‘Or, as you’ve just been in the boss’s office,’ she shot back, ‘a dramatic improvement in your already excellent upside-down reading skills, eh?’
‘Sir.’
‘Eh, sir?’
‘No comment,’ he answered, crunching another digestive.
Cursing the rain, Lena stepped gingerly towards the very edge of the kerb, unable to see properly through her streaked spectacles and blinded by the passing headlights. The first car to draw up contained three men and she knew better than to attract their attention, someone else can take the risk, she thought to herself, slipping back into the shadows. The second, a Volvo, seemed possible. But it drew close only to speed up in the flooded gutter, deliberately showering her with filthy water. She shook herself like a soaked dog, knowing as she was doing so that it was futile, rain having begun to cascade down, bouncing up off the pavement and splattering her bare legs.
Another vehicle slowed down and she peered, shortsightedly, into it, catching a glimpse of a male and female occupant. No dice. But the man tapped on his window to attract her attention and she sidled over, only to find a police identity card flashed in her face.
With ill grace, she climbed into the back seat, belligerent already, determined to get out as soon as possible. Time in the car was time wasted, and she needed a fix. Life had to go on, murder or no murder.
Shivering uncontrollably in her damp clothes, her impatience on display, she told the police officers the truth. That she and Isobel had been partners, looking out for each other, keeping tabs with their mobiles, ready to raise the alarm should the need arise. But last night, she paused for a second, they had fallen out. Over money, if they must know. So she had not kept watch and, yes, she was well aware that the woman was now dead. Got the Evening News like everyone else. The last she had seen of Isobel had been at about seven p.m. on the Tuesday night, the cow had nabbed her pitch at the Leith end of Salamander Street. She nodded her head on being shown the picture of Eddie Christie, swearing at the very sight, and confirming that Isobel had been assaulted by him, just as she had. All she knew was that he worked as a teacher at Talman Secondary. French, s’il-vous plait.
Unbidden, the prostitute opened the car door, feeling claustrophobic in its steamed-up interior, just as the sturdy police sergeant was lobbing another question at her. Looking in the mirror at the big blondie, she considered giving him a wink. He seemed vaguely familiar, and anyway, he was just another man, just another policeman, and they were no different under their clothes, plain or otherwise. Actually, there was nothing to pick between the lot of them, from the unemployed to the Members of the Scottish Parliament, except that politicians got a thrill from the risk of getting caught. Unlike those on the dole.
‘Lena,’ the policewoman said, ‘we don’t know who murdered Isobel. Whoever it is is still at large, might kill again. May even be on the lookout for prostitutes. Who are you working with tonight?’
‘I’m nae workin at a’,’ the prostitute lied.
‘Fine,’ Alice replied. ‘You’re not working, simply enjoying a stroll in the pouring rain where you would be working, if you were working. Anyway, should you consider returning to work, if you must, please don’t unless you’ve got yourself another partner? Ideally, keep off the street altogether until we’ve caught this nutter.’
‘Aye. But a’m nae workin’, see?’
She stepped out of the car, back into the downpour, her mind focussed on one thing and one thing alone. Smack. And until the needle had been plunged into the vein, and released its longed-for load, she could think of nothing else.
Lying contentedly in her bed that night, Alice began to look at the newspaper. The whole of the front page was again taken up with coverage of the abduction of a little boy, a huge colour photograph of the child staring back at her. Inside, three more pages were devoted to him, and the entire editorial. The story was considered from every possible angle: the nature of the police investigations and the particular difficulties encountered by them, profiles of any likely suspects, the precise circumstances leading up to the boy’s disappearance and so on. Even the psychological effects of the loss of a brother on a younger sister merited comment by a well-known child psychologist. Alice read it all, appalled, sympathising with the parents’ plight, recognising their utter desperation but deliberately choosing not to imagine herself precisely in their shoes. It would be a painful yet completely pointless exercise. Her heartache would assist no-one, remedy nothing. Below the rambling leader, her eyes were caught by a short paragraph headed ‘Yangtse River Dolphin Now Extinct’.
‘A rare river dolphin, the baiji, is now thought to be extinct. The species was the only remaining member of the Lipotidae, an ancient mammal family that separated from other marine mammals, including whales, dolphins and porpoises, about twenty-five million years ago. The baiji’s extinction is attributable to unregulated finishing, dam construction and boat collisions. The species’ incidental mortality results from massive-scale human environmental impact.’
Reading it, for a second she felt a wave of despair wash over her. The only supposedly rational species on the entire planet, the one with the fate of the rest of the natural world in its epicene hands, thought the matter so unimportant. The possible, not definite, loss of one of the billion upon billion of members of its own species merited four whole pages of newsprint, whereas humanity’s unthinking obliteration of an entire class of unique creatures deserved only a tiny footnote. Tomorrow more would be written about the boy’s abduction, but nothing further about the end of the baiji. Then again, tomorrow, like everyone else, she would consume the coverage avidly. Possibly she would read it while eating a yellow-fin tuna sandwich from a polythene carrier bag and, certainly, having done nothing for the next species perched precariously on the edge of extinction. Like everyone else, she was too busy living her day-to-day life, her good intentions simply paving on the road to hell.
Sleep was hard to come by, but just as she dropped off the phone rang. Alice woke, and in her dozy state hoped that Ian would answer it before remembering that he was away, visiting his mother. She clamped the receiver to her ear.
‘Ali… eh, Alice?’ Miss Spinnell, her neighbour, warbled. ‘I need your help. Can you come down straight away?’
The World Service was still on the radio. Six pips at two o’clock.
‘It’s only two, Miss Spinnell. It couldn’t possibly wait until the morning?’
‘No. It’s a drama… an emergy… a crisis. We may even need a doctor.’
Dragging herself out of bed, head still longing for the pillow, Alice shivered in the cold, searching around in the darkness for a jersey to put over her nightie. The recent spell of plain-sailing in her dealings with her elderly neighbour had seemed too good to be true. After all, Alzheimer’s did not stop, had no second thoughts about the casual destruction it wrought on its victim’s mind and personality. She had watched as, before her eyes, it had transformed a bright independent old lady into a suspicious eccentric, obsessed with the theft of her possessions by unseen intruders. Alice herself was now treated as a suspect, although her dog, Quill, remained the light of the old lady’s life.
The door had been left ajar by the time Alice reached her neighbour’s flat, but Miss Spinnell had returned to her bed and was sitting crouched on it, head down, knees against her chest, whimpering to herself. Alice came and sat on the edge of the bed. Seeing a wizened hand nearby she clasped it in her own, intending to comfort the distressed woman. Instantly the frail fingers were whipped away as if they had, inadvertently, touched lizard skin. The moaning, however, continued unabated.