Denise Mina - Exile

"Well, the next one, then."

"That's the last flight to Glasgow tonight, I'm afraid." She smiled, and Maureen knew she was enjoying it.

"What about Edinburgh?"

"No. I've just sold the last ticket on the last flight."

A hot, impotent tantrum shot up Maureen's neck and she leaned her dirty face across the desk. "Fuck you," she said, chalking up another triumph for Glaswegian diplomacy.

She walked downstairs, quivering with the craving for nicotine. She took the wrong lift and found herself at the Paddington Express station. She bought a ticket anyway, afraid that if she went back upstairs she'd get lost in the airport. The ticket cost a tenner. She was the only poor person on the platform. The tunnel was encased in sleek aluminum sheeting and the chairs were stark molded pine. She tried to affect the look of an eccentric millionairess and cupped her hand over her throbbing red throat. An immaculate high-speed train pulled into the station and Maureen climbed on, sitting down just inside the door. As the train slipped from the station all of the passengers within a ten-foot radius were staring at her. It was only when they arrived in Paddington and she stood up to get off that she saw the flickering television above her head. She ran across the concourse, following the signs for the cab rank. She opened the door and threw in her bag. "Victoria coach station," she said.

Despite having left it to a couple of hours before the bus left, Maureen managed to queue in the smelly ticket office and book her return for that night. The bus station was far poorer than Glasgow's. Desperate travelers from all over the country gathered in it with their poor luggage, waiting for the buses to take them away. Glass walls had been erected all over the coach station as well, part of either a fast-spreading fad in bus-station design or a nationwide push to lower the number of passenger-on-concourse deaths.

Maureen used the phones to call Vik. She could hardly hear his answering-machine message because a very fat man sitting near the kiosk was listening to a Walkman and warbling along to Marian Carey at the top of his voice. She shouted over the racket that she'd be in touch. She was coming home. She'd phone him when things were more settled. Definitely phone him. She'd keep his lighter for him and give it back when things were settled. She whispered that she was thinking about him, that she was going to make things right, but the background noise was so high she doubted he'd hear it.

It was ten minutes before the bus left and she finally managed to get Liam at home. "Mauri, I wasted over two hundred quid on that fucking ticket."

"I'll pay it back, Liam, I'm sorry."

"I'm not made of money, ye know."

"I know, Liam, I'll pay ye back."

"I'm a poor student."

She could tell that Liam had been rehearsing the fight all the way home. "I'll give it straight back to ye tomorrow," she said. "I'm really sorry."

Liam hesitated for a moment. "What time ye getting in?" he asked.

"I don't know," said Maureen, looking around the coach station. "About six thirty in the morning."

"Well, I was going to come and meet ye but ye can fuck off," he said, as if she'd timed the bus deliberately. "Listen, I'm sorry about Martha. I heard ye banging on the floor."

"Yeah, and I heard you banging on the bed."

"Sorry," he said quickly.

"It's not me ye need to be sorry to," said Maureen.

The moment she sat down on the itchy seat she knew that she was going to be okay. The coach was less than half full and Maureen managed to get half of the backseat to herself. An elderly woman took the other side, squashing herself up against the window, arranging her refreshments in a tidy spread on the seat next to her.

The bus rumbled out of central London, up through the deep valley of Swiss Cottage and out onto the vast Ml. Maureen settled back, resting her head on the shuddering window, watching the individual people in their individual cars pass the window, the individual houses with individual strips of gardens, poisoned by collective exhaust fumes. She watched the dirty gray city slip into the past, saw the low houses on the shallow hills leave the frame of the window, and she suddenly knew how close she had come to dying. She changed her mind and fought back at the last minute, like poor Ann. Poor Ann, lying on the settee with her fat lip and ugly children.

Maureen was close to crying but the bruised rings of cartilage in her throat resisted. She was going home to face them all, knowing that her brittle courage had shattered. She was going home to Glasgow and for the first time remembered that she had a life beyond her present troubles. She loved the colors of the city; she had a place and history there; she understood the obscure kindness of the people and the rationale behind the brutal weather. She'd missed the cleanness of the air, the archaic turns of phrase and the rasping guttural speech. She could have a bath in her own bathroom soon, without the intrusion of Ruchill, and sleep soundly in her own bed. Leslie would be safe and Liam had been saved. She didn't care about Ann anymore, didn't care that Moe didn't make any sense.

The motorway left the city behind it and entered a dull, flat landscape stretching beyond the horizon punctuated by gray villages and shadowy gymkhana runs. Maureen pulled her legs up and wrapped herself up tight in her dirty coat, no longer too good for the bus or for her, and watched middle England's bland suburban plain coast past the window.

Joe McEwan had been at work for eleven hours and he wasn't feeling well. He was drinking a lot of coffee and smoking twenty-five a day, or so his doctor thought. The office was almost empty; only the obsessive and divorces were still in. The Hutton investigation was dragging to an unsatisfying conclusion. The evidence they'd amassed didn't pan out. Terrified witnesses changed their statements from stupid lie to stupid lie and the case had swallowed up their overtime budget for the next three weeks. Rumor and retracted witness statements had given them the pickup place, the pub where he'd been killed, the name of the driver and, by implication, the boss who'd ordered it. They even had the name of the guy who stole the taxi. What they didn't have was a shred of usable evidence, not a single witness. Inness kicked open the door and stormed into the room. He was grinning, his stubby teeth half hidden under his mustache, his excitement clashing with everyone else's worn apathy. He spotted McEwan and almost ran across the room. "Look at the e-mail notice board," he said, beckoning him over to a desk and calling up the system and the page. "Look at this."

It was a message from the Met in London. The text explained that they were trying to trace a Scottish woman called Marian Thatcher. She had dialed 999 and had given important inside information about the Ann Harris murder. A call had been made from the same phone box to Stewart Street directly before the 999 call but it might have been unrelated. The taxi had been traced and the woman had tried and failed to get on the last plane to Glasgow. Inness clicked on an attached file and a color picture slowly unraveled in strips from the top. Three strips down McEwan was grinning. It was a scratchy color shot of Maureen O'Donnell coming out of a phone box and hailing a taxi. "Eh?" Inness said, smiling. "Told you."

"Fucking lovely." McEwan smiled and lit himself a congratulatory fag.

It was much later and Maureen woke with a start at the pains in her neck. She looked around her and saw the gray road and the red tail-lights and the old woman sitting upright on the other end of the backseat, looking out of the window. It was three o'clock and they would be stopping soon. She could have a cigarette. She looked out of the window at the chill night and spared a thought for everyone who went to London and never came back. For the poor men and women looking for work and brighter futures and for the maddies like herself, who went to fix the world and got lost. She felt a nudge to her elbow and found the woman on the far backseat handing her a plastic flask cup of orange juice. She thanked her, but the woman had shuffled over to the other side of the bus already, glaring resolutely out of the window. Maureen drank and the acid juice washed away the flavor of stale cigarettes and blood and sour milk.