by Denise Mina
Pat could hear the Irish consider the angles. ‘I don’t know you.’
‘I’ll call you after,’ said Pat and hung up.
Eddy took the phone back, dropping his chin so he was looking up, puppyish, ‘Pal . . .’ he said, meaning thank you, meaning to express affection, hinting at words he would never say.
Pat was thinking words he would never say too.
Pat was thinking that the world would be better off if a cunt like Eddy wasn’t in it.
12
Morrow sat in her car as the sun came up over the young trees in Blair Avenue. It had been a warm autumn, plenty of rain and the gardens were bursting with life. Balding branches of well-tended trees shadowed the road and the hedges, verdant, waxy leaved, littered the pavement below. A smattering of rain had cleared the sky to an uninterrupted solid blue.
Her bum was numb. She had been sitting there for forty minutes, tiredness and indecision pinning her to the seat. In every fraction of a second she was poised to reach for the car key, pull it out and open the door. The muscles on her forearm twitched in rehearsal, her mind focused on the plastic casing around the key, the crunch of the lock as she pulled the key out, the warm mottled plastic of the door handle, but still she didn’t move.
She had been there so long that the blood had drained from her hands resting on the steering wheel. Several times she had thought about turning the radio on for company, but that would have meant admitting that she wasn’t going to get out of the car.
She could go back to the station. Bannerman was giving a briefing but she could still hide in her office. She had the day off. She could go into the office and say she couldn’t stay away - never mind that she wouldn’t get overtime - show willing, instead of going indoors and dealing with Brian.
She looked up at the brand new house. All the lights were off, the curtains still drawn in the living room.
This had been her dream once, when she was little, to live in a clean, bland house with a clean, bland husband. A man who would never raise his voice or said anything alarming. A man who never shouted ‘fire’ into her sleeping face in the middle of the night because he was pissed and wanted attention. A man who would never get taken away by the police at 6.15 in the morning and spit saliva streaked with blood on his own hall carpet as they dragged him away.
The Blair Avenue house was new, they were the first people ever to live in it and she savoured the absence of history. They chose it because it was quiet and there were so many children in the neighbourhood.
The front door was painted red, the brass letter box polished, glinting a chirpy answer to the early morning sunlight. She’d liked that door when they bought the house. Most of the new-builds had white plastic doors. It was the first thing she’d liked about it, at the viewing.
‘Look at this, Brian.’ She ran her fingers down the watered sheen of red paint and looked up to find him smiling at her hand. She had looked at his lips and known precisely the words they were going to form.
‘That’s a lovely colour, isn’t it?’
She glared at the door now, her mouth moved soundlessly, reforming the words - that’s a lovely colour.
The straightness of the man was gone, the steadiness she had fallen in love with. Brian had become the chaos she was running from.
The postman’s back suddenly obscured her view. He opened the gate and left it wide as he stepped up the path, looking through a bundle of letters, pulling their junk mail and bills out and shoving them through the door. He didn’t look up as he came back down towards her, already sorting the mail for the next house. Birds twittered in trees. A commuter with a briefcase and grey suit crossed the road to his car. People were beginning to stir. She had to go in or be spotted spying on her own home.
A sudden longing struck her, to see Danny, speak to him, be back in that familiar set of tracks. She knew Danny, understood him, could predict him. He was never a straight line and a sudden curve. Danny was always the same and not sorry about it either.
Somehow in her head the thought of Danny became entangled with the Anwar case because of the area, because they were both at school there. She had never asked for his help before, always kept those worlds as far apart as possible, but she was so angry with Bannerman she was prepared to consider it.
Brian was in there, awake possibly, wondering where she was, why she hadn’t come home, why her phone was switched off.
Reaching for the car key her hand lingered for a moment. She turned it, starting the engine and pulling out into the street, heading back into the vibrant, screaming city.
13
It was only a twenty-minute drive from her house at this time of the morning but the brand new block of luxury flats was a world away.
Morrow looked up at the verandas as she pulled on the handbrake. Thrown up during the housing boom they were already beginning to disintegrate. A number of them had been bought with dirty cash, at a time when all property was a good investment. But the gangsters wouldn’t pay the exorbitant maintenance fees and now the flats were coming apart.
They dumped bags of rubbish in the lifts and left police cones in the best parking spots. The factor wasn’t attending to the building any more and lights were out all over the halls, dents in communal walls were being left. One lift in the block was always well maintained though, no one would have dared piss in it or use a lighter to melt the plastic buttons: it was the lift that went to Danny’s penthouse.
She had passed the entrance to the underground car park and pulled up in the street. Going down to the underground car park was safer but buzzing up to Danny would give him advance warning that she was coming up. If he had the chance he’d hide anything incriminating, and they’d have to go through the embarrassing pretence of talking about his security firm and the problems of book keeping and managing men. He was on the cusp of legal, running a string of security firms that ring-fenced a territory and won the contracts in it through threats and sabotage. Anyone who didn’t use Danny’s firm would find their site subject to a spate of fires or assaults on staff until they capitulated. Danny had even made the papers once, a full page stop-this-evil-man. Ambushing him in the early morning was brutal, but at least it was honest.
She took a long breath and looked out at the street. Ahead of her the motorway was choking up with morning traffic. Behind, the road running along by the river was getting busy too, but this street was broad and empty. Bad place to park, she knew. Exactly the sort of spot cars got stolen from.
This used to be the dockside, wild sailors’ bars and flop houses, huge warehouses full of goods from all over the world, waiting to be lifted by light-fingered dockers. No longer. For decades the riverside had been an empty series of sheds until it was cleared to become an industrial estate: carpet warehouses and furniture sheds struggled there for a while until recently, when the housing boom cleared them away to make room for luxury riverside apartments. Twelve storeys of plasterboard and gimmicks, wet rooms, wall-mounted coffee makers, all with verandas looking over the water to one of the most deprived boroughs in Scotland. House buyers had camped overnight for the privilege of buying the first phase of the development. The market changed so quickly the builders could hardly give away the final phase.
Weak with tiredness Morrow climbed out of the car, pulling her coat closed against the wind coming off the river, and opened the boot. The presentation bottle of single malt had been in there for two weeks. She picked it up, cradling it like a puppy under one arm, locked the car and went around to the front entrance. Dan’s buzzer: 12.1.
‘What?’
‘Danny, it’s me.’
She sensed him hesitate, then the entrance door clicked and hummed and she pushed it open. The clip-clop of her modest heels ricocheted off the stone floor as she walked over to the steel lifts and pressed the button. Plastic plants were placed on either side of the doorway, improbably green palms that were dusty, cigarette butts scattered around the gravel at their feet. Canvases were screwed tight to the
wall: slashes of green and red.
The lift came to a stop in front of her, the doors opened and two hoodies and a business woman in a trouser suit stepped out, the hoodies shifty and smirking, the woman newly coiffed for the day, looking alarmed.
Morrow stepped back to let them pass, got in and pressed the button for the twelfth floor. The button lit up pink but still she stared at it, wondering. Because it opened straight into the flat the button for the penthouse suite only worked if a key was used or someone in the flat pressed a button to allow it. She always wondered if Danny would refuse her, not because he ever had, but just because he could. The doors slid shut, the metal box giving a little jolt downwards before setting off for the roof. Her stomach tightened at the thought of seeing him.
Softly, the lift came to a standstill and the doors slid open into the bright daylight. Crystyl was standing fifteen feet away in full make-up, blonde hair brushed down her back, wearing skinny jeans over four inch heels, a pink sequinned T-shirt stretched tight over the tennis balls she’d paid someone to surgically implant on her chest. Disconcerted at the sight of Morrow glaring out at her, Crystyl raised her hand to her waist and gave her a little wave, whispering her hellos in a child’s breathy voice.
Morrow stepped out onto the stone floor. ‘Right, Crystyl?’
‘Aye, brilliant, how are ye, yourself?’
Even though Alex forced social pleasantries out of her mouth she knew her face twisted with annoyance when she spoke to Crystyl. It wasn’t Crystyl herself so much as the type: glam, fluffy, sentimental, but underneath the glitter nail varnish she was hard enough to live off a man who broke legs in the course of his business. Crystyl pretended she didn’t know, that the business existed in some parallel universe, but she used notes greasy with grief and sweat and terror to buy thoughtful greetings cards and angel key rings. Alex wanted to slap the woman and tell her to get a fucking job.
‘Yeah. Dan about?’
‘Be down in a wee tiny minute.’ Crystyl giggled at this, a nervous titter that sounded like a high heel grinding glass into a dirty pavement. ‘Um, could ye go a coffee at all?’
On the basis that they could either stand here and try to talk to each other, or busy themselves with the rigmarole of making a drink, Alex nodded and followed Crystyl through the living room, heading for the kitchen.
The living space in the flat was gorgeous: warm yellow sandstone two storeys high with a wall of glass looking down the river towards the Irish sea. A big L-shaped sofa faced the view. Throughout the flat all the fittings were either yellow or stone, all the furniture show-flat tasteful, included in the price. Alex had been in Crystyl’s own flat years ago, when she and Danny first got together. Decorated exclusively in pink it felt vaguely obscene to Alex, like walking into an instructive model of a vagina.
Crystyl led her across the living room and into the kitchen. The lowered ceiling had dazzling halogen lights punched into it. Glassy black granite worktops shone around the room meeting at a massive double-door fridge with a wooden pediment built over it, like a mausoleum to food.
‘I’ll make ye a real coffee, in the coffee machine. I love real coffee. Do you like it?’
Alex shrugged.
Running out of things to say about coffee Crystyl hummed tunelessly to fill the awful, prickly quiet. Silence was the most basic interview technique; Alex knew most normal, innocent people would try to fill the conversational void. Glaswegians would give up their own mother rather than sit quietly with a stranger. She didn’t want Crystyl to talk but couldn’t think of anything to say herself.
Crystyl went to a cupboard and took out an unopened silver tin of Illy coffee, took the plastic lid off and peeled back the metal, looking into the tin, bewildered. ‘Oh,’ she said.
‘What?’
‘It’s wrong,’ said Crystyl.
Alex went over and looked in. Beans. ‘Can’t you grind them up?’
She looked at the food processor. ‘In that?’
‘Haven’t you got a coffee grinder?’
Crystyl looked at the wall-mounted coffee maker. ‘Is there one on that?’
It had a button for pushing warm water through coffee grinds and a nozzle for frothing milk. Crystyl pressed buttons, trying to decipher the symbols. Getting nervous she opened a small door in the machine and took out the water tub, yellowed because it had never been used. ‘Do the beans go in here?’
As Alex watched Crystyl a burst of compassion for the silly woman came from nowhere. ‘Look, never mind coffee, I’ll have a cup of tea if you’re having one.’
‘But I’m not.’ Crystyl looked up, over Alex’s shoulder and her face brightened. ‘Hi, darlin’.’
Alex hadn’t heard Danny coming in. He had his jacket on already and was pointedly twirling his car keys around his index finger. The jacket was down-quilted for warmth and bulked him up, made him look as if he’d spent a two stretch lifting weights in prison. His shaved head and the long scar on his cheek didn’t contradict the impression.
‘What you doing here?’ he said, trying not to smile.
‘Visiting,’ she replied, chewing her cheek so that she didn’t either.
‘At seven thirty in the morning?’
‘I’m on nights, on my way home. Wanted to see you before ye set off for the day.’
He pursed his mouth. ‘Easy to miss each other.’
‘It is.’ They nodded away from each other, both wishing in their separate ways that this was easier.
‘Baby?’ he asked.
‘Not recently,’ she answered quickly, making a joke to deflect the question. She reminded herself to breathe in. They smiled away from each other. ‘Nah, he’s fine. Good. Brought ye this.’
She set the bottle of single malt on the kitchen counter and he sniggered at it, touching the lid lightly with a finger. ‘Thoughtful.’
Confused, Crystyl looked from one to the other. Danny didn’t drink.
Alex smiled away from him. ‘I’m always that. Happy birthday, Danny.’
‘I missed yours.’
‘Don’t care,’ she said honestly.
Crystyl gasped and brushed past Alex to Danny’s side, wrapping her arms around his middle and pressing her tits into his side. She gave him a weak mock punch. ‘Your wee sister’s birthday! What a bastard - pardon my French - you’re a bad bastard, Danny.’ She smiled. ‘Total.’
Danny straightened his face. ‘Right, doll,’ he said, wrapping a hand around Crystyl’s tiny waist and giving her a squeeze. ‘I’m off then, I’ll get Alex here downstairs,’ and to Alex, ‘did ye park on the street?’
‘Aye.’
He understood why and it hurt him a little, she could tell.
Crystyl trotted out to the lift door on her tiptoes, ponytail swishing ahead as they followed her. She stopped in the same place she had been in when Alex had arrived, and let them pass her. She must think she was well lit there, that whoever was looking out from the lift would get the best view of her from this angle and would perhaps remember her fondly while he was shutting a car door on someone’s fingers during the day.
‘Bye, da’lin’.’ She blew a kiss.
Seeming rather tired Danny raised his hand to catch it in his fist. The doors shut.
Mirrors on all four walls threw their reflections back at them: both tall, blonde, both thirty-four, both with their father’s baby dimpled cheeks. They looked sweet on both of them now, babyish, but they knew from their father that ageing dimples sagged into gashes. Their father looked as if he’d been in a fight with a knifeman plagued by a need for symmetry. Apart from that they didn’t look alike: Alex took after her mother’s side for eyes and chin, and Danny had his own mother’s mouth, tight, mean.
Three months between them. Their father was a charmer in his day, and had all of his many families concurrently. Alex’s mother was naive and loved him with a passion that congealed when the baby arrived. Danny’s mother was younger but already inured to disappointment. Danny didn’t grow up with shame and an
ger, just in a household governed by a series of bad men and drink.
Alex and Danny met on their first day at school. They looked like twins, everyone said so, it was an innocent joke. They were sweethearts for their first term of school but it all ended abruptly when their mothers met at the gates. The most vivid memory of Alex’s early life was walking home through a park, blood dripping from her sobbing mother’s mouth onto the grey path. She’d ripped her blouse in the fight and everyone could see her bra strap.
People didn’t move schools in those days. Danny and Alex went all the way through primary school together, and secondary. And all the time there was the ever present threat of their mothers fighting, of the other boot falling.
She was glad when Danny’s mum died of the drink in second year and no doubt he was glad when they were sixteen and hers died, but she never knew: he was long gone from school by then.
She was lucky never to have had the McGrath name, she realised later. Her mother always wanted it for her but her father wouldn’t admit she was his. Somehow that mattered then. If she’d had his name the police admissions board might have worked out where she was from, who she belonged to and not let her into the force.
Neither spoke until they were three floors down.
‘I came to ask ye about someone,’ said Alex, taking out her mobile. She flicked through the pictures until she reached the photo she had taken in the road the night before. Standing behind police tape was Omar Anwar, as clear as she could get him, smoking and looking sorry. She showed it to Danny, ‘Know him?’
Danny narrowed his eyes. ‘Nut,’ and handed her back the phone. ‘Seen anyone?’
‘No.’
‘Lan Gallagher go’ married last month.’
Morrow smiled. ‘Who in the name of God’d marry her?’
‘Well, ye know,’ he shrugged, ‘for every ugly there’s a bugly.’
She smiled. Charm that sagged into gashes. That’s how the McGrath men got you.
Before the doors were open properly Danny nipped through them, stepped quickly across the lobby and through a side door marked ‘car park’. Alex went after him.