The Red Road

by Denise Mina

  ‘Where’s that from?’

  ‘This afternoon. The boys were asleep for twenty minutes and the door went and a market researcher came to the door. Fancy a glass?’

  Morrow smiled up at him, calculating whether saying yes would mean she’d have to stand up. ‘Aye, go on then.’

  He smiled as he backed out of the room, returning with two small glasses. It was pleasant wine, sweet but crisp.

  ‘That’s quite nice,’ said Morrow to the television.

  ‘Yeah, it’s all right, isn’t it? I’d prefer beer, really.’

  ‘What was the research about?’

  ‘Holidays.’

  She took another sip.

  ‘Have we got to go to a presentation or anything?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Did they go around the other neighbours?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Man or woman?’

  Brian tutted. ‘For heaven’s sake, Alex.’

  ‘I’m just asking, Brian.’

  ‘You’re very suspicious.’

  ‘Hm. Man or woman?’

  He smiled. ‘Woman, OK?’

  ‘For a twenty-minute chat, she gave you three bottles?’

  Brian grunted but she wasn’t sure if he was talking to the telly or her.

  ‘What did you tell her?’

  ‘We can’t afford a holiday.’

  Morrow watched the millionaires jog around midfield and thought about what they were all prepared to settle for now. Free wine. Enough to eat. The absence of civil war.

  10

  Though she had a key Rose rang the buzzer. She wanted to give Atholl the impression of courtesy, so that he would think she was in one mood and she could wrong-foot him with quite another.

  The block of flats was made of orange and yellow brick, a modern take on a tenement building. Ten years old and it was wearing badly. Someone’s buzzer was stuck and the intercom gave off a perpetual hiss. The ground-floor windows were always roughly curtained, as though the tenants were sick of being stared in at by other people’s visitors.

  Atholl’s voice crackled through the fuzzy intercom.

  ‘Me,’ she said into it. The door fell open.

  Inside, the stairs were steep and thin, carpeted to minimise sound. It was a noiseless place.

  Atholl called it ‘Lonely Mansions’ and ‘The Wound-Licking Station’. He said it was full of separated and divorced people, some with kids, some with bottles. No one wanted to know anyone else. No one heard anyone else. It was a recovery room, he said. The flats were as much as they legally needed to be and no more: the bedroom could fit a double bed, but not the space to walk around it. The ceiling skimmed the scalp – and thank God the builders hadn’t used Artex. Atholl liked describing things. He’d told her once that he’d wanted to be a writer.

  She jogged up the stairs, three floors, six flights, and knocked on his door. He opened it and she could smell immediately that he was drunk. It wasn’t the smell of vodka that hit her, it was his sweat. He gave off a strange odour that reminded Rose of her mother’s melancholy smell. She took a deep breath and stepped inside, shutting the door behind her.

  ‘This isn’t the time,’ she said, meaning for drunkenness, but it was too late for that. Anton Atholl was bouncing off the walls on his way to the sitting room. His shirt back was caked in sweat.

  Holding onto the door jamb, he managed the turn into the sitting room and she followed him.

  Atholl slumped in a low armchair, half bottles of vodka cluttering up a table at his side, three glasses, different sizes, all dirty with orange juice. Behind him, through a long picture window, was the Clyde, a black mile oozing towards the sea, and beyond it, on the far bank, small windows into other lonely lives.

  She didn’t want to go into the room. She leaned on the door frame, tucking her hands into her hoodie pockets. Self-pity hung in the room like a smoker’s fog.

  Atholl attempted a smile. ‘You hear about Aziz Balfour?’

  ‘What about him?’

  Anton Atholl shrugged. Rose felt sick again and looked around the room. He hadn’t taken much furniture when he left his wife and kids. He wasn’t a man for going to John Lewis and picking out fabrics for sofas. He had a leather chair, a table for the drink, and a radio for the cricket. Luckily, the flat came furnished with a washing machine.

  So Lord Anton Atholl sat on his one chair with nothing but his misery for company. Rose imagined his wife and kids, who she’d never met, over the other side of the city, laughing and sitting on different chairs, using crockery and napkins, reading books they’d had for ages, with chests and beds and sofas, laughing as they thought about the fat old man in his empty flat. Lonely Mansions, right enough.

  She honestly thought that Anton would be the one to go to the police one day. When Julius died Atholl was her first concern. He was the weak point, they’d always thought that. She’d always believed that he didn’t report them to the police out of loyalty to Julius. But now Julius was dead and still he hadn’t made any kind of move. She looked at him, sitting in his ruin; the fact that he’d done nothing made her think less of him.

  She cut to the chase. ‘Where the fuck is Robert?’

  Atholl looked into the far distance as his eyebrows rose in panic and confusion. She watched as a sob seemed to roll from his belly, through his chest and come screaming out of his mouth. He covered his face with both hands and cried. He didn’t know where Robert was.

  She watched impassively from the doorway. She couldn’t leave before she knew who was doing what. ‘What’s Dawood up to?’

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t know—’ He broke off to sob. ‘... Work out what’s going on ... Julius was the one who knew everything.’

  ‘I thought Dawood knew everything.’

  ‘Julius made his own contacts, recently. He’s ...’ He lost his breath and sat crying, not messily like her with the cops, not out of control. It was funeral crying. He was trying to make her stop asking.

  She watched him for a while. She wasn’t entirely unsympathetic but she knew it was at least amplified by the drink. Julius warned her never to waste time talking drunks around. He said it was like trying to stand jelly on its nose.

  She watched him for a while. Just when she’d decided he probably wouldn’t stop soon, had rolled her shoulder into the hall to leave, she heard his breathing change. She looked back. Wet faced and red, Atholl looked up at her.

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  She didn’t understand. ‘What for?’

  He started to cry again, a hand over his eyes. Rose tutted. ‘Have you done something?’

  ‘Not me. The office safe is locked. The keys are gone.’

  She froze. The safe. She should have gone there but she hadn’t had time. ‘What did you just say?’

  ‘The keys are gone. Can’t get in.’

  It was second-hand information. The safe didn’t take keys. Atholl was passing on information from someone else.

  ‘Who told you that?’

  ‘Dawood.’

  Dawood and Monkton. Looking for the contacts book, looking for the accounts. That’s what it was. That’s what they’d been planning.

  Rose watched him sit forward, pick up a half bottle with an inch left in it and drain the vodka. Rose felt her gums wither just watching him. ‘What did Dawood expect to find in there?’

  In the distance, somewhere across the water, a car alarm called plaintively.

  ‘There’s nothing in there. More importantly, have you found Robert’s laptop?’ asked Atholl.

  Rose shook her head.

  Atholl took a deep breath. ‘Robert sent a money-laundering report to the Serious Organised Crime Agency—’ He heard her sharp intake of breath and held a hand up, turning away as if he couldn’t bear her shock. ‘St— don’t! Dawood caught it. It’s OK, Dawood caught it.’

  ‘The fuck are you talking about, “caught it”?’

  Atholl considered the angles and then just shut his eyes and told her,
‘Robert sent it on his laptop through the firm’s wi-fi after he looked in the safe. Dawood has a ten-minute delay built into the computer system. He scans all the emails and he caught it. It never got sent.’

  Rose’s mind was having trouble taking it in: Robert finding the safe, Robert looking in the safe, Robert reporting the contents to SOCA. And Dawood having access to all of the firm’s emails.

  ‘Did Julius know Dawood had that?’

  Atholl shrugged. ‘Does it matter now?’

  It didn’t. She hoped no one had ever sent emails about her. They must have, though – her case was heard in late 1997. Everyone had email then, didn’t they? But Julius wouldn’t have said anything indiscreet about her in an email. He didn’t even use a mobile phone.

  The car alarm was still whining across the river. It made her feel afraid, brought back faint, uncomfortable memories. She wanted to get out of here.

  ‘Well, Robert’s laptop isn’t in the house.’

  ‘And it’s the laptop you need to find. The safe isn’t important. He could have sent the report through another email system.’

  Not Robert. He did everything in a half-assed way because someone else was always there to sort out his fuck-ups for him. She stood straight, about to leave, when it occurred to her that she had come for information and given it instead. Even pissed and desperate, Atholl was clever. She could hardly remember why she’d come but then it came to her. ‘Atholl, why the fuck is Monkton talking to me in front of people?’

  It was Monkton’s seeping wound, the deal done with Dawood all those years ago to get her off. Julius told her that Monkton had arranged it all, found the boy, set it up. He wanted her to know so that she had it over Monkton, as insurance. Monkton had never spoken to her before, ever. Though they had passed each other in courts, been near each other in Julius’s presence, though he had attended the christenings of all of Francine and Robert’s children.

  Atholl shook his head, looked as if he might cry again. It was a ruse to stop her asking again.

  ‘What’s making him so cocky? Why’s he so sure nothing’s coming up?’

  He cried again, pressing his fingers into his eyes; it looked painful. He’d been crying before, when he knew she wanted to ask something. He panicked when she asked about Monkton. The SOCA report was alarming but it had been stopped and had nothing to do with the safe.

  ‘Could there be something else in the safe?’

  He shrugged. ‘No. The safe’s ... there’s nothing in there. Robert’s put the keys somewhere daft, that’s all. He ran off because of the SOCA report.’

  Rose watched him touch the collection of half bottles at the side of his chair, looking for a mouthful. She hated vodka. She hated the smell of it, the greasy look of it, the acrid tang of vodka sweat. She looked at Atholl’s face and saw it then: regret. He wasn’t looking for mouthfuls of vodka left in the bottle, he was averting his face. Atholl had done something terrible. He had done a thing that he could never forgive himself for, something that would come to his mind in his death throes. She wondered if the thing he’d done was kill Robert.

  ‘Is Robert dead?’

  ‘What?’ Still looking through his collection.

  ‘Robert? Is he dead?’

  ‘I don’t know. Not yet, maybe.’

  Rose wanted to cry then. Her rarely used tear ducts yawned a painful ache. She sucked in a sharp breath, ordered them to stop and turned and walked out of the desolate flat without saying goodbye. She shut the door carefully behind her.

  The cold night enveloped her so she pulled her hood up and tucked her hands back into her pockets, tramping up the hill to the train station.

  Robert was a lovely person. She had seen him grow up, just a few years ahead of her, and she loved him as his father did: they both saw in him the innocence and loyalty of a good dog. He married a nice girl from uni, he had nice children and a nice, clean house. And when Julius got her to do a nannying qualification and mind Robert’s kids it was always understood that she was nanny to Robert as well. She was the buffer, because Julius needed two things: a pair of soiled hands, and an heir. But if she and Julius were ruined, Robert was their hope, their humanity. She had failed to protect him. She had failed Mr McMillan.

  She cried for all of them, letting her tear ducts have their childish way as she walked through the quiet suburban streets to the station. She formed her defence: if anyone asked her she’d say he was crying for Julius.

  A SOCA report meant that Robert had found the back safe. How the hell did he get in there? He didn’t even know the room was there. Would Dawood have told him? He couldn’t have, he couldn’t have been sure Robert would send the email from the office.

  Robert must have gone into his father’s office and looked at everything. Everything, otherwise it was just a pile of money and no explanation. Rose felt the loss then, a sudden death. Not like Julius, not just sadness. She had wanted better for Robert. She felt herself sag, the weight of his innocence dragging at her, slowing her feet.

  Ahead of her in the lane, the bright lights of the station cut through the inky dark. But Robert filled out a money-laundering report. He saw what he saw and was indignant. He was fighting against knowing, he didn’t accept it, and that was hopeful somehow. All she had to do now was get Robert out of a mess and she’d done that a hundred times. No one knew where he was, that was good.

  Cheered, deciding that it was the smell of the vodka, the SOCA report, the malicious reach of Dawood that got her so down, Rose dried her face with her sleeve. She took the underpass to the platform and waited with her hood up, facing away from the direction the train would come from so that no one on the train would see her when it drew in.

  Then she thought back to Atholl. He didn’t know where Robert was, she felt certain that was true. Atholl was good at his job, she reflected again, he could steer a conversation any way he wanted. Three times, he told her not to bother with the safe. Then Rose shut her eyes and processed his answer through her gut.

  There was something in the safe.

  11

  Morrow and DC Wheatly were parked in the Red Road at the pitiless start of the morning rush hour. Wainwright had sent word that the health and safety paperwork was through and she could come and have a look at the murder scene, but she would have to come early.

  Wheatly’s meaty hands gripped the steering wheel and his farmer’s neck craned to follow a chamois-faced early riser hurrying down the hill. They were all making their way towards the city, out of here, clustering at bus stops, smoking and waiting. They glanced in at the car, spotting Morrow and Wheatly, knowing they were cops because he looked so square and pinched-mouthed and policey.

  ‘You could lose the moustache, Wheatly,’ she said, continuing a conversation they had been having intermittently for a week.

  He wanted to do more undercover work but his face wouldn’t let him.

  ‘I’ve done that before.’ Wheatly stroked the black ’tache hairs towards his lip with his forefinger. ‘I still look like a recruiting poster.’

  Morrow shrugged and looked up at the flats. The body was gone and that was good. A body was always a distraction at a murder scene. It tended to draw the eye and evoke sparks of empathy, or, for Morrow at least, distracting ponderings on why she wasn’t feeling empathy. The site was so spectacular, it would be hard enough to focus on details.

  The Red Road flats were twenty-seven storeys tall, five hundred yards wide and being stripped for demolition. All the walls, the casing and especially the windows were being removed before the explosives were set, to avoid a glass storm. They couldn’t get into the scene of the murder before this morning: without health and safety paperwork she couldn’t even pass through the protective fencing. Morrow didn’t like heights terribly much.

  Early in her career Morrow had policed the crowd when the high flats in the Gorbals were demolished. The officers had to stand with their backs to the show, watching the crowd for three or so hours. People brought food, drinks, th
ings to sit on. The fevered atmosphere was unsettling. Morrow watched the crowd swell and grow boisterous, scanning for drunks and trouble and pickpockets. Over the afternoon she listened as people tried to explain away their excitement. It’s a bit of history, they said, history of the city. But that didn’t satisfy, it didn’t explain the buzz of anticipation running through the crowd so they began to falsify complaints against the high flats: we had damp, my auntie died there, I saw a man go out a window. Excuses, because they knew there was something venal about their lip-licking excitement. It was a modern public hanging. They were there to see something bigger than them die, to participate in an irreversible act of destruction.

  Morrow got out of the car. Cold rain pattered on her head and she looked around the road, cut off at the end by a high fence. A burger van was parked by some garages, presumably for the workers. At the base of the demolition site, still open for business, was a chemist. It must have been running a methadone-dispensing programme, keeping the locals dozy, or the council would have shut it down by now.

  She climbed back into the car and told Wheatly to drive around the block to the other side. They pulled out and went up the hill, took a right at the roundabout and another right to the front entrance of the flats. Wheatly was looking hard in his rear-view.

  ‘A white van’s been following us,’ he said. ‘Stopped down there behind us, just moved off and went on up the hill.’

  She didn’t really know what to say. ‘D’you get the reg?’

  ‘Aye.’ He parked up carefully and jotted it in his notebook. ‘I’ll check it when we get back.’

  The road was blocked off ahead by fencing and a complex of shipping containers with the demolition company’s name stamped on them.

  Morrow got out on the exposed hillside. Buffeted by the brutal wind and horizontal rain she pulled her coat tight and walked over to the chicken-wire fence. What used to be the central stairwells were being used as rubbish chutes to funnel the stripped rubble to the ground. At the bottom a digger was pulling lumps of plaster and brick away from the opening, tidying it into dunes.