The Red Road (25 page)

‘What did you think happened to his hand?’

‘I thought he punched Dawood.’

Morrow held her breath. ‘Dawood McMann?’

‘Yeah.’

‘He met him at McMillan’s?’

Mina looked at her. ‘Aye. Dodgy Dawood. Mr Glasgow. Ziz was ranting about him for a day.’ She sat up, calmer now. ‘Dawood’s shops are a cover, but you know that.’ Morrow didn’t, actually. ‘He brings in drugs from Pakistan. Everybody knows that. The carnage he causes back home, the people they fund to keep the channels open. Pakistan could be a rich country, you know, a safe country. All over the world, they’ve raised enough money to build three houses for every single family made homeless by the earthquakes but they’re still living in tents, children dying of cold and hunger. It’s bastards like Dawood who let that happen. But you can’t prove it because he never touches anything, someone else holds the money, someone else holds the drugs, the guns, the everything. Every time you get someone it’s another monkey running errands for him. Ziz didn’t want the money he’d raised being part of that.’

‘So he got in a punch-up with Dawood and then what happened?’

‘I thought nothing had happened.’ She shrugged. ‘Next day he got a call from McMillan’s office, there was a problem with the access code. It was late at night, we didn’t know McMillan was dead already. Ziz went to meet someone in his office. He never came home.’

‘The office is quite near the Red Road flats, isn’t it?’

‘Yeah.’ She smiled sadly. ‘He looked out at it from his window. Saw the hard hats and the yellow vests they all wore. He used to say if that was in Pakistan families would be living in it.’ She looked up. ‘You seen the state of it?’

‘Yeah, went up it.’

‘Bloody hell.’

‘Yeah. Terrifying. Thought I might need airlifted off.’

‘Wouldn’t bother Ziz.’

‘No?’

‘Nah, he was part of the rescue effort in 2008. He’d climbed through collapsed buildings and everything.’

‘They said he ran up there and someone followed him.’

‘Yeah, he’d be trying to get away. Wouldn’t think they’d be brave enough to follow him.’

‘But they did.’

Mina nodded slowly at her desk. ‘They did.’

Out in the car Morrow checked her phone and found a voicemail from Anton Atholl. He sounded drunk. ‘I have something important to tell you. Please meet me for breakfast,’ he said, ‘seven a.m. in Le Pain Provençal in Argyle Street.’ He pronounced the café’s name in a thick, guttural French accent.

23

Rose stood at the window, stirring a pot of spaghetti hoops with a wooden spoon. Behind her, sitting across from each other at the table, the children were playing a game of Guess Who?

She knew what she was doing with the toast and the spaghetti hoops, feeding them comfort food because she wanted to be comforted herself. Normally she disapproved of those fat nannies who crammed cakes and biscuits and sweeties into their children’s mouths, who coaxed them quiet with the promise of what they themselves wanted. A sit down. A DVD holiday. But it was all right. It was all right to do that sometimes. She was using a pot instead of the microwave, dirtying it and stirring to make herself feel as if it was any effort at all. It was a nice pot, a little round-bellied one that looked homely and well used, to add to the lie she was telling herself.

Hoops on toast. No nutrition in them. At least beans were a vegetable. The children were delighted. So delighted they weren’t even fighting about Guess Who? yet.

She looked at the window and caught her own eye, flinching at the sight of herself. She began to stir faster. An avocado bath. Fast breathing in a pissy alleyway. She shut her eyes tight and held her breath. They were coming thick and fast now. Worse and worse. Dust on her face in the Red Road, in her nose and ears and hair. She opened her eyes. The sauce was sticking to the side, drying and turning a deep bloody red. Her stomach lurched but she managed not to react to it. She reached down carefully and turned off the gas burner.

The fight had begun behind her. Jessica and Angus were arguing with Hamish about their question, hair, it’s got hair and the hair had sick in it, dried sick in it and he was fucking her anyway though she had been sick in her hair and she was trying to tell him she’d been sick but he just kept pumping into her, nudging her up the dirty, the dirty bed, and she could see her childish hands on the bed, Jessica hands, kids’ hands and the stupid cheap ring Sammy’d given her out of a cracker or something.

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 own 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.