Redemption Road

by Lisa Ballantyne

  Moll had always been bright. Kathleen had been criticised by the school for it, but she had taught her daughter to read and write before she started primary. Her teachers had worried that she would be bored and cause trouble, but Moll had never needed attention like that. Even at home, she was content to play by herself. She liked to take John’s thick hardback books from the bookcase and pretend that she could read them.

  Kathleen dried her hands and glanced outside to see if it was raining, just as the telephone rang.

  ‘Hello?’

  It was John. He stopped for a tea break at ten and would often call her.

  ‘You’re lucky you caught me.’

  ‘You don’t have to tell me that. I’ve always known I’m a lucky man.’

  ‘You know what I mean,’ she said, elbows on the bunker, raising her eyes and smiling as if she were talking to him face to face. There was a paperweight by the telephone, which Moll had also crafted: a smooth, heavy stone that she had found on the beach. She had painted MUMY in green across it and often told Kathleen that she hated it because it was spelled incorrectly. Her daughter often asked for the gift to be returned so that she could paint over it, but Kathleen wouldn’t allow it.

  ‘You can find another stone and paint it with the correct spelling if you want, but I like this one.’

  ‘I won’t ever find another stone that flat.’

  Kathleen and John talked for a few minutes, low murmurs into the telephone. They had nothing new to say, but simply enjoyed the sound of each other’s voices.

  ‘I’m meeting Fiona for lunch.’

  ‘Well, you enjoy your day.’

  ‘When will you be home?’

  John sighed. ‘After six, I should think. We’ll see.’

  She could hear the stress returning to his voice.

  ‘See you later, then.’

  ‘Tatty-bye.’

  Kathleen put on her jacket and was counting the money in her purse when the phone rang again.

  ‘Are you bored today or something?’ she said, laughing, expecting it to be John again.

  It was not her husband, but the head teacher of Ravenshill Primary.

  ‘Mrs Henderson, is that you? It’s Barbara Wainwright.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Kathleen, tossing her bag on to the kitchen bunker. ‘I thought it was… How can I help you? Is everything OK?’

  ‘I don’t want to alarm you at all, but I’m just checking that you didn’t ask for Molly to be collected from school this morning by a friend or family member?’

  Kathleen’s lip stiffened. ‘Moll? Collected by whom? I saw her off this morning.’

  There were a few seconds of silence on the line and Kathleen’s thighs began to tremble.

  ‘Moll didn’t make it to school today, and some classmates witnessed her talking to a strange man and getting into his car. We’re going to call the police…’

  Kathleen hung up the telephone. She had tried so hard to listen as Mrs Wainwright spoke of the next steps, but the only thing she could think about was finding Moll. A notepad hanging on the wall next to the telephone listed important numbers. Kathleen’s forefinger shook as she found the one for John’s work. She misdialled twice because she was trembling so badly, but finally got through.

  His secretary answered.

  ‘I need to speak to John right now.’

  ‘Kathleen, is that you?’

  ‘I need to speak to John.’

  ‘He’s at the plant. I can try to get a message passed but it might take some time.’

  ‘I need to speak to him now. Right now.’

  ‘Kathleen, love, is everything all right?’

  She hung up, her hand over her mouth. It couldn’t be true. It couldn’t happen to her. She’d read about little girls being taken, but it couldn’t happen to Moll. No one would hurt Moll.

  She felt as if her skin had fallen off; raw, she ran out into the street and towards the school, following the steps her daughter had taken when she waved her off this morning. Kathleen could remember her small wet lips against hers and the uneven strand of hair that had escaped her ponytail which Kathleen had tried to straighten on the doorstep. She could imagine every last pore of her – bone, skin, hair and smell. Tears blinded her as she mentally hugged her, squeezing her tightly, tighter than she ever had, as if she could push her back inside her own body and protect her for ever.

  This wasn’t happening. It couldn’t happen. Moll was never to come to any harm. She was too loved.

  The streets were a blur of faces and cars and trees. She bumped into one woman and another called after her to watch where she was going.

  It was less than a ten-minute walk from the house to the primary school, but Kathleen had been running too hard. By the time she reached the school gates she could hardly breathe. She bent over and had put a hand over her mouth to stop herself from vomiting. Her hair, which she had carefully pinned earlier, was now wild and loose. She ran a hand over her face and hair as she prepared to enter the school.

  They had made a mistake, she decided. Moll was inside, in her classroom, stretching up her hand to answer the teacher’s question.

  In the school car park, she saw two police cars.

  9

  Big George

  Wednesday 2 October, 1985

  George put his foot down and crossed the River Thurso, and was about to accelerate out of town on the A9 southbound when an old lady stepped out on to a zebra crossing. George drummed his fingers on the wheel impatiently, glancing to the park on his left and noticing that it was named after him: Sir George’s Park.

  Moll was turned away from him, still crying, and he was about to speak to her again in an attempt to calm her when she released the lock, threw open the door and fell out right on to the road, such was her rush. She was on her feet before he could reach for her and sprinting back along the road towards the bridge and the town.

  ‘Christ,’ said George.

  He drove through the zebra crossing, startling the old lady, and parked the car by the side of the road, half on the pavement, before he leaped out and gave chase. Running full pelt, he made up the distance between them in seconds. He caught her by the collar of her jacket and spun her round. She started screaming and twisting away from him and George panicked again. His hand closed around her wrist and he began to drag her back to the car. Up ahead he saw a man and a woman, walking arm in arm, and wondered if he should just let Moll go and make a run for it. The couple both glanced in his direction, but instead of looking alarmed they smiled at him with understanding. Realising that they assumed it was just a young child having a tantrum, George dared to smile at them and shake his head. The couple nodded and walked on.

  At the car, George threw open the passenger door and tried to drag her inside, but she leaned over and bit the hand that held her wrist. It wasn’t a playful bite; George felt her small teeth break the skin.

  He shook her, just to get her off him, but then realised that he had been too rough. She was suddenly very pale, either from shock or terror.

  When he pulled his hand away, he saw that she had drawn blood. He lifted her up, put her in the passenger seat and closed the door.

  After pushing down the lock and pulling her seatbelt over to secure her, he drove away with a skid, glancing into the mirror to see if the couple were turning back to look in their direction. The speedometer twitched well above the speed limit as they drove out of town on the A9, before George left the main road to take the smaller mountain roads, where he considered he would be less visible.

  He needed a cigarette suddenly, but was driving too fast. The chase and the fight with her had shaken him. Two hands on the steering wheel, he glanced at her and noticed that she was crying soundlessly; the tears already breaking through the plaster that covered her left eye.

  The blood was trickling from the wound on his hand where she had bitten him, curling around his wrist. He brought his hand to his lips and instinctively sucked at the wound, tasting the familiar
salt of his own blood.

  George was seven years old. He was laughing and joking with his sister while they ate their tea of mince and tatties. George liked to mash the tatties into the mince so that it was a huge brown mess, while Patricia liked to keep the mince completely separate from the potatoes, and would complain to her mother if they were touching. She would then eat the mince first and then all of the tatties, leaving stray onions on the plate, which she said were slimy as worms, and which their mother would then cajole her to finish. George never needing cajoling to eat his food. Every time he finished, his mother would tousle his hair and tell him that he was a good boy and he had a good appetite.

  ‘Is not.’

  ‘Is too.’

  ‘Is not.’

  ‘Is sot.’

  ‘Not, not, not!’

  ‘Sot, sot, sot, sot!’

  The key turned in the lock. George and his sister stopped their chatter and their mother turned off the wireless. His mother focused on the dirty mince pot in the sink and George and his sister looked down at their plates.

  Brendan McLaughlin sighed as he closed the front door. George and his sister didn’t move, but their mother turned to their father.

  ‘Run a bath,’ said their father, without a word of hello. They both knew he was speaking to their mother. She had been washing the mince pot, but she put it down immediately and went to run the bath, wiping her hands on her pinny. She stopped dead at the sight of her husband in the hall. George and his sister followed the direction of their mother’s gaze.

  They were used to seeing their father roughed up. Often his knuckles would be bloodied and their mother would set a bowl of Dettol on the kitchen table for him to steep his hands. The smell of antiseptic would fill the room, thick as shame, as he made bloody fists into the milky liquid.

  But tonight, it was not just his hands: Brendan McLaughlin was covered in blood. His clothes were dark and wet with it; his face was smeared with it and his hair was slick with it. Blood pooled around his black shoes and when he walked to the bathroom, he left dark red footprints on the floorboards.

  ‘Mother of Jesus, a bath? You need the hospital.’

  ‘Run the bath,’ said Brendan, his voice slow and menacing.

  Not a single person in the household would counter him when he spoke like that, not even Peter. George’s mother ran the bath and poured Dettol into it, so that the familiar stink eased through the house like enmity. Patricia brought towels and, with two hands, George put the kettle on the range to top up the bathwater in case it went cold. The children and their mother were like soldiers rushing to their posts.

  George hid behind the door, watching his father and mother in the bathroom. He didn’t like it when they spoke to each other directly because often it would turn sour, and George would want to protect his mother but be afraid for himself. His father’s temper was often sparked by physical pain. If he had been stabbed or beaten badly, it made him angrier. But tonight they stayed calm and his mother passed his father the yellow bar of carbolic soap, so that he could wash himself.

  Through the steam in the bathroom, George could just make out that the bathwater had turned red, and he wondered if his father was bleeding to death. The thought brought a small flutter of delight under his ribcage, and he pressed his lips together in hope and expectation.

  His mother sat on the toilet seat, preparing dressings.

  ‘Where is it you’re hurt?’ she whispered. ‘If you need stitches then you need stitches; you can’t go without like last time…’

  George held his breath as he strained to get a better look, making sure that he kept out of sight. The water was dark red now, as if all the blood in his father’s body was pouring out into the bath.

  George rested his head against the door, feeling something akin to happiness.

  But then his father pushed his knees forward, leaned back and dunked his head into the bath to wash his hair and George saw the firm muscles of his father’s abdomen rising up like a lobster before peeling. Moments later George watched his father’s pale, hard body rise from the blood. His father stood naked, dripping in the bath. Brendan McLaughlin was six foot one, and George had to look up to take him in.

  His body was clean, hard, faultless as a statue. There was not a single cut on him. At seven years old, he understood that his father had not been bathing his wounds at all: he had been cleaning brutal murder from his skin.

  George pressed himself into the crack of the door as he watched, feeling he was invisible. He bit his thumbnail as he watched his father towel himself dry. As his father bent down to dry between his toes, George bit the skin of his thumb right through.

  George cut off the A9 on to the mountain roads, where he slowed his pace. When he was on the back roads, outside Inverness, he pulled over and turned to speak to her for the first time.

  ‘Are you OK, Moll?’

  She turned her face away. The tears had created a gap at the bottom of the plaster covering her right eye.

  George stroked it with his finger and she winced slightly at his touch.

  ‘Let’s take this off, shall we? Let’s see those baby blues.’

  She kept her face turned from him, but did not fight him, and he gently peeled away the rest of the plaster. When the patch was removed, he turned her face to his. Her skin was reddened from crying, and George felt guilt gut him, deft as a fisherman’s knife. Holding her face in his hand, he realised the reason for the plaster. She had a lazy eye, and so one of her eyes was now fixed on him, unrelenting, accusing, while the other was turned away. The eye that had been covered was her good eye.

  Her face was pale, impassive, yet she shrank from his touch. It was not as he had imagined; not as he had wanted.

  ‘I’m sorry if I frightened you, Moll,’ he said, rubbing her leg and dropping his chin to look up at her. ‘I didn’t mean to upset you.’

  ‘I don’t forgive you,’ she said, almost without moving her lips.

  ‘See what you did to me,’ he said, holding up his hand with the tiny, bloody teeth marks on his skin. Because Moll’s two front teeth were missing, the marks were like a snakebite on his hand.

  ‘You deserved it,’ she said, turning away.

  George frowned and stared at the road ahead, hands between his knees. It was not as he had imagined it. He had pictured himself driving this same road, with the money in the boot and Kathleen and Moll singing car songs as they headed south.

  Everything had changed overnight. Yesterday he had disappeared from Glasgow, hoping to win back his sweetheart and his little girl. Now, he was on the run with an abducted child, a bag full of dirty money and a stolen car. It was the abducted child part which was the real problem, even if she was his daughter. George wiped a hand across his mouth. Trouble had always clung to him, like summertime sticky willow. Freedom taunted him now but George was determined not to relinquish it.

  ‘You need to do what I say, angel… We’re going on an adventure.’

  ‘You’re a bad man,’ she said, whipping her head round so that her right eye confronted him while the left looked away. ‘I want to go home.’

  George exhaled, clasping his hands on his lap. ‘I’m not a bad man,’ he whispered, ‘I’m your daddy,’ speaking as though the two were mutually exclusive – although he himself knew better.

  10

  Angus Campbell