This village shop, Alice thought irritably, should have gone out of business long ago with the rest of them. The days when shopkeepers could lean on their counters exchanging local gossip with every shopper, however paltry their purchase, were thankfully over and their replacement with brightly-lit, soulless supermarkets could only be a cause for rejoicing.
‘Well, ma lass, what can ah dae fer ye?’
‘Just the crisps and the Irn Bru, thanks.’
The old lady fingered the crisp packets and can before placing them slowly in a carrier bag and, smiling up at Alice, apparently quite unconscious of her customer’s impatience, she continued with her chat.
‘Ye’re just visiting, eh?’
‘That’s it.’ Such brevity should convey the hint.
‘Who were ye seein’?’
None of your business. ‘I was at Geanbank. I just saw the gardener there and now I’ve got to hurry back to Edinburgh.’
‘Gairdner, there’s nae gairdner there. Just Nicholas.’
‘Sorry? What did you say?’
‘Ah says there’s nae gairdner at Geanbank. Just Nicholas… well, ye ken…’
‘I’m sorry, I’m not sure what you mean.’
‘Och, he’s a fine man, dinnae git me wrang. But he’s no’ the Sheriff’s gairdner, no, no. He daes the gairden a’richt. Daes it well, an a’. But he’s no the man’s gairdner… He’s his-well, ken, his wife, ye could cry him. Ma sister cleans their hoose. They’ve separate rooms but-ah kent the both o’ them fer the last ten year since they moved… Well, ye can tell, eh? Live an’ let live, ah always say, but Nicholas’s nae the gairdner.’
‘What’s Nicholas’s surname?’
‘Lyon. Ah always thocht he wis mair the lioness though…’ She chuckled merrily, pleased with her own joke, before her laughter turned itself into a bubbling cough.
Nicholas Lyon did not put down the string he was weaving around the peonies when he saw the Astra return to the gravel sweep. He wound another length of it between their reddish stems and then tethered the twine, finally, to a thin metal support. It had to be done. Otherwise a strong wind could come at any time and destroy the plants, never mind the damage the rain would do, rotting their glorious crimson heads while they were still tight in bud. He had done all he could to protect them and, if he had the time, he’d stake the delphiniums too. James loved delphiniums, ‘delphiniums (blue) and geraniums (red)’ and neither of them had ever tolerated chrysanthemums in any colour. The woman approaching him seemed to be quite young, the same one he had seen before; her leaving had seemed too good to be true.
‘Mr Lyon? I’m Detective Sergeant Alice Rice of Lothian and Borders Police. Could we go inside the house? I’d like to talk to you.’
Looking at the elderly gentleman putting the kettle on the Aga in his kitchen, Alice cursed her own stupidity. Of course the face was familiar, she could place him now. He was the fellow she had seen at the Sheriff’s service, sobbing, overcome by grief. The image of him had remained fixed in her mind simply because at the funeral he had been almost the only one, bar Mrs Nordquist, to exhibit any kind of sorrow.
‘Mr Lyon, I need to talk to you about the Sheriff, James Freeman.’
The old man nodded his assent as he poured out the tea into two mugs. But his eyes never met hers, they flitted nervously to the floor, to the ceiling, left and right, and all the while he blinked copiously.
‘I understand that you lived together?’
The question had come, as he had known it would. Nicholas Lyon thought long and hard before replying, although he had already allowed himself ample time to rehearse any response. ‘Lived together.’ He knew exactly what was meant by this apparently innocuous phrase. That he and James lived together as homosexuals, inverts, nancies or whatever… There were few such objectionable epithets with which he was not familiar. People must have known, of course they must, but never the people that counted. Or, if those people had known, then it had not mattered as James had been so discreet. He, both of them, had never chosen to venture out of the closet. Maybe it was claustrophobic inside, but, fortunately, they had only ever needed each other and, anyway, it had been necessary. Many, no doubt, had found it suffocating, undignified certainly, but they had coped and nothing in James’ private life had prevented him from becoming a QC nor, eventually, from being elevated onto the Shrieval bench.
If such involuntary incarceration had been the price for his career then they had paid it. And when the militants had gone mad and smashed the closet doors around them to sawdust, he and James had declined to join in, having become accustomed to their private retreat and the double life that society had, once, enforced upon them. It was too difficult, breaking the habits of a lifetime. Of course, James had been a master of the half-truth, the distraction. He was a verbal-impressionist: a single well-chosen word and the inquisitors would create for themselves some unsuitable female consort for him, her nonappearance immediately explicable to them, and they would secretly pat themselves on the back for their perspicacity in the face of such subtlety. Others again, just assumed that he was asexual, had no ‘passionate parts’, and, insulting as it was, he let it pass. ‘Confirmed bachelors’ were not threatening and needed no further investigation.
It was just a case of triggering expectations, people seeing what they expected to see despite the truth staring them in the face. And with his simple assent their well-worn carapace would be stripped away, never to be replaced. Still, no harm could now come to James or his career with such an admission, and pretence would be futile, maybe even dangerous. A private life was a thing of the past.
‘Yes,’ Nicholas replied baldly, interlinking his fingers to control the shaking that had begun in his hands.
‘For many years?’
‘For forty-five years and three months exactly.’
‘Why didn’t you come forward to help us… when the Sheriff was killed? You must have known; it was in all the papers.’
Another simple question to which no simple answer could be provided. Difficult to think where to begin, but a start must be made somewhere. The incompatibility of their early relationship with James’ advancement, perhaps? Or the motor neurone disease? The amitriptyline, even? Something must be said, seconds were ticking by. But Christ, what? He felt like a snail being torn out of its shell, soon to be exposed in all its vulnerability.
‘I’ll tell you, Sergeant, as best as I can.’ She appeared sympathetic; maybe she would listen, even comprehend. Certainly, silence was no longer an option.
‘My relationship with James has never been public. If it had been you would have been here much sooner. We are just an old married couple really… but nobody, well almost nobody, knew that. I mean KNEW that. Some suspected, maybe others guessed. James’ career had to be protected, you see, and to be honest, his privacy, our privacy… what business was it of anyone else? But the tabloids would have taken a prurient interest in James-gay Sheriff found dead-in both of us, I suppose. Now? Now, maybe it is acceptable, but then it wasn’t, and we got used to things the way they were. Why should he, or I, put up with being called an “old poof” and all the other far more unpleasant things that go with such a label? Why should we, on sufferance only, be allowed into polite society? And what a misnomer that is! We managed very well without them all.’
‘So, you didn’t come forward as you didn’t want the nature of your relationship to become public?’
‘Yes, that’s partially true. It was part of the reason, but there was another, too, which you may or may not understand…’ His speech ended, nervousness having drained him of all energy. It felt so unreal, listening to his own voice laying bare their lives, exposing secrets that should have gone to the grave with them.