Then she returned to the wardrobe and used the T-shirt to open it.
No hats.
There were a couple of hoodies badly folded on a shelf, one of which, a pale grey one, looked roomy enough to fit her. She grabbed it, wriggled it on over her top and pulled up the hood, feeling the need to hide her face immediately. It smelt of sweat and sickly deodorant. Her throat contracted and she gagged.
She folded her arms, hands tucked away so she wouldn’t accidentally touch anything else, and stepped carefully from the bedroom to the hall – she didn’t look down again – and to the front door of the flat. It was still standing slightly open.
She stopped just inside it and listened, but there were no sounds coming from the stairwell. Quickly, before she lost her nerve, she stepped onto the stone landing and, tugging the sleeve of the hoodie over her hand, pulled the door almost shut.
Her mouth dry, her pulse thumping in her ears, she made herself walk, not run, down the stone steps, onto the landing below, past the two doors there, onto the next flight of steps, the raincoat flapping against her legs.
On the next landing down she could hear voices behind one of the doors, the scruffy black one. What if the door suddenly opened and they saw her?
Grabbing the bannister, she flung herself round the curve of the stairwell and down two steps at once – and jolted to a halt.
Idiot!
She’d touched the bannister with her bare hand.
She pulled the thin wool of the hoodie’s sleeve over her hand and ran it back up the bannister to where she’d grabbed it. She was going to be sick. Sour bile was rising at the back of her throat again –
If she was sick, could they get DNA from it?
Swallowing and gasping, she somehow made it down the last flight of stairs to the dingy passage that led to the main door.
Her footsteps clopped along it, echoing up the stair as she heard a voice on the landing above; a harsh laugh.
She ran.
Pulling the sleeve back over her hand, she wrenched open the heavy door and ran out into the air, up the narrow close to the street, to the litter and the traffic and the run-down shopfronts and the people walking by – an old woman’s sharp little eyes on her –
She stopped running – slowed to a normal pace, her legs almost buckling under her, as if they’d forgotten how to do it, how to move normally.
She looked down at her feet as they moved, one past the other, at the grubby pavement with its pockmarks of chewing gum, its fag ends and its broken paving. It had been raining, and where the slabs had sunk and cracked, dirty brown puddles had formed in random geometric shapes. Even the puddles here had hard edges. The pavement had a sheen on it, and her right foot came down on a disintegrating scratch card stuck to its surface.
All around her was the sound of people, potential witnesses – so many cars swishing past, so many bodies passing by, looking at her, probably, this strange woman in the hoodie walking with her head down.
But it had been raining, so maybe that was okay.
She risked a glance up to get her bearings. There was the newsagent on the corner with dusty windows behind metal grilles, a stark contrast to the aggressively smiling, doll-like celebrity couple on the sandwich board outside.
She waited for a break in the traffic, hood pulled well over her face, and when it came she ran across the road, ran up the side street where she’d left her car.
The tears came, for some reason, as soon as she caught a glimpse of red behind the broad rear of a silver four-by-four. Her little red Ka. For some reason, it was at this moment that she was no longer able to hold back the image of Saskia’s little boy in his mother’s arms, the arms that had held him as no one else ever would again.
I just wanted to see you.
Fumbling the key from her pocket, she pointed and pressed the rubbery button and the car winked its lights at her and she hauled open the door and dived inside.
22
The internet was full of Saskia, although her name hadn’t yet been released.
While Beckie and Neil ate breakfast and argued about whether cats were too intelligent to be trained (Beckie) or not intelligent enough (Neil), Flora sat on one of the sofas with her laptop, trawling through the newsfeeds, trying to concentrate through the pulses of pain just above her eyebrows.
With the sound muted, she watched an STV reporter standing on the street outside the entrance to the close, while in the background a little crowd of people had gathered and a policewoman stood in front of the ‘Police – Road Closed’ sign, hands behind her back, face impassive. Behind her, blue and white police tape was stretched right across the road, and between the Road Closed sign and the tape there were white vans and police cars parked and people milling about, some in black police uniforms, some in white forensic suits, some in plain clothes.
She closed the page and did another search for ‘Glasgow woman dead’. A BBC article was the first hit. It said that a woman had been found dead in a flat in the Haghill area of Glasgow and police were treating her death as suspicious. And that she was understood to be a former social worker who had recently been suspended from her post with Glasgow City Council pending an inquiry into her conduct.
She closed her eyes.
‘Mum?’ said Beckie. ‘Can we?’
She looked up. ‘Hmm?’
‘When Mia’s cat has kittens, can we have one? Dad says we can if you agree.’
‘I didn’t say that, Beckie,’ Neil said quickly, aiming an appeasing smile at Flora. He thought she was still angry with him – about the ‘assault’ on Carly Johnson and/or his new laissez faire strategy. He thought that was why she’d burst into tears when he’d started apologising again about it as they were preparing breakfast. He thought that was why she was so touchy and trembly and snappy.
She wished she could tell him about Saskia. But she couldn’t. She couldn’t tell him why she hadn’t called the police.
Instead, she’d told him she hadn’t gone to see Saskia after all. That she’d decided he was right, and they couldn’t trust her. That she would ask Deirdre about the Johnsons instead.
‘So can we?’ Beckie persisted.
‘No we can’t.’ She sighed. ‘Beckie. Do you really think getting a kitten is a good idea?’
Beckie’s face became expressionless. ‘Because the Johnsons might kill it?’
‘Oh, no darling, I just meant – kittens are a lot of work…’ She shut the laptop and came over to the table and draped her arms round Beckie’s neck. ‘The Johnsons aren’t going to do anything bad to us. And even if they try to, the police will arrest them.’
‘They already tried to and the police haven’t done anything.’
‘Well, they’ve cautioned them. So if they do anything else, they’ll be in big trouble. And now we’ve got the CCTV, we’ll have them on camera if they come anywhere near the house.’
What if she’d been caught on CCTV at Saskia’s? What if even now the police were on their way here to arrest her?
But if she was on CCTV, surely whoever had killed Saskia would be too?
The Johnsons.
She wasn’t going to kid herself that anyone else could be responsible.
They’d killed Saskia. They must have found out that Saskia had been suspended from her post for hurting children. And they’d managed to track her down and kill her.
And if they were capable of that, what might they do to Flora and Neil and Beckie?
‘They can’t do anything to us, darling,’ she finished lamely. ‘And now we’re going to forget all about them and have a really fun day. After we’ve been to Cairn Hill, how about we have lunch at the Bistro?’