Denise Mina - Garnethill

She stepped out and dried herself with the crisp, clean towel. The hair dye was the darkest she'd ever used: it wasn't Goth black but it wasn't a kick in the arse off it. She was shaking the bottle when she realized that she would ruin the white towels if she used them.

She chucked some clothes on and went into the hall, looking for an old towel in the airing cupboard, but there weren't any. Benny had some scabby ones, Maureen had seen them. She went into his bedroom, knelt down by the chest of drawers, pulled open the bottom one and rummaged, feeling for a towel texture. The drawer was filled with big winter jumpers and odd socks. Her hand landed on a glossy piece of paper. She nearly pulled it out before she realized it was a pornographic magazine. She shoved it back in, bristling with embarrassment, and pushed it to the very back. She felt something hard and flat and plastic lying on the floor of the drawer. She pulled back a jumper and looked in. It was a CD: it had been set into the corner of the drawer on the floor so that it didn't get lost in the jumble. She lifted it out, recognizing the two-tone corner before she saw the front of it. It was the Best of the Selecter CD. It was the CD she had left on the bedroom floor up in Garnethill; it even had the crack on the corner of the plastic cover.

She put it back where she had found it, covering it over with the same jumper and odd socks, and went back into the bathroom.

She combed her hair into a ponytail and hacked through it with a pair of nail scissors.

It was half-seven.

She listened at the bathroom door. The flat was still. She left a note on the kitchen table saying she'd stay at Leslie's tonight, and made her way down to the Great Western Road, taking a backstreet route she had never known Benny use.

Liam had more or less lived there for three years so she remembered the phone number. Lynn had moved; the guy who answered gave her an Anderston number.

"Hello, Lynn?"

"Aye," said Lynn cautiously.

"Lynn, it's me, Maureen O'Donnell."

"Mauri! How the fuck are you?"

They arranged to meet, under conditions of the utmost secrecy, in a large, busy cafe near Lynn's house.

LYNN WAVED HAPPILY WHEN Maureen walked through the door. She had naturally black hair and flawless pink velvet skin but her eyes were her crowning glory, black with a blue tinge that made them look like polished semiprecious stones. Her body was slight and wiry and if Liam was to be believed she was unusually agile. She had a deep, gruff voice from smoking twenty a day from the age of twelve. She was eating a bowl of carbonara made with cubed gammon. Expertly, she rolled a string of spaghetti onto her fork as Maureen sat down. "So what's this about, Secret Squirrel? And what have you done to your hair?"

"Cut it myself," said Maureen, sitting down.

"It's all uneven. You come to mine after we've eaten and I'll straighten it."

" 'S all right," said Maureen distractedly.

"No, it's not. There's all jaggy bits hanging down at the back. It looks like a mad wummin's fanny."

They sat in silence for a moment as Lynn chewed a mouthful of pasta. The creamy sauce gathered at the corners of her mouth; it looked like froth. Maureen looked around the room. Tourist posters of Italy had been pasted onto the wall: behind Lynn's head loomed an aerial photograph of Florence. The pictures were skirted with flags-of-all-nations bunting.

"Auch," said Lynn. "Let's just skip all these pleasantries."

"Aye," said Maureen.

Lynn looked her over. "I know about your boyfriend, Maureen. Is that why you're doing this silent, haunted thing?"

"Ami?"

"Aye."

"Don't tell anyone we've met, eh?" said Maureen.

"I'm not sure we have yet," said Lynn.

They sat in silence until Lynn had finished eating. She paid the bill. "Come on," she said, standing Maureen up and slipping her arm through hers. "Let's go back to mine and fix your hair."

Lynn was living in a big flat on Argyle Street, across the road from a twenty-four-hour grocer's. The house must have been very grand once: it had five large bedrooms and a massive communal kitchen with a walk-in larder. The ceilings were thirteen foot high with ornate cornicing. One of her flatmates kept a gang of giant, love-bombing cats. The minute they got through the door the cats started rubbing against their legs, and when Maureen sat down on one of the kitchen chairs three of them scratched and hissed at one another for the right to sit on her lap. "If you sit on that wee settee," said Lynn, pointing over to a green two-seater by the TV, "they can all love you at the one time."

Maureen sat on it and her knees were immediately covered with a carpet of purring animals. Lynn stood behind her, spraying her hair with a pump-action aerosol full of water. She combed Maureen's hair this way and that, snipping at the bottom with a pair of sharp hair scissors. "Oh, Maureen," she said. "You've hurt your neck."

"Yeah."

"It looks like scratches or something."

Maureen didn't answer. The cats writhed on her lap, purring and digging their claws into her legs, nesting her as if she were a blanket.

"It looks a wee bit raw," said Lynn carefully. "Will I put some Germolene onto it?"

"Please."

She went out of the kitchen and came back with a huge jar. "Nicked it from the work," she said, when she saw Maureen looking. She rubbed the smelly cream gently, gently, onto the ripped skin on the back of Maureen's neck. "How's it feel now?"

"Itchy."

"You should put some foundation on that, doll, or wear a scarf or something. It looks a bit frightening." She screwed the lid back on the tub, washed her hands in the sink, lifted the scissors and carried on trimming. "Now," she said, "tell us why ye phoned."

"I need a favor," said Maureen.

"Big one? Wee one?"

"It's just a question. I don't know if you'd know anyway. I want to find something out from someone's medical records."

"Is it a patient at my surgery?"

"Naw. Lynn, don't tell Liam or anyone else this, right?"

"Okay."

"I think Benny's been in my house."

"Benny? Of course Benny's been in your house."

"But I think he's been in my house recently, when the police wouldn't let me in. I think he's talking to the police or something, I dunno. I can't put it together."

She would have told Lynn about the migrating CD but she knew she looked a bit mad and Lynn would think that she gave it back and then just forgot.

"I think he might have known Douglas. The police told me he'd been arrested in Inverness a few years ago. They didn't bring the case to court, he was sent for psychiatric treatment instead."

Lynn stopped cutting. "I never heard about that," she said.

"Me neither."

"Did he get treatment in Inverness?"

"No," said Maureen. "It must have been in Glasgow. He's never been away for any length of time."

"Maureen, Benny might be a bit mental sometimes but I don't think he'd talk about you to the police."

"I don't know what to think about anything now."

Lynn started snipping at her hair again. "So what do you want me to do?"

"I need to know how to get access to his medical record. I want to find out who his psychiatrist was. I think it might have been Douglas."

"Maureen, you can't get to see someone else's record without their consent. It's illegal. You can't hardly get to see your own."

"Really?"

"Yeah, man."

She finished cutting and handed Maureen a mirror, holding another behind her so that she could see what she had done. "There," she said, "that's a nice haircut."

Maureen looked at herself. It was the shortest she'd had her hair in a long time. It made her look younger. Lynn danced around her, pretending to be a hairdresser, showing her the reflection from both sides, holding it at an angle so that Maureen couldn't see the cuts on her neck.