The consultant smiled. "The bottom line on this is that although we're
very happy to collect our fee, this examination has been entirely
unnecessary, and demonstrates a significant degree of stupidity on the
part of the police authority."
Skinner shook his head. "Not stupidity. Malice."
"I don't think we'll go that far in our report."
"It's okay, I wouldn't want you to; or even to include the stupidity
line. On the face of it, I just want to appear grateful for being
returned to duty, but at the same time pleased that the manpower
committee were so concerned about my welfare. Once I'm back on the
prowl, they'll find out how I really feel about it." He looked at the
two cardiologists. "You'll put all that in writing?"
"This evening," said Hurley.
"And deliver it to Mr. Laidlaw at Curie, Anthony and Jarvis?"
"First thing in the morning."
"That's fine. There's a timetable in place. The chief constable has
called in the authority chair and the chair of human resources to a
meeting in his office at twelve noon. When they get there, they'll
find that I'm the agenda."
"In that case," Patience declared, 'you'll be back in your office by
one p.m."
Skinner grinned, as he picked up a towel and headed for the changing
room. "Only I won't be. I've got other plans."
Thirty-One.
She had fought against it all day. She had found distractions;
insisting on taking Mark to school herself, to let Trish have an easy
start to her day; taking Jazz to the playground for an hour longer than
she would normally have allowed him, joining vigorously in his games
until they were both too tired for more.
In the afternoon she had gone to collect Mark, and had spent time
helping him with his homework, although the reality was that her older
son never needed anyone's help. He had covered in Scotland some of the
work he was doing at his American school, and the rest came easily to
him.
In the evening, she had stood down Trish for cooking duties, even
though it was her turn, under their informal agreement, and had made
spaghetti bolognese, "Mafia-style' as she called it, as she remembered
seeing it done in the Godfather trilogy.
Finally, she ran out of excuses. There was nothing else in her mind
except Ron, and her need to see him. It was so strong that she could
actually feel it within her as an amputee will feel a phantom limb.
She waited until the children were asleep, and until Trish, who had
developed an unexpected interest in baseball, had settled to watch an
evening telecast of the Yankees on the road at Boston. Only then did
she slip into her bathroom, shower, and make herself ready. She chose
a black thong, a close-fitting brown dress, and the high-heeled shoes
that she had bought to match it; that was all. She didn't expect that
she would need anything else.
She applied only light make-up and a coating of hairspray, then slipped
downstairs and out of the house. Both of her cars were standing in the
driveway; she would have taken her father's beloved Jaguar, but she had
the keys of the Ford Explorer in her bag and so she climbed in behind
its steering wheel.
Ron's house was only ten minutes' drive away from hers, through the
suburban streets of Buffalo. The daylight was fading, and the traffic
was light; she saw few other vehicles along her route, until she turned
into Sullivan Street and saw the modest house, just where the road
curved.
It was a pleasant street, ordinary in a comforting way, the sort of
vision that came to her mind in Scotland, when she allowed herself the
luxury of thinking of home. The homes were all built on generous, but
not huge, plots of land; they belonged to middle managers and
was multi-racial, with blacks, Caucasians and Hispanics living happily
and harmoniously together. She looked around as she drove slowly
along, past an elderly man walking his dog. The movement of a car
refocused her. It was picking up a child from a house almost opposite
Ron's; balloons tied to a tree on its sloping lawn signified a party.
Even in the dying light, other children were playing on the grass, and
a woman was filming them with what she guessed was a camcorder. She
smiled as she flicked her indicator; for all the War on Terror, her
native land could still be a comforting place.
His flashy Camaro was in the driveway; at the sight of it, she felt a
surge of anticipation deep within her. She parked the Explorer behind
it, switched off the engine and took a deep breath. As she put the car
keys in her purse, she saw his letter. She took it out, opened it and
read it again. It was barely light enough for her to see the page, but
she knew it off by heart.
"God, Ron," she whispered to herself, 'if you had written this all
those years ago, where would we be now?"
She frowned. "Divorced, probably." His drawing a line under a career
of success was one thing, but she knew that giving it up would have
been quite another. There would have been another pressure too. She
would have had to compromise with her own career, to limit her horizons
to wherever he had practised law, and perhaps to general medicine,
rather than her chosen specialty, an ambition which had driven her all
the way through med school.
Within herself, she knew that it would have been a disaster; Ron had
been right to go to Texas. She had been right to chalk him up to
experience and head for New York, and then to her appointment with
fate, in the hypnotic shape of Bob Skinner, in Scotland. When she had
gone there, she had only meant to stay for a couple of years. But she
had not counted on him; no, not at all.
She closed her eyes, and for the first time that day, Bob's face
appeared before her. Yet she could only see him angry, as he was when
he had left, in spite of her pleas that he should stay with her, in
spite of her threats about the potential consequences of charging back
to Edinburgh in defence of a job which had almost killed him on more
than one occasion.
Where s the difference? she thought. He had done what Ron had done,
back in the eighties: chosen career over everything else. Wasn't it
logical that she should do now as she had done then, and let him get on
with it? And now Ron was back; back for good, he had promised, his
life fulfilled, and hers if she wanted him. Where there had been
bitterness in her parting with Bob, there had been nothing but
tenderness, emotional and physical, in her reunion with her second
lover. Where Bob had been adamant and uncompromising, he had been
flexible, ready to see things her way, and make a commitment to her
alone.
And yet that was her husband as he had always been: single minded
determined, courageous, professionally outstanding, and at the same
time, on more than one important, crucial occasion, emotionally blind.
There was nothing different about him. The angry face
in her mind's
eye was that of the man she had married, and had been, all along. Would
his life ever be fulfilled?
She thought of Ron. In their first relationship it had been all
excitement; now it was all tenderness. She thought of the years that
would stretch ahead with him; peaceful and content, with not a ripple
on the surface of their smooth waters. Then she thought of Bob, and
saw towering white-topped waves.
Sarah stepped out of the Explorer and walked up to Ron Neidholm's front
door. She felt herself shaking in anticipation as she pressed the
bell, as nervous as she had been on their first encounter in college,
when she had wanted him with an urgency she had never suspected had
lain within her.
There was no answer. Evening had given way almost entirely to
darkness, but she realised that there were no lights within the house.
Ron was either in his den, maybe with his headphones on, or possibly he
had gone for an evening run. She peered into her bag once again, and
found the key he had given her.
She unlocked the door, and opened it. "Eleven ninety-one," she said
aloud, recalling the code he had given her in the expectation that the
alarm would need to be deactivated. But there was no warning buzz; it
had not been set.
"Ron," she called, as she stepped inside. She listened for his feet on
the stairs, from above or from the cellar, as he rushed to greet her,
but there was no sound, no shouted reply. The door to his den lay
directly in front of her, across the hall. She opened it, but saw at
once that it was in darkness. She looked into his living room, in case
he was asleep in his chair, but it was empty. She ran upstairs to his
bedroom, in case he was in the shower, but it was neat, with no
discarded clothes on the floor, and no discordant country song coming
from the bathroom.
With more than a touch of frustration, she went back downstairs, to
await his return; on impulse she stepped into the kitchen to make
herself a coffee, throwing open the door and switching on the light in
a single movement.
Ron was there.
He was lying on his back, his head almost at her feet. He was
stretched out, massively, on the kitchen floor, staring sightlessly up
at the ceiling. The hilt of a knife protruded from his chest; all of
its blade was embedded in him, and most of the front of his yellow polo
shirt had been dyed dark red by his blood.
Sarah had seen countless dead people ... inside and out... through her
career. As had been the case when Bob had collapsed, none of that
counted for anything. She threw her hands to her face and screamed, as
she had in the cemetery. There, she had been surrounded by friends;
there had been people to come to her aid. Here, she had nobody to turn
to. She was gripped by hysteria; she screamed again and again, until
she felt her stomach begin to heave. Instinct alone made her run to
the back door. She threw it open and vomited out into the garden.
From somewhere in the distance she seemed to hear a man's voice. "Hey
lady, is everything all right over there?" it asked, nervously.
"The hell it is!" came a loud reply; a woman this time. "Move your
ass, Mort. Call the friggin' police."
Thirty-Two.
"Have your guys taken a formal statement from Brother Aidan?" Skinner
asked.
"Yes," Andy Martin replied. "Rod went to see him himself, yesterday
afternoon."
"Did he sharpen up on his description of the guy Skipper I told you
about?"
"No. If anything he was probably vaguer than when you saw him. He
couldn't swear to a thing about the man, other than his age bracket,
around the same as your brother's."
"Have you picked up any other leads up there?"
"None. The whole thing's a mass of uncertainties. We can't even be
certain that Michael went into the Tay. There are various tributaries
flowing into it; there's the Tummel, for example, that flows through
Pitlochry. When the snows melted and the flood began, the whole river
system was in spate."
"So he could have been dumped in the water in Pitlochry and wound up in
Perth?"
"In theory, yes," Martin admitted. "Not above the hydro dam though, he
wouldn't have got past that. They did open the sluice to increase the
flow of water out of the reservoir, but a body would have been
trapped."
"So what have you got that you're phoning me first thing in the
morning? If it was just to say hello you'd have done it by now."
"I've got the post-mortem report. The pathologist was a bit slower
than I'd have liked, but..."
"I agree. We'll have thoroughness before speed, every time. So what's
the verdict?"
"You want all of it?"
"Of course."
"We don't have a homicide investigation, of any sort."
Skinner whistled. "I don't know whether to be happy or sad about
that," he said, eventually. "He drowned, then?"
"No."
"What was the cause of death?"
"Michael died of a heart attack; all his main arteries were clogged up
to hell, and he had a failing valve. His liver was also in the sort of
condition you'd expect from someone who'd had an alcohol dependency for
at least forty years. The pathologist said that he could have died at
any moment, but that he did just over a week before discovery. The
condition of the body shows that he was put into the river shortly
after death. No doubt about that."
"The marks on the body? What about them?"
"Professor Hutchison agrees with you about the mark on the wrist; that
he was probably wearing a leather watch strap and bloating of the body
resulting from immersion could have stretched it to breaking point. We
didn't find a watch at Miss Bonney's but it could have come off
anywhere."
"What about the head wound? What about the bruising to the body?"
"They were all pre mortem, apart from the head wound. That was
inflicted after death, possibly by something he hit in the river. The
other bruising was largely superficial. Analysis showed a significant
amount of alcohol in the bloodstream. Joe Hutchison says that the
bruising could have been caused by him falling while drunk, and rolling
downhill. I asked him about your claw hammer scenario. All he would
say was, maybe."
"Stomach contents?"
"Jesus, Bob," Martin exclaimed, 'do you want to go that far?"
"Yes, Andy, I want to know everything."
"If you insist. He ate poached wild salmon, haunch of venison, well
hung, mashed potatoes and turnip, and rum baba, shortly before he died,
washed down with a significant amount of pretty good claret. The prof
said that meal alone could have been enough to kill a man in his
condition."
"Sexual activity?"
"Are you serious?"
"Yes."
"Bob, surely..."
"My brother was homosexual, Andy. What if the man who took him away
from Oak Lodge was someone from that area of his past?"
"Man, you were sixteen when he
left and you never saw him again. How
do you know that?"
"I just do. Okay?"
"Okay. There is no mention in the report of any signs of sexual
activity, or of any sexually transmitted disease or infestation. Maybe
he did go off to live happily every after, but there's no evidence of
it."
Skinner sighed. "So what have we got?"
"Not a murder, certainly," said Martin. "Nor is there any physical
evidence that might support a charge of culpable homicide; in theory