‘Wasn’t asking you. Him.’ Pointing. ‘The lump with the limp.’ Her chin came up. ‘Think I don’t know who you are?’
I nodded. ‘Helen, you’re looking well.’
Her eyes narrowed, the wrinkles around them deepening. ‘Eleven years in HMP Bastarding Oldcastle — I missed my granddaughter’s birth because of you!’
‘No, Helen, you missed your granddaughter’s birth because you battered Neil Stringer’s head in with a pickaxe handle. And you’d have been out after eight years, if you hadn’t chibbed Ruth Anderson in the prison library too.’
‘Hmmph... Bitch was asking for it.’
‘Sure she was.’ I jerked my head towards next door, on the other side of the chain-link fencing. ‘You heard about the body?’
‘Alleged body.’ Helen folded her thick arms, muscles bulging through the freckled skin. ‘Fat Girl here said it was—’
‘Who are you calling fat?’ Mother pulled herself up to her full height, shoulders back, considerable chest out. ‘I’ll have you know—’
‘—don’t see what it’s got to do with me, and—’
‘—because big bones are nothing to be ashamed of! It’s—’
I thumped my cane on the door again. ‘ALL RIGHT, THAT’S ENOUGH! Both of you.’
Mother shuffled her feet. Turned her reddened face away. ‘Not fat.’
Helen shrugged. Looked at the ground. Cleared her throat. Didn’t say anything.
Better.
‘There’s nothing “alleged” about the body, it’s real.’
‘Still don’t see what it’s got to do with me.’
‘With your reputation? A dead body miraculously turns up next door: you really think we’re not going to connect the dots?’
The chin came up again. ‘No comment.’
‘Just like old times.’ I took a step back and made a show of examining the roof, then the walls on either side. ‘Place looks ready to fall down round your ears. Crime really didn’t pay for you, did it? What, they didn’t have a retirement package waiting when you got out of prison? A nice golden handshake to say thank you for keeping your mouth shut?’
‘No comment.’
‘Dropped you like a radioactive jobbie, didn’t they? And I thought loyalty was supposed to go both ways?’
Her eyes hardened. ‘No comment.’
‘There you are, sent down for killing Neil Stringer, on their orders, and I bet they didn’t even bother picking you up from prison when you finally got released. Bet they stopped taking your calls. Bet they ghosted you. Like you were nothing to them.’
‘No — comment!’ Both words squeezed out through gritted teeth.
‘Stuck out here, waiting for your craphole house to fall into the sea. An irrelevant, useless old lady.’
Helen stiffened, as if she was about to take a swing... then licked her lips. Blinked. Let her shoulders drop. ‘I know what you’re doing.’
Mother huffed out a breath. ‘I’m glad someone does.’
‘You think if I kick off, you can do me for assaulting a police officer. Drag me down the nick and fit me up for whoever got buried over there.’ Pointing in the vague direction of next door’s garden. ‘Well I’m not stupid and you can bugger right off. Go on, and take your fat bitch with you.’
Mother’s eyes bulged. ‘There’s no need to be so rude!’ Fists curled, trembling.
A voice peeped up at my shoulder: ‘Hello?’ And there was Alice, slipping into the gap between Mother and Helen MacNeil, the hood on her jacket thrown back, nose a Rudolf-shade of pink. She had Henry’s lead in one hand, the other held out for Helen to shake. ‘I’m Dr McDonald, but you can call me Alice if you like, because it’s easier when everyone’s not standing on ceremony, isn’t it, and I like your T-shirt — is that Crowley’s Ghost, I used to listen to them all the time, there’s a lovely urgency to proper death metal, isn’t there — anyway I was taking Henry for a walk and I heard raised voices and thought maybe I could help?’
Helen MacNeil stared at her.
Alice handed Henry’s leash to me. ‘Excellent, right, now: Ash, DI Malcolmson, could you give me and... Helen, isn’t it? Yes, so if you can give us a moment — if that’s OK with you, Helen — and we can have a chat, you and me, two girls together, and see if we can’t find a way to be all friendly about things and really work as a team, right?’ She turned a full-strength smile on all of us. ‘Great, let’s do it!’ Clapping her hands as she advanced on the door.
Helen’s face went a bit pale as she backed away, looking as if an articulated lorry was bearing down on her, but Alice followed her in anyway.
Thunk, the door closed behind them, leaving Mother, Henry, and me outside in the rain.
A shuffle of feet, then Mother cleared her throat. ‘Are you sure your wee friend’s safe in there? Like you said, Helen MacNeil’s reputation isn’t exactly—’
‘You mean the organised crime, loan-sharking, enforcement beatings, general mob violence, and involvement in at least three murders, two of which we couldn’t pin on her?’
‘That kind of thing, yes.’
I shook my head. ‘It’s not Alice I’m worried about. Helen MacNeil doesn’t stand a chance.’
3
‘Well, this is nice, isn’t it?’ Alice patted the arm of the saggy couch she was sitting in, smiling around at a living room that had all the warmth and charm of a decomposing corpse.
In addition to the two horrible couches; horrible armchair; horrible painting of a wee girl holding a balloon, above the horrible china dogs on the mantelpiece; horrible Anaglypta wallpaper; and horrible brown carpet; a large multigym took up a good third of the space. But unlike any normal person, the stainless-steel bars and weights weren’t draped with washing and furred with dust. The thing shone, the scent of metal and WD40 almost strong enough to mask an underlying grubby taint of mildew.
God knew how she’d done it, but Alice hadn’t just managed to get us all invited inside, she’d even talked Helen MacNeil into producing four mugs of tea. And a couple of biscuits for Henry, too.
The wee lad sat at my feet, crunching away on his Hobnobs, tail thumping against the armchair’s side, as Helen wriggled backwards along a black leather bench until her head and shoulders were under the metal rod of a loaded barbell. Hissing as she lifted it off its metal pegs and bench-pressed what had to be about sixty kilos.
‘So, Helen,’ Mother had a sip of tea, grimaced, then put the mug back on the coffee table, ‘if you had nothing to do with the body buried next door, who did?’
‘See, the trouble with most people is they bulk up in prison for protection.’ The weights went up and down again. ‘No one messes with you when you’re solid muscle.’ Another rep. ‘Then they get out and it all turns to flab.’
‘Tell us about your next-door neighbour...’ She checked her notebook. ‘Mr Gordon Smith?’
Another rep. ‘No comment.’
Alice leaned forward. ‘Please, Helen, I know it can’t be easy, helping the police after everything that’s happened, but if—’
‘You useless buggers didn’t help me when our Leah went missing, so why should I?’ The barbell made another trip. ‘My granddaughter disappears and you tossers didn’t even bother your arses sending someone round.’
I looked at Mother; she just shrugged.
OK.
Good to see Oldcastle Division was every bit as useless as it’d always been. You’d think any competent police officer would have run a PNC search on someone before trying to interview them.