The Red Road (26 page)

The hiss of the oxygen into the mask made his eyes water. He turned his face away, leaning his ear to the lips.

I love you, son. That was what he expected, as if Julius would have sat through the same heart-warming romcoms Francine favoured and would know the script. Instead, ‘The back safe. Remember: left-hand corner of the safe at the back. Button. Press—’

Julius stopped. Thinking he might be passing out, Robert lifted the mask to put it over his face again but Julius’s left hand batted it away.

‘Left-hand corner right at the back. Reach in. Press once. Wait for a count of eight, press again. The code:
your birthday
.’

Robert looked at his father. Julius hadn’t even opened his eyes. He seemed still now. Tentatively, Robert lifted the mask and put it back over his father’s mouth and as he did Julius said the line, the three syllables: I love you.

Robert fell back into his seat. He hadn’t expected it. After all this time, and all this distance between them, he began to sob and covered his face and just then all the alarms went off and the staff ran in. Robert ended up against the wall and somehow, by inches, in the corridor. And then again by inches in the café downstairs, drinking tea and waiting for news from the emergency surgical ward. It was two fifteen a.m. when they called down for him. Bad news, I’m afraid.

Robert didn’t even really remember going to the office. He wasn’t there and then he was there. They told him to go and get some sleep but he was afraid to go home because he knew he would sleep, soundly, untroubled. He stayed awake, feeling sure that dizzy with tiredness was about as close to really upset as he would get.

The safe. The button. The back of the safe swung open into a small lighted corridor.

Climbing in, Robert was certain that he would find the usual sort of things lawyers kept in their safe: disputed papers, some bits of evidence relating to old cases that they didn’t want anyone else ever to find but needed to keep. Some jewellery for safe keeping because of the value or because it was stolen and couldn’t be sold, maybe some cash. But there had to be something special in Julius’s safe because it was a second safe, a secret safe. And because Julius had built this room for it, under the street.

It was a crappy little safe. He typed in the first four digits of his birthday. It didn’t open. He tried the last four, the middle four, nothing worked. Stumped, he sat back. Why did his father send him here? And then he realised. He felt sick with jealousy when he realised. His father’s eyes were shut when he said I love you. He was almost unconscious. Those last words were not for Robert. He thought he was talking to Rose.

Weeping softly, Robert reached forwards and typed in the last four digits of Rose’s birth date. The door fell open.

He covered his face and cried. Always something between them, Rose and Julius. Always something. He chose Rose over Robert time after time.

Finally he stopped crying, not because he was less sad about it, but because he ran out of energy. He pulled the safe door open and looked in.

Bricks of cash, shrink-wrapped. A solid square of them. If each brick had five grand in it, he remembered thinking, even if they had ten grand in them, there were only eight of them. It was a very small safe. He took them out and found, underneath, a bright red double entry cash book, the worn cardboard cover held shut with a thick elastic band. The spine was facing him, the edge bald grey cardboard. He took it out and opened it at the last page that had writing on it.

Six columns: a name, all Indian or Pakistani probably, his father knew a lot of the Pakistan community here. Then a number: forty, twenty, 0.9. The name of a city, he recognised some of them: Quetta, Karachi, Rawalpindi. Then a long number in a column headed
Access Code
, half letters, half numbers. The next column had nothing but two or three letters, many of them recurring. Then, in the final column, a cross or tick, added later in different pens. The total was added up at the bottom of the number columns on each page with a plus or minus underneath. All scored out. Total paid.

Robert flicked through the book. Month by month, going back many years, fifteen or so years. All the pages were half filled out and the increasingly exorbitant sums were paid at the bottom of the page. Over the years whoever-that-was had paid vast sums of money to the owner of the book.

Robert looked at the writing: it was Julius’s hand, starting in pencil, changing to biro sometimes, then fountain pen as the numbers got bigger. Sometimes he introduced a red biro for the final summing up. Sometimes he stayed with the fountain pen. Towards the last ten pages the writing got less certain, less firm. Back to pencil, faint scratches. He had been ill before the fall. They knew his health was precarious.

Robert dropped the book to his lap. It wasn’t good, whatever it was. Not at all good. His father had been sending money to Pakistan, informally, illegally. What did Julius want Rose to do with it?

Robert realised then: Julius wanted Rose to burn the ledger. The payments were illegal payment and Rose had known about it all along. She knew and he didn’t. Julius chose her, to tell her, involve her and not Robert.

Why always her? Was she more dependable than Robert? Smarter than him? Or because they were involved in something more than illegal, something venal that Robert would never agree to. He had always been honest, and ethical and honourable. Had they not? He was contemplating whys when he looked up and saw a small envelope on the floor of the safe.

Idly, he reached in and lifted it out, thinking about the book while he took out the pictures. He saw then that they were involved in things he could never be a part of. Blackmail, hateful business. Robert was better than that. He was a better person than that. He couldn’t believe they had sunk so low. It was from this high ground that he had phoned the police, was put through to the Serious and Organised Crime Unit and a woman who told him in a bored voice that the only way to report the illegal movement of money, the only way, was to fill out the form and email it in.

Remembering that moment, the photos in his hand, the breath stuck in his chest, put him back in the cold kitchen in Mull. Remembering the images made him pull his foot off the chair and stamp it on the ground. Weedily, but still a stamp to bring back the pain.

He was wincing at it, his eyes shut tight, realising that he had been here for over an hour, hoping that when he opened his eyes he would stop seeing that image of Rose’s young face.

The hippy at the window made Robert jump. He was up too close to the glass, his whole face framed by one of the small panes like a grotesque picture.

Seeing that he had startled Robert, the hippy raised a hand in greeting. It filled another pane.

‘Come in,’ said Robert, gesturing in case he couldn’t hear.

He came in through the French doors, bringing with him a blast of cold from outside. He sat down at the table, looking at Robert’s ankle.

‘Ouch,’ he said.

‘What
is
your name?’ said Robert, sounding short tempered because he was in pain.

‘Oh.’ He looked at the ankle again. ‘Simon.’

Robert held his hand out and they shook. ‘Hello, Simon.’

‘Yeah.’ Simon pointed at the fat ankle, back on the chair again. ‘Ouch. And your face.’

‘I went for a walk and fell.’

‘Oh.’

It was getting dark in the kitchen. Suddenly it was the time when someone should have put on the light. Simon stood up and put his hat on.

‘Come up the hill on the quad bike? For a smoke? Tide’s coming in, the dolphins’ll be out soon. We can see them up there.’

Robert smiled. It sounded like a great idea. ‘Is there room on the bike?’

Simon walked off to the corridor. ‘Jumpers.’

The rain was off and the sun was setting, a burning orange shimmer on a navy blue horizon. They sat on plastic sheeting on the ground, Michelin men in their many jumpers. The island of Coll was silhouetted on the horizon, deep black with white lights at the shore, sparse enough to be earthbound stars.

The wind was fierce up here though. No trees grew this far up. The hill was bald green grass defiantly swishing back and forth. Simon had parked the quad bike twenty feet away, in a rocky corner. The wind, he said, pointing up the hill, could knock it over when they weren’t sitting on it. It could roll all the way down the hill. They walked and hopped the rest of the way, into the wind, faces tight against it.

A wind so sharp, thought Robert, it could strip a soul of original sin.

Now his swollen ankle was out in front of him, resting high on a rock. He took the spliff from Simon’s hand, cupping the red tip to stop the wind blowing it out, and took a drag. It scratched down through his throat, a pain familiar from last night. He remembered smoking downstairs now, at least his throat remembered. That was what had happened. He’d been very drunk and blacked out and smoked some weed or something and didn’t know and that was why it all seemed so muddled and crazy.

Simon was sitting cross-legged, hands tucked inside his tweed cape. He was watching the water for the dolphins to break. His hair was pulled back, ponytail thin as a rat’s tail. The wind held it horizontal with his shoulder, whipping his face sometimes. He’d taken his hat off for safe keeping.

Robert felt the burning warm flood through him, felt the tingle in his swollen ankle change to a sensation of warmth, a tickle on his skin. He imagined the skin stretching wide, wide, wide over a balloon, so wide the pores were the size of biro tips, comical. He thought of Hamish and Angus as men, holding his ankle as he died and seeing the marks of this particular adventure on his skin. It made him feel nice. He missed them, his kids. He missed Jessica.

Simon leaned forward, touching the ground with his forehead as if he was bowing to the setting sun, making Robert smile. But he stayed down, his forehead on plastic.

‘YOU’RE AGILE,’ shouted Robert over the sound of the wind.

And then, as if to prove his point, Simon stayed there, absolutely still.

‘SIMON: I SAID “YOU’RE VERY AGILE”.’

He must do yoga, thought Robert, noticing the black shadow creeping out from under Simon’s face.

‘DO YOU DO—’ A sudden flash of blinding, brilliant white light blotted out the world as the bullet passed through Robert’s head. He didn’t even have time to wonder before he fell sideways, face down on Simon’s back, bleeding onto him.

25

Through the gloomy blue morning Morrow ran, crouching, under heavy fire from the rain until she reached the coffee shop doorway. She was up far too early to feel altogether well and was proactively angry with Atholl. He probably wouldn’t be there, she felt, might not even remember calling her. Even if he was it was presumptuous, asking her to come at this hour, as if she had no calls on her time but the summoning of an earl.

The place was only technically open. Through the glass door she could see staff dressed in stiff white aprons, one handing metal trays of defrosted raw croissants over the counter to another. They had ovens behind the counter and pumped the smell of fresh baking out into the street to bait passers-by. The furniture was French rustic, scrubbed pine tables and stone floors, so ill-suited to the mucky damp of Glasgow as to seem almost sarcastic.

She opened the door and stepped in to glares from the staff, their morning faces as raw as the pastry.

Atholl was slumped in a far corner, watching the door for her. He looked as if he was between two worlds: one side in a warm Provençal kitchen, the other stuck to the rain-warped window. His eyes were unfocused, redder than usual, and he looked as if he had brushed his hair, perhaps for her, which she found ominous. He saw her, raised his chin and tried to smile but couldn’t pull it off. He raised a greeting hand instead.

Hung-over. She worked her away around the empty seats to his table, remembering Brian offering her another glass of market research wine the night before and how they’d decided they both actually wanted a cup of tea instead. She was ready for a rant at Atholl if he’d forgotten why he’d asked her here.

He tried to stand up to meet her but his knee buckled and he dropped back in his chair.

‘You been out for a run already?’ she said.

His smile worked this time. ‘Come rain or shine. Old army habit.’

She sat down opposite him, shedding her wet coat, wondering why she liked him at all.

Atholl had a small pile of creamy yellow vellum envelopes on the table, sealed and face down, square like invitations, not business letters. The colour of the envelopes matched the whites of his eyes, yellow and so dry she could see the grainy texture of his eyeballs.

‘God, you look terrible.’ She noticed her accent was more succinct than normal. ‘Have you even been to bed?’

Atholl gave a queasy smile. ‘I seem to have contracted a stomach bug, I think. I’ve been ill ...’

They weren’t in court. They weren’t even in the building and she felt that maybe she could just say it. ‘You need to stop drinking. It’s killing you; I feel like I’m actually watching it happen.’

He grinned.

‘What’s funny about that?’

Then he gave a wheezy laugh.

‘Heard it before?’ She leaned over the table at him. ‘A hundred times, I know, but I can see your eyeballs drying out, for pity’s sake.’

Atholl chortled to himself, wiping the rough wooden table back and forth. ‘Ah, Alex Morrow.’ He looked up at her. ‘Alex. Alexandra.’ His eyes weren’t dry any more, they were damp but he didn’t look sad. Morrow met his stare and, for a moment all too fleeting, read there the course of a relationship they might have had if things had been different: laughs and fights and an ocean of tenderness. She remembered Brian suddenly and dropped her gaze to the table.

Atholl reached his hand into her field of vision and let it sit on the table. She didn’t move. His hand slithered back to his side.

‘Coffee?’

‘Aye,’ she said in her own voice, ‘go on then.’

Atholl raised his hand to a server behind the counter and the man put the tray down. ‘No,’ called Atholl, ‘no need to come over. Coffee for two, please.’