Absolution (20 page)

It wasn’t going to work.

‘You look as though you’ve been in a fight.’ She refolded her arms. ‘You’re about to walk into another.’

He tried for levity. ‘At your worst, when you had PMT and had stopped smoking, you weren’t as dangerous as a BMW with a mind of its own.’

‘Drove itself, did it?’ she snorted. ‘Don’t blame the monkey, blame the organ grinder.’ Helena looked him up and down, then the smell hit her. He had got drunk and had
been lying all night in a gutter somewhere, throwing up on himself. She saw his bloodshot eye and the deep angry cut on the side of his face, a bloodied gap in his lower jaw. She resisted the thought that he might be badly hurt.

‘Do you mind having a shower? You smell,’ she said calmly, keeping her eyes from his face.

‘I’m fine, thank you for asking.’

‘I didn’t.’

‘I don’t think I have any broken bones, but your car is lying in a field somewhere. I managed to get out before it exploded into a million pieces.’ He went to lean on the worktop, but the pain ricocheted through him and he shot back upright. ‘I’ve dislocated my shoulder, though,’ he said.

‘Does it hurt?’

‘Yes, I’m in agony.’

‘Good. We all have our crosses to bear. You chose yours; some of us aren’t so lucky.’ She raised her chin, a sign that she was going on the attack. ‘You were the one out shagging some brainless bimbo. In the throes of passion, you forgot your mobile. She phoned. She phoned
here
!’ Helena walked past him. ‘You owe me an explanation as well as a new car, but it can wait. I’m busy right now. And you stink.’

He heard the front door shut. He couldn’t disagree with her.

Upstairs, he spent a good hour in the en suite bathroom, using all of Helena’s bottles that smelled nice but not too girlie. He punished himself by dabbing Dettol into the cuts on his face, managing to get copious amounts of blood on the towel. He wanted Helena to see it, to know how much he was hurting. He wanted her to apologize. First.

In another suit and a fresh shirt, he began to feel a little more human. He dumped his soiled clothes in the laundry
basket, took them out, carried them into the bedroom and dumped them in the middle of the floor, arranging them so the blood looked as bad as he could make it. Mick Batten would have a field day with them.
Why not go the whole hog?
He went downstairs and scribbled a note saying he was going to the Western to get his shoulder X-rayed. He folded up the piece of paper and walked into the sitting room, placing it on the coffee table.

He needed to get to the hospital, but from the look of the traffic the taxi would take ages. He turned to go, then noticed the photographs lying on the sideboard, still wrapped in their envelope of fragile tissue paper, still covered in dust from the loft. On top of them, folded and dog-eared, was Robbie’s Queen’s Commendation. He picked them up and held them to his nose, inhaling dust and old memories. He sensed that somebody else had gone through them. Frowning, he slipped them into the inside pocket of his jacket. He wouldn’t let them out of his sight again.

Hurriedly, he left the house, walking out to Great Western Road to get a taxi to the hospital. He had an hour to get to A&E, jump the queue and get his shoulder sorted and the cut on his face cleaned properly. Then it would be back to the station, to face another atrocity with a head full of sepia-tinted memories, memories of two little boys and a snowman.

Helena got round the corner and was in the back of a taxi before she burst into tears, her hands to her mouth as she wept uncontrollably. What if he was really hurt? Why should she care? The stupid selfish bastard. So why was she crying? She didn’t know. She blew her nose, wiped the tears from her eyes and stabbed out the station number on her mobile,
trying to remember the last two digits. She didn’t get the number right until the taxi was outside the gallery. She asked for DI Anderson to be paged and left a number for him to call. She then went into her office and slammed the door. Fiona looked up but said nothing and returned to cataloguing the Dutch imports.

Helena was mindlessly opening a pile of envelopes, ripping up the junk mail, placing the bills on a neat pile, when the phone went. ‘Hello,’ she said.

‘Helena?’

‘That you, Colin?’ She found she couldn’t speak any more, her throat closed with tears.

‘Are you OK?’

‘I’m sorry. I’ve just seen the state of him. It was a bit of a shock.’

‘Yes, but are
you
OK? That couldn’t have been easy for you.’

There was an unmistakable tenderness in his voice.
He knows.
His kindness provoked a tear that ran slowly down her cheek.

‘Helena?’

‘Sorry, Colin. I’m a bit shattered by all this, that’s all.’

‘Well, he’s doing a good impression of the walking wounded. A uniform went and got him. Judging by the state of the Beamer, he was lucky to walk out of it.’ A pause. ‘I’m not making this any better, am I?’ He sounded somewhere busy; she could imagine him talking, one hand to his ear.

‘Had he been to hospital before he came home?’

‘Don’t think so. He was probably saving the whole horror of it for you. Do you know where he is now?’

‘Probably still at home, licking his wounds,’ said Helena.

‘I have a profiler champing at the bit; no matter what
state Alan’s in, we need him here. If the press get on to this…’

‘Bloody-minded arsehole,’ said Helena stabbing the next envelope with a pencil, shattering its point. ‘My car’s a writeoff, I take it?’

‘I guess so.’

Helena thought before asking the next question, never exactly sure how far Anderson’s twenty-year loyalty to her husband could be stretched, or how far she wanted to stretch it. Where did it happen?’

Silence.

‘I want to know where it happened.’

‘On the coast road, near Culzean Castle.’

‘The Heads of Ayr Road?’

‘Yes, I presume he was avoiding the police. No sober normal person would choose to go home that way. It’s an accident black spot at the best of times. And, before you ask, I don’t know who he was with.’ There was silence on the line.

‘Don’t worry, Colin. I don’t want to know the gory details. He’ll have his reasons.’

By six o’clock on Monday night the incident room was busier than Glasgow Central in the rush hour. Colin Anderson was holding his head in his hands, staring at the screen in front of him, about to read something for the third time and no nearer making any sense of it. He needed sleep.

Wyngate tapped him on the shoulder. ‘It’s the wife on the phone.’

‘Whose wife?’

‘Yours.’

Anderson shook his head, ‘Tell her I’m not here.’

‘Told her that at lunchtime.’

Well, you haven’t found me yet.’

Wyngate walked away, muttering platitudes down the phone. Anderson checked his mobile was off and began rattling his thumbs on the keyboard. There was no point in reading any of this; he needed action, and he could feel the adrenalin building up in his blood.

‘I’m ready, DI Anderson,’ said Batten into his ear. ‘How’s the Boss? He looks a little delicate.’

‘Aquaplaning BMW. Best not to ask.’ Anderson had to hand it to McAlpine. When the Boss had returned from Accident and Emergency with a strapped-up shoulder and a bumful of analgesic, he had strutted into the office looking fresh and calm. His face looked as though he had gone two rounds with Mike Tyson, but he was smiling, tentatively trying to hide the gap in his teeth.

Anderson knocked gently on the open door, wary of the Boss’s mood. ‘Alan?’

‘Yip.’

We’re ready to roll.’

‘I’ll be out in a minute.’

Anderson looked at the piles of painkillers, coffee cups, reams of statements and papers covering the DCI’s desk, and realized that in that small amount of time he had been absorbing every detail of Arlene, had tasted and digested every morsel of information. The distinct smell of alcohol, wound-cleaning or recreational, didn’t escape him.

McAlpine gestured at the photographs in front of him. ‘And all this was in Whistler’s Lane?’

‘Yeah, in behind Savaways to be precise; it was one of their skips.’

McAlpine sucked air in through pursed lips. It caught the bloodied well where the tooth had been, and he grimaced.
‘Whistler’s Lane, eh?’ He looked out of the window. Well, we’d better get on with it.’

Forty-two officers were waiting for them to get started, ending phone calls, sending off emails, doing a final scroll-through of screens of information. McAlpine walked to the back of the room, speaking to nobody, holding the side of his bruised face with bruised fingers.

Anderson rapped the bottom of a coffee cup against the tabletop. ‘Look, guys, it’s a big meeting, it’s a small room. The longer we’re here, the more unpleasant it is going to get.’ He rubbed his forehead with his open palm. ‘You all know Mick here, he’s been floating around this station like Casper the friendly profiler.’ Batten raised a hand in greeting but remained seated, feet up on a computer terminal, letting the string of leather he had been playing with swing like a metronome. ‘You all know what he does. Well, he has a few interesting things to say, so settle down and pay attention.’

Costello lifted her eyes to look at McAlpine, but his face remained impassive as though he wasn’t listening as Anderson continued to talk. ‘The two policemen who emerged from Whistler’s Lane saw’ – Anderson ticked them off on his fingers – ‘two loved-up Goths – the young kids who found the body – and another couple. The girl was described as wearing a Victorian-type cloak, very pretty, with matt-black hair, very dense, probably dyed.’ He pointed at the identikit faces. ‘The male, early twenties, blond, thin, not tall, slight build.’ The group murmured; there had been a few sightings. ‘They looked as though they’d been having sex up the lane and had been disturbed. We need to track them down, and we need to talk to them. The blond guy had a mark on his T-shirt that might have been blood, and he was seen earlier by Michaels, one of the cops, appearing,
quote, “as if he was looking for somebody”. He was first seen on his own, then with her, and again after she left him. He was on his own, twice, and might have been sexually charged up. So we concentrate on him. What we don’t know is how to tie that precisely with the time of Arlene’s death, but it was within thirty minutes.

‘They’re doing an e-fit as we speak,’ said Anderson, ‘and Michaels has a good idea in his head as to what they both look like. The two kids who found the body are in the clear. So we’re more interested in these two, the shaggers with no names,’ said Anderson. ‘From two points of view. Was the dark-haired one in the cloak a potential vic who got away? Or was she the bait? Women tend to trust other women… so pay attention to what Mick Batten has to say.’

‘The guy that the witness said was Irish, the guy who was seen speaking to the victim minutes before she died…’ Littlewood said. ‘The witness can’t describe a face, but he got the impression he was about forty, dressed soberly in an anorak, and with a hat on, so we don’t think he’d been out clubbing. Something about the exchange made the witness think Arlene knew him. We haven’t traced him yet either.’ The temperature dropped in the room. ‘Note that this kind of echoes what they said when Lynzi left the train station, the same vague pick-up. So we might have found his method, or, as I said, it might be an innocent witness we haven’t traced yet. And, for the record, Arlene was not working. She was out, celebrating the fact that she had got the keys for her new flat. Council flat down in Norval Street. We’ll get there when we have time. Costello is going to interview Arlene’s friend Tracey, once she’s sobered up.’ Littlewood smirked at his own joke. ‘Once
Tracey’s
sobered up, not Costello.’

‘If she wasn’t turning tricks, then what was she doing up Whistler’s Lane?’ asked Mulholland.

‘That’s what we have to find out.’

‘The same reason Elizabeth Jane let him into her flat, maybe?’ Costello challenged, glaring at Littlewood. ‘The same reason Lynzi went up Victoria Lane?’

‘What was her religion? If she was a hooker?’ Batten asked out of the blue. Everybody looked blank. Batten was unruffled. ‘Any connection? With the others, I mean?’

‘Not that we can find.’

‘Good,’ said Batten firmly.

The door opened, and Irvine came in with a sheaf of white paper. ‘E-fits, as close as we can get them.’ Hands were raised, the pictures passed round.

McAlpine had been sipping a cup of cold coffee with the good side of his mouth. He then straightened, staring at the pixellated image as it was pinned on the wall, catching teasing glimpses as other people’s copies were passed around the room. There was the semblance there of someone he knew. He took a copy and looked at it closely.

It took him a while to recall it. ‘I think I can ID him,’ said McAlpine quietly. ‘Sean James McTiernan.’

Silence dropped on the room like darkness.

‘He’s on my list,’ Costello almost shouted with delight. ‘He came out of Penningham ten days ago.’ She flicked through her papers.

‘Penningham?’ asked Batten.

‘Open prison, down the coast. He would be there because his last address was Ayr,’ explained Costello.

‘What did he go down for?’

‘Culpable homicide. He killed a Glasgow hard man, Malkie Steele, four – five – years ago. Should have got a medal, not a life licence.’

‘Stabbing?’

‘Kicked him to death. He did damage his face, though, if I remember right.’

‘Faith?’

‘Catholic? A name like Sean James McTiernan, must be.’

‘Can we set up an interview?’ asked Batten.

‘No, we can’t. Scots law. Once we nab him, we have only six hours, so that’s the last thing we do.’ McAlpine’s voice was quiet but authoritative. ‘Especially as the death of Malkie Steele happened in Whistler’s Lane. I don’t want anybody going near him without my precise say so. And I mean it. Costello? A word, please. My office, after Mick is through?’ McAlpine’s voice was sharp. Costello coloured at being singled out. She had been on her feet for fourteen hours, and had her mind set on a fish supper and a hot bath. No chance. ‘Over to you, Doc.’

Michael Batten, B.Sc. (Hons.) Psych., Ph.D., perched himself on the table, his eyes on McAlpine, weighing something up in his mind. He stubbed out his cigarette into his Diet Coke before turning to face them. As he moved, his leather jacket opened, revealing a T-shirt that stated: ‘Hug me, I’m sober.’