How To Kill Friends And Implicate People

by Jay Stringer

  The PI business operated out of the backroom of the courier depot, in a small Gorbals unit. Most of the space was taken up by spare bikes, tyres, tubes and other equipment. We had a selection of second-hand sofas arranged around an Xbox and a cheap TV. We had two desks in the office. One was filled with paperwork, comics and the computers that Phil used to run both companies. The other was arranged with chairs on both sides, and lined with empty coffee cups.

  As I turned the coffee percolator on, I heard a car door shut outside. The guy who’d been sat in the blue Ford stuck his head in around the entrance. ‘You open?’

  Technically no. We didn’t open the door to customers until around seven-thirty, but I’d be out on my bike by then and Phil wouldn’t roll in until later, so I started seeing people as soon as they turned up. You don’t make money by turning it away.

  ‘Hiya.’ I walked forward and waved for him to come on in. ‘How can I help?’

  ‘Are you Sam Ireland?’

  ‘Yup.’

  I took his hand in a shake. He had the grip of someone who’d never been told not to do it so hard. He was a little taller than me, but on the short side for a man. He had broad shoulders, and his body stretched out in all directions from there, with belly fat, back fat, man boobs and thick arms.

  He didn’t look unfit, despite the flab. He was strong, and looked like he worked out with the same vigour that he ate cheeseburgers.

  ‘Mike Gibson,’ he said, and everything made sense.

  I knew who Gibson was.

  ‘You know me?’ My reaction had given it away, but he smiled. ‘Don’t worry, hen, most of it’s made up. I read about the work you did with the arson case last year. That was good stuff.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  He looked around at the bike equipment. ‘This your office?’

  I led him through to the back and waved for him to take a seat at the desk. I walked round the other side and settled in. It’s a clichéd bit of theatrics, but it serves a good purpose. Clients tend to think they can treat you like crap when you’re freelance, but if you put them in their place right at the start, and establish a little control, you’ll get treated better.

  ‘How can I help?’

  ‘You know I have properties in town, aye?’ I nodded. ‘Right, well, one of them burned down last night.’

  I had an idea where this was going. Ever since I’d solved a big case last year that involved a string of arson attacks, people thought that was my thing. I was a pop band, and fire was my hit single.

  ‘I don’t really work arson cases, Mr Gibson—’

  ‘Mike—’

  ‘Sure, okay. Mike. I don’t really work them. And yours was last night?’ His turn to nod. ‘Well, see, the polis will still be investigating it. And the water fairies.’

  ‘Water fairies?’

  I smiled. ‘Sorry. Cops and paramedics hate the fire service. I don’t know why, really, but I’ve picked up the slang.’

  He laughed. A little too much. It was polite of him, but the joke hadn’t been that good. ‘Well, see, I’m not bothered about the building. The insurance’ll pick that up. And I already know who’s done it.’

  ‘You do?’

  ‘Aye. My shite of a son. Callum. He’s been trying to piss me off for ages and, bully for him, he’s finally done it. Done a fucking runner, though, hasn’t he? I want you to find him, let me know where he is.’

  Callum?

  As in Cal ?

  It couldn’t be, could it?

  Glasgow is a big city, but it gets very small when there’s trouble. Everybody knows each other. Especially in Gibson’s world. If his Callum and my Cal were the same, then this was all linked to my dead undercover cop. Why not let Mike Gibson pay me to work it from both sides?

  TWENTY-NINE

  FERGUS

  10:00

  Man, I’m having fun.

  Sam and me stay up way too late messaging each either. She’s full of good chat, and not afraid to get in digs at me. I like that. No standing on ceremony. No pretending. Just straight to taking the mick.

  I sleep in later than usual and get up at 10 a.m. I like to get a run in around nine, but I don’t have anything on this morning so I can afford to take it easy. I take a cold shower to get my senses awake, and drink a pint of water before getting into my running gear. Usually when I go outside I try to appear nondescript. On the job I want to blend into the crowd, pass by unnoticed, and when I’m off the clock I still find myself wanting to be unmemorable. I don’t want to stop and chat. I don’t want to be spotted by old school friends.

  When I first decided to leave New York and move back to Glasgow, a lot of people on the circuit assumed it was some kind of crisis. They said that everyone gets it, around 28–30, and we all feel the need to go home and reconnect with old friends, or our first loves, or compare our new lives to our old ones. And what other reason would I have for leaving the busiest city in the world for paid assassins, and moving to the west of Scotland? To them, I was an artist choosing to become wilfully obscure. It had to be the third-life crisis, right?

  Nope.

  Since moving back, I’ve made no effort to reconnect with old friends. And I’m still pretty much the same idiot now as I was at seventeen, so why would I want to meet up with old flames and assume things would be any different?

  I haven’t really made any new friends in Glasgow, either. This isn’t a very sociable line of work. Some people choose it for that very reason. Others, like me, simply end up that way. It becomes difficult to form any lasting bonds with people who aren’t in the life. What do we have in common?

  And if all of this sounds dangerously like I’m going on an introspective philosophical ramble, don’t worry. It’s for a purpose. What I’m winding up to here is a punch line that says I’m a wee dick.

  Because, for all that I like to blend in, and wander around unnoticed, I can’t help that I’m a runner. And like everyone else cursed with that affliction, I need to buy the latest gear. So when I’m out for my daily spot of long-distance self-punishment, I’m very noticeable. And proud of it.

  So I get decked out in:

  Gore Air Shirt.

  Gore 2-in-1 Shorts.

  Asics Metarun Trainers.

  And—

  Most important—

  My Garmen Fenix Sapphire GPS Watch.

  I don’t listen to music. That’s really only for amateurs, people who don’t want to listen to their own bodies and the world around them. But I still need to be contactable, so I strap my phone to the inside of my right forearm, and run with a Bluetooth headset in my ear.

  I head out at a steady pace, and pretty soon I’m running alongside the Clyde. Some days, this river looks like absolute shite. Catch it on a good day, though, and it’s stunning. I’m focusing on the way the sun bounces off the calm surface of the water when my phone rings. I tap the screen, and Stan’s voice fills my ear.

  ‘Hey,’ he says.

  He’s out of breath again. It sounds like he’s running, but I can’t quite tell over the sounds of my own feet.

  ‘Are you running again?’ I say.

  ‘Yep. I’m at the gym.’

  ‘Stan, it’s five in the fucking morning where you are.’

  ‘Best time for it.’

  His actual words. Manhattan is a wonderful place, but it’s fucking crazy. I only lived there for two years, but even at that, it had started to do strange things to me. I would go out for my morning run every day along the East River Promenade, but I swear, right before I left I found myself doing it at six. And enjoying being up at that time. That’s when I knew it was time to come home.

  ‘You’re running, too, it sounds like?’

  ‘Yeah,’ I say. The two of us on the phone, running at each other across thousands of miles. ‘At a normal time. When sane people do it.’

  ‘You’ve got all that deep fried food to work off.’

  Ah yes. Deep fried food. The one thing people from outside of Scotland are guaran
teed to bring up in every conversation. Along with rain. Well, I don’t eat chocolate bars that have been stuck in hot oil, and it’s the middle of a heatwave.

  ‘I’ve got something for you, something you could do tonight. Client doesn’t care what happens to the body, so you’d be able to use it afterwards for whatever. There’s one catch with the job.’

  ‘Okay?’

  ‘It’s pro bono.’

  ‘So now I need to kill someone for free, in order to pretend to kill someone for money?’

  ‘Right. It’s for some local sex workers. They can’t afford to pay, but there’s a guy who keeps hurting them. They hired a PI to find his address, but that used up all of their money.’

  ‘They can’t wait a few nights and earn some?’

  ‘He’s left them in bad shape. They can’t work right now, and they’re worried he’ll hurt someone else if he’s left to it. It’s been sitting in the queue for two weeks and nobody’s been willing to do it.’

  ‘Now you’re guilting me into killing someone?’

  ‘Hey, you said—’

  ‘Aye, I’m just being a dick with you. I’ll take it. Send me the details. Before your third run of the day. Oh, and, Stan? I’m a little rusty on explosives. I’m thinking car bomb, but I haven’t blown anything up in a while. Could you send me the manual?’

  Stan laughs and hangs up.

  I stop running. There’s something eating at the back of my mind. I want to check my messages, just like when I got my first phone and I kept texting Sandra Carter. I would stare at the phone, willing it to beep response.

  Well, I’d play Snake, too.

  That was fun.

  I’ve downloaded the dating app to my phone. I know, right? My rules lasted right up until I finally started talking to a woman. I’m a dick.

  I load up the messenger screen from the night before and type a message.

  FergusSingsTheBlues – Ooooft. We were up late.

  FergusSingsTheBlues – What you up to? I’m going for a gun.

  Shit. That’s not what I meant. This thing keeps trying to correct what I say. I think it’s predictive, based on words I’ve used the most. That’s not a good sign.

  FergusSingsTheBlues – RUN. Bloody auto correct.

  Her icon pops up, along with some dots that tell me she’s already typing a response.

  My stomach—

  turns—

  over.

  THIRTY

  SAM

  10:00

  Once work drops off around ten, I always have a late breakfast with Phil, who would be just starting for the day. We both used the excuse that it was a business meeting, because it gave us a chance to plan the rota for the day ahead, and talk about any problems that needed to be sorted. But all of that was just a cover; we just wanted to hang out.

  Phil is not a morning person by nature. And he barely counts as one now, clocking in after ten in the morning. But he’s improving. The extra responsibility of running both companies has made him step up. He’s a big guy, but he’s been losing weight recently. He didn’t talk about it, but I knew he’d started cycling to and from the office, a couple of miles each way. As the fat was going from his face, he was starting to look more like our father.

  Naturally, I never mentioned any of this to him. Come on. He’s my brother, I can only be nice to him up to a point.

  We meet at a coffee shop round the corner from the office. They keep a tab for us, and usually write some of it off in exchange for us running a few deliveries for them.

  ‘Wakey wakey,’ Phil said. He set his coffee down on the table. ‘I’ve been thinking.’

  I knew the look in his eyes. It said he was about to go on a tangent.

  ‘Is this going to relate to the job?’ I said.

  ‘Maybe.’ Phil put up a hand. ‘Bear with me on this. See The Batman?’

  ‘We’re talking about Batman now?’

  ‘The Batman, Sam. It’s important. Same as the hyphen in Spider-Man – gotta be there, otherwise you sound like a bam.’

  ‘Well, I wouldn’t want to sound like a bam while discussing Batman.’

  ‘The. Anyway. See how he keeps fighting all these villains, and they keep losing, aye? I mean every single time. They break out, they try to take over the city. The Batman shows up. He broods at them until they surrender, then he goes back to his cave to play video games.’

  ‘I don’t think he—’

  ‘Have you read the comics?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Okay, shush then. See the other thing is, loads of the baddies know who he is by this point, right? Ra’s Al Ghul knows. Talia knows. I think Riddler knows. Bane knows, for sure. Bane had this whole crazy thing where he tried to send The Batman insane by breaking out all the villains at once.’

  ‘Good plan.’

  Phil sighed and shook his head, like I’d just disappointed him, then waved his croissant at me. ‘You’re not going to be in charge of the plan when we try to take over the city, okay? It was a rubbish plan. The logistics alone. No way. Or Talia, that time she wanted to blow up Gotham, but instead of building a bomb, she funnelled billions into building some cold fusion machine, that she then converted into a bomb. You and Talia, you’d get on. Rubbish at plans. My point is, there are a lot of people who know who he is at this point, Bruce Wayne, I mean. And a lot of them want to defeat him, aye?’

  ‘As you pointed out, I’m not really up to date with the literature.’

  My phone buzzed. It was a message from Fergus.

  FergusSingsTheBlues – Ooooft. We were up late.

  FergusSingsTheBlues – What you up to? I’m going for a gun.

  FergusSingsTheBlues – RUN. Bloody auto correct.

  I wrote back.

  TheSamIreland – My brother is telling me about Batman.

  FergusSingsTheBlues – He knows about The Batman? I thought it was a secret.

  I snorted. Phil was pretending not to notice. ‘Well,’ he continued. ‘What I think they should do is, see, he’s grieving, aye? The whole dead parents thing. Why don’t a bunch of the villains all club together and hire the best therapist they can afford. Then lure Bats into a trap. When he thinks he’s got them cornered, they whip out a sofa, sit him down, and let the therapist work his magic.’

  ‘You want them to give Batman counselling sessions?’

  ‘It’s genius. Just make Bruce Wayne get over his shit, then, presto, no more Batman. The baddies win by default.’

  ‘So, when I asked if this was going to have anything to do with the job?’

  ‘I was maybe being a bit cunning.’ He gave me a look. He wanted me to think on the hidden meaning, but it was too obvious. No thought required.

  ‘So I’m Batman now? Because usually you—’

  ‘Just this once.’

  ‘I’m fine,’ I said. ‘I don’t need to see a therapist.’

  Phil’s concern for me was sweet, but bordered on annoying. Sure, I’d had a tough year. My ex-boyfriend had turned out to be a killer. I’d seen someone get hit by a train. And, before I’d had time to deal with any of that, our father had passed away. I still hadn’t cried. Phil and Hanya both insisted that I was storing things up, letting everything change me.

  I just told them the truth: I’ve been keeping busy.

  ‘I’m fine. Seriously, you and Hanya should hook up. You act like an old married couple – you may as well be one.’

  ‘Well, if she had a brother who looked enough like her—’

  ‘Anyway.’ I took a sip on my own coffee. Still too hot. ‘Getting back to the work you’re being paid for?’

  I checked my phone while he talked. Hanya hadn’t texted me back yet. I sent her a follow-up message that was just a row of question marks.

  ‘I planted the trackers,’ Phil said. ‘One on each car. The job we’re being paid for, and the job you’ve invented for yourself. Sammy, do you remember back when you used to trust people?’

  ‘I’m a private detective.’

 
‘Part time.’

  ‘Okay, I’m a part-time private detective. I’m paid to have trust issues.’

  THIRTY-ONE

  ALEX

  11:00

  Alex’s PA, Emma, buzzed him on the intercom.

  ‘Asma Khan’s here,’ she said.

  Alex grunted. He’d been staring at the same document for twenty minutes. The lines kept blurring on the page, and rubbing the bridge of his nose was doing nothing to fine tune his eyesight.

  He hadn’t meant to hit it so hard last night. The combination of whisky and beer had given him a killer headache, and to top it off he’d had bad dreams when he finally drifted off. He didn’t remember what they were now, but he’d been restless with them all night, and woken up a number of times feeling scared.

  Kara hadn’t stirred at all.

  ‘You have an appointment with her for two o’clock,’ Emma said.

  ‘Wait, come in here. I can’t hear you on this bloody thing.’

  Emma let him wait just long enough to play with his patience. Her desk was in the next room, but she liked to move slowly when Alex was being rude, to remind him to play nice. She walked in carrying a mug of coffee and a stack of papers.

  ‘Two o’clock,’ she repeated. ‘With Joe Pepper. The file’s on your desk just there.’

  MHW used files and paperwork more than most companies these days. Even at Alex’s previous job, which had been a smaller firm, all the information was shuttled about electronically. But for MHW, half of the job was choosing which information to have on the computer, and which to have on paper. The art was in shuffling the two around, hiding things in plain sight.

  ‘Sorry.’ Alex squinted at the document she was pointing to. ‘I must have lost track of it.’

  With anybody else he would have covered for the hangover, pretended to be ill and maybe asked for some Lemsip to lay it on thick. But Emma knew him too well. He could never slip anything past her. In fact, he wouldn’t be surprised if she’d figured out he was up to something dodgy, but she was too loyal to say anything.