Our Little Secrets

by Peter Ritchie

  The second and much younger cop idolised FT, thought that his teachings were gospel and was busy morphing from a promising recruit to someone who just carried a uniform. It wasn’t Tonto’s day, and there was worse to come.

  The potentially violent drama moving quickly towards the stadium gates seemed to create an invisible shock wave that raced ahead, rippling over the alarm senses of the early-bird fans, a few locals and the polis. Many of them felt it before they saw it: the change in noise level some distance from them as jaws collectively dropped and a hundred conversations stopped mid-sentence. Some people froze at the passing drama, transfixed not so much by Tonto sprinting in a way unique to the hunted animal but by the shiny axe that every cell in the fleeing man’s body was trying to avoid.

  The sight of the Pole, almost naked apart from his Mickey Mouse boxers, would have been comical had he not intended to spill his target’s brains all over the outer perimeter of Tynecastle Stadium. No one really noticed the pants, but a neutral and safe observer would have been interested in the varying reactions of the dozens of witnesses ahead of and behind the two men, who were now no more than five metres apart and closing. Some people turned into living statues: one man had a handful of greasy chips halfway to his gob and stayed like that for almost twenty seconds till his brain switched on again. There were people who dived for cover as a natural reaction to danger, and there were a few mercenary characters who saw an opportunity when it came their way. They whipped out their iPhones to capture an incident that would tickle their pals on social media and might even bring in a few bob from one of the news outlets. The ones that started videoing were in for a real treat, because no sooner had Constable Denholm sensed then identified the fast-approaching horror story than he made the decision that a tactical withdrawal was in his best interests.

  Denholm didn’t wait for his young partner. For someone at least a couple of stone overweight and whose idea of aerobic exercise was walking to the boozer rather than getting a bus, he took off with remarkable pace, yelling, ‘Get tae fuck,’ as he went.

  Tonto couldn’t believe what he was seeing. For a moment, the sight of the uniforms was like all his best Christmases rolled into one, and then it became an unfolding nightmare as one of them took off along Wheatfield Place, thirty metres ahead of him. His heart, which was under near-critical strain, sank a little further as the younger of the two uniforms stared at him and they made eye contact for the briefest of moments. Tonto believed, because he had to, that this fit-looking young guy with shoulders like a middleweight boxer was his last remaining hope. His legs felt as if molten lead was pouring through his veins and he knew that he was slowing, in contrast to the madness that consumed the Pole and drove him on like an Audi TT on rocket fuel.

  He was closing on the young policeman and rescue when he realised that the cop had been swivelling his head from Pete the Pole to the escaping arse of his supposed partner, who hadn’t taken a moment to worry about his health and safety. A couple of the witnesses who were nearby would later testify that the young cop mimicked Denholm’s favourite catchphrase ‘Fuck that’ in a loud voice before taking off and pounding away in the same direction as his mentor.

  The witnesses, and especially those with their iPhones running, knew they were onto gold dust – if they could take pictures of fleeing cops plus the mad bastard axing the boy he was after then there was pay dirt at the end of it.

  Tonto made something like an agonised groan as he swerved left into Wheatfield Place, well behind the young cop and a long way behind his partner. He tried to pump some energy into his engine, but he was failing, and he heard the sound of the Pole’s feet hitting the street with an almost rhythmic beat. The Pole knew all he had to do was wait till his quarry ran out of juice – then it was time for some open-skull surgery.

  It was as if white noise was drowning out Tonto’s hearing, but just above the roar he could hear some drunken twat shouting, ‘Gon yersel’, big man.’ He realised the Jambo bastard was encouraging the Pole. Tonto had been a diehard Hearts man since he was old enough to hurl abuse at the Hibees and here was a maroon brother encouraging his annihilation!

  If he’d been able to stop long enough for breath he’d have lamped the bastard in the nuts, but that wasn’t going to happen. He could actually hear the Pole’s lungs pumping oxygen round his body like an Olympic sprinter, and he was so close that Tonto finally accepted he was about to die. He’d always been convinced that he carried bad luck about with him like a physical blemish. Other people saw it too and it was a regular piss-take. Much as he laughed it off, in his heart he believed it, and that he was cursed in some way.

  The moment arrived as it always does, when enough is enough and it’s just better to get it over with than draw out the agony of waiting for the red card. Time to switch off, lie down and in a few moments the pain would be over.

  He let his body turn to loose jelly just as a trailing foot hit the edge of one of the old cobbles and he sprawled onto the deck like a drunk. The Pole was ready to strike, but Tonto’s collapse meant he was actually too close and he had to jump over the groaning figure on the deck to put the brakes on. He turned, grinned and showed the space where his two front teeth had been removed over a drugs debt.

  Tonto looked up and somehow found the strength to say, ‘Please . . . ’ as he squeezed his eyes up into knots, waiting for the first blow. Remarkably, that moment of delay he’d caused by collapsing saved his life. He’d got lucky at last, although he would never see it that way.

  The Pole took another moment to consider which part of his victim to bury the axe in and two dozen iPhones zoomed in on the action.

  ‘Armed police!’ It was said loud and clear. The Pole hadn’t even heard the police personnel carrier arrive with an armed response team. He’d been enjoying it all just too much.

  The watching film-makers groaned almost in unison and hoped that at least if the mad bastard didn’t do the boy on the floor then the polis would riddle the axeman.

  ‘Fack yo!’ The Pole gobbed a greaser in the general direction of the police team pointing an array of firepower at his torso. The guns never wavered and the Pole spat on Tonto just as he raised his head again and the mess ran down his forehead into his eyes. It didn’t matter; it seemed like he was going to survive. He looked round at the marksmen and had never been so happy to see the law in his puff.

  The Pole decided that he wasn’t going to die that day and threw the axe to the side. He knew the drill, stuck his hands up and, staring at the cops, got down slowly, first onto his knees, then his belly. He rested the side of his head on the cold surface of the road no more than four feet from Tonto. He grinned all the way from one ear to the other.

  ‘I come back and fackin’ kill you someday.’ He looked like he meant it, and Tonto grinned in return because he was going to live.

  ‘It’ll be a fuckin’ while, son.’ But Tonto’s problem was that he could never see that far ahead. He should have realised that there was more bad luck waiting in the shape of an ounce of high-quality Charlie in his left-hand jacket pocket.

  The firearms team were all over the Pole and it turned out that although the two uniformed officers at the gates had legged it, there were a couple of concerned citizens who’d called in the incident while Tonto was still being chased along Gorgie Road. He had two slices of luck because the firearms team were close and just happened to be travelling through the area when the call came in. There was more to it than that, but a little player like him never saw the big picture till it fell on his napper like seagull shite.

  4

  ‘Yer a lucky wee bastard, Tonto. Never thought I’d say that.’ One of the firearms men knew him from his days on the beat in the West End.

  Tonto hated his nickname and would normally have kicked off if anyone called him it to his face, but today the polis were his saviours, so he definitely did not want to fuck them around – not for the time being anyway. He still had that rush of elation that follows a near-death exp
erience; he was flying and even liked the polis at that precise moment. The medics had given him a hot, sweet tea and it looked like spring had arrived early. Tonto had never really thought about the natural world apart from his nights with his ex-burd Chantelle, who he always said was the closest thing to a dog walking on two legs. He told that joke over and over till Chantelle’s old man heard about it and punched his pus in.

  He was in a nice moment, drinking the tea and realising that he was still alive, back from the dead even, and as he looked up at the sky, Tonto seemed to be seeing his environment for the first time. The weather had been freezing the country’s balls off for months, but today the sun had been showing its face and there was still warmth in its early-evening glow. It was as if nature was trying to make up for the overlong pish winter. Shafts of almost copper-coloured light split by small, harmless altocumulus clouds looked like great spotlights, and after the terror of the chase the world was back at peace. He smiled almost dreamily at the nearest firearms cop, who sneered back, frustrated as he always was that he hadn’t been able to shoot someone at last.

  ‘What happens now, Officer?’ Tonto had never called a lawman officer in his puff, but given how he felt, it was time to show a little respect after hating the bastards all his life. It was a moment and a half, but as his survival instinct began beating its way back to life, he realised he’d been chummy with them long enough and wanted to get the fuck away from the uniforms.

  ‘Tell you what happens, Tonto. You’re all mine, pal.’

  The sound of the female voice behind him drew his attention – the phrase ‘you’re all mine’ when there was law about usually meant trouble. He swivelled round and faced Detective Inspector Janet Hadden.

  ‘Who the fuck are you then, hen?’ He was looking straight into the steel-grey eyes of a woman who on any other day would have pushed a lot of the right buttons for him. Unfortunately, he might have been better trying to outrun the mad fucking Pole.

  5

  DI Hadden was regarded in the job as a cold fish but supremely efficient at getting results. ‘Cold’ didn’t quite hit the accurate temperature description where she was concerned, and she was known as the Ice Queen for good reason. She just didn’t mix well; in fact, she didn’t deign to mix because she despised people – both men and women, but particularly other women. She turned up at the odd piss-up for appearances’ sake; that is, to counteract the almost inevitable view in the police culture that a single woman avoiding social contact could mean only one thing: she was a lesbian. Like everything about her, there was the legend and then the reality. The truth was that sex meant nothing to her, and certainly not as something that would be part of an emotional relationship. She’d only had a few brief encounters: one with an influential female boss that confirmed her promotion to sergeant then inspector. When the same boss realised Hadden had played her like a child, she cut off all contact. She had to keep it quiet because Hadden knew too much and had sucked out every little dark secret she’d kept well away from her professional reputation.

  The others were different and a bit off the wall. A couple of times she’d changed her appearance as much as she could, jumped on a train to Glasgow and trawled the bars for the wrong kind of guys: gangsters. Although she’d only managed it a couple of times, they’d been the real deal, and she’d even recognised one of them from criminal intelligence bulletins she’d read. They were crude, foul-mouthed and only wanted a short, absolutely meaningless relationship – and they got it. The thrill of risking her career and her own safety made her feel alive. The sex didn’t worry her because she felt nothing.

  One of the men was still so pissed in the morning that she’d even dipped his wallet and taken his mobile phone before heading back to Queen Street station, grinning all the way. She’d extracted some top-class intelligence from the phone and claimed it had come from one of her sources. It helped develop the reputation that she might be cold but by God was she fucking efficient.

  Becoming a bent bastard hadn’t happened overnight, but eventually it seemed to become the only logical option that could work for her career prospects. She’d looked at so many of her colleagues and seen them as nothing more than pre-programmed robots who’d complete their service, work in some pish job for a few years, then die. Life was meaningless without risk and she’d had to find other ways to feel that she existed at all. Danger and risk were vital.

  Having tried every extreme sport there is, Hadden discovered that after the first thrill of jumping out of an aeroplane or diving among sharks there was nothing. It had become harder and harder to trigger the adrenalin rush that made it all worthwhile; so, slowly, corruption had replaced the legitimate sports and become the oxygen she needed to live. It was all she had left and she’d decided that it wasn’t monetary gain that was important, only how it could propel her to the top.

  There was success, no doubt, but her lack of empathy had caused her a problem she just hadn’t planned for: despite the benefits from the encounter that had resulted in her first couple of promotions, she just couldn’t win over her bosses. A subliminal message had flickered around the force and however hard she tried, she simply couldn’t overcome other people’s natural instincts. No one could point the finger at hard evidence, and, particularly in such a politically correct age, she was safe but stuck. Realising this, she decided she needed to cut a new path to the top. She engineered a sideways move to the source-handling unit and was determined to recruit gold-plated informants who would give her career the lift-off she craved. It hurt like fuck that she was surrounded by so many incompetents and someone like her was stuck at the inspector rank. She watched the self-satisfied looks of the men and women who had been the promotion opposition till they ran past her at speed. She could have killed them for those expressions that said ‘look at me’ every time she passed them in a station and they expected her to say ‘sir’ or ‘ma’am’ just for the privilege of being in their presence.

  At night in her flat she would stare at the spectacular view across the Forth and grind her teeth at the injustice of it all. She had the plan – all she had to do was make it happen.

  Sometimes in the night she would wake, frightened, dribbles of sweat trailing down between her shoulder blades. It was the same dream over and over again: she stood on cliffs that were so high she could hardly see the waves crashing over the rocks in a fog of chaotic spray. She was wearing a chief’s uniform and regalia, but they were no more than rags almost devoid of colour. On the horizon, there was a line of fire and in the dream she imagined that she was the only person left alive after some great event. She looked over her shoulder and it was as if there was nothing but a black wall behind her, stretching all the way into the far distance. She was on an immense stage, then she felt the cliff giving way below her and she would scream as she fell, even though no one was listening.

  6

  ‘Anyone searched this man?’ Hadden barked towards the firearms team.

  The lead officer told her they’d done a rough pat for concealed weapons; he didn’t want to get it wrong with this woman, but the search had been cursory, probably too fucking cursory. Fortunately for him, it suited her purposes, although she couldn’t actually say that. The fact that Tonto was being chased, and therefore the victim, didn’t mean he wasn’t carrying something he shouldn’t have in his possession. He was a ned being chased by a ned and that was the point.

  Tonto felt reality cramp his stomach and suddenly his bladder decided it was about to explode. He wondered how that had happened; he hadn’t worked out that fear had just kicked him in the goolies. The high had peaked, stalled for a few minutes then he nosedived back into the real world, and although he didn’t mean to, he pissed himself. In the cooling shadows of the stadium his groin area steamed like an old coffee machine just to complete his humiliation. The firearms team variously screwed up their faces or guffawed, but Hadden stared straight at him and was pleased with the result. A ned wetting himself in public didn’t make her laugh or w
ince – it was just a positive result as far as she was concerned. It meant he was scared, and scared was good. The realisation that a substantial bag of Charlie stuck down his pants might be about to come into the light had clearly added an unsustainable pressure on his bladder.

  ‘Any chance of a toilet break, chief?’ Tonto directed his words towards the firearms officer who’d wanted to shoot him a few minutes earlier and was bored now. Even though the bastard looked disappointed for some reason, he thought he might have more joy than with the female pig who’d dropped into the scene.

  ‘A bit fuckin’ late, Tonto.’ The firearms officer sneered at his humiliation but secretly loved witnessing it.

  ‘I’ll tell you when you get a break, Davy. I’ll tell you exactly what to do and when to do it.’ Hadden walked as close as she could get without it being indecent and stared hard into his eyes.

  Tonto felt like a child and it was as if he was being assaulted. He tried to take a step back, but the bitch had her front foot just behind his heel, so as soon as he moved, he landed on his arse and the pain of hitting the cobbles on his tail took all his breath away. ‘What the fuck?’ It was all he could say, but he knew that what had started off as a normal day, became a terrifying day and then a joyous one had all turned to rat shit – in other words, back to normal. He knew the drill and what was coming next.

  Hadden stared down at him and showed him her perfect teeth, but it wasn’t a smile. It was a predator baring its fangs just before it ripped half your arse off for dinner. She nodded to a couple of the uniforms. ‘Get a towel and put it under his arse in my car. I want a word with him.’