Troubled Waters (16 page)

‘Because of the baby?’

‘It would make sense, wouldn’t it?’

‘What about a girlfriend?’

‘Girl friends?’

‘A girlfriend – did she mention a girlfriend? It appears she may have been in a lesbian relationship, too.’

‘She didn’t tell me that. She could have been, I suppose. I can’t say one way or the other. It’s not uncommon in her situation. Sometimes victims of abuse are confused about their sexuality but, in her case . . . well, I have no way of knowing. Why do you ask?’

‘She never mentioned anyone called Anna to you?’

‘No. Why do you ask?’

‘What sort of person was she?’ Alice persisted, ignoring the woman’s questions. Catching Aileen Tennant’s exasperated sigh, she added, ‘I know, you only saw her once . . .’

‘From memory . . . I was impressed by her. Anyone would be. A survivor. That’s how I’d describe her. She was, genuinely, trying to sort herself out, and she was very, very young. Seventeen, I see I’ve noted down. Not many come to us that young.’

A survivor. An odd choice of words for a dead girl, Alice thought.

William Stobbs’ flat in Cockenzie faced the harbour which, like many on the east coast of Scotland, became a sad sight when the tide went out, reduced to a field of stinking, grey-brown mud within crumbling, guano-streaked stone walls. Its air of quiet desolation was reinforced by the presence of a wrecked fishing boat, barnacle-encrusted and with a gaping wound in its side, propped up against the sea wall; a reminder of a more prosperous past. Fifty years earlier, the quay there had been alive with a cacophony of sounds: the thuds made by heavy fish-boxes landing on stone, the shouts of the men as they hosed down the decks, and the cries of the gulls as they swooped around the vessels, desperate to catch any discarded entrails in their beaks before they sank into the oily, black water. However, in one respect at least, Cockenzie Harbour, along with the rest of the sleepy village attached to it, was unique. They were all dwarfed, miniaturised, by the gigantic geometry, largely rectangles and squares, of the power station that stood, incongruously, a little distance from the end of the Hawthorn Bank road. This monumental, sculptural presence on the skyline, with its cloud-stroking twin chimneys, skewed perspectives for miles around and made the whole of Cockenzie look like a toy town.

Watching from her own car as the inspector parked her Escort opposite Dickson’s, the fish merchant’s shop, DC Cairns got out and crossed the road to meet her.

‘How did you get on?’ she asked.

‘Alright. But, if anything, the waters are further muddied. She was sexually abused as a child, as an adolescent. That’s why she went to the Sanctuary, for counselling.’

‘Who by?’

They had begun walking towards the two-storey white-painted building in which William Stobbs had his flat.

‘I don’t know. Counselling by a Mrs Aileen Tennant – abuse by a person, or persons, currently unknown. The woman treating her never found out who was responsible for it, so for the present we’ve drawn a blank. How did you get on, hassling the lab?’ Alice asked, her finger poised over the doorbell.

‘The same prints from the photo, Hamish Evans’ prints, presumably, are all over her flat. Just as you might expect. He took a flight from Heathrow back to Edinburgh, arriving at about ten-thirty. He was definitely back in the city on the night that she died, but we’ve still not found him or his vehicle, and everybody’s looking. And I mean everybody. He must, I reckon, have gone into hiding.’

‘Like Anna,’ Alice replied, ‘and her prints must be all over the place too, if they were living together there. If so, that’s two of the three sets identified.’

‘One other thing . . .’

‘Yes?’

‘There was a message from Dr Cash, apologising for the delay. The alcohol level showed she’d had a couple of glasses of wine, something like that, shortly before she died. Pregnancy or no pregnancy. I wonder if she even knew she was expecting? At seventeen, you might not.’

Inside the warmth of the flat, an eighty-five-year-old lady was bending over her eighty-seven-year-old sister, attempting to roll a curler through her thin white locks. Margaret Stobbs, the elder of the two, resembled a bulldog, being squat with powerful shoulders and a couple
of pointed incisors in her bottom jaw, visible due to her massive underbite. Her sister, Jessie, cursed with similar, though slightly less pronounced, features, had never rid herself of the unfortunate maiden name they had both been born with: Bottom.

‘How’s that feel, Maggs?’ Jessie asked, peering through her pebble thick glasses at the large mirror to see her sister’s response to her ministrations.

‘A wee bit over-tight, Jessie,’ the answer came back, accompanied by a delayed grimace of pain as she tried to raise and lower her eyebrows, feeling the skin of her forehead tighten and loosen with each movement. The half-smoked cigarette in the corner of her mouth waggled up and down as she did so.

‘I’ll try again, give it a wee tweak,’ Jessie said, pulling out the grip, unrolling the hank of hair and gathering up another one. In passing, she adjusted the pink towel over her sister’s beefy shoulders, retying it under her ample chins, while skilfully avoiding falling over the two crossed walking sticks which rested on her sister’s lap.

‘I’m going out for my tea, officer, so I need my hair done,’ Margaret Stobbs said. ‘It’s a Golden Wedding celebration – old, old friends of mine in the village. But you just ask away. Take no notice of Jessie. She’s not going, not been invited although they know her too. Do you want any tea or coffee? She’ll get it for you, won’t you, Jessie? She knows where everything’s kept in my son’s house, in my William’s house.’

‘Mmm,’ replied Jessie, lips pursed, not bothering to hide her annoyance at being asked.

‘I understand, Mrs Stobbs,’ Alice began, ‘that recently you overheard an argument on the stair of your flat in Casselbank Street. Is that right?’

‘Did you, Margaret? You never told me!’ Jessie said, her previous grievance replaced by this one.

‘I don’t have to tell you everything, dear! You’ve got your own life, haven’t you? I did, yes, officer. A man was bawling the place down – shouting away. He sounded furious.’

‘When did you hear it, the argument?’ Alice asked.

‘Oh, I don’t know. Monday night? Aye, it was the night before I came here. When did I come here, Jessie?’

‘Tuesday morning,’ her sister replied, concentrating on unfankling the next curler, which had somehow caught its spikes in the neck-fastening of Margaret’s Alarmaid.

‘Careful!’ the old woman hissed, aware of a sudden strangulation.

‘What time was it when you heard the argument?’ DC Cairns interjected.

‘Late. It must have been late, I’d been asleep in my chair . . . after nine, ten, eleven. Something like that. He was mad, shouting at the top of his voice, screaming at . . . Well, it was more of a wee nap, I’d just had . . .’

‘Who was the man shouting at?’ DC Cairns interrupted, leaning forward, her curiosity getting the better of her manners.

‘That’s what I’m trying to tell you, lass. At Mandy or . . .’ she paused for dramatic effect, ‘her Fancy Woman.’ Having dropped her bombshell, she raised her eyebrows impishly, knowing that her sister would be electrified by her words. As if to underline their importance she removed her cigarette, holding it between her forefinger and her middle finger in a rather louche fashion.

‘Mandy! That Mandy! You never told me that either, that she had a fancy woman!’ Jessie said, now openly peevish, placing a roller on the crown of her sister’s head and tugging none too gently at another lock of hair.

‘Jessie!’ Margaret moaned.

‘Sorry, dear, I’m a bit out of practice.’

‘The argument in the stair,’ Alice prompted, ‘what was it about, Mrs Stobbs?’

‘You’re more than a bit out of practice. That hurt, Jessie! Be careful! Well, the man, he was shouting, saying that she’d no right, no right at all – that the girl should not be with her, that she had no business having her there – that – I think he called her, or one of them, an unnatural cow or something like that, too.’

The roar of a hairdryer starting up drowned out the rest of her words.

‘Turn it off, Jessie, for pity’s sake, turn it off! I’m trying to speak here. The police have come here, all the way out here, specially, to speak to me,’ Margaret shouted, determined to be heard, whatever the cost. Jessie, giving her sister’s reflection a malevolent glare, grudgingly obeyed and laid the dryer down.

‘So, what did Miranda say?’ DC Cairns chipped in, once more unable to contain herself.

‘She said,’ came the slightly hoarse reply, ‘that she loved Anna. That Anna was her life, that she was not giving her up, that he should go and never come back. She said, actually, that he was a monster . . .’

‘A monster!’ Jessie repeated, hands now on her hips, enthralled by the description.

‘Do you know her surname?’ Alice asked.

‘Stimms.’

‘Anna’s surname,’ Alice clarified.

The woman shook her head, watching herself intently in the mirror as she did so and then answered, ‘I heard her called Anna. I heard her name being called once or twice in the stair.’

‘How often is the stair cleaned?’ Alice asked.

Eyes narrowing, flummoxed at this unexpected question, Mrs Stobbs said, ‘Cleaned? Never! The woman from number three was supposed to arrange it and I’ve seen once, mind, just the once, a Polish girl with a mop on the steps. It’s filthy. I’m ashamed if I have guests. If I was younger, if my legs worked, I’d do it myself. But nobody cares nowadays, do they?’

‘Did you see the man – do you have any idea who he is?’ Alice asked.

‘Nope, I never seen him,’ Margaret replied, gazing at her own reflection and patting the curlers on her head with one hand, adding, ‘he’d be her boyfriend, I expect.’ Having dropped that further morsel, she carefully reinserted her cigarette into the side of her mouth. There it rested secure, wedged between her lips and one prominent fang.

‘Her boyfriend!’ her sister said in shocked tones, ‘For pity’s sake! Did she have a boyfriend as well as a fancy woman? She was AC/BC?’

‘She did. She was,’ her sister replied smugly, forcing a jet of smoke through her lips as if to underline the fact.

‘How did you know that the girl . . . whoever she was, living with Mandy, was her “fancy woman”?’ Alice asked. ‘Perhaps, she was just a lodger, a friend, something like that?’

‘Sure you’d not like a tea or a coffee, officers? Jessie would happily get it for you,’ Margaret said, mischievously, willing them to take up the offer. Jessie would be desperate to hear this snippet.

Jessie signalled her happiness to do so by glaring at her sister.

‘No? Sure? Jessie would be delighted, really. No? OK. I knew because I seen them together, holding hands,
arm-in-arm in the road. Would you hold hands with your lodger? Anyway, Ronnie Dowdall told me, there’s only the one bed in the flat. They must have shared it. Would you share your bed with a friend? I wouldn’t, I can tell you. I wouldn’t share with her, with Jessie. I know what they were. Modern. You could tell, just looking at them, what they were up to. One day they kissed in the street. In public. They’d no shame.’

‘I’d not share with you either,’ Miss Bottom said trenchantly, lower jaw jutting even further out in her defiance.

‘Did you see the man?’ Alice inquired.

‘No, I was in my flat.’

‘Did you not try and see him after the row? Did you not think to look out of your window then?’ Jessie demanded, unimpressed by her sister’s culpable lack of curiosity, her lack of diligence.

‘No. I would have done but I had a call.’

‘A telephone call? Who’d call you? You didn’t have to answer it!’

‘I did. Eh . . . eh . . . my pal – Nan, my old pal, said she’d give me a call on her return from Florida, and it was her. I couldn’t have put her off, could I? Anyway, I know what her boyfriend looked like.’

‘You could have put her off!’ Jessie replied hotly, quite carried away by the mystery of it all.

‘I,’ Margaret answered coldly, blowing her smoke directly into her sister’s face, ‘have friends, Jessie, real friends. Real friends make demands.’

‘Margaret!’