The Stone Gallows (42 page)

I breathed deeply, trying to focus my mind to the task in hand, working hard to establish a rhythm. Riding a bike isn't the headlong dash that some people would have you believe. Sure, it's easy to ride quickly – right up to moment you make a tiny mistake and smear yourself over the concrete like strawberry jam on toast. To avoid this requires planning and a measured approach. The brain becomes acomputer, constantly weighing odds and potential consequence. It was something I had been good at, good enough that, had I not been accepted in the CID, I could have pursued it as a career path as a bike cop. I'm pretty sure that my life would have turned out differently had I chosen more wisely.

I was starting to overtake traffic. Drivers would spot my approach in their rear-view mirrors. Some, concerned that I was not wearing a helmet and seemed to be in a hell of rush, would move to one side.

Others didn't care, holding their lane and speed with the dogged determination of a terrorist who has finally made it into the cockpit of a passenger jet. They didn't bother me. The bike was smaller, faster and more manoeuvrable; I had no difficulty getting past them. Without trying, I managed to keep the speedometer needle (analogue, by Christ; it was like being back in the stone age) between one hundred and one hundred and twenty. That would be fast enough to catch up with Sophie.

Assuming that she hadn't pulled off the motorway at the first available exit.

I weaved in and out of traffic, never missing an overtake, never failing to exploit a gap. At one stage, three articulated lorries hogged all the lanes, rolling side by side at a sedate forty miles, a tailback of cars forming behind them. I undertook them on the hard shoulder, hoist-ing the middle finger of my left hand when I dived in front of them.

The landscape was changing as we got closer to Glasgow City Centre: office blocks on the horizon, the skeleton of the Kingston bridge looping to the left and over the Clyde.

And then I saw her.

She was about four hundred yards in front of me, cruising along in the middle land. I could see the blonde of Mark's hair beside her.

Fighting the instinct to speed up, I throttled down instead, allowing the Ducati to creep until it was less than a hundred yards behind her.

I had no wish to repeat the accident that had caused me to leave the police force. By now we were on the bridge. The traffic was heavy, nose to tail, and every few seconds I would nearly lose sight of them. She took the exit that led to the city centre; I followed.

It was another mile before I figured out where she was headed.

Gallowgate.

12.11.

Even though it was less than forty-eight hours since I had last been there, it was still weird. Different and yet somehow similar. The buildings were still grey, the traders still managing to eke out a living despite the obvious lack of consumer wealth in the area. Less than a hundred yards away I could see the blue outline of the cash machine that taxi-driver Harry Josephs had stopped at on his doomed charity mission. I watched as the BMW came to a halt and parked less than twenty yards away from the spot where I had killed two people.

Did she know? Did Sophie Sloan
know
I was behind her?

I cruised a little closer. Traffic buzzed around us, so I pulled into an empty space, turning the engine off, remembering to slip the keys into my pocket. Hopefully, the bike's rightful owner would get it back without a scratch on it, although it was by no means a certainty.

I watched as she got out of the car and moved round to the other side to help Mark with his seatbelt. He looked alright: pale, tired, but otherwise unharmed. Sophie was a ghost. Her movements seemed jerky, her face pinched and drawn. She took Mark by the hand, started to pull him closer still to the spot. I followed.

Why had she come here? Here, of all the places?

12.12.

I had two choices. One, I could run at them and grab Mark, hauling him away to a place of safety, while at the same time scaring the living shit out of him. Or secondly, I could walk up to them, talk quietly, and attempt to reason with her. One victim to another.

Option one was the slightly more attractive of the two. Sophie was holding Mark by the hand, standing in the middle of the pavement, watching the road while pedestrians stepped around her. She seemed dazed, lacking in focus. She probably wouldn't fight with me, and if she tried to, I'd give her a sore face.

Except there had been too much of that kind of behaviour recently.

I'd hurt too many people in the past twenty-four hours. I suppose there are some out there that would feel my behaviour justifiable, but I wasn't one of them. I was starting to worry that violence was the only answer I had for all of life's big questions.

I walked over until I was about five yards away. ‘Sophie?'

She started, and I saw her hand grasp Mark's even more tightly.

Then Mark was pulling. ‘Daddy!'

She resisted for only a second before letting him go. He ran to me, hitting my legs and wrapping his arms around me in a hug. I held him as tightly as I could, feeling a single tear in my eye. All the fear, all the worry that I had repressed in the past twenty-four hours, suddenly bubbled to the surface. For a brief but incredibly clear instant, I wanted to kill Sophie Sloan for making feel so vulnerable.

She looked at me, and I saw that she was crying too. ‘I'm sorry.'

I moved a little closer so that I didn't have to shout. ‘Why'd you do it, Sophie?'

She thought about it for a few seconds. ‘I don't know.' Her hand waved. ‘It's noisy in here. Sometimes I don't know why I do anything.'

For a second I thought she meant the ambient noise of the city.

Then I realised that she meant in her mind. In here.

I didn't know what to say, so I rephrased the question. ‘Why me?'

‘Because you took mine.'

‘What?'

This time, she shrieked. Mark buried his head into my waist. ‘I said you took mine!'

‘Sophie, I don't know what you're talking about. Your boy. . . they told me that he died of Leukaemia.'

Her eyes met mine, and in them I saw the truth.

‘I'm not talking about Luke. I'm talking about Maria. I'm talking about Maria McAuseland.'

Oh Jesus. I felt weak. I felt like the world was dissolving into dust.

‘Sophie, I don't understand.'

‘Well you should. She was mine, you bastard! Mine!' Her voice cracked. ‘I gave up a baby for adoption when I was sixteen. After Luke died, I paid a private detective to find out what happened to her.'

The noise of the city faded into nothing. There was nobody else.

No pedestrians, no traffic. Even Mark was nothing more than a vague presence against the lower half of my body. All that was left was me and Sophie Sloan and the terrible tragedy that had bound us together for the rest of our lives.

I thought I knew guilt. I thought I understood it.

I was wrong.

I'd killed this woman's daughter, and her grandchild, and I had driven her insane with grief.

‘I'm sorry.'

Even as I spoke, I hated the words. They meant so much more to me than they did to her. It's one of the hardest, most bitter truths there is: being sorry doesn't make things right.

She looked at me with hate in her eyes. ‘It's not enough.'

‘It's all I have.' I looked down. Mark was still holding on to my legs, our conversation passing unnoticed over his head. ‘Apart from him, and he's not yours to take.'

‘You took mine. You took both of mine.'

I thought about what she said for a long time. I wanted to argue with her, tell her that it was somebody else's fault. A gangster called Alan Grierson. A crooked, lazy cop called John Coombes. Instead, I said, ‘I never meant to.'

‘You can't imagine what it felt like.'

‘Tell me.'

‘Fuck you.' She watched me carefully, waiting for a reaction she didn't get. ‘You don't deserve to know.'

‘You need help, Sophie. Professional help. People care about you.

Ian loves you. He wants to see you get better.'

She sneered. ‘Ian? He doesn't understand.'

I nodded at Mark, who still clung to me. ‘I won't press charges for this. His mother will want to, but I'll talk her out of it.'

Somehow.

I continued. ‘But you must get help.'

She nodded at the spot where I had killed her daughter and grandchild. ‘Do you ever think about them?'

‘All the time,' I said. ‘What happened that night. . . there's not a day goes by when I don't wish for something different. I hate myself for what I did. If I could take it back somehow, I would.'

She looked down at Mark, who still had his face buried in my thigh. ‘You don't deserve him.'

‘I know. And he doesn't deserve me. But that won't stop me doing my best for him. You'll know that when you see how far I went to find you, and what I went through to get him back. I love him.'

‘I wish you were dead. I wish you had died in the crash as well.

Then you wouldn't be here. Having you alive is a constant reminder that they're not. It's not fair.'

‘So do I, sometimes,' I told her. ‘More times than you might think.'

She looked straight ahead. Somewhere in the city, a police siren wailed. ‘What am I going to do?'

‘You can be better.' The words were hollow in my ears. Was I really going to give this woman the standard clichés? Next I would be telling her that time was a great healer. ‘If you want.'

‘Great. I can book a room in Fraggle. You ever stayed in a place like that? You ever gone to twice daily counselling with a psychiatrist who has no idea how you feel?'

‘No.'

‘It doesn't help, believe me. I might be better off dead.'

‘I don't think so. You're sick. Mentally sick. I want you to get better.'

‘What you want is for me to forgive you. You want me to say to you that it's alright, you ran my daughter and her daughter down in the road like they were a pair of fucking hedgehogs or something and you want me to say that it's alright, that you were only doing your job as a policeman. Well, fuck you, Cameron Stone. You're not forgiven. You never will be. I hope you spend the rest of your days in misery because you're nothing. You're a baby-killing scumbag who refuses to take responsibility for your actions. You say that you're sorry, but you don't know what sorry is.' She looked briefly at Mark. ‘I should have killed him. I should have overdosed him with the Nembutal. Then you might know how I feel.'

I wanted to speak, but nothing came to mind. We spend our lives reviewing our mistakes, time and time again, from every angle, from every viewpoint. There were so many people I could blame, but that didn't alter the fact that it had been me that had been driving the car that night. It had been me that had wanted to catch up with Grierson.

When the car struck Maria and Sonata, it had been me behind the wheel.

It was all my fault.

I started to cry. Sophie watched me coldly. ‘I hate you.'

Then she turned. Stepped into the road. An engine swelled, a bus, trying to make up for time lost at road works. It was only doing thirty miles an hour when it struck her.

Plenty fast enough.

1.

I was going to kill her.

The two of us had been sitting in the car for nearly forty minutes, and she had yet to stop talking and draw breath. Subjects had included her childhood, her pet dog called Mongoose (or it might have been a pet Mongoose called Dog; I hadn't been paying close attention), her primary school teachers, her secondary school teachers, her ballet teacher, her first boyfriend, her last boyfriend, how they had built a swimming pool in Inverness but on the first day it opened somebody cut their foot on a piece of glass in the water and there had been blood all over the water and they had closed the pool and it had taken another six months to open it again and when it did it had the best flumes that she had ever been on but she didn't like to go there very often because there was rumour that a little boy had broken in one night and drowned in the water and the cleaning staff found him the next morning floating face down in the water and his ghost was meant to haunt one of the changing rooms and she knew that it was just a story but still it gave her the shivers and there was also meant to be a ghost in the field behind the farm where. . .

‘Susan?'

‘What?'

‘Stop talking, please.'

‘I'm just nervous. I get like this when I'm worried about something. I was like this when they sent me for the CAT scan and the sister said that I shouldn't worry but of course the minute a nurse says you're not to worry then it's all you can do. . .'

‘Susan?'

‘What?'

‘You're still talking.'

‘I'm sorry.'

‘Please don't think I'm being nasty, but shut the fuck up, alright?'

She gave a tiny squeak and did as she was told. My brain sighed with relief. I counted to ten, half expecting her to forget and start wit-tering.

I'd collected her from the hospital two days ago. The bruises had faded, and the cuts on her face had almost fully healed. With enough time, she would be a pretty girl again, although I suspected that her eyes would always be twenty years older than her face. In my wallet was a train ticket to Inverness. Her father was going to collect her from the station, and the McPherson family was going to be reunited so that they could live happily ever after, if such a thing is possible. It's nice to think that endings like that aren't just things found in books.

We managed a whole three minutes of silence before Susan broke it. ‘This is a nice car.'

We were in Elizabeth Banks' Mini. After its adventure on the slip-road, the Golf had been a write off. I wasn't especially sorry; more than anything, it felt like it was time to move on.