nurse was on the phone, and the redhead was looking at her knee, picking something from the skin.
He got up, placed his hand on the steel handle of the door.
The room was a tomb of dark silence. He looked round, giving his eyes time to adjust. He had a vague sense of freshness, the smell of sea salt, not the stale air of his mother’s room. In the dull light he saw the incubator in the corner, empty, the white cellular blanket rumpled at the bottom. They must have taken the baby away for a wee while, to do whatever nurses do to babies.
She was lying in state. She could have been in a sarcophagus, the only movement the slight rise and fall of her stomach as the ventilator hissed and sighed life into her. He was unable to pull his eyes away, transfixed by the gauze that covered her face, her death mask, tantalizingly opaque, lines of blood beneath it like butterflies trapped in a web. He knew she was beautiful.
He stood back and took a deep breath.
He crossed himself.
Her feet looked cold in the blue light. He picked up each foot delicately by the heel and smoothed the white cotton underneath. Fine delicate feet with long elegant toes, a dancer’s feet, fragile and cold under his hands. Chilled. His finger traced the length of a vein on her instep, then caressed a little flaw round the base of her toe, a perfect white smile of a scar.
She was being pulled from sleep, up to the light. She lay quietly, listening to the silence, listening to the breathing at the end of her bed. She knew she was being studied. All her life men had looked at her, and she knew this too was a man.
She heard a deep sigh, felt a hand touch her foot. She waited for the prick of the injection.
Nothing, only the soft stroke of flesh against flesh. Slow, soothing. A grip on her heel, firm yet delicate, almost a lover’s caress...
‘You’re not supposed to be in here!’ The redhead was standing behind him, the look of a dispossessed wife on her face. ‘You could infect her.’ Her voice dropped. ‘Not that it’s going to make any difference.’
‘You don’t think she’s going to survive?’ McAlpine asked. ‘Why? Surely it’s only her face?’
‘Her face, her neck, her arms, her hands, her tummy.’ The nurse’s voice softened a little as she approached the bed, folding the yellow blanket over the bare feet. ‘Poor lass. She was pregnant and lying in acid. It burned deep. It’s sad. Come on.’ She gestured to him to follow her to the sluice room, where they kept the spare kettle. He had to hurry to keep up. ‘It’s the depth of the burn that matters. You know your body is basically water? If your skin comes off, as hers has, you leak, leading to dehydration, leading to failure of all the major organs. There’s nothing we can do for her, except wait.’ She pulled two mugs from a cupboard. ‘Sometimes they get an infection that glows in the dark. Gives them the heebie-jeebies in the morgue if they don’t wash the body properly.’
‘If she’s as ill as all that, why keep her tied up? Hardly likely to do a runner is she?’ asked McAlpine.
The nurse sighed, tilting her head to one side, as if forming an explanation for a slightly stupid child. ‘Her instinct would be to claw the dressings off, and that would allow infection in, so she’s tied for her own good.’
‘So she lies there in frustration?’
‘But safe from nasty bugs as long as daft cops don’t keep going in and out, touching her.’
McAlpine ignored the jibe. ‘She was pregnant. She would have attended a clinic. Where would she go, do you think, in the West End?’
‘You not from round here?’ she asked, fishing.
‘No, Skelmorlie.’
‘Now that’s a one-horse town.’
‘And the horse died of boredom. What prenatal clinics are near here, then?’
‘Might be the Dumbarton Road Clinic, but women like that, you know, they don’t exactly look after themselves, do they?’
‘Women like what?’ McAlpine bridled.
‘Well, you know, that end of Highburgh Road, down on her arse. She’s a hooker. Must have been.’
McAlpine shook his head. Vice would have had her on file. She had no phone numbers, no . . . He shook his head again.
‘And you’d know?’ The redhead licked her lips slowly. ‘She was a hooker, I tell you.’
‘You talk to her when you’re in there? Do you think she can hear anything?’
The nurse blew on her coffee, pursing her lips and looking at him through the steam. ‘It’s never been proved that people in coma have any awareness of anything, but we put the baby in there just in case she can hear or sense something. She’s probably brain-damaged, deaf, dumb and blind.’
‘Should play a mean pinball,’ McAlpine muttered.
Every day that passed her sense of smell got stronger. She knew he smoked. He wore aftershave, he smelled nice.
And she could smell the sweet milkiness, the soft breath of the little person, the little bit of herself who lay by her side, so close but too far away. More than anything she wanted to touch her baby, to cuddle and caress her. She needed someone to lift her up and place her daughter in her arms.
She thought about the policeman, the young one with the kind brown eyes, sitting just beyond the door.
Kinstray, the landlord at 256A Highburgh Road, was blind and hunchbacked. He stood in the narrow crack of the door, wearing a beige cardigan that was more holes than wool, one red hand held up to protect rheumy eyes from the sun, the other feeling the card carefully between his thumb and the palm of his hand.
‘Would that be more polis?’ he asked.
Two minutes of monosyllabic conversation revealed that Kinstray had little to add to his statement. His speech was so Glaswegian McAlpine found himself subconsciously translating everything the man said. It was a sin what happened to the lassie, he said. She was quiet; he’d heard she was a looker, but he wouldn’t know, would he? She paid her rent in advance.
‘How far in advance?’
‘Right up tae the end o’ July. Paid it aw up front, the minute she arrived. Wisnae too bothered when ah said she wouldnae get it back if she left early.’
‘And she’d been here for...’
The bony shoulders shrugged. ‘Months.’
McAlpine sighed. ‘How many months? Look, I’m not interested in how much she paid you, but I need to know when she came here.’
‘April, it was. Four months.’
‘You didn’t know she was pregnant?’
‘If I’d known that, she wouldnae’ve got her foot in the door. That’s just trouble. I foond oot later, though.’ He sniffed in disgust.
‘And you didn’t know her name?’
‘Don’t
