The rise, p.37
The Rise, page 37
The taxi pulled up outside the flat and she was suddenly desperate for her own bed, her own home, milk in her tea that tasted normal.
Looking up, she could see that there was a light on in Simon’s office. No surprise there. Perhaps if they’d dedicated as much time to each other as they did to their jobs, it wouldn’t have come to this. Not that this was in any way his fault. It was all on her.
As she opened the door, it struck her that she should probably have told him she was on her way. This could turn out to be like one of those clichéd scenes in a movie when someone arrives home early and catches their partner in bed with their lover. She almost laughed at the thought. Not Simon’s style. Absolutely not. Simon was all about truth and justice and fairness. Cheating wasn’t in his personality. But then, until last week she’d have said the same about herself.
Leaving her suitcase behind the front door, she wearily climbed the stairs, psyching herself up to be cheery and normal and the returning loving girlfriend. Just one night of sleep, she promised herself, then she’d face up to the situation.
The higher she got, the more snippets she could hear of Simon’s voice. He must be on the phone. Bit late, but it wasn’t unusual for him to talk to clients well into the night. If she was in luck, it would be a long call and she’d be asleep by the time he was done. Nausea swirled between her stomach and her throat. Oh God, this was awful. Awful. In a moment she realized she could back out, take a cab to a hotel. Why hadn’t she thought of that? It was exactly what she should have done. She could go now; he didn’t have to know that she’d even been…
What was that?
The tinkle of laughter? A woman’s voice.
They were in Simon’s study, so it must be someone from the office. His intern perhaps?
The door was open a few inches, and as she got closer, she could see the top of his head, sitting in his chair, facing his computer. It was so funny she almost laughed. He was on a conference call. No clichéd discovery. He wasn’t having an affair and she wasn’t about to walk in and see him having sex with his secretary, his intern or the next-door neighbour.
The thick grey carpet muffled the sound of the door opening, so much so that he didn’t even have a chance to turn round.
Which probably wasn’t a bad thing.
Because as Sarah entered the room, she realized he was absolutely alone. He was absolutely sitting in his office chair. And he absolutely had his trousers at his ankles and his dick in his hand.
‘Oh my God, Simon.’ The voice wasn’t hers.
It came from the screen, where Pippa, his best mate’s girlfriend, was on her knees, naked, having an X-rated encounter with a large dildo.
‘Simon…’ Pippa repeated, her voice tight with horror.
‘Yes, darling. Yes.’
He was jerking faster now. Sarah couldn’t bear to look. Oh, the irony. Via the wonders of Facetime or Skype or whatever screen-to-screen service they were using for their mutual gratification, Pippa was probably miles away and was staring at Sarah, yet Simon was so close she could slap the back of his head and he had no idea.
‘Simon!’
The tone of Pippa’s voice finally registered in the part of his brain that recognized a potential problem, and he paused, mid-tug.
‘Look behind you,’ Pippa told him, dropping the dildo. It continued to vibrate.
In excruciating slow motion, Simon turned his head and saw her standing there.
‘Fuck.’
Sarah had no words. Instead she smiled. And waved.
‘Honey, I’m home,’ she told him, deadpan, before spinning around and going right back out the door.
Half an hour later, she checked into the Hotel du Vin on Great Western Road. More expensive than she could afford, but the newspaper had a corporate deal and she knew that Ed wouldn’t mind her using it.
Almost twenty-four hours later, she was still in bed. Fourteen hours of sleep, interspersed with several hours of thinking.
Pushing back the white duvet, she padded across the room and pulled a bottle of beer from the minibar. She didn’t bother with the glass. It drove Simon mad when she drank from the bottle. Past tense. She’d blocked his number, so she had no idea if he was trying to contact her, and no clue as to where he was. Right now, that was fine.
The fleeting anger was gone, pushed out of the way by the knowledge that to hold this against him would make her a hypocrite. If anything, she’d done worse. As far as she knew, he’d only had sex with Pippa on screen – that had to rate below the exchange of bodily fluids. If there was an infidelity score sheet, she was currently top of the leader board.
There were decisions to be made. She’d have to move out, find a place of her own, sort out her life, but she wasn’t due back at work until Monday and right now she just needed to get past the jet lag and get her head back together.
She was so deep in thought she almost missed the buzz of her phone, only catching it a second before it would have switched to voicemail.
‘Sarah?’ Rob – Simon’s best friend – sounding, if she wasn’t mistaken, slightly pissed. ‘Sarah, is that you?’
Cancel the last guess – make that very pissed.
‘Hey, Rob, are you OK?’ she asked. Oh God, Rob. She should have checked on him, tried to find out if he knew about his girlfriend and his mate’s screen connection.
‘He’s been shagging Pippa. I’ve suspected for ages and she’s just confessed. Said it’s been going on for weeks. Fucking weeks.’
He knew. And suddenly Simon knocked her off top place on the infidelity chart. An ongoing affair definitely trumped a one-night stand.
‘I know, Rob. I’m sorry.’
‘Can I come over? I’m coming over.’
‘Rob, no. Don’t. Thanks. I’m not at the house. I’ll meet you next week, but I just got back and—’
‘I’d kill the bastard but I’d never hack prison.’
‘I know, Rob.’
‘You know you should have gone out with me?’
Sarah laughed for the first time since she’d touched down in Scotland. ‘You’re right. But look, I have to go, Rob. I’ll call you.’
They both knew she wouldn’t.
After cracking the top off the beer bottle, she moved back to the bed, just her thigh-length white jumper and cream slouch socks protecting her from the chill.
She crawled back in, picked up the remote control and flicked to the hotel movie channels. Comedies. Thrillers. Family. Classics. Porn.
If she wanted the latter, she could just Skype home.
She went for Classics. There must be a movie in there that she wanted to see. It took a few moments to scroll through the hundreds of options beginning with A. Nothing. Then to the Bs. She was almost at the end when her finger jumped off the button.
The Brutal Circle (1991).
Their movie. Sarah had watched it when she was a teenager – maybe ten years ago – and remembered being absolutely gripped by it. But that was the last thing she needed right now. A dark, mildly terrifying thriller about… about… she couldn’t quite remember. Something about a young girl and an older man. Didn’t matter. This wasn’t the time for darkness and harrowing storylines. The part of her brain craving comfort ordered her to switch it off. Turn over to the Comedy Channel. There must be a Friends episode on somewhere.
Yet, somehow, the rest of her wasn’t responding. The titles rolled. Glasgow. A young Zander Leith – wow, he must have been about nineteen then, but in this scene they had to be using filters to knock a few years off – swaggers across a concrete square of wasteland, surrounded by four rows of terraced houses. As he passes a house in the middle of the terrace, he spots a teenage girl, sitting on a bench next to the front door. In front of her, a young guy, around the same age as the others, floppy hair, cute grin. Zander wanders over in time for him to hear Davie Johnston ask her, ‘So why are you out here, then?’
The girl takes a puff on her cigarette, dead eyes looking downwards.
‘Because she’s in there with a bloke and I don’t like hearing them.’
This takes Davie’s and Zander’s characters by surprise.
‘So every night you sit out here—?’
‘She’s in there with a bloke,’ the girl repeats the line, making the point.
Sarah couldn’t move, could barely breathe. The minutes passed; the light on the TV flickered as the images changed; her beer went flat in the bottle she gripped in her hands.
Two hours later, she knew. Knew the whole story. It had been right there all along.
Her mind buzzed as facts whirled around, falling into place, making her heart ache for Mirren’s tragic neglect and the brutality she faced in the end, for Zander’s harrowing upbringing of violence and fear, and for Davie, the sweet young thing who tried to keep it all together, put patches on the pain.
It was all there. She had her story.
63
SCREAMS
GLASGOW, 1989
Jono Leith was so fucking heavy. How could he weigh this much?
Davie’s breathing was fast and gasping as he staggered a few feet, then placed the weight down.
‘Hang on, hang on. Can’t get a good grip. Give me a minute.’
Zander showed no expression, just gave Davie the break that he needed.
He was freaking out inside. Freaking. Out. He’d never seen a dead body before, let alone touched one. The blood. And Jono, so white, no colour left in his face or body. Like he was made of chalk.
They’d had the sense to roll the body in a polythene sheet before moving it. Jono had acted all flash when he’d called in the decorators to have Marilyn’s kitchen painted. Aubergine. Apparently it was the ‘in’ colour. Now the cover sheet they’d left behind was being put to a very different use. They’d needed it. The stuff coming out of him… Urgh, Davie didn’t even want to think about it. He was so light-headed. Couldn’t breathe.
Davie stared at the hut in his garden, trying to work out the distance. Mirren lived in the middle house in the block, Zander at one end, Davie at the other. They just had to get it across two gardens, then past his window to the hut.
And they had to do it all without being seen. That meant staying close to the walls, dragging the body under the eyeline of the windows: commando crawl, pull, commando crawl, pull. There were access gaps between each garden so the bin men could get in to collect the black plastic bags that nestled inside steel cages outside every back door.
Well, now they were definitely throwing out a piece of rubbish.
The Macalisters on the other side weren’t a problem. They both worked the night shift down at the frozen chicken plant. But his mum was always saying that old Mrs McWilliam, who lived between Davie and Mirren’s homes, had the surveillance skills of a bloody telescope. He checked his watch. Almost eight. They’d just have to hope that she was so engrossed in Coronation Street that she didn’t notice a polythene-wrapped corpse being dragged past her window. Commando crawl, pull. Commando crawl, pull.
This was mental. Pure mental. They were bound to get caught, jailed, and they hadn’t even done anything wrong. Mirren’s mum was a fucking fruit loop and they were going to get the blame. But what else could they do? Mirren had begged them not to call the police. There was no other choice. Heart racing, hands shaking, he tried not to look at Jono, not to think of the lump he was carrying as a real person, because if he did, he’d lose it. Freak out even more. A glance at Zander told him nothing about how his mate was doing. He couldn’t even begin to imagine how that would feel – carrying your own dad. Dead. Blood oozing under the polythene so that now it looked like a packet of steak you’d pick up from the supermarket.
Davie turned to the side and vomited, retching until there was nothing left to come up. Stomach empty, he closed his eyes, took a deep breath and forced some air back into his lungs.
‘You OK?’ Zander asked. ‘I’ll take the blame for this, Davie. Go home. I swear I’ll never say you helped. I’ll tell them it was me. Won’t mention you or Mir.’
Davie shook his head. How many times had Zander said he wished his dad was dead? Too many. But saying it was one thing, seeing it was another. He wasn’t going to bail out and leave his best mate to deal with this now. They stuck together. It’s what they did.
‘OK, let’s go,’ he told Zander, once again heaving his half of the body up, waiting until his pal had done the same. They got a fair distance this time. Fast and small steps now that they were no longer crossing someone else’s garden.
One last semi-sprint and they burst through the hut door, hurtling the body between them, jumping at the bang as it hit the floor.
Looking at each other, they slid down the walls, sweating, breathing hard.
‘How did this happen?’ Davie sighed, not really a question, not expecting an answer. He could feel the tears sitting at the back of his eyes, waiting to fall, and he pushed them away.
Zander pushed the lawnmower out of the way and reached into the big hole in the floor, the one made all those years ago by a stray cigarette. He felt around, then pulled out a bottle of vodka he always kept there, took a slug and rested his head back against the wall. Both of them were filthy, their clothes matted with blood and dirt, their faces streaked where sweat had smeared the dust.
‘It’s weird. I hate him. Have always hated him. But now I just feel nothing,’ Zander said quietly. ‘Not even glad he’s dead. Just nothing.’
He knocked back another inch of vodka.
Davie’s guts twisted again, but he knew there was nothing left to throw up.
‘So what’s the plan?’ Zander said.
Davie nodded towards the hole from which Zander had pulled his vodka. ‘There. We lift more of the floor, bury him underneath. No one can see us if we stay inside.’
‘You’ve got to be fucking kidding,’ Zander said, one hand running through his hair. ‘We’re putting my dead da under your hut?’
‘Got a better idea?’ Davie challenged him.
Zander paused, thought for a moment. ‘No.’
‘Right. We take up that half of the floor,’ Davie said, gesturing to the hole again, ‘and dig deeper, put the soil on this half. Thank fuck my Ma didn’t put this on a concrete base. Said it would be too expensive, so she just got some bloke to lay a wood frame down under it. We can just saw out some of the bits if we need to. Then when we’re done, put him in there and just fill it with the soil again. Then tomorrow morning, I’ll go to B&Q. Not the one in Parkhead. Another one. Further away. Just to be sure. And I’ll get some concrete, the ready-made stuff. I’ll put a layer of concrete over the soil and… and… him, then put the wooden floor back down. Look,’ he finished wearily, ‘it’s all I’ve got.’
More vodka before Zander wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and then pushed himself up. ‘Then we’d better start. I’ll get a shovel from my garden and take the first shift. I meant what I said, pal. I’ll do this.’
Davie shook his head. ‘Naw. I’m in.’
Hours later, they were back on the half of the wooden floor that they hadn’t ripped up, Jono no longer there, buried under the freshly replaced soil next to them. For once, Davie reached over, grabbed the vodka bottle and took a gulp. The reaction was instant. It didn’t even get as far as his stomach before his mouth rejected it, spraying it across the wall.
‘Christ, how can you drink that stuff?’ he asked.
Exhausted, head resting on his knees, Zander didn’t reply for a long time. Davie was beginning to wonder if he’d fallen asleep when he eventually croaked, ‘Thanks, Davie. I mean it.’
Davie smiled sadly. ‘Just hope we get away with it. Don’t fancy Barlinnie.’
He wasn’t joking. HMP Barlinnie stood like a grey fortress overlooking the city, a warning that it was up there, waiting for the mad, the bad and the evil.
‘If anyone had seen us, we’d know by now,’ Zander murmured, a layer of hope sitting over a tone that blended confidence with desperation.
He was almost right.
The Macalisters were both at work, as hoped, so their house lay empty. Old Mrs McWilliam had missed Coronation Street, but only because she’d had a fish supper for tea and the massive intake of food had made her doze off in front of her four-bar electric fire.
There were no dog-walkers in the woods behind them, no kids loitering around where they shouldn’t be, no police keeping an eye on Jono Leith’s territory using covert surveillance. None of that.
Just Davie’s mum, standing well back from the window, wearing a thick fleece dressing gown, cigarette in hand. The noise of Mirren running around the house looking for Davie had momentarily distracted her from the book she was reading in the bath. Jackie Collins. She was her favourite.
She’d climbed out, opened the bathroom window, saw the state of Mirren as she’d flown out of the hut a few moments later, her boy and Zander in tow.
Then not long afterwards, from her kitchen window, she’d seen the boys carry something into the hut.
It wasn’t difficult to work out what had happened – some of her guesswork was slightly off base, some of it spot on.
But the thing they’d dragged into her shed? She knew. Of course she knew. It was Jono Leith. He’d had it coming for a long time. No matter how they’d got here, he was no loss to anyone and she wouldn’t mourn him. Not for a second.
For four hours she’d stood in her kitchen, watching the light shine from the tiny opaque window in the hut, listening to the sound of sawing and digging.
But at no point did she go in there. That wasn’t her job. Her job was to watch, oversee, look for danger coming, protect those she loved, keep their secrets.
Hadn’t she been doing that for years?
This was just one more secret to add to the list. And Ena Johnston would die before she gave it up.
64
