Redemption Road

by Lisa Ballantyne

  ‘Are you all right?’

  She nodded, blinking. Wet, her eyelashes seemed impossibly long.

  ‘You’ve got too much soap in your hair, you daftie. Do you want me to help you rinse it?’

  She nodded silently, so he took down the shower hose and ran the water until it was the right temperature.

  ‘Lean your head back.’

  She did as he asked and he washed all the soap out of her hair, noticing some areas where he had almost shaved it to the scalp. When her hair was clean, he picked up one of the big towels and lifted her out of the bath, wrapping her in it. He rubbed her a little, and then told her to get dressed.

  Their dinner came, on a trolley and hidden under silver serving dishes. George paid and tipped the waiter and then set the table up for her, and changed the TV channel to cartoons. They ate in silence, watching Bugs Bunny.

  She ate almost all of her dinner and he let her sit on the bed with the ice cream to watch the television better, while he took a shower.

  The water was hot and the jet was strong, and he felt relief as he washed. He hadn’t bathed since he left Glasgow and he felt the dirt and stress of the journey rinsing off his skin. He thought about Kathleen and the brave way she had fought back tears at the press conference and he thought about Moll and her strange shorn head that made her seem like an urchin.

  He had started this, and he didn’t know what was next, but he hoped to find some place where they could be at peace, and then he would try to persuade Moll to stay with him. There was no going back now, he thought, as he rinsed his hair and turned off the shower.

  George roughly towelled himself dry, put on one of the hotel robes, wiped a clear spot on the steamy mirror and shaved. When he opened the bathroom door, he found her asleep on the bed with an empty dish of ice cream beside her. He looked at the clock: it was nearly eight.

  He put the ice cream dish on the trolley, then folded her limp sleeping body under the covers. He was exhausted himself, so he lay on the bed opposite, drinking his lager and watching a war film with the sound turned down low. He was about to light a cigarette when he became aware that she was whimpering. Her eyes were rolling under her eyelids and her hands were clutching the bedcovers.

  ‘Wheeesht,’ he whispered in an attempt to soothe her.

  She became more restless and just as he was about to go to her, she sat up in bed and burst into tears.

  ‘Hey, what’s the matter?’ he asked, leaning over.

  She didn’t seem to hear him, and so he sat on the edge of her bed and put his arm around her.

  ‘Hey, Moll, what’s the matter? Why are you crying?’

  She looked into his face, her lashes wet and her eyes full of confusion.

  ‘Were you dreaming?’

  She nodded, once.

  ‘What were you dreaming about?’

  ‘A monster was… was coming to get me,’ she said, between stolen breaths.

  ‘A monster? I wouldn’t let any monsters near you, would I?’

  She looked at him, the same wariness in her eyes as earlier, but then shook her head. He got a tissue for her and she dried her eyes then looked around at the hotel room, as if she had forgotten where she was.

  The film he was watching was full of guns and fighting, so he changed channels, but only found the news again, or a soap opera. He turned the television off.

  ‘Settle down now,’ he said to her. ‘Lie down and try to get back to sleep. We have another long day of driving ahead of us tomorrow.’

  She lay down, her big eyes open.

  ‘Try and sleep.’

  ‘I like to be read to, but you said you can’t.’

  ‘I could sing to you.’

  ‘OK.’

  He sat on the bed opposite, facing her, and began a quiet rendition of ‘Sweet Caroline’. She giggled and turned on to her side to face him, two hands tucked under her cheek. When he finished, she asked him to sing it again. He sang instead, ‘Song Sung Blue’, which she thought she knew and tried to sing along at the chorus.

  When he was finished, he tucked her in and pulled the covers up to her chin, the way he remembered his mother doing when he was little. He bent and kissed her forehead. She smelled of lemon shampoo. The skin of her cheek was clear and perfect, and he touched it briefly with his thumb, which seemed rough and old and dark in comparison. He thought he had never felt anything so soft and smooth as the skin of her cheek.

  ‘Why can’t you read?’ she asked him.

  ‘I dunno, I just can’t.’

  ‘Can you write?’

  ‘I can write my signature: GM.’

  ‘But why can’t you read and write? I can read and write.’

  ‘I just… was never good at school.’

  ‘You mean you weren’t clever?’

  ‘No, I was the dunce.’

  ‘What’s a dunce?’

  ‘Someone who’s stupid.’

  ‘Why were you the dunce?’

  ‘I don’t know why. I just… was never able to do the lessons.’

  ‘But even people who’re not good at school can read. Everyone can read and write even if they’re not good at it.’

  ‘Can they?’

  Moll nodded, her mouth hidden under the edge of the bed heet, making her blue eyes seem bigger. As always when she was facing him, he found that he spoke to the eye that looked straight at him and not the eye which turned away, so that after a while he was unaware of her squint.

  ‘Well, when I was wee, I used to write with my left hand.’

  ‘So do I,’ said Moll suddenly, raising her face up off the pillow and smiling at him. She held her left palm outstretched towards him, and he touched it with his.

  ‘And that’s OK now, is it? The teachers allow that?’

  Moll shrugged and nodded.

  ‘When I was wee, the teachers would belt me when I used my left hand. Do they have the belt at your school?’

  Moll shook her head.

  ‘Well, it was the nuns, you see… They wanted me to use my right hand and so every time I picked up a pencil with my left, I got it. Sister Agatha was the worst. I still remember her. She was tall and fat and in her habit she looked like a big, giant… penguin.’

  Moll giggled. ‘Giant penguin.’

  ‘Aye, but you wouldn’t laugh if you saw her. I remember one day, she told me to come forward and hold my hands out for the belt. And I got up and went to the front of the class and did as she asked. You had to hold your hands like this, one hand under the other, so it was harder for you to pull away.’ George demonstrated, sitting on the edge of the bed and holding out his hands towards Moll. She was rapt, listening to him. ‘One day, I remember, there was a hair on my hand. It might have been my own, or one of the girls’, I don’t know,’ he said, winking at her. ‘But anyway, when Sister Agatha belted me she caught the hair, and it cut the palm of my hand so that it was bleeding. The class saw the blood after that first crack, and I remember they all just gasped…’ George paused again to mime the shock of his classmates. Moll was frowning now, her small mouth pursed together. ‘But it didn’t stop Sister Agatha. All she did was ask me to change hands, then she kept on till she’d finished.’

  ‘Did your mum and dad not complain?’

  George grinned and pinched her cheek. ‘My mother had a lot to complain about, believe me, but her whole life I never heard her utter a word of complaint and my father, well…’ George looked away, ‘well no, he wasn’t bothered.’

  Moll was silent and serious, looking down at her fingernails, and George was sorry that he’d told her the story. She had been frightened already, and now he had scared her again. He sighed and looked away, and was about to suggest another Neil Diamond song when she put her hand on his.

  ‘I can teach you to read and write,’ she said, licking her lips and sitting up suddenly.

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ he told her. ‘I’m a lost cause.’

  She climbed out of bed and padded barefoot to the desk, and brought bac
k a sheaf of hotel paper and a pencil. There was a large black Bible on the bedside table and she opened it, and for a moment George thought this was to be his reading book, but she only placed it on the bed as a hard surface for them to write upon.

  She smoothed the paper over the Bible, took the pencil in her left hand and wrote, Aa, Bb, Cc.

  ‘You try,’ she said, giving him the pencil.

  ‘I’m tired, can we do it tomorrow? You need your sleep.’

  ‘It’s only three letters, we can do the rest of the alphabet tomorrow.’

  George sighed and picked up the pencil in his right hand. He held the pencil the way his brother Peter held a knife.

  ‘No,’ she whispered to him, opening his large palm with her small fingers and prising the pencil from his grasp. ‘Use your left hand, if you’re like me and you’re left-handed.’

  He put the pencil into his left hand and she tried to move it into position, but then pulled the pencil from him again.

  ‘Look at me,’ she said, kneeling on the bed. ‘Look how I hold it. Can you do this?’

  She handed George the pencil and he copied how she had held it.

  ‘Good,’ she said, ‘well done. Now try and do the A.’

  He made an attempt, but it was messy and not joined together. ‘I can do a G,’ he said, shrugging nonchalantly.

  Moll bounced from the bed again and took another pencil from the desk.

  ‘Let’s do it together,’ she insisted, writing slowly beside him each of the three strokes of the letter A, waiting for him to finish. She wrote on her stomach, propped on her elbows, with the tip of her tongue between her lips and her face very close to the page.

  Nevertheless he watched her and made the three strokes when she did. To his surprise, the letter looked good.

  ‘See, you can do it,’ she said, smiling at him, up close to his face, so that he could see the pink of her gums where her baby teeth had been.

  ‘That’s only one letter,’ he said. ‘I’ll have a problem with the others.’

  She leaned in close to him and put her forefinger against his lips to silence him. ‘There’s only twenty-six of them, and you’ll learn them in no time. I’m a good teacher. I want to be a teacher when I grow up.’

  ‘You are a good teacher,’ he said, replacing the Bible and putting the pencils and paper away, then tucking her back in. ‘I tell you what, you’re better than any teacher I ever had.’

  She smiled at him, and from this angle he could see the tip of a new tooth breaking her gum. He bent to kiss her forehead again.

  ‘Good night, Batman.’

  ‘Robin!’

  22

  Angus Campbell

  Tuesday 8 October, 1985

  It was the middle of the night, but Angus was lying with his hands behind his head and his eyes wide open. The light of the full moon strained through the thin bedroom curtains. Hazel was sound asleep and still beside him, curled as she always was, away from him on her right side.

  He got up, put on his trousers and a pullover and went downstairs. In the kitchen, he poured some milk into a pan and turned on the stove. He watched the ring turn red, and stared at the circle of milk for a few moments. He went to the window and looked out at the barn. Unable to help himself, Angus slipped on his boots and wandered down the dirty path, rubbing his arms against the chill of the night. The moon was bright and lit his way.

  At the barn, he stepped inside Maisie’s pen. It had been scrubbed clean and stank of disinfectant. There was no straw covering the floor on which she had lain, no grain in her feeding trough, no water in her bucket. He cupped his hand the way he used to when he touched her cheek. He could almost still feel her.

  Angus placed his cupped hand over his eyes and began to cry. He wept with abandon, spit stretching from his mouth to the floor and his shoulders heaving. After a few moments, he had to lean against the wall to catch his breath. He wiped his face with the sleeve of his jerkin, and whispered small prayers of apology and forgiveness, moving his lips without sound, as if whispering to a lover.

  Finally, he turned towards the door and stood staring up at the night sky. The loss filled him, as the spirit of God filled a believer. Being filled with loss was like being full of darkness and Angus had never felt so empty. In the midst of his grief, nothing seemed to matter any more: he had no interest in prayer or worship, no motivation to guide his wife and his children, no interest in the farm. He knew that God was testing him, as he had tested Jesus in the desert. During the day, Angus was fatigued and sullen and at night he could not sleep. Whenever he drifted off, he would dream of Maisie moaning in labour.

  The only thing that still inspired and motivated Angus was his quest to find out the truth about the criminal who had taken Molly Henderson. Now, standing in the moonlight, his tears chilling on his cheeks, Angus chewed the inside of his mouth, twisting his lips one way and then the other, as he contemplated that, in a few hours’ time, Kathleen would read his article. He had reported his findings about George to the superintendent in charge of the Molly Henderson investigation while he was writing the article.

  Detective Inspector Black had not realised the great importance of the information Angus had given him. He had merely muttered, ‘We’ll look into it,’ when told about George McLaughlin. Angus remembered that the Yorkshire Ripper had been questioned several times before he was finally caught and Angus saw Black’s lack of interest as another example of police incompetence.

  It was now six days since Molly had been taken, but her body had not yet been discovered. Angus hoped that his article would be picked up by the national press and the police would confirm that George was wanted for questioning.

  The similarity of Molly’s abduction to those of the murdered children meant that Highlands and Islands Police were coordinating with police teams nationwide working on the other open cases. Black had taken note of Angus’s information about George, but it seemed as if the team’s attention was focused on the danger that Molly’s abductor was a serial child murderer.

  Angus was certain that there was a way to track George McLaughlin down, and prove that he had taken the Henderson child. Angus was bitter that the police could not see the light. Blinking in the moonlight, Angus imagined the heat of flashbulbs, as he was interviewed by an audience of the national press, all asking how he had solved one of the most pressing cases of child abduction in recent years.

  Angus was smiling, formulating a response in his mind, when he became aware of a dark shape in the kitchen window, watching him.

  Clarity returned to Angus and he saw that Hazel was staring at him from inside the house. He marched back to the farmhouse to find the kitchen blackened with smoke and Hazel scrubbing the cooker, pink rubber gloves pulled over the sleeves of her nightie.

  ‘What are you doing, woman?’

  ‘I woke up. There was smoke. Did you p-put some milk on?’

  She was hunched over, turned from him and watching him with downcast eyes.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ he said. ‘I must’ve. Now that you’re up, you can put on some fresh. I’m having trouble sleeping.’

  He left her with the hazy smell of burned milk and climbed the stairs to his study.