by Claire Askew
Tolkien got me into big books too: got me a rep for reading them. And once you’ve got a rep in high school it’s easier to make the best of it than try and ugly-duckling your way into something else. I didn’t have that many pals. I studied. Fucking cliché, but books kept me company. And I wanted the biggest ones, wanted to fight the biggest, hardest bastards the library could find. Turned out the biggest, hardest bastards were all Russians.
Not that many folk have read War and Peace all the way through. Better believe I fucking have. But The Master and Margarita was my favourite, angsty little sixteen-year-old me. Folk took the piss but I mean, it’s got the devil in it, and a lairy talking cat who drinks vodka and carries a gun. It got banned and that made it cool. Bulgakov was my gateway Russian. I was obsessed with that book. First thing I did when I turned eighteen was get a Behemoth tattoo. By that time I’d got As in my three languages and started on The Brothers Karamazov. I’d been saving up to go to Russia: I wanted to see the Patriarch’s Ponds in Moscow and ride the Trans-Siberian railway. I knew fuck all really, but the one thing I did know was I’d need to learn the language – use that natural aptitude of mine. I had this vision of sitting in a big coat and a fur hat outside a Moscow café, middle of winter, smoking a cigarette and reading Tolstoy in his native tongue. In my defence, I was a wanky eighteen-year-old who’d been coddled by his maw and never been anywhere. Small-town kid bags fancy degree in Russian, packs up, leaves and never comes back; is smart enough to go it alone. That was my future as I saw it. I guess, when you think about it, a fair bit of that came true.
‘Sir, all I’m asking you to do is confirm your full name for the record.’
Birch stifled a yawn.
The perp sitting across from her noticed, and smirked. ‘No comment.’
‘Sir.’ The man sitting to Birch’s left was DS Scott: a tall, lanky member of the Glaswegian cohort who’d been on McLeod’s back-up team that morning. God, that seemed like weeks ago. Could this day really still be happening? ‘Sir, I haven’t even begun questioning yet. If you can confirm your full name for the record, we can proceed.’
‘No comment.’
Birch sighed. She knew exactly how this was going to go. She’d known before she walked through the interview room door.
‘DS Scott.’ She said it as gently as she could.
Her new colleague looked at her, and the perp sat back and looked at them both.
McLeod had tried to make this look like a gift: she was going in to interview with a Glaswegian sergeant, an opportunity to mentor and guide. Bullshit, Birch thought. Operation Citrine had gone a little too well, in that they’d arrested every man at the scene, and there weren’t enough personnel to process them all, even with the Glaswegians around. He was treating her like a constable, just another body to boss around. She was interviewing the boat pilots, the van drivers, the bag men. And DS Scott wasn’t exactly feckless, although at this point it did seem like he needed some help.
‘Perhaps we should just move this along,’ Birch said. ‘We can proceed with questioning, for now, using this gentleman’s preferred name.’
DS Scott moved his eyes to the tabletop. Birch sensed him shuffling imaginary paperwork.
‘Very well,’ he said, looking up again. ‘Mr Toad. What is your relationship to—’
‘Toad,’ the perp said.
Birch watched Scott’s eyebrows disappear into his hairline.
‘I’m sorry?’
‘Toad. It’s just Toad. Not Mr Toad.’
She looked the guy up and down. She could hazard a guess at the sort of work he did for Solomon: his knuckles were webbed with so much scar tissue that each fist looked frosted, like a cupcake. He was getting on a bit: he had the look of a man who’d once been very muscular, but had gone soft around the middle. He must have been scarier once, but even now Toad was the sort of man that women crossed the street in broad daylight to avoid. On his neck, a tattoo in Cyrillic. He said the word Toad like Toat.
‘Charmed,’ she said, holding his gaze, ‘I’m sure.’
‘What is your relationship to Solomon . . . Toad?’ DS Scott said the word like Tood. His Weegie accent made the stupid hard-man nickname sound practically cute.
‘No comment.’
‘How long have you worked for Solomon, Toad?’
‘No comment.’
DS Scott sighed a long, deliberate sigh. ‘An easier question, perhaps. When did you come to Scotland?’
Toad’s lips thinned. ‘No comment.’ The threat of a smile seemed to scuttle around his face, never quite landing.
‘Any family here?’ DS Scott sounded blithe. Birch could tell he wasn’t. ‘Or did you come here for work?’
‘No comment.’
Birch banged her hand down on the table. It hurt, but the room rang with the noise of it, and she watched Toad jump.
‘I’m tired of this,’ she said. She could feel the day’s bad mood boiling inside her, somewhere behind her diaphragm. This was her sixth interview, and she was tired of hearing those two words over and over. ‘Is no comment the only phrase you know? Lived here a while and that’s all you can muster?’
The scuttling smile stopped dead. ‘I speak good English,’ Toad said. A muscle twitched in his cheek. She’d offended him.
‘Yeah?’ Birch sat back in her chair. ‘Prove it.’
Quiet hung in the room. Birch wanted to rub her sore hand, but instead folded her arms, felt it throb in her armpit. No one was talking: they’d all been well trained. She wondered, again, who the hell this mystery informant was, and what had happened to make him talk.
‘Let the record reflect that Mr Toad said nothing,’ Birch said. ‘And therefore I remain unconvinced.’
The perp curled his lip, and showed her his top row of teeth. One, a canine, was missing. Another was a dark, clouded grey.
‘Looks like you could use a dentist, Mr Toad,’ she said. ‘Does Solomon not cover dental work for his employees?’
She could feel DS Scott looking at her. Her irritation was hijacking the interview.
‘No comment,’ Toad said, folding his lip back down.
Scott put one hand on the table. This was for her benefit, Birch knew – he was telling her he wanted control. Get back in your box, Helen, she thought. A knock sounded on the other side of the door, and while DS Scott turned towards the sound, Birch stayed still to see if Toad would flinch. He did not.
Amy poked her head around the door. ‘This gentleman’s solicitor has arrived,’ she said, and then vanished again.
When Scott turned back, Toad’s smile made a proper appearance: it revealed that the bottom row of teeth was every bit as foul as the top.
Scott got to his feet. Fuck, Birch thought. She felt like she might just have been starting to fluster the man. She had no choice but to stand, too.
‘We’ll give you some alone time,’ Scott said, still breezy as anything.
Birch walked over to the voice recorder, but paused to look back at Toad before switching it off. ‘Baba s vozu – kobyle legche,’ she said.
DS Scott stopped, framed in the doorway. Beyond him, in her peripheral vision, Birch could see the vague suited shape of the solicitor. Toad, meanwhile, blinked at her. For a split second, she panicked – her pronunciation must be rusty after all these years. But then she saw he had understood.
‘Let the record reflect,’ she said, her finger held above the pause button, ‘that I said good riddance . . . and that Mr Toad here is Russian.’
It had been dark a while by the time Birch got out: she’d been at the station for over fourteen hours. Her eyes stung. Her mouth tasted like battery acid: too much coffee. It was cold out, and Edinburgh blew its trademark hard wind between the buildings. It had rained. Birch stood in the door’s yellow square of light, and listened to the distant wet hiss of traffic on Crewe Road. The car park’s floodlights refracted in puddles, windscreens, the fluoro panels of panda cars.
At the far end, she could see the dim figures of a few men, huddled to
gether with collars turned up. She watched as the lit ends of their cigarettes flared, flared, flared: the long drags of a frazzled day. She was about to cross the tarmac to speak to them, when the door opened behind her and a gaggle of staff stepped out. One of them said her name, and she turned.
‘Evening, Amy.’
DC Kato flapped one hand at the gaggle, already disintegrating in various directions into the night.
‘See ya, girls,’ she called, and then stepped into Birch’s square of lobby-thrown light.
‘Quite the day, eh, marm?’
Birch hauled a stream of good, cold air into her nose. ‘Sure was,’ she said. ‘What did you get done?’
‘Oh.’ Birch felt Amy roll her eyes more than she saw it. ‘Lawyer liaison. Call them up, see them in, bring them their green tea, see them out. Repeat. All day.’
‘Green tea?’
Amy smiled. ‘I think word’s got around about the coffee in this place.’
On Crewe Road, a siren.
‘Some of these solicitors are mean,’ Amy was saying. ‘And it was all big guys, I was surprised. I’d expected at least some of them would be legal aid types.’
‘No.’ Birch had noted the same thing herself. ‘Solomon’ll be bankrolling all this. Make sure no one grasses, no one cracks. And he’s got them all well trained: I did a dozen interviews today, boat guys and drivers. No comment to everything, every single one. Won’t give real names, only their ridiculous aliases. It’s a real dog and pony show.’
Amy was quiet for a second. ‘You were interviewing the drivers?’
‘Yeah.’ Birch looked down. She could feel her cheeks prickling. ‘McLeod needed all hands on deck. We’re all pitching in.’
Amy frowned. ‘I hear DI Crosbie was assigned Solomon. Heading everything up.’
‘Yeah.’ Birch rolled out the speech she’d been rehearsing for this moment. ‘And good luck to him. It’s a case and a half to try to pull off. Couple of days to make something stick or we have to let Solomon go. And he’ll have some absolute bastard of a lawyer.’ She paused for what she hoped was a natural-seeming amount of time, then lied, ‘So yeah . . . rather him than me.’
Amy was nodding, looking down the car park at the cigarette ends weaving like fireflies in the damp night.
‘There is no lawyer yet,’ she said. ‘That’s one bit of liaison I haven’t done.’
Birch turned to face her friend. ‘Okay, that’s a surprise,’ she said. ‘I’d’ve thought Solomon’s solicitor would be banging on the door before we even walked him into the custody suite.’
‘No,’ Amy said. ‘It’s weird, isn’t it? Maybe he wants to represent himself?’
‘That’d be pretty fucking confident. I heard Robson is sitting in with Crosbie?’
Amy looked back at Birch. ‘Robson is the Glasgow DI? Yeah. And DCI McLeod is even sitting in for some of it.’
Birch bit at a scrap of skin on the inside of her lip. She remembered Toad’s gappy smile, the match-flare in his eyes at the proverb she’d recited. ‘I doubt he’s saying much,’ she said. ‘Not without a lawyer. That’s weird.’
Amy shrugged. ‘Rumour has it,’ she said, ‘he’s a pretty weird guy, our Solomon.’
‘Well, here’s two fine lassies.’
The door behind them had opened: Big Rab sidled out of it, an unlit cigarette already in his mouth.
‘DI Robson,’ Amy said. For a second, Birch thought the younger officer might curtsey.
‘Big Rab, darlin’.’ Rab drew level with them and nudged Amy’s elbow with his own.
Amy blushed, which made Birch smile.
‘Rab,’ she said, ‘this is DC Kato. One of Edinburgh’s finest, and set to be our chief constable before we all know it.’
As Birch had predicted, Amy blushed deeper.
‘Call me Amy,’ she said, holding her hand out to Rab. ‘Since we’re all off duty.’
‘Pleasure to meet you, darlin’.’ Birch watched Rab fold Amy’s hand into his own as though it were the handle of a spoon – the same grip he’d performed on Birch herself, earlier, at the briefing. He nodded down the car park at the smokers, their crow shoulders. ‘We out-of-towners are on the hunt for a bevvy or two. Can you recommend us an establishment, either of you?’
Amy looked at Birch as Rab leaned towards her, lowering his voice. ‘Preferably,’ he said, ‘one where the walls dinnae have ears.’
They ended up in Kay’s Bar. She knew one of the bartenders: James was also a plumber and had come highly recommended by one of her prom terrace neighbours. He’d done a great job fixing leaks when she’d moved into her crumbling little house. Every time she went in for a drink, she promised him more work once she got better settled: a whole new bathroom, new washing machine, fitting an outside tap. She’d lived there for nearly a year now, and these days he’d just started to laugh.
The snug in the back had a couple of tables occupied, but Birch strode in and sat down. As seven other officers followed her – most of them large, tattooed Glaswegians – the other drinkers quickly picked up the signal to sup up and move. Rab went to the bar for a round, taking Amy with him ‘to carry’. Birch watched as her colleagues settled, squeezing into the cosy little space, their faces wrung out and sleepy. DS Scott frowned down at his phone as an older officer talked at him in rapid firebursts. The voices in the snug were low, and every so often a different face flicked up towards the bar, like the face of a dog who’s heard the distant rattle of his bowl. Birch had ordered a tonic water and lime: she knew that any alcohol consumed now would just send her straight to sleep. Plus she needed to drive home, and the idea of even that short journey made her wearier still.
Perhaps it was tiredness that made her do what she did then, or perhaps it was tradition. She did it every anniversary, and every anniversary she told herself that she’d never do it again. She thumbed open her phone, and looked at Charlie’s number in her contacts. Fourteen years she’d kept it, transferring it into every new phone she got. She used to know it by heart and now didn’t, which bothered her. It might have been disconnected by now. This year she might get a bounce-back. Then she could stop. Then she’d know there was no point.
But now, she pressed start new message, and the thread opened up. Thirteen identical texts, all sent exactly one year apart. She never cut-and-pasted, rather she typed the words out in full every year.
Charlie, I miss you. Please come home. x
She’d only made one change. Last year’s message also read I miss you, but the previous twelve all said we. We miss you. Then her mother had died, and Birch had wanted to text Charlie and tell him, but the very idea also stung like the press of a brand. So she just changed the we to I, and thought maybe from that clue alone he’d know, and come back at last from wherever it was he’d gone. Birch hit send. Fourteen messages now. And Charlie was dead – he had to be dead – and she felt absurd. Next year, she thought, I won’t do this. Next year will be the year I stop.
She flicked back to her inbox, and her stomach flipped: a message from Anjan.
I think we need to talk, Helen. Give me a ring. A.
She stared at the message. Talk about what? Talk about what, Anjan? Oh God.
A fizzing glass landed on the table in front of her, and she jumped.
‘. . . and one fun-free cocktail for the lady with her face in her phone.’ Rab made a flourish, then positioned a low stool between his knees and manoeuvred his bulk down onto it. ‘You all right, hen? You look a bit green in the gills.’
Birch shoved her phone into her pocket, and pasted on a smile. ‘Oh, fine,’ she said. ‘Just awake too long, like all of us.’
Rab nodded, and lifted his pint. ‘But we survived,’ he said, ‘and that cunt’s in a cell right now, where he belongs.’
Birch picked up her glass. It was slithery with condensation. She clinked it off Rab’s.
‘To surviving,’ she said.
‘Aye.’ Rab raised his voice. ‘And to the cell that Solomon sits in!’
Rab put his pint down on the table with a glassy thud. ‘Now,’ he said, squaring his forearms on the table’s lip and leaning in towards Birch. ‘About that briefing this morning.’
Never mind that, she thought. What the hell does Anjan want to talk about? But she put her own elbows on the table and leaned forward too, pushing the thought away.
‘What about it?’
Rab sniffed. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘it was the official version, wasn’t it? Tidy. All ancient history, wi’ the new stuff all allegedly and might be connected to. You ask any of the boys in this room.’ He cocked his head in the direction of the other officers, talking quietly in trios and pairs. ‘They’ll tell you there’s no allegedly about it. Put away Solomon and you’ll be putting away a fucking plague – one that’s been festering in Glasgow for fifty-odd years.’
Birch nodded. ‘Trust me, DI Robson,’ she said, ‘there’s not a single officer at Fettes Avenue who doesn’t understand how much is riding on a conviction here.’
Rab snorted. ‘No disrespect, darlin’,’ he said, ‘but I honestly don’t think ye do. There’s officers I’ve worked with had to end their careers because of that bastard. Had to move out of Glasgow, change identities, go and live in safe houses. He’s a real old-fashioned scumbag: hates Catholics, hates women, especially hates the polis. He loves tae feed us false evidence, set up blind alleys an’ then watch us run intae them. He likes tae keep an eye oan us, likes tae think he kens what we’ll dae next before we even ken ourselves. He got in wi’ razor gangs as a wean, learned aw that off them. Learned how to beat a man so his ribs go through his lungs but it won’t leave a bruise. Yer man mentioned his wife this morning – he should’ve said wives, ’cause Solomon’s had plenty, mistresses an aw. He gets older, they never seem tae. They’ve aw felt the back of his hand, every last wan. Patched a couple of them up mysel’, in my time. And as a businessman, as yer boss called him, Solomon learned – and I mean learned fast – how to make other hard bastards dae his dirty work for him. There’s been times that whole streets in Glasgow were fronts for Solomon’s boys: money laundering, fencing jewellery, art, fucking car parts – whatever. Drugs, plenty of drugs. When the Berlin Wall came down Solomon got to know some real hard cunts on the Continent: Chechens, Georgians – and Russians obviously.’