Stuart MacBride - A Song for the Dying

‘I was part of the investigation. I tried to catch the man who did this to you.’

Marie’s eyes flicked back towards Alice for a moment. ‘I don’t like him. Make him go away.’

Noel Maxwell glanced back over his shoulder, down the empty corridor, then slipped a box of pills from the pocket of his blue scrubs and into my hand. ‘Just between us, right?’ A frown lined his wide forehead. A tuft of black hair clung to the middle, the rest of it receding out of view; sticky out ears; and a pointy chin. Thick brows above a pair of watery blue eyes. ‘You sure you’re OK?’

I popped a couple of the Prednisolone from their blister pack and knocked the little round pills back. Then reached for my wallet, but he waved me off.

‘Nah: old times’ sake, and that.’ He cleared his throat. ‘I was sorry to hear about your daughter. Crappy thing to happen. Really crappy.’

I flexed my hand a few more times. Still felt as if there was something inside, gnawing at the joints.

He shrugged. ‘Give it a few minutes.’ Then checked the corridor again. ‘You need anything else? You know, medicinally?’

‘I’m fine. Thanks.’

‘Don’t mention it. You know, cos we’re friends, like. Right?’ A greasy little smile. Then he turned and swaggered off the way he’d come, whistling.

There was a clunk behind me and Alice slipped out of the rec room. ‘Maybe best to give her fifteen minutes or so.’

A small glass pane sat in the middle of the door. On the other side of it, Marie Jordan was curled into herself, feet up on her chair, knees against her chest, sobbing.

Alice placed her fingertips against the glass. ‘It’s been a lot for her to process, but I think we’ve made real progress, and I know that rhymes, but it isn’t meant to, she’s never actually walked through what happened to her before and-’

A voice rang down the corridor. ‘What the bloody hell do you think you’re doing?’

A tall thin man in three-piece tweed marched towards us, strip-lights glinting off his bald head and big black-framed glasses. ‘You!’ He jabbed a finger at Alice. ‘Who said you could interfere with my patients? How dare you!’

Tony the orderly scurried along behind him. ‘Honestly, Professor Bartlett, they never said they were going to do stuff to her! I was only trying to help, and-’

‘I’ll deal with you later!’ Bartlett stomped to a halt in front of Alice, towering over her. ‘I don’t know who you think you are, but I can assure you-’

She stuck her hand out. He didn’t take it. Alice’s smile didn’t slip an inch. ‘You must be Professor Bartlett, I’ve heard so much about you, it’s a pleasure, lovely secure ward you’ve got here, I mean of course the décor’s a bit depressing, but there’s only so much you can do with these old Victorian asylums, isn’t there?’

‘Miss Jordan is extremely vulnerable and I will not have people wandering in off the street and interfering with-’

‘Marie needs time to process what happened. Doping her to the eyeballs and sticking her in a padded room isn’t making her better.’

‘That’s simply not-’

‘It’s been eight years; I think it’s time to try something new, don’t you?’ Alice produced a business card and slipped it into the breast pocket of his jacket. ‘I can see her Wednesday afternoons and Friday mornings. Make sure she’s clear of medication for at least four hours beforehand. Oh, and Aberdeen are running a trial treating Post Traumatic Stress Disorder with MDMA, it looks promising, you should try getting Marie into the study.’

‘But-’

‘And if you really want to help her, stop making her wear that hideous cardigan.’

‘Cardigan?’ I reached down into the footwell and had a scratch at the ankle monitor as we swung around the Ptarmigan roundabout into Cowskillin.

‘It was horrible, how could that possibly be good for anyone’s mental health?’

The downpour had faded to a misty drizzle that turned the approaching cars’ headlights into orbs of gold. ‘Left up here at the junction.’

The City Stadium loomed on the other side of the road, all exposed metalwork and angular glass, wrapped in dark-blue metal and painted concrete. Castle Hill rose up behind it, the sides covered in dark buildings with slate-grey roofs, the castle lost in the rain.

Alice glanced over from the driver’s seat. ‘Do you want to talk about it? You know, before we see her?’

This part of Cowskillin was all post-war council houses, semi-detached boxes built for a brighter tomorrow, turned drab and saggy by the intervening years. Crumbling harling and drooping gutters.

‘Ash?’

‘There’s nothing to talk about. He cut her open, something happened, and he abandoned her. Didn’t call it in, just left her there to die.’

‘I meant, talk about her relationship with you.’

‘She woke up from the anaesthetic in a patch of waste ground: no idea how she got there, covered in blood, middle of the night, pouring with rain. And somehow she manages to stagger as far as the main road. Drunk driver stopped and gave her a lift to hospital.’

‘She must be very brave.’

A large corrugated-iron building slid past on the driver’s side, the six-foot lettering fixed to it spelling out ‘THE WESTING’, with the silhouette of a sprinting greyhound tacked on the end. Mrs Kerrigan’s lair…

I turned away. ‘Yeah, well, that was a long time ago.’

‘I know you still blame yourself, but-’

‘She helped me and he saw her. If she hadn’t done that…’

‘If she hadn’t done that, he’d just have picked someone else. Maybe someone not so brave. Someone who wouldn’t have survived.’

That didn’t exactly make me any less to blame.

I pointed at the junction ahead. ‘Right here, then again at the end of the street.’

Two-up-two-downs lined the road: salt-and-pepper harling bristling with satellite dishes; neat gardens out front, bordered by knee-high brick walls. A row of three shops stood side by side halfway down — a butcher’s, a grocer’s, and a vet’s — their windows boarded up and plastered with fliers and posters for a circus that passed through town six weeks ago. The signs above the sheets of chipboard were barely legible, weather-bleached, peeling, and grimy.

Alice took the right at the end. The gardens were a little less tidy here, the windows and doors in need of a fresh coat of paint.

‘And down to the left.’

She pulled onto First Church Road.

More post-war boxes. Patches of harling had crumbled around their windows. Weeds poked out above the garden walls. Black-plastic bags piled up the side of wheely-bins. A Renault Fuego was up on bricks at the kerb, the bodywork more rust than steel. A terrier snuffled around the brake discs.

Three-quarters of the way down it looked as if four or five houses had been demolished and replaced with a four-storey block of flats. Orange brickwork stained with grime and scrawled with gang tags: ‘KINGZ POSSE MASSIVM FTW!’, ‘BANZI BOYZ ROOL’, and ‘MICKYD SUX COX!’

Past that, at the end of the road — where the tarmac was blocked off with concrete bollards — rose the blood-red spire of the First National Celtic Church. Barbed with gargoyles and spines, curved black slates like the scales on a dragon’s tail.

Half a dozen kids did lazy figure-of-eights around the bollards on BMX bikes, all baggy jeans and hoodie tops, cigarettes leaving curling contrails where they stuck out between their teeth. Half twelve on a Monday — little sods should’ve been in school.

I checked the text message on my phone again.

Ruth Laughlin: 16B, 35 First Church Rd, Cowskillin

Thank you Shifty. Speaking of which…