Blood Salt Water

by Denise Mina

Yes, you do. His total double and you know what is most like Danny McGrath about you? Your stony face. The way you sit and move your hands. You’re cold.

  And who exactly is Danny McGrath?

  So Iain told her: I knew him in Shotts. No, I didn’t know him. I’ve seen him but I don’t know him. He’s a gangster in Shotts Prison and he’s a bad man. He’s a blank-faced hard nut and you wouldn’t know he was coming at you until he was on you. And you look just like him.

  And she said, Well, you’ve got a good eye for a man who can’t even wash his own face, Mr Fraser, because Danny McGrath is my half-brother.

  A slow smile rippled out from Iain’s nose, crossing his face and warming him behind the ears. You, he said. You’re that cop who put her own brother in prison.

  He’s not in prison because of me. He’s in prison because he was convicted of conspiracy to murder.

  She was as cold as her brother. Her voice never even wavered as she said it.

  You’ve no loyalty, said Iain. You don’t know who you are belonging to.

  She looked him in the eye then, and she was smiling but angry with it. She said, No, Mr Fraser, I know exactly who I am belonging to. And I know who I am: I’m the person who tells the truth even when it doesn’t suit me. Even if it hurts me.

  The talk went on. Questions went on. Eyebrows rose, asking questions of him, but all Iain could see was this woman in front of him who looked like Danny McGrath but tried to tell the truth. All he could think was what a sublime thing it would be, to stop lying. He saw her standing in front of fires in pubs, standing in Lainey’s hall, taking orders from Barratt. She was staring at him, at Iain. She asked another question.

  Iain opened his mouth and out came the truth: Mark Barratt gave the orders. I killed her at the loch and I’m sorry. Andrew Cole lent us his boat. Tommy drove the van and Tommy started the fire at the Sailors’ Rest that killed Lea-Anne and Murray.

  No, I don’t need a lawyer.

  His mouth opened wider and more came out, yellow came out, and the woman told the truth too: I was killed on the dockside, in sand dunes on the dockside. I trusted bad men. That’s why I came willingly. These are bad men.

  ‘No, Iain,’ the honest woman said, leaning close to him, ‘Hester Kirk came with you because she was blackmailing someone. She thought you were going to give her a pay-off. That’s why she came with you.’

  ‘A pay-off?’

  ‘It was about money. She thought you were going to give her money.’

  A pay-off. That was why she waited so patiently. That was why she didn’t try to run or talk them out of it. That was why she walked with them, from the van, through the high dunes of yellow yellow sand. She wasn’t a martyr. She didn’t say Sheila. She didn’t go into his chest to teach him anything.

  Iain felt his chest, but she was gone.

  Iain spoke to her but heard nothing. She had never been there. There was nothing in him.

  He knew something was coming. His vision was framed with a jagged bright white light. With a terrible sense of urgency he pleaded with her: tell them, will you? Annie and Eunice tell them that it wasn’t me. Please? It wasn’t me. But his lips were sliding across his teeth and his tongue was swelling and the light got suddenly brighter and the world was gone.

  A slow wave, as high as a hill, washed over him, the cold of it touching his forehead, the point of the third eye, folding over him, a white wave, a cold wave, a salt wave.

  40

  Late in the evening, in her car, Alex Morrow sat looking up at the Southern General Hospital, at small windows burning into the night. Members of the public came and went. Nurses pushed patients out to a smoking shelter in the car park and then went back for them. Minicabs arrived, picking up or dropping off and then they drove away again. Danny was up there, behind one of those windows.

  It was nearly midnight. She wanted to go home but sat in the car, so sad she felt paralysed.

  Iain Fraser was dead. She had watched them lift his body onto a stretcher in the interview room. A massive heart attack, they said. They hadn’t brought a body bag upstairs with them. The lead paramedic hoped that was OK? He could go and get one if she wanted? Morrow said no, it was fine. They could carry him downstairs and through the lobby and not pass anyone. No one came into police stations any more.

  She was glad that there were cameras everywhere in the station, glad the surgeon who examined him was his own doctor, glad she had double-checked his medication. But still, when she watched the footage back and saw him half collapse on his way into the holding cell, she knew it would look bad. That was why she went to the hospital with the body. She needed to know it was a heart attack. She needed to know she wasn’t going to be on a death-in-custody charge first thing in the morning.

  Superficially, Iain Fraser had died of a heart attack, the lab told her, but actually, look. Look at the fingers here, see that? On his fingernails?

  She couldn’t see it but they were clubbed. She thought they said stubbed, but he repeated himself: clubbed. The tips of the fingernails were squared and swollen. Lung cancer. Untreated, advanced, his heart probably just gave out. He must have been in terrible pain.

  Fraser was a lowlife, a career thug. She shouldn’t feel sad for him but she did and it bothered her. She shouldn’t have any feelings about him.

  The arrest warrant for Abigail Gomez had gone through an hour too late. The party of three had made their connecting flight to Ecuador. She tried to rationalise the failure: international arrest warrants did take time. They did take time. She knew they did. But they didn’t have to. They didn’t always.

  Whoever Abigail Gomez really was, she had a talent for identifying weakness. She had arrived in a tiny west coast Scottish town, swooping in like an omniscient being, posing as a returner with just enough information to make it work. She had found Police Scotland’s weakness too. But lack of funds was universal. It wasn’t a hard weakness to identify.

  She had seen Iain Fraser’s weakness too. He was determined to take responsibility but he was just a cog. She’d seen that many times before. It was a belief often borne of a traumatic childhood, it was so much more manageable to believe himself bad than the world. It was people like Danny she had trouble with. People who blamed everyone else or thought injustice was the natural order of things.

  Iain Fraser died begging. He slumped over the table, mumbling, rambling. Morrow didn’t know what he was begging for. He was pleading with her, Annie and her niece, tell them he did something, or didn’t do something. But then he was gone. She could watch the tapes back but didn’t think it would make it any clearer. She’d check his records in the morning and try to find Annie or the niece. She didn’t know what she could tell them though.

  Morrow sighed. She should go home but she didn’t. She stayed there, looking up at the windows of Danny’s ward, asking herself questions that were far too big for midnight in a rainy hospital car park.

  Danny was up there, in a bed with a respirator hissing next to him, having a good night. He’d felt no compunction about letting a civil war break out to make a point. She cursed him and phoned the ward.

  A female nurse answered. She dropped the phone when Alex gave Danny’s name. Picking it up again, she sounded nervous and breathless, and said she would just get someone to talk to Alex, can you wait a wee minute? Would that be all right, pet? Morrow was crying before the doctor even picked up the receiver. He was very sorry. Alex said she was too, but she was lying. She hung up.

  Iain Fraser was wrong. They didn’t make the world. They didn’t make all the lies and the crap in it. She shouldn’t lie about Danny: she wasn’t sad. She was crying with relief.

  Weeping and exhausted, she turned on her headlights, let the handbrake off and drove the cherished journey home, to her warm house, to her good man, to her lovely children who were breathing and thriving.

  41

  In the bright early morning a two-car convoy crested a high hill. The sudden sight of the Irish Sea was broken only by Ail
sa Craig, a bare stone island as round as a baby’s buttock, sticking out of the water.

  Morrow had not been to bed. Arriving home three and a half hours before she had to leave again, she made a pint of coffee and sat in the dark kitchen with a packet of biscuits, holding a solitary wake for her brother. She sat in the gloom for three hours, inviting the sorrow to hit her. Nothing came. So she dredged up memories, tender moments they had shared, kindnesses, sadnesses. Nothing came. She couldn’t command grief any more than she could command the sea.

  Prestwick Airport was a hangover from the Second World War. It was a cheap-flights airport and dressed the part. An advertising hoarding on the roundabout ordered drivers to fly to Rome for £9. The footbridges and outside wall of the train station advertised discounted airfares, car hire and hotels. Everything had a discount price on it. Prestwick Airport knew what it was selling.

  They parked in short stay, a hundred yards from the entrance, and walked, hunched against a bitter wind, into the lobby. It was wide and tall and white and empty. Most of the flights came in or left early. It was part of the discount deal: holiday flights at business times, business flights on a holiday schedule. The arrivals board announced that the flight from Barcelona was expected at 7.15.

  They had ten minutes to waste. Morrow ordered the DCs to sit down on the chairs and they did. McGrain sat with her. She had come team-handed in case Barratt had heavies with him.

  It was quiet in the lobby. No one lingered. Most passengers hurried straight to security to meet their early morning flights.

  Across the road a train arrived from Glasgow. The passengers crossed the footbridge and took the long escalator down, deposited luggage at the airline desk and scurried to the ordered queue for security. Within a few minutes, check-in printouts read, passports checked, they were swallowed by the security door and the lobby was clear again.

  Morrow gradually became aware of a man in her peripheral vision. He was reading a copy of The Times, notable for not taking one of the plentiful empty chairs. She imagined he would be picking up a daughter, she guessed, back from gap year travels, playing at poverty but always with a nice house and her benign father’s credit card to fall back on if it didn’t work out. But then she noticed his red trousers. It was Frank Delahunt. McGrain had noticed them too.

  ‘Ma’am?’

  ‘Yeah, I know,’ she muttered. ‘Sit back.’

  They waited, sitting still, doing nothing but sweating. Delahunt was behind them, he could spot them at any time. She thought he was there for Barratt but couldn’t be sure until she saw them together.

  The arrivals board announced that the Barcelona flight had landed. Delahunt saw the announcement too and folded his paper carefully, tucking it under his arm. He wandered across their path to the double doors marked No Entry or Re-entry. He was tense.

  They waited. Finally, the double doors opened and a lone woman came through. Dressed in peach cotton and silver strappy sandals, she was ready for dinner on a Spanish beach and looked tired and pissed off to be back. Behind her, through the closing swing doors, a throng of people gathered around the luggage carousel, adjusting their dress after a cramped two-hour flight.

  Delahunt shifted his weight to see through the crack in the doors. He was nervous. He wasn’t expected and had come on his own initiative.

  ‘Let’s move,’ she muttered, waving her officers up and over to the building exit so that Barratt wouldn’t see them the moment he stepped through the doors. A man with his history would have an eye for polis, not that he’d need second sight to place the guys she had with her: even in plain clothes they all looked police. Too neat. Notably conformist.

  They stood in a clump between the exits to the car park and the check-in desks. Morrow told two of them to face away and pretend they were checking their phones while she watched over their shoulders.

  The Barcelona passengers began to trickle through the doors. Delahunt moved out of the way of the trolleys and the crowds.

  And there he was. Mark Barratt came through the doors, small and broad-shouldered. His skin was white as dough, making him look as if he’d never left Scotland in his life. She realised that she’d half expected to see Danny, because Barratt had the same shaved head and tracksuit, but she felt nothing when it wasn’t him.

  Barratt was pulling a small, wheeled suitcase. It was incongruously feminine, had a tapestry pattern of an Alsatian dog on the front.

  He spotted Delahunt and stopped. Surprised and angry to see him, he walked over.

  Delahunt spoke to Barratt’s shoulder. Barratt said two forceful words and walked away. Flustered, Delahunt pretended to look for someone else coming out of the doors.

  Barratt thundered towards the exit, one of the wheels on his suitcase giving an intermittent shriek.

  Morrow nodded the two DCs over to pick up Delahunt and she and McGrain walked over to the doors. ‘Mark Barratt?’

  Barratt stopped. He looked at them and knew what they were. He said nothing.

  ‘Mr Barratt, we’d like to talk to you about events which occurred in your absence. Will you come with us, please, sir?’

  ‘Giving us a choice?’ His voice was a low rumble, a premonition of thunder.

  ‘I think we both know I’m not, Mr Barratt.’

  Delahunt was brought over and protested his confusion. Barratt shut him up with a threatening scowl.

  ‘OK,’ said Morrow, ‘let’s get these two winners in the motors.’

  Delahunt was in her car as they drove back to London Road. He would talk. Morrow could tell from the unevenness of his breathing, the way he’d pull a sharp intake and let it out. She didn’t speak to him. If he had anything to say she wanted it on tape.

  At London Road, McGrain pulled the car through the back gate of the station. Delahunt sat, upright as an Irish setter, looking at everything, taking it in. The other car arrived and Barratt slid past in profile, expressionless.

  They took them in through the back bar, left the desk sergeant, Mike, to do the paperwork, and took Delahunt straight upstairs to an interview room. Barratt’s lawyer was called and on his way. They booked him into another interview room but told him they would have to book his suitcase because it was too big.

  As he was led away, Morrow watched Barratt’s eyes linger on the roll-on standing on its end behind the desk. She waited until Mike came back.

  ‘That,’ she said to the suitcase, ‘has got something in it.’

  Mike stared at it. They couldn’t get into it without a warrant. To get a warrant they needed cause. To get cause they needed Barratt to say something, but he wouldn’t. They weren’t going to get into the suitcase. Mike looked at her.

  ‘I could do with a hand, ma’am. If you could put that in the storage area for me?’

  Morrow didn’t know what he meant.

  ‘I mean you can give it a good feel, you know, like a Christmas present.’

  He was clever, Mike, always had an eye for the limits of regulations.

  Morrow crouched down and felt the outside of the suitcase. It was cloth-covered. The tapestry on the front was raised, green and yellow on a black background, but it was solid at the front and back. She tapped it with a knuckle. It felt as if it had been reinforced with solid plastic. The front sank, the tapestry became slightly flaccid. On the back it felt heavier, moved differently and there seemed to be a solidity to the base, as if there was a false bottom inside.

  Mike lay the case on its back and tapped the bottom. Again, a heaviness that was too uniform to be explained by shampoo and sandals. They stood up and looked at it.

  ‘Where’s he coming from, ma’am?’

  ‘Just arrived from Barcelona.’

  ‘Cocaine?’

  ‘Dunno.’

  ‘He’s put his job down as “upholsterer”. Said he’s done an apprenticeship and everything. But would he bring it in himself?’

  ‘It’s the weakest point in the process, isn’t it? Risk averse and you get someone else, but that really cre
ates more risk.’

  They looked at the suitcase. Even if it was packed with coke they weren’t getting in.

  ‘Store it,’ said Morrow, pissed off, and went upstairs to interview Delahunt.

  42

  Delahunt was delighted to see her. He stood to shake her hand, his mouth hanging open, keen as chips to tell her the story he had made up in the car. She fitted the tapes, holding a hand up to stay Delahunt’s gallop before the tapes were notified of who was here and what was afoot.

  ‘OK, now, Francis Delahunt, can you tell me, in your own words, what you were doing at Prestwick airport this morning?’ She spoke slowly, trying to counter his excitement and make him slow down.

  ‘So, yes,’ he began, holding his breath and looking at the floor. ‘I was at the airport to wait for a friend when I happened to see Mark Barratt—’

  ‘Name?’

  ‘Name?’

  ‘Of your friend. We’ll check flight records for your friend.’

  ‘Ah,’ thinking on his feet, ‘see the thing is—’

  ‘FRANK.’

  Delahunt looked at the table.

  ‘Frank,’ she said quietly, ‘we found Roxanna Fuentecilla dead. We found another dead woman in Loch Lomond. She was an ex-employee at Injury Claims. The man who killed her worked for Mark Barratt. This is really serious now. Do you understand?’

  Shocked, he jerked a nod. ‘She’s dead?’

  ‘This is really serious. You’re looking at serious jail time here.’

  ‘Roxanna’s dead?’

  ‘Strangled with wire.’

  He slumped in his chair, ‘Oh, God.’

  ‘I need you to tell me the truth.’

  He nodded and his eyes pleaded with her to help him.

  ‘I can help you, but I need you to help me. It can’t all be one way. We need to help each other.’

  He nodded still, he got that, he understood and whispered at both of them, ‘I’m just her contact in the town.’

  ‘For who?’

  ‘Roxanna. I’m just a conduit. I’m not doing anything illegal per se. I’m giving advice and putting people in contact with one another.’