“Aye, sir. We—”
In the outer hallway, the woman who’d discovered the bodies was working up to another fit of teary hysterics. Her name was Christine Gibbon, and she’d identified herself as the best friend of the looker in the tidbit nightie, stressing in the bluntest of terms that she’d held an absolute loathing for the man of the house and gone out of her way to avoid contact with him whenever possible.
“More of a bawler than that little one, she is,” Gorrie muttered under his breath. “But let’s hear what you were saying… ”
“We found some formula in the kitchen. Nappies in a closet near the crib. Robertson gave him a change. And he’s got him on the bottle right now.”
“Four boys of his own, dabbing the piss off a rashy tossel must be nothing new.”
“Aye. I’d suppose.”
Gorrie released a sigh.
“All right, you’d best get somebody in here with a camera,” he said. “Capture the moment, as they say… not that I expect either of these sweethearts’ll be sending the other any endearments next Valentine’s Day.”
The constable smiled feebly, nodded, and left the room. Gorrie noticed he hadn’t once glanced at the bed. No great wonder. With the low violent crime rate in Inverness, and this his first year with the Force, he’d most surely never encountered anything comparable to the scene in this room.
Gorrie looked down at his spiral notepad, flipped to a clean page, and was about to add a few words to his notes when Christine Gibbon resumed her emotional narrative to the officer he’d stationed in the hallway. Gorrie perked an ear. No telling whether she’d come out with something he hadn’t yet heard.
“I told Claire a hun’red times…”
Claire Mackay, the wife, Gorrie thought.
“… a hun’red time’s over ’n more, you want to count, that she’d be doin’ herself a favor by leavin’ the bloody mutt…”
Said mongrel dog being Ed Mackay, the husband. Gorrie had needed to coax the Gibbon woman into giving his name in her initial statement, as she’d insisted the very utterance of it would rot her tongue.
“… to his drinkin’ and erse-chasin’, but I couldn’t get her to listen. See how he provides for me an’ the baby, she’d say. If it weren’t for him I’d still be in the lands, she’d say. Got to forgive him his weaknesses, and so on, and so forth. Well, I say good riddance to the besotted radge, an’ keep your sympathy for Claire…”
Never mind that it was her mate who appeared to have been the victim in what was shaping up to be a murder-suicide case, Gorrie thought.
“… poor girl, she’d been better off in that cramped old flat we used to share when we was single. What good’s his high job at the plant to her now? Or this high place, in the end tally…”
Gorrie frowned at her latest repetition of what had become a tedious song. The “high place” was a suburban bungalow with a nice plot of green here on Eriskay Road, a short jaunt from the city center. The “high job,” taking Christine Gibbon’s comments backwards, was a supervisory waste-management position at the Cromarty Firth nuclear power plant over on Black Isle.
“… tell you, officer, I knew it would come to tragedy. Better they’d gone their separate ways. I’m not one for dirty talk, but this man was one adulterous shit. Always figured he’d take a hand to Claire when he was in one of his moods, though I can’t claim she declared it out and open. He’d got her so mousy intimidated, she kept everything bottled inside. And now the bottle’s broke. What she did, she was pushed to do. Pushed, you can be confident. A hun’red times I told the poor girl…”
As she dissolved into sobs, Gorrie phased her out, thinking there wasn’t much more of relevance to be gotten from her. Hearsay aside, Christine Gibbons’s account could be trimmed to a paragraph. She’d come to her friend’s bungalow this morning in her automobile, the two of them having planned to strap the tyke into a carriage and go shopping down by the Ness. Because Mr. Mackay would occasionally take a ride to the plant with one of the other site-workers, it did not strike Christine as unusual to find his car in the drive. At any rate, she’d knocked on the door and got no answer. Knocked some more, no answer. Then she’d rung the bell. Still no one came to the door. All the while she could hear the child crying inside the house, which caused her some growing disturbance. After another ten minutes of knocking and bell-ringing, Christine let herself in with a spare key Claire had given her to use in a pinch, and called out from the entry hall, again without response. With her opinion of Mr. Mackay being what it was, and no sign of Claire, and the baby shrieking its lungs out, Christine’s concern led her toward the nursery, at which point she passed the open bedroom door, was confronted with the sight of the two dead bodies, and rushed to phone the police, something she could not afterward recall having done in her trauma.
The rest was distraught babble, and a free-flowing tirade of slurs and accusations against the deceased Mr. Mackay.
Now Gorrie clicked the tip back into his pen and glanced out the bedside window. A newly arrived trio of official vehicles had joined the line of police cars that had preceded them into the front drive. A patrol cruiser led the pack. It was followed by a forensics van, and an ambulance. None of them had its flasher or siren on. The damage was done, they were in no hurry, why stir up the entire neighborhood?
Gorrie watched the patrol car’s driver and passenger doors swing open to break the horizontal orange stripes painted across both sides. Watched Robertson and a female social worker exit the car and start toward the house. Then he shifted his eyes to the ambulance at the rear, and watched the emergency medical technicians leave their vehicle for what was no longer an emergency at all, but rather a nasty cleanup job.
Gorrie frowned again. The evidence would be collected and examined, the bodies taken to the morgue for autopsy, and the child passed on to relatives or foster care, depending on who was or wasn’t out there in the world for him. Gorrie and his constables would conduct their follow-up inquiries of family, friends, and acquaintances. And when the case report was filed, his instincts told him it would be written up as an explosive domestic incident, the tale of a marriage gone as bad as they got, its last act an eternal mystery to everyone but the two who’d played it out here in the cold, violated intimacy of its setting.
Better they’d gone their separate ways indeed.
Feeling the sudden need for a breath of fresh air, Gorrie turned from the bed and went outside the house onto the lawn.
FOUR
Marc Elata folded his arms so that he held his elbows in the palms of each hand. He stood still before the statue as the American couple and their four-year-old brat — a four-year-old, at the Louvre! — staggered past him on the steps. Elata held his breath, willing himself past the moment, past their babble: “Do you think the Mona Lisa will smile for us?” said the father, as if the portrait were a carnival trick. The four-year-old whined about wanting more French fries, and when were they going to see a train?
A tour group swelled up on the landing behind him, chattering in Swedish or something Nordic; Elata pushed himself to move on, following the Americans in their quest for the undying smile. If it weren’t for the fact that he wanted to see several paintings — several master-pieces — displayed in the same room as the Mona Lisa, he might have pointed them in the proper direction as they continued up the stairs. This way he would have known where they were, making them easy to avoid.
A thick knot formed in front of da Vinci’s most famous painting; the crowd was a permanent feature of the room. Elata walked past it, glancing at the equally beautiful though far less famous da Vincis alongside, but not wanting to go near the rabble to admire them. He had Ucello and Pierro in mind; he had not thought about the Renaissance masters lately, and wanted to consider their problems of shade and perspective as an antidote to Picasso, whom he’d had so much of over the past seven days.