Cold Hands (21 page)

‘Walt?’ I shouted down the hallway.

‘Daddy!’

‘Everything’s OK. Just stay where you are.’

‘Ah. The good father,’ she said.

‘How could you? To Sammy? To Walt? You know them, they –’

‘You knew Craig.’

‘I WAS JUST A KID!’

Silence. She let my shout reverberate, die away in the big echoing room. ‘You’ll see those moments forever, won’t you? They’ll never leave your head. But I wonder what’s worse – definitely knowing what happened or inventing your own scenario every night? I could never really get a clear picture of what happened to Craig. I’d invent it. Alter it. Change it almost every night. And you go, you know, you go mad!’

‘How, after all this time, how did you find me?’

‘You remember Mr Cardew, don’t you?’

YEARS BACK THERE
had been a flurry of press reports surrounding the release of Boy C, William Anderson, a young man now, with a new name and a new identity. You remembered him well from court. The newspapers had tried to contact you for a quote about him getting out but you were so far gone at that point.

You began by travelling up to the Mitchell Library in Glasgow every day – taking the bright orange train along the west coast, travelling over the railway bridge, looking down at the weir where Craig died, whispering a benediction to him every time – where you sat at the microfiche tables, turning the big knob and studying every report, every photograph. There were several from Anderson’s release and various prison transfers: a blanketed figure emerging from a police van, being moved through photographers into Glasgow Sheriff courthouse, the snarling mob in the background. You noticed the same figure in several different photographs; a silver-haired man in his fifties, sticking close to the shrouded figure, an expression of irritation on his face as he scanned the mob of photographers jostling for a shot.

You studied his face intently, for hours, learning every line. He didn’t look like a policeman. His facial expression, as you studied it over and over, it wasn’t so much irritated as anxious, concerned. He had a protective arm around the crouching figure beneath the blanket. This, you came to believe as you gazed at the grainy black-and-white photographs for hour after hour, was someone from one of the ‘caring’ professions: a social worker perhaps, certainly someone with great reserves of understanding. Someone who could manifest sympathy for the thing under the blanket, the thing that, according to his testimony, had watched as his friend stuck a broken fishing rod into your son’s rectum.

You reasoned: if he were a social worker who had worked on this type of case . . . was it possible he was now working on others? Where would such a person be found?

Very likely in and around the courthouses of Glasgow.

It was 2002, the twentieth anniversary of Craig’s death, when you began your new daily routine: that bright orange train to Glasgow, canvas bag with sandwiches, flask and research books (nursing, torture) over your shoulder. The walk from Central Station along Jamaica Street, along the river and across the bridge to the Sheriff Court. There you’d sit on one of the benches, watching the comings and goings, the lawyers and police officers and the accused and their wretched families, lost in the pall of last, hurried, cigarettes in their stained, crinkled sportswear.

You watched and you read your books and this went on for nearly two years.

Rebuilding your body was a whole lot easier than rebuilding your mind. You’d put on three stone from the drinking and your jowls, bum and belly all hung fleshy and
slack. Your lungs were desiccated from pack after pack of Embassy Regal, the brand you’d chosen because it was what Stephen used to smoke years ago. The first few times you tried to go running were a joke – maybe four or five hundred yards before you collapsed sobbing and panting against a hedge. But you kept going, increasing it a little every day. It must have been true that you had an addictive nature because you were soon up to three, then four, then six miles a day. From your flat you’d run the length of Harbour Street until you hit the shore, make a left on the hard, packed sand near the surf and run to Barassie and back; three miles each way along the beach, the wind whipping into you, the spray stinging your face, mixing with your sweat, burning your eyes. You’d get twitchy and irritable if you didn’t get your run in by 7 a.m. and some days you’d do two runs; one first thing and another around 6 p.m., which was when you’d sometimes feel yourself getting fidgety, walking around the flat, opening the fridge door, and you knew it was your body craving a drink, wanting its old routine.

The weight fell off and you felt strength and suppleness returning. You were in your fifties and in the best shape of your life.

The town’s first gym had recently opened and you started lifting weights, crunching your stomach on the rowing machine, building up your abs and pecs and your laterals. The strength in your arms and upper body grew and grew until you could pull yourself quickly up the ropes that dangled from the ceiling of the gym. And you liked that feeling – the couple of seconds where you paused, breathing hard at the very top of the rope, thirty feet above the floor, your head pressing against the roof, your biceps straining.
You liked the fact you were alive and climbing that rope, towering above it instead of swinging at the end of it.

You enrolled in a tae kwon do class at the leisure centre, the Magnum, where you had taken Craig ice-skating a couple of times. (It terrified you, that ice rink – with all the vicious, glowering boys speeding round. The thought of Craig falling out there, his fingers spread on the watery ice as the twin blades came slicing towards him – and you were relieved when he said he didn’t like it and didn’t want to go any more.) You learned the punches and blocks and – especially – the powerful, sweeping kicks. Your instructor Keith told you were a ‘natural’.

And you couldn’t say yet exactly why you were doing all of this. Just that you wanted to be . . . ready.

You took an evening class: Basic first aid.

The treatment of trauma and the preservation of life.

You joined the gun club, lying on your stomach on a mat on the rifle range at the leisure centre, squeezing off rounds from the old Martini action rifles they had. Learning the basics about more advanced weapons. You weren’t sure what skills you’d need if the day ever came.

Then it happened, towards the end of 2004. It was late autumn, your ears cold, a dewdrop on the tip of your nose, great rifts of desiccated leaves blowing by, when the silver-haired man from the photographs came down the courthouse steps, talking to two policemen. They came close to your bench (a history of medieval torture on your lap, open at a page on wheeling), close enough for you to hear the man’s voice, working class, Glaswegian, and watch as he took an unfiltered Capstan Full Strength from its pack and expertly lit it with a match held in cupped fingers, the
fingertips as yellow as the phone book. He was older, in his sixties now, but it was certainly him. He walked towards the underground station and you followed.

To Cowcaddens and then the short walk to the police station. You watched him signing in through the glass doors. You waited across the street and it was dark, five thirty, before he left again. You trailed him to Central Station, then the train out to Rutherglen. You watched as he disappeared into a tenement building near the station. Ground floor, right. You got close enough to read the little brass nameplate on the wooden door frame: ‘P. CARDEW’.

Your heart had filled your whole chest from the moment you saw him.

For days you thought it over, gradually realising that even greater reserves of patience were going to be called for. You felt sure that this man would have information about the boy who helped to kill your son. All you needed was a name and a city. However, if something untoward happened to P. Cardew, it might have reverberations for the new identity William Anderson had been given. Yet P. Cardew was old. In a few years, surely, he would retire. More time would have elapsed. Less attention would be paid.

In the end it took another four years. You discovered reserves of patience you did not know you had. You watched and waited and learned. He lived alone, a bachelor. (This was good.) He smoked and drank too much. (This was bad. Your greatest fear in that time was premature death: a stroke or a heart attack. Those Capstan Full Strength and the bottles of Grouse from the off-licence on Rutherglen High Street three or four times a week.) Then, finally, in the summer of 2008, the grim little retirement party in the
pub in Cowcaddens. You were several tables away, with your Coke and your book. He even smiled at you once as he wove unsteadily to the toilets.

And still you waited another six months, noting with sadness the reductive curve of this man’s retirement: his visits to the pub coming earlier in the day, the lunches with colleagues growing more infrequent already. His occasional visits to the Mitchell Library, your old haunt, where he read mainly social histories of Glasgow, often nodding off, his head lolling onto his chest in the great reading room. The smirks and the head-shaking of the nearby students.

Finally you could wait no more. You rang the doorbell one evening in early May 2009, almost exactly twenty-seven years to the day. He smiled kindly as he looked at you through thick glasses, the smell of cooking behind him in the tired old flat as he said, ‘Can I help you, dear?’

You Maced him in the mouth.

He scrabbled at his throat as you pushed him backwards into the hall. He was trying to shout but the Mace was already constricting, burning his larynx. It would wear off. You needed him able to talk. Without fear, and in exactly the way you’d rehearsed it countless times, you slammed the door behind you and kicked his legs from under him, following him down, making sure he didn’t bang his head on the floor, the knife already out of your other coat pocket and up at his jaw, tickling his jugular vein as you said, ‘Do what I say and everything will be OK.’

The great pain, fear and confusion in P. Cardew’s eyes as you slipped your heavy rucksack off your shoulder and set it on the floor. As you took out the car battery.

Stronger than you’d expected, this 66-year-old man.

He held out for several hours, whether through loyalty to, or a genuine affection for, William Anderson, or whether because of some personal code of honour you were never quite sure. In the end you had the voltage up as high as you dared. Smoke was coming off his hair, out of his nose, the gag was barely muffling the screams and you had to have the television up loud to cover this. You were grateful for the thick walls of those old Victorian sandstones. Every time his eyeballs flipped upwards, vibrating in their sockets, you feared it might be the last time; that they’d never come back down again. Finally it came out, just four words, the sweetest four words you’d heard in many years. Almost as sweet as ‘I love you, Mummy’.

‘Donald’ (gasping), ‘Miller’ (retching), ‘Toronto’, (panting), ‘University’ (sobbing).

You thanked P. Cardew and then dum-de-dummed a little song to yourself to drown out his pleading and bargaining as you carried him through to the bedroom, no fight left in him. The worn old dark-wood furniture, the green bedspread, an ashtray and a photograph of some nephews and nieces on the nightstand.

He gratefully drank down the mug of water with a fistful of your Valium and sank down, slackjawed with exhaustion. You tidied the flat, meticulously removing any trace of your presence. You lit one of his Capstan Full Strength and placed it between his fingers. He was deeply asleep as the unfiltered cigarette burned against the bedspread, forming a dark brown line that began smoking, then flaming.

You sat in the corner of the room and watched for as long as you dared. Long enough to see the bed and half the room engulfed in flames. He never woke up.

You closed the garden gate gently behind you, a soft marmalade glow just visible through the net curtains of the living room, something that would have looked to a passer-by like a nice fire burning in the grate.

You read the headline at Glasgow Airport two days later: ‘
RUTHERGLEN MAN DIES IN HOUSE FIRE
’.

You scanned the details (‘Paul Cardew, 66, recently retired . . . Strathclyde Police . . . highlighted the dangers of smoking in bed’), finished your coffee and boarded the flight to Toronto.

It all became much easier after that. Your acting skills. You were charming with the lady in the administration office at the University of Toronto and she riffled through the records and told you that Donald Miller, your nephew from Scotland (‘wee Donnie’ you called him), had indeed graduated from the Masters programme in 1996. If you’d just hold on she’d see if – and wasn’t that a lovely blouse you had on? – she could find the last address they mailed the alumni newsletter to and, oh yes, here we are, an apartment in Regina, Saskatchewan. The address was a few years old, so few of the students kept in touch to update their details, and how were you enjoying Canada?

In Regina, two days later. No Donald Miller listed in any of the phone books. It wasn’t a big city, but you couldn’t go asking around, you weren’t quite sure how, exactly, you wanted to work it. You walked the streets a lot for the first few weeks, hoping you might see the adult face of that gap-toothed thirteen-year-old walking past you, but knowing that if you did you’d never recognise him. You went to the library and checked the electoral roll. Nothing there either. You moved from the hotel into a short-term rental and the
weeks turned into months and you began to lose faith when kindly fate dealt you an unexpectedly wonderful hand. You were sitting in a coffee shop one morning when you picked up the copy of the
Regina Advertiser
someone had left lying in the booth across from you. Flipping through the real estate and local interest stories your eye snagged on the headline: ‘MILLER’S CHOICE’, then the little postage-stamp-sized photograph next it; a shyly grinning fortyish man. Then the byline at the bottom of the page – Donald Miller’.

You sat there for several minutes, your breath shallow through your nostrils. You had no way of connecting the man in the photograph with the boy from the front pages of almost thirty years ago. It was possible that this was an entirely different Donald Miller. But you knew, knew in your blood and in your bones, that it was him.