Dying of the Light Read Free

jostling themselves exuberantly onto the pavement. A tin of lager was held aloft, followed by a chorus of cheers and the raising of exultant, clenched fists. One of the stragglers on the margins of the group accidentally backed into her.
    ‘Sorry, hen’, he said almost to himself, before, looking at her a second time, he realised he knew her and let out a wild whoop.
    ‘Well, I niver, it’s wee Annie hersel’. Hey, Tam the Bam!’, he screamed, ‘it’s her – ken, yer wham bam ma’am!’
    From the centre of the excited mob Thomas McNiece elbowed his way towards her, an uneasy grin on his glistening face, and as he did so his followers grew quiet, silent, like hyenas watching for the kill. Just as he reached her, a tall, dark-haired policewoman approached, and the men immediately began to disperse, some shifting themselves towards St Giles and Parliament Square, others heading northwards towards the Castle.
    ‘I’m sorry we never secured a conviction, Annie,’ the policewoman said, coming up to the woman, her exhaled breath like white smoke in the wintry air.
    ‘Yeh, right,’ Annie Wright replied. ‘I stood up and wis counted, eh? So he’d niver be able tae rape anybody again.’ She laughed loudly. ‘An’ he’s oot, free! Oh, an’ wan ither thing, sergeant, he’ll want tae git me fer that an’ a’, he says as much already. So I’d better watch oot fer masel’, eh?’
    Detective Sergeant Alice Rice was painfully aware that no words of hers, no truthful words at least, would be adequate. She had no comfort to offer. They both knew that justice had not been done and that a guilty man now walked free. But she could not bring herself to apologise for persuading the woman to complain. It would be altogether too hypocritical, because she would do the same again, tomorrow and the next day. And the day after that, too.
    ‘We’ll keep an eye out as well,’ she answered, unpleasantly conscious of the hollowness of her reassurance. McNiece had, after all, just routed them all. Made fools of them all.

    A double-decker drew up at the stop on the North Bridge and the woman clambered in, glad to be back in the warmth and returning to some form of normality. Taking a seat at the back she pressed her face hard against the window pane, conscious of every vibration on her cheekbone as the vehicle juddered over the potholed road, finally squealing to a halt at the Balmoral, ready to cross Waterloo Place. Ignoring an amber light it trundled onwards, stopping and restarting endlessly in the rush-hour traffic, crawling slowly past the brutal architecture marring the west side of Leith Street as if the sight of it was something to savour. Pedestrians streamed endlessly along the pavements, catching the January sales, most weighed down by bulging carrier bags and all wrapped up against the biting cold.
    At the first stop at the top of Leith Walk an old man, cap in hand, maundered unsteadily up the central aisle towards her, lurching onto her bench as the bus continued its erratic progress towards Portobello and her destination . Another abrupt halt and he fell against her shoulder, apologising the instant contact was made and righting himself to the best of his ability. And then, hesitantly, he began to talk to her, waiting for a response, nudging her into the usual, inconsequential, companionable banter that can help a journey pass. A daughter in Australia, a doctor no less, he boasted; and a son, fortunately close by in Port Seton. He’d spent Hogmanay there, the little of it he could remember anyway. And once he too had been a bus driver, doing the Haddington run.
    The man seemed so kind, fatherly almost, that Annie Wright would have liked to have told him the truth abouther day, unburden herself of its painful reality, and in the telling somehow reduce its importance. But she could not bear to watch him recoil. To smash his innocent illusions . After all, she was not, as he probably imagined, just another middle-aged