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CHAPTER SIX

W hat the hell was he doing?

Robert had never enjoyed hanging out in pubs to get shit-faced or to find women. Although he had met his late wife at a pub.

They’d been on four dates before they’d talked about a future together. Three months later, Robert had moved in with Anne, and five months later, they’d married in the City Chambers. End of. Anne had been deep in debt, and he’d been no better – a police constable’s salary only went so far. They each had one friend and no family. And neither of them liked the hullabaloo of weddings.

A few years later, here he was, widowed and sitting in the Counting House with a woman he’d picked up in a back alley. An alley behind the very building his wife had been murdered in. This situation had all the makings of a disaster, yet he stared at the woman sitting in front of him.

As a police constable, walking the beat, he met a lot of people. So he knew everyone displayed their emotions in different ways. Behaved in different ways. But he’d yet to meet someone whose eyes betrayed their true feelings like this woman’s did.

When he’d walked into that side alley, he’d seen the building before spotting her, leaning behind a pipeline. The expression on her face – loneliness and utter vulnerability – had tugged at something in him. So his goal had shifted from investigating to just being there for this woman. If there was one thing Dickheadson had got right, it was that Robert worked well with emotions. For him, being a cop meant serving the city that had given him so much support.

‘What’s your go-to?’ Robert asked the woman.

Sitting here amongst herds of people, her shoulders lowered slightly. Still, those eyes flitted from group to group, studying each member before moving on. Everything about her was sharp – the cut of her bob, her cheekbones, her clothes and, now that she sat in a crowd, her eyes.

‘Beer,’ she answered, not meeting his gaze.

Robert nodded. ‘Let’s make that two.’

He pulled out his phone to order, so he didn’t have to leave her or to struggle through the crush at the bar.

The Counting House straddled Glasgow’s famous George Square. The interiors – majestically decorated friezes, statues reminiscent of Grecian temples, Corinthian columns and a massive glass dome capping the main room of the pub – hinted at old money, yet the drinks were cheap and the vibe moderately casual.

Robert tapped their drinks order into the app, then ran his gaze past the giant bar in the centre, right underneath the dome. It was polished wood with golden glass holders – again very much at home with the surroundings. Satisfied, he set his phone aside and turned his attention to the woman. Her gaze had moved from evaluating people to reading the short snippets and poems about Glasgow scattered like a montage of the city’s past on the walls.

Noticing his eyes on her, she shuffled in her seat. ‘I don’t usually go for a drink with a man I’ve just met, in a side alley or otherwise.’

‘Let me guess – you look him up online?’

She shrugged. ‘It’s what the world has become now. Not to say that what you find online is always true. In fact, the last person I met here told me he was a frustrated forty-year-old. He had a social media account that looked legit, but it turned out he was a bald seventeen-year-old who could pass himself off as forty. However, his voice – which had yet to break – didn’t pass muster with the bartender here. So he wanted me to buy him drinks.’

Robert grimaced. ‘That must’ve been a strange experience, especially if it was a date you were looking forward to.’

She waited a beat before nodding. ‘Aye, something like that. What about you?’

‘I haven’t had a horrifying date, actually. But I once almost fell asleep on my feet at one.’

Her lips curved in a small smile. ‘That sounds like a story.’

He opened his mouth to share, but the waiter arrived with their order – two cans of Tennent’s. They thanked him, then clasped the cold cans and snapped them open.

She had a way of pouring – tilting the glass and emptying the amber liquid in – as if she’d done it several times before. He wondered then if she’d chosen beer for its low alcohol content.

Robert mimicked her, then they clinked their glasses before taking a sip.

She barely touched the glass to her lips. Ah, yes, she was being careful.

‘The date,’ Robert began. ‘The way we planned it should’ve been a red flag. I mean, she insisted on grabbing coffee before a walk. I don’t mind a coffee and a walk, but she wanted to meet at one of the cafés on Sauchiehall Street. I, naively, said yes. The coffee lasted fifteen minutes, then she spent the next two hours shopping.’

The woman chuckled. Her inhibited smile smoothed out those sharp edges, giving her a more playful, approachable look, and Robert’s heart stumbled. Oh sweet Lord! Why hadn’t he noticed her lips before? They were soft, nothing angular about them. Nor had he noticed that beauty spot just on the bottom left of her face, as if enticing someone to lean in and press a soft kiss to it, millimetres from those lips.

Had he also not noticed the hazel in her dark eyes? The slight upturn in her chin? Or how her fingers – almost delicate looking – were wrapped around the perspiring glass?

Oh shit! He shifted and cleared his throat. ‘It worked though because the next day, I met my wife.’

Yes, bring this conversation to safer shores.

That smile fizzled out in an instant. ‘You’re married.’

‘I was. She passed.’

Now the slight frown was back, her forehead creased, her eyes assessing. ‘You’re not a ring person, are you?’

Expecting the usual ‘I’m sorry for your loss’, Robert needed a minute to understand her.

He wiggled his fingers. ‘Rings make me feel as if someone’s choking me. Never wore one. I wish I did. At least that would’ve been a sign that I belonged to her; something I could look at, on my body, and say, I was married . It’s silly.’

The woman shook her head. ‘Grief is like water – it flows into strange crevices. I am sorry for your loss, though. I’ll take a leap and guess she was taken far too soon?’

‘She was.’

The woman pulled out her phone. ‘In that case, you need something stronger than beer.’

‘Only if you join me.’

Five minutes later, they had toasted Anne with ten-year-old Glenfiddich single malt, neat.

‘To lost dreams,’ he said and drained his glass. The liquid stung his throat, and he grimaced. When he set his glass down, he realised hers was empty too.

She chuckled. ‘Should’ve gone with the tequila, eh?’

Robert leaned in again, looking into her eyes and studying those hazel flecks. This time he was sure they glinted just for him. ‘What dreams did you lose?’

She scoffed. ‘My job. And it was me who detonated it – that’s the worst part. After everything I’ve done for it in my life, I went and took it off life support and watched it die.’

That was a harsh way of putting it. ‘Why was it on life support?’

‘You really want to know?’

‘You heard me regale you with my luck in love. I want to know why you’d drink with a sorry arse like me instead of, I don’t know, doing something much more fun?’

She reached over and placed her hand on his. Shocks zinged through him at her touch. Oh God! No, no, Robert. Hold yourself together.

But his hand turned, and he joined their palms together, caressing the soft skin on the inside of her wrist.

‘I can’t think of anything more fun that talking to a stranger about my life detonating. People should do this more often. There’s no judgement here, is there?’ She bit her lip, taking a second before she spoke again. ‘As you might’ve guessed, I’m not from here. I moved here to pursue what I really wanted from my life. That’s an entire story in itself that I just don’t want to talk about. The short of it is, me moving here meant I wouldn’t see my friends or family anymore. That’s the price I paid for the career I wanted. It might seem… far-fetched or even stupid. I’ve had people say that to me in job interviews, but it was what it was… And still is.’

Robert showed his solidarity by continuing the light strokes over her jumping pulse, and they just sat there for a moment, hands linked, taking the company of the other person in.

‘In your late thirties, you have enough of a life to look back on and judge that the dreams you had didn’t come true,’ he whispered.

She picked up his train of thought. ‘And even if someone might say you have enough time to make those dreams come true…’

Robert nodded. ‘The time for a few of them has long since lapsed.’

She wrapped her other hand over their conjoined ones on the table. Their eyes were still locked, as if each of them were reading the other person. What felt like an eternity later, they both smiled at each other.

A kinship blossomed inside him, even though it didn’t make any sense. He didn’t know anything about her. Hell, he didn’t even know her name. Yet if she told him everything she’d done in her life, he would understand, sympathise and… he’d support her, like he knew she would him. A partnership. How did you build a partnership with someone you didn’t know?

‘Another round?’ he asked.

She chuckled again, flashing him the grin that softened her features. Robert had the sudden urge to lean in and press his lips to hers.

Stop it!

‘I’d like that. But I need to go to the loo.’ Her hands left his, sending goosebumps up his arms – not from embarrassment but from the coldness of losing her warmth.

He watched her strut away, her posture confident and bold – sharp. What the hell was going on? It was just his body missing Anne. It had to be. How could you feel anything so intense for a stranger?

Robert willed his logical brain to take over, instead of the pink haze his heart had lulled him into. He was a cop, for God’s sakes.

She was a well-dressed woman, probably late thirties, or early forties. Single – hence the disastrous date with the pseudo forty-year-old – with soft hands, an athletic body and a sharp bob. And he’d found her in a back alley behind the burned building where Anne had died…

Finally, logic broke through and wrenched those rose-tinted glasses off.

Oh no – oh hell no! What was a well-dressed woman doing staring at a burned-down structure in a back alley? She hadn’t been drunk or high.

A journalist.

And journalists would go to any lengths to extract a story. As a cop, he’d stood outside enough victims’ houses to know those vultures had no morals. Cared about no one but their careers. And he’d waltzed straight into her trap.

Of course she knew who he was. Hell, he’d told her about Anne and the grief he felt. Fuck! While he’d been falling all over himself to be with her, she’d just been working away. Hence the damned beer. She was working him.

Robert looked around to search for a purse, a bag, anything to see if she’d planted a listening device. But there was no purse. She’d taken it with her. Was she in the loo sharing the details of their conversation with a colleague in a race to get the story out as soon as possible – get the exclusive on the grieving husband?

Stupid, stupid, stupid!

Hell, he wasn’t sitting here and waiting for her to return. He was going to confront her!

Robert jumped off the chair, swayed just a bit then stalked towards the toilets. He excused himself as he wove through the groups of people sitting at the high tables and others queued up at the bar.

If he fumbled just a bit, no one cast him a second glance.

He skirted around the bar and headed towards the toilets. Then he stopped. There were two ways to enter and exit the loos. If he went one way and the woman emerged from the other side, he’d miss her.

Either way, she’d have to leave via one of these two doors. So Robert stepped back and halted right in between the two exits.

Another man was loitering by the doors too. His hair was a shaggy mess, and he kept running a hand through it. Robert caught sight of a few tattoos beneath his leather jacket. Some of them were filled with colour; others?—

The man lifted his hands again, and again his jacket rode up. But instead of the ink on the man’s torso, a glint caught Robert’s eye. It was just a second, but his cop instincts kicked to life.

He recognised what he’d seen there. It wasn’t a belt buckle; it was a knife, strapped into the man’s belt.

Oh hell!