by Jane Renshaw
Breakfast had been strained to say the least. But Flora knew she was right about this: they had to get as much on the Johnsons as they could from Saskia, and pick her brains on how to tackle them. Maybe Saskia would know something about the garage that had supplied Travis Johnson’s so-called alibi; and she might let Flora have the names and numbers of the neighbours who had been prepared to talk and had described the Johnsons as a ‘family from hell’, so Flora could call them and maybe arrange to meet at a café or something – because no way were either of them going anywhere near Meadowlands Crescent again.
The landline started ringing on the side table by the TV.
She picked it up. ‘Hello, Flora Parry here?’
‘Oh, hello, Mrs Parry. This is Karen Baxter. I’m a Children’s Reporter with the Scottish Children’s Reporter Administration. I’m calling to ask if it would be possible to arrange a time when I could pop round and see you and your husband and Beckie, just to check that everything’s okay?’
Still smiling at Beckie, she pulled open the glass doors and took the call outside. ‘What do you mean, to check that “everything’s okay”? Scottish Children’s… what?’
‘Scottish Children’s Reporter Administration. We deal with child welfare and protection in Scotland. We’ve had a referral from a member of the public with a few concerns about Beckie. I need to just pop round and see you. Would after school on Monday be convenient – say, 4:30?’
Flora shut her eyes. Breathed in the fresh, early morning scents of the garden. ‘Concerns? What kind of concerns?’
‘We can talk about that when I see you.’
‘But that’s not necessary!’ She crossed the patio to the expanse of grass, wanting to take this call as far from Beckie as possible. ‘Beckie’s fine, there’s no –’
‘We have a duty to investigate every referral made, Mrs Parry – if, as you say, everything’s fine, no further action will be taken. But we do have to carry out an investigation, as I say, once a referral has been made.’
‘This is the Johnsons. Beckie’s biological family.’ The grass was still dewy, moisture soaking into her pumps. ‘It’s meant to be a closed adoption, but they’ve found out where we live and they’ve been harassing us. It’s the Johnsons, isn’t it, who’ve made the referral?’
‘I can’t discuss that with you.’
Oh God. Neil, of course, was going to see this as support for his theory that the Johnsons were basically harmless, out to discredit them and nothing more; to make out that they were unsuitable parents for Beckie.
‘No. Of course. All right. Tomorrow at 4:30, then. I suppose you have our address?’
The place is a fucking disgrace so it is, fucking needles and that lying in the close and a big jobbie that looks fucking human.
Ryan’s pulling on the white forensic suit over his shirt and the wee cushion he’s got strapped to his belly, and then he’s putting on the tabard with ‘Environmental Health’ on the back like I’m wearing. When he’s done, I lean on him to put on the blue plastic covers for my trainers, and he’s leaning on me to do the same, then we’re pissing ourselves when we’re getting the showercap whoogies on us over the wigs, and pulling up the masks, like we’re dealing with fucking Ebola here.
Aye well, what we are dealing with isnae any less virulent, eh?
I make sure the false neb’s still in place under the mask. Ryan got it off of the internet and it’s that realistic wee Kai didnae even know me when I was practising with make-up and that, the poor wee bairn was ‘Hello?’ and his wee face was Who are you and where’s my Nana?
I pull on the gloves and buzz the buzzers at the door. I’ve got my story all ready – we’re from the Council, Environmental Health, here to get the place cleaned up – but I dinnae need it, the door buzzes open. Fuckers cannae even bother their arses to ask who’s there?
Candy from a bairn.
Mair likely thinks she’s safe enough in this dump.
Ryan’s whistling his way up the stair, taking it two steps at a time.
I like to see a man happy in his work.
At Mair’s flat door I do a rap-tap-a-tap-tap nice and cheery, and I go, ‘Hi, Saskia, it’s Claire from the ground-floor flat, can I have a wee word?’ Mair isnae gonnae know anyone in the stair. ‘It’s about the wee lassie in Flat 2, she’s in the hospital and I’ve got a card going round…’
There’s sounds from inside the flat. Footsteps.
I’ve got the dishcloth I’ve brought with me over the peephole.
‘Just take a sec for an autograph,’ I goes, so fucking cheery it would make you boak.
There’s scraping and clunking and then the door’s opening and Ryan’s breenging against it and Mair’s ‘Uh! Uh!’ like she’s a fucking chimp, and then we’re in with the door shut behind us and I’m ‘Hello Saskia-hen’ and she’s making a run for it to the bog and Ryan’s got her by the arms and he shoves her back against the wall.
I can tell he’s grinning away behind the mask.
I shove the dishcloth in her gob.
She’s a fucking mess so she is, like she’s no brushed her hair for a fucking month, and the stink off of her!
‘Aye hen,’ I goes. ‘You fucked with our wean and now we’re fucking with you. That’s justice. That’s fucking justice, eh?’
Mair’s shaking her head.
‘You hurt our Bekki. You took her whole fucking family off of her and gave her to fucking randoms. Her whole fucking family, that loved her to pieces and that she loved right back.’
Mair’s pure white and she’s shaking like an alky.
‘Saskia-hen – I can call you Saskia, aye? Saskia-hen, it’s payback time. Me and the family have been having a wee conference about what all you can do to make it up to Bekki. That right, son?’
Ryan smacks Mair back against the wall and goes, ‘Aye. We’ve had what you might call some constructive interfacing around the whole issue and we have come to the conclusion that you, hen, are a piece of shite needs wiped off the arse of the fucking planet.’
Mair’s going, ‘Oh go… gay gay-eh-eh!’
‘What’s that, hen?’ I goes. ‘We’re no gonnae get away with it? Oh, we’re gonnae get away with it, because unlike you we’re professionals. We’re not in fucking forensic suits for a wee joke, eh?’
‘It’s not fucking Hallowe’en!’ chuckles Ryan.
‘Ee-ee gi-ee,’ goes Mair.
‘Eh?’
‘CCTV, hen?’ I chuckle. ‘There’s no cameras in the close – what bastard’s gonnae bother? Two in the street that maybe cover the entrance, but the boys dealt with they ones last night.’
‘Like Maw says, we’re professionals.’
‘It’s a wee shame though, eh, what it’s gonnae do to your kids? Hard on them, growing up without their maw. But maybe you shoulda thought about what kids’ families mean to them before you started fucking with their lives, eh?’
‘But check it, Maw.’ Ryan waves a hand. ‘Check the place. Check this bitch. Her weans come and bide, they’re gonnae get septicaemia off of all this crap, and maybe while she’s high on her drug of choice they’re gonnae give it a wee try? We’re doing they weans a favour.’
‘You’re right, son. We’re practically Child Fucking Protection.’
Ryan chuckles. ‘No word of a lie.’
‘When I think,’ I goes, real quiet, in Mair’s face, ‘when I think of you and that so-called Doctor Fernandez cooking up that pack of lies… The two of yous go for a wee coffee at Starbucks, aye, when yous was supposedly round ours carrying out a rigorous professional assessment of our ability to care for our wean? Sit there making up shite about low IQs and depression while you sipped your skinny lattes? Do I look like a fucking eejit, doll? Do I look like I’m depressed?’
The grey, dirty, dingy little courtyard wasn’t just deserted – it felt abandoned, as if no one could possibly live here. No one, surely, could open that battered, graffiti-covered door and think ‘Home’?
Flora couldn
’t remember which flat number Saskia was, so she pressed all the buzzers and waited.
No response.
It must have rung with voices once, this little close, with all those barefoot Haghill children, their lives spilling out of the single-ends down the stair and into the close and the street, all mixed up together in happy, heedless communal poverty. She’d heard them on TV programmes, these children, saying in old age: ‘We didn’t know we were poor, you see – sixpence to spend down the shop and we were millionaires! Deprived? Not a bit of it! None of us felt deprived. We all looked out for each other, you know? If you were out playing and you were hungry, you could chap a door and ask for a piece and like as not get it, though you’d maybe to put up with “Aw, Davie, the state of you!” and getting your face scrubbed and a comb through your hair. We were surrounded by folk that cared about us – how were we deprived, eh? Happy as the day is long.’
Did Saskia hear those children’s ghosts, she wondered, their high voices echoing up the deserted close? Did they haunt her? Reproach her for what she’d done?
She tried the array of buzzers again. This time, a crackly voice said, ‘Aye?’
‘Hello. I’m here to see Saskia Mair in one of the top flats.’
‘Okay dear.’ And the door buzzed open.
Her shoes on the worn stone steps rapped out a rhythm as she climbed, clop clop, clop clop, echoing off the hard surfaces.
Saskia’s door was open, just slightly. Maybe the neighbour had told her that Flora was on her way up. She knocked nevertheless.
‘Saskia?’
No response.
Could she have popped down to the communal garden or into a neighbour’s flat?
‘Hello, Saskia? It’s Flora.’ She pushed open the door.
The place stank of stale air and drains. There was a pile of dirty clothes against the wall, and something dark and wet had been spilt on the carpet.
Not a pile of clothes.
‘Saskia!’
That was blood.
Hands shaking, Flora knelt to push the hair off Saskia’s face, to feel for a pulse at her neck.
No pulse.
She felt warm to the touch, but that could be because Flora was, suddenly, so freezing cold herself. Was she still warm?
‘Saskia,’ she said again, stupidly.
Vital signs.
She’d been a nurse, for God’s sake.
Vital signs.
She found her sunglasses in her bag and held them, shaking, under Saskia’s nose, peering at the dark surface for signs of condensation.
Nothing.
Shoving the sunglasses back in her bag and fumbling for her phone, she turned on the flashlight app. Her hand steady now, she lifted Saskia’s right eyelid. The eye under it was rolled back slightly, as if already turned to heaven. She shone the light into the eye.
No constriction of the pupil.
She lifted one of Saskia’s arms – surprisingly heavy for such a thin person – and shone the flashlight onto the skin under the forearm. It was reddened in mottled patches.
The first, definitive signs of lividity.
So no CPR.
She must have been dead for at least half an hour.
And then all Flora could do was kneel there as Saskia’s blood soaked from the carpet into the knees of her jeans. The source of the blood, the nurse’s part of her brain noted, was Saskia’s chest – the front of the green T-shirt she was wearing was one huge dark purple stain.
Saskia Mair had been stabbed to death.
She needed to call the police.
She tapped 999 on her phone and then stopped.
She couldn’t.
If she called the police, she would be scrutinised as a possible suspect. They would dig into her past. They might find out that Ruth Innes died at the age of six and was reborn as a teenager in 1983. They might find out about Rachel.
No one had seen her come in here.
She needed to just go.
She could find a phone box, disguise her voice, tell the police she was a concerned neighbour who didn’t want to give her name, but there had been yobs hanging about the stair and she thought they might have got into Saskia’s flat.
Or she could just go.
She dropped her phone back in her bag and stood.
‘Sorry,’ she mouthed to Saskia.
The knees of her jeans were sticky with blood. But they were dark navy denim and it wasn’t too noticeable. She was parked just round the corner. All she had to do was get to her car without attracting attention.
But the police would be asking people about anyone they’d seen. There might even be CCTV in the street.
There were four doors off the tiny hall. The second one she tried was a cupboard, with some coats hanging up and others in a pile on top of various boxes. She found a raincoat which was way too small but which, tied round her waist by the sleeves, flapped over her knees and concealed the bloodstains.
Now she needed something to hide her face.
A hat?
She couldn’t see one.
She opened another door – a bathroom, smelling of mould and uncleaned toilet, a grey tidemark all round the bath. And another – a chaotic bedroom – clothes all over the bed and floor, a furring of dust on the cheap pine dressing table.
She had her hand on the wardrobe when she realised: fingerprints. DNA.
She grabbed a dirty pink T-shirt from the floor and used it to wipe the door of the wardrobe, then the door handles in the hall. Had she touched anything else? Had she touched Saskia? Would her DNA be on Saskia’s body?
She thought she had maybe touched her face.
Her neck, definitely, when she was feeling for a pulse.
Then, she had touched her with the tenderness of one human confronted by another who’d been hurt, who needed help. Now, it was like being a butcher prepping a slab of meat as she wiped the T-shirt flinchingly across Saskia’s dead forehead, cheeks and neck.
Then she returned to the wardrobe and used the T-shirt to open it.
No hats.
There were a couple of hoodies badly folded on a shelf, one of which, a pale grey one, looked roomy enough to fit her. She grabbed it, wriggled it on over her top and pulled up the hood, feeling the need to hide her face immediately. It smelt of sweat and sickly deodorant. Her throat contracted and she gagged.
She folded her arms, hands tucked away so she wouldn’t accidentally touch anything else, and stepped carefully from the bedroom to the hall – she didn’t look down again – and to the front door of the flat. It was still standing slightly open.
She stopped just inside it and listened, but there were no sounds coming from the stairwell. Quickly, before she lost her nerve, she stepped onto the stone landing and, tugging the sleeve of the hoodie over her hand, pulled the door almost shut.
Her mouth dry, her pulse thumping in her ears, she made herself walk, not run, down the stone steps, onto the landing below, past the two doors there, onto the next flight of steps, the raincoat flapping against her legs.
On the next landing down she could hear voices behind one of the doors, the scruffy black one. What if the door suddenly opened and they saw her?
Grabbing the bannister, she flung herself round the curve of the stairwell and down two steps at once – and jolted to a halt.
Idiot!
She’d touched the bannister with her bare hand.
She pulled the thin wool of the hoodie’s sleeve over her hand and ran it back up the bannister to where she’d grabbed it. She was going to be sick. Sour bile was rising at the back of her throat again –
If she was sick, could they get DNA from it?
Swallowing and gasping, she somehow made it down the last flight of stairs to the dingy passage that led to the main door.
Her footsteps clopped along it, echoing up the stair as she heard a voice on the landing above; a harsh laugh.
She ran.
Pulling the sleeve back over her hand, she wrenched open the he
avy door and ran out into the air, up the narrow close to the street, to the litter and the traffic and the run-down shopfronts and the people walking by – an old woman’s sharp little eyes on her –
She stopped running – slowed to a normal pace, her legs almost buckling under her, as if they’d forgotten how to do it, how to move normally.
She looked down at her feet as they moved, one past the other, at the grubby pavement with its pockmarks of chewing gum, its fag ends and its broken paving. It had been raining, and where the slabs had sunk and cracked, dirty brown puddles had formed in random geometric shapes. Even the puddles here had hard edges. The pavement had a sheen on it, and her right foot came down on a disintegrating scratch card stuck to its surface.
All around her was the sound of people, potential witnesses – so many cars swishing past, so many bodies passing by, looking at her, probably, this strange woman in the hoodie walking with her head down.
But it had been raining, so maybe that was okay.
She risked a glance up to get her bearings. There was the newsagent on the corner with dusty windows behind metal grilles, a stark contrast to the aggressively smiling, doll-like celebrity couple on the sandwich board outside.
She waited for a break in the traffic, hood pulled well over her face, and when it came she ran across the road, ran up the side street where she’d left her car.
The tears came, for some reason, as soon as she caught a glimpse of red behind the broad rear of a silver four-by-four. Her little red Ka. For some reason, it was at this moment that she was no longer able to hold back the image of Saskia’s little boy in his mother’s arms, the arms that had held him as no one else ever would again.
I just wanted to see you.
Fumbling the key from her pocket, she pointed and pressed the rubbery button and the car winked its lights at her and she hauled open the door and dived inside.
22
The internet was full of Saskia, although her name hadn’t yet been released.
While Beckie and Neil ate breakfast and argued about whether cats were too intelligent to be trained (Beckie) or not intelligent enough (Neil), Flora sat on one of the sofas with her laptop, trawling through the newsfeeds, trying to concentrate through the pulses of pain just above her eyebrows.