LITMIR.BIZ

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TOURIST BUS CRAWLED past, part of a new Explore Scotland initiative. Glasgow at midnight, on a bitter cold November Sunday. The open-topped upper deck was empty apart from the two drunks leaning off the back of the bus singing a song about where to shove your granny. The downstairs of the double decker was steamed up. Anybody in there would see nothing but glazed lights and a dense smirr of rain, which was probably just as well.

      ‘I do worry about Valerie. She wasn’t exactly stable before the murders. Something I have only become aware of in hindsight,’ said Walker, now he and Anderson were alone.

      ‘She was married though, so there was a somebody once?’

      ‘He left her because of her drinking, I know that. Now. She was like a robot walking round the house on Balcarres Avenue, no tears, no emotion. It all seemed too much trouble for her. Talking about a picture that was missing, where was the Lego model she had built at Christmas? Was George going to sell the house?’

      ‘You know murder transforms those it touches. Valerie’s not immune because she’s part of the judicial system. She has lost everybody,’ argued Anderson.

      ‘I don’t even think she sees George now.’ Walker glanced at his watch. ‘I suppose I should go and visit her. She’s staying at the Jury’s.’

      ‘Really? It’s very nearly midnight.’

      ‘Alcoholics don’t sleep; recovering ones sleep even less. And she’s in a hotel because she’s skint. She sold her flat to try to buy a baby, remember.’

      Archie Walker wasn’t ready to sleep and he wanted to clear his head. It was only a twenty-minute walk from Byres Road to the hotel where Valerie had been living for the last three weeks. She’d be awake. Insomnia was one of the reasons she had reached for the bottle. He’d get there and phone her. If she answered, fair enough, if not he’d walk on to his own house which was another ten minutes along Great Western Road.

      It was one of his conditions to get her to stop drinking. He would pop in with no advance warning, and she had better be sober. So far, for him, it was fifty-fifty.

      As he watched the steady rain, the glow of the traffic lights, he wondered about her memory lapses, and the nagging doubt at the back of his mind. Valerie was a fiscal, she had been a talented prosecutor in court, fierce when she was at the top of her game. Would she know how to commit a perfect murder?

      Since Braithwaite attacked her at the Blue Neptune, Abigail had said Valerie could stay at her house, but Valerie said she had not been there, or if she had she couldn’t recall it. If she had been there on the night Abigail and Malcolm were killed, she was drunk and nobody else left alive could bear witness to what had happened. Valerie had been in the house on the 11th of October, three days before the murders. Her prints had a right to be there. And the perpetrator had taken their time in the house, they had known the house, known the victims.

      And in DCI Mathieson’s view, from her position in Complaints and Investigation, a smart fiscal like Valerie Abernethy would be well placed to have committed these murders. But whoever had committed that atrocity had a clear and precise thought process. That wasn’t the Valerie Archie now knew, the one who crawled around the floor, too pissed to stand up.

      He watched two young women, giggling as they got off the bus, deciding walking would be quicker than waiting for the late-night traffic through Queen Margaret Drive to clear. Their laughter made him think of how Valerie had been his favourite godchild, the quiet, thoughtful one. Abigail was the loving wee girl then, a normal happy child, mischievous and playful, a free spirit. She was fun to be around.

      Anderson nudged him. ‘Now we are on our own, tell me, do you think Valerie did it?’

      ‘Nope. She’d have been so pissed she wouldn’t have cleaned up. It was a cool, methodical mind committed that crime.’

      ‘OK, does she share Costello’s suspicions of her own brother-in-law?’

      ‘Valerie is the one with no alibi, not George.’

      ‘Answer the question, Archie.’

      ‘Yes, she does.’

      ‘Come on, let’s walk up to Oran Mor,’ Anderson suggested; it was too cold to stand still. ‘So what was Abigail like?’

      ‘I was just thinking that. She was happy. A GP, bright. She was happy, then Oscar, her first husband, was killed in an accident – boating, I think. Car? No, drowning. She ended up going to court to get him declared dead.’

      ‘That takes ages, seven years?’

      ‘Indeed. Mary Jane was about six or seven at the time he went missing,’ Archie replied.

      ‘They seem to be a very unlucky family,’ said Anderson thoughtfully, standing at the kerb, waiting to cross Byres Road. ‘Abigail’s first husband drowned when he fell off his yacht, then Mary Jane was murdered by Braithwaite . . .’

      ‘You don’t know that . . .’

      ‘. . . and then Abigail and Malcolm were murdered. So I do see Costello’s point that no family can be that unlucky, which suggests it was nothing to do with a lack of luck.’

      ‘Maybe that’s not true, maybe in a roundabout kind of way everything is linked.’

      ‘A butterfly flaps its wings in Columbia and the number twenty-seven bus gets diverted through Clydebank? That kind of thing? Come on, let’s cross.’ They both jogged across the road, cutting between the four lanes. Once safely on the pavement Anderson continued, ‘It’s not a small world when the fish swim in the same small circles. I still don’t understand why Sally never told me she was pregnant. I know we were young and still at university but I’d have stood by her. I’d have wanted to know Mary Jane.’

      ‘Maybe she didn’t know the baby was yours. Or she did and didn’t want you to know. She was with Braithwaite at the time and we know what a psycho he turned out to be. Maybe it was self-preservation.’

      Despite the tragic ending to the whole situation, Anderson smiled. ‘It was a drunken night in the park when Sally’s bloody boyfriend had buggered off elsewhere. So yeah, not proud of it, but we were young and, maybe not in love but in lust at least.’

      ‘Well, there you go then, at least you are human.’ Walker stopped to put a pound in the box of a homeless person. Anderson patted the Staffie cross that was snuggled under the blanket and gave him two of Nesbit’s treats. They walked on. ‘I’ve been thinking,’ proclaimed Walker.

      ‘Be careful,’ cautioned Anderson. ‘You’re a lawyer, it’s against your religion to think without getting paid by the hour.’ They continued up to Oran Mor, watching the remnants of the rain fall as orange and golden tears, catching the glare of the street lamps and the headlights of the traffic waiting at the Queen Margaret Drive junction.

      Walker spoke with a sigh. ‘I really do need to go and see Valerie, I’m feeling guilty. I think she’s hiding from me. She thinks that she has let me down, again. Especially at the house. She could barely be bothered to put a comb through her hair, or wash her face.’ He shook his head, being as perjink and neat as he was, this was a heinous offence. ‘Maybe she became a lawyer for all the wrong reasons. Who can cope with months and months of working on child abuse cases when she was yearning for a child she couldn’t have. I’m her godfather. I’m supposed to look after her spiritual welfare, so I buggered that up good and proper.’

      ‘She buggered it up herself. At one point, Valerie was on a good career ladder. She was already in charge of a unit in Edinburgh. She was doing OK. At one point,’ Anderson repeated.

      ‘She was, at least until . . . until her marriage broke up, until she realised that she was going to have difficulty having kids. Then she began to drink. It was the pressure of the job, the pressure of going through every test in the book, with a husband that thought it was all too much bother. Grieg, Valerie’s husband, had more of a que sera sera view on the subject. I’d like to think if I had a fiscal in my office with failed IVF behind her, I’d have

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