Crime

by Irvine Welsh

  What got to you was the phone call, at around eleven fifteen. A uniformed cop, Donald Harrower, telling you about a seven-year-old girl, Britney Hamil, setting off for school at 8.30 a.m. and never arriving. The school had reported the absence to her mother, Angela, just before ten, who, after phoning some friends and relatives, had called the police half an hour later. Harrower and another officer had gone out to speak to the woman, as well as Britney’s teacher and some neighbours and schoolmates. Two older girls had seen her walking down the street ahead of them, but when they turned the corner a few minutes later, Britney had vanished and they’d witnessed a white van speeding away.

  — The girls, Andrea Jack and Stella Hetherington, were the only witnesses and the white van was the only vehicle they recall seeing in the vicinity, Harrower had explained in his adenoidal tones, — so I thought you’d like to know about it.

  The words ‘unmarked white van’ crackled through your brain in static. That great British archetype: always trouble to a polisman. You’d thanked Harrower, thinking it was unfortunate his dour, taciturn aspect often shielded a thoughtful diligence from his bosses. The van compelled you to go straight to your boss, acting Chief Superintendent Bob Toal, and request to investigate the disappearance and potential abduction of a child.

  You worked with Harrower, talking to neighbours, friends, the school staff and children whom Britney might have passed en route. And Angela. You remembered the first time you set eyes on the child’s mother, on her way out to the local shopping centre. She’d been due at her cleaning job in the Scottish Office that afternoon, but explained that she’d taken time off to look after her other daughter, Tessa, who had food poisoning. She was the eleven-year-old sister who normally accompanied Britney to school. Instead of asking Angela to hold on, something made you want to walk with her. You followed her around Iceland, as she filled up on cheap burgers, fish fingers, oven chips and cigarettes. Found yourself judging her every purchase, as if they made her not only complicit in Tessa’s poisoning but also in Britney’s vanishing. — Isn’t she a little young to be walking to the school on her own?

  — I was gaunny take her, but Tessa started being sick again, really chucking it up. Britney … she didnae want to be late. Telt me she was a big girl now. Angela fought back the tears as she pushed her shopping trolley down the yellow neon-lit gangways. — It’s only five minutes’ walk, she pleaded. — You will find her, won’t ye?

  — We’re doing everything we can. So Tessa was ill this morning?

  — Aye. I took them oot tae that burger bar last night, the yin at the centre. For a wee treat, then tae the pictures, at the multi-plex tae see the new Harry Potter. Tess came doon wi it in there. Ah mind ay Britney bein that sad that we had tae go hame …

  — Right, you had said, feeling then that missing a film might be the least of the girl’s worries.

  Leaving Angela back at her flat, you walked the walk to the school and found that it actually took fourteen minutes. Out the housing scheme, past the Loganburn roundabout, round the corner into Carr Road (where Britney vanished), and alongside a long, stark brick wall, behind which sat a disused factory. Then, round another corner, a block of tenements and the Gothic black-railed gates of the Victorian school.

  Everyone at Police Headquarters knew that the next few hours were crucial, the something-or-nothing time. An alert call was made to all cars to be on the lookout for the girl and the driver of an unmarked white van. But as morning rolled into afternoon there was no news, and outside of Andrea and Stella, the girls walking behind Britney, only a couple of neighbours – a Mrs Doig on her way to her work, and a Mr Loughlan out walking his dog – could specifically recall seeing the girl that morning.

  You went back to Bob Toal and asked if you could put a proper investigation team together. In the era of sex-crime awareness a missing child was big news and the media-savvy Toal quickly concurred. — Take Amanda Drummond, he’d said, — and Ally Notman.

  You expressed gratitude. Drummond was thorough and had good people skills, while Notman had an engine on him and knew his way around data management. Like you, he had an Information Technology degree from Heriot-Watt University, but you were envious of the more efficient way your younger charge put these skills to use.

  Then Toal had added, — And Dougie Gillman.

  You felt the air inside you ebbing away. There had been a serious personal fallout with Gillman a few years back. But you said nothing, because it was personal. You’d keep it off the job.

  You got Harrower and another reliable copper, Kenny McCaig, out of uniform. You commandeered an office at Police HQ and started your formal investigation. McCaig and Harrower continued knocking on doors. Notman examined speed camera and CCTV footage to identify any white vans tracked in or around the vicinity of Carr Road at the time, pulling out possible registration numbers, checking the list of owners against the Vehicle Licensing Agency’s database in Swansea. Drummond and Gillman took a forensics team out to give the bend on Carr Road, where Britney had vanished, a good dusting down. Neither forensics nor IT were the forte of Gillman, an old-school street cop, but he’d coldly followed your order.

  As for you, you busied yourself with the ‘register’: the database of sex offenders. Seeing who was out, who was on parole and who was under surveillance; who was considered to be high-risk and low-risk. You’d clicked through the mugshots that Wednesday in your office, as the light declined in the drizzle over the Castle Hill, calling Trudi and telling her that you’d be late meeting her at the Filmhouse. When you got there, you’d coughed out an apology. — Sorry, babe, shit day at work. This weather doesnae help.

  She didn’t seem to mind. — Thank God we’ve got Miami to look forward to!

  But you weren’t looking forward to anything. You’d felt a building tug of unease from Harrower’s call; through your job you’d learned to define evil not just as the presence of something malign, but the absence of something good. Experience had taught you that the only misfortune worse than a having loved one murdered was for them to vanish without their fate ever coming to light. The torment of uncertainty, where the heart pounded each time the doorbell or phone rang, and desperate, hungry eyes devoured every face in every crowd. The inevitability of the cherished person’s death could be mentally reasoned, but it was harder to stifle the soul’s defiant scream that they lived on. But were they coming home or had they gone for ever? After time spent in this hellish limbo, any news, no matter how searing, was welcomed beyond the endless waiting and searching. In Britney’s mother, lone parent Angela Hamil, you saw a woman slowly drowning in this terrible madness.

  By that evening you all knew that somebody had snatched Britney. The next day Toal decided to go public and give it to the newspapers. If the situation couldn’t be managed, then the news had to be. The later editions of the Evening News in Edinburgh carried a smiling, wholesome-looking picture of the girl that would become iconic. Adults would gaze at their children with a tender ache, giving strangers a suspicious glare. The term ‘like an angel’ was used a lot in the press. You recalled her grandad saying that.

  The police switchboards became jammed with the usual litany of busybodies and sickos, as well as the genuine but largely misguided members of the public. And that creeping unease, how it had spread like a virus through your investigative team. Whatever you all said on the PR front, or to the family, you knew as professional law enforcement officers that after twenty-four hours you were probably dealing with a child sex murder.

  The team quickly swung into action. Gillman had been the first to find something, a single page of yellow notepaper wet in the gutter on the other side of the road to where Britney had vanished. Angela confirmed it was from her school notepad. Its very presence indicated some sort of struggle between child and kidnapper.

  The villain needed some degree of tangibility in the minds of his pursuers, and was dubbed the usual nicknames, ‘The Stoat’, ‘The Nonce’ or ‘The Beast’. But another moniker in
the police canteen was Mr Confectioner. It came from the Toblerone chocolate advert from television: Oh, Mr Confectioner, please … give me Toblerone. The boys in Bert’s Bar thought the cartoon confectioner looked like a stereotype sex beast, bribing kids with sweets.

  Stop this.

  No crime …

  Vacation …

  His actions strangled the empathy from us like they had the life from …

  Because …

  Because he was born like that, he had to be, the fuckin beast. That dirty bastard was put on this earth to prey on us …

  We had to be strong and vigilant and alert to stop them; stop them from destroying our flesh …

  He jars back into something like full consciousness as the beaker crushes in his fist. A gloopy vodka and tomato mix slops over his undamaged left hand. He puts it down and catlicks himself, mopping up with a napkin. Trudi hasn’t noticed; she’s engrossed in the magazine with the old girl. He tries to think about some of the games he’s seen over the years at Tynecastle Park. His dad taking him along to watch Hearts beat Leipzig five–one. Curtis Park, one of his mates from school, and a Hibs fan, seeing it on television and telling him that the Englishman, Alan Weeks, was commentating. Iain Ferguson scoring the winning goal against Bayern Munich. That three–two Scottish Cup victory over Rangers. Lifting the cup at Parkhead. John Robertson’s numerous derby winners. Shaking the wee man’s hand in the carpet department at John Lewis’s. John Colquhoun, teetering on the brink of world class for a season. That fateful afternoon in May 1986, when they threw it all away. The charity dinner a couple of years back, when he’d sat next to Wallace Mercer, the former chairman, who told him some great stories about games past and that terrible day up in Dundee. Now who was in charge?

  A Russian millionaire as chairman. A convicted sex offender as manager.

  Heart of Midlothian FC.

  Tradition.

  It all means nothing now alongside our vile decadence. How long before we have paedophile reality TV shows? Michael Jackson, Gary Glitter and that whole BBC crowd, like the former football pro working as a pundit. Those who were on the right side of the divide and got their noncing in before we cared.

  He shuts his eyes. With the sound of the engines it’s like going through a long, dark, tunnel. Hopes they stay closed until he steps into the light with the blood of other men on his hands. Even if it takes for ever.

  2

  Miami Beach

  AS THEY COME to the glorious salvation of land, Lennox can see how quickly the powerful 747 jet plane devours the toytown miles beneath them. America is not a big country, he remembers. He’s jumped across it before in aircraft; New York–Chicago–New Orleans–Vegas–San Francisco–LA. It was like going round Scotland in a bus, only at ground level you could see the vastness of the country in the changing landscape. One function of wealth is to shrink the world. And, like poverty, it has at least the potential to breed dissatisfaction. Florida, he knows, he will encounter as Scotland, immense and irreducible by the plane. A tremor of excitement passes through him as he awaits its grandeur. For beyond the plexiglas he sees Miami, gleaming silvery-white constructions straddling the edge of a milky turquoise sea and its harbours. The water is rashed with emerald-purple shadows cast up from below by submerged islands. Tiny sailboats surge along like yellow dots against a radar display backdrop, leaving a fading trail behind them.

  People clap as the plane lands – so smoothly he’s barely aware of the touchdown he had braced himself for hours ago, since surviving take-off and turbulence. Despite this sense of anticlimax, Lennox’s wrapped and damaged hand gently squeezes Trudi’s.

  Their room is in a boutique hotel in the art deco district of Miami Beach. The historic art deco district, as it seems to say everywhere. Historic? Art deco? Where’s the history in that? He goes into the shower, and realising that he badly needs to urinate, lets himself pee as he washes. The heavy, gold streams of his piss weave down the drain-hole. The bathroom is mirrored on opposite walls. He watches his cloned naked body purging into infinity.

  Then, without warning, he’s hit by an acute desperation to get outside. The bathroom, the bedroom, they seem too small. He drips over to the sink. Rubs at himself with a towel. Fills a glass with water and downs two antidepressants he has left out. The Seroxat. Consumed like M&Ms. At least one hundred milligrams more than the maximum recommended daily dose. The anxiety isn’t as bad when you’re on them. Yes, it’s always there, you can still feel it, it just doesn’t bother you as much. But he hasn’t brought many; he wants to stop them. Thinks the sun will help. Light is good for depression. A natural cure. A good dose of winter sun will do you more good than all the pills in the world. Somebody had said that. Trudi? Toal? He can’t think. But they were right. It was a relief to leave the cold and dark of winter Edinburgh. There had been the horror of the funeral. Then Christmas was a washout. Hogmanay too. Lennox had no head for it. The chanting crowds: people seeming boorish and hateful as they tried to enjoy themselves. Beneath the surface bonhomie there was desperation, a barely submerged fear that the next year would be just as miserable as the last. He steps out of the bathroom, towel round his waist. The tumbler of water is still in his hand. He sets it down on the glass table by the phone.

  Trudi is lying on the bed in her black underwear still reading Perfect Bride. Cooling off under the overhead fan that augments the air con. Lennox admires her feet, with the red-painted toes.

  He gets hold of the nail clippers on his key ring. Then he switches on the television. It’s what you do in America. That big holiday, years ago: with Caitlin Pringle, an old girlfriend, pre-Trudi. Her father worked for British Airways; a big noise. Alasdair Pringle. Cheap travel. Caitlin; Alasdair-Big-Noise-from-the-Airline’s daughter. A sexual relationship, a baseball pennant procured from every city they’d fucked in. Then, the second time, New York, with some of the boys on the force. A piss-up. Las Vegas for a wedding: this time with Trudi. Whose wedding? He can’t think. But every time he’d watched loads of telly. You just went to the TV automatically here, like you did in no other foreign country. That one clicking gesture with the handset and you were into America. The breaking news. The infomercial. The daytime soap with the moving mannequins. The courtroom show. The fat poor people who screamed at each other while Jerry or Ricki or Montel kept order. Tried to help, even. Attempted to understand the problems faced by the poor and the fat. Empathise with their need to shout and point their blobby fingers at each other in public. The evening dating shows. The thick, complacent studs, wearily referring to themselves as ‘players’ as they slowly suffocated in their own ennui. Bored, manicured girls, faces immobilised, unmoved by anything other than the boys’ salaries. How those crazed inanities were rendered understandable, even palpable, by the context.

  As he chops at nails already close to the quick, voices fill the room. They drown out the slow rattle and hum of the air conditioning. There’s one channel that appears to be devoted to culture in the Miami area. To Lennox, this seems to mean mainly real estate and shopping. A series of impeccably groomed yet tacky presenters, reading in clipped tones from autocues, expound various opportunities in different high-rise apartment developments. Clearly something exciting is happening. Missing out isn’t an option. The failed actors and Botox-faced models stress the high-concept, architectural qualities of what to Lennox appear to be Scottish scheme tower blocks in the sun.

  — You can’t keep clipping your nails, Ray, Trudi says, — your thumb’s bleeding! Compulsive behaviour!

  He turns to observe her lying on the bed, reading her magazine.

  — I have tae or I pick at them. I need to keep them short.

  But she’s no longer concerned; her mouth has gone round and her eyes stare at the magazine as if seeing something she can’t comprehend or quite believe she’s reading. Before, he might have found that look sexy. Caressed the inside of her bronzed thigh. Up to where several pubic hairs curled enticingly outside her panties. Put his hand between h
er legs. Or maybe on her breast. His lips pressing on hers. His cock’s belligerent push against her thigh.

  But now she looks other-worldly.

  — An alien wedding, Lennox says softly, rummaging through his case, which lies at the bottom of the bed, on a fold-out stand with straps. Did these things have a special name? Whatever, there is a Motörhead T-shirt in there somewhere. Ace of Spades. He picks it out. It lies on top of a white one with BELIEVE in big maroon letters.

  Lennox looks out into the street and sees a white van, brilliant magnesium sunlight reflecting from it as it pauses at traffic lights.

  Trudi lowers her magazine, watches him go through his suitcase. His movements have the attractiveness of the awkward man who has learned to circumvent this condition by slowing everything down. Catlike in his languid movements, with his slightly hunched shoulders, hands a little too big for his body, like he’s never quite known what to do with them. Legs perhaps a tad short for the frame; in tandem with the slouching tendency and his hairiness, they could occasionally hint at something simian. But he’s always carried the air of a large wounded mammal; how the potentials of vulnerability and violence never seem far from him.

  It is easy for her to relate to grace as a destination rather than a state. A few years back she’d decided to shed the sugar and carbohydrates in her diet, do a regular gym programme, spend more money on decent clothes and make-up and invest time in her appearance. It came as a shock to her that new cheekbones and a slim, athletic body quickly began to emerge. The blonde tints followed, and the biggest surprise was that the world could so lazily reclassify her as conventionally beautiful. It was a disappointment to learn just how much perceived female beauty was about diet, exercise and grooming.

  Nonetheless, Trudi had become entranced by the shallowness of it all; the easy power it conferred. The exalting attentions of others; how men in groups at bars would graciously part for her like the Red Sea for Moses. How spite would sting the eyes and tongues of other women who saw only the make-up, clothes, diet and exercise; the effort they couldn’t or wouldn’t make. How men and women at the public utility where she was employed gave up chairs for her at crowded meetings. She’d be the first to be asked by the new start in the office what she wanted brought back for her lunch. Handsome Mark McKendrick, a young senior executive, challenging her to lunchtime games of squash. Then the several workplace promotions came easily, fast-tracking her all the way up to the glass ceiling. That relentless evolution of Trudi Lowe: from office junior to corporate female managerial icon.