"Shut up, Mauri," Leslie murmured sleepily. "It's nothing to do with you."
"Yes, it is, it's my fault. I'm playing at this and I don't know what I'm doing. I could be putting you in danger, or Liam, or anyone. Or even Siobhain."
"Maureen, please, shut up and go to sleep."
"I can't, I feel like such an arse. I was there just a couple of hours beforehand. I was the last person to see him alive-"
"You can't have been, Maureen," said Leslie, her voice irritated and loud. "They wouldn't have let you go if you had been."
"D'ye think so? D'ye think someone else saw him after me?"
"Yeah. Why's that important?"
"Dunno. Do you think I've got a good memory?"
"What, for details and stuff?"
"Aye."
"It's fine, Mauri. Can we go to sleep now?"
"I should never have gone to see Martin in the first place, and going back a second time, I don't know what I was thinking about or why I was trying to find the person who did this. There's nothing I can do even if I do find them."
"Why?"
"Well, if it has got anything to do with the Northern the police'll want to talk to Siobhain and all the other women about it, and look at what this afternoon did to her. It could kill her."
Leslie rolled onto her back and stared at the ceiling.
"So you're giving up?"
"Fuck, I'll have to. Everyone at the Northern knew about the list from that Frank guy. I mean, I might have been just as clumsy about other things."
"He isn't coming after the people the police are talking to, is he? He's coming after the people you're talking to. That means you're on the right track."
"But even if I do find out who did it I can't take them to the police. They'll need witnesses and they'll have to question the women. God knows what kind of damage they could do."
Leslie rolled onto her side and looked at her. "You can't just stop." She sounded angry. "It doesn't matter a toss that you can't take him to the police, Maureen, for fucksake. We have to take responsibility about this and do something to stop it."
"But the police-"
"Never mind the fucking police. The point is, you know more about this than anyone else now. We can't just throw our hands up and walk away, for Christ's sake. We have to stop him from hurting other people."
"But I wouldn't know what to do."
"Well," she said sarcastically, "let's mount a poster campaign or something. How about letters to the papers?"
"Auch, Leslie-"
" 'Auch, Leslie' nothing. This is it, Maureen, this is the big crunch. Do you genuinely give a shit or do you just like fighting about politics?"
"No, but-"
"If you do give a shit we have to find this man and put him out of action."
"I'm not killing anyone."
"I'll do it if you don't." Leslie rolled onto her back again, crossing her arms and tucking her hands under her armpits, grunting with annoyance.
"We still don't know it's a man who did it," said Maureen carefully. "We don't know that the rapes at the Northern were done by the person who killed Douglas or Martin. For all we know those murders could have been done by a woman."
"Of course it's a fucking man," snapped Leslie. "You just don't want to be wrong."
"Maybe we'll never know…"
Leslie sat up impatiently. The back of her head was in a shaft of light from the street, obscuring her face. She pointed her finger at Maureen, poking it aggressively. "You have to find this fucker, not just for yourself but for that Martin guy and Siobhain in there and all the other women, 'cause you can bet your arse the bastard wasn't caught out every time. Do you think he got this brutal at a knitting bee? He's been working up to it, practicing on other people, he's been busy and I'll fucking bet you any money that there are women all over this city who can't live in their skin because of what he did to them. And when we find him we need to stop him, not try and educate him or get the police to sort him out, just fucking stop him."
She took her finger out of Maureen's face and tugged at the pockets in her jacket. She found a packet of cigarettes, flipped it open, and shoved one in her mouth.
"Christ, Leslie, man," said Maureen, holding tightly on to the edge of her coat/blanket and pulling it up a little. "Calm down."
"I'm sorry," she said sharply, rummaging in her pocket for matches.
"You should be," said Maureen. "What was that about?"
"I hate that, I hate it."
"You hate what?"
"Just that when we act so powerless, like there's nothing we can do, they smack us and we say please stop, they smack us and we say please stop. We should smack them fucking back."
"But if we use violence how are we different from them?"
"Morally?"
"Yeah, morally there'd be nothing to separate us."
Leslie shook her head. "God Al-fucking-mighty, Maureen, have you thought about this at all? It's all right for you and me to worry about our moral standing – neither of us are getting our faces kicked in every night in the week. These women are treated as if they were born on the end of a boot and we set up committees and worry about our moral standing. It's a fucking joke, the movement's turning into the WRVS, it pisses me off. We're not fucking helpless, we're fucking cowards."
She lit the cigarette and Maureen saw her face in the match's flare. She was frowning angrily, her eyebrows knitted tightly together. "Specifically in what context does it piss you off?" said Maureen, now sure that it was nothing she'd done.
"It just does, okay?"
"Tell me the story, though."
She drew heavily on her cigarette. "I don't really want to," she said and exhaled.
"All right, then," said Maureen.
The smoke swirled above Maureen's head.
"Do you remember the woman who was raped by the three men in the West End?" asked Leslie quietly. "They threw acid in her face afterward."
"I read about it in the paper. It was a while ago."
"It was two and a half years ago. She was called Charlotte. She'd been in the shelter for a while."
"I didn't know that."
"Yeah." She puffed at the cigarette.
"Give us some," said Maureen, holding her hand out for the fag. As Leslie passed it to her their fingertips touched momentarily and Maureen felt how cold Leslie was.
"Her husband had been beating her and she came to us. She had these facial scars-you know, the kind that make you shudder when you first see them. Her nose was flattened and one of her eyes was higher than the other. Ina said it was a cheekbone fracture that hadn't been set, it'd just been left. You could see the bone sticking out sometimes when she was eating. She'd scars all over her cheek, there." She gestured to her left cheek, drawing a circle on it. "The really vicious ones cut across cuts so that the doctors can't sew it up. There's nothing to sew it onto, just bits of skin hanging off. They can't patch it up, they just have to let it scar. That's how out of control these fuckers are, they've got the presence of mind to go over the cuts a second time." She took the cigarette from Maureen and sucked it hungrily.
"Anyway," she said, "she started getting it together, really together. She went on a course and got a job doing landscape gardening. She was going to set up her own business, once she'd saved some money, went to see the bank manager with a business plan and everything. She got herself a wee flat and moved out.
"Four months later I read in the paper about a rape. They dragged this woman off the Byres Road in the early morning and took her to a house and raped her for eight hours. Then they threw acid in her face. She crawled out into the hall after they left and managed to get into the close. They said she was in a critical condition. We were all talking about it in work and Annie came in and said it was Charlotte."
Leslie paused uncharacteristically and rubbed her eye hard with the ball of her palm. Her long slim neck was bent and the wispy hairs and bumpy vertebrae were lit in stark relief by the streetlight.