The Road to Hell Page 9

  The memory was so vivid, so strong, that she could see his smiling face in front of her, hear the laughter in his voice. And she did not want to. Trying to think about other things, she walked back towards her sister’s house. It was an old, stone-built farmhouse set on the side of a hill. Normally the beauty of the place moved her. It seemed to be being gradually reclaimed by the earth, with ivy, clematis and climbing hydrangea covering its walls, fringing its lower windows, their tendrils curling upwards into the metal gutters. Majestic lime trees surrounded it, sheltering it from the prevailing wind, and, in the summer, the scent of its flowers was heady, drowsy bees working in its shade. She took its existence as proof that harmony could be achieved between the works of man and nature, each enhancing the other. Even in the winter, on the coldest, darkest days, something of its essence usually touched her, but not today. It was as if she was no longer able to truly see; everything was there just as it had been before, but the sight of it left her cold. A veil seemed to have been placed between herself and the world.

  ‘Aunt Alice . . . phone!’

  Sam was standing beside her, and seeing that she did not move, he immediately shouted at her, ‘Come on, come on. Chop, chop!’

  Obediently she followed him back to the house, and as she entered the kitchen her sister handed the phone to her, soundlessly miming the words, ‘Ian’s mother.’

  The noise in the room had not abated but was, if anything, worse. A radio was now in competition with the television, the dogs were barking and the washing machine was whirring on spin-cycle. So she walked into the nearby study and closed the door.

  ‘Hello,’ she said.

  ‘Alice?’ Mrs Melville asked, apparently not recognising her voice.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How are you, dear?’

  ‘I’m all right, thanks. And you?’

  ‘I’m fine too. But I need to speak to you about Hamish.’ The old lady’s voice sounded firm, as robust as ever.

  Slowly, Alice closed her eyes, then, sighing to herself, she covered them with her left hand. In her grief she had forgotten all about the child, Ian’s son. He lived with his maternal aunt and her partner in Roseburn Terrace, on the top floor of a tenement close to the Water of Leith. The boy’s mother, who had had a brief affair with Ian, had died a year earlier and Ian had learnt of her death and the boy’s existence simultaneously. Since then they had both been trying to get to know him, seeing him once a fortnight, and if allowed, more frequently. He was now aged four, curly-haired and sturdy, with a gap where one of his front milk teeth had been knocked out in a fall.

  ‘Right,’ she said, feeling ashamed, shocked by her own thoughtlessness. Maybe it was true that blood was thicker than water. Mrs Melville, despite her bereavement and over seven decades spent upon the earth, had not forgotten the boy, overlooked his very existence.

  ‘Does he know yet?’ the old woman asked.

  ‘I don’t know, but I wouldn’t think so. I haven’t told him. If you haven’t either, I can’t think who would have done.’

  ‘That’s what I thought. But it does need to be done . . . and his aunt, Rachel, needs to know too.’

  ‘Shall I do it? Would you like me to do it? I could go and see her today if you like. Let Rachel know.’

  ‘Yes. The sooner the better, I think, but I’ll come too. I want to see Hamish and to speak to Rachel about him myself. Whatever has happened to his father, I’m still his granny. I’ll leave the arrangements up to you, if you don’t mind, and perhaps we could meet there. In Rachel’s flat?’

  As she was searching for a parking space in Roseburn, Alice saw Mrs Melville getting out of her car. She looked frail, more bent than usual, and seemed to be having difficulty fitting her keys into the lock. Succeeding, and looking up, she caught sight of Alice and waved her over. They greeted each other wordlessly, instinctively putting their arms around one another, holding tight as if afraid that if they did not they might lose one another as well. Both were determined not to cry, aware of the contagion of tears and each unwilling to set the other off. Red-rimmed eyes would only further upset the boy. Unusually, the old lady took Alice’s hand in her own, gripping it firmly and only releasing it once they were inside the tenement.

  They climbed the four flights of stairs at a snail’s pace, stopping every few minutes for Mrs Melville to rest her legs and catch her breath. Once they came to the immaculately-painted, green front door she held onto the banisters, attempted to straighten herself up and said, ‘Are you ready, dear? Shall we go in?’ Her face was white, almost bloodless, but her expression was firm and resolute. Alice nodded and knocked on the door.

  The woman who opened it, Rachel Ford, was tall and gangly, with washed-out blue eyes and a pale, freckled complexion. Her finely-lined face looked anxious as she ushered them in to her sitting room. It had a single window overlooking the river and was furnished with a couple of old-fashioned armchairs and a grand piano, which dominated the room. As they were sitting down she said in a high, slightly tremulous voice, ‘I’ve not told him.’ She sounded defensive. Mrs Melville leant forward in the over-soft armchair into which she had sunk, using the arms to pull herself closer to the edge of the seat.

  ‘Would you like us . . . me or Alice, to tell him?’ she asked.

  ‘No.’

  For a moment there was complete silence. Mrs Melville smiled benignly at Rachel Ford but said nothing, as if waiting for her to explain herself. Her tactic worked.

  ‘I’ve tried to. I’ve begun once or twice but I can’t do it,’ Rachel said, shaking her head and looking them both in the eye before continuing. ‘I’m sorry. I’m the one who had to tell him when Paula died and I can’t do it again. It was too awful.’

  ‘But he should know, shouldn’t he, dear? It is important that he knows, isn’t it? Not least because otherwise he won’t understand why there are no more visits from Ian.’

  There was another long, pregnant pause. Finally Rachel said, ‘Yes, he should know. He’s entitled to know.’

  ‘Very good. Then I’ll tell him for you, shall I? I’m his granny, I can do that,’ Mrs Melville said, levering herself up from the deep armchair and adding, ‘don’t worry, Rachel, children are surprisingly resilient . . .’

  She hesitated for a second, and continued, ‘and he was just getting to know his father. Don’t worry, it’ll not be like the loss of Paula.’

  While the old lady was out of the room, Rachel Ford turned to Alice and said, not unkindly, ‘Would you like to keep seeing him, Alice? Obviously, everything’s completely different now that Ian’s dead, there’s no connection between the pair of you, but you can see him occasionally if you’d like to.’

  It had been spelt out to her. With Ian alive, the child had been in some definite sense ‘theirs’. He did not live with them and saw them only once a week or so, but he formed a large part of their dreams, their plans. One day, when he knew them better, had come to love them, he might live with them. They rarely discussed the prospect but both knew that it was there, secretly rejoiced in it, and cherished the possibility. But he had never been, in any sense, ‘hers’, and Rachel was underlining this simple truth. Without Ian she had no right of any kind to a relationship with the little boy, no tie that would be recognised as continuing in his absence. If she saw him at all, it would be on sufferance.

  ‘But frogs don’t croak, granny – they go “Gribbit! Gribbit!”’ the child said. He was perched in his grandmother’s arms holding a bean-bag frog in his hands and tapping her on the arm with it to emphasise his point. Seeing Alice and Rachel in conversation, the old woman winked at Alice to let her know that the deed had been done.

  ‘Alice!’ the boy said, struggling to get free of his grandmother and running towards her. Now, standing directly in front of her and looking up into her face, he demanded, ‘Where’s Quill? Why’s Quill not here with you?’

  ‘He’s busy,’ she said, lifting him onto her knee, ‘he’s hard at work today.’

  ‘At work
? Is he in the Police too – a police dog?’ the boy asked excitedly, his eyes shining.

  ‘Yes, but he’s of a higher rank than me, he’s an Inspector. Inspector Quill.’

  ‘Inspector Quill!’ he repeated, savouring the words, before stomping back to where his grandmother was sitting and backing himself into the space between her knees. Leaning against her he said mournfully, ‘Granny’s not got a dog, only got a cat. Macavity the Mystery Cat.’

  ‘He’s called the Hidden Paw,’ the old lady said, sweeping his dark hair out of his eyes and then taking him in her arms.

  Over the following days Alice walked a great deal. It seemed to help. She had no desire to speak to anyone about her loss, but wherever she went she talked to herself, trying to resolve things in her own mind. Late one afternoon she set out from the house and, after continuing eastwards for an hour, found herself at a nearby loch. It had frozen over, and she stopped there for a while, taking a seat on the broken-down jetty that abutted the thatched boathouse. Still lost in thought, she swung her legs idly to and fro, over the edge.

  In the distance, a swan, its brilliant white plumage making the ice surrounding it look grey and dirty, swum round and round in small circles within its tiny black pool, trying to prevent the only remaining water from icing over. As she watched the bird, the contrast between the white of its feathers, the black of the water and the blue-grey of the ice registered in her brain. She gazed at the scene, pleased by the sight and thankful that something of it had penetrated the veil that surrounded her at last, and touched her. It was odd. She had been there last year with Ian and because of that she had had to force herself onwards, expecting to find it desolate in his absence. But his absence was no more marked, no sharper, there than anywhere else.

  Sitting on the rotten wood of the jetty, she looked down at the snow-melted surface of the ice all around her and noticed masses of small tracks on it. Some had been made by the elongated toes of a bird, a heron perhaps, and some by rabbits, showing the characteristic scuff where they had kicked off. Running across the middle of the loch was a single set of fox prints. Each one of its four paws was perfectly aligned.

  Without thought she stepped out onto the ice, a sudden zinging sound as it took her weight making her hesitate momentarily, then she began following the fox’s tracks. They meandered across the smooth expanse, leading her to a bank of dead reeds at the far end of the loch. Below them lay a small pile of feathers, and a few grains of wheat, with droplets of blood spattered among them.

  I must tell Ian, she thought, and then, catching herself, she cursed the workings of her own mind. It was so lazy, following the old, known tracks like a tram, refusing to adjust to new roads, and crashing time after time.

  Forced to contemplate his absence anew, the pain was almost unbearable and she shouted out loud, railed against everything, including him. How could he have done it? How could he have left her on her own without him? She might live another thirty or forty years without seeing his face again, without touching him.

  Already, she could not conjure up his likeness at will, had to rely on an image from a particular photograph. ‘He is gone,’ she repeated to herself, ‘he is gone and will never come back.’ She tried to force her brain to reshape itself, to stop making her relive the horror of loss endlessly.

  Drained, she knelt down on the ice, her hands covering her face, and listened in the silence for him. For something, anything, some tiny sign that he was beside her still. In the scarlet-streaked winter sky, silhouetted against the fading light, a pair of mallards flew overhead, their wings beating in unison, the movement audible in the heavy air. It was nothing more than a couple of wild ducks returning to the roost but it was enough to remind her that life was going on, the world was still spinning on its axis.

  As she looked upwards, straining to see the black dots as they disappeared into the distance, she heard a single crack, and the next second fell forwards, plummeting through the ice. Gasping, breathless with the shock of the cold water, she flailed about, and her hands, unexpectedly, found solid ground. Next the top of her head touched it, and she realised, still falling forwards on her knees, that she was in the shallows.

  Suddenly, as she pictured herself, kneeling in water less than a foot deep, shards of ice splintering around her as she desperately sought a sign from above, the preposterousness of her position struck her and she laughed out loud, at the bathos of it all. Still doubled up, unable to stop hooting with laughter, tears coming to her eyes, it struck her that Ian would have loved the whole scene. Because, thankfully, there had not been an ounce of sentimentality in him.

  7

  ‘Are you OK?’ Elaine Bell asked. The DCI was busy in her office, her eyes fixed on her computer screen and her right hand scribbling simultaneously, but the solicitousness in her tone was heartfelt. She was fond of her sergeant. But she was also short-staffed and in the middle of a murder investigation. Crucially, she had to tread carefully, mindful of the legal pitfalls awaiting her. If she allowed an employee to return to work too quickly, or too slowly, and a complaint of stress at work or some such thing followed, she might find herself in hot water.

  ‘Fine.’

  DCI Bell looked up from her screen to peer into her subordinate’s pale face, trying to assess whether her brief response could be taken on trust or not. Exhausted, at the end of a long case, she had seen Alice look a lot worse, she decided.

  DC Elizabeth Cairns bustled into the room holding a sheaf of papers, and before she had off-loaded them onto the desk, she was sent packing, unceremoniously, with a dismissive wave of a hand.

  ‘I’m not sure whether to believe you or not, Alice. Are you still staying with your sister?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Perhaps you want to stay there a little bit longer? Need to, even?’ the DCI continued probing, watching carefully her sergeant’s reaction to the question and adding, ‘I don’t know. On the other hand, maybe it would help to have other things to think about?’

  Alice nodded, and, still feeling her way carefully, Elaine Bell said, ‘If you’d like to come back, we could certainly use you here. Progress has been pretty sluggish. We still haven’t discovered the identity of the body in the Hermitage. You could pick up where you left off.’

  The telephone rang. Unreasonably annoyed by its unseemly intrusion into their delicate conversation, the DCI snatched it up.

  ‘DCI Bell,’ she said, then paused briefly before continuing, ‘Yes, Sir. The lab’s confirmed that. Yes, I appreciate that. Of course, but there are a few hundred thousands or more of them in Scotland, aren’t there? Plenty of women, too, I’m sure you’ll find. Yes. Yes. I will, as soon as possible, naturally. I will . . . Sir,’ she added with distaste. Putting down the receiver she said ‘Superintendent Bruce,’ stressing his rank sarcastically and unconsciously folding her arms over her chest.

  ‘Have you tracked down the driver yet?’ Alice asked.

  ‘The driver?’ Elaine Bell inquired, bemused, still sufficiently riled by the phone call to have forgotten everything else.

  ‘The one who ran down Ian?’

  ‘Sorry – sorry, Alice. Of course. My mind was on other things. No, we haven’t, I’m afraid. We’re still looking. But you should know . . . a witness says that he had a good drink in him before he crossed the road.’

  ‘Of course he had, he’d just left a pub,’ Alice replied, uneasy, not sure exactly where this exchange was heading.

  ‘“He’d had more than enough” was what she actually said. She also reported that he pretty well launched himself onto the road without looking properly.’

  ‘Not Ian. I don’t believe it. He held his drink well. He wasn’t stupid or mad. What exactly are you trying to tell me?’ Alice asked, suddenly distraught, looking her superior directly in the eye.

  ‘I’m telling you – that it was a hit and run, we know that, but . . . he may have been partially responsible for –’

  ‘You said there was a witness?’ Alice demanded.<
br />
  ‘Yes. A witness.’

  ‘Who? How many have we found?’

  ‘Only one, so far. I’m not sure I can tell you the name off-hand – but Celia Something or other . . . We’re still looking for the other two. They’re on holiday together somewhere in Ireland.’

  ‘There must have been plenty of people in the pub?’

  ‘There were.’

  ‘Do they say that? That he launched himself – without looking?’

  ‘No,’ Elaine Bell said, now trying to pacify her, ‘they don’t say that, but they weren’t there. Only Celia and the other two actually witnessed the accident. I’m only telling you because . . . you need to know that it has been suggested. If you’re coming back here – well, you should know that. That’s why I’m telling you now. You can see her statement, if you like.’ The DCI frowned, annoyed with herself for weakening, attempting to justify herself.

  ‘I do. She didn’t say that to me when we met up.’

  ‘I didn’t know you’d spoken to her. All I can say is that’s in her statement. Maybe, talking face to face with you, she wanted to spare you any un . . .’

  ‘Unlikely,’ Alice retorted, cutting in. ‘Anyway, the toxicology report will settle it.’

  ‘It will give us his blood-alcohol count, certainly.’

  ‘Thank you, Ma’am,’ Alice said stiffly. ‘I’ll start first thing tomorrow, if that’s OK with you?’

  ‘That is OK with me,’ Elaine Bell said, keeping her eyes on her subordinate’s face. ‘One other thing . . .’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Just before you went off, they released Brian Riley. I only got the news today.’

  ‘Riley?’ she said in disbelief.