Hour Of Darkness (31 page)

Sixty-Two

There was a time in my life when I’d have been as high as a kite walking out of that interview room, a time when I’d have thought that any result was a good result, regardless of the feelings of the innocent caught up in the backwash. After Myra died, I’d spent years making myself impervious to my own pain, and been so successful that the hurt of others had meant nothing to me.

I knew that my intensity could scare people; I’d even been proud of the fact and prepared to use it as a weapon. It’s still there, but not to the same extent. Too much has happened to me over the years, and too much has happened to others. I’ve hurt too many people close to me, most of all, Sarah.

It took my own wounding by Aileen, Sarah’s successor in my life, now gone to wreak, her havoc on English politics, to make me understand how much harm I’d caused Sarah. I’ve made both of us a promise that I’d never do so again.

That’s why I told her about Mia Watson, after Alex’s phone call, told her all about her, and why I’d hoped she’d stay away for good.

Sarah thought about it for a while, and then she asked, ‘If I’d been around at the time, would the outcome have been any different?’

‘I’d like to think so,’ I replied, honestly, ‘but given the man I was back then, I can’t be certain.’

She kissed me and said, ‘Well, I have faith in the man you are now, and that’s enough for me.’

How tragic it was, I thought as I drove, that David Mackenzie had never experienced such self-discovery. He had died, as I knew for sure by then, as he had lived, self-centred, uncaring and ultimately self-destructive. It was an even greater tragedy that he had destroyed three other people alongside himself.

Cheryl was bound for a life sentence. Their children, Alice and Zach, faced one that would be even longer, as they would discover. They would carry their parents’ story with them for life, and they might even be condemned to an institutional upbringing, unless the uncle that I knew they had was big-hearted enough to take them on . . . always assuming he wasn’t a clone of the one who had blighted David’s life.

Yes, I was more than a little depressed as I drove west. I hadn’t gone in there with Wilding intending to unmask a murderess, although the information that Father Donnelly had finally got round to giving me had made that a highly possible scenario.

No, I’d gone in there hoping against hope that Cheryl would tell me that her volatile husband had pissed off to cool down in Benidorm and work off the jealousy that he harboured towards everyone he encountered in his professional life.

My optimism had faded when she said that she had withdrawn all that cash, not David. She hadn’t been trying to throw him off her scent; she’d been trying to fool us.

Even then, though, it wasn’t until I told her that I knew about her confession to Tom Donnelly, the secrets that he could not, rather than would not divulge, and I saw the look on her face, that the last doubt left me.

The Allans’ cottage wasn’t actually in Lanark, but in the surrounding countryside, near to Hyndford Bridge which crosses the River Clyde, near the old Winston Barracks, a place I’d heard my father mention. There was a car parked just along the road when I arrived, but I ignored it. Instead I turned into the short drive that led into Max’s place.

The old ex-ACC wasn’t surprised to see me when he answered the summons of the big brass knocker. ‘Come in, Bob,’ he said. ‘Julie told me you’d been to see her.’

He led me through the house and out into the back garden. Actually ‘garden’ was an understatement; it was more of a paddock, and there was an old building at the far end that might have been a stable.

‘Sit yourself down,’ he insisted, pointing to a green metal table, with a couple of folding seats. ‘Would you like a beer?’

At that moment I would have loved a beer, but something stopped me from accepting; it wouldn’t have tasted right. ‘No thanks, Max,’ I replied. ‘The tap water’s nice in this part of the world, though.’

He disappeared back indoors, returning with a jug and two tumblers, all blue plastic. ‘This’ll be about Mackenzie,’ he murmured, as he poured.

‘Yes, Max,’ I told him. ‘And don’t tell me you weren’t expecting me, even before your wife called you. I’m too good for that.’

‘I never made any secret of the fact that David was married to my niece,’ he said, anticipating my first accusation and denying it, all in one breath.

‘Come on, Max,’ I sighed, probably sounding as sad as I felt. ‘That’s exactly what you did. You never declared it, and you should have. I’ve asked around and I can’t find a single officer who knows about the relationship. In my book that’s secrecy. You could have volunteered it when Dan Provan came to see you in your local, but you held it back, even then.’

‘I didn’t think it was relevant,’ he said.

‘Aw, man,’ I protested, ‘please don’t insult me, or yourself for that matter. A police officer, a former colleague, and his wife had disappeared. There were clear signs that he might have harmed her, possibly even killed her. Everything you knew was bloody relevant.’

‘But how was I supposed to know all that had happened?’ he countered. ‘Wee Dan was very circumspect when we had our chat.’

‘Not that bloody circumspect. I know that he told you Mackenzie was missing, yet you virtually denied knowledge of the man.

‘Let me ask you something, Max. Your wife, and her sister-in-law, the two Julies, do they not get on? Do they never speak to each other? Sorry, chum, I believe that you knew from early on that Cheryl was missing too and that the worst was feared. When you heard you panicked.’

‘Why would I do that? Are you going to tell me that?’

‘Sure,’ I retorted, ‘and before you ask, yes, I can prove it. You were scared because you intercepted David’s application to join the police, with its accompanying document and the full disclosure that would have ruled him out, almost certainly in those days, as a candidate. In doing so you saddled the force with a guy who was emotionally unstable, and borderline psycho. That’s criminal, and I’m duty bound to report it to the fiscal.’

My old friend threw back his head and gave a short laugh. ‘Aye, fine,’ he exclaimed. ‘You do that. You’ll look like a clown at the trial, though.’ He peered at me, over the top of his reading glasses. ‘When you took him off my hands, Bob, one of his line managers was insisting that I refer him for psychological assessment. I had no grounds for refusing that, but you turned up and took the problem away. So yes, go ahead, report me to the Crown Office and see if you like the way you come out of it.’

I sensed relief in him, as if he’d just dodged a bullet. So I fired again.

‘I wouldn’t hesitate, Max, but I’m not really here about that. I’m here about Cheryl. We know, chum. She’s been charged.’

It happened in an instant. The light left his eyes, the colour left his face and his cheeks seemed to collapse as he turned into a very old man, far older than his years.

‘I’m sorry,’ I told him, sincerely. ‘There’s no triumph in this.’

‘I love that lass,’ he whispered. ‘All the more since our wee Rosina was taken so young. I warned her about David right at the very start. If you’ve found out about his past, you’ll know I was involved right at the very start.’ He looked at me again. ‘You do know all of it, I take it?’

I nodded.

He frowned, deeply. ‘David had taken some terrible beatings from that uncle of his,’ he continued, ‘but he never showed a scrap of remorse for what he did to him in revenge. It’s easy to assume that his nature was beaten into him but maybe it was there all along.

‘I told Cheryl to be careful when she took up with him, but she had her heart set on him. So I did what I could. I pushed Tom Donnelly towards him, you know. I thought his influence would make him better, and it did, or I thought it did.’

‘Why did you tell Provan about Father Tom?’

‘Because at the time I thought that David would go there. When Julie told me, I thought what you all did, that he’d finally snapped and done something terrible to the lass. In sending Dan to Tom, I thought I was sending him after David. It never occurred to me that it would be Cheryl who’d turn up on his doorstep. It never occurred to me then either that our relationship need come out, or that it would be seen as relevant if it did.’

He looked me in the eye. ‘You’re right of course, I did change his application form. Cheryl made me promise to help him get into the force, and that was the only way I could be sure of it.’

‘She told us he knocked her about,’ I said.

‘Aye, she told me that too, but only lately. The abused became the abuser, and not just physically; there was mental cruelty there too. It’s not that he didn’t love her; he did, no question, but as you said, he was borderline psycho, Bob, and sometimes he strayed over on to the other side.’ Max buried his face in his hands and rubbed it, vigorously, almost violently.

‘If only she’d told me about that sooner,’ he moaned, ‘but she didn’t because she knew I’d have finished him in the police, and without the police, he’d have had no restraint, none at all. She put up with it, until she snapped herself. She did to him what he did to that uncle years ago, only she was better at it.’

‘How?’ I asked, as horrific visions flashed through my mind.

He must have read them in my eyes, for he exclaimed, ‘No, no! Nothing as cruel as that. You know she’s a pharmacist?’ I nodded. ‘She had some stuff in the house that she probably shouldn’t have, diazepam, sedatives that she gave him when he got really disturbed, that time he had his serious breakdown. She ground enough into a bottle of beer to knock him out and then she suffocated him with a plastic bag.’

He removed his specs to wipe away tears. ‘I think she sees it as something of a mercy killing,’ he said. ‘She told me he was raving about your man McGuire, and about Andy Martin; he said that given half a chance he’d kill them both. She believed he meant it, so in the end she killed him to save him from himself.’

I gazed at him, directly. ‘Where is he, Max?’

He stamped his foot on the ground. I looked down and saw that some of the paving on which we sat was new, or had been replaced. The concrete grouting between the slabs was much less weathered than the rest.

‘I’m sorry, Bob,’ Max sighed. ‘I know. After forty years as a police officer, I shouldn’t have had a second thought. I should have called you as soon as she turned up here on Thursday evening. She phoned me, you see, and told me she needed my help. She needed my help,’ he repeated. ‘I love the lassie like a daughter. What was I going to do?’

I couldn’t answer him. A long time ago, I disregarded my own duty, even if it wasn’t on such a serious scale.

‘What next?’ he asked.

‘Lottie and Dan are outside,’ I replied, quietly. ‘They’ll take you into custody, then we’ll get the excavators in. Your house is now a crime scene.’

‘Tell them to put it back the way they found it, Bob, please. My Julie loves this garden.’

His Julie. Another life shattered.

I couldn’t look at him as I phoned Lottie Mann, telling her to join us.

I couldn’t bring myself to hang around either. I didn’t want to see him being put into the back of a police car with the ridiculous over-precaution of an officer’s hand on his head. I didn’t want to see the paper suits crawling over the place looking for samples of the bleach Max said he’d used to scrub out the luggage compartment of the Honda that his niece had used as a hearse.

He’d asked me if I thought she might be able to plead to a reduced charge. I mumbled my way round that one, but it must have been as clear to him as it was to me that her flight, and the things she’d done in the aftermath to conceal her crime, had to mean, inevitably, that she’d be done for nothing less than murder.

I wanted out of there and so I got out of there, heading back to Sarah and my lovely, normal, well-adjusted family unit, that I’d determined was going to be the centre of my life from that moment on.

But I didn’t get halfway home before I had another call from Alex that kicked the ball right up on the slates once again.

Sixty-Three

It made Alexis Skinner very sad that she had no memory of her mother, only a vision in her mind put together on the basis of photographs, stories her father had told her, and the shockingly self-revealing diaries that had been discovered after her early death in a car accident that she would probably have survived in a modern vehicle.

Alex was under no illusion that Myra Graham Skinner had been an angel, but her dad had loved her. More than that, he had liked her; he had told her when she was old enough for mature discussion that when she had died, it was as if he had lost three people, his wife, his lover and his best friend.

It was only as an adult that she had come to appreciate what a sad and lonely man her father had been through her childhood. He hadn’t been monastic, not at all; there had been women, for sure, and even a semi-domestic relationship with another detective called Alison that had lasted for a couple of years, until it dwindled to nothing.

The Mia Sparkles thing . . . she always thought of her by her radio name . . . had been very short-lived . . . if it had ever lived at all, for maybe she’d been wrong about a strange phone conversation she’d had with her father after he’d been away overnight . . . but it had made an impression on her.

He had met Mia in the course of an investigation, and somehow, after he’d told her she had a big fan in Gullane, he had wound up bringing her home. While Alex had been impressed as any thirteen-year-old would have been by a star figure twice her age, and had taken to her, she had known instinctively that she was not stepmother material, and so she had not been heartbroken when she had gone, as surprisingly as she had arrived.

She thought of the years between her mother’s death and the arrival of Sarah as her father’s Dark Ages. She believed firmly that they should stay unlit, and so, when Andy had brought up Mia’s name, she had been unusually uncommunicative.

She and he had been a couple on, off and then on again for a decade, and they had a ‘no secrets’ policy. However, if Mia was a secret, she was her father’s, not hers, and not one to be shared with anyone. He hadn’t pressed her on it; indeed, he hadn’t discussed it further, and that was good.

As she watched Andy’s daughter running through the first few fallen leaves of autumn in the Royal Botanic Gardens, with her younger brother staggering after her, she wondered what her mother would have thought about her lack of desire for children of her own.

She and Andy had broken off their engagement over his discovery that she had terminated a pregnancy without his knowledge. She had done so because she had believed that having a child at that point would have disrupted the formative years of her legal career.

She stood by her decision; it had worked out for her. She had become a partner in her firm, Curle Anthony and Jarvis, in almost record time, and was one of its key earners. She had reached a position where if she chose, she could take a couple of years out to start a family, then step back in exactly where she had been before.

But she felt no urge to make that move, and with no pressure from Andy, she was beginning to doubt that she ever would. They might marry, they might not. Either way they would be happy . . . just like her father and Sarah, who seemed more content and confident the second time around than they had ever been before.

She was smiling at the thought, as she ran to retrieve a ball that Danielle had kicked down a sloping path, smiling as her mobile rang.

She reached the ball, stood on it to stop its progress, and checked the phone. She saw her own number on screen; her position in her firm meant weekend calls and because of that she put her landline on divert every time she went out.

‘This is Alex,’ she said, cheerily.

‘I think I would have known that,’ a woman replied. ‘You had a mature voice for a thirteen-year-old. This is Mia, Mia Watson, Mia Sparkles, if you remember that name.’

‘Yes,’ she whispered. ‘Yes I do. What do you want?’

‘I need to speak to your father. I’m sorry to be calling you, but his number is ex-directory and probably monitored, so this is the only way I could think of to contact him.’

‘What do you want me to do?’ she snapped. ‘I won’t forward this call, if that’s what you’re thinking. It’ll be his choice whether he speaks to you or not.’

‘Understood.’ Alex was struck by the change in her voice. There was none of the old vivacity; instead there was a coolness, and an underlying tension. ‘I’d like you to ask him to call this number. It’s a Spanish mobile.’ She recited nine digits, then repeated them. ‘Have you got that?’

‘Yes; I’ve noted it. Okay, I’ll do it, but I warn you, he may not want to know you. It’s been a long time, and his life’s a lot different now.’

‘So’s mine,’ the woman said, ‘believe me. Tell him it’s very much in his interests to call me . . . to call me, and nobody else, that is. It has to be between us, and us alone.’

The line went dead. She found herself staring at the phone.

‘Who was that?’ Andy asked, approaching, with Robert riding on his shoulders. ‘The ghost of Christmas yet to come, by the look on your face.’

‘Business,’ she answered, sharply. She kicked Danielle’s ball back towards him. ‘I’ll catch you up,’ she said. ‘I have to make a call.’