"Did Douglas know it was him?"
"Yeah. I told him a couple of weeks after Iona killed herself," continued Shan. "I was in the Variety Bar and I saw Douglas, pissed to fuck, coming up the stairs from the toilet, so I called him over. Man, he was so drunk, he almost couldn't breathe. You know that labored way?" He mimicked someone breathing heavily. "Yeah?"
"Yeah," said Maureen, not much the wiser.
"Douglas wanted me to order a drink for him, the barman had refused him. He was behaving strangely, he kept crying and laughing, and when I asked him where he lived he'd point in different directions and wouldn't say, so I took him up to mine to crash. On the way home he started to sober up a wee bit and by the time we got to mine he was more or less lucid. We sat up with a bottle and he was acting crazy, like crazy mood swings, and then he told me that Iona had hung herself. She was a colleague's patient and Douglas knew they were having an affair. He knew and did nothing and she killed herself. He said she always seemed fine to him, he thought she was all right. He'd been keeping an eye on her."
"And he felt guilty because he knew about it and did nothing," she said, taking a cigarette out and lighting it with Shan's lighter. "Did he know it wasn't an affair?"
"No, he really thought it was consensual. I could tell by the way he was talking about it." Shan smiled uncomfortably. "When I read about you it all made a lot more sense. That's why he wouldn't report them for having an affair."
"But I wasn't his patient," she said, lowering her eyes. "I was at the Rainbow but I was Angus's patient. I didn't have a professional relationship with Douglas."
"That's a bit thin," said Shan. "Fucking a patient is fucking a patient, whichever way you look at it."
Maureen inhaled heavily and kept her eyes on the table. She needed to believe she wasn't a victim just as much as Douglas had. "It might be a bit thin… but it's still different, isn't it?"
"No." Shan shook his head adamantly. "It's not. Doctors and nurses shouldn't fuck patients. That's fundamental. We all know that. Douglas knew it, we all know it."
Maureen took a heavy gulp of the bitter lager. "All right, it's a fine distinction," she said. "But it is still a distinction."
"Bollocks," said Shan. "Don't fuck the patients. How complicated is that? You're either fucking the patients or you're not."
Shan was right and Maureen knew he was.
"People who do things like that," said Shan, "they always say to themselves, 'This is different because yada-yada-yada, because I'm not her therapist now, because she's better-''
"Because she's got a big hat."
"Exactly, they've all got justifications. They don't say to themselves, 'I'm a bastard and I'm doing a fucking terrible thing.' Rapists do it. Pedophiles do it too. They say, 'They wanted it,' 'They were asking for it."
Maureen rubbed her head. Thinking of Douglas in the same league as a pedophile made her eyes ache. "I don't think he saw himself in the same league as them," she said, sad and disgusted. "He always drew the distinction that I wasn't his patient. I think he believed it. When did you meet him? What day was it?"
"A Monday," said Shan. "Monday's country-and-western night at the Variety. Monday, five weeks ago."
"He didn't touch me after that," she murmured.
"What-like, sexually?"
"Yeah. Never again." She lifted her beer. "Never again before he died."
Maureen drank a throatful as Shan sat back and sighed. "Well, maybe the justification stopped working the night I told him. Maybe he was crying for himself as much as anything."
Maureen looked up at Shan. "Was Douglas crying?"
"Yeah, big-time," said Shan. "He started crying when I told him about Iona, he was sobbing. He hid himself in my bathroom. He was in there for an hour – I could hear him crying through the door."
"Fuck," she said. "I went out with him for eight months and I never saw him crying."
"Well, he couldn't have been more upset if Iona was his own daughter."
Maureen dropped her cigarette onto the floor, stepping on it to put it out. "He withdrew the contents of his account," she said, "and paid Yvonne's nursing-home fees. I think it was to ease his conscience. He gave me money too."
"How much?"
"Too much. It feels like blood money." Maureen picked up her packet of fags. "D'ye want one?"
"Yeah," said Shan pleasantly. "Go on.
"Anyway," Shan went on when he'd lit their cigarettes, "I told Douglas who it was and I told him about the Northern."
"What did he say?" she asked, hoping that Shan would repeat something Douglas had said or say something like he would say it so that she could hear Douglas's voice again.
"He didn't say anything," said Shan. "In the morning he was very serious and we talked about it. He said we should try to prosecute through the courts, for the sake of the victims we might never find. They'd see it on TV and know they were safe. He got the list from the office in the Northern and we started going to see them all."
"But why was he so clumsy about getting the list?" she asked.
"We didn't think anyone would pay a blind bit of notice, to be honest."
"Everyone in the Northern knew," said Maureen.
Shan cringed. "Really?"
"Yeah."
"God." He shut his eyes tight. "Fuck, we thought we were being well fly."
"Maybe he only knew Douglas was involved because of the list. You weren't there when he got it, were you?"
"No. They wouldn't have given it to me."
"That's why he was killed – because he was finding out about the Northern."
"Actually" – Shan held up his hand to stop her – "I know he didn't kill Douglas. I know that for sure."
"How?"
"Well, when the police came to see us they were asking about the daytime, yeah? I was working and he was in the office all day He didn't leave until half-six and then he drove one of the secretaries home to Bothwell and that's miles out on the South Side. He didn't even leave his office to go for lunch-"
Maureen interrupted. "They've been asking about the evening too now."
Shan was stunned. "They've been what…?"
"They seem to think it happened in the evening now. It's a bit of a media myth, the time of death thing, they just have a good guess."
Shan had turned gray. "I was sure it couldn't be him because the only time he left the room was to use the pay phones in the foyer."
Maureen's heart was palpitating. "Why would he use a pay phone? Isn't there a phone in his office?"
"Yeah, but the line's only for domestic calls," Shan said. "Shirley said he was calling abroad or something."
"What time did he use the pay phone?"
"Why do you want to know that?"
"Just…" She shook her head.
Shan shrugged. "I've no idea."
"Can you try to remember?"
He thought about it. "Before lunch, about eleven or twelve the first time. Then after lunch. Early. Early afternoon."
"How many more times?" she asked.
"Only twice that I know of. All before two o'clock, because there was a case conference in his office after that and he was definitely there."
She ran her finger over the spilled coffee on the table, drawing a snake pattern.
"Who was he phoning?" he asked.
"He phoned me," she said. "At work. He wanted to see if I was there. My pal said I wasn't in. He thought I was away for the day."
"Why would he phone to see if you were in?"
"He needed the house to be empty during the day. He did it at night and fixed it to look as if it happened much earlier. He made a half-arsed attempt to frame me. He made footsteps near to the body with my slippers as well. He even got information about me and fitted the scene to look like something I'd done before…"
She shut her eyes and rubbed them hard. If the Northern rapist had killed Douglas to stop him digging up evidence, he would want to make the police think Douglas died in the afternoon. That way they wouldn't try to trace Douglas's movements during the day and they would miss Siobhain. She led straight back to the Northern rapes. And it would explain why Maureen had been left with a cast-iron alibi; the murderer wanted an empty house that Douglas could have been hidden in all day. Fitting Maureen up badly wasn't a mistake at all, it was halfhearted because it was incidental. His real concern was fucking up the time of death and keeping Siobhain out of it.