Peacock's Alibi

by Stuart David

  Then the panic attack passed, and I was back to just lying there again. And if I’m being perfectly honest, although I should have been savouring each precious moment I had left on this earth, I actually started to feel quite bored. I was certain another hour had passed, and then another one. And finally, when I’d probably drifted off to sleep, I heard a thump like a hand battering down on the lid of the boot, then the unmistakable clatter of the central-locking system springing into action. Then a click, then a creak, and the cold rush of air flooding into the car as the boot finally opened.

  It turned out, though, when I looked up towards Brian, that I had yet another disaster on my plate. Maybe, I thought, this is a further symptom of the severe blow to the head, or maybe I popped something vital during my panic attack – but whatever the cause was, there was no getting away from the fact that I now appeared to be blind.

  Totally sightless.

  I could hear the dickhead breathing, and I could hear his feet shuffling about on the road, but, visually, complete blackness was the order of the day.

  I blinked hard, scrunched my face up – nothing. I tried again, and this time when I opened my eyes, it was the opposite problem, an extreme experience of explosive light. Then I got a handle on what was actually happening. I wasn’t blind at all. I’d spent so long lying in the boot of the car that it was nighttime – pitch dark outside – and now the donkey was shining a torch into the boot. As he moved it away from my face, it gave my eyes a chance to adjust and I could see his outline against the sky, and gradually – in the reflected light from the torch – I was able to actually see his face.

  Something weird had happened to it. His cheeks seemed swollen, and his teeth looked all fucked up. And then, as my eyes continued to improve, I worked out what had happened. This wasn’t actually Brian I was staring at. I’d been mistaken. It was somebody else altogether. Are you ready for this? No word of a lie, I was actually staring straight up into the knackered face of the omnipresent officer of the law, the brave Detective Inspector Duncan McFadgen.

  Police clown extraordinaire.

  ‘I knew from the off you were mixed up in this, Johnson,’ he said. Then he took a step back, still shining his torch on my taped-up body, and one of the goons who had been shadowing him when I met him in that manky café stepped forwards into the light. He was carrying a knife, and he started prodding about amongst the tape that was holding me pinned to the floor of the boot. Then he noticed the bit of tape across my face and reached up to whip it off.

  ‘Leave that,’ McFadgen said, and grabbed the lackey’s arm before he could do any damage. ‘We don’t need to be listening to any of his shite on the drive back to the station. Just cut him out of there and leave it at that.’

  So the minion did what he was told. He freed my feet, but left my hands trussed up behind my back, and he spun me into a sitting position with my legs dangling out over the edge.

  ‘Take a minute to get the blood flowing again,’ he said, then McFadgen took hold of my arm and they marched me towards a police car that was sitting behind the BMW.

  I was at a total loss as to what the fuck was going on. McFadgen eased me into the back seat with a hand on top of my head, for all the world as if my wrists were in handcuffs. The minion got into the driver’s seat, McFadgen flopped into the passenger side, and then we were off.

  I tried puffing my cheeks up in the hope that it would dislodge the tape, so I could ask them what in the name of Christ had led to this unexpected turn of events, but the tape wouldn’t budge, and it hurt like fuck.

  ‘If I’d thought I could get away with it, I’d have left him in there,’ McFadgen said to the lackey. ‘Trust me. You’ve no idea the bullshit we’re in for when we remove that muzzle. I should have got an order from above to carry out a controlled explosion on the vehicle. Told the boss I’d reason to believe the perpetrator put a bomb in the boot.’

  I made as loud a noise as I could – just to register my disapproval – then I looked out the side widow and ignored his yammering for the rest of the journey.

  And I hoped to fuck I wasn’t on my way to finding out that this prick had just saved my fucking life.

  14

  I don’t know if Wilma Caldwell had been expecting her wedding day to be one of the best days of her life. When you’ve already been through it once before, you pretty much know the drill, and you no doubt adjust your outlook to be more in keeping with reality. So like I say, I don’t know what Wilma’s expectations were, leading up to the thing. But I do know that for the past couple of months I’d been expecting her wedding to be one of the best days of my life. I’d been building it up as the moment a new future would open up before me, full of possibility and hope for a better time to come, a day full of joy and wonder and celebration. And yet, here I was, all of that having gone right up the spout, simply stuck at yet another run-of-the-mill wedding, with all the tedium and repetition that entails.

  Fucking brutal.

  ‘Look at the face on Shirley Miller,’ the wife was saying. ‘Sitting up there at the head table like she’s the Queen of Sheba. Unbelievable. Let me tell you, Peacock, she is not the Queen of Sheba – far from it. And I should know. Whatever possessed Wilma to pick her as the maid of honour, I’ll never know. Wilma’s only known her for about ten minutes, if that. How long have I known Wilma for, Peacock? Eh? How come I’m not sitting up there? How come I’m just a normal bridesmaid? Tell me that.’

  ‘I thought you said you didn’t want anybody looking at you in your dress,’ I said. ‘If you were sitting up there you’d be the centre of attention. Bang slap in the middle of everybody’s wedding pictures.’

  ‘True,’ she said. ‘But still, it’s the principle of the thing. It should be me that’s the maid of honour. And they’ll be getting their meals first – and theirs’ll be much bigger than ours.’

  ‘They’ll be just the same.’

  ‘But they’ll get them first. And I’m starving. What was it Wilma said we’re getting again? Can you remember? Was it salmon? I hope it’s not salmon. I don’t really like salmon. Why is it everybody always has salmon at the minute? I think salmon maybe brings me out in a rash.’

  Another couple came and plonked themselves down at our table, and that quietened her down for a bit. Christ knows who they were. Craig and Wendy their place names said. They looked like a right couple of warmers. I started wishing Brian had taken the liberty of tipping me into the river while he’d had the chance.

  ‘Are you Craig and Wendy?’ the wife said. ‘I saw your names sitting there. We’re Bev and Peacock. It’s been a lovely day, hasn’t it? So far.’

  Craig and Wendy gave it the strained smiles, and Wendy even went so far as to say it was nice to meet us.

  ‘What did you think of the ceremony?’ Bev said. ‘It was gorgeous, wasn’t it? I promised myself I wouldn’t start greeting. Fat chance. Once I got started I thought I’d never stop. Did you see me? I made a right fool of myself. I’m terrible, amn’t I, Peacock? I just hope the speeches don’t get too emotional, or I’ll be off again.’

  As it turned out, in that particular instance, she got her wish – especially where the father-of-the-bride’s speech was concerned. I mean, it started off conventionally enough. He stood up – in a dark blue suit that was a couple of sizes too big for him, his wispy grey hair squashed down with Brylcreem, the collar of his shirt too wide for his neck – and he ran through a few well-rehearsed jokes, as old as the hills, and a set-piece about how he wasn’t so much gaining a new son-in-law as losing the social stigma that came with having a middle-aged divorcee for a daughter.

  All very middle-of-the-road and par for the course. But then, about five minutes in, he veered off spectacularly into uncharted territory, fuelled by an abundance of sherry and the sheer madness of the events of the past week or so, and he was soon miles off script and improvising a rather unique and entertaining piece of oratory.

  ‘Let’s just hope,’ he said, taking another large sw
ig from his glass and beginning to slur his words quite liberally, ‘let’s just hope Vince turns out to be a slightly less interesting husband than the maniac Wilma married the first time around. Not that Brian ever seemed particularly interesting in all the time Wilma was with him, mind. I vividly recall many a tedious evening spent in the man’s company, during his years as a law-abiding citizen. But I think we can all agree that these past few days have revealed a side to the man that’s a great deal more colourful than any of us had previously given him credit for. And I now find myself in the unlikely position of admitting that as long as Vince can refrain from getting himself chased halfway across the continent by Europol, then he’ll be a marked improvement on my previous son-in-law.’

  It was a good point: the bar was now quite low regarding what Vince would have to live up to in order to look like a good catch. Whether he’d manage to pull it off, though, was another matter. There was every chance he’d be on the run soon enough himself, or sitting in a prison cell wishing he’d gone on the run.

  ‘I’m reliably informed,’ Wilma’s old man continued, ‘that my ex-son-in-law is currently somewhere between Frankfurt and Munich, suspected to be heading for the Austrian border, and leading the authorities on a merry dance, having now attained the status of being the most wanted man in Western Europe.’

  That last quip was a bit of an exaggeration – no doubt added in to enhance the drama – but it certainly had its basis in fact. Brian had even made it on to the STV news that morning – a man from Glasgow at large somewhere on the continent, guilty of having left an innocent victim bound and gagged in the boot of a car for upwards of five hours, and suspected of having murdered a local criminal by the name of Dougie Dowds. Police said it was likely that drugs were involved. Thankfully, word hadn’t got out that I was the stooge in the boot – not to the public at large anyway. I’d asked McFadgen to do me the favour of keeping that quiet for the time being, in exchange for the information I was in a position to give him about the Brian fellow.

  At this point, the bride’s mother more or less rugby-tackled her husband to get him off the microphone, and we returned to more mainstream wedding territory again – the best man, a right bore of hell, giving it laldy about Vince’s early sexual experiences and various minor misdemeanours, and then the groom himself, essentially just thanking the cast and crew for a good hour and a quarter.

  When it all finally clattered to a halt, and much to the wife’s relief they started to serve the grub, I felt a light tap on my shoulder and turned round to see Vince was standing there beside my chair.

  ‘Congratulations,’ our tablemate Craig told him, and Wendy had a good go at insisting how enjoyable the speeches had been, but Vince himself was somewhat distracted.

  ‘Can we have a quick word, Peacock?’ he said, looking to the right and the left at regular intervals. ‘Somewhere quiet?’

  And off we went, leaving the wife to start firing into her crab cakes, as content as could be.

  When McFadgen had bundled me into an interrogation room and sat himself down on the other side of the table, I was still fully taped up, and still wearing the strip across my piehole.

  ‘Right,’ he’d said, ‘you’re about to explain to me exactly what’s going on here, after I fill you in on the full extent of my knowledge at the present time.’

  There were only the two of us in there, and McFadgen claimed that about an hour ago they’d had an anonymous phone call at the station saying there was somebody locked in the boot of a car down by the Clyde, just beyond the Transport Museum, and that the car key was under a rock beside the front passenger wheel.

  ‘I was all set to clock off,’ McFadgen said. ‘Thirty-six hours straight I’ve just done. Then I hear about this phone call on my way out the door. It turns out the officer that took it had the wherewithal to ask the caller if he could supply the identity of the individual in the boot, and after a protracted silence the caller gave her your name and hung up. Naturally I got excited. “Did the caller say if it was a dead body?” I asked her. He hadn’t specified. As you’ve probably noticed, I’m still trying to shake the disappointment of finding out you were still breathing in there.’

  All heart, eh? You’ve got to hand it to McFadgen. Six hours it turns out I’d spent in that confined space, constantly awaiting my execution, and that was as much sympathy as McFadgen could muster. Now, whether Brian had always intended to just lock me up in the boot of the BMW to keep me quiet long enough for him to make his getaway, or whether he’d initially been planning to kill me and then bottled it and come up with his harebrained scheme on the fly, I’ve still no idea. But I’d certainly been under the impression that my number was up during my confinement, and a smidgeon of compassion from the man of the law wouldn’t have gone amiss at that point in time. It would have been very much welcome. But it was far from forthcoming.

  He got to his feet. ‘I’m about to remove that gag now,’ he said. ‘But I don’t want any shite out of you. Cold hard facts, nothing less: who phoned us, why, what this is all about. That’s it. I want this done and dusted so I can get home to my bed.’

  And he yanked at the tape with relish, enjoying it tearing chunks of the moustache out at the root.

  It hurt like a bastard.

  Poor Vince Cowie wasn’t looking too clever as we stoated about the venue, trying to find a quiet alcove for our confab. The boy was a nervous wreck, and it clearly wasn’t just a case of the wedding-day jitters. Whenever a guest approached him to express their congratulations, each time we thought we’d found a spot that would suffice, he’d look like a startled rabbit, and we’d be off again seeking ever deeper seclusion. I got the distinct impression that he was on the verge of a psychotic episode.

  Eventually we found ourselves outside the establishment entirely, standing behind a monumental oak tree on the lawns that sloped down from the place. After Vince had walked round the trunk of the thing six or seven times he seemed to be satisfied, and he sat down with his back against it and stared up at the branches.

  ‘So what’s the story?’ he asked me then, and I moved round so I was standing in front of him. There was no way in hell I was flopping down on the floor myself, risking getting grass stains on the Versaces. Not a chance.

  ‘Eh?’ I said. I’d no idea what he was getting at, as sympathetic as I was to his obvious state of anguish.

  ‘Am I fucked?’ he said. ‘I know it was you that worked out Brian killed Dougie Dowds, and told the filth about it. I’d no idea Brian was capable of something like that, but you must know I was involved at the business end – taking that painting. Am I knackered? Did you fill them in on that?’

  A big crow landed in the branches above him, and he just about shat himself before he sussed where the noise had come from.

  ‘I think you’ve got your wires crossed, Vince,’ I said. ‘It wasn’t so much a case of me going to the authorities as it was of Brian delivering me to them himself.’

  I unfurled the whole scenario for him – meat cleaver included – and he took it all in, in wide-eyed wonder, and expressed his deepest sympathies come the end.

  ‘Fucking hell, Peacock!’ he said. ‘That’s fucking mental.’

  ‘You’re not wrong, son,’ I told him. ‘But you can rest easy for the time being. I kept your name completely out of my report to McFadgen. I’ve been trying to keep him off your tail for a good while now. I’ve known you took that painting for yonks, but I wanted to play my part in making sure the old wedding came to fruition. I told McFadgen it must have been Brian that stole the painting. Stands to reason.’

  And luckily for Vince, Jinky hadn’t even known that a painting had been stolen from Pollok House. Despite all my worries, Jinky could have stayed in the interrogation room for a month, and McFadgen would still have been no closer to the truth.

  Vince looked genuinely moved on hearing what I’d done for him. He even got up off his arse and gave me a wee dunt on the upper arm.

  ‘You’re some
man,’ he said. ‘I’m serious. I owe you big time, Peacock. So what did McFadgen make of the whole thing? Was he buying the idea that Brian stole the painting?’

  I shrugged. ‘Fuck knows,’ I said. ‘I’d a hell of a job even convincing him the horror show with Brian actually happened. “How do I know Brian Caldwell’s not just away on his holidays?” he said. Something like that. “There’s a good chance you just stuck yourself in the boot of his car and cooked this whole thing up to take the heat off yourself.” The prick’s obsessed with putting me in Barlinnie. “What about the fact that Brian phoned you?” I asked him. “That could’ve been anybody,” he said. “How in the name of Christ would I have managed to tape myself into the boot of the car and leave the key outside?” “Obviously you’d a pal involved.” McFadgen’s far from being the brightest star in the sky, Vince. He’s unlikely to work out you’d anything to do with it before they get their hands on Brian. Once that happens, it all comes down to whether Brian decides to put you in the shit, or just keep schtum.’

  A huge burden seemed to lift from his shoulders. His eyes lit up. He suddenly looked like what he was – a man who had just married the latest love of his life.

  ‘That’s good enough for me,’ he said. ‘We’re honeymooning in Spain. I don’t think it’ll be too much of a stretch to convince Wilma to take a prolonged trip down on the Costa del Sol. Then we can take it one day at a time. I know a few folk down there who’ll no doubt hook me up with something or other.’