Peacock's Alibi

by Stuart David

  ‘Oh, I will wait and see,’ she said. ‘I absolutely will. And I’ll tell you what – I hope you fail. I really do. And I’ll tell you why, because the sooner you fail the sooner you can start growing up, and treating Beverly the way you should be treating her. Chipping in. I’m actually willing you to fail now so I am. For everybody’s good.’

  Charming, eh? It was something else altogether to sit there listening to her bumming up the qualities of Vince Cowie in contrast to my own failings, knowing what I knew about him, and guessing beyond that to everything else he might be caught up in. Still, I managed to keep that on the back burner.

  ‘You’re going to be sorely disappointed if that’s your attitude,’ I told her. ‘No doubt about it. You’re in for a bit of a shock when I’m rolling in it this time next year.’

  ‘You’ll be lucky if you’re not in prison this time next year,’ she said, ‘what with Duncan McFadgen on your trail night and day.’

  ‘Who told you that?’ I said.

  ‘Beverley did.’

  ‘I did not,’ Bev said.

  ‘Well, you said he was round here the other night,’ Wilma said. ‘And Vince has been filling me in on the rest. You’re in big trouble if Vince is right, Peacock Johnson. Big trouble.’

  ‘Just as well he’s wrong then,’ I said, ‘about everything.’

  ‘He’s right in his assessment of your ideas so he is,’ she said. ‘As am I. And you’ve never had a good one in your puff.’

  ‘What about my idea for a record?’

  ‘Rotten.’

  ‘That’s not what you said at the time.’

  ‘I was being polite.’

  ‘What about my idea for hiding the adverts on the telly?’

  ‘Mince.’

  ‘Oh for God’s sake, you two!’ the wife suddenly shouted. ‘Stop your bickering, will you? I’m just in, my head’s splitting, and I’m trying to unwind. Peacock, away downstairs and see wee Jinky or something. Give Wilma and me a bit of peace and quiet to have a nice conversation. Come on, beat it.’

  ‘Jinky’s away,’ I said. ‘He’s in Malta. With the Tartan Army.’

  She fair perked up a bit at that, the wife. She bounced out of the slouch she’d adopted and sat up straight on the couch. Then she turned towards Wilma and laid a hand on her arm, beaming. ‘Wait till I tell you about what happened to wee Jinky. Do you know him? Gordon Jenkins? Peacock’s pal that lives down the stair?’

  Wilma nodded. ‘I do, unfortunately. He was in here that night after my divorce came through.’

  ‘That’s right,’ Bev said. ‘I’d forgotten about his carry-on that night. Anyway, he was flying out to Malta a few days ago to watch Scotland playing . . . Is that right, Peacock?’

  I nodded.

  ‘You should’ve seen him, Wilma,’ Bev said. ‘All done up in the kilt, saltire painted on his face. I saw him on my way out to work that morning. Eight o’clock and he’s standing out on the street all done up like that, a wee tartan bunnet and a football top on, waiting for a taxi, freezing to death. His legs were nearly as blue as his face, and he was chittering away – on the verge of hypothermia it seemed to me. Have you ever seen him in a kilt, Peacock?’

  ‘Not that I remember.’

  ‘Well, he’s hardly got the legs for it, I can tell you that. But he was that excited. I stopped to have a quick word with him, and it turned out he’d never been away with the Tartan Army before. This was his first time. He was like a wean going on a school trip to the safari park – totally buzzing.’

  She shook her head at the memory, then took a good long drink from the gin and tonic. It was unclear if there was a punchline to the story, or if that was it. You can never tell with the wife – she’s as liable to drift off onto another subject as she is to finish any story she starts, and half the time you can never work out if there’s any relationship between the place she begun and where she’s ended up.

  ‘Is that it?’ Wilma said, and Bev shook her head while she was still drinking, the ice cubes rattling about in the glass.

  ‘Wait till you hear what happened,’ she said, and she leant forward and put her drink down on the coffee table. ‘Jinky got to the airport, two hours before the flight. And after he checked in he got so blootered with his pals in the departure lounge the airline refused to let him on the plane. I saw him in the close on my way out to work this morning. “I thought you were away until next week,” I says, and he told me the whole story. He’s mortified. Said he’s been hiding himself away in the hope nobody would find out. He never even got a refund on his ticket.’

  The top of my head went fizzy, as if the blood had been diverted elsewhere, and for a minute I thought I might pass out. Who the fuck gets too drunk to be allowed on a plane? What a fucking tadger.

  ‘So you see,’ Bev said, her voice sounding as if it was a couple of hundred yards away, ‘there’s nothing stopping you going to visit him, Peacock. Away downstairs and give Wilma and me peace for a while.’

  ‘Right,’ I said, and got unsteadily to my feet. ‘Right, aye.’

  My McFadgen plan was fucked. I had to find Jinky quick smart and let him know what I’d let him in for – help him to get his story straight. I grabbed my coat and headed for the door, still feeling like I might keel over at any minute.

  ‘I’ll see you when your idea’s gone to hell in a handbasket,’ Wilma shouted after me, but I didn’t even bother to think up a reply. I just wobbled my way down the steps, two and three at a time, hoping to Christ I could find the wee man before McFadgen did.

  10

  Here’s a strange thing.

  As I ran about the town looking for Jinky – his girlfriend having told me he’d left the flat early in the morning, and that she hadn’t seen him since – I kept becoming aware of this feeling nudging at me that something good had happened. Beneath the outright panic, beneath the chaos in my mind as I tried to work out where to look for Jinky next, and beneath the self-recrimination over the position I’d put the wee man in, there was this other thing going on. This nudging.

  I was well aware it wasn’t connected to the immediate business at hand – that it had nothing to do with Jinky, or McFadgen – so I did my best to ignore it. I gave my full attention to trying to track the Jinkster down, and ran myself ragged on the city streets, trying to put things right. But all the same, there it was, like a constant companion – this feeling that I’d somehow won a watch or something.

  It’s a stick-on that when Jinky’s not sitting on his arse in his flat, the first place you can usually find him is in the bookies on West Nile Street. It’s the bane of my life that whenever he wants to put a bet on we have to traipse halfway across the city just to get to that particular place. It’s not even as if there’s any special ambience in there, or a crowd of pals that give you a good welcome. It’s as characterless as any other chainstore bookies, full of sour faces and antisocial punters. But Jinky’s won big there a couple of times, and for that reason he’s deemed the place lucky.

  ‘Jinky,’ I’m forever telling him, ‘you’ve lost a fucking fortune in there, son. It’s just as likely there’s a curse on the place.’

  But his few big wins have wiped out all semblance of rational judgement on his part, and in the end you have to respect a gambler’s superstitions.

  ‘Has he been in yet?’ I asked Pete, the permanent fixture behind the counter who looks as if he hasn’t seen daylight since about 1975.

  ‘He was in this morning,’ he said. ‘Haven’t seen him since.’

  ‘Did he win?’

  Pete shook his head, which was at least a pointer to where he might have gone next. If he’d won, it would be a cert he’d either be in John Jack’s casino, trying to ride his luck as far as it would go, or in the arcades at the far end of Sauchiehall Street, doing the same thing. Without the boost of a win he was much more likely to be in one of his usual haunts, and I paid each of them a visit in turn: the Horseshoe Bar, the Vale bar, the shops that were just closing in the A
rgyll Arcade.

  Nothing doing.

  It occurred to me that things would have been a hell of a lot easier if the two of us were less paranoid about the tracking possibilities of the mobile phone. I could probably have hunted him down in about five minutes. As it was, by the time I gave the McDonald’s on Argyll Street a look, and found it lacking his presence, I realised I was absolutely starving, and I grabbed some chips and a cup of tea for myself, and sat down to revitalise my energy levels.

  The place was next to empty – nice and quiet – and as I sat there wondering where in hell the wee man might be, dipping my chips in a wee paper cup of barbecue sauce, the thing that had been nudging at me constantly throughout my travels suddenly made itself fully present. It burst into my consciousness front and centre, in full-blown Technicolor, and I finally understood why it had been making me feel so good, despite everything.

  It was nothing other than a realisation, and it was as simple as this: I was off the hook regarding any sense of obligation I’d previously felt towards Wilma Caldwell. If there’s one thing I don’t take kindly to, it’s somebody badmouthing my ideas, and Wilma had certainly excelled herself in that department. She’d gone above and beyond the call of duty, in my view. But as it turned out, she’d actually done me a massive favour, cause her slanderous outburst had removed the feelings of guilt I’d been experiencing about letting her walk blindly into her union with Vincent Cowie. Absolutely. Fuck her – that was my attitude to the whole thing now. She was on her own. And on top of that, she’d set me the ultimate challenge: to prove to her that my latest idea would be a massive success.

  Challenge accepted.

  I felt a muscle that had previously been tight and troubled relaxing somewhere down deep in the recesses of my brain. I was good to go. And even the fact that I’d so far failed to lay my hands on the Jinkster was less distressing, now that a wave of the good stuff was washing over me. I’d find Jinky. No question. Before the night was out, I’d have tracked him down, explained the situation to him, and we’d have worked out a way to keep him hidden from McFadgen for a few more days. And I’d fall asleep ticking over the problem of who to send McFadgen off in pursuit of next, drifting into oblivion like a baby.

  I took a right good swallow of my sugary tea, put paid to the remainder of my chips, and then I sat back in my seat and gave some thought to where I could look for Jinky next. The longer I sat there, though, the more I started to get the weird feeling that there was actually somebody sitting next to me, at my own table, in a seat I’d been sure was empty just a few minutes earlier. I paid some attention to my peripheral vision, and the more I did the more I became certain there was some mad bastard sitting there – hardly moving, hardly breathing. And in the end the tension got too much for me, and I swung right round to examine exactly what was going on. And I’d been right. Dead on. There was somebody sitting beside me, staring into space, happy as Larry. And that somebody – are you ready for this? – that somebody, was Detective Inspector Duncan McFadgen.

  As I live and breathe.

  ‘Have you been looking for Gordon Jenkins?’ McFadgen asked me. Straight in. No preliminaries, no ‘fancy bumping into you here’, not even a casual hello. Just immediately down to business.

  It took me a minute to work out whether I was coming or going, but then I was on it. ‘I told you earlier,’ I said. ‘We’re far from being on speaking terms these days.’

  ‘I’m well aware of what you told me earlier,’ McFadgen said, ‘but it hardly matches up with your recent actions. You’ve spent the past hour and a half nipping in and out of Jinky’s favourite haunts. Am I wrong?’

  I turned round and glared at the guy. I was seriously starting to wonder if he’d had me microchipped, so he could follow my movements via GPS. It was unbelievable.

  ‘You’re way off,’ I told him. ‘If I don’t see Jinky till the middle of the next century it’ll still be too soon. I’ve had it with the clown. Totally.’

  McFadgen got up out of his seat and moved round to the other side of the table to sit facing me. The lights in McDonald’s are never particularly flattering, but they definitely had it in for McFadgen. I was glad I’d already finished my chips. He’d have put me right off them otherwise.

  ‘If that’s the truth,’ he said, ‘then this is your lucky day. Cause I can pretty much guarantee you won’t be seeing him for a good few years. We’ve got him down at the station right now, and I’d be willing to stake my reputation on the fact that he won’t be coming out again.’

  I adopted the poker face. Jinky would be in a right stinker with me for weeks about this, no question. I’d have to go to a hell of a length to make it up to him, but at least McFadgen would look like a right plum when the matter of Magaluf finally raised its napper.

  ‘You got him on the painting?’ I said. ‘You’ve got to hand it to John Jack, eh? He rarely puts a foot wrong.’

  McFadgen smiled. Not a good move considering the harshness of the fluorescent lighting. Not a good look for him in there at all. I don’t think I’d ever noticed how truly gruesome his teeth were before. Far from pretty – let’s just leave it at that.

  ‘You know we didn’t get him on the painting,’ he said. ‘And you know we won’t. Do you think I zip up the back, Johnson? Honestly? My guess is you only just found out Gordon failed to make it to Malta. And I’m pretty sure that’s how come you’ve been haring about the town trying to track him down, hoping you can warn him what’s going on before I get to him. But I got to him. Hours ago. He was in the Vale bar. A good two-and-a-half hours before you even thought about looking in there. And it didn’t take long to establish that he was in Magaluf at the time that painting was stolen. What kind of operation do you think I’m running here? Some kind of training course for mentally challenged cadets?’

  I had to admit, from where I was sitting, that was exactly how it looked.

  ‘So you’ve arrested him for doing something that happened while he was thousands of miles away?’ I said. ‘How the hell does that work?’

  ‘It works like this,’ McFadgen said. ‘Nobody’s claiming we arrested him for stealing the painting. Like we both know, he’s got a stone-cold alibi to prove otherwise. But the thing he hasn’t got, importantly, is an alibi for the twenty-third of June between the hours of seven and ten o’clock. And that’s why, barring the formalities, he’s been arrested for the murder of Dougie Dowds. And I reluctantly have to admit I’ve got you to thank for helping us make that arrest.’

  This news hit me like a full-on kick in the stones. The pain was actually physical. And it was a mindbender on top of that – a real brain-melter – I couldn’t make head nor tail of it.

  ‘Wait a wee minute here, McFadgen,’ I said. ‘I don’t think I’m quite following you, pal. You’re telling me John Jack was havering when he said Jinky took that painting, right? Fair play, I can just about buy that. Everybody’s capable of making a mistake once in their life. But how are you getting from the fact that Jinky was in Magaluf when the painting was stolen to the idea that he murdered Dougie Dowds? I think I must have missed a step or two.’

  McFadgen employed that manky smile again. ‘I told you,’ he said. ‘He’s unable to confirm his whereabouts on the evening in question. He’s got no alibi.’

  I stared at him while the wheels of my brain spun chaotically.

  ‘Listen, McFadgen,’ I said, ‘I told you I’d be happy enough to see Jinky locked up for nicking that picture. That’s a given. The guy’s nothing but a thorn in my side at the minute. But standing by while he gets a life sentence is something else again. You’re just after telling me that the reason you’ve been suspecting me’s because I have got an alibi. You’ve been telling me that’s an anomaly – that folk can very rarely prove where they were at any given time – so what the hell’s going on here? If the only thing you’ve got on Jinky’s the fact that he’s devoid of an alibi, how the hell can that mean anything? By your own reckoning?’

  ‘It can’t,
’ McFadgen said. ‘And it wouldn’t, if that was all I had on him. But it’s not all I’ve got, is it?’

  ‘It looks hell of a like it to me.’

  He shook his head. ‘What I’ve got, Johnson, is this. I’ve got one guy with a cast-iron alibi for the time a highly valuable painting was stolen. I’ve got a murder victim who was on the verge of telling me who had stolen that painting, just before he was killed. And then I’ve got another guy with a cast-iron alibi for the time this informant was murdered. Now, when you take into account that these two guys with the unbreakable alibis are a long-term double act, and that one of them has just spent the past couple of hours charging about Glasgow with the intention of informing the other that I’m about to start questioning him, that seems like a hell of a coincidence, does it not? Surely I’d have to be some kind of deranged lunatic to refrain from drawing the obvious conclusions from that pile of evidence. No?’

  McFadgen’s unique brand of faulty logic had rarely failed to astound me in the past, but this was something else altogether. This was a guy on the precipice of a full-scale mental collapse, it seemed to me.

  ‘I’m inclined to adhere to the opposite point of view, McFadgen,’ I said. ‘Coming to that conclusion seems to me the work of a deranged lunatic. Are you for real? Seriously?’

  He wiggled about in his seat and leant across the table towards me. ‘I told you I’d get you,’ he said. ‘And the way I see it now, you’ve got two options. You can either admit that you killed Dougie Dowds and save your daft pal from rotting away in Barlinnie for the rest of his life, or you can leave me to question Gordon for a few days – let me convince him he’ll get a sizeable chunk of time off for helping us to bring in whoever stole that painting, and I’ll get you that way. Your choice. Are you in the mood for doing the right thing?’

  I knew it was going to be far from pleasant, getting even closer to McFadgen’s bulbous face and bogging teeth under the harsh fluorescent lights, but I bit the bullet and aped the way he was leaning forward, to meet him in the middle of the table.