Read Online Troubled Waters by Gillian Galbraith - Free Book Online Page A

It would take months, if it could be done at all, and Lambie would not stand for that. Last night she had taken too much whisky, two tumblers both well-nigh neat, and become argumentative, shrill and hectoring. Not like the woman he knew and had married. The woman he loved.
    The phone went again and he snatched it up.
    ‘Yes?’ He sounded irate.
    ‘It’s just me,’ she said, taken aback.
    ‘Lambie . . .’
    ‘You left so early.’
    ‘I had to. I’ve got my work to do, I’ve got to keep things going.’
    While talking to her, unseen by her, he rubbed his tired eyes with the tips of his fingers.
    ‘What news, how are you getting on?’
    ‘I’m getting on fine, my sweet. Did you speak to the school?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘What did you say?’
    ‘Tonsillitis – that worked last time.’
    The door opened and Jake began to come in.
    ‘Get out!’ the man shouted, then realising how it would sound down the phone, he immediately added, ‘Not you, Lambie, I wasn’t talking to you. Someone came in to myoffice. It’s busy here – it’s a dispatch day. We’ve orders going all over the place.’
    ‘But you have started looking – you are looking for her, too? I can’t lose her. I’ve got to go to the meeting, but I couldn’t bear to lose . . .’
    The voice at the other end tailed away to nothing. Knowing the woman as he did, he could picture her in their kitchen, dissolving in her distress, her chin wobbling and tears starting to trickle down her cheeks. She would be biting her lip, trying and failing to stop herself from crying. Before too long she would start choking, unable to contain herself or breathe. Hysterical, enfeebled by her unhappiness.
    ‘Lambie, my darling, it’s alright,’ he said, his voice firm and confident. ‘Trust me. You know I will find her.’

    Three-fifteen p.m. found him sitting in his Mazda 6 a couple of hundred yards from the low brick wall which enclosed the Cowan Lea Special School on Drum Brae Terrace. The school itself comprised an uninspired sixties building, flat-roofed and white-painted with a matching Portakabin tacked to one side. Around it was a small garden, the turf worn in parts, and dotted on the grass was the play equipment: a couple of swings, a roundabout and a slide. The only tree left on the site, a crooked Scots pine, had a circular tree-house round its trunk, a rope ladder dangling forlornly from its dark interior.
    In the fifteen minutes or so that he had been parked, women had appeared from all four points of the compass and begun to congregate at the gates. Some of them were smoking, some chatting, others looking intently into the playground, ever watchful for the arrival of their ownprecious offspring. A solitary man, a small girl clutching his hand, joined the female crowd, getting nods of recognition from most of them. In her free hand, the little girl held the lead of a yapping Border terrier. As a white-faced teenager, pigeon-toed, bespectacled and with a strange bullet-shaped skull hurtled out of the gates towards it, the dog began pulling on the lead, rearing up on its back legs in its determination to greet its master. Eventually it broke loose, barrelling towards the boy, its lead dragging behind it.
    No other child, he noticed, left the school unaccompanied; all the rest held the hand of schoolmate or a parent. Policy, no doubt; and that was, he determined there and then, how he would do it. If she was there, he would walk in, take her hand and lead her out. Knowing her, she would not protest or demur, or attempt to attract anyone’s attention. And no foster mother would be half as sharp-eyed, half as vigilant, as him. She would be too busy gossiping and socialising with the other women in all probability to notice them leaving together, and she would not be expecting that. No, she would be looking only for a lone girl.
    His phone went.
    ‘Boss?’
    ‘Aha,’ he replied, never taking his eyes off the children in the playground.
    ‘Dunfermline