‘Don’t you worry yourself,’ I declared. ‘Neither of those things is going to happen. No kitchen-sharing, I promise. Now bugger off to school. What are you doing today anyway? A post-grad in adulthood?’
‘Double maths, Spanish and English this morning, as it happens. See you tonight?’
‘See you tonight,’ I confirmed. ‘And you’re cooking, since you’re so bloody grown up all of a sudden… and so territorial when it comes to the kitchen.’
I slipped on my jacket and ventured out of the bathroom. I’d hoped, maybe even assumed, that Mia would be waiting outside, contrite, with tea and toast, and maybe even a full Scottish on the hob if I was lucky. But she wasn’t. The bedroom door was still closed. ‘Fuck her,’ I whispered, angry and more than a little humiliated, as I walked out, closing the door firmly so that she’d know I’d gone, but just short of slamming it like a petulant kid.
I was first into the office, but only just. Andy Martin arrived just as I was starting on my copy of that morning’s Saltire newspaper. It was my barometer; I took its journalism and its editorial line seriously, which I didn’t do always with the other blacktops. There was nothing in it about either of the murder inquiries. That pleased me in one way and worried me in another. It meant that there was no immediate public pressure on me for a result in either case, but worried me because I’d expected a harder time from them, on the Weir-McCann investigation at least. My reading was that the paper was sitting on the story, not wanting it to run out of steam, in case.. . in case there was more, in case there was a third murder. At that moment, that was my biggest fear. Two down. How many more to go?
I looked up and saw Martin standing outside my door, as if he was considering whether or not he should knock. I waved him in.
‘Hi, Andy,’ I greeted him. ‘I thought I told you not to be too sharp getting in this morning.’
‘I couldn’t sleep, boss. I didn’t see any point in hanging about the flat.’
‘Lucky you. I wish I hadn’t slept.’ I’d never been more sincere.
‘Bad dreams?’
I nodded. ‘The worst. You had breakfast?’
‘Coffee, that’s all.’
I stood. ‘Come on then, let’s go to the canteen. When I’m feeling fucked I always refuel.’
The staff catering was just as good as that in the senior officers’ dining room, and every bit as traditional. Cops need feeding properly. I filled a plate with fried egg, sausage, bacon and black pudding, then topped it off with a fried potato scone, just for luck, to be washed down with a huge mug of tea. Martin had the same, only more so. ‘It’s a training night at Raeburn Place,’ he explained.
‘Are you still serious about rugby?’ I asked.
‘The day I stop being serious about it, I’ll have played my last game. I may have dropped out of the top flight, but I’m still as committed as ever. I owe that to the other fourteen guys in the team.’
‘Think that way in CID and you’ll be fine,’ I told him.
We ripped through our breakfasts like a chainsaw through a tree, then turned our attention to the well-stewed tea. I looked at the DC over the top of my mug. I’d known him for less than a week, and we were hardly equals in rank, but I was starting to think of him as a friend. ‘Have you got a bidey-in?’
He blinked at my question. ‘A what?’
His surprise made me chuckle, and realise how far from my roots I’d travelled. ‘Sorry, I forgot that’s more of an east coast term. Have you got a live-in girlfriend?’
He shook his head. ‘No, not just now. I did have, but that went tits up about nine months ago.’
‘Whose fault?’
‘Nobody’s, really. We didn’t fall out or anything. She wanted it to go further than I did, that’s all, so we split. I still see her from time to time; we’re still good friends.’
‘Is she in the job?’ I asked.
‘Hell no. She works in PR. I would not fancy having a policewoman as a girlfriend.’
‘No?’
‘What else would you talk about over the dinner table, other than the job?’
‘Your kids, eventually. By the way,’ I added, ‘you’re not supposed to use that word any more.’
He was puzzled. ‘Which word?’
‘Policewoman. There are no more WPCs; we’re all police officers now, everybody. It’s no longer politically correct.’
He grinned. ‘Did I catch an inference there, sir, that you don’t have much time for politicians?’
‘I’ll say it out loud if you like. I can’t fucking stand the breed. There is something completely fucking phoney about them. They’ll be back soon promising us the world in exchange for our votes, and as soon as they have them they’ll fuck off for another four or five years and forget about us, until it’s time to be nice to us all again.’
‘Don’t you like any of them?’ he asked.
‘I admired the last Prime Minister… “admire” being different from “like”. Balls like grapefruits. But the present bloke? I don’t believe he really exists. I’m sure he’s made of fucking latex, like his puppet. As for the new guy, he’s all fucking bouffant and razzamatazz. He went to bloody Fettes, for Christ’s sake, that fucking Gormenghast of a school across the road. “Boys Only” when he was there and now he’s fixing the rules to get more women into Parliament, just because they’re women. That should be a fucking gender-free zone, man. Every MP should be there on the basis of ability; no elector’s choice should be restricted to people who sit down to pee. It’s un-fucking-democratic, Andy, and it’s the mark of the man.’
I realised that I had raised my voice, and was drawing glances from other tables; I stopped. ‘Christ,’ I continued, a little embarrassed and a lot more quietly, ‘listen to me. You’d think I was a misogynist, yet I’m anything but. We need more women in the police force, we need them in the higher ranks and yes, we need them in politics too, but only as long as they get there the right way and not through some artificial process. Our service has been male-dominated from the start. Its thinking is far too narrow, and if I ever got to command rank, I would do everything I could to change that, but that would not include putting “Women applicants only” signs over promotion boards.’
‘You lost your wife, didn’t you?’ he said.
Taken aback, I stared at him. ‘Yes, I did. A while back.’
‘Is that how you and she talked over the dinner table?’
A smile, so broad that I felt my cheeks bunch, spread across my face. ‘Yeah,’ I replied. ‘Exactly like that. We used to go at it hammer and tongs, especially when Myra’d had a couple of drinks and her tongue was really loosened… not that she ever held back much.’
He nodded. ‘That’s the kind of relationship I want,’ he declared. ‘Full frontal, nothing left unsaid. That’s why… your word… bideyins don’t work for me. I want a relationship that challenges me every minute of the day. Clearly you’ve had one, and you’ll never settle for anything else again.’
But I did, for a while. And so did Andy. We’ve got there in the end, both of us, but if we’d recorded that conversation and played the tape to ourselves every day, maybe we wouldn’t have made the mistakes that we did along the way. But, if we hadn’t, then four lovely kids wouldn’t have been born, so… what the hell?
That morning, though, our discussion showed me something very clearly. It told me why, as much as we liked each other, Alison had been right to set limits to our relationship, to draw a boundary line over which neither of us would step. We didn’t fire each other up in that way, and we both knew it.
As for Mia, she was history to me, even then. There was something about her reaction that I knew I wasn’t going to get over. Sure, I had scared her; there was no doubt about that. But she’d known where I’d been the night before, and she’d even known that it connected to her, and yet there had been no shred of sympathy in her, or any attempt to understand why I had reacted in that extreme but completely involuntary way. I didn’t want to reach out to her again, not after the way she’d behaved, and if she’d phoned me at that moment, I wouldn’t have taken her call.