The Job (Novella #10)

by William Meikle

  I spent my days protecting my new master, my nights sleeping the sleep of the just, and after a couple of weeks of this routine, I even started to call the old house home.

  That all changed on the morning Mr. Campbell told me he had a wee job for me.

  * * *

  “Someone succeeded where you did not,” he said without preamble. “We appear to have been burglarized. The safe is secure. But I am missing a book from the shelves. It is not the Concordances, thankfully, but it is one that I cannot be parted from. You will fetch it back for me.”

  That wasn’t a request, and I was smart enough not to treat it like one as he continued.

  “It’s Fifteenth Century, leather bound, and about so big,” he said, outlining a ten inch square with his hands. “It can hardly be taken for anything other than what it is. You’ll find it went to Edinburgh, then onto somewhere else, but a smart lad like you should have no trouble tracking it down.”

  I wondered if this was maybe another of his tests, but as I said, I’d grown some smarts from somewhere in the past few weeks. I gave him a nod, and headed out to find somebody to drive me to the railway station.

  * * *

  Like many people from Glasgow I have an ambivalent relationship with the capital city. I can admire the architecture, the castle and the classical beauty of the New Town. But it’s hard to ignore the shrill yet expert fleecing of the hordes of tourists, or the too-loud claims of artistic excellence that emanate like noxious farts from the mouths of punters in the faux posh bars. And don’t get me started on estate agents.

  All fur coat and no knickers.

  That sums Edinburgh up for me. It looks lovely on the surface, but there’s something sleazy that always makes me yearn for the rough and ready streets of Glasgow, and I’m always glad to leave. The fact that I was having these thoughts as my train pulled in to Waverley Station did not bode well for the rest of the day.

  My reception was as I’d have expected given my mood. I stepped off the train, onto the platform, took out a cigarette, and had my first encounter with the accent.

  “You will not be lighting that up, young man.”

  I knew even before I turned around that it was going to be a well groomed, elderly lady with too strong a sense of her own importance, and I was not disappointed.

  I got out my lighter, smiled at her, and applied it to the end of the smoke. The lady looked like she might have a fit.

  “Well, I never,” she said.

  I gave her a mock salute.

  “Surely that cannot be true, madam? I’m sure you were better looking when you were younger.”

  I left her in my wake before she could think of a rejoinder, and suddenly I was feeling a bit better about the trip. Seeing blue skies stretch over the castle lifted my spirits further, and I was almost jaunty as I walked along.

  Sadly that was as good as the morning was going to get.

  * * *

  I should have known it wasn’t going to be my day after the bookshops did their three wise monkeys act on me. It seemed that accusing a bookshop owner of fencing stolen materials was a hanging offense in these parts, and I was told, in no uncertain terms, never to darken their doors again.

  Back in Glasgow, I’d have known exactly which shops to visit and the people I had to speak to. But over in the East, I was lost without a compass. I yielded to the inevitable at lunchtime and went to the one place where I would feel most comfortable…the nearest bar. Even here the differences between Scotland’s two largest cities could be clearly felt. The bar I entered was one I hadn’t been in before. It was neat, clean and polite; three things rarely found in such close proximity back in the West. And the beer tasted different somehow; with less malt, and a burnt taste that wasn’t exactly pleasant to my palate.

  One thing remains constant, no matter which city you are in; barmen are always willing to talk, if the price is right. I used George’s name and that opened some other doors for me.

  “Give me half an hour,” the barman said, and made my twenty vanish into his pocket as he turned away. I took my beer outside to a walled back yard that had a bench, a parasol and two dead pot plants in what they had the cheek to call a garden, but was the only place I could light up without becoming a pariah. I sucked smoke and stared at the walls, switched off and idling in neutral for a while. Nobody bothered me, and that suited me just fine.

  I made the beer last the full half an hour, having to fight the urge to get another one in. When I went back in to the bar, the barmen had an address for me, written on a beer mat. He handed it to me.

  “Tony Jones. You’ll find him there. He’s just a lad really,” he said. “But word is he did a job for a gentleman from out in Linlithgow, a special request for what he called a wee scary book.”

  “And this is kosher?” I said, putting the mat away in an inside pocket.

  “It cost me ten of your twenty, so it had better be,” he replied.

  I thanked him, and headed back out into the city to look for a cab.

  * * *

  I found Tony Jones right where the barman said he’d be; playing pool in a dockside bar in Leith. He was indeed only a lad, only just into his twenties by the look of him, and full of that particular brand of brash, cocky swagger a lot of young Scotsman carry until life beats it out of them. He seemed wary of me at first, concerned I might be a copper, but a few free pints of lager, and the mention, again, of George’s name brought him around. I even let him beat me, twice, at pool before we settled in a table near the window where we wouldn’t be disturbed.

  “It was a piece of piss,” he said as he downed a liberal gulp of lager, as if afraid I might take it off him at any second. “In and out in two minutes, and two hundred quid in my pocket that same night.”

  “And who paid you?”

  “A guy fae Linlithgow,” he said. “The whole thing was set up over the phone at first. Then, when the job was done, I delivered the book to him.”

  “At his house?”

  “No. He’s old, not daft. He was waiting when I got off the train. I gave him the book, he gave me the cash, and I was on another train back here five minutes later. Sweet as a nut.”

  I’ll give him this, he was the proudest wee burglar I’d ever talked to. He wasn’t helping me much though.

  “Can you describe him?”

  “Soft,” the lad said. “Soft all over, like a lump of wet dough. And posh, you know? Fae one of those schools where they talk funny, I thought. About your height, but he’s fatter, and older. Gray hair and big lips.”

  Like I said, he was not helping much. I bought him another lager and left him to it.

  * * *

  Linlithgow is fifteen minutes out of Edinburgh by train, and about fifty years away, all old stone, cobbled streets and wheezing pensioners with arthritic dogs. It’s dominated, like Edinburgh, by an old building, a palace in this case, but the streets are mostly quiet, calm even, with far fewer tourists making it out this far. When I walked into The Three Marys I was the only customer in the place, and the barman was as pleased as a particularly excited puppy to see me. He liked the color of my money too, and made a twenty vanish as fast as the one had earlier.

  “I’m looking for a man,” I said, then sighed as he gave me a smile and a wink. “No, not like that. There’s a guy I need to speak to.”

  I gave him the description, and to my amazement he immediately gave me, not just a name, but an address.

  “You want Mr. Drake. He’s a regular; two pints of shandy and a packet of cheese and onion after a game of bowls in the afternoon. He lives just around the corner. Two Twenty One Manor Drive. You cannae miss it. He’s a neat old bugger.”

  I found out he was he was right on that score. Many of the gardens in the short street were overgrown and unkempt, but Drake’s house was a shining exception. The front garden was a perfectly square, perfectly mown piece of lawn with a diamond shaped box hedge in the center that had been trimmed to within an inch of its life.

&nb
sp; When he answered the door to my knock the man proved to be as neat as his horticultural habits. He wore a suit and tie; both items crisp and ironed to a crease-free perfection. His pencil-thin moustache had been trimmed so neatly it could almost have been drawn on with a marker pen, and his skin looked like he scrubbed it daily with fine sandpaper. I don’t believe I’d ever seen anyone so tidy or so clean. Young Tony Jones had been observant enough though. He had fat lips.

  He pre-empted anything I might say before I had a chance to speak.

  “You’ve come about the book.”

  It wasn’t a question, and only needed a nod in answer. He turned away, leaving me on the doorstep. I stayed where I was. From where I stood the hallway gave the impression of having been scrubbed daily with bleach, and the carpet was as fluffy and soft as the day it left the factory; which might have been this morning given how pristine it looked. I’d only have spoiled the place with my presence; I was surprised he ever dared to open the door, for fear of possible contamination.

  He came back seconds later, carrying a brown paper parcel in his hands. I didn’t have to look at it to know that it had been wrapped and sealed with military precision.

  “Take it,” he said, almost shouting at me. “Take the bloody thing. The biggest mistake I ever made was in asking for it to be stolen. And you can tell your master from me, he’s welcome to it. You can tell him it doesn’t work. The Just One can only be caged for a while. He cannot be controlled.”

  He handed me the parcel. I pretended to take it, but let it fall to the ground between us. As he looked down at it, he just had time for puzzlement before I rammed the bottom of my hand hard and upward into his nose. Bone mashed and blood spurted all over the white carpet and I had to step back to avoid getting any on me. He wouldn’t be worrying about the mess; I’d got the right spot first time, forcing the bone up into his brain, and he fell at my feet, a dead weight that I had to kick aside to retrieve the parcel. I stepped back, just the two steps needed to give me room to close the door on where the red was seeping into the white.

  Someone was singing loudly; I had Latin in my head as I went back to The Three Marys.

  * * *

  The barman was just as pleased to see me as he’d been twenty minutes earlier. I had him pour me a pint to keep him busy, and took the beer over to the phone. I took out the business card and dialed the number on it. Mr. Campbell answered on the first ring. There was no preamble; he seemed to know it was me who had rung.

  “You have it?” he said.

  I followed his lead and kept it terse.

  “Yep.”

  “Bring it right back.”

  What I really wanted to do was open the parcel and have a look at the book, but the wrapping was so precise, so surgical, that any attempt I could make to re-wrap it after opening would look crude and ham-fisted. I also wanted a cigarette, but it wasn’t allowed in this place; some bars actually followed the rules that George in The Twa Dugs was able to ignore so blithely.

  I drained my beer then headed for the railway station. It was while I was standing on the platform that I started to think I was being followed.

  5

  At first it was just a feeling, no more than that. But the longer I stood there, the stronger it grew. I looked up and down the platform, but at this time of the early afternoon there were only obvious shoppers heading into Glasgow, a couple of teenage students sucking each others’ mouths, and a young mother with three kids, only two of which she had control over at any one moment. I didn’t have any of them pegged as either cops or opponents.

  But even after the train arrived and I took a seat where I had a clear view of the corridor, I couldn’t shake the feeling. What with that and the ever-present urge to open the wrapped book to see what was so important, I was starting to twitch. For the first time in a while I thought about drinking; not beer, but the more serious stuff, and I considered making a detour to The Twa Dugs on the way back, just for old times’ sake.

  It felt like that thought wakened something, something that had been curled up, sleeping, but watching. I heard soft chanting; again it sounded like it was in the distance, but I knew I was the only one in the carriage hearing it. Just the sound of it did much to calm me, and all thought of The Twa Dugs, whisky, or of looking at the book in my lap, lifted and washed away as if they had never been.

  Something else happened too. I knew, don’t ask me how, that my feeling of being followed stemmed from someone who was in the rear carriage of the train, about halfway down. It was as if I was tuned in to his signal, a GPS working in my head telling me what to watch out for.

  If I hadn’t been feeling quite so relaxed about the whole situation I might have been worried; either that or starting a giggle that might never stop before it turned into manic laughter. But I just sat there, with the book in my lap and the soft Latin chant in my head and not a care in the world.

  When I got off the train in Falkirk, my new internal GPS told me my tracker was still behind me, and he was still following me as I caught a connection to Dunblane. I didn’t want to be followed all the way to the house, so I left the station and stepped into the Village Inn. I ordered a beer, and waited to see whether they’d make a move.

  When I was finally approached it wasn’t, as I might have expected, by anyone I’d felt on the train. Instead, it was one of my brother guards from the house. I looked up to see him in the doorway; he gave me a nod, and pointed out into the road, where I guessed there was a car waiting for us both. Again, I didn’t think to question how or why he’d come for me; I drained my beer and followed him out.

  I had just dropped the wrapped package containing the book onto the passenger seat of the waiting Range Rover when I heard an engine rev loudly, too close behind me. I didn’t have time to get inside. I slammed the door shut and shouted in through the open window.

  “Get out of here. Get the book to the boss. I’ll hold them off.”

  He didn’t hesitate. He drove off, leaving me in the street. I stood in the road, blocking the path of any vehicle that might attempt to follow the Range Rover. But it wasn’t the book, or even the vehicle they were after.

  Four men got out of a black van and quickly moved to surround me.

  I had been their quarry all along.

  * * *

  I put up a fight, and a pretty good one at that. I think I broke one guy’s arm, and I kicked another one in the nuts so hard that it would be a week or more before he walked properly again, but they were young, fast, and strong. I went down under their weight, and they smacked me around for a while to slow me down before bundling me into the back of the van. We were off and away into the night before anyone even came out of the bar to see what the rumpus was all about.

  I had a hood of sorts pulled over my head. It stank, of sweat and blood and fear, and I knew I was in a bad place. But strangely, I still felt calm, almost detached from the pain and hurt, and although I could not hear the Latin chant, I knew it was there, sustaining me. I’d get through this; whatever the fuck this was. In the meantime, I tried to keep track of all the twists and turnings the van made, hoping that I might be able to retrace my steps later.

  But the journey proved to be a longish one, an hour or so at least, and by the time we came to a halt I had little clue as to the location, although the traffic noise alone told me we were in the city rather than in the country. They roughly manhandled me out of the back of the van and, stumbling between the hold of two of them, I went along a short path, down a long flight of stone stairs, and into a damp, cold place that echoed hollowly. My sense of calm detachment faded at about the same moment I was roughly pushed down into a chair.

  The last thing I expected to see when they took off the hood was a priest.

  * * *

  He wore a black wool cassock, and a white dog collar, but it wasn’t a cross or crucifix that hung on a silver chain around his neck. It was a circular amulet of some kind, and my eyes were refusing to focus enough just yet for me to mak
e out any detail. In any case, I wasn’t given time to get a good look, for the man, a tall, thin, almost emaciated chap with jet black hair and a neatly trimmed goatee, was walking around the chair where I sat. He went in and out of view so that I couldn’t follow him without turning continually from side to side. I was too dizzy for that, so I fixed my gaze on a spot on the far, red brick wall, and tried to pay attention to what he was telling me.

  “You’re a murderer, Mr. Wilson,” he said softly. “Three men. There’s the man in the Twa Dugs, your wee thieving pal in the big house, and the old man today in Livingston. Yes, we know about them all. We even know about the dog. Vile crimes, all of them, and yet, you seem remarkably calm and composed. Is that the kind of man you are, Mr. Wilson? Would you say that cold-blooded murder bothers you no more than having a sandwich? More to the point, would you rather instead say that your outlook on life has changed rather suddenly since your first visit to the big house?”

  I was about to reply, but he stopped me by putting a hand on my shoulder.

  “No, just listen. You’ll have to listen, I’m afraid, but at least you won’t hear any of that damned chanting. Not down here. Down here, we are alone with ourselves, as free men should be.”

  All I heard was his voice, a soft, almost insistent drone that wormed its way in to places where the Latin had been. It banished that feeling of calm indifference, and allowed, for the first time since the night of the original job, my own memories and emotions to surface from where they’d been suppressed.

  A sudden wash of overwhelming guilt and dismay hit me. It felt as physical as a punch in the jaw. My guts roiled in spasms that threatened to have me throwing up over myself. I heard the sounds as if they were happening again, and again. Bones broke under the heel of my hand, blood gurgled wetly as I drove jagged glass into a face too torn to recognize, and a man I might have come to know as a friend stared at me, pleading, as I broke his neck. And, somehow not as bad, but at the same time worse, I felt the little dog squirm, trying to lick my hand even as I broke its neck and threw it, casually, away over the bridge parapet and into the river below.