Exile (25 page)

“How are ye?” she asked, smiling.

“Aye,” he said, and went back to kicking the dirt.

“Can I show ye a photo of someone?”

The driver was intrigued. “What for?”

“My pal went missing and I think she took this bus.”

“Ah, well now”—he looked wary—”we get a lot of people on the buses, ye know.”

Maureen took out the photocopy of Ann’s face, holding it up in front of the driver so that it caught the light from inside the bus cab.

He looked at it for a moment. “She had yellow hair and a red face,” said Maureen. “Smelt of drink, a bit.”

He looked at the picture and was surprised that he remembered her. “That’s amazing,” he said. “Up and down she was, just before Christmas.”

“Up and down?”

“I seen her a few times. I remember because she was up and down every few days and sometimes she’d keep her bag on her knee, a big bag.” He drew a one-foot square in front of him with his fag-free hand.

“When did ye last see her?”

“Months ago,” he said. “Start of December. I remember because she was on the way up and got off the bus for the break and never got back on again.”

“She got left at this service station?”

“Aye, well, across the road.” He pointed to a covered walkway bridging the motorway.

“Was she just too late?”

“Don’t know,” he said, wanting to be alone in the dark with his cigarette.

Aware that she was running short of time, Maureen fumbled the Polaroid out of her pocket. “Did ye ever see this guy with her?”

The driver shrugged, looking at the picture, getting impatient. “I wouldn’t know, hen.”

“Listen, thanks,” said Maureen. “Thanks a lot.”

She backed off, leaving him to his break, and climbed the stairs into the cab feeling elated. Liam had been right. Ann was up and down and she might have been running for the loan sharks, she might have been running for Hutton. But if she was running for loan sharks she would only have carried the bag one way, not up and down again. She stretched out, enjoying the whole of her seat while she could, before Jokey came back.

The engine started softly, shaking her awake. She opened her eyes to see Jokey falling into his seat like a malodorous avalanche in an anorak. They were pulling out of the service station, leaving the big lorries and the bright lights and sliding along the slip road onto the quiet carriageway.

It was five a.m. and the gray monochrome was broken only by the red taillights of overtaking cars. The land was very flat: they were in the middle of a plain so vast the edges were beyond the horizon. Farmhouses and tiny hamlets flashed by. They passed a small set of horse jumps in a paddock and then sudden banks of the motorway came up, enclosing the road. They passed a village, then through a town and into the country again. The towns began to blend together, meeting at their thinning outer edges, closer and closer until they were tumbling over one another, houses and houses and houses blanketing the shallow hills.

They left the motorway, following the broad road to the city, passing through Swiss Cottage. Houses gave way to small blocks of flats and the small blocks to bigger blocks to high-rises to massive glass and steel offices. The clumsy bus rattled through the dark city, stopping at lights and rumbling across roundabouts. They pulled slowly into King’s Cross, stopping by the great blind arches of St. Pancras. The Afroed driver spoke over the Tannoy, telling them they were in London, so get off and thank you.

The bus emptied quickly. A crowd gathered by the boot while the other driver pulled out the bags and sat them on the pavement. Maureen lit a well-deserved cigarette, enjoying the feel of Vik’s chrome lighter in the palm of her hand. She took off her jersey and rolled it up, pulling her overcoat out of the plastic bag, unraveling it and slipping it on. It didn’t seem very cold, a little frosty, but not like winter at all. She spotted her cycle bag being thrown onto the pavement and stepped over a couple of suitcases to get to it. She waited until everyone else had claimed their baggage before she cornered the driver again. “See, about that girl …”

The driver looked up at her. His eyes were red-rimmed and he looked exhausted. “Look,” he said, slamming the boot shut and locking it, “I cannae mind the guy.”

“You look knackered,” she said, and offered him a fag. He took one and she lit it for him. “No, I just wanted to ask about her bag. Did she always have it with her? Could she have just had it with her on the way down?”

The tired man exhaled. “She put it in the boot sometimes.”

“Was it when she was going home or coming here?”

The driver took a draw and looked at the tip, frowning and trying to remember. “Now ye say that, I think it was just the one way”—he looked up at her—”but I cannae remember which.”

“Did ye have an unclaimed bag left in the boot in Glasgow,” prompted Maureen, “the last time, the time she got left behind at the service station?”

The driver smiled at his fag and nodded. “On the way up,” he said. “She kept it on her lap on the way up.”

Chapter 27

INDIFFERENCE

It was half past seven in the morning and King’s Cross was already gridlocked. Cars and buses on the Euston Road were jammed up close and exhaust fumes hovered over the stodgy traffic like smoke in a nightclub. Across the road the Underground entrance hoovered streams of pedestrians off the pavement. Maureen realized that, for the first time in months, she was walking with her head up because the weather was so mild and Michael wasn’t here and Vik had come to see her off.

She crossed at the lights heading for the tube. At the foot of the stairs stood a filthy old man with one agate eye. He smiled beatifically up at the ferocious river of bad-tempered people, enjoying the warm stream of heat from the vents, peeling an orange with one hand, his other arm cramped into his waist, his hand puckered and paralyzed by a stroke. The torrent of commuters bustled past him, swinging to the far side of the tunnel to avoid even seeing him, rendering him invisible with their indifference.

It was oppressively warm downstairs. By the time Maureen arrived on the southbound platform the sweat was running down her back, soaking into her coat and ruining it. After a gentle back-draft, a welcome cool breeze whispered from the tunnel. The crush of people shifted, looking to the left as a train clattered into the station. The passengers clotted around the opening doors, pushing from the back, shoving onto the train before the disembarking passengers could get off. The doors shut behind her, skimming Maureen’s bag, and the train took off with a jolt.

Inside the carriage the commuters and tourists pressed tightly against one another, valiantly defending the fiction of unconnected-ness. Those standing looked covetously at the seated. The seated looked relaxed and happy, reading books or staring contentedly into the crotch of the person standing in front of them. A Norwegian tourist shared an indignant observation with his companion, who agreed. Maureen wondered about Ann carrying up to Glasgow, wondering whether it meant anything. She couldn’t think straight, her eyes burned hot and tired, and more than anything she wanted a wash and a sleep. Her coat was far too heavy — she was sweating into the gorgeous silky lining, straining a muscle on her side trying to reach the bar on the ceiling. The train stopped at a station and a fresh set of tired commuters, wearing their office best, clambered into the carriage.

The train was cooler than the Underground and brought her to Blackheath station. She followed the directions Sarah had given her, turning right out of the station, following the steep road up the hill and taking the left-hand fork. Blackheath was postcard pretty. The low shops had big bow windows with inappropriate red sale banners plastered across them. She walked on until she came to the corner of the heath. Restrained colonnades of high Georgian houses faced onto an extravaganza of empty land, which came to a little hill in the middle, like a pseudohorizon, as if the grassy land were as infinite as the empire. Sarah Simmons lived in Grote’s Place, one street back from the heath.

Maureen trotted up the stairs to number three but couldn’t find a doorbell. She knocked with the heavy brass knob, heard the clip-clop of court shoes on stone, and the door opened. Sarah was dressed for work in a white blouse, navy blue skirt and matching tights and shoes. She looked Maureen over, took in her expensive overcoat, her cheap trainers and her heavy bag. “Hello, hello, Maureen,” said Sarah, drawing it out as if she’d have nothing to say when the greeting was over. “How are you?”

“Hi, Sarah, not bad,” said Maureen, smiling. “How’s yourself?” She noticed once again, as she had all the way through university, how rough her accent sounded.

Sarah stepped aside and invited her in. “Come.” She smiled. “Come into the humble abode. Most welcome.”

Maureen walked into the hall and looked up. “Oh, Sarah,” she said, before she could stop herself.

“Nothing much,” said Sarah, blushing with shame and pleasure. “Granny’s old house.”

The hall was fourteen feet high with black and white floor tiles, walls papered in textured fleur-de-lis, and hung with blue-black portraits of bearded men in naval uniforms. A high wooden staircase clung to the wall on the right with a black wood balustrade. The house was very still. Maureen pointed at the paintings. “Who are these fantastic men?” she said.

“Relatives,” said Sarah. “Deceased. Mostly from syphilis. Look, I have to leave for work in half an hour. I’d leave you here but I don’t have a set of spare keys.” They looked at each other. Sarah smiled weakly and slid her gaze to the floor. “I can give you a lift into town if you’d like?”

Maureen nodded. Sarah didn’t trust her. All she knew was that she and Maureen had had little in common at university and Maureen had been mentally ill since then. “That’s fair enough,” she said, neglecting convention and responding to the subtext.

Sarah steered her to the back door, turned her round and lifted her coat by the shoulders, helped her out of it and hung it on a coat peg. “Come”—she slipped her arm through Maureen’s—”and have a little breakfast with me. Come and tell me everything that has happened to you. You must be famished. How’s your hunky brother?”

The tentative pals walked into the Aga-warmed kitchen where Maureen sipped her tea and gave Sarah a disinfected summary of her past four years. Her time in hospital with mild depression, how Liam’s business had done so well he could pay his way through uni, about her boyfriend, Douglas, who’d died of a heart attack, and how her mother didn’t keep terribly well at all. Sarah was sad for her, happy for her and sad again, as the story dictated. She put on her makeup at the table as Maureen finished spinning a tattered web of half-truths, then took her turn.

Sarah had been engaged to Hugo at the tail end of her university career but their relationship just hadn’t worked out, they weren’t as suited as they had imagined. Maureen had met Hugo briefly when he came up to attend the graduation ball. He was a thick-lipped, overbred, rugby-shirted haw-haw. He didn’t seem interested in Sarah, much less in love with her, and Maureen was glad she hadn’t married him. Anyway, Sarah got her dream job at an auction house and was working hard and getting promotions and good work to do all the time. It was great and she had the house, so money wasn’t a worry. You see, she knew everyone here, in this area, so she had a ready-made circle of friends locally. And the local people were so friendly. They went out all the time. Sarah’s lies were so bright and cheerful that Maureen felt sorry for her. She was a nice woman, and Maureen wished something nice had happened to her, but the big house felt cold and Sarah seemed bereft and needy.

“Right,” said Sarah, taking a drink of tea and leaving most of the lipstick she had just applied on the rim of the cup, “let’s go. Where are you off to?”

Maureen said she was going to Brixton. Sarah frowned at the mention of the area. She said she wasn’t headed that way but Maureen could get a train straight there from the station at the bottom of the hill and insisted she’d drive Maureen and drop her. The station was a quarter of a mile away. Maureen wondered why she had invited her to stay at all. She could just have said no. “Sarah,” lied Maureen, “you’re a pal.”

Joe McEwan sat back in his chair and lit his fifth smoke of the morning. He was thinking about her again. The harder he tried to avoid it the more she came to mind. His mother had died a month and a half ago and he knew he was coping badly, losing his temper, working too much, giving into the fags again. Whenever he relaxed or took his mind off his work for any length of time there was Patsy, waiting for him, her hand, her voice, her eyes. He had been sitting at home, alone and maudlin, sorting through her papers, the night before when the call had come through about Hutton. It was exactly what he needed: a big investigation with city wide implications.

Hutton had been killed for dealing on his own. He was one of the new generation pushing their way up the ranks, one of the worst side effects of Operation No-Go. The success of the operation was a mixed blessing. It pushed prices and profits up, turned already vicious men into animals, and it meant more dead junkies in shopping-center toilets. As new dealers sprang up to replace the old ones they sold virtually pure heroin to their first few clients so that word would get around that they did good deals. An OD brought the punters to the dealer’s door like an advertising campaign. But the old powers were still battling for control, and the nature of Hutton’s injuries was meant as a warning to other aspiring entrepreneurs.

McEwan knew Hutton. He had seen him in court several years before when he had battered his neighbor. The sheriff had asked him why he was nicknamed “Bananas,” and Hutton’s sodden junkie eyes had darted around the room. “I like bananas,” he said, and the public benches laughed. “I could eat them all day.” He tried to bring his purported love of fruit into every answer thereafter, laboring the joke, playing up to the public, irritating the sheriff and drawing the court’s attention to his confused mental state. It was as if he thought the public benches were deciding his fate.