by Irvine Welsh
The meal was well under way by the time your semi-drunk brother arrived. John Lennox moved away from his wife so that their younger son might sit in between them, as if he was a child they had to take turns watching. — Had an audition yesterday in Glasgow, he explained, — Stayed over in the land of the Weedge and my train got held up. Engineering works.
You set your face in a scungy smile, turning to your father. — The decline of the railways, eh, Dad?
John Lennox was a man prone to splenetic discourse on where Britain had gone wrong, invariably tracing it back to the railways. The words ‘Beeching’ and ‘privatisation’ he would pronounce as others might sexually transmitted diseases, but tonight your father was keeping his counsel.
— Your big brother’s getting married, Stuart, Jackie said. Her appeasement of Stuart grated; as a ball-crunching criminal lawyer she never behaved like this with anyone else.
— Well, no shit, Sherlock, Stuart laughed. — I had sort of gathered that was what this wee shindig was about, and he poured himself a glass of champagne. — To Ray and Trudi, he toasted, — may the force by with you!
— Stuart, Jackie warned.
Your brother ignored your sister, looking over at the bride-to-be. — Well, Trudi, I can’t help being the brother of a polisman, he said, — but marrying one? That’s a very brave choice, I shiteth thee not.
You would if you could find one that fancied you, you’d thought, but bitten your tongue. Instead, you contented himself with, — I’m sorry I’ve been such a big trial to you.
— I bear it with dignity, Stuart laughed loudly. He looked over at Donald, who had an eyebrow raised, and Joanne, who seemed to be enjoying his performance. Her eyes fizzed like aspirin in a glass. — You know, years back, a bunch of us from the drama college went every morning up to Dundee to join the Timex factory picket line. I said to my brother, ‘How can you do that job: protect the rich, shit on the poor?’
— I’m sure you’re going to tell everybody what I said. You acted bored, drumming your fingers on the table and looking to the ceiling.
— Aye. You said you asked yourself that every day. Stuart paused, looking around the silent table. — Every day, he repeated.
— Yeah, you tried to affect weariness.
But Stuart had now clicked into actor mode, enjoying his audience. — Naw, I shiteth thee not; you said something like: ‘I do it to get the bad bastards out there. Ask any of the most vulnerable people in Muirhouse or Niddrie who they really fear and they’ll all tell you that it’s the bad bastards in their own midst.’ So I said something to the effect of: ‘Fine, Raymond, but what about the rich bad bastards?’ Then he looked pointedly at you, encouraging everybody else to do the same.
You made an exasperated farting noise by expelling air through your lips. — They get away, unless they’re really careless, you conceded. — That’s Jackie’s department, the criminal justice system. I’m only a gofer.
— Leave me out of this, Jackie said.
You recalled how Stuart was never satisfied with this response. And he was right to not be. While it was the truth, there was another factor, a personal element, that you could never bring yourself to include in your stock speech. Now Stuart, with his open, imploringly sincere eyes, manifestly sensed the omission, and not for the first time, but disclosure wouldn’t be prised from your lips. — Help me out, Ray, he pleaded, — I’m trying to understand you.
The Lowes were now, sensibly, you thought, engrossed in their own conversation with your dad at the other end of the table. As the food and drink went down your mother was trapped, with her children arguing across her.
Then you said, — Remember that doll, what was its name? though you remembered Marjorie very well.
Jackie looked poisonously at you.
— Raymond, Avril pleaded.
— It’s okay, Mum, Jackie said. — This is what happens when we get together as a family. Stuart resents Ray for who he is and Ray resents me for who I am.
You were taken aback by this. All the more so because you realised it was true. You’d been trying to hit back at Stuart in a roundabout way. Preparing to develop the theme that you’d loved that doll so much your dad worried you were queer. By the time Stuart came along (who actually was gay), John Lennox had grown more laissez-faire in his parenting and had forgotten about the Marjorie-and-biro incident, which had so shamed you and your sister.
— He was such a lovely wee laddie, your mother announced in desperation to the gathering. — My sweet wee El Mondo.
You know fuck all about me, you thought bitterly, looking round the table at your family.
Donald Lowe had put an arm around Trudi. — Well, I have to say that this one never gave us a day’s trouble, did she, Joanne? The perfect daughter, he announced with pride.
— I wouldnae go so far as to say that! Joanne laughed, bringing up a trivial childhood anecdote, and you were delighted that it was now Trudi’s turn to squirm. Then, for a second or two, the table vanished and all you could see was a slab with a small blue body on it.
Hyperventilation shook you and you fought it down, staring at a wedge-shaped lamp bolted to the wall. — You okay, son? your mother asked, noting your discomfort.
You switched your stare on to Stuart. The angel-faced wee crawler who’d turned into the opinionated obnoxious wanker, and everyone still made a fuss of him. — I’m lucky having you to tell me how Scotland would’ve been a free socialist utopian republic by now if I hadnae joined the polis.
Stuart raised his hands in mock surrender. — Okay, Ray, I apologise. I was out of order. I’m just a wee bit pissed off that I didn’t get this Taggart part I was up for.
— But you’ve been in Taggart before, son, Avril consoled.
— Aye, Mum, but that was a different role.
But you weren’t going to let him take over this time. — And I’m glad you know my job well enough to tell me that I oppress the poor. Here was me hallucinating, thinking about the dead body of a sexually abused and tortured seven-year-old girl I’d pulled out of the sea. And it was all my fault. She came from a housing scheme: maybe I was oppressing her.
— Enough! John Lennox snapped. — A bit of respect from you two. C’mon!
A worn glance of truce flashed between you and Stuart as the waiter moved to the table to announce the desserts. As you recharged your glass, you heard the conversation drift to Hearts and the sacking of George Burley. You were about to chip in with some gusto when your mobile rang. It was Keith Goodwin. — Hey, Ray. What’s up? Where ye been?
— I’m sitting drinking champagne with my family, you said. — I’ve just got engaged.
— Congratulations, but, eh, the alcohol, is it wise? I mean to say –
— Call ye later, Keith, you said, snapping your mobile shut. A pub bore was a pub bore, with or without alcohol or drugs. You vowed that night to have a decent drink. It was what people did when they got engaged and put child killers behind bars.
It hit everybody in the face that Monday morning. The team were hung-over after their celebration and you were also feeling fuzzy after your engagement meal.
Ronnie Hamil couldn’t provide an alibi but the hospital records of the Western General’s Accident and Emergency Department could. A man had fished him out of the Union Canal after he’d stumbled in drunk following a session on heavily fortified wines the Tuesday night before Britney’s disappearance. They’d kept him in hospital till ten o’clock the next day, when he’d resumed his binge at a friend’s flat, drinking himself comatose, oblivious to being Scotland’s most wanted man. He’d been too inebriated to remember this incident but his rescuer, a passing jogger, very clearly could.
Following the grandad’s release, the first thing you did was phone George Marsden and tell him the situation. — Quite, George had crisply retorted.
Perhaps some of this smugness had transmitted to you. The scent of failure hung in the air that evening, as your Serious Crimes team trooped wearily into Bert’
s Bar. You weren’t aware of an I-told-you-so look coming off your face, but couldn’t absolutely swear it wasn’t there. In the bar tension built like a bonfire all night until Ally Notman slurred, — He’s a fuckin nonce. He would’ve done.
— He’s a bag of shite but he’s no a child killer and it would have meant impunity for the real one, you’d sniped back. One or two heads around the table nodded. Most refused to make eye contact with you. You were isolated, and not for the first or the last time, for the crime of not taking part.
The following evening, as you were leaving Police HQ following another lonely night of searching through records, statements and video recordings, a silver-haired figure in a coat shuffled through the automatic doors and approached you. — You okay? your boss asked.
— I’m sorry, Bob. We’ve nothing. Zilch, you said. It was the first time you’d seen Bob Toal since the Ronnie Hamil connection had proved a dead end. Now your boss looked as worn out as you felt.
— Keep at it, Toal nodded, and his shoulder punch, the paternal blow of the football coach, was enough to relaunch you back into the thin darkness of a chilly Edinburgh night.
You felt utterly useless. The cop as Popperian philosopher: disproving every hypothesis your department came out with. As the next few days rolled by, you empathised with the boss. The pension was so close, and Toal wanted to get to the finishing line unscathed. A blaming culture always came to the fore in any police department in which a big case seemed to be going nowhere. Those were the rules. They were operating in a tight financial environment. Cost-cutting measures were already planned. There would be a disciplinary hearing. Charges of gross negligence made. Summary dismissal. The only issue was how far down the line the buck would be passed.
Dissenting voices were starting to be heard. A comprehensive investigation appeared on the Independent’s front page. It raised doubts about the strength of the case against Robert Ellis, affirming your belief that a multiple murderer was on the loose. But pressure from Toal compelled you to keep on at Angela Hamil and the men in her life.
— There’s fuckin shite gaun oan here, she’s covering for some cunt, Toal had said, his Morningside accent thickening to Tollcross, showing you a different set of possibilities for your gaffer. Somebody who, perhaps in other circumstances, could have been a villain. — Ride her hard, Ray, he had said. — I’ve seen it before with weak women like that. They become mesmerised, dominated by some bad bastard. Find out who he is!
So like the rest of Serious Crimes, you became obsessed with Angela’s sex life. Openly scoffing at her in an incredulous manner when she said she ‘never brought men back to the house because of the bairns’. Knowing the woman would be too broken to challenge you. You hated her passivity, saw yourself – felt yourself – becoming a bully, perhaps like many of the other men in her life, but unable to stop. You wormed one name out of her, a Graham Cornell, who worked at the Scottish Office. He was described as ‘just a friend’.
A couple of days later you’d gone back to the office at Serious Crimes and studied the dreaded whiteboard again. After a while Ally Notman invited you for a drink. When you stepped into Bert’s Bar, they were all there. It was a set-up. Relaxed at first, then Gillman and Notman started the ball rolling. — It’s him. Cornell, they harmonised.
It was the cue for Harrower and McCaig to join the chorus. You’re our boy. Our leader. The boss. Don’t let us down. He’s making cunts of us all.
And part of it chimed with you. Because there was something about this man. But then you spoke to Cornell on Halloween evening. You caught him about to leave his flat, dressed in a red costume with horns and a forked tail. Even discounting this attire, Graham Cornell’s bearing announced him as transparently gay. To your mind it was ludicrous to think he’d snatch a female child. But for some of the boys, like Gillman, gay equalled pervert, equalled nonce. You could stick them on as many equal-ops training courses as you liked, but the algebra, long formed, couldn’t be totally encrypted, and was always waiting to return. It came back with a vengeance in the fatigued, desperate group, sweating under the strip lights in that small office, burning their eyes on computer screens, knocking on doors asking the same questions over and over again. You feared that you were the only one privy to the collective psychosis that had them all in its clenched fist. They would fall silent whenever Drummond, the lone female officer on the team, entered the room. Even Notman, who was living with her.
Your response to the voices jabbering at you was to engage with your own increasingly urgent naggings. One bleak early-November afternoon, a train took you over the border to Newcastle. Then, a short taxi ride and you were in a dilapidated tavern in that city’s West End, where, as a Scottish cop, you felt safe enough to score your first grams of cocaine in over four years.
And you needed it like the rest seemed to need Cornell. It couldn’t be admitted that a multiple child murderer was on the loose. The myriad legal and police careers that had been built on Robert Ellis’s arrest and prosecution would be for ever tarnished. And a hated figure would be living the rest of his life in the Bahamas at the taxpayer’s expense. The groupthink of the bureaucratic organisation went into destructive overdrive: Cornell was the man. And in your own way, you did the same.
Day Three
8
Everything But the Girl
TRUDI LOWE SITS in the hotel room, ostensibly watching the television, but immersed in the recounting of incidents, from their ‘last life’, as she habitually refers to it. Years ago, when he’d shown up the self-hating drunk, using crass, fabricated outrage as a crude shield against his own guilt. She knew where he’d been. They’d argued about his behaviour and he’d shouted, — You haven’t got a clue what the fuck guys are like, have you?
Now the last life has come back. And I thought he’d changed. That putrid cliché slithers south into her chest, as a voice sneers back from inside her head: you fuckin mug.
But the rage that brims somehow refuses to overflow. She’s got up to pace around, looks outside. Her anger is stronger seated. So she’s fallen into the chair again and feels the poison flow through her.
Clean when they’d got back together, he’d blamed it all on the cocaine. And NA seemed to work for him. Their new life together felt like a genuine renaissance. They went to the gym, attended French classes, watched movies, enjoyed vigorous sex, engaged in camping and hillwalking expeditions. His job was always there, but he seemed to be treating it as just that: a job, albeit a particularly intrusive and demanding one. But then the drinking started again. He blamed the horrible case of the murdered little girl, and there was obviously his father and the subsequent estrangement from his family. But whatever the causes, the drink was there and would lead to cocaine, and that would lead to other women. And then they’d be finished.
You haven’t got a clue what the fuck guys are like. In the empty hotel room, that hurtful proclamation from the past resonates more acutely than ever. But her dad isn’t like that, and she recalls her child’s gloved hand in his, waiting in the queue for the cinema on Tollcross’s blue-grey streets. Can envision it so clearly, his younger self, his scent, that when she stops she feels a dissonance like she’s reincarnated into the body of a future descendant. And his own father was a kind and decent man. Trying to stop herself picking nervously at the skin around her manicured nails, all Trudi can think is: they are supposed to be here to make love. To get their sex life back on track. She is hormonal and premenstrual, and she needs him. And he’s gone.
She knows his contempt for her career and, thinking of that bundle of services that gives the country its pulse, suddenly finds a way of converting all the anger that has paralysed her into energy. It propels her down to the bar, but it’s empty and she doesn’t stay, stepping out on to the street. Walking for a bit, she entertains the vague notion that she can do anything he can, but isn’t inclined to patronise the local hostelries, raucous with beery, obnoxious males; there seems no acceptable category between boorish
youth and sleazy middle age. On Lincoln Avenue, she is becoming more acutely conscious of her solitary status, when the vivid colours of the artwork on display in a gallery window beckon her inside. The place is almost empty. The originals are expensive but she can see a mounted print that’s reasonable. She lingers at it, wonders if Ray would like it. Probably not. Thinks that might be a reason to buy it. Then he approaches her.
Noises in his head, as a white ceiling comes into focus through one eye. The other is held shut by gummy secretions. He rubs at it; feels the springs of an old couch prong his back. A throw pulled over him. He had unravelled in the night and achieved a kind of exhausted peace. The events of last night gatecrash into his head. You’ve fucked up again, keens in self-flogging mantra. The sunshine bursts through the old yellow lace of the curtains as the neuralgia stabs the inside of his skull.
Trudi.
The noises. The television. Pulls himself up into a sitting position. Sees the kid, Tianna, lying on the floor, watching the box and drinking from a can of Pepsi. Tries to stand. Manages it. Stretches and yawns. Looks down at the girl.
She is locked on the telly, but had been watching him in his sleep. His face contorted, like he was still fighting, but in his dreams. His snoring so loud, she’d needed to turn up the volume. But she’d also wanted to waken him. To figure him out.