The Less Dead

by Denise Mina

  She watches as Joe sits down slowly on it. It’s a big grey velvet sofa, bought less than a year ago. They got it on tick, are paying it up over a year. She remembers when they bought it. Ex-display in the New Year sales. Janette was quite ill but still aware, still happy in herself, tottering around the lower floors of her enormous house, waiting for Kiki to bring her dinner in. Joe had just taken over the bike shop a few months before and was working longer hours than Margo. He was tired all the time and they had fights, play fights, nothing serious, about him nodding off at night and drooling onto the precious velvet. A nice time. Before Lilah and Richard arrived back from London and everything got messy.

  She sits down on a chair across from him, no longer welcome on the big spongy sofa, no longer part of that.

  He looks up at her expectantly but says nothing. He needs a shave and a shower, she can smell his smell. He’s just in from work and looks tired.

  They don’t usually talk when Margo appears at his door late in the evening. They usually start kissing and go to bed and hope that everything will be better when they wake up. They’ve talked out their relationship, talked as far as talking can go. Joe isn’t sorry for reporting Richard. Margo can’t forgive him for breaking Lilah’s confidence. Lilah and Richard won’t call a ceasefire so Margo and Joe can’t stop fighting either.

  ‘Did Lilah tell you Richard broke Emma’s window?’

  ‘Not really. You know how she is.’

  ‘She told you in silly voices so she doesn’t have to take it seriously?’

  She thinks about the rabbit’s foot on the key chain. ‘Sort of. They kept him in for ages because of your complaint, you know. You shouldn’t have interfered.’

  ‘Margo, you think being cautious means you’re not doing anything but that’s bullshit. He could really hurt Lilah and it’s a flashpoint–when someone leaves a relationship that controlling, this is when something serious could happen. I’m protecting him as much as her. But let’s not pretend you’re not doing anything. You’re standing there, letting it happen right in front of you and not stepping in. That is doing something. It’s just not taking responsibility.’

  ‘She doesn’t want you to protect her.’

  ‘I don’t care what either of them want. I did it because someone needed to do something.’ Joe shuts his eyes and holds up a hand. ‘Can we, just for one night, not talk about them?’

  Margo doesn’t know if they can. ‘We should have stayed out of it until we knew what was going on.’

  ‘Margie, we knew perfectly well. You did what you always do and did nothing, to be careful. You need to be reckless sometimes. At the moment you’re just drawing back from the world inch by inch and blaming everyone else –’

  ‘She’s my best friend.’

  ‘He’s my brother. And OK: I don’t like Lilah, I think she’s a pain in the arse, but the irony is that I’m the only one who’s concerned enough about her safety to do anything.’

  ‘She’s not in danger. You’ve no idea how many scrapes Lilah has gotten out of.’

  ‘We’re avoiding talking about us by focusing on them again.’

  He’s right. They are.

  He holds up one adorable finger. ‘I’m saying one thing and then we’re not talking about it, even hinting at it, for the rest of this conversation: Richard has a history of violence with his ex-wife. He broke her arm. She said it was an accident but I know it wasn’t, I saw the bruises on her jaw. That’s all I’m saying.’

  But they’ve made eye contact now, properly, and the tone has changed. Voices have dropped, eyes are hooded, they’re craning towards one another and straining with the effort of not touching.

  ‘Am I allowed one thing as well then?’

  ‘Just one,’ he says, leaning forward and touching her hand to distract her.

  ‘If the H-bomb was dropped on Glasgow tonight I’d go and stand next to Lilah. She’s indestructible.’

  Their fingers intertwine.

  ‘Finished?’ he whispers.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Can we talk about you now? About the adoption lady? By the way, I know yesterday was Janette’s six-month anniversary. I didn’t want to text you…’

  Margo had forgotten. Joe remembered though. He’s reminding her that she’s this far away from her mum dying, that he’s thinking about how she feels, that he’s making allowances for her because he knows it isn’t an easy time.

  She almost tells him she’s pregnant.

  The world-shattering news rattles around her head like a stick being dropped down a well. Saying it will change the direction of everything forever, she knows it will, but she still doesn’t know which direction she wants to steer in. When she looks at Joe, at his wide shoulders and his broad jaw, at the brown freckles in his green eyes, she knows she wants to keep on looking at him for the rest of her life. It’s when they’re not together that she doubts herself. She’s bullying to him because she’s afraid of the pull he has over her, frightened of his high-handedness, worried that he seems to be deciding who she can and can’t be friends with. She saw fleeting glimpses of it before Lilah came home, his reluctance to socialise, how he didn’t like a lot of her friends and accused her of being dishonest about her motives for a lot of things. She’s not sure of him, she’s defensive, and she’s terrified of being trapped.

  ‘Well,’ she says, ‘I met my aunt and you will not believe the half of it.’

  Joe smiles. ‘Is it a big, long story?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Are there lots of side stories and irrelevant characters?’

  ‘Buckets. Do you know how much you can charge for watery linguine?’

  ‘I don’t.’ He draws her to him. ‘Would you care to join me here on this hire-purchase velvet life raft and bore the shit out of me with every single detail?’

  So she does.

  At five in the morning she wakes, queasy and startled, and slips out of bed, leaving Joe to sleep. She makes a cup of ginger tea in her favourite mug, a pint-sized one with a photo of a grubby street pigeon on it. She settles down in the velvet sofa and opens Robertson’s Terror on the Streets.

  The style is tabloid and mildly hysterical. Sentences never seem to want to end. He gives a rundown of the first murder, which policemen were in charge of the investigation, who the important crime reporters were at that time, who the editors of the newspapers were and what they were known for. There are a lot of men’s names and descriptions of them that mark none of them apart. It’s all very chummy and, to an outsider, really quite boring.

  He talks about all of the women who died violently on the Drag, starting with a woman found in a car park. He gets to the second death and then the third and then the fourth: Susan Brodie. It tells her nothing new in a lot of words.

  Robertson gets to the night she went missing and sets the scene. Three ‘prostitutes’ had been murdered within five years. The atmosphere was tense on the Drag, everyone was afraid of the next murder.

  He goes on: it was a cold Thursday night, Susan was feeling tired and depressed, craving drugs, missing her baby, when a white van pulled up and someone motioned to her to get in. Susan was unsure but desperate. Susan moved towards the van to see inside. Whatever she saw reassured her because she got in.

  Margo sits back. Robertson can’t possibly know these things, he’s describing someone else’s life in a subjective narrative. Margo doesn’t know if it’s all right to do that. It feels wrong and unkind and presumptuous.

  Susan got into the van and was never seen alive again. She died as ‘a bitter sun rose over Glasgow’s mean and dirty streets’. He mentions that toast was found in her stomach at the post-mortem, that there must have been a toaster wherever she was, and finishes the chapter on that observation, as if the presence of a toaster has narrowed her whereabouts down conclusively.

  The next chapter is about McPhail.

  Martin McPhail always wanted to be a police officer. His brother went into the force before him, and was promoted up th
rough the ranks very quickly. It’s almost word for word what he told her in the restaurant. She’s a little bit annoyed about that, but he makes a point of saying that in every one of the murders ‘urine samples’ were found at the scene. That’s a bit thin–and, Margo notices, very carefully worded–given that most of the women were found in alleys in the city centre. In every single murder, McPhail, or someone fitting his description, was seen in the vicinity at the time. McPhail could not account for his whereabouts at the time of any of them except for the fourth one–the Susan Brodie murder–and that alibi was confirmed by only one source, Strathclyde Police. Later, when he was arrested for rape, he confessed to a cellmate, giving details of the murders that police confirmed could be known only to the killer.

  Margo tuts. They weren’t known only to the killer. They were known to the police as well and McPhail was in the police. It’s a frustrating read. He’s making logic leaps and assumptions, propelling himself through nonsense arguments with indignation.

  She flips to the photographs in the middle. An image of the High Court, pictures of women in silhouette, gathered on street corners. Mugshots of some of the women. She gets to the middle image. It’s Susan’s crime-scene photo. Susan, naked on the rug, cigarette ends in the gutter. This picture is higher resolution than the one on the Internet. This is where they scanned it from.

  Jack Robertson knew where the picture came from. He must have known but he lied about it to her in the full knowledge that she’d find out when she opened the book. He didn’t care.

  She shoves the stupid book back in her bag. It’s badly written rubbish, the evidence is thin and the tone is salacious. Margo thinks that Nikki read this stupid book, possibly at a time when she was vulnerable, and it messed with her head. She’s not even going to mention it when they meet for a drink tonight. She doesn’t know enough about it. She’s not going to get involved or do anything. Sometimes people just want you to listen.

  14

  SUSAN JOGS UP THE outside stairs and gets keys out of her pocket, slips them into the door and goes in.

  This is a different house. A big house with lots of ways in. The lights are all off. Empty. She’s alone.

  Her red Mini is hard to hide, easy to follow, and she’s not even trying. Parked on the street last night, after the library and the close call. Just took a couple of hours of waiting behind it in the town for her to come back and drive to a house, not the letter house, another house, one of her punters maybe. Good pay for a full night’s work. Must have the cash on her still.

  Bitches get everywhere.

  This is a big house, front garden hidden behind bushes along the pavement, plenty of dead space between the street and the windows. Good for hiding.

  The window frames look loose, can see that from the street. The house is falling down, the doors and windows are peeling, window locks are old or broken or non-existent.

  Rev the engine and pull the car away along the street, looking for a place to park, out of sight, somewhere the bitch won’t see it.

  Have to keep your eye on them, watch them, manage them.

  15

  JANETTE’S HOUSE IS DUSTY now that no one is moving around in it. A thin film of dry dust settles over everything, clinging to picture rails, skirting boards, on boxes and worktops. Even the toilet seat is dusty.

  Margo shuts the front door on the street and braces herself before she turns round. She makes herself look up. There is the stained-glass globe light shade her mother fixed at the kitchen table with Araldite. There is the last scarf Janette ever wore, hanging on the bannister. She leans her back against the door and doesn’t want to move. She lets out a sigh and forces herself to step over the boxes and go into the kitchen and put the kettle on. She’s trying not to look up because everywhere her eye falls is a job not done.

  Janette’s house is in Strathbungo, now a ‘sought-after area within a vibrant community’, according to the estate agents. It wasn’t always. Janette bought the crumbling house for a song shortly after Paul Dunlop left them. They needed somewhere cheap. It was only in hindsight that they realised that Janette was clinically depressed for years afterwards.

  The house overlooks a sunken railway line that was kept clear of vegetation when they first moved in. Passing trains rattled crockery in the cupboards, made window glass vibrate at a low frequency, almost imperceptibly, just enough to make the outside world seem blurry and uncertain. The house disintegrated around them for the first few years.

  They were eating tea in the kitchen one evening, a school night, when they heard a crash in the front room and a cloud of dust billowed through the hall. A ceiling had fallen in. It was a low point, referred to ever after as the Fall of the House of Dunlop.

  The villa is early nineteenth century, has grand proportions and lots of original features. Victorian Anaglypta wallpaper runs up to the picture rail, all the fireplaces work, there are butler’s bells by the beds and a stained-glass sun room that used to let in the rain. One day, shortly after the Fall of the House of Dunlop, Margo came home to find workmen in the house, replastering the ceiling. Then she found Janette using a palette knife to fit window putty and firm up the glass. Rooms got painted and carpets were pulled up. It was as if Janette had started to admit there would be a future as well as a past. Slowly, she restored the house as she recovered, learned joinery and fixed door frames and bannisters. She painted whole rooms herself and tiled all three bathrooms. She grew a garden from a gravel pit, planted flowers in the small strip of garden that looked out into the street, had the front door painted a jaunty red. The wonder of her hands was everywhere. It wasn’t an investment to her. It was emotional signage, a commitment to stay alive.

  Then, as if her recovery was contagious, neighbouring houses were bought from the slum landlords who had subdivided and neglected them and the area began to regenerate. Houses and gardens were restored by gifted amateurs. Neighbours formed committees, helped each other and replaced the cobbles and crumbling walls in the abandoned back lanes. Someone started a book club and an annual barbecue for the street. They campaigned for planting around the railway to dampen the noise and vibrations and the area became more green.

  Imperceptibly, the area slid into the second stage of gentrification and became a parody of itself. Professional developers bought houses and fixed them up and sold them to people with money. Soon glass-walled kitchen extensions were being built over gardens, saunas and garden studios were being fitted. Coffee shops opened everywhere. Parking became an issue. They got letters through the door asking if they wanted to sell, first from people who loved the house, then from estate agents. The cars outside got bigger and braggier. Then smaller and sportier and finally electric.

  They didn’t belong here any more but Janette hadn’t noticed because she was busy having strokes. The house was three storeys high and she couldn’t manage the stairs, it was completely impractical for her to stay, but she wanted to and she had never asked them for anything before. Margo and Thomas paid for a carer to look after her, for cleaners and bills and the incessant building repairs. They worried about budgeting for the next twenty years, knowing it could only get more expensive. They lived in cramped flats, scrimped on everything and resented it. Thomas went to Saudi chasing money, Margo moved in with Joe, chucked his old flatmate out and took on half his rent. Meanwhile property values rocketed around Janette. They knew they’d get a good price when it came to what they always referred to as ‘the time to sell’, but the money was running out. Even between them, they couldn’t afford her care. They mortgaged the house and invested but it wouldn’t last longer than five years. It was a constant worry.

  Abruptly one morning, on her way to work, Margo came in to pick up the shopping list for the day and the carer, Kiki, came down the stairs crying. Janette had died in her sleep. Kiki found her when she went to wake her up. She died without a whimper, twenty years too early. Now Margo would give anything for five more minutes of resentment about the cost of Janette’s care. She
missed the visits, the strain, resenting Thomas for being away, resenting Janette for being ill. She didn’t know what to do with Sundays and Mondays, Kiki’s days off, when it fell to her to look after Janette. She missed lifting and washing, she missed sore backs and interminable afternoons. She missed all the bad parts.

  Janette wasn’t a hoarder but the house is full of stuff. It was a slow accumulation of pleasing things, of ornaments and books and wall hangings and brasses and paintings from art fairs and models of things, none of it intrinsically valuable. Margo has five days to clear the traces of her mum’s life from the house before the estate agent comes to take pictures. She’s swimming in circles.

  She’s in the kitchen, looking out of a dirty window at an overgrown hedge and a head bobbing along in the street beyond, wondering why someone is walking down the lane at the back of the house, when her phone rings in her handbag. It’s Tracey from the adoption agency.

  ‘Ah, hello again. It’s Tracey from the adoption agency, there,’ she says, dragging even that sentence out.

  ‘Hi,’ Margo says, showing her how quick a greeting can be. The person in the lane seems to have ducked behind a garage a few houses down. She doesn’t recognise anyone here any more.

  ‘I was actually calling about that photo of Susan Brodie on the Internet you saw?’ Tracey leaves a pause for a response.

  ‘Oh, right?’

  ‘Yeah, so, my husband is actually a computer nerd and he’s managed to trace the address of that wee site that you’ve told me about and they’ve replied quick-as-you-like and they’re saying that they’ll take it down. Wouldn’t apologise but it turns out they don’t have copyright permission. It should be down by late this afternoon.’