Denise Mina - Resolution

"Are you handling the lease?" said Maureen.

"Yeah." He pulled open a drawer of his desk and lifted out a summarized schedule on stapled sheets.

"What's the walk-through like here?" said Leslie, making Maureen flinch. Even she knew that Web designers didn't care about trade from idle passersby. The estate agent, however, didn't seem to be aware of this.

"Well," he said, sitting back, pressing his fingertips together, making a church of his hands, "it's good for the area because of the post office next door and the pub across the way. Also, because there's damn all to do in the village, lots of people walk around the square." He pushed the schedule across the table as if he couldn't be bothered talking anymore. "It's a big village for the overall area and people come here to shop. There's a Spar around the back of the kirk."

"Nice," said Leslie.

"So, is this room all that's included in the lease?" asked Maureen.

"No, no, there's this room and a back office and upstairs as well."

He stood up to show them round but Maureen waved him back into his chair. "We're looking at a lot of places," she said. "You said the walk-through's good, so why are you leaving?"

"No, no," he said. " 'S nothing to do with this place. The business is winding up."

"Going bankrupt?"

"No," he said defensively, "just dissolving. The senior partner's retiring."

"And the junior partner?"

The man broke eye contact.

"He's not… as experienced."

Maureen smiled. "It's McGerty who's got the money, then?"

The man looked up at them. "Who are you?"

The olde authentiky pub had a lot of young bar staff decked out in black uniforms with fussy white pinnies over them, serving the tables. Maureen ordered a pint and Leslie asked for a cheese and ham toastie and a bag of smoky-bacon crisps. She asked Maureen to have something while the tweeny waitress stood there and smiled at them. "I'm all right," said Maureen, lighting a cigarette.

"What are ye going to have for lunch, then?" said Leslie.

"I'm not hungry," insisted Maureen. "I'll have something later."

"Have something now."

Maureen looked at the waitress. "That's all for now, thanks," she said, and waited until the girl had written everything down in longhand and gone away. "How's the stomach now?"

"Wee bit better," Leslie said, wrinkling her nose. She looked out of the window at the McGee and McGerty office. "It doesn't mean anything."

"McGee's business is going down the tubes and it doesn't mean anything?"

"Well, lots of people change what they do for a living. It doesn't mean the automatic next step is moving in to whoremastering."

Maureen smiled knowingly. "Do you think Si McGee is the sort of man who could happily take a drop in his income and social status?"

"How do you mean?"

"You were right," she said. "It's not about the money at all. McGee's not interested in money. It's about status, proving he's as good as the other good old boys. It means everything to him."

Maureen was feeling confident and ready for anything. She knocked on the glass panel and stepped back. A shadow moved in the kitchen corridor and Liam opened the door. He didn't have a top on and had been sitting in the garden.

Liam's house was the one good thing that had come out of his foray into the underworld. It was a three-story town house in the middle of the West End, with high ceilings, magnificent windows and a stretch of garden at the back. In times gone by, the West End had been a tatty, cheap area to live. Students clustered together in damp old houses with boilers held together with sticky tape and glue. Men left drink-ruined marriages and came to live in bedsits here, trying to revive their glory days. It was a better area now. The housing boom meant that bomb sites and inches of spare ground were being developed into cramped flats for short, thin people with no possessions. Deserted shops and boarded-up garages had been taken over by sandwich bars and international coffee-shop chains. The bookshops had shut, replaced by designer clothing outlets.

When he was dealing Liam had left the downstairs of the house dirty and unaltered to discourage his sometimes desperate clients from trying to rob him. Since enrolling as a student he had become obsessed with renovating it. He used all his spare time to strip the flock wallpaper, bare the scored plaster and woodwork, filling the rooms up with a lot of chairs he bought in auctions. His obsession with chairs was getting to be too much: the place was beginning to look like a Quaker meetinghouse. He had left the garden and kitchen until last and had just started making inroads on them. Maureen had never known him to have any interest in gardening, much less skill at it, but the long, dry stretch of mud had sudden thin grass growing on it. Just outside the kitchen window a small herb bed had been planted with cuttings and sticks with pictures on them, proclaiming the potential. A seemingly ready-made shrubbery was flourishing at the far end.

They were sitting in the second-floor sitting room, above the noise of the traffic. The floor-length windows clipped the top of the roofs opposite but mostly they were filled with blue sky, textured with occasional puffs of white cloud, like living paintings. It was a blue room, kept plain and empty apart from the Corbusier lounger, the cracked leather chesterfield and the telly and video.

Liam handed her a mug of tea and pointed at the Jiffy bag on the floor. "It might be completely innocuous," he said.

"I know."

"It's probably a promo for Disneyland or something."

"Probably." Maureen didn't move to put the video into the machine but sat looking at the envelope, sipping her tea.

"But you don't think it is?"

"No." She sipped again. "He's the only person who sends me anonymous mail."

"It's not from the hospital, though, is it?"

"No. It was hand-delivered. He must know people on the outside."

"Okay," said Liam, slapping the back of the sofa. "I'll watch it."

SHE WAS ON STRICT orders to wait downstairs but found herself hovering in the hall, smoking a fag and trying to hear anything from upstairs. It would last about an hour, she guessed, from the big reels, or maybe even just half an hour. She could hear the floorboards creak as Liam walked to the video, the click of the tape being sucked into the machine. He walked back to the sofa and pressed play on the remote. She listened. There was no sound for about five seconds then suddenly Liam scampered out of the room and leaned over the banister. She looked up at him, turning a little circle on the stairs to see his face properly. His mouth was open and he seemed to be swaying. "Liam?"

He fell back heavily against the wall. Maureen put down her tea and ran up the stairs to find him hunkered on the floor.

"What is it?" she said, rubbing his back.

Liam coughed hard. Maureen fed her cigarette to him, holding it against his lips, and Liam inhaled a full centimeter. "Pauline Doyle," he said, exhaling thick smoke as he spoke. "On a bed."

"Pauline alive?"

Liam hung his head. "On a bed."

She had never thought of herself as more hardened than Liam but she could watch it and he couldn't. He was sitting downstairs in the front room, chain-smoking and sipping medicinal bourbon while Maureen watched Pauline on a Bed.

It was a small room with girlie curtains in flowery peach and a single bed. The bedstead was green velour. There were two people in the shot. Outside the window cars and lorries sped past on a distant dual carriageway. It was homemade, the date and time stamped in the corner of the screen, four months after Maureen's discharge from hospital. Pauline had been in the hospital recently, that much was clear, because she was over six stone. It didn't look like a rape. To anyone who didn't know Pauline, it was a normal, grubby home-made porn tape. Pauline sat on the single bed wearing a dirty red nylon bra and pants with scratchy lace trim, looking at the man's face apprehensively, trying to catch his eye, glancing occasionally at the video camera. A casual viewer, chugging along to the action, wouldn't notice the similarities between the skinny bird on the bed and the guy doing her, wouldn't notice that behind the apprehension she was asking him, please, not to hurt her.