The Midnight Eye Files Collection

by William Meikle

  “I don’t usually go outside the immediate circle,” he said, “But this time it’s a bit tricky. I can’t show any favoritism.”

  “So what’s the problem?” I asked. Half my mind was on trying to find my cigarettes, and I made the cardinal sin of not paying attention. I didn’t yet realize that the next case was already under way.

  “I’m getting on a bit,” he said. “There’s a lot of years, a lot of tradition, and a lot of gold, tied up in the family business, and my children are jostling for position for when I’m gone. Not that I’m planning to go for a long time yet, you understand...but a couple of the grandchildren have got it into their heads that it’s time the old ways were pushed aside. They’ve always been a flighty bunch, and they never go long without some feud or other breaking out between them. And this time it’s gone further than before...it’s got to the stage where there’s real bad blood between them.”

  “And what can I do to help you?” I asked. I still hadn’t found a cigarette, and I was beginning to get testy, what with the hangover and all. I resolved to let Doug answer the phone from now on...especially first thing in the morning.

  “I figure that the kids need a new mother,” the old man continued. “It’s sort of an extended family...my own fault, of course...three wives, six kids...that I know of... I haven’t exactly been careful where I sowed my seed. If you could find me a new wife then I could get the family business sorted out, install a new head of the family...somebody to look after business while I’m away. Then the whole thing would be on a more secure footing...for a few years longer, anyway.”

  “We’re not a dating agency,” I said.

  He laughed...and the hairs at the back of my neck chose that moment to stand up, a cold shiver running up my spine.

  “Oh, I know that, son. It’s just that my needs are very particular. I’m not just looking for any woman. She has to be a goddess...I’ve got standards to maintain. I was looking for your help in narrowing the field a bit...some research, a wee bit of legwork...that kind of thing.”

  “I’ve just taken on a new researcher who’d love to help you. And legwork I can handle,” I said. “Especially when it involves women. Why don’t you come down to the office and we can talk things through.”

  “I’m a bit tied up with the business for the next couple of days, but maybe I’ll do just that,” he said. “You sound like the man for the job.”

  “We’re on Byres Road. You just...” I never got time to complete the sentence.

  “Oh, I know where you are. A wee bird told me. Don’t rush me son. I’ve been thinking about this for a long time, and I want to get it right.”

  There was a double thud, as if he’d tapped the phone twice.

  “I’ll be seeing you around.”

  He hung up.

  Doug looked over and raised an eyebrow.

  “A client?”

  I see-sawed my hand back and forth. “Maybe. It sounded like he was just testing the water. But I’ve got a feeling we’ll see him sometime. He wants me to find him a woman.”

  Doug laughed.

  “Has he heard your track record in that department?”

  I grunted back at him. Wit and repartee wasn’t going to be available until the hangover passed...I would have to rely on brute strength and ignorance till then.

  He returned to disentangling the nest of cables, and I finally found my cigarettes and went back to nursing my hangover.

  The doorbell rang.

  I looked at Doug, and he looked at me.

  It rang again.

  “Do you want me to answer it?” he said finally.

  I gave him my best smile.

  “That’s what I pay you for,” I said.

  He was still muttering as he showed the client in.

  I had her pegged for a lost cat commission...most little old ladies who came straight in off the street were either looking for a cat or a husband, and this one didn’t look like the type to lose a husband after she’d got hold of him.

  “I need your help,” she said.

  “Come on in and sit down,” I said. “We’ll see what we can do.”

  She was dressed all in black, her skirt so long that it almost trailed on the floor. The clothes were heavy, like thick velvet, and when she crossed a patch of sunlight coming through the window she seemed no more than an empty, black space. As she got closer I could see she wasn’t quite as old as I’d first taken her for. When she’d been standing at the door she’d looked frail, even weak. But there was a light, a vitality, in her eyes, and although her face was wrinkled, she still showed plenty of signs of having been a beauty in her younger days. Her eyes were bright blue and piercing but she looked like she had been crying recently...the skin under the eyes was dark and puffy, and there were red rims showing.

  I motioned her to the chair across the desk from me. She was no more than four foot eleven tall in her flat black shoes, and my old sagging leather armchair threatened to engulf her. In fact she sank so far back into it that I had to give her a hand to sit forward when I offered her a cigarette. Her hand felt smooth and cool, and it slid in my palm as if it had been slightly greased. There was a strong smell coming from her...mothballs and lavender. I guessed the black velvet wasn’t her usual daytime apparel.

  “Thanks, son,” she said, taking a cigarette as if it was a pill that might save her life. “My man didnae like me smoking, I’ve hardly touched the baccy in near on forty years, but I used to love a smoke.”

  She wasted no time getting back in practice. I had barely lit her up before she was sucking away like an industrial strength vacuum cleaner. Only occasional wisps of smoke appeared when she breathed out...the rest she somehow, magically, seemed to soak up.

  I was so rapt that I almost didn’t notice when she started talking. Doug had been making a pretense of fiddling with some especially badly entangled cables, but he gave up as the old lady dumped her trouble on us.

  It came out in one, long, agonized spiel.

  “My son isnae my son,” she began, and there was a brief pause as she took another prodigious draw from the cigarette.

  “I kent it as soon as he spoke. It was like talking to a stranger, as if I wasn’t anybody he knew. Oh, I know you’ll think me a stupid auld women, but I ken my boy...and whoever I spoke to on the phone...it wisnae my wee John. I only rang him because his faither died last week. The pair of them never got on and he left the house when he was nineteen. He only came back to visit when he knew Tommy would no’ be there and...”

  I motioned to Doug that he should get the coffee going. This was a Scotswoman of-a-certain-age in full flow. Experience told me it could take a while.

  We were halfway through the first coffee and second cigarette, and we were still only on how wonderful the nurses in the hospital had been. She settled back in the chair, and paused long enough to ask Doug if he had any biscuits. I took matters into my own hands.

  “Excuse me, Mrs...?”

  “Malcolm. Jessie Malcolm, I’ve gone back to my ain name you see. After Tommy died I decided...”

  I jumped in again.

  “Mrs. Malcolm. What is it you want us to do for you?”

  She looked exasperated, and I felt suddenly guilty...as if I’d been haranguing my Granny.

  “I’m trying to tell you, if you’ll just give me a chance.”

  She took another cigarette from the pack I’d left on the seat of her chair, and lit it from the butt of the last.

  “Cancer. That’s what took Tommy. Seventy years of god-fearing abstemious living...and look what it got him. Two months ago he found a lump under his left arm...just a wee thing, not any bigger than a pea. He wisnae even going to tell the doctor, but when I saw it, I knew what it was all right. The doctor hummed and hawed, and sent him for tests. They opened him up in the hospital...and shut him straight away again. It was downhill all the way from then.”

  She looked up at me, heavy tears filling the bottom half of her eyes.

  “He
wisnae a bad man...and he tried to do his best for me. He didnae deserve that much pain...no matter what he’d done in the past. At the end all I could do was hold his hand and watch it eat him away. I spent more time at that hospital than anywhere else, trying to make things easier for him. In the end, the drugs did the job better than I could, and he just slipped away...a wee smile on his face as if he’d heard some private joke. The nurses let me spend an hour wi’ him after he passed on, then I went to phone the boy.

  “The only address we had for him was in a hotel in Portree. It took me three goes to get through, and then it took ages for them to find him...I could hear the lassie shouting his name across the bar. It’s just as well Tommy passed away. The thought of John in a public bar would have killed him anyway. I remember the time...”

  I had to jump in again. Any sentences that started with those four words had to be nipped in the bud quickly before they spread.

  “Mrs. Malcolm...” I said.

  She waved her cigarette at me. A small snowfall of ash spread across the black velvet.

  “Bugger,” she said, and it was as shocking as a fart in a church. “I’ll never get that out. And I had it cleaned specially. Twenty-five pounds the cleaner took... I would have washed it in the bath if I’d known it would cost that much. When I was a lassie...”

  “Mrs. Malcolm,” I said again, and this time I let some of my exasperation show.

  “Okay, Okay. And its Ms. Malcolm...I’m not married... anymore. Just hold yer horses...we’re getting there. He came to the phone...eventually. And he even called me Maw, just like John would have done. But it wisnae him...it wisnae John. It was some other fella.”

  It was Doug who interrupted her this time. He’d given up all pretense of assembling the computer and had been perched on the edge of my desk since making the coffee.

  “What do you mean...somebody is impersonating him?”

  She gave Doug a pitying look...the kind my Granny used to reserve for drunks and gamblers.

  “Oh no, It’s him alright. It’s just not him.”

  Doug and I stared at each other blankly.

  “In here...” she said, hitting her heart with her right fist, “Where it matters. It’s not him.”

  There was silence in the room for a long moment. Doug’s mouth was opening and closing, but no noise was coming out.

  “What exactly is it you want me to do?” I finally said.

  She sat up in the chair, suddenly all prim, proper and businesslike. I noticed for the first time that she had a small handbag on her lap...jet-black like her clothes.

  “The funeral is on Saturday...two days’ time. I want my boy at his father’s funeral...and I don’t care what you do to get him there.”

  Doug was still doing his fly-catching act so I said what had to be said.

  “Ms. Malcolm. We’re a detective agency, not the heavy mob. Look at Doug here...can you imagine him acting the hard man?”

  She looked Doug up and down, slowly.

  “I see what you mean, son,” she said. “But you’re a big fella. And I don’t care what it costs. I have plenty of money.”

  “But I’m sorry,” Doug said. “We can’t get involved in anything illegal.”

  This time it wasn’t just the old woman that looked Doug up and down. There was a long silence, then she spoke, looking me straight in the eye.

  “Is two thousand enough?” she said.

  “Just tell me where he is and I’ll do the rest,” I replied.

  Doug went back to catching flies, and the old woman told me the rest of her story. I let her ramble...hell, for two grand she could stay for a week.

  “He’s in Skye...he’s been there for nearly a year and only three phone calls in all that time. He went up for a holiday, and the next thing I ken he’s decided to stay. He even gave up his job... and a good job it was too. Tommy never thought John would amount to anything, but he had a good job with the council...in charge of the councils investments...no’ that councils are ever any good with the taxpayers money...look at yon Kingston Bridge. Built twenty-odd years ago and been under repair ever since. Then there’s all that money they spend on junkets for themselves to foreign countries. If I had my way...

  I gave her a look. This time that was all it took to get her back on track.

  “He spent years studying and sitting exams just to get a sniff of a place in the council. But he just walked away... I bet there’s a woman involved, but he’s saying nothing. I wasnae that bothered before Tommy died...the call before the last one he told me he was happy, an’ I was happy for him. But that last time...when he spoke, it was his voice...but it wisnae him...it wasnae him.”

  She started to sob quietly, and Doug poured her a drink from my whisky bottle before I could stop him. I had a lot to teach him...like how not to let clients near the booze... especially not little old ladies who had already shown an appetite for free cigarettes. My fears were confirmed. She knocked the first glass back in one easy swallow, and held the glass out for more.

  “It’s thirsty work, all this talking,” she said.

  Doug at least had the good grace to look sheepish as he poured the last of my good whisky into her glass.

  It turned out there wasn’t much more to tell. She opened the handbag in her lap, and the smell of lavender suddenly got stronger, almost overpowering. She gave me a bit of paper with two addresses on it...one in Skye, one in the south of Glasgow.

  “Bring him to Govan...” she said, as she also handed me a photograph of her son and a check for one thousand pounds. “Bring him there and you’ll get the rest.”

  She showed me a second check, then put it away in the small black bag. As she sat back in the chair the bag seemed to disappear into the black folds of her dress.

  “And I want him at the house by ten in the morning, the day after tomorrow. I’ll not have the neighbors saying that my boy didnae go to his own father’s funeral. I remember when next door’s mother died and...”

  “Thanks, Ms. Malcolm,” I said, getting up out of my chair. I put out a hand and she used it to climb up out of the seat. She had one last, longing look at the whisky bottle. It wasn’t worth her while...it was already empty...although if I gave her even the smallest hint that there was another bottle in my desk drawer, she’d have been in that seat for the rest of the day. She nodded once to me, then headed for the door. Just as she put her hand on the doorknob she stopped and looked Doug up and down again.

  “Maybe you should go to Skye with your man here. You look like you need some fresh air.”

  It was only after she left that I noticed she’d taken my cigarettes with her.

  When I turned back from the door Doug was playing with the check.

  “A grand on my first day. See...I told you I’d be good for business,” he said.

  “Tell me again on your 20th day,” I replied. “If you’re still averaging the same. I might keep you on.”

  “If we’re making that much, you’ll have to give me a raise,” he said.

  “Aye. You’ll be after five bob a week if I’m not careful.”

  “Six,” he said. “And a key to the executive lavvy.”

  “Six bob!” I said in mock horror. “With overheads like that I might have to consider downsizing.”

  In truth, I liked having Doug around. After the affair with the Johnson Amulet we both had too much time to ourselves and found we didn’t like it much. After two months writing for a local paper I was back at my desk in the hallway of my flat that doubled as an office...working cases, working for myself... staying just above the poverty line. Doug meanwhile had tried to go back to work, but his nerves were shot.

  At his first lecture back someone had slammed a door and Doug had run, screaming. Then there had been a power failure in his basement office. Trapped there, for five minutes without light, had been enough to send him over the edge again, and they’d found him crouched in a corner, arms over his head, squealing like a kid that expected a beating. The University had
been sympathetic, and had put him on extended sick leave, but their patience had recently run out...and so had their paychecks.

  Doug was spending most of his life locked in a room with his computer and the Internet connection, but the University’s decision meant he had to find a source of income. It was purely by chance that he found there was a demand online for his expertise. There are plenty of people willing to pay to be told how little knowledge they have, and Doug was soon making enough money on online research sites to keep himself.

  He was still having problems being on his own though...and he spent a couple of weeks persuading me that his newfound skills could help my business.

  “You can find out just about anything online,” he had told me. “Let me help you. I can make you money.”

  He knew and I knew that he mainly wanted to spend his days somewhere he felt safe, and I owed him. He’d saved my life in the Amulet case, he was my friend, and besides...my own nerves weren’t so calm anyway...it would be good to have him around. Yesterday I’d told him he could have a job...on the basis that he only got paid when the Agency made enough to afford it. The only thing he asked me was whether he’d have to pay the phone bill for his connection. We’d shaken hands on it, then gone out on the town.

  He’d started in the morning, and already we had a check for a grand. If I believed in good omens, I might believe he was already bringing us luck.

  “So what do you think?” he said, and fell into an almost perfect impression of the old woman. “Ma boy isnae ma boy.”

  I laughed, and that spurred him on.

  “It wisnae like this when I was a lassie. I remember the time...” He said. This time he even had her mannerisms perfect

  “Please...stop,” I said. “I thought she was going to sit there all day.”

  “She might well have done. And did you see her pocket your cigarettes?”

  “Nope. She was too quick for me.”

  “Aye, I don’t think there’s much that gets past her. I’m surprised she let ‘her boy’ go so easily.”