The Inglorious Dead (A Doug Michie Novel)

by Tony Black

  The barrier gates started to rise and the lights flashed at the sides of the crossing. The Range Rover proceeded forward, over the Maybole Road, towards the high-walled mansions of greater Alloway; I took the left towards my mother’s more modest abode.

  The pizza shop was too good to pass, so I grabbed another junk-food dinner and promised to stock up on the Lean Cuisines tomorrow. It was a promise I made to myself daily, I was good at making it, bad at acting it out.

  In the driveway I collected the pizza box and pointed the key ring at the car; the blinkers flashed once to tell me it was secure. As I walked into my old family home I could still smell the dog’s confinement; he’d hardly ventured out of doors in weeks. The familiar smell haunted the house with all the other ghosts. Every room was a stack of memories from years gone by. My father in his retirement, snoozing in his armchair or checking the form at Chepstow. My mother, in her latter years, drunken insensate, a litter of bottles at her feet as she cried for her lost days, her lost hope.

  I wandered through to the kitchen and took Ben’s lead from my pocket for the last time. I placed it on the worktop and it sat at first unfurling from its coil like a thin red snake, then motionless and accusatory, brazen with the weight of its inert meaning. I snatched it up and placed it in the bin.

  As I turned back to the pizza box, opened up and stared at the soggy, dough-heavy article where it had slid to one side – dispensing the greater share of toppings and congealing cheese – I knew I’d lost my appetite. I turned over the lid and removed myself to the living room.

  In my father’s chair I reached into my coat pocket and felt for the envelope Andy had handed me outside Billy Bridge’s Bar. I tapped the edge of the manila-coloured envelope against the chair’s arm and sighed. There was no writing on the front, or back, nothing to help me infer its contents.

  If I wanted to know what, or who, had put Andy on such a knife-edge, there was only one way I was going to find out. But I had to ask myself, first: did I really want to?

  Chapter 4

  The letter was in a strange hand, neat and tidy, though lacking the finer points of spelling and grammar. I could tell the words were a man’s – it had been signed by a man – but the handwriting was definitely a woman’s: I hadn’t met a man yet that put little circles above the letter ‘i’.

  It could have been a joint effort – a husband and wife – but the feeling I got from the tone was more of a man dictating his thoughts. He was gruff, too. Blunt, a solid Ayrshire straight-talker. The kind I’d met a million times before, the kind that liked the sound of their own voice.

  Nothing in the letter inspired me to delve further, except the mention of one name: Steven Nichols. Maybe it was the close ring of the old Liverpool super-sub that got my attention, or maybe I had seen it somewhere before. Either way I was unmoved by the prospect of delving into a cold case involving the murder of a local lad that the police had shoved in the ‘too hard’ drawer.

  ‘No thanks, Andy …’

  I put the letter back in the envelope and eased further into the chair. I was sparking up a cigarette when a thought occurred to me: what was Andy thinking? In that strange way that the real world has of intruding on your thoughts, my mobile started to ring.

  It was Andy. ‘Hello, Doug, have you read the letter?’

  I inhaled deep on my cigarette, let the smoke trail reach the ceiling before I answered. ‘I have, yeah.’

  ‘And?’ His voice sounded anxious.

  I tapped the edge of the letter, spoke. ‘This Nichols lad … I know the name.’

  ‘Yeah, it was in all the papers … you probably read about it in The Post, they went to town on it, him being a local lad and all that.’

  It made sense. I could have stored the name away subliminally, it was certainly the kind of story that I’d follow in the paper. I took another drag on my cigarette, tried to figure a way to tell Andy this didn’t seem like my kind of thing. ‘Look, mate, I have to be honest …’

  He cut in. ‘Yeah, the Nichols lad was one of the Order, there’s no love lost between them and the police these days.’

  ‘What Order?’

  ‘The laddos, the Orange Men … he was a marcher, used to run with some big names in the town and was very flash with it, by all accounts.’

  If Andy was trying to make this case more appealing, inspire me to take it on, he was having the opposite effect. The loss of another flute-playing bigot in a bowler hat was not something that bothered me one iota. It was a mystery to me why, at the one point on the calendar that Ayrshire had any decent weather, we still had these people parading through the streets, booted and suited, in their little orange sashes.

  ‘I can’t say my interest is sparked by this, Andy; I’m sorry, I just don’t want to get involved in that sad little world.’

  ‘But … they asked for you especially!’ He sounded incredulous.

  ‘Who, the Nichols’?’

  ‘No, Davie Grant …’

  I took out the letter, checked the name. It matched. ‘Should I be as impressed by the name as you sound, Andy?’

  ‘Davie is the top man in the Order, he’s a good friend of Steven’s father, Bert, and he’s not a happy man. Look, Davie’s got deep pockets and he knows your form, Doug, I’m sure you’d be well looked after on the money side.’

  ‘And what exactly’s in this for you, Andy?’

  ‘You know the score, finders keepers, I found you … like you said, I get a drink for my trouble, and I really need this drink, mate.’

  I was in a difficult situation; I liked Andy, he was an old face from the past and I’d always been a sucker for those connections, perhaps that’s why I was still in Ayr. But I knew from my time on the force in Belfast that any crime with religious undertones could get very messy.

  ‘Andy, you said yourself the police have laid this one to rest. What makes you think I can do any better?’

  His voice rose, became lyrical. ‘Well, you can try. Maybe they missed something.’

  ‘I doubt it.’

  ‘But you won’t know until you try.’

  ‘Andy, I’ve got a lot on now, I’ve got my mother’s house to pack up and sell, and …’

  His voice sliced me like a saw-blade, ‘Look, have a word, talk to the man, if you don’t like what he has to say then think about passing it up. Will you do that for me, for an old friend?’

  He knew he had me. I could hardly say no.

  ‘Alright, but I’m promising nothing.’

  ‘Brilliant!’ His spirits audibly lifted. ‘You won’t regret this.’

  I knew as soon as he said the word, I probably would.

  I hung up the phone.

  I found myself shaking my head as I tapped Steven Nichols into my iPhone and pressed search. The top hits in the Google list were from newspapers; I opted for Ayrshire’s paper of note and waited for the page to load.

  There was a photo: Steven looked like just another lad enjoying a pint in a rowdy pub. Those pictures tell their own story. He was holding a Rangers scarf in the other hand so was clearly celebrating an old victory, because winning the Third Division wasn’t worth shouting about. The paper seemed to have given a lot of coverage to the story, the full details of his death by stabbing – just yards from his home – and the subsequent police investigation.

  I recognised one of the names attached to a police quote, DI John Scott, who said they were pursuing a line of inquiry that Nichols had been the victim of a random street brawl.

  ‘Oh, really?’ I shook my head. Street brawls were impulsive acts, they took place outside pubs, clubs, taxi ranks, not in leafy residential Prestwick, a sobering half-hour walk from the foot of the town.

  The circumstances of Steven Nichols’ death left me with more than a few questions, and none that I’d like to find the answers to. I cursed Andy again and returned to my cigarette.

  Chapter 5

  Something was wrong with my old home town of Ayr. It was as if invisible hands were choking t
he life out of it, cutting off the vital blood supply somewhere south of the High Street’s middle. I stood outside Markies with an eye on the empty shops surrounding Fish Cross. Only a pound store and a charity shop kept the march of shuttered fronts at bay. I remembered a busy car accessory store had stood there, before it was whisked off to one of the out-of-town sites. That’s where everything seemed to be now; somewhere else, somewhere out-of-town. Nobody wanted to be here now, or so it seemed. I knew the jury was out on my own intentions. I felt myself sinking deeper into a landscape that was abstract to me now. The Auld Toun I knew was gone, if it ever existed; it was a figment of my imagination, a romantic notion to file away with my store of Burns’ quotes.

  ‘Auld Ayr, wham ne’er a toon surpasses.’

  Only a cynic with a nice line in sarcasm would turn that phrase now.

  I smiled to myself, walked on, and wondered what Rabbie would be reeling out for the masses of today.

  I knew my vision of the place was now coloured by the blunt shock of my homecoming: my mother’s death, the bitter loss of a wife and profession, and the inevitable disaster of a rebounded relationship. I didn’t want to think about any of that, though. I didn’t want to think at all, to tell the truth, so perhaps Andy’s wild goose chase was just the kind of distraction I needed.

  The horn of an old VW Polo soughed a limp announcement that my friend had arrived. Andy peered over the rim of the wheel and waved a hand at me. I nodded and crossed the street towards the car; the door made the unmistakeable screech of metal on metal, like an engraver’s point putting its shrill wince upon my spine.

  ‘Andy, wherever you’re taking me, I hope it’s not far in this biscuit tin,’ I said, tugging on the seatbelt.

  ‘No. Not far. Davie Grant just stays in Dalmellington.’

  I turned in my seat as he over-revved the engine to encourage the biting point. ‘Davie Grant … I thought you’d be taking me to see the boy’s father.’

  ‘Davie knew the Nichols lad, and he’s the one picking up the tab, so …’

  I watched the lights change up ahead. ‘I want to see the lad’s father, not the author of that semi-literate letter.’

  ‘Aye, and we will … I just thought that Davie would be useful, y’know, for our investigation.’

  I coughed back a guffaw. I could already see Andy sizing himself up to play Tonto to my Lone Ranger. It wasn’t happening.

  ‘Andy, couple of ground rules … One, I do the thinking. And, two, there’s no we here. You can limit yourself to introductions, right?’

  ‘Okay. Okay.’ He widened his eyes, glowered at me. ‘Just trying to be of some help, that’s all.’

  I wound down my window and sparked up a cigarette; it didn’t seem worth asking for permission. On the way to Dalmellington I sat back and watched the green fields stretch along the bourne of the by-pass. It was farmland, for now, but more and more suburban-style housing was creeping out this way. Will it change the place, I wondered? I knew it would, but then change was long overdue.

  At the Whitletts Roundabout I watched Andy shake his head at the confusion of lanes and lights, then summon the horn again when a girl in an Aygo tried to move out. We were near Mossblown, I knew they marched there, like they did in most of these villages at the end of June. It’s barbecue weather now, surely people have better things to do at this point in the development of the human race, I thought.

  ‘I think you’ll get along with Davie,’ said Andy. ‘He’s salt of the earth.’

  ‘I’ll make my own mind up about that,’ I said, knowing that I’d already let his pastime influence me some way before our introduction.

  ‘Tell me, Andy, how do you know these people?’ They didn’t seem his sort, but he was fond of saying live and let live.

  ‘Och, we go way back. Who can say, football maybe, the piping … aye, that was probably it, I remember Davie hired me to play the pipes for one of their get-togethers.’

  It was a plausible connection, Andy was one of those kent faces who found it impossible to cross the road without shaking hands with someone. I think even the strays in the street approached him for a pat on the head.

  The property wasn’t quite in Dalmellington, but on the long, steep incline of rough and ready road that tricked you into the village with sweeping views of the hills. There was a couple of white vans parked out front and a bulky man with a ruddy complexion stood, square footed and sure, hosing down the lawn. His rotund gut was held in check by two buttons on a short-sleeved shirt, the chest-rug above was something Connery would have been intimidated by.

  ‘I didn’t think we were going to spot the Yeti today,’ I said.

  Andy laughed. ‘You need a second skin to survive in these badlands!’

  The car slowed to a halt, grinding gravel beneath the wheels. I was still removing my seatbelt, opening the door, as Andy made a sprint for the front of the car and Davie Grant’s outstretched hand. I’d never seen him play the sycophant before, this was a first for me, and I was sure I didn’t like it.

  I got out and greeted our host. ‘Hello …’

  ‘So you’re the boy they kicked off the force.’ Davie’s opener was a calculated put-down of the type I’d become depressingly familiar with, growing up on the west-coast. It was a variant form of the get your retaliation in first philosophy. I had thought this type of patter was dying out, but obviously not; I was never surprised to find the world was populated by more meat-heads than even I could conceive.

  Something told me I wasn’t going to get along with Davie Grant, as he eyed me like Cro-Magnon man peering from his cave lair.

  Chapter 6

  The house wasn’t your typical edge of Dalmellington abode. It was bigger, for a start, the side-wings and back massively extended – but not sympathetically, it had to be said. They were boxes added to let people know they weren’t part of the original home. The result was a gaudy McMansion, the kind of thing a crass new footballer’s wife might go for, or a lottery winner with more luck than taste.

  We walked inside; the polished-stone floors seemed newly buffed, the whole place sparkled. Davie gave the directions to follow him.

  ‘Down the back, there, we’ll sit in the conservatory, it’s just through the kitchen.’

  I felt like a fly in ointment walking through the hallway; the walls were covered in large, glossy photographs of Davie and a peroxide blonde half his age that I presumed to be a trophy wife. Every shot was taken under blissfully blue skies; foreign skies, not Scottish for sure. In one Davie sat on the back of a yacht, on the other he held up a large cobalt-blue fish, his bloody fingers hooked under its gills. The fish looked like a Marlin, a beautiful creature, even with its silvery underside cleaved asunder. I’d read about these fish being on the verge of the endangered list, but as Davie grinned for the camera he didn’t appear to give a rat’s.

  Our host stopped at the kitchen island. ‘The wife’s pride and joy, this, you don’t want to know how much it cost me …’

  He was right, I didn’t. But something told me he was going to tell me anyway.

  ‘More than my first house,’ he said. ‘Ten grand more than my first house, to be precise.’

  I watched Andy purse his lips and start to let out a shrill whistle but I tried to look unimpressed. After all, I’d been living in my parents’ home in Alloway for the last few months and grown accustomed to the bragging rights some people attach to their lifestyle. It was pathetic, to reach middle-age and think that material gain was a yardstick of worth. I’d been a police officer long enough to know that most people just used money as an excuse for bad behaviour.

  ‘Is your wife not at home today, Davie?’ My words forced a crease into his heavy brows.

  ‘What do you want her for?’ He raised his hands, showed palms.

  ‘Just asking, that’s all … If I’d spent more than ten grand on a kitchen I’d be living in it.’

  He smiled, a piranha smirk that split his broad face in two. I saw he liked my mention of his sp
ending power; his ego was tragically transparent.

  ‘Drinks, gents!’ Davie clapped hands together and led us through to the conservatory as he prepared a jug of something bright-coloured and sweet. He was well out of earshot when I spoke again.

  ‘Andy, what the hell have you got me into?’

  ‘Eh?’ He fiddled with a little silver ornament. ‘Feel the weight of that … bet it’s solid, as well.’

  I took the item from him, a little silver swan, and placed it back on the table. ‘Tell me this guy is legit and I’ll eat my hat.’

  His eyes retreated into his head. ‘Big Davie’s sound as a pound, Doug.’ He painted a look of mock indignation on his face. ‘Do you honestly think I would get you involved in anything shady?’

  I felt myself bite on my lower lip as I turned away from him. I didn’t want to answer that question.

  Davie appeared in the doorway with a tray of drinks. ‘Right, dive in!’

  The drink was iced, but didn’t cool my temper off any. I wanted to bolt, get back to my life and carry on with my normal, boring existence, but with Andy as the driver I was trapped. I felt a deep urge swell in me to plant a foot in his backside for bringing me here.

  ‘I was saying to Doug,’ said Andy, ‘that the man to see about the young Nichols lad is yourself.’

  Davie sat down with his thick flanks spread forward, feet up on the chair in front. ‘Tragic business,’ he shook his head in limp sympathy. ‘Very sad business indeed.’

  I wanted to ask, ‘For who?’ But I got the impression Davie Grant didn’t like direct questions. And besides, he was fond of his own voice; I’d only be interrupting.

  Davie went on: ‘I knew that lad from when he was knee-high to a grasshopper. His father’s a good Orangeman, as well.’