Maggie picked up the last of the five head shots. It showed a woman, not old, of indeterminate age, with a severe hair arrangement, sharp eyes and an even sharper frown. "What about her?" she asked.
"One doesn't like to be unkind, but what about her, indeed. Who stole her scone, do you think?"
"I don't know," Maggie muttered. "But I wouldn't like to be him when she finds him. Do you know her?"
"Would her own mother know her from that likeness? No, I don't think I can help you with her." She laid the photograph back on the table, and looked at it again. "And yet…" She took a pen from the pocket of her cardigan and laid it across the woman's eyes. "There's a girl about the town, an odd lass. They say she's very bright; to my knowledge she has a first in chemistry. She did a teacher training course, but that ended when she assaulted a girl who was rude to her.
After that, she worked for a while for one of the children's charities, as a clerk, until they got rid of her for sending an offensive letter to one of the patrons. Then she went to work in the office of a New
Town hotel, but she was moved on from that; a resident swore in her hearing and she emptied a vase of flowers over his head. After that her father brought her to me, in the vain hope that I could find her a job. That could be her, only…"
She picked up the photograph again, took the pen and drew a pair of spectacles, roughly over the eyes. "Only when I met her she was wearing big thick glasses. That's the girl; I'm sure of it. Her name's Andrea Strachan, and her father's a lecturer in religious studies at Napier."
"Where can we find her?"
"If I hadn't seen that photograph, I'd have said you could have found her in the Royal Edinburgh Hospital. Last I heard, she was sectioned after she tried to set fire to a church."
Twenty-two
Pops said he was old, Alex thought, as she looked across the coffee table in the sparsely furnished room, but that was an understatement. Brother Aidan, the superintendent of Oak Lodge, was an ancient, twinkling, nutmeg of a man, a tiny figure with skin like well worn leather, sharp features and sparse, wispy, flyaway hair. Looking at him Skinner's daughter was struck by his resemblance to a character in the Star Wars series… a character depicted by a puppet.
"Did it strike you as odd that I offered you a drink," he asked her father, in vibrant Irish tones, 'here of all places, where it's a problem to so many?"
The big detective grinned. "Now that you mention it, I suppose it did."
"Nothing odd about it at all. My friends who live here don't do so on the basis that they keep off the drink. Some of them just can't, poor souls, or they wouldn't be here in the first place."
"How many people do you have here?" Alex asked him.
"Up to twenty-five, my dear. God knows there's a need for more places, but we have to strike a balance with the feelings of our neighbours."
The hostel was situated in a residential suburb on the western side of the Clyde coast town, on a hillside looking across the Firth to Dunoon.
"They're good folks in the main," Brother Aidan went on, 'but if we tried to expand this place, one or two of them might object. And I'd understand why, too. My friends here are all good people too, at heart, but some of them can get a bit obstreperous from time to time."
"What's the mix among the, um, residents?" asked Skinner.
The little priest scratched his chin. "The mix? They're just men, all of them, people who would like to live in normal society, in a normal home, but with problems that make it difficult, nay, impossible, for them to do that. With some it's mental illness. With a few, it's personality disorders.
With others, it's just the drink. With one or two, like your poor brother Michael, it's both."
He rocked back in his chair, and took a long look at his visitors, his sharp gaze finally coming to rest on Bob. "So he's dead, then, my old friend."
"I'm afraid so."
"He was here the longest, you know. I came myself thirty-two years ago, and Michael joined us a couple of years after that."
"How was he, all that time?"
"Sure, and how do I answer that? Sad, I suppose; yes, whatever else he was, he was always sad. At first, when he came here from the hospital, he was very disturbed. He was medicated, but there was still a great anger in him."
"What did he have to be angry about?" Skinner blurted out, before he could stop himself.
"A great deal," Brother Aidan replied, 'but it was all directed at himself. In those early years, I had a fear that it might drive him to take his life. But gradually, that anger faded, until only the sadness remained. He became, I'd have to say, a nice man, quiet, but popular within our community here. Eventually, if my friends here can be said to have a leader among them, that's what he became. He had been thrust out of his own family, but he had the good fortune to find another here. He was a great asset to us as well. He had all sorts of skills with his hands, from his army days; just about all of the maintenance around here, he did."
The priest held up a hand. "You mustn't take that as criticism, my son. I understand why your father did what he did. It hurt him very deeply, but as he saw it, he had no choice. Truth be told, that's how I saw it too."
"You met my father?"
"Of course. He came to inspect Oak Lodge while Michael was still in the hospital. He was a substantial man, right enough, with an air about him that I saw in you the moment you walked through the door." He smiled at Alex. "And in you too, my dear, if I may say so. Michael would have been very proud of his niece, had he known of you." Brother
Aidan sighed. "But he never did, of course; he never once asked me about his family. I think he knew that he wouldn't have been able to bear having a running commentary on their lives."
"You told him when my parents died, though?"
"Of course. When he learned about your poor mother, I thought he really would end himself. He locked himself away and cried for a whole day. Eventually I had to have his door broken in. When I told him about your father, though, I have to say that his reaction was very strange. He was every bit as broken-hearted, but there was something else too. He was afraid for the security of his life here. He was convinced that you would wind up his trust and cut off his money."
"God, I'd never have done that."
"I knew you wouldn't, and eventually I was able to persuade Michael of that. Still and all, though, his view of life did change after your father's death. There was always that edge of fear in him."
"Fear?"
"Yes, my son; he always had a fear of you. Michael told me about the terrible things he did to you, when you were a child. He told me what he did to your mother, and about what happened after that. I am not condemning you here, because I know what you saw. You were no more than a boy defending his mother; the most natural thing in the world.
But your brother's last memory of you was of you beating him unconscious, telling him all the time in a quiet voice that you were going to kill him. He came to realise that among his many sins, possibly the greatest was to have put such hatred in the heart of one so young. He couldn't believe that it could ever leave you, and when the years went by without a visit from you, or cards on his birthday or at Christmas, his sadness and his guilt went all the deeper."
Bob Skinner stared out of the window of the old priest's office. "I'm carrying my own guilt now, Brother. Michael's dead, and I wish that at the very least I'd written to him, or called him, if only to wipe away his memory of that hatred, and to cleanse him of his guilt. It came to me, when I looked at him in the mortuary, that in my life as a police officer I've dealt with many people who were a hell of a lot worse human beings than my brother ever was, and yet I've shown most of them more mercy than I ever showed him." He winced, as if his pain was physical.