by Irvine Welsh
Lennox pulls a tight smile.
— That’s a very misty Caledonian perspective, Buck, Bill Riordan cheerfully offers.
— What about Yeats, Joyce, Beckett, Wilde? Trudi intervenes. — The Irish have given so much to Western culture.
Ginger is now drunk enough to openly scoff at her.— Couldnae write their names on a giro compared to the bard. Rabbie Burns, right, Ray?
— I’m keepin ootay this one.
— You stop it, Dolores shouts, leaning forward in her chair and punching Ginger in the chest. — I’m Irish. And Danish. And Skats. My paternal grandfather came from Kilmarnock.
She pronounces it Kil-mir-nok.
— A wise choice to get on that boat, Ginger teases, mellowing under her intervention.
Lennox turns to Riordan. — Must have been some tough beats in New York, Bill.
Riordan nods in cautious affirmation. — The city’s a lot different now, Ray. But I loved my time on the force. Wouldn’t have changed a thing.
— It must be so dangerous compared to the UK, all these guns, Trudi shudders, glancing briefly at Lennox.
This time Riordan gestures in the negative. — I certainly wouldn’t like to work in Britain and not have a pistol in my holster.
Trudi clicks her teeth together. She often does that when she’s nervous or excited, Lennox considers. — But isn’t it dangerous? Doesn’t it make you more likely to use the gun? You must have shot a few people, right?
Smiling genially at her Bill Riordan lowers his glass. — Honey, in all my years on the force I shot nobody. I worked some of the toughest precincts in Brooklyn, the Bronx, Queens. You name it. I’ve never personally known a New York City cop who shot anybody. I unholstered my gun twice in thirty-five years.
Lennox watches her almost purring under his kindly gentleman-uncle patter. Sees the wedding guest list grow by two.
— Uh-oh, cop talk, Dolores gripes, — time to evacuate, girls. She stands, sending her plastic chair hurtling back along the tiled balcony floor. Jessica follows suit. Trudi hesitates for a while, preferring the company of one youngish and two old men, to that of two old women, but realises that Scottish sexist protocol will set the social agenda tonight, and follows back through to the lounge.
Ginger cranes his neck to watch the sliding glass door slurp along its runner, before thudding closed. — Course it’s aw fucked now, he slurs, as he pours some shots from a tequila bottle he’s opened, — the job. It’s the same everywhere. The high-flyers come in, tell all us old pros how it’s done, eh, Bill?
— I guess, Riordan smiles warily. Like Lennox, he seems keen on avoiding the fight that the host is spoiling for.
— Ray? Ginger challenges, his eyes narrowing on his ex-colleague.
Lennox feels himself swallow his beer in a hard gulp. That promotion was eight years ago. His career has stagnated since, but some cunts wouldnae let it go. He shrugs again in a non-committal manner.
— I reckon that’s the way of the world, Buck, Bill Riordan chuckles.
— Aye, but it shouldnae be. Ginger closes one eye, focusing the other in accusation on Lennox. — Polis, they call them. That job you got, that should have gone tae somebody like Robbo. Now there wis a polisman!
Lennox takes in a long breath through his nose, pleasantly surprised to hear his sinuses pop. — Robbo was a fuckin washed-up nutjob, he spits. And he wants to add: And now I’m just like him. Just like the lot of youse.
— A fuckin good cop, Ginger mumbles, seeming to run out of steam. Then he asks, — How’s Dougie Gillman? Some boy him, eh, Ray … His voice tails off.
— The same, Lennox says through tight lips.
— Course … ah forgot that you and Gilly had that wee fawoot. Kissed and made up yet?
— No.
A silence falls. Rather than let it hang, Lennox rises and heads through to the open-plan lounge where Jessica is playing with the dog and Dolores is teaching Trudi some dance steps. — I’m heading for my scratcher, he announces. — Jet lag kicking in.
— Ah … lightweight, Trudi teases, now lost in the drink and the dance.
In the en suite bathroom he washes down his last two antidepressants and prepares for another night, hoping he’s ingested enough to obliterate its horrors. Sliding into the bed, he listens to the chatter and laughter from the front room dissolve into the madness inside his head. Though exhausted, a harsh, regressive calculus seems to dictate that sleep will be denied him again. Instead, he has thought.
What was it Toal said in his briefing about Angela Hamil? – A wanton slut, he’d ventured, putting his pipe back in his mouth and sucking on it. Since the ban he wasn’t allowed to smoke it in the office now, but he still brought it out as a prop, chewing on the stem when he was nervous. Then he’d added, — I reckon that it’s some scumbag she’s had in her orbit. You know the kind of rubbish the likes of that woman’s bound to attract.
Lennox blinks, tugging on the duvet. Images of Angela, her straw hair and haggard face, form into clarity around him, not like in a dream because he is painfully conscious that he’s in this bed.
Then he can see him, Mr Confectioner: his cold, fishlike eyes, his monstrous, rubbery, scandalised lips, and Britney, helpless, at his feet.
And Ray Lennox thinks of that balcony outside, beyond the cackling party. Just to step over that railing and let go. To be away from it all: the Nonce, Britney. Just how hard could it be?
4
Edinburgh (1)
IT WAS THE morning following the disappearance. You’d broken off a long session sifting through data, stealing a few hours of sleep at your Leith flat. Awakening with a start in disorientating blackness, your missed calls list told you that Keith Goodwin had phoned. You’d forgotten about last night’s NA meeting. It was still shy of 6 a.m. when you were back at Police HQ’s IT lab, reabsorbed in the CCTV footage.
Not that there was much of it. The mind-boggling network of cameras that recorded every Briton’s movements on an average of between ten and forty times a day, depending on your source, had thinned out when it left the city centre and was threadbare by the time it got to Britney’s housing scheme. There was some coverage of her yesterday morning: a grainy shot on security film that lasted just under a minute as she left her block of flats, school-bound, then a few beats more, courtesy of a speed camera, as she traipsed towards the roundabout. You deployed every program and procedure that might enhance these shabby images. You stretched them out, slowed them down, closed in and pulled out to scan the peripheries and all the nooks and crannies where somebody might be lurking. From the back of Britney’s head and the side of her face, you’d try to trace her line of vision, to see the world through her gaze. Like a fevered prospector, you sifted through the data swarm hoping to find a pixel of gold that might provide a clue to the kidnapper’s identity. Nobody in Lothian and Borders Police knew more about sex offenders. And nobody was more inclined to cast the net wider.
Through the repeat black-and-white viewings of the pensive child, the name Robert Ellis kept resonating in your skull. A man who’d been under lock and key for three years now for the murder of two young girls, one in Welwyn Garden City, Hertfordshire, the other in Manchester. Britney’s case seemed to have many of the same characteristics as the murders of Nula Andrews and Stacey Earnshaw. Predictably, Ellis had protested his innocence to those heinous crimes.
The other name that came back to you was George Marsden, part of the Hertfordshire team who had put Robert Ellis away for the kidnap and murder of twelve-year-old Nula. The prosecution had established that Ellis was prone to hanging around the local park where the girl had last been seen, by a tree-lined path that she was traversing en route to her aunt’s.
Only George believed that they’d got the wrong man. There were similarities with the case of Stacey Earnshaw, whose body had been found dumped in woods in the Lake District two years previously. When Hertfordshire Police hauled in Ellis, they discovered he’d had a girlfriend in Preston whom he’d
visited regularly around the time of Stacey’s murder. The girl, Maria Rossiter, disclosed some fairly mundane details of their relationship to a tabloid, which were luridly recast and spiced with innuendo. Alongside a disturbing tape Ellis involuntarily made, this helped establish his guilt. George Marsden was sure it was same person who snatched Nula Andrews who had got Stacey Earnshaw in Manchester. Only he was absolutely convinced that it wasn’t Ellis. In Welwyn Garden City, a white van had been reported leaving the side street adjacent to the wooded parkland near the time of Nula’s disappearance. Now Ellis was inside and White Van Man was back.
You’d felt a disturbing weight settle around your limbs as you’d looked up at the wall clock at around 9 a.m. It was now over twenty-four hours since Britney had gone. You opted to give those stinging eyes a rest, head to the Stockbridge Deli and get another black coffee and call up George Marsden. You were on friendly terms, having got drunk together after a DNA-testing training course in Harrogate several years back.
—White van, was it? George casually asked after you’d explained the crime in broad brushstrokes. Refusing to confirm or deny this detail as a smile pulled at your features, you hoped your silence didn’t speak too many volumes.
You seemed to get immediate pay-off from the break when you returned to the footage. Once again Britney stepped out of her stair, turned, but this time you noticed that she seemed to give a half-wave; a furtive acknowledgement to someone approaching from her right. An enhancement of the image confirmed this impression. The person was out of shot but would be heading into the stair. You looked at the list of names of the neighbours. Then you loaded up the sex offenders register and the image of Tommy Loughran leapt out at you.
When you got down to the Hamil family’s house with Notman, it was discovered that Loughran was the man just beyond camera range. He’d been walking his dog yesterday morning. And he was the people’s choice, with votes cast in brick through his shattered window, and campaign graffiti dubbed on his wall:
NONCES DIE
The security guard, an old flasher, was an ex-alco turned Christian teetotaller. He carried the air of the sinner who had repented with gusto but still expected more retribution before the slate could hope to be wiped clean. Such was Loughran’s masochistic self-loathing, you figured that he could easily have been induced to admit that he’d committed the crime. The only problem was that after taking his dog home and seeing Britney leave for school, he boarded a crowded bus to a cinema, where local students had started a morning movie club. The transaction on his Bank of Scotland card and the film theatre’s records indicated that Loughran was watching the Werner Herzog documentary Grizzly Man. You recalled how the movie – about a self-righteous, liberal environmentalist, eaten by the creature he was trying protect – was a hit in the police canteen. Remembered Herzog dismissing the subject’s claims of the spiritual superiority of the bear. In the face of the beast, the German film-maker saw only ‘the cruel indifference of nature’. — What do you think the message of that film was, you’d asked the bemused Loughran.
Billy Lumsden, a janitor at Britney’s school who regularly talked to the girl (although he talked to most of the kids), was late for work on the day of the disappearance and was taken in to assist the inquiry. You learned that his marriage had broken up the previous year, when he’d left his wife and their three kids. Lumsden had already been suspended for being intoxicated on duty, and he confessed to you his feelings of loneliness and despair. The compassion you experienced for this man shocked you in its intensity. What if Lumsden was the beast? But he seemed so broken, so quietly desperate. Then it was established that his mother had suffered a bad fall at her home. Neighbours and a local shopkeeper verified his presence four miles away at the time of Britney’s vanishing.
The case continued to seep under your skin. The clock was ticking. The disappearance of a child was harrowing enough. But it was also showing you how the vulnerable were lining up to be devoured by the criminal justice system. The potential for miscarriage was so strong everywhere. It sowed a sickening moral relativism into your psyche, spreading a rash of doubt and uncertainty. You steeled yourself with the thought that somebody had taken Britney. She couldn’t have just vaporised into the misty air in those three minutes she turned the corner into Carr Road out of sight of Stella and Andrea. Somebody was evil. And you vowed that you were going to get them.
The starting point had been checking out the men who came into contact with the girl, at school, home and work, and slowly eliminating them from the investigation. Britney’s biological father was off the list; long estranged from the family, he was on an oil platform in the North Sea. One man remained unaccounted for and, chillingly, he’d vanished around the same time as the child. They couldn’t find her grandfather, Ronnie Hamil, at his flat in Dalry. Neighbours informed you that this was nothing new; Ronnie could vanish for days at a time when his giro arrived. It had been Gillman who had cottoned on to the grandfather connection first. — That cunt’s up tae something, he’d sneered over a photograph of Ronnie with Angela and the girls. — Auld Gary Glitter.
You put everyone in the team on a full-time search for Ronnie Hamil. All squad cars were instructed to be on the lookout for him. His tenement flat was staked out around the clock. The team spent hours visiting his haunts: the bookies, the off-licences and the bars of Dalry and Gorgie Roads. But you declined to join the hunt. Try as you might, you couldn’t stop yourself pursuing another avenue. — I’m heading off to do some snooping around, you’d informed Bob Toal.
Toal had given you his trademark lemon-sucking look. He knew you were up to something. Somehow you’d suspected this wasn’t going to be a typical child sex case; a bubbling in your innards told you that the trail wouldn’t lead to a traditional British nonce. You’d studied the mugshots of every paedophile on the register: the priests, schoolteachers and scoutmasters; the pervert uncles, opportunistic stepfathers and twisted blood-fathers with their arrogant and chilling rationalisations. Nobody fitted the bill. It seemed an American-style crime, or rather the kind of crime of US fiction, as you supposed that real American crimes were like British ones. But it was culturally American: a lone drifter, a predator, not driving across long and lonely interstate freeways over a vast continent, but shuffling along in a white van through crowded, nosy Britain.
What you did was drive to the airport, surreptitiously boarding a lunchtime flight to Gatwick, then jumping on a train down to Eastbourne, where George Marsden now lived. He’d resigned after the Nula Andrews case and now installed security systems and offered advice to nervous retirees. George had never struck you as a maverick. Ex-forces, Royal Marines; had fought in the first Gulf War. A straight-backed divorcee with a rugby player’s build, a floppy head of thick grey hair and sportive smile that suggested he wouldn’t spend too many lonely nights. With his pressed trousers and freshly laundered shirts, everything about him suggested steadfast adherence to procedure. Except that when he’d seen the evidence and it didn’t add up, he’d lost faith.
Over espresso in a café, you and George watched his prospective clients amble along the seafront as he explained that Ellis had been the town bad boy back in Welwyn. A charismatic and sly young man, he wasn’t a hard case, but was somehow able to get tougher souls to do his bidding. Ellis had several offences, mainly burglary, but there had been one charge of rape, dropped through lack of evidence. While there was nothing to link him to minors, he was easy to detest; the sort of shitbag that every community manages to produce. Nobody, police or public, would lament him being banged up for a long time. Nula Andrews was the opposite: small, frail, elfin-faced, an innocent looking much younger than her twelve years. You recalled the picture of her they’d circulated, and those blazing doe eyes that blitzed into the psyche of the British public. Nula was on her way to help her aunt with some decorating. She was easy to cast as Little Red Riding Hood to Ellis’s Big Bad Wolf. So Robert Ellis became the most hated man in Britain: a Huntley, a Brady. And, in
a sickening fashion, he did make an unsolicited confession of sorts.
But whatever Ellis was, he was not guilty of this crime. George Marsden was having none of it and honour compelled him to resign, ending his police career on a sour note. He had a troubling belief in right and wrong. If it was religion, it wasn’t the insurance policy stuff most people took out by nipping to church on Sunday. So George talked through the Nula Andrews case with you: the similarities and differences to Britney. Then you’d discussed Stacey Earnshaw, snatched near Salford Shopping Centre. — It wasn’t Ellis, he said emphatically.
Every city produced its share of Ellises. Bob Toal was anxious to see if any in Edinburgh could be linked in some manner to Britney. He himself had cried wolf about retiring for years and now that his compulsory date loomed, he wanted to do so on a high. Some sections of the press, which had originally crucified Ellis, now, in light of Britney’s case, had started to hint at a grave miscarriage of justice. The public, meantime, were doing what the public will do in such instances: clamouring for a body.
You hadn’t told a soul about the Eastbourne visit and feared the phone call that might force the truth, but received nothing other than routine messages informing you Grandad Ronnie’s whereabouts still hadn’t been uncovered. Guilt was beginning to strike hard; you felt you should have been knocking on doors and sitting in cramped vans on stake-outs with the others. You’d fallen asleep on the plane back to Edinburgh, not fully waking up till you picked up the local newspaper at an airport stand to see Britney’s face, with a vibrant, insolent grin, staring at you. Tomorrow it would go national. You took a taxi back to your Leith flat, in a new development by the docks. You were planning on speaking to Toal about the Ellis case. Then you realised that in your tiredness you’d neglected to switch on your mobile after coming off the flight. There was a message from Trudi and two from your boss. — Think we’ve got our man, Ray, he’d chirped in the last of them.