A Taste for Malice (40 page)

‘Two and two sometimes makes four, DI McBain,’ says Jim. ‘The Ayrshire coast was renowned for smuggling in the not so dim and distant past. Robert Burns himself was an exciseman. I know of some caves down by Culzean that were apparently used by smugglers. Could there be a connection that is specific to this part of the Ayrshire coast?’

‘How would she get there?’ asks Alessandra, then adds, ‘wherever
there
is.’

‘She doesn’t have a car,’ says Jim. ‘She said that her socalled husband took it back along with Erskine. Whenever she went anywhere with Angela she booked a taxi.’

‘What firm did she use?’ I ask. Jim recites the telephone number.

Alessandra picks up the phone and dials. We hear her side of the conversation as she asks the taxi controller to check any hire from this address on the date on question. She shakes her head at us as the conversation draws to close and then hangs up.

‘Nothing’ she says shaking her head. ‘Absolutely nothing.’

‘Do you need to lie down, honey?’ Jim asks Angela once the detectives have gone.

‘How can I possibly sleep at a time like this?’ she replies. He says nothing, simply strokes the back of her hand.

‘I’m sorry.’ His words were quiet and unforced. ‘If only I hadn’t …’

Angela held a finger to his lips. ‘Don’t Jim. I can’t …’

‘I understand,’ Jim’s chin was all but touching his chest as he turned his head away.

‘I’m not saying I can’t forgive you, Jim. I’m saying I can’t deal with this right now. It’s too much. Ben is out there …God knows where, with this crazy woman we thought …I thought was a friend.’

‘When did you start to remember stuff?’ Jim asked. He needed to know how much energy he had been wasting. Energy he could have used to keep his family together. This is knowledge he can use in the small hours like a religious penitent might use a steel-tipped whip.

‘Not long after Moira showed up.’ She looked at him. ‘You were all I had in the world. Who else could look after me? I didn’t really know Moira at that point. I was terrified at the thought of you not being there. Terrified.’ Her eyes were full of shadow. ‘Can you understand that?

‘This has all been too much.’ She closed her eyes. ‘It’s like my life has been frozen in a mirror. Only the mirror has been shattered and each tiny fragment isn’t quite big enough for me to see the whole story. And when I look too hard…and believe me I look
hard
…the image fades. The sense of it is gone. It’s all just tiny bits of broken glass that crunch under my feet. It takes me all of my time to make a cup of tea for chrissake. The thing is …I remember the me I used to be. What happened to her, Jim?’

‘She’s still there,’ said Jim and tapped her forehead and offered a small smile.

‘That’s why I can’t talk about us at the moment. I have to know that Ben is safe first.’ As she spoke she stroked the cover of her notebook. Then she opened it from the back. She lifted out what appeared to be an envelope folded in half and handed it to Jim. He folded it flat and looked at the cover. It was addressed to Angela at this address. He looked from the envelope to Angela, his eyes forming the question, what is this?

‘I can’t talk about us, Jim, but I want there to be no more secrets between us. No more lies. I never told you, but the first time we broke up, it was because of what was in that letter.’ She stood up. ‘I think I’ll have a lie-down.’ She left the room.

Jim pulled out the contents. He looked to see whom the letter was from. He checked for a date and then did a quick calculation. He scanned the letter quickly, heart thumping in his chest. Then again, this time more slowly, picking out the truth from the near-truth and the lies.

Dear Angela,

This letter has been years in the making and I don’t quite know how to begin. Conscience is a funny old thing, isn’t it? Something happens and you think you can deal with it. Only it comes back and whispers to you from dark corners.

You are my dearest, oldest friend and I know that I’ve been distant from you recently and it’s all down to this secret — and my conscience. Don’t worry, I’m not dying or anything. This isn’t the confession of a woman on the edge. It’s a righting of wrongs. An attempt to shut off the nagging guilt.

If you could only see me now, you’d laugh. At least I hope you would. Me, who you used to call the breezeblock ’cos I never cried at any of those sappy movies you used to love.

This story goes back to the time when your mother died. And I hope and pray that you don’t hate me for this, but the night you found her you tried to call me and then you tried to call Jim. The reason you didn’t get me was that I was with Jim.

We were in love, Angela. Please believe me when I say that nothing happened between him and me until after you and he split up. I wanted to tell you straight away, but Jim wouldn’t let me. He didn’t think you could handle it. But I always knew you were stronger than that.

Anyway, you eventually found Jim and he came over — and you don’t need me to tell you what happened next. I could die at the thought that I was hiding in his bedroom at his parent’s house while he was “consoling” you on the couch.

Then the night you met him and told him you were pregnant — and didn’t he handle that with his customary aplomb — I was again with him at his parents’ house.

He came back, stunned from your meeting and told me everything. He also told me that it was me he loved and that we should get married regardless. As far as you were concerned, he would do what he could to help you with the baby, hoping that you would get it adopted, but that he had no interest in you. To his credit, he didn’t like the idea of abortion.

We talked and talked well into the night. Jim wanted us to stay together and I wanted you to be taken care of. After all, you had just lost your mother, you had no one.

The thing is, and I can only see this now, is that Jim is not a bad guy. He’s just a man — you know. Us girls, we’re made of much sterner stuff.

Anyway, I told him that he and I were over and that you and his baby should be his priority. He begged me and begged me, but I refused to listen to his arguments. By the end of the night I’d convinced him that we had no future and that he should act like a man and take care of his responsibilities.

So, he and you were married. And I moved away.

I was so pleased that you guys made a go of it, and especially pleased when Ben was born. It’s great to be an aunt and I’m so looking forward to showing him how he should treat the women in his life.

My dearest hope is that you burn this letter, if I send it. I may just burn it myself. I believe that Jim regrets the actions of his youth and that eventually he came to love you in his own way.

I hope and pray that you can forgive me for my part in all of this and that we can continue to be friends.

Be safe. Be happy,

Kirsty.

We reassure the Hiltons that we will do everything in our power to find their son and leave to go back to the cop shop in Ayr.

There’s nothing quite like local knowledge in this situation and we know a man who can help. Alessandra is trying her best to look all calm and collected when I approach Dave Bishop. He’s also doing his best to listen to me while his eyes stray to Alessandra. I feel like giving them the number for that bed and breakfast place in Troon, just so they can get past the whole first blush thing.

‘We should do the tour of the local taxi firms?’ Dave asks me without actually looking at me. Three guesses where his eyes are. Alessandra’s hand strays to her blouse, checking that the buttons are all closed and she’s not having a Janet Jackson wardrobe malfunction. Then she excuses herself to go to the toilet, probably to make sure her hair is sitting nicely.

‘Dave,’ I give him my elderly statesman look. ‘Do me a favour, mate. Keep your eyes off the totty and your focus on the case?’

Alessandra comes back in and we divide all of the taxi firms in Ayrshire between us. The next hour passes in a blur of conversational dead-ends. If all of the people we spoke to are to be believed no one gave Shearer a lift to wherever she was going. She just vanished.

‘Any car thefts in Troon recently?’ I ask Dave.

‘Afraid not, sir,’ he answers. ‘That was one of my last calls there. I called the Troon office and there’s nothing.’

‘Good work, Dave,’ I say, impressed, and looking at Alessandra I nod my head in Dave’s direction. She kicks my foot.

‘What now?’ Alessandra asks in an attempt to deflect attention from her efforts at bodily harm.

‘We try to find out as much as we can about Troon’s history,’ I answer.

‘History?’ asks Dave. ‘Why?’

‘A hunch,’ I say. ‘Each kid that Shearer is with she mentions stuff about smugglers. And we know that she holidayed in the Troon area as a wee …’ I stop talking aware that Dave has stopped listening. Except this time his focus is on me, not Alessandra.

‘Smugglers,’ with a smile, ‘Why didn’t you say?’

Dave Bishop is officially my new best pal. We’ll overlook the fact that he’s desperate to get into Alessandra’s pants and celebrate his admission that he is a keen rambler. Not many men of his relatively tender years would admit to such a thing, blame the parents I say, but it has led to a break in the case.

It appears that hundreds of years ago the smugglers would bring their ill-gotten gains up from the beach at Troon to the town of Dundonald. The trail they trod is known as The Smugglers’ Path and has recently been renovated and signposted by the local council. It’s a bit tame for our Dave, but ideal for a warm-up for some of his longer walks.

As Jim Hilton said rather succinctly earlier on, sometimes two and two just makes four. So I’m happy to take the knowledge that Shearer holidayed in Troon, add in the several mentions she had made of smugglers to the various children she has cared for and extrapolate that into a search of this area.

Dave, Alessandra and I are standing at the information board for said path with the sun beating down on our heads and shoulders. Dave has arranged for some uniformed officers to check the houses and farms that are dotted along the road to where we are standing. In front of the board is enough space for one car to turn and park. It is occupied by a small Vauxhall, so we had to reverse down the hill and steal some space from one of the houses at the end of that section of path.

The board itself highlights various points of interest on the way over to Dundonald, like the reservoir, the working quarry and the castle at the far end.

Although it is still technically spring, May is when Scotland tends to get its summer weather. June, July and August are often lost under a swelter of swear words as parents of school kids and tourists wonder what happened to the fucking weather.

Today Troon is masquerading as Torremolinos. It must be in the mid-twenties.

‘I’m worried about your head, Dave,’ I say. ‘What do you think, Alessandra? Think he’s going to get burned?’

‘I think if anyone’s going to get burned it’s you, DI McBain,’ she smiles sweetly.

Beyond the board is a high, grey stone wall. It has a padlocked gate with a “No Fishing Without Permit” sign and a space for people with said permits to get through. Begs the question, why bother with the padlock?

Just as we are about to enter the space in the wall, we hear a scream and some shouting. We all look at each other and file through. A teenager in a Rangers football top is running down the grassy hill towards us, his arms wind-milling in panic.

‘Somebody phone the polis. A wee boy just fell in the water.’

The three of us take off up the hill. Dave gets to the top first and I reach the crest in time to see his shoes and jacket being kicked off before he dives in. In front of me is a stone walkway, stretching left and right, from which the water leads off in a triangular shape. This part of the reservoir is man-made, the far edges of the water are edged in grass and reeds.

I take in the scene instantly.

There’s a square orange stand about one hundred yards to the right of me. A young woman is running from it with a lifesaver in her arms.

In the water I can see a small head of dark hair and a tiny, white hand clutching desperately at the air.

I run to the woman and pull the lifebuoy out of her arms and, turning, throw it to Dave. He pops it expertly over the head of the boy who is splashing frantically. Once the ring is secure I pull it in and help the boy out of the water. The weight of him and the ring is nothing and I soon have him gasping on the stone floor of the walkway.

I search his face hoping for recognition. It could be Ben. He’s about the right age. He has the same colouring. The same long lashes.

The woman pushes me out of the way and is all over the boy in a flurry of snot, tears and remonstrations.

‘Why did you go so close? I told you not to get so close.’ Only when the woman has him in her arms does the boy start to cry. It’s as if the strength of her reaction makes him realise for the first time that he was in real danger.

Dave clambers out and Alessandra moves to check that he is okay. Apart from a violent shiver and sodden clothes that are now sticking to him, he looks none the worse for his brief swim.

The wee boy is still crying. The woman’s tone is placatory.

‘There, there, wee man. Don’t worry. No need to tell mum. Let’s keep this our wee secret. Okay?’

Our wee secret.

‘DI McBain,’ I introduce myself. ‘Who are you and who is this boy to you?’

Her name is Mary and she’s the boy’s aunt. His name is Lewis. They both live in Troon and she was looking after him while his mother was called in to work. As quickly as I showed her my warrant card, she had her purse out of her handbag and was waving her bank cards under my nose. A switch card, a credit card and a blood donor card. They all have the name Mary Agnes McKee stencilled along the bottom. Then she’s pulling out some letters and bank statements all with the same name.

She’d heard about the new walkway from a pal and decided, seeing as it was a nice day, to take the wee fella for a walk. Never again, she said solemnly holding a hand to her chest.