He was gone in a moment. The same moment in which I realised just what it was I had done. How he had managed somehow to drag me down to his level, and lower. I threw the knife into the river as if the haft of it was burning my hand, and looked quickly around. But there was no one to witness my descent into hell. The same place to which I had just dispatched Lee Jardine. Not a living soul in sight. Cars rumbled by on the road bridge, headlights catching the falling rain. Folk on their way home, or out for the night. I looked down and saw Jardine’s blood glistening wet all over the front of my coat. I stripped it off and rolled it up to tuck under my arm, and started running. Back towards the lights of the city. Back to the dark side street where I had left my car.
In preparation for the murder I never really believed I would commit, I’d stowed a roll of bin liners and a pack of hand wipes in the boot. I tore a bag from the roll and stuffed my coat into it, having checked the pockets for anything incriminating. Then I cleaned my hands on the disinfectant wipes I tore from the packet. There didn’t seem to be any blood on my trousers or my shoes. But I wasn’t going to take any chances.
It took me less than fifteen minutes to drive home to Pollokshields. I left the car in the drive and went in through the back door. Addie was out for the evening, and Mel had gone early to bed. I stripped off in the kitchen. Everything — shoes, socks, trousers, underpants — and stuffed them into another bin bag. Then I snuck upstairs to the guest shower room and stood under steaming hot water for a good five minutes, trying to wash away the guilt. Mel took up most of the wardrobe space in our room, so I kept my stuff in the guest room. I went in there to slip into clean clothes and tiptoe back down to the kitchen.
I threw the bin bag into the boot alongside the one with the coat and the discarded wipes, and drove west towards Paisley. It was somewhere on the Renfrew Road that I dropped the floor mat from the driver’s side of the car, along with the bin bags, into a large wheely bin whose contents would be destined for landfill. And I sat in the car, eyes closed, drawing the breath that I had just robbed from another human being. My heart was still hammering at my ribs, fit to burst, and all the regrets I would carry with me for the rest of my life came pressing in around me in the dark. The ghosts that would haunt me all my days.
I guess Jardine would have been missed when he failed to turn up for work the next day. Maybe he didn’t show for a meet with his mates at the Brazen Head. But the alarm bells wouldn’t have gone off full gong until he missed his first appointment with the parole officer.
I didn’t know, didn’t want to seem interested. It was only when Tiny told me one day that Jardine had gone AWOL and there was a warrant out for his arrest that I knew it was all going to come to a head soon enough.
I had no idea if he and Mel had been in touch in the time following the debacle at the Leonardo. I knew, or at least was pretty certain, that they hadn’t met. But there must have been some line of communication between them, because in the weeks following that night under the George V Bridge, she became more and more withdrawn. If she had been expecting to hear from him, she must have wondered why he hadn’t been in touch. Maybe she tried to contact him, I don’t know. But the change in her was palpable.
I kept expecting to hear that they’d pulled him out of the Clyde. But it was almost three weeks before they did. Well downriver, near the Erskine Bridge. Of course, the body was decayed beyond recognition by then, but DNA identified him fast enough. The post-mortem located the fatal stab wound, and the traces of cocaine found in the pocket of his jacket led investigators to the conclusion that his murder was probably the result of a drug deal gone wrong. I knew there wouldn’t be much effort made in trying to find his killer.
I suppose I thought then that I was home free. But it didn’t really feel like it. I would never be brought to civil justice, perhaps, but natural justice has a way of finding you. There were other ways I would pay for killing that man.
I never told Mel about his body being taken from the river, or the results of the post-mortem. I was stupid to think that I could keep it from her. And sure enough, she heard. I don’t know where, or how, but she did. Mentioned it to me one night at dinner, and I had to admit that I knew. I mean, she wouldn’t have believed it if I’d claimed otherwise.
She seemed quite philosophical about it. Accepting, in that way of hers. As if she’d just heard that he was back in the Bar-L.
I really did think we were going to come through it, me and Mel. Until the night I got sent home early to find the cop cars and the ambulance in the street, and Mel dead in the bath.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Addie’s face, even from behind the wash of soft warm light that came from the wood burner, was paler than he had ever seen it. Her eyes were wide. He could see the shock in them.
Her voice came in barely a whisper. ‘You murdered him.’
Brodie nodded, unable to maintain eye contact. He said, ‘You always blamed me for the death of your mother. And you were right. Just not in the way that you thought.’ He closed his eyes to focus on control of his breathing. ‘Yes, I killed the man. And if I had my time over, God help me, I’d probably do it again. But what I know now, that I didn’t know then, was that in taking his life, I effectively ended Mel’s, too. In sliding that blade between his ribs, I might just as well have used it to cut your mother’s wrists.’
If Addie had been shocked by his confession, it was possible that she was even more shocked now to see the tears that coursed down his face. Silent tears, a muted weeping that he choked back to swell in his throat and make his head pulse. Her eyes drifted down to the piece of paper that he had been turning over and over again in his fingers during the telling of his story.
‘What is that?’ she demanded, and he looked down to see how he had mangled the printout from Sita’s DNA reader. He crumpled it up in his hand, and held it tight in his fist.
‘Dr Roy had this new piece of kit,’ he said. ‘A portable DNA sampler capable of producing a reading at a crime scene.’ He hesitated, his heart full of dread. ‘I asked her to sample your DNA and mine.’
He felt her sudden fear reach out to him all the way across the room. ‘Why?’
‘I wanted to know if there was a familial match.’
‘You said Mum told you—’
He cut her off. ‘She did.’
‘And you didn’t believe her?’
‘I did.’ He paused. ‘Ninety-nine per cent of me did. Probably because it’s what I always wanted to believe.’
‘And the one per cent?’
‘Doubt. That tiny, shitty, niggling little grain of doubt that eats away at your soul until you just have to put it to bed. You just have to know.’
Her voice was very quiet. ‘And now you do.’
He nodded.
‘And?’
He pushed the crumpled piece of paper into his pocket and forced himself to look at her very directly. It was almost painful to see the dread in her eyes. He said, ‘Addie, I would never have told you about killing Jardine if I’d believed I was responsible for the death of both of your parents.’
Chapter Thirty
Brodie had no sense of there being a moment when he drifted off to sleep, and he was startled to be awakened by the sound of a door opening.
Addie stood in the hall, kitted out as if she were intent on climbing a mountain. Her hair was tucked up under a dark blue woollen hat, and she clutched Cameron in her arms. He wore a parka and welly boots and mitts, and a cagoule that folded around his neck to keep him warm, his sleepy little face peering out from behind soft grey fabric.