by Denise Mina
‘Oh, Christ,’ said Ella, getting flustered, ‘you fucking do it.’ She stood up and turned away, busying herself with the tapes.
Maureen stood up behind her uncertainly. ‘You’ve to sign it, you’re bringing the case. I can’t sign for you.’
Ella McGee looked at her as if she were stupid. ‘Aye, ye can.’
Maureen stood up next to her. ‘Are ye afraid to sign it, Ella?’
‘No,’ she said emphatically, patting the Phil Collins tapes into a tidy row.
Maureen watched her turn away, looked at the back of her wrinkled neck and realized why Ella had confided in her. Ella couldn’t fill in the form herself because Ella couldn’t write. It would have been shaming to ask anyone else for help but Maureen was a newcomer to the market and Maureen didn’t count.
‘Will I sign it, then?’ said Maureen.
‘Aye, you do that.’
Maureen considered signing Ella’s name but thought it might be fraudulent. She put down her own name and address. ‘Um, you’ll need to write an envelope and send it to the Sheriff’s office.’ ‘You can do that, can’t ye?’
They looked at each other and Maureen nodded. ‘Aye, no bother, I’ll do it.’
She folded the form and went to brush past her, but Home Gran caught her by the flesh on her upper arm. ‘And you’ll come to the court with me, eh?’ she said anxiously. ‘If it comes to that.’
Maureen didn’t want to. She had more than enough psychos in her own life without a man who’d threatened his seventy-year-old mother. They wouldn’t go to court, families don’t go to court. ‘Might not come to it,’ said Maureen, squeezing past her.
‘Aye, might not,’ said Ella unconvincingly. ‘Eh, Pat by the river got raided yesterday.’
Maureen would have heard it from someone else anyway but she knew Ella telling her was a friendship gesture.
‘Took all his fags away,’ said Ella, ‘and he still needs to pay Sammy for them.’ ‘Nightmare. Thanks, Ella.’
‘No bother,’ said Ella, as if she’d done Maureen the favour.
‘By the way, wee Trish showed me your picture in the paper this morning. Ye look nice.’ ‘In the what?’
‘You’re in the paper.’
Maureen bolted for the mouth of the tunnel and the bright sunshine.
The newspaper-seller was hiding in the shadow of the high tunnel over the road, hollering headlines unintelligibly. The poster on the front of his stall read: ‘Brady Trial Exclusive’. She bought the paper and read the front page. Angus Farrell had been declared fit for trial and had been charged with the murders of his colleague Douglas Brady and a hospital porter. The porter, Martin Donegan, had been twice the man Douglas ever was but his name wasn’t mentioned because his mother wasn’t famous. An old file photograph showed Carol Brady, the ex-MEP and victim’s mother, snarling into the camera. Mrs Brady was quoted: ‘I am heartbroken,’ claimed Brady. ‘He must never get out of Sunnyfields.’ Maureen had had an uncomfortable lunch with Carol Brady a year ago and knew her patterns of speech. Either she’d had a stroke in the interim or the journalist was making it up. A small inset photograph showed Maureen’s building from the outside, the black and gold Mars Bar advert above Mr Padda’s shop visible in the corner. The close door was propped open in the picture, showing how insecure it was. Inside, on page five, they’d reprinted the photograph of Maureen on holiday in Millport. She was wearing a ‘Never Mind The Bollocks’ T-shirt and shades, grinning as she held on to a rented tricycle. Liam and Leslie had taken her to the seaside for a holiday just after she got out of hospital. She was painfully thin but still recognizable. Any nutter with the price of a paper had her face, her name, a picture of her house and its approximate position in the city. Siobhain might see that headline, and God knew what it would do to her. Maureen felt the fight go out of her. It was too much, the baby and the trial at the same time. She leaned against the wall under the high arch, standing in the dark, pretending to read as she tried to get her nerve together. Angus Farrell was twice as smart as she was. He scared the shit out of her.
She leaned her bare shoulder against the crumbling cold wall and looked at the guddle of the market. Joe the Hawk was selling car stereos with the wires still hanging out the back. Lenny’s daft wee dog, Elsie Tanner, was sniffing a blanket someone had left in a gutter. Milling crowds gathered around stalls selling tights and biscuits, curling tongs and bits of stereos. Everyone was sunburned in a snapshot trace of their activities the day before: red necks and shoulders from gardening, red forearms with inside elbows cadaverous white where they’d been reading a book or sipping cups of tea. The true religious had full-on red faces and white garrotte rings around their necks. Gordon-Go-A-Bike waved to her from his perch and she waved back. Gordon sold greetings cards in the lane. He had something wrong with his legs and rather than stand still all day and make his condition worse he sat on an old exercise bike and worked his knees while he shouted at the passers-by to get their cards here.
Maureen looked at the busy crowds of good people, looking for bargains and just the very thing. Not yet. None of it had happened yet. She dropped the paper to the ground. There was time enough for grief, she told herself, without rehearsing it for weeks in advance.
She stopped at Gordon-Go-A-Bike’s stall, bought a packet of big brown envelopes and he gave her a loan of a stamp. She addressed one, as the form instructed, to the Clerk of the Sheriff Court and nipped out to the street to post it. When she came back with the egg rolls Leslie asked her what Home Gran had been saying.
‘She wanted me to fill out a form for her.’
‘What form was it?’
‘Um, the council tax,’ said Maureen, because she’d promised not to tell.
‘Aye,’ said Leslie. ‘It’s a bugger that form.’
‘Aye,’ said Maureen. ‘It’s nice and cold in here.’
She lowered herself on to the wee stool and they sat complaining about their achy-breaky knees, staring at each other, and smoked the day away in their dark tunnel as another scorcher blazed across the city.
6
Broken
They were in the square waiting room next to the interview cubicles. Across the room a stocky prison officer nodded slowly to the guard sitting next to Angus Farrell, letting him know that he was watching.
It was an old part of the asylum building, refurbished with soundproof walls and remote-control security doors. The white strip-lights embedded in the ceiling were painfully bright and in each corner of the room red-eyed, whirring cameras watched every movement. Some patients could only be interviewed in the containment rooms, held behind a window while their lawyer shouted reassurance through toughened safety glass. Some were interviewed across a normal table. Whichever Angus got would give him a clue as to whether his lawyer trusted him. He had no other way of knowing. He was waiting for the man to arrive. In the past he’d had to wait here for up to an hour, poring over the events of last autumn.
He thought back to the Northern Psychiatric Hospital, to all those mute girls, provocative, defenceless, and their goading blank eyes. His dick warmed and twitched. He almost hoped the lawyer would talk about them, show him pictures of the cupboard or the girls or something. He blinked and remembered the sluice cupboard, the grimy darkness and stinging air, thick with the smell of urine. The lawyer wouldn’t talk about the rapes, they hadn’t charged him with the rapes, just the murders. It would be better to go to prison as a murderer. The rapes would give him a shorter sentence but he’d be held in segregation and would be afraid for his life most of the time. Labels matter most on the margins. The ideal outcome would be no conviction at all.
At the far end of the room a door buzzed. An officer pushed through it and the tone rose to an urgent whine until the lock clicked shut behind him. The door was made of yellow pine with small glass windows, like an outside door, sturdier than Maureen O’Donnell’s close door.
The door beside Angus opened and Alan Grace looked out, inviting him into the room with a raised eyebrow and a forced smile. Grace was a thin man, bald, his uneven pate glinting under the fluorescent light, the hair too long at the sides. The guard stood up and nodded deferentially, standing Angus up with an authoritative pat to his elbow, guiding him with a hand on his shoulder forward into the room. Angus glanced up just once. It was a small room, painted two shades of grey, dark to shoulder height, lighter above. There was no partition, just a table bolted to the floor and two chairs. In two of the high corners black cameras watched, hungry for action. The officer stopped at the door behind him as if he was waiting for a tip. ‘Will I come in with yees?’
‘I think we’ll be fine,’ said Grace, and the guard left, shutting the door after him. ‘Perhaps you might like to sit, Mr Farrell.’ Grace always maintained a cheery voice. It sounded less like conviviality than egging himself through an unpleasant task. ‘We can start to go over what happened to you yesterday.’
As Angus sat down the legs on the chair splayed beneath him, thin plastic that wouldn’t snap or give an edge. Behind Grace’s head an air vent hummed softly, wafting the fringe of hair back and forth over his ears. He seemed very young. Young but tired.
‘Are you well, Mr Farrell?’ Grace was trying to catch his eye.
‘Fine.’
‘They treating you all right?’
‘Fine.’
Grace nodded. ‘I understand you had a visit from the Crown Office yesterday,’ he said quietly, ‘at which they charged you with the murders of Mr Douglas Brady and Mr Martin Donegan.’
Angus stared at the table. ‘I don’t know what they’re talking about,’ he whispered urgently.
Grace looked at his notes. ‘You know who Mr Brady is?’ ‘Of course I know him,’ said Angus, sitting up and coming alive. His accent was clipped and clear. ‘I worked with him for years. They interviewed all of us in the clinic about it. He died in Maureen O’Donnell’s living room. But the porter, Martin, I didn’t even know he was dead until yesterday.’
Grace made a consolatory face. ‘You have been ill for quite some time, I’m afraid.’
‘Dr Heikle tells me I was given a massive dose of LSD.’
‘So it would seem. He’s surprised that you recovered. Do you remember anything about the time leading up to your admission here?’
Angus looked at him. ‘I remember nothing,’ he breathed, his eyes flickering around the grey table top as if he was trying to reassemble the events. ‘I told the police yesterday that I remember meeting the woman, Maureen O’Donnell.
She’s an ex-patient of mine. We had coffee together in my office. After that I remember nothing but fire and being scared and being here.’ He stabbed the table, as if his presence in this room was the only thing he had been sure about for a very long time. ‘I remember being here. I don’t know what happened to me to get me here.’
Grace paused, writing a note to himself in his pad. ‘Did you know,’ he said eventually, ‘that Miss O’Donnell was having an affair with Mr Brady?’
‘The police told me. I was disappointed in Douglas for that.’
‘Did you know that O’Donnell’s brother is a drug-dealer?’ Angus sat forward, and the broken veins on his nose came into focus. ‘No, I didn’t know that. She could have given me the LSD. Can you do that with coffee?’
‘I don’t know, we’ll find out. But it does suggest a knowledge of drugs and a potential source. Incidentally, you were writing threatening letters to Miss O’Donnell while you were still . . . under the influence. Do you remember that?’
Angus cringed and sat back, sliding his flat palms back across the table, his fingers leaving snail trails of sweat on the scarred grey plastic. ‘Vaguely.’ He shrugged apologetically. ‘She’s my last memory before I went under. Maybe I got stuck . . .’
Grace sat forward, tapping the table with his pen. ‘Can you pinpoint the date on which Miss O’Donnell came to see you with the coffee?’
Angus shook his head. ‘I was at the clinic in the morning, briefly. She came in to see me after Douglas’s death.’
‘Would that be the last day you went into the clinic before disappearing?’
Angus sat back as if startled by his acumen. ‘I expect it was. I honestly have no idea.’
Grace scribbled something on his pad. ‘We can check that out.’ He looked up. ‘The evidence they have links you to the murder of Mr Donegan. They have only circumstantial evidence linking you to the murder of Douglas Brady. Realistically they would have to prove the second case to get a conviction on the first.’ ‘What evidence do they have?’
‘Your bloody fingerprints on the back of Mr Donegan’s neck.’ Grace dropped his voice in embarrassment. ‘He was stabbed . . . in the face.’
Angus shrank. ‘Could I have done that?’ he muttered urgently.
‘The evidence suggests that you did, Mr Farrell.’
‘How could I?’ he whispered, and let his head drop to his chest. ‘Why would I do such a thing?’
‘I really don’t know,’ said Grace, and turned back to his notes. He seemed uncomfortable.
‘Is there any hope at all?’ whispered Angus, wondering as he did so whether he was overplaying it. He was suddenly overcome by the desire to smile. He covered his face with his hands, and slipped his fingers under the lenses of his glasses, rubbing his eyes roughly with his fingertips. His specs jiggled up and down.
Grace cleared his throat. ‘I don’t want you to get too excited about this,’ he said seriously, ‘but we have a potential defence. It’s speculative at the moment.’ He spoke slowly. ‘It would be very difficult for the prosecution to get a conviction on the Brady charges without a guilty on the Donegan charge. Let’s just say that you were under the influence of LSD at the time of the Donegan murder, yes?’ Grace waited, and Angus looked at him and nodded that he understood. ‘Yes,’ he said.
‘And if we can show that someone else gave you the LSD, yes?’
Grace waited again. Angus considered bludgeoning him with the chair but nodded instead.
‘Yes?’ said Grace. ‘Well, we can plead that while you physically did the act you were not mentally responsible for it.’
Angus decided that he had shown enough interest in the plea. He crumpled his chin at the table. ‘Did I do it?’ he asked.
‘It would seem so. But we may be able to argue that you didn’t have the mental intent to do it, if you were given the drugs without your knowledge.’ ‘What does mental intent mean?’
‘Well, if you didn’t mean to do it,’ said Grace patiently, slipping into Ladybird law-book language, ‘even if you did the physical actions, then the law says you’re not guilty. We’ll have to check the sightings of you, make sure the dates match and so on. If the plea is successful – there are a lot of conditions on that, I should stress – well, you’ll be going home, Mr Farrell.’
‘But did I do it?’ muttered Angus.
‘It would seem so, Mr Farrell,’ repeated Grace.
Angus Farrell rubbed his eyes hard again and his mouth dropped open. The crooked lower teeth were worn down to dark, ringed stubs from the months he had spent grinding them when he first came here. His head ached all the time. He rubbed his eyes harder. ‘God almighty,’ he whispered. ‘I did it, didn’t I?’
7
Sheila
It was a warm evening but the room felt damp. It always felt damp. The grey carpet squares were beginning to curdle in protest. Ten group members were sitting in a circle, sipping tea and coffee from Styrofoam cups and nibbling at the lovely chocolate biscuits Liz bought from Marks & Spencer every week.
Sheila, a tall woman in her fifties with an eating disorder, was the Incest Survivor Group’s convenor. She wore her greying brown hair up in a leather clasp and dressed in shapeless shirts and long skirts, as if trying to deny that sh
e had a body. She raised her elegant English voice and cut across the chatter. ‘Let’s convene this week’s meeting with a reminder.’ She held up the laminated page and read through it. It was a poetic rendition of a series of group rules. No directional advice would be given by members of the group unless requested, no one would interrupt another member while they were sharing.
Maureen zoned out and took out a cigarette.
‘I want to speak tonight.’ Colin leaned forward into the circle as he ran a hand through his hair. Behind him, tall Alex sighed and folded his arms. Colin always wanted to speak first. He spoke every week, and every week he said the same thing: he wasn’t coping. His ex-wife wanted him to look after their child but he couldn’t. Colin had only realized that his abuse was still a live issue when his son reached seven. When he got angry he wanted to hurt the boy. He could control the urges if he saw him during the day and didn’t spend too long with him. His ex-wife wanted him to take his son for weekends. If he told her why he couldn’t do it she’d stop him seeing the child altogether. He stared at the carpet, wringing his hands, the anxious sweat on his palms smacking noisily, making him even less likeable. He was going to have to stop seeing him, he knew that, he was afraid for him. He loved him. That was all he had to say. Any advice would be welcome.
When she was sure he had finished, Sheila thanked him and asked whether someone else would like to come in. Tall Alex lunged forward and began his tirade against whoever had pissed him off that week. He was angry. The focus of his fury changed from week to week but the content was always the same. Everyone was picking on him, they underestimated him, he wasn’t going to stand for it. Every week he had a new revenge fantasy, he was going to show them. The revenge was always small, a slight or a slap, spreading a rumour. A blind dog in a drunken stupor with no clinical training could have identified the pattern: Alex was just angry and he was angry because he was afraid, but no one was allowed to say that. Every week he finished by saying that advice would not be welcome. If anyone attempted to talk to him afterwards he’d speak from the body of the hall the next week, railing against know-all bastards, glancing pointedly at the offender, threatening petty Armageddon. Hugh McAskill had told her about the group during the investigation into Douglas’s death. She hadn’t really understood why he was so kind to her at the time; it was only afterwards when she came to the group that she realized how much his experience matched hers. She didn’t associate Hugh the policeman with Hugh the responsible group member. The damp room felt separate somehow, like a grubby grey antechamber to real life where each member’s darkest moments could be touched on and safely left behind, lingering in the smell of mouldy dust, waiting for next week.
