by Black, Tony
He nodded and took out a cheque book.
I bit. 'Cash.'
'I'll have to go to a bank.'
'Then, let's.'
I drained my pint and rose from the table.
On the way out the door, Urquhart placed a hand on my elbow and spoke softly, 'One more thing, I neglected to mention ...'
'Yeah?'
'My daughter, I believe, is ... with child.'
* * * *
The newspapers had been full of scare stories coming out of the hospitals. We had a swathe of superbugs rampaging through them. Resistant to treatment, so the red-tops said, it was a new plague. Before I tired of the endless wanky grandstanding of millionaire comedians — and the TV set got taken to Crack Converters — I'd watched a rare documentary about the issue. Doctors were in the clear, apparently, and so were nurses; the blame was being planted firmly at the feet of immigrant workers. I'd been a hack and knew a beat-up story when I heard one. Papers played to the gallery as much as anyone else and the country was bankrupt so we had to find someone to blame all our ills on. Everyone needs a scapegoat. Welcome to Scotland, scapegoats a speciality, we've a history littered with them.
The last time I'd been in hospital was far from voluntary. I'd been drunken insensate and mowed down by a mobility scooter with a Ferrari upgrade. I couldn't remember being admitted, only waking up with a drip in my arm and a banging in my head Ringo would have been proud of. I'd got up and walked. I don't do hospitals as a rule. I didn't make the rule, it was made for me the day my ex-wife miscarried our only child.
I traipsed through the main doors of the Royal Infirmary and picked out the maternity ward. It was all depressingly familiar to me. The memory of Debs's slow, fragile gait towards the door on the day we left, childless, stung me. She had managed to get all the way to the car without tears but the sight of the empty babyseat in the back had brought on a gale of sorrow. I still felt that day's chill wind blowing all around me now.
I shook myself and approached a nurse as she passed me in the corridor, 'Hello, there ...'
She eyed me with suspicion, the result of my tramp-like appearance no doubt, said, 'Yes.'
'I was wondering if you might be able to help me.'
I fell into the gaze of a full head-to-toe eyeball, 'Visiting hours are six till eight.'
'No, sorry, I'm not visiting. I'm just looking for someone.'
'Looking for someone?'
'Yes, a girl ... her name's Urquhart and she's about sixteen.' I knew her father must have tried the place already and the chances of her using her own name were slim to none, but chanced it. And with nothing else to go on, I needed to start somewhere.
The nurse twisted her face to the side, surveyed me over slit eyes. 'Are you a relative?'
She was suspicious, likely even onto me. But the boat was out now so I pushed it further, 'Yes. I'm her brother.'
As soon as the words came out I saw at once she wasn't buying them. I might have been able to pass for her brother once but the sauce had added a few years to the dial of late. Knew I should have said uncle; Caroline was only sixteen, after all.
'Do you have any identification?' said the hard-faced nurse.
I stalled, reached into the inside pocket of my Crombie. 'Can I show you a picture?' Urquhart had supplied a photo, a few years old I'd say. Caroline was still in school uniform, one of those dreadful posed, say-cheese numbers that everyone has tucked away in a sideboard at their parents' home. Not me, though, all I have tucked away at my parents' home are skeletons.
The nurse took the photograph from me, looked at it, said, 'This girl has red hair.'
'Yeah?'
'And bright-blue eyes.'
'You caught that.'
'If you and her are related ... I'm a monkey's uncle.'
I snatched back the picture, there was a line and she'd just crossed it. 'Are you in charge here?'
'I'm the ward sister.' I didn't know what that meant exactly, but I sure as hell knew a fucking jobsworth when I saw one.
'Well, look, sister, this young lass is missing. Her father is very concerned and if I don't find her soon who's to say what might happen to her.'
Hands on hips, I got hands on hips from her. 'I'm calling the police.'
'Y'what?'
A hand came off one hip and a finger got pointed at me. 'If you're not off this ward, and out of this hospital in the next thirty seconds, I'm calling the police.'
I focussed on the short, scrubbed fingernail beneath my nose and slowly pocketed the photograph. 'Nice bedside manner you have there.'
The same finger was pointed to the door. 'Out!'
I turned, and fired out a parting shot. 'Don't worry, I'm gone.'
As I went there was a torrent of words whipping my back, I caught only a few but they were enough.
'Come in here stinking of drink ... The state of you, as well ... Think I was born yesterday.'
I knew in a flicker I'd reached the end of one line of inquiry.
* * * *
There was a time in my life when I was full of piss and vinegar. Lately, I'd lost some of the vinegar, if not my craving for the other. I headed to The Artisan pub on London Road, feeling slightly more comfortable back in my own neck of the woods.
The Artisan could have been renamed The Utilitarian. It had no style, which was just my style. I ordered a pint of dark from the dour barmaid who seemed more than annoyed to have to put her nail file down and return to the taps.
'Anything else?' She was Polish, that much I clocked right off. Her countrymen had developed a reputation in town for being as miserable as the natives — I wondered if they'd brought that with them or picked it up by osmosis?
'Yeah, put out a wee birdie?'
'A what?'
'Grouse ... double.'
I took my drinks and checked the clock on the way to the other side of the bar. My Docs were sticking to the carpet with every other step. When I sat down there was a pair of old jakes to my side, they were gambling on an iPad — the Paddy Power site taking the place of the ScotBet up the road.
I was shaking my head and wondering about the state of the universe, the disruption of chi that showered billions on a few Internet entrepreneurs and ass-fucked the rest of us, when I caught sight of a familiar face making his way towards me.
Fitz the Crime stationed himself at the bar momentarily and then eased himself off his elbow. He was shaking his head as he approached my table, 'Christ, where do they find them?' he said.
I nodded. 'The city has a great shortage in hospitality staff, Fitz ... haven't you heard?'
'Hospitality, is that what they're calling it. Christ, yer wan couldn't bloody spell it.'
He was still shaking his head as his pint arrived, deposited on a Tartan beer mat, a few millilitres of suppage evacuating over the edge like a prod for him.
'Fucking hell ... you see that?'
'You could ring out the mat, I suppose ...'
He didn't like that. 'I'll ring your neck if you're not careful.'
Fitz the Crime and I went way back. In my time on the paper I'd kept a couple of his indiscretions out of the headlines. Plod tends to turn a blind eye to its own lot's peccadilloes in private, but seeing them in print is a whole other matter. There was a time when he was grateful but it didn't last long. I'd well and truly overstretched the favour with my own subsequent requests for payback. Fitz had arked up and reminded me just who carried the weight in the relationship, but to his credit, he also displayed an unerring sense of justice that seemed out of all proportion with the world we currently lived in.
'How's the family?' I said.
He put down his pint and thinned eyes. 'What are ye after?'
I smiled; it forged itself into a low laugh. 'Did someone steal your toffee today, mate?'
The pint was raised again, a longer draught taken this time. 'No, I am just what you might call inveterately suspicious by nature ... especially when the bold Gus Dury contacts me for a fly pint when there has be
en no contact since ...'
He trailed off, eyes chasing a ghost about the ceiling. We didn't need to reference our shared past to know why sometimes it was better to ignore each other for long periods. Edinburgh was a small city, its Medieval streets winding and personal, but it was also a topography that favoured the incognito when they most needed it.
'Look, I need your help ...'
He turned his gaze on me. 'I thought as much.'
'It's not a big favour for you, but it's a big favour for me and a big favour for ...'
I filled him in on Callum Urquhart and his missing daughter. I laid it on as thick as I was capable. Fitz was a father, he had the territory of the heart well and truly mapped from experience.
'By the holy, it's my bollocks in a jar ye want,' he said. I let him settle, grab a hold of himself.
'I'd be happy enough with you running the girl through the system ... she's sixteen, Fitz.'
He shook his head. 'I heard you.'
'And pregnant ... did you hear that bit?'
He raised his pint again, the remaining dark liquid was a mere swirl in the bottom of the glass. His heavy thud shook the table as he let down his drinking arm. 'I said I heard, didn't I?'
Fitz started to rise, he put a finger in the empty pint glass and returned it to the edge of the bar. The barmaid watched over her nail file but didn't move. Fitz was doing up the front of his coat and staring towards the street as he spoke again.
'Urquhart, you say ...'
'Caroline, yeah. But she might not be using that name.'
He set back his shoulders and exhaled breath. 'She's sixteen, Gus, in my experience they're rarely the most forward thinking.'
'So, you'll have a squint?'
He put his hands in his pockets, looked like a car-salesman trotting out on the forecourt to flog Puntos. 'Keep your phone handy, I'll only call the once.'
* * * *
I schlepped back to the flat via the Booze and News on London Road. There was a far superior offie on Easter Road but my tastes were not elaborate, even with the fair wedge in my back-pocket that I'd taken from Urquhart.
Something wasn't sitting right with me. He was church, from that section of society that did things by the book. The filth was the obvious option for a bloke like him but Fitz hadn't heard of a missing schoolgirl who was up the peg. I wondered where the minister had got my details, but then I dismissed it: where did anyone?
I put my order in to the chick on the till. 'Case of Sweetheart and a pack of Silk Cut.'
She looked at me like I'd made a mistake. Did she remember the night before's order? Surely she was used to me changing my brand of tabs; I couldn't stick to anything.
'You're on the Silkies, now?' she said.
'Bit of a sore throat ...' It was a lie and I think she knew it. The letter from the Hypertension Clinic had put a bit of a fright on me. Maybe the trip out to the Royal was the lolly-stick in the dog turd I needed to keep me from stepping right in the shit.
'Okay,' she said, smiling.
I took the blue and white striped carrier from her and headed for the door.
My flat was cold and dark, even the shadeless 100-watt bulb in the hall wasn't enough to illuminate the grimness of the place. I took my cans through to the lounge and cracked one open. They were sweet, like they said on the tin. A tin that hadn't changed since my boyhood, I recalled a time when Hogmanay meant a sip from a can of Sweetheart Stout. The young woman on the front with the tight orange sweater was still smiling out like we were all waiting for the White Heather Club to begin.
I sparked a tab and checked my mobi. No missed calls, but there was one I needed to make. I selected the number from my contacts and dialled.
Ringing.
'Hello, is that you, Amy?'
'Gus ..?' she sounded surprised.
'How are you getting on?'
'Is this, like, a social call?' Answering a question with a question was so Amy.
'Well ... yes and no.'
A little chill entered the line. I took a sip on my stout.
'Well, it has to be one or the other ... do you remember what I said to you?'
I suddenly felt the Sweetheart Stout wasn't going to cut it. 'I told you that was all a lot of bullshit ... Amy, trust me, you were never going to be just a back-up plan for when things didn't work out with Debs.'
'Oh, really?' The tone was sarcastic, dipping perilously close to animosity. If I'd hurt the girl I hadn't a plan to. Jesus, what did I know about plans?
'Yes, really.'
'Well, you might not have consciously planned to ...'
I cut her short. 'Look, Amy ... Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face.'
'Is that a quote or something?'
'Yeah, Tyson ...'
'Do you know any other feminists, Gus?'
She had me. 'Okay, bad example.' I stubbed out my cigarette. 'Can we start again?'
'What?' her voice rose like a foghorn.
'I mean this conversation ... just the conversation.' The line fizzed. I let a few seconds of static collect. 'Amy, how about it?'
She sighed into the receiver, 'Okay. I'm all ears.'
'Great. I was hoping you'd say that because I could really do with your help.'
'Sounds ominous.'
'I wouldn't ask if there was anyone else.'
'Sounds even more ominous.'
I could see I'd caught her in one of those moods, played the placatory hand. 'How about a drink ... tomorrow?'
'Where?'
It wasn't going to be in my manor and I didn't fancy the trip out to Lothian Road where she was. 'How about Deacon Brodie's, around mid-day ...'
'Christ, if you're going that touristy why don't we just go to the Sherlock Holmes?'
'It's smack-bang in the centre ... I was thinking of the ease and convenience.'
She laughed me up. 'Holy shit, Gus, you'll be buying Hush Puppies next!'
'Yeah, whatever.'
'And putting a door in the bath.'
'Yeah, good one.'
'Getting a fucking stairlift and a Big Slipper ...'
She was on a roll. I cut her off, said, 'See you there, Amy.'
Hung up.
* * * *
I spent the night supping Sweetheart and staring at the wall. I only interrupted this pattern of events to delve into a book and chug on the odd Silkie. I could hardly manage a decent draw so told myself the fags couldn't be doing too much damage. The reading I wasn't so sure about. I'd once had a houseful of paperbacks but was now reduced to doing all my reading on the screen of a Kindle. I'd been resistant at first — books were like vinyl to me, each one had history: a time and a place they were purchased, a memory of the first play or read to regale with — but now I was swept along with the convenience of a mobile library in my pocket.
I started to devour works I'd never contemplate in paperback: War and Peace, Parts One and Two; The Communist Manifesto; classics by the barrel-load. They were all free, but I couldn't help but wonder how, or why?
When vinyl went, we lost the musos. They were replaced by boy-bands and talent-show shite. It was as if the world didn't have a place for the artist anymore. Or at least, didn't want to pay for them.
We'd just about lost journalism — my profession — to a kind of corporate PR. I wondered what was next? If we lost all the artists among us — those point men for the human race — we were truly fucked. Except the corporations, of course. Jesus, it was like The Player all over again: 'If we can just do away with these actors ... I think we'll really be onto something!'
I had no thought for breakfast and the last of the tins of stout lay crushed and empty on the floor. The coffee craving was on me, though, so I climbed into my Wranglers and looked for something to wear with them that wouldn't have Amy in stitches of laughter. Opted for an old Super-Dry flannel over a crisp white T-shirt. With the Crombie and the Docs I could have passed for a student — a very mature and misguided one. Perhaps just out of a marriage and tr
ying to recapture some misspent youth. I didn't exactly want to run with the analogy.
In The Manna House I got myself a large black and felt my stomach turning at the thought of the sugary Danish on offer. Caffeine was all I needed, at this point of the day I would have mainlined it if I could. The friendly Italian at the counter knew better than to put chat on me, handed over my cup and change and smiled.
'You have a good day now,' he said.
'Cheers.' No matter how mid-Atlantic we all became, I couldn't resist a cringe sometimes. Would always be more comfortable with Scots insults dressed up as patter.
On the way to Deacon Brodie's pub on the Mile I checked my phone for any messages from Fitz: nothing. It was still early, and I'd only asked him yesterday, but I still felt a twinge of disappointment. It was a long-shot that he'd find anything on Caroline Urquhart and I knew it, but I had to ask. My modus operandi was always, turn over all the stones in the hope that you find the one with the gold key underneath.
The coffee was awakening the cold recesses of my brain that had been put out of action by the stout and the distraction of reading. I knew better than to brood on a case, you turned it over to the subconscious and let it work its own way out. All my actions seemed to have turned up, though, was more nagging uncertainties. I was missing something, not a piece of a puzzle exactly, more like the whole picture was blurred. I felt like I was approaching Caroline's disappearance from the wrong perspective but I had no clue what the right one was.
The Mile was as steep a climb as I remembered. The entire way sprinkled liberally with tourists dipping in and out of the tartan-tat stores. It had once been quite a thriving, lively place — for an open-air chocolate-box lid — but had now been turned into one, long outlet for cheap plastic trash from Chinese warehouses. Someone at the council must have been getting a good drink out if it, mind you, they seemed to open a new outlet every week.
At the pub I traipsed to the bar and ordered a pint of dark. I was a little bit early for Amy, which gave me just enough time to settle my nerves with a few pints. Before I got my jotters from the paper, Amy had been my Girl Friday. She was work experience, had a thing for old movies with journalists cracking big stories. Had a thing for old journalists too, but that's another story altogether. We never worked out because she couldn't comprehend my ties to my ex-wife.
