A Taste for Malice (8 page)

‘It’s about power, Ms Gibson.’ I outline the situation of Mr & Mrs Craig’s son. The abuse he suffered culminating in the fake rescue, if that was indeed what it was.

‘What are you looking for DI McBain?’

‘Please, call me Ray. All this formal stuff wears me out.’

‘Okay,
Ray
. What do you want from me?’

‘Be still my beating heart.’

Silence pours into my ear. There is nothing to give me the heads up as to whether she is enjoying my attempts at flirting or if she is scathing of them. The silence continues for another couple of seconds.

‘An indication of the character we are dealing with,’ I admit a flirting failure. For now.

‘Don’t you have a profiler linked to your department?’

‘Only happens in the movies.’ And where we have the money. And in official investigations. ‘Speaking of which there’s an interesting film on at the Glasgow Film Theatre …’

‘Let’s not go any further with that.’ Her tone is firm, but not entirely unfriendly. ‘You could be right, Ray. Abuse is always about power. In this situation you have to ask yourself a couple of questions. Was this a genuine accident? Was the woman interrupted and diverted from her original plan of murder and then made it look like an accident? Or was this always her plan, to harm the boy and stop just short of murder?’

‘That was three questions. What is it with you women and numbers?’

‘I thought it was men who had that problem?’

‘With numbers we have no problem…first date, second date, etcetera. It’s measurements we struggle with. Six inches, twelve inches.’

‘DI McBain, you are outrageous,’ I can hear a smile in her voice.

‘Say we go with the latter explanation. Our sicko always planned to stop just short of killing the boy.’

‘That would suggest someone who toys with her power. She revels in it. She has ultimate control in that situation. Let him die or not. She enjoys this, Ray. If that is the real scenario you have a dangerous and manipulative woman to find before she allows herself that final, delicious show of her will. And Ray, if I can offer you one piece of advice?’

‘Sure.’

Her voice is full of concern. ‘I almost hesitate to say this, Ray. I don’t want to tell you how to do your job. But please don’t call this woman a sicko. That reduces her to nothing more than a horrible caricature. Nothing more than a label.

‘She is more … much, much more than that.’

Jim’s clothes were neatly folded in three black bin bags on the front path when he came home from work the day Angela decided the marriage was over.

‘Don’t I at least deserve an explanation?’ he remembers asking.

Angela’s expression was chipped from granite. ‘You can say goodbye to your son and then the next time we speak will be through lawyers.’ He looked in the front window to see Ben doing a kangaroo impression from one end of the settee to the other. He hadn’t yet picked up any tension.

‘Angela, you’ve got to tell me what I’ve done,’ he grabbed her arm.

She looked at her arm and then into his eyes. He let go.

‘What’s happened, Angela. What went wrong?’

‘I’m done talking, Jim. I don’t even have the energy to argue any more. Just, please, say goodbye and then go.’ She stepped back into the hallway, looked over her shoulder to Ben and said, ‘Come and say goodbye to your dad, Ben. He’s going away for a few days.’ Her hand moved from her chin to her nose and then rested on her mouth as she struggled to maintain her control. By her actions she was telling Jim that Ben had to be protected at all costs.

Jim went along with the play as scripted by her and stamped a smile on his face in preparation for his goodbye scene.

‘Daddy will see you later,’ he said while trying not to hold him too tight. “Later” came out of his mouth as if a giant fist had squeezed the last drop of oxygen from his lungs. He pressed his lips against the warm square of Ben’s forehead and turned away from him while he still had some measure of control.

How he made those few steps to the car and remained upright he’d never know. His shoulder shook with huge hiccupping sobs. The view from the car was so blurred as to be indistinct. He made it round the corner before his emotions swamped him. Hugging himself he rocked back and forward in the car seat. Was this feeling ever going to end?

Then it occurred to him that he would no longer be a part of Ben’s daily existence. No way would Angela keep him from seeing him, he trusted her on that, but he wouldn’t be there every morning when Ben walked through from his bedroom with his pillow-tousled hair. He wouldn’t be there every day when Ben complained about having to eat carrots. He wouldn’t be there every evening to listen to his son plead for another story. He didn’t know how he would cope. A day without Ben in it was simply unthinkable.

What have I done? he had kept asking himself. What have I done? As he left the house Angela almost gave in to his demand for an answer.

Her eyes were heavy with betrayal. ‘Look into your conscience, Jim. The answer’s there.’ As she spoke she slipped something into her back pocket. Jim caught it in his vision for no more than a second. Long enough to see what looked like a letter.

Jim was in his office at the bookshop processing the sales from the previous week. Or he should have been. Instead he was staring at a computer spreadsheet with his mind immersed in his worries. Ever since he returned to work he worried about leaving Angela in the house on her own. Yes, she would spend most of the day sleeping, it seemed she was never done sleeping, but there were a lot of things she’d want to do, things that could mentally trip her, things that might hurt her. She needed constant attention, but he had a job to maintain. A mortgage to pay.

Most of the time it felt like that was the least of his worries however. He was living a perjured life. Every moment of his family’s life, every step forward was reaching his brain through the filter of a monumental lie. And it was imprinting its stain on everything. Nothing good would happen without it being tempered, warped or reduced to a cheaper version of itself. No smile or touch would reach him and make its full impact.

And what about last night? They had almost ended up in bed together. He couldn’t let that happen again. The chances were that Angela had forgotten all about it and he wasn’t about to remind her. The lie of their relationship couldn’t be allowed to flounder against the rock of his libido. That would be one betrayal too many to an Angela in full possession of her faculties.

Could he tell the truth? Could he just go home after work and tell her everything? They were too far along the road surely. Surely? If, or when Angela found out, could she go it alone? Maybe she would see that she was too fragile without him. Maybe by then she would be in love with him again and she would forgive the lie knowing it was told with the best of intentions.

To live through the alternative again was just too painful to contemplate.

She was at the psychologists. Her referral had come through at last. Part of her rehabilitation was to work on regaining her long-term memory and improving her short-term memory. Jim had been unable to get time off work to go with her. Any more time off and he was sure his bosses would lose their patience. So he’d ordered a taxi to pick her up and to take her back home. It would do until other arrangements could be made. He’d heard of a local charity that helped people in this situation. He’d give them a call. Perhaps he should phone home to make sure that Angela had gotten home safely. Just as he reached for the phone it rang.

‘Jim,’ it was Annette down on the shop floor. ‘Look on your CCTV monitor.’

‘What exactly am I looking for?’ He looked at the small black box to the right of his PC, which displayed several views from the shop on its 10-inch screen.

‘To the right of the doors. At the three-for-two section.’

‘Yeah?’ Mr irritable was coming back. There’d better be a point to this.

‘Is that…your wife … Angela?’

‘Eh?’ He squinted…and there sure enough was his wife picking a book from the shelf. But she looked different, smaller somehow. And as if she’d just stepped fully clothed from a swimming pool.

‘I’ll be right down.’

When she saw him walking towards her Angela twitched a smile.

‘So this is where you work?’ Her eyes looked anywhere but into his face. ‘Nice. I wrote it down. In case I got lost.’ She reached into the pocket of her jeans, while looking into the distance. Her hand came out empty. Her eyes told him that she wasn’t sure what she was looking for. ‘Must be lovely working with all these books.’ She looked around at the well-stacked shelves, her eyes darting from book spine to book spine like a literary bluebottle. Her arms were folded tight across her chest.

‘Hey. What are you doing here? What’s wrong, honey? How did you get so …?’

‘I felt good. Strong …you know. I wanted to see where you worked. I wrote it down and everything.’ A sob escaped from her lips. ‘It’s raining …and I got lost.’ She closed her eyes against the flow of tears. Jim drew her into his chest. Her shoulders shook with emotion.

‘C’mon. Let’s go up to my office and have a wee bit of privacy,’ said Jim.

In the office, Jim sat her on a rickety blue computer chair — facing his own rickety blue computer chair. Handing her a cup of water he said in as calm a tone as he could muster, ‘Okay. Tell me everything from the start.’

Angela shook her head slowly from side to side, closed her eyes and scrunched up her mouth. Then she bent forward, elbows on her thighs and fingers gripping her head through her soaking hair.

‘I can’t remember,’ she said in a strangled whisper. Then louder. ‘I can’t fucking remember.’ Then a whisper with her head down, as she was examining the carpet. ‘Fucking cunt cunt cunt cunt.’

‘Your appointment was at ten this morning.’ He looked at his watch and ignored the words coming out of Angela’s mouth. Pre-accident Angela would have been as likely to say the “C” word as she would have been to give Ben a backhander. ‘And it’s now two-thirty. How long were you with the doctor for?’

‘Can’t remember.’

Jim guessed it wouldn’t have been longer than an hour.

Christ. She’d been walking the streets ever since then.

‘You must be …’

‘And on the way back I thought it would be nice to go and look at the shops. You know, act like a normal person instead of a …freak.’ She took a deep breath.

‘Then I thought, wouldn’t it be nice to come in and see you. Celebrate my return to the big bad world and all that.’ She took a sip from her water.

‘Is that okay? Would you rather have a coffee?’

‘No, this is fine. Thanks.’ Another sip. If she could have inhaled it Jim was sure she would have. ‘And I couldn’t find your shop. Couldn’t remember where it was.’ Her eyes looked tiny against the mottled pink of her face. Drips from her hair threatened to refill her cup.

‘Look, why don’t I go and get you a towel,’ Jim said and stood up. ‘You’ll get an attack of the sniffles.’

She pushed a rope of hair thick with moisture away from her face. ‘Okay. Thanks.’

Moments later he was back with a towel. Then he noticed staining on the carpet around her feet. ‘You really need to get some dry clothes.’

‘JIM. Will you sit down and stop fussing? I feel enough of an idiot without you barging around.’ Her nostrils flared, her eyes bulged. Then as quickly as the storm blew in, it blew out. She sagged back into her chair.

‘Fuck,’ she said. This single syllable was drawn out, thick with desperation.

‘Sorry, honey. I was just trying to help.’

She closed her eyes. It read to him as if she was fighting a further irritation. Then the flow of tears started up again. ‘Jim, it was awful. Do you know what I mean? Terrifying. I didn’t know where I was. Barely knew who I was. Couldn’t remember the name of the shop. I’ve been walking up and down this street,’ her right arm flew out to the side, she swivelled her head to one side and then to the other, ‘or was it that way? It was horrible.’

‘Honey, you’re here now. Safe.’

‘And I kept thinking, what if Ben was with me? I can’t be trusted to look after myself, what would have happened to him?’

Apologising to the staff, Jim bundled a still weeping Angela into his car, drove her the fifteen minute journey home, poured a bath and helped her out of her clothes. By this stage, she wasn’t giving a thought to the fact she was naked, he didn’t think she was capable of thought, she simply obeyed his every request as if she was on automatic.

In the bath, knees gathered to her chest she was like an island of bone jutting out from a sea of foam. Her slight limbs trembling within a translucent layer of skin. He hadn’t noticed just how thin she had become. As he soaped her down she gazed into neverland and allowed Jim to move her arms up so he could wash the flesh underneath.

Dropping the sponge through the layer of bubbles to fill up with warm water and then slowly squeezing the contents down the knobbled line of her spine soothed him as much as it did her. It felt like a concrete thing to do, a way to connect with the tired and lost soul somewhere behind those vacant, staring eyes.

Like a child she let him dry her while she sat feet planted on the rug, her backside on the edge of the bath. Carefully Jim drew the towel across her shoulders, down her back and arms and then across her breasts. Kneeling before her he attended to her feet, her legs and the soft brush of hair at their junction. All the while, Angela stared impassively into the distance.

Then he dressed her in a robe, bound her hair in a towel and led her through to her bedroom. Once she was under the quilt he closed the curtains then walked out of the room. Closing the door behind him, he heard the sigh of the door as its base brushed across the thick pile of the carpet.

In the kitchen, a mug of coffee heating his cupped palms he wondered at the new Jim Hilton and his calm acceptance of what needed to be done. Where did he come from?

Short-term memory loss. That was what the doctors warned him to look out for. Four little words that came nowhere close to describing the chaos they could cause. They did nothing to prepare him for the panic in her eyes, the anger, the exhaustion.