by Denise Mina
He was chewing through the biscuit as if trying to plug his mouth shut.
‘That was the worst attempt at a fib I’ve ever seen,’ she said to McCarthy and he smiled at McMahon.
Harry looked relieved and rolled his eyes. ‘Shit,’ he said, ‘I’m just not ...’
They were all smiling now and Harry relaxed a little, now he knew that they weren’t going to push him into a corner.
‘Is that why you left the force?’ smiled Morrow.
‘No.’ He took another biscuit. ‘But it is why I’m self-employed. You can’t talk to business folk the way we do, do you know that? They start crying and all that ...’
He looked at the table, puzzled. They were both glad to know that his transition hadn’t been entirely unproblematic.
‘OK, Harry, here it is: I’m going to assume you do remember the case?’
He blinked a yes.
‘And that something unusual happened in that case?’
Another blink.
‘Maybe something you don’t want to talk about?’
Blink.
She nodded at the table. ‘Something with fingerprints?’
He looked confused and gave a little head shake.
‘Not fingerprints?’
‘No. I don’t know anything about that.’
‘Your name is down as having taken them.’
‘I didn’t.’
‘Who did?’
He paled.
‘OK.’ She held up a hand. ‘Now we’re not after any old buddies of yours from the force, that’s not what we’re interested in at all. It’s the fingerprints from that case that we’re concerned about.’
‘I don’t know anything about that. I wasn’t there when the prints got took.’
The good thing about interviewing a bad liar was that Morrow knew he was telling the truth. ‘Who would know about that?’
‘George Gamerro. He was my DS at the time.’
‘And where’s he now?’
‘Stirling. He’s got a paper shop out there in Bridge of Allan.’
‘OK.’ She stood up. ‘You’ve been great, Harry.’
He saw them out to the hall and got their coats from the cupboard, holding Morrow’s open for her to slip into. ‘You’re not supposed to do this for women any more,’ he said as she put her arms in.
‘Aren’t you?’
‘PC and that,’ said Harry. ‘My missus likes it though.’
‘I think it’s slapping us on the arse and not promoting us you’re not supposed to do,’ said Morrow. It sounded a bit harsh but Harry smiled at it.
‘Oh,’ he said, ‘OK. You sound like my daughter. She thinks I’m a caveman.’
Morrow held out her hand and shook his warmly. ‘Nice to meet you, DC McMahon.’
He shook their hands and smiled and then reached for the door. He didn’t open it though but turned back. ‘Would you do me a favour? Please don’t mention that you were here. Not to George. Not to anyone.’
19
Rose held her paper coffee cup and leaned sideways, so that part of her face was obscured by the plastic plant. She didn’t want to be seen by anyone. She couldn’t go home. Robert had seen those photos of her. Robert knew who she really was now. She couldn’t stand that. And she knew why Anton Atholl hadn’t reported them all this time.
He must have loved you. Julius kept her close because she kept Anton Atholl quiet. That was why he kept her. He didn’t love her. He wasn’t her father. She was useful. More than useful. They couldn’t have run the business without Atholl keeping quiet. They’d always known he was the one weak spot.
He loved you.
She wanted to kill Atholl. She wanted him annihilated. Not to kill him but for him to be gone, wiped off the face. She couldn’t kill anyone again. She just knew she couldn’t, and she couldn’t think straight because she had Aileen Wuornos’s chicken in her head.
She shut her eyes and was back to the night she heard about the chicken.
Late, two or three in the morning, sitting in Francine’s immaculate living room on the gold striped sofa with pale blue cushions. Rose was holding Hamish, rocking him as he cried a thin, exhausted wail. He had colic. The living room was the furthest place in the house from Robert and Francine’s bedroom.
She had the TV on to keep her awake, the subtitles on and the noise down and she came across a documentary about the American serial killer Aileen Wuornos. She was a prostitute. She’d killed six or seven men and now they were going to kill her. She was an ugly woman and a liar. They proved that she was a liar. She made faces into the camera, wore orange, looked dirty.
Hamish began to settle a little, Rose had given him some drops of medicine and he got drowsy. She wondered if maybe she could take a chance and put him down. She was distracted, walking back and forth with him on her shoulder, savouring the small weight of him, his nuzzling into her neck.
On the telly they were saying that Wuornos’s father killed himself in prison. He was in for raping and trying to kill a seven-year-old girl. That was what caught Rose’s attention, the mention of the father, and she realised that they were going back into her childhood, showing where she was from. Rose rarely heard stories like her own. It piqued her interest.
The father left the family two months before Wuornos was born. Then her nineteen-year-old mother left and Wuornos and her brother went to live with their grandparents.
Hamish was asleep. In the twilight living room, Rose looked for the remote to turn the telly off.
The grandfather was an alcoholic. He raped Wuornos and lent her out to his friends. She got pregnant by one of them. Rose couldn’t see the remote. She usually left it on the sofa. Wuornos had the baby and gave it away. When she was fifteen she left home and went to live in a wood nearby. Rose was looking for the remote by the sofa and thinking that Wuornos must have come from somewhere warm, to live in woods, that Michigan must be a nice warm place. Wuornos was whoring for money and food and when she came back into the town she used to hang around a house that belonged to a local paedo.
Rose stopped looking for the remote then. She began to watch the TV.
They interviewed people who had been kids back then and lived in the town. They all hung around there. They knew he was a paedo, they knew he was after them, but they went to his house anyway. He let them in and gave them food. He gave them beer and cigarettes. Rose saw herself at the door of the shack on TV, as if she had been in that house. She felt disgust and hated herself. She told the other kids she went there for beer and cigarettes, but that wasn’t why she went there. She went because he paid her attention. He told her she was special, that she meant the world to him. He looked at her and saw her. That’s why she was there, not for money or beer, not to save herself from the cold streets of Glasgow, but because he cared whether she was there or not. The things he gave her were a cover, because more shameful than fucking rooms full of old men was the need for someone.
Rose stood in front of the big TV, in the midnight twilight, with Hamish on her shoulder and cried for herself back then. She hadn’t thought about it for ten years.
A hard-faced woman talked about the paedo’s house, where things were and how dirty it was. Then she told the story of the chick.
The paedo kept chickens. The chickens laid eggs. He used to get the children to crack open fertilised eggs before they were ready to hatch. The chicks weren’t ready yet, not ready to come out. He’d make them watch the chicks struggle, trying to breathe, try to stand.
Rose couldn’t remember whether they had shown a chick doing that, struggling, but she could see it. She could see it clearly: a broken egg on a table. In the background a man’s face watching, smiling as a featherless chick tried to stand on unformed bones, its skin thin and blue, huge eyes bulging. They died, of course. Of course, they died. And the man made the children watch them die.
Robert knew about her. When he came home, the house would no longer be safe. It wouldn’t be separate. It would be like everywhere else,
then.
So Rose sat in the most anonymous place she could think of, a city centre Starbucks. She hid among the shifting sands of customers coming and going, the sameness of the cups and the sticky floor and sugar-freckled tables and waited for the thought to go.
A chick and a broken egg. Not a yellow fluffy Easter chick, plump and full of promise. A featherless creature, blue skinned, staggering on a table. The picture made her feel sick. The picture made her want to bring her fist down on the chick, smash it and smear its soft bones and thin, stupid skin, its watery blood, over the table.
She wiped her hand on her leg, cleaning imaginary guts on her thigh. She couldn’t go home yet.
Outside, in the pedestrian street, shoppers hurried by in groups and singles. Rose watched their ankles, hating them. They had real people they belonged to. Real families and friends and they hated them, probably. They weren’t making themselves part of the family by giving a service, they weren’t being left outside the door of the Art Club to come in later.
Julius must have loved you, Atholl had said at the funeral. He must have loved you. But he didn’t. Julius used her to shut Atholl up. And in the end, at the very end, he broke the bond between them and told Robert about the back safe, told him the code, as if nothing they had built together mattered.
He was snide, Atholl. A snide shit. She knew exactly what he meant now. Julius loved having her around. She was so useful to him, in more ways than taking care of his business or running his errands or watching out for Robert and keeping him clean. Feeling angry was better than the sad sickness. She was able to look up and see something other than the chick or the photographs.
A woman was sitting at a far table, alone. She still had a woolly hat on, even though she was indoors, and was absent-mindedly arranging and rearranging the sugar strip packets into rows on the table in front of her. Her hand movements were jerky, her mouth hanging open and her shirt was buttoned up wrong, the spare button gaping above her heart. She reached slowly into her bag and pulled out a small bottle of antiseptic gel, a clear bottle with a pump action dispenser at the top. Pumping with a nervous finger, she squeezed out two measures and rubbed them on her hands, rubbing too long. Then she put the bottle away again.
Rose watched her from half inside the plant and shut her eyes. She wasn’t doing that. She wasn’t a nutter trying to clean herself in a café. She wasn’t that bad.
She lifted her drink to her mouth but remembered the chick again just as the coffee sloshed onto her lips. She couldn’t take anything in her mouth. She put the full cup back down and wiped her mouth with her sleeve.
The disgust shuddered through her. Who took those photos of her? It didn’t matter. Wasn’t McMillan, she knew that. Wasn’t even about her. It was about them, the men in the pictures. She was just a body. Couldn’t even see her face in one of them. But their faces were clear. No flash. Maybe they didn’t know the pictures existed. Atholl must have known though. That’s why he said there was nothing in the safe. He must have always known the pictures existed.
Without the photo Rose would never have remembered Atholl from back then. It would have been a party of drunk men, Sammy bringing her in, the men, one by one, taking her next door – it was usually in a separate room but not always. It would just have been a party among many parties. She didn’t look at faces.
Atholl knew though. Every time they spoke to each other, he must have seen that photograph the way she was seeing the chick in her head. She held her breath for a moment, certain she was going to vomit.
She held it.
She held it.
She let it out and found herself looking at a table of laughing teenagers, at a mother with a baby, at a man in a suit jacket eating a massive cake. They didn’t give a fuck. No one gave a fuck. Somewhere in the city right now a child was being fucked by someone and they were all here eating cakes and drinking coffee and chewing biscuits. Chewing and salivating and swallowing, sugar and cream and chocolate and coffee.
They didn’t give a fuck but they wanted to hear about it, afterwards. They’d crowd around the telly and listen to wizened old women talk about way back then and how different things were. They listened to people who overcame it, became a film star or a chess champion. That’s all they’d listen to, successes, survivors, because it meant they could keep eating and drinking and sitting around complaining about their husbands and housing and shoes and the government.
The woman with hand gel was not a film star or a champion anything. Rose wasn’t a champion anything. No one wanted to hear that. She took a breath, saw the chick, featherless, staggering on soft bones, its eyes so bulbous the eyelids couldn’t cover them. She saw the chick stagger and fall, felt the air through its ill-formed feathers as it tumbled to its side.
Now Rose looked across the generic café, the sticky café with fake leather seats and windows running with condensation, she looked across and saw that chick again, only now it wasn’t a nameless stranger from a warm place in America she saw, laying his head on the table, grinning as he watched the struggling chick fight and die. It was Julius.
It was Julius. And he didn’t love her, he wasn’t her friend. He had used her all this time. He never touched her but he’d used her just the same and he didn’t love her. But she had loved him.
A phone rang; she heard the buzz buzz before she connected it to her own phone. Probably Francine, weak, asking where she was.
Rose took the phone out of her pocket and looked at it. But it wasn’t Francine. It was exactly who she didn’t want to talk to. It was BB – code for Anton Atholl.
She looked at the phone and let it ring again, unsure whether she should answer, because she wasn’t certain she could speak. Fuck him, she thought and answered.
‘Is that you?’ he asked.
‘Hm,’ she said, hoping for news of Robert.
‘Need to see you.’
‘No.’
‘It’s imp—’
She hung up and turned her phone off. Across the room she saw the nutter woman with her shirt done up wrong. She had the small bottle in her hand again. She was pumping the alcohol rub out into her palm with a nervous jerky motion. Rose could smell it.
Rose was at her side suddenly. The smell from the hand rub was knife sharp, clean. She said, ‘Sorry, can I have some?’
The woman looked up at her and blinked slowly. ‘Sure.’
She was drawling, her lips moist, but Rose looked away from her face, looked away from her shirt and her chest where the wrongly matched buttons collided, gaping at her heart.
She pumped the bottle four times into her left hand and curled her fingers around the sacred contents of her palm.
‘Thanks.’ She retreated back to her coat and drink.
Under the table, where no one could see what she was doing or how odd she was being, Rose rubbed the alcohol all over her hands, felt it burn off the dirt and the filth. She lifted her hands above the table and shut her eyes and rubbed it into her face.
She sat still, eyes shut, feeling the dirt evaporate into the air.
She couldn’t do it again. She couldn’t kill Atholl. But she couldn’t let him live either.
20
The shops in Bridge of Allan were modest and functional: Co-op supermarket and chemist, but the shops in between were florists and card shops, gift shops and country wear. George Gamerro’s paper shop was at the far end of the main street.
The students at the nearby university were gathering at a fish and chip shop, the sort of Italian café that would have done good business in north London but here it wasn’t retro mock-up but the real thing. A felt-tipped sign leaned forehead first into the window, faded letters boasting Scotland’s best fish tea. The students stood outside in groups, eating steaming chips, scarved and jumpered, their skin impossibly good and clear with the air of bright futures around them. McCarthy parked the car outside the shop.
‘Tell you what,’ said Morrow, ‘why don’t you wait here and let me go in alone?’
/> It wasn’t what they were supposed to do but they both understood that a cop would know the rules, would know that a single cop would need corroboration. She thought Gamerro was more likely to talk if she went in alone.
‘Sure?’ said McCarthy.
Morrow wasn’t sure. She looked at the paper shop for a moment, wondering whether she was employing a clever technique or just desperate. She felt as if she was trying to trap herself, trick herself into doing the right thing. If Michael Brown didn’t kill his brother then his whole history should have been different. He shouldn’t have been given a life sentence, shouldn’t have been out on licence, shouldn’t be back in prison now. She was trudging towards an expensive retrial of a dead case and the release of a ruined, unsympathetic man who would be rearrested within a year and tried for something else, at a time of upheaval, when only the budget keepers and company men would feature in the future.
‘Dunno ...’
They sat for a while, Morrow pulling apart and fitting together her career suicide, McCarthy awaiting her decision.
Students passed them, heading back to the uni campus. Morrow looked at the shop.
The windows were covered in adverts for different papers. A huge black and white skyline of Glasgow covered one whole window and outside stood a bin sponsored by an ice cream company and a newspaper stand from a paper.
‘To hell with it,’ she said finally. ‘Wait here.’
It was dark inside the shop. It took a moment for Morrow’s eye to adjust. A chubby young woman was serving, leaning heavily on the counter top and reading a celebrity magazine. She had very pink lipstick on and chewed gum. She glanced up as Morrow came in, long enough to see that she wasn’t a child, unlikely to shoplift, and went back to her reading.
‘Excuse me,’ said Morrow, ‘I’m looking for George Gamerro?’