Exile

by Denise Mina

  The policeman paused. ‘Um, okay, let’s do that first. What happened?’

  ‘I’m running out of money here. Will you phone me back?’

  ‘Can’t you come—’

  The phone clicked and she was listening to the dialling tone. Maureen checked her watch. It was going on twenty to six and her throat was killing her. It shouldn’t be this fucking hard to dub someone up. She dialled 999. ‘Fire, police or ambulance?’

  ‘Police,’ she said, trying to make her strangled voice sound urgent.

  The operator told the police that Maureen was in a callbox and told them what the number was. ‘Hello, caller, what is the nature of the emergency?’

  ‘There’s a woman called Ann Harris, she’s being held in flat six three two in Argyle Street in Brixton Hill. I think they’re going to kill her.’

  ‘Who is going to kill her?’

  ‘Tam Parlain, Elizabeth, Heidi and Susan. She’s on the settee, they’re going to throw her in the river.’

  ‘What’s your name, caller?’

  ‘Please help her.’

  ‘Caller, I need your name.’

  ‘Marian Thatcher.’

  ‘And your address?’

  ‘Six three one Argyle Street off Brixton Hill. Tam Parlain’s going to get two of his pals, a fat guy and a guy called Andy, to come up and put her in the mattress and throw her in the river.’

  ‘Caller, your name isn’t coming up at the address you’ve given me.’

  Maureen hung up and backed out of the phone-box. Liam would be frantic. She stepped into the street and hailed a black cab. She had forgotten that the close-circuit camera was hovering high above the road, watching the street, keeping it clean.

  42

  Knutsford

  Maureen watched the slow traffic snake ahead of them on the motorway and saw the fare clocking up on the meter. The taxi driver’s eyes flickered towards her in his rear-view. He had tried speaking to her, managed to get as far as she was going to Glasgow because she lived there when Maureen’s throat began to hurt so much that the conversation ran out.

  ‘It’s bad traffic,’ he shouted, over the noise of his engine, his eyes smiling. ‘Getting worse all the time in London.’

  ‘Will ye get me there for seven thirty?’

  ‘I don’t know, darlin’. I’ll try. This time of day you can’t tell, being honest wiv ya.’

  She was going home and she was going to fight back before the last gasp. She patted her bag sitting next to her on the seat. She knew what she was going to do. She wasn’t afraid of Ruchill any more.

  The taxi drew into Terminal One at twenty past seven. Maureen gave the cabby sixty quid and bolted up the escalators, pushing past bewildered gangs of tourists standing with their luggage, her throat aching with every heavy step. She couldn’t see a sign but stumbled through an archway and found herself facing the BA check-in desk. A long, tired queue snaked around an elaborate maze of Tensabarriers. She skipped along it, glancing down the aisles, looking for Liam. He wasn’t there. She found the gate and had to queue to speak to the woman on the desk. ‘Listen,’ she said, rasping for breath, ‘my brother’s got my ticket for Glasgow and I think he’s in there. Can I go and see him?’ But the immaculately made-up woman couldn’t let her through without a ticket. ‘Sorry,’ she smiled. ‘For security reasons.’

  ‘Can’t you put a call out for him?’

  ‘Which plane was he on?’

  ‘The seven thirty.’

  ‘Well,’ she said, smiling slowly, ‘the seven thirty has just left. It’s taking off now, so I’m afraid you’ve missed him.’

  ‘Put out a call,’ said Maureen, close to tears. ‘Call him. He won’t have gone without me.’

  ‘I’m afraid you’ll have to go to the information desk to put a call out,’ she said, and pointed to a separate desk with its own queue.

  Maureen waited. A man in an expensive suit bought a ticket to Edinburgh using a credit card with a disputed limit He gave the dolly-bird behind the desk another card and she tried that one, swiping it with long pink fingernails. ‘Yes,’ she said, stretching her Peach Party lips across her peroxide teeth. ‘This one’s fine, sir.’

  They paused to smile at each other. Maureen lit a cigarette. ‘Excuse me,’ said the woman, standing up and reaching for her arm. ‘I’m very sorry but you can’t smoke here.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because it’s a no-smoking area. There are designated smoking areas.’ She pointed to the signs hanging from the ceiling.

  Maureen dropped her fag and stood on it, wishing she could fill her lungs just once more. The businessman was staring at her. ‘You going to leave that there, then, are you?’

  ‘Leave what?’

  ‘That cigarette end. Are you proposing to leave it on the floor?’

  ‘Aye,’ said Maureen, sounding as hard as she could, ‘I am.’ The businessman looked at the woman behind the desk and rolled his eyes. ‘Smokers,’ he said, and she stared at his credit card.

  Her hand hovered over the printer for a month as his ticket emerged. ‘There you are, sir,’ she smiled, ‘thank you very much.’

  ‘No,’ the man addressed her tits, ‘thank you very much.’ He picked up his briefcase and gave Maureen a dirty look before walking away.

  ‘Can I help you?’ said the woman, smiling hard at Maureen, employing the best of her training.

  ‘I want to buy a ticket for the next flight to Glasgow.’

  ‘I’m afraid that flight is boarding now.’

  ‘Well, the next one, then.’

  ‘That’s the last flight to Glasgow tonight, I’m afraid.’ She smiled, and Maureen knew she was enjoying it. ‘What about Edinburgh?’

  ‘No. I’ve just sold the last ticket on the last flight.’ A hot impotent tantrum shot up Maureen’s neck and she leaned her dirty face across the desk. ‘Fuck you,’ she said, chalking up another triumph for Glaswegian diplomacy.

  She walked downstairs, quivering with the craving for nicotine. She took the wrong lift and found herself at the Paddington Express station. She bought a ticket anyway, afraid that if she went back upstairs she’d get lost in the airport. The ticket cost a tenner. She was the only poor person on the platform. The tunnel was encased in sleek aluminium sheeting and the chairs were stark moulded pine. She tried to affect the look of an eccentric millionairess and cupped her hand over her throbbing red throat. An immaculate high-speed train pulled into the station and Maureen climbed on, sitting down just inside the door. As the train slipped from the station all of the passengers within a ten-foot radius were staring at her. It was only when they arrived in Paddington and she stood up to get off that she saw the flickering television above her head. She ran across the concourse, following the signs for the cab rank. She opened the door and threw in her bag. ‘Victoria coach station,’ she said.

  Despite having left it to a couple of hours before the bus left Maureen managed to queue in the smelly ticket office and book her return for that night. The bus station was far poorer than Glasgow’s. Desperate travellers from all over the country gathered in it with their poor luggage, waiting for the buses to take them away. Glass walls had been erected all over the coach station as well, part of either a fast-spreading fad in bus-station design or a nationwide push to lower the number of passenger-on-concourse deaths.

  Maureen used the phones to call Vik. She could hardly hear his answer-machine message because a very fat man sitting near the kiosk was listening to music on headphones and warbling along to Mariah Carey at the top of his voice. She shouted over the racket that she’d be in touch. She was coming home. She’d phone him when things were more settled. Definitely phone him. She’d keep his lighter for him and give it back when things were settled. She whispered that she was thinking about him, that she was going to make things right, but the background noise was so high she
doubted he’d hear it.

  It was ten minutes before the bus left and she finally managed to get Liam at home. ‘Mauri, I wasted over two hundred quid on that fucking ticket.’

  ‘I’ll pay it back, Liam, I’m sorry.’

  ‘I’m not made of money, ye know.’

  ‘I know, Liam, I’ll pay ye back.’

  ‘I’m a poor student.’

  She could tell that Liam had been rehearsing the fight all the way home. ‘I’ll give it straight back to ye tomorrow,’ she said. ‘I’m really sorry.’

  Liam hesitated for a moment. ‘What time ye getting in?’ he asked.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Maureen, looking around the coach station. ‘About six thirty in the morning.’

  ‘Well, I was going to come and meet ye but ye can fuck off,’ he said, as if she’d timed the bus deliberately. ‘Listen, I’m sorry about Martha. I heard ye banging on the floor.’

  ‘Yeah, and I heard you banging on the bed.’

  ‘Sorry,’ he said quickly.

  ‘It’s not me ye need to be sorry to,’ said Maureen.

  The moment she sat down on the itchy seat she knew that she was going to be okay. The coach was less than half full and Maureen managed to get half of the back seat to herself. An elderly woman took the other side, squashing herself up against the window, arranging her refreshments in a tidy spread on the seat next to her.

  The bus rumbled out of central London, up through the deep valley of Swiss Cottage and out on to the vast M1. Maureen settled back, resting her head on the shuddering window, watching the individual people in their individual cars pass the window, the individual houses with individual strips of gardens, poisoned by collective exhaust fumes. She watched the dirty grey city slip into the past, saw the low houses on the shallow hills leave the frame of the window, and she suddenly knew how close she had come to dying. She changed her mind and fought back at the last minute, like poor Ann. Poor Ann, lying on the settee with her fat lip and ugly children.

  Maureen was close to crying but the bruised rings of cartilage in her throat resisted. She was going home to face them all, knowing that her brittle courage had shattered. She was going home to Glasgow and for the first time remembered that she had a life beyond her present troubles. She loved the colours of the city, she had a place and history there, she understood the obscure kindness of the people and the rationale behind the brutal weather. She’d missed the cleanness of the air, the archaic turns of phrase and the rasping guttural speech. She could have a bath in her own bathroom soon, without the intrusion of Ruchill, and sleep soundly in her own bed. Leslie would be safe and Liam had been saved. She didn’t care about Ann any more, didn’t care that Moe didn’t make any sense.

  The motorway left the city behind it and entered a dull, flat landscape stretching beyond the horizon punctuated by grey villages and shadowy gymkhana runs. Maureen pulled her legs up and wrapped herself up tight in her dirty coat, no longer too good for the bus or for her, and watched middle England’s bland suburban plain coast past the window.

  Joe McEwan had been at work for eleven hours and he wasn’t feeling well. He was drinking a lot of coffee and smoking twenty-five a day, or so his doctor thought. The office was almost empty; only the obsessive and divorcees were still in. The Hutton investigation was dragging to an unsatisfying conclusion. The evidence they’d amassed didn’t pan out. Terrified witnesses changed their statements from stupid lie to stupid lie and the case had swallowed up their overtime budget for the next three weeks. Rumour and retracted witness statements had given them the pick-up place, the pub where he’d been killed, the name of the driver and, by implication, the boss who’d ordered it. They even had the name of the guy who stole the taxi. What they didn’t have was a shred of usable evidence, not a single witness. Inness kicked open the door and stormed into the room. He was grinning, his stubby teeth half hidden under his moustache, his excitement clashing with everyone else’s worn apathy. He spotted McEwan and almost ran across the room. ‘Look at the e-mail noticeboard,’ he said, beckoning him over to a desk and calling up the system and the page. ‘Look at this.’

  It was a message from the Met in London. The text explained that they were trying to trace a Scottish woman called Marian Thatcher. She had dialled 999 and had given important inside information about the Ann Harris murder. A call had been made from the same phone-box to Stewart Street directly before the 999 call but it might have been unrelated. The taxi had been traced and the woman tried and failed to get on the last plane to Glasgow. Inness clicked on an attached file and a colour picture slowly unravelling in strips from the top. Three strips down McEwan was grinning. It was a scratchy colour shot of Maureen O’Donnell coming out of a phone-box and hailing a taxi. ‘Eh?’ smiled Inness. ‘Told you.’

  ‘Fucking lovely,’ smiled McEwan, and lit himself a congratulatory fag.

  It was much later and Maureen woke with a start at the pains in her neck. She looked around her and saw the grey road and the red tail-lights and the old woman sitting upright on the other end of the back seat, looking out of the window. It was three o’clock and they would be stopping soon. She could have a cigarette. She looked out of the window at the chill night and spared a thought for everyone who went to London and never came back. For the poor men and women looking for work and brighter futures and for the maddies like herself, who went to fix the world and got lost. She felt a nudge to her elbow and found the woman on the far back seat handing her a plastic flask cup of orange juice. She thanked her, but the woman had shuffled over to the other side of the bus already, glaring resolutely out of the window. Maureen drank and the acid juice washed away the flavour of stale cigarettes and blood and sour milk.

  The bus hurried up a slip-road without losing velocity and hit the car-park at fifty. The frightened passengers sat up straight, looking out of the window, holding on to the seat in front of them. The bus slowed and eased to a stop. Maureen stood up and scrambled for the door. As her feet hit the concrete she had a fag in her mouth and was lighting it. She filled her empty lungs.

  It was cold and windy in the car-park, properly cold and windy, making her nose run and her skin tingle. She walked slowly to the service station, straggling behind the other passengers, taking time to enjoy the weather, smoking and letting the wind peel the ash from the tip. The automatic doors slid back and Maureen found herself facing a sign welcoming her to Knutsford service station. The name reminded her of Ann, but she couldn’t remember why.

  She went to the loo and washed her face and hands, thinking her way through Moe and Tam and Elizabeth. Moe still bothered her. She looked at her throat in the mirror. The red marks were turning dark blue. Frank Toner’s thumb had impressed a perfect imprint on the right-hand side of her small neck. She remembered. This was where Ann got off the bus and never got back on again. She had probably met someone and got a lift, but if she was ferrying drugs up to Glasgow she wouldn’t be that careless. Just out of interest Maureen fished around in her pocket, found the battered and cracked photocopy of Ann and went into the shop. There were two members of staff on but neither of them had been working here before Christmas. They were both new starts. Thinking how reckless it was of the management to leave two new starts running a shop together, Maureen made her way to the restaurant. She stopped and realized that there were CCTV cameras everywhere. The new starts could have been safely left in charge of the Brazilian national debt. Out in the foyer she saw a sign for a pizza bar. She turned the corner and found a café area with red plastic chairs and tables cordoned off from the stairs. A waitress in her fifties was cleaning the chipped plastic with more care than it deserved.

  ‘Excuse me,’ said Maureen, finding her voice more rough than before. ‘Have you been working here long?’

  ‘Yes, love, I’ve been here for five months.’

  ‘I’m trying to find out what happened to a friend of mine who was on the night bus to
Glasgow. She got off for the break and never got on again about a month ago.’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ said the woman, folding her cloth to a flat surface. ‘I know.’

  Maureen got out the picture and showed it to her. ‘I know,’ nodded the woman. ‘Wasn’t it awful? We were all shocked, actually.’

  Maureen was surprised that news of Ann’s death had reached Knutsford. ‘How did you hear about it?’

  ‘I saw her, dear, I saw her coming out of the toilet and going into the ambulance. It was very sad. We were very shocked.’

  ‘Into an ambulance?’

  ‘Yes, she was mugged, dear, in the ladies’. Beaten very badly. Had her bag stolen.’

  ‘Her bag?’

  ‘Yes, her handbag. She wasn’t found for half an hour. The men that did it were probably long gone by then.’

  Ann’s bag. She’d taken the bag everywhere with her, afraid of it being stolen, drawing attention to herself everywhere she went. If Tam Parlain told Maxine when it was coming in, Hutton could have been waiting for her at the service station, watching for her, waiting to do what he did best, annihilate the weak. They must have known she was going to get off and come in with a handbag worth tens of thousands. Parlain and Maxine were going out on their own, siding with Hutton against their own family and Toner. Toner would know Maxine lived with Hutton and he must have realized what they’d done before Hutton was killed over a mystery stash. Elizabeth said Toner had wanted to talk to Ann, and Senga had told Leslie that Ann had recognized Hutton’s picture in the paper. Parlain had killed Ann to stop her talking. Poor witless Ann. Toner could afford her no protection here– in Glasgow and London maybe, but not in this wilderness. The CCTV evidence might have been kept, and even if it hadn’t, the ambulance would have a record of it.

  She went back to the bus early, standing outside on the grass verge, smoking a final fag, wondering about Ann. How desperate would a woman have to be? How much money would she need to owe to take a chance like that? But that’s what Frank Toner had been counting on, someone desperate enough to take those chances.