Marnie Bruce walked slowly up Oxford Street in the autumn dark, late October starting to tip towards bleak November. The air was damp and heavy with the hint of fog splintering the light from the street lamps and cars and buses into brilliant shards. The shops were closed but the shop window displays cast bright patches of light on the pavement, slicked with damp.
Waves of people swept past her so that she felt almost buffeted in their wake, people who had homes to go to or friends to see or plans for theatres or restaurants or parties, people who weren’t walking huddled round the misery inside which felt like a great sharp stone, weighing you down and cutting into you at the same time.
She wasn’t sure why she’d come here, just that it was somewhere to go, and she glanced aimlessly into the windows of the shops she passed: clothes she couldn’t afford, gadgets she didn’t want, souvenirs of a London that bore no relation to the city she lived in. And skull masks, plastic skeletons, witches’ hats, bats on nylon strings, swooping across under green and orange light.
Halloween next week. October 31st, All Hallows’ Eve. Her mother would never let her celebrate it, and after what happened the one time Marnie had, she didn’t like it either: the Day of the Dead, when restless souls stirred from their sleep, awakening heedless mortals to their duty of memory.
Marnie needed no reminder. She never forgot anything. That was the problem.
‘You’re freaking me out!’ he cries suddenly. He’s putting his hands up to cover his face, groaning. ‘I can’t take this any more. It’s doing my head in.’
She is still high on the satisfaction of being right, sitting across from him in the tiny rented flat above a Chinese takeaway that they’ve made so nice. They keep it nice too; she hates mess.
‘What do you mean?’ She is feeling the adrenaline ebbing away. ‘Don’t be stupid, Gary. It’s just an argument, that’s all.’
‘Oh no,’ he says bitterly. ‘It’s not an argument. It’s a demolition job.’
‘Gary, it’s just that you said you’d told me yesterday that you were going to be late and you didn’t, and I—’
‘Yes, you played me back the whole evening, every sodding word. You know how people talk about CCTV cameras spying on them in the street? Try living with one.’
She’s beginning to feel panicky, as if someone has put a hand round her throat. ‘Sorry, Gary, sorry! I won’t do it again—’
She has to stop another clip starting to run in her head, the one when they’re out in the park and she’s saying, ‘Sorry, Gary, I won’t do it again.’ There are others waiting to follow; she talks over them fiercely.
‘I know I’ve said it before—’
He gives a harsh laugh. ‘Yes, you would, wouldn’t you? I expect you can tell me every single time, with a description of where we were and what I was wearing and what the weather was like. The thing is you can’t help it, no matter what you say.’
She’s crying now. ‘It’s a disability, Gary. You wouldn’t blame me if I couldn’t walk, or if I was blind.’
He looks down at her – he’s tall, Gary, and not specially hot or anything, but she thinks he’s nice-looking with brown eyes and a kind smile. He isn’t smiling now.
‘It wouldn’t be weird if you were in a wheelchair or you couldn’t see. I’ve tried, but this is getting to me so it’s messing with my brain. I’m sorry, girl.’
And then Gary had been lost, like everything else, including the little flat she loved possibly even more than she’d loved Gary. It had been a proper home, a place where she belonged. She’d never felt she belonged, before.
She couldn’t afford to stay on, not on her wages, and she felt upset all the time, looking around knowing she’d have to leave. So tonight she had walked out too. Gary could settle up with the landlord. He wanted this; she didn’t.
She hadn’t cried. It was pointless, crying. If your mother disappeared when you were eleven and you went into something that was unconvincingly called a home, then if when you were sixteen even that support was removed and you were all on your own, you knew that the only thing crying did was give you sore eyes to add to your problems.
Instead you just tried to shut out everything you had the option to forget and took the misery inside you and carried it around like a stone in your heart until its weight began to seem normal. One day, though, as more and more miseries were added, there would be one that brought you to your knees. It could be this one.
Marnie didn’t know where she was going to spend the night. In one of the darker doorways she passed there was what looked like a heap of rags, but then she caught the glint of the woman’s dark eyes and long, dark, greasy hair; she had a baby shawled up to her and she held out her hand, saying something in a language Marnie didn’t understand.
She fumbled for her purse and found a pound coin. It wasn’t true charity; it was to make a clear separation between herself and someone like this, to banish the thought that this was the sort of someone Marnie might become now the ground had shifted from under her feet.
There was no reason to get spooked by it. For the moment, at least, she was all right. She had money and money was safety. She had a decent enough job waitressing and sharing with Gary had meant she’d even been able to save a little bit. If she headed across into North London, where she could walk to work, she’d find cheap lodgings, just a room somewhere. Save on bus fares.
If she walked there now, at the end of it she’d be tired so she might sleep instead of having to watch their last argument, like a bad movie, all night. It was the curse she couldn’t escape, the curse that even the shrink she’d been referred to couldn’t lift. She’d stormed out, feeling like a freak show when he told her eagerly that she was going to be the subject of a paper he was writing.
Marnie walked on, with purpose now, but still glancing at the windows as she passed. A travel agent’s display stopped her short.
A VisitScotland poster: she recognised that picture, knew the soaring arches and the intricate trefoil windows. The Chapter House, Glenluce Abbey, it said under the picture. It took her back, and for a few minutes she wrestled pointlessly with the intrusive memory.
They walk in, giggling and pushing. It’s a day out of school, so that’s cool, but Miss Purdy their class teacher is seriously uncool so they’re mucking about. The teaching assistant is taking charge now, though, and Gemma nudges her to shut up.
He’s got a squint but she’s not going to mention it because her friend fancies him and she doesn’t want to argue with Gemma. He’s boring on now about how there were monks and stuff and it’s mostly a ruin. But then they go into this building, and she’s blown away.
He uses the word ‘elegant’. She’s only heard it about people before, and not very often, but she takes it in. It’s like cool, only more. And this place is so elegant it makes her hurt inside when she looks at it: the white walls and the cleanness and the emptiness and the arches that spring upwards and cross each other and then fall like a sort of stone fountain.
That’s how she wants everything to be and when she gets home she yells at Mum because somehow she can’t bear that everything is messy, but when Mum yells back that she could tidy her room, somehow the beautiful whiteness splinters and disappears and she just sort of forgets about it.
Until now, when it had been prompted to reappear in high definition. Enough! Sometimes, if she pinched her arm really hard … Yes, success, this time.
The photograph prompted an odd sort of hunger, a feeling that her senses had been starved for years living in the city. Here in the damp murk she remembered clear fresh air, sparkling water and low green hills under a wide, wide sky – should she go back there, back to Scotland?
She had left the place as soon as she could. London is the answer for a million runaway Scots kids, and she’d had a bit of luck for once. The man who spotted her at Euston wasn’t a pimp, he was a decent man with daughters of his own. He’d got her a job in a café and she’d never been out of work since.
After a while there had been Gary, but she couldn’t even hope now that he’d come back because she knew he wouldn’t. The future was a blank sheet and no one could fill it in but herself.
Maybe it was time to confront the demons whose presence she had long ago taught herself to ignore. She could be in Scotland by tomorrow, ask the questions she’d suppressed all her life, since that night …
She’s going to have to keep well out of her mother’s way, just stick her head round the sitting-room door to say she’s home—
No, no, no! She began to run, in the direction of Euston, London’s Scottish gateway. Sometimes physical effort helped, but this time it was inexorable, flooding back in its relentless, pointless detail.
… She and Gemma had necked a couple of lagers and with Mum like she was, anyway, she could go mental. Mum’s not in the sitting room, though, and so she drops her hat and mask onto one of the chairs …
The big kitchen, fitted out in the sort of farmhouse style which no genuine farmhouse has ever aspired to, was ringing with excited squeals as a heavily treacled scone swung from the pulley, with dramatic effect on the eager small boy’s face, T-shirt and ultimately hands as he made increasingly frantic efforts to snatch a bite.
‘No, no! We told you, Mikey – no hands!’ his grandfather instructed, holding them behind the child’s back and getting covered with the sticky stuff himself as a result. ‘Gemma, haven’t you taught your child to play by the rules? Look at this!’ Laughing, he held out his hands and went over to the Belfast sink to wash them.
‘Come on, Dad, he’s only three!’ his daughter protested, smiling as her mother held the string still so that Mikey, who was showing signs of frustration, could get at the scone.
Michael Morrison turned round drying his hands. ‘Looks to me as if dooking for apples should be next on the agenda. Head right down under the water, Mikey, old chap – that’s the best way.’
Gemma watched with an affectionate smile. The traditional Scottish Halloween was dying and Mikey would probably never even remember his grandparents’ party for him. They’d gone to so much trouble, with the orange and black balloons and a turnip lantern with a carrot for the nose and green counters for eyes and matchstick teeth in the grinning mouth. She’d just have to watch that he didn’t swallow any of the foil-wrapped coins in the champit tatties he’d have with his tea. And even though it was such a miserable night, Dad was determined to set off the rather expensive fireworks he’d got in – nothing was too good for his little namesake.
What would she have done without Dad this past year, after Fergus vanished along with most of their bank account? Dad had just scooped them up and made everything all right, just the way he always used to kiss her and make it all better when she was a little girl. And Mikey had never been happier, lapping up the attention from two doting grandparents.
As her mother filled a basin with water and dropped in half a dozen rosy apples, Gemma watched his dance of excitement with just a shade of sadness. He was growing so fast, and it wouldn’t be long before he preferred tacky commercialism and a skeleton outfit from Tesco. But at the moment, he was having the time of his life. Oh, she did love Halloween!
The name Marnie Bruce hadn’t crossed her mind for years and years.
There were voices outside the house. It was dark and windy and pouring with rain; in this quiet street on a night like this, why should there be voices outside in her garden? Anita Loudon, alone in the house she had lived in since her parents died, stiffened.
Then she heard the giggles. Children’s voices – oh God, Halloween! She’d managed to forget about it until now. She didn’t often achieve that.
It was too late now to put out the lights and pretend she wasn’t in. They’d ring the doorbell any minute and if she didn’t answer it there would be the festering contents of her carefully separated bins – to save the planet for their future – tipped all over her garden path to be cleared up in the morning.
When had the innocent Scottish guising become the nasty American form of blackmail that went under the name of trick-or-treat? And, of course, she had other reasons to hate Halloween, but she desperately tried not to think about those.
That was the doorbell now. Anita didn’t like giving them money but she hadn’t any of the usual cheap sweets to buy them off with, ready to distribute as she muttered under her breath, ‘I hope they rot your teeth.’
She didn’t recognise any of them as kids from the village; they’d come out here from Stranraer, probably, in the hope of better pickings. The leader of the little group on the doorstep, a skinny youth in jeans and a hoodie, had made no effort at disguise though Anita could see a ghost and a skeleton among his entourage. He looked too old to be out begging for sweets and his face brightened as she appeared with her purse. It darkened again as she handed him fifty pence and she retreated inside and shut the door before he could say anything. She waited for the sound of bins being kicked around, but they seemed to have been at least minimally satisfied.
Anita returned to the magazine she’d been leafing through, but the ‘Age-defying Tricks that Really Work’ article didn’t hold her attention. She’d tried most of them already, and they didn’t.
Now she knew it was Halloween she’d have to spend the evening trying to quell the guilt and the irrational sense of dread. If it overpowered her she’d have one of her panic attacks, when the room closed in round her and she couldn’t breathe. Another noise outside almost set her off until she realised it was just the children returning along the road.
She picked up the Daily Record she’d brought in, but she’d lost interest and started flipping over the pages with hands that still shook a little. Then she came to the centre spread and gasped as if a punch had taken her breath away.
The face looking up at her from the page, the bright child’s face that had dominated the headlines for so long, all those years ago – forty, she realised now, reading the strapline – was in the largest of the photographs. Other old-fashioned, slightly-blurred family snaps like his were spaced round about the article.
Anita always told herself it was all past, all safely forgotten. The heat in the room was suddenly stifling and she stumbled across to the window, flinging it wide even though the wind-borne rain lashed in, soaking her.
The cold air helped and at last she began to breathe more evenly She shut the window again and collapsed onto her chair, her heart still racing.
It was all right, all right, she told herself. No one had contacted her this time; it was just an off-the-cuff piece. Anita tore it in pieces and threw it in the bin.
She’d phone him tomorrow, though. Any excuse.
The sea was troubled tonight, roaring and crashing against the rocks as the storm swept in up Loch Ryan from the Irish Sea. There would be no ferries setting out to Belfast tonight.
The view from Grant Crichton’s large modern house on the loch side just between Stranraer and Cairnryan was incomparable in good weather. Tonight, though, the drawbacks to its position were apparent.
He had been sitting in the lounge with a pile of papers on the small piecrust table beside him pretending to work when he suddenly crashed his fist down, making it rock on its pedestal.
‘That damned noise! It’s driving me mad. I can’t concentrate. We’re going to have to do something about it, Denise.’
His wife looked up uneasily from the pile of glossy travel brochures she was leafing through, curled up on the deep cushions of the cream velour sofa beside the living gas fire. She was a neat, sharp-faced blonde, twenty years younger than her husband, fighting the inexorable onset of middle age with every weapon available, short of surgery; Grant had spelt out that he wouldn’t spring for that.
‘Yes, of course,’ she said. It was a dreary sound, admittedly: the drama of the waves was muted by double-glazing and interlined curtains to a low moaning but it was hardly obtrusive. What was distracting her husband wasn’t the noise. He’d been impossible all day.
Denise’s eyes flicked to a silver-framed photo on the mantelpiece showing a curly-haired little boy pulling a cheeky face for the camera. It was fading a bit but she didn’t want to suggest having it redone. Mentioning him at all, she’d learnt in her eight-year marriage, was a bad mistake, always putting Grant into one of his moods which could last for days.
Halloween, of course, was the worst. She always phoned on Halloween and he would twitch until she had. She couldn’t just phone in the morning and get it over with, could she – oh no, she would know how it preyed on her ex-husband’s mind and deliberately leave it late. The year she’d only got round to phoning at midnight Grant had needed Valium to get any sleep at all.
Denise had tried suggesting he phone her instead, but only once. He’d refused bluntly, telling her almost in so many words that this unfinished business from his first marriage was nothing to do with her. That was what he said, but she knew it was only an excuse. Despite years of experience he was clinging to the hope that this year just might be the one when Shelley forgot – as if she would, on the fortieth anniversary. That was racheting up the tension tonight.
When the phone rang at eight o’clock Grant jumped as if he had been jabbed with a pin and when it turned out to be a member of her book club handed it over to Denise with a glare.
She took the call quickly, then went back to her browsing. The sound of the sea became audible again in the quiet room and she braced herself for another outburst from Grant. When the phone rang again, they both jumped.
He picked it up, glanced at the caller ID and grimaced towards her. She nodded, then discreetly lowered her eyes to the brochure again in symbolic withdrawal. This was delicate ground for a second wife.
‘Yes, Shelley?’ he said wearily.
Denise could hear crying at the other end of the line – loud, uninhibited crying – and saw her husband’s face contort with grief, mingled with resentment that his ex-wife had managed to provoke it.
His eyes went involuntarily to the photo on the mantelpiece and they filled with tears as he snarled, ‘Yes, of course I haven’t forgotten it was today he disappeared.’ He put up his hand to rub them away. ‘You needn’t think you have the monopoly on feeling.’
Denise couldn’t hear the words being said but she could hear the voice at the other end rising towards what would in the end become a screaming match. It usually did.
She could bear it no longer. Grant was looking tired and old, running his hand through his thinning grey hair, and his jowly face was beginning to turn an unhealthy mottled purple. She slipped out of the room.
He would be angry at the end of this, very angry. Grant was a powerful man, a controlling man, and the annual reminder of his helplessness had side effects which she and everyone in his vicinity would have to suffer for days.
At times like this she seriously wondered why she had married him. It came perhaps into the category of things that had seemed like a good idea at the time. She’d been rather taken with his forcefulness at first and as forty loomed with nothing to look back on but a string of failed relationships with commitment-phobes it had looked like a no-brainer.
She hadn’t quite realised then that with his attitudes he could have co-authored The Surrendered Wife – a recent hit at the book club – but on the other hand as a hotel receptionist she wasn’t exactly pushing at the glass ceiling.
And there were always the holidays. She was still holding her pile of brochures as she went towards the kitchen. A spot of intensive brochure therapy before he and Shelley finished yelling at each other might put her in a more resilient mood when he came out looking for a dog to kick.
In the Glasgow warehouse nightclub, midnight came with a burst of smoke effect, dramatised with orange and black laser lights. The foetid atmosphere was rank with human sweat and the crush of bodies on the dance floor swayed and stamped to a relentless, mind-numbing, pounding beat.
The girl in the witch’s outfit, abbreviated in both directions, was standing at the edge to catch her breath. She was humming to the music, smiling a little vaguely, just nicely high. She was tilting back her long, white throat to drink from a bottle of water when the vampire struck.
She gave a shriek, then giggled as the man in Dracula costume, with pale make-up and a deep peak painted into the centre of his forehead, dropped his fake fangs into his hand.
‘Sorry – just, you were asking for it.’
He had to raise his voice above the din and as he grinned at her he still looked a bit wolfish, even without the fangs. He was quite buff too, with dark-blue eyes and a cleft chin, though when she looked closer she realised that under the make-up he was a lot older than she’d thought at first. Normally someone that age would never have got through the check at the doors but hey, even if old guys weren’t her style, that had been funny. She wasn’t on the pull this evening, anyway – Jezz had only gone out for a fag.
‘God, I about had a heart attack,’ she shouted. ‘You’re mental!’
‘Can’t resist—’ As she indicated that she couldn’t hear, he moved in closer and spoke in her ear. ‘Can’t resist the lure of young, virginal human flesh.’
‘Here – who’re you calling virginal?’ she protested. ‘What’s your name, anyway?’
‘Just call me Drax.’ He held out his hand. ‘Care to dance?’
The old-fashioned way he said it was quite cute. She glanced over her shoulder but there was no sign of Jezz yet so she shrugged. ‘Why not?’
He swept her close immediately, which she hadn’t bargained for. It wasn’t pleasant; she felt hot and sweaty and she could smell his sweat too. Even in the dim light she could see the trails on his make-up.
She edged a little further apart. ‘This place is pure dead brilliant. I love Halloween, don’t you?’
‘Sometimes.’ The way he said it made her feel as if a door had been slammed in her face. But he pulled her back against him, really quite roughly.
She was starting to feel uncomfortable. Jezz’s tap on her shoulder was definitely a relief.
‘Hey, babe.’ He didn’t look best pleased.
Nor did Drax. He was a couple of inches taller than Jezz and a lot broader. Scowling, he said, ‘Back off! I saw her first.’
Jezz swore at him. ‘First? You stupid or something? She’s my girl.’
Drax didn’t let go. Her heart began to race; she knew what could happen when guys got started and it didn’t do to be standing in the middle. With a violent effort she pulled herself free and evaded the grab he made at her arm.
‘I’m away home. Coming, Jezz?’
She walked off without waiting to see if he would follow and when she glanced back they were still squaring up to each other like dogs ready to fight, though neither had made the first move. She had just reached the door when Jezz caught up with her.
‘Care to tell me about it, then?’ he said, and she realised with a sinking heart that not fighting had left him with a lot of aggression going spare. She was tired and coming down from her high and the last thing she needed was one of these arguments that went on all night. Or worse.
‘Tam – good. Come in.’ DI Marjory Fleming smiled as she looked up from the particularly tedious report she was attempting to write as DS Tam MacNee appeared in her office on the fourth floor of the Galloway Constabulary headquarters in Kirkluce. It was a welcome relief from a dreary task on a dreary morning.
Though it was almost eleven o’clock the lights were still on, and it looked as if they’d be on all day. The sky was grey and heavy and the plane trees whose tops she could just see outside her window were bare skeletons, black with earlier rain. That it was only to be expected in November didn’t make it any better.
She set aside the sheets of stats she was working from and said, ‘I just wanted to tell you we’ve got a problem with one of the trials calling next week. The Fiscal’s saying there’s been intimidation of one of the witnesses.’
MacNee took the seat opposite her desk. ‘Oh aye. That’ll be big Kenny Barclay, right? Well, what did they expect? I suppose I’ll need to get round there and do a bit of intimidation myself.’
His voice sounded uncharacteristically flat and she looked at him sharply. Usually his face would have brightened at the prospect of a bit of psychological warfare, at which he was a past master; the Glasgow street-fighter might have reformed long ago but the killer instinct was still there.
Fleming noticed with a pang that his hair was more grey than brown these days and his eyes were becoming hooded. Admittedly her own chestnut crop owed more to Nice ’n Easy than to nature and it was a while since she’d chosen to linger before a mirror in a strong light, but even so …
‘Something wrong, Tam?’
MacNee put on the irritating face that men tend to put on when asked that question. ‘Wrong? Naw. Why should there be?’
‘I don’t know why there should be,’ Fleming said crisply. ‘But if you go around looking as if someone’s stolen your scone, it doesn’t take exceptional sensitivity to work out that whether or not something should be wrong, all is not bluebirds and sunshine in the world of Tam MacNee.’
He favoured her with a black look. ‘So what if there is? It’s nothing to do with my work.’
‘Can I take it that “my work” is code for “you”? But when going out to do over Kenny Barclay doesn’t produce that spark of bloodlust, I wonder how effective you’re going to be.’
Fleming waited as he thought about it, chewing his lip. She owed MacNee a lot; he had watched his protégée go past him professionally without rancour and smoothed paths for her which lesser men might have seamed with potholes. With his ‘hard man’ self-image, he was always reluctant to talk about his problems but there had been a disaster before when he’d brooded alone. She’d kept it light; would he open up?
At last he said grudgingly, ‘Oh, all right, then. It’s my dad.’
‘Ah.’ MacNee’s elderly father had been estranged from his son for many years, ending up alcoholic and homeless in a Glasgow alleyway and lucky to have survived this long, but MacNee had found him secure and comfortable lodgings and she had thought the problem had been taken care of. ‘Back on the streets, is he?’
‘If it was just that!’ MacNee gave a short laugh. ‘No – he’s getting married.’
‘Married!’ Fleming gaped. Davie MacNee must be pushing eighty and there were other reasons why she wouldn’t have described him as a catch herself. ‘Oh – is it the woman that took him in last year?’
‘Maggie? If it was Maggie I’d be breaking out the champagne. And I’m not saying it couldn’t have been, mind – she’s aye had a soft spot for the old devil.
‘That’s part of the problem – she’s jealous.’
‘Right,’ Fleming said carefully. It wouldn’t do to show unfeeling amusement about this version of the eternal triangle being played out among the Glasgow geriatric set. ‘Who’s the lucky lady, then?’
MacNee looked at her sourly. ‘It’s all right for you to laugh.’
‘I didn’t!’ she protested.
‘Oh, not right out loud, maybe, but I could hear you anyway. It’s not funny from where I’m sitting.
‘Maggie says this Gloria’s an old friend from the backstreets, another alkie, and Maggie’s beside herself because she’s drawing Davie back to his old ways when he’d got on an even keel. And she can’t be expected to go on giving him a home with the pair of them coming in roaring drunk and – well, going up to his room.’
This delicate euphemism almost undid Fleming. It was a triumph of self-control that she managed to say gravely, ‘Very difficult. What are you going to do?’
‘I’ll take suggestions. You’re not meant to have to go around breaking up unsuitable relationships when your dad’s eighty next birthday. I’m going to have to away up there now and take time off tomorrow to talk some sense into him – and meet the bride.’
That did it. Fleming began to laugh, and after a reluctant moment MacNee joined in.
‘At least you’ve realised there is a funny side,’ Fleming said at last. ‘Better out than in, you know.’
‘I couldn’t tell Bunty. She’d be all for coming up with me to help choose the wedding dress. She’s no sense, that woman.’
MacNee’s adored wife, with a heart as generous as her figure, could never see the downside of any situation. It was a characteristic which, while endearing in itself, was a source of considerable frustration to her more cynical husband.
‘She probably would,’ Fleming agreed. ‘So what are you going to do?’
MacNee groaned. ‘God knows. Like Rabbie Burns said, O wad some Pow’r the giftie gie us, To see oursels as others see us! He’s needing to see he’s looking a right tumshie.
‘Still, it’s my problem.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘I’d better look in on Kenny before I go off duty. He’s been throwing his weight around lately—’
He broke off as the phone on Fleming’s desk buzzed. As she took the call he got up, signalled that he would leave and headed towards the door.
‘Who?’ Fleming said, then, ‘Marnie Bruce? Oh – Marnie Bruce!’
Shock showed on her face. MacNee stopped dead, then turned round slowly.
‘Tell her to wait.’ Fleming put the phone down and stared at her sergeant. ‘You heard. What are we going to do about that?’