The Distant Echo. Val McDermid
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even going so far as to marry his wife in a Catholic church. He’d learned how to belong in this strange, insular land that had made him welcome. He’d surprised himself at the fierce possessive pride he’d felt when a Pole had become Pope so recently. He so seldom thought of himself as Polish these days.
He’d been almost forty when the son he’d always dreamed of had finally arrived. It was a cause for rejoicing, but also for a renewal of fear. Now he had so much more to lose. This was a civilized country. The fascists could never gain a hold here. That was the received wisdom, anyway. But Germany too had been a civilized country. No one could predict what might happen in any country when the numbers of the dispossessed reached a critical mass. Anyone who promised salvation would find a following.
And lately, there had been good grounds for fear. The National Front were creeping through the political undergrowth. Strikes and industrial unrest were making the government edgy. The IRA’s bombing campaign gave the politicians all the excuses they needed for introducing repressive measures. And that cold bitch who ran the Tory party talked of immigrants swamping the indigenous culture. Oh yes, the seeds were all there.
So when Alex Gilbey had rung and told him his son had spent the night in a police station, Karel Malkiewicz had no choice. He wanted his boy under his roof, under his wing. Nobody would come and take his son away in the night. He wrapped up warmly, instructing his wife to prepare a flask of hot soup and a parcel of sandwiches. Then he set off across Fife to bring his son home.
It took him nearly two hours to negotiate the thirty miles in his elderly Vauxhall. But he was relieved to see lights on in the house Sigmund shared with his friends. He parked the car, picked up his supplies and marched up the path.
There was no answer to his knocking at first. He stepped gingerly on to the snow and looked in through the brightly lit kitchen window. The room was empty. He banged on the window and shouted, ‘Sigmund! Open up, it’s your father.’
He heard the sound of feet clattering down stairs, then the door opened to reveal his handsome son, grinning from ear to ear, his arms spread wide in welcome. ‘Dad,’ he said, stepping barefoot into the slush to embrace his father. ‘I didn’t expect to see you.’
‘Alex called. I didn’t want you to be alone. So I came to get you.’ Karel clasped his son to him, the butterfly of fear beating its wings inside his chest. Love, he thought, was a terrible thing.
Mondo sat cross-legged on his bed, within easy reach of his turntable. He was listening, over and over again, to his personal theme, ‘Shine On, You Crazy Diamond’. The swooping guitars, the heartfelt anguish of Roger Waters’ voice, the elegiac synths, the breathy saxophone provided the perfect soundtrack for wallowing to.
And wallowing was exactly what Mondo wanted to do. He’d escaped the smother of his mother’s concern that had swamped him as soon as he’d explained what had happened. It had been quite pleasant for a while, the familiar cocoon of concern spinning itself around him. But gradually, it had started to stifle him and he’d excused himself with the need to be alone. The Greta Garbo routine always worked with his mother, who thought he was an intellectual because he read books in French. It seemed to escape her notice that that’s what you had to do when you were studying the subject at degree level.
Just as well, really. He couldn’t have begun to explain the turmoil of emotion that threatened to swamp him. Violence was alien to him, a foreign language whose grammar and vocabulary he’d never assimilated. His recent confrontation with it had left him feeling shaky and strange. He couldn’t honestly say he was sorry Rosie Duff was dead; she’d humiliated him in front of his friends more than once when he’d tried on the chat-up lines that seemed to work with other lassies. But he was sorry that her death had plummeted him into this difficult place where he didn’t belong.
What he really needed was sex. That would take his mind off the horrors of the night before. It would be a sort of therapy. Like getting back on the horse. Unfortunately, he lacked the amenity of a girlfriend in Kirkcaldy. Maybe he should make a couple of phone calls. One or two of his exes would be more than happy to renew their relationship. They’d be a willing ear for his woes and it would tide him over the holidays at least. Judith, maybe. Or Liz. Yeah, probably Liz. The chubby ones were always so pathetically grateful for a date, they came across with no effort at all. He could feel himself growing hard at the thought.
Just as he was about to get off the bed and go downstairs to the phone, there was a knock at his door. ‘Come in,’ he sighed wearily, wondering what his mother wanted now. He shifted his position to hide his budding erection.
But it wasn’t his mother. It was his fifteen-year-old sister Lynn. ‘Mum thought you might like a Coke,’ she said, waving the glass at him.
‘I can think of things I’d rather have,’ he said.
‘You must be really upset,’ Lynn said. ‘I can’t imagine what that must have been like.’
In the absence of a girlfriend, he’d have to make do with impressing his sister. ‘It was pretty tough,’ he said. ‘I wouldn’t want to go through that again in a hurry. And the police were Neanderthal imbeciles. Why they felt the need to interrogate us as if we were IRA bombers, I’ll never know. It took real guts to stand up to them, I can tell you.’
For some reason, Lynn wasn’t giving him the unthinking adoration and support he deserved. She leaned against the wall, her expression that of someone waiting for a break in the flow so she could get to what was really on her mind. ‘It must have done,’ she said mechanically.
‘We’ll probably have to face more questioning,’ he added.
‘It must have been awful for Alex. How is he?’
‘Gilly? Well, he’s hardly Mr Sensitive. He’ll get over it.’
‘Alex is a lot more sensitive than you give him credit for,’ Lynn said fiercely. ‘Just because he played rugby, you think he’s all muscle and no heart. He must be really torn up about it, especially with him knowing the girl.’
Mondo cursed inwardly. He’d momentarily forgotten the crush his sister had on Alex. She wasn’t in here to give him Coke and sympathy, she was here because it gave her an excuse to talk about Alex. ‘It’s probably just as well for him that he didn’t know her as well as he’d have liked to.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘He fancied her something rotten. He even asked her out. Now, if she’d said yes, then you can bet your bottom dollar that Alex would be the prime suspect.’
Lynn flushed. ‘You’re making it up. Alex wouldn’t go around chasing barmaids.’
Mondo gave a cruel little smile. ‘Wouldn’t he? I don’t think you know your precious Alex as well as you think.’
‘You’re a creep, you know that?’ Lynn said. ‘Why are you being so horrible about Alex? He’s supposed to be one of your best friends.’
She slammed out, leaving him to ponder her question. Why was he being so horrible about Alex, when normally he’d never have heard a word against him?
Slowly, it began to dawn on him that, deep down, he blamed Alex for this whole mess. If they’d just gone straight down the path, somebody else would have found Rosie Duff’s body. Somebody else would have had to stand there and listen to the last breaths dragging out of her. Somebody else would feel tainted by the hours they’d spent in a police cell.
That he was now apparently a suspect in a murder inquiry was Alex’s fault, there was no getting away from it. Mondo squirmed uncomfortably at the thought. He tried to push it away, but he knew you couldn’t close Pandora’s box. Once the idea was planted, it couldn’t be uprooted and thrown aside to wither. This wasn’t the time to be coming up with notions that would drive a wedge between them. They needed each other now as they had never done before. But there was no getting away from it. He wouldn’t be in this mess if it wasn’t for Alex.
And what if there was worse to come? There was no escaping the fact that Weird had been