Our Little Secrets

by Peter Ritchie

  They both said ‘I love you’ a few times, never meaning it for a moment but thinking it was a statement that needed to be made from time to time, especially in public. Each of them had been having a great time in their respective fast lanes and had taken up with each other in much the same way as they might have acquired the latest fashion accessory, so perhaps it shouldn’t have come as such a surprise to Jude that it was only about a fortnight after they’d taken their vows at the obligatory glitzy wedding that she’d found him in their bed with one of her closest friends.

  It was at that point that this couple who led lives of no depth realised they didn’t really know each other all that well. In fact, there was definite evidence that their joining together in holy matrimony had revealed they didn’t much like each other once they saw beyond the looks and highly developed appreciation of expensive fashion.

  After the ‘bedroom incident’ they continued to live in the same house but started to lead separate lives, both understanding that someday they’d have to get divorced. A kind of phoney war existed where major conflict was coming but full-scale combat operations hadn’t quite broken out yet because both of them were constrained for different reasons. Those constraints originated from secrets that could ruin them and any plans they might have for the future.

  It all started to go wrong only a few days after the wedding, and before the incident with her friend, when Jude discovered she was pregnant. A huge overdose of champagne plus high-quality cocaine a few weeks earlier had resulted in an uncharacteristic and complete loss of control one evening. It was ironic, because in most respects they looked after their respective bodies, maintaining memberships at the most fashionable gym in the city and rarely drinking to excess. They’d thought they were having a ball and that the world belonged to them, until it had all gone to rat shit after the party at the home of a friend who had less regard for his health and didn’t mind a bit of recreational substance abuse. It shouldn’t have been that much of a surprise because shifting coke was where the friend made his living. He’d convinced them to go for it because ‘everyone does it now’, and they’d had the night of all nights – then, in the morning, the crash of all crashes.

  In two short weeks the honeymoon was over, replaced by quiet contempt, though the pregnancy, as quickly and surprisingly as it came to their notice, ended when she miscarried. It was a result both of them were happy with, as they could stop pretending they were delighted at the news that she was carrying.

  The fact that neither of them felt even a moment’s sadness for their unborn child exposed them for what they really were – selfish, shallow people who didn’t give a fuck about each other or anyone else; who hid behind glossy images that were entirely false – and what was left in the way of feelings for each other deteriorated in a few short months into raw hatred. The phoney war was over and now they were going for each other’s exposed throats.

  Part of the complication was that Jude Hamilton was the daughter of a semi-retired but well-respected gangster, Arthur Hamilton (or Big Arthur as he was better known), and Grainger didn’t need bad blood with the father-in-law who could still create a shitstorm if he was brought into the issue. For different reasons, they kept their problems out of his sight – or so they thought – and Jude swore to Grainger that she was going nowhere for the time being. ‘You can fuck right off but I’m staying,’ she told him. ‘You’re the genius who decided to screw the bridesmaid two weeks into the marriage.’

  It was after that statement that she lobbed a couple of expensive ornaments at him to prove she meant business. They missed and smashed on the wall, but he got the message.

  ‘You can fuck off whenever you like but I want it all. You hear me? I want the house and everything that goes with it.’ Hamilton had almost come to enjoy despising him and had made up her mind to cripple the bastard where it would really hurt, so the contents of his wallet and all he owned were her target and no more than she deserved – at least as far as she was concerned.

  She’d come to regard him as a heartless bastard who’d rewritten history to fit his version of their problems: he’d suggested ‘getting rid of it’ when she first realised she was pregnant (although she’d erased from her memory the fact that a termination would have suited her as well). The idea of stretch marks and nappies had filled her with dread, and they weren’t the image that she liked to present to the world. After remembering various real and imagined instances of his callousness, she came to the conclusion that this was just another man who’d used and abused her, and she was fucked if she wasn’t going to have her revenge. In her self-delusion, she forgot that her husband was a crook and being devious was part of his toolkit. Hamilton hadn’t soiled the marriage bed as he definitely had, but she had her own guilty secrets, which weren’t as well hidden as she might have thought.

  Dominic had been in a corner after the incident with the bridesmaid, but he knew he had no option but to fight back.

  ‘I’m going nowhere,’ he told her every time the subject of the division of property came up. ‘This fuckin’ place cost me seven hundred grand, so no way am I leaving.’

  Although he was the one who’d been caught in the act, he knew it was still not far off a score draw, because he’d discovered that her morals had turned out to be no better than his. He had been stunned for about ten minutes after he found out that she was going at it as if the Tory government was about to ban sex for the general public. But after pulling himself together, he’d realised that her father, a proud racist, would go into meltdown if he learned she also had a taste for black men.

  Grainger immediately invested in a private detective to get solid evidence, and the man duly came home with bacon and all the trimmings in the form of some nice pictures of her in a variety of compromising positions that would be enough to give her old man a fatal stroke. Grainger stashed them safely away.

  It was a war of attrition, and with each passing day they hated each other a little bit more. It was the domestic equivalent of the Cold War concept of mutually assured destruction, or MAD as it was known in the days when the West and the Soviet Union pointed hundreds of nuclear missiles at each other.

  In fact, both of them shared a passion for picking up strangers and forgetting them the next day, although Dominic had one expensive hooker he loved to entertain every couple of weeks. She was a stunner who went on the game for big money, and she took every penny she could screw out of him. Although he felt ashamed because she didn’t even pretend that she liked him, for some reason she excited him in ways he could never have imagined. As far as the hooker was concerned, he could have died in front of her and it wouldn’t matter a toss. This was just part of the mess that passed for Dominic Grainger’s personal life.

  For Dominic and Hamilton, it could only last so long, as the venom in both their hearts boiled with the growing rage they felt for each other. At first, she held the upper hand and almost got her result, but when he confronted her with the evidence that she’d hooked up with the occasional black man, the game had changed. She had ground her teeth when he showed her the photos but was rendered impotent for the time being.

  ‘How would Big Arthur like that, Jude? Sure he’d love this one.’ Grainger had pointed to his favourite, where she’d thought there was no one watching them in the back of her car. ‘You could ask one of them over for a nice dinner with the old man.’

  He knew it was a pyrrhic victory, but at least it kept him even with her in the poison stakes. Her father adored her, but Grainger knew if he found out, he would never forgive her for this little indulgence. When they had their rare conversations, they looked at each other and saw the same empty life; both were searching for something that didn’t exist, but they were addicts and addicts don’t do logic.

  So Grainger trawled the upmarket boozers for women who were sometimes married, bored and wanted the kind of thing men like him could provide. He had looks, desire and a complete lack of morals – all he wanted was to meet, satisfy himself and
forget whoever he was with as soon as possible. The hooker was the only one he came back for again and again. There was no point in forming relationships when the world seemed to be filled with so many souls like him trawling for adventure.

  Grainger had become slightly bored with it though and had started to look for women with something different to offer, although he didn’t quite know what that would mean.

  11

  Janet Hadden sat at the end of the bar she knew Grainger used on a regular basis. It was in the heart of Edinburgh’s West End and a favourite for married men trying to pull women half their age or, if that failed, the older models who were always good for a laugh. There were some intelligence notes on his habits, but they were vague, and she was proved right when she recruited Tonto. There was enough talk within the Graingers’ team to give her a pretty clear picture of Dominic’s hobby at the weekends. Tonto had never met Dominic Grainger or been near him, but he’d seen him around with his brothers often enough, and in any organisation the staff talk, exchange gossip about the bosses. Tonto was all ears now he was working part-time for Police Scotland, and he’d given Hadden a mine of information on all the Graingers, though mostly on Dominic’s younger brothers, Paul and Sean. He had nothing about Dominic that related to crime, but she got what she wanted in what he liked doing and his off-duty habits. The guy was a rabbit where women were concerned and that suited her perfectly.

  Hadden had been in the same boozer the previous couple of nights as well, hoping that Grainger would appear. It wasn’t by the book – not even close to the book. What she was doing might have worked in the period covered by Life on Mars, but she was operating alone and in dangerous territory. By the book, she would have had a surveillance team on Grainger, picked her time to talk to him, and the rules meant she would have to be partnered up for corroboration. It was the thrill again, the one thing that made her feel alive, and her spine tingled when she weighed up all those laws she was breaking.

  The other legal option was pulling in Grainger as a suspect, work the oracle on him about possible money laundering and then make the offer to recruit him rather than shoving him in a cell. But they didn’t have solid evidence – only a suspicion that he was washing money. She was short on weapons to fire at him, but the thought of the pokey could make the best of them sweat. That one might have worked because he was one of those rare creatures in his game who hadn’t done hard time inside. The reality of existence inside the high walls was that it crushed the spirit – any romantic vision of happy cons only existed in TV comedy. Hadden wasn’t interested in any of that though; all she wanted was to play the game she’d invented.

  She stared at the mirror behind the bar and a small smile turned up the sides of her mouth when she saw her reflection. Anyone who knew her would have to have spent some time staring before possibly working out it was her: the wig and gold-rimmed glasses worked a treat and looked natural. She was pleased with it, liking this version of herself, and in that bar at that time she looked like a piece of class material.

  There was always the possibility that he might just ignore her, but she was on her own and there weren’t too many women who looked like her or had the confidence to carry off the act. He would have to at least notice her; after all, that was why he was there – to spot his next victim and make his move. If push came to shove, she’d just walk up to him and make him an offer he couldn’t refuse.

  Grainger had walked in the door on his own and scanned the bar area, partly because he was a professional criminal and liked to know what was in the same room as him in case any of it was labelled ‘pork product’. Hadden was dressed just about right to send out all the signals required to attract predators and Grainger wasn’t the only one in the bar.

  It was Friday night and a few business suits were there pretending they weren’t married. She wore the black suit she kept for court and those special occasions; it had cost a fortune and made for an attractive business look. Her high-cut cheekbones and steel-grey eyes gave her a look all of her own, and if nothing else he couldn’t miss her. She could never be described as beautiful, but there was something in the plain, clean lines of her face and almost boyish body.

  From a distance, the Cruella de Vil features could give her a do-not-approach look, but the hairpiece plus glasses softened her appearance, and she had the ability to act or lie like a trained thespian. Over time, people who knew and worked with her always sensed something dark in her nature, which she was aware of, so she’d learned to adopt faces or camouflage whenever it was required. So much of what she said and did was a lie, like the briefcase she was carrying – it had fuck all inside but completed the picture for the evening.

  Grainger wandered slowly to the opposite end of the bar and ordered a beer, while his head swivelled back and forward through an arc, digesting as much visual information as he could. The bar was near to full with West End office staff trying to relieve the endless boredom of jobs that forced them to stare at computer screens for most of the day. The noise level was up and a few older men started to appear minus their wedding rings, hoping that the soft lights would shave a few years off their real age.

  Grainger chewed the fat with a couple of mid-level drug dealers who he really couldn’t be arsed with but who gave him a bit of human cover as he scanned the bar for what might be available. He caught his reflection in the mirror behind the bar and it pleased him. He was a good-looking man; there was no doubt about that in his own mind, and some lines of premature grey in his hair gave him a nice touch of sophistication. With his deep brown eyes that seemed to smile, and like the woman at the end of the bar who was watching his every move, he could act the part when it came to the opposite sex.

  It was all a game, but it was becoming dull; even though his last few visits to the West End had been successful, they’d left him feeling empty and it gnawed at his mind. Even the hooker he used was starting to get to him: he felt nothing but shame when he was finished with her, and her contempt made him feel angry and humiliated. He needed something different, but the problem was finding it in the bars he trawled. If picking up women was starting to bore him, he wondered what he would or could do to replace the thrill that part of his life had once offered.

  The two dealers were flattered that a premier-league name like Grainger would spend time with them, not realising he barely registered a word they said. He saw nothing that interested him and decided he needed to move around the bar to see what else was on show. The place was starting to heave, and he knew from experience that something interesting could be concealed in among the crowd. That was how he thought of women, as somethings rather than someones.

  ‘Need to go for a slash, boys. Might put some business your way next time,’ he lied as he moved away from the dealers before they had time to say au revoir.

  As he made his way through the throng, Grainger decided that if there was nothing doing he’d head for George Street, and anyway he’d had enough of the two dealers trying to get their tongues up his arse.

  He’d given up and was almost behind Janet Hadden when he glanced to his left to cop another look at his profile and caught her reflection staring down at a newspaper on the bar. Bingo! She was on her own and was definitely not part of the usual crowd – different, no doubt about it. He had her as a serious business type, maybe a lawyer with the tin flute she was wearing. Grainger had never bagged a lawyer so that would be a first.

  He carried on to the bogs, washed his hands and checked himself out in the mirror, feeling the buzz that maybe he was onto something. He’d seen enough to decide she would be a challenge, but that was fine by him. He seriously needed a distraction because, unlike in popular fiction, sometimes being head of a criminal organisation could be a full-time pain in the arse with all the problems that cropped up, like keeping ahead of the law or out of range of your competitors.

  Grainger knew that just appearing next to her at the bar then pretending to make casual conversation was too obvious, especially as she had
the look of a smart piece of work. She could be waiting for someone, but that seemed unlikely given the time she’d spent there, and she definitely had that look of someone comfortable with their own company. Being a criminal, direct action tended to be stitched into his nature, so he thought what the fuck and went back to the bar to make his move.

  ‘Can I buy you a drink? We look like the only two people on our own in here.’ He leaned on the bar and spoke to the side of her head; she still seemed to be studying the middle pages of The Scotsman.

  She looked round slowly, no smile, and studied him for a moment as if he was an interesting problem. ‘Why?’

  She met his eyes and for a moment he felt uncomfortable, which was unusual for a man who could take the decision to bury someone in concrete without a moment’s doubt. It passed; he was definitely interested and wanted to know who she was. He fell back into his role.

  ‘Why not? You look interesting, it’s Friday night and we’re both on our own.’ Grainger had decided that, for a change, a straight, upfront approach was the best method, as she definitely didn’t look like someone who would appreciate a pile of bullshit.

  ‘Don’t you have any friends to play with?’ She seemed to be unfazed by him. He felt uncomfortable again and Hadden realised she might be playing the cool bitch too far, so she broke into a pretend warm smile to show she was kidding. It worked and he took the lie.