Denise Mina - Resolution

"No, it's all right," said Maureen. "I know the way."

"I'm leaving anyway." He stood up and smiled at her, trying to seem friendly. "I've got the car outside. I'll drive you home, if you like."

Maureen glanced at Ella but Ella was staring at her son. "Thanks, but I'm fine, someone's picking me up."

Si smiled with cold eyes. "It's no trouble," he said. "I'd like to."

"No, someone's picking me up."

In the lift Si kept catching her eye and trying to smile. "Where is it you stay?" he said, sliding along the metal wall towards her.

Maureen slid along the wall in the opposite direction, distancing herself. She didn't want to tell him anything about herself. "West End," she lied.

"That figures," he said. "Trendy wee thing like you."

Maureen looked him in the eye and thought what an arsehole he was. She didn't like creepy strangers trying to flirt with her. It felt like a grotesquely intimate intrusion.

"I bet you've got a lot of boyfriends."

She could happily have hit him then but the lift reached the ground floor and the doors opened. She stepped back to let him go first but Si misunderstood and, thinking she was flirting back, insisted that she go first.

"Is it a boyfriend who's picking you up?" he said, catching up with her at the door.

"It's my brother," she said firmly.

Despite her hearty protestations Si insisted on waiting with her outside the gates until Liam turned up in his Triumph Herald. "What an unusual car," he said, as Maureen walked away.

Liam's triumph herald had a soft top, and a back end so rusted that it looked as if it might snap off in a brisk wind. It had been bought as camouflage during his days as a dealer because no one would suspect the driver of being anything but a mug. As Maureen brought the cigarette to her mouth, the wind blew live ash into her hair and she heard the tiny crackle of hairs burning, smelled a whiff of sulfur.

"Who was that?" asked Liam.

"The old lady's son," shouted Maureen, above the noisy engine. "What a creep. Has Una been in touch with you?"

"Not in the half hour since ye last asked me, no," Liam shouted back. "Don't worry, she'll be late. First babies are often late."

Liam spotted the red light up ahead and cursed it. He slowed the car, trying not to reach it before it changed back, but the lights didn't budge and the engine petered to a coughing stop. He whipped off his shades and looked accusingly at Maureen.

"Fuck all to do with me," she said.

"Well, you're sitting there," he muttered, and began the long ritual of the choke.

The lights changed and impatient cars behind them began to hoot. Eventually the Triumph spluttered to life, taking off just as the lights changed again, trapping the other cars behind it. Liam grinned as they honked. Maureen wished that she'd had the chance to speak to Ella alone. She looked pretty shocked.

Liam coughed next to her and she looked at him. He might not tell her when the child was born. He didn't know what the birth meant to her: he didn't know what she was planning for Michael. The only people who knew were Doyle, because she'd told him, and Sheila, because she'd guessed. Liam might decide not to tell her because it would upset her. She hoped she could read it in his face if he was lying. They were gathering speed on the broad road to Dennistoun and he smiled to her and raised himself up in the seat a little, enjoying the warm wind chewing his hair. Maureen smiled back. She'd know if he was lying. She felt sure she would.

Siobhain McCloud opened the door to Liam's familiar knock. She had sunglasses on, exactly the same model of Ray-Bans as Liam. She didn't wait to see who it was or even welcome them but walked away wordlessly down the dark hall and back to her beloved outsize television.

"Hiya," called Liam, stepping into the hall. "I've brought Mauri with me."

Siobhain didn't reply. Liam shut the door behind Maureen, nodding for her to go into the living room ahead of him.

Siobhain was sitting on the beige settee watching a Gaelic film about North Uist. She seemed to have taken to wearing her shades indoors a lot because the TV brightness was set so high that both Maureen and Liam had to put on their sunglasses to make sense of the picture. The program showed a group photograph of islanders from the sixties, a lineup of thick-legged girls in miniskirts with indistinct knees and innocent grins. She turned over suddenly to Montel. A woman in a flowery dress was crying and Montel took her hand.

"What's happening?" asked Liam, sitting down next to her on the settee.

"She's crying," said Siobhain, "and Montel is holding her hand."

Maureen sat down in the armchair. Siobhain's house was depressing. The settee was beige, the walls were beige, the carpet was beige, everything inoffensive and inexpensive. The only ornamentation in the living room was a small watercolor of irises and a big oil painting of her younger brother, done from a small snapshot photograph, a little boy standing on a hillside many years ago, squinting into the camera.

As part of a university project, Liam had made a film of Siobhain. She talked to the camera about her people and the Highlands, showing irrelevant pictures cut out of ladies' magazines. She told the story of her childhood with the travelers, how her brother drowned in a burn and her mother left the land and came to the city to die. It was a peculiar film. It should just have been annoying but it was strangely touching, fat Siobhain barking in her Highland accent at the camera, her stilted delivery seeming affected and mistimed. Liam had written an end-of-term paper on his film, a vague and pretentious piece about the rare beauty of reality. He failed and was having to do a resit exam over the summer.

Maureen would never have thought of them as friends, much less close friends, but since the film Liam had been over at Siobhain's all the time, watching television, showing her films and asking her what she thought.

Siobhain had been very fat when Maureen met her but it hadn't disguised how beautiful she was. Her nose was a straight arrow, her plump mouth a tidy rosebud and her cheekbones high and proud. Her black hair had started to gray prematurely but in most lights the silver strands looked like a glossy sheen. Angus Farrell had almost broken her. As a senior psychologist at the Northern Psychiatric Hospital he had had unlimited access to the ward where Siobhain was being treated for depression. Farrell had tethered the women with rope, around the ankles, around the wrists. Of the other two victims Maureen knew about for sure, Lona McKinnon had hung herself and Yvonne Urquhart had had a stroke that left her severely brain damaged.

It might have been the shock of seeing herself on film, or just that she had pals, but Siobhain had changed dramatically in the past six months. She went on a crazy diet of steak and citrus fruit, which caused her to exude a sharp, rotting smell. It also made her fart soundlessly every fifteen seconds although she steadfastly denied it every time Leslie challenged her. She had lost half her body weight. Because the weight loss had been so rapid her skin was just catching up with her, contracting around the new shapes and forms. She had had a chicken neck for a month but it had settled back now to show a strong jaw and slim neck. She still moved as if she were obese: swinging her legs around each other clumsily, holding her arms out stiffly to the sides. When she sat down she cleared space for her phantom belly, sitting with her legs wide open as if she still had forty-inch thighs.

She needed new clothes and trawled the charity shops with Maureen and Leslie, choosing a peculiar mixture of old-lady flowery dresses, a big yellow anorak, tennis shoes and bright jerseys in blues and oranges. It was the first time she had ever chosen her own adult clothes. She dressed like no one else they had met. Today she was sporting white tennis shoes with red soles, a red skirt and a green shirt with button-down breast pockets.