He stood in the dock flanked by a couple of uniformed officers. He seemed unrepentant, and I figured that the social work reports that the judge had received probably made pretty grim reading. When asked if he had anything to say, he just shook his head.
‘Speak up for the record,’ the judge told him.
‘No comment, Your Honour.’
Twenty years was the decision. Some in the court might have thought that harsh. Personally, I thought life would have been too fucking short.
Jardine himself showed no emotion. Just before they led him down to the cells, he turned and scanned the benches behind him. His gaze fell on me, and lingered there for a moment. I had no idea how much he knew about me and Mel, if anything, but for those brief seconds I felt bathed in his hatred, before he glanced at Mel, and a sick, sad smile washed momentarily across his face.
I was parked on the other side of the river, and sat waiting there for Mel for nearly half an hour after the sentencing was over. I was beginning to think she’d stood me up when I saw her trauchling across the Albert Bridge. She looked like she had the weight of the world on her shoulders, and there was something infinitely sad about the way she held herself.
I’d seen her only a couple of times, and briefly, since the crash. I had no idea what she’d had to deal with, what kind of relationship she had with Jardine’s relatives, or the friends who had probably come to Soutra Place to offer comfort and who knew what else. I was sure she must have been to visit Jardine in the remand wing at Barlinnie. All of which meant I had no real idea where we stood now. And, in all likelihood, no say in where we went from here.
She slipped into the passenger seat and sat gazing out the windscreen, back across the river towards the High Court. I couldn’t even bring myself to speak. Afraid that, whatever I said, it would be the wrong thing. I saw a single tear track its way slowly down her cheek. She said, ‘My mother had a weakness for the horses. Had an account with the local bookie. Sometimes she’d place her bet by phone. But more often than not, she went to the bookie’s in person. They always made a fuss of her there. And quite often she’d take me. Showing me off. She was still a good-looking woman then and liked folk to think we were sisters. I was probably only fifteen when I first met Lee there.’
She glanced at me. She knew I didn’t like her to talk about him, so this was the first time I’d heard how they met.
‘He had a sort of wide-boy charm, you know. My mum was a good bit older than him, of course, but I think he quite fancied her. He could make her laugh, and he worked hard at it.’ She paused, lost in wordless recollection. ‘I was eighteen when my mum OD’d. The guys from the bookie’s all came to the funeral, and it was Lee who took me home after.’ She shrugged. ‘That was the start of it, I suppose.’
And I had the first inkling of what it was that drew her to him like a moth to the flame. He was more than a lover. He was the father figure she’d never known. No matter how abusive he got, he was some kind of anchor. Gave her life shape and stability, even if the only predictability in it was that he would get drunk every weekend and raise his fists to her. I remembered her telling me that first time we met how he’d bring her flowers and chocolates, and take her out to nice restaurants after the violence. His way of showing penitence for the way he was when he drank.
I said, ‘It’s over, Mel. You’re free of him.’
She turned and looked at me. ‘Free?’
‘To start a new life. Build a future that doesn’t include violence and abuse.’
She nodded and wiped away that single tear. ‘I’m pregnant, Cam.’
I was so shocked, at first I couldn’t even speak. I was scared to ask, but I had to know. ‘Is it... mine?’
She nodded.
‘How can you be sure?’
And she raised her voice, just a little, to lend it certainty. ‘Because I am.’ She looked at me so directly then that I very nearly had to look away. ‘That new future you see for me, Cam: it won’t be anything if it doesn’t include the father of my child.’ As if she thought for one moment that I would let her go. Either of them.
It took her less than a month to settle affairs at Soutra Place and move in with me at Maryhill. Free of Jardine, she seemed like a different person, and there was no impediment to our relationship being whatever we wanted it to be.
Some nights we sat up in bed watching TV, eating ice cream from a local deli and drinking port. Well, I drank the port. Mel wouldn’t touch alcohol till after the birth. We made love at any time of the day or night. Whenever the notion took us.
She wasn’t much of a cook, so we lived mostly on carry-out pizza, or Indian or Chinese. We ate out a lot, and she made me take her to the ballet at the Theatre Royal. She’d always wanted to go, she said. I suppose all little girls are drawn to the ballet for some reason. We sat in the front seats. Close enough to hear the thumping and grunting, and smell the elephant odour of straining bodies sweating in nylon. She loved it. I hated it. And we laughed about it long and hard in the pub afterwards.
Mel was presenting quite a bump when we got married six months into her pregnancy. It was a dead simple affair at the registry office in Martha Street. Tiny was my best man. His Sheila was Mel’s best maid. They met for the first time on the street outside. Witnesses, the registrar called them. And they were, indeed, the only folk to witness the short ceremony. We had an awkward biryani afterwards at their favourite Indian in Shawlands, and me and Mel were just happy to get home and carefully consummate our new-found status as man and wife. God, how I loved that girl!
Three months later, Addie came into our lives and we moved to a semi in a south-side suburb with a wee pocket-handkerchief square of garden at the back. I built Addie a swing, and a see-saw. I taught her to ride a bike, how to swim. I adored that wee girl, and she loved her daddy.
In the years that followed, Tiny and I sat and passed all our exams and moved up the ladder. CID, plain clothes, working now out of the new HQ at Pacific Quay. Tiny and I were still pals, though me and Mel hardly ever saw him and Sheila as a couple. Sheila still didn’t like me much, and the feeling was still mutual. And I’m sure she disapproved of Mel.
Where do the years go? I mean, it seemed like no time since me and Mel were meeting secretly at the Cafe21. And now Addie was in her teens, all hormonal and awkward and doing her best to piss me off at every turn. I think, maybe, she was closer to her mum in those years. But we were a family, even if Mel never did get pregnant again, and there was a lot of love there. We’d moved into a red sandstone semi in Pollokshields by then, and Addie had not long turned seventeen the day I logged in at Pacific Quay to find Tiny sitting at my desk in the detectives’ office. He was swivelling back and forth in my chair, legs akimbo, sucking on the rim of a disposable coffee cup.
In my usual polite way, I told him to fuck off out of my chair. But he didn’t budge, just sat there staring at me thoughtfully. Then he said, ‘You heard?’
‘Heard what?’
He hesitated for just a moment. ‘Lee Alexander Jardine is out on licence.’
Chapter Sixteen
A muffled thud from somewhere deep in the hotel startled him.
The fire he had lit earlier was a faint glow as the last of its embers turned to ash. The snow outside was still blowing hard against the window, even wetter now, and running down it in sleety rivulets. A few moments before, he had forced himself to drain his glass. There was no real escape in the drink, he knew that. There never had been. He had learned long ago that no matter how much you drank, everything that made you seek refuge in it was still there in the morning, when you woke with a splitting head and a mouth so dry it was an effort to peel your tongue off the roof of it. But as his old history teacher had been fond of saying, the only thing we learn from history is that we never learn from history.