Стюарт Макбрайд - The Coffinmaker’s Garden

Interesting...

‘And Child Protection were happy with that? The Smiths weren’t related to her, why didn’t she get put into care?’

‘No idea. Can find out, if you like, but you’ll have to wait till Social Services get in, Monday morning.’ More slurping, the words after it mumbled around whatever Rhona was eating. ‘Anyway, I say “poor cow”, but Sophie wasn’t exactly a choirgirl. We’ve got three arrests for possession with intent, two warnings for fighting, one six-month stretch for assault. Chip off her good old mum’s block, that one.’

Alice and Shifty finally got the door open, and he stumbled inside, leaving Alice to wobble on the top step all alone.

‘And Leah’s been a chip off her granny’s, too. Mostly assault, some petty theft, possession — didn’t have enough blow on her to count as dealing, so the arresting officer let her off with a caution — and one theft from a lock-fast place. Guess your mum throwing herself off Clachmara Cliffs screws you up.’

That was a relief, to be honest. At least now we knew Sophie MacNeil hadn’t ended up in Gordon Smith’s private graveyard.

‘They know why she did it?’

‘Oh yeah. She left this reeeeeeealy long, rambling suicide note. There’s a copy in the file. You want me to read it out to you?’

‘Not particularly.’

Alice did an about-face, nearly crashed into the jagged crown of an un-pruned rose tree, and staggered back towards the car. Moving like she was on the deck of a rolling ship.

‘It’s all boy trouble, and not wanting to be pregnant again, and not being able to cope, and everything being so hard. Six pages of it.’ Slurp. ‘Looks like it’s been written by a drunken spider too.’

It took Alice three goes to get the door open and collapse into the passenger seat. She pulled her chin in, grinned, then let free with a diaphragm-rattling burp. ‘Par... Pardon... me.’

‘Thanks, Rhona.’

‘Nah, no trouble. I was twiddling my thumbs here anyway. The joys of nightshift.’

There was some fumbling with the seatbelt.

‘Ooh, you hear about the post mortem? Your physical evidence guru, AKA: the Pinstriped Prick, says Lewis Talbot was strangled with some sort of silk rope. Maybe a curtain tie, or something from a soft-porn bondage starter set. Don’t know about you, but that sounds like an evolving pattern, to me. He’s getting more sophisticated.’ Slurp, slurp, slurp.

‘What on earth are you eating?’

‘Bombay Bad Boy, Pot Noodle, nightshift lunch of champions.’ An extra-long slurp for effect.

‘You’re disgusting.’

A laugh, then she hung up, and I slipped the phone back into my pocket.

Turned to look at the wobbly wreck in the passenger seat, still fighting with the seatbelt.

I took the end off her and clicked it home in the buckle. ‘You planning on throwing up at some point?’

Alice stuck two thumbs up.

‘Wonderful.’

My life just kept getting better and better and better...

Rasping snores perfumed the air with garlic, wine and the sour taint of vomit, as I placed the washing-up bowl on the floor beside Alice’s bed and tucked her in. Then ruffled the fur between Henry’s ears. ‘You look after our stinky drunkard, OK?’

He stared back at me with his shiny button eyes, then lowered his head onto her ankles again, curled up on the floral-print duvet.

I clicked the light off. Took one last look.

OK, so she probably wasn’t going to throw up again. Because, let’s face it, there couldn’t be much left to throw up. Two bottles of wine, plus the large glass of red she’d had while we were waiting for our starters, plus the three brandies she’d downed instead of dessert, and half of Shifty’s rum-and-Coke when he wasn’t looking. No wonder she’d spent the last half hour evicting everything she’d eaten since breakfast.

Silly sod.

Could it really be nine years? Nine years of trying to keep her safe, while we went after murdering arseholes. Nine years of watching her drink herself to death, and clearing up after her. Nine years of violence and killers and pain and horror...

Great. Well done, Ash. That wasn’t depressing at all, was it?

Alice wasn’t the only silly sod in the place.

I closed the door to her room. Took my mug of tea back through to the lounge.

Had to hand it to Jacobson, he’d actually got us a nice place to stay, instead of the usual manky B-and-Bs. And on Shand Street — very swanky. High up, too: a fourth-floor, self-catering, two-bedroom flat in a new six-storey development, perched on the blade of granite that pierced the heart of Castle Hill. The panoramic windows looked out over the jagged remains of the Old Castle, its tumbledown walls and stone stumps lit up in shades of yellow and red, and beyond that the land dipped away in a tangled ribbon of streetlights. The wide black expanse of Kings River separated them from the regimented roads and houses of Blackwall Hill on the right and Castleview on the left — with the Wynd rising up behind it.

It was almost pretty.

But then Oldcastle always did look better in the dark.

Especially if you couldn’t see Kingsmeath.

Sitting on the floor, by its charger, my phone let out the ding-buzzzz that announced an incoming text.

The number wasn’t recognised, but the message made it clear enough:

Mr Henderson you promised John you

wood email that footageage to me!!! Don’t

make me regret thrusting you.

Autocorrect strikes again.

Might as well get it over with.

Mother’s business card had gone limp from its stint in my damp pocket, but I dug it out anyway and sent her everything we’d filmed in Gordon Smith’s basement, even the duff bits. Then unplugged my phone and settled into the squeaky leather couch.

Pressed play.

Footage was shaky, but the camera lingered long enough on each Polaroid to capture most of the details. The young blonde woman on one leg, in a park. The brunette on a beach. The young guy in a beer garden. The old man and younger woman, looking awkward on a putting green... Then more. And more. All those people, smiling and alive. Then all those people in life-ending agony.

By my count there were sixteen people in the ‘before’ pictures, and twenty-two in the ‘after’ ones. Couldn’t be sure, but it looked as if most of the first lot were in the second. Not all of them, though. And there were definitely people getting tortured who didn’t have ‘before’ shots.

I went back to the start and pressed play again.

Park; beach; beer garden; putting green; then a man in his mid-twenties and swimming shorts, reclining on a sunlounger, chest and shoulders a painful shade of scarlet, raising a half-coconut with a wee paper umbrella and straw sticking out the top. Two young women, wrapped around each other — one red-haired, the other blonde — caught in the act of laughing, bent nearly double in front of one of those coin-operated binocular things you got at seaside piers. A happy couple, slightly blurred, waving at the camera as the carousel horses they were sitting on galloped past. A teenaged boy wearing a Manchester United top, grinning out of the photo, hot dog in one hand, can of Coke in the other, bunting in the background. A young woman, sat astride a bay pony, crash helmet on, polo shirt and jodhpurs, knee-high riding boots, beaming like this was the best ever day of her life. Rather than the start of the last one.

Clearly, Gordon Smith liked his victims young. The only person over twenty-five was the old guy on the putting green. But then he probably wasn’t the target. The young woman he’d been caught so awkwardly cuddling was.