by Claire Askew
‘You’re right, ignore them,’ he said. ‘Phone on silent, that’s my advice. If it is some nutter calling, dinnae give him the satisfaction. An’ if it’s Solomon’s boys, they’ll soon try something else if they cannae get ye that way. Let’s see if we can get them tae show their hand, eh?’
Great, Birch thought. Suddenly I’m bait for gangsters. ‘Sure,’ she said, with forced cheeriness. ‘I mean, why not?’
It took them a while, but eventually they started to talk. I’ve learned now that it’s the way of hard cunts – I mean the truly, truly hard bastards of this world – to knock back a few bevvies before they get down to business. One thing a real hard man will never do is look eager. And there’s definitely a macho thing about not being the first to speak.
It surprised me that Tsezar broke the silence first. He’d been so quiet and reacted so little to any of his surroundings that I’d started to wonder if he was deaf.
‘I don’t know why you brought me here,’ he said. Then, after a beat, he nodded at me and said, ‘And I don’t know who this is.’
Tsezar was Ukrainian, I could tell as soon as he began to speak. He spoke a kind of pidgin Russo-Ukrainian: a nearly-but-not-quite Russian that I had to think hard while listening to. Toad seemed unbothered.
‘You lost something,’ Toad said, ‘that belongs to Solomon.’
That was the first time I heard his name. At the time, I hadn’t a scooby who Toad was referring to. But something clicked: he’d been calling me lately, dictating to me in Russian while I typed in English, something about a missing unit. Those units again.
‘It wasn’t me,’ Tsezar said. ‘I’m not there every hour of every day. Someone else was asleep on the job, not me.’
Toad ran one fingertip around the rim of his glass, making a grating hum. ‘Where the cloth is thin,’ he said, ‘that is where it tears.’
I remember making a mental note of the idiom.
‘Then speak to Vyshnya.’ Tsezar sort of squirmed in his chair, still looking mad as hell but maybe also a little scared. ‘She is the priemnaya mat.’
It took me a minute, but: foster mother.
‘I am not going to go dealing with the nasedka,’ Toad said. ‘With the brothel keeper. Solomon entrusted you, Tsezar. A man takes responsibility for his women.’ He leaned forward then, making the shot glasses clink. ‘Always,’ he said.
Now I could tell Tsezar was actively trying not to look rattled. I wasn’t trying at all. I was confused as all hell, and though I didn’t know why I was there I knew it couldn’t be good. I wanted to go buy some beers and walk home through the park and get in my shit single bed and close my eyes and sleep.
Toad had other ideas. He ploughed a conspiratorial elbow into my ribs. ‘Schenok,’ he said. ‘Do you know the saying, It is a bad workman who has a bad saw?’
I just nodded, mute.
‘And you believe it is true?’
Tsezar looked at me. He wanted me to be on his side, but surely also knew that however stupid I looked (and fuck me, I must have looked stupid), I knew better than to disagree with Toad.
‘Sure,’ I said.
‘And what do you think to this man, who blames his devushka for his own failings?’
They both looked at me. I had to say something. As if it might be less committal, I switched to English.
‘I reckon that’s pretty shady, Toad.’
Tsezar frowned. He hadn’t understood.
‘He says you are . . .’ Toad translated in Russian, and then said a slang word that must have been both unique to Ukrainian and pretty fucking offensive, because suddenly Tsezar was lunging at me across the table, and the old boys with their free Toad beers were looking up, hungry for the fight.
Toad had choreographed this, I could tell. He swung one big arm round Tsezar’s bent neck in a way that looked almost affectionate, while I leapt out of my chair and assumed the classic Scottish-man-about-to-fight pose: taking three steps back and balling my fists like a kid in the playground. The shot glasses clattered on the table as Toad wrestled Tsezar towards the door.
‘Too much to drink,’ he bellowed at the barman as they struggled past. ‘I’ll take him now.’
He bundled Tsezar, who was now howling obscenities, out through the swing doors. With all the drinkers staring at me, I felt like I had no choice but to follow.
Outside on the pavement, Tsezar had gone quiet and limp. His head was still under Toad’s arm, but his struggling had ceased. I saw why: Toad had produced, from somewhere, the first real-life handgun I’d ever seen. He was holding it at waist-height, millimetres from Tsezar’s face, half hidden in the folds of his coat. He looked up, making sure I’d seen it too. Holy fuck, had I seen it. I was mesmerised by it. It was entirely black: black barrel, black grip, black slide. It seemed light as air, the way Toad held it, but it also looked like it ought to be heavy as cast iron. It was like a plastic toy, but was also very definitely not a plastic toy. My head was mince, looking at it. I had this really fucking disturbing urge to hold it.
‘A little walk, now,’ Toad said. He disappeared the gun into his coat, and Tsezar straightened up. His eyes looked wet.
‘Don’t fuck with me, brother,’ he said.
Toad just laughed and gave him a shove out into the road, in a long gap between lit night buses. We began to walk, in single file, like ducks: Tsezar in front, glancing back every thirty seconds at Toad. I trailed them, feeling hungry and tired, wanting to peel off and run, but not daring to. Also, I wanted to see what the gun was for. I admit, I wanted to see where this was going.
At that point I didn’t know the bit round Kinning Park all that well, but part of me was praying we’d pass a polis station, still open, that I could run into. But to say what? I’ve just seen a guy show a gun to another guy? This was Glasgow for fuck’s sake. And for all the bullshit I’d told myself, I knew that by being in with Toad I was in with some fucking headcases. I wanted to run for it. I just didn’t quite know how.
So instead we walked into this car park, mostly empty, not lit except for one streetlight right at the front. Big high wall on one side, and all the racket and tangle of the M8 flyover up above. Shitty flats up at one end, little square windows with tacky coloured blinds. It wasn’t tarmacked really, more like potholes and gravel. Long whitewash lines up the walls to show where the spaces divided. I tripped a couple of times. Toad walked us on, right up the middle. At the far end there were a few vans: trade vans, parked for the night.
‘Look, Toad.’ As we got to the far end, to the darkest bit, Tsezar turned round. He kept walking, only backward, so he could look at Toad while he talked. ‘You haven’t even given me chance to fix this. I can fix this. I can find her.’
I was following Toad’s dark expanse of back. He didn’t speak.
‘I’ll find the bitch,’ Tsezar said, ‘and I’ll cut her fucking legs off. The merchandise would still work, right?’
You know that expression, my stomach turned? I’d never known what that meant until right then. Somehow I’d failed to realise that they were talking about a woman. And it all came home to me: the units Toad and his pals talked about in their emails? The units were women. And I knew from those emails that the units got transported in shipping containers. I knew where they came from and where they went. I knew that some units were ‘kept for personal use’, or deemed to be ‘below standard’. When Toad said Tsezar had lost a unit, he meant that a woman had gone AWOL.
Toad said nothing. He walked us as far as a battered, dark blue Transit van, parked nose-out against that high wall. It had once had decals that had been peeled or scrubbed. I could make out the words stove fitters, where the paintwork had faded around the lettering. Leaning against the inside of the windscreen was one of those stupid personalised number plates that lorry drivers have. ‘VIC’, it said. The M8 roared in my ears. I found myself wondering who the fuck Vic had been – whether he was a dodgy stove fitter who hung out with guys like Toad, or whether he’d just flogged his old v
an for cash to some friendly Russian gent who looked rather like a bear. More likely it was nicked. But I half expected that, when Toad led us round to the back of the van, he’d open up the double doors and the shell would be full of flues and firebacks.
But no: it was full of dark. I couldn’t see a fucking thing in there at first, but my eyes grew slowly accustomed. Toad sort of cuffed Tsezar up into the van and for a minute, he got swallowed in that darkness, skiting on his arse along the aluminium floor. Then I could see him again, the only thing in the back of the empty van, except for tarps: tarps on the floor, pinned up and lining the walls.
Toad ushered me in, and I ended up standing with him in the box that the two van doors made around us, the big high wall inches off our backs. I realised that, even if someone in those shite flats opposite had looked out with binoculars then, they’d have seen fuck all.
Tsezar’s face seemed to glow in the dark, incandescent with terror, and he held his white hands up like pale stars. What little light there was bounced off his wet eyes. I’d never seen proper fear till then – I mean proper fucking primal, animal fear. He was saying something I couldn’t pick up, perhaps because it was Ukrainian or perhaps because my brain was flooded with such overwhelming what the actual fuck that my old faithful ‘natural aptitude’ just fell away. Toad took the gun out of his coat again. I didn’t dare look at it, but I knew from the way he’d shifted his stance that he’d done it: his feet planted, wider apart, in the weedy gravel.
‘I’ll tell Vyshnya,’ he said, ‘that Schenok here is in charge now,’ and then the sound of the gun going off nearly knocked me over. My ears rang, so I didn’t hear the sound of Tsezar’s body hitting the back wall of the van’s cab. I watched as his legs convulsed, both feet battering against the tarps. I could see a sheen of dark wetness dripping down the van’s insides. I waited for Tzesar to scream, or even to rear back up and laugh and tell me it was a joke. But what I heard instead was a sort of terrible, gurgling rattle. Then, quiet. Tzesar’s legs went still. His blood spread in a pool underneath him. It was close range, and I guess Toad was a good shot, even in the dark.
I remember saying fuck, over and over again – my own voice sounding muffled under the buzzing in my ears – and Toad laughing at me. I just watched a guy die, I thought, and then I couldn’t dislodge the thought and it looped round and round in my brain. Toad reached round, close to me – too close, the proximity made me feel crowded, sick, jumpy. He took hold of the van door on my side and smoothed it shut, letting it click into its fixings with barely a sound. With that done, he pocketed the gun, and used all his weight to slam the other door home. The clang it made didn’t sound much like the gunshot to me, but I guess from inside a double-glazed flat two hundred yards away, you could tell yourself you’d heard the two back doors of a Transit van slam shut, and think nothing of it. That night was my first lesson in the fact that people – your average Joes on the street – they like to think nothing of it. They like to assume that it’s all okay and they can go on living in their not-bad area, as areas go, police station not far away, no, crimes don’t happen here, not in my street, all that shit. I didn’t know about that kind of wilful oblivion . . . not until that night.
And then Toad strolled out from round the back of the van, gallus as anything. I followed him, as best I could. I felt like every thought my brain was capable of having was in my head at that moment: all of them, all at once. I thought he was going to shoot me too. I thought he was going to burst out laughing, open the cab of the van and Tsezar would be sitting there, laughing too, and it had all been some massive inexplicable prank, a hazing for a club I didn’t know I’d joined. I thought I might wake up any second, maybe on the floor of my room with an empty Tennent’s can in my hand and curse myself for overdoing it, scaring the shit out of myself. But also I was just fucking tired and starving and confused and wanting my bed. I stood at the passenger side of the van’s cab and waited for a siren that never came. In the shit flats, not one single blind was pulled up. Not one single curtain seemed to have twitched.
‘We have more work for you,’ Toad said. He walked round the van’s snub nose and opened the passenger door, then held it, like I was the fucking queen.
It was the first time he’d ever said we, not I, about the work, and that one word, we, turned my whole body cold. I remember my hands prickling like the blood had gone out of them.
‘But it’s full time, Schenok,’ he said, ‘and you start now.’
Birch spent the rest of the day interviewing, her phone set to silent as Rab had instructed. The calls were less frequent now. They were hourly, on the half-hour, instead. Somehow, this was even more disconcerting, like whoever was calling her had moved on to some new set of rules she hadn’t yet learned. Beyond the interview room door, the news about Anjan broke in the bullpen. Any time Birch stepped out, she could hear McLeod stomping around, taking his annoyance out on whomever was closest. She was fleetingly grateful, then, that she hadn’t been assigned to lead this case. McLeod had never liked Anjan but knew that Birch did – her remark to Amy about DI Crosbie had begun to feel truer. Rather him than me.
With the perps, Birch changed tactic. Most were scheduled for release that day unless they could be charged, and in most cases, they couldn’t be charged unless they talked. After her meeting with Rab, she’d sifted back through the briefing file on Solomon, and pulled out the most heinous crime scene photos she could find. Grainy, black and white photos of teenage boys with slashed throats, jumped by Solomon’s old razor gang. A grisly close-up of a body police had found floating in the Clyde, blue-fleshed and swollen from days submerged in the water. There were many photos of women, too: alive, but sporting injuries inflicted by Solomon himself, or those close to him. Former girlfriends with both eyes so blackened that they’d sealed closed; women with teeth missing, lips burst, cheekbones dislodged. So much purpled flesh, so much ooze and congeal. Birch’s stomach turned every time she flipped them over and slapped them on the table between herself and a perp.
‘This is who you work for,’ she’d say. ‘This is the man you’re protecting.’
It achieved very little. The interviewees barely raised an eyebrow: they already knew of their boss’s long career, what he was capable of. If anything, today they were bolder: their solicitors sat beside them, their mandatory release time ticking ever closer.
One man – a younger guy, perhaps twenty-five or so – did flinch away at the sight of the photos.
‘Disturbing, isn’t it?’ DS Scott cut in.
‘Aye,’ the man said. He was almost laughing. ‘Why d’ye think I’m no’ saying a word, pal? Think I want tae end up like that?’
At lunchtime, Amy dropped by to see her: Birch knew it was her from the thud-thud, thud-thud of her high heels, then the pause outside the door before she knocked.
‘Come in, Amy,’ she called, and Amy elbowed in through the door with a coffee cup in each hand and a pair of clingfilmed baguettes tucked under one arm.
‘Peace offering,’ she said, wobbling the coffee down into Birch’s hand, and letting the sandwiches roll onto the desk. ‘I’m so sorry, marm. About the whole you’ve got a suitor line. I had no idea.’
Birch smiled, and studied the baguettes: cheese ploughman’s, coronation chicken.
‘It’s okay,’ she said. ‘You weren’t to know.’
Amy pointed at the sandwiches. ‘Your pick,’ she said. ‘I’ve no preference.’
When Birch went for the cheese, she saw from Amy’s face that she’d chosen correctly.
‘So what’s going on,’ she asked, picking at the clingfilm, ‘on your side of the fence? Any logistical movement?’
Amy sighed. ‘Only the slowest kind,’ she said. ‘I mean, I came in to tell you the one piece of good news: we got the extension. Ninety-six hours we can hold Solomon without charge.’
Birch raised her coffee cup in a cheers gesture. ‘Wahey,’ she said, ‘that’s a relief.’
‘Yeah. But the first
twenty-four are already up. All the low-level guys are being released as we speak.’
Birch balled up her peeled clingfilm and threw it, overarm, in the direction of her wastepaper bin. It missed.
‘I had a feeling,’ she said. ‘My interviews were like talking to a brick wall. But nothing stuck to any of them?’
‘Well,’ Amy said. ‘Obviously there were so many arrested. We’ve only got Solomon’s crew at this station, the ones picked up alongside him on the eastern harbourside. Drylaw and St Leonard’s got some of the others, Gayfield got the ones off the boats, who didn’t seem to speak English. I don’t know what’s going on with them other than hearsay, but it sounds like at least some will be charged. The raid brought in a huge haul of . . . whatever you call it.’
Birch raised her eyebrows. ‘Flakka,’ she said. ‘We think.’
‘Right,’ Amy said. ‘But it’s all still with the lab. There are bets on round the office that it’s heroin, or crack. Whatever it is, some of the guys were arrested literally carrying it, so it’s likely there’ll be some possession with intent to supply, smuggling charges, etcetera. The other stations are dealing with that. But I’d be willing to bet it’s the same as here, and no one’s talking.’
Birch gave a low whistle. It was just like Rab had said, last night in the pub: They’ll go off to the jail like lambs.
‘But no charges here?’ Birch asked. ‘Nothing for Solomon’s entourage?’
Amy shook her head. ‘I mean, not much from what I hear. One had marijuana on him so he’s up for possession; a couple had falsified documents, credit cards and stuff. They’re claiming they had no idea, the usual, so I think we’re hosting them for a little longer.’ She stopped speaking for a moment, to shrug. ‘But otherwise, they’re all headed to the pub right about now.’
Birch snorted. ‘Yeah, them and their lawyers. I couldn’t get through to a single one. It’s a real bitch.’
