The Less Dead

by Denise Mina

  ‘If McPhail was a police officer couldn’t he get that information from other cops and put it in a letter? The bits of rug and hair, maybe he got those things from an evidence locker? Doesn’t mean he killed her but he could have written these letters to warn you off telling people he did. Maybe the police even know that and that’s why they didn’t want to take it any further?’

  ‘God, that’s possible!’ Nikki seems pleased at that and nods respectfully at Margo. ‘That makes sense. He was angry at me saying I thought he was involved.’

  ‘Robertson said he was nasty.’ ‘Oh aye, nasty just about sums him up.’

  The door opens into the kitchen and Lizzie is standing there. It’s half-time. They can hear adverts from the TV. Lizzie has a functional haircut and large bifocals with clear frames. She’s even smaller than she seemed when she was swamped by the armchair, less than five foot tall. She’s dressed like a man in straight jeans, grey socks and a boxy sweatshirt. She tips her head back to use the bottom half of her lenses to see Margo, magnifying and warping her grey eyes.

  19

  ‘THIS HER?’ ASKS LIZZIE, staring at Margo with saucer eyes.

  Nikki rests her hand on Margo’s forearm. ‘Aye,’ she says. She looks proud and shy at the same time.

  Lizzie comes over and looks closely at Margo, a smile flickering in her eyes. ‘Awful nice to see that wee face again.’ She breaks off to sob, covering her face with both hands, crying like a child. Nikki laughs fondly at her reaction and comforts and coaxes her to sit with them.

  They sit her down in Margo’s seat as Nikki laughs at her and rubs her back.

  Lizzie shakes her head and mumbles through her hands, ‘It’s a happy… I’m happy.’ Breathing unevenly, Lizzie dries her face on her sleeve and asks Nikki, ‘Is she fucking mental like Hairy?’

  Nikki rubs her back again, hard this time. ‘No. She’s pretty sedate.’

  Margo asks, ‘What do you mean by “fucking mental”?’

  ‘No, no.’ Lizzie waves a hand, ‘I don’t mean she was mentally ill. Just–Susan was scared of nothing. God knows she had plenty of reasons to be scared, enough had happened to her, she was just one of those lassies who didn’t have that in her.’

  ‘Ah, well, that’s not true.’ Nikki smiles ruefully at the table. ‘Hairy did get scared. She told me once that she was scared all the time, even when she was sleeping, and she just realised one day that she couldn’t get more scared, that it wasn’t going away, and after that she just did what she wanted. She said she had nothing left to lose so she could try anything.’

  Lizzie tells Margo in an awed whisper, ‘She carried a knife.’

  ‘Really?’ says Margo, not sure what to say.

  Lizzie looks at her critically, taking in her flattened down hair, her bland Marks and Spencer coat and her cream cashmere crew neck. ‘Is it OK? Does she know what we are? Because I’m not lying about myself in my own house.’

  ‘She’s a grown-up, Lizzie,’ says Nikki nervously, ‘I told her.’

  Lizzie tilts her head, abruptly aggressive. ‘You know, do you?’

  Margo isn’t sure what’s going on now.

  Lizzie’s eyes harden. ‘We’re prostitutes.’ She hisses the word and waits for a reaction, relishing the tension.

  Nikki says flatly, ‘Lizzie, she already knows. I already told her.’

  Lizzie doesn’t break Margo’s gaze. ‘Whoors. D’you know what I mean by that?’

  ‘Sex for money?’ says Margo, careful and not wanting to offend.

  ‘Aye. Most people think we should lie about that, call ourselves something else, lie about it, but I won’t. We’re whoors. Can’t say it, can ye?’

  Big wet owl eyes bore into her. Margo doesn’t know how to be right in this situation. ‘Is that the word? I don’t know what’s OK and what’s offensive.’

  ‘Oh, words.’ Lizzie folds her arms and draws her lips tight, nodding smugly. ‘Fucking words. Give me a fucking break. The City Mission wouldn’t let them call us prostitutes or sex workers for a year, for a whole year they couldn’t call us anything. We’re out there getting killed and these politics twats are having fucking arguments about words.’

  Nikki looks nervous and mutters, ‘She’s not interested in that, Lizzie.’

  ‘Well, she should be! We can’t all be Tanya fucking Williams! She should be interested in it! She should!’ But the more Lizzie insists the less convinced she sounds.

  ‘What was different about Tanya Williams?’ asks Margo, a bit scared of Lizzie.

  ‘Oh, she was completely different from the rest of us.’ Lizzie’s furious. ‘Completely different. Had a family. Sat on a horse once.’

  ‘Come on, Lizzie, Tanya Williams was a poor wee soul like the rest of us,’ says Nikki but she turns to Margo. ‘That was different. The cops investigated and witnesses came forward and everything. No one came forward when it was us getting attacked.’

  ‘Why?’

  Lizzie gives her a hard stare. ‘You tell me. You’re the public. You tell me.’

  Nikki doesn’t want to talk about that. ‘Look, Tanya’s folks were lovely people. They made TV appeals. She was young, she’d had a sad life. That’s why they did a proper investigation.’

  Margo can’t believe that. ‘You shouldn’t have to be nice for the police to investigate a murder, surely?’

  ‘Yes.’ Lizzie nods slowly, ‘You do.’

  ‘But that’s what the police are there for.’

  Nikki pats her hand. ‘They’re there for you. For Tanya. They’re not there for us.’

  ‘In fairness to the cops –’ Lizzie waves a hand at Margo–‘the public don’t give a shit either. When it’s us they pretend it didn’t happen. They’d step over you in the street. You’d step over us in the street.’

  ‘She wouldn’t,’ says Nikki quietly.

  ‘Aye, she would.’

  ‘She wouldn’t,’ says Nikki, half smiling. ‘She’s a doctor.’

  ‘Is that right?’

  ‘Aye. An actual doctor in the family.’

  ‘God, she is like her, isn’t she? And she’s a doctor,’ says Lizzie admiringly. ‘Amazing.’

  ‘I know,’ nods Nikki proudly.

  Nikki and Lizzie smile and look at Margo as if she is a very pleasing breed of dog. Margo speaks, almost just to show she can. ‘Did the police think McPhail did the Tanya Williams murder?’

  Lizzie and Nikki chuckle at each other.

  ‘No, we shouldn’t laugh about that–it’s not funny,’ says Nikki. ‘She was a young nice lassie and what happened was terrible.’

  ‘You’re right,’ says Lizzie. ‘Her poor wee mother.’ She turns to Margo. ‘We’re not laughing at what happened to the wee soul, it’s the cops… just, they’re fucking idiots.’

  ‘And you know,’ says Lizzie, ‘if they had investigated the other ones, the rapes and assaults and the other murders, they could have done a better job when Tanya was killed, couldn’t they? But they fucked it up royal.’

  Nikki tuts and turns to Margo to explain. ‘See what happened was that the cops decided it was these Turkish guys. Bugged their cafe for two years. Charged them all. Said they caught them talking about it. Then, when the defence lawyers got these two years of incriminating tapes, it turns out there was nothing there, just muffled sounds and them playing a Turkish card game called “Hide the Lady”. Cost millions. Case collapsed. Police put a big fund aside to investigate what went wrong in the investigation. Turns out they spent it all trying to find out who told the press they’d fucked it up. They were illegally tapping the phone of the cops who’d told on them.’

  ‘Fucking hell.’

  ‘Fucking hell, indeed,’ says Lizzie, serious as a newsreader. ‘And that’s what happens when they do care.’ She shoves her glasses back up her nose and looks at the letters, pawing through them until she hits the one with the scrap of dirty tartan material in it. ‘Whoever he is, he’s a fucking arsehole. Susan’s murder broke us, so it did.’ She gets agitated a
t some memory, reddening. Nikki rubs her shoulders roughly, telling her to shake it off. ‘Even Betty. She was never the same.’

  ‘Psychic Betty?’ asks Margo. ‘Did you know her?’

  ‘Since she lived down in Washington Street,’ says Lizzie. ‘She lived above a warehouse. Building was full of rats.’

  ‘It sounds horrendous. Why live there of all places?’

  Lizzie raises her eyebrows and defers to Nikki.

  ‘Those voices in her head,’ says Nikki. ‘Too loud for her if she lived with other people. She had to be alone.’

  Lizzie catches a stern look from Nikki and suppresses a grin. ‘Well, I don’t know, maybe she was hearing dead folk saying stuff, not just avoiding her mental family.’ She gets up and steps away.

  ‘She was psychic,’ Nikki says firmly. ‘Wasn’t she, Lizzie?’

  ‘Well –’ Lizzie slaps her mini hands on her tiny tummy and shifts her weight onto the foot nearest the door–‘if she wasn’t psychic she certainly did a very good job of appearing to be.’ And then she winks at Margo behind Nikki’s back and excuses herself from the kitchen. They can hear the football resuming on the TV.

  Nikki shakes her head. ‘Betty lost the sight the night Susan died.’

  Margo looks at the envelopes. ‘Same postmark on all of them?’

  ‘All Easterhouse, where her wee body was found.’ Nikki sighs and shakes her head as if she’s had this conversation many times. ‘You don’t believe me.’

  Margo doesn’t want to tell her about her own letter. If Nikki sent it she’ll be expecting her to and if she didn’t Margo knows it will frighten her, so she doesn’t say anything.

  Nikki speaks quietly. ‘McPhail killed Susan. No one believes me.’

  ‘Jack Robertson believes you.’

  ‘No, I believe him. That’s when I realised it was McPhail, when his book came out. Can’t believe McPhail is still out there.’

  If she isn’t writing these letters herself, Margo thinks Nikki is vulnerable, that someone is messing with her. She thinks Nikki probably knows the person who is, that it’s someone close by, that they see her getting upset and it excites them. Could be Lizzie. Could be the boyfriend who smashed her teeth out. But they’ve made a mistake in picking on Margo because she has a degree and a car. She doesn’t believe in psychics or magic or genius serial killers. Margo can call the police and they’ll listen to her. She’s not Nikki.

  Nikki gathers up the letters and carefully puts them back into the brown envelope, pats the fat package and lets her hand rest on it.

  ‘Susan,’ she says sadly.

  Margo wants to say something helpful. ‘I’m sorry, Nikki,’ she says. ‘Look: what can I do?’

  It’s a line she uses on patients in the surgery to move them on to the next part of the ten-minute consultation, after they’ve described their complaints and had a cry. She regrets saying it now because it sounds clinical, almost adversarial.

  But Nikki loves that she said that. She straightens up. ‘Care about what happened to your mum. No one cares. When I’m gone it’ll be as if she was never even here. Then he’ll really have killed her.’

  20

  MARGO IS LEAVING. THEY’VE been together for two hours but it feels like a month. She can hardly wait to be alone and comb through everything.

  Nikki gets a Post-it notepad and a tiny Ikea pencil out of the drawer and writes down her home address, an email and mobile number and her landline. She gives it to Margo and hands her the pencil and pad. Margo feels trapped, she’s got enough going on, but Nikki is staring at her, at the pad, at the pencil, so she writes. She puts her mobile number down but changes the last three digits. She gives a home address to the north of the city, in the opposite direction of her real address on the Southside. She gives an email address that’s just a jumble of letters and numbers.

  Nikki takes it, reads it and smiles, she folds it very carefully. She puts it into the pocket of her jeans and pats it, smiling at Margo who feels like a duplicitous cow. Then Nikki says she’ll stay on at Lizzie’s to watch the end of the game but insists on escorting Margo down to the outside door to say goodbye there.

  Margo would really rather say their goodbyes in the flat, where it’s private, in case Nikki cries again, but Nikki is indignant about that, she comes from a culture with different customs and says not escorting Margo down to the street would be very rude. Out in the hallway she puts on slippers and a blue dressing gown, both of which are too big for Lizzie. Margo wonders if the women are a couple.

  They leave the flat and trip down to the mouth of the close, get to the outside door and Nikki opens it to the cold night.

  ‘I can’t thank you enough for coming to meet me, Nikki.’

  Nikki hugs her awkwardly and lets go. She says maybe they can meet again, in a few weeks, now Margo’s got all her contact numbers and her home address. Margo says yes, lovely, and you’ve got mine.

  They don’t know how to end their meeting. Margo steps out of the close and turns back to see the door shutting and Nikki watching through the narrow mesh window. Margo waves bye-bye and turns away. She is alone and relief sweeps over her.

  She’s finally alone.

  She glances back and sees Nikki still peering out at her through the narrow slit of glass, smiling. She nods and smiles too and Nikki waves but doesn’t leave. Margo turns away and performs looking for a taxi. She looks down to the river and the bridge but there’s nothing coming. She looks up, past the railway bridge, to the bright Trongate. Few cars, no taxis, but she sees movement in the dark under the bridge.

  Two hundred yards away, in the shadows, a group of drunk men are walking towards her. Three men walk in a row but the fourth is an advance scout. He’s the smallest, the drunkest. They’re hanging back from him. He is unaware of this, out in front of the group, waving his arms and shouting. He emerges from the dark under the bridge and his heel skids on the icy pavement. He catches himself from falling and shouts a swear word. He is wearing a white tracksuit with a streak of mud up the backside. He has already fallen over.

  He spots Margo standing alone on the edge of the pavement and shouts, ‘HAA HO! FUCKING GORGEOUS!’

  He barrels towards her, straight arms rising like a baby demanding to be picked up. His friends hang back, embarrassed, letting him go. He’s shouting but she can’t understand what he’s saying so she smiles at no one in particular, feeling awkward, not knowing what to do. She looks away down the road for the orange eye of a saviour taxi but can’t see any. He’s closing in on her. She hurries across the empty road to get away, pretending to look for taxis that aren’t coming.

  He changes his trajectory, he’s crossing too and he’s shouting something. She glances back and finds that he’s alarmingly close, twenty yards, moving fast. His friends have stopped under the bridge and are pretending not to know him. One of them turns back the way they came and then the others do the same.

  The drunk is closing in, gathering speed, running on his tiptoes as if he’s going to fall on her. He’s so near that Margo can see a raised red rash on one side of his mouth and a burst capillary in his left eye. His eyes shut as he closes in, fifty yards, hands up, falling at her. Margo has never been jumped in the street before. She is aware, with a sudden dawning horror, of how close and dark Glasgow Green is. The entrance to the park is a hundred yards away. He could drag her in there, into the dark.

  Fantasy Margo would punch him, hit him with her bag, kick him in the balls, she has always imagined herself quite able and angry, but this is real life. She freezes, shuts her eyes and holds her breath.

  A high, loud crack fills the street, bright and clear in the cold air. The sound ricochets back and forth across the stone valley of the tenements.

  Margo looks.

  A sprinkle of shattered glass skitters across the tarmac behind him. Lizzie is hanging out of the second-floor window and shouts, ‘Fuck off!’ The man is frozen, just ten feet or so away from Margo, his dirty fingernails aimed at her face. His m
outh hangs open and Margo can see cracks in the yellow fur on his tongue.

  Lizzie leans further out of the window and drops something. It’s metal, heavy and falls straight down to the pavement in front of the close where it clatters like a scaffolding pole. She lifts another bottle and holds it high, aiming straight at him.

  The close door flies open, banging against the inside wall, and Nikki runs at them, screaming: ‘LEHERALANE! LEHERALANE!’

  A second bottle from Lizzie hits the man on the shoulder. It bounces off him and shatters on the road.

  He backs away, surprised, his hands up, calling, ‘Ho! Ho! Gir-als!’ his feet crunching glass. ‘Bit of fun! Come on!’

  Nikki brandishes a metal baseball bat over her head and the fluffy blue dressing gown billows out behind her. Her lips are curled tight into her false teeth and she screams again, ‘LEHERALANE!’ She’s working her way between Margo and the man, shouting and swinging the bat in a figure of eight to separate them.

  Margo looks to Nikki but sees her looking past her, her eyes open crazy-wide. The man jumps at Margo, his fingernail scores her cheek, but Nikki swings at him, hits his knee at the side and knocks him down. He lands heavily on his shoulder, on his back and he howls.

  Nikki swings at his forehead. The metal bat makes an oddly comedic thunk as it hits his skull. She tells him he’s an arsehole.

  He looks up, brow low, eyes cold and angry and shouts: ‘YA BUNCH OF LESBIAN COWS YE.’ He runs out of breath and whines back to his friends. ‘She’s burst my fucking knee!’

  Margo is pretty sure he hasn’t broken anything but his knee will be very painful. Now he’s rolling around in bits of glass which can’t be good either.

  Nikki raises the bat and slams it hard on his hand. He screams. That is definitely broken. Margo can see it from here. She wonders who’s on at the A&E in the Royal tonight, who’ll get him.

  ‘NO! NO! NO!’ He scrambles away cradling his hand, grinding his hip along the glass.

  Nikki follows him slowly, the tip of the bat scumbling noisily along the ground. He stops and she steps over to him and spits on his face. A thick gob of saliva hits his chin and drips off. Lizzie laughs loudly at the window.