The Suffering of Strangers Page 2

  ‘Was there ever a doubt? That kid was dead in the flat for six months before anybody noticed. I’m surprised they are not asking for the death penalty to be reinstated.’

  ‘And your old pal was front page news, did you see that? The old woman?’

  Anderson tried to make the connection in his mind. He had seen the headlines. It was a long time before the penny dropped. ‘Costello, you mean, my old DI?’ he said, well aware that he hadn’t spoken to her about it, even though the case had been all over the media. Not so long ago, she would have been his first call. He looked at his watch, she’d be off duty by now. Maybe better to leave it.

  ‘Word from Govan is that she made mistakes, her and that old pathologist. He should be retired by now anyway.’ Stevie offered his valued opinion. ‘There’s a nice new pathologist over at the QE, little blonde, Welsh. Got an arse that could make a vicar kick a stained-glass window.’

  Bruce chipped in. ‘Costello’s been drifting for a while. She must have been a dead weight in your career, Colin. I mean you were really going places. At one point. Is she retiring now?’

  Retiring? Costello was only a few years younger than him. It was a chilling thought. Anderson looked at his phone, scrolling, pretending that he was reading the news updates on the Kissel case. God, in the old days they had shared everything, sat on surveillance in frozen cars for bum-achingly tedious hours, sipping tea from a flask and eating cold chips. He knew her so well he could choose her as his specialist subject on Mastermind. She was one of the few women he knew who was happy to sit in silence. Why had he not phoned her? Was he jealous that she was still out there doing the job while he was stuck in here with the Versace twins?

  And did they see him as they saw her, old with his career well and truly behind him?

  Cold case units had so many different names to mask the reality of the bureaucratic game of pass the parcel. They opened files, a quick check to see if any advancement in forensics might help or if there was any nicely preserved, uncontaminated material to test. There rarely was. So the file was closed again and left for the next review.

  He was going to be the sixth unwanted cop to review the Gillian Witherspoon case. What was he supposed to do? Go out and interview Gillian, so she knew she wasn’t forgotten? ‘Under constant review’ sounded like good policing to some but to others making contact with the victim every three years only dragged up painful memories that prevented them from moving on.

  He looked at the picture inside the front page of the file, a pleasant, totally unremarkable woman except that on the 15th of March 1996, Gillian, a young, busy mum of two, had nipped out to her local shop for a pint of milk at night after watching the ten o’clock news, full of the horror of the Dunblane massacre. She had pulled her coat over her PJs, slipped on her trainers and picked up her purse to walk down to the main road and the garage shop. It was well covered by CCTV, it was an unseasonably warm night, the area was well lit. Everybody knew everybody. Nobody saw anything.

  But somebody had been watching.

  She was found behind the bins, bleeding badly. She couldn’t remember what she saw, or heard, or smelled, or tasted, only that she had been aware of somebody.

  End of.

  As the rage of Thomas Hamilton unfolded, Gillian got lost in the later pages of the press. She had been divorced in 1998. Anti-depressants followed. Not an unfamiliar story.

  ‘Looks like we are reconvening.’ Stevie crushed his plastic cup in his fist and tossed it into the non-recyclable. ‘Yeeeees,’ he said, ‘got it in one.’

  ‘You’ve still got the moves,’ agreed Bruce, and they high fived each other. Anderson walked quickly away before they started French kissing.

  Roberta stopped dead, the world stopped with her. For a stupid moment, she turned to glance behind her, thinking she had come out a different door of the shop. She looked up and down the street, but the Duster was gone.

  The car parking space was empty.

  The baby was gone.

  Baby Sholto was gone.

  She dropped the bottle. It exploded onto the concrete, feathering the streets with champagne.

  She turned around to see if anybody was about. ‘Did you see? Did anybody see? Where is my son, where is my baby?’ She knew that the words were coming out her mouth but they didn’t sound right. She was merely making noises.

  Grabbing a pensioner in a grey raincoat, she screamed in her face, ‘Sholto? Sholto? Sholto! Where is the blue Duster? There was a blue Duster parked right there.’ She pointed, then grabbed the old lady again, this time by the shoulders, and began to shake her. ‘Did you see them? Who drove my car away?’

  Then strong hands were removing hers from the damp grey raincoat. Barry was out the shop, shouting at his assistants, sending one to run up the street, the other down. The Duster couldn’t have gone far.

  Roberta was aware she was screaming. ‘Where did that car go?’ she shouted in the woman’s face, flecking her skin with saliva. She plunged her hands onto her pockets, grabbing only the silky lining and fresh air, frantically searching for her phone. It was on the dashboard of the car. James had called. She’d put it back in the cradle on the dashboard. After she had moaned about Sholto, about how horrible he was, how noisy.

  Well, her world was quiet now.

  She heard Barry on his mobile calling the police. The old woman was telling her to calm down.

  ‘Where did it go?’ She heard the screeching of a banshee. She knew it was her, but she couldn’t stop herself.

  Now Barry was stopping people, the woman at the auto bank, the teenager walking her pug, another customer. Roberta scanned them, her finger held horizontally, pointing at each one, thinking that one of them could have taken the baby; one of them must have seen something they were not telling her. It was a conspiracy. They were all in it together. Cars do not disappear, not in that short period of time. How long had it been?

  She heard the word ‘Duster’.

  ‘What? What?’ She wiped the snot from her face.

  The teenager with the pug pointed. ‘Look, there’s a blue Duster parked round there.’

  Just as the man who worked the front till for Barry shouted something from the end of the road and waved up the side street.

  Roberta ran to the corner, to the narrow road that led to the small car park behind the shops. Not somewhere to leave a car on a rainy, darkening night. Not somewhere she would have parked. She thought she had been careful.

  The Duster was there. She looked at it and stopped dead, registering the number plate. Then began moving quickly again, almost laughing. Somebody had played a little joke and she had fallen for it. She could see the front seat, the outline of Sholto’s car seat, still in its place. She ripped open the door. Wrapped up warm in his yellow blanket, the baby was there. He was fine.

  He was quiet, he was gurgling and content.

  She pulled down his fluffy blue coverlet trimmed with cream fluffy lambs.

  And then she started screaming.

  In the end, Costello decided to get into a worse mood. She had got soaked twice shopping. Having gone in for a two-pound bottle of shampoo, she came out having spent thirty quid. There was a special offer on a cream that would energize her skin, make her twenty years younger and a foot taller. It would make her wake up each morning at five a.m. and eat yoghurt. If she was lucky, it might make her look like the skinny Scandinavian twelve-year-old supermodel on the cover of the box, but she doubted it.

  She was nibbling a blueberry muffin in the coffee shop, quietly drawing a blue Groucho moustache on the supermodel when they walked past on the opposite side of the road. Archie with the brunette on his arm, sharing his umbrella. She was slightly smaller than him, despite her strutting along in very high heels. Costello thought she could see a flash of red soles. A young woman pushed a pram towards them. They didn’t break stride as they sidestepped, both keeping under the shelter of his umbrella. As if they were used to walking together. The muffin went dry in her mouth. The bru
nette had stopped and turned her face to Archie. He leaned forward. Had he kissed her in the middle of Byres Road? He barely spoke to Costello in public, never mind show her any affection. She growled inwardly as the brunette turned towards the kerb, holding up her car keys.

  ‘Holy Jesus,’ muttered Costello as the lights flickered on a Porsche tucked into the kerb. A black Porsche Panamera? Who the hell was she?

  What was she?

  With Archie’s wife, Pippa, in a care home for nearly a year now, enough time had passed for him to bring along a lady companion to the Law Society events. Places he had never asked Costello to attend. Not that she would have gone.

  Had she only been a stopgap in his life? An emotional Elastoplast until time healed the wound?

  She had always appreciated his need for privacy out of respect for his profession. Maybe the secrecy was for quite a different reason.

  Maybe he was a two-timing little shit.

  Her thoughts ran riot. Was there a conspiracy? Did Anderson know about it? Was that why he had not been in touch? Bloody men sticking together as usual. If anybody was good at convincing themselves they were being benignly unfaithful, it was her ex-boss DCI Colin Anderson.

  She studied Archie’s face as the Porsche pulled away, his hand raised in the rain. He remained on the pavement under the shelter of his umbrella, watching the Porsche merge into the queue of traffic.

  He had never stood at his window watching her leave.

  Abigail Haggerty had been home from the surgery since half twelve and had been cleaning ever since. Now it was half five and she hadn’t finished. She still had the downstairs bathroom to do, and she needed to vacuum the hall again. George liked the pile on the carpet to lie the same way, like a cricket pitch. That kind of thing made George happy. And if he was happy with the house then he might be more agreeable about her going out with her sister tonight. But then it had been George himself who had suggested that Valerie stay over, as she was in Glasgow anyway. He had even given her some money to treat Valerie to dinner before the theatre and that was a first.

  It would be nice, like old times for the two of them. Abigail felt a bit guilty about not getting the housework done but instead, with the light dying, she stood at the window and looked past the monkey puzzle tree that dominated the garden, down the avenue, scrutinizing the houses, watching the sky change colour from blue to grey to black, the dark clouds rolling in. She liked watching the goings on in the street but was always careful to retreat behind the curtain when anybody looked up. Abigail couldn’t recall the last time she had spoken to somebody in a non-professional capacity, either ‘That’ll be four pounds twenty please,’ or ‘Can I have a line for another two weeks’ but tonight she could talk to Valerie, sisters together.

  She had texted Mary-Jane to see if she wanted to come along but there was no response. There never was. Her daughter hadn’t visited them for months now; she didn’t get on too well with her stepdad. There was no animosity. They just didn’t gel like a family. Abigail wondered, sometimes, where she was, the older one. Always somewhere else. Like wee Malcolm after school or at the weekend always somewhere better than here. When Malcolm eventually returned, he’d refuse his tea as he had ‘already eaten’. Then he’d go upstairs and not be seen until the next morning. So, she didn’t cook for him anymore. George said she shouldn’t waste her time and money cooking food that Malcolm wasn’t going to eat. The boy kept his bedroom door closed and left his bedclothes on the kitchen floor on a Monday, his laundry basket outside his bedroom door on a Friday. Each morning he took a pint of milk from the fridge and wound his way down the avenue, waving at Mrs Sinclair from number nine. Sometimes he met up with the man at number four. Abigail didn’t know the tall, skinny man’s name but thought he was the dad of the wee baby in the dark blue pram.

  They had gone to the last parents’ night. Abigail had sat clutching her handbag to her chest as George did all the talking, chatting away with relaxed eloquence as she had sat tongue-tied, wondering who this child was, this young man they talked about. He was bright, Malcolm, they said. He had a future. He could go to university.

  Just like his mum with her medical degree. Just like Aunt Valerie with her law degree. The words had floated through Abigail’s mind but she had remained quiet. Malcolm wanted to study engineering. Not law. Not medicine. What good had her degree done her, leaving her too scared to cross her own front door step.

  Her husband had nodded in encouragement, taking some pride in his offspring. That might last until they got home. He certainly had no interest in Abigail’s career, forcing her to cut her clinics until, like now, she was hardly working at all. And he had no interest in Mary-Jane and her dreams of being a singer. She would never make it, head up in the clouds, full of empty ambition. And maybe if Malcolm belonged to another family, a family that fed him, that saw to his haircut and his dinner money. Maybe if he had a father who would give him a laptop to type on, a printer to produce his essays, yes maybe he would make it to university.

  But his dad wouldn’t. Not George.

  Abigail glanced back at the clock. Malcolm would not be home for a while yet. She was surprised he had stayed in school the way he had been coughing and spluttering that morning. She hoped he was OK, feeling a little better. She missed him. Even when he was upstairs, locked in his room, she could hear him moving around, the odd floorboard squeak and when she was allowed upstairs she would go and lean her head against the door, not really listening, but hearing his movements all the same, sensing that there was somebody alive in this bloody house. Malcolm could still make her smile. Sometimes, on one of her bad days, he would make her a cup of tea and bring it to her in bed. On Mother’s Day, he had made her up a tray with a few colourful weeds out the garden, stuck in an old jam jar. There had been scrambled egg with lots of eggshell in it, and a napkin folded into a swan. She had kept that, for a while, under her pillow, unfolding it as far as she dared before she couldn’t get it folded back up again. Then George had found it and threw it in the fire.

  She looked at the clock again, rubbing her arm to ease her bruises. The anniversary clock on the mantelpiece was going on for six. George might be back soon, she had better get a move on and get the carpet vacuumed before Valerie arrived. She hated that clock and its perfect time keeping. Its message was always the same; that was another day of her life she wasn’t going to get back.

  It was getting dark, the rain shortening the day. It might have been her mood, but she felt daylight had somehow escaped her today. She wondered where Malcolm was. When was he coming home to confront her with those black empty eyes that so reminded her of George. He was so like his dad. Too like his dad.

  Mary-Jane was lucky, she had grown up and slipped out of her stepdad’s shadow before he had time to notice. But Malcolm was stuck. And at night, as she stared at the ceiling worrying about the man who shared her bed, she worried that her son might not be allowed to grow up at all.

  The system had been updated with Gillian Witherspoon’s number. Before driving out to the house, Colin Anderson had already read the notes of DCI Lennard, who Anderson did not know personally but he admired the man’s style. The update was comprehensive and personal with paragraphs detailing the passing of Gillian’s mother, her remarriage and the acquisition of a stepson to her own family of two boys. Anderson did a quick calculation. Her own boys would be in their early twenties now, her stepson about fourteen or so. Gillian had been his mother for most of his young life.

  She now lived in a semi-detached in a quiet estate in Cardonald. He could have phoned first but a footnote on the file said that a cold call would be better, not giving her time to fret, which sounded to Anderson more like they were giving her no chance to reject the meeting.

  It looked like he was in luck and there was somebody at home. Anderson saw the Corsa in the driveway. He walked up the path, seeing the backs of greeting cards, a series of white rectangles standing to attention on the windowsill.

  The door opened
at his knock, a young woman answered, looking like she had a cold, eyes red and running, a handkerchief jammed to her nose.

  ‘Hello?’ she sniffed.

  ‘Hi.’ He was wrong-footed, no idea who this woman was. ‘Hi, I am looking for Gillian, if I could have a quick word?’

  She stared at him, her little buck teeth opened, the hanky went up to her nose, and she slowly shut her eyes. And she closed the door on him.

  He placed his finger against it. It had shut firm. So not simply away to get Gillian. He stepped back, casually looking in the window, trying to see if Gillian was going to appear, maybe curious about her unexpected visitor.

  The door flew open again, an older man. Her husband? He was small and powerfully built, not somebody to be messed with.

  ‘And what do you want?’ His words were clipped by anger.

  Anderson realized he had landed right in the middle of something. ‘I would like a quiet word with Gillian please. Witherspoon was her maiden name, I know she has remarried.’ He stood on the step with his sincere face on, hoping that his hint about the time that had lapsed might get his message across without him having to spell it out. He was not going to break Gillian’s confidence.

  ‘And who are you?’

  ‘My name is Colin Anderson, though that might mean nothing to her.’ He conceded.

  ‘What do you want to speak to her about?’ The brown eyes bored into his, searching.

  ‘It’s a personal call just to see how she was doing.’ He again hoped that was enough, without going into detail.

  ‘Not much of a personal call if she wouldn’t know your name.’

  ‘She’d know Bobby Lennard.’ That got a reaction, a slight withdrawal of the head. ‘And who are you?’ asked Anderson pleasantly, looking at the bright white shirt, thrown into contrast by the plain black tie.

  Oh shit.

  Anderson recognized the hint of resignation on the other’s face, so he kept his own voice polite and engaging as he lifted his warrant card keeping it shielded by his palm, aware that there were people behind the door listening, peering out the window, watching.