stop puffing out your chest and tell me exactly what the hell it is you want.’
‘Listen…’ he growled.
‘I’m listening.’
I heard a deep breath being drawn. ‘I’ve got a crime scene,’ he continued, eventually.
‘Infirmary Street Baths,’ I said. In the Victorian era Edinburgh’s civic leaders built several public swimming pools to combat the scourge of cholera. When I was young, my father took me to see his grandfather’s grave in a cemetery in Wishaw, Motherwell’s neighbouring town; as we approached it he pointed out a green area, without memorial stones, and told me that it was the site of a mass grave for victims of a cholera epidemic.
‘That’s right,’ Jay confirmed, brusquely.
‘I thought they were closed.’ A hundred years on, we weren’t so bothered about Biblical plagues.
‘They are. They were shut down about a year ago; they’ve been mothballed while the council tries to find a new use for the building, or for the site, if it comes to that. There are jannies going in every so often, to check the place out, make sure that everything’s all right.’
‘But today something wasn’t?’
‘That’s right. They found a guy in the pool.’
‘What stroke was he doing?’
‘Very funny. There’s no water supply to the building, but even if there had been, this one wasn’t swimming. He was at the deep end; right under the high diving board. His neck was broken.’
‘He took the plunge, eh?’
The superintendent allowed himself a grim chuckle. ‘That’s how it looks. But we don’t know for certain whether he dived off it or whether he was chucked off.’
‘What makes you think I can tell you?’ I asked.
‘If what Alf Stein says about you is right,’ I could see the sneer on his weasel face, ‘you probably could tell us just by looking at him.’ Detective Chief Superintendent Stein was our head of CID, Jay’s boss and mine. I’d heard myself described, with undisguised jealousy, by someone who didn’t know I was within earshot, as his protege, but Alf had never told me that I was. ‘But the reason I’d like you to look at him…’ he hesitated, ‘… this has got drugs overtones to it, Bob. There’s no ID on the body, but Alison Higgins reckons she’s seen this bloke before. She thinks that he’s one of Tony Manson’s crew.’
I could have said that I’d look at him next morning in the mortuary, but in truth, if Jay had done that to me I’d have been seriously upset. And there was something else: Alison wasn’t wrong too often. I told him to hold, and put my hand over the phone’s mouthpiece. ‘Do you know if Daisy has anything on tonight?’ I asked my daughter.
She nodded. ‘She’s taking some pictures to show to a private buyer in Haddington.’
‘Do you have much homework?’
‘I’ve done it.’
‘Fancy a quick trip into town?’
‘Aw, Dad! Top of the Pops is on in a minute or two.’
‘We can record it. I need to do this.’
‘New jeans?’
‘Are you trying extortion on a police officer?’
‘It’s always worked before.’
‘Okay.’ I put the phone back to my ear. ‘I’ll be about forty-five minutes, give or take a couple,’ I told Jay.
‘Our guest will wait for you,’ he replied.
I let Alex set the VCR; we had no empty tapes so she and I had a brief argument about which to use. She won in the end, because I wasn’t really interested in catching up on Juventus winning the Champions League on penalties. She didn’t get to choose the music in the car, though. I never could stand R Kelly, and Wyclef’s language on one of the Fugee tracks was… well… ‘Mista Mista’ had become the anthem of the Edinburgh drugs squad, but it wasn’t for my daughter’s ears. Instead I forced her to listen to ‘Aria’, a strange, contemplative blend of opera and chill-out music by the Cafe del Mar maestro, that a friend had given me in Spain a few weeks before, at Easter.
Although it was a Thursday, most of the late evening shoppers were heading for home by the time we came into the outskirts of the city. I was thinking about Infirmary Street Baths, and what was waiting for us there. Alexis was thinking about something else; we were on Milton Link when she turned the volume down.
‘Dad,’ she said, abruptly, reclaiming my attention. ‘Why don’t we have a dinner party?’
‘What?’ I spluttered. ‘Why the hell would we do that?’
‘Why shouldn’t we? You never invite friends to the house. It’s as if we’re hermits. You’re a good cook, and I’m not bad at some things. We could manage.’
‘Who would we invite?’ As I thought about it, I conceded the point; we did live a secluded existence. Alex wasn’t my life in its entirety, but I didn’t have a legion of friends, not outside the job. Yes, I was invited to parties thrown by people who’d been part of our circle when I was half of a couple, but nobody expected me to take a turn as host myself, not with a kid… but she wasn’t any more, was she?
‘You could invite the Lloyds,’ she suggested. Jack Lloyd was my usual foursomes partner in the golf club. He and his wife were more than ten years older than me. ‘And Aunt Jean could come.’
I smiled. I must have looked condescending, for she frowned. ‘When you’re a lawyer,’ I told her, ‘and you have an opposition witness on the stand, you’ll need to take your examination more slowly than that, or you’ll have no flexibility left, no wiggle room. It’s the biggest mistake defence counsel make when I’m in the box.’
‘I don’t know what you mean,’ she snapped.
‘Yes you do. You’re matchmaking, and you’re not very good at it.’
Alex and her aunt, her mother’s younger sister, had always got on. So had Jean and I, for that matter. But neither my daughter nor I could stand her husband Cameron, one of the very few men that Myra had ever detested absolutely. Jean had joined our camp a couple of years earlier. She had celebrated her thirtieth birthday by chucking him out, and had called a week before to tell us that her divorce had been finalised.
‘Okay, so what if I am? Dad, it’s been a long time. You’ve got to …’
‘Move on?’
‘Yes.’
‘Alex, I have moved on.’
She looked across at me. ‘Do you have a girlfriend?’
‘You know that I don’t.’
‘I know that you never bring any women home, but that’s all.’
‘Well I don’t.’
‘None at all?’
‘No.’
‘You mean you’ve been celibate since Mum died?’ She pronounced the bombshell word carefully, as if she’d just learned it.
‘Hey!’ I protested, laughing. ‘Jesus, kid, what sort of a question’s that for a thirteen-year-old to be asking her father?’
‘That means you haven’t. If the answer was “yes” you’d have said so. People prevaricate when they have something to hide; that’s what you told me.’
‘I’ve got nothing to hide,’ I insisted.
I had, of course. Nine months before, I had left Alex in Daisy’s care and gone to Spain for a long weekend, to do some maintenance on the house that I’d bought with part of my father’s estate, and to commission an extension. I’d flown from Glasgow to Barcelona and Jean had come with me. Her suggestion, not mine; nothing had been said in advance about the sleeping arrangements, but I suppose we’d both known what was going to happen. It wasn’t a disaster, but it did feel a little weird. We had some laughs, the sex was good, and I didn’t imagine for a second that Myra would be turning in her grave, but when Jean made it clear at the end of the trip that it would be a oneoff, I felt relieved rather than slighted. She hadn’t been my only fling; there had been other women, a few over the years, but always away games, work as far as Alex was concerned, the truth and nothing but the truth with the understanding Daisy.
