And then… this is my day for analogies, so I’ll follow one metaphor with another. Remember those imaginary bricks I mentioned earlier? Well, a whole pile of them materialised and formed themselves into a wall. It wasn’t quite solid, it was still a bit ephemeral, but it was there.
‘Forgive my surprise,’ I said. ‘Here was me thinking you were dead.’
He smiled. ‘Is that what the cow told you? I shouldn’t be surprised by that, I suppose. I might as well have been as far as my family was concerned. No, as you see, I’m still alive.’ He held out an arm. ‘Go on, have a feel; it’s solid.’
‘Where have you been?’ I asked, my mind still swirling in the aftermath of that wave.
‘These past twenty years? I’ve been sailing. I moved on from trawlers and joined the Royal Fleet Auxiliary. I’m chief officer on a support tanker, Leaf class. I live in Portsmouth now, have done for fifteen years.’
‘How did you hear about Marlon’s death?’
‘When I’m on shore,’ he replied, ‘my newsagent gets the Scotsman for me. I read about it in there. I found out about the funeral through the local authority, and came up for it. I thought I might have seen my other two children there.’
Jesus, he didn’t know. ‘I’m sorry to have to tell you this, Mr Watson, but your other son’s dead too. Your daughter’s estranged from her mother, and has been for twelve years. She’s…’ I was on the point of telling him where he could find Mia, but I stopped. I had unfinished business there, and I didn’t want him getting in the way. Also, I didn’t think she’d be too pleased to see him, since he was supposed to be helping Davey Jones sift through his locker.
‘I see,’ he murmured. ‘Lucky Mia.’
‘Why did you leave?’ I continued.
‘Where are my brothers-in-law?’ he asked. ‘Those fucking Spreckleys?’
I pointed, downwards.
‘Both of them? Now that is good news. Billy maybe not so much, but Gavin, yes. If I’d had the guts I’d have put him there myself. He was the reason I left.’ He looked at us. ‘I was a bit wild in my youth. Check your records and you’ll find my name there, although for nothing serious. But I had no idea when I married Bella what her family was like. She was pregnant with Mia and we did the old-fashioned thing, then we had the other two. I was away at sea a lot, so it took me a while to find out what Gavin was up to, with the drugs and everything. When I did, I went mental. I told Bella we were moving away. But she’d have none of it. She did her nut. We had a big argument. A couple of days later, I had a visit from her brothers. Gavin put a gun to my head and said that if I was still around in twenty-four hours he’d pull the trigger. He told me to disappear and not to even think about going to the police as he’d friends who would find me and put me through an industrial mincer, feet first. He scared me all right, enough for me to leave my wife and family behind, and never even think about coming back.’
So: Mia had made up the story she’d told me about her father’s departure, but she hadn’t been that far off the mark. ‘If you’d known he died twelve years ago, would you have?’ I asked.
‘No,’ he admitted. ‘I had another family by then, a wife and a daughter. Not bigamous, mind; I divorced Bella as soon as I could when the law let me.’
I wasn’t too bothered about that. I had other matters on my mind, for example that mirage-like wall. ‘Give my colleague your contact details, please, Mr Watson,’ I said. I left them to it. I walked away, across two double ranks of graves, and sat on a long, flat, mossy tombstone, giving myself time and space to think.
Mia had lied to me. She’d told me that after Ryan’s murder she’d run off to live with her father, her tragic, lost-at-sea trawlerman father, who’d given her the stability she’d needed, and let her build a proper life for herself away from the remnants of her doomed family. That was all fiction, a farrago of Mills and Boon candyfloss, but she had gone somewhere, that was for sure. It was probably likely that the degree she’d told me of was real, and her CV. She wouldn’t have expected me to check any of it, but her bio would have to stand up to the scrutiny of others as her career developed.
So where had she gone when she was barely sixteen? I ran through everything she had ever said to me, looking for a hint. Her contempt for her family had been evident, for her brother Ryan, for Gavin, her uncle. Not a psycho, she’d insisted, but what was it that she’d said about him, only a couple of hours before? I searched for her words and they came back to me. ‘Gavin had aspirations, he wanted to be Mr Big, but he was never in the same league.’ And the vehemence with which she had spoken them, as if she was speaking from…
No, come on, Skinner, stay focused. But couldn’t it be? What had she said, according to Telfer? She didn’t shag boys, only proper men. Not Gavin, surely? Not her uncle? No, even Bella would have drawn the line there, but did he take her about with him? Did she meet any of the crew he worked for? Could she ever have met… Fuck!
‘So where did she go?’ I whispered. And answered myself, intuitively.
I snatched my phone from my pocket, and searched through incoming calls until I found a number with a prefix I recognised. I knew it was a long shot, one that I hoped wouldn’t pay off, but didn’t Foinavon win the Grand National, didn’t Ali dismantle the monster Liston, then topple the invincible Foreman?
Lowell Payne was on duty when I called. He was surprised to hear from me, but sharp and efficient as usual. I asked him for a telephone number, and he found it in seconds. The lady who answered my call was posh Lanarkshire; her voice was the sort that I’d heard as a child, mostly on my occasional visits to my dad’s office, when clients arrived for appointments.
‘Mrs Shearer?’ I asked.
‘Yes.’
‘I’m a police officer,’ I told her. ‘My name is Skinner, and I’m a colleague of the sergeant who spoke to you the other day.’
‘About poor Violet and her children?’
‘That’s right. I need to ask you something else. Can you remember, was there a third child living with them at any point? It would be about ten to twelve years ago.’
‘Oh yes, dear. I remember her well. Not really a child, though. She’d be about sixteen when she joined them, about halfway between Peter and Alafair in age. I have to confess I didn’t care for her at first. She was a little… well, a little coarse, I have to say. But she improved; Peter, when he was there, and Alafair, were a good influence on her, and Violet, of course. She was a clever girl as I recall… I was a teacher myself, you know. She went to Hamilton Grammar with Alafair. Violet told me that she had problems at first, but that she caught up very quickly. She did a very good group of Highers, and went off to university. I don’t recall seeing her after that.’
‘And her name?’ I knew, but still, tension gripped me tightly.
‘She had a funny name.’ Mrs Shearer laughed softly, genteelly, the way posh Lanarkshire people do. ‘But no funnier than Alafair, I suppose. She was called Mia.’
I sat in silence for a while, until I realised that I had to start breathing again. ‘One last question,’ I continued. ‘I know that Violet is… was,’ I corrected myself, ‘a widow. But when the family lived there, do you recall if they were ever visited by a man?’
‘Oh yes,’ she exclaimed with the enthusiasm of a gossip too long out of practice, ‘there was. Violet’s cousin, she said,’ she paused, ‘although, to be honest, from time to time I did wonder. A very nice man. She introduced me once; he was quite charming, in a formidable sort of way. His name was Perry. That was his first name, dear,’ she added, ‘she never did tell me his surname, and one doesn’t like to be nosy.’