Now in her kitchen, she was busy getting leaves out of my hair and dabbing at me with cotton wool. “She really tried to run you off the road?”
“I think it was a case of mistaken identity,” I said. “She seemed to think I’d done …” It clicked. “Sorry, one second, I need to check something.”
I took my phone out and played the voicemail that Sonia had left me yesterday, which I’d never got around to listening to.
“Arden!” came Sonia’s disembodied voice. She sounded panicked. “I’ve done something really stupid. Holy shit, what was I thinking? I thought it would be easy. Oh God, they’re totally gonna know it was me. Call me, I’m freaking out!”
The message ended. I banged my phone on my forehead, thinking hard.
“Friend of yours?” Katrina asked.
I nodded. Ow. “Who apparently doesn’t listen and doesn’t have a single shred of self-preservation.”
“Oh, dear.”
“Innit?”
“I’m glad that I passed by when I did,” she said. She looked down at the stun gun on the kitchen table and shuddered. “No idea what that woman would have done if she’d been left to her own devices.”
“Yes, thank you. And sorry to interrupt your day out … walking?”
She smiled. “I’d been to the beach, a nice ramble along the cliffs, really brushes away the cobwebs.”
“Lovely. I should give it a try,” I said.
I caught her looking at the photo again. “Can I ask you a question?”
She nodded as she moved from my head to my arm. She had a bowl of warm water and was washing off the dirt and crud to reveal that the skin on my arm was grazed. It stung like hell.
“If you could do it all over again, would you get married and do it the same?”
She thought for a second. “Yes, yes, I would,” she said. “My Andrew, he wasn’t the easiest man, but he was a good man. I … how do I put this, well, it was the nineteen-eighties, and you may think, oh, modern times. But, well, it wasn’t, not really. Anyway, my first husband” – I gasped, and she nodded – “we married straight out of school. He was a squaddie. Anyway, it wasn’t a great marriage. He liked a drink. We tried for a baby for many years and then eventually, when I was already in my thirties, over the hill in those days, I got pregnant with my Rabbie.”
“Your son?”
“Aye, my Rab – well, we named him after his dad, but I always called him Rabbie, his middle name, after my father. And there are some things I’d do differently there. But, you know, in the beginning, my ex loved being adad, up until he didn’t. And then it was time for us to leave.”
I nodded in sympathy. “My mum had to do the same.” As much as I never wanted to see my mother again, I couldn’t blame her for her actions in those early days. She had three young kids and a drunk husband. It was eat or be eaten, in her view, and she chose to be the hunter.
“So, you left your ex and found Andrew?”
“Yes, and Andrew was older than me, already in his forties. Never married. But a bright career. An officer. Very senior. Oh, for a girl like me with a wean and no man, it was a godsend. He was a good provider. We lived in a lovely big house; I never worried about bills again. Yes, it could have been a better marriage, and no, we weren’t some great love story. But he was all I needed.”
“So Rabbie followed his stepdad into the army?”
She nodded. “Dad. Andrew adopted him. But, yes, straight into the officers, oh, so proud of him.” She blinked back tears.
“I’m so sorry, Katrina. I didn’t mean to dig up painful memories.”
She waved away my concern. “It’s good to talk. It helps, actually. You’re a lot easier to talk to than Odette bloody Douglas, who is always around trying to get every detail of my life out of me.”
I shuddered.
She left the room again and came back with a different picture. “This is my Rabbie.”
She showed me a handsome young lad in full army uniform posing for a picture. “Well, hello,” I said.
Rabbie had been very striking looking with incredibly high cheekbones and almost Asiatic eyes. Chestnut curls were visible under his beret. “He modelled in his teens, you know? His father was Chinese-Malay.”
