eyes were crusty and jaggy. She picked at her eyelashes with inaccurate fingers, missing the islands of scabs, poking herself in the eye a few times, making her blink. She could sense the solidity of the darkness outside the room now. It was very quiet, much later at night. Maybe midnight. Maybe not. Time was very elastic these days.
Closing her eyes again, she tried to stand, levering herself up between the door and the wall, and then she saw the bed, minus the duvet, with the expanse of rumpled white sheet with dark islands of staining, and in the middle, framed by wrinkles in the Egyptian cotton, lay a small black gun.
A gun.
And then, as she held onto the wall, she remembered.
She couldn’t even kill herself properly.
She was a high-functioning alcoholic and had been for years. Her drinking never bothered her, it was life she couldn’t really contend with. She had never suffered bad hangovers because she had barely ever sobered up. The constant top-ups gave her strength and kept that black dog from snapping at her too much, kept it from biting at her heels. She drank to be happy. Her drinking had brought her to this misery.
Why did she get a gun that didn’t work? What was wrong with her that nothing, nothing ever went right?
She was too tired, and too sore to cry. What was the point? She picked up the gun and slid back down to the floor, her head thumping as she went. Crawling over the carpet, pushing the gun in front of her, she thought how bloody stupid it would be if the gun went off now and blew her leg off, or her arm off or half her face. Or if it went right through her brain, in the front and out the back, leaving her a dribbling incoherent vegetable, a bag on a drip in her arm putting nutrients in as the catheter took the metabolites out to fill another bag. She tapped it along a little more gently, slipped it into her suitcase using the zipped pocket at the side. Then she thought again, and stuck it into her handbag.
Her mobile phone was lying on the floor where she had flung it, so she slithered across the floor towards it. The black screen refused to swipe into life. She hadn’t charged it up. Nobody had called her for weeks now, nobody except the police, and lawyers, and they weren’t calling Valerie Abernethy the woman. They were calling Valerie Abernethy the victim. Or the suspect. No friends ever called her. No friends had called when Abigail had died. No friends had visited her in the hospital.
Alcoholics do not have friends. They use people so much that friendships wear away, slip away, here with the roses and gone in the autumn.
It was winter now, the deep, deep winter.
TWO
SUNDAY, 26TH OF NOVEMBER
Old Salty’s Fish and Chip Emporium was busy, and very noisy. Adding to the usual chattering and cutlery commotion was the family at table eight, who were having some birthday Jenga-with-chips competition. The very attractive Australian waitress was judging and the rest of the restaurant was clapping and taking bets.
All except the four men sitting at table nine.
Four men on a table set for five.
They were subdued, three of them picking at their chips with their fingers, the eldest of the four using a fork. Failure has a bitter taste that no amount of cheesecake can sweeten; they ate as if their food was choking them, totally oblivious to the birthday celebrations in the next booth.
The four men; three detectives and a procurator fiscal. It was the first time they had met since the brutal murder of Abigail Haggerty and her son Malcolm six weeks before.
Not something anybody with a human soul should get over quickly.
They had an unspoken pact not to talk about it. That had lasted until the first lull in conversation, between the fish and chips being cleared away and the arrival of the cheesecake. They had exhausted the ‘how are the kids doing?’ conversation for Gordon Wyngate, and the ‘how is Baby Moses doing?’ conversation for Anderson.
Archie Walker related the story of walking round the house with Valerie and the missing picture and Lego model. At that point they all tried to avoid talking about Costello when she was the one thing they really did want to talk about; she was their thread of commonality.
It was a puzzle that consumed the detectives, eating away at their core. At the heart of the case was a strange coincidence, which was later revealed not to be so much of a coincidence at all. The Braithwaite Case and the deaths at the Monkey House, as the tragedy of the Haggertys had become known, were ‘intertwined, but legally separate cases’ as the fiscal had put it. And the Haggerty case was under the eagle eye of DCI Diane Mathieson. Those sitting around the table, as part of the original Braithwaite investigation team, had been debriefed, welcomed, tolerated and then told in no uncertain terms to ‘bugger off and to stop trying to be helpful’, according to DI Bannon, or ‘stop bloody interfering’, according to DCI Mathieson.
While they had no reason to meet, none of them had wanted to be the one to call off a date that had been pencilled into the diary for weeks. And they wanted to know about the problem. Costello’s empty chair.
DCI Colin Anderson, the blond detective in the jeans and casual shirt, had had very little to do with the case professionally, but he had a declared personal interest. This personal interest, the discovery of a daughter he never knew he had, automatically precluded him from any further professional connection. And he was becoming aware that it wasn’t in his nature to accept that.
Archie Walker, the fiscal, looked to be his immaculately dressed self, but the constant drumming of his fingers, the frequent glances at his watch, betrayed him. He might have been trying to fool himself that all was OK in his world but he was having no luck fooling the three detectives round the table with him. His goddaughter was suspected of murdering her sister and her son. And she had no alibi. No memory. Only now was he discovering the issue of her alcoholism, mostly from reading his online newspapers.
Viktor Mulholland was watchful, keen to enhance his career here. This situation was a mess and he knew Diane Mathieson. He might hear something round this table that he could casually mention to her. Indeed, she was already approaching him, not any of the others, for any information she needed. That might be a simple matter of rank, but Mulholland suspected something more political. Mathieson was a player and Mulholland hadn’t quite come to a decision about which team to back. His present career trajectory was on shaky ground.
With Costello gone, and the increased likelihood of Anderson going, the solid peg he had pinned his entire career on was now looking very shoogly indeed. And Mathieson had a reputation as a two-faced wee bitch. Being a cop who investigated cops was bad enough, but her track record was worse than most. She was after Costello for harassment of George Haggerty. And that complaint was justified.
Mulholland didn’t like being associated with Anderson’s team, not now Complaints were sniffing around, but he didn’t enjoy the thought of being exposed in a new team led by a woman with only her own ambition at heart, so he was watching both Anderson and Walker carefully. Both men seemed deep in thoughts that he would like to have access to.
However, Gordon Wyngate was happily eating his cheesecake, aware of the tensions round the table and easy in the knowledge that he would be the one who would unwittingly broach any forbidden subject. So he did.
‘When’s the trial starting?’
The silence fell like a rock through a cloud.
Wyngate wanted the ground
