Garnethill

Chapter 4

As soon as Joe McEwan appeared at the top of the stairs Maureen could tell he was still pissed off with her. He held her eye as he walked steadily down the steps and came straight up to the desk, standing too close to her, looming over her so she had to bend her neck to look him in the face. "Did you contact your brother?" he said abruptly.

"Yeah," said Maureen. "And here he is."

Liam stepped forward and smiled. McEwan recognized him as the scruffy man who had been waiting in the lobby, the man who had driven Maureen O'Donnell up to Maryhill in the red Triumph Herald. He glowered at her. A double door next to the stairs opened and Inness and the red-haired man appeared, greeting McEwan with conspiratorial nods.

McEwan looked out of the glass doors. "You go with them," he ordered. Neither Maureen nor Liam knew which of them he was talking to. The red-haired man tapped Liam on the shoulder and jerked his head to the doors by the stairs, signaling for him to move. Liam looked back at his wee sister, still standing at the desk, looking underfed and brittle in the shadow of the tall policeman. He gave her a nervous thumbs-up and she waved him a silly cheerio.

"You come with me," growled McEwan, and stomped up the stairs, taking her back to the narrow corridor.

The high midday sun shone in through the miserly window in the interview room, hitting the wall inches above the tape recorder in a glowing yellow smear. A gangly young officer was sitting at the table waiting for them. He smiled up at Joe McEwan as he came into the room. McEwan grunted back. Disconcerted by McEwan's filthy mood, the young officer turned shyly and introduced himself to Maureen. He spoke so quietly that she couldn't make out his name. It sounded like Something McMummb. His hair was mousy brown and he had a matching mousy brown mole on his left cheek. Three coarse hairs stuck out of it like the legs on a tiny milking stool. He was dressed in a brand-new suit.

Maureen took her seat at the other side of the table, away from the door. McEwan sat down and took a slim leather-bound notebook out of his pocket, placed it on the table and slid a skinny pencil out of the spine. He turned on the tape recorder and leaned into it, telling it who was present this time. She listened for McMummb's name but McEwan's intonation dipped at the end of the sentence and she was left none the wiser.

"Did you check the heating in the house?" she asked.

McEwan lifted his notebook and began to look through it. "The heating switch was on a timer," he said.

"Yeah, but it wasn't set for-"

McEwan interrupted her. "Were you drunk when you came home last night, Miss O'Donnell?"

"Well, yeah," she said, surprised by his adversarial tone.

"You don't seem very sure now. You were sure this morning when you said you didn't see the body because you went straight to bed. Were you or weren't you drunk?"

"What has me being drunk got to do with the central heating?"

"Is it possible that you came home and put it on?"

"I know I didn't," she said meekly.

He ignored her and wrote something in his pad. She decided to try again. "When I come home drunk I've got better things to do than fiddle about with the heating."

"Like what?"

"I dunno." She smiled, trying to get them onto a friendly footing. "Like pass out."

McEwan looked at her, thinly masking his disapproval. "You were that drunk, were you?" he asked.

They weren't going to have a friendly conversation, she could tell that now. McEwan leaned his arms on the table and meshed his fingers together. He looked her in the eye as he worked the tip of his tongue into his wisdom tooth. "You said Douglas worked at the Rainbow Clinic," he said suddenly. "Was he your therapist?"

"No," said Maureen, emphatically, defensive at the implied slight on Douglas's honor. "Never."

"Well," he said, a petulant edge to his voice, "your mother said you have received psychiatric treatment in the past."

"Urn, yeah," said Maureen, uncomfortably. She knew he was launching straight into the psychiatric questions to disarm her and it was working. Most people with no experience of mental illness don't see it as part of a continuum, it's them and us, the nutters and the whole people. "I was in the Northern for five months in nineteen ninety-six," she said, "and I've seen a psychiatrist. Not for anything special, really, just in case."

McEwan wouldn't speak or break eye contact. He was much better at it than Inness. Maureen focused on the bridge of his nose.

"In case what?" asked McEwan finally.

"I had a breakdown. That's why I was in the Northern. The psychiatrist was just a follow-up thing, in case it happened again. Not that it's likely… just in case… you know."

"No, I don't know," said McEwan unpleasantly. "What were you being treated for?"

Maureen looked at them. Something McMummb seemed impressionable, probably just out of training. He watched McEwan intently, his face reacting to Maureen's answers as if he were conducting the interview himself, glancing at McEwan every so often, desperate for some sign of approval. And McEwan sat there between them, his hands clasped together, his face smug and confident, a fight looking for a venue. Fuck him, she thought, if he's so fucking smart he can find out for himself. "Depression," she said. It wasn't a lie, exactly, it was more of a half-truth, and holding information back from him made her feel empowered and confident, as if it was still her life even if McEwan was legally entitled to rake through it. She put her hands on the table, playing with an old bus ticket she had found in the pocket of Jim Maliano's jogging trousers.

"And who is your current psychiatrist?"

"I don't have one," she said, enjoying the sense of control.

McMummb looked surprised.

"Your mother said you had a psychiatrist," said McEwan.

"My mother drinks too much too often. She's in tune with the moon a lot of the time."

A hint of a smile floated across McEwan's face. "How would you know if you were having a breakdown?"

"I'm not having one, if that's what you meant. When depressives have a breakdown it's pretty obvious. We can't function or get ourselves out of the house. If I was having a breakdown you'd be able to tell."

McEwan looked at McMummb, who must have done a two-day course in psychology. He nodded his confirmation and McEwan turned back to her. McMummb sat back and blushed with delight at McEwan's deference.

"So," said McEwan, oblivious to his protégé's glee, "you said Douglas worked at the Rainbow Clinic?"

"Yes."

"And you've never been there?"

"I went a couple of times to meet him but never as a patient."

She had been to the Rainbow to see Angus, Douglas's colleague, for two sessions before being referred on to Louisa at the Albert but she knew the lie would hold up. When she first came out of the Northern they had referred her to an arse of a psychiatrist at a small clinic in the Great Western Road. He sat across a desk from her, looking unhappy and bored as he asked her leading questions about the most painful events in her life. He took the pause-and-prompt technique too far, refusing to accept that it wouldn't work with Maureen. They spent most of their sessions staring at each other in a gloomy, adversarial silence. Maureen began to phone other clinics, looking for someone else.

She found the Rainbow's number in the Yellow Pages. The clinic ran an outreach scheme for victims of sexual abuse and they let the patients use an assumed name if they wanted to. Maureen had called herself Helen and no one but Douglas knew her real name. The only way Joe McEwan could find out she had been to the Rainbow was from Louisa Wishart at the Albert.

Maureen got talking to Shirley, the receptionist at the Rainbow, the first time she went there, and Shirley introduced Douglas to her when he came into the waiting room to check his appointment times. Maureen didn't give it a second thought. She was four months out of hospital and was afraid she was losing it again. Her mind was full of other stuff. After her last session with Angus Farrell she was standing at a bus stop across the road from the clinic when Douglas stopped his car and offered her a lift back to town. She was upset, stuck in the middle of nowhere with an hour to wait for the next bus. They got talking in the car and went for a drink. She topped herself up with triples while he was in the toilet. She woke up at ten past four in the morning, her face in a puddle of hot moonlight, just in time to see Douglas struggling into his trousers at the end of her bed.

"Now," said McEwan, reaching down to a brown cardboard file box at the side of his chair and lifting a clear polyethylene bag onto the table. "Is this yours?"

The yellow plastic cagoul was folded neatly inside the open-ended bag. Most of the blood had been washed off but the white drawstring on the hood was stained an uneven pink. A long number was typed onto an envelope address label and stuck on the corner of the bag. McEwan muttered something into the tape recorder.

She didn't want to touch it-she didn't even want to touch the bag. She took her hands off the table, resting them on her lap. "Not mine," she said.

McEwan sensed her discomfort. He pushed the bag across the table to her with his fingertips. "Sure?"

"Certain," she said.

"Have you ever seen it before this morning?"

"No."

He put the cagoul back into the box at his side, pulled out a smaller bag and dropped it on the table. Four strands of bloody rope were tucked inside. "Any idea where these came from?"

Maureen looked at them. The rope was made of a shimmering nylon material and was stained pink like the drawstring on the cagoul. It was far too thick to come from the clothes pulley in the kitchen. She thought her way through the flat. "No," she said finally, "I can't think where they might have come from. Are they from the house?"

"It's not a trick question," said McEwan. "We want to know if you can identify them before we start tracing them. Have you ever seen them before?"

"No."

He put the bag away and pulled out another one. "Are these your slippers?"

Maureen looked at the bag. Her slippers were tagged and sealed inside. She turned the bag over. The soles still showed traces of dried blood. "Yeah, they're my slippers, but I don't see how they could be covered in blood. I left them in the cupboard, I haven't worn them for days."

"But they are your slippers?"

"Yeah, they're mine."

McEwan dropped the bag back in the box and fitted a cardboard lid on it. She put Benny's packet of cigarettes on the table, took one out and lit it.

McEwan watched resentfully as she inhaled. "I want to ask you again," he said. "Did you go into the living room when you saw the body?"

"No. I definitely didn't go in there."

"Did you go into the hall cupboard?"

McMummb looked excitedly from Maureen to McEwan and back again. The question was clearly significant.

"No. I didn't go in there either."

"Okay," he said slowly, and jotted something in his notebook, stabbing a full stop at the end of the sentence. "Right, next thing, do you have any idea where Douglas's key to your house might be?"

She thought for a moment. "He had it, I dunno, wasn't it in his pocket?"

"No. Was he in the habit of putting it down somewhere in the house when he came in, say, on the hall table, somewhere like that?"

"No, he kept his keys in his pocket. Are you sure it wasn't on him?"

"No. We've been pretty thorough."

"It wasn't in his jacket pocket?"

McEwan sneered. " 'Thorough' would usually include his pockets."

She thought about it with a rising sense of panic. "Could the man who killed him have taken it?"

McEwan shrugged. "We don't know where it is," he said.

Maureen slumped back in her chair. "My God, he's got a key to my house."

"You're very sure it's a man, Maureen."

"I'm guessing."

"Of course, he may not have had the key on him." McEwan spoke slowly, watching for a reaction. "He could have got into the house some other way."

"I didn't let him in, if that's what you're hinting at," she said. "I would have remembered."

"Yes," said McEwan, tip-and-tailing the skinny pencil noisily on the table. He smiled up at her. "Do you know Douglas's wife, Elsbeth Brady?"

"No."

"You've never met her?"

"No."

He asked her to go through her movements yesterday morning and afternoon. She repeated the details she had given Inness at the house that morning: she went to work at nine-thirty and didn't leave until six o'clock. McEwan asked her carefully whether she had been out of the office for longer than a few minutes, say for lunch. She definitely hadn't. She'd been in the office with Liz all day, they could ask her if they liked.

"We will," said McEwan, and closed his notebook. "Incidentally, your mother has been phoning here all day. She keeps demanding to speak to you. I suggest you phone her. She's been getting more and more… upset."

"Right." Maureen knew full well what Winnie had been getting more and more. "I'm sorry if she's been bothering you."

McEwan brushed over it. "Talking of mothers, do you know Douglas Brady's mother?"

"I've seen photos of her in the paper."

"But you've never met her?"

Maureen shook her head.

"Well," said McEwan, "we'll try to keep this out of the papers for as long as possible but there is going to be a lot of interest in it because she's an MEP. I don't want you talking to the press."

"Right," she said, her heart sinking at the thought of Drunk Winnie's propensity to talk and talk and talk. She couldn't be with her all the time and Drunk Winnie's very favorite subject was family secrets and how shitty her kids were.

She gave him Benny's name, address and telephone number. They wouldn't allow her into her own house unescorted; if she wanted to go home to get anything she would need to phone in advance and they would arrange for an officer to be present.

"Why?"

"In case you disturb any evidence we haven't collected yet."

"You surely don't suspect me?"

"We don't know who did it yet," he said, looking at his pencil in a manner that strongly suggested he did.

As he was showing her out they ran into Elsbeth in the lobby. She was petite with a sharp blond bob, sharper features and a tidy figure. Her eyes were red raw. Poor Elsbeth had been the focus of gut-gnawing guilt over the past eight months: Maureen's sense that they were doing a very unkind thing indeed had snowballed as her feelings for Douglas changed. Seeing the picture of Elsbeth in the newspaper had made it worse: she had a face to put to the guilt. Douglas didn't seem to think about it. He didn't flinch when Maureen reproached herself; he acted as if she was making a big something out of nothing; it was as if Maureen was being unfaithful to Elsbeth and not Douglas. Seeing Elsbeth in the flesh for the first time made Maureen feel sick and hot. She tried to slip past her but Elsbeth caught her arm. "Did you do it, Maureen?" she asked.

Maureen was startled. Elsbeth shouldn't know who she was. "No," she said, guilty and uncomfortable.

"Neither did I," said Elsbeth. Her face sagged suddenly and she shuffled over to Joe McEwan, who was standing at the foot of the stairs. Panicked and shaky, Maureen turned stiffly toward the door.

"Maureen?" Elsbeth's voice was fraught and cracked. "Will you wait for me?"

"If you want me to," said Maureen, resisting the urge to scream and run away.

McEwan smiled at her but when Elsbeth turned her back he frowned and motioned for her to leave. She watched them climb the stairs together. Elsbeth was wearing the Aran jumper Maureen had bought for Douglas's last birthday.

She left the police station and crossed the main road, walking two blocks to the shops. She'd decided to cook a meal for Benny as a thank-you for letting her stay. She chose some baby corncobs, zucchini and a green pepper to pad out a tomato sauce. The garlic looked old and sprouty. She asked an assistant if they had any more at the back of the shop and looked through it slowly. Her heart began to palpitate at the checkout. She abandoned her trolley in the queue and ran the two blocks, darting across the main road and getting into Stewart Street just in time to see Elsbeth coming out of the main entrance of the station. Elsbeth didn't seem surprised that she was there: she assumed people would do what she asked and Maureen resented her for it.

"Let's go to my house," she said, without looking up, and Maureen followed her into a waiting black cab.

The driver turned onto the broad Great Western Road and headed west. The traffic was heavy for early afternoon and the taxi got caught at three red lights in a row.

Elsbeth and Maureen sat as far apart as the backseat would allow, looking out of their respective windows in silence, watching the pedestrians going about their business.

"How did you know who I was?" asked Elsbeth, her sharp voice shattering the heavy silence between them.

Maureen turned to her and tried to catch her eye but Elsbeth was looking out of the window. "I saw a picture of you in the paper," she said softly, "at the last election. It was you and Douglas in front of a hotel."

Elsbeth looked at her lap and ground her jaw. She lifted her head and stared out of the window again.

"How come you recognized me?" asked Maureen.

"I saw a photograph of you," said Elsbeth. "It was in Douglas's briefcase. You were wearing a party hat."

Jesus Christ, the party-hat photo. Douglas had borrowed it because he thought it was so funny. Maureen was pissed and spliffed and guffawing and wearing a purple pointy hat with streamers coming out of it. The thick string of elastic was under her nose, pulling it back into a piggy snout. It must have been the ultimate insult for pristine Elsbeth, cuckold to a vulgar red-faced drunk.

The West End is Glasgow's student quarter and centers around the Byres Road, a broad street down the hill from the neo-Gothic university. Every third shop is a deli or bar. When Maureen was at university she worked in a West End bar and was often mistaken for an out-of-work actress. She was young at the time and thought it was a compliment.

As they neared the university the driver turned the cab off the Great Western Road into a crescent street. It was lined with elegant blond sandstone tenements on one side; on the other ornate cast-iron railings barred the steep drop to the river Kelvin. He pulled over to the pavement and stopped the meter.

Elsbeth stopped outside one of the blocks and took out her keys. She opened the security door into a close with shimmering green tiles up to shoulder height topped off with a border of pseudo-Mackintosh roses. The fancy tiling ceased abruptly on the first floor, replaced by green gloss.

They stopped on the second floor and Elsbeth unlocked her front door, letting it swing open into a huge hallway with stripped-pine floorboards. It was the biggest hallway Maureen had ever seen. "Come in," said Elsbeth, wrestling her key out of the door, relishing Maureen's surprise. "I'll show you around."

Elsbeth took her into all the rooms, pointing out unusual pieces of furniture and favored ornaments. The ceilings in the flat were high and ornate, the furniture sparse and expensive. The framed pictures in the living room were all Miro prints but Maureen suspected that this was a decor decision rather than a passion.

Elsbeth was trying hard but she was doing a bad job of covering her upset: her consistently indignant intonation was exhausting. Maureen had been impressed when Elsbeth had spoken to her and asked her back: she thought perhaps they were really going to talk to each other, but now Elsbeth was treating her like a new neighbor and she was behaving like one.

They settled in the large, bright kitchen. Elsbeth took a bottle of mineral water from the fridge and opened a wall cupboard full of glasses. For just a moment her hand hovered over the plain ones. She stood on her tiptoes and reached to the side, chose an expensive red and green goblet from a set of six, poured herself some mineral water and put the bottle back in the fridge without offering Maureen any.

Hanging on the wall next to the breakfast bar was a glass-covered montage of photographs. Groups of friends grinned across tables strewn with the wreckage of dinner parties past. The sun shone in various holiday destinations while Douglas sat alone reading or eating.

There were only two pictures of Douglas and Elsbeth together. One had been taken on a distant Christmas Day: they were sitting next to each other on a brown settee looking at a shiny new toaster on Douglas's knee. A lonely string of tinsel hung on the wall behind them. The other had been taken at their wedding. It was an informal photograph: they were standing on a lawn, chatting to an elderly man in a dark suit, he could be a vicar. Elsbeth was laughing and looked delicate and pretty in her plain ankle-length white dress. She had her arm around Douglas's waist. He wasn't holding her; his arms were hanging at his side, his expression a familiar mixture of disapproval and supercilious amusement. He looked at Maureen like that sometimes when he had a couple of drinks inside him; it made her feel as if she'd done something unbelievably stupid. The largest of the color photographs was of Douglas's mother. The plethora of surrounding dignitaries were frowning at something to the left of the photographer. She was holding a bunch of flowers and staring into the camera, her face creased into a glassy, go-ahead-punk smile.

Elsbeth saw her looking at it. "An extraordinary woman." She smiled. "I keep meaning to cut these others out, except, of course, Jacques Delors. I don't think he would take kindly to being cut out." And she laughed a tinkling, luncheon laugh. Maureen laughed too because she was sorry she had shagged this woman's husband and that woman's son.

It was becoming clear that Maureen hadn't been asked back to engage in a frank exchange of fond remembrances. She climbed onto a tottery stool at the breakfast bar and steeled herself like a good penitent. Elsbeth sat down opposite her and took a deep breath. She wanted Maureen to know that Douglas had had a series of affairs and she knew all about it. He had told her that he had taken on private work at an addiction clinic in Peebles, hence the Monday sleepover, but he had never been interested in that sort of work. They had a combined income of sixty-five K a year anyway, so it wasn't as if they needed the money. "So you see," said Elsbeth, a kindly veneer over her vindictive intent, "you're just the last in a long line of women."

"Yeah," said Maureen flatly, "I guessed. Am I the first one you've met?"

"Oh, no," she said, casually unaware of the pitiful picture she was painting of herself, "no, you're not."

And what the fuck were they doing, thought Maureen, having this petty, bland conversation, as if any of it mattered, as if Douglas hadn't been sliced up and killed hours before? She stopped herself. This is Elsbeth's time, she thought, this is her triumph. Let her have it. Be kind. Maureen tried to imagine what it would be like to be the wife of a philanderer, how likeable she herself would have been after a decade of hanging on to Douglas.

She had a sudden vision of him on the second night they had spent together. He had come over, ostensibly to apologize, but had stayed. Maureen had come back into the living room with a glass of water and had seen him lying on his side where she had left him, the image of Manet's Olympia, with his trousers around his knees and his shirt rumpled up around his chest, nonchalantly displaying his fervent hard-on. His dick wasn't round but strangely rectangular, like his buttocks, curiously geometric. But what she remembered most fondly was the unashamedly lewd look he had given her. She had knelt down next to him and leaned forward, pressing her face into the soft skin on his warm, hairy belly.

Sitting opposite Elsbeth, trying to retain her composure, she could feel Douglas's chest hair brushing her face, up and down, up and down.

Elsbeth had a great job. She worked in the graphics department in the BBC. She talked about the Corporation as though it was a beloved family friend. "What do you do?" she asked. The smile behind her eyes suggested that she already knew.

"I work at the ticket office in the Apollo."

"Oh?"

Maureen had smoked two cigarettes without as much as a cup of tea and her mouth was foul. A decade of petty humiliations and a faithless, murdered husband couldn't make Elsbeth sympathetic.

On her way out Elsbeth asked whether Douglas had ever given Maureen money.

"No," said Maureen quickly. She thought Elsbeth was trying to shame her further until she noticed the anxious expression on her face. There was something more behind the question. Elsbeth was looking for something. She was looking for some missing money.

"Well," said Maureen, as if she was thinking about it, "like when?"

"Couple of days ago?"

"Fifty quid," lied Maureen.

"Just fifty pounds?"

"Yeah, do you want it back?"

"No, no. Not important."

Maureen left the flat with the feeling that she had unwittingly been involved in a suburban wife-swapping circle. The thought depressed her beyond measure.