by Denise Mina
She pulled back the covers on her bed and took off her dressing gown, folding it carefully in half, laying it along the bottom of her bed.
‘Goodnight, dear.’ She kissed her own hand and touched his cheek with her fingertips to save her bending down. ‘Goodnight, my dear.’
He waited until she was well tucked in, then pulled the string above his head to turn off the light. A cosy blue settled on the room, broken only by the puddle of yellow light from the hall. In unison they took off their spectacles, folded them and set them, side by side, on the night stand. Rachel was propped up on pillows, having been told to sleep sitting up as much as possible to let the fluid settle at the bottom of her lungs where it would take up less surface area. She folded her hands in front of her over the coverlet. ‘Busy night?’
‘Aye, a good night.’
‘Good takings?’
‘Six thousand, give or take.’
‘Same as last Friday?’
‘Aye, that’s right,’ he said, and she could hear him smiling. ‘About the same.’
She smiled too, reaching across for his bed but finding only air and patting that instead. ‘Well done.’
They settled back, listening to each other’s breathing, Rachel rasping a little sometimes but mostly even, Abraham taking long, deep breaths to set an example. They slept little now but liked to be in bed listening to each other, without the necessity of speech or the need always to be doing things. They lay for forty minutes together in the soft blue gloom. Once, Rachel reached out and patted the air again, moved by some tender memory.
A sudden loud snap just outside the bedroom door made Rachel turn her head sharply.
They both watched as a black shadow fell across the pool of light from the hall and suddenly the door was thrown open, smashing off the bedroom wall. Two figures, maybe three, came running in. One held a blanket high and flew at Abraham, covering the old man’s head with it. The other stepped on Abraham’s bed and swung himself across the room, making for Rachel.
He grabbed both Rachel’s wrists, wrenching her off the bed and onto the floor on the far side, kneeling on her operation scar, making her cry out with the pain. He let his weight settle on her chest. Retracting his arm at the elbow he shot his fist forward and punched her on the jaw. He could see her in the light from the hall, her toothless mouth, her thinning hair and wiry neck. He punched her again, on the cheek, on the neck, on the jaw again.
Abraham heard his wife from under the blanket and used all of his one-hundred-and-ten-pound frame to wrestle the man who was holding him. He heard the man’s short breaths, sensed his surprise. He had strong fingers from doing the count every night and found the man’s arm, sticking his fingers into the soft armpit, squeezing hard. The man shouted.
‘Get this cunt off me, Pat!’
He was from Glasgow, Southside, Gorbals possibly, where Rachel and Abraham both grew up.
Suddenly Rachel breathed normally again and Abraham stopped struggling. He hadn’t managed to shake off the blanket and sat still, holding the man’s oxter, listening keenly, wondering what the new swishing noise was. An iron bar swung through the air and made contact with his back, with his legs, his arms, his back again.
They took everything: the money, travellers’ cheques, what little jewellery there was and Rachel’s watch, pulled off her arm as she lay bleeding and crying. When it was all done they tied them up, Abraham black and blue under his blanket, his whimpering wife next to him. He lay under the blanket trying to remember things about the men. They were both Glaswegian, one called Jim or Jimmy, one called Pat; one was big and stocky, the other thin.
The men decided not to leave until the sun came up so as not to raise suspicion. Settling down in the living room, they drank the last of a bottle of fifteen-year-old Glenmorangie Abraham had been keeping for best.
Left alone in the bedroom, Abraham tried to free himself but couldn’t.
‘Don’t.’ Rachel was struggling to stay awake. ‘Please. Stay still. They’ll hit us.’
So Abraham stayed still for his wife. He stayed still and listened to her dry breath rattle around the room they had shared for thirty years.
Eventually a watery white light began to seep through the blanket.
‘Is it getting light?’ he asked, but Rachel didn’t answer. The men were there again, in the room, walking over to them. Abraham flinched away but they weren’t there to hit him. They tied more ropes around them, tightening the ones already on the couple. They were standing up to leave when Rachel spoke again.
‘Please,’ she said, her breath shallow, ‘send an ambulance for me. Please.’
They didn’t answer. They walked to the door.
She called again. ‘Please send an ambulance—’
‘Shut up, shut up. We’ll send an ambulance. All right?’ The door slammed behind them and they were gone.
III
Meehan and Griffiths were outside Kilmarnock on the deserted road to Glasgow, doing eighty and singing a dirty song about the different coloured hairs on a whore’s cunt, both pleased that they hadn’t taken the risk of robbing the office, when they passed a crying girl in a mini skirt and shiny white boots.
‘Stop!’ shouted Meehan. ‘Slow down.’ Griffiths sat upright suddenly, looking around for cop cars.
‘Did you see her?’ Meehan thumbed behind them. ‘There was a girl crying back there.’
Griffiths slowed the car and pulled over, squinting into his rearview mirror. He threw the car into reverse and careered backwards towards her.
Irene Burns didn’t have the legs for a mini skirt. She had calves like a navvy but a big chest, and to Meehan’s and Griffiths’ eyes that balanced her out a bit. She had a drink in her but was only sixteen and wasn’t used to it. She was sobbing so hard she could barely explain what had happened. She had been hitchhiking with her pal Isobel when two men offered them a lift home. They got into a white car, an Anglia, and one of the men got out a half bottle of whisky. They were driving along and Isobel started winching one man but Irene didn’t fancy hers, wouldn’t let him touch her, so the men got annoyed, stopped at the side of the road and put her out. Now Isobel was all alone in a car with two strange men, Irene was ten miles from home, drunk for the first time in her life, and she didn’t know what she was going to tell Isobel’s mother.
Meehan reached into the back of the Triumph and opened the passenger door. ‘You get in, pet,’ he said. ‘If anyone can catch that car it’s this man.’
Griffiths grinned out at her. He was missing quite a lot of teeth and it made her smile a little. He gave her a salute and called ‘hello there’ in a silly voice, like Eccles from The Goon Show. Irene climbed in the back, feeling better already.
Before he became a thief Griffiths was a racer, and he was a talented driver. Within five minutes they saw the white Anglia in front of them on the road. It was going slow, doing about thirty, weaving back and forth across the road. Griffiths slowed and pulled up, keeping shoulder to shoulder. The other driver was a young country boy spruced up for a night out. In the back of the car a girl with a mashed-up beehive was necking another guy.
‘Isobel!’ squealed Irene. ‘That’s her! That’s her with him.’
The driver looked over at them and Meehan gestured to him to pull over to the side. He saw the country boy hesitate, his eyes flickering from the road in front of him to their car, trying to work out who they were and why he should comply. Irene wound down her window and shouted for her friend but Isobel ignored the call and carried on kissing ferociously, her new friend’s hand lost in her candy-floss hair. The country boy slowed and pulled into the side. Griffiths had barely stopped the Triumph in front of it when Irene pulled open the passenger door and ran out, heaving open the Anglia door and tugging her friend out of the back seat and into the road. Isobel shook her off with a single bat of her hand. She was a big girl who didn’t loo
k like she would ever need saving. Below her mini skirt her tights had made a suspension bridge between her knees.
In the Triumph, Meehan sighed. ‘What d’ye reckon? Maybe we should just leave them.’
They watched for another minute. Isobel pulled up her tights by the waistband. Irene was howling again. She seemed to be having a drama of her own, as if she was in a completely separate movie.
‘They’re just wee girls, though,’ said Meehan, watching Isobel move in a way that made her big, fluid breasts tremble beneath her jersey.
Griffiths flashed him a cheeky smile. ‘Isobel’s game though, eh?’
Meehan’s face broke into a wonky smile. He cleared his throat and smeared his hair down. Exaggerating his hardman swagger, he got out of the Triumph and walked over to the driver’s window, cutting between the girls and the car and keeping his hand in his jacket pocket as if he had a blade.
‘These girls are too young to be out at this time. I’m taking them home.’
The country boys glanced at each other, dropping their shoulders.
Meehan leaned down, filling the open window. ‘Want to make something of it?’ The boys shook their heads.
Meehan gestured to the girls to get in the back of the Triumph. Isobel burped and pulled down her jersey as Irene, too drunk to realize that the danger was by, sobbed and dragged her towards the Triumph.
‘Right, guys,’ said Meehan, enjoying himself, playing it like an off-duty policeman, ‘back up and pull out.’ He slapped the roof of the car. ‘On your way.’
Far from fulfilling her promise as a jail-bait temptress, Isobel fell asleep as soon as she got into the car. She sat with her fat legs sprawled across the back seat, snoring vehemently. Irene sobbed with fright and drink all the way to Isobel’s and then on to her own house. Whenever she managed to stop crying, she told Meehan and Griffiths that they were awful good, dead kind, and the thought would start her crying again. She was irritating the life out of them.
The sun was halfway up in the sky and the milkmen were finishing their rounds by the time they arrived at a row of brown and white prefabs on the outskirts of Kilmarnock. The curtains were open in Irene’s living room, the lights on inside.
‘My ma’ll be frantic,’ she said, rubbing her swollen, itchy eyes. ‘She’ll be phoning the polis and everything.’
They made her get out quickly at that. Griffiths sped all the way back to Glasgow. They’d missed the meat market and skipped breakfast, parting slightly sick of each other, knowing they’d be pals again after a sleep and a feed.
IV
Mr and Mrs Ross lay on the floor for two more nights and two more days. They heard children playing in the street outside and cars rolling past their house. The telephone rang in the hall. A couple of dog walkers met on the pavement outside their bedroom window and chatted for a while. They lay on the floor until Monday morning at ten o’clock when their cleaner turned up for work as usual and used her own key to get in.
Rachel Ross sighed her last breath as the ambulance drew to a soft stop outside the hospital.
19
Heather’s Lucky Break
1981
I
Heather gathered the keys for her mother’s car from the hall table and tiptoed out of the house. Heavy rain masked the noise of the closing door and Heather’s feet crunching over the moat of gravel around the house. She swung her bag into the passenger seat, shut the door carefully and started the red Golf GTI, leaving the lights off until she had cleared the drive.
The country roads were quiet all the way into town and stayed quiet as she approached the city centre. It was just past midnight on a Friday night but the rain had chased everyone off the streets. Every third car was a cab. Even the buses had stopped. Going at full speed the windscreen wipers only managed to pull back the curtain of rain periodically, and sheets of water rippled down hills.
Waiting at a traffic light, Heather rummaged in her handbag on the seat next to her, feeling for her cigarettes.
The lights changed before she could take one out of the packet and she found herself on the green side of every light into town. It wasn’t until she reached Cowcaddens that she managed to put one in her mouth and press the lighter on the dashboard. She inhaled, and the smoke made her lungs feel dirty and clogged. On the way out it did the same to her teeth. It felt good.
The Pancake Place was straight across the road from a shuttered and padlocked side entrance to Central station. A big van was parked right in front of the doors so she parked a few spaces back and checked her make-up in the rearview mirror. Her lipstick was coming off in the middle where she had sucked her cigarette. She took the No. 17 Frosty Pink from her handbag, taking one last puff before touching up her lips. She opened the door, stepped out into the wet street, dropping the half-smoked cigarette into the wet to hiss to death, and ran into the café.
The Pancake Place menu was a testament to the versatility of the humble pancake: it was offered with everything, from a dollop of cheap jam to a pair of eggs and black pudding. Open until four a.m., the café had become a haven for late-night shift workers, students on their way home from the dancing and tired street prostitutes giving their feet a rest. The overwhelming impression of the decor was dark brown. Plastic timbers had been grafted into a suspended ceiling and fake oak partitions built between the tables. To add a touch of olde worlde authenticity, laminated menus were propped up in darkwood stands.
It was quiet, and Heather immediately spotted the man sitting at the back table reading a copy of yesterday’s Scottish Daily News, just as he had promised. He was younger than she had expected from his voice, but his hands looked too rough for the paper he was reading. He was dressed like a navvy, in a donkey jacket and a black Benny hat pulled down over his ears.
‘Hello,’ she said, trying to look unexcited and professional.
He seemed puzzled. He looked her up and down, taking in her expensive red overcoat and thick lipstick, and went back to reading his paper. ‘You called me?’ she said.
He looked up at her again, annoyed this time. ‘Do I know you?’
It was a different voice to the man on the phone, and Heather looked behind her to see if there was another man in a donkey jacket reading the Daily News. There wasn’t. She checked her watch. It was one in the morning. She was right on time.
‘I think …’ She looked at the empty seat across from him. ‘May I?’
‘May you what?’
‘May I sit down?’
He folded his paper shut and cleared his throat. ‘Gonnae leave me alone?’
‘Didn’t you phone me and ask me to come here?’
‘I never phoned ye.’
‘But someone phoned me.’
‘Well,’ he said, opening his paper again, ‘it wasn’t me that phoned ye.’ He glanced at her and saw how disappointed she was. ‘I’m very sorry.’
‘I was to look for a man in a donkey jacket reading the Daily News.’
‘I think someone’s playing a joke on ye. Sorry.’ Heather suddenly understood. It was one of those bastards at the Daily News, one of the morning-shift boys having a laugh at her expense. They’d be watching her. They’d be in here or across the road, laughing at her.
‘OK,’ she said, her voice cracking on the second syllable as the disappointment choked her. ‘Thank you.’
She backed off, glancing around the café, making sure there wasn’t someone else in the room who met the description. Two tarty women in high heels and evening wear were huddled together near the back; a stoned mod girl was sitting with two boys in leather jackets, each red-eyed and slow moving; an old, old man in an overcoat with tobacco-stained arthritic fingers. No-one looked back at her.
She stood inside the door looking out at the shitting rain, blinking hard and trying not to cry. She lifted a paper napkin from under the cutlery on the nearest table and wiped
the itchy lipstick off. There would be no London. She would never get a job up here either because the union had taken against her and those bastards never forgot a grudge.
They were inside, she guessed; someone in the café was watching her. She fumbled a cigarette from her packet and lit it, taking a deep, bitter drag. She felt fat tears welling up, uncontrollable, because she was tired and it was late at night and she’d set such hopes on coming here.
She opened the door and stepped out into the rain, pulling the car keys from her pocket, only vaguely aware of the figure following her out. The street was empty of parked cars but somehow the big van had backed up nearer to the Golf so that she would have to reverse first to get out. Cursing it, herself and every spiteful shit who worked at the Daily News, she turned sideways to slip between the van and the bonnet of the little red GTI.
The van door flew open, hitting her in the face, breaking her nose with a dull thunk. A large, rough hand fell over her face, covering it entirely, smearing what was left of her Frosty Pink lipstick over her chin. She heard him behind her, the man from the café. She heard him speak to the grabbing man, heard him object. Thinking him her saviour, she tried to turn to him but the hands in front of her grabbed her neck, lifting her by her throat into the back of the van.
Donkey Jacket hardly spoke above a whisper. ‘Wrong fucking bird, ya mug ye.’
II
When Heather came to she knew she was in the van and felt it moving fast, along a motorway or a good flat road. She was lying on her side, on a flat surface, with a towel that smelled of sour milk hooked over her head. She was missing a shoe and her hands were tied together with rope behind her back. Through the waves of shock and nausea she realized that her face was very swollen; the pain seemed to radiate out from the bridge of her nose, engulfing her eyes and cheeks and ears, almost meeting round the back of her head again. Whenever the driver hurried or slowed she drifted a little over to the side of the floor. Her nose was blocked with blood. She tried to blow it clean but it hurt too much. She could hear the faint sound of a radio coming from the front of the cab, a sound of voices, and poor, dead John Lennon’s ‘Imagine’ came on.