Flesh Wounds (44 page)

Morrison’s flat was on the second floor of a tenement in Cathcart, two to a landing. The close was immaculately kept, its walls lined with green tiles to roughly shoulder height, above which was crisp and regularly re-coated blue paint. There were planters on each half-stair turn, a bay tree in the first, a healthy ficus in the second. It always amazed Anthony how different one tenement could be from the next. He had shared a flat just around the corner from this place when he was a student. The buildings looked identical, but the only organic life he’d ever encountered on the common stairs was a jobbie laid overnight by some manky bastard who couldn’t wait until he got home.

Adrienne rang the doorbell but Anthony wasn’t any more optimistic about getting an answer than when they had tried Morrison’s landline. The flat had a wooden outer door comprising two halves meeting in the middle. They looked robust, heavy and unwelcomingly closed. Contrastingly, across the landing his neighbour’s outer doors were open, tucked back to form the walls of a shallow porch.

Adrienne tried the bell again and waited a little longer, but there was no sound of movement from within, and no light from the glass panel above the semi-doors. She tried the handle and, to their mutual surprise, it opened.

‘Not locked. Shit, look at this.’

The inner door’s lock had been punched out: a pro-looking job, fast and quiet, probably executed with the outer doors closed for concealment. Whoever had done it had closed everything over again upon exit, not wishing to advertise the fact that the place had been hit.

Adrienne opened it and stepped inside, then promptly stepped back out again, pulling the door behind her.

‘What?’ he asked.

‘We’re going to need face-masks. At least a hanky or something.’

Anthony’s stomach lurched. He wasn’t sure he was ready to be first on scene at the discovery of another body, especially as it would necessitate an inescapable admission of how they had come to find it.

‘Oh shit.’

‘No, it’s not a smell. Not yet anyway. It’s just … You ever see that film
Sunshine
, the bit where they find the spaceship that’s been dead and drifting for decades?’

Adrienne reached into her bag and produced a pack of wet wipes.

‘New use number two thousand, seven hundred and twelve,’ she said, placing one over her nose and mouth and proffering the packet.

Anthony followed her inside, where he was grateful for the wet wipe but could have done with a pair of goggles as well. As the thick clouds of billowing particles stung his eyes, he tried not to think about how in the movie Adrienne just mentioned the dancing dust was disintegrated human flesh.

‘Single men,’ she said disapprovingly. ‘They never think to lift a duster or push the hoover around once in a while.’

Anthony had never seen anything like it, and given that he’d lived in a few student gaffs, this was saying something. The closest he’d witnessed had been when his parents were getting their dining-room floor sanded, and he’d made the mistake of sticking his head around the door while the bloke was running the machine.

‘What the hell is this?’ he asked, but as he looked past Adrienne and further into the flat he could see the answer through every open door.

The place had been torn apart. Anything that could be opened was ripped asunder; anything that could be broken was in a thousand pieces; anything that could be turned inside out had been disembowelled. The air was choked with fibres from every seat cushion, every pillow, every duvet, the stuffing pulled out and dumped on the floor. Picture frames lay broken at the foot of every wall, their canvases slashed and discarded. Skirting had been tugged from the walls, carpets lifted and rolled back, floorboards worried at with tools.

‘Do you think they were looking for something?’ he asked.

Adrienne turned around very slowly. He couldn’t see her mouth over the wet-wipe, but her eyes told him his patter was rotten.

‘At least this means we’re not going to find a body,’ she said. ‘If Morrison had been here they’d have made him tell them where whatever it is was hidden.’

‘Unless he came home and interrupted them,’ Anthony mused, eyeing the one closed door off of the chaotic hall.

‘Flip you for it?’ she asked.

Anthony was having a heated internal dialogue regarding the price and value of chivalry when the doorbell suddenly rang from eighteen inches above his left ear. He had a mental image of himself as Scooby Doo leaping into the arms of Adrienne’s Shaggy, so chivalry probably wasn’t going to edge the debate.

‘Hello?’ said a female voice, following up the ring with a knock on the frame of the door.

He pulled it open to reveal a woman in her late sixties or early seventies, dressed in a paint-spattered smock, further pigment flecking her hair. Behind her across the landing he could see that the front door was open on the flat opposite. This was the neighbour. She had a brush in her hand, a fine, pencil-thin item indicating that she was working on canvas as opposed to slapping a fresh coat of emulsion on the ceiling.

‘Oh my God,’ she said, taking in the sight of two strangers and the devastation at their backs.

Anthony produced his warrant card as quickly as he could, before she might flip out in the fear that she’d caught the bad guys in the act.

‘Police, ma’am.’

‘Oh no. There’s been a break-in. Oh, God, that’s awful. Poor Colin. What a dreadful sight to come back to.’

‘Do you know Mr Morrison, Miss … Mrs…?’

‘Alva. Margo Alva. Mrs. I live across the landing. But this is just dreadful. Poor Colin, after everything that’s happened. I just hope he’s having a nice holiday.’

She was very precisely spoken, reminding Anthony of his Great Aunt Vera who would not tolerate a glottal stop within the walls of her Kelvinside abode.

‘Everything that’s happened?’ asked Adrienne. ‘Has Mr Morrison had some trouble recently?’

‘Hmm, well, not that recently perhaps. Honestly, where does the time go? He lost quite a bit of money in that credit crunch business. Back when he was still working, he used to joke about retiring to the sun. Now he’s just grabbing it a bit at a time, I suppose.’

‘So Mr Morrison is away at the moment? Do you know where?’

‘No, I’m afraid not. I just saw him leaving on Tuesday afternoon.’

Anthony and Adrienne shared a glance. Tuesday afternoon: when the news had broken about Stevie Fullerton going off in his Bentley to the great car wash in the sky.

‘He was on his way down with his suitcase as I was coming up the stairs. I teach a still life class at the Botanics on Tuesdays, you see. He said he was going abroad for a wee break but he didn’t say where. He didn’t stop to speak. I think he was maybe worried he was going to miss his plane. He certainly seemed to be in quite a hurry.’

Catherine sat in the kitchen staring at the rain as it lashed the windows, her barely touched mug of tea long since gone cold on the table in front of her, surrounded by the dishes she hadn’t been able to motivate herself to clear. She had thought she might cry once everyone else had gone out and there was nobody left to hide her tears from, but the truth was that now she was alone she just felt numb.

Less than an hour ago she had been seated here at the dinner table with Drew, Duncan and Fraser, eating from the same roast chicken, drinking from the same jug of water, listening to the same music on the speaker dock, but she felt like she was observing it all from behind a wall of glass. She could reach out and touch them, hear their conversation, respond to their remarks, but she wasn’t feeling any of it, only pretending to them that she was.

She was wearing a mask, one that it seemed incredible they could not see through. Every smile she gave them felt conspicuously false, every laugh hollow, and the more she faked the further away the three of them became. Yet she could not afford to let them see that she was in turmoil, that she was clinging on by her fingernails. When she first got home she had sat outside in the car for only a few moments before concluding that the ritual would be futile in this instance: the only way she wasn’t bringing this inside with her was if she stayed out there all night. There was no way to escape from it, only conceal it.

She thought of all those occasions when she
had
worn her pain on her sleeve: short-tempered, unapproachable, volatile; or palpably disconnected, uncommunicative and withdrawn. It had been the single greatest ongoing point of tension between her and Drew.

‘
There’s this dark place you go…
’

He thought it was the job that took her there, away from him and from the boys. But the truth was that the dark place had been there long before she joined the force. Doing the job was what had kept the darkness from swallowing her for ever.

Until now.

The irony doused salt liberally about her wounds. The darkness had tracked her down, followed her into her house, bared its fangs in readiness to devour her family, and yet she was drawing on her every strength to conceal that there was anything wrong.

Duncan was losing it at Fraser, a sustained campaign of minor irritations finally breaking through the dam and delivering the reaction his little brother had sought. He bellowed at him, his cheeks reddening, fists and jaw clenched with shuddering forces of pressure. She could see tears of frustration, a familiar sight in Duncan, as he struggled to contain the torrents of emotion that could erupt from within.

She glanced warily at the cutlery gripped in his hands, ashamed of her own fears and yet unable to prevent herself from feeling them.

Drew intervened, apportioning equal blame: that time-honoured parental arbitration that was unsatisfactory to both parties but without alternative. Nonetheless, they reined it in with no dissent, as Drew had a nuclear option tonight. He was taking them to see the WWE tour at Braehead; they had been looking forward to it for months – almost as much as Drew wasn’t – and they wouldn’t do anything to jeopardise it this close to the prize.

The spat was swiftly forgotten. Conversation turned to what their favourites were going to do to each other in the ring, and then to what they had been doing to each other in the wrestling video game they got last Christmas. Their play was all fantasies of violence. Their table talk was of nothing but violence. Then they were going out to watch this absurd pantomime of simulated brutality.

Catherine had to hide how she felt beneath feigned vicarious excitement, her protests silent behind this wall of glass. She was with her husband and her boys, sitting in the kitchen, present but not quite connected. Was that how it was going to be now? Was that the price?

What really hurt – what always hurt most about this – was that she couldn’t tell Drew what was wrong. He was the first one she went to when she needed to unload, to pour out her troubles and be shown they weren’t so awful now that they weren’t flapping around manically inside her skull like a bird trapped in an attic.

She had been missing him, even as he was sitting right beside her. It had been this way many times down the years, but tonight she had experienced a far more acute version of it, and found herself facing an entire future of feeling this way.

How could she tell him about this, though? And if she couldn’t tell Drew, who could she talk to about it?

It would not be accurate to say that over time she had made her peace with what she did, but she had learned to live with it. Every so often it crept up on her again, but she drew strength from her family: her need to conceal this providing a constant force, like magnetic repulsion. It was a self-sustaining symbiosis: she endeavoured to repel the darkness from them, but drew the power to do so by bathing in their light.

Now she would have to live with other crimes, greater sins, in order to continue shielding them from the truth. For what was the alternative?

What would it do to them if she was taken away?

What would it do to them simply to know?

She didn’t want to find out. To be with them, to be here for them, that was all that mattered. And yet she would never fully be present. It would always feel like this. There would be times when it faded into the background and she would almost forget, but it would always come back, always be with her. She would always be afraid. She would always be disgusted with herself. She would always be stuck here, behind a mask, behind a glass wall.

This was the price now, the hidden price of her sin. To keep her family together she had no choice other than to pay it, but the cost was not merely what she would always know about herself. The greater part was that the men behind this would go unpunished. They would thrive and they would prosper, and inevitably, when the time came, they would ask her for more.

Was this how it started, she asked herself? Was this how you became Bob Cairns?

She thought of Drummond in his office today, hostage to his own transgressions, rendered soulless: a vessel for another man’s will.

Whose will, though? Gordon Ewart? His father?

Her phone buzzed, skidding sideways along the table like a tiny hovercraft. It was Beano again. She picked it up and hit Ignore, feeling just a little more shitty about it, as she had done incrementally on each of the past three times today. She was leaving him hanging and it was cowardly, she knew, but she couldn’t speak to him because that would formalise a decision she wasn’t yet ready to make. As long as she remained incommunicado, then what she had discussed with Drummond wouldn’t bleed into Beano and Adrienne’s world.

The rain continued to patter against the window, like a fairytale malefactor drumming his evil claws against the glass. At some point she was going to have to move, get up from this chair and start clearing these plates.

‘Just leave them,’ she had told Drew, so that he could get the boys organised and off to Braehead.

Part of her had wanted them out of the door as soon as possible, so that she could stop pretending.

The doorbell rang, its benign electronic chimes incongruously unsettling, like the playing of a music box in a horror movie. Surely Beano hadn’t come here, she thought. It was possible, though: she had roped him and Adrienne into this and then cut herself off.