The Less Dead

by Denise Mina

  The legend underneath reads: Susan Brodie: Vice Girl’s Body Found.

  Margo pinches in so that the photo fills the screen. She’s avoiding the text of the article because the contrast between the story and the algorithmic setting is too much. The story is a retrospective of a dark episode in Glasgow, a time when nine young women were murdered less than a mile from George Square, when drug deaths hit an all-time high, when her mother was stolen and killed. This is intercut with animated offers of free online bingo games and an advert for package holidays: a woman in a red swimming costume singing show tunes about being happy on a beach.

  She’s focused on Susan. Stray, fractured words from the article hit her eye: ‘-ecially brutal’, ‘several murde-’, ‘McPhail’, ‘plague’. She doesn’t want to read much more about that, her mood is so low already.

  The photograph holds her there. Susan. Other Margo. She’s looking off to the side and Margo dips her head as if, through time and the magic of a Google search, she could catch her dead mother’s eye and smile and reassure her because Susan looks poor and lost. She looks drug-addled. She looks like a casualty. Maybe she was using when Margo was born. Janette could have lied about the timing–she had books about attachment in the house and must have worried.

  To make herself leave the screen, Margo takes a screenshot and saves it. Then she phones her brother in Saudi.

  Thomas picks up. ‘What?’

  ‘Where are you?’ she says, because that is what she always says when Thomas picks up.

  He’s in some bloke’s apartment, watching rugby. She can hear from the background burble that there are lots of people there. He says they’re all drinking beer and eating curry. What’s she phoning for?

  ‘I went to meet my mum…’

  He’s distracted by the match and says he forgot she was going to the adoption agency today. ‘How’d it go?’

  ‘I met an aunt. I saw a photo of Susan and she’s got crazy hair, like mine. Same eyebrows as well.’

  ‘Wow.’ She’s not sure if he’s commenting on the rugby or her news about the hair.

  Riyadh is only three hours ahead but she and Thomas always seem to be in different moments: she’s having a busy morning and he’s full of lunch. He’s falling asleep and she’s just got in from work. Their moods never match.

  He’s a year older than her. They were kind to each other growing up but he’s a hard man to stay close to. They’re very different. Margo works for and loves the NHS. Thomas hates rainy Glasgow and lives in Saudi for the tax breaks. All their friends visit him for free holidays but Margo only went once and had to come home early. She said she couldn’t cope with the heat but, really, she hated the compound lifestyle and told Joe, her ex, that Thomas was living like a factory animal. Now she worries that he’ll tell Thomas she said that. She knows they’re still in touch.

  He asks if her mum was fourteen when she had her.

  ‘No, she was nineteen,’ says Margo.

  ‘She wasn’t forced to give you up, then? A nun didn’t rip you from her arms?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘She just gave you away.’

  Thomas is bitter about being adopted and always has been. He has no interest in tracing his own birth family. Margo has always been more sanguine. Thomas was an unhappy child and thinks it’s because he was adopted into a family that fell apart. When he speculates about his birth mother he says she was probably a fourteen-year-old slut who left him in a McDonald’s. He never speculates about his birth father. He doesn’t think that’s relevant, says it could be anyone, that his imaginary teen mother probably serviced all comers and got paid in packets of crisps.

  Margo snickered when he said those things because she was young and he was her big brother. She laughed with Thomas about his slut mother, about promiscuous girls, at jokes about the local bike. She laughed along and absorbed the implied set of rules about the dangers of enjoying her own body, about keeping it controlled, appropriate, thin, young and white. They sneered together because they’d been rejected and it felt empowering to reject back. But now she sits in the taxi, looking out of the window at the acres of overgrown waste ground in the Gorbals and imagines a pregnant fourteen-year-old Susan eating crisps, not knowing who the father of her child is because she could have been impregnated by so many men. It’s horrific. She’d take Susan straight to social services and call the police, get them to find the men who did that to a fourteen-year-old and get them off the streets. She can feel the hairs on her neck stand up when she imagines that. Excitement. The thrill of righteous anger.

  ‘So, is your aunt as rough as buggery?’ says Thomas.

  Margo can’t bear to lose a fight to Thomas. ‘No, Nikki’s very nice. She’s a nice lady.’

  ‘Yeah? What does she do for a living?’ He’s shooting questions as if he’s making conversation at a company drinks party.

  ‘Works in a cake shop.’

  It’s the only non-professional middle-class job she can think of. She’s trying to sell Nikki to Thomas but, really, Thomas doesn’t care about that. It’s Margo who would like Nikki more if she worked in a cake shop. If Nikki bred labradoodles or had a rose garden or lived in the country Margo might read Nikki’s crassness as her being straightforward, her lateness and no-nonsense manner as eccentricity. Now she just thinks Nikki’s a scary ned. She can never let Thomas meet Nikki because, if he does, Margo will be the only thing worse than a snob: she’ll be an exposed snob.

  ‘You going to see her again?’ asks Thomas.

  ‘Nah, think we’ll just leave it there.’

  He likes that. His voice is lighter when he says, ‘Will Janette’s be cleared for the estate agent next week?’

  ‘Getting there.’

  ‘Is it going OK?’

  ‘Oh yeah.’ It’s going incredibly badly. She’s mostly crying in different rooms but doesn’t want to tell him that. She said she’d do it and she hasn’t.

  ‘Hey, well, I’m sorry it’s all down to you, Margie, but thanks for taking it on.’

  ‘No worries,’ she says, though she is nothing but a big bag of worries.

  She’s scared that Thomas will float away from her when it’s all sold and settled. Until now they’ve been held close by the crippling cost of Janette’s care and she’s terrified she’ll lose him. She’s worried she did the wrong thing, walking out on Joe, and she hasn’t told anyone she’s pregnant yet. She was hoping Nikki would be warm and motherly, maybe present her with a warm extended family and invite her in, that it would be straightforward.

  ‘Anyway!’ she says. ‘Anyway, clearing out is keeping me busy. Nikki gave me a photo of my mum and she looks exactly like me.’

  Thomas tells her to send him the picture and she has to hang up to do it. She doesn’t want him to see the newspaper one. She takes a picture of the photo Nikki gave her and sends it. Thomas texts back in seconds.

  Don’t be a bloody dork. He sounds like all those ex-pat arseholes out there.

  She doesn’t know what he means. She texts back, ?

  Not of you. Send pic OF HER.

  She takes a deep breath. She isn’t imagining it, he can see the crushing likeness between them too. She texts back telling him to look carefully at the teeth. A moment later Thomas replies with a surprised emoji.

  She sits in the dark taxi staring at the photo of Susan on her phone, willing Thomas to call or text again, but he does neither.

  Susan looks so much like Margo it’s frightening. Same face and hair and long neck, same stubby fingers, same eyes. She wants to phone Joe and talk to him about it but that’s not fair. It’s not fair to call him for emotional support. She left him after all.

  The image dims and dies, leaving her alone with her thoughts and a rising sense of panic.

  Margo stabs in her security code and buries her face in her phone, skimming the article about long-ago dead women and far-future holidays. She backtracks and opens another one about the case today. It was brought against a man called Moorov from Blant
yre. Police took a DNA swab from him when the garage he worked in was robbed and got a hit for the thirty-year-old murder. He was not interviewed at the time and had never been a suspect. He was expected to plead guilty.

  An inset paragraph gives a recap of all the murders and Susan Brodie is fourth on the list. She was nineteen when she was killed, her body was dumped in Easterhouse. No one was ever charged with her murder but Martin McPhail, a police officer who left the force shortly afterwards, was named as her killer in a book about the killings. He is currently suing the author.

  Margo looks out at the dark wasteland and then glances up to the rear view mirror. She sees the taxi driver’s eyes slide towards her. Suddenly self-conscious, she arranges her face for viewing and looks back out of the window.

  They stop at the Eglinton lights, where a train line to London cuts beneath the road and the M74 to Carlisle flyover passes above.

  With every passing moment she feels more adrift and alone.

  6

  THE CAB PULLS UP in Holly Road and Margo pays, gets out and lets the taxi draw away behind her. Unaware that she is being watched, she stands on the pavement and looks up at her flat. She is still paying rent on the flat she shared with Joe and this is all she can afford. She can’t face living all alone in Janette’s house but she hates it here.

  It’s a new building, positioned in a vacant space between nice tenements, facing pretty old town houses across a narrow street. The neighbours hate the people who live here because it is ugly, the work was contentious, the sound insulation is awful and they’re all short-term tenants in an area of proud homeowners.

  She thumbs the code into the keypad on the door and pushes it open, tramping up to her sterile rented flat in this sterile rented building.

  The building isn’t good quality. There’s a parsimoniousness to everything: the rooms are too small, doors are hollow, sinks and baths are shallow. Nothing is scuffed or broken but it’s just a matter of time. She moved in two months ago when she left Joe because it was available, cheap and close to Janette’s house. Now she feels shaped by the meanness of it. A single vase makes a room feel cluttered. The heat rising from the flats downstairs makes it too warm. She’s always got a headache because she grinds her teeth when she’s here.

  She opens her front door, drops her coat and bag in the tiny hall, goes into the bathroom and starts running a bath. She wants to wash the night off herself.

  The man downstairs is playing a computer game. He plays it at night and the soundtrack is thunder or explosions or something but, heard through the floor, it sounds as if he’s moving furniture all night for hours. She can feel it in her bones as she texts a prompt to Lilah:

  Aunt turned up. Hello and goodbye. Bit mad. How was baby shower?

  She gets nothing back. Lilah turns her phone on and off like a pensioner conserving the battery because she can’t always be bothered talking.

  In the living room Margo opens her laptop and turns it on. She looks at the screen for a moment and then she does exactly what Tracey warned her not to do: she looks up Barney Keith.

  Facebook has only one Barney Keith living in Glasgow but he doesn’t look anything like her. He has fishy lips and yellow skin and small eyes and he’s ancient. He lives over in Nitshill, on the far southern outskirts of Glasgow, and isn’t a big Facebook slave. His posts are intermittent. He can’t spell very well and uses a lot of text speak, numbers for words and emojis for emotions. He expresses his identity through strings of emoji flags. She works out his address from his posts complaining about the bin men. On Google Street View she can see a grey pebble-dash terraced council house and a front garden littered with a washing machine, skip bags of rubble and dog shit. Her heart sinks until she realises that this can’t possibly be her father, he’s twenty or thirty years older than Susan would be now if she had lived. She’s surprised, she’d have thought it was an unusual name but there must be another one and he’s not on Facebook. She’s quite proud of that in a way. Maybe he’s got a life going on, doesn’t feel the need to advertise. Maybe this Barney is some sort of relation to him.

  The pitch of the running water changes and she gets up and goes into the bathroom, leaning over to turn the tap off. She stands up and catches sight of herself in the mirror. It’s Susan Brodie, back from the dead, standing in Margo’s horrible flat, caught unaware.

  Back in the living room she looks up old newspaper articles about Susan Brodie. There aren’t many. Mostly Susan is in a sidebar, a bit of backstory to a series of murders a long time ago. A disgraced ex-police officer, Martin McPhail, was interviewed about her murder but no charges were ever brought. Over the course of a decade nine different women were killed in the same small area of Glasgow, all sex workers. Police struggled to get information from the public or make arrests until Tanya Williams.

  Unlike Susan’s photo, Tanya’s picture is of a smiling blonde, very thin and young. She looks sweet and giggly with big eyes and backcombed crazy hair. Her grey-haired mother is pictured too, holding a family photo of Tanya riding a horse. Tanya wanted to travel and hoped to study nursing one day. Her grandmother had died and Tanya turned to drugs to cope with her grief. They had been very close.

  The other women are represented quite differently, in what seem to be arrest photographs. Their murders are listed chronologically. It gives each woman’s name, her age, whether or not she had children and the method of her death: strangled, stabbed, beaten with a brick. Susan Brodie is listed as: age nineteen, no children, abducted, body dumped in Easterhouse. Margo was four months old when Susan died. She would have been cosily tucked up at Paul and Janette’s, long before their marriage went sour.

  That’s all the papers say about the other murdered women. It’s a cold, factual list that could be about someone stealing park benches: an old one was taken from here, a green one from there, are these bench thefts connected? What are the police doing to stop the bench thieves?

  In all of them Susan is just a detail. Margo wonders if Nikki made up the killer-cop story as a counter to Susan’s roaring insignificance. But the articles mention him too.

  Some of the tabloids even have a photo of McPhail. He’s fat and square and red-faced, looks as if he has high blood pressure but he’s smoking in the street, looking to the side as if he has spotted someone he knows. Next to him is a picture of a very good-looking man. He’s blond, tanned and lean, wears a cotton shirt and has a big, handsome face. It’s the author Martin McPhail is suing for defamation, Jack Robertson.

  Robertson left journalism in 2003 and wrote a book about the case of the Glasgow murders, Terror on the Streets. A search of his name shows Robertson at a variety of book signings, wearing various noisy shirts, giving talks to adoring crowds of, mostly, women. Robertson’s book theorises that a serial killer committed ‘most, if not all’ of the murders. There’s a profile interview where he poses in a dank alleyway at night, looking worried. His book was a bestseller and he’s reported as having sold the film rights for a six-figure sum. Margo isn’t sure that’s true. It’s on Wikipedia and could have been written by Robertson.

  Lilah finally texts back:

  CARNAGE. Massive fight.

  Margo replies:

  OMG?

  Can’t talk. Still here with police.

  You OK?

  No one hurt but very annoying. Broken window.

  Margo half laughs to herself. It was supposed to be a bunch of women in their thirties drinking wine and cooing over baby clothes, not a drunken brawl, but she stops suddenly as she realises that it’s bound to be something to do with that wanker Richard. She knows it is because of the minimising tone of ‘very annoying’. Lilah makes everything else more dramatic and downplays every outrage by her mental ex-boyfriend.

  M and P tomorrow am?

  Margo replies:

  Deffo. 10am?

  After a pause Lilah texts back:

  Unable to locate thumbs up or whichever emoji is taken to indicate the affirmative. In summation: yes. />
  Margo smiles at that, even though she knows Lilah is being playful because she doesn’t want Margo to ask for details. Margo doesn’t want to be quizzed too closely either so they’re quits.

  She goes back to her laptop. There must be more about Susan than an odd paragraph here and there. When patient files are lost at work Margo always tries a variant spelling, so she tries a search for ‘Suzanne’, ‘Brodie’ and ‘Glasgow’ and this brings up a different set of hits, mostly for a radio presenter, but on the second page, right at the bottom, is a heading: REALCRIMESCENE.com. She opens it to a page with blood splattered across it and a series of numerical links, one of which has ‘SB’ next to it. She clicks on the listing.

  A photograph of a cold blue morning. A bus stop in a grey place: a kerb, a pavement and a naked body lying on trampled mud. The crime picture is wide, taking in the overall scene. Gathered in the gutter are soggy cigarette ends, dropped by people getting on buses. The cob-orange filters have unravelled in the rain and lie around like little square sweetie wrappers. The bus stop is just a pole with a timetable attached, tagged and unreadable.

  Beyond that is Susan. She’s lying on her back on a red and yellow tartan rug. It’s a lap rug, too small to protect her from the cold ground. Her skin is pearlescent, radiant white because it’s so bloodless. Susan has been stabbed through the heart, in the upper left thoracic quadrant, six or seven times. The blood has been washed from her body, the skin has contracted around the wounds and they gape, a cluster of tiny mouths screaming in chorus. Her arms are limp, one thrown out to one side, the other draped across her chest. She looks as if she’s been thrown out of a van. She has the waxy pallor and sunken sockets of a day dead. Her breasts rest on the side of her ribcage. She isn’t underweight. Most addicts are. Both upper arms are bruised where she has been restrained but there are no track marks, none on her legs or feet either. Susan wasn’t using when she died.