Chapter 21 #3
“Not on the game!” Bunny says, quite loud considering the server is out pretending to clear tables again. “Just . . . enjoying life.” He rubs his thumb over the engraving on David’s name. “Minto,” he says. “I might know this chap actually. Minto is a name of great pedigree in Edinburgh circles.”
“Yes, he’s pretty posh.”
“But are you quite sure he’s single? I seem to remember a Burns Supper I was dragged to by a pal . . .”
“I’ve caught him between wives,” I say. But I’m not feeling nearly as light-hearted as I sound. I don’t know anything about the law but I know there are a lot of professional arenas where truly useless people get kicked upstairs out of harm’s way.
“Bunny,” I ask. “You knew Peggy better than I got a chance to. Do you think she’d want me to have her house? All things being equal? Should I let it go right now? Because the sale is so tainted. Or should I try to hang on to it?”
“Do you love it?” Bunny says.
“I really do.”
“And you’re not going to ruin it? Put in a gym and a cinema?”
“Not a chance.”
“Then I think she’d be delighted.” He shivers. “Let’s go,” he says. “Even in July, it’s still Perthshire and my old bones reckon there’s rain coming. Anyway, you’ve got work to do.”
“Once I’ve decided which bloody police station to go to—Fife, Perthshire, Clack, or Stirling,” I say, standing and hauling him to his feet too. “If they investigate, they’ll be able to track down the doctor, surely. And they’ll be able to track down Peggy’s son too.”
Bunny is standing stock still, staring at me.
“Is your bum numb?” I say. “Those chairs are pretty but brutal.”
“I’ve remembered something,” he says. “It was you talking about the coppers tracking down Peggy’s son and about a doctor. Oh, my dear girl. Peggy’s son is a doctor.”
“Oh my God, yes,” I say. “You told me.”
“I can’t quite bring his name to mind right now. It’ll come back to me.”
“Searching for a ‘Dr. March, Glasgow’ would surely find him,” I say. “But . . .”
“But?”
“But no one would do that to their own mother!”
Out of kindness he doesn’t mock my naivety and so it’s in silence that we make our way home.
I let myself in the back door and sit down with my laptop.
“But which police station?” I ask myself again.
The house is in Perthshire, but the estate agent is in Stirlingshire.
Lord’s Yard is in Clack, although it still seems like the smallest deal out of everything.
The nursing home is definitely the worst angle of the whole scheme, so I decide to go down to Fife, to Kincardine, where there might already be suspicions about the Elms and it won’t be such an uphill battle with the cops when I drop my bombshell.
I turn to the keyboard to look up their address and only then notice that I’m still holding David’s business card, curled into my fist. Did I really not put it back in my wallet after showing Bunny?
I don’t know if I’m clutching it to keep him close to me, like a lovesick teenager, or because I’m holding on to the idea that he knew what he was doing about the house sale and I’m not going to lose this place.
Of course I’m not. It doesn’t matter what David specialises in now; he did a law degree and conveyancing is ground-level stuff.
It’s like a pilot could reverse a milk float but a milkman couldn’t land a plane.
Still, to reassure myself—and I make a promise that it’s my last selfish act before I report the whole ugly business and take what’s coming—I look him up again, thinking surely one of those 89,000 hits is going to mention that someone in his chambers, or practice, or department, or however Crown counsels organise themselves, will know enough about selling houses that David would have bobbed along the corridor and asked, if he’d seen something fishy.
I let the page fill this time, ignoring the first few entries, which are about some other guy, like they always are: Everyone I’ve ever stalked online has had the same name as an apartment complex manager in S?o Paulo or an adjunct professor at Texas A&M.
But I still haven’t found David when I’ve scrolled right down the first page. It’s all this other guy, bald and sleek and sixty. I read one of his entries, David Minto, LLM, CC, Advocate Depute, Crown Office, 25 Chambers Street, Edinburgh.
That’s what Bunny said. And Chambers Street came up too, sometime. Last night, wasn’t it? When David went to Stirling jail because an important client snapped their fingers and summoned him.
I’m 99 percent sure what I’m going to find as I type in advocate depute. My mouth is pouring with water like I’m going to vomit and my fingers are trembling, while I wait for the results to load.
I have to blink away tears to read what it says.
Advocates depute are prosecutors. They don’t have clients that could suddenly find themselves in jail after dinner one night. One of the tears falls. Either the man I’ve been calling David Minto doesn’t know that, or he thought I wouldn’t check.
I walk down the little staircase, letting it all sink in, feeling what I know only too well is advance mourning.
I’m an expert at grieving before the actual loss.
I fill a glass with water from the tap and stand at the sink looking out over the garden to Shelley’s greenhouse she won’t get to use, the grass I’ll never see four boys having a kickabout on, the trees whose leaves I won’t be sweeping up when autumn comes.
It doesn’t last long, this glum misery that’s almost enjoyable, in a weird way, if you let yourself really wallow in it. It soon departs and leaves room for the anger to come roaring back in. Why? That’s what I keep asking the absent “David”? How did he get mixed up in all thi—
Then, as quick as a finger snap and as loud as a thunderclap, I know.
Four men round the table that first night I spied on John’s poker game: John Lord the scrappie, Farmer George the estate agent, Nicotine Ned from the nursing home and the other one, with the grey hair, who was facing the other way.
And then once, when David was facing away from me and I was looking at his back and his grey hair, I felt that same old vertigo.
And, as if I need any more to ram this home, it strikes me that the second poker night—last night—when there were only three, of course there were only three! Because the fourth had gone rushing off to Forth Valley Hospital, where his son was in A&E.
Then he’d come back here to give me a load of flannel about himself, all sheepish and “honest.”
And then I’d slept with him.
I feel my guts clench at the memory, and I set the glass down in the sink, sure that I’ll puke if I try to take another sip.
The phone rings and I grab it without looking. “Chloe?”
“Bunny,” comes Bunny’s voice. “An easy mistake to make. I remembered Peggy’s son’s name as I was dropping off, which is better than as I was waking up, because my naps are long. I knew it was something very traditional, such as Robert or William or John or some such.”
“Is it David?” I say.
“Oh, splendid. You’ve found him already. Good work, Lindsay.”
I suppose I must say goodbye. Certainly he doesn’t notice anything amiss. Maybe I even thank him. After he’s rung off, I hit speed dial one. “Chloe,” I say to her voicemail. “I’ve got to talk to you. Code Red, Chlo. Code Red. I need you.”