Conviction

by Denise Mina

  ‘Maybe you like the attention?’

  ‘Hm. “Shy Man in a Spotlight”. Not sure I do.’

  He was quoting their biggest hit at me, which I thought was quite crass.

  ‘Why did you come to my door, Fin?’

  He shrugged. ‘I was walking around for hours feeling sorry for myself. I’ve been trying to be less self-obsessed. I was nearby so I tried to think about someone else. It’s part of my spiritual practice. Trying to be other-centred.’

  ‘Does it work?’

  ‘Sometimes? I’m here. I could still be out walking and hating myself.’

  ‘And instead look at all the fun we’ve had: there have been fights, you’ve been threatened with chicken and we’ve had a car crash.’

  ‘A smashing day out. You’re pretty obsessed with that podcast. What’s that about?’

  Well, I was too tired to make up a story so I just told him the truth, that I met Leon when I worked in a hotel and how I just liked him and felt he was being maligned in the podcast, that Leon was nice, a bit daft, a bit feckless, but not overtly nasty. Gretchen Teigler was a bag of poison. She’d destroyed lives before, I knew she had, but she was so powerful that no one ever said anything. As I told him this I felt my craving to see Adam Ross grow, Adam who could read between lines and didn’t need everything explained to him in exhaustive detail.

  I drove on and got Fin to watch the dive film. It freaked him out so much that he made me pull over for a minute. It was probably more intense for him because he was watching it in a moving car and it was dark outside and his body was eating itself.

  ‘Did you see that light coming from the boy’s mouth?’

  He nodded. ‘Is he speaking?’

  ‘No. It’s a reflection of the diver’s light, from his head torch.’

  ‘I’m going to be sick.’

  But he wasn’t sick. We waited until he felt better before driving on.

  When we got going again I told him Gretchen Teigler was almost certainly responsible for Amila taking the blame. She had blocked investigations before. She was rich and powerful and thought she was above the law.

  ‘Did you meet her at the hotel?’

  ‘No, I’ve had dealings with her but never met her.’

  ‘You have any evidence against her?’

  ‘She doesn’t leave evidence.’

  He didn’t seem convinced. It did sound a bit mad. I told him to look at the photo of Leon and his kids on the website. He did and said, ‘Oh God, look at them.’

  I loved the way he said that, as if he really looked at them, read their gestures, saw the tender interplay.

  I took a left at a deserted crossroad. ‘And that was taken an hour before he’s supposed to have killed them. I mean does that look like a man who’s planning to kill them?’

  Fin was still looking at the picture.

  ‘It doesn’t, does it?’ I continued. ‘He’s smiling. He’s happy. The daughter, Violetta, she’s wearing the necklace he bought her. Look at those gorgeous kids, at how proud Leon is of them.’

  He hesitated and then said, ‘Who took the picture?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘They’re all holding champagne glasses, you can see everyone’s hands. No one’s using a selfie stick. The phone isn’t resting on anything so it’s not on a timer. If only the three of them were alone on board, who took the picture?’

  20

  PARTS OF FORT WILLIAM had been pedestrianised since I was last there and the road system was unfamiliar. We had to park quite far away but I found Adam Ross’s door by memory. It had been several lifetimes since I was there.

  His flat was on the top floor of a converted Georgian merchant’s villa, overlooking a beautiful little square. The council had tried to make the space into a gathering point for locals, furnishing it with plant pots, paving and a large steel bench in the shape of a comfy chesterfield sofa. The steel sofa had little puddles all over it and represented the hollow hope of comfort afforded by the square itself, which was a conduit for winds and whipping rain.

  We stood in the bitter cold and looked up to dirty windows with rotting curtains sagging in them. I had a sick feeling Adam was dead. His health was precarious, by which I mean he was a lifelong heroin addict.

  The front door was heavy and low, down a step from the street because the floor of the square had been built up over the years. His name was still on the door.

  I pressed the buzzer. No answer.

  ‘Not in?’ asked Fin.

  I was so far back in time, in such a specific set of emotional memories, that I was annoyed to find Fin with me.

  He stood with one hand tucked into the pocket of his jacket, just the fingertips, as if he was modelling in a catalogue. He was shivering from his belly again, embarrassed about it, again.

  ‘Are you shivering because you’re too thin?’

  He looked scared.

  ‘I’m not going to nag you, just tell me. We’ll get you some jumpers or something.’

  The door buzzer suddenly echoed around the empty square, amplified on shop windows and the steel sofa, sounding as if it was coming from all around us. I pushed and the door fell open and down, sagging on loose hinges. We stepped into the concrete close.

  When the housing association bought the house they kept the facade but rebuilt everything else. The close floor was concrete, painted oxblood red up to waist level. The stairs, which I suppose were once an elegant twist around the turn of a hall, were squared off and paired with a plastic banister. The downstairs lightbulb was out and we ascended from the dark into a soft light. Adam Ross was standing on the landing, hanging over the banister, too excited to wait indoors, same as always. He was grinning wide, showing his bad teeth.

  ‘Annie, ya fanny!’ he called down on my head. ‘How old are you now?’

  ‘Adam! Look at the wrinkles on me!’ I said gleefully, lifting my hair to show my washboard forehead.

  ‘Mental!’ he grinned, meaning an old friend from a decade ago appearing on the doorstep at ten o’clock on a midweek night. ‘You’re a middle-aged hausfrau who’s losing her looks!’

  ‘My man just left me for someone younger,’ I said and we both laughed.

  Lovely thing about Adam, and why I loved him, was that he was kind to me when it mattered and he had seen a lot too. It’s hard to be among vanilla bastards all the time. Normal people can get genuinely upset about a bad haircut, cross words, sick cats. It’s hard not to roll your eyes and say the wrong thing. I often said the wrong thing–wake up, shut up, grow up. These are the wrong things to say when people are sad about some minor cruelty or sentimental incident. But Adam Ross was as damaged as me. He didn’t need to be shielded or protected and he knew what not to pick at. A fellow traveller. You could say anything to him. That is rare and very precious. Most of us demand a tiptoe or two. I hadn’t really driven all the way here for information I could probably find on the internet. I really just wanted to get out of there, and to rest my eyes on Adam.

  I’m struggling to describe his appearance.

  You know when you squeeze a tea bag out and leave it in the sink, it looks spent and crumpled. But if you leave it in the sink to dry out for days, perhaps in a warm environment, it becomes almost unrecognisable as an ex-tea bag. The edges bleach to white. The inside desiccates. These sorts of things had happened to Adam.

  I think we had both assumed the drugs would have killed him by now. He worked as crew on private yachts, then as a sailing instructor, then a fisherman and then a trawler man. These are not careers enhanced by the use of soporifics. I worried about Adam and checked him out on Facebook every so often. He only posted when he got clean. His timeline read like a digital clock that needs new batteries:

  Ninety days!

  Seven days!

  Twenty-four hours!

  One year!

  Ninety days!

  The comments below were always positive and encouraging but over the years the supportive comments grew fewer, got shorter and mor
e formulaic. Like most addicts, he was fucking infuriating.

  ‘How do I look?’ He held his skinny arms out and pulled some bodybuilder poses.

  ‘Spiffy as ever but, honestly, Adam, really quite fucked.’

  ‘Aw, I know. Thanks anyway. Come away in.’ He stepped back to let me through, saw Fin on the stairs and blinked hard at the sight of him. ‘Is that Fin Cohen?’

  Cohen didn’t know what to say. He looked to me for guidance but I didn’t know either. I went into the flat.

  Adam’s girlfriend had been living with him when I knew him before, I used to visit them, but all her stuff was gone now. I wanted to ask about her but couldn’t remember her name. The flat was very tidy, everything was in neat piles and the carpet had track marks from a Hoover.

  Fin and I walked into the vibrant orange living room and sat down next to each other of the sofa. Adam stood in the doorway, rubbing his hands together, pretending that Fin Cohen wasn’t sitting in his house.

  ‘Well, can I get you a wee cup of tea and a biscuit, maybe?’

  ‘No, Adam, I just wanted to ask you about something technical.’

  ‘Good,’ he said, ‘because I don’t have any biscuits or tea or coffee. ’

  Then he stood in front of us, crossed his ankles and dropped, cross-legged, to the floor.

  ‘Do you remember Leon Parker?’

  ‘Did he work at the castle with us?’

  ‘No, he was a guest, there with a club member called Lillie Harkän. She was Dutch. Very good-looking. Snippy.’

  ‘Don’t remember either of them. Did they come sailing with me?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘Ah, I wouldn’t know them then. Does McKay know you’re about?’

  ‘Albert McKay?’

  ‘He asked after you when you left. Earywigging for snippettes. Even asked me once if I ever heard from you, which, you know… it’s big for him.’

  Albert McKay was not known for being emotionally engaged but he took an interest in me for some reason. He was the manager of the castle. When he sacked me he did so reluctantly. He said I did not have the ‘right personality for service’, which I considered a great compliment. He said we had to be nice to our guests meaning we shouldn’t hit them. Still, he had always given me references afterwards and many of them were glowing enough to verge on the fraudulent.

  ‘I was thinking about going to see him.’

  ‘He’d love that,’ nodded Adam. ‘What do you want to know about sailing anyway?’

  I told him about Leon’s yacht, a sixty-foot schooner, how he was supposed to have cast off himself. Adam said yeah, you could do that alone. It’s not that complicated. I said that he hadn’t turned the navigation lights on, had left the radio off and sailed out to the Bay of Biscay at night. Adam said that was dangerous. I said I know, they all died. Had Adam seen the insurance company film of the wreck? They found the family’s bodies in the dining room. Christ no, he said, sailors don’t watch shit like that. That’s for civvies. I said OK, here’s something I was wondering about: Leon paid the crew, in cash, at the start of the voyage.

  Adam waited, turned his head sharply, tipping his ear towards me, waiting for more. He tittered, ‘What?’

  ‘He paid them in cash at the start of the voyage.’

  He snorted and shook his head. ‘No, he didn’t.’

  ‘He definitely did.’

  Adam shook his head and wrinkled his nose. ‘Whit?’

  ‘He gave them full payment, up front.’

  He laughed. ‘No one would ever do that. You get paid monthly, into a bank account from an offshore company. Do you know who crews these boats? Folk like me. Would you give me cash and expect to see me again?’

  ‘But, Adam, you’re–’ I didn’t know how to formulate it so that it didn’t sound derogatory. A drug addict? A junkie–I hate that word. I hate people who use that word.

  Adam knew what I was struggling with. He nodded at his skinny legs, flexed his hands. A chunk was missing from between the knuckles where he’d had an abscess. The scar was tight and deep. Fin was looking between us.

  ‘I’ve got a wee bit of an addiction thing going on,’ explained Adam. ‘And it’s not exactly conducive to honesty in all your affairs.’

  Cohen nodded that he understood. His gaze flitted around the poor room, making sense of it.

  ‘Anna, no one pays a crew in cash up front. They’ve got every reason to fuck off. It’s hard work, long hours.’

  ‘But Leon did that, so the question is: why would he?’

  Adam laughed at me. ‘“The question is”? The fuck are you on about? You investigating it?’

  Fin was quite excited. ‘We were listening to the podcast and then I looked at the photo from when they were supposed to be alone on the boat but it’s not a selfie. There had to be someone else on the boat.’

  ‘Ooooh,’ Adam grinned, ‘Like you’re armchair detectives now?’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Fin.

  ‘Good for you.’ He gave a patronising nod to Fin and then looked at me and laughed. ‘The fuck, Sophie?’

  I laughed with him but calling me Sophie was a stupid slip. I tried to bluster my way out of it, ‘I liked Leon! They say he killed his kids but I don’t think he did. I’m trying to find out what really happened.’

  ‘Hmmmm. Yes.’ Adam grinned. ‘Sweet, sweet justice.’ He knew there was more to it than that. He knew there was a lot more to it and he waited for me to tell him, nodding a soft prompt. Adam didn’t even notice that he’d called me Sophie. Fin had though. I could see him watching us, waiting for an explanation.

  Adam’s eyebrows were leaping up and down.

  They both wanted explanations but I didn’t want to tell Adam about Gretchen Teigler or the other girl. And I didn’t want to tell Fin who Sophie was.

  Adam kept nodding and I nodded along, belligerent, waiting out the awkward moment. Then we both laughed.

  ‘Well,’ I lied, ‘so, you know, what else is there to do on a Monday night?’

  He laughed at that as well.

  During all this to and fro and knowing laughter Fin was just sitting there, taking it all in, thinking.

  Adam stopped laughing and glanced at Fin, and gave me a stern look, telling me not to drag Fin into trouble without telling him what was going on. It was obvious he hadn’t a clue. Adam was damaged but he was also decent.

  ‘So.’ Adam considered the problem. ‘Something you might want to think about. A crew won’t get on board if there is a sniff that they wouldn’t get paid. That’s two or three months of your life. Sometimes, if the chief is a twat, you worry that they’ll dock your wages for, you know, doing things wrong.’

  ‘Like what?’ asked Fin.

  ‘Being late back from shore. Refusing duties, breaking things. Stuff.’ He shrugged. ‘You can end up basically paying them at the end. So, would the crew be worried? Was he broke?’

  Fin said, ‘Or suicidal and liked the crew, that’s why he paid in advance?’

  ‘No,’ I insisted, ‘he wasn’t suicidal.’

  But Fin corrected me. ‘We can’t know that. You hardly knew him.’

  Adam tipped his head and frowned. ‘Ah, come on, we’ve all thought about it.’

  ‘The crew said he was very calm.’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Adam sadly. ‘You know sometimes, when people have decided to do it, they’re very calm just before. Kind of saintly. I’ve seen that a few times.’

  We looked at Adam, a husk of a man. He lived in a high-stakes world. I’d seen him RIP friends on Facebook, always young people, always grinning in blurry photos. He’d saved my life once. He’d probably done it for other people too.

  His eyebrows rose in a question. ‘Was Leon broke? Because banks’ll freeze your account. Maybe he wanted to make sure the crew got paid and didn’t know if the money would be there when he got back?’

  ‘He wasn’t broke,’ I said. ‘Gretchen’s rich.’

  ‘That doesn’t follow,’ said Fin, dismissive
ly. That kind of annoyed me.

  ‘Albert’ll know,’ said Adam. ‘Albert knows who’s rich like I know who’s holding. You should go to Skibo and see him. He’s still there.’

  He was right. Albert McKay would know but I didn’t know if he would tell me. He was manically discreet. It would take some teasing to get it out of him.

  21

  THE HEAT HAD LEFT the car by the time we got back into it. With the stale smell of cigarette smoke and the burst airbag it felt like walking back into a party where a lot of regretful things had been said and done.

  We shut the doors and looked out at Ben Nevis, haughtily ignoring us in the distance.

  ‘Why did Adam call you Sophie?’

  ‘Adam?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Did he?’

  ‘You know he did.’

  ‘I didn’t hear that.’

  ‘He called you Sophie.’

  ‘Oh! That’s his ex-girlfriend’s name.’

  Fin hummed and hesitated. ‘I wouldn’t have put you two together, to be honest. He’s quite… I don’t know.’ He gave a mini cringe as he did up his seat belt. ‘You’re quite middle class?’

  I laughed. ‘Am I?’ Keen to change the subject, I pulled on my seat belt and said, ‘Anyway, I don’t think Leon was broke. His wife is one of the richest women in the world.’

  ‘But they signed prenups.’

  ‘Even if Leon was broke I know he wouldn’t kill himself.’

  ‘You can’t be sure.’ He was being rude again. He didn’t even know Leon.

  ‘Yes, I can.’ I sounded too adamant and I couldn’t know. Just a few hours ago I’d nearly done it myself. I think what I was saying was that Leon was a good man. I needed to believe that but maybe I needed it more back then, when I was so friendless and frightened. This felt like an echo of that time and I’d survived. Maybe I could–‘Anna, you’re even lying to yourself now.’

  ‘FIN, CAN YOU SHUT THE FUCK UP?’

  He turned to me and he was smiling, not the reaction I expected because I had shouted pretty loud and used a curse and hoped, really, to scare him into being quiet.