Morrow and McGrain pulled a couple of chairs away from the back row in the Victoria Hall. They sat next to the wall, in the shadow of the overhanging balcony. They weren’t there to participate in the public meeting. They were there to watch the crowd.
The appeal for information was being filmed and would be shown on both the local news and a national TV crime show. A huge camera took up the centre of the room, facing the table on the stage. Banks of plastic chairs were arranged in front of it.
The Sailors’ Rest fire was national news because of the tragic death of young Lea-Anne Ray. Helensburgh was appalled by her death, but none of the information the police received had been particularly useful. The feeling was that a lot of people knew but were too afraid to speak out.
Morrow crossed her arms and looked around the familiar hall. She knew almost every corner of it from the plethora of photographs they had collected of the dinner dance. They were collating information on ‘Abigail Gomez’. The search would continue on both sides of the Atlantic but Morrow could already feel the energy ebbing from it. Police Scotland would get their slice of the proceeds from Injury Claims 4 U but they would forego a case clean-up. Gomez was a potentially costly collar and they couldn’t afford her. So far all they had turned up was a tentative identification: a dead woman by the name of Elizabeth Marquez. Gomez’s photos had been loosely matched by a US facial recognition programme. A Venezuelan ‘freelance security consultant’, Marquez had disappeared in Nigeria three years ago. She was presumed dead. They only had eight points of facial identification, not enough to action.
The TV camera was bigger and boxier than Morrow would have expected. It was manned by slim people with suntans and haircuts too sharp for the small town.
On stage a short table and four chairs had been laid out in front of a blue backdrop banner with the thistle and crown logo of Police Scotland:
Keeping People Safe,
it said.
The burghers of the town began to filter in. A janitor pointed them to the seats and the TV people began to rearrange the audience like flowers in a vase. They placed the early arrivals in the front row and aisles, checking the composition in their monitors and going back to move them again.
Morrow could see the monitor screen on the back of the camera, the boxy view of the room making the hall seem small and intimate. The view through the monitor was insistent. Her eye kept being drawn back to the bright little rectangle of ordered reality.
Simmons arrived with Chief Inspector Pittoch who was wearing his full ceremonial uniform. They toured the hall together, smiling and shaking hands with the television people, with journalists. CI Pittoch gave a radio interview into a small dictaphone. Then someone from the TV came over and fitted the two of them with collar mics, sliding the wire down the back of their jackets and putting the transmitters into their pockets. All the while townspeople filtered in and were directed into their chairs.
More chairs were brought in for more people. They were arriving all the time and the crowd began to creep towards Morrow and McGrain.
A commotion near the door. Elderly members of the audience stood up, reverently watching two old women coming in. One was in a wheelchair, a bad leg straight out in front of her, two hands clutching the handle of her handbag like a steering wheel. The other old lady leaned heavily on the chair. Both of the women were dressed in their best, clean blouses, smart cardigans.
At the side of the stage they were mic’d up and helped up the steep steps to the stage. The standing woman took it slowly and the seated woman was eased out of the chair by a couple of audience members. She made it up to the stage one shuffled step at a time. The wheelchair was folded, handed up, opened again and she sat down. She was wheeled behind the table and her companion sat down next to her. A man in the audience gave a couple of misplaced claps and was slapped on the arm for his trouble by the woman next to him.
Still the town was arriving. The pensioners had come good and early, but now the rest of the town were streaming through the doors. Men in work clothes, women hurrying in as if they had just shed children in the car park, a woman with an NHS badge nodding to almost everybody.
Three young men came in together, all wearing ‘Yes’ badges and carrying handfuls of referendum literature. A ripple of annoyance ran across the hall. They weren’t going to, were they? Not here, for goodness’ sake! But they weren’t. They sat down by the door, just canvassers on a break.
Frank Delahunt arrived alone and was ignored by everyone. He sat down next to an elderly couple. They took his proffered hand and shook it but resented having to do so. He wasn’t liked and Morrow knew he had been told that he was losing his house. Police Scotland were going to auction it.
Boyd Fraser came in, still wearing his chef whites. He must have come from next door. He’d been out of custody for four days but he looked shaken. His wife, Lucy, held his hand tightly, her jaw clenched, her attention on his every step. She was worried for him and he was grateful for her.
The room stiffened suddenly. A momentary hush fell and everyone looked to the door. Mark Barratt was in the doorway. He stood with his chest out, taking the opprobrium full on. Morrow had to bite her cheek to stop herself from crying. It was the way he stood, arms out to the sides, fists balled, defiant. For a fleeting moment he had looked so much like Danny that she was afraid she would be sick.
The moment passed, the chatter in the room rose again and Barratt walked into the body of the room. He wasn’t alone. The two younger men were dressed like Barratt, in dark tracksuits and they all had shaved heads. They looked like Barratt’s apostles. One of them had very heavy eyebrows.
‘That’s Tommy Farmer,’ muttered McGrain, and Morrow nodded.
The trio walked around behind the camera, surveying the hall for seats. Tommy Farmer found three chairs together and stood by them, looking to Mark for approval, but the other guy had found a run of four seats and Mark nodded and headed over to him.
Tommy looked puzzled. He stayed where he was and watched Barratt sit down and look up to the door. A woman was standing there. Barratt beckoned her over. They seemed an unlikely couple. She was messy, shuffling as she made her way over. Her ankles were swollen and she had a rip on the hem of her skirt. Her thin blonde hair was tangled at the back. She smiled and nodded at Barratt and sat down next to him.
Tommy was agitated. He hurried over, looking at the woman, looking Barratt, moving quickly, looking for an explanation of something as he sat on the other side of his boss. Barratt blanked him but the woman made a point of giving Tommy a big grin. She looked like him. It was Tommy’s mother.
The room was full. The doors were shut. The TV directors checked their monitors. The old women on the stage flattened their hair and collars and cardigans. Simmons and her boss moved to the wings of the stage, watching for a cue. Silence fell in the room.
The director looked away from the monitor and gave the police a nod.
CI Pittoch pulled his tunic straight with a firm tug at the hem, gave the audience a fleeting look of utter terror, walked to the table and sat down on the nearest chair. Simmons followed him on. She looked very comfortable. The press conference began.
Pittoch welcomed them and said that the devastating fire at the Sailors’ Rest had been started deliberately. A local man, Murray Ray and his young daughter, well-loved in the local community, had died. Now: people knew who was responsible and this was the time to tell the truth. It was difficult sometimes, in such a close-knit community, to tell the truth but it was important.
Pittoch introduced Mrs Eunice Ray, the lady in the wheelchair, and Annie Kilpatrick. They were Lea-Anne’s grandmothers and they wanted to read a statement.
Annie and Eunice. Morrow hadn’t known their names. She hadn’t even mentioned Iain Fraser’s stilted last words to Simmons because they made no sense. Tell them. It wasn’t me.
The room was silent and still. Annie Kilpatrick kept her eyes down, trembling, as Eunice lifted her statement. The microphone was turned up so high to catch her faint voice that the room was filled with her breathing, the sound of her clothes brushing against each other. In the monitor screen Morrow saw that she was holding the paper too high, obscuring her face from view. She read in a high voice. Her only son and her granddaughter, their princess, had been murdered in this fire. People in the town knew who had started it. They had a duty to come forward and tell the police. Please tell—
She stopped speaking. The paper in front of her face trembled. The room was so still, the mic so high, they could hear her tears drip on the paper.
Eunice lowered the sheet, making herself visible again. She was weeping, looking at Annie sitting next to her. Annie was crying openly at the table, her chin on her chest. She whispered deep into the collar mic, ‘Our lives are over.’
Everyone waited for her to speak again but she didn’t. Simmons looked to her boss. CI Pittoch hadn’t expected to be called upon to speak so soon. He was startled but took over:
‘So! We appeal. To anyone who knows anything. Come forward and help this family.’
In his confusion he looked straight at Mark Barratt.
Mark Barratt sat, unflinching, and looked back at him. Then he nodded, just a little.
‘No! Mark! No!’
It was the woman next to him. She was on her feet, grabbing across Barratt, reaching for her son, Tommy.
Barratt lifted an arm up and blocked her, took her shoulder and pushed her back into her seat.
In the far corner of the hall a small man raised his hand, watching Barratt’s impassive face as he did. He was wearing a track suit too. He wanted to speak and Mark Barratt gave him a nod. ‘Tommy Farmer started the fire. I seen him.’
A solitary shriek of a chair filled the room. Tommy was standing, looking at the door out.
‘Stay!’ Simmons was across the stage and down the steps. ‘Farmer! Stay there!’
Mark Barratt was up. He lifted the woman at his side to her feet, yanking her out of the room with him.
Farmer shouted after them. ‘I never!’
But Simmons was at his side, taking his wrist, nodding a cop over to the man with his hand up. CI Pittoch sat still on the stage, trying hard to remain dignified for the camera. The audience were nodding, satisfied, agreeable.
But Morrow wasn’t watching the arrest. She was transfixed by the old women on stage. Anek and her niece. Annie and Eunice. They weren’t watching the arrest either. They were crying, holding hands, forehead pressed to forehead. Everything they said was amplified by both their mics, so loud it drowned the room.
Annie gasped for breath through her tears and Eunice sobbed, ‘Thank God! Thank God! Thank God!’
The room was a maelstrom of action, Tommy resisting arrest, the small man with his hand up being questioned, Boyd Fraser and his wife hugged in a corner. Groups of people swirled and ebbed, lives were changed and cliffs swept away, but Morrow wasn’t watching any of it. She was listening.
Through the big speakers on either side of the stage surged the sound of old women crying, reaching for each other, and the rasp of blouse against mic filled the room as surely as water.
I’d like to thank Nicola White for inviting me to Hel often, and explaining the referendum politics of the area, though we were on different shores at the time. I’d like to apologise to Ms White if I have inadvertently misrepresented any of the nuances around the whole gazebo controversy. Any overt or covert implications on the use of gazebos for political purposes are inadvertent. I had strong opinions on this at one time but now I no longer care. To be clear: I will still fight ye, but the fun has gone out it for me.
Also thanks to the people who advise and guide and patiently explain why this bit is rubbish and that character wasn’t even in the story until page 274 and everyone in the book has glasses on: Jon Wood, Jemima Forrester, Peter Robinson. Also to Angela McMahon and Graeme Williams, and sorry about forgetting to go to things all the time. Also to Juliet Ewers and Susan Lamb. And the God-sent Susie Murray and Trudi Keir, both of whom wrangle with the chaos and leave me free to work.
You’re all bloody lovely and I wake up every morning grateful for you.
Still Midnight
The Last Breath
The Dead Hour
The Field of Blood
Sanctum
Resolution
Exile
Garnethill
The End of the Wasp Season
Gods and Beasts
The Red Road
AN ORION EBOOK
First published in Great Britain in 2015 by Orion Books.
This ebook first published in 2015 by Orion Books.
Copyright © Denise Mina 2015
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ISBN: 978 1 4091 4076 4
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