The Red Road (16 page)

‘What started Monkton off?’

Harry looked confused. ‘I dunno. Kid was crying, he’s only fourteen, at the end of the day. Monkton was driving, kept looking in the rear-view and just got more and more annoyed. Dunno.’

George tapped his arm with his forefinger. ‘What did Michael Brown do?’

Harry couldn’t look at George. One shoulder rose slowly to his ear. ‘What could he do?’

George didn’t know what to say. Harry was a good man, a good cop. George knew he would have pulled Monkton off the kid and got him back to the station. He knew he would have said a few words to the boy, that he was probably the person who called the staff member in and made sure they got the Yvonne lassie to come from the kids’ home and not just use the duty social worker.

‘Did he confess to the murder?’

Harry dropped his eyes to the table. ‘I never heard it.’

‘Monkton’s saying you heard it.’

Harry couldn’t meet his eye. ‘I know.’

‘So when did that first become the story?’

Harry sighed. ‘When we went to book him. Monkton said it as if we’d both heard it and just looked at me for confirmation. Stared at me until I nodded.’

‘Aw, for fuck’s sake, Harry.’

‘I’m stupid ...’ Harry tried to explain. ‘I just, I kind of thought that ...’

But George was aware of his own sins of omission, and it wasn’t the first time he’d brushed over irregularities to secure a clean case. He looked up and found Harry staring at the door.

There, on the other side of the room, stood Monkton. He was watching them. He wasn’t angry, or sorry, but he had a look on his face that George had used many times when faced with an accused he found distasteful. It was disgust, or disdain. It was a look that meant the civilian in front of him hadn’t the sense to know the damage they had done to the people around them. Suddenly, George wondered if Monkton was a very senior officer sent in to their department to test him. He knew it was a stupid idea but Monkton had authority and George didn’t know where it came from.

George had to remind himself that he outranked him. He stood up – he was a little afraid, he could admit to himself that he was – and walked over to him.

‘You.’ He poked Monkton in the chest as he walked past him. ‘You come with me right now.’

They were in a tiny interview room at the back of the station. George had told Monkton to sit but he didn’t.

‘I’d rather stand.’

‘I’m not interested in what you’d
rather
, son. Sit-the-fuck-down.’

Monkton sat down opposite him. The two men looked at each other.

‘You hit that kid.’

Monkton smirked and sat back, rolling his eyes like an insolent teenager.

George leaned over the table and shouted, ‘WHO THE FUCK DO YOU THINK YOU ARE?’ He wanted to hit him but didn’t. Monkton leaned away in his chair but held his eye. He wasn’t scared.

‘What if the kid didn’t do it, did you even think of that?’

Monkton shook his head. ‘He did it.’

George shouted again, ‘We don’t
know
that yet.’

Monkton said quietly, ‘Aye, we do, George. The prints match.’

George didn’t understand. ‘What do you mean “match”?’

‘His prints, the boy’s prints, are all over the alley. The kid’s prints.’ He held up his hands, fingers splayed, showing George his palms. ‘They match the scene.’

‘They
might
.’

‘No,’ said Monkton carefully, ‘they
do
.’ And he raised his finger, pointing at the ceiling. ‘It’s a match.’

Without speaking George stood up and walked out to the corridor. He shut the door carefully and walked down to the toilet, locking himself in a stall. He couldn’t even cry. He sat on the toilet pan, and blinked over and over at the back of the door. It was Sunday. Diana had died. No one was in. None of the admin staff were in. The boy’s prints wouldn’t get processed until Monday morning.

But Monkton had pointed at the ceiling, meaning it was being decided further up, somewhere. If George decided to pursue it he’d be setting himself in opposition to very powerful people. He’d lose rank, lose his sergeant’s pension. George didn’t know who Monkton was or who he knew or why he was so confident.

That’s when George decided to leave the service and take up his cousin’s offer on the paper shop.

13

Robert McMillan had only reached a lower level of consciousness when his stomach lurched violently. He sprang from the bed, looking for something to vomit into and found himself in a strange room. He looked left. He looked right, vaguely aware of a blond Persian carpet and giant double bed. A black tin waste bin appeared in front of his mouth and he emptied himself into it, following it to the ground as it was gently lowered in front of him.

He was on all fours, naked, vomiting green bile out of an empty stomach, unable to stop convulsive retching but suddenly aware of his surroundings. The waste bin was copper, lacquered black but chipped in places so that the copper glinted through. It looked like a military item, like something from the Boer War. At the bottom were the contents of his stomach, a lake of algal water reflecting frothy saliva clouds.

Death. He’d been trying to remember, keep it at the forefront of his mind, but it kept slipping away. Even now his attention was drawn by irrelevant details. The rug below was very fine, silk, pale peach with white and yellow flowers blooming on stems sewn from green and the faintest tint of blue.

‘That’s it.’

The voice was coming from behind him, unfamiliar, soft. And then a hand on his back, low. Too low for his waist. The warmth of a flat palm on his haunches. Though he was still being sick, though his nose was dripping from the force of his vomiting and his eyes were running, he was suddenly horrified by the intimate touch. He shot upright on his knees, his head and eyes roaring hangover objections.

He opened his eyes, blinking to clear the tears, and turned with great effort to look at the figure on his left.

Bright orange pubic hair under a small overhang of belly skin. Troublingly large pink nipples.

The hippy stood with his hands hanging by his sides now, unselfconscious, watching Robert impassively. ‘Make sure it goes in the bin,’ he said softly, looking at the vomit. ‘The rug’s worth thirty thousand pounds.’

He turned and padded across the room to the doorway. Robert watched his sagging buttocks until they disappeared down the dim corridor, then swung back to face the bin and threw up again.

A mug of coffee sat on the table in front of Robert, next to a deep Bristol Blue glass with water in it, and a strip of painkillers.

He stared hard at them, trying to keep his line of vision on the table. When he had stopped being sick the first thing he did was stagger across the bedroom and pull his trousers on before following the sound of the radio into the kitchen. The hippy, however, was still completely bare. He was not in the least bit bothered by being naked in the cold blue light of a cold blue day but sashayed barefoot, stomach out, baggy-arsed, oblivious to being seen.

‘Underfloor heating,’ he said, as if in answer to a question.

It took a moment for Robert to fit it into his head. Underfloor heating. He moved his toes. The slate was warm to touch. It was quite lovely.

He took two pills out of the packet, put them in his mouth and tried to chase them with as little water as possible. They got stuck sideways, the water melting them, and they powdered on the back of his tongue. He managed to swallow some more water but the bitter paracetamol aftertaste hung in his mouth, making the saliva glands in his cheeks yawn.

The hippy came to the table and sat down at right angles to him.

‘Do you remember last night?’ he said quietly.

Robert didn’t. He remembered being in the front room, drunk and sobbing and the hippy being there but not looking at him. Darkness in the pink drawing room. The firelight and another drink being poured. Standing somewhere, somewhere with a low ceiling, by a door. Then he remembered waking up, levitated from the bed by a wave of nausea.

Robert hadn’t eaten yesterday. He imagined himself sobbing, telling the hippy everything. Did he? The hippy couldn’t know. It was so convoluted, the story, Robert would have talked about the money and the photos of Rose and the SOCA report and that men were coming to kill him. The hippy would have been sickened if he’d told him. And he’d be frightened. He’d have mentioned the police by now.

‘You were a bit drunk.’

‘Was I?’ Robert felt sure there must have been hash cakes or pills or something, to make him black out that much. His throat was sore, maybe he had smoked something.

‘I need to go,’ said the hippy.

Robert drank his coffee and the pills kicked in. More remembered snapshots came to him. Falling. A square table with a glass on it.

They’d kill him when they found him here.

The hippy was back at the door to the kitchen, dressed this time. He was wearing a tweed cape with a matching hat and a bizarre pheasant’s tail feather sticking backwards out of it. ‘What time do your friends arrive?’

Robert didn’t know what to say. Five? Nine? Tomorrow? What had he said last night? And then finally, why lie? Was the man wearing women’s clothes?

‘They’re not coming. It’s just me.’

Robert couldn’t look at the hippy, stared nervously at his coffee cup, his eyes falling on the blue glass and the hippy’s reflection. The face looked warped in the glass, as if he’d had a stroke. Embarrassed, Robert looked back up and said accusingly, ‘Are you wearing women’s clothes?’

‘Am I?’ The hippy flattened his hands to his stomach and looked down at himself. ‘Dunno.’

‘Those are women’s clothes.’

‘OK.’ He stood straight. ‘Well-made, anyway.’

After a while he heard a door close and moments afterwards felt the cold from outside curl around his toes and realised that the hippy had gone out of a front door. This subterranean flat had its own door.

A growl outside, coming from the back of the house, and Robert looked up to see four fat wheels pass the window. The hem of a tweed cape and a pair of cowboy boots on a quad bike.

Moving carefully, trying to keep his head level, Robert stood up slowly and looked around the room. A large cream-coloured Aga, old and chipped with three doors that hung as if they were exhausted. A large pot sitting on top with a wooden spoon through the handle. Next to it a bread board and fresh white bread sitting on its nose to keep the cut side fresh.

His first instinct was to go over and smell the food but his stomach churned at the thought. He should get out of here.

Back in the bedroom he followed the trail of his clothes, shirt by the wardrobe, vest nearer the bed. He found one sock on the blankets and took a guess, feeling under the sheets and finding the other one halfway down. A sudden flash of memory: the two of them in the bed, drunk, were they hugging? Robert sat up.
Hugging? Naked
hugging? Was he remembering that?

No.

He’d imagined that. There were no physical sensations attached to the image. It wasn’t a memory. Or was it? No. Or was it? It felt like the image of him sobbing in the front room but it wasn’t likely, was it? But his sock was in the bed. The hippy held his hips as he vomited. And the hippy wore women’s coats and hats with feathers in them. That wasn’t normal but it didn’t seem gay when he did it, more like a sartorial mishap.

Cringing, Robert looked at the bed. No. God no, it hadn’t happened. Now he was worried that he’d even wondered about it. And then, as if recalling an onerous social obligation, it occurred to him that he was going to be murdered today, his life would end for ever, so there was no fucking point worrying about physical contact, hugging, inappropriate or otherwise.

He found his shoes outside the door, one sitting properly, the other on its side. He had everything. Then he looked over at the bin sitting at the side of the dressing table.

It was a beautiful object. The thin light of day filtered in through the low windows and hit the exposed orange copper, just chips here and there on the tar-like enamel. It had a rolled copper brim and was bashed on the side as if someone had kicked it. He walked over to it and looked in.

The hippy had emptied the vomit out and washed it and dried it and put it back where it belonged.

The clothes, the furniture, the house, everything the hippy had was second-hand, someone else’s stuff. He was wearing an Edwardian lady’s coat, cowboy boots and riding a bad ass, filthy quad bike. He was living in his ancestral castle, inhabiting his own history. Robert wished he could tell him about his father because the hippy, of all people, might understand the suffocating weight of his inheritance.

Robert held his bundle of clothes and went out to the hall. A door sat open to a set of stone stairs leading up inside the castle. He stepped outside the little underground flat. Shutting the door, he heard the lock snap behind him. He immediately felt colder.

He put his foot on the first step and found it there, waiting for him: the awareness of his own death.

14

The circular portico in front of the high court was busy with smokers. All of the cases started at ten prompt and everyone was anxious to get as much nicotine into their bloodstream as they could before they went in. Gowned QCs stood in small groups, smoking quietly next to the families of accused and the families of the wronged who all smoked with their eyes down, avoiding contact with one another. Whatever their differences, there was a consensus of shame in the smoking area.

Wheatly dropped Morrow in the car park. She scanned for Atholl’s face as she walked from the car park. She expected to see him. She didn’t know if he smoked, she had supposed that he would. She was looking for him, reading the faces, when a small white rectangle passed the very outer scope of her vision. She stopped, turned and saw a white van pulling into the salt market traffic. Wheatly hadn’t mentioned the reg number. He was drawing out behind her and she flagged him down.