The Red Road (30 page)

‘Why were they in care?’

‘I’m not allowed to discuss that.’

Morrow liked that. It was a long time ago and Michael Brown was unlikely to sue her for defamation but she was still respectful of him and his history.

‘He was a nice guy back then?’

‘Lovely.’ She was adamant. ‘
Lovely
wee guy. Loved being read to and kids’ TV shows. He was kind and cried
a lot
, relied on Pinkie, on John. After he died I didn’t see Michael for a long time and then when I read about him, it didn’t sound like the same person at all. Weird how someone can change that much. I actually wondered if he’d had a head injury because it didn’t sound anything like the wee guy I knew. Very sad.’

‘So, the day after Diana died ...’

‘Yeah, so that night the police phoned and we knew they had Michael, that they were asking him about Pinkie’s death but we didn’t think there would be anything in it. I mean, Michael adored John and he didn’t carry knives or anything and he fell apart when they came and told us that he’d been found dead—’

‘Were you on when they came and told him?’

‘I was. The police came and told us and they asked us to get Michael and bring him to the office. That’s why I went to the questioning of Michael, later, because I’d been there when they told him Pinkie was dead.’

‘How did he react, exactly?’

‘Very upset.’

‘But can you describe where they told him? How they told him?’

‘Well,’ she looked at the ceiling, taking herself back to the time, ‘Michael came into the office, it was small, quite messy, full of rotas and stuff. Big window so the kids could talk in to you even if you were working. He came in and the two cops were there, full uniform, and they asked him to sit down. He looked a bit worried but he probably thought it was his parents or something, he hadn’t seen them for a long time, so he sat down and I remember him looking out into the corridor through the window, a kid came past and he looked out and there was a flash on his face, like hope or joy or something, because I think he thought the kid outside was Pinkie, you know?’

‘You don’t think he knew Pinkie was dead at this point?’

‘No, he didn’t.’

‘So, what are you thinking, that he knew Pinkie was stabbed but not dead?’

‘I don’t think he knew that either. I’ve never believed he killed his brother. I was amazed when they found his fingerprints all over the place. If he did it he didn’t remember because when they told him Pinkie was dead he just melted. He slid off the chair. I mean, he couldn’t take it in. He was in a total daze for the rest of the day. He didn’t eat. We made macaroni cheese – he loved that, his favourite – but he didn’t eat. I had to sit over him and make him drink water. He was in bits. If he did it, he didn’t remember doing it.’

‘So you don’t think he did it?’

‘No. Then I was quite naive. Later I got pretty cynical but I still don’t believe it. He loved Pinkie. Pinkie was his parents, you know? Michael could be soft because Pinkie was a hard nut. Pinkie protected him, let him be tearful. He allowed him to be a kid. More than Pinkie got.’

‘So, on the night Michael was questioned, what happened?’

‘Oh, yes, so, the police came and asked if they could talk to Michael. He went in to the station—’

‘Wouldn’t a social worker have gone in with him?’

‘Well, we were short-handed and couldn’t leave the other kids with just two members of staff, it would have been illegal. Believe me, we wanted to go with him but we could hardly say to the police, you’ll need to wait until tomorrow because so-and-so’s off sick tonight. They billed it as just an informal chat, I mean, we didn’t think it was any big deal. There was no way Michael was involved. Next thing we know, Michael’s a suspect, can one of us come down and sit in on the interviews.’

Morrow nodded. She wished she had a tape recorder now – she needed to clarify everything before they moved on so she would remember. ‘So, Michael is told the morning afterwards. Then later that day the police come to pick him up for an informal chat, they didn’t charge him or read him his rights or anything?’

‘No, absolutely not. I was there, in the station, when they read him his rights.’

‘So, there was some sort of change between picking him up at the home and the station?’

‘I was told he’d confessed to one of the cops in the car.’ She looked sceptical.

‘Who told you that?’

‘When they phoned, that’s what they told us. He’d confessed in the car on the way there.’

‘Do you know who phoned you to come in?’

‘No. I can’t remember names. We were all pretty shaken.’

‘So you got there, to the station, and what happened?’

Yvonne then rolled through the questioning but none of what she said added to anything.

‘He had cuts on his hand as well, like he’d hit someone or something. It wasn’t entirely peaceful, is what I mean.’

Morrow nodded dutifully. ‘I see. Did you see his prints being taken?’

‘No.’

‘Did he talk to you about that?’

‘No.’

‘Do you remember DC McMahon?’

‘Policeman?’

‘One of the arresting officers. Big moustache.’

‘No.’

Morrow didn’t know what else to ask. She stood up and opened the door to the lobby. ‘Well, Yvonne, thanks so much for coming in to see us, we can arrange for you to be taken home—’

‘I’ve got a car outside,’ said Yvonne, turning back to her stick, ‘it’s fine.’

‘I’m amazed you remember that all so well.’

‘It was a big night, Diana dying and both the murders.’

Morrow grimaced. ‘You really think she was murdered?’

Yvonne laughed at the misunderstanding. ‘No, I mean the two murders. There were two murders in Glasgow that night: one outside Turnberry group home, and Pinkie. I didn’t mean Diana. I don’t give a stuff about that.’

‘Who else was murdered?’

‘Auch, a wee lassie at Turnberry killed her abuser outside the home there. That was a knife as well. Very sad. It wasn’t even in the papers. Because of Diana, I suppose.’

An hour and a half later Morrow got up from her desk.

The girl charged with the murder outside Turnberry Children’s Home on the same night that Pinkie Brown was killed was called Rose Wilson. Morrow had got McCarthy to download and print the court report on the case. Rose Wilson had been represented by Julius McMillan and no evidence was brought in the case, fingerprint or otherwise, because Rose Wilson pleaded guilty.

Her current home address was in Milngavie, a high prestige hamlet to the north of the city, and she shared the address with Robert McMillan, LLB.

30

It was a strange-looking house. The only consistent thing about the façade was the white paint. Morrow and McCarthy stood outside the low gate, looking at the backs of two large matching cars. Only twenty feet away, no one had bothered to put them into the double garage with a roof that matched the attached main house. They sat outside like prize bulls abandoned in a pen.

The house itself was low, with so many features, columns here, stair window there, eaves, ornamental chimneys ... the eye couldn’t read where the floors were. The entrance door wasn’t especially big but was heralded with twin rows of two columns and a path that snaked violently towards it.

‘I hate these new builds,’ said McCarthy, as if they were all like that.

‘Nice area though,’ said Morrow, looking around the street of equally ugly mansions. Three of the five were for sale. ‘Posh.’

‘Broke,’ said McCarthy, his eye on a garish
For Sale
sign next door.

The buzzer was answered by a woman’s voice. And a red light blinked on the camera lens.

They introduced themselves and the woman asked them to show their ID to the lens. The gate fell silently off its latch and dropped open.

Swinging it like a field gate, they stepped inside the low wall, onto the grey herringbone path that led to the front door. Doubtless the garden designers had drawn the snaking path to give an illusion of distance from the gate but the grass was bald in strips where the path led off in the wrong direction and Morrow saw a small print in the mud. Children, more than one, judging from the muddy footprints, taking short cuts.

A young woman was standing at the door. Her hair was pulled back in a high ponytail and she had great skin, a good figure swamped by a saggy mustard jumper and Uggs. Her earrings were small gold hoops, and she had on a small gold chain that sat on her collarbone, all very tasteful and upper middle, but Morrow recognised Rose Wilson from her mugshot. She still had the broad round cheekbones and thin lips she’d had as a child. Her forehead was short under her thick black hair.

‘Can I help you?’

‘Yes.’ Morrow held out her hand. ‘I wonder if you can. We’re looking for Rose Wilson.’

Just a moment’s hesitation and then she said, ‘I’m Rose. Won’t you come in.’ Not a question, a pleasantry, an automatic response. She stepped back and disappeared into the hall. They had no option but to follow her.

It was a big hall, like a small hotel might have. Rose Wilson took their coats and scarves and hung them on hooks in a cupboard. Morrow heard a voice from one of the rooms, a Disney voice, an adult doing a child and asking for something and then an FX rumble.

‘Have you got kids?’ She was trying to sound light.

‘No, I’m ... I’m the nanny here. We’ve got three: seven, eight and half and ten.’

‘Nice ages,’ said Morrow, looking up the stairs, wondering where the children’s mother was.

‘Got kids yourself?’

‘Twins. One year old.’

‘Wow,’ she said languidly, ‘that must be hard work.’

‘We’re getting there.’

Rose waved them across the hall, through a door to a kitchen with a dining room attached. The back wall of the house was made of timber-framed glass panels looking out onto a bland garden. A lawn. A far wall. No features, no toys, no bikes abandoned on their side in the rain. The kitchen was very tidy.

‘Tea? Coffee?’

‘No thanks,’ said McCarthy.

Morrow was looking at the cooker. It was strange that everything in the house was immaculately clean but the cooker was smeared with red sauce, wiped up very badly into ridges and swirls. It reminded her of the bloody girl in the mugshots and she wondered if Rose had thought about that when she abandoned the chequered cloth in the sink. She hadn’t been cleaning up when the door buzzer went. The spill was dry in parts, on the swiped ridges. She had just stopped cleaning it and dropped the cloth. Maybe they had a cleaning woman and it was her job.

‘So, what can I help you with?’

‘OK.’ Morrow turned back to her. ‘Can we sit down, please, Rose?’

‘Sure.’ They sat around the nose of the dining table and Rose watched their hands, expecting perhaps a form or something. Morrow took a notebook and a pencil out.

‘Do you know why we’re here?’

‘Robert?’ She bit her lip hard.

‘
Robert
?’

‘Have you found him?’ Rose’s eyes rimmed then and she started to weep, feeling in her jeans pockets for tissues, finding one, drying her eyes. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘Robert McMillan?’

‘Have you?’ She looked at them and realised suddenly that they had no idea what she was talking about.

‘We’re not here about that. Is Robert missing? Since when?’

‘Oh.’ Her composure was a little compromised by that. ‘Robert? He went missing, I thought you were here about that ...’

‘No, no.’

‘Just, when police officers come to the door ...’

‘I know,’ said Morrow. ‘We’re not there to say you’ve won the lottery, usually, are we?’

Rose laughed, tears still dropping from her eyes. ‘Sorry.’

‘When did he go missing?’

‘After his dad died.’ She realised that they might not know. ‘Sorry, his dad died and then he went missing. Upset.’

‘Rose, it’s Julius I wanted to talk to you about. He was your lawyer a long time ago, wasn’t he?’ She had never seen shutters come down so fast. Rose sat tall, straight, and her face dropped into neutral. But it was her turn to speak and she did.

‘Julius?’

‘Yes. When you killed Samuel McCaig?’

‘Yes, Julius represented me then, yes.’

‘And afterwards you stayed in touch?’

‘Yes. He visited me in prison. We became very close. Robert was just that bit older than me and his father used to bring him to visit. I came to work for them shortly after I came out.’

‘You must have liked each other?’

‘Very much.’

‘Like a father?’

‘A grandfather.’ But she seemed to think of something uncomfortable and corrected herself. ‘A
benefactor
. Like in an old film or something.’

Morrow nodded agreeably. ‘Do you remember the night Diana died?’

Rose blinked. ‘Of course.’

‘That was the night you killed Samuel McCaig.’

She blinked again, keeping her eyes on the table top. ‘Of course.’

‘You pleaded guilty. He attacked you. He had a history of attacking girls.’

‘So I found out. Afterwards.’

‘Anything else happen that night?’

There wasn’t an obvious answer to the question. She looked up. ‘Diana died?’

‘Pinkie Brown died.’

As if she had dropped from the sky Rose was back in that alley and her hands were wet and her lips were pressed tight together so nothing could get in there, and her young bones were sore and her backside was aching and she was frozen with terror. But she managed, through tight lips, to mutter, ‘Who’s that?’

‘Pinkie Brown. A fourteen-year-old boy in local authority care. He wasn’t in your home, he was just up the road in Cleveden. I remember those homes. They used to pal-about together, Cleveden and Turnberry, didn’t they? When they weren’t attacking each other.’

‘Yeah.’

‘Hung about in wee gangs, didn’t they?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Because they were close by.’

‘Yeah, yeah, we did. I didn’t know Pinkie though.’

‘Did you ever meet his wee brother, Michael?’

She remembered him, Morrow could see the flash of recognition and then a slump as if she was shrinking down into her hips. ‘No, I don’t ... don’t remember a wee brother.’