Everything She Forgot (11 page)

CHAPTER 12

I
T WAS NEARLY DUSK WHEN
G
EORGE AND
M
OLL
CROSSED THE
English border. It had taken them almost eight hours from Thurso. He had avoided all the main roads that he could and ensured that he drove under the speed limit.

They had followed the coast until Inverness, with the North Sea to their left and the purple and brown mountains to their right, immutable, timeless. The landscape embraced them as they drove.

They passed through the Cairngorms National Park and the trees darkened the road, stretching up so tall that they almost blacked out the sun. They headed south through Perth and then Kirkcaldy. It was the first time that George had crossed the Forth Road Bridge and he found his steering wavered as he looked at the rail bridge on his left, the bright red girders intricate as capillaries. He bypassed Edinburgh and headed for England.

He had stopped once or twice to smoke or urinate, but had not let Moll out of the car. She hadn't eaten or drunk a thing since he had taken her. As they approached the border, the Cheviot Hills came into sight. She was asleep, her head resting
against the seat belt and her thin legs akimbo. She had resisted falling asleep, but he had turned on the radio and turned up the heat in the car and finally she had succumbed. He glanced at her as he drove.

He had wanted the three of them to run away together—but he was on the road now with only his daughter.
Daughter. His daughter.
The sleeping child beside him filled him with panic and regret. It was not how he had intended. He remembered the swish of Kathleen's hair and her graceful, rhythmic walk. Years they had been apart, but he could still recall her exact smell and the memory of it cleaved him now, as he realized that he had lost her, for a third and probably final time. Sweat formed at his lip as he considered and he clasped a hand over his mouth.

“What've you done now, Georgie?” he whispered to himself. He had taken her baby girl,
their
baby girl. She would never forgive him now.

He was a fugitive. George took a deep breath as he realized.
Fugitive.
In some ways, it didn't feel so different. He had always felt like this. He had always wanted to run, and now, here he was, on the run.

He was strangely grateful that Moll was with him. Seven long years of separation but now here he was, going on a road trip with his little girl. Asleep, she looked awkward but beautiful and he felt a flush of love for her similar to how he had felt when he first held her in his arms. When he found someplace safe to stay, and managed to settle down, he would ask her if she wanted to stay with him. He hoped that she would grow to love him too. He imagined it might be possible.

So much of his life had been like this: a single impulsive choice mapping out a course of action. Liquid always follows
the path of least resistance and so George's life had run away from him in just such a way.

He hunched over the steering wheel as he looked for a place to pull over for the night. He needed to stretch his legs. He had heard on the Scottish news and again on the national news that the police were looking for a tall dark man wearing a dark suit and driving a dark-colored car. He knew the police could have more information than they were sharing with the media, but he felt encouraged that the descriptions were so vague. He had brought a few changes of clothes with him.

He was tired and needed to wash, but felt that he couldn't risk a hotel this evening. They were conspicuous: a man traveling alone with a young girl, and he could not yet count on Moll to behave herself. He strained into the dark looking for somewhere to stop for the night.

O
n the English side of the Cheviot Hills, he found a turnout near a forest and pulled into it. He kept the car running for a few minutes for fear that the child would wake, but when he turned off the ignition she remained sound asleep. He ran his hands through his hair and then placed them over his mouth. He stared at himself in the rearview mirror. He was finally away. He had done it.

It was five o'clock and the sky was only just starting to bruise, a pale early moon set high in the blue. He opened the door and closed it gently, and then shook a Benson & Hedges cigarette from its packet. The evening was cold and damp, but the air was fresh with the scent of pine needles. He checked that Moll was still asleep, stretched, then lit up, leaning on the roof of his car as he enjoyed the head rush of the welcome cigarette. Deep in the forest was the distant bark of foxes: their voices
hoarse screams like the sounds of a child in pain. George took another drag of his cigarette, thinking that the foxes reminded him of his childhood.

He was the black sheep in his family. Ever since he was small, he had wanted out of there, and now he dared to hope that he had made it. George had always dreamed of another life. It was partly why he had loved Kathleen. Her family was like the ones you saw on TV: sitting around the dinner table laughing and talking, church on Sundays and holidays in Rothesay. Kathleen's father could do magic tricks and had a beautiful singing voice; George's father only needed a bath to get away with murder and could knock someone out with a single punch. He had loved Kathleen and her family, or at least
the idea
of her family. Losing them all had been like losing his own skin. He had gone crazy for a few years after he split with Kathleen: drink and drugs and women, all of which his own family had tolerated, but George had felt lost.

Back then, Kathleen had been his only chance of escape. He had been stupid at school—could barely write his name. All he had ever wanted was a family of his own. Now Moll was with him and, at twenty-seven, he had his whole life ahead of him. He felt sure he could win her heart and make a life for them together.

He felt as if he had broken out of prison, only with a suitcase filled with one hundred thousand pounds. The police seemed to have no idea who had taken Moll; and the McLaughlins weren't even looking for the money that George had taken because they thought it was at the bottom of the Clyde. For just a moment, George wondered if he had got the better of everyone. He felt frightened and excited at the same time. He was free at
last. He could start a new life away from the garage, which still stank of his dead father's bloody hands.

G
eorge remembered it had been a Thursday. He was in the garage with Tam, working on an old Rover. Tam had showed George how to replace a fan belt and give the car basic service. The instructions from Peter had been to clean the car up and make it roadworthy. Tam had made sure he stayed under the bonnet, saying nothing to George except to ask for tools. The front right tire had a puncture, and Tam asked George to check in the boot in case there was a spare.

George whistled nervously as he walked around to the back of the car, wiping the grease on his hands onto his overalls. Cleaning cars was a job that George tried to avoid, but Peter had asked him directly, clasping his gloved hands. The body had been disposed of—weighted down and thrown into the Clyde—but there was still residue and other evidence in the car that needed to be removed. They would fix it up and sell it. George's jaw was tight as he approached the rear of the vehicle. It seemed as if, all his life, authority had compelled him to do things that he didn't want to do. And after his father had gone, Peter had slipped on their father's shoes without so much as a thought.

A chill sweat on his skin, George laid both hands on the boot and took a deep breath. He wasn't sure what he was going to see, but he opened it and peered inside.

It was empty. The carpet lining was dark gray but appeared stained. George put a hand over his mouth. The iron scent of old blood was familiar to him and he took a step back. He was silent and, at the front of the car, Tam was silent also. George
knew that Tam would not even speak to him until the boot was closed and the job was done.

He had planned on cleaning it with bleach, but the carpet material had soaked up too much blood and would have to be removed altogether and burned. George reached into the recesses, searching for the mechanism to release the base or at least find the edge of the fabric so that he could peel it back. As his fingers skirted the farthest corner he felt something soft and cold. When he leaned forward, he saw that it was a portion of a hand: two fingers and a thumb, pressed together, as if to signal “OK” or as if they were about to snap to the beat of a tune. At first George thought the fingers had been trapped, and there was another level of horror waiting for him below the fabric, but then he realized that they had been severed and forgotten. He scooped them into a plastic bag and then peeled back the fabric. Below, in the space where the spare tire would have been, there was a black carryall. Again, George paused, fighting a wave of nausea. He knew that sometimes bodies were packed in such carryalls before they were weighted and thrown into the Clyde. Peter had always been threatening to test George's loyalty, and his resolve. George wondered for a moment if this was the test that he had to complete. He took the handles of the bag and felt the weight of it. It seemed as heavy as a small man.

George's fingers began to tremble.

The bag was padlocked, but he used his pocketknife to cut a small hole in it. When he pulled back the black material, he did not see what he had imagined: an eye frozen in a death stare, a torn mouth or beaten face. George saw that the bag was tightly packed with used banknotes.

G
eorge finished his cigarette, crushed it underfoot, then tossed it out of sight into the forest. He saw that Moll had wakened and got into the car beside her. She was rubbing her eyes. The sleep and the tussle with him earlier had messed up her hair. Her ponytail was askew and some of the hair hung loose outside the hair band. George reached out to touch it, but she jerked her head away.

An idea came to him suddenly, and he realized the necessity of it, although he knew now that Moll would fight him. He decided to wait until later.

“Are you hungry, sleepyhead? I've got some rolls, and some Irn-Bru. Would you like some?”

George spread the traveling rug over the back seat and set a makeshift table with the bottle of Irn-Bru in the middle. They ate, sitting at either side of the back seat, both of the doors open. Midges hung in clouds outside each door. He had ham salad sandwiches and egg rolls and also a sausage roll that he had not finished the evening before. He tore everything into halves and set it on a brown paper bag in front of her. She took the Irn-Bru bottle in two hands and raised it to her lips. The glass sounded off her teeth and she put a hand over her mouth as if it had hurt, but then raised it to her lips again and gulped.

“Take your time,” said George, biting into one of the rolls. “Are you very thirsty?”

The bottle sounded as Moll removed it from her lips. She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand and burped.

“Pardon me,” she said, hand over her mouth.

George grinned at her. “Eat some food. You need it.”

She ate quietly, but quickly, finishing an egg roll and also the sausage roll. George stopped eating, in case she needed
more. He had not made any preparations for looking after a child. He took a swig of Irn-Bru, thinking that he should have bought more food along the way: milk, a change of clothes for her, toys for her to play with—but he had only been thinking about evading the police. It occurred to him that he had never looked after anyone before, other than himself.

When she was finished she sat, turned from him, looking at the dark country road. They had been eating for nearly half an hour and not a single car had passed. It was dusk now and the sky was navy blue slashed with red from the sinking sun.

“Where are we?” she asked, her good eye fixed on him, her bad eye staring out into the night.

“We're in England.”

Her eyes filled with tears. “We're so far away. I want to go home.” She covered her face with her arms and cried and George felt her unhappiness as a sharp pang underneath his rib cage. He had spent his whole childhood crying, it seemed, and he hated to see her cry. When he had imagined running away with her, she had been happy, delighted that her father should return after so long. He hadn't thought that the tall, wealthy old man she called Dad would have won her affection.

How different it would have been, had Kathleen been with them. It seemed naïve now, that he had imagined all three of them happy on the road south, together after all this time.

He reached out and put a hand on her skinned knee. “Don't cry,” he whispered.

She did not cringe from his touch, but she continued to cry, fists to her eyes.

George didn't know what to do. He was the youngest of four. He didn't have any idea how to console a child, or entertain her. It would have been easier, he thought, had she been younger.
Even though Moll was just seven years old, with her long limbs and assertiveness she seemed much older.

He took a deep breath as he considered what to do. She had a strength that reminded him of Kathleen. Even weeping, she seemed stronger than him—Big George had never felt so small. He only wanted her to stop crying.

“Hey, hey,” he said, “don't do that. You're so pretty and greetin' like that'll just get you all messed up.”

She took her hands away from her face, which was reddened after her tears. A single blue eye focused on him. “I'm not pretty,” she said, wiping her face with the palms of her hands. “I'm ugly, so if I cry it doesn't matter.” Her voice was broken, spoken in gasps. “I just want to go home.” She bit her lip and fat tears rolled silently down her face, dropping off her chin onto her school blouse.

George cleared the picnic space between them. He reached over and took her hand, which felt small and cold in his.

“Sweetheart, don't say that again. You're a princess, I tell you. You're my daughter and you're the most beautiful thing that there is.”