VALERIE HAD NO IDEA where she was.
Something rough against her lips, her shoulder numb and her feet very cold, sticking out of her warm cocoon. It seemed she was bound in a cloud of cotton wool; soft and warm, but it bound her all the same. She tried, but couldn’t move any of her limbs, or straighten up, or stretch out. She had no hope of getting up on her feet. Her head hurt. Her legs were burning, her thighs sticky with her own urine. And the room was reeking with the dull smell of faecal matter.
That was obvious at least. She had shat herself.
Opening her eyes, she looked across a green field that stretched forever, until it reached a piece of wooden fence, a flat solid white fence. As she allowed her eyes to focus, in the dark that wasn’t really dark, she began to make sense of it all.
She had fallen on the floor, rolled off the bed taking her duvet with her. From the feel of it she had hit her head on the way down, probably off the small white bedside table, and as she had lain there drunk, her bladder and bowel had voided.
That wasn’t a first.
And then the full horror of it. This was a hotel room, not her home.
Slowly she tried to unwind herself from the duvet, trying not to throw up and add to the mess of the bodily fluids. Another thought struck her through the maze that passed for her intellect nowadays. If this was in a hotel room then house-keeping would be coming in sooner or later. They couldn’t find her like this, in this awful state. Alcoholism is the most private of diseases. It hides in plain sight.
In the end, after about ten minutes of writhing and slow acrobatics, she freed herself and crawled across the carpet on all fours, leaving the duvet, soiled and wet, in a pile near the bottom of the bed.
She got to the door and, holding onto the handle, she pulled herself up on her knees and listened. There was a flash of a memory. Could she recall, vaguely, being here the night before, between the first and second bottle? Doing something like this at some time? She flicked over the plastic sign hanging from the doorknob. On the inside.
Do not disturb.
Not even sober enough to put the sign out.
Still not sober enough to have an accurate memory of it. From last night or this morning? Or this evening? She opened the door as quickly as possible, peering down the corridor, to the right and to the left before she slid the sign out, the scab on the palm of her hand nipping as she slid it up against the wood to the handle.
She retreated inside the room and tucked herself in the corner of the carpet and the door. She closed her eyes and slid down a little more, her body folding onto the floor.
Her eyes were crusty and jaggy. She picked at her eyelashes with inaccurate fingers, missing the islands of scabs, poking herself in the eye a few times, making her blink. She could sense the solidity of the darkness outside the room now. It was very quiet, much later at night. Maybe midnight. Maybe not. Time was very elastic these days.
Closing her eyes again, she tried to stand, levering herself up between the door and the wall, and then she saw the bed, minus the duvet, with the expanse of rumpled white sheet with dark islands of staining, and in the middle, framed by wrinkles in the Egyptian cotton, lay a small black gun.
A gun.
And then, as she held onto the wall, she remembered.
She couldn’t even kill herself properly.
She was a high-functioning alcoholic and had been for years. Her drinking never bothered her, it was life she couldn’t really contend with. She had never suffered bad hangovers because she had barely ever sobered up. The constant top-ups gave her strength and kept that black dog from snapping at her too much, kept it from biting at her heels. She drank to be happy. Her drinking had brought her to this misery.
Why did she get a gun that didn’t work? What was wrong with her that nothing, nothing ever went right?
She was too tired, and too sore to cry. What was the point? She picked up the gun and slid back down to the floor, her head thumping as she went. Crawling over the carpet, pushing the gun in front of her, she thought how bloody stupid it would be if the gun went off now and blew her leg off, or her arm off or half her face. Or if it went right through her brain, in the front and out the back, leaving her a dribbling incoherent vegetable, a bag on a drip in her arm putting nutrients in as the catheter took the metabolites out to fill another bag. She tapped it along a little more gently, slipped it into her suitcase using the zipped pocket at the side. Then she thought again, and stuck it into her handbag.
Her mobile phone was lying on the floor where she had flung it, so she slithered across the floor towards it. The black screen refused to swipe into life. She hadn’t charged it up. Nobody had called her for weeks now, nobody except the police, and lawyers, and they weren’t calling Valerie Abernethy the woman. They were calling Valerie Abernethy the victim. Or the suspect. No friends ever called her. No friends had called when Abigail had died. No friends had visited her in the hospital.
Alcoholics do not have friends. They use people so much that friendships wear away, slip away, here with the roses and gone in the autumn.
It was winter now, the deep, deep winter.
TWO
SUNDAY, 26TH OF NOVEMBER
Old Salty’s Fish and Chip Emporium was busy, and very noisy. Adding to the usual chattering and cutlery commotion was the family at table eight, who were having some birthday Jenga-with-chips competition. The very attractive Australian waitress was judging and the rest of the restaurant was clapping and taking bets.
All except the four men sitting at table nine.
Four men on a table set for five.
They were subdued, three of them picking at their chips with their fingers, the eldest of the four using a fork. Failure has a bitter taste that no amount of cheesecake can sweeten; they ate as if their food was choking them, totally oblivious to the birthday celebrations in the next booth.
The four men; three detectives and a procurator fiscal. It was the first time they had met since the brutal murder of Abigail Haggerty and her son Malcolm six weeks before.
Not something anybody with a human soul should get over quickly.
They had an unspoken pact not to talk about it. That had lasted until the first lull in conversation, between the fish and chips being cleared away and the arrival of the cheesecake. They had exhausted the ‘how are the kids doing?’ conversation for Gordon Wyngate, and the ‘how is Baby Moses doing?’ conversation for Anderson.
Archie Walker related the story of walking round the house with Valerie and the missing picture and Lego model. At that point they all tried to avoid talking about Costello when she was the one thing they really did want to talk about; she was their thread of commonality.
It was a puzzle that consumed the detectives, eating away at their core. At the heart of the case was a strange coincidence, which was later revealed not to be so much of a coincidence at all. The Braithwaite Case and the deaths at the Monkey House, as the tragedy of the Haggertys had become known, were ‘intertwined, but legally separate cases’ as the fiscal had put it. And the Haggerty case was under the eagle eye of DCI Diane Mathieson. Those sitting around the table, as part of the original Braithwaite investigation team, had been debriefed, welcomed, tolerated and then told in no uncertain terms to ‘bugger off and to stop trying to be helpful’, according to DI Bannon, or ‘stop bloody interfering’, according to DCI Mathieson.
While they had no reason to meet, none of them had wanted to be the one to call off a date that had been pencilled into the diary for weeks. And they wanted to know about the problem. Costello’s empty chair.
DCI Colin Anderson, the blond detective in the jeans