A Silent Death

Chapter Seven

The Linn Crematorium sprawled across a hill on the south side of the city to the west of Castlemilk, a housing estate built in the 1950s to accommodate people cleared from Glasgow’s inner-city slums. It was built around an old mansion called Castlemilk House, constructed on the site of a thirteenth-century castle. But there was nothing in the rows of drab pebbledash blocks that bore any resemblance to the castle which had inspired their name.

When Mackenzie stepped off the plane at Glasgow Airport it was overcast and drizzling, what Scots called smirr. It was in stark contrast with the sunshine he had left behind in London.

He felt an odd sensation returning to the city of his birth, the place where he had spent the first seventeen years of his life. Unhappy years remembered now as having passed entirely on days like this, grey and sunless and wet. He wore a dark suit, a white shirt, and the black tie he had eventually found in a men’s outfitters in Fleet Street. In a holdall he carried a change of underwear and his toilet bag. Just one night in this haunted town before flying out tomorrow to Spain.

Through the window of his taxi, he watched rain-streaked red sandstone tenements drift past, the colour leeched from them somehow by lack of light, like watching a black-and-white movie of his childhood spool by. None of it seemed familiar and he had not the least sense of belonging.

The south-side suburbs were greener, tree-lined streets in leaf, the huddled hulk of Hampden Park floating past as they climbed the hill towards the crematorium. Through wrought-iron gates bearing the city crest and the date 1962, then down a long curving drive, past the departing mourners from the previous cremation, to the concrete and coloured glass structure that offered faith and flames in unequal measure.

Mackenzie felt self-conscious, still clutching his overnight bag as he stepped from the taxi. No time to drop it off at his uncle’s house before the funeral.

There were only three vehicles left in the car park, and just five souls in the waiting room. At first he thought he’d made a mistake with the time, for he didn’t recognize any of them. But then was shocked to realize that the white-haired old man with the stoop and the silvered bristles on a cadaverous face was his Uncle Arthur. The old man’s suit looked several sizes too big for him, the collar of his shirt curled up at both sides. The knot in his tie pulled far too tight. The colour seemed washed out of his once bright blue eyes, leaving them a pale, insipid grey. He was diminished in every way. Mackenzie remembered, with guilty regret, almost relishing the opportunity to confront his uncle at his aunt’s funeral. No pleasure now in sticking it to this shadow of a man who had once been a vigorous and robust teacher of physical education. Almost as if his uncle had contrived to deny him even that.

The old man extended a big hand, deformed by arthritis, and Mackenzie felt obliged to shake it. Shiny reptilian skin like crêpe paper crinkling in his palm. He was anxious to let it go, but his uncle held on and placed his other hand over the back of Mackenzie’s.

‘Good to see you, John. I’m glad you could come.’

Mackenzie had no idea what to say. He had harboured such hatred over all these years, he was unprepared for the warmth in his uncle’s handshake and the apparent affection in his watery washed-out eyes. Had the old man forgotten how much he disliked his nephew, how often he had dished out discipline with Mr Kane, or with the tawse that he sometimes brought home with him from school — half an inch of thick leather strap divided in two at one end, and delivered on to the palms of outstretched hands, leaving stinging weals on the inside of the wrists?

Had he forgotten all the harsh words, the derision, the contempt, perhaps even jealousy, for the prodigy his brother had bequeathed him? Had he forgotten that final shouting match which had sent Mackenzie running to his room to pack a bag and leave, never to return?

‘Your Aunt Hilda missed you, you know. A wee card now and then wouldn’t have gone astray,’ he said, and Mackenzie realized that nothing had changed. The hurt was just delivered in a different way.

They arrived back at the house in Giffnock mid-afternoon. The bungalow was as gloomy as Mackenzie remembered it. There must surely have been sunny days, but he had no recollection of them. The first thing he saw in the hall was the umbrella stand, crowded with old brollies and walking sticks — and the onyx-handled Mr Kane. Mackenzie could barely take his eyes off it. He wanted to take the damned thing and break it over his thigh, as if somehow that could erase the pain it had been used to administer through all the miserable years he had lived in this house. Instead, he followed the handful of mourners past the coat-rack and into the front room where whisky was poured into cut crystal glasses and sipped in a silence broken only by the odd mumbled reminiscence.

They didn’t stay long, and Mackenzie was glad to see them go. In spite of the rain he thought he might go for a walk. He wanted to spend as little time in the house as possible, and even less of it in the company of his uncle. When there were just the two of them left he said to the old man, ‘I’ll put my stuff in my room. The same one, I take it?’

His uncle nodded. ‘You’ll find it pretty much as you left it, son. She kept it for you just the way it was, in case you ever came back.’

He spoke of his wife in death with a respect he had never shown her in life. Mackenzie remembered how she had always lowered her voice in his presence, tiptoeing around his unpredictable sensibilities, bearing with extraordinary fortitude the words he flung at her in frequent rage.

Mackenzie found the pole with the hook on the end of it leaning in the corner of the hall where it had always stood. He raised it above his head to open the hatch in the ceiling and pull down the ladders that led to the attic conversion they had made for him. Although there were two bedrooms in the house, Uncle Arthur used one of them as a study. A place on which he could close the door to be disturbed only on pain of punishment.

There had been no space in the hall for a staircase to the new attic room, and so the pull-down ladders had been the compromise solution. One that his uncle had grown to regret when the young Mackenzie retreated to his room after rows, pulling the ladders up after him like a drawbridge, so that neither his aunt nor his uncle could reach him. He had once spent almost forty-eight hours barricaded in his room after a particularly tempestuous argument, pissing and defecating in a porcelain chanty kept under the bed.

He climbed the ladder now, ascending to his past. And as he stood and took in his old room, goosebumps raised themselves on the back of his neck. The old man had been right. Almost nothing had changed. There were even hairs still trapped among the bristles of his old brush on the dresser. He felt like the ghost of himself haunting his own childhood. Everything about this room — the very air he breathed in it — took him back. He sat on the bed and wanted to weep for the unhappy child he had been, but no tears would come. Just cold, hard memories.

For an adult so disinclined to violence, as a young boy he had fought and usually beaten every bully who took him on. The young John Mackenzie was incapable of backing down. So often returning home bloodied and bruised.

If it wasn’t physical fighting with other boys, it was verbal conflict with his teachers. He had lost count of the number of times he received punishment for his insolence, for his inattention, or the failure to do his homework. And then they had wondered how it was possible that he could score straight A’s when it came to the exams. No one ever gave him credit for his achievements, expressing instead only astonishment.

How stupid had they been not to realize how much smarter he was than them? That the only reason his attention wandered was their mediocrity, their inability to engage his interest? That he only ever questioned them because he almost always knew better?

Looking back now he thought that his uncle must have realized early on that Mackenzie was his intellectual superior, and that if he couldn’t best him mentally he would do it physically. He had been a powerful man then, a professional footballer in his youth before qualifying as a gym teacher, a job that had given him carte blanche to bully the physically inferior. Boys that were overweight, or had flat feet, or were just soft. Or his brother’s fatherless son given in to his care. He was unused to children answering back, unaccustomed to contradiction, traits he was determined to beat out of his young nephew.

But there had come a time when Mackenzie could match him physically too, a hormonal teenager pumped up by testosterone and anger. And his uncle had no longer been able to dominate him in any sense.

Still, he’d had one devastating card left to play. One that he had been saving for just the right moment. One that could deliver pain far beyond any corporal hurt.

He had played it, finally, when Mackenzie announced that he wasn’t going to university, despite having achieved A grades in each of the seven Highers he had sat at the end of fifth year. He was going to join the police, he said.

His uncle had railed at him claiming, not unreasonably, that it would be a criminal waste of his academic abilities — some kind of pun intended. But the young Mackenzie hadn’t wanted to hear it.

Now, as he sat on the bed, he heard the distant echoes of the shouting match in the hall downstairs.

‘You’re a bloody idiot, boy! Christ knows, you’ve been a pain in the arse all through school, but you’ve a God-given talent. Don’t throw it away. Why the hell would you want to be a policeman?’

‘Because that’s what my dad was.’

His uncle had exhaled his contempt through pursed lips. ‘Your dad! For Christ’s sake, don’t go wasting your life like he did.’

‘He didn’t waste his life!’ Mackenzie had been incensed.

‘Yes he did. He was a total waster, your father. Mr High and Bloody Mighty. Thought he was better than everyone else. Just like you. Thought he knew it all, that nothing was beyond him. Well he learned the hard fucking way just how wrong he was.’

Mackenzie remembered being shocked. In all the years his uncle had beaten and berated him, he had never heard him use the F word. He screamed back, ‘You’re just jealous!’

‘Jealous?’ The old man almost laughed. ‘Jealous of what?’

‘That he sacrificed his life to save someone else. While you frittered yours away. A lifetime bullying boys in school gyms, picking on the weak to make yourself look big.’ Mackenzie had caught sight, then, of his aunt standing in the kitchen doorway, the blood drained from her face, apprehension in her eyes. ‘Well, no one’s fooled, Uncle Arthur. For all your size you’re a little man, and everyone knows it.’

An index finger like a rod of iron extended from his uncle’s fist and jabbed into his nephew’s chest. His eyes were wild and he leaned in close, so that Mackenzie could smell the whisky on his breath and see the spittle gathering on his lips. ‘Don’t you speak to me like that you little runt. Time you got your fucking facts straight.’

‘Arthur, don’t!’ Mackenzie could hear the fear in his aunt’s voice, but there was no strength in it, and her husband would ignore her as he always did.

‘No one ever disavowed you of the crap you were told about your dad. Don’t tell him the truth, they said, it could scar him for life. So we didn’t. All this fucking time, and we let you go on believing what a hero he was, just in case you might be damaged by it.’ He couldn’t hide his scorn. ‘Well, you’re a big boy now, sonny. Big enough to handle the truth, I’d say. How about you?’

For once in his life Mackenzie found himself suddenly at a loss for words. A sick sense of dread began to weigh like lead in his gut, then slowly suffused his entire being like a fast-acting poison. It robbed him of his ability to speak.

‘Please Arthur...’ A pleading in his aunt’s voice now, but there would be no stopping him. The dam which had held back the bile for all these years was finally bursting. The finger stabbed into Mackenzie’s chest in time to the rhythm of his uncle’s anger, which had now achieved an oddly lyrical cadence. ‘You think he was a hero, eh? A brave man risking his life to try and save that poor fucking woman?’ He sucked in air to fuel his fury. ‘Well, there’s nothing brave about suicide, sonny. That’s the coward’s way out.’

A noise like tinnitus filled the teenager’s head, trying to drown out the words. But still, above it, he heard the wail that escaped his aunt’s lips, a strangely feral sound.

‘He screwed up, your dad. Disobeyed a direct order. Because, of course, he knew better. Like he always fucking did. Went charging in to try and rescue her, only to get her killed.’ He was breathing stertorously now, as if he had just sprinted the length of a football pitch to score a goal. ‘Some hero, eh? It was in all the fucking papers. And everyone knew he was my brother. You wouldn’t believe the shit I got at school. And then he goes and makes it worse. Cos, being your dad, he couldn’t stand it that he was wrong. That he had fucked up. So he took a rope, tied one end around his neck and the other around the top rail of the stairwell, and jumped off.’

Mackenzie stood, eyes blazing, tears blurring vision. Anger, fear, disbelief, pain, all filling the chaotic space that was his mind. He lashed out, knocking his uncle’s fist away and pushed him hard in the chest with both hands. Big man though he was, his uncle staggered back. ‘You’re a liar!’ Mackenzie screamed at him. ‘You’re only trying to hurt me.’

‘Nothing hurts quite as much as the truth, sonny,’ his uncle said, and he seemed suddenly calm again, anger replaced by triumph.

The teenage Mackenzie lunged for the umbrella stand and pulled out Mr Kane, holding it by the capped end, and swinging the onyx handle at his uncle’s head. He heard his aunt scream as her husband drew back in alarm, and the handle buried itself in the wall. His uncle snatched it from him, and Mackenzie prepared himself to be on its receiving end, as he had been many times before. But his Uncle Arthur just stood, clutching it in his white-knuckled hand, and screamed, ‘Get out of my fucking house, you little bastard.’

The words reverberated through Mackenzie’s memory as he sat on the bed and saw his seventeen-year-old self climbing up through the hatch to stuff whatever clothes he could grab into his sports holdall. They were the last moments he had spent in this room until his return today, twenty years later. The hurt had never gone away, even though he had learned to sublimate it, locking it up in the darkest recesses of his mind, in those places that everyone keeps for hiding their demons.

The last sight he had of his aunt was caught in a backward glance as he slammed the front door behind him, a fleeting glimpse of the tears that wet her cheeks. He had never seen her again, until watching her coffin today as it slipped through the curtain towards the flames.

His first stop before buying a one-way ticket to London at Glasgow Central railway station had been the cuttings library of the Glasgow Herald. It took very little time, searching the archive, to find the report on the suicide of a Glasgow police officer found hanging by the neck in the stairwell of his tenement home in Partick. He had gone almost straight to it, because he knew that his father’s death had fallen just two days before his thirty-first birthday. Without making a direct connection, the single-column piece referred to his attempt the previous month to rescue a woman taken hostage by an escapee from a psychiatric prison in Lanarkshire.

Flicking back through the editions of the paper, he had found the original report. The police officer concerned, unnamed in this story, had defied orders to await the arrival of an expert in hostage situations, deeming the threat to the woman’s life imminent. His attempt to rescue her, at the risk of his own life, had failed. Her captor had slit her throat with a butcher’s knife, so forcefully that he had very nearly decapitated her.

Mackenzie rose stiffly from his old bed and knew that there would be very little sleep for him tonight. He opened the Velux window in the slope of the ceiling and looked down into a back garden grown wild with neglect. It had once, he remembered, been his Aunt Hilda’s pride and joy. Hours spent weeding borders, planting annuals, pruning her precious roses. And it only occurred to him now that all that time spent in her garden was her way of escaping from Arthur.

An odd sound rose up from the house below, like a muffled cough, repetitive and raw. Curiosity got the better of him and Mackenzie climbed carefully down the ladders into the gloom of the hall. The light outside was fading.

But it wasn’t until he pushed open the kitchen door and saw the old man seated at the table, head in hands, that he realized it was sobbing he had heard. A painful retching sob that tore itself with involuntary regularity from his uncle’s chest.

Mackenzie stood watching him impassively for several long moments before the old man became aware of his presence. He turned red-rimmed eyes towards his nephew and swallowed to catch his breath. He said, in a voice like torn sandpaper, ‘I don’t... I can’t...’ He sucked in a trembling breath. ‘I don’t know how I can go on without her.’