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it would kill her. She had been discharged for all of two weeks when a woman out walking her dog found her in the scraggy woods near her house. She was under a tree, curled up into a ball, her face covered by her skirt. She had dried spunk on her back and the police thought she had been murdered until they found the letter in the house, a vague, heartbroken ramble about bad feelings and difficulty coping.
    Leslie hadn’t come to the funeral, she had said she wouldn’t be able to keep her mouth shut, and they had all decided not to tell her mother. It had been Pauline’s only ambition. Her mother cried so hard she burst the blood vessels in her eye. The father stood next to her on the bench, squeezing her shoulder when her sobs became too loud. The brothers wore cheap suits and hurried to get outside and have a fag, missing the lineup by the door. No one at the funeral knew which of the brothers had been raping her. Pauline never told. The family huddled in the pub after the service, silently sipping whiskey and smoking hard. Liam insisted on buying the father a pint and slipped two tabs of acid into it. Months later, they heard through the grapevine that the father had gone mad with grief and had been hospitalized himself.
    Leslie relished that small, vicious gesture. In all the time Maureen had known her, Leslie had always talked lovingly about direct action and how she’d like to blow this up and stab that one and lead the revolution. The only time either of them had attempted anything was when they came up against Angus Farrell. Angus had killed Douglas and a dear man called Martin but they couldn’t turn him in. He had done it to cover up his systematic rape of the women on the ward at the Northern psychiatric hospital, knowing that none of the deeply damaged women could give credible evidence against him. Maureen and Leslie went after him themselves, luring him to the tiny seaside town of Millport on the Isle of Cumbrae, but Leslie lost her bottle at the last minute, saying she knew she’d freeze if she had to do anything but sit with Siobhain. Maureen had attacked Angus alone.
    They had all that history between them, knew so much about each other, and Maureen felt sure they would get over Leslie’s bad-choice boyfriend. It was Hogmanay before she finally realized that Cammy wasn’t a blip, that their friendship was really dying.
    Millennium Hogmanay was not Liam’s most auspicious social outing. There was a bad dry on, and demand for party drugs was exceptionally high. It seemed that everyone in Glasgow wanted to celebrate two thousand years of the Christian message by getting completely out of it. Liam had retired from dealing several months before; he still had a lot of contacts but even he couldn’t get a deal. Unused to drinking without chemical enhancement, he got completely off his face by half ten.
    Liam had never hosted a party before; he’d only recently admitted to having access to the rest of the house. During his dark dealing days, he had left the first floor of the four-story town house as worn and dirty as it was when he bought it. He kept the partition at the foot of the stairs to give his many dodgy visitors the impression that upstairs was a separate flat. He had been raided during the investigation into Douglas’s murder and the police had scared the living shit out of him. They brought dogs and ripped up the floorboards. They strip-searched him and his girlfriend. They talked to all his neighbors and told them why they were there. They emptied every cupboard in the house, tipped over every box and container. It was a long time afterwards before he told Maureen that they’d found his scuddy mags under his towels in the bathroom. They weren’t anything special but they showed them to Maggie and made her look at them. He didn’t need to explain to Maureen why it hurt him so much. They’d searched her house too, found her vibrators and gone to the trouble of leaving them in a neat pile. She