The Road to Hell

by Gillian Galbraith

  ‘He thinks she died as a result of the head injury that she got when she fell in the hostel.’

  ‘Splendid. So we’ve finally unravelled the mystery. It’s no longer a suspicious death, just an everyday tale of a down-and-out having a drink in the Hermitage, who dies as a result of the delayed effects of a fall the previous night. What about the bruise on the other side of her head?’

  ‘It’s old and trivial, apparently. It wasn’t the cause of her death, he says. He thinks she probably got it a few days beforehand. The fall caused the bleed.’

  ‘Another one bites the dust!’ said Elaine Bell triumphantly, now openly rubbing the stone with its small gold chain between her fingers. She wanted to slip it round her neck as soon as possible. Already it seemed to be exerting its benign effects on her circulatory system and she felt calmer, her nerves no longer jangling. Muirfield, indeed! It was a joke. A bloody joke!

  ‘Professor McConnachie thinks we may need an FAI.’

  ‘What? Why on earth?’ Elaine Bell said, suddenly apprehensive again, her grip tightening once more on the stone.

  ‘Because he’s concerned that the hospital failed to pick up the subdural haemorrhage, didn’t do enough tests and so on.’

  ‘Oh for God’s sake! Do we know anything about that?’

  ‘No, we haven’t had a chance to check it out yet. He’s only just raised the possibility, after all. I’ll need to find out more about the accident at the Bread Street Hostel, speak to the nurses, the doctors who saw her at the Infirmary and then go back to him.’

  ‘Right, on you go then. No time like the present. Once you’ve done that, we’ll wash our hands of it, pass the papers on to the Fiscal Service and see what they have to say. At least it’ll be off my desk.’

  She put the lapis lazuli pendant around her neck and countered Alice’s curious glance with a single raised eyebrow. It worked. No question was forthcoming from her sergeant.

  The air in the Bread Street Hostel was chilly. The few old-fashioned, cast-iron radiators in the building were unequal to their task, incapable of making any real impact on rooms with lofty ceilings and large Victorian windows.

  Alice, shivering in the cold, waited in the manager’s office for about ten minutes as, one by one, various members of staff wandered in, looked at her and then marched straight out again. None of them, she noticed, questioned the presence of an unaccompanied stranger in the office, free to peruse any sensitive information lying about on the desk.

  Eventually, someone who had come in to collect a phone directory asked who she was waiting for.

  ‘Maureen McKee.’

  ‘Right. Mr Imrie’s away hunting for her the now.’

  As more people passed through the office, Alice stared idly out of the window at the grey slate roofs of the tenements opposite. A pigeon, its dull, damp feathers puffed out, strutted up and down the zinc-clad spine of the nearest building. Out of the grey, sunless sky another one arrived and immediately the resident pigeon began courting it, advancing towards it and then retreating, head bobbing up and down, as if performing a well-rehearsed dance routine.

  It was, she thought, as if spring had unexpectedly broken into winter. The second bird nodded its head, responding to the other bird’s display. And from nowhere, the thought of Ian’s death, his eternal absence, hit her, ambushed her anew.

  Determined to prevent herself from crying, she fixed her gaze on a prayer-card pinned to the wall. If she could focus the whole of her attention on that, it should drive unwanted thoughts away, for the moment at least. Silently, she read it to herself.

  In the light of God’s mercy

  In his almighty Love

  Slimmers are precious

  To Heaven above.

  What about naturally thin people or unrepentant fat people, she wondered. Are they, too, not precious to God? Then she looked hard again at the card and saw, with her now dry eyes, that it said, ‘Sinners are precious’. She laughed.

  ‘Is it me you’re wanting?’ an Irish voice inquired. When Alice turned round she found herself face to face with a small, plump woman with a high complexion and bushy, low-set eyebrows which partially obscured her pale blue eyes. She, like the rest of the staff, was dressed for comfort, in baggy tracksuit bottoms and a loose-fitting T-shirt. The slogan on it read, ‘JC’s the Coolest Cat’.

  ‘Are you Maureen McKee?’

  ‘I am she,’ the woman replied, beaming as if pleased to be asked, chewing her gum and showing no obvious uneasiness despite the fact that a policewoman wanted to interview her. Perhaps, Alice thought, she was not a car driver, and therefore had a clean conscience? Or, more likely, someone had already told her what the policewoman wanted to talk about.

  ‘I understand that you were in the room when Moira Fyfe had her fall?’

  ‘Moira Fyfe. Aha.’ The woman smiled again, sitting down and clasping her fingers together around a crossed leg, bending confidingly towards her inquisitor.

  ‘Could you tell me what happened?’

  ‘I could, I could, I certainly could. Moira had come back in that evening. She smelt of the drink, and another of our service-users, Linda, had a go at her. The pair of them didn’t get on. She accused Moira, outright, of having stolen her money to buy the booze. It happened in the TV lounge. Like I said, Moira was the worse for wear and she lost it. Launched herself straight at Linda, but luckily Linda seen it coming and dodged to the side. Moira toppled over, and on the way down she cracked the side of her head on something.’

  ‘Is Linda still living here?’

  ‘Aha.’

  ‘What did you do when Moira fell?’

  ‘I left her there. She was OK where she was on the floor. I went and filled in the Accident Book. You have to do that before anything else, I was trained for that. Later, I put the ointment on her head. She’d no bruise there or nothing like that, but that’s what you’re supposed to do. Procedures like. Tiffany took Moira to her room to gather some stuff.’

  ‘Tiffany?’

  ‘Tiffany’s another member of staff here. She’d been watching TV with the residents before I came in. I went with Moira to A&E.’

  ‘In an ambulance?’

  ‘No, in my own car. The manager told me to take her in it. Moira was mouthing away all the time, shouting out loud, saying that she didn’t need to go. I said to her, “And what would you know about that?” “Everything,” she said, “everything!” As if she did know, as if she was a doctor or something!’

  ‘Did you wait with her in casualty?’

  ‘No. Well, not when they seen her, like. She got taken into a wee room by the nurse on her own, for privacy’s sake.’

  Maureen coughed, holding her hand across her mouth.

  ‘What about when the doctor saw her? Were you with her then?’

  ‘Em . . .’ She continued coughing, her eyes watering, her colour rising so that even her neck became dark with blood. She sounded as if she was choking. Simply looking at her made Alice feel breathless.

  ‘Are you all right? Do you need some water or a pat on the back?’

  ‘Em . . . no,’ the woman spluttered, gasping for breath and adding weakly, ‘it’s nothing. I just swallowed my gum.’

  After a few moments of silence and when the woman’s breathing had returned to normal, Alice repeated her question: ‘Were you with her when the doctor saw her?’

  ‘I was not.’

  ‘Did she tell you what happened to her when she saw the doctor or the nurse? What they said to her?’

  ‘No . . .’ The woman coughed once more, attempting this time simply to clear her throat. ‘She said it had all been a feckin’ waste of time. She knew there was nothing wrong with her, that she’d get a clean bill of health. Then she fell asleep in my car and snored like a pig.’

  Linda Gates, Moira Fyfe’s accuser, looked about fifteen years old but claimed to be twenty-four. Alice found her in the pool room, waiting her turn, her gaze fixed on the table and her cue held like a staff beside her. She
was so small that the tip of it was a foot above her head. While she waited she whispered to a friend, periodically licking the chalk off her fingers. She did not conceal her reluctance to talk, rolling her eyes heavenwards, and seemed to believe that denying everything, however trivial, would protect her and allow her to return to the game more speedily. Accordingly, she denied knowing Moira Fyfe, denied accusing her of anything and of having been involved in any confrontation with her. Faced with the other witnesses’ accounts of events, she simply maintained that they were all lying, and when Alice questioned her as to why they might be doing that, she replied hotly, ‘Because they’re bitches!’ When her opponent in the game of pool guffawed at this response she shouted angrily, as if it was some kind of proof of her innocence, that she had no money to steal, so why would she be accusing anyone of stealing something she’d never had.

  Alice decided to try one more time. ‘So, despite the fact that you lived in the same hostel as Moira Fyfe for months, and two separate witnesses saw you accuse her of having stolen your money, you’re maintaining that you never even met the woman?’ she asked, trying to sound incredulous. But she knew the answer she would get. It would be more remarkable, after the stream of denials, if Linda Gates had conceded that she knew her.

  ‘Aye, that’s right. See, I never leave my room, do I?’

  At this remark her opponent on the table laughed uproariously, twirling his finger at his temple to convey to everyone in the room his view of her sanity, or lack of it. Glaring at him, Linda stamped to the door and slammed it behind her.

  11

  The alarm clock silenced, the Reverend Duncan McPhee yawned, stretched and then leant over and switched off his electric blanket. A good nine hours achieved, he thought, pleased that he had not had to resort to a pill. While still under the duvet, he mumbled his devotions to himself, confident that God would hear him.

  Steeling himself to face the cold, he lumbered out of bed and across the room to open the curtains. In the bathroom his ablutions were perfunctory, the only deviation from normal routine being his use of a lather of mango-scented soap instead of Gillette foam. The can was empty.

  Returning to his bedroom, he took his black clerical shirt off its hanger and buttoned it up, then looked blearily into his cuff-link box for his studs. Disentangling them from the catch of his grouse claw kilt-pin, he affixed first one and then the other to his dog collar and shirt. His black trousers took more of an effort as the dry-cleaning process appeared to have shrunk them. Finally conceding failure, he gave up in his attempt to do up the second button.

  ‘Thought for the Day’ on the radio caught his attention, and as he listened to it, he began to fume inwardly. More self-pitying drivel, of precisely no universal significance, from that tiresome, rambling rabbi. If the fellow had nothing to say, as was clearly the case, why on earth was he being pandered to by the BBC and provided with a platform to peddle his trite nonsense from? Could it be simply for old times’ sake? What other possible explanation could there be? Surely, licence payers, such as himself, were entitled to a bit more for their money than an anecdote about burning the toast, impatient words to a partner followed by heartfelt penitence. If there was much more of this so-called religious twaddle, the militant atheists would win the day and the slot would be scrapped. They were playing into Dawkins’s hands.

  After he had breakfasted and fed the dog, he strode into his study feeling ready for the day’s work. His diary lay open on his desk, and reaching for his spectacles on the cord around his neck, he read the entry for Tuesday 8 February. A funeral, and for a second his heart missed a beat. Who on earth was Matilda McEwan? Then he saw in brackets the word ‘Parish’ after her name and breathed easily again. Not a member of the congregation, so Jim would be dealing with that one.

  Further down the page, in blue biro and in his own neat hand, there was another entry: ‘School Assembly – Garstone Secondary – 2 p.m.’ That would be a doddle. He would use the usual text, so all that he needed to do by way of preparation was to find the appropriate prop. The Tate & Lyle syrup tin with its picture of the dead lion and the bees, and Samson’s riddle printed on it, ‘Out of the strong came forth sweetness’. And if, God forbid, Juliet had finally thrown out the tin, then he could rely on his old standby, the Old Testament tale of the Burning Bush, the image of which was on his lapel badge, and the significance of the Call. That sermon too, known by heart, required no further thought, and as the headmistress had suggested spending no more than thirty minutes on the whole shebang, that would fit perfectly with the rest of his timetable. It would give him plenty of time for a haircut before the Church and Society Council meeting at 4 p.m. at 121 George Street.

  The phone rang, and with one eye still on his diary, he picked up the receiver.

  ‘Hello. Reverend Duncan McPhee speaking.’

  ‘Good morning, Reverend, it’s Donald Cartwright. It’s just to let you know that my wife’s out of hospital, she came out yesterday. It may not be for very long, but it was to tell you that she’s home now, out of hospital for the moment at least.’

  ‘Splendid news, Donald,’ the minister replied, switching on his computer and cringing at the sudden notes of the Windows theme. Would Donald recognise it? Too old and too much of a fuddy-duddy, with luck.

  He opened the first of his emails. It looked dull enough, a communication from Christian Aid Scotland, no doubt seeking further donations. The second, however, caught his eye, and reading it, he almost cried out in his excitement. The subject field read ‘Nomination Committee – Membership’. Thrilled at these magical words he longed to open it, and became newly determined to get his caller off the line.

  ‘I was wondering,’ Donald Cartwright said, ‘while she’s here, in bed at home, whether you’d be able to come out and see her? I know how busy you are, I really do, and she does too, but if you had a minute to spare it would make a huge difference to her. She wants to speak to you . . . she wants to talk to you.’

  ‘But of course, Donald. If I can make it, I will. If for any reason I can’t, then my assistant, Jim, will come instead. You know him well. So, don’t you worry. One way or another we’ll see Mary at home. Now, was that everything?’

  ‘You’ll see her, Reverend?’ The man was not to be fobbed off so easily.

  ‘Me . . . or Jim.’ Jim had plenty of time on his hands. He could do it.

  ‘She’d love to see you. It would make her day and, to be honest, I don’t think she’s got that many more of them. She especially asked to see you.’

  ‘As I say, it’ll be me or Jim. I’m sorry, Donald . . .’ the minister said, knocking with his knuckles on his desk and watching with delight as the dog ran out of the room, barking wildly, ‘but I’ve got to go. There’s someone at the front door. The dog’s going bananas. But don’t you worry. Jim – or I – will be around in the next day or two.’

  Putting down the phone, he clicked on the email. As he scrolled down it, he felt his heart almost burst with joy. It was a three-line message from the Secretary requesting that his name be put forward to the Assembly to be considered for inclusion in the membership of the Select Forty-four. ‘Thou hast anointed my head with oil and truly, my cup runneth over,’ he murmured into the silence.

  For a single second, he contemplated picking up the phone and calling his wife, letting her know that all that he had been predicting for so long was finally coming to pass. Had he, or had he not, told her that the invitation to dinner with the Moderator in Charlotte Square had presaged great things? Oh, the doubting Thomasina would be confounded now!

  Granted, it had not been the same as an invitation to Holyrood with the Lord High Commissioner, but it was the next best thing. All those years of drudgery – the school chaplaincies, the convenorship of dull and powerless committees, hours spent in obscure working groups – were finally paying off. He might have started his days in a small Lanarkshire village with no hope for the future but, by his own efforts, he had confounded them all now.

>   No one had expected a McPhee to become the Dux of the school, or get a scholarship to university. But he had done it, and in his probationary period he had, at last, washed away the traces of coal dust clinging to his name. Even within his charges he had made steady progress, moving from Carstairs to Coalburn, and then eastwards and upwards to Carrick Knowe and Colinton. All the Cs.

  No, he would not phone her and have his hopes dampened, could not bear that. Instead, he would leave a printout of the email on the kitchen table. Its significance would not be lost on the daughter of a former Moderator, and even the children’s horrid jibe, calling him ‘the Reverend I. M. A. Loser’, might be forgotten for good when he added ‘The Right Reverend’ to his name.

  The grandmother clock in the corridor outside chimed eleven and, deliberately trying to quell his excitement and concentrate, he turned his attention to the day’s post. The first envelope was a small brown one and was, he thought, probably more Ecumenical Relations Committee papers. Sure enough, it contained a report prepared by the minister from Carnbo who had been deputed to attend the conference in Grand Rapids, USA. Topics covered included ‘Peace amongst All Peoples’, a contribution to the Ecumenical Decade to Overcome Violence. Overall, the correspondent noted, there had been inadequate time for any proper dialogue about joint-ministry, oversight or evangelism due to a terrorist bomb scare, fortunately false, which had resulted in the premature termination of proceedings. The next envelope contained a number of fabric samples sent by Wippells, for him to consider for his new preaching gown. That was Juliet’s department, so she could choose for him, he decided, putting it on one side.

  Opening the third envelope, he found a crumpled note from the organist, Mrs Tyrell, written as usual on lined paper and in red biro. Someone had, she complained, smeared superglue on one of the organ pedals and she suspected an ‘inside job’. Who but a member of the congregation would be aware that she always operated the pedals in her stocking feet? In the privacy of his office, Duncan McPhee rolled his eyes heavenwards and gave an exasperated growl. This was not the woman’s first accusation against the culprit whom she named. They were legion. Following her first complaint he had, foolishly, taken it at face value and confronted the child’s parents, only to emerge with egg all over his face. The boy had, both his parents assured him, never owned a pet mouse, far less incarcerated one within the organ stool. No. This time Mrs Tyrell could pursue her own vendettas, be her own investigator and judge. He crumpled the note into a ball and tossed it into the wastepaper basket, making a mental note to tell her so himself, face to face, after the first service on Sunday.