G03 - Resolution (35 page)

“If,” said Kilty ponderously, “trafficking isn’t an offense in Poland, and McGee’s name isn’t on anything here —”

“We don’t know that,” interrupted Leslie. “What about Ella’s court case?”

“That’s not evidence, that’s an allegation,” said Kilty succinctly. “And if he’s fly enough to traffic from Poland because it’s one of the few countries that isn’t a signatory to any convention, you can bet your arse he’ll have kept his name off the sauna license.”

Leslie stirred her chocolate, coaxing the settled cocoa powder from the bottom.

“If his name isn’t on anything,” continued Kilty, “what can we do? We can’t go to the police. They’ll tell us to piss off.”

They all thought about it, each trying to think of alternatives to going to the police.

“We could blow him up,” said Leslie stupidly.

“Yeah.” Kilty looked at her askance. “I think you should get back with Cammy before ye kill someone. Leaving your commando tendencies aside, goal two is get the women out.”

They couldn’t think of anything for that either and were feeling discouraged as the food arrived at the table. Kilty got the waitress just to put it all in the middle and they tried to share it but everyone wanted the eggs and it turned into an unsightly scramble.

“God,” said Leslie, “that was gorgeous.”

“Taste the Croque Monsieur,” said Kilty, pointing her to a golden toastie. “They make it with butter.”

“The problem with helping the women,” said Maureen, “is what do we do? Do we get them out and send them home?”

“Yeah,” said Kilty. “Otherwise we’d need somewhere safe for them to hide from Immigration and the bastards who brought them over here. We don’t have those kinds of resources.”

Leslie sat back. “I’ll go in with a gun and get them out, if that’s what it takes.”

“Look, you can’t use being angry with your boyfriend to shoot up a licensed premises,” said Kilty, as if she’d been involved in a tremendous amount of paramilitary activity. “You might remember the good times halfway through and then where will ye be?”

“Standing in a brothel with a gun and whole lot of foreign women?” said Leslie, as if she’d really thought about it.

“How would ye get the women to leave with ye? What would you say to them?”

“That I’d come to rescue them and if they came with me they’d be safe—”

“In Polish? Or Latvian?”

“Oh.” Leslie looked deflated.

“And what about afterwards? What if they want to carry on working? Would you take them to your house?”

“They can’t stay with me, even if they’re not working,” said Leslie firmly. It seemed a strange line for a mad bomber to stand firm on. “I’m gonnae … I need my space,” she said, and looked shifty.

Maureen leaned across the table. “What about upsetting your dad? Couldn’t you just tell him?”

“Nope,” said Kilty. “He’d just do what he always does and say I was mad. Anyway, getting one lot of women out probably won’t even cost Si that much money.”

“See,” said Maureen, “I don’t think he really cares about the money.”

“Why?”

“Well, think about it. He’s a poor scholarship boy at a Catholic school, his mum’s a prostitute and the other boys probably know that, his sister’s a psycho. He doesn’t want money. The money is a side issue. He wants respectability.”

Leslie shook her head. “How can this even be happening in this day and age? It’s un-fucking-believable.”

“Yeah,” said Kilty. “They count on that, like the child prostitution racket. I read today that lone child immigrants seeking asylum routinely go missing in the UK. The cops think they’re being prostituted and used to make pornography by organized gangs but they can’t find them. Who’d believe that?”

“No one,” said Maureen.

“No one,” said Leslie miserably. “And even if they did they’d roll their fucking eyes and do nothing.”

Sitting on the back of the bike, holding on to Leslie’s waist, Maureen shut her eyes and wished herself anywhere else. She felt sick and dizzy, and suddenly aware of her bare legs and arms and the danger of the night traffic. If they crashed and skidded on the Tarmac she’d be skinned alive. The possibility still seemed more inviting than their destination. Leslie had agreed to help her watch Michael but had no idea what Maureen was planning. She pulled up at a junction, flicking the bike into neutral and kicking down the stand. Her voice was muffled through the helmet. “Ye’re hurting me,” she said, working her fingers into Maureen’s clenched fists, making her relax her grip. Sorry.

“Just loosen it a bit.”

The front of the house was dark again and Una’s Rover was parked outside the front door. They stood behind the strip of communal garden in the street for twenty minutes, watching the lights in the hall through the open living-room door, but saw no movement. “Let’s go round the back,” whispered Leslie.

“Wait here a bit.” Maureen was afraid she’d be sick again and shame herself in front of Leslie, who’d just KO’d a brick shit-house.

Leslie elbowed her hard. “There’s nothing going on here.”

Maureen pushed her elbow down. “Wait a bit, though.”

Leslie, still bristling with adrenaline, pushed her arm. “What’s the point in us standing here —”

The close door opened and Una stepped out into the street, followed by a small bald man. Maureen froze, holding on to the chicken-wire fence. Una had gained a lot of weight since they had last seen her, and her haircut was worse from the front than the back. It stuck up at the top and hung over her ears. She was wearing purple leggings and a giant pink T-shirt. She raised her hand and pointed at the car. The lights flashed and beeped and she walked round to the driver’s seat. Michael was shuffling and looked as if something demeaning had just happened to him. As he reached forward to open the door Leslie grabbed Maureen’s arm and pulled her away to the bike parked on the corner. She had to lift Maureen’s leg to get her on the bike and slammed the helmet on her, banging the top of her head so hard it rang and buzzed. They took off, following the Rover at a distance.

Maureen shut her eyes, leaning her head on Leslie’s shoulder, trying to take herself back to Vik. They were crossing the river at Jamaica Street when the anger in her belly stirred awake, swirling around her gut, mustering allies among the hormones. She sat up. They were on the Maryhill Road, heading up to where she knew he stayed. They passed Benny’s house and she tried to see if his lights were on, but they were doing forty and whizzed under the railway bridge marking the boundary with Ruchill.

Three cars in front, Una took a left, disappearing off the road. Leslie followed her round the corner and suddenly came to the Rover, parked at the back of a shop. Leslie passed by just as Una opened her door, flicking on the internal light. Michael had on a white T-shirt with a Nike tick across the front, the soft material articulating his drooping belly and rounded back. Maureen wanted to lean across and grab him from the bike, forgetting who he was, thinking he was McGee or Angus or someone else. She wanted to grab him and drag him along behind her, skin him alive on the potholed road.

Leslie turned the block and rejoined the main road, following it back to the town. At a set of lights she wrestled with Maureen’s clenched hands again, loosening them, digging at them with her nails unnecessarily.

Back in Garnethill, Maureen cracked the lid off a brand-new half bottle of whiskey and drank it. Leslie said she only had another couple of days on the antibiotics and watched her enviously, sipping a cup of tea. They hadn’t bothered to put the lights on in the living room and the dark orange sky filled the window.

“Maureen,” she said, “ye have to remember that the baby isn’t you. It could be different this time. I mean, he’s a hundred and ten years old and Una doesn’t trust him to get a taxi home on his own. I don’t think she’ll be leaving him alone with the baby.”

“I’ve seen her leave him with the baby,” said Maureen. “I’ve seen her do it.”

“Can’t you be patient?” said Leslie quietly.

“Why would I be patient?”

“He’s not going to live long, Mauri, he was having trouble walking.”

Leslie nodded off on the settee and Maureen tiptoed into her bedroom. She sat on the end of her bed, drinking from the bottle as she looked out over the city to the blackened Ruchill Tower, drinking and thinking about skinning Michael.

“You didn’t even know her,” said Leslie, watching Elsie Tanner sniff at a stained lamppost.

“I knew her as well as you did,” said Lenny, defensively, tugging at the itchy collar of his dark jacket. It was chafing his neck red raw.

“But my pal did know her.” Leslie pointed at Maureen. Behind her sunglasses Maureen’s eyes were burning. A yearning for sleep made her blink every two seconds, dragging her eyelashes back and forth across the lenses of her shades like a boa on a burlesque stage. She had woken up with a familiar inch-long bruise under her chin, a parallel bruise on her forehead between her eyebrows, and she could not work out where on earth they had come from.

“You’ve got something on your head,” said Lenny helpfully, leaning in to see better.

Maureen raised her hand and touched it self-consciously. “I know, it’s a bruise and I don’t know where it’s come from. I’ve got another under my chin again as well.”

“Pull your fringe down,” said Leslie, flattening hairs over it so that it looked like a big horizontal bruise with hairs stuck to it.

Despite being hungover and bedraggled, Maureen, Leslie and Lenny were one of the more glamorous parties at the small funeral. The family had yet to arrive but a couple of other groups had gathered by the door to the church. Three elderly men with withered, pinched faces stood in front of it, smoking fags held in cupped hands and laughing at one another’s jokes. Two casually dressed young women sat on the church steps, offering their already brown faces up to the sun. Maureen guessed that they had come in lieu of someone else.

They were in Partick, down by the river at a small Catholic church. The building across from the chapel had been knocked down, leaving a stretch of wasteland, currently being used as a makeshift car park. Behind the church, on the banks of the slow river Kelvin, stood an old sandstone mill recently converted into flats.

The small church was unassuming; an arched wooden door was set at the gable end, flanked by small flying buttresses and two long windows of brightly colored glass. To the side of the door, a ragged lump of granite with a large brass shield attached stood on a concrete plinth. Etched with the Madonna crowned with stars and a stiff heraldic spread eagle, it was a thank-you gift from the Polish servicemen and -women who had attended mass there during the war.

The arched chapel doors opened. A young priest with sandy hair the same color as his skin greeted everyone, inviting them inside on the condition that they were part of the McGee party. The old men finished their fags and the young women stood up. Maureen, Leslie and Lenny walked towards the door, Lenny shouting back to Elsie Tanner to stay, Elsie, stay. Elsie sat down suddenly and started licking her fanny. As the priest walked away down the aisle to the vestry, every single person present climbed into the back row, knowing they hadn’t been central to Ella’s life.

The altar was a plain wooden rectangle with matching paneling at the back. A cloth-covered trestle sat in the aisle, waiting to receive the coffin. The priest came down the aisle and whispered orders for them all to move up to the front. The old men shuffled out to the aisle and everyone else pretended they were going to move but as soon as the priest left they settled back where they belonged, leaving the old men standing ostentatiously at the front. Lenny closed his eyes and began to pray, clasping the flat of his palms together and sticking his elbows out to the sides, as fervent as a child saint.

They heard cars drawing up outside, door slamming, someone giving orders, and Ella the Flash made her last big entrance. Following behind a glossy white coffin came Si McGee. Tonsa was hanging heavily on the arm of a man with a slash scar running from his ear to his nose. She was dressed in a beautiful black woolen suit with gold Chanel buttons and a veiled pillbox hat. Maureen turned to watch her and saw that although her body was grieving her face was blank, her eyes staring steadily at the floor in front of her. Her boyfriend had been in the papers a few years ago, complaining that the police hadn’t even tried to catch his slasher. He had aged dramatically in the interim, his hair turning from brown to white, his skin from white to gray.

The priest performed his incantations while the congregation stood, sat and stood again, singing reluctantly through barely opened mouths without accompaniment. Maureen looked back once or twice and saw Elsie Tanner standing in the sunshine, wagging her tail and looking into the dark church, anticipating Lenny.

As the sad service drew to a close, professional pallbearers came forward, picked up Ella’s gorgeous coffin and carried it to the waiting hearse. The priest, Si, Tonsa and her scarred man followed the coffin out into the bright day. Tonsa got straight into a car, leaving the priest and Si waiting by the door to thank the sorry turnout for coming.

Maureen wanted to look at him now: she wasn’t afraid of him anymore, wanted him to know she was smart and knew what was going on. In front of her in the queue, Lenny shook Si’s hand warmly. “She was … a lovely lady,” he said, voicing the one thing about Ella that everyone knew wasn’t true.

Si pulled away his hand before Lenny had finished shaking it. He turned to Maureen, trying to smile through his distaste. “Yes,” he said, even though she hadn’t said anything. “Thank you for coming.”

“Warsaw,” said Maureen.

He widened his smile. “Sorry?”

“Gotcha,” said Maureen, and moved on into the sun.

Leslie caught up with her on the pavement. “His neck was shaking,” she whispered.

They were four steps from the church when the door of the black car in front of them opened, blocking their path. Tonsa stepped out and unfurled her long, slim self. She looked down her nose at Maureen and nodded, as if she had spoken to her.

“Hello,” said Maureen. Tonsa didn’t answer. “I’m sorry about your mum. I worked near her in Paddy’s.” She gestured to Leslie. “We both did, actually.”