a handbag, a driving licence, a credit card. The only eyewitness statement said that a woman had walked out of a house; that a white car, maybe a taxi, had pulled up. The witness had not connected the car to the woman at all; the first thing she knew was when the car pulled into the traffic and she noticed the woman – ‘youngish, blonde, slim but very pregnant’ – lying on the pavement. Six thirty on a bright summer Sunday evening in Partickhill. Nobody else saw anything.
McAlpine started to rub his temples, and something that had been curled in his subconscious began to flex and stretch. Why had she not screamed? Why had she not ducked or . . . ? And who was she? Where was her paper trail – National Insurance, mortgage, wages, tax? She had nothing. She had swept away every trace of her existence as she moved. So she had something to hide. And she was clever. Skilful.
He tensed in his chair, one ankle twitching rapidly up and down as his mind raced. He could feel a tingle of excitement: this was no longer a surveillance job; this was an intellectual pursuit. But who had she been hiding from? Who had tracked her down? And how? It suddenly dawned on him that DCI Graham had guessed there was more to this story and had rostered his star pupil, knowing he would rise to the bait. McAlpine smiled to himself.
Well, two could play at that game.
And DCI Graham would come second.
The redhead emerged from the room, dressed now in a white uniform, her shoes still squeaking. McAlpine looked past her through the door, catching a glimpse of a slim, tanned foot lying on a sheet, and was shocked. He hadn’t expected the victim to be so young, so fragile. The foot framed itself perfectly in his mind, clear as a photograph, before the door closed.
*
The fourth time she woke, the squeaky shoes came close almost immediately. ‘Just relax now, sweetheart.’ Cold liquid dripped into the corner of her mouth, rolling sweetly over raw skin. She raised her head for more, feeling the skin round her lips crack, saw a shadow hover over her, then recede. ‘Second time she’s done that today.’
‘It’s been a fortnight but that’s her oxygen stabilizing at last.’ The tube in her mouth twitched, the voice receded. Then returned, louder. ‘Your daughter’s doing fine, the wee darlin’. She’s along in the baby unit for now – we’ll bring her in to you in a wee while –’
A harder voice, interrupting from the door. ‘What do those police expect?’
‘To question her, I suppose. She didn’t do this to herself.’
‘How’s she going to tell them anything, the state she’s in?’
The softer voice remained with her, droning on, confusing her. It was like a badly edited film: she was watching herself from a distance, closing the door, coming down the stairs carrying her bag, then clutching the handrail outside the door as a contraction hit her.
And?
On the street, falling...
Her skin on fire, her eyelids burned through, the pain in her eyes, the world going dark.
Then nothing.
The red-headed nurse squeaked along the corridor, a cup of tea in her outstretched hand. PC McAlpine took it, knocking her hand slightly, spilling a wave of tea down her white uniform.
‘Sorry about that,’ he said, getting to his feet. He smiled: he knew how to use his charm. ‘Have there been any phone calls about her? Anybody asking after her? Any visitors? Anything?’
‘No. No one. The hospital chaplain came immediately, and his assistant’s been in a few times to see her and the baby. Just doing the usual. Apart from that, nothing.’
‘So who is she? Any ideas?’
‘Is that not what you’re supposed to find out?’ She raised a saucy eyebrow.
‘You must have some idea.’ He smiled again.
‘She has no face,’ replied the nurse, all sauciness gone, and McAlpine’s smile faded.
‘And when she was admitted? Was there nothing on her, no wee bit of paper with a phone number, a contact-in-the-event-of-an-emergency?’ He gave her the full benefit of his charm.
‘I was on when she was admitted, and she had an overnight bag, that’s all. There was nothing that said anything about her.’ She began to sense his frustration. ‘Honestly.’
‘But has she a name?’
‘We gave her a number. She was in labour when they brought her in, so we did an emergency section, just past midnight. It was a wee girl. We’ve put her in with her just now.’
He sat back down, anger burning inside him, knocked the cup of tea down his throat and handed it back to the nurse.
Pregnant? Acid in her face? He shuddered at the cruelty of it.
With the warmth of morphine in her veins, she imagined the pain waving to her as it went, floating away on a sea of blood. It left her senses so sharp she could hear water gurgle in the pipes next door, could distinguish between the different phones at the end of the corridor. She could hear the policeman outside, stirring a cup of tea, the spoon tapping against the side of the cup. She could hear her daughter, breathing beside her...
In ... out ... in ... out...
She could listen to that for ever.
They were talking about one of the policemen outside. ‘He’s lovely, isn’t he, even though he’s so short? Kind of bite-sized? Huge kind brown eyes, like pools of –’
‘Sewage?’ the older voice suggested. ‘He’s not a Labrador.’
‘He doesn’t have a girlfriend, you know.’ There was a slight giggle. ‘I bet I get a date with him before the end of the week.’
‘Too good-looking for his own good, that one,’ the other voice warned. ‘It’ll be tears before bedtime.’
She heard the creak of the door opening, a bump as it closed, then silence. She tried to imagine his face, a noble handsome face, eyes of burnt umber, hair the colour of sun on mahogany, and tried to give him a smile before he faded away to a cloud of morphine.
It was quiet in the hospital in the hour of the dead, that slow hour between 2 and 3 a.m. It reminded McAlpine of the night shift at the station. The clock clicked round, its tick ominously loud in the silence of the corridor, and music floated through from the IC station, where a nurse had a radio on quietly. He’d been sitting here, on and off, for the best part of four days. For something to do, he got up and went to the coffee machine down the landing.
The door of IC ⅔ opened; the red-headed nurse and the older one came out and returned to their desk.
McAlpine also walked to the station, where he sat and sipped the vile coffee, deep in thought. He knew there was something nagging at the back of his mind, but he couldn’t quite touch it. He crushed the cup in his hand and chucked it in the bin. He heard a noise, a faint squeak. The door of IC ⅔ had been left open,
