This Is How It Ends

by Eva Dolan

  I scramble up on to the top bunk and tuck my bag against the wall, turn my back on her and pretend to drop off. Even on a better night I wouldn’t want to make conversation with her.

  She noisily unfolds a map and begins to murmur and mutter to herself, repeating directions over and again as if she’s trying to memorise them, while the paper crinkles and rustles.

  I tune it all out, preoccupied by the uncertainty of my own path once we arrive.

  As soon as Callum put the phone down on me I googled him and everything fell into place. His nightmares, the way he’s isolated himself, that dangerous edge I’d put down to him being a soldier rather than a cook. Turns out he wasn’t a combatant. That, at least, was the truth. I didn’t misread his capacity for violence, though.

  At first I wasn’t going to do this. Didn’t think he deserved the opportunity to explain himself, especially when the details appear so clear-cut. I screwed up the visiting order and tossed it in the bin, got on with my day, trying to push him out of my head.

  But he wouldn’t go easy.

  I kept thinking about all the time we’d spent together, the small acts of kindness he’d shown me and other people, how he would help out Derek and Jenny no matter what they needed. I thought of the unexpected friendship we’d forged and how that had become deeper so fast that it had to mean something. Because I’m not a kid any more. I don’t just fall for a man because he makes me come reliably. There was something else between us. And it was more important to me than I’m entirely comfortable admitting.

  I miss him.

  I want to see him again.

  So, the visiting order came out of the bin and he’ll get a chance to tell me whatever it is he has to say that’s too delicate to be shared over the phone. It’ll be an excuse for what he did, I guess. Everyone who’s committed a crime of that magnitude has one. Even me. I have dozens of excuses I keep rehearsing in my head but none of them ring true.

  I hope I’ll have a good one in time for the hard questions, which are well overdue.

  The police completed their search of the building without finding anything of interest. After they left, long after, once it was dark, I went up to 402 and found the door smashed in. The curtains were still closed, as I left them, no sign of disturbance anywhere. If they lifted the rug I placed near the hearth, they put it back very carefully.

  That kind of good luck has to be balanced out.

  Something bad is on the way.

  Probably Quinn.

  He would have called by now if he was okay. Carol knows that. I know that. We’ve spoken about it, brief conversations, loaded with reproach, and it feels like her patience is running low. She says she’ll report him missing first thing Monday morning. Make it official.

  She won’t turn us in but she’s going to lead the police to Ella.

  Another betrayal from someone I thought I could trust to the end of the earth. Another punch to my already pummelled old heart.

  At Waverley I have a couple of hours to kill and spend them drinking coffee and chain-smoking outside an early-opening cafe, until it’s time to catch the Glasgow train, which is packed but thankfully quiet. I watch the countryside go by, remembering the last time I was up here, heading for the Faslane peace camp with Carol. It seems much longer than eighteen months ago. All the other times we went there during the last twenty years now blurring together in my memory.

  When I get off at Addiewell I realise that most of the other people on the platform are heading for the prison too. There are a dozen women, who seem to know one another, little kids in tow acting like it’s just a fun day out, the older, more astute ones dragging their feet. There are a few men among the group. Disappointed fathers, I think, sympathetic brothers.

  I follow them up to the gates, to a building that looks like the centrepiece of a middling business park designed in the early nineties. Threatening in its sheer banality.

  Ahead of me the visitors let themselves be processed with bovine calm and I try to behave the same way when it’s my turn, but the attitude of the staff during the search rankles me and I resent having to give them my fingerprints.

  ‘You’ll be through quicker next time,’ one of the disappointed fathers tells me. ‘First time’s a bother.’

  It hadn’t occurred to me that there might be a next time. I can’t see this becoming a regular feature of my existence, once a month for the next ten years to life, coming to sit with Callum and struggle to make conversation. I can’t imagine that far ahead.

  The visiting room isn’t what I expected: light and airy, high-ceilinged and white-painted, clusters of softly padded chairs arranged around low tables. There are thirty or so tables, half with men in the same prison-issue T-shirts already seated, waiting for their visitors. Nothing looks bolted down, but the room is heavily staffed and the mood of relaxed congeniality could flip in an instant.

  I hang back, waiting for the rest of the group to find their people, make their greetings, clear my path to Callum, who’s sitting under one of the long, high windows full of flinty sky, at a table slightly distant from the others, a cordon of empty ones around it.

  We make eye contact and he stands, seeming not to know what to do with his hands as I walk towards him. He looks different here, broader, harder. He holds himself with an air of menace I recognise as survival instinct. His hair has grown in a little longer, furring his head black and grey, and he wears a beard already shaggy and threaded with coppery strands.

  It seems impossible that he’s changed so much in a fortnight.

  Or maybe this is who he always was. His old identity reasserting itself.

  He mumbles something that sounds like a thank you and gestures for me to sit down, as if I’m his visiting solicitor or some charitable drop-by.

  I didn’t expect us to fall weeping into each other’s arms, but this coldness is disconcerting. Painful, even.

  I sit down, legs crossed, feeling as defensive as I must look.

  Callum hunches over, elbows on his knees. I see that his knuckles are bruised and wonder which of these men he’s been fighting with already, whether he was the victim defending himself or the instigator making his mark, warning off the others.

  Knowing his history now, I suspect the latter.

  ‘I didnae want ye tae find out like this,’ he says, his accent so thick it’s as if a stranger is speaking through his face at me.

  ‘Because you had a better way you were going to break it to me?’ I’m angrier than I thought I was. The hours travelling, convincing myself I can handle this, are immediately revealed as a lie. ‘Come on then, tell me why he deserved it.’

  The nearest prison officer turns towards us, alerted by my raised voice. He comes closer. Folds his arms and waits.

  Callum brushes his hand over the top of his head, kneads the muscles across the back of his neck for a few seconds before he finally looks up at me.

  ‘He didnae deserve it. I wis drunk and I didnae like the way he looked at us. If he’d huv stayed down I’d huv left him be, but he was after a fight. I wisnae going tae back down.’

  It was the same story the local press told at the time. Two stupid young men, both drunk, getting into a fight at a taxi rank outside a nightclub. Twelve years ago now. Callum would have been twenty-six, the boy he killed barely old enough to get served a drink. I doubt it was a fair fight but will never know. The press told one story, Callum will tell another, and the truth will be somewhere between the two.

  All I know for sure is that he skipped bail a few days before sentencing. Going AWOL at the same time because he was home on leave from the army when it happened, up in Inverness visiting family. Two cousins who’d been given suspended sentences for their involvement in the attack. They might come and visit him, anyway.

  ‘Why did you do a runner?’

  ‘Wouldn’t you if you wis looking at ten years inside?’ he asks incredulously. Then frowns. ‘No, you wouldnae, hen. You’ve no’ run, huv you?’

  I don’t ans
wer the question. I can’t. Not here.

  ‘How did it take them so long to catch up with you?’ I ask. ‘You went to your parents’; it’s the first place they’d have looked, surely?’

  ‘I wis on the streets for two, three years,’ he says, punching his fist into his palm. ‘When Ma died and I wis too scared tae go see her off. But Dad needed me, he wis on his knees. Whatever time I got with him, it’d be worth it. But naebody come.’

  ‘What about when your dad died?’

  He shrugs. ‘Different country, different polis. Stuff gets lost in the cracks.’

  ‘And then you found the body.’

  ‘Aye.’ Callum sucks air through his teeth. ‘Should never huv opened that lift up. Thought it wis a rats’ nest stinking. Derek saw the lad. Mebbe I wouldnae huv reported it if I wis on my own. He wis calling the polis before I could stop him.’

  I remember that night: Callum sitting stunned at his kitchen table, trying to act normal and failing. And, selfishly, I thought it was about me, that he knew Ella and I were involved and was worried what would happen. But it was knowing they’d want to talk to him. That the minute his name was put into the system a big red flag would pop up.

  ‘Why didn’t you leave before they got to you?’ I lean forwards in my chair, closing the space between us. ‘You knew what was going to happen.’

  ‘Where was I going tae go? I’ve got nothing. I’m too old to go back on the streets.’ He shakes his head and I notice he’s sounding more like the Callum I know again, as if I’ve coaxed that man out of his hiding place. ‘I’ve had a lot of time tae think on what I did, Mol. I belong here.’

  Without thinking I reach out and grab his hand. His fist opens and he takes my hand inside his, lifts it to his face and kisses my fingers, once, quickly and drops it again.

  He looks around to check if anyone has seen. It’s a weakness, caring about someone; it can be used against him. Callum belongs in here but I’m not sure he’s built to survive it, big as he is and strong as he is. Emotionally, he’s too soft.

  ‘Have they questioned you yet?’ he asks.

  ‘Not properly.’

  ‘What about Ella?’

  This isn’t the conversation I came for. I’ve had enough of talking about Ella and thinking about Ella. I want to get up and walk away but, surrounded by so many happy visitors, it’s going to look wrong for me to leave now. At the very least it’s going to arouse interest. And when a new prisoner has a public bust-up with his visitor, that tends to get noted, followed up on. Especially a prisoner who’s been recaptured during a murder investigation.

  ‘I heard them arguing,’ he says, dropping his voice. ‘I knew it was her. I’ve known the whole time. For Chrissakes, Mol, d’you think I’m simple?’

  I shake my head.

  ‘And you helped her, aye?’ he says. ‘Stands tae reason. She wouldnae have moved him on her own. No’ a lad that size. No’ with those wee arms of hers.’

  I glance towards the nearby prison officer but see only a stretch of wall where he was standing.

  ‘Callum, this isn’t the time.’

  ‘It’s the only time we’re going tae get, Mol.’ He looks sadly around the room, at the other men with their wives and girlfriends and kids, and I feel him retreat from me and the possibility of the other visits I’d decided upon the moment he kissed my hand.

  ‘Were you there when she did it?’

  Part of me doesn’t want to answer. I think of Quinn, getting an early release for informing on his cellmate, and wonder if Callum has been made a similar offer. A reduction on his sentence in return for information. Would he do that to me?

  Now I retreat from him. Unwillingly and instinctively.

  We’ve been close but we’re not a couple. We have no history beyond eighteen months of casual sex and shared dinners and bad films watched on my sofa. It was enough for me to grow to care about him, but who’s to say whether he feels the same? Was I just handy? Easy-going company and sex on tap.

  ‘Did she tell you it was an accident?’ he asks.

  He’s too earnest, he needs an answer. He’s physically straining towards me to get one. And that scares me.

  ‘Because it wasnae an accident.’ This time he reaches across the space for my hands. ‘I saw the post-mortem photos, Mol. They were shoving them intae my face, shouting at me. They said I grabbed the lad’s head and kept smashing it intae the hearth until he was dead.’

  ‘They’re lying,’ I whisper.

  ‘No, I saw his head. There wis three, mebbe four, breaks on his skull.’

  I think back to that night, try to recapture the scene, but it’s all scrambled up in my memory and coloured by the fear I’d felt the second I walked into the flat and the sense of desperation to get us both away as cleanly as possible. It didn’t look like a violent crime. It looked like an accident.

  But, really, how can I know? I didn’t pull off his hat and check his skull. When I was close to him, searching for the pulse that refused to come, then when I was carrying him to the lift, I was focused on Ella, trying to keep her calm, keep her moving.

  Callum has no reason to lie, does he? Not now.

  Unless he’s trying to make a deal, negotiate down his sentence in return for handing the pair of us in. I can’t believe he’d do that, though. Despite the lie he’s been living for years and the crime he committed, I just don’t believe he’d do that to me.

  ‘She told you it was an accident,’ he says, nodding to himself.

  ‘Who was he?’ I ask.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘They must have told you.’

  ‘They were asking me who he was,’ Callum says. ‘Mebbe they’ve found out now, but they didnae know when they wis questioning me.’ He flicks a quick look around to see if any officers are nearby. ‘You not know who he is?’

  I shake my head, thinking, Quinn. Because even though I don’t know for sure, it’s coming to feel like the inevitable explanation.

  ‘Hasn’t Ella told you?’ he asks.

  ‘We’ve not talked for a while.’

  He frowns at me. ‘You’ve done that for her and she’s no’ talking to you?’

  ‘It’s complicated.’

  ‘Hen, it’s no’ complicated.’ His eyes widen fearfully. ‘She’s a fucking murderer and you’re the only witness to what she’s done. You need to watch out for yourself now.’

  Ella

  Then – February 2016

  One of the spotlights was emitting a high-pitch buzz, which rose and fell and for a few seconds would stop, making Ella think she was imagining it, before it started again, the intensity rising, sounding like a hornet was trapped inside the flush chrome casing, battering itself to death against the burning bulb.

  It was the light in the corner, set above the low sofa and the modular armchairs, which looked like leather and probably were, because this was the office of someone important enough to demand the best and get it. He hadn’t managed to get maintenance in to fix that bulb, though.

  Ella had been directed towards the sofa, told to make herself comfortable, but she’d taken a seat facing the desk. She lowered herself into it gingerly, biting down on the pain in her ribs, holding her palm flat against them as if that would contain the damage done. She wanted to be upright when he came back, show that she wasn’t defeated, that she had stood up to one bully and she would stand up to him as well.

  Because she knew how it was going to go.

  She’d been here before and had her complaints disregarded. It was ‘part of the training exercise’ or ‘the normal cut and thrust of role playing’.

  But there was no excusing what had happened. Not this time.

  No passing it off as good-natured joshing or banter. With the CCTV footage there was no chance of denial, even if the other people present decided they’d seen nothing.

  Finally, she had the bastard.

  And yet, she didn’t feel triumphant. She thought she would, eventually, when she was calmer and when the p
ain was gone, but now she felt sick and edgy, even through the sedative she’d been given by the doctor who checked her out and assured her there was no internal bleeding and that the rib fractures were hairline, nothing to be done but rest them.

  She wondered if her doctor could be convinced to give her a couple more days’ worth of Valium and then dismissed the idea. It would be too easy to hide from this rather than push through it. And too easy to go seeking a medicated escape next time she felt life rushing away from her.

  It was tempting, though, as she sat in the office with the sound of the fizzing light and vacuum cleaners along the hall.

  Just take a pill and let it smother the unbearable stress Garton induced. The pressure to perform, to succeed, to come out top every time. That’s how it had always been with her, ever since she could remember, right through school and university. She was always top of the class and she had no intention of letting any of her fellow recruits beat her.

  She realised that was what had led her to this point, sitting battered and disorientated in her course leader’s office. She’d wanted to be the best and that had made her a target for people who never would be.

  The office door opened and ex-DCI Gould came in carrying two cups, placed one in front of her before he went around to his side of the desk.

  He looked less troubled than when he’d walked out of the office ten minutes previously to fetch some tea. Calls had been made, she guessed, the first line of enquiry checked out to see if this was another meeting he could bring to a quick close with a promise to speak to the parties involved and keep an eye on them, a suggestion that she ‘rise above it’.

  ‘Shouldn’t I have a rep in here?’ Ella asked.

  ‘You’re a trainee,’ Gould said. ‘You don’t get access to a union rep.’

  ‘So, who’s looking out for my best interests?’

  ‘I am.’

  Ella snorted and the colour rose instantly in Gould’s lightly pockmarked face, red right to the roots of his wetly gelled hair. She could see how much he wanted to shout at her, be the DCI again, throw his weight around. But he was a teacher now, to all intents and purposes, and she was a student with a legitimate complaint he had to pretend to be concerned about.