Cold War - Jerome Preisler [17]
“We found some formula in the kitchen. Nappies in a closet near the crib. Robertson gave him a change. And he’s got him on the bottle right now.”
“Four boys of his own, dabbing the piss off a rashy tossel must be nothing new.”
“Aye. I’d suppose.”
Gorrie released a sigh.
“All right, you’d best get somebody in here with a camera,” he said. “Capture the moment, as they say . . . not that I expect either of these sweethearts’ll be sending the other any endearments next Valentine’s Day.”
The constable smiled feebly, nodded, and left the room. Gorrie noticed he hadn’t once glanced at the bed. No great wonder. With the low violent crime rate in Inverness, and this his first year with the Force, he’d most surely never encountered anything comparable to the scene in this room.
Gorrie looked down at his spiral notepad, flipped to a clean page, and was about to add a few words to his notes when Christine Gibbon resumed her emotional narrative to the officer he’d stationed in the hallway. Gorrie perked an ear. No telling whether she’d come out with something he hadn’t yet heard.
“I told Claire a hun’red times . . .”
Claire Mackay, the wife, Gorrie thought.
“. . . a hun’red time’s over ’n more, you want to count, that she’d be doin’ herself a favor by leavin’ the bloody mutt . . .”
Said mongrel dog being Ed Mackay, the husband. Gorrie had needed to coax the Gibbon woman into giving his name in her initial statement, as she’d insisted the very utterance of it would rot her tongue.
“. . . to his drinkin’ and erse-chasin’, but I couldn’t get her to listen. See how he provides for me an’ the baby, she’d say. If it weren’t for him I’d still be in the lands, she’d say. Got to forgive him his weaknesses, and so on, and so forth. Well, I say good riddance to the besotted radge, an’ keep your sympathy for Claire . . .”
Never mind that it was her mate who appeared to have been the victim in what was shaping up to be a murder-suicide case, Gorrie thought.
“. . . poor girl, she’d been better off in that cramped old flat we used to share when we was single. What good’s his high job at the plant to her now? Or this high place, in the end tally . . .”
Gorrie frowned at her latest repetition of what had become a tedious song. The “high place” was a suburban bungalow with a nice plot of green here on Eriskay Road, a short jaunt from the city center. The “high job,” taking Christine Gibbon’s comments backwards, was a supervisory waste-management position at the Cromarty Firth nuclear power plant over on Black Isle.
“. . . tell you, officer, I knew it would come to tragedy. Better they’d gone their separate ways. I’m not one for dirty talk, but this man was one adulterous shit. Always figured he’d take a hand to Claire when he was in one of his moods, though I can’t claim she declared it out and open. He’d got her so mousy intimidated, she kept everything bottled inside. And now the bottle’s broke. What she did, she was pushed to do. Pushed, you can be confident. A hun’red times I told the poor girl . . .”
As she dissolved into sobs, Gorrie phased her out, thinking there wasn’t much more of relevance to be gotten from her. Hearsay aside, Christine Gibbons’s account could be trimmed to a paragraph. She’d come to her friend’s bungalow this morning in her automobile, the two of them having planned to strap the tyke into a carriage and go shopping down by the Ness. Because Mr. Mackay would occasionally take a ride to the plant with one of the other site-workers, it did not strike Christine as unusual to find his car in the drive. At any rate, she’d knocked on the door and got no answer. Knocked some more, no answer. Then she’d rung the bell. Still no one came to the door. All the while she could hear the child crying inside the house, which caused her some growing disturbance. After another ten minutes of knocking and bell-ringing, Christine let herself in with a spare key Claire had given her to use in a pinch, and called out from the entry hall, again without response. With her opinion of Mr. Mackay being what it was, and no sign of