lack of forensic evidence on Andrew Bragg was compromised by the amount of blood he had lost. And anyway no one questioned the witness statements of a detective constable and an ex-detective inspector. Because what possible reason could there be for them to lie?
‘A righteous compromise,’ Jackson said. ‘Truth is absolute, but the consequences of it aren’t.’
‘Sounds like a specious argument to me, Mr B.’
‘And yet this is where we are, Reggie. You do what you think is right.’
She hated him for doing this to her. And she loved him for it, too. Somewhere, deep down, she still yearned for him to be the father-figure in her life. The dad she’d never known. She hated him for that, too.
And they were old hands at covering up, of course. When Dr Hunter killed the two men who had abducted her and her baby, Jackson had destroyed the evidence and Reggie had lied about what she knew to be the truth. So that it wasn’t something that would follow Dr Hunter for the rest of her life, Jackson had said. So Reggie already knew how easy it was to step over the line from law to outlaw.
She had a sudden flashback to seeing Dr Hunter walking down the road, walking away from the house that contained the two men she had killed. Dr H had been covered in blood, her baby in her arms, and Reggie had thought how magnificent she looked, like a heroine, a warrior queen. The two Polish sisters had stood with their arms around each other, looking defiantly at the body of Stephen Mellors. They had the straight, strong backs of dancers. Heroines, not handmaids. They were beautiful. For my sister.
When she’d saved Jackson Brodie’s life on the railway tracks all those years ago, Reggie thought that he would be in her thrall until he repaid the favour, until he saved her life in return, but that wasn’t so. It was Reggie who had been in thrall to him. And now they were joined in compromise for ever. ‘Righteous compromise,’ he reminded her.
And as Dr Hunter once said, ‘What does justice have to do with the law?’
It was so wrong that it was right. That sounded like the title of one of Jackson Brodie’s God-awful country songs. Reggie knew that she had some thinking to do before she could walk a straight line again.
She sifted through Ronnie’s music on her iPhone and put on Florence and the Machine. When ‘Hunger’ came on Ronnie started singing along softly, and by the time they got to the second chorus they were both belting out We all have a hunger at the top of their lungs. And then they grabbed each other’s hands and made fists and held them up in winners’ triumph. They were like Thelma and Louise about to drive off the cliff, except they weren’t going to do that, they were driving home.
They were Cagney and Lacey. They were the Brontë sisters. They were the Kray twins. They were police. They were women.
‘See you around, then,’ Ronnie said when she dropped Reggie off in Leeds.
‘You betcha,’ Reggie said.
What Would Tatiana Do?
‘Mr Brodie?’
Sam Tilling reporting for duty on the phone.
‘How’s tricks, Sam?’
‘Tricky. I don’t know how to say this. Well, I do, I’m just …’
‘Spit it out, Sam.’
‘It’s our Gary, Mr Brodie. He’s dead.’
‘Dead? How?’
‘His diabetes, apparently. He fell into a coma in a hotel room in Leeds and was dead when housekeeping found him the next morning.’
‘And where was Kirsty in all this?’ Jackson asked.
‘Not with Gary. He was on his own. And Mrs Trotter was at the Great Yorkshire Show with her sister and thirty thousand or so other people.’
‘Which hotel was he in?’
‘The Malmaison in Leeds. Drinking in the bar beforehand. He did have quite a bit of alcohol in his system, according to the autopsy.’
‘There’s been an autopsy already?’ Jackson was surprised at the speed with which Gary had been all done and dusted for eternity.
‘Yep. Already done, according to Mrs Trotter. Death due to hypoglycaemia. They ruled it as natural causes.’
‘And I say, you buy lady drink? If you lady, he say, pleased with himself. Oh, funny man, I see, I say. I like funny men. My father was great circus clown, although, true, not funny. Not in Russia. Vodka for me. Pozhaluysta.
‘You’re not from round these parts, are you? he say. Ha, ha. Yes, you real comedian. I can tell, I say. I ask him if he have wife, he say nyet. I