knew all about me. Once we met, on board his schooner, it didn’t take me long to realise that he’d had me checked out.
I didn’t hold that against him. He was a very wealthy man, and if he was on his guard against fortune hunters, it was understandable. Indeed, I felt the same way: Alex was my fortune and I knew that in a few years’ time I’d be vetting her potential suitors. (Not very effectively, as it transpired.)
That sailing weekend was a landmark event in my life, but it was never repeated. The offer of another trip was made, more than once, but conflicting diaries, or weather, contrived to ensure that I never returned to the Palacio de Ginebra, Eden’s casually named Gin Palace.
The vessel didn’t live up, or maybe down, to its name; it was a sleek, speedy, no-frills racing yacht, and when we berthed in the Inverkip marina, after our cruise to Campbeltown, I had a couple of blisters to prove that I wasn’t as hard handed as I’d believed.
Eden and I met up again at a few social events over the next couple of years, until Alison decided that being with me was a hindrance to her career. Jimmy Proud, our chief constable, knew of our relationship; he had always kept us apart professionally, and Alison came to believe that had ruled her out of the running for a couple of jobs she’d fancied. She may have been right . . . honestly, I do not know, and there’s no point in asking Jimmy now . . . but in any event, the truth was that our thing had run out of steam by then.
The split was easy and amicable, not least because we’d never moved in together. Afterwards, when she did come into my police orbit, we kept it formal . . . at her insistence, not mine, for I was never precious about rank. At work I was ‘Sir’ to her, and she was ‘Inspector’ to me, then ‘Chief Inspector’ and finally ‘Superintendent’.
She might have become ‘Ma’am’, if she’d lived, if she hadn’t been killed by a car bomb that was meant for someone else.
The last time I’d seen Eden, before our reunion on the Mound, had been at Alison’s funeral. We shook hands at the door of the church after the service. All I could say was, ‘So sorry, mate.’ He nodded briefly, but that was all; his silence may have been because Sarah was with me, or quite simply because he was so choked up that he couldn’t speak.
We didn’t stay in touch after that, but that didn’t prevent me from shopping in Dene Furnishings, or from noticing when Eden sold the business for many millions, to focus on the venture capital involvement that had been a sideline for a few years.
His career was very easy to follow from then on; if he ever put a foot wrong in business, it never made the press, but every success, and there were plenty of them, made headlines.
My progression was high profile too, but boy, how I wish my judgement had been as good as his.
‘How can you know that?’ he asked me, after I’d had my revelation.
‘I saw it, a few months ago: I was in L’Escala, in Spain, where I have a house.’
He nodded. ‘I remember. You took my sister there.’
Eden was right; his memory was better than mine, for I’d filed that fact at the back of the mental drawer. I don’t believe that I ever loved Alison, or that she loved me, but as I’ve said, I liked her, more than any woman I’ve ever been with, apart from Sarah, and her death hurt me more deeply than I let anyone see at the time.
‘Yeah,’ I murmured, as another recollection came to me. ‘She didn’t like it in the summer. She said it was too hot for her. But she, Alex and I spent a Christmas there; she enjoyed that.’
‘I know,’ he said. ‘She told me so. Then less than a year later, she told me she’d decided it was you or her career, and her career won.’
‘What she told me,’ I replied, ‘was that she’d make a better chief constable than a wife, and that since she didn’t believe she could be both, we’d better pack it in.’
‘Did you try to talk her round?’ he asked.
‘No, I didn’t,’ I admitted, ‘because I felt exactly the same way about myself. I was a lousy husband while I was a cop,