by Stuart David
Even out on the kerb I thought he’d decided just to keep sitting there, till I noticed he was actually moving, almost imperceptibly. Shuddering off into the flow of traffic, while I stood getting my story straight for Brian.
It didn’t take me long. Rab Clark, that was the solution. John Jack was sending me into the belly of the beast for a couple of weeks, to get him some information from Rab Clark.
‘So don’t worry about our joint endeavour if you hear I’ve been lifted, Brian,’ I’d say. ‘It’s purely temporary, strictly a set-up. As soon as I’ve got the lowdown from Rab, John Jack’ll point the law in the direction of the real villain and I’ll be out of there again.’
And the best of it was, if he asked, I could feign ignorance about who was guilty of the crime I was owning up to – say J.J. wouldn’t tell me in case I freaked out in prison and spilled the beans to get myself released, before I’d completed the job at hand.
Lovely.
Then when Vince actually went down, my record would remain unblemished in Brian’s eyes. The responsibility for ruining Wilma’s future would fall entirely at John Jack’s feet. Fair and square.
I was already halfway up the path by the time I’d it fully figured out. No hanging about when he answered the door, that was the main thing. I pushed the bell and stood there waiting, rehearsing my bit, editing it down – ‘I’m in a right rush, Brian. This is just a quick heads up. Neither business nor pleasure, just a wee warning.’
He’s got one hell of a pad, the Brian Caldwell chap. It makes you feel good just to be associated with the guy. Big detached job, huge garden, gravel driveway. What it always says to me is this is where you’re heading, Peacock, now that you’re going into business with this guy. Out of the manky Southside flat and into a place like this. No problem. From what I understand, the reason he got to keep it when Wilma and him split up was because he runs his architect’s business from there. Lives there and works there. So he paid a premium in alimony to be allowed to keep it.
You can see how you’d end up attached to a place like that. Absolutely. If Jinky broke down under McFadgen’s questioning and stood between me and a place like this, he’d better fucking watch himself – that’s all I could think. Hang in there, Jinky, son – just another half hour. Forty-five minutes at the outside. Breathe deeply, Jinks – withhold the information.
Your pal Peacock’s on his way.
I watched the light coming on in the hallway and Brian’s misty shape moving towards me behind the frosted glass. He was wearing something yellow – a jumper or a cardigan.
‘Hurry up,’ I muttered to myself, and then he was there – door open, big smiles. We were good to go.
If there’s one thing you can say about Brian Caldwell, it’s this – the bastard can fair talk. He’d already started talking before he even opened the door, and before I could interrupt him he’d turned and was halfway back down the hall, muttering something about cavolo nero.
‘It’s just coming to the boil,’ he informed me. ‘Just in here. The advice was to chiffonade the leaves prior to blanching. That’s what the recipe says anyway.’
‘I was just . . .’ I shouted, but he’d turned towards an open doorway and disappeared. I’d been intending to give him the full pitch right there on the doorstep. The last thing I’d wanted to do was cross the threshold, but I couldn’t see any avoiding it. I could still hear him yabbering away – seemingly under the impression that I’d followed him in – so I was forced to do just that. I whacked the door shut behind me and jogged towards the room he’d gone into, determined to disrupt his monologue.
‘I’m just following a video some guy posted online,’ he said. ‘Who knows how it’ll turn out. By rights, I should really be working. I’ve got a commission with a deadline for a week on Wednesday, but it’s been driving me daft. You need a break sometimes. So I thought I’d give the cavolo nero a go. See how it turns out. That’s the worst thing about living and working in the same place, too many distractions. And then again, you never really clock off. You’re always working. Hang on . . . let me just turn the heat up a bit.’
‘Brian,’ I said, ‘I’m only here for a minute. I’m on a schedule. I’ve . . .’
‘Ah,’ he said, ‘the joint venture. How’s it coming along? Are we looking good? You were saying you’re still scouting potential venues. How are things looking? I was talking to Sandy Boyle the other day, and he was telling me about a new place out near the Barras. Sounded promising. And discreet. Let me think now, how much was it he said they were asking? It seemed pretty reasonable.’
Now, to be honest, I should probably have taken a few deep breaths at this point and then had another go at drawing the guy’s attention to the immediacy of the situation, in a reasonable and controlled manner. But I was just about at the end of my rope. John Jack’s dithering, the taxi driver apparently strung out on Temazepam, and now this – it had me rammed up to the limit. At that very moment, Jinky could be deciding that all that mattered in the world was sleep, and he could be making up his mind to give them whatever they wanted, just for a chance to lie down and drift off into the dreamless. So I suppose I saw red. And I suppose, with the benefit of hindsight, I maybe went a wee bit overboard.
‘For fuck’s sake, Brian, shut the fuck up!’ I roared. Full voice, mind. And so close to him that I could see wisps of his hair blowing back in the blast. ‘This is serious, pal. I’m not here on a social visit. I’m not here to learn about the finer points of boiling a fucking cabbage. This is life or death, Brian. Pay attention, son.’
I don’t suppose you can really blame the guy for the look that appeared on his face. He was fair taken aback, I can tell you that. But give him his due, he didn’t accept matters lying down. The boy stood his ground. He straightened himself up to his full height and took a step closer towards me. He did at least shut the fuck up for a minute, though, there was that to be said for my efforts – I’d at least managed to achieve my aim.
I took quick advantage of the situation, and dived in there before he got started up again.
‘Wee Jinky,’ I said. ‘Right? He’s been nabbed. He’s currently sitting in a police cell, courtesy of a detective inspector by the name of McFadgen. He’s . . .’
I realised I’d lost my train of thought. I was going into jail at the request of John Jack – that was the message I was here to deliver. But I’d got myself into a hell of a mess, no doubt owing to the highly charged atmosphere and the urgent need for me to be on my way.
‘McFadgen’s convinced Jinky killed a boy called Dougie Dowds,’ I said. ‘But I know otherwise. That’s what I’m here to tell you. That’s what we need to be talking about, Brian. Not whatever’s going on with your pot there. Not whether I’ve found us premises yet. Are you understanding me? This is serious business, Brian. Jinky’s sitting in there, right now, fighting for his life, and meanwhile you’re . . .’
A horrific burst of pain exploded on the inside of my skull, and all of a sudden I was helpless. One minute, I appeared to be standing up staring Brian in the face, the next I’d come to with a different view of the room altogether, convinced beyond all doubt that I must have had a stroke, or something of that nature. Brian was standing over me, peering at me in a puzzled manner, and I didn’t seem to be able to move. I was dizzy as fuck, everything sort of spinning, and I tried to lift a hand up to touch my head, to grab at where the pain was centred.
Nothing doing.
The will was there. As far as I could tell I was sending the signal to the desired limb, but that’s where the whole operation hit a brick wall. The arm itself refused to obey the command. So I switched my thinking to the other arm and gave that a go instead – same story. No response.
I became certain then that I must have blown something serious in my overheated brain. Thinking about it logically, it was hardly surprising – the ideas had been coming thick and fast ever since I’d had the big one about giving myself up to McFadgen. And on top of that, there’d been the c
onstant stress of trying to get to McFadgen before Jinky snapped, and never quite managing it.
I tried to focus more intently on the Brian chap. Everything was still hell of a fuzzy, but he was continuing to lean in towards me, squinting at me, and I realised there was a further consequence to this unfortunate development. Me having the stroke had left the way clear for him to get a word in edgewise again, and he was taking full advantage of the opportunity. As his image sharpened I clocked that he was talking – non-stop. And although things were sounding as if I’d been submerged in a tank of gloop, I tried to get a handle on what he was saying.
‘I don’t know what to do,’ I heard. And something like, ‘What did you have to do that for?’ And then again, ‘What am I supposed to do, Peacock? Eh? What can I do?’
In the main, I was getting two messages. One, he was in a right panic about how to go about helping me, and two, he definitely seemed to be berating me for having fallen victim to this debilitating malady.
‘Why?’ he was shouting. ‘What did you have to do it for?’
Which hardly seemed all that compassionate under the circumstances. It seemed a bit harsh. I could understand his anxiety at having to deal with me in this state, especially since he seemed at such a loss as to how to go about it. But I felt it was something he could have made more of an effort to keep to himself, rather than crouching over me, bawling into my face like that. It didn’t really strike me as the most empathetic bedside manner I’d ever encountered.
‘Calm yourself,’ I tried to say. And my full expectation was that nothing would materialise at my lips, given the earlier fiasco with the arms. But as it turned out, my voice didn’t seem to have been impaired. I still had the power of speech, and I heard myself saying the intended words quite clearly. Not that they’d any effect on the ranter – he was still in full flow. But the whole thing instilled me with a certain level of confidence. The dizziness eased off a notch, the vision sharpened up to full whack, and my hearing began to return to normal.
‘What would you do in my position?’ the bold one was shouting. ‘Eh? Consider that. Ask yourself that question, and see what you come up with. You’ve put me in a very difficult place, Peacock. My back’s against the wall. Why did you have to . . .’
He backed away from me at this point and stood up properly. Then he turned his back to me and started pacing about.
‘I think I might be all right, Brian,’ I said. ‘I think everything might be okay.’
And then I suddenly realised that it absolutely wasn’t.
Seriously.
It wasn’t even close.
You see, I wasn’t lying on the floor, like I’d thought I was. I was sitting in a chair. And it wasn’t that my hands had been refusing to obey my commands earlier, it was that my hands were taped behind my back. As tight as fuck. And my ankles were taped to the legs of the chair. There was a dirty wad of tape wrapped around my chest six or seven times, securing me to the chair’s back, and then I noticed that the pot that had been boiling away on the cooker when I came in was now lying couped on the floor, the muck that had been in it strewn about the place. And it came to me that this pot was no doubt the source of the horrendous pain in my napper, and that Brian – God bless him – must have skelped me with it, just seconds before I’d passed out.
He picked another pot up from the worktop now, and hurled it at the far wall, shouting four colours of abuse at it as it careered across the floor behind me. Certainly disconcerting, don’t get me wrong, but I was somewhat preoccupied with my own wee psychodrama at the time, and his outburst had less effect on me than you might imagine. You see, I was in the middle of rejoicing at the realisation that I hadn’t actually had a stroke while at the same time dealing with the reality that there was no possible chance of me ever getting to Jinky in time now – what with the duct tape and the unhinged maniac making it quite clear he’d be keeping me here for the foreseeable future. Swings and roundabouts, I suppose. They say you always get the yin and the yang at times of great upheaval.
Your man Brian seemed to have managed to unburden himself of a good deal of frustration during his latest tantrum, though, and he calmed down somewhat and came to stand in front of me again.
‘I’m going to have to kill you,’ he said, with a touch of regret in his voice – and although I appreciated that slight concession, his statement still fair took the shine off the elation I’d been feeling about the fact that I hadn’t had a stroke.
‘How come?’ I said, and he came over a bit shirty, like he was a school teacher and I’d drifted off for a while during one of his boring lessons.
‘Self-preservation,’ he said. ‘Obviously. Do you think I’m going to stand by and let a lowlife like you drag me down? Honestly? It’s you or me, Peacock, and since I’m the one in the position of power here, I’m afraid it’s going to have to be you. What did you have to get involved for anyway? What the hell did Dougie Dowds matter to you? Surely he was as much of a thorn in your side as he was anyone else’s?’
‘I don’t think I’m quite following you, Brian,’ I said. ‘It might be something to do with the massive blow to the head I’ve just sustained, but I don’t seem to be thinking quite as clearly as usual. What in the name of fuck are you talking about?’
‘He was a grass,’ Brian said. ‘An informer. Don’t tell me you never knew that. You must have done. But contrary to what you might think, it wasn’t my intention to hurt him. Not at all. I only went round to his flat to try and talk some sense into him, and things got heated. That’s the truth. All I wanted to do was convince him to keep quiet about a painting. I offered him money. We argued about the amount. He started getting aggressive, and we got into it. That’s all that happened, with God as my witness.’
I have to admit, I was struggling to keep up – which is pretty much always the case when Brian starts spouting – but the unexpected nature of what I was hearing was playing a part in my befuddlement as well, as was my burgeoning concussion, no doubt.
‘I know you probably think I’d gone out there with the specific intention of . . . whatever,’ he said, ‘but you’re wrong. It was an accident, pure and simple. We ended up struggling out on the balcony, and then I just got the better of him. I don’t think I even realised at that point we’d ended up outside. Then I just overpowered him, and he fell. And I ran.’
He was looking a bit teary now, in actual fact. He wiped his nose on the back of his hand, and I just stared at the guy, stunned, finally grasping what he was talking about. Finally on it.
‘Eh . . .’ I said, feeling a tad awkward as a couple of tears rolled down his cheeks. ‘I think you’ve maybe jumped the gun a bit here, Brian. I think you’ve maybe got a bit ahead of yourself. I only came round to tell you I was going to be spending a couple of weeks in the slammer to get wee Jinky out of there. And to do a favour for John Jack. This whole revelation is totally news to me, pal. I’m thinking you’ve maybe given me credit for something a touch beyond my capabilities.’
‘But . . .’ he said, and his eyes widened, to an extreme degree in fact. And his face went as white as the face of a corpse. ‘But when you shouted at me you said . . .’ He stopped and he thought, no doubt rerunning the earlier conversation in his mind and trying to see it from a different angle.
‘I think it’s been a case of crossed wires,’ I said. ‘Mixed messages. It’s easily done, I suppose.’
Embarrassing, I have to admit. To be frank, I hardly knew where to look. He’d make a cock-up of epic proportions, and he knew it.
He put his head in his hands and just stood there, totally silent. It struck me that if there’d been somebody mooching about in the garden at that minute, and they’d happened to look in through the window, they’d have seen one hell of a strange sight – me sitting there trussed up with the duct tape, firmly attached to the kitchen chair, him standing in front of me with his face covered, slowly rocking backwards and forwards. It would have taken quite a bit of surmising to work out what th
e fuck was going on, I was certain of that. Still, eventually he got a grip on himself, and he re-emerged from behind his mitts in a more collected state of being.
‘So you never knew I killed Dougie when you came here?’ he asked. ‘When you said, “I’m here to put things right”, you didn’t even have an inkling?’
I shook my head. ‘Not a clue,’ I said, and, strangely, he looked like a great weight had been lifted from him. It was as if we’d gone back to that point in time, and he seemed to think that was still how things stood. He apologised for having skelped me on the skull with the ironmongery, and he seemed like his old self for a second or two, then reality apparently caught up with him, and his face darkened again.
‘But you know now . . .’ he said, and I admitted there was no getting away from that singularly uncomfortable fact.
‘I certainly appear to,’ I said. ‘Although I have to admit to being a bit confused about the whole thing. How did you even know a guy like Dougie Dowds? It’s hard to imagine the two of you moving in the same social circles.’
Brian shut his eyes. ‘I didn’t know him,’ he said. ‘He just turned up at the door one night about a month ago, and told me he’d some information concerning Wilma’s future happiness that I might be interested in.’
‘He was looking for a bung?’
Brian nodded. ‘He asked me for a hundred quid, then told me he’d heard Vince had stolen a valuable painting, in case I wanted to warn Wilma about what she might be getting herself into. I was glad to pay him. I appreciated the service. But at the time, Wilma seemed to be happy for the first time in years – truly happy – and I didn’t want to destroy that. So I decided later not to tell her. And I thought, chances are, Vince might never get caught anyway.’
‘I daresay your keenness to get your hands on that cancelled alimony played a part in your decision as well,’ I said, but he just narrowed his eyes at me, suggesting the way I thought was beneath contempt, and he battered on, telling me how Dougie had phoned up a couple of weeks later and asked how Wilma had taken the news.