“Right. I see.” He tried to recalibrate his thinking on the matter, but couldn’t. “Why didn’t you invite me, then?”
“Because I don’t like you,” Maddie said, then she flinched and shook her head. “Don’t. Didn’t. I don’t know.” She sighed and looked down at Taggart, who seized the opportunity to lick her on the chin. “I was angry.”
“About what happened in Inverness?”
“About everything! About two-and-a-bit decades,” Maddie retorted. “But yes, you almost getting me raped and murdered didn’t exactly help matters, let’s put it that way.”
“I wouldn’t have let anything happen to you. I’d never let anything happen to you.”
“But that’s just it! You did. You let that happen,” Maddie said, the pitch of her voice rising an octave or more. “You think because you stopped him—you think because you swung in just in the nick of time—that everything’s fine. That all’s well that ends well. That I’m fine. But I’m not. Because it doesn’t work like that, Dad.”
She ran a hand through her hair. Logan recognised the movement as a mirror of one he made himself. Usually when he was frustrated.
“You might be able to just reset everything after every case,” Maddie continued, her volume dropping again. “You can just move on to your next big adventure and forget everything that happened before, but that’s because you’re… you. I’m not. No one is. You get to move on with your life—eat ice cream in Largs—and I’m stuck reliving it. Everything that happened. All of it, again, and again, and again. How is that fair?”
“It isn’t,” Logan admitted.
“You want to know why I didn’t want you at the wedding?” Maddie asked. “Because, when I look at you, I see him. I see Owen Petrie. I see what he was going to do to me. To Mum. To everyone. I look at your face, and I see his.”
Logan looked away, across the road, past the big metal Viking, to where the water met the shore. He nodded, his throat tight, his eyes prickling.
“Right. I see,” he said, then he shrugged. “I mean, if you’d told me that, I could maybe have worn a balaclava.”
It was a gamble. A big one. Her stifled snort of laughter told him it had paid off.
“You’re a dick,” she said.
He turned back to her. “You know, one of them full-face IRA ones. No’ the ones with the big hole in the middle. That’d just have made me look like a fanny.”
“You are a fanny,” Maddie told him. A smile tugged at the corner of her mouth. “Imagine the photos.”
“What, if I was done up in paramilitary gear? Aye, they’d be belters, right enough. Love to see one of them on your mum’s fireplace.”
She laughed at that. A proper laugh, albeit a brief one. “She’d be raging.”
Logan reached a hand across the table—across the divide—and placed it on her arm. She regarded it like it was something bordering on offensive, but didn’t pull away.
“I’m sorry,” he told her. “I didn’t know.”
“But that’s the point. You should’ve known. You should’ve understood.”
Logan conceded the point with a nod and a squeeze of her arm. “Aye. I should’ve,” he said. “Although, there is one thing I did do right. One thing I’m proud of.”
“What’s that?”
“I never gave you a last name for a first name,” he said, with absolute sincerity.
Maddie sniffed. Smiled. “Madison is a last name,” she said.
Logan sat back in surprise. “Is it?” He stared at her for several seconds, his eyebrows slowly creeping back down his forehead until they met as a shallow V above his nose. “Fuck.”
Shona stood back from the counter in Nardini’s while Anderson ordered up two teas, one coffee, a jumbo chocolate milkshake, and a bowl of water for the dog. She could see Logan and Maddie through the little square windows in the door, but was trying very hard not to look. Looking felt intrusive. Best to leave them to it for a few minutes.
There was a small TV on the back wall, showing a news report on a missing ten-year-old girl. She tuned her ear to it, listening to the details. North of England somewhere. Not Jack’s turf.
She was watching the tearful pleas of the girl’s parents—a well-dressed black couple that the on-screen text revealed both had ‘Dr’ before their names—when Anderson arrived, tucking a receipt into his slim carbon fibre wallet.
“They said they’d take it out to us,” he told her.
“Oh. Right,” Shona said. She chewed her lip for a moment, then indicated an empty table. “Or we could sit and wait for it? Give them a chance to chat.”
“And delay us getting shouted at,” Anderson added.
Shona smiled, clicked her fingers, and pointed at him. “Bingo. That, too.”
They took a seat. Anderson, like Shona, was avoiding looking out at the veranda where Logan and Madison sat. He picked up a salt cellar, studied it like it was some rare antique treasure, then set it down again.
“How do you think it’s going?” he asked.
“Not a clue,” Shona admitted. “But I haven’t heard anything breaking, so that’s positive.”
Anderson smiled. It wasn’t a particularly noteworthy smile. He wasn’t the ‘slick, slimy bastard’ that Logan had described, based on nothing but a few Facebook photographs and his own worst fears. He was a fairly unassuming-looking guy. No fancy watches. No red corduroy trousers and fancy shirt. No braying laugh. None of the things, in fact, that Logan had theorised he’d have.
He’d been friendly enough on Messenger, too, once he’d got over the initial shock of Shona getting in touch, and been persuaded that arranging the meet-up was a good idea. Maddie did speak about her dad, he’d told her. Not in a particularly flattering way, but she spoke about him. She regretted the state of their relationship and wished it could be better.
Granted, she had never actually said as much, but Anderson had read between the lines.
Which was the main reason he didn’t want to look outside, in case it turned out that he’d completely misread between the lines, and they were now trying to kill each other with dessert spoons.
He and Shona filled a few minutes with idle chat. Anderson asked how the drive down had been, what the weather was like in Inverness, and what time they were planning to set back off up the road.
Shona asked if Anderson had ever seen the Richard Donner cut of Superman II.
He hadn’t.
A waiter passed then, carrying a tray of drinks towards the front door. Shona leapt to her feet and intercepted him before he could make it all the way.
“Wait! Hold on! Those are ours,” she said.
The waiter regarded her with suspicion until Anderson produced the receipt and held it up as evidence.
“We’ll take it,” Shona said, grasping the edge of the tray. “It’ll be safer that way. Probably.”
The waiter, who had absolutely no idea what she was on about, and no desire to find out, happily let her take the tray, then headed back to the kitchen. Shona took a deep breath and met Anderson’s eye.
“You ready?”
He drew in a deep breath, then nodded. “Ready.”