V. McDermid - Final Edition

Lindsay felt anger rising up inside her. Hadn’t Cordelia made her position clear enough the night before? ‘What is there to say?’ she demanded abruptly. She wanted this conversation over with. The longer it went on, the more upset she was going to become. ‘You’ve obviously made your choices,’ she snapped.

‘At the time, it was the choice between loneliness and having someone to share things with. I missed you so much, Lindsay. And the months kept going by … well, I decided I couldn’t go on hurting forever. Then I met Claire.’ In spite of the conciliatory tone of her words, Cordelia’s face was set in a stubborn expression of self-righteousness.

‘Fine,’ said Lindsay, cutting Cordelia off. ‘I’ll see you around.’ She moved forward, but Cordelia was in front of her, barring her path.

‘Wait,’ she said urgently. ‘Claire says you’ve agreed to try to clear Jackie. I wanted to offer my help.’

‘That’s very noble of you.’ Lindsay snorted derisively, refusing to let herself be moved. ‘Aren’t you worried about the competition if Jackie gets out?’

Cordelia flinched, but didn’t rise. ‘We used to work well together on this kind of thing. I know you like bouncing your ideas off someone. Look, Lindsay, we might not be lovers any more, but I know the way your mind works. Let me help.’

In spite of herself, Lindsay was touched by Cordelia’s offer. ‘Okay, let me think about it. I’m not making any promises, but I’ll think about it.’

Cordelia smiled and Lindsay felt as if she would burst into tears. ‘Thanks,’ Cordelia said. ‘You can get me at Claire’s if you want to talk.’ Then, with the impeccable sense of timing that always left people wanting more, she walked briskly back to her new Mercedes without a backward glance.

Close to tears, Lindsay stumbled blindly into the close and ran up the stairs to the first-floor flat. She walked into the hall, but before she could reach her room, Helen’s voice rang out. ‘Lindsay? Is that you? Thank God you’re back. Rosalind’s flat’s been burgled!’

Less than an hour after she had left Caird House, Lindsay was heading back there, this time with Helen. ‘I told Rosalind I’d find you and bring you round as soon as you got back,’ Helen announced for the third time. ‘I knew you’d be going back to Sophie’s flat, so I thought I’d wait for you there. I still have a key, so I can feed her bloody tropical fish when she’s away.’ Why me, thought Lindsay wildly. Answering her unspoken question, Helen continued. ‘With you being there this afternoon, Rosalind thought you might have noticed somebody hanging around. And besides,’ she added mysteriously, ‘there are things involved that I don’t think Rosalind will be too happy to tell the police about.’

‘What do you mean?’ Lindsay asked.

‘Oh, I’ll leave Rosalind to tell you all about it. It’ll be better coming from her. How did you get on with Claire? Tell all!’

Lindsay gave Helen a brief rundown on her day, punctuated at regular intervals with Helen’s sharp exclamations. When she reached the meeting with Cordelia, Helen exploded in righteous anger as incandescent as her flaming red hair. ‘The nerve of the woman!’ she declared. ‘I hope you sent her away with her guts in a paper bag!’

Lindsay drew up in Caird House car park, saying, ‘What’s the point, Helen? She’s got every right to her own life. I was the one who did the walking.’ She got out and slammed the car door, adding as they walked over to the flats, ‘I don’t think I was doing her much good by the end. As soon as I left, her writer’s block disappeared, and she wrote the best book of her career, by all accounts. I guess she’s better off without me.’

Before Helen could reply, Lindsay used Rosalind’s spare keys to let them into the block and headed straight for the lifts. ‘It’s the eighth floor, isn’t it?’ she asked, her finger hovering over the button.

‘That’s right,’ Helen replied, finally realising that Lindsay didn’t want to discuss Cordelia further.

When they rang Rosalind’s bell, the door was opened almost immediately by a uniformed police constable. ‘We’re friends of Ms Campbell,’ Helen announced, sweeping past him in the narrow hall. ‘She’s expecting us.’ Flashing an apologetic smile at the constable, Lindsay followed Helen through to the living room.

Rosalind was sitting in an armchair, looking dazed in the midst of the chaos that surrounded her. Her violet eyes were red-rimmed, as if she’d been rubbing them, her white hair in a disarray that was all the more shocking because of the contrast with her usual neatly groomed appearance. Papers were thrown everywhere, furniture had been overturned, carpets pulled up, and pictures hurled from the walls into corners where they lay surrounded by shards of broken glass. The drawers of the desk had been pulled out and emptied on the floor, and a bottle of ink had broken, leaving a permanent-blue puddle on a scattered pile of envelopes. Lindsay, who had only been in the flat a couple of times before, remembered how neat and orderly it had always been and felt a dim version of the shock that clearly possessed Rosalind.

Helen rushed impulsively across the room to hug Rosalind. ‘I’ll make a cup of tea,’ Lindsay said, feeling useless. She went through to the kitchen where the burglars had also been active. All the storage jars had been emptied on the floor, and the contents of the cupboards were strewn everywhere. It didn’t have the air of random vandalism, however. Odd, thought Lindsay. Almost as if they knew they were looking for something specific. Lindsay raked through the wreckage till she found a mound of teabags and put the kettle on. She stuck her head into the hall and asked the policeman if he wanted a cup of tea.

‘Thanks very much,’ he said gratefully, following her back into the kitchen.

‘How many are there of you?’ Lindsay asked.

‘Just me,’ he replied. ‘I was told to hang on here till the CID could send somebody round. They’ve made some mess, eh?’ he added almost admiringly as he looked around.

‘You’re not kidding,’ Lindsay said absently as she brewed up. ‘I’ve never understood why they feel the need to do it.’

‘Anger and frustration, so they say. If they don’t find any money or decent jewellery that they can sell easy, they take it out on the householder. I always tell the wife, leave £20 in a drawer in the living room. That way, if we do get some animal breaking in, they might not make a mess of the place.’

Crime prevention from the horse’s mouth, Lindsay thought wryly. She handed a mug of tea to the constable and returned to the living room where Helen was sitting with her arms round Rosalind, who looked smaller and more vulnerable than Lindsay could have imagined possible. She handed them both a cup of hot tea, then settled down to wait for Rosalind to tell her what had happened.

Rosalind took a gulp of tea then gave Lindsay a weak smile. ‘If I hadn’t gone white at twenty, this lot would have done the trick. I’m sorry to drag you into this,’ she said, clutching her mug as if it were a lifebelt in a stormy sea. ‘But I needed your advice.’

‘What happened?’ Lindsay asked.

‘I came back from the office in Edinburgh at lunchtime because I had a report to finish for my Minister by tomorrow morning,’ Rosalind said. ‘You can never get any serious work done in that office. The Minister’s in and out all afternoon, wanting his hand held about something or other, so I thought I’d just pack up the draft and bring it back here.

‘When I went to print out the finished report, I realised I was nearly out of computer paper. So I drove down to Byres Road and bought a box, then came straight back. I was only gone for about twenty minutes. As soon as I got out of the lift, I knew something was wrong. The front door was open, you see. I dithered for a minute or two, wondering whether there was still someone inside, but then I decided, to hell with it, and went in. The place was empty, but it was like this. The policeman said he reckoned they must have been keeping an eye out for me, and just did a runner when they saw my car come back.’