She downed the whisky in one. If I’d done it I’d have been coughing for a week.
“It’s a long story. Maybe you’ll get it from me, and maybe you’ll get it from somewhere else, but it’s a tale too long to tell here. It’ll have to wait.”
She climbed out of the armchair and got a check from her bag.
“Same as before. Half now, half when you get him back to Skye.”
“Maybe he’ll make his own way back,” I said.
She shook her head.
“He’s not going to be making many decisions for himself. “
“And Doug was right,” I said, “It’s too much money.”
“I can afford it. And I’ve got a feeling you’re going to be earning it.”
She handed me the check.
“Just promise me you won’t involve your pal next door,” she said as she left. “Please? I’ve seen too many nervous boys get into trouble over my mistakes.”
And then she surprised me. She pulled me into a tight hug and kissed me on the cheek. She still smelled of lavender and mothballs, but suddenly she reminded me of my grandmother.
“God bless, son. You’re one of the good guys.”
And, big sap that I am, I had tears in my eyes as she turned and left.
Doug was still shouting at the television.
“1970, you idiot! World Cups are every four years,”
I lit a cigarette and phoned Skye. She answered on the second ring.
“The Auld Kelpie, Irene speaking, how can I help you?”
“It’s Derek Adams. John’s done a runner.”
There was a sharp intake of breath at the other end of the line.
“How long ago?” she finally asked.
“At least three hours. I need to know where he’s likely to go...where I should look for him.”
“In the city? I wouldn’t know. He won’t go far from water. And if he’s lucid, he might even seek you out. Or his mother. Beyond that, I can’t tell...he’s too far.”
“Too far from the Source you mean?”
That got me another sharp intake of breath.
“If you find him, bring him here,” she said. “We can take care of him.”
“Aye. I’ve already got the idea,” I replied. “I’ll be in touch. And there’s another thing. That reporter whose nuts you crunched...he’s pressing charges. You can expect a visit from the Glasgow Police.”
“I’ve heard already,” she said. “Don’t worry. I can handle it.”
“I’m sure you can.” I said, but she’d already hung up on me.
Her words rang in my ears.
He might even seek you out.
I heard Doug shout at the television again.
“No. The sun is not a planet...where do they get these people?”
I suddenly knew two things...I couldn’t go out and leave Doug alone...and I was probably going to have to tell him what was going on...but not yet.
I poked my head round the door.
“You can come out now. The scary wee woman has gone.”
He switched off the television.
“Can you believe there are people in this world who, given a choice of whether Australia is north or south of the equator would say ‘north’?” he said in disgust.
“You mean it’s not?”
He threw a pillow at me. The big smile on his face blew away any notion I had of telling him about the case.
“So want did she want?” Doug said, sitting at his desk.
“The boy has gone on a bender, and she wants me to find him, and take him back to Skye,” I said. “She needs him out of Glasgow.”
“And you’re taking five grand off her for that? Derek...you should be ashamed of yourself.”
I tried to look suitably ashamed, but it’s not an emotion I’m used to.
“There’s more to it. I think he’s in trouble,” I said by way of mitigation.
“Must be a lot if it’s worth five thou,” he said.
“Just leave it to me,” I said. “I know what I’m doing.”
He sat at the computer and put on his headphones...a sure sign he was displeased with me.
I sat back and did what I do best...I blew smoke rings and let the case coalesce around me.
I still wasn’t happy. The case was just too far from my comfort zone...five thousand pounds or not. Too many people were hiding things from me...John Mason, his mother, the trio of hulks back in Portree...hell, even Jim Morton, for all I knew. The money was welcome...sure it was. But if this turned out to be another gig like the Amulet case then the obituary desk on the Star was going to start looking awfully tempting again.
My biggest stumbling block was the secret that was held in Portree...what was ‘The Source’...and how did it control what John Mason was becoming?
Until I knew that, the case wouldn’t be over for me.
I did know how to do one thing, though...I knew how to stir things up. I rang Johnny Brown, news editor on the Star.
“Johnny, it’s Derek Adams,” I said when he answered.
“Ah, the Dark Avenger,” he said with a laugh. “Are you still putting the world to rights, son?”
“Trying my best, Johnny, trying my best. I’m phoning about Jim Morton. I presume he’s been spinning you a line about kidnap and extortion on Skye, with a bit of howling at the moon thrown in.”
“Aye. We’re running it tomorrow. He’s out just now interviewing that boy you brought back.”
I doubted that.
“A word from the wise,” I said. “Would a kidnap victim hire somebody to take him back?”
I found out that wee Jim wasn’t the only one who knew how to curse.
“I think your man got a wee bit over-keen after yon lassie crushed his bollocks. Maybe used a bit too much artistic license?” I said, trying to keep a smirk out of my voice.
“I hope you don’t want your obituary desk job back,” he said. “Because Morton is going to be sitting there until hell freezes over.”
When I put the phone down Doug took his headphones off.
“What are you smiling about?” he said.
“I just got the equalizer against Jim Morton.”
“Aye?” he said. “Well you just scored an own goal against me.”
He unplugged his headphones from the computer and pushed a key. I heard, tinny but clear, my conversation with old lady Malcolm playing back to me. Some of the sentences seemed to stand out louder, but maybe that was just my conscience amplifying them.
“You need to keep an eye on your pal there.”
“God forgive me, I should have let him stay in Skye.”
“Just don’t involve your pal next door.”
The recording moved on, and I heard my side of my conversation with Irene.
“Too far from the Source.” I heard myself say.
Doug leaned over and pushed another button on the keyboard and the playback stopped. He came over and stood in front of my desk, almost shouting. “So. ‘Don’t involve your pal, she said’. What’s so important? And what’s The Source? Sounds like it might be weird stuff. Eh, Derek...does it sound kosher to you?”
I opened my mouth to spout the lie, to quell his fear, then I realized it wasn’t fear...it was anger. Tears of rage swelled in his eye, and his knuckles were white over clenched fists.
“How could you shut me out. I nearly died for you...I...Oh, fuck it.”
He leaned over and took the whisky bottle, chugging it straight. He slammed it down hard on the desk.
“And now you’re sitting there, thinking you’re protecting me. Bastard!”
He took one of my cigarettes, lit it with a flourish, then spoilt the effect by having a coughing fit.
“Don’t...you...dare...laugh,” he said between coughs, and that did it. I guffawed, he sniggered and five seconds later we were collapsed like a pair of giggling schoolboys.
“Okay,” I said when we’d recovered. “I’ll call your bluff. We’ve got a client, and we’ve been pa
id. What do you say...are you up for a jaunt?”
He went from beet root red to white as the blood drained from his face, but he didn’t back down.
“Get your jacket. I’ll drive, you can talk,” he said.
“Who said anything about driving?” I said, but even as I said it I knew where I would be headed...back to Govan, to the block of flats.
We caught the end of the rush hour traffic, and I had the mistake of directing Doug to the Kingston Bridge instead of the tunnel. Half an hour in stationary traffic gave me ample time to bring Doug up to speed. And far from being afraid, he was excited...the same way he’d been when I’d got involved in the Amulet Case.
“Mer-women! Cool,” he said. “Did anybody say whether they had big tits or not? They were supposed to have enormous ones.”
He was over-compensating. I knew it, and he knew it, and it was all that was stopping him from running away screaming.
“I’ve never heard that Loki story before,” he said. “But that’s not surprising...there’s thousands of tales about the trickster.”
“A bad boy?” I asked.
“One of the worst. He was a son of Odin, but he had a thing for giants. He fathered three children on one; Hel, a hag who ends up ruling the underworld; Jormungand, the serpent that circles the world; and Fenrir, the wolf that eats the moon at Ragnarok, the twilight of the gods. I haven’t heard about any other ‘Sons of Loki’. But John Mason was right about Loki being a shapechanger...there’s stories of him as a fox, a salmon, a crow, even a fly!”
“So how does that work?”
“Buggered if I know,” he said. “It’s not physics that matters in the old stories...its magic. Now, if I had a wireless laptop, I could find out right now...”
“And how much is one of them when it’s at home?” I asked.
“Oh, about half of what the old lady is paying us,” he replied, smiling.
Never mind my own goal, I figured the score was now two-nil to him.
The traffic eventually got moving, and we headed out to the wilds of Govan.
“When we get back, I can get you all sorts of stuff on Loki,” Doug said. “And I’ll see if we can get some background on the ‘The Source’. We don’t want you taking any chances if you have to go back to Portree.”
“When I go back, you mean. You’re forgetting that your half of the payment is the second half.”
I was back in the game.
I managed to find the block of flats at only the second attempt...the first time found us turned back on ourselves and heading for the town center. I had Doug turn off the lights and park us towards the far end of the car park, with a clear view of all approaches.
“So, what now?” he said as we sat in the darkness.
“Now we wait,” I said. I tilted my seat back and relaxed into it as I lit a cigarette. Silently, I wished for a hat to pull down over my eyes...but felt fedoras were in short supply on the south-side of Glasgow.
Doug started to fidget after less than five minutes. It started with the drumming of fingers on the dashboard, then progressed to playing with the electric windows, then to matching lights and wipers in intricate rhythms.
“Doug,” I said softly. He took the hint the first time, but three minutes later he’d started drumming his fingers again.
“The idea is that nobody see us...nobody knows we’re here,” I said in a whisper.
“Is it always this boring?” he asked. His hand was reaching for the window control.
“Doug, you’ve been here less than ten minutes. This could take hours. Maybe even all night.”
“Oh...” he said in a small voice.
Even before the Amulet case, Doug had badgered me for months about ‘running’ a case with me. And once I’d been stupid, and let him come with me as I tried to track down a missing teenager. When we found the kid buried in the garden of his parent’s holiday home he’d thrown up all over the body. I should have remembered that he just wasn’t suited to fieldwork. But I owed him.
I nearly had a life once. It was back when Doug and I were just getting to know each other, and Liz was still alive.
The night my life changed—the 30th of January all those years ago—started like many others. Doug and I left another dull chemistry lecture and had a few pints in the Student Union. I was several sheets into the wind and that was always a recipe for disaster, especially when I hadn’t told my girlfriend Liz that I was going to be late.
I got involved in a darts match against a team from Edinburgh University, and I was having fun, even although I was so bad at the game that I was the one who ended up buying most of the drinks. At some point in the evening the barman called me over and offered me the phone handset.
“It’s your girlfriend,” he said. “She says she needs you right now.”
The drink had spoken for me.
“Tell her she needs her head examined. I’ll be back when I’m good and ready.”
And so help me, I’d enjoyed myself. While she sat in an empty flat and decided on the future course of our lives, I enjoyed myself. I drank a lot of beer, I sang bawdy songs about the Mayor of Bayswater’s daughter, and the hairs on her dickie-die-doh, and only have a vague memory of getting back to the flat.
I’ll never forget the next hour, though.
I wandered into the kitchen, bumping into tables and knocking over chairs. That took a minute.
I put on the kettle, and stood beside it while it boiled. That took three minutes.
I took the coffee into the front room and watched the end of the late night news. Ten minutes.
The beer told my bladder it needed to get out. I put down my coffee and got out of the chair—slowly. I wasn’t very steady. One minute.
She was in the bath, and she had used my razor on her wrists her ankles and her throat. She hadn’t wanted to make any mistakes. This wasn’t a cry for help—she’d tried that earlier, and I hadn’t answered. For the past fifteen minutes she’d been dying.
By the time the police arrived I was nearly sober, but after they found her note and showed it to me, I got drunk again quickly. She had been three months pregnant.
Doug took me in that night. It was him who cleared out the flat and got me somewhere new to live, and it was him I leaned on through the funeral as I tried to avoid the tear-stained eyes of Liz’s family. But he couldn’t persuade me to stay on in my studies.
The road from there to here was long, and well-traveled.
The crisis came on the fifth anniversary of Liz’s death. I’d arranged to meet Doug at seven in the evening for a few beers and a curry, but by the time he turned up I was already well to my way to oblivion. He took me home, sobered me up, and told me I’d be dead in a year if I didn’t slow down.
“Good,” I said, but even then, in my blackest depression, I knew I didn’t mean it. Suicide had been big in my mind in the first week after I’d found Liz, but I hadn’t done it then, and I knew I never would. Not the quick way, anyway.
“You need to do something, man,” Doug had said. “What do you want to do with your life?”
“Fight bad guys, save the world, get the girl, all that happy shit. I want to be James fucking Bond,” I growled at him.
“No can do,” said Doug. “You’re not good looking enough. But if that’s what you want, why not join the cops?”
I shook my head.
“Or become a private dick?” he said, and it was as if a light bulb came on over my head—a big one with the word ‘IDEA’ written on it.
And I had done it. Doug had thought I was joking, but three months later I left the paper and set myself up in the office in Byres Road. My first client was a wee man called Pete Mulville who had lost his wife. He hadn’t lost her, she’d run off with an aerobics instructor from Kelvinside called Marco, but he still paid me, and I was off and running.
I’d never have done it without Doug...and for that, I was willing to put up with a certain amount of irritation. Up to a point.
Ten minut
es later his hand crept towards the wiper controls again, but he pulled away quickly after only a sharp look from me. Ten minutes after that he was sound asleep, and I was soon in that state between watchfulness and relaxation that was needed on nights like this.
People see the job on the screen and think its all thugs, blondes, bad cops and sudden leaps of intuition. In reality it’s hours, days, sometimes weeks of tedium. Over time I’d developed strategies for dealing with it, playing games in my head, sometimes logic puzzles, sometimes compiling lists. Tonight it was ‘connections’ in films. For example, I was trying to get from Bringing up Baby to Pulp Fiction in as few steps as possible...I went Katherine Hepburn, Spencer Tracy, Robert Wagner, Natalie Wood to Christopher Walken, but I was trying to get it down to four. It was a game I often played with Doug, and I found it useful if I knew the best answer before I asked the question.
Most of the time it didn’t help...Doug had a memory like a computer, and made connections almost as fast...when he was on form, that is. He hadn’t been on top form for a while, and before tonight I’d been starting to wonder if he ever would be again. Getting him out of the office was a big step in the right direction. Even when he started to snore I was still glad he was here.
I lit another cigarette and went back to the problem at hand. I was looking for a link from Cary Grant to Cybil Shepherd when a light went on up in old lady Malcolm’s room. I checked my watch. It was nine-thirty...we’d been there for nearly two hours. No one had entered or left the flats, and no one had pulled into the car park. It looked like this was one of the few parts of the city that closed down early. I watched the light for two cigarettes, but there was no further movement and I went back to the problem.
I was on Hepburn, Poitier and looking for a link to Samuel L. Jackson when a movement at the corner of the building in front of me caught my eye. In the dark it was only a darker shadow among other shadows. But it moved in a sinuous, careful way that reminded me of a cat stalking its prey. But this was no cat...the shadow was tall, human in size and shape. It came slowly, carefully round the corner, its eyes, almost green, being the only thing I could see in the darkness.
I reached for the car’s lights, but I had to lean over Doug to do it. The movement jolted him awake, and he jerked, slamming a hand on the car horn.
The Midnight Eye Files Collection Page 29