The Red Road (2 page)

‘Rose.’ Pinkie lifted a hand between them. ‘Take this?’

Not a ring from Argos. Instead, in his open palm, sat a Rambo knife, curved blade, ragged teeth. The handle was gaffer-taped silver, spongy with blood.

‘Put it down your sock and I’ll come for it later?’ He raised the hand towards her face. ‘Gonnae hide it for me? The polis’ll search Cleveden for sure. I need it but I can’t keep a hold of it.’

The bloody knife was inches from her nose.

He watched her expectantly but Rose didn’t move. Her eyes brimmed with stinging tears. She kept staring at the blurry knife. She blinked and behind her lids saw yellow burns on a green bath. She opened them and a tear fell, landing on the dirty blade: a clean silver splash on the red.

‘Don’t be scared,’ he said, but Rose wasn’t crying because she was scared. ‘You like me, don’t you?’

Rose lifted her hand slowly and took the knife by the handle. It was wet and sticky. It didn’t matter. She had touched worse.

Pinkie smiled, whispered, ‘Your prints are on that now.’

A trap. Eight men in a flat, not Sammy’s one friend. Drunk men, dirty bed, vodka to wash her mouth clean. Her hold tightened on the handle and blood oozed from the gaffer tape, like mud through toes.

He sensed the change in her and tried to soften it. ‘I like you too, Rose.’ But he said it flat, like ‘nice to meet you’, like ‘it’s for your own good’, like ‘we’re only trying to help’.

Pinkie Brown had clocked her like she clocked punters with cash and a conscience. She could read compunction like other kids read crisp flavours and Pinkie Brown had read her. He would never hold her hand or stir a pot or coo at a baby. There was no one in the wee clean house. There was no house. When she made up those stories about him, she had been pressing her hands together, convincing herself they were stuck. Well, they were unstuck now.

This was all there was. Dirt and piss smells and Sammy and filth. She shut her eyes tight.

‘Rose, I’ve see ye at school—’ Pinkie’s shadow was over her, his breath in her face.

Hope exhausted, she shoved him away.

Except she didn’t.

She meant to shove him, slap his shoulder in a flat cold rage. But he had moved and she’d forgotten the Rambo knife in her hand. The sensations registered in her elbow: teeth catching in meat. Warm wet flecked on her cheek. Disgust and panic made her jerk her hand down fast, sawing through whatever she was caught on. Down and down, the knife ground free. She dropped it, heard the chink of cutlery on stone. She shut her eyes tighter, pressing her lips together so that nothing splashed into her mouth.

A suck of air signalled the weight of him dropping to the ground. She heard him land, heard him grunt with surprise. She heard a splash on cobbles. The rubber sole of his trainers shrieked as he scrabbled against the floor. Then he was still.

She couldn’t look. The wet on her face began to cool.

Wary, she opened the eye closest to the wall. Normal. Dark, smelly, night. The stench of piss and fat. She looked down. The cobbles were molten.

Pinkie was on the ground and next to him lay the knife. He had fallen sideways, arms out, eyes half open. He lay completely still except for something moving under his neck, a brief throb that caught the silver light.

Rose watched the beat slow. She stood, barely breathing, looking sixteen, feeling twelve. A slow dawning realisation: a door had shut. She would never get away. They’d cut her up and leave her in a bag.

Keeping her hands on the wall behind her, she bent down, picked up the knife and tucked it into her sock like Pinkie said to. She slid upright against the wall, fingers sticky because her jeans and socks were covered with blood.

Rose blinked and turned off all her physical sensations, she knew how to do that. Then she clung onto the wall, edging backwards out of the alley, smearing bloody prints as she edged away.

She crossed the pavement to the car, not even looking to see if there was anyone there. Back inside the car she locked the door, pulled on the seat belt and sat still, looking blankly out of the window.

As soon as Sammy saw what she had done she was dead. Like her mum. A man on top of her. A fat, smothering man on top of her mum in the dark kitchen, heels kicking the floor, a fat man on top of her. She kept kicking, as if it would help. Kicking against air, looking for a thing to kick against. Rose closed the bedroom door and stood against it, watching the wee ones, praying that none of them would move or wake or make a noise. She stood behind the door until the man left. A drunk, fat, clumsy man, brushing against walls on the way out, never seen again, never found. Her mum had tried suicide many times, failed and was sorry she’d failed and yet she died kicking against air.

Rose sat in Sammy’s car and thought about that for an hour or a day or a minute, she couldn’t tell. Finally Sammy sauntered along the street. He walked up to the car, not looking in the alley. As he put the key in the door his plump belly flattened against the window. He would kill her. Or take her to the men who would kill her. Soon as he saw the blood on her she was dead, but he climbed back in without looking at her.

Sammy was bald at only twenty-four. He was fat too. He looked about fifty to her. She looked sixteen but he looked fucking fifty or something, disgusting.

‘Fucking hell, guess what?’ he said, looking out of the windscreen, his voice normal and loud and cheerful.

‘What?’ Rose asked, numb.

‘Princess Diana’s dead.’ He huffed a small laugh. ‘’Magine! Died in a car crash in Paris.’

Rose couldn’t see how that was relevant. ‘Fuck off,’ she said, mechanically.

He smiled at that and started the engine. ‘Aye. In a car crash.’

‘’King hell,’ said Rose.

Sammy flicked the lights on and pulled out into the deserted street.

‘Wow,’ he said as he drove. ‘Makes you think.’ He seemed excited about the whole thing. ‘She was young to die. And those boys. What d’ye think Charles’ll have to say about it?’

Rose wasn’t used to discussing current events with Sammy, or anything with Sammy. It made the night feel even more strange, him being chummy, like they always talked about stuff like this.

He nudged her with his fat elbow as they drove down Bath Street. ‘What d’you think? Charles: what’ll he be feeling?’

‘Dunno.’ She had to say something. ‘Gutted?’

‘Nah.’ He smiled as he took a turn at some lights. ‘Not gutted. He’s free to marry that other one now.’

He gibbered on about it, about the Queen and Prince Charles. Rose tuned out. She didn’t know about politics. She was so deep-down tired that she forgot Pinkie Brown. All she could remember was that she was dead and there was blood. Death filled her consciousness like an ache.

They were drawing up into the mouth of Turnberry Avenue. She reached down to absent-mindedly scratch away an itch from her ankle. As dampness registered on her fingertips she remembered: it was itchy because it was covered in Pinkie Brown’s blood and she had killed him. She froze, bent double, her fingers touching the car floor like a sprinter on the blocks.

The kids’ home was in a big Victorian villa at the heart of the posh West End. Sammy’s eyes flicked around the street, checking for staff or witnesses.

‘Good girl,’ he said, seeing her bent down, thinking she was hiding for him.

He parked two hundred yards further up the road, in the deep shadow under a big old tree. A branch sagged down in front of them under the weight of leaves, heavy, swaying, leaves flipping over and back in the breeze, silver, black. Orange street lights winked through but dawn was already bleeding into the night. Rose stayed down.

Sammy was chatting away now, she thought he’d had a smoke or something while he was out of the car.

He said, ‘One day you’ll grow out of me, hen, you know? You’ll move on in your young life, but I hope you’ll remember me kindly. I think the world of you, you know.’

He waited for the responsorial lie – I’ll never move on from you, Sammy, you’re the only one in the world who gives a fuck about me – but Rose didn’t say anything. She was thinking about air and kicking air and felt that same urge rise up in her.

Her eye fell on the posh flats outside, dark with curtains drawn. Sleeping in those flats were lawyers and students and dentists, refreshing themselves with warm, comfy sleeps. They’d wake up in a few hours, have calm breakfasts and then settle into Sunday. They’d get dressed and start writing letters to the council, complaining about the children’s home bringing down property prices.

‘What do you want for yourself, Rose?’ he said, repeating the tone, changing the sentiment. ‘From life, what do you want?’ And then he pulled on the handbrake as if he was planning to settle in for a long conversation.

‘Dough,’ she told the floor. She couldn’t get up. He’d see the blood.

‘Well, you’re going the right way about that, hen.’ He laughed softly. ‘What ye doing down there?’ He was looking at her now, his big stupid face kind of gawping.

What was she doing down here? The question howled through her. What was she doing all the way down here? Why was
she
all the way down here? The injustice of it struck her so suddenly and completely that she had to blink to warm her eyes. Why were other girls asleep? Why were they wearing ironed clothes and worried about the size of their thighs and learning piano and painting their fingernails and she was down here?

Rose looked back at him, her fingers creeping up her leg, drawing the jeans up with them until she felt the gaffer tape.

‘You’re in a strange mood – what’s down there—’

She bolted up against the air, swung the knife at his neck, in and out. She’d kicked and now she shut her eyes, curled up knees to chin, cowering into the passenger door.

Wet gasps and thrashing. Rain in the car. Sammy kicking, feet scrabbling against the pedals. He grabbed her hair and yanked her down to the side.

Slowly, his fingers relented, slid down her wet arm and disappeared. Rose waited as the thrashing slowed. Like her mum, Sammy’s legs were the last thing to still. The only sound in the car was a wet gurgle.

Sammy deflated, wilting onto the steering wheel, and the horn eased out a long droning blare.

Rose couldn’t hide indoors, she was covered in blood.

She couldn’t run away. When the police found the body of Sammy the Perv the first place they’d look was the children’s home; the first thing they’d notice was that she was missing. Even if she got away from the police the men would find her.

She’d never get away.

She opened her eyes and looked out of a window filigreed with blood, deaf to the skirl of the horn.

Outside the car lights burst on in flats. Curtains drew back. Angry faces looking for the car horn ripping their Sunday morning. Rose watched the street lights deferring to the dawn, flicking off, one by one.

She sat inside the bloody car and waited for the police to come.

2

Alex Morrow hated feeling this nervous. She hated it. A chair scraped the floor beyond the door and her stomach sent up an acid distress signal. She ground her teeth until they hurt, angry with herself. She knew her nerves were caused by public speaking and seeing Michael Brown again but knowing didn’t seem to help. Deep breathing didn’t help. Eating bananas and avoiding coffee hadn’t helped. She hated this.

The witness waiting room was dull. The walls were lined with yellow pine, the carpet navy blue. Six chairs, in matching pine and navy blue fabric, and a low table with some magazines no one would ever read. An empty water cooler gathered dust in the corner. Morrow imagined an anxious witness, waiting, taking drink after drink from the cooler to moisten a dry mouth and then needing the toilet as soon as they stepped into the witness box. Morrow’s mouth was dry too. She chewed her tongue.

Usually when she felt like this it would make her wonder why she put herself through it, but not today. She’d happily sit here, heart hammering, every day for a year if it meant a longer sentence for Michael Brown. She never wanted to have to interview that bastard again. He threatened her during interviews. He threatened Brian during interviews. He said he knew of paedophile rings who’d pay for the use of her children. He’d chanted her home address, goaded her about her sex life, he even tried to expose himself to her.

At first Morrow considered handing the interviews over to someone else. She was getting angry, felt soiled. But as they went on, as his pallor changed to prison white, as he lost weight and started wearing prison-issue clothes, she began to see him for what he was: a lifer in his death throes. He was out on licence when they arrested him. He’d been done for murdering his older brother, Pinkie, when he was just a kid. When word got out that he’d been loaning semi-automatic guns to junkies, there would be a suspicion that he wanted to get caught and sent back, that he just couldn’t cut it outside. The rest of his life would be shit if they believed that of him so he had to put on a good show, resist the firm hand as hard as possible. It was the lifer equivalent of final exams and Morrow wasn’t the audience, she was a prop.

They knew what the finale was going to be: Michael Brown would try to escape from this court. His Dutch lawyer had just commissioned a refurbishment of Brown’s villa in northern Cyprus. If he did manage to get there, she was sure, he would absent-mindedly come back to Glasgow for something and get done then. They didn’t know how, but they knew he was planning to abscond. A leap over the wall to the public gallery was a possibility.

She leaned back in her chair and thought her way through the security arrangements: a van of officers at the front and back of the court. Extra security staff downstairs. CCTV on every exit and a closed court. Two armed officers putting on a show in the lobby. The jury were sequestered for the full trial, kept in a hotel with heavy security. It was costing a fortune and there was to be no press coverage. Journalists would be allowed in, but only to make notes for later. It was easier than saying no, but effectively the same.