THE SAM BRYSON COLLECTION

by McLean, Russel D; Chercover, Sean

  “Any children?”

  “None.”

  “You gave me his mother’s address. What about his father?”

  “Dead. Buried up at Balgay Cemetery”

  “And known associates I’m going to guess crooked wee wankers like the Kennedys?”

  “Closest he has to a family, I imagine.”

  “So he’s got nowhere to go.

  “Probably not.”

  “And assuming he doesn’t run back to the forgiving arms of Bobby and Jimmy?”

  “They’re going to be looking the same places we are.”

  “But they’re not going to ask questions so politely.” I took a drink of my pint. It fell heavily into my stomach, like a lead weight. “I should get going,” I said. “The night is young.”

  “Naw, mate,” said Sandy. “This one’s old”

  ***

  I grabbed my car—a flashy new BMW I got at a good price from a satisfied client—and headed out to Lochee, where Dudman’s wife now lived in a comfortable semi with her new man. I didn’t have much on him, but it was the ex—Mrs. Dudman I wanted to talk to anyway.

  The semi had a small garden out front. There was a pond with fish in it. I stopped on the path for a moment to look at them. They swam around under the surface, creating patterns with their movements I doubt they were even aware of.

  The front door opened and a female voice said, “Who are you?”

  I looked up and saw a woman in her mid-forties standing on the front step. She wore a white dressing gown wrapped tight round her body. She was skeletally thin and her skin hung loosely about her frame. Her blue eyes were graying with age and sunken back in her skull. Her hair had been a vibrant blonde once, but now it looked like brittle straw.

  “Mrs Jennifer Dudman?”

  “It’s Fischer,” she said. “Miss Fischer.”

  “Of course,” I said. She’d taken back her maiden name after the divorce. “Nice house.”

  “I guess. Are you with the polis? I already talked to some wanker called Lindsay. Bloody girl’s name!”

  “D.L Lindsay,” I said. “Something of a prat. I’m not a copper.” I took out my wallet and walked up the path. I handed her my card.

  “I’m a private investigator.”

  “Didn’t think we had those in Scotland.”

  “Well, there you go,” I said with a shrug.

  She looked me up and down. “You look like a scruffy bag of tatties,” she said. “I watch those films in the afternoon, ken? With that Humphrey Bogart and all. That’s a private investigator, son.”

  I smiled. “Can I come in?”

  “No.”

  “It’s important,” I said. “It’s about Ally.”

  ‘Already told that D.I., I haven’t seen him in almost a year now.”

  The divorce was amicable.

  “Aye; doesn’t mean I want to see the toerag again.”

  “Sure,” I said, “but I need to talk to him, Miss Fischer. And besides, this is definitely going to concern you.”

  She sighed. “I’m no going tae get rid of you, am I, son?”

  I shook my head.

  “Christ,” she said. “Come inside, then. But wipe your bloody feet! No one trails mud round my house, you got that?”

  ***

  Jennifer Fischer’s front room was fairly small and free of clutter. The bookcase set into one wall was filled with a few videos and some pot plants. There were a couple of books there as though in concession to the actual purpose of the cavity. They looked new and I guessed she wasn’t much of a reader.

  She threw herself into a ragged brown armchair. She didn’t bother inviting me to sit. I stood, anyway.

  “Like I said, I haven’t seen him.” She looked at me with hard eyes, as though she was challenging me to contradict her. “In over a year,” she said, emphasizing each word in case I hadn’t caught that information outside the house.

  “Sure,” I said. “The two of you didn’t talk, right?”

  “Bloody toerag!” she said, condensing her feelings toward Ally in four forceful syllables. “What do you think?”

  I nodded. There was a small coffee table with an ashtray sitting in the middle of the room. Two cigarettes were crumpled in there. It made me wish I could spark up. I’d been trying to give up lately—Ros’s idea—and now I was starting to see temptation round every corner.

  “So I haven’t seen him,” she emphasized once more.

  “Okay,” I said. “But you know him better than most people. I mean, where else would he go if he needed a place to hide?”

  She shrugged. “Just about any bloody pub,” she said. “That’d be a good start. Or the bookies.”

  “You know he’s in danger,” I said.

  “What? From, the polis?”

  I shook my head. “He was working with the police,” I said. “Maybe he was trying to turn his life around, I don’t know. But he was working with them, and now that he’s done a runner, the people he was helping the police to nick are probably going to be after him.”

  I walked to the bookshelf I scanned the unbroken spines. A few Grishams, a Guinness Hit Singles, and The Atkins Diet.

  “They’re not nice people,” I said. “They’re pretty dangerous people, actually.” I kept my tone light and airy like I did this kind of thing all the time, like it didn’t matter to me really one way or the other whether the Kennedy brothers got their hands on wee Ally Dudman.

  “That’s too bad,” said Jennifer Fischer. “For Ally, I mean.” But her tone trembled slightly.

  The front door opened. “Jennifer?” shouted a gruff man’s voice.

  “You in there?”

  A burly ball of sweat came into the living room. He stopped and looked at me suspiciously, his small eyes narrowing. “Who’re you?”

  “Sam Bryson,” I said. “I’m a consultant with the police force. Just here to ask Miss Fischer a few questions about her ex-husband.”

  “Can’t you bloody people leave her alone?” thundered the ball of sweat. I tried not to look at him directly. He was a hard man in the worst sense of the word; direct eye contact would be like a red flag to a bull. And I was no matador

  “I’m sorry to intrude,” I said. “I didn’t mean to cause Miss Fischer here any trouble.”

  “I think you should leave,” he said.

  I glanced at Jennifer Fischer out of the corner of my eye. She was trembling. It was barely perceptible, but I could see it. It was a look I’d see many times. She was petrified of this man. I wondered what would happen after I was gone.

  I walked past the big man and out of the house. I turned when I got to the gate and looked at the living room window. Jennifer Fischer knew something. Given time, she might even have told me. But now that the bruiser had walked back into her house, she’d just clammed up. It would give him just one more reason to beat the snot out of her.

  I called Sandy from my mobile.

  “Hey,” he said. ‘Any word?”

  “I think he’s been to see his ex,” I said. “But she’s not saying anything.”

  “Still sweet on him?”

  “I just don’t think she wants her new man to find out,” I said. Sandy was silent on the other end of the phone. I could sense his body tense, his fists close together. I knew the look he’d have in his eyes. His weakness, the one thing he couldn’t handle in a calm and rational manner, was wife beaters, child-batterers. To Sandy they were the worst possible kind of criminal. It was personal. His own father had killed Sandy’s mother. Sandy may even have killed his own father; it was a part of his life I’d never fully understood, a place he’d never let me into. All I knew was that it was an aspect of his police work he took seriously enough to bend more than a few rules to bring a conviction against anyone guilty of domestic abuse. The current advertising campaigns by the Scottish Exec advocate a zero tolerance of domestic violence: Despite his deceptively skinny frame and thinning haìr Sandy could be the embodiment of true zero tolerance.

&nbs
p; “Okay,” he said, eventually. “Try the mother, see if you can get anything from some of the bars. The Crow and Claw perhaps. Maybe Big Ian’ll know something.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “I might pop in and see if J can get Miss Fischer to be more cooperative”

  “What about her man?”

  “He’s just going to have to lump it,” said Sandy. “Official police business and all.”

  After Ï hung up I looked back at the house. The curtains had closed. The house had swallowed Miss Fischer and what had been a promising initial inquiry.

  ***

  There was no answer at Dudman’S mother’s house. She lived in a purpose-built council semiin a small cul-de-sac of Identikit houses, separated only by the colour of the front doors. I persistedfor a few minutes.

  The door of the house next door opened. An old man in a dressing gown stepped onto the front step and looked at me. “What do you want there?”

  “1 need to speak to Mrs. Dudman.”

  The old man laughed and scratched at his neck like he had fleas.

  “You won’t get her,” he said.

  “Why not?”

  “Been gone. Three days.

  “Gone?”

  “Dead, son,” said the old man. He stopped laughing and his face hardened with the doomed wisdom of age. “Dead.”

  “Did you know her well?”

  “Why do you want to know?”

  I shrugged. “I knew her son.

  “Get the hell out of here,” the old man hissed. “Just leave her alone!” He went back inside and slammed the door. That told me all I needed to know about Dudman’s relationship with hismother. I’d reached another dead end.

  ***

  Big Ian Machie was behind the bar in the Crow and Claw when I walked in. He wore a horizontally striped polo shirt and black trousers. The “middle-age” spread seemed to have grown since the last time we talked. I didn’t want to bring it up, however. It’d only piss him off. Nevertheless, despite the advance of the years, he still looked more than capable of holding his own against any of the rough crowd who composed his regular clientele.

  “Sammy,” he said. “No seen you round here in a while.”

  I smiled, grabbed a seat at the bar. Big Ian pulled me a pint without asking. I figured one couldn’t hurt too much. I was driving, but sometimes you have to make these sacrifices.

  “I’ve not been in the area,” I said.

  “No one’s around these days,” he said with a sigh. He looked at the bar. People congregated round the tables, leaning into their small groups like they were afraid someone was listening. “No one worth bothering about, anyway. All the old crowd have gone. They either got respectable or they got into trouble.”

  “What about Ally Dudman?”

  “Whit am I now, yer wee snitch?”

  I smiled. “Ally’s the snitch, or hadn’t you heard.”

  “He was in trouble with the Kennedys right enough,” said Ian. “Mind you, Ally’s the type of bawbag who’d get in trouble with just about anyone.”

  “I need to find him, Ian,” I said.

  He put the pint on the bar. Some of the head broke off drifting down the smooth edges of the glass.

  “How would I know where he is?” asked Ian.

  ‘Ally was still a regular” I said. “You’re known for your loyalty.”

  “Even to wee bawbags who went and joined the coppers,” he said, pointedly.

  “I’m not a copper these days.”

  “Just as bad. You work for them.”

  “I do favours for friends sometimes,” I said. “Some of those friends are in the law enforcement business.”

  He chuckled at that.

  ‘Ally’s life is in danger,” I said. “I’m looking to help him.”

  “Aye, and what about your friend?”

  “He’s looking to help too,” I said. “All we want is to help Ally.”

  “He was in here about half an hour ago,” said Ian. “He asked me for help.”

  “What did you say?”

  “I said I couldn’t help someone so messed up as him.”

  “You couldn’t help a wee bawbag like that, you mean?”

  “Aye, that’s it,” he said. “Look Sammy-boy, I don’t know what all this is about, ken, but Ally looked in a bad way.”

  “Where would he go if you couldn’t help him?”

  “There’s a few places,” Ian said.

  I nodded. I took a deep drink of the pint.

  “He couldn’t go home,” Ian said. “No if he was in trouble with the Kennedys. So he’d need money and clothes and all that if he wanted to get out. I’d say he’d go to see Omar.”

  “Omar? I can’t see the two of them exactly getting along.”

  “Omar doesn’t care about that kind of crap, Sammy. All he cares about is making sure his family are taken care of. All he cares about is where the next bushel of money comes from.”

  I nodded. I didn’t want to go and see Omar, but Ian was right.

  If Ally wanted money, clothes, and a quick, quiet escape from the city, he’d go and talk to Omar.

  ***

  It was ten to eleven by the time I reached Omar’s pad. Omar operated out of a high-rise in one of the poorer areas of the city.

  He was one of those men who had a finger in almost every pie, but was careful enough not to get any filling stuck under his nails.

  When I knocked at his door, his brother answered. Yafit took one look at me and shook his head. I knew what he meant: Omar didn’t like me. We’d only met a few times, but those few times had been enough for Omar to know we’d never be friends.

  When Omar finally came to the door he was dressed in a sharp grey suit. Last time we’d talked he was clean shaven, but now he’d grown a beard. It was flecked with grey. I guess he must have been approaching fifty.

  He looked at me like I was some kind of insect. Finally he said,

  “I know why you’re here.”

  “You do?”

  “Raise your arms.”

  I did so. He gestured for his brother to come out into the hallway. Yafit patted me down. He took my cell phone out of my pocket and turned it off.

  “You’ll get that back when you leave,” said Omar.

  I nodded.

  Yafit stood up straight and nodded to his brother. Everything was okay; I was clean.

  “I suppose you can come in,” said Omar

  We walked through to the living room. A wide-screen TV hooked up to a DVD player was showing Pulp Fiction. The picture had paused on Uma Thurman and John Travolta dancing to Chuck Berry.

  “Nice setup,” I said, nodding to the TV

  Omar grinned. “I know a guy,” he said. Then his face became stony once more. He gestured to the sofa. I took a seat. Omar remained standing.

  “You know why I’m here,” I said.

  “Yes,” he said. “Ally Dudman.”

  I waited.

  “You do favours for the police. Ally was doing a favour for the police.”

  “Don’t waste my time,” I said.

  “I’ll waste as much of it as I want,” Omar said. “Mr Bryson, you do realize that you and I are not exactly on friendly terms.”

  I smiled. “Sure,” I said. “But these days there’s not a lot of people with whom I am on friendly terms.

  “After all, on a few occasions you have inconvenienced me.”

  I shook my head. “You mean those illegal immigrants? The guys you faked passports for? The criminals you sneaked into this country?”

  “They had regrettable pasts, Mr. Bryson. But none of us are angels.”

  “In any case, that was just an unhappy coincidence, considering I was following up on a young girl who’d disappeared with one of your associates.”

  “Not only do you disrupt the business of people like myself but you insist on homing into a burgeoning love affair.”

  “She was thirteen.”

  “And burdened by archaic la
ws that forbade her to express the love she felt for my friend.”