Absolution Read online

  ‘I’m sorry, but I had to know. It’s fine,’ he said. ‘It’s fine.’ He put the hand down carefully, reluctant to let her go and leave her. He held his hands over hers, warming them as he studied the monitor, a single fluorescent line firing across it, hiccuping every now and again, left to right, left to right.

  There was a movement… a something…

  He turned and looked at her. ‘You OK?’ he asked. Bloody stupid question.

  Nothing, just the wheeze of the respirator.

  He moved towards the door, opening it and closing it without leaving the room. She sighed, and he watched her relax, her head dropping slightly in heartfelt relief.

  He smiled and took one last look. He walked back slowly to his seat in the corridor, deep in thought, and sat down, his arms folded, his eyes never leaving her door.

  ‘I’m official this time. Official.’ His voice was still deep, polite, conversational, sexy, but there was something else. This time it wasn’t going to be a monologue. ‘Look, sweetheart, I think – I know –you can hear me. And that leaves you with two options. Either I can sit here and talk to myself and feel like a right prick, or you could talk back.’

  She so desperately wanted to talk to somebody; it had been months since she had said more than good morning to another human being. And she wanted to hold her baby in her arms; the pain of not having that was worse than anything. She considered her options, who she could trust, who she couldn’t. She didn’t have much choice.

  ‘The fingers on your left hand aren’t too bad. The right hand sustained a bit of damage, I’m afraid. Can you move your thumb?’

  She knew she could not move her hands; her fingers were bound together, not tightly but restricted. She moved her thumb, felt her skin crack and a searing pain shoot through her palm.

  ‘Good.’ His hand rested on hers, his fingers warm.

  She moved her thumb again, easier, less pain. She felt tearful, tense, yet she so wanted to say something. He kept talking, his voice steady and reassuring. He tapped the tip of her forefinger gently. ‘What about this finger? Can you move that?’

  It was difficult, a small movement, hut he saw it. ‘Good. So we’ll make it a finger for yes, and the thumb for no. That OK with you, sweetheart?’

  She thought for a moment, then twitched her finger.

  ‘You fancy a wee chat? My name’s Alan.’

  Yes, I know. She twitched her finger.

  ‘Look, love, we know what happened to you, and we can find out who did it.’ Strong words, but the voice remained friendly. He sounded very young. ‘But the first problem is, we don’t know who you are…’

  She listened hard to his voice, so young, so sympathetic. But so few words – could she judge? She kept still.

  ‘Do you have any memory of what happened to you, anything at all?’

  Conversational? Concerned? She kept still.

  ‘OK, OK.’ He didn’t speak for a while. She wondered if he was going to trip himself up, imagined him contemplating his next question. ‘Look, I’m not stupid, and I don’t think you are either.’ The voice paused. ‘You made a good attempt at covering your tracks, but a trained eye can always see things.’ She felt fear prickle at the back of her neck. ‘You were in labour, yet the last thing you did before you went out that door was to wash bits of burned photograph down the sink. Must have been important to you.’

  She heard him move, shifting closer. ‘Somebody got to you. They’ll come after you again. You know they will. They might come after the baby.’

  He wasn’t threatening her; he was stating fact. She was sure he would hear the panic of her heart as it slapped against her chest. She kept her fingers still.

  After a moment he said, ‘If there’s anybody we could contact for you, let them know how you are?’

  She stayed still.

  His voice softened. ‘What about the guy who gave you the ring? Your husband? Fiancé? Was he involved in the attack?’

  The thumb jerked. No.

  ‘He’s a good guy, then?’

  Piet, smiling at her, on the yacht, the wind ruffling his hair, his Steve McQueen smile… she watching as the flames ate the photograph, the black flakes disappearing down the drain in a torrent of water…

  Eventually her finger twitched.

  ‘I see.’ She felt his fingers, warm and soft, caress her hand. He had the same gentle touch as Piet.

  This was a man used to talking to women.

  I want to hold my daughter.

  ‘But I’ll have to call you something. What do you fancy?’ His hand was still stroking hers. ‘You have long blonde hair. Rapunzel?’ She had no idea what he was talking about, but she could tell he was teasing her. ‘Alice in Wonderland? Oh, I know – Anastasia. They can’t work out who she is either. Anna for short.’

  Anastasia and the rest of the Romanovs? They had had their precious stones, their diamonds, all the wealth they could take with them, sewn into their clothes. They didn’t make it.

  She could remember holding a pile of uncut pure diamonds, almost warm to the touch, in her hands. They were secure now, wrapped in

  black velvet in a safe-deposit box in Edinburgh. They were safe, safe

  for their child, but she herself wasn’t. A tear of pain bit into her eyes

  to remind her. Her life was precarious.

  ‘I’ve got a present for you… we took them from your room –your ring, the watch, it’s all there.’

  Her finger twitched.

  ‘Here’s the ring. I thought it was silver, but Mappin & Webb tell me it’s an imperfect blue diamond set in platinum, a one-off. Why were you in a bedsit with a diamond worth a fortune?’

  There was no response.

  ‘Did the guy who owns the watch give you the ring?’

  Again her thumb twitched, twice.

  ‘OK.’ The voice was conciliatory. ‘Just make sure someone doesn’t take them. Things go missing in hospitals, you know.’

  Her finger twitched three –four – times.

  Silence hung thick around them for a minute or two.

  ‘Anna, are you saying you want me to keep them for you?’

  A single twitch of her finger.

  ‘All right, I’ll keep them safe, I promise.’

  She heard the chair scrape, sensed his shadow move, as he stood up.

  ‘The wean looks fine.’ Wean? A word she didn’t know. ‘They all look the same to me, but the nurses seem to think she’s a pretty wee thing. Do you have a name for her?’

  She heard him walk over to the cot. ‘Can I pick her up?’

  Her heart began to race. Maybe, if she concentrated really hard, he would know. She raised her finger.

  ‘Well, look at you, eh? Oh, don’t cry now.’ Then his voice changed. Have you seen – sorry, held her?’

  Please. She twitched her thumb. Oh, understand – please.

  ‘She’s got blue eyes, blonde hair, extremely pretty. Takes after her mum.’

  She twitched her thumb at him, telling him he didn’t know that, turned her head as far as the dressings would allow. The baby was quiet now.

  Please.

  ‘Here.’ His voice was nearer now. She could smell mint – he had just cleaned his teeth. He guided her hand the inch or two the restraints would permit to something on the bed beside her, something warm, breathing, living. Anna, meet your daughter. Small person, this is ‘your mother.’

  Her daughter’s head. Her fingers, stiffly at first and painfully, were exploring all the little pulses and bumps and fontanelles, seeing as blind people see, creating a picture in her mind of downy eyebrows, little wisps of eyelashes, the soft chubby flesh of a cheek. Her daughter.

  ‘Here, feel this.’ He moved her fingers down a little. A tiny hand. Her daughter’s hand.

  ‘You’ve no idea how small her hands are. So wee.’ He was talking like a daddy. ‘My brother had hands like spades; always had to stick them in his pockets for photographs.’

  She picked up the ‘my brother
had’ –past tense – and the wistful tone. Had he lost his brother young? Yet he sounded so young himself, younger than her perhaps.

  After a moment he spoke. ‘So small, so full of life.’ He fell silent again and then said, ‘You wonder how they survive, that will to live. The older cops talk about cases – you know, abused kids, starved kids, battered kids – but somehow they keep going. As they say, the trick is to keep breathing, no matter what.’ Minutes passed, and she could feel the silence congeal between them. Then he spoke again, his voice sounding desolate, bereaved.

  ‘Do you think dying is a passive process? Because I think that’s what my dad is doing. When you have had enough, you give up breathing. Maybe death isn’t something that comes up and gets you. You just let it happen. But my mum…’ He was holding back tears, she could hear it in his voice. For a while, all she heard was the rush of the ventilator; he didn’t trust himself to speak. My mum – she’s got cancer, you know. It’s spread bloody everywhere. She’ll die of a broken heart, of course. No bloody cure for that, for losing a favourite son. But she’ll choose when she dies. And if Robbie hadn’t died, then she’d have chosen to keep going’ – she tried to crawl her fingers over the blanket towards his – ‘because she’d have had something to live for. Her favourite son. I can’t help thinking, when she heard, it must have flashed across her mind– why Robbie? Why not Al –’ He stopped abruptly. She could hear a monitor bleeping somewhere outside, the banging of doors as somebody was rushed to Intensive Care, another human drama. Anyway, life goes on.’

  She felt a caress on the top of her head, gone before it had registered.

  He had kissed her.

  His mother was dead.

  He was eating soggy chips from a newspaper, sitting on a rock, nothing in front of him but Dunoon on a cold wet morning. The baking heat of the previous week had given way suddenly to overcast skies, and the brisk wind coming in off the Atlantic chopped up the water of the Clyde. The view gave him no comfort; it looked like eternity had been coloured grey.

  Her passing had been simple in the end: no last-minute grasp at life, no desperation to hang on to the final breath.

  McAlpine had popped his head through his mother’s bedroom door at midnight, said good night, as he always did, and she was still. McAlpine’s eyes had wandered to the empty morphine sulphate bottle. She had taken the lot. And that hurt him more than anything, her betrayal. Losing the son she loved had been the last straw, and it was too difficult for her to stay alive for the son she didn’t love.

  He threw the rest of his chips to the seagulls, then thrust his hands deep into his anorak pockets. He couldn’t bear to go back to the house, couldn’t bear to be alone with his dad, who had nothing to say at the best of times, couldn’t bear even to think about what it meant to have lost his mother.

  No, he wasn’t going back.

  A mother’s grief. Those words had sunk deep into his conscience. A mother’s grief. Sleeping Beauty and that tiny innocent little baby. He could feel a smile come to his face just thinking about her. Robbie had gone, his mum was gone. At that moment he didn’t think he had anybody else, just his blonde angel, lying still in her cocoon, waiting. And that was enough.

  Two seagulls squawked, fighting over a chip. It was time to go. He stood up, shook the sand from his shoes and started to walk back to the Victorian railway station at Wemyss Bay. He needed a place where death came with sirens blazing. He needed a place where it was quiet, and he was invisible. He needed to go back to the hospital. He needed Anna.

  ‘Have a seat, Alan. I hear Robbie is to be nominated for a Queen’s Commendation for Bravery. You must be very proud.’ DCI Graham smiled gently.

  A slight pause, a flash of insolence in the dark eyes before McAlpine sat down. ‘Proud’s not exactly top of the list just now. We don’t even know yet when we’ll get him back for burying.’

  Graham coughed. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, slightly abashed. ‘What I meant is that it must be some consolation. And now the dreadful news about your mother.’

  ‘They say good news travels fast,’ said McAlpine sarcastically.

  Graham closed the file, stood up and moved the picture of his wife to the side of his desk. He perched himself on the edge, closer to McAlpine. His voice was full of restraint. ‘Putting all that aside, do you want me to list all the procedures you’ve broken during your association with this case?’ he said.

  ‘Do what you want.’

  Graham folded his arms. ‘I made a mistake. I thought this would be a good case for you, to get your brain back into gear. I knew there was a story about that girl, and I knew you’d get on to it. You were supposed to tell us her secrets, not vice versa; you were supposed to – ’

  ‘Supposed to what?’ McAlpine was on his feet. ‘Supposed to what? Just ignore her? Ignore the fact she’s scared stiff? Just give her a bloody number, like the hospital?’

  ‘Sit down and be quiet, Constable McAlpine.’ Graham put his hand up. ‘There are lines that you are not allowed to cross, and those lines are there for a reason. Put it this way: say we get on to who threw the acid, say we get to the bottom of it – you’ll have ruined any chance we have of getting him to court, never mind securing a conviction. Interviewing a witness without corroboration of tape and without a colleague present, tampering with evidence, solo search, and without a warrant at that… the case would be thrown out before the ink was dry on the release sheet, and you know as well as I do, PC McAlpine, that kind of shit sticks. And it is not sticking to me, not in this station. You let her down. You let me down. Do I make myself clear?’

  McAlpine folded his arms and looked out of the window with a teenager’s petulance, reminding Graham just how young he was.

  ‘Do I make myself clear?’ Graham repeated.

  ‘Indeed you do.’

  ‘Those rules are there to protect you in cases like this. How are you going to survive the first time you see the body of a dead child? You can’t react personally; you have to learn to walk away and move on. In the meantime Interpol have given us a promising lead on her, so I am ordering you to leave the girl alone. Just file your report and walk away.’

  ‘And that’s it? I’m supposed to just –’

  ‘No, you are not supposed to, you have been ordered to. End of story. If you’re not going to take time off, you’ve work to be getting on with. There’s been a fatal traffic accident in Byres Road, woman driver killed, and daughter, a Helen – no, Helena – Farrell, she’s at the Western Infirmary. Go and sort it out. And don’t – just don’t – start anything.’

  McAlpine climbed the stairs at the Western two at a time and turned left, going quickly along the corridor, fuming, arguing with himself. How dare he? How dare he? It was just police talk; he was a human being and she needed him. She needed him.

  Or did he need her?

  He stopped at the sign for the Intensive Care Unit. The red-headed nurse went past, ignoring him. A uniform he didn’t know was sitting in his seat, watching Anna’s room. He was reading the Sun, his legs crossed, his foot bobbing up and down as he hummed to some secret melody. McAlpine paused as the uniform glanced up and down the empty corridor before going back to Page Three. A door clicked, and another uniform cop appeared with two cups of tea, settling into the seat opposite his mate. Two of them? There was no way McAlpine could get in there without being seen. He had somewhere else to go, somebody’s daughter to sort out. He turned and kept walking.

  ‘Helena Farrell?’ At first he had thought it was a workman in the visitors’ room, a tall figure in dungarees. Then she turned towards him, caught in the act of pulling a velvet scarf from her hair, leaving a smear of purple paint on her face as auburn curls cascaded down her shoulders. She flicked her head, freeing them, before restraining them once more in their velvet knot.

  When they said daughter, I imagined…’ McAlpine held his hand out flat, indicating the height of a child.

  ‘No,’ she said. She pulled the handkerchief from her eyes, s
niffing, and started to dab at the paint stains on her fingertips. He could smell turpentine from her. ‘I was working when they called,’ she said by way of explanation.

  ‘I’m PC McAlpine, Partickhill Station. Have they told you what happened?’

  ‘As much as I want to know,’ she sighed. ‘Seems Mum had a heart attack at the wheel and crashed the car on to the pavement.’ She shrugged, and the auburn curls bounced slightly against their velvet restraint and resettled.

  ‘Much to the distress of the pedestrians using it at the time. How are you feeling?’

  The girl bit the corner of her mouth, almost managing to stop a lone tear in its tracks. ‘We weren’t close,’ she said. Her eyes didn’t leave his. She was looking down at him, being a few inches taller, and he wasn’t sure he liked that. ‘I’m surprised I feel so shocked. I just feel numb, really.’

  ‘If that’s the way you feel, that’s the way you feel. There’re no rules.’ He paused. ‘Is there anybody I can phone for you? Better that you’re not on your own right now.’

  Helena stood resolutely, then lifted her hands to her face, open palms covering her eyes. He took two steps forward, allowing her to drop her head on his shoulder before she started to sob. He had no option but to put his arm round her.

  DCI Graham and DI Forsythe stood at the door of the DCI’s office, listening as McAlpine’s slow footfall came up the stairs towards them. Graham looked at his watch. ‘Two weeks she was lying there, and we had no idea who she was. Now that we do know, I wish we hadn’t bothered.’

  ‘Best of luck with it.’ Forsythe stood on the landing, looking down over the banister. ‘He’s a good copper, McAlpine. I worked with his dad for years. Had a passion for the job, he did.’

  ‘Not always a good thing.’

  McAlpine was climbing the stairs very reluctantly. On the landing, he stopped and remained silent, his eyes passing like a condemned man’s from Graham to Forsythe.

  Graham gently guided him into his office, saying nothing as he handed McAlpine a photograph and sat down.