Fragile Cord (15 page)

When he spoke softly like this,
his Edinburgh burr rolled gently from his tongue, and Coupland
found himself wondering if Kyle had had a Scottish accent too, or
whether he’d picked up the harsher Salford inflection.

‘
I mean,’
Angus’s face lit up as he said this, ‘It’s every dad’s dream isn’t
it? A chance to re-live your childhood.’

He looked at
Coupland for agreement, Coupland jerked his head slightly in what
he hoped was a nod. His father had been an alcoholic. He never
wanted to re-live
his
childhood ever again.

‘
The nursery
was a railway,’ Angus continued, ‘I’d painted trains around the
walls, big puffs of steam, large as clouds. “But what if it’s a
girl?” Tracey kept asking, and I said to her “Girls like trains
too.”’

He stopped
then, and Coupland could tell from the droop in his shoulders that
the make-believe walls of his world were crashing down around him.
His facial muscles began to jerk in opposing directions as a
multitude of emotions flashed across his face. A low growl erupted
from deep within his body as he covered his face with his hands.
His wedding band glinted in the afternoon sun.

‘She was having another wee boy
after all.’

His words
were bittersweet. A mixture of pride and despair in equal
proportions.

A gentle
breeze stirred the branches outside and Coupland found himself
picturing Kyle as he played in his neighbour’s garden while Tracey
had coffee with Diane. A small boy wearing Wellington boots and a
beanie hat, a smudge of jam around his mouth. Mucky fingers
sticking to the glass like limpets as his mother chided him for
making a mess, unable to conceal her smile as he rubbed his nose
against the glass. An Eskimo kiss, Lynn called them, and the
thought of her now made his insides ache.

He watched
helplessly as Angus succumbed to his grief, his shoulders rising
and falling in time with his sobs. Coupland lurched to his feet,
hurried through to the kitchen, back to Diane and Harry, sitting
numbly at a small round table.

‘Are you done?’ Harry asked him
when he appeared in the doorway, as though he alone was the cause
of Angus’s pain.

Coupland nodded.

Diane slipped
soundlessly through to the conservatory, placed a blanket around
her neighbour’s stooped shoulders, whispered that maybe he should
get some sleep. Easing his head down onto a cushion, she lifted his
feet until he was curled like a foetus on top of the sofa.
Returning to the kitchen she rummaged in a cupboard until she found
a chamois leather, ran it under the tap until it was damp, then let
herself out through sliding patio doors.

‘
She likes to
keep busy.’ Harry explained, but Coupland was no longer listening.
His chest thudded as he followed her round to the side of the
conservatory; saw her dabbing at several sticky prints on a pane of
glass. Finger-sized jammy smudges, the height of a small
child.

Hurrying in
through the station doors Alex called out to the desk sergeant.
She’d been delayed getting back, caught out by the volume of
traffic leaving the airport. It had been busier than she’d
anticipated – it didn’t usually go berserk until the end of summer
term, which was still a couple of weeks away. Added to that she’d
been overwhelmed by the sheer bewilderment of Angus’s parents,
Donald and Morven. They were clearly devastated by the loss of
their only grandchild, but, like most people touched by the case,
they weren’t sure where to vent their anger.

They sat in silence on the back
seat of the squad car she’d taken to collect them.

Stunned silence.

Picking
through every memory they had of their daughter-in-law and their
grandson to see if any of them were real. Re-living every word and
conversation to find the missing clue that would have tipped them
off, warned them of the ticking time-bomb they’d taken into their
family.

Would they ever stop blaming
themselves, Alex wondered, for not doing more?

Alex hated
this part of the job. She could cope with the bodies, well,
most
of the time. What
she couldn’t handle was meeting the families, for the relatives
humanised the loss, put it into its proper perspective. Linked by a
heritage and a cacophony of cells each family member belonged to a
certain place in the family line. Two days ago Donald and Morven
were grandparents, did that mantle leave them now that Kyle was
gone?

Donald, a
consultant at the cancer hospital in Edinburgh was a tall angular
man, all elbows and knees with a head of thick white hair and large
glasses. Morven was tall and slender with a boyish frame that
suited the trouser-suit and plain V-neck t-shirt she wore. A simple
scarf was arranged around her neck, held in place by an expensive
looking brooch. A GP, she worked part-time at a surgery in
Edinburgh’s West End. Quietly spoken, with a slightly more
pronounced Scottish accent than Angus, they’d wanted facts, asked
for the name of the pathologist who’d carried out the
post-mortems.

‘Maybe if they’d come home after
they married we’d have seen it coming, been able to head it off at
the pass…..’Donald articulated to Alex as she drove them to their
hotel.

‘
That was
never going to happen,’ Morven responded with venom, confirming
there was no love lost between Tracey and her mother-in-law. They’d
bickered for a moment then, the way long term married people do,
informing her they’d be happy to answer any questions she had but
first they must see their son. Alex had nodded, turning the car
round to take them over to where Angus was staying. Of course they
would want to see him first. It was natural that they needed to be
sure he was OK. On the way over Alex studied Morven in her
rear-view mirror. Her face was pale, drawn. Eyes red-rimmed and
bright, making her look startled. When she’d looked at her son as a
child, what had she hoped for his future, Alex wondered?

Not this.

Rushing into
the station half an hour behind schedule Alex looked at her watch
and cursed. Charlie Preston would have been and gone by now, she
chided herself; it would probably take several days to set up
another meeting. As she entered the main double-doors she brushed
shoulders with an overweight woman dressed new-age style in a long
dark skirt and crushed velvet top. Her dark curly hair had been
pinned up, framing her chubby face with tightly wound tendrils that
moved with a life of their own putting Alex in mind of an Octopus.
The woman glanced at her and nodded, continued to make her way down
the station steps.

The sergeant on duty looked up
as Alex approached the main desk, began pointing back the way she
came.

‘Has a Charlie Preston called in
to see me?’ she asked, ignoring his pointing finger, leaning onto
the counter top while she waited for a reply.

‘
Charlie
Preston hasn’t,’ he replied dryly, ‘but Charlotte Preston
just passed you on the steps.’

Irritated
that he hadn’t said so sooner she thanked him tersely and raced
back out of the building to the small parking area at the side of
the station reserved for members of the public. Alex had
underestimated the woman’s bulk, which didn’t impede her transit in
any way. Before she had time to run down the steps the woman had
climbed into an aging Citroen Saxo and sped off in the direction of
the city centre.

Shit
, muttered Alex
Shit, shit, shit.
She
turned around and trudged back up the steps toward the station
building, annoyed at herself for being late. They’d probably end up
playing Ping-Pong phone calls for another couple of days and she
wasn’t even sure how useful the woman would be to the investigation
anyway.

The desk
sergeant called out her name as she passed the reception desk, held
out a business card.

‘Charlotte Preston left you a
message,’ he said smugly, ‘said she doesn’t live too far from here,
could call back in to see you same time tomorrow.’

‘Why the hell didn’t you tell
me?’ Alex snapped as she snatched the card from him, her eyes
falling onto a logo she recognised in the bottom right hand
corner.

‘
I just did.’
He retorted, but his reply fell on deaf ears. Alex had seen the
woman’s job title, was already intrigued as to what her
significance could be to the investigation.

By the time
she’d had returned to her desk following her brush with Charlie, or
rather
Charlotte
,
her head was spinning. Picking through the melee of messages taken
in her absence she opened Tracey Kavanagh’s file trying to fill in
the missing gaps. She wondered briefly what it was they didn’t
know, what secrets Tracey had chosen to take with her…

Sergeant
Coupland passed her desk with Turnbull, touching base before they
went their separate ways again. Coupland seemed more buoyant than
he had been for a long time, Alex wondered if it was good
news.

After sending Turnbull for
drinks Coupland spoke quietly: ‘Lynn’s agreed to meet up after
work, maybe I’ve not burnt all my bridges after all.’

Alex smiled approvingly.

‘How’d you get on with Angus’s
parents?’

‘Christ, they don’t know what’s
hit them. They’re a close family by the looks of it, though I don’t
think it extended to the daughter-in-law. Still, no one could’ve
predicted this.’ Or could they? Was there something ticking away in
Tracey’s past that was always going to lead to this? Was is
possible that Kyle, and his unborn brother could’ve been saved?

‘Making headway with Tracey’s
contact book,’ she added.

Coupland nodded, ‘anything
specific?’

Alex was tired. She wanted to
read through the file she’d put together on Tracey in peace, so she
could get home on time to read Ben a bedtime story. She didn’t want
to run through it with Coupland just yet, wanted to let the ideas
bounce around in her mind a little longer. She looked up at him and
shrugged, played down the fact that she might have just made a
breakthrough…

‘Oh, just
tracked down a contact from Tracey’s past.’ She replied carefully,
looking at the logo on Charlotte’s business card, ‘Works with
ex-offenders.’ Coupland shook his head. ‘When
will
they learn, eh?’ he sneered,
‘These
agencies
.’
He spat the word out like he’d tasted something foul.

‘Full of do-gooders in
comfortable shoes who believe in rehabilitation right up there with
Santa Claus and the Easter bloody Bunny.’ He shook his head, his
jowls falling into his familiar hang-dog expression.

‘He’s off…..’ someone called
out. Turnbull smiled in readiness for the

lecture.

‘An
Ex-offender,
’ Coupland
sneered, ‘is just someone who hasn’t committed his next fucking
crime.’

He parked his heavy backside on
the edge of Alex’s desk, ready to put the world to rights. Turnbull
returned with their coffees, blowing across the top of his own
before parking himself on a chair with wheels and manoeuvring it to
Coupland’s side. It was weird how, since Coupland’s marriage had
hit the skids, the DC seemed to have latched onto him, followed him
around like a lap-dog. Turnbull had been through a devastating
divorce the previous year, maybe he saw Coupland as a future
comrade-in-arms. Whatever the reason, Coupland seemed to enjoy
having his very own rent-a-crowd.

‘Look,’ Coupland turned,
relishing the opportunity for a good old rant. ‘What does an actor
say he’s doing between jobs?’

Turnbull eagerly shrugged his
reply, basking in Coupland’s attention.

‘He’s resting, of course.’
Coupland answered for him. ‘They don’t suddenly become ex-actors
just because they’re out of work. Stands to reason doesn’t it? It’s
the same with cons, only they’re never going to bloody admit it are
they?’

He raised his voice to catch
the attention of a couple of DCs who’d just walked in, exaggerated
his Salford accent, making a point of rolling his ‘r’s:

‘Yeah, yer ‘ono, ah used to be
a pilferin’ bastard but ah’m between scams right now.’

Alex stifled a smile. She could
rely on Coupland, out of all of them, to sum it up just about
right. To call a spade a spade.

Coupland turned his attention
back to Alex. ‘They’re bloody restin’, love, that’s all they’re
soddin’ well doing. Waiting for the next job that’s worth their
while…and these do-gooders that “work” with ex-offenders,’ he made
quotation marks with his fingers around the word work, ‘what
they’re really doing is spending tax-payers’ money playing silly
beggars: the revolving door of rehabilitation, eh, don’tcha just
love it? - the shuffling of tables, moving of cons from one list to
another. Anything in fact, that hides the fact they’re still
breakin’ the bleedin’ law.’

Coupland looked at his watch,
realised he needed to be somewhere else. He lifted his buttock off
the desk, gave it a rub where his arse-cheek had gone numb. He made
to go towards the CID room door, pausing for effect in case anyone
had missed his point.

‘Massaging the figures, that’s
all they do, so the unsuspecting public can sleep soundly in their
beds.’

He turned swiftly, headed down
the corridor towards the entrance to the car park. Alex shuffled
papers on her desk, attention shot, thinking she might as well call
it a day. She closed her eyes and rubbed the tension away in the
back of her neck, snapping them open when Coupland’s rugged voiced
rumbled from the direction of the main reception area:
‘Ex-bleedin’-offenders…… If it walks like a duck and quacks like a
duck, it’s a duck. Stands to bloody reason eh? Stands to bloody
reason…’