Page 26 of Watching You

Christie Salter and Connie Woolwine walked side by side down the stairway to the cells where their presence had been requested by the custody sergeant on duty.

‘Do you know what this is about?’ Connie asked.

‘He wouldn’t say. The custody sergeants here are notoriously tight-lipped and unimpressed.

It’s a tough job. They’re the gatekeepers to the drunk, the drugged, the villains and the falsely accused, and I wouldn’t want to be locked up with any of them.

’ Salter flinched as they turned a corner and her hand went straight to her abdomen.

‘You okay?’

‘Old wound,’ she said. ‘The scar tissue mended pretty tight. Gets me when I least expect it. I’m fine now but it was touch and go when it happened.’

Connie saw the shadow draw across Salter’s face.

‘What else happened?’ Connie asked.

Salter gave her head a tiny shake that ran down her body as a shiver.

‘Do you mind if we don’t talk about it?’ Salter asked. ‘It’s personal and still painful.’

‘Did you not get therapy?’

‘Counselling, we call it here. And no. Never much saw the point of talking for hours. Time heals, right?’

‘Not at all. Time can sometimes make things substantially worse. And the point about therapy isn’t that you have a chance to talk, it’s that you’re listened to.

Otherwise you could just sit and spill it all to the mirror.

What happened?’ Connie paused on the landing and stepped back into a concrete corner.

Salter blew out a long breath and stared at her. ‘Everything I heard about you was true, then. You’re unstoppable and intrusive.’

‘And still you don’t really seem to mind. You’re perfectly relaxed, your facial muscles aren’t drawn in at all. You never let your pain affect you. How have you done that?’ Connie asked.

‘I adopted a baby to ease the pain of the one I lost,’ Salter replied quietly.

‘Except it didn’t work like that. You still have all the grief and, on top of that, you have all the exhaustion, tumult and exhilaration.

I’m surprised you can even get out of bed in the morning.

’ Salter said nothing. ‘There’s a thing I do that freaks people out, which seems to be a theme with me right now.

But could I see the scar? It would help if I could touch it. ’

Salter frowned at her. ‘We’re in a corridor.’

‘Sometimes it’s best to make yourself utterly, uncomfortably vulnerable. Often that’s the only way to start to heal.’

Salter swore softly beneath her breath, but she was already pulling her T-shirt out of her jeans as she stepped in close to Connie.

They stood, silently, as Connie stared at it before touching it.

‘Someone stabbed me with the broken shard of a pottery cat bowl. Are you not going to comment on how red it is? My husband tells me at least once a week that it looks almost like it’s still bleeding,’ Salter said.

‘I can only see in black and white, or shades of grey to be precise,’ Connie said.

Salter paused and cleared her throat. ‘How’s that possible?’

‘Another scar. Mine’s inside my brain.’ She reached out cool but firm fingertips and ran them over Salter’s scar, exploring the map of jagged edges, twists and branches of hurt flesh.

‘You could have asked a surgeon to improve this. It would have helped dramatically. But the pain helps with the guilt, right? You feel like you have no right to be happy when your baby is dead. You’re using your scar like an offering to the gods.

If you keep feeling the pain every day, nothing bad will happen to the child you’ve adopted. ’

‘I should have listened to Lively. He told me not to let you get inside my head.’ Salter stepped away and pulled her top back down.

‘Do you want to know what you’re actually doing, or do you want to keep hitting an emotional brick wall?’ Connie asked. She rubbed her hands together gently as if she was memorising the scar.

‘If I let you tell me, will you stop?’ Salter asked, already heading towards the staircase.

‘I will,’ Connie said, following after her.

‘That scar and the pain it gives you aren’t just reminding you to grieve the baby you lost, they’re actively stopping you from bonding with your adopted child.

You feel obliged to hold a part of you back so that the betrayal you’ve imagined isn’t complete.

Because guilt is the real monster that lives beneath every adult’s bed, and generally it has more teeth for women than it does for men.

So here’s my prescription. See a surgeon.

Let them improve your scar. Grieve your loss by loving more, not less.

Heal by feeling joy, not pain. Motherhood is hard enough without deliberately keeping yourself ripped in two for something that wasn’t your fault. ’

They reached the corridor into the cells as Salter turned to face her.

‘Why do you do that – get into people’s heads? It doesn’t make you feel awkward?’

‘It’s how I learn. My job is like being a psychological dictionary or thesaurus.

An encyclopedia. Every human being I can understand makes me better able to understand all the ways people break.

Also, I hope I can help along the way. People always know what’s wrong with them really, it’s just that they fight the urge to admit the truth to themselves.

Having someone else do it simply forces a reality check that hopefully leads to progress. Shall we?’

She walked past Salter and opened the door into the cells and the custody sergeant who was pointedly looking at the enormous clock on the wall.

‘Took your time. You’ll be glad to know that madam in cell two has vomited twice in the last fifteen minutes, so if you’re lucky her stomach will now be empty. In any event, I should stand well back and run if she starts groaning,’ he instructed.

‘What’s she in for?’ Salter asked.

‘Shoplifting. Haven’t seen her for a few weeks, but Mandy’s a regular.

This time, the off-licence is insisting we prosecute as she knocked over several bottles of expensive wine on her way out, so the total damages run to about three hundred quid.

Mandy, however, seems to think she has an ace up her sleeve.

Said she wants to talk to whoever’s investigating Archie Bass’s death. I gather that’s you.’

‘It is indeed,’ Connie said. ‘Let’s go talk to Mandy.’

Mandy MacGill smelled worse than a student nightclub toilet at 4 a.m. She had a tattoo on her forehead that at one point must have said ‘Fuck you’ but it had such a deep wrinkle running across it that it looked more like the forces of nature had attempted to redact it.

It was impossible to guess her age. Either she was much older than she looked and been pickled by all the alcohol, or it had aged her by a couple of decades.

Connie felt a rush of sadness at Mandy’s vulnerability and let Salter take the lead, introducing them before getting down to it.

‘You wanted to tell us something, Mandy?’

‘I’ve got demands, I have. They’ve gotta be fuckin’ met, right, before I’ll say a bloody word. I’ve got important in-for-ma-tion!’ She punctuated the word with a pointed finger.

Salter sighed and folded her arms. ‘Your demands are?’

‘Bottle of vodka, not cheap shit, fish and chips, deep-fried Mars bar, a four-pack of Irn-Bru, and impunity in fuckin’ writing from all prostitutions.’

Salter rubbed her eyes. ‘You can have the food but not the booze. I’ll do what I can about immunity from prosecution but first you have to make us believe you’ve something to bargain with, or we walk and you don’t get so much as a sniff of deep-fried fat.’

‘Na, I’m not fallin’ for that. You’ll take the gold and disappear and I’ll get nuthin’,’ she shouted. ‘I want a fuckin’ lawyer in here!’

‘Mandy,’ Salter said. ‘I’m going to need you to shut the hell up.

You don’t need a lawyer because Dr Woolwine and I are not here to charge you with anything.

I can and will get you the food. You know the rules about alcohol in the cells and you never expected me to say yes to that.

But if you don’t start talking, I’m leaving because I’m not in the mood to be messed around. You have one chance, and this is it.’

Mandy huffed and kicked at the badly stained floor before nodding.

‘Aw right, aw right. But I want curry sauce wi’ the chips. I was there, see, the night Archie got murdered. I seen it all.’

‘Tell us,’ Salter said.

‘We was both round in the road behind the back of them big shops, the electrical store and whatever. They’ve got the big bins out there that’s good for finding cardboard and you don’t get kicked by the fuckin’ passers-by like you do in the city centre.

Less chance of being thrown cash, but less chance of getting fucked over, too, know what I’m saying?

I was there first and I seen Archie come in but I was already in my boxes and I didn’t want him stealing my bottle, so I didn’t call out to him. ’

‘What time was that?’ Salter asked.

‘Do I look like I wear a fuckin’ watch?’ Mandy replied.

‘Anyways, he’s over the road from me, wrapping himself up in his sleeping bag or whatever so I say nuthin’, just make sure I’m covered up and start to fall asleep.

I wake up when I hear him moaning. He never screamed.

Like it all happened so fast that he didn’t have the chance. ’

‘Did you see the person who stabbed him, Mandy? Think hard, and don’t just tell us what you think we want to hear. It’s too important for that,’ Salter said.

‘It were just one person. Big coat, hood up. I only saw them from behind. I just know they were in front of him when I looked up, and he was groaning when they walked away. Didn’t say a word.

I figured it was just like a fight or something.

’ She put her head down. ‘I didn’t know he’d been fuckin’ stabbed, did I?

I’d have done something. Told someone. He just sat there, and I thought he’d fallen asleep again. ’

‘Was it a man or a woman? What were they wearing on their legs? Anything else, like skin colour or age?’

‘Dunno. Never saw anything except the back of the big coat. Wearing trousers, I guess, or I’d have noticed.

They walked away normal pace, though. Didnae run.

I’ve seen kids do that sort of thing before.

Kids run away, like they’ve been brave wee bastards for a few seconds then they start to shit themselves. ’

‘You didn’t go over to Archie, check on him?’ Salter asked.

‘To be honest, I was tired. Had a bit to drink, you know? And you get used to a bit of violence on the streets. Archie was all right, but he wasn’t a pal.

I just thought he owed someone some cash or somethin’ and they were teaching him a lesson.

I only found out a few days later that he was dead.

When I left in the morning, I didn’t give him a second look. ’

‘All right,’ Salter said. ‘We’ll get you your food, I’ll talk to the off-licence and see if we can get the charges dropped. You should see a doctor while you’re here, too. Anything else we can do?’

‘Na, s’awright. Just the food. But I could do with a new pair of socks if you’ve got any. Some bastard nicked mine.’

Salter and Connie made their way back upstairs.

‘Well that was a waste of time,’ Salter said. ‘I thought we might finally get a break.’

‘It might not have been a break, but it definitely wasn’t a waste of time.

We know Archie wasn’t killed in some random drunken fight, we know the assailant was a lone operator, we know the stabbing was planned and calculated, we know it wasn’t done by some kid trying to prove how hard they are.

That’s quite a lot of extra knowledge. Can I just ask, what on earth is a deep-fried Mars bar? ’

‘Imagine a visual representation of every possible lifestyle cause of a heart attack,’ Salter said. ‘It looks and tastes exactly like that.’