The Red Road

by Denise Mina

In compensation for missing the boys’ bath, Morrow allowed herself the luxury of not asking. ‘Please come through.’ She turned and led the way to her office.

  Showing McGregor in, she pointed her to one of the two seats facing the computer screen. While Morrow had been waiting for her to arrive she had checked out her pay grade to see how susceptible someone in her position would be to bribery. She was making thirteen grand more than Morrow, and her qualifications were transferable.

  ‘OK.’ She took the neighbouring chair. ‘I’ve asked you here to talk me through something.’ Morrow flicked her mouse to waken the screen and the IDENT1 fingerprint database appeared suddenly.

  ‘We’ve got a problem with a case: we found fingerprints in a place they couldn’t possibly be. I need you tell me how the database could make a mistaken match—’

  ‘It can’t,’ said McGregor.

  Morrow looked at her. McGregor stared at the screen, mouth pinched tight.

  McGregor was wrong. They both knew she was wrong. They sat in silence for almost a minute. It was too early in the conversation for Morrow to stand up and chase her out.

  Morrow took a deep breath. ‘There are some grey areas to explore: prints could be complex marks or wrongly identified as not complex, isn’t that right?’

  ‘Complex marks’ was a technical term for crap fingerprints. It carried with it a different set of obligations. Three examiners had to look at the prints independently. They had to submit reports with their conclusions to show their working. With non-complex marks a superficial match on the database could be followed up with just one examiner and a standard report.

  McGregor stared sullenly at the screen as if she was watching a boring TV show.

  ‘Clare, couldn’t there be grey areas in identification? It’s not an absolute science, is it?’

  McGregor was finding it hard to be wrong. Morrow thought that she must have been quite good at her job or they wouldn’t have sent her over. Either that or she was a nutcase and they wanted her out of the office. She gave a sharp little nod at the computer, as if she wanted to head-butt it. ‘Grey areas ... Yes.’

  ‘Could someone access the database and change an accused person’s ten-prints?’

  ‘Yes, if digits have been lost or scarred, you can change them. But you need a high level of clearance and it would be traceable. Every time a file is accessed it’s traceable. Here ...’ She flicked through a couple of screens and drew up the file history detailing who had been in there, what their ID number was and when they were there.

  Morrow watched carefully. ‘What about scene of crime prints? Can you go into the database and change them?’

  ‘No.’

  Morrow knew they could change them.

  ‘Are you sure?’

  McGregor blinked. She was wrong and she knew it. ‘Not any more,’ she conceded.

  ‘Any more?’

  ‘Used to be able to if you were working on a partial and you got a better set, for example, but they changed that seven years ago. It’s all traceable now.’

  Morrow sat back. ‘So, you can but it’s traceable?’

  ‘Yes.’ McGregor clicked through three screens. ‘See there?’

  Up on the right-hand corner in vivid blinking red was a notification of the date of when an entry had been changed and the IT officer’s number.

  ‘OK.’

  They could be changed. Michael Brown could have found a bent IT officer to change his prints and give a match.

  ‘Could you hack in and alter them remotely?’

  ‘No. You’d need access to the building, to the servers that are capable of accessing the database ...’

  She didn’t believe McGregor now, because she’d bullshitted before. Morrow made a mental note to ask someone else and tuned out as McGregor talked her through access codes and passwords, who changed them and when.

  As a final test Morrow asked an obvious yes prompt: ‘Could someone have put in the wrong prints in the first place?’

  ‘No,’ said McGregor.

  Morrow sat still, letting the idiotic ‘no’ echo around the room. They sat there, together, until the untouched page on the screen dulled for a moment like a sleepy eye half shutting. Then it went off.

  Morrow stood up. ‘That’s all I need from you.’

  McGregor got to her feet, shoving the chair back noisily. ‘Cousin used to work in this division.’

  This was the pre-rehearsed argument. Morrow asked, ‘Who’s that then?’

  ‘DC Harris. He used to work here.’

  Harris was as close as Morrow had ever come to a friend on the force. He’d been done for taking bribes and was currently in prison. Morrow was so disappointed in him that she had punched him and broken his nose. She regretted it. She missed him.

  McGregor was so angry she was losing her breath. ‘And you’ – she said, bubbling at the nose and mouth – ‘are just the sort of ...’

  But again Morrow wasn’t listening. She was blinded by visions of Harris standing in a dark street taking a punch and letting her punch him again, because he knew what he had done was low and shameful.

  ‘Harris pleaded guilty.’

  ‘Your brother’s Danny McGrath.’

  Morrow found herself shouting. ‘If you can’t function in the service because of your family history you should leave and get another job.’

  She opened the door and held it as the other woman slunk through it. McGregor’s was a good job, an easy job, and they both knew it. She could see McGregor was worried Morrow would report her, make up an allegation and she’d lose her position.

  McGregor looked back at her. She didn’t look anything like Harris but Glasgow was a small city and the service was even smaller.

  ‘Tell Harris I was asking after him.’

  McGregor responded automatically, ‘Will do.’

  Morrow slammed the door. Everyone knew about Danny now. It came up all the time and even when it didn’t she felt the shadow of that association hanging over her, tainting her moral authority.

  McGregor would go home and sob. She’d worry about her job for the next few months, but eventually she’d forget that it ever happened. Morrow wouldn’t forget it. She missed Harris every day.

  Thoughts of what she missed made her check her watch: she was too late for the bath but if she hurried she could still get them to bed.

  She opened the door and called DS McCarthy over.

  ‘McCarthy, you trained to use a Mobile fingerprint ID?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Get one and bring it to the high court at nine thirty tomorrow morning.’

  McCarthy was surprised. ‘We’re taking his prints again?’

  ‘If he’ll let us.’ She turned away to get her coat and bag. ‘I suspect he’ll be very keen to.’

  7

  The moment Rose Wilson heard the buzzer she knew it was the police. It was typical of Margery to be so deep in denial that she’d call the cops in when Robert ran away. Francine wouldn’t do that. Still, Rose reminded herself that was normal, that’s what people did when someone went missing. The cops might even get a handle on where Robert was. She’d checked his credit card online. He hadn’t paid for anything in the past two days. She’d checked his ‘find my iPhone’. But he had turned it off. At least no one else would be able to track him that way.

  She looked at the video phone screen. Two men in cheap suits at the gate, both of them slightly fat. One had thinning dark hair and spoke into the camera, telling her they were Strathclyde Police, could they come in for a moment? The other cop looked at the house, mild puzzlement on his face. She knew what he meant. The house didn’t work.

  She pressed the button for the gate and opened the front door for the officers.

  The security gate was low and leapable. The drive was shallow. Realistically, the householder could look out of the window and get better definition and a clearer idea of who was out there. But the gate and camera were cheap copies of actual security. The developers knew that anyone pay
ing a million pounds for a house would look for certain features, like security gates, sauna, double garage, so they had crammed them in. Sometimes, if she got up in the night or approached the house from the wrong angle in the street, she saw it all afresh, a chaotic jumble of pointless totems.

  The cops looked over the building, their eyes confused by the small, ill-matched windows on different levels, some cutting across the floors to create minstrels’ galleries. A grey, overhanging roof dominated the white façade, the entrance portico had too many columns.

  The house looked outside how the family felt from the inside: disjointed, over-embellished, nervous and busy.

  ‘Hello,’ she said, as the two men approached the front step. The bald cop smiled at her.

  ‘Strathclyde Police,’ he said, smiling again, showing her his ID. ‘We’re here about Mr McMillan?’

  ‘Please come in.’ She opened the door.

  They stepped into the hallway, looking around awkwardly, trying hard not to gawp.

  It was a big hall, wide but low. A pine staircase lurched up the wall and veered away awkwardly. The ceiling was too low for the eighteen halogen downlighters punched into it. They hit the eye like consecutive searchlights. She offered to take their coats. They demurred politely but Rose’s attention was drawn by the whispers of children on the upper landing.

  They weren’t supposed to be playing up there. Angus had a bad tumble down the stairs once and she’d told them not to play there.

  She shut the front door and stood tall. ‘Hamish! Angus! Not there.’

  Two small faces peeked around the head of the stairs, Angus smirking behind his brother who was too interested in the police to mind being in trouble.

  ‘I said not there, Hamish.’

  Hamish raised a finger. ‘Who are they?’

  ‘Don’t point at people,’ she said.

  The bald policeman smiled up at the children and said ‘hello’.

  ‘Who are they?’ smiled Angus, still shielding himself behind Hamish.

  ‘Hamish, what do you say?’

  The boys paused for a moment and ran through all the things she nagged them to say. Hamish hit the jackpot with an obligation ‘hello’ but Angus said ‘thank you’.

  ‘These men are policemen.’

  ‘Are they here about Daddy?’ asked Angus.

  She didn’t want to look at them. ‘Yes,’ she said, hearing the hiss in her voice reverberate around the cold hall. ‘You two go upstairs to the playroom. You can play on the Wii for twenty minutes.’

  They bolted off upstairs as Rose held out a hand towards the kitchen door. ‘Would you like to come through?’

  The cops walked through to the back of the house and she followed them.

  The kitchen was narrow with tottery stools around a breakfast bar. The dining room had a big table and chairs but she didn’t want them to be comfortable, to linger. She offered the cops a seat, watching as they climbed up, gracelessly yanking their jackets out from under their bottoms. They settled and looked at her, as if expecting praise for getting up there.

  ‘Can I get you tea or coffee?’

  ‘No,’ said the bald one, ‘no thanks.’ He put a nasty plastic briefcase on the clean worktop. A greasy sheen on the handle caught the light. Rose thought she could see crumbs, possibly from biscuits, caught in the zip. It looked disgusting. She imagined licking it, felt sick at the thought of it and forced herself to look away.

  ‘I’ll get Mrs McMillan for you. She’s lying down.’

  ‘Hang on,’ the dark-haired one spoke for the first time, ‘you’re not Mrs McMillan?’

  ‘No, I’m the nanny. I’ll get her.’

  She had already turned away when he said, ‘Sorry, what’s your name?’

  Rose knew that tone. The tone denoted interest, suppositions about complications. He’d be wondering about Robert, about affairs and unreciprocated crushes, about fumblings in the middle of the night. She heard the tone from Robert’s friends, from Francine’s occasional forays into the world of other mothers, from workmen who came to the house. She wasn’t offended by it, not any more. Most people couldn’t even begin to understand the closeness between her and Robert. He was her brother. Her naïve older brother.

  She turned back. ‘Rose Wilson.’

  The cops exchanged glances. ‘Maybe we could interview you first, Rose?’

  Rose didn’t want to but it would look strange. She turned back and sat down on a stool, hands clasped in front of her on the table, facing the cops.

  ‘Sorry. It’s been a heavy day. Family funeral.’

  The dark-haired one unzipped his briefcase and pulled out a form. ‘Julius McMillan’s funeral? Was it this morning?’

  ‘Still going, I’m sure.’

  ‘I met McMillan once,’ said the baldy one. He waited then, open mouthed, for a prompt.

  Exhausted, Rose gave it to him. ‘Did you?’

  ‘Yeah.’ He smiled at the table. ‘When I was a young cop I arrested some care-home kids and McMillan was their defence counsel. Even back then, and that was ten years ago, you could tell he’d been brilliant and here he was defending a wee—’ He looked up, remembered where he was. ‘You know. Well, you know how he did those defence cases.’

  Rose cleared her throat. ‘Look, um, I can save you a bit of work if you’d like. That’s how I met him. I was one of those cases. He defended me when I got in trouble.’

  It took a moment to register. Then the dark-haired one dropped his voice to confidential. ‘What sort of trouble?’

  ‘You don’t need to whisper. It was a culp hom.’ She noticed that she’d dropped her own voice. ‘The family know, well, the kids don’t know and I’d rather you didn’t mention it in front of them ...’

  The cops were too uncomfortable to write it down.

  ‘Culpable homicide?’ The dark-haired one repeated it to give himself time to take it in.

  They’d go straight back to the office and check out her record. They’d see the guilty plea and the details. Were the photos in that file? If they saw the photos they’d be horrified. Julius McMillan showed her them. He wanted her to see them, take it in, get over it. She could recall them in detail: Sammy slumped against the wheel like an empty costume, blood everywhere. Black and white, colour. Mugshots of her, encrusted with dried blood.

  The balding cop cleared his throat. ‘And you stayed in touch?’

  ‘He did. He helped me out when I was released.’

  ‘That was good of him.’ His eyebrows were high on his forehead.

  ‘Yes. He was a better man than most people knew. I can understand Robert wanting to be alone. He’ll need time. Julius is a terrible loss to all of us.’

  ‘He was very ill, wasn’t he?’ The baldy one was building to something.

  ‘Julius?’ she said, trying to anticipate his next move. ‘Yes. Yes, I’m afraid he was. Lung condition. Could have happened at any time. He wasn’t in pain.’

  ‘So it was a mercy, really?’

  She shrugged. They looked at each other. And though Rose kept a straight face she was thinking that the bald cop had never been with anyone when they died. Rose knew that death was never expected or accepted, no one went gently. There was always a futile kick against the kitchen floor. She dropped her eyes to the table and repeated the palliative lie for him, ‘It was a mercy, yes, I suppose.’

  He smiled at her for saying that. ‘But Robert doesn’t see it that way?’

  ‘He didn’t show it but I’m sure he’s very upset.’

  The dark-haired cop was busy studying her. She didn’t look the part, she knew that. She dressed like a middle-class graduate: good quality jeans, big belt, baggy cashmere jumper. They were all things that Francine had bought her or replacements for worn out things she had bought her. And she had that ease and arrogance that confused people, the steady eye of someone who knew exactly who she was but who spoke with a low-class accent.

  ‘We need to fill out the forms.’

  He took her na
me, her age: twenty-nine; her address: here; and her job. She was a nanny, had an HNC in Early Education and Childcare from Langside College.

  He pretended to be pleased. ‘Did you do your HNC when you were in prison?’

  ‘After. Francine and Robert were expecting their first baby, Hamish. They offered me the job before he was even born.’

  ‘That’s very community minded.’ He looked to his partner to see if he would concur in the lie. ‘We don’t always hear stories like that, you know?’

  Rose smiled politely. ‘I know. They’re good, Christian people.’

  ‘Oh!’ he said. ‘They’re religious.’

  She smiled but didn’t confirm or deny it. They both seemed satisfied with that as an explanation of why a professional couple would hand over their firstborn to someone convicted of murder. The truth was that Francine was the one who wanted her. Rose and Robert liked each other, felt very close in many ways, but it was at Francine’s insistence that Rose got the job. She trusted her. You know how to look after people, she said to Rose, in secret, because Robert didn’t know yet. I’m going to need you. Can you keep a secret? They were all consumed by the need to protect Robert.

  So, could she tell them when she last saw Robert McMillan?

  Rose told them it was the night before last. She told them he seemed fine.

  And, they asked, how did Robert seem, recently?

  She told them that Robert had been calm when his father died. He spent time at the private hospital and was there with his father when he died after the operation to reinflate his lungs.

  Did she get on with Robert?

  She said she didn’t really see that much of him. He worked for a big law firm and spent most of his time at work. He rarely managed to get home for family dinners and she was always busy with the kids. When he was around her job was to attend to the kids and let Robert and Francine spend a little time alone together.

  It was true in a way; she didn’t know what films he liked or watched or enjoyed. She didn’t even see him eating that often. But she and Robert had known each other since they were children, herself only four years younger than him. Two sides of a coin, Julius called them. She’d loved that when she was younger.