THE SAM BRYSON COLLECTION

by McLean, Russel D; Chercover, Sean

  I waited. After a few seconds, he spoke again: “Sam, I’m getting on the Internet, getting the train times. I’d guess she would have got the next one down after we spoke.”

  “Aye,” I said. “Seems likely.” My hands began to sweat and slip‚ about the steering wheel. My body tensed, and I had to concentrate to keep driving straight.

  “got it’” he said a few seconds later. “Going tae arrive at Burnton Station in . . . five minutes ago!”

  “That’s the first one she could have got?

  “Aye.”

  “We’re going to have a talk when I get back,” I told him, and hung up. There was an off ramp up ahead. I took it and swung round the road to the other side of the motorway. Luckily for me it was late at night and traffic was quiet.

  I scooted back onto the motorway again and hit ninety. By the time I arrived back on the main road in Burnton, it was twenty to one. I slowed in the quiet village streets. Pulling up outside Sanderson’s house, I watched for signs of life. The living room light shone a dull yellow through the curtains.

  I got out and walked to the front of the house. I didn’t try the front door straight away, instead nipping round to the living room window, trying to peek through a gap in the curtains. Through a sliver of space in the centre I saw someone walking around in there and I heard Mrs Archer’s voice. I tried to make out what she was saying, but she was muffled and incomprehensible.

  I moved back to the front door and tried the handle. It turned smoothly and easily. I walked inside. As I did so, I heard a crash, something smashing, the dull thud of a table overturning on the floor.

  I burst into the living room. Mrs Archer was sprawled on the floor in the middle of the room. Sanderson was bent over her, his hands round her throat. He looked up as I entered the room, and I saw in his eyes not the anger I expected but rather a deep and painful sadness.

  I rushed forward and tackled the old man, knocking him off Mrs Archer. He went down easily, cracking the back of his head off the floor. I stood up, ready for him to move again, but he raised his hands in defeat. Tears rolled down the folds of his face.

  I turned to Mrs. Archer and offered her my hand. She lay there on the floor, looking up at me. Her bloodshot eyes flooded, and she blinked out the tears. “You bastard,” she said to me. “You bastard.”

  ***

  The pretty constable shook her head as she came out of the interview room. “It’s a mess, Mr. Bryson,” she said. “Both of them, cocked up beyond repair.”

  I nodded and pulled a packet of cigarettes out from my coat. She shook her head. I put them away again. “She wanted him to kill her,” I said.

  “Yes,” said the constable. She folded her arms across her chest and exhaled loudly. “I don’t know which of them’s worse off He’s shut down completely, keeps saying how pathetic he is. She won’t say anything. She just sits there, her eyes staring straight ahead. I don’t know that she’s even seeing anything. It’s all I can do to stop myself checking that she’s still breathing.”

  I shook my head. “She’s carried this with her for decades,” I said. “When she came to me, she said she had been in love with him. I believed her. Maybe I had my doubts, but that’s part of my job, you know. Never trust anything no matter what your gut says. But she was so convincing; you could see it in her eyes.”

  “Stockholm,” said the constable. She took the seat beside me. “Like with abductees who form relationships with their abductors. She decided at some point maybe she loved him because it became difficult to tell the difference between love and hate.” She shrugged. “I’m no psychologist.”

  “Neither am I.”

  We sat there for a moment in silence. Finally, she said, “You want a smoke, we could go outside. I’m dying for a cigarette myself”

  “Sure,” I said.

  “I should tell you, I’m in love with someone.”

  “So am I.”

  She laughed. “I’m no psychologist,” she said. “But sometimes a cigarette is just a cigarette.”

  ***

  I spent the night in a Travel Inn just off the motorway. I didn’t sleep well, just lay beneath the covers, staring at the ceiling and listening to the traffic pass outside the window.

  In the dark, I thought about Mrs Archer and about the damage that had been done to her. It was more than, physical, and the psychological scars went deeper than anyone suspected. Even Mr Sanderson—Mr Darren—had been affected and changed by those events. He was right; he had become a pathetic specimen. He said he thought he’d been in love with her, but he’d been driven by something darker than love, something I guess we all fear might be lurking inside of us.

  As dawn came around and light spilled into my room, I rose, barely rested, and padded through to the bathroom. As I stood under the shower, letting the tiny fists of water pound my skin, I tried to remember what love was.

  I thought of Ros.

  LIKE A MATTER OF HONOUR

  (Thrilling Detective Magazine, Summer 2006)

  “Aw, c’moan, man,” said Jimmy. He pushed the package across the desk, back towards me. “Just for a wee while.”

  I looked at the package – a nondescript square box wrapped with brown paper – and then I looked at Jimmy. On anyone else, the moustache might have had the air of a twenties sophisticate. On Jimmy it looked as if he’d forgotten to wash his upper lip. His greasy black hair was combed forward in a horrendous parody of a Beatles mop-top. His skin was flared up. He was twenty-five years old. On the inside he was probably going on sixty.

  “I think you have to tell me what’s in the box,” I said.

  “C’moan! After all the shite I’ve done for you. Goin' places you can't go. Chattin' up people won't even look at you. I'm like Fozzie Bear.”

  “You mean Huggy Bear.” The same conversation we always had. Jimmy on repeat like a messed up Dictaphone.

  “What?”

  Except Jimmy's neither black nor cool, nor down with the ho’s. At least none as gorgeous as Huggy's.

  “Just tell me what’s in the package.” I could feel the sun coming through the window, toasting the bare skin just above my shirt collar. It was a heatwave outside, a Scottish heatwave at any rate.

  Jimmy leaned back in his chair. His eyes screwed up against the sunlight coming in behind me. “It’s personal. Just need someplace tae hold it fer a while.”

  “What’s wrong with your place?”

  He laughed. “You ever seen ma place?”

  I shook my head. I hadn’t thought about where Jimmy lived, whether he had friends or family. Hard for a man like him to have anything but associates. Like me.

  “Fine,” I said. I pulled the package over. It was light. But I could feel the shape. A lockable box, same kind as you could pick up in any stationery store. “Just tell me there’s nothing illegal in here.”

  He held up three fingers on his right hand. “Scout’s honour. Dib dib dib and aw that crap.” He smiled at me lopsidedly. He’d never been in the scouts. They’d have thrown him straight out on his arse.

  ***

  At lunch, my girlfriend Ros popped by the office with some sandwiches and a couple of cans of Coke.

  “I have an hour,” she said, “before my next class.”

  Ros moved from the U.S. to lecture in post-modern feminist philosophy at the University of Dundee. She still maintained an accent, although there was a hint of Scots creeping into her Southern twang.

  We chatted as we ate. She was excited about an upcoming conference: Transcendence and the Self. She talked about things I didn’t understand. They say that opposites attract.

  When she left I looked over at the iron safe I kept in one corner of the room. I could almost see the wrapped parcel in there, tempting me with its secret. You don’t fall into my line of work without an inquisitive mind. And where Jimmy was concerned, my instincts acted overtime. I could have opened the package. But I’d felt the lockbox in there, figured someone as paranoid as Jimmy would know if it had been t
ampered with. He talked like an eejit, but he was smarter than most folks gave him credit for.

  ***

  Close to ten at night, I was still in the office replying to email when my mobile phone began bleating. I answered in three rings.

  “Hey, man."

  “Jimmy,” I said, genuinely surprised to hear from him. “What’s up?”

  “Look, man.” He was having trouble starting sentences. He sounded high. At the very least pissed out of his ugly wee face. “There’s been a, y’know, like, a wee…” I thought I could hear a car pulling away in the background. “Complication,” he said finally.

  “Complication?”

  “Just get the bloody package, awright, and meet me.”

  “Aye, okay. Where?”

  After a moment, he said, “Balgay Park. Up near the cemetery. The wee theatre thing.”

  “The amphitheatre?”

  “Aye, whatever-the-hell.” He hung up.

  I dialled 1471 and the BT woman on the end chimed in with, “We’re sorry, but the last caller withheld their number.”

  I sighed. Jimmy’s like a stray dog who pisses all over the rug. When you take him in you feel a little sorry for him but every time he does his business you have an overwhelming urge to boot him out the door.

  I opened the safe and took out the package. Whatever was inside was important to Jimmy. I wanted to know why. Jimmy was going to tell me. He wouldn’t have a choice.

  I went out into reception and grabbed a plastic bag from where Babs kept a whole stack beneath her desk.

  I tucked the package into a Tesco’s carrier and headed out the office. Locking up as I left, I thought the night was blacker than usual. The close was more confined, and every time I stopped thinking about it the walls in my peripheral vision began closing in. I could have done with a drink, but Jimmy would probably be at the amphitheatre already. He sounded scared enough that he’d want to deal with whatever the situation was as soon as possible.

  My car was parked across the street. I slid into the driver’s seat and started up the engine. I placed the package in the passenger footwell. I was five or ten minutes drive from Balgay Park. I planned on going in the back way, past the Western Necropolis You twist and turn on this road until you get to a large amphitheatre just across from a grassy expanse that, in the summer months, is filled with families and couples and people walking their dogs. It can be beautiful in the day and darkly eerie at night.

  I left the BMW beside the gate at the rear entrance to the park. The gates were locked and bolted. I vaulted them and walked between the Balgay hills, underneath the Hird Bridge.

  When I arrived at the amphitheatre, Jimmy was sitting on a stone wall, smoking a cigarette. He trembled as he sat. At first I thought it was the cold night air. As I got closer, I saw the cuts and bruises on his face. His shirt was ripped. His knuckles and the backs of his hands were red raw. Between drags on the cigarette he whistled off-key snatches from an old Frank Sinatra number: My Way.

  “What’s going on, Jimmy?”

  He looked up and saw me. Grinned, his eyes watering as though just moving the muscles in his face hurt. “Heh, straight down tae business, likes?”

  “Tell me.”

  “Ye brought it, I see.”

  I sat down on the wall beside him. Laid the package on my far side out of his reach. Then, I reached inside my jacket pocket to bring out a pack of L&B. I sparked up and took a deep drag. I waited for him to say something.

  “Do you no want tae know who it was beat me up, then?”

  "Aye."

  I was nearly done with the cigarette when he said, “Ye might have guessed it’s got something with the wee package I left you.”

  “Aye."

  “Pretty obvious, likes.” He patted down his pockets. “Shite. Got another fag on you?”

  I took my cigarettes out again and passed him one. He used his own lighter. A cheap, disposable bic with a Saltire printed on the side.

  “The package belonged to this wee wanker I met in the Fiddler’s Drop.”

  I knew the place, up in Lochee. The kind of pub you could describe only as a dive. Dirty, smoke-filled and stinking of body odor. The landlord, William McVey – or Wee Willie Winkie as he’s better known – is a greasy little moron who survives not so much on the drink he sells but on the kickbacks he takes for allowing certain less than legal businesses to operate on his premises.

  “Cannae remember his name. But he was drinking pint after pint: getting more and more pissed, waiting for someone to arrive. He was gonnae sell them the package, and they were gonnae pay him good money for it. He didnae want tae tell me what was inside. Anyway, his buyer's late and he’s getting more and more bladdered, so I’m chatting away tae him and telling me all kinds of crap. Ken, stuff he shouldn’t be telling the likes of me. Fucking love loose-lipped alchies, eh?”

  He paused and blew a long plume of smoke into the night air. He wasn’t shaking so bad now. “Aye, so anyway he needs to go take a leak and he’s so pissed he asks me tae look after the package. Leaves it there, and the wee piece of paper with the name of his client on it. Pretty bloody stupid, aye?”

  I nodded.

  “So I figured I could dae the deal myself, make a quick bit of cash. Should have read the wee note first.”

  “Who was he waiting for?”

  Jimmy smiled, somewhat bashfully. “Omar,” he said.

  I took a deep breath.

  “Aye, well, we all make mistakes.”

  “One hell of a mistake crossing Omar,” I said.

  “Aye, well, I think I may have made matters a wee bit worse than that."

  I shook my head. “That who beat you up?”

  “Oh, no the man himself. Some big buggers he sent for the package.”

  “You were holding out for money, weren’t you?”

  “Aye.”

  “Just give him the bloody package.”

  “Can’t.” He took a deep drag on the cigarette. “Shite, it’s like a matter of honour, y’ken?" I didn’t comment about Jimmy using the word, “honour”. He believed himself and I couldn’t shake that kind of conviction.

  I passed him the package. “Just take it, Jimmy. Do what you have to do.”

  Jimmy took the package. “What I have tae do, Sam, is tae meet Omar in a little under two hours. He’s gonnae give me what I asked for. I’m gonnae give him the package.”

  “Great,” I said, standing up. “Good for you.” I made to walk away.

  Jimmy grabbed my arm. “Which is why I need ye to do me another wee favour," he said.

  “No way.”

  “Aw, c'moan, man. After aw the crap..."

  I turned around.

  “Just come along, man. Stand aroond a bit. Muscle and aw that.”

  “Muscle?”

  “Omar knows you, right?”

  “Aye. He wants to break my face.”

  "Is there anyone in Dundee who doesn’t? Look, man, he doesnae like you but I think he respects you. Like Sherlock Holmes and Blofeld… Doctor Evil… ahhh, whatever the bastard’s name was."

  I pinched the bridge of my nose. I wanted to go home and climb into bed beside Ros. But Jimmy wasn’t going to let this go easily. Besides, I owed him more than a few favours. It was one of the reasons I didn’t just break into that lockbox in the first place.

  “Okay," I said. "Let's go."

  My mobile began to shriek. I took it out and looked at the caller ID. Babs, my secretary, was calling from her mobile.

  “Sam, where are you?” Her voice trembled.

  “I’m working on something,” I said.

  “So you have time tae get back tae the office?”

  “What is it?”

  “Some bastards broke in. Wrecked the place!”

  It took me a second to digest the information. “How bad is it?”

  “It's gonnae take me days tae get the files back in order. Doesnae look like anything was actually taken. They broke into your safe. The wee one in the off
ice.”

  “You weren’t there?” Babs is in her mid sixties, and as tough as she is, I couldn’t help being worried about her.

  “No. I got the call fae the polis.”

  “Okay,” I said. I had a fair idea of what might have happened. “Who’s dealing with it?”

  “Sandy’s come in, said he wanted to oversee it personally when he heard it was your place.” Sandy’s a DI with the local CID and my best mate since school. He’s one of the few coppers in Tayside Constabulary who hasn’t branded me a professional pain in the arse.