"If he wouldn't bring anyone to your house," said Leslie, "someone else might have brought him to the house. They might have threatened him somewhere and made him take them to your house."

"Right."

"See?" said Leslie. "It is a logic problem. Why wouldn't he answer the phone?"

"I dunno, he was just, sort of… secretive, you know."

"Yeah, sort of married?"

Maureen rubbed her neck uncomfortably.

"Anyway," said Leslie, "I still think this was a rational action by a rational man. We can work it out."

"But I don't know half of the facts, though. I don't even know what was in the cupboard."

"Then we'll have to find out somehow," said Leslie, with the reassuring certainty she brought to everything she did.

Maureen ran her fingers hard through her hair. "I'm frightened, Leslie."

"He's just a guy, Maureen."

"It might be a woman, right enough."

"Nah," said Leslie. "Women don't do things like that. It's men who do that sort of shitty, vicious stuff. With us it's about important things like love and kids and not getting your face kicked in. With them it's for big motors, younger birds or a bit of a tug."

"It might be about love or kids, we don't know. The woman at the Rainbow said someone was fucking a patient in one of the offices."

"In an office?"

"Yeah. She didn't even seem shocked about it. She thought it was me."

"Could he be having an affair with someone else at the same time?"

"That's what I thought," said Maureen. "We hadn't shagged each other for weeks."

"That's it, then. God, men are pigs."

"Anyway," said Maureen, "I don't think men and women kill for different reasons. Logically, it could have been a woman who murdered Douglas."

Leslie pulled her collar up around her neck. "But I bet you it wasn't," she muttered.

They defied the cold and stayed on the veranda until midnight, kicking the facts backward and forward, huddled in their coats, watching their smoky breath in front of them.

Chapter 14

Leslie shook Maureen out of a heavy sleep at nine. Her shift at the shelter started at ten and Maureen would need to get up now if she wanted a lift back into town.

They pulled into a lane next to the shelter. The reserve funding was running out rapidly now and the house looked shoddy in comparison with its neighbors. It stood out in the elegant street of terraced houses like a meatball in caviar. Leslie let Maureen in and pointed her to the pay phone in the front hall.

She dialed the number for the Dennistoun day center and asked the receptionist if Tanya was there. Without replying to her question the receptionist lowered the phone and spoke to someone. "Hello?" said Maureen, conscious that her money was running out and she didn't have any more change. "Hello?"

"Yeah?" said the bored receptionist.

"I asked if Tanya was there."

"She's here."

The pips went and Maureen put down the phone without bothering to thank her.

The walk only took twenty minutes but it felt like an hour. One week ago none of this had happened and Douglas was still alive, smooching about the city, lying to his wife, listening kindly to his patients and making silly jokes.

She thought about the two of them tumbling over each other in bed. Douglas had a smell about him, the smell of many women past. At first she didn't notice particularly, but gradually she began to see the unfocused look in his eyes when he spoke about his feelings for her, like an invisible shutter coming down. His lines were empty and over rehearsed. Latterly, when they had sex, she longed for the ghosts of the other women to come and keep her company because Douglas was so far away.

She remembered an evening a month ago: she had asked him calmly why he didn't want her to touch him anymore. He wouldn't answer. She got more and more angry and ended up shouting at him to fuck off back to Elsbeth. He left the house and came back four hours later, as drunk as she had ever seen him, declaring his love for her with slurred hyperbole. If he had left it for a little longer her annoyance might have subsided but it hadn't. All she could think was what an arse he was, how he was looking for comfort and not for her. As he stroked her face softly with his big hands, paying attention to every line, every detail, as though mesmerized, she noticed that his fingers smelled of fags and piss. She plied him with drink until he fell asleep. She watched him as he lay snorting and twitching in her bed and realized that she'd be disappointed if she spent much more of her life with him.

After that night they no longer argued and Maureen avoided mentioning Elsbeth. Douglas misread it as a good sign: he thought it meant they were getting on better, but Maureen was storing her grievances for a time when she was ready to be without him.

The Dennistoun day center was in a small converted kirk built before the Second World War in a narrow space between two tenements. The front was a squat rectangle with a triptych of arched windows. An acute triangular roof sat on top like a party hat. The proportions and shape of the facade were echoed in the little doorway, sitting on the side like an afterthought. Inside, the floor and ceiling had been covered in yellow pine, and the sloping roof had been inset with windows, making it bright and cheerful. Behind the high reception desk sat a miserable young woman.

Maureen walked up to her. She didn't move. Maureen drummed her fingers on the desk. The girl inhaled a "tut." "Yeah?" she said.

"Oh dear," said Maureen sympathetically. "You're not having a very good day, are you?"

The girl tutted again. "I don't even know what you're talking about," she said obnoxiously.

"Please yourself," said Maureen, tutting back. "Tanya about?"

"Tanya who?" said the girl, pulling a form out of a half-open drawer and picking up a pencil.

Forms mean time and Maureen couldn't be arsed. She rubbed her nose. "Toilets?" she said.

The girl lifted her hand slowly and pointed to the signboards hanging overhead.

"Thank you very much," said Maureen warmly. "But for you I might have got lost in this labyrinth." She followed the signs into the dayroom. A middle-aged Down's syndrome man with dark panda circles around his eyes was standing in a doorway smoking a fag. He was listening to a football match on a red plastic tranny pressed tightly against his ear. She asked for Suicide Tanya. He turned round quickly, nearly scratching her face with the retractable aerial, and pointed to the television room.

The chairs were plastic in case of incontinence, and a thick, greasy cloud of smoke sat an inch above the residents' heads, blocking out the natural light from the skylights. The chairs radiated around a loud television against the back wall. A small bare kitchenette had been built just inside the door.

Suicide Tanya spotted her from across the room. She stood up and screamed her hellos. No one paid any attention. She beckoned Maureen over. "You sit with me and we can watch the telly. This is Siobhain."

Siobhain was beautiful. For a fleeting moment Maureen wondered if Douglas had been having an affair with her too but when Siobhain smiled her eyes were so sad that Maureen knew she was depressed and had been for a long time. Douglas didn't go for that sort of thing. Siobhain's eyes were pale blue, framed in dark lashes, and she had high soft cheekbones. Her nose was arrow-shaped, pointing downward to her rounded pink lips and perfect white teeth. Her dark hair was speckled with swatches of frizzy gray and was matted at the back. She was overweight but looked as if that was a recent development: her body was still adjusting before the extra flesh settled and became watery; the fat sat in pockets on her frame, her skin taut over it.