Resolution

Chapter 22

His driveway formed a break in a continuous stone wall leading up the hill and disappeared around a corner. The houses on the road were detached and solid, Victorian maybe. Si's house was on the summit of a short, steep drive. It had two large windows on either side of the front door and three above. The garden was tidy but not loved. It had the look of a professional gardener about it, a neatly striped lawn, bordered by a single row of pink roses. An intermittent sprinkler spat a circle of water onto the green. The gray Saab was parked in the drive.

Maureen wondered what the fuck she was doing there, loitering behind the gatepost, trying to scare him back. She was waiting but didn't know what for. She had an urge to go and chap the door and ask Si if he was happy now his mother was dead. She was there looking for a fight. The light changed behind the glass panels on the front door, it swung open, and Si stepped out, pulling on a leather jacket. He was holding his car keys. He unlocked the Saab with a remote beeper and climbed in, reversed and turned down the narrow drive, flicking on the right indicator. Maureen stood back against the gatepost, keeping as flush to the wall as she could. Si drove down to the road, paused, then pulled right. She stayed still for a while, waiting to see if he'd spotted her and would come back.

The back garden was as tidy as the front. The layout was the same: plain grass and thin borders, a dutiful effort by someone who didn't care. There were no children's toys or odd bits of garden furniture left sitting out. Through the kitchen window she saw that the place was clean: a single cup sat in the sink, waiting to be washed; the circular pine table was empty apart from a couple of unopened letters and a folded newspaper. The farthest window looked into a utility room with a washing machine and tumble dryer. On a wooden pulley hanging from the ceiling was a series of black Y-fronts and three shirts. There were no women's clothes in the room. Either Si and his wife were separated or the woman at the hospital had been someone else altogether. She stood there, licking whiskey fur off her teeth, and wondered why Si had bought a family mansion when he obviously lived alone.

"Excuse me, please." A firm hand grabbed her elbow, swung her arm behind her back and fitted the handcuffs onto her wrists tightly.

"What the hell are you doing?" said Maureen, turning to face two overweight uniformed police officers.

"Actually, miss," said the burly woman holding on to her, "we might ask you that."

Maureen realized that she was drunk. She wanted to get away from the police officers and go and drink more. Protesting her innocence from the back of the car, she told them that her name was Lizzie McCafferty. Affecting her poshest accent, she told them that she had booked a viewing of the house but the owners weren't in when she got there. Because she was a bit pissed, she half believed it herself and got genuinely annoyed when the officers didn't. Officer Fatman frowned hard. "The owner saw you standing at the gate for ten minutes, and called us before he left the house. Why were you standing there for so long? Why not just go straight up to the house?"

Maureen tutted. "I wasn't there for ten minutes. I just wasn't sure of the address."

"There was no for-sale sign outside the house," said the woman officer, turning from the wheel. "Didn't that make you wonder?"

Maureen rolled her eyes. "It was supposed to be a private sale."

The female officer looked at Maureen's crumpled T-shirt, her baggy shorts with sagging pockets full of fags and money and tissues, at her outsize skate trainers and smiled. "Were you going to buy the house with cash, miss?" she said snidely.

Maureen looked her in the eye. "I was viewing it for my dad. He's coming back from the Emirates next week. He's retiring to Scotland and I'm supposed to find some places for him to look at when he gets here." Maureen congratulated herself-the Emirates, nice touch.

The female officer thought about it, wavering in her conviction that Maureen was a master burglar. She looked out of the window at the house and back at Maureen. She was going to let her go. "Which other properties have you -"

"Maureen O'Donnell." It was Fatman. He was smiling and shaking a finger at her. "Garnethill." His smile blossomed into a toothy grin. "Douglas Brady."

They had called ahead to Stewart Street to see if Joe McEwan was interested. Maureen didn't understand what had been said in reply because it was coded but the officer started the engine and headed towards the town. The fat man turned to look at her as his colleague drove.

"What are you staring at?" said Maureen, sweating with annoyance.

He looked her up and down. "I saw you in the paper, in Millport. D'ye like Millport?"

Maureen shrugged.

"I like it there," he said, turning back into his seat. "Pretty."

Joe McEwan must have been having a quiet night because he had the time to come and see her arrive at the station. He was standing at the top of the stairs as they came into the lobby, smiling slightly, dressed in a pair of beige trousers and a dark blue silk shirt. He raised his hand in a bitter little wave as the person on the desk took Maureen's details. She didn't wave back. "Am I being charged with something?" she asked the desk sergeant.

"No," he said, apparently surprised that anyone in front of him had the wherewithal to ask such a technical question. "We just want to talk to you."

"Nice," said Maureen, drumming her fingers on the desk and glaring at Joe as she raised her voice. "I always have a nice time when I come here."

The desk sergeant wasn't listening to her: he was filling in a form and writing something on a clipboard. She took out a cigarette and lit it, breathing in the smoke like a dying asthmatic on an inhaler.

Joe was smiling and smoking a cigarette. He wasn't asking her questions, just smiling and smoking, smoking and smiling. He opened his mouth to speak once but glanced at the tape recorder and stopped, going back to his cigarette for another puff. Sitting next to him, Hugh McAskill was doing a great job of covering up their friendship. He blinked at her a couple of times, telling her to calm down. She knew he was right but the sight of Joe McEwan enjoying himself so much grated on her. She was sobering up and it was making her agitated. She wanted a drink. "Have you got a sunbed?" she said.

Joe smiled at her reproachfully, in a way that suggested it would take more than that to get a rise out of him.

"I'm just asking because you're always brown." He didn't answer and she could tell he wasn't afraid of her. "You'll ruin your skin if you keep it up, ye know, and then the smoking too. Bad for you."

Joe blinked and cut her off, took a deep breath and moved forward over the table. "Si McGee's house. What were you doing there?"

The hairs on her neck stirred. Not "Simon" but "Si." Way too familiar.

"Nothing. Do you know him?"

Joe nodded and smiled, creeping her out.

"How do you know him?"

Joe shrugged, a little uncomfortable. "That's not your business."

"Does he live near you or something?"

Joe blinked, brushing the question away. He licked his top lip slowly and moved his right hand across the table, watching his index finger unfurl from his fist. He tapped it once on the tabletop. "Ella McGee works at Paddy's. You work at Paddy's." He looked up at her and clocked her genuine surprise that he had such a handle on her movements. She glanced at Hugh but remembered that she'd never told him where she worked. Joe was trying to disconcert her. And then she realized: Joe didn't know Ella was dead. He looked at the tabletop and tapped his finger again. "Si McGee, brother of Margaret Frampton who, one year ago, made an assault allegation against your brother, Liam O'Donnell." He saw that she didn't know who he was talking about. "Tonsa," he said.

Maureen frowned and leaned forward. "Tonsa?"

Joe nodded, disappointed that she was so confused. "Tonsa Frampton."

"Tonsa is the sister of the guy who owns that house?" It dawned on Maureen that it was Tonsa she had seen standing on the steps of the Park Circus Health Club-Tonsa, and not a foreign wife at all. Tonsa had been a crack courier when Maureen had last heard of her. Just when it mattered most, during the worst part of the investigation into Douglas's death, Tonsa had told Joe McEwan that Liam had beaten her up. She looked like a well-groomed lady, wore Burberry overcoats and dressed carefully, but her eyes were frighteningly dead, watery and open just a touch too little, focused on nothing.

"Why else would you go up there?" said Joe, bringing her back to the small room.

She ran through the dad-from-the-Emirates story, but couldn't think of a variation that would work in this context. "I was looking for Si McGee," she said.

Joe smiled smugly and sat back. "Care to tell us why?"

Maureen sighed. "His mum died."

Now it was Joe's turn to be surprised. "Ella the Flash is dead?"

Maureen nodded. "The hospital couldn't get hold of him. I didn't want him going up there to visit and finding out. I wanted to tell him myself."

"What happened to her?"

"She was in hospital." Maureen exhaled deeply and found that the tears came easily. "She just slipped away, apparently."

Hugh leaned forward and she could tell he was shocked too. "Why did you lie to the officers who came to pick you up?"

"I don't trust the police to be discreet," she said. "I just wanted to tell him myself."

Joe sat back heavily and blinked several times. "Does he know yet?" he said.

"Dunno," said Maureen.

"Bloody hell." He took a draw on his cigarette and stubbed it out. "Ella the Flash."

"Why was she called that?" asked Maureen.

"Is she not called that at Paddy's?" asked Hugh.

"Naw," Maureen said, "not that I'd know. We call her Home Gran because she wears those tracksuits and all the gold."

Joe smiled sadly. "Yeah." He cleared his throat, stopped smiling and restored the distance. "She was too old to wear those. She was called the Flash because she always dressed well, even though she worked the streets. Wore hats and good coats and things. Had a bit of dignity about her."

"Did you know Ella long?" asked Maureen, enjoying the kindly atmosphere.

Joe and Hugh looked at each other and Maureen saw how long they had known each other, how they had grown up together on the police force. She suddenly appreciated how decent Hugh had been to her and how easily he could have blocked her out.

"She was my first collar," said Joe.

"And mine," said Hugh.

"Did she get arrested a lot?"

"No," said Hugh. "We were together."

Hugh and Joe seemed sorrowful somehow, sad for who they had been or who they had become.

"Si's running a brothel in Kelvingrove," Maureen blurted.

Joe shook his head. "No, Tonsa's involved in that but it's nothing to do with him. He's an estate agent."

"You know there's a brothel there?"

Joe sucked his teeth. "The city licenses a number of saunas," he said, and added defensively, "Well, it's better than them standing around on street corners."

"Is Si McGee married?"

"No, I don't think so," said Joe suspiciously. "Why? D'ye fancy him?"

"No," tutted Maureen, indignant at the thought. It had been Tonsa at the hospital when Ella died; the nurses had probably just assumed she was Si's wife. Maureen thought of poor cold Ella lying on the metal trolley and felt tearful again. "She was a kind sort of person, wasn't she?" she said, overcome by drunken sentimentality and starting to cry. "I mean, she was a good person. A mum and that." She wiped her nose on the back of her hand. "Maureen," said Joe, "are you drunk?"