Free The Red Road by Denise Mina Page A

he persisted. ‘D’you remember me?’
    She felt her bowels drop: but she was a nanny here. She looked up, it was fucking Monkton. He’d ballooned but still fancied himself. Rose gave a nondescript smile, looked down. ‘I don’t, um ...’
    He held out his hand. ‘I’m David Monkton.’
    ‘Oh, hello.’ She was pinned in on either side by the swarm around the buffet and had no option but to shake his hand. Suddenly Dawood was next to them.
    ‘Lovely, what you said about him,’ she said, hoping he was here to take Monkton away. They didn’t move to leave. Dawood and Monkton stood so close to her in the buffet scrum that she couldn’t see past them. She was worried that the children were slipping away from her.
    ‘Rose, we met years ago.’ Monkton was insistent. ‘Do you remember? With Julius.’
    She didn’t answer. He shouldn’t be talking to her, he must want something. Or know something. And if he knew something he would use it because that’s what Monkton did: found things out and used them.
    ‘So, David,’ said Dawood, reining his doggy in, ‘how did you get here?’
    She should have known this would happen. Julius dead, Robert missing and suddenly everyone was misbehaving. She’d need to find out what they were up to. But not now.
    ‘Sorry,’ she whispered, dipping her shoulder to squeeze through the forest of suits. She was just in time to witness Jessica cramming two squares of brownie in her mouth while she had two on her plate.
    Rose reached over to her, took the plate out of her hand and dropped it on the table. She held Jessica by the back of the neck, guiding her through the suits and out of the crowd. In the clearing beyond the scrum, Rose found that her hand was trembling. It wasn’t about Jessica.
    Jessica wasn’t worried, she was laughing and little boulders of brownie tumbled down her black dress. ‘Come on, Jessica, I said two only.’
    The buffet-hungry crowd were behind Rose, a dark forest of suits, but in front of her was Jessica, laughing, her black eyelashes intertwined, top and bottom, crumbs of dry chocolate sponge raining down her chin. Rose leaned in so that Jessica’s opalescent pink skin filled her vision. She watched the girl chortle, saw spongy crumbs bounce off her little chest and she felt overwhelmed by love. Here was all goodness, and sweetness, and brutal honesty. Rose felt, not for the first time, that she wanted to uncouple her jawbone, fit her mouth around the top of Jessica’s head and swallow her whole.
    She stood up and pushed Jessica away from the food. ‘Move it.’
    Seeing her set on her way, she dived back into the crowd for the boys. She found them by the table. Angus had dropped his plate and was looking on the floor for his brownies. Hamish had done something wrong, she couldn’t tell what, but he stood stiff with a plate of two brownies, looking shifty.
    ‘Right,’ she said. ‘That’s it.’ She had a boy on each hand, was pushing through the crowd, when she looked up and saw them: Uncle Dawood and David Monkton still standing together when they shouldn’t, staring at her when they shouldn’t. Rose looked straight back at them defiantly, heart hammering, guts churning. They used to be frightened of her. Not anymore. They knew what she’d done, that she was a spent force.
    She stared, expressionless, until they looked away. She wasn’t done. There was nothing to link her to Aziz Balfour. She still had the book and the contacts, she was Julius’s heir and she would make them pay for the impertinence of that look. She couldn’t do it again, though, she just couldn’t do that again, ever. But she didn’t need to do it again, she could pay someone else.
    An innocent, glancing bump on her shoulder spun her around, ready to fight. The boys slipped her hands, took their chance and escaped.
    ‘Sorry!’ A smile, unsure, his hands full of a double whisky, a plate piled with sandwiches draped in a napkin shroud. ‘Beg pardon. I’m so greedy,