The Stone Gallows (8 page)

Like I said, shoe leather.

‘So how did you end up working in a place like this?' I asked her.

‘I just kind of drifted into it. I was homeless when I first came here, sleeping in squats and stuff like that, always cold. I ended up having a one nighter with some rich guy just so as I could have a place to sleep.

When I woke up in the morning he'd gone out, to get a loaf of bread to make toast or something. Didn't matter. I cleaned out his flat and hit the road.' She lit a cigarette. ‘I realised then and there that there was no reason for me to be cold and hungry all the time, not when I was young and good looking and not too picky.'

‘You're still young and good looking.'

She blew a plume of smoke at me. ‘Tough luck, pal, your fifteen minutes are up.'

‘So why run away in the first place?'

She shrugged. ‘Did you read the letter my dad gave you?'

I shook my head. ‘I was only hired to find you.'

She took the page out, read through it quickly before tucking it away again. ‘I just got sick of them, you know? Mum had an affair with the next door neighbour. Dad knew about it, but just let it go. You could see how miserable he was, but he just didn't have the balls to act, and all the time mum was just making a complete fool of herself.

She was talking about leaving dad, of upping sticks and going to run a bar in Ibiza, and everybody in the fucking village was laughing at her. I just got tired of the whole thing and moved on. My boyfriend was a few years older, said that we could make a go of it. I was dumb enough to believe him.'

‘Boyfriend?' I'd asked about boyfriends, but her father had been unable to tell me anything. Now I could understand why. At the time, he'd been too concerned about his wife's affair to notice what was going on in his daughter's life.

‘Yeah. The bastard ditched me a week after we got here.'

‘Sounds like a nice guy.'

‘A prince.'

‘So why didn't you go back to your parents?'

She shrugged, and in that gesture I realised that for all her adult mannerisms, she was barely more than a kid pretending to be a grown-up. ‘I figured I was old enough to look after myself.'

‘You were sixteen.'

‘Yeah, and about twice as bloody mature as my parents.'

‘They want you to go home.'

‘Why should I?'

‘Because. . . ' I wasn't sure what to say. Even though she was still young, this girl had done things most people couldn't imagine. It had changed her, making her seem not older, but more cynical. She was confusing life experience with maturity, but if I was to tell her that, she wouldn't believe me. ‘Because they're sorry.'

‘Everybody is, nowadays.'

I looked over at the fat businessman. He whispered in the ear of one of the girls at his side; a second later her hand slid underneath the table and into his lap. Her expression suggested that she would rather fondle a bucket of toads. ‘You'd prefer to stay here?'

Anther shrug. ‘The money's good.'

I nodded in the direction of the opposite table. ‘It can't be that good.'

She watched for a few seconds, her face expressionless. ‘You'd be surprised. It beats working in some call centre for six pounds an hour.'

‘Your parents love you.' I told her, feeling hopelessly old. It used to be that selling sex was the lowest one could fall, and now this girl, this child, was telling me that it was nothing more than a life-style choice.

‘They love you,' I repeated, my voice lame.

‘Stop telling me that they love me!'

The other two girls looked up briefly; the fat businessman was too busy enjoying himself. Susan lowered her voice. ‘I don't care if they love me! I don't care! I tried to talk to them, I mean really
tried
, but they didn't listen.'

‘Which is why they're sorry now.'

‘Jesus Christ, you don't get it, do you? How can I go back? How can I face my parents after this? How can I tell them that I once let a guy pee on me for two hundred pounds?'

‘You don't. Tell them what you want. They won't care. All they want is to know is that you're safe. When your dad came to hire us, we told him that you could be doing anything. We told him that you could be dead, that you could be working in a place like this. You want to know what he said?'

She nodded.

‘“It doesn't matter. She's a good kid, and a smart one. She'll do what it takes to get by.” Bonnydoon is two hundred miles away. It's not as if you're going to be running into people that you've met in Glasgow every day of the week. And the guy that paid to. . . you know. . . you think he's going to tell people what he's into? You think he's proud of the fact that he's such a weirdo that he has to pay someone to be a part of his sick little fantasy?'

Whatever I said, I felt that I wasn't going to get through to her. Still, I kept trying. ‘Look, you can sit there and pretend that you've been there, done that and bought the fucking T-shirt, but the truth is that you don't know shit. You might at the time have thought you had a good reason to leave, but you know now that's a load of crap. You know that your parents love you but, rather than admit that, you have the nerve to sit here and pretend that you're the one that's the victim in all this. Can you imagine all the worry and hurt you caused them?

Can you understand how their lives stopped the minute you went missing?'

I reached into my wallet and took out a business card and a pen, scrawling my home number onto the back before placing the card on the table in front of her. ‘Look, if you're scared about facing your parents, call me first and I'll talk to them for you.'

She just sat there, shaking her head as if by doing so she could discount everything I had said. I stood up, angry. ‘Fuck it. I said I wasn't going to tell your parents where you were, but I think I will.

Because maybe then you'll see. They'll keep looking for you. They'll come down here and ask questions, so unless you decide that you can handle it, then you're going to have to move on. But wherever you go, they're going to keep looking because, for whatever reason, they love you and will forgive anything. . .
anything
. . . you've done. You can't run forever.'

2.1

Take Control: Glasgow
operated from a small grey building on Paisley Road that had originally been a doctors' surgery. Four years ago, a new health centre had been built a couple of hundred yards away, and the doctors had lost no time in decamping to the upgraded facility.
Take
Control
lived up to their name and took control, turning the examination rooms into small offices that were ideal for one-to-one counselling. Everything – the reception area, the private rooms, the coffee bar – was painted in soothing earth tones: harvest browns and spring yellows and forest greens. Pamphlets covered every available surface in the reception area – Coping With Loss, Dealing with Depression, So You Think You Might Be Gay? As I sat in the waiting area, I flicked through something called Positively Positive, only to find it was aimed at people who had been diagnosed with HIV.

As soon as I was fit, the police had made me attend mandatory counselling sessions. They didn't help much. Most of the coppers I know would rather chew their own leg off than admit that they were having difficulty dealing with the nasty things they see in the course of the job, and the force itself is still dominated by stereotyped attitudes to mental health. Rather than talk something through, we'd rather keep it to ourselves and hope it goes away on its own. Most of us, including myself at the time, believed that the best way to deal with mental trauma was to buy it a drink. To actually admit we needed help not only defined us as headcases but could actively harm our careers.

The counselling ended when I quit the police force. It was scary. In a few short months I had lost nearly everything. I had been reviled in the media, and when I walked down the street I could feel people staring and talking about me from behind cupped hands. I was completely alone, a social pariah. The worst incident was when an elderly woman spat on me while I was queuing to pay for a loaf of bread in my local supermarket. She grabbed my arm, told me that she had something to say to me, and unloaded right in my face. I just stood there, her saliva on my cheek, saying nothing as she told everybody what I had done. There was nothing I could say; everything she said was technically true. I had been driving too fast. I had mown down a mother and child. In the end I dropped my basket of groceries and walked home.

That night, I tried to commit suicide.

At best, it was a fairly Mickey Mouse attempt. I drank half a bottle of Bushmills and munched my way through a box of paracetamol, also taking a pathetically small chunk out of my left wrist with a blunt kitchen knife. Then I got scared and staggered to the nearest A & E unit, where I was given an activated charcoal drink to neutralise the effects of the paracetamol. I spent three days taking up space in an acute medical ward before being discharged with a referral to my G.P., who in turn suggested a weekly session at
Take Control
.

That was nearly four months ago.

Nobody – not even Joe, my boss – knew about the suicide attempt.

When he gave me the job as his assistant, he made it clear from the start that he expected me to be sober, shaved and in a clean suit, on time and keen. Had he known just how unstable I was, he might not have been so forthcoming with the offer. As it turned out, the work helped me get back on a reasonably even keel in a way that the booze, anti-depressants and therapy hadn't.

3.1.

Monday morning. The most hated day of the working week. I was hoping for peace and quiet, but it wasn't going to happen. The first thing I heard upon arriving at the office was a tirade of invective.

‘Goddam shit-bastard piece of bloody plastic crap!'

Joe, my boss. What he lacked in vocabulary he made up in enthusiasm. I winced as an ominous clattering sound came from the direction of his office. ‘Fucking useless waste of money!'

I cautiously approached the open door. ‘Joe?'

‘I can't get this piece of crap to give me Stuart Lilley's phone number.'

I stepped into the room. The “piece of crap” was actually a new Blackberry that his wife Becky had given to him for his fifty-fifth birthday. Given that Joe had the technical ability of a panda wearing boxing gloves, I hadn't figured out if she had meant it to be a joke. I'd given him a bottle of fifteen year old scotch, and he'd definitely had little trouble figuring out how to use that.

He smacked the BlackBerry off the edge of his desk. ‘Fuck sake!'

‘Stop hitting it!'

‘The bloody thing doesn't work!'

‘Neither would you if I smacked you off the side of your desk like that.' I took the seat opposite and held out my hand. ‘You've probably broken it by now.'

He passed over the offending item. ‘I only tapped it,' he said sullenly. ‘Besides, I never wanted the bloody thing in the first place.

You can't break an old-fashioned diary.'

‘How true.' I probed the screen. It wasn't broken, or at least, didn't appear to be. ‘What's your code?'

‘Code?'

‘Entry code. So that only you can access it.' His face was blank. ‘To prevent your private information falling into the hands of the dark forces of the night.'

‘The dark. . . Cameron, I don't know anything about a bloody access code!'

‘Did Becky give you anything with it?'

Grumbling, he fished around in his pocket, eventually coming up with a small booklet and passing it over. The operating instructions.

‘Joe. . . '

‘What?'

‘Did you even look at these?'

‘Becky said it was easy to use.'

‘Not that easy.' I tried to come up with an appropriate metaphor, failed completely. Joe was instant death to anything with a microchip, with an uncanny ability to make computers crash just by looking at them. Christ knew what Becky had been thinking. I showed the booklet to him. ‘See?'

Written across the front cover in heavy black pen was ‘Access code: 6960.' I recognised the hand-writing as that of Joe's wife.

He had the grace to look slightly sheepish. ‘That's Becky's birthday.'

I used it to enter the system and retrieve the required phone number, scribbling it down on a scrap of paper. ‘Joe, just one question. If you don't know how to use it, how come all your phone numbers managed to get in it in the first place?'

‘Becky did it,' Joe said, not so much an admission as an accusation.

‘She copied them out of my diary.'

‘Do you still have the diary?'

He nodded.

‘Then maybe you should just use that instead.' I stood up. ‘I'm going to make a coffee. Want one?'

‘Oh, God, yes, please.'

3.2.

The kitchen was the size of a shoebox, but it was all that we needed.

As I waited for the kettle to boil, I spooned instant into two mugs – the Partick Thistle one for Joe and the British Superbikes one for me.

The office was the smallest suite on the seventh floor of a city centre block. It comprised four rooms – a main reception area, Joe's office, the kitchen, and a tiny bathroom. When I wasn't out in the field, I hung out in the reception area, doing whatever it was Joe needed of me – answering phones, computer searches, typing general correspondence. I guess you could call me a secretary.

The phone started ringing. I walked the three inches from the kitchen to my desk and picked it up. ‘Banks Investigations.'

The woman had one of those breathy, little-girl voices that were fine on nineteen-fifties movie starlets but don't really cut it in the real world. She sounded muffled, like she was cradling the receiver between her shoulder and her chin, watching her nail polish dry while a Pekinese yapped around her ankles. ‘Is that Mr Banks?'