by Owen Mullen
Gavin voiced what the three of them were thinking. ‘Are you asking us to stay away from Mackenzie?’
The two men stared at each other. ‘No, I haven’t said that. In fact, quite the opposite. The thing is: I need to get back to work. I can’t stay away indefinitely. Mrs Hawthorne, our cleaner, has been sitting with Mackenzie a couple of days a week so I can go in. But she has other commitments. If necessary, I’ll hire a private nurse. But I was hoping Adele and Monica might step up. It’s just really important that nothing and no one stands in the way of her recovery. We all have to realise what is and isn’t good for her. As I said, that we’re on the same page here.’
He sat back apparently unaware of the effect he’d had on them. ‘We all have Mackenzie’s best interests at heart. If she’s going to recover we have to work together on this. Do you agree?’
Monica moved in to smooth the ruffled feathers. ‘Absolutely Derek. We’ll be there for her. I was thinking the three of us could treat ourselves to afternoon tea at Crossbasket Castle in Blantyre. What do you think, Adele? Then we could work out a rota – you know, going to the gym and stuff.’
Derek’s bullish approach was ill-judged and Gavin didn’t know whether to be proud of Monica or angry at him.
Derek tried to soften what he’d been saying. ‘It’s not all bad news. She’s given up smoking and it looks as if alcohol is out of the picture. Hasn’t once taken a drink. She’s even talked about going back to the garden centre. I don’t discourage it, though of course it won’t be happening. And, as you’ve probably guessed, we won’t be splitting up. Mackenzie needs me more than ever.’
Adele was still smarting from their difference of opinions but did her best to hide it. ‘Oh, that’s marvellous news. I was afraid to ask.’
Monica was more clear-sighted. ‘What about the man in the car?’
Derek Crawford didn’t hide his displeasure with her. ‘Turns out it was my mistake, he was a friend from Alcoholics Anonymous.’
The news, delivered casually, was a stark reminder they’d chosen to think the worst. That when Mackenzie needed them to believe her none of them had. For seconds they avoided each others’ eyes, not comfortable enough to speak, until Monica said, ‘AA? She was going to AA? Why didn’t she tell us?’
Gavin answered. ‘Maybe she didn’t trust us.’
Derek didn’t comment. He got up and walked to the door. ‘I’d better be getting back. There is one more thing. And Mackenzie mustn’t hear about it.’ He spoke as if it had almost slipped his mind. ‘The lawyer got it wrong. Because they can’t be sure who the knife belonged to the procurator fiscal didn’t dismiss the charge. I’m going to be tried for the culpable homicide of Joe Melia.’
The Last Day
They say time heals all wounds. Gavin Darroch had his doubts. The meeting with Derek hadn’t sat well with him. He felt he’d done the right thing by his sister though in the light of his revelation that Mackenzie was getting worse, hoped he hadn’t added to the problem.
He poured himself a drink, tried to switch off and flicked on the TV. With the sound turned down so as not to wake Monica and Alice, watching was a waste of time. Gavin picked up the drawings he’d been putting off looking at for days, couldn’t concentrate and found himself doodling in the margin.
Why? Why? Why?
A stranger with a grudge?
What kind of a grudge would be played out like that?
Mackenzie was certain it had been about her and he believed her. So what drove a stranger with a grudge against Crawford Cars to take such terrible revenge on an innocent woman? The question had been swimming on the edge of his mind ever since they’d been told about Joe Melia’s connection to Derek’s business.
Suddenly, there it was. Right in front of him.
a stranger with a grudge
Andrew Geddes was at home. The words were slurred. Geddes was drinking. ‘Gavin, mate, what can I do for you?’
‘Been thinking about Joseph Melia. Bit of a mystery man, wasn’t he? Didn’t you say he’d no history of violence? To do what he did would need a powerful motive, don’t you think?’
‘Getting sacked is pretty powerful.’
Gavin disagreed. ‘People get sacked every day without abducting the boss’s wife.’
‘True, except Melia went from Salesman Of The Month to out on his arse. Losing a lot of money in the process.’
‘What was he up to?’
‘Stealing. Like all the best scams, his was simple: the object of the exercise in the car game is to shift stock. Over-generous offers on trade-ins are common. Just how generous is often left to the discretion of the salesman. Sometimes trade-ins need to be written off entirely. No sweat, so long as more expensive new models are rolling off the forecourt. Apparently, Joe Boy was very good at making that happen. As I say, the bastard was only in the door when he won Salesman Of The Month. Nobody guessed he was negotiating kickbacks for himself.’
‘How did he get caught?’
‘January’s a graveyard month in most businesses. The car game’s no exception. Not for Jo-Jo. He was setting the heather on fire. That was his mistake. A manager twigged his figures were just too good and started checking. Nabbed him in the act shortly after that.’
‘Why wasn’t he charged?’
‘Should’ve been, no question. They settled for quietly getting rid of him. Didn’t want the publicity.’
‘And Derek wasn’t involved?’
‘No, the manager handled it.’
‘This happened in February?’
‘Right. Three months before he kidnapped your sister.’
Gavin let what he was hearing sink in. ‘Okay, except the grudge was against Crawford Cars. Melia didn’t know Derek, so why take his wife and not the manager’s who’d sacked him? Doesn’t make sense.’
Geddes wasn’t sympathetic. ‘Good question, mate, and I agree with you. Unfortunately the only guy who can answer it isn’t around. Every case can’t be tied in a big bow. Life isn’t as simple as that.’
Maybe he was right. Gavin apologised for breaking into his evening and rung off. He poured himself another glass of wine and turned over what Andrew Geddes had said. Then he opened the PC and checked Melia’s Facebook account. The dead man hadn’t used it much, what was there was standard stuff, like the blurry shot of a fish lying on a riverbank. Underneath it he’d written “The one that didn’t get away”.
Six weeks before he’d been sacked he’d posted a slew of pro-Brexit comments and links to newspaper articles supporting his views. Nothing else, until a picture of people wearing paper hats, with their arms round each others’ shoulders at the Christmas party. Joe Melia was second from the end, grinning drunkenly at the camera.
In the final entry, posted a month later, a night-time shot of King Tut’s Wah Wah Hut at the top of St Vincent Street had snow on the ground. Whoever was gigging didn’t get a mention. No friends either, female or otherwise, which struck Gavin as unusual.
Who went to a gig by themselves? Not anybody he knew, that was for sure.
His ‘friends’ list ran to only half a dozen, none of them in Scotland. It seemed selfies weren’t his thing, or women for that matter, and there was no suggestion he was gay. Melia had been a man of few interests and even fewer mates. A loner. On this evidence nobody was going to miss him.
Gavin could hardly keep his eyes open. The wine, what was left of it, got poured down the sink and he made a double-espresso. The coffee tasted harsh and bitter and he had to force himself to drink it. He went back to the PC and scrolled through Melia’s Facebook one more time. Trying to understand who the stalker had been wasn’t easy, yet he wasn’t ready to give up. The more he looked the less he saw. Maybe Andrew Geddes was right about having to make sense of it all instead of accepting what was already known. Eventually, he closed the computer down and went to bed.
* * *
But sleep wouldn’t come. And in the darkness, listening to the occasional car pass on the street outside, ima
ges of his sister chained to the bed, her body abused and broken, appeared behind his eyes.
When dawn broke over the city it found him washed-out and weary and back at the computer, going over the same old ground. Nothing had changed, it was all still there: the dead fish, the Brexit stuff, the wintry King Tut’s, and the gang at the Christmas party. Gavin studied Melia’s boozy face guessing he’d been the star of the show that night. It wouldn’t last. Just weeks later his glittering career would be over, he’d be fired – out on the street and fortunate not to be facing a prison sentence. On the surface, he seemed normal, ordinary. Dull even. But Gavin Darroch had been there. He’d seen. And what this man had done to a defenceless woman was far beyond the grudge the police had settled for.
He printed off the picture of the Christmas party group, slipped it into his inside jacket pocket and headed for the door with no clear idea where he was going. On his way out he looked in on Monica and Alice, wishing he could crawl in under the clothes and lose himself in his wife’s warm body.
At twenty past seven, Great Western Road was already full-on and progress was slow. Every now and then he glanced at the print-off on the seat beside him, as if all he had to do to force it to give up its secret was say the magic words. Unfortunately, he didn’t know those words. So he zoned out and let the car drive itself while Andrew’s rebuke rang in his head.
tied in a big bow
life isn’t as simple as that
At Hamilton, with Strathclyde Loch a choppy stretch of grey water on his right-hand side, he gradually rejoined the world like a dreamer waking from a troubled slumber. It had cost a night’s sleep and there were still more questions than answers, but now he knew where he was going though he still didn’t know why.
On the outskirts of Leadhills village his bleak city-boy assessment of where he was came to him.
mamba country
He drove on until he arrived at where Mackenzie had been held against her will and treated so cruelly. The collapsed roof and boarded windows revealed the extent of the dereliction, though not the terrible crimes committed here, and the ground was still pitted with the tyre-tracks of the ambulance and police cars. Gavin got out and gazed for a moment at the empty landscape, wondering how Melia had discovered this place?
Some unknown hand had made a half-hearted attempt to hold the front door closed and failed. It had fallen ajar in a final statement of dilapidation.
A noise like a child’s cry came from the rusted hinges when he pushed at the rotted wood and started down what had once been the hall, stepping carefully over the old timbers. A bird flew unexpectedly from somewhere above, startling him. Flapping and squawking in the eaves before escaping through the hole in the roof. On another day, an inconsequential happening not worthy of a mention: an embarrassing overreaction to laugh about. Not today. The grim history made it portentous enough to have his heart pounding in his chest.
He made his way along the hall. At the top of the steps he stopped, found the battery light then reluctantly went down.
Over the years the space would have had many uses though surely none as inhuman as its last incarnation. On the floor in the centre of the room, a dark stain – darker even than the flagstones – caught his eye and he heard again Melia gasp as the knife slid into him.
He’d been a bad guy who deserved what he got, no doubt about that, but it was a memory Gavin Darroch could live without.
The chain which had kept his sister prisoner had been removed. Everything else was as it had been, except the bed with its bloodstained crumpled sheets had been remade and the coffee cups, soup cartons and sandwich wrappers swept into a corner. He lifted a cardboard container and read the familiar logo with the sound of Mackenzie begging and pleading so clear she could’ve been there with him.
The hairs on the back of his neck stood, the temperature fell. It was bitterly cold and his tongue raced around his mouth. The awful energy of the place had got to him.
This was a basement in name only, in reality, it was a dungeon.
He needed to get out.
Standing watching the pale-blue early-morning sky, the feeling passed and the house was just a house again. Behind it, the hill rose steeply. Climbing it wouldn’t be easy because the sun hadn’t had a chance to do its work and the grass was wet with dew; Gavin had lost his footing several times on the way up. At the top, barren hills stretched for miles patched by mist floating like islands of smoke above them. A welcome breeze cooled his face and, after the dank cellar, the air was fresh in his lungs. No other dwelling was visible but, from this height, lines of dark-green moss rooted between the grey slate tiles and the ragged edges of the collapsed roof were starkly defined. Through the sagging tear he was able to look into the dark heart of the neglected building. Given its state of decay, spending time in it, even during the day – as he’d discovered – was an unpleasant experience. In the dead of night, manacled and terrified, waiting for the stalker to return to do his worst was beyond imagining.
It was a hellish place.
To his right, the ground fell away, gently sloping, disappearing into a gully. Gavin started walking. Five minutes further on, the horizon was as far away as it had ever been.
Where was he going? What was he looking for? He didn’t know.
Until he found it.
The wooden stake had been washed clean by the waters of the shallow stream it lay across, the sign warped and cracked, though the lettering was legible. He turned his head to read it and immediately understood. Joe Melia hadn’t reinvented the wheel to find somewhere so perfectly suited to his purpose. He’d taken the obvious route and been rewarded.
CUNNINGHAM AND McCLURE
ESTATE AGENTS
LANARK
01555 964142
* * *
What had brought him back to that God-forsaken house a third time was the nagging doubt his sister had planted on their last visit. At first, scaling the hill, slipping and sliding on the dewy grass, he’d truly no idea what he was looking for. Another man would have seen the Lowther Hills melding with the sky in every direction and turned back. He wasn’t that man.
There was no reason, no excuse. The stalker was dead. Everybody was satisfied. Everybody but Mackenzie. And now him.
There were no other vehicles on the forecourt at Abington when he pulled up to the pumps. He filled the tank with fuel he didn’t need to the hum of lorries and trucks going south. With the sun warming him it should’ve been hard to hold onto the memory of the house, or dismiss it as the lingering fragment of a nightmare.
It wasn’t. It had happened. It had been real.
Inside the service station he added a cup of muddy coffee from a machine to the petrol and went into his act with the fair-haired woman behind the counter, the same one as before, guessing she wouldn’t remember him. It was two months and she hadn’t recalled the guy in the black coat minutes after he’d been in the shop.
‘Beautiful day, isn’t it?’
‘It certainly is.’
‘I’m a city guy but, on a day like today, I envy you living here.’
She smiled and handed him a receipt, pleased by the admission. ‘It’s not everybody’s cup of tea, but I like it.’
Gavin turned away and turned back, feigning uncertainty, drawing the Christmas party print-out from his pocket like a spur-of-the-moment decision. ‘I wonder. Do you recognise anybody in this picture? I’m supposed to meet somebody here – one of these guys – but I’m not sure which one it is. All I know is he’s a local.’
She glanced at it then at him, her willingness to help tinged with a shadow of distrust. The smile disappeared. Seconds passed before she answered. ‘As a matter of fact I do.’ Her fingertip settled on Joe Melia’s drunken grin. ‘Him. But he’s not local. Seen him a few times. Hasn’t been in recently though.’
‘You’re sure?’
‘Absolutely.’
He started to fold the sheet and was about to thank her when she touched his arm, her hand hov
ering over the group. ‘And him right at the back. Came in together a few times.’
Gavin couldn’t speak. He’d been so focused on Melia and the people near him he’d paid no attention to the crowd at the back by the bar.
‘Sorry, you say they came in together?’
‘Once or twice, yes.’
* * *
The Clyde Valley runs through countryside which, in its own way, is as glorious as any in Scotland. Lush and green, peaceful and ordered. None of it registered. Gavin gripped the steering wheel, driving faster than was wise and, for a short stretch early on, almost winning a race he was always going to lose with a train from London heading to Central Station in Glasgow. Unfamiliar villages with unfamiliar names: Roberton, Wiston, Thankerton and Carmichael, came and went unnoticed. It was only when traffic lights at the single file Hyndford Bridge halted his progress that the full implication hit him. He’d come, hoping someone or something could offer an insight into why Melia had done the terrible thing he’d done. Instead, he’d uncovered a crime too bizarre to believe. And try as he might, he couldn’t get his head round it.
But he did believe it. He knew it was true. The lady at Abington’s confident identification meant it could be no other way.
Four miles further on he hoped an estate agent would finish it. The accelerator hit the floor and the engine roared as the SUV shot up Hyndford Road towards the Royal Burgh of Lanark.
At the top of the hill, golden shards of sunlight pierced the branches of dense fir trees on either side of the road, the temperature dropped and he was reminded again of the dungeon in the Lowther Hills. Gavin glanced at his watch; it was still only ten o’clock in the morning. Further on, the Inn On The Loch and then a row of detached houses on one side of the road told him he was almost there.
With no idea where he was going it made sense to take the first parking option that came his way, which turned out to be the car park at Morrisons, off Whitelees Road. He found a space between a green Renault and a black Citroen, got out and started to walk.