The Red Road (12 page)

‘Fifty thousand.’

He savoured Monkton’s reaction, watching the wide easy smile spread across his face, looking at his teeth as if he was counting them, reflecting the smile back at him.

‘That’s a hell of a lot of money.’

Dawood smiled. ‘I’m asking a lot. It’s not just a bit of information this time. Find someone, make it stick. That’s all.’

They smiled at each other, wider, unguarded. Monkton didn’t mind the dirty bangles or the wet-look hair. He didn’t care about the gold filling in one of Dawood’s incisors or his strange way of nodding his head that looked like yes and no at the same time.

9

Morrow’s eyes fell on the house, the warm light in the front window, the scraggy grass on the sloping lawn to the road, the messy hedge. She glanced at the roof, worrying herself. It did need to be done but they’d spent the money already and had to hope that the roof would see the winter through. Even as she was fretting she was still smiling because she was so close to being home. She puckered as she turned into the cul de sac, rehearsing a smother of kisses for her boys, already feeling the tickle of soft baby hair on her lips. Then she saw him. Her brother, Danny, was parked outside her house, waiting for her.

She drew up sharply, bonnet to bonnet with Danny, a car space between them, and switched the engine off. They looked at each other in the dark. As if it was happening in slow motion, she saw him realise she was pissed off that he was there. She saw him glance down, decide to ignore it and look up. He forced his face into a passive smile.

She stayed where she was, watching him. Danny McGrath letting an insult go. With her cop’s head on she knew it was ominous. Danny was a predator and he was after something.

His car bonnet loomed over hers but she sat, looking up, not matching his smile. He must know the things she knew about him, the broken legs and burned-out shops, the wash of money and the army of muscle.

Danny ran half the taxis in Glasgow, since he had magically acquired a licence despite his reputation and all his previous convictions. Alex knew what went on with the taxis, how much money was being cleaned through the cash business. She sat in her car and remembered the dapper old car dealer weeping in his office as they bagged up the files of his decades-long business. She blamed Danny, though the family that did it were rivals of his.

She got out, grabbed her bag and walked over to his window. It rolled down smoothly and Danny smiled at her.

‘How are you?’ he said.

Morrow chewed her cheek. ‘What you doing here?’

Though the act of tolerance was choking him, he rallied: ‘Just visiting my godsons in there. How are you?’

He waited for a pleasantry back. She didn’t have one for him. She looked over the roof of the car. ‘Look, um, don’t come to my house when I’m not here.’

Danny wasn’t used to that, to people being sharp or abrupt with him. He was a powerful man. He had been in knife fights, he’d kicked people in the face. He huffed an indignant laugh at the windscreen and looked at her, amused and puzzled.

She said it again, ‘I don’t want you in my house.’

‘... My godsons,’ he said, smiling but the anger showing in the set of his eyes.

They stood in the dark, looking away from each other.

Finally Morrow spoke. ‘Danny, this isn’t ...’

‘This isn’t
what
?’

She didn’t want to get into a discussion.

‘Am I not good enough?’

She looked at his face, at the scar on the chin, at the lies in his eyes. He wasn’t good enough to be near her kids but they were so mired in bullshit that she couldn’t say that. ‘Dan, I think we should have a break for a while. I’ll call you.’ She walked away up the path to the door.

‘Alex.’ He was out of the car and coming after her. He’d put on weight, eating takeouts every night, and the tracksuit wasn’t doing him any favours. ‘Wait.’

He caught up with her, reaching into his back pocket and pulling out an old photo. ‘This is why I came. I only wanted you to have this.’ He handed it to her. ‘Nineteen seventy-six.’

The photo was old, in the faded pastels of the 1970s. It had been ripped almost in half and sellotaped back together. Two girls, their arms around each other’s shoulders, wearing shorts and cheesecloth smock tops. Alex recognised her mum’s hairstyle: a Farrah Fawcett flick with a Debbie Harry dye job: brown at the back and blond-flicked fringes. The other girl was Danny’s mum, still recognisable even without the broken nose. She had a matching hairstyle, cheaper, the flick less defined.

Morrow hadn’t known their mothers were ever friends. The two girls each had a baby just a year or so after the photo was taken, both to the same nasty man. Danny and Alex. They started school together without knowing they were half-brother and -sister. They had a mutual crush in their first term at school, until their mothers met at the gates and set about each other. There was no mystery about Danny and Alex’s relationship then, just shame and fascination.

But here their mothers were so young and fresh and hopeful. Photographed smiling, standing on waste ground, the earth hard and dry. There was a heatwave that year, she remembered her mum talking about it. Her mum’s legs and forearms were sunburnt pink in the picture.

Danny hated his mother. When he was very young, thirteen, fourteen, she couldn’t remember, he’d been arrested for battering her. It seemed unfair to Morrow at the time. It seemed unfair to everyone at the time. His mother was no stranger to a brawl and if Danny hadn’t come off the worst it was probably to his credit. He loathed the woman. Yet here he was, smiling over Morrow’s shoulder at the photo, head tilted just so. Danny did nothing unless it served him some purpose.

‘I wanted you to keep it,’ he said. ‘For the boys, for later. So they can see how close they were. It wasn’t always bad ...’

She looked at the photo. The lies were rigid between them now. She looked at the photo and wondered what they were doing, if they were lying to each other or to themselves.

‘Lovely.’ She backed off a step. ‘You got a copy?’

‘Yeah.’ He took a hopeful step towards her.

‘Thanks.’ She turned away, fitted her key in the door and shut it firmly between them.

She was in another world, suddenly looking at the stairs her waters had broken on, the Christmas stairs, the birthday stairs, the stain where baby Dan was sick.

A sour tang of milk sick was carried to her on the heat of the house. She took off her coat and let her senses engulf her.

‘Alex!’ Brian called from the front room. ‘Alex, get in here!’

She looked in the door. He was holding Danny on his knee, holding a cupped hand full of stinking white vomit in the other.

‘A cloth! A cloth!’

The boys were falling asleep. Alex had given them a second bath and put them to bed while Brian took an hour to himself, sitting and watching football. Neither boy was hot or spotty and they didn’t look as if they’d be sick again. It was one of the fleeting bugs they kept picking up. Small wonder. They put everything they got hold of into their raw wee mouths.

She stood at the door, smiling, and watched them battle to stay awake, getting to their knees and dropping back, punch drunk from the day. The cots were pushed up next to each other because they liked to hold hands through the bars.

She watched them until they fell asleep, listened to their snuffling until her feet were too sore to stand any longer. She turned the intercom on and tiptoed down to the living room.

Brian was slumped on the settee. All around him the carpet had scrubbed stains from glories past.

‘We’ll need a new carpet,’ she said.

‘Hm.’ Brian kept his eyes on the TV. ‘Not yet.’

She sat next to him, gently kicking his feet over for a share of the footstool. Brian fought back, gaining ground and losing a slipper. She took her feet off and then he made room for her. Their feet formed a tidy row and they smiled at the telly. The football match was between two teams neither of them cared about. Fifty minutes in and the score was nil nil.

Her foot nudged Brian’s. ‘What was Danny saying?’

‘He was only in for a minute. He was all smiles. Trouble at his work.’

‘Sort of trouble?’

Brian shrugged. ‘Just fed up, I think. Hard for everyone at the moment. He was here to see you.’

‘Well,’ she felt tired suddenly, ‘he saw me.’

He sat up suddenly. ‘Oh, guess what ...’ He stood up and left the room, coming back in with a cardboard wine carrier with three bottles in it. He held it up and grinned. ‘Eh?’

‘Where’s that from?’

‘This afternoon. The boys were asleep for twenty minutes and the door went and a market researcher came to the door. Fancy a glass?’

Morrow smiled up at him, calculating whether saying yes would mean she’d have to stand up. ‘Aye, go on then.’

He smiled as he backed out of the room, returning with two small glasses. It was pleasant wine, sweet but crisp.

‘That’s quite nice,’ said Morrow to the television.

‘Yeah, it’s all right, isn’t it? I’d prefer beer, really.’

‘What was the research about?’

‘Holidays.’

She took another sip.

‘Have we got to go to a presentation or anything?’

‘No.’

‘Did they go around the other neighbours?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Man or woman?’

Brian tutted. ‘For heaven’s sake, Alex.’

‘I’m just asking, Brian.’

‘You’re very suspicious.’

‘Hm. Man or woman?’

He smiled. ‘Woman, OK?’

‘For a twenty-minute chat, she gave you three bottles?’

Brian grunted but she wasn’t sure if he was talking to the telly or her.

‘What did you tell her?’

‘We can’t afford a holiday.’

Morrow watched the millionaires jog around midfield and thought about what they were all prepared to settle for now. Free wine. Enough to eat. The absence of civil war.

10

Though she had a key Rose rang the buzzer. She wanted to give Atholl the impression of courtesy, so that he would think she was in one mood and she could wrong-foot him with quite another.

The block of flats was made of orange and yellow brick, a modern take on a tenement building. Ten years old and it was wearing badly. Someone’s buzzer was stuck and the intercom gave off a perpetual hiss. The ground-floor windows were always roughly curtained, as though the tenants were sick of being stared in at by other people’s visitors.

Atholl’s voice crackled through the fuzzy intercom.

‘Me,’ she said into it. The door fell open.

Inside, the stairs were steep and thin, carpeted to minimise sound. It was a noiseless place.

Atholl called it ‘Lonely Mansions’ and ‘The Wound-Licking Station’. He said it was full of separated and divorced people, some with kids, some with bottles. No one wanted to know anyone else. No one heard anyone else. It was a recovery room, he said. The flats were as much as they legally needed to be and no more: the bedroom could fit a double bed, but not the space to walk around it. The ceiling skimmed the scalp – and thank God the builders hadn’t used Artex. Atholl liked describing things. He’d told her once that he’d wanted to be a writer.

She jogged up the stairs, three floors, six flights, and knocked on his door. He opened it and she could smell immediately that he was drunk. It wasn’t the smell of vodka that hit her, it was his sweat. He gave off a strange odour that reminded Rose of her mother’s melancholy smell. She took a deep breath and stepped inside, shutting the door behind her.

‘This isn’t the time,’ she said, meaning for drunkenness, but it was too late for that. Anton Atholl was bouncing off the walls on his way to the sitting room. His shirt back was caked in sweat.

Holding onto the door jamb, he managed the turn into the sitting room and she followed him.

Atholl slumped in a low armchair, half bottles of vodka cluttering up a table at his side, three glasses, different sizes, all dirty with orange juice. Behind him, through a long picture window, was the Clyde, a black mile oozing towards the sea, and beyond it, on the far bank, small windows into other lonely lives.

She didn’t want to go into the room. She leaned on the door frame, tucking her hands into her hoodie pockets. Self-pity hung in the room like a smoker’s fog.

Atholl attempted a smile. ‘You hear about Aziz Balfour?’

‘What about him?’

Anton Atholl shrugged. Rose felt sick again and looked around the room. He hadn’t taken much furniture when he left his wife and kids. He wasn’t a man for going to John Lewis and picking out fabrics for sofas. He had a leather chair, a table for the drink, and a radio for the cricket. Luckily, the flat came furnished with a washing machine.

So Lord Anton Atholl sat on his one chair with nothing but his misery for company. Rose imagined his wife and kids, who she’d never met, over the other side of the city, laughing and sitting on different chairs, using crockery and napkins, reading books they’d had for ages, with chests and beds and sofas, laughing as they thought about the fat old man in his empty flat. Lonely Mansions, right enough.

She honestly thought that Anton would be the one to go to the police one day. When Julius died Atholl was her first concern. He was the weak point, they’d always thought that. She’d always believed that he didn’t report them to the police out of loyalty to Julius. But now Julius was dead and still he hadn’t made any kind of move. She looked at him, sitting in his ruin; the fact that he’d done nothing made her think less of him.

She cut to the chase. ‘Where the fuck is Robert?’

Atholl looked into the far distance as his eyebrows rose in panic and confusion. She watched as a sob seemed to roll from his belly, through his chest and come screaming out of his mouth. He covered his face with both hands and cried. He didn’t know where Robert was.

She watched impassively from the doorway. She couldn’t leave before she knew who was doing what. ‘What’s Dawood up to?’