A Rush of Blood

Sixty-three

Alex frowned as she looked at her father, sat in a chair in the garden room. ‘What do you want me to say, Pops?’

‘Nothing that you don’t want to,’ he replied. ‘I’m just telling you what happened after you stomped off last night.’

‘I didn’t stomp off!’ she protested, indignantly.

‘It looked like a stomp to me, kid, but I’m not blaming you for it. Andy was pushing his luck in showing up where he did, although I concede that his gamble paid off.’

‘I wonder who told him you’d be there.’

‘She’s in the kitchen, helping Seonaid make the supper.’

‘Seonaid’s four, Pops; I know you think she’s a prodigy, but not even Jamie Oliver started that young. Are you serious? Aileen told him?’

‘Yup. She confessed as soon as I got home last night. Andy called her and asked for her help to put things right between us. She suggested that he just turn up here, at the house, but he didn’t want that, in case there was a row in front of the kids. So she told him about the Torphichen office disco.’

‘Are you mad at her?’ his daughter asked.

‘She was afraid I would be. . but I’m not. I couldn’t be, ever. The truth is she was right; apart from the professional side of it, he and I needed to sit down together. There are times when I need to be protected from myself.’

‘Maybe I do too.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I’ve done some daft things in my life,’ she pointed out, ‘almost invariably involving men, the daftest of all being that which caused the bother between you and Andy in the first place.’

Her father smiled, gently. ‘If that’s true it’s in the blood. You’re talking to a three times married guy who’s had a couple of indiscretions himself. I’d prefer to say that most of the time you’ve been unlucky. I’m the one who’s been stupid, and a bloody sight more indiscreet than you.’

Alex winced. ‘You’ve never broken up anyone’s marriage, though.’

‘Nah.’ Bob shook his head. ‘I know it’s easy for you to accuse yourself, and in part you’re right. You knew Andy was married and yet you and he. .’ He left the sentence unfinished. ‘Karen would have been within her rights to slam the door on him there and then, but she didn’t. She took time to think the situation through properly and when she had done, she came to the conclusion that the easy thing to do would have been to forgive him for the one slip he ever made in their marriage, but that the right thing was to face up to the fact that there was more fundamentally wrong with it than that. She wasn’t happy before the thing with you muddied the waters. And neither was Andy. When they got together, they were both wounded people, for different reasons, and they were good for each other’s recovery. But they got married far too quickly; if they’d taken time to let the icing harden on the cake, they might not have. Then the family came along, Andy got deputy chief rank, and. . they drifted apart. You might have been a catalyst, but all you did was spark a reaction that would have taken place anyway.’

She looked at him. ‘Andy told you all this last night?’ she asked.

‘No. Karen did. I phoned her as soon as I left the disco, before I drove home. We had a long chat, and she told me everything she was feeling. She doesn’t blame you, not any more. In fact. .’ He stopped short.

‘What?’

‘Nothing.’

‘It’s out of the bottle now; tell me.’

‘She said,’ he continued, a little reluctantly, ‘that the two of you should never have split up in the first place.’

‘Is that what you think too?’ she challenged.

‘What I think doesn’t matter. All I know is that a relationship counsellor could write a bestseller on the emotional history of you and Andy Martin. It’s what you and he believe that counts.’

‘I can’t speak for him,’ she said. ‘I’m not even sure I can speak for myself. What I do know is that when we did break up, acrimoniously, the underlying cause was a lack of communication. We were engaged, I got pregnant by mistake, and I had a termination without telling him. He went crackers, and I told him where he could shove his ring. We didn’t talk to each other, before or during the disaster. He had his assumptions about me and motherhood, that he never put into words, but they were wrong. I knew enough about him to realise that if I’d told him I was expecting and what I planned to do about it, the row would have been just as big as it eventually was. I couldn’t take the chance that he’d pressure me into having the baby, so I had the abortion without telling him.’

‘And now?’

‘Now? I’m more mature than I was then; in the same situation I’d tell him, and then go ahead and do the same thing whether he liked it or not. Look, Pops, I know you’re getting round to asking me whether he and I are likely to get together again, but don’t, please don’t. The truth is that apart from that specific, just as there was something else wrong between Andy and Karen, there was another problem with the two of us, the same thing that went wrong between you and Sarah. He and I were both far too career-obsessed at the time to have been even thinking about domesticity. Well, I still am, and from what you’ve told me about the way his marriage has worked out, so’s he. I might be strongly attracted to him, I might love him, but where we were before, I’m not going back there, no way.’

‘I don’t imagine he’d fancy that either.’

‘I’m not going to call him, Pops,’ she vowed.

‘And he says he’s not going to call you. So there you are, it can stay in the past.’ He shrugged. ‘You’re both going to be living in the same city, but it’s a big place.’

‘It’ll need to be. OK, you’ve told me. Thanks. Now, how’s today been?’

‘Interesting. I went to see an old acquaintance, in the nick, somebody who once did business with your firm’s late client, Mr Zaliukas. What he told me makes me all the more pleased that Mitch has the sense to move you off that account. We are going to have to look at those companies, to check on the amounts that moved out of there and into Tomas Zaliukas’s pocket.’

Alex’s eyebrows rose. ‘Indeed?’ she murmured. ‘Mitch is going to love that.’ She paused. ‘But you won’t find anything; nothing that you shouldn’t, at any rate.’

‘Maybe not,’ Bob conceded, ‘but we’re going to have to look. There are some numbers that don’t add up.’