Crime

by Irvine Welsh

  And now back with Ray Lennox. A broken boy soldier. She watches his muscular but lithe body negotiate his clothing, a pair of long canvas trousers and the Motörhead T-shirt. Notes a slight thickening around his waistline; no, she isn’t imagining it. The gym would sort that out.

  The TV programme changes emphasis, discussing Miami’s museums and monuments. Lennox can’t believe it when they get to a Holocaust memorial, which is situated here in Miami Beach. — So that we never forget, the presenter says sincerely, patently more downbeat than when he talks about condominium prices. — A place of healing.

  — Why the fuck do they have that in Miami Beach? he asks incredulously, pointing at the screen. — It’s like having something tae commemorate the Rwandan atrocities in Las Vegas!

  — I think it’s great. Trudi puts down the magazine. — There should be one in every city in the world.

  — What’s Miami got tae dae with the Holocaust? Lennox raises his eyebrows. Sunlight suddenly rips through the blinds, casting tight, gold bars across the room. He can see the dust particles floating in them. He wants to be outside: away from the air conditioning.

  — It’s like the guy said; a place of healing, Trudi contends. — Besides, I think the Rough Guide mentioned that there were a lot of Jewish people in Miami. She reclines back on the bed. That is what she does. He knows that recline. Used to love it. But, please God, not now.

  — I need to get some air, Lennox says, avoiding contact with her hopeful eyes. Instead, his wrapped hand depresses some slats on the blind and he looks across to the sun-reflected, smiling facades of the vanilla apartments opposite. They seem to be beckoning him to come out and play. He picks up the phone on the dark glass table. — I said I’d call Ginger Rogers. He’s a good mate. He hears the plea in his voice. — No seen the old bastard in yonks.

  — Does it have to be right now? An internal tautness distorts Trudi’s sexy purr into something quite high and fey. She turns her head and glimpses at the empty side of the bed. Perhaps sees the phantom climax that could chill her out. — I don’t want to sit nattering with old people. I’ve nothing to say to them.

  — Me neither. But let’s get the boring shit oot ay the way while we’re jet-lagged, Lennox says, shaking the phone.

  — Okay, Trudi concedes, — I suppose we’ve got plenty time.

  — Attagirl, he responds, instantly aware of the strange in-appropriateness of the term. Lennox can’t look at her, as he calls his friend Ginger. Trudi can hear the voice of the old retired cop through the receiver: grating and loud, charged with the dangerous enthusiasm of Scotsmen bonding.

  Lennox puts the phone down. Informs Trudi that Ginger will pick them up later on, and that they’ll get a drink and a bite to eat. Watches something sink inside her. Defensively, he looks across to the table. The glass of water seems to have shifted a few inches to the right.

  Then, Trudi’s elevated sigh of resignation: — I’ll only come if you promise not to talk about police stuff.

  — Deal. Lennox feels his face muscles relax in relief. — But we should go down for that cocktail first. It’s complimentary, he picks up the voucher they had given him at the desk during check-in. Displays it to her.

  A South Beach welcome:

  Complimentary afternoon cocktail: 2–4 p.m.

  — You have to watch the drinking, Ray. It’s so silly. You put in so much work at NA …

  He moves over to the table. The glass from this angle seems normal. — I just want to drink socially. I don’t want to be in recovery all the time. It’s not as if I’m going to get cocaine here, he shakes his head, realising where he is, adding tamely, — even if I wanted to, which I most certainly don’t.

  Her eyes roll. She changes tack. — Why don’t you phone your mum? Just to tell her that we got here safely. She’ll be worried.

  — No way, Lennox says emphatically. — Let’s grab that cocktail, he urges, trying to keep the need out of his voice.

  During the check-in Lennox had already decided that the boutique hotel was not to his taste. The slick metal-and-chrome surfaces, exuberant artwork on the walls, draped mirrors and lean chandeliers didn’t bug him; he has nothing against luxury and decadence. It just felt too public, and when they get down to have their cocktail it’s become very busy at the bar. Lennox kills his vodka Martini quickly. Then he’s struck by an inkling that, with her marginally deeper breathing, and control over her glass so that it makes no sound every time she sets it back down on the marble table, Trudi is as tense as he is. Her behaviour frays his nerves more effectively than any violent outburst, and makes him want to go outside. The people, both staff and customers, strut and preen like catwalk models, everybody sneakily checking out everyone else while all the time cultivating an air of studied aloofness. He looks to the door. — Let’s explore a bit before Ginger comes tae pick us up.

  Outside it is hot. He recalls the TV forecaster saying it was unseasonably warm for winter. It was usually only around seventy-five degrees in January, but it has soared into the mid-nineties. Lennox is baking. That is how he feels. Like he is baking in a big oven. His brains a stew in the casserole dish of his skull. It’s too hot to walk far. They sit down on the patio of a bar-restaurant. A flashbulb-smiling girl flourishingly hands them a menu card.

  — It’s roastin, he says lazily, from behind his shades as he and Trudi sit al fresco sipping another cocktail, this time a Sea Breeze. They have only gone one block. Collins Avenue on to Ocean Drive. Strutting holidaying youths pass by, enjoying the bounty of their years and wealth; waxed macho boys pumped up with muscle, giggling and pouting girls in bikinis and sarongs, older women trying to emulate them with some help from pills, scalpels and chemicals. Tropically smart Latin men in white suits smoke Cuban cigars the same colour as their girlfriends. Salsa and mambo music fills the air, and a programmed bass pulses out from somewhere. The sea is close, across the busy two-way street. Behind a couple of Bermuda-grass verges, some tarmac and a few palm trees is a strip of sand and then the ocean. You can’t see it, but you know it’s there.

  — Ray! Trudi’s hand scalds his forehead. He winces. Like she’d branded him with a heated iron. — You’re burning up!

  Rising and skipping off towards the shop next door, Trudi returns with a New York Yankees baseball cap. She pulls it over his head. It feels better. — Sitting frying your brains out! With that haircut you’ve no protection in this sun!

  She delves into her straw bag, producing a tube of sunblock and swathing it on his neck and arms, disdainfully regarding his Ace of Spades T-shirt. — A black T-shirt! In this heat! And I don’t know why you won’t wear shorts!

  — For wee laddies, he mumbles.

  Lennox remembers his mother making similar administrations to him as a boy, at home in the small utilitarian garden with its cut-grass lawn and its paved path meandering down to a ramshackle tool shed. Or in the summer at Dingwall: a rare Highland heatwave when they were staying at his aunt’s. Again at Lloret De Mar, on their first family holiday abroad, with his father’s pal and workmate, Jock Allardyce, and his wife, soon to be ex-wife, Liz. It was also their last, as Avril Lennox’s stomach was swollen with his kid brother, and his older sister Jackie was on the cusp of being too cool for such excursions. He’d met a mangy old dog on the beach and they’d become friends. He’d introduced the animal to his dad, horrified when his father chased it off. — Keep away from that filthy bugger. Rabies, John Lennox had explained in alarm. — Standards of hygiene in Spain are different from Scotland.

  He takes the cap off and regards the ubiquitous NY symbol. He reluctantly puts it back on his head, pulling a sour face. Something about it depresses him. It was the sort of hat that might by worn by someone who had been to neither a baseball match nor New York City. The sort of hat Mr Confectioner might have had in his wardrobe.

  — What’s wrong with it? Trudi asks.

  — I don’t like the Yankees. No Boston Red Sox hats?

  — There’s loads in there, I didn�
��t know what you wanted. I just got it to keep the sun from burning out your brains! It’s New York, she urges.

  — This is Florida, Lennox shrugs. He tried to think of a Florida baseball team. The name Merlins seems to ring a bell. The Magical Merlins.

  — Yes, but it’s all American and that’s where we are, she says, then sips her Sea Breeze and returns to her notes. — Go and see if they’ll change it if you want … I think Mandy Devlin and her boyfriend should be at the evening do, rather than the church and the meal … what do you think?

  — I agree, Lennox says. He gets up, stretches, and steps next door. Some football shirts: Real Madrid, Manchester United, Barcelona, AC Milan. The baseball caps. He chooses a Boston Red Sox number and puts it on. Returning to the patio, he sticks the Yankees one on Trudi’s head. Her hand goes to it, as if he’s messed up her hair, then stops.

  She simpers at him, squeezes his good hand. Something rises in him, a surge of optimism, which is crushed when she speaks. — I’m really happy, Ray, she says, but it sounds like a threat. — Are you winding down?

  — I need to get the Hearts score. We’re at home to Kilmarnock in the Cup. Shall we find an Internet café soon?

  Trudi’s expression is briefly acerbic, then her face lights up. — There’s some stuff I want to show you on this website, some really good ceilidh bands.

  She is reading in another magazine about the television actress Jennifer Aniston; her recovery after her divorce from the actor Brad Pitt, now with a different actress, Angelina Jolie. Lennox glances at each magazine on the table. Both were about relationships: one focusing on a day of happiness, the other dealing with a lifetime of misery and uncertainty. He’d glimpsed at it on the plane. Jennifer Aniston was supposed to be with another actor now, whose name he couldn’t recall. Trudi points at her picture on the cover. — It must be so difficult for her. It just goes to show: money can’t buy happiness. She looks at Lennox, who has caught the waitress’s eye and ordered another two Sea Breezes. — We’re okay though, aren’t we, Ray?

  — Hmm, he muses to himself, trying to think of the last decent film Brad Pitt was in. Decides that the remake of Ocean’s Eleven wasn’t too bad.

  — Well, thank you for that vote of confidence! We’re only going to be spending the rest of our lives together! She looks at him, harsh, shrew-like. He can see the old woman in her. It’s like she’s fast-forwarded forty years. She throws the notepad on the table. — At least pretend to be interested!

  Jennifer Aniston and Angelina Jolie. Different women, faces, bodies.

  The body had seemed to shrink in death, washed up on the rocks at the bottom of that cliff. It was strange, but it hadn’t bothered him at the time. Well, it had bothered him, but not obsessively. He thinks of his old mate, Les Brodie. How they used to shoot seagulls with their air rifles. How, when you shot a gull, it was different from shooting a pigeon. Les and his pigeons. The gull, though, it just reduced, went into nothing, like it was a balloon, all air. The difference between a dead adult body and a dead child’s (and Britney was the first dead child he had seen) was that sense of reduction. Maybe you were just seeing for the first time how small they really were.

  Lennox feels his heartbeat rising again, as sweat coats his palms. He forces down a deep breath. That cyanic corpse and its mysterious, unyielding opacity; it was just a body though, Britney had gone; what counted was bringing the bastard who had done her to justice. But now he can see it as vividly as ever; the eyes popping out of the head, the blood vessels on the lids haemorrhaged where he’d throttled her, while penetrating her, wringing the life from her for his own fleeting gratification.

  A human life bartered for an orgasm.

  He wondered if it was really like that. It was when he tried to imagine the little girl’s fear, her last moments, that those corporeal images came racing back. But did she really look like that? Was it not his imagination filling in the gaps?

  No. The video. It was all there. He shouldn’t have watched the video. But Gillman was present, staring coldly at the images Mr Confectioner had filmed. His act demanding that Lennox, as superior officer, had to sit as implacably as his charge, even though every second of it was crippling him inside.

  He thought about the moment before he squeezed the trigger, the gull in his sights. That timeless pause before release: the hollow shabbiness inside him afterwards, as it lay small and lifeless on the tarmac or the rocks at the Forth estuary at Seafield.

  Les Brodie. The pigeons.

  Suddenly he is tuning into a voice.

  — … you won’t talk to me Ray, you won’t touch me … in bed. You’re not interested. Trudi shakes her head. Turns in profile. Her eyes and lips are tight. — Sometimes I think that we should just call the whole thing off. Is that what you want? Is it?

  An ember of anger glows in his chest. It seems to be coming from so far away, cutting through a maze of paralysis. Ray Lennox looks evenly at her, wants to say, ‘I’m drowning, please, please help me …’ but it comes out as, — We just need to get some sun. A bit of light, likes.

  Trudi hauls in a huge intake of breath. — It is a stressful time, Ray. And we really need to make our minds up about the venue. I think that’s the big one hanging over us, and then she gasps, — September is only eight and a bit months away!

  — Let’s take it easy tonight, his tones are soothing, — go and meet Ginger back at the hotel.

  — What about your Hearts score?

  — It can wait till I see the papers. We’re on holiday, after all.

  Trudi twinkles, her face opening up further as a carnival float crammed with children in fancy dress chugs along in the traffic of Ocean Drive.

  3

  Fort Lauderdale

  THE MOTTLED LATE-AFTERNOON clouds head in from the Atlantic and the palm trees move loosely in the gentle breeze. Trudi and Lennox have settled back at a table on the hotel’s front patio to wait for Ginger. They people-watch on Collins Avenue, Lennox drinking a mineral water to try and prove some point, when he’s craving alcohol so badly he could commit any number of crimes for a vodka.

  He’s changed into a short-sleeved blue shirt and tan-blond canvas trousers. Trudi wears a yellow dress and white shoes. The cloud cover has thickened, and although the sun still pulses out occasionally, she can feel the coolness on her limbs. Then a familiar accent shouts out the surname Trudi has guiltily practised signing, but all she can see is a 4×4 Dodge, which has pulled up outside the hotel. Though its tinted-glass window is wound down, the driver remains concealed. The door opens and a fat man wearing a garish yellow and green shirt emerges, squinting in the sun, before staring at her. — Hey! Princess! he sings. She can tell he’s forgotten her name, as they’d only met once before: back in Edinburgh at his retirement do.

  — Ginger! Lennox smiles. He gets up and hugs his old friend. Feels the increased girth. Ginger is a big brown leather suitcase wrapped in a Hawaiian shirt. He gets a thin smile back. — Look, Ray, I’d appreciate it if you didnae call me that here. I’ve never liked it, makes me sound like a fuckin nancy boy.

  Lennox nods in taut acquiescence as Trudi reviews her elementary knowledge of Eddie ‘Ginger’ Rogers. A retired Edinburgh cop with nearly forty years’ service on the force. His first wife had died a year before his retirement. He had married Dolores Hodge, an American whom he’d met in a ballroom-dancing chat room. After some Internet romancing and a few transatlantic visits, they had tied the knot, Ginger moving over to his new bride’s home in Fort Lauderdale.

  — What’s this? He notes Lennox’s bandaged hand. — Wanking injury? Then, aware of Trudi, he gives a contrite smile. They climb into the 4×4, Trudi in the back, and drive on to Washington Avenue, and down 5th Street. Soon they cross over a long bridge heading towards what Ginger tells them is Miami proper. Trudi watches a rusting, low-built sludge tanker as it creeps past some dazzling white cruise ships berthed at the docks, like a jakey sneaking into a society wedding, and then they’re on a five-lane freeway. It�
�s a mess: tagliatelle rather than spaghetti junction.

  Ginger drives in the aggressive manner of the TV cop, perpetually jumping lanes. Trudi believed that Americans were generally decent drivers compared to the British, being used to travelling on roads actually designed for that purpose. Ginger seems intent on confirming his reputation for cavalier performances behind the wheel. He pulls out in front of some college kids in an unhooded convertible. Despite being in the wrong, his response to their blaring horn is to give them the finger, US style. — Spoiled little cunts, he chuckles, before snorting, — Think they’re entitled. Then he recklessly weaves in front of another car and is tooted again. — No hesitation: reservations are for yuppies and Indians, he grins broadly, glancing back at Trudi. — Awright, princess?

  Her tight-stretched, tooth-bearing smile at the back of his head. One hand checks the seat belt; the other, white-knuckled, grasps the exit strap above the door.

  Ginger’s section of Fort Lauderdale is situated right by the beach. The apartment is in the Carlton Tower Condominiums, a twenty-storey building behind a Holiday Inn, just one block from the Atlantic Ocean. Lennox has noted the relative proximity of the thin strip of beach to the road in comparison with the art deco district. Externally and from afar, the tower might have given the initial impression of British council flats, but closer examination makes Lennox revise his opinion. The ground level is opened up with floor-to-ceiling plate-glass windows. They step inside to a large lobby and reception area, the marbled floor and walls impressing him, and Trudi too, he can tell by the arch her biro-thin brows make. It is furnished with couches and coffee tables full of glossy magazines, and decorated with exotic and lavish floral arrangements, which it takes Lennox a couple of glances to ascertain are actually plastic. The concierge, a large black woman, sits behind the reception desk. She smiles at Ginger who waves cheerfully at her. — Nice woman, he says humbly, as if apologising to Lennox for his previous police-canteen racism, and underlining that it’s a thing of the past.