Blood Lines (25 page)

‘She was your friend,’ I said, and Marjorie nodded. It seemed at that point as though we might at last have reached some understanding – she might have struck me as distinctly unlikable, but it was obvious that life had dealt her a pretty raw deal. Joe stared at his feet. We passed an informal moment’s silence over the death of the man who, under the surgeon’s knife, became Donna Diamond.

‘How will you manage financially?’ I asked. It’s the sort of rude question solicitors habitually ask in the interests of looking after their clients. Marjorie was not, strictly speaking, my client, but her husband had been.

‘David’s life was well insured – I’ll be quite well off.’

I thought I saw a twinkle in her eye but she didn’t quite have the air of the merry widow about her. Maybe she’d get around to propositioning Joe sometime in the future. For the time being, she was happy enough to give him small orders that he happily carried out rather than getting involved in anything emotional or embarrassing.

‘All this upset has made me thirsty – could you please get me a cup of tea, Joe?’

Marjorie watched him walk away, the muscles on his broad shoulders outlined against a deep blue shirt. I’d spoken to him before about wearing clothes that were too tight for him, but he liked to make people think he was just too broad for normal clothes to contain him. Vanity again. Joe’s hair, as Donna had observed, was his crowning glory. Today he had it back from his face; presumably he was trying not to inflame Marjorie’s senses, but he still looked damned gorgeous.

‘You would be entitled to make a claim under the Criminal Injuries Compensation scheme,’ I said, getting back to business but still trying to be helpful. I needn’t have bothered. Dr Jekyll turned into Mrs Hyde as soon as Joe was out of view.

‘Firstly,’ she said, fixing me with an icy stare, ‘I didn’t want to see you again – Joe persuaded me. Secondly, I don’t want any handouts.’ Little flecks of spit gathered round her mouth. The hairs on her top lip and chin were evident. Donna had obviously spent the family budget on electrolysis and Marjorie had been left out. She had lived in the shadow of her more glamorous housemate and that must have been tough – even now that Donna was dead, I was still comparing them.

Joe appeared back on the scene before we killed each other. I kicked myself for not going with my first impressions – she was horrible.

‘Lizzie let me skip the queue,’ he announced, like a wee boy who had done well. ‘I said it was an emergency.’

‘Oooh, it’s lovely, Joe! Just the way I like it,’ Marjorie simpered, as if he’d made the bloody stuff himself.

‘What did you make of the diary, Brodie?’ the lapdog asked.

I stared blankly at Joe.

‘I told you, Joe, I only trust you – I don’t want to air my dirty laundry in front of anyone else. I can tell she’s like all the rest. Blame me, blame the wife. How can David Ross be queer? What kind of woman is his wife that she’d drive a man to cut his bits and bobs off?’

‘I don’t …’

Marjorie wouldn’t let me start, let alone finish.

‘Save it for the cocktail circuit, Brodie. I can read you like a book – and I can tell you one thing here and now: he’s too good for you, and the sooner he realises that, the better.’

She motioned her head towards Joe.

‘A promise is a promise, Madge.’

Joe put his arm around her. I wondered what he had done to extract any promise from her. And what was all this with pet names? Joe had already admitted – like every other man – he was a sucker for flattery, and ‘Madge’ was playing him like a jukebox. Any other time and I would have suggested that she gave Lavender some advice, but, looking at Joe, I thought I should be asking her myself.

‘You give it to her then, Joe – it’s in my bag.’

She handed Joe a large battered synthetic-leather handbag. I could see the fabric showing through on the corners and I knew that Donna Diamond would never be seen with such a cheap style statement. Once again, it occurred to me that David’s transformation into Donna had been the least of Marjorie’s worries. Keeping up with her spending habits, which reminded me of those of a lottery winner on coke, must have been frightening – especially as business slowed.

Despite my dislike, I couldn’t keep the pity out of my eyes. Ever vigilant, she noticed and tried to snatch her bag back from Joe. Thankfully, he was aware that I would blow his good work and he was too quick for her. He swung the bag high above her head, scattering cut-price cosmetics as he turned around.

As Joe handed me a black five-year diary, he slipped his arm around Marjorie and pulled her close. He whispered into her ear just loud enough so that I could hear; he was binding me too.

‘I promise that Brodie and I will catch whoever killed Donna. You’ll get justice, Marjorie, and then you can move on; start again. I’m telling you, you’ll find some man who will love you for the woman you are.’

She looked crushed, realising that Joe wasn’t offering himself. He manoeuvred her away from where we were standing – he was actually really good at this type of thing. Mind you, it wouldn’t be the first time he’d found himself between two warring women – even if they weren’t his ex-wife and the widow of a transsexual.

Joe walked with Marjorie to her car and a fleeting thought stole across my mind – would he be safe or would Marjorie have one final go? However, all thoughts as to Joe’s safety or otherwise were quickly dispelled when I looked inside the diary. Any clandestine pleasure I anticipated was gone as soon as I opened then quickly closed the pages again. I’m not a sadist – that bit of my father wasn’t in my blood. The pain of David Ross’s transformation to Donna looked like it would be too much to bear on a half-empty stomach. I snuffled around looking for the buffalo-burger stall but the guy was closing up for the day. I spied Lizzie at the other end of the market. A coffee and homemade bran and raisin muffin would set me up for what I was about to endure. I wandered over with the diary in my hand.

Lizzie was peering over my shoulder whilst she poured a double espresso into foaming milk and chocolate syrup. I needed all the help I could get.

‘What have you got there?’ she asked.

It seemed a straightforward-enough question.

I sat down on one of the bistro chairs with the diary and looked intently at some of the cartoons Donna had doodled inside. They were labelled ‘The Biggest Lie’. They appeared to depict the time that David told Marjorie that he had found the source of his pain. David confessed that he was a transsexual but that he still loved the woman he shared his life with. Marjorie said she was not a lesbian, sex was important to her and she had found someone else. No wonder naughty Madge didn’t want anyone to see this. Sweet-talking Joe as if she was some sixteen-year-old virgin when, all along, she had her eye on someone else whilst Donna was still in pain.

‘So, the writer of the diary didn’t go ahead with the operation,’ continued Lizzie, peering over at what I was reading. It was no use trying to get rid of her – she was looking at the diary as if a new issue of
Heat
had fallen onto her lap.

‘No, he did,’ I assured her.

‘But the last drawing there shows him promising that he won’t change, that he won’t be a transsexual – I hope his wife didn’t believe him, Brodie.’

‘She did.’

After all Marjorie’s insults to me, I could gossip with Lizzie, because ‘Madge’ had declined to be my client. There was no confidentiality issue, but I wondered whether Marjorie herself had even bothered reading this diary – why had she given it up to me, given what we thought of each other, when it portrayed her so negatively?

‘I know I’m thick compared to you – but how is this poor sod’s diary going to help you, unless there’s something you haven’t told me?’ asked Lizzie. She smiled. She was dressed in the worst possible taste. Although it was midsummer she wore a woolly Bob Marley hat in bright green, yellow and black. Her hair was piled inside it and, even for her, it was an unusual statement. The only explan ation could be the skinny youth she had been seeing recently.

‘What’s your new beau into?’ I asked, distracting both of us for a welcome moment.

‘Is it that obvious?’

I nodded, and Lizzie continued. ‘We’re going to an open-air reggae festival in the Meadows this afternoon – do you fancy coming?’

‘Playing gooseberry is bad enough at the best of times. Amongst the great mass of unwashed adolescents who will be dancing on the grass today, it will be even worse. Besides, Lizzie, I’m too old for that sort of thing, so you certainly are.’

She ignored my comment. ‘Who said you had to come alone? Bring Joe.’

‘I don’t think so. If he comes back looking for me, tell him I’ll be with Moses at the diner.’

I threw away the rest of my muffin and mocha; suddenly I had lost my appetite.

Chapter Thirty-Three

The Lost Knickers Diner was Moses’ idea of a joke. He had believed that the term ‘money laundering’ had come from the 1950s when the Mafia had bought laundries to ‘clean the money’ from their illegal gambling operations. It was an urban myth but one that had become yet another money-spinning scheme for Moses.

The boy wonder could do no wrong when it came to dragging cash in, even legitimately. I wasn’t resentful, though – as Mary McLennan would have said, I wouldn’t have had his life for all the tea in China. No one who knew him, even those who rightly condemned some of his actions, would fail to understand how such a personality was formed, given his history.

The Lost Knickers Diner was primarily a laundry. It was in a good area so its clientele was mostly made up of young professionals. Moses the businessman had read in the
Financial Times
that young professional types were having difficulty meeting partners, hence the rise of speed dating. He had already observed some romances spring up amongst his customers as they watched their whites being tumble-dried. After a lightbulb moment, he thought he would capitalise on the romance of soap suds and open a café-style diner. The coffee, burgers and chips went down well, because they could eat their tea, get a shag and still have a clean shirt for the morning. A multi-tasker’s paradise.

‘Did you bring your washing?’ Moses shouted from the back as my entry tinkled the door chime.

‘No, I just brought myself – isn’t that enough?’

‘I just wanted to rifle through your dirty knickers, Brodie – but I hear Jack Deans got there first.’

Now this was clearly a lie – obviously not about Jack Deans and my knickers, but the fact that Moses wanted to get into my thong. I tried to change the subject, so I switched to a topic that always diverted Moses.

‘How come you always look so good?’ I purred. I had learned a thing or two from Marjorie.

‘You know the story, Brodie.’

‘No, I don’t – I want to know why you always take such time to groom yourself and stuff. To me it seems like there’s never enough time in the day,’ I said, casually brushing the remaining muffin crumbs from myself onto the floor.

‘It’s not something I like to divulge.’

He handed me a Diet Coke with a slice of lime and crushed ice in a highball glass with a curvy lady in a swimsuit on it. Fifties’ music blared out of the speakers.

Moses may not have been wearing a Fifties’ swimsuit but his costume was just as outlandish. It wasn’t the Goth clothes that I was interested in but the excessive neatness behind the Dark Angels. Their hair never had roots showing through the peroxide-blond. The black nail polish was always perfect, and that’s not easy when you’re ripping a car apart. If I found out how they motivated themselves to do it then maybe I could do it too and keep Kailash off my back.

‘Most of us lived in that home.’

I knew which one he was referring to – it was out in South Queensferry and my late father and his wife used it to operate a paedophile ring. The children of the ring were the original Dark Angels and Moses was their leader.

‘Every Sunday, prospective parents would come to the home to look for children,’ he went on, not really talking directly to me. ‘We were told to put on our best clothes and clean our teeth and then maybe we would get a new mummy and daddy. Some of us scrubbed our necks so hard they were bleeding. None of us ever got adopted – they all wanted babies, not ten-year-olds like us. We thought it was our fault and every Sunday another one of us joined the band that scrubbed so hard they bled. Old habits die hard, Brodie.’

Kailash would just have to bear my messiness. She had also been in the home and subject to my father’s treatment – or I wouldn’t be here to tell the tale. I suppose Moses’ story gave me a greater understanding of Kailash; she was just trying to get the best for me, and that wouldn’t happen in her eyes unless I looked ‘neat’. I didn’t think I could manage even that to cement mother–daughter relations.

‘Do you want another one?’

Moses pointed to my empty glass. Fear had made my mouth dry and I’d gulped it down.

‘I’m fine, thanks.’

‘Why are you here, Brodie? No offence, but with a budding romance on the scene I would have thought that you had better things to do on a Saturday than hang around with me. Not that I’m not glad to see you, you understand.’

‘It’s not a romance, Moses. It is absolutely not a romance.’

‘You’re risking a lot for a quick shag, Brodie, if you don’t mind me saying.’

I did mind, but I didn’t tell him because I didn’t want to fall out with anyone else today. I was still shaken by Marjorie. ‘In case it’s escaped your attention, we are both in deep shit, and when I’m in deep shit my sex drive flags.’

‘Liar,’ he whispered at me.

It was true. I was lying. Since this whole thing had started up I had felt like I was on heat. The old primal urge that linked sex and fear was kicking in again. I hadn’t wanted to admit it even to myself but, this morning when I’d looked at Joe, I’d remembered how good we had been together. Flashes of passionate nights under the desert sky in Vegas had come into my mind. I had caught him smirking at me; he always knows what I’m thinking.

‘Even if I am lying, Moses, I’m not admitting it to you. You’d trade the information for a cheap deal on soap powder.’