The Red Road

by Denise Mina

  A sudden physical twitch made her flick the spoon, unbalancing the pot on the stove, tipping it onto its fat little side and spilling the hoops all over the hard-to-clean stove top.

  ‘Ships!’ She reached into it, burning her fingers. ‘Ships!’

  The children fell silent behind her, all their attention on her suddenly.

  She was crying, she couldn’t turn around to them now.

  ‘Oh, dear,’ she said, raising her hands in a pantomime. ‘Oh dear me. Now I’ve spilled a little bit.’ But her voice was wrong and strained and cracked and they knew something was very wrong. ‘Oh, ships.’

  Tears running down her face she reached into the heat and picked the burning hoops up with her fingers, dropping them back in the pan. The heat clung to the hot sugary sauce, sticking to her fingers, scalding and merciless. A rifle-shot of toast bouncing out of the Dualit made her jump and she stood sobbing at the cooker.

  Even in prison she hadn’t had this, these ambushing thoughts and visions. In prison, after the first short panicking while, she knew where she was to go and at what time, where she was to sleep and at what time and she was numb mostly. No one touched her. She was visited and she knew that soon it would all end and she would be looked after by Julius McMillan. She was offered counselling and said no because she had Mr McMillan and it was all right, that was taken care of. She was taken care of. Now there was no one between her and herself. She raise her burning hand to her face and held it, the red sauce colder now but still burning enough to feel right and she pressed it to her tender eyelids and the softness of her lips. She stood and burned and sobbed at the stove, hardly knowing where she was or what age.

  A hand on her arm, small and calm. Come on, said a wee voice, come on. It might have been herself that led her across to the sink. There now, she said to herself, it’s OK. She thought it might be herself because she did say those things, come on and there now, she said those things. And then a tap came on, not in a frantic gush but calmly. She opened her eyes and saw the water was as cold and clean as baptism water. Her hand was held beneath the water by smaller hands and the soreness was washed away. There now, come on. The burny sauce was washed away and then she was bent down over the sink and the small hand scooped the water to her, to wash away the red and the burn. There now, there.

  A tea towel to dab dry her eyelids. Dab dab. Dab dab. She opened her eyes again, just a little, and saw that it wasn’t herself but Jessica and Jessica was afraid for her and sad for her and worried. She wasn’t playing at being kind, Rose had seen her do that, standing next to a crying girl at a party, touching her casually, implicating herself in the drama without feeling it. She was feeling this but Rose didn’t want her to. Rose wanted more for her than this chipping away. She wanted her to stay selfish and casual and not know these other things.

  ‘Is it because Grandma said wait outside?’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘At the funeral, is it ’cause Grandma said wait and come in after us? Hamish said that was rude, didn’t you, Hamish?’

  Hamish sat at the table, hands stiff in his lap, and nodded solemnly.

  ‘He said you’d be upset about that because it was rude and insulting. Because you’re our servant but also our family member and Grandma was insulting about it.’

  Rose stood up and took the towel from Jessica’s hand. ‘Yes,’ she said, folding it carefully though she knew it would have to go in the wash. ‘Yes,’ she folded order into it, restoring order, ‘I was insulted.’

  ‘I want to kick Grandma in the penis,’ said Hamish with venom.

  ‘That’s not a nice thing to say,’ muttered Rose.

  ‘Anyway, she doesn’t have a penis,’ said Jessica.

  ‘No, I know.’ Hamish read Rose’s face again. ‘She’s a monster.’

  Rose ordered them to set the table, charging Hamish with the cutlery and napkins, Jessica with the glasses and Angus with the plates. She made what she could of the hoops that were left. She spread extra butter on the toast, as if that would make up for the small stack of spaghetti on each plate, and grated a little bland cheese for a bowl in the centre of the table.

  They sat down together and Hamish, with great solemnity, led them in the grace she had taught them: We’re grateful for the food we eat and thank you for the comfy seat.

  Rose’s plate was empty and she saw them noticing. ‘I’m not that hungry,’ she said.

  ‘But we have to eat, even if we’re not hungry,’ objected Angus but Jessica hushed him.

  They sat on their best behaviour, quietly using cutlery, remembering halfway through to tuck the napkins into their collars. They didn’t even beg for straws for their drinks.

  Rose sat slumped in front of her empty plate, her mind on Atholl eating the tablets. He knew about Aziz, what she had done, and the police must know about Aziz.

  She felt the world closing around her, coming to get her, and she didn’t give a fuck.

  24

  Robert sat at the kitchen table with his foot up on a chair. His ankle didn’t hurt when it was up, it tingled, the skin sort of fizzed, but that was because it was stretched over the puffy flesh. He sat looking at the cold Aga in the dark kitchen, calculating. It took about one hour to drive to the castle from the ferry terminal, the last ferry had been due to arrive an hour and a bit ago. He had been sitting at the table, in full view of the window, waiting every moment for a blinding white light in his left eye, a jolt in his left temple, the one nearest the French doors. He had sat there for a long time and now the mug he was clutching was cold and his fingertips were sore from holding on so tight. He peeled them off, flattened his hands to the table and considered for the first time in days the possibility that he might not die.

  He had turned his phone on again, knowing that the reception was patchy here in the shadow of the mountains and knowing that as he came down the hill, slow and hobbling, his phone was picking up emails and texts and voicemails. He hadn’t looked at them but he knew the phone was giving and receiving. They could track him through the phone, they knew where he was and they hadn’t come.

  He went back to the why. The SOCA report and the dark night in intensive care with his father. He honestly thought Julius had opened up to him in those last hours. He thought it was the morphine or some other end-of-life chemical excreted by the body as it began to shut down. Near-death visions of tunnels of light were supposed to be chemical. Maybe deathbed confessions were too. Robert wished he’d waited outside the room. He wished the frail liver-spotted hand had found nothing there when it crawled across the carefully folded sheet for the touch of loved one.

  He was in the room with his father because he was trying to feel something for the old man. They had never connected, not really. It was a source of regret to Robert that his father’s eyes always slipped his, that he never made it to sports days or for birthday parties or his brief, subordinate role in the school football team. All his life he had thought his father regretted Margery, felt guilty and helpless that the wife he had chosen was clinically depressed and spent all her time in bed or sipping wine in front of the television. That’s what Robert would have felt if he was Julius. Now he could see that Julius had avoided him because he was even less of a prize than Margery.

  The back of a bony hand, a purple lake with a yellow shore under the skin around the cannula into his vein. Julius had tried to pull it out when he got into recovery and they had taped it on with shiny waterproof plastic tape, winding it around his palm so tight that it caught the skin and folded it over. His yellow smoker’s pinch still gave off a faint smell of tar as the fingers walked their way across the sheet and took Robert’s outstretched hand.

  Robert was trying to feel something, devastation, some loss. He was embarrassed at how little he felt for the man. When the staff consoled him with hollow pleasantries he dropped his eyes and nodded. A very difficult time, yes. Keep hoping, he knows you’re here, yes. Make sure you get enough sleep, yes.

  So he sat by the bed with his ow
n cold heart, hoping his emotions were in there somewhere and he would be feeling big things shortly. Then came the hand, crawling towards him like the sea coming in, and the dry lips trying to move under the oxygen mask.

  Robert slipped his hand underneath Julius’s and they held each other. Well, as much as the tight tape around Julius’s palm would allow. He could really only keep his hand straight but the tips of his fingers curled down as if he was trying to communicate the intention of a tight, meaningful squeeze. Robert’s hand looked meaty and pink against his father’s dry bones. The hand reminded him of Francine choosing a canteen of cutlery for their wedding list. This set is made of a softer metal, said whoever-it-was in the department store. It does mark, yes, so that every occasion the canteen is used for leaves a mark on the set, a memory of each event. I don’t want that, said Francine. I want them to look new all the time. What about those ones? Julius’s hand had scars and folds and wrinkles, knuckles poking through freckles, crosshatched, weathered skin.

  The blue lips moved inside the mask, bub bub bub. As if from nowhere Julius’s left hand rose from the far side of the bed and dropped onto the mask, pausing there, an exhausted climber on a summit. The hand squeezed the soft mask, gripping it and yanking it to the side, half off Julius’s mouth. The elastic band around the back of his head made full removal impossible. Robert stood up, still holding the hand, and leaned over.

  The hiss of the oxygen into the mask made his eyes water. He turned his face away, leaning his ear to the lips.

  I love you, son. That was what he expected, as if Julius would have sat through the same heart-warming romcoms Francine favoured and would know the script. Instead, ‘The back safe. Remember: left-hand corner of the safe at the back. Button. Press—’

  Julius stopped. Thinking he might be passing out, Robert lifted the mask to put it over his face again but Julius’s left hand batted it away.

  ‘Left-hand corner right at the back. Reach in. Press once. Wait for a count of eight, press again. The code: your birthday.’

  Robert looked at his father. Julius hadn’t even opened his eyes. He seemed still now. Tentatively, Robert lifted the mask and put it back over his father’s mouth and as he did Julius said the line, the three syllables: I love you.

  Robert fell back into his seat. He hadn’t expected it. After all this time, and all this distance between them, he began to sob and covered his face and just then all the alarms went off and the staff ran in. Robert ended up against the wall and somehow, by inches, in the corridor. And then again by inches in the café downstairs, drinking tea and waiting for news from the emergency surgical ward. It was two fifteen a.m. when they called down for him. Bad news, I’m afraid.

  Robert didn’t even really remember going to the office. He wasn’t there and then he was there. They told him to go and get some sleep but he was afraid to go home because he knew he would sleep, soundly, untroubled. He stayed awake, feeling sure that dizzy with tiredness was about as close to really upset as he would get.

  The safe. The button. The back of the safe swung open into a small lighted corridor.

  Climbing in, Robert was certain that he would find the usual sort of things lawyers kept in their safe: disputed papers, some bits of evidence relating to old cases that they didn’t want anyone else ever to find but needed to keep. Some jewellery for safe keeping because of the value or because it was stolen and couldn’t be sold, maybe some cash. But there had to be something special in Julius’s safe because it was a second safe, a secret safe. And because Julius had built this room for it, under the street.

  It was a crappy little safe. He typed in the first four digits of his birthday. It didn’t open. He tried the last four, the middle four, nothing worked. Stumped, he sat back. Why did his father send him here? And then he realised. He felt sick with jealousy when he realised. His father’s eyes were shut when he said I love you. He was almost unconscious. Those last words were not for Robert. He thought he was talking to Rose.

  Weeping softly, Robert reached forwards and typed in the last four digits of Rose’s birth date. The door fell open.

  He covered his face and cried. Always something between them, Rose and Julius. Always something. He chose Rose over Robert time after time.

  Finally he stopped crying, not because he was less sad about it, but because he ran out of energy. He pulled the safe door open and looked in.

  Bricks of cash, shrink-wrapped. A solid square of them. If each brick had five grand in it, he remembered thinking, even if they had ten grand in them, there were only eight of them. It was a very small safe. He took them out and found, underneath, a bright red double entry cash book, the worn cardboard cover held shut with a thick elastic band. The spine was facing him, the edge bald grey cardboard. He took it out and opened it at the last page that had writing on it.

  Six columns: a name, all Indian or Pakistani probably, his father knew a lot of the Pakistan community here. Then a number: forty, twenty, 0.9. The name of a city, he recognised some of them: Quetta, Karachi, Rawalpindi. Then a long number in a column headed Access Code, half letters, half numbers. The next column had nothing but two or three letters, many of them recurring. Then, in the final column, a cross or tick, added later in different pens. The total was added up at the bottom of the number columns on each page with a plus or minus underneath. All scored out. Total paid.

  Robert flicked through the book. Month by month, going back many years, fifteen or so years. All the pages were half filled out and the increasingly exorbitant sums were paid at the bottom of the page. Over the years whoever-that-was had paid vast sums of money to the owner of the book.

  Robert looked at the writing: it was Julius’s hand, starting in pencil, changing to biro sometimes, then fountain pen as the numbers got bigger. Sometimes he introduced a red biro for the final summing up. Sometimes he stayed with the fountain pen. Towards the last ten pages the writing got less certain, less firm. Back to pencil, faint scratches. He had been ill before the fall. They knew his health was precarious.

  Robert dropped the book to his lap. It wasn’t good, whatever it was. Not at all good. His father had been sending money to Pakistan, informally, illegally. What did Julius want Rose to do with it?

  Robert realised then: Julius wanted Rose to burn the ledger. The payments were illegal payment and Rose had known about it all along. She knew and he didn’t. Julius chose her, to tell her, involve her and not Robert.

  Why always her? Was she more dependable than Robert? Smarter than him? Or because they were involved in something more than illegal, something venal that Robert would never agree to. He had always been honest, and ethical and honourable. Had they not? He was contemplating whys when he looked up and saw a small envelope on the floor of the safe.

  Idly, he reached in and lifted it out, thinking about the book while he took out the pictures. He saw then that they were involved in things he could never be a part of. Blackmail, hateful business. Robert was better than that. He was a better person than that. He couldn’t believe they had sunk so low. It was from this high ground that he had phoned the police, was put through to the Serious and Organised Crime Unit and a woman who told him in a bored voice that the only way to report the illegal movement of money, the only way, was to fill out the form and email it in.

  Remembering that moment, the photos in his hand, the breath stuck in his chest, put him back in the cold kitchen in Mull. Remembering the images made him pull his foot off the chair and stamp it on the ground. Weedily, but still a stamp to bring back the pain.

  He was wincing at it, his eyes shut tight, realising that he had been here for over an hour, hoping that when he opened his eyes he would stop seeing that image of Rose’s young face.

  The hippy at the window made Robert jump. He was up too close to the glass, his whole face framed by one of the small panes like a grotesque picture.

  Seeing that he had startled Robert, the hippy raised a hand in greeting. It filled another pane.

  ‘Come i
n,’ said Robert, gesturing in case he couldn’t hear.

  He came in through the French doors, bringing with him a blast of cold from outside. He sat down at the table, looking at Robert’s ankle.

  ‘Ouch,’ he said.

  ‘What is your name?’ said Robert, sounding short tempered because he was in pain.

  ‘Oh.’ He looked at the ankle again. ‘Simon.’

  Robert held his hand out and they shook. ‘Hello, Simon.’

  ‘Yeah.’ Simon pointed at the fat ankle, back on the chair again. ‘Ouch. And your face.’

  ‘I went for a walk and fell.’

  ‘Oh.’

  It was getting dark in the kitchen. Suddenly it was the time when someone should have put on the light. Simon stood up and put his hat on.

  ‘Come up the hill on the quad bike? For a smoke? Tide’s coming in, the dolphins’ll be out soon. We can see them up there.’

  Robert smiled. It sounded like a great idea. ‘Is there room on the bike?’

  Simon walked off to the corridor. ‘Jumpers.’

  The rain was off and the sun was setting, a burning orange shimmer on a navy blue horizon. They sat on plastic sheeting on the ground, Michelin men in their many jumpers. The island of Coll was silhouetted on the horizon, deep black with white lights at the shore, sparse enough to be earthbound stars.

  The wind was fierce up here though. No trees grew this far up. The hill was bald green grass defiantly swishing back and forth. Simon had parked the quad bike twenty feet away, in a rocky corner. The wind, he said, pointing up the hill, could knock it over when they weren’t sitting on it. It could roll all the way down the hill. They walked and hopped the rest of the way, into the wind, faces tight against it.