put into words, what Brennan felt inside himself: everyone around him was insane. The game of life was hardly worth the candle. It wasn’t that he rated himself a higher being, or felt embayed with some inveterate wisdom of his own, not at all — Brennan knew he was every bit as likely to be pulled into the maelstrom. A loss of focus, a weakness, giving in… any one of a thousand daily challenges not met and he would be in there, in the drink with all the floaters, swimming for his life.
Brennan sat outside his home for the best part of an hour, staring at Sophie’s window and waiting for the light to go out. When it did, the flickering of the television screen continued and Brennan smiled to himself.
‘Don’t leave it on all night, love.’
He took another draw on his Embassy Regal and flicked the ash into the tray on the dashboard. He looked at the keys for his home in his left hand. Joyce had changed the locks, but she didn’t need to. He would have gone quietly. On the same keyring were the little keys he carried for his handcuffs; he lifted the metal ring and slid them off. For a moment he stared at them; he remembered the first time he’d put cuffs on someone, it was a drunk after Glasgow Rangers had played Hibs and he had chased the lad up Easter Road before pinning his arms behind his back. It had been a disaster; after getting one of the cuffs on he had failed to get the second one tightened in time and the drunk had lunged at him, swinging the open cuff and taking a lump of flesh out of his eyebrow.
Brennan grimaced with the memory, he leaned forward, checked in the rear-view mirror to see if he still had the scar. It was there; they were all there. He wondered how many scars he couldn’t see. It was the ones on his soul that worried him the most. He knew he was thinking too much about the past, and that was never a good sign.
Brennan stubbed his cigarette in the ashtray, opened the door and stepped out. He held his keys in his hand and wondered about mailing them through the letter box; he thought better of the idea, he didn’t want to alert anyone to the fact that he was there, least of all Sophie. It would be too painful to have to explain why he was collecting suitcases of his clothes from the garage, why her mother — his wife — couldn’t even look at him, never mind speak to him. He bunched the keys in his fist and proceeded down the driveway.
It was his property, his home and yet he felt like an intruder there now. He paused in the driveway; the building sat grey and weary against the night sky. He didn’t feel welcome there; he knew he had crossed a chalk line with Joyce and there was nothing else to do now but leave. He paced towards the garage door and opened up; at once he saw his two dark cases sitting in the middle of the floor. The sight of them caused his heart to sicken, he raised a hand towards his face and brushed the edges of his mouth as he slowly exhaled. A sharp, dramatic gasp followed, and then he placed the bunch of keys on the workbench and lifted the cases.
On the way down Corstorphine Road Brennan’s thoughts felt like splinters in his mind. He knew his marriage was over, he had no desire left to fight for it; it somehow felt like the end of yet another long journey; one that had promised a great deal and yet failed to deliver on almost every front. A lot of his life had been lived in expectation, and so much of it had been met with disappointment that he almost felt like laughing at the naivety of his youthful dreams and hopes.
‘Get a fucking grip, Rob,’ he said.
Princes Street had been opened again. He followed the thoroughfare to the end and snaked down Leith Street towards the Walk. He had secured a studio flat in Montgomery Street, it was a temporary measure he told himself.
‘The most burgled street in Edinburgh,’ had been his reply when he was informed of all that was on offer.
The agent hadn’t argued, ‘It’s all we’ve got.’
‘Take it or leave it?’
A shrug.
He took it.
As Brennan parked up he looked down the street towards the Walk; he knew Wullie was down there, not far away. For some reason the thought gored him. He didn’t know why that should be at first and then he remembered a visit to Wullie soon after his retirement; he recalled how shocked he had been at the state of the place, and the state of him.
Brennan smirked, ‘Partners in crime again, eh, Wullie.’
He took a recent purchase, a bottle of Macallan, from the passenger seat and placed it in the pocket of his overcoat, then got out of the car. At his new front door Brennan lowered his cases, ferreted for the keys the agent had given him earlier.
The Yale fitted in the lock and turned easily. He went inside.
The flat had been mis-sold; it was a bedsit.
There was only one room, about three-quarters the size of the living room he had in Corstorphine. In one corner was a sink unit with a small white boiler above it. A grey plastic draining board leaned against the wall next to the stainless-steel sink. Beside that was a heavily-bracketed shelf with a Baby Belling cooker. Brennan walked over, opened the door, it came away in his hand.
‘Well you’ve seen better days,’ he said. He put the door back, ‘Mind you, haven’t we all.’
He turned, scanned his new surrounds. There was a large window, covered with a set of psychedelic seventies swirl-print curtains. Brennan shook his head; he could see a street light burning through the thin fabric. In one corner was a bed, without bedding, and in the other an old couch that looked like it had been emancipated from a skip. He went over and patted the cushion; a cloud of dust rose into the room — little particles of effluvia were illuminated in the orange glow of the street lamp.
‘Fucking hell.’ He put his hands on his hips, stood firmly on the balls of his feet. ‘What a kip house.’
Is this what he had come to? Is this what his forty-one years of life had amounted to?
Brennan didn’t know where to look next; even as temporary accommodation, it couldn’t have been any worse.
He spied a foldaway table and two chairs, walked over and opened out the table. He removed his overcoat, then his jacket and loosened his tie. As he sat down he reached for the bottle of Macallan and a cup from the drainer. Just about everything in the room was within grasping distance.
He poured out a good measure of the whisky and started to roll up his sleeves; after the first sip he grimaced, then smiled.
‘Well, at least the company’s good.’
He delved into his briefcase and removed the blue folder with Fiona Gow’s name on the front, opened up.
On top were photographs of the victim. Fiona Gow had been a pretty girl; she had short straight blonde hair, she had been described as ‘leggy’ by the press.
‘Poor lassie,’ he said.
He leafed through a few of the pictures, until the scenes of crime shots appeared and then bunched them together, removed them from the file, and placed them face down at the corner of the table.
The girl had been a hairdressing apprentice, had a day-release class once a fortnight and was said to be ‘popular’ in the case notes. She was also described as a bit ditsy, and no one could remember her ever having had a bad word to say about anyone. She seemed the epitome of the girl next door. The murder seemed utterly pointless, unless she had been targeted at random.
Brennan scanned more of the notes, there were further details on her schooling — Portobello Academy — her social status, she went clubbing on the weekends. A
forensic serology report identified the presence of blood on her body that wasn’t hers; it was a rare group: B.
DI Jim Gallagher seemed to have talked to just about everyone who had ever known the girl, but had turned up very little that was going to be useful to Brennan.
‘Where’s the pull, Jim?’
Nothing in the notes indicated a cohesive investigation, it was all perfunctory. A couple of local sex offenders had been called in, interviewed, but neither had the blood group B and both had supplied alibis for the time of the murder. They were released and that was as close as the squad had got. As far as suspects went, that seemed to be it.
Brennan leaned over on the table, took another sip of whisky. He felt his brows start to ache, he rubbed at his forehead. Something bothered him; he reached back to his jacket, removed his mobile phone and called
