Exile

Chapter 43

The air was very still in the bus station. Maureen's breath hovered in front of her, swirling as she pushed past the other passengers, picked her bag from the growing pile and walked out of the automatic doors. The pavement shimmered and the buildings strained against the cold. A white mist filled the tall street and Maureen cut a swath through it, leaving black footprints in the frost. A black cab glided past her, turning for the city center and the stations. She lit a cigarette. Her raw throat throbbed and she looked like shit but she was home. A sudden flurry of snow bleached the colors out of the city as she passed the foot of Garnethill and walked north. She was tempted to go home first, to dump her heavy bag, but she was sure she'd never come out again. Maureen pulled her scarf around her head and walked on.

Williams parked across the street from the station.

"Here, just here," said Inness. "That'll be fine."

"Are you sure?" asked Williams, cranking up the hand brake and making Bunyan sigh. "We're on a yellow."

"Yeah."

They walked across the road and took the gray concrete stairs down to the bus station. It was almost empty. Local double-deckers were parked in tidy lines along the center of the concourse. A single bus, stopped in front of the ticket building, showed signs of life. A driver in a blue nylon uniform walked around the bonnet and disappeared behind it. Williams bristled. "It's already in," he said, and jogged over to it, his suit jacket flapping open. He stopped a withered wee guy with an Afro hairdo. "Is this the London bus?"

"Aye."

"Look, I'm a police officer." He pulled the grainy printout photograph of Maureen O'Donnell out of his pocket. "Was this woman on the bus?"

The wee guy looked at it and asked his pal to come and see as well. "Think so," said his pal.

"Aye," squawked the first driver nasally. "I recognize the hair. She was on the bus, right enough."

"Where is she now?"

"How should I know?"

"Did you see anyone come and pick her up?"

The ugly man shrugged. "I don't watch them all leaving – we've to get the luggage out."

"Did ye see anyone grabbing her?"

The men stood apathetically and Inness pulled Williams by the arm. "She might just have gone home."

"Do you know where it is?"

"Yeah, it's up the road, two minutes up the road. Top of that hill there."

It was a long walk. The snow thickened as the sun came up, enveloping the city in a heavy gray light. It lay on her sleeves and shoulders, catching on her scarf and eyebrows, deadening the noise of the cars and traffic as she made her way up the Maryhill Road. She got angrier as she walked, working up a sweat as she approached the turnoff to Ruchill. The early-morning streets began to empty. The lazy blizzard stopped suddenly under the disused railway bridge. Maureen walked on, stepping out of the envelope of calm into the white sheet and up the steep hill.

Ruchill was a dead area. A single row of buildings stood against the steep road. Behind it, ten acres of wasteland were crisscrossed by overgrown roads. Street after street of damp and rotten tenements had been demolished. On the other side of the street a high fence barred entry to the park, a tall grassy hill pitted with skeletal trees and the looming hospital tower. Maureen ignored it, willing herself not to look as she passed the black machine-gun nest pub, and walked on. The first of the hospital outbuildings appeared on the shoulder of the road, a modest red bungalow with an outsize Dutch gable facade.

Maureen paused at the foot of the steep driveway, hot and trembling. She shifted the scarf on her head to get some of the snow off and looked up. The drive curved sharply and disappeared behind a high bank of bushes. Shards of broken glass scratched the tarmac beneath her feet and she walked on, past the bushes, and followed the road to the tower. The vandals had been there night after night. Single-story buildings were dotted around the campus; their wooden onion domes lay on the ground, burned and smashed. Crazed Venetian blinds hung forlornly in broken windows and net curtains flapped lazily at the muffled wind. She walked on to the top of the hill and looked out over the city dawn. She could see her house.

Maureen narrowed her eyes, blinking and catching snowflakes in her lashes as she looked up at the jagged tower silhouetted against a crumbling white sky. She crouched, picked up a stone, ran towards the building as she aimed, and threw it, her feet skidding on the slushy snow. The heavy gray stone hurled through the air, spinning and scattering the snowflakes falling gently in its path. She gasped as she saw where it was headed. The high window shattered and fell like a curtain. She picked up another stone from the overgrown grass verge, ran again and chucked it as hard as she could. Her scarf fell off her head, trailing down her back, baring her head to the weather. The stone shattered another window. Maureen smiled. She dropped her bag onto the wet ground and felt inside for Kilty's shopping. Her cold, stiff fingers relaxed when they found the rough cardboard of the box of fire lighters.

The heat left her as soon as she reached the bottom of the stairs. She was smiling and happy, chewing squares of Milka chocolate and feeling safe and home. She must never, ever tell anyone what she had done. She let the tension leave her. All she had to do now was phone Leslie and wait for the police to come to see her. Then she was looking forward to a wash and a sleep and a day in her pajamas, sitting on the settee in front of the television, sipping tea. Grinning and excited, she skipped up the stairs, taking them two at a time, until she got two steps away from her front door and stopped.

The front door was hanging on the hinges, two inches ajar. The lights were on in the hall. Noiselessly, she slid her bag to the floor and reached into her pocket for the stabbing comb. She pushed the door open with the tips of her fingers. She couldn't see into the living room but she could hear. Someone was in there – she could hear a voice muttering something, a short question, followed by a curt answer. Footsteps came towards her along the wooden floorboards, pausing in the living room. They stepped towards her, pressing on the back of the door to shut it. Maureen kicked the door with the flat of her foot, banging it against the wall, and found herself staring at a startled, sleepy Inness. She dropped her bag. "What the fuck are you doing in my house?"

Inness was standing in her hallway, grinning out at her with the blue morning behind him. "Mrs. Thatcher, I presume? I've got some pals here who are dying to meet you."

A man and a woman in smart dark suits were standing in her living room. Angus's letters were scattered over the table. Every one of them had been pulled from its envelope and read. "You bastards." She lurched into the hall, reaching for the letters, but Inness grabbed her by the arm and pulled her roughly round to face him. He screamed at her, "Calm down!"

Over his shoulder, out of the kitchen window and beyond on the north horizon, the Ruchill fever hospital tower was burning like a Roman candle, the turret windows belching black sparking clouds of dead men's ashes. Below, in the quiet city, siren screams rushed to a fire too well set to be sated. A door opened in the close and Jim Maliano appeared in her doorway pulling his purple dressing gown shut. "What is going on in here?" he demanded, his bouffant trembling with fury.

Inness held on to Maureen and put his other hand on Maliano's shoulder, pushing him out of the door. "We are police officers," he said, "and we are here to speak to Miss O'Donnell. Go back inside, please, sir."

"You can't go through my stuff," said Maureen stiffly. "Those are my letters."

"Well," shouted Jim, "if you are police officers you should know better than to come into a domestic close at eight thirty in the morning and make that sort of noise."

Inness pushed him with the flat of his hand. "Back inside, please, sir," he said, pushing too hard and making Maliano stumble over the step.

Maliano slapped his hand away and turned to Maureen. "Maureen, are you all right?"

Maureen didn't like Jim Maliano and he had made it abundantly clear that he didn't like her or her lifestyle, but whenever there was trouble Jim came running across the close and looked out for her.

"I'm fine, Jim, I'm really fine. You go back to bed and I promise we'll keep it down."

Maliano glared at Inness insolently. "Call me if you have any trouble?"

"I will, Jim, thanks."

He turned and looked at her. "Ruchill's on fire," he said, somewhat gleefully, as if he were having an everyday chat with his neighbor.

Maureen and Inness looked down the hall to the kitchen window and the column of fire on the horizon, and Inness muttered an awed curse.

"Neds," said Maliano, and looked accusingly at Inness. "Ye should be out stopping that sort of behavior instead of harassing her. I keep a diary of all your comings and goings up here"-he gestured to his spy hole-"so," he said, pointing at him, "just you watch it." Jim's bottle snapped and he blushed and scuttled back across the close to his own door, giving Inness a last warning look before he shut the door. Maureen knew he would be standing, watching. She shut her front door and darted into the living room, gathered up all of Angus's letters and held them to her chest. "These're mine," she said.

"We asked you about them," said Inness sternly, "and we're seizing them, so you can put them down. They're not even yours anymore."

"What gives you the right to break into my house?"

The fat guy in the dark suit stepped over to her. "Miss O'Donnell," he said, "where have you been since you got off the bus? We thought you were dead behind the door in here."

"I don't have to fucking tell you anything," she said.

"What happened to your neck?" asked the little blond woman, staring at it.

Inness stepped closer and Maureen could tell from the flush around his eyes that he was furious with her. "Those letters'll be going to the fiscal." He was trying to threaten her but in the past few days she'd been trapped in Parlain's, she'd been strangled by Toner and she'd made her home safe from the evil eye and had chosen her path. Inness couldn't frighten her with a mustache and a stare.

"Get out," she said, trying to shout but sounding strained and weak.

The fat guy was staring at the bruise around her throat. "What happened to your neck?" he asked.

"Get out," said Maureen.

He touched her arm gently. "Miss O'Donnell? I'm Arthur Williams from the Met?" His face was kind and nervous. "I understand that you have information about Ann Harris's murder."

Maureen was folding the letters, shoving them back into their envelopes, dizzy with the desire to be alone and home and safe. She ripped an envelope trying to shove a letter into it and that was enough. "Fuck it," she shouted. Her throat throbbed and stabbed with the effort. She dropped all the letters and kicked them out of the way. "Fuck it."

Inness was staring at her. "What happened to your neck?" he said.

The plump man stepped forward. "We really need to talk to you, Miss O'Donnell."