Absolution (4 page)

She heard the chair scrape, sensed his shadow move, as he stood up.

‘The wean looks fine.’ Wean? A word she didn’t know. ‘They all look the same to me, but the nurses seem to think she’s a pretty wee thing. Do you have a name for her?’

She heard him walk over to the cot. ‘Can I pick her up?’

Her heart began to race. Maybe, if she concentrated really hard, he would know. She raised her finger.

‘Well, look at you, eh? Oh, don’t cry now.’ Then his voice changed. Have you seen – sorry, held her?’

Please.
She twitched her thumb.
Oh, understand – please.

‘She’s got blue eyes, blonde hair, extremely pretty. Takes after her mum.’

She twitched her thumb at him, telling him he didn’t know that, turned her head as far as the dressings would allow. The baby was quiet now.

Please.

‘Here.’ His voice was nearer now. She could smell mint – he had just cleaned his teeth. He guided her hand the inch or two the restraints would permit to something on the bed beside her, something warm, breathing, living. Anna, meet your daughter. Small person, this is ‘your mother.’

Her daughter’s head. Her fingers, stiffly at first and painfully, were exploring all the little pulses and bumps and fontanelles, seeing as blind people see, creating a picture in her mind of downy eyebrows, little wisps of eyelashes, the soft chubby flesh of a cheek. Her daughter.

‘Here, feel this.’ He moved her fingers down a little. A tiny hand. Her daughter’s hand.

‘You’ve no idea how small her hands are. So wee.’ He was talking
like a daddy. ‘My brother had hands like spades; always had to stick them in his pockets for photographs.’

She picked up the ‘my brother had’ –past tense – and the wistful tone. Had he lost his brother young? Yet he sounded so young himself, younger than her perhaps.

After a moment he spoke. ‘So small, so full of life.’ He fell silent again and then said, ‘You wonder how they survive, that will to live. The older cops talk about cases – you know, abused kids, starved kids, battered kids – but somehow they keep going. As they say, the trick is to keep breathing, no matter what.’ Minutes passed, and she could feel the silence congeal between them. Then he spoke again, his voice sounding desolate, bereaved.

‘Do you think dying is a passive process? Because I think that’s what my dad is doing. When you have had enough, you give up breathing. Maybe death isn’t something that comes up and gets you. You just let it happen. But my mum…’ He was holding back tears, she could hear it in his voice. For a while, all she heard was the rush of the ventilator; he didn’t trust himself to speak. My mum – she’s got cancer, you know. It’s spread bloody everywhere. She’ll die of a broken heart, of course. No bloody cure for that, for losing a favourite son. But she’ll choose when she dies. And if Robbie hadn’t died, then she’d have chosen to keep going’ – she tried to crawl her fingers over the blanket towards his – ‘because she’d have had something to live for. Her favourite son. I can’t help thinking, when she heard, it must have flashed across her mind– why Robbie? Why not Al –’ He stopped abruptly. She could hear a monitor bleeping somewhere outside, the banging of doors as somebody was rushed to Intensive Care, another human drama. Anyway, life goes on.’

She felt a caress on the top of her head, gone before it had registered.

He had kissed her.

His mother was dead.

He was eating soggy chips from a newspaper, sitting on
a rock, nothing in front of him but Dunoon on a cold wet morning. The baking heat of the previous week had given way suddenly to overcast skies, and the brisk wind coming in off the Atlantic chopped up the water of the Clyde. The view gave him no comfort; it looked like eternity had been coloured grey.

Her passing had been simple in the end: no last-minute grasp at life, no desperation to hang on to the final breath.

McAlpine had popped his head through his mother’s bedroom door at midnight, said good night, as he always did, and she was still. McAlpine’s eyes had wandered to the empty morphine sulphate bottle. She had taken the lot. And that hurt him more than anything, her betrayal. Losing the son she loved had been the last straw, and it was too difficult for her to stay alive for the son she didn’t love.

He threw the rest of his chips to the seagulls, then thrust his hands deep into his anorak pockets. He couldn’t bear to go back to the house, couldn’t bear to be alone with his dad, who had nothing to say at the best of times, couldn’t bear even to think about what it meant to have lost his mother.

No, he wasn’t going back.

A mother’s grief. Those words had sunk deep into his conscience. A mother’s grief. Sleeping Beauty and that tiny innocent little baby. He could feel a smile come to his face just thinking about her. Robbie had gone, his mum was gone. At that moment he didn’t think he had anybody else, just his blonde angel, lying still in her cocoon, waiting. And that was enough.

Two seagulls squawked, fighting over a chip. It was time to go. He stood up, shook the sand from his shoes and started to walk back to the Victorian railway station at Wemyss Bay. He needed a place where death came with
sirens blazing. He needed a place where it was quiet, and he was invisible. He needed to go back to the hospital. He needed Anna.

‘Have a seat, Alan. I hear Robbie is to be nominated for a Queen’s Commendation for Bravery. You must be very proud.’ DCI Graham smiled gently.

A slight pause, a flash of insolence in the dark eyes before McAlpine sat down. ‘Proud’s not exactly top of the list just now. We don’t even know yet when we’ll get him back for burying.’

Graham coughed. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, slightly abashed. ‘What I meant is that it must be some consolation. And now the dreadful news about your mother.’

‘They say good news travels fast,’ said McAlpine sarcastically.

Graham closed the file, stood up and moved the picture of his wife to the side of his desk. He perched himself on the edge, closer to McAlpine. His voice was full of restraint. ‘Putting all that aside, do you want me to list all the procedures you’ve broken during your association with this case?’ he said.

‘Do what you want.’

Graham folded his arms. ‘I made a mistake. I thought this would be a good case for you, to get your brain back into gear. I knew there was a story about that girl, and I knew you’d get on to it. You were supposed to tell us her secrets, not vice versa; you were supposed to – ’

‘Supposed to what?’ McAlpine was on his feet. ‘Supposed to what? Just ignore her? Ignore the fact she’s scared stiff? Just give her a bloody number, like the hospital?’

‘Sit down and be quiet, Constable McAlpine.’ Graham put his hand up. ‘There are lines that you are not allowed
to cross, and those lines are there for a reason. Put it this way: say we get on to who threw the acid, say we get to the bottom of it – you’ll have ruined any chance we have of getting him to court, never mind securing a conviction. Interviewing a witness without corroboration of tape and without a colleague present, tampering with evidence, solo search, and without a warrant at that… the case would be thrown out before the ink was dry on the release sheet, and you know as well as I do, PC McAlpine, that kind of shit sticks. And it is not sticking to me, not in this station. You let her down. You let me down. Do I make myself clear?’

McAlpine folded his arms and looked out of the window with a teenager’s petulance, reminding Graham just how young he was.

‘Do I make myself clear?’ Graham repeated.

‘Indeed you do.’

‘Those rules are there to protect you in cases like this. How are you going to survive the first time you see the body of a dead child? You can’t react personally; you have to learn to walk away and move on. In the meantime Interpol have given us a promising lead on her, so I am
ordering you
to leave the girl alone. Just file your report and walk away.’

‘And that’s it? I’m supposed to just –’

‘No, you are not
supposed
to, you have been ordered to. End of story. If you’re not going to take time off, you’ve work to be getting on with. There’s been a fatal traffic accident in Byres Road, woman driver killed, and daughter, a Helen – no, Helena – Farrell, she’s at the Western Infirmary. Go and sort it out. And don’t – just don’t – start anything.’

McAlpine climbed the stairs at the Western two at a time and turned left, going quickly along the corridor, fuming, arguing with himself. How dare he? How dare he? It was
just police talk; he was a human being and she needed him. She needed him.

Or did he need her?

He stopped at the sign for the Intensive Care Unit. The red-headed nurse went past, ignoring him. A uniform he didn’t know was sitting in his seat, watching Anna’s room. He was reading the
Sun,
his legs crossed, his foot bobbing up and down as he hummed to some secret melody. McAlpine paused as the uniform glanced up and down the empty corridor before going back to Page Three. A door clicked, and another uniform cop appeared with two cups of tea, settling into the seat opposite his mate. Two of them? There was no way McAlpine could get in there without being seen. He had somewhere else to go, somebody’s daughter to sort out. He turned and kept walking.

‘Helena Farrell?’ At first he had thought it was a workman in the visitors’ room, a tall figure in dungarees. Then she turned towards him, caught in the act of pulling a velvet scarf from her hair, leaving a smear of purple paint on her face as auburn curls cascaded down her shoulders. She flicked her head, freeing them, before restraining them once more in their velvet knot.

When they said daughter, I imagined…’ McAlpine held his hand out flat, indicating the height of a child.

‘No,’ she said. She pulled the handkerchief from her eyes, sniffing, and started to dab at the paint stains on her fingertips. He could smell turpentine from her. ‘I was working when they called,’ she said by way of explanation.

‘I’m PC McAlpine, Partickhill Station. Have they told you what happened?’

‘As much as I want to know,’ she sighed. ‘Seems Mum had a heart attack at the wheel and crashed the car on to
the pavement.’ She shrugged, and the auburn curls bounced slightly against their velvet restraint and resettled.

‘Much to the distress of the pedestrians using it at the time. How are you feeling?’

The girl bit the corner of her mouth, almost managing to stop a lone tear in its tracks. ‘We weren’t close,’ she said. Her eyes didn’t leave his. She was looking down at him, being a few inches taller, and he wasn’t sure he liked that. ‘I’m surprised I feel so shocked. I just feel numb, really.’

‘If that’s the way you feel, that’s the way you feel. There’re no rules.’ He paused. ‘Is there anybody I can phone for you? Better that you’re not on your own right now.’

Helena stood resolutely, then lifted her hands to her face, open palms covering her eyes. He took two steps forward, allowing her to drop her head on his shoulder before she started to sob. He had no option but to put his arm round her.

DCI Graham and DI Forsythe stood at the door of the DCI’s office, listening as McAlpine’s slow footfall came up the stairs towards them. Graham looked at his watch. ‘Two weeks she was lying there, and we had no idea who she was. Now that we do know, I wish we hadn’t bothered.’

‘Best of luck with it.’ Forsythe stood on the landing, looking down over the banister. ‘He’s a good copper, McAlpine. I worked with his dad for years. Had a passion for the job, he did.’

‘Not always a good thing.’

McAlpine was climbing the stairs very reluctantly. On the landing, he stopped and remained silent, his eyes passing like a condemned man’s from Graham to Forsythe.

Graham gently guided him into his office, saying nothing as he handed McAlpine a photograph and sat down.

She was sitting on a desolate beach, the dark mass of the sea to one side, dunes and reeds to the other, the sand spreading out behind her as far as the camera could see. The bleakness of the setting only emphasized the vitality of the subject. She sat half crouched, half sitting, her dark sweater pulled down over her knees, arms wrapped in front of her shins. She held her chin up, exposing her throat, and blonde hair caught by the wind framed her perfect face in brightness. Her grey eyes were full of humour, almost challenging, their stare intense, eyebrows elegantly arched. The lips twisted in a slight smile, the smile of a seductress. He didn’t think he had ever seen such a beautiful face. And at the bottom of the photograph her little toes curled into the sand, the little scar bending into a crescent moon.

She was in love with whoever was behind the camera.

He was jealous.

Graham reached out to take the photograph. He pinned it to the board on the wall. Just a picture to him, McAlpine thought, just a cheap black-and-white photo of some blonde with nice legs. Yet there was a subtle change of expression in her sideways glance, catching him in the pit of his stomach. He couldn’t quite read it.

The closest he could get was
Don’t leave me.

Graham’s voice cut in, unpleasantly real.

‘I’m glad you’re sitting down, Alan. There’s something we’ve found out, and you’ll have to know. We think we know who she is. Interpol have been looking for a blonde female, twenty-four years old, grey eyes, Dutch, slim build, 1.76 metres tall. What’s that – five foot six, seven?’ He flicked the page over. ‘Fingerprints have been lifted from the bedsit but none to compare… obviously. And they’re sending dental records, but the medics won’t let us X-ray her.’

‘If she had an interest in art and an operation scar on the big toe of her right foot, I don’t think you need look any further.’

Graham turned over another page on the file and sighed. ‘Yip, degree in fine art and a ballet injury when she was twelve. Broke her big toe.’

The DCI took a deep breath and pressed on. ‘This is going to be hard. Do you recognize any of these people?’ He passed over another photograph. A young man who bore an uncanny resemblance to Steve McQueen had his arms round a dark-haired man and a beautiful blonde woman who was leaning lovingly towards him, obscuring the name of the yacht moored behind them. All three were laughing and smiling, the joke of the minute caught for eternity. McAlpine’s eyes rested on her; there she was, her hand in the pocket of her shorts, long brown legs, barefoot on the wooden deck, her blonde hair catching in the sea breeze.