The Road to Hell (15 page)

A Cairn terrier came into the room and immediately sprang up on to the man’s lap, getting a couple of affectionate pats on its rump as it settled down.

‘Can you tell us anything else about her?’

‘Like what?’ he asked, his eyes fixed on the screen again.

‘Well, what she looked like, what she sounded like, that kind of thing?’

‘That was a bloody foul!’ he shouted, gesticulating wildly. ‘Has the ref no eyes in his heid? Yellow card, ref. Come on, book him! The wee cheat took a dive!’

‘The woman?’ Alice began again.

‘Aye,’ he answered, briefly coming to as if from a dream and looking at her. ‘I cannae mind what she looked like. No’ bonny, that’s for sure. I knew when I phoned
yous but I’ve forgotten now. She was old, middle-aged anyway, and she had that big red blot on her cheek. And I can tell you one other thing for free – she stank.’

‘Of?’ DC Cairns asked excitedly, pressing the bridge of her glasses onto her nose.

‘She’d peed herself, what d’you think? Perfume?’

‘Her voice,’ Alice said. ‘Did she have any sort of accent that you recognised? Was she Scottish, for example, English, Irish or whatever?’

‘She didnae sound a bit like you do, hen, that’s for sure. Proper, you’d call it, maybe? Right posh or English, I’d say. No, she talked like me. Scottish.’

He hesitated for a second, then hit his fist on the arm of his chair, screaming, ‘Red card, this time! It should be a red card now. Get him off the park, ref, right now!’

Startled by the blow, the dog, its tail now between its legs, looked up at its master and then launched itself onto the floor. Once there, it scuttled behind its mistress’s legs for
shelter, whining from the safety of its hiding place.

‘Are there any regulars on that route? Any passengers whose names you know?’

‘What d’you mean?’ the man asked, unable to take his eyes off the screen. A penalty was about to be taken and he was hunched forward, tense, mentally readying himself to take
the kick.

‘Aye,’ his wife answered, looking first at him and then at the two police officers. ‘He’s mentioned them to me. There’s a pair of twins always get off at the same
stop, right at the end of Morningside. Done it for years. He calls them –’ she hesitated, trying to remember, ‘the something or others . . . Derek, what d’you call
them?’ She folded her paper tidily on her lap.

‘Who?’

‘They twins – you know, the ones who dress the same. What’s their name?’

No answer was forthcoming.

‘Derek,’ she said crossly, ‘what’s their name?’

‘Aaaw, Jesus!’ her husband sighed, his head now in his hands. ‘Why d’you let that plonker take it! An open goal and he’s nowhere near it . . . send him back to
Czechoslovakia or wherever you bought him from! What a tosser!’

‘The name, Derek,’ his wife insisted.

‘Eh . . .’ the man said, coming to again as the final whistle was blown, ‘. . . Fitz. The Miss Fitz. The misfits, see?’

‘That’s their name – Fitz?’ his wife chipped in, trying to help.

‘Aye. They’re no’ though.’

‘Not what?’ DC Cairns asked.

‘Fit – if you get my drift.’

He laughed, stretched his arms above his head, jubilant at his team’s win and now relaxed and prepared to talk. ‘She was trouble, that one. A barefaced troublemaker, if you know what
I mean. When I told her to get off, she showed me her ticket as if it entitled her to stay – she stayed sitting, never even apologised. Said she couldn’t help it.’

‘What did you do?’

‘I tore the ticket up in front of her face. Into wee pieces and dropped the bits onto the floor. I can put anyone I want off my bus, for cheek, violence, anything. I’m allowed,
it’s my bus.’

‘Where was her ticket for?’

‘Eh . . . I’m not sure. I think it was Fairmileheid. But I couldn’t swear it.’

‘Anything else you can remember about her?’ Alice inquired.

‘Like?’

‘Anything at all.’

‘No.’

‘What about the flowers?’ his wife prompted, picking up the dog and cuddling it.

‘What about them?’

‘He gave me flowers, in cellophane. Pretended they were from him, didn’t you, Derek? Is it coming back to you now? But I seen the ticket. He said they were from Lisa’s but they
weren’t, they were from Flora’s Flowers. He didn’t even know what they were. Eventually I got it out of him, didn’t I, Derek?’

By way of reply the man shrugged his shoulders, grinning widely.

‘The woman had left them on the bus . . . that’s right, isn’t it, Derek?’

Alice first became aware of a new, strange sensation, a prickling feeling at the back of her neck, as she was hurrying down Leith Street on her way home. She looked behind her,
suddenly convinced that someone was following her, watching her. She was sure of it. Rain was falling hard about her, smashing onto the pavements and overflowing the gutters, pouring out of the
black sky.

She glanced back up the street again, searching for the person, but everybody seemed to be on the move, desperate to reach shelter. Her wet hair fell over her eyes and she shook her head,
instinctively trying to shed the water and see better. But it was useless, and with the rain still cascading down, her vision became blurred once more.

To cap it all, as she waited to cross the east end of York Place, she was suddenly deluged with water. A pool had collected by the pedestrian crossing, deep enough to overflow onto the pavement,
and a bus ploughed through it at speed, careless of the nearby pedestrians, soaking them, leaving only waves in the brown puddle where it had passed. Among the sharp intakes of breath from the
other people at the crossing, she cursed angrily and out loud.

Again she turned round, still trying to see who was following her. The other pedestrians were now crossing the road, rushing to take advantage of the green man. In seconds she was the only one
on the pavement. She wiped her eyes, and then scrutinised the streets in all directions, but no one stood out. All the shoppers, students, traffic wardens, commuters, schoolchildren and others
appeared to be on the move, striding purposely towards some destination or other. Nobody was standing still, mirroring her movements or lack of them, waiting to take a cue from her before moving
on. It must be all in her head, she decided, an overheated fancy, her imagination working overtime. Stress could, she knew, play strange games with the mind.

But the odd physical sensation would not go away, and it felt real enough. She turned to look behind her several more times as she made her way down the hill, unable to shake off the conviction
that someone was tailing her. Her body would not lie. Deliberately taking a diagonal course across the mouth of Broughton Place she thought, for a second, that she had caught a glimpse of a man
stopping for a moment to watch her. But when she turned round to get a proper look at him he had gone, merged into one of the small groups of people still braving the downpour. It was ridiculous,
she told herself, this fear – childish, irrational and unjustified.

She looked up at the windows of her flat and, seeing them unlit, thought for a single second that Ian must still be busy in his studio. Then it came back to her, how things were, that she was on
her own. Glancing up Broughton Street for a final time, she pushed open the door of the tenement.

When Muriel Fitz opened the front door of the spotless villa in Nile Grove that she shared with her twin sister, the smell of boiling marmalade billowed out like a sweet cloud.
Warning Alice what to expect, she led her into the kitchen. There, the other twin, Margaret, the youngest of the pair by ten minutes, was perched on a three-legged stool, scooping out the insides
of Seville oranges into a large pan. On the stainless steel hob, the mixture was bubbling and frothing like hot lava.

‘We’ll have to carry on, I’m afraid, as we’re mid-boil. I hope that’s all right with you, officer?’ Muriel said in her brittle Morningside accent. Showing
Alice to a chair, she immediately re-armed herself with a wooden spoon and dipped it experimentally into the brew. Both women were dressed in fawn cashmere polo-neck jerseys and matching fawn
flannel slacks, and to protect their good clothes each wore an oilcloth pinny, tied tight at the waist. A large railway clock ticked in the background, its pendulum swinging steadily below it. In
the heat, the sisters’ cheeks had reddened and Muriel had her long, straight grey hair scraped back into a neat ponytail. Margaret had elected to cover her head with a floral shower cap, a
few thin wisps of her fringe escaping from it.

‘On the phone, Miss Fitz, you told me that you remembered the woman I described?’ Alice said, watching them as they rhythmically dipped their spoons into the softened pulp and dug it
out. She had no idea which of them she had spoken to earlier or, for that matter, which of them would answer her now.

‘We do. We certainly do. She was a memorable individual,’ Muriel replied, and Margaret looked up briefly, nodding her head to communicate her agreement with her sister’s
comment.

‘Can you tell me what you remember about her?’

Muriel caught Margaret’s eye, and seconds later and as if something had been decided between them, she began to speak.

‘She appeared to be – how can I put this politely?’ She hesitated. ‘Deranged. Wandered.’

‘Or drunk,’ Margaret added, gathering a handful of the hollowed-out orange skins together and beginning to slice them up with an oversized butcher’s knife.

‘Yes – or intoxicated,’ her sister conceded, looking at Margaret and remarking, ‘not too coarse, mind. We don’t like huge bits, do we?’

‘No, but I don’t like it like Golden Shred either,’ Margaret replied, continuing to slice exactly as before.

‘How did she behave?’ Alice asked, enjoying the smell of bitter orange from the boiled pith and peel.

‘Not well,’ Muriel began, her wooden spoon now raised like a conductor’s baton. ‘First of all she was talking to herself. Weeping away, too. Muttering incessantly to
herself. She seemed to think . . .’

‘That someone wanted to sit next to her!’ Margaret chipped in delightedly, finishing her sister’s sentence and banging her knife heavily on the chopping-board for emphasis.

‘Margaret!’ Muriel said coldly, gesticulating with her spoon, ‘I thought we’d agreed –’

Her sister nodded, and a contrite expression passed fleetingly across her flushed face.

‘As if anyone would choose to sit beside
her
! She was sobbing to herself, making awful faces at anyone who came near her. Growling, once, like a tiger or a lion, or a madwoman, when
she thought someone was going to sit next to her. People were moving away from her seat in droves. We certainly did. And . . .’

‘And,’ Margaret said, standing up, unable to restrain herself any longer in her excitement, ‘imagine. She called the bus driver “a twit”!’

‘A twat, actually,’ Muriel corrected her, nudging the final batch of pulp off the chopping board and into the steaming pan.

‘Twit. Twat. It’s all the same,’ Margaret shot back peevishly, seated once more, her knife pointing at her sister.

‘I think, dear, that you’ll find it’s not,’ Muriel replied, adding menacingly ‘and we agreed, didn’t we, who would speak?’

‘Why,’ Alice intervened, ignoring their bickering, ‘did she call him a twit or a twat or whatever it was?’

‘A twat. Because,’ Muriel replied, ‘he had braked sharply and we were all thrown about the bus. At the lights at Holy Corner, he misjudged them badly. You know what those
drivers are like, careless, in a word, slapdash. Everyone was flung about like so many sacks of potatoes, and she banged into the seat in front. Most likely she got a whiplash.’

‘In front,’ Margaret repeated, nodding her head excitedly.

‘Anything else about her that either of you remember?’

‘To be frank, and we began by sitting directly behind her, she was a bit . . . high? Unwashed, if you know what I mean. She was drinking something or other while she was actually on the
bus. I couldn’t see what it was. Cheap sherry, I daresay. Lost all self-respect, I expect. Living homelessly in the Grassmarket or wherever those sort of people live nowadays. Of course,
it’s come up a lot lately, hasn’t it?’

‘I saw what it was!’ Margaret said, giving her twin a smug glance.

‘You did not!’

‘I did, really, dear, I did. When we were moving, after she’d banged into the seat in front, I saw her empties. It was beer or lager, you know, that sort of Tennent’s stuff in
tins. There were three or four empty ones, lying beside her on her seat.’

‘If you say so,’ Muriel replied, sounding unconvinced.

‘You have my word.’

‘Whereabouts did she get off the bus?’ Alice asked.

The sisters eyed each other and, having reached another unspoken agreement, Margaret replied breathlessly, ‘No, she did not. She did not get off the bus. Well, not voluntarily, at least.
She was forced off it!’

‘Why?’

‘Because . . . because . . .’ Margaret paused for a moment, searching for the right expression, ‘she’d spent a penny . . . right there, on the bus seat! We’d
already moved after she called the driver a twit, but you couldn’t miss it. The driver, “Redface”, we call him . . .’ she hesitated once more, like a timid child checking
the policewoman’s reaction to their nickname, ‘Redface manhandled her off the bus.’