Quintin Jardine: Grievous Angel

If Myra hadn’t died? If, if, if, if… hell, ‘if’ I could eliminate a single word from our language that would be it. Truth, she did bloody die, she did, and so did part of me, the place where my compassion dwelt. It was lost for years, and so in a way was I, all the way through a later loving relationship, and then a doomed second marriage that I could have saved, maybe, with a little more kindness and generosity and a little less self-obsession.

Do I feel guilty about that failure? Yes. Do I regret it? No. For Sarah is where she wants to be, and so am I. She and I were never soulmates. We were lovers who settled for what we had, and in our case that wasn’t enough for a lifetime.

And now I’m with Aileen, my second chance, my second redeemer. For, yes, she saved me too. She took a hard, bitter, obdurate man, and she softened me. It didn’t happen all at once, but gradually she restored my inner warmth and she stopped me from applying my expectations of myself to everyone around me.

There are moments in my life now that, honestly, I’ve never known before. I’ll walk in on her when she’s busy, doing something that requires her full concentration… clothes-filing, for example, or shoe-arranging, or saving the planet… and I’ll gaze at her without her being aware of it, and I’ll smile. Then she’ll look back, her eyebrows slightly raised in puzzlement, and she’ll say, ‘What?’ and I’ll laugh out loud and take her in my arms and lift her up and say, ‘Nothing, baby, nothing. You make me happy, that’s all.’

But oh, if only it could be like that all the time. There are still the black moods, and they will never leave me. I’ve seen terrible things in my life, work and private, and I’ve done some too, the sort that would not look good to the world outside. But that brings me back to my unwitting gift from Michael, that capacity for secrecy so deep that it’s been known to lead me to hide things even from myself.

A few months ago, even though I’ve risen to the rank of chief police officer, and theoretically I’m above the messy end of the job, circumstances took me to a couple of crime scenes, two of the nastiest I’ve ever encountered. Experiences such as those have led me to develop a ritual. It’s very simple. Once all the smoke has cleared or the blood has been swept away… or substitute the metaphor of your choice… I will sit down in the garden room in our house in Gullane, preferably in the dark unless it’s high summer, when the daylight in the north never quite fades, and I will kill a bottle of very good red wine, maybe a Pesquera or a Mas La Plana. If that doesn’t do the trick I will open another, and a third, if that’s what it takes. Next morning I will rise early, feeling too bad to be allowed into hell, and I will run along the shore to Dirleton and back, or beyond, to North Berwick… if that’s what it takes. It’s my way of purging myself, and it’s always worked… until those two horror scenes a few months ago.

We all have our limits… even me, for all that I’ve tried to deny it. I tried my hardest to chase the memories of the couple, incinerated in their kitchen, and of the men in the isolated barn, tortured relentlessly before they were killed. I followed my ritual: we were low on wine, so I drank countless Corona beers, until I fell asleep in my armchair. I woke just after six, and ran fifteen miles, sticking to the roads because it was dark when I set out. I assumed that I would be fine after that, but… wrong.

That evening, I sat silently through dinner, drinking water rather than alcohol, then watched television, a replay of Lewis on a nostalgia channel, not caring that I’d seen it before. As I looked at the screen, gradually the images began to fade, and were replaced by others, from that house, from that barn, from other places, a first-hand documentary of the evil that I had witnessed and known, all the way back to my childhood and Michael, my own true scream movie, all of it put together from my own life, suffering seen, suffering inflicted, suffering endured. I squeezed my eyes closed, as tightly as I could manage, but I couldn’t kill the images. I shoved my knuckles into the sockets until they hurt, but it made no difference.

And then Aileen slid on to my lap, tugging at my wrists. I resisted, but she kept on pulling, until my forearms were resting on the arms of the chair, and she was kissing my closed, moist eyelids, until gradually I relaxed and I could open them and the daymare was over and I could look into her face, and take in her distress.

‘What is it, love?’ she whispered.

‘Everything,’ I said, hoarsely. ‘All the… all… everything. My life. It’s caught up with me.’

‘Tell me.’

‘Tell you what, love?’

‘Everything. Everything that you’ve got bottled up inside you. Talk to me, Bob. You don’t, you know.’

‘I do,’ I protested. ‘I talk to you all the time.’

‘Sure you do, but you set your limits. There’s a part of you that’s locked up, that’s closed to me.’

I tried to fob her off. ‘You wouldn’t want to know what’s in there.’

It didn’t work. ‘I need to know,’ she insisted. ‘I’m sitting here watching you have a breakdown, before my eyes. I’ve seen it coming for the last couple of days, and it’s just about the scariest thing I’ve ever known. You think the kids haven’t sensed that there’s something wrong? Mark’s noticed too, and so has James Andrew. “Is Dad okay?” he asked me last night. I want to help, Bob, but I can’t as long as I’m on the outside. Tell me, love. Tell me everything about you that I don’t know already. You have to. I’m not moving from here until you do.’

And so I did. I began from my earliest days, with Michael’s reign of terror. I tried to downplay that as much as I could, but Aileen didn’t buy it. She made me set out every detail of his torture, and of his violations. When I told her the worst of it, we were both in tears. ‘You’re a very special person,’ she said.

‘Me?’ I gasped. ‘How do you work that out? How does being buggered by your brother when you were seven make you special?’

‘You survived it, and you didn’t kill him.’

‘Ah, but I thought about it. I knew where he was, afterwards, and there were times when I thought about finding him and finishing him. I could have done it, being what I am, without ever being found out. I could simply have made him disappear. The very fact that I didn’t became part of my guilt. I have no idea whether he ever preyed on other kids. I should have thought of that, and removed the possibility, even if it was only by discussing my own experiences with another officer, in another force. But I didn’t, I kept it to myself.’

‘There’s no evidence that he ever did that, is there?’

‘None that I know of. I like to think that he redeemed himself, that his banishment made him a better person.’

‘Then stop beating yourself up. It happened, it’s long in the past, and now you’ve shared it with me, it makes me love and admire you all the more.’ She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. ‘So move on; go on. Tell me the rest of it. Open yourself to me.’

And I did. I set out for her all my secrets, shared with her all of the evil memories I had gathered and stored through my career, those things that I’ve seen because of the job, those deeds that I’ve done because someone had to, told her where all the bodies were buried

… in a couple of cases, literally so. I talked, and she listened, for two hours. When I was done, I was spent… and so was Aileen, exhausted and shaken.

‘Do you feel the better for that?’ I asked her.

‘No. But that wasn’t the idea.’ She paused. ‘That man you shot,’ she whispered. ‘In your cottage. Did you have any other option?’