I nodded.
He frowned, deeply. ‘David had taken some terrible beatings from that uncle of his,’ he continued, ‘but he never showed a scrap of remorse for what he did to him in revenge. It’s easy to assume that his nature was beaten into him but maybe it was there all along.
‘I told Cheryl to be careful when she took up with him, but she had her heart set on him. So I did what I could. I pushed Tom Donnelly towards him, you know. I thought his influence would make him better, and it did, or I thought it did.’
‘Why did you tell Provan about Father Tom?’
‘Because at the time I thought that David would go there. When Julie told me, I thought what you all did, that he’d finally snapped and done something terrible to the lass. In sending Dan to Tom, I thought I was sending him after David. It never occurred to me that it would be Cheryl who’d turn up on his doorstep. It never occurred to me then either that our relationship need come out, or that it would be seen as relevant if it did.’
He looked me in the eye. ‘You’re right of course, I did change his application form. Cheryl made me promise to help him get into the force, and that was the only way I could be sure of it.’
‘She told us he knocked her about,’ I said.
‘Aye, she told me that too, but only lately. The abused became the abuser, and not just physically; there was mental cruelty there too. It’s not that he didn’t love her; he did, no question, but as you said, he was borderline psycho, Bob, and sometimes he strayed over on to the other side.’ Max buried his face in his hands and rubbed it, vigorously, almost violently.
‘If only she’d told me about that sooner,’ he moaned, ‘but she didn’t because she knew I’d have finished him in the police, and without the police, he’d have had no restraint, none at all. She put up with it, until she snapped herself. She did to him what he did to that uncle years ago, only she was better at it.’
‘How?’ I asked, as horrific visions flashed through my mind.
He must have read them in my eyes, for he exclaimed, ‘No, no! Nothing as cruel as that. You know she’s a pharmacist?’ I nodded. ‘She had some stuff in the house that she probably shouldn’t have, diazepam, sedatives that she gave him when he got really disturbed, that time he had his serious breakdown. She ground enough into a bottle of beer to knock him out and then she suffocated him with a plastic bag.’
He removed his specs to wipe away tears. ‘I think she sees it as something of a mercy killing,’ he said. ‘She told me he was raving about your man McGuire, and about Andy Martin; he said that given half a chance he’d kill them both. She believed he meant it, so in the end she killed him to save him from himself.’
I gazed at him, directly. ‘Where is he, Max?’
He stamped his foot on the ground. I looked down and saw that some of the paving on which we sat was new, or had been replaced. The concrete grouting between the slabs was much less weathered than the rest.
‘I’m sorry, Bob,’ Max sighed. ‘I know. After forty years as a police officer, I shouldn’t have had a second thought. I should have called you as soon as she turned up here on Thursday evening. She phoned me, you see, and told me she needed my help. She needed my help,’ he repeated. ‘I love the lassie like a daughter. What was I going to do?’
I couldn’t answer him. A long time ago, I disregarded my own duty, even if it wasn’t on such a serious scale.
‘What next?’ he asked.
‘Lottie and Dan are outside,’ I replied, quietly. ‘They’ll take you into custody, then we’ll get the excavators in. Your house is now a crime scene.’
‘Tell them to put it back the way they found it, Bob, please. My Julie loves this garden.’
His Julie. Another life shattered.
I couldn’t look at him as I phoned Lottie Mann, telling her to join us.
I couldn’t bring myself to hang around either. I didn’t want to see him being put into the back of a police car with the ridiculous over-precaution of an officer’s hand on his head. I didn’t want to see the paper suits crawling over the place looking for samples of the bleach Max said he’d used to scrub out the luggage compartment of the Honda that his niece had used as a hearse.
He’d asked me if I thought she might be able to plead to a reduced charge. I mumbled my way round that one, but it must have been as clear to him as it was to me that her flight, and the things she’d done in the aftermath to conceal her crime, had to mean, inevitably, that she’d be done for nothing less than murder.
I wanted out of there and so I got out of there, heading back to Sarah and my lovely, normal, well-adjusted family unit, that I’d determined was going to be the centre of my life from that moment on.
But I didn’t get halfway home before I had another call from Alex that kicked the ball right up on the slates once again.
Sixty-Three
It made Alexis Skinner very sad that she had no memory of her mother, only a vision in her mind put together on the basis of photographs, stories her father had told her, and the shockingly self-revealing diaries that had been discovered after her early death in a car accident that she would probably have survived in a modern vehicle.
Alex was under no illusion that Myra Graham Skinner had been an angel, but her dad had loved her. More than that, he had liked her; he had told her when she was old enough for mature discussion that when she had died, it was as if he had lost three people, his wife, his lover and his best friend.
It was only as an adult that she had come to appreciate what a sad and lonely man her father had been through her childhood. He hadn’t been monastic, not at all; there had been women, for sure, and even a semi-domestic relationship with another detective called Alison that had lasted for a couple of years, until it dwindled to nothing.
The Mia Sparkles thing. . she always thought of her by her radio name. . had been very short-lived. . if it had ever lived at all, for maybe she’d been wrong about a strange phone conversation she’d had with her father after he’d been away overnight. . but it had made an impression on her.
He had met Mia in the course of an investigation, and somehow, after he’d told her she had a big fan in Gullane, he had wound up bringing her home. While Alex had been impressed as any thirteen-year-old would have been by a star figure twice her age, and had taken to her, she had known instinctively that she was not stepmother material, and so she had not been heartbroken when she had gone, as surprisingly as she had arrived.
She thought of the years between her mother’s death and the arrival of Sarah as her father’s Dark Ages. She believed firmly that they should stay unlit, and so, when Andy had brought up Mia’s name, she had been unusually uncommunicative.
She and he had been a couple on, off and then on again for a decade, and they had a ‘no secrets’ policy. However, if Mia was a secret, she was her father’s, not hers, and not one to be shared with anyone. He hadn’t pressed her on it; indeed, he hadn’t discussed it further, and that was good.
As she watched Andy’s daughter running through the first few fallen leaves of autumn in the Royal Botanic Gardens, with her younger brother staggering after her, she wondered what her mother would have thought about her lack of desire for children of her own.
She and Andy had broken off their engagement over his discovery that she had terminated a pregnancy without his knowledge. She had done so because she had believed that having a child at that point would have disrupted the formative years of her legal career.
She stood by her decision; it had worked out for her. She had become a partner in her firm, Curle Anthony and Jarvis, in almost record time, and was one of its key earners. She had reached a position where if she chose, she could take a couple of years out to start a family, then step back in exactly where she had been before.