Epilogue

September 2021

Karen stood on the Royal Mile outside the High Court, letting the sun spill down on her face. In front of her, set in the cobbles, the mosaic Heart of Midlothian marked the Old Tolbooth, where countless judgements and executions had taken place over the centuries. Today’s judgement would have a different ending, but not one that was necessarily easier. Ross McEwen would be an old man before he’d be eligible to be released on licence. Rosalind Harris would serve only a few years, but that would be enough to take her life from her.

For the Hardie family, hunched together on the public seats, a different kind of life sentence lay ahead. Every milestone Emma clocked up – graduation, first job, love, maybe children – would be matched by the grief of never seeing Lara on the same road. At every family occasion, there would be an absence that shouted louder than any celebratory words. Karen didn’t think the punishment meted out to the pair in the dock would feel like justice to the Hardies, but then, nothing could.

There had been times when she had wondered whether they would ever reach this point. Lockdowns, restrictions on public places, her own unpleasant experience of COVID, delays in the criminal justice system that brought home painfully the adage that justice delayed was justice denied – they’d all conspired to make this an even tougher wait than usual.

She felt a touch on her arm, and there was Jason. ‘Let’s go,’ she said, leading the way down the Royal Mile towards the bridges. It had been a strange time for Jason too. The whole shape of his life had changed; his mother’s death had brought many aspects of it into sharp relief. He loved his brother but without his mother’s love to intervene between them, he’d finally realised he couldn’t trust him. He’d thought he loved Eilidh, but lockdown and crisis had combined to force a realisation that when the going got tough, she didn’t know how to handle it. She’d tried to brush off Sandra’s death as something they ‘just had to accept’, but Jason had realised what he just had to accept was that she was never going to be there for him. As he’d said to Daisy, ‘When you realise you’ve got more support from your boss than your fiancée, you know something’s not right.’

But recently, he seemed to have turned a corner. The grief was less insistent. He’d decided to try for sergeant, because Sandra would have wanted him to. And he’d been out on a couple of dates with Meera Reddy from the National Library. Just a movie, and dinner at that nice Italian in Leith. But it had been good fun. And she liked football too. Although he wasn’t sure he could work up the same enthusiasm for the women’s game, he was open to conversion.

The truly good news for all of them was that Ann Markie had departed. She’d taken up the reins as chief constable at a small force in the South of England. ‘It’s the obvious next step on the road to world domination,’ Daisy had said in the pub on the night they’d gone out to celebrate the news. The new ACC (Crime) hadn’t been appointed yet; Jimmy Hutton had heard on the grapevine that it was going to be a proper copper who’d had boots on the ground in the recent past. At least, thought Karen, they wouldn’t have any personal beef with her.

Daisy had surprised them all by installing herself not in her own flat in Glenrothes but in the Bruntsfield flat of a teacher Karen had yet to meet. She was still reticent about her private life but lockdown romance, love on the Zoom, seemed to have worked for Daisy.

Life without Hamish was going just fine for Karen. At the end of the first lockdown, Daisy and Karen moved out of his flat. It had felt like a good decision at the start of lockdown, but she’d felt a genuine sense of relief to close the door on his home for the last time. Only when she returned to her own flat did she realise the weight of being under someone else’s roof, even so luxurious a roof as Hamish’s. She still stopped in at his coffee shops if she was passing and needed a caffeine fix, but so far, their paths hadn’t crossed.

Six months after the terrible night at the breakwater, a letter had arrived at Karen’s flat. It was postmarked Montreal and the handwriting seemed familiar. She turned it over and saw the return address: Yasin, Prince Arthur Est, Plateau Mont Royal, Montreal.

After the end of the lockdown, when Aleppo reopened, Karen had sat down with Miran. He explained that one of their group knew a crew member on a container ship about to unload in Grangemouth. He’d managed to persuade the captain they needed a doctor on board – ‘a nod and a wink, I think you say, Karen’ – and Rafiq had found a berth. Miran assured her he’d be safe and she almost believed him.

And then out of the blue, a letter. She’d ripped it open and read it with an eagerness that took her by surprise. He’d travelled from Grangemouth to Antwerp. From there, he’d found a place on a container ship bound for the Port of Montreal. Within a month he’d been on Canadian soil. As soon as he’d arrived in Montreal, he’d claimed asylum. Because his life was in danger if he’d returned to Syria, his claim had been accepted. They welcome refugees here, his letter said. They treat us like human beings, not animals or prisoners. I feel safe here.

More than that, he’d been placed on a programme that would ultimately restore his professional life to him. Within the year, he hoped he’d be back in the operating theatre, doing what he did best. And he was writing to thank her and to hope that they would meet again. His email address had been at the bottom of the letter.

It had taken her three days to reply, mostly because she didn’t know why it had so unsettled her to hear from a man she’d spent such a small amount of time with. A man she thought was gone from her life. But she had replied, and somehow they’d found a way to cross the distances between their experiences.

It would be a while yet before Rafiq would be able to get a passport. But she had amassed plenty of holiday leave over the past couple of years. And she’d promised that, as soon as the McEwen trial was over, she’d book a slab of leave and visit Montreal. After all, she’d grown up to the sound of her father playing Leonard Cohen albums; she always thought he was more sexy than miserable, and she’d always fancied visiting his home town. There must be somewhere she could sit down with Rafiq and enjoy tea and oranges while they watched the sun pour down on Our Lady of the Harbour.