Crime (16 page)

Following the grandad’s release, the first thing you did was phone George Marsden and tell him the situation. — Quite, George had crisply retorted.

Perhaps some of this smugness had transmitted to you. The scent of failure hung in the air that evening, as your Serious Crimes team trooped wearily into Bert’s Bar. You weren’t aware of an
I-told-you-so
look coming off your face, but couldn’t absolutely swear it wasn’t there. In the bar tension built like a bonfire all night until Ally Notman slurred, — He’s a fuckin nonce. He would’ve done.

— He’s a bag of shite but he’s no a child killer and it would have meant impunity for the real one, you’d sniped back. One or two heads around the table nodded. Most refused to make eye contact with you. You were isolated, and not for the first or the last time, for the crime of not taking part.

The following evening, as you were leaving Police HQ following another lonely night of searching through records, statements and video recordings, a silver-haired figure in a coat shuffled through the automatic doors and approached you. — You okay? your boss asked.

— I’m sorry, Bob. We’ve nothing. Zilch, you said. It was the first time you’d seen Bob Toal since the Ronnie Hamil connection had proved a dead end. Now your boss looked as worn out as you felt.

— Keep at it, Toal nodded, and his shoulder punch, the paternal blow of the football coach, was enough to relaunch you back into the thin darkness of a chilly Edinburgh night.

You felt utterly useless. The cop as Popperian philosopher: disproving every hypothesis your department came out with. As the next few days rolled by, you empathised with the boss. The pension was so close, and Toal wanted to get to the finishing line unscathed. A blaming culture always came to the fore in any police department in which a big case seemed to be going nowhere. Those were the rules. They were operating in a tight financial environment. Cost-cutting measures were already planned. There would be a disciplinary hearing. Charges of gross negligence made. Summary dismissal. The only issue was how far down the line the buck would be passed.

Dissenting voices were starting to be heard. A comprehensive investigation appeared on the
Independent
’s front page. It raised doubts about the strength of the case against Robert Ellis, affirming your belief that a multiple murderer was on the loose. But pressure from Toal compelled you to keep on at Angela Hamil and the men in her life.

— There’s fuckin shite gaun oan here, she’s covering for some cunt, Toal had said, his Morningside accent thickening to Tollcross, showing you a different set of possibilities for your gaffer. Somebody who, perhaps in other circumstances, could have been a villain. — Ride her hard, Ray, he had said. — I’ve seen it before with weak women like that. They become mesmerised, dominated by some bad bastard. Find out who he is!

So like the rest of Serious Crimes, you became obsessed with Angela’s sex life. Openly scoffing at her in an incredulous manner when she said she ‘never brought men back to the house because of the bairns’. Knowing the woman would be too broken to challenge you. You hated her passivity, saw yourself – felt yourself – becoming a bully, perhaps like many of the other men in her life, but unable to stop. You wormed one name out of her, a Graham Cornell, who worked at the Scottish Office. He was described as ‘just a friend’.

A couple of days later you’d gone back to the office at Serious Crimes and studied the dreaded whiteboard again. After a while Ally Notman invited you for a drink. When you stepped into Bert’s Bar, they were all there. It was a set-up. Relaxed at first, then Gillman and Notman started the ball rolling. — It’s him. Cornell, they harmonised.

It was the cue for Harrower and McCaig to join the chorus. You’re our boy. Our leader. The boss. Don’t let us down. He’s making cunts of us all.

And part of it chimed with you. Because there was something about this man. But then you spoke to Cornell on Halloween evening. You caught him about to leave his flat, dressed in a red costume with horns and a forked tail. Even discounting this attire, Graham Cornell’s bearing announced him as transparently gay. To your mind it was ludicrous to think he’d snatch a female child. But for some of the boys, like Gillman, gay equalled pervert, equalled nonce. You could stick them on as many equal-ops training courses as you liked, but the algebra, long formed, couldn’t be totally encrypted, and was always waiting to return. It came back with a vengeance in the fatigued, desperate group, sweating under the strip lights in that small office, burning their eyes on computer
screens
, knocking on doors asking the same questions over and over again. You feared that you were the only one privy to the collective psychosis that had them all in its clenched fist. They would fall silent whenever Drummond, the lone female officer on the team, entered the room. Even Notman, who was living with her.

Your response to the voices jabbering at you was to engage with your own increasingly urgent naggings. One bleak early-November afternoon, a train took you over the border to Newcastle. Then, a short taxi ride and you were in a dilapidated tavern in that city’s West End, where, as a Scottish cop, you felt safe enough to score your first grams of cocaine in over four years.

And you needed it like the rest seemed to need Cornell. It couldn’t be admitted that a multiple child murderer was on the loose. The myriad legal and police careers that had been built on Robert Ellis’s arrest and prosecution would be for ever tarnished. And a hated figure would be living the rest of his life in the Bahamas at the taxpayer’s expense. The groupthink of the bureaucratic organisation went into destructive overdrive: Cornell was the man. And in your own way, you did the same.

Day Three

8

Everything But the Girl

TRUDI LOWE SITS
in the hotel room, ostensibly watching the television, but immersed in the recounting of incidents, from their ‘last life’, as she habitually refers to it. Years ago, when he’d shown up the self-hating drunk, using crass, fabricated outrage as a crude shield against his own guilt. She knew where he’d been. They’d argued about his behaviour and he’d shouted, — You haven’t got a clue what the fuck guys are like, have you?

Now the last life has come back.
And I thought he’d changed
. That putrid cliché slithers south into her chest, as a voice sneers back from inside her head:
you fuckin mug
.

But the rage that brims somehow refuses to overflow. She’s got up to pace around, looks outside. Her anger is stronger seated. So she’s fallen into the chair again and feels the poison flow through her.

Clean when they’d got back together, he’d blamed it all on the cocaine. And NA seemed to work for him. Their new life together felt like a genuine renaissance. They went to the gym, attended French classes, watched movies, enjoyed vigorous sex, engaged in camping and hillwalking expeditions. His job was always there, but he seemed to be treating it as just that: a job, albeit a particularly intrusive and demanding one. But then the drinking started again. He blamed the horrible case of the murdered little girl, and there was obviously his father and the subsequent estrangement from his family. But whatever the causes, the drink was there and would lead to cocaine, and that would lead to other women. And then they’d be finished.

You haven’t got a clue what the fuck guys are like
. In the empty hotel room, that hurtful proclamation from the past resonates more acutely than ever. But her dad isn’t like that, and she recalls her
child’s
gloved hand in his, waiting in the queue for the cinema on Tollcross’s blue-grey streets. Can envision it so clearly, his younger self, his scent, that when she stops she feels a dissonance like she’s reincarnated into the body of a future descendant. And his own father was a kind and decent man. Trying to stop herself picking nervously at the skin around her manicured nails, all Trudi can think is: they are supposed to be here to
make love
. To get their sex life back on track. She is hormonal and premenstrual, and she needs him. And he’s gone.

She knows his contempt for her career and, thinking of that bundle of services that gives the country its pulse, suddenly finds a way of converting all the anger that has paralysed her into energy. It propels her down to the bar, but it’s empty and she doesn’t stay, stepping out on to the street. Walking for a bit, she entertains the vague notion that she can do anything he can, but isn’t inclined to patronise the local hostelries, raucous with beery, obnoxious males; there seems no acceptable category between boorish youth and sleazy middle age. On Lincoln Avenue, she is becoming more acutely conscious of her solitary status, when the vivid colours of the artwork on display in a gallery window beckon her inside. The place is almost empty. The originals are expensive but she can see a mounted print that’s reasonable. She lingers at it, wonders if Ray would like it. Probably not. Thinks that might be a reason to buy it. Then he approaches her.

Noises in his head, as a white ceiling comes into focus through one eye. The other is held shut by gummy secretions. He rubs at it; feels the springs of an old couch prong his back. A throw pulled over him. He had unravelled in the night and achieved a kind of exhausted peace. The events of last night gatecrash into his head.
You’ve fucked up again
, keens in self-flogging mantra. The sunshine bursts through the old yellow lace of the curtains as the neuralgia stabs the inside of his skull.

Trudi
.

The noises. The television. Pulls himself up into a sitting position. Sees the kid, Tianna, lying on the floor, watching the box
and
drinking from a can of Pepsi. Tries to stand. Manages it. Stretches and yawns. Looks down at the girl.

She is locked on the telly, but had been watching him in his sleep. His face contorted, like he was still fighting, but in his dreams. His snoring so loud, she’d needed to turn up the volume. But she’d also wanted to waken him. To figure him out.

— Where is everybody? Lennox asks as he registers the glass from the broken coffee table. He recalls trying to tidy it up, but there are still plenty of shards around.

Fuck sake, the kid’s barefoot
.

Lying prone on the rug, watching the television, the girl wears a pair of blue shorts and a yellow tank top. Some kind of rash: red, angry burns on one shin. She doesn’t even turn round as her right leg beats out a rhythm on her left. It’s like he scarcely exists. Doesn’t exist or is always there, Lennox wonders. — Where’s Robyn?

— Dunno. Tianna sits up. Swivels round. Her top has BITCH emblazoned on it in gold glittering letters. She regards him briefly, before pivoting back to recumbency by the box.

She isn’t a kid you can take to, Lennox thinks. He wanders around the apartment. It’s empty. He shrugs to an invisible audience and makes for the door. Stops. He can’t leave her alone like that, not without finding out when Robyn will be back. That creepy shitbag might come along again.

He considers Trudi. Will she be worried about him? Possibly. Probably. Once she’d calmed down, would she not think: ‘Where’s Ray?’ Lennox finds it nigh on impossible to conceive of anybody missing him.

But of course she would. She’s his fiancée. He’s been ill. Is ill.

I’ve stayed out all night. What the fuck have I done?

I have the pussy, I make the rules. Jesus fuck Almighty
.

No. Trudi would be hurt. She may even have gone home, got a flight back to Edinburgh, perhaps telling his family – what’s left of it – that he’s had another breakdown. Maybe the police are looking for him! Or she might possibly be with Ginger and Dolores.

But he can’t leave the girl here alone.

It isn’t right. Her mother is
…

— Do you get left on your own often? Lennox asks the supine figure as he starts to pick up the rest of the glass. The table as fragmented as last night in his mind. His head pulses like a wasp’s nest. Nasal cavities and throat stung raw.

— Dunno, she shrugs.

— When’s your mum due back?

— Like
you
care? she says, and he almost reacts, but as well as reprimand her tones carry a smidgen of enquiry.

So he gives up with the glass and sits back on the couch. He feels like leaving. But what if they’d gone on to another party and forgotten about her? You take enough coke, you can forget about anybody and anything. And Robyn looked like she took enough coke. An empty cigarette packet on the floor: it makes him miserable.

He rises and goes into the kitchen. There’s some beers left in the fridge, cans of Miller. How he wants one. Just one. But it isn’t right to drink it in front of the kid. It isn’t right because that’s what they all did. They lumbered to the fridge, every guy that had ever come into her mother’s apartment, at all hours. He could see them. Trace that path from the couch like a biologist would a bear’s salmon-fishing route. He wants to show her that it isn’t normal. Not taken as given that a kid would see guy after guy come into her home, into her life, with beer on his breath. Cause if she thinks it is normal then she will grow up and be with guys who have beer on their breath all day, every day. And guys who have beery breath all day, every day, they’re bad news to women. What else can they ever be?

What else?

So Ray Lennox makes himself a cup of coffee and he waits.

And waits.

Minutes stretch into quarter-hour blocks, pulling piano-wire nerves to their tensile limit then swiftly contracting, letting a sharp fatigue leak in pulses from his brain into his sinuses and eyes. Each of these temporal blocks resembles a stretch of ocean and he feels like a manacled, oar-pulling slave in the bowels of
a
coffin ship trying to cross its choppy expanse. Penance for the drink and drugs, their playful uncoupling of time and space last night. Thoughts of strategy come slowly and tentatively.

He should call Trudi. Feels the plastic room key in his pocket. She has a duplicate. A separate card with the address. She’ll be fast asleep. It’s still early: the digital clock says 8:33. Maybe she won’t thank him. What can he do? There is no excuse. That’s what she’ll tell him.
No excuse for that kind of behaviour
. What excuses can you make? He has reasons, but at what point do they stop becoming excuses?