Gillian Galbraith - Blood In The Water

In such a place the presence of any stranger was a cause for concern amongst the residents: bound to be a rent man, a bailiff, a DSS snoop or a vandal. The police were as unwelcome as the rest of them, nowhere to be seen when help was needed but ever-present when they wanted some. Eternal vigilance was the key to survival in the Medway, and the leisure provided by unemployment meant a full complement of sentries in the dwellings still occupied. The two sergeants trekked dutifully from door to door, hunched against the cold rain, avoiding the dog mess and broken glass, only to be told again and again that nothing had been seen, nothing had been heard. One inhabitant, among the hundreds, was prepared to co-operate, but then just to volunteer that Sammy had returned home in his van at about five pm.

If the tourists visiting Holyrood Palace and Charlotte Square considered the capital akin to a beautiful woman, elegant and well-coiffeured, then Granton Medway was her underwear, and none too clean at that. It was a place forsaken by God and man alike, one where the few residents that remained shared a single, burning ambition, to move somewhere-anywhere-else.

Dr Clarke’s former boyfriend, Ian Melville, was waiting in an interview room at St Leonard’s when they returned, weary and dispirited from the palpable antagonism that had met them in Granton. He’d been traced by DC Porter to an address in the city, St Bernard’s Row in Stockbridge, having left Leadburn about a month earlier. The man was tall, well over six feet, with long, gangly limbs and oversized hands and feet. He had the sort of irregular, asymmetrical features which produce either a plug-ugly face or one of great attraction, with deep-set dark eyes, a hook of a nose and crooked, inward-leaning teeth. The combination in his case was arresting, eye-catching in its idiosyncratic appeal. As they entered, Alice saw him remove his drumming fingers from the table onto his trousers, where they continued, hidden, to drum on his thighs. Neither sergeant subscribed to the nasty-nice school of interrogation, preferring instead the role of overworked schoolteachers whose patience should not be stretched beyond its limit, for fear of some unspoken repercussion. As a tactic it often worked well, somehow regressing the interviewees back to powerless schoolchildren facing some omnipotent dominie from their past. The truly recalcitrant were left to Eric Manson and his incoherent code of ethics.

‘You’ll be aware, Mr Melville, of the death of Dr Elizabeth Clarke,’ Alice began.

‘I read the papers like everyone else, yes.’

‘Can you tell me where you were between five pm on Thursday evening and nine pm the next morning?’

‘Am I a suspect?’ Melville asked defensively.

‘No. You’re simply assisting us with our enquiries. Is that alright with you?’

The man hesitated before replying, ‘Fine.’ His anxious expression undermined his words.

‘So can you tell me where you were…’

‘On Thursday evening I worked in my studio until about eight or so, and then I went home.’

‘Where is your studio?’

‘Stockbridge. Anyone see you at your studio?’

‘I don’t know. I certainly didn’t see anyone else there. Does that matter? I can show you the work that I was doing if necessary.’

‘After leaving the studio you walked home to St Bernard’s Row?’

‘Yes. I collected a carry-out from the Chinese and spent the rest of the evening in, watching the television, until I went to bed.’

‘Were you on your own all the time?’

‘Yes, but I have no one to confirm I was actually there, if that’s what you’re getting at.’

‘Any phone calls to you or made by you?’

‘No. I don’t think so. I use a mobile anyway.’

‘What did you watch on TV?’

‘I can’t remember now. I think I watched a DVD, something I’d got from the shop.’

Alastair decided that his turn had come, and catching Alice’s eye, cut in.

‘I understand that you and Dr Clarke went out with each other up until about a year ago?’

‘That’s correct.’

‘Why did the relationship end?’

Melville didn’t answer immediately. He looked at his interrogators keenly, as if trying to assess what they might already know, and then committed himself.

‘You already know the cause, I’d guess. We broke up as Liz decided to have a termination, as she called it-an abortion, to have our child aborted.’

‘You hadn’t agreed to this?’

‘I wasn’t consulted. I was presented with a fait accompli .’

‘Had you been aware that Dr Clarke was pregnant?’

‘No.’

‘If you’d been told, what would your reaction have been?’

‘I’d have been delighted. What can I say? I loved Liz, I would have wanted my child to be half her, Liz to be the mother of my children.’

‘So you would have tried to stop her having an abortion?’

‘Obviously, if I had known.’

‘And you’re a Catholic?’

‘Lapsed. A lapsed Catholic.’

‘What was your reaction when you heard what she’d done?’

Melville’s expression changed to one of hostility, disbelief that such a stupid question could be uttered. What the hell would you feel if your baby had been killed? When, at last, he spoke, he spoke slowly.

‘At first I didn’t believe her… I couldn’t believe it. But it’s not the kind of thing you make up, is it? So when the news sank in I was… furious, disgusted, sad… appalled. We had a tremendous row.’

‘Disgusted?’ Alice asked.

‘Disgusted with her. I never thought she could do such a thing, not her. It made me think of her differently-she had killed our child.’

‘Who ended the relationship?’ she continued.

‘She did… Liz did. After the row she refused my calls, never answered my letters, and on the one occasion when I waited for her to return to Bankes Crescent from work, she cut me dead, wouldn’t say a word and shut the front door in my face.’

‘Have you had any girlfriends since Dr Clarke?’

His hackles rose again. None of your business.

‘No, I haven’t even been looking. I told you, I loved her and it’s not easy to get someone like that out of your system, even after what she did.’

Alastair showed Melville a photo of Sammy McBryde. ‘Do you know him?’

‘Never seen him in my life before.’

‘Can you tell us where you were yesterday evening between four-thirty pm and, say, eleven-fifty pm?’

‘I worked in my studio until about eight pm or so, then I met a pal, Roddy, for a drink at the Raeburn Inn. I left there at about ten, I think, and went home. It’s just round the corner from the pub. I watched the TV until I went to bed.’

‘Anyone at home with you? Any calls?’

‘No. I can’t prove that I was there, but I was.’

‘Can you give us Roddy’s full name and address?’

‘Roderick Cohen, St Stephen’s Street. I’ll get the flat number.’

No one brushed the stairs within Alice’s tenement in Broughton Place; they belonged to everyone in the block and so were cleaned by nobody. The last time they’d been swept was when one of the flats was for sale; a potential purchaser could not be expected to overlook the squalor routinely disregarded by the residents.

Alice trudged upwards, blind as ever to the dust, stopping only when she reached Miss Spinell’s flat on the second floor. Without the aged spinster’s help as a dog-sitter she would have been unable to keep Quill, her collie cross mongrel, and she was painfully aware of her dependence on the animal for company, a source of silent support and uncritical adoration, and on Miss Spinell’s goodwill as his daytime keeper. Fortunately, the old lady needed the dog as much, if not more, than Alice, as in his absence day after endless day would be spent alone behind the multiple mortice and Yale locks with which she fortified her front door. Alzheimer’s was creeping up on her in the form of a thief, a thief who made free with the contents of her fridge, her pan cupboard and her underwear drawers. One day her favourite aluminium cooking pot would have disappeared, the next a tin of sockeye salmon would appear half-consumed beside the ice cubes, and her numerous locks no longer provided any protection against the quick-fingered scoundrel.