The Less Dead Read online

  Copyright

  The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Copyright © 2020 by Denise Mina

  Cover design and artwork by Jim Tierney

  Cover © 2020 Hachette Book Group, Inc.

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  Mulholland Books / Little, Brown and Company

  Hachette Book Group

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  First ebook edition: August 2020

  Published simultaneously in Great Britain by Harvill Secker, an imprint of Penguin Random House UK

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  ISBN 978-0-316-52852-8

  E3-20200624-JV-NF-ORI

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Acknowledgements

  Discover More

  About the Author

  Also by Denise Mina

  For DM, KM, LM, MR, JG, TW, ML, EC and all who loved and cared for them

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  1

  HOPE DIES SLOWLY BUT it does die. Even though it’s obvious that Margo Dunlop has been stood up she can’t seem to make herself leave. She’s a doctor and well knows how stubborn and pernicious hope can be. Without confirmation, in the absence of direct contradiction, hope will linger long beyond the point of being useful. The speed of death is often determined by the degree of initial investment.

  She has been waiting for an hour and forty minutes, alone in this odd-shaped room, listening for the lift and staring at the back of the door, willing it to open and change her life. She has come to meet her birth family for the first time. Not her birth mother though, it turns out that Susan died a long time ago. How wasn’t specified in the contact letters but Margo very much needs to know. She’s a doctor. She’s pregnant and afraid of her own genetic legacy. She has suspicions.

  She’s too invested. She shouldn’t have come here. She should have been more careful.

  The birth family are very late. Deep down Margo knows that they’re probably not coming now but she’s trying not to get angry. She’s still clinging to an outside possibility that they have a good reason for being late–a train crash or a stopped watch, as if that still happens. If they turn up late and blameless she doesn’t want the meeting to turn into a fight about punctuality. There are questions she needs answered.

  She’s waiting in a room at the top of an old office block in the heart of Glasgow, just off George Square. It’s hot and smells weird, as if something is rotting deep in the fabric of the building. The adoption charity have tried to make the room homely but the furnishings are cheap and somehow ominous, like a police reconstruction of a family sitting room where something dreadful happened. There’s a sagging sofa with a low back, a coffee table with a box of tissues on it and a dining-room chair. An Ikea bookcase holds torn children’s books and a sticky game of Hungry Hungry Hippos with no balls. She’s been here long enough to look.

  The shape of the room bothers her too. It’s square with a low ceiling of glass squares, all painted opaque with white emulsion. She thinks the inside of the building has been gutted and modernised and this must have been the top of a grand old staircase, that what she’s sitting under is the old skylight. Thinking about it makes her feel the void beneath her and her shin bones tingle, like a memory of falling.

  Margo found the contact letters from Nikki hidden deep in a drawer in her mum’s bedside table. The first was dated several years back, the latest just a few months ago. They were addressed to Margo, care of Janette and asked Margo to please write back? Nikki said she was desperate to see her because she really needs Margo’s help with something.

  Janette was dying and rarely conscious when Margo found the bundle of letters. She has tried to understand why Janette didn’t pass them on. Nikki did sound mad, all that stuff about ‘Glasgow’s Jack the Ripper’ hunting her for thirty years, but Margo is less interested in the substance of her delusions than the tone. Margo’s not entirely sure of her own mental health. She wants to know if Nikki was schizotypal, if there is a genetic likelihood of her getting it. But Nikki’s not coming.

  Margo looks at the back of the little door to the room and imagines what she would look like to a stranger walking in. She’s tall and the ceiling is low, her hands are on her knees, feet are flat on the floor. She’d look intimidating and monumental, like a statue of Queen Victoria discovered in a crate. She attempts a welcoming smile but tension instantly warps it into a growl.

  But no one’s coming anyway. She drops the scary smile and lets her face idle in neutral. No one. She picks up her coat from the settee and sits it on her knee, a first move towards putting it on.

  Now she’ll never know what happened to Susan or if she gets her height from her, if she’s mixed race. Her hair says yes but her skin tone says no. She won’t get to ask anything. No one is coming.

  So bloody rude. Selfish. What kind of people agree to a meeting this emotionally charged, pick the place and the time, and then don’t turn up? She checks the time on her phone; it’s an hour and fifty minutes now. She’s on an indignant roll but gets distracted by an unanswered text from an hour ago.

  Her best friend Lilah asked:

  How about now, lambchop, anything yet?

  Margo still hasn’t replied. She kept hoping to have a better answer.

  A very careful knock is followed by the little door being opened. It’s Tracey, th
e counsellor who gave Margo a long talk about limiting her expectations on the way in. Margo dislikes Tracey for reasons that she can’t quite fathom.

  Maybe it’s the tense situation. Maybe it’s Tracey’s belligerent walk. She sways her shoulders and enters the room belly first as if she’s pregnant and wants to talk about it, or is fat and doesn’t. She has thick glasses that distort her big green eyes and wears a dress with a low neckline displaying four inches of cleavage. A gold chain with a green pendant surfs her record-breakingly long boobs, bobbing around, going under sometimes only to be unthinkingly fished out by Tracey’s chubby forefinger.

  ‘Hello again,’ she whispers as she comes in, head tilted sympathetically, lips pressed tight in a very sad sorry as she sits on the sofa and clasps her hands together. She’s going to tell Margo to give up and get out. She’ll dress it up but that’s what she’ll mean.

  Tracey doesn’t get to speak before Margo blurts that she’ll just wait for another half-hour, if that’s OK?

  ‘Well, see now,’ drawls Tracey in a breathy Northern Irish accent that sounds like a melancholy old song, ‘the problem with that is we’re supposed to actually shut the office in a wee ten minutes. I sort of just wanted to have a wee chat with you before that happened so that you don’t leave feeling that you might have liked to have talked to someone? Would you maybe like a wee chat about it? About your feelings?’

  Every sentence ends in a tonal upswing, every statement is littered with infuriating conditionals–maybes and minimisations and perhapses. But Margo is a doctor and has been on the receiving end of enough impotent rage from patients to know that Tracey isn’t to blame for how she feels.

  ‘I’ll just wait on for the last ten minutes, if you don’t mind.’ Margo says it softly, overcompensating for her white-hot fury. ‘At least then I’ll know for sure that Nikki didn’t come. It’s just ten minutes. I may as well.’

  ‘Aye, yeah, may as well, grand, grand. May as well.’ Tracey pats her own knee while looking at Margo’s. ‘You don’t owe them anything, you know? You’ve given them a good long time to get here. You’ve done what you can. You don’t have to wait.’

  Margo doesn’t know why Tracey is using the plural. Is she being formal? Or does Tracey know something Margo doesn’t? Is Nikki trans, or has Margo just been stood up by several people? Is that better or worse?

  ‘Well, I’ll wait for the ten minutes.’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘If that’s all right.’

  Tracey nods and smiles vaguely. She air-rescues the green stone from the ravine of her cleavage but doesn’t move to leave. She’s trying to be kind, waiting with her and giving Margo space to talk about her feelings if she wants to. Margo doesn’t trust her.

  What Margo does say is that it’s very quiet in the office, is it always like this? Tracey tells her that, to be honest about it, they don’t really do reconciliation mediation very much any more. They used to but people tend to trace their birth families on Facebook. She wouldn’t recommend that. That can go very, very wrong. Being stood up isn’t the worst, believe-you-her. You’ve no idea. Honestly.

  Margo was still clinging to the faintest possibility of car crashes or excitement-induced heart attacks but Tracey knows no one is coming. She works here, she’s seen it all before. Margo is suddenly so angry that she feels sick and Tracey sees that. She reaches over and squeezes Margo’s hand pityingly, which makes it worse.

  Margo puts her own hand over Tracey’s and squeezes back, maybe a little too hard, and begins to rage-cry. Lilah calls this the ugliest cry of all.

  Tracey says kind things: listen-you-to-her-now, you’re all right, you’re all right, now. It could be worse.

  Margo yodels: ‘What could possibly be worse than this?’

  Tracey talks softly: this is not the worst I’ve seen, not by a long way. It can go very wrong, especially if there isn’t a mediator. The state of some of them! Wouldn’t you look in the mirror and wash your hair? They’ve had some right arseholes in here. Tracey’s being a lot more frank than she was on the way in. It can be dreadful and she should know because she’s been through this herself, oh yeah, and that is why she works here, as a volunteer, because of her own terrible, terrible experience.

  She looks at Margo, waiting for a prompt but Margo doesn’t care what happened to Tracey. This is happening to her right now and she’s overwhelmed.

  It takes a moment for Tracey to realise that she isn’t going to ask about it. She blinks, shuts that box of horrors and moves on, talking in abstracts: when people meet on the Internet, well, a lot of people are far too young. Don’t all teenagers resent their parents? Tracey knows she did. That’s part of growing up, isn’t it? It’s tempting to look for a different family to connect with. There’s often an initial delight because, you know, they’ve kind of solved a mystery, haven’t they? Everyone is focused on what they have in common and they ignore the differences, points of conflict, all the while being that wee bit too open with each other. And the birth families, huh! Well, that’s a whole other barrel of fish. Most families have stuff going on, don’t get her wrong, but sometimes they’re just dealing with bad people who want money, for example. There have been situations… stalking, police involvement…

  Tracey’s eyes well up. This is her story. Margo didn’t ask when prompted but Tracey has managed to share it anyway. She’s making this about her. Her chin twitches, she’s about to cry and that’s it for Margo. She holds up both hands.

  ‘Tracey, no, look, I’m really sorry–this is all too much for me already. My adoptive mum died recently, I’ve split up with my partner…’ She stops short of blurting that she’s pregnant. ‘Can you leave me alone?’

  Tracey takes it well. She says of course, no problem at all, take your time, and she gets up and goes out, shutting the door behind her carefully as if she’s trying not to wake a sleeping baby.

  Margo covers her face and sobs. She’s been fantasising about this moment since she was tiny. She’d rather that it went horribly wrong than that no one turned up. She wants to know what Susan died of, do they have genetic mental health issues, she needs to know for her own sake, for the baby’s sake. Are they prone to postnatal depression? But she also wants to know more mundane things: did Susan want to keep her? Did she try to get her back? Are her birth family rich or poor, Catholic or Jewish, Irish or Romany? Are they musical? Athletic? Margo has always felt diluted by possibilities. Splintered. She imagined all of these alternative selves existed in parallel worlds and these other lives have meant so much to her. They fostered possibilities and comforted her when things were miserable at home.

  But she’ll never get to ask. Nikki isn’t coming.

  The hope she harboured is finally gone and she realises that she shouldn’t have come here looking for answers to all of that. She shouldn’t have come here at all. It’s too much for her right now.

  It’s over. Fuck it and fuck them. Fuck death and her ex-partner Joe and the smell in here and Tracey’s mad intonation. Fuck everything. From now on it’s just Margo and the Peanut in her uterus.

  Tonight she’s going to cheer herself up, go to the movies alone and see something with explosions in it, she’s going to drink a bucket of fizzy sugar and eat a family bag of chocolate raisins. She stands up, pulling her hairpins out and scratching at her scalp, shaking her hair loose, letting it stand up and stick out and do what it wants. She rubs her hot eyes, smearing mascara down one side of her face.

  This is what she looks like when there is a change in the energy outside the door. She feels it before she hears it: the muffled shriek of a lift arriving.

  2

  A SUDDEN COMMOTION OUTSIDE, a shrill voice saying indistinct words and Tracey calling a nervous ‘hello?’ from her office as the new voice cuts high and turns towards the door.

  The door is hurriedly opened before Tracey can gallop over from her desk and a very small woman steps into the room and presents herself.

  ‘Oh my God!’ shrieks Nikki. ‘
I can’t believe what you’re wearing, Patsy!’

  There’s a lot going on at one time: Patsy is the name on Margo’s birth certificate, the name given to her before she was handed over at two days old. Margo isn’t wearing anything extraordinary, just a cotton shirt and black jeans, so that’s odd. She’s also distracted by Nikki’s voice which is not loud or angry, just a very particular nervous timbre, pitched to be heard over blaring televisions and people screaming at each other. It’s a voice she hears patients use in the surgery, the voice of very anxious people and mothers who can’t control their kids.

  ‘Hello?’ says Margo. ‘Are you Nikki?’

  ‘Is that you?’ says Nikki.

  They examine each other with the bold regard of small children meeting for the first time.

  They look nothing alike. Nikki is small and blonde and underweight. Margo is tall with thick black hair, deep-set brown eyes and pearlescent skin.

  Nikki’s clothes are strange, she looks as if she is wearing a costume. Everything she has on is brand new and slightly too big for her: an immaculate grey trackie top straight from the packet, cuffs rolled up, matching lumpy trackie trousers. Over the pristine grey she wears a beige overcoat with a dangling cloth belt that has never been tied. She looks as if she’s had an accident and been given someone else’s clothes to wear home. Such plain clothes don’t really fit on a woman like Nikki because she’s strikingly good-looking. She has good bones, she’s graceful and moves with the consciousness of her core that dancers sometimes have: Margo is struck by the slow ease of her long neck, her spine snakes as she slides into the room, her hand movements are eloquent. None of it seems affected either but unconscious and natural.

  Her blonde hair is pulled back tight to the nape of her neck. She wears no jewellery and her face is heavily powdered, like the first frame in a YouTube make-up tutorial. Margo thinks it was because she was coming to meet her. It wasn’t. She’ll soon find out that Nikki has been in court all day and her dull, asexual appearance is a pointed message to old acquaintances and adversaries that her life is very different now, that she is very different now.