‘What’s that, hen?’ I goes. ‘We’re no gonnae get away with it? Oh, we’re gonnae get away with it, because unlike you we’re professionals. We’re not in fucking forensic suits for a wee joke, eh?’
‘It’s not fucking Hallowe’en!’ chuckles Ryan.
‘Ee-ee gi-ee,’ goes Mair.
‘Eh?’
‘CCTV, hen?’ I chuckle. ‘There’s no cameras in the close – what bastard’s gonnae bother? Two in the street that maybe cover the entrance, but the boys dealt with they ones last night.’
‘Like Maw says, we’re professionals.’
‘It’s a wee shame though, eh, what it’s gonnae do to your kids? Hard on them, growing up without their maw. But maybe you shoulda thought about what kids’ families mean to them before you started fucking with their lives, eh?’
‘But check it, Maw.’ Ryan waves a hand. ‘Check the place. Check this bitch. Her weans come and bide, they’re gonnae get septicaemia off of all this crap, and maybe while she’s high on her drug of choice they’re gonnae give it a wee try? We’re doing they weans a favour.’
‘You’re right, son. We’re practically Child Fucking Protection.’
Ryan chuckles. ‘No word of a lie.’
‘When I think,’ I goes, real quiet, in Mair’s face, ‘when I think of you and that so-called Doctor Fernandez cooking up that pack of lies… The two of yous go for a wee coffee at Starbucks, aye, when yous was supposedly round ours carrying out a rigorous professional assessment of our ability to care for our wean? Sit there making up shite about low IQs and depression while you sipped your skinny lattes? Do I look like a fucking eejit, doll? Do I look like I’m depressed?’
The grey, dirty, dingy little courtyard wasn’t just deserted – it felt abandoned, as if no one could possibly live here. No one, surely, could open that battered, graffiti-covered door and think ‘Home’?
Flora couldn’t remember which flat number Saskia was, so she pressed all the buzzers and waited.
No response.
It must have rung with voices once, this little close, with all those barefoot Haghill children, their lives spilling out of the single-ends down the stair and into the close and the street, all mixed up together in happy, heedless communal poverty. She’d heard them on TV programmes, these children, saying in old age: ‘We didn’t know we were poor, you see – sixpence to spend down the shop and we were millionaires! Deprived? Not a bit of it! None of us felt deprived. We all looked out for each other, you know? If you were out playing and you were hungry, you could chap a door and ask for a piece and like as not get it, though you’d maybe to put up with “Aw, Davie, the state of you!” and getting your face scrubbed and a comb through your hair. We were surrounded by folk that cared about us – how were we deprived, eh? Happy as the day is long.’
Did Saskia hear those children’s ghosts, she wondered, their high voices echoing up the deserted close? Did they haunt her? Reproach her for what she’d done?
She tried the array of buzzers again. This time, a crackly voice said, ‘Aye?’
‘Hello. I’m here to see Saskia Mair in one of the top flats.’
‘Okay dear.’ And the door buzzed open.
Her shoes on the worn stone steps rapped out a rhythm as she climbed, clop clop, clop clop, echoing off the hard surfaces.
Saskia’s door was open, just slightly. Maybe the neighbour had told her that Flora was on her way up. She knocked nevertheless.
‘Saskia?’
No response.
Could she have popped down to the communal garden or into a neighbour’s flat?
‘Hello, Saskia? It’s Flora.’ She pushed open the door.
The place stank of stale air and drains. There was a pile of dirty clothes against the wall, and something dark and wet had been spilt on the carpet.
Not a pile of clothes.
‘Saskia!’
That was blood.
Hands shaking, Flora knelt to push the hair off Saskia’s face, to feel for a pulse at her neck.
No pulse.
She felt warm to the touch, but that could be because Flora was, suddenly, so freezing cold herself. Was she still warm?
‘Saskia,’ she said again, stupidly.
Vital signs.
She’d been a nurse, for God’s sake.
Vital signs.
She found her sunglasses in her bag and held them, shaking, under Saskia’s nose, peering at the dark surface for signs of condensation.
Nothing.
Shoving the sunglasses back in her bag and fumbling for her phone, she turned on the flashlight app. Her hand steady now, she lifted Saskia’s right eyelid. The eye under it was rolled back slightly, as if already turned to heaven. She shone the light into the eye.
No constriction of the pupil.
She lifted one of Saskia’s arms – surprisingly heavy for such a thin person – and shone the flashlight onto the skin under the forearm. It was reddened in mottled patches.
The first, definitive signs of lividity.
So no CPR.
She must have been dead for at least half an hour.
And then all Flora could do was kneel there as Saskia’s blood soaked from the carpet into the knees of her jeans. The source of the blood, the nurse’s part of her brain noted, was Saskia’s chest – the front of the green T-shirt she was wearing was one huge dark purple stain.
Saskia Mair had been stabbed to death.
She needed to call the police.
She tapped 999 on her phone and then stopped.
She couldn’t.
If she called the police, she would be scrutinised as a possible suspect. They would dig into her past. They might find out that Ruth Innes died at the age of six and was reborn as a teenager in 1983. They might find out about Rachel.
No one had seen her come in here.
She needed to just go.
She could find a phone box, disguise her voice, tell the police she was a concerned neighbour who didn’t want to give her name, but there had been yobs hanging about the stair and she thought they might have got into Saskia’s flat.
Or she could just go.
She dropped her phone back in her bag and stood.
‘Sorry,’ she mouthed to Saskia.
The knees of her jeans were sticky with blood. But they were dark navy denim and it wasn’t too noticeable. She was parked just round the corner. All she had to do was get to her car without attracting attention.
But the police would be asking people about anyone they’d seen. There might even be CCTV in the street.
There were four doors off the tiny hall. The second one she tried was a cupboard, with some coats hanging up and others in a pile on top of various boxes. She found a raincoat which was way too small but which, tied round her waist by the sleeves, flapped over her knees and concealed the bloodstains.
Now she needed something to hide her face.
A hat?
She couldn’t see one.
She opened another door – a bathroom, smelling of mould and uncleaned toilet, a grey tidemark all round the bath. And another – a chaotic bedroom – clothes all over the bed and floor, a furring of dust on the cheap pine dressing table.
She had her hand on the wardrobe when she realised: fingerprints. DNA.
She grabbed a dirty pink T-shirt from the floor and used it to wipe the door of the wardrobe, then the door handles in the hall. Had she touched anything else? Had she touched Saskia? Would her DNA be on Saskia’s body?
She thought she had maybe touched her face.
Her neck, definitely, when she was feeling for a pulse.
Then, she had touched her with the tenderness of one human confronted by another who’d been hurt, who needed help. Now, it was like being a butcher prepping a slab of meat as she wiped the T-shirt flinchingly across Saskia’s dead forehead, cheeks and neck.