Driftnet Page 6

  So, she thought, there was another job where you got to examine as much semen as you liked. And definitely better paid.

  Chrissy pulled her jacket tighter across her chest and stuck her hands in her pockets. Late May or not, it was cold out here. She decided she would give the guy five more minutes then she was off. Easy money or not.

  When he appeared round the side of the building, he nodded at her to walk beside him and took off down a side street. The street lamps were coming on, glossy red against the grey night. Chrissy tried to keep up with him, but he was walking fast and she was always a step behind. His collar was up, his hands in his pockets too. It seemed this way of walking was compulsory round here.

  It was funny meeting Neil MacGregor, here of all places. Chrissy hadn’t seen him since school, or since he last went to school. And that had been a long time ago. She had been a year ahead of him in Secondary, but she knew him. Everyone did. He was the bane of his form teacher’s life, she remembered. Poor Miss Smith had spent a lot of time trying to get him to come back to school, but she hadn’t succeeded. Then he disappeared from home too. Chrissy’s mum said his father had thrown him out of the house.

  ‘In here,’ Neil said.

  The close door was off its hinges, slammed back against the wall. There was dog dirt on the step and he pushed her out of the way of it and nodded to her to follow him up the stairs. The stair lights weren’t working and Chrissy had to hold onto the banister and keep looking up, where faint street light seeped in through the cupola. His place was on the third floor and when he opened the door they were both relieved to get inside.

  The front door opened on to a small hall which led into a long room with a window at the end. Chrissy expected the room to be a mess and was embarrassed to find she was wrong. There was a double bed at one end. The wall nearest the door held a couch (sloping slightly), a chair, a telly and a stereo. It was better than the room she had at home, she thought.

  He locked the door behind her and Chrissy had a sudden thought that she was stupid coming in here with him, alone. But when he turned to face her, he had that same old grin on his face, as full of cheek as ever.

  ‘Funny,’ he said, taking off his jacket and hanging it on a peg at the back of the door. ‘I always wanted to shag Chrissy McInsh. All the time we went to school together.’

  ‘I was the only one you didn’t shag.’

  He laughed. It was true. Everybody, except Chrissy and Miss Smith. Even Chrissy’s pal Irene succumbed in the end. Irene thought she could change Neil, just like Miss Smith. But she was wrong. No one could change Neil. Chrissy wondered if the teacher had known that all the girls fancied Neil.

  ‘Still as tight-arsed as ever?’ Neil was asking.

  ‘Aye.’

  He laughed and nodded at her to sit down on the sloping couch. Then he went through to the kitchen that led off the living room and brought back two glasses.

  ‘Vodka?’ he said.

  ‘And orange?’

  ‘Get fucked!’

  ‘Not by you,’ Chrissy said firmly.

  Neil laughed again and unbuttoned his shirt and Chrissy saw the weals on his neck. His hand followed her eyes and he rubbed at the healing skin.

  ‘Fucking old queer,’ he said sitting down beside her. Somewhere below them the left leg of the couch slid nearer the floor. ‘Funny eh?’ he said. ‘I used to be the one doing the shagging.’ He threw back the glass and let the clear liquid slide down his throat.

  Chrissy waited until he finished then said, ‘I need to speak to you, about Patrick.’

  Neil looked at her curiously. ‘You mean your brother. The big one with the brains?’

  Chrissy nodded.

  Neil got up and went back into the kitchen and came out with his glass filled again.

  ‘Lucky night,’ he said, toasting her. ‘Better than that Buckfast piss anyway.’

  He sat down again and pulled out a cigarette packet and offered her one. She shook her head.

  ‘Always were a good wee Fenian lassie.’

  ‘You were an altar boy,’ Chrissy reminded him.

  ‘Aye.’ Neil blew smoke at the ceiling. ‘It was Father Riley that taught me all I needed to know in that wee back room of his,’ he laughed again, bitterly this time and looked at Chrissy to see if he had shocked her.

  Chrissy was past being shocked. She hadn’t been allowed in the back room of the chapel with or without Father Riley. It seemed being a good wee Catholic girl had had its blessings after all.

  ‘Somebody’s blackmailing Patrick,’ she said.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘He’s gay.’

  ‘Fucking stupid word,’ Neil said. ‘None of the ones I meet are any fun. Just queer. So what do you want me to do?’

  ‘I want to know who it is.’

  ‘And you think I can find out, being in the business myself, you mean?’

  Chrissy didn’t know how to answer that one so she kept her mouth shut. Neil looked at her shrewdly.

  ‘Got any money?’ he asked.

  She took out the hundred she’d taken from the cashline machine.

  ‘A picture?’

  He took Patrick’s picture from her and the money and then leaned back on the tipping couch and took a long draw at the cigarette.

  ‘It’s not a crime to be gay, you know.’

  She gave him a look that said it all.

  ‘Oh I see, once a Catholic always a Catholic. Eh, Chrissy?’

  ‘I don’t care about all that. It’s his job at the Catholic school. If the Marist brothers found out about this, he would have to leave and my dad and my brothers… they hate that sort of thing. If my dad finds out Patrick’s gay, he’ll ban him from the house and my mum wouldn’t get to see him.’

  ‘Happy families, eh? Did you bring the note?’

  She took the note from her pocket and handed it over.

  He read it and whistled.

  ‘Patrick hasn’t seen it,’ she said. ‘It came to the house and my mother opened it. I told her it was just somebody jealous of Patrick.’

  ‘Your big brother’s running with the wrong people, Chrissy. He wants to get a nice steady boyfriend.’

  ‘Don’t.’

  ‘Okay. If I get you a name what are you going to do then?’

  She shook her head because she didn’t know. All she wanted at the moment was a name. That was enough.

  Neil looked at his watch, then got up and went to the door. ‘You’d better go now, unless you’ve changed your mind about that shag.’

  Chrissy handed him the lab phone number.

  ‘I know where you work,’ Neil said, stuffing the bit of paper in his pocket. ‘I’ve seen you from the park.’

  When Chrissy reached the street, it had started to spit. She stopped and fastened her jacket and turned her collar up. A big car was parked along the road under a street lamp, its soft velvet grey touched with drops of rain. When she reached the corner she turned to see Neil open the back door of the car and slip inside.

  Neil MacGregor had lived along the road from Chrissy until his father finally chucked him out of the house for good. His father was a wide boy himself and there wasn’t room for two wide boys in the same house. Mrs MacGregor had enough on her hands looking after one.

  Neil’s father liked a wee drink. A wee drink taken frequently and especially on a Thursday night when half the population of the street was in the pub while the other half were at the bingo; or in Chrissy’s mother case at something in the chapel.

  If ever a man was prayed for, Chrissy thought, it was her father.

  Chrissy’s mother called Neil a wee toe-rag, but there was something about him that would ‘get him a jeely piece at any door’.

  When Neil’s big brother joined the parachute regiment and was sent to Belfast, Neil’s mother and Chrissy’s mother had their own line of candles in the chapel for him. It didn’t stop him being killed, his stomach blown out and splattered on a woman with a pram who was walking by. Neil’s father
liked a wee drink even more after that and Mrs MacGregor lost sight of Neil in her endless trips to the chapel.

  Chrissy laid her face against the bus window and watched the drops of rain skid off in annoyance. Neil hadn’t changed much. The dark hair and blue eyes (shanty Irish her mother used to call him), and the grin that, in another city, might have made him a movie star.

  The bus began to crawl up through St George’s Cross and onto Maryhill Road. On the right a block of flats loomed out of the rain.

  Chrissy and Patrick had been two of the few on her street ‘to make good’, outside the ones that joined the army. Chrissy’s three other brothers existed on handouts from her, Patrick and the State. Sometimes she thought they were the lucky ones. If she hadn’t been giving away so much of her wages she could have moved into a flat of her own and she would have been headed there now instead of sitting on the bus back to Maryhill.

  Chrissy knocked her head against the window. If there was one thing she’d learned in chapel, it was to suffer in silence. Father Riley had taught the weans that well. Even Neil had kept his mouth shut. Old Riley was gone now. Not to a better place but to an old folks home for retired priests. Not much chance of a wee fuck in the back room there.

  When the bus stopped at the terminus, Chrissy sat until everyone else got out. She didn’t want to walk along with anyone and have to talk. She needed time to rehearse her speech to her mother about how the letter about Patrick was all bullshit (she’d have to find another word for that because she wasn’t allowed to swear, even in a house that had heard the word ‘fuck’ more often than the Pope said his prayers). Patrick was seeing a girl, that’s what she would tell her mother. She’d met her, and he was even talking about bringing her up to the house soon. Her name was Teresa, so she must be one of us. If Chrissy got it right her mother could miss her candle-lighting trip tonight and maybe even sit down with a wee sherry and watch the telly.

  Convincing her brothers, Chrissy knew, would be another matter.

  Chapter 9

  Sean was gone. All that remained was the clatter of his feet on the stairs, the bang of the outside door and the retreating hum of the taxi. Rhona stood silently in a room that still echoed with his anger.

  ‘This is stupid, Rhona. First you’re not going, then you’re going, then you’re not going. What the fuck is going on?’

  ‘I don’t want to go, that’s all.’ She knew she sounded unreasonable.

  ‘But you told Chrissy you were going. You took time off to go.’

  ‘I’ve changed my mind.’

  ‘Why?’

  She didn’t answer. Couldn’t answer.

  ‘If it’s about the woman in the Art Gallery…’

  She didn’t want to talk about her so she interrupted. ‘I can’t leave the lab. We haven’t finished the murder tests yet.’

  ‘Fuck the murder tests.’ He came towards her.

  ‘Don’t!’

  ‘Don’t what Rhona?’

  ‘Don’t touch me!’

  He stopped in his tracks and the look he gave her froze her chest. She hadn’t meant to say it like that. She didn’t want him to touch her because it would make her go with him and she couldn’t go and she couldn’t tell him why.

  She had never seen him angry before. He turned from her and headed for the door.

  ‘Sean,’ her voice was a whisper.

  His was cold, remote. ‘I’ll phone you when I know where I’m staying,’

  She had nodded, unable to argue any more. Now she felt suddenly bereft. She didn’t want him to go like that, didn’t want him to go at all. She wanted him here. She wanted to tell him what was really wrong. Tell him about this nightmare. Let him talk sense into her. But that would mean revealing herself. And she couldn’t do that. Not now. Perhaps not ever.

  Her heart was drumming in her chest. The cat dropped from the back of the couch and wrapped itself around her legs, miaowing. She bent to stroke its head and its neck stretched to run with her hand.

  As usual, everything important has been left unsaid, she told herself. She had simply created more ghosts between them.

  Sean hadn’t believed her excuses about the tests. He knew she was lying. They weren’t short-staffed any more either. Tony was back from his holiday in Mexico. In fact it was something Tony said that had given her the idea, that she might pretend to go to Paris with Sean.

  ‘I agree with Chrissy,’ he’d told her. ‘You look like shit.’

  ‘Thanks Tony.’

  ‘You need a break. Go with lover-boy to Paris, have endless sex and leave me to run this lab the way I want. For a week at least.’

  So she’d agreed. She told Chrissy she would go. She even went out with her after work on Thursday to buy new underwear for the trip.

  But it was all a lie.

  She had lied to Sean, made him think she was going. Until the last minute. The cruelty of her actions frightened her. She made excuses, saying to herself, if he could see another woman on the quiet, she could keep the truth from him.

  Rhona switched on the gas fire, sat down on the couch, picked up a cushion and hugged it to her. The cat jumped up lightly and rubbed itself against the cushion, manoeuvring it into shape before it plopped down on top. Rhona stroked the velvety ears and the purring settled into a pleasant drone that began to calm her. If she had tried to tell Sean about the nightmares, she thought, she would have to explain why the boy’s death haunted her. He had been with her long enough to know that dealing with death was not normally a problem for her. She would have had to tell him about Liam. And she had never told anyone about Liam.

  So she phoned the number the hospital had given her. A woman answered. Sensing her reluctance to speak and the likelihood that the phone would be put down, the woman suggested calling in to talk things over with a counsellor. Rhona made an appointment.

  When the time came, she’d managed to find a million reasons why she couldn’t go. Instead, she waited for an evening when Sean was playing at the jazz club, and phoned Edward at home. She explained about the murder and the birthmark and told him she had to know what had happened to their son.

  The silence at the other end was as deep as the chasm between them. Edward cleared his throat. He didn’t think that would be wise but, and here he interrupted her angry reply, if she insisted on this line of action, there was someone he knew who might help. Rhona must agree to say nothing about any of this to anyone, not even her Irishman.

  And she had agreed.

  ‘I’ll phone you back,’ Edward said.

  ‘When?’

  ‘I don’t know. Sometime this week. And Rhona? If you’re not in, I’m not leaving a message about this on an ansaphone.’

  ‘You won’t need to. I’ll be here.’

  So she told Chrissy and Tony she was taking the week off to go to Paris with Sean and she told Sean she couldn’t go with him because she was too busy at work.

  Rhona moved the protesting cat from her stomach and reached for the remote. She switched the television on, flicking through channels until she found the early evening news. She sat impatiently through the usual political headlines, then at last the announcer stated that there would now follow an appeal by the mother of the Glasgow murder victim. Flanked by two Detectives and surrounded by newspaper men, sat a small, dark-haired woman. A woman who looked nothing like the murdered boy.

  Rhona leaned back on the couch while the camera moved in, as if it needed to be closer to hear her whispered words, so close that Rhona could see the red swollen eyes, the skin sagging with distress. The woman became suddenly aware of the camera and drew herself up, taking a deep breath, she began.

  My son has been murdered. Her voice pierced Rhona’s heart. He has been murdered by a madman. A madman who preys on boys. My son was a clever boy. A boy with a future. I loved him. Please help the police find Jamie’s killer. If you have children you will understand. Her voice began to falter. Please, please tell the police anything that might help, before this madman kills ag
ain… The words petered out and the camera moved aside, as if embarrassed by so much grief.

  Now it was the turn of the policeman on her right.

  Bill looked exhausted but he was as professional and cogent as ever. He evenly explained that the murder victim, James Fenton was a student of Computing Science at Glasgow University. A quiet hard working student, who kept himself to himself. The police had in their possession a curtain that had been spread beneath his body. It was their belief that the murderer had left in a hurry and that he would otherwise have taken this curtain with him. Someone might recognise it.

  The camera swung to the left. After the greyness of grief, the bright swirling colours of the curtain dazzled Rhona’s eyes.

  Rhona spent the next day sifting through forensic journals for articles she had promised herself to read. She went out briefly for fresh milk and bread and hurried back, worried that Edward might phone in her absence. But it was Sean who phoned first. He always sounded more Irish on the phone, as if distance marked out who he was more clearly.

  There was an awkward silence, then he told her he would be staying on for a second week.

  ‘Why?’ she asked, her voice small.

  ‘The guy I’m filling in for has met a rich divorcee in Florida.’ He was trying to joke, cover the awkwardness. ‘He doesn’t want to leave yet. So,’ he said, and she could hear the caution in his voice, ‘you could come out the second week.’

  ‘Sean…’

  ‘I’m sleeping on someone’s couch at the moment but I could get us a hotel room. I’m off during the day. Springtime in Paris and all that.’ He was waiting for an answer.

  ‘I’m not sure.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘I mean I’ll need to check with work.’ Silence.

  He gave her a number.

  ‘You can try my mobile or this number.’

  ‘Is that where you’re staying?’

  ‘No it’s the club.’

  ‘Right.’

  The call ended as badly as it began. As she hung up, the thought crossed Rhona’s mind that Sean was not used to being turned down.

  After tea Rhona put on a video and sat down with a glass of wine. The cat resumed its favourite perch on her lap. The phone rang at nine o’clock. It was Edward.