‘Was Mr Brodie in this sort of condition, unable to do anything for himself?’
‘No. He could dae a wee bit, lift a spoon and the like. He wis no’ as far gone as what she is.’
‘Could he take his own medicine, straight from the bottle, say?’
‘No’ really,’ she replied, putting the bowl on the trolley, where it joined an uneaten slice of buttered bread and an untouched glass of water.
‘Why not?’
‘He’d take anythin’, like, if you gave it him, but he didnae know anythin’ any more. So, he wouldnae have known whit wis in the bottle. Could have been juice, water, wine. He’d no’ ken that it wis his medicine, like.’
A moan interrupted their conversation and they both shifted their attention back to the doctor. Her eyes were now wide open, staring straight ahead, a look of utter dread contorting her features as if a vision of hell was unfolding before her. She whimpered, turned her face into the chair and groaned once more. Instantly, Una sprang up and put an arm around her, murmuring, ‘It’s all right, Doctor, dinnae you worry, darlin’. You’ll be all right, I’m here beside you.’ Slowly the fear receded from the bloodshot eyes, and, for a second, intelligence shone in them as they rested briefly on the nurse. Then, like a comforted child, the doctor allowed her heavy head to flop onto Una’s shoulder and rest there.
A few seconds later, the nurse’s phone went and, using her free hand, she got it from her pocket, nodded several times in response to the voice at the other end, and then began, ever so slowly, to slide her body free of its burden, tenderly resting the patient’s head against the side of the chair. The call ended with her saying, ‘OK, OK. I’ll tidy up the place before I go. Make sure it’s neat and tidy for everybody.’
‘A visitor?’ Alice asked.
‘No,’ Una replied, picking up the tray and moving towards the door, ‘she doesnae get any visitors nowadays. She’s got a daughter, like, but she cannae face comin’ any more. See, she’s got a fifty-fifty chance of developin’ the disease herself, and she cannae bear tae look at her own future. The Doctor doesnae recognise her anyway, an’ twice she’s scratched her face wi’ her nails, bit her oan the nose once. She can be a wee bit violent sometimes, but she’s aye quiet as a lamb wi’ me.’
‘Can I ask you about Mrs Brodie?’ Alice asked, following Una out of the room.
‘Aha.’
‘How did she cope with her husband’s illness? How did she manage?’
‘She jist got oan wi’ it. She hud tae. She couldnae dae much else, noo could she?’
‘Did she have any support, anyone to help her? The children?’
‘They’d both gone, left home, like. The boy’s at college and so’s the girl, an’she’s got her own wee wan noo.’
‘Was there anyone else to support her? Did she… was she seeing anybody else?’
‘How d’you mean? You mean the Doctor or somethin’?’
‘No. I meant socially.’
‘Aye. Me an’ a’. She wis seeing him “socially” as you cry it. Havin’ it away wi’ him as I’d say… her “toy boy”.’
How d’you know?’
‘I’ve eyes in ma heid like everybody else. and I wisnae born yesterday neither. Onyway, he was aye sendin’ her flooers, big bunches o’ red roses usually. I seen the cairds. You couldnae miss it – she and him, Dr Paxton, were eyeing each other up. I’d bet ma life oan it. If I had wan.’
‘That settles it. We’ll just go and see her again, that Brodie creature,’ Eric Manson said, switching off his computer and not bothering to hide his dislike of the woman. ‘Let her know that we know that she’s a sodding liar. That she’s been two-timing her sick husband with the poor bugger’s own doctor, and that he’s a lot younger than her too.’
‘Fine, Sir. Of course. But if we do do that, she’ll know we’re onto her, won’t she? And, apart from her lying to us, we don’t have much on her yet, do we? We don’t even know that she was with him, and if he is involved, in some way, then there’s a question-mark over all the information we’ve got from him – the drugs stuff, his opinion about Brodie’s condition and the rest. And maybe he wasn’t with her – for all we know he may have an alibi for the Saturday night. Having an affair in itself is not a crime, after all.’
‘No? Right. What we’ll do is speak to him, eh? See where he says he was, get a DNA sample from him, make like it’s routine. If they’re both lying, then chances are…’
He stopped mid-sentence as Elaine Bell came over to his desk. She looked grey with exhaustion, her clothes rumpled from another night spent in the office.
‘So, what did the Reid woman have to say?’ she asked Alice.
‘Heather Brodie’s lover seems to be her husband’s doctor, Colin Paxton.’
‘His doctor! Bloody Hell! Are you quite sure? Were they together on the Saturday? He’d know all about drugs, quantities and so on, and he’d be able to get prescriptions if he wanted. This puts everything in a very different light. We’ll need to go over the India Street house again – thank God it’s still ours. But we’ll have to scour it for completely different things this time. You can do that, Alice. Look over all of Heather Brodie’s stuff this time. Anything that ties her and lover boy together would be useful, letters, cards, whatever. I’ll get permission to have their phones checked. Eric…’
He was sitting with one hand covering his eyes, and did not respond.
‘Eric!’ she repeated, shaking her head in disbelief.
‘Ma’am.’
‘Go and see Paxton, but do not – I repeat DO NOT – scare him off, OK? Ask him politely where he was on the Saturday night. Just accept whatever he says and then check it out. Got that?’
‘Aha. Loud and clear.’
As soon as Alice entered the hallway of the India Street house, she was hit by its chilled air, the raw coldness of it. The place was now dank, unheated, unloved and unlived in. Silent. Her breath was as visible as steam from a kettle, and she crossed her arms, hunching her shoulders and trying to husband her body heat. The murdered man’s bedroom door was open and she glanced into it, a musky smell instantly assailing her nostrils. Her attention was caught by the trails of blood spattered across the faded wallpaper, now looking more like black ink than blood.
A cursory inspection of the kitchen suggested that it would reveal nothing, so she pushed open the door to the drawing-room, and entering it was surprised how shabby it now seemed. Without the presence of the normal occupants of the house, breathing in and breathing out, moving around, attending to the myriad, small, inconsequential affairs that make up a life, the room’s tiredness could not be hidden. There was nothing to distract the eye from the frayed patches on the carpet, the cracks in the glass of the cabinet or the odd broken ornament on the mantlepiece. A thick layer of dust coated the antique wooden furniture, masking its lustre and turning it grey, and the panes in the sole window were dirty, providing only the subdued light of perpetual dusk. Everywhere needed redecoration and a good clean.
A writing desk was tucked away in one corner, its sun-bleached walnut veneer beginning to part from the wood beneath, and Alice sat down at it. First she pulled out all of the miniature drawers on the desktop. Only a magnifying glass, a thimble and a couple of half-empty needle cases were revealed. The first of the larger, lower drawers seemed to be filled with the paraphernalia of Christmas: decorated paper, tinsel, hundreds of old cards and baubles for the tree, many cracked or discoloured. The middle drawer contained about forty brown envelopes, some with their contents listed on the outside: ‘Harry’s and Ella’s school reports – 1995-1998, 1999-2003, 2004-2007’, ‘Ella’s art project (Roman)’, and ‘Letters from mum’.
In case something had been misfiled and partly out of curiosity, Alice gave them all a quick check. From her cursory scrutiny of the reports a vague picture of both of the Brodie children emerged, and it largely accorded with the impression she had formed from her brief meeting with them in their aunt’s house. The boy, Harry, seemed t
o be intelligent, slightly nervous and immature, excelling in drama and English. Many of his teachers seemed concerned by his lack of focus, some remarking on his inability to handle pressure, particularly at exam time. Almost all of them commented that his head was always in the clouds, and criticised his absent-mindedness. Ella, in contrast, seemed to have sailed through school, collecting prizes and positions of responsibility from her earliest childhood. Great things seem to be expected of her, her last head teacher remarking on her high hopes for the girl’s future.
Putting the last report cards away, her mind drifted onto Ian as it had done periodically throughout the day. Only by making a conscious effort could she stop thoughts of him intruding whenever they liked, wrecking her concentration and making everything else seem unimportant, whirling round and round in her head but resolving nothing. Deliberately banishing him from her mind again, she turned back to the drawer and picked out one of the letters from the ‘Mum’ envelope, but it was in an impossible hand. Only ‘My darling’ on the first line could be deciphered, the rest of the writing, including the signature, being completely illegible. After wasting a further five minutes trying to read the most recent one, dated 2008, she gave them up as a bad job and bundled them all back into their envelope.
When she hauled out the bottom drawer, Alice’s spirits sank. It was weighed down with files, each one bulging, the contents overflowing into a ghastly sump of miscellaneous papers. Anticipating hours of probably pointless drudgery ahead, she gave a deep sigh and then picked up the first document in the ‘TAX’ file. Methodically, she ploughed through them all, before passing onto ‘BANK’, then five other equally dull folders. ‘HEALTH’ briefly caught her attention, documenting as it did the course of Gavin Brodie’s hopeless decline and the mass of quack remedies that they had invested in before accepting the inevitable. Wondrous crystals, exotic fruit essences, animal serums and the frozen scrotums of bulls, all promised cures. Each advert had been cut out and kept, each marked with ‘cheque for £50 sent’ or some equally poignant note.
Three hours later, and conscious that her eyes were no longer focusing properly, she opened the second last folder. It was marked ‘INSURANCE’. Inside, as anticipated, were a mass of certificates of car, house and household contents and travel insurance. Like the rest of the files, they revealed that the woman’s grip on the family’s administrative matters seemed to be slipping. Her filing was becoming progressively less accurate, many of the dates were higgledy piggledy, with papers eventually being added in no particular order at all.
At the very back of the folder, stapled onto the cover, was another certificate, a term life insurance policy in Gavin Brodie’s name. Amongst the details listed on it were the extra premium charged for an unspecified ‘Underlying Medical Condition’, the sum assured, the date on which the policy was taken out and the date of expiry. Alice put it to one side, relieved to have found something to show for all the tedium, something concrete and, surely to God, significant.
The final file, untitled and with a dark blue cover, was the thinnest. It seemed unpromising, and held a only small sheaf of papers. Picking out a five-page document from it she saw that it was headed ‘Court of Session, Scotland. Petition for Interdict against Agnes Hart’.
Hart’s address in Henderson Row was given. The aim of the document seemed to be to get the Court to prohibit her from coming anywhere near Gavin Brodie or any members of his family, his house or his possessions. Reading the numbered paragraphs that made up the petition, a picture began to emerge, and it was a disturbing one. It catalogued a campaign of harassment and intimidation waged by an obsessive woman as she worked out a grudge against Gavin Brodie and his nearest and dearest. Dog excrement had been put through the India Street letterbox, cars scratched, obscene notes attached to the front door, his children shouted at and his mother had received a gob of Hart’s saliva on her cheek. The list of hate-filled deeds perpetrated by the woman covered two full pages. Agnes Hart, whoever she was, had plainly loathed the dead man, and judging from the description of her behaviour, she was both unbalanced and highly effective in her campaign of revenge. Another document among the papers, headed ‘Extract Decree’, revealed that the Court had granted Gavin Brodie’s request that Agnes Hart’s behaviour be restrained on 5th July 2008.
Late that same evening, Eric Manson tiptoed past his open sitting-room door, straining for a minute or two to decipher the high-pitched, excitable chatter coming from it before retreating into the kitchen. He had heard more than enough. Not least the sudden change into whispers. All Margaret’s friends seemed to be there, divorcees to a woman, of course, apart from sour Helen whose interests, he felt sure, lay in another direction altogether. They would be offering advice, laughing among themselves in their venal way, eager to enlist another member into their unholy club. Nowadays, however late it was, when he got home it was never just the two of them, with Margaret waiting eagerly for his return. No, the harpies had positively taken the place over.
Nosing inside the fridge, he saw with alarm that a raspberry mousse appeared to have been made for him. Half-heartedly he dipped a finger into it, licked it, and as he did so the telephone rang. Picking up the receiver and, still in work mode, he said gruffly ‘DI Eric Manson, here’. Instantly, and with an ominous click, the phone went dead.
It must have been Him, the Other Man, the Bastard, now intruding into his home! His own home! He threw down the instrument as if it had been contaminated and, had the house been empty, would have howled out loud in his anguish like a wolf. Instead, he sat at the table with his head in his hands, hiding from the world, and sighed involuntarily.
Covering his eyes, he repeated to himself over and over that this should not be happening to him, him of all people. And not now, in the middle of a murder investigation, when all his time, all his thoughts, had to be devoted to the job of tracking down that poor, sick bugger’s killer. What the fuck had he ever done to deserve this? But he could not talk to Margaret, or have it out with her, because he did not know where to begin, or where it would all end. Heavens above, she might actually admit to playing away, and what would he do then? The awful nightmare would have become reality. And Margaret would no longer be Margaret, and who, no, what, would he be without her?
‘You alright, Eric?’ It was sour Helen’s voice, so he rubbed his hands up and down over his face as if to refresh himself, and replied as brightly as he was able, ‘Yes, just fine, thanks, love. Rarely better’. Then Margaret herself swept in, and seeing him, asked tenderly, ‘Tired, pet?’ Catching her eye and forgetting what he had just said, he nodded mutely and watched, speechless, as she took his supper out of the oven for him, laid it before him and departed to return to the gaggle of women. A dish of beef olives, prettily garnished with a handful of freshly chopped parsley.
His phone went again. He threw down his fork and shouted down the mobile, ‘If that’s you, again, you fuckin’, fuckin’, fuckin’…’
‘Sir! Sir, it’s me, Alice. I was just calling to let you know what I have found out, in case you wanted to speak to the DCI.’ The man sounded possessed.
‘OK. Right. Get on with it.’
‘It’s not really what we were expecting, but it may be significant,’ she continued, slightly breathlessly, still taken aback by the unexpected tirade. ‘There’s a life insurance policy in Gavin Brodie’s name. His widow was to get a payout on his death, as long as he died prior to the 10th of February next year. Are you alright, Sir?’
‘Aye. Fine. How much?’
‘Two hundred thousand pounds. I didn’t think people like him would be able to get that kind of insurance. But it looks as if you can if you’re prepared to pay an extra whack each month. Maybe they exclude death from the disease or something, I don’t know…’
‘Right,’ he said, cutting her off and sounding uninterested.
‘And there were some court documents, too.’
‘Yeah. Well, tell the boss tomorrow, eh? We’re already well on the way w
ith things. Paxton gave me a right load of porkies as far as I can see. Said he was at his health club until late, but nobody there seems to have seen him, his usual day’s Wednesday anyway. Said he went on to the pub, then home. Lying fucker. The pub was closed all day as they had a pipe burst in the night, it didn’t open again until the Tuesday. I’ve already spoken to the boss. We’re going to bring him into the station, first thing tomorrow morning, straight from his morning surgery. Marked police car, blue light and everything. That’ll make the toy boy sweat.’
10
Saturday
‘So, Doctor,’ Elaine Bell began, feeling tense already, knowing that the man might be a difficult interviewee with his university degrees and the ease, the self confidence, which came from his position in the community. But some bloody pillar of it he was – pillock, more like – and she would get the better of him. The lying toad. Fortunately, he looked rattled now, his dark eyes looking anxiously into hers, sweat shining on his upper lip, and all before she had even begun. The ride in the marked police car seemed to have done the trick.
‘I understand from the Inspector that on last Saturday night you were at your health club, Triton, until about 10 pm or so, is that correct?’ Let him assent, and hang himself here and now. A firm ‘yes’ would leave him no room for pleas of error or forgetfulness later.
As she had hoped, he did say yes, glancing nervously at Eric Manson’s well-built figure as he was doing so. In American cop programmes they beat people up, but not here, surely? If only he had watched The Bill or Taggart, anything, then he would have had an idea.
‘And after that you went on to the Geordie in Rose Street?’
He nodded, adding quietly, ‘Yes, that’s where I went.’
‘Sure about that?’
He nodded once more, crossing his legs and fingering the cleft in his chin.
No Sorrow To Die Page 15
