The Sleeping and the Dead

She swirled the remaining gin in her glass. ‘I’d been out. It didn’t happen often. Snowberry was miles from anywhere. The only entertainment was the pub and those days a woman didn’t go out drinking on her own. One of the lads on the estate asked me to go to the pictures in town. He had a car. That was the only reason I went and I made sure I wasn’t late back. The nursery was at the back of the house and I couldn’t see the fire from the front. The first thing I did was check on Emily but I couldn’t get near her room. You wouldn’t believe the heat and the smoke. Sometimes I wake up at night and I can still taste it. Theo was asleep but I managed to get him out. Crispin and Stella were still up. They’d both been drinking and they hadn’t noticed a thing.’

‘Was anyone else there?’

‘Not in the house itself. There was a couple who looked after the place, but they lived in a cottage at the end of the drive. They didn’t know anything until the fire engines woke them up.’

‘Are you sure it was an accident?’

‘You think the fire’s related to Theo’s murder?’

He shrugged. ‘I hope I’ve got an open mind.’

‘Stella wouldn’t hurt a fly, even in her maddest moments. Crispin had a fearsome temper. I can imagine him lashing out at Stella, but he loved the baby. And even if the fire was his fault, why kill Theo after all that time?’

And what, Porteus thought, could any of this have to do with Melanie Gillespie?

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Porteous had made an appointment to see Melanie’s psychiatrist. Walking from the car park to the day hospital, all glass and concrete like the superstore next door, he tried to walk in her footsteps, see it through her eyes. On the step by the entrance, a young couple stared blankly into space, smoking cheap smuggled cigarettes. In the waiting-room a middle-aged man with wild hair paced backwards and forwards talking to himself about God. Sitting on one of the orange plastic chairs in the corridor a plump woman in a neat, grey raincoat sobbed discreetly into a handkerchief. What would Melanie have made of them? Would she have considered herself different and sat apart? Would she have visited the place alone, her parents too busy to be there? He found it hard to imagine Melanie here at all. He thought Richard Gillespie would have arranged somewhere private, an exclusive clinic where discretion would be guaranteed, the sort of health farm where customers were force fed instead of starved.

The receptionist on the main desk gave him a brief smile of recognition, but when he showed her his warrant card she shook her head. A sort of apology for mistaking him for one of the patients. The waiting-room was unusually busy. The hospital tried to see patients on time. If they were kept hanging around some lost their nerve and walked out. Others turned nasty. Porteous had a sudden qualm of conscience about taking up the doctor’s time.

‘Mr Porteous, the doctor will see you now.’

They watched him, aware he was jumping the queue, but too apathetic or too cowed to comment. The nurse started walking with him.

‘It’s all right,’ he said. ‘I know the way.’

He followed the corridor with its jolly posters promoting healthy eating and adverts for self-help groups, until he came to the door. He stopped outside, feeling for a moment the old anxiety, the breaker of rules outside the head teacher’s study, then he knocked lightly and went in.

Collier was a red-headed Scot with freckles and blue eyes. He ran marathons and looked horribly fit.

‘Peter. You’re looking very well.’

Despite himself he felt pleased. Collier had always been honest. If he looked lousy he’d have said so. This meant he must be doing OK.

‘I’m not here for me. Didn’t they say?’

‘Yeah. There’s a note somewhere.’ He scrabbled through a pile of scrap paper. Porteous would have loved the opportunity to go through the desk, to reduce it to a series of neat piles. ‘And I had a phone call,’ the psychiatrist continued. ‘From Mr Gillespie.’ He lay back in his chair. ‘What you might call a warning shot across my bows.’

‘Oh?’

‘Oh aye. I’m to respect Melanie’s confidentiality although she’s dead. The cheek of the man. You’d think he was paying me.’

‘Isn’t that odd? I mean Melanie being treated on the NHS. He must have private health insurance.’

‘I’m the best,’ Collier said, quite seriously. ‘If he’d asked around he’d have been told that. And I don’t do private.’

‘I do know. That you’re the best.’

Collier grinned. ‘And they might have gone private before they came here. They said not, but I wouldn’t have been surprised if they’d tried something else. Herbal remedies. Acupuncture. Hypnosis. Any damn thing to avoid having to face what was going on. You’d be surprised by the number of patients who’ve been fooled by some quack but who’re too embarrassed to admit it.’

‘So,’ Porteous said cautiously. ‘There’s nothing you’re prepared to tell me. You’ve been warned off.’

‘I can’t tell you about the lassie’s illness.’

‘When did you last see her?’