Career of Evil

She took a tremulous sip of her orange juice and continued:

“We heard all about it. Our friend Brian, who you just met, he saw the fight happening out on the street. Four of them onto one, all of them shouting and yelling. Someone called the police. Jamie got a caution. He didn’t care,” said Mrs. Bunyan. “They didn’t want him anywhere near them, or their mother. They ran him out of town.

“I was terrified,” she continued. “For Rhona. He’d always said he’d find her when he got out.”

“And did he?” asked Strike.

“Och, yes,” said Margaret Bunyan miserably. “We knew he would. She’d moved tae Glasgow, got a job in a travel agent’s. He still found her. Six months she lived in fear of him turning up and then one day he did. Came to her flat one night, but he’d been ill. He wasn’t the same.”

“Ill?” repeated Strike sharply.

“I can’t remember what it was he’d got, some kind of arthritis, I think, and Rhona said he’d put on a lot of weight. He turned up at her flat at night, he’d tracked her down, but thanks be to God,” said Mrs. Bunyan fervently, “her fiancé was staying over. His name’s Ben,” she added, with a triumphal flourish, the color high in her faded cheeks, “and he’s a policeman.”

She said it as though she thought Strike would be especially glad to hear this, as though he and Ben were comembers of some great investigative brotherhood.

“They’re married now,” said Mrs. Bunyan. “No kids, because—well, you know why—”

And without warning, a torrent of tears burst forth, streaming down Mrs. Bunyan’s face behind her glasses. The horror of what had happened a decade ago was suddenly fresh and raw, as though a pile of offal had been dumped on the table in front of them.

“—Laing stuck a knife up inside her,” whispered Mrs. Bunyan.

She confided in him as though Strike were a doctor or a priest, telling him the secrets that weighed on her, but which she could not tell her friends: he already knew the worst. As she groped again for the handkerchief in her square black bag, Strike remembered the wide patch of blood on the sheets, the excoriated skin on her wrist where Rhona had tried to free herself. Thank God her mother could not see inside his head.

“He stuck a knife inside—and they tried to—you know—repair—”

Mrs. Bunyan took a deep, shuddering breath as two plates of food appeared in front of them.

“But she and Ben have lovely holidays,” she whispered frantically, dabbing repeatedly at her hollow cheeks, lifting her glasses to reach her eyes. “And they breed—they breed German—German Shepherds.”

Hungry though he was, Strike could not eat in the immediate aftermath of discussing what had been done to Rhona Laing.

“She and Laing had a baby, didn’t they?” he asked, remembering its feeble whimpering from beside its bloodstained, dehydrated mother. “The kid must be, what, ten by now?”

“He d-died,” she whispered, tears dripping off the end of her chin. “C-cot death. He was always sickly, the bairn. It happened two d-days after they put D-Do

Strike laid a large hand briefly on the sobbing woman’s shoulder, then hoisted himself to his feet and approached the young barmaid who was watching them with her mouth open. Brandy seemed too strong for the sparrow-like creature behind him. Strike’s Aunt Joan, who was only a little older than Mrs. Bunyan, always regarded port as medicinal. He ordered a glass and took it back to her.

“Here. Drink this.”

His reward was a recrudescence of tears, but after much more dabbing with the sodden handkerchief she said shakily, “You’re very kind,” sipped it, gave a little gasping sigh and blinked at him, her fair-lashed eyes pink like a piglet’s.

“Have you got any idea where Laing went after turning up at Rhona’s?”

“Yes,” she whispered. “Ben put out feelers through work, through the probation office. Apparently he went to Gateshead, but I don’t know whether he’s still there.”

Gateshead. Strike remembered the Donald Laing he had found online. Had he moved from Gateshead to Corby? Or were they different men?

“Anyway,” said Mrs. Bunyan, “he’s never bothered Rhona and Ben again.”

“I’ll bet he hasn’t,” said Strike, picking up his knife and fork. “A copper and German Shepherds, eh? He’s not stupid.”

She seemed to take courage and comfort from his words, and with a timid, tearful smile began to pick at her macaroni cheese.

“They married young,” commented Strike, who was keen to hear anything he could about Laing, anything that might give a lead on his associations or habits.

She nodded, swallowed and said:

“Far too young. She started seeing him when she was only fifteen and we didn’t like it. We’d heard things about Do

“He’d already been accused of rape?” asked Strike. His fish and chips were excellent. The pub was filling up, for which he was grateful: the barmaid’s attention was diverted from them.

“Oh yes. They’re a rough family,” said Mrs. Bunyan, with the sort of prim small-town snobbery that Strike knew well from his own upbringing. “All those brothers, they were always fighting, in trouble with the police, but he was the worst of them. His own brothers didn’t like him. I don’t think his mother liked him much, tae tell the truth. There was a rumor,” she said in a burst of confidence, “that he wasnae the father’s. The parents were always fighting and they separated round about the time she got pregnant with Do

“He was the wildest of all of them. A big lad. He got into the junior sevens—”

“Sevens?”

“The rugby sevens,” she said, and even this small, genteel lady was surprised that Strike did not immediately understand what, to Melrose, seemed more religion than sport. “But they kicked him out. No discipline. Someone carved up Greenyards the week after they kicked him out. The pitch,” she added, in response to the Englishman’s mystifying ignorance.

The port was making her talkative. Words were tumbling out of her now.

“He took up boxing instead. He had the gift of the gab, though, oh aye. When Rhona first took up with him—she was fifteen and he was seventeen—I had some folk telling me he wasn’t a bad lad really. Oh, aye,” she repeated, nodding at Strike’s look of disbelief. “Folk that didn’t know him so well were took in by him. He could be charming when he wanted to, Do

“But you just ask Walter Gilchrist whether he was charming. Walter sacked him off the farm—he was always being late—and someone set fire to his barn after. Oh, they never proved it was Do

“Rhona wouldn’t listen. She thought she knew him. He was misunderstood and I don’t know what else. We were prejudiced, narrow-minded. He wanted tae join the army. Good riddance, I thought. I hoped she’d forget him if he left.

“Then he came back. He got her pregnant but she lost it. She was angry with me because I said—”

She did not want to tell him what she had said, but Strike could imagine.

“—and then she wouldn’t talk to me anymore, and she went and married him on his next leave. Her dad and I weren’t invited,” she said. “Off to Cyprus together. But I know he killed our cat.”