by Denise Mina
Suddenly, she found herself back in remand, in the dark, a fourteen-year-old, her skin dry from the dusting of blood. She kept scratching her head and finding red dust under her fingernails. Her scalp was raw by the time Mr McMillan came to see her. Though she was fourteen and looked sixteen she was still small, too small for the clothes they gave her to change into. She sat across the table from him in the interview room, a small, flattened thing at the end of her life.
Not here. That memory did not belong in this house but she couldn’t shake it and knew that she was frozen at the table, staring, exciting interest.
With a furious energy, she managed to make the memory ebb, kicking it down through the kitchen floor. She looked up at the cops.
‘Sorry,’ she whispered, hoarse. ‘It’s been quite a shock, really, all of it. Everyone’s been very upset. We knew he wasn’t healthy but it was still an awful shock. Awful.’
The coppers nodded, as if they knew anything. ‘You said you became very close?’
‘Mr McMillan visited me in prison. I wasn’t going to appeal the sentence. It was five years for culpable homicide, he did a great job, the court was very kind to me. He visited me though and encouraged me to study while I was in there – he took an interest.’
‘And when you got out he gave you a job?’
‘No, when I got out I was doing nursery training at Langside. I was living in supported accommodation. Francine was pregnant and he got me an interview. Three kids later I’m still here.’
And how did she get on with Francine?
She wiped her nose, listening for noises from the hall, mentally mapping the children’s positions in the house. ‘I love Francine. She’s like my sister. I just love her.’
Did she have a boyfriend?
No.
That seems unusual, a pretty woman her age. They smiled at her. She didn’t smile back. They persisted.
Was there someone recently?
No.
She couldn’t pretend like they wanted her to. She couldn’t giggle at the compliment or make up a history. There was no one. There never was anyone. She never wanted there to be anyone. Every night she got into bed and before she fell asleep she remembered that no man had touched her today, and smiled.
They wrote something on the sheet and she could see them thinking she was having an affair with Robert, or Francine. Or both. But she looked at their doughy cop faces and guessed that their imaginations probably wouldn’t stretch to both. Not unless they watched a lot of pornography. You could tell when a man did that. It gave them a lot of strange ideas about people.
They filled out the bottom of the form and asked her to go and get Francine out of her bed.
Rose stood up, reviewing her performance. It was OK. ‘Officers,’ she said, ‘are you sure I couldn’t get you a cup of tea?’
She sounded imploring, mostly because she was upset but she saw them respond to the suggestion of respect and care as a child does to love. They looked at her and their faces blossomed warm and soft. Them and us. Us and us.
‘No, thanks, Miss Wilson, if you could just get Mrs McMillan for us.’
She turned back to the hall, keeping her head down so that the children wouldn’t see her looking upset.
Francine was reading in bed. She had a throw over her legs and a folio edition of The Mill on the Floss open on her knees. She had been crying.
Rose walked over to the bedside and looked down at the book. She was on page four. Rose sat down.
‘Is that the police downstairs?’
‘Yeah.’
‘They want to talk to me?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Did they ask about you?’
‘Yeah.’
‘What did you tell them?’
‘Everything.’
Francine reached out to Rose and held her hand for a moment.
‘Once the police leave, I need to go out,’ said Rose.
Francine squeezed her hand.
8
1997
Julius McMillan sat in his small office, tapping his pen on the desk, and considered the situation. It was a bad situation. She had killed two men in one night. He had their story for Samuel McCaig. That was a good story. Rose had just met him, he tried it on, she panicked. Fine. Culp hom, self-defence. So that was fine. But the Pinkie Brown murder, that was bad.
He lit a Rothmans and sat back, climbing inside the story, looking for the chinks of light. Pinkie brought the weapon. Pinkie had a record of violence. They could claim that he tried to rape Rose but that would undermine the Sammy the Perv defence. They were at school together. It was difficult. Julius couldn’t see a break in it. There was no way out. The significant thing so far was that she hadn’t been charged or even questioned about Pinkie. But she would be, eventually, if he didn’t do something.
She was an astonishing little animal. McMillan had defended kids, women, people in extremis, but he had never met anyone like her before. She had no one: no family, no friends, even her social worker changed every six months. She’d never even been fostered and she didn’t have friends at school. Her pattern seemed to be that she had one person in her life at a time and that person was her all. Her mother, first, an all-consuming mess. Then no one for a year, then Sammy. Absolute fidelity. McMillan saw it in her. When she pledged her loyalty to him he saw the rest of the world die in her eyes. But it wasn’t that she had a naive belief in him, she wasn’t stupid. She saw something in him, he knew she did.
He picked up the phone and called Dawood McMann. They arranged to meet in a car park, which seemed a bit melodramatic to Julius.
He was careful not to tell his receptionist, Mrs Tait, where he was going. He was sure she was leaking information to Anton Atholl.
DC David Monkton was in the locker room, hanging his T-shirt and jeans neatly onto a hanger. He had a half smile on his face, half listening to the chat among the other officers. He felt self-conscious about that smile because it wasn’t genuine, he knew it wasn’t. He was trying to convey belonging and yet not belonging, being somehow above the rest of them and yet not making a big thing of it, but the smile kept slipping. The joke among the men was going on too long and it wasn’t really that funny.
‘Hey, Monkton.’ The officer speaking to him was standing in crumpled underpants and his blue shirt and he was fat and hated Monkton.
‘What?’
For a short moment they looked at each other across the heads of the others with undisguised loathing and then the fat man turned it into a smile. ‘You been ironing your cock?’
Everyone laughed at him. Monkton knew the expression to make: unconcerned, also amused, but he just couldn’t get his facial muscles to do that today. He looked sick, he thought, so he changed it and then worried that he looked hurt. He turned into his locker and hung his clothes up for the end of his shift and thought to himself, one day I will be your boss.
‘I’m just asking,’ said the cop, ‘because you’ve got a seam down the front of it.’
He hadn’t seen David’s cock. The laughter was less cheerful this time, wary. Someone said, ‘Nah, man.’ Monkton came back out of the locker. The cop was still glaring at him.
Monkton met his eye, raised his eyebrows. Everyone looked away.
‘What?’ said the cop, thinking he was squaring up to fight him.
Monkton said nothing. He was remembering the man’s face for later, further on in his career. He turned and walked out of the locker room. He was just outside the door when he heard the guy say, ‘Who does he think he is?’
Monkton wanted to run back in and punch his lights out. But he didn’t because he was controlled, because he knew what he was doing and scum like that couldn’t stop him. He was going right to the top. That’s what they couldn’t cope with; his ambition. And he would one day be running divisions, running squads full of grunts like him and he wouldn’t have to put up with their crap, their humiliating, belittling crap.
He walked up the stairs to the office he was shar
ing with his DS. He was in an office with the fucking DS because he actually had ambitions. He was already ahead of the game and that’s why they hated him. They were jealous. His phone rang in his pocket as he reached the landing. He took it out. It was a tiny phone, they could make them so small now.
He answered it and found Dawood McMann on the other end. A warm sensation flooded through him. A call from McMann meant money. Cash to spend, cash he had to spend because he couldn’t bank it.
‘What can I do for you?’
‘It’s a bit more complicated than the usual. Can we meet?’
Monkton looked around. No one who mattered was anywhere near him. ‘Sure. When?’
‘Now? Outside?’
It was a Range Rover, the cabin was warm and the seats were made of leather. Monkton shifted in the chair, even the steering wheel was covered in leather, pale leather, his hand lingered on the seat leather, brushing it, feeling it, loving it.
‘So it would be a step up,’ said McMann. ‘But are you ready for that?’
‘How much?’
Dawood didn’t answer so Monkton looked at him. He was a strange-looking man. Half Pakistani, he had a moustache when no one in Scotland had a moustache. It was a big one too and his hair had some sort of preparation in it that made it look wet, the tracks of his comb still in there. He wore jewellery as well, big gold rings and cheap string bracelets around his left wrist that looked dirty.
‘Fifty thousand.’
He savoured Monkton’s reaction, watching the wide easy smile spread across his face, looking at his teeth as if he was counting them, reflecting the smile back at him.
‘That’s a hell of a lot of money.’
Dawood smiled. ‘I’m asking a lot. It’s not just a bit of information this time. Find someone, make it stick. That’s all.’
They smiled at each other, wider, unguarded. Monkton didn’t mind the dirty bangles or the wet-look hair. He didn’t care about the gold filling in one of Dawood’s incisors or his strange way of nodding his head that looked like yes and no at the same time.
9
Morrow’s eyes fell on the house, the warm light in the front window, the scraggy grass on the sloping lawn to the road, the messy hedge. She glanced at the roof, worrying herself. It did need to be done but they’d spent the money already and had to hope that the roof would see the winter through. Even as she was fretting she was still smiling because she was so close to being home. She puckered as she turned into the cul de sac, rehearsing a smother of kisses for her boys, already feeling the tickle of soft baby hair on her lips. Then she saw him. Her brother, Danny, was parked outside her house, waiting for her.
She drew up sharply, bonnet to bonnet with Danny, a car space between them, and switched the engine off. They looked at each other in the dark. As if it was happening in slow motion, she saw him realise she was pissed off that he was there. She saw him glance down, decide to ignore it and look up. He forced his face into a passive smile.
She stayed where she was, watching him. Danny McGrath letting an insult go. With her cop’s head on she knew it was ominous. Danny was a predator and he was after something.
His car bonnet loomed over hers but she sat, looking up, not matching his smile. He must know the things she knew about him, the broken legs and burned-out shops, the wash of money and the army of muscle.
Danny ran half the taxis in Glasgow, since he had magically acquired a licence despite his reputation and all his previous convictions. Alex knew what went on with the taxis, how much money was being cleaned through the cash business. She sat in her car and remembered the dapper old car dealer weeping in his office as they bagged up the files of his decades-long business. She blamed Danny, though the family that did it were rivals of his.
She got out, grabbed her bag and walked over to his window. It rolled down smoothly and Danny smiled at her.
‘How are you?’ he said.
Morrow chewed her cheek. ‘What you doing here?’
Though the act of tolerance was choking him, he rallied: ‘Just visiting my godsons in there. How are you?’
He waited for a pleasantry back. She didn’t have one for him. She looked over the roof of the car. ‘Look, um, don’t come to my house when I’m not here.’
Danny wasn’t used to that, to people being sharp or abrupt with him. He was a powerful man. He had been in knife fights, he’d kicked people in the face. He huffed an indignant laugh at the windscreen and looked at her, amused and puzzled.
She said it again, ‘I don’t want you in my house.’
‘... My godsons,’ he said, smiling but the anger showing in the set of his eyes.
They stood in the dark, looking away from each other.
Finally Morrow spoke. ‘Danny, this isn’t ...’
‘This isn’t what?’
She didn’t want to get into a discussion.
‘Am I not good enough?’
She looked at his face, at the scar on the chin, at the lies in his eyes. He wasn’t good enough to be near her kids but they were so mired in bullshit that she couldn’t say that. ‘Dan, I think we should have a break for a while. I’ll call you.’ She walked away up the path to the door.
‘Alex.’ He was out of the car and coming after her. He’d put on weight, eating takeouts every night, and the tracksuit wasn’t doing him any favours. ‘Wait.’
He caught up with her, reaching into his back pocket and pulling out an old photo. ‘This is why I came. I only wanted you to have this.’ He handed it to her. ‘Nineteen seventy-six.’
The photo was old, in the faded pastels of the 1970s. It had been ripped almost in half and sellotaped back together. Two girls, their arms around each other’s shoulders, wearing shorts and cheesecloth smock tops. Alex recognised her mum’s hairstyle: a Farrah Fawcett flick with a Debbie Harry dye job: brown at the back and blond-flicked fringes. The other girl was Danny’s mum, still recognisable even without the broken nose. She had a matching hairstyle, cheaper, the flick less defined.
Morrow hadn’t known their mothers were ever friends. The two girls each had a baby just a year or so after the photo was taken, both to the same nasty man. Danny and Alex. They started school together without knowing they were half-brother and -sister. They had a mutual crush in their first term at school, until their mothers met at the gates and set about each other. There was no mystery about Danny and Alex’s relationship then, just shame and fascination.
But here their mothers were so young and fresh and hopeful. Photographed smiling, standing on waste ground, the earth hard and dry. There was a heatwave that year, she remembered her mum talking about it. Her mum’s legs and forearms were sunburnt pink in the picture.
Danny hated his mother. When he was very young, thirteen, fourteen, she couldn’t remember, he’d been arrested for battering her. It seemed unfair to Morrow at the time. It seemed unfair to everyone at the time. His mother was no stranger to a brawl and if Danny hadn’t come off the worst it was probably to his credit. He loathed the woman. Yet here he was, smiling over Morrow’s shoulder at the photo, head tilted just so. Danny did nothing unless it served him some purpose.
‘I wanted you to keep it,’ he said. ‘For the boys, for later. So they can see how close they were. It wasn’t always bad ...’
She looked at the photo. The lies were rigid between them now. She looked at the photo and wondered what they were doing, if they were lying to each other or to themselves.
‘Lovely.’ She backed off a step. ‘You got a copy?’
‘Yeah.’ He took a hopeful step towards her.
‘Thanks.’ She turned away, fitted her key in the door and shut it firmly between them.
She was in another world, suddenly looking at the stairs her waters had broken on, the Christmas stairs, the birthday stairs, the stain where baby Dan was sick.
A sour tang of milk sick was carried to her on the heat of the house. She took off her coat and let her senses engulf her.
‘Alex!’ Brian called
from the front room. ‘Alex, get in here!’
She looked in the door. He was holding Danny on his knee, holding a cupped hand full of stinking white vomit in the other.
‘A cloth! A cloth!’
The boys were falling asleep. Alex had given them a second bath and put them to bed while Brian took an hour to himself, sitting and watching football. Neither boy was hot or spotty and they didn’t look as if they’d be sick again. It was one of the fleeting bugs they kept picking up. Small wonder. They put everything they got hold of into their raw wee mouths.
She stood at the door, smiling, and watched them battle to stay awake, getting to their knees and dropping back, punch drunk from the day. The cots were pushed up next to each other because they liked to hold hands through the bars.
She watched them until they fell asleep, listened to their snuffling until her feet were too sore to stand any longer. She turned the intercom on and tiptoed down to the living room.
Brian was slumped on the settee. All around him the carpet had scrubbed stains from glories past.
‘We’ll need a new carpet,’ she said.
‘Hm.’ Brian kept his eyes on the TV. ‘Not yet.’
She sat next to him, gently kicking his feet over for a share of the footstool. Brian fought back, gaining ground and losing a slipper. She took her feet off and then he made room for her. Their feet formed a tidy row and they smiled at the telly. The football match was between two teams neither of them cared about. Fifty minutes in and the score was nil nil.
Her foot nudged Brian’s. ‘What was Danny saying?’
‘He was only in for a minute. He was all smiles. Trouble at his work.’
‘Sort of trouble?’
Brian shrugged. ‘Just fed up, I think. Hard for everyone at the moment. He was here to see you.’
‘Well,’ she felt tired suddenly, ‘he saw me.’
He sat up suddenly. ‘Oh, guess what ...’ He stood up and left the room, coming back in with a cardboard wine carrier with three bottles in it. He held it up and grinned. ‘Eh?’