by Geoff Small
Digital edition first published in 2013
Published by The Electronic Book Company
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This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this ebook with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this ebook and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author. This ebook contains detailed research material, combined with the author's own subjective opinions, which are open to debate. Any offence caused to persons either living or dead is purely unintentional. Factual references may include or present the author's own interpretation, based on research and study.
Please note: The Dirty Rouge was written, produced and self-edited in the UK where some of the spellings and word usage vary slightly from U.S. English.
Copyright 2013 by Geoff Small - All Rights Reserved
CONTENTS:
Introduction
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Also by the Author
Introduction
D.C.I Patrick Curzon is the ‘Dirty Rouge’.
A thief, a blackmailer, a ruthless politician, this tough, misanthropic Scotsman is one of the vilest cops to have ever graced the page. That said, he’s also one of the most dedicated.
While investigating the death of a young ‘schemie’, Curzon paces the streets of his beloved Glasgow, conversing with junkies, small time coke dealers, a millionairess and even a premier league footballer. The case also brings him back into conflict with his sworn enemy, Fergus Baxter, a highly vaunted though particularly sleazy defence lawyer who acts on behalf of the city’s most lucrative violent psychopaths and any celebrities who happen to fall through the cracks into criminality.
As the truth unravels, Curzon finds himself caught between the interests of justice and those of the local establishment, leaving him with a major dilemma.
Book One of The Dirty Rouge Series.
Please note: The Dirty Rouge was written, produced and self-edited in the UK where some of the spellings and word usage vary slightly from U.S. English.
Chapter 1
DCI Patrick Curzon stumbled down the steps from Nancy’s townhouse. He staggered across the street to a park, where he slumped on a bench and smoked a cigarette while enjoying the June dawn chorus. At just five-foot-nine, this forty-year-old Scotsman had short black curly hair, a pug nose and deep brown eyes which wouldn’t have looked out of place on a ventriloquist’s doll. Shoulders hunched, a sullen, spiteful sneer, his whole body exuded the malice that bred within, warding off all but the most foolhardy. Having no friends to speak of, he lived in a one bed-roomed apartment on Gardner Street, cluttered with all the bric-a-brac he’d stolen over the years, not only from the homes of criminals, but from the houses of witnesses and even the families of murder victims. This included a half-knitted jumper with the needles still attached, a prosthetic leg and would you believe, a stuffed racing pigeon. This may not sound too outrageous, until, that is, you factor in forty-three suitcases, twelve holdalls and three backpacks full of luggage, all snatched from the various transport terminuses around Glasgow while in the course of his duties – not to mention a draw load of phones, which he always took as a matter of principle if left unattended. It wasn’t that he was a kleptomaniac, he just enjoyed inconveniencing people. That said, he always waited for folk to commit some slight before resorting to robbery, thus absolving himself on the basis he was discharging justice. However, he actively provoked people into treating him badly by behaving in a fashion that he knew would elicit their worst side, for which he then made them pay – forever. Without doubt, this spitefulness emanated from his childhood, when he’d been taunted by the whole school as ‘The Dirty Rouge’ because of his alcoholic father’s impoverishing taste for red Buckfast wine, an affliction which had left Curzon a neglected boy wandering the streets in unwashed rags. Then, he’d dreamed of becoming a policeman so that he could arrest each and every one of his persecutors and lock them away for the rest of their lives.
Abandoned by a clinically depressed mother and ostracised by his peers, Curzon had spent his free time as a child hanging around libraries, reading the works of Raymond Chandler and Mickey Spillane, before wandering the city centre’s hilly grid plan at night, peeking his little head in at bar-room doors and fantasising that he was Phillip Marlow or Mike Hammer. To this day their noir aesthetic had stayed with him and was exemplified during the winter months by a beige Burberry trench coat and, on special occasions, a trilby hat which he donned with undisguised pride. Even the location of his apartment – in a tenement on one of Glasgow’s steepest streets – had been chosen simply because of its resemblance to San Francisco, where some of his favourite fictional detectives had lived and worked.
You’d have thought with such chivalrous characters as role models, Curzon would have ended up of a more philanthropic disposition, but his non-fiction reading saw that their influence was heavily diluted, incorporating as it did anything on Niccolò Machiavelli, Joseph Stalin or, his personal favourite, J. Edgar Hoover: the FBI’s director who had dirt on the whole population of America. The end result of such a dubious education was a streetwise politician with the drop on everyone, including his superiors. Everybody, from his chief superintendent down to the local junkie, lived in terror of the evidence he had horded away at lawyers offices up and down the land, ready to be disseminated the moment anything untoward befell him. As a consequence he was loathed by criminals and colleagues alike, but the truth was he was an incredible detective who lived and breathed the streets of Glasgow each second of the day.
Sat at his bench in his dark grey Armani suit and black polo T-shirt, Curzon had just finished a cigarette when his phone rang. It was Detective Constable George McKay requesting his presence down at Largs, thirty miles away along the Firth of Clyde, where the body of a young man had washed up on the beach. Curzon, who hadn’t slept in nearly twenty-four hours, was still way too drunk to drive, so he asked McKay to send him someone from uniform in a squad car, which arrived five minutes later, blue light flashing. What with the empty roads at that time of morning and the ability to speed at one hundred and thirty miles an hour with impunity, it took just fifteen minutes to reach the seafront, from where Curzon could see a huddle of people down near the shoreline, silhouetted against a white sky that made the whole world feel like the inside of a Tupperware box. Leaving his driver in the car, he crunched across the pebbles in his brown suede shoes towards the group, which stood about ten feet from a corpse and an eight-foot pine log, both having become enmeshed somehow in an orange fishing net.
“I assume that floated down from Glasgow with the rest of the shit,” he shouted as he approached, causing Detective Sergeant Denise Deegan to flash him a disapproving stare, while a woman police officer escorted the horrified looking old lady who’d found the body away, a sorry looking poodle in her arms.
Curzon continued past the group and crouched down beside the fish-netted cadaver. Tasselled with seaweed, the body was clad in denim jeans, a navy blue T-shirt and a backpack containing house bri
cks, its crew cut hair black, its alabaster face, though now swollen and covered in goose bumps after having been immersed in saltwater for so long, probably good looking once. The most distinguishing feature, though, on the young man’s right forearm, a St. Clyde F.C Tattoo with ‘BOBBY’ underneath.
“Forensics will be here shortly sir. But as you can already see by what’s in the backpack , someone definitely didn’t want us to find him,” proffered Denise, who was now standing directly behind Curzon, looking pretty alluring in a dove grey pinstriped trouser suit, which accentuated her tall, svelte, twenty-seven year old body and set off her shoulder-length blonde bobbed hair and piercing blue eyes.
Curzon stood up from his haunches and turned to Denise scratching his head, his puffy eyes squinting in the morning light, the salty, sea air penetrating his stale skin and making his booze soaked bones feel brittle.
“So how the hell did we find him anyway, after someone went to so much trouble?”
“We spoke to an old beach comber before you arrived, a guy in his seventies who just happens to have once been Professor of Oceanography at Aberdeen University. He says that forty per-cent of the stuff that washes up on this shore is from North America, and that the log in the fishing net has come all the way from Canada. He even offered to bet me a hundred pound that somebody’s most probably dumped the corpse off a boat in the dead of night, unaware that it’s gone straight into the path of this log, where it’s got caught up in the attached net and then been brought straight back to shore…Basically, if they’d chucked it ten seconds earlier, or ten seconds later even, it’d be at the bottom of the sea now.”
Denise and her boss suddenly started laughing at the darkly comedic, bizarre absurdity of the whole thing.
“Wait till whoever’s done this see’s the news tonight,” Curzon gloated, “they’ll choke on their Special Brew, so they will,”
“It’s pure chaos theory when you think about it sir. Some moustachioed lumberjack in Newfoundland ties his load a little too loosely, then, a month later, at precisely the wrong moment, one of his logs bobs up two thousand miles away and ruins a perfect murder in Scotland. It’ll probably be the cause of a war too, coz this is definitely Glasgow gangland…professional stuff sir. But for that piece of timber ‘Bobby with a St. Clyde tattoo’ would have been just another missing person.”
“I hope to Christ you’re right Denise, coz I don’t want to spend a minute longer than I have to in this godforsaken place.”
Hands buried deep in his suit jacket pockets, shoulders hunched even more than usual against the sea breeze, he turned, wincing, to face the wet looking green hills which loomed behind the short promenade of red sandstone and whitewashed buildings, framed by a gothic church spire at either end. To a city boy like Curzon, this was hell.
Forensics had turned up by now, so the three detectives left them to it and repaired to a cafe on the front, which had kindly opened two hours early to cater for the ever increasing entourage of policemen. Deegan and McKay had coffee and toast, while Curzon, who sat opposite, ate a full cooked breakfast, slurping his tea and masticating his food with such slow deliberation it were as if he were interrogating each morsel. Not only that, but he smacked his lips together the whole time, causing Deegan teeth-grinding irritation, which, she suspected, was the whole purpose of his exaggeratedly bad table manners.
Having cleaned up the plate with his last morsel of fried bread, Curzon licked the grease from his fingers then sucked on his teeth.
“Right, I’ve to be in court this morning for a verdict. No doubt by the time I’ve come out we’ll know who exactly ‘Bobby’ is.” Deegan and McKay nodded. “Then we’ll start with his mammy and daddy and work our way out from there, picking up as much shit as we can on everyone, innocent or guilty. And if it looks like it’s going to be too easy to solve, then we’ll deliberately begin somewhere right off the mark…Remember, murders are our opportunity to legitimately stir nests we couldn’t otherwise disturb and to gather knowledge about as many citizens as possible.”
At this point Curzon had to answer his phone.
“D.C.I Curzon.” He listened for about three seconds and then jumped up from his chair. “Come on you two!”
Deegan and McKay sprang up and hurried out of the cafe behind their boss, who jogged down the promenade until he’d reached his chauffeur driven squad car.
“What is it sir?!” Deegan asked, gasping for breath.
“Avoiding paying for that breakfast, hen, that’s what it is! Now, I’m away back to mine for a shower. I’ll catch you later on.”
And with that he climbed back into the squad car, which tore off at high speed again, blue light flashing.
Chapter 2
Curzon had enjoyed a good weekend. On Sunday, he’d finally succeeded in pinning an attempted murder charge on a villain he’d been pursuing for over ten years – hence the party round at Nancy’s that night – and on the Friday morning before, he’d managed to derail an exquisite defence case at the High Court, turning the prosecution’s lot from lost cause to hanging in the balance. However, this had required some serious skulduggery. Just as the defence team’s unscheduled, last minute alibi had arrived in the building, Curzon had intercepted the woman and deliberately shepherded her to the wrong waiting room. While doing so, he’d sent a sneaky text message from one of his many stolen phones. This served as a signal for the recipient to make a hoax emergency call to the defence advocate’s clerk, who, in turn, had handed the court usher an urgent note, which was passed to her boss just as he was about to request the judge’s permission for a final, wild card witness. On reading the letter, the advocate had literally run from the courtroom, without explanation, causing an adjournment. How was he to know that his six-year-old daughter hadn’t really been run over at all, or that the phone call hadn’t come from a hospital social worker, but that it was in fact made by a junkie from Calton? Of course, by the time he’d found out, it was too late. With every designated piece of testimony having been heard, the judge had already told the prosecution to prepare their closing statement. As a consequence, nobody got to hear that the defendant wasn’t even in Glasgow on the date of the alleged baseball bat attack, or that he’d actually been in Dundee all day, making love to his sister-in-law. Yes, the accused was a notorious thug who’d been terrorizing folk for years, but on this particular count he was completely and utterly innocent. Tiny details such as these made no odds to Curzon though. According to him, it was far sweeter to convict a professional criminal for something he hadn’t done, rather than for everything he had. Not only that, but it was also a damn sight easier.
It sounds incredible that every unpredictable aspect of Curzon’s plan should just fall into place like this. Truth is the hoax call had been a total gamble. No one could have known how the advocate, a highly professional man, would have reacted to the emotional bait. As for the judge, well, Curzon had already been told by Nancy that he would be retiring after this case, and that he was impatient to get it over before the weekend. Why? Because Judge Lord Douglas Roper was due to start a new career on the lucrative after-dinner speaking circuit the following week, adding two-thousand pound per appearance to his sixty-five-thousand pound pension. Least to say, he’d been pretty angry when the jury had failed to reach a verdict, necessitating their stay at the Crown Plaza hotel until the Monday morning, when everyone would have to return and try again, while his plane left for Toronto without him.
It wasn’t necessarily the defendant that Curzon was willing to risk his career on seeing defeated, so much as the person representing him, and in this case it wasn’t the advocate himself but the lawyer he worked for. His name was Fergus Baxter, a highly vaunted though particularly sleazy defence lawyer who acted on behalf of the city’s most lucrative violent psychopaths and any celebrities who happened to fall through the cracks into criminality. This smirking, gnome-like, ginger haired, goatee bearded, brown and green tartan-suited mobster’s mouthpiece had excited Curzon’s ire after
having successfully defended a drunken banker by the name of Maker, who’d mown down two schoolboys in his Porsche, which was later found torched on a council housing scheme. If he’d been beaten fair and square, Curzon would have accepted that. But the verdict had been highly dubious. In the face of endless circumstantial evidence, four eyewitnesses and three items of material proof – which included a cigarette butt with Maker’s DNA on it, thrown from the car window, twenty yards from the crime – the judge had still directed the jury to pass a verdict of Not Proven. To add insult to injury, two teenage delinquents whose fingerprints were found on a fuel canister, near to where the burnt-out sports car had been found, were tried and found guilty of manslaughter. Curzon couldn’t help but suspect a closing of ranks among high society and his feud with Baxter had become an obsession. That’s why he was now willing to delegate urgent preliminary work on the Largs murder inquiry, because he just had to be in court to see the look on his adversary’s face if he lost. And lose he did, though this was small fry compared to the Maker case, just a gangster’s muscle being found guilty of a serious assault. But Curzon had put his marker down, shown the tartan serpent that he was willing to fight dirty as well, ensuring that both of them now had the bit between their teeth, guaranteeing their next encounter as gargantuan.
Meanwhile, it hadn’t been too difficult for DS Deegan and DC McKay to ascertain the identity of a Bobby with a St. Clyde tattoo, what with him being on probation for shoplifting.
Bobby McQueen had lived with his parents in the south-east of the city on Castlemilk, one of four infamous post-war, peripheral housing schemes which occupied each corner of Glasgow. Here, at a first floor apartment in a grey, pebble dashed tenement, the two detectives endured the ordeal of informing a mother that she’d lost her only son.
