by Smith, Anna
Silence.
‘Before Katya.’ She flicked a glance at Rosie then stared into her wine glass.
The tears came again and she let them run down her cheeks.
*
Mari had been a final-year student of Eastern European Studies at Glasgow University. She almost blushed as she recalled how just about every female student in the faculty was a little bit in love with Tom Mahoney. One or two of the boys were, too, she smiled, as though she were back on the campus in her heyday. Mahoney was in his mid-forties and drop-dead gorgeous: more than that, he was a force of nature, a highly intelligent, passionate lecturer who could take a subject as dull as the Five-year Plans for the economy of the former Soviet Union and bring it to life so that his students hung on his every word, feeling as though they were living through it. He was also relaxed and witty, drinking in West End bars, where he was sought after by students and lecturers alike. Everyone knew he was married, but it was the early seventies and there was a new sense of freedom among the students and women everywhere felt empowered to be able to sleep with whoever they wanted without judgement being passed on them. There were always rumours that Mahoney had bedded a couple of his students, but that didn’t stop Mari from falling for him. She’d slept with him on three or four occasions, none of them planned, and no commitment ever made. Sex was what it was, and Mahoney was quite clear about that. Just before their fling, Mahoney had been on a sabbatical, teaching students in East Berlin for a year. When he returned he was bursting with enthusiasm and determined to make the USSR, its history and current situation more understood and accessible to his students. He took eight of them on what he called a field trip to East Berlin.
‘It was there,’ Mari said, ‘that I saw him with Katya. He introduced her to us as a cultural representative of the East Berlin Department of Education. So, you could take it for granted she was a member of Stasi, the secret police. All government officials were part of Stasi,’ Mari said, matter-of-factly.
‘Can you explain a bit more?’ Rosie asked.
‘At that time,’ Mari said, ‘in East Berlin, and in fact all over East Germany, there were about seven Stasi government spies for every single person in the country. Everyone was spying on each other and informing on each other. It was that kind of climate – even in places of work or in apartment blocks, there was always someone informing on their neighbours or workmates. So when this woman Katya was introduced as some kind of educational attaché, we kind of assumed she’d be a spy. The students joked about it during the few days we were there, because she stuck to us like glue.
‘But all the time we could see the little looks and secret glances between her and Tom. It was as if they shared something that none of the rest of us did, and we suspected it wasn’t just their love of all things in the USSR. We’d be taken to various areas within the education system and the workplace and given demonstrations of how hard the people worked and strived for their country, and Katya was at the forefront of that. But we could see there was more. Or I could. Maybe it’s because, by the time of the field trip, I’d been involved with him, so I was perhaps more sensitive. But to me they were lovers, and my heart sank every single day I saw her.’
‘But you knew Mahoney was married, surely? Did you really think more would come of the . . . er . . . situation you had with him?’ Rosie didn’t want to call it a fling, which is clearly what it was – for Mahoney, anyway.
‘Of course I knew he was married and we could never be more to each other than lovers. Look . . . I know it sounds stupid and naive, but I thought we had something special.’
Rosie didn’t want to say any more and make her feel worse.
Mari went on to tell her that the week passed with dinners, outings and lectures, visits to historical sites. But she’d sensed that the whole city was shrouded in secrecy and suspicion, and everywhere the people had a glum look of resignation. They’d kept on being shown buildings where industrial innovations were apparently taking place, but the truth was they were far behind everyone in the West. Except in gymnastics and some other sports.
Rosie had nodded, as if she knew all this. She didn’t want to admit that her knowledge of Eastern Europe didn’t go much deeper than what she had seen years ago on the vests of athletes of the GDR (German Democratic Republic) during the Olympics, and it had often been hard to distinguish the men from the women. She recalled shot-putters with arms like hams who walked like John Wayne, and how everyone had looked miserable, even when they won a gold medal.
‘So was that only time you went on a field trip like that?’
‘Yes. When we got back I was with Tom only one more night, and it was then that I asked him straight out about Katya. He was furious. He told me to mind my own business, that anything he did was nothing to do with me. He became completely indifferent to me after that. But I was in love with him. Long before anything ever happened between us he had made me feel like I was the only woman in the world. I never saw him after we left university, and hadn’t heard anything about him in years, because I moved away. But when I read about his murder in the newspaper it took the feet from me. I cried all day. It was like a part of my life – which I realize now was part of me growing up – like part of my life had been ripped away. He was such a big influence in so many people’s lives.’
Chapter Seven
Ruby came off the slip road for Glasgow Airport and drove to the car-rental place, where she dumped the car and quickly dealt with the paperwork. She’d booked it over the phone with a credit card in one of several aliases she’d used in recent years as she travelled the world hiding Rab Jackson’s money in offshore accounts from Jersey to the Cayman Islands. She had three different passports for that kind of travel, and two she kept for her own personal use. She couldn’t believe how easy it was to defraud her way around banks, hotels and airlines. Money opened every door – especially in banks, where the suits were only vaguely interested in where it came from, as long as you had stacks of it and were lodging it with them. She had safety-deposit boxes in banks from Amsterdam to Paris to Malaga, where she kept wedges of cash in sterling for her own use, just in case the shit ever hit the fan. Which it just had.
She crossed the car park to the taxi rank and headed for the city, asking the driver to drop her in Hyndland Road, close to where her flat was. Ruby had bought the two-bedroom flat in Dudley Drive three years ago, working on the basis that the West End wasn’t the kind of place you ran into the lowlifes employed by Jackson’s prodigy, Tony Devlin. The foot soldiers lived in the high-rise flats or the run-down council-housing schemes like Drumchapel or Possilpark or Maryhill, where they were handy for their smackhead customers queuing at the door morning, noon and night. Their dens were kitted out with slick TVs, stereos, all mod cons, their wardrobes bulging with designer clothes – all of it blagged from shoplifters and fraudsters. And they lived side by side with decent, ordinary families who busted a gut to try to keep their children out of the clutches of the drug dealers, gangsters and loan sharks who had most of the neighbourhood on the end of a debt that could never be repaid. The lieutenants, slightly higher up the food chain, would be holed up in some of the shiny new city-centre developments, either in the Merchant City or downtown, overlooking the River Clyde, bought by their bosses with laundered drug money and rented to them for next to nothing but on paper for several hundred a month. They were the guys who did anything they were told, organized shootings, beatings or slashings for unpaid drug debts. They’d be used to travel up and down to Manchester, Liverpool or London, making drops or picking up drugs in bulk. The chances of seeing any of this bunch in Dudley Drive, with its neat tenement flats side by side in uniform anonymity was minimal. You seldom saw your neighbours and nobody asked any questions. That was perfect for Ruby.
She walked briskly down the street and into the second-floor flat. It felt good to enter the broad hallway and go into the living room, with its old wooden floors and Rennie Mackintosh replica fireplace, and its big, solid b
ay window. This was the closest thing she’d ever had to a home since she was a kid. But there were no real signs of herself in it – except for one print of two small sun-burnished children on a beach somewhere in Ireland. She’d bought it years ago because it reminded her of happy days with Judy and her mother. She went into the kitchen and turned on the cold-water tap, let it run for a while, then took a glass out of the cupboard and drank it, enjoying the taste of the pure Scottish water she missed when living abroad. She filled the kettle and switched it on, then went down the hallway and into her bedroom. She sat on the king-size bed and opened the wardrobe doors, running her hand over the half a dozen blouses, tops and jackets on hangers. Seven or eight pairs of shoes. This was just about all she had. A wave of loneliness washed over her. Pick it up, she told herself. No more of that shit. She closed the wardrobe doors.
*
Ruby flopped on to the big sofa with her feet up on the coffee table and opened her laptop. She signed into one of her email addresses and it pinged with two new emails. She knew who it would be even before she opened it, and she cursed herself for ever giving her email to Tony Devlin. He’d have been bombarding her with messages on her regular email address – the one she used for business in Spain and the one most people had for her. But she should have kept her private one to herself. It was careless. She opened the email and read it:
Ruby – Where the fuck are you? You’re not answering your phone, or your normal email. Everyone is looking for you in Spain, but you’re obviously not there. Are you? This does not look good. I’m losing patience. I know you’re out there, so call me. Don’t make me come looking for you. Tony.
It had been sent at eight o’clock this morning, probably not long after Tony got word of Malky Cameron’s surprise barbecue. Ruby knew Tony would also have been calling her mobile within hours of her driving away from Rab Jackson’s villa, but she’d tossed both her phones into the sea near Marbella before driving north. She hadn’t checked her emails – she didn’t need to. She knew everyone would be trying to reach her.
She sat back, staring at the high ceiling, suddenly transfixed by a spider spreading its web further across the cornicing so that the whole side of the ceiling would end up as one big web, where it could lie in wait, knowing that once its prey got tangled up, there was no way out. It wasn’t much different from the web she’d just cut herself out of. The difference for her was that she’d walked into it six years ago with her eyes wide open, knowing that once she was in, there might be no way out. She pictured Tony’s face, fired up with barely contained anger, telling the arseholes he surrounded himself with that everything was under control now that he was in charge. She knew what a chillingly evil bastard he could be if anyone double-crossed him. She’d seen him shoot one of his men in the chest for trying to pull a stroke with a delivery of coke from London. It was brutal and ruthless, and he’d insisted Ruby remain in the room while he dealt with what he called ‘a bit of business’ with one of the lads who had fucked up. It was the first time she’d seen anyone executed, and she had to hold on to every scrap of her strength not to faint from the shock as the blood bubbled out of the guy’s chest when he shot him. The last thing she could show was weakness. Tony was Jackson’s prodigy. When they’d left the office that night he’d taken her to dinner, and he had talked as though nothing had happened. Afterwards they went to his flat, where he made love to her for the first time. That was a shock in itself – the sex had been tender, caring – no sign of the cold-blooded killer he’d been two hours earlier. Ruby had been expecting a hungry, wild encounter, bordering on brutal. And part of her – the dangerous, reckless side she had, which she knew would never allow her to be a normal person – had been looking forward to it. Instead, he’d kissed every part of her, gently asked her permission before he entered her, and afterwards held her for a long time as if she were a baby, while she stroked his back until he fell asleep. A complete psychopath, Ruby had thought as she lay awake, the rest of the night. She realized then her biggest mistake was to have gone anywhere outside of the business relationship she’d had with him. On the occasions they had met over the last three years on the Costa del Sol, she took care of Rab Jackson’s money – laundered it through businesses, investments, construction companies, as well as charities in UK and abroad.
Ruby looked up at the ceiling again. The spider had now spread its little empire right across to the other side. Her mind flashed back to the café at King’s Cross and the moment the gun was fired at the old guy’s head. She could still see his shocked expression as he slipped down the chair and onto the floor. And then the grief, panic and frustration of his friend. She felt sorry for them. Then she remembered the look on the sandy-haired guy’s face as he went into his pocket and passed a packet over to his friend. Those bastard Eastern Europeans hoodlums must have shot him for a reason. The newspapers had been full of speculation. But she had that piece of paper, with the name of some company or other on it. She fished it out of her handbag. J B Solutions. She keyed it into her laptop and hit the search key.
Half an hour later Ruby picked up the two newspapers she’d taken from the café in Judy’s care home. It had crossed her mind yesterday to make a call to the papers, just throw them a line about the company. But she’d worried they might end up tracking her down. What the fuck did she care anyway? Why bother? She could help the papers, but what would she get in return? She didn’t need the money. But maybe she could do something for the first time that wasn’t about her. All her grown-up life had been about survival. And once she’d tracked Judy down, she built everything around her sister, squirrelling away enough money to make her life better, dreaming that one day Judy would come back to her. Then, ultimately, her life was about retribution. But that was finished now.
She picked up the Sun and flicked through the story, then the Post. She found the news-desk phone number at the bottom of the back page and dialled it. She asked for Rosie Gilmour, the name of the journalist under the headline, but when she was put through it was a young man’s voice. She told him she needed to talk to Rosie regarding the murder of the university lecturer, and she could hear the voice perk up. Rosie would be in later, he said, but he could take the information. When he seemed reluctant to give out Rosie’s mobile number, she told him to forget it and he quickly reeled the number off. Ruby hung up then punched the numbers into her phone, in the impulsive, instinctive way she’d been doing things all her life.
‘Hello. Is that Rosie Gilmour?’
‘Who’s this? Your number didn’t come up.’
‘Never mind who it is. Am I talking to Rosie Gilmour?’
‘Yes, you are. What can I do for you?’
Ruby paused and took a breath. She wanted to ask what the fuck were they playing at, suggesting the woman who left the café was in any way involved with the men who did the shooting. Where was the fucking evidence? She tightened her stomach to restrain herself.
‘Hello? You still there?’
‘Yeah.’ Ruby cleared her throat. ‘Well, what you can do for me is stop saying in the paper that the mystery woman who left the café after that shooting at King’s Cross may be linked to the murder of that old university guy. Because it’s total shite.’
Silence.
‘Right. And how do you know this?’
Silence.
‘Because it was me.’
Silence.
‘You’re the woman who was in the café? Seriously?’
‘Why? Have you had a lot of women phoning you up and telling you they were in the café?’ She knew she sounded sarcastic.
‘Actually, no. But are you really that woman?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Can we meet?’
Silence.
‘I’ve got information you might want. About the men who did it.’
‘Listen. Can we meet? I don’t like doing things over the phone.’
‘J B Solutions,’ Ruby said. ‘If you’re smart, look into them.’
‘J
B Solutions? I’d really like to talk to you. No names, no pack drill.’
‘J B Solutions. Find them. Then maybe we can talk.’
‘I’ll make sure my newspaper doesn’t in any way relate you to the shootings in future articles. You have my word on that. But I’d really like to meet. Can I get your number?’
‘No. I’ll call you.’ Ruby hung up.
Chapter Eight
It was nearly midday by the time Rosie left the office and made her way up to the West End to doorstep Gerard Hawkins. She’d briefed McGuire about her talk with Mari, and he’d agreed with her that they wouldn’t write it as a story but would play their cards close to their chest. It was a fantastic snapshot into Mahoney’s life, and right now it was all they had to go on. Declan had dug up only a few old colleagues who’d said nothing other than that Mahoney was a brilliantly committed individual and a gifted teacher who would be sorely missed. Mari’s story had revealed a little of who he was, and if Mahoney had been involved with a woman in East Berlin, it opened up all sorts of possibilities.
McGuire was already excited about the murder of Malky Cameron in his garage last night. Declan had been dispatched to Ayrshire, where the police had set up an incident room in the village close to Cameron’s home. Rosie could catch up with that later, but right now her priority was Hawkins, and she steeled herself for a tough doorstep.
Hawkins lived a stone’s throw from Glasgow University, where he’d lectured for more than thirty years before retiring. The electoral register had him at his home address for the past twenty-three years. Rosie guessed he didn’t want to move too far from where his life was, to stay within sight of the spires and cloisters of the ancient university. The register also said he lived alone, and Declan’s background checks hadn’t thrown up a wife.
She climbed the steps to his front door, imagining some clichéd crusty old pipe-smoking lecturer in a tweed jacket with elbow patches sipping claret in a dimly lit, book-lined living room. She rang the doorbell and waited. Nothing. She glanced over her shoulder – no sign of other hacks – then she rang again. Still nothing. Automatically, she bent down and looked through the letterbox, hoping some old West End snob didn’t call the cops to say she was snooping. But, in this neck of the woods, you’d be more likely to be lynched for being from the tabloids than for breaking and entering. Rosie stood for a few moments then in her peripheral vision she caught sight of a curtain twitching on the bay window of the ground-floor flat. She waited, then heard movement in the hallway. The sound of bolts being clicked and slid back, and a key being turned. The door opened just enough for her to see the face behind the chain.