The Turning Tide (5 page)
And while Morag had never quite been able to break herself of the habit, she did learn to not be so loud and obvious while doing it. ‘The council are useless,’ the old dear continued. ‘All they do is send the same form letter. Impossible to get anyone on the phone to listen, much less see you in person.’
Morag bobbed her head, the smile pasted on her face. The fingers of her right hand tapped lightly, rhythmically, across the top of a folder. Arjun caught her eye and motioned for her to cut it out. She glowered, but stopped. She nodded at him to start shutting the office in the hope the woman would take the hint and finish up.
‘It is an unfortunate situation,’ Morag said to the scowling face on the other side of the desk. ‘But it is in the Council’s hands, not mine. I am sure that if you persist with them, you will get the satisfaction of an answer.’ She reflected, not for the first time, that it was just as well the contents of the surgery appointments were confidential. Not because of sensitive information, much the opposite. Anyone having to read through them would likely die of boredom.
At least getting involved on the independence issue had resulted in one pay-off she’d hoped for: the front bench. Local concerns had slipped even further down her to-do list since being appointed Shadow Home Secretary. Morag checked her watch discreetly. If this didn’t wrap up soon, she would have no time left to visit the morgue before the train went.
‘The lottery?’ Erykah said. ‘Since when do we play the lottery?’
Erykah sat down on her bed – their bed – in the large room. Maybe she’d misheard. She waited for him to correct her. But he didn’t. ‘You never play the lottery,’ she said.
Rab peeled off his suit jacket and loosened his tie. He extracted a handkerchief from his pocket and mopped the sweat from the back of his neck. ‘No, I . . . It was on a whim. I saw the Big Billions Lottery in the shop, and, well . . .’ He unfolded a newspaper to the page where the results were printed and laid it alongside the crumpled ticket next to her.
‘Big Billions? Never even heard of it.’ Erykah looked at the ticket and paper in turn. In a corner of a back page, in a small black-bordered advert, the winning numbers were printed. And they were the same ones as on the ticket she was holding. Matching six numbers from forty-nine was a one in fourteen million chance. You were more likely to get hit by an asteroid. Or struck by lightning. Playing the lottery was one of those things other people did. Desperate people. Not them.
So this was what he had come to: a man loses his job and has to pay the bills somehow. By her calculations, he was probably getting down to the end of what little buffer he had. So he might pick up a ticket in desperation. Hoping against hope. When hope was all he had left.
But while buying a ticket made some kind of sense, winning sure didn’t.
‘This is – this is
real
?’ she said. ‘Twenty million jackpot?’ Rab nodded, dabbing sweat from his brow. She flipped through the paper, looking for a line or a page to let her know this was a wind-up, an anniversary prank. A specially printed edition of the paper, bought from a humour website. But there was nothing, because this was real. It was the same newspaper she had seen at the corner shop on her walk home from the boathouse.
‘I don’t get it,’ she said. ‘If there was some kind of new lottery, wouldn’t there be adverts for it on all the time?’
‘I don’t really know,’ Rab admitted. ‘I think it’s run from the Isle of Man, or something. Anyway. It’s money. It’s a lot of money.’
Twenty million pounds. Erykah felt a jolt of adrenaline that she recognised from being on the start line of a race. Her mouth went dry. It was both exciting and terrifying. She wanted to leave Rab. Scratch that,
needed
to leave. The charade of a marriage had gone on too long.
But this.
This
.
She remembered the money Mum scraped together to play the first National Lottery draw in the ’90s. Pound coins, shrapnel of change, to play her ‘lucky numbers’. Erykah was visiting and Rainbow had insisted they watch the programme. Her mother leaned so close to the orange flickering face of Noel Edmonds on screen that Erykah thought she might trip and fall through the television. Neon-coloured balls tumbled in a spinner like socks in a dryer and an announcer shouted the results as they appeared.
Even before the National Lottery started her mother had been a sucker for any promise of money with no strings attached. Horse races. The Irish Sweeps. Raffles in the pub, charity draws. Erykah collected up any losing tickets and flattened them out between the pages of her textbooks. She punched a hole in one corner and threaded the tickets onto a piece of string. She did this until Rainbow found the collection and went apoplectic. Erykah couldn’t understand why she was so upset. Hadn’t she realised how many there were? Why spend the money at all if you didn’t want to know you were spending it?
But it wasn’t the wasted money that bothered Erykah. Saving wasn’t for people like them anyway. A few pounds each week spent on food instead of lottery tickets wasn’t going to get them off the estate in Streatham. It wasn’t going to make her blend in with the white kids at school or make their parents stop talking about her in hushed tones the few times she had been invited over to do homework in one of the detached houses that bordered the estate. It wasn’t going to stop final notices for bills coming through the door. It wasn’t going to stop the few valuables they had ending up in the pawn shop, and it certainly wasn’t going to stop the times when Rainbow was looking ragged and sweaty and was pushing down a kind of hunger that food alone couldn’t fix.
No, what bothered Erykah was what the lottery represented. It stood for the loss of hope for any future apart from blind luck.
What was excruciating was not that her mother kept playing these games, no matter how many times Erykah explained the statistical improbability of winning. That wasn’t it. It was the look on Rainbow’s face that night when each neon ball dropped, and they were all the wrong ones. The look as whatever dreams she had were snatched away, piece by piece. Then, when Rainbow had checked her numbers over once, and once again to be sure, she disappeared. Out the front door, going to do whatever it was she did out there. Erykah didn’t want to think about the details of that bit very much. She promised herself that, no matter what, she would never have nothing left but blind hope. Betting on luck was a fool’s game.
‘So,’ Rab said. He looked down at her bag, at the bits and pieces of clothing on the bed. ‘Are you going somewhere?’
Erykah bit her lip. Was she going somewhere? Half of twenty million was a hell of a lot more than she had been planning to carry out of the house today. ‘There’s a training camp tomorrow,’ she said. ‘It’s in Peterborough. Instead of driving up early I thought I might stay over.’
The weight of Nicole’s key had felt so good in her hand, so natural. Leaving was the right thing to do. For herself. For them. But this . . .
This
was money. To a girl who had grown up with her mum reeling between double shifts on a miserable wage or sick with drugs and unable to work, money was nothing to sniff at.
‘Nice of you to tell me.’ Rab sat on the corner of the bed and looked up at her. ‘About going away.’
‘Yeah, well,’ she said. ‘I’m not the only one who’s been keeping secrets lately, am I?’ She held his gaze, hard. Go on, say it! Say it. I dare you. I dare you.
Rab broke the stare first. He turned the lottery ticket over and over in his soft white hands. ‘No, I suppose not,’ he said. ‘We . . . I mean I . . . have some, ah, unexpected debts to cover.’
‘So I guess this money comes at the perfect time for you, doesn’t it,’ Erykah said.
‘Yes, I guess it does,’ Rab said. There was a pause, longer than was comfortable, shorter than it felt. ‘I took out a bank loan.’
A bank loan? Was that all he would admit to? ‘What about that second mortgage you didn’t tell me about?’
Erykah watched her husband’s mouth open and close silently and knew she had him bang to rights. ‘You forged my signature on the application,’ she said.
‘How did you know?’
‘Ha,’ Erykah said. ‘You think I don’t check my own credit history? Come on.’
‘Credit history?’ he said. ‘Credit history. When have you ever had to check your credit history?’ Rab’s voice raised now and creaked near its breaking point. ‘When have you even had a credit history? I’ve always been the one who provided anything you wanted. Cars, jewellery, spending money . . . Unless this . . .’ he glanced at the clothes on the bed. ‘. . . is really because you were planning to walk out behind my back all along.’
‘Fuck you Rab, fuck you,’ she said, her voice level calm. ‘Don’t talk to me about managing money, and don’t you try to turn this around on me! I know you’ve missed over a year of mortgage payments and that we are less than a month away from repossession.’
‘You could have done something to help,’ he snarled.
‘Oh, that’s classic,’ she said. ‘Turn it around on me. But you know what? I’ve had it. I am done. Falling out of love with someone is hardly the same thing as committing fraud.’ She hadn’t even thought the word until she said it, but it felt so good to say out loud. He was a fraud. The relationship was a fraud. Everything about their life together was a fraud. It always had been.
Fraud
. The word hung in the air between them. Her brown eyes bored into Rab’s blue ones. She dared him to make his accusations, to say whatever he wanted to say. He probably had no idea about Nicole, but would it change anything if he did? Right now she was standing and he was sitting down. It felt good. No, it felt better than that. It felt great.
When they first married, he said he understood her need to be out of the spotlight for a while. When she tried to find work and couldn’t, he said he would support her to train and try to get back into the GB rowing squad selection. When she finally accepted that the effort she was putting into that dream was never going to work out, well, that was ten years they had been together, and by then they were hardly speaking any more anyway.
‘I know the truth,’ Erykah said. ‘I know you were fired from your job. Did you really think you could hide that from me? You drive down the street every morning, you park your car at the station, and you sit in the coffee shop – or sometimes, the library – until it’s time to come home.’
‘How did you find out?’ Rab said.
She snorted. He wasn’t half as smooth as he thought he was. Never had been. ‘Two decades married to a man who works in the City, and you think I wouldn’t notice when his mobile goes silent? Come on.’
Rab closed his eyes. ‘I was ashamed,’ he said.
‘So ashamed you couldn’t tell me?’ she said. He didn’t answer; there was no answer to give. ‘Do your family know?’
He looked up. ‘God, no,’ he said. ‘I wouldn’t bother them with this.’
Typical. There was probably little they could offer apart from a scant equity in a pebbledash bungalow in Norwich. His head shrank into his shoulders. ‘I knew you were a liar and a sneak, Rab, but I never imagined how far you would go.’
‘Would you have understood?’
‘I haven’t understood a thing about you – about us – in years,’ Erykah said. Once upon a time it had felt like the two of them against the world. Wasn’t that exactly what he had said, over and over? She had clung so hard to that idea, even when slapped in the face with his lies and infidelity, because she had nothing else to believe in. Bit by bit, year by year, insecurity had chewed away at that. Until all that was left was what was in her bag: a roll of cash, an old book, and a change of clothes. ‘At least I would have been able to make an informed decision.’
‘Now this,’ Rab said. The lottery ticket, and whatever else came with it, was technically as much hers as it was his.
‘Yeah, this,’ Erykah said. Maybe her plan could wait.
‘We don’t even have a prenup,’ he said.
‘We sure don’t,’ she smiled.
A few miles away from Morag Munro’s constituency office, the Cameron Bridge mortuary was bucking local trends. Business on the high street might have fallen to all time lows, but traffic through the morgue was very good indeed.
The reason was accidents. Loads of them. Although the year-round local population was shrinking and few murders happened in town, the tourist trade in misadventure on the hillsides was booming. Keen walkers and climbers might have been giving the local shops a miss but they were falling off the mountains with a vengeance.
Thirty-six people had met their ends in the vicinity in the previous year. The bodies were duly transported to a barn-like building tucked up one end of a glen like a dirty secret. Winter brought the ice climbers, the skiers, and many more. Avalanches claimed the greatest number of winter adventurers, followed by a couple of ice-climbing accidents, and one young woman on Hogmanay who reckoned that flip-flops and board shorts were appropriate climbing gear for January. Drivers as well, unused to icy conditions, often came a cropper.
Today’s mortuary excitement was neither an accident-prone tourist nor a careless driver. For the helicopter team that had collected the bagged human remains found on the beach in Raasay, the Cameron Bridge facility was nearest. It was here the decomposing body in a bag first rejoined the mainland and here it would be autopsied.
Mortuary assistant Iain Laudale opened up the post-mortem suite. The lights flickered to life one by one. Half a dozen stainless steel autopsy stations stood like monuments in the main theatre, each with an examination table, rolling cart for surgical instruments, and a tap and hose.
Iain swung open the doors of the body refrigerator with a calm born of routine. He rolled a green trolley up to the edge and tugged on a handle inside the refrigerator, pulled a tray inside onto the trolley. On the tray sat a long white body bag. Whatever was inside was distinctly not body-shaped.
The cavernous room was cool, almost too cold to work, but he was used to worse. Iain’s head nodded to the rhythm of a death metal mix CD playing in the background. The overhead fluorescent lights gave his buzz cut a greenish cast. His face had the etched look of a man who grew up fast and stayed there. His skinny arms were covered in tattoos, remnants of years on the terraces as a Rangers fan and, later, in the Army. It was the service that took a teenager with no skills, apart from tanning a bottle of Buckie, and gave him a vocation. They taught him how to collect up a body, to prepare it for what came next.
But it also taught him cynicism. The hard way, looking at rows of bodies shrouded and waiting for the cargo plane. He learned that the slogans and songs on the terraces about honour and tradition were only songs and that the Army he’d idolised had an insatiable appetite for young flesh.
Iain switched on an industrial-grade bug zapper and it flickered to life. Standard operating procedure with a decomp. No matter how well the morgue was cleaned after the autopsies, inevitably a few flies would escape, and maggots were a concern. Even in winter, even in the cold of Scotland’s west coast. The body had picked up a few sandflies when it washed up on that beach and probably worse.
Iain hadn’t been squeamish to start with, but the stint with the Army had turned him into a hardened pro. After fishing parts of Omagh bombing victims out of gutters, anything else was easy by comparison. When he left the service he joined a forensic recovery company and did some airline crash and mass grave work for the UN in Srebrenica and Grozny.
Yugoslavia made Omagh look like child’s play. The mass graves overflowed with bodies of men who had been rounded up, their arms and legs tied together with wire, shot in the head and dumped into pits. Three generations of men in some families. Sometimes children. Iain and the others pulled the bodies out of the ground in the same clothes they had died in. They washed the clothes after the post-mortems, left them out to dry on the grass. Every day weeping women came past, hoping to recognise a T-shirt, a pair of trousers, a hat. It was terrible when they didn’t. It was worse when they did.
Iain manoeuvred the trolley up to the first examination table and slid the tray across. The post-mortem team waited in the doorway outside the autopsy suite. Apart from Iain himself, the team today numbered only two. Pathologist Harriet Hitchin chatted with a ginger whip of a police photographer. The young man was looking decidedly green around the gills. Iain unzipped the bag. Inside it was another, a black sports bag.
‘First day?’ Harriet Hitchin asked the snapper, who nodded. ‘What’s your name?’
‘Dougie,’ he said.
‘Well, welcome to the morgue, Dougie.’ Harriet’s cut-glass English accent was much at odds with her distracted and unkempt air. She washed and powdered her hands, selecting thick rubber gloves for herself and for the snapper. ‘Has MacLean deserted you?’ she asked, referring to the police sergeant who usually tagged along on these chores.
‘Ali said he had a few things to get from the van,’ Dougie said. His eyes darted towards the examination table, where a very wet and very smelly piece of luggage sat in the middle of the opened body bag. It did not look promising. ‘And wanted a smoke before he came in.’
Harriet nodded. Alastair MacLean’s extended smoke breaks were the stuff of legend. Most people reckoned he spent as little as one minute in ten on the job. Not that it seemed to have a negative outcome on his work that anyone could see.
Bit mean to leave the new kid to cover this on his own, though. ‘Documenting autopsies is never a good way to follow breakfast,’ she said with a brisk assurance that might have passed for sympathy. ‘By the way – if you’re going to vomit, make sure you do it before you get up on the stepladder to take the top shots, please?’
‘Vomit?’ Dougie asked.
Iain waved at the pair to let them know he was ready. Harriet showed the photographer where they kept the wellies, then how to step over the half wall blocking the doorway to the autopsy suite. On the other side was a basin on the floor filled with disinfecting solution for them to walk through.
Dougie watched Harriet roll a disposable plastic apron off a spool and tie it over her scrubs, then motion for him to do the same. ‘Does everyone vomit?’
‘Either that or they faint,’ Iain said. ‘If you don’t do either then you’re a sociopath.’
‘Great,’ Dougie said. He reached into his pocket and withdrew a small container of mentholated chest rub to ward against a wave of stench.
Iain spotted the snapper about to dab some of the gel under his nose. ‘Och, you don’t want to be doing that,’ he said. ‘That’s a myth. It doesn’t help with the smell.’ Dougie looked at him doubtfully. ‘Makes it worse,’ Iain nodded. ‘Instead of getting delightful overtones of corpse à la carte, you’re now getting full on corpse plus noxious top notes of pine cleaner. You’ll wantae boak in no time.’ Iain stared hard until Dougie pocketed the chest rub.
‘Not what you thought it would be is it?’ The kid shook his head. ‘Nah,’ Iain said, half to Dougie and half to himself. He had seen enough trainee police and university students wander through, especially in the last ten years or so, hoping for something more technological, more glamorous than the reality the mortuary offered. ‘Not like the television is it. Too bright in here,’ he said, indicating the tube lights suspended across the length of the room. He gestured at his own faded scrubs and plastic apron. ‘And none of the fit emo lasses they tell you work in all the morgues.’
Dougie laughed in spite of his churning stomach. ‘No, I guess not.’
Nothing had changed at the Cameron Bridge morgue in all the time that Iain had worked there. There was no need for change. People died the same ways they always had and were autopsied in the same way it always happened. If there was lab work they sent it to the police or to a university.
Iain popped a fresh CD in the boom box and hit play. Screeching guitars and an apocalypse of drums blasted through the morgue.
‘Iain, do you mind?’ Harriet scowled. ‘We have a guest.’ She smiled at Dougie as if to apologise. ‘If it gets too much, I keep earplugs in the changing room,’ she said.
‘Sorry,’ Iain said and turned the volume down a notch.
Dougie picked up the CD case and looked at the illustration, a photo from what appeared to be the scene of a death. ‘That was a belter,’ Iain said. ‘Rescue helicopter snagged the bloke on a tree and had to cut the line or else the Sea King would have crashed with six crew on board.’
‘Jesus Christ.’
Iain nodded. ‘You could say that,’ he said. ‘Or it might be more accurate to say gravity is the fella responsible.’ He pointed at the picture with one gloved finger. ‘The body bounced twice on the way down and landed next to Scouts on a camping trip. I don’t know about them, but if a man fell out of the sky and landed in the middle of my campfire, Jesus is probably the last person I would be calling on.’
The photographer gulped again. ‘Isn’t this a little disrespectful?’ he said.
‘Disrespectful,’ Iain considered this. He watched the young man’s eyes dart from spot to spot in the morgue, unsure where to land, as if looking at anything too long might be contagious. The stainless steel counters with autoclaved instruments lined up ready for the autopsy; the worn and chipped lino on the floor; the rolls of cotton batting, the stereo blasting music. It didn’t add up, he would be thinking, as they all did. What about respect? What about dignity? But there is no dignity in death, only the end, and what gets done for the living.
Iain shrugged at the young photographer. ‘Depends on your definition of respect, I suppose.’ He turned to Harriet. ‘Speaking of which, Professor Hitchin?’
‘Doctor,’ she corrected him.
‘Right, doctor. Not professor. My mistake. So, I was listening to the news and it seems like someone let slip to the press that our friend here was found in a bag.’
Harriet’s frown seemed exaggerated, for show. ‘Oh? Is that a problem?’
‘It just occurs to me possibly the police would have wanted to hold that back,’ he said.
Harriet nodded, but didn’t meet his eyes. ‘Someone should really have a word with those Coast Guard boys,’ she said. ‘They won’t know how we normally do things around here.’
Iain nodded sceptically. ‘No, probably not. I’m sure
whoever
it was won’t do it again.’
‘What’s the deal with the press?’ Dougie said.
‘In a word?’ Iain said. ‘Don’t.’
‘Don’t what?’ The young man looked confused.
‘Don’t talk to them. It’s always bad news. Best to say nothing at all, even if they get it wrong. Especially in your job. The police have media advisors. Let them handle how and when information is released. We’re just here to do a job,’ he said, and looked pointedly at Harriet. ‘Not seek attention for ourselves.’
Harriet shifted nervously from one foot to the other. ‘Gents? Please? Can we get on with this?’ She didn’t like to spend more time in the suite than she had to.
‘Sorry,’ Iain said.
‘So we’re looking for an ID here – who is this man,’ Harriet stated matter-of-factly. ‘Then it’s how did he die. And then: can we say how long he’s been dead.’
Iain rubbed his gloved finger over the darkened fabric of the sports bag to reveal some kind of pattern showing through. He moistened a wad of gauze and wiped it across the surface, revealing a Union Jack print. ‘So possibly not a local, then,’ he said. ‘Or at least not one on the right side of the independence debate.’
‘Iain, give it a rest,’ Harriet rolled her eyes. ‘The referendum is old news.’
‘Maybe to you,’ he said.
‘Could the bag itself lead to someone?’ Dougie asked.
‘Might do,’ Iain said. ‘I like your instinct.’ He cut through the seams of the bag, careful not to nick any of the dead man’s flesh. ‘But could also be the kind of tat you might buy at any souvenir shop in England.’ A puddle of fetid liquid pooled from the bag, some of it seawater, some of it brown purge fluid from the body itself.
Slowly the thick canvas fabric was peeled away from the skin. Iain’s crablike hands moved over the surfaces gently, with great skill. In some places the skin and fabric seemed almost fused, like soft cheese stuck in a sieve. It took him half an hour to arrange what was left of the corpse onto the slab, lying on its side.
Anyone who knew the man in life would have been hard pressed to recognise him now. Even freed from the bag the body was still wrenched into unnatural angles, the legs folded up against his chest, the arms twisted behind his back. The skin had started slipping away from the underlying tissues like a badly fitting suit of clothes. Large sections of the body bore the impression of the inside of the bag, its seams and the zip. The colour of his flesh varied from waxy pale to purple-red. The bag hadn’t stayed completely closed, at least not near the end of the aquatic journey, and his eyelids and lips had been eaten away by insects and fish. Something had chewed away the flesh of his penis.
The dead man’s eye sockets and lipless grimace looked out at the room like a caricature of someone laughing. But with no cock, no eyelids and no lips, this fellow’s laughing days were over.
‘Fuck,’ Dougie repeated weakly. ‘How long do you think he was in?’
Harriet wrinkled her nose. ‘Difficult to say.’ She had no fondness for any case she couldn’t swan in and out of. ‘He probably stayed down for some time, then the gases built up until the bag floated.’
‘Weeks,’ Iain said. ‘This early in the year, when the water is cold? Let’s say a month or six weeks, if we were taking bets.’
The photographer winced. ‘He almost looks . . . shiny.’
‘Waxy,’ Iain said, his gloved finger passing over the body’s midsection. ‘Bit like a candle?’ Dougie nodded. ‘That’s because he is, or would have been if he had been under the water much longer. You see here, these spots around the fat of his belly where it’s smooth and pale? This is adipocere. Grave wax, they used to call it. The chemistry is complex, but in short this man was starting to turn into soap. Happens when the body isn’t exposed to air. Only a little bit now, but give it another year or so and most of his soft tissue would have turned into this.’
