Sunday 28 February 2010
Costello made her way down to the lake on her own, and stopped at the little garden hidden among the shrubs. The snowdrops were out now, and soon little jonquils and daffodils would be nodding merrily in the spring sun. Mick and Colin were hovering tactfully fifty yards away, keeping their distance.
Near the bleak remains of the old boathouse, Bobby McGurk was standing handcuffed to a prison officer. Somebody had bought him a suit, tidied his hair, tried to smarten him up a bit for the funeral earlier that day. Tears streamed down his face as he set light to a little wooden boat, his boat, and pushed it out across the lake. The sails caught fire and flamed fiercely, and for a few minutes the blaze was reflected in the water, and a plume of white smoke swirled and danced around it. For a minute everybody watched in silence as the little boat went gallantly on, until it keeled over and sank. It was as if Bobby had given Itsy a Viking funeral, though her body lay in the cemetery in a coffin with a small brass plate that said simply ‘Itsy’.
The black-suited prison officer standing behind Bobby patted him on the shoulder, telling him that it was time to go. Back to remand. Back to custody. Back to whatever fate had in store for him. Bobby wiped his nose with the back of his hand and took one last look at the pond, the willows, the koi, the smoke that rose and curled into the sky, and said a quiet goodbye to all of it, a quiet goodbye to his Itsy Bitsy.
As they left, Iain broke away from the knot of guests on the lawn and came over to clasp Bobby’s shoulder and bid him farewell.
‘That was nice,’ Browne said to Anderson. ‘That wee boat going on fire. She would have liked that.’
Anderson nodded absently. His mind was running along another track. ‘You really should think again, you know, Gillian, about leaving the force.’
‘I have to. That night, it made me realize, I can’t do it – be a police officer, I mean. I just can’t. I’ve Frank and Rhona to think of,’ she said.
Anderson was casting an eye around the garden, wondering where his own children had got to. Suddenly Peter materialized at his elbow.
‘Gillian, this is my son, Peter,’ he said. ‘Peter, this is DC Gillian Browne.’
‘Are you the lady that smashed the ice with yer ar … bottom?’ Peter demanded.
Browne managed to keep a straight face. ‘Yes, I am.’
‘Cool!’
‘Actually, it was freezing!’
‘And it was Gillian who sent me home with Nesbitt,’ Anderson reminded his son.
Peter’s open-mouthed adoration of Browne was total. But short-lived.
‘Oh, look, there’s Aunty Helena!’ he shrieked and went pelting off to talk to her.
Helena was alone, Anderson was guiltily relieved to see – not with the man Gilfillan, the one Alan McAlpine used to refer to as ‘the ponytailed prick’.
Iain Kennedy came over to join them. ‘Thank you all for coming,’ he said. ‘You can’t imagine how much better this is than the media razzmatazz there was for Marita.’
‘It was good of you to have Bobby here today,’ Anderson said. ‘The authorities will go easy on him.’
‘I hope so,’ Iain said. ‘I pulled what strings I could, got him a good defence counsel. It’s hard for anyone to lose everybody they love, as he has.’
Well, you’d know, Anderson thought.
As Brenda sidled off to find Claire, Kennedy turned to Anderson and said, ‘Oh, there’s Sarah, talking to Jack O’Hare. Come and meet her.’
Anderson was introduced to Iain Kennedy’s former wife, the one he had left Marita for, and liked her on sight. For a moment he wondered whether he was looking at the future chatelaine of Strathearn, then he realized he wasn’t. This was a woman who had resolutely put the past behind her, and was here to support her ex-husband simply as a friend.
A few yards away, Anderson saw Costello being greeted by a pleasant-faced, smiling woman. For a moment he quite failed to recognize Jenny Corbett. She was holding hands with Lambie, who had lost the haunted look Anderson had come to know so well, and was shyly holding out her left hand to show off her engagement ring.
Costello was being less than effusive.
‘To some extent, I blame myself still, you know,’ O’Hare said. ‘If only I’d told you what I suspected.’
Quinn laid a comforting hand on his arm. ‘You shouldn’t blame yourself, Jack. If you’d come to me with a story about recognizing some old git because he had grey eyes and so does DS Costello, I’d have suggested a nice lie-down in a darkened room. I doubt I’d have believed you. Even you.’
‘Thanks, Rebecca. But it will always haunt me.’
‘Well, I suppose Mick Batten’s going to get a bloody great book out of it, at least. He misses a narcissist right under his nose and gets a book deal. And what do I get? My pension!’ Quinn knocked back the wine in her glass, and looked around for more. ‘And Anderson’s been told that a refurb for Partickhill Station will start in the summer.’
‘So the old place will live again.’
Suddenly there was a shriek of shock, then a ripple of laughter as Nesbitt the Staffie burst from nowhere, galloping round the garden with the speed of a bullet, his tongue flying out the corner of his mouth. He darted up to his beloved Browne and jumped up at her, putting dirty paws all over her blue coat.
Guilty laughter bubbled round the crowd as Peter came running from the rhododendron bushes. Even Mulholland was smiling. And he kept smiling as Nesbitt jumped up at him, leaving muddy paw prints down the front of his cashmere coat.
‘Sorry, Dad, I just wanted to show him to Aunty Helena. Nesbitt! Nesbitt, come here, you bad wee bugger!’
‘I wonder where he learned language like that,’ said Sarah Kennedy, failing to keep a straight face.
Nesbitt stopped, panted, looked at Peter, and charged towards him, veering round him at the last minute; dog and boy disappeared back into the shrubbery.
‘Wee Nesbitt seems to have worked wonders,’ Browne said cheerfully.
‘Thanks to you, Gillian. As you can see, Peter never shuts up now.’
Alone amid a crowd of people, Quinn looked idly up at the sky. A single seagull was flying high overhead. She frowned. Not a seagull. Not that size.
Somehow Ally must have got himself up to a high enough part of the Moss in time to catch a strong gust of wind to get him off the ground. Then that massive wingspan would have lifted him, higher and higher, until he met a wind current that would carry him … somewhere else.
Somewhere safe, with plenty of fish.
She smiled. Everyone else was too busy chatting, pouring glasses of wine and accepting nibbles off silver trays, to notice him. She raised her glass to him in a silent toast.
‘Safe home,’ she whispered.