The Red Road

by Denise Mina

  She needed to get out before they drank more. She scanned the room, spotting the kids beneath the far fireplace. Hamish was sitting on the couch, ostentatiously eating his last bit of cake. Angus and Jessica stood in front of him, watching covetously. Rose hurried over, keeping her line of vision high to avoid eye contact with anyone else.

  She smiled to herself: the centrepiece of the fireplace was a beaten metal relief of a woman in heroic profile, hair billowing, chin tilted up, eyes shut. Her finger was pressed to her lips.

  Rose dropped her eyes and bowled over to the kids. She couldn’t wait to get home and shut the door on the world.

  6

  Alex Morrow sat in her boss’s office and stared at the printouts on his desk. They were both dumbfounded. Riddell, a slim, pale man with slightly grey teeth and acne scars on his cheeks, opened his mouth and then shut it again. He frowned at the papers on his desk, his eyes running from the printed fingerprint sample taken at the Red Road crime scene to the neat little row of Michael Brown’s ten fingerprints, taken from his criminal record.

  Brown had been locked in a prison cell and simultaneously halfway across the city, touching things and murdering a man in a deserted block of flats. It was too much of a coincidence, the prints being found right now, just when he was about to go down for a long time. What was even stranger than his teleporting stunt was that it wouldn’t get him out of prison. Brown plus others had staged this baffling, elaborate hoax and neither Morrow nor Riddell could work out what the pay-off was to them.

  They’d run through possibles, Morrow suggesting, Riddell dismissing:

  Distract attention from the person who actually did it? Too complicated. They’d use prints from someone who might actually have been there.

  Draw attention to the dead guy’s link with Brown? But the dead guy had no link to Brown.

  Send a message: but no one would ever know Brown’s prints were found there unless the police went about telling people and they had no interest in doing that.

  Riddell said that those higher up wanted the fingerprints issue cleared up thoroughly and quickly. Priority. Put other cases aside. Morrow felt sure that the urgency came from the need to minimise costs to the Fiscal’s office. No one wanted to be left looking like an idiot when the prefect badges were handed out next year.

  Riddell cleared his throat. ‘So what are you thinking, DI Morrow?’

  Then he sat back, with a hand over his mouth and waited. He was a lazy man. He was asking her how she was going to sort this out for him. He wasn’t a bad man or a bad cop, he was just lazy.

  ‘Well, sir, I keep coming back to a move by Brown to muddy the fingerprint evidence in the court case. If not in this case then on appeal. I think he may have either planted his own prints there somehow, or paid someone to hack into the database and change his prints.’

  ‘Yes, I see,’ said Riddell as if that was his idea, ‘and so you’re going to ...?’

  ‘I’ve called in an InfoTech expert to go through the system with me and explain the weak points.’

  ‘Yes, good, yes, do that. Do we have to pay for that?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Yes, good, do that then.’

  Morrow could see why he’d been promoted over her. He was no trouble at all to management. She was more problematic: her background, her attitude, her brother.

  She gathered the papers from his desk, thanked him for his help and left for her own office. She didn’t hate Riddell actually. He was bland enough not to be offensive and he was a good buffer between her and the politics of the higher orders. When she asked him how he was he always told her who he was annoyed with. He was too lazy to vigorously implement all the new, sometimes contradictory reforms being brought in because Riddell was waiting for the new single Scottish police force to be formed in a year’s time. It was a game of statues, everyone holding their breath, hoping someone else would fall over first.

  She sat down at her desk and looked at the papers scattered over it, all urgent, all complicated. Being in court with Brown was exhausting. The adrenalin rush made her peak too early in the day. The rest of her shift was spent recovering.

  She reached for the phone but stopped herself. Brian was getting annoyed at her calling every time she missed the twins. Her craving for contact seemed to be on a twenty-minute timer. Whatever was happening in her day, unless she was right in the middle of a meeting with senior officers or chasing someone down a hill, every twenty minutes her mind flipped suddenly to the boys, to their smell, the astonishing movement of their tiny hands, toes, faces. Her first son, Gerald, had died abruptly, and she wondered if it was insecurity that made her want incessant contact. But it didn’t feel like part of that sadness. It felt like craven joy. She shut her eyes and allowed herself two seconds of the twins seeing fireworks for the first time. She and Brian held one each, and they stood at the kitchen window with the lights off and watched the boys seeing white fire-chrysanthemums bursting in the sky.

  The truth was that even at home she missed whichever twin she wasn’t looking straight at. She was spread so thin that she could feel her hard-won career running through her exhausted fingers.

  She forced herself to open her eyes. Paperwork. Maybe she could eat something, but she wasn’t hungry. A Kit Kat or something small, just to break the tedium.

  Cursing to herself, Morrow shut her eyes. Everything felt like a bloodless administrative chore. She had said as much to Riddell and he laughed and said maybe she was ready for promotion. It was no mistake, he said, that no one got any power until they could be trusted not to do anything stupid with it. She’d wanted to slap him for saying that. She couldn’t stand the thought of the rest of her career being a careful, backwards tiptoe to the door, telling the right lies to the right people.

  The thought of lies made her think of her brother, Danny. He’d offered her a loan of money. At that, she smiled. Her brother was a gangster, he was offering money made through criminal enterprise and she couldn’t call him on it. Danny’s life was mired in fictions: he cared about the community, he loved his kids, he was basically a good man beset with troubles. Danny was far from a good man. Danny was a bad and violent and greedy man. She couldn’t say that to him – she used to be able to but now they had this lie between them, like a bastard child they had conjured from river water and mud.

  She charted a biography of the lie as she sat in her office with the door closed, avoiding her squad. At the beginning she could mention his ‘work’, ask him for tips, which he gave, and he could ask for tips which she didn’t. They could joke about it. For a brief, gilded interlude they were honest about who they were. That lasted for a few months. Then she began to flinch at the sparks of hurt in his eye and avoided mentioning his big car, his cheap clothes, his empire. Tenderness prompted her to stop and slowly those truths became unmentionable and slowly, drip by drip, she was drawn into the lie that he was a service provider, doing his best in a bad economic climate. She knew, of course, that he wasn’t, but just saying it, for the sake of peace, made it become the story they told themselves. Now, they were so far into the fiction that Danny could offer her a wad of cash with a straight face and she couldn’t call it what it was. Small lies, layered, tenderly conceded, had changed their world.

  She missed her old team. Personnel were shuffled from division to division all the time but higher up had been especially keen to move everyone under Morrow after a nasty bribery scandal was uncovered. Not her fault, she did all she could, but the only one left from her old squad was McCarthy. Every cop had a favourite team they had worked with and she worried that Harris, Leonard, Gobby and Wilder had been her best of times and, worse, she hadn’t really noticed while she was there. She’d met plenty of nostalgic old cops who carped on about their glory days. She knew they were never happy again.

  Too much change. Personnel change, forms changing, computerisation of everything and now the service was being turned into a Scotland-wide service. They could all be moved anywhere at any t
ime, that’s what the union were warning. Scare tactics, probably, but Morrow felt every change as a nudge towards the door. Her new squad didn’t know her well enough to like her. She didn’t exactly exude sunshine.

  Brian said it didn’t matter whether she liked her job or not. The twins were costing a fortune, they needed two brand-new somethings every month and they’d had to take out a crisis loan on the pretext of fixing the roof to pay the heating bills. She had a job and plenty didn’t, so shut up. He was right.

  She sat up and looked around the dull room. The InfoTech wouldn’t be here for an hour. She took out the case file on Aziz Balfour.

  It had been faxed over to her from DI Paul Wainwright in the north. It was his case and he was allowing her to see everything. He was a good man, Wainwright. They knew each other from their patrolling days, had never been close or anything, but she liked him for his genius at sidestepping the negative politics that plagued the police. When anyone began to gossip or whine he changed the subject or walked away. When she asked Wainwright how he was he told her who he fancied on X Factor.

  The scene of crime photos showed a man lying on his left side. Next to his head a faded red girder rose out of the grey concrete, coated in black fingerprint dust. It was on that surface that they had found Michael Brown’s fingerprints, high and low, holding tight, sliding off, partials and complete. Infuriatingly, although someone, not the dead man, had been violently sick nearby, they couldn’t use the vomit to get a DNA sample: it was contaminated with dust and blood in it. Also a workman had stepped in it.

  She looked at a photograph of a woeful dried puddle with a perfect footprint in the middle of it.

  The dead man had been stabbed several times and had bled out all over the floor, the spill of sticky blood trapping dust and feathers from the many birds who had taken up residency since the block had been abandoned. She looked for a closer view of his hands. It was the right hand, the upper hand, or else she might not have noticed: the back of the hand had a deep, aged bruise on the knuckles, yellow and swollen.

  The dead man, Aziz Balfour, was twenty-five. Originally from Pakistan, he had come to Scotland working for a charity that was raising money for the people left homeless after the 2008 earthquake. He was a posh boy, had a degree from back home and clearly came from money. He had been studying for a Masters in Overseas Development at Glasgow and had married a Scottish girl last year. All his paperwork was good.

  The Scottish family were interviewed. None of them could believe he’d been murdered. They said he was a ‘great guy’. He didn’t drink or take drugs or gamble, he did nothing but work and gave a fifteenth of his earnings to charity, even though he was expecting his first baby in two months. A photo of him showed a handsome guy at a party, holding a small girl in a preposterously frilly red dress. He was grinning, had a James Dean quiff and sideburns, exaggerated enough to be cool and ironic.

  She looked at the death pictures, the slack face with half-open eyes, bathed in the cold light of the photographer’s flash. Aziz was heavy, his backside and thighs rounded. He wore a grey three-quarter length coat and it had ridden up behind, showing pudgy hips straining against a belt. The back pocket of his trousers showed the imprint of a wallet, which meant he wasn’t robbed. His shoes were patent leather slip-ons with leather soles.

  It was telling her nothing. Morrow put the photos back in the envelope, opened the door to the corridor, forcing herself out.

  She looked in at her team. They were working phones, checking computers, filling out forms over an ongoing surveillance case of a car dealership. They looked young, energetic. She could hardly remember their names. DC Brigid Daniel looked up at her standing outside the door. Morrow actually did remember her name. It was so bullishly Catholic and yet Daniel hadn’t been given a Papish nickname. It was a good sign, Morrow had thought, a sign of good change.

  ‘Daniel.’ She flicked a finger for her to come out.

  Daniel did so. ‘Yes, ma’am.’ She stood at ease, hands behind her back, eyes straight. Her polo neck and trousers were deep, lint-free black without a single washed-out splatter of baby sick. She ran, Morrow remembered; she looked fit but her thighs were splayed with fat and the tops of her legs rubbed noisily against each other when she walked.

  ‘You find anything?’

  ‘No, ma’am.’

  Morrow looked back at her desk. She had asked Daniel to check criminal records for anyone associated with a particular car dealership. Her desk looked very tidy. ‘Did you check the financial records?’

  ‘Yes, ma’am. There’s a couple of big transfers but they seem to be accounted for. Found bank receipts and everything.’

  ‘OK, come in here a minute.’

  Daniel hurried into Morrow’s office with unseemly enthusiasm.

  Morrow looked back in at DS McCarthy sitting at his desk. ‘Anything?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What are you thinking?’

  ‘That the old guy’s telling the truth and we’re bastards.’

  That was her fear.

  The car dealer had been in business for twenty-three years, selling luxury cars. They only became aware of him because a gangster’s fat, spoiled son was seen driving a Lotus that came from his shop. CID went in looking for evidence that the fat son had paid with dirty money and found a wee old man who claimed that the boy came in, said he was taking the car, would bring it back when he was ready to, and simply drove off in it. The car dealer knew who the boy was. He was far too frightened to object. It sounded true but CID still had to order a thorough search for the money: if they didn’t rip the business apart car dealers all over the city would be using the story within a week. So they had been through all of his records, frozen all of his bank accounts, trawled the accounts of all his family and friends for evidence of money laundering, looking for unusual purchases, mortgage pay-offs, bags of money in cupboards. They found nothing, which meant the old man was probably telling the truth, which in turn meant that he had been victimised twice: once by the fat son, once by the frantic search for the proceeds of crime. It was the burning crime question: where the hell was all the money going?

  ‘InfoTech’s coming to see me,’ said Morrow, trying to be conversational. ‘Talk through the fingerprints.’

  McCarthy nodded.

  She nodded him back to his desk. ‘Keep going. We might not be bastards.’

  Daniel was sitting opposite Morrow’s seat waiting to be spoken to.

  ‘No,’ said Morrow, waving her to sit next to her facing the computer. ‘I want fresh eyes on something.’

  They shuffled around awkwardly in the small office until they were both facing the computer. Morrow called up the fingerprint database IDENT1.

  ‘OK,’ she said, ‘talk me through the database and how a match is found.’

  Daniel nodded, took a breath and when she spoke it sounded like she was reciting a handout from her training: ‘Prints found at a scene of a crime are lifted, photographed and uploaded into the database as unidentified. Ten-prints taken at the point of arrest are uploaded into a separate but related database, adding the criminal record number if you have it. Searches can be run locally or nationally. It runs through the database of unidentified ones. Matches come back high or medium confidence and show you the date of birth and family name, so you can check it’s the right guy.’

  Morrow nodded. The DOB on the matching set was right for Brown. ‘We’ve got prints at a scene from someone unknown. They match someone they couldn’t possibly be from. Let’s say he’s dead. What do you think?’

  ‘It’s a mismatch then,’ said Daniel. ‘If that’s right then one of three things have happened: the ten-prints are wrong, the unidentified prints are wrong. Or the match is wrong.’

  ‘No, it’s high confidence. Been rerun several times. And the DOB’s right.’

  Daniel nodded and thought about it. ‘Well, thinking rationally, could the database prints have been changed?’

  ‘That’s what I thought.’
/>
  Daniel suppressed a grin.

  ‘Thanks, Daniel. You can go back now.’

  Daniel stood up, tried to think of something to say and then left.

  ‘Shut the door after you.’

  The InfoTech expert, one Clare McGregor, arrived thirty-four minutes late for their appointment. Because she was late Morrow would not be home to give the boys their tea or get to bath them. But McGregor didn’t know that, Morrow reminded herself, forehead pressed to the back of her office door. It was not deliberate. There might be a very good reason for it. She took three deep breaths and opened the door, heading out to the lobby to meet her.

  She reminded herself of the questions: how could someone get prints into a scene or how could a database mismatch prints.

  Morrow opened the door and walked into the lobby. The moment she saw McGregor she knew this would go very badly indeed.

  Clare McGregor was furious. She leaned on the front bar, legs wound around each other, arms crossed, cheek-chewing. In her mid-twenties, she was slim, pretty and dressed in comfortable trousers, a grey silk shirt and high-heeled boots. McGregor had never been in uniform, she was a civilian and wasn’t dressed like someone who needed to stay dry while working for twenty hours, be able to run, and/or sit in a car for four hours.

  ‘I’m DI Alex Morrow.’ She held her hand out. ‘Are you all right?’

  McGregor uncrossed her arms but refused to shake Morrow’s hand. She muttered a stark ‘yes’ as if they were in the middle of an argument.

  ‘Is there a problem here?’ asked Morrow.

  ‘No,’ said McGregor. ‘I’m the InfoTech. You asked me to come.’

  Morrow held her hand out insistently and McGregor gave in, pinching Morrow’s fingertips in response.

  It was clear to Morrow that Clare McGregor was having strong feelings about her and wanted them acknowledged. She was late, angry. She had probably rehearsed arguments, articulating her objections to Morrow all the way here. She wanted to be heard.