The Less Dead

by Denise Mina

  It takes a moment for her to hear keening from just feet away and she turns to see Lilah crouched in the corner, her back pressed up against the wall, knees tucked high. She’s naked, covered in bloody spray, her eyes wild in the dark.

  ‘Lilah?’

  Her mouth hangs open and she cries silently, looking at Margo, staring at Richard, at the deep pool of blood around him.

  ‘Lilah?’ she reaches out to comfort her.

  ‘WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOU?’

  She raises a horrified finger to Margo. Margo realises, too late, that she’s covered in blood too and must look terrifying.

  ‘My head got cut. Did you stab Richard?’

  ‘Is he dead?’

  ‘He is. Did you kill him?’

  ‘Not me.’ Lilah shakes her head. ‘He did.’

  That is when Margo notices the bedclothes are pulled back, the bed has been occupied. Suddenly she hears another sound, a gasping, rasping breath and sudden retching. It’s coming from across the corridor. She looks to Lilah for an explanation but Lilah can’t talk or move. Her eyes swivel to the door, horrified.

  ‘Please…’ A man’s voice is coming from the bathroom. He sounds as if he’s drowning. He’s in trouble.

  Margo stands up, slides sideways in the viscous blood, catches herself from falling and steps out into the narrow hall.

  ‘… Help me.’

  Now she sees what she didn’t notice on the way into the room: bloody footprints and smeared red hands on the walls trailing along the corridor to the bathroom, fading as they move away from the room.

  Margo steps clumsily to the bathroom door, uncertain of her body. The lights are on and it’s green inside, light bouncing off the pale green wall tiles. It’s a long thin room with a big white bath. At the far end is a toilet behind a modesty screen of mottled glass.

  A shadow moves behind it, a bloody hand on the glass.

  ‘Fuck –’

  It’s a man. He bends down and rises again, bends and rises as if he’s bowing. Loud, dry retching.

  He throws his head back violently, staggering from behind the partition. He’s naked, his hair and face so drenched in blood it takes her a moment to recognise him.

  Jack Robertson is not hurt. She hurries to him but he sees that she is covered in blood and is shocked and bats her away just as he jack-knives over the toilet again. She checks him for injuries while he’s dry-heaving: he’s not cut. He’s just shrouded in Richard’s blood.

  40

  SHE IS MADE TO stand still for what feels like three hours but is actually nearer twenty minutes. The police keep telling her not to move while they wait for the scene-of-crime photographer.

  Margo is frenziedly compliant: sure, sure, of course, not a problem, not a problem at all.

  They’re working around her, trying to understand how she could have arrived at a murder scene covered in blood. Margo is trying to calm herself down by focusing on Joe and Thomas. They’re standing out in the close, watching and waiting for her, holding Pitstop and Muttley’s leads. The dogs have been removed from the flat because they were licking Richard’s blood off the floor and interfering with the investigation.

  ‘Margo,’ Joe calls at one point, ‘are you OK?’

  ‘I’m fine.’ Stupid thing to say. ‘Are you OK?’

  He nods but he’s looking over her shoulder. ‘’Scuse me, officer? I’m sorry to bother you, I can see you’re very busy, but that lady is pregnant and is in shock.’

  ‘I’m perfectly fine,’ she says. ‘Officer, that is the man on the floor’s brother. His younger brother. The other man out there with him is my brother.’

  ‘I see,’ says a cop, neither writing any of it down nor really listening.

  ‘I think,’ calls Joe, ‘she might be in shock.’

  The cop thinks so too. He goes off to get permission and then comes back and tells her to go and sit in the front room.

  It’s not until Margo tries to move that she finds that she’s covered in dried blood, has a huge scab forming on her temple, that her knees aren’t working properly and she might fall over. The officer lifts her with one arm around her waist and sits her down on the sofa, telling her to put her head between her knees and do some deep breathing. Everyone is very kind.

  She’s so faint that she doesn’t notice when they make Thomas take Joe away from the crime scene. He’s just suddenly not there any more.

  She’s in the living room. Flash photographs are being taken all around the flat, blinding her at first until they move away into the bedroom.

  The atmosphere changes when four men in suits arrive. They’re not kind. They make her give up her shoes in case there’s anything on them and bark at her to show them how she came into the flat, what she touched, where her feet went. Then two of them walk her downstairs.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ says Margo, hoping that will make them like her.

  It’s raining outside and her car is gone. She doesn’t have any shoes on but can’t remember why. She walks through the wet, through puddles, making her feet cold and clean, bringing her back from the foggy shock, to a police car where they sit her in the back seat and shut the door.

  ‘I have a car,’ she says as the two men get into the front. What she means is where is my car?

  ‘Do you?’ says one of them and holds her eye in the mirror, waiting perhaps for her to confess.

  This does not feel as if it is going very well at all.

  They drive through rain that falls so hard she can’t see out of the window. They could be anywhere at any time, except that Richard is dead. She startles every time she remembers the sight of him. She remembers it every five seconds.

  Then they’re driving down through the town, empty as a bottle on New Year’s Day, past Glasgow Green and the river, through wide empty roads bordered by wasteland until they arrive at a big glass building with the police logo stuck to the front.

  They are buzzed in through doors and walk down corridors. They climb stairs and report to people. Margo gives them her coat, anything to help.

  Is Lilah OK? Where is Joe?

  Lilah is in hospital, they tell her, she has been sedated. Joe is being questioned in another room.

  Then she’s in a windowless room with a high ceiling, two armchairs and, bizarrely, the same Ikea sofa as the adoption agency reconciliation room. She stares at it for a long time wondering what it means, why it’s the same. Is she imagining that? But it is. It’s the exact same one. Why? She has washed her face and her skin feels very dry. The cut on her temple is tiny, less than a centimetre long, hardly worthy of the two butterfly plasters she put on it. Then someone has given her a blanket to help with the shivering. She’s wearing a pair of clunky pink trainers that don’t belong to her.

  Two men are in the armchairs, talking to her. She is on the sofa. These are different men from the men who brought her here, not uniformed, but their clothes are pressed and neat, one a blue shirt, one a grey T-shirt. Their haircuts and demeanour say they are policemen as much as a uniform would. One has blue eyes and a rugby player’s nose. The other one is small and oddly nondescript. He looks like a photofit picture because his face is so featureless, his brown eyes normal, his sandy beard trimmed into a dull shape. Every time she blinks she forgets what he looks like. She can’t keep his face in her mind.

  She tells the whole story unabridged, about Joe reporting Richard to the police, about Emma’s baby shower, how Richard arrived and broke a window. Was she at the baby shower?

  No, she was not there.

  Who was there?

  She keeps trying to give them phone numbers but can’t find her phone. How strange. She looks at her empty hands. She can’t find it. Then she remembers Richard breaking her phone at the hotel. She tells them about that.

  They’re giving nothing away but they’re writing everything down.

  ‘Richard is dead, isn’t he? I panicked, I didn’t get that wrong? Did I do something wrong?’

  Rugby takes on the
job of telling her that he is dead, he’s afraid. He looks quite sad.

  ‘Who killed him?’

  ‘Well, we don’t know that for certain yet.’

  ‘Joe’s my partner.’

  ‘Ah,’ he says but she thinks he already knows that. ‘The man with all the dogs?’

  ‘Lilah MacIntosh had a substantial amount of cash in her handbag. Do you know anything about that?’

  Margo doesn’t.

  They’ve finished with her but drag it out. One goes out to ask about something, the other one waits in the room. Then they swap for a while and finally they say she can go.

  Rugby escorts her downstairs, through the quiet office building to the lobby and the glass doorway out.

  Joe and Thomas are dozing on seats by the door, slumped uncomfortably on fixed chairs. Muttley and Pitstop are sleeping underneath, caked in blood. Margo has to wake them up. Joe has dried blood on his neck and black rims to his fingernails.

  He tells her what happened in the flat before she got there: Robertson and Lilah were in bed when Richard broke in. Richard grabbed the letter opener from the dresser and ran into the bedroom but Jack wrestled it off him and then lunged. He only stabbed Richard once.

  He bled out really quickly.

  ‘He was a sweet bloke, underneath,’ says Joe quietly, ‘I don’t know if you ever saw that in him but he was…’

  Thomas is listening sadly and nodding. When Joe breaks off he steps forward and rests his hand on Joe’s forearm, letting his hand sit there. ‘Mate.’

  Joe nods, acknowledging the rare touch of an undemonstrative friend. ‘Yeah.’

  Margo kisses Thomas on the cheek because she’s bursting with love for him and she takes Joe’s bloody hand in hers. She doesn’t care that it’s covered in gore because it’s Joe underneath.

  ‘Let’s go home,’ he says.

  Rugby presses the green button on the wall and the doors open but all three of them stall at the fresh air. They’re afraid to leave.

  ‘Go on,’ says Rugby. ‘Go home.’ He’s seen this reaction before, she feels. Seen this type of shock.

  ‘Just go about your business. We’ll find you.’

  They step outside and the doors slide shut behind them.

  It’s four in the morning. The night is still. The rain has washed the world clean again. She’s wearing pink trainers.

  Everything is wrong but she has Joe and Thomas, she has a random stranger’s dogs and Lilah is OK, but, most of all, she’s Susan Brodie’s daughter, Susan Brodie of the Whiteinch Brodies, and they can face anything.

  41

  IT’S TWO DAYS LATER and the road in the Saltmarket still glints with glittery shards of glass. They’ve been ground into the tarmac by passing cars.

  Margo buzzes Flat 2/1. She doesn’t know if Lizzie will be in at this time. It’s early evening and the traffic behind her is so busy and loud and she has to lean in to the intercom to hear.

  ‘Who’s it?’

  ‘Is that Lizzie?’

  ‘Aye. Who’s it?’

  ‘Margo.’

  Lizzie doesn’t say anything.

  ‘Nikki’s niece from the other night.’

  ‘Oh. Oh, OK.’ The door clicks open.

  Margo pushes and pauses, remembering the security measures she took last time. Should she text someone? Normally she would text Lilah but she can’t. She doesn’t want to text Joe and worry him. She can’t text Thomas because he’d tell her to come home. Fuck it, she thinks and goes in without texting anyone.

  Lizzie has left the door ajar again but when Margo pushes it open she finds her standing in the hall, waiting.

  ‘Hello?’ says Lizzie, breathless and confused. She doesn’t know why Margo’s here.

  ‘Yeah, hi,’ says Margo and shuts the door behind her.

  Lizzie waits, nodding encouragement, waiting for her to speak. But Margo doesn’t know what to say.

  ‘So… what is it?’

  A dog barks three times upstairs. It sounds like the start of a round.

  ‘I need to ask you about my Aunt Nikki,’ says Margo.

  Lizzie thinks about it. ‘Want a biscuit?’

  Margo lies and says she does. Lizzie takes her into the kitchen and opens a packet of Jaffas. They’re a fancy variant: dark chocolate with lime-and-mango-flavoured jelly in the middle. They sit down and Lizzie says she hasn’t tried these ones before. She’s seen them in the shop but not tasted them. She eats one and pays it attention, looking at it as she chews. She declares it ‘quite nice’.

  ‘You eat a lot of biscuits,’ says Margo, looking around the kitchen.

  Lizzie laughs and says, ‘I suppose I do.’

  She’s smiling. She’s very good-looking, Margo realises, good skin and grey eyes and chiselled cheekbones, but she’s disguised it carefully. Her clothes are loose, her haircut functional as if she’s afraid of being pretty, afraid of what that brings.

  ‘Can I ask about Nikki?’

  Lizzie tightens her face defensively. ‘Only fair to warn ye that if you say anything bad about her I’ll punch your lights in.’

  ‘I’m not going to. I just want to ask –’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘I think I hurt her feelings.’

  ‘You did.’ Lizzie points at her with her half-Jaffa. ‘You gave her the wrong number. She tried to call you and the number was rubbish.’

  Margo says she was afraid. She met ex-DCI Gallagher and she told her the Brodies were kind of famously rough. She doesn’t believe in the serial killer theory either. She said it was started by Jack Robertson and Barney Keith.

  ‘Oh aye.’ Lizzie looks distant. ‘Poor Barney went mad. Susan was the love of his life, right enough. He was a changed man after she died. Never got past it.’

  Margo opens Facebook on her phone and shows Lizzie Barney’s page.

  ‘My God, he’s alive…’ Lizzie scrolls through the photos. ‘That is Barney. God, he’s that old-looking. He must be a million by now.’

  Margo asks if Lizzie thinks he’s her dad.

  Lizzie looks at Margo’s face. ‘Probably,’ she says.

  ‘Did you like him?’ she asks.

  Lizzie shrugs. ‘He was old. I didn’t think about him.’

  ‘Did Susan like him?’

  Lizzie grins as if she’s going to say something nice about Barney. ‘Well, he had a house. She was homeless. It was quite a nice house. I mean, it had doors and none of them were kicked in or anything. He kept it clean and had food and stuff. He had made beds, I remember that was a big deal. Sheets and stuff. Once he had a jar of instant coffee.’ She reels. ‘Wow! I mean. We were from nothing, really nothing. It didn’t take much to impress us, you know?’

  Margo nods to be nice but she doesn’t know what it’s like and they both know that.

  ‘But he was steady for a junkie. He did love Susan. She’d have moved on when she grew up. He was one of the stepping-stone blokes. People you grow past. He probably is your dad. We all used condoms on the street, I mean, it was the late eighties, HIV was no mystery.’

  ‘Nikki said he got Susan pregnant when she was thirteen.’

  Lizzie nods and cringes and gives a little grunt.

  ‘It’s very young.’

  She grunts non-committally again, shrugs and takes another biscuit. ‘I can’t explain that you.’

  ‘Isn’t he a paedophile then?’

  ‘Yeah, technically. But then he was still with her until she was nineteen, so then what? He wasn’t any more? What does that mean?’

  Margo doesn’t know. She half hoped Lizzie would say Susan was very grown up at thirteen, but she saw her dead body at nineteen and it didn’t look as if she’d ever been old.

  ‘Barney came from some stuff as well. I don’t know. I don’t know how to make it all right for you.’ She looks suddenly very sad. ‘It was a different time. We did what we had to. You should be nice to Nikki, you know. She’s pretty amazing.’

  ‘I know she’s survived a lot.’

&nbs
p; ‘No, you don’t.’ She puts a half-eaten biscuit down and brushes her hands clean as she speaks. ‘See, we know who we are. Me and Nikki, believe it or not, we’ve survived all that shit: care, deaths, fucking… raped left, right and centre, spat on. We were rounded up by cops and shouted at by drunks, and we were still on the go, like the SAS, we made being outsiders the thing we were. They couldn’t break us or make us lie. We knew who we were. If we hadn’t become friends I don’t know, but us knowing each other, that was important. We never had to pretend to be anyone else or explain, you know?’

  ‘I don’t really, to be honest.’

  Lizzie smiles at that. ‘You’re honest. I like that. What I’m saying is that when you’re shamed, like us, like whoors, the religious people and all them, they want an explanation: how you got there, what’s the worst thing that ever happened, how sorry you are. They want you to hate the punters. I met some lovely men, some I’d have stayed pals with if I had a choice. I still think about them, wonder how they are. Some nasty bastards too, no getting away from it, but those ones weren’t regulars, just fly-bys. There was unlikely moments of tenderness there, in vans and lanes and smelly bedsits.’ She shakes her head. ‘No one wants to hear the full story of it though. I knew an old guy who was in the war and he never talked about it because he said people just thought, “That’s sad, he was in a war,” but it was a whole lot of things. It was exciting and cheery and funny and he’d pals and that. But to people who weren’t in the war it was just sad. That’s what it’s like for me and Nikki. Fifteen years of our lives, important years but people just want the sad bits or the dirty bits or the Christ-saved-me bits but not the whole of it, the whole messy truth of it. Just the bits that fit their agenda.’

  ‘Doctors get warned about asking closed questions, you know those ones where the answer is predetermined?’

  ‘Aye, “How unhappy are you?”, that sort of thing. They’re using you as much as the punters because it’s usually about how helpful them having a good job and a pension is. But me and Nikki, we know the whole of it. We don’t need to lie to each other. She’s my sister.’

  Margo feels honoured to be in Lizzie’s kitchen. ‘Then you’re my auntie too, in a way.’