Free A Deviant Breed by Stephen Coill Page B

had risked excommunication just to please him sexually.  Quite early on in their relationship Maggie had displayed traits of insecurity and almost suffocating neediness and jealousy, but as angry as he was about getting trapped into parenthood, he did love her and without hesitation vowed to do the right thing.
    Much to her parents’ disgust and embarrassment their heavily pregnant daughter got married at a registry office – and had her union merely blessed by their parish priest. Whatever blessing the priest had bestowed though was short lived.  Zoe’s birth heralded a devastating bout of post-natal depression aggravated by a pre-existing condition later diagnosed as manic depression.  It was impossible to tell when or if the post-natal phase ever passed.  Her unpredictable mood swings, inflamed by alcohol continued for six years.
    Despite reservations Dunbar became dependent upon the support his in-laws provided.  They were hardly ever away from his and Maggie’s small house in Wardie on the outskirts of the capital.  What he could have done without though, was the Catholic guilt their presence engendered in his sick wife’s fragile mind; and Jim pandering to his precious daughter’s every whim.  When he joined the CID things at home got even worse.  The trouble was that he loved his job and so, spent countless unpaid hours at work, but more importantly – away from Maggie’s histrionics and rampant jealousy. 
    Conversely, Maggie hated his job, hated his colleagues and the “criminal scum he obviously preferred”, over her company.  She reserved particular loathing for police women.  Man-hungry, husband-stealing whores – was her most common, unqualified and irrational opinion of just about every woman with whom he spent his working hours in the company of.  Never once was he unfaithful, despite any number of opportunities, but acknowledged in retrospect that he should have spent more time at home and less drinking with his sidekicks.  Boozing was part and parcel of the CID culture back then and one he slipped into seamlessly having earned his drinking spurs at post-match piss-ups and in Durham University’s student bar.
    His biggest regret though, was that in the depths of guilt and grief, he allowed Jim and Elaine to take over the raising of his daughter.  A decision Zoe would later cite as one of the reasons for her hostility towards him.  It had made perfect sense at the time.  He could not pack his job in and certainly could not afford nursery fees or a nanny.  So Jim and Elaine would be carrying the burden of child-minding duties and school runs anyway.  His parents, though willing, lived in Jedburgh and were much older.  To make life easier for his in-laws Zoe moved in with them.  Naturally, as grandparents tend to, they spoiled her and, as the years passed, slowly indoctrinated her into believing that the blame for her mother’s premature death lay entirely with her selfish, ambitious, hard-drinking father. 

5
    Andy ‘Shaggy’ Lound shrieked and crabbed backwards across the turf.  Everyone about snapped around.
    ‘What is it, Shaggy?’ Professor Geary shouted, poking her head out from the finds tent.  Shaggy pointed his trowel towards the pile of turf and soil he had excavated.
    ‘What?’
    ‘A heid!’ he gasped back.
    ‘Not another skull?’
    ‘Heid!’ he repeated louder, ‘a feckin’ heid.’
    Zoe, immediately stopped what she was doing and ran over to him.  She stopped dead in her tracks when she saw what Shaggy had uncovered. Hands to mouth, she turned to meet the professor’s troubled gaze with wide-eyed horror.
    ***
    Both investigations were thrown into turmoil by this latest find.  Professor Geary’s archaeological dig was well and truly a crime scene and officially put on hold, and DCI Dunbar’s ‘unexplained death’, had almost certainly turned into a double-homicide investigation or, heaven forbid, the start of a serial-killer enquiry.
    ‘I’m