She looked at the label and a reluctant smile brought light to her dark eyes. She held the door wide and I brushed past her into the sitting room. In the hours since I’d left, she’d made something of an effort to clear the place up. The bottle and broken glass were gone. Chairs righted. There were still feathers everywhere. I turned as she came into the room behind me.
‘Got some cotton wool?’
She nodded and went through to the kitchen, returning with soft, coloured balls of cotton wool in a clear plastic bag. I sat down on the settee beside her, soaking a ball with the witch hazel and applying it liberally to the bruising on her face and arms.
In keeping with the rabbit eyes, she sat like one caught in the headlights and just let me do it. A patient and long-suffering creature who has learned through experience that resistance is pointless. I was so focused on what I was doing, I didn’t notice at first that although she was facing straight ahead, she had turned her eyes in my direction and was staring at me. It came as something of a shock, and I think I might have blushed.
‘What?’ I said.
‘Did Lee do that to you?’
And I felt my hand go involuntarily to the swelling on my forehead. I nodded.
‘Why are you doing this?’
It was a good question. Why was I? I couldn’t admit that I fancied her. Cos it wasn’t really that. I mean, I fancied lots of birds. But there was something... compelling about her. Yeah, that’s the word. In some way beyond my control, I had felt compelled to come back. It wasn’t a decision I took, or a choice I had made. It was her fault, not mine. But all I said was, ‘I hate bullies.’
She smiled sadly. ‘So do I.’
‘So why do you stay with him?’
She just shrugged. There was a word I’d come across recently. Lassitude. It means kind of lethargic. Lacking energy. That’s what she was like. As if the hand that life had dealt her owed everything to fate and nothing to choice. ‘It’s complicated.’
‘Then try and explain it to me.’
‘Why?’ She turned genuinely puzzled eyes towards me.
‘Because...’ She was asking such simple questions and I was finding them so hard to answer. ‘Because I’m concerned.’
Her smile then was dismissive, as if to say that I shouldn’t be wasting my time, or my concern. She said, ‘He’s not always like he was tonight.’ Her eyes turned down towards wringing fingers between her knees. ‘Not when he’s sober. Tomorrow he’ll be a different man. You wouldn’t recognise him. The place’ll be full of flowers, and chocolates. He’ll have booked us a table in a nice restaurant somewhere...’ Her voice trailed away and she cast uncertain eyes towards me, as if fearing I wouldn’t believe her. ‘He treats me well. Spoils me.’
‘Aye, until the next time.’
And she saw her own doubt reflected in my scepticism.
‘Listen...’ I took one of her hands in mine. ‘You can get away from him if you want. I can recommend a refuge. There are good people there. You’ll be safe. It’ll be the first step to a new life. One where being battered by a drunk today isn’t the price you pay for being spoiled tomorrow.’
She drew her hand quickly away from mine and wouldn’t meet my eye. ‘Lee would never let me go. He’d track me down. He’d find me.’
I found myself shaking my head, and knelt down in front of her to take her by the shoulders. It kind of forced her to look at me. ‘Mel, as long as I’m around, I’m not going to let him hurt you.’
And I saw such pain then in her black, black eyes. And felt the scorn in the breath that escaped with her words. She shook her head. ‘And when you’re not around?’
I met Tiny in the locker room when we started our shift at five the following afternoon. He was still in a mood with me, and we shared our own little pool of silence amid the banter of the guys finishing up and the officers just starting. No one seemed to notice. But there was a definite lull in the conversation when Joe Bailley stuck his head round the door and said that the sergeant wanted to see me and Tiny in his office toot sweet.
This was our regular sergeant. Not the duty officer on the charge bar from the night before. Frank Mulgrew was a big man with a ring of fuse-wire ginger hair around his otherwise bald pate.
‘Shut the door,’ he said when we went in, and we knew then that we were in trouble. He sat behind his desk and glared up at us from beneath bushy ginger brows. He lifted a handful of clipped sheets from the desk and dropped them again. ‘Medical report on one Lee Alexander Jardine. Extensive bruising, couple of cracked ribs, concussion, broken nose. Injuries not exactly consistent with a simple case of resisting arrest.’
I said, ‘He was drunk, Sarge. Headbutted me and came at Tiny fists flying.’
He cast a sceptical eye over the two of us. ‘Is that right?’ He lifted the medical report again. ‘A couple of big fellas like you needed to inflict this much damage just to restrain a drunk man?’ He almost threw it back on to the desk.
Me again. ‘He was well gone, Sarge, wouldn’t come quietly.’
Mulgrew got slowly to his feet, brown-speckled green eyes bathing us in the light of his contempt. He placed clenched fists on the desk in front of him and leaned forward on his knuckles. ‘You are so fucking lucky that Jardine’s common-law missus didn’t want to press charges against him. And he just wanted out of here so fast he wasn’t interested in raising a complaint against you two.’
‘You let him go?’ I couldn’t believe it.
‘Maybe you’d have preferred to face disciplinary charges, Brodie.’
Which shut me up.
Mulgrew raised himself up to his full and not inconsiderable height. ‘Cross the line one more time and I’ll make it my personal mission to see you both out of uniform before you can say Section 38. Now get the fuck out of my sight.’
Tiny didn’t say a word until we were safely ensconced in the BMW. Even then he just sat silent behind the wheel for the longest time before he turned a look on me that would have wilted flowers. I’d never felt the full force of his fury before. It came in softly spoken words that delivered each blow like a punch.
‘You ever do that to me again, Cammie, I’ll no’ stay silent. I’ll fucking shop you. I’ve worked hard to get where I am. No chance I’m going to throw it all away for some wanker with a hard-on.’
Chapter Six
Earlier Brodie had turned on lights all over the flat, tearing it apart to look for more whisky. Finding, finally, a drawerful of miniatures collected from flights and hotel rooms.
Now he sat in the sad, harsh light of the front room working his way through them, one after the other, as he watched more images of the past slide across the screen above the fireplace.
In the early photographs, when Addie was just a baby, Mel had been happy and radiant, and he lingered over them. But the increasingly haunted face she presented to the world in later years made him scroll more quickly by. Somehow, when someone close to you loses weight, and sadness leaches the life from their eyes, you’re not always aware of it. Not at the time. It’s only later, and with the benefit of hindsight, that you see it. The before and the after. And it is shocking. Brodie was shocked now that he hadn’t seen it in the moment. Or maybe hadn’t wanted to. And couldn’t face the self-recrimination on top of his self-pity.
He focused instead on Addie. How easy it was in the digital age to take photographs and videos. Hundreds of them, thousands of them. Most languishing on hard drives and SD cards, seldom viewed beyond the taking. But there could hardly have been a generation in history whose lives had been more visually chronicled than Addie’s.