by Jay Stringer
I take the stairs two at a time on the way down, then walk out onto the street into the sun. I check the time. Perfect. I’ve got an appointment to meet another customer at four. I blend into the crowded street behind three hot young women in tight clothes, each loaded down with shopping bags. I slip off my rubber gloves and drop them into the nearest of the bags.
I pull sunglasses from my pocket and put them on.
That’s two botched jobs in a row, but maybe I can get back on track with the next one.
Please, let it go smooth.
SEVEN
CAL
17:00
Well, this is a fucking mess.
I’m in Marxist Martin’s bedroom. Or, his ex-bedroom. Is it still really his room, now that he’s dead? Or is it just a room? Martin’s in the bathroom. He’s face down in his own blood.
I was glad to find him face down, because it meant I didn’t have to see his nuddie little pecker. But then I walk in here, and there’s Dom Porter dead on the floor, his brains sprayed across the wall, and his own Steamboat Willie glaring at me through one dead eye.
What the hell happened here?
And where’s Paula?
My first sign of trouble wuz when I checked my stash, and saw she’d taken all of my proof. Everything. Then, when she didn’t call me by four-thirty, like we’d fuckin’ agreed, I came round here.
Getting in was easy, really. My da owns the building, so I’ve got a key to every door in the place. I’m pretty sure the tenants aren’t told that when they sign the lease. That’d be a fun clause for them to agree to. I’m not actually sure my da knows, either. Me and him don’t talk these days.
It’s a long story.
Well, not that long.
I killed his favourite koi, years ago. I got high, and wanted to talk to the fish. Wanted to ask him how he stopped his skin from going all wrinkly. I mean, look, I’m in the bath for thirty minutes and I look like a fucking prune. This fish? He’s in there all the time, looks great.
Well, not great, because he looks like a fish.
But I have nothing against fish.
I wouldn’t fuck one, but—
(Well, look, that was just the one time, and for a bet.)
Anyway. So I accidentally killed the fucking fish. He drowned in the air. So my old mate Joe Pepper, he turned up and tried to fix things for me before my da got home. First we tried stealing another one that looked the same, but that didnae work. Then we said, Hold on, why not just make it look like a break-in, steal some stuff from the house, and kill the other fish, too?
Then my da would think that some fuckers had broken into the house, and killed his pets on the way out.
And it worked, too, until we all went out for a drink to celebrate Joe’s graduation, and I got drunk and started telling stories about all the crazy shit we’d done down the years.
Haw, howsabout that time I killed yer fish, and the bigyin here covered it up?
Look, we were telling funny stories, and I thought it was a good ’un, okay?
Live and learn, that’s what I say.
That’s why I have to try pulling jobs like this, find my own Babycham. I got cut off over a fish, you believe that? But now there’s two dead bodies, and a load of blood, and I have no idea where my fake hooker has got to.
If only Joe was here.
He’d know what to do.
Hey, that’s what I need . . . I’m in a mess here. My Babycham has gone all tits up. I’ll call Joe Pepper.
We haven’t spoken in years, but he can fix it.
EIGHT
CAL
17:10
The buzzer goes, and when I press the intercom I hear Joe’s voice. I click the button to unlock the front door and wait for him to come upstairs. He looks tired. He’s dressed all smart, in a suit that looks like someone pressed it around him. He’s no’ shaved in a couple days and, man, he looks stressed.
‘That was fast,’ I say.
‘I was nearby.’ Joe sounds pissed off. But he was never happy. I think he’ll enjoy this. Me calling him now. It’s just like old times. I’m bringing a bit of fun back to his life.
We go way back.
Joe’s parents died when he was a wean, and my da pretty much raised him. Joe was always cleverer than me, so it was his job to keep me out of shite. And I kept pushing that as far as I could. It was like a game, see how much trouble I could cause, and still have Joe to fix it.
Before that thing with the fish.
That was right after Joe had finished a law degree. We’d helped him through it, paid for extra tutors, bribed teachers, all the stuff that families do, aye? He was going to be our guy on the inside, until I fucked it up, and my da cut both of us off.
Joe landed on his feet though. Big time.
He’s high up in the local Labour Party now, behind the scenes. He’s the guy who pulls the strings, like. Arranges things, sets up meetings, cleans up messes. And he does practise law sometimes, too. Usually it’s free jobs he takes.
What’s that phrase? Like the lead singer of U2? Summat Bonio?
Well, that’s what he does. Because it looks good, and it makes people think he’s a good guy. But I know the truth. He’ll kill yer fuckin’ fish as soon as look at you. Which is why he’s my kinda guy.
‘How’s the lawyering?’ I say.
He sighs. ‘Busy.’
‘Still doing that bonio work?’
‘Pro bono. You make it sound like a dog biscuit.’
‘That’s the badger.’
‘Yeah, still doing it.’
‘And the politics shite?’
‘Yeah.’
Joe walks past me and into the flat. He stops in the doorway to the bathroom, and looks down at Martin. He grunts. It’s not quite a surprised noise, more like he’s saying, Here we go again.
‘Anything else?’ he says.
He looks at me with tired eyes. I thought he’d enjoy this, but no. His expression makes it feel like I’ve just walked into his office at the end of the day and put another pile of legal stuff on his desk.
I nod toward the bedroom and he goes to take a look. Even his walk looks fed up, he moves slow, with a great weight pressing down on him. I follow in. He bends down in front of Dom Porter. He’s not fazed by seeing the fat fucker’s pecker, but then, I reckon Joe likes a bit of cock.
‘He wasn’t supposed to be here,’ he says. He doesn’t turn to face me. He’s still staring at the dead body. ‘Neither were you.’
‘It was going to be my fucking Babycham, bro.’ Then it hits me and I add, ‘What do you mean, he wasn’t supposed to be here?’
He turns and looks up at me now. ‘Your what?’
‘You know, my big job. My masterpiece. Cal’s big score.’
‘Babycham?’
‘Aye. Pure classy.’
Joe looks at me like I’ve got a screw loose. Maybe the Babycham is too expensive for all those secret lawyer clubs he must go to. Whatever. Fuck it.
I carry on. ‘But now Paula’s missing, and these guys are, well, spoiler alert an’ aw that, but they’re deid.’
He stands up and laughs. ‘Spoiler alert an aw’ that.’ Then shakes his head and looks at me again. For just a second, I can see the old Joe in there, the one who used to like listening to my banter.
I hear someone behind me, and turn around. There’s a big guy there. Looks like a bouncer, maybe. Has a beard and a flat cap, but he’s dressed smart, in a suit. I didn’t hear him come in. How didn’t I hear him come in?
This isnae good.
I look back at Joe and try again. ‘Joe, what did you mean, about him not being here? And who’s this guy?’
Joe looks past me to the big guy, and nods. He says, ‘Todd,’ but it’s more in greeting to him than answering me.
I turn to look at this Todd guy. He’s wearing black gloves.
‘I sorted the other problem,’ he says.
I’m all, like, What the fuck? Is this a code?
Todd reaches
inside his suit jacket and pulls out a gun. The last thing that goes through my brain, before the bullet, is to wonder how he managed to have that in his pocket without ruining the line of his sui—
NINE
SAM
16:20
Phil sent the address for the pickup to my phone. We ran both the courier service and a detective agency from the same office, and had phone apps for both.
Basically, we’re Uber for parcels and mysteries.
And I promise, I’ve only used that line about ten times before.
The address Phil had sent me for the pickup was listed as Virginia Street. I knew a lot of the businesses there from previous jobs. There was a publisher’s, a hotel, a place that made corsets and a law firm. A couple of gay bars, too, though they tended not to need a courier.
I followed the numbers in the street. The address I’d been given was the garage for one of the main high street stores. A large sign above the entrance said it was the ‘Collection Point’. The entrance itself was hidden in shadows. I couldn’t see anybody inside. Had to be a mistake, surely? There was a small hotel directly across from the garage. Maybe that’s where I was meant to go?
As I was scanning the address on my phone again, a woman stepped out of the shadow in the entryway to the garage.
‘Are you the courier?’
I looked her up and down. There wasn’t much to her. She was shorter than me, with a narrow frame and short black hair combed flat to her head. She was wearing knee-high boots and a black dress beneath a biker jacket. Her eyes were hidden beneath sunglasses, and I always get defensive when I’m talking to someone who won’t show me their eyes.
‘Who’s asking?’
‘It’s, ah, I ordered you. The delivery, I mean. I ordered the delivery.’
She had a strong Belfast accent, but she was nervous and spoke fast. I got the impression the jacket and glasses were a form of defence against the outside world.
‘I wasn’t expecting . . .’ Her words trailed off.
‘A woman?’
‘A hot one.’ She smiled, and then looked away.
I looked away, too. Then down at the bike beneath me. I smiled and looked back up. We both let out a small nervous laugh at the same time. Just like that, she’d knocked me off my game.
She smiled again. ‘Sorry.’ Then she leaned into the shadow and came back with a large padded envelope. The end was folded over and wrapped in brown parcel tape. I could feel something heavy inside as she passed it to me. There was something off about this job. I knew it straight away. We have some strict rules. We don’t do drugs, we don’t knowingly pick up crime-related goods, and if a rider feels something is wrong, they don’t do it.
Those rules applied to everyone except me.
I’ve always felt that if I turned down a job, then it might send a different message. The other riders might decide I’m not committed, that I think I’m better than them. As a result, there have been a couple of times I’ve taken on a package that I wasn’t comfortable with.
‘Listen,’ I said. ‘We don’t deliver anything dodgy.’
‘No, please.’ She stepped close and put her hand on mine, resting on the bullhorn. She sounded worried at the thought of being turned down. ‘It’s important.’
I looked down at her hand and she pulled it away, self-consciously.
There was no address on the envelope, only a name. Robert Butler. I checked the delivery address on the message Phil had sent me. Blythswood Square. I could cycle there in minutes, but it also wouldn’t take long for this biker chick to get there herself on foot.
She must have read the hesitation in my face.
‘Please,’ she said again.
I looked back up at her from my phone, but only saw my own face reflected back in her black glasses. She turned to look down the street, and then up in the other direction. She was worried about being watched.
This stank. I decided we’d come up with the rules for a reason. I started to hand the package back, but she stepped back and pushed her hands into the pockets on the front of her jacket.
‘I need your help,’ she said. ‘I can’t deliver it myself, and remembered reading about you in the news. Please, just get it there for me, quickly.’ Her right hand came out of the pocket with a roll of twenties. She handed the whole roll to me. The message Phil had sent told me that she’d already paid by debit card, so this was just a nice wee extra. I took the money and looked at it, then made a show of rolling my head, letting her see that I was thinking about it. Then I sighed, put the money into the front pocket of my cut-offs, and slipped the package into my messenger bag.
‘Thank you,’ she said.
I pushed off on the bike and turned away. I headed down Wilson Street and took a left, heading in the direction of George Square. Glasgow is laid out in a grid, like New York, and it has a confusing one-way system to the traffic that I usually tried to obey. I took my time and followed the rules. There was no point busting a gut on this one. I’d been on the bike all day, and there was a meeting lined up with someone who wanted to hire me for an investigation job at 6 p.m. I just about had enough time to deliver the package and get home to clean up.
I cycled up St Vincent Street. I could feel the day in my thighs and calves. As the incline got steeper, I needed to get down closer to the bike and really push myself to keep going. I turned up Douglas Street, where the hill rose again, and promised my body I would give it a long hot bath later on.
Something with amazing bubbles.
Maybe even glitter.
I came to a slow stop at the address I’d been given for the delivery. It was empty.
A large ‘To Let’ sign was bolted to the wall beside the door. I climbed the steps to look in through the door, but it was dark inside. I stepped back and looked up at the windows on the floors above. They were all dark. None of them had curtains or blinds.
I searched the name ‘Robert Butler’ on my smartphone, but got nothing that seemed to fit. I tried again, varying searches with phrases like ‘Law’, ‘Glasgow’ and ‘Solicitors’ added in, but came up blank.
I got back on the bike and headed down the hill, back into the city centre. I love fixed-gear, but there were moments, like this one, when I would have loved the option of coasting. On this bike, the pedals turned even when I was going downhill, and I apologised to my legs with each rotation of the crank.
I cut down Buchanan Street, the pedestrianised area of the city centre. I drew dirty looks from the shoppers as I threaded between them and their heavy loads of plastic, paper and debt, but I didn’t really care. I turned onto Argyle Street and then into the bottom of Virginia Street.
Blue lights bounced off the walls of large old buildings. There were police vans in the street, and an ambulance parked at the kerb, at the entrance to the garage. Paramedics in green jumpsuits were bent over a fallen figure, working furiously.
The motionless figure’s legs were all that I could see. They were covered in knee-high boots.
What the hell had I got into this time?
TEN
SAM
16:45
The blue police lights flashed around the narrow street, bouncing off the brownstone walls of the old buildings. I watched as the paramedics worked away at the body. I saw blood covering their gloves as they moved. The police presence was building up around the scene, with more cars pulling into the road, and uniforms starting to put up tape to keep away the passers-by.
I took a few quiet steps back to allow another officer to start cordoning off my end of the street.
The package in my messenger bag started to feel heavy. What the hell was it? A younger version of me might have believed this was all a coincidence. Maybe she was mugged after handing the delivery off to me, and it all meant nothing. A younger version of me also believed in Santa. I’d seen too many of the nasty surprises this city had to offer, and coincidence wasn’t one of them.
More cars were arriving, pulling into the scene from Wilson S
treet, to the right. One of them was a midnight blue Audi, and I knew who was behind the wheel even before she climbed out.
Hanya Perera.
My best friend.
Hanya was English, but had been in Glasgow for five years, so she now spoke with a hybrid accent like those rich people in Edinburgh. Her parents were Spanish and Indian, and the most accurate way to describe her looks was interesting.
Hanya had transferred up from London back before the regional Scottish police forces were all merged into one. She’d been part of a specialist armed unit, trained in using guns. After the merger, she’d been shuffled around between departments, finally settling in the MIT.
With a Starbucks in one hand and an E-cig in the other, she headed over to watch the paramedics work. She had a terse conversation with them, quiet enough that the words didn’t carry down the street toward me. She slipped the E-cig into her jacket and set the coffee down on the road before slipping on a pair of plastic gloves and picking something up off the ground. A purse. She looked through the contents, and then glanced around the street. Finally, her eyes rested on the crowd that had gathered at this end.
On me.
She cocked her head to one side and smiled, just a little. She waved for me to come closer, and nodded to the uniform holding the line. He lifted the tape up to let me through, and I stooped to meet it, wheeling my bike underneath to stand with Hanya on the other side. We moved back down the street a little, far enough away from the crowd.
She nodded at my bike. ‘Picking up or dropping off?’
Our friendship was built on many things. Gin. Talking about sex. Watching American TV shows. But, like all good friends, we also lied to each other constantly. ‘Just passing by,’ I said. ‘Caught the whiff.’
Hanya turned and watched the paramedics. She worked murders, mostly. Her being here meant that nobody was expecting a miracle, but she also wasn’t on the clock yet.
‘Looked at vLove yet?’ she said.
When I first started working the detective business, I’d been appalled that cops, paramedics and fire crews could stand and hold such banal conversations so close to tragedy. But that was then. This is now. Violence and blood had become just another thing I was getting used to, like paperwork and flat tyres.
