All the way the old man stayed face down on the rumbling floor of the van, lying in exactly the same position he had landed in after they pulled the pillowcase over his head and shoved his face to the van floor: legs straight out, one arm flat by his side, the other hand by his face, still, as the heavy white plastic petrol cans swam slowly about the floor.
He lay so still that Pat began to worry. He looked back often, concerned that he might have suffered a head injury when they chucked him into the van. Pat’d watched a guy die outside a club once. The guy, mid-thirties, staggered and tripped on the step, toppled backwards, hitting the pavement like a comedy drunk and lay there, out of the way. Everyone coming out of the club assumed he was pissed and sleeping. They laughed about it.
As they had zipped up the black rubber bag a sad-eyed ambulance guy explained that the skull has limited space in it. A bleed into the brain is like dropping a pickled egg into a full pint of lager, only there’s nowhere for the extra volume to go so the brain gets sucked down into the spinal column. That’s what kills you.
Remembering that night took Pat back to the door at the Zebra Wine Bar. Ugly drunks and the orange women staggering about on icy pavements in summer shoes. The women all had long hair that winter, he remembered. Nylon hair extensions that looked like bad wigs. 1669, they called the Zebra, because the women there looked sixteen from behind and sixty-nine from the front.
So he worried that the old man was dying under the pillowcase and he thought of the young girl he had shot and the pleasant, toast-smelling house, wishing he had stood up to Eddy and refused to go in. Eddy was a substitute family for Pat, had been for years, but suddenly Pat realised he’d picked the same family again: nasty loser fucking twats.
As though he could hear Pat shifting away from him, Eddy slapped the old man’s foot and asked his name. The pillowcase lifted slightly off the floor, said he was called Aamir and Pat knew then that Eddy had been afraid too. It was good because maybe Eddy wasn’t totally wrapped up playing soldiers, could still be reasoned with.
Eddy knelt next to the man in the back of the van, his balaclava rolled up around his forehead half an inch above his eyes. He wouldn’t look at Pat.
They were at Harthill, the heart of central Scotland, a bleak stretch of high ground littered with TV and mobile phone masts, where the winds were always brutal. Malki took a slip road, a perfect turn at the roundabout, took the sharp turn off the road into a field and rolled the van quietly along the foot of a hill into a coppice of windswept trees. He stopped, pulled on the handbrake and sighed, smacked his lips. He smiled at Pat.
Without a word to either, Eddy stood up, opened the van door and slipped out, closing it after himself.
Eddy stepped out of the tree cover into a vast muddy field.
The ground was frozen solid, the churned mud covered with a fur of sliver frost. A swollen blue moon lit the ground like a harsh strip light. Eddy, arms out for balance, kept his eyes on the uneven ground. The light was so sharp and blue that he could see individual icy fronds as he followed the tracks of the van, heading back towards an opening in the hedge. He stopped and looked around. The fallow field stretched over the horizon. He could hear the hum of cars passing on the distant motorway. No houses in view, no van loads of people camping in the field. No one. Perfect.
He followed the tracks of the van, walking down the churned middle for another two hundred yards, his breath crystalline in front of him. Though he had parked it there himself, Eddy still wanted to rest his tired eyes on the Lexus.
Stopping, he looked up the road at the side of the field and could see the edge of the silver boot, the red tail lights. It was a hire car. As he drove here, trying all the buttons, loving the bucket seat and the steering wheel CD controls, he’d promised himself he’d get one of these, when the money came through. The sight of it now calmed him and slowed his heart from a sprinter’s gallop.
Despite everything that had happened it might still be OK. Blinking back tears, Eddy made his way back to the van.
4
It was as a punishment that MacKechnie made her come in here, sitting on a hard chair in the soporific light of the bedroom, interviewing the bed-bound daughter-in-law who was little more than a bystander.
Morrow could hear them behind the door, out there, behind her in the hall, a happy gang, muttering, looking at details, gathering important scraps of information that would flesh out the story while she was in here, being kept busy and out of the way.
Meeshra looked rough, black fuzz grew down the sides of her face and her hair was wild, knotted at the back where she had been sleeping on it.
The door was shut behind them, for the sake of modesty, while Meeshra threatened the baby with her engorged nipple. The two-week-old child bucked and struggled, his gummy, desperate mouth clamping to skin and fingers but failing to meet the breast. It was too full, Alex knew, so heavy with milk that the baby couldn’t get his mouth around it. But the advice stuck in her throat. It seemed improper and intimate. It wasn’t her job, it was for a health visitor to tell her.
‘They were waving the gun and shouting. Looking for a guy called Rob. “Robbie”. A right Scottish name, in’t it?’
Lancaster lingered in Meeshra’s accent but it was fading to Scottish. She had been here for less than a year, she said, moving in with her in-laws after her wedding. They were a happy family, and here she blinked, a prosperous, hard-working family, and she blinked again.
A female officer was standing behind Alex, jotting the lies down, allowing Alex to simply watch. Every individual had a tic that signalled a lie, and the best way to find it was ask them about their family.
Morrow was sure that Meeshra wasn’t lying deliberately. Family myths and fables were more than conscious fibs; they were a form of self-protection, conversational habits, beliefs too embedded to challenge: she loves me, we are happy, he will change. But there was always a tic. It amazed Alex, the craven need of people to tell the truth. During questioning, when inconsistencies started to show in a story, people often broke down, sobbed with the desire to be honest, as if getting caught lying was the very worst that could happen. She’d seen men carve fingernails into the palms of their hands, breaking the skin to relieve the pressure to tell. Adamance was the most common giveaway. She’d never again trust anyone who began a sentence, ‘Honestly’, or, ‘To tell the truth’. These were flags raised high above a statement, drawing the casual viewer’s attention; here be dragons.
Professional liars thought out excuses beforehand and stuck to them, but synthetic memories were unwieldy; ask for a colour or a detail and they were too slow to answer. Fluent liars were dangerous, either because they were so malevolent or suggestible.
The skill of spotting lies had given Morrow a jaundiced view of the world. The worst of it was that it denied her the luxury of lying to herself. The cold light of day was no place to live.
So she envied Meeshra’s insistence that they were all happy together. Sure, there were tensions but her mother-in-law was basically a good person, a bit educated but still good, and she knew how she wanted the house run and where the furniture should go and she had her own ways of cooking, eh? That was natural, right? And the baby was such a blessing, a son, first grandchild. She blinked at that and Alex noted it, filed it away. We will be happy, Meeshra said, stopping, surprised to find herself using the future tense.
She pressed the baby towards her tit again. He rolled his bald head back and gave out a dry, thin squeal. Frustrated, Meeshra squeezed her nipple between her fingers and a powerful arc of watery milk jetted across the bed and soaked into the sheet. Tearful with embarrassment, she cursed herself in a language Alex didn’t recognise.