Candles and Roses (21 page)

Another related thought struck her. If she hadn’t fought back, what really might have been the outcome? Physical assault? Sexual assault? Rape? Anything was possible. And if he could potentially do that to her, he could do it to any woman.

Including Lizzie Hamilton.

She just left. It was nothing to do with me.

She just left.

Still shaking, Kelly fumbled in her handbag for the small purse she used to store her bank cards. After she and Greg had found the body at the Clootie Well, that policeman, the detective, had given them one of his business cards. ‘Just in case you think of something else,’ he’d said. ‘If anything occurs to you, even something trivial, don’t hesitate to call. You never know what might be important.’

She found the card and held it between her fingers. DI Alec McKay. Major Crimes Division. A PO Box address in Inverness. A direct line number. A mobile.

She’d speak to Greg when she got back. He’d want her to report the assault in any case, though she couldn’t really see that going anywhere beyond an informal warning to Gorman.

But this was something else.

She just left.

It was nothing to do with me.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

This guy had already kept them waiting twenty minutes and McKay wasn’t in the best of tempers. Chrissie kept glancing at him, knowing fine well how he was feeling, and no doubt hoping he was still going to play ball.

Well, yes, he’d do that. He’d promised Chrissie he was going to, and, whatever else he might be, McKay was a man of his word. And smart enough to recognise that Chrissie might just be right. This might be what they needed. It might be the answer, or at least part of the answer.

But that didn’t mean he had to be pleased that this arrogant bugger couldn’t even be bothered to keep to his appointment schedule. Typical of bloody medical types. Always thought their time was invaluable, and the rest of us should just put up with being buggered about.

Chrissie had picked him up at five forty-five as agreed. She’d been waiting in reception, chatting to one of the receptionists who, it turned out, had been at school with her. That was another thing about this neck of the woods. It was such a small world that everyone knew everyone else’s business. Even if Chrissie had said nothing—and he knew her well enough to accept she hadn’t—it wouldn’t take long for word to get around. Well, just let anyone try to take the piss.

The office was part of a medical centre, just outside the main drag. McKay had a vague memory of being here before to deal with some attempted break-in. Some half-addled junkies after the drugs, almost immediately defeated by the centre’s security.

‘What’s his name again?’ McKay asked, as they sat in the otherwise empty waiting room watching the clock edge its way towards six twenty.

‘Jack Robinson,’ she said. ‘Doctor Jack Robinson, I think.’

‘What sort of name’s that?’ McKay asked. ‘Sounds like a sodding stage name. How quickly can I cure your neuroses? Before you can say Jack Robinson. For Christ’s sake.’

‘It’s probably just his name,’ Chrissie said. ‘He can’t help that.’

‘He can help calling himself Jack,’ McKay pointed out. ‘John would do just fine.’

She’d been tempted to chastise him for being so negative, but she knew this was just McKay’s way of coping with his own anxieties. This wouldn’t be easy for either of them, but Alec was the last one to talk about his own feelings. He was much happier when he was the one asking the questions.

The receptionist leaned forward to take an internal call, and then looked up at the two of them. ‘Mr and Mrs McKay. Mr Robinson will see you now.’

McKay turned to Chrissie as he rose from his seat and mouthed the word ‘Mister’. She shook her head and followed him to the door indicated by the receptionist.

Robinson’s office was an anonymous workspace that gave little clue to his role or profession, except for an array of framed certificates that presumably denoted specialist qualifications of one sort or another. Robinson himself was a bearded man in an expensive-looking suit, who watched their entrance over a pair of half-moon spectacles. He gestured for the McKays to sit in two low chairs at the end of the room, and sat himself down facing them.

‘I’m sorry I can’t offer you coffee,’ he said. ‘I used to have a machine in here but it got banned. Some health and safety thing.’ He gave the impression that this was part of a standard chatty spiel, intended to relax his clients.

McKay was watching Robinson closely. ‘I’ve a feeling we’ve met before,’ he said. ‘But can’t place where.’

Robinson shrugged. ‘I don’t think I’ve had cause to meet you in a professional capacity before, Mr McKay.’ He laughed to indicate that he was making a joke. ‘Shall we get down to business?’

It was an interesting choice of word, McKay thought, given that Robinson was charging them £75 for the session. He wasn’t sure what to make of Robinson. The man carried a slightly theatrical air. His greying hair and beard were carefully styled to suggest a bohemian style, the pattern of his mauve shirt and matching tie calibrated to be tasteful but noticeable under the bland suit. The cultivated effect was of a mildly eccentric academic, apparently off-the-wall but no doubt brilliant and highly successful in his field. But, to McKay’s eyes, he also looked fit—a man who worked out. There were traces of a local accent, although it was almost lost beneath an upmarket lowlands burr he’d acquired somewhere along the way.

‘I don’t ask for any information about clients in advance, as I like to hear you describe your situation in your own words. My first question is, quite simply, what’s brought you along to see me today?’

McKay glanced at Chrissie, resisting the temptation to offer some facetious response along the lines of ‘Because my wife told me to.’ It was clear she had no intention of breaking the silence so after a moment he said: ‘I suppose because we’ve been struggling at home.’ He looked over at Chrissie again and went on: ‘I don’t know whether Chrissie would describe it in the same terms—’

‘We’ll find out in a moment,’ Robinson said, smoothly. ‘How would
you
describe it?’

‘That we’re both tense all the time. That when we’re together we’re walking on eggshells. That we both want to blame each other.’

‘Blame each other for what?’

McKay hesitated, hoping Chrissie would intervene. She would know how uncomfortable he found this, but he guessed she wanted to hear him articulate his feelings for himself. He couldn’t blame her for that.

‘For our daughter, Lizzie. For her death.’

Robinson was motionless. ‘‘How did she die?’

‘The official verdict at the inquest was an accident,’ McKay said, tonelessly. ‘She slipped and fell on to the line at Tooting Broadway tube station. Rush hour. A crowded platform. She was hit by a train. Died instantly.’ McKay intoned the facts with the air of someone reading a shopping list.

Robinson moved his gaze slowly from McKay to Chrissie. ‘But you think it wasn’t an accident?’

‘Who knows?’ McKay said. ‘She’d always suffered from—well, mental health problems. Depression. Anxiety attacks. She’d seen the GP about them several times, and he’d recommended various specialist help. But we never knew how seriously to take it. It seemed to come and go. I suppose we—well, I—thought it was probably part of adolescence and she’d grow out of it.’

Robinson nodded. ‘And what did you think, Mrs McKay?’

Chrissie seemed surprised by the direct question. ‘Something similar, I suppose, if I’m honest. I probably took it a bit more seriously than Alec did, but that’s because I saw more of her—’ She stopped, conscious of what she was saying. ‘I don’t mean that as a criticism. Alec was working full-time. I wasn’t. And you know what mothers are like. We worry about the slightest thing. If Lizzie had a cold, I convinced myself it was meningitis. But we did what we could for her. Alec’s right. We took her to the GP. She did some counselling. Some of it seemed to help but it was difficult to be sure.’

‘What was she doing in London?’ Robinson asked.

‘University,’ McKay said. ‘That was one of the things. We’d tried to persuade her to go somewhere closer to home, but she was adamant she wanted to go to London. As if she wanted to get as far away from us as possible.’

‘A lot of children see university as a way of flying the nest,’ Robinson said. ‘They don’t necessarily want a safety net. It’s not unusual.’

‘I can see that. It’s what we told ourselves. But in retrospect we should have been more aware of the dangers to her.’

‘In retrospect,’ Robinson echoed. ‘I do a lot of work with troubled teenagers, adolescents. It’s always easy to decide what was right for them in retrospect. It’s almost impossible to know in advance. At that age, their brains are going through huge changes. A lot of the difficulties they face—depression, anxieties, intrusive thoughts—have as much to do with those physical, neurological changes as they have to do with environmental or other factors. And for that reason many of them do literally grow out of it. But of course some don’t. It’s often very difficult, if not impossible, to work out which fall into the latter category.’

‘Even so,’ McKay said, ‘if you’re a parent, it’s difficult not to blame yourself if you get that judgement wrong.’

‘And you think that this is what lies behind your current problems?’ Robinson asked. ‘That you’re blaming yourselves and each other for Lizzie’s death.’

McKay found himself feeling irrationally resentful at the way this man had appropriated Lizzie’s name. He’d never met her. He didn’t know how warm and lively and joyous she’d been on her good days. Or how blank and morose she’d been when the depression had hit. ‘That’s part of it, anyway.’

‘And the other part?’ Robinson prompted.

McKay hadn’t really known what he meant. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I guess—well, we’ve been together a long time. I devote more time to work than I should. We’ve allowed ourselves to drift apart.’ He stopped, his brain pursuing its own thoughts. ‘Maybe we’ve treated Lizzie—Lizzie’s death—as an excuse. A reason not to engage with each other.’

‘What’s your view, Mrs McKay?’ Robinson asked.

‘Maybe Alec’s right. I don’t know. I don’t know what to think about Lizzie’s death. The inquest said it was an accident. It was a crowded platform. Easy to lose your footing. I think in those circumstances they go for the most neutral verdict to spare everyone’s feelings. So we’ll never know. But it’s easy to wake up in the night torturing yourself. If only we hadn’t let her go to London. If only we’d made more effort to get serious treatment for her. And it’s easier to blame each other than to blame ourselves.’ She stopped. ‘But, aye, maybe Alec’s right and we’re just using that as an excuse. It’s something more tangible, more specific, than just admitting that we’ve fallen out of love—’ This time she stopped more suddenly, as if she’d said something unexpected. Something she hadn’t realised she was thinking.

‘Do you think that might be the case?’ Robinson asked. ‘That you’ve fallen out of love?’

There was a long silence. Chrissie was staring at the ground. McKay had stretched back in his seat and was staring, with apparent fascination, at one of the framed certificates on the wall. Finally, Chrissie said: ‘I don’t know. Sometimes it feels as if we’ve nothing in common except that we happen to live in the same house. As for love—well, it feels like a distant memory. Something that happened to someone else.’

‘How do you feel, Mr McKay?’

McKay tore his gaze away from the certificate. ‘Similar, I suppose. But I don’t know whether that’s because we’ve let Lizzie—what happened to Lizzie—come between us. Or whether, really, it’s because there’s nothing for it to come between.’

Robinson jotted something down on the pad he’d kept balanced on the chair arm. As far as McKay could recall, it was the first note the man had made. ‘Well, then,’ Robinson said. ‘There’s plenty for us to work on there.’

‘Really?’ McKay asked sceptically. He supposed that, at £75 per session, Robinson wasn’t going to give up on them easily.

‘Yes, really.’ Robinson leaned forward in his seat. ‘I can’t tell you whether you’re still in love. In the end, only you can decide that. But I can help you get some perspective. See what really matters. Gain some understanding of the factors that are influencing the way you see things. At the end of that, you might look at each other and think: well, that’s fine, now I see how things are and I still don’t want us to be together. Or you may think—and this is much more common—actually, now the fog’s cleared, we’re the same people we always were and we’re right for each other. But whatever decisions you make will be rational ones, made for the right reasons. That’s all I can offer. The question is whether you both want to continue.’

It sounded like a prepared spiel, and, at least to McKay’s ears, even Robinson didn’t seem to deliver it with much conviction. But what else did they have? At least it would be a chance, finally, to get things properly out in the open.

‘I’m up for it,’ Chrissie said.

McKay had risen from his chair while Robinson had been talking and had begun to walk around the room, in the same way he prowled around Helena Grant’s office when he was feeling uncomfortable or impatient. He stopped in front of another of the framed certificates, half-expecting that Robinson would tell him to sit down.

Finally, he turned around. ‘Why not?’ he said. ‘Let’s give it a go.’

***

‘Jesus Christ. You’re kidding. That slimy bastard—’

Greg’s response had been as she’d expected. If he’d been a different sort of person, he’d already be on his way to Fortrose to avenge her honour. As it was, they were sitting on the waterfront in Cromarty, the hoods of their waterproofs raised against the persistent drizzle, staring at the rows of oil platforms out in the Firth. In the gloomy evening, the first lights were coming on across the water, the far shore partly lost in mist. The oily colours on the water were drifting with the incoming tide.

‘He’s just a drunk,’ she said. ‘He wouldn’t have done anything.’ She was feeling more charitable now the terror of the moment was behind her.