Garnethill by Denise Mina (3 page)

It happened six months before Maureen was taken to hospital, but the way Marie told it there was only a matter of weeks between one incident and the other. And that explained it. Maureen was mental and Marie forgave her.

Marie was married to Robert, another banker, who worked in the City. They had been married on the quiet in the Chelsea Register Office two years before but Robert had never found the time to come to Glasgow and pay his respects to her family. It was a shame because now he couldn't afford to: he had become a Lloyd's Name at just the wrong time, on just the wrong syndicate, and they were living in a bedsit in Bromley.

Una's husband, Alistair, was an integral part of the family. He was a plumber and couldn't believe his luck when Una agreed to marry him. He was a quiet, honorable man and, to Una's everlasting joy, had proved himself eminently malleable. She began by changing the way he dressed, then moved on to his accent, and at the moment she was trying to change his career.

Una was a civil engineer and made a right few quid. She scheduled beginning a family for 1995 and had virtually booked her maternity leave but she didn't get pregnant. She put a brave face on it but recently she had confided in them all, individually and in confidence, that she was getting desperate. Maureen went with her to the clinic when she had the preliminary tests. It turned out that Alistair's sperm count was a bit low and he was put on a course of medication. Una was happy and Alistair was if she was.

When it came time for Liam to go to secondary school, Michael, their father, had lost his job as a journalist because of his drinking, quite a feat in those days. They couldn't afford to send Liam to the private school Marie and Una had been to so he was sent to Hill-head Comprehensive and Maureen followed him a year later. It was a good school but neither of them studied very hard.

Winnie's alcoholism progressed rapidly after Michael left them. Within four years she was married again and their new stepfather, George, became the silent partner in loud, brutal arguments. Despite the atmosphere in the house Liam delighted his mother by getting into Glasgow University Law School. He dropped out after six months and started selling hash to his friends on a casual basis but he discovered a talent and went professional. He bought a big house. They told Winnie he managed bands. Maureen used to nag him about security in the house but he said that if he started to worry about things like that he'd get really paranoid.

His present girlfriend, Maggie, was a bit of a mystery. She was a model, but they never saw her model anything, and a singer, but they never heard her sing either. She was very pretty and had the roundest arse Maureen had ever seen. She didn't seem to have any friends of her own. Poor Maggie had a lot to live up to: Lynn, Liam's first and last girlfriend, was a doctor's receptionist and as rough as a badger's arse but such great crack even Winnie's snobbishness dissipated when Lynn told a story.

Maureen did well at school and went straight to Glasgow University to study history of art. She was in her final year when she began to think she was schizophrenic. The night terrors she had always suffered from got progressively worse and she started having waking flashbacks. They were mild at first but escalated in frequency and severity. Because she didn't know what she was flashing back to, she thought they were random delusions. In her more lucid moments she realized something was very wrong. She had never done acid so that wasn't it. She began to read about mental illness and found that she was in the right age group for her first schizophrenic attack. She wasn't very surprised: like many people from unhappy families she'd never assumed the future would hold anything too thrilling. She told no one, got the job at the Apollo Theatre and bought the tiny flat in Garnethill so that when she fell down the big black hole into the hands of the social services they wouldn't make her live with Winnie.

It took a year and a half of patient panic for the breakdown to come.

She was sitting upstairs on a bus. A fat man sitting behind her was breathing mucousally in her ear. The noise got louder, closer, more rasping, until it was deafening. She waited for him to hit her, a fisted slap on the side of her head. When it didn't happen she screamed for a bit and threw up. The driver came to see what was wrong and found her sobbing and trying to wipe up the mess with a single tissue. He told her to leave it. She ran off the bus. None of the other passengers came after her.

The family got worried when Mr. Scobie, the manager at the Apollo, phoned Winnie's as a last resort. Maureen hadn't been at work for three days and hadn't called. Liam went looking for her and found her hiding in the hall cupboard in Garnethill. She had been there for two days and had urinated and defecated in the corner. She remembered Liam wrapping her in a blanket and carrying her downstairs to his car. He pulled the blanket over her face and whispered to her all the way to hospital, telling her she was safe, still safe, be brave.

One month after she was admitted to the Northern Psychiatric Hospital Una's husband, Alistair, came to visit on his own. He asked to speak to her and her psychiatrist together and broke Una's confidence, telling them that this had happened before. When Maureen was ten she had been found hiding in the cupboard under the stairs. She had been there for a whole day. Her face was bruised down one side and when they gave her a bath they found dried blood between her legs. No one knew what had happened because Maureen couldn't speak. Michael packed a few things, took the checkbook and disappeared forever. Winnie told the children that Maureen had fallen on her bottom and got a surprise. It was never mentioned again.

Winnie had never forgiven Alistair for telling. She phoned him sometimes when she was drunk. He wouldn't tell Maureen what she said.

Leslie came to the hospital every day, working her visits around her shifts at the shelter. She treated the hospital stay as if it was something that was happening to both of them together. Leslie was scared at first and then settled into the routine, getting angry about the pettiness of the ward rules and making friends with the other patients. Everyone else behaved as if they were coming to view Maureen. She knew that it was her friendship with Leslie that prompted her to get angry and get better. Their relationship changed after the hospital: Maureen couldn't bring herself to lean on Leslie in even the smallest detail. She was always reluctant to phone her when she had a problem. Leslie dealt with other people's emotional crises all day every day at the shelter and Maureen knew she could easily tip the scales and go from being Leslie's pal to being her client. She found herself wishing Leslie would have a disaster sometimes, something minor and fixable, so that Maureen could save her and restore the balance between them once and for all.

The Mustache Man was waiting for them at the car-park entrance to the station. They took her into a small reception area and asked her to sign a book saying that she had come to the station voluntarily. They asked her permission before taking her fingerprints.

She still felt light-headed, her stomach ached with tense after-vomit contractions and she was having trouble with her eyes: her depth perception kept changing suddenly, shifting objects closer and farther away. She blinked hard, pressing the rims of her eyelids tight to stop it. She knew she must look pretty crazy but they weren't watching her, they were anxious to get her upstairs.

The policewoman and the Mustache escorted her up two flights, through a set of fire doors and into a windowless beige corridor illuminated with imperceptibly flickering strip lights. The pattern on the linoleum was too big for the small space. It would have been a disorienting place at the best of times and this wasn't the best of times.

"Is this corridor a bit narrow?" Maureen asked the Mustache.

"A bit," he said, worried by the question. "Are you going to be sick again?"

She shook her head. He stopped at one of the doors and opened it, waving her through in front of him. It was a bleak room. The walls were painted with mushroom gloss, the kind that is easy to wipe clean, and a gray metal table was bolted to the floor. A large clumsy black tape recorder was resting on the table next to the wall. A tiny window, high up on the wall, was barred with wrought iron. Everything about the room whispered distrust.

A tall man with ruffled blond hair was sitting at the near side of the table with his back to the door. He stood up when they came in, introduced himself as Detective Chief Inspector Joe McEwan, and asked her to sit down, motioning to the far side of the table, the side farthest away from the door. She had noticed him back at her house: while she was standing in the close she had seen him in the living room, talking to a man wearing a white paper suit. He had looked out at her, his glance lingering too long to be casual. His skin showed a fading long-term tan, the result of regular foreign holidays. He was in his forties and dressed so carefully in black flannels and an expensive blue cotton shirt that he was either gay or a bachelor. A quick look at the fading milky strip on the third finger of his left hand told her that he had shed a wedding ring one or two sunny holidays ago. He had the look of an ambitious man on his way to some bright future. Maureen's Celtic shirt glowed a strange shade of cheap green under the fluorescent light.

She sat down and Joe McEwan introduced the Mustache Man as Detective Inspector Steven Inness. The policewoman was not introduced. She took the hint and left, shutting the door carefully behind her.

McEwan pressed a button and turned on the tape recorder, telling it the time and who was present. He turned to Maureen and asked her very formally whether or not she had been cautioned prior to the interview. She said she had been. Without looking at him McEwan nudged Inness, telling him to take over.

Inness asked her all the same questions he had asked her at the house, again nodding and yessing her answers. She told them who Douglas was, about Elsbeth and that his mother was an MEP. The two policemen glanced at each other nervously. Inness asked her what her shoe size was, and why she hadn't reported the murder last night. She hadn't looked into the living room, it was to the right of the front door and the bedroom was to the left, so there was no reason for her to pass it unless she had been to the toilet. She went straight to bed because she was pissed.

Inness left long pauses after Maureen imparted each bit of information, expecting her to panic at the silence and fill in the spaces with important clues. Maureen had seen a lot of psychiatrists in her time and knew what he was doing. She found it familiar and calming, as if, among all the confusion, she had stumbled across a set of rules she understood. She did what she had always done with the long-pause technique: she sat and looked at the person interviewing her, her face blank, waiting for them to notice that it wouldn't work. The professional thing to do was stare back at her, take it on the chin and then try something else, but Inness couldn't. He looked at everything in the room, his eyes rolling around, swerving past Maureen to the back wall and over her head to the tape recorder. He gave up and flicked back and forth through the pages of his notebook, looking increasingly confused.

McEwan took over. "Who has a key to your house apart from yourself, Miss O'Donnell?"

"Urn, my brother, Liam, Douglas, and that's it. Oh, I suppose the factor would have one."

"What's the factor's name?"

She told him and guessed at the phone number. McEwan wrote it down in a notebook. "I'm not sure that's the right number," she said.

"It's okay," he said, pleased at her willingness to cooperate. "We can look it up. Where can we find your brother?"

She couldn't let them turn up at Liam's house unannounced — she knew he left stuff lying around all the time. It would frighten the shit out of him if nothing else. He'd never had a scrape with the law. "Urn," she said, "he's staying with some friends at the moment, I'll bring him down if you want to talk to him."

McEwan wasn't pleased. "Can't we contact him?"

"Well, the people he's staying with aren't on the phone. They're difficult to get a hold of. I'll get him for you."

"Well, okay," said McEwan, raising his eyebrows insistently, creasing his forehead into three deep parallel ridges. She thought he must make that face a lot. "But we need to see him
today
."

"I'll bring him down, I promise. Why was it so hot in the house?"

He looked at her. "What do you mean?"

"It's not usually that hot in the house."

He nudged Inness to make a note of it and turned back to Maureen. "So Douglas had his own key?" he asked diffidently.

"Yes."

"Did you let him into your house yesterday?"

"No, the last time I saw him was on Monday. He stayed the night and left in the morning before I got up."

"Did he mention anything to you about being threatened by anyone, arguing with anyone, being followed, anything like that?"

Maureen thought back over the night's conversation. He was tired when he came in, he didn't even kiss her as he came through the door. He took his shoes off and sat on the settee telling her the usual gossip, the usual moaning appraisal of the people he worked with. Nothing different. They didn't have sex. Douglas fell asleep a minute after getting into bed and Maureen lay wide-awake next to him and watched him dribble saliva onto the pillow. They hadn't had sex for five weeks. Douglas had begun to recoil when she touched him, he rarely even kissed her now.

"Not that I remember," she said.

McEwan scribbled something in a notepad. "And that was the last time you saw him?" he said, without looking up.

"Yeah."

"Except for this morning," observed Inness unnecessarily.

"Yeah," said Maureen, puzzled by his crassness. "Except for this morning."

"Now," said McEwan, "when you found the body this morning did you touch anything?"

Maureen thought about it. "No," she said.

"Did you go into the living room before you phoned us?"

"No."

"Did you go into the hall cupboard?"