A Song of Isolation

by Michael Malone

  Dave paused before answering. His father’s firm was an estab­lished player in the financial world of the city of Glasgow. Peter Robbins had salted enough away over the years to give him a very comfortable retirement, but would his legacy suffer? Dave shifted in his seat, feeling the responsibility of that.

  Realising that some kind of positive answer was going to help his cause, he replied, ‘Dad is a creative thinker. If the business is in danger he’ll find a way to appease the concerned.’

  ‘For example?’

  ‘Remove me as a partner and quietly bring me in to the back office. Perhaps work from home. Get me to work on internal audits. He’ll keep me busy and employed, be assured of that.’

  ‘Where will you live?’

  ‘There’s a small flat on the top floor of our business premises in St Vincent Street. Dad used to use that when he was in the city for posh charity dinners and the like.’

  ‘Used to?’

  ‘Mum didn’t like it.’ He stopped speaking. The mention of her caused a bubble of grief to work up from his chest into his throat. The muscles there tightened. He coughed. A tear slid down his cheek. ‘She, eh, preferred to go home to her own bed after a night of wearing posh frocks and eating rich food.’ He heard her voice in his head as he said this, remembering how she loved helping the charitable causes Dad’s success enabled, but hating the waste and cost of bringing all these rich people together and cajoling them to donate. How much did that dinner cost to put on? Bloody ridiculous, she’d say each time.

  ‘Do you need a moment?’ Davidson asked him. In that moment, he appreciated that she was asking him as a fellow human being, seeing past the tag of paedophile. And that recog­nition was enough for the pressure to release, and for the first time since he heard his mother was dead, he cried. Hands over his face, bent over so that his elbows were on his knees, he gave in to the emotion.

  Moments, or minutes, later he was aware that Davidson was rummaging in her bag. Then she was sliding something across the table top to him. A packet of paper tissues.

  He pulled one out and wiped his cheeks and his nose. Then the corners of his mouth.

  ‘Thanks,’ he managed. It came out in a whisper.

  ‘Do you need a break?’ she asked, leaning towards him. ‘I can book in to come back another day to finish this off.’

  Dave shook his head and coughed as if he was trying to relocate his vocal chords. ‘Please. Let’s get this over with today.’

  She sat back in her seat and her more business-like mask was on.

  ‘In among that expression of grief for your mother was there any thought for the victim of your crime?’

  ‘Her name’s Damaris, and it’s thanks to her lies that I’m in here.’ Under the table Dave felt his fists clench. An involuntary reaction. And he was back in anger mode.

  ‘In my experience little girls don’t lie about things like this.’

  ‘This one did.’

  ‘The jury believed her.’

  ‘Yeah, cos they never get it wrong.’ Dave challenged her with his eyes.

  She didn’t flinch, she’d probably had years of dealing with bad men. Dave was just another one.

  ‘Part of the process of your rehabilitation while you serve your sentence is for you to examine why you did this and to express your remorse.’

  ‘Am I sorry?’ Dave leaned forward. ‘Yeah, I’m sorry. Sorry I ever moved in next door to her and her fucking awful parents. That little girl was coached to lie and you lot fell for it.’

  She said nothing. Her head was inclined slightly to the left, her hand poised over her notepad.

  Dave recognised the tactic of employed silence and decided at this point he couldn’t – wouldn’t – play the game. He wasn’t going to fill the quiet with any dark, heavy secrets. He shifted in his seat so that he was side on to her. So that she was getting nothing but his profile and an elbow pointing back at her.

  ‘Why do you think parents would use their child in such a way?’

  ‘Why else? Money. I did not abuse Damaris. I was only ever a friend to that little girl…’ His throat tightened with emotion again. He coughed, then swallowed, trying to release the feeling. Blinked back the tears that sparked in his eyes.

  Dave thought about standing up and leaving. This woman wasn’t interested in what he had to say unless it was to acknowl­edge his guilt. But if he did leave that would mean going back to E Hall and the beasts. As bad as this was, at least it was a break with being surrounded by sick and dangerous men. Besides, the outcome of this meeting could well determine the length of his sentence. He needed to get a grip.

  ‘You’re saying a mother and father would put their child through the hell of a court case and convince her she’d been sex­ually molested to make money?’

  ‘It’s the only reason I can think of. They are having serious money problems, as was documented in court. So, this day, Damaris comes home crying. She’s all bruised down there after falling off her bike. Mummy dearest concocts a plan to cash in on the fame of her next-door neighbour.’

  Hearing a crack and waver in his voice, he became aware that the deep unfairness of it all was leaking into his speech. He might say something that would make his situation worse. He clamped his jaw shut.

  Davidson briefly scratched her pen on her notepad. He couldn’t read her writing from where he was sitting but he could guess what she had written.

  In denial.

  It was clear on every line of her posture. The jury had found him guilty. Therefore he was guilty. The system was infallible or her existence came into question and that would be an intolerable position to be in. In her eyes he was guilty of a heinous crime and every thought or consideration she had about him flowed from that unassailable mindset.

  Enough. His slender control on his emotions lost, he jumped to his feet, ignoring the squeal of the chair against the floor. ‘Why don’t we get to the part where you try to get me to demonstrate remorse and I reassert my innocence for the millionth time?’

  Chapter 36

  Despite her assertion she’d never leave her home, on the way back to her hotel from Norma Robbins’ funeral Amelia was on the phone to Bernard asking him to find her a place for rent. Prefer­ably in a hamlet somewhere the press would never think to look for her. The thought of going back to being neighbours with that couple was simply unbearable.

  ‘And put the cottage up for rent. Fully furnished. Other than my clothes I can’t bear to take anything with me,’ she instructed him. What about the cat? Oh George, she thought. She’d really miss him. ‘And make sure whoever arranges this, they only accept a cat-lover. George has to be looked after.’

  ‘Won’t old Mrs Whatshername across the yard want him?’

  ‘She likes a visit now and again but she won’t want the full re­sponsibility.’

  ‘Any ideas where this peaceful hamlet should be?’

  She rubbed at her forehead, watching the grand buildings of Glasgow slide by the car window. ‘I don’t know, Bernard. I can’t think. Somewhere unpronounceable. Ardnamurchan. It’s difficult enough for the London press to get up to Glasgow. Let them wrestle with that one.’ Where that name came from she’d no idea. Probably somewhere Dave talked about visiting.

  ‘But that’s in the middle of the middle of nowhere.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘I’m sure the world’s media would still find you there. Didn’t you and Dave meet in the Highlands? That’s part of your legend, they’ll eat that up.’

  Bernard had a point. She could see the headlines that would cause. ‘Hollywood Star Retraces Paedophile Steps’.

  ‘Did your French passport ever arrive?’ he asked.

  In the heat of the past few months, she’d forgotten about that. In a fit of anger over the Brexit vote she’d applied for her French passport. It had arrived some time ago and she’d stuck it in a drawer somewhere, realising it was
an empty gesture and would change nothing about the political situation. She did get a thrill though when she plucked it out of the envelope and saw her real name on an official document: Solange Amelie Meric. Solange after her paternal grand-mère, with her father’s surname, a name she hadn’t used in such a long time, preferring her mother’s maiden name, Hart.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘It’s in a drawer back in the house somewhere.’

  ‘Well, what about France? You’ve always talked about going back there, retracing the paternal line and all that.’

  ‘But that would mean abandoning Dave.’

  ‘How long would it take to get from Ardna-wherever to visit him in prison, supposing he changes his mind and puts you on his visitor list?’

  Amelie wasn’t exactly sure where it was but knew it was on the north-west coast of Scotland somewhere and suspected that narrow, winding roads and possibly even a short ferry journey would be involved. ‘Ages.’

  ‘And how long would it take to fly back from France to Glasgow? Supposing he changes his mind and puts you on…’

  ‘Yeah, alright,’ Amelie said. ‘I take your point. But it still feels like I’m abandoning him.’

  ‘He knew the relationship was over before this all kicked off.’ And then, as if he sensed she was about to ask how he knew about the state of her relationship, he added, ‘Sorry, darling, Lisa and I occasionally talk. Dave doesn’t want you to stick by him out of some sense of duty or, God forbid, pity. He wants you to get on with your life.’

  Peter Robbins wasn’t so lost in his own grief that he didn’t realise what a difficult situation she was in. When she called him the day after the funeral he offered her a place to live.

  ‘I don’t expect you can go back to Thorntonhall,’ he said. ‘You could stay at ours … mine,’ he corrected, ‘until you get yourself sorted. There’s the granny flat. Or if you prefer the anonymity of the city centre to our place here in Bearsden, you can have the apartment on the top floor of the office building. Have it for as long as you like, Amelie,’ he said. And Amelie heard a faint note of desperation there. Now that his wife was dead and his son was in prison, perhaps she was a link to a better time that he subcon­sciously felt he needed.

  With a massive sense of gratitude, Amelie collected her belong­ings from the cottage, at a time when she knew the Browns would be out, said goodbye to the cat, after she’d dumped a month’s worth of cat food with her neighbour to tide George over until the new people were set up, and moved in to the city-centre apart­ment. It was well fitted out – a bit on the sterile side with barely a picture on the walls and no soft furnishings to talk of – but it had lots of space for her and her more personal belongings.

  Then, without any real expectation that it really would happen, Amelie hoped that with the sentencing hearing over and a four-year sentence handed down, the clamour for all things Robbins and Hart would now die down.

  If anything, it went up a notch. People were outraged about the length of the sentence and it seemed that every daytime TV host had an opinion about it. Then there was the petition started by one of the tabloids, apparently aimed at pressurising the Scot­tish courts into increasing the sentence, but of course, really aimed at increasing readership.

  Every day, it seemed like a microphone was thrust in her face and the question was asked, ‘Now that your lover is a convicted paedophile how can you still support him?’

  Vanessa Court was a regular on TV now, boosting her acting career with a running commentary on her relationship with Amelie Hart and her ‘paedophile boyfriend’. If the TV was on and Vanessa’s face appeared Amelie was quick to turn it off.

  However, one morning she gave in to the impulse to listen, like a driver slowing down to get a good look at a mangled car.

  ‘Didn’t trust him for a moment. There was something that was just off about him. Everyone could see it,’ Vanessa replied to what­ever question she was asked. Amelie recognised the format of the show, she’d enjoyed this on many a lazy lunchtime. Four women at a large desk in front of a studio audience chatting informally to a guest, who always sat in the middle.

  ‘So other people in your circle had concerns about David Robbins?’ one of the women asked.

  A nod. ‘He was just, like, a bit awkward, you know? Anyone at these things who can’t make eye contact is not quite right, in my humble… I mean, why else are you there, but to be seen –’ she gave a little toss of her head and turned slightly to the left as if fully aware that was her best side ‘– and to network?’

  Amelie tried to work out what event she could be referring to. Dave rarely attended any of them with her. There was only one she could think of, and he was only there because he was trying to raise money for a befriending charity. ‘It was Children in Need, you dumb bitch.’ She was on her feet shouting at the screen.

  ‘And concerning these awful events, do you think Amelie Hart was aware she had a monster living in her house?’

  Vanessa turned her face to the camera. Working her full emo­tional range, she looked down at the table top, over to the hosts, and then back to the camera. She swallowed, as if that would in­dicate her reluctance to betray a friend. And then, crossing her arms, as if bracing herself against a painful truth, she said, ‘I have no doubt that Amelie Hart knew exactly what David Robbins was.’

  The hate mail went up several notches after that, and every day it seemed someone spat on her. Refusing to hide from it all, she went out regularly, determined that the outrage wouldn’t deter her from living her life, and when she got home it was to find that the back of her coat, and often her hair, was covered in spit.

  She’d closed down her social-media accounts so people were driven into print. Letters arrived by the sack-load, all of them – all the ones she read, in any case – telling her what a foul human being she was. Many of them containing rape and death threats, and many of them were from other women, a fact that gave her much distress. How people knew where she lived now was a mystery. Often they were simply addressed to Amelie Hart, Glasgow. Many of them were even addressed to Peter’s firm, in a desperate but scarily successful attempt to locate her.

  Most days, after work, Peter would quietly knock on the door and enquire how she was. Every time, she would invite him in for a coffee or a glass of wine. Occasionally, he accepted, and now and again a glass of wine led to a simple meal. Judging by the way his suit was hanging on him he wasn’t eating nearly enough food, so Amelie started a mission to feed the man. It hurt her to see how much he’d changed since they’d first met.

  ‘You can’t go on living like this, dear,’ he said one day after man­fully chewing through half a bowl of mushroom risotto. ‘What are you going to do with the rest of your life?’

  ‘I guess I was waiting to hear what the sentence was before think­ing about that, but now I’m stuck in this state of inertia. I don’t seem to have the energy to do anything, or make any decisions.’

  She told him her thoughts about going to France.

  He nodded. ‘They have stricter rules about hounding famous people in the media. Worth more than a thought, I’d say.’ He pushed his plate away from him. ‘Would you go back to work? How would you support yourself?’ She’d told him about her fi­nancial losses during a previous late-evening chat. ‘I have plenty,’ he added. ‘You stood by our David, and Norma would want me to help you … financially … if you needed it,’ he added with an apologetic smile.

  ‘Thank you, Peter. That’s very kind of you, but you’ve done enough.’

  ‘It’s no problem, really.’

  ‘I’ve always stood on my own two feet. It’s important to me that I carry on like that.’

  ‘France is a good idea,’ he said slowly as if continuing to think this through. ‘How you can stand the attention every day is beyond me. People really are foul towards you, and you’ve done nothing wrong.’ His eyes grew moist. ‘Norma would be so angry.’

 
Chapter 37

  ‘Who the fuck are you?’ the young man sitting on the bottom bunk in his cell asked Dave when he returned from his session with the social worker.

  ‘I should be asking you that question.’

  ‘This your place then?’ he asked, looking around the cell. ‘I’m your new co-pilot, by the way. Angus.’ Dave guessed if the man was over twenty years old it was only by a few weeks.

  It had to happen at some stage, but Dave had become used to being on his own. His new ‘co-pilot’ obviously knew the lingo; did that mean he’d been inside before? As was his habit now, Dave looked him over, assessing him for danger. He had short blond hair, a carefully trimmed beard with a handful of acne scars peeping through. Under his red polo shirt, the sag of his man-boobs suggested the lad was a stranger to a press-up.

  Angus’s hands were clasped and rested on his knees as he sat there in a slightly crouched position, jiggling his legs. He was nervous then. The aggressive welcome merely a weak attempt at disguise.

  ‘Here.’ The guy stood up and Dave could see he was about average height. Shorter than him, then. ‘Ah know you. You’re that cunt with the movie-star girlfriend who was supposed to huv abused that wee lassie.’

  Dave groaned. And was then on alert. He braced himself for an attack.

  ‘Ma granny says you didn’t do it. Says if you’re guilty she’s the Queen of Sheba. Whoever that is. Ma granny watches all they CSI programmes and guesses the murderer every time. It’s like magic or something. Pure genius.’ He held a hand out. ‘I’m Angus, by the way.’

  ‘Aye, you said.’ They shook hands. ‘Dave.’

  ‘Ah know yur name,’ Angus said. As he spoke he rubbed his scalp and his face pinked with pleasure. ‘Ah’m dubbed up with a bona-fide celebrity. How cool is that?’

  ‘Bin the celebrity shit, Angus.’

  ‘By the way,’ Angus looked at his face as if studying it, ‘your scars are healing up nicely. That was a pure shame what they done to you. Imagine scalding somebody. That’s pure evil.’ Angus shud­dered. Dave could judge by the careful attention to his beard and hair that Angus sported his fair share of vanity. Something like that would be his worst nightmare.