He wouldn’t have been grinning if he’d been around when, finally, I looked at Paula and saw not a kid cousin, but the woman I’d loved all along, even through the years of my marriage. As it failed, I turned to her for comfort, and discovered that I didn’t want to be anywhere else, ever again.
My old inhibitions didn’t disappear in a flash, nor in anything like it. For a while the fact that we were sleeping together was a secret to be kept, even from our mothers. When the shackles were finally broken it was by the unlikeliest person: Nana Viareggio, our grandmother, our matriarch. She’s a wise old bird and she spotted the difference between us before it had dawned on anyone else. When she asked me about it, I started to apologise to her, to seek her understanding, if not her forgiveness.
She laughed at me. ‘You must be a secret Calvinist, boy, for all you were raised in the Holy Catholic Church. That’s Scotland for you; where your Papa and I came from, your relationship would have been encouraged. His father and my mother were cousins. Didn’t anyone ever tell you that? What’s wrong with such marriages? The European royal families have been marrying with each other for hundreds of years.’
She was right; Nana’s wisdom encouraged me to do some research on the subject, and I discovered that in many cultures, it’s the norm, not an exception. When I showed this to Paula, she laughed, and told me that she knew three women in the Edinburgh merchant community who were in happy marriages with cousins, arranged when they were children.
Nobody’s ever told us they disapprove of our relationship. . or even been foolish enough to try. . but I know we were the subject of gossip when we moved in together, as we did after a period of maintaining separate homes, for show. The chattering classes were pretty much silenced though, by our friends, first among them Bob Skinner. He made a point of inviting us, as a couple, to every formal dinner with which he was involved, and the chief constable, or deputy as he was then, hosts or organises plenty of those. He and Aileen, his politician wife, and Neil and Louise McIlhenney, were the only non-family guests when Paula and I were married in a private ceremony in Kelso just over a year ago, and they’re still among very few people who know that we’re man and wife.
It wasn’t long after we tied the knot that Paula got broody. Ironically, Maggie, my ex, had a lot to do with it. She remarried and had a baby daughter, born a few months after Stevie, her cop father, was killed, tragically, while on duty, by an explosive device that was meant for someone else. We gave her as much support as we could, saw a lot of her and the wee one, and it was those first few weeks of Stephanie Rose Steele that triggered a full-blown outbreak of the baby blues.
‘When you were told you were infertile, what was the diagnosis?’
The question came out of the blue, across the table in a corner of Ondine, a trendy restaurant on King George IV Bridge that Paula had booked for my fortieth birthday dinner. (Just the two of us: I’d warned her that if she organised a surprise party for me, I would tell the world when she hits the same mark.) I was taken aback, but more by the content than the timing, for I’d read the signs by then. However, I’d been expecting her to ask what I thought about adoption. If she had, I’d have said ‘Fine’, without missing a beat. But I’d misread her. She didn’t simply want to be a mother; she wanted to have a child.
I frowned, as I recalled the moment when the cock-doctor had broken the news. ‘Diagnosis?’ I repeated. ‘How many ways are there of telling you your tadpoles don’t work?’
‘Lots,’ she replied. ‘What did he actually say?’
I shrugged my shoulders. ‘Word for word, I can’t recall. He gave me the headline news straight up: “Mr McGuire, you’re the problem.” Then he said I was producing sperm, but that they were no use.’
‘You mean the count was too low?’ she persisted, like a QC in court.
‘I dunno. That was what I assumed.’
She drew me that look, over her glass. ‘You did want a baby, though.’
‘Yes.’
‘Why?’
‘Pfffff. Why does any bloke? Because he’s married and it’s what you do. We did try, you know; we read textbooks on the subject, took her temperature, did it with a cushion under her bum. We even went by the phases of the moon for a while. None of it worked.’
‘So you gave up?’
‘What else could we do? We weren’t left with any choice.’
‘My darling boy,’ she purred, ‘do the words “second” and “opinion” have any significance for you?’
‘The man who did my tests was an expert, a top consultant,’ I protested. ‘He cost a load of money.’
‘For which you didn’t get value,’ she suggested, ‘if that’s all he told you.’
‘There was more,’ I admitted, ‘but I wasn’t listening. He gave us a written report, but I never read it.’
‘Aw!’ she exclaimed, with more than a hint of mockery. ‘Poor wee boy. Mario threw a huff. You took it personally, saw yourself as unmanned, so you went away and flexed your muscles in a corner, without even thinking “underlying cause”, and looking into it.’
I felt myself go red. ‘If your sperm is useless, love, that’s it,’ I muttered.
‘Not necessarily,’ she countered. ‘Do you still have the report?’
‘Hell no. It hit the bin the next day.’
‘Can you get another copy?’ she asked.
‘I imagine so.’
‘Will you?’
I looked her in the eye and I saw something I’d never seen there before, an unspoken thing that was, beyond any doubt, a plea. She wasn’t asking me to go back to the cock-doctor; she was begging me.
‘Of course I will, love,’ I promised. ‘With neither hope nor expectation, but I’ll do it.’ I paused. ‘And if it confirms what I believe, then we’ll look at other options, like a donor, for example.’
‘No.’ She reached out and touched my cheek. ‘I want your baby, nobody else’s.’ Then she grinned. ‘But I warn you. If the consultant says there’s just one viable tadpole in there that’ll do the job, and I have to squeeze it out with my own bare hands, then I will.’
Thank God, it didn’t come to that. When the copy of the report hit my email inbox and I read it, I found out that it said that the problem required further investigation before the precise cause of my infertility could be established. I went straight back to the consultant and told him to go ahead. My output was collected and observed. It didn’t take the specialist long to tell me that I suffer from what he called asthenospermia; what that means is, the little buggers were there, but they were lousy swimmers. That being the case, he proposed that we assist them by trying in-vitro fertilisation. He warned us that the odds were against success, even after several attempts, but he didn’t know Paula. The first shot was a bullseye.
When her pregnancy was confirmed, I’ve never seen her so happy. No, scratch that; I’ve never seen anyone looking so happy. Me? Looking at her, I couldn’t stop myself; I cried like the baby she’s expecting.
She picked up the metaphorical bones of our unfinished discussion and gnawed on them some more. ‘So how are you going to play it?’ she asked.
‘Like any other criminal investigation,’ I replied.
‘Criminal?’
‘Yes. Varley and Cowan compromised a CID investigation; worse than that, they leaked information to a suspect. Jack McGurk and Sauce Haddock had a man called Kenny Bass under surveillance in connection with a cigarette smuggling operation; they’d had a tip that he’d imported a cache of dodgy fags, and they were playing him. They had an authorised phone tap in place on Bass’s mobile, trying to pull in other people involved in the scam. Late yesterday afternoon, when they were just about to finish for the day, they were told about an exchange of texts setting up a meeting that same evening. They traced the other number to a man called Freddy Welsh. He’s a building contractor, and he has no criminal record, but the fact that he initiated the get-together interested my guys. The venue was Lafayette’s, Regine Zaliukas’s pub out in Slateford.’
Paula looked puzzled. ‘Which one’s that? I thought I knew everywhere in Edinburgh.’
‘It used to be called Caballero’s, before Regine made her now departed husband move it upmarket and clear out the pole dancers.’
‘Ah, that place.’ She smiled. ‘I went out with a guy once and he took me there. I did not go out with him twice.’
‘Did I know him?’ I asked.
‘No.’
‘Just as well for him. Anyway, our two planned to be in there, waiting for Bass and the other man when they
