The Red Road (11 page)

Rose cleared her throat. ‘Look, um, I can save you a bit of work if you’d like. That’s how I met him. I was one of those cases. He defended me when I got in trouble.’

It took a moment to register. Then the dark-haired one dropped his voice to confidential. ‘What sort of trouble?’

‘You don’t need to whisper. It was a culp hom.’ She noticed that she’d dropped her own voice. ‘The family know, well, the kids don’t know and I’d rather you didn’t mention it in front of them ...’

The cops were too uncomfortable to write it down.

‘Culpable homicide?’ The dark-haired one repeated it to give himself time to take it in.

They’d go straight back to the office and check out her record. They’d see the guilty plea and the details. Were the photos in that file? If they saw the photos they’d be horrified. Julius McMillan showed her them. He wanted her to see them, take it in, get over it. She could recall them in detail: Sammy slumped against the wheel like an empty costume, blood everywhere. Black and white, colour. Mugshots of her, encrusted with dried blood.

The balding cop cleared his throat. ‘And you stayed in touch?’

‘He did. He helped me out when I was released.’

‘That was good of him.’ His eyebrows were high on his forehead.

‘Yes. He was a better man than most people knew. I can understand Robert wanting to be alone. He’ll need time. Julius is a terrible loss to all of us.’

‘He was very ill, wasn’t he?’ The baldy one was building to something.

‘Julius?’ she said, trying to anticipate his next move. ‘Yes. Yes, I’m afraid he was. Lung condition. Could have happened at any time. He wasn’t in pain.’

‘So it was a mercy, really?’

She shrugged. They looked at each other. And though Rose kept a straight face she was thinking that the bald cop had never been with anyone when they died. Rose knew that death was never expected or accepted, no one went gently. There was always a futile kick against the kitchen floor. She dropped her eyes to the table and repeated the palliative lie for him, ‘It was a mercy, yes, I suppose.’

He smiled at her for saying that. ‘But Robert doesn’t see it that way?’

‘He didn’t show it but I’m sure he’s very upset.’

The dark-haired cop was busy studying her. She didn’t look the part, she knew that. She dressed like a middle-class graduate: good quality jeans, big belt, baggy cashmere jumper. They were all things that Francine had bought her or replacements for worn out things she had bought her. And she had that ease and arrogance that confused people, the steady eye of someone who knew exactly who she was but who spoke with a low-class accent.

‘We need to fill out the forms.’

He took her name, her age: twenty-nine; her address: here; and her job. She was a nanny, had an HNC in Early Education and Childcare from Langside College.

He pretended to be pleased. ‘Did you do your HNC when you were in prison?’

‘After. Francine and Robert were expecting their first baby, Hamish. They offered me the job before he was even born.’

‘That’s very community minded.’ He looked to his partner to see if he would concur in the lie. ‘We don’t always hear stories like that, you know?’

Rose smiled politely. ‘I know. They’re good, Christian people.’

‘Oh!’ he said. ‘They’re
religious
.’

She smiled but didn’t confirm or deny it. They both seemed satisfied with that as an explanation of why a professional couple would hand over their firstborn to someone convicted of murder. The truth was that Francine was the one who wanted her. Rose and Robert liked each other, felt very close in many ways, but it was at Francine’s insistence that Rose got the job. She trusted her. You know how to look after people, she said to Rose, in secret, because Robert didn’t know yet. I’m going to need you. Can you keep a secret? They were all consumed by the need to protect Robert.

So, could she tell them when she last saw Robert McMillan?

Rose told them it was the night before last. She told them he seemed fine.

And, they asked, how did Robert seem, recently?

She told them that Robert had been calm when his father died. He spent time at the private hospital and was there with his father when he died after the operation to reinflate his lungs.

Did she get on with Robert?

She said she didn’t really see that much of him. He worked for a big law firm and spent most of his time at work. He rarely managed to get home for family dinners and she was always busy with the kids. When he was around her job was to attend to the kids and let Robert and Francine spend a little time alone together.

It was true in a way; she didn’t know what films he liked or watched or enjoyed. She didn’t even see him eating that often. But she and Robert had known each other since they were children, herself only four years younger than him. Two sides of a coin, Julius called them. She’d loved that when she was younger.

Suddenly, she found herself back in remand, in the dark, a fourteen-year-old, her skin dry from the dusting of blood. She kept scratching her head and finding red dust under her fingernails. Her scalp was raw by the time Mr McMillan came to see her. Though she was fourteen and looked sixteen she was still small, too small for the clothes they gave her to change into. She sat across the table from him in the interview room, a small, flattened thing at the end of her life.

Not here. That memory did not belong in this house but she couldn’t shake it and knew that she was frozen at the table, staring, exciting interest.

With a furious energy, she managed to make the memory ebb, kicking it down through the kitchen floor. She looked up at the cops.

‘Sorry,’ she whispered, hoarse. ‘It’s been quite a shock, really, all of it. Everyone’s been very upset. We knew he wasn’t healthy but it was still an awful shock. Awful.’

The coppers nodded, as if they knew anything. ‘You said you became very close?’

‘Mr McMillan visited me in prison. I wasn’t going to appeal the sentence. It was five years for culpable homicide, he did a great job, the court was very kind to me. He visited me though and encouraged me to study while I was in there – he took an interest.’

‘And when you got out he gave you a job?’

‘No, when I got out I was doing nursery training at Langside. I was living in supported accommodation. Francine was pregnant and he got me an interview. Three kids later I’m still here.’

And how did she get on with Francine?

She wiped her nose, listening for noises from the hall, mentally mapping the children’s positions in the house. ‘I love Francine. She’s like my sister. I just love her.’

Did she have a boyfriend?

No.

That seems unusual, a pretty woman her age. They smiled at her. She didn’t smile back. They persisted.

Was there someone recently?

No.

She couldn’t pretend like they wanted her to. She couldn’t giggle at the compliment or make up a history. There was no one. There never was anyone. She never wanted there to be anyone. Every night she got into bed and before she fell asleep she remembered that no man had touched her today, and smiled.

They wrote something on the sheet and she could see them thinking she was having an affair with Robert, or Francine. Or both. But she looked at their doughy cop faces and guessed that their imaginations probably wouldn’t stretch to both. Not unless they watched a lot of pornography. You could tell when a man did that. It gave them a lot of strange ideas about people.

They filled out the bottom of the form and asked her to go and get Francine out of her bed.

Rose stood up, reviewing her performance. It was OK. ‘Officers,’ she said, ‘are you sure I couldn’t get you a cup of tea?’

She sounded imploring, mostly because she was upset but she saw them respond to the suggestion of respect and care as a child does to love. They looked at her and their faces blossomed warm and soft. Them and us. Us and us.

‘No, thanks, Miss Wilson, if you could just get Mrs McMillan for us.’

She turned back to the hall, keeping her head down so that the children wouldn’t see her looking upset.

Francine was reading in bed. She had a throw over her legs and a folio edition of
The Mill on the Floss
open on her knees. She had been crying.

Rose walked over to the bedside and looked down at the book. She was on page four. Rose sat down.

‘Is that the police downstairs?’

‘Yeah.’

‘They want to talk to me?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Did they ask about you?’

‘Yeah.’

‘What did you tell them?’

‘Everything.’

Francine reached out to Rose and held her hand for a moment.

‘Once the police leave, I need to go out,’ said Rose.

Francine squeezed her hand.

8

1997

Julius McMillan sat in his small office, tapping his pen on the desk, and considered the situation. It was a bad situation. She had killed two men in one night. He had their story for Samuel McCaig. That was a good story. Rose had just met him, he tried it on, she panicked. Fine. Culp hom, self-defence. So that was fine. But the Pinkie Brown murder, that was bad.

He lit a Rothmans and sat back, climbing inside the story, looking for the chinks of light. Pinkie brought the weapon. Pinkie had a record of violence. They could claim that he tried to rape Rose but that would undermine the Sammy the Perv defence. They were at school together. It was difficult. Julius couldn’t see a break in it. There was no way out. The significant thing so far was that she hadn’t been charged or even questioned about Pinkie. But she would be, eventually, if he didn’t do something.

She was an astonishing little animal. McMillan had defended kids, women, people in extremis, but he had never met anyone like her before. She had no one: no family, no friends, even her social worker changed every six months. She’d never even been fostered and she didn’t have friends at school. Her pattern seemed to be that she had one person in her life at a time and that person was her all. Her mother, first, an all-consuming mess. Then no one for a year, then Sammy. Absolute fidelity. McMillan saw it in her. When she pledged her loyalty to him he saw the rest of the world die in her eyes. But it wasn’t that she had a naive belief in him, she wasn’t stupid. She saw something in him, he knew she did.

He picked up the phone and called Dawood McMann. They arranged to meet in a car park, which seemed a bit melodramatic to Julius.

He was careful not to tell his receptionist, Mrs Tait, where he was going. He was sure she was leaking information to Anton Atholl.

DC David Monkton was in the locker room, hanging his T-shirt and jeans neatly onto a hanger. He had a half smile on his face, half listening to the chat among the other officers. He felt self-conscious about that smile because it wasn’t genuine, he knew it wasn’t. He was trying to convey belonging and yet not belonging, being somehow above the rest of them and yet not making a big thing of it, but the smile kept slipping. The joke among the men was going on too long and it wasn’t really that funny.

‘Hey, Monkton.’ The officer speaking to him was standing in crumpled underpants and his blue shirt and he was fat and hated Monkton.

‘What?’

For a short moment they looked at each other across the heads of the others with undisguised loathing and then the fat man turned it into a smile. ‘You been ironing your cock?’

Everyone laughed at him. Monkton knew the expression to make: unconcerned, also amused, but he just couldn’t get his facial muscles to do that today. He looked sick, he thought, so he changed it and then worried that he looked hurt. He turned into his locker and hung his clothes up for the end of his shift and thought to himself, one day I will be your boss.

‘I’m just asking,’ said the cop, ‘because you’ve got a seam down the front of it.’

He hadn’t seen David’s cock. The laughter was less cheerful this time, wary. Someone said, ‘Nah, man.’ Monkton came back out of the locker. The cop was still glaring at him.

Monkton met his eye, raised his eyebrows. Everyone looked away.

‘What?’ said the cop, thinking he was squaring up to fight him.

Monkton said nothing. He was remembering the man’s face for later, further on in his career. He turned and walked out of the locker room. He was just outside the door when he heard the guy say, ‘Who does he think he is?’

Monkton wanted to run back in and punch his lights out. But he didn’t because he was controlled, because he knew what he was doing and scum like that couldn’t stop him. He was going right to the top. That’s what they couldn’t cope with; his ambition. And he would one day be running divisions, running squads full of grunts like him and he wouldn’t have to put up with their crap, their humiliating, belittling crap.

He walked up the stairs to the office he was sharing with his DS. He was in an office with the fucking DS because he actually had ambitions. He was already ahead of the game and that’s why they hated him. They were jealous. His phone rang in his pocket as he reached the landing. He took it out. It was a tiny phone, they could make them so small now.

He answered it and found Dawood McMann on the other end. A warm sensation flooded through him. A call from McMann meant money. Cash to spend, cash he
had
to spend because he couldn’t bank it.

‘What can I do for you?’

‘It’s a bit more complicated than the usual. Can we meet?’

Monkton looked around. No one who mattered was anywhere near him. ‘Sure. When?’

‘Now? Outside?’

It was a Range Rover, the cabin was warm and the seats were made of leather. Monkton shifted in the chair, even the steering wheel was covered in leather, pale leather, his hand lingered on the seat leather, brushing it, feeling it, loving it.

‘So it would be a step up,’ said McMann. ‘But are you ready for that?’

‘How much?’

Dawood didn’t answer so Monkton looked at him. He was a strange-looking man. Half Pakistani, he had a moustache when no one in Scotland had a moustache. It was a big one too and his hair had some sort of preparation in it that made it look wet, the tracks of his comb still in there. He wore jewellery as well, big gold rings and cheap string bracelets around his left wrist that looked dirty.