watching Dean with her eyes wide.
Dean was still looking at Billy, rage in his eyes.
‘Stay away from Adele, you dirty cunt. Understand?’
Everyone in the ward was staring at them. With a clatter and swish, the men hauled Dean back through the door, leaving a vacuum of silence to fill.
Zoe turned to Billy. Tears on her cheeks now, a look of understanding in her eyes.
‘Wait,’ Billy said, but he didn’t really mean it. Why should she wait, to hear more bullshit?
She turned and strode down the corridor, raising her hands to her face, not looking back, then she was through the doors and away.
Billy stared at the doors, swinging to a stop.
He heard a whine and spotted Jeanie cowering next to the bedside cabinet.
He put his hand out. ‘It’s OK, girl.’
He tasted blood in his mouth, then noticed spatters of red on his white sheets.
Jeanie crept towards him tentatively, but he made comforting noises to bring her near. When she was close enough, he stroked her snout and head, making small shushing noises. He felt the tension leave her body, then he lowered himself back on to his bed, still touching her face with a limp hand.
He pushed the morphine button and kept pushing until he knew there was no more coming.
26
More drug-soaked sleep, distressed, swimming with nightmare visions, him in the pub toilets standing over Dean bent over the sink, then their faces morphing into Zoe and Charlie, then his mum frowning at him, Jeanie’s simple stare, all of them crushing him, making his head explode. Images of his brain liquefying, pouring out of the hole in his skull and down the sink, everything that’s him disappearing into the gutter then the sewer then out to sea.
His eyelids snapped open. His breath caught in his chest then released in a chain of sickly gasps. He felt a slick sheen of sweat all over his body, sticking him to the sheets. Then new pain sweeping in, his face, kidneys, mingling with the old pain, the familiar throbs and aches and pulses of death flowing through him.
‘Are you OK, Kiddo?’
Rose. Thank fuck.
She was sitting by the side of the bed, her face was worried, full of compassion. It was good to see a face like that.
‘I’m fine,’ he said.
‘Because you look like shit.’
He coughed out a laugh and winced, pain across his midriff and forehead.
She smiled. ‘It only hurts when you laugh, eh?’
‘Something like that.’
‘It’s been quite a week for you, huh, Kiddo?’
‘I thought my nickname was Scoop.’
‘You seem more like a kid than an ace reporter, sitting there in your hospital jammies, lost to the world.’
Billy looked round. It wasn’t quite daylight outside, maybe around sunset, a warm evening glow ebbing through the window. He examined the ward, same spread of old-timers, wheezing and spluttering towards a bitter end.
‘Where’s Jeanie?’
‘The dog?’
Billy nodded.
‘Your brother took it home. I met him on my way in.’
Memories of his last conscious spell began filtering into his mind. Zoe. And Dean. The truth about Adele.
Rose was watching him intently. He knew she could read his face.
‘What were you thinking?’ she said.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Come on, I know what you were up to. In the toilets with the merry widow? That is quite something.’
Billy raised a hand to his face. His skin felt like a plastic bag, creased and artificial. He ran a hand over his bandaged head, trying to find the weak spot with his fingers.
‘Does everyone know?’
Rose sighed. ‘Not sure how far word has got out. Tom and I will keep it out the Standard, but I can’t guarantee the tabloids won’t get a sniff of it. I spoke to the barman, persuaded him to keep his mouth shut if anyone came asking, but if one of the red tops gets wind of it and offers him money, there’s not a lot I can do.’
‘It’s not really news, though.’
‘You’re right, a rival reporter taking drugs and having sex in a pub toilet with the grieving widow of a recently murdered, notorious Edinburgh crime lord — not newsworthy at all. I think the worst hack in the world could make a case for that getting some column inches, don’t you?’
‘It wasn’t like that.’
Rose stared at him. ‘Look, I’m on your side. You’re a friend, a colleague, OK? We cover for each other, look out for each other. And you got us some great stuff on this story, although now your means of getting the scoops looks rather unprofessional, to say the least. But anyway. Rest assured that the paper is going to do its best to protect you in all this, I have the gaffer’s word. And I’ve got your back too,
OK?’
‘I appreciated that, Rose, really.’
She looked down. ‘But you’re going to have to take some serious time off, you understand? You’re way too close to this whole thing, to the point where you’re part of the story.’
Billy had a flash — Frank’s body clunking up the bonnet and over the roof of the Micra.
Rose nodded at Billy’s bandages. ‘I guess all that nonsense will take a while to recover from anyway.’
‘Brain surgeon reckoned I could be out in a week.’
‘Really? Modern medicine, eh?’
There was silence for a moment, just the low thrum of hospital machinery, occasional coughs from other patients.
‘Listen,’ Rose said. ‘Your brother told me that Dean came to see you.’
‘Yeah.’
‘And threatened you.’
‘That’s putting it mildly.’
Rose shook her head. ‘I’d love to tell you not to worry about it.’
‘But you can’t.’
‘I know what that arsehole is like, Kiddo. Maybe you should consider lying very low for a while. Maybe even leaving town.’
Billy thought about that. His dead mum, absent father. His tiny microcosm of life. ‘I’ve got nowhere else to go.’
‘No, I don’t suppose you have.’
Billy’s orphan status hadn’t taken long to come up in conversation with Rose when he started at the Standard. He wasn’t exactly shy about mentioning it, using it for leverage. It always helped to have sympathetic, middle-aged women on your side, taking care of the motherless child in all his sorrow.
Billy spoke. ‘Zoe knows.’
