Beast of Burden

by Ray Banks

  “Anything else?”

  “Police know … it wasn't robbery.”

  “They're sure?”

  “Yeah.”

  “So what now?”

  “Check on Mo's … love life.”

  We stare at each other for a short while. Tiernan's obviously trying to work out if that was a dig at his daughter. It wasn't, but it's not a bad thing to get Alison back in the man's head. For all intents and purposes, I'm off the Alison lead, but there's no harm in refreshing his memory every now and then.

  Tiernan nods, drops his cigarette. He digs into his jacket, revealing what looks like a bodywarmer underneath. As he brings out a thick envelope, the light catches the fabric of the body armour he's wearing. When Tiernan notices me staring, he zips up and smiles.

  “It's a lot of money,” he says, handing me the envelope. “Plenty more where that came from an' all. C'mon.”

  He heads off around the side of the club. I follow him at a distance. As we emerge from the alley on the other side, Darren spots us, twisting round with his mouth open. By the kerb is a large black SUV, its engine idling. The guy behind the wheel — bald, heavy eyebrows, face on him like a bulldog licking piss off a kettle — glances at Tiernan, then faces front, staring at some obviously uncomfortable point in the middle distance.

  “Thought we'd lost you,” says Darren.

  Tiernan strides towards the SUV. As he passes the driver's door, he slams his hand against it. The driver flinches. “The fuck were you, you lazy cunt?”

  The driver opens his mouth, flaps for a second before he says, “Thought you said—”

  “Don't make a difference what you thought.” The SUV door slides open noisily; Glen's already inside. “You be here when you're supposed to be here. And you keep your fuckin' phone on, dickhead.”

  The driver starts to say something else, but his mouth's long stopped working in tandem with his vocal cords. All that comes out of his gob is what sounds like a throaty cough. Darren steps ahead, holds the door to one side for Tiernan.

  Before he gets into the van, Tiernan stops and looks at me. “That thing we talked about. We'll sort it. You keep on doing what you're doing.”

  “Thanks.”

  He ducks into the SUV. “And you lot get your fuckin' heads out your arse. Safer with him over there than I am with you bunch of twats.”

  Darren shoots me a glare that makes me think he wants to chop me in the fucking throat. “You can never be too careful.”

  “Yeah, you never fuckin' know, son.” Tiernan laughs, stretches out in his seat. “Wake the fuck up, Daz. Look at him.”

  Darren does. Tiernan waves a hand for him to get in and close the door. He backs up, slides the door across and into place with a loud metallic bang.

  But before Tiernan disappears from sight, I hear him say: “How the fuck is he a threat to me?”

  Too right.

  After all, I'm just a mong, aren't I?

  THREE

  NOBODY WALKS

  It was supposed to be a family meal, but we weren't much of a family, so it wasn't much of a meal.

  My last night in Scotland, the night after the funeral. Promised my mum that I'd show up for a farewell dinner, just me, her and Uncle Kenny. Supposed to be a nice way of saying goodbye, but as me and her sat there — nine o'clock, Christmas tablecloth spattered with wax from the now-guttering candles, the throat-closing smell of a roast dinner that had gone from succulent to husk about an hour before — I realised I'd had enough of watching my mum try not to show the tears and pushed away from the table.

  “Where are you going?” she said.

  “Going to get … Kenny.”

  “He's—”

  “I know where.”

  Out in the hall, and I knew she wouldn't follow me, but I turned around anyway. I saw her silhouette flicker in the candlelight, then I was gone.

  Port Edgar was more boneyard than boatyard when the bad weather rolled in, foul icy winds sweeping in across the Firth of Forth that took the skin from your face, dug in and put a chill right through the marrow. I caught a cab out to the marina, left him outside the main gate with the engine running.

  Place was supposed to be closed at this time of night, but it was a home away from home for my uncle, and he didn't need to tell me why.

  Thing was with Kenny, when I was a kid, I barely remembered him. He was a wallpaper-suit kind of bloke. Whenever we'd have to trudge round to my Auntie Linda's for Christmas and she got out all the spare chairs, there'd always be one missing, and that would be Kenny's. So he'd stand by the wall, try to blend in. And when the conversation faltered between the adults, plunging into a thick silence, he'd be the one to break it with a nonsense sound — “Uh-huh …” — as if that would get people talking again.

  He faded into the cigarette smoke. He barely registered, even when he started fucking that nurse in Bo'Ness and him and Linda called it a day with fourteen years and two kids under their belts. After that, we didn't go round for Christmas anymore. Can't say I shed any tears. Nor did I when I heard that Kenny and the nurse split up, and he was living the lonely bachelor life in Leith.

  Anyway, with nothing else in his life, Kenny did what any man would do. He threw himself into his work. Which is how I knew exactly where to find him in a time of stress.

  When I found him, he was out by one of the pontoons, the wind and rain lashing him. He didn't feel it much, though. Judging from the dregs in the whisky bottle he was holding, Kenny wasn't feeling much of anything.

  I shouted his name. He responded as if he'd been kicked in the back.

  “Callum,” he said. At least that was the way his lips moved. The wind whipped the sound away from him.

  I fought the gale, hobbled out towards him. Nodded at the bottle he was holding. “Least you didn't … miss dinner.”

  Kenny dropped the whisky to the ground. It bounced and rolled towards the end of the pontoon. “I'm sorry.”

  “What was that?”

  “There's something …” Shook his head. “I didn't mean to.”

  I looked at him. “Kenny.”

  “Didn't want to live. I mean, we talked about it.”

  I didn't say anything. Tried to stay cold, which wasn't difficult considering it was freezing as fuck out here. Watched the wind whip the smoke from his cigarette, already sodden from the rain. Kept my hands down, even as I felt them tighten.

  “I didn't kill him,” he said. “He killed himself.”

  “Because of … the baby.”

  “No.”

  He shook his head quickly. “He would've done it anyway. That's the thing about our family, Callum. About the men in the family. My brother, your brother, you. Self-destructive. Weak in a fundamental way, do you understand me, Callum?”

  I stared at him. Realised he'd been waiting for me to find him. Spent all his time draining the bottle that rocked at his feet. I felt drunk, myself. This was a guy who'd spent a majority of my life not saying a fucking word, especially not to me. Look at him now, the seal was broken, and that tsunami of shit sure to follow.

  “We're all fucked, Callum. From … birth, a genetic flaw. I've been thinking about it for a long time, and it's all proven true. You know your dad, he couldn't take the idea of settling down, hated the idea of having one kid never mind the pair of you. You know the worst thing you ever could've done to him, you did. You knocked him down. That was it, he needed out. Same as your brother when you hit him. Only way you'd get him sent up here was to hit him first. We all run away, try to escape what hurts us, because we don't want to admit that we're killing ourselves, Callum.”

  “Shut up,” I said, trying for dismissive and failing miserably. There was still time to play this as if Kenny was a daft old drunk, time to forget all about it. But we both knew that wasn't going to happen.

  “You don't believe me,” he said. “That's fine. But he killed himself. And I had to help him. Because it's what we all want.”

  “Not me.”

  “
You're exactly the fucking same,” he said. “You get a family, you'll fuck it up, try to kill yourself in the process.”

  That was when I hit him.

  My first punch was weak, but then so was he. Caught him sharply in the side of the head with my hand, still wrapped tight around the handle of my walking stick. Pushed him back, swung the stick in a short arc, connected with the top of his head.

  Again, and a swipe that knocked the hand he'd brought up to his cheek. Kenny folded, stumbled back. I lurched forward, kicked the whisky bottle, sent it skittering into the water. Swung my stick again, caught Kenny behind the knee. He dropped to clutch where it hurt, and I pivoted on the good foot, brought the bad one into his face. His head snapped back. His legs shot out from under him, and he landed on his right arse cheek, swaying over the edge of the pontoon.

  “Cunt,” I said.

  “I know,” he said.

  “You killed him.”

  “No.” Kenny had his hands up. “He did it to himself. I told you, you don't listen—

  “I'll fuckin'—”

  But I couldn't move. I wanted to kill him, push on, beat fuck out of him, kick what was left into the Firth of Forth and let the cunt float to Norway. Even if they found him before that, he'd be another one of those bloated corpses they skimmed around the Forth bridge, miserable twats who took a header to prove a point.

  Let his theory ride out.

  And he wanted me to do it. If I killed him, it would be the same situation as him buying smack for Declan, knowing full well what he was going to do with it. It was a mercy killing, pure and simple. And somewhere in the fog of alcohol that had swaddled his brain, he believed that he'd done my brother a favour. Hoped I'd do him the same.

  I wasn't about to end it there. Because Kenny wasn't really to blame. All this shite started long before he scored for my brother.

  Besides, I had a cab waiting. And he was still on the meter.

  31

  DONKIN

  A bolt of sunlight woke us up. That was what it felt like, anyway.

  Except it wasn't that sunny. Outside the skies were grey and it was coming down in fucking sheets.

  Then the banging kicked in. I had a twelve-can, half-bottle hangover, so it took a moment for us to work out that the banging noise was coming from out in the hall, not the inside of my head. Sounded like someone was getting ready to kick the door in, so I pulled myself off the settee. Tried to get steady by grabbing the coffee table, but I just ended up knocking all the empty cans onto the floor. There was the sudden stink of ciggies and beer and I realised I must've been using the cans as ashtrays the night before.

  All the while, whoever it was outside wouldn't stop hammering on the fucking door. I managed to haul myself out into the hall where it was nice and dark. Colder than the lounge, and I reckoned that I must've gone to sleep with the gas fire on again. Meant that this bastard behind the eyes wasn't going anywhere soon, and my nose and throat were all dried to fuck.

  A pause in the banging when I got to the door. Silhouettes behind, looked like two blokes.

  When I pulled it open, it was more like two and a half, because one of them was big as a fucking house. Suited, looked like bailiffs, which meant they were in for a surprise, because everything in this house was paid off. And then I reckoned Annie sent some blokes round to pick up the rest of the stuff she thought was hers.

  Either way, they weren't getting in.

  “The fuck do you want?” I said.

  The House hit us in the face. I lost my balance, stumbled back, my legs gone wide and I hit the wall with my back as I turned. The breath went out of us. I grabbed at my face, felt the blood running hard, just as those two bastards came storming in the house. I opened my gob to shout for help, but the smaller one kicked the door shut behind him and for a second, they dropped into shadow. I braced my back to the wall, pushed off and made a run for it.

  Something hit us hard in the back. I bent and something else knocked out my legs. Pain lashed across the backs of my knees. I grabbed out at the wall, missed it, hit the floor. Caught an up-close-and-personal whiff of the chicken korma I spilled on the carpet about a month ago and was too pissed to clean up properly, and my gut did a triple fucking somersault. I gritted my teeth, spat blood, tried to focus on the carpet. Reckoned if I just got my head right, I'd be able to put at least one smack on this pair of clowns.

  Then the big bastard put the boot in. Made us do this scratchy belch and then the chicken burger I had last night came up for a fucking encore. When the boot came back at us, I made sure I rolled out of the way of the spew. Might've taken an extra couple of kicks because of it, but there was no way I was going to be covered in my own puke as well as my own blood.

  Hands on us. It was the smaller one, because the big bastard's Chelseas didn't move. Pulling us up. I didn't put up a fight, not yet. If this twat wanted to drop his guard, I'd be in there, but seeing as there was two of them, I'd have to be clever about this.

  “Y'alright?” The big one said. I got a decent look at his face through the haze. Big face, small features. Unibrow.

  “I know you?”

  “Nah.”

  “I do.”

  He looked at the bloke behind us. “Let's get him in the lounge.”

  “I do,” I said, staring at him. “I know you. Fuckin' lounge, you fuckin' ponce.”

  The pick-up merchant shoved us towards the front room and my legs buckled. I grabbed onto the doorway, but the big lad knocked my hand away. I dipped, was pushed, hit the settee and then bounced off onto the floor. I knocked the rest of the cans off the coffee table, heard laughter from somewhere. When I looked up at the big bastard, he hadn't cracked his face, so I guessed I'd amused the little fucker. I pulled myself back up onto the settee, mopped at the blood on my mouth, the hangover long fucking stifled with new pain.

  “Now,” said the big lad. “Y'alright?”

  “Now what the fuck d'you keeping asking us that for?”

  “I want to know.”

  Giggles stood to one side, watching us with a twitching smile on his face. Like he was gearing up to twat us one, like this was the most exciting thing that'd ever happened to him. I reckoned that I'd have to keep an eye on him; looked too much to me like he was straining at whatever invisible leash the big lad had him on.

  “Here,” said the big lad, snapping his fingers at us.

  “What?”

  “I asked you a question.”

  “Eh?”

  “Are you alright?”

  I stared at him. “No, I'm not fuckin' alright, am I? I'm fuckin' bleeding, and what the fuck do youse pair of cunts think you're doing in my house?”

  “Mouth on him,” said the smaller bloke.

  “Mouth on you. Thought you were a fuckin' mute.”

  The big bloke snapped his fingers again.

  “And you,” I said, “I'm not your fuckin' waiter, so I don't know what you think you're snapping at, son.”

  Mouthy smiled, moved under his suit. One fluid movement and his jacket was unbuttoned. “I'm just trying to get your attention. You're easily distracted. I just want to make sure you're completely focussed when I'm talking to you.”

  “Then spit it out, for fuck's sake. Haven't got all fuckin' morning, have I?”

  Mouthy took one step — barely saw it — and smacked us in the exact same place he'd smacked us before. I shook and kicked out at nothing with both feet, heard something crunch and my nose just give it up. When my head came back down, blood started scooshing again, splattering the settee. I put a fist under my nose, wedged it up to stop the blood and put my head back. Looked at the mouthy bastard with horse eyes.

  “So,” he said. “Y'alright?”

  I didn't say anything.

  “Asked you a question.”

  I knew he'd asked us a question. And it was one I already saw coming, because it was about the only thing that came out of this bastard's gob. He was like a broken fucking record.

  “So?” he
said.

  Moved the fist to a cup, felt my hand filling up with blood. I wanted to flick it at him, but I held my temper. “Yeah, mate, I'm fuckin' super-duper.”

  “No pain, nowt like that?”

  “Actually, yeah, funny you should mention it.”

  “Yeah?”

  “My nose does smart a little.”

  “That's a shame.”

  “Nah, I think it'll be alright.”

  “You look like you might need a hankie.”

  “Oh, you think?”

  “Yeah.”

  I smiled, said: “Fuck yourself.”

  The giggler stepped in, smacked us right in the ear. Snapped my hearing out and sent a jolt through the side of my head. I jerked, lost my hand from my nose and sprayed blood across the carpet, which pissed us off more than the sting in my lug. I turned and looked sidelong at the fucker. Giggles held his fist, staring at us like it was my fault he misjudged his punch.

  He'd be easy taken. Couldn't throw a punch for toffee, bring it the fuck on.

  I spluttered out a laugh, dug my feet into the carpet, got braced, and made to barrel the bugger. I managed three steps before the big bastard put his fist on the other side of my face. When he clipped my nose, a flashbulb went off behind my eyes and I went down like a dropped dog. I blinked at the carpet, and as my vision cleared, the first thing I noticed was more of my blood. Place was beginning to look like a fucking abattoir.

  “Sergeant,” said Mouthy.

  “Detective Sergeant,” I said. “And you both know I'm a copper, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “So you know that I'll fuckin' have you.”

  The big lad shook his head, grinned at us, and somewhere near the back of his smile, I caught the flash of a gold tooth. I hoped that someone had knocked out the original — the way this bloke took pride in his appearance, a missing tooth would've been cause for a three-week crying jag.

  “Doesn't work like that, Detective.”

  “Right, so how does it work?” I pulled myself to the edge of the settee. Kept one eye on Giggles, who was itching to plant a square blow on us. But just because he didn't get the first one right, didn't mean I was going to let him have a freebie.