It was my turn to sigh.
“And just what is after you?” I asked. “Some big dog? Or a Glesga heavy with an axe maybe?”
The fear lay big in his eyes.
“It’s worse,” he said. “Much worse. Three of my friends died recently. And I might be next,” he said.
“Tell me,” I said softly.
He started to cry in that holding-it-all-in way kids do when they’re trying to be brave. His shoulders heaved and tears ran down his cheeks. Then he really frightened me. He started to wheeze, struggling for air. He doubled over and broke into a coughing fit so strong I thought his lungs might come up.
I poured a glass of whisky and held it out to him, having to place it in his shaking hand.
He downed it in one. The coughing stopped. But the fear was back in his eyes as he stared at the glass.
“I thought it was water,” he whispered.
Something stronger than just the wind rattled my window behind me.
“Please. I thought it was water,” he shouted. He got out of the chair so fast that it fell with a bang on the floor.
I stood, unsure as to what to do next.
I wasn’t given an option. The window behind me blew in with a crash and a spatter of glass. I felt something grab me at the back of the neck, and my head was thrust down, hard, against the side of the desk. The corner caught me near the right eye. Blood spurted as I fell away.
Duncan screamed.
I tried to wipe my eyes clear. I was partly blinded by blood in one eye, and my sight was blurred, but I could make out enough to know that something large and white crouched over the man.
What the hell is that?
Duncan stopped screaming and went quiet. The only sound was a moist sucking like a wet fart. I wanted to stand up straight but my head had other ideas and the room span until I steadied myself with a hand on my desk.
Now even the sucking noise had stopped.
I looked up as the out-of-focus white thing bounded off Duncan and came towards me. I just had time to duck as it leapt over the desk like a pony taking a jump. By the time I’d turned it had gone out the window. My sight cleared... enough that I was able to pick my way through the shards of glass on my way to the window. I looked out, but there was only the usual Glasgow skyline.
Duncan lay still on the floor. I staggered to his side. His eyes stared up at me from a face that had dried out like an old raisin left in the sun.
He was dead and already going cold.
I lifted the money from the desk and, closing the door quietly behind me, went to work.
* * *
My first stop was the Twa Dugs. I told George what I needed and he gave me an elastoplast, a beer and his promise that he’d get the mess cleared up.
“How did he find you?” I asked George as I sipped at the beer. The urge was to knock it down and get started on the next, but Duncan had laid his money down. That bought him my attention, for a while at least.
George shrugged.
“How does anybody find me? You ken what this town is like.”
I knew only too well.
Everybody knows everything when there’s money involved and nothing when there’s Polis in the frame.
I thanked George for the beer and headed for the Mitchell library.
I thought I’d had a headache to start with, but two hours at the microfiche taught me the real meaning of the word. But I found what I was looking for. Anne Gardner, 31, from Clarkston, was found dead in her flat on the twenty-second of February. The cause of death was listed as starvation but the Procurator Fiscal had delivered an open verdict... she’d been perfectly fit and healthy the night before, and had been seen tucking into a few beers and a curry in a restaurant off Sauchiehall Street. I found out more than I needed to know about her from the tabloid reports of her death, but I also found out where she had worked.
The office was in the old Merchant area in the town centre. Not that many years ago this had been a place of dark dank tenements with hookers on the corners and winos in the alleys. Now it stood as a shining market of consumerism with Italian clothes shops, coffee bars and chrome and glass offices for people in expensive suits.
At this time of night it was mostly shut and locked down. What the suits didn’t know was that the winos and hookers hadn’t gone. They’d just changed their shift patterns. Down in the alleys at night the waste from the rich became the tit-bits of the poor as scavengers raked over the detritus of the day.
Nothing really changes.
The security guard at Carnegie Towers wasn’t keen on me until I showed him the quarter bottle of whisky I kept in my coat for such occasions. That loosened his tongue, and a fifty from Duncan’s pile made sure it stayed that way.
“I didnae ken the Gardner lassie,” he said. “But I was there the nicht the other two got deid.”
I handed him the bottle and let him talk.
“Everybody knew about the diet team,” he said. “They were making fools o’ themselves in the wee gym downstairs every night. Thirty and forty year old men trying to be boys again, and failing. The lass dying put a wee bit of a dampner on them for a while, but a couple of weeks later they were back at it as bad as ever.
“The night it happened two of them were down there, each trying to lift heavier weights than the other. The three of us were the only ones in the building and I was jist waiting for them to go before I could lock up and have a kip. They buggered that idea when they came straight out the shower and ordered fish suppers. They gave me a tenner to go get them and told me to keep the change, but I was still pissed off later when they called down from the office.
“They wanted me to go up and get rid of a big white cat that was pestering them. I told them to fucking catch it for themselves.
“I didna hear a peep out of them after that.
“When I did my rounds at ten o’clock I found them baith, face down in their supper. The doctors said they’d starved. But whit dae doctors know? Everybody kens ye cannae starve while eating a fish supper. It’s jist no’ natural.”
* * *
That seemed to be the sum total of his knowledge. I didn’t know yet how it helped me, but my spidey sense was tingling.
The game was afoot.
I did get something else of interest... I got the last known addresses of the remaining three dieters. It had been a while since any of them had been seen at work, but the guard didn’t seem too concerned.
“Yon Duncan man was here longer than the others. But everybody was glad when he called to say he wasn’t coming back. He was getting too skinny anyway,” he said as I left him with the last of the booze. “He was scary.”
I already knew where Duncan had ended up. That just left the last two... Peter Clarke and David Ellison. Both had addresses out in Milngavie... too far for a trip at this time of the night. The pounding in my head had lessened, but it hadn’t gone away, and the small amount of whisky I’d taken from the quarter bottle had just got me started.
I should have headed back to the office and the bed in the back room. But all that waited there for me was Duncan’s dead eyes. They’d still be there, even if George had cleaned up the mess. I needed a drink before I’d be prepared to face it. I wandered down towards Central Station, found a bar that had avoided gentrification, and settled in.
I have little memory of the next few hours. I drank, I talked to strangers, and I drank some more. I drank until my head stopped pounding and I couldn’t see Ian Duncan’s eyes.
Some time later I slept.
I dreamed of white cats and fish suppers.
* * *
When I woke it was morning, and I was sitting on a bench in Buchanan Street Bus Station. My mouth felt like somebody had shat in it. I took a taxi back to the office and climbed the stairs as wearily as Duncan had managed the day before.
George at the Twa Dugs had been as good as his word. There was no dead body on the floor, and the window was fixed. The room smelled of putty. I sent some cig
arette smoke to join it before showering and shaving.
After two cups of coffee I started to feel almost human. The weight of Duncan’s money started once again to prey on my conscience. I lit up a new Camel, pulled the phone towards me and went back to work.
Clarke and Ellison weren’t hard to find in the book, but Clarke wasn’t answering the phone, and I got the answering machine at Ellison’s place. I wasn’t doing anyone any good by sitting in the office, so I left a message for Ellison telling him I was on the way and headed for Milngavie.
It had just started to rain so I hailed a cab. He wasn’t keen on going so far out of the city, but the sight of my money shut him up fast. We headed along Great Western Road past Anniesland, and the traffic lessened as we left the city behind.
This far out Glasgow becomes suburbia. Neat houses with neat cars outside and neat little people inside, living neat, tidy lives of clockwork regularity.
For people out here, the Glasgow I knew was a foreign country. They visited it during their working hours, but they only saw what was on the surface, what the city let them see. They didn’t remember that all around them was a dark, old lady, brooding and cold. She mostly let herself show at nights, in the bars, around the docklands, and in the vast cemeteries which marked where all her children lay sleeping.
Some of them might occasionally catch a glimpse of her, in the face of a drunk, in the hands of a beggar. But they’d soon forget her once safely home and locked into their havens with their soap operas and reality shows and their TV dinners and boxes of Australian wine.
I was never allowed to forget her.
And I don’t want to.
The cab dropped me off in a cul-de-sac of houses that all looked the same... perfectly groomed, perfectly dull. Curtains twitched as I walked up the drive to Ellison’s place. A trim woman in a nurse’s uniform answered the door.
“I knew the suburbs were kinky,” I said. “But isn’t this taking it a bit far?”
I didn’t even get a smile.
“If you’re here to see Mr. Ellison, he’s resting, and can’t be disturbed.”
“He’s expecting me.”
She looked me up and down.
“He’s expecting a private detective, not somebody who smells like a brewery and looks like he’s slept in one.
“I left a message...” I said.
She sighed loudly and rolled her eyes. She looked kind of cute, but not enough for me to cut her any slack. I stared at her until she relented.
“He got it,” she finally said. “He said I was to show you in.”
She stood aside, but only just, and the look she gave me told me just what she thought of the idea. She motioned me through to a front room that had been turned into a room to care for a very sick man.
Ellison lay on a bed that looked far too big for him. He reminded me of the children you see in pictures of African famines; distended belly pushing through hospital whites, arms like thin sticks, lips pale, drawn back from gray gums showing yellowed, tombstone teeth.
“He won’t let me put in a drip,” she said. “Won’t let me feed him. All he has is water.”
“How long has he got?”
She shrugged. She looked like she was past caring.
“By rights he should be dead already.”
One of the stick-like arms rose and waved me forward. I had to lean over close to hear him, and even then his voice barely rose above a whisper.
“Tell Clarke I don’t forgive him,” he said.
“For what?”
He coughed and spluttered, thin spots of blood splattering the white of his covers.
“It was Clarke’s idea in the first place,” he said. “Him and that fucking binding agreement he made us sign.”
The man laughed bitterly, and I realized he was hardly more than thirty years old. He looked at least eighty.
“It was binding all right. And now there’s just the two of us left. Well you can tell Clarke that I might be dying... but I’ll see him go to hell first.”
He started to laugh and cackle and I realized something else... the poor bugger was mad as a bag of rabid monkeys. More blood spattered. The nurse ushered me aside as the coughing fit got worse and some of the machines he was wired to started to beep faster.
At the back of the room French doors opened out into the garden. I went out and lit up a smoke.
The case was getting to me. I hadn’t learned anything I liked, and little that would lead me to the root of what was going on. Meanwhile everybody involved was heading south fast.
The nurse came out five minutes later and bummed a cigarette from me.
“How’s the patient?” I asked as I lit her up.
She sucked a lung-full before replying. “He coughed himself unconscious,” she said. “He won’t last but a few more days. Maybe a wee bit more now that I’ve put a drip in... he cannae complain when he’s out for the count.”
And just like that everything came together... Duncan drinking my whisky, Wee Annie eating a curry, the two men wolfing down fish suppers. Somebody... or something, didn’t want any breaking of the diet.
Binding agreement.
That’s what Ellison had said. It looked like it had been more binding than any of them had anticipated.
I turned back into the room. “You have to take the drip out,” I said.
“I don’t have to do anything.”
We weren’t given time to get into an argument. The front window blew in with a crash and something that looked like a shaved albino chimpanzee bounded inside. I was halfway to the bed already, but I was too late. It latched its mouth on Ellison’s face and sucked.
The sound of Ellison’s life draining away made my guts roil. I stepped forward and punched at the hunched figure sat on the man’s chest. My hand seemed to sink into it. It felt like hitting a slab of warm butter.
The moist sucking stopped. The beast raised its mouth from the dry husk that had once been David Ellison. It turned towards me.
There was no face.
But it saw me, just the same.
A wet, oily mouth opened, no more than a slit in that formless visage. I aimed another punch, but met only air as the beast leapt out of the broken window. I had a last glimpse of white as it jumped through the shrubbery, then it was gone.
* * *
The nurse stood at the garden door, cigarette dangling from her fingers, mouth opening and closing like a drowning goldfish.
“I thought he was hallucinating,” she whispered. “A big white dug he said it was. I didnae believe him.”
I took the cigarette from her before she burned her fingers.
“His pal, Peter Clarke. Does he live round here?”
She couldn’t take her eyes from the dried out thing on the bed.
‘I thought he was addled,” she said softly. She was on the verge of going into shock, but I didn’t have time to play nice. I slapped her cheek until I got her attention. It took a while.
Finally her eyes fixed on mine.
“Clarke,” I said. “Does he live round here?”
“Acacia Avenue,” she said. “Two lefts then a right, number 45.”
I was on my way out of the door before she remembered to be outraged.
“Hey. You hit me. I’ve a good mind to...”
I didn’t hear any more. I ran along the suburban streets, hoping like hell I would make it on time.
* * *
45 Acacia Avenue wasn’t quite like the other houses on the street. The lawn hadn’t been mown for months, and fast food cartons lay strewn the length of the drive alongside torn rubbish bags spilling their contents to the wind.
But it was the front door that gave away the fact that I’d left suburbia behind. It was covered in intricate drawings done in black charcoal; swirls and curlicues around pentagrams and hexagrams. I’d seen something like it before, during research on another case that had taken a dive into the twilight zone. But this looked less like a formal magic protection ritual and more
like a man trying as many symbols as he could, in the hope that at least one might work.
I knocked hard on the door.
Somebody moved inside, but they didn’t answer.
“Mr. Clarke? I know about the diet... and the Binding Agreement. I’m here to help.”
“Help? I’m afraid the time for that passed a while back.”
The door opened.
I expected to see another skeletal, shuffling figure, but this man was portly, almost fat. He was unshaven and smelled ripe, but otherwise seemed healthy.
“Peter Clarke?”
He hurried me inside and closed the door quickly. He led me through to a room piled knee deep in food cartons, beer cans and dirty clothing. It smelled worse than I did after a night on the town. The curtains had been pulled closed and the air felt stale and warm. There hadn’t been a window opened in here for a long time.
“It’s the maid’s day off,” he said, and spilled a waterfall of trash on the floor to make room for me to sit on an armchair. I let myself down gingerly, making sure I was going to be able to get back up before committing myself.
I lit up a smoke as soon as he sat opposite me. It helped some with the smell, but not quite enough.
We sat and looked at each other for a while.
“You’re looking well,” I said when he showed no signs of talking.
“In the circumstances, I suppose I can’t really complain. I could be dead, like the other three.”
“Other five,” I said softly.
He went pale.
“I’m the last?”
I nodded.
“Then it must be huge by now,” he said.
I didn’t have to ask him what he meant.
“I’ve seen it,” I said. “But I don’t know exactly what I was looking at. Care to fill me in?”
He lifted a six pack of beer and threw a can towards me. I was careful to give it a good wipe with the arm of my jacket before opening it. It was warm, but went down well enough.
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