Dark Angels

by Grace Monroe

  ‘I’ve never told anyone else, Brodie–maybe if I had our wee Laura would be with us the day.’

  Glasgow Joe was hovering at Duncan’s back; surreptitiously I shooed him away, judging it unlikely that the broken man would speak in his presence. I placed my hand on Duncan’s, stroking the smooth bones beneath my fingertips, and feeling his death nearby, urged him on.

  ‘You and your brother were put in the King George V school near South Queensferry…’ I prompted him out of his drug induced haze.

  ‘Aye that’s right…stuff was going on there. Men touching the wee lassies…’ Duncan broke off and started to weep vociferously. ‘My ma thought her bairns would be safe in local authority care…it was jist temporary, kinda like respite, but those perverted bastards…well, they felt up wee boys as well.’

  I reached across to wipe away the tears that were streaming down his blotchy face; he didn’t seem to mind that my hanky was grubby.

  ‘Were you one of those boys, Duncan?’ I asked, knowing the answer. Nodding he added, ‘But we were lucky. We were in and out of that place. Some of those bairns had been there for years.’ The whisky was taking effect, loosening his tongue and relaxing his body, but on a damaged featherweight like him, the window of lucidity would be short. I encouraged him once more.

  ‘Duncan, what you’re telling me is key to finding Laura’s killer.’ At that stage I wasn’t sure, but evidence was thin on the ground and we had to follow up any lead we had about paedophiles.

  ‘Other bairns weren’t so jammy. I was about thirteen and I had a girlfriend that I met in there. Totally innocent ’cos she was totally fucked up by what had been happening to her. Her name was Heather. Heather Beith.’ Closing his eyes in remembrance, he reached inside his trouser pocket, and with the hand marked H.A.T.E. he handed me a curled up photograph. Studying it, I remembered, he was good looking once, like a member of a glam rock band, long hair cut over one eye, mascara smudged like eye-liner.

  ‘No’ a bad looking boy eh?’ He smiled proudly at me. ‘The photo was taken at the bus station.’ It was a passport sized photograph in black and white, Duncan had his arm around Heather and she had her tongue out.

  ‘We were supposed to go out on my birthday the next Saturday, but she never came.’

  ‘When’s your birthday?’

  ‘Seventh of June. When Heather didn’t show up I knew that something had happened so I kept reading the newspapers…as soon as I heard about the girl in the bag, I knew it was her.’

  ‘Did you tell anyone?’

  Uncomfortably aware that I was cross-examining him, I tried to soften but he was oblivious. The dam had been opened, and he needed to talk, confess before he died, who knew?

  ‘They said they wanted anyone with information to come forward…I phoned the number that they mentioned on telly twice. I gave my name and everything but no one ever came near. I was surprised that no one wanted to know about Heather.’

  ‘Can I keep this?’ I held the photograph in the palm of my hand. ‘I’ve seen her face before,’ I said, doubting my next course of action. ‘I have a book of photographs that show the girls before they were cut up.’

  ‘Shit, Brodie–I guess it doesn’t surprise me for she was one sick mother fucker.’

  THIRTY-TWO

  ‘She?’ I asked.

  ‘A woman?–But everybody thinks it’s a man.’

  The words exploded from my lips, because everyone had always assumed that the killer was male.

  ‘Yeah, well, she seemed to run the ring, she was the one who got hold of the bairns. The wee ones trusted her, the older ones, well, she made us feel as if we’d asked for it–in some way we’d brought it on ourselves, even that we liked it.’

  He took the whisky bottle himself, and poured a generous nip.

  ‘Do you know what that does to a boy?’ He paused, and took a swig. ‘It makes him a man like me, a pathetic man, with a wasted life. I’ve heard people say that if there’s a killing team then the woman’s only involved because of the man’s influence. That cow was nobody’s patsy. If she hadn’t been there, none of us would’ve been touched.’

  I considered that unlikely, but I didn’t want to distress Duncan any further.

  ‘Why did nobody phone me back, Brodie? Did Heather’s disappearance mean nothing? The polis were shit hot at nabbing me when I robbed a few lousy cars for drugs.’

  ‘Did you tell any of the teachers at school what was going on?’

  ‘Do you think we were dafties? Of course we did–but they just belted us for making up stories about our betters. It’s too late for us, Brodie–most of us are wrecked, but maybe there’s still some hope for the memories of those other kids. Maybe you can do that for them, and put some ghosts to rest for other families like you have for my mother.’

  Depression rolled over me like a heavy North Sea haar. Duncan was clearly worn out from his trip here and from talking.

  ‘Do you want to go back, Duncan?’ I asked.

  ‘Aye. Nae choice really. I can hardly get myself the strength to walk for a piss these days never mind anything else. This is like a fuckin’ Christmas outing for me,’ he laughed bitterly.

  The taxi jolted over the cobbles as we left the Rag Doll. Joe insisted on accompanying me, and Duncan agreed, affirming that: ‘There’s a bunch of right of nasty cunts out there, Brodie, sorry to say.’ They were protecting me–despite the fact that I had seen plenty of ‘nastiness’ in my line of work for years. I was too tired to be offended.

  Joe had been forced to carry Duncan to the cab–he was more incapacitated through drink than illness. As we drove on, Duncan lay down on the back seat and we took a pull down each. Joe’s knees were round his chin but no one could complain of discomfort in Duncan’s presence. The taxi wound its way inexorably along Junction Street, with its hordes of Sikh shops, each turbaned head speaking in a broad Leith accent, passing the Vicky baths where we all used to swim. We had passed the point where Bowling Green Street used to be. I went to Brownies there in the Ebenezer church, it smelled of beeswax polish and freshly cut flowers. I loved it, principally for the fact that when you kneeled at church there, your knees were placed on a blue velvet cushion, trimmed with tassels of gold. At St Mary’s Sweet Star of the Sea, where I went to nine o’clock mass every Sunday, the pews were hard and wooden, likewise the kneelers.

  The journey reinforced the renunciation of my roots, and my family origins; ascending up Leith Walk we reached St Mary’s Cathedral at the top, and I was back on more customary territory.

  Driving from Leith to Fairmilehead is a stretched and sluggish climb. As we ascended yet further into the driveway to Mile End hospice, we seemed to be entering the clouds–but it was just another haar. The hospice is purpose built in the heart of a community surrounded by trees. Drawing to a stop, the taxi driver got out and helped us bundle Duncan inside–like a broken puppet he was all angles and bones.

  A well-padded receptionist met us with a wheelchair and a smile. I followed behind gravely, as she whistled, and spoke to Duncan.

  ‘She’s got an arse like two bairns fighting under a blanket,’ observed Joe as he watched, fascinated as the mounds of flesh moved independently of each other under her uniform. Wheeling Duncan into his room she declared brightly: ‘My, you’ve had a busy day, and a good one too from the look of you!’

  Duncan flicked his eyes at Joe and myself–the jollity of the staff was probably a coping mechanism. Duncan looked like a lot of things, but a man who had just had a good day wasn’t one of them. We waited in the corridor to allow her to leave, the scowl on her face when she saw outsiders saying more than her smile, before we entered.

  I brought Joe up to speed with what Duncan had told me–and saw his mouth gawp open in the process. ‘Is this right?’ he asked Duncan.

  ‘Aye, it’s right,’ he said in the middle of a coughing fit. ‘Every time we told a teacher, they just hit us. Then the Head would give a speech about how we were just one big happy family.’ />
  ‘One big happy family, eh?’

  ‘He said we were all in the same boat, and we had to put our shoulders to the wheel and work together–he’d been on lots of motivational courses. The staff and the kids–he said it was always very “undermining” when the kids took it upon themselves to make stories up.’ Duncan paused for a moment and when he spoke, his voice could hardly be heard. ‘As if we could even imagine things like that.’

  Lingering over Duncan, the odour of decaying flesh filled my nostrils, sweet, cloying, and musty. Beneath me lay a man who had the life leeched out of him, pathetically thin, a carcass hovering on the threshold of death.

  ‘I remember the first time I saw her,’ he whispered, his eyes tightly closed. ‘I caught sight of a woman going into the dormitories. She didn’t work there and I didn’t think it was right, not at night. It wasn’t my dorm she went into that night, but I still knew she shouldn’t be there. It wasn’t just that I didn’t recognise her, it was that there was an air coming from her. She oozed something. I didn’t know what it was, but I knew I didn’t want to be anywhere near her. I kept my eyes open that night. I didn’t want to risk falling asleep. I told the Head the next day.’

  ‘What did the headmaster say?’ I asked.

  ‘He said she was a friend, and that it wouldn’t be wise, it wouldn’t be wise at all, to mention it to anyone else.’

  ‘Did you mention it to anyone else?’

  ‘I told another boy from my dorm the next day–he wouldn’t even speak about it for a few days, then when he realised I wasn’t going to shut up, he told me that his two older brothers had been in the school before him. They had mentioned the lady to him as well.’ As he spoke, the fingers on Duncan’s emaciated hand grasped the bedclothes. When he paused, it was only for one hand to fold over the other and lightly trace the black marks of his carcinomas.

  ‘Turns out I wasn’t the first child to complain. It had been going on for years.’ His eyes were downcast.

  ‘The lady–that’s what they called her–would come and pick the kids up. I started to watch out for her. She came regularly; I’ve seen her take the youngest ones half asleep from their dormitories. But most times they would be sent to the school gate.’

  He looked at me to say something. There was nothing I could say. Holding Duncan’s claw-like hand to my face was all I could do and he seemed to draw strength from the gesture.

  ‘The children would stand there in all weathers. Sometimes she was late. I watched from the windows.’

  ‘Where were they taken?’

  ‘On their outings,’ he sneered. ‘That’s what they called them. They said they were taken to the devil’s house.’

  ‘The lady, the devil and the missing girl? It’s like a fucking tarot card, Duncan–I can’t make sense of it.’

  Joe tried to reason with me. ‘He’s not to blame, lass.’

  ‘Do you know what you’re up against, Brodie?’

  I felt his breath hot and sour on my face. Tears flowed freely, dripping from his chin. ‘Of course I don’t. Care to enlighten me?’

  ‘I might be dying, but I’m not stupid. Ever since that time when I was in that place, I’ve looked out for this sort of thing. It’s become a full-time fucking job. It’s everywhere. But this time, the bastards are so fucking untouchable that no one has any chance of getting them–and they know it. You tell me, Brodie, you explain things to me.’

  I couldn’t answer him–he was doing well at playing me at my own game.

  ‘Have you any idea the time scale these people work to? A hundred, two hundred years–that’s nothing to them.’

  ‘Stop talking in fucking riddles!’ I shouted in exasperation. ‘Who? Who works to that sort of time scale?’

  ‘The knights,’ he shouted back at me just as loudly.

  ‘The knights? Do you mean the Knights Templar? Christ, Duncan–I didn’t know you were some dopey bloody conspiracy theorist too.’

  ‘No, Brodie, that’s not who I mean. There are others–the Knights of the Enlightenment. That’s what they’ve chosen, that’s what they call themselves–they’re very keen on origins and heritage. If you’re talking about an organisation that is controlling Scotland, that has controlled Scotland for years, you have to go back a bit. This wasn’t started by some dozy hippies in the ’60s.’

  Concrete filled my heart, drying slowly, stopping movement, and then it spread to my lungs making it hard to gasp more than a mouthful of oxygen. I started to worry, in the blurred way that I had learned as a child, the game had swung quietly but swiftly into vulnerability and helplessness. It had been too much for Duncan. I’d underestimated him–I’d seen the druggie, in his last days, one of Maggie’s brood. I hadn’t seen the intelligent man who had been keeping a quiet but watchful eye on all of this for years, who had made sense of it in the only way he knew how. But how much of it did make sense?

  I had been reared since childhood in the knowledge that The Devil, watches waits and picks his time. Now, I was facing the Devil and his Lady. When had the world gone so mad?

  THIRTY-THREE

  If I’d realised it was going to be so busy I would have suffered the inconvenience of arriving at court half an hour early. After all I’d been awake all night.

  With ten minutes to go I could see everything clearly from the Hall. The doorways to court nine were on a long irregular stone-floored corridor directly leading from the Great Hall. The ground was shiny, buffed by the feet of litigants and their agents over the centuries. The two sets of wooden doors were old and had been painted to look like varnished wood.

  Above the door, on the cream plaster, each entrance was marked for Counsel or Public use. Both entries had an outer and an inner door. Counsels’ door had a glass partition that was used to observe what was going on in court, without disturbing it unnecessarily. I couldn’t say if the public entrance had the same glass, for I never entered the court via that door.

  I used to think there was something delightfully exclusive about having a special doorway, while wondering why exactly it was necessary to separate us from the public. It couldn’t be on grounds of safety because the doors were adjacent, separated only by a thin wooden partition. But now I was beginning to see there was altogether too much exclusion going on in Parliament House, a lot of it for no reason whatsoever–with regards to my own situation, the only way I was going to gain admittance to the club was to do their bidding in this trial.

  I pushed my way through the public throng as the almost indistinguishable cry of the Macer reverberated around the hallowed hall

  ‘Her Majesty’s Advocate against Kailash Coutts, calling in court 9.’

  The black cotton felt heavy and warm as I pulled its voluminous weight around my shoulders. If I were Queen’s Counsel, I would have silk, not cotton–one of the many privileges of rank. Nonetheless, I have some additional status shown by gown; an extra flap of black cotton hangs from my shoulder like a badly repaired tear. It may not look like much but it indicates to the court, and to my learned friends, that I have addressed the House of Lords in an Appeal case.

  ‘Her Majesty’s Advocate against Kailash Coutts.’ The Macer spoke again over the microphone–in this garbled manner he called us to business. I hurried to court 9, almost tripping over my gown as Glasgow Joe trailed behind me, uncomfortable in a grey pinstriped suit and conservative blue tie. The stripes on his suit were too far apart to make him appear legal: with his stature and demeanour he looked more like a member of the Celtic mafia.

  ‘Do you need so many different bits of paper? And what’s with all the poncey bits of pink ribbon? You trying to give me a red face?’ he said, dramatically blowing a piece of pink cotton tape away from his nose.

  ‘You insisted on clerking to me. I didn’t advertise a bloody vacancy.’ I spoke to him over my shoulder whilst I was still pushing forwards.

  ‘I’m here to keep you safe, you narky bint–not be your bloody donkey.’

  It was impossible to get near the
Counsels’ doorway because the queue to get in the public entrance had snaked out to the Great Hall and was blocking my access.

  ‘Joe, go in front–and see if you can make any headway here.’ I pushed him in front of me and snuck in behind his shoulder blades hoping to make progress.

  ‘Coming through, coming through,’ he shouted as he shrugged his great shoulders from side to side. Like the Red Sea, the crowd parted and I scampered along in his wake.

  I had already been to the toilet three times that morning, and the griping pains in my stomach told me that I had to go again. I was not unduly concerned that I would disgrace myself in front of Lord MacDonald because this is a symptom I always got before appearing in court. I tried to think of it as Shitting Herself Lawyer Syndrome rather than IBS. A rampant dose of ‘the skitters’ always told me that I was ready to perform. Electricity flowed through my veins and I never felt more alive than when I was on my feet before a particularly vicious bench.

  Lord MacDonald was new to me; I had rarely appeared before him, so I couldn’t form my own opinion. Consensus was that he was hard and appearing before him was like being repeatedly hit on the head with a claymore.

  The files, papers and books that Joe was carrying reached from his groin to his chin. We had breached the outer door but we were unable to gain entry to the court because of the gaggle of young counsel peering in, hoping to get a glimpse of the infamous Kailash Coutts. Their wigs were pure white and unblemished like their skin. A white wig shows inexperience, and we all long for the dirty tarnished wigs of the weary old war-horses: which was why I had bought mine secondhand. After the purchase, I then stained it with tea bags, dried it in the oven, and dragged it round the floor for a couple of days. It looked great and no one had ever called me on it. There wasn’t much difference really between that and not wanting to be called names at school because you had pressed new jeans or gleaming white trainers on.