Criminals Read online

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF, INC.

  Copyright © 1995 by Margot Livesey

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions.

  Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York,

  and simultaneously in Canada by Alfred A. Knopf Canada,

  a division of Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  Distributed by Random House, Inc., New York.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Livesey, Margot.

  Criminals : a novel / by Margot Livesey. — 1st ed.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-82229-1

  I. Title.

  PR6062.1893C75 1996

  813’.54—dc20 95-31512

  v3.1

  I would like to express my deep gratitude to the following friends for their invaluable suggestions on the manuscript: Tom Bahr, Carol Frost, Rig Hughes, Camille Smith, and Janet Sylvester. My greatest debt is to Andrea Barrett, without whom this novel would not exist.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Part I

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Part II

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Part III

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Acknowledgments

  Other Books by This Author

  A Note About the Author

  I

  Chapter 1

  As the bus neared Loch Leven, Ewan studied the back of the seat in front of him, which more energetic travellers had used for self-expression. The sight of so many epithets, all that passion untidily scrawled in different pens, only deepened his exhaustion. He had worked late at the office the night before and taken the sleeper up from London to Edinburgh. Scotland greeted him with her dourest morning face. Princes Street, before the shops opened, had a gloomy, dishevelled air, and the castle squatted above the city like a toad. Now, through the bus window, the waters of the loch were a rumpled grey, the soft outlines of the Lomond Hills barely visible through the mist.

  George loves Lindy forever. What kind of person, wondered Ewan, wrote such things to be read by strangers? Sow your seed, someone else had printed neatly. Support the Greens. On impulse Ewan took out a pen. If he wrote something, he would know how it felt. His hand hovered, but nothing came to mind. The long glittering snake of love slithered round the corner at the first sign of his approach. His political sentiments? That seemed easier, though how to choose amongst them? Eat the rich, by most standards, if not his, included him. World peace? Give bankers a chance?

  This is what people don’t like about me, Ewan thought. Even my spontaneity is calculated. His sister Mollie, for instance, whom he was on his way to see, could until recently have covered the back of this seat and several more with succinct advice. Recycle for a better world. Say no to exams. Stop eating dead animals.

  For two pins Ewan would have put his pen away, but a faint cough drew his attention. Glancing across the aisle, he saw a young man—a boy, really—in a threadbare denim jacket, watching him. The cold curiosity on the boy’s freckled face reminded Ewan he was wearing a suit, pin-striped no less. On his mettle now, he shook the pen a couple of times as if he had just been waiting for the flow of ink, leaned forward, and scrawled the least likely thing he could think of: Remember the Krays.

  There, he thought, without looking over at the young man. He put the pen away and closed his eyes. He did not feel transformed, not remotely, into the energetic, passionate person he had imagined. Behind him in London, his desk overflowed with intricate financial transactions, and more sinister matters, which he could not bear to consider, threatened. Ahead in the Scottish countryside waited his neurotic sister. He opened his eyes. The words were still there; they might be his most lasting accomplishment of the year so far.

  A quarter of an hour later the bus pulled into Perth station. On previous trips north, Mollie and Chae had come to meet him here, or sometimes in Edinburgh, where they could combine collecting him with a visit to Chae’s children. But on the phone Mollie had sounded so frail that Ewan had announced he’d take the bus all the way to the local town. He even offered to take a taxi the final five miles to her house. This she brushed aside. “Of course I’ll fetch you,” she said, with a catch in her voice that made Ewan wish, for the first time in years, he had learned to drive. In London, and the other cities where he did business, taxis filled the streets yearning for the sight of his raised arm, but in rural Perthshire, his lack of skill became a noticeable handicap.

  “Twenty minutes,” the driver called.

  Ewan stood up with his briefcase. Reluctantly, he eyed his bag in the overhead rack. He let the other passengers go ahead and went to ask the driver if it was safe to leave his luggage.

  The driver paused in the midst of extricating his stout bulk from behind the wheel. “Safe as houses,” he said with such conviction that to take the bag would’ve been an insult.

  Ewan thanked him and stepped down onto the oily tarmac. A few yards away, the boy in the denim jacket was hawking and spitting. Ewan watched as he sauntered off, kicking an empty beer can along the gutter. He would have bet a hundred pounds the boy lived at home, another fifty that he was unemployed.

  The station was no more than a single low building with a covered area down one side, where passengers could wait and be encouraged by a series of faded posters to take pleasure trips to the Trossachs, Oban, and Inverness. Ewan made his way to the cafeteria, thinking of coffee, but stopped short as soon as he opened the door and smelled the overwhelming odour of bacon. Coffee would be a disaster. The thing to order in these places was tea. No sugar, he had to say twice to the woman behind the counter to halt her automatic gesture.

  He carried his cup to a round table, strewn with other cups, and perched there, trying to read a history of Mary Queen of Scots that Mollie had given him for Christmas. Now, four months later, he had brought it along, hoping to seem tactful. I can’t do anything right, she had said on the phone, and he could suggest one small contradiction: look at the pleasure her gift was giving him. It was the autumn of 1542, and Mary’s mother, Mary of Guise, was preparing for her accouchement at Linlithgow Palace. Ewan read a page. At the bottom he realised he had understood nothing. He read it again, to no greater effect. He was so tired that the sentences melted before his eyes; he could not keep one in mind long enough to grasp the next. Even the tea, thick as treacle, did not help.

  An excruciatingly thin man in a shabby raincoat shuffled by, sat down at the next table, and began to devour a plate of baked beans, fried eggs, and toast. Forgetting Mary, Ewan stared at the man in surreptitious fascination. His Adam’s apple heaved with every mouthful, and he clutched the knife and fork like weapons. There was something bizarre, Ewan thought, about this spectacle.

  Suddenly he remembered the time. He stood up, downed the rest of his tea, and headed in search of the Gents. It was outside, halfway down the building, next to a poster of Loch Ness. He opened the door and once more was assailed by the smell of bacon, which here at least served to mask other, potentially less pleasant scents. Inside were one stall, its door a couple of inches ajar, and two urinals. Ewan had the place to himself. After using a urinal, he washed his hands at the surprisingly clean basin. There was no mirror, but on
the cream-coloured wall someone had drawn a neat rectangle and printed MIRROR—12 × 16.

  He was leaving, rubbing his hands dry on the legs of his trousers, when he heard a small sound behind him. Mice, he thought. Or something worse? The sound came again, a soft whimpering that did not seem rodent-like. Cautiously Ewan pushed open the stall door. On the floor, wrapped in yellow plastic, was a doll. No, not a doll. A baby.

  Unthinkingly Ewan did what he often did at moments of crisis: he loosened his tie. He squatted down beside the bundle. “Goodness,” he muttered. The baby looked past him with round dark eyes and whimpered again. The tile floor, unlike the basin, was not clean; an empty crisps wrapper lay in one corner, and pieces of paper clung damply to the base of the toilet.

  The baby’s skin had a coppery sheen, and its hair was silky black. Slowly, awkwardly, because there was nothing else to do, Ewan picked it up. He stood in the doorway of the stall, holding the baby, dumbfounded. Then from outside came the blaring of a horn, and he remembered his luggage in the rack above his seat. He bent down to grab his briefcase and stepped quickly through the door. A few yards away the grimy bus was already vibrating. A new driver, a prissy-faced woman, sat behind the wheel, writing in a notebook. When Ewan reached the top step she demanded his ticket without interrupting her task.

  “I found this. My l-l-l-l-”

  The driver closed her notebook and looked up. At the sight of Ewan’s suit and the yellow bundle, her face lost some of its primness. “My, you’ve got your hands full. Just take a seat for now, sir.” She almost smiled. “We’re leaving.”

  Another late passenger was waiting behind him. As he moved down the aisle, Ewan heard a male voice ask for a day return. His luggage was still there. Ewan stepped into the cramped space in front of the seat. He caught a flash of red, a jacket or pullover, as the man passed him and took a seat a couple of rows further back. In a series of jerks, the bus pulled out of the station.

  Later Ewan could never quite recapture his thoughts at this crucial moment. He had intended, hadn’t he, simply to retrieve his bag and make his way to the police station. But the door closed, the bus started moving, and, to avoid falling, he sat down with the baby in his lap. Exhaustion clung to him like cobwebs. The bus passed beneath the railway bridge and accelerated towards a green light. The freckled boy, the main witness to his previous solitude, was gone, and the other passengers from before, three teenage girls in the back, would have found a sack of potatoes more interesting than a middle-aged, besuited banker.

  As for the baby, the baby was no help. It stared at Ewan, and Ewan stared back. He was much more familiar with millionaires than with infants. Although some of his friends had them, he glimpsed them only from afar, mysterious visitors; he could not remember when he had last held one. Now he studied this strange object. It was wrapped so neatly, a tiny mummy, with just the head visible. “Who are you?” said Ewan. “Where do you come from?”

  The baby’s eyes widened slightly. Ewan experienced a flicker of recognition. Not an object, he thought—a small, silent human. Presently he unwrapped the yellow plastic, which turned out to be a poncho of the kind worn by cyclists and hikers. Beneath was a clean blue blanket. There was no note, nothing saying My name is David or I am Nell. Take good care of me.

  Vexed, perhaps, by the loss of its outer covering, the baby sent up a piercing wail. The sound, no worse than a dog barking or the teenagers in the back seat with their radio, made Ewan instantly desperate. If they had still been in Perth, he would have begged the driver to let him off and dialled 999 at the first phone he came to. But already they were passing by fields, ploughed on one side, grass on the other. The occasional cows and sheep promised no succour; they had their own knock-kneed offspring to deal with. He patted the blue blanket, uselessly. “Be quiet,” he whispered. And then, “Shut up.”

  He had, he realised, nothing to offer by way of refreshment. What if the baby was hungry? But its plump cheeks did not speak of starvation so much as passionate aggravation. Finally Ewan raised it to his shoulder. He had seen people do this, men and women, in shops and parks, raise their babies and pat their backs. In his attempt to imitate them, he found that the baby’s head fitted under his chin, snug as a violin. The wails continued for a few seconds and abruptly, in the middle of an especially loud outcry, ceased.

  The bus slammed over a series of potholes, then entered a wood of beech trees. The new leaves, bright green even on this dull day, cast an aqueous light. Ewan felt his own breathing slow. The baby’s head, crooked against his neck, was astonishingly warm, as if its entire life were happening just beneath the skin. He stared again at the graffiti on the seat in front. Children, he now noticed, were conspicuously absent. If his hands were empty, he would write something different. Free childcare?

  Somehow that thought led him to his sister. He managed to reach into his briefcase, where he’d been carrying her letter since it arrived earlier in the week. She had written in pencil, on a page torn raggedly from a notebook. No date, no address.

  Dear Ewan,

  Black birds follow me. They wait for me in the treetops and swoop down when I leave the house. I’m afraid of their beaks. They hate my eyes. When I drive, they dive-bomb the car. I can’t see where I’m going.

  Or maybe they’re bats.

  Inside are voices. They ooze from the table and the tap. They say bitch cunt Penelope whore stupid mole-eyes snot yellow tongue. They know.

  And at night poisonous gas fills the house. I’m afraid to lie down, afraid to breathe. Maybe there is something buried under the stone floors. I never used to think of bones but now the house is full of them.…

  Rereading the jagged sentences, Ewan thought the only consolation was that Mollie had dealt successfully with all the business of posting a letter. The envelope was addressed clearly, a first-class stamp affixed. “I got your note,” he had said when he phoned to announce his arrival. “My cri de coeur,” she said with an embarrassed laugh, and thanked him.

  He slipped the letter back into his briefcase and, like his small companion, closed his eyes. For a few minutes Mollie’s dark words fluttered round his brain, then they gathered into a flock and flew away into a dreamless sleep.

  He woke as the bus pulled into the narrow streets of the town. Something warm lay against his chest. Looking down, he discovered the baby still sleeping in his arms. Good God, he thought, what have I done? But in the confusion of getting off, there was no need to answer. By the time he’d lifted his bag down from the rack and packed the yellow poncho, the other passengers had departed. With his bag, briefcase, and the baby, Ewan manoeuvred down the aisle and off the bus. Behind him, the driver, who seemed to have forgotten all about his ticket, called goodbye.

  In the street, a second, smaller shock awaited him. Rain had begun while he slept and was bucketing down—ricocheting off the pavement, sinking into his suit and hair, his bag, and the baby’s blanket. Through his beaded glasses, Ewan searched the town square. Most of it was given over to parking, with a bronze war memorial in one quadrant. There was no sign of Mollie. He spotted several of his fellow passengers sheltering beneath the sizeable canopy of the old Odeon. The teenage girls were examining one another’s earrings, and the man who’d followed him onto the bus, wearing what Ewan now saw was a red jacket, was smoking a cigarette. Ewan made his way over and stood on the top step, facing the street.

  Cars passed, a baker’s van, and one intrepid, black-clad cyclist, whose undulating progress Ewan followed attentively. Just as he began to worry that something had happened to Mollie, that she had been unable to drive after all, he heard a horn hooting. Across the road, from the open window of a blue car, an arm was waving. Once more Ewan gathered his belongings and hurried down the steps. Somehow he managed to get himself and everything else into the car and close the door.

  “Sorry I’m late,” Mollie said, leaning over to kiss his cheek. “Christ, what’s that?”

  “I should have thought it was obvious.” As so of
ten in childhood, her emotion calmed him. “A baby.”

  “But whose is it? Where did you get a baby?”

  In a few sentences Ewan explained about the Gents, the bus leaving, his luggage. “I didn’t know what to do,” he said. “Maybe I should have left it there?” But the notion that he could have emerged from the Gents empty-handed was by now inconceivable. What if the freckle-faced boy had found the baby? Or the thin man in the cafeteria? Horrid newspaper visions flitted through his mind.

  Mollie did not answer his question. Momentarily he forgot he was meant to be taking care of her and instead waited nervously for her to scold, then rescue, him. Surely he’d overlooked some practical thing that would be readily apparent to her, like the time he failed to put a filter in her and Chae’s coffee machine. But Mollie was regarding him with an odd expression, one he did not know how to interpret. Her face was pale, and her hair, shorter than he had ever seen it, had an uneven, bitten quality. In their school production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, she had played Puck, and still, at thirty-five, she looked as if she ought to be flying through the trees, admonishing lovers and fairies alike.

  “Is it a boy or a girl?”

  “Not sure.” And then, as Mollie reached towards the baby, “Careful, it’s asleep.”

  “Well.” She drew back. “You’re certainly full of surprises, Ewan.”

  In the long pause, they all three simply breathed. Rain throbbed on the roof of the car and hazed the windscreen. The situation was urgent, Ewan reminded himself, but his nervousness had ebbed. He was experiencing an almost drowsy contentment, similar to what he often felt after swimming, when the chlorine of the pool took on narcotic properties. Mollie was cracking her knuckles, a dark, sinewy sound he recognised as the puzzling noise he had sometimes heard in the background during their last month of phone calls. The gesture signalled anxious thought but only reinforced his own lack of anxiety. She was his older sister; soon, he was certain, she would tell him what to do. They would deliver the baby to the proper authorities, go back to Mollie’s house, and solve all her problems too. A lorry roared by, leaving the car rocking slightly in its wake.