicine, like.’
A moan interrupted their conversation and they both shifted their attention back to the doctor. Her eyes were now wide open, staring straight ahead, a look of utter dread contorting her features as if a vision of hell was unfolding before her. She whimpered, turned her face into the chair and groaned once more. Instantly, Una sprang up and put an arm around her, murmuring, ‘It’s all right, Doctor, dinnae you worry, darlin’. You’ll be all right, I’m here beside you.’ Slowly the fear receded from the bloodshot eyes, and, for a second, intelligence shone in them as they rested briefly on the nurse. Then, like a comforted child, the doctor allowed her heavy head to flop onto Una’s shoulder and rest there.
A few seconds later, the nurse’s phone went and, using her free hand, she got it from her pocket, nodded several times in response to the voice at the other end, and then began, ever so slowly, to slide her body free of its burden, tenderly resting the patient’s head against the side of the chair. The call ended with her saying, ‘OK, OK. I’ll tidy up the place before I go. Make sure it’s neat and tidy for everybody.’
‘A visitor?’ Alice asked.
‘No,’ Una replied, picking up the tray and moving towards the door, ‘she doesnae get any visitors nowadays. She’s got a daughter, like, but she cannae face comin’ any more. See, she’s got a fifty-fifty chance of developin’ the disease herself, and she cannae bear tae look at her own future. The Doctor doesnae recognise her anyway, an’ twice she’s scratched her face wi’ her nails, bit her oan the nose once. She can be a wee bit violent sometimes, but she’s aye quiet as a lamb wi’ me.’
‘Can I ask you about Mrs Brodie?’ Alice asked, following Una out of the room.
‘Aha.’
‘How did she cope with her husband’s illness? How did she manage?’
‘She jist got oan wi’ it. She hud tae. She couldnae dae much else, noo could she?’
‘Did she have any support, anyone to help her? The children?’
‘They’d both gone, left home, like. The boy’s at college and so’s the girl, an’she’s got her own wee wan noo.’
‘Was there anyone else to support her? Did she… was she seeing anybody else?’
‘How d’you mean? You mean the Doctor or somethin’?’
‘No. I meant socially.’
‘Aye. Me an’ a’. She wis seeing him “socially” as you cry it. Havin’ it away wi’ him as I’d say… her “toy boy”.’
How d’you know?’
‘I’ve eyes in ma heid like everybody else. and I wisnae born yesterday neither. Onyway, he was aye sendin’ her flooers, big bunches o’ red roses usually. I seen the cairds. You couldnae miss it – she and him, Dr Paxton, were eyeing each other up. I’d bet ma life oan it. If I had wan.’
‘That settles it. We’ll just go and see her again, that Brodie creature,’ Eric Manson said, switching off his computer and not bothering to hide his dislike of the woman. ‘Let her know that we know that she’s a sodding liar. That she’s been two-timing her sick husband with the poor bugger’s own doctor, and that he’s a lot younger than her too.’
‘Fine, Sir. Of course. But if we do do that, she’ll know we’re onto her, won’t she? And, apart from her lying to us, we don’t have much on her yet, do we? We don’t even know that she was with him, and if he is involved, in some way, then there’s a question-mark over all the information we’ve got from him – the drugs stuff, his opinion about Brodie’s condition and the rest. And maybe he wasn’t with her – for all we know he may have an alibi for the Saturday night. Having an affair in itself is not a crime, after all.’
‘No? Right. What we’ll do is speak to him, eh? See where he says he was, get a DNA sample from him, make like it’s routine. If they’re both lying, then chances are…’
He stopped mid-sentence as Elaine Bell came over to his desk. She looked grey with exhaustion, her clothes rumpled from another night spent in the office.
‘So, what did the Reid woman have to say?’ she asked Alice.
‘Heather Brodie’s lover seems to be her husband’s doctor, Colin Paxton.’
‘His doctor! Bloody Hell! Are you quite sure? Were they together on the Saturday? He’d know all about drugs, quantities and so on, and he’d be able to get prescriptions if he wanted. This puts everything in a very different light. We’ll need to go over the India Street house again – thank God it’s still ours. But we’ll have to scour it for completely different things this time. You can do that, Alice. Look over all of Heather Brodie’s stuff this time. Anything that ties her and lover boy together would be useful, letters, cards, whatever. I’ll get permission to have their phones checked. Eric…’
He was sitting with one hand covering his eyes, and did not respond.
‘Eric!’ she repeated, shaking her head in disbelief.
‘Ma’am.’
‘Go and see Paxton, but do not – I repeat DO NOT – scare him off, OK? Ask him politely where he was on the Saturday night. Just accept whatever he says and then check it out. Got that?’
‘Aha. Loud and clear.’
As soon as Alice entered the hallway of the India Street house, she was hit by its chilled air, the raw coldness of it. The place was now dank, unheated, unloved and unlived in. Silent. Her breath was as visible as steam from a kettle, and she crossed her arms, hunching her shoulders and trying to husband her body heat. The murdered man’s bedroom door was open and she glanced into it, a musky smell instantly assailing her nostrils. Her attention was caught by the trails of blood spattered across the faded wallpaper, now looking more like black ink than blood.
A cursory inspection of the kitchen suggested that it would reveal nothing, so she pushed open the door to the drawing-room, and entering it was surprised how shabby it now seemed. Without the presence of the normal occupants of the house, breathing in and breathing out, moving around, attending to the myriad, small, inconsequential affairs that make up a life, the room’s tiredness could not be hidden. There was nothing to distract the eye from the frayed patches on the carpet, the cracks in the glass of the cabinet or the odd broken ornament on the mantlepiece. A thick layer of dust coated the antique wooden furniture, masking its lustre and turning it grey, and the panes in the sole window were dirty, providing only the subdued light of perpetual dusk. Everywhere needed redecoration and a good clean.
A writing desk was tucked away in one corner, its sun-bleached walnut veneer beginning to part from the wood beneath, and Alice sat down at it. First she pulled out all of the miniature drawers on the desktop. Only a magnifying glass, a thimble and a couple of half-empty needle cases were revealed. The first of the larger, lower drawers seemed to be filled with the paraphernalia of Christmas: decorated paper, tinsel, hundreds of old cards and baubles for the tree, many cracked or discoloured. The middle drawer contained about forty brown envelopes, some with their contents listed on the outside: ‘Harry’s and Ella’s school reports – 1995-1998, 1999-2003, 2004-2007’, ‘Ella’s art project (Roman)’, and ‘Letters from mum’.
In case something had been misfiled and partly out of curiosity, Alice gave them all a quick check. From her cursory scrutiny of the reports a vague picture of both of the Brodie children emerged, and it largely accorded with the impression she had formed from her brief meeting with them in their aunt’s house. The boy, Harry, seemed to be intelligent, slightly nervous and immature, excelling in drama and English. Many of his teachers seemed concerned by his lack of focus, some remarking on his inability to handle pressure, particularly at exam time. Almost all of them commented that his head was always in the clouds, and criticised his absent-mindedness. Ella, in contrast, seemed to have sailed through school, collecting prizes and positions of responsibility from her earliest childhood. Great things seem to be expected of her, her last head teacher remarking on her high hopes for the girl’s future.
Putting the last report cards away, her mind drifted onto Ian as it had done periodically throughout the day. Only by making a conscious effort could she stop thoughts of him intruding whenever they liked, wrecking her concentration and making everything else seem unimportant, whirling round and round in her head but resolving nothing. Deliberately banishing him from her mind again, she turned back to the drawer and picked out one of the letters from the ‘Mum’ envelope, but it was in an impossible hand. Only ‘My darling’ on the first line could be deciphered, the rest of the writing, including the signature, being completely illegible. After wasting a further five minutes trying to read the most recent one, dated 2008, she gave them up as a bad job and bundled them all back into their envelope.
When she hauled out the bottom drawer, Alice’s spirits sank. It was weighed down with files, each one bulging, the contents overflowing into a ghastly sump of miscellaneous papers. Anticipating hours of probably pointless drudgery ahead, she gave a deep sigh and then picked up the first document in the ‘TAX’ file. Methodically, she ploughed through them all, before passing onto ‘BANK’, then five other equally dull folders. ‘HEALTH’ briefly caught her attention, documenting as it did the course of Gavin Brodie’s hopeless decline and the mass of quack remedies that they had invested in before accepting the inevitable. Wondrous crystals, exotic fruit essences, animal serums and the frozen scrotums of bulls, all promised cures. Each advert had been cut out and kept, each marked with ‘cheque for £50 sent’ or some equally poignant note.
Three hours later, and conscious that her eyes were no longer focusing properly, she opened the second last folder. It was marked ‘INSURANCE’. Inside, as anticipated, were a mass of certificates of car, house and household contents and travel insurance. Like the rest of the files, they revealed that the woman’s grip on the family’s administrative matters seemed to be slipping. Her filing was becoming progressively less accurate, many of the dates were higgledy piggledy, with papers eventually being added in no particular order at all.
At the very back of the folder, stapled onto the cover, was another certificate, a term life insurance policy in Gavin Brodie’s name. Amongst the details listed on it were the extra premium charged for an unspecified ‘Underlying Medical Condition’, the sum assured, the date on which the policy was taken out and the date of expiry. Alice put it to one side, relieved to have found something to show for all the tedium, something concrete and, surely to God, significant.
The final file, untitled and with a dark blue cover, was the thinnest. It seemed unpromising, and held a only small sheaf of papers. Picking out a five-page document from it she saw that it was headed ‘Court of Session, Scotland. Petition for Interdict against Agnes Hart’.
Hart’s address in Henderson Row was given. The aim of the document seemed to be to get the Court to prohibit her from coming anywhere near Gavin Brodie or any members of his family, his house or his possessions. Reading the numbered paragraphs that made up the petition, a picture began to emerge, and it was a disturbing one. It catalogued a campaign of harassment and intimidation waged by an obsessive woman as she worked out a grudge against Gavin Brodie and his nearest and dearest. Dog excrement had been put through the India Street letterbox, cars scratched, obscene notes attached to the front door, his children shouted at and his mother had received a gob of Hart’s saliva on her cheek. The list of hate-filled deeds perpetrated by the woman covered two full pages. Agnes Hart, whoever she was, had plainly loathed the dead man, and judging from the description of her behaviour, she was both unbalanced and highly effective in her campaign of revenge. Another document among the papers, headed ‘Extract Decree’, revealed that the Court had granted Gavin Brodie’s request that Agnes Hart’s behaviour be restrained on 5th July 2008.
Late that same evening, Eric Manson tiptoed past his open sitting-room door, straining for a minute or two to decipher the high-pitched, excitable chatter coming from it before retreating into the kitchen. He had heard more than enough. Not least the sudden change into whispers. All Margaret’s friends seemed to be there, divorcees to a woman, of course, apart from sour Helen whose interests, he felt sure, lay in another direction altogether. They would be offering advice, laughing among themselves in their venal way, eager to enlist another member into their unholy club. Nowadays, however late it was, when he got home it was never just the two of them, with Margaret waiting eagerly for his return. No, the harpies had positively taken the place over.
Nosing inside the fridge, he saw with alarm that a raspberry mousse appeared to have been made for him. Half-heartedly he dipped a finger into it, licked it, and as he did so the telephone rang. Picking up the receiver and, still in work mode, he said gruffly ‘DI Eric Manson, here’. Instantly, and with an ominous click, the phone went dead.
It must have been Him, the Other Man, the Bastard, now intruding into his home! His own home! He threw down the instrument as if it had been contaminated and, had the house been empty, would have howled out loud in his anguish like a wolf. Instead, he sat at the table with his head in his hands, hiding from the world, and sighed involuntarily.
Covering his eyes, he repeated to himself over and over that this should not be happening to him, him of all people. And not now, in the middle of a murder investigation, when all his time, all his thoughts, had to be devoted to the job of tracking down that poor, sick bugger’s killer. What the fuck had he ever done to deserve this? But he could not talk to Margaret, or have it out with her, because he did not know where to begin, or where it would all end. Heavens above, she might actually admit to playing away, and what would he do then? The awful nightmare would have become reality. And Margaret would no longer be Margaret, and who, no, what, would he be without her?
‘You alright, Eric?’ It was sour Helen’s voice, so he rubbed his hands up and down over his face as if to refresh himself, and replied as brightly as he was able, ‘Yes, just fine, thanks, love. Rarely better’. Then Margaret herself swept in, and seeing him, asked tenderly, ‘Tired, pet?’ Catching her eye and forgetting what he had just said, he nodded mutely and watched, speechless, as she took his supper out of the oven for him, laid it before him and departed to return to the gaggle of women. A dish of beef olives, prettily garnished with a handful of freshly chopped parsley.
His phone went again. He threw down his fork and shouted down the mobile, ‘If that’s you, again, you fuckin’, fuckin’, fuckin’…’
‘Sir! Sir, it’s me, Alice. I was just calling to let you know what I have found out, in case you wanted to speak to the DCI.’ The man sounded possessed.
‘OK. Right. Get on with it.’
‘It’s not really what we were expecting, but it may be significant,’ she continued, slightly breathlessly, still taken aback by the unexpected tirade. ‘There’s a life insurance policy in Gavin Brodie’s name. His widow was to get a payout on his death, as long as he died prior to the 10th of February next year. Are you alright, Sir?’
‘Aye. Fine. How much?’
‘Two hundred thousand pounds. I didn’t think people like him would be able to get that kind of insurance. But it looks as if you can if you’re prepared to pay an extra whack each month. Maybe they exclude death from the disease or something, I don’t know…’
‘Right,’ he said, cutting her off and sounding uninterested.
‘And there were some court documents, too.’
‘Yeah. Well, tell the boss tomorrow, eh? We’re already well on the way with things. Paxton gave me a right load of porkies as far as I can see. Said he was at his health club until late, but nobody there seems to have seen him, his usual day’s Wednesday anyway. Said he went on to the pub, then home. Lying fucker. The pub was closed all day as they had a pipe burst in the night, it didn’t open again until the Tuesday. I’ve already spoken to the boss. We’re going to bring him into the station, first thing tomorrow morning, straight from his morning surgery. Marked police car, blue light and everything. That’ll make the toy boy sweat.’