‘Das beste oder nichts,’ she said. ‘It’s the Mercedes slogan, Leo, you fucking loser. I saw it a lot in Germany. It means the best or nothing, like me and you Leo. I’m the best, and you, Leo, you’re a nothing.’
She listened to Leo shouting something inaudible through the metal of the boot; she thought of the ink on his skin. ‘You’re a fucking nothing, Leo, you fucking bell-end. Das beste oder nichts, you can remember that, it’d make a nice tattoo.’
She walked away from the car, pressed the button to open the electric gate of the garage, slipped out into the street. She listened carefully to the sounds coming from the garage. You could hear a very faint noise, which was Leo trying in vain to get out. Could you force your way out of the boot of a Mercedes? Probably, if you knew what you were doing; she doubted Leo did.
Leo was as thick as two short planks. What had Manny said to him before they had left in the car? This was all almost certainly Manny’s idea. Leo would be able to get dressed in the morning by himself, but that would be about his limit.
She pressed the button again and closed the barred door behind her, putting the keys in her pocket.
It shut with a satisfactory clang.
Hanlon walked off into the streets of Govan without a backward glance.
28
Hanlon checked her location on the maps on her phone and walked off in the direction of the Clyde. As she had thought when she’d been in the car, the great river was very close. Until today, she had only seen it from the air. Now here it was, in all its grotty glory.
She made her way down the wide, quiet, shabby streets to the waterfront and walked along by the river. It was an industrial wasteland down here. Warehouses and abandoned office blocks. A few hundred metres later, she came across a rubbish-removal barge, which was moored to a couple of bollards on the quayside. It had two holds, which were open to the air, and a kind of large mechanical grab like a scaled-up child’s toy with which it could remove junk that had found its way into the water. The twin holds were filled with detritus – shopping trolleys, bicycles, tree branches, all the flotsam and jetsam from across the spectrum, both natural and man-made, that had found its way into the waters of the Clyde that the boat had scooped out of the river. She reflected that it could well have been her body, floating face down in the water, that the barge might have found.
An old has-been.
Someone had tipped Manny off about her past, someone who knew her career history. And who might that be? Campbell, you bastard.
And you, Manny, I’m looking forward to renewing our acquaintance. As she walked past the St Mungo, as the boat was called, she casually tossed Leo’s iPhone into one of the holding areas with all the other rubbish.
She hadn’t gone very far when she heard the engines onboard start up with a loud throbbing roar. A figure in high-viz overalls appeared out of the cabin, jumped onto the quay with effortless agility and cast off, leaping back on board as the St Mungo pulled into the mid-stream of the river.
It disappeared westwards carrying Leo’s phone. She wondered where it would end up. She liked the thought of Leo, once he had eventually managed to free himself or, more likely, after someone found him, using the Find My app and tracking it down to some landfill site somewhere hopefully gratifyingly far away.
Good luck, Leo, she thought. I hope you spend a long time rummaging around in the shit on a vast municipal rubbish tip surrounded by flies and squawking seagulls shitting on you. And good luck explaining your facial injuries – a girl did that, Leo. Don’t forget that detail when people ask.
And as for you, Manny, you fat, smoke-ridden gut-bucket, I’m coming for you.
She walked off in search of a taxi.
The black cab pulled up in front of a tenement building near the centre of Paisley. She thought of Leo’s coke in her pocket. I bet Leo’s the dealer, she thought, not Tam. And Manny’s the guy pulling the strings. And Campbell is ensuring supplies keep on coming. She got out of the taxi, pulling out her purse, now bulging with notes taken from Leo’s wallet, and got ready to pay the driver. He looked at her critically,
‘Are you OK, hen?’
‘I’m fine,’ Hanlon said, surprised. ‘Why do you ask?’
‘Umm, well, will ye look at the state of yoursel.’
Hanlon looked down at what she was wearing: jeans, pink Doc Martens and a cream blouse over a white T-shirt. The blouse was spotted and stained with Leo’s blood, including a big smear over one sleeve, which must have come from when she pushed him into the boot. Fleetingly she wondered how he was getting on in there. She hoped he was claustrophobic.
She bent down and looked at her face in the taxi’s wing mirror. There was an ugly bruise under one eye; by the following day her eye would be black.
‘My yoga class got out of hand,’ she said, adding a large tip from Leo’s wad. ‘Have a nice day.’
The taxi drove off, the driver waving at her cheerily – it had been an enormous tip. Hanlon went to the front door. She looked up at the building. A depressed, blackened tenement. The windows smeared and dirty. The pavement outside was cracked and marked with the ghost of chewing-gum traces and cigarette butts. There was a panel with a dozen buttons on the wall next to the tall, shabby, forbidding door. It looked a thoroughly depressing place to live.
She pressed the bell.
‘Who is it?’ asked a female voice.
‘Police,’ said Hanlon. ‘Which floor?’
‘Second floor right,’
