But Maureen knew there had to be more to it. "Did he feed you while you were there?"
Elizabeth reached out a bruised hand and held Maureen's wrist, looking at her watch. She gestured towards the door. "We should go."
"It was a vicious thing to do, Elizabeth. She had four kids."
"Well, I was out. At the doctor's." Even Elizabeth was having trouble believing in a doctor's appointment that lasted several hours. She blinked, looked at the floor, blinked again and looked back.
"Ye can't have been out for all of it," said Maureen. "It must have gone on for hours."
Elizabeth gave it some thought but the terrible cold was driving through her muscles like frozen needles, cracking her bones. "There was a queue," she said feebly.
"There was a queue?" repeated Maureen, her high voice pushing the battered rings of cartilage against the bruised muscles, sending a searing pain through her neck.
Elizabeth knew how stupid it sounded but she wasn't used to being talked to, or listened to, or taking responsibility. She played with her glass, running her finger down the side and around the rim. She lifted it and drank deep into it, looking for blindness and peace. Maureen knew that if she tried to make Elizabeth admit her part she'd never find out what had happened. She tried again.
"So, when you came back from the doctor's, did ye see what happened to Ann at the end?"
"Oh, I was in then." She sat forward. "That was Tarn. Tarn did that at the end. He kicked her."
"Where did he kick her?"
She pointed to her face. "In the chin. She was lying on the floor and he kicked her. She held his leg, held on while he kicked her with his other foot." She looked away wistfully. "She was hitting his leg, little pats, you know, like, slapping him, over and over, while he kicked her. I thought that was brave of her, hitting back. Can we go now?"
Maureen thought back to the missing flooring and shuddered when she remembered the grainy texture of the damp leather settee. "Who did he get to put Ann in the mattress?"
"A fat bloke and a bloke called Andy."
Maureen drained her drink. "Let's go to the bank."
The butch barmaid watched them leave, sadder than she had been before, certain she'd be watching the cheeky Scottish girl die inch by inch over the coming months and years.
Elizabeth was shaking so intensely that she had to sit on a chair at the side while Maureen went to the counter. The queue was long, busy with shop managers depositing end-of-day bags of small change and office workers paying their bills. Maureen looked over at her. The white lights in the bank glinted off her sweaty face. Elizabeth gathered her hair with her shaking hands, twisted it into a rope at the front and threw it over her shoulder, keeping her eyes down like Maureen did when she was dying, concentrating on breathing in and breathing out. Maureen looked away and followed the rest of the line, shuffling forward. She needed to get to the airport, she needed some cash herself for a cab.
She thought of Ann with her split lip and her battered fanny, coming to London to give herself up gladly for her kids. But Ann fought back at the last, refusing to go gently, a dying woman with burned feet and cuts on her legs and a fractured skull, hitting back as she was kicked in the face. Maureen wanted to fight back before it was too late, before her head was broken. She thought about Winnie playing cards, crying because she was sober, of Elizabeth running into the pub with her straggly fanny on display – hedonistic casualties.
The clerk made no secret of his skepticism. He didn't think a bedraggled woman like Maureen could take out six hundred quid. He read carefully as Maureen's account details came up on-screen and watched as Maureen typed in the PIN number. He asked her how she wanted it.
"Any way."
Elizabeth was excited and on her feet. She watched the wad of notes with cloudy, absent eyes and Maureen recognized the tranquilizing calm of anticipation. Elizabeth took the money, shoving it deep into her pocket, plugging the hole in her soul with the readies, and her panic evaporated. She stood up tall and straight, flinching slightly at muscle pains, flicking her hair back over her shoulders again. She knew she'd done a bad thing. "You won't tell anyone, will you?" she said, quite casual.
But Maureen couldn't lie to her. "Don't kill yourself with that money."
"Please don't tell," she whispered close. "Frank doesn't know I was there. He'll be really angry. I'm only a little fish." She dipped her chin down again and looked up. At best she had stood by while the rest, as vicious as frightened children, had ripped and burned Ann to death.
"Don't worry," said Maureen. "I won't tell Frank."
When they got outside Elizabeth said good-bye and walked quickly away, melting into the crowd. Maureen watched her skinny shoulders swaying, her hair roped and tucked into her sweatshirt, and she felt exhausted. It was so pedestrian. She didn't have the sense of having met with something evil. It was so normal, so within the scope of what she knew. She couldn't set herself apart from Elizabeth or from the crowd of greedy users, helping themselves as a mother of four bled to death on the settee.
Maureen lit a fag, inhaling with her tongue flicking over the cut in her cheek. She wanted to tell someone who couldn't have done this, seen this, heard this without feeling different and separate. The police. She wanted to tell the police.
"Excuse me." She stopped a man and could see him taking in the bruises on her neck and the smell of whiskey on her breath. "Could you tell me if there's a police station around here?"
"Yes, dear," he said, "down there, under the bridge, third on your right. Canterbury Crescent." His accent was African and his yellow and brown eyes were sad and sorry for her. Maureen looked down the street towards the bridge. "You want me to take you there?" he asked.
"No," said Maureen, laughing as if it were nothing, as if she'd lost her poodle. "I'm – I can find it okay."
She was beyond the bridge when her mind settled. She couldn't walk into a police station and give her name. If she went in and said she'd found a gang of murderers, they wouldn't let her go home with Liam, they'd keep her there for hours. If she didn't leave London now she would never get home, and Douglas's money wouldn't last forever. She knew her place here, next to Elizabeth and the men on the pavement, afraid like them, floating for years, another fun-seeker picking at scabs on the back of her knee. She turned up Electric Avenue, following the railway arches back to Coldharbour Lane and the phone boxes outside the Angel. She went into a newsagent's for a ten-quid phone card.
"Maureen," Martha whined reproachfully, "he was so worried about you. He's gone to the airport. He didn't have your pager number with him and he was counting on you being there."
"What time's the plane?"
"It's at seven thirty. You'd better set off now if you're going to get there on time."
"Cheers, Martha," said Maureen, because she couldn't bring herself to thank her properly, and hung up.
Hugh McAskill wasn't at his desk. The man who answered the phone wandered away to look for him. Maureen listened down the line to some men laughing and people walking past, watching as two and a half quid ticked away on the crystal display. The man came back over to Hugh's desk; she could hear him sniffing and chatting to someone near the phone. It took him twenty pence to pick up the receiver again. "Sorry about the delay," he said. "He's left the office for the day. Can I help?"
"Well," said Maureen, speaking fast, "someone I was drinking with has just confessed to witnessing a crime and I don't know what to do about it."
"Whereabouts are ye?"
"In London."
"Did the crime happen in London?"
"Yeah."
"Well"-the man sounded completely uninterested-"you're through to the wrong division anyway. Have ye tried the Crimestoppers hotline? Or the City Police? Or what about the Metropolitan Police?"
"Okay," she said, surprised by his cavalier lack of concern. "Well, thanks anyway."