Death's Door

Seven

Alex Skinner was smiling as she replaced her phone in its cradle. Leaning across her desk in her small screened office space, she thought no one had noticed, but she was wrong.

‘That’s the weekend fixed up, is it?’ asked Pippa Clifton, the secretary she shared with two other associates of Curle Anthony and Jarvis, Scotland’s leading business-law firm.

‘Mind your own, woman,’ she replied cheerfully.

‘Come on, spill it. That was him, wasn’t it? Your new Mr Perfect.’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘You damn well do. You had your girlie face on, and these days that’s a dead giveaway: it was him.’

‘Pippa, we’re too busy for this,’ Alex protested.

‘It’s now or I’ll hound you after work.’

She sighed. ‘Okay, that was my next-door neighbour and friend, Detective Constable Griffin Montell. As it happens, he was apologising for breaking a date tonight as he’s been roped into a big investigation.’

‘But you were smiling.’

‘Yes, because I didn’t really want to go out tonight.’

‘Ah!’ Pippa’s eyebrows arched. ‘So he’s coming to your place once he’s finished.’

‘No, he’s not. How many times do I have to tell you? Griff’s a friend, that’s all. I like him, he makes me laugh, and that’s fine, for there is no way on this earth that I’m ever getting seriously involved with another copper. I repeat, but for the last time, he’s just a friend.’

‘Mmm.’ The secretary sniffed. ‘There’s nothing in my rule book that says a friend can’t give me one on occasion without either of us assuming that we’re engaged.’

Alex felt her cheeks flush and hoped that her tan disguised the fact: she kept her face straight.

‘Your dad approves of your friend, doesn’t he?’ Pippa continued relentlessly, even as her boss picked a folder from one of her trays.

‘I don’t seek his approval, any more than he seeks mine.’ She almost bit her tongue as she finished the sentence.

‘Which reminds me. I meant to ask you: is it true about him and the new First Minister, Aileen de Marco? The word is out, you know.’

Alex glared across her desk, signalling a jibe too far, and with it, the end of the conversation. ‘Pippa,’ she snapped, ‘there is office gossip, and then there is pushing your luck. Guess where you’re at? Get to work, now.’

As her secretary beat a hasty retreat, the young lawyer focused on the work before her, a study for a retail client on the consequences of a potential acquisition. She sketched out her analysis and her recommendations, then dictated it in memo form into a handheld recorder for Pippa to type and pass to Mitchell Laidlaw, the practice chairman, for his approval. Next she turned to her notes of an early-morning meeting with Paula Viareggio, the chief executive of the company to which she was legal adviser. As she turned them into a formal report, with action points, she found herself thinking about Paula.

The two women had become good friends, although there was the best part of ten years between them in age. They were confidantes: where Alex would not have dreamed of discussing her sex life with Pippa or, for that matter, with anyone else in the office, she was able to be reasonably open about it with Paula, knowing that if she asked for it, she would receive very good and very direct advice.

She smiled as she recalled what her client had said about Griff Montell: in fact, she had expressed much the same view as Pippa. ‘Okay, you like him,’ she had said, ‘but you don’t love him. You don’t want to marry him. You’re not yearning to have his babies. Fine, now we’ve dealt with all that. Do you fancy fucking him? Yes? In that case, if the opportunity arises, so to speak, what the hell’s stopping you? If I was in your shoes, or underwear, or whatever, I bloody know I would.’

In turn, Paula had felt able to discuss her relationship with Mario, confessing that, cousin or no cousin, she had been hopelessly in love with him since her mid-teens, and that she had never wavered in that, not even when he had married Maggie Rose. She had wished them no harm, but she had been sure from the start that they were wrong for each other, and had simply waited them out. Any relationships she had had herself before or during that time, including her brief fling with Stevie Steele, had been short-term affairs, safe and with no chance of permanency.

And yet, that morning, Alex had sensed a difference in her: she had not been the usual razor-sharp Paula, and once or twice, in mid-meeting, she had seemed to drift off somewhere else. It was as if there was something on her mind that she felt unable to discuss, even with a friend. There were no business worries, of that Alex was certain, and so her strange mood had been even more troubling.

Finally, she had asked her. ‘Paula, is everything all right? You and Mario haven’t had a row, have you?’

She had been quietly, and politely, brushed off. ‘Mario and me? Row? No way: he wouldn’t dare. We’re fine, I’m fine. But how about you? What about Griff the friendly detective?’ Subject closed, and not too subtly.

‘Him?’ she had lied. ‘Let’s just say I’m still thinking over your advice.’

‘What’s holding you back?’

‘I don’t want to spoil a nice friendship. You know the trouble with hunks: they have so much expectation to live up to, usually too much.’

Paula had smiled, normal service resumed. ‘Usually, but not always. I used to have a simple philosophy with guys like that. I thought of them as very expensive sports cars, sitting on their lacquered tyres, gleaming in the showroom. You know what I mean: the running costs might be prohibitive but you can always take them for a test drive.’

‘The Ferrari syndrome? Nice one, Ms Viareggio. I wonder if men think about women like that?’

‘Are you kidding? They invented the game. But the great thing is that nowadays, as often as not, the players are women like us. Role reversal at its finest.’

Alex smiled as she finished the report; she dictated it on to the same tape as the earlier document, filled in her time-sheet on her desktop computer, then took the micro-cassette along to the secretarial area. Pippa was absent; coffee break, she guessed. She checked her watch and decided that she too could afford five minutes for a break.

She walked along the corridor to the professional staff rest room, bought herself a diet drink from the dispenser, and picked up a copy of the first edition Evening News from the table, nodding to Grey Bauld, another associate who was the only other person in the room. He was sitting crouched over The Times, concentrating on a sudoku game.

The picture jumped out at her from the front page. There was something odd about it, something strange about the face, its lack of expression, perhaps. Yes, that was it: the eyes, they were vacant, emotionless. ‘My God,’ she whispered ‘she’s. .’

She began to read the story below, to confirm her realisation. ‘Police investigating the murder of a young woman,’ she murmured aloud, ‘whose body was found on an East Lothian beach yesterday afternoon, admitted today that they are no nearer identifying her. Releasing an artistically improved photograph of the victim, media spokesman Alan Royston said, “We are appealing for the public’s help in identifying this unfortunate girl. Anyone who thinks they know her should. .”

‘Artistically improved.’ Alex snorted. ‘She’s bloody dead.’ Although the background was a hazy blue colour, giving nothing away, she would have bet that the shot had been taken on a mortuary table, and retouched later using computer software to make the subject look as lifelike as possible. But nothing can truly restore life, once its light has been extinguished.

She stared at the page, not realising that she was frowning, until Bauld, frustrated once again by his puzzle, called out to her, ‘What’s up? Did your team lose?’

‘Don’t be daft,’ she replied. ‘I don’t have a team.’ She held up the paper. ‘It’s this photograph; this murdered girl. I can’t put my finger on it, but I have this weird feeling that I know her.’