by Claire Askew
‘I am entirely convinced,’ she said, ‘that he is guilty. I am entirely convinced that he has been . . .’ Birch remembered Rab’s words earlier. ‘That he has been a plague on our streets for the past fifty years. He’s just good at keeping his nose clean is all. And sure, you’re right – I’m terrified that we won’t make anything stick, that he’ll get to go back to his antics, scot-free. But if you represent him, there’s no point in the fucking trial. You know you’ll get him off – you’re the best.’ She tailed off. When Anjan didn’t speak, she continued, ‘I don’t know how you can do this to us.’
When he spoke again, his voice was stiff. ‘Detective Inspector Birch,’ he said, ‘I have to do my job. The firm has brought some pressure to bear: this will be quite the landmark case. And forgive me, but I fail to see what business it is of yours how I—’
‘Are you kidding?’ The whisky was talking now, and Birch couldn’t stop it. She felt as though she were watching herself from behind glass: mouthing at herself to stop, but the message wasn’t getting through. The other self, the one on the near side of the glass, was screeching. ‘You made it my business when you spent the night here last night! When you decided to ask me out! You know we can’t see each other if you’re defending the perp I’m trying to put away! So you’ve basically picked him over me, haven’t you? I knew that date was a mistake, I knew it.’
As soon as the words fell from her mouth she wanted to reel them back in, the way a magician who’s vomited coloured handkerchiefs can pack them back into his top hat once he’s done.
‘A mistake,’ Anjan said quietly. ‘A mistake.’
Birch clamped her mouth closed, and sucked her lips inside her teeth to prevent herself from speaking again. The dry sobs she’d heaved out had now turned into quiet tears. She wanted to take a deep breath, but he’d hear her. He’d know she was crying.
‘Very well,’ Anjan said at last. ‘I may see you, tomorrow, at the station. Until then.’
There was a pause, then her phone beeped: call ended.
Birch sat very still, the fingers of one hand laced around the now empty tumbler. The spilled whisky had grown into a patch and was dampening her thigh. The mantelpiece clock told her it was a quarter past midnight, and a thought occurred to her: Well, at least it’s not the anniversary any more. The house was quiet again. She was still shaking, but now it was with anger, not fear. And she’d made a fool of herself: she knew that already, in spite of the rage still pulsing around her head. She’d wrecked everything, and everything was wrecked. Birch stood up, swaying. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d eaten. The gloved and skull-faced man outside was all but forgotten. Ahead of her was the hardest task of all: to set aside everything that had just been said, and sleep.
Of course, nothing’s ever what you imagine. My natural aptitude got me exactly nowhere once I got to the University of Glasgow. I’d been a huge fish in a tiny wee pond back in high school, but this was the big leagues. And Russian is fucking hard. There’s a whole other alphabet to learn, for starters. I got put in this shared flat with four other guys. The only one who ever worked as hard as me was Arne, this dude doing law. The other three were doing philosophy or geography or other piss-about subjects and they just hung around toking weed and bunking off lectures. I got to kind of hate them. They got to kind of hate me. I used to wander round the flat at night when I thought they were all asleep, pacing back and forward and speaking Russian to myself. Trying to make phrases stick. Trying to keep hold of my daft laddie dream of smoking outside a Moscow café.
I was pure skint as well. I know all students are, but I felt like it was just me, like I was the poorest kid in the world. I had to buy all these textbooks – it felt like endless textbooks and endless reading and endless negative bank balance. I was fucking rooked, and I was raging about it. The flat was on the Great Western Road, right near Kelvinbridge subway but six crippling floors up. My window looked down over the park there, where all the posh Toryboys used to go and stroll with their girlfriends on a weekend. Sunny days, when I’d be bent over my textbooks, hunched over in the dreich wee world of my room, I got to hate them, too. I got to hate all of it. Maw couldn’t afford to help me out – I occasionally begged some money off Nella but she wasn’t exactly flush. It turned out uni was an absolute bastard and after the first six months it was only some warped sense of pride that was keeping me there.
And I had to make money. I worked in the Blockbuster Video on Byres Road and it was a class job: I’d jump on the subway, get there for six at night, finish late, rent a DVD out for free and wander the twenty minutes home with all the drunks. Me and the other lads working there used to drop the big slab chocolate bars on the floor through the back, accidentally-on-purpose, so they were no good for sale and we got to eat them. I liked it there. Got a crush on a lassie with green hair and a nose ring who used to come in. But it was minimum wage and fuck-all hours, like two nights a week. It wasn’t enough.
There was this guy used to show up. Big hulking guy, built like a bear. He liked horror movies, the real sick ones: female hitchhikers getting locked in cabins and mutilated, that sort of thing. He came most nights I was in, always got three discs and a two-litre Coke. The other lads used to joke he was in the Russian mafia, and yeah, he had this thick accent that I’d clocked was Russian the first time he walked in.
One night he comes up to the counter and I’m nineteen and gallus, so I speak to him in Russian. Probably shit Russian, looking back, but he got it. He sort of looked at me for a minute and then spoke back. And after that we’d speak Russian to each other: him going slow so I could understand, giving me time to formulate my replies. I told him about my degree and all that. Even told him about the Moscow idea and all my plans for trips and Tolstoy and blah blah blah. Embarrassing, in hindsight, but he listened and was cool with it. I told myself he was some tragic exile or something, and he never got to speak his mother tongue and he appreciated me like I was a kindred spirit or some naïve teenage shit like that. We’d been chatting like this maybe a couple of months. Then he comes in one night and asks me if I’d take a bit of extra work on the side. I know you have your studies, he says, but I need someone I can trust. A hard worker. This job is for a friend. Translation, he says. Translate some documents, Russian to English, cash in hand, boom. He said what the money was and I could have kissed him. It’s sensitive. Sensitive documents. Then he leaned in close over the counter – I remember – and spoke into my ear, and in English, to make sure I’d understood. You cannot tell anyone about this job. Do you hear what I am saying? Anyone. I shook his hand, clueless as anything. I didn’t give a fuck. He had me at the word bablo: loot. Money. Green.
Tuesday
Birch was in her mother’s house. Her mother’s bedroom looked the way it had at the end: the hospital bed that had to be carried upstairs folded, like some enormous, terrifying mousetrap; the IV stand with its bladders of saccharine liquid. Big brown tubs of pills on the windowsill: she’d always shuddered at the little wraiths of powder-dust that rose up under their lids. But the bed was stripped, empty, and the house was quiet. She was too late: her mother had already died.
Beside the bed was a door Birch hadn’t noticed before. She knew this building, its thin walls: the door could lead to nothing more than a shallow press. The bars were bolted up around the bed, as they had been at the end to stop her mother from rolling out, and Birch skimmed a hand along the topmost rung as she moved to the door. The bar was freezing cold, in spite of the strong sun at the window bouncing off the plastic mattress, the plastic jars. She flinched her hand away as though burned, and with the same hand flattened, put her weight against the mystery door.
Oh, Birch thought, as the door swung open. It’s a dream. She felt a surge of relief.
Beyond the door was a wooden staircase. The wood was dark and the steps were thick wedges set into a massive newel post. They turned a corner, slanting up into a gloom that buzzed like TV white noise when Birch tried to look.
She stepped into the stairwell and turned back, her mother’s grim little bedroom caught in the doorframe’s sickly lozenge of brightness. Then the mystery door swung shut, and a series of clicks said an unseen hand had locked it from the other side. Her mother, something told her. Her mother’s vengeful ghost had banished her to some attic room, some place she’d kept hidden all these years.
Birch’s curiosity gave way to panic. She turned and battered the door with her open palms, crying for help. On the other side, her mother’s voice, the way it had been at the end: rattling in her throat like a crow trapped in a flue. She was only feet away beyond this door. Birch made fists and hammered till the skin on her hands was raw. She called her mother’s name, and the voice that she heard come out of herself was a girl voice, the sound of her eight-year-old self. Petulant. Inaudible beyond the wall, which seemed to grow thicker – the sound of her mother beginning to fade away. Birch ran the pads of her fingers across the door, searching for the edges, for some way to claw it back open, so she could be heard. But the surface before her was smooth now: plastered over and sticky with damp. She’d been walled in, and beyond the wall she caught the edge of her mother’s laugh.
At first, Birch heard the alarm as a sound in that space beside her: the panicked beep of a smoke alarm, perhaps, telling her to get out when she knew she could not. Coming around was a shock. She opened her eyes and looked directly into the hot glare of her bedroom’s overhead light, dappling her retina with after-images. Of course. The bulbs had burned all night in this room, and in every other – her little house awake all night in the long black strip of the prom.
It was still dark out: she knocked off the alarm as the digits on her phone clicked over to 05:01. She’d last checked at 03:24. Birch felt relieved that she’d dropped off, but also dreadful: the grogginess of ninety minutes’ sleep far worse than the glassy calm of no sleep at all.
Somehow, she levered her legs over the side of the bed, and stood. She’d laid the open baton by her side on the mattress, and now she saw that she’d rolled over on to it: its impression a deep red welt on her thigh. Birch tugged down her oversized T-shirt and shuffled to the bedroom door – baton in one hand, mobile in the other – to listen.
This was ridiculous, she knew. If someone had wanted to get into this house and hurt her, they’d have done it in the dead of night, not waited till now, when the early pre-work runners and dog walkers would surely already be out. Straining for sounds of a phantom intruder, she could hear the city waking up: the distant swish of traffic. Sirens. Out front of the house, a cyclist’s comforting bell. Slowly, the events of the night before returned to her, bizarre and dreamlike after that short stretch of sleep.
Still, she found herself creeping the length of the landing, baton raised, to check out every room. She poked the weapon in behind doors, and opened the spare room wardrobe though she knew it was packed from top to bottom with her own disorganised crap. This is ludicrous, she thought, descending the stairs at a snail’s pace, trying in vain to avoid the creaky spots. The living room was empty, the kitchen too. The back door remained untampered with. Birch unlocked it and stepped out baton-first into her little yard with its rain-peeled IKEA coffee table, birdbath, crumbling shed. The orange heads of streetlights bobbed beyond the wall like shiny daffs. There were deep, black shadows, but the lamplight bounced off the fat padlock on the shed: intact. The slabs under Birch’s bare feet were crispy with frost. She hopped back inside, onto the lino.
‘Yeah, hide in the shadows,’ she said aloud, to a garden she knew was empty. ‘See if I care. Just stay the fuck out of my house.’
She slammed the back door and locked it again, her cheeks burning.
Scoffing at herself, she wondered if she ought to check the under-stairs cupboard. Although it was also stuffed with tat – much of it brought from her mother’s house and not yet sorted – she couldn’t be sure that some slim-built assailant hadn’t folded himself away among the boxes, waiting to spring.
As she passed back through the living room, she smelled the spilled whisky. The phone call with Anjan came back to her all at once, like she’d tripped and suddenly her whole frame was splayed over concrete. Shit. The memory halted her, her arm bent into a lopsided V, the half-lifted baton frozen in the 5 a.m. air. She felt suddenly, uncomfortably awake. Afraid she might be sick, she sank onto the sofa, the potential under-stairs murderer forgotten.
Birch sat and listened to the distant tick of the kitchen clock. She began counting the ticks: twenty-seven, twenty-eight, twenty-nine. As she counted, she replayed everything she could remember from the phone call: her crying, him stiffening up into strictly professional mode. When she reached seventy ticks of the clock, she stabbed the baton closed against her palm. It hurt. She threw it down onto the sofa beside her, and felt it ricochet onto the floor.
‘Oh fuck you, Anjan.’
He’d come into the station today and she’d have to see him. She’d have to act the same as everyone else, and pretend that she and Anjan hadn’t been flirting for months, hadn’t gone out for drinks, hadn’t slept together, that she hadn’t raged at him over the phone. She’d have to fake the same cold seething that her colleagues would reserve for him – she’d have to pretend she hated him, too. And then he’d be his usual brilliant self for Solomon, and Solomon would walk free. Solomon would get away with it. She imagined Big Rab’s face shuttering up as he heard the news: not guilty. She imagined having to be the one to tell him. Rab, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry. She remembered the cheer that had gone up last night in the snug when he’d spoken of Solomon locked in a cell. And the night before that: she remembered watching Anjan’s deft fingers as he unbuttoned his shirt and thinking, This could be the start of something. Birch put her head in her hands.
‘Stupid, Helen,’ she said. ‘You’re so fucking stupid.’
Beside her on the couch, her phone rang, and she jumped. Number withheld: it was 5.15 a.m.
He gave me a bunch of emails to translate. They were to do with money, mostly: I had to learn a bunch of financial jargon in Russian really fucking quickly. I didn’t understand much of the content. Units, these emails talked about, but units of what? I was never really sure and, frankly, I didn’t care. I liked the challenge of trying to decode them, but only because they were full of text speak, shorthand, idioms; it was amazing for my Russian to be honest. As well as the finance stuff I was learning a fair bit. And I never really questioned the why of it all: he’d told me he did business with guys from all over, and not all of them had Russian, but everyone had at least a bit of English. That was enough explanation for me. I just said, Sure pal, whatever, and took the cash.
Obviously now I realise it was a test. He wanted to see how biddable I was, how much of a blind eye I’d turn if he crossed my palm with silver. He upped the stakes bit by bit, giving me more stuff to work on, bigger documents, and references to dodgy activity started to appear. An email giving directions to some vstrecha, some meeting place, say. I got to learning some drug slang. He wanted things turned around faster: after a few months he started calling me up and dictating to me in Russian while I typed stuff out for him in English. He’d put wodges of cash in the DVD cases when he brought the discs back. He had my number all right. I was some naïve little žlob who’d say, How high? when asked to jump. I didn’t even question it, really: embarrassing, when I look back on it now. But to cut a long story short I basically stopped doing my uni coursework and spent most of my time working for him. I was learning more fucking Russian that way anyway – including conversational because he and I talked so much. Toad, I called him. All these years and I still don’t know his real name. We don’t have real names, any of us. We don’t have real lives. We’re invisible, we walk through walls, we shapeshift. We’re the ghosts of the people we used to be.
Sort of appealing, isn’t it, that idea? Back then – or before I met Toad – when I was skint and fucked off, I used to have this daydream. I’d be able to freeze time, just for, like,
five minutes every so often. Not enough to make me age way faster than the rest of society or cause a space-time rift or any shit like that. But imagine: enough time to whip round a shop, everyone around you frozen, just pick up whatever you wanted, and walk out. Enough time to unclip a guy’s Rolex while he’s standing there with his phone up to his ear and stock-still, no idea . . . in fact you’d take the phone, too, right? Five minutes is enough time to browse, even: pick what you want before you stick it in your pocket and walk away. I used to daydream about that. And I’m jesting – it wasn’t Rolexes really, or anything like that. Just . . . a nice bottle of wine on a Friday night, or, I don’t fucking know . . . organic orange juice. It was shit like that which felt like a luxury, but such a tiny pissing luxury that it was like a slap in the face not to be able to afford it. Toad – that cash he threw my way was my five minutes. Thanks to Toad, I drank the orange juice. Then I bought the vodka to go with it. And that’s the thing. We’re never fucking happy with anything, any of us – we’re always asking, Right, what’s next? That was me. I downed it all and then I slammed my glass back on the bar for another. Always more. You can’t blame me. It’s the human fucking condition.
Birch was later than she’d wanted to be, in spite of the 5 a.m. start. Getting off that couch had been hard; making herself get dressed for a likely audience with Anjan after last night’s palaver had been even harder. She’d stared into her wardrobe for a long time, unsure quite what she was looking for. It was only after she’d got dressed and gulped a half-cup of scalding coffee that she realised: she was looking for the outfit that would make her most invisible.
