The Red Road (28 page)

A shadow, Michael Brown, got up from his bed, standing to attention as the guard spoke through a slot in another door. The shadow put his hands out and the guard came into the room, patting him down, finding nothing, ordering him to sit, which he did. The solicitor came in. She spoke for a few minutes, her hands clamped in front of her. Brown looked at the camera. Even in the poor definition of the small screen Morrow could see he was confused. The solicitor backed out of the room and the door was shut again. Brown put his hands to his head and curled over his stomach.

The solicitor appeared at the mouth of the corridor.

‘He says Atholl never asked him about fingerprints. This is the first he’s heard of it. He wants to know what it’s about.’

Atholl had never asked him. That meant he hadn’t agreed to it, but it also meant he’d never refused in the first place. Morrow didn’t know what to make of it.

‘That his fingerprints turned up at a murder scene—’ The solicitor was amused and incredulous, thinking that they were asking Brown to implicate himself in another murder, until Morrow explained: ‘This murder was committed
last week
.’

The solicitor nodded as she took it in. ‘Oh.’

‘We need to clear this up as soon as possible.’

‘Oh.’ She thought about it for a minute and then motioned to the guard to take her back through.

Michael Brown was standing up when Morrow and McCarthy came into the cell. Though his fists and jaw were clenched and he raised his chin defiantly at Morrow as she came through the door, she could see that he was wasting away.

‘Hello, Michael.’

He gave a curt nod.

‘How are you? I heard you’ve been ill.’

‘Crohn’s,’ he said, sneering.

‘Atholl’s not well, did you hear?’

‘In hospital.’

‘That’s what I heard. This is DC McCarthy, who you’ve met before.’

Brown didn’t acknowledge him. ‘Said it’s his liver.’

‘Yeah, must be painful.’ She nodded McCarthy to get the fingerprint machine out. ‘You’ve known each other for a long time, haven’t you?’

‘Since I was a wee guy. He defended my first case.’

‘Yeah, I read that in your notes.’

McCarthy had the machine out and turned it on. The fingerprint plate glowed red and Brown muttered, ‘My brother ...’ and turned his attention to the machine. ‘D’ye want me sitting?’

‘Whatever suits you, Michael, is fine.’

‘Think I’ll sit down ...’ He shuffled over to the bed, his steps uncertain, his knees staying bent like an old man’s. She felt for him, for the crap life he’d had and his frail condition. He reached behind himself, feeling for the bed, and helped himself down onto it. ‘So, this murder ...?’

‘The prints came up as yours, Michael, or something very like yours. We’re not that clear, but we need to eliminate you even though there’s no way you could have done it.’

‘So the prints machines are going mental?’ He grinned up at her, trying to look cheeky, but his gums were bad, pale and veined, retreating from his teeth. There was no threat about him now and not just because he was ill and twenty pounds thinner. Michael was resigned to his fate now.

‘Aye, well, we’ll see,’ she said, allowing him to think they were in trouble.

McCarthy held out the MobileID and instructed Michael to put the thumb of his right hand on first, then his index finger. Thank you. Next the middle finger, now the ring and the pinkie, thank you. And now the left hand.

They were as quick as they could be, though the machine had trouble with Brown’s left ring finger. It was slow because it was trying to make a wi-fi connection.

‘So,’ said Morrow to Brown, ‘you must have met Atholl at the height of his powers?’

‘How?’

‘Back in the late nineties, he was one of the greats, wasn’t he?’

‘For all the good it did me.’

The machine blinked and she tipped forward to read the screen. Connection failed. ‘Try again,’ she told McCarthy.

‘Who was your solicitor back then?’

‘Julius McMillan. He died ...’

‘Oh, I heard that. Just recently. Shame.’

‘Aye.’ Brown was looking at the ground and seemed tired. They should have left. They could get a better connection if they just went upstairs and McCarthy kept looking at Morrow, wondering why she wasn’t ordering them out.

‘Was that the first time you got your prints taken? Back then?’

‘Aye.’ Brown sounded faint.

‘Was it different, then?’

‘It was on
paper.
That’s how different.’

‘They took your prints onto cards back then?’

‘Aye, there was no computers in the cop shop lobby back then. They did ’em on cards and fed them into the machine.’

The tampering would never have shown on the database. The prints were switched before they were fed in.

‘Who took those prints, the ones on the cards?’

Brown looked up and met her eye, exhausted but aware that she was asking him something significant. ‘David Monkton. You ever heard of him?’

‘Don’t think so.’

‘Cunt,’ he said, soft as a sigh.

She remembered the photo of the boy in the dirty T-shirt and looked at Michael now. He would get out. When this came to light they’d throw him out of prison pending a retrial, desperate not to incur further legal liability for the unfair conviction. She could see how ill he was now, and Atholl said he was getting treatment. He’d die out of prison.

The machine declared that it couldn’t connect again.

‘We better go upstairs for this,’ said Morrow.

Michael stood for them leaving. ‘You’ll tell me, yeah?’ he said, first to Morrow and then turned to the solicitor, afraid to ask a favour of a cop.

‘We’ll let you know the outcome,’ said the lawyer.

They backed out of the cell, the guard coming last. He locked the door.

In the time-honoured tradition of prison, Brown waited until the door was safely locked before shouting that Morrow was a fucking cunt and he knew where she lived and her weans were cunts and he’d fucking get her.

Morrow stopped and turned back to the door. They had eaten Michael Brown and now she was going to make them spit him out.

‘OK, Michael,’ she said, a guilty hand on the metal door. ‘That’s fine, pal.’

Flummoxed, he paused and called, ‘See ye later, anyway.’

‘Aye,’ she knocked the door gently with the back of her hand, ‘I’ll see ye later.’

27

The Royal was a large teaching hospital in what had once been the centre of the city. Built next to the squat medieval cathedral, it overshadowed an elaborate Victorian necropolis, where monuments to great men vied with each other in death as they had in life. Now they were towered over by the modern additions to the hospital. It was an architectural shouting match that medical intervention won hands down, the brand new maternity ward, in grey and steel, stealing the light from the dark hill.

Morrow and Daniel went to intensive care and found Atholl’s name on a board. The nursing staff wouldn’t let them in. Atholl was unconscious. He had been in surgery. He had taken an overdose and the damage to his kidneys was irreparable. The nurse made a solemn face and said that all they could do now was wait. She nodded them to a woman sitting on a nearby chair.

Morrow knew immediately that she was Atholl’s wife. The woman was slim with messy, dyed blond hair, green eyes. She was the right age for Anton, self-possessed and swaggeringly informal, dressed in baggy charcoal linen slacks and a short grey V-neck sweater. She had a ring on her wedding finger with a diamond so big it looked fake.

Mrs Atholl was red eyed and curled tight with tension, arms crossed at the elbow, legs crossed and curled around each other. Morrow wondered if she would ever be able to unravel.

She was looking down the corridor toward Atholl’s room, a glass-walled box with a curtain half-drawn over the windows, the bright white light inside stirred and muddied by the movement of a nurse.

Morrow told Daniel to wait where she was and went over.

‘Are you Mrs Atholl?’

She looked up at Morrow, critically assessed her outfit, wondered if she was having an affair with her husband, dismissed the idea and then said, ‘Yeah, why, who are you?’

Morrow smiled. ‘I’m DI Alex Morrow. I was involved in the case he was trying just now.’

Mrs Atholl nodded, shuffled over in the chair to make room for Morrow to sit down next to her.

‘You met him for breakfast?’ She sounded suspicious.

‘Le Pain Provençal at seven a.m. They didn’t even have any croissants ready yet.’

The wife nodded. ‘He liked ...’ The past tense shocked them both. ‘Anton took the pills yesterday. Did he say anything to you?’

Morrow thought through the awful meeting. ‘We had coffee. He said I could meet one of his clients. He said he’d made mistakes—’

Mrs Atholl interjected a ‘hm’ to shut Morrow up and looked away. ‘You were friends.’ She clearly didn’t mean ‘friends’ but it was said without rancour.

‘Not really.’

She turned back, seemed to like that. ‘Not friends?’

‘No, we knew each other from court, he cross-examined me, and I’d asked him a favour, about the client, and he asked to meet me this morning—’

‘When did he ask you?’

‘Last night. Very late. Left a message on my phone.’

‘After he took them.’ She nodded, seemed to be trying to piece together his last few moments. ‘They think.’ Her accent was drawly and English, soft and easy, without all the guttural harshness of Morrow’s own.

They suited each other, the wife and the husband. Smart and sharp and charismatic. Anton Atholl had bothered Morrow. He’d made her wonder if she was in danger of having an affair, with him or someone else. It made her feel unsure of herself, as if, without meaning to, she might miss her footing and end up in bed with someone, shattering everything she had with Brian and the boys. But sitting here with Anton’s wife, a female version of him, she realised that she had just liked him.

‘Mistakes ...’ muttered his wife.

‘Mistakes,’ echoed Morrow.

They fell into a comfortable quiet, in the hum of beeps and buzz of lights until Morrow asked, ‘How is he?’

‘He’s, um ...’ She blinked hard. ‘His organs are shutting down one by one. He’s not coming out of it. The blessing is he’s unconscious.’ She looked down the corridor again towards his room, craning her neck towards him, pleading for something, a quick death, a miraculous recovery, Morrow couldn’t tell. ‘You got kids?’

Morrow nodded.

‘Anton and I have three boys. We separated. The boys are furious with him. I said “Daddy’s taken an overdose” and the oldest said “good”. What a thing to live with ...’

Her hand rose to her face, cupped her mouth, pressing hard on her lips. Morrow wanted to say something comforting but there wasn’t anything to say.

‘I see kids survive amazing things.’ It was stupid and banal but Atholl’s wife latched onto it.

‘Really?’

‘Oh, every day.’ Morrow struggled to think of an example. ‘Every day.’

The wife looked at her, waiting with her for her to think of something useful.

‘It’s the day-to-day things that do the damage, mostly,’ said Morrow, unable to deny the desperate woman some trite comfort. ‘Not the big stuff. Not really.’

She nodded to Morrow in the dark. Morrow expected her to be more cynical, more like Atholl. ‘I suppose so.’

She turned back to the room. ‘His drinking. That’s why I asked him to leave. Mood swings. We had a different man living with us every evening. Julius dying didn’t help. He was in the ward across the corridor.’

‘Julius McMillan?’

‘Yeah.’

‘What happened to Julius?’

‘Oh.’ She shook her head softly. ‘Julius ... He smoked like an absolute bastard, he was always on the brink of death, past ten years. If you heard him cough it sounded like oil being struck.’ She did a fair impression of someone gargling on phlegm but with a comic edge, did it quietly. ‘Quite disgusting, actually. He fell over and his lungs literally collapsed. No surprise, I don’t think. Astonished it hadn’t happened before, really.’

She turned back to facing the direction of Atholl’s room.

‘He
fell
and his lungs collapsed?’

‘Hm.’ She looked back at Morrow, clarifying by placing a hand flat on her breastbone. ‘Fell forwards and his lungs collapsed. They must have been half tar anyway.’

‘Right?’ Morrow tried to envisage a man falling onto his breastbone without lifting his hands to protect his face. ‘Did Julius drink too?’

‘No.’

Atholl’s wife still craning to the room, watching for changes while Morrow stared straight into the brutal whiteness of the linen room opposite. She waited until it seemed long enough. ‘He hasn’t woken up, has he? Has he said anything to you?’

The wife blinked hard and shook her head. Her lips twitched and then she said reluctantly, ‘They don’t think he’s going to ...’

Morrow stood up. ‘I’m sorry. I liked him.’

‘So did I,’ she said wistfully.

Morrow didn’t know how to end it and took out her card. ‘If I can do anything for you.’

The wife took the card without looking at it. ‘Cheers.’

Daniel and Morrow buzzed to get into the next-door ward, since they were here anyway. The nurse in charge welcomed them to the desk but refused to answer any questions about Julius McMillan unless she was given written authorisation from the hospital management to discuss the case. The consent would have to come through the family, she said. Morrow wasn’t that sure she remembered Julius McMillan. She got the impression that the nurse had been on a training programme about patient confidentiality and was treating this as an impromptu test.

‘We’re the police,’ she said.

Nevertheless, the nurse insisted, whichever agency they claimed to be from. Patients’ files were kept centrally and she was not in a position to release details about a patient’s care or condition, at this time.

She looked up, crossed her arms and her weight slid defiantly to her hip. A young medic was replacing a file behind her and rolled his eyes at the wall. Not a happy ward.