An index finger like a rod of iron extended from his uncle’s fist and jabbed into his nephew’s chest. His eyes were wild and he leaned in close, so that Mackenzie could smell the whisky on his breath and see the spittle gathering on his lips. ‘Don’t you speak to me like that you little runt. Time you got your fucking facts straight.’
‘Arthur, don’t!’ Mackenzie could hear the fear in his aunt’s voice, but there was no strength in it, and her husband would ignore her as he always did.
‘No one ever disavowed you of the crap you were told about your dad. Don’t tell him the truth, they said, it could scar him for life. So we didn’t. All this fucking time, and we let you go on believing what a hero he was, just in case you might be damaged by it.’ He couldn’t hide his scorn. ‘Well, you’re a big boy now, sonny. Big enough to handle the truth, I’d say. How about you?’
For once in his life Mackenzie found himself suddenly at a loss for words. A sick sense of dread began to weigh like lead in his gut, then slowly suffused his entire being like a fast-acting poison. It robbed him of his ability to speak.
‘Please Arthur...’ A pleading in his aunt’s voice now, but there would be no stopping him. The dam which had held back the bile for all these years was finally bursting. The finger stabbed into Mackenzie’s chest in time to the rhythm of his uncle’s anger, which had now achieved an oddly lyrical cadence. ‘You think he was a hero, eh? A brave man risking his life to try and save that poor fucking woman?’ He sucked in air to fuel his fury. ‘Well, there’s nothing brave about suicide, sonny. That’s the coward’s way out.’
A noise like tinnitus filled the teenager’s head, trying to drown out the words. But still, above it, he heard the wail that escaped his aunt’s lips, a strangely feral sound.
‘He screwed up, your dad. Disobeyed a direct order. Because, of course, he knew better. Like he always fucking did. Went charging in to try and rescue her, only to get her killed.’ He was breathing stertorously now, as if he had just sprinted the length of a football pitch to score a goal. ‘Some hero, eh? It was in all the fucking papers. And everyone knew he was my brother. You wouldn’t believe the shit I got at school. And then he goes and makes it worse. Cos, being your dad, he couldn’t stand it that he was wrong. That he had fucked up. So he took a rope, tied one end around his neck and the other around the top rail of the stairwell, and jumped off.’
Mackenzie stood, eyes blazing, tears blurring vision. Anger, fear, disbelief, pain, all filling the chaotic space that was his mind. He lashed out, knocking his uncle’s fist away and pushed him hard in the chest with both hands. Big man though he was, his uncle staggered back. ‘You’re a liar!’ Mackenzie screamed at him. ‘You’re only trying to hurt me.’
‘Nothing hurts quite as much as the truth, sonny,’ his uncle said, and he seemed suddenly calm again, anger replaced by triumph.
The teenage Mackenzie lunged for the umbrella stand and pulled out Mr Kane, holding it by the capped end, and swinging the onyx handle at his uncle’s head. He heard his aunt scream as her husband drew back in alarm, and the handle buried itself in the wall. His uncle snatched it from him, and Mackenzie prepared himself to be on its receiving end, as he had been many times before. But his Uncle Arthur just stood, clutching it in his white-knuckled hand, and screamed, ‘Get out of my fucking house, you little bastard.’
The words reverberated through Mackenzie’s memory as he sat on the bed and saw his seventeen-year-old self climbing up through the hatch to stuff whatever clothes he could grab into his sports holdall. They were the last moments he had spent in this room until his return today, twenty years later. The hurt had never gone away, even though he had learned to sublimate it, locking it up in the darkest recesses of his mind, in those places that everyone keeps for hiding their demons.
The last sight he had of his aunt was caught in a backward glance as he slammed the front door behind him, a fleeting glimpse of the tears that wet her cheeks. He had never seen her again, until watching her coffin today as it slipped through the curtain towards the flames.
His first stop before buying a one-way ticket to London at Glasgow Central railway station had been the cuttings library of the Glasgow Herald. It took very little time, searching the archive, to find the report on the suicide of a Glasgow police officer found hanging by the neck in the stairwell of his tenement home in Partick. He had gone almost straight to it, because he knew that his father’s death had fallen just two days before his thirty-first birthday. Without making a direct connection, the single-column piece referred to his attempt the previous month to rescue a woman taken hostage by an escapee from a psychiatric prison in Lanarkshire.
Flicking back through the editions of the paper, he had found the original report. The police officer concerned, unnamed in this story, had defied orders to await the arrival of an expert in hostage situations, deeming the threat to the woman’s life imminent. His attempt to rescue her, at the risk of his own life, had failed. Her captor had slit her throat with a butcher’s knife, so forcefully that he had very nearly decapitated her.
Mackenzie rose stiffly from his old bed and knew that there would be very little sleep for him tonight. He opened the Velux window in the slope of the ceiling and looked down into a back garden grown wild with neglect. It had once, he remembered, been his Aunt Hilda’s pride and joy. Hours spent weeding borders, planting annuals, pruning her precious roses. And it only occurred to him now that all that time spent in her garden was her way of escaping from Arthur.
An odd sound rose up from the house below, like a muffled cough, repetitive and raw. Curiosity got the better of him and Mackenzie climbed carefully down the ladders into the gloom of the hall. The light outside was fading.
But it wasn’t until he pushed open the kitchen door and saw the old man seated at the table, head in hands, that he realized it was sobbing he had heard. A painful retching sob that tore itself with involuntary regularity from his uncle’s chest.
Mackenzie stood watching him impassively for several long moments before the old man became aware of his presence. He turned red-rimmed eyes towards his nephew and swallowed to catch his breath. He said, in a voice like torn sandpaper, ‘I don’t... I can’t...’ He sucked in a trembling breath. ‘I don’t know how I can go on without her.’
Chapter Eight
It’s a hot one. The words of Santana’s ‘Smooth’ reverberated around Cleland’s head like an earworm. And he tried to stay cool just like in the song. But it was hard in the olid airless space of this armoured truck. He wore a pair of freshly pressed linen trousers and a crisp white shirt, brought to his cell first thing that morning by his abogado before they transferred him to the truck. He had showered, shampooed and deodorized, determined to look and feel his best. But already his thick, blond-streaked brown hair had fallen across a forehead beaded by sweat. He felt a trickle of it run down the back of his neck.
If he could, he would have held his breath. Neither of the armed Guardia who sat with him in the back of the truck had showered this morning, of that he was certain. The stink of stale body odour and last night’s garlic filled the air. But he tried hard to remain impassive, keeping his own counsel.
He could feel the smooth surface of the AP7 motorway beneath the tyres. They had not yet, he knew, reached Marbella, a town classier than most along this stretch of coast. The Cannes of the costas, he had heard it called. It was here, and in Puerto Banus, that he shopped for his clothes in the best boutiques, where he bought his wines in the most discerning stores — Priorat a favourite, a Catalan wine rarely available in this southern part of Spain, its grapes cultivated in a unique terroir of black slate and quartz soil many kilometres to the north.