Mindful of the journey back to Edinburgh in Hardacre’s car, he bought himself half a pint of John Smith’s and sat down on a leather-covered sofa facing the bar, perusing the laminated menu and hoping that Margaret Bunyan would be punctual, because he had just realized that he was hungry.
She appeared a mere five minutes later. Although he could barely remember what her daughter looked like and had never met Mrs. Bunyan before, her expression of mingled apprehension and anticipation gave her away as she paused, staring at him, on the doormat.
Strike got up and she stumbled forwards, both hands gripping the strap of a large black handbag.
“It is you,” she said breathlessly.
She was around sixty, small and fragile-looking, wearing metal-framed glasses, her expression anxious beneath tightly permed fair hair.
Strike held out a large hand and shook hers, which trembled slightly, cold and fine-boned.
“Her dad’s over in Hawick today, he can’t come, I rang him, he said to tell you we’ll never forget what you did for Rhona,” she said on a single breath. She sank down beside Strike on the sofa, continuing to observe him with mingled awe and nerves. “We’ve never forgot. We read about you in the papers. We were so sorry about your leg. What you did for Rhona! What you did—”
Her eyes were suddenly brimful of tears.
“—we were so...”
“I’m glad I was able to—”
Find her child tied naked and bloodstained on a bed? Talking to relatives about what the people they loved had endured was one of the worst parts of the job.
“—able to help her.”
Mrs. Bunyan blew her nose on a handkerchief retrieved from the bottom of her black handbag. He could tell that she was of the generation of women who would never usually enter a pub alone and certainly not buy drinks at a bar if a man were there to undertake the ordeal for them.
“Let me get you something.”
“Just an orange juice,” she said breathlessly, dabbing at her eyes.
“And something to eat,” Strike urged, keen to order the beer-battered haddock and chips for himself.
When he had placed their order at the bar and returned to her, she asked what he was doing in Melrose and the source of her nervousness became apparent at once.
“He’s not come back, has he? Donnie? Is he back?”
“Not as far as I know,” said Strike. “I don’t know where he is.”
“D’you think he’s got something to do...?”
Her voice had dropped to a whisper.
“We read in the paper... we saw that someone sent you a — a—”
“Yes,” said Strike. “I don’t know whether he’s got anything to do with it, but I’d like to find him. Apparently he’s been back here to see his mother since leaving jail.”
“Och, four or five years ago, that would’ve been,” said Margaret Bunyan. “He turned up on her doorstep, forced his way into the bungalow. She’s got Alzheimer’s now. She couldn’t stop him, but the neighbors called his brothers and they came and threw him out.”
“They did, did they?”
“Donnie’s the youngest. He’s got four older brothers. They’re hard men,” said Mrs. Bunyan, “all of them. Jamie stays in Selkirk — he came tearing through to get Donnie out of his mother’s house. They say he knocked him senseless.”
She took a tremulous sip of her orange juice and continued:
“We heard all about it. Our friend Brian, who you just met, he saw the fight happening out on the street. Four of them onto one, all of them shouting and yelling. Someone called the police. Jamie got a caution. He didn’t care,” said Mrs. Bunyan. “They didn’t want him anywhere near them, or their mother. They ran him out of town.
“I was terrified,” she continued. “For Rhona. He’d always said he’d find her when he got out.”
“And did he?” asked Strike.
“Och, yes,” said Margaret Bunyan miserably. “We knew he would. She’d moved tae Glasgow, got a job in a travel agent’s. He still found her. Six months she lived in fear of him turning up and then one day he did. Came to her flat one night, but he’d been ill. He wasn’t the same.”
“Ill?” repeated Strike sharply.
“I can’t remember what it was he’d got, some kind of arthritis, I think, and Rhona said he’d put on a lot of weight. He turned up at her flat at night, he’d tracked her down, but thanks be to God,” said Mrs. Bunyan fervently, “her fiancé was staying over. His name’s Ben,” she added, with a triumphal flourish, the color high in her faded cheeks, “and he’s a policeman.”
She said it as though she thought Strike would be especially glad to hear this, as though he and Ben were comembers of some great investigative brotherhood.
“They’re married now,” said Mrs. Bunyan. “No kids, because — well, you know why—”
And without warning, a torrent of tears burst forth, streaming down Mrs. Bunyan’s face behind her glasses. The horror of what had happened a decade ago was suddenly fresh and raw, as though a pile of offal had been dumped on the table in front of them.
“—Laing stuck a knife up inside her,” whispered Mrs. Bunyan.
She confided in him as though Strike were a doctor or a priest, telling him the secrets that weighed on her, but which she could not tell her friends: he already knew the worst. As she groped again for the handkerchief in her square black bag, Strike remembered the wide patch of blood on the sheets, the excoriated skin on her wrist where Rhona had tried to free herself. Thank God her mother could not see inside his head.
“He stuck a knife inside — and they tried to — you know — repair—”
Mrs. Bunyan took a deep, shuddering breath as two plates of food appeared in front of them.
“But she and Ben have lovely holidays,” she whispered frantically, dabbing repeatedly at her hollow cheeks, lifting her glasses to reach her eyes. “And they breed — they breed German — German Shepherds.”
Hungry though he was, Strike could not eat in the immediate aftermath of discussing what had been done to Rhona Laing.
“She and Laing had a baby, didn’t they?” he asked, remembering its feeble whimpering from beside its bloodstained, dehydrated mother. “The kid must be, what, ten by now?”
“He d-died,” she whispered, tears dripping off the end of her chin. “C-cot death. He was always sickly, the bairn. It happened two d-days after they put D-Donnie away. And h-he — Donnie — he telephoned her out of the jail and told her he knew she’d killed — killed — the baby — and that he’d kill her when he got out—”
Strike laid a large hand briefly on the sobbing woman’s shoulder, then hoisted himself to his feet and approached the young barmaid who was watching them with her mouth open. Brandy seemed too strong for the sparrow-like creature behind him. Strike’s Aunt Joan, who was only a little older than Mrs. Bunyan, always regarded port as medicinal. He ordered a glass and took it back to her.
“Here. Drink this.”
His reward was a recrudescence of tears, but after much more dabbing with the sodden handkerchief she said shakily, “You’re very kind,” sipped it, gave a little gasping sigh and blinked at him, her fair-lashed eyes pink like a piglet’s.
“Have you got any idea where Laing went after turning up at Rhona’s?”
“Yes,” she whispered. “Ben put out feelers through work, through the probation office. Apparently he went to Gateshead, but I don’t know whether he’s still there.”