Mr Austen's voice had sounded quite calm but a small frown furrowing the consultant's brow showed Maggie that he was genuinely concerned.
'If it was your wife…?' she asked, hearing the breathy catch in her words.
He smiled then, a sympathetic smile. 'I'd tell her to go ahead and have the surgery,' he said, his eyes full of pity for her dilemma. 'But then, we already have two boys,' he shrugged.
Maggie nodded again, glad of the man's honesty. He hadn't just told her what to do: he had understood the turmoil in her heart and mind. Probably used to women like me, she reminded herself.
'Okay,' she sighed. 'When can you do it?'
Omar lifted the bundle of mail from the dark space by the door.
Most of it consisted of flyers – for a local grocery store, someone offering car insurance and a tree surgeon. He smiled at that last one. There were no trees in this block of flats: he supposed that the sorting office was given loads of that sort of stuff to thrust through letterboxes in a wide area, irrespective of how appropriate it was to the householder. The rest of the mail consisted of a bill from his electricity provider and one handwritten envelope that looked as if it might be an invitation to someone's birthday party.
Omar opened this one first, hopeful of adding a date to his somewhat empty calendar.
He drew out a plain piece of card, neatly folded down the middle, then turned it over, expecting some sort of picture on the front. There was nothing and its stark whiteness made him grit his teeth, anticipating the contents.
GET OUT BLACK BASTARD
The words, scrawled in dark felt pen, jumped at him, making Omar flinch. So. They had found his address already. That was bad.
Heaving a sigh, Omar Fathy nodded to himself as though he had come to a decision. He had endured so much up in Grampian and had thought that this move would mean a fresh start. But someone must have followed him here. Picking up the envelope, Omar examined the stamp to see if the franking mark might give him any information: it did. The card had been posted locally, here in Glasgow.
It was time to do something about this. His dark face hardened as he dropped the junk mail into a recycling box. Taking the card carefully between his fingers, he walked through to his kitchen, looking for a clean plastic bag.
DCI Lorimer turned slowly into his street, willing the old car to roll into the driveway. He came to a stop and turned off the engine, sensing the sigh of relief from the Lexus as it began to cool down. Pressing a button, Lorimer saw that he'd clocked up the best part of two hundred thousand miles now, surely more than could be expected from even the trustiest workhorse. The old girl was losing oil at an astonishing rate these days and he knew in his heart that it was time for a change of car. The detective was surprised at his attachment to what was, after all, a heap of metal. A fondness for this machine that had carried him to so many destinations was surely bordering on a sentimentality that was unworthy of his calling? But he sat still, fingering the worn leather on the driver's seat, feeling as much at home here as he did in his own front room. He'd miss driving this car but there was no denying it was time to trade it in for something newer. His fortieth birthday was a few months away now, Lorimer reminded himself. Perhaps he could justify the purchase of another Lexus? 'Hi,' he called, closing the front door behind him.
As soon as he saw her tense white face Lorimer knew something was wrong.
'Hey. What's happened?' He was at her side in two long strides, arms around her shoulders as Maggie began to weep silently.
A pot of tea and several man-sized Kleenex tissues were required before Maggie could explain her health problem.
'You have to do what you think is right for you, love,' Lorimer told her gently, stroking her hair back from the tear-stained cheeks. 'You know we'd given up any notion of a family,' he added quietly.
Maggie nodded and blew her nose again. Th-huh,' she gulped.
'I know. It's just…' Her voice disappeared in another swell of emotion and Lorimer held his wife close to his chest, patting her back, noting the irony as he did: it was a gesture a father might make to comfort a child.
'With Rosie… and everything… it's hard,' she sniffled.
'It'll always be hard, love. Other people's bairns will be like the gifts we've been denied. But we've got a lot to be thankful for, haven't we?' Lorimer turned her face to his, searching her eyes for answer.
A tremulous smile and a nod gave him what he'd wanted. They had one another. Okay, there had been periods of difficulty caused mainly by his work, but they'd weathered such storms and were still together, stronger for those times, Lorimer believed.
'What did the consultant say?' he asked eventually and Maggie told him, haltingly at first then with growing confidence as she began to see that her decision was the right one.
'No date yet, then?'
'Possibly just before the October break,' Maggie said. 'Mr Austen goes on holiday then and wants me done before that.' She giggled a little at her choice of words. 'Says I'll be off school for about three months, depending on what he finds inside.'
'So, a break till the end of the year? Manson won't like losing his favourite member of staff, will he?' Lorimer replied, referring to Maggie's head teacher.
'Plenty of teachers on the supply list,' she told him. 'He'll have no bother replacing me for a while. And I can visit Rosie and her new baby when it arrives,' she said, looking past her husband at a point in the distance.
Lorimer followed her glance but there was no indication what, if anything, his wife was seeing.
The wee small hours of the morning found Lorimer awake, his arm around a sleeping Maggie, her drowsy body curled into his side. Thoughts of her impending surgery had been supplanted by other notions. Sometimes in the cold hours before dawn his mind was suddenly alert, full of ideas. What had happened in the days before Ken Scott had been gunned down? That he had been stalking his ex-wife seemed almost definite, Lorimer reasoned, given the host of photos taken in the streets of Glasgow. A chilling thought had taken hold of the detective and he drew back slightly from his sleeping wife as though the very idea might contaminate her.
Stalkers had been known to become so obsessed by their victims that they eventually killed them. Nobody but the crazed killer knew just what took place on such occasions but psychologists and police officers had attempted to piece together the likely steps that had led to the stalker finally descending into that ultimate violence. Memories of high profile cases flooded back to him now; women who had been the object of someone's fantasy and desire and whose rebuffs had led to their slaughter.
Is that what had happened to Marianne Scott? Had she been killed by her ex-husband, a seemingly mild- mannered man who had given little indication of his obsession to those who claimed to know him best?
Marianne Scott was certainly missing and in Lorimer's experience that could mean one of two things. Either she was playing a very clever game at deliberately disappearing or she was dead, her body concealed somewhere. Now, as the grey light crept into his bedroom, Lorimer felt certain that the woman had been murdered.
It made sense of Scott's killing: could it have been an act of revenge for taking his ex-wife's life? Brogan might well have undertaken a hit against his former brother-in-law if he had any reason to believe the man had killed his sister. He'd had her picture in his flat, a sign of his fondness for her, surely? The man wasn't just a known drug dealer. He was ex-army, undoubtedly with contacts in the underworld where guns were readily available for the right money.
As he rolled onto his other side, Lorimer became more and more convinced that his theory would stand up in the light of day.
Why had Brogan done a runner? He grinned to himself. Maybe they'd find out today. The Spanish police might even have the man in their custody by now, he thought. And once they had Brogan extradited back home he might supply answers to all of these questions.
As the night clouds rolled away and a thin line of scarlet bled onto the horizon, Billy Brogan groaned with relief. Only half a day more and they would be free of this tumbling sea and the endless heave and swell that had turned his stomach inside out. He shivered, rubbing his arms in a vain attempt at making them warm again. He'd been awake most of the night, only dozing fitfully on the bench by the window. Carlos had thrown a blanket over him some time during the night and he had heard voices, speaking in Spanish, as he'd drifted in and out of sleep. Now, fully awake, Brogan knew that there were two men on board, not just the old man. It made sense, he
