A Silent Death

by Peter May

  Sometimes she remembers what it was like to see and hear, but it is too painful to dwell upon it. You can never regain what is lost beyond retrieval.

  Accept and adapt. That has been her constant mantra through most of the last twenty-five years, ever since she first learned of her impending self-imposed prison sentence. But even after all this time, acceptance of that life sentence is still the hardest part.

  The anger has never subsided.

  People think she has found solace in God. Her daily pilgrimage with Sandro to the church, holding his leash with a trust she would find it hard to place in any human being. Along to the end of Calle San Miguel, feeling the cobbles under her feet, the smell of meat that comes from the carniceria, fresh bread from the despacho de pan. Left into Calle Portada, heat spilling from the open door of the peluquería along with the acrid smell of peroxide and the pungent faux fruit of fresh shampoo. Careless people in a hurry, brushing past her, breathing garlic and smoke into warm morning air. Then right into Calle San Antonio and the long descent to the Iglesia Nuestra Señora de los Remedios in the Plaza San Francisco, inhaling the perfume of the flowers, the delicious aroma of fresh-ground coffee, the snacks in preparation in tapas bars near the foot of the street.

  She feels the cool of the church the moment Sandro leads her through the doors. People come here to light their candles and kneel before the Virgin, praying for many things: a better life, pregnancy, wealth, good health. Ana kneels on the cold slabs, eyes closed, and silently vents her anger at the god who took away what others take for granted. Her sight, her hearing. Her life. If only she had been born deaf and blind she would never have missed those senses, would have known nothing else. But what cruelty was it to give her both, then take them away? What kind of god plays a trick like that?

  So what others take for devotion is really recrimination, the anger she cannot let go. And after all, who else is there to blame?

  Now she sits in her accustomed seat, feeling Cristina’s anxiety in the patterned dots that raise themselves on her screen. The whole sordid story told in graphic detail, from her fateful decision to answer the call in place of Diego, to the shooting of the girl in the villa. Sitting opposite, with her own keyboard and her own screen, she is typing almost faster than Ana can read, tension in every keystroke, apprehension in every word.

  Ana is puzzled. She says, ‘But none of it is your fault, cariño. You hurt no one. This man killed his own lover.’

  Cristina types rapidly.

  – But it is me he blames, Aunt Ana. He says if I had not entered his home illegally with my weapon drawn there would have been no shooting. His Angela would still have been alive.

  ‘But it was him who broke into the house, not you. He was the one in possession of an illegal weapon. And it was him who shot the poor girl.’

  – And it’s him who’s threatened to kill me and every member of my family if he ever gets free.

  ‘Oh, my darling girl, people say things like that in the heat of the moment, overcome by anguish and anger. Deep down he must know it’s his own fault. And, anyway, he’s in custody isn’t he? In no position to do you any harm.’

  – He is to be extradited back to the UK. The courts have agreed to it and he has not contested the decision.

  ‘Well there you are then, cariño. Soon he’ll be back in his own country and will forget all about you. When do they take him away?’

  – They bring him back from Madrid today, and a police officer from the UK will come to Malaga tomorrow to take him to London.

  Ana senses there is something more. It is impossible to say how she feels such things, but they gather somehow in the air around her and she can almost touch them. ‘And?’ she says.

  – It’s ironic, Aunt Ana. The Guardia will take him in an armoured truck to the airport in the afternoon, and Paco told me today that he will be among the detail assigned to guard him. My own brother-in-law! It is just as well that this man Cleland will never know.

  Ana smiles. ‘Well there you are, then, mi niña. He couldn’t be in safer hands.’

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The Linn Crematorium sprawled across a hill on the south side of the city to the west of Castlemilk, a housing estate built in the 1950s to accommodate people cleared from Glasgow’s inner-city slums. It was built around an old mansion called Castlemilk House, constructed on the site of a thirteenth-century castle. But there was nothing in the rows of drab pebbledash blocks that bore any resemblance to the castle which had inspired their name.

  When Mackenzie stepped off the plane at Glasgow Airport it was overcast and drizzling, what Scots called smirr. It was in stark contrast with the sunshine he had left behind in London.

  He felt an odd sensation returning to the city of his birth, the place where he had spent the first seventeen years of his life. Unhappy years remembered now as having passed entirely on days like this, grey and sunless and wet. He wore a dark suit, a white shirt, and the black tie he had eventually found in a men’s outfitters in Fleet Street. In a holdall he carried a change of underwear and his toilet bag. Just one night in this haunted town before flying out tomorrow to Spain.

  Through the window of his taxi, he watched rain-streaked red sandstone tenements drift past, the colour leeched from them somehow by lack of light, like watching a black-and-white movie of his childhood spool by. None of it seemed familiar and he had not the least sense of belonging.

  The south-side suburbs were greener, tree-lined streets in leaf, the huddled hulk of Hampden Park floating past as they climbed the hill towards the crematorium. Through wrought-iron gates bearing the city crest and the date 1962, then down a long curving drive, past the departing mourners from the previous cremation, to the concrete and coloured glass structure that offered faith and flames in unequal measure.

  Mackenzie felt self-conscious, still clutching his overnight bag as he stepped from the taxi. No time to drop it off at his uncle’s house before the funeral.

  There were only three vehicles left in the car park, and just five souls in the waiting room. At first he thought he’d made a mistake with the time, for he didn’t recognize any of them. But then was shocked to realize that the white-haired old man with the stoop and the silvered bristles on a cadaverous face was his Uncle Arthur. The old man’s suit looked several sizes too big for him, the collar of his shirt curled up at both sides. The knot in his tie pulled far too tight. The colour seemed washed out of his once bright blue eyes, leaving them a pale, insipid grey. He was diminished in every way. Mackenzie remembered, with guilty regret, almost relishing the opportunity to confront his uncle at his aunt’s funeral. No pleasure now in sticking it to this shadow of a man who had once been a vigorous and robust teacher of physical education. Almost as if his uncle had contrived to deny him even that.

  The old man extended a big hand, deformed by arthritis, and Mackenzie felt obliged to shake it. Shiny reptilian skin like crêpe paper crinkling in his palm. He was anxious to let it go, but his uncle held on and placed his other hand over the back of Mackenzie’s.

  ‘Good to see you, John. I’m glad you could come.’

  Mackenzie had no idea what to say. He had harboured such hatred over all these years, he was unprepared for the warmth in his uncle’s handshake and the apparent affection in his watery washed-out eyes. Had the old man forgotten how much he disliked his nephew, how often he had dished out discipline with Mr Kane, or with the tawse that he sometimes brought home with him from school – half an inch of thick leather strap divided in two at one end, and delivered on to the palms of outstretched hands, leaving stinging weals on the inside of the wrists?

  Had he forgotten all the harsh words, the derision, the contempt, perhaps even jealousy, for the prodigy his brother had bequeathed him? Had he forgotten that final shouting match which had sent Mackenzie running to his room to pack a bag and leave, never to return?

  ‘Your Aunt Hilda missed you, you know. A wee card now and then wouldn’t have gone astray,’ he said, and Mack
enzie realized that nothing had changed. The hurt was just delivered in a different way.

  *

  They arrived back at the house in Giffnock mid-afternoon. The bungalow was as gloomy as Mackenzie remembered it. There must surely have been sunny days, but he had no recollection of them. The first thing he saw in the hall was the umbrella stand, crowded with old brollies and walking sticks – and the onyx-handled Mr Kane. Mackenzie could barely take his eyes off it. He wanted to take the damned thing and break it over his thigh, as if somehow that could erase the pain it had been used to administer through all the miserable years he had lived in this house. Instead, he followed the handful of mourners past the coat-rack and into the front room where whisky was poured into cut crystal glasses and sipped in a silence broken only by the odd mumbled reminiscence.

  They didn’t stay long, and Mackenzie was glad to see them go. In spite of the rain he thought he might go for a walk. He wanted to spend as little time in the house as possible, and even less of it in the company of his uncle. When there were just the two of them left he said to the old man, ‘I’ll put my stuff in my room. The same one, I take it?’

  His uncle nodded. ‘You’ll find it pretty much as you left it, son. She kept it for you just the way it was, in case you ever came back.’

  He spoke of his wife in death with a respect he had never shown her in life. Mackenzie remembered how she had always lowered her voice in his presence, tiptoeing around his unpredictable sensibilities, bearing with extraordinary fortitude the words he flung at her in frequent rage.

  Mackenzie found the pole with the hook on the end of it leaning in the corner of the hall where it had always stood. He raised it above his head to open the hatch in the ceiling and pull down the ladders that led to the attic conversion they had made for him. Although there were two bedrooms in the house, Uncle Arthur used one of them as a study. A place on which he could close the door to be disturbed only on pain of punishment.

  There had been no space in the hall for a staircase to the new attic room, and so the pull-down ladders had been the compromise solution. One that his uncle had grown to regret when the young Mackenzie retreated to his room after rows, pulling the ladders up after him like a drawbridge, so that neither his aunt nor his uncle could reach him. He had once spent almost forty-eight hours barricaded in his room after a particularly tempestuous argument, pissing and defecating in a porcelain chanty kept under the bed.

  He climbed the ladder now, ascending to his past. And as he stood and took in his old room, goosebumps raised themselves on the back of his neck. The old man had been right. Almost nothing had changed. There were even hairs still trapped among the bristles of his old brush on the dresser. He felt like the ghost of himself haunting his own childhood. Everything about this room – the very air he breathed in it – took him back. He sat on the bed and wanted to weep for the unhappy child he had been, but no tears would come. Just cold, hard memories.

  For an adult so disinclined to violence, as a young boy he had fought and usually beaten every bully who took him on. The young John Mackenzie was incapable of backing down. So often returning home bloodied and bruised.

  If it wasn’t physical fighting with other boys, it was verbal conflict with his teachers. He had lost count of the number of times he received punishment for his insolence, for his inattention, or the failure to do his homework. And then they had wondered how it was possible that he could score straight A’s when it came to the exams. No one ever gave him credit for his achievements, expressing instead only astonishment.

  How stupid had they been not to realize how much smarter he was than them? That the only reason his attention wandered was their mediocrity, their inability to engage his interest? That he only ever questioned them because he almost always knew better?

  Looking back now he thought that his uncle must have realized early on that Mackenzie was his intellectual superior, and that if he couldn’t best him mentally he would do it physically. He had been a powerful man then, a professional footballer in his youth before qualifying as a gym teacher, a job that had given him carte blanche to bully the physically inferior. Boys that were overweight, or had flat feet, or were just soft. Or his brother’s fatherless son given in to his care. He was unused to children answering back, unaccustomed to contradiction, traits he was determined to beat out of his young nephew.

  But there had come a time when Mackenzie could match him physically too, a hormonal teenager pumped up by testosterone and anger. And his uncle had no longer been able to dominate him in any sense.

  Still, he’d had one devastating card left to play. One that he had been saving for just the right moment. One that could deliver pain far beyond any corporal hurt.

  He had played it, finally, when Mackenzie announced that he wasn’t going to university, despite having achieved A grades in each of the seven Highers he had sat at the end of fifth year. He was going to join the police, he said.

  His uncle had railed at him claiming, not unreasonably, that it would be a criminal waste of his academic abilities – some kind of pun intended. But the young Mackenzie hadn’t wanted to hear it.

  Now, as he sat on the bed, he heard the distant echoes of the shouting match in the hall downstairs.

  ‘You’re a bloody idiot, boy! Christ knows, you’ve been a pain in the arse all through school, but you’ve a God-given talent. Don’t throw it away. Why the hell would you want to be a policeman?’

  ‘Because that’s what my dad was.’

  His uncle had exhaled his contempt through pursed lips. ‘Your dad! For Christ’s sake, don’t go wasting your life like he did.’

  ‘He didn’t waste his life!’ Mackenzie had been incensed.

  ‘Yes he did. He was a total waster, your father. Mr High and Bloody Mighty. Thought he was better than everyone else. Just like you. Thought he knew it all, that nothing was beyond him. Well he learned the hard fucking way just how wrong he was.’

  Mackenzie remembered being shocked. In all the years his uncle had beaten and berated him, he had never heard him use the F word. He screamed back, ‘You’re just jealous!’

  ‘Jealous?’ The old man almost laughed. ‘Jealous of what?’

  ‘That he sacrificed his life to save someone else. While you frittered yours away. A lifetime bullying boys in school gyms, picking on the weak to make yourself look big.’ Mackenzie had caught sight, then, of his aunt standing in the kitchen doorway, the blood drained from her face, apprehension in her eyes. ‘Well, no one’s fooled, Uncle Arthur. For all your size you’re a little man, and everyone knows it.’

  An index finger like a rod of iron extended from his uncle’s fist and jabbed into his nephew’s chest. His eyes were wild and he leaned in close, so that Mackenzie could smell the whisky on his breath and see the spittle gathering on his lips. ‘Don’t you speak to me like that you little runt. Time you got your fucking facts straight.’

  ‘Arthur, don’t!’ Mackenzie could hear the fear in his aunt’s voice, but there was no strength in it, and her husband would ignore her as he always did.

  ‘No one ever disavowed you of the crap you were told about your dad. Don’t tell him the truth, they said, it could scar him for life. So we didn’t. All this fucking time, and we let you go on believing what a hero he was, just in case you might be damaged by it.’ He couldn’t hide his scorn. ‘Well, you’re a big boy now, sonny. Big enough to handle the truth, I’d say. How about you?’

  For once in his life Mackenzie found himself suddenly at a loss for words. A sick sense of dread began to weigh like lead in his gut, then slowly suffused his entire being like a fast-acting poison. It robbed him of his ability to speak.

  ‘Please Arthur . . .’ A pleading in his aunt’s voice now, but there would be no stopping him. The dam which had held back the bile for all these years was finally bursting. The finger stabbed into Mackenzie’s chest in time to the rhythm of his uncle’s anger, which had now achieved an oddly lyrical cadence. ‘You think he was a hero, eh?
A brave man risking his life to try and save that poor fucking woman?’ He sucked in air to fuel his fury. ‘Well, there’s nothing brave about suicide, sonny. That’s the coward’s way out.’

  A noise like tinnitus filled the teenager’s head, trying to drown out the words. But still, above it, he heard the wail that escaped his aunt’s lips, a strangely feral sound.

  ‘He screwed up, your dad. Disobeyed a direct order. Because, of course, he knew better. Like he always fucking did. Went charging in to try and rescue her, only to get her killed.’ He was breathing stertorously now, as if he had just sprinted the length of a football pitch to score a goal. ‘Some hero, eh? It was in all the fucking papers. And everyone knew he was my brother. You wouldn’t believe the shit I got at school. And then he goes and makes it worse. Cos, being your dad, he couldn’t stand it that he was wrong. That he had fucked up. So he took a rope, tied one end around his neck and the other around the top rail of the stairwell, and jumped off.’

  Mackenzie stood, eyes blazing, tears blurring vision. Anger, fear, disbelief, pain, all filling the chaotic space that was his mind. He lashed out, knocking his uncle’s fist away and pushed him hard in the chest with both hands. Big man though he was, his uncle staggered back. ‘You’re a liar!’ Mackenzie screamed at him. ‘You’re only trying to hurt me.’

  ‘Nothing hurts quite as much as the truth, sonny,’ his uncle said, and he seemed suddenly calm again, anger replaced by triumph.