The Less Dead

by Denise Mina

  They look at each other.

  ‘Are you seeing anyone?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘Are you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Good.’

  The clock ticks loudly and Margo’s defences are up. They sit in the dusty kitchen as the gritty spirit of Janette swirls around them and reminds Margo that finding someone adorable doesn’t mean it’s a good idea to raise children with them.

  ‘Are you worried about Richard’s mental health?’

  ‘Yeah,’ he says. ‘And I’m worried about you. So is Thomas.’

  ‘I’m fine,’ she says but sounds really angry.

  He looks around the cluttered room, nodding to himself. He looks at his watch. ‘It’s two fifteen. I could stay?’

  She can’t let him see upstairs, how little she has done, admit that the hall stuff isn’t all there is and she has completely failed to cope with this one small task. So she says no and it feels final.

  At the door he wrestles his bike onto his shoulder, struggling to turn among the boxes in the hallway. She opens the door to a cold night and doesn’t want him to go. He passes her, edging out awkwardly, because of the bike, the boxes and the narrowness of the hall.

  ‘Why did you finish with me?’ he says. ‘Reporting Richard doesn’t feel like enough of a reason. Is it because Lilah’s back in Glasgow?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Will you ever tell me?’

  Margo shrugs. She’s really tired. Janette died and her flat was ransacked. Her eyes are burning.

  ‘It is Lilah. I know it is.’

  He doesn’t like flashy, bitchy Lilah, he thinks she’s an arse, but Margo thinks about Lilah coming to the flat with her, bravely jogging back up the stairs to the broken-into flat even though they didn’t know it was safe. She thinks about Lilah looking after Pitstop and Muttley and packing her things up and looking after her.

  ‘Bye.’

  ‘Bye, Joe.’

  She stands quite still in the hall until his shadow is gone from the frosted glass. Then she puts the light out and stands there until she’s too tired to stand at all.

  26

  SHE WAKES UP IN the bed of her childhood, momentarily comforted by the familiar sounds of the house and shape of the room. The ceiling is high and slopes to a bright curtainless window. An old sycamore tree sways outside. The bed is small with a spring mattress that bounces when she moves. But when she opens her mouth she finds her tongue is dry and her fingertips are puckered from dust.

  On her bedside table Margo sees the mended shepherdess figurine she found in Janette’s room. The lamb looks up adoringly at the fey shepherdess, its eyes two little dots denoting love and trust because of the angle of its neck. But the neck has been broken, mended but still the yellowed-glue remains of the injury are there. She remembers that Janette is dead and she’s hiding here, that this house is full of urgency and chores. Even this room has a massive bookcase full of books and diaries and tin toys that don’t work. She’s basically lying on top of a three-storey to-do list.

  She promises herself a coffee if she gets up, if she just gets up now and gets through the next hour or so. She throws her legs over the side of the bed, trying not to look up at the room full of reproaches, when she hears the faint doorbell ping-ping down in the hall.

  It’s got to be Lilah or Joe. No one else knows she’s here. Pulling a jumper on, she walks to the head of the stairs.

  Bright morning glows behind the frosted-glass front door. The hall is stacked with boxes and shopping bags.

  She freezes, because there, sitting in a pool of light, a blue envelope is lying, face down like a drowning victim. Margo steadies herself on the bannister, her breathing shallow.

  She blinks fast, trying to wipe the image clean. The hallway is bright and busy, a big aspidistra that won’t die, all the boxes from Holly Road, a hatstand festooned with hats for all weathers and some for holidays, the frosty white light coming through the glass on the door and checkerboard tiles on the floor. She blinks but every time she opens her eyes the letter is still there. She drops down on stiff legs, holding tight to the bannister.

  It’s just an envelope.

  She makes herself take a deep breath, drops another step down, but her hand is sweating and sticks to the wooden handrail, dragging on the skin.

  She looks up at the door and takes each step with both feet, being careful, until she’s at the bottom of the stairs. The envelope is in front of her.

  She looks down at it, daring it to bite but nothing happens.

  Suddenly angry, she picks it up and turns it over and finds it addressed to ‘fucking bitch Brodie, Marywood Sq’. Same handwriting: small, straight ‘t’ and ‘f’s with a hurried forward slant to the letters.

  This envelope is heavier than the last one. It feels spongy. Something is in there, something flat and heavy.

  She opens it roughly, ripping the top edge, and pulls out a single sheet of writing paper. Something sandwiched between the folded page drops on the floor.

  It’s a scrap of red tartan rug, heavy with age and grease, old and rotting and dirty, as if it has been fingered and rubbed at for three decades. It’s on Janette’s tiles.

  Margo leaves it on the floor and reads the letter. Same fucking bullshit. Threat, taunt, insults, know where you live, posh bitch, call the cops if you want, you better get ready. Move house as often as you like, you cannot get away.

  Margo looks at the glass window on the door. She steps towards it, picking up a heavy knotted wooden walking stick from the hatstand and raising it over her head.

  She throws the door open and stands, ready to attack.

  The street is still.

  A magpie screams in a distant tree. The wind ruffles the bushes by the door. She looks up and down the street but sees no one.

  Dropping the walking stick to her shoulder, she goes back inside.

  The bit of tartan rug sits on Janette’s restored tile floor. Janette used earbuds and paint stripper to get the grime off them. She did each one individually. It took her months and now this rotting thing is touching them.

  Margo picks it up.

  She can see the vibrant yellow weft through the greyness of age. It’s a match for Nikki’s little chopped-off square, it’s from the rug that was under Susan’s body. Susan, saving up and brimming with potential. Susan, who was never given a chance but took one anyway.

  Her terror subsides slowly and she turns cold.

  She reads the letter again and again, standing in the hall, and she notices one thing: there’s no mention of the break-in at Holly Road.

  She goes upstairs and throws clothes on, pins her hair back tight.

  Down in the kitchen she grabs her car keys and handbag and takes the heavy walking stick from the hallway to her car.

  She sets the GPS for Nairn Drive, High Blantyre.

  27

  THE STREET IS WET but the rain has stopped, replaced by blinding sun that flashes off wet cars and pavements.

  Margo is in her car, watching Martin McPhail’s house. She is sitting with the walking stick on her knee, holding it tight. She can see someone moving in McPhail’s front room.

  The window is dirty; the yellowing net curtains hang heavy and grey in the window. Even from here she can tell it’s a heavy smoker’s house.

  This is a four in a block, good council stock building with bad tenants. She can read the road. It’s as far from the local school as it can be, next to no swing parks or shops. CCTV cameras are prominently displayed on all of the street lights with signs declaring what they are and warning passers-by that they’re being watched. It’s one of those odd, child-free areas that only make sense when you know. It’s where sex offenders get rehoused.

  There are few cars and no movement in the street. A cat ambles from a concrete front garden to a lamp post and disappears round the back of one of the houses.

  As she’s watching she sees McPhail’s door open a little, shut again
and then open wide. She holds her breath but no one comes out. Two metal handles stick out of the doorway, a hand grabs the outside of the door frame and McPhail pulls himself out of the house. He’s in a wheelchair.

  Laboriously, he backs his chair out of the door, stepping his feet and pushing the chair with his heels. He lifts a crutch resting on his lap and hooks it through the handle of the door trying to pull the door shut but it’s an awkward manoeuvre–she can see he’s cursing. He can’t get it to close. Holding the wall, he leans forward in his chair reaching for the handle. The wheels lift at the back as the chair tips forward and he pulls the door shut. He checks it twice. Then he sits back, fits the crutch on the back of the chair, uses the wheel rims to change direction towards the street and slowly walks himself forward to the kerb. He stops, pulls on the chair handbrake and looks up the street. He’s waiting for someone.

  Martin McPhail is a spent man. Margo has seen men like this lined up outside hospitals, tanned fingers and missing limbs, keeping each other company as they die. These are the inveterate smokers, the ones who will never give up, men and women with an unbreakable addiction that is eating them from the inside. It doesn’t take everyone like that. Some smokers go on for years, some die of unrelated illnesses, but not these ones. It’s a special look.

  Martin is a grey husk. The meat of him is gone and she knows that the photo Robertson showed her was not a release photograph. Maybe his police friends told him it was but the man in front of her is half the man in that picture. He has grown a silver-and-gold beard but it’s discoloured, brown and dirty around the chasmic mouth. He spots her car, sees her waiting, and a grey, cracked tongue sneaks out of the hole in his face to lick at the side of his mouth.

  Margo gets out of the car and takes her walking stick with her.

  ‘Are you Martin McPhail?’

  He peers up at her. ‘Who the fuck are you?’

  ‘Are you Martin McPhail?’

  ‘You social work? She’s not even been here.’

  Margo is thrown by the comment. ‘Who’s not even been here?’

  But McPhail is looking at her heavy walking stick, he’s looking at her–a tall, healthy woman, looming over him in an empty street, clearly angry. He thinks she’s going to hit him. She’s not sure he’s wrong.

  ‘Ne’mind.’ He knows he’s said the wrong thing and looks away. His hand half rises and he points at a pole with a sign on it warning residents that they are being watched. His hand is trembling. He’s terrified of her.

  Then she notices the thighs of his joggers. They are covered in drips and spills, crumbs fill the creases. McPhail couldn’t make it up Janette’s front steps. He isn’t getting up when no one is looking. He’s not travelling across the city in the middle of the night and sneaking into flats to leave threatening letters. The letters are not from him.

  A small electric bus turns the corner at the end of the street and makes its way silently towards them. McPhail looks back at her. His cheeks are wet with frightened tears.

  ‘Who in the fuck are you anyway?’ he says as the bus pulls up.

  She watches the driver get out and go round the back, open the doors and use the button to lower the electric ramp.

  McPhail shoves the handbrake off and gives her one last glance. ‘Don’t even fucking know who you are,’ he says and turns away, using his feet to walk the chair away from her towards the back of the bus.

  ‘I’m Susan Brodie’s daughter.’

  McPhail stops. He slumps forward as if he’s been kicked in the stomach.

  The driver has the ramp down and looks around the side of the bus, eager to get going. ‘Mon, Marty, I haven’t got all day.’

  McPhail rears up, takes a breath so deep that his body arcs backwards. He turns round and looks Margo in the eye and he says:

  ‘Wasnae me.’

  28

  SHE TAKES THE WALKING stick from the well of the passenger seat when she gets out of the car. She would have hit him. She would have gone for the side of his head if he came for her. She knows she would and it frightens her. She didn’t think she was like that.

  She locks the car and goes through the gate, noticing only when she’s fitting the key in the lock on the front door that the gate is open. She shut it on the way out.

  The front door swings open into the house and she knows that someone has been in there.

  It takes a moment for her to register why she knows. It’s the smell. A smell of piss.

  She backs out to the front step, hoping, somehow, that her senses are awry. But she can smell it out here now. Strong, concentrated. She leaves the door open and goes back to the car.

  Armed with the walking stick, Margo approaches the open door again. She steps into the hallway and listens. She knows this soundscape so well, deep in her bones she knows the crack of wooden stairs on a summer evening, the soft groan of the plaster, the deflected coo of wood pigeons resting on the chimney stack.

  The house is empty.

  She reads the hallway. Nothing different. She holds the walking stick high as she walks into the kitchen. Nothing moved from the table, no stacks of plates touched on the worktops.

  It’s in front of the sink. A puddle of stinking yellow piss, half absorbed by the spongy plastic floor tiles Janette never got around to replacing. Two footprints next to it and they’re alone: no companion walk-in prints from the hall or the back door, no walk-out footprints. And a fresh strip of filthy tartan rug sitting in it.

  Margo knows that no man over thirty pisses as fluently as that and no one can come into a room to piss without touching the ground.

  She gets Robertson’s book out and turns to Susan’s crime-scene photo, looking at the rug under her body. She thought the edge was folded over on itself but she can see now that it has been cut off. A sudden hammering on the front door makes her drop the book. She lifts the heavy walking stick high and slides along the wall to the hall.

  A shadow in the frosted-glass grows as the person outside approaches the door again. Margo steels herself but a hand comes up and knocks three times. The first knock wasn’t a hammering at all, she’s just scared.

  ‘Yoohoo!’ It’s Lilah.

  Margo hides the stick and opens the door a crack.

  Lilah is holding a greasy bag of rolls. ‘Yoohoo?’

  ‘Anyone out there when you came up the path?’

  Lilah looks behind her. ‘No.’ She looks at Margo. ‘Still weirded out about last night?’

  ‘No. Got another letter and someone broke in here this morning.’

  They go into the kitchen and look at the pee.

  ‘Fucking hell,’ says Lilah. ‘We can’t call the police again, can we?’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ says Margo. ‘They’ll think we’re a two-woman time-wasting tag team.’

  Lilah takes charge. She sits Margo down and orders her to eat one of the rolls while she cleans the piss up with kitchen paper. It’s no bother, she says, because she has to do this for the dogs all the time and you get used to it. Honestly. She throws away the bit of rug but can’t get the smell out with Flash and the tiles are kind of peeling up at the edges anyway so she pulls them up and puts them in a bin bag and scrubs the floor underneath with a Brillo pad and a scourer sponge. Then she dabs Dettol on the floorboards.

  ‘Disgusting fucker,’ she says as they stand and look down at the result of her hard work.

  Now the floorboards have bits of piss-soaked sponge stuck to them and are swollen with Dettol.

  ‘That’s almost worse,’ says Margo and they stand and laugh at the mess until she starts crying.

  ‘How in almighty fuck am I going to get this place organised?’

  Lilah sits her down again and says look: things are getting done. A man has come to fit a new door in Holly Road. She propped the door shut last night and went back this morning to let him in. So things are getting done, it just feels as if nothing is happening. She picked up Margo’s mail from Holly Road and gives it to her.

  It�
�s a bank statement. Margo doesn’t open it because she’s had enough bad news. There’s also a fresh brown envelope with her name and address handwritten in black pen.

  She opens it and finds a letter from Jack Robertson on embossed paper. The threatening letter from the Ram is folded and tucked inside. Jack thanks her for dinner and for lending him this horrific threatening letter (enclosed). He hopes she doesn’t mind but he has informally notified the police out of concern for her well-being and personal safety. Please be sure to let the police know if anything else happens and if he can be of any help his details are at the top here, just let him know.

  ‘Piece of shit,’ says Margo and tells Lilah about him. ‘That’s where that crime-scene picture on the Internet came from. It was in his trashy fucking book.’

  She shows her Terror on the Streets and Lilah snorts at the vulgar cover design and is appalled by the crime-scene photo. But then she looks at the author portrait on the back cover.

  Jack is smiling wryly. His hair is voluminous. His Rolex is prominently on display. She is aghast.

  ‘Is this him?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘You’re joking.’

  ‘I know he’s quite good-looking, but believe me, he, he’s a total shit –’

  ‘No, no, no, Margo, he was there last night. At your flat. I saw him come out of your building while I was waiting. I saw him there. I spoke to him.’

  ‘In Holly Road?’

  ‘I was waiting and I saw him come out and, honestly, I thought he was a bit of a ride and I wondered if he was a neighbour.’ She looks embarrassed. ‘Because of the hair, I noticed him. You know?’

  Lilah would have noticed him. He’s just her type: tall, slim and a total arsehole.

  ‘He asked me if I was lost because I was waiting for you.’

  ‘What did you say?’

  She rolls a shoulder. ‘Just sort of, you know, hello, sailor.’