Ahead of the Game

by JD Kirk

  She shook her head, dragging herself back from the past and into the present, just as a black SUV drew up at the front of the house. It wasn’t her usual taxi, but Olivia was in the front passenger seat. The driver beside her was in his mid-twenties, Shona would estimate. Shaved head. Brow that didn’t suggest a deep thinker.

  Something about him—everything about him—made her want to step back from the window and draw the curtains shut.

  Shona watched Olivia tap her watch, and point to the floor. The skinhead nodded once, waited for her to get out, then pulled a tight U-turn and revved noisily off in the direction of the Kessock Bridge, headed back to Inverness.

  Olivia gave a wave as she came up the path, and opened the front door without knocking.

  “Hello!” she called, stomping her feet on the mat.

  “Hi. I was starting to think you weren’t coming,” Shona said, meeting her in the hall.

  Olivia frowned. “Am I late?”

  “It’s fine.”

  “I had stuff I had to sort out,” Olivia explained.

  “Still busy, then?”

  Olivia smiled. “Yeah. Yeah, something like that.”

  She was being cagey. Her vagueness set alarm bells ringing. “Is everything OK at home, Olivia?”

  “Fine. Yeah.”

  “Because, if it’s not...”

  “It is. And it wasn’t a home thing. It was a work thing.”

  Shona’s eyebrows arched. “Work? I didn’t know you had a job. When did this start?”

  Olivia shrugged, took off her jacket, and hung it on the peg behind the door. “Just sort of fell into my lap a while back,” she said, then she rubbed her hands together and sniffed the air. “Do I smell popcorn?”

  “You do,” Shona confirmed. “Sweet and salted.”

  “Get in!”

  Before Olivia could head through to the living room, Shona nodded in the direction she’d come from. “Who was that dropping you off? A friend? He looks a lot older.”

  “So are you,” Olivia pointed out.

  “Well, yes, but—”

  “He’s not a friend. He’s just someone I work with.”

  Shona’s eyes crept to the door, like she was trying to see through it and all the way along the road to the bridge. “Oh. Right. And what’s the job? What is it you’re actually doing?”

  “It’s a distribution company,” Olivia replied. “Small at the moment, but we’ve got big plans to expand.” She smiled and very deliberately sniffed the air again. “Now, about that popcorn…”

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  DC Neish and DS Khaled sat in Tyler’s car, the setting sun skipping across the surface of the unimaginatively named Loch Lochy down the hillside behind them, and a small whitewashed stone cottage nestling amongst the trees fifty yards up the slope ahead of them.

  “See? Didn’t drive like an old woman, did I?” said Tyler, as he shut off the engine and unfastened his seatbelt.

  “Well, you did at the winding bits,” Hamza pointed out.

  “Yeah, but I didn’t want you throwing up in my car, did I?” Tyler protested.

  “I think I’d have been alright. My stomach can cope with speeds greater than twenty-five miles an hour.”

  “Bollocks it was twenty-five! And even if it was, some of those bends are pretty hairy.”

  “Unlike your chest, ye big Jessie,” Hamza chuckled. He opened the door and wiped his smile away with a rub of his hand. “Right. Game faces on. You ready?”

  “Ready, Sarge,” Tyler confirmed, snapping off a salute.

  “You can knock that on the head, for a bloody start.”

  “Sorry, Sarge. Don’t shout at me, Sarge,” Tyler whimpered, as they both got out of the car. “I hate it when you stamp your authority, Sarge.”

  Hamza gave the DC the finger, then led the way up the track to the ramshackle front gate that led to a garden of weeds, gravel, and dog shit.

  A sign on the gate warned them to ‘Beware of the Dog,’ but other than the regularly-dotted shite coils, there was no sign of one.

  “Here, boy,” Hamza called in a sing-song voice. “Heeere, boy.”

  “What the fuck are you doing?” Tyler asked.

  “Checking if the dog’s around.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it says ‘Beware of the Dog.’”

  Tyler tutted. “It probably just says that to keep Jehovah’s Witnesses out.”

  “Have you seen the size of those turds?” Hamza asked. “What dog shites like that? The Hound of the Baskervilles?”

  Tyler had to admit that they were sizeable deposits. Whatever breed of dog had left them was likely to be a monster. But they could see a full three sides of the garden, and there wasn’t a dog—giant or otherwise—in sight.

  Besides, he was still smarting a little from the ‘big Jessie’ comment and was keen to reassert himself.

  “You’re worrying about nothing,” he said, reaching for the gate. “If there is a dog, we’ll pat it. Alright? We’ll calm it down. We’re a couple of bright lads, Sarge. I’m sure we’ll figure it out.”

  The gate gave a two-note creak as Tyler pushed it open. It sounded almost like a trumpet-call—one low note, then a second higher one as the rusty hinges continued to swing.

  Tyler was halfway up the path when the fucking thing came careening around from the back of the house, all teeth and drool and eyes like burning coals. It moved like a bullet of furry fury, its paws rarely appearing to touch the ground as it rocketed towards the detectives.

  The barking reached them a moment later, as if the dog was travelling too fast for the sound to keep up with it.

  Tyler ejected a breathless, “Shit!” then raced back out through the gate and slammed it shut a fraction of a second before the dog collided with it.

  If the detectives thought the creaking of the gate had wound the dog up, then crashing into the thing drove the animal full-on bananas. It snapped, snarled, foamed, frothed, its lithe, muscular body vibrating with a rage it had no hope of managing to contain, even if the thought had occurred to it.

  “Jesus!” Tyler yelped, drawing back from the gate just as the dog tried to force its head through the bars.

  “I told you, didn’t I?” Hamza said. “It’s on the sign. ‘Beware of the Dog.’ I told you.”

  “I don’t think that’s even a dog, though,” Tyler wheezed. “That’s a fucking bear, isn’t it?”

  This was, of course, an exaggeration. The animal was definitely a dog. Quite what kind of dog, however, was more difficult to pin down. There was some Rottweiler there. A bit of Bulldog, a pinch of German Shepherd, and a liberal sprinkling of Cujo, from the Stephen King novel of the same name.

  Tyler’s notion of calming it down suddenly seemed child-like and naive. It would take more than some soft words and a bit of patting to soothe this beast. An electric net and a tranquilliser dart might do the job, but even that felt like a bit of a stretch.

  “If that thing doesn’t have rabies, I don’t know what does,” Tyler said.

  The initial panic of being in the same enclosed space as the animal was fading now that it was safely on the other side of the metal gate.

  Given the energy it was devoting to trying to force its way through, though, there was no saying it would remain on the other side for long.

  “I have an idea,” said Hamza.

  “Is it ‘call in an orbital strike’?”

  “No. I’ll distract it, and you go knock on the door.”

  “Fuck off!” Tyler cried. “No chance! It’ll eat me alive!”

  “Like I said, I’ll distract it.”

  Tyler’s voice ramped up an octave. “How are you going to distract that?”

  “I don’t know. I could… I could throw a ball for it,” Hamza suggested.

  DC Neish scowled. “A ball? Fuck a ball, maybe if you throw a hand grenade for it to catch, it might slow it down and buy us a few seconds, but a ball? I’m not going in there, even if you give it your balls to
play with.”

  “We need to go see if this Dinky fella’s at home,” Hamza reminded him.

  “Fine. I’ll distract it, then, and you be the one to go knock on the door.”

  Hamza side-eyed the frothy-mouthed maniac mongrel currently trying to chew through the bars of the gate, then he drew himself up to his full height. “I’m the one giving the orders around here, sunshine,” he said.

  “Oh. It’s like that, is it?” asked Tyler. “That’s where we’ve got to, is it? Pulling rank? Well, what do you think of this?”

  Still watching Hamza, Tyler sidestepped along the front fence a few paces, away from the gate. The dog followed, barking and snarling, its coal-black eyes fixating hungrily on him.

  Tyler returned to the gate, and the dog did the same, then turned its attention back to trying to gnaw through solid metal.

  “It’s me the fucker wants, not you. I was the one in the garden,” Tyler pointed out, ashen-faced. “I’ll lead it around the back. You go over the gate and sneak up to the house. Then, phone me when you’re ready to come out, and I’ll keep it busy.”

  Hamza regarded the dog. He looked along the path to the front door. There was nobody at the windows. If someone was home, they were bound to have heard all the commotion out front. Which meant either the house was empty, or whoever was inside couldn’t give a shit about who or what his dog chose to set about.

  “Right, fine,” he sighed. He undid the knot on his tie and put it in his pocket, then undid the top button of his shirt.

  “That going to make you faster, like?” Tyler asked.

  “Just… shut up. This is your fault,” Hamza told him.

  “How is it my fault?”

  “Just go. Get the bloody thing around the back. And make sure you keep it there!”

  Tyler nodded, winked, then kicked the mesh fence as hard as he could, rattling it against the posts.

  “Come on then, you big hairy bastard,” he spat, dancing along the front of the fence. He thrust a hand over the top, then whipped it away just before teeth snapped shut around it. “You want me? Come and get me!”

  “God, he’s so shiny,” Olivia remarked. “He’s such a shiny man.”

  Shona’s mouth was full of popcorn, so she could only nod and make noises of agreement.

  “It’s like he’s been polished,” Olivia continued as, on screen, Arnold Schwarzenegger went trudging through a jungle with a big gun and a facial expression that suggested he’d been heavily constipated for several days. “Like someone’s buffed him up.”

  Shona swallowed her popcorn. “Yeah. I think this is his shiniest role,” she said. “He’s pretty shiny in Commando, too, but I think this is peak-shine.” She reached into the bowl and grabbed a handful of popcorn before it was all gone, then gestured to the screen with it. “Just wait, though. If you think he’s shiny, hold on until you see—”

  “Holy shit, look at him!” Olivia laughed, stabbing a finger at the telly. A bald black man came staggering out of the trees, his skin sporting such a sheen he could’ve been made of glass. “Has he been swimming in baby oil? No wonder the alien can track them down, they’re all so shiny they must be glowing!”

  Shona dropped her voice into her Arnie impression again. “Don’t make fun of my shiny muscles! Or I’ll be back.”

  Olivia tilted a hand back and forth, suggesting an iffy performance. “Three out of ten,” she said, reaching for more popcorn.

  “Three? That was a solid six!” Shona protested.

  “It was a three. And that’s generous,” Olivia insisted. “‘I’ll be back!’ That’s six out of ten.”

  “That sounds exactly like how I said it!” Shona protested. “‘I’ll be back!’”

  “‘I’ll be back!’”

  “‘I’ll be back!’”

  “Meh. Still not great. Maybe five,” Olivia said, then they went back to watching the movie.

  They were sitting side by side on the couch, their feet pulled up at their sides, the popcorn bowl sitting between them. There had been no more talk of Olivia’s late arrival, of her new job, or her mysterious skin-headed co-worker. And they hadn’t even touched on her last-minute cancellation the night before.

  For a while, Shona had dreaded Olivia’s visits. Their relationship had started from a strange place, with Shona essentially being complicit in her kidnapping. When the girl had continued to invite herself over for movie nights, Shona had initially tried to find ways out of it. Olivia had been tenacious, though, and rarely took no for an answer.

  Eventually, Shona had surrendered to her fate, and accepted that weekly movie nights with the teenage daughter of a jailed Russian drug kingpin were now just a thing that happened in her life.

  Over the months that followed, though, she’d come to enjoy the visits. Olivia could be good company, and it was always a pleasure to educate the younger generation on some true cinematic greats. Besides, Shona had enjoyed revisiting some long-forgotten classics, too.

  She’d always been careful, though, to steer herself away from the role of ‘much older best friend’ in Olivia’s eyes, and tried to position herself as a stable adult figure with concerns for the girl’s wellbeing.

  As such, she always felt something of a responsibility to be a sounding board for any challenges Olivia might be facing.

  Unfortunately, Olivia was rarely forthcoming.

  “How was school?” Shona asked, during a lull in the movie’s action.

  “Fine,” Olivia said with a shrug.

  “No drama?”

  “Nah.”

  “That boy not still bothering you?”

  Olivia’s hand paused with her popcorn halfway to her mouth. “Jonathan? No,” she said, after a moment. “I sorted him out.”

  “That’s good. But remember… If there’s anything… I know it’s not easy to tell your mum things, sometimes, so if there’s anything you’re worried about. Any concerns. If anyone’s bullying you, or—”

  “Bullying me?” Olivia turned to her, a look of amusement on her face. “Ha. Nobody’s bullying me. Believe me.”

  “Right. Good. That’s… great,” Shona said, pleased to hear it. “It’s just, you said before that some of the kids were giving you grief.”

  “They stopped,” Olivia said.

  Something about the way she said it made Shona miss a beat. “They stopped?”

  “I stopped them.”

  The puzzled look on Shona’s face told the girl she needed more information.

  “I had a word with them,” Olivia elaborated. “We talked it over.”

  “Oh! Good! And… What? They just stopped picking on you? Just like that?”

  Olivia nodded. Smiled. Or smirked, maybe. “Yes,” she confirmed. “Just like that.”

  She fished the last of the popcorn out of the bowl, stuffed some in her mouth, then turned back to the screen.

  “It wasn’t difficult. You can make people do pretty much anything,” she remarked, as several shiny men shot guns at trees on the TV screen. “You just have to find the right motivation.”

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Logan and Sinead were shown into the neat living room of a compact semi-detached house, presented with tea, biscuits, and an apology for the greeting they’d initially been given.

  “Clyde doesn’t like visitors. Especially during dinner,” Lana Lennon explained. “He didn’t know you were… If he had, he’d never have spoken to you like… Well.”

  She smiled apologetically, then hovered by the armchair on the opposite side of the coffee table to where the detectives were sitting, as if waiting for permission to sit.

  “That’s quite alright, Mrs Lennon. I’m much the same myself,” Logan assured her. “And it must be a difficult time.”

  Lana wrung her hands together. “Difficult time?”

  “Yes.” The DCI waited for some moment of realisation, then continued when it didn’t come. “I understand Mr Forsyth was a friend of yours.”

  “Mr… Fergus?” She sm
oothed down the front of her jumper and shot a wary look at the living room door. “I don’t… Sorry, what’s this about?”

  “You didn’t hear?” asked Sinead. “Sorry, we thought Cops—uh, I mean, we thought Mrs Robertson at the school would’ve told you.”

  “Told me what?” Lana asked. The senior detective’s previous words suddenly hit her properly, and she lowered herself onto the armchair. “What do you mean ‘was a friend’ of mine?”

  Logan was happy to sit back and let Sinead handle this part. When it came to breaking bad news to people, she was a natural—sympathetic without being patronising, to-the-point without ever being blunt. She knew how to deal with grieving people. God knew, she’d been through it herself enough.

  “I’m sorry to have to tell you that yesterday morning Mr Forsyth was found dead,” Sinead said.

  “Dead?”

  “I’m afraid he was attacked.”

  “Attacked?”

  This sort of reaction was par for the course, in Logan’s experience. He called it ‘the echo’—when a person receiving bad news wanted so badly for it to not be true that they turned it around and bounced it straight back, rather than take it in.

  “What do you mean, he was attacked?” Lana cried. “What do you mean he’s dead? How? Why? I don’t… How can he be dead? How can Fergus be dead?”

  She realised her tone was creeping higher and higher, glanced at the door, then swallowed as she fought to bring her voice back under control.

  “I understand what a shock this must be for you, Mrs Lennon,” Sinead said. “Mrs Robertson mentioned that you and Fergus were close.”

  There was that look again, the eyes going to the door, the moment of panic at what she might find there.

  “Would you like to discuss this elsewhere, Mrs Lennon?” Logan asked her.

  “What? No. I don’t…” Her voice was a whisper now, nothing more. “I just… God. I don’t know why she’d say that. Please, don’t repeat that. My husband wouldn’t… It’s not… Fergus was… There wasn’t…”

  She buried her face in her hands and her shoulders heaved. Logan and Sinead would have been content to leave her there to pull herself together, had a grunt from the doorway not snapped her upright like she was spring-loaded.