Exile (41 page)

Elizabeth reached out a bruised hand and held Maureen’s wrist, looking at her watch. She gestured towards the door. “We should go.”

“It was a vicious thing to do, Elizabeth. She had four kids.”

“Well, I was out. At the doctor’s.” Even Elizabeth was having trouble believing in a doctor’s appointment that lasted several hours. She blinked, looked at the floor, blinked again and looked back.

“Ye can’t have been out for all of it,” said Maureen. “It must have gone on for hours.”

Elizabeth gave it some thought but the terrible cold was driving through her muscles like frozen needles, cracking her bones. “There was a queue,” she said feebly.

“There was a queue?” repeated Maureen, her high voice pushing the battered rings of cartilage against the bruised muscles, sending a searing pain through her neck.

Elizabeth knew how stupid it sounded but she wasn’t used to being talked to, or listened to, or taking responsibility. She played with her glass, running her finger down the side and around the rim. She lifted it and drank deep into it, looking for blindness and peace. Maureen knew that if she tried to make Elizabeth admit her part she’d never find out what had happened. She tried again.

“So, when you came back from the doctor’s, did ye see what happened to Ann at the end?”

“Oh, I was in then.” She sat forward. “That was Tarn. Tarn did that at the end. He kicked her.”

“Where did he kick her?”

She pointed to her face. “In the chin. She was lying on the floor and he kicked her. She held his leg, held on while he kicked her with his other foot.” She looked away wistfully. “She was hitting his leg, little pats, you know, like, slapping him, over and over, while he kicked her. I thought that was brave of her, hitting back. Can we go now?”

Maureen thought back to the missing flooring and shuddered when she remembered the grainy texture of the damp leather settee. “Who did he get to put Ann in the mattress?”

“A fat bloke and a bloke called Andy.”

Maureen drained her drink. “Let’s go to the bank.”

The butch barmaid watched them leave, sadder than she had been before, certain she’d be watching the cheeky Scottish girl die inch by inch over the coming months and years.

Elizabeth was shaking so intensely that she had to sit on a chair at the side while Maureen went to the counter. The queue was long, busy with shop managers depositing end-of-day bags of small change and office workers paying their bills. Maureen looked over at her. The white lights in the bank glinted off her sweaty face. Elizabeth gathered her hair with her shaking hands, twisted it into a rope at the front and threw it over her shoulder, keeping her eyes down like Maureen did when she was dying, concentrating on breathing in and breathing out. Maureen looked away and followed the rest of the line, shuffling forward. She needed to get to the airport, she needed some cash herself for a cab.

She thought of Ann with her split lip and her battered fanny, coming to London to give herself up gladly for her kids. But Ann fought back at the last, refusing to go gently, a dying woman with burned feet and cuts on her legs and a fractured skull, hitting back as she was kicked in the face. Maureen wanted to fight back before it was too late, before her head was broken. She thought about Winnie playing cards, crying because she was sober, of Elizabeth running into the pub with her straggly fanny on display — hedonistic casualties.

The clerk made no secret of his skepticism. He didn’t think a bedraggled woman like Maureen could take out six hundred quid. He read carefully as Maureen’s account details came up on-screen and watched as Maureen typed in the PIN number. He asked her how she wanted it.

“Any way.”

Elizabeth was excited and on her feet. She watched the wad of notes with cloudy, absent eyes and Maureen recognized the tranquilizing calm of anticipation. Elizabeth took the money, shoving it deep into her pocket, plugging the hole in her soul with the readies, and her panic evaporated. She stood up tall and straight, flinching slightly at muscle pains, flicking her hair back over her shoulders again. She knew she’d done a bad thing. “You won’t tell anyone, will you?” she said, quite casual.

But Maureen couldn’t lie to her. “Don’t kill yourself with that money.”

“Please don’t tell,” she whispered close. “Frank doesn’t know I was there. He’ll be really angry. I’m only a little fish.” She dipped her chin down again and looked up. At best she had stood by while the rest, as vicious as frightened children, had ripped and burned Ann to death.

“Don’t worry,” said Maureen. “I won’t tell Frank.”

When they got outside Elizabeth said good-bye and walked quickly away, melting into the crowd. Maureen watched her skinny shoulders swaying, her hair roped and tucked into her sweatshirt, and she felt exhausted. It was so pedestrian. She didn’t have the sense of having met with something evil. It was so normal, so within the scope of what she knew. She couldn’t set herself apart from Elizabeth or from the crowd of greedy users, helping themselves as a mother of four bled to death on the settee.

Maureen lit a fag, inhaling with her tongue flicking over the cut in her cheek. She wanted to tell someone who couldn’t have done this, seen this, heard this without feeling different and separate. The police. She wanted to tell the police.

“Excuse me.” She stopped a man and could see him taking in the bruises on her neck and the smell of whiskey on her breath. “Could you tell me if there’s a police station around here?”

“Yes, dear,” he said, “down there, under the bridge, third on your right. Canterbury Crescent.” His accent was African and his yellow and brown eyes were sad and sorry for her. Maureen looked down the street towards the bridge. “You want me to take you there?” he asked.

“No,” said Maureen, laughing as if it were nothing, as if she’d lost her poodle. “I’m — I can find it okay.”

She was beyond the bridge when her mind settled. She couldn’t walk into a police station and give her name. If she went in and said she’d found a gang of murderers, they wouldn’t let her go home with Liam, they’d keep her there for hours. If she didn’t leave London now she would never get home, and Douglas’s money wouldn’t last forever. She knew her place here, next to Elizabeth and the men on the pavement, afraid like them, floating for years, another fun-seeker picking at scabs on the back of her knee. She turned up Electric Avenue, following the railway arches back to Coldharbour Lane and the phone boxes outside the Angel. She went into a newsagent’s for a ten-quid phone card.

“Maureen,” Martha whined reproachfully, “he was so worried about you. He’s gone to the airport. He didn’t have your pager number with him and he was counting on you being there.”

“What time’s the plane?”

“It’s at seven thirty. You’d better set off now if you’re going to get there on time.”

“Cheers, Martha,” said Maureen, because she couldn’t bring herself to thank her properly, and hung up.

Hugh McAskill wasn’t at his desk. The man who answered the phone wandered away to look for him. Maureen listened down the line to some men laughing and people walking past, watching as two and a half quid ticked away on the crystal display. The man came back over to Hugh’s desk; she could hear him sniffing and chatting to someone near the phone. It took him twenty pence to pick up the receiver again. “Sorry about the delay,” he said. “He’s left the office for the day. Can I help?”

“Well,” said Maureen, speaking fast, “someone I was drinking with has just confessed to witnessing a crime and I don’t know what to do about it.”

“Whereabouts are ye?”

“In London.”

“Did the crime happen in London?”

“Yeah.”

“Well”—the man sounded completely uninterested—”you’re through to the wrong division anyway. Have ye tried the Crimestoppers hotline? Or the City Police? Or what about the Metropolitan Police?”

“Okay,” she said, surprised by his cavalier lack of concern. “Well, thanks anyway.”

“Yeah, ‘bye,” he said, and hung up.

She phoned directory inquiries for the number and called New Scotland Yard. She told the switchboard operator that she had information relating to the murder of Ann Harris and they put her through to a phone queue. A screechy voice from the East Midlands told her that she was being held in a queue and her call would be answered as soon as a communicator became available. The phone rang out blindly at the other end. The voice came back on several times, one and a half quid’s worth of times, and each time returned her to the ringing phone. Maureen was running out of money. When the phone was finally answered a pleasant man asked her for her name and address. Maureen didn’t want to get involved, she just wanted to pass on the information and go and find Liam. “Marian Thatcher,” she said. “I live in Argyle Street off Brixton Hill.”

“What number?”

“Six three one,” she said, feeling clever.

“Well, Marian, why don’t you come in and tell us what happened?”

“Look, I’ve got kids. I can’t come in. Can’t I just tell ye and ye can come and interview me later?”

The policeman paused. “Urn, okay, let’s do that first. What happened?”

“I’m running out of money here. Will you phone me back?”

“Can’t you come—”

The phone clicked and she was listening to the dial tone. Maureen checked her watch. It was going on twenty to six and her throat was killing her. It shouldn’t be this fucking hard to dub someone up. She dialed 999.

“Fire, police or ambulance?”

“Police,” she said, trying to make her strangled voice sound urgent.

The operator told the police that Maureen was in a call box and told them what the number was. “Hello, caller, what is the nature of the emergency?”

“There’s a woman called Ann Harris. She’s being held in flat six three two in Argyle Street in Brixton Hill. I think they’re going to kill her.”

“Who is going to kill her?”

“Tarn Parlain, Elizabeth, Heidi and Susan. She’s on the settee — they’re going to throw her in the river.”

“What’s your name, caller?”

“Please help her.”

“Caller, I need your name.”

“Marian Thatcher.”

“And your address?”

“Six three one Argyle Street off Brixton Hill. Tarn Parlain’s going to get two of his pals, a fat guy and a guy called Andy, to come up and put her in the mattress and throw her in the river.”

“Caller, your name isn’t coming up at the address you’ve given me.”

Maureen hung up and backed out of the phone box. Liam would be frantic. She stepped into the street and hailed a black cab. She had forgotten that the closed-circuit camera was hovering high above the road, watching the street, keeping it clean.

Chapter 42

KNUTSFORD

Maureen watched the slow traffic snake ahead of them on the motorway and saw the fare clocking up on the meter. The taxi driver’s eyes flickered towards her in his rearview. He had tried speaking to her, managed to get as far as she was going to Glasgow because she lived there when Maureen’s throat began to hurt so much that the conversation ran out.

“It’s bad traffic,” he shouted, over the noise of his engine, his eyes smiling. “Getting worse all the time in London.”

“Will ye get me there for seven thirty?”

“I don’t know, darlin’. I’ll try. This time of day you can’t tell, being honest wiv ya.”

She was going home and she was going to fight back before the last gasp. She patted her bag sitting next to her on the seat. She knew what she was going to do. She wasn’t afraid of Ruchill anymore.

The taxi drew into Terminal One at twenty past seven. Maureen gave the cabbie sixty quid and bolted up the escalators, pushing past bewildered gangs of tourists standing with their luggage, her throat aching with every heavy step. She couldn’t see a sign but stumbled through an archway and found herself facing the BA checkin desk. A long, tired queue snaked around an elaborate maze of Tensabarriers. She skipped along it, glancing down the aisles, looking for Liam. He wasn’t there. She found the gate and had to queue to speak to the woman on the desk. “Listen,” she said, rasping for breath, “my brother’s got my ticket for Glasgow and I think he’s in there. Can I go and see him?”

But the immaculately made-up woman couldn’t let her through without a ticket. “Sorry.” She smiled. “For security reasons.”

“Can’t you put a call out for him?”

“Which plane was he on?”

“The seven thirty.”

“Well,” she said, smiling slowly, “the seven thirty has just left. It’s taking off now, so I’m afraid you’ve missed him.”

“Put out a call,” said Maureen, close to tears. “Call him. He won’t have gone without me.”

“I’m afraid you’ll have to go to the information desk to put a call out,” she said, and pointed to a separate desk with its own queue.

Maureen waited. A man in an expensive suit bought a ticket to Edinburgh using a credit card with a disputed limit. He gave the dolly bird behind the desk another card and she tried that one, swiping it with long pink fingernails. “Yes,” she said, stretching her Peach Party lips across her peroxide teeth. “This one’s fine, sir.”

They paused to smile at each other. Maureen lit a cigarette. “Excuse me,” said the woman, standing up and reaching for her arm. “I’m very sorry but you can’t smoke here.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s a no-smoking area. There are designated smoking areas.” She pointed to the signs hanging from the ceiling.

Maureen dropped her fag and stood on it, wishing she could fill her lungs just once more. The businessman was staring at her. “You going to leave that there, then, are you?”

“Leave what?”

“That cigarette end. Are you proposing to leave it on the floor?”

“Aye,” said Maureen, sounding as hard as she could, “I am.”

The businessman looked at the woman behind the desk and rolled his eyes. “Smokers,” he said, and she stared at his credit card.

Her hand hovered over the printer for a month as his ticket emerged. “There you are, sir.” She smiled. “Thank you very much.”

“No,” the man addressed her tits, “thank you very much.”

He picked up his briefcase and gave Maureen a dirty look before walking away.