by Denise Mina
Night is falling as she pulls into Granville Street and spots a handy parking space.
She notices lights in her rear-view mirror; a car close behind hers is hesitating, apparently unsure whether she is stopping in the middle of the street or waiting to reverse-park. She waits for them to draw back but they don’t.
She can’t get in if they don’t move. She flicks on her indicator, asking them to pull back, but they stay still. She puts the car in gear so the reverse lights will show but the car behind her pulls towards her slightly, nudging forward, coming too close. Margo reverses an inch. The car closes the gap. There are plenty of spaces, she doesn’t think they’d secretly bagsied that one, but they won’t budge.
She raises her hands so they can see her exasperation.
They nudge forward again. She can’t reverse at all now.
Muttering curses, she changes gear and pulls slowly forward, driving straight into a space nose-on to the library building, watching the car behind in her mirror.
It does nothing. The engine is still running but the car hasn’t moved.
She pulls on her handbrake and gets out, standing on the pavement to look, thinking maybe the driver has been taken ill or they are on the phone. The car is a big old boxy Honda, green-coloured, about thirty years old and quite dirty. The sun visor is down, though evening has fallen and it is getting dark. The engine revs.
Suddenly the car shoots along the road to the junction. Her eyes are on the driver’s window and she sees an upraised palm facing her as if they’re waving.
She doesn’t recognise the car, even though it’s quite distinctive, but the driving style is attention-grabbingly erratic. Is the driver ill? Are they going to crash? At the last minute it takes a fast, neat turn into a side street, heading away from her, and, as it turns, the slim hand drops from the window. It turns again and is gone. She thinks that the hand was not a wave after all but the driver hiding their face from her. Odd. A little bit threatening.
Still puzzling over it, she goes into the library. She wants to check something out before she goes to Andolfo’s. She’s pushing the doors open before she even thinks about the threatening letter to her house. And the ones sent to Nikki. It makes her shiver, the notion of that dark malevolence lurking everywhere, but the incident in the street was unconnected, she’s sure. She’s looking for patterns in pebbles on the beach. She’s being paranoid.
Inside the doors, the building opens out into a big bright courtyard with a shop and a cafe and a bank of computers. The cafe is shut but something is on in the theatre next to it and people are gathering at the tables, waiting to go in. She walks over to the lifts and takes one up to level 5: the newspaper archive.
The lift doors open to a swirly 1970s red carpet and smoked-glass bannisters. The reading room is quiet. It has magazine racks filled with obscure titles, football history, types of trains. A few readers, mostly men of retirement age, sit scattered at tables, poring over old newspapers and maps, reading quarterlies and staring into space. White filing cabinets form a wall down the centre of the room.
A librarian standing behind a low desk beckons Margo over. Margo asks how she would get to see newspaper coverage of an old murder trial in Glasgow in the early 1990s.
Possibly a tabloid would be best?
Yeah, says Margo, that’s a good bet.
At the filing cabinets the woman explains the chronology, which drawer has which paper, and opens one to show her rows of white boxes, dated. They find the relevant dates for four months after Margo’s birthday and take them over to a screening machine perched on a table for one at the side of the room.
The machine consists of a screen at the back of an upright three-sided box with protruding wings at the side to shield the viewer’s face and a spooling mechanism at the front. The librarian takes one of the rolls of microfilm, threads it through the glass clamp and onto the receiving spool. She turns a switch at the side and a light shines up, projecting the image through the glass onto the roof of the box where it’s mirror-reversed and reflected onto the screen at the back.
This is the button for scrolling forward. This is for rewinding when you’ve finished each spool. Please return them as you found them and be sure to put them back in the right filing cabinet. She leaves Margo to it.
Margo isn’t sure how to operate the machine. She was trying to pay attention but got distracted by thoughts about the driver of the Honda. Were they ill? Rude? Mad? Maybe it just didn’t mean anything.
She sits down at the basic machine and sees handmade signs stuck all over it: ‘PLEASE rewind’, ‘DO NOT REMOVE’, ‘Push gently to rotate image’. Margo already feels as if she’s done something wrong and she hasn’t even touched it yet.
She scrolls through to a date four months after her birthday and starts to read.
The paper is tabloid and unfamiliar. It’s more than thirty years old and the values are quite shocking. She skims stories about a by-election in Govan and sex and football. A lot of the paper is about sex. Teen sex, kiddie sex, teacher sex. Are Women Finished By Forty? The women pictured in it are all in luridly sexualised poses, legs apart, blouses undone, looking over their shoulder. Margo sees a TV presenter, now considered grandmotherly and dowdy, but back then she’s biting her own shirt collar and smouldering out at the audience through lowered eyes. By contrast, all the men in the paper are solemn meaty lumps who have done things or had things happen to them. They gaze out, unperturbed by being observed, certain of the audience’s empathy.
Margo feels as if she’s reading in a language she doesn’t understand, as if she’s eavesdropping on aggressively heterosexual Victorians.
Two weeks in, she finds a three-inch column on page 7: DEAD VICE GIRL’S FEAR OF STALKER.
Here is a photo of Susan that she hasn’t seen. She is out of focus, as if she moved just at the moment the picture was taken. It’s tightly cropped on her face and she is laughing, her eyes are crinkled shut. Her wild hair is wet, as if she has just come in from heavy rain, and it glitters with sparks of light, as if all the wild kinks are filled with pearls. She smiles wide and her twisted tooth is bare and sweet, there’s no shame here, she doesn’t know anyone is looking at her. She’s young and her cheeks are pink and wet.
Margo cranes into the box, towards the screen, trying to fill her eyes with the image. She feels a yearning for her mother roll up from her stomach in great, warm waves, the desire for connection shoving her into the image. She mouths her mum’s name.
It feels cruel to pair that picture with the story. Sad to have to read those words. She forces herself.
Tiny vice girl Susan Brodie was murdered plying her trade in fear of a crazed stalker. Susan, 19, was found dumped on the busy Edinburgh Road in Easterhouse on Saturday morning. Devastated sister, Nikki Brodie, made an emotional appeal last night: ‘Somebody must have seen something. Lassies are dropping like flies out here.’ Susan had been living with boyfriend Barney Keith, 38, since she was 15.
Margo sits still. There’s a picture of him. The legend underneath reads: Devastated: Barney Keith.
Barney has grey teeth, sunken cheeks and Margo’s round brown eyes. She blinks. That’s her dad. His girlfriend was a fifteen-year-old sex worker. Mr Nitshill Complaints-to-the-council is her dad. She’s glad he’s devastated. She hates him. She hopes his entire life was shit.
Mothers are different. Susan carried and formed her, cupped her stomach when Margo was inside. Janette raised her, fed her, saw her through fevers and taught her how to make a bed. Barney is just a sperm donor, really, a genetic reference point. He’s not who she is. He’s just a ball sack with a backstory.
A little shocked at her venomous thoughts, Margo sits back to take a deep breath and meets the eye of a man across the room. His eyebrows tent suddenly as if he can hear what she has been thinking. Embarrassed, Margo slides back into the screening box.
The article quotes Barney. He says Susan had been raped quite recently by a client who was known to the police. She
had seen him hanging around again in his van and was afraid. The last time Barney saw her was the night she went missing, as she was getting into a taxi for the city centre. He is devastated.
She scrolls on, putting Barney’s devastation in the past with the press of a button. She stops at a photograph of DI Gallagher looking almost exactly the same as she does now but with brown hair and tighter skin. She still has the same patrician bearing, the same hard stare, and is quoted saying that Jack Robertson’s claims last week that a serial killer is on the loose are irresponsible, not true and causing mayhem. What the police need are witnesses, not theories. ‘We know it is easier not to get involved,’ says Diane in the past. ‘We know who was in the area at the time. If we don’t hear from them soon we will have no option but to visit these men in their homes and places of work.’
Margo likes the veiled threat of that, of cops turning up at a man’s door to ask his wife if they can have a word about a sex worker’s murder. She spools on and finds nothing more. No more comments, no arrests, no more appeals for information.
The story seems to die as Susan died: dumped at the side of a road in the dark.
12
THE FOOD AT ANDOLFO’S is startlingly bad. Margo’s linguine tastes of nothing but calories and water. The chef has tried to dress the plates with fresh parsley but it’s still basic supermarket pasta with one-note tomato sauce. She didn’t know people went to restaurants this bad any more. Even the decor is awful: the tables are grey marble, too cold to rest a hand on, and the bare stone walls are varnished with wet-look gloss. It looks like a Bond villain’s cave. The place is busy and bustling though. Everyone else seems to be enjoying the tasteless food except her.
She begins to doubt herself because Jack Robertson is so enthusiastic. He smiles and nods and hums at his plate, sends his compliments to the chef.
‘Isn’t this delicious?’ he says, ripping off a portion from the garlic bread they’re sharing.
It tastes of oily tinfoil. Margo wonders if pregnancy has changed the enzymes in her saliva, or the consensus in the room is an elaborate practical joke, but it isn’t. Either this level of bland is the perfect level of bland for the clientele or no one here has ever been to another restaurant.
She tries to think of something to say that isn’t about the food. ‘I’ve never actually been here before.’
Jack smiles and nods. ‘I hear that all the time! This place is one of those well-kept Glasgow secrets.’
Jack is very likeable. He has the unshakeable self-confidence of a man in his mid-fifties who has neither lost his hair nor gotten fat. His skin is sun-kissed, as if he’s just back from having an adventure somewhere exotic, and his hair is a loose, silver mane framing his brown face. He’s still wearing his grey leather trousers but has changed into a yellow and black Versace shirt. He wears an antique Rolex and a chunky gold chain around his neck that rests on stray grey chest hairs. This feels like a date or, more specifically, as if Robertson is on a date and Margo is here for an interview. Sartorial flair is eyed with suspicion in the medical profession. She’s wearing clothes that mark her out as a sensible person who will do her job, turn up on time and not steal meds.
‘Why has your book been withdrawn from sale?’
‘Legal reasons.’ He puts his beer down. ‘Martin McPhail is suing me for naming him.’
‘As responsible for the murders?’
‘Yes.’
‘Including the one that was tried today, where another man pled guilty?’
He shakes his head, reaches down to his large leather messenger bag on the floor and pulls out a brick of a paperback. As if to emphasise the weight of his work he drops the book and makes the table shudder. ‘My opus. This is where I make the case against McPhail. You can have that. It’s a gift.’
‘Thank you,’ says Margo. ‘I should give you some money for it –’
‘No, no,’ he puts his hand on the book, still convinced that this might be some form of legal entrapment. ‘You pay for dinner and we’ll call it quits.’
The meal is going to cost quite a lot more than she would have spent on the book but Jack smiles and waves a hand as if she should let the enormous favour he’s doing her pass. ‘I’ve got boxes of them at home. Can’t sell them while this case is hanging over me so the garage is full. Self-published. Didn’t want to go with a commercial publisher because we knew it would be big. It was.’ His eyebrows bob.
‘You made a lot of money?’
‘Well, define “a lot of money”. I made a good chunk of change. Put it this way: McPhail thinks he’ll get a decent pay-out just for threatening me. I’m worth suing.’ He looks terrified and proud at the same time. It’s a salty mix. ‘Benefit of not going with a publisher. Get a bigger share of the profit.’
Margo hesitates, unsure of how well it will go down but then just says it. ‘But a bigger share of the liability. I suppose a publisher would have been more circumspect about what you said.’
‘Yeah. Yeah.’ He looks at Margo with a respect she didn’t know was missing until it arrived. He points at his book with his fork. ‘Have a look.’
Margo gladly abandons her soggy linguine to flip through the book.
It looks serious and scholarly and dense. There’s an index and pages of photographs in the middle but the cover is lurid. It’s red and black like a tabloid front page. In the foreground are a woman’s legs in fishnet stockings. In the distance, a faceless man in silhouette crouches, holding a knife, ready to pounce at her. Along the bottom are individual photos of all of the women who were killed, their eyes redacted.
‘That cover is an embarrassment,’ frowns Jack. ‘We changed designer four times over a year and a half.’ He stabs at the fish-netted legs with his fork, leaving four tiny teeth marks on the woman’s calf. ‘Gaudy. The PR people were trading bitch-slaps the whole time.’ His grin falters. ‘Sorry. Is “bitch-slap” OK to say now…? Everything changes so quickly I don’t know what’s all right any more…’
Margo doesn’t know either but she’s only half listening. Mostly she’s looking at the photo of Susan.
There’s a black bar across Susan’s eyes but it’s still definitely her. Her squint tooth is visible between her open lips. It’s a head and shoulders shot. She’s wearing a yellow vest top, red lipstick and a toothed hairband that flattens her hair away from her face and lets it puff out at the back. Margo wore that style to a school disco when she was thirteen.
‘Did you have to use mugshots?’
‘They’re the only pictures we could find…’
Margo knows they weren’t. The papers had better pictures of Susan than this one. This makes the victims look like criminals. This makes them seedy and problematic.
‘Susan Brodie,’ she says. ‘What a life she had…’
‘Oh, not just her. They all had hard lives. You heard them talking through that girl’s last night in court today?’
‘No, I just came at the end.’
‘Well, it was a fairly typical night down on the Drag: she was at the needle exchange, popped into the Jesus bus for a cup of tea at two a.m., two thirty she went out on the streets again, picked up a punter. Next thing she was found dead in Wellington Lane. Strangled. Naked. Teeth marks punctured the skin on her shoulder. Pretty sad.’
‘And you thought Martin McPhail was responsible for that?’
‘I did. I do.’
‘But they found someone else guilty today.’
‘Yeah, well, they didn’t prove his guilt, he pled guilty. There could be a lot of reasons for that, I suppose… Doesn’t definitely mean he did it…’
But they both know that it probably does. Robertson can’t meet her eye.
‘Who the hell knows what was going on today? His lawyer said the case was defensible but his client wanted to plead guilty, said in court that he was “reluctantly following instruction”. Was he convinced to plead guilty by the powers that be?’
‘Maybe he just did it.’
‘No. I ca
n see why you might think that. His DNA was all over the poor girl but that doesn’t mean anything. Vicious, what he did that night, McPhail…’
He looks at Margo, as if he’s trying to get her to agree that it was McPhail. Margo nods and this pleases him.
‘Injustice. See, this is what happens when policing fails,’ he says and stabs the tabletop with his forefinger, ‘fools like me, nuts like me, we can’t stand it. We can’t just throw our hands up and accept that and walk away. We can’t. This is how society breaks down, how feuds start, you know? You hit my brother, no one is there to intervene so I seek justice by hitting you back and on it goes… It’s a failure of policing.’
He’s suddenly so adamant and off topic that Margo thinks he has said terrible, irresponsible things in his mad book. She can hardly wait to read it.
A sudden burst of high-pitched laughter draws their attention. Four middle-aged women at a nearby table laugh loudly. Behind them, at another table, a man knocks a beer bottle over and it clatters to the stone floor. The women all cheer and start talking to the man and his friend. Margo realises that the draw of the restaurant isn’t the food, it’s that they serve wine in enormous glasses. Everyone is here to get pissed in a civilized setting.
‘See,’ says Jack, ‘you had to be there to understand: back in the mid to late 1980s, when heroin came to Glasgow, it changed everything. A whole generation was wiped out, parts of the city became chaotic.’