The stone gallows, p.28
The Stone Gallows, page 28
knew that she had gone too far, that the coastline of reality was almost lost over the horizon.
The other part. . . well, that was a different matter. Tap-dancing beside her rational mind was a gibbering chimpanzee of pure, obsessive hate, bug-eyed and drooling with anger.
I’m going to finish it. Soon.
But the boy. . . he was so beautiful.
So was my child.
He was innocent.
So was my child.
11.14.
It took a few seconds for the penny to drop, metaphorically bouncing and spinning, taking forever to vibrate to a halt. Even then, my mind stuttered.
I remembered standing at the window of my burning flat, feeling the increasing tightness in my chest as I inhaled.
Smoke. Fear. The street. Litter blowing in the wind. Broken light bulb in the lamp-post. Lines and lines of parked cars.
A hooded figure running to a parked car. The angle had been steep and the light had been dim, making it impossible to gauge the arsonist’s height or build – a fact that a good defence lawyer would have capitalised on.
Headlights flickering on, tyres squealing. I’d recognised the general shape of the car, and associated it with the wrong person.
Jason Campbell.
I hadn’t really seen him. I’d seen a hooded figure jump into a convertible car and assumed.
And we all know what they say about making assumptions.
By doing so, I had made ass out of myself – and, just for a bonus, broken the arm of an innocent man.
Well. . . relatively innocent.
I clutched the phone. ‘Joe, what the hell should I do?’
For once, he was silent.
‘I mean, should I tell Audrey?’
‘I think you have to.’
‘But it’ll just give her more reason to keep Mark away from me.’
‘Listen, Cam, if Scotty had beamed Mark onto the bridge of the Starship Enterprise, she’d find a way of making it your fault. You need to focus on the bigger picture here. Is there a FPU officer there?’
‘Yeah. Somebody called Janice Galloway.’
‘I know her. She’s good at what she does.’
‘Good at what she does? All she’s done is make coffee.’
‘Let me talk to her.’
I slipped off my stool, making my way across the kitchen into the living area. Both women looked up as I entered. Galloway’s eyes were significantly friendlier than Audrey’s. I waved the phone at her. ‘You know Joe Banks?’
She nodded.
‘He’s got a theory about who might have abducted Mark.’
She took the phone with a questioning expression on her face.
Audrey looked like she was considering biting me. ‘For God’s sake, Cameron. What’s going on?’
I sat down beside her. I had some explaining to do.
11.15.
Forty minutes later, I was on my merry way, driving the streets of Glasgow with no particular place to go. The night was unseasonably warm, causing the rear windscreen of the Golf to steam up. It didn’t matter; I was disinclined to look behind me in case all I could see was burning bridges.
Audrey had taken the news in an entirely predictable fashion, remaining silent as I explained the Sophie Sloan case, her lips thinning to a blood-red slash, the vein in her temple growing more and more prominent. When I finished speaking, she started.
This was my fault.
Although it was obvious that the woman was mentally imbalanced, I had ignored the signs and deliberately placed Mark in harm’s way.
I was never going to see him again.
Then she threw me out, which was actually something of a relief. I had my mobile phone. Why sit around being miserable and worried at my ex’s house when I could be just as miserable and just as worried behind the wheel of my car? And at least there I would be doing something practical. The chances of running into Sophie and Mark were slim, but not non-existent.
I wondered where he was and how he was coping. Mark was a fairly bright kid, but he was so young, too young to be a pawn in a crazy game of chess. I hoped that wherever they were, she was treating him kindly, and that he wasn’t too frightened.
Without a destination, I found myself drifting through the city as it put itself to bed. A light drizzle fell, causing the few pedestrians that loitered the streets to hunch their shoulders and share the occasional umbrella. It was the usual Monday-night suspects – couples making their way home from dates, older singletons returning from the weekly bingo pilgrimage. There was even a healthy amount of neds, munching on kebabs and swigging from bottles of Buckfast and Mad-Dog. Most of them were young, barely more than kids. As I hissed by on the damp road, a boy threw a bottle at the car, missing by a few inches, the bottle exploding on the pavement beside me. I shook my head and carried on, wondering how things could have turned out so badly.
It seemed like the world had taken a wrong turn somewhere. I hoped that the song was wrong and that children weren’t the future, because if they were, then the future was looking pretty bleak. I worried about the kids wandering the streets when they should have been in bed. When I was sixteen, I’d had rules – in before ten on a school night, midnight on a Friday or a Saturday. No underage drinking, no hanging about street corners throwing half-bricks at the late night buses to see if we could get the driver to chase us.
Of course, I’d done my best to ignore the rules, screwing around, getting into trouble at every opportunity, but I had still been bound by the moral and ethical code that my parents had instilled in me. I never did drugs, I never hurt anybody. I was just a silly wee boy.
These kids, with their shell-suits and their iPods and their dead, glassy-eyed stares – they were different. They didn’t give a fuck. About anything. They weren’t out wandering the streets at all hours because they wanted to rebel against authority, because they had no authority to rebel against. They were out because they had nothing else to do.
Their biological parents barely knew their names, their social workers told them what they should do but not how to do it. If they wanted to work, they could flip burgers in the service industry for minimum wage. Or they could go to college, get an education, except there was no point. They didn’t have a chance. Children are like books: the longer they sit on the shelf, the more obscure and difficult to understand they become. Because nobody had ever taken the time to teach them, they were now unable to learn, with an attention span barely longer than the average MTV video. Because of the ongoing absence of authority in their lives, they lacked the discipline it required to sit still and actually learn anything, especially when you consider the fact that most of them could barely read and write. And even if they could, what the fuck for? So that they could be treated like shit for the rest of their lives before being made redundant at the age of fifty, shuffled to one side to make room for the next generation of wage-slaves?
I shouldn’t think so much. I was just bringing myself down.
I checked my watch: twelve fifty. The Golf sat steady at thirty-one miles an hour, past the kebab shops and pubs and garage forecourts that had been turned into drug supercentres. I realised that I was hungry and turned into an all night supermarket, parking the car and checking my phone to make sure that I hadn’t missed any messages. I hadn’t. As I walked through the car-park I messed around with the ring-tones on my phone, making sure that I hadn’t put it onto silent.
The supermarket was just another supermarket: bright lights, wide aisles, high shelves, James Morrison in the background whining about having a bad day. I’d like to meet him. I’d teach him about the concept of a bad day. Next to the front door was a chiller cabinet that had probably been filled with sandwiches. Now it was filled with empty space. In one corner was a lone packet of sushi; I decided I wasn’t feeling that brave. I grabbed a packet of crisps and made my way to the checkout.
Then I spotted an old friend.
11.16.
He was perched on a high stool behind a till, running items across the automatic scanner, his expression one of intense concentration.
His hands moved slowly, as if unsure of themselves. The name badge on the lapel of his blue polo shirt was Sean.
Sean. AKA Shabsy. AKA Celtic Bhouy, confidante and trusty sidekick to Flick-Knife.
His was the only checkout open, and he was busy serving a little old lady who leaned on the handle of a tartan shopping trolley. She had taken full advantage of the promotional offers on frozen meals, stacking at least two dozen cardboard boxes onto the conveyor belt.
Behind her was a man with a trolley that seemed to contain about fifty tins of dog food. He took one look at my packet of cheese and onion.
‘You can go in front of me if you want.’
I shook my head. ‘I’m in no rush.’
‘Suit yourself.’
We waited, shuffling our feet as Shabsy ponderously prodded at the buttons of the till as if they were electrified. Eventually he arrived at a total. ‘Eighteen pounds sixty-five.’
‘Are you sure?’ The old lady said in a querulous voice.
‘Yeah.’
‘I think you made a mistake. It’s buy-one-get-one-free, you know.’
Sean nervously touched the keypad. The till beeped at him in an accusing tone. ‘I’m sorry, but the total’s correct.’
‘I won’t be able to afford a taxi home.’
‘You could always put some back.’
‘Let me see what I have with me.’
It took her nearly a full minute to extract her purse from the very bottom the shopping trolley. When it finally creaked open, it appeared to be filled with coppers. After an eternity of fumbling, she waved a handful of change. ‘Eighteen pounds twenty-three pence.’
‘I need the whole amount. It’s the rules.’
The old bat looked hopefully at Dog Food Man, who waved his credit card at her. Her gaze transferred to me. I studied the ventilation ducts. When it became apparent that no knight in shining armour was available, she huffed and turned her attention back to her purse, fiddling away before withdrawing a secret twenty pound note that she had for some reason folded into tiny squares and handing it over to Sean. He laboriously unfolded it and held it up to the light. I wondered if he knew what he was looking for. Dog Food man sighed, shook his head, and muttered something that ended in the word ‘sake’.
James Morrison faded out and James Blunt faded in. Another singer whose relentless optimism made my teeth itch. Eventually, Sean decided that the twenty pound note was real enough, putting it into the till and counting change with the speed of a plumber who revelled in the fact that getting paid by the hour was the greatest thing since sliced bread. The old woman watched him place the coins on the palm of her gloved hand, her eyes black specks in her wrinkled face.
As soon as she was on her way, Sean turned his attention to the man in front of me. He eyed the cans of Winalot and Pedigree Chum.
‘Have you got a dog?’
The man sighed. ‘No, son. I’ve got a restaurant.’
11.17.
Four minutes and thirty-five pounds later, it was my turn. Shabsy passed my packet of crisps over the magic eye of the scanner and said,
‘Forty-eight pence.’
‘How have you been, Shabsy?’
He looked up at the sound of my voice, his eyes widening as he recognised me. For a second I though he was going to run; his hands grabbed the edge of the checkout and his backside slid off the edge of the stool. I held my hands up. ‘I’m not going to hurt you.’
‘You’re not?’
‘If I had wanted to, I’d have waited until the end of your shift and followed you home, wouldn’t I?’
He nodded slowly, his hand hovering in mid-air, my packet of crisps held between thumb and forefinger. ‘What do you want?’
‘How’s your little buddy?’
‘I haven’t seen him for a few days.’
‘I didn’t know you worked nights.’
‘I just started here.’
That explained the hesitancy while using the till. Then again, maybe it didn’t; I had a sneaking suspicion that Shabsy would forever be slightly intimidated by anything that had more buttons than the hand-control to his games console. I reached out and took my crisps.
‘You and I need to talk.’
‘What about?’
‘Many things. Shoes and ships and sealing wax and whether pigs have wings.’
‘What?’
I’d forgotten; Shabsy had probably never heard of Lewis Carroll. ‘I want to know how you knew my name.’
‘I don’t know.’
I glanced around. The place was almost deserted. Down one aisle a heavily pregnant woman was trying to build a pyramid of disposable nappies. I reached out and grabbed Shabsy by the neck of his polo shirt. ‘Your friend. I want to know how he knew my fucking name.’
He pulled away, bumping his arse off the stool and overturning it, sending it to the ground with a clatter. The pregnant girl looked up briefly before returning to her building blocks. Shabsy smoothed his collar. ‘Look, I don’t want any trouble. I just got this job. I don’t want to lose it in the first week.’
‘I wouldn’t have thought you were so career minded.’
‘Look, I got a fright the other night, alright? Dave really meant to cut you. I don’t want the jail.’
‘So you’re trying to go straight. How admirable.’
‘Look, I’m sorry about what we did, pal. I really am. It was a stupid, dumb thing to do, and it went way too far. Come on, it’s not like you didn’t get your licks in. You broke Dave’s thumb.’
‘Dave? Is that his name? How can I find him?’
‘I don’t know.’
I considered grabbing him again, but before I could, a couple stepped around the corner of the opposite aisle and started making their way to the checkout. I held up a finger. ‘You really want to keep this job?’
Shabsy nodded.
‘When’s your next break?’
‘Twenty minutes.’
‘I’ll wait for you at the front door. If you’re not there in half an hour then not only will you lose this job, but I’ll use a few contacts to find out where you’re staying. You ever been kneecapped?’
He shook his head.
‘It’s not very nice.’
I started to turn away. Shabsy said, ‘Wait!’
I turned back. He pointed at the crisps in my left hand. ‘That’s forty-eight pence, please.’
I waved the packet at him. ‘Think of them as compensation.’
11.18.
The car park was nearly empty. I’d shifted the Golf to a deserted little corner, close enough that I could keep an eye on the doors, far enough away to avoid undue attention.
Shabsy showed up twenty-eight minutes later. By then, I had eaten the crisps, tossed the packet and checked my telephone messages half a dozen times. They didn’t take long to check, because there weren’t any. I was listening to the end of the news on the radio when I saw him step out of the main door of the supermarket, zipping up his fleece and turning the collar up despite the warmth of the night. I honked the horn and flashed the headlights at him. He started to trudge over with the enthusiasm of a member of the French aristocracy asked to test the reliability of the guillotine.
I got out to greet him. ‘I was beginning to think you weren’t going to show up.’
He stuck a cigarette into his mouth. ‘It crossed my mind.’
I walked round and opened the passenger door of the Golf. ‘Don’t bother lighting it.’
He tucked the cigarette behind his ear. ‘Where are we going? I’ve only got fifteen minutes.’
‘We’re not going anywhere. We’re just going to talk.’
He looked up at the sky, from which a light drizzle had began to fall. ‘How do I know that you’re not going to hurt me?’
‘You don’t. But I can guarantee two things. One, I can run faster than you. Two, better this than to spend the rest of your life looking over your shoulder.’
He took a deep breath and got in.
I slipped round to the driver’s side and slid behind the wheel. He flinched when I reached across to turn the radio off. The two of us sat there in silence for a slow count of thirty. I wanted him to feel the need to break it.
He did. ‘I don’t know where Dave is. You hurt him bad, man. I had to take him to casualty. I think you even cracked a couple of ribs.’
I rubbed my thumb and forefinger together. ‘You know what this is?’
‘What?’
‘It’s the world’s smallest. . . forget it. How did he know my name?’
‘I don’t know.’
I nodded at the cigarette tucked behind his ear. ‘Maybe if I let you smoke that then your memory will improve.’
He reached around and removed it. ‘Thanks, man. Got a light?’
‘Sure.’
I pressed the button for the cigarette lighter.
11.19.
Ten seconds later, the lighter clicked to let me know it was ready.
Ever the polite host, I used it light Shabsy’s cigarette before sliding it home. He inhaled with enthusiasm. ‘Cheers. Listen, it wasn’t my idea to give you a kicking. I was just along for the ride.’
‘So what happened? The two of you saw me walking home and just decided to chance your luck?’
He unwound the window and blew smoke outside. ‘ I don’t really remember.’
‘Try.’
‘I’d dropped a wee bit of acid. Everything was kind of blurry.’
‘I didn’t think people still did acid.’
Shabsy shrugged, apparently unaware of the rapidly-approaching boundaries of my patience. I watched the car park, trying to figure out my next move. Trying to interview the monkey rather than the organ-grinder was a high-risk strategy at best. It would be simple enough to turn the kid upside down and shake him until something of value fell out, but I was getting tired of violence being a solution.
