Crime

Fucking sales, Lennox thinks. What is this? — Yeah.

— Me too, Lance smiles, eliciting a giggle from Starry.

— But I guess that this fella ain’t the same type of salesman as you, Johnnie laughs.

— I guess he probably ain’t, Lance Dearing says in mock sorrow. — But then again, I reckon that there might just be two types of salesmen: good and bad. Ain’t that right, Ray?

Lennox remains silent, Starry’s capricious grin telling him it was them she had talked with on the phone earlier. Their presence is certainly a surprise to Robyn, and not, it seems, a pleasant one. Lennox moves away, sits down on the settee. Silence is always the best way, he has found, in such situations.

His eyes scan around the room, seeming always to wind up back at Robyn’s legs, hips or arse. He’s aware that he wants to fuck her, but considers, shamefully, this is probably just because the opportunity has receded with Lance and Johnnie’s presence. But now anyone will do. Something has gone off behind his cock.

Instead, he chops out another line from the big rock in a larger packet Starry has placed on the table, all the time on edge against the kid reappearing, and he takes it down. He looks at the print of a semi-nude woman on the wall. Then he considers Johnnie and Lance again. The concern he felt at their intrusion has gone. His fear evaporating, he fancies it kicking off. Now all that’s inside him is a black anger, still and even. He’s not thinking of Britney Hamil any more but he knows that when he does, he can kill anyone for her demise.

And he feels like killing. Just hurting would be insufficient. His dark mood creeps through his veins like a poison. He knows those faces: Dearing’s mocking reptilian smile, Johnnie’s pudgy, vacant stare. If only those men knew the danger they were in. He grinds his teeth till he imagines he hears the enamel crack. But he is a cop. Abroad. Calm the fuck down.

So he goes to the kitchen and gets another beer from the fridge. Dull those coke rushes. Robyn follows him. He wants to fuck her and kill the rest of them. Even Starry. Especially Starry. Something about her has disturbed him. That protean presence: one minute sexy, the next malign and controlling. She changed when those guys came in. He could feel it. See it in her eyes. Maybe it was just the coke. It was good stuff. Not too chemical. Maybe it was because he was doing all her gear. He wonders about offering her some cash. Feels a wad of twenties in his pocket.

He can’t think laterally. His thought pattern is linear, like a high-speed locomotive, careering towards one destination.

All he can do to stop this is to take some more coke. It helps. You can outrun your thoughts. He heads back into the living room, Robyn still pursuing him, ranting something about star signs, and he lifts up the copy of Perfect Bride. The lines he’d hidden from the kid are intact. Starry moves over and augments them for Lance and Johnnie. They are nothing now, the other three, no threat, just a source of drugs. A defiant sense of entitlement fuses him. On holiday. Prudey Trudi. Starry has another big bag of the stuff. A big rock. It might be a long night. A long, long night that lasts half an hour. They take another line each. Lennox needs the drug now more than ever. He recalls how they would sit near the toilet in the Grapes, the young coppers’ bar, or up in somebody’s flat, often his, snorting and boasting of how they had put away this cunt and threatened that cunt and done this cunt and would get that bastard. The real vitriol was not reserved for the criminals though, but the bosses: senior police officials, local and national politicians. It was these spastics that fucked everything up, that fucked up the job.

Lennox has done what he refers to as ‘the rehab thing’, and still goes to regular NA meetings. He knows how the drug presses you like a wild flower into something resembling yourself but a one-dimensional representation of it. Jagged and volatile, all sneers and jeers pushing back your boundaries of verbal and physical and sexual violence.

That lassie in Thailand; she was just a fucking kid.

The lads’ holiday in Bangkok. The girls were very young, but you could never tell with Asian lassies – so slender and petite. And, after all, we were on holiday. Drunk in that Patpong bar, the Thai girl with the dyed blonde hair who’d sat on my lap. Notman drunkenly whispering, — If you want tae ken the colour ay a bird’s minge, look at her eyebrows, no her hair.

Would upright George Marsden with the pressed blazer have behaved like us? Or would he have behaved like cops were supposed to behave? And how were law enforcement officers meant to behave off duty? Work together. Play together.

Then I saw the one with Gillman: she was just a kid. I told him to leave her. — She’s fuckin peyed fir, so she’s gittin it, he said. I was drunk. We argued. I pushed the blonde away. Pulled the other one, the kid, off Gillman’s lap. He got to his feet. Then his head was in my face and I was on the deck, before being helped into a taxi by Notman. Waited ages at the Bangkok hospital to get my nose badly reset. Later on I heard that he’d taken my half-arsed intervention out on the girl. She was just a kid. Once a girl, then made like Britney was, reduced…

You have to stop thought.

The line goes up his nose. Britney’s face dissolves, becomes the attractively sluttish woman opposite him.

Robyn. The cloying, irritating girlish voice somehow grows sexy. A Southern belle: Scarlett O’Hara to his Rhett Butler. Way down in Alabama. Milky tones enquiring, — Y’all wanna go lie down for a while, honey?

And Lennox knows that even feeling like fucking the world, it will take extremity, violent, perverse extremity, to make his floppy penis anything like hard enough to do the job. — In a bit, he says, charging his glass with the bottle of vodka. He feels trapped, in a skanky vortex of his own making.

Lance Dearing has swooped down to rant at him. Ostensibly telling him about fishing, but Lennox knows the charged power of words on cocaine and that Dearing is trying to establish presence, power and dominance. — Pulled a big ol bastard out of the sea yesterday. Took a while and I thought he’d bust the line at one point, but I stayed on his ass. That was the thing: I stayed on his ass. Sucker was goin nowhere once he bit on my hook.

So Ray Lennox kicks back with a skinny smile on his lips and gives monosyllabic answers. As he looks into this man’s leathery face, watches the spittle shoot from the corner of his mouth, he feels nothing now; he neither likes nor dislikes Lance. How can he? They are strangers, on cocaine. Grinding their teeth. Obstacles for each other to navigate: Formula One drivers trying to go round traffic cones at high speed. They rant in short bursts at each other in an ugly intimacy, each exposing the same raw nerve of ego to the other. Then Lance gets up to dance with Robyn, who obviously fears him, and a smiling Starry, as Lennox considers his lot.

He can’t marry Trudi. If they were ever going to get married then they would have been by now. He met her when she was eighteen and he was twenty-seven. Eight years ago. He’d just got his second big promotion. Detective Inspector Lennox. He’d be the youngest Chief Constable in Scotland, they’d only half joked. But after that, nothing. Treading water. Snorting more cocaine. Then Trudi and him had split up.

Three years later, though, they started going together again. He had come back from Thailand and was cleaning up, going to NA, and was back at the kick-boxing. They met at a new gym he was trying out. Unbeknown to him, she was a member. A coffee. Catching up. Both free agents. The spark. Still there. Catching up. Dinner. A film. Coffee. Bed. Catching up. The sex; it was better than before. Trudi: now a sleek, confident mid-twenties gym rat rather than a slightly pudgy teenager. Him: a sober shagging machine; the carnal obsession dominating everything. Shrugging aside the words of several guys on the force: reheated cabbage. Beware. Bad move.

But she loved him. She loved him because he was a lost cause and her own vanity was strong enough to convince her that with her brand of tough love, Ray Lennox, Project Lennox, could be successfully realised. He could become a superannuated superman, a breeder of good Scottish Protestant children who would excel not just academically but at the BBs and school sports, and be model citizens of the world as the Scots always were. Or at least the ones designated for export.

Trudi saw how he’d changed. Matured, was the term she frequently used. The first time she’d touched him again was to run her finger down his nose. — It’s bent a little, she’d said.

— Accident in Thailand. Broke it, he’d explained, looking into her eyes. — That was what made me give up the gear. I realised what it was doing. What I’d lost.

She liked what she saw.

But she’d seen what she’d wanted to see. He was a mess. Affecting a seen-it-all blase front, when his insides were like chopped liver. Cool Lennox with the shredded nerves. His old associate Robbo always saw through him.