Garnethill by Denise Mina (23 page)

She put it back where she had found it, covering it over with the same jumper and odd socks, and went back into the bathroom.

She combed her hair into a ponytail and hacked through it with a pair of nail scissors.

It was half-seven.

She listened at the bathroom door. The flat was still. She left a note on the kitchen table saying she'd stay at Leslie's tonight, and made her way down to the Great Western Road, taking a backstreet route she had never known Benny use.

Liam had more or less lived there for three years so she remembered the phone number. Lynn had moved; the guy who answered gave her an Anderston number.

"Hello, Lynn?"

"Aye," said Lynn cautiously.

"Lynn, it's me, Maureen O'Donnell."

"Mauri! How the fuck are you?"

They arranged to meet, under conditions of the utmost secrecy, in a large, busy cafe near Lynn's house.

LYNN WAVED HAPPILY WHEN Maureen walked through the door. She had naturally black hair and flawless pink velvet skin but her eyes were her crowning glory, black with a blue tinge that made them look like polished semiprecious stones. Her body was slight and wiry and if Liam was to be believed she was unusually agile. She had a deep, gruff voice from smoking twenty a day from the age of twelve. She was eating a bowl of carbonara made with cubed gammon. Expertly, she rolled a string of spaghetti onto her fork as Maureen sat down. "So what's this about, Secret Squirrel? And what have you done to your hair?"

"Cut it myself," said Maureen, sitting down.

"It's all uneven. You come to mine after we've eaten and I'll straighten it."

" 'S all right," said Maureen distractedly.

"No, it's not. There's all jaggy bits hanging down at the back. It looks like a mad wummin's fanny."

They sat in silence for a moment as Lynn chewed a mouthful of pasta. The creamy sauce gathered at the corners of her mouth; it looked like froth. Maureen looked around the room. Tourist posters of Italy had been pasted onto the wall: behind Lynn's head loomed an aerial photograph of Florence. The pictures were skirted with flags-of-all-nations bunting.

"Auch," said Lynn. "Let's just skip all these pleasantries."

"Aye," said Maureen.

Lynn looked her over. "I know about your boyfriend, Maureen. Is that why you're doing this silent, haunted thing?"

"Ami?"

"Aye."

"Don't tell anyone we've met, eh?" said Maureen.

"I'm not sure we have yet," said Lynn.

They sat in silence until Lynn had finished eating. She paid the bill. "Come on," she said, standing Maureen up and slipping her arm through hers. "Let's go back to mine and fix your hair."

Lynn was living in a big flat on Argyle Street, across the road from a twenty-four-hour grocer's. The house must have been very grand once: it had five large bedrooms and a massive communal kitchen with a walk-in larder. The ceilings were thirteen foot high with ornate cornicing. One of her flatmates kept a gang of giant, love-bombing cats. The minute they got through the door the cats started rubbing against their legs, and when Maureen sat down on one of the kitchen chairs three of them scratched and hissed at one another for the right to sit on her lap. "If you sit on that wee settee," said Lynn, pointing over to a green two-seater by the TV, "they can all love you at the one time."

Maureen sat on it and her knees were immediately covered with a carpet of purring animals. Lynn stood behind her, spraying her hair with a pump-action aerosol full of water. She combed Maureen's hair this way and that, snipping at the bottom with a pair of sharp hair scissors. "Oh, Maureen," she said. "You've hurt your neck."

"Yeah."

"It looks like scratches or something."

Maureen didn't answer. The cats writhed on her lap, purring and digging their claws into her legs, nesting her as if she were a blanket.

"It looks a wee bit raw," said Lynn carefully. "Will I put some Germolene onto it?"

"Please."

She went out of the kitchen and came back with a huge jar. "Nicked it from the work," she said, when she saw Maureen looking. She rubbed the smelly cream gently, gently, onto the ripped skin on the back of Maureen's neck. "How's it feel now?"

"Itchy."

"You should put some foundation on that, doll, or wear a scarf or something. It looks a bit frightening." She screwed the lid back on the tub, washed her hands in the sink, lifted the scissors and carried on trimming. "Now," she said, "tell us why ye phoned."

"I need a favor," said Maureen.

"Big one? Wee one?"

"It's just a question. I don't know if you'd know anyway. I want to find something out from someone's medical records."

"Is it a patient at my surgery?"

"Naw. Lynn, don't tell Liam or anyone else this, right?"

"Okay."

"I think Benny's been in my house."

"Benny? Of course Benny's been in your house."

"But I think he's been in my house recently, when the police wouldn't let me in. I think he's talking to the police or something, I dunno. I can't put it together."

She would have told Lynn about the migrating CD but she knew she looked a bit mad and Lynn would think that she gave it back and then just forgot.

"I think he might have known Douglas. The police told me he'd been arrested in Inverness a few years ago. They didn't bring the case to court, he was sent for psychiatric treatment instead."

Lynn stopped cutting. "I never heard about that," she said.

"Me neither."

"Did he get treatment in Inverness?"

"No," said Maureen. "It must have been in Glasgow. He's never been away for any length of time."

"Maureen, Benny might be a bit mental sometimes but I don't think he'd talk about you to the police."

"I don't know what to think about anything now."

Lynn started snipping at her hair again. "So what do you want me to do?"

"I need to know how to get access to his medical record. I want to find out who his psychiatrist was. I think it might have been Douglas."

"Maureen, you can't get to see someone else's record without their consent. It's illegal. You can't hardly get to see your own."

"Really?"

"Yeah, man."

She finished cutting and handed Maureen a mirror, holding another behind her so that she could see what she had done. "There," she said, "that's a nice haircut."

Maureen looked at herself. It was the shortest she'd had her hair in a long time. It made her look younger. Lynn danced around her, pretending to be a hairdresser, showing her the reflection from both sides, holding it at an angle so that Maureen couldn't see the cuts on her neck.

"It's not bad, is it?"

"I think it's lovely," said Lynn.

"Do you know a guy called Paulsa?"

"Bad Acid Paulsa?"

"That guy who came forward for Liam."

"Yeah, I know him. We went up to his house once."

"Where does he stay?"

"You know that big Unionist pub off the Saltmarket? Next close."

"Oh, aye."

Maureen suddenly realized she had been talking about herself since they met and she'd barely asked Lynn how she was. She grinned unsteadily. "Did you and Liam get it together again, then?"

Lynn looked embarrassed. "Yeah, a wee bit. What's this Maggie character like?"

"She's all right. Not much crack, though. Are ye going out together again?"

"Naw," said Lynn, picking lumps of hair off the back of the settee. "I don't think we will be either."

"How come?"

Lynn displayed a polite reticence and then told her, "Uch, you know, Mauri, I used to look at him and all I could see was sunshine. It's not like that now. He's a bit too angry for me."

"Yeah," conceded Maureen. "He's angry enough."

Lynn punched her gently on the chin. "Like all the rest of the fucking family."

Maureen pulled her coat on. "It was good of you to come and meet me there," she said. "I think I lost the place for a wee minute."

"Happens to the best of us," said Lynn. "You stay in touch anyway, eh?"

"I will, Lynn, I will."

She walked down through the town, feeling her father's breath on her neck all the way to the shelter.

Leslie met her in the hallway. She led Maureen out of the house quickly and spoke to her on the doorstep. She couldn't come home, she said. Her shift didn't finish for another three hours. "The police came to see me again, they asked me about the night we went to that pizza place. I just told them the right times, is that okay?"

"Yeah."

"Can I pick you up at Benny's?"

"No, no," said Maureen. "I'll come back."

Leslie could see that something was wrong with Maureen: she was pale and her eyes were unfocused. "Where are you going?"

"I'll just wander about for a bit."

Leslie rubbed her arm. "Look," she said, trying to make eye contact, "urn, go to the pictures or something, all right? Don't just wander off somewhere."

"Naw, I'm all right," Maureen murmured, and toppled off the outside step, wandering away with her hands deep in the pockets of her overcoat.

They had been there for a picnic once. Benny took Maureen and Liam down there — he had played there when he was a wee boy. It was a track of waste ground by the river, looking over to Govan and the shipyards, surrounded by run-down warehouses. It was probably a dangerous place to come at night, the motorway cut it off from the town and it was dark, but Maureen was tired of caring and she had her stabbing comb in her pocket. She lifted the chicken wire, crouched down and scrambled under it. She climbed to the top of a ten-foot-high concrete wedge sticking out of the river wall and sat down. Across the water she could see into the shipyards through an open slide door. Sparks from the welders' tongs flew in slow, red arcs. She pulled her coat tight against the mean river wind and lit a fag.

It was much darker now. The tide was coming in and the river flowed backward, slapping against the wall far below her feet. She thought about the ships passing down the river many years ago, taking emigrants to America, whole families of Scots lost to their own people forever. Lost to drizzling rain and a fifty-year recession, to endemic domestic violence and armies of drunk men shouting about football.

When she climbed down the rock and straightened her coat she felt taller somehow, as if, without trying to, she had floated across the dividing line between fear and fury.

She got there just in time to meet Leslie coming off her shift. She hadn't noticed before but Leslie had been crying. The appeal committee had notified them that morning that they would not allow them to make additional submissions. In the afternoon a husband had found the address of the house, come round and convinced his wife to move back home. "He broke her pelvis last time," said Leslie. "They only took the pins out last month."

"How the fuck did he do that?"

"He beat her with a baseball bat."

"I suppose everyone'll be going home if the appeal fails," said Maureen.

"Don't even say it," muttered Leslie, and handed Maureen a crash helmet.

Chapter 21

FRANK

Next morning Maureen adopted an English accent and phoned the Northern from Leslie's house. She asked reception to put her through to Frank in the office.

As soon as he lifted the receiver she realized that she should have thought it through beforehand. She didn't know who she was going to pretend to be, she didn't even know what story she was going to tell. She asked him whether he had seen the article about the superannuation mix-up, it was in the newsletter, he had probably read it. Well, Frank said, he remembered something about that, yes. Stunned that the story was hanging together, she staggered on: obviously it wasn't her fault, she had been called in to sort out her predecessor's mistakes, wasn't that always the way? Frank agreed vehemently. Maureen couldn't imagine Frank being called in to sort piss from shit but she didn't say so.

He agreed to get her a printout of the names and national insurance numbers of the full-time medical staff spanning ten years, from 1985 to 1995, excluding agency, and Maureen would send a courier to pick it up at two that day.

She looked at the phone before she put it down. Martin was right: Frank was really stupid.

Frank finished his sticky blueberry muffin and played another three games of Tetris. This was a bit lucky. If he did them this favor they might remember if he applied for a job at the regional office. A job in a real office. An office where you wouldn't be surrounded by bloody loonies.

At ten past two she walked into the office wearing a crash helmet and Leslie's leathers. Frank handed her a brown envelope. Curious as to how far she could push it, she made him sign a receipt for a novel she had bought a couple of weeks before. She walked down the back stairs and out of the hospital with her visor down, feeling untouchable, like a movie hero. Leslie had kept the engine running and the stand up on the bike. Maureen swung her leg over the seat and Leslie turned, spraying gray gravel. The lights farther down the road changed, causing a break in the traffic, and they pulled out into the road.

Back in the Drum they broke open a quarter bottle of whisky, took a slug each and opened the envelope. Frank had printed out a single sheet from his files, all medical personnel employed at the Northern covering the years 1985 to 1995, excluding agency. It was a list of national insurance numbers. No names. Frank really was a stupid bastard.

As they finished the whisky Leslie showed her how to sharpen the end of the stabbing comb into a point. She drew the long handle of the comb across a black wedge of silicon carbide, backward and forward, turning it over at the end to sharpen both sides, dragging it on the diagonal to give it an edge. She wrapped a J-cloth over the teeth and gave it to Maureen to have a go. She scratched the handle over the block, turning it over and drawing it through. She kept going until she brought it to a neat point with an inch-long sharpened ledge on either side of the tip. Leslie rubbed margarine into it to disguise the scratches.

Maureen thought about the stabbing comb as Leslie drove her back to Maryhill and Benny's house, she thought about it and it warmed her, as the remembrance of a great love would.