The Stone Gallows (29 page)

Joe keyed the ignition and the Jag started with an unhealthy grinding noise that he had previously assured me was completely innocent.

‘Correction. My fancy new outfit. Now. . . who is she?'

I sighed. ‘Her name's Liz. She's a nurse.'

‘Christ, that didn't take you long.'

‘She lives. . . lived. . . up the stairs from me. She spent the night at my place. I helped her to get out, but she hurt her leg.'

When I had first told Joe about my escape, I had carefully edited Liz out of the story, still under the illusion that I might have a private life. This time, I told him the complete version.

Joe looked impressed. ‘She must be quite a lass to climb down a rope,' he told me. ‘Especially being registered blind and all.'

‘Ha ha.'

He put the car in gear and pulled out of the parking space. ‘It's just a shame that her guide dog got barbecued.'

I ignored him, staring moodily out of the window, oblivious to the passing scenery. Joe drove as if there was a glass of whisky balanced on the dashboard, which up until a few years ago, there probably had been. We headed east, through the city's industrial heart, making our way to Newton Mearns, where the people who
owned
the city's industrial heart lived. Joe clicked the radio on to Clyde Two FM and seventies music – Bread, Supertramp, Pink Floyd – provided a sound-track. When he next spoke, Joe sounded almost humble. ‘I'm glad you're OK, mate.'

I found myself absurdly touched. ‘Thanks, boss.'

‘I can't afford to train a new assistant.'

10.2.

Unlike her husband, Becky Banks was warmth personified. She enveloped me in a hug the second I stepped through the front door.

‘Cameron. You must be so upset.'

I hugged her back. She was tall and slim, dressed in a cerise silk blouse and flowing skirt. Her blonde hair was elegant but looked natural, and her face was smooth with baby blue eyes. It was no wonder her publishers loved her; if you asked the average romantic fiction reader to describe an average romantic fiction novelist, they would have come up with someone like Becky. Completing the image was a pair of granny glasses that dangled from a string around her neck. It was easy to imagine her sitting at a typewriter and sipping herbal tea as her busy fingers breathed life into her fictional creations.

When I saw the two of them together, I often wondered what they saw in each other. Becky was cultured and graceful, a glass of wine in the garden in a summer breeze. Joe was the opposite: whisky and cigarettes, greyhounds and pubs with sawdust on the floor. Yet they had been together for nearly thirty years, with four lovely, well-adjusted daughters. Their oldest daughter was married – happily, it went without saying – and lived in Kidderminster, propagating the eagerly awaited first grandchild. The twins were about to finish University (both in the top five percent of their classes), and the youngest seemed to be as likeable an example of a ten-year-old girl as one could reasonably wish for without seeming greedy.

Even the house Joe lived in seemed to reflect his luck. It was a four bedroomed bungalow in one of Glasgow's more expensive suburbs, all whitewashed walls and well-trimmed hedges. Inside it was just as nice: dark wood, light rooms and high ceilings. Joe once told me that he'd lived there almost all his life, inheriting it when his parents passed on.

Reading this, you might think I was jealous of Joe. Nothing could be further from the truth. He was the first to admit how lucky he was, and I knew that luck alone hadn't bought him the comfort and security that he enjoyed. All his life, he'd grafted, putting his heart and soul into everything he took on board. The snide rumours about his days as a supposedly corrupt cop were nothing more than groundless gossip spread by people who didn't have his ability or charm. Although he occasionally showed poor judgement (Derek and Gary were just one of many such examples) Joe had been one of the best cops in the division. His conviction rate was one of the highest in the country, and he had refused promotion on numerous occasions, preferring to stay a detective. He had little use for the bullshit politics that seemed to grow ever more abundantly the higher you climbed the tree.

Becky finally let me go. ‘You can stay as long as you like. It'll be nice to have a little company now the girls have gone back to university.

How about a cup of coffee?'

Coffee sounded good.

‘Why don't you go into the lounge, then?'

I followed Joe into a room at the front of the house, collapsing in an settee that seemed to be larger than my car. It was like being enveloped in a large, leathery marshmallow, and as I shifted my position, the thing squeaked and squalled beneath me. Eventually I was comfortable – too comfortable. A lot had happened in the last couple of days and I could feel my eyelids drooping underneath the weight of it all. From the direction of the kitchen, I could hear Becky humming to herself as she clinked mugs and boiled water. There was a picture on the coffee table. I picked it up and studied it, finding myself looking at a group of women. Three rows of ten, to be exact, tallest at the back, the front row seated so that nobody obscured anybody else. They were all young, and their faces were a mixture of expressions: ambition, hope, relief. I turned the picture over, wondering if there was a list of names. Instead, there was a hand-written note:
Me and the gang – Rotten Row, Class of '78
.

I looked at Joe and raised my eyebrows.

‘It's Becky's graduating class from nursing school,' he said. ‘I think she's in the back row, on the left.'

Becky swept into the room, carrying two mugs of coffee. ‘Oh, for goodness sake, you're not looking at that old thing, are you?' She passed out the drinks and took the picture from my hand, turning it so that she could examine it. ‘That was taken about a hundred years ago.'

‘Joe said that it was your nursing class.'

She shot her husband a vexed look. ‘Not my nursing, but my mid-wifery.' She pointed with a nail that had also been painted a light shade of cerise. ‘That's me there. The two women on my left are my friends Myra Dollar and Bessie Longfellow. . .'

Something rang in my mind and I looked at Joe, surprised that he hadn't heard the same set of bells. ‘Didn't Sophie Sloan say that she used to know Becky? Back in the day?'

Joe nearly dropped his coffee cup. ‘That's right! I completely forgot.'

Becky was looking from one of us to the other. ‘Sophie Sloan?

What's going on?'

Joe explained. ‘Sophie Sloan. She's a client. Used to be a nurse at the R.A.H. She said that she used to know you.'

‘I don't remember her.'

‘Her husband runs a local nursing home. Inch Meadows.'

‘I've heard of the place.' Becky sat where she was, her fingernail still touching the glass of the photoframe. ‘Was she in Cardiology?'

‘I don't think so. I don't know how she knew you.'

‘I'll try and remember her.'

But the expression on her face wasn't hopeful.

10.3.

I spent a little time napping and drifting around the house, the events of the past twelve hours catching up with me. Joe wasn't much better; after another long night of drinking, he'd finally locked the Harald and Ginsel people into a deal. He popped out for an hour in the afternoon and returned with five hundred cash, which he gave to me. I tried not to take it, only to be rebuffed.

‘Shut up. I was going to give you a bonus anyway. It should tide you over for a couple of weeks.'

Later in the afternoon, I borrowed Becky's car – a smart little Mini convertible that was a huge amount of fun to drive but made me feel like a male hairdresser – and made my way to my flat, or rather, what was left of it. Apart from the ceiling of the unoccupied flat below, the rest of the tenement was undamaged, although a vile smell of burned plastic filled the landings. I passed Crazy Cat Lady on the stairs; she harrumphed and gave me a look that I suspect was intended to stop my heart in its tracks. By the time I had made my way up both flights, I was breathing heavily and wishing for Nurse Harriet's oxygen. I guessed it would take a couple of days to flush the smoke out of my lungs.

There was a policeman standing outside the blackened ruin that had been my front door. He told me that the fire investigators had left.

Because the fire had burned so quickly and fiercely, it had consumed what there was for fuel before dying out almost as rapidly as it began.

After some sweet-talking, he let me have a look inside.

It was pretty fucking grim.

Just about everything I owned had been destroyed. I floated through the rooms, hardly hearing the warnings about being careful I didn't fall through the floor. My CD collection had been reduced to a pile of melted plastic, with the occasionally recognisable scrap of casing. I picked one up and gave a hollow little laugh: Dan Reed Network's ‘The Heat'. My books were nothing but a pile of ash, the settee a blackened husk. It seemed like a lifetime ago that Liz and I had laughed and made love on that very same sofa. Next to it was a charred lump that was out of place with my memories. It took a few seconds before I realised what it was: my denims. Liz had helped me out of them less than twenty four hours ago. I picked the remnants up. They were sodden from water the fire brigade had sprayed into the place, and it took brief seconds for them disintegrate into a soggy mush. As they fell to pieces, I was left holding what remained of my wallet. On the outside, it was badly damaged, but it had been made of good quality leather. Maybe I had been lucky. I peeked inside, handling it as gently as I had ever handled a piece of physical evidence, ready for the contents to dissolve the way the jeans had, hoping against hope that my photograph of Mark had survived.

It had.

I drew it out with steady fingers, surgeon's fingers. It had been taken on his fourth birthday, him sitting on my knee and stuffing his face with cake. Audrey hovered in the background, the very top of her head missing because she had misjudged how long she had to position herself before the automatic timer made the shot. I have – had – many pictures of him, but this one was my favourite because it was one of the three of us together, and every time I looked at it I was reminded of better days. After the accident, the press had somehow got hold of a copy of the picture, and it had been featured in several of the national newspapers.

I held it up to the light, the detritus of my life forgotten. Sure, the edges were scorched and black, but everything else was fine. In it, we were smiling. It had been a good day. Audrey and I seemed to have managed to put our differences to one side, and were joking and laughing the way we had when we first met. Mark had been a joy, delighting in his presents and the sense of occasion.

We'd taken him to Edinburgh zoo to see the penguin parade.

I looked at it for a long time before I realised that I was crying.

10.4.

I found one other thing before calling it quits. My keys had been in the lock of the front door when the whole thing went up in flames.

Although the door was destroyed, the fitting for the lock appeared to have survived. The key-ring itself – a leather swatch that Mark had

‘given' me for Father's day – was nothing more than a dried out scrag of dust and ash, but the keys themselves looked to be alright. I took the key for my car and the key for the office. The rest I abandoned. I had no use for them. My only regret was that I was unable to use them to close the door on this part of my life.

10.5.

I caught up with Jason Campbell in the pub.

Actually, that wasn't not quite true. Jason lived Jordanhill, a part of the city that was too posh to be classified as the West End and too affluent to count as a suburb. It was less than three miles from what remained of my flat in Craghill, but just as the river divided the two areas in a geographical sense, wealth – or the lack of it – illustrated the differences between the two neighbourhoods. Jordanhill was rich.

Craghill wasn't.

I checked his house first. Apart from the time he spent in the secure Psych unit, Jason had grown up in his mother's three story mansion on Jordanhill Road. Except it wasn't so much on the road as back from the road, directly in the middle of two acres of grounds. In a city where a goddamn parking space recently sold for more than sixty-eight thousand pounds, two acres was more than just a garden.

It was a fucking republic.

I'd expected there to be some form of controlled entry, but there had been nothing; just an open front gate, which I breezed straight through.

A driveway of white gravel – at least, it looked like gravel to my untrained eye, but for all I knew might have been the pulverised bones of paupers – crunched underneath the tyres of my Golf as I cruised slowly up a gentle hill toward the house. Surrounded on both sides by tall hedges the driveway was slightly curved, making me conclude that it eventually looped back on itself and led back to the main entrance.

Soon I was out of sight from any passing traffic. Good. I brought the car to a halt in the shadow of a beech tree and decided to walk the rest of the way.

The Mercedes was parked diagonally outside the front door of the house, buried up to the wheel rims in white stones. Whoever had last driven it had stopped in a hurry. As I passed the windows of the dining room, I kept my eyes peeled for any sense of movement, but saw nothing. I climbed a short flight of stone steps, stepped into a vestibule and rang the doorbell.

Nothing.

I listened carefully, hoping for a sign there was somebody home, hearing only the hum of traffic from the main road and the breeze as it shuffled the leaves on the trees. I bent down and gently pushed the letterbox open, pressing my ear to it, unconcerned that I was committing a grievous invasion of privacy. If somebody were to open the door now, there could be no justification for what I was doing. I would look like a tawdry little snooper.