Crime

  His bare feet step outside on to the cool porch, as he smells the diesel and gasoline. It’s still warm and nobody’s around, the only limited sign of life was the night light that glowed softly from the office. In the distance, the faint hubbub of a convoy of big trucks rattling down the highway, and the lights of the Roadhouse clicking off. A lick of wind chills his naked torso. He yawns, stretches and gets himself another bottle of water from the machine before moving back towards Tianna’s room, this time bolting the door shut behind him. Inside, the blankets look in disarray but everything else seems fine. Removing his trousers, he dives under the covers, quickly pulling his leg back as it plunges into wetness. — Fuck … he growls, as he hastily gets out the bed. — Fuck sakes!

  He tugs off the blankets and climbs on to a small settee, cramped and uncomfortable. He gets up again and pulls the mattress from the bed, feeling the other side. Fortunately, her pee hadn’t gone right through. After turning it over, he balls up the soaked bottom sheet, then pulls the blankets back over him. Though exhausted, his nerves are now like piano wire and he can’t sleep. He finds himself rising again, taking refuge once more in the television, channel-hopping till he finds a nature programme on Discovery.

  The documentary concerns itself with the growing extinction of the panda in China and the attempts to save it. These mostly seem to involve scientists molesting pandas and their cubs. Separating the young creatures from their mothers, tagging their ears with transmitters, tattooing them inside their mouths. An American woman, who is accompanied by her son, narrates the programme, described as a ‘personal journey’. They assist the Chinese zoologists in interfering with the pandas to the animals’ obvious distress. Lennox thinks that if those creatures could communicate, they’d just say: — Fuck off and let us eat our bamboo and grow extinct in peace.

  But it wasn’t the human way. Our greed is killing you, so our vanity demands that we must save you.

  Tianna. Is she his own personal panda cub? Is he doing this for her, or because his own ego refuses to allow him to be bested by nonces? The likes of Mr Confectioner or Dearing? Ultimately, he supposes, it doesn’t matter about the motive. What’s important is the action. Doing the right thing.

  Lennox clicks off the television and tries to settle down again in the bed. He still can’t sleep. Tianna’s bag sits on the table. The sheep’s stupid face mocks him. He reaches over and picks it up. He doesn’t want to go through her things, but he’s a cop, and she’s in some kind of jeopardy. He needs to know stuff about her. Opening the various pouches and compartments of her bag, he feels the shameful power and acute agony of this newer violation of the girl. The cop and the nonce: brothers in atrocity. Apart from the baseball cards, a hairbrush and some cosmetics, there is the black-bound notebook. On the next page to her illustrative diamond is a scribbled entry:

  Hi Nooshka,

  I’m sorry that I ain’t had a chance to write you in a while. I guess I’m getting lazy. You’ll never guess what’s happened to me. I met this guy. His name is Ray. He lives in a castle, over in Scotland, way across the sea. I call him Bobby Ray. The big news is that we’re very much in love and we’re going to get married! I want you to be my bridesmaid! In a castle over in Scotland where we both shall live. You can come and visit, come to stay. You and Momma. We’re going to let her live in the cottage in the grounds where we can take care of her. She can come watch TV with us and eat with us in the grand hall.

  Ray ain’t like the others, like you-know-who. Ray’s more like Uncle Chet but kind of younger and better-looking. He’s got sort of brown hair, cut real short, like he’s a US Marine or something.

  I guess I’m worried about Momma. I pray for her. But I know that Ray will help her. I know that my Bobby Ray and Chet will make everything good. I wish we had stayed in Mobile. But the liar Vince was there and any case I would never have gotten to meet my sweet Bobby Ray.

  Your dearest friend,

  Tianna Marie Hinton

  He lets the notebook fall on to the desk. Gets up once more to try and squeeze the last of the urine from his bladder. Nooshka sounded like an imaginary friend. Part of him, though, is flattered by the way the kid sees him, the trust she has in him. It’s just a silly crush. Like the one he had on his primary-school teacher, Miss Milne, simply because she was nice to him. But then he was a sexless child; she’s been fucked up by nonces, which gives the fantasy a dangerous edge. But even if it comes out messed up, the fact is the kid believes in him, wants to believe in him, so much. He can’t let her down. Yet he’s still sullied by the episode, crawling furtively back into bed on all fours.

  Lennox puts the book back in the bag and looks at the cards again. Babe Ruth. Reggie Jackson. Mickey Mantle. Joe DiMaggio. Scots Bobby. He reads the career details on the back. Bobby Thomson wasn’t in the same league as the others, who were obviously giants of the game. His legendary status was based on that one shot, rather than his career record. Yet she’d kept him. He doesn’t get baseball. Maybe you have to be American. A yawn rips open his jaw; sleep is gnawing at him again.

  Happy to succumb, he sinks like rainwater into a drain.

  13

  Edinburgh (3)

  YOU THOUGHT ABOUT Britney’s last days as you sat in the Stockbridge Deli, the uncertain silvery sky outside offering you no reassurance. It seemed her body was dumped from the grassy clifftop to the pebbled inlet on that treacherous Saturday night, before the hardy walkers had found it the next morning. The murder though, the coroner had estimated, had been done earlier on Saturday afternoon, through strangulation. Mr Confectioner had kept her prisoner for three and a half days of a hell meticulously pieced together by pathologists and forensic scientists.

  An old woman was staring at you in the café; you were rattling the cup of black coffee against the saucer. You stopped, scoured the occupants: a sea of blonde, ginger and black domes fading to a ubiquitous pinky grey. Everyone looked both archetypally North European and slightly shabby, perhaps a trick only the Scots could properly master.

  For the Nula Andrews investigation, the Welwyn Garden City police had set up a false grave complete with headstone and attendant publicity in the local newspapers. It was a tactic police forces often deployed. They knew that the confessional urge was strong and that the killer often felt the irresistible compulsion to visit the resting place and talk to the victim. CCTV camera and microphone equipment was concealed in the overhanging trees, filming and recording the disclosures of Nula’s posthumous visitors.

  George Marsden had been an advocate of this approach, but now he had reservations, as you found out when you’d gone back to the office to make another lengthy phone call to Eastbourne. — It got the wrong man banged up, Ray.

  But you were starting to think that it was the last chance; bar the Graham Cornell dead end, the trail had gone cold. Robert Ellis was just one of the misfits who cheaply ‘confessed’ to the victim at the Hertfordshire grave. Ellis’s tape made sickening listening. Innocent Nula was cruelly derided as a rabid slut who craved all kinds of sexual practices. Though his back was to the camera, it appeared that Ellis was masturbating over her resting place as he gasped out his demented spiel. It confirmed him as a disturbed individual who’d gone badly wrong somewhere along the line, but, the cool heads asked, was he the murderer? Logistically, in the time frame, it would have meant that he possessed superhuman organisational skills and extraordinary focus. But the investigating officers knew that the public scented blood and the bosses would have retired long before the press, who had cheerled the lynch mob, had the inclination or courage to investigate fully. It quickly became unfashionable to be a cool head.

  You studied the Welwyn files again, taking particular interest in the one person who hadn’t checked out. He’d made just one appearance, wearing a snorkel-hooded parka, and had stood silently at the grave till he was disturbed – ironically by the appearance of Robert Ellis. He’d crouched down before the headstone, looked at it for a bit, then, as Ellis came into the p
icture, got up and walked away. They’d briefly exchanged words. Ellis’s comments were picked up, but his back and his elongated hood ensured that nothing was heard from the other party.

  You jumped in your car and drove down to Manchester. Ellis was in Strangeways Prison. He’d made a couple of visits to that city, en route from his Preston girlfriend’s place, and now he had got to know a little corner of it very well. You wanted to see if time had improved his memory.

  Robert Ellis had fitness’s sheen and his eyes glinted with purpose. You never smoked but always took along a pack of cigarettes when visiting prisoners. Ellis politely declined the offer. You hated that this impressed you, but it was clear that some sort of a journey had been undertaken. Ellis was well aware of the irony of his condition: the prison in which he was wrongly incarcerated, and had spent the last few years trying to get out of, was perversely the making of him. — Even though I shouldn’t be here, this place has saved me, he admitted. — I was a fucked-up idiot. But a child killer? He laughed in derision. — Do me a favour.

  — Parka man.

  — Didn’t see much of him. He wore a scarf over his mouth. All I got was crazy eyes pointing at me from inside that big hood. I’m normally dead good at staring people out, but I felt the chill in his look, I’ll tell you that for nothing.

  — What did he say?

  — After I said, ‘It’s a sad thing,’ he goes: ‘Kids die all the time. Malnutrition. Disease.’

  — Has anything about his voice come back to you: pitch, accent?

  — I couldn’t place no accent. It wasn’t, like, Jock, Ellis smiled at you, then nodded to the silent screw in attendance, — or Northern, or even like mine. It was sort of posh, but not like a toff, just pretty nondescript.

  — Why did you say those things about Nula? At her grave?

  Ellis’s jaw clenched and something dulled in his eyes. You thought it might have been shame. — Cause I was a saddo. Fucked up, full of anger and desperate for attention. And guess what? He looked around his spartan surroundings and smiled broadly. — It worked! Then his grin receded a little. — But I don’t plan on getting too comfortable here.

  — Oh aye?

  — Cause you’re gonna get me out, ain’tcha?

  Perhaps the journey wasn’t as pronounced as you’d given Ellis credit for. Under the polished facade, you smelt the old incarnation rising to the surface. — I’m gaunny find the bastard that killed Britney Hamil.

  — Same thing, mate, Ellis said.

  But for an excruciating few days the heat continued to pile on Cornell, who broke down and confessed. But not to Britney’s murder. He revealed the affair he’d been having with a married MSP, which was maliciously leaked to the papers. The MSP had the indignity of having to confirm these liaisons and destroy his career, in order to get the innocent man off the hook. Toal was shattered by this; he agreed then to let you set up the bogus gravestone and the CCTV cameras at Stockbridge cemetery.

  Britney’s bogus funeral became an official one. Angela so skint, she’d pleaded, — Could youse no just, like, bury her for real? I’ll never be able to gie her anything like that …

  So the local-council taxpayer footed the bill from the police budget. And then, after Britney’s remains were lowered into the earth, you waited in the van, watching on the screens every mortal soul who came close to her place of rest. It was a bleak and frustrating duty for everyone. It was impossible not to get backache or a stiff neck. November was on you and the world beyond the glass window was cold like curved marble.

  On one occasion you’d gone for a piss. When you came back you found Notman standing outside, chatting to a woman. Enraged, you ran over to your colleague. — What the fuck are ye playin at?

  Notman apologised as the bemused woman quickly walked away. — I just stepped out for five minutes to stretch my legs.

  You went inside, played the tape back on one of the monitors. Nothing. Your heartbeat settled down. You thought about your team. It meant nothing to them, outside of their sneering pub and canteen bravado. It was just a fucking job: there were corners to be cut, time that needed stealing back. And you knew this because with anything else you were exactly the same. Notman, too, was now painfully aware of it. — This one’s special to you, right, Ray?

  — I want the cunt.

  — I hope you don’t think I’m talking out of turn, Notman said, — but you look fucking terrible. Are ye getting any kip?

  — Naw. That wee lassie, she’s getting plenty for both of us.

  You took double shifts. Tired and psychotic, you popped Benzedrine and snorted lines of cocaine to stay awake in the unmarked surveillance van outside the graveyard. You knew you would only have one chance.

  At the same time, another local drama was unfolding. Most of the officers were supporters of Hearts Football Club, and were shocked that popular manager George Burley’s replacement was Graham Rix, an Englishman who had served a prison sentence for having underage sex with a fifteen-year-old girl. It was the afternoon following this announcement in the office at HQ, and you were preparing the Stockbridge surveillance rota. Dougie Gillman came in with a new Scotland coffee mug, discarding his Hearts one into the metal waste-paper basket.

  — What’s up wi the Jambos’ yin? Notman asked.

  — I wouldnae put it near ma fuckin lips as long as there’s a nonce in charge. Makes a mockery ay everything we stand for, Gillman barked.

  Strung-out, you’d looked up and rounded on him. — What do we stand for, Dougie? What did you stand for in Thailand?

  — We were on holiday. It’s different.

  — Different, my arse.

  But Gillman wasn’t at all defensive. — What about you, here? Wi Robbo? That wee lassie?

  You fought the impulse to swallow hard. — That was nonsense … Robbo was a fuckin bam!

  There had been a time when you and Robbo had been on an investigation and had barged in on a young couple having sex. The girl was underage, the boy not that much older. Robbo had gotten you to question the boy in the other room, while he spoke to the girl in the bedroom. He’d found pills, Ecstasy, in her bag. He’d briefly nipped out to ask you to confirm this. Then he’d gone back into the bedroom and cut a deal with the young girl. You often shuddered when you thought of what kind of deal it was, but no charges were pressed.

  — Robbo was aw around the canteen wi that tale. Made the bird gam um, Gillman said. — Heard the wee lassie OD’d after. Stomach-pump job.

  — If that did happen ah had nowt tae dae wi it!

  — You kent what Robbo was like. Like you sais, a bam. You left him alaine wi an underage lassie. Think aboot that, Gillman sneered, sly and couthie. — Think aboot that when ye get on yir high horse and start telling tales oot ay school. Keep it oot, Lenny boy. Gillman provocatively tapped the side of his own nose. And you felt your eyes water, just as they had done in that Bangkok bar when the forehead of your colleague had smashed into your face.

  But there were other things to think about besides your escalating war with Gillman. At almost 4 p.m. on an afternoon already swimming in dreich, nebulous darkness, those lonely, tedious days and neck-cricking nights of sitting in the van finally paid off. You’d been at Greggs, and were enjoying the sharp brief pleasure of solitude en route to bringing back sandy-coloured pies and coffee for yourself and Notman. Out of the blue, you were mugged by hail. The cold white stones stung you like pellets from an air rifle. You dived into the van, where Notman was glued to the monitors. The cantankerous weather drummed on the vehicle’s metal roof. It’ll pass, you’d thought, and it did, but not before intensifying furiously. You gratefully sipped the coffee as you’d talked about Hearts and its new East European owner’s penchant for controversy. The team under Rix was growing as quiescent as the overhanging trees in the graveyard, having their own winter shutdown.

  Then you saw him on the screen. The man in the parka. Same parka. Same man. Standing above Britney’s grave. The man who was at Nula’s before being dist
urbed by Ellis. That snorkel hood of the parka, and the thrashing hail: would the mike pick up anything? It didn’t matter, you were flying towards the front gates, yelling at Notman to get round to the side entrance and head him off.

  You bombed down the wet path, at one point almost losing your footing. But the man didn’t sense you advancing from behind him. Slowing down, you closed up on your quarry, creeping so near you could see the frosted breath coming from the side of the hood. — Sir! you shouted, pulling out your ID. — Police!

  And Notman closing in from the other direction. You had him in a pincer movement. You anticipated a struggle, perhaps a desperate one. But the man didn’t run. Instead he turned round slowly, as if he’d been expecting this moment.

  You knew it was Confectioner. Eyes arresting, yet at the same time strangely dead. Thick brown hair, slightly grizzled at the temples. Ruddy complexion. Small, broad and powerfully built, like he was from farming stock, though he’d probably never seen a farm in his life.

  Notman was with you now. The man gazed from one cop to the other. — Had a decent run, he half shrugged, half smiled, as if he’d been done for shoplifting.

  That offhand arrogance. The abhorrent, horrendous world he inhabited, how he’d normalised it for himself. By extension, nurtured a contempt and loathing for broader human society that you would feel the unremitting brunt of. It scared you. Made you feel weak and small even though you had a righteous outrage and the whole British state and its citizens behind you. And now Mr Confectioner had a name. — I’m Gareth Horsburgh, he’d smiled cheerfully. — Call me Horsey.

  You went to your father’s office in Haymarket; you hadn’t seen the old man in a while. You’d take him out for a pint. This would ensure that you’d just have one: you always screwed the nut in his company. You smiled at Jasmine, the admin assistant who worked with him, and who took you through to his small office, where your dad had just set down the phone. You could hear his ragged breathing. You couldn’t see, through your own shit, just how messed up your father was. Emotionally, he gave little away. But there were physical signs. For a while, you’d been noticing a tightening and reddening of the skin on his face. Age was overcooking and reducing him; the scarlet marks where the cheekbones pressed from underneath had spread and flared.