Blood Salt Water

by Denise Mina

  Marie Antoinette had it built in the grounds of Versailles. A grotesque. She commissioned it to escape the pressures of courtly life. It was a phony peasant village, a place where she could play the part of a country maid. She would come here, the tour guide said, and milk freshly washed and perfumed sheep into Sèvres porcelain pails commissioned for the purpose. But the Hameau wasn’t just for her to play the peasant in. It also allowed the residents of Versailles to feel as if they were in the wild French countryside, instead of a fenced-in enclosure surrounded by starving, angry Frenchmen.

  Pretty bungalow. Lovely garden. He tramped across the dewy lawn to the side door.

  Boyd looked up, saw the soft lights spill from the windows onto the damp grass. It looked idyllic. He thought of taking a picture and sending it to Sanjay. But he was always sending photos to Sanjay. Jumpers and wellies and rosy-cheeked kids, sea-spray-tousled Lucy, pictures of the dog. Sanjay’s texted responses were getting shorter and shorter as he lost interest. You lucky fucker, man, I’m stuck on the Circle line became Looks great became Great. Last time he even replied in text speak–gr8–something they both disapproved of. It was as if he didn’t care whether Boyd thought he was a prick any more, because Boyd was a ghost to him. Sanjay would have visited if they’d moved to Cornwall. All their friends would have visited if they’d been in Norwich. It only took two fucking hours to get from Heathrow to Helensburgh, but no one came.

  Angry now, instead of snaking around the edge, Boyd stomped across the lawn. Halfway over he felt his heel sinking into the immaculate grass. Lucy had taken on the garden and she’d be bitching about that for a month now.

  He walked around the back to the kitchen door, tripping the pensioner-paranoid sensor lights his father had fitted. They felt like a perpetual reproach from a frightened father to his absent son. Boyd would have pulled them down if they weren’t so far up the wall.

  Opening the back door, he let it bang off the wall, heard the kitchen noise of the kids die abruptly. Even the dog was quiet for a moment. The household was reading his entrance to gauge his mood. Annoyed by that, he kicked his shoes off, hitting the door with one of them.

  A sniff and a scratch on the inside door and Boyd leaned over and opened it. Jimbo, the black Cairn terrier, looked up at him with worried old-lady eyes, his pink tongue frozen on his lips.

  He wilfully misunderstood the dog’s concern: ‘Well, go on then,’ he motioned for him to go out to the garden, ‘get out and do it, you incontinent little shit.’

  In the kitchen the boys laughed uproariously because their dad had said ‘shit’ and because Jimbo was in trouble and not them.

  Jimbo scurried past him to the dark rockery.

  ‘Don’t let him go in the rockery, Boyd.’ Lucy was standing in the doorway, a blackened oven glove on her right hand. Isabel Marant joggies hung from her yoga-perfect hips. She wore a white T-shirt, good French cotton. A wedge of skin was exposed at her waist. Boyd wanted to kiss it.

  Lucy saw his lascivious ogle and smirked. ‘Seriously–don’t let him poo in there. I’ll have to pick it up.’

  Boyd kept his eyes on her hips. ‘Give me ten minutes.’

  Lucy looked back at the oven, then at Boyd. She knew what he was thinking.

  ‘I’ve got a moussaka coming out of the oven, it’s the boys’ supper. I’ve spent hours—’

  ‘No,’ he said, refusing her refusal.

  A look of sadness flickered in her eyes but she blinked it into a wry smile. ‘Fuck off, Boyd.’

  She went back to her oven.

  Jimbo was at the door, waiting for permission to come back into the house. Boyd swung his foot behind the little dog and booted him gently indoors, shutting the door to the porch.

  He walked into the kitchen. She’d brought the little flat-screen TV in from the bedroom, stood it on the counter top and they were watching a Loony Tunes DVD. She was keeping the boys’ eyes busy. It was far too exciting for early evening. Larry was watching and throwing his weight back and forth, banging the feet of his chair dangerously on the floor.

  ‘Daddy,’ William observed absently, keeping his eyes on the screen.

  Lucy had her back to him, her shoulders defensive as she lifted the steaming dish onto the hob. They had talked about using the TV as a babysitter. She knew it was wrong.

  Boyd stomped over to the counter. ‘Put the fucking telly off, Lucy!’ He pressed the switch too hard, nearly knocking the flat-screen over.

  The boys chorused their objections. Jimbo joined in, huffing loud yips, and Lucy swore at him. Boyd walked away.

  ‘IT’S BAD FOR THEM,’ he shouted and went into the bedroom to take a shower, slamming the door.

  He could hear Lucy out there, screaming down the corridor, calling him a FUCKING wanker. Then the boys started crying because they were arguing again.

  Boyd wasn’t sorry. He was angry and wanted her to be angry too.

  He shed his work clothes on the bed, hating the spindly legged furniture in here, the heavy padded headboard, the three-mirrored dressing table. His mother’s choice. Everything old and brown and so well made that they couldn’t justify spending money, even Ikea money, to replace it.

  He went into the en suite and turned the shower on, waiting for it to get hot. First thing he’d do when they made some money: have a proper walk-in shower installed instead of an afterthought over the bath.

  He had to huddle under the flow to get more than one shoulder wet at a time. His mood warmed as he realised what he had decided. He smiled down at the floor, letting the water run over him.

  He was going to have a blowout. Tomorrow, after the dinner dance, he was going to have a mental night, get wrecked, dance, whatever the fuck he wanted. And then the day after he’d be sorry and start again.

  13

  Alex and Brian were slumped on the settee in a living room scattered with damp towels and small toys, nappy bags tied at the neck, toast-crumbed plates. They were half watching the news. Mostly, though, they were listening for the twins on the baby monitor.

  With the insight unique to those who have known otherwise, Morrow was aware of her profound contentment in this moment. She felt the warmth of the nice man next to her, savoured the health of her children. She even had a cup of tea and a biscuit. She found happiness hard to recall most of the time–misery was stickier, puzzling, more intense–but she could be happy in the moment.

  The twins were thirteen months old and now, from the moment she walked through the front door until she left, she was lifting, wiping, changing or dressing them. She measured every task in the distinct number of hand movements it required. Brian and Alex were almost ambidextrous now. Out of necessity, they could both feed a baby and make a sandwich at the same time. But now her hands were empty. And she was sitting down. Celebrating the moment, she reached lazily across the settee, not quite reaching Brian. ‘Your day all right?’

  ‘Usual,’ said Brian. ‘You?’

  ‘Same as ever. Liars and politics.’

  ‘Oh, aye.’ Brian kept his eyes on the telly. ‘Spent forty minutes this morning answering emails while the boss lectured me about how men can’t multitask.’

  The baby monitor crackled, glowing green. It sounded as if the twins were asleep but that didn’t mean they were. They were conspiracy incarnate.

  On the TV a smiley man was forecasting a change in the weather. Heavy rain, danger of landslides. A debate show started, angry audience and suited panel, talking about the independence referendum. Both Alex and Brian lurched for the remote.

  Brian got it first and flicked over.

  ‘God,’ he said, ‘I hate this. Next office down’s handing out literature and holding lunchtime rallies in the canteen. They look at your lapel before they look at your face.’

  The fervent had taken to wearing badges declaring their allegiances, putting stickers and signs in their windows and cars. It made the vote an incessant background thrum, impossible to forget.

  ‘It’s getting mental,’ said Mo
rrow.

  ‘This must be what the Reformation was like,’ said Brian cheerfully. ‘At the beginning. When it was all bright hopes of the Resurrection.’

  She huffed, ‘I can’t wait for it to be over, anyway.’

  ‘The Reformation?’

  Alex snorted a laugh. ‘That too.’

  Brian grinned at her. ‘It’s the Reformendum.’

  ‘Bit of a mouthful,’ said Alex as her phone lit up on the side table. Unknown caller. She frowned and answered it.

  Alexandra Morrow? This was Shotts Prison. They had her number listed as Daniel McGrath’s family contact.

  The officer apologised for phoning so late but her brother had been stabbed and was in hospital. He had been operated on. He was in a stable condition. If she wanted to visit him she needed to contact this person in that department of the Scottish Prison Service. Thank you, sorry, and good night. They hung up.

  Brian watched her hand drop to her lap, still clutching the phone.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Danny. Stabbed. In hospital.’

  ‘He OK?’

  ‘Stable.’

  Brian’s hand found hers across the settee.

  ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘Aye,’ she said, but too high, too fast.

  He squeezed her hand. ‘Want to call the hospital?’

  ‘Tomorrow.’

  They lay shoulder to shoulder in bed. Lazy tears oiled from Alex’s eyes, running into her hair at the temples.

  The light on the baby monitor lit the room kelp-green. An undulating ocean of sound filled the room, an ebb and swell of little boys’ breathing. Brian waited for a wave to crash before he spoke.

  ‘You crying?’

  She waited for the next back draught and whispered, ‘A bit.’

  ‘I’m sure he’s OK.’

  She wasn’t crying because she was worried about him. She was crying because, again, Danny had robbed her of the delusion of nobility.

  In the moment after she hung up, before Brian squeezed her hand, Alex had wished her brother dead with a fervour that was almost sexual. Not because he was a bad man. She wasn’t wishing him dead for the good of the world. She wished her brother dead because he was an obligation she did not want to meet. He made her uncomfortable. It was mealy, malevolent, and she didn’t want to know it about herself.

  Brian whispered in the green dark, ‘Never going to be over, is it?’

  She didn’t answer.

  They shouldn’t even have her number. Danny must have given it to them. She tried to believe that he’d done it to shame her but that was a lie. Danny gave them her number because Alex was all he had. She had all of this: Brian, the twins, her job, everything. But she was all that Danny really had and she didn’t want him.

  She lay still, listening to the wash of the twins’ breathing. They were trying to synchronise: one would snuffle, the other stumble over an exhalation, correcting themselves, trying to meet as completely as they had in the womb, but failing. Always failing.

  14

  It was a fraught morning. Paranoid about Danny, afraid someone would phone at an inopportune time if his condition worsened, Morrow gave in and called the prison service. They told her Danny was in the Southern General acute post-surgical ward. They couldn’t tell her anything about his current condition, she’d have to phone the hospital. That probably meant he wasn’t dead.

  She turned to her work for comfort but found none. The first item in her email was the trace that had been run on Fuentecilla’s mobile. It was preliminary, covering the last forty-eight hours only.

  The phone had taken the motorway south, stopped at Stone in Staffs, in the Luton car park, and then went on to Mayfair in central London, arriving yesterday in the early evening. Maria and Juan Pinzón Arias lived in Mayfair. Four hours later, through the night, the phone was tracked coming back up the M1, making its way to Scotland. It was a six hour drive each way to London. It was a long time to stay angry, thought Morrow, even for Roxanna. She didn’t look angry in the ATM photo.

  Fuentecilla arrived in Glasgow and, avoiding her house, passed the airport and took the Erskine Bridge across the Clyde Estuary to Argyle. At five o’clock this morning she made a call from a hillside outside Helensburgh. The call was to the landline of a Mr Frank Delahunt out in Helensburgh. Then the phone went dark.

  Morrow mapped the site of the phone call. It was from a bare field on the coast road, a mile outside the town.

  The second email was from DS Saunders, warning her that the Met had been notified about the missing persons call. They’d been cc’d on Fuentecilla’s phone trace, had decided to handle the Arias angle themselves. She wasn’t getting a jolly to London.

  Met officers would visit Maria Pinzón Arias and her husband in their Mayfair home this morning. Met officers would be offered fancy-dan tea and, doubtless, biscuits. Meanwhile, Morrow was charged with checking out the site of the phone call. She was to stand on a rainy hillside, wading through the rain and the cow shit, looking for bodies and/or bits of telephone, and then visit Frank Delahunt.

  She phoned the farmer who owned the field. David Halliday sounded old and gruff. He lived next to the field, worked the farm alone, he said. And he’d heard something: he had woken up at five o’clock yesterday morning to his dogs barking. That meant someone was there, which was rare enough because the road was a dead end. He went back to sleep but they kept barking on and off. He’d seen headlights on his ceiling. Two cars, he thought. The dogs kept on barking though. Morrow asked what that meant and he said he didn’t know, the dogs never said. Mr Halliday sounded like a bit of a laugh. Going to visit him might take the tinge off the melancholy morning.

  She hung up and went into the incident room to ask McGrain about his kid’s hospital appointment. She was feeling low enough without scheduling in a morning listening to Thankless talk shit. As she walked in the room she scanned for anyone else who had been fully briefed but Thankless was all there was. He looked up hopefully at her, not yet aware that he wasn’t being flown to London for the day. He watched with open-mouthed anticipation as she spoke to McGrain across the room.

  McGrain said he had to be back here by two fifteen. She was only going to Helensburgh now, she could still take McGrain but it would be a tight turnaround.

  ‘There’s a call, ma’am.’ DC Kerrigan, a blond woman with very jaggy teeth, handed her the phone. ‘Mr Halliday from Lurbrax Farm calling you back.’

  Mr Halliday sounded out of breath. Listen, pet, he said, he’d just been out and followed one of the dogs around the back of the big shed. He found a car. It was black and big and it wasn’t his and there was no one in it.

  Roxanna’s car was black.

  Morrow told him to touch nothing, please keep the dogs in and she’d be there in half an hour. Scene of Crime might be called if they found a body. McGrain was out of the question. She motioned to Thankless to come. He stood up, smirking, and pulled his passport out of a drawer.

  ‘No, we’re not flying to London,’ she called across to him, ‘we’re driving to Helensburgh.’

  The incident room enjoyed that.

  It took her fifteen minutes in the car to remember why she disliked him so much: Thankless was aggravatingly declamatory. Sometimes he was right, she couldn’t insist that he wasn’t, but it was the way he said things.

  She filled him in on the morning’s developments as they drove out to Helensburgh.

  ‘The Met’ll get the proceeds,’ he announced as they passed the Erskine Bridge. ‘Our chief hasn’t got the pull.’

  She ignored that. Fuentecilla had been traced to London—

  ‘She’s run off with a boyfriend.’

  She tried to denote her annoyance by leaving a pause, but he was undeterred.

  ‘Spanish woman are diff—’

  ‘Fucking shut up. You’re just burbling. It’s bad police work. Wait for the facts, let things become clear. Keep an open mind, for fuck’s sake.’

  Thankless’s eyebrows ros
e high and stayed there.

  Alex looked out of the side window. She’d done it again: another stranger met, another friend made. She had a bit of an anger problem. It was her problem, she reminded herself, not his problem. People were allowed to be annoying.

  They drove on in silence until the sharp turn-off to Lurbrax Farm. It was on the side of a steep hill a mile before Helensburgh, overlooking the broad Clyde Estuary.

  ‘Here,’ said Morrow, and they took the turn.

  Hedged on either side, the bumpy road led up to a cluster of run-down farm buildings set around a house. The farmhouse had ‘Yes’ referendum campaign signs in each of the high windows, white on a pale blue, propped against the inside of the glass.

  Thankless nodded at them. ‘He’s got guts,’ he proclaimed. ‘It’s pretty much solid “No” voters out here.’

  The problem was hers, not his. She grunted and Thankless took it to mean–really? Do elaborate, you interesting and knowledgeable man. So he did:

  ‘“Yes” want to shut the nuclear sub base. They’re saying the housing market’ll collapse out here. Prices are frozen now.’

  A Ford Fiesta, a city car, was parked up ahead; Morrow had been told the forensic photographer would visit the scene and guessed it was hers. The fact that she was here at all was down to PINAD. Fuentecilla’s body hadn’t been found, just her car, she shouldn’t really be here at all. Thankless parked behind it and Morrow was shocked to see a ‘No thanks’ campaign sticker in her back window. It was a contentious issue. The photographer might as well have turned up wearing a football strip.

  Morrow got out into a fresh shower of warm rain and pulled her coat around her, stomping up to the farmhouse.

  Two dogs heralded their arrival with a chorus of unthreatening barks. An older dog, grey haired with a cataract in one eye, looked out of the open-sided barn and disappeared back into the dark. Mr Halliday came out, flanked by his milk-eyed companion. He shouted at the noisy young dogs, ‘Shut it!’

  He looked older than he sounded on the phone. A weather-beaten man in his sixties or seventies, the curvature of his belly accentuated by the ribbed jumper straining over it. He looked at Morrow with a cheeky twinkle in his eye. ‘Is it you?’