The Red Road

by Denise Mina

  Wheatly got out and came over to her side of the car. Beyond the wire gate they watched a hard-hatted workman come out of a shipping container. He approached the gate and checked their warrant cards before undoing the padlock to let them onto the site. He pointed them towards the container he’d come out of. It was made of blue corrugated steel with a window and door cut into the side.

  They took the metal ramp to the door and knocked. It was answered by a small energetic man with a carefully mended harelip.

  She held out her hand. ‘DI Alex Morrow.’

  He shook it. ‘Farrell McGovan,’ he said, his top lip sliding on the diagonal.

  He stood aside, welcoming them into the overheated metal room. It was carpeted, had chairs and two desks and a wall chart but it was still very obviously a metal container.

  Standing with a DC was DI Paul Wainwright. Tall, dark and ugly, Wainwright smiled, shook her hand and nodded hello to Wheatly. She nodded at his DC as Wainwright introduced him, forgetting his name instantly.

  ‘Nice to meet you,’ she said, feeling guilty. ‘So, we going up there?’

  McGovan nodded. ‘I need you to sign this waiver, saying we’re not responsible for your safety. I can’t take you all up, there’s only me, so I can only take two of you. Health and safety.’

  Morrow and Wainwright nodded their assent. He gave them the forms, long and legalistic, already faxed to their superior officers and OKed. Morrow and Wainwright signed them and handed them back.

  ‘Also health and safety: you need hats and high-vis vests on.’

  They nodded again and he opened the door out. ‘You two all right to wait here?’ he asked the DCs. They looked to their bosses for permission to sit about in the warm office while Morrow and Wainwright climbed eleven storeys of bare concrete.

  She strained to think of a job for Wheatly. Finally she said, ‘Call that reg. number in and then, um, just sit there.’

  Wainwright laughed softly next to her.

  They shut the door behind them and followed McGovan to another container next door, filling the journey with pointless pleasantries: how’ve you been? How’s the north? Will we all be getting moved next year? Morrow didn’t really believe it would happen but the current custom was to fret about it.

  McGovan welcomed them into a manned room, much colder than the office, with a wall of yellow hard hats on a shelf and a rack of bright yellow waistcoats.

  He found one to fit each of them. As they put them on Morrow considered why they needed to be highly visible; if it was so they could be seen falling, or spotted lying dead under a ton of rubble. McGovan led them out of the door towards the building. Wainwright made a weak joke about the Village People and Morrow laughed, because she liked him, not because it was funny.

  ‘This is, um,’ Wainwright looked fearfully up at the building, ‘a bit hairy, really ...’

  Across a hundred yards of broken glass and wooden splinters, they walked into the rotting remains of a housing revolution.

  The corner stairwell steps were bare concrete, the cladding on the walls stripped off. They climbed, slowing to catch their breath, following McGovan. On the sixth floor the banisters disappeared. On the eighth floor the outside walls were already down and the wind swirled dust around their knees, brushing it from the upstairs landings into their eyes, down their collars. Birds flew past their ankles. Each time her head rose above another landing floor Morrow saw the giant thrumming city afresh. The confusion of scale left her sick.

  The girders were whining, the whole edifice swaying slightly as it caught the wind. The building felt as if it was crumbling, a skeleton dosed in lime.

  Morrow’s awareness of the sheer drops heightened until they were all she was aware of. The stairs became nothing but a series of mortal edges, hypnotic and terrifying. A braying wind buffeted her towards them, her muscles lost faith in her, resisting, tightening. Images of specks jumping from the World Trade Center drew her muscles tighter still until all of her movements were stiff and ineloquent.

  Losing her breath, she had just decided that she couldn’t go up any more when McGovan shouted over the wind that they were there.

  Hands out to steady herself on a flat surface, Morrow was glad to turn away from the sheer drop and walk into what had once been flats. Not now. A five hundred foot long stretch of concrete and beyond that another mesmerising drop. McGovan led them three girders down, to a dark patch and a girder whose dusty redness was marred by smears of black fingerprint dust.

  No buckets of water had been carried up eleven terrifying floors to wash the mess away; the pool of dried blood was still there, undisturbed.

  Morrow stood at what she supposed were Aziz Balfour’s feet and took it in. They were thirty feet from the outside edge, from the front of the building, close enough to keep her stomach queasy.

  Why eleven floors up, was what she was thinking. Why would anyone go to the trouble of bringing him up here? It was hard to imagine anywhere more godforsaken. Maybe this space meant something important to someone.

  ‘Who last lived here?’ she shouted at Wainwright, trying to be heard over the wind and the creaking steel.

  ‘Asylum seeker,’ he shouted back, his voice snatched by the sharp wind. ‘Somali.’ He held up three fingers. ‘Three kids.’ Two hands in surrender, a frown and nod. ‘Couldn’t be nicer.’ He pointed out to the north. ‘Lives there, now. Alibi. Nice woman.’ He repeated the surrender, using made-up, garbled sign language.

  Morrow reciprocated, rolling her hands around each other. ‘Before that?’

  ‘Empty for a long time ...’ shouted Wainwright, stumped for a gesture.

  He hadn’t looked into previous tenants and that was fair enough. It was his case and he had the right to decide which lines of inquiry to pursue.

  ‘What’s your thinking?’ She wanted to sound deferential but it was a bit too subtle a tone for the circumstances. She held her hands out in a question. It was stupid, like a tourist shouting because someone didn’t understand English.

  Wainwright knew what she meant though. ‘Bilfour’s charity has its office over there.’ He nodded vaguely to the northern sky. ‘They chased him from it, up here. Footprints’ – he flattened a hand and slid it on the level – ‘running.’

  They gave up trying to talk and each looked around the site. Morrow wondered again why they’d chase him here, it had to mean something. Or nothing. They may have thought he’d never be found. The flats were due to come down soon but a pair of peregrine falcons had nested on the twenty-fourth floor, laid two eggs and couldn’t be moved because they were a protected species. But a human wouldn’t choose to be up here. She saw McGovan glance back to the stairs.

  Wainwright turned his wrist towards his face without actually looking at his watch. He was thinking about time.

  ‘OK.’ She waved a hand towards the stairs.

  ‘Enough?’

  She nodded.

  McGovan looked at both of them, saw they were ready and shuffled around so that the wind would carry his voice to them.

  ‘Now, I warn you,’ he said, perfectly audible, ‘the way down is a bit scary.’

  A sudden gust of wind carried a puff of dust and they closed their faces to it, tucked their chins into their chests and walked back to the stairs.

  McGovan was wrong. The walk down wasn’t scary, it was terrifying. The steps were coated in rubble and the dust that rose up from below. Wainwright wasn’t enjoying it either, he was in front of her and she saw his back straighten, his feet feeling for the step in front. One foot slipped, skidding a millimetre in an unexpected direction and she read the sudden horror in his posture. He looked down, concentrating on the steps.

  They arrived back on the floor where the sides of the building rose around them. Two floors further down and a banister appeared and they clung to it, grateful, as they were swallowed by the dark and followed the stairs down.

  The tension didn’t leave them when they got back to earth; Morrow and Wainwright still fel
t for their steps with their toes, still kept their hands out to steady themselves, until they got out of what was left of the doorway.

  The sunlight and steady ground were a blessing they could hardly remember. Morrow was sweating under her hard hat, and exhausted, every muscle in her body had been taut for half an hour.

  She followed McGovan. Wainwright fell into step next to her.

  ‘Health and safety gone mad, eh?’ he said.

  Morrow grinned and rolled her eyes at him. ‘How many times you been up there?’

  Wainwright winced. ‘Five times. Gets worse every time.’

  ‘Thanks, Paul, I’d no idea that was so ...’ she struggled to think of a more heroic word and gave up, ‘scary. Aziz Balfour seemed like a nice guy.’

  ‘By all accounts, really. Funny guy. Devout, kind, got married last year, first baby due in a couple of months. He came here after the 2008 earthquake to help run a relief charity.’

  ‘Why were they up there?’

  Wainwright looked back up. ‘He was in the office, really late at night,’ he nodded to the north again, ‘then he was up here. We think he ran, trying to get away. He came up the central stairwell. There are skidded footprints all the way up, his soles.’

  ‘Just his?’

  ‘And others, trainers,’ he said. ‘They’re small, size six. They look like a kid’s feet.’

  ‘Some wee guy?’ She was thinking of a minor player, a young gangster trying to impress a boss.

  ‘Could be. They were lone prints though and Adidas trainers.’ No one wore Adidas any more.

  ‘Take a pretty determined wee ned to chase him all the way up there. Bloody shame. Balfour was a real hero back home. He was involved in the rescue effort in the ’05 and ’08 earthquakes. Came from a lot of money, corrupt military family, but he walked away. He was a really good guy.’ Wainwright shuffled his foot, frowning, troubled by his engagement with the victim. It didn’t help to feel that way.

  ‘What about his hand?’ Morrow held out her own fist. ‘In the photos it looks like he punched something a day or so before he died.’

  ‘That we don’t know. Wife has no idea. She saw the bruise but he said he’d banged it by accident at work. That was a day before he disappeared.’

  ‘Bruises were yellow ...’

  Paul looked down at her. ‘D’you think going up there helped you?’

  ‘It’s more complicated than I thought. Aziz makes no sense. The Pakistan connection is interesting though. I thought it was a set-up by Michael Brown, but he’s not that smart. Mind you, he’s getting very complex advice from someone ...’

  Wainwright nodded. ‘’S what money does for them. Crim’s a crim but a crim with money, that’s a different fish.’

  Morrow nodded. ‘Aye, Paul, you don’t need to tell me about that.’

  ‘Oh, sorry, Alex, I didn’t mean your brother—’

  ‘No, no ...’ She waved his discomfort away, and looked back at the building. ‘I just can’t see how they did it. I was hoping Brown’s prints were on something movable.’

  They walked on for a few steps, enjoying the new fluidity of their muscles.

  ‘Well,’ Wainwright stood tall, looking over her head, ‘back to the glamour.’

  ‘So, what’s on your board?’

  ‘Got this,’ he nodded back at the flats, ‘got another murder, a domestic. Got two big lassies that stabbed a pal with their jaggy heels at a club. And a missing person.’ He leaned over her, smiling. ‘The missing person’s a lawyer.’

  ‘Aye? What does that mean?’

  ‘Nicer biscuits,’ he said, and they laughed loud and long because they weren’t dead.

  12

  1997

  Glasgow shut down on the Sunday Princess Diana died. Garage flowers were left in a directionless pile in George Square. Cars drove slower. It rained. The city closure was not, like London, a natural response to crippling grief, but rather an awkward pause. The city cast its eyes down and stood to the side, waiting for the moment to pass.

  By teatime DS George Gamerro had been working hard all through the quiet day, getting his own paperwork up to date and co-ordinating other people’s. Now he was preparing to question the suspect in the Pinkie Brown murder.

  He was sitting in the canteen, eating the sandwiches his wife made and drinking soup from his flask. Outside the window the sky was grey and glowering, grim, the early evening sliding imperceptibly into night.

  It was nice when cases were this straightforward. George was late in his career, long enough in to see everything as part of a pattern. This was an easy clean-up, he would leave his desk tidy at the end of the day. Plus, it was satisfying to get someone who was like that off the streets at fourteen, before they could do any more harm.

  Some uniformed colleagues came into the canteen, saw him at the table and came over and sat with him or near him, got their own sandwiches out. They formed an encampment in the big empty room and took their time. Everyone was getting proper long breaks today because of what had happened in Paris. No shoplifters because most of the shops were shut. No football trouble because there was no football.

  Someone said it would hot up later, when the drink kicked in. They nodded. Foretelling disaster was a deeply embedded cop habit but they all knew that the city wouldn’t get Saturday-night wild, not even Sunday-night annoyed. Everyone was a little bit stunned. Really dedicated alkies would be asleep tonight, having had a good clean run at the drink all day. Social drinkers would be sitting indoors watching the telly, waiting for the day to pass. The chat turned to the car crash in Paris, everyone said where they were when they heard, as if trying to insert themselves into the event, and then the stories petered out and everyone felt slightly confused.

  George put the lid on his piece box and screwed the top back on his flask.

  ‘Right.’ He stood up holding his belly and said what he always said after lunch, ‘That was nice soup.’

  ‘Don’t you make your own soup, George?’

  ‘Aye. It’s fucking lovely.’

  They chuckled and George smiled as he made his way to the door. He jogged down one flight of steps to the office, heavy on his feet, old knees protesting at the jauntiness of his gait.

  Four of them shared the office, their desks turned to the walls as if they’d all been naughty. Three of the desks were empty but DC David Monkton was sitting at his. He was waiting and broke off to smile up at George.

  ‘She’s in there now,’ he said.

  Monkton was newly transferred to their section. He had asked to neighbour Gamerro in the Pinkie Brown questioning. He needed the experience, he said. He was planning to do his sergeants’ exams soon.

  Monkton was young, slick, ambitious. He seemed to know senior officers Gamerro was intimidated by, nodded to them on the stairs, smiled knowingly at the mention of their names.

  George was an old cop, and he understood the formal systems of power, rank, seniority, qualifications. He also knew there were informal systems. He didn’t really understand those. In his younger day, when he was ambitious, he’d thought about joining the Masons. He’d be embarrassed to admit that now. No one was really in the Masons or the lodge. The real informal power systems were invisible – at least they were to George.

  So Gamerro felt uneasy with Monkton who made it plain that he understood those informal systems. Monkton’s voice was never moderated or deferent, he spoke loudly, always expected to be listened to. Another reason George didn’t like him was that Monkton had bought a house. He was single. It seemed the height of decadence to Gamerro, a man of another generation, who had lived with his parents and handed in his wages until he married. He disapproved of Monkton, either for his abandonment of his parents or for coming from the sort of family who didn’t expect their children to contribute.

  But the real reason that George didn’t like Monkton was that he made Gamerro feel old and clumsy. Gamerro gave advice as he always did with young officers but Monkton seemed to know everything already.
He listened patiently, he was superficially respectful but he knew it already. The entry exams were more stringent now. The new intake were a different class than in his day. George found himself thinking about bringing his retirement forward. His cousin had a paper shop and wanted him to come in with a half share.

  And yet George Gamerro was too experienced a cop to distrust his discomfort with Monkton entirely. He found himself seeking Monkton’s company, the way he might return time and again to a lying witness.

  ‘OK.’ George put his flask down on the desk for later. ‘You ready then?’

  Monkton stood up. ‘Aye.’

  They walked down to the cells together, taking their time, walking in silence as they got their heads ready.

  Questioning a child about a brutal murder would be draining. George’s own children were in their twenties and he couldn’t help but remember the unformed putty of them at fourteen. He comforted himself with the thought that it should be straightforward: in the car with Monkton and Harry, the kid had already confessed to the murder. They just needed to get it on tape for corroboration. If they didn’t get it there would be plenty of fingerprints. The alleyway was wallpapered with smeared handprints.

  The lighting in the corridor was dim and contrasted sharply with the hard white light in the interview rooms. George had often thought that it gave interviewees the subliminal sense of being marooned.

  He and Monkton hesitated at the door to the interview room, looked at each other, gathered their thoughts. George opened the door to the startlingly bright room and his pupils contracted suddenly, a painful twinge as the light slapped his retina. His eyes watery, his vision blurred, he guessed his way to the seat at the table, following the route his legs remembered from a hundred other interviews held on a hundred other rainy evenings.

  He didn’t look at the boy at the table. Neither he nor Monkton greeted either him or the woman sitting behind him. It wasn’t deliberate rudeness. They had to get the tape recorder working before anyone said anything, so that everything would be on record. George was aware that it must seem rude, or cold, or something, but they had procedures to follow and it was important that they saw them through. He was aware also of performing well for Monkton, showing him how it should be done, proving he wasn’t past it. For a moment, as his backside made contact with the chair, he felt like a memory of Monkton’s, from early in his career, a story being passed on to the would-be cops who were now in primary school, the boys who’d become the men who’d make Monkton feel old and out of touch.