I kept my coat on, covered the bloody knees that showed beneath my torn trousers.
‘Wouldn’t you be more comfortable with your coat off?’ said the doctor.
I shook my head. ‘I’m fine.’
She stood up, adjusted the thermostat on the wall. ‘And how are you today, Gus?’
‘I said already, I’m fine.’
She let the sting of that settle. I turned away, didn’t want to catch her reaction.
The child’s tricycle still sat in the corner. She caught me staring at it again. ‘I thought we might try to talk about something different today,’ she said.
‘Oh, yeah?’ I snapped. I really wasn’t in the mood for playing the patient any more. I wiped my palms on my coat sleeves.
‘Would you like to tell me about your working life?’
I rolled my eyes. ‘Oh, sweet Lord.’ I knew I was being difficult for reasons of my own, it wasn’t her problem. I checked myself. ‘Look, my career is over. The trade’s finished, and I’m what you might call on the scrapheap. So, not a good choice of subject really, doc.’
She sat forward in her chair, put out her elbows as she crossed her fingers together. ‘We can talk about whatever you like.’
I didn’t want to talk about anything, so that was going to be a short conversation. I stood up, sighed, ‘Is there much more of this to come?’
Dr Naughton’s voice softened. ‘That’s up to you . . . Do you feel you’ve made any progress with these visits?’
I shook my head. ‘Not really. I don’t much like going over the past.’
She motioned to my chair. There was nowhere to hide in the room so I sat down again. ‘Surely there must be some moments of happiness you recall.’
I kept my hands in my pockets, manoeuvred my coat over my knees again. ‘Some . . .’ They all involved Debs; it touched a deep part of me, registered why I was there.
‘Would you like to tell me about one?’
I dredged up a few images: expressions on her face, how she looked at one time or another. How happiness felt. My heart seemed to still inside me, and a warmth washed over my mind. A precious memory lit up; I almost smiled.
‘We were at the birth of my niece, Alice . . .’
‘Go on.’
‘It was special. Debs had taken a real interest when Jayne got pregnant – my wife, we were married then, she’d lost a child and couldn’t have another . . . I think she got something out of being around Jayne, do you understand?’
‘I understand, yes.’
I fiddled with a hangnail as I spoke. ‘It was all, y’know, baby talk and baby books and clothes and so on for months. Jayne and Michael were so young it was a bit of a shock to them both but I think it focused them, it was a real spark for Michael making something of himself . . . He was still trucking then, was halfway across Europe when we got a call to rush Jayne to the hospital. We were on standby, so to speak, we drove her in the back of the car.’ Now I smiled at the recollection. ‘She was so bloody big, like a house. We could hardly get her through the door of the car . . . Debs sat with her on the back seat, doing the breathing exercises.’
I stopped to savour the memory. My eyes misted.
A prompt: ‘And you drove the car to the hospital?’
‘Yeah, yeah, I did that . . .’ I remembered pacing the corridor. A nurse had asked me if I was the father and I had had to explain that Michael wasn’t coming. I remembered the way Debs had lowered her head when the nurse asked me; she was wounded. I stopped smiling.
‘Was it a simple birth?’
‘No, not at all . . .
Christ
, I must have emptied that coffee machine, we were there all night. They put off doing a Caesarean for hours but in the end Jayne was so weak that they had no choice.’ The moment we were called into the ward still lived in me: Jayne was almost too drugged to hold baby Alice, her head was lolling from side to side and Debs had to put her hand underneath to support it. We couldn’t believe the black hair on her, thick, thick black hair. When Debs took Alice in her arms they looked so similar that they could have been mother and child. We both had so much love for her that it felt as if she was ours. Jayne looked exhausted but she had enough energy to cry – we all knew why.
‘How did you feel when you held your niece for the first time?’ said Dr Naughton.
My throat seized, my eyes filled and I knew if I moved my head, even slightly, tears would fall. ‘I felt joy . . .’ I said, ‘real joy . . . and the most incredible pain that my wife would never hold our own child.’
Chapter 29
DEBS HAD LEFT A NOTE stating she’d gone to stay with her friend Susan.
‘Just . . . great.’
Susan would not be talking me up – we shared a mutual antipathy. The note was brief, said she’d taken the dog because he needed looking after and ‘You have enough to do mending yourself, Gus.’
Debs claimed she wanted to give me some space, that I needed to think.
‘Fuck that!’
Thinking was the last thing I needed more of right now. I knew why Debs had left, couldn’t fault her for it, but it still felled me. I just couldn’t expect her to stick around while I delved into my brother’s murder. Way things were shaping up, she was safer out if it.
I stormed to the bathroom and kicked off the cistern. It flew in the air, made a one-eighty then clattered off the sink, splitting in two. I fired into the speed wraps and took myself back to the living room. As my heart rate increased I immediately felt panic settle on me. The flat was silent and cold, empty. I paced to the bedroom. Debs had cleaned out her make-up and styling products. A small wheeled suitcase that usually sat on top of the wardrobe had been taken and her dressing gown no longer hung on the back of the door. The room seemed to have changed very little, but what had altered was seismic. I loped back to the living room in a daze, sat on the couch. I looked through to the space we’d cleared under the kitchenette counter for Usual’s basket. It was gone.
A throbbing started in my temples. I put my fingers around my skull and squeezed.
‘This isn’t happening,’ I told myself; but I knew it was.
I picked up Debs’s note and read it through again. She’d left the number for Susan’s house. It seemed such a strange thing to do when we all had mobiles nowadays. As I thought it through I sussed she was trying to say I could still contact her, she’d still speak to me. At least I hoped that’s what she meant; maybe I was being optimistic.
I got up and made myself a coffee, tried to buy off my shrieking brain with caffeine. Didn’t work. I found myself back on the couch looking through Debs’s Cranberries CDs and wondering what the hell I should do next. Nothing I’d tried so far seemed the right move. I was sure the shrink had made me feel worse, raked up old hurts. I wondered if there would ever be a future for Debs and me. It just seemed like the world was against it. We’d tried so many times to make it work but it always ended the same way – with me hurting her. I felt ashamed at the realisation.
I held my head in my hands once again, then my phone rang. The noise broke through the desolation of the flat.
I dived up to grab it from the mantel.
‘Hello . . .’
‘Ah, Dury, ’tis yer bold self.’
‘Fitz.’
‘Ye sound disappointed . . . Who were ye expecting, Angelina Jolie?’ He laughed at himself. I wondered if he had a drink in him.
‘What do you want?’
A harrumph. ‘I was, er, thinking we might have a little, whatsit they say these days? . . . A catch-up.’
I remembered our last one: ‘Do I need a brief this time?’
He roared laughing. ‘Ah, Dury . . . yer some joker.’
I was deadly serious. ‘I’m not laughing.’
‘Okay, so . . . Look, I’m after clearing my desk of one or two items relating to your late brother’s unfortunate demise, and I was needing to return some of it. I thought I could let you have them, save disturbing others.’
I got the picture, said, ‘Yeah, fine. You want to meet the same place?’
‘Caff on the Mile . . . Can you be there in an hour?’
‘I’ll be there.’
Clicked off.
The auld wifey from number three was coming up the stairs as I walked out.
‘Hello, there,’ she said.
I nodded, had passed her with little recognition when she spoke up again. ‘Your wife told me about the poor dog.’
I stopped still, turned. ‘She’s not my wife.’ The words came out too harshly. ‘I mean, we’re not married.’
The wifey creased her mouth into a thin smile. ‘Well, the pair of you look made for each other . . . I’m sure there’ll be a big day soon.’
I didn’t know what to say, stumbled on the step.
She went on, ‘She’d make a beautiful bride. A bonnie-looking girl she is.’
I found my feet, managed, ‘I don’t deserve her.’
The truth, I knew, was that she didn’t deserve me.
The street looked as if it had just been dusted with icing sugar; another light snowfall had settled over the city. Footprints had started to erode the white covering on the pavement but the wider view was so bright it burned my eyes. I schlepped over the road at the Arc building and turned under the railway bridge. I bent into a chill wind that cut into my face and froze my jaw. I longed for winter to be over, for the temperature to rise and the sun to make an appearance again. Even the weak Scottish one that shows too rarely, and when it does, not for long enough.
At the foot of the Mile a tartan shop had taken a break from blasting the street with teuchter music and had turned to Slade’s ‘Merry Christmas Everybody’ instead. I took a sketch in the window: the jolly kilted mannequin that spent his days drinking pretend whisky from a plastic tumbler had been strangled with a tinsel noose. He didn’t seem fazed – laughing it up same as ever – but he did stare out at the new parliament, which was a joke the year round.
In the caff some student bell-end in a Cossack’s hat danced before me in the queue. If he stood on my toe one more time he’d get a taste of my own footwork in his coal-hole. I was in no mood to indulge some Tarquin who was slumming it with the proles because mammy and daddy had cut back on his gin money during the economic crisis.
I tapped him on the shoulder. ‘Excuse me.’
He turned round, a dramatic flourish of the arms as he went all Bronski Beat on me. ‘Yes?’
I pointed to my boot. ‘Do you see that?’
He eyeballed me.
Bad idea.
‘A foot, for standing, perhaps walking,’ he said. Sniggers from his shitkicker friends.
I edged closer, went nose to nose with him. ‘Would you like me to introduce you to another of its uses?’
He backed away. If he’d went any faster he’d have given himself whiplash.
A gap appeared in the queue.
Ordered, ‘A coffee, please, and a pot of tea. Can you hold the tea till my friend arrives?’
‘I’m here . . . I’m here.’ Fitz appeared ruddy-faced, cheeks on him like the fire station doors. He carried a bag over his left shoulder – the look was way too metrosexual for him.
We took a table. Fitz loosened his collar.
‘Did you run here?’ I said.
‘Feck off, man. ’Tis that hill: damn near has me buggered.’
The tea and coffee came, got placed down before us.
I thought to ask him how the case was going, but knew if he had anything that he was prepared to divulge it would be dished up soon enough. He leaned back on his chair, reached for the bag. He took out a padded envelope. ‘This is, erm, well . . . It’s your brother’s possessions.’
I imagined what would be inside. Little see-through plastic bags containing Michael’s watch and wedding ring. Whatever else there was, I didn’t want to see it. I took the package – it seemed very light.
Fitz said, ‘There’s a computer and some stuff we took from his office; I gave that to uniform to drop off at the factory.’
‘Have you been into the computer?’ I knew I was being optimistic.
‘Oh yes, the boffins have been all through it. Nothing for us, I’m afraid.’
I expected no more.
I held the envelope in my hands as though it was made of the most delicate porcelain. It seemed to take my attention from Fitz. My thoughts wandered all over the place; I was no more than emotional carrion now. I broke out of my daydream, placed the package on the table. Fitz started to stir his tea.
I said, ‘Thank you.’
‘I thought, y’know, you might be better taking the bits and pieces to his wife . . . Might come better from you.’
I was grateful for the compassion. ‘It was a generous thought.’
He flicked up an eyebrow, pointed with his spoon. ‘I wanted to say . . . after our last chat . . .’
‘Yeah?’
‘I wanted to reassure you that, all we can, we’re doing for you.’
I tutted. I knew what
doing for me
meant to most of the force. I swung from gratitude to anger: I knew I was the only one moving this investigation forward. ‘Is that so?’ I said. I leaned in, placed my elbows on the table. ‘I’ve been doing a bit more myself since I saw you last, Fitz, and let me tell you, I’m not convinced your lot are doing enough.’
He raised his cup, slurped. ‘Is that so?’
‘Yeah, yeah,’ I slumped back in my seat, ‘I don’t see you all over the papers announcing you’ve made any progress, like you’ve found the gun or have a suspect for Michael’s murder . . . or Andy’s, or Ian Kerr’s either.’
That got him fired up. ‘Fucking papers.’
‘You’d be happy enough to have the press splash any good news about.’
He slammed his cup on the saucer. The spoon jumped. ‘There is progress, but I can’t tell you everything.’
I lurched for him. ‘Why the fuck not?’
‘Look at you . . . because you’re away with it, man! You’d go haring in like some mad heller and get yerself and Lord alone knows who else killed if I gave you a sniff of what I’m on to.’
I wasn’t wearing that, lamped in: ‘Why haven’t you busted the Czechs?’