Never Die in January

by Alan Scholefield

  Macrae hated Sundays.

  As a child he had lived in the village of Morile, a few miles north of Aviemore in the Central Highlands, whose religious focus was Free Presbyterian. And while his father was not religious — he was usually nursing a hangover on a Sunday — Macrae’s grandparents were, and he was packed off to church with them.

  His grandfather had been the blacksmith in the village and on Sundays his house was like the grave. He and Macrae’s grandmother were strict. No work was done on Sundays, not even any cooking — the food was prepared the day before.

  Macrae didn’t mind not being allowed to work. But he greatly resented not being allowed to play once the long morning service was over. He couldn’t fish, he couldn’t go bird-nesting, he couldn’t even read unless it was the Bible or the Lives of the Saints.

  He lay in bed hating this January Sunday with particular venom. And, indeed, there was not a lot going for it. It was grey, it was cold, it was silent. And he was lonely. Frenchy was never there on a Sunday morning because Saturday night was her busiest time.

  He read the papers, showered, made himself a cup of coffee, paced up and down, and smoked a thin cheroot. Then he stared at the blank TV screen and thought about switching it on, then thought that way lay madness. He put on his hat and coat and drove into Cannon Row.

  He still had a few days of leave left to him but he couldn’t stand it much longer. He was not a holiday person. The thought of lying on a beach was revolting.

  Now the withdrawal symptoms were upon him. He needed Cannon Row as an alcoholic needs liquor. That was where he lived his life — he certainly didn’t do much living in his house — and that was where, at this crucial time, he needed to be. It was the centre of things. It was where the shit was going to fly if it was going to fly. It was where he could keep track, like a missile early warning system, on Stoker.

  London was quiet. He drove down the Queenstown Road, past the old Battersea power station. It was supposed to have been turned into a fun palace, then a museum, then God knew what, but nothing had been done. The old wharves were still there, the place was looking derelict. A kind of modem archaeological site.

  He’d been in there a couple of times looking for suspects, but all he’d found were tramps and dossers, most of whom were too drunk to know what year it was. But there didn’t seem to be anyone about on this bitter morning.

  He negotiated the security gates at Cannon Row. The desk sergeant looked up as he entered the building.

  “Can’t keep away then, George?”

  Macrae growled a greeting and went to his office. He fetched the Crime Book and flicked through the pages. Nothing of immediate interest.

  He checked his messages. There was one from Norman Paston. He was reaching for the phone when Scales appeared in the doorway.

  He made to walk on but Macrae looked up. Scales nodded coldly. “I thought you were off for a few days.”

  “I am.”

  Stalemate.

  Scales said, “Have you seen the papers this morning? The Chronicle’s got a piece on a new shake-up in the Met. Apparently the Home Secretary wants it made easier to sack officers who are insubordinate or who don’t do their jobs properly. And not soon enough, in my opinion.”

  “I must have read a different story. Mine said it was the senior officers who were going to go if they didn’t get their backsides off their chairs. But then you can never believe a blind word of what the papers say, can you, sir?” He smiled to take the edge off his words.

  The Deputy Commander looked at him with loathing and went off down the corridor.

  Macrae’s hand went out to the phone again, then he checked. It’d be just like the bastard to come tiptoeing back to ask if he was using the bloody thing for a private call.

  He left the station and drove north. Paston lived in a block of flats off Baker Street, with a TV monitor in the foyer, shatterproof glass doors, a security guard, and genuine potted plants. It was all a bit rich for Macrae’s blood but Norman’s boyfriends seemed to like it.

  “George? What brings you here at this hour?”

  “Your phone call.”

  “Well, come in, come in. You know Lionel, don’t you?”

  Macrae had met Lionel once or twice. He was a bricklayer from Sunderland whose accent needed subtitles. He was a large, well-scrubbed young man with a single earring. One earring was supposed to be a signal that you were homosexual or heterosexual. It depended in which ear you wore it. But Macrae had never admired men in earrings and anyway he’d forgotten which ear was supposed to indicate which — so they were all dodgy to him.

  Lionel was wearing jeans and a chambray shirt and looked ordinary next to Norman who wore a yellow paisley dressing-gown and Moroccan slippers. Paston noticed Macrae’s inspection of his gown and said, “Noel Coward had one just like it.”

  Macrae was always a bit uneasy in the lush surroundings of Norman’s flat, the heavy brocades, the overstuffed button-backed furniture in mustards and greens, the velvets, the mirrors; it was all a bit like a fin de siècle French brothel. Macrae had no personal knowledge of such an establishment and his own shorthand would have been “a tart’s flat in Brighton”. He wondered if Frenchy would have approved.

  “Croissant, George? They’re bloody good. Lionel makes them. Don’t you, sweetie?”

  “Maydwiswatebutteh,” Lionel said.

  It took Macrae some moments to work out that what Lionel had said was “made with sweet butter”.

  “No thanks, I’ve had mine.”

  “To business then.”

  Macrae followed him into his study. There was nothing fin de siècle about this room. It was functional, professional, with a word processor, a modem, a fax, and filing cabinets. And it was extremely neat.

  Macrae sat in a brown leather office chair and Paston went to his desk. He pulled out a sheet of paper.

  “You ever heard of a villain called Jimmy Swallow?”

  “No.”

  “No reason why you should. He never worked in your area. He was murdered, found on Primrose Hill. It’s possible Stoker was involved.”

  He filled Macrae in about the attempted encroachment on Artie Gorman’s patch but Macrae shook his head. “That was never Artie’s speed. I mean I knew him well enough. He wasn’t above nicking a few quid here and there, a bit of fraud, that sort of thing. But murder? Never.”

  “From what I hear it was supposed to be in the nature of a warning. He wanted Jimmy Swallow warned off. So he gets Stoker to give him a good seeing to. Probably only supposed to break an arm. But Stoker goes too far.”

  “It’s all in the air, laddie. Nothing concrete.”

  “Ah, but Georgie, I’ve got a name. There was a partner. One Mick “Toasties” Buckle. He was Swallow’s partner. He’d know a lot more than he ever divulged in the first place or I’m very much mistaken.”

  “I’ve never known you to be mistaken, Norman.” Paston frowned. “Small joke.”

  “OK, George, always warn me. I can never tell. Oh, and by the way, this isn’t free. I want something in return.”

  “What?”

  “I hear a whisper, just the very faintest whisper, that a senior officer is on the take. I’d like the story.”

  “Christ. I haven’t even heard it myself. Where? The Yard?”

  “I don’t know. And I don’t mean today, this minute. I mean when it hardens. You’ll hear eventually. You always do. Then the name please, Georgie, the name.”

  CHAPTER XVII

  Irene held the cardboard file in her hands as though it was a bomb, which in a way it was. She was afraid of it. Of course she didn’t have to open it but what would be the point of that?

  She opened it.

  There were over three hundred pages of neatly typed material. It looked professional.

  “That’s why we read it,” Juliette Simmonds had said when Irene met her. “Usually we don’t give much attention to unsolicited manuscripts unless an agent sends them. But this looked so prof
essionally done.”

  Irene had met her in the reception area of Kingswood Publishers. Miss Simmonds was tall and thin and appeared to be in her late twenties. She wore large glasses in orange frames, in an effort, Irene thought, to give her rather gaunt face some drama.

  After she had expressed her shock and sadness at Grace’s death, she said, “Forgive me, but you and she must have been more like sisters than mother and daughter.”

  “I had her when I was very young.”

  Irene was aware that she was being studied closely and felt a touch of irritation.

  “She said she had never written fiction before,” Miss Simmonds said.

  “Not that I know of.”

  “You weren’t here then?”

  “I’ve been living in Spain.” She put her hand out to take the manuscript.

  Miss Simmonds said, “I wish we could have made something of this. But she seemed too close to the subject. As though she was on the inside looking out.”

  “I’m not sure what you mean.”

  “Well…” She paused as though unwilling to go on, then said, “Well, she seemed very much on the edge. Both physically and mentally.”

  “Go on.”

  “I don’t know how to put this without seeming to be unkind.”

  “Be unkind.”

  “She looked as though she’d been sleeping rough. Could that be right?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “It’s just that her clothes were uncared for and the same could be said for herself. There was a bruise on her forehead. She kept pulling her hair over it but it was visible. And she seemed so, well, febrile is the best way I can describe it. On the edge of hysteria. And given the book’s contents it was easy to see why. That’s the reason I thought she was too close…I mean too close to be able to see the story objectively. I hope I’m wrong…I hope it was all in her imagination…”

  These were the thoughts that remained with Irene all the way home. So much so that she did not have the courage to open the manuscript until she’d had a couple of large gins. The memory of Grace’s suicide note was terrifyingly fresh in her mind.

  The heading on the title page read:

  IN THE FORESTS OF THE NIGHT

  by Grace Davies

  Gwen Daley lived in a garden flat in Clapham. She was lonely, hut that was nothing new, she had always been lonely, for her mother had deserted her when she was very young…

  Oh God, Irene thought, I don’t want to go on with this.

  But she did. It was all there, her life, her mother’s life, Grace’s life. It was like reading a family history written by a person you thought you knew but didn’t, about lives you thought you knew but didn’t. For, as she read, she began to realize how events became changed by another’s perspective.

  She read on and on as the hours passed. She saw herself emerge from the pages as selfish and unthinking both to her daughter and her mother. Something inside her seemed to wither and die.

  By the time she reached the final chapters her psyche had twisted out of shape, and she was hunchbacked by guilt and despair and anger.

  These were the chapters when “Gwen” began her affair with “Geoffrey”. When she suffered, martyr-like, the beatings, then the abasement by Geoffrey, the closeness, the scenes of forgiveness, the cathartic love.

  And then the pastoral idyll, all passion spent, the drives in the sports car, the playfulness of the dog…

  “A dram and a pint.”

  “Grouse, Mr Macrae?” The barman asked.

  “No, no, make it Glenmorangie. And a large one.” To hell with the expense, he thought.

  He was in the Blind Pig in Battersea. It was early evening and business was light.

  “Still very cold,” the barman said.

  “Aye.”

  “Hate these bloody fogs. Thought we wasn’t supposed to have no more.”

  Macrae grunted and took his dram and pint to a table out of sight of the fruit machine. Now he had only the sound of piped music to put up with.

  He took half the Glenmorangie at a gulp, feeling the smoky fire of the Speyside malt in the back of his throat. This is what the nobs had drunk on shooting days at Morile Mhor, the great estate where his father had worked as keeper.

  “Come along, Macrae,” the laird would say at the end of the last grouse drive of the day. “Come and take a dram.”

  It was a ritual. And his father would touch his cap and stand to attention and take his dram — usually in a crystal glass — while the guns gathered in small groups and unscrewed the tops of their flasks and gave themselves something to keep out the chill. Most drank Glenmorangie or Islay or one of the great single malts.

  The laird always gave his father a bottle of Glenmorangie for Christmas. By the end of Boxing Day it was finished.

  It was what Macrae would have drunk all the time — if he could have afforded it — and none of your supermarket muck.

  He opened his briefcase, scarred and battered, a bit like himself, and took out a copy of statements made during the investigation into the murder of James Herbert Swallow, bludgeoned to death on Primrose Hill.

  There were the reports from the forensic team, the fingerprint team, the doctor who originally examined the body, statements taken by detectives, there was the post-mortem report from the government pathologist, there was a statement from the young man who had found the body when walking his dog, there were eyewitness reports of a blue Ford Escort seen near the scene…There was everything except the name of the person or persons who had killed him.

  Nothing about Stoker.

  He put these away and took out a single sheet of computer listing-paper. Michael John Buckle. There was an address in Wandsworth. Macrae glanced down the list of previous convictions. Mick Buckle had been a naughty boy in his younger days: burglary, suspicion of robbery, car theft, etc., etc. Macrae could have recited the litany blindfolded. There had been a period of youth custody. Then a year in the Scrubs. Common-law wife. Three kids.

  Macrae thought that the time had come to have a word with Michael J. Buckle.

  He finished his pint and drove home, ate a Cornish pasty he had bought earlier in the day and which had crumbled in its packet. It smelled awful and he doused it with Worcester sauce to kill the taste. Then he checked Buckle’s address in the new phone book. The Percy Estate. SW17. Same as the one Norman Paston had given him.

  Well, he was still there, but did he want to go to Wandsworth now? The Glenmorangie had changed the receptors in his mouth.

  “I’ve got the taste, laddie,” his father used to say. And Macrae would hang around outside a pub in Morile or Inverness or wherever it was and the minutes would tick by and then the quarters and the half-hours and finally his father would stagger out and give him a bag of crisps.

  Why not have a few more drinks and ring Julius and ask if Frenchy was free for the night? And see Buckle tomorrow.

  The phone rang.

  A woman’s voice said, “Is that Mr Macrae?”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s Gladys.”

  “Who?”

  “Mrs Twyford. Eddie’s wife.”

  “I’m sorry. I was miles away.”

  “Eddie said that to me once. He said Mr Macrae wouldn’t hear him sometimes, he was so deep in thought about a case. I hope I’m not disturbing you.”

  Her speech was formal, hesitant.

  “That’s all right. No bother. How are you, Mrs Twyford?”

  “My back’s not too good. But it never was. Eddie used to rub it.”

  “Aye, rubbing’s good for backs.” They paused. “And apart from your back?”

  “That’s what I’m phoning about. You see…Oh, Mr Macrae, I’m so ashamed! I wouldn’t ask except there’s no one else, and Eddie said — ”

  He could hear her snuffling.

  “Take it gently. What did Eddie say?”

  “He used to say, “Gladys, if anything goes wrong Mr Macrae will fix it.” But we never had to ask before. He
thought the world of you, sir.”

  “Don’t call me sir.”

  “I’m sorry…I’m very, very sorry…Mr Macrae, I need five hundred pounds.”

  Christ, Macrae thought, not another one.

  “Are you there?”

  “Yes, I’m here. Listen, Mrs Twyford, I have to tell you — ”

  “It’s five hundred and fifty, really. But I can manage the fifty. You see he wouldn’t take it monthly. I been saving for my grave, next to Eddie. Oh, I know I said to him what’s the use? But still…You can’t lie next to ashes can you? If you was cremated, that is. I want to be next to him. But this other thing…I mean when you’re dead you’re dead, in my opinion. But when you’re alive they can do things to you — ”

  “Mrs Twyford.”

  “They knocked me down and took my money.”

  “Who?”

  “Them. The yobbos. That’s what Eddie called them. Well, when you’re dead they can’t do that no more. You’re safe when you’re dead.”

  “But what’s that got to do with the five hundred pounds?”

  “That’s what he wants.”

  “Who’s he?”

  “Mr Geach, the housing manager.”

  “Hang on, Mrs Twyford, you’re going too fast. This Mr Geach wants five hundred pounds from you, is that right? What for?”

  “It’s the administration costs and the stamp duty.”

  “Stamp duty? You’re not buying a house, are you? Besides “Me buying? No, Mr Macrae. Couldn’t afford to. No, it’s the move to Briar. He said he could move me if the other lady don’t come back from hospital. Get me away from the yobbos. I can’t sleep, Mr Macrae. Not at night. There’s the music all the time. So I says can I pay you monthly. I’ll use my burial-fund money. Cash he says. No cheques. That’s why I rung you.”

  Macrae took a deep breath.

  “Let me get this straight. This man Geach wants five hundred quid from you — ”

  “That’s the admin — ”

  “Hang on, hang on…He wants five hundred quid to move you from the place you’re living in to another block of flats on the estate. Is that right?”

  “And the stamp duty.”