The Guest House

by David Mark

  ‘…when you mess with somebody’s fingers or toes, you mess with their whole being. Don’t get me wrong, when you slash a fucker’s mouth you know you’re messing them up for life, but if you hurt somebody’s fingers or feet you know that even years from now, when they’re trying to tie their laces on a cold morning, they’ll look back at the mistakes they made, and wish it had all been so very different…’

  I put the book back where I found it. Glance towards the door. I don’t know what I’m looking for but there must be something that gives an indication of what sort of man I’ve allowed to stay in my home. Quietly, I start opening the drawers at the base of the wardrobe. Two pairs of socks, neatly balled, and a chunky, cable-knitted jumper. I pick it up, gently, and breathe it in. It hasn’t been worn since it was last laundered – it smells of soap flakes and heather and the background whiff of stale smoke.

  I look around me, wondering what the hell I should do next. I realise just how vulnerable I’ve left myself – how many strangers have passed through my home. Why haven’t I asked more questions? He didn’t arrive in a car – hasn’t parked a vehicle anywhere nearby. So where are his other possessions? His camera, binoculars, his waterproof clothes? Has he made a friend who will help him store it all? Or has he decided to cut his losses and get rid of anything that may be stained with another man’s blood.

  I sit down on the bed, suddenly tired and pissed off. I think of Bishop, and find myself wondering whether I’m simply the victim of some elaborate joke. Maybe Bishop and Mr Roe play this scene out at guest houses up and down the country. Maybe this is how they get their kicks. I realise I’m fighting the urge to pray. I no longer wear a cross but my fingers are at my throat and would be pulling at my golden cross were it not at the bottom of my jewellery box on the dresser. In such moments, prayers are little more than wishes: directed at a deity instead of a genie. But they provide a comfort of sorts, and suddenly all I want is for Bishop to be okay and for none of this to have happened.

  My gaze falls on the skirting board by the bed, just at the place where the flex from the bedside lamp runs down to the floor. I have a landlady’s eye for any imperfections. And there is a little smear of dark on the white-painted wood. Moreover, there is a fine, barely visible smattering of dust upon the floor.

  I squat down. Flick on the bedside lamp and peer at the little speck of wrongness. I adjust my angle. The skirting board has been pulled away from the wall. Whatever has been used has slipped, streaking the paintwork. It has sent up a tiny cloud of paint and wood. Somebody has made themselves a hiding place.

  I feel my pulse start to race, looking around for something I can use to lever up the wood. I can’t seem to quell the impulse to dig deeper. Sense dictates that I pause; think things through – decide how best to act without causing myself more problems. But I’ve never been one for sense.

  There’s a teaspoon in amongst the tea-making facilities at the bottom of the wardrobe and I dart to the open door, retrieving it from the cup full of teabags and sachets of instant coffee. In moments I’m down on my knees again, wiggling the tip of the teaspoon into the tiny crack in the wall, giving a little grunt of satisfaction as it disappears into the space behind. I pulled and push, wiggle and yank, and then there is the glorious sound of a fixture coming loose, and the board is skittering away across the floor and I’m peering into a small black space behind it. There’s a smell of damp and empty air; something that makes me think of abandoned cellars. I tilt the bedside lamp, throwing some light into the darkness, and give something between a grimace and a smile as I spot the bulging shape inside. I reach in, automatically. There could have been mousetraps, I tell myself, despairing. Could have been a bloody scorpion…

  I look at my discovery. It’s black and plastic and looks to my inexpert eyes horribly outdated – the sort of thing I’d have asked for as a Christmas present in my mid-teens. I turn it over in my hands, feeling the clunky buttons beneath my fingertips. As I do I feel a piece of the main casing come away and it falls through my fingers to the floor. I look down and retrieve the length of black plastic and realise it’s a pen, of sorts: like something stolen from a book-keeper’s or Argos. I fumble with the buttons on the side, trying to find some way to turn the damn thing on, and jab with the metal nib at what I take to be the screen. My index finger finds a small round cavity along the smoothest edge. I touch the pen to the hole, then to what must be the charging point, but it remains frustratingly dead in my hands.

  Holding it to the light, I turn it over and over, searching for some indication that this belongs to the lodge’s current occupant and hasn’t been left by a previous guest. By the light of the lamp, I see scratches by the charging port: scratches left by a fragile or drunken person trying to make the connection. The same sort of evidence of pained fingers that left the scratch on the skirting board.

  I turn the pen in my hands. Click my tongue against my mouth, a tick-tock of frustrated thought. I press the buttons in random sequences, two at a time, one at a time, but it remains steadfastly blank. I get back on my knees and scooch back to the hole in the wall. I reach in, feeling gooseflesh rise as I emerge, imagining all the different things that could scuttle out of the darkness. I root around, touching dirt, stone, thick twirls of cobwebbed dust, and then my knuckle touches something stuck to the inside of the remaining panel. It’s small – no bigger than a postage stamp, and I have to prise it free with a nail. I pull it free between finger and thumb. It’s a SIM card: old; black and gold – no shape I’ve seen before, but unmistakably some piece of technical wizardry. I look at the phone again, and tug at a tiny crack on the rim of the plastic. I put my nail into the groove and slide out a small panel, perfectly shaped for the card. I put it where it wants to go, and slide the panel back again. It moves slickly – far more than I would have expected from such a clunky piece of Nineties machinery.

  The screen lights up; a soft grey, overlaid with green writing. It’s code, a thousand different symbols and letters streaking across the display as if somebody has fallen asleep with their face on a keyboard.

  Excited now, my pulse thudding, sweat greasing the backs of my knees, I jab with the pen at the screen. The digits stop scrolling. A cursor flashes, a simple icon waiting for a password. There’s no keyboard I can make out, and the screen doesn’t offer any obvious way to enter a code. I chew my lip, and wonder how long I have been out here. Should I put it back? Run home? Or take it with me? He won’t be home for ages, surely. I could sit in the kitchen, think it through properly, lock the door. Could call Callum. The police.

  I touch the pen to the screen. Distractedly doodle a shape on the glass. The lettering changes before my eyes. A warning sign flashes up. This is encrypted software, it tells me. I have three more attempts to get it right.

  I want it to stop, suddenly. Want to hear a car pull up and give myself an excuse to throw it all back in the hole in the earth and run back to the house. I don’t. Instead, I look at the nib of the pen. It’s metallic. The screen is a hard glass. And when I doodled on the screen the machine acted as if I’d made an attempt at entering the code. I hold up the tablet to the light. Faintly, scored against the surface of the glass, I can make out a circle, and four straight lines: a child’s drawing of a full, glowing sun. I copy the pattern with the nib. Hold my breath.

  The screen fills with colour. Suddenly I’m staring at a series of document files, laid out neatly on a blue screen. They’re dated: neatly labelled. I touch the pen to one at random, and find another series of files. I touch one at random. In a moment pixels become an image. A face. A pretty woman in her mid-twenties with dark roots and blonde hair and a stud in her top lip. She’s talking on a phone, sitting outside a bar. There’s water behind her. Posh flats. She’s with somebody. He’s facing away from the camera but there’s a set to his jaw and a tightness to his shoulders that seems suddenly more than familiar.

  I open the next image. See him. See him reaching out across the table, holding her hand,
dark eyes staring into hers, a look on his face that I don’t recognise, even as I stare into features as familiar to me as my own.

  It’s Callum. My Callum.

  Holding Kimmy’s hand.

  The blood rushes in my head the way the floodwater surges over the bridge. What does it mean? Why does Mr Roe have a picture of my husband? Why does he have a picture of the skank I booted him out over?

  Through the drawn curtains, a sudden flickering light. Somebody has activated the motion sensor.

  Desperately, my fingers trembling, I shove the gadget back in the hole and wedge the skirting board up against the wall. I look around and know that I haven’t left any signs of disturbance, but if it’s Roe it won’t make a difference. I’m in the room! And I don’t know how to get out without being seen.

  I hear the sound of a key in the lock. Hear the curses and grunts of an ungreased lock and a wooden door swollen larger than the frame by rain.

  I brace myself. Then I hear the sound of objects being moved from the lodge next door. Paretsky. I let out a huge great breath of relief, and slip out the door, pulling it tight shut behind me and locking it all in one fluid motion. I move across the grass, my chest heaving.

  Stop, dead, as I realise my mistake. The SIM card. I’ve left the SIM card in the device.

  I turn back. Move back the way I’ve come.

  From the street, a clatter of broken glass. Quickly, I creep to the edge of the house and peer round, looking through the trees to where the road disappears and the shingly beach begins. It’s too dark and stormy to make any of it out tonight, but I can see the small, wiry shape that stumbles over the recycling boxes as he staggers his way home.

  Mr Roe. Drunk as a skunk and a halo of grey cigar smoke around his head.

  Silently, I unlock the back door, and slip into the kitchen, closing it behind me and leaning with my forehead against the glass.

  At the kitchen table, Atticus sits chatting with a round, bald-headed man in Police Scotland uniform. I know him. PC Eoin Stewart. He looks up from dipping a biscuit in a mug of tea and his immediate reaction looks a lot like panic. He doesn’t know what to say to me. Doesn’t know what to do. And then a strikingly attractive woman in an expensive suit is walking through from the living room; her hairstyle more expensive than my car. And the expression on his face is pure relief.

  ‘Mrs Ashcroft,’ she says, with a smile that doesn’t reach her eyes. ‘I’m Detective Chief Inspector Emma Cressey. Do you perhaps have a moment?’

  And suddenly, all I can hear is breaking bottles, and the thunder of my own rushing blood.

  17

  Ten weeks ago

  Mount Alexander, Camaghael, Fort William

  ‘Bloody hell.’

  The woman driving the blue Volkswagen Bora jumps forward in her seat. She hadn’t known her passenger was awake. For the past ninety miles he has been doing an excellent impression of a shop dummy carved from discount ham. He’s been sleeping with his eyes open, gazing deadly out of the grimy window as the urban landscape of Glasgow Central has gradually given way to greenery and soft rain. It has been a slow, tiring journey and she has kept the radio off in deference to the presence of her companion. She has had to fight an innate urge to chatter and to point out interesting sights.

  Now, on the verge of reaching their actual destination, he has announced himself conscious, though she can see no obvious reason for the choice of words. They are down a dirt track, bounded on one side by a rusty chain-link fence and on the other by a scabby wall of trees and dead vegetation. The shortbread-and-thistles of Fort William’s touristy areas are nowhere to be found in this out-of-the-way location on the very outskirts of town. In the distance, she can make out the snow-topped peaks of a jagged mountain range, but the immediate view beyond the glass is so dispiriting that the far-off panorama seems somehow unreal.

  ‘Sorry?’

  He shakes his head, readjusting himself and sitting up straighter. ‘No. No you’re not sorry. No manners now, love. No politeness. You’re hard, right. You don’t give a fuck. I say something you don’t understand, it’s not your fault, it’s mine. Yes?’

  She looks across at him. Dirty trousers, unwashed shirt, harlequin-patterned jumper and a greasy donkey jacket. She feels as though she’s picked up a hitch-hiking tramp.

  ‘Don’t mumble, ya wee fuck.’

  He smiles, showing mismatched teeth. The yellow ones are real. The gleaming white ones have been drilled into the bone, though they move around in his soggy gums like poorly hammered tent pegs.

  ‘Was there a reason for the “bloody hell”?’ asks the driver.

  ‘Just occurred to me I’m in Scotland. With the Scottish.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘I’ve got a lot of Jock jokes. It’s going to be a battle.’

  ‘We can laugh at ourselves. You might get a few Englishmen-are-wankers jokes in return. Difference is, we won’t be joking.’

  ‘And you’d be right. We are wankers.’

  ‘Takes the fun out of it if it’s not news to you.’

  ‘Take a coach trip to London. You’ll find a load of arrogant pricks who still haven’t been told.’

  They turn a corner and the broken-down fence becomes something sturdier: a long line of corrugated iron panels nailed to big imposing posts. It points the way to where a low, pebble-dashed grey building hunkers down as if hiding from the wind, and which conceals the entrance to a large parking area. The surface is all craters and potholes: loose shingle and broken glass. Further ahead, another chain-link fence, barring access to a big flat space given over to dozens of wrecked cars – roofs smashed in, bumpers torn off: a mechanical graveyard full of metal bones and rusty innards.

  ‘There,’ says the driver, slowing down.

  A dark-haired man is leaning against the door of the outbuilding, staring up at the sky as if in prayer. He still has his eyes closed as he turns towards them, delaying the moment for as long as he can.

  ‘Not bad-looking. You might need to behave yourself.’

  ‘Get tae fuck.’

  ‘Not bad. Bit more spit when you talk though, eh? Bit more froth between the teeth.’

  ‘I’m still being me.’

  ‘Oh, right.’

  They pull in to the empty parking area, bouncing over the pitted surface. A moment later, the back doors open and the man climbs in, announcing himself with a sigh.

  ‘Don’t start off like that, mate. Put a downer on proceedings. We’ve come a long way for this.’

  ‘Sorry, I…’

  ‘And don’t start with a sorry. Can’t stand apologists.’ He turns in his seat. Gives him a once-over, then nods. ‘I’m Nicholas Roe. I’m not, of course, but that’s who the fuck I am for now. And you’re Callum Ashcroft.’

  A nod. He’s pale. There’s a darkness under his eyes. He’s huddled inside his coat as if trying to disappear.

  ‘This is Kimmy,’ says Roe, nodding at the driver. ‘She’s a bad girl. Bad as they get. She’s been working with one of Pope’s rivals for a good while now but she’s seen the light. She has special skills. She has connections. Connections that Bishop might need, and that Pope will appreciate. She’s also your bit of skirt, and you’re going to introduce her to the people you know.’

  Ashcroft looks at Kimmy. She has her hair scraped back tight and there are gold studs in her dimples and top lip.

  ‘You’re a copper?’

  Roe laughs, shaking his head. ‘Well, you’re going to be shit at this, I can tell. Should I just shoot her now and save you the bother? What’s the matter, mate? Is it a syndrome, or something? There must be a name for it. I mean, nobody’s allowed to say “moron” anymore, but it’s the neatest fit.’

  ‘I’m sorry… I’m nervous, I’ve never done anything like this before.’

  ‘No, I hear you. I was the same up until I killed my first bastard. Figured it would be harder than it was. Now, take a breath, and do as I tell you. Say hello.’

  ‘H
ello.’

  ‘Wrong. That’s not how you talk to a Kimmy. Kimmy here, she’s been through it. No time for soft soaping. No time for a gentleman or a romantic. She likes a man who bangs her head off the cistern when he’s enjoying himself behind her – know what I’m saying? So, put some bass in your voice, mate. If you’re going to be our way in, I need some faith in you and right now I wouldn’t trust you to put your shoes on the right feet. Just take a breath. Get yourself together.’

  Kimmy gives him what she hopes is an encouraging look. She’s only partly in character. She can turn it on when required. Right now she’s still mostly a detective constable, on secondment to the NCA. Even with the hair and the jewellery and the semi-permanent tattoos of former lovers’ names tattooed on her left breast, she can’t be Kimmy until she has to be. Every time she puts on the character it seems to eat a little bit of what lies beneath.

  ‘I have a wife,’ says Callum, quietly. ‘She doesn’t deserve to get caught up in this.’

  ‘Wouldn’t life be peachy if we only got what we deserved, eh?’

  ‘Whatever happens, you have to keep them safe. You have to promise me that.’

  ‘How would that help, lad? What’s my promise worth to you? How about you make a promise to yourself instead. Promise yourself you’ll do everything in your power to make things right. Promise yourself you’ll do whatever it takes to put the bad men away before they can make good on their threats.’

  For a moment, there is something like sincerity in Roe’s eyes. Something flares: some spark of humanity. Then it is gone.

  Callum turns to Kimmy. ‘You all right, doll? That’s some tan ye’ve got yersel’. Must have cost a fortune to fill a bath with that much Irn-Bru…’