The Red Road (21 page)

On the first step he felt the phone vibrate once, twice, three voice-message alerts. Uncle Dawood. Without even looking at it he reached into his pocket and turned the phone off again and carried on his way.

18

Johnstone was not a destination. Morrow and McCarthy took the turn off the motorway to Paisley, checking the GPS every so often, worried they might drive through it and not notice.

A low town on the outskirts of Paisley, Johnstone had houses as small as a cramped inner-city area, two-up two-downs, with windows as small as factory gate hovels. The inhabitants were inexplicably proud of their town though. While checking ex-DC Harry McMahon’s address McCarthy found the house sale – he’d only just moved there. It was a moderate price for Glasgow but, being in Johnstone, they were expecting a mansion.

It wasn’t a mansion but abutted a golf course. The detached house had a drive and a square of orderly grass at the front. It looked identical to its neighbours, new and neat. Whatever Harry McMahon had been doing for the past seven years since leaving the police, he’d had a bit of luck at it.

They parked in the street and walked up the drive, past a four-year-old blue Honda. McCarthy knocked on the front door as Morrow looked in the windows. Neat net curtains in the shallow oriel window by the door. Two ornaments and a framed photograph facing into the room. She could see the floors were wood laminate, giving the front room an orange glow.

The door was answered by a tall man in his late forties, smart hair, clean white shirt tucked into ironed jeans. Morrow smiled: she would have known he was an ex-cop if she passed him in a supermarket.

‘Hello,’ he said, ‘what can I do you for?’

‘Harry McMahon?’ She showed him her card.

‘Oh, aye.’ He read her card. ‘DI Alexandra Morrow. How are you?’

They’d never met but there was that easy sense of camaraderie that came with a common value system.

‘I’m dealing with a case that touches on an old one of yours. Can I come in and speak to you?’

‘Ah, come away in, both,’ he said, looking pleased.

The hallway was tidy and devoid of fripperies. A skateboard stood on its nose against the wall, the messy, tagged design on it a stark contrast to the sterile white walls and clean wooden floor.

‘You a skateboarder?’ she said.

Harry nodded, acknowledging the joke. ‘One of my boys.’

Morrow looked around for signs of them. ‘Do they not live with you?’

Harry laughed at that. ‘No, we’re just a very tidy family. Come in.’ To McCarthy, he said, ‘Didn’t catch your name.’

McCarthy introduced himself. They shook hands and then McMahon seemed to remember that he’d forgotten to shake with Morrow so he did that and asked them for their coats. He hung them up in the tidiest understairs cupboard Morrow had ever seen.

Harry waved them into a sunny kitchen looking out on a garden that was a square of perfect green ending abruptly in a tall fence. At one side stood a pine summerhouse, the two large front windows with double glazed doors in the middle. The doors were shut.

‘If that was my shed,’ McCarthy said, pointing at it, ‘it’d be crammed with bits of motorcycles. All that patio bit’ – he looked at the honey-coloured flagstones leading to it – ‘would be stained with oil.’

‘Oh, aye.’ McMahon looked out at it. ‘My missus is a fiend for the tidiness. Don’t get me wrong, I’m tidy myself but she’s mad for it.’ He seemed quite pleased about that. ‘Would you like a cuppa?’

Normally they wouldn’t take a cup of tea from someone they were questioning. But Harry was an ex-cop and he understood perfectly the grades of intimacy involved in accepting.

McCarthy looked at Morrow for permission. ‘Lovely,’ she said.

As McMahon boiled the kettle and got out cups from the cupboard they talked about mutual acquaintances, about now senior officers McMahon had done his training with and about the politics of the single force. He had not a bit of bitterness about the force; it was nice to hear, encouraging to still-serving officers.

‘You seemed to have done quite well since you left,’ said Morrow as he put the mugs of tea on the completely empty kitchen table.

‘Lucky,’ he said. ‘Please sit down.’ He went to the cupboard and took some biscuits out of a plastic box, filed next to another one with cereal in it. ‘Left at just the right time. Got my pension, still fit to work, job market was buoyant. We’ve been very lucky.’

He came back to the table with a plate of biscuits. They were cheap chocolate chip cookies, an unbranded version of biscuits that were pretty cheap anyway. Morrow looked at her tea and saw it was weak, that the milk in it was thin and must have been skimmed.

‘So what is it you do now, Harry?’

‘Heard of “Information Solutions”?’

‘No.’

‘Well,’ he tipped his head to her, ‘you will. You’ll likely be working for them at some point in the future. They’re an investigations firm that work all over Scotland. Really, it’s a loose network of firms but we all work together. It means I can call Ullapool and get a company’s offices looked at in an afternoon by someone else, report back to the client within the day. It’s good. It works.’

‘Is it not all divorce stuff?’

‘No. Precognitions, statements, that sort of thing. The divorce stuff is rare enough. Not very salubrious but it’s better than missing pets. Makes you work like a bastard at your own marriage, anyway.’

‘And it pays?’

He shook his head, he didn’t really want to talk about that. ‘It’s fine. But they recruit ex-cops. When you leave the force they’ll get in touch, probably. You’ll get a letter and they’ll see if you want some work or just to register for the future. Very organised.’

‘That’s nice to know,’ said McCarthy and then winced when he remembered that Morrow was there. It was bad form to let on that he’d be having doubts. Morrow let it go.

‘So, Harry,’ she said, not wanting to drink the weak tea, ‘this case.’

‘Oh aye.’ He turned to her. ‘So, what year are we in?’

‘Nineteen ninety-seven. It was a murder—’

‘Done enough of them.’

‘A stabbing, two young guys, Michael Brown killed his brother.’

‘Hm, trying to remember ...’ He looked over her head, into the garden, and took a bite of his biscuit. Harry knew exactly which case she was talking about, she could tell. He was looking into the garden shed as if he wished himself in there. ‘Nineteen ninety-seven ...’

‘In the lane off Sauchiehall Street. Body found in the morning. Michael Brown was in Cleveden at the time, that’s where you picked him up—’

‘Oh!’ He was trying to act surprised but instead looked scared. He was an awful actor. ‘The night Diana died.’

‘Was it?’

‘Yeah. Was it?’ He searched her face.

‘Well,’ said Morrow, ‘what do you remember about it?’

‘Nothing, nothing, nothing.’ He was sitting bolt upright in his chair. ‘Well!’ he said, slightly too loud. ‘Let’s see. Hm. Diana died that night. The boy was found dead in the lane ...’

‘Down by ChipsPakoraKebab,’ nodded Morrow, trying to help him out.

‘Yes! Down the lane, there, and hm, let’s see.’ He raised a hand to his chin as if he was trying to think. ‘Ah, hm.’

McCarthy couldn’t take it any more. ‘Don’t,’ he pleaded quietly.

McMahon didn’t speak then. He sipped his tea, his eyes flicking about above the rim. Then he put his cup down and reached for another biscuit.

They sat around the circular table, three spokes on a wheel. All of them knew that something had happened to make the case memorable. Wee guys stabbed each other all the time in Glasgow. Morrow guessed it was a bad thing that had impressed it on McMahon’s mind. He wouldn’t remember a case from fourteen years ago otherwise. But McMahon wasn’t used to lying. She suspected that he hated having to do it, that was why he was so bad at it.

He was chewing through the biscuit as if trying to plug his mouth shut.

‘That was the worst attempt at a fib I’ve ever seen,’ she said to McCarthy and he smiled at McMahon.

Harry looked relieved and rolled his eyes. ‘Shit,’ he said, ‘I’m just not ...’

They were all smiling now and Harry relaxed a little, now he knew that they weren’t going to push him into a corner.

‘Is that why you left the force?’ smiled Morrow.

‘No.’ He took another biscuit. ‘But it is why I’m self-employed. You can’t talk to business folk the way we do, do you know that? They start crying and all that ...’

He looked at the table, puzzled. They were both glad to know that his transition hadn’t been entirely unproblematic.

‘OK, Harry, here it is: I’m going to assume you do remember the case?’

He blinked a yes.

‘And that something
unusual
happened in that case?’

Another blink.

‘Maybe something you don’t want to talk about?’

Blink.

She nodded at the table. ‘Something with fingerprints?’

He looked confused and gave a little head shake.

‘Not fingerprints?’

‘No. I don’t know anything about that.’

‘Your name is down as having taken them.’

‘I didn’t.’

‘Who did?’

He paled.

‘OK.’ She held up a hand. ‘Now we’re not after any old buddies of yours from the force, that’s not what we’re interested in at all. It’s the fingerprints from that case that we’re concerned about.’

‘I don’t know anything about that. I wasn’t there when the prints got took.’

The good thing about interviewing a bad liar was that Morrow knew he was telling the truth. ‘Who would know about that?’

‘George Gamerro. He was my DS at the time.’

‘And where’s he now?’

‘Stirling. He’s got a paper shop out there in Bridge of Allan.’

‘OK.’ She stood up. ‘You’ve been great, Harry.’

He saw them out to the hall and got their coats from the cupboard, holding Morrow’s open for her to slip into. ‘You’re not supposed to do this for women any more,’ he said as she put her arms in.

‘Aren’t you?’

‘PC and that,’ said Harry. ‘My missus likes it though.’

‘I think it’s slapping us on the arse and not promoting us you’re not supposed to do,’ said Morrow. It sounded a bit harsh but Harry smiled at it.

‘Oh,’ he said, ‘OK. You sound like my daughter. She thinks I’m a caveman.’

Morrow held out her hand and shook his warmly. ‘Nice to meet you, DC McMahon.’

He shook their hands and smiled and then reached for the door. He didn’t open it though but turned back. ‘Would you do me a favour? Please don’t mention that you were here. Not to George. Not to anyone.’

19

Rose held her paper coffee cup and leaned sideways, so that part of her face was obscured by the plastic plant. She didn’t want to be seen by anyone. She couldn’t go home. Robert had seen those photos of her. Robert knew who she really was now. She couldn’t stand that. And she knew why Anton Atholl hadn’t reported them all this time.

He must have loved you.
Julius kept her close because she kept Anton Atholl quiet. That was why he kept her. He didn’t love her. He wasn’t her father. She was useful. More than useful. They couldn’t have run the business without Atholl keeping quiet. They’d always known he was the one weak spot.

He loved you.

She wanted to kill Atholl. She wanted him annihilated. Not to kill him but for him to be gone, wiped off the face. She couldn’t kill anyone again. She just knew she couldn’t, and she couldn’t think straight because she had Aileen Wuornos’s chicken in her head.

She shut her eyes and was back to the night she heard about the chicken.

Late, two or three in the morning, sitting in Francine’s immaculate living room on the gold striped sofa with pale blue cushions. Rose was holding Hamish, rocking him as he cried a thin, exhausted wail. He had colic. The living room was the furthest place in the house from Robert and Francine’s bedroom.

She had the TV on to keep her awake, the subtitles on and the noise down and she came across a documentary about the American serial killer Aileen Wuornos. She was a prostitute. She’d killed six or seven men and now they were going to kill her. She was an ugly woman and a liar. They proved that she was a liar. She made faces into the camera, wore orange, looked dirty.

Hamish began to settle a little, Rose had given him some drops of medicine and he got drowsy. She wondered if maybe she could take a chance and put him down. She was distracted, walking back and forth with him on her shoulder, savouring the small weight of him, his nuzzling into her neck.

On the telly they were saying that Wuornos’s father killed himself in prison. He was in for raping and trying to kill a seven-year-old girl. That was what caught Rose’s attention, the mention of the father, and she realised that they were going back into her childhood, showing where she was from. Rose rarely heard stories like her own. It piqued her interest.

The father left the family two months before Wuornos was born. Then her nineteen-year-old mother left and Wuornos and her brother went to live with their grandparents.

Hamish was asleep. In the twilight living room, Rose looked for the remote to turn the telly off.

The grandfather was an alcoholic. He raped Wuornos and lent her out to his friends. She got pregnant by one of them. Rose couldn’t see the remote. She usually left it on the sofa. Wuornos had the baby and gave it away. When she was fifteen she left home and went to live in a wood nearby. Rose was looking for the remote by the sofa and thinking that Wuornos must have come from somewhere warm, to live in woods, that Michigan must be a nice warm place. Wuornos was whoring for money and food and when she came back into the town she used to hang around a house that belonged to a local paedo.

Rose stopped looking for the remote then. She began to watch the TV.

They interviewed people who had been kids back then and lived in the town. They all hung around there. They knew he was a paedo, they knew he was after them, but they went to his house anyway. He let them in and gave them food. He gave them beer and cigarettes. Rose saw herself at the door of the shack on TV, as if she had been in that house. She felt disgust and hated herself. She told the other kids she went there for beer and cigarettes, but that wasn’t why she went there. She went because he paid her attention. He told her she was special, that she meant the world to him. He looked at her and saw her. That’s why she was there, not for money or beer, not to save herself from the cold streets of Glasgow, but because he cared whether she was there or not. The things he gave her were a cover, because more shameful than fucking rooms full of old men was the need for someone.