Blood Salt Water

by Denise Mina

  Iain looked out of the van window at the massive hills, the snowcaps and the veils of mist, hearing Sheila’s guts giggling in one ear and Tommy’s nasal breathing in the other.

  ‘I’ll bang some tunes on, then,’ said Tommy, a bit huffy that Iain wasn’t for talking. He touched the play button and Fiddy’s ‘I’m Supposed to Die Tonight’ filled the cabin. The bass made the ill-fitting windows buzz. Tommy bobbed his head to the beat.

  Iain recognised that this wasn’t new. He had felt this before, this distance from the world. It reminded him of Andrew Cole, because he’d been there, then. Iain and Andrew were in prison together and had nothing in common. Andrew was posh and read all the time but he said a nice thing to Iain at a time when it mattered. You’ll be all right. Just try and act normal. A kindness in a time of despair. The words and the tenderness stayed with Iain, a prison tattoo, ink in a ragged cut.

  Just act normal. He heard the music and tried to follow the sequence of the melody, but he was off the beat, jerking his head out of time, as if he was rehearsing smashing his face on the dashboard. He stopped, distracted by a tiny shift: the barb was gone from his throat. She had moved down, deep down into the dark. There was nowhere to go but down. But she wasn’t paralysed by the cold. He felt her move, uncoiling in the dark spaces.

  Face to the window so Tommy couldn’t see, Iain shut his brimming eyes and shrugged a shoulder, resigned. She was going to bite her way out through his chest. She would be the death of him but he didn’t care. The debt was paid and he was spent. Save him the bother of doing it himself.

  5

  Central Station had sent two footage files, both an hour and a half long. McGrain had scrolled through both to 7:03:32 a.m., ten seconds before the call came through. He pulled up the first. A very wide shot of the concourse and five platforms, with the bank of phone boxes in the bottom right-hand corner of the screen. Obscuring the view of the phones was an out-of-focus forest of what looked like erect grey pipe cleaners. Morrow squinted at them.

  ‘What is that?’

  McGrain touched the screen. ‘Unfortunate. Anti-pigeon spikes. Stop them landing. They’re all furry with dust from the station.’

  ‘Is the other one a better shot?’

  ‘Pointing in the wrong direction.’

  ‘I’m so hoping this isn’t the wee cake-guy,’ she said quietly.

  McGrain nodded heavily. ‘God, me too.’

  They stood still for a moment, smiling sadly at the screen as they each remembered the mother and the child and the cake and the contagious silent laughter. Morrow was the first to pull herself out of it. She pointed at the screen. ‘Come on, then.’

  McGrain clicked play.

  A grainy smear of movement, people walking, standing facing the giant information screen. The image was grey but for orange beacon lights flashing on a mobility cart in the distance. The camera was pinned above the entrance to a shop.

  A small figure in a dark green parka, fur-trimmed hood up, walked in from the bottom right. They went straight to a phone box, picked up the handset and dropped a coin in. The person they were looking for had dialled the free emergency number so Morrow wasn’t sure it was their caller, but then the hooded figure reached into the slot for a returned coin. They were talking into the handset.

  ‘Teenager,’ said Morrow, looking at the skinny-leg grey jeans under the baggy parka.

  ‘Teenage boy,’ said McGrain, pointing at the back pockets sagging halfway down his legs.

  The caller was getting agitated, looking left, stepping from foot to foot. They hung up suddenly, at 07:04:09, exact to the second for the audio time. They hesitated, hand resting on the receiver, and then scurried off, head down under the hood as if they were crying.

  McGrain pressed pause and they both looked at the screen. It was hard to tell if it was the boy. They didn’t really know how tall he was and they’d never heard his voice. It sounded more like a girl but the jeans seemed boyish.

  The second file of footage showed the same action but was less in focus.

  ‘Did you ask for other cam views?’ said Morrow. ‘Maybe we can get the face?’

  ‘I know one of the guys over there, he checked the three exits in that direction. Found them leaving, hood still up. Got in a waiting taxi but we can’t read the reg.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Camera hood’s broken. It’s hanging in front of the lens.’

  Morrow nodded. ‘Typical.’

  It had to be the cake-boy. They couldn’t see his face but Roxanna had a teenage boy and a teenage boy had called them. They should go speak to the kids immediately but they couldn’t. They couldn’t do anything. They needed permission.

  ‘PINAD,’ said McGrain.

  Morrow nodded. ‘Fucking PINAD.’

  She went back to her office to await instructions, pending the chief superintendent’s office getting in and bothering to call her. She felt miserable and wanted to check the CCTV anyway, even though she knew Roxanna wasn’t on it. She wondered why she was so involved with this woman, wondered if Roxanna was filling a space in her head that Danny usually filled.

  Danny McGrath was Morrow’s half-brother. He was a well-known and feared Glasgow gangster until he was sentenced to eight years for conspiracy to commit murder. Morrow didn’t think he was funny or sweet or strangely admirable, not the way she thought about Fuentecilla, but he did preoccupy her to the same degree. Once or twice a day Danny came into her mind and Fuentecilla had started to fill those spaces. One big similarity, she realised, was her feeling of impotence about both of them. She wasn’t even allowed to brief the PINAD team on the woman’s disappearance until she had word from on high. She busied herself with duty forms and background files for other cases, waiting.

  The PINAD case began six months ago and four hundred miles away with a fishing exercise. The Met were monitoring a boozy Park Lane charity auction for money-laundering activities. It was a good place to look for ostentatious spending: rich people showing off to other rich people in a drinking environment. The Met’s curiosity was piqued when a barman and his unemployed girlfriend paid sixty-four thousand pounds for Cabinet–a Larkin & Son’s Design Icon. The PINAD incident room had a picture of it on the wall. According to the description in the auction catalogue it was handcrafted rosewood, inlaid with walnut and ebony marquetry, made by master craftsmen. Sixty-four grand’s worth of ugly wall unit, as far as Morrow was concerned.

  The Met began a minimal investigation into the couple. They found that the boyfriend, Robin Walker, worked as a barman in a private dining club in Belgravia. Roxanna Fuentecilla had no income. She had no inheritance. She had never worked.

  Robin Walker was not the children’s father. He had moved in with Roxanna Fuentecilla just over a year ago, following a whirlwind romance. Their natural father, Miguel Vicente, came from an absurdly wealthy Ecuadorian family. Three years ago he left the family home with an overnight bag and flew back home to Ecuador. A month later he married a fellow absurdly rich Ecuadorian: she had a plastic surgery ski-jump nose and a zoo in her garden. Pictured in an online society magazine, the couple were a bizarre sight for Scottish eyes: their teeth looked as if they had stolen them from a child, both had their eyebrows plucked, both had shiny, line-free skin. Vicente stopped supporting Roxanna and the kids a month after he left.

  Robin Walker was handsome, directionless and in his late twenties. He lived with his new family in a serviced flat in Belgravia. Despite their straitened circumstances, they wintered in St Lucia. Roxanna continued to educate her children alongside ambassadors’ kids at an exclusive central London Spanish-speaking school. Sensing money, the Met investigation grew.

  The incomeless couple were seen in the company of a Colombian attaché and his wife. Checking back, Maria and Juan Pinzón Arias had paid for the table of ten at the charity auction, Robin and Roxanna had been their guests, but the wealthy couple bid on none of the items themselves.

  The Arias children were at the same Spanish sch
ool as Roxanna’s. The four kids weren’t known to be friends, they were in different years, but Maria and Roxanna became very close very suddenly. Roxanna travelled often with Maria Arias, usually on overnight stays to Barcelona, a known distribution point for cocaine. Smuggling was suspected. On their third trip the Met investigators compared the airline’s weight of Roxanna’s luggage on the way out (twenty-three kilos) and on the way back (thirty-three kilos). The differential was suspiciously precise.

  Maria Arias was using a diplomatic bag which could be neither searched nor weighed. The investigation grew again, serious now because of the diplomatic implications.

  Like Roxanna, Juan Pinzón Arias also had money that could not be explained. He bought cars with cash. He bought three flats in central London in his mother’s name, all in the same block of foreign investment flats. The Met were moving in, swift and hungry for a proceeds-of-crime bonanza. They’d get to keep a percentage of whatever they found. Every police force needed that sort of money. It looked like fifty or sixty million net, estimated from the iceberg tip they could see above the waterline.

  Then, abruptly, in the middle of a school term, Robin and Roxanna packed up and moved to Glasgow. With no capital, Roxanna Fuentecilla bought a viable insurance business for a peppercorn sum. The nominal amount suggested an off-the-books payment. She arrived with seven million pounds of investment money, transferred from a string of Cayman Island companies. It would take months of document recovery and tracing to prove legally, but the original account was in Maria Arias’s name.

  Police Scotland took over the surveillance and began to covet the Fuentecilla slice of the case.

  Met investigators speculated that the insurance company was engaged in fraudulent claims but Morrow couldn’t see Fuentecilla going from suspected cocaine smuggling in London to insurance fraud in an unfamiliar city. That was a career-criminal move and she certainly wasn’t that. The Met had a theory that Arias and his wife were trying to distance Roxanna, something had gone wrong. That explanation seemed wrong to Morrow as well, but no one wanted her input.

  Paul Tailor, the brand new chief constable of the brand new Scotland-wide police service was an ex-Met man. He had taken a personal interest in the case. All developments were to be reported directly to his second in command, Deputy Chief Constable Hughes. DCC Hughes channelled the chief’s voice as surely as a soundboard and he had made it very clear to everyone involved that, whatever happened, he did not want them to cock up in front of his old comrades. Her chief inspector had taken this to heart: no one would be using their initiative on this but they might well take the blame. They understood the implication: Police Scotland were the chief constable’s stagehands but not his audience. Among themselves officers began to refer to the investigation as P.I.N.A.D. ‘Are you on that PINAD case?’ ‘Pass that onto the PINAD team’. The acronym stood for ‘Prove I’m Not A Dick’.

  A month after Walker and Fuentecilla moved to Glasgow, Morrow’s instincts were proved right: the Arias couple weren’t trying to distance themselves. Juan Pinzón Arias, short, lumpish, and his wife Maria, tiny and as elegant as a dragonfly, flew into Glasgow International on a private charter plane and spent a night at an exclusive Loch Lomond hotel, fifteen miles north of the city. Walker and Fuentecilla drove up to meet them, dressed in full regalia. The local cops kept an eye and reported a meal for four in a private dining room. The drinks bill came to almost three grand. Someone liked their whisky old and overpriced.

  Looking at the bill for the meal, Morrow knew she was right: the Colombians weren’t sidelining Fuentecilla and Walker. Roxanna had been sent here to do a job. The question was, what.

  Her desk phone rang. She watched it for a moment, thinking swear words in a long unbroken stream.

  The deputy chief constable’s PA ordered her to come into Pitt Street right now. The deputy head of the entire country’s police force was holding a meeting about a missing woman.

  PINAD.

  6

  Tommy stopped the van on the esplanade and pulled on the handbrake. ‘So, I’ll see you at the do tomorrow?’

  Iain was staring over the choppy grey estuary to a low peninsula rising out of the water. A brigade of uniform trees stood to attention, same height and shape, planted at the same time and subject to the same conditions. The Dark Wood, it was called. The foliage was a deep, warm green, a welcoming green.

  ‘Iain? Bud? You getting out or what?’

  Move. Iain opened the cab door, pushing hard against the wind. He dropped down to the pavement, flat-footed, every part of him heavy and worn.

  ‘Bud? You all righ—’ Iain slammed the door before Tommy finished his sentence and stood still, his back to the van, until it moved off behind him, following the long shore road to Rhu.

  He felt dead. The breeze salted his lips. He was nothing but a heavy husk standing there, hypnotised by the Dark Wood across the water, the trees outlined against a brightening sky. It looked clean, soft as a bed. Iain took a step towards the sea.

  No.

  That was her thought. He couldn’t walk through the water to get to the Dark Wood. If he was going to die he should still be careful. He’d draw attention to himself, walking off into the sea. He might undo the payment of the debt and that was the one good thing he had to cling to. Anyway, between the paved esplanade and the water there was a ten foot drop to a shale beach and then fifty yards to the water’s edge. Somebody would see him. It would cause a fuss and Mark would be angry.

  He stood anyway, looking at the water, wondering. Maybe she wanted him to walk into the salted sea to clean the blood off.

  ‘Iain Fraser?’

  He only half heard the woman’s voice.

  ‘Iain Fraser? Is that you?’

  He looked. A tall woman. The wind whipped strands of wild white from her bob, hairs wiggling up like cartoon electricity. She had rich-people skin. Soft cheeks and a long, straight nose.

  He looked her in the eye and saw that she was scared. Was she scared of him? She blinked it away and her face broke into a warm, masking smile. ‘Iain, you’re so tall! It’s me, Susan Grierson. Don’t you remember me?’

  Susan Grierson had been an Adventure Scout. He didn’t want to make her frightened. She was nice. She had tried to get him to join the Scouts but there was too much going on. She had taken him sailing.

  Sitting in a boat in Loch Long, Susan Grierson and the other cub scouts doing all the work. Iain sat in the middle, holding the sides, watching the water. It was very early in the morning. Why were they out so early? It was dark still. A chill was radiating from the deep grey. A small boat, low enough to hear the sibilant rustle of the water breaking on the bow. She excused Iain from the work of sailing because something bad had happened and it was a shame. He couldn’t recall what particular thing it was that time.

  He had watched the wash from the boat breaking, soft and rhythmic. Over and again the water bulged, splitting at its peak, a knife slit in a bag of sand. It rose and split and fell back again and again as they sailed down the soft grassy coast. Iain had found hope and comfort in the rhythm of that. A swell breaks and another swell arises, everything passes. It seemed a different image to him today: something about death. Death was rhythmic, an endless pattern. Every death looked identical as long as you were far enough away.

  Susan Grierson smiled warmly up at him. The last time they met she’d been taller than him. ‘Do you remember me?’

  He took a deep breath and tried to speak, because it was her and she was nice: ‘I’d remembered, you then, in a boat?’

  She gave a small, confused frown, her eyes focusing on a space between his nose and mouth.

  ‘Sorry?’

  Iain shook his head. No. He shouldn’t say that again. It didn’t make sense.

  ‘Iain? Are you all right?’ Head tilt, concern, but another thing in there. Something else too. Something glad in there. She liked helping people. Moneyed people often did. ‘Are you all right?’

  It was a big questi
on. Iain looked back at the water, letting the wind sting his eyes. He was twice as tall as he had been when last he saw Susan Grierson. They left, all of the townspeople from then, left and came back, some to stay, some to bury, some to brag and gloat. In and out, sea water in the estuary. And, like the sea, they looked the same when they came back but they weren’t. Iain wasn’t the same when he came back from prison. They all acted as if they were the same, as if nothing had changed, as if they could all trust each other.

  Susan liked helping. She stayed next to him, pulling her cardigan tight around herself. They stood still for a long time.

  ‘Beautiful, isn’t it?’ she said, filling the space between them. ‘So, so beautiful… ’ She talked on, stringing bland clichés together into observations. She could just fuck off and leave him alone. He didn’t need help.

  He wanted a cigarette.

  He hadn’t smoked for six years. He couldn’t remember when he last craved one but he dearly wanted one now. He’d go and buy tobacco in a minute. He would smoke it out, this thing, this woman.

  ‘When you take the time to stand and watch the water,’ Susan was saying, ‘it’s mesmerising, isn’t it? Like a fire.’

  Her accent was odd. He recalled some information about her from somewhere. ‘Didn’t you move to America?’

  ‘Yes.’ She looked away, down the water. ‘I lived in the States for a long time.’ Her voice was gentle and calming.

  ‘Chicago?’ He didn’t think it was Chicago but he wanted her to speak again.

  She glanced at him. ‘No, not Chicago. Nassau County, in fact… ’

  ‘That near Chicago?’ He was slurring.

  ‘It’s on Long Island.’

  They stood for a moment, but he missed her caressing voice. ‘On Long Island?’ he said. ‘In America?’

  Her face twitched and she stepped away very slightly. Iain wasn’t offended. His delivery was wrong, he knew that, but he felt quite proud of himself. However strange he seemed on the outside, it was nothing compared to how baffled he was on the inside.