'We still are; I still am. It's just that he was being so, so… stifling at the time. He was choking me emotionally, and part of me was so angry, and Ray was there, an attractive, interesting boy who fancied himself, and me. There were no ties with him, it was all under my control and so I said to myself, "Girl, you're only young once. Don't let anyone rob you of that," and I had a fling with him. It's over now: the night before I left for Marbella I told him that his time was up.'
She paused, and frowned. 'I didn't know about the girlfriend, though.'
'Serves you right then, kid. He went straight to her, more or less, after he left you last Saturday morning.'
'Hah!' Her quick laugh took him by surprise, and strangely, lightened him. 'So we were using each other really. Fair enough. I've got no complaints about that.' She looked at him. 'Pops, when you were my age, didn't you ever feel like that? Didn't you ever fancy being with someone else? Didn't you feel oppressed?'
'Alexis, when I was your age, or a bit older maybe, I was the oppressor for most of the time. However, since we're shaking out the skeletons here, just after my twenty-first, I had a short but intense fling with an emerging young actress. I won't tell you her name, but she's quite a star now. It ended as easily as it began, no recriminations, no regrets on either side, except…' He paused and grinned, scratching his chin.
'Afterwards the guilt got to me, and I confessed all to your mother; she and I were engaged at the time. She forgave me; there were a couple of tears but she forgave me, just like that, after I'd promised not to do it again. She didn't write about that in her diary though: it must have been too big a blow to her ego, I guess, to be committed to paper.
'Aye, she was some ticket, your mother. And now I look at you, and I see history, struggling to repeat itself.'
'Don't bring Mum into this. Pops.'
'Of course I will,' he exclaimed. 'She's what this is about, isn't she?'
'You hardly knew her! As you found out fairly recently, to your cost.'
Bob shook his head, and laughed, softly. 'Alexis, my lovely daughter, I knew your mother from when we were kids until the day she died. You knew her for four years, and for most of that time you were too wee to wipe your own bum. You can't even remember her, girl, so don't presume to lecture me about her.'
'But you didn't know all of her. You didn't know what was in the diaries.'
'No,' he admitted, 'but I'm not stupid, and I wasn't blind. I knew what a devious and manipulative little bitch she could be. I worked out way back that Myra always got what Myra wanted… even me, I came under that description. But I didn't mind any of it, you see, because I loved her and I wanted her to have everything she wanted.
'So if I had known about the tart in the diaries — and I still try to kid myself sometimes, that at least some of those stories might have been fantasies — maybe I would have put up with that too. Or maybe not.
Maybe I'd have broken her neck, literally. But no, your being there would have stopped me from doing that.
'Alex, you may be imagining that you are your mother reincarnated; you may even have enjoyed the notion during your escapade with this boy. But you can take it from me, you are not Myra. I'm the linking factor between you. I know, knew, you both, I love you both… Oh yes, I still love her inside,' He tapped his chest, 'and I always will.
'I promise you, there are fundamental differences between you and her. She was bright, for sure, but you're brilliant. She had limited professional horizons, yours are boundless. But the most important thing of all is this. Essentially, let's face it, she was bad. You? Through and through, you're good. I'll show you proof: your reaction when I told you about young Weston's steady girlfriend. If you'd known about her you'd have patted him on the head and sent him home. Am I right?'
Reluctantly, she nodded. 'Yes,' he continued, at once, 'because that's your morality. When we were engaged and on holiday, your mother screwed my best pal, another woman's husband. Why? Because she didn't have any morals, she didn't have any control inside her to tell her what was right and what was wrong. When that's missing from someone, there's no telling what they might do.
'I've spent my life dealing with people like that, Alex. The fact that I loved your mother with all my heart, doesn't prevent me from recognising now that she was of that sort. If she was alive now, and we were man and wife, then that knowledge wouldn't prevent me from loving her still. That's in me, though I keep it to myself.'
He stood up, came round the desk and sat on its edge, taking his daughter's hand. 'Now, as for you… you can play the bad girl as hard as you like but you can't change what's at the heart of you: goodness.
That's how it is; pretending doesn't make you what you're not.'
He reached under her chin and drew her eyes back to his. 'Look, kid, given my recent track record, I'm not the guy to lecture you on how to run your sex life. I won't presume to advise you about you and Andy either, about what you should do. I think I know well enough, but you've got to work it out between you.
'There is this though. You've put me in the most difficult professional position I've ever encountered. Locked in my desk is an almost complete report by Mackie and Pringle on their investigation, and you feature in it, as Ray Weston's alibi on the night of Anthony Murray's murder. Now you've dropped in the last piece of the jigsaw.
'Andy's my Head ofCID. He's been preoccupied for the last week, but he'll expect automatically to see that report, and he's entitled. He's asked me about it a couple of times already, and I fobbed him off by telling him it wasn't finished. Now that it is, there is no way I can keep it from him, however much it might hurt him. If I even try, he'll smell a rat.
'So,' he said, 'on Monday…'
Alex nodded. 'I know, I know. But you'll let me talk to him first, Pops, won't you?'
'Sure; that would be best. Do it tonight or tomorrow though.'
'Yes. But when I do, there's something else that I know now I have to tell him. It's something you should know too.'
81
Andy looked at her across the kitchen. 'Let me sum up what you've just told me,' he said. He was wearing glasses, rather than his tinted contacts, but still she could see the hurt in his eyes.
'You've been having it off behind my back, with some kid who's just about young enough to be my son. Now, through some sort of Murphy's Law, that fact has become an important piece of evidence in a criminal investigation, and three detectives under my command know all about it.
'That's what you're saying, is it?'
Alex nodded, watching the ice cubes swirl round in her gin and tonic. 'I'd say that was a fair summary of it. Andy, I'm sorry it had to come out this way, I really am. As I said, I may have done it because of you in a way, but I never meant to hurt you by it. Ray didn't mean anything to me.'
'Maybe not, but he sure means something to me. Most men would feel very serious about someone fucking their fiancee, you know.
You're not saying that he didn't know you were engaged, are you?'
'No. I told him I was.'
'Jesus! The boy must think I'm a right inadequate prat; he must be laughing all over his face. I'll be the talk of the Aberdeen University Union bar right now, and so will you.'
'He's not that sort of guy,' she protested.
'Crap! He's eighteen, and he's a little toerag. Listen, you go on about not wanting to hurt me. Did you ever think about how badly I could hurt him?'
'Andy, you wouldn't! You could break him in two.'
His laugh was cruel; a sound she had never heard before. 'I wouldn't need to lay a finger on him. Clan Pringle told me, just before he forgot to mention Weston's horizontal alibi, that he and the Thin Man caught the kid with a parcel ofcannabis and a bottle of pills that he'd nicked from his old man. Your Ray smokes grass and barters stolen drugs for beer with his student pals; bet you didn't know that.