Absolution (43 page)

‘I’ve heard enough,’ said Anderson. ‘You don’t need to tell me any more.’

‘No, I want you to understand. She wouldn’t touch them. She never has.’

‘If I’m thinking right, she’s happy to live off the spoils of the crime, though.’

‘She’s lost enough, don’t you think? You should have seen the way she held on to that photograph, as if she would never let it go. She knew what was important to her. I think she thought the diamonds –
knew
the diamonds – were a curse right from the start.’ McTiernan smiled. ‘Even more so when I blagged my way into the Mitchell Library, and they had all these newspapers on these small rolls of film.’

‘Microfiche?’

Sean nodded. ‘And there it was, all the details about the theft. Just the theft, nothing about the killings that followed. That’s when I realized what we had. And Trude was right. From that moment he was on to her.’

‘Malkie Steele?’ Anderson prompted.

Sean nodded. ‘He was the one who came after her. I thought he would be the first of many, and if we could just get away, live in a remote place, drop out and disappear, we would be safe. But Malkie was the only one who ever came. The real threat –
this –
came from… well, another source altogether.’

‘How did Malkie know? A long time had passed.’

‘I can only think he was involved in the original… incident. He would only have to pay attention to Trude at – what? Eighteen? Twenty-one? Even if he lost sight of her, people are not hard to find, if you know where to look.’ The boy shrugged and turned to face Anderson. He looked
pinched and deathly tired under the midnight fluorescent lighting. ‘But when no one else came after us, I reckoned he’d decided not to tell them he’d found her, to keep everything for himself. But I really don’t know.’

‘And when you decided to do away with Malkie Steele, she disappeared from sight; you made a good job of that.’

‘That was the worst day of my life. Closing up the flat in Ayr. She left, dressed as a boy. I didn’t think I would ever see her again.’ Sean pressed his hands to his face. For a moment Anderson thought he was going to cry.

‘And she went to live in your cottage by the sea until you came back.’

Sean nodded. ‘Nan had to pay the deposit, money laundering and all that. She had to keep them going until I got out of jail, but they sorted things out themselves pretty good. They started trading without me.’ Suddenly, Sean cried out with agonized desperation, ‘I would have done anything – anything – to keep her safe!’

Anderson moved to put an arm round the slender shoulders. ‘I know,’ he said. ‘I know. I hope I’d have the courage to do the same. But I don’t think I would.’

‘Oh, you would. If a guy like Steele came round your daughter, you’d kill him. You would.’

Anderson gave him a squeeze on the arm, turning to lean against the wall, keeping an eye on the green line. ‘I should warn you, there’s no statute of limitation on stolen goods over a certain value. On the other hand, it’s nothing to do with me; it wasn’t my case. And I don’t imagine anyone’s going to be interested in digging it all up again now.’

‘We just want to be left alone. She’s suffered enough.’

‘Look, anything we could do to you now would be a walk in the park after everything you’ve been through.’

Sean nodded again. ‘All those years I worried about Trude,
looked out for her. Yet the bigger threat came out of the blue.’ Sean turned to watch the green line chase itself from left to right, left to right. ‘They said Leask knew her mother?’

‘It seems so. She lived upstairs from him when she came to Glasgow. He might have liked her face, her quiet manner, the fact that she was foreign and alone. But he was a theological student, and she was unmarried and pregnant, so it would have torn him in different directions. I think he probably mistook her secretiveness for rejection and that just burned him for years. Our psychologist thinks he loved her, in a weird sort of way. If Trude looks like her mother, I can see why. She’s very beautiful, beguiling.’

They both looked at the figure in white, the green line still moving, and shared another silence.

‘Mr Anderson?’ said Sean.

‘Colin.’

‘I’m truly sorry.’

Anderson nodded slightly and walked away, leaving the swing doors to close quietly behind him.

Anderson tried not to think, but his brain was moving at the speed of a runaway train.

He had been sitting in the incident room for half an hour, maybe an hour. After an initial burst of frantic activity, time had compressed itself into deep thought and strong coffee. He put the cold coffee down on the desk and sat, cradling his head in his hands, the palms against his eyes, pressing so hard that he could see stars dance on his eyelids.

There was a discreet knock at the door. He shook his head, trying to get his thoughts together.

‘Hello, Colin, how are you?’ It was Costello. ‘Sorry to interrupt.’

‘I wasn’t really doing anything.’

Costello sat down on the desk opposite him. She looked wrung out. ‘I’m just here to pick up my stuff. I’m off on the sick for a week. With all this I don’t think I can cope with – ’

‘Quite right,’ Anderson interrupted, not wanting her to push that conversation to its natural conclusion.

‘Well, I just need some sleep. I seem to have lost the ability to put my head on a pillow and fall asleep. So the Doc said take a week off. I’ve cleared my desk. I think Quinn is reorganizing everything anyway.’

‘Good for her.’

‘Helena McAlpine and her friend are downstairs talking to somebody about clearing out Alan’s stuff. Bit awkward, as I think Quinn’s filed most of it in the bin. I thought you might like to deal with that one. How was she when you – ’

‘Don’t talk about that. It was awful,’ Anderson said slowly, biting his lip.

‘I thought I should start putting the report together. We’ve put Leask in the cottage at Culzean, we’ve got the Leask knife with’ – she paused – ‘two sets of blood. The ADW knife has blood-type matches to the victims, but we’ve sent it away for DNA. Quinn insisted.’

‘Fair enough.’

‘Burns traced the maker of the knives, hand-made in Back, one for each boy, presents from their mother on their twenty-first birthday, and the maker can ID his own work easily. So we have him. We just need to find him.’

‘And I got these from the fax machine.’ She handed him three typed pages, still curled. ‘Quinn requested a brief background report on Leask. The local police sent some official stuff through, but they sent another copy. They’d a bit to add on a more personal level, seemingly. The signature looks like the Gaelic spelling of Macdonald. And the report we requested on the brother has come through.’

‘Mr A.D.W.?’

‘I think you should look at this; it makes some kind of sense of it all.’ Costello slithered from the desk and pulled out a chair. ‘Leask’s story is not pretty. Will I condense it for you or do you want to read it?’

‘Just tell me please.’

‘Brought up on a remote croft they had, miles out of Back, a long walk to school, a long walk home, usually just him and his mum. His dad was dour, depressive, used to beat his wife senseless. Wee George used to try getting between them and would go to school covered in bruises. Once his dad let him rear a lamb, which followed him all over the place. Then he slaughtered it, in front of him. He was six years old, poor wee sod.’

‘God’s sake, I phoned every bloody pet shop on the south side when Peter’s goldfish died, to find a match so he wouldn’t notice.’ Anderson shook his head. ‘Some folk.’

‘He’d be sent to bed on a Sunday for laughing, often going hungry for misbehaving. OK, things were like that in those days, but Leask senior took it all a wee bit too far.’

‘Is that all in the official report?’

‘No, in the margins of this one. I don’t think the local police were too surprised when they heard what had happened. Batten was quite interested when he read in there that when Leask was ten, he saw his dad gored by a cow, right in the stomach. He was in such shock he didn’t go for help. He basically stood there and let his dad bleed to death.’

Anderson nodded with some understanding.

‘Leask had gone on to the Nicholson Institute in Stornoway by then, but was still totally devoted to his mother.’

‘And then the mum remarried and had Alasdair, a sibling rival?’

‘The new husband was charming but the marriage didn’t
last. He was good-looking but not much use in the way of family duties. George took on himself the role of the good father, the man of the house. The new husband legged it pretty quickly. Couldn’t cope with George’s closeness to his mum. George helped bring up the younger one; little Alasdair apparently adored his big brother. Then, when the mother died back in the spring, some batty old cousin at the funeral kept saying how alike the brothers were, with their “lovely blue eyes”. Turned out the whole of Back had realized George Leask wasn’t his father’s son, but no one had said. That was when George first knew that he and Alasdair were full brothers. Nice, eh? What a fall from grace for womankind. That coincided with Alasdair having trouble with his sanity; later he was flipped over the edge by Christina.’

‘I don’t believe all that is in here.’ Anderson was trying to decipher the cramped, scarcely legible writing.

‘A lot of it is. Also, DC Burns’s family is from Stornoway, don’t forget. And don’t dismiss his Auntie Dolina as a source of local knowledge. She was the one who said, and I paraphase, he could accept it when Alasdair was a half-brother but not when he was a full-brother.’

‘Meaning?’

‘Alasdair’s fall from grace was now definitely down to the influence of a bad woman.’

‘And bearing in mind he now knew his mother had been having an affair all along…’

‘And wee George had been getting the shit kicked out of him for a mother who didn’t deserve such devotion. It all starts to add up. He put his career, his whole life, on hold to keep the croft going – ’

‘He looked after his mum and did all kinds of stuff around the farm, which was how he came to be so handy with a knife?’

‘A present from his mother.’

‘Only to be repaid with dishonesty, and the knowledge that all the good he’d tried to do had been useless, a lie.’

‘Batten was right – you can see where it all comes from, can’t you?’

‘So he came down here, and Leeza believes he came down to live among these women to try to help them, but it just all went wrong in his head. It wasn’t just the girlfriend’s fault or Arlene’s fault. It all went back much further. If it weren’t for the fact that he’d left three women dead, he’d be more to be pitied than scorned, as my granny used to say.’ Anderson flicked through the papers. ‘Do we give this to Quinn as it is?’

“We can give her this copy.’ Costello handed over another set of papers, the official version, devoid of the gossip in the margins.

‘Nowhere near as enlightening as that.’ He nodded towards the annotated report.

‘She can have this. It’s the medical report on Alasdair Donald Wheeler. It shows quite clearly the downward spiral of a healthy young man into depression, neurosis, suicidal tendency, hospitalisation for chronic depression… all stemming from his girlfriend taking him for every penny and then aborting their baby. He died less than a year later.’

‘What of this do we take credit for?’

‘I’ll wait and see what we have to carry the can for. You’re the senior officer. I leave it to you.’

‘Ta, matey.’

She stood up. ‘I’ll see you, then.’

‘Try to get a good rest, Costello. We’ve all been through a lot.’

‘You should take your own advice.’ Costello caught a
movement in the room outside. ‘I’m out of here. Quinn’s on her way.’

‘Just what I need.’

Costello left quietly, leaving Anderson feeling worse than he would have thought possible. So much they hadn’t known, couldn’t have known. They were all going to be tormented by
if only
for a while to come.

He could block out the images, but music was playing in his head, worming in his brain. A tune he could not quite identify, annoying him, distracting him. He knew it was a tune he liked, but he would for ever associate it with this moment.

Ella Fitzgerald, ‘Every Time We Say Goodbye’.

He saw DCI Quinn walk past the glass panel in the door. She gave him a compassionate smile, a slight raise of the hand before opening the door.

‘DI Anderson? I am so, so sorry.’

Anderson did not reply.

‘I know this isn’t the time – ’

‘You’re right, it isn’t.’

‘I’ll be brief. Lab says there were three blood types in the sheath on the ADW knife.’

‘Yes, I know.’

‘But I’ve requested the DNA. Better chance of identification, with the passage of time and everything. Only Leask’s prints on the handle. So I think we’ll be safe and sound once we get the reports in.’

‘Good for you.’ Anderson’s voice was flat. ‘All you have to do now is find him.’

Quinn ignored him. She tugged at the sleeves of her beige suit with some irritation. ‘There’s somebody here to see you. I’ll bring her in here. I think it’s a private visit.’

He sniffed loudly and, for the first time since he was a
boy, he wiped his nose with the back of his hand. The figure at the door was tall, wearing a dark coat, standing too close to the door for him to see through the window. Quinn let her pass.

Helena McAlpine walked slowly, clutching a small holdall, the charcoal drawing of her husband sitting on the top, its little bit of Blu-Tak still visible. Helena looked half the woman she had been, as though somebody had switched off the light in her life.

‘I don’t know what to do.’ She looked perfectly calm, pale and composed.

Anderson found that harder to deal with than tears. ‘Neither do I,’ he said honestly.

She pursed her lips a little. ‘How’s the girl? Any progress?’

‘Touch and go. But Leask would have killed her, if Alan hadn’t intervened; it’s worse than they first thought. He saved her life.’

‘It’s no consolation. I just don’t understand.’ Helena sniffled. ‘No. I do know, and I think I understand perfectly.’

‘Just the daughter of a woman he once knew.’