restless night. Not that I’d have slept much anyway; my mind was in danger of overload, a whirlpool of thoughts, each of them a crisis of sorts: the two murder investigations that I was heading up, and the two women with whom my life had become entangled. As I struggled with the intricacies and implications of them all, I kept coming back to Thornton. Myra’s death had been as great a bereavement for him as for me, yet he’d been my rock in the aftermath, my wise counsellor in the dark hours when I thought I wouldn’t be able to cope…
Jesus, I hate that word now. Cope. All those well-meaning people, who looked at me anxiously and asked, ‘Are you coping?’ I found myself hating them for their pity. I hoped they would choke on their own kindness. I wanted to rage at them, to shout, ‘What fucking choice do I have?’
It was Thornie who got me through, for all that his own heart must have been breaking. I might not have made it without him. My own father was no help to me at all; I didn’t know it then, but he was in the last couple of years of his life. He was working too hard, and the diabetes that he hadn’t bothered to tell me about, and was neglecting, was about to lead to irreversible heart difficulty. My dad had always been a remote figure to me. Now I’m inclined to blame him for a lot of things, but in those days he was someone I barely saw, and as I found out after he died, and I learned just a little of the truth about his war, someone I barely knew.
How I wish now that I hadn’t been so self-obsessed in my youth, and so angry over Michael, that I let him maintain that distance between us. If I had known of the war service that had earned him one of his nation’s highest honours, and had taken the time to ask him about it, to ask him what it was he had done or seen that, I realise now, haunted him forever afterwards, then today I might feel a lot differently about him.
I never loved my father; yes, that’s the sad truth, and I doubt that he ever loved me either. There’s nothing I can do to change history, but maybe I can find out a bit more about it. I’ve made myself a private promise, that one day, when I’m a man of leisure, I will seek out his past, and find out what it was that he did on his country’s behalf that marked him so badly. He left Alex and me comfortably off when he died, but that meant little to me, for he had left me nothing of himself, nor given me anything when he was alive.
Thornie was my real dad, and it was him I cried for in the small hours of that night, something that I never did for William Skinner, GC. But no, it wasn’t just for Thornie, but for everything that he had given me as well, for she who had been taken away. My daughter was learning not to cry; I still had a way to go.
I felt grim in the morning, and in a state of turmoil so deep that I did what I had decided against the afternoon before. I told Alex that I’d be very late that night, and I fixed it for her to sleep over with Daisy. Before I left, I packed an overnight bag and slung it in the car. I was flying on autopilot, but the damn thing was faulty and I was heading for a mountaintop.
I didn’t go straight to my desk; it wouldn’t have been fair to my team. Instead I told Fred that I’d had a family bereavement and wanted some space. I went to the gym and lifted some weights, then put on my running shoes and spent an hour and more taking out my anger on the streets. I must have covered about ten miles around the city centre. By the time I’d cooled out and showered, I felt more human, and more able to face my colleagues without the near certainty of turning into Mark McManus.
I did a quick catch-up. There was no news from Newcastle; Milburn and Shackleton were off the radar completely. Our Northumbrian colleagues had run out of ideas, and places to look for them. However there was a message from Alison, asking me to call her when I could.
I did, there and then. I took care to keep my tone professional. I reckoned that if I did I wouldn’t be overcome with guilt about where I was headed that evening. And anyway, Skinner, why should you feel guilty? No strings, no commitment, careers first and foremost, remember.
‘What have you got?’ I asked her, briskly.
‘A name for McCann’s mate: Charles Redpath. Steele managed to have a chat with him over the phone, but all he could do was confirm the barman’s story.’
‘Description?’
‘The clothes match what the man from the mews house told us, but we’ve got nothing more to go on. Redpath isn’t a fighting man from the sound of things. Stevie reckons he didn’t look too closely at the guy, just in case he took an interest in him as well as McCann.’
‘Any other leads?’
‘No,’ she said, candidly. ‘We’ve got names for a few of the other people who were in the bar, some from Redpath and some from the bar staff. Steele and Mackie are going round talking to them all, in the hope that somebody might have seen the killer and known him.’
‘Aye, maybe,’ I murmured sceptically.
She read my mind. ‘I know, anybody who could might think twice about it.’
‘So where do you go now?’
‘Back to Wyllie, as you suggested,’ she replied. ‘I’ve read his statement again. It’s one of the vaguest things I’ve ever seen. I do not believe that it’s a straightforward account of what happened, so I am going to give him another chance to get it right.’
‘That’s good,’ I told her, ‘but don’t you go to him. Have the bugger lifted; have him brought to Torphichen and tell the uniforms who pick him up to have their serious faces on. Let’s get him as jumpy as we can.’
‘That was what I was planning. But I thought we should give him the full treatment. So, how are you placed?’
I frowned. ‘Ali, I told you this was your gig.’
‘I know, but I want your help.’
She didn’t sound desperate, or indeed anxious in any way. What she was asking was logical: the more weight we could put on Wyllie, the more we would squeeze out. ‘Yeah, fine,’ I agreed. ‘Tell you what. Let’s bring him here. Do you know where he works?’
‘Same place as Weir did. B amp;Q at the Jewel.’
‘Right, I’ll send my boys Andy and Mario to lift him there. Those two would scare cheese. Speaking of which, come for lunch at one, and we’ll see him at two, two thirty, once he’s had a wee sweat in our smelliest interview room.’
‘When you say lunch, do you mean senior officers’ dining room?’ she asked, with the smile in her voice that always managed to put one on my face, even then.
My promotion had opened its door to me, although I hadn’t had time to take advantage of the privilege. ‘If that’s what you’d like,’ I replied. ‘But if you’d prefer it, I could get a takeaway from Pizza Hut.’
‘You’d be wearing it as a hat, my dear.’
I’d done it again. I’d begun my conversation with Alison fighting off guilt about my date with Mia, and ended it by inviting her to lunch. But the fact was, she’d lifted my spirits in those few minutes; she’d taken the last of my anger away. Instead of replacing the receiver, I pressed the button in the cradle to get the dial tone. I tried to dial Mia’s mobile number from memory so that I could call her to cancel, but I lost my way after half a dozen digits, so finally I did hang up and reached for my mobile, where it was in the memory. I was scrolling through my directory when the thing sounded; ‘Jean’, it told me.
‘How are you doing?’ I asked, before she could speak.
‘How did you know… oh, these bloody clever mobiles. I’m doing all right, thanks, Bob. I stop for a cry every now and again, but there are things to be done after a death. You just have to get on with them. The undertaker’s been to see me. The funeral’s arranged for Friday afternoon, two o’clock at Daldowie Crematorium.’
That’s good, I thought, instantly. We’ll still be able to go sailing. My face flushed as quickly as my reaction, at its selfishness.
‘You know how to get there?’ she continued.
‘My God, Jean, I haven’t lived in the east for that long,’ I reminded her. ‘My parents were sent off from there, remember, and your mother.’
‘Of course, I’m sorry, Bob. Will you be bringing Alexis?’ My sister-in-law never shortened her niece’s forename.
‘Of course, to that question as well.’
‘It won’t be too much for her?’
‘You’ve got some catching up to do, Auntie. She would drive cocktail sticks under your fingernails if you asked her that question. At her age, a day’s a week in maturity terms.’
‘Mmm,’ she sighed. ‘I keep forgetting. You’re right, I should see more of her, Bob, I know.’
‘I hope you will now that she’s your closest blood relative.’
