‘What do you want to drink?’
‘Vichy Catalan.’
He chuckled. ‘Fizzy water? You? This must be a serious meeting.’
I chose the middle of the three seats, on the side of the table that looked out across the marina. There had been a little wind, so John had rolled down the canvas wall. Its plastic window obscured the view slightly, but that didn’t stop me from spotting a woman. She was sitting on the other side of the road that runs in front of La Clota, on the wall near the water’s edge, but she wasn’t looking out to sea. No, she was looking around her, and I could read caution in it.
When she was satisfied, she stood up, and started to cross the road. I didn’t watch her. Instead I poured some of the water that John had put on the table. I stood as she reached me, extending my hand, to ward off any attempt to kiss me on the cheek.
‘Hello, Mia,’ I greeted her.
‘Hello, Bob. It’s good to see you. Thank you for coming.’
‘You didn’t give me much choice,’ I observed.
She had taken care of herself, no mistake about that. Mia has one of those elfin faces, high cheekbones, pointed chin, big expressive eyes, the sort that never seems to age. She looked pretty much as she had the last time I’d seen her, and if I’d got her out of her simple, cream, square-shouldered dress, I’d have bet that her body would have checked out just as well.
‘How have you been?’ she asked.
‘You should know already,’ I replied. ‘You seem to know everything about me, right down to this place.’
‘Don’t be offended,’ she pouted. ‘I have a special interest in you. I always did, ever since we met.’
‘I’m sorry to be brutal,’ I retorted, ‘but my interest in you ended when you drove out of the Airburst car park all those years ago.’
‘Really? Why?’
‘You know why. You set your brother Marlon up to be murdered, Mia; my people found a text on his phone from you, sent on the day he died. It invited him to your place, at nine that evening. When he got there, the two hoods from Newcastle that Perry Holmes had hired were waiting for him.’ I paused, but only for a second.
‘You know what happened next,’ I went on. ‘They took the poor lad down to the old Infirmary Street Baths. The council had closed them down by then, but the equipment was still there. They threw Marlon off the high board into the empty pool, and they kept on doing it until he was dead. I was there afterwards,’ I told her. ‘I spared you the details at the time, but let’s just say it remains one of my more vivid memories.’
‘I owed Perry,’ she whispered, then fell silent as John appeared with his order pad.
‘You ready to order,’ he asked, ‘or you want to wait for the third person?’
‘No,’ Mia said. ‘We’ll eat. We’ll be joined later. I’d like fish.’
‘Me too,’ I added.
‘The sea bass is best today. I do two of them, okay?’
‘Okay,’ I agreed, ‘in the oven, and a nice white wine, an Albarino, maybe.’
She waited until he had gone before taking up her story once again. ‘Perry Holmes saved my life,’ she said, frown lines appearing around her eyes. You have no idea what that brother of his was like, that Alasdair. I was thirteen or fourteen, Bob, not much older than your Alex was when I met her, when my uncle, my very own uncle,’ she hissed, ‘first forced me to go with him. You spared me the details, you said. I’ll do the same for you but only because I can’t repeat them, not even to myself.
‘I think Al Holmes would probably have killed me in the end, if Perry hadn’t found out about it. For all the things they say that he was capable of himself, he was a very moral man when it came to children. He burst in on us one night when Al had me tied to the bed, face down for a bit of variety. . get the picture?. . and he beat him like a dog. He threatened to castrate him, and he promised he would, if he ever caught him with a kid again. And then he untied me and took me home with him.’
She paused as a waitress arrived with the wine, opened it and poured.
‘Nice,’ Mia said, after she’d tasted it. ‘I know a bit about wine, you know.’
‘So I’ve heard.’
She didn’t react to my remark. ‘To be honest,’ she continued, ‘when Perry took me away I expected more of the same, but I couldn’t have been more wrong. He asked me about my family life and I told him about Uncle Gavin and how he’d pretty much sold me. He asked me about my mother and I said she’d known and hadn’t cared.’
If I hadn’t known her better I’d have thought she was going to cry. ‘I don’t know why my mother hated me, Bob,’ she whispered, ‘but she did, always. Years later when I was on the radio she found out about it, and extorted money from me. You must remember that; you put a stop to it.’
Yes, I remembered. Mia told me about it during one of our first meetings, and I had given old Bella a serious talking to, one that Alf Stein would have been proud of.
‘As vicious as Al had been,’ she said, ‘Perry was the absolute opposite. He bought me a lot of new clothes, then he took me through to Hamilton and gave me a room in his wife’s place. I know they weren’t married but that’s what he called her. I went to school with Alafair and I got to know Hastie too, whenever he came back from the forces on leave. I had a decent home, for the first time ever, not one that was full of hate, and violent boys and men. I did well at school and then Perry put me through university. Yes, Bob, I had a new life and my mother never knew where I’d gone.
‘So yes, I owed Perry and when he asked me to set up a meeting with my brother, because he wanted to ask him some things about Tony Manson, I did it without a second thought.’
‘I never asked you this at the time,’ I said, ‘maybe because I thought I’d be better off not knowing, but I will now. Did you know about the hoods from Newcastle?’
She shook her head and winced. ‘No,’ she whispered. ‘They arrived just before nine, and told me Perry had sent them to take Marlon to him.’
‘Did you know that Manson was porking Alafair at the time?’
‘No, she didn’t tell me that; she wouldn’t, the way things were between him and Perry.’
‘How did you feel when you heard what had happened to Marlon?’
She sipped her wine then looked me straight in the eye. ‘How do you think? I was gutted, because I’d been deceived. Was I overcome with grief? Honestly, no, because Marlon had chosen that sort of life, in spite of what happened to Gavin and to Ryan, my other brother. He knew what Tony Manson was.
‘And this too,’ she added. ‘My brothers were always the best loaf in the house; mother’s pride. They treated me like shit as well; I was their servant too.’
Silence fell between us as the sea bass arrived, and it stayed there, more or less, as we did it justice. Any talk was merely that of a renewed acquaintance, and all of it came from Mia. She asked me about my kids, although I sensed that she had no real interest.
‘Do you still have that cottage in Gullane?’ she ventured. ‘I loved that place the first time I saw it. For a very short while, I imagined what it would be like to live there with you.’
‘What?’ I said, with more than a little derision. ‘Me and Perry Holmes’s foster-child? Get real, Mia.’
Yet even as I spoke and saw the flash of hurt in her eyes, I thought of Sauce Haddock and his partner, the granddaughter of a criminal who’d been. . I hoped my tense was right. . almost as big a player as Perry.
Then I recalled the young woman who’d hooked me and I thought, Maybe, just maybe.
I kicked that notion into touch and focused on the present as we finished our meals.
‘Okay,’ I said when I was ready, ‘you think you’ve got a hold over me that you can use in some way. Back then, you might have, but this is now. Claim that I tipped you off, and I think you’d find that you’d be asked to prove the allegation. Not just that, Mia,’ I added, ‘you’d find that nobody cared. The truth is, I didn’t tell you to get out of town to save you from being arrested for Marlon’s murder. You’ve just told me you didn’t know those guys were going to be there, and I believe you. I’d have believed you back then, just the same.