The Red Road (5 page)

She was a little surprised he was young enough to have studied under McMillan. ‘You trained under him? I thought you were the same age, sort of ...’

He tutted playfully. ‘I’m not as old as I look,’ he said, ‘I’ve just had a lot of adventures. No’ – suddenly stern – ‘we must all go. Lend a little support to poor Margery. She’s his wife. I’m sort of looking for people to go with ...’

She wanted to leave, get back to the office right now but was worried that it would seem abrupt and arouse his suspicion. ‘Did they have kids?’

‘One.’ He looked away, towards the wall of light. But for the daylight catching she wouldn’t have noticed the thin tear brimming in his eye. ‘A son.’

He had a nice profile, a good big nose.

‘I have to go.’

Atholl bowed from the neck and backed away. ‘See you tomorrow.’

She walked off, slow-clapping herself through the metal detector. She took the revolving door and turned to the car park. From the corner of her eye she saw Atholl through the big window just as a white van pulled out and obscured her view. She walked on towards her car, glancing back to see if Atholl was still standing there, watching her.

He wasn’t.

3

1997

It was half ten on Sunday morning and Julius McMillan was watching the television news. Princess Diana was dead. Great racking sobs spewed up from his abdomen like hiccups, his eyes ran, tears dripping into his open mouth; he didn’t even know he was capable of such depth of emotion. He was crying so hard he couldn’t manage to light a cigarette. His eighteen-year-old son, Robert, and Margery, his wife, were still in bed, either asleep or avoiding him. He couldn’t let them see him crying. He wouldn’t be able to explain why he was so upset. He was afraid that if they found him and asked him he might blurt something about the clients’ missing funds: the disaster looming on his own horizon.

Diana, betrayed and alone, always pictured alone. Betrayed but hopeful, still looking for love. She still cared about other people, about landmines and Aids patients. She loved all the people. She had boyfriends, was still looking for love. But no one thought about how she felt. No one cared how alone and overwhelmed she felt. No one knew how frightened she was sometimes. Diana must have had staff who loved her – they couldn’t know her and not love her – but Julius had no one. He was in a bind, needed money and Dawood McMann was circling, hinting that he knew about his situation, offering a way out.
Help me to help you.

What Dawood wanted would be illegal. He was a strange character – Julius couldn’t see his endgame at all. He floated from one set to the other – lawyers, city councillors, union leaders – never settling, never belonging. But he was half Scottish, half Pakistani, maybe he was used to straddling and that’s just what he did.

Julius knew one thing though: Dawood was picking him because he knew he was desperate. The investment firm looking for their money back must have told Dawood about it, that they were one week away from starting a legal action against him.
I
want you because you know people.
Julius knew everyone.
This will need a number of people.
He kept saying it – a number of dedicated, loyal people.
It
is a long-term thing, a good thing. Help me to help you, Julius.

But Julius couldn’t. Anton Atholl worked for Julius, he knew McMann wanted a deal. If there was a whiff of a deal between them, Anton Atholl would tell the police. Atholl had a thing about Dawood McMann. He told Julius not even to talk to the man. He had
heard
things about him, wouldn’t go into detail. Atholl hated McMann so much that Julius felt he’d do time himself, just to fuck McMann over. Julius explained it to Dawood: Atholl won’t go along with it, he just won’t. Let me help, said Dawood. A week later he gave Julius the photograph. A polaroid. Atholl drunk. Very drunk. It was revolting but not illegal. It didn’t help Julius at all.

The phone rang, jagged and loud. Julius jumped up to get it, afraid they’d hear it upstairs, come downstairs and catch him crying.

A murder case at Stewart Street station. Juvenile, a girl, care-home case, found in a car with a dead man, saying she did it. Could he come in?

Twenty-five minutes, he said and hung up, glad of something to think about other than Diana dying in Paris, alone.

He went to his downstairs bathroom. No one else used it and he kept his shaving things and his toothbrush in there, so that he didn’t have to disturb his son or his wife. They all kept out of one another’s way as much as possible. The bathroom was in an awkward part of the house, through the cold-floored utility room. Black spots of mould flourished on the silicone seals around the never-used bath. One of the bulbs over the mirror had gone ages ago. He had to shave in virtual silhouette.

He ran the water until it was warm and put the plug into the sink before looking up at himself. Red eyes, a weak, twitching mouth and he saw what Diana had seen the night they met.

It was years before, at a charity ball, a dreary affair in the Royal Academy in Edinburgh. She sat at a distant table, a blond smudge next to other smudges. Julius didn’t care much. After dinner they gave the loyal toast. Julius crossed his fingers as he drank it and then lit a longed-for cigarette. Diana stood and read a faltering speech while Julius smoked and calculated his journey back to Glasgow.

Somehow they all came to be standing as she left the room. She came past Julius’s table and stopped.

‘I saw you smoking,’ she said.

‘I was gasping,’ he said, his mind still on the journey home.

She smiled right at him, taller than him, luminous. ‘
Gaspers
,’ she said. ‘Terribly bad for you.’ Terribly bad for you. Not carping, not like that, tender, as if she was concerned.

Then, quite suddenly, Julius was in the room, in Edinburgh, with Princess Diana. She was beautiful. Long necked, a choker of small pearls, six or eight rows of them, such a long neck. She wore a purple dress, sleeveless, the skin of her arms was bronzed and flawless.

She left, gliding through the assembled tables, but Julius stayed in the room with her. He never told anyone how he felt about that. He would have been ashamed. He was a Republican, anti-Royalist by instinct and tradition. But he couldn’t deny it to himself: the sensation that he had met someone much, much better than him and that she had cared whether or not he smoked.

Now she was dead.

Julius saw the footage of people sobbing at the gates of Kensington Palace, strangers clutching one another, lucky not to live in cynical Glasgow, a city exhausted of sorrow.

He lathered soap on his cheek and scratched it off, aware that the blade was wrong, that a flaw was scratching tiny welts in his skin, but too sad to stop. He splashed water on his cheeks, washing the soap off his sore face and patting it dry. The towel smelled faintly sour.

Defeated, he lit a cigarette and examined the grief-stricken face in the mirror. You could tell, just looking at him.

He would tell the police officers that he was hung-over. He took the cigarette out of his mouth, lifted his shoulders as if his head hurt. He lowered his eyelids into a half wince. A hangover. That’s what he would say. If Diana came up he’d say he’d heard about it and then move away. He couldn’t discuss her with any of them. He just couldn’t.

Julius finished his cigarette in the corridor outside the holding cell interview room. He glanced in at Rose Wilson through the wired glass in the viewing slot.

The glass was scratched on the inside, almost opaque, but he could see that she was tiny. She was sitting at a steel table. When they found her she was covered in blood and her clothes had been taken as productions. The prison issue hung off her, as if she’d shrunk in them.

Julius dropped his cigarette and stamped it out, nodding to the officer on duty. The cop came over and took out his big brass key, fitted it in the door and opened it.

She looked up at him.

She had been covered in blood when they found her. They’d given her a basin to wash in but no mirror. Her face was washed with watered blood. Every future furrow, every crease that would one day be, picked out in dried crimson. It was in the folds of her forehead, the laughter lines around her mouth, the prophetic tracks of sorrow under her eyes. This newborn ancient looked up at Julius with the eyes of a disappointed mother.

Aware that he was stalled at the door, he dropped his chin and forced himself to walk into the room, taking in what he could bear to look at. She wore a baggy grey T-shirt and a pair of grey tracksuit bottoms, rolled up at the ankle into a fat rim. Her hair was brown, quite short. It looked as if she had cut it herself because it was shorter at one side than the other. She was miniature enough to evoke wonder, like a baby’s fingernails, but these fingernails were black with dried blood.

The door scraped shut behind him, the lock crunched closed as he sat down opposite her. He didn’t want to look up. He busied himself getting a notebook and pen out of his pocket, putting them on the table, straightening them.

She was looking straight up at him. ‘The fuck are you?’

‘I’m Julius McMillan. Mr McMillan. I’m your lawyer.’

He had brought her a bar of chocolate. He always did with young offenders. He brought fags for the older kids. That was all it took, a cheap gift made them loyal customers for life. That’s why he liked young offenders, they kept the office number and used it again later, and there nearly always was a later. He had clients he’d been representing for twenty years. But Rose Wilson didn’t look as if she could be bought by chocolate.

‘So, Rose, what’s the story here?’

She looked at the wall. She raised a hand and scratched her cheek, flaking off a dusting of rust. He saw then that she wasn’t old, didn’t look old. She was nothing special, just a child. He picked up his pen.

‘What age are you?’

She smiled at the wall but her smile looked bitter because of the lines on her face. ‘Fourteen,’ she said. ‘But I look sixteen.’

She looked a hundred today.

Julius wrote it down. ‘And where do you live?’

‘
Live?
’

‘
Stay
,’ he said, using the vernacular. ‘Where do you
stay
?’

‘Turnberry.’ She watched his notebook, waiting for him to write it.

‘The kids’ home?’

‘Kids’ home, yeah.’

He wrote it down for her. ‘And how long have you been staying there for?’

‘Two year.’

These were questions he could answer with a glance at her file but he was trying to get her talking as a warm-up to the difficult events of the charge. When she got going he would be able to jot it down, put in a guilty plea, get out and think about this Dawood situation.

‘You like it there?’

She raised a shoulder. She was looking at the wall again.

‘Is it OK?’

‘Mm.’

‘Like the staff?’

She shook her head a fraction. ‘Mm.’

‘Chocolate?’ Julius put the Dairy Milk bar on the table and pushed it over to her with his fingertips.

He watched her looking at it. She wanted it but didn’t take it. Instead she looked at the door, suspicious. He followed her eye-line. She was making sure the viewing slot was open. She looked at the chocolate again, wanted it again, but shook her head and shrank back from it.

‘I’ll leave it there in case you change your mind,’ said Julius casually. ‘Do you smoke?’

She shook her head. ‘Makes me chuck.’ She was very suspicious now and sat further back in her chair. ‘You smoke. I can smell ye. Spark up if you want.’

‘So, what happened to you last night?’

‘Went out ...’

McMillan didn’t say anything.

‘Went out ...’ she said again, waiting for an interruption that never came.

‘OK.’ He put his pen down. ‘Let’s start with what you have told the police about what happened last night.’

Desolate, her mouth hanging open, she stared beyond him to the wall. ‘Nothing ...’

‘You’ve said nothing? They’ve questioned you, haven’t they? Brought you into an interview room and taped you talking?’

‘Found me in his car.’ She was shocked, drawling. ‘Haven’t been taped.’

He knew then that they had so much overwhelming physical evidence against her that they didn’t need a confession. ‘Did you tell them you did it?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Did you do it?’

‘Yeah.’

‘What did you do?’

‘Stabbed him.’

‘Where did you get the knife?’

She fell back into shock. Slowly her forehead rose to meet the map of bloody wrinkles.

Julius put his fingertips on the chocolate bar and pushed it closer to her. ‘Eat that now.’

She picked it up and fumbled with the wrapper, her fingers unfocused. He took it off her and undid it, pulling the entire wrapper off and handing it over to her. ‘Eat at least half.’

She did eat half and he watched her. She didn’t swallow because her mouth was dry but kept chewing, waiting for her saliva glands to start working. The habit of compliance. She had been ordered around a lot.

‘You’ve been in care for a few years since your mum died, haven’t you?’

She looked up at that, dutifully chewing dry mud. ‘
Julius
McMillan,’ she said, rolling her chocolate-stuck mouth around the strange name. She flicked a finger from him to herself. ‘What’s this?’

‘What?’

‘This.’ She flicked again, faster. ‘The point of this.’

‘I’m here to help you.’

A sharp smirk, quick as a blink. ‘
Help
me? How’s my life not going to be shit anyway?’

He looked up. There was no self-pity, no real sorrow. Rose Wilson was resigned to desolation. She had fully, without rancour, surrendered to the pity of life. He saw her next to the car in the Paris tunnel, shrugging. He pictured her at the gates of Buchenwald with her hands resting in her tracksuit pockets, sorry about the queues of women and children, but accepting. He saw her through every catastrophe in history, standing at the side, an impassive witness.