Gateshead. Strike remembered the Donald Laing he had found online. Had he moved from Gateshead to Corby? Or were they different men?
“Anyway,” said Mrs. Bunyan, “he’s never bothered Rhona and Ben again.”
“I’ll bet he hasn’t,” said Strike, picking up his knife and fork. “A copper and German Shepherds, eh? He’s not stupid.”
She seemed to take courage and comfort from his words, and with a timid, tearful smile began to pick at her macaroni cheese.
“They married young,” commented Strike, who was keen to hear anything he could about Laing, anything that might give a lead on his associations or habits.
She nodded, swallowed and said:
“Far too young. She started seeing him when she was only fifteen and we didn’t like it. We’d heard things about Donnie Laing. There was a young girl who said he’d forced himself on her at the Young Farmers’ disco. It never came to anything: the police said there wasn’t enough evidence. We tried to warn Rhona he was trouble,” she sighed, “but that made her more determined. She was always headstrong, our Rhona.”
“He’d already been accused of rape?” asked Strike. His fish and chips were excellent. The pub was filling up, for which he was gratefuclass="underline" the barmaid’s attention was diverted from them.
“Oh yes. They’re a rough family,” said Mrs. Bunyan, with the sort of prim small-town snobbery that Strike knew well from his own upbringing. “All those brothers, they were always fighting, in trouble with the police, but he was the worst of them. His own brothers didn’t like him. I don’t think his mother liked him much, tae tell the truth. There was a rumor,” she said in a burst of confidence, “that he wasnae the father’s. The parents were always fighting and they separated round about the time she got pregnant with Donnie. They say she had a run-around with one of the local policemen, as a matter of fact. I don’t know whether it’s true. The policeman moved on and Mr. Laing moved back in, but Mr. Laing never liked Donnie, I know that. Never liked him at all. People said it was because he knew Donnie wasn’t his.
“He was the wildest of all of them. A big lad. He got into the junior sevens—”
“Sevens?”
“The rugby sevens,” she said, and even this small, genteel lady was surprised that Strike did not immediately understand what, to Melrose, seemed more religion than sport. “But they kicked him out. No discipline. Someone carved up Greenyards the week after they kicked him out. The pitch,” she added, in response to the Englishman’s mystifying ignorance.
The port was making her talkative. Words were tumbling out of her now.
“He took up boxing instead. He had the gift of the gab, though, oh aye. When Rhona first took up with him — she was fifteen and he was seventeen — I had some folk telling me he wasn’t a bad lad really. Oh, aye,” she repeated, nodding at Strike’s look of disbelief. “Folk that didn’t know him so well were took in by him. He could be charming when he wanted to, Donnie Laing.
“But you just ask Walter Gilchrist whether he was charming. Walter sacked him off the farm — he was always being late — and someone set fire to his barn after. Oh, they never proved it was Donnie. They never proved it was him who wrecked the pitch, neither, but I know what I believe.
“Rhona wouldn’t listen. She thought she knew him. He was misunderstood and I don’t know what else. We were prejudiced, narrow-minded. He wanted tae join the army. Good riddance, I thought. I hoped she’d forget him if he left.
“Then he came back. He got her pregnant but she lost it. She was angry with me because I said—”
She did not want to tell him what she had said, but Strike could imagine.
“—and then she wouldn’t talk to me anymore, and she went and married him on his next leave. Her dad and I weren’t invited,” she said. “Off to Cyprus together. But I know he killed our cat.”
“What?” said Strike, thrown.
“I know it was him. We’d told Rhona she was making an awful mistake, last time we saw her before she married him. That night we couldn’t find Purdy. Next day she was on the back lawn, dead. The vet said she’d been strangled.”
On the plasma screen over her shoulder a scarlet-clad Dimitar Berbatov was celebrating a goal against Fulham. The air was full of Borders voices. Glasses clinked and cutlery tinkled as Strike’s companion talked of death and mutilation.
“I know he did it, I know he killed Purdy,” she said feverishly. “Look at what he did to Rhona and the baby. He’s evil.”
Her hands fumbled with the catch on her bag and pulled out a small wad of photographs.
“My husband always says, ‘Why are you keeping them? Burn them.’ But I always thought we might need pictures of him one day. There,” she said, thrusting them into Strike’s eager hands. “You have them, you keep them. Gateshead. That’s where he went next.”
Later, after she had left with renewed tears and thanks, after he had paid the bill, Strike walked to Millers of Melrose, a family butcher he had noticed on his stroll around the town. There he treated himself to some venison pies that he suspected would be far tastier than anything he would be able to purchase at the station before boarding the sleeper back to London.
Returning to the car park via a short street where golden roses bloomed, Strike thought again about the tattoo on that powerful forearm.
Once, years ago, it had meant something to Donnie Laing to belong to this lovely town, surrounded by farmland and overlooked by the triple peaks of Eildon Hill. Yet he had been no straightforward worker of the soil, no team player, no asset to a place that seemed to pride itself on discipline and honest endeavor. Melrose had spat out the burner of barns, the strangler of cats, the carver-up of rugby fields, so Laing had taken refuge in a place where many men had found either their salvation or their inevitable comeuppance: the British Army. When that had led to jail, and jail disgorged him, he had tried to come home, but nobody had wanted him.
Had Donald Laing found a warmer welcome in Gateshead? Had he moved from there to Corby? Or, Strike wondered, as he folded himself back into Hardacre’s Mini, had these been mere stopping posts on his way to London and Strike?
17
The Girl That Love Made Blind
Tuesday morning. It was asleep after what It said had been a long, hard night. Like he fucking cared, although he had to act like he did. He had persuaded It to go and lie down, and when It began to breathe deeply and evenly he watched It for a while, imagining choking the fucking life out of It, seeing Its eyes open and Its struggle for breath, Its face slowly turning purple...
When he had been sure that he would not wake It, he had left the bedroom quietly, pulled on a jacket and slipped out into the early morning air to find The Secretary. This was his first chance of following her in days and he was too late to pick up the trail at her home station. The best he could do was to lurk around the mouth of Denmark Street.
He spotted her from a distance: that bright, wavy strawberry-blonde head was unmistakable. The vain bitch must like standing out in the crowd or she’d cover it or cut it or dye it. They all wanted attention, he knew that for a fact: all of them.
As she moved closer, his infallible instinct for other people’s moods told him something had changed. She was looking down as she walked, hunch-shouldered, oblivious to the other workers swarming around her, clutching bags, coffees and phones.
He passed right by her in the opposite direction, drawing so close that he could have smelled her perfume if they had not been in that bustling street full of car fumes and dust. He might have been a traffic bollard. That annoyed him a little, even though it had been his intention to pass by her unnoticed. He had singled her out, but she treated him with indifference.