500 Miles from You (Scottish Bookshop #3)(22)

It was terrifying. And there was nowhere to stop, no quiet lay-bys; red markings on the roadside meant you couldn’t stop at all, just try to rotate your head 360 degrees at all times to try to clock who was coming at you and where from.

Eventually Cormac pulled into a large supermarket car park and took a deep breath. This was going to have to be gotten used to. These roads were insane. He took another deep breath and checked his GPS. Okay. There was a housing development not far from here called Rosebud, and all the names of the buildings were flowers. He needed to be on floor 19, Daffodil House.

DAFFODIL HOUSE WAS the least likely thing to be named after daffodils he could imagine. It was a massively high tower block, one of seven in the development cutting great bruised scars across the sky. As a child he’d wondered what it would be like to live up high, rather than in their little terraced house. It sounded very exciting and glamorous.

Daffodil House was not like that at all.

There was deprivation in the Highlands, of course. Cormac had known houses without indoor plumbing. There were places that relied entirely on foraged wood to keep warm. And then there were the usual ravages of all economies: drink, of course; horse racing; family breakdown.

But there were always the hills, the mountains, the lochs, and the trees. There was work, even if it wasn’t always the best paid. The schools still had plenty of outdoor space to play. You could still cycle your bike into the village and feel most people knew who you were, or walk into your local bakery and get a hello and a French cake for 75 pence, and rich or poor, that was one of the best things Cormac knew.

Whereas here. There was an unpleasantly dark and dirty little convenience store with heavy bars on the windows and the security grilles halfway down. A huge dog was chained up outside and barked at him, setting off another few dogs barking around the place. Everything was grimy; nothing seemed friendly. Cormac was good with dogs—they didn’t put that on the job description but should have—but even he didn’t feel like extending his hand to be sniffed by this fearsome-looking beast who was showing his teeth at him.

“Good dog,” he muttered, heading on.

The lobby smelled absolutely dreadful, a concentrated mixture of hash and urine that made Cormac’s eyes sting. He’d been buzzed in, but the trundling old lift took a very long time to come. There was graffiti everywhere. As he waited, an old lady came in pulling a shopping trolley on wheels.

“Morning!” said Cormac, standing back to let her go ahead.

“Fuck off,” she said instantly, and they had to stand for what to Cormac felt like another five years before the lift finally arrived, smelling, if anything, actually worse. Two men got out, obviously in the middle of a fight about something, or so it sounded to Cormac.

“Yeah, roight, fing is you cahnt . . .” trailed behind them as they swaggered past, all aftershave and wide knees. They glanced at him as he got in the lift, and he kept staring straight ahead.

On the nineteenth floor the scent of dope was still pretty strong, but it was now mingled with food and cooking smells, some of which were good, some less so. He paced up the hallway, which was covered in dirty linoleum. Most of the lights were broken and there was no natural light at all. Cormac didn’t want to admit it, but he was nervous. His admiration for his counterpart was rising in leaps and bounds.

He could hear music playing behind the door of number 16 and he knocked gingerly, then louder when it became obvious nobody could hear him. Eventually he rapped loud enough that the noise was turned down inside and a tumble of voices answered the door. He glanced down at his notes as a burly man pulled the door open, surrounded by children.

“Mergim Kavaja?” said Cormac as best he could.

The man frowned at him.

“MerGIM KaVAja?” Cormac tried again, with the emphases on different syllables.

The man continued to frown at him suspiciously as a loud stream of questions in a woman’s voice came from behind him. He shouted back noisily, and Cormac simply showed him the name printed on the file, at which he sniffed and pushed open the door.

The tiny flat, with its thin walls and cheap doors, was clean but full. Undeniably full. Through open doors, Cormac saw mattresses on the floors of each room, and in the sitting room, bedding was piled beside two ancient worsted sofas. Men and boys sat around the living room, and where there was space they sat with their heads pressed against the wall. There was a smell of cooking as well as a lot of drying clothes, sweat, deodorant. The shower was running, the washing machine.

“Mergim!” said the man, somehow making it sound totally different from what Cormac had said, and in the corner a man raised his hand. They spoke to each other in an unintelligible string, then the first man turned back to Cormac.

“Doctor,” he said, pointing at him.

“Actually I’m a nurse,” said Cormac, but everyone ignored him as he approached Mergim, who was sitting in the only armchair and had his leg up, his cheap tracksuit bottoms turned up to reveal a skinny white leg thick with black hair.

What Cormac saw was an absolute mess. He looked at it, blinking, for a minute. He had stitches to take out, but the wound itself was a total mystery; it wavered up and around like a whirlpool or a drunk.

“What did you do to yourself?” he asked, undeniably interested. He’d never seen anything like it.

Mergim—he was twenty-four, according to Cormac’s file—didn’t say anything, looked inquiringly out into the throng. Eventually a slender man with glasses who had been sitting to the side reading a comic in English got up, sighing. He hissed something at Mergim—probably along the lines of “Speak English!” Cormac guessed—and reluctantly came over.