Redemption Road

by Lisa Ballantyne

  ‘You seem uncertain?’

  ‘I’m not uncertain, maybe you are?’

  ‘No, I’m just interested in the facts.’

  ‘Is everything OK, Tam?’ the man in the office called out. Angus looked over at him. It wasn’t Peter, he was sure, but there was something about the man that made him wary: the tilt of his chin, the cut of his suit, the way he forced his hips forward when he put his hands in his pockets.

  ‘All fine,’ said Tam, wiping his hands and raising his voice so that it carried over his shoulder to the man in the office.

  ‘If you know anything…’ Angus pressed again.

  ‘I know that’s you sorted to drive up to Thurso,’ said Tam, with a one-sided smile, letting the bonnet slam closed.

  Angus took a deep breath. ‘What do I owe you?’

  ‘I won’t charge you for the tyre… give us a fiver for the plug?’

  ‘Very well,’ said Angus, opening his wallet and taking out a twenty-pound note.

  ‘Pay over there,’ said Tam, walking away.

  Angus approached the cash desk and gave his twenty-pound note to the man behind the counter. He found it hard to look the man in the face, but he was sure that this was the other McLaughlin brother – Richard. He recognised him from the photograph taken on the steps of the High Court.

  The man placed fifteen pounds’ change on the counter in front of Angus.

  ‘Can I have a receipt?’ said Angus, raising his eyes, swallowing and then looking straight at the man.

  Richard stared at Angus for a moment or two then slapped a receipt book on the counter. He leaned so heavily on the page that the biro tore through to the carbon paper beneath.

  Tam had returned to rolling down the shutters when Angus moved to leave.

  ‘Thanks for seeing me when you were shutting up,’ said Angus, loudly and for effect. ‘I’m very grateful to you.’

  Tam nodded and then Angus leaned over and passed him his business card. ‘If you need to get in touch with me…’

  Tam glanced at the card then slipped it into his pocket. ‘Why would I want to do that?’

  ‘In case you remember anything more. I have reason to believe that George McLaughlin has abducted a small girl. As a father, you might —’

  ‘I told you I know nothing,’ said Tam, nodding goodbye to Angus and turning away.

  In the car, Angus checked the clock. It was just after six. Even if he drove continuously, it would be midnight before he was home. Glasgow was heavy. He sensed the weight of its Baroque red sandstone and felt the leaden energy of the garage still surrounding him. He was a newspaperman and he knew it was his calling to mingle with the filth of the earth, but sometimes he felt besmirched by it. It was like gutting out the barn: one way or the other, it got under your fingernails.

  The sun set as he drove, and his thoughts returned to Maisie and the discomfort that he knew she would be feeling. The thought of the heifer suffering caused him deep pain. He considered the characters from the garage earlier: shifty Tam and his nameless boss, who Angus was sure was part of a crime family.

  Animals were so much purer than most of the human race. Angus remembered the barn when he was a child, and the comfort that the animals offered him: taking him into their fold and nurturing him. He had wrapped his arms around the warm necks of ponies and nuzzled their faces, taking the smell of them down into the deepest part of him. The animals had healed him. They had shown him love outside the coldness of his family: his father’s indifference, his mother’s criticism and the house that stank of gutted fish.

  It had been the animals that had shown him the beauty of God’s love and God’s forgiveness.

  He leaned forward and accelerated so that he was driving just below the speed limit, in order to get home as soon as possible. Saturday evening and he had expected the roads to be clear, but he got stuck in a traffic jam before Dunfermline, and then there was an accident after Perth and again just before Inverness. By the time Angus pulled into Thurso, it was eight minutes to midnight. He was glad he had made it home in time. Technically he had been working, and it was immoral to do any kind of work, or indeed play, on the Sabbath.

  The Sabbath was only for worship.

  As he passed through the town, then turned off the main road and drove down the farm track to his house, Angus felt a heavy, sick feeling in his stomach. It was time for bed, but there was a minute or so left to put his mind at rest. He had to check on Maisie. He felt an anxious joy at the thought of seeing her again, but also a strange panic, a premonition that things were not well.

  He got out of the car and opened the door to the house. All the lights were on, but there was no sign of Hazel. He pulled on his wellingtons and walked down the path to the barn.

  He heard Maisie before he saw her: long, agonised cries, deep and stirring as the low note on a viola. He broke into a run.

  He was out of breath when he arrived at the barn, not because the distance was far but because he had run too fast. The familiar smell of the barn, sweet hay and dung, was laced with the bitter, iron smell of blood. When he went to Maisie’s pen he saw she was on her side, her large eyes wide with panic. Hazel was kneeling, red-handed, at Maisie’s tail. The concrete floor was splashed wet with her waters, and the straw was blackened with blood.

  Angus looked at his watch. It was two minutes to midnight. Sometimes the Lord’s grand design eluded him, yet he knew that it was not his place to question God’s will.

  ‘Get up,’ he shouted to Hazel. ‘Get away from her.’

  Hazel stood. Her arms, the front of her cooking apron, her knees and the toes of her rubber boots were all covered in blood, so that she seemed a strange communion of homemaker and butcher.

  ‘You’re not to touch her.’

  ‘You were away and she’s in such pain. It’s stuck. It’s breach. I can feel its rear end. She needs the… the v-vet. Will you help her, Angus?’

  ‘Did you do this? Did you interfere before her waters broke, out of your ignorance and your… impulsiveness?’

  ‘I did nothing.’

  ‘This morning you told me she was fine and now look at her…’

  ‘She needs you… she needs a vet. Will you call?’

  ‘It’s the Sabbath,’ Angus whispered so quietly that the words were only felt leaving his tongue, not audible.

  ‘Will you help her though?’ said Hazel.

  Angus struck her across the face with the back of his hand. She stumbled under the blow and turned away from him, cowering against the barn wall. He was filled with pain and fear for Maisie and could think of nothing else. He didn’t want Hazel in here. He didn’t want her anywhere near the barn. It was the Sabbath and she had no right.

  ‘You had no right,’ he shouted, taking her by the neck and then driving her face into the wall. She buckled under the blow and put a hand to her nose.

  A shovel, used for mucking out the barn, stood near the door. Angus picked it up with two hands. Hazel made no sound but ran for the door. He caught her before she got there, once between the shoulder blades and again in the small of her back. She fell under the blow, then curled up in the mud outside the barn.

  Exhausted, chest heaving, Angus threw down the shovel and looked up at the moon.

  He blinked and remembered being a child, locking himself in the barn on their farm. The barn was a place for exaltation and love, not pain and death. It had been the place where he felt safe.

  ‘Why?’ he screamed, a single, long, diaphragm-aching syllable that emptied him of air and hope.

  Hazel began to crawl, in the mud, back to the farmhouse. Angus looked down at his hands and the shovel at his feet. He felt a shiver of shame. The force of the blows had jarred his shoulder and he realised that he had gone too far. Nevertheless he turned his back on her and re-entered the barn.

  He could see that Hazel was right for once and that Maisie was in trouble. Angus looked at his watch – midnight – and then removed it. He turned his hand to the side and flatten
ed his palm, fingers tight together like a swimmer, and then entered the heifer. He could feel the calf’s rear before he was elbow deep. It was breach and it was stuck.

  If it had been Monday, Angus would have called the vet and paid the emergency call-out fee; then, as he waited, he would have got down on his knees and slipped his hands inside her, pushing the calf further inside in the hope of turning it. Maybe he would have been able to turn the calf and find its feet, allowing him to slide it out of her, timing his actions with her own muscular push. She would be silent, breathing heavily through flared nostrils, knowing that he was caring for her. The calf would slip out, blue and yellow, stuck with the gel and slime of the birthing.

  Angus stood before Maisie and looked into her face, his right hand slick with her insides.

  ‘It is the Sabbath,’ he told her. ‘And the Sabbath is sacred. I have to leave you. I know that you can do this by yourself. It is God’s will.’

  Maisie let her head fall against the hay, her mouth open and her eyes half closed. Angus got down on his knees.

  ‘You understand, my girl,’ he said, making long, flat-palmed strokes on her velvet neck, ‘that I love you, but I also love God.’

  She jerked away from him. He wondered if a contraction had taken hold or the calf had shifted, or if she had heard and understood every word he had said and was, now, appalled by him.

  There was a tremor in her abdomen and Angus could see the angle of the calf under her flank. Maisie bent her front leg, as if preparing to stand, but could not. She moaned again, so loudly that it caused the water in the metal trough to ripple.

  Angus got up and ran outside. He ran towards the farmhouse, two hands pressed over his ears. By the time he arrived at the house, he was in tears. He covered his face and sank down on his knees into the mud.

  ‘Dear God, give me strength,’ he said, putting a hand to his face that smelled of Maisie.

  It was God’s will, but he had never felt so damned.

  14

  Big George

  Wednesday 2 October, 1985

  George gave Moll a big smile. ‘C’mon back here till I show you something,’ he said, offering his hand.

  She folded her arms.

  George exhaled: she was hard work.

  He offered his hand to her and after a moment’s consideration she took it. He led her to the back of the car. The boot was open and the hunting knife was lying where he had left it. The blade of the knife reflected the moonlight. When she saw it, she bucked away from him. He held her wrist and pulled her into him.

  He hunkered down and took her by the shoulders. ‘Listen to me. I’m not going to hurt you. I said I’d take you back and I will, but there’s something I need to do, and you need to trust me.’

  She dug her heels in, leaning against him, but when he looked into her good eye he saw that she might yield to him.

  ‘You have to know that I won’t hurt you. You have to understand that, but this has to be done before tomorrow, and we may as well do it now.’

  ‘What?’ she asked, blanching with fear. ‘What are you going to do to me?’

  He let her go. ‘Turn around. Trust me.’

  She hesitated for a moment, her good eye searching his face. ‘Go on,’ he whispered.

  She watched him intently for seconds that seemed like minutes, then slowly turned around.

  Her shoulders were raised in anxious expectation, as if a kitten might jump on her back.

  He picked up the knife.

  She rolled away from him and crawled backwards, her mouth set and her brows lowered. ‘No,’ she said. ‘What are you going to do?’

  ‘I’m not going to hurt you. I just need to cut your hair a bit.’

  Moll sat up on the moss she was sitting in and stroked her long ponytail. ‘Cut my hair, why?’

  ‘It’s a wee bit long.’

  ‘I like it that way.’

  George stood up. It was as if, with every step, he had to reach deep inside himself to find the right way to charm her. In that sense, she was the most challenging girl he had ever met, apart from the nuns.

  ‘Short hair’s all the rage,’ he tried, raising his eyebrows. ‘It’s very with it. I’m just talking about a trim, mind, a wee shaving off, just to make you a bit more fashionable.’

  Still sitting on the ground, Moll hugged her knees and stared at him.

  ‘You know you want to.’

  She was still reticent.

  ‘Listen to me,’ he said, bending over so that he could look her in the eye. ‘I’m going to take you back, but right now there are people looking for you and looking for me, and so I just want to change the way you look a wee bit, so we’re not so… obvious.’

  ‘I don’t want to change the way I look.’

  ‘How long have you had that haircut?’

  ‘Always.’

  ‘Well, always is a long time. A change is as good as a rest, they say. Help me out. Shorter hair’ll show off your pretty face.’

  She clasped her hands and looked up at him, as if considering.

  George turned around, scanning the scene for inspiration. There was a dirty cloth in the boot of the car that George used for the windows or to get rid of excess grease. He picked it up and flapped it gallantly, like a barber’s towel.

  ‘If madam would like to sit on this fine chair,’ he said, bowing and motioning to the hatchback, ‘I will be glad to give her a grand bouffant worthy of the greatest film star.’

  Moll smiled, showing the gap between her teeth. George held out his hand and she got to her feet.

  He lifted her up and set her on the boot of the car, then fussily tucked the greasy cloth around her neck as if it were a hairdresser’s cape. ‘There we go. Is madam comfortable? Would madam like a glass of Irn Bru while she gets her hair cut?’

  Moll giggled and nodded.

  George retrieved the bottle from the back seat and set it between her knees. She was about to open it and drink when he stopped her.

  ‘Careful now,’ he said, picking up the knife. ‘You can take a drink when I’ve done this, but now you need to stay still. You can’t move an inch or it’ll cut you.’

  She heard the serious note in his voice and froze. He took her ponytail in his right hand. Her face was pale, and he worried again that he was frightening her.

  ‘Nearly done now, madam.’

  He knew he didn’t have long. He cut her ponytail right through – cutting close to the nape of her neck. He handed the hair to her.

  ‘Hold on to that. You can keep it as a souvenir.’

  He had expected her to cry again, or try to fight him, but she merely looked at the hair in her hands and said, ‘Why?’

  ‘You’ll see when I’m finished.’ He used the knife to cut off the remaining long strands of hair. ‘Hold still. Hold really still, OK?’ he said, with the knife against the nape of her neck.

  She nodded her head.

  ‘Dear God, I said don’t move. Pretend you’re a statue.’

  She did as he had asked, straightening her spine and sitting tall and still, arms at her side. He cut as close to the scalp as he could, shaving through the hairs.

  ‘Ow,’ she said, but did not pull away.