Resolution

Chapter 28

Martha Street is a dead end. The steep hill leads to a pedestrianized area outside a students' union building, with large concrete bins of flowers and benches for the students to sit on while they eat their lunch, take disco drugs and end the night with a kebab. The road ended at a dowdy building coated in jagged gray Artex. It was the Public Register Office and the wedding suite. Leslie parked the bike outside and they climbed the steps to the door. Inside, the walls were paneled in fake walnut, so yellow and solid that it looked like the car ceiling of a homeless smoker. Through a second door they came to a wooden desk, barring public entry into the office proper. A tired, distressed-looking young man was waiting on a wooden chair just inside the door, his elbows on his knees, his head hanging limply between his hands.

There were three women in the office. Two elderly women sat across a desk from each other, eating supermarket sandwiches, taking the smallest mouthfuls and chewing them slowly. The third woman was sitting at a desk on her own. She was very overweight and wore a skirt and vest top, showing off arms as big as fleshy wings. When she saw Leslie and Maureen at the desk she glared accusingly at the two elderly women before standing up slowly and coming over to the desk. "Who's first?" she said loudly.

Maureen and Leslie looked at the man in the chair and, sensing something, he stood to wobbly attention. "I'm here to register a birth," he said, waving a yellow card and a bit of paper.

Maureen and Leslie took seats and waited for the man to finish his business. They looked around the room at the public information posters pinned to the far wall, listening to breathless cars negotiating the steep hill.

"Are ye sure we can get it here?" muttered Leslie.

"Nut," said Maureen. "It was just a thought. We might need to go through to Edinburgh."

"Will it have the cause of death on it?"

"God, I dunno, I'm just guessing. I've never seen a death certificate."

"Me neither."

It took ages for the woman to do the registration. She kept glancing at her colleagues resentfully and telling Maureen and Leslie that she wouldn't be long. Eventually, the man stood up straight, put something in his pocket and sloped out of the office. The portly woman looked behind her, stared at the others eating their sandwiches. They didn't look back. When she finally turned to face Maureen and Leslie, she was puce and couldn't bring herself to speak.

"Urn," said Maureen nervously, "I wonder if you could help us. We're trying to get a look at the death certificate of a woman who died a week ago in the Albert."

The woman nodded repeatedly, as if she was mentally nutting them. "I need details," she said.

"What sort of details?" asked Maureen, looking behind the woman to see if her colleagues had noticed the state of her. The pair sat facing each other, one taking minute nibbles, the other dabbing her mouth elaborately with a paper napkin.

"Date of death, name and age."

"I haven't got her age but I know the name and place and a date-would that do?"

The woman made her write it all down before telling them to wait and storming off to the back office. As soon as she was out of the room one of the elderly women started to laugh and the other reached across the desk and slapped her hand playfully.

They were on the benches outside the students' union, smoking cigarettes and calming down.

Maureen sighed. "Ella, ya wee shite," she said, hanging her head and taking another draw. She unfolded the certificate again and looked at it. "A fucking heart attack. Protecting him to the last."