Snow Storm

by Robert Parker

  This was his hell. Two years and three psychotherapists on and still there was no end in sight. It was a racket. Who didn’t have a screw or two loose?

  He wasn’t there through choice but under orders; not Gray’s this time but Rachel’s. She put up with a lot but demanded this in return; one hour a week in the company of a shrink and his ghosts.

  It was a large office but even Burke would concede it got crowded in here of a Wednesday afternoon.

  “They’re back,” he said, cursing his own lack of self control and watching as she acknowledged this information without giving anything away.

  4

  Daryll woke in a state of confusion. He blinked at the midday sun streaming through the yellowing net curtains and took a moment to assess the situation.

  The pain surged into the base of his skull as his stomach somersaulted in sympathy and his mouth began to water. He would not throw up he assured himself. He wouldn’t. He launched his slight frame across the room and plunged headfirst through the bathroom door towards the pan. His stomach emptied itself as the cranial pain was renewed once more.

  Never get high on your own supply; that was the old adage. No one saw fit to mention the perils of getting wasted on cheap rum while trying to deal with the tedium of attempting to peddle the shit though.

  What a fucking mess. They were a man down thanks to Leon going missing, probably having thought better of the whole thing as they’d made naff all progress so far.

  Stupid fucking plan anyway. There was no way with this place. A – it was too cold, B - the people seemed to have adjusted themselves accordingly and let off the same vibe and C – when you did manage to engage the muppets they had a few trust issues going on. There was a bit of a prejudice element to it he reckoned. How precisely was someone supposed to get a foothold in this place?

  All they wanted was to be the local crack dealers but would anyone give them a break? Hell no.

  A series of snorting and snuffling sounds emerged from Gus’s mouth or nose. He couldn’t say which. The great pile of lard lay face down on a mess of feather filled rags that might once have passed for a mattress. He couldn’t even breathe properly. Such a basic human function and he had to make it sound like a pig was up to some serious truffle hunting on the on the other side of the room.

  Crawling was the best solution to his current malaise and its inherent mobility issues. He slumped back onto the mattress knowing it would be a while before he could move again without incurring the wrath of his head but wary of the fact there was a limit to the length of time he could stay still before his weak and feeble mind took over. Once that happened the symptoms would be magnified further. Such was the state of hangover play.

  This thought alone brought the stomach churning on once more and once more he made contact with porcelain. There was nothing left to give as it turned out, save for a large amount of reflexive exertion. Was this what hell would be like? Probably, although it would be a close run contest between a perpetual hangover and just one weekend in this place.

  It wasn’t the Brum. That was for sure. It didn’t have the familiar haunts. There was no comfort zone to stretch out in but he’d hoped that might mean a lack of the same frustrations, no more glass ceiling to bounce his head off. They had talked about this being the promised-land. Stupid. That was back when it was all shiny and new. They still had hope then, to some degree, thought they’d do it together, like The Godfather Part 2 in the flashback sequences. They’d get rid of the established market they said, get their own slice of the pie, couldn’t be more than a few daft jocks and they were all pissed most of the time.

  It had seemed a flawless plan but now, much like last night’s Lamb Bhuna, it was headed round the u-bend.

  They had done some serious under estimation. This might not be a bigger pond but as far as they were concerned, there were a lot bigger fish.

  Gus spluttered some more before kicking into life like some kind of clapped out over-loaded motor. He looked up from his mattress through eyes that as usual looked set to burst out of their sockets. “Well what now, man with the plan?” he rasped.

  ********************

  The initial chat with Edwards had been brief. Yes, the SCDEA were missing Vlad the Inhaler, was all he was willing to give away over the phone before he began quizzing Burke regarding the state of the body or part thereof that they had in their possession.

  Burke sent some pictures across in a password protected file along with some info from forensics.

  They had arranged a call back for later in the afternoon, following the head shrinking session.

  It was around three; the point at which afternoons generally tended to sag. He often wondered what they’d done to cope with it in the past. In the days of the liquid lunch afternoons must have amounted to an endurance event. Sleeping on the job was hard enough to avoid in these more puritanical times. His system seemed to go into a sort of pre-hibernation state. It was worse in the summer, when the air con struggled to cope in a building constructed on the cheap with one eye on the public purse strings.

  He went for a wander to the coffee machine, more in an effort to get the blood going than anything to do with caffeine, which, if he was honest, he needed just to function normally, never mind provide any sort of perk.

  Campbell shifted awkwardly in his seat as he passed, pretending to focus on a set of generic graphics Burke recognised from an online gambling site and which popped up when the skiving chancer in question made the mouse hover over a “look busy” icon.

  He didn’t actually mind Campbell being on the site but did feel reassured when any of his subordinates scrambled to hide things like that when they heard him coming. It was one of life’s little pleasures, admittedly a mildly sadistic one.

  Campbell had been talking about placing a bet on the possibility of a white Christmas earlier.

  Edwards had a shifty air when he finally called back. “I’m sending a couple of my team through to identify the remains if it’s ok by you,” he said. “Or at least do the best they can.”

  “Yeah sure,” Burke replied.

  “Just another scumbag off the street, small time pusher. Gets it all off your desk doesn’t it?”

  “It does,” Burke agreed, thinking it was terribly helpful.

  “First thing tomorrow we should be able to confirm either way but looking at the snaps I’d say it’s our boy.”

  “Good.”

  Burke attempted to extract a fairly stubborn bit of chicken from between two of his back teeth.

  “And as for this other one, I’m not even sure they’re connected but as a one off finders fee let’s say..”

  The chicken gave way and Burke felt a sense of victory.

  “… I suppose we could, ahem, assume they are and take that off your hands to boot.”

  Gotcha. A smile slowly spread across Burke’s face. A low down shrink’s trick it was but definitely one that worked and the results themselves had a certain therapeutic quality.

  “Anyway,” Edwards continued, talking into the void, “I suppose we should catch up again this time tomorrow.”

  “Tomorrow it is then.” Burke agreed. As he put the phone down he felt the tension ease itself out of his shoulders and his brow begin to unfurl.

  He left the office and made his way home where he crawled into bed and into a state of unconsciousness for the next 12 hours.

  5

  Andy waited patiently at the port road end. The big John Deere rattled in its diesely way and the cover on the exhaust did its dance in his eye-line as he waited for a gap in the line of cars coming out of Braehead towards Newton: rush hour - shire style.

  It was a tiny bit ironic, just how vulnerable you could feel at the wheel of several tons of metal, especially having a few more tons hitched to the back of the tractor in the form of a trailer.

  It was a cushy job this though if he was honest; take the John Deere down to Baldoon and fill the trailer up with feed. Repeat the cycle a couple of time
s. Everyone knew you couldn’t exactly haul ass in a tractor, so taking it easy was the order of the day or at least the afternoon.

  He needed an easy afternoon after the weekend he’d had. Friday night they’d hit Newton just for the hell of it. They started playing pool in The Star, trying to have a quiet one. But then someone said something about karaoke in The Central and big mental Davie, who’d missed out on the hi-jinks of the weekend before, had declared himself to be a black belt in karaoke.

  After that everything went a bit jumpy memory-wise. He remembered The Central, someone singing Kenny Rogers’ “The Gambler” and Jimmy Walker eating a pint glass. Why did he always feel the need to do that? Then some boys from Whithorn had offered to fight everyone, just because they’d decided amongst themselves that they could.

  Saturday was a write off. This was what happened when the parents went away on holiday and left him in charge.

  They’d headed up to Stranraer. They’d trudged the mean streets of this insular tribute to a certain style of seventies architecture looking for some kind of adventure and accidentally found it in The Royal after stepping on someone’s toes, quite literally.

  He’d been trying to get the barmaid’s attention. It wasn’t working but he wasn’t a man to give in easily. As she passed by he tried to make eye contact, a bit the worse for wear. He was over enthusiastic and despite only trying to follow her with his eyes he’d ended up doing so with his entire body as his feet tagged along for the ride.

  He walked straight across the feet of a mean looking skin headed type who seemed to take exception. The guy’s face was distinctly bulldog-like. His nose had seen better days and his slow movements made him look punch drunk more than traditionally hammered.

  Before Andy could say anything by way of an apology the other man lashed out, slamming him up against the bar. His movements were so subdued the way he swung almost looked camp. The man’s head shot forward without warning, driven by some unforeseen force, rattling his teeth off the bar. His shoulders slumped down as his body seemed to give in briefly before jerking fitfully back to life.

  Andy looked up and saw the grinning face of Davie, who as it turned out was blissfully unaware of the bottle headed straight for the back of his head.

  Everything happened so quickly; that was what people always said and it kind of did but at the same time everything was in slow motion. He heard the bottle holding guy say something in what he thought must have been an Eastern European language, probably Polish. He looked a lot like the bulldog but was distinguishable by an unusual tattoo sticking through the top of his shirt. He could remember thinking all of this just as the heavy duty bar stool came into contact with the guy’s jaw and everything underneath that point just seemed to collapse.

  The bulldog guy seemed to find his balance again. He opened his mouth to speak but his words were slurred as the air and blood vapour breezed through the gap where his teeth had been. He rubbed his face, looked down at his hand and frowned before heading for the nearest exit as though on autopilot.

  His friend lay on the ground dazed while people crowded around, partly trying to be good Samaritans partly wishing to be bit players in the action.

  After that everything died down pretty quickly. It amazed him how that could happen. One minute you were having a quiet pint on a Saturday night, the next it had all gone tits up and you were dazed, spitting blood and wondering where the fuck your incisors had gone. Meanwhile, everyone went back to normal rules of engagement as the music kicked off again and you were left to pick up the pieces.

  Sunday night they decided it was far safer just downing a few cans in front of Call of Duty.

  The consequences of all of this caught up some time around Monday morning and now he was paying his debt to the party gods in full.

  As he headed down the track the low hanging branches bounced off the tractors cab jarring his nerves more than they needed. The flat expanse of Baldoon opened up before him stretching off into the distance to be interrupted by Wig Bay, going south to the Solway Firth. Beyond, the Galloway Hills looking glacial at this time of year, having received their seasonal dusting of snow, dominated the north and east of the horizon.

  The airfield had been built in the war, this being a suitably out of the way place to hide trainees for the RAF’s finest. A good few pilots had ended their days on those hills due to errors of judgement or just plain bad luck. Air strips ran east to west and north to south intersecting each other and the shells of what had once been the base’s buildings lay like the skeletal remains of what must have been a much more dramatic world.

  To the south of The Machars, nearer the bottom of the peninsula at Garlieston they’d built the Mulberry Harbour; a top secret floating construction used for the D-Day landings and to the west at Knockienam Churchill and Eisenhower met to formulate plans.

  It seemed strange to think so much had gone on here. Now they didn’t even have a railway. The creamery had gone years ago and farming had changed altogether. Now the first thing many people did when they were old enough was get out. There was a bit of a brain drain going on. University or college in one of the big cities gave people a taste for the bright lights and life in the big smoke. Many didn’t return. It could get lonely if you stayed.

  Not that Andy was worried. He was getting out. That was for sure. He was on a gap year; that was all. A gap yaaah, Davie had called it in his best scarf wearing toff accent before asking if he shouldn’t be somewhere more exotic, volunteering and teaching people the error of their ways, to which he’d replied he was.

  He’d done it to help the old man out. He knew his dad would never ask him to stay, although deep down he knew he wanted him to. As a way to cut down on his guilt he’d decided to stick around for a year, remind the old boy how nuts they drove each other, chill out and earn some coin before heading for the bright lights, a place at uni and whatever the future might hold. The truth was he had no clue what he wanted. He just knew there was stuff out there. He wasn’t even sure what stuff, just stuff you could get your teeth into; conversations that didn’t involve cattle, cars or casual gossip.

  He rounded the airfield and approached the entrance to the feed store. Some of the old buildings had evolved over time into a mini industrial complex that now contained a saw-mill and an agricultural supply store along with some offices and warehouses. Recently the whole lot had been bought over by a big company and it looked like security had been beefed up as he drew up to a full-on looking galvanised gate.

  Andy had an uncomfortable feeling in his bones as he leaned down out of the cab to speak to the only worker by the gate, a man he now realised had a familiar toothless grin.

  6

  The two officers from the SCDEA had arrived around half past nine, conspicuously better turned out than their Edinburgh CID counterparts. It looked like they spent most of their wages in Urban Outfitters and probably the rest being seen in the flashiest bars in the Merchant City. Burke had always been more of a west end man where Glasgow was concerned, although even that was filling up with hipsters these days by all accounts.

  They could have passed for students if you dropped them into another context he thought, before rebuking himself for the kind of lazy thinking he hated seeing in anyone else. Sometimes he felt he was engaged in a constant battle to see off the thought processes that signalled the start of the inevitable decline. Fair play, he was half way to seventy this year.

  The guy, who introduced himself as DC Black, seemed almost shy, and yet there was something about his manner, something just the wrong side of assertive; probably just a sense of entitlement bestowed upon him by virtue of the fact he was a member of the SCDEA, the institution the media had taken great pains to describe as a Scottish equivalent of the FBI. Or maybe it was the fact he was a small man with big hair, as so many weegies seemed to be.

  He wore a wedding ring which seemed out of place, given his age and wore a leather bomber jacket, which Burke suspected was less ironic fashion sense, more p
laying at being the big movie cop. He wondered how long he’d spent practising the iron grip handshake: probably bullied at school.

  The girl, DC Wilson seemed pretty hard-nosed in the sense that she said very little but had an unrelenting gaze and when she did speak it was more of a grunting in acknowledgement kind of thing. He got the sense she was busy taking everything in, mixing it with a healthy sized pinch of disdain. He could tell she didn’t approve of him; an old fogey wearing a suit and hiding out here rather than getting on with the high flyers and busting the big criminals. She too was on the small side. He wondered if they’d been paired up to make Black feel more secure. She stood with folded arms, not in a way that some people seemed to think gave away a sense of discomfort. She wasn’t hugging herself. She was more intent on projecting the idea that she couldn’t be bothered standing up straight with her arms by her sides. This place wasn’t worthy of good posture or standing to attention in any way. Her hair was scraped back in austere utilitarian fashion and she chewed on her lip as she scanned the room and tried to rein in the contempt. She wore a scarf tight around her neck so that only her face was visible.

  This was just a courtesy call of course; before they identified the Russian or former Russian’s head officially, as they inevitably would, and Edwards would put in a courtesy call to give him the soft soap, tell him it was ok, they’d take the whole thing off his hands while inwardly gritting his teeth and hoping those parochial Edinburgers wouldn’t get possessive over a case and an operation they’d blundered their way into by virtue of just working on the patch the relevant part of the stiff had turned up on. How much better might things have been for Edwards if one of the other body parts had simply turned up elsewhere? A leg in Bishopbriggs perhaps, an arm in East Kilbride, or maybe a foot in Falkirk could have been a foot in the door.