by Irvine Welsh
When you got to Trudi’s you found her busy with a work report, about a restructuring in her section. She was telling you about it and you weren’t listening. — What is it, Ray? she’d asked. — What are you thinking about? She looked at you in sharper focus. — Have you been drinking?
— Yes, you’d said, with a smile on your face.
— But the NA … Keith Goodwin …
— I’ve had something on my mind.
— The job? This case with the wee girl?
Emotion drowned you as you looked at her. — I was thinking that we should get married.
And then you’d crawled across the floor on your knees and buried your head in her lap, taken out the ring and looked up and asked her. She had said yes and later you’d gone to bed and made love most of the night. It’s bizarre for you to think that that was the last time.
Because when you woke up on Saturday morning Britney had been gone, without trace, for three whole days. The realisation deflated you. It got worse as Trudi paced the living room, talking into her mobile phone, shrieking with excitement as she broke the news to her friends. You could have done without her saying, — I’ve booked Obelisk for Sunday. Just me, you, our mums and dads, Jackie and Angus and Stuart and whoever …
She caught your frozen expression.
— I couldn’t get anywhere decent on a Saturday night at such short notice!
— It’s no that … could we maybe no just keep it a bit low-key for a while …?
— We have to let them know, Ray. It’s family, Trudi insisted as she silenced you with a kiss, — this is meant to be a happy occasion! I’ve called everybody, and I think they know what’s up! Then she declared, — All you need to do is show up at eight o’clock tomorrow, and be nice!
— Okay.
Then a call from Notman came in on your mobile. — Ronnie Hamil’s just shown up at his flat. He looks fucked. Will I bring him in?
— No. I’m just up in Bruntsfield, I’ll meet you there in ten minutes. I want to check out his doss.
Trudi’s pleading gaze, trying to paint in your cold, white spaces.
— Sorry, babe, but I think we’ve just got the fucker, you said, and recalling you’d left the car at Fettes, had to ask her for the keys to her Escort.
Notman was waiting for you in a blue van outside the block of flats. Ronnie Hamil’s place was a top-floor dwelling in a tenement building that had miraculously escaped the renovations of the area that had been ongoing for the best part of thirty years. Rubbish-strewn and with its poor lighting and worn stairs, it seemed, like the grandad, to be a remnant of the seventies.
Two firm knocks brought Ronnie Hamil to the door. He was a shabby, furtive, accordion-faced wee man, his black and yellow teeth exposed in a knowing leer. With his attendant bronchitic wheeze, he seemed central casting’s identikit Minging Old Pervert. You thought of Angela, how his nicotine-stained fingers had violated her as a child. But was he now, you wondered, responsible for the fact that her own similarly marked hands only tucked in one of her kids at night?
— Police, you said, almost gagging on the word; when you stepped into the apartment, you and Notman physically recoiled under the impact of a vile stench, your eyes burning. Amazingly, Ronnie Hamil apparently didn’t notice as he invited you in to take a seat in the lounge.
You found a battered armchair, pushing aside some old newspapers to make room for yourself. You’d never seen so many: in neat stacks and unruly piles, strewn over the floor and furniture, some yellow with what you hoped was age. All seemed to be copies of the Daily Record and the Edinburgh Evening News. It was a fire trap, you considered, but you had more crucial matters to concern yourself with. — Where have you been, Mr Hamil?
— That’s ma business.
— No, it’s ours. Don’t you read the papers? you said without thinking, then looked around the room and raised your eyebrows. Could tell it was only the pungent aroma that was stopping Notman breaking out in laughter.
— An angel, that wee lassie, Ronnie Hamil said sadly. Then enmity filled his eyes. — If ah got muh hands on the bastard –
— Where have you been since Wednesday?
— Went oan a wee tear. The incestuous paedophile allowed a smile to crease his lips. — Dinnae mind much aboot it.
— You’re close to the kids? you said, coughing as the smell grew deeper, acquiring greater density, ripening in your nostrils.
— Aye, I’m ey roond for a cup ay tea n a blether.
— But they never come to you?
His face subsided so violently, it was as if an invisible object had struck his jaw. His voice dropped an octave. — No very often.
— What is that? Once a week? Once a year? You’d think you’d want to see more of them, you challenged, looking around in distaste at the old wallpaper, the mess of takeaway cartons and wrappers, but mostly those newspapers. Worst of all, however, that rank, violent odour! You coughed, then found yourself almost retching again. You noted Notman had opened the top buttons on his shirt and his left eye shivered uncontrollably. The aroma was beyond anything that old rubbish, burned food, stale bread and baccy could produce. Something evil was stinking the place out. It was killing you. A terrible thought grabbed you.
— What’s aw this aboot? Ronnie Hamil growled, still somehow oblivious to your discomfort and its source.
— You’re coming down to the station to help us with our inquiries, Mr Hamil, you said, struggling to effect nonchalance as the pungent odour continued its remorseless, overwhelming assault, filling your mouth. You saw Notman’s eyebrows and hackles raise and you were going nowhere until you found out the answer to another question: the origin of a stink that could burn skin. — There’s a very strong smell in here, and you rose and started looking around. Your first thoughts were the roof space.
— Aye, ah thought it was comin fae next door …
Notman located the source: a dead black kitten, which had electrocuted itself by chewing through a cable running to a lamp, and lay under a pile of newspapers behind the settee. It was covered in what appeared to be rice. At first you thought it had been poisoned by an old carton of Chinese food left out, but then saw that the grains were moving. You bent closer: the dead cat was crawling with maggots.
— Emlyn, Ronnie Hamil gushed in genuine heartbreak. — So that’s where ye went, ya daft wee bugger … He sank to his knees in front of the animal’s decomposing corpse.
You beat a hasty exit, making a note to call both the Environmental Health Office and the RSPCA. On the way out crowds were milling around, heading for the stadium. Bundling Ronnie into the back of the van, Notman turned to you and moaned, — Top of the League and we’re missing the game thanks tae a fuckin paedo.
You climbed into the van – you would pick up Trudi’s car later – letting Notman drive past the asbestos-ridden stand designed by Archibald Leith, the last surviving part of the old stadium. On the field, foreign mercenaries in maroon sandwich boards had replaced local lads. Instead of steep terraces where men roared, drank, fought, hugged and urinated on each other, there were the pink grandstands. The adjacent brewery had shut down, removing the pervasive smell of hops from the area.
Ronnie Hamil provided his own distinctive aroma on the drive down to Fettes HQ, where you carried on the interrogation. On Wednesday morning when Britney vanished, he said he was out for a drink, then took a walk by the canal. No witnesses. All he claimed to remember was waking up this morning on the floor of a drinking acquaintance at Caplaw Court, a tower block of flats in Oxgangs, scheduled for demolition. Again the wagons were forming in a circle. But you had your doubts. The old boy was feeble. Even with the element of surprise, would he be robust enough to overpower Britney so quickly? There was nothing to link the grandfather to what Toal saw as your damaging obsession, the white van. Ronnie Hamil could drive, but he didn’t own a vehicle and no record of him recently having rented or borrowed one could be unearthed.
As well as questioning Angela Hamil,
you’d got Amanda Drummond to quiz Britney’s older sister Tessa. The girl, recovered from her food poisoning, confirmed that they’d been told to avoid their grandad. — Mum says we shouldnae go near him. Says he’s no right in the heid.
You and Notman, buoyed by the news Hearts had won two–nil, extending their unbeaten run to eleven games, intensified your interrogation of Ronnie Hamil. As the booze-tainted rivulets streamed down from his face, you had a sense of him dissolving under the overhead strip lights. His vanishing and Angela’s confessing to his abuse of her would almost have been enough for Bob Toal, but there was no body. So no charges were brought against the alcoholic rapist of his own child, but he was put under twenty-four-hour surveillance. You wanted him outside, in the hope that he would take you to Britney, or her remains.
Escorting Ronnie Hamil to the front desk, you watched him shamble off into the early-evening darkness, then went back up to your office. Notman poked his head round the door. — Other news, he said glumly, and for a second you had expected to hear of the child’s body, — Romanov’s just sacked Burley.
You swivelled round in your seat. — You’re fucking jokin!
— Naw, it’s on Sky.
— But we’re top of the League and unbeaten! What the fuck is he playin at?
— Fuck knows.
You were suddenly seething. Your anger wasn’t really directed at Hearts although you were moved to gasp, — The fuckin derby next week as well.
Your football club had shot themselves in the foot again, but you felt they could now appoint anybody and it wouldn’t matter; the glory days of the late fifties and early sixties weren’t coming back. The Glaswegian sides had positioned themselves better, using bigotry to forward their interests, then getting on the right side of consumerism. But they and their fellow-travellers were welcome to it, the hollow glory by proxy. All you craved was to find a child unharmed.
The following day, two Sunday hikers, braving a cold, slashing wind and pinpricking rain, had seen something washed up on the rocks down by a stony inlet in cliffs near Coldingham. They looked down at the naked blue-grey body of a young girl. — It was like a doll, one had said. I couldn’t believe it was a child at first.
You’d been at Trudi’s Bruntsfield flat when you received the news. On the drive down the A1 you’d felt oddly calm. Then you’d looked at the dead child, the water lapping against her cold skin. — Sorry, sweetheart, you whispered under your breath as you felt your own hands freeze and numb. Part of the job you hated most was talking to the victims of sex offenders. Usually they were female, so departmental procedure and protocol often spared you this ordeal. But this child would never be able to tell you who had done this to her. Cupping your hands in front of your face, you expelled your hot breath into them. Some yards away, Britney’s school bag, with its books, had been discarded. As there was no sign of her clothes, it seemed a deliberate rather than careless act, but out of kilter with the rest of the crime.
A helicopter team retrieved the body and they took it back to the morgue. Britney hadn’t been dead for more than fourteen hours, but had been gone for over three days. The murderer had strangled her before he’d thrown her off the cliff, hoping the tides would take her out to sea. Divers combed the coast, but nothing else was recovered. Three hours later, around lunchtime on Sunday, Ronnie Hamil was formally charged with the murder of his granddaughter.
It wasn’t enough for you. The grandad reeked of old drink, he’d obviously been inebriated for days. Would he have been together enough to do all this? Other than the incongruous discarding of the books, it seemed like the work of a meticulous planner. Some traces of lubricant were present on the body, but no sperm. The murderer had used a condom. There was no blood or anything else to evidence foreign DNA, only some tape marks on her wrists and ankles. Nothing on the girl’s body could tie Britney to Ronnie. Some of his prints were found on one of the school books, but so were many others. It was plausible she’d shown it to him when he’d visited last week, as he’d claimed. Instead, it all seemed so much like the Ellis cases.
So you made a call to someone you’d met last year at a training course on the psychological profiling of sex offenders. You recalled him as a tubercular-looking man, with a slouch that indicated a terrible burden, but whose nervous eyes hinted that the invisible escape hatch of impending retirement was in his peripheral vision. Will Thornley was investigating officer on the Stacey Earnshaw case in Manchester. Unlike George Marsden, Will was decidedly a company man. He was off duty and didn’t like being interrupted at his gardening. He was so unhelpful that by the end of the call he’d completely convinced you that Ellis had absolutely nothing to do with Stacey’s murder.
The celebratory mood at Police HQ left you cold. Thankfully, Gillman wasn’t around in Fettes small lounge bar, when Notman had heartily slapped you on the back. — Well, we nailed the bastard, Ray.
— Aye, you’d agreed, — he’s certainly that, glad for the first time to be booked in for this family meal with Trudi tonight.
So you left the team to it, first biting the bullet and heading for Bob Toal’s office. Your boss offered you a Cuban cigar, which you declined. — I don’t like that look, Ray, Toal warned you. — It’s happy-camper time.
— Bob, I know this isn’t what you want to hear, but I’m duty-bound to tell you about the Hertfordshire and Manchester stuff, as it was part of my investigation.
— Pish on our parade, Ray, go on.
There was a frozen moment of dread between you as your eyes locked. He wanted you to stay silent. So did you. But you spoke. — I’m worried about this Ellis business. It’s not safe. It’ll blow up.
— So you want to undermine convictions that involve two police forces?
— If they’ve done the job right then they’ve nothing to worry about, you said, and even as it left your lips it sounded ridiculous to your ears.
Toal was in no mood to spare you. — I wonder what planet you’ve been on, Ray. Cause it ain’t fucking Earth.
— Ellis’s connection to the Earnshaw case is nonsense. It’s a total dustbin job. And there’s no substantial forensic evidence to tie him to Welwyn.
Toal shook his head so violently his jowls flapped, reminding you briefly of a bloodhound emerging from a river. — Did you hear him on that tape, by that wee lassie’s grave? Did ye listen? His eyes bulged. — The things he said he’d done with her?
You squirmed in recollection. — He’s a sick bastard, but he didn’t kill her. There’s nothing to link him to the white van –
— FUCK THE WHITE VAN! Toal bellowed. — Every cowboy in Britain whae’s daein a job on the side, or knocking off some tart he shouldnae be, or having a wank at passing schoolies, they’ve all got white vans! Forget it, Ray! We have our man!
You felt the paranoid tingle of humiliation after this chewing-out. Then, the first person you saw in the corridor was the grinning Gillman.
The Obelisk restaurant was an upscale two-star Michelin joint, dimly lit with copper lamps fixtured on its terracotta walls and placed on the big wooden tables. You weren’t in the best of moods when you arrived. Your mother Avril and sister Jackie had just beaten you to it, the maitre d’ fussing over their coats. Your mother greeting you in bug-eyed trepidation. — What is it? Everything okay?
— Aye, you’d dismissed her agitation. — All will be revealed.
— This is nice, she offered in relieved concession, swivelling and scanning before presenting her face for a kiss, which you dutifully delivered, with another for your tight-featured sister, who was less easily impressed by the surroundings.
— Angus can’t make it, he’s at a conference down in London, Jackie informed you. You’d nodded sombrely, just about managing to keep the smile of your face.
Donald and Joanne Lowe were already seated beside their daughter. Trudi was wearing a blue dress you hadn’t seen before, and she’d had her hair done. You kissed her, complimented her and winked, then greeted her parents. You liked them b
oth. They were a youthful couple of around fifty, but seeming closer to your age than your folks. Donald was a handsome, fine-featured man with slightly thinning, greying hair. He worked as a transport manager for a bus company, and had once been a professional footballer, keeping goal for Morton and East Fife. Joanne was a trim, beacon-eyed woman with a smile like a lottery win, who ran a cards and gift shop in Newington.
The Lowes greeted Avril and Jackie enthusiastically, compelling both women to apologise for the absence of their husbands, Avril stressing that in her case it was temporary. — He’s been down at the office, she rolled her eyes. — Sunday! she added, too loudly for your raw nerve endings.
Your father always worked on a Sunday, he said it was the busiest day for rail freight. John Lennox supervised local operations from a small office in Haymarket, transitioning there after a long-ago heart attack had stopped him driving trains. You liked the hoary, Gothic feel of his dark office and occasionally met him there to take him for a pub lunch in one of the local bars. Even though the operations had long been computerised, your father maintained neat files of hard copies of dispatch orders, delivery notes and route plans, taking pleasure that he could carry on working when the systems went down.
Arriving a few minutes later, he nodded to you, kissed Trudi and shook hands with Donald and Joanne, giving his wife and daughter cursory acknowledgement before sitting down.
— No Stuart? John asked.
Fuck Stuart, you thought, the spoiled wee bastard would make the evening all about him soon enough. — He’ll come when he comes, you said, ordering some champagne for the table. It amused you to watch everyone pretend they didn’t know what was happening. They stole glances at Trudi’s hands, both of which she kept covered with cream gloves. — We’ve got something to announce, you said, determined to get this part out of the way with as little bullshit as possible, — we’re getting married next year, probably September.
Trudi whipped off the gloves, unveiling the ring to delighted gasps and comments. You tried to gauge the reactions: nobody was overtly pissed off. The least enthusiastic responses seemed to come from your own parents, and as Trudi was hugged and kissed by hers, you felt the smack of envy. Your father merely nodded with the same look of quiet vindication he deployed when the Hearts dugout finally obliged with the substitution he’d been calling for all afternoon. You could almost hear the ‘aboot time n aw’ coming from the old man’s lips. You watched something in your mother’s sinewy neck sliding up and down like a pump-action shotgun. She held that motion for a moment before finding her voice:— El Mondo … my wee El Mondo, bleating out your childhood nickname, the one that had graced the bullfighting posters on your bedroom wall, procured from old Spanish holidays.