The Less Dead

The sun is setting as she crests the hill. She imagines, for a moment, the multitude of mourners, all the friends and children and family and social workers and cops, lives ruined by the loss of those women. She thinks of the men who inflicted it, men blind to the worth of the people they hurt and killed.

She goes upstairs and stands in the doorway of the big bathroom, paralysed. A brown spider plant droops from the macramé hanger, all its tiny babies brown and wilted, like a sad memory of fireworks.

MARGO CAN'T FACE GOING back to Holly Road. She feels even less comtortable there now, so she goes to squander a couple of hours in the Mitchell Library. It's near Andolfo's and one of Margo's favourite places on earth. She'd happily be locked in for a month. The Mitchell is a huge, rambling reference litbrary in the centre of Glasgow. Built over the course of almost a century, it incorporated other buildings and extensions so that the interior swings wildly through time frames. Brushed-steel lifts arrive in tiled Victorian corridors, Edwardian wood-panelled rooms lead into stairwells with smoked-glass bannisters.

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.