Exile (37 page)

Liam was horrified. “Tonsa?” he said, slapping her leg and leaning over her. “Maureen, they’ll think you’re working for me.”

“But you’re retired.”

“No one retires, you silly cow. If Tonsa realizes who you are and tells Toner, I’m fucked. God.” He sat back and looked at her. “Wee hen, you’ve got to come home before ye do some real damage.”

Vaguely, vaguely in a distant place within her shriveled brain, she remembered telling Tonsa she was Liam’s sister. She’d said his name to Tonsa, of all fucking people. She looked up at the umbrella floating on the ceiling. He had told her not to mention him. He had specifically told her.

Liam nudged her gently. “Let’s go home.”

“I need one more day to make it right,” she said, panicking. “I need to see her sister again. She’s a wee old lady, she doesn’t keep well. One more day? Can’t we stay tonight and leave tomorrow?”

Liam looked hurt. “Promise me that’s all you’re going to do.”

“I promise.”

Martha was leaning on the door frame, her forearms wrapped around her waist in a way she imagined was slimming. She smiled at Liam. “Looks like you’re staying,” she said, and laughed gaily.

“We’re not staying here,” said Liam bluntly. “There isn’t any room.”

“Alex is away for a couple of days,” said Martha casually. “There’s loads of room. Maureen’s comfortable on the sofa, aren’t you?”

“Yeah,” said Maureen. “It’s just one night.”

Reluctantly, Liam went out to the hall and phoned the airline, changing the flights for the next evening. Maureen and Martha sat together on the settee, listening and relaxing when they heard him confirm his details. Martha smiled. “It’s comfortable, isn’t it?”

“What?”

“The sofa. Nice and comfortable.”

Confused, Maureen smiled back at her as Liam came back in. “Tomorrow night,” he said. “But we can’t change them again, right?”

Maureen nodded. “I’d better go back to Sarah’s,” she said, staring meaningfully at Liam, “and let her know I’ll be staying here.”

“Good. Come on, then,” said Liam, deliberately not inviting Martha.

Maureen said she wanted to see Kilty to give her back what was left of her shopping. In fact, she had been so drunk the night before that she wasn’t sure how they had left things. A twitching pang of hangover insecurity nagged at her and she wanted to see her to make sure it was all right. The young landlord let them into the narrow hallway and said that Kilty was upstairs, last door, knock loud.

“She knows we’re coming,” said Maureen.

“You’ll still have to knock loud.”

The door to Kilty’s room trembled with the reverberating theme tune from the Money Programme, and beyond the wall of noise a trilling little soprano voice sang along badly, following the notes a step late and pausing for breath midbar. Maureen banged on the door as hard as she could but felt the sound being swallowed beyond the door. She banged again and the singing stopped. Moments later the theme tune flickered to a dead stop. “Did someone knock?” asked Kilty politely.

“It’s me.”

The door opened on a grinning Kilty. Her room was large, with a big oriole window at the far end and wooden shutters like the ones in Liam’s house. She had very little furniture: a single bed, a leather armchair and an ottoman. On the far wall a semicircular fireplace built of orange tiles looked like a decorator’s take on a sunset. It was stacked with smoke-free fuel, little burning black boiled sweets. A gold mesh fireguard stood in front of it.

‘This is my brother, Liam.”

Kilty smiled and held out her hand. “Kilty Goldfarb,” she said, shaking Liam’s hand.

Liam looked bewildered. “What is that?” he said. “An anagram?”

Kilty wiggled her eyebrows alternately at Maureen, and Liam watched them, hoping she’d do it again. Kilty turned off the television and made sure the fireguard was as close to the fire as possible before slipping on her fur coat and turning off the light. She said that the best place for a quiet chat was the Alhambra restaurant and the coffee was beautiful. On the way round the corner Maureen chatted anxiously and managed to glean that Kilty had had a good night the evening before and Maureen had neither said nor done anything spectacular in her company, apart from convincing her to have a drink in the Coach and Horses.

The Alhambra was a North African restaurant decorated with a desert-theme mural. It looked as if the artist could only draw people from a side-on view but they had exploited their limitations to the full; men carried heavy bags and led camels backwards and forwards across the wall while the women stared straight at them or watched their backs. Kilty took a table near the window and began talking to Liam, asking him about himself. They knew the same crowd of people from the Glasgow Tech disco and worked out that they had probably been at several of the same parties when they were in their late teens but had somehow managed never to meet each other. At Kilty’s insistence they ordered three coffees. Maureen sipped hers. It was delicious, the bitterness of the coffee tempered by the subtle perfume of cardamom seeds and other hints and flavors too complex for a heavy smoker’s palate. Maureen asked Kilty to smoke a cigarette. Liam and Maureen sat and watched her puff-puffing over her coffee, giggling and nudging each other. Maureen didn’t expect Kilty to enjoy the negative attention quite as much as she did, but Kilty didn’t mind people laughing at her because Kilty thought she was great. And so she was. Kilty stubbed out her fag, finished her coffee and pulled on her jacket, saying she’d better go home and get ready for work tomorrow. She invited them both out for dinner the following evening.

“We’re going home tomorrow,” said Liam.

“Oh.” Kilty looked crestfallen. “What a shame. You will come back, though, won’t you?”

“I’ll definitely come back and see ye,” said Maureen. “I promise.”

Kilty leaned across the table, grabbed Maureen by the ears and pressed a smacking kiss into her cheek. She stood up. “I had a fucking top time last night.” She pulled her ski hat down over her eyebrows like a cloche. “It was lovely to meet you. Both.”

“She’s a turn and a half,” said Liam, when she had gone.

“She certainly is.” Maureen grinned.

Liam had ordered two plates of lamb couscous. Maureen didn’t want to eat but the cardamom coffee had given her an appetite. When the food arrived the smell from the meat was rich and heady and the couscous was as light as air. Tentative, she tried eating a little couscous on its own, then with a spoonful of gravy over it and finally got stuck in. Liam ate his dinner and kept an avaricious eye on hers, discouraging her where he could, telling her that dinner was the worst meal to eat with a hangover and lamb could prolong the pain for up to a week.

“How’s Winnie?” said Maureen. “Still sober?”

“Sober as a very jumpy judge. She won’t have Michael in the house anymore either and her and George have remade their bed together.”

“That’s great.” Maureen smiled. “Una’ll be pleased, anyway. She won’t keep having to fend a drunk granny off the wean.”

Liam looked suddenly at the table. “Yeah,” he said. “That’s right, yeah.”

“What?” said Maureen, knowing the look of old. “Una’s not seeing Winnie or what? Has Alistair finally put his foot down or something?”

“Alistair’s, well, Alistair’s gone.”

“Gone?”

“He’s left.”

“What do you mean he’s left?”

“Una’s chucked him out. They’re getting divorced. He’d been having an affair with the upstairs neighbor.”

Maureen sat back and looked at him. “Alistair?”

“Yeah, Mr. Steady Eddie Alistair.”

“But he was the only nice one out of all of us.”

“I know,” said Liam. “Changes things, doesn’t it, if Una’s bringing up the child alone?”

“Is Michael still hanging about at Una’s?”

“Like a persistent bad smell. She’s the only one who’s kept faith with him. I think that’s why Winnie got sober. I think she’s worried about the wean.”

“Jittery Winnie’s going to protect the wean?” said Maureen, her voice cracking midsentence.

Behind the counter the two men shouted over each other angrily until one of them slammed a frying pan down on the worktop. An intense quiet fell over the décor. It wasn’t born yet, Maureen told herself, not yet. She didn’t want to care about that, she didn’t have room to care about that. She wanted to nuzzle her face into the abstract problem of Jimmy and Ann and never think about Michael again.

“See, if someone’s carrying drugs up to Glasgow? Do the people buying them pay before they arrive or do they pay on delivery?”

Liam giggled at her. “On delivery.”

Maureen frowned. “Why are you laughing at me?”

“You’re very décor, Mauri. The trip’s the dangerous bit. We’d all be broke if we paid before.”

Maureen clicked her tongue at him. He was very patronizing sometimes. “This woman,” she said, “was killed in a really bizarre way.”

“How?”

She watched Liam shoving couscous into his mouth. “D’ye really want to hear about it when you’re eating?”

“Doesn’t bother me,” he said.

“Well,” she said, “her feet and hands were burned, her legs and arms were cut and her skull was fractured. Does that sound like a gangster killing to you?”

Liam wiped his plate clean with a chunk of lamb.

“Not really,” he said. “Not unless they were torturing her for information.” He looked at her meat dish. “They’d probably be disguising her identity.”

“That’s the one thing they weren’t doing. They left her identity bracelet on.”

“They must have been torturing her, then. Where did they cut her on her legs?”

“The backs of her knees.”

Liam sat up and looked at her curiously. “Really?”

“Yeah.”

He gazed into the middistance and mapped the injuries on his body, moving his lips and gesturing to his legs, his feet and finally his hands, like a tiny genuflection. “Those are all places you inject yourself,” he said.

“Eh?”

“The veins junkies inject in — arms, hands, feet and behind the knees — that’s a bit later.”

“Maybe she became a user?”

“Maybe.” Liam lit a cigarette and sat back, rubbing his swollen belly. “That was fucking lovely.”

“You know who I feel really sorry for?” said Maureen. “Hutton’s girlfriend. She’s pregnant.”

Liam huffed at his plate. “I wouldn’t waste my energy feeling sorry for Maxine Parlain.”

Maureen dropped her fork to the table. “She’s a Parlain? From Paisley?” Liam nodded. Maureen sat forward, shaking her finger in his face. “Her brother’s down here. Tarn Parlain paged me to go and see him.”

“Ye didn’t go, did ye?”

“I didn’t know it was him till I got there. He’s a dealer—”

“Keep your fucking voice down,” muttered Liam.

“Sorry, sorry.” She affected a whisper. “But he’s down here and he’s involved in this somehow. Martha says he works for Toner.”

“Well,” said Liam skeptically, “he won’t work for him but he’ll distribute for him.”

“Why won’t he work for him?”

“Well, he’s a Parlain and they’re a team so Tarn is always going to be one of them. Toner might get him to work for him but he knows his loyalty will be with the family. He’d only have taken him on to build contacts with them. It’s like the idiot son who used to get taken on by another firm as a goodwill gesture.”

“So Toner’ll have a lot of contacts at home?”

“Yeah.”

“She must have been muling for Toner, not Hutton at all.”

“Well, there you are, she’d be carrying up to the Parlains, then. That Tarn’s got slash scars all over his face.”

“I know,” said Maureen. “Is he quite heavy?”

“Naw, everyone says he’s a prick. He kept getting slashed for annoying people. He’s probably down here out of harm’s way.”

Maureen gave Liam the rest of her dinner as a reward and sat back watching him eat. The Parlains could have put the ticket through Jimmy’s door. Senga could have given Maxine the photos and Toner would have an army of lackeys in Glasgow happy to fake letters for him. She wondered about Las Vegas Elizabeth. She’d been to Scotland on the train — she might have been a courier too. Liam finished the meat and sat back, picking at his teeth with a complimentary toothpick. Maureen went to the back of the restaurant to use the pay phone. The mobile was answered before it rang out. “Hello,” called Maureen, sounding jolly.

“Maureen, for fuck’s sake come home,” said Leslie.

“What?”

Leslie dropped the phone to her shoulder but Maureen could still hear her asking permission to take it outside. She heard the shriek of a chair being pushed back and Leslie muttered, “Hang on, don’t hang up,” before walking somewhere and shutting a door.

“Are you all right?”

“No. The police are going to arrest me. They don’t believe me about the Polaroid.” She was whispering quickly and sounded terrified. “They think I told Jimmy where she was, and gave him the money to fly to London. They found the shelter Christmas pictures in Jimmy’s and they think she was back there.”

“But you’ve got Ann’s set.”

“I’ve told them that. They don’t believe me. Even if I don’t get charged I’ll lose my job if the committee hears about it. Fuck.” Her voice was rising to a tearful pitch. Leslie dropped the phone to her shoulder to gather herself together and the receiver crackled in Maureen’s ear as she rubbed it against her jacket. Leslie cleared her throat and came back on. “He was in London, Mauri — he was in London when she was murdered.”

“Ye haven’t given them the CCB photos, have ye?”

“Are ye fucking joking? They’re gonnae charge me and I’m going to do that?”

“Look,” said Maureen, “tell them Maxine Parlain’s brother lives down here and knew Ann.”

“What’s that to do with anything?”

“Just tell them. I’m coming home tomorrow.”

“Don’t lose that fucking Polaroid.”

“I won’t, I promise I won’t. Sit tight — it’ll be okay, I promise.”

“Even if they don’t sack me they’ll never trust me again. I’ll end up working in that fucking office with you.”

Maureen coughed and hesitated. “I’m not going back there, Leslie. I’m going to do something else.”

“Aye,” said Leslie, looking around. “Well, ye might have to save me a seat.”