Dead Won't Sleep

THE DEAD WON’T SLEEP

Anna Smith

First published in Great Britain in 2011 by

Quercus
21 Bloomsbury Square
London
WC1A 2NS

Copyright © 2011 by Anna Smith

Extract from 100 LOVE SONNETS: CIEN SONETOS DE AMOR by Pablo Neruda,
translated by Stephen Tapscott, Copyright © Pablo Neruda
1959 and Fundacion Pablo Neruda, Copyright © 1986 by the University
of Texas Press. By permission of the University of Texas Press.

The moral right of Anna Smith to be identified as the author
of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be
reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means,
electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording,
or any information storage and retrieval system, without
permission in writing from the publisher.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available
from the British Library

ISBN 978 0 85738 295 5 (TPB)
ISBN 978 0 85738 705 9 (HB)

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations,
places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination
or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons,
living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Typeset by Ellipsis Books Limited, Glasgow
Printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, St Ives plc

For Franco – the legend – and that long
dusty road to Mongolia, with love. x

Only do not forget, If I wake up crying it’s because in my dreams I’m a lost child hunting through the leaves of the night for your hands.

Pablo Neruda,
100 Love Sonnets,
XXI

Ayrshire coast, September 1997

‘She’s dead! Christ’s sake! Jack! Wake up for Christ’s sake! The bird’s dead. What the hell did you do to her?’

Somewhere in Jack’s fogged head, he could hear the words drag him out of a drunken sleep. His head was thumping. He opened one eye and tried to focus on the figure towering over his bed.

‘Wh . . . What? Who’s dead? What are you talking about, Foxy?’ Jack’s voice was thick and groggy as he blinked and sniffed. He was in that shitty place between drunk and sober, his body shuddering from being woken before the booze had worn off. Then he was bolt upright on the bed, his head spinning, dizzy with the sudden exertion. The room swayed. Maybe it was the movement of the boat.

The look on Foxy’s face made his stomach turn over. Jack shook his head and leaned across the bed to see
what was causing the worried look in Foxy’s eyes. Foxy never looked worried.

When he saw her, his mouth went dry.

‘Oh, fuck,’ was all he could say.

Slumped on the floor at the side of the bed was a naked, waif-like blonde girl. Her pale blue eyes stared up at him with a look of surprise. Her lips were blue, and there was a shiny streak of dried saliva on her ghost-white silky cheek. One scrawny arm was raised above her head and the other draped over her skinny body. Her legs, long and slender, were slightly parted at the knees. In the cold light of day, she looked no more than fourteen or fifteen.

Dim recollections flashed through Jack’s head, the images unfolding in a confused blur. The girl had laughed when he had joked about her fair, sparse pubic hair, asking her if she was really old enough to be doing this. She did look very young last night, but as he rolled her around the bed, her responses made him believe this little hooker had been around the course a few times. And anyway, by that time he wasn’t much caring what age she was.

‘Aw Jesus! Holy Christ, Foxy!’ Jack leapt out of bed and pulled on his boxer shorts over his beer belly.

‘I don’t know! Christ! I mean . . . She was fine. She was all right.’ He tried to remember everything they had done, in case he had been too rough. Jack liked rough, but he knew just how far you could push it. Rough
enough to see the fear in their eyes, the pleading. It gave him control.

‘It was just the usual stuff,’ he said. ‘Nothing crazy. Then we fell asleep. I mean . . . I was out of my face, Foxy. We all were. I didn’t hurt her. Honest to Jesus I didn’t. I swear on my kid’s life.’ Jack stumbled around the room, shoved his legs into a pair of trousers and pushed his beefy arms into a short sleeved shirt.

The door of the cabin swung open and Bill stood in the doorway, dressed in his underpants. His eyes flicked around the room.

‘Fuck’s going on? What’s all the noise?’ He scratched his head. Then he saw the girl.

‘Shit! What the hell happened?’ He was across the tiny cabin in two strides.

All three of them stood looking at the limp body lying in front of them, as though if they kept on looking she would get up and laugh out loud at the expression on their faces. But she just lay there, staring up at them. Bill knelt down and felt her arm, then her neck. He pulled his hand back quickly.

‘She’s freezing. Christ! She’s been dead for a few hours I’d say.’ He stood away from her.

‘What we going to do?’ Jack looked at Foxy for answers. His mind flashed back to the night before. How they all took turns with the girl, and he ended up with her in his bed.

‘I didn’t harm her. Honest. You can see that yourself.’
There were tears in Jack’s eyes, and he felt a rising urge to throw up. The boat swayed and he rushed to the toilet. As he retched into the bowl, he could hear Foxy and Bill talking outside.

‘We’ll have to dump her.’ Foxy’s voice was controlled, the voice of reason. It was the tone he used when he had to remain calm in a crisis, when he was briefing his men on matters of great importance. It was the voice of the head of the CID.

Jack emerged from the toilet, his face crimson. He sniffed, and wiped tears from his face.

‘Wrap her in that sheet,’ Foxy said flatly, looking at both of them.

Jack and Bill followed the order, dragging the sheet from the bed. Jack lifted the girl by her shoulders, her arms flopping, as Bill lifted her legs and put the sheet under her. She was skin and bone. Her eyes continued to stare at them.

‘Wait,’ Foxy said, as they were about to cover her with the white sheet. He took a step towards them, reached out his hand and closed the girl’s eyes. Nobody spoke. Then he picked up a mobile phone that was lying at her side, and flicked through the numbers.

Foxy led the way up to the deck, as Jack and Bill carried the girl’s body up the steep steps.

‘She’s light as a feather,’ Jack said, swallowing hard.

Outside on the deck, the early morning mist shrouded the land in the distance. In the pale, grey light you could
just make out the craggy mound of Ailsa Craig pushing itself out of the water like a monumental silent witness. The air was damp, and in the chilly dawn there was no sound except the gentle lapping of the water against the side of the boat. Foxy motioned them to the edge of the deck, his rubber soles squeaking on the polished wood. He looked at the two of them and jerked his head towards the water.

Jack looked at Bill; they both stood there, paralysed.

‘What? Like just throw her over?’ Jack said.

‘There’s nothing anyone can do for her now, Jack,’ Foxy replied. ‘Nothing any one of us can do. And we sure as fuck can’t call the cops.’ Foxy looked out to sea, his face like flint. Then he threw the mobile as far as he could.

She hardly made a splash as she dropped down from the side of the boat. Jack watched her foot just before it disappeared beneath the water. Then nothing. All that remained was the white sheet, billowing in the swell.

Glasgow, February 1998

The mobile rang and shuddered at the same time in Rosie Gilmour’s jacket pocket. She fished it out and glanced to see if she recognised the number. She didn’t.

‘Hallo.’ Rosie’s voice was sharp. She wasn’t in the mood to talk to anyone. It had been a crap morning spent at the police press conference after the body of a girl had washed up on the beach at Troon three days ago. There hadn’t been much left of her, but she’d been identified by dental records as the fourteen-year-old kid who had been reported missing from a Glasgow children’s home nearly six months before. Rosie had worked on the story at the time. No matter how many times she waded through this kind of shit, it still got to her.

She pressed the phone hard to her ear, against the racket of the Argyle Street traffic jam. She could hear the pinging sound of a call box, but nobody was talking.

‘Hallo,’ she said again, her voice slightly more receptive. Better to be friendly. It could be anyone.

‘Hallo.’ The voice on the other side finally came through. Rosie thought she detected a slight slur. Christ, she thought. Some bastard’s given my number out at the office.

‘Is that Rosie Gilmour fae the
Post
? The reporter?’ The voice was clearer now.

‘Yeah. This is Rosie Gilmour. Who’s this?’ Her naturally suspicious mind surfaced. Either it was a junkie looking for payment for some story they had helped on, or some saddo wanting Rosie to sort out all her problems. Rosie wished people back at the newsroom wouldn’t keep giving her mobile out to every misfit from here to Karachi.

‘You don’t know me, I don’t want to give ma name. But I want to talk to you about that lassie that got washed up in the sea.’

The voice was definitely that of a junkie. Rosie had spent enough days with the flotsam on the streets that chic, trendy Glasgow turned its back on, to recognise the familiar slur of a gauching heroin addict. But it was what they said that was important, not how they said it.

‘Yeah?’ Rosie was interested. ‘I’m involved in that story. I was at the press conference this morning. The cops are still doing tests, but it looks like she was an addict. Did you know her? Was she a friend?’ Rosie’s voice probed. She had to keep this girl on the phone.

Silence. Damn.

‘Hallo,’ Rosie said, ‘are you still there? Hallo?’ She cursed under her breath. Typical, dizzy bastard junkies. You never knew where you were with them.

Through the silence she could hear sniffs and sobs.

‘Hold on . . . Hold on . . . Sorry. I’m upset. I can’t stop greetin’,’ the girl sobbed.

‘It’s okay.’ Rosie was relieved she was still there. ‘Look, where are you? Why don’t I come and meet you? We can have a wee chat.’ Rosie’s voice was consoling. She was good at this.

‘Ah can’t get ma name in the papers, but I know stuff. I know stuff that’ll blow everything sky high. I know where Tracy was before she went missin’. I know. She was ma pal, she wisnae a junkie. No a right one. Just smoked heroin and took coke,’ the voice said, between sniffs.

Rosie was hooked in. Even if this was the voice of some broken heroin addict wanting to tell her an unprovable, unpublishable story, she had to hear it. You win some you lose some – but more often than not you got a front page out of it. And even if you didn’t, you never knew when you would need a handy contact in the gutter. The downside was that once you had made that contact and shown these people the slightest attention, they clung to you, got under your skin, and you just couldn’t help lending a sympathetic ear, and, usually, a tap of a tenner.

The Strathclyde Police press conference that morning would have written off Tracy Eadie as just another dead junkie. The only difference was that she was fourteen years old and she was naked when she washed up on the beach at Troon. And, the headline grabber: she was from a children’s home. That was the only reason it would get on the front page of the
Post
these days. Nobody even turned a hair now when a junkie was found up some close with a needle in their arm. Time was when it would be a splash and spread, with a parade of rent-a-quote experts wringing their hands at how awful life was in the lower depths. But now a dead junkie would barely make a few paragraphs in any newspaper. Rosie was disgusted by the shallow mindset of the tossers who set the criteria – the editors and executives, who too often replaced depressing, cutting-edge stories with showbiz crap. But that’s how it was.

She had been on the story briefly when the kid went missing from the children’s home, but, as usual, the news agenda moved on. There were rumours at the time that the kid had been working the Drag as a prostitute at night, but nobody had any concrete evidence. Junkies would tell you just about anything to get a few quid, so none of the claims that came into the
Post
at the time stood up. The cops and the social work department had insisted there was nothing to suggest she’d been working the streets. She was just another child from the system
who went missing. She would turn up on a street some day, somewhere, homeless and drugged up.

‘Tell you what.’ Rosie spoke with more command than consolation now. ‘Meet me at the Grass Cafe off London Road in twenty minutes. We’ll talk then. No names, nobody needs to know who you are, just trust me. Okay? Don’t worry, I’ll look after you.’ Rosie knew the last words would bring the junkie running to her. Being looked after might mean a few quid – enough for a tenner bag. If nothing else made her keep the date, that would. It made Rosie feel like a dodgy salesman, but it always did the trick.