Denise Mina - Resolution

Across the square the door opened and shut. The bodybuilder looked straight at them as he walked down the steps, and ran a slow, graceless jog over to them, swinging his overworked arms. He stopped in front of them and looked along the line as if he was memorizing their faces. Maureen nodded at him and went back to staring at the door. "What are you girls doing out here, then?" he said, sounding jolly and friendly.

Maureen jerked a thumb at the house behind her. "Locked out," she said.

He laughed, thinking it was a joke, and stopped when he saw that she wasn't joining in. "Come on," he said, reaching forward and cupping his hand under Leslie's elbow, lifting her, "time to go home."

Skinny as she was, Leslie turned on him. " Get your fucking hand off me, " she spat, wringing her arm free and stepping back. She had her finger in his face, a stiff, angry finger, and she was shouting. "Do you own this street, do ye, eh?" She didn't give him time to answer. "Do ye own this fuck street and everyone in it, do ye? Your fucking street, is it?" She was close to hitting him, they could all tell. He backed off. "Calm down." He looked at Maureen for support.

"You fucker. You fucking fucker." Leslie was screaming at the top of her voice. Lights flicked on in front rooms around the quiet square. "You're running a fucking brothel over there. D'ye batter them if they won't work for ye? Do ye?"

The bodybuilder had been nice for long enough. He pressed his lips together. "Calm down," he said, telling her this time. He reached for her roughly, grabbing her arm, holding her tight. Kilty, seated three feet away, launched herself, landing mouth first on his wrist, biting him as hard as she could. Yelping, he let go of Leslie, who seemed to have grown two feet taller than any of the rest of them.

Her mouth was a thin, furious line, her voice low and hard. "The man's not born that can raise his hand to me," she said, and punched him on the side of the neck. They hardly saw her hand go out, just retract, heard the sound of skin slapping hard against skin, and the bodybuilder went down like a bag of bricks.

"What the fuck…" said Maureen.

"I'm afraid I've lost my temper," said Leslie, with supernatural calm. "Perhaps we should leave."

They were buzzing with nervous excitement as they queued to get into the all-night cafe.

"I enjoyed that," said Leslie, standing tall and proud, her eyes open a little too wide. "Can't we just go back to Maureen's?"

"No," snapped Kilty disapprovingly. "I think we should stay out until you've calmed down."

"Dunno why you're so snotty about it," said Leslie aggressively. "You bit him."

"I was defending you," said Kilty. "Anyway, there's no food in hers. I haven't eaten since yesterday." She poked Maureen hard in the ribs. "And you look like Bobby Sands."

"Give it a rest," said Maureen, and nodded at Leslie. "She's already had a go at me today."

It was a strange cafe, furnished with old school desks and a curvy bit of a church pew. Two avocado-colored baths took up valuable floor space and had plants growing in them for no good reason. It was kept busy with the waves of homebound pub-goers, clubbers and lost loners who just couldn't sleep. Kilty ordered a whole lot of things from cups of cocoa to eggs Benedict and they dutifully handed their menus back to the exhausted waitress.

"What was all that stuff?" asked Leslie.

"Calming food," said Kilty, getting a pink Powerpuff Girls notebook out of her handbag and flipping it open. "We need to calm down and think about what we're going to do about this."

"I don't want to calm down," said Leslie. "I enjoyed that."

Kilty took out a pen, clicked it open and wrote an elaborate "1" in the tiny margin. "We need to think. What are our goals here?"

"What d'ye mean?" Leslie asked.

"What are we going to try to achieve? It's better if we work that out before we come up with a plan." Then she explained, "Social work postgrad, course 101."

They saw the logic.

"I want to bring that bastard McGee down," said Maureen.

"I want to help the women in there," said Leslie reproachfully, and Maureen realized that she should have said that too.

"Right." Kilty wrote slowly, in a jagged but precise hand. Then she looked up. "I want to make my dad wake up," she said, waited for them to nod and jotted it down as the hot chocolate arrived.

Maureen ate her Flake with showy gusto, spooning warm cream into her mouth and swallowing it as if she were enjoying it. Leslie was taking her out on the bike to look for Michael after this and the last thing she wanted was heavy food but she ate to reassure the others. All three looked at the notepad and the three points, nodding and thinking about it as they drank milky chocolate.

"If," said Kilty ponderously, "trafficking isn't an offense in Poland, and McGee's name isn't on anything here -"

"We don't know that," interrupted Leslie. "What about Ella's court case?"

"That's not evidence, that's an allegation," said Kilty succinctly. "And if he's fly enough to traffic from Poland because it's one of the few countries that isn't a signatory to any convention, you can bet your arse he'll have kept his name off the sauna license."

Leslie stirred her chocolate, coaxing the settled cocoa powder from the bottom.

"If his name isn't on anything," continued Kilty, "what can we do? We can't go to the police. They'll tell us to piss off."

They all thought about it, each trying to think of alternatives to going to the police.

"We could blow him up," said Leslie stupidly.

"Yeah." Kilty looked at her askance. "I think you should get back with Cammy before ye kill someone. Leaving your commando tendencies aside, goal two is get the women out."

They couldn't think of anything for that either and were feeling discouraged as the food arrived at the table. Kilty got the waitress just to put it all in the middle and they tried to share it but everyone wanted the eggs and it turned into an unsightly scramble.

"God," said Leslie, "that was gorgeous."

"Taste the Croque Monsieur," said Kilty, pointing her to a golden toastie. "They make it with butter."

"The problem with helping the women," said Maureen, "is what do we do? Do we get them out and send them home?"

"Yeah," said Kilty. "Otherwise we'd need somewhere safe for them to hide from Immigration and the bastards who brought them over here. We don't have those kinds of resources."

Leslie sat back. "I'll go in with a gun and get them out, if that's what it takes."

"Look, you can't use being angry with your boyfriend to shoot up a licensed premises," said Kilty, as if she'd been involved in a tremendous amount of paramilitary activity. "You might remember the good times halfway through and then where will ye be?"

"Standing in a brothel with a gun and whole lot of foreign women?" said Leslie, as if she'd really thought about it.

"How would ye get the women to leave with ye? What would you say to them?"

"That I'd come to rescue them and if they came with me they'd be safe-"

"In Polish? Or Latvian?"

"Oh." Leslie looked deflated.

"And what about afterwards? What if they want to carry on working? Would you take them to your house?"

"They can't stay with me, even if they're not working," said Leslie firmly. It seemed a strange line for a mad bomber to stand firm on. "I'm gonnae… I need my space," she said, and looked shifty.

Maureen leaned across the table. "What about upsetting your dad? Couldn't you just tell him?"

"Nope," said Kilty. "He'd just do what he always does and say I was mad. Anyway, getting one lot of women out probably won't even cost Si that much money."

"See," said Maureen, "I don't think he really cares about the money."

"Why?"

"Well, think about it. He's a poor scholarship boy at a Catholic school, his mum's a prostitute and the other boys probably know that, his sister's a psycho. He doesn't want money. The money is a side issue. He wants respectability."