Polish immigrants.
The newsagent put the bottles before me. I looked at the label — name I’d never heard of. Pocketed them. On the street I stood waiting for Hod, wrestled the cellophane off my tabs, sparked up.
The smoke cancelled out the smell of dampness rising from the paving flags. It was like an old memory being shoved to the back of my mind: dampness, wet, rain… When I look back these are the background images in every scene. My life has been lived in the tones of Van Gogh’s early paintings, grey and greyer. The few moments of colour all involved Debs; but she featured in a lot of the grey days too.
I had a Mossberg pump under my Crombie that Rafi had sold to me; kept a firm hand on the barrel. As I schlepped over the road, the shooter rammed into my ribs with every step. Knew it pulled my coat south. I felt lopsided, but in this rain, who was looking?
I wasn’t messing about. End of.
The night was cold. Dark clouds gathering at the edges of a red sky. As I waited at the roadside I powered through my Rothmans King Size. The sharpness of the air seemed to take the hit out of the cigarette so I stubbed it. For some reason I thought of Debs again. It was on nights like this we’d begun to bond. Freezing half to death on park benches, sharing ten Regal on a roundabout in some skanky playground.
The reverie was soon interrupted as Hod’s car screeched up; a yell, ‘Get in.’
I opened the door. ‘Fuck me, it’s Chewbacca!’ I sat down and buckled up. All the while trying to disguise the shooter. He wouldn’t approve.
‘What’s with the faraway look?’ said Hod.
‘No look.’
‘Bollocks… Is it Debs?’
Jesus, did it still show? ‘No, no way.’
‘C’mon, you can’t kid me, I was your best man, remember. I know that look.’
I took out my smokes again. Sparked another one. ‘I saw her earlier,’ I said.
‘And?’
‘She told me Jonny Johnstone has it set in his mind that I’m going down.’
Hod pulled around a red Micra, waved a hand to let out a bus. ‘Hasn’t she been speaking up for you? Can’t she set this arsehole straight? I mean, she should be our inside track here, no?’
I wound down the window, flicked ash. ‘Hod, she’s not my wife any more. She doesn’t owe me anything and besides…’
I trailed off mid-sentence but Hod was listening, a gap appearing in the fuzz of his face. ‘Besides what?’
‘I think she’d be too frightened to speak up for me. Not because she’s shitting it from J. J., but because she wouldn’t want to rattle him any more. Like Fitz said, the man has a boner for me.’
Hod fired up: ‘I thought plod was supposed to be professional about these things. Fucksake, what’s his problem? I just don’t get this.’
‘Jonny Boy’s young and insecure, Hod. That’s what it boils down to. He wants to obliterate Debs’s past, completely own her — with this murder case he’s found the perfect way to do it… And there’s more to it. He’s up to some kind of shit I can’t quite get a handle on.’
‘But how? He’s off the case.’
‘Bollocks to that. McAvoy’s working the case for him: a man desperate for a collar, any collar — what a gift!’
‘Bad boys stick together.’
I frowned. ‘I’m not sure about that. I mean, I don’t know how much McAvoy is interested in J. J. as a partner, even a junior one. The pair struck me as both a little too self-interested to get along… D’you know what I mean?’
Hod revved the engine, dropped a gear; in second he beat the lights. He didn’t need to answer my question, I could see he understood where I was coming from — the pair would cut each other’s throats to get ahead.
‘Anyway, things might change tonight,’ said Hod.
I had my doubts but I was willing to give it a go. ‘You think the wee bastard with the Corrado will be there?’
‘There’s every chance. They don’t put these sort of gigs on every night of the week.’
‘I suppose.’
‘Look, be positive…’
I saw Bell’s books again — reran ‘Techniques for positive visualisation’.
‘Positive — that’s horseshit. You’ll be telling me to keep my fingers crossed next.’
‘Gus, we have a chance here, slim as it might be, to track down the little fucker that killed Tupac, maybe even link him up to Mark Crawford. Let’s not balls it up is all I’m saying.’
‘Okay. Okay.’ The point was taken. Stay off the sauce. Keep the head. Don’t, under any circumstances, lose it.
‘At the very least we get to see that slimy fucker Sid in action. Keep a close eye on him — whoever he’s mixing it with might be useful to us.’
I took a grip on the shooter. I had a handful of cartridges in each pocket of my Crombie. Felt comforting. Like insurance.
‘And anyway, it’s not the end of the world if we don’t grab us a gimpy boy tonight,’ said Hod.
‘How come?’
‘Well, we have some leads now, right?’
‘ We?’ I wasn’t getting this Hod seeing himself as my partner business one iota.
‘Yeah, well, I’m on the team, right?’
‘Hod, there is no fucking team… there’s me versus the world. I wouldn’t be opting for a side so quick if I were you.’
Hod pelted the accelerator, hit the bypass. ‘C’mon, don’t mark me for a wuss — I’m in, all right.’
An artic pulled out from a slip road. Hod had to floor it to get past.
‘Hod, watch the road, eh?’
‘Gus, my man, relax there. With me on the team you have an extra pair of hands, eyes, and that’s not to mention my brain and brawn.’
I laughed. ‘You put it like that…’
‘How else would I put it?’
‘Well, there’s no question you can be a help. What I’m having trouble with is the whole babysitting aspect.’
‘Oh…’
‘Yes, oh… Hod, I know you and Mac and maybe one or two others are scheming to get me off the sauce, sorted, into, I dunno, the poor man’s Priory. Hear me now: it’ll never happen.’
Hod put on the indicator, pulled off the bypass at the Loanhead roundabout.
Just before the village was a row of abandoned terrace cottages, old-style red-brick jobs. All boarded up. Like a post-apocalyptic Coronation Street. How, in the city’s mad state of overdevelopment, these had not been snapped up was beyond me. A few flat-pack kitchens, plasterboard walls, we were talking a quarter mil for one of them.
‘You’re not scoping new property, are you?’ I said.
‘Fuck no — Loanheid!’
‘Well, why you slowing down?’
‘This is the first part of the trip, my son.’
‘You what?’
A skinny lad in a blue Lonsdale hoodie came scurrying out of the backyard of the nearest boarded-up terrace. He looked down the street, left to right, then seemed to take a note of the number plate and check it against a list.
‘Here we go. Let me do the talking, Gus.’
‘Go yerself.’
The lad lolled up to Hod’s window, leaned over. He spoke, ‘You know the big man, eh?’
‘Yeah, I know the big man… he likes his fishing.’
