‘Don’t, Jack, don’t. Please,’ Amy said, and reluctantly MacNeil let go of the youth, pushing him back into the arms of his friends.
‘Sorry,’ he said to her, embarrassed, and he wheeled her on down to Shaftesbury Avenue.
‘Why did you do that?’
‘I hate unfairness.’ He kept his eyes dead ahead.
‘What was it you imagined he’d said?’
‘Something unpleasant. Something about you.’
‘You get used to it,’ she said. ‘I’ve been called a “chink” all my life, “slanty eyes” sometimes. And worse. Now it’s “slanty-eyed cripple”.’ As soon as she said it she thought how bitter it sounded. And she didn’t want to be bitter. She had seen what bitterness could do to people.
On Shaftesbury Avenue he hailed a taxi. The driver apologised. He didn’t have a ramp.
‘We can wait for the next one,’ Amy said.
‘Don’t need to,’ MacNeil told her. And he lifted her out of the wheelchair as if she weighed nothing at all, a child in his big, strong arms, and he put her into the taxi before lifting in the wheelchair. ‘I’ll go with you,’ he said. ‘Then there won’t be a problem at the other end.’
On the drive across town she said, ‘You really don’t have to do this, you know.’
‘Nothing else to do.’
‘You’ve a wife and child waiting for you at home.’ There was a long silence. He was looking out of the window at the passing lights and didn’t respond. ‘Haven’t you?’
He turned to face her, and in the fleeting light of a passing streetlamp she saw a look in his eyes like a wounded animal. He couldn’t hold her gaze. ‘No,’ he said eventually. ‘No, I haven’t.’
It seemed like a very long time before she summoned the courage to ask. ‘Why not?’
‘We’ve separated,’ he said simply. He was looking at his hands in his lap, and turning his wedding ring around and around. This time she knew he wasn’t going to elucidate, and she knew better than to ask.
The Tower of London was discreetly lit as they drove past and across Tower Bridge to the South Bank. The taxi dropped them at the corner of Gainsford Street and Shad Thames.
‘I’ll see you to the door,’ MacNeil said when he’d got her out and back into her wheelchair.
‘There’s no need, really. I’m a big girl. I come home in the dark all the time.’
‘Aye, but not when I’m around to worry about it. It’s alright, I’m not looking to get asked up for coffee. I never drink the stuff.’ He paid the driver, and Amy punched in her entry code at the gate. He pushed it open and they crossed the courtyard to the ramp which led up to her front door.
She frowned. ‘That’s odd.’
‘What is?’
‘The light’s out above the door. I always leave it on when I go out.’
‘Just to advertise to burglars that the place is empty?’
She gave him a look. ‘I need to see to get in.’ She unlocked the door and opened it into the stairwell. The whole apartment was in darkness. There was a light switch within easy reach of the wheelchair, but it produced no light.
‘Where’s the fuse box?’ MacNeil asked.
‘On the top floor.’
MacNeil looked at the redundant stair lift at the foot of the stairs. ‘How the hell do you get up and down when the power’s out?’
‘It’s never been out before.’
He closed the door and picked her up out of the wheelchair again. She put her arms around his neck, and remembered how safe she had felt as a child, carried up the stairs to bed by her father who would sing to her every night as they went. Carry me, carry me ’cross the world.
‘You’d better show me,’ MacNeil said, and he carried her in the dark up two flights of stairs to the sprawling attic room at the top. Here street lights shone through the windows, casting a pale yellow glow across the room. He lowered her gently into the top floor wheelchair and opened the door of the fuse box. He flicked a switch and all the lights came on. He shook his head. ‘Must have been a power surge or something. Tripped the fuse. You want to have some kind of battery back-up on those stair lifts if you don’t want to get stuck.’
‘I could always call you to carry me up and down.’
‘I’d be here like a shot.’
Something in the way he said it made her heart skip a beat then pulse a little faster, and he seemed suddenly self-conscious. Her mouth went dry, and she couldn’t believe that he might be interested in her. Not in that way.
Later, he told her the reason he’d hesitated was because he had no idea how to kiss someone in a wheelchair. It explained his clumsiness as he took a step towards her, and then stopped, before dropping awkwardly to his knees and taking her face gently in both of his big hands and kissing her.
It was a moment that would live with her always. A moment when she felt as if God had given her back her life.
Chapter Nine
I
MacNeil parked outside the police station which stood in what Scots would have called the gushet between Kennington Road and Mead Row. It was a word MacNeil had used several times when he first arrived in London, but which nobody seemed to understand. He looked once in a dictionary and couldn’t find it. The closest he got was the word ‘gusset’, which described a triangular piece of cloth sewn into a garment to reinforce it. And so he’d figured that must be it. And it described the positioning of Kennington Road Police Station precisely — built in the triangle created by two streets intersecting at acute angles.
He had been back to Islington to shower and change, and felt less contaminated now. Less mingin’, some of his colleagues might have said. It was another Scots word, but one which this time had been unaccountably hijacked by the English to become trendy London slang.
DCI Laing, however, was sticking with good old-fashioned Glasgow profanity. ‘Where the fuck have you been?’ he bawled at MacNeil across the detectives’ room. ‘In here.’ And he pointed an aggressive finger into his office. No one else paid much attention. They were used to Laing by now.
MacNeil stood in front of the DCI’s desk. ‘I had some personal business to attend to, Detective Chief Inspector.’
‘There’s no such thing as personal on this job, sonny. I’d have thought you’d know that by now.’
‘Well, to be perfectly honest with you, Mr Laing, I don’t give a shit what you think. And if you’ve got a problem with that, feel free to fire me.’ He had meant to tell the DCI about Sean, but somehow this didn’t seem like the moment.
Laing glared at him. ‘If you don’t want me to fuck with your pension, MacNeil, I’d suggest you keep a civil tongue in your head.’ He didn’t appear to see any irony in that, and MacNeil bit back a retort. ‘I’ve had some prick from the Deputy Prime Minister’s office chasing me for a written explanation of why one of our officers held up work on the Archbishop’s Park site this morning. And I couldn’t even send them your report, because I don’t have it.’
‘It’ll be on your desk in the morning.’
‘I want it on my desk before I leave tonight.’
MacNeil stood and surveyed the paperwork accumulating in drifts on his desk. Reports and files and summonses, a hundred different Post-its stuck to the sides of his computer and all along his desk lamp, scribbled notes from dozens of investigations making a tower on the spike in his out-tray. Normally at this time the office would have been buzzing. Today there were no more than half a dozen officers and clerks sitting at desks. There were telephones ringing constantly, because there weren’t enough people to answer them.