The Red Road (22 page)

Rose stood in front of the big TV, in the midnight twilight, with Hamish on her shoulder and cried for herself back then. She hadn’t thought about it for ten years.

A hard-faced woman talked about the paedo’s house, where things were and how dirty it was. Then she told the story of the chick.

The paedo kept chickens. The chickens laid eggs. He used to get the children to crack open fertilised eggs before they were ready to hatch. The chicks weren’t ready yet, not ready to come out. He’d make them watch the chicks struggle, trying to breathe, try to stand.

Rose couldn’t remember whether they had shown a chick doing that, struggling, but she could see it. She could see it clearly: a broken egg on a table. In the background a man’s face watching, smiling as a featherless chick tried to stand on unformed bones, its skin thin and blue, huge eyes bulging. They died, of course. Of course, they died. And the man made the children watch them die.

Robert knew about her. When he came home, the house would no longer be safe. It wouldn’t be separate. It would be like everywhere else, then.

So Rose sat in the most anonymous place she could think of, a city centre Starbucks. She hid among the shifting sands of customers coming and going, the sameness of the cups and the sticky floor and sugar-freckled tables and waited for the thought to go.

A chick and a broken egg. Not a yellow fluffy Easter chick, plump and full of promise. A featherless creature, blue skinned, staggering on a table. The picture made her feel sick. The picture made her want to bring her fist down on the chick, smash it and smear its soft bones and thin, stupid skin, its watery blood, over the table.

She wiped her hand on her leg, cleaning imaginary guts on her thigh. She couldn’t go home yet.

Outside, in the pedestrian street, shoppers hurried by in groups and singles. Rose watched their ankles, hating them. They had real people they belonged to. Real families and friends and they hated them, probably. They weren’t making themselves part of the family by giving a service, they weren’t being left outside the door of the Art Club to come in later.

Julius must have loved you, Atholl had said at the funeral. He must have
loved
you. But he didn’t. Julius used her to shut Atholl up. And in the end, at the very end, he broke the bond between them and told Robert about the back safe, told him the code, as if nothing they had built together mattered.

He was snide, Atholl. A snide shit. She knew exactly what he meant now. Julius loved having her around. She was so useful to him, in more ways than taking care of his business or running his errands or watching out for Robert and keeping him clean. Feeling angry was better than the sad sickness. She was able to look up and see something other than the chick or the photographs.

A woman was sitting at a far table, alone. She still had a woolly hat on, even though she was indoors, and was absent-mindedly arranging and rearranging the sugar strip packets into rows on the table in front of her. Her hand movements were jerky, her mouth hanging open and her shirt was buttoned up wrong, the spare button gaping above her heart. She reached slowly into her bag and pulled out a small bottle of antiseptic gel, a clear bottle with a pump action dispenser at the top. Pumping with a nervous finger, she squeezed out two measures and rubbed them on her hands, rubbing too long. Then she put the bottle away again.

Rose watched her from half inside the plant and shut her eyes. She wasn’t doing that. She wasn’t a nutter trying to clean herself in a café. She wasn’t that bad.

She lifted her drink to her mouth but remembered the chick again just as the coffee sloshed onto her lips. She couldn’t take anything in her mouth. She put the full cup back down and wiped her mouth with her sleeve.

The disgust shuddered through her. Who took those photos of her? It didn’t matter. Wasn’t McMillan, she knew that. Wasn’t even about her. It was about them, the men in the pictures. She was just a body. Couldn’t even see her face in one of them. But their faces were clear. No flash. Maybe they didn’t know the pictures existed. Atholl must have known though. That’s why he said there was nothing in the safe. He must have always known the pictures existed.

Without the photo Rose would never have remembered Atholl from back then. It would have been a party of drunk men, Sammy bringing her in, the men, one by one, taking her next door – it was usually in a separate room but not always. It would just have been a party among many parties. She didn’t look at faces.

Atholl knew though. Every time they spoke to each other, he must have seen that photograph the way she was seeing the chick in her head. She held her breath for a moment, certain she was going to vomit.

She held it.

She held it.

She let it out and found herself looking at a table of laughing teenagers, at a mother with a baby, at a man in a suit jacket eating a massive cake. They didn’t give a fuck. No one gave a fuck. Somewhere in the city right now a child was being fucked by someone and they were all here eating cakes and drinking coffee and chewing biscuits. Chewing and salivating and swallowing, sugar and cream and chocolate and coffee.

They didn’t give a fuck but they wanted to hear about it, afterwards. They’d crowd around the telly and listen to wizened old women talk about way back then and how different things were. They listened to people who overcame it, became a film star or a chess champion. That’s all they’d listen to, successes, survivors, because it meant they could keep eating and drinking and sitting around complaining about their husbands and housing and shoes and the government.

The woman with hand gel was not a film star or a champion anything. Rose wasn’t a champion anything. No one wanted to hear that. She took a breath, saw the chick, featherless, staggering on soft bones, its eyes so bulbous the eyelids couldn’t cover them. She saw the chick stagger and fall, felt the air through its ill-formed feathers as it tumbled to its side.

Now Rose looked across the generic café, the sticky café with fake leather seats and windows running with condensation, she looked across and saw that chick again, only now it wasn’t a nameless stranger from a warm place in America she saw, laying his head on the table, grinning as he watched the struggling chick fight and die. It was Julius.

It was Julius. And he didn’t love her, he wasn’t her friend. He had used her all this time. He never touched her but he’d used her just the same and he didn’t love her. But she had loved him.

A phone rang; she heard the buzz buzz before she connected it to her own phone. Probably Francine, weak, asking where she was.

Rose took the phone out of her pocket and looked at it. But it wasn’t Francine. It was exactly who she didn’t want to talk to. It was BB – code for Anton Atholl.

She looked at the phone and let it ring again, unsure whether she should answer, because she wasn’t certain she could speak. Fuck him, she thought and answered.

‘Is that you?’ he asked.

‘Hm,’ she said, hoping for news of Robert.

‘Need to see you.’

‘No.’

‘It’s imp—’

She hung up and turned her phone off. Across the room she saw the nutter woman with her shirt done up wrong. She had the small bottle in her hand again. She was pumping the alcohol rub out into her palm with a nervous jerky motion. Rose could smell it.

Rose was at her side suddenly. The smell from the hand rub was knife sharp, clean. She said, ‘Sorry, can I have some?’

The woman looked up at her and blinked slowly. ‘Sure.’

She was drawling, her lips moist, but Rose looked away from her face, looked away from her shirt and her chest where the wrongly matched buttons collided, gaping at her heart.

She pumped the bottle four times into her left hand and curled her fingers around the sacred contents of her palm.

‘Thanks.’ She retreated back to her coat and drink.

Under the table, where no one could see what she was doing or how odd she was being, Rose rubbed the alcohol all over her hands, felt it burn off the dirt and the filth. She lifted her hands above the table and shut her eyes and rubbed it into her face.

She sat still, eyes shut, feeling the dirt evaporate into the air.

She couldn’t do it again. She couldn’t kill Atholl. But she couldn’t let him live either.

20

The shops in Bridge of Allan were modest and functional: Co-op supermarket and chemist, but the shops in between were florists and card shops, gift shops and country wear. George Gamerro’s paper shop was at the far end of the main street.

The students at the nearby university were gathering at a fish and chip shop, the sort of Italian café that would have done good business in north London but here it wasn’t retro mock-up but the real thing. A felt-tipped sign leaned forehead first into the window, faded letters boasting
Scotland’s best fish tea
. The students stood outside in groups, eating steaming chips, scarved and jumpered, their skin impossibly good and clear with the air of bright futures around them. McCarthy parked the car outside the shop.

‘Tell you what,’ said Morrow, ‘why don’t you wait here and let me go in alone?’

It wasn’t what they were supposed to do but they both understood that a cop would know the rules, would know that a single cop would need corroboration. She thought Gamerro was more likely to talk if she went in alone.

‘Sure?’ said McCarthy.

Morrow wasn’t sure. She looked at the paper shop for a moment, wondering whether she was employing a clever technique or just desperate. She felt as if she was trying to trap herself, trick herself into doing the right thing. If Michael Brown didn’t kill his brother then his whole history should have been different. He shouldn’t have been given a life sentence, shouldn’t have been out on licence, shouldn’t be back in prison now. She was trudging towards an expensive retrial of a dead case and the release of a ruined, unsympathetic man who would be rearrested within a year and tried for something else, at a time of upheaval, when only the budget keepers and company men would feature in the future.

‘Dunno ...’

They sat for a while, Morrow pulling apart and fitting together her career suicide, McCarthy awaiting her decision.

Students passed them, heading back to the uni campus. Morrow looked at the shop.

The windows were covered in adverts for different papers. A huge black and white skyline of Glasgow covered one whole window and outside stood a bin sponsored by an ice cream company and a newspaper stand from a paper.

‘To hell with it,’ she said finally. ‘Wait here.’

It was dark inside the shop. It took a moment for Morrow’s eye to adjust. A chubby young woman was serving, leaning heavily on the counter top and reading a celebrity magazine. She had very pink lipstick on and chewed gum. She glanced up as Morrow came in, long enough to see that she wasn’t a child, unlikely to shoplift, and went back to her reading.

‘Excuse me,’ said Morrow, ‘I’m looking for George Gamerro?’

The girl looked her over. ‘What for?’

‘I need to talk to him.’

She nodded. ‘Selling something?’

‘No, I’m an old pal from the police.’

‘Oh.’ She brightened at that. ‘Hang on.’ She shuffled out from behind the counter and took two steps to a door at the back of the shop. She opened it into a narrow cupboard, crammed with crates of pop and boxes of crisps, shelves reaching right up to the ceiling. The nearest wall was taken up with a narrow wooden staircase, steep as a ladder, that led up to a hole in the ceiling.

The girl kept her eyes on the shop and shouted up into the hole, ‘Hey, Granda! GRANDA!’

A thump upstairs made her smile at Morrow. ‘He’s annoyed now. Watch this: GRANDA!’

Another thump was followed by a series of muttered curses and the girl laughed softly to herself. ‘He’ll be spitting now.’ She went back to the counter, leaving Morrow at the bottom of the steps.

A foot dropped through the hole, then another, feeling gingerly for the step. George Gamerro looked enormous as he climbed down from the small hole. When he finally stood in front of her Morrow could see that he was enormous. Tall as the door and muscled, still, despite his age. His face looked old, a craggy map of wrinkles and skin tags but his body was still spritely. He stood like an old school polis, shoulders back, hands comfortably by his side, feet planted firmly on at-ease legs.

‘Hello?’ he said, looming like a giant in the tiny cupboard.

Morrow put her hand out. ‘George Gamerro? I’m DI Alex Morrow.’

George looked wary. He looked at her hand but didn’t take it. ‘From Strathclyde?’

She smiled. ‘How did you know that?’

He didn’t return her smile. ‘What are you doing here, on your own?’

Morrow had meant it to be friendly and informal, her being here without a colleague. ‘I, um, my neighbour’s in the car outside. Can we talk to you?’

George put his hands in his pockets. ‘Why’s he in the car?’ he whispered, looking over her head to the door. A twitch on his chin expressed the panic he was feeling. ‘Who is it?’

‘Who do you think it is?’ She wanted him to say a name, tell her who it was that he was so afraid of, but he heard it as a threat.

He looked her in the eye and snarled, ‘What if I don’t come?’

She shook her head, trying to backtrack. ‘That would be fine. I came in on my own because I thought it would be more friendly, you being an ex-DS, but clearly it’s not come over like that at all ...’

George kept the snarl on his mouth but his eyes told her he doubted himself, that he was afraid of who, or what, was in the street, that he was too old for this now.

Unbidden, she put her hand on his forearm. ‘Gamerro, come and have a fish tea with me and my DS. And don’t worry: I’m buying.’

The middle-aged café owner was plump, plain and clearly very fond of Gamerro. She saw him from behind the counter and came out to greet him warmly, wiping her hands on her pinny as she pushed through the queue to get to him. She led him to a table for four, explaining to the usurped customers in the queue that Gamerro, Morrow and McCarthy had a reservation.