by Unknown
We went down in silence. Police car lights flashed blue outside. From the moment I'd seen Angeline's face on the landing I'd known. I'd known that whatever I thought I'd seen over at Crinian, Dove had been here in Dumbarton all the time. The driver in the cap was a doppelgänger – a spectre, a blind coincidence. It was only now, with Danso here and back-up cars on the way, that shock set in. As I got to the bottom of the stairs I began to keel sideways.
'Hey up.' Danso came up behind me, catching me under the arm. 'There you go, big man. That's it, through here, let's sit you down before you fall.' He led me into the living room and lowered me on to the tattered sofa where I sat heavy, my feet planted a pace apart, my hands on my knees, staring at nothing, solemn and stony as old Lincoln in the Washington memorial. Angeline sank on to the sofa opposite me, blinking rapidly, her eyes puffed from crying. 'Still with us, eh?' Danso, bent over with his hands on his knees so he was eye-level with me, studying my face, reassuring himself I wasn't going to fall over like a skittle. He straightened and scanned the living room and kitchen. 'Have you a drop of something about the place?'
'Jack Daniel's.' I nodded automatically. 'Yes, Jack Daniel's.' I looked up at the kitchen, and then, like the noise of my own voice might drown the static in my head, I repeated it a few times, 'Jack Daniel's. Jack Daniel's. Jack Daniel's. Over there. See it? In the kitchen.'
'Will I fetch you a drop, then? Just a little – just to get your head back on, eh?'
If there was any evidence worth preserving in the living room Angeline and I had already destroyed it, walking back and forward down there, waiting for Danso to arrive. But the bizzy habits were in Danso's blood, and he went carefully, automatically tearing off a length of kitchen roll to pick up the bottle because with these break-ins they always make a beeline for the booze. When he saw the cracked cupboard door he took a step back, like he'd been slapped, holding his hands up.
'Me,' I said dully, shaking my head. 'Me. The other day. Bull in a china shop.'
He looked at it a bit longer, then slowly lowered his hands. He got a cracked Rangers mug from the back of the shelf, splashed a couple of inches of JD into it and handed it to me. The mug smelt of coffee and sour milk, but I sipped it gratefully, hearing my breath come back at me from inside the mug.
Danso went to the chair. 'This her bag, then?'
'Yes.'
'And she hasn't taken any clothes?'
'Nothing.'
'Your bedroom just as you left it?'
'It's just the bathroom. The bathroom's the only place that anyone has—' I broke off and pressed my fingertips to my throat, moving my Adam's apple in a circle as if that would stop me choking. 'Anyone has ... you know ...'
'Yes,' Danso said quietly. 'Yes. I know.' He scratched his head, then pinched up his trousers by the knees and sat on the sofa next to me, his giant spider's legs black and sharp and thin. 'When you came in, did you notice anything unusual about the house? Anything strike you as odd?'
I stared out of the window in silence. Danso's driver was standing next to the car, speaking into a radio, one hand on the car roof, one on his hip so his coat was pulled back just far enough to show the glint of handcuffs on his belt. Every now and then he turned and stared off in the direction of the red line of trees, their shadows lying flat and long across the playing-fields.
'No,' I said. 'Nothing.'
Danso tapped his fingers on his knee. There was a long silence. Overhead the immersion-heater came on, a chirruping, tapping noise like a trapped beetle in a joist. 'The back door was locked.' He leaned over and stared out down the corridor, as if to reassure himself that he had remembered correctly. 'And the front door was—'
'Locked.' My mouth was numb, drugged. The words were coming out painfully – like pulled teeth. 'I used the key.'
'And is there anywhere she could have gone? Has she got any friends or relatives in the area?'
'Her ma's in Gloucestershire. She'd have used her mobile to call. But the only calls on it are to me and to the Royal Infirmary...' I trailed off and turned to look out of the window, a memory coming to me.
'Joe?'
'A car,' I said faintly, my finger floating up to point out at the street. 'There was a car in that road half an hour ago. It was leaving.'
Danso sat forward, frowning at me. 'A car?'
'White.' I half stood, staring at the boarded-over houses opposite. 'White or silver, maybe ...'
'Saloon? Hatchback? Estate?'
'Saloon – I...' I was on my feet, throwing the front door open, walking out stiffly to stare down the road in the direction it had gone. The officers in their cars stopped their phone and radio conversations and turned to watch me. Danso came out of the house and caught up. He stood shoulder to shoulder with me, staring at the same grey piece of road between the houses. 'It was fly-tippers,' I said faintly. 'I mean, I thought it was fly-tippers.'
'Don't suppose you got a registration number?'
'It went too quickly.' I blinked, staring out at the road, trying hard to force the thoughts. There had been something ... something ...
'Did you see who was driving?'
'No.' Was she in the car, you fucking twat? Did you sit there and watch him drive her away? Something about the back of the car ... 'I only saw it for a couple of seconds – couldn't see who was driving or if there was anyone else in the—' I broke off. It had come to me in a flash. 'Boots,' I said. 'Football boots. Little ones – the ones you hang off a mirror. And a miniature Celtic strip. Right up there, hanging over the back shelf, like there could have been kids in the car. That's why I didn't think anything of it.'
As information went it was piss-poor, but it was all I could force out of my memory. Danso took it to the officer, and he sent a PNC marker on his radio. Danso's face was tense as he turned, a little apprehensively, to scan the fields and the empty streets behind him. Then we traipsed back inside, feeling beaten. I sat down next to Angeline. Upstairs the immersion-heater began to knock rhythmically, as if it had come loose from its moorings.
'I'm sorry,' Angeline said quietly. 'I'm really sorry.'
I looked at her. She was still in her coat, bunched-up and miserable-looking, her chin almost on her chest as if she was beyond crying or moving. That flushed-drunk look had gone. Now she was wiped clean of colour. Her feet in the brown boots were turned inwards, like she was trying to disappear. 'I shouldn't have left the house.'
'It's not your fault,' I said. 'It isn't.'
'It's my dad. My dad. And I shouldn't have gone out. You told me not to. It's just that we – Lexie and I – we had a fight and ...' She broke off. 'If I hadn't been staying with you he'd never have come here.'
I shook my head sadly. 'It's not your fault.'
She nodded and tried to smile but I could tell she didn't believe me. Danso sat down and was about to speak when the noise from the immersion-heater interrupted him. He turned his eyes to the ceiling. 'That's a noisy wee set of apparatus up there.'
'Everything's falling apart in this place.'
'I'll speak to maintenance about ...' He trailed off as the knocking got louder. Now Angeline and I turned our eyes upwards to stare at the place on the stained Artexed ceiling where the sound was coming from. For a long time none of us spoke. Then Danso lowered his eyes and met mine. A little wash of pale pink was already creeping across his cheeks. He swallowed and gave me a pained smile. 'Joe,' he said evenly, as if he was asking me nothing more serious than what time it was. 'Before you called us, did you check all the rooms upstairs?'
4
'I need some space here.'
'And I don't? I've got to get this Hartmaan's in. You told the consultant you'd keep out of our way.'
The forensic examiner, a female GP from the south of Glasgow, was arguing with a liaison nurse from the Burns Unit. The doctor's cardboard kit sat on a chair in the Glasgow Royal Infirmary's Intensive Care Unit, open, spewing out sealed tubes and latex gloves. The nurse kept having to squeeze past it as she moved round the b
ed where Lexie lay motionless, legs swaddled in webbed petroleum bandaging, monitors on mechanical arms hovering above her, three different tubes connecting to taps on the Venflon central line going into her neck.
'Why's that green?' said the doctor. She was pointing to the catheter bag. 'Is that something you're giving her?'
'Propofol.' The nurse pushed past her. 'Neurologist doesn't want her moving around. Wants deep sedation until they know what swelling she's going to get from that head injury. Now, would you like to check her fluid output or do you trust me to manage?'
'Just trying to do my job,' the doctor muttered. She bent and took a sealed tube from her bag. 'Just trying to do my job.'
Danso watched from the corner of the private room, face grey, arms folded. He'd asked me to leave for this bit, but I'd said, no, I wasn't leaving her, whatever happened. I sat inside the privacy screen on a wobbly plastic chair, silent, watching numbly as the doctor examined Lexie's limp hands, carefully scraping under the fingernails, sealing the wands into test tubes, each labelled and dated, checking the wall clock for a time and handing the tube to Danso to sign. It was seven o'clock and the day had gone in a blur. Lexie was alive. Alive. But no one could figure out why. She should be dead. That was what they kept telling me.
I turned stiffly, like my head might explode. Angeline was there, sitting a few feet away, white and shocked, staring unblinking at me. All day long I hadn't spoken to her. I hadn't even acknowledged her.
'You'll talk to her,' I said. 'When she wakes up you'll tell her what to do.'
She opened her mouth. It looked to me like she was moving in slow motion. The inside of her mouth was pink. 'What?' she whispered. 'What did you say?'
'What to do now she's ...' I paused and turned to look at Lexie again. They'd put her on a dark blue air mattress that was supposed to take the pressure off the burns that ran all the way down the backs of her legs. Her airways were clear, none of the burns circled her legs, and the consultant said all of this was promising. But no one was pretending there'd be any getting away from the disfigurement. That was hers. For life. The first paramedic to arrive at Lightning Tree Estate had gone pale when he saw the burns. I remember him trying to wrap her legs in clingfilm, the crime-scene manager yelling at him to hurry up, hurry up, and I knew from everyone's faces there wasn't much could be done about those burns. 'It's the pensioner syndrome,' someone muttered in the confusion. 'Saw it once on an old stiff I got called to. Died in bed. When I got there he'd been simmering on an electric heating pad for six days.'
The noises from the immersion-heater hadn't been the sound of it switching itself on: that had already happened a long time before I got back to the house. What Danso, Angeline and I had heard from the living room was Lexie's heels drumming out a reflex tattoo on the hot-water tank. It was a neurological spasm, a tic, because she was unconscious when I opened that cupboard door. She'd been placed on top of the tank, legs astride the copper pipe that led up to the tank in the attic, her arms flopped backwards. Her mouth was open and her head was back against the wall, not lolling but alert and upright even though her eyes were closed. That weird angle to her head wasn't an accident: she'd been pinioned there, her head jammed over and over again into a nail that stuck out of the wall. He'd done it so hard, and so many times, that there was a hole in the back of her head the size of a shot glass and he must have thought for sure she was dead. He'd have loved to see my face when I found her.
I'm fucking with your peace of mind, Joe.
The doctor unsnapped the kit from its Cellophane and began to lay out its contents. A dull ache started in my back and my knee joints: the tiredness that sets in after an adrenaline jag. I knew what that kit was. I knew what she was going to do. Lexie's legs were burned so badly because Dove had removed her tights and knickers before he hauled her up on the tank. The lagging had come loose so the top of the hot copper tank had been in direct contact with her thighs and buttocks for two and a half hours. I managed everything else, all the stuff about the nail rammed through her skull, about the bruises on her face, the red welts on her neck where he'd strangled her, but that detail of there being no underwear ... It was that detail took my legs out from under me, sent me dry-heaving over the kitchen sink.
Danso helped me like he was my father: he kept close to my face, talking to me constantly, kept me from losing it. He stayed with me while we went to the station and I went through the miserable process of giving DNA, because, yes, we were still sharing a bed even though the sex was pretty much dead and buried. I let the arse of a doctor take what he needed: hairs and a tube of blood. I spent the rest of the day trying not to picture a lab technician somewhere in Glasgow sorting my DNA from Dove's.
I'm fucking with your peace of mind, Joe.
The nurse stopped what she was doing and watched as the doctor pulled a speculum from the kit. 'Is that what I think it is?' she asked. 'Did the consultant tell you that was OK?'
The doctor peered at her over the top of her glasses. 'As a matter of fact, yes. I believe he did give his permission.'
'Because that burn to the perineum. That's really complex. You know that, don't you?' She moved closer to the bed, to where the doctor was pulling the sheets down, gently moving Lexie's legs apart. 'It's the worse for swelling.'
I looked up and found Danso's eyes on mine. I knew what he was saying: You don't want to be here for this, you don't want to be here. I held his eyes, the blood pumping in my head. The doctor peeled the wad of bandage from between Lexie's legs, careful not to move the catheter tube – and that was enough for me. I stood shakily and left the room, standing in the corridor and breathing carefully. A moment later there was a click and when I turned Angeline stood behind me, expressionless. She had unbuttoned her coat in the warm hospital air and was clutching a tissue in her right hand, maybe to dab her forehead or her eyes.
'What?' I said. 'I had to come out here. I can't watch that.'
'I know.'
She stood there for a while, looking at me, saying nothing.
'What? What do you want?'
'Joe?' she said quietly. 'When she wakes up?'
'Yes?'
'When she shows you. You won't ...'
'Won't what?'
'You won't let her see you're disgusted?'
I stared at her. For a few minutes I wasn't getting it. 'What?' My head was so drum tight, nothing was sinking in. 'What did you say?'
There was a pause. Then she said, 'Don't let her think she disgusts you.'
'Angeline.' My voice was stiff. 'I didn't say it. Whatever you think ... I never said it.'
5
Nine the second morning Lexie's ma arrives, trailing luggage. Bony calves in expensive hosiery poking out from under her tweed skirt. A Harrods astrakhan hat crammed on to springs of auburn hair.
'This was always going to happen, Joe,' she says crisply, as she comes in. 'And forgive me if I blame you. You and your job.'
I don't answer. I watch her kiss Lexie. I watch her summon the nurse to clean the thin line of saliva that runs down Lexie's chin. I watch her survey the room and get comfortable, hang up her coat and hat, arrange her belongings, and sit down primly, one hand on her skirt because I'm definitely enough of a pig to try getting a look at her knickers, the cacky old mare. And I don't say a word.
We sit like this for thirty-six hours, locked in a monumental battle of wills: the first to wilt, to give up the vigil, is the loser. I spend my time slumped in my chair, staring sullenly across the room, a leaflet they've given me crumpled in my hand: Managing the Future After Burns: Psycho-Social Needs. She sits upright, her mouth pursed as she peers at the Telegraph crossword over the top of her specs. I keep studying her, making sure she never tries to switch on her mobile phone. We've all been told not to have any contact with the outside world, not even with relatives and friends, and I'm not going to give her a chance. Because the police have got a problem.
At first when the word came through about Lex everyone up at Oban was se
cretly relieved: Malachi Dove had done his bit to fuck with my head and it had taken out just one person, not hundreds like they'd been afraid. But now they saw the catch: in Dove's head his job was over because he thought Lex was dead. Reality was different. A local reporter had got wind of a 'domestic' at the rape suite. He hadn't connected it yet to the Pig Island massacre, but when his usual police contact stonewalled him over it he knew there was more and he was starting to dig. Danso was going crazy trying to contain it: he knew Dove was finished now, but Danso wanted to be sure before they let anything out to the papers. We wanted Dove's body. There were blinds on the private room and every nurse and doctor who came through was warned not to speak to anyone. Not even a friend. Still, you got the feeling that any time now the bag was going to split and it was all going to come out. If Lexie's ma so much as moved her hand near to her phone I was going to be on her.
Angeline had been trying to get us to leave the room, to get some proper rest – there were couches in the relatives' room we could stretch out on, and she'd call us if anything happened. She kept limping in and out of the room, ferrying coffee and Snickers bars, asking when they were going to wake Lex up. At eleven a.m. on day two she brought in four doughnuts in a pink-and-white-striped box. There was a blue picture of a chef's hat on it. She placed a napkin on the chair next to Lex's ma and carefully put two doughnuts on it.
Lex's mother looked down at them and gave a small laugh. 'And they say the nation's youth don't know how to eat properly.'
Angeline paused, and for a moment I thought she was going to take the doughnuts back. But she didn't. Instead she straightened and moved calmly to my chair, putting the box down and setting the coffee next to it. 'My mother's dead,' she said, addressing no one, but making us both raise our eyes to her. 'My mother's dead, but she was beautiful. She was beautiful and she was kind. And she loved me.'
