by JD Kirk
“Come on and eat me then, you four-legged bastard,” had been Hamza’s personal favourite so far, although, “I bet your dad shagged a pug,” put in a respectable showing for second place.
There was no sound from inside the house. The door was a decrepit, rotting thing, and the two glass panels fixed into it were weathered by a lifetime of dirt and grime.
Hamza tapped again. “Come on, come on,” he whispered.
The dog stopped barking.
Hamza went rigid. Held his breath. Performed a series of advanced calculations that took in the distance from the door to the gate, the speed at which he could run, and how far away the dog had sounded, and ultimately concluded that he was in deep shit.
“Oi! Bollock-breath! Over here!”
The barking started up again. Hamza exhaled silently. He was about to knock for a third time when a lock clunked and the door was opened just far enough for a security chain to pull tight.
A face appeared in the gap just a little higher than Hamza’s waist height. Despite the relatively short distance between it and the ground, the head appeared to be adult-sized, with a scar on one cheek, and a thick, luxurious moustache like a 70s porn star.
“What you want?” the little man demanded. Hamza had been expecting a helium-style falsetto, but the guy sounded like he’d been gargling with gravel. Shut your eyes, and he was an old-school Glasgow hardman, ready to chib anyone who looked at him the wrong way.
“Uh, hi. Are you…” Hamza almost couldn’t bring himself to say the word. Then, he remembered the dog, and his sense of self-preservation forced it out of him. “…Dinky?”
“Who’s asking?”
Hamza produced his warrant card. “Detective Sergeant Hamza Khaled,” he said. From the other side of the house, he heard a frenzied howl, and his buttocks clenched so suddenly his arse nearly folded inwards. “Mind if I come in and ask you a few questions?”
A few moments before Hamza got an answer at the door, Tyler was feeling pretty pleased with himself. He’d found his rhythm now and, as a result, keeping the dog distracted was turning out to be a walk in the park.
All he had to do was keep walking, and the mutt would follow. If it started to get distracted, he could wave his arms around, or clap his hands, or make some disparaging remarks about its heritage, and he’d have its full attention once again.
The dog, for its part, was less happy about the situation. Tyler had been called to deal with a few stray dog situations when he was back in Uniform, but this was the angriest bastard of a thing he’d ever seen. And it wasn’t even a close-run thing. He had no doubt whatsoever that, given the opportunity, the dog would eat him alive. Literally.
And possibly without having to chew.
He plodded on a little further, keeping one eye on the snarling demon-beast, and another on the house. They were almost around the back of the cottage now, where an old-style Volkswagen Beetle stood propped up on bricks, most of its parts long-since cannibalised.
The curtains were all drawn, Tyler thought, although the green-tinged grime on the windows made it difficult to say for certain. There was no sign of movement, though, and had it not been for the dog in the garden looking quite so well fed, Tyler would’ve guessed the place had been abandoned for months.
Shit. The dog!
It had stopped a few paces back, and now stood with its head cocked and an ear pointed to the sky, a growl growing at the back of its throat.
Tyler did a sudden star jump, clapping his hands together above his head. “Oi! Bollock-breath! Over here!” he yelped.
That did the trick. The animal charged at the fence, teeth bared, long strings of saliva swinging from its slavering jaws. Despite the barrier between them, Tyler skipped back a few steps. Each furious bark shot past him like the crack of a bullet. They echoed off the hillside and rolled away across the bracken and heather.
“Yeah, yeah, very good. Woof, woof, woof,” Tyler mocked. “Everyone’s very impressed by the racket you’re making. That was a lie, by the way. Everyone hates you.”
He continued on, headed for the very back of the house—the furthest point from the front door. This time, he side-stepped, keeping a closer eye on the mutt.
With a bit of luck, Hamza would already be inside. Keeping the dog occupied until he had finished asking his questions shouldn’t be too much trouble. His mere existence seemed to be enough to hold its attention for now.
“Like taking candy from a baby,” Tyler said.
The next side-step brought him level with a gap in the fence.
Quite a big gap.
Two whole missing panels, in fact.
Tyler stared at the space where that part of the fence should have been. His head shook from side to side, like it was refusing to believe what it was seeing.
The dog stopped barking.
Tyler swallowed, smiled, then took a slow sideways step back in the direction he’d come, hoping that the mutt hadn’t noticed the opening.
No such luck.
The dog threw back its head and howled like a werewolf on the hunt. The sound was an ancient, primal thing, and some aeons-old instinct in DC Neish flared into life.
“Oh. Shit,” he whispered.
And then, as the boggle-eye hellhound launched itself through the gap, he ran.
Dinky’s living room was, not to put too fine a point on it, a shithole. Not literally—the generous slabs of dog faeces that dotted the garden didn’t make an appearance here—but it was, in every other conceivable sense.
Empty bottles and cans lay in puddles on the threadbare carpet. Newspapers were stacked taller than the house’s owner, piled up on the floor, the couch, the coffee table, and almost every other reasonably level surface.
Nicotine had yellowed the paintwork, and turned the blue sky of a printed landscape canvas into a sickly shade of sea green.
No wonder the little man sounded the way he did. If he’d been responsible for half the nicotine staining, it was a miracle he had a throat left.
And the smell… God. The smell.
As a child, many years ago, Hamza had taken a sneaky swig from a beer can at a neighbour’s Hogmanay party, only to discover that the half-empty can had been serving as a makeshift ashtray for the past half hour.
The living room of Dinky’s house smelled exactly like that had tasted—sour, stale, bitter, and eye-wateringly, stomach-churningly awful.
“Take a seat, if you can find one,” Dinky instructed.
Hamza couldn’t find one. He didn’t look, granted, but even if he had spotted somewhere to sit, there was no way he was letting on. Standing would be fine. Standing would be far preferable to the alternative.
Dinky didn’t bat an eyelid when Hamza remained on his feet. He clambered up onto an armchair, shuffled in beside a stack of old Radio Times, then sparked up a comically oversized cigarette and clutched it between two stubby fingers.
“So?” the little man said, urging him on with a wave of a hand and a waft of smoke. “What you want?”
“Are you, eh… Are you Dinky?” Hamza asked.
“The fuck’s that supposed to mean? What are you saying, exactly? You taking the piss out of my size?” demanded the dwarf. He took a long draw on his cigarette while Hamza hummed and hawed through the beginnings of an apology, then gave a nod of his disproportionately large head. “Aye. I’m Dinky. What can I do you for?”
Hamza aborted the apology halfway through. There had been no laugh or smile from the man in the chair. No ‘gotcha!’ or other acknowledgement that he’d been joking. He had just spoken in the same gravelly Glasgow monotone, his expression giving nothing away.
“Right,” Hamza began. “OK, good, so—”
“Hiya!” said a slurred voice from the couch.
A visibly inebriated older man with a nose so red he could’ve led a team of reindeer through a pea souper, leaned out from behind a stack of papers and gave a friendly little finger-wave.
“You alright, pet?” the old man ask
ed, all gums and grin. He had the look of the long-term jakey about him. Too much drink and too many drugs, over too many years, had pickled his brain and shunted him into a sort of docile slow motion, out of step with the rest of the world.
“Uh… aye. I’m fine, thanks,” Hamza said. “Sorry, who are you?”
“That’s Ally Bally,” Dinky announced, which immediately caused the old man to burst into tuneless song.
“Ally bally, ally bally bee,” he sang, still beaming from ear to ear, and holding unflinching eye contact with Hamza. “Sittin’ on yer mammy’s knee. Greetin’ for a wee bawbee, tae buy wee Dinky’s candy.”
Dinky thumped a hand on the arm of the chair and cackled through a cloud of cigarette smoke. “That was fucking magic, big man! Fucking proud of you, by the way! Fucking proud of the big Ally Bally!” He looked up at Hamza. “Was that no’ pure fucking magic?”
“Aye, it was good, aye,” Hamza said.
This was a lie. It wasn’t good. Not by any stretch of the imagination. Not by any known definition of the word.
Mildly unsettling? Oh yes.
But good? Not even close. Not by a long shot.
“Now, what was it you said your name was again?” Dinky asked.
“DS Hamza Khaled.”
Ally Bally gawped up at him in wonder. “Is that a spaceman’s name?” he asked. Quite genuinely, Hamza thought. “Are you a spaceman, man?” He snorted loudly at that, said, “Spaceman, man,” again, then fell back out of sight behind the stack of papers, laughing away to himself.
“Is this about the cow?” Dinky asked.
Hamza frowned. “Cow? What cow?”
“Doesn’t matter then,” Dinky said. “So, what’s it to do with?”
It took Hamza a moment to remember why he was there, the sheer absurdity of the scene momentarily throwing him for a loop.
“I believe you’ve had some dealings with a Fergus Forsyth recently.”
“You can say that again. Fucker owes me two grand,” Dinky said. “Is he in trouble? What’s he done? He’d better still be able to pay me back that money.”
“He’s dead,” Hamza announced.
Dinky’s face tightened, his mouth becoming a thin, narrow slit. “You are fucking kidding me,” he intoned. “Tell me this is a fucking joke right now.”
“No joke,” Hamza told him. “He was attacked and killed on Monday.”
“That selfish prick!” Dinky bellowed. He thumped a child-sized fist down on the arm of the chair, and half a dozen magazines immediately toppled over into his lap. “He’d better have mentioned me in his will, I’ll tell you that much. Two grand he’s due me. Two grand!”
“That’s a lot of money, Dinky,” the drunk on the couch chimed in.
“You fucking shut up,” Dinky warned him. There was a dangerous glint in his eye, and his face was reddening from the neck up. As dwarfs went, he was definitely Grumpy. “No one’s talking to you, so button your fucking lip! Alright?”
“Aye, sure Dinky. Message received and understood,” Ally Bally said, Dinky’s sudden change in demeanour sharp enough to cut through his decades-long stupor. He mimed zipping his mouth shut, crossed his arms, then sat back out of sight behind the newspapers once more.
“What did he owe you the money for?” Hamza asked.
“Because I lent it to him. Why else would he owe me money?”
Hamza shrugged. “I heard a wee rumour that you’ve been running a bookie’s out here,” he said.
“A bookie? Me. Naw. That would be illegal, officer,” Dinky replied. “Couldn’t be having that, now, could we? Naw, me and Fergus just had a friendly wee arrangement between two pals. That was all.”
“You wouldn’t have been charging interest, then?”
Dinky snorted. “I said I was his pal. No’ that I was a mug. Aye, there was interest. At a very reasonable rate.”
“Which was?” Hamza asked.
Dinky was not liking this line of questioning. A vein was throbbing on one temple, and he was flexing his fingers in and out, like the motion was the only thing keeping his temper in check.
“I’d have to have a think about that,” he finally said, giving himself a tap on the side of the head. “Dig around in the old memory banks. See what comes up. If you want to leave your phone number, I can get back to you.”
“Fair enough. What did he want the money for?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t ask.”
“You loaned two grand to someone and you didn’t ask what it was for?”
“No. I didn’t. Something about some woman, I think. I don’t know. I’m no’ a fucking building society. I don’t give a shit what it’s for. All I care about is that I get it back.”
Hamza nodded. “Well,” he said, rocking back on his heels. “I’m afraid that’s looking unlikely.”
“Fuck’s sake!” Dinky ejected. “You do someone a favour—you do a good fucking deed—and this is what you get.”
“Favours don’t usually come with interest rates,” Hamza pointed out. He had his doubts that the man in the oversized chair would have ever done a genuine good deed in his life.
“You can help people out and be a fucking businessman,” Dinky snapped back. “The two aren’t… What is it?”
“Mutually exclusive,” Ally Bally said.
“Fucking shut up,” Dinky barked at him. “Aye. That’s it. Mutually exclusive.”
Hamza pulled a noncommittal sort of face that said he disagreed, but that he didn’t want to get into a debate about it.
Instead, he moved on to a more relevant line of questioning.
“Where were you on Monday, Dinky?”
“Same place I am every day,” Dinky replied. “Right here.”
“All day?”
“All day, every day.”
“And you’ve got witnesses who’ll confirm that?”
Dinky grinned. “Dozens.”
“Dozens?” Hamza arched his eyebrows. “Have a party, did you?”
“Every day’s a party here,” Dinky said.
Hamza looked around them. Ally Bally was peeking out at him from behind the cover of the newspaper stack, still looking somewhat awestruck.
“Shite party, then,” Hamza remarked.
“It was great craic until you turned up,” Dinky replied. “Ally Bally’ll tell you I was here all day. And I can give you twenty other names who’ll all say the same.” He pushed the magazines off him, and they slid onto the dirty carpet with a series of slapping sounds. “You’re barking up the wrong tree, if you think I did Fergus in, pal. That’s the last thing I want, swear to fuck. Now, if he’d been kidnapped and tortured, I’d get it. Few fingers cut off, maybe. Coming to me then? Aye. Then it makes sense. But, I can’t exactly get my money back if he’s dead, can I?”
“No. I suppose not,” Hamza conceded.
“Good. Right. So, we’re done, then?” Dinky asked.
Hamza shook his head, took out his notebook, and flipped to a blank page. “I’m afraid not. I’m going to need that list of names you mentioned…”
Ten minutes later, Hamza returned to the car, sat in the passenger seat, then almost screamed with fright when Tyler rose up from behind him, his face ghostly white beneath a caked-on layer of mud.
“Is it gone?” the DC hissed. He kept low and peered out through the side windows in the back. “Is it… Is it gone?”
“What? The dog?”
“Yes, the fucking dog! Of course, the dog!” Tyler yelped. He clamped a hand over his mouth and ducked, bracing himself for an attack that didn’t come.
“Yeah, he called it in before I left,” Hamza revealed. “It was actually alright when he brought it in. Quite friendly.”
“Friendly?!” Tyler gasped. “Try telling that to my arse cheeks! If you can even find them!”
He reached for the door handle, thought better of it, then clambered through the gap between the front seats and slid awkwardly behind the wheel.
Hamza watched all this while biting do
wn on his bottom lip, but the ragged backside of Tyler’s trousers tipped him over the edge, and the car began to shake with his silent-but-violent giggles.
“It’s not fucking funny!” Tyler protested. “I’ll need to go get a tetanus shot now. Although, how they’ll do that, I have no idea, since I’ve got no arse left for them to stick the needle in.”
“It’s not that bad, is it?” Hamza asked.
“No’ that bad?! Look!” Tyler angled himself until one buttock was pointing up at the Detective Sergeant. “Check that out!”
“I’m not going to check out your arse!”
Tyler tutted. “I sustained a work-related injury. It’s your duty to check my arse!”
With a sigh of resignation, Hamza checked his arse.
“There’s nothing wrong with it,” he said, once he’d given the offered cheek a once-over. “I don’t think it broke the skin. Maybe a bit of bruising, but that’s it.”
“Bollocks!”
“I’m no’ checking them,” Hamza said. “I draw the line there.”
Tyler pawed at his buttock through the hole in his trousers, then checked his hand. “I was sure it was bound to be bleeding. It felt like the bastarding thing sunk its teeth right in.”
“Looks OK to me. You can always check in the mirror.”
Tyler began twisting his way out of the seat. “Good idea.”
“No’ the rearview mirror!” Hamza said, stopping him before he could go any further. “Later. In the hotel or something, I mean.”
Tyler stopped, thought this over, then sat down again. “Aye, that makes more sense, right enough,” he admitted, then he nodded in the direction of the house the DS had just come from. “Tell me you got something worthwhile, at least. Tell me I didn’t go through all that for nothing.”
“Well, it was…” Hamza tried to think of the perfect word to describe the experience, before concluding that a suitable one probably didn’t exist. “…interesting. It was an interesting twenty minutes. Let’s just put it like that.”
“Aye, well,” Tyler grunted, starting the engine and crunching the car into gear. “I bet not half as bloody interesting as mine.”