Murder Mile

Chapter 32

DI Rob Brennan thought the world was cracked, fragmenting. He felt the age he lived in had grown confused and uncertain. The world no longer knew right from wrong. It confused profits with rewards and seemed unsure of the value of anything. As he drove towards the Sloans’ home in Pilrig his mind thrashed between the case and more petty concerns. He thought about the way the Chief Super had cautioned him — not for his conduct on the case but for his financial mismanagement of the force’s resources. It was insane: he knew you could not put a price on policing the streets. You could not put a price on finding the killer who had left the cold bodies of Fiona Gow and Lindsey Sloan in a Straiton field. He shook his head, wondered how far off a privatised police force was. They had put the prisons in the hands of big business — and the court transport — was a private force much closer now? Nothing was beyond the scope of the bean counters, he surmised.

Brennan tilted with the sweep of the car as he overtook a double-decker bus with an advertisement for a new reality show on its side. He realised he no longer knew what a good television programme was. Or a good book. A movie or a piece of music. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d engaged with mass culture. It was for other people, alien to him; it seemed to him like nobody got Rob Brennan any more. He didn’t fit the unthinking mould: they were all waiting to be told their tastes, spoon fed.

He turned on the car radio, a saccharine pop song burst from the speakers and assaulted his eardrums; he turned it off, sneered into the windscreen.

‘Fuck’s sake.’

Where were the true artists, thought Brennan, the people to make sense of this mess? If a fifteen-year-old singer with a side sweep could shift records, it meant all now — but it meant nothing — where were the arbiters? Had they gone too? If they had gone — those point-men for the human race — then the rest of us weren’t far behind. No one stood up any more to say we had all lost our way; we had supplanted our souls with rhinestone or dust or paste — anything vacuous and empty, anything worthless, meaningless.

Brennan felt like the only one who cared; he was old enough to remember a different way, a different world. Was he simply being nostalgic? he wondered. Had it really been that much better to hear a song he’d enjoyed on the radio had reached number one on Top of the Pops? Did it mean anything? It was just another fond memory from his youth that triggered deeper memories — reminded him that those times were now gone, passed, and would not be coming back. Was it further evidence of his growing discontent? Brennan knew that the world he had dwelt in as a younger man had vanished and the promise it offered had never materialised. He felt let down, duped; and every reminder of the fact dug at his battered heart.

The mobile phone on the passenger seat beside him started to ring; he picked it up. The caller ID said Joyce. He flicked on the blinkers, pulled into the side of the road.

Brennan took a deep breath before he answered, ‘Hello, Joyce.’

She started on him immediately, ‘That was some trick to pull.’ Her voice was high, forceful. She had taken time to let her wrath simmer. ‘I mean, to drag your daughter out of school is one thing, but to not even tell me, to leave me waiting at home… Wondering where in the name of Christ she was.’

‘Shut up, Joyce.’

There was a single second of silence, then indignation bit once more, ‘What did you say to me?’

Brennan answered calmly, he let the flat tone of his voice lead her opinion more than his words. ‘I think you heard, I think you’re being unfair, and I think you know it.’

Her teeth clacked on the other end of the line, ‘I don’t believe I’m hearing this.’

‘Neither do I… did you just call to bawl me out?’ Brennan could tell from the tone of his wife’s voice that she had no intention of making a valid point about him collecting Sophie from school. She was not concerned about where she had been or whom she was with; Joyce had called to vent unspoken frustrations. She wanted to tell him that she was the one who had decamped to the moral high ground, she was the one who stayed home, looked after their daughter. He, by contrast, had to be reminded he was the adulterer, not fit to remain under their roof. That was her message, however she attempted to relay it.

‘She went straight to her room and stayed there all night, never spoke a word. Do you realise the psychological damage you could have done to our daughter?’

Brennan tutted into the phone, it came out as a more guttural noise than he intended, but he wasn’t entirely dissatisfied with the effect. ‘Jesus Christ, woman… Will you listen to yourself? I took my daughter for coffee, one coffee and I delivered her to the door.’ He paused, ‘And, I have to say, she was in fine form when I left her…’

‘And what’s that supposed to mean?’

‘It means what it means.’

Joyce’s voice broke bluntly, ‘I see…’ She at once seemed to sense the futility of her situation. ‘Well I called to tell you I will not tolerate anything like that in future… If you want access to my daughter you can apply through the courts.’

‘Sophie is our daughter, Joyce.’ A cat ran from a shaded wynd as Brennan waited for his wife’s reply; none came. ‘Joyce?…’

She had hung up.

The memory of the night he had met Joyce had grown opaque now. There had been a party, one of the weekly crop of them that had sprung up that long summer of his early twenties. At some point they had got chatting — he seemed to think it was in the kitchen, but that might have been maturity rearranging memory for conveni-ence sake; hadn’t all his party appearances convened in the kitchen? She wore her hair up and had a beautiful, slender neck that he had longed to kiss, that much was credible fact. He stored the image of her like a daguerreotype and brought it out when he had mourned its passing. Joyce was no longer the clubbable, girly party-goer, was no longer smooth skinned or supple necked. He wasn’t so superficial a man as to be swayed by her physical diminution — what plagued Brennan was the boy who had once been stripped of all reason, all sense, by the sight of a pretty girl. What he saw now was the vision of Joyce laid bare — the subcutaneous woman — and that was something he had failed to notice on their early encounters.

There was a harshness in Joyce, not a meanness of spirit exactly but a nagging, dispiriting malaise at the singular unfairness of life. He had wondered — had it always been there, his wife’s bitterness? Or, had it been a late surfacing — perhaps even brought about by a sense of lack at their own station in life, or, indeed, her own reassessment of her poor early judgement. But he dismissed this. That was Brennan the detective doing his due diligence; Joyce’s underlying angst, her enmity, had always been there. The markers were not hard to find. He could recall cutting, carping comments directed at their social circle that had irritated him at first. They sprouted in sparse patches like paving weeds — unsightly, certainly unwelcome, but always overlooked. As her opinions became entrenched, became a dogma she preached, the weeds proliferated. There was no point in him passing his own remarks — lobbing rejoinders — he had admitted early on he couldn’t compete. His spleen wasn’t strong enough for the counter-attack, and when attacked — when faced with her insensitivity — the issue itself became an irrelevance, bawled out by the censure of a caterwauling harpy. The weed-skirted edges of their existence had soon been supplanted by rainforests of animosity — dark and impenetrable lands that swallowed up even the strongest of constitutions.

When he thought about it, about Joyce and the choice he had made to marry her, Brennan was perplexed now. He had seen the signs — even as an inexperienced, naive young man — and yet he’d avowed himself to her. He had willingly signed up for a life of misery and discontent, wilfully ignorant of the roaring sirens warning him to get out of the way. Should he regret it now? Should he regret any of his erroneous, hasty, foolhardy decisions taken in his youth? Yes, he thought — but also — no. He could mourn the lost lives he may have lived. The happy, fulfilled, sun-lit, soft-focused days that played on the screen of his mind like ruddy-cheeked children were phantoms. They no more existed in reality than wishes. He was where he was and nothing could change that. Not now. Decoupling from Joyce had been the rational thing to do but — he knew in retrospect — rational thought was not the proclivity of a young man.

Brennan looked out to the grey-purple wash of the sky, and sighed. He reached for the door handle, opened the car and stepped out; some fragments of red tail-light glass crushed under his shoes as he walked to the edge of the road and lit a cigarette. A loud motorbike roared past, dragging his attention back to the present.

He cursed out, ‘Fucking hell.’

Brennan inhaled deep on the cigarette; at first his breathing felt constricted but then the anodyne rush of nicotine worked its way into his lungs. He exhaled slowly through his nostrils, looked towards the burning tip of the cigarette. He knew his mind was cartwheeling; was it the job? His life? He ran a hand through his hair and sighed as he stubbed out the remainder of the cigarette and returned to the car. Inside he sat with the door open for a bit, his head leaning back. He knew he needed to refocus, he needed to get his mind on the job, the case; he had let far too many infinitesimal distractions take him from his aim lately. He sat forward, rested his brow on the rim of the steering wheel for a moment; a damp patch stared back at him as he withdrew it. What was going on? What was happening to him? Brennan had never questioned his career choice before, he had never felt the weariness that now settled on him. He wondered where this uncertainty, this questioning of his lot had come from, and, where was it leading? The answer to the last part of the question scalded him; he knew there was no place on the force for someone who was conflicted like him, the job required more. But how could he give it his full attention when his life was imploding?

A chill wind blew down the wide sweep of the street. Brennan watched it carry an empty take-away carton with it and closed the car door. A sneer rose on his face as he reached for his mobile phone and brought up the contacts. He scanned the names, found what he was looking for and hoped might be a solution of sorts: Wullie Stuart — he pressed ‘call’.

Ringing.

Brennan cleared his throat.

Wullie answered on the fourth ring, ‘Hello.’

‘Hello, auld fella,’ said Rob; his voice sounded lyrical.

‘Rob Brennan… Haven’t heard from you for donkey’s.’

His conscience pricked, ‘Well, sorry about that… How are you keeping?’

Wullie’s voice dropped. ‘Aye not bad. And you? How’s the job?’

Brennan steered the conversation back to where he wanted it to be, ‘Well, there’s time enough to get round to that, I was wondering if I could take you for a pint?’

‘A pint… Christ Almighty, Rob… you must be in some bother if you’re after a pint with me!’