When he had caught up with her, she had been sitting on a low flat red rock, a few yards below the high-water mark. ‘Is this it, then?’ he had asked. ‘The place you’ve run away to?’
She had looked up at him, and wrinkled her nose. ‘Yes,’ she had announced, with the kind of dignity that only a child can affect. ‘This is my huffy rock.’
She was there again. She said nothing as he sat down beside her, as he had done almost twenty years before, and slid his arm around her. ‘Andy thinks I set the two of you up,’ he told her, ‘but, honest, baby, I didn’t. The dishwasher was full and just finishing its cycle, so we did the lunch things by hand, then we emptied it, stacked everything away and tidied up the kitchen.’
‘Whatever,’ she murmured, ‘it had its effect. Did he tell you? Everything I said, everything I yelled at him?’
‘All of it. I have to say,’ Bob chuckled, ‘you chose your moment. When we were outside, Andy and I, he was beating himself up about the two of you, and the way he acted back then. No wonder he thinks I turned you loose on him.’
‘Oh, God, I’m sorry, Pops.’
‘Don’t be. It needed to happen, for your sake, and maybe even for his. I’m to blame too.’
‘What do you mean? How can you be?’
‘For not getting involved at the time, for not being a proper dad and letting you soak my shoulder. You and Andy did nothing but shout at each other when you should have been talking. But he wasn’t rational, and I don’t suppose you were either. You should have been able to talk to me, but I wasn’t around for you.’
‘Yes, you were, and so was Sarah. I chose not to talk to you, that’s all.’
‘You chose to bottle all that up inside you, and get on with your life?’
‘Yes.’
‘For how long now, going on four years?’
‘Yes, and you want to know why? Because the more I thought about it, the more ashamed of myself I became. Pops, I came off the pill for one month because Andy kept going on about having kids, and in that time I got pregnant.’
‘And you took a decision for good and valid reasons. It’s all right, love.’ He gave her a one-armed hug.
‘But it’s not,’ she cried, with a desperation that cut into him. ‘It was expedient, it was cowardly, and I’m ashamed of being the kind of person who could do something like that.’
Bob took his arm from around her waist and clasped his hands together, his elbows on his knees. ‘Your mother had two miscarriages,’ he said. ‘One when we were engaged, just before we were married, and another a year after you were born. It happened while she was at work, and she was whipped into hospital for an emergency D and C. Except that wasn’t true: she never went to work that day. She went straight to Roodlands and had an abortion.’
Alex stared at him. ‘How did you find out?’
‘I’m a detective, kid. I took her head teacher a box of chocolates to thank her for her help. She was in on it; she said, “Don’t mention it,” and thanked me for the chocs, but there was something in her eye, and I read it. I made some personal enquiries and found out the truth. Scared the crap out of a gynaecologist in the process.’
‘God, Pops. How did she justify it to you?’
‘She didn’t, because I said nothing about it. The gynae bloke was shitless because I told him what I’d do to him if she ever found out from him that I knew. I loved your mum, Alexis; if she felt that’s what she had to do, it was all right with me, even if it hurt me like a broken bone. I’m sure she pined for that kid, though, and so did I, for a long while, even after Myra was dead.’
‘How did you get over it? God, did you get over it?’
‘I told your Granddad Skinner. He said, “That’s too bad, son, but it’s history. Now treat the child like all the others that are gone and get on with your life.” And that’s what I did. I put it in my mental box of cherished things and got on with my life.’
She squeezed his arm. ‘Your what?’
‘My mental box of cherished things. Your past selves are in there, as a baby, then as a kid. So’s your mum, and your grandparents. Sarah, from the early days when things were okay with us: she’s there too. And even a couple of others that I’ve never told you about, and won’t, for now at any rate. You, they, are all in there, and every so often, when I’m alone, I open the lid and put myself inside for a while. Then I close it again. That’s what you have to do. Define that box in your head and put the kid you never had in there. Then go forward. You can do that because essentially you’re me, even if I can’t read you all the time.’
‘If you have that box, what do you do with the demons?’ she asked.
‘They’re in another one. It’s locked up tight, and I’ve hidden the key, even from myself.’ He stood and held out his hand for her to pull herself to her feet.
They walked back up the bridle path and across the bents, the rough, rising ground beyond the shore, until they reached the garden gate. Andy and Aileen were waiting for them in the garden. ‘Sorry, Andy,’ said Alex, awkwardly, as she approached him.
He shrugged and smiled. ‘All the better for the telling,’ he replied. He looked at Bob. ‘I believe you now. Aileen told me what kept you.’
‘Don’t make disbelieving me a habit, for Christ’s sake,’ said his friend, heavily.
‘There was a phone call,’ Aileen told him. ‘Neil. He asked if you’d call him back on his mobile as soon as you got in.’
‘Sounds like the sort of call you don’t want on a Sunday. . but Neil wouldn’t do it if he didn’t have to.’ He took out his phone and strolled across to the corner of the garden, calling up McIlhenney’s number as he went. ‘What’s up?’ he asked, as they were connected.
‘Somebody’s put paid to Theo Weekes. In his house. With what looks like a very big, very sharp knife, only Arthur’s people can’t find it at the scene.’
‘Which of his surviving women did that?’
‘Neither. PC Grey found the body. When he was killed, about six last night, the pathologist reckons, his ex-wife was with Jack McGurk. And please, don’t give me the witness-protection joke again: I’ve heard it four times so far this afternoon.’
Skinner beckoned to Martin. ‘I won’t,’ he promised McIlhenney. ‘I won’t give you anything. I want you to tell all this to Andy. He’ll be looking into something beyond the leak inquiry, and this is too close to it to be treated separately.’ He handed the phone to his friend and walked away, back to Aileen and Alex.
Sixty-nine
‘This thing you’re doing, Andy,’ said Neil McIlhenney, standing outside Theo Weekes’s house, in the evening sunshine that baked South Bughtlin Road. ‘It makes my flesh creep. I can’t lose the thought that if it was anyone else we’d have had him in for serious questioning, or the Spanish would have if they’d known all the facts about the Dean murder, and especially about the picture connection to the second one.’
‘That’s why he wants me involved.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘He knows me, and he knows that if the evidence becomes overwhelming, I might have to lock him up. He’d rather it was me than anybody else.’
‘Come on, you’re not seriously suggesting that Bob’s in the frame for these killings, are you?’
‘He’s suggesting it himself. At least, he’s pointing out the obvious, that there’s a chain of circumstantial evidence connecting him to the victims, not just these two but the Ballester victims as well.’
‘But those cases are closed. We know Ballester did it.’
‘As you say,’ Martin concurred, ‘those cases are closed.’ He glanced along the road to where the press corps was mustered behind a barrier. ‘But maybe they shouldn’t be.’
‘Stop it, for fuck’s sake!’ McIlhenney protested. ‘You’re suggesting that our deputy chief, never mind that he’s a friend of both of us, might have gone on a killing spree.’