by Denise Mina
But the worst of it for Morrow was that she had clearly not been positioned like that: her feet were uneven. Sarah Erroll had dropped there, died there and had been left. The killer had not looked at her, thought how to demean her and set her in a way that was undignified. They had left her there carelessly. Her vulnerability was unbearable. Morrow understood the distancing joke about her legs now: it was only a matter of time before the officers came to despise Sarah Erroll, as if she had chosen to be found like this, because the reality of it was too pitiful.
She stepped over, took a breath and tried to look at the injuries but she found herself examining the banister: delicate struts, deep warm wood. SOCOs were taking fibers from the dried pools of blood on the stairs, white-suited, their little boxes of kit, white plastic vanity cases, littering the steps.
Morrow tried again but her eye would not stay where she put it. It skitted off the face to the window high above the stairs, to a painting of a greyhound hung on the wall, to a bloody footprint on the stair next to her.
It was natural, she knew that: the need for order in a face. When injuries were this catastrophic there was nothing to anchor the gaze, no starting point for the human map. It took an act of will to force your eyes over it, a cold determination to orientate yourself.
She remembered a scene-of-crime photograph from a helicopter crash on a hillside on the Western Isles. The front of the chopper had been cut off so the pilot’s body was clear and crisp in the picture when it was projected onto the cinema screen in the dark room in Tulliallan Police College. He was sitting upright, his right hand still resting easily on the throttle. She remembered the confusion she felt looking at that face: red but not bloody, no eyes, no lips but the teeth were there, a strangely shortened nose. She remembered the feeling of disorientation as her eyes slid around the picture until she suddenly saw Munch’s The Scream hanging down at the pilot’s side like a deflated balloon. His face had been sliced off by the rotor blades.
Morrow took a breath and forced herself to look at the red pulp at her feet, made her eyes stay out of respect for the woman, to set an example. The lobe of one of her ears had become detached and nestled under the shoulder, a fleshy comma, speckled pink.
It was easier to look at photographs back at the station, often more effective for finding patterns or traces, but the officers in the hall would see her looking closely at the woman, tell each other and it would set the tone. No nonsense, no hysterics, look straight at it and say what you see.
The effort of looking made her breathing shallow, her heart rate slow and the blood drain from her extremities. She was standing so still that the twins in her belly mistook horror for sleep and performed sinister somersaults around each other.
She was looking at a blunt-trauma split in the skin, feeling the babies dance a slow sensuous ballet in honor of the mess, when the flesh pulsed suddenly and Morrow lurched back, thinking the thing alive.
She looked up. A SOCO ghost stood at the top of the stairs, face obscured, eyes guilty. A door had been opened on the first landing and the light had shifted on the body.
It began as a nervous titter. Someone in the hall laughed and she looked around. Suddenly everyone in the hall was laughing, embarrassed in the circumstance, and the laughter became relief, a normalizing expressing of shock and disgust, puffed out in great hearty gusts, echoing around the hall and snaking up the stairs, punching through the oppressive silence in the old house.
Morrow tutted. “Calm down, for God’s sake. As if you’ve never seen a bit of pudding before.”
SIX
Thomas was watching a wasp die on the window ledge when Goering came for him. The sun burned hot through the windows, a shaft of yellow like a pathway to heaven, lying low over the long lawn in front of the old house, burning in through the glass that gravity had warped and two hundred years had tinged yellow. The wasp was struggling to get onto its stomach, antennae writhing, the little comma body contracting, the essential shape of it the trap that killed it.
End of the wasp season.
They all died, it was natural. At this time of year, when the rain set in and their time had come, the wasps found their way into every room at the front of the old mansion house, through rotting window frames, burrowing under stones and through vents, making their way inside to die.
He watched the insect struggle and wondered whether they knew death was coming. Maybe they understood its inevitability and chose not to drown, but to curl up in the dry. Or maybe evolution afforded them the luxury of self-delusion, that they genuinely thought they could escape in here.
He watched the wasp contract like a small child over a tummy ache, curl up tight, still struggling, hoping for a future. Thomas wanted to get up and step over and use a ruler to flip it onto its side, give it another minute or so of delusion, a final sense of triumph before it died. But Beany was invigilating library time, his skinny limbs dangling from his long thin body, making sure their faces were pointed at the page they were supposed to be reading. That’s as much as they could control you. Make you point your face at the front of the chapel, at the book, at the massive angry boy thundering towards you down the rugby pitch. But they couldn’t control what you thought about it. Not unless you told someone else and they reported you.
Beany, thirty-something but still boyish, willowed between the tables in the library. He nodded at favorites, flicked fingers at the inattentive, making them pretend to read the books they had chosen. Library time. It said in the prospectus that it built a lifelong thirst for self-education. Lack of staff. It used up a small portion of the endless study time they had. They only let them watch TV once a week and then it was in a giant hall with a hundred other boys and the TV tuned to such a fucking weak program that no one wanted to see it, X Factor or some shit.
Thomas liked this room. The library was in what would once have been the drawing room of the house. The ceiling was so high that the seven-foot-tall bookcases hardly made it halfway up the walls. Two enormous sash windows looked out over the lawn towards the trickle of a burn and the rolling Perthshire hills. A big vista. He liked to imagine he owned this house, that this was his drawing room, that everyone else would fuck off and he could do the cornicing justice, fix the windows and be alone.
It was pseudo Adams. The cornice plastering had been repainted during the summer, different colors picking out the grapes and leaves. It was just like the estate’s management to get it so wrong: the grapes were green and the leaves coiling around them yellow. Thomas imagined that they’d made a mistake at the beginning, started with the grapes and only realized their mistake when the pot of yellow came out. No one else seemed to have noticed.
The room was quiet, apart from the shuffle and fidget of boys, jumpers being pulled off, discreet sniffs. Pages fiddled with. Beany whispered “stop that” and everyone looked up to see Donald McDonald grinning. He’d been cleaning his nails on the edge of the pages again.
Abruptly, the big black door to the drawing room opened, not quietly, not creepingly careful, anxious not to interrupt, the way the library door was usually opened, but flung open so it bounced on its hinges. Hermann Goering caught the back bounce with the flat of his hand, intimidating the door to a dead stop. He filled the doorway. Everything about Goering was big and square, from his giant rugby shoulders to his oddly geometric head. Adamant black eyes scanned the room, stopping on Thomas.
“Anderson,” he said and stepped back, staring straight at Thomas, ordering him to come.
Thomas stopped breathing. He fumbled his jumper, balling it into his satchel, shoving it in so that the arms hung out like spaghetti over the edge of a pasta pot. He turned to his books but Goering spoke again, louder this time: “Leave it.”
“Yes, sir, Mr. Cooper.”
Thomas blushed, not because he was embarrassed, just in a sort of panic. People didn’t hate him the way they did some boys, though they had every reason to. It was because of his dad that three boys from their year had been forced to l
eave the school. Somehow, his old man being in the papers all the time had countered the shame of that, and he was a bit of a celebrity.
“Anderson.” His voice was more commanding this time and Thomas jumped.
They called him Goering because he was Doyle’s number two. Goering did nothing himself. Goering was here to take him to Doyle’s office.
Realizing he was blushing, that he was being watched and looked a fool, Thomas stood up tall, looked around at his classmates and felt furious with them. Fuck them, he thought, they’d fucking hear about him and he didn’t care. It was between his father and him, not them. He didn’t even tuck his shirt in. He dropped the bag messily on its side, letting the books and folders tumble out, walked over to Goering without catching Beany’s eye or asking. He just went.
Nosy, desperate to know, Beany followed him out but Goering cut him off at the door. “No,” he said firmly. “Just Anderson.” And then gracefully dipping a meaty knee, he swept the door shut between Thomas and his classmates, listening for the big brass mechanism to click shut before standing and looking Thomas in the eye.
Until recently Thomas would not have thought that Goering knew him by name. All of the staff probably knew him by now. Probably read the papers out loud to one another in the staffroom, savoring the misfortune of the pupils.
“Thomas, Mr. Doyle would like to see you in his office.”
Would like to. Not Move. Not Get. Thomas couldn’t work out what it meant. Goering acting respectful was so unfamiliar he felt sure it was very, very bad. They’d found the car. They were angry. He and Squeak were being sent away.
The library door led into the central hall, an oval balcony above, roofed by a matching glass oval. It was freezing. Below, at the bottom of the stone steps, was the drafty front door, and the large double doors on either side of the hall channeled cold but still Thomas was sweating. He clenched his fists, telling himself he would unclench them when they went numb and that was something to think about, a different thing to think about other than how much trouble he was in and what old man Doyle’s face would look like when he stepped into the office and who would be with him. Squeak, probably, and police officers. His mother. Not Nanny Mary. Please God, not Mary.
Cooper pointed at Thomas’s belly and half smiled. “You’d better tuck your shirt in. Don’t want to get into trouble.”
For a moment Thomas stared at him, flummoxed. He managed to unclench his hand and tuck the shirt front into his trousers, tucking the end of his tie in too. It was a style they had, a mark of defiance, untucked at the front, tie worn low, but Goering was telling him kindly to fix it instead of giving him a talk about civic responsibility and setting an example for the younger boys. He was being uncharacteristically kind, trying to soften his face, attempting a smile. It was eerie.
Before Thomas had a chance to look up and read his face again Goering had turned his back and was leading the way through the network of drafts to the chapel corridor that led to Doyle’s office.
Thomas followed him, aware of his silly slouching walk that the other boys teased him about. Imagining himself seen by Doyle, he was aware of every error on his person, every problematic aspect of his appearance and manner.
They moved from the freezing hall, through a side hall, past the infirmary and the music room, passing into the mouth of the chapel corridor, a quiet area of dull lighting where talking and running were strictly forbidden. The corridor was long and windowless and smelled of stale benediction incense. The only door off it led to a choir balcony above the chapel, rarely used in case idiot boys threw each other off, saved for visiting parents on holy days of obligation.
Cooper’s footfalls were quiet, regular. Thomas’s leather soles shuffled and skipped to keep up. At the far end, through a double door set in an arch, stood Doyle’s office door.
Goering knocked, heard a call and opened it in time for Thomas to arrive and be swept straight onto the nylon carpet. He hesitated, surprised to find himself in the office with no one but Doyle there. Doyle stood up to meet him. He had an impenetrable expression on his face: annoyance or distaste.
“Sit down please, Mr. Anderson.”
Hypervigilant, watching for clues, Thomas sat down in the uncomfortably overstuffed chair. He was alarmed to find Doyle step out from behind his desk and come around behind, lowering himself into the chair next to him. Doyle was wiry, slim, hangdog face. Goering stood behind the desk, not sitting down, hands clasped behind his back.
Doyle leaned forward and softened his voice. Thomas heard him as if through a tunnel: something has happened. Athome. Andyourmotheraskedustotellyouaboutitourselves. Sosorry. Deadisyourfather. Hanging. Verysadsuiciding. Areyouallright. Thomasareyouallright?
But Thomas was stuck behind a gathering bzzbzz in his ears and eyes, a dulling of the lights as his lids lowered to shut out the room. End of the wasp season. Burrowing in out of the cold and the rain, their death callously witnessed by bored schoolboys. Boys watching as wasps thrashed and died.
Hanging. A hanging. A sudden bolt of empathy shocked him awake, imagining his father’s body in the garage and how cold it would have been. “Is he dead?”
They looked at each other, Mr. Doyle and Hermann Goering.
Mr. Doyle said, “I’m afraid he is.”
Thomas nodded over and over; so much it was as if he was confirming what Doyle had said: yes, you are correct, yes, yes, very correct. He couldn’t seem to stop his head bobbing and he looked at the desk jumping in front of him, at the oak legs and the blotter and the pens in the school pen holder and the telephone. “She could have phoned…?”
“Your mother?” asked Doyle.
Thomas didn’t answer.
“Your mother thought it might be better coming from someone who was actually here, rather than on the phone, from her, at home…” He had that voice on, the one that told the boys not to mess with him or question him and just shut up or someone would be in trouble. She was wrong to do that, they all knew it was shoddy of her, but staff weren’t allowed to speak against a parent. That was the whole point of the school, to do the parenting duties she couldn’t be fucking bothered with.
“’S…he’s dead?”
“We had to tell you before you set off for home because the newspapers have got it and they’ll be reporting it from this evening. Your mother is sending your father’s airplane—”
“Which?”
Doyle was not used to being interrupted. “Which what?”
But Thomas was so angry he couldn’t stop himself. “Which plane? It’s the Piper, isn’t it?”
Goering stepped in. “We don’t know which of your father’s planes she’s sending for you but it will be at the airstrip in an hour. We’d like you to go to your room and pack a bag.”
Weedy tears stung his eyes, spite-drizzle down his face. “It’s the Piper. She’s sent the Piper.”
“Thomas.” Goering had run out of sympathy and it told in the sharpness of his voice. “It doesn’t matter which plane she’s sent—”
Abruptly, Thomas slapped the wet off his face. He stood up and looked at the two men.
“My father came here,” he said, looking down at them, not saying what he meant: when my father came here there were religious brothers running this school, monks ran this school, not just fucking teachers who couldn’t get another job or work in industry actually making things and doing things. “You’re teachers.” And my father paid for the fucking extension to the sixth-form halls and the computer lab and you couldn’t do that because you’re just fucking teachers, so don’t look down on me as a sad, lost fucking kid whose own fucking mother won’t bother phoning and she’s sending the fucking Piper. “Ella?”
“Your sister, Ella?” Doyle stood up to meet him.
“Ella? Does she know?”
“I believe that Ella is on her way home now too.”
“In the ATR-42,” said Thomas. “I believe she is on her way home in the ATR-42.”
Doyle reached across and di
d something Thomas had never seen him do. He touched a boy, placed his hand on Thomas’s shoulder. It felt warm, the heat prickling his skin. It felt threatening. Thomas expected Doyle to push him down and touch him and humiliate him. He flinched, shuddering out from under the hand. He looked at Doyle. The man had a kind, sad look on his face, seemed perplexed at Thomas pulling away.
“Sorry.” Thomas’d got it wrong again. He didn’t trust himself suddenly. “Sorry. Sorry.”
“Don’t worry,” said Doyle, dropping his hand to his side.
Thomas lost himself in the carpet. He had tried to get his dad to look at him, to see him, but Lars rarely made eye contact. He had to look at the company prospectus to see his eyes. His father only spoke to him when they were standing up, looked over the top of Thomas’s head and made pronouncements, not conversation: You are stupid; Business is a battle; Spread your bets; Never show weakness. Thomas had tried to get to him, past his mother and over Ella, through Mary, but nothing worked. Nothing. “When…did he die?”
“Your father?”
“Today?”
“Yesterday. At lunchtime.”
Yesterday at lunchtime, when Thomas was in the refectory eating spongy white bread saturated with golden syrup, when Thomas was drinking a pint of brown tea and looking over the rim to Squeak, holding his eye too long so that he knew to come to his room after lunch. He asked Squeak because he had a car. He thought he knew Squeak but he didn’t. They had soup with carrots in. Stock cube clumps at the bottom of the serving dish.
“Mr. Cooper will take you to your room and help you pack.”
Thomas stood straight and remembered himself. “Thank you. Both. For telling me. It cannot have been easy for you.”
They liked that a lot, not so much that he had remembered his manners in such a fraught moment but that he was making it easier for them. Doyle smiled kindly. Goering nodded and pressed his lips together tight, sympathetic. They stood for a moment in the stillness, the clock on the wall ticking softly, counting down their allotted seconds on earth, and then Doyle shifted his weight. He moved towards the door and Thomas turned with him. Doyle stopped in front of him.