Chapter 2

Douglas was tied into the blue kitchen chair with several strands of rope. His throat had been cut clean across, right back to the vertebrae, his head was sitting off center from his neck. Splashes and spurts of his blood were drying all over the carpet. One long red splatter extended four feet diagonally from the chair, slashing across the arm of the settee and nearly hitting the skirting board on the far wall.

She couldn't seem to move. She was very hot. She had been scuttling back down the hall from the toilet when the blood-drenched cagoul lying just inside the living-room door caught her eye. A trail of bloody footprints led to Douglas, tied to the chair in the dead center of the room. The footprints were small and regular, like a dance-step diagram.

She didn't remember sliding down the wall into a fetal crouch. She must have been there for a while because her backside was numb. She couldn't see him now, just the cagoul and two of the footprints, but the sweet heavy smell of blood hung like a fog in the warm hall. The yellow plastic cagoul was drenched in blood.

The hood had been kept up; the blood pattern on the rim was jagged and irregular.

He could have been there all night, she thought. She'd gone straight to bed when she got in. She'd slept in the same house as this.

Eventually, she got up and phoned the police. "There's a dead man in my living room. It's my boyfriend."

She was standing still next to the phone, sweating and staring at the handle on the front door, afraid to move in case her eyes strayed into the living room, when she heard cars screaming to a stop in the street and people running up the stairs. They hammered on the door. She listened to the banging for two long bursts before she could reach over and open it. She was trembling.

They moved her into the close and asked her where she had been in the house since coming in. A photographer took pictures of everything.

Her neighbor, Jim Maliano, came out to see what the noise was. She could hear him asking the policemen questions in his Italian-Glaswegian rat-a-tat accent but couldn't make out what he was saying. Maureen was finding it hard to speak without drawling incomprehensibly. She felt as if she were floating. Everything was moving very slowly. Jim brought her out a chair to sit on, a cup of tea and some biscuits. She couldn't lift the cup from the saucer because she was holding the biscuits in her other hand. She put the cup and saucer down on the ground, under her chair so that no one would knock it over, and balanced the biscuits on her leg.

The neighbors from downstairs gathered vacantly on the half-landing, standing with their arms crossed, telling each new arrival that they didn't know what had happened, someone had died or something.

A plainclothes policeman in his early thirties with a Freddie Mercury mustache and piggy eyes cautioned Maureen.

"You don't need to caution me," she mumbled, standing up and dropping her biscuits. "I haven't done anything."

"It's just procedure," he said. "Right, now, what happened here?" He said yes to everything she told him about Douglas as if he already knew and was testing her. He interrupted Maureen as she tried to explain who she was. "You lot," he said tetchily to the assembled neighbors, "you'll be contaminating evidence there. Go back indoors and wait for an officer to come and see you. Give your names and addresses to her." He gestured to a uniformed policewoman and turned back to Maureen. She threw up, narrowly missing the policeman's face but hitting him squarely in the chest, and passed out.

It took her a minute to work out where she was. It was a large bed, a black-lacquered mess with small tables attached at either side. It looked like the devil's bed. Jim Maliano was third-generation Italian immigrant and proud. His house was a shrine to Italian football and furniture design. On the wall at the foot of the bed a black and blue Inter Milan football shirt was squashed reverently behind glass and framed with tasteful silver. It was wrinkled and fading like a decaying holy relic.

Her mother, Winnie, was sitting by her feet stroking them histrionically. Winnie liked to drink whisky from a coffee cup first thing in the morning and most days were a drama from start to finish. She coughed a sob when she saw Maureen open her eyes. "Oh, honey, I can't believe it." She slid up the bed, cupped Maureen's face in her hands and kissed her forehead. "Are you all right?"

Maureen nodded.

"Sure?" Winnie's breath stank of Gold Spot.

"Aye."

"What on earth happened?"

Maureen told her about finding the body and passing out in front of the policeman. Winnie was listening intently. When she was sure Maureen had finished talking she said that Jim had left a wee brandy for her, for the shock. She lifted an alcoholic's idea of a wee brandy from the side table.

"Mum, I've just thrown up."

"Go on," said Winnie, "it'll do you good."

"I don't want it."

"Are you sure?"

"I don't want it."

Winnie shrugged, paused and sipped.

"It's good brandy," she said, as if the quality of drink had ever made a difference. Maureen would phone Benny and get him to come over. Benny was in Alcoholics Anonymous and Winnie couldn't stand to be in the same house as him.

Winnie sipped the brandy, nonchalantly taking bigger gulps faster and faster until it was finished while Maureen got up and dressed. Jim had left out a Celtic football shirt and black jogging trousers for her. She took off her sticky T-shirt and slipped them on. Just as she was tying the drawstring on the trousers she caught sight of herself in the full-length mirror on the far wall. She had one panda eye from last night's makeup and her hair was dirty and stuck to her head. She had only washed it the morning before. She ran her index finger under her eye, wiping off the worst of the nomadic mascara.

The mustachioed policeman looked around the door. The front of his jacket and shirt were wet, he had washed Maureen's vomit off too vigorously and although he had tried to pat them dry the jacket lapels were losing their shape and his shirtfront was see-through. Maureen could see an erect nipple clinging to the wet material. "Are you decent?" he said, looking her up and down.

He was followed into the room by the policewoman and an older officer with rich auburn hair flecked with gray. Maureen had seen him directing the Forensics team. His pale face was dotted with orange freckles, oddly boyish in such a serious man. He had a big gap between his two front teeth and watery china blue eyes. She remembered him for his courtesy when he moved her into the close.

"I don't usually dress like this," said Maureen, smiling with embarrassment at her outfit. "Can I get my own clothes?"

"Is that what you were wearing last night?" asked the Mustache, gesturing to the discarded T-shirt on the bed.

"Urn, yeah."

He pulled a folded white paper bag out of a pocket and took a Biro from his breast pocket. He slid the pen under the T-shirt and poked it into the bag.

"We'd like you to come with us, Miss O'Donnell," said Mustache Man. "We'd like to talk to you at the station."

"You can't arrest her!" shouted Winnie, her voice a startling wail.

"We're not trying to," said the policewoman calmingly. "We're just asking her to talk to us. If she comes down to the station it'd be voluntary."

Winnie put out her hand in front of Maureen in a dramatic, brandy-induced gesture of maternal protectiveness. "I demand that you allow her to see a solicitor," she said.

Maureen shoved Winnie's hand out of the way. "Stop it, Mum," she said, and turned back to the police officers. "I'll come down with you."