Candles and Roses (12 page)

So that was that. Another sodding job up the spout. She hadn’t even been there long enough to get redundancy pay. Back to the Job Centre, back to all the balls-ache of trying to claim Jobseeker’s Allowance, and back to frantically applying for any job she could find. She still had a few hours of bar-work each week, but there didn’t seem any prospect of expanding that, even if she could do so without tripping over the benefits threshold. She was no scrounger. She’d always tried to be self-reliant and was happy to take on any work she could find. But it was getting harder and harder. She wasn’t getting any younger, and employers were starting to look at her employment record and wonder why it was so patchy. Some of that was her fault, of course. For a start, she had a criminal record. A couple of convictions for shoplifting, and the second time she’d been given a short custodial sentence. It was long spent, but she’d got the sack from her job at the time and had found it hard to get work afterwards. From then on, it had been dead-end stuff. Many employers weren’t prepared to offer anything more than short-term or zero-hours contracts these days, and even when she’d found what was supposedly a permanent role, as with the shop, it had generally ended in being laid off as soon as they found half an excuse.

Every month she struggled with the rent and the bills. She’d been lucky there in that she’d found a house-share in a decent housing association place, but she wasn’t entirely sure of the legality of the arrangement. Apart from the difficulty of scraping the money together each month, she had a fear the whole set-up would fall apart. She’d spent weeks sofa-surfing on a couple of previous occasions and didn’t want to end up doing it again. It was a good way to lose what few friends she still had.

On top of all that it was, as always, pissing down. She’d lost her umbrella somewhere, and she had only a thin coat and hood to ward off the rain for the fifteen-minute walk between her bus stop and the place that, for the moment, she was able to call home. She hunched her shoulders and began the trek.

Hulme was decent enough these days. She’d heard people talk about the old days of the Hulme Crescents, the medium-rise estates that had been a disaster almost from the days they were built. By the 1980s, the council had more or less abandoned them and they became a haunt for drugged-up criminals and every kind of weirdo you could imagine. There was something oddly romantic about that, she thought. A derelict estate taken over by people from the fringes of society. But maybe it had been less romantic if you had to live there.

It was different now. There were still areas you steered clear of but most of it was neat rows of housing, well-maintained by the council and housing associations. The university area was adjacent, and the student population meant there was a decent selection of pubs and bars and a few interesting shops. It was only a short bus-ride into the city centre. The place would be perfect, if only she could afford to live here. Or to live anywhere for that matter.

From time to time she wondered if she’d be better returning back up north. But it was too late for that. She’d eventually put all that behind her. It was still there, lurking in the darkest recesses of her mind, and every now and then she’d wake from an unremembered nightmare, knowing it had seeped back into her consciousness like a toxic gas. But it was dealt with. She’d moved on. Maybe not far and in no clear direction. But away from all that. She had no intention of doing anything to risk bringing any of that back to the surface.

The rain was coming harder, clattering off the roofs of parked cars and the grimy pavements. She broke into a semi-run, hoping to reach the shelter of the house before she was completely soaked.

She turned into the cul-de-sac where she lived, still with her head down, and almost ran headlong into the figure standing outside the shared house.

‘Oh, Jesus, sorry. Didn’t see you there—’ She looked up, and took a breath.

It was almost as if her thoughts had conjured this up. The figure was standing, motionless, head tipped forward, clad in a heavy-duty black cagoule. She could barely make out the features in the shadow of the hood, but she’d known as soon as she raised her head.

‘Christ, what the hell are you doing here?’ she said.

‘Waiting for you.’ As if it was the most obvious thing in the world. As if it wasn’t so many years.

‘But how the hell did you know—?’

‘Where you lived? I was just lucky. Came across it.’

‘But—’ She couldn’t make sense of it. She might have expected a call or maybe a friend request on Facebook. Not this.

‘I didn’t have any way of contacting you beforehand. Just the address. So I thought I’d come out on the off-chance you might be around.’

‘You’d better come in,’ she said, aware she sounded grudging. All this would do was stir it up again, bring out those same demons from the corners of her head. ‘You must be soaked.’

‘I’m OK inside this. It’s designed for Manchester weather. Look, I don’t want to intrude. Wondered if you fancied grabbing a bite to eat somewhere. My treat. We can chat. Catch up. Then I’ll bugger off and leave you alone.’

She’d realised, even as she made the offer, that she really didn’t want to go into the house. It was as if it would bring everything, all that history, inside. That it wouldn’t be a refuge, but just another place contaminated by the past. Anyway, it wasn’t every day that someone offered to take her for dinner. The way things were going, it would be a long while before she could afford to eat out herself. She raised her rain-drenched face. ‘I’m not exactly dressed to go out,’ she said, ‘unless the drowned rat look became fashionable when I wasn’t looking.’

‘I wasn’t thinking of anywhere posh. Just a pub or something.’

‘We’ll get even wetter walking there.’

‘I’m parked just round the corner. I can drive us somewhere then drop you off back here when we’re done.’

‘Aye, why not? Like you say, we should catch up. It’s been a hell of a long time.’

‘It has that. All kinds of stuff gone on. I’ll tell you about it. Let’s get on before you get any wetter. Car’s only a minute or two away. Follow me.’

‘But what the hell are you doing down here?’ she called.

‘Long story.’ There was a parked van, with the passenger door standing open. ‘Here, get out of the wet.’

For a moment, unexpectedly, she felt a shiver of unease, a cold finger down her spine that had nothing to do with the rain leaking into her thin overcoat. But she could think of no reason to refuse.

She climbed into the car, relieved to be out of the driving rain.

***

It was nearly eight when McKay finally left the office. Helena Grant had managed to beg, steal and borrow resources from every part of the division. They had a decent-sized team now, working out of the MIR and a couple of overflow rooms, camped on the phones, taking statements, collating intelligence, crunching data. Most of it was routine stuff, trawling through the list of addresses and contacts that Mrs Scott had left for them, calling individuals who had known Katy Scott during her time in Culbokie and Inverness.

Scott’s identity had been announced to the media that evening, along with a couple of the most recent photographs they’d been able to obtain. Since the story had appeared on the local news, they’d had a steady trickle of calls from people claiming to have information. Most were nothing more than attention seekers, old school-friends or past acquaintances who had some vague half-memory of having encountered Katy. Little of this was likely to be of real value, but it was the necessary leg-work. McKay had similarly been liaising with the communications team at Greater Manchester Police to organise an appeal for information on the local news there.

They’d still made no progress in identifying the second victim. She hadn’t shown up on the police databases. They’d found a few possible matches on the national missing persons database, but so far those had led nowhere. They’d issued a description, complete with reference to the distinctive tattoos, and had received a few calls but none yet sounded promising.

They were still at that relatively early stage in the investigation when you can sense a genuine buzz of enthusiasm among the team. It was hard and monotonous work, but they still felt that, sooner or later, some real lead would emerge. But he knew this energy could be sustained only for so long. Within a few days, if they still seemed to be getting nowhere, the enthusiasm would start to wane. The leads would become less numerous and less promising; the work would become routine; the team would start just going through the motions in the vague hope that something would turn up. If they reached that point, McKay’s challenge would be to lead them through it, keep the promised land in sight as they trudged through the investigatory desert. It wasn’t something he was looking forward to.

He spent the last half-hour tidying up various administrative loose ends and checking through his e-mails. McKay was happy to cultivate his reputation as a maverick, but he knew as well as anyone the importance of professionalism in this work. You could be as brilliant as Sherlock Holmes, but nobody would thank you if the prosecution fell apart because you’d screwed up the evidence or hadn’t followed due procedure. By eight, he decided to call it a night. A couple of the team were still on the phones or tapping away at their keyboards, so he gestured that they should follow his example before long. It didn’t do anyone any good to end up knackered on a case like this, where it looked like they were in it for the long haul.

At home, Chrissie was curled up on the sofa, watching a cookery show on the TV. A half-empty bottle of white wine was sitting on the floor. ‘You’re earlier than I expected,’ she said, in a voice which suggested that this wasn’t necessarily a welcome development.

‘Done what I could,’ he said.

‘Stew’s still in the oven. I had mine earlier. Potatoes in the saucepan on top. You’ll need to heat them up.’

‘Thanks. I’m starving.’ Stews of various kinds were Chrissie’s default supper these days. He couldn’t blame her. His working days were as erratic as ever. A stew would sit in the oven without spoiling, or without spoiling too much, as long as he wasn’t ridiculously late.

He’d told her not to bother cooking. He enjoyed cooking himself—he often did it at the weekends—and would have been content to rustle up something when he got in. But she insisted that this was her contribution. These days, she only worked a couple of mornings doing administration for a local medical centre so she had plenty of time, she said. In his worst moments, McKay felt it was simply another way of punishing him, a way of ensuring he owed her something, however trivial. A way of making him feel guilty on those nights when he arrived back too late and the food was dried out and inedible.

Tonight, it was fine. He reheated the boiled potatoes, spooned out a decent helping, and poured himself a glass of red wine from the resealed bottle on the side. There’d been a time, after it had happened, when both of them had been knocking back the booze too much. McKay had always been a serious drinker. It had been part of the role profile in his early days in the job—a few pints and chasers after work alongside the chain-smoking and the crap fast food. In his mid-thirties, McKay had realised he was well on the way to participating in the grand Caledonian tradition of a coronary before the age of forty, so he’d made an effort to knock it on the head. That was when he’d given up smoking, cut back heavily on the drinking, and started to think about eating some food that was green without being mouldy.

He’d more or less kept it up ever since. But both he and Chrissie had found their alcohol intake creeping up as they tried to come to terms with what had happened. McKay had reached the point where he could easily knock back half a bottle of Scotch in an evening without noticing. Chrissie had hit the wine. It had taken him a month or two to realise what was happening, and then he’d made the effort to stop. These days, he limited himself to no more than one or two glasses of wine. Chrissie, he thought, was still drinking too much, but he wasn’t about to try to tell her so.

He slumped himself on the sofa next to her, the plate of food on his knee. On the television, a chunkily-built bald man was expressing doubts about the flavour combinations in the dish he was tasting.

‘How’s it going?’ she said.

‘Slowly, but we’re making progress.’ He rarely talked about his work with Chrissie, except at the most superficial level.

‘I saw it mentioned on the news. Didn’t say much, except that you’d identified the first victim.’

‘Aye, some poor lass from Culbokie. Well, originally. She’d been living in Manchester.’

They both sat in silence for a few minutes. Chrissie’s eyes were fixed on the TV screen where one of the contestants was struggling with an unsuccessful chocolate fondant. McKay munched through the stew and potatoes, occasionally pausing to take a sip of wine.

‘What are we going to do, Alec?’ Chrissie asked.

‘How’d you mean?’ Though he knew full well.

‘About us. We can’t go on this way.’

‘Can’t we?’ He felt, already, as if he were being coerced into a row. His instinct was to clam up, play dumb, but he knew that would only make matters worse.

‘Oh for Christ’s sake, you know we can’t. Every sodding night sitting in silence because neither of us knows what to say.’

‘So what do you suggest?’

‘We need to talk about it. We need to talk about what happened.’

‘We’ve talked about it. Endlessly. We just go round in circles.’ Except, he thought, that generally you end up blaming me, and I end up blaming you. And not even because we really do blame each other, probably, but just because we’re each trying to offload our own guilt.

‘Maybe it’s time we thought about professional help.’

‘Professional help?’

‘You know, counselling. Couples counselling. That sort of thing.’

McKay felt himself bridling. Chrissie had suggested this before and he’d always resisted, maintaining it was all just woolly bollocks. But he knew, really, that he disliked the idea of someone, some stranger, sticking their nose into his head. Trying to tell what he was thinking. But that was maybe just because he was afraid of what that might be.