I could scarcely believe it. Until I ran my mind back over the previous few weeks. The number of times she’d been meeting this girlfriend or that. And it felt then like my life had just ended.
I didn’t even notice her coming back into the kitchen. Didn’t hear her when she spoke to me. At least, not the first time. Then I heard her saying, ‘Cam, Cam, are you with us?’
I looked up, and she had her phone in her hand. ‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘I was away in a dwam.’ But she was the one not listening now, as she read her text, and suddenly slipped her phone in the back pocket of her jeans like it was burning her fingers. I knew then that I had lost her.
She thought I was on duty Friday night. But I swapped shifts, and I was sitting in my car at the back of the parking lot at the Leonardo Inn for a good half hour before the seven o’clock rendezvous.
I saw Jardine arrive first in a beat-up old Tesla. So they’d given him his licence back, in spite of everything. Either that, or he was driving illegally. But long gone was the flash, expensive sports car. Which no doubt was something he could no longer afford.
He got out of his banger and propped his arse on the bonnet to light a cigarette and wait. She was nearly ten minutes late, finally arriving in one of the new generation of black e-cabs. Dressed to the nines and all made up for the big date. Lipstick, eye shadow, the lot. As if she needed somehow to impress him. Thirty-six years old, and she was still a fine-looking woman. But I loved her in her baggy old jog pants and T-shirt, without a trace of make-up.
I sat there behind the wheel of my car with tears filling my eyes. It was loss I felt more than anger. I could never be angry with Mel. She was so innocent. Even in her betrayal.
Jardine threw away his cigarette and when she ran to him, they kissed. Not just a casual, ‘hi there’ sort of kiss. It was longer than that, lips that lingered, turning the knife in me. As if I wasn’t hurting enough. Then they laughed, and he held her hand as they ran lightly up the steps to push open glass doors into reception.
I sat for what must have been ten minutes or more, knuckles turning white as I gripped the wheel in front of me. What was I going to do? Turn around and drive away? Accept that life with Mel as I’d known it was over? It would have been impossible for me to pretend that I didn’t know about her and Jardine. If I wanted to keep her, I was going to have to fight for her.
The girl at reception was flustered when I thrust my warrant card in her face and demanded to know the room number of the couple who had just checked in. She wasn’t to know that I didn’t have that authority. And she didn’t need to check her records. She remembered it. Room 347.
I took the elevator up to the third floor, trying to not even think about what I was doing, holding every emotion in check. I was like some kind of container under pressure, ready to explode. I walked along a carpeted hallway and stopped in front of Room 347 to rap on the door. There was no magic eye in it, so he wouldn’t be able to see me.
‘What is it?’ his voice barked from somewhere inside the room. A gravelly, smoker’s voice grated raw by years of alcohol abuse. I wondered how he’d managed inside, but prison security was like Swiss cheese in those days.
I put on a posh voice. ‘Richard from reception, sir. There’s a problem with your electrics.’
‘What the fuck?’
‘The management’s apologies, sir, but we’ll have to move you to another room.’
I heard banging about behind the door before it flew open, and a semi-dressed Jardine filled the frame of it. There was no time even for surprise to register on his coupon before I put my shoulder in his chest, and we both went barrelling backwards into the room.
I heard Mel scream as I landed on top of him, and his foul breath exploded in my face. Just as all my pent-up fury exploded in the fists I slammed into his. I reckon I broke his nose and took out a couple of teeth with the first three blows. Then I punched him in the throat and he couldn’t breathe. He was bucking beneath me like a demented horse, and I kept hitting him till I couldn’t see his face for blood.
I was barely aware of Mel screaming at me, trying to pull me off, before finally the veil of madness lifted and I got to my feet with bruised and bleeding knuckles. Jardine lay on the floor gasping for breath, blood bubbling from between split lips.
I pulled myself free of Mel’s grasp, and my eyes must have been on fire, because she recoiled from me as if I might hit her. As if I would. As if I ever would. Her blouse was open and I could see the black lacy bra against the white of her skin beneath it. Everything I didn’t want to see. I grabbed her jacket from the bed and told her to put it on. She was coming with me.
It was only later, I guess, that I realised I had no right. That by removing her choice, I wasn’t treating her any better than Jardine. I’m ashamed now of what I did. But when I look back on it, I’m not sure I would have done anything different. If only I could have spared Mel the hurt and humiliation.
She snatched her bag from the dresser as I dragged her from the room. Jardine had pulled himself up on to one elbow by now. And I could see only murder in the eyes that blinked away blood. ‘I’ll fucking get you, Brodie. Count on it. You’ll fucking regret this, both of you.’
I pulled the door shut on him and hurried Mel away down the hall to the elevator.
The girl at reception stared at us, wide-eyed, as we ran across the lobby and out into the dying light of the day. I no longer had to drag Mel behind me. She came without resistance. That passive acceptance she always had of everything that life threw at her.
We sat for a long time in the car without saying a word. Staring sightlessly out of the windscreen, breathing hard, filling the air with our spent oxygen and all our regrets. When I finally turned to look at her, silent tears ran freely down her face. She said, in a voice so brittle it damn near broke my heart, ‘I’m so sorry, Cam. He... he threatened Addie if I didn’t see him.’ And I thought there didn’t seem anything threatening in the kiss I’d seen them exchange just fifteen minutes earlier. Maybe she read my mind, because she said, ‘It doesn’t mean anything.’
And I closed my eyes to shut out the pain, because I knew it meant everything.
‘I can’t even explain it...’ Her words came staccato through her sobs. ‘He... he just has this hold on me.’
I dropped my head on to bloody hands clutching the steering wheel. I whispered, ‘Tell me you won’t see him again.’
‘I swear, Cammie, I swear it.’
But I knew she would.
Chapter Twenty
Addie climbed now in silence, her face as white as the snow in which she left traces, just a little colour rising in patches high on her cheeks. She had listened to her father in silence as they stood on the incline beneath the pines, before turning without comment to continue the climb towards the old military road somewhere up ahead.
Brodie felt hollowed out, as if letting go of everything he had kept to himself all this time had left a gaping hole inside him. Nothing rushed in to fill the void. Not even regret. And he wondered how something as full of nothing as emptiness could weigh so heavily.
Wearily he started off after her and they climbed in silence for another fifteen minutes or more, before emerging finally from the trees and on to the unbroken snow-covered military road that cut its way around the side of the hill. It was exposed here, and they could see all the way back down into the valley. The mountains that rose steeply from the banks of the loch pierced a troubled sky, and the clouds which had earlier obscured them seemed anxious now to pass them by, blown east on the first breath of the coming storm. Brodie felt it, too, in his face. Like an icy hand brushing cold flesh.