Blood, Salt, Water (7 page)
They were assembled around the same table in the same sterile meeting room.
Morrow gave her report in bullet points: a transcript of the entire Walker interview would be available tomorrow morning.
• The Fuentecilla kids made the missing persons call this a.m.
• The bank had been contacted and were checking RF’s account for withdrawals.
• Traces were being conducted for the mobile phones.
• Mr Y is Frank Delahunt. Family report that he is the company lawyer. They were tracing him right now.
• Walker had consented to allow them access to the office. They were currently looking for officers with forensic accounting diplomas who were available tomorrow morning. They’d get them into the Injury Claims 4 U office and gather as much intel as possible.
She continued:
• Martina Fuentecilla suggested that Roxanna might have driven to London to confront Maria Arias. There had been some suggestion of a possible romantic connection between Maria and their father, Manuel Vicente.
In conclusion:
• Still missing, still no reason to suspect foul play.
She looked up. That was about it.
Somewhat glassy-eyed after listening to her report, CS Saunders pushed a sheet of paper over to her. It had a photo on it. A security shot of Roxanna from inside a cash machine. The bank had sent the jpeg as Morrow was driving here.
Fuentecilla had withdrawn cash from an ATM yesterday at twenty past two in the afternoon. It was in Stone, Staffordshire, four hours south of Glasgow down the M6. She took out fifty quid and there had been no charges to the card since then. Her normal pattern was fifty quid a day.
So, concluded DCC Hughes, Martina is correct: Roxanna was on her way south. The car GPS had been traced, all the way down to the M1. Just after the cash withdrawal, Fuentecilla had pulled into a car park in Luton and the tracker was turned off manually.
Morrow looked at the cash point picture. It was taken from an unflatteringly low angle with a fisheye lens. Her mouth was slack as she punched in her PIN. Her hair was in disarray, her eyes puffy.
Morrow was disappointed in her. Even if Roxanna had only gone to London to shout at a love rival, she hadn’t phoned the kids at four fifteen to reassure them. She could have rung. She hadn’t called last night either. Morrow looked at the picture again. Roxanna looked frightened.
Saunders and Hughes were still talking. CI Nolly Dent was doing his customary obsequious nod. Morrow had to turn the picture of Roxanna on its face to stop her eyes straying to it. She tried hard to listen and pay attention but was aware of her hand resting on the cheap, porous paper, of the moisture from her palm warping it.
The bosses were telling each other that Fuentecilla didn’t know anyone in Staffordshire or Manchester or Birmingham, the major cities nearby, so they could conclude that she was heading straight for London. Morrow should be ready to fly down in the morning to question Maria Arias, before the Met heard that Roxanna had been there. The Met and the Serious Fraud Office were closing in on Juan Pinzón Arias’s money. A freeze on his accounts was imminent. The chief didn’t want the seven million in the Fuentecilla case being requisitioned into the Met’s proceeds pot. The chief got up as he finished talking and gave them all a stern, warning look: find the money before the Met do.
Outside, Morrow gave McGrain his orders for the morning. Get this ready, trace that, bring your passport because you and I will probably have to fly to London. McGrain listened but was shaking his head, a gesture so small it seemed almost to himself.
‘I’ve got tomorrow late off.’
‘Can’t you change it?’
‘Kid’s hospital appointment. Wonky hip.’
She didn’t like that. ‘We’ll be back on time,’ she said, knowing they probably wouldn’t be.
‘Can’t take the chance, ma’am.’ He held his breath, not at all comfortable about standing up to her. ‘We’ve been waiting for three months for an appointment . . .’
She could insist. She wanted to. She saw herself suddenly as one of those old bastard bosses who were in charge when she was coming up, throwing their weight around because they could.
‘Right. Tell Thankless to bring his passport. I’ll take him instead.’
But she was pissed off about it: she didn’t like Thankless.
Boyd Fraser was in a terrible mood. He wanted to go for a pint or something, have a minute to himself. That was the problem with living somewhere small; he had no sooner finished work than he was at his own front door. He’d got used to the rhythm of London, having an hour or so commute after work, time to decompress, read or listen to music. Here, his life felt unremittingly dutiful and tedious.
He crossed the steep road home and took the long way, circling the block to his house. The sky was bruised pink, the day drawing to a lazy end and a soft breeze blowing in from the sea. The warmth of the café lifted from him like the odour of fresh bread.
Really, he was under a hell of a lot of pressure, new business, young family. He needed a break but Lucy didn’t see it that way. She wanted him home, always. He circled the neighbours’ grounds and arrived at his own garden gate eight minutes after locking up the café.
He climbed the six steps to the lawn. Pretty bungalow, lovely garden. The lights were on in the front rooms.
It was a modest house by the standards of the town, but not spectacularly modest. A bungalow with four reception rooms, four bedrooms, a small kitchen with the original larder and a butler’s pantry. The garden was well established. The roof was in good repair. It was picturesque: the front had a panoramic view of the sea from a covered wooden porch.
The Reverend Robert Fraser kept the house well until he died. Too old to undertake improvements, he had not stapled an ugly conservatory to the front porch or had plastic windows installed. No work needed doing, no ugly dissonant changes needed reversing, which was just as well. Boyd arrived back in the town with nothing but two sons and a wife. They had remortgaged to start the business.
Hameau de la Reine.
Fuck. It pissed Boyd off how often that came to his mind when he looked at the house. It was spreading too. He thought about it in the café the other day, when someone, a middle-aged woman, naturally, bought organic local free-range eggs. It was the look she had on her face when she asked if they were ‘local?’.
Hameau de la fucking Reine. It wasn’t even part of their holiday itinerary. They might have strolled through, none the wiser, but the tour guide happened to be giving a talk in English.
Lucy and Boyd made a trip around Europe the year before William arrived, in a VW van with a brand new engine. They visited the Venice Biennale, stopped in the Alps, ate and drank and fucked and danced all over Europe. The weather was perfect, the reconditioned van admired wherever they stopped. The trip was beautiful. They were beautiful. They were so full of each other that Lucy’s pregnancy felt inevitable, a comma in a long, fluid sentence. But here, in Helensburgh, what lingered in his mind was that ridiculous Hameau.
Marie Antoinette had it built in the grounds of Versailles. A grotesque. She commissioned it to escape the pressures of courtly life. It was a phony peasant village, a place where she could play the part of a country maid. She would come here, the tour guide said, and milk freshly washed and perfumed sheep into Sèvres porcelain pails commissioned for the purpose. But the Hameau wasn’t just for her to play the peasant in. It also allowed the residents of Versailles to feel as if they were in the wild French countryside, instead of a fenced-in enclosure surrounded by starving, angry Frenchmen.
Pretty bungalow. Lovely garden. He tramped across the dewy lawn to the side door.
Boyd looked up, saw the soft lights spill from the windows onto the damp grass. It looked idyllic. He thought of taking a picture and sending it to Sanjay. But he was always sending photos to Sanjay. Jumpers and wellies and rosy-cheeked kids, sea-spray-tousled Lucy, pictures of the dog. Sanjay’s texted responses were getting shorter and shorter as he lost interest.
You lucky fucker, man, I’m stuck on the Circle line
became
Looks great
became
Great
. Last time he even replied in text speak –
gr8
– something they both disapproved of. It was as if he didn’t care whether Boyd thought he was a prick any more, because Boyd was a ghost to him. Sanjay would have visited if they’d moved to Cornwall. All their friends would have visited if they’d been in Norwich. It only took two fucking hours to get from Heathrow to Helensburgh, but no one came.
Angry now, instead of snaking around the edge, Boyd stomped across the lawn. Halfway over he felt his heel sinking into the immaculate grass. Lucy had taken on the garden and she’d be bitching about that for a month now.
He walked around the back to the kitchen door, tripping the pensioner-paranoid sensor lights his father had fitted. They felt like a perpetual reproach from a frightened father to his absent son. Boyd would have pulled them down if they weren’t so far up the wall.
Opening the back door, he let it bang off the wall, heard the kitchen noise of the kids die abruptly. Even the dog was quiet for a moment. The household was reading his entrance to gauge his mood. Annoyed by that, he kicked his shoes off, hitting the door with one of them.
A sniff and a scratch on the inside door and Boyd leaned over and opened it. Jimbo, the black Cairn terrier, looked up at him with worried old-lady eyes, his pink tongue frozen on his lips.
He wilfully misunderstood the dog’s concern: ‘Well, go on then,’ he motioned for him to go out to the garden, ‘get out and do it, you incontinent little shit.’
In the kitchen the boys laughed uproariously because their dad had said ‘shit’ and because Jimbo was in trouble and not them.
Jimbo scurried past him to the dark rockery.
‘Don’t let him go in the rockery, Boyd.’ Lucy was standing in the doorway, a blackened oven glove on her right hand. Isabel Marant joggies hung from her yoga-perfect hips. She wore a white T-shirt, good French cotton. A wedge of skin was exposed at her waist. Boyd wanted to kiss it.
Lucy saw his lascivious ogle and smirked. ‘Seriously – don’t let him poo in there. I’ll have to pick it up.’
Boyd kept his eyes on her hips. ‘Give me ten minutes.’
Lucy looked back at the oven, then at Boyd. She knew what he was thinking.
‘I’ve got a moussaka coming out of the oven, it’s the boys’ supper. I’ve spent hours—’
‘
No
,’ he said, refusing her refusal.
A look of sadness flickered in her eyes but she blinked it into a wry smile. ‘Fuck off, Boyd.’
She went back to her oven.
Jimbo was at the door, waiting for permission to come back into the house. Boyd swung his foot behind the little dog and booted him gently indoors, shutting the door to the porch.
He walked into the kitchen. She’d brought the little flat-screen TV in from the bedroom, stood it on the counter top and they were watching a Loony Tunes DVD. She was keeping the boys’ eyes busy. It was far too exciting for early evening. Larry was watching and throwing his weight back and forth, banging the feet of his chair dangerously on the floor.
‘Daddy,’ William observed absently, keeping his eyes on the screen.
Lucy had her back to him, her shoulders defensive as she lifted the steaming dish onto the hob. They had talked about using the TV as a babysitter. She knew it was wrong.
Boyd stomped over to the counter. ‘Put the fucking telly off, Lucy!’ He pressed the switch too hard, nearly knocking the flat-screen over.
The boys chorused their objections. Jimbo joined in, huffing loud yips, and Lucy swore at him. Boyd walked away.
‘IT’S BAD
FOR
THEM,’ he shouted and went into the bedroom to take a shower, slamming the door.
He could hear Lucy out there, screaming down the corridor, calling him a FUCKING wanker. Then the boys started crying because they were arguing again.
Boyd wasn’t sorry. He was angry and wanted her to be angry too.
He shed his work clothes on the bed, hating the spindly legged furniture in here, the heavy padded headboard, the three-mirrored dressing table. His mother’s choice. Everything old and brown and so well made that they couldn’t justify spending money, even Ikea money, to replace it.
He went into the en suite and turned the shower on, waiting for it to get hot. First thing he’d do when they made some money: have a proper walk-in shower installed instead of an afterthought over the bath.
He had to huddle under the flow to get more than one shoulder wet at a time. His mood warmed as he realised what he had decided. He smiled down at the floor, letting the water run over him.
He was going to have a blowout. Tomorrow, after the dinner dance, he was going to have a mental night, get wrecked, dance, whatever the fuck he wanted. And then the day after he’d be sorry and start again.
Alex and Brian were slumped on the settee in a living room scattered with damp towels and small toys, nappy bags tied at the neck, toast-crumbed plates. They were half watching the news. Mostly, though, they were listening for the twins on the baby monitor.
With the insight unique to those who have known otherwise, Morrow was aware of her profound contentment in this moment. She felt the warmth of the nice man next to her, savoured the health of her children. She even had a cup of tea and a biscuit. She found happiness hard to recall most of the time – misery was stickier, puzzling, more intense – but she could be happy in the moment.
The twins were thirteen months old and now, from the moment she walked through the front door until she left, she was lifting, wiping, changing or dressing them. She measured every task in the distinct number of hand movements it required. Brian and Alex were almost ambidextrous now. Out of necessity, they could both feed a baby and make a sandwich at the same time. But now her hands were empty. And she was sitting down. Celebrating the moment, she reached lazily across the settee, not quite reaching Brian. ‘Your day all right?’
‘Usual,’ said Brian. ‘You?’
‘Same as ever. Liars and politics.’
‘Oh, aye.’ Brian kept his eyes on the telly. ‘Spent forty minutes this morning answering emails while the boss lectured me about how men can’t multitask.’
The baby monitor crackled, glowing green. It sounded as if the twins were asleep but that didn’t mean they were. They were conspiracy incarnate.
On the TV a smiley man was forecasting a change in the weather. Heavy rain, danger of landslides. A debate show started, angry audience and suited panel, talking about the independence referendum. Both Alex and Brian lurched for the remote.
Brian got it first and flicked over.
‘God,’ he said, ‘I hate this. Next office down’s handing out literature and holding lunchtime rallies in the canteen. They look at your lapel before they look at your face.’
The fervent had taken to wearing badges declaring their allegiances, putting stickers and signs in their windows and cars. It made the vote an incessant background thrum, impossible to forget.
‘It’s getting mental,’ said Morrow.
‘This must be what the Reformation was like,’ said Brian cheerfully. ‘At the beginning. When it was all bright hopes of the Resurrection.’
She huffed, ‘I can’t wait for it to be over, anyway.’
‘The Reformation?’
Alex snorted a laugh. ‘That too.’
Brian grinned at her. ‘It’s the Reformendum.’
‘Bit of a mouthful,’ said Alex as her phone lit up on the side table. Unknown caller. She frowned and answered it.
Alexandra Morrow? This was Shotts Prison. They had her number listed as Daniel McGrath’s family contact.
The officer apologised for phoning so late but her brother had been stabbed and was in hospital. He had been operated on. He was in a stable condition. If she wanted to visit him she needed to contact this person in that department of the Scottish Prison Service. Thank you, sorry, and good night. They hung up.
Brian watched her hand drop to her lap, still clutching the phone.
‘What?’
‘Danny. Stabbed. In hospital.’
‘He OK?’
‘Stable.’
Brian’s hand found hers across the settee.
‘Are you all right?’
‘Aye,’ she said, but too high, too fast.
He squeezed her hand. ‘Want to call the hospital?’
‘Tomorrow.’
They lay shoulder to shoulder in bed. Lazy tears oiled from Alex’s eyes, running into her hair at the temples.
The light on the baby monitor lit the room kelp-green. An undulating ocean of sound filled the room, an ebb and swell of little boys’ breathing. Brian waited for a wave to crash before he spoke.
‘You crying?’
She waited for the next back draught and whispered, ‘A bit.’
‘I’m sure he’s OK.’
She wasn’t crying because she was worried about him. She was crying because, again, Danny had robbed her of the delusion of nobility.
In the moment after she hung up, before Brian squeezed her hand, Alex had wished her brother dead with a fervour that was almost sexual. Not because he was a bad man. She wasn’t wishing him dead for the good of the world. She wished her brother dead because he was an obligation she did not want to meet. He made her uncomfortable. It was mealy, malevolent, and she didn’t want to know it about herself.
Brian whispered in the green dark, ‘Never going to be over, is it?’
She didn’t answer.
They shouldn’t even have her number. Danny must have given it to them. She tried to believe that he’d done it to shame her but that was a lie. Danny gave them her number because Alex was all he had. She had all of this: Brian, the twins, her job, everything. But she was all that Danny really had and she didn’t want him.
She lay still, listening to the wash of the twins’ breathing. They were trying to synchronise: one would snuffle, the other stumble over an exhalation, correcting themselves, trying to meet as completely as they had in the womb, but failing. Always failing.
