by Denise Mina
No one knew where he was. The SOCA report would be with the police, it would be leaked by now, the police were as leaky as a sieve, and whoever his father was in business with would be after him.
They’d check Robert’s old firm, his colleagues at the firm, see who he was close to. Robert wished he was back there, fighting with the other junior partners, falling out with the secretaries, being overlooked for promotion. It seemed a golden time now. He’d left with great ceremony, leaving to take over his father’s firm. He remembered thinking as he left that now he’d be happy.
The pictures of Rose came into his head and winded him. He sat back down. She looked the same in the photos. Her face was recognisably her. She even had her hair pulled back in a high ponytail. She was crying in one of them. Her face impassive but tears dropping off her nose as she leaned forward. He could tell she was young. She hardly had any pubic hair.
When he took them out of the safe and looked at them Robert threw them across the room. He scurried to the opposite wall and clung to it. Did his father take those photographs? Did his father masturbate to them? No one would masturbate to them, they were terrifying. But then you never knew what people wanted to see. When he saw them Robert was so mesmerised by her face that he didn’t see the context. It was a small girl, naked in a group of looming men, dark men, some laughing, some leering. But Robert being Robert only saw Rose in the pictures. Rose crying. Rose looking up at a face, frightened. Rose smiling in one of them as a man fingered her. The rooms were anonymous. There was drink.
These were the things people did when the lights were out, when no one was watching.
I cannot fix this, he thought, in the low womb of the safe room, as he held the warm wall. I cannot fix this on my own. He had seen the books. Why did his father have those pictures of Rose?
Rose was almost a sister to Robert. She was in prison, he was at school. She had accidentally killed a man who tried to abuse her, his father told him. They went to visit her. And Julius and Robert stayed loyal to her, differentiating themselves from those sorts of men.
Robert visited her in prison with his father. On the way there, for the first visit, Robert half hoped he’d fancy her but he didn’t. Later he thought that they were too much alike but that wasn’t true, really. They just didn’t fancy each other. He accepted her the way family do: without too much appraisal, without assessing her. She was theirs and when she became their nanny Robert felt that it was right and proper and was delighted she and Francine got on so well, with Francine being always a little bit delicate even before she got ill. Like his mother: Margery was always a little bit ill.
But to see her in the photos, that made him ferocious about her. He wanted to wrap himself around her, small Rose, and protect her from these terrible men. He was prepared to ruin himself, his family, his father’s reputation, if it meant bringing these men down too. He would do that for Rose. So he called the police and did what they told him: fill out the form.
He sat at the window of the castle and felt slightly better again, remembering how honourable he was being, how different from the men in the picture. He was going to let them kill him for Rose. He stood up, thinking he might go for a shit, trying to remember where the toilets were, and then he saw him: the hippy was in the field below the castle, trundling across it on his quad bike. He stopped, took a small bag of grain from under his cape and emptied it onto the ground. Then he drove a few yards away and watched the geese gather around and eat it.
The geese were chalk white, bigger than a city dweller like himself would have supposed. The hippy folded his arms under his cape and watched them. Even from here Robert could see that he was smiling. And then two men at the distant end of the field, beyond the fence, waving him over. The hippy looking at them, seeing them, staying on his bike and trundling over to them and Robert was gripped by horror as he saw him approach them in their dark clothes, faces obscured by woolly hats pulled low. He couldn’t see the hippy’s face but felt he was still smiling and the men were smiling, Robert could see flashes of teeth, they were smiling as he approached them and one of them had his hand in his pocket.
They chatted. The hippy tucked his hands into his cape, a woman’s cape for fuck’s sake. And then one of the men took his hands out of his pocket as Robert watched, holding his breath, and he offered the hippy a chewing gum. The hippy shook his head, took his hands out and drove back across the field. The men turned and walked on.
They were out for a walk.
Robert fell back from the window. He couldn’t let them kill the hippy. He just couldn’t let them. Robert was going to have to leave the castle.
Feeling much, much better, Robert walked up over the crest of the hill and found the sea laid out before him like a silver picnic blanket. To the left a steep drop led to the white sanded beach and the castle overlooking it. To the right soft green hills showed the decaying foundations of an abandoned village, one of those decaying crossword puzzles left by the clearances. The sharp wet wind whipped at his hair. Seagulls hovered over the sea. In front of him the land dropped away into the water.
Robert was wearing his office suit, city shoes and a one pound plastic cagoule he’d found in the boot of his car. Unfortunately, he’d stepped in a puddle as he came out of the house and his feet were wet, his toes numb with the cold now and the material on his shins was damp, sticking to him, making his skin numb on his bony shins. He felt wonderful. The rough terrain, the wind and noise and the screams of the seagulls, the intermittent rain and brutal blasts of sunshine all tore him from his father’s burden of guilt, from Rose’s tortured childhood and those circles of men, took him from faceless men talking to the hippy and thoughts of his children and left him in the moment. He had climbed up here on his hands and knees, scrabbled over scree, got his loafer stuck in a hollow full of mud. And he stood tall now on the ancient landscape, looking out at a sea that didn’t know or care that he existed.
He looked over at the village. Ankle-high stumps of foundations that were once homes to generations. They had been run off their land, victims of an injustice, bigger than he had suffered, bigger than a room full of men and small, naked Rose. The buildings had been left and had decayed back into the soil and now it didn’t really matter any more. He smiled and walked towards them. His shoes were squelching horribly, there seemed to be more water in them than out of them and he thought about taking them off to empty them and promised himself that he would when he got over there. He hurried up the hill, anticipating a little shelter from the wind. The native Highland people knew where to build, it would be a sheltered place for a village.
It wasn’t sheltered at all. At the first square of foundation stones he found the wind harder than the hill top he had come from. He stepped over the little wall, into the house, and tried to imagine what it would have been like. Very small. Tiny room. He felt nothing, tried to evoke some awe in himself: he tried to imagine a whole family, six kids and grandparents too living in this tiny room. But he wasn’t sure if it was a house. It could have been a dunny, for all he knew. Or a storeroom. He didn’t know how they lived back then. He circled the space. Six children and two parents and two grandparents couldn’t fit in this room, actually. It must be a storeroom.
He moved onto the next square, stepped inside and tried to reimagine the whole thing there. Why were there two grandparents, he thought. There should be four grandparents, but even just the two were too many. But maybe some grandparents would have died, at sea or of colds or something. He was pondering this when he stepped out of the imagined room.
His foot, expecting but not finding the ground where it was supposed to be, dropped suddenly away from him into a hole, overbalancing him so that he twisted and fell and landed on his face, on a big stone lying on the ground.
Robert lay in the wet grass, groaning, his cheekbone still on the offending stone. His mind flailed as he tried to think of someone to blame, the tourist board, the Highlanders, gravity. And then, at the same time as he became
aware of the futility of blaming anyone for what was essentially a mishap, he became aware of the dull pain in his ankle and the tingling in his numb toes. He sat up and looked at the foot that had gone down the hole. He peeled up his wet trouser leg. The ankle looked raw in the bright light, raw and a bit chubby. And then as he watched, moving his toes, knowing it wasn’t broken, the ankle got fatter and fatter.
A seagull landed near him, eyeing him as though he might be a felled lamb. It looked fucking enormous, tipping its big, ugly head at him, getting the measure of him. Robert picked up a stone and threw it, missing. The seagull was unperturbed.
‘Fuck off!’ shouted Robert, but it didn’t.
He felt wetness on his face and reached up, took his hand away and saw blood. Really quite a lot of blood. It was coming from his cheek. He needed a mirror and looked around as if there might be one lying somewhere in the wet grass pitted with sheep shit.
The seagull was watching him. Maybe it had smelled the blood before he saw it. No, wait, that was vultures. It was eyeing him still, tipping and untipping its head as if working out which part of him to eat first. Robert felt foolish, at a disadvantage. He had a massive gash on his face the seagull knew more about than he did.
Then he had an idea. Sitting on the muddy ground with only one fully functioning ankle and blood dripping onto the plastic cagoule that was sticking to him like cellophane now, he took out his mobile, turned it on, touched the icon for the camera and took a photograph of his face. There. He could see it now. It wasn’t even that bad. Just a bit of split skin on his cheek.
He smirked over at the seagull but it was pecking at the ground. It opened its wings and flew straight out to sea.
Holding on to the low wall for support, Robert carefully extracted his grotesque ankle out of the hole and pulled the trouser leg back down over it. He bent his good leg under him and stood up, keeping the bad ankle off the ground until he was upright. If he couldn’t get down the hippy might be killed in his place. Then he tried it. Not too bad. He could get back down on his own. It was a little bit painful when his weight was on it. He’d have to go slow but it wasn’t too bad at all.
On the first step he felt the phone vibrate once, twice, three voice-message alerts. Uncle Dawood. Without even looking at it he reached into his pocket and turned the phone off again and carried on his way.
18
Johnstone was not a destination. Morrow and McCarthy took the turn off the motorway to Paisley, checking the GPS every so often, worried they might drive through it and not notice.
A low town on the outskirts of Paisley, Johnstone had houses as small as a cramped inner-city area, two-up two-downs, with windows as small as factory gate hovels. The inhabitants were inexplicably proud of their town though. While checking ex-DC Harry McMahon’s address McCarthy found the house sale – he’d only just moved there. It was a moderate price for Glasgow but, being in Johnstone, they were expecting a mansion.
It wasn’t a mansion but abutted a golf course. The detached house had a drive and a square of orderly grass at the front. It looked identical to its neighbours, new and neat. Whatever Harry McMahon had been doing for the past seven years since leaving the police, he’d had a bit of luck at it.
They parked in the street and walked up the drive, past a four-year-old blue Honda. McCarthy knocked on the front door as Morrow looked in the windows. Neat net curtains in the shallow oriel window by the door. Two ornaments and a framed photograph facing into the room. She could see the floors were wood laminate, giving the front room an orange glow.
The door was answered by a tall man in his late forties, smart hair, clean white shirt tucked into ironed jeans. Morrow smiled: she would have known he was an ex-cop if she passed him in a supermarket.
‘Hello,’ he said, ‘what can I do you for?’
‘Harry McMahon?’ She showed him her card.
‘Oh, aye.’ He read her card. ‘DI Alexandra Morrow. How are you?’
They’d never met but there was that easy sense of camaraderie that came with a common value system.
‘I’m dealing with a case that touches on an old one of yours. Can I come in and speak to you?’
‘Ah, come away in, both,’ he said, looking pleased.
The hallway was tidy and devoid of fripperies. A skateboard stood on its nose against the wall, the messy, tagged design on it a stark contrast to the sterile white walls and clean wooden floor.
‘You a skateboarder?’ she said.
Harry nodded, acknowledging the joke. ‘One of my boys.’
Morrow looked around for signs of them. ‘Do they not live with you?’
Harry laughed at that. ‘No, we’re just a very tidy family. Come in.’ To McCarthy, he said, ‘Didn’t catch your name.’
McCarthy introduced himself. They shook hands and then McMahon seemed to remember that he’d forgotten to shake with Morrow so he did that and asked them for their coats. He hung them up in the tidiest understairs cupboard Morrow had ever seen.
Harry waved them into a sunny kitchen looking out on a garden that was a square of perfect green ending abruptly in a tall fence. At one side stood a pine summerhouse, the two large front windows with double glazed doors in the middle. The doors were shut.
‘If that was my shed,’ McCarthy said, pointing at it, ‘it’d be crammed with bits of motorcycles. All that patio bit’ – he looked at the honey-coloured flagstones leading to it – ‘would be stained with oil.’
‘Oh, aye.’ McMahon looked out at it. ‘My missus is a fiend for the tidiness. Don’t get me wrong, I’m tidy myself but she’s mad for it.’ He seemed quite pleased about that. ‘Would you like a cuppa?’
Normally they wouldn’t take a cup of tea from someone they were questioning. But Harry was an ex-cop and he understood perfectly the grades of intimacy involved in accepting.
McCarthy looked at Morrow for permission. ‘Lovely,’ she said.
As McMahon boiled the kettle and got out cups from the cupboard they talked about mutual acquaintances, about now senior officers McMahon had done his training with and about the politics of the single force. He had not a bit of bitterness about the force; it was nice to hear, encouraging to still-serving officers.
‘You seemed to have done quite well since you left,’ said Morrow as he put the mugs of tea on the completely empty kitchen table.
‘Lucky,’ he said. ‘Please sit down.’ He went to the cupboard and took some biscuits out of a plastic box, filed next to another one with cereal in it. ‘Left at just the right time. Got my pension, still fit to work, job market was buoyant. We’ve been very lucky.’
He came back to the table with a plate of biscuits. They were cheap chocolate chip cookies, an unbranded version of biscuits that were pretty cheap anyway. Morrow looked at her tea and saw it was weak, that the milk in it was thin and must have been skimmed.
‘So what is it you do now, Harry?’
‘Heard of “Information Solutions”?’
‘No.’
‘Well,’ he tipped his head to her, ‘you will. You’ll likely be working for them at some point in the future. They’re an investigations firm that work all over Scotland. Really, it’s a loose network of firms but we all work together. It means I can call Ullapool and get a company’s offices looked at in an afternoon by someone else, report back to the client within the day. It’s good. It works.’
‘Is it not all divorce stuff?’
‘No. Precognitions, statements, that sort of thing. The divorce stuff is rare enough. Not very salubrious but it’s better than missing pets. Makes you work like a bastard at your own marriage, anyway.’
‘And it pays?’
He shook his head, he didn’t really want to talk about that. ‘It’s fine. But they recruit ex-cops. When you leave the force they’ll get in touch, probably. You’ll get a letter and they’ll see if you want some work or just to register for the future. Very organised.’
‘That’s nice to know,’ said McCarthy and then winced w
hen he remembered that Morrow was there. It was bad form to let on that he’d be having doubts. Morrow let it go.
‘So, Harry,’ she said, not wanting to drink the weak tea, ‘this case.’
‘Oh aye.’ He turned to her. ‘So, what year are we in?’
‘Nineteen ninety-seven. It was a murder—’
‘Done enough of them.’
‘A stabbing, two young guys, Michael Brown killed his brother.’
‘Hm, trying to remember ...’ He looked over her head, into the garden, and took a bite of his biscuit. Harry knew exactly which case she was talking about, she could tell. He was looking into the garden shed as if he wished himself in there. ‘Nineteen ninety-seven ...’
‘In the lane off Sauchiehall Street. Body found in the morning. Michael Brown was in Cleveden at the time, that’s where you picked him up—’
‘Oh!’ He was trying to act surprised but instead looked scared. He was an awful actor. ‘The night Diana died.’
‘Was it?’
‘Yeah. Was it?’ He searched her face.
‘Well,’ said Morrow, ‘what do you remember about it?’
‘Nothing, nothing, nothing.’ He was sitting bolt upright in his chair. ‘Well!’ he said, slightly too loud. ‘Let’s see. Hm. Diana died that night. The boy was found dead in the lane ...’
‘Down by ChipsPakoraKebab,’ nodded Morrow, trying to help him out.
‘Yes! Down the lane, there, and hm, let’s see.’ He raised a hand to his chin as if he was trying to think. ‘Ah, hm.’
McCarthy couldn’t take it any more. ‘Don’t,’ he pleaded quietly.
McMahon didn’t speak then. He sipped his tea, his eyes flicking about above the rim. Then he put his cup down and reached for another biscuit.
They sat around the circular table, three spokes on a wheel. All of them knew that something had happened to make the case memorable. Wee guys stabbed each other all the time in Glasgow. Morrow guessed it was a bad thing that had impressed it on McMahon’s mind. He wouldn’t remember a case from fourteen years ago otherwise. But McMahon wasn’t used to lying. She suspected that he hated having to do it, that was why he was so bad at it.