The Suffering of Strangers

by Caro Ramsay

  Mitchum nodded. ‘I know, remember the fiasco of the Stay Sober initiative. Not too difficult, you would think, in this day and age of the nominated driver, for one person to stay sober and look after the others but all it did was produce a backlash.’

  ‘We were condoning the evil of men.’

  ‘We can’t help it if people don’t want to know the truth. All stupid people do is hand the power to the predators among us. You know that better than any of us. We’d better get back to the drawing board. The meeting tomorrow will still be on. I shall have to think of something else.’ The ACC nodded to him in dismissal and walked off down the corridor, his shiny shoes clipping on the lino.

  Colin Anderson was having a cup of coffee, sitting on his favourite spot on the sofa, trying to read Garcia Marquez but still thinking about the ACC and his new campaign and Gillian Witherspoon. There was a knock at the front door and he looked up, wondering when his house had become a hotel. Nesbit was curled up at his feet, snoring softly and preventing his owner from standing up, so Anderson was still sitting, paperback in hand, when he heard the usual thump of Doc Martin’s on the stair carpet and a shout of ‘I’ll get it.’

  Claire.

  As usual she was dressed in black, in a skirt so short it wasn’t worth wearing and thick, black tights covering her long slender legs that had made her the butt of teasing at school, but which now signalled her metamorphosis into the kind of girl that turned men’s heads.

  Anderson had no real idea when that had happened.

  He heard the front door open, a muffle of conversation and then Claire shouting, ‘It’s only David.’

  It was always ‘only David’. For Anderson, the father, ‘the boyfriend’ was new territory. Was he supposed to stick his head out the door and ask David in for a coffee, small chit-chat that avoided the question, ‘Are your intentions honourable?’ Anderson knew his daughter better than that, and yet suspected they weren’t doing anything that he didn’t do himself at that age. Which was cold comfort.

  And this house didn’t lend itself to casual intervention. The living room was too big for a start, there was no incidental meeting at the bottom of the stairs, no way he could leave the door open and call the boy in without it appearing the summons that it was. So he sat there, impotent, listening to the quiet thump of Claire’s feet and the painfully slow step of David. There was a blast of music as the bedroom door opened, abruptly silenced as it closed over again.

  Maybe more prudent to leave them to it. David was still carrying the scars of a terrible and violent crime. The perpetrator was in Carstairs for the criminally insane, pronounced unfit to face trial. Detained under The Mental Health Act, he was locked up for much longer than they ever would be at Her Majesty’s Pleasure. It was not the easy way out, there was no defined tariff which meant they could stay there, locked up for the rest of their life and nobody would bat an eyelid. But the fact remained, David was the victim of extreme violence borne of a deranged mind. Apart from that, he was everything that Anderson would want in a boyfriend for his daughter. But he still wished they weren’t upstairs on their own. When Colin had mentioned it to Brenda, she had drawn him one of her ‘well she lives with you’ looks. Mum and daughter spoke, they went shopping and had lunch. Surely Brenda and Claire must have spoken about ‘that stuff’. Colin thought that David Kerr was a lovely young man, kind, intelligent, obviously thought the world of Claire, but if he laid a hand on her, Colin would have him up against a wall by his throat and the boy would be singing falsetto in a Bee Gee’s tribute band.

  He picked up his mobile. Brenda would know what to do. She was a mum, it was in her job description. There was no answer, no opportunity to leave a message. The last time he had tried, it had been turned off. He dialled the landline but instead of voicemail, Peter answered, his voice full of ‘just got out of bed’ teenage enthusiasm. Colin managed to extract a little information from him, a few statements about school, homework and his upcoming work experience. After that conversation had run its brief course, Colin asked if ‘mum’ was in. Peter’s answer was short and sweet. ‘No.’

  He didn’t elucidate. No mention of where she was and when she would be home. So he left it.

  Colin slipped back into the chair and went back to Love in the Time of Cholera, trying to enjoy it. He had some stats to look at for an early meeting tomorrow, and the outline of a development report to write to lend support to his opinion about the way money was being spent in the cold case unit. He needed to affirm that cold cases should be selected by the scientific support staff like Mathilda McQueen, those cases where there was a little bit of tissue evidence or a DNA stain, where science might have caught up and it took an expert to recognize what might be useful. But everybody had an agenda. Usually on someone else’s budget.

  And there was the knock-on effect of Gillian Witherspoon’s passing and that meeting to look forward to.

  He came out in a cold sweat when he thought of the way he had knocked her door, intruding on the grief of that family. Police Scotland had had their pound of flesh from him this week, and tomorrow looked like death by spreadsheet. He felt like he was the only one who did the job for the right reasons nowadays.

  There was another burst of music as the bedroom door opened, more clattering of swift feet on the stairs, so that would be Claire going downstairs to the kitchen for a beer for David. Claire was very sweet natured and supportive – a word she used a lot – but Colin was sure David would get through his trauma with or without her. The boy had emotional and familial resources, an adoring mother, his estranged father was back on the scene. He enjoyed a wide network of friends, a good brain and career prospects. To be fair, Claire had been just as kind to the other youngster caught up in that horror. Paige Riley. The Paiges of the world usually slipped through the net but she and Claire had struck up some kind of bond. Claire had explained to her dad, with all the patience of a teenager to a stupid parent, that she knew she couldn’t help them all. But she knew Paige and she could help Paige. Well, her dad could help Paige. He had money. It had been hard to argue and Colin had felt rather proud of his daughter and her passion for helping a girl who had not benefitted from all that Claire took for granted. Paige had been abducted and held captive for weeks. The only person who had noticed she was missing was the woman who put a pound coin in her begging bowl every day. Even now, the file had no precise date as to when Paige was actually snatched from the street.

  Anderson got into a panic if Claire was half an hour late.

  So, Colin Anderson and his socially conscious daughter had come to an agreement. Paige was to become David’s carer, accompanying him to uni, carrying books, his laptop and helping out when Claire or his mother couldn’t. Anderson paid her a wage so long as she stayed clean; one whiff of heroin, any return of her habit and she’d be out on her ear. He had taken her to one side and told her that in a language she had understood. He had then pulled strings to get her put up in a decent halfway house run by a priest he knew well. Anderson was aware he was conducting a social experiment. Paige was removed from her old friends, taken out of her environment and placed in another where she was made to feel welcome. And useful. Paige had had her moments but overall, she was doing OK. The priest said she was now thinking about going back to college. It had been her idea. Claire had asked her dad if he would give her an allowance to help her through college. He said he’d think about it, recalling that quote about saving a life and then being responsible for everything that life did. The last time he had set eyes on her, Paige had stood, rake thin staring at him with eyes that burned with distrust and abuse. It was all she knew from every man she had ever met. He had smiled, said hello and walked on as if he hadn’t noticed.

  But he had the money. Funny how it had always been an issue, Brenda and him as newlyweds, struggling to pay a heavy mortgage. Now he had inherited loads of it and seemed to be getting more and more with every day that passed. He knew nothing about art as commercial value; a painting was a pictu
re that sat on a wall and you looked at it. Either you liked it or you didn’t. What he didn’t know was that Helena had rented out much of her work and it was becoming more and more in demand now she had passed on.

  Oh, it was a very nice position to be in, another sip of instant coffee. That was symbolic of the issue. He still couldn’t work out how to get a good cup out of the state-of-the-art black mega vanilla steamer hot squirt device that sat in the corner of his kitchen. It seemed to behave for other folk, but not him. He was instant coffee and Greggs, not fancy dancy decaff mulberry flavour shite with more stuff on it than a John Lewis Christmas tree.

  He felt that this one, this life he was living now, was not his somehow. He had been derailed into a life of good suits and endless meetings with wankers like Stu and Bruce. He was now valued in Police Scotland as some kind of adviser as he had ‘been there’, ‘done that’ and had the mental health reports to prove it. He was not old enough to be shifted into retirement, and he suspected that his history of PTSD simply made him an asset, allowing his bosses to show they were considerate to their colleagues injured in the line of duty.

  His trouble was, having seen it all and done it all, he wanted to see and do it all again. And soon, before he got soft and rotted away into this lovely sofa and started cutting his crusts off and eating goat’s cheese. He was one step away from tasting wine before he drank it and using a napkin. It would be quinoa next.

  He needed to get back in touch. He scrolled down his mobile, thinking about texting Costello, getting her opinion on this media thing.

  Costello had an opinion on everything.

  DI Costello was cold and hungry by the time she was waving her warrant card at the hospital reception and had been told to take a seat like everybody else. In the emergency department waiting area there were a few pale-looking kids, two adults holding towels to various bleeding parts of their anatomy and three drunks arguing about Glasgow Rangers and Theresa May, as if they were in some way connected.

  Costello sat in a plastic chair bolted to the floor, glad to have a rest, and watched the Sky evening newsfeed on the overhead screen. The Kissel conviction had not made the national news, thanks to Brexit and a supermodel falling over. That wee kid didn’t even warrant a few words on the rolling commentary across the bottom.

  She wondered if Anderson had read it. Was he taking an interest? Did she really want him dissecting her case, making sure that any chance of an appeal would be squashed, ensuring she left no way in for an inventive defence council? She wondered where the old gang were now. Anderson living up in his posh house, and working in a nine to five. Mulholland stuck in his desk-bound job by default due to his leg injury. Some weird kind of fracture he had that had formed a cyst in the bone. Was he still convinced that he was Johnny Depp’s better looking younger brother? She wondered if he had undergone another leg operation. It had seemed so simple at the time, a fall from a stone not a foot from the ground yet it threatened to end his career. In new Police Scotland, if you weren’t fit, you were out. But then, just as one of the drunks, the one with blood all over his face, demonstrated how to take a penalty, she recalled a rumour he had been transferred to some intel unit that was so hush hush nobody knew anything about it. Although she didn’t put it past him to be the source of that rumour, to add a touch of glamour to what was a job involving sitting on his arse and typing. She hoped that Wyngate was with him, they worked well together and Wyngate lacked the streak of meanness needed to be a really good detective. But give him a computer …

  One drunk was now doing the rounds of his captive audience, asking if they had any spare change.

  She looked at her watch. This baby abduction was going to take a lot of legwork, Roberta and James Chisholm’s lives were being pulled apart as she sat here. That baby had been targeted, she was sure of it. She wasn’t so sure of Prior and McCaffrey, especially Prior. Still in uniform and out on the street at his age showed a remarkable ability to avoid promotion. She could do with the technical support of Wyngate and Mulholland.

  After collecting a cup of hot tarry tea from the machine, she enquired at the desk if they had any idea how long it was going to be. Flashing her warrant card again only got her a bad tempered ‘Can you not see I am busy?’ Costello closed her warrant card wallet slowly, looking long enough at the nurse’s face to let her know her features and her name were being mentally noted. Busy was one thing, rudeness was something else.

  Costello settled down with a cup of sticky tea and a notebook, aware of the staff at the desk talking about her. One sharp look at the words ‘snotty’ and ‘bitch’ silenced them. She had very good hearing.

  This baby abduction case was falling apart before it had got going. She didn’t know how she was supposed to work it. Nobody official had told her that Roberta was still here. That had only come to light on her visit to the neat, brand new, three-bedroomed detached sitting in the cul de sac at the end of Westerton Farm Lane. Despite the Duster in the driveway, she noted the darkness of the property before she had got out of her car. No lights on, no police cars, no sign of anybody. She had called in again, thinking that Sholto had been found but was told no. Had Roberta gone back to her mum’s for some emotional support? Costello was still in the car waiting for Govan to get back to her with an update when the cop’s gift appeared: the nosey neighbour.

  Costello got out of her Fiat, encouraged that the woman in the flowery pyjamas and thick fluffy housecoat might know something. Bobby, Roberta, she had corrected herself was still at the hospital. Had Costello any news, nothing as yet she assured her but took the chance to ask if there were any other young babies in this estate, less than a year old? There were not.

  That would have been too easy.

  Costello then wondered why the house-to-house had not contacted her yet. She’d ask that young cop McCaffrey when she saw him. He had sounded bright enough to spell his name properly, which she couldn’t say about many of the new recruits who went home at five p.m. on the dot and complained about the pension scheme.

  Fifteen minutes after she had finished her tea, she was still sitting in the waiting area having remonstrated with the drunks for annoying the queue. Then she started arguing with the desk staff. Then she decided on blatant queue jumping. Costello eventually wound her way round to the treatment area of the A and E and was walking up and down until a voice asked if she was looking for him.

  It was McCaffrey, sitting on a padded blue chair with his back to the wall, playing solitaire on his phone. She mouthed hello before pulling back the plastic curtains by an inch and glancing into the cubicle; two nurses, a baby tucked under a blue blanket with a drip that wound down to his tiny chubby shin, tiny pads of a heart monitor taped on the visible portion of his chest. A woman with bad skin was lying on the bed, her forefinger looped around the baby’s elbow while a smartly-dressed man stood to one side, an island of calm in a sea of chaotic efficiency. Costello registered the child’s shallow epicanthic fold, the big forehead. She withdrew, sensing her relief. They had traced the mum, she would get looked after. Nothing here that needed her attention right now and she could go home and have a shower, climb into bed and sleep the sleep of the righteous. She turned and sat beside the constable, wondering if she could take her shoes off and give her feet a massage, her soles were burning. She didn’t think she could make it all the way back to the car, it was parked miles away.

  ‘We meet again.’

  ‘How long have you been waiting here for?’

  ‘Long enough, I’ve been waiting for somebody to come here and relieve me, I didn’t think I could leave, you know. Got kind of involved with it all.’

  Costello waved her hand. ‘Oh, there’s nothing wrong with that, but you can go now. The mum’s here so as long as everybody is safe and well, the paperwork can wait. Who is she? What’s her story?’

  McCaffrey stood up, and rolled his shoulders, then cleared his throat. ‘That’s not the mum, that’s Roberta Chisholm. She’s here because the wee guy ha
s a chest infection. She “needed” to be here.’

  That explained the man’s detachment. It wasn’t his child.

  ‘At least he’s in the best place.’ She pulled out her notebook, sitting with pen poised. ‘But why is Roberta in there, doing all that? That’s not their kid. What’s happening with Sholto? And where is that baby’s real mother? Uniform haven’t even called at the Chisholm’s neighbours yet.’

  ‘They said they were short-staffed.’

  ‘Christ.’

  ‘Road blocks up but I’m not sure with all those fields and back roads it will do much use.’ He lowered his voice. ‘Nothing has come back to me yet.’

  ‘Let me know as soon as it does. How is that wee guy? It’s not serious, is it?’

  ‘I’ve called him Moses, you know … out the—’

  ‘Yeah, I know the story …’

  ‘His body weight is low, he’s only five weeks, still vulnerable.’

  ‘Any sign of abuse?’

  He shook his head. ‘No, he seems very well cared for. I thought he was coughing too much, going a bit blue round the gills so sent him here. They are waiting for a bed in paediatrics, and the paediatrician to have a look at him. We have been waiting a while, no surprise.’ He moved into the side of the corridor, indicating that Costello should follow. ‘You know, my wife was a mess after the second baby. Neither up nor down after the first. Five weeks is a long time to bond.’

  ‘And long enough to succumb to the psychosis of sleep deprivation.’

  ‘Indeed. And maybe the mum was OK with that until Moses got ill and she panicked. Maybe it was one push too far. She could be an unsupported mother with no experience. So she sticks her kid on a mum who appears to be doing a better job than her. And Roberta Chisholm is fulfilling that role, cuddling and soothing that kid as if it was hers. Maybe Moses’ mum knew Roberta would be like that?’ He shook his head. ‘It’s understandable. The doc suggested we leave it for now.’