Denise Mina: Garnethill

Winnie had never forgiven Alistair for telling. She phoned him sometimes when she was drunk. He wouldn't tell Maureen what she said.

Leslie came to the hospital every day, working her visits around her shifts at the shelter. She treated the hospital stay as if it was something that was happening to both of them together. Leslie was scared at first and then settled into the routine, getting angry about the pettiness of the ward rules and making friends with the other patients. Everyone else behaved as if they were coming to view Maureen. She knew that it was her friendship with Leslie that prompted her to get angry and get better. Their relationship changed after the hospital: Maureen couldn't bring herself to lean on Leslie in even the smallest detail. She was always reluctant to phone her when she had a problem. Leslie dealt with other people's emotional crises all day every day at the shelter and Maureen knew she could easily tip the scales and go from being Leslie's pal to being her client. She found herself wishing Leslie would have a disaster sometimes, something minor and fixable, so that Maureen could save her and restore the balance between them once and for all.

The Mustache Man was waiting for them at the car-park entrance to the station. They took her into a small reception area and asked her to sign a book saying that she had come to the station voluntarily. They asked her permission before taking her fingerprints.

She still felt light-headed, her stomach ached with tense after-vomit contractions and she was having trouble with her eyes: her depth perception kept changing suddenly, shifting objects closer and farther away. She blinked hard, pressing the rims of her eyelids tight to stop it. She knew she must look pretty crazy but they weren't watching her, they were anxious to get her upstairs.

The policewoman and the Mustache escorted her up two flights, through a set of fire doors and into a windowless beige corridor illuminated with imperceptibly flickering strip lights. The pattern on the linoleum was too big for the small space. It would have been a disorienting place at the best of times and this wasn't the best of times.

"Is this corridor a bit narrow?" Maureen asked the Mustache.

"A bit," he said, worried by the question. "Are you going to be sick again?"

She shook her head. He stopped at one of the doors and opened it, waving her through in front of him. It was a bleak room. The walls were painted with mushroom gloss, the kind that is easy to wipe clean, and a gray metal table was bolted to the floor. A large clumsy black tape recorder was resting on the table next to the wall. A tiny window, high up on the wall, was barred with wrought iron. Everything about the room whispered distrust.

A tall man with ruffled blond hair was sitting at the near side of the table with his back to the door. He stood up when they came in, introduced himself as Detective Chief Inspector Joe McEwan, and asked her to sit down, motioning to the far side of the table, the side farthest away from the door. She had noticed him back at her house: while she was standing in the close she had seen him in the living room, talking to a man wearing a white paper suit. He had looked out at her, his glance lingering too long to be casual. His skin showed a fading long-term tan, the result of regular foreign holidays. He was in his forties and dressed so carefully in black flannels and an expensive blue cotton shirt that he was either gay or a bachelor. A quick look at the fading milky strip on the third finger of his left hand told her that he had shed a wedding ring one or two sunny holidays ago. He had the look of an ambitious man on his way to some bright future. Maureen's Celtic shirt glowed a strange shade of cheap green under the fluorescent light.

She sat down and Joe McEwan introduced the Mustache Man as Detective Inspector Steven Inness. The policewoman was not introduced. She took the hint and left, shutting the door carefully behind her.

McEwan pressed a button and turned on the tape recorder, telling it the time and who was present. He turned to Maureen and asked her very formally whether or not she had been cautioned prior to the interview. She said she had been. Without looking at him McEwan nudged Inness, telling him to take over.

Inness asked her all the same questions he had asked her at the house, again nodding and yessing her answers. She told them who Douglas was, about Elsbeth and that his mother was an MEP. The two policemen glanced at each other nervously. Inness asked her what her shoe size was, and why she hadn't reported the murder last night. She hadn't looked into the living room, it was to the right of the front door and the bedroom was to the left, so there was no reason for her to pass it unless she had been to the toilet. She went straight to bed because she was pissed.

Inness left long pauses after Maureen imparted each bit of information, expecting her to panic at the silence and fill in the spaces with important clues. Maureen had seen a lot of psychiatrists in her time and knew what he was doing. She found it familiar and calming, as if, among all the confusion, she had stumbled across a set of rules she understood. She did what she had always done with the long-pause technique: she sat and looked at the person interviewing her, her face blank, waiting for them to notice that it wouldn't work. The professional thing to do was stare back at her, take it on the chin and then try something else, but Inness couldn't. He looked at everything in the room, his eyes rolling around, swerving past Maureen to the back wall and over her head to the tape recorder. He gave up and flicked back and forth through the pages of his notebook, looking increasingly confused.

McEwan took over. "Who has a key to your house apart from yourself, Miss O'Donnell?"

"Urn, my brother, Liam, Douglas, and that's it. Oh, I suppose the factor would have one."

"What's the factor's name?"

She told him and guessed at the phone number. McEwan wrote it down in a notebook. "I'm not sure that's the right number," she said.

"It's okay," he said, pleased at her willingness to cooperate. "We can look it up. Where can we find your brother?"

She couldn't let them turn up at Liam's house unannounced – she knew he left stuff lying around all the time. It would frighten the shit out of him if nothing else. He'd never had a scrape with the law. "Urn," she said, "he's staying with some friends at the moment, I'll bring him down if you want to talk to him."

McEwan wasn't pleased. "Can't we contact him?"

"Well, the people he's staying with aren't on the phone. They're difficult to get a hold of. I'll get him for you."

"Well, okay," said McEwan, raising his eyebrows insistently, creasing his forehead into three deep parallel ridges. She thought he must make that face a lot. "But we need to see him today ."

"I'll bring him down, I promise. Why was it so hot in the house?"

He looked at her. "What do you mean?"

"It's not usually that hot in the house."

He nudged Inness to make a note of it and turned back to Maureen. "So Douglas had his own key?" he asked diffidently.

"Yes."

"Did you let him into your house yesterday?"

"No, the last time I saw him was on Monday. He stayed the night and left in the morning before I got up."

"Did he mention anything to you about being threatened by anyone, arguing with anyone, being followed, anything like that?"

Maureen thought back over the night's conversation. He was tired when he came in, he didn't even kiss her as he came through the door. He took his shoes off and sat on the settee telling her the usual gossip, the usual moaning appraisal of the people he worked with. Nothing different. They didn't have sex. Douglas fell asleep a minute after getting into bed and Maureen lay wide-awake next to him and watched him dribble saliva onto the pillow. They hadn't had sex for five weeks. Douglas had begun to recoil when she touched him, he rarely even kissed her now.