Saturday 20 February 2010
‘Have a seat, Jack. How are you?’ said Kennedy.
‘I’m fine,’ said O’Hare. ‘You?’
‘Doing OK, I guess. Whisky?’
‘Just a small one.’ O’Hare settled into the comfortable leather chesterfield and contemplated a crystal tumbler of the Macallan. He cast a glance out the window in the direction of the gatehouse.
‘We’ll see her coming, don’t worry.’
The two men sat in silence for a few minutes, the low growl of the fire warming them.
‘Jack, do you think Marita would still be alive if that idiot detective hadn’t told Bobby about Itsy? No, don’t answer that.’ Kennedy took another sip of whisky, letting it settle on his tongue. He went on thoughtfully, ‘I think I might have killed her myself, if I’d been told she’d killed Itsy.’ He leaned back and closed his eyes.
O’Hare wondered how much he’d had to drink before he had got there.
‘But to do that, to Itsy! To strike her, in the heat of the moment, I could at least have understood. But to walk away and leave her! To my mind, Marita murdered her by doing that just as surely as she did by hitting her with that rock. And don’t tell me Itsy would have died anyway because I won’t believe you.’ He glanced out of the window in turn. ‘How do you think she’ll be – Costello? It’s a huge thing to take on board – her father, her brother.’
‘And in such circumstances.’ O’Hare thought for a minute. ‘Wee Tony put this family photograph up on your wall. Left it there for her to see. And she would have, sooner or later, with the force being featured in the exhibition too. I think he was trying to tell her, If you want to find me, here’s a way to start.’
‘Seems a strange way to communicate with your child.’
‘How confident would you be about walking up to your sons and risking being rejected again? I certainly would rather my daughter came to find me, from wherever she is. I don’t know that I could take her walking away if I went to find her,’ O’Hare mused, gazing into the fire. ‘You know, I think Wee Tony was watching, keeping an eye on Costello once he knew Harry was around. The squad remember seeing your white van. Indeed, I saw it myself, not far from my house. No wonder Browne and Costello thought they were being watched. They were.’
‘Is she staying with you just now?’
‘Just for a few nights. She couldn’t go home alone after an injury like that.’
‘That’s decent of you.’
‘I’m not there much. Anyway, it’s a big flat,’ said O’Hare dismissively. ‘I screwed up my relationship with my own daughter, so I might as well look after somebody else’s.’
‘Will she be all right on her own, down there at the gatehouse?’ Iain asked.
‘I think she needs to be there on her own. And going through her dad’s stuff will answer a lot of her questions. Harry for one.’ O’Hare shook his head. ‘He couldn’t have been a pretty child. Cleft palate, a bad one. I’m no expert but his cranium, post-mortem, bears witness to some major surgery, some of it after his second teeth were through. So he must have suffered severe facial deformity for most of his childhood.’
‘Why do you think Tony took him away to London?’
‘I’d imagine the wee sister was not safe around Harry. Pure supposition, but it’s as good an explanation as any. Something may have happened, so Abbott realized what his son was growing into. The disfigurement, the arrival of a little sister, separation, painful hospitalization? Mrs Costello was a violent, unhappy woman – a drunk. Did she reject her son, as she later rejected her daughter? Something – all of it, maybe – set Harry on the path which ended up out there on the ice.’
‘But why did Tony not make himself known to his daughter? Couldn’t he have warned her about her brother?’
‘He might have, in time. He may have suspected some of what Harry was up to. But he’d have no evidence. It’s hard for a man to turn against his own son; would you turn one of your boys in to the police? But he did save her life. He didn’t hesitate. The minute DC Browne mentioned that Costello was up here, he did a runner from the station. His wee Prudenza was in danger.’
‘Was that what he called her? Not her real name, surely?’
O’Hare didn’t answer.
Iain got up and reached for O’Hare’s empty glass.
O’Hare shook his head reluctantly. ‘I’ve to drive Costello home,’ he explained.
‘Jack, it’s only a ten-minute walk.’
The amber liquid filled the glass, catching the echo of the flames from the fire.
Iain poured himself another slug of malt, and sat down again. ‘She’s very like her father,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘She has some of his qualities, his kindliness, his sense of rightness.’
‘Grey eyes,’ smiled O’Hare.
‘I wasn’t at all impressed by her when I first met her,’ Iain admitted. ‘How wrong I was.’
The gatehouse was warm and cosy. Iain Kennedy had put the heating on for her, O’Hare had said, and she was to take as long as she liked.
Costello stood in the front room and turned slowly in a full circle. It was almost like being in a doll’s house. Scarcely anything was out of place. That tidiness certainly hadn’t been passed on to her, but then she didn’t have to share such a small space with another person. In the middle stood a small round table covered with a red cloth. The takeaway menu for Hazbeanz was neatly laid on top of a newspaper folded to show the television listings. A pair of felt slippers was pushed tidily under one armchair, and there was a pile of books on a wooden bench beside the other. It felt homely, companionable. A good place.
On the wall opposite the fireplace, Tony had put up a big piece of cork board. Pinned to it were dozens of drawings of birds. Costello went over to look at them more closely. Even without the immaculately neat captions, in the sort of writing no longer taught in schools, every one was immediately recognizable and vibrantly alive. There was a mallard, a robin, a pheasant, several sorts of gull, and other birds Costello had never heard of. And in the corners, again and again, in laborious capitals at odds with the fluency of the drawing, the name ITSY. Browne had been right – talented indeed.
Behind the front room Costello found a galley kitchen, a compact little bathroom, and two tiny little bedrooms, scarcely more than cubicles. One was clearly Bobby’s – the floor was barely visible under flung-down clothes. She went into the other, and stood for a moment, trying to gain a sense of the man whose room it had been. Wee Tony. Her dad.
She hesitated before opening the drawers of the small chest of drawers. It was battered and old, but had been lovingly polished. Inside, everything was neatly folded – sweaters, shirts, socks, all carefully aligned. On top of the chest lay an old photograph album. She picked it up and sat down with it on the bed. The plastic cover cracked open. Inside, the brown-edged pages were pale lilac.
Every photo in it was of her. Her as a baby sitting in her pram, her playing in a paddling pool with nothing on, her in a frilly dress scowling into the sun. Each photograph was annotated in the same fine italic hand that had captioned Itsy’s bird drawings. Her being held by her mum, smiling and pretty as Costello had never known her. And her with her head nestled into her dad’s shoulder, baby arms clasping his neck and his lips pressed to her hair. Costello sat for a minute feeling as though a great tidal wave was poised over her head, waiting to crash down on her.
Then there was a gap where a photograph was missing. The caption read A happy day at Strathearn.This was where the Polaroid had been hiding all these years.
She turned over the pages, to read her whole life in pictures. A picture of her on the way to school, just walking past the camera, unaware. Her eyes narrowed; she remembered that school, that uniform, but she didn’t remember her dad. Here she was in the three-legged race at the school sports day with some girl she couldn’t stand. Under it was written Prudenza, in the three-legged race, disqualified for punching her partner. It was a good punch. Boxing next year! A cutting from the local paper of her doing a sponsored walk for Help the Aged. Her graduation from police college, all sparkling uniform and keen smile, ready to change the world. Cuttings about cases she had been involved in, and dozens of photographs of herself in the streets, hurrying across Byres Road at the lights, coming out of the supermarket, running up the station steps. And each one labelled Prudenza, and the date.
Weary, Costello closed the book and let herself slump sideways on the bed, her head on the pillow. She breathed in, trying to remember what the man who had held her in his arms had smelled like. The pillow held a human smell, of hair and breath and cigarette smoke.
She lay there for a long time, staring at the ceiling.
Costello carefully locked the gatehouse door and put the key in her pocket. At last the wind had blown the fog away and the night was sparklingly frosty and clear. For a moment she breathed in the sharp air, and carefully tilted her head back to look up at a sky full of stars. She didn’t feel ready yet to join O’Hare and Iain Kennedy up at the Big House, so she fished in her bag for her torch and headed off in the direction of the pond. Memories of that night were flooding back now, and she would have to face up to it all sooner or later. Why not now?
At the top of the pond she sat down on the bench among the conifers, where John Littlewood had sat down for his smoke. She could remember how beautiful the ice had been then, sparkling through the fog.
Costello shivered, and steeled herself to walk along the path as she had that night. She reached the willow tree, and shone her torch again on to the globules of ice that hung like jewels from the whip-thin twigs. Just about here was where she’d been thrown down, had her head rammed hard into the ground, and where she’d heard the sinister click.
Just like Emily.
She had been lucky. She knew that.
The frosty lawn was still criss-crossed with the footprints of the paramedics, the crime scene police, the divers, photographers and everyone else who had swarmed all over the garden. Among them must be the footprints Wee Tony, her dad, had left as he hurried down the lawn and out on to the ice to save her. But she would never know which were his.
She shut her eyes for a moment. ‘Thanks, Dad,’ she whispered.
Rebecca Quinn walked into the empty investigation room, the click-click of her stiletto heels echoing against the bare walls. It was the dead of night, nobody around. A squad from Partick Central had been over the place like a plague of locusts, removing the evidence and all the paperwork for storage. Flat boxes ready for assembly, storage crates, vast piles of padded envelopes, lists and computer printouts cluttered the floor. There was paper everywhere.
The evidential chain was gradually joining together. They were ripping apart Harry’s car after they’d found all kinds of DNA in the hollow of the wheel brace retrieved from the pond. They had found a phone at his flat with a number ending 666, which confirmed that he had been in touch with Donna McVeigh and Stephen Whyte’s mother. The click of Quinn’s heels echoed the faint tick of the clock. That was the sound of her career passing.
Strangely, she didn’t feel alone in the deserted room. In her imagination she could hear them – talking on the phone, patting the dog, typing, gossiping, bickering. Her squad. Her team.
But no more. DCI Rebecca Quinn of Partickhill CID had been politely but officially told to bugger off. The big boys were going to play now. She was to work out her contract and, with annual leave, her last working day could be this Friday if she wanted.
At least, she’d been told that was what she wanted.
She looked up at the wall, like a general inspecting her troops. All those women could be taken down now, their cases laid to rest. A few more young men might have their deaths linked to Harry Castiglia, but that would be no more than a bonus now, a tying-up of loose ends.
Mulholland, still feeling fragile after twice being punched hard in the gut, and still living with the prospect of a disciplinary, had tried to redeem himself by repeating to Quinn his conversations with Bobby and with Marita.
Anderson and Browne’s account of finding Bobby cradling the dead Marita in his arms raised similar questions. What had their relationship been? Quinn had duly repeated everything to Iain, and had asked what he could add.
‘I always had my suspicions about Marita and Bobby. What you found on her scarf only confirmed them. Marita could easily have manipulated Bobby into sex. She only ever took lovers she could dominate, and poor Bobby was fairly easily controlled. Until …’
‘Until he snapped.’
But when told that Bobby had said he and Itsy were ‘lovers’, Iain had been genuinely incredulous, and wanted to know exactly what questions had been asked. ‘Bobby’s a simple soul. Lover, to him, would mean someone who loves you, not a sexual partner. So asking, “Is Itsy your lover?” would be like asking, “Does Itsy love you?” Of course he’d say yes. Because she did. And he loved her. It was entirely innocent. Tony would have known if it wasn’t.’
For a long time, Kennedy had not wanted to believe that his wife had murdered her own sister, the woman he loved. But a search of the white van had unearthed a pair of olive-green vicuna wool gloves, probably kicked under the driver’s seat, which matched the fibres found on the bloodstained stone. They were Marita’s and they were stiff with Itsy’s blood. So Marita was now, beyond argument, linked to the attack on her sister. Quinn had surmised that Marita had left the house after talking to Mulholland, guessing they were going to re-examine the van. She had gone to Bobby and asked for his help in retrieving them. That decision had proved fatal.
Quinn had then explained carefully that the SOCO team had gone back to the Moss and found one sawn-off sapling stump, among the many, that had blood on it. After careful analysis of the crime scene photographs, a report had landed on her desk which suggested that Itsy had fallen hard on to the stump, damaging her face, dislodging her teeth, and injuring the palate of her mouth. But what the photographs couldn’t tell them was what had then possessed Marita to hit Itsy. Hearing that her pitiable little sister was going to have a baby was only one of many possibilities, all of them painful.
‘But in the end,’ Quinn said gently, ‘whatever made her lash out, Marita took off that beautiful scarf, folded it carefully, lifted Itsy’s head, and placed it there as a pillow.’
She decided it would be neither kind nor constructive to point out that Marita must surely have known the scarf had Bobby’s semen on it. Let Iain take some small comfort from believing his wife hadn’t been a complete monster.