Career of Evil

16

Behind the glass door of a shop on the high street hung a tea towel. It was decorated with black line drawings of local landmarks, but what attracted Strike’s attention were a number of stylized yellow roses exactly like the tattoo he remembered on Donald Laing’s powerful forearm. He paused to read the verse in the middle:

He had deposited the Mini in a car park beside the abbey, with its dark red arches rising against a pale blue sky. Beyond, to the south-east, was the triple peak of Eildon Hill, which Strike had noted on the map and which added drama and distinction to the skyline. After a bacon roll purchased at a nearby coffee shop and eaten at an outside table, followed by a cigarette and his second strong tea of the day, Strike had set out on foot in search of the Wynd, the home address Laing had given sixteen years previously when he joined the army and which Strike was not entirely sure how to pronounce. Was it “wind” as in breeze, or “wind” as in clock?

The small town looked prosperous in the sunshine as Strike strolled up the sloping high street to the central square, where a unicorn-topped pillar stood in a basin of flowers. A round stone in the pavement bore the town’s old Roman name, Trimontium, which Strike knew must refer to the triple-peaked hill nearby.

He seemed to have missed the Wynd, which according to the map on his phone led off the high street. He doubled back and found a narrow entrance in the walls to his right, only large enough for a pedestrian, which led to a dim inner courtyard. Laing’s old family home had a bright blue front door and was reached by a short flight of steps.

Strike’s knock was answered almost at once by a pretty, dark-haired woman far too young to be Laing’s mother. When Strike explained his mission, she responded in a soft accent he found attractive:

“Mrs. Laing? She’s no been here for ten years or more.”

Before his spirits had time to sink, she added:

“She stays up in Dingleton Road.”

“Dingleton Road? Is that far?”

“Just up the way.” She pointed behind her, to the right. “I dinnae ken the number, sorry.”

“No problem. Thanks for your help.”

It occurred to him as he walked back along the dingy passageway to the sunlit square that, barring the obscenities the young soldier had muttered into Strike’s ear in the boxing ring, he had never heard Donald Laing speak. Still working undercover on his drugs case, it had been imperative that Strike was not seen wandering in and out of HQ in his beard, so the interrogation of Laing after his arrest had been undertaken by others. Later, when he had successfully concluded the drugs case and was again clean-shaven, Strike had given evidence against Laing in court, but he had been on a plane out of Cyprus by the time that Laing had stood up to deny that he had tied up or tortured his wife. As he crossed Market Square, Strike wondered whether his Borders accent might have been one reason that people had been so willing to believe in Donnie Laing, to forgive him, to like him. The detective seemed to remember reading that advertisers used Scottish accents to suggest integrity and honesty.

The only pub he had spotted so far stood a short distance along a street Strike passed on the way to Dingleton Road. Melrose appeared to be fond of yellow: though the walls were white, the pub’s doors and window were picked out in acid-bright lemon and black. To the Cornish-born Strike’s amusement, given the landlocked situation of the town, the pub was called the Ship Inn. He walked on into Dingleton Road, which snaked under a bridge, became a steep hill and disappeared out of sight.

The term “not far” was a relative one, as Strike had often had occasion to observe since losing his calf and foot. After ten minutes’ walk up the hill he was beginning to regret that he had not returned to the abbey car park for the Mini. Twice he asked women in the street whether they knew where Mrs. Laing lived, but though polite and friendly, neither could tell him. He trudged on, sweating slightly, past a stretch of white bungalows, until he met an elderly man coming the other way, wearing a tweed flat cap and walking a black and white Border collie.

“Excuse me,” said Strike. “Do you happen to know where Mrs. Laing lives? I’ve forgotten the number.”

“Messus Laing?” replied the dog walker, surveying Strike from beneath thick salt and pepper eyebrows. “Aye, she’s my next-door neighbor.”

Thank Christ.

“Three along,” said the man, pointing, “wi’ the stone wishing well oot front.”

“Thanks very much,” said Strike.

As he turned up Mrs. Laing’s drive he noticed, out of the corner of his eye, that the old man was still standing on the spot, watching him, in spite of the collie trying to tug him downhill.

Mrs. Laing’s bungalow looked clean and respectable. Stone animals of Disneyesque cuteness littered her lawn and peeped out from her flowerbeds. The front door lay at the side of the building, in shadow. Only as he raised his hand to the doorknocker did it occur to Strike that he might, within seconds, come face to face with Donald Laing.

For a whole minute after he knocked, nothing happened except that the elderly dog walker retraced his steps and stood at Mrs. Laing’s gate, unabashedly staring. Strike suspected that the man regretted giving out his neighbor’s address and was checking that the large stranger meant the woman no harm, but he was wrong.

“She’s in,” he called to Strike, who was deliberating as to whether to try again. “But she’s wud.”

“She’s what?” Strike called back as he knocked for a second time.

“Wud. Doolally.”

The dog walker took a few steps down the drive towards Strike.

“Demented,” he translated for the Englishman.

“Ah,” said Strike.

The door opened, revealing a tiny, wizened, sallow-faced old woman wearing a deep blue dressing gown. She glared up at Strike with a kind of unfocused malevolence. There were several stiff whiskers growing out of her chin.

“Mrs. Laing?”

She said nothing, but peered at him out of eyes that he knew, bloodshot and faded though they were, must have been beady and ferret-like in their day.

“Mrs. Laing, I’m looking for your son Donald.”

“No,” she said, with surprising vehemence. “No.”

She retreated and slammed the door.

“Bugger,” said Strike under his breath, which made him think of Robin. She would almost certainly have been better than him at charming the little old woman. Slowly he turned, wondering whether there was anyone else in Melrose who might help — he had definitely seen other Laings listed on 192.com — and found himself face to face with the dog walker, who had proceeded all the way down the drive to meet him and was looking cautiously excited.

“You’re the detective,” he said. “You’re the detective that put her son away.”

Strike was astonished. He could not imagine how he was recognizable to an elderly Scottish man whom he had never met before. His so-called fame was of a very low order when it came to being identified by strangers. He walked the streets of London daily without anyone caring who he was, and unless somebody met him or heard his name in the context of an investigation, was rarely associated with the newspaper stories about his successful cases.

“Aye, you did!” said the elderly man, his excitement rising. “My wife and I are friends of Margaret Bunyan’s.” And in the face of Strike’s mystification he elaborated: “Rhona’s mother.”

It took a few seconds for Strike’s capacious memory to render up the information that Laing’s wife, the young woman whom he had discovered tied to the bed beneath the bloodstained sheet, had been called Rhona.

“When Margaret seen you in the papers she said to us, ‘That’s him, that’s the lad that rescued our Rhona!’ You’ve done very well for yourself, haven’t you? Stop it, Wullie!” he added in a loud aside to the eager collie, which was still pulling on its lead, trying to regain the road. “Oh, aye, Margaret follows everything you do, all the stories in the papers. You found out who killed that model girl — and that writer! Margaret’s never forgot what you did for her girl, never.”

Strike muttered something indistinct, something he hoped sounded grateful for Margaret’s appreciation.

“Wha’ for are you wanting to talk to auld Mrs. Laing? He’s nae done something else, has he, Donnie?”

“I’m trying to find him,” said Strike evasively. “D’you know if he’s back in Melrose?”

“Och, no, I wouldnae think so. He came back to see his mother a few years back, but I dinnae know that he’s been here since. It’s a small toon: Donnie Laing back — we’d hear, ken?”

“D’you think Mrs. — Bunyan, did you say? — might have any—?”

“She’d love tae meet you,” said the old man excitedly. “No, Wullie,” he added to the whining Border collie, which was trying to tug him to the gate. “I’ll ring her, will I? She’s only over in Darnick. Next village. Will I ring?”

“That’d be very helpful.”

So Strike accompanied the old man next door and waited in a small, spotless sitting room while he gabbled excitedly into the phone over his dog’s increasingly furious whines.

“She’ll come over,” said the old man, with his hand over the receiver. “D’ye want to meet her here? You’re welcome. The wife’ll make tea—”

“Thanks, but I’ve got a couple of things to do,” lied Strike, who doubted the possibility of a successful interview in the presence of this garrulous witness. “Could you see whether she’d be free for lunch at the Ship Inn? In an hour?”

The collie’s determination for its walk tipped the balance in Strike’s favor. The two men left the house and walked back down the hill together, the collie tugging all the way so that Strike was forced into a faster gait than suited him on a steep downward slope. He said good-bye with relief to his helpful acquaintance in Market Square. With a cheery wave, the old man headed off in the direction of the River Tweed and Strike, now limping slightly, walked down the high street, killing time until he needed to return to the Ship.

At the bottom of the road he encountered another explosion of black and acid yellow which, Strike realized, explained the Ship Inn’s colors. Here again was the yellow rose, on a sign announcing MELROSE RUGBY FOOTBALL CLUB. Strike paused, hands in pockets, looking over the low wall at a smooth, level expanse of viridian velvet surrounded by trees, the yellow rugby posts shining in the sun, stands to the right and softly undulating hills beyond. The pitch was as well maintained as any place of worship, and an extraordinarily well-appointed facility for such a small town.

Staring out across the expanse of velvety grass, Strike remembered Whittaker, stinking and smoking in the corner of the squat while Leda lay beside him, listening open-mouthed to the tales of his hard life — credulous and greedy as a baby bird, as Strike now saw it, for the yarns Whittaker spun her. From Leda’s point of view, Gordonstoun might as well have been Alcatraz: it was nothing short of outrageous that her slender poet had been forced out into the harsh Scottish winter to be pummeled and knocked about in the mud and the rain.

“Not rugby, darling. Oh, poor baby... you playing rugby!”

And when the seventeen-year-old Strike (sporting a fat lip from the boxing club at the time) had laughed, softly, into his homework, Whittaker had staggered to his feet, shouting in his obnoxious mockney:

“What are you facking laughing about, meathead?”

Whittaker could not stand laughter at his expense. He needed, craved adulation; in its absence, he would take fear or even loathing as evidence of his power, but ridicule was evidence of another’s assumed superiority and consequently unbearable.

“You’d facking love it, wouldn’t you, you stupid little tit? Think you’re facking officer class already, dontcha, out with the rugger buggers. Get his rich daddy to send him to facking Gordonstoun!” Whittaker had yelled at Leda.

“Calm down, darling!” she had said, and then, in slightly more peremptory terms: “No, Corm!”

Strike had stood up, braced, ready and eager to hit Whittaker. That had been the closest he had ever come to doing it, but his mother had staggered between them, a thin, beringed hand on each heaving chest.

Strike blinked and the bright sunlit pitch, a place of innocent endeavor and excitement, seemed to come back into focus. He could smell leaves, grass and the warm rubber from the road beside him. Slowly he turned and headed back towards the Ship Inn, craving a drink, but his treacherous subconscious was not done with him yet.

The sight of that smooth rugby pitch had unleashed another memory: black-haired, dark-eyed Noel Brockbank, running at him with the broken beer bottle in his hand. Brockbank had been massive, powerful and fast: a flanker. Strike remembered his own fist rising around the side of that broken bottle, connecting just as the glass touched his own neck—

A basal skull fracture, that’s what they had called it. Bleeding from the ear. A massive brain injury.

“Fuck, fuck, fuck,” mumbled Strike under his breath, in time with his own footsteps.

Laing, that’s what you’re here for. Laing.

He passed under the metal galleon with bright yellow sails that hung over the Ship Inn’s door. A sign just inside read MELROSE’S ONLY PUB.

He found the place instantly calming: a glow of warm color, shining glass and brass; a carpet that resembled a patchwork of faded browns, reds and greens; walls of warm peach and exposed stone. Everywhere were more indications of Melrose’s sporting obsession: blackboards announcing upcoming matches, several enormous plasma screens and, above the urinal (it had been hours since Strike had last peed), a small wall-mounted television, just in case a try was pending at the point a full bladder could no longer be ignored.

Mindful of the journey back to Edinburgh in Hardacre’s car, he bought himself half a pint of John Smith’s and sat down on a leather-covered sofa facing the bar, perusing the laminated menu and hoping that Margaret Bunyan would be punctual, because he had just realized that he was hungry.

She appeared a mere five minutes later. Although he could barely remember what her daughter looked like and had never met Mrs. Bunyan before, her expression of mingled apprehension and anticipation gave her away as she paused, staring at him, on the doormat.

Strike got up and she stumbled forwards, both hands gripping the strap of a large black handbag.

“It is you,” she said breathlessly.

She was around sixty, small and fragile-looking, wearing metal-framed glasses, her expression anxious beneath tightly permed fair hair.

Strike held out a large hand and shook hers, which trembled slightly, cold and fine-boned.

“Her dad’s over in Hawick today, he can’t come, I rang him, he said to tell you we’ll never forget what you did for Rhona,” she said on a single breath. She sank down beside Strike on the sofa, continuing to observe him with mingled awe and nerves. “We’ve never forgot. We read about you in the papers. We were so sorry about your leg. What you did for Rhona! What you did—”

Her eyes were suddenly brimful of tears.

“—we were so...”

“I’m glad I was able to—”

Find her child tied naked and bloodstained on a bed? Talking to relatives about what the people they loved had endured was one of the worst parts of the job.

“—able to help her.”

Mrs. Bunyan blew her nose on a handkerchief retrieved from the bottom of her black handbag. He could tell that she was of the generation of women who would never usually enter a pub alone and certainly not buy drinks at a bar if a man were there to undertake the ordeal for them.

“Let me get you something.”

“Just an orange juice,” she said breathlessly, dabbing at her eyes.

“And something to eat,” Strike urged, keen to order the beer-battered haddock and chips for himself.

When he had placed their order at the bar and returned to her, she asked what he was doing in Melrose and the source of her nervousness became apparent at once.

“He’s not come back, has he? Donnie? Is he back?”

“Not as far as I know,” said Strike. “I don’t know where he is.”

“D’you think he’s got something to do...?”

Her voice had dropped to a whisper.

“We read in the paper... we saw that someone sent you a — a—”

“Yes,” said Strike. “I don’t know whether he’s got anything to do with it, but I’d like to find him. Apparently he’s been back here to see his mother since leaving jail.”

“Och, four or five years ago, that would’ve been,” said Margaret Bunyan. “He turned up on her doorstep, forced his way into the bungalow. She’s got Alzheimer’s now. She couldn’t stop him, but the neighbors called his brothers and they came and threw him out.”

“They did, did they?”

“Donnie’s the youngest. He’s got four older brothers. They’re hard men,” said Mrs. Bunyan, “all of them. Jamie stays in Selkirk — he came tearing through to get Donnie out of his mother’s house. They say he knocked him senseless.”

She took a tremulous sip of her orange juice and continued:

“We heard all about it. Our friend Brian, who you just met, he saw the fight happening out on the street. Four of them onto one, all of them shouting and yelling. Someone called the police. Jamie got a caution. He didn’t care,” said Mrs. Bunyan. “They didn’t want him anywhere near them, or their mother. They ran him out of town.

“I was terrified,” she continued. “For Rhona. He’d always said he’d find her when he got out.”

“And did he?” asked Strike.

“Och, yes,” said Margaret Bunyan miserably. “We knew he would. She’d moved tae Glasgow, got a job in a travel agent’s. He still found her. Six months she lived in fear of him turning up and then one day he did. Came to her flat one night, but he’d been ill. He wasn’t the same.”

“Ill?” repeated Strike sharply.

“I can’t remember what it was he’d got, some kind of arthritis, I think, and Rhona said he’d put on a lot of weight. He turned up at her flat at night, he’d tracked her down, but thanks be to God,” said Mrs. Bunyan fervently, “her fiancé was staying over. His name’s Ben,” she added, with a triumphal flourish, the color high in her faded cheeks, “and he’s a policeman.”

She said it as though she thought Strike would be especially glad to hear this, as though he and Ben were comembers of some great investigative brotherhood.

“They’re married now,” said Mrs. Bunyan. “No kids, because — well, you know why—”

And without warning, a torrent of tears burst forth, streaming down Mrs. Bunyan’s face behind her glasses. The horror of what had happened a decade ago was suddenly fresh and raw, as though a pile of offal had been dumped on the table in front of them.

“—Laing stuck a knife up inside her,” whispered Mrs. Bunyan.

She confided in him as though Strike were a doctor or a priest, telling him the secrets that weighed on her, but which she could not tell her friends: he already knew the worst. As she groped again for the handkerchief in her square black bag, Strike remembered the wide patch of blood on the sheets, the excoriated skin on her wrist where Rhona had tried to free herself. Thank God her mother could not see inside his head.

“He stuck a knife inside — and they tried to — you know — repair—”

Mrs. Bunyan took a deep, shuddering breath as two plates of food appeared in front of them.

“But she and Ben have lovely holidays,” she whispered frantically, dabbing repeatedly at her hollow cheeks, lifting her glasses to reach her eyes. “And they breed — they breed German — German Shepherds.”

Hungry though he was, Strike could not eat in the immediate aftermath of discussing what had been done to Rhona Laing.

“She and Laing had a baby, didn’t they?” he asked, remembering its feeble whimpering from beside its bloodstained, dehydrated mother. “The kid must be, what, ten by now?”

“He d-died,” she whispered, tears dripping off the end of her chin. “C-cot death. He was always sickly, the bairn. It happened two d-days after they put D-Donnie away. And h-he — Donnie — he telephoned her out of the jail and told her he knew she’d killed — killed — the baby — and that he’d kill her when he got out—”

Strike laid a large hand briefly on the sobbing woman’s shoulder, then hoisted himself to his feet and approached the young barmaid who was watching them with her mouth open. Brandy seemed too strong for the sparrow-like creature behind him. Strike’s Aunt Joan, who was only a little older than Mrs. Bunyan, always regarded port as medicinal. He ordered a glass and took it back to her.

“Here. Drink this.”

His reward was a recrudescence of tears, but after much more dabbing with the sodden handkerchief she said shakily, “You’re very kind,” sipped it, gave a little gasping sigh and blinked at him, her fair-lashed eyes pink like a piglet’s.

“Have you got any idea where Laing went after turning up at Rhona’s?”

“Yes,” she whispered. “Ben put out feelers through work, through the probation office. Apparently he went to Gateshead, but I don’t know whether he’s still there.”

Gateshead. Strike remembered the Donald Laing he had found online. Had he moved from Gateshead to Corby? Or were they different men?

“Anyway,” said Mrs. Bunyan, “he’s never bothered Rhona and Ben again.”

“I’ll bet he hasn’t,” said Strike, picking up his knife and fork. “A copper and German Shepherds, eh? He’s not stupid.”

She seemed to take courage and comfort from his words, and with a timid, tearful smile began to pick at her macaroni cheese.

“They married young,” commented Strike, who was keen to hear anything he could about Laing, anything that might give a lead on his associations or habits.

She nodded, swallowed and said:

“Far too young. She started seeing him when she was only fifteen and we didn’t like it. We’d heard things about Donnie Laing. There was a young girl who said he’d forced himself on her at the Young Farmers’ disco. It never came to anything: the police said there wasn’t enough evidence. We tried to warn Rhona he was trouble,” she sighed, “but that made her more determined. She was always headstrong, our Rhona.”

“He’d already been accused of rape?” asked Strike. His fish and chips were excellent. The pub was filling up, for which he was grateful: the barmaid’s attention was diverted from them.

“Oh yes. They’re a rough family,” said Mrs. Bunyan, with the sort of prim small-town snobbery that Strike knew well from his own upbringing. “All those brothers, they were always fighting, in trouble with the police, but he was the worst of them. His own brothers didn’t like him. I don’t think his mother liked him much, tae tell the truth. There was a rumor,” she said in a burst of confidence, “that he wasnae the father’s. The parents were always fighting and they separated round about the time she got pregnant with Donnie. They say she had a run-around with one of the local policemen, as a matter of fact. I don’t know whether it’s true. The policeman moved on and Mr. Laing moved back in, but Mr. Laing never liked Donnie, I know that. Never liked him at all. People said it was because he knew Donnie wasn’t his.

“He was the wildest of all of them. A big lad. He got into the junior sevens—”

“Sevens?”

“The rugby sevens,” she said, and even this small, genteel lady was surprised that Strike did not immediately understand what, to Melrose, seemed more religion than sport. “But they kicked him out. No discipline. Someone carved up Greenyards the week after they kicked him out. The pitch,” she added, in response to the Englishman’s mystifying ignorance.

The port was making her talkative. Words were tumbling out of her now.

“He took up boxing instead. He had the gift of the gab, though, oh aye. When Rhona first took up with him — she was fifteen and he was seventeen — I had some folk telling me he wasn’t a bad lad really. Oh, aye,” she repeated, nodding at Strike’s look of disbelief. “Folk that didn’t know him so well were took in by him. He could be charming when he wanted to, Donnie Laing.

“But you just ask Walter Gilchrist whether he was charming. Walter sacked him off the farm — he was always being late — and someone set fire to his barn after. Oh, they never proved it was Donnie. They never proved it was him who wrecked the pitch, neither, but I know what I believe.

“Rhona wouldn’t listen. She thought she knew him. He was misunderstood and I don’t know what else. We were prejudiced, narrow-minded. He wanted tae join the army. Good riddance, I thought. I hoped she’d forget him if he left.

“Then he came back. He got her pregnant but she lost it. She was angry with me because I said—”

She did not want to tell him what she had said, but Strike could imagine.

“—and then she wouldn’t talk to me anymore, and she went and married him on his next leave. Her dad and I weren’t invited,” she said. “Off to Cyprus together. But I know he killed our cat.”

“What?” said Strike, thrown.

“I know it was him. We’d told Rhona she was making an awful mistake, last time we saw her before she married him. That night we couldn’t find Purdy. Next day she was on the back lawn, dead. The vet said she’d been strangled.”

On the plasma screen over her shoulder a scarlet-clad Dimitar Berbatov was celebrating a goal against Fulham. The air was full of Borders voices. Glasses clinked and cutlery tinkled as Strike’s companion talked of death and mutilation.

“I know he did it, I know he killed Purdy,” she said feverishly. “Look at what he did to Rhona and the baby. He’s evil.”

Her hands fumbled with the catch on her bag and pulled out a small wad of photographs.

“My husband always says, ‘Why are you keeping them? Burn them.’ But I always thought we might need pictures of him one day. There,” she said, thrusting them into Strike’s eager hands. “You have them, you keep them. Gateshead. That’s where he went next.”

Later, after she had left with renewed tears and thanks, after he had paid the bill, Strike walked to Millers of Melrose, a family butcher he had noticed on his stroll around the town. There he treated himself to some venison pies that he suspected would be far tastier than anything he would be able to purchase at the station before boarding the sleeper back to London.

Returning to the car park via a short street where golden roses bloomed, Strike thought again about the tattoo on that powerful forearm.

Once, years ago, it had meant something to Donnie Laing to belong to this lovely town, surrounded by farmland and overlooked by the triple peaks of Eildon Hill. Yet he had been no straightforward worker of the soil, no team player, no asset to a place that seemed to pride itself on discipline and honest endeavor. Melrose had spat out the burner of barns, the strangler of cats, the carver-up of rugby fields, so Laing had taken refuge in a place where many men had found either their salvation or their inevitable comeuppance: the British Army. When that had led to jail, and jail disgorged him, he had tried to come home, but nobody had wanted him.

Had Donald Laing found a warmer welcome in Gateshead? Had he moved from there to Corby? Or, Strike wondered, as he folded himself back into Hardacre’s Mini, had these been mere stopping posts on his way to London and Strike?