reflecting street lamps and stars.
I didn’t know how long Tuckfield was prepared to stay in there, but I was ready to sit it out till the following morning, if necessary. By one o’clock the others were getting restless.
‘Come on,’ Strings said. ‘This is pointless. Let’s go.’
Roddy was shaking his head slowly, almost like a man in a trance. He muttered, very nearly inaudibly, ‘This is the end for Donald fucking Murray. He’s finished. Finished!’
All the lights around the pavilion went out, plunging the end of the pier into darkness. Everyone was suddenly alert. Almost at the same time, the distant wailing of a police siren drifted to us across the night, and I turned to see the blue light of a police patrol car heading down the hill towards the front. It was no surprise when it bumped across the promenade and headed straight up the pier towards us.
‘Jesus!’ Rambo said. ‘He’s called the cops.’
I felt indignation welling in my chest. ‘So? We haven’t done anything wrong.’
But as it turned out, the cops weren’t interested in us. The patrol car drove straight past, swerving into a sideways skid on a handbrake half-turn, and coming to a stop right outside the main door. A white-faced Tuckfield emerged, quickly locking the door behind him, and jumped into the back seat of the police car. The car revved and spun its back wheels, and sped off along the pier.
For a moment we all stood watching in disbelief.
Mairead sat in the front seat of the car, face pale and angry, like a full moon reflected on the windscreen. Roddy and Strings were in the back, Roddy sitting side-on, with his legs out of the open door. I don’t really know what possessed me, but anger rose in me like overheated milk and I jumped behind the wheel of the car and started the engine.
‘What are you doing?’ Roddy shouted.
‘Just shut the door!’
He barely had time to get his legs in and pull the door closed before I had spun the car around to accelerate hard along the pier in pursuit of the police car. ‘For Christ’s sake, Fin, you can’t go chasing the cops!’
I saw Strings’ frightened-rabbit face ballooning into my rearview mirror. ‘Jesus, Fin, you’ll get us all arrested.’
I said nothing, and as I pressed my foot to the floor in an attempt to close the gap on the blue flashing light ahead of us, I was aware of Mairead turning to look at me. But she never said a word.
The police car slewed across the promenade and turned south towards a collection of fairground attractions shuttered up for the night. The driver ran a red light, and turned up the hill. I could feel the tension in my own hands as I spun the wheel and followed. There were no other vehicles around this early in the morning.
At the top of the hill the police car turned right then dog-legged to the left, and I felt my tyres sliding on the wet surface of the road as I followed, losing control for just a moment before finding grip again and picking up speed. I was almost hypnotized by the blue flashing light dead ahead, without a single thought of what on earth it was I might do if and when I caught up with it. But we were gaining on it, and the tension being generated by the others in the car was almost tangible.
Suddenly the brake-lights of the car in front filled our windscreen, blurred and dragged across it by the wipers. I stood on my brakes, feeling the car drifting beneath me, swinging left, and then right as I pumped the brake for grip and swung the wheel one way then the other to right the skid. We stopped, I think, within six inches of the rear bumper of the police car.
There was an almost collective exhalation of relief from Roddy, Strings and Mairead, and I sat clutching the wheel, breathing hard. For what felt like an inordinate length of time nothing happened. Both cars sat there, one behind the other, engines idling.
I could see Tuckfield’s frightened face, half turned to peer back at us through the dark. Nobody moved. Nobody spoke.
Then the driver’s door of the police car swung slowly open. A goliath of a uniformed police sergeant stepped out on to the street, pulling on his cap and tugging its shiny peak down over his eyes. He stood for a moment glaring at us, then walked slowly towards my side of the car, one hand on his hip, the other touching the handle of the baton that hung from his belt.
I wound down the window as he leaned in to peer at me. His face was impassive, and his dark eyes flickered first towards Mairead, and then Roddy and Strings in the back, before returning to me. I could see a shaving of ginger hair around his head beneath his cap. ‘Are you in the band?’
‘I’m the roadie.’
He nodded and took a black notebook and pen from his breast pocket. He reached past me and handed it to Mairead. ‘My daughter’s got your CD. I figure she’d love to have your autograph.’
Mairead gave him one of her smiles. ‘Of course.’ She took his notebook, found a blank page and signed it. She glanced over her shoulder. ‘Do you want the others?’
‘Are they in the group?’
‘They are.’
He nodded, and Mairead handed his notebook back for Roddy and Strings to sign. Roddy reached over my shoulder to give it to me, and I handed it back. He returned it to his breast pocket, then focused his glare on me once more. To my surprise he thrust his big hand through my window.
‘I’ll shake your hand, son.’ For a moment I couldn’t bring my arm to move, before suddenly it reached up, almost involuntarily, for my hand to be gripped by his. A warm, firm handshake, that he held for what seemed like an eternity. When finally he returned it to me he said, ‘You’ve got some fucking nerve, boy, I’ll give you that.’ He paused to draw a long breath. ‘Your story had better be good.’
So I told him. He stood and listened in silence, his slow, stertorous breathing pulsing out clouds of misted breath to swirl around his head. When I had finished he nodded and drew in his lips. ‘Well, I’ll tell you, son. And here’s the thing.’ He nodded towards his car. ‘Mr Tuckfield there has friends in high places. And I’m just doing what I’m told, no questions asked. So whatever the rights or wrongs of what’s gone down here tonight, you’ll be going home without your money, and damned lucky not to be spending the night in a police cell.’ I could have sworn then that there was a smile in his eyes that he was doing his best to conceal. ‘In all my years in the force,’ he said, ‘I have
We sat in silence and watched as he got back behind the wheel of his car and drove off into the night. I could see Tuckfield’s smug face grinning back at us. I wound up the window and Roddy said, ‘Donald’s fucking dead!’
I never was party to exactly what transpired between Roddy and Donald, but within the week the band had fired him and signed up with an established London agency. And while Donald’s career and life then went into free fall, Amran’s fortunes soared. They made several television appearances, and Roddy and Strings were commissioned to write a song for a Hollywood movie being shot in Scotland. The producers liked it so much they asked the band to write and record all the incidental music, which then became the basis of their next album. The subsequent success of the film led to even greater success for Amran. The song was released as a single and shot straight into the charts at No. 1, where it stayed for almost five weeks. By the time their next CD was in the music stores, they were riding high on what appeared to be an unstoppable track to the top.
Except that Roddy, for all his talent and all his ambition, never lived to see it.
I remember that it was the following summer, June or July, when I heard. I had got drunk the previous night, on the rebound from a relationship of several months, and ended up in the bed of a girl I’d met at a party. She was a student, living in a bedsit in Partick, on the downmarket edge of Glasgow’s west end. I didn’t wake up till ten or eleven, pretty hungover and with very little recollection of what had passed between us the previous night. She didn’t even seem familiar to me as she leaned over the bed and shook me gently awake.
‘You told me last night you roadied for Amran,’ she said.
I could hardly open my mouth, it was so dry. ‘So?’
‘Roddy Mackenzie’s the keyboard player, right?’
‘Jesus Christ, what about it?’ I screwed up my eyes against the light.
‘It’s all over the morning news. Apparently his plane went missing somewhere up the west coast yesterday evening. Search and rescue have been out all night. They’ve given up hope of finding him alive. They’re just looking
