One year later.
David Burns was serving life. In solitary. For his own protection. Rumour mill said that he was also on suicide watch.
I tried not to care.
My appeal was under consideration by the ABI in regard to my suspension. I was trying to get my business back together.
The SCDEA was disbanded, as Griggs had predicted it would be. Nothing to do with corruption but the First Minister was set on streamlining the police forces, creating a unified service: Police Scotland. No one was entirely confident about the prospect.
My work as an investigator was beginning to build again. Small scale. A few divorce cases. A couple of missing person jobs. The irony of the investigative business is that the more people know who you are, the less they want to employ you. How can you be discreet when everyone knows your face and your name?
All the same, I managed.
I was sorting notes on a missing daughter job. A local builder had employed me to find his missing girl. She had fallen in with the wrong crowd, and, one too many arguments with Dad later, decided to split. My contacts has spotted her down in Manchester where she was smoking too much weed and getting piercings. Not the worst-case scenario. The builder had gone to fetch her himself. Turned out the girl had run off after her dad remarried and spent too much doting on the wife who wasn’t much older than the girl.
Teenage rebellion.
Age-old story.
But simple.
Simple was what I wanted.
The buzzer rang from the front desk. Dot told me that Susan was here. I said to send her on through.
Susan came in, sat on the edge of my desk. Dressed in civilian clothes. She’d allowed her hair to grow out, had tied it back in a loose pony tail and let some stray strands frame her face. I took her hand, stood up and kissed her.
She said, ‘I’m surprised you’re here today.’
‘Aye?’
She nodded at the calendar.
I looked at the date.
Every year for six years on this date, I had driven out to a lonely field in Fife and stood there, thinking about what I had lost in one night of bad decisions and bad luck.
For six years, my life had been about trying to find a way forward. A few times I had come close, but I had kept slipping. Unresolved issues holding me back.
And now?
‘I hadn’t noticed,’ I said. ‘Is that a bad thing?’
Susan shook her head. ‘We all move on.’
I nodded. ‘New beginnings?’
‘A new story. A different one.’
She didn’t say ‘a better one’, perhaps because we both knew it was a tough one to hope for.
New beginnings. I had been looking for one for years, but sometimes things happen only when you stop looking, when you allow yourself to be open to possibility.
I squeezed Susan’s hand.
We talked about our plans for the evening.
The world moved on.
The future was filled with possibilities. More than just blood and pain. More than despair and darkness.
There was hope.