Was she still listening? MacNee had been holding her hand like a fragile piece of china; now he gripped it harder. ‘Come on, lass! You’ve shown me you’re a bonny fighter – get cracking!’
She wasn’t with him any more. She had switched off, gone back into her twilight world where he couldn’t reach her. Slowly he released her hand and laid it gently back on the covers.
He was making it up, MacNee told himself firmly as he went out. He’d been imagining it all along, Kim’s interest and then her disengagement. He was a practical man who had no truck with all the touchy-feely nonsense and there’d been too many occasions lately when he’d let himself get spooked. He was needing to get a grip.
It was early in the day for it, but maybe a wee dram might stop him feeling quite so cold and bleak.
Epilogue
They were going to bulldoze Rosscarron Cottages. The remaining owners were happy to settle for the insurance money, it would save the council expensive repairs to the utilities, and there wouldn’t be political trouble about the work that should have been done to prevent the landslide in the first place.
It seemed to Fleming a fitting outcome. The road to nowhere would now lead to nothing, just as Lisa Stewart’s short life had done. The sea, over the years and the winter storms, would gradually claim its new territory, and with its salt cleansing, the passions and hatreds and terrible deeds would be swept away and forgotten.
With a sigh she turned back to her desk. You couldn’t clean up people’s lives in the same way. There in front of her, in the files and on the screen, were the records of more pain and suffering and corruption.
And Kim Kershaw had not recovered. She was buried with the damaged daughter, who, if you believed in a heaven, was whole and happy now, reunited with the mother who had loved her more than life itself.
Acknowledgements
My thanks go as always to my agent Teresa Chris, Carolyn Mays and all at Hodder, but especially to Kate Howard who has been such a wonderful and supportive editor.