Crime

Did that wee girl?

Nah, no that wee soul…

Turbulence rocks the plane and Lennox’s sweat ducts open up under its broadside, as he’s abruptly conscious of the fact that he’s travelling in a metal tube at six hundred miles an hour, six miles in the air over the sea. A drop in the ocean: just a speck waiting to fall into oblivion. He watches Trudi, unperturbed, small scarlet slash of a mouth, only briefly raising a thinly plucked brow in disdain. As if an aircraft disaster would merely inconvenience the wedding plans.

The shaking in the Boeing 747 stops as the engines thunder through the air. The buzz that permeates the plane constantly in his ears. Thrusting ahead. Into blackness. The pilots seeing nothing in front of them. The instruments in the cockpit would be blinking and twirling on the console.

You can see why terrorists and governments – those with the biggest stake in our fear, Lennox considers – are so focused on aircraft travel. We are scared shitless before we start out. All they need to do is fine-tune this dread through the odd atrocity or its consort, heavy-handed security.

Trudi has a blanket over her legs.

The magnetic dark around him. He can feel it beckoning.

Why should he worry? He’s on holiday. He’s done his job. What is there to regret? It’s self-indulgent. But he can’t help it. The metal taste in his mouth. Can’t help hurting himself with thoughts. Nerves prickling under his skin. He fears himself again. He wishes he’d taken more pills.

— What if we go down? Lennox whispers, swamped with notions of death as a vast bleak nothingness. — We’d be free from it all.

— I’m still thinking periwinkle for the bridesmaids, Trudi says without looking up from the magazine, — but I don’t want Adele upstaging me. Then she turns to him in real fear. — You don’t think—

Ray Lennox feels a surge of emotion as he recalls a picture of Trudi as a young girl, on the mantelpiece at her parents’ house. An only child: the couple’s one shot at immortality. What if anything were—

Another jag of trepidation rising in him. — Trudi, I’d never let anybody hurt you, you know that, don’t you? he announces in desperate urgency.

Her eyes expand in the stilted horror of the soap-opera heroine. — You think she’s pretty, don’t you? Don’t even try to deny it, Ray, it sticks out a mile.

Trudi thrusts her breasts out towards him and he sees the ribbing pattern of her tight brown sweater curve almost implausibly in a way that once aroused him. A few weeks back.

She wants to be the perfect bride. Like wee Britney Hamil might have dreamt of.

He grabs her, hugs her close, breathing in her perfume, the fragrance of the shampoo in her hair. Something in his throat is choking him. As if a foreign object is wedged there. His voice so thin he wonders if she can hear him. — Trudi, I love you… I…

She squirms in his grasp, wriggles free and pushes him away. For the first time on the flight, her searching eyes engage with him. — What’s wrong, Ray? What is it?

— That case I was working on… that wee lassie…

Her head shakes vigorously and she puts a shushing finger over his lips. — No shop talk, Ray. We agreed. You’ve to get away from the job. That was the plan. That was what Bob Toal said. If I remember correctly his exact words were: Don’t even think about the job. Don’t think. Have a good time. Relax. The purpose of this vacation is to relax and plan the wedding. But you’re drinking again, and you know how I feel about that, she exhales, protracted and peevish. — But it’s what you wanted, and the mug that I am, I reluctantly agreed. So relax. You have your pills for anxiety.

It occurs to Lennox that she’s used the American term ‘vacation’ instead of holiday. The word clatters around in his head. To vacate. To leave.

But to go where?

Where did you go when you left?

The stewardess arrives with the drinks service. Trudi orders a white wine. A Chardonnay. Lennox gets in a couple of Bloody Marys.

Trudi settles back in her seat. Her head tilted to the side. Voice cooing, in sing-song manner. — All jobs are stressful in this day and age. That’s why we have vacations.

Again!

— Ver’ near two glorious weeks of sun, sand, sea and the other, she nudges him, then sulks, — You do still fancy me, Ray? And she does that thing with her breasts again.

— Course ah do. Lennox feels a constricting of the muscles around his chest and throat. His windpipe has become a straw. He is trapped; hemmed in beside the window, far too small to offer escape into the oblivion of sky. He looks at his crippled, bandaged right hand, a bag of broken knuckles, phalanxes and metacarpals. How many more would go, how long would it take for both fists to be pulped trying to punch a hole through this plane? Between him and the aisle sits first Trudi, then a blade-faced older woman, spare-framed, with bony hands. Probably ages with his own mother. He breathes in the dirty, dry recycled air of the plane. The old girl’s skin is like melted plastic. Like it has been dried out by the air conditioning. There are orangey blotches. He wonders how many hours an eight-hour flight aged you. He didn’t want Trudi to know that he’d only brought a few pills; that he was planning to stop them in Miami.

Trudi drops her voice. — I’ll do it if you want, Ray. If it’s what you really want…

He raises the plastic beaker to his mouth and sips at the vodka. His hand trembles. Then his body. How many paltry measures from those little bottles will it take to stop this, to make it go away? — The thing is… he manages to cough.

—… because I want to please you in that way, Ray, I really do, she implores, perhaps a bit too loudly as she’d had a few drinks at the airport bar and with the wine and altitude they are digging in. She turns to the old dear sitting next to her and exchanges saccharine smiles followed by a greeting.

Lennox thinks about the crime. At his desk the morning he heard and—

Trudi’s elbow digs his ribs. Her voice now a low whisper. The faintest of downy hair on the top of her glossy pink lips. — It’s just that it shocked me at first. It was trying to reconcile the fact that you’re a normal, red- blooded, heterosexual male with you wanting to be… penetrated in that way…

Lennox fortifies himself with another swig of the Bloody Mary. It’s all but gone. — I never want you to do anything you’re uncomfortable with, he says, pulling his features into a shallow smile.

— You’re a honey, she kisses him on the side of the face, the kiss of an aunt, he thinks. She holds open Perfect Bride, at a page displaying, in several script styles, the same announcement of a fictitious wedding. — What do you reckon about these for the invitations? Her big nail thuds down on a blue script in Charles Rennie Mackintosh style.

Glancing at them, Lennox thinks, with mild parochial resentment, of Glasgow. — Too Weedgie. He then points at the Gothic illustrations. — I like this one better.

— Oh my God, no way! She gasps and laughs, — You are totally bonkers, Raymond Lennox! These are like funeral invitations! I’m not the Bride of Frankenstein. She raises her eyes and fills her wine beaker. — Just as well you’ve got me organising this wedding. I dread to think what kind of a joke it would be if it was left up to you. She turns to the old girl whose cheery, intrusive smile is beginning to nauseate Lennox. — Men. Honestly! Good for nothing!

— I’ve always said it, the old girl adds encouragingly.

They cluck enthusiastically over the contents of the magazine and Trudi’s ecstatic descriptions of her dress, as Lennox adjusts the seat to its stingy recline, his eyes growing heavy with sleep. Soon his mind is drifting back to the crime. His thoughts are like a landslide; they seem to subside and settle, then before he knows it they’re off again, heading for the same downhill destination. The crime. Always plummeting inexorably towards the crime.

You got the call that morning.

At your desk in that small, utilitarian office in Edinburgh’s police headquarters at Fettes. A frosty, late-