"There could be a lot of reasons for that. Isn't it a bad neighborhood?"
"Anyway," Maureen said weakly, "Ella was recovering and then I miss a day's visiting and she's dead, of a heart attack, and no one can tell me why a fit old lady would pop off during visiting times in a hospital when her son's there."
Mr. Goldfarb sat back in his chair and tried to smile.
"Did you know his business is going down the tubes?"
"No, no. McGerty's retiring. That's why they're dissolving."
"Isn't it more usual for the other partner to take over when someone retires?"
"Only if they have the money to buy them out. It's not always the way." He waited for her to say something else he could disagree with. "Basically," he said, "there's no evidence of anything, then?"
Leslie and Kilty agreed with him but rather than say that they looked at their hands or at the floor. Mr. Goldfarb chose the glass ceiling, a peach color now that the sun was setting. He looked at Kilty. "Why would you bother with all of this?" It sounded like an argument they'd had a hundred times before.
"Because it's not fair," said Kilty firmly, and pressed her lips together.
Mr. Goldfarb rustled his paper, his expensive cigar dozing off in the ashtray. It was time to leave. Maureen stood up. "Well, thanks for the offer of a drink, anyway," she said.
"I'll tell you something about Si McGee," he said, patting his paper with a flat hand, crumpling the pages. "He's a good man and gives a lot of money to charities." He shook a reproachful finger at the three girls. "More money than you'll ever earn." He seemed to think that their earning a low wage was an affront. "He has pumped money into Eastern Europe, into a scheme to give students, girls like you three, the chance to study in this country. Young people with a future can come over here and extend their education to better themselves, make something of themselves. And he never talks about it, doesn't want it widely known. He gives generously and does so as a modest man should. I don't want any of you blabbing about this."
The three of them were still.
"How do you know that, Dad?"
Mr. Goldfarb was oblivious to the implications of what he had said. "Because he needed a letter of recommendation to the Polish government by a national before he could set up offices there."
Kilty's eyes bulged. "You used your dual nationality and wrote the letter?" she said quietly.
Mr. Goldfarb nodded, and Leslie and Maureen looked at each other. McGee was importing women from Poland. Mr. Goldfarb picked up his cigar and relit it with a slim gold lighter. He looked at Kilty from behind a flaming stub.
"Dad," said Kilty, standing up and handing him the rest of the paper, "you should read more than the business section."
Chapter 35
It was a warm, still morning. Leslie wasn't well again and didn't feel up to driving the van. The bus pushed through the stagnant yellow air and headed up Springburn hill. Splatters of milky Sunday-morning vomit punctuated the pavement and greedy pigeons picked out the best lumps. It was approaching lunchtime and people were stirring, coming to the shopping center for hangover cures of Irn Bru and fresh rolls, to the newsagent's for Sunday papers and cigarettes.
Springburn Cross was an ugly place without scale; high flats jostled with higher flats on the hill, all looking down to the low-level shopping center and the railway station. Across the valley, ringing the summit of a little hill, a circle of white prefabs with pale blue roofs watched the valley like a defensive encampment.
As they stepped off the bus Maureen and Leslie saw an angry woman across the road pushing a baby stroller, the child inside wearing pajamas. The woman was old before her time, baggy-eyed with thin brown hair hanging loosely about her shoulders. She had a pale blue homemade tattoo, a Charles Manson cross between her eyebrows. "D'ye think she did that herself?" murmured Maureen.
"Ye'd think she'd have the wit to grow a fringe if she didn't," said Leslie.
Without meaning to they had slept the night in the front room again, keeping Kilty with them, afraid to let her go home alone. They tried reassuring her, saying that her father clearly didn't understand what he had done, that they didn't even know for sure whether McGee was trafficking women. She was silent most of the night, watching Maureen and Leslie talk, glancing occasionally at the television but mostly just sitting on the floor, looking out of the window and smoking their duty-frees. She didn't want to join Maureen in a very big drink and was still quiet when she left this morning to get ready for her now reluctant date with Josh.
Maureen had fallen asleep feeling slightly high: if she was right about McGee and everyone else was wrong, maybe she was right about what to do about Michael. Maybe Doyle would make it all right and she'd walk away from it unscathed. This morning she was feeling secretly excited, hoping they'd find evidence against Si. She was betting her soul on whatever Maddie said.
Maureen and Leslie followed the road past the shopping center and around to the side of the station. The hill was steep and they were both damp by the time they stopped outside the Holy Cross community hall, across the road from a disused, blackened kirk. The complex of rooms centered on a gravel square with a concrete slab path running around it. Two plain women waited outside on the steps, one in a navy blue summer dress with short sleeves, the other in a white blouse and peach skirt. As Maureen and Leslie approached, the women turned and their faces fell a little: Maureen smelled of stale drink, and they both looked tired and crumpled.
"Hello," said Maureen, ignoring the implied snub, taking an outstretched hand and shaking it. "I'm Maureen."
Leslie took the other hand. "Hiya," she said, and pumped the hand. "We're looking for Maddie?"
"Inside," said the summer dress.
The small room was unadorned and empty, apart from a couple of microphones on a raised stage and about twenty chairs set out in rows in front of it. An elderly black woman sat alone one row back from the front, dressed in an overcoat and matching hat with her handbag on her knee. A spindly young man was tuning up his electric guitar at the side of the stage and another man was standing in front of three adoring women, chatting and nodding, blinking slowly and holding photocopied sheets of paper. He saw them and broke away from the group, coming over with his hand outstretched, his eyes contracting in a practiced smile that hid everything beneath. "Hi," he said, closing his eyes like a smug cat as he shook their hands. "I'm Jack Gibb. I'm the pastor. I lead the services around here, not that that makes me anything – anyone." He had a Sheffield accent. It had escaped neither Maureen's nor Leslie's attention that, despite thinning brown hair on top, Jack Gibb had a scrawny wee ponytail. Alone, neither would have objected ferociously to it but in their collective consciousness a ponytail on a man was the greatest fashion crime of all.
"We're looking for a girl called Maddie who comes here," said Leslie stiffly, trying not to look at Maureen.
"Has she spoken to you?" said Jack Gibb, pastor and nobody. "About the church?"
"Oh," said Maureen, "no, not really, it was a separate thing."
Jack wasn't pleased but he nodded none the less. He pointed them to a small underweight woman sitting on the stage listening, enraptured, to the guitarist tuning up, swaying back and forth. "She may not want to talk just now – the service is about to start."