I might have hung in there and gone to work on him. If I had done, I might have, could have, won his support or, if not, won his silence at worst. I’ve decided not to, because now I know that my ship is sunk, holed below the waterline by the other thing I hadn’t anticipated.
When Bob and his second wife split, I assumed that she would take her kids with her wherever she went. Even after she decided to go back to the US, and the children stayed with Bob, I was sure that it would be a temporary arrangement and that once she was settled they would join her. I mean that’s what mothers do, isn’t it?
But no, not that one. She and Bob worked out their friendly, no-fault split with a shared custody arrangement that meant effectively that the kids were with us most of the time. Was I consulted? Was I hell! No, regardless of the fact that I’m a legislator and leader of the country’s largest political party, I found that I was expected to be a Goddamn mother figure as well!
Sorry, that is not me. It’s not that I hate kids. What it is, I don’t understand them, I can’t empathise with them, I have no interest in them. Thank God we had a nanny or I’d have blown a fuse a long time ago. As it was I let Trish get on with her job, and she enabled me to get on with mine.
I probably shouldn’t have phoned him that Saturday morning. He assumed I was checking up on him, and maybe I was. He likes having a shoulder to cry on, preferably female. I know that because he used mine for a while. We didn’t speak for long, but in the time that we did, things went from worse to irrevocable. At the end of it, we both knew our marriage was in pieces, and that all the counselling in the world couldn’t put it back together.
To tell you the truth, for all my blazing anger at his intransigence, I was relieved. No more sham, no more Mummy Aileen, no more Sex By Numbers with sighs afterwards. His, not mine. If he couldn’t make me come, that was his lookout. The only pressing problem I had left after our Saturday conversation was that I was saddled with Paula fucking Viareggio as my chum at Clive’s bloody concert.
No, that’s not fair. Of all the women in that circle, I like Paula most; she’s honest, up front, a truth-talker, and not affected by her business success. The rest?
There’s Alex, prodigiously talented they say, but endowed with all the same qualities that I’ve come to dislike so much in her father.
There’s that DI I met once, Stallings; ten minutes with her is like watching EastEnders for three hours.
There’s a hugely repressed lesbian superintendent called Mary Chambers.
There’s the widow Steele, with her miracle child, a police goddess with shards of shattered glass ceiling at her feet, yet with something very cold and rather scary at her centre.
And then there’s the newly returned Sarah; if you want him back, you can have him. . honey.
Yes, you can keep all of those ladies, as far as I’m concerned.
It was only Paula’s blooming maternity that made me regret having been manoeuvred into inviting her. But I had been, and I had to make the best of it. So I decided to let the government car service be her taxi, freeing me of the chore of driving her myself, since I no longer had plans to go on to Gullane after I’d dropped her off.
I called her to tell her about the arrangement, and also in the vain hope that she might pull out. She was up for it, though, excited, even. How was she to know that when she told me that she was wearing the same colour dress as me, I almost screamed at her, for putting the glace cherry on the icing on the pile of shit that my week had been?
Becky Stallings
The devil makes work for idle hands, and it’s been said that there’s something dark and Satanic about Mario McGuire. But given the alternative of hanging the flock wallpaper that I’d chosen and was already beginning to regret, I was happy to lend him my soul. There was a second reason why I didn’t mind. I was on the trail of a bent cop. I’m old school Met, and when I come across one of them, I feel that I’m defending my own reputation, not just my force’s. And yes, there was another: I welcomed a distraction from the reality of another chucked breakfast, and an excuse not to go to Boots for a pregnancy testing kit.
The DCS had given McGurk and me a stack of objectives. I did think about calling Sauce in, but Jack told me that he and his girlfriend were going far away for the weekend. Luckily the uniforms were having a quiet weekend, with no football at Tynecastle, so Mary Chambers, the station commander, was able to lend me three of them to back up the one rookie DC that I had at my disposal.
I set them all to work, looking for two needles called Varley in the twin haystacks that were Edinburgh Airport and Waverley Station, checking the taxi companies and one other possibility that Jack had thrown into the mix, car hire companies. I wasn’t optimistic, though, that any of them would turn up anything. Life’s never that easy.
While that was happening, Jack came up with a home address for Freddy Welsh. It was south of the city, out in West Linton, a nice rural village, he called it, that straddles the road that leads to a place called Biggar and on towards Carlisle. We headed on out there, taking Jack’s car because he’s too tall to fit comfortably into mine, and also because he knew where the hell we were going. Neither Ray nor I are country types; we don’t do greenery.
‘How are you and Lisanne getting along?’ I asked him as we drove across the Edinburgh bypass.
He shrugged his shoulders. ‘Fine,’ he replied.
‘Wedding bells?’
He glanced at me and chuckled. ‘And you?’
‘Not at the top of our to-do list,’ I admitted. Not yet, but that seemed to be changing by the day.
‘Same with us. But unlike you and Ray, we’ve both been married before. Neither of us is too fond of the institution.’
‘What happened to your first marriage?’ I asked. ‘Or don’t you like to talk about it?’ He never had, not to me.
‘I don’t mind. It started to fall apart when I was posted down to Borders Division. Mary didn’t want to go but she was talked into giving it a try. Didn’t work.’ He paused. ‘You’ll never guess who did the talking.’ He was right, I never would have, but he didn’t give me a chance to try. ‘Karen Martin, Andy Martin’s wife. She left the force when she married him and got pregnant. She set up this thing that she called the police partners’ support group, that was supposed to help people like us with job-related problems. It did a bit of good, for a while, then Andy got the Tayside job, they moved to Perth and the group folded. Too bad; she could have done with some support herself.’
‘Would it have stopped him bonking Alex Skinner?’ I murmured.
He laughed. ‘Shhh. This car may be bugged; those Agency guys are everywhere now.’
‘What’s your ex doing now?’
‘She went back to her old job; she’s teaching art in a school in Aberdeen, married to a car salesman and I get to see Regan once every couple of months if I’m lucky.’
‘Regan?’
‘My wee girl. Old George thinks she was named after him. . as if we’d ever have done that. . but the truth is we called her after the John Thaw character in The Sweeney.’
‘Thank God for that,’ I exclaimed. ‘It would have been weird if it had been the other one.’
‘What other one?’
‘Have you never seen The Exorcist? That’s what the girl was called, the one possessed by the Devil.’ Or maybe Mario McGuire? I thought.
Jack gasped. ‘You’re joking. And no bugger ever told us? Fucking hell!’
‘It’s all right,’ I said. ‘Everyone’s forgotten about The Exorcist by now.’
‘You haven’t.’
He drove on in silence, frowning. I looked at his grim profile and reckoned that my gaffe would cost me a right few drinks in the near future. ‘Where did you get that mark on your ear?’ I asked. I hadn’t noticed it before, but a small piece of it was missing.