Denise Mina - Exile

"Aye," said Leslie. "The girl's learning to drive. I see her going up and down the road at three miles an hour in the Merc."

"She's learning to drive in a Merc?"

Leslie nodded.

"God." Maureen looked back to the warmth and lack of want, covetous and wondering. "Nice life."

Cars and lorries hurtled across the bright junction. They stopped and looked and Leslie pointed to the right. They walked down a few hundred yards and came to a row of white pub lights glistening through the rain. It was a freestanding house, broader and older than the shelter, whitewashed, with an illuminated plastic sign in garish red and gold. Flower boxes of plastic greenery lined the inside of the windows. A Jeep and a Jag were parked in the forecourt.

"No way she drank there," said Maureen. "She couldn't have seen it from the junction and, anyway, it's a brewery pub and they're always pricey. She wouldn't have enough money for a lot of drinks and I can't imagine anyone else buying for her."

"Yeah," said Leslie. "It's handy, though."

"If you were covered in bruises and feeling like a good bevy would you go in there?"

Leslie looked at the pub I. "No," she said.

They retraced their steps to the junction and walked to the left this time. They could just make out a dingy shop front farther on. It was a pub called the Lismore, ill lit and set up against the road without a gable sign.

"There," said Maureen, and walked towards it.

The Lismore was pleasant inside. The varnish on the floor had been worn away from years of shuffling punters; a strip of worn and softened wood led around the bar like the suggested route in a department store. More striking was the absence of music; the only sounds were the undulating murmur of voices and the chink of glasses being washed behind the bar. A lone table of elderly men huddled over their half-and-halfs, chatting to one another. The barman smiled automatically as they came in and put down the glass he was polishing. "Good evening, ladies. What can I get ye?"

"Two whiskeys, please," said Maureen, brushing the rain from her hair.

They pulled up two bar stools and looked around the room as the barman relieved the whiskey optic of its contents. He put the drinks in front of them, sliding a fresh beer mat under each glass and pulling an ashtray over for them.

"I wonder if you could help us," said Maureen, counting out the right money for the drinks. "A pal of ours is missing and we're worried about her. We wondered whether you might have seen her."

The barman took the money and looked uneasy. "Depends," he said.

Leslie pulled the photocopy out of her pocket. She hadn't done her job very well. She'd enlarged the full-length shot by two hundred percent, getting Ann from the waist up. They had to fold the photocopy over in the middle so that her bra and battered tits were hidden, and the color on the photocopier had been wrongly set: Ann's face was high orange, her irises deep black. She looked as if she'd been colored in by a child.

"Oh, aye, Ann – is she missing, then?" The barman paused and looked at them sternly. "You're not here on behalf of her man, are ye? Because I know he hit her."

"No," said Leslie quickly. "We're trying to make sure she didn't fall back in with him."

"We don't even want to find her, really," added Maureen. "We just want to know if you've seen her."

"Right." He thought about it. "Right, no, I don't know where she is. She came in here for a while, a couple of weeks – she'd a burst lip. She was a favorite with the old fellas over there. She used to listen to their stories and flirt with them and that. Aye, she was a big favorite."

"When did she stop coming in?" asked Maureen.

" 'Bout a month ago. 'Fore Hogmanay. She came in Boxing Day but I put her out. She was begging people, not even tapping, but begging for drink."

Leslie leaned across the bar eagerly, letting her hands fall over the far edge. "Ye put her out?"

"Aye." He pointed to an old-fashioned black-on-white enamel sign hanging on the wall:

No Football Colors.

No Spitting.

No Hawkers.

"Don't need it," he said, wiping the bar closer and closer to Leslie's arm, reclaiming his space.

Leslie sat back.

"She can't have been disrupting ye, surely?" asked Maureen.

"See those old swines over there?" He gestured to his only customers. The old men heard him and their chat fell silent. The barman raised his voice. "They were asking what they would get for their money. Auld swines, playing on the lassie's weakness for the drink." He lowered his voice. "That's pensioners for ye – they can smell a bargain a mile off," he muttered, as if the bargain-hunting skill of the elderly was an unspoken universal truth.

Maureen turned back to the bar. "So, she was bothering ye?"

"She wasn't bothering me, hen, but I'm a publican, not a vulture, and if ye need a drink that badly you won't get it here."

"Where would ye get it?" asked Maureen.

"The Clansman. It's a couple of blocks down." He pointed over his left shoulder. "I heard she was drinking in there. It's a hole."

Maureen finished her whiskey. "Right," she said. "Thanks very much for your help."

"No bother, ladies. Call again."

The wind had risen and Maureen had to peel her wet hair from her face as they walked. They headed away from the main road, following the barman's directions, passing progressively meaner tenements with smaller and smaller windows. The area deteriorated quickly; the blocks of flats got higher and less cared for. Pseudo-tenements, built in the fifties and sixties from prefab concrete slabs, stood in the holes left by German bombs. Three streets down from the Lismore they reached a desolate block of burned-out and boarded-up flats. The Clansman was on the far corner. A very drunk man was standing outside, holding on to a streetlight, his hips swaying softly from side to side as if his knees were full of mercury. Frosted windows sat high on the wall, an old pub device to stop women and children from seeing in. The front door heaved against the press of men, opening slightly, and the sweet smell of drink wafted into the street, as subtly enticing as a pheromone signal. Leslie pulled open the door, pushed her way through the crowd at the door, and Maureen followed in her wake.

The bar was filthy but still looked too classy for the dead-eyed men drinking wine and smoking ten-packs of Club. The carpet was as shiny as linoleum. Candle-shaped electric wall lights were dim beacons through the layered smoke, and empty glasses sat abandoned on every surface. The drinking men were shouting to one another and laughing, some the entertainers, some the entertained, a distinction determined by who was holding the money that night. Hard men jostled with cardboard gangsters, the lesser mortals who fed off their detritus, mimicking their language and stealing their stories. Maureen could see Ann drinking in a pub like this. There were no other women in the bar and Ann wouldn't have been stuck for hopeful beaux, keen to buy her a drink and see what they got in return. Maureen and Leslie squeezed their way through to the bar.

"You get the drinks and I'll ask around," Maureen shouted, over the noise.

"I don't like this," said Leslie, looking furious because she was scared.

"Hey, you." The voice was deep and husky. "The women, there."

They looked over their shoulders but couldn't find the speaker until a tiny man wriggled in between them. He had a large head of greasy black hair, a protruding lower jaw and lopsided shoulders, the result of a jaunty wave to his spine. He was drinking a tumbler of purple wine and grinning up at them. "I'm Malki," he shouted, staring at Leslie's leathers, holding his hand up to her face for a shake. Leslie looked at his hand and declined, but Malki took the snub in stride and grinned at her again. "Are ye a polis wummin?"