Garnethill

Chapter 3

Maureen was the youngest of the four of them. They all bore a striking family resemblance: dark brown hair, square jaws and fat button noses. Their build was the same too: they were all short and thin. When they were children, people often mistook Liam and Maureen for twins: they had been born ten months apart, both had pale blue eyes and they spent so much time together they adopted all of the same mannerisms. When they hit puberty Liam refused to hang about with Maureen. She didn't understand: she followed him around like a little dog until he threatened to beat her up and stopped talking to her. Their resemblance gradually faded.

Marie was the eldest. She moved to London in the early eighties to get away from her mum's drinking, settled there and became one of Mrs. Thatcher's starry-eyed children. She got a job in a bank and worked her way up. At first the change in her seemed superficial: she began to define all her friends by how big their mortgage was and what kind of car they drove. It took a while for them to realize that Marie was deep down different. They didn't talk about it. They could talk about Winnie's alcoholism, about Maureen's mental-health problems, and to a lesser extent about Liam dealing drugs, but they couldn't talk about Marie being a Thatcherite. There was nothing kind to be said about that. Maureen had always assumed that Marie was a socialist because she was kind. The final break between them came the last time Marie was home for a visit. They were talking about homelessness and Maureen ruined the dinner for everybody by losing the place and shouting "Get a fucking value system!" at her sister.

It happened six months before Maureen was taken to hospital, but the way Marie told it there was only a matter of weeks between one incident and the other. And that explained it. Maureen was mental and Marie forgave her.

Marie was married to Robert, another banker, who worked in the City. They had been married on the quiet in the Chelsea Register Office two years before but Robert had never found the time to come to Glasgow and pay his respects to her family. It was a shame because now he couldn't afford to: he had become a Lloyd's Name at just the wrong time, on just the wrong syndicate, and they were living in a bedsit in Bromley.

Una's husband, Alistair, was an integral part of the family. He was a plumber and couldn't believe his luck when Una agreed to marry him. He was a quiet, honorable man and, to Una's everlasting joy, had proved himself eminently malleable. She began by changing the way he dressed, then moved on to his accent, and at the moment she was trying to change his career.

Una was a civil engineer and made a right few quid. She scheduled beginning a family for 1995 and had virtually booked her maternity leave but she didn't get pregnant. She put a brave face on it but recently she had confided in them all, individually and in confidence, that she was getting desperate. Maureen went with her to the clinic when she had the preliminary tests. It turned out that Alistair's sperm count was a bit low and he was put on a course of medication. Una was happy and Alistair was if she was.

When it came time for Liam to go to secondary school, Michael, their father, had lost his job as a journalist because of his drinking, quite a feat in those days. They couldn't afford to send Liam to the private school Marie and Una had been to so he was sent to Hill-head Comprehensive and Maureen followed him a year later. It was a good school but neither of them studied very hard.

Winnie's alcoholism progressed rapidly after Michael left them. Within four years she was married again and their new stepfather, George, became the silent partner in loud, brutal arguments. Despite the atmosphere in the house Liam delighted his mother by getting into Glasgow University Law School. He dropped out after six months and started selling hash to his friends on a casual basis but he discovered a talent and went professional. He bought a big house. They told Winnie he managed bands. Maureen used to nag him about security in the house but he said that if he started to worry about things like that he'd get really paranoid.

His present girlfriend, Maggie, was a bit of a mystery. She was a model, but they never saw her model anything, and a singer, but they never heard her sing either. She was very pretty and had the roundest arse Maureen had ever seen. She didn't seem to have any friends of her own. Poor Maggie had a lot to live up to: Lynn, Liam's first and last girlfriend, was a doctor's receptionist and as rough as a badger's arse but such great crack even Winnie's snobbishness dissipated when Lynn told a story.

Maureen did well at school and went straight to Glasgow University to study history of art. She was in her final year when she began to think she was schizophrenic. The night terrors she had always suffered from got progressively worse and she started having waking flashbacks. They were mild at first but escalated in frequency and severity. Because she didn't know what she was flashing back to, she thought they were random delusions. In her more lucid moments she realized something was very wrong. She had never done acid so that wasn't it. She began to read about mental illness and found that she was in the right age group for her first schizophrenic attack. She wasn't very surprised: like many people from unhappy families she'd never assumed the future would hold anything too thrilling. She told no one, got the job at the Apollo Theatre and bought the tiny flat in Garnethill so that when she fell down the big black hole into the hands of the social services they wouldn't make her live with Winnie.

It took a year and a half of patient panic for the breakdown to come.

She was sitting upstairs on a bus. A fat man sitting behind her was breathing mucousally in her ear. The noise got louder, closer, more rasping, until it was deafening. She waited for him to hit her, a fisted slap on the side of her head. When it didn't happen she screamed for a bit and threw up. The driver came to see what was wrong and found her sobbing and trying to wipe up the mess with a single tissue. He told her to leave it. She ran off the bus. None of the other passengers came after her.

The family got worried when Mr. Scobie, the manager at the Apollo, phoned Winnie's as a last resort. Maureen hadn't been at work for three days and hadn't called. Liam went looking for her and found her hiding in the hall cupboard in Garnethill. She had been there for two days and had urinated and defecated in the corner. She remembered Liam wrapping her in a blanket and carrying her downstairs to his car. He pulled the blanket over her face and whispered to her all the way to hospital, telling her she was safe, still safe, be brave.

One month after she was admitted to the Northern Psychiatric Hospital Una's husband, Alistair, came to visit on his own. He asked to speak to her and her psychiatrist together and broke Una's confidence, telling them that this had happened before. When Maureen was ten she had been found hiding in the cupboard under the stairs. She had been there for a whole day. Her face was bruised down one side and when they gave her a bath they found dried blood between her legs. No one knew what had happened because Maureen couldn't speak. Michael packed a few things, took the checkbook and disappeared forever. Winnie told the children that Maureen had fallen on her bottom and got a surprise. It was never mentioned again.

Winnie had never forgiven Alistair for telling. She phoned him sometimes when she was drunk. He wouldn't tell Maureen what she said.

Leslie came to the hospital every day, working her visits around her shifts at the shelter. She treated the hospital stay as if it was something that was happening to both of them together. Leslie was scared at first and then settled into the routine, getting angry about the pettiness of the ward rules and making friends with the other patients. Everyone else behaved as if they were coming to view Maureen. She knew that it was her friendship with Leslie that prompted her to get angry and get better. Their relationship changed after the hospital: Maureen couldn't bring herself to lean on Leslie in even the smallest detail. She was always reluctant to phone her when she had a problem. Leslie dealt with other people's emotional crises all day every day at the shelter and Maureen knew she could easily tip the scales and go from being Leslie's pal to being her client. She found herself wishing Leslie would have a disaster sometimes, something minor and fixable, so that Maureen could save her and restore the balance between them once and for all.

The Mustache Man was waiting for them at the car-park entrance to the station. They took her into a small reception area and asked her to sign a book saying that she had come to the station voluntarily. They asked her permission before taking her fingerprints.

She still felt light-headed, her stomach ached with tense after-vomit contractions and she was having trouble with her eyes: her depth perception kept changing suddenly, shifting objects closer and farther away. She blinked hard, pressing the rims of her eyelids tight to stop it. She knew she must look pretty crazy but they weren't watching her, they were anxious to get her upstairs.

The policewoman and the Mustache escorted her up two flights, through a set of fire doors and into a windowless beige corridor illuminated with imperceptibly flickering strip lights. The pattern on the linoleum was too big for the small space. It would have been a disorienting place at the best of times and this wasn't the best of times.

"Is this corridor a bit narrow?" Maureen asked the Mustache.

"A bit," he said, worried by the question. "Are you going to be sick again?"

She shook her head. He stopped at one of the doors and opened it, waving her through in front of him. It was a bleak room. The walls were painted with mushroom gloss, the kind that is easy to wipe clean, and a gray metal table was bolted to the floor. A large clumsy black tape recorder was resting on the table next to the wall. A tiny window, high up on the wall, was barred with wrought iron. Everything about the room whispered distrust.

A tall man with ruffled blond hair was sitting at the near side of the table with his back to the door. He stood up when they came in, introduced himself as Detective Chief Inspector Joe McEwan, and asked her to sit down, motioning to the far side of the table, the side farthest away from the door. She had noticed him back at her house: while she was standing in the close she had seen him in the living room, talking to a man wearing a white paper suit. He had looked out at her, his glance lingering too long to be casual. His skin showed a fading long-term tan, the result of regular foreign holidays. He was in his forties and dressed so carefully in black flannels and an expensive blue cotton shirt that he was either gay or a bachelor. A quick look at the fading milky strip on the third finger of his left hand told her that he had shed a wedding ring one or two sunny holidays ago. He had the look of an ambitious man on his way to some bright future. Maureen's Celtic shirt glowed a strange shade of cheap green under the fluorescent light.

She sat down and Joe McEwan introduced the Mustache Man as Detective Inspector Steven Inness. The policewoman was not introduced. She took the hint and left, shutting the door carefully behind her.

McEwan pressed a button and turned on the tape recorder, telling it the time and who was present. He turned to Maureen and asked her very formally whether or not she had been cautioned prior to the interview. She said she had been. Without looking at him McEwan nudged Inness, telling him to take over.

Inness asked her all the same questions he had asked her at the house, again nodding and yessing her answers. She told them who Douglas was, about Elsbeth and that his mother was an MEP. The two policemen glanced at each other nervously. Inness asked her what her shoe size was, and why she hadn't reported the murder last night. She hadn't looked into the living room, it was to the right of the front door and the bedroom was to the left, so there was no reason for her to pass it unless she had been to the toilet. She went straight to bed because she was pissed.

Inness left long pauses after Maureen imparted each bit of information, expecting her to panic at the silence and fill in the spaces with important clues. Maureen had seen a lot of psychiatrists in her time and knew what he was doing. She found it familiar and calming, as if, among all the confusion, she had stumbled across a set of rules she understood. She did what she had always done with the long-pause technique: she sat and looked at the person interviewing her, her face blank, waiting for them to notice that it wouldn't work. The professional thing to do was stare back at her, take it on the chin and then try something else, but Inness couldn't. He looked at everything in the room, his eyes rolling around, swerving past Maureen to the back wall and over her head to the tape recorder. He gave up and flicked back and forth through the pages of his notebook, looking increasingly confused.

McEwan took over. "Who has a key to your house apart from yourself, Miss O'Donnell?"

"Urn, my brother, Liam, Douglas, and that's it. Oh, I suppose the factor would have one."

"What's the factor's name?"

She told him and guessed at the phone number. McEwan wrote it down in a notebook. "I'm not sure that's the right number," she said.

"It's okay," he said, pleased at her willingness to cooperate. "We can look it up. Where can we find your brother?"

She couldn't let them turn up at Liam's house unannounced – she knew he left stuff lying around all the time. It would frighten the shit out of him if nothing else. He'd never had a scrape with the law. "Urn," she said, "he's staying with some friends at the moment, I'll bring him down if you want to talk to him."

McEwan wasn't pleased. "Can't we contact him?"

"Well, the people he's staying with aren't on the phone. They're difficult to get a hold of. I'll get him for you."

"Well, okay," said McEwan, raising his eyebrows insistently, creasing his forehead into three deep parallel ridges. She thought he must make that face a lot. "But we need to see him today."

"I'll bring him down, I promise. Why was it so hot in the house?"

He looked at her. "What do you mean?"

"It's not usually that hot in the house."

He nudged Inness to make a note of it and turned back to Maureen. "So Douglas had his own key?" he asked diffidently.

"Yes."

"Did you let him into your house yesterday?"

"No, the last time I saw him was on Monday. He stayed the night and left in the morning before I got up."

"Did he mention anything to you about being threatened by anyone, arguing with anyone, being followed, anything like that?"

Maureen thought back over the night's conversation. He was tired when he came in, he didn't even kiss her as he came through the door. He took his shoes off and sat on the settee telling her the usual gossip, the usual moaning appraisal of the people he worked with. Nothing different. They didn't have sex. Douglas fell asleep a minute after getting into bed and Maureen lay wide-awake next to him and watched him dribble saliva onto the pillow. They hadn't had sex for five weeks. Douglas had begun to recoil when she touched him, he rarely even kissed her now.

"Not that I remember," she said.

McEwan scribbled something in a notepad. "And that was the last time you saw him?" he said, without looking up.

"Yeah."

"Except for this morning," observed Inness unnecessarily.

"Yeah," said Maureen, puzzled by his crassness. "Except for this morning."

"Now," said McEwan, "when you found the body this morning did you touch anything?"

Maureen thought about it. "No," she said.

"Did you go into the living room before you phoned us?"

"No."

"Did you go into the hall cupboard?"

"The shoe cupboard?"

"Yes," said McEwan. "The small cupboard in the hall, the one with the shoe box in it."

"No, I didn't go in there. I saw the body and phoned you immediately."

' 'Immediately'? At the scene you told Detective Inspector Inness that you sat in the hall for a while."

"Well, yeah, I saw the body and sat down in shock and as soon as I was able to stand up I got to the phone and called you."

"How long were you sitting in the hall?"

"I don't know, I was in shock."

"One hour? Two hours?"

"Ten minutes, maybe. Twenty minutes at the longest."

"And where were you sitting in the hall?"

"What difference does it make where I sat?" she said impatiently.

"Just answer the question, Miss O'Donnell."

"I was sitting directly across from the hall cupboard."

"And the door to the cupboard was…?"

Joe McEwan seemed to be trying to prompt her toward some meaningful statement about the state of the cupboard but she wasn't sure what it was. She shrugged. "I dunno, what? Broken?"

"Was it open?" asked McEwan. "Was it shut?"

"Oh, right, no, it was shut."

"Could you see into the living room from where you were sitting?"

"I could see some footsteps."

"How many footsteps could you see from there?"

She thought about it for a moment. "Two," she said. "I could see two but there were seven altogether."

McEwan looked at her suspiciously. "You seem very sure about that."

"I remember them because they looked odd. They weren't shuffled, there were no scuffs of blood at the heel, but they were too close together. It looked odd. Like someone had been walking funny."

"As if they were planked," said Inness quietly, looking at his notes.

His comment annoyed McEwan for some reason: he turned and looked at Inness. Inness realized his mistake and eyed McEwan a subordinate's apology.

"Why are you so interested in the hall cupboard?" asked Maureen. "Was there something in there?"

McEwan was evasive. "Never you mind what was in there."

Maureen ran her fingers through her greasy hair. "Would either of you have a cigarette I could blag?" she said.

She had come out of shock minutes before and was desperate for a fag. Her packet was in her handbag, on the bedroom floor.

Inness sighed and looked at McEwan as if to say Maureen was a chancer. McEwan didn't respond. With pronounced reluctance Inness took a packet of Silk Cut from his pocket and handed one to Maureen. He lit a match, holding it across the table. Maureen leaned over, sitting the cigarette in the flame. It crackled softly. She inhaled and felt the smoke curl warmly in her lungs, her fingers began to tingle. McEwan reached out suddenly, took a cigarette out of Inness's packet and leaned forward, lighting it from the ready flame. Inness seemed surprised. McEwan inhaled and grimaced. "Now," he said, looking at his cigarette accusingly, "I'm afraid we can't allow you to stay at your own house for a while. Is there anyone else you can stay with?"

"Oh, aye," said Maureen, "loads of places."

"I mean, we'll need the address you'll be staying at so we can find you if we need to."

"I might be able to stay with a pal in Maryhill but I'd have to check with him first."

"That would be handy," nodded Inness. "It's just up the road."

"Yeah," said Maureen, wanting desperately to see Liam or Benny or Leslie, or anyone familiar and alive. "Can I nip up the road to ask him?"

McEwan gave her a hard, determined look. "No," he said. "I'd prefer it if you stayed here."

"I really want to leave for a while and come back."

"I want you to stay. We'll be receiving information all the time and it may be important for me to check things out with you."

"I want to go," she said firmly. "I want to get some fags and something to eat and have a think."

"We can bring you food and cigarettes."

"I want to have a think."

"What have you got to think about?"

"I just want to get the fuck out of this building for a while," she said, becoming agitated. "The lighting in here is making my eyes hurt and I'm tired, all right?"

"I want you to stay," he said, leaning on the table and exhaling smoke slowly through his nose. "We can keep you here for up to six hours if we have some reason to suspect you've broken the law."

Maureen leaned forward. They sat head-to-head, each reluctant to sit back and relinquish the space to the other. "Are you arresting me?" she asked.

"I don't need to arrest you to keep you here."

"I haven't done anything."

"It's not that simple," said Inness.

Joe McEwan was getting very annoyed, his eyes narrowed and his forehead creased indignantly. He must be very unused to being defied. Maureen thought about his ex-wife and wished her well. He stood up, shoving the chair away noisily with the backs of his knees. He leaned over and opened the door. The policewoman was standing outside: he ushered her into the interview room and left, slamming the door behind him.

"Have we got to wait for him to come back?" asked Maureen.

"Uh-huh," said Inness, fiddling with the Biro, tapping it softly on the table.

"How come there's always two of you?" said Maureen.

Inness looked up. "Corroboration."

"What's corroboration?"

"We can't use any evidence that's witnessed by one person. There have to be two officers present at all times in case we hear something important."

"Oh."

After an infinity McEwan came back in. "You can go," he said, looking disgusted and angry. "But I want you back here in two hours, is that clear?"

"Yes," said Maureen, pleased to be getting her way.

He leaned over the table and told the tape that it was eleven thirty-three, that the interview was being suspended and that he was turning it off. He flicked the switch and turned back to Maureen. "You know," he said, his voice louder than it need have been, "I really think if you wanted us to find the person who murdered your boyfriend you'd cooperate more fully."

"I appreciate that," she said, gracious in victory. "I'll do everything I can to help you but right now I need a break."

He looked at her disbelievingly and motioned for her to follow him as he walked out of the room.

Coming down the stairs to the main entrance she could see Liam sitting on a plastic chair in the lobby. He looked up and grinned when he saw her, wrinkling his nose. She shook her head softly and looked away, warning him not to speak to her. If McEwan saw Liam he'd recognize him as her brother and would insist on interviewing him right away. Maureen would have to wait for him.

"I'll be back by half-one," she said, distracting McEwan's attention. "I promise."

McEwan walked straight past Liam. He paused by the reception desk and patted it with the flat of his hand, telling her firmly that this was where she should report to when she came for their appointment. Maureen gave him an insolent look and left.

McEwan watched her walk through the glass doors and saw a young man with the same build and hair color follow Maureen O'Donnell toward the main road.

Liam caught up with her in the street. "He must be used to dealing with half-wits," he said.

"Naw, I think he was trying to patronize me. He's pissed off because I insisted on leaving for a while."

Liam's Triumph Herald was parked at the far end of the street. Maureen could see the rust patches from two hundred yards away. It was a rotten car, it broke down at least once a month but Liam said it was good for business: the police tended to stop young guys in Mercs, not mugs in shitey motors.

Maureen slipped her arm through his, something she hadn't done in years. "Did Mum tell you about Douglas, then?" she asked.

"Yeah," said Liam, keeping his eyes on the road and squeezing her arm hard.

"How long were you waiting for?" she said.

"Just about three-quarters of an hour. Not long anyway."

"Liam, they're going to have to speak to you. I didn't think and I told them you had a key to the house."

He flinched. "Oh, bollocks."

"I'm sorry," she said. "Would they know about your business?"

"Dunno, maybe," he said. "Auch, actually they probably don't. Where are we going, anyway?"

"Well, I want to ask Benny if I can stay there for a while. I'm not allowed to go home until they've finished looking through everything and I can't stay at yours, obviously. How's Mum?"

Liam looked shifty. "Mm, well, Una's with her."

"You mean she's pissed?"

"Umm, she might be," he said quietly. "She's very upset. Una's comforting her."

"For fucksake, this is going to turn into something that happened to her, isn't it?"

"You know Mum, she could scene-steal from an eclipse." He opened the passenger door for her and saw that she was winding herself up. "Getting pissed off won't make a sod of difference. You should know that by now."

Maureen got into the car. The windows were opaque with cold condensation. Maggie was sitting in the backseat. "Oh, Maggie," said Maureen. "Have you been here all that time?"

Maggie smiled politely and nodded.

"Why didn't you come inside? You must have been freezing."

"I didn't like to," she said vaguely.

Liam revved the engine. "Let's go and see Benito," he said, and pulled out into the Maryhill Road. "Benito Finite"

An unmarked police car followed the Herald at a discreet distance.

Hillhead Comprehensive's catchment area covers a middle-class area and a profoundly deprived one. Benny came from the latter. He had been expelled in third year for setting fire to a toilet but Maureen and Liam stayed in touch with him because he was mental and a good laugh.

Benny drank like his father. Consequently his early life was a series of Dadaesque adventures: he woke up in a meat factory, he got engaged to a woman whose name he couldn't remember, he fell into a quarry on a Saturday night and didn't manage to get out until the men came to work on Monday morning. When he was twenty he said he was sick of getting his face kicked in all the time and started attending Alcoholics Anonymous and got sober. He was homeless at the time and Maureen let him sleep on her bedroom floor at home. He talked about nothing but the joy of AA for two months. Winnie came to hate him.

His alcoholic family disowned him when he moved in with Maureen's family and got sober. He did some exams at college and got into Glasgow University to study law. His family owned him again. He was in senior honors studying corporate law and had a series of traineeship interviews lined up with high-flying companies. His bank manager kept writing to him, asking him to take out more loans.

THEY DREW UP INTO Scaramouch Street. It was short, only four closes long, with bollards blocking off the end from the Maryhill Road. The street used to be a handy cutoff before the lights. When the bollards first went up several drivers, thinking they'd be cute and save a couple of minutes, swerved straight into them and wrote their cars off. They climbed the stairs to the second floor and knocked. Benny opened the door. He wasn't bad-looking: he was dark with long eyelashes and kind gray eyes, six foot something tall, and had a solid muscular frame, but his close association with Liam and the rest of her family made Maureen squeamish about fancying him. He looked Maureen up and down and burst out laughing. "What the fuck are you wearing?" he squealed. "You look like a ned!"

Maureen pushed her way in through the door. "I've had a bit of an eventful day," she said, and went into the kitchen to put the kettle on. Benny was a dirty bastard: the kitchen was filthy. Dishes, bits of food and packaging were sitting on the work tops and table, the sink was full and smelled faintly of mildew.

She could hear them in the hall, Liam mumbling the story in a monotone and Benny whispering exclamations back. Liam called to her that he was going to drop Maggie home and would be back in half an hour.

Benny stayed in the living room for a few minutes before coming into the kitchen. His face was gray. "Jesus, Mauri," he said, "Jesus. I don't know what to say."

Maureen dropped into a chair and covered her face with her hands. She wanted to cry but nothing seemed real. Benny sat next to her, putting his arms around her, holding her close and kissing her hair. He was trembling. "Oh, Mauri," he whispered, "Jesus, Mauri, it's so shockin'." She sat up and asked him for a fag. "Haven't you got any?" She explained what had happened to hers and he insisted that she take his packet.

He gave her a lemonade and an ashtray and sat at the table with her, leaning close and listening intently. She told him about the cagoul and the shoes and the rope. How could they get into the house, she kept saying, how could they get in the front door without making a noise?

"Did Douglas have his own key?" asked Benny.

"Aye."

"And there was no sign of forced entry?"

"Not that I noticed."

"Well, Douglas must have let himself in and, either then or later, let in the person who did it. Unless they picked the lock. What kind of locks have you got?"

Maureen described them.

"They'd have to know what they were doing," he said. "Chances are he let them in so ye can conclude that he knew them."

"Aye." She was impressed by the logic of his deduction. "Aye, that'll be it. You're good at this."

"This is awful. I suppose they think it was one of his clients from the clinic. Or could it be the woman he was living with?"

"Elsbeth?"

"Yeah, Elsbeth. It's kind of poetic, killing your unfaithful man in the other woman's house."

"It didn't look very poetic," said Maureen.

"Oh, fuck, I shouldn't have said that, I'm sorry, it's hard to take in."

"I know," said Maureen. "It's so shocking it almost isn't." Her bum was numb again. She stood up and rubbed it with her palms. "I've had a very fucking strange day," she said, as if the fact had just occurred to her.

"How're ye fixed? Did you leave your wallet at home too?" He took a tenner out of his pocket and pressed it into her hand.

"I don't need any money, Benny. I'll get my wallet from the police."

"Just take it in case, okay?"

"I'll give it back as soon as I get my wallet."

Benny quirked an eyebrow playfully. "Give it back to me when you give me that Selecter CD back."

Maureen rolled her eyes. "God, not again, Benny, I gave you that back months ago."

"Ye never did."

"Benny Gardner, I'll buy you a replacement but you're going to find that CD in this filthy house and ye'll have to crawl to me."

"It's been discontinued and, Mauri, I'm telling ye, you'll find it in your filthy house and you'll have to crawl to me."

Maureen finished her lemonade. "Can you think of anything else about Douglas, Benny? Any more elementary-my-dear-Watsons?"

Benny smiled, pleased at being asked.

"Not off the top of my head, no."

Maureen slumped over the table. "I'm worried they'll think I did it."

"Oh, no" – he took her hand and squeezed it tightly – "they won't think that. They won't. Anyone who knows you could tell them it wasn't you. When you went into the living room, did you see a murder weapon?"

Maureen thought her way back through the room, censoring Douglas's body out of the picture. "I dunno, um, no. But I didn't get a good look, really." She blinked and saw a blood-soaked curl of hair behind his ear, and below that his poor broken neck, sliced open like a raw joint. She got up, washed her hands over the dirty dishes in the sink and tried to blink away the image.

"I'm just asking because it'd be good if they didn't find one," he said.

She splashed cold water on her face. "Find one what?"

"A murder weapon."

"Why?"

"Well, if you were in the house all the time and the weapon's found somewhere else that means someone came in, did it and then went away again. That'll be good for you."

"Okay," said Maureen, having trouble seeing how any of this could be good for her. She sat back down at the table. "It turns out they were married, after all. I feel like such a mug."

"Douglas was married to Elsbeth?"

"Yeah."

He touched her forearm and spoke softly. "I thought ye'd decided he was an arse anyway."

"Yeah," she said miserably, "but he was my arse."

Benny scratched his head and looked at her shirt. "You look mental. Let's find you something to wear."

They went into the bedroom and Benny dug out a red T-shirt with "The Broad Left Anti-Capitalist Dynamos F.C." printed on the front. The Anti Dynamos were a football team Benny used to play for. Maureen had been openly coveting the shirt for years and she appreciated the gesture. Benny was over six foot and Maureen was only five two so they couldn't find her any trousers.

"You'll have to keep those joggers on."

"I hate these things," she said. "They always make me think of fat guys with free-range bollocks."

He gave her a key to his house. Maureen could sleep on the sofa bed in the front room until she wanted to go home. The arrangement was perfect: Winnie would never come here.

"Can I ask another question about it, Mauri?"

"God, please, Benny, anything you can think of…"

He bit his lip and looked at her. "It's a bit of a rough one, though."

"I can take it."

"sure?"

"Positive."

"Did you notice whether there were a few cuts or just one?"

"What, on his neck?"

"Yeah, were there a few cut marks and then a big one?"

She blinked. "Naw, from what I saw there was just one big one." He exhaled slowly. "Fuckin' mental," he muttered. Maureen asked him what he meant.

"It means whoever killed him just tied him up and did it, no threat to do it, no first go. It means they didn't hesitate."