April 2021, Edinburgh
On the other side of the city, in a quiet park lined with oak and beech trees, two women sit two metres apart, each on their own blanket. It is still early, perhaps around nine thirty in the morning. There are few others in the park. A slim woman running under the trees in pink leggings with a blond bobbing pony tail. An older man in the middle of the vast expanse of grass with a chestnut spaniel straining at the end of a long leash. Two men in hi-viz vests with black bin bags and litter pickers propped against their knees sitting on a metal bench smoking cigarettes.
Sun is burning off the harr and the light is shifting, brightening.
Both women are dressed for an early cold spring. Thick coats, thin scarves and woolly hats. If one was to make a judgement, Lisa appears the more elegant of the two. She has chosen greys and blacks and charcoals. Her wool is fine, the cut of her coat neat and narrow, and there’s no skin gap between her matt black ankle boots, her dark socks and her black corduroys. She holds a takeaway coffee cup an inch from her lips, steam pushing up past her nose and eyes.
The other woman, Katherine, has bright lips and matching orange nails, and a green pompom so large on her yellow woolly hat that it seems to tilt her backwards when she laughs. Her legs, clad in thick red tights under a navy pinafore dress, are splayed out across her blanket and cross and uncross in an apparent attempt to find some comfort on the hard ground. Lisa watches the legs without comment.
It is their first meeting in person, beyond a few text exchanges, and they have been talking about lockdown and pandemics and vaccinations and survival. It takes some time, ten or fifteen minutes, for Katherine to steer the conversation to the point.
‘You must have had some odd cases,’ she says, pouring milky coffee out from her flask into its matching metal cup. Lisa smiles, puts her own cup down, and leans back on her elbows.
‘Yes,’ she says, ‘but not as many as everyone thinks.’ Katherine laughs.
‘God, everyone must ask you that, sorry.’
‘Most of it’s divorce stuff, affairs, money, lost family members, you know. Straightforward.’
‘I didn’t even know private detectives existed beyond the telly’.
‘Private investigators,’ Lisa says. ‘Detectives are employed by the police.’
‘Sorry,’ says Katherine.
‘You really need to stop saying sorry,’
‘I know, sorry, no, I take that back.’ Katherine laughs and the green pompom does a rapid cha cha before settling to the right of her head. ‘What about unusual pets, stolen ones, ever investigate those?’
Lisa sits up again, crosses her legs into a lotus position, and faces Katherine. She is no longer smiling. ‘Is there something specific you want to know, Katherine?’
Katherine takes a sip of the luke warm coffee. Puts the cup down on the grass beside her.
‘Yes’, she says, ‘I guess there is.’
Lisa gets up to her feet, lifts the small cream blanket, brushes it down and folds it up, doing up its three leather buckles.
‘I never break client confidentiality,’ she says, pushing the blanket into her bag.
‘Lisa, please. You’re misunderstanding me. It’s not about a case. Not exactly anyway.’
Lisa picks up her coffee cup and looking around the park. Her eyes settle on the bin in the far corner.
‘I trusted you, Katherine,’ she says as she walks away.
Katherine is up on her feet, calling after her. ‘My friend is missing, Lisa, please. She hired you before all this covid stuff. To find her damn cloud kidnappers. Now she’s disappeared herself.’
To be continued.
SANDERLINGS 