She loved that her house had filled up with women. She’d forgotten back when it was just her and Jim how much a roomful of women changed the energy, how much she missed the community of it. She looked around the kitchen. Including herself there were five of them, each at a different stage in life, each carrying something unique. There was too much going on in all their lives at the moment, but she kind of loved it. After decades of linear existence dealing with the dead, she revelled in the chaos. ‘May you live in interesting times’ and all that.
Abi was curled up in a chair at the window, cradling black coffee and stroking Schrödinger. She didn’t eat breakfast. She was fifteen, hated herself and her body, plus she was in shock about the horrible crap of her mum and granddad. She hadn’t blamed Dorothy for not telling her what she knew, but they were meeting Abi’s mum later to have things out.
Indy and Hannah were at the kitchen table with bowls of granola, buzzing about last night. They had their phones out, checking news sites and social media. There had been several sightings of a big cat around Bruntsfield, Marchmont, Greenhill and The Grange. Hannah had already explained there’s no such thing as a black panther, that’s a generic term not a distinct species. She was apparently an expert having googled for five minutes. She and Indy reckoned it was a jaguar, usually found in South America, although no one had a clue where this one had come from. They weren’t missing a jaguar from the zoo, that was the first thing anyone checked. Hannah and Indy had nicknamed it Whiskers and presumed it was female. Dorothy saw Einstein under the table curled up at Hannah’s feet. He’d stayed close to her since last night.
Dorothy walked over to Jenny at the whiteboards covered in cases and funerals, mysteries waiting to be solved and lives waiting for a final resolution.
‘It’s good to be busy, huh?’ Jenny said.
Dorothy touched Jenny’s back. She wanted to be reassuring, give her daughter a hug, but there was a distance between them, that little girl she’d chased around this kitchen and played with in the park was gone, replaced by a middle-aged woman with scars and darkness. One of the main reasons was on the board, ‘Craig’. Beneath his name were three more, ‘Charlotte Cross’, ‘Karl Meyer’ and ‘Seb Anster’.
Dorothy tapped the board, thought about the hundreds of names written up here over the years, all dead and gone, the good and bad and in between.
‘Three of Craig’s ex-clients,’ Jenny said, looking at her mum’s finger. ‘Fiona reckons they liked him enough to help him.’
‘Is that where we are with him?’ Dorothy said.
‘Your boyfriend didn’t come up with much.’
‘That’s not fair.’ Was Thomas her boyfriend? It was the wrong word for a man in his fifties. He was fifteen years younger than her so technically he was a toyboy, but that hardly fit either. ‘He’s doing all he can.’
Jenny nodded. ‘I know. But if I’ve learned one thing with Craig and his bullshit, it’s that the police are never enough. They investigate, check forensics, find evidence, solve crimes. Sometimes. When they have manpower and funding. But they can’t deal with this shit and Craig knows that. This is personal. Fiona and I have to find him ourselves.’
‘I wish you didn’t feel that way,’ Dorothy said, touching Jenny’s arm. ‘But to be honest, I understand.’
Jenny looked surprised. ‘I presumed you would try to talk me out of it.’
Dorothy was scared for Jenny, and for Hannah too. But she’d spent her life telling Jenny to watch out, take care. Jenny was forty-six, this wasn’t a scraped knee in the park or a broken heart in the playground or cleaning up drunken vomit in the bathroom after the school dance. Jenny would make her own mistakes and chase her ex-husband if she wanted.
Jenny tapped Charlotte’s name on the board. ‘We’re meeting her later.’
Elsewhere on the P.I. board was ‘José Ramírez’ in Hannah’s writing and ‘Vanessa Chalmers’ in Jenny’s. Mysteries landing in their laps. But it was more than work. Dorothy was spiritual not religious, but she hated the get-out clause of ‘everything happens for a reason’, or the Scots version she learned from Jim, ‘whit’s fur ye’ll no go by ye’. That was fatalistic bullcrap. She believed in the randomness of the universe, but she also believed they had a duty of care, they had a special place in this city to help people when they were most in need, whatever form that took. She would help where she could with Hannah’s and Jenny’s cases. They needed each other, even if it was hard to put that into words.
She looked at the whiteboard where she’d written ‘The Foot’. She assumed it was connected to the panther of course. But where did Whiskers come from? Where had she found a foot and whose foot was it? Dorothy was on her way to the morgue later to talk to her friend Graham about it.
She looked again round the kitchen, felt energy pass through her like the neutrinos Hannah told her about, ghost particles that barely interact with the world. But she wanted to interact with the world, wanted to make a difference. She wanted to matter.