G03 - Resolution (29 page)

“For not turning up?” asked Kilty.

“For thinking about not turning up,” said Maureen, taking a long drink.

Kilty and Leslie watched her. “What d’ye think’ll happen in the trial?” asked Leslie.

“Joe McEwan thinks he’ll get off,” said Maureen, drinking again.

“And then what?” said Kilty quietly.

“He’ll come for me.”

Leslie sat staring out of the window and thinking. As if she was going to hit Maureen’s legs, she reached out quickly, snatched up the bottle of cheap, own-brand whiskey and filled Maureen’s glass. “Bad timing,” she muttered.

Kilty smiled, glad it was over. “Yeah,” she said. “Bad timing.”

Maureen drank again, enjoying it while she could. She decided not to tell them that Hugh had promised that her house would be full of policemen when Angus came. She’d tell them after the drink was done. As she drank she realized that delaying the trial meant she had an extra two days to do something about Michael, two more days to get herself together enough to face him. Being allowed to drink and a two-day stay of execution made the night feel quite luxurious.

“Why will he get out?” said Leslie.

“He’s saying that I gave him drugs, and the drugs made him do the murders.”

“Did ye give him drugs?” asked Kilty.

Maureen and Leslie looked at each other.

“She did,” said Leslie.

“I gave him a load of bad acid but it was after the murders.”

“We went to Millport on Cumbrae and he followed us on the ferry,” said Leslie. “Because we had Siobhain with us and he wanted to kill her to shut her up. Mauri fed him the acid and tied him to a bed.”

“Where were you?” Kilty asked her.

Leslie looked at her hands. “I shat it,” she said. “I encouraged her to do it and then I shat it and left her to do it alone.”

“You stayed with Siobhain,” said Maureen. “Someone had to stay with her.”

“I shat it.”

“Where did you get the acid?” asked Kilty.

“I got it from a wee guy who knows Liam,” said Maureen, “but they’re going to say I got it from Liam and tell everyone he’s a drug dealer. The uni might even chuck him out.”

“You don’t know that,” Kilty reassured her.

“Naw, I don’t, but they’ve raided him and they’ve got that evidence to bring so it makes it easier to get the audience to believe I did it—”

“The jury, Mauri,” corrected Leslie.

“Yeah, the jury. Them.”

They settled back, watching adverts, and Maureen thought of poor dead Ella lying on her cold metal bed, leaving nothing in the world but Si and Tonsa.

The Friday night porno started on television. Two women rubbed about on each other, one looking nauseous, the other in an advanced state of sexual excitement for no discernible reason. Maureen stood up and turned it off. “Look,” she said, “I know you don’t believe me about McGee but will you humor me over it for a wee bit?”

Kilty and Leslie looked at each other again and Maureen wondered just how close they were.

“For how long?” asked Kilty.

Maureen shrugged. The court case was this week and she’d have to decide about Michael before she ended up in jail. “A week,” she said, randomly.

Kilty and Leslie looked at each other. “A week,” agreed Leslie.

They sat with Maureen for a while to show her they were sorry for talking about her drinking. Eventually Kilty stood up and picked up her bag. “We going to look for Candy III at the Wayfarers’ Club tomorrow, then?”

“Yeah,” said Maureen. “Can we talk to your dad about Si McGee?”

Kilty smiled uncomfortably. “I dunno. He’s not very keen on you at the minute.”

Kilty promised to meet them the next evening and left, shutting the door quietly behind her. Leslie waited until Kilty’s last footfall had finished echoing around the close. “Mauri,” she said, “why are you so afraid of Angus Farrell?”

“Nothing.”

Leslie, not known for affectionate gestures, reached out and touched her arm. “You’ve been freaked by him since Millport. What happened there? I know ye didn’t just feed him the acid, I know something else happened.”

Maureen sighed into her chest. She wanted to speak, wanted to say it out loud, but it stuck in her throat and swelled. “You know the dreams?” she said. “About the fingernail and the blood?”

“Yeah,” said Leslie, filling in the hesitation.

“He said …” She swallowed hard against the lump in her throat. “… Angus said Michael raped me.”

Leslie sat back against the sofa and together they looked out at the black sky. “He said this in Millport, right?”

“Yeah.”

“After you’d given him the acid? After you’d tied him up?”

“Yeah. But he was my therapist, he was astute, he knew things.”

“Mauri, that’s a lot of shite. He said it to hurt ye, to frighten ye. If ye’d been raped at that age ye wouldn’t get a wee nick inside the wall of your fanny. It would be split all the way up.”

“But he said—”

“Mauri, I think Angus Farrell probably said a lot of things to a lot of people.”

Maureen looked into the deep swirling amber in her glass. “I feel as if I’m losing it again,” she said, in the quietest voice.

Leslie was afraid she was right.

Without meaning to, they slept on the floor in the living room. It was the breeziest room in the house with the biggest windows and everywhere else was unbearably hot. When they woke up it was eight o’clock and they were already late for the market. Outside the window a pitiless sun glared over the city and they both wished it would rain.

The market was busy and the Saturday crowd of buyers were waiting impatiently for them. They served the backlog and settled on their wee stools, glad to be in the cold tunnel.

“There was guys here looking for the two of you earlier,” said Peter.

“There was a gang of men when we got here,” said Leslie.

“Two guys looking for you.” Peter pointed at Maureen. “One of them had a suit on and the other one had a camera. Guy in a Celtic shirt was asking for you, Leslie.”

After little discussion Maureen and Leslie decided to pack up for the day. They told Peter to spread the word that they wouldn’t be back for a week or so.

Leslie didn’t want to go to the country but she had promised to humor Maureen for a week and, anyway, she had nowhere else to go. Maureen lit two cigarettes and handed her one as she rattled the old van down the slip road from the motorway and stopped at the roundabout.

Lanarkshire is fine countryside. Lush old trees hung over the road or sat softly on the rolling hills. Past the concrete sprawl of Motherwell, residents had paid enough to relish the luxury of privacy and there were few houses near the road. Behind hedges and trees, the hills were scattered with new bungalows and solid old houses built when the area was farming land, before its proximity to Glasgow made it commutable. The road was narrow and busy at weekends. The only set of traffic lights in the area caused tailbacks of up to half a mile on Sundays, when the car-trunk sale was open. As the van passed a field with opaque Nissen huts cloaked in rippling cellophane, Maureen spotted a signpost. “There,” she said. “Dreyloan.” She checked the address in the phone book on her lap. “That’s it. Left up here.”

Leslie turned the van over the old stone bridge. Far below they heard the sound of cool water splashing through a rocky crevasse.

Dreyloan village was picturesque and litter free. The cars parked in driveways were new and expensive. Even the Saturday visitors from the city looked healthier than average and certainly better dressed. Their shoogly van attracted interested glances as they parked by the green. Leslie pulled on the hand brake and turned off the engine, pocketing the keys. She waited for Maureen to get out so she could shut the passenger door from the inside but Maureen didn’t move. “Will we get out?” said Leslie.

Maureen was smiling straight ahead, her head tipped to the side. In front of the windscreen, on the edge of the village, a small office in a pretty pink cottage had a large to-let sign nailed above the door. It was McGee and McGerty, estate agents.

“That doesn’t mean anything, really,” said Leslie, worried by how pleased Maureen seemed. “There could be a lot of other explanations.”

“Aye,” said Maureen. “Could be.”

The village green was a long, bumpy stretch of grass. In the center, at the intersection of two diagonal paths, stood a solemn monument to the war dead from the village. Around the perimeter of the green, villagers and visitors were catered to by a cake shop, a camping-equipment store, a curry house and an olde authentiky coach house pub, doing three-course meals for a fiver. Around and about, visiting families climbed out of cars after long drives in hot weather; a couple of men in obscenely clinging Day-Glo outfits stood next to fancy racing bikes drinking from water bottles and panting, wiping sweat from their necks. Maureen and Leslie headed straight for the estate agent’s.

The cottage was a squat single story, with deep windows and a step down to the entrance. McGee and McGerty had one window of the cottage; the other was occupied separately by a small post-office-cum-newsagent. The window display only showed six houses for sale but they were laid out tastefully on gray cards, without prices. They were cottages, a barn conversion and a manse, photographed in perfect sunshine and with bare, expensive graphics laying out the details. Maureen looked at them and it occurred to her that she could sell her house, take the money and just piss off.

“Posh,” said Leslie.

Inside the front door the two businesses had built their own entrances, diagonal doors facing the main entrance like a moral choice. Maureen pushed the door, setting off a tinkling bell, and stepped into a small room with plush carpeting and a single desk. The man behind the desk, elderly, in a pink and baby blue Pringle sweater and gray flannels, was on the phone. He looked as if he had been pulled off a golf course and made to sit there. He clearly wanted the person at the other end of the line to think he found them hilarious. With sorrow-sodden eyes he laughed and nodded, texturing his laughter with high and low intonation, rocking back and forth in his chair. Maureen and Leslie sat down across the desk from him. He mouthed at them that he’d just be a minute and laughed some more before hanging up and looking sadly at them. “What can I do ye for?”

“We’re interested in the lease for this place,” said Maureen.

He smiled insincerely and looked at them. “Can I ask what you do?”

“We’re Web designers,” said Leslie.

He frowned at his papers. “Really?”

“Yeah,” said Maureen.

The man didn’t know what else to ask them because he didn’t know anything about Web design, which was just as well because they didn’t know anything about it either.

“Are you handling the lease?” said Maureen.

“Yeah.” He pulled open a drawer of his desk and lifted out a summarized schedule on stapled sheets.

“What’s the walk-through like here?” said Leslie, making Maureen flinch. Even she knew that Web designers didn’t care about trade from idle passersby. The estate agent, however, didn’t seem to be aware of this.

“Well,” he said, sitting back, pressing his fingertips together, making a church of his hands, “it’s good for the area because of the post office next door and the pub across the way. Also, because there’s damn all to do in the village, lots of people walk around the square.” He pushed the schedule across the table as if he couldn’t be bothered talking anymore. “It’s a big village for the overall area and people come here to shop. There’s a Spar around the back of the kirk.”

“Nice,” said Leslie.

“So, is this room all that’s included in the lease?” asked Maureen.

“No, no, there’s this room and a back office and upstairs as well.”

He stood up to show them round but Maureen waved him back into his chair. “We’re looking at a lot of places,” she said. “You said the walk-through’s good, so why are you leaving?”

“No, no,” he said. ” ‘S nothing to do with this place. The business is winding up.”

“Going bankrupt?”

“No,” he said defensively, “just dissolving. The senior partner’s retiring.”

“And the junior partner?”

The man broke eye contact.

“He’s not … as experienced.”

Maureen smiled. “It’s McGerty who’s got the money, then?”

The man looked up at them. “Who are you?”

The olde authentiky pub had a lot of young bar staff decked out in black uniforms with fussy white pinnies over them, serving the tables. Maureen ordered a pint and Leslie asked for a cheese and ham toastie and a bag of smoky-bacon crisps. She asked Maureen to have something while the tweeny waitress stood there and smiled at them. “I’m all right,” said Maureen, lighting a cigarette.

“What are ye going to have for lunch, then?” said Leslie.

“I’m not hungry,” insisted Maureen. “I’ll have something later.”

“Have something now.”

Maureen looked at the waitress. “That’s all for now, thanks,” she said, and waited until the girl had written everything down in longhand and gone away. “How’s the stomach now?”

“Wee bit better,” Leslie said, wrinkling her nose. She looked out of the window at the McGee and McGerty office. “It doesn’t mean anything.”

“McGee’s business is going down the tubes and it doesn’t mean anything?”

“Well, lots of people change what they do for a living. It doesn’t mean the automatic next step is moving in to whoremastering.”

Maureen smiled knowingly. “Do you think Si McGee is the sort of man who could happily take a drop in his income and social status?”

“How do you mean?”

“You were right,” she said. “It’s not about the money at all. McGee’s not interested in money. It’s about status, proving he’s as good as the other good old boys. It means everything to him.”

Maureen was feeling confident and ready for anything. She knocked on the glass panel and stepped back. A shadow moved in the kitchen corridor and Liam opened the door. He didn’t have a top on and had been sitting in the garden.

Liam’s house was the one good thing that had come out of his foray into the underworld. It was a three-story town house in the middle of the West End, with high ceilings, magnificent windows and a stretch of garden at the back. In times gone by, the West End had been a tatty, cheap area to live. Students clustered together in damp old houses with boilers held together with sticky tape and glue. Men left drink-ruined marriages and came to live in bedsits here, trying to revive their glory days. It was a better area now. The housing boom meant that bomb sites and inches of spare ground were being developed into cramped flats for short, thin people with no possessions. Deserted shops and boarded-up garages had been taken over by sandwich bars and international coffee-shop chains. The bookshops had shut, replaced by designer clothing outlets.