At first he was too jet-lagged, hung-over and shaken up by the LA thing to think about anything more than getting himself out of being arrested, but as he spoke to Jenny later, he began to realise what had been wrong with the picture.
He had seen plenty of McGregors. Decent men made cynical through the constant disappointment of discovering what human beings are really capable of, numbing themselves so that nothing shocked them, nothing surprised them. Problem was, as a result they became too credulous of atrocity; they were prepared to believe anything as long as it sounded authentically sordid. They had lifted some scrote of a junkie in Leith who had a string of burglary convictions and a history of violence. McGregor would have no problem believing the wee runt was capable of doing it, and if the evidence didn’t fit, he’d be off looking for another such smackhead housebreaker.
But Jenny had been looking for something else, and having had time to think more calmly about what he had seen, Parlabane thought he knew why.
***
His first and most probably last shift at the Evening Capital had not gone well. When Duncan accompanied him into the newsroom, one hack had jumped over his desk and darted out of the door, and the news editor had backed up against a pillar and warned: ‘I’ve already called security. They’ll be here any minute.’
‘Donald, this is Jack Parlabane,’ Duncan had said, bewildered. ‘He’s here for a shift, remember?’
The visibly sweating news editor looked back and forth between Duncan and Parlabane, nervous and confused. ‘But I thought . . .’
‘I was the guy you stitched up on the front page the other day? Small world, huh?’
For Donald McCreedie, it ranked among his least comfortable moments in journalism, right up there with the time in Portsmouth when he splashed the front page with an exposé of an adulterous affair between a top local councillor and a pictured mystery woman, who turned out to be the proprietor’s wife. It was all true, but that didn’t make his sacking any easier to take.
‘Er . . . em . . . welcome aboard, I suppose. Em . . . no hard feelings, eh?’
Parlabane stared at him for a long time without saying anything.
‘Look, eh . . . why don’t you eh . . . sort of . . . sit here maybe?’
Parlabane picked up a dictionary and started thumbing through it. McCreedie looked on in gaping fear.
‘There,’ he said, pointing to the word ‘suspect’. ‘Read and remember.’
As a freelance, from out of town and low on local contacts, he was unsurprised to be stuck at a desk all day, landed with exactly the sort of busywork the staffers hated doing. The knowledge that transferring funds from his bank in LA might take a couple of days and that this was a fast way of getting some ready cash kept his professional ego in check, but he was still relieved no one seemed to know who he was.
However, the feeling of being a shark getting fed plankton was starting to get to him, and the editorial style of the paper was grating on his nerves like sandpaper. It seemed to be a mixture of blue-rinsed moral disapproval and parochial couthiness, mixed with a paranoid, negative preoccupation with all things Glaswegian, an animosity which it mistakenly believed to be enthusiastically reciprocal. He didn’t know how to break it to them. ‘Hey guys, sorry, but through in the West, you know . . . we don’t actually worry too much about Edinburgh . . . you know, like, ever . . .’
And the more copy he read, the more annoyed he got about the fact that he had been the high-profile subject of it the other day. Finlay Price, the little bastard who had written it, snuck back in quietly after a while, a slimy wee shite with greasy hair and big damp patches under his arms. Parlabane clocked him immediately as a national tabloid wannabe; this gig was just his audition. He wasn’t interested in what the real story was, just what would make the loudest splash below his byline.
Price had taken what the police had told him and gone straight to work on it; the thought that there might be more to discover would never occur to him. His job wasn’t to find things out, his job was to ‘make’ stories. Some innuendo here, some association there and voilà: you had fifteen pars on the front page that suggested much but actually told you fuck-all.
The success of popular reporting since the Eighties had lain in the practice of massively increasing the ratio of column inches to facts. Facts were both expensive and time-consuming to procure, so you had to use them as sparingly as possible.
On last night’s final edition front page, Price had the junkie burglar found guilty by the end of the standfirst. Listening to him on the phone and watching him talk to people around the office, Parlabane was in almost awed disbelief that someone could have so little doubt that the police had the right man. But if they let the junkie go and arrested a different bloke tomorrow, Price would work on the premise that the new suspect was one hundred per cent guilty too. What Parlabane found so hard to understand was the guy’s lack of a need to get his own perspective, to look for anything deeper in the story than ‘Gory murder – police seek baddie – police catch baddie – baddie goes to jail’.
Watching this fucking moron work had him climbing the walls, desperate to get out and get his teeth into finding the real story behind the Ponsonby murder.
The final edition’s front page was going to lead on a story about the police confiscating a stash of hard-core tapes from a video store in Leith. Just the sort of morally indignant tale to have them snorting over their scones in Murrayfield.
COPS SEIZE PORN was the gleeful banner headline planned in on the chief sub’s computer monitor, but McCreedie, the deputy editor and the hack who had faithfully jotted down the police statement – sorry, written the story – were gathered round trying to improve on it.
Parlabane was wandering relievedly towards the exit, his shift mercifully over, when McCreedie called him across to their gathering.
‘Can you think of a better headline for this?’ he asked.
Parlabane leaned over and read the story on the screen, then stood with his brow furrowed for a few moments as they looked expectantly at him.
‘I’ve got it,’ he finally said. ‘How about: DRACONIAN CENSORSHIP CONTINUES, with a strap saying: Sexual repression maintains sad climate of dangerous ignorance? No? Just a thought. Good night.’
From his window that evening he had seen the woman remonstrating with the police, and had made out enough of the conversation to understand that she wanted into Ponsonby’s flat. He made sure he got a good look at her face and clothes, and scribbled down Girlfriend? on his notepad.
He was still suffering from jet-lag, and was finding it very hard to get to sleep before about three in the morning as his body got used to the time difference. Staring at the ceiling had lost its appeal after a couple of hours, and he had got up and out of habit wandered into the living room, forgetting that he didn’t have a TV. Instead he found himself looking out of the window at the Square, his eye occasionally caught by the meanderings of drunks heading down Elm Row. Then he saw the woman from earlier on, looking back and forth – but inexperiencedly not up – to check no one was watching her. She disappeared out of view and into the close. He got dressed.
Twenty minutes later he was making her coffee in his kitchen.
It was a total lie about the policeman.
SEVEN
Darren Mortlake was in the huff. He was feeling unappreciated, taken for granted and unfairly chastised. He had shown initiative, proven his ability to adapt under pressure, and bollocks, he had got the job done. But it hadn’t been enough, apparently. That bearded wanker Lime had been furious, talking to him like he was some stupid kid, ranting away down the phone and telling him – no, ordering him – to stay put in this fucking awful guest house until he had decided what to do about it.
It was at times like this he wished he had just killed the cunt that night. Christ, plead guilty to a reduced plea of manslaughter, keep his nose clean inside and he might have been out by now.
But the real reason Darren was in such a bad mood, he k
new, was that he had screwed up, and because he had screwed up he had had to listen to the little hairy fat bastard’s whingeings without being able to give him an earful back.
He had been quite proud of the way he had improvised in a tricky situation, and had managed to kid himself for a while that Lime might even be impressed. He had ‘thought on his feet to protect the investment’. A ‘successful damage limitation exercise’, he would say. Lime liked words like that.
But there had been no getting away from the one crucial error.
Lime had given him the cash and told him to get someone else this time, ‘put the contract out to tender’. His job had been simply to find ‘an independent operator’ to ‘neutralise a potential liability’. They ‘could not afford high exposure on this transaction’, and Darren had to assume ‘a less pro-active role’ and ‘take the job out-of-house’.
What? Did the cunt think Darren was in some nationwide guild of criminals, that he could put an ad in the newsletter and find a good operator up in fucking Jockland, just like that?
Darren had assured Lime that he had found someone with the appropriate skills, pocketed the dosh and decided to do it himself after all. Lime wouldn’t be any the wiser.
It was supposed to look like suicide. Lime had given him the syringe and the stuff to pass on to the ‘sub-contractor’, with the instruction that there should be no mess whatsoever, or ‘the second instalment of the remuneration’ would be withheld.
No mess.
The words had popped in and out of Darren’s head in Lime’s nasally little voice all throughout the battle in the flat.
He had got in silently through the first-floor window at the back, despite the shoulder-strap from his little plastic satchel catching unseen on a piping bracket and almost strangling him. He had contorted his huge frame to try and wriggle out of it, his feet resting on another pipe below him. He twisted his neck and his head popped free suddenly, rattling painfully off the stone by the window-frame. At least it hadn’t hit wood or glass, as there might have been more sound than just the quiet, dull thud which preceded the steady flow of blood into his right eye.
He wiped it with his sleeve and clambered in. He had dripped some blood on the window-sill inside, but no matter. Once the job was done he could clean up after himself.
He removed the ropes from the satchel and crept stealthily into the bedroom, where the ‘liability’ was asleep on his stomach, head turned away towards the wall. He had planned to restrain him before the injection, but he didn’t think his ropes would fit around the double bed and there was no headboard to tie him to either. Besides, he might leave ropemarks, and that would just get the Filth interested. Best to just stick him right away, get the stuff into him and if he wakes up, hold him down until it takes effect.
He held the syringe delicately in his left hand and leaned over, having selected a spot on the liability’s arm. However, as he was about to penetrate, another little rivulet found its way into his eye, and he instinctively brought his hand up to wipe it, ramming the needle into his forehead and breaking off the syringe.
He failed to stifle a yelp, and it was enough to waken the liability, who looked on in bewildered terror for a moment, quickly decided he wasn’t dreaming and darted for the door. Darren leapt blindly after him, catching his foot and tripping him up so that he spilled into the hallway, kicking out at Darren’s face. The liability got his leg free and scrambled into the living room as Darren pulled the needle out of his forehead and wiped more blood from his eye.
He heard the living room door slam and the turning of a key in its lock. With enormous relief he saw that there was a telephone on a small table in the hallway, and he picked it up to hear whether the liability might be calling the Filth from another extension. Just a dialling tone.
He backed up the full length of the hallway, took a run and lunged shoulder-first into the living room door, which crashed splintering through on to the wooden floor with him on top of it.
No mess.
The liability was on top of him instantly, pummelling at him with some sort of metal ornament, like a cast of a race horse going over a jump. He rolled over to throw the liability off, and lashed out with a heavy right fist, which smashed into the plate of glass on top of a coffee table very similar to the one in his mum’s house in Dagenham, breaking it into huge shards. His fist emerged like an over-ripe plum, purple and gushing juice from several lacerations.
No mess.
He saw the liability sprawling next to him on the floor, looking to get some purchase with his fucking race horse again. He let him stagger almost to his feet, waiting for that half-balanced moment, then suddenly sprang up and charged, running him across the floor until they rammed a bookcase, sliding it a few degrees out from against the wall and spilling its titles on to the floor. Darren punched the liability in the stomach, doubling him over, then threw him to the ground and toppled the bookcase over towards him. However, the liability rolled reflexively out of the way, so Darren leapt upon him and they struggled about the floor in an angry tangle of limbs.
Darren found his good hand trapped somewhere amidst the two heaving bodies, but could feel facial features with his pulped one. He reached around, seeking out the eyes with his straining fingers. The face was slippery under his hand due to blood and sweat, and the liability’s writhing made it impossible to get a grip on anything. His pinky slipped into a hole which he guessed to be a nostril, then it happened.
He felt a searing, tearing, grinding pain as the liability clamped his jaws closed on his index finger, biting with mortal determination. Darren screamed and tried to pull himself away, but just couldn’t get the finger free. Then with a mighty lunge he rolled himself clear, his hand whipping out from his opponent’s face with a sudden recoil. The liability must have finally opened his fucking mouth, which was inevitable if he wanted to breathe, as Darren had still had a finger up the cunt’s nose.
Then he saw the liability spit something out, and looked in alarm at his hand.
He had bitten his finger off. The Jock cunt had bitten his finger off. Next to his thumb there was just a messy stump with little stringy bits and a throbbing, pumping spurt of blood like a burst water pipe.
Right. That was it.
He leapt at the liability once more in a blazing torrent of rage, getting hold of one of his ankles and punching his bollocks once with his free fist. Unfortunately it was the recently ravaged one, and the pain on contact was blinding. He got his elbow into the liability’s groin instead, and started pumping at it until the bastard was paralysed, then got hold of his ears and sank his teeth into his nose, shaking his head and worrying at it, at which point the liability passed out.
He stood up and scanned the wreckage – the door, the table, the bookcase – and the noseless, blood-spattered wreck lying unconscious in front of the fireplace.
He reckoned the Filth might not think it was a suicide now.
The room’s condition reminded him of many such sites in his teen years, breaking into places just for fun, wrecking the joint and taking their cash and booze. Maybe the Filth would think so too. He could empty out a few drawers, make it look like he had really been through the place.
Then he had his flash of inspiration, his moment of genius.
Make it weird.
Confuse the Filth. Get the bastards guessing.
He moved the liability on to the door and tied him to it securely with the ropes, then propped the whole arrangement up on the remains of the table.
‘Right you cunt,’ he said.
Taking his knife from the satchel, he quickly and practicedly cut the liability’s throat, which brought him round and initially started him screaming until he cut through the vocal chords, after which he just sort of gurgled. Darren placed a hand over the dying man’s mouth because the gurgling noise was annoying him, then remembering what had happened earlier, he stuffed a rolled-up magazine in there instead, and held the door in position from behind as the liability strugg
led against his bonds.
Gradually the struggling calmed and Darren stood away, sighing with exhaustion.
What next, he thought, then remembered. When he trashed a place in his youth he usually liked to shit on the floor somewhere, a nice centrepiece to the surprise the poor suckers were coming home to. It wasn’t a unique calling card, everyone did it. The Filth knew that too. So if he left a turd they’d be sure it was a burglary – might even reckon he was laying the finishing touch when the victim had come home and surprised him. Only thing was, where to put it? If he had just squatted down on the floor in here, there’s no way the Filth would believe the thing could be intact after the battle that had pretty obviously taken place.
Then he noticed the space in the middle of the mantelpiece where that fucking race-horse statue thing must have stood.
By the time he had climbed back down, the liability was dead. He looked with satisfaction at the bloody throat, the ravaged nose, but glancing at the stump where his index finger should be he felt another wave of anger, and grabbed at the liability’s right hand, gnashing and chewing at the index finger until the bone was exposed and he could snap it off.
Make it weird, he remembered.
He stuck the finger up one of the liability’s nostrils. Then he repeated the drill with the other hand.
Right. Done.
His anger extinguished, his rage calmed, he simultaneously caught a whiff of his turd and a taste of the liability’s flesh, and vomited copiously over the radiator.
Darren diligently ferried a few armfuls of clothes from the bedroom and scattered them liberally about the floor, then conscientiously upturned most of the remaining items of furniture, and as an after-thought, rammed the hatstand through the telly.
Quite Ugly One Morning Page 5