‘Hi,’ Archie said. ‘Skelf’s to pick up Mr Duggan.’
They were buzzed into the nondescript foyer, concrete and pastel paint, linoleum floor. No need to make this appealing to prospective clients, this was the way out in every sense of the word.
A middle-aged woman in blue scrubs emerged from a door.
‘Hey, Archie,’ she said.
‘Moira.’
She saw Dorothy, who never did pick-ups while Jim was still around. You could see her putting it together.
‘I was sorry to hear about Jim,’ she said.
‘Thank you.’
‘He was lovely,’ Moira said. ‘Just a lovely man.’
Dorothy reckoned this woman was maybe twenty years younger than Jim, still attractive, a sparkle in her smile, plenty of ass to hold on to, didn’t men like that? Damn, she had to pull herself together.
‘Thank you,’ she said again, and felt stupid.
A long, awkward silence.
Archie cleared his throat. ‘We’re here for John Duggan?’
‘Of course,’ Moira said, ‘this way.’
She led them to an open space, a couple of gurneys parked in the corner, industrial-sized fridge taking up the opposite wall. She and Archie wheeled the gurney to the fridge and she opened the door. There were nine slots arranged three by three. She pulled one out as Archie unfurled the body bag onto the gurney, unzipped it and lined the gurney up.
Moira and Archie exchanged a glance then looked at Dorothy. She stood there thinking about Jim’s skin crisping on the pyre, then about the sunburn he always got on the beach, his pale Scottish skin unprepared for Californian sunshine. They used to joke about it, how he burnt in five minutes.
She didn’t step any closer to the body in front of her.
Moira took John Duggan’s feet while Archie put his hands under the armpits, then they counted to three and shifted him onto the body bag, tucked him inside then zipped up.
The cold air from the fridge made the skin prickle on Dorothy’s arms and neck.
‘Got any holidays planned?’ Archie said.
‘Tenerife in October,’ Moira said. ‘I need it.’
‘Sounds nice.’
They sorted paperwork and swapped small talk as Dorothy watched, feeling dislocated, as if she was the corpse here. She had an inkling of how Archie felt before his medication stabilised, what point was there in interacting with the world if you were already dead? How could you expect others to take you seriously when you weren’t here at all?
She touched the folded piece of paper in her pocket with Natalie’s hairs inside and felt like she was a ghost, walking invisibly through the world.
What use was a funeral director who couldn’t touch dead bodies?
She sat on the bed and looked out of the window. All she could see from here was the top of the high wall between their house and the neighbour’s, white clouds scudding across blue sky like they were racing each other. The uppermost branches of an oak, waggling its fingers towards heaven in the breeze.
She lowered her head until it was in her hands. She pressed her face into her fingers, pushing at her eyeballs until it hurt. She felt something rising inside her then sobs came out, shaking her shoulders, tears dampening her palms, snot suddenly in her nostrils that she had to sniff back. She gasped in air and sat up, arching her back.
‘My God,’ she said. ‘Get a grip.’
She shook as she wiped at her cheeks with the backs of her hands, breathing with jerky movements of her chest.
She swallowed and pulled the piece of paper from her pocket, unfolded it carefully. Four hairs, two with the root still attached. Was it illegal to take someone’s hair without consent? It certainly felt wrong. But she appeared to be that kind of woman now. She sat staring at the hairs for a while then folded them away.
She reached over to the bedside table and opened the drawer. Pills for Jim’s prostate, a book about the history of Bruntsfield with a receipt halfway as a bookmark. A book that would never be finished. A packet of tissues, a tape measure for some reason, and then what she was looking for, his comb. So old-fashioned, no one used combs anymore, but he had. She picked it up and squinted at it. Several short white hairs. She lifted them from the comb and placed them into a small plastic bag she’d brought from the kitchen and sealed it up.
She sat with the bag and the folded paper in her lap then she remembered something and reached into her pocket. The bone. The piece of Jim she was carrying with her all the time. The sharp edge was still darkened with a smudge of her own blood.
She reached for her phone.
‘Are you sure you want to do it this way?’ Thomas said.
Students and tourists slid up and down the street past their table outside Söderberg like twigs in a river after the first thaw of spring, full of promise but destined to be spat into the sea eventually. Dorothy watched them and tried to shake the feeling she was a malevolent spirit, bent on evil.
‘I need to know,’ she said.
Thomas held the two hair samples in his fingers like they were from a nuclear reactor meltdown.
‘You know you can send off for a DNA testing kit, do this online.’
Dorothy ran her tongue around her top teeth. ‘I looked it up. They generally need mouth swabs, hair is much harder. I figured a proper forensics lab might do better.’
Thomas’s eyebrows went up. ‘And how am I supposed to swing this? We have procedures, resources have to be accounted for. It’s not like I just drop by the lab and bang these on the table.’
‘Sure, but someone of your stature.’ Dorothy smiled to let him know she was trailing sarcasm, but also buttering him up at the same time.
‘Flattery will get you everywhere.’ He rolled his eyes. He was still toying with the samples, rubbing them between his fingers. ‘Do you want to tell me what this is about?’
Dorothy took a sip of her tea. ‘I think you know what it’s about.’
Thomas nodded. ‘Jim and the money.’
He waited for her to speak but she didn’t.
‘How about you lay it out for me?’ Thomas said.
‘I don’t know.’
‘I might be able to help. A police officer of my stature.’
She smiled. It was good to be understood by someone, to be seen. That’s what she missed most about Jim, that he really saw her for who she was, he knew her at her best and worst, through the miscarriages and the deaths of her parents, the depression in the aftermath, the cancer scare that turned out benign, the time Jenny had an emergency appendectomy, all of it. Even the spell when she lost her mind, hooked up with Lenny Turner again after twenty years, scared of domesticity and Scottish life and motherhood and a life surrounded by death, stupidly mesmerised by Californian sunshine and an old lover who still viewed her with lust. Even through that, Jim had understood. He was heartbroken, of course, but he seemed to sincerely forgive her, and that was the most amazing gift.
No one else would ever have that level of shared experience with her, the knowledge of life’s mundane elements, the quirks and foibles, the likes and dislikes. She was seventy now, had spent fifty years with him, nothing would even come close.
But Thomas did see her, he understood her. It was like paddling in the shallows compared to the deep dive of a lifetime of experience, but sometimes splashing in the shallows was enjoyable all the same.
She pointed across the table. ‘The bag is Jim’s hair.’
‘OK.’
She wondered what to say that would not make her seem crazy. ‘The other sample is Rebecca Lawrence’s daughter.’
Thomas pressed his lips together. ‘And how did you get a sample of her hair?’
Dorothy watched two teenage boys clatter past on skateboards down the slope towards the Meadows. They were weaving between walkers with panache, showing off skills, full of energy.
She didn’t answer.
Thomas shook his head. ‘Was it legal?’
‘Technically?’ Dorothy said.
Thomas stared at her.
‘I don’t know,’ she said.
‘O–K,’ he said, stretching the letters out. He put the samples down and rubbed his face like he was tired. ‘What do you hope to achieve with this?’
Dorothy sipped her tea, caught a whiff of something fishy from a nearby table, salmon or tuna. She was suddenly aware of the rustling leaves on the trees.
Saying it out loud would make it more real and she didn’t want that. It would also be obvious how stupid this was. But she leaned forwards anyway, touched her finger to Natalie’s sample on the table.
‘I want to know if Natalie is Jim’s daughter. Or maybe his granddaughter, maybe Rebecca is Jim’s daughter. Maybe she got in touch with him when she was pregnant with her own kid.’
Thomas put his hands out wide. ‘But how would that tie in with Simon’s disappearance? Or the fact Jim was paying her money?’
‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘But Jim lied to me about Simon’s disappearance and I think Archie is lying too. Rebecca was pregnant with Natalie when Simon disappeared and Jim started paying her. It all stinks.’
Thomas frowned. ‘Are you saying Jim was sleeping with Rebecca, she got pregnant, and between them they got rid of Simon? Or he had an affair decades ago and a daughter he never knew about? But then Simon working for you is a crazy coincidence.’
‘Maybe it wasn’t a coincidence, maybe Simon came to us on purpose.’
‘Why?’
Dorothy rubbed at the table. ‘I don’t know.’
‘You realise how insane this sounds.’
Dorothy touched her eyebrows. ‘Yes.’
‘He would’ve been sixty years old when he was sleeping with Rebecca – if he did.’
She stared at him. ‘Sixty-year-olds can’t have sex?’
‘She would’ve been in her mid-thirties then.’
‘So?’
‘In a happy marriage.’
‘We don’t know that. Maybe Natalie isn’t his, maybe Jim bonded with Rebecca over her missing husband, took advantage of a distressed pregnant woman.’
‘Then this DNA test is pointless.’
‘It’s just one possibility.’
‘Jim was a good man, Dorothy. He loved you, that was obvious.’
‘That’s right, men who are in love with their wives never have affairs.’
‘Not Jim.’
‘Especially when those wives are old and wrinkled and dried up.’
Thomas paused and held her gaze. ‘You’re none of those things.’
She looked away, embarrassed that she’d fished for the compliment. This wasn’t about that.
A young woman walked past pushing a girl in a buggy. The toddler had a banana squished in her fist, chewing at the fruit from the edge of her fingers. Her mum was on the phone, talking loudly about booking a holiday.
Dorothy turned back to Thomas and lifted the two hair samples off the table.
‘Can you do it or not?’ she said, holding them out.
He looked at the samples then at her. Eventually he took them and put them in his pocket.
‘It’ll take as long as it takes,’ he says. ‘It depends how busy they are and the quality of the sample.’
Dorothy exhaled. ‘Thank you.’
Thomas finished his coffee and placed the cup in the saucer. ‘What happens if it comes back negative?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘What happens if it comes back positive?’
She looked at the stream of people, hundreds of them getting on with their lives, talking and eating and breathing and laughing and crying like regular people. She felt disconnected from it all.
‘I don’t know that either,’ she said.
24
JENNY
Jenny stared at the bubbles clinging to the lime in her gin and tonic. Lunchtime back at The King’s Wark, this time she was sitting at the bar, her back to the diners and the door. Tiny shards of sunshine cut through the windows as the same barmaid from last night poured pints of Italian lager for two guys in suits. Jenny looked at the receipt she got with her drink, ‘You Were Served Today By Sam’. She’d already Googled the name and the pub, tracked her down on LinkedIn. Sam Evans. She made a mental note to follow up on that later. When Sam was done serving, Jenny stared at her watch and sighed dramatically. Sam turned and Jenny tapped her watch.
‘Men, eh? He’s half an hour late.’
The barmaid made a sympathetic face. She looked prettier up close, freckles and dark eyes. Jenny could see why guys might drink in here because of her.
Jenny twirled the stirrer in her drink, swished the lime around. ‘You got a boyfriend?’
Sam looked across the pub for something else to do but then took a step closer anyway. ‘Yeah.’
‘So you know, right?’
‘I suppose so.’
Jenny followed her gaze around the place. The barman who served her last night wasn’t in, so she took a punt.
‘I haven’t been here before,’ she said. ‘Nice place.’
Sam shrugged. ‘It’s OK.’
‘Different if you’re working.’
That got a tiny smile. ‘Yeah.’
‘Actually, a friend recommended it, I think he drinks here quite a lot. You might know him?’
She got a shrug for that.
‘Liam Hook.’
She watched for a reaction but Sam shook her head.
‘Tall, dark and handsome,’ Jenny said, forcing a laugh at her own cliché. ‘Forty years old. Comes in after work sometimes, so I guess he’d be wearing a suit.’
Another shake of the head. ‘Get a lot of guys in here like that.’
When Jenny was twenty, forty-year-old men were invisible to her, especially if they wore a suit. But her experience wasn’t universal, she knew younger women who went for the sugar-daddy thing, the flattery of a guy with experience and cash in his pocket.
She tried to read Sam’s body language. She looked very at home behind the bar.
‘Fuck this guy,’ she said to Sam, touching her watch. ‘He doesn’t know what he’s missing.’
She downed her drink and got up, the barmaid watching as she walked squinting into the daylight outside.
She went to Maritime Street, feeling the alcohol in her system accelerated by sunshine. She couldn’t handle her drink now like she could when she was younger, found herself buzzing as she strode across the cobbles to the vennel and the studio. She walked up and tried the door, and to her surprise it opened. She went into an empty foyer, narrow corridors in both directions. She noticed that the buzzer system and lock on the door were both busted. A beer crate acting as a coffee table had a spread of community flyers and notices, exhibitions, drop-in workshops, some crap about tribal drumming, chakra realignment. On the walls were posters for local gigs, galleries and clubs, all cheap, lo-fi stuff.
She hesitated then went right. She could smell burning plastic, other kinds of industrial smells she couldn’t identify. The corridor had three doors off to the left, all unmarked, cheap plywood. She walked to the end and back, then along the other corridor, which was the same except with a scabby toilet at the end. She knocked on the nearest door, no answer, then tried the handle. Locked. Same at the next one. Knocked on the third and got ‘Just a minute.’
A woman in her late twenties opened the door, a lit blowtorch in one hand, goggles pushed into her mess of curly red hair, wearing orange overalls that made her look like a terrorist prisoner. She stuck her chin out.
‘Yeah?’
‘Hi, I was thinking of renting one of these studios, do you know if any are free at the moment?’
The blue flame of the blowtorch flickered as the woman moved her hands about. ‘Maybe, I think Derek committed himself to the psych ward again. In and out of that place. He struggled to pay rent anyway, so I reckon the owner would be happy to see someone else.’
‘Could I have a look at it?’ Jenny said.
‘Mohammed will have a spare key b
ut he’s not around.’
‘Are they all the same?’
‘More or less.’
‘Could I check out yours, just for two secs?’
The woman thought for a moment then opened the door.
Jenny walked in, the smell of welding strong. The room was dominated by a six-foot sculpture made from rusty scrap, shaped into an embracing couple, two naked women. A cut-down car door panel had been beaten into the shape of a leg and lay on the floor beneath the sculpture, as if the woman in the embrace had just been in an accident. The rest of the room was cluttered with old metal junk, bigger pieces on the floor, smaller ones on a long table. A large sink, a corkboard, posters everywhere. The room was surprisingly light, much bigger windows on this side of the building flooding the space.
Jenny chewed her lip. ‘Have you got a number for Mohammed?’
The woman went to the table and lifted a bent business card. ‘He’s more likely to answer in the evenings.’
Jenny took the card. ‘Thanks.’
Back at the door, she turned. ‘It was a friend of mine suggested this place. Liam Hook?’
The woman nodded in acknowledgement.
Jenny waved along the corridor. ‘Which one is his, out of interest?’
The woman pointed with her chin. ‘Last one down the other end.’
‘Thanks.’
And the door closed.
Jenny walked to Liam’s studio, knocked, nothing. She looked around then stepped back and kicked her boot against the handle. The door juddered in the frame. She booted it again and again, pausing after each time to look along the corridor. Then a fourth kick and the wood of the frame splintered around the lock. Two more hefty boots and the door swung open. She looked around then went in.
The room was full of large canvases, racks of them stacked against the walls, two on easels in the middle of the room, another two laid flat on the floor. There was a table full of paints and brushes along one wall, a sink and draining board covered in paint splatters, cups and jars, dirty rags and towels. Jenny approached the easels. The paintings were six feet by four, swirling abstracts with recognisable elements, skulls and flowers, spines intertwined with vines, animal body parts intermingled with tree roots, soil and earth. She touched a canvas in the corner, rubbed her thumb against the material. She wandered round, soaking it in. The two on the floor were similar, brighter, more blooms and petals blending into hair and fur. She flicked through the stacked canvases, more of the same, strong shapes disappearing into shimmering backgrounds.
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