The Red Road

by Denise Mina

  28

  Morrow had briefed the squad and avoided a long chat with Riddell about Michael Brown’s unsafe conviction. He’d get out as soon as she explained the mismatched prints but she felt sure it was a death warrant for him. She dodged her boss until he went to a meeting.

  Now everyone was working hard. Prints. It was all about fingerprints, because Michael Brown didn’t kill his brother and someone else had. They were still out there. She wondered if they’d followed the Michael Brown case, seen him go to prison, heard he’d got out, if they felt anything about it.

  She hadn’t discussed Atholl’s death with anyone, covered it in her briefing to the squad only by mentioning that Brown’s case was being continued until they found a replacement counsel. She didn’t know how to talk about his death. It was work-related but seemed personal, didn’t connect to any investigations.

  She was at her desk and the memory came to her mind every so often – Atholl is dead, she thought, and then remembered that it wasn’t relevant. In police terms it didn’t really matter.

  She made herself a coffee, took a quick tour of the squad at their desks, checking their work, seeing what they were doing, who was coming up with what on the car dealership investigation. The day felt formless, as if she couldn’t quite get hold of it.

  She went back to her office, keeping the door open to stop herself thinking about him. Then she remembered the invitation in her handbag.

  She shut her door before taking it out of her bag, sat down at her desk and pushed the computer keyboard to the side.

  A square yellow vellum envelope, pockmarked with dried rain. Morrow held her mouth and stared at it for a moment. Then she took her hand away, and stared at it for another short while.

  Holding the lower edge of the envelope she fitted a biro into the loose seal and ripped it open, shaking out the card.

  His name was embossed in racing green. No qualifications were added underneath, none of his titles. The font was no-nonsense.

  She let her eyes rest there for a moment and took a deep breath before reading the handwritten note:

  Dear Detective Inspector Alexandra Morrow,

  I do hope you will come to my home. Please pay particular attention to the two discarded bottles of paracetamol. I have tried not to touch the sides or smudge the prints.

  I’m sincerely sorry for involving you in this unpleasant business, but I suppose, strictly speaking, murder is your business.

  I think you are lovely. I wish I had been a better person.

  Faithfully,

  Anton Atholl

  It was strange. For a full five minutes she sat there and all she could really see on the letter was the line I think you are lovely.

  The words rolled around, warming her. He knew he was dying in the café. She wished he had lived, that they had grown old together in the city and bumped into one another over the years. She wished he was alive to worry her.

  She sat back from the card. Then she stood up and opened the door to the corridor as McCarthy passed.

  ‘McCarthy.’ He turned to her. ‘Get me Anton Atholl’s last known address.’

  He nodded and left.

  She stood, leaning against the wall, and looked at the envelope again. There were three letters on the table in the coffee house. This was one of them.

  McCarthy looked back in. ‘Ma’am: Wallace Street. Tradeston. South.’

  ‘Who do we know in the south?’

  ‘Tamsin Leonard’s there now.’

  ‘Get her on the phone.’

  Leonard’s pull in the south wasn’t quite Wainwright’s in the north. Morrow had to wait for permission from her boss’s boss before she was allowed into the flat for a look.

  It was the perfect flat for a middle-aged man to commit suicide in. It was in the old dock area of the city, a grim quarter of anonymous luxury flats down by the river. Danny used to live across the water from Anton’s. Morrow didn’t like the area. The flat itself was devoid of furniture. It looked as if he had been squatting. The only chair faced firmly away from the window overlooking the water. A bouquet of empty bottles lay on the floor. The paracetamol bottles were on the carpet: one next to the chair, one by the skirting board.

  Morrow had explained that Atholl was an earl and an advocate and had killed himself in strange circumstances. It must have been a quiet day in the south because Leonard’s DI had ordered a search of the flat as well as the fingerprinting.

  There wasn’t much to find: some clothes, a laundry ticket, basic toiletries. No food. No files. No address book. They searched his cupboards and found a polaroid of Anton Atholl at an orgy. Morrow didn’t want to look at it. She found herself squinting away from the image, screwing her eyes up to stop herself seeing it. He wished he had been a better man.

  She took a breath, looked out of the window and forced her eyes back to the image.

  Atholl and three other men who formed a wall at the back of the picture. Anton was fucking a woman who was bent over towards the camera. Morrow actually mistook her for a boy at first glance: she was so slim she barely had breasts. Then the image resolved in her eye and she saw that it wasn’t slimness that made her frame so modest. The woman was a girl and she was very young. Atholl’s face was flush and contorted. The men behind him were out of focus, their faces cut off at the chin, at the nose.

  Morrow held her hand up. ‘That’s it,’ she said to the officer holding the picture for her. ‘That’s fine.’

  The fingerprints on the bottles of pills were processed while they stood there and sent over to her division: they were only partly Anton’s. A separate set, very clear, had been lifted. Morrow knew before McCarthy phoned her that they were a match for those found at the scene of Aziz Balfour’s murder.

  On the way out the SOCO told her that the prints on the polaroid were the same as the paracetamol bottle.

  She walked slowly down the bare, soulless stairs towards the street, thinking that evidence could be processed in an instant now but it could take her a lifetime to sift through it. She knew so much but she couldn’t fit half of it together.

  They were driving back to the station when an unknown number called her mobile.

  ‘Hello? Is that DI Morrow?’

  ‘Yeah, who’s this?’

  ‘Greta.’ The woman’s voice was hoarse and faint and Morrow didn’t recognise it. ‘From last night?’ She paused to sniff hard.

  ‘Sorry,’ said Morrow, ‘I don’t know—’

  ‘Greta Atholl. Lady Greta Atholl. Anton’s wife. I got a letter from him in the post. I thought I should ring ... someone.’

  Anton had written a letter to his wife and one to his sons.

  They sat on the work surface at the far side of the kitchen, the envelopes face down, the cards pulled out and read. They lay like dead albino insects on the glinting black granite.

  Morrow sat at the table with Greta, staring at them along with her while Daniel lurked in the front room. There were no offers of tea or coffee, no plates of biscuits pressed into the hand. This was a house in shock and Greta moved as if she was afraid of breaking: slowly, carefully, glad to be sitting down.

  They had settled at a small table next to French windows into a large well-tended garden where a big lawn was scattered with weather-beaten rugby balls and dog-mauled chew toys. Old trees sheltered the end of the garden, giving it colour and texture while the borders died back for the winter.

  The house was gorgeous. Big, square and Georgian in the middle of the countryside near Hamilton, close enough to the motorway to effect a quick escape to Edinburgh or Glasgow. Around it were soft wild fields for horses and wild-flower meadows.

  As they drew up Morrow had imagined Anton and Greta moving in, a handsome couple with their three fine children and a large dog. Greta opened the door to a silent house, took their coats in the carpeted hall and hung them on a coat rack near-to-toppling with the weight of scarves and blazers and teenagers’ coats.

  Still the house was silent. They went th
rough to the letters and as they passed different rooms, a telly room, a sitting room, a nice old dining room with a table and ten chairs, she imagined them over the years, buying furniture, curtains and rugs.

  But as they sat in the kitchen staring at the letters on the worktop she felt their slow descent into hell and recrimination. Fights and splits and paracetamol. There was hardly a trace of Anton in the house. No coats, no shoes, no overfed dog. It was as if he had only ever been a notion there.

  The notes were hardly pertinent to the investigation. In them he told his wife that he had always loved her and that she was too good for him and that he wanted her to forget him and marry again. Tears had mottled the page. The letter to his sons was equally bland but Morrow was glad. Truisms might not give comfort but they wouldn’t haunt either.

  ‘Are your boys OK?’

  Greta shrugged. ‘It hasn’t really hit them,’ she said apologetically, and her eyes strayed to the letters on the worktop again.

  ‘Do you want me to take them away?’

  Greta nodded.

  ‘I’ll give you them back.’

  ‘I don’t want them back,’ said Greta.

  29

  To save themselves the forty-minute round drive to Busby they asked the only independent witness to Michael Brown’s 1997 interview to come into the station. As soon as Morrow saw Yvonne McGunn sitting in the reception area at London Road she knew they should have gone to her. Her date of birth on the accompanying adult form put her in her mid-forties, but illness had rendered her ageless.

  She sat with her eyes shut, her face bloated and mottled purple under thin blond hair that needed a wash. Under the hem of her blue flowery dress, her ankles were purple and as swollen as a man’s thigh. Black corduroy slippers were fastened with Velcro. She opened her eyes as Morrow came over.

  Morrow introduced herself and Wheatly and they shook her swollen hands.

  ‘Yvonne, I’m so sorry for asking you in, I didn’t know that you didn’t keep well.’

  Yvonne held up a puffy hand. ‘I’m all right.’

  ‘I’m so sorry. Would you like to come with me, we’ll get you home after ...’

  Morrow left a pause for Yvonne to object but she didn’t. She was busy trying to stand up. She bent forward, leaning heavily on her four-footed walking stick as she tried to rock herself up. It was painful to watch. Morrow reached forward to help a couple of times before finally slipping her arm under Yvonne’s and nodding Wheatly to the other side. They lifted on three, managing to get her onto her feet. Morrow was left with a sweat-damp hand she didn’t know what to do with. Still, it was her left hand. Wheatly had used his right.

  Morrow had planned to take her into the interview room upstairs but the lift was two hundred feet away, through a couple of locked doors, and she didn’t know how they could possibly manage it. She led her instead to the small, rarely used interview room by the reception desk. There was no tape machine or camera, just a table and four chairs. They sat her in the one nearest the door and took the seats opposite.

  ‘So, Yvonne, you know why you’re here?’

  Yvonne nodded.

  ‘We wanted to ask you about the night after Diana died, when you were working in the Cleveden House group home and got a call about a young boy—’

  ‘Michael Brown.’

  ‘That’s right, Michael Brown. You went to Stewart Street police station to act as his accompanying adult. Could you tell us about that?’

  ‘Yes.’ They looked at each other. ‘Um, what do you want to know about it?’

  ‘Could you maybe start by telling me what your job was?’

  ‘I was a staff member at Cleveden House. My first job out of college. I trained as a social worker.’

  ‘So, who phoned the house?’

  ‘The police. They asked for someone who knew Michael to come down and sit with him, a familiar face.’

  ‘And you knew Michael?’

  ‘Really quite well. He was one of the first kids to be admitted to Cleveden House when I first started. Those kids really stay with you, the ones you meet early in the job. I know things have gone bad now but he was a lovely wee person back then, very close to his big brother John. Nickname was Pinkie.’

  She smiled as she remembered the two boys.

  ‘Why was he called Pinkie?’

  ‘’Cause he had a broken pinkie.’ She held up her hand, straightening the last two joints of her little finger.

  ‘Why were they in care?’

  ‘I’m not allowed to discuss that.’

  Morrow liked that. It was a long time ago and Michael Brown was unlikely to sue her for defamation but she was still respectful of him and his history.

  ‘He was a nice guy back then?’

  ‘Lovely.’ She was adamant. ‘Lovely wee guy. Loved being read to and kids’ TV shows. He was kind and cried a lot, relied on Pinkie, on John. After he died I didn’t see Michael for a long time and then when I read about him, it didn’t sound like the same person at all. Weird how someone can change that much. I actually wondered if he’d had a head injury because it didn’t sound anything like the wee guy I knew. Very sad.’

  ‘So, the day after Diana died ...’

  ‘Yeah, so that night the police phoned and we knew they had Michael, that they were asking him about Pinkie’s death but we didn’t think there would be anything in it. I mean, Michael adored John and he didn’t carry knives or anything and he fell apart when they came and told us that he’d been found dead—’

  ‘Were you on when they came and told him?’

  ‘I was. The police came and told us and they asked us to get Michael and bring him to the office. That’s why I went to the questioning of Michael, later, because I’d been there when they told him Pinkie was dead.’

  ‘How did he react, exactly?’

  ‘Very upset.’

  ‘But can you describe where they told him? How they told him?’

  ‘Well,’ she looked at the ceiling, taking herself back to the time, ‘Michael came into the office, it was small, quite messy, full of rotas and stuff. Big window so the kids could talk in to you even if you were working. He came in and the two cops were there, full uniform, and they asked him to sit down. He looked a bit worried but he probably thought it was his parents or something, he hadn’t seen them for a long time, so he sat down and I remember him looking out into the corridor through the window, a kid came past and he looked out and there was a flash on his face, like hope or joy or something, because I think he thought the kid outside was Pinkie, you know?’

  ‘You don’t think he knew Pinkie was dead at this point?’

  ‘No, he didn’t.’

  ‘So, what are you thinking, that he knew Pinkie was stabbed but not dead?’

  ‘I don’t think he knew that either. I’ve never believed he killed his brother. I was amazed when they found his fingerprints all over the place. If he did it he didn’t remember because when they told him Pinkie was dead he just melted. He slid off the chair. I mean, he couldn’t take it in. He was in a total daze for the rest of the day. He didn’t eat. We made macaroni cheese – he loved that, his favourite – but he didn’t eat. I had to sit over him and make him drink water. He was in bits. If he did it, he didn’t remember doing it.’

  ‘So you don’t think he did it?’

  ‘No. Then I was quite naive. Later I got pretty cynical but I still don’t believe it. He loved Pinkie. Pinkie was his parents, you know? Michael could be soft because Pinkie was a hard nut. Pinkie protected him, let him be tearful. He allowed him to be a kid. More than Pinkie got.’

  ‘So, on the night Michael was questioned, what happened?’

  ‘Oh, yes, so, the police came and asked if they could talk to Michael. He went in to the station—’

  ‘Wouldn’t a social worker have gone in with him?’

  ‘Well, we were short-handed and couldn’t leave the other kids with just two members of staff, it would have been illegal. Believe me, we wanted to go wit
h him but we could hardly say to the police, you’ll need to wait until tomorrow because so-and-so’s off sick tonight. They billed it as just an informal chat, I mean, we didn’t think it was any big deal. There was no way Michael was involved. Next thing we know, Michael’s a suspect, can one of us come down and sit in on the interviews.’

  Morrow nodded. She wished she had a tape recorder now – she needed to clarify everything before they moved on so she would remember. ‘So, Michael is told the morning afterwards. Then later that day the police come to pick him up for an informal chat, they didn’t charge him or read him his rights or anything?’

  ‘No, absolutely not. I was there, in the station, when they read him his rights.’

  ‘So, there was some sort of change between picking him up at the home and the station?’

  ‘I was told he’d confessed to one of the cops in the car.’ She looked sceptical.

  ‘Who told you that?’

  ‘When they phoned, that’s what they told us. He’d confessed in the car on the way there.’

  ‘Do you know who phoned you to come in?’

  ‘No. I can’t remember names. We were all pretty shaken.’

  ‘So you got there, to the station, and what happened?’

  Yvonne then rolled through the questioning but none of what she said added to anything.

  ‘He had cuts on his hand as well, like he’d hit someone or something. It wasn’t entirely peaceful, is what I mean.’

  Morrow nodded dutifully. ‘I see. Did you see his prints being taken?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Did he talk to you about that?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Do you remember DC McMahon?’

  ‘Policeman?’

  ‘One of the arresting officers. Big moustache.’

  ‘No.’

  Morrow didn’t know what else to ask. She stood up and opened the door to the lobby. ‘Well, Yvonne, thanks so much for coming in to see us, we can arrange for you to be taken home—’

  ‘I’ve got a car outside,’ said Yvonne, turning back to her stick, ‘it’s fine.’

  ‘I’m amazed you remember that all so well.’