The Road to Hell Page 8

‘No, but I worked as a nurse for a while. An awful lot of things happening to the living are much worse than that. The dead don’t feel a thing, do they? So they’re all right. You don’t need to worry about them.’

  ‘Still, there are the foul smells, the sounds, you know, the saws, the ripping and tearing . . .’

  ‘It’s water off a duck’s back as far as I’m concerned. It would probably mean nothing to you too if you’d had to watch people crying out in pain, people screaming – and that’s just a hashy catheterisation. A post mortem’s a cakewalk in comparison, a party.’

  ‘Why did you give up nursing?’ Alice asked.

  ‘Because,’ she replied in a matter-of-fact tone, ‘I never grew a second skin. And you need one for that job. Oh, and the pay. It wasn’t too hot either, sweeties, not to mention the hideous uniform they force you to wear.’

  ‘We shouldn’t be here – in the pub,’ DC Galloway said, and then he tilted his glass of IPA towards his mouth and took a large gulp.

  ‘I don’t see why not. There’s nothing more we can do tonight,’ DC Littlewood replied. He was using the coasters on their table as cards, propping them up against each other in an attempt to make a house. Just as he was about to complete the third storey, DC Cairns pushed up her spectacles and blew hard on them, causing the entire structure to collapse.

  ‘You shouldn’t have done that,’ he said peevishly, looking at her in disbelief and then gathering the coasters up to try again.

  ‘If you do it again . . .’ he threatened, but his voice was drowned out by a loud roar as the pub erupted with joy, men now rising from their seats and punching the air as Hearts scored their first goal against St Mirren.

  ‘Anyway,’ Alice said, once the noise had died down, ‘it’s late and the Inspector knows we’re here.’

  ‘How did you manage at your first post mortem?’ DC Littlewood asked the bespectacled female constable. He had given up on the card house and was now curious about the new recruit from Torphichen Street.

  ‘Fine,’ she replied breezily. Her second glass of gin and tonic was already half empty.

  ‘You didn’t throw up, then?’ he asked, impressed, a couple of crisps in his hand.

  ‘No.’

  ‘I did,’ he said, his mouth now half-full, and added, ‘but I’d had a heavy night before and it was first thing in the morning. I’d have been all right otherwise.’

  ‘’Course you would!’ DC Galloway said sweetly. ‘Like you were the last time. Not.’

  ‘Want another one, Sarge?’ Tom Littlewood asked, pointing at Alice’s empty glass.

  ‘No thanks,’ she replied, finishing the dregs. ‘I’d better be going home.’

  She stood up and walked towards the door, but before she reached it she found herself face to face with Eric Manson. He looked exhausted, colourless.

  ‘Everything all right, Sir?’ she asked, surprised to see him in the pub and worried suddenly by his haunted expression.

  ‘Yes, Alice. But I need to speak to you . . . outside, if that’s OK with you?’ She nodded, feeling uneasy, further disconcerted by the uncharacteristically nervous tone in his voice. Something really must be up. He followed her out onto the High Street and they stood close together by the door of The Thistle as she waited for him to speak. A couple moved past them and as they went into the pub the sounds of rowdy conversation leaked out from it. A drunk staggered through the doorway, bumped into the Inspector, winked and sniggered, ‘A fine night for it, eh?’, as if he and Alice were about to kiss.

  Watching the man meander down the pavement, Manson still said nothing. Alice asked him: ‘You said you needed to speak to me, Sir?’

  ‘Yes, I did,’ he answered, but again he said nothing. She waited a few more seconds, her impatience growing. The air was freezing, and Ian would be back by now, waiting for her.

  ‘Well, I’d best be getting home then, eh?’ she said, looking at him, trying to prompt him to speak, and then, when he did not, turning towards the Tron Kirk, ready to go.

  ‘It’s about Ian,’ he said.

  She stopped in her tracks and turned back to face him.

  ‘What about him?’ Her heart already racing, her words came out too fast, in a rush.

  ‘He’s been in a car accident. He was hit this evening by a car in Stockbridge.’

  ‘He’s all right?’ she said.

  He said nothing.

  ‘Tell me he’s all right?’ she repeated, pleading with him.

  ‘I can’t.’

  ‘Tell me –’ she implored him.

  ‘He’s dead. They took him to the Infirmary but he was dead on arrival.’

  6

  The next morning Alice awoke in a strange bedroom and for a single, blessed second, wondered where she was. As her eyes roamed around the room, the realisation that she was in her sister’s house was accompanied by a physical sensation of dread, of fear almost, as the fact of Ian’s death hit her once more. Feeling tears forming behind her eyes, she deliberately looked up at the ceiling, blinking them back, and tried to concentrate on the whiteness of it, the strange pattern made by the single hairline crack, anything to distract her from this new, unwanted reality. But a voice in her head, unbidden by her, repeated insistently: ‘He is dead. He is dead. He is dead,’ chiming like a bell.

  ‘Alice?’ It was her sister, Helen, standing outside the door.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Would you like some breakfast?’

  No. That would be the truthful answer, but it was not worth saying. Sometime she would have to get up, sometime she would have to face them all, and now was as good a time as any.

  ‘Thanks. I’m just coming.’

  ‘I’ll just bring it in then, shall I?’ her sister asked, and, without waiting for an answer, barged her way sideways through the door and into the room. She bore a tray, laid for breakfast, and on it was a small vase of snowdrops. As if Alice was an invalid, she placed it in front of her, resting it on the blue duvet, and then bent over her, plumping up one of the pillows, ready for her sit up and lean against them. Then she sat down on the bed and looked intently at her sister.

  ‘Thanks,’ Alice said, looking down at the toast and boiled eggs and feeling no hunger for any of it. The meal seemed about as appetising as her own bedclothes.

  ‘Did you sleep all right?’ Helen asked.

  ‘Fine. Thanks.’ Her answer sounded oddly formal, Alice thought, and added to the air of unreality that enveloped her, that she could not shake off. Everything that mattered had changed. The world was no longer the same. Yet the rules of grammar were being adhered to, food was being brought at the normal time of day and their exchange had been a model of polite triviality. But she, or the she that she recognised, no longer existed. She had become hollow, no longer had any substance. There was now a huge gap in her where once her heart had been.

  ‘Do try and eat something,’ Helen said.

  When Alice made no move, her sister took matters into her own hands, knocking the top off an egg with a knife and then buttering the two slices of toast.

  ‘They were laid yesterday, so they’ll be as fresh as can be,’ she said.

  ‘What?’ Alice said, bemused, her mind somewhere else.

  ‘The eggs.’

  ‘What about them?’

  ‘They were freshly laid, yesterday.’

  ‘Were they laid by your hens?’ Alice asked, trying to sound interested, but feeling her chin tremble as she said the words.

  How the hell had this happened? How could they possibly be talking about the identity of the hens that had laid the eggs when Ian was dead? Simply pronouncing his name in her head made the tears swim in her eyes.

  Because that was all he was now. A name in people’s mouths, a memory in their minds. As insubstantial as air. There was no flesh, no body to touch any more, no eyes to look into, no voice to hear. He, as she had loved him, was no more.

  ‘Yes,’ she heard her sister’s voice as if in the distance, ‘and I’m pretty sure they
are both from the Black Rocks. I got them as pullets, on point of lay, and I think that these two are a couple of their first efforts.’

  ‘Really?’ Alice answered, trying to infuse her voice with interest, but finding that she was quite unable to think of anything else to add. Mechanically, she lifted her spoon and sank it into the yolk, watching her sister watching her.

  The kitchen, when she entered it, seemed to be alive with noise. Sam, her four-year-old nephew, was racing around the wooden table on his bicycle, stabilisers squeaking on the wooden floor. He was naked except for a pair of trainer pants, and his dog, a blue-eyed collie, was tearing after him and barking loudly. Quill, Alice’s mongrel, was in hot pursuit of both of them, and he, too, was barking. The boy was shouting their names, egging them on in their pursuit of him and howling like a wolf.

  Helen had her hands in the sink, washing pots and pans from the night before, and her younger child, Angus, was sitting cross-legged at her feet. He was watching the TV, a wide-eyed look of wonder on his face, singing out loud and occasionally bursting into high-pitched laughter.

  Walking into the room, Alice felt overwhelmed. Everything happening in it was happening too fast, it was blurred with speed, and the colours were too vivid, the sounds too loud. When she spoke, her voice sounded oddly heavy, leaden, like someone else’s.

  ‘Hello, Sam.’

  ‘Out of the way! Get out of the way!’ he shouted at her, missing her by inches as he careered past, the dogs straining to reach him.

  ‘Sam!’ Helen said crossly, but he took no notice of her.

  Rolling her eyes heavenwards, she took off her rubber gloves and, on his next circuit, stretched out to catch him as he whirled past her again. At her second attempt, she managed to grab his bare shoulders and slowly draw him towards her. Once he was still, the dogs, too, came to a halt, and Quill, pink tongue lolling from his mouth, wandered over to the water bowl for a drink.

  Seeing that the bowl was empty, Helen took her hands off her older son, and the instant he was free he pedalled away to start his circuits of the kitchen table once more. The dogs, seeing that the game had begun again, rushed back to join in. One of them tripped over the television flex, pulling the plug from the socket, and instantly a loud wail came from Angus, who found himself sitting in front of a blank screen. Tutting irritably, Helen picked him up. The child turned his head away from her, wriggling in her arms, desperate to return to his seat on the floor and resume his viewing.

  ‘It’s all right, Helen,’ Alice said, putting the tray down by the sink. ‘I liked it as it was.’ Helen looked at her doubtfully, so she added, ‘Honestly, just as it was.’

  Before Helen had a chance to respond, she had to leap out of the way to avoid being run over by her son.

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Sure.’

  Helen bent down and put the plug back into its socket and the TV flashed into life. There were gurgles of joy from her younger child, already enraptured by the picture on the screen. Alice picked up a red-and-white dishcloth and began to dry one of the newly-scrubbed pans. Her sister returned to her place at the sink, yellow gloves on once more, as she attacked a blackened oven dish.

  ‘Pete left it in the oven overnight to “roast” peppers,’ she said with a rueful sigh. Alice nodded but said nothing. After a while Helen spoke again. ‘Would it help to talk?’

  ‘Not really,’ Alice answered, cutlery in hand, her eyes on the children. But in the minutes of prolonged and uncomfortable silence that followed she felt the need to say something. Helen seemed to expect it.

  ‘I haven’t get my own mind around it yet, Helen,’ she began. ‘It’s hard to explain. It’s like something I’ve only half seen, something glimpsed. One bit of my brain knows exactly what it saw, but another bit of it, the hopeful bit, goes on insisting that it was not that at all. It tells me that it was something else. And that’s the bit that I want to believe. The hopeful bit, the bit that says that there’s been a mistake and he’s not really dead, that someone else was run over, not him. And then I can believe that he’ll come walking through the door at any minute. Every time I think I’ve accepted his death, believe it, the hopeful bit of my brain upsets everything, saying I’m wrong. I know he’s dead, of course I do . . .’

  ‘What happened?’ Helen asked, leaning her head against her bare forearm and rubbing her itchy forehead on it.

  Alice breathed out. She did not want to talk to anyone about it, had a superstitious fear of putting into words the circumstances of his death. Describing it, talking about it, meant that it was true, that she accepted that it had all happened and in that way. In the process of telling it, he would become a story, a tale to be told, someone to be spoken about by others, but who no longer said anything himself.

  ‘He was in Stan’s Bar in Stockbridge,’ she started, hesitating before forcing herself to go on, listening to the sounds coming out of her mouth as if they were being made by someone else. ‘I don’t know who he was with exactly, Cici told me their names but I didn’t know any of them. Some of his studio pals, apparently. I phoned her to find out what had happened . . . because she’d been with him. She said that he was knocking back the drink a bit and became argumentative, so she decided to leave. He left at the same time, and as he was crossing the road, dawdling a bit, he was hit by a car. Simple as that. They took him –’

  She stopped, aware that tears had forced their way into her eyes again. ‘Well, not him any more... his body . . . to the Infirmary, but it was too late. DOA. Dead on arrival. I saw him.’

  ‘What happened to the car driver? Was he hurt?’ Helen asked, slipping another plate into the rack.

  ‘I don’t know. It was a hit and run,’ Alice replied, tired with the effort of speaking. ‘Eric didn’t tell me and I forgot to ask. I’ll be told as soon as they get him.’

  ‘Quiet you two! Ssshh!’ Angus demanded, putting his finger to his mouth to silence them and adding, ‘I can’t hear the telly!’

  Seeing her sister’s appalled expression, Alice wordlessly put an arm around her shoulder. She did not mind what the boy had said, would have preferred to remain silent herself. But to admit this sounded too unfriendly, and she did not have the energy to work out how to phrase it as tact required. It would be difficult to tell Helen that the children’s complete indifference to her predicament seemed preferable, at present, to her own obvious concern. Their self-absorption meant that they required nothing of her, had little interest in anything she said. Her tears did not have to be hidden from them because they would not notice them even if they were coursing down her face. Their own inner worlds were so interesting, so vivid and engaging, that little of anyone else’s impinged upon them. So she did not have to make any effort with them, nothing needed to be hidden or explained. Thankfully, the part she played in the drama of their lives was so small that they would not notice her absence from the stage. Yet they were company. In contrast, Helen’s sweet sympathy demanded a response.

  ‘Aunt Alice?’ Angus said, rising from his place on the floor and toddling towards her, the lip of an empty beaker trailing behind him along the tiled floor.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Why are you here?’ he asked, frowning, looking at her and attempting to drain the last drop of juice from his beaker.

  For a moment she was not sure what to answer. Did he know? Should she allude to Ian’s death or simply gloss over it? Angus knew him after all, had referred to him as ‘Uncle Ian’ on their last stay. But maybe she was supposed to palm the child off with some innocent lie? Such as, ‘I’m here because I like it here.’ Or perhaps his parents had a policy of not shirking the ‘big issues’ as they arose? What did the boy know of death?

  ‘Well,’ she began, feeling the need to say something and catching her sister’s eye, in the hope that she would provide some kind of guidance on the appropriate answer. But before she had begun to formulate anything, the boy yelled, ‘Prank Patrol!’ and rushed back to the TV set.

  Later that
morning, Alice went alone to feed the chickens. Her nephews, too busy wrestling with each other, had declined to come with her and she was relieved to be on her own. The silence outside was like balm. The henhouse was set in a small paddock surrounded by laurel bushes, and the morning sun danced and sparked on their shiny, dark green leaves.

  She threw the birds their mix of grain and layers pellets and then went into their house to see what they had laid since the previous day. A few of the straw-lined hen boxes contained clutches of pale brown eggs but in one a hen was sitting, surveying Alice with an unblinking, malevolent gaze. A couple of eggs lay touching her feathered breast and Alice stretched a hand out to collect them. A sharp peck to her wrist made her look up, meeting the bird’s outraged eyes. Its stare left her in no doubt that any further attempt to rob it would be met with the same treatment, so she retreated, turning her back and leaving.

  As she leant against the dilapidated little hut she gazed at the small flock as they pecked feverishly on the ground, the sun reflecting off their glossy, green-black feathers. Sparrows hopped between the scaly feet of the fowl, ducking and dodging in search of missed morsels. A loud crowing behind her made her come to and she whirled round. A huge cockerel, his red crown flopping over one eye, charged at her, flinging himself at her legs with his sharp spurs uppermost.

  Instinctively, she moved aside to evade his attack and her manoeuvre worked, the cockerel missed his target and ended up somersaulting in the dirt. While she was still gazing at her floored assailant, a memory bubbled to the surface, of the last occasion on which she had entered his domain. It was five months earlier, in the height of summer, with the cow parsley blooms fading and the air heavy with the hum of bees. They had gone together to the hens. She was supposed to be feeding them and Ian planned to sketch them as they scratched about, beaks agape, in search of grain. As soon as she had entered the hen-run, the cockerel had launched a surprise attack on her, charging without warning from a space below the hen-house, wings flapping and spurs to the fore. But he had been stopped in his tracks by a tin pencil case flung at him, bouncing off his head and causing him to run off, squawking, to the shelter of his harem. When Ian had picked his case up, he had brandished it at the cowering bird, muttering, ‘Next time, rooster – you’ll be coq au vin.’