When Will There Be Good News? (9 page)

Louise hardly saw Archie now. He had elected to board during the week because he would rather live in a school than with his mother. At weekends he sought out the same boys he spent all week at schoo
l
with.

'Stop fretting,' Patrick said. 'He's sixteen, he's spreading his wings.'

Louise thought of Icarus.

'And learning to fly.'

Louise thought of the dead bird she had found outside the flat at the weekend. A bad omen. Little cock sparrow shot by a boy with
a
bow and arrow.

'He has to grow up.'

'I don't see why.'

'Louise,' Patrick said gently, 'Archie's happy.'

'Happy?' Happy wasn't a word she had employed in the context of Archie since he was a little boy. How wonderfully, joyously untrammelled he had been then in his happiness. She thought it was fixed for ever, didn't realize that childhood happiness dissolves away, because she herself had never known happiness as a child. If she had realized that Archie wasn't going to be that sunny innocent for ever she would have laid up every moment as treasure. Now she could have it again if she wanted. The north wind howled. She shut the door.

She was on her way back from a meeting with the Amethyst team out at the Gyle. That was how Louise first came across Alison Needler, six months before the murders, when she was seconded for a few months to Amethyst, the Family Protection Unit. David Needler, defYing the court injunction against him, had taken up a position on the family lawn in Trinity where he was threatening to set himself alight with his kids and ex-wife watching from an upstairs window. When Louise arrived, hot on the heels of the Instant Response Vehicle, he was being berated by Alison's sister Debbie, standing on the front doorstep. ('Lippy, our Debs,' according to Alison. Well, she paid the price for that, didn't she?) Taunted, perhaps, rather than berated (' Go on then, you bastard, let's see you torch yourself.).

In court the next day David Needler had been cautioned and told to obey the injunction and stay away from his family, which he did, until he came back six months later with a shotgun.

Louise pulled into the car park at Howdenhall. Check in at the station, pick up her own car, back on the road in five minutes. She had plenty of time.

'Final report's back from forensics, boss,' her baby DC, Marcus McLellen, said to her, handing her a folder. 'As was anticipated, the amusement arcade fire was definitely wilful fire-raising.'

Twenty-six years old, Marcus had a BA in Media Studies fro
m
Stirling (who didn't?) and a head of hair that would have give
n
Shirley Temple a run for her money if he had allowed it t
o
grow instead of sensibly shearing it into astrakhan. He was
a
rugby player and Louise had once shivered in a freezing col
d
stand on a Saturday morning shouting herself hoarse in suppor
t
of him (a great outlet for aggression, she discovered), which wa
s
something she had never been able to do for weedy, sportsphobi
c
Archie.

Marcus's baptism of fire after coming from uniform had been the Needler case and he'd handled it even better than she'd expected. He was a sweet boy, downright cherubic, straight as a Roman road, tougher than he looked and always cheerful. Like Patrick. Where did it come from, this cheerfulness, did they imbibe it with their mother's milk? (Poor Archie, then.)

She had taken Marcus under her wing, a mother hen. Louise had never felt maternal towards anyone she had worked with before, it was an unsettling experience. It must be age, she concluded. But'Marcus?' -a strangely Latinate name for someone born in Sighthill. (,Aspirational mother, boss,' he said. 'Better than Titus. Or Sextus.') He had been razor-keen on the Needler case but she had taken him off it and put him on something else. 'So you can get more experience,' she told him but really she just didn't want him to end up as obsessed with Alison Needler as she was. So now he was working on an amusement arcade in Bread Street that had mysteriously gone up in flames a couple of week
s
ago.

'Insurance?' Louise speculated. 'Or malicious? Or just neds messing about with matches?' 'Wilful fire-raising', a baroque Scottish term for arson, the chie
f
suspect for which, in Louise's book, was always going to be the Owner of the property. Insurance money was just too tempting a prospect when you were needing money. Twenty thousand for a d'lamond, how much for an amusement arcade? An amusement arcade owned by none other than the lovely Dr Joanna Hunter's husband, Neil. ('And what does Mr Hunter do?' she had said conversationally to Joanna Hunter when she visited her yesterday. 'Oh, this and that,' Joanna Hunter said lightly. 'Neil's always looking for the next big opportunity, he's a natural-born entrepreneur.') Just what the lovely Dr Hunter was doing being married to someone with business interests in the pubic triangle (as it was known) of Bread Street with its strip joints, dodgy pubs and show bars was anyone's guess. Shouldn't she be married to somebody more respectable -an orthopaedic surgeon, for example?

According to his wife, Neil Hunter was in 'the leisure industry', a term that seemed to cover a lot of possibilities. In his case it seemed to be two or three amusement arcades, a couple of health clubs (not particularly upmarket) and a small fleet ofprivate hire vehicles (tiredlooking four-door saloons, masquerading as 'executive cars') and a couple of beauticians, one in Leith, one in Sighthill, that looked like health hazards -Louise was pretty sure that Joanna Hunter had never had a facial in one of them, the Sheraton One Spa they weren't.

'Fill me in on our Mr Hunter.'

'Well, when he first came to Edinburgh,' Marcus said, 'he starte
d
with a burger van parked in Bristo Square, that way he caught the students as well as the pubs coming out.'

'Burger van. Classy.'

'Which burned to the ground in the wee small hours when it wa
s
unattended.'

'Well, there's a coincidence.'

'Moved on to a wine bar, a cafe, a food delivery service, anythin
g
he could try his hand at really.'

'Any of them catch fire?'

'The cafe, actually. An electrical fault.'

'And the arcade?'

'A lot of petrol splashed around inside,' Marcus said. 'Not a spuro
f-the-moment thing. Door was broken into at the back, all th
e
alarms were on but by the time the fire brigade arrived at the scen
e
the place was well alight.'

'And the word on the pavement on Mr Hunter these days?'

'Word is he's clean,' Marcus said. 'Bit of a rogue, but to all intent
s
and purposes, a legitimate businessman.'

'So it's just the people he associates with who are dodgy?'

She had already seen the photos that the Fraud Squad had sent over, nice crisp images of Hunter sharing a variety ofbeverages over the weeks with one Michael Anderson from Glasgow, plus various hangers-on. 'His retinue,' Marcus said. 'Look at these guys, faces only a mother could love.' Anderson was suspected of drug-dealing in his home town but was so far up the food chain in his luxury penthouse that Strathclyde Police had found it hard to hang anything on him. 'Good lawyers,' Marcus said.

'Or bad lawyers, depending how you look at it.'

The Fraud officers thought that Anderson had run out of ways to clean his money in Glasgow and was looking to Edinburgh, to utilize a bit of Neil Hunter's 'this and that', as his lovely wife would have it. Dr Hunter wore the word 'wife' so much better than Louise did.

'How did you two meet?' Louise asked her yesterday, pretending to be the kind ofwoman who was interested in romantic anecdotes, who listened to Steve Wright's Sunday Love Songs while making breakfast in bed for her husband, and not some hard-nosed cow who was probably about to send a report about your husband to the Procurator Fiscal. Joanna Hunter laughed and said, 'I treated him in A and E, he asked me out to dinner.'

'And you went?' Louise couldn't quite keep the incredulity out of her voice.

'No, highly unethical.' Joanna Hunter laughed again as if the memory was part of some long-treasured amusing story (How I met your father). 'He persisted,' she said, 'and eventually I gave in.'

Me too, Louise thought but instead said, 'My mother and father met on holiday,' and Joanna Hunter said, 'Ah, a holiday romance!' and Louise didn't say, actually, he picked her up in a bar on Gran Canaria and she never could remember his name, which hardly mattered as he wasn't the only contender for the coveted role of totally absent father to Louise.

'Why was Mr Hunter in A and E?' Louise asked.

'He'd been set upon by some thugs.'

Accident-prone, keeping bad company, all the signs there at the beginning. Why on earth would the lovely doctor go out with someone like that?

'I liked his energy,' she offered, unprompted. Dogs are energetic, Louise thought and smiled and said, 'Yes, that's what my mother said about my father.'

She didn't mention the arcade fire to Joanna Hunter, it seemed impolite given the nature of the news she had brought to her doorstep.

'Call me Jo,' she said.

'There's nothing concrete to link Hunter to any of the Glaswegian guys,' Louise said to Marcus. 'Maybe Anderson and Hunter were wee pals at primary school.'

'Well, word on the pavey also says Hunter's on the edge of going under,' Marcus said. 'Has been for a while. Going into business with Anderson might be one way of keeping afloat but then so might the insurance payout from a big fire.'

'I'll talk to him,' Louise said, picking up the file.

'Boss?'

'What? Not my job, me being such a high heid yin? He lives round the corner from me. I'll pop in on my way to work tomorrow morning.' She didn't say I'm reading my way through his father-in-law's canon. Certainly didn't say, I'm fascinated by Joanna Hunter, she's the other side ifme, the woman I never became -the good survivor, the good wife, the good mother. 'Let's apply to the Procurator Fiscal for a warrant to get our hands on Hunter's documentation.'

'Yes, boss.' He looked disappointed at having the case snatched literally from under his nose.

'I'll just talk to him,' Louise soothed, 'and then you can have him back. I have a bit of a connection, I had to go and see his wife yesterday, that's all.'

'His wife?'

'Joanna.'

DS Karen Warner came through the open door to Louise's office and dropped a pile offiles on her desk. 'Yours, I think,' she said, resting her weight against the desk. A walking filing cabinet, eight months pregnant with her first baby and still at work. ('Going down fighting, boss.') She was older than Louise (,Elderly primigravidas how disgusting does that sound?'). Motherhood was going to be a shock to her, Louise thought. She was going to hit the wall at sixty miles an hour and wonder what happened.

Karen was still on the Needler team, halved in size now from what it had been six urgent months ago, moved back now from St Leonard's to Howdenhall and occupying a smaller incident room. Louise's superintendent had suggested it was time for her to 'move on a little' from the Needler case, to start taking on other cases. 'You're obsessed with Alison Needler,' he said.

'Yeah,' she agreed cheerfully. 'I am. It's my job to be obsessed.'

Karen unwrapped a Snickers bar and bit into it, patting her stomach. 'Licence to eat,' she said to Louise. 'Want a bit?' 'No thanks.' Louise was starving but there wasn't anything she fancied.

Marriage seemed to have affected her normally good appetite. Patrick seemed to grow healthier on it while she was fading away. She had flirted briefly with bulimia in her teens, between the selfcutting and an early bout of binge drinking (Bacardi and Coke, the thought of it now made her want to throw up) but all those things felt like an addiction of one kind or another so she had stopped. Only room for one addict in the family and her mother had had no intention of giving up her place.

Karen looked at the report on Louise's desk. 'Same Hunter?' she said. 'Neil Hunter is Joanna Hunter's husband? Wow. There's a coincidence.'

'Is Joanna Hunter a name I should know?' Marcus asked Louise.

'The one that got away,' Karen said. 'Gabrielle Mason, three kids? Thirty years ago?' Marcus shook his head. 'Sweet
. Y
ou're so young,' Karen said. 'A guy killed the mother an
d
two of her kids in a field in Devon,Joanna ran away and hid and was found later unharmed. Joanna Hunter nee Mason.' 'The man who was convicted of her murder was called Andrew Decker,' Louise said. 'He was declared fit to plead. If stabbing
a
mother and her two children is sane then what's the definition of insane? Makes you wonder, doesn't it? And now he's getting out -is out, in fact -and someone's leaked it. It's going to be all over the news for at least, I dunno, two hours. Feeding the empty maw of the press. I went yesterday to warn her.'

Karen crumpled up the Snickers wrapper and threw it in the bin. 'And is she still a victim, boss?' 'Good question,' Louise said.