Good News, Bad News

by WHS McIntyre

  I didn’t feel any pressing need to repeat myself. I preferred just to sit down again and say nothing.

  Once Jake and Deek had gone, Brendan finished polishing the beer tumbler, came from behind the bar with a brush and shovel and started to sweep up around me. ‘Bad news, Robbie?’

  I could sense the eyes of the other patrons on me. I’d represented many of them over the years, and hoped to again in the future. It wasn’t good publicity to show that I’d been at all fazed by the skirmish with Jake.

  ‘You could say that, Brendan,’ I said, tossing the remaining peanut into the air and catching it in my mouth. ‘But then again, if there was no bad news in the world, I’d be out of business.’

  31

  Friday night. Joanna was out with friends and my dad had gone down to the Red Corner Bar. Tina was bathed, in her pyjamas and on the sofa engaging me in a no-holds-barred game of dominoes. I was wondering when she’d notice that I hadn’t played the double-blank, but another domino turned upside down, when Malky walked through the front door carrying a small cardboard box and looking pleased about something.

  ‘Close your eyes,’ he said to Tina, setting the box down on the coffee table and knocking some of the domino pieces onto the floor. ‘Right, now you can open them.’

  ‘What is it?’ Tina asked, excitedly. The box started to move. She jumped back, and then, very slowly, bent closer.

  Malky lifted the lid off the box, put a hand in and brought out a furry, grey object. ‘It’s a rabbit for your new hutch!’

  Tina screamed with joy as my brother placed the animal in her lap. Surprisingly, the rodent seemed pretty okay with the swift transition from the relative safety of a cardboard box to the more uncertain care of a five-year-old, and sat there twitching its nose.

  ‘She can live in the new hutch you and Gramps made,’ Malky said, rather obviously. ‘I’ve got sawdust and wood shavings and a wee thing for it to drink from and everything.’

  Tina wanted to know if it was a boy or a girl rabbit because she wanted to call it Rosie, and Rosie wouldn’t really do if it was a boy rabbit.

  Malky turned to me for gender advice.

  To my knowledge, the only sure way to tell the sex of a rabbit involved the introduction of another rabbit, standing back and waiting to see what happened next.

  Malky took that opinion and applied his own logic. ‘And so, seeing how you’ve only got the one rabbit, no-one knows if it’s a boy or a girl so you can call it whatever you like.’

  I was about to suggest she call it Schrödinger, but Tina was already demanding more information on my two-rabbit gender test, so I didn’t think the introduction of theories on quantum physics would assist matters. When Malky changed the subject and suggested we go looking for dandelions, I slipped out of the back door, walked around the side of the cottage and climbed into my new car.

  The difficulty between Jake and Ellen, that I’d been ordered to sort out, was a tricky one raising all sorts of legal issues, and although there were people to whom I could turn for advice on tricky legal matters, there was really only one person I could rely on to advise on tricky illegal matters. This being Friday night, that particular person’s be-kilted behind would be resting on a seat in A&E.

  ‘What’s the news?’ I asked, strolling into a large, harshly lit room where the casualties of a West Lothian Friday night were scattered around on the orange plastic bucket seats awaiting triage.

  ‘Pretty good, as a matter of fact,’ Sammy said, slipping a paperback into his jacket pocket. ‘There was a nice wee smash on the B8046, down by Ecclesmachan. Some eejit took a bend too fast, went through a hedge and into a field. There were three passengers, all teenagers. I’ve already spoken to their parents about making a claim. There’s no-one to blame but the driver. I’ve got one of them signed up already, so I reckon the others will follow.’

  ‘And the bad news?’ I asked.

  ‘Bad news? No, Robbie, there’s no bad news. The whole lot of them are properly injured. One’s quite serious.’ He rubbed his hands together. ‘Anyway, what brings you here?’

  I glanced around and lowered my voice. ‘You remember what we were talking about the other night? I’ve been giving it some more thought.’

  Sammy’s turn to check around. He stood up. ‘Not here.’ He pinched the sleeve of my jumper between thumb and forefinger and gently tugged me towards a snack-vending machine situated in a region of the waiting room populated only by a couple of jakeys, one pressing a piece of white gauze against a head wound, the other sprawled across two chairs singing Roy Orbison.

  ‘Can I take it there have been some developments?’ Sammy let go of me, reached into his sporran and began feeding coins into the machine.

  It had been obvious to me since being tasked by Jake to ‘get things sorted’, that the only way Ellen and Freddy could pay back the money they were due was to adopt the original life insurance plan, but it would need to be tweaked.

  ‘Things have become slightly more complicated,’ I said. ‘There’s another party involved.’

  Sammy pressed a few numbers on the keypad. A bag of crisps took a nose-dive from the top rack and landed in the tray at the bottom. He stooped to collect it.

  ‘And I take it this third party would like a share?’ he asked, after he’d straightened again, pulling the bag open.

  ‘Bang on.’

  ‘What do you want?’

  ‘To have nothing to do with it.’

  ‘That can be arranged, but I was meaning do you want crisps or a Mars bar or something?’

  I didn’t. All I wanted was to leave the problem with him and hope that he could come up with an arrangement to keep everyone happy and me out of it.

  ‘And this third party. Anyone I know?’ he asked, delving into the packet, pulling out a large crisp and stuffing it into his mouth.

  I could see no obvious path around it. I’d have to tell him. ‘It’s Jake Turpie.’

  Sammy stopped chewing, looked at the floor for a moment and then up at me, swallowing hard. ‘You don’t half know how to make life difficult, Robbie. Why on earth would Ellen Fletcher want to do business with Jake Turpie?’

  Why would anyone? I was going to ask, until I recalled that I’d just bought a car from him, even though I was yet to part with the money.

  ‘I wouldn’t have thought that pair would be on speaking terms, considering,’ Sammy said.

  ‘Considering the difficulty with Freddy, you mean?’

  ‘Definitely that, and there was also that difficulty with Ellen’s brother, way back.’

  I knew nothing about any such difficulty, mainly because I didn’t know Ellen had a brother. When preparing her will, I’d been told she had no next of kin.

  ‘He’s dead,’ Sammy said.

  ‘So, what’s difficult about that?’

  From the waiting room entrance door someone called, ‘Mr Veitch? Could we have a word with you, please?’ A nurse in a pale blue uniform was standing next to an older man and woman, who themselves were standing either side of a teenager wearing a big black rubber boot and propped up on crutches. There was a little white ladder of paper stitches across one of the youth’s eyebrows and a plaster over the bridge of his nose.

  ‘Sorry, Robbie,’ Sammy said, ‘duty calls.’

  He made to go, but I pulled him back by the arm. ‘What’s the difficulty with Ellen’s dead brother?’

  ‘Not now, Robbie.’

  ‘Yes, now.’

  Sammy shook his head and sighed. ‘It happened a long, long time ago. Jake and Ellen were going out with each other back then, they were just kids. Someone noised-up Ellen’s brother, Eric, at the dancing. He was a nice enough lad, not a fighter, but he’d gone through to Glasgow and chatted up someone else’s burd.’ Sammy smiled and waved to the group at the entrance door. ‘He was a good-looking boy, Eric. The girls loved him. Knocked one of them up and came to see me about having to pay child maintenance. I think it was a wee girl he had. Could have been a boy. It
was one or the other, I can’t remember all the details. All I know is that Jake, being Jake, and no doubt wanting to show off to Ellen, went through to see this other guy, taking Eric with him. Things didn’t go too well.’ Which was Sammy’s way of saying that Jake had kicked off a fight with a group of neds, during which young Eric had been stabbed through the heart with a carving knife and died.

  ‘Ellen always blamed Jake for Eric’s death. If she’s prepared to do business with him now, it must be because she’s got no other option.’

  More calls from the entrance as the group grew impatient.

  ‘Listen, Robbie, it’s no problem for me to set up a term insurance policy to cover the three lives. The problem is that the three lives belong to three of the dodgiest individuals in West Lothian. If we’re going to—’

  ‘If you’re going to.’

  The voices from the entrance door were growing more irritated and irritating by the second.

  ‘Okay, if I’m going to,’ Sammy said. ‘And if I’m going to do it right, so that there is no chance of a comeback, I’ll have to put in place some kind of business transaction involving all three, so it looks like there’s actually a reason for them to be insuring each other.’

  ‘Finding a good reason won’t be easy,’ I said.

  ‘Don’t worry.’ Sammy shoved the packet of salt & vinegar crisps at me. ‘I’ve got to do something to earn my money, and, anyway, I don’t need a good reason. A bad reason will do just as well.’

  32

  Inspiration often springs from the most unexpected of sources. I’d never thought it would issue forth from Stan Blandy, a long-time client of mine who dabbled in drugs in much the same way as Adolf Hitler used to dabble in European politics.

  Stan Blandy was a man low on educational qualifications, high on street smarts. He’d left school at fifteen when his father died in a prison fight, and found himself head of the family. By the time he was seventeen he was a forklift driver working chiefly at Grangemouth docks and other ports along the Firth of Forth. For the next ten years young Stan lifted heavy pallets and lightweight pay-packets, watching as others with exam passes and University degrees climbed over him up the career ladder and into cushy well-paid managerial positions.

  That was why Stan eventually came to the conclusion that if he was ever going to make it he’d have to do it himself and set up his own business. How hard could it be? The secret to a successful retail enterprise boiled down to an efficient workforce selling quality merchandise to a loyal customer base. So Stan set up his own import company. His years on the docks hadn’t been wasted. He’d formed friendships, made contacts, and knew the best methods of importing goods - including those goods that should never have been exported in the first place. All he needed was a commodity to specialise in, and it didn’t escape his attention that the market for illegal drugs was an especially buoyant one. But what kind of drug should he deal in? As a product, marijuana was bulky to import and growing your own involved too much outlay on people and equipment.

  Heroin was out of the question too. It wasn’t the product, it was the customers. You could trust a junkie about as far as you could stick a used syringe into a collapsed vein. Careless to an alarming degree, easy for the cops to spot, everyone knew that when the average smack-head was arrested he sang like a canary on a TV talent show, prepared to grass on anyone if it meant getting back on the street in search of the next needle.

  Cocaine and ecstasy were the preferred options. Both readily available to those who knew how to import goods from abroad, and a little went a long way. All Stan needed to do was ensure a good quality product that would keep a good quality clientele happy. A clientele that, unlike heroin addicts, didn’t hang around street corners looking like the living dead. Stan’s customers were responsible people in responsible jobs; people who seldom came into contact with the police; people careful with everything except their money, for whom spending a couple of hundred pounds on a few grams of coke or some quality disco-biscuits at the weekend was just so much loose change; people who didn’t need to run the risk of shoplifting jars of coffee or packs of bacon to score their next tenner bag.

  Product and clientele sorted, that left human resources. Just as a port’s chief operating officer never toted a bale on the waterfront, Stan had no wish to dirty his own hands, and, because his staff were the only link between him and his product, he realised he needed to instil loyalty in his workforce for those times when things didn’t go quite according to plan. That was why he made sure his personnel were hand-picked, well-paid and shit-scared of him.

  For Stan it was a business strategy that worked. Since starting off in business in the eighties, he had never been so much as questioned by the police, far less arrested or charged. The same couldn’t be said for certain members of his staff nearer the base of the company pyramid. Whenever one of the delivery team was arrested, I was given a call. Stan paid for my services generously and in cash. So far as I and the shoebox under my bed were concerned, his personnel didn’t get caught nearly enough.

  On the rare occasions I met with Stan, it was never at my office. This Saturday afternoon we were at the football. Stan wasn’t a football fan, but his workers were and so he had corporate hospitality at various stadiums. It was all part of his employee incentive scheme. Today we were at Hampden for the Scottish Cup Final.

  Stan had no family, didn’t use drugs, take a drink or chase women. He didn’t listen to music, never read books or watched TV. Once when asked to name his favourite film he’d answered, ‘cling.’ No, Stan’s only interest outside business was gambling. Perhaps he was keen on it as a leisure activity because he was otherwise so risk averse.

  Stan had a thousand on the favourites to win by two goals or more. He was getting even-money. Just to be sociable, I’d put ten pounds on their opponents to lift the trophy after penalties at odds of eight-to-one.

  Our padded seats were a lot wider than those available in the less salubrious parts of the ground, but Stan still had some difficulty cramming his bulk into the one next to me. We hadn’t discussed any business over pre-match food and drinks, Stan preferring to do his talking in the privacy of fifty thousand or so noisy football fans.

  ‘One of my boys was delivering a message for me yesterday,’ Stan said, as the match kicked off and the crowd roared in anticipation. ‘He was headed for St Andrews, and told to take the coast road to keep out of the way. I’ve not heard from him.’

  The favourites had launched an early attack and a speculative long shot was tipped over the bar for a corner kick. Stan emitted a small grunt of approval at his chosen team’s early signs of intent. The noise of the crowd around us lowered and it wasn’t until the set-piece was cleared, allowing play to break down the right wing, that the volume increased sufficiently for Stan to continue, his mouth close to my ear. ‘It can mean only one thing. He’s been lifted.’

  There was no more talk for a while as we watched the match. It was a good game. Most underdogs tended to park the bus, employing two ranks of four defenders, a number ten rattling around in middle-field and a lone striker hoping for a breakaway. Today’s minnows were clearly under instructions to go for it, and their have-a-go tactics paid off when they took the lead with a strike on the half hour mark. It was only a controversial penalty kick on the stroke of half-time that saw the teams go in at the interval with the score level at one apiece. With a grand riding on the favourites to bang in two more without reply, Stan seemed neither up nor down. Meanwhile my tenner bet was looking good.

  When the referee blew for the interval, Stan and I, along with the rest of the suits and ties, shuffled off to our lounges for sandwiches and another quick beer, leaving the masses to their Scotch pies and beef tea.

  ‘How big a message was it?’ I asked, eyeing up a cute little steak pie, one of a number reclining on a silver tray, all vying for my attention.

  ‘Just a couple of bricks.’

  Perhaps in Stan’s world, two kilos of cocaine wasn’t
much but, if it had been seized, the Crown’s PR department would value it as a £100,000 drugs haul.

  The mini steak pie never stood a chance. I washed it down with a swig of beer, and picked up a couple more. ‘What do you want me to do?’

  Stan devoured several prawn pastries and then led me back outside to the now deserted directors’ box. There was a half-time penalty shoot-out taking place between two youth teams, each successful strike eliciting a smattering of applause and half-hearted cheers from the pie and Bovril brigade.

  ‘I don’t want any unwanted attention,’ he said.

  ‘Of course not.’

  ‘I mean it, Robbie. He’ll know he’s looking at a decent stretch, so I don’t want him trying for a better deal by being all co-operative. If he’s done out the park, he’ll just have to plead and take what’s coming. Tell him you’ll go and see the Fiscal and fire in an early plea, get him a reduced sentence or something. I’ll see that he’s all right for money when he’s inside and I’ll square him up when he gets out.’ Stan stared at me unblinkingly, smiling as though to do so was hurting him. ‘Just so long as he keeps his trap shut.’

  Knowing Stan’s unforgiving employment disciplinary policy, I don’t know why I bothered to ask if it was his delivery boy’s first time in trouble, but I did and remarkably it wasn’t.

  ‘Do you not remember him, Robbie? Toffee McCowan. You acted for him the last time he was in bother. Wee wrinkly old guy. Face like a chewed-up—’

  ‘Toffee?’

  ‘Aye that’s him. He was done for the same thing about eight year ago. He was a first offender then and you got him fifteen month. I should have cut him loose.’ Stan shrugged his massive shoulders. ‘But you know me. I’m a big softy.’ About as soft as the blue tint on armour-plating. ‘Aye, Toffee’s all right. Old school. Not like most of them these days who can’t keep their hands off the stuff. The only bump Toffee’s after comes out of a rum bottle.’