‘Yes,’ he said, quietly now, but just as angrily, and with a cruelty which Sarah had never seen before. ‘Yes, she bloody was.’
‘Yeah, I guessed she must have been, because eighteen years on she still has you by the cock!’ She began to sob, and to punch him, hard, on the chest, with both fists, until he seized her by the wrists.
‘I thought it was guilt-driven at first, this crusade of yours,’ she said. ‘That you were chewed up by remorse because it should have been you in that car, not her. Then I realised that it was more, that when she was alive you were completely in her power, and that somehow Kevin O’Malley had awakened not just your memory of her death, but of the hold she had over you.’
She looked up at him, tears streaking her face. ‘Now it won’t leave you, Bob, not until you have the strength to will it away. But you don’t, you bastard. You don’t want to. You’re wallowing in your memory of her. You’re putting our marriage and our future to one side, because of a ghost.
‘That was why I used Jimmy, to have you sent away, in the hope that over those thirty days you would come to your senses, and would start missing me, not her. But the minute you walked through that door, when I saw the Chanel Number Five that you had brought back for Alex, I realised that nothing had changed.
‘In fact, it’s worse than ever.’
She drew the back of her hand across her eyes and squared her shoulders. ‘Straight choice, Bob. Her or me. Dead or alive. Past or present. Stay or go.’
As he looked down at her, he felt his anger leave him. But it was replaced by something else. During the years of his widowhood, there had always been Alex as the focus, the pivotal point of his life. Yet he knew that with a strong mother there to rear him, Jazz would never need him in the same way.
Until that moment, he had never felt real desolation, never realised that it was palpable, never realised that it could consume the soul, not until that very moment as it engulfed his.
‘How can I stay, Sarah?’ he said, quietly. ‘When my life is built on trust, and when you’ve proved to me that I can’t trust you any more?
‘You say Myra had a hold over me, but that’s absolute crap. You don’t know anything about how it was between the two of us.
‘You look at me and you say I’m obsessed. Sure I am: with justice. I always have been, and I always will. But from where I’m standing, you’re obsessed too: with blind, irrational jealousy, so much so that you’ve resorted to deceiving Jimmy Proud, my friend, so you could manipulate me and control my actions and my life.’
Suddenly he smiled, but it was full of sadness. ‘Forget the rights and wrongs. The fact is that now, when each of us looks at the other, neither of us is seeing the person we married. You agree?’
She looked him in the eye, and nodded.
‘So tell me, Sarah, my wife,’ he said. ‘How can I stay?’
12
Finding a needle in a haystack is rather easy, if it is the only one, and if the searcher has a sufficiently powerful magnet.
There was no Carl Medina listed in the Edinburgh telephone directory, but a single call to DVLC in Swansea uncovered one licensed driver of that name in the city, living at an address in Slateford. A subsequent check with the City of Edinburgh Council Finance Department revealed that the Council Tax for that address was paid by one Angela Muirhead, by monthly instalments, remitted from an account at the Clydesdale Bank in Charlotte Square.
Dave Donaldson pressed the entry buzzer at the smart, newly-built block of flats and waited. But no voice came from the small speaker in the casing, only the hum of the lock being released by remote control.
The flat, listed ‘Muirhead/Medina’ beside the buzzer stud, was on the third floor of four. There was no lift, but Donaldson and Maggie Rose took the stairs at a trot. Number 3c was at the end of a long, narrow hallway, heavy with intermingling stale cooking smells which made the detectives’ stomachs churn. The front door had obscure glazed panels, top and bottom, but no bell, only a letterbox with knocker attached.
It was six thirty, and the flat was dark inside. DCI Rose rapped the knocker, three times, hard and loud. After only a few seconds the hallway behind the door was lit up, and a tall figure approached.
‘Have you lost your keys, Angie? They’re not hanging up in the . . .’ The voice, muffled at first behind the closed door tailed off as it opened, in a classic mixture of surprise and alarm as the man saw the two officers on the doorstep.
‘Carl Medina?’ asked Donaldson.
The man nodded. ‘Aye, that’s me.’ For all his Hispanic surname, his accent was pure Edinburgh, and his features and his fair, thinning hair, swept back from a high forehead, betrayed no Latin connection. He was a strikingly handsome man, around thirty years old, but he seemed, if anything, Nordic in his ancestry. Maggie looked at him, thought of her swarthy half-Italian husband, Mario, and was struck by the vagaries of genetic inheritance.
‘Superintendent Donaldson, DCI Rose, Edinburgh CID,’ her colleague announced. ‘We’d like a word. Can we come in?’
‘Aye, if you like,’ said Medina, with a sigh.
The two detectives stepped into the flat. Closing the front door behind them, Medina pointed them towards a room at the far end of the hall. As soon as she stepped into the sitting room Rose’s eye was caught by the late edition Evening News lying on the small couch, and by its front page heading, ‘City Woman Dies in Fiery Hell’.
‘What can I do for you?’ he asked.
Rose picked up the tabloid and held the front page towards him. ‘I think you know.’
Medina said nothing, but gave a brief nod, his gaze dropping to the grey-carpeted floor. He pointed the detectives to the two soft, cream-coloured armchairs on either side of the couch, on which he sat down himself.
‘We’d just like a chat for now,’ said Donaldson. ‘Later we might want you to make a formal statement, but we’ll cross that one when we get there.
‘Is this your permanent address?’ he asked.
‘Aye.’
‘You live here with Miss, is it, Angela Muirhead?’
Medina shook his head and smiled, for the first time. ‘That’s Ms. Angie’s very definitely a Ms.’
‘What does she do for a living?’
‘She’s a civil servant. She’s personal secretary to some high flyer, in the new place down in Leith.’
‘Where is she now?’
‘Her boss works all hours. She’s no’ usually home before seven.’
‘Where do you work, Mr Medina?’ asked Rose.
‘I don’t, as I’m sure you know by now.’
‘Did you apply for a job recently?’
Medina glanced across at her, sharply. ‘I apply for jobs all the time. I hate that bloody Giro, Miss . . . er, sorry, I didn’t catch the name.’
‘It’s Rose,’ said the DCI quietly. ‘Let me be more specific. Two or three months ago, did you apply for a job in the motor trade, with a Renault dealership?’
‘Aye.’
‘What was the job?’
‘Book-keeper. Unqualified accountant. That’s what I do.’
‘What was the outcome?’
He glanced at her, a sour expression crossing his face. ‘I’m still drawing the bloody Giro, amn’t I.’
‘Do you know why you didn’t get the job?’
Medina looked away from the officers, towards the wall. ‘Oh aye,’ he said, heavily. ‘One day the recruitment people said it was as good as mine, the next I was told that my last employer’s reference was, quote unquote, “unsatisfactory”. That wee bastard Jackie Charles!’
Donaldson leaned forward. ‘Come on, Mr Medina. You were sacked for dishonesty. Surely you couldn’t have expected Mr Charles to give you a reference after that?’ He paused. ‘You do admit that, don’t you?’