by Denise Mina
Williams was out of bed and pulling on his trousers before Hellian had finished the sentence. ‘ . . . under the sofa which give a superficial match to blood and hair samples from the deceased. Obviously we won’t know for certain until the lab have a look at it.’
Williams balanced the receiver on his shoulder and knelt down, feeling under the bed for his shoes. The guesthouse carpet was a hideous hangover from the seventies: it flowed and spiralled like a melted box of crayons and smelt of dog. ‘Parlain ye said?’
‘Yes, Tam, t.a.m., Parlain, p.a.r.l.a.i.n. Works for the Adams family.’
‘Those bastards again. Who’s Parlain under, did Intelligence tell ye?’
‘One Frank Toner, f.r.a.n—’
‘And she bought a ticket up on the overnight bus?’
‘Yes, but we can’t confirm whether she’s on it. DCI Joe McEwan knows her and has volunteered one of his officers to give a visual.’
‘She’d better be on it. You realize that if this gets out before we interview her she’s dead?’
‘Won’t get out this side, sir.’
Maureen couldn’t sleep. The cigarettes and the story about Ann had woken her up and she was desperate to get home, home to the cold and the red and yellow tenements, the big sky and the rude children. She knew who she was in Glasgow and she was going to fight back before the last and make it safe. It was half four when they reached the wild hills. Steep slopes of mud and jagged rock were capped by creeping snowbanks and the bus felt suddenly colder. She looked at the bare hills and saw the families driven from their homes to make way for sheep, a thousand Coach and Horses all over the world, serving succour to souls who couldn’t go home, who didn’t even know where home was. Maureen leaned her head on the window and cried for the beautiful land, sobbing and covering her face with her hands, trying not to sniff. The woman on the back seat was at her elbow. ‘Why are you crying?’ she asked.
Maureen sniffed. ‘Scotland,’ she pointed out of the window. ‘It’s so beautiful. I haven’t been home for so long.’
‘That’s well seen,’ said the woman quietly. ‘This is the Lake District.’
*
The bus hurtled into the reluctant dawn, through lowlands and into the flat Clyde valley. A cloudless electric blue sky was marred in the distance by a patty of thick black cloud and in its dark grey shadow sat Glasgow, her Glasgow, and she began to cry again.
43
Ruchill
The air was very still in the bus station. Maureen’s breath hovered in front of her, swirling as she pushed past the other passengers, picked her bag from the growing pile and walked out of the automatic doors. The pavement shimmered and the buildings strained against the cold. A white mist filled the tall street and Maureen cut a swath through it, leaving black footprints in the frost. A black cab glided past her, turning for the city centre and the stations. She lit a cigarette. Her raw throat throbbed and she looked like shit but she was home. A sudden flurry of snow bleached the colours out of the city as she passed the foot of Garnethill and walked north. She was tempted to go home first, to dump her heavy bag, but she was sure she’d never come out again. Maureen pulled her scarf around her head and walked on.
Williams parked across the street from the station.
‘Here, just here,’ said Inness. ‘That’ll be fine.’
‘Are you sure?’ asked Williams, cranking up the handbrake and making Bunyan sigh. ‘We’re on a yellow.’
‘Yeah.’
They walked across the road and took the grey concrete stairs down to the bus station. It was almost empty. Local double-deckers were parked in tidy lines along the centre of the concourse. A single bus, stopped in front of the ticket building, showed signs of life. A driver in a blue nylon uniform walked around the bonnet and disappeared behind it. Williams bristled. ‘It’s already in,’ he said, and jogged over to it, his suit jacket flapping open. He stopped a withered wee guy with an Afro hairdo. ‘Is this the London bus?’
‘Aye.’
‘Look, I’m a police officer.’ He pulled the grainy printout photograph of Maureen O’Donnell out of his pocket. ‘Was this woman on the bus?’
The wee guy looked at it and asked his pal to come and see as well. ‘Think so,’ said his pal.
‘Aye,’ squawked the first driver nasally. ‘I recognize the hair. She was on the bus, right enough.’
‘Where is she now?’
‘How should I know?’
‘Did you see anyone come and pick her up?’ The ugly man shrugged. ‘I don’t watch them all leaving, we’ve to get the luggage out.’
‘Did ye see anyone grabbing her?’
The men stood apathetically and Inness pulled Williams by the arm. ‘She might just have gone home.’
‘Do you know where it is?’
‘Yeah, it’s up the road, two minutes up the road. Top of that hill there.’
It was a long walk. The snow thickened as the sun came up, enveloping the city in a heavy grey light. It lay on her sleeves and shoulders, catching on her scarf and eyebrows, deadening the noise of the cars and traffic as she made her way up the Maryhill Road. She got angrier as she walked, working up a sweat as she approached the turn-off to Ruchill. The lazy blizzard stopped suddenly under the disused railway bridge. Maureen walked on, stepping out of the envelope of calm into the white sheet and up the steep hill.
Ruchill was a dead area. A single row of buildings stood against the steep road. Behind it, ten acres of wasteland were criss-crossed by overgrown roads. Street after street of damp and rotten tenements had been demolished. On the other side of the street a high fence barred entry to the park, a tall grassy hill pitted with skeletal trees and the looming hospital tower. Maureen ignored it, willing herself not to look as she passed the black machine-gun nest pub, and walked on. The first of the hospital outbuildings appeared on the shoulder of the road, a modest red bungalow with an outsized Dutch gable fac¸ade.
Maureen paused at the foot of the steep driveway, hot and trembling. She shifted the scarf on her head to get some of the snow off and looked up. The drive curved sharply and disappeared behind a high bank of bushes. Shards of broken glass scratched the Tarmac beneath her feet and she walked on, past the bushes, and followed the road to the tower. The vandals had been there night after night. Single-storey buildings were dotted around the campus; their wooden onion domes lay on the ground, burnt and smashed. Crazed Venetian blinds hung forlornly in broken windows and net curtains flapped lazily at the muffled wind. She walked on to the top of the hill and looked out over the city dawn. She could see her house.
Maureen narrowed her eyes, blinking and catching snow flakes in her lashes as she looked up at the jagged tower. silhouetted against a crumbling white sky. She crouched, picked up a stone, ran towards the building as she aimed, and threw it, her feet skidding on the slushy snow. The heavy grey stone hurled through the air, spinning and scattering the snow flakes falling gently in its path. She gasped as she saw where it was headed. The high window shattered and fell like a curtain. She picked up another stone from the overgrown grass verge, ran again and chucked it as hard as she could. Her scarf fell off her head, trailing down her back, baring her head to the weather. The stone shattered another window. Maureen smiled. She dropped her bag on to the wet ground and felt inside for Kilty’s shopping. Her cold, stiff fingers relaxed when they found the rough cardboard of the box of firelighters.
The heat left her as soon as she reached the bottom of the stairs. She was smiling and happy, chewing squares of Milka chocolate and feeling safe and home. She must never, ever tell anyone what she had done. She let the tension leave her. All she had to do now was phone Leslie and wait for the police to come to see her. Then she was looking forward to a wash and a sleep and a day in her pyjamas, sitting on the settee in front of the television, sipping tea. Grinning and excited, she skipped up the stairs, taking them two a
t a time, until she got two steps away from her front door and stopped.
The front door was hanging on the hinges, two inches ajar. The lights were on in the hall. Noiselessly, she slid her bag to the floor and reached into her pocket for the stabbing comb. She pushed the door open with the tips of her fingers. She couldn’t see into the living room but she could hear. Someone was in there, she could hear a voice muttering something, a short question, followed by a curt answer. Footsteps came towards her along the wooden floorboards, pausing in the living room. They stepped towards her, pressing on the back of the door to shut it. Maureen kicked the door with the flat of her foot, banging it against the wall and found herself staring at a startled, sleepy Inness. She dropped her bag. ‘What the fuck are you doing in my house?’
Inness was standing in her hallway, grinning out at her with the blue morning behind him. ‘Mrs Thatcher, I presume? I’ve got some pals here who are dying to meet you.’
A man and a woman in smart dark suits were standing in her living room. Angus’s letters were scattered over the table. Every one of them had been pulled from their envelopes and read. ‘You bastards.’ She lurched into the hall, reaching for the letters but Inness grabbed her by the arm and pulled her roughly round to face him He screamed at her, ‘Calm down!’
Over his shoulder, out of the kitchen window and beyond on the north horizon, the Ruchill fever hospital tower was burning like a Roman candle, the turret windows belching black sparking clouds of dead men’s ashes. Below, in the quiet city, siren screams rushed to a fire too well set to be sated. A door opened in the close and Jim Maliano appeared in her doorway pulling his purple dressing-gown shut. ‘What is going on in here?’ he demanded, his bouffant trembling with fury.
Inness held on to Maureen and put his other hand on Maliano’s shoulder, pushing him out of the door. ‘We are police officers,’ he said, ‘and we are here to speak to Miss O’Donnell. Go back inside, please, sir.’
‘You can’t go through my stuff,’ said Maureen stiffly. ‘Those are my letters.’
‘Well,’ shouted Jim, ‘if you are police officers you should know better than to come into a domestic close at this time of the morning, making that sort of noise.’
Inness pushed him with the flat of his hand. ‘Back inside, please, sir,’ he said, pushing too hard and making Maliano stumble over the step.
Maliano slapped his hand away and turned to Maureen. ‘Maureen, are you all right?’
Maureen didn’t like Jim Maliano and he had made it abundantly clear that he didn’t like her or her lifestyle, but whenever there was trouble Jim came running across the close and looked out for her.
‘I’m fine, Jim, I’m really fine. You go back to bed and I promise we’ll keep it down.’
Maliano glared at Inness insolently. ‘Call me if you have any trouble?’
‘I will, Jim, thanks.’
He turned and looked at her. ‘Ruchill’s on fire,’ he said, somewhat gleefully, as if he were having an everyday chat with his neighbour.
Maureen and Inness looked down the hall to the kitchen window and the column of fire on the horizon, and Inness muttered an awed curse.
‘Neds,’ said Maliano, and looked accusingly at Inness. ‘Ye should be out stopping that sort of behaviour instead of harassing her. I keep a diary of all your comings and goings up here,’ he gestured to his spy-hole, ‘so,’ he said, pointing at him, ‘just you watch it.’ Jim’s bottle snapped and he blushed and scuttled back across the close to his own door, giving Inness a last warning look before he shut the door. Maureen knew he would be standing, watching. She shut her front door and darted into the living room, gathered up all of Angus’s letters and held them to her chest. ‘These’re mine,’ she said.
‘We asked you about them,’ said Inness sternly, ‘and we’re seizing them, so you can put them down. They’re not even yours any more.’
‘What gives you the right to break into my house?’ The fat guy in the dark suit stepped over to her. ‘Miss O’Donnell,’ he said, ‘where have you been since you got off the bus? We thought you were dead behind the door in here.’
‘I don’t have to fucking tell you anything,’ she said.
‘What happened to your neck?’ asked the little blonde woman, staring at it.
Inness stepped closer and Maureen could tell from the flush around his eyes that he was furious with her. ‘Those letters’ll be going to the fiscal.’ He was trying to threaten her but in the last few days she’d been trapped in Parlain’s, she’d been strangled by Toner and she’d made her home safe from the evil eye and had chosen her path. Inness couldn’t frighten her with a moustache and a stare.
‘Get out,’ she said, trying to shout but sounding strained and weak.
The fat guy was staring at the bruise around her throat. ‘What happened to your neck?’ he asked.
‘Get out,’ said Maureen.
He touched her arm gently. ‘Miss O’Donnell? I’m Arthur Williams from the Met.’ His face was kind and nervous. ‘I understand that you have information about Ann Harris’s murder.’
Maureen was folding the letters, shoving them back into their envelopes, dizzy with the desire to be alone and home and safe. She ripped an envelope trying to shove a letter into it and that was enough. ‘Fuck it,’ she shouted, her throat throbbed and stabbed with the effort. She dropped all the letters and kicked them out of the way. ‘Fuck it.’
Inness was staring at her. ‘What happened to your neck?’ he said.
The plump man stepped forward. ‘We really need to talk to you, Miss O’Donnell.’
44
Rosenhan
Williams insisted that Maureen have some tea to warm her up, and Bunyan made her a mug and brought it through from the kitchen. She hadn’t put any cold water in it and Maureen managed to scorch her tongue, but the heat soothed her throat a little so she persevered and sipped at it anyway.
Bunyan lit a cigarette and shoved the packet across the coffee table. Maureen couldn’t resist her hollow camaraderie. She lifted the packet and took one. She could have cried for ever now she was home. Arthur Williams sat calmly, smiling dutifully whenever she looked at him. ‘Have you charged Leslie and Jimmy?’
‘Not yet,’ said Williams softly. ‘We might still, we’ll have to see how this pans out.’
‘Did you go to Tam Parlain’s house?’ asked Maureen.
‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘We’re questioning Parlain and Elizabeth Woolly.’
‘You found Elizabeth?’
‘She was at his house when we got there. They’ve both been arrested on another charge, so we’ve got all the time in the world.’
‘What other charge?’
‘Possession.’
Williams watched Maureen looking downcast at the table, drawing on her fag. Her throat was a red and black mess; he wouldn’t be surprised if she had broken something.
She looked skinny and bedraggled, and judging from the letters in her house, life wasn’t too sweet at all. He leaned over the table and tapped his fingers softly on the table in her line of vision. ‘Why don’t you just tell us what happened?’
So Maureen sat and smoked Bunyan’s fags and told them the story about Ann’s big bag, the debts to the loan sharks and the attack at Knutsford, about the letter from the nonexistent law firm and Tam Parlain’s damp settee. She left out the troubling inconsistency of Moe and the benefit book, left out Mark Doyle because she still didn’t know what to make of him. She was getting to the end, to Maxine and Hutton and the service station. She had just phoned Hugh and New Scotland Yard and 999 when Williams interrupted. ‘What was the story about the Polaroid?’
‘It was a picture of Toner and her son. He sent it to her to flush her out of the shelter.’
‘But you don’t have it?’
Maureen shook her head and reached into her pocket. ‘I’ve got something, though.
’ She pulled out the photocopy she had made of the Polaroid in the copy-shop in Brixton high street. Bunyan leaned in as Williams unfolded it and they looked down at Toner holding the small boy’s hand.
‘Nice bloke, isn’t he?’ said Bunyan, lowering her voice. ‘Did you get a fright?’
Maureen hung her head and drew on her fag.
‘These people,’ said Bunyan, nodding gently, ‘are very frightening.’
Maureen noticed that she was talking to her as if she were a child, as if she could make it better with a glass of orange and a chocolate biscuit, but Maureen needed that certainty now and she responded to it. She nodded back. ‘I got a fright,’ she said.
‘I’m not surprised,’ said Bunyan, leaning towards her. ‘I get a fright when I talk to these people.’
Maureen looked at her. ‘Did you come all the way up to see me?’ Her voice was high and nervous. ‘Yeah.’
‘How did you know I’d be here?’
‘Didn’t know.’
‘How could you possibly know it was me that phoned?’ Bunyan tapped her nose playfully. ‘Copper’s instincts,’ she said, and smiled a consolation.
Maureen smiled back. ‘Thank you,’ she said:
Williams sat back. ‘It’s still possible that Jimmy Harris did it, you know.’
‘I know.’
‘He was in London.’
‘I know,’ she looked at Bunyan, ‘but you’ve spoken to Jimmy, you know how passive he is. I’m sure Tam did it. Why else would he wash a leather settee?’
Williams nodded at the floor. ‘But that’s not evidence. We can’t get a conviction on the basis that he mistreated his leather sofa, can we?’ Williams smiled sadly again, and Maureen realized that nice, plump, unthreatening male was his catch, they must send him in to question all the mental birds.
‘We’ll have to take you to Carlisle to interview you formally,’ he said. ‘Why Carlisle?’