‘Good.’ She smiled. ‘Enough for tonight, Chief Constable. No more shop, just Bob and Sarah for a while. I’ve been thinking about what happened a couple of nights ago, you and me having a nice quiet dinner and ending up in bed together.’ She took his hand, studying it as she spoke. ‘I have to ask you this, Bob, because it’s been gnawing away at me, knowing from personal experience how unpredictable you are when it comes to women. Are you and the witch definitely a thing of the past? Is there any chance of a reconciliation?’
He sipped some water. ‘Given our history,’ he began, ‘I suppose I deserved that “unpredictability” crack. But you can take this to the bank: Aileen and I are through. Sit her across from you and she would give you the same answer. She’d probably add also that we’re not going to walk away as friends either. Each of us married a person without knowing them at all. Before too long we found we didn’t even like each other all that much.’
‘Do you think you know me now?’ she asked.
‘None of us can live inside someone else’s head, but if I don’t know what makes you tick by now. .’ He leaned forward and looked deep into her eyes. ‘I always did like you; now I know more. I never stopped loving you either.’
‘But let’s not put it to the test by getting married again. Agreed?’
Bob nodded. ‘Agreed. But is that because you don’t trust me? If it is, I understand.’
‘Amazing as it may sound, I do trust you. No, it’s because right now, the way we are. . I don’t think I’ve ever felt happier, and I don’t want to risk that.’
‘Fair enough. Now, with the kids upstairs in bed, can we do something old-fashioned, like watching television?’
She laughed. ‘How very couple-ish! Yeah, let’s.’
She was flicking through the channel choice when Bob’s work mobile sounded. ‘Bugger,’ he murmured. ‘I must give this Edinburgh phone back to Maggie and get a new one from Strathclyde. Chances are this is for her.’ He looked at the caller identification. ‘No, it’s not. Lowell,’ he said as he accepted the call, ‘what’s up? News from down under?’
As Sarah watched him, she saw his eyes widen, a frown wrinkle his forehead for a second then disappear. ‘You’re fucking kidding,’ he exclaimed. ‘So that’s what the bloody woman was leading up to. Don’t apologise, man, I know you had to tell me, but worry not; it won’t ruin my night. I just wish I could be a fly on a certain wall, that’s all.’
He ended the call as Sarah laid down the TV remote.
‘Well?’ she demanded. ‘What bloody woman? Aileen?’
‘As it happened, no,’ he told her, ‘another bloody woman, but not unconnected. What you asked me earlier on, whether there was a cat’s chance of the two of us staying together.’ He laughed. ‘If you doubted me at all, then, by Christ, you’re going to be a happy woman tomorrow morning.’
Eighteen
‘Are we all set for tomorrow, Alf?’
‘Yes, but I’ve brought it forward to eleven thirty. The phone’s never stopped ringing all day, and the place is going to be packed out. If you want to do follow-up interviews and get them on the midday news we’ll need to start a bit earlier than noon.’
‘Agreed,’ Aileen said. ‘And the announcement: do they have that ready?’
‘Yes,’ the party CEO replied. ‘I’ve just sent you a draft by email. If you clear it, I can tell the policy staff to go home for the night.’
‘I’ll do that right now.’
‘Thanks. I must go now, Aileen. For some reason the switchboard’s just lit up like a Christmas tree.’
She cradled the phone and turned to Joey Morocco, who was removing silver boxes from a brown paper bag. She smiled. ‘You must do this a lot,’ she remarked. ‘I heard you at the front door; you were on first-name terms with the delivery boy. “Thank you, Wen-Chong.” I take it that means we’re having Chinese.’
‘I see that being married to a detective’s rubbed off on you,’ he said. ‘Sure, first-name terms with him, with Jeev from the Asian up in Gibson Street, with Kemal from the kebab shop and with Jocky.’
‘Jocky? Who the hell’s he?’
‘Pizza. That’s the Italians for you; much more interbred with the indigenous population.’
She looked over his shoulder. ‘What have we got?’
‘Chicken, brack bean sauce,’ he replied, mimicking a Chinese accent, ‘plawn sweet and sowah, clispy duck and pancakes, and lice; flied of course.’
‘Sounds great. I just need five minutes on my laptop and I’ll be ready.’
She wakened her computer from the sleep state in which she had left it earlier in the evening, and searched her email inbox. It was full of messages from friends, anxious, she guessed, for news of her safety, but Old’s was near the top and she found it with ease.
She opened the attachment, which was headed, ‘Draft Statement: Unified Police Force’, scanned it quickly, made a few changes to bring it into her delivery style, then sent it back with a covering note that read, ‘Final version clear for use.’
She had just clicked the ‘send’ button when a tone advised her that another message had hit the inbox, once again from Alf Old. Almost simultaneously, her mobile rang, and the screen showed that he was calling. She made a choice; the phone won.
‘Aileen.’ Even although he had only said her name, the chief executive, famed for his calmness, sounded rattled. ‘I’ve just sent you an email.’
‘I know, it just arrived. I haven’t opened it yet.’
‘Then you’d better do so.’
Not only rattled, she realised; he was angry also.
She opened the message. There was no text, only an attachment, headed ‘P1’, in PDF form. She clicked on it and an image appeared, as quickly as her ageing laptop would allow.
It was a newspaper front page, with the masthead of the Daily News, and beneath it a headline. ‘Road to Morocco: married Labour leader goes to ground.’ Most of it was taken up by a photograph, taken from a distance with a long lens, but the face was all too clearly hers, looking out of Joey Morocco’s bedroom window, with a curtain held across her, but not far enough to cover her right breast, which the newspaper had chosen to cover with a black rectangle.
‘Fuck!’ she screamed.
‘Exactly!’ Old barked. ‘What the hell were you thinking about, Aileen?’
‘It’s not what you think,’ she protested.
‘Then what the hell else is it? Anyway it doesn’t matter what I think, it’s what the readers of the Daily News think, them and the readers of every other paper that the photographer sells it on to, once they’ve had their exclusive. They’ve already given it to BBC, Sky and ITN, for use after ten, to sell even more papers tomorrow morning.’
‘Is it on the streets yet? Can we stop them?’
‘It will be any minute now, and no we can’t. We could go to the Court of Session and ask for an interdict preventing further publication. We might get it, we might not, probably not. Anyway, the damage is done.’
Her anger had risen up to match his. ‘But how did they get it?’ she asked. ‘How did they know I was here?’
‘They didn’t. I spoke to the editor of the Scottish version; he’s a mate and he was good enough to call me, and to send the page across. He said it was taken by a freelance photographer, a paparazzo, who stakes out Joey Morocco’s place periodically, just in case.
‘She saw a car parked across his driveway, with two guys in it who had Special Branch written all over them. . her words. . so she found a vantage point out of their sight and hung around, just in case. She got lucky; saw a face at the window and a bit more, snapped off as many shots as she could, then legged it.
‘It was only when she downloaded the photos on to her laptop in her car that she realised how lucky she was. She got straight on to the News. That’s her best payer, apparently.’
‘Bastards!’ she hissed, then chuckled, taking herself by surprise. ‘It’s the wee black sticker I really hate. It’s suggesting that my tits are too misshapen for a family newspaper: that they might put folk off their breakfast.’