Bob Skiinner 21 Grievous Angel Read Free

and so was Aileen, exhausted and shaken.

    ‘Do you feel the better for that?’ I asked her.

    ‘No. But that wasn’t the idea.’ She paused. ‘That man you shot,’ she whispered. ‘In your cottage. Did you have any other option?’

    I thought about her question carefully. ‘Probably,’ I told her, when I was ready, ‘but the guy had gone rogue, he’d already killed a couple of people . . . not to mention the fact that he’d already shot me.’ I added, ‘If he’d walked out of there, it would have been embarrassing for those who sent him. I made the call, and to be frank, it’s been a long time since I even thought about him. In the same situation, I’d do the same thing. To be even more frank, I don’t regret anything I’ve ever done to someone else . . . apart from that unfortunate kid in the boxing ring in Motherwell all those years ago. It’s the cruelty that I’ve seen human beings inflict on each other; that’s what tears me up. Now you’ve made me share it with you, but I’m not sure that it will help. A burden shared might be a burden halved, but now you’re stuck with one you never had before.’

    ‘Then write it down. And don’t worry about me; I’m tougher than I look.’

    ‘You’re not serious,’ I exclaimed. ‘There’s things I can’t ever write down, can’t ever mention outside this room.’

    ‘Then stick to the stories you can tell. They don’t need to be for publication, but maybe as you examine each one at length, you’ll be able to put them in a better perspective.’

    And so, that is what I’m going to do. They won’t be chronological, these . . . memoirs, I called them earlier, and that’s as good a word as any. They’ll be stories that my wife reckons need telling, for therapeutic reasons, before I become a psychological basket case.

    But where to begin? Basket cases? Why not? Let’s start with the man in the wheelchair, the Stephen Hawking of crime, as a chum of mine once called him.

One

    ‘W hy were we created to suffer and die?’

    ‘Why the hell not?’

    I stared at her, fork halfway to my half-open mouth. I’m closer to my older daughter, my first child, than anyone else in the world, even Aileen . . . that’s how it is, in truth . . . yet she’s always had the capacity to surprise me. I gasped, not just at the bluntness of her reply, but because she’d nailed down the answer to my metaphysical question, one hundred per cent.

    ‘You . . .’ I began, and then the phone rang. ‘Bugger,’ I grunted. She frowned. ‘Not you,’ I added, quickly.

    When? It must have been fifteen years ago that I read a spoof sci-fi story about a space wanderer who travelled the universe, looking for its Maker, so that he could put to Him/Her the Primal Question.

    Yes, that’s right, it was fifteen years ago, for Alexis Skinner was at that unmercifully awkward stage, not quite a woman, I thought, but on the other hand definitely not Pops’ wee girl any more. The attitude that’s characterised her ever since was in its formative stage, with all of the sharp edges that time would smooth away, still, then, at their most abrasive.

    We were having our evening meal, she and I, the two-person family unit that we’d been for almost a decade, since Myra had died in a tangle of metal. Daisy Mears had gone home for the night. She’d been a part of our lives for the previous eight of those years. More than a part: in truth, she’d been the saviour of mine, professionally.

    Daisy lived in Gullane, in a cottage, as we did; hers was on the other side of the main street from Goose Green, in Templar Lane. She was five years older than me, just past forty, divorced, childless, and with no intention of ever getting involved with another man in any way, other than business. She was an artist, and a pretty good one at that; her landscapes, and stormy, brooding seascapes, sold for upwards of a grand a time through an Edinburgh gallery, and for not quite as much to