Hit and Run

by Doug Johnstone

  He pulled on his seat belt and grabbed the gearstick. Vibrations from the engine chugged up his arm and through his body, like he and the car were part of the same beast.

  ‘Hey, you’ve got a wee chip there,’ Rose said, pointing at the top of the windscreen. Billy followed her finger and saw a small crystal of cracked glass in the shape of a star. ‘You better get that sorted, Kiddo, otherwise the crack will just get bigger and bigger.’

  Billy put the car in gear, his feet twitching on the pedals, and pulled out.

  6

  Blacket Place was a leafy enclave of Georgian mansions hidden between the bustle of Newington Street and the student chaos of Pollock Halls. The Neighbourhood Watch signs were brass plaques, CCTV everywhere, and Billy’s ancient Micra was making curtains twitch.

  The Whitehouse place was the swankiest of the lot, a gravel drive winding round an ornamental fountain out front, Doric columns fronting a two-storey edifice that was verging on stately home. They crunched up the drive and rang the doorbell.

  After a while the door opened and a fair-haired young woman answered. She had an accent, Polish or Slavic, and she threw a glare at them. She was the nanny, Mrs Whitehouse wasn’t in and she didn’t know when she’d be back. End of conversation, door closed.

  They mooched round the side of the house, having a nosey. A huge, well-tended garden with half a forest of oak and pine, a large treehouse and a pond. To the side of the house was a four-car garage. Locked, alarms, security cameras, no windows. Round the back, a gabled pine summerhouse hidden from the main building.

  ‘Leave, now.’

  They turned. A thug in a suit, thick tattooed neck, muscles flexing as he tapped a baseball bat against his leg. A smaller guy lurked behind, same air of menace.

  ‘And you are?’ Rose said.

  ‘Out.’

  ‘OK.’ Rose lifted a placating hand. ‘We got a little lost trying to leave this palace.’

  They shuffled towards the front gate, taking a wide berth round the goons.

  Rose smiled at them. ‘Are you employees of Mr Whitehouse?’

  The big guy shook his head and indicated the gate with the bat.

  ‘Well, nice talking to you.’

  The men watched until they reached the car. They got in, drove round the corner and stopped for five minutes, then headed back to Blacket Place, parking further away from the house. The guys were gone. Billy killed the engine, his fingers still gripping the wheel.

  Rose got her notepad out. ‘OK, let’s think about what we’ve got. Edinburgh crime lord dead. There’s our headline right there. We can assume he died last night.’

  Billy nodded, although Rose wasn’t looking for input, just using him as a sounding board.

  ‘So what the hell was Frank Whitehouse doing up the Radical Road in the middle of the night? I don’t believe he’d kill himself, and I doubt he would be up there on his own at 3 a.m. or whatever, so that rules out an accident. Which means he was taken up there and thrown off.’

  Billy was still nodding. He touched the bump on his head. Rose hadn’t asked how he got it. He touched his face, pushed at the skin over his cheekbone. He couldn’t feel anything. He was confused for a moment, didn’t know whether it was his face or his fingers that were numb. He rubbed his hands together. His fingers tingled. His brain felt sluggish, syrupy. Those pills. At least the pain had gone for now. He looked down. His legs were jittery, like a current was passing through them. He tried to stop them but couldn’t. He put his hands on his thighs but the vibrations just passed up his arms. He wound his window down and gulped air, but swarms of midges made him wind it up again.

  Rose was still talking to herself, figuring it out.

  ‘Maybe he wasn’t up the Radical Road at all.’

  Billy gripped his legs to stop them shaking.

  ‘Maybe he was killed somewhere else and dumped at the bottom. Or maybe he was killed somewhere else, then taken up there and thrown off to make it look like suicide or an accident. But that’s an awful long way to lug a corpse when you can just dump him anywhere. And if you’re going to dump him, why not do it where he’s less likely to be found? Or maybe the point was to make sure he would be found.’

  Billy stared out the window, his mind fizzing. Or maybe it was a hit and run and he wasn’t dead like they thought and he got up and walked away, and collapsed in the gorse. Maybe they could’ve saved his life if they’d called an ambulance. Maybe.

  ‘It’s all speculation until forensics come back with something.’

  The gears in Billy’s mind ground together.

  ‘What sort of things can they find out?’

  ‘It just depends. It’s not like CSI, but they sometimes come up with a useful nugget. Precise cause of death would be handy.’

  Billy thought about that for a minute.

  ‘I reckon the Mackie boys must be the prime suspects,’ Rose said. ‘I wouldn’t be surprised if the cops have brought them in for questioning already, checked their alibis.’

  Billy raised his eyebrows.

  Rose looked at him. ‘Wayne and Jamie Mackie. For a crime reporter, you really don’t know much about Edinburgh’s criminal underworld.’

  ‘You’re supposed to be teaching me.’

  ‘How did you get this job again?’

  A running joke. Rose and the paper’s editor and news editor had been the interview panel. The other two had wanted another candidate with more experience, a hotshot young woman from down south. Rose had talked them into hiring Billy. She sealed it by pointing out he’d be cheaper and she could train him up. She reminded him at every opportunity.

  ‘Yeah, the Mackies had the most to gain, rival criminal gangs and all that, and they’re just about the only guys in town capable of something like this.’ Rose looked at Billy. ‘It takes a lot of bottle to kill someone, you know. More than you’d think.’

  A lot of bottle, thought Billy.

  A silver Lexus swept past them and turned into the Whitehouses’ drive.

  ‘Aye, aye,’ Rose said. ‘Look lively.’

  She huffed as she got out of the car, and Billy followed. She scuttled to the house as he caught her up.

  The car had stopped at the front door and a man and a woman got out. The car drove on to the garage, the driver waiting for the garage door to slide upward electronically.

  The couple were walking up the steps, the man with a hand placed on the small of the woman’s back. He was short and skinny in a loose suit, she was taller, red hair to her shoulders, wearing a black polo neck, tight skirt and heels. She had a graceful walk.

  ‘Mrs Whitehouse?’ Rose called out as they approached.

  Both figures turned at the door. The man had close-set eyes and stubble. He tried to steer the woman inside the house but she didn’t budge. She wore large, round sunglasses. Billy was struck by how beautiful she was – old-style, full-figured glamour.

  ‘Mrs Whitehouse, I’m Rose Brown from the Evening Standard, I wondered if we could have a quick word.’

  The man stood in front of the woman. ‘Adele has nothing to say to you.’

  ‘Mrs Whitehouse?’ Rose looked past the man at her.

  The man snarled at Rose. ‘If you don’t leave immediately, I’ll call the police.’

  ‘Was it your husband, Mrs Whitehouse? At the morgue?’

  The man stepped forward and pressed a finger into Rose’s chest. ‘You don’t want to mess with me, darling, I can bring you a world of fucking pain, believe me.’

  Rose smiled at him. ‘Can I quote you on that?’

  ‘Here’s a quote for you,’ the man said. ‘My brother Frank was a much loved husband and father, and an upstanding member of this community.’

  ‘So it was a positive identification. Mrs Whitehouse, how do you feel about the suggestion that your husband committed suicide?’

  The woman raised a hand to her forehead, but Billy couldn’t tell what she was thinking. He noticed some discolouration of the skin around her right eye and ch
eek, the edge of a bruise.

  ‘Fuck off,’ the man said. ‘Frank didn’t kill himself.’

  ‘So you suspect foul play?’

  Billy almost laughed at the quaint phrase Rose had used, like something out of Miss Marple. He couldn’t take his eyes off Adele Whitehouse. She hadn’t said anything yet. He wanted to hear her voice.

  The man was right in Rose’s face now, spit on the corners of his mouth as he spoke.

  ‘When we find out who killed Frank, they’re gonna wish they’d never been fucking born. And you can quote me on that.’

  ‘Thank you, I’ll do that. Mrs Whitehouse, do you have anything to add?’

  She turned from Rose to Billy. Billy wondered what colour her eyes were.

  ‘No comment,’ she said.

  A soft accent. A hint of west coast.

  She turned and walked into the house. Billy stared at her figure, the sway of her red hair on her shoulders, the confident strut in those heels.

  ‘You heard the lady,’ the man said, giving Rose a gentle shove. ‘Now fuck off and leave us alone.’

  ‘Of course.’

  The man walked into the house and slammed the door.

  ‘So sorry for your loss,’ Rose shouted after him. She turned to Billy. ‘Nasty little prick. Did you notice her shiner?’

  Billy nodded.

  Rose laughed a big, throaty laugh. ‘A crime lord dead in suspicious circumstances, a vengeful brother, an abused widow. Oh boy, have we got a front page to write.’

  7

  ‘This is dynamite.’ Tom McNeil sat in his office looking at his computer screen.

  Rose grinned. ‘Isn’t it?’

  The editor turned to Billy, who was tangled up in an uncomfortable metal chair. ‘Old-school reporting, doing the footwork, doorstepping the story,’ he said. ‘You could learn a lot from Ms Brown here.’

  ‘I already have.’

  ‘Screw blogs and tweets, this is real news.’

  Billy had already had this lecture when he was hired. Modern mass media and digital formats were all very well, but old-fashioned foot-pounding journalism, getting out there and actually covering a story, blah blah.

  McNeil was the same generation as Rose, and Billy could see what he was getting at up to a point, but they were on their way out. The whole newspaper industry was dying. The vast majority of his fellow Napier students had wound up writing online content in one form or another. He was one of the few working in print. And that wasn’t out of any principles, just the only job he could get, like snaring the last berth on the Titanic right before it launched. Lucky boy.

  Billy looked at McNeil as he talked, and wondered if Rose had slept with him too. McNeil was a solid and handsome fifty-five, sleeves rolled up, broken nose adding to the rough charisma. Billy tried to think of himself at that age, but couldn’t get his head round the idea.

  Just like this story. Rose had written it up in two hours like the pro she was. Leading on the suspicious death, using Dean Whitehouse’s choice quotes about his brother, alluding to Adele Whitehouse’s bruising, rounding up with the dog walker who found the body and the police call for witnesses.

  It was all way ahead of the curve. The police hadn’t officially even given out Frank’s name yet. The tabloids would be sniffing, but not too hard, it wasn’t a major story until the Whitehouse name came out, just another jumper.

  They were dismissed from McNeil’s office with pats on the back. Billy excused himself and went to the toilets. He splashed water on his face, then took two of Charlie’s pills. His head was pounding again, the pain swimming into his neck and shoulders. He wondered how long it would take the pills to kick in.

  He tried to think, but his mind was sludgy. A muscle twitched under his left eye. A tingle spread across his face, the feeling back after the numbness of earlier. There was a sharp pain across his temple and something flashed in the corner of his eye. He moved his head in that direction, but it was gone. There was a whiff of something amongst the stench of urinal cakes, an electrical burning smell, then everything went black. The last thing he felt were his legs crumpling beneath him.

  *

  Cold tile against his ear. The sound of water trickling in the urinals. Disinfectant smell.

  He opened his eyes and look at his watch. Hardly any time had passed. What the fuck? Must be the stress and shock. He was so fucking tired. He felt full of fatigue, his bones aching at the joints. His headache was still there. The cold floor against his face was soothing, but he dragged himself up and checked in the mirror.

  He didn’t look too bad, considering. He splashed some more water on his face, dried himself with paper towels then left.

  On the mess of his desk was a Post-it note: ‘Go home and get some sleep, you look like you need it. I’ll chase police and forensics, see you tomorrow. Good work today, Rose.’

  He grabbed his bag. Instead of heading for the exit he crossed the first-floor mezzanine, through open-plan desks, towards the front of the building. There was an unofficial apartheid in operation, the Sunday paper journalists spread out across the front of the building in the flagship position, the Evening Standard and the daily paper down the two flanks. Mixing wasn’t encouraged.

  He spotted Zoe at her desk, pointing at a computer screen. Two plucked and tanned thirty-somethings hovered behind her ergonomic chair and nodded. Zoe had her hair up in a bun, a pencil through it.

  The two Sex in the City types frowned as he reached her desk. She looked up, surprised. He’d never come to her desk before.

  ‘Can we talk?’ He looked at her colleagues. ‘In private.’

  Her eyes widened. ‘I’m kind of in the middle of something here.’

  He looked at her screen, saw a two-page layout of tasselled handbags. He remembered as students they used to laugh together at the vacuous nature of lifestyle journalism. Not any more.

  He walked away, heart stuttering against his ribs.

  8

  He could feel the thud of a hip-hop beat as he stood digging for his keys. He opened the door and got a blast of Wu-Tang Clan. He followed the noise downstairs and found Charlie at the kitchen table with a sandwich in one hand, fingering the touchpad of a laptop with the other. A San Miguel bottle sat sweating on the table.

  Billy grabbed a remote and turned the docked iPod off. Charlie looked up and swallowed a mouthful of sandwich.

  ‘Hey, Bro.’ He pointed at the laptop. ‘Just checking to see if there’s anything about our little incident last night.’

  ‘Little incident? Is that what you think it was, a little incident?’

  Charlie took a swig of beer. ‘OK, calm down. I’m only saying. Doesn’t look like there’s anything come out about it yet, anyway.’

  ‘There won’t be. We’re first with the story, no one else has it yet.’

  ‘How did you manage that?’

  ‘Rose is sleeping with the detective inspector in charge of the case.’

  Charlie laughed. ‘Naughty girl.’

  He took another bite of sandwich. Billy watched him chew then turned away. His stomach felt tight.

  Charlie pointed at the laptop again. ‘Been googling your man Whitehouse, quite the little one-man crime industry. Well, two-man, seems he did everything with his brother Dean.’

  ‘I met him at their house. Little shit.’

  ‘Brotherly love, eh?’

  ‘He threatened to kill whoever was responsible for Frank’s death.’

  Charlie looked at Billy and slugged his beer. ‘Look, we’re going to be OK.’

  Billy stared at his brother. ‘How the hell can you say that?’

  ‘Because it’s true. We just have to stay calm.’

  ‘In case you hadn’t noticed, me and my boss are investigating this story.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘What if Rose finds something out?’

  ‘How is she going to do that?’

  ‘I don’t know, we haven’t had the forensic report yet. That could incriminate us.’


  Charlie smiled. ‘It’s not going to say he was killed by a red Nissan Micra at 2.30 a.m. at that exact spot on Queen’s Drive, is it?’

  ‘I have no idea what it’s going to say. Anyway, he wasn’t killed there, was he?’

  Charlie didn’t speak.

  ‘Did you hear me?’ Billy’s voice rose and he swallowed hard.

  ‘I heard you.’

  ‘You said he was dead last night. On the road.’

  ‘I thought he was.’ Charlie’s voice had gone quiet and his eyes were on the laptop screen.

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Maybe you just didn’t want me to report it, so you said he was dead. That way, he was already gone, we couldn’t have saved him anyway.’

  ‘That’s not how it was.’

  ‘Look at me.’ Billy’s head was pounding, his neck muscles strained. He felt dizzy.

  Charlie’s gaze didn’t budge from the screen.

  ‘Look me in the eye,’ Billy said, ‘and tell me you thought he was dead.’

  Charlie looked up and stared straight at Billy. ‘I thought he was dead.’

  ‘Promise me.’

  ‘I promise.’

  Billy shook his head.

  ‘Look,’ Charlie said. ‘I was fucking loaded. We all were. And we were in shock. I made a mistake. He must’ve been past help anyway.’

  ‘But he got up and walked two hundred yards.’ Billy felt his legs twitching. He grabbed the back of a chair to steady himself.

  ‘Yeah, and then he died. Anyway, I don’t know why you’re wasting your time worrying about Frank Whitehouse. Word on the net is that he was a nasty piece of work and the world’s better off without him.’

  Billy had both hands on the back of the chair now, gripping hard.

  ‘He had a son.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You heard. Five years old. Ryan.’

  Charlie shrugged.

  ‘Charlie, we both know what it’s like to grow up without a dad.’

  ‘OK, I feel sorry for the kid. But we’re getting way off the point here. We did the right thing.’