Costello closed the door of her riverside flat and walked awkwardly back to the living room humming ‘Private life, drama baby leave me out.’ She limped, only weight-bearing on the outside of one foot, keeping her blister clear of the carpet. Then she sat down and put her foot back in the bucket of warm water, staring at the damp towel lying crumpled beside the half-eaten packet of Doritos. She had been enjoying them for breakfast until interrupted by the buzz of the entry system, hobbling to the door in her pyjamas, presuming wrongly that Archie Walker was the only person who would dare to annoy her this early. She had barely recognized Brenda Anderson’s voice as she asked to come up as she was ‘just passing’. On the morning of the meeting that was going to decide her husband’s future? Aye right! Costello had buzzed her in and, sure enough, there was Brenda Anderson, the DCI’s missus, suited for work, her red hair neatly cut into a power bob. But her face was pinched and pale. ‘Sorry. I need to talk. To you, I mean.’
The conversation that followed was awkward. Costello had put on her dressing gown and made a cup of tea. Brenda had sat with her handbag on her lap, her feet crossed at the ankle as if she were the Queen. Her eyes were fixed on the breakfast TV news as if the towel, the Doritos, and the basin of bloodstained water were perfectly normal.
‘Long shift on high heels. Blister,’ Costello had explained, and Brenda had given her a look. The look that belonged to sceptical PE teachers and thin women who worked for Weight Watchers.
‘This rain is terrible,’ said Brenda, looking out through the huge window that looked right down the Clyde.
‘It’s atrocious; there’s some bad flooding in town,’ Costello agreed.
Brenda sat still, very stiff, very upright. Then her cup had started to shake. ‘Colin will fall apart if they don’t let him back.’
Costello had no answer. It had been fourteen months of doctors, psychologists, psychiatrists, occupational health and God knows who else. Peter, the Andersons’ son, wouldn’t come out of his room. The rumours of their daughter’s – Claire’s – mental health abounded; Costello had hoped they were untrue, but was too scared to ask.
The conversation had been short and one-sided. Brenda was terrified that her family was falling apart, that Colin would not be able to accept the fact his career was over, if that was the decision. In that case, the marriage would be over as well. Brenda had had enough.
Having told Costello that, she had left.
Costello wriggled her toes in the now lukewarm water. Brenda had thought, wrongly, that Costello had known something, or had some influence.
If the past fourteen months had been hell for the Andersons, it hadn’t been a bed of roses for the rest of them. Living the life of a Police Scotland detective who nobody knew what to do with had been frustrating. She had gone to meetings to develop things, looking at spreadsheets, judging people she didn’t know on their key performance indicators. People she would never meet and had no wish to judge.
DI Costello preferred to look people in the eye when she decided to dislike them.
She had been dreading this day and had been up most of the night, blaming her sore foot but knowing it was worry about Colin. It was twenty to eight and all the early dawn was revealing to her was a sky full of more bloody rain. Most of it already seemed to be battering against her window, looking for a way in. The Clyde beyond was in a dark and churning mood.
She pulled her foot from its soapy bath and examined the blister. It was huge, filled with blood. She checked her mobile phone – still no word from Archie. If anybody knew, he would.
Today, as the song said, was the day the teddy bears had their picnic. The top brass were meeting DCI Colin Anderson to pass on their considered opinion of whether he was fit to return to work.
Today, either way it went, Anderson would need his friends with him. The team had a lunchtime meeting planned, in a nearby café called Where The Monkey Sleeps, a corner seat booked so they could console or celebrate. It would be the first time they had been together for over a year.
The emotional car crash of the Shadowman had hit them all hard, but Anderson had lost his lover, nearly lost his daughter – and his life. He was now in danger of losing his career and his marriage. He had been diagnosed with PTSD. The top brass were looking for a scapegoat. The family had closed ranks.
Oh yes, the fallout of the Shadowman was like the rain, still falling. Vik Mulholland, their pretty handsome metrosexual DS, had broken his ankle. It had mended, then he had bent the pin. He was still not back on full operational duty. There was a rumour that a certain medical student called Elvie McCulloch was looking after him well in her flat in Glasgow. Supposedly because he couldn’t manage the stairs up to his mum’s flat.
And Costello believed that as much as she zipped up the back.
She looked at the phone again. Still nothing. Serves her right for expecting a relationship with a married man, a fiscal to boot. A married man with a demented wife, in the medical sense. It could take Archie a long time to get Pippa up and about in the morning. Sometimes she never went to bed, spending the night walking around the bungalow like a caged animal, testing the locks on the doors, muttering that she was looking for Archie, who was always three steps behind her. Whatever demons possessed that woman’s mind, they came out to wreak their havoc when darkness fell. It put her own blister into some kind of perspective.
By the end of the day, one way or another, the gang would be back together. Colin, with his own demons of the post-traumatic stress. Vik with his superficial charm. Wyngate, the new dad, with his magnificent spreadsheets. She had met Professor Michael Batten for coffee a few times last year, when Colin had been really bad; not eating and haunted by nightmares. That’s when Batten had hinted that Claire had been in a psychiatric ward for self-harming.
Colin was not coping. Brenda, his wife, needed support but had none. And nobody knew what to do.
Today might be the end of their era together.
Costello was not ready for that yet. She had been biding time, believing that Colin was coming back. Her career was on hold; everything was marking time and treading water. Except those who were drowning.
Colin Anderson woke from a sleep that was not his own. His nightmares were those of an unsound mind, where fire had consumed all and he was the only one left alive, stumbling about in a blackened, warped world as his loved ones ran ahead of the flames. They sang joyfully, ignorant of the death that pursued them. He tried to follow but his legs were stuck in the mud, too heavy to pull free. When he looked up, they had gone into the smoke, lost from his sight. Then he heard their screams as flames seared their flesh. He felt their pain as the heat blistered their skin and burned their lungs.
At that point, he usually woke up. Then he would check the house, opening doors, windows, checking escape routes. In the early days, he had pushed all the furniture against the wall so they would have a straight run to the door. He wasn’t as bad as that now, but those first few months had been embarrassing for the kids as Peter tried to pull the settee away from the TV screen. Colin had lifted his hand to strike him, then turned on Brenda as she tried to intervene. He could remember his own tears, standing in the middle of the living-room floor, screaming that they would all die if they got caught there.
Brenda just looked at him in stunned, accusatory silence.
The guilt was the worst thing. So Dr Cotter said in her beautiful silky tones. It is what it is. He cannot change the events that happened that night, so he had to accept, and until he did that, he would be taunted by images of trees and flames. And pain. He would feel he was being burned. It was his brain reminding him, not of what had happened, but reminding him of what he had not accepted.
It was the way with all post-traumatic stress cases.
The guilt was made worse by the fact that he was a wealthy man now. Materially rich, emotionally empty.
The pain in his leg eased off slightly. The flame was now licking at his skin. He closed his eyes and lessened its power by accepting it, as he had been taught. If he mentally put his hand out to shake hands with the pain, it would go away. There was nothing to be scared of. He took his sertraline and his lorazepam, swallowing them dry.
Then he waited.
Dr Cotter was right. She was always right in daylight, in company. At three o’clock in the morning, sick, alone with a cold sweat, she had no idea how wrong she was.
He stared at the ceiling, putting his hand out and letting his fingers walk across the bed. Brenda was not there, of course she wasn’t. But his fingertips found the hairy body of Nesbit. His life might be collapsing around him, but his dog was always true.
There were to be no distractions this morning; he had to keep his mind together.
Today was the day.
The air on the upper landing was still scented with orange shower gel. He would go through his routine as normal. That was what Dr Cotter had recommended: keep things at home as normal as possible, even when he was lying on the bathroom floor curled up in a ball, crying because the pain of invisible flames was too much for any human soul to bear. Even when his daughter was sectioned after slitting her wrists. As the hospital looked after Claire, as the psychologist looked after Colin, Brenda had to keep going for Peter, for some sense of normality.
PTSD was infectious; it worked its way through a family tree like woodworm, eating away at the foundations.
Anderson crossed the hall and paused, Nesbit following him out of the bedroom, snuffling. The house was bathed in the dull daylight. He could hear the rain battering on the roof and it only did that when there was a blow on. Some things don’t change.
He paused at his daughter’s bedroom. She was going back to school today, just for the afternoon to see how she got on. He wanted to open the door and wish her good luck, tell her not to worry, she would cope. Oh, and by the way, I am sorry for nearly getting you killed and for getting our best friend killed. We both lost someone dear to us and she has left you so much in her will and I can’t even tell you that.
Why? Why should he? He admitted to Dr Cotter that he was angry at his daughter for not saying anything of comfort to him. Not one word about the loss of Helena, his lover, her mentor. Why wasn’t he allowed to mourn her?
But all this angst was normal according to Dr Cotter; it was all to be expected. Better out than repressed, and it would all return to some kind of new normality in the course of time.
In the course of time.
He wished the violence in him would subside. God knew how many times he’d come close to striking his own children at some imagined slight.
Without realizing it, he had walked to Claire’s door and placed the palm of his hand flat on the paint. It was lying slightly open. He listened at the gap; there was no noise from inside, not the gentle breath of a snore, no wheeze of respiration. He removed his hand; he was not allowed in her room now. Until they came to the time when they could talk to each other again.
That was what the doctor said.
He sighed and went into the bathroom, trying to not make a sound.
He needed to get back to work.
He ran the hot tap, filling the sink with steaming water, and dropped his face into the surface, let the heat ease the pain off. He recognized the headache – brutal, throbbing. He had waited eight months for today. It wasn’t going to pass without some kind of stress reaction, but pass it would.
He held his breath under the water.
He slowly let the air bubble from the corner of his mouth, then lifted his head from the water and took a deep breath in, shaking the loose water from his hair. He leaned against the mirror, letting the cold glass calm his forehead. And tried to get the pounding in his heart to relax, the skewer in his head to stop twisting.
Today he would know, and at this moment he didn’t care which way it went. Anything was better than this no man’s land; this endless round of talking, going through it and over it again and again. Dissecting it down into every little decision, like O’Hare teasing out a piece of organic tissue until it was an unrecognizable sliver on a slide.
He lifted his forehead from the mirror and looked at his reflection. His drawn, lined face was alien to him, but the tears coursing over his cheeks were familiar enough.
He blinked slowly, catching a tear before it fell, then opened his eyes at a click. Out of the corner of his eye he saw his daughter’s door close.
He wasn’t the only one who wasn’t sleeping.
God knew that his nightmares were bad enough.
Hell only knew how bad hers must be.