Driving home alone, Costello’s thoughts drifted back to Archie and the mysterious brunette in the Porsche and got mad at the two-timing little shit. She was practising her deep breathing, forcing her fury to subside. It wasn’t working. And the greatest hits of Beyoncé on the car radio wasn’t making her feel any better.
She knew she wanted to be angry at something. At Roberta for leaving Sholto in the car. At Moses’ mum for abandoning him. At the man, or woman, who facilitated it all. At herself, for getting involved in the case. She thought about getting angry at the long wait in the hospital corridor and the rude blonde nurse on reception, but she decided to save time and stay angry at Archie. Whatever was going on with him, the only thing different was that she had stumbled across it. It wasn’t his fault that he was having lunch with a younger, smarter woman and had forgotten to mention it. But that suggested to her that she, the woman, was more likely to be a colleague. Maybe more than a colleague, but he wouldn’t be up to anything, not behind her back. The brunette would be the daughter or the niece of a friend, a new graduate, a young lawyer trying to make her way in the legal world. Maybe doing some research for a case and wanted the opinion of the Chief Procurator Fiscal.
Costello told herself.
And yet rich enough to drive a Porsche?
He wasn’t the type to cheat, he was an honest man. Archie was the type to have an affair only once his wife was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. And that was a different thing.
Or was it? And she didn’t strictly know if that was true, she only had the lying bastard’s word for it. There could have been a bus load of women before her.
Since her.
She parked the Fiat outside the deli, near her old station at Partickhill, bouncing up on the pavement as she couldn’t be bothered walking to the car park, acknowledging that she had criticized Roberta Chisholm for exactly the same thing. But she didn’t leave anything of value in the car. She was going home, home to have her long shower, put on her jammys and turn her phone off. She was going to enjoy herself with CBS Reality, a few episodes of Dr G or Killer Clergy Go Mad On Cocaine. If that was a true reflection of criminality in the southern states of the USA, she was glad she worked amongst the more usual, everyday jakey kind of Glasgow scum. Like Bernadette Kissel.
She climbed out the car, aware of the deep itch in her scalp, a build-up of God knows what over the last few days. She stood at the window looking at a side of ham, lying on a bed of slimy green lettuce as she had a good scratch, digging her nails in until it hurt. It felt good. The anger. The pain. Fury still bubbled inside her like a bad biryani. At least Little Moses had been left somewhere safe. Maybe by somebody who knew how Roberta Chisholm would react. Maybe the abductor had, with the good but misguided intention of the not very bright, simply gone out and got themselves a better baby. Maybe the car seat being the same was a coincidence or maybe an igniting factor; he saw that and thought ‘that’s the baby for us’.
That was still a million miles away from Bernadette Kissel who had stood there and shrugged her shoulders when shown the post mortem photographs of her own emaciated child. Nothing to do with her. Her kid had faded over a period of weeks, dropping to less than half the body weight it should have been. The infection that ate into his skin because he never had his nappy changed, the bruises, the broken and fractured cartilage on one whose bones were not yet old enough to calcify. Who knows what they had gone through? Nobody was too young to suffer the rage, the drunkenness of others. Costello knew that first hand.
And some believe it’s only abuse if it’s violent. Neglect is as bad, she mused as a couple of teenagers walked past the shop window behind her, their uniforms reflected in the glass, and neglect is often unreported. It was subtle in its evil. Mental health issues Costello could get her head round, that might be somebody else’s responsibility to intervene. But that degree of neglect because Kissel had a needle in her arm, well that was something else.
‘Your own call, Bernadette, nobody else’s,’ Costello muttered as she regarded her own reflection. She was as tired as a Halloween ghost. She had listened to so much shite in the past few weeks she could sell it as fertiliser. All kinds of crap about trust, relationships, primary caregivers, stakeholders, core feelings and the responsibility of the caring society. By day two of the hearing Costello had realized what a dinosaur she was. She couldn’t abide this ‘we will get you all the support you need’ crap. The only two people she felt any empathy for were the deceased, life taken before they had the chance to enjoy it, and that poor overworked social worker who would take the mental scars of her cross-examination to the grave. Linda? Laura? McGill. Lorna McGill? She’d be on the happy pills after the roasting the defence council had given her. No doubt her boss had done the same when she got back to the office, the poor lassie had scapegoat written all over her. The powerful had feasted on that girl, and they were not stupid people, not stupid ‘men’, she reminded herself – they knew the financial constrains the social services were under – yet they pulled Lorna McGill apart. Costello made a mental note to find out the reg of the Merc the defence council drove and get him nicked for speeding or driving while on his phone or picking his nose at the traffic lights. She had a few friends in traffic who owed her a favour.
Applewood cheese, red onion chutney. She thought, the sight of the dead pig putting her off the ham. She realized she had been standing there for a few minutes, lost in her mind-set. The two school kids had disappeared round the corner of Hyndland Road.
She thought she heard the squawk of a seagull and looked around. Nothing to see. She was stepping into the shop when she thought she heard it again and stepped out, listening, waiting for a break in the traffic to hear properly. There was a something, not sure exactly what it was but twenty years of being a cop alerted her.
A something.
She stood down back on the pavement, making her way to the corner, the lane and the three wheelie bins sitting in a line, waiting for the refuse lorry. A green and white hooped top was visible in between, none too clean and not warm enough for a night like this.
‘You OK?’ she asked.
Anderson had intended to turn left to take Nesbit for an evening stroll round the Botanics, but he was late and they would be closed, so his feet turned right, down to the junction with Hyndland Road and the road to Partickhill Station, his old cop shop. It was a chilly, damp night, the air seemed full of the post-rain fecund scent of leaves rotting slowly in the gutter.
In the end he had got out of the house for the sake of his sanity, listening to every noise upstairs, distracted by the noise of the door opening and closing above him. The presence of Claire and David in the house, their togetherness had made him feel a bit lonely. He had never had any trouble attracting women, just the opposite in fact, so why was he on his own now? By choice? So why was it troubling him? Helena was dead. His wife was out most of the time. Costello was away with Archie. Mulholland had formed some kind of peace treaty with Elvie McCulloch, Wyngate was happily married and breeding like a little rabbit. Even Claire was pairing off. They were all with somebody else now, except him. He only had Nesbit, the faulty Staffie, a faithful and constant companion on his walk to clear his mind of the mundanely boring work, a job so tedious he had started to look forward to emails from his boss. He should have been going for walks years ago, all those difficult times when he worked like a mad man, when he grafted all the hours God sent rather than the nine to five he was trapped in now. In those days, he was so stressed he didn’t eat or sleep. All that counselling and anti-anxiety medication? He would have been better taking the dog out. In those days he never had time to speak to his family. Now he had all the time in the world but had bugger all to say. And there was the sneaking sense that they were moving on while he was going backwards.
Oh yes, he was getting quite comfy with his slow strolls round the streets and back lanes around Kirklee, or the other way if the traffic was quiet, up to the hospital, around the pond, where Nesbit could chase the ducks. At the far end of the pond it was easy to forget that the hospital was there at all, it felt a mile away from any drama. That walk was a long slow drag up a dark, tree-lined avenue. If he was feeling energetic, not a common feeling these days, Anderson would turn right off Great Western Road and then right again, for a leg punishing stroll through the up and down twisty turny streets of the big posh houses of Kirklee itself. Some deep part of his cynicism reminding him that his own house was one of the poshest of them all. There had been another offer in his inbox that morning. These properties, the ones like his that had stayed intact as three-storey townhouses, were in big demand and very rarely on the market. Most had been converted into flats and sold off or rented out. He had been offered £1.2 million. He already had enough money to do him so he didn’t know what to make of that offer. He liked the house, but it wasn’t his home. And he liked the money he had to be tied up in bricks and mortar. Claire and Peter were good kids but money like that could easily absolve them of the need to get out of bed in the morning. He didn’t want his children to be damaged by the money he had been left. That offer in the email had been more than it had been last month. How high would they go? And did he care?
Anderson walked on, standing at the crossing. The Premier newsagents shop behind him was still open, that strange little red and brown shop standing in an island of blond sandstone, like a few Lego bricks in a house wall, too bright, too modern. Out of place, a bit like himself.
Would tomorrow be another boring day of sitting in meetings or would his chat with the ACC that afternoon spark something worthwhile rather than another knee-jerk response to a headline. The Kissel case? Or that woman killed by her husband in a dispute over Coronation Street where the police had been called but taken so long to attend the incident that by the time they got there it was a murder scene rather than a domestic violence report. The nine-year-old son had witnessed the murder. There had been two cases of child killing in the last three months, which the media had blamed on the lack of intervention of unspecified social services. The meeting might be about another bid by some MP or an MSP to try to get Police Scotland and the social services to work more efficiently by cutting their budgets and incarcerating them in meetings.
It would be Klingon Kirkton all over again. And that thought made him feel sick to the stomach. If he sold the house he’d never have to work again and never have to pander to arseholes like him. Who was he kidding; he didn’t have to work now.
Without him noticing, his life had emptied.
What crap would he get involved in this time? He walked on, Nesbit the Staffie panting and grumping by his side, pulling on the lead whenever he scented another dog in the air. Nesbit should have been enjoying himself back at Brenda’s house on the south side, lying on Peter’s bed as his young master played some unfathomable computer game where he pitted his wits against aliens, assisted by an unseen partner who lived on the other side of the world. And ignoring his homework.
Peter was at that really awful teenage stage, communicating by grunts and snorts. Maybe Peter was spending too long with Nesbit? Usually Colin could talk the boy round with an offer of going to Xscape or out for a pizza, but not this time. Peter had remained monosyllabic. It had been another very short phone call.
Come to think of it, Claire had been a little quiet as well recently, not annoying him as much as she usually did. He had come to rely on her to give the big house its vibrant buzz of music and nonsense now that his own job was so boring. And why was interrupting the purvey of a funeral viewed as lifting his working life from the mundane.
And he had admitted that to himself.
Late the previous evening Anderson had left Claire and David his credit card number in case they wanted a Chinese takeaway, and he had watched some slow TV about a barge trip along the Kennet and Avon canal, a nice glass of red in one hand, Nesbit’s head nestling in the other. Bored or relaxed?
He had watched two hours of that programme, seeing nothing but the front of the boat. And the water. And more bloody water.
When was the last time he had had a good laugh? Gone out for a curry with the squad? Had a pint with some pals? Listened to Mulholland moaning about his leg, Costello sniping at Mulholland’s moaning? Wyngate trying to keep the peace and changing the subject? What had happened to Wyngate in the end? God, he couldn’t recall if his colleague had actually left the force or got divorced. When they last spoke, those looked like being the DC’s only options.
That was bad, he’d phone him tomorrow. He might even phone Costello and get the goss on the Kissel case and any spare goss on what was going on at the fiscal’s office. He found himself smiling, yes he knew where he needed to be. Back in the buzz. If the buzz would still have him. He couldn’t thrive in this coffee culture, in pubs, going out on his own. And he was ‘on his own’.
He walked past a beautiful three-story detached house, sitting a little high from the pavement, a crescent of a pebbled driveway cutting across the front of the two four-paned French windows and the stained-glass porch over the front door, partially obscured by a monkey puzzle tree he had always rather admired as it had seemed so at odds with the neatly trimmed row of conifers grown to cover the garage door. At the moment the door was open, a white Volvo was running, door ajar, waiting to be reversed in. The owner, a slight man in a huge woollen cardigan was bending down at the rear of the vehicle, illuminated by the security light as he examined a scratch or speck of dirt. As Colin passed he took out his handkerchief and started polishing. He looked up and caught Colin’s eye. They exchanged greetings in a very West End kind of way; too polite to ignore each other all together, but resisting any real conversation. Anderson walked on, thinking what a boring git that guy must be.
And how quickly he himself was turning that way. It would be slippers and daytime TV next, Werther’s Originals and the Reader’s Digest.
Whatever the ACC offered him tomorrow, he was up for it. Disturbing people’s funerals was better than this.
There was no answer. Costello pulled the wheelie bin out a little and to the left, manoeuvring it gently from side to side, wondering how many weeks it had been since this thing was emptied. The boy sat there, on the coping stone, his tracky bottoms five inches short of his ankles, his knees up to his chin. The green of his Celtic top matched the snot streaming from his nose. He had huge doe eyes, a brown mane falling across his forehead. He looked like an angel, fallen out the dark clouds above, to land in the bed of crisp packets behind the bins.
‘You got a cold?’ Costello asked, trying for her smiley face.
‘Fuck off.’
It had been a very long day. ‘Oh, fuck off yourself. You’re not the only one having a shite life, you wee squirt.’ She pulled the wheelie bin back over and walked into the shop, aware of a high-pitched sneeze behind her, sounding very much like a seagull in distress. In her mind’s eye she could see the forearm being used as a handkerchief.
Kids.
She went into the shop, buying some extra strong Applewood cheese, red onion chutney and tiger bread. She added a box of man-sized tissues with balm, paid for it all and went back out again. Pulling the wheelie bin back she saw the boy was rubbing his nose with a fist of fingers that were blue with cold. And dripping with snot.
‘You’ll be smiting everybody with a nose like that. Here.’ She handed him the box of tissues. He put his hand out, sniffed, and took the box, ripping off the perforated flap and pulled out a handful of hankies. His thank you was polite and automatic. He spent the next five minutes coughing and spluttering into them. At one point Costello knelt down between the bins, amongst the squashed beer cans and the used condoms, thinking that the boy was going to stop breathing. He couldn’t get a breath in between the coughing fits. He was red in the face, getting redder, tears coursing down his cheek, looking over the back of the bins with rheumy brown eyes.
Dickens would have been proud of this urchin. Costello wondered if kids nowadays got TB. That cough had a terrible rattle about it.
‘Where do you live? Do you want a run home? I have my car here.’
‘You a paedo?’
‘No,’ said Costello, ‘I’m a cop.’
From the look on his face he might have been happier if she had answered yes.
‘You got an issue with that?’
He shook his head, but she knew. And he knew that she knew. Not him, but somebody close did have issues with the forces of law and order, like the sort of parent who was too stoned to know where their kid was at this time of night, hiding behind bins in a football top.
‘Come on then, in the car, we will get you home. You should be tucked up in bed, not skulking about. What was your name?’
‘Harry fucking Styles.’
‘Fed up with the singing then? Fair enough.’ She looked around. ‘You want to try that again?’
His house was a surprise. He lived in Balcarres Avenue, which Costello only found out after she had driven him around for ten minutes with him only saying left, left and left, taking her round in circles. She then pulled back onto Great Western Road, turning towards the police station at Partickhill, threatening to leave him in the cells overnight for his own safety. As she took a right, she caught sight of a man walking along the pavement, a dark Staffie limping along behind him. The dog reminded her of Anderson’s little Staffie, but she was caught up in the long line of traffic before she had the chance to check and by then he had gone.
‘Harry’s’ house, indicated by a nod, was a beautiful detached sandstone, behind a pebbled driveway that cut across the French windows. The stained-glass porch over the front door was impressive, but not as impressive as the monkey puzzle tree in the front garden.
‘Is this really your house? Bit posh, innit?’ said Costello in her best cockney accent.
‘It’s shite,’ was the boy’s considered opinion.
She pulled up outside and asked the sniffling Harry Fucking Styles if he wanted her to come in with him.
The boy sneezed into his hanky and then had a good look at the contents, dark green and lumpy.
He shook his head, but he didn’t try to get out the car.
‘Do you like living round here, Harry?’
‘Nope.’
‘What school do you go to, Cleveden Primary?’
‘I am at the high school. Glasgow High School,’ he clarified.
Too thin, too frail, too unsubstantial. ‘You don’t look old enough to be out on your own, never mind at high school.’
‘I’m fucking stunted.’
‘You’re certainly not tall enough to be using language like that to an officer of the law. Still, no school tomorrow. Not with a cold like that.’ She sniffed. ‘You’ve probably given it to me now.’
‘Sorry,’ he said, but still made no move to get out the car.
‘I think your dad is watching,’ said Costello, pointing to a twitching curtain behind the wide French windows.
‘Harry’ turned his head. ‘Yeah.’ Flat voice, no emotion.
‘Shall we go in then?’ She unclipped her seat belt. He did the same.
‘I’ll explain where you have been,’ although she had no idea why he was behind the bins.
He sighed, a middle-aged weary sigh, like nothing she did or said would make any difference. ‘Or we can lie and say you felt faint and had to have a sit down. What about that? That would explain why you didn’t go home.’
‘I ran away.’
‘Well I guessed that. You didn’t run very far though.’
‘I felt fucking faint, didn’t I?’
‘What were you running from?’ Who were you running from? He had still made no movement to get out the car, the seat belt now entwined round his hand.
He shrugged.
‘Well, you ran away and felt too poorly to go home. But why did you leave in the first place?’ She adjusted the rear-view mirror, pulling at her filthy hair, pretending not to be interested in the answer. The smell of the cheese was starting to fill the car, her stomach was rumbling.
He turned and looked at her, every inch the vulnerable starving orphan, save the Celtic top, this season’s, expensive. And the fact he went to an exclusive private school, and he lived in the West End in a half-million pound house. But would rather sit behind a bin.
‘You know I am a cop, you remember that? Just in case you have sneezed out your brains. There’s all sorts pouring down your nose.’
He nodded, slid his seat belt back and opened the door. He moved quickly, silently like a feral creature and slithered out, onto the dark tree-lined street.
He stopped at the sound of the front door opening. The security lights came on, two beams joining to highlight him in a sphere of white light that seemed to pin him to the driveway.
Costello got out the car, walking round the back of the vehicle while the boy remained frozen to the spot. The door was only open enough for the person behind it to look out. She couldn’t see them, or get a sense of them, the way the light was shining in her eyes.
‘Malcolm, you get yourself in here. Now.’
‘You wee liar, telling me you were Harry Styles. I wouldn’t have given you a lift if I had known,’ Costello said quietly, holding up her hand as she turned to stand with her back to the door, between the boy and the house. ‘You take that, Malcolm, that’s my card. My mobile number is on it. You keep that somewhere safe, somewhere only you know and if you want to speak to me, you call me.’
She held the card close to her. He took it, slowly, and felt it between his thumb and forefinger.
‘Malcolm!’ The voice called again. Not particularly male or female. It had risen slightly, a little bit of impatience already giving way to anger. ‘And who the hell are you? Bringing him home in your car?’
Malcolm took the card and slid it under his top, or wrapped a tissue round it, a sleight of hand that impressed her. He gave a little shake of his head. Was he warning her? Telling her not to do it. Begging her?
‘Do you want me to walk away?’ she asked quietly.
He nodded.
‘Oh, no problem,’ she said loudly, turning round and smiling into the light. ‘He isn’t feeling too well and had a wee sit down on a wall outside work so I thought I’d better bring him home. No problem,’ she repeated. ‘There you go.’
The door said nothing as Malcolm slid through the light, swallowed by the darkness beyond.
‘He has a right bad cold on him,’ said Costello cheerfully, from the door of her car.
‘Picked him up outside your work, you say? And where would that be, young lady?’
Male, definitely male, she thought, but it was the authoritarian ‘young lady’ that did it. The tone of it. It wasn’t friendly, it was bloody sarcastic. The tone that told women that the world was too complicated for them and would they mind getting back into the kitchen where they might be of use.
She had already turned her back to the front door of the house but it didn’t stop her. She didn’t turn around either, just threw a casual remark over her shoulder, loudly. ‘That would be Partickhill Police Station,’ she said realizing that was not technically true. ‘And it’s DI Young Lady to you.’ And after a slow count of three, she added very quietly, ‘Wank.’
She got back into the car, leaning over enough as she tilted the mirror round in order to see the house, knowing a small figure would appear up at a bedroom window. Then she saw the outline of a head, two sticking-out ears, a white patch appearing as he pressed his forehead to the glass, what looked like a violent nod but was another sneeze. She thought she saw him wave slightly.
She released the handbrake and let the car roll back so she could execute a U-turn, easing it to a halt as a black sports car came round the corner at speed, taking a wide sweep and disappearing up the drive and into the shadow of the monkey puzzle tree. It might have been a Porsche Panamera, but she couldn’t be sure.
She wasn’t sure about Malcolm either. Was he such a poor wee squint or was she seeing stuff that wasn’t there because of her immersion in the Kissel case? That dad had every right to be annoyed that his boy had run off, dressed so badly for this weather.
But that didn’t explain that look in the boy’s eyes. And she was sure about that. She had seen it so many times when she had looked in the mirror.