Free Lawless by Alexander McGregor

earlier. Maybe the traces stay that long?’
    McBride raised an eyebrow. ‘Not unless she hadn’t got off her back. What about the wine, the tie?’
    ‘I never drink white wine,’ Gilzean said sharply. ‘Can’t stand it. I’m a beer man and, if forced into wine, I’ll only take red. Besides, I’d never seen the glass in my life before.’
    ‘You’re about to tell me you never wear a tie either, right?’ McBride said.
    ‘Only for special occasions. I am – was – an architect, Mr McBride, working in a small practice. It was very informal. Nobody dressed up.’
    ‘What about all the rows the two of you had? Pretty frequent, by all accounts?’
    Gilzean slowly nodded his head. ‘I know …’ He looked over McBride’s shoulder. Into the past – remembering. ‘They were never as bad as they might have sounded,’ he said quietly. ‘We were passionate about things … just about everything. We got over the arguments quickly – usually in a good way.’ He was speaking more to himself than his visitor.
    McBride eyed him steadily, lifted his voice to bring him back to the present. ‘OK. Two last questions. Did you have any other girlfriends and did she have boyfriends?’
    For the first time since they’d met, Bryan Gilzean could not meet McBride’s gaze. He hesitated. Stared at the floor. ‘No – don’t think that was her style.’
    ‘You?’
    Gilzean paused again. ‘Not really.’
    ‘What does that mean?’
    ‘Nothing serious. Nothing steady. Just the occasional one-nighter. You know how it is …’ He looked away, embarrassed.
    McBride knew exactly how it was but saw no point in enlightening Gilzean about his own sexual habits. He said nothing, just shrugged his shoulders non-committally.
    ‘Right, finish up,’ an officer’s voice called out from the dais. It signalled the end of visiting hour. The mothers shouted their offspring back from beneath the pictures of Goofy and the Seven Dwarfs and, at the tables, the women reached thin-fingered hands out to grasp those opposite, the need to make physical contact even more desperate. Some of those on both sides of the table struggled with tears.
    McBride rose slowly, unsure how to end the meeting. ‘I’m glad I came, Bryan,’ was the best he could do. ‘I’ll kick it all around and get back to you.’
    The pleading face looked up at him, a mixture of eagerness and uncertainty.
    McBride said the word first. ‘Promise.’
    ‘Thanks, Mr McBride, thanks.’
    On the way towards the door, McBride noticed for the first time that behind the barred windows and disturbing paintings there was an open-air, triangle-shaped visitors’ section with picnic benches and a play-area whose centrepiece was a climbing frame. It was standard height but, even if it had been close enough to a wall, it wasn’t going to help anyone over. The cold stone surrounding the unexpected oasis rose for fifteen feet and there was another five feet of razor wire on top of that. As play parks went, you were never going to have to worry about your children wandering off.
    McBride reached the end of the room and turned, knowing that Bryan Gilzean, who would be kept at his table until the last visitor had left the hall, would have watched his every step. From a distance, the twenty-seven-year-old looked even more like someone approaching middle age. Oddly, when he raised an arm, the wave that came from it resembled the kind you got when you left a child in the school playground for the first time. It reminded him of how Simon had once bade him anxious farewells.
    McBride held out his left hand for the ultraviolet lamp to reassure an officer he wasn’t an escaping inmate and waved back with the other one. Instinctively, he put his thumb up.
    All the way back to Dundee, he wondered how appropriate the gesture had been.

14
    McBride had turned off the coastal path that led from the river and was running towards the series of rises that would test his stamina when an unseen hand