Bob Skiinner 21 Grievous Angel Read Online Free Page A

foursomes partner in the golf club. He and his wife were more than ten years older than me. ‘And Aunt Jean could come.’

    I smiled. I must have looked condescending, for she frowned. ‘When you’re a lawyer,’ I told her, ‘and you have an opposition witness on the stand, you’ll need to take your examination more slowly than that, or you’ll have no flexibility left, no wiggle room. It’s the biggest mistake defence counsel make when I’m in the box.’

    ‘I don’t know what you mean,’ she snapped.

    ‘Yes you do. You’re matchmaking, and you’re not very good at it.’

    Alex and her aunt, her mother’s younger sister, had always got on. So had Jean and I, for that matter. But neither my daughter nor I could stand her husband Cameron, one of the very few men that Myra had ever detested absolutely. Jean had joined our camp a couple of years earlier. She had celebrated her thirtieth birthday by chucking him out, and had called a week before to tell us that her divorce had been finalised.

    ‘Okay, so what if I am? Dad, it’s been a long time. You’ve got to . . .’

    ‘Move on?’

    ‘Yes.’

    ‘Alex, I have moved on.’

    She looked across at me. ‘Do you have a girlfriend?’

    ‘You know that I don’t.’

    ‘I know that you never bring any women home, but that’s all.’

    ‘Well I don’t.’

    ‘None at all?’

    ‘No.’

    ‘You mean you’ve been celibate since Mum died?’ She pronounced the bombshell word carefully, as if she’d just learned it.

    ‘Hey!’ I protested, laughing. ‘Jesus, kid, what sort of a question’s that for a thirteen-year-old to be asking her father?’

    ‘That means you haven’t. If the answer was “yes” you’d have said so. People prevaricate when they have something to hide; that’s what you told me.’

    ‘I’ve got nothing to hide,’ I insisted.

    I had, of course. Nine months before, I had left Alex in Daisy’s care and gone to Spain for a long weekend, to do some maintenance on the house that I’d bought with part of my father’s estate, and to commission an extension. I’d flown from Glasgow to Barcelona and Jean had come with me. Her suggestion, not mine; nothing had been said in advance about the sleeping arrangements, but I suppose we’d both known what was going to happen. It wasn’t a disaster, but it did feel a little weird. We had some laughs, the sex was good, and I didn’t imagine for a second that Myra would be turning in her grave, but when Jean made it clear at the end of the trip that it would be a oneoff, I felt relieved rather than slighted. She hadn’t been my only fling; there had been other women, a few over the years, but always away games, work as far as Alex was concerned, the truth and nothing but the truth with the understanding Daisy.

    ‘Tell you what,’ I offered her. ‘No dinner party, but we’ll have a barbie in the garden, one Sunday afternoon. We’ll invite friends from the village, you can ask some of yours from school, if their parents are okay with it, and I might ask some from work. You can invite our Jean if you like, but don’t you be surprised if she wants to bring a man.’

    The notion that her aunt was capable of independent thought and action sent her into silent contemplation. ‘You up for that?’ I asked, as I negotiated a troublesome roundabout.

    ‘We’ll see.’The idea of a joint adult-kids party left her underwhelmed, as I had guessed it would. Negotiations were suspended, and I drove on, letting the music fill the void.

    Infirmary Street had been closed at either end as I turned into it off the Cowgate. The uniform on duty waved a ‘get on your way’ gesture at first, but he was looking at Alex rather than at me. He knew me well enough; his name was Charlie Johnston and he wasn’t going anywhere other than towards retirement and a PC’s pension, his objective from the start. He and I were contemporaries. The first thing he’d done on joining up was to learn, off