But she felt no urge to make that move, and with no pressure from Andy, she was beginning to doubt that she ever would. They might marry, they might not. Either way they would be happy. . just like her father and Sarah, who seemed more content and confident the second time around than they had ever been before.
She was smiling at the thought, as she ran to retrieve a ball that Danielle had kicked down a sloping path, smiling as her mobile rang.
She reached the ball, stood on it to stop its progress, and checked the phone. She saw her own number on screen; her position in her firm meant weekend calls and because of that she put her landline on divert every time she went out.
‘This is Alex,’ she said, cheerily.
‘I think I would have known that,’ a woman replied. ‘You had a mature voice for a thirteen-year-old. This is Mia, Mia Watson, Mia Sparkles, if you remember that name.’
‘Yes,’ she whispered. ‘Yes I do. What do you want?’
‘I need to speak to your father. I’m sorry to be calling you, but his number is ex-directory and probably monitored, so this is the only way I could think of to contact him.’
‘What do you want me to do?’ she snapped. ‘I won’t forward this call, if that’s what you’re thinking. It’ll be his choice whether he speaks to you or not.’
‘Understood.’ Alex was struck by the change in her voice. There was none of the old vivacity; instead there was a coolness, and an underlying tension. ‘I’d like you to ask him to call this number. It’s a Spanish mobile.’ She recited nine digits, then repeated them. ‘Have you got that?’
‘Yes; I’ve noted it. Okay, I’ll do it, but I warn you, he may not want to know you. It’s been a long time, and his life’s a lot different now.’
‘So’s mine,’ the woman said, ‘believe me. Tell him it’s very much in his interests to call me. . to call me, and nobody else, that is. It has to be between us, and us alone.’
The line went dead. She found herself staring at the phone.
‘Who was that?’ Andy asked, approaching, with Robert riding on his shoulders. ‘The ghost of Christmas yet to come, by the look on your face.’
‘Business,’ she answered, sharply. She kicked Danielle’s ball back towards him. ‘I’ll catch you up,’ she said. ‘I have to make a call.’
Sixty-Four
‘I can’t get my head round this,’ Sammy Pye said.
‘I have trouble myself,’ Karen Neville admitted, ‘but it’s true nonetheless. I called Jack McGurk and asked him if he knew about it. He didn’t but he rang me back half an hour later, after he’d spoken to DI Stallings. . I don’t know her, she came in after I’d gone to Perth with Andy, but I’m told she’s Ray Wilding’s other half. . and managed to get something out of her, on a colleague-to-colleague basis.’
‘These are heavy grapes, even for the force vine.’
‘Tasty metaphor, Sam,’ she acknowledged. ‘It seems that Ray’s been coordinating a national search for the Mackenzies since Monday, after they both disappeared. The fear was that he’d done her in, not the other way around, but from what Ray said, she turned up safe and sound this morning, claiming no knowledge of where her husband was.
‘He was called in by the chief to talk to her, but not at home, in his nick. Even then, no alarm bells were ringing with him. But when he got to Gayfield, Bob Skinner turned up and more or less took over the interview. Next thing Ray knew, he was being told to arrest her on suspicion of murder, and turn the thing over to Mary Chambers and the ACC.’
‘But only suspicion of murder?’
‘At that point yes, but Stallings. . what’s her first name?’
‘Rebecca. . Becky.’
‘Right. She told Jack that Ray had just been sent by Maggie Steele to an address in Lanarkshire, where a second, related, arrest had been made by Strathclyde.’
‘Does Becky know who it is?’
‘No, Ray wasn’t told. But he did say that the chief sounded very tense indeed.’
‘Jeez,’ the DI whistled. ‘You were right. This is going to be top of the news cycle when it breaks; we’ll get blown out of sight.’
‘Don’t get too down about it. If the Spanish can’t trace this Mia woman, that might be a good thing.’
‘Yes, but even if they do, Karen, it’s her mother’s death that we’re investigating. I know, if what Alafair told you is true, there’s no love lost between them, but even so, her mother. .’
‘Is that so different from Cheryl Mackenzie murdering her husband?’ She frowned. ‘We’ve been friends for a long time, so I can say this to you. I’d say it to Andy as well, for it’s true of him too. . of all of you really. You guys, in your heart of hearts, you want to be Bob Skinner, but he is what he is because there’s no evil beyond his comprehension, nothing so dark that he can’t see its detail.’
‘I don’t know if I fancy that,’ he admitted. ‘Maybe I’ll settle for being Sammy Pye.’
‘That would be a good choice,’ she told him. ‘When you go to the other place, there’s no way back.’
‘Hey,’ Sammy exclaimed, ‘that has the sound of personal experience about it.’
‘Probably, but I don’t want to talk about it. All I’m saying is that when it comes to homicide, nothing’s off limits.’
‘Okay but there’s this too. Everything has to be proved in court, however obvious it may be to the likes of us.’
‘That’s true,’ she agreed, ‘and it’s what I really meant about Mia not being traced being a good thing. We can put her van in Caledonian Crescent at the time of Bella’s death, but we can’t put her in it. Who knows, we might find her DNA in the flat, eventually, but as we’ve just discovered with Hastie McGrew, and as you said yourself a few minutes ago, that won’t prove anything, other than that she went to see her mother.’
Pye yawned. ‘And with that discouraging word,’ he pushed himself to his feet, ‘I’m out of here.’
The DS checked her watch. ‘Me too, in half an hour,’ she said, ‘but I might just go and investigate a break-in in Costa Coffee that I thought had been reported.’
‘Got big plans for tonight?’
She shot him a raised eyebrow glance. ‘Big plans and I don’t go together. I’ve forsworn them, for ever.’
‘Oh dear,’ he chuckled, ‘sorry I asked.’
‘Not your fault. Just when I thought it was time to go back in the water, I found it was too salty for my taste.’
‘I won’t even try to understand that. There are always dating sites you could try.’
‘Online poker, maybe. Online dating, never.’
Pye turned towards the door of his office, to find that it was open and that Jackie Wright was standing there.
‘I’ve just had a call from the Fife police,’ she began. ‘Remember we put out an appeal for any sightings of a wooden blanket chest along the coast? There was one found a few days ago, washed up on the beach at Kinghorn.
‘It’s in the local nick; they weren’t sure what to do with it. They were going to give it to a local antique dealer. They said if we want it, it’s ours, but we’ll have to collect it.’
The DI looked at the DS, and smiled. ‘That could be your evening taken care of,’ he said.
Sixty-Five
Trepidation is one of those words that has never really figured in my vocabulary, nor even in my adult life.
If I’m honest, it was a big part of my childhood, although I couldn’t have put that name to it at the time. It was what I felt whenever my bedroom door opened at home. If my mother came into the room, or less frequently, my dad, that was all right. If it was my brother, Michael, that agitation turned into fear, or even terror, depending simply on the expression on his face.
It has occurred to me on occasion that maybe I should have sought him out while I had the chance, not to give him some more of his own back, but to thank him. Reason being, having survived him, I’ve never really been afraid of anything else that might happen to me.
More than that, he left me with an acceptance of some of the things I’ve encountered as a police officer that few other cops have. The notion, ‘surely he couldn’t have done that to another human being’, has never held me back. Thanks, brother.