“Hey, big man,” one rheumy-eyes drunk said to me. “Nice eye shadow, I could do you a fine pair of sunglasses for a couple of quid. I’ll even throw in a bottle of aspirins.”
He had a kitchen towel stretched out in front of him. On it he had one Churchill commemorative coin, a fake Gucci watch, a 1950’s Parker fountain pen without a nib, and a Luke Skywalker action figure without the light saber.
“I’ve got some good stuff coming this afternoon,” he said, and cackled, until he started to wheeze and cough.
“You couldnae spare a cigarette?” he said as I walked away. I turned back and gave him two. He was so surprised he forgot to cough. Then he dropped his voice to a whisper.
“He’s waiting in the auld lavvie,” he said. “Just past auld Jock the Pervert’s pitch.”
He saw the question coming before I asked.
“Oh, you’ll ken when you see it. You cannae miss it. And if auld Jock is not there, just follow your nose.”
He started coughing again, and I left sharply before I got phlegm on my shoes.
I’m sure his brother was manning the next pitch down, a white sheet covered with coins from every country under the sun. After that there was a young girl, pale and bruised, selling china teacups that had probably belonged to her great- grandmother. There were yet more old men, all selling trinkets in the hope of a bottle of fortified wine later. And then there was Jock the Pervert’s pitch.
I thought I’d seen some hardcore porn in my youth. But there were magazines here with cover pictures I had to look at twice to make sure I was really seeing what I thought I was seeing. I made the mistake of slowing down for a closer look. The old boy was on me like a funnel spider.
“What’s your pleasure?” he said. He was bald, with liver spots over a scalp that looked loose enough to slide off. While he talked he moved his false teeth around his mouth with his tongue. He looked lascivious, he sounded it…hell, he even smelled like it.
“I’ve got anything you’d ever want. All Danish and Dutch stuff. Horses, Great Danes, golden showers, amputees…you name it, I’ve got it.”
“I’m looking for a man,” I said, and immediately regretted it.
I didn’t think it was possible for him to be any more suggestive, but he managed it. He shuffled around in a pile of magazines, and showed me a cover.
“Gay Boys in Bondage. I’ve got a mate who’s got a wee dungeon set-up if you’re interested?”
I was already backing away.
“No. I mean, I’m looking for the Auld Lavvies,” I said.
He did the thing with his teeth again.
“Ah. It’s fresh meat you’re after. Second on the right. Follow…”
“Aye. Follow my nose. I’ve heard.”
“Do you have anything with old women?” I heard a voice ask him as I walked away. “Really old women?”
I walked faster, suddenly feeling the urge for a shower. The feeling got stronger as I got closer to my destination…an old Victorian gentleman’s lavatory down at the far end of the alleyway. I pushed the door open gingerly.
The smell hit me, as if it was partly solid. Once the place had been all green marble and gold taps, but now it was dark, grey, damp, and smelled like something had died…then something else had shat on it. The man I’d met in The Vaults was standing just inside. He was smoking a thin cigar, clenched tightly between his teeth.
“Now I know why Clint Eastwood smoked. He probably stank like this after a week in the saddle,” he said. “I’d smoke them if you’ve got them. It helps with the smell.”
As I was lighting up the door behind me opened, and I was surprised to see a well-known local businessman come in.
“Fuck off. We’re busy,” my contact said, and the door was shut sharply.
“Poofs. I hate them,” he said to no one in particular.
He bent and lifted a long package from his feet. It was a leather case, the kind you keep fishing rods in. Only this one contained a rifle…or, more accurately, a tranquilizer gun. He showed me five darts, each with a hollow chamber filled with golden fluid.
“They use these for elephants. One brings it down. Two kills it. Do you understand what I’m saying,” he said.
I nodded. He took my money, zipped up the case and handed it to me.
“The Police shouldn’t know it’s missing until tomorrow,” he said.
Again I nodded. “By then I’ll either be okay or past caring.”
This time it was him who nodded.
“You can tell me about it over a pint in the Vaults next week,” he said. “Whatever yon thing you’re after in Govan is…I guarantee the stuff in those darts will keep it quiet for a while. Remember…two kills an elephant.”
He left. I stayed and finished my cigarette, just in case anybody saw us together, then I thankfully went back out into the fresh air.
“That was quick,” the old pervert shouted after me as I passed. “I hope you got your money’s worth.”
I gave him the finger and I was followed up the alley by the cackles of the old man. I was just beginning to think I was away and clear when I spotted two beat coppers heading my way. I did a ninety-degree turn, not caring where I was going, and found myself in the entrance hall to the Barrowlands Concert Hall. I pretended to read the advertising posters for forthcoming bands until the cops passed by, and I was about to leave when somebody tapped me on the shoulder.
“Hey, big man. You’ll do. Come with me. I need you to hear something.”
“Sorry, mate. I’m pushed for time,” I said, and he came back with the magic words…
“There’s a free beer in it for you.”
Even then all my instincts were telling me to be on the move. I was holding stolen goods, and the day was getting on. I should have been back in the office, planning the night to come, looking after Doug…anything but standing in a dark corridor, feeling as if life had just suddenly taken another lurch into the twilight zone.
But the lure of beer won. It usually does.
I followed the man up the dark corridor towards the hall proper. In the gloom I couldn’t make out much, but he seemed to be a big fellow, wearing the aging rockers uniform of peg-denims and black leather jacket. His hair swung long in a plait down to the middle of his back, but it was streaked with grey, and he was nearly bald on top. He walked with a swagger that I recognized. Although I couldn’t see it, I guessed he was carrying a fairly substantial beer gut.
I was proved right a couple of minutes later when he led me into the hall proper and over to the bar where the light was stronger. He was older than I had imagined…somewhere in his fifties. His face looked like he’s been out in the weather for most of those years, like old beaten leather, but when he laughed he looked a good thirty years younger.
There was another man sitting at the bar…a much younger chap, all tattoos and gun-metal piercings. The older man went behind the bar and started pulling a beer.
“I need your opinion on something,” he said, handing me a beer. “I’ve got a new act on the go. The lad here thinks they’re too retro…whatever that means. Hit it, girls!”
The hall lights went out, and a single spotlight lit up a drum kit.
‘Val Keries and the Shieldmaidens’ the logo said. The beat kicked in and my stomach started to vibrate in time. The lights went up to show three women, dressed as Viking warriors, at their places at drums, bass and guitar. They began to pound out a heavy, martial rhythm. It felt like my ears might bleed…I hadn’t heard anything like it since Motorhead back in ’83.
And then she walked in. She had Jagger’s fuck you strut, coupled with an air of a wide-eyed maniac as she screamed over the beat, threatening to tear out her lungs as she sent shivers down my spine. I couldn’t make out a single word of the lyrics, but it didn’t matter…I couldn’t take my eyes off her, and I found myself drifting closer to the stage.
The song ended with the whole band screaming in unison, a rising note that went up and up as the drums whipped the gui
tar and bass into a crescendo that they all three brought to a halt with military precision. The singer stood stock-still, her chest heaving, sweat running down into her cleavage. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything sexier in my life.
“Too retro,” the younger man said at my shoulder.
The older man came up and joined me. It was only then that I noticed he had a glass eye, green where the other was a piercing blue.
“The youngster here doesn’t want to book the girls,” he said.
“Too retro,” the younger man said. He sounded bored.
“But I’ve told him, see. They don’t just do rockers. They do melodies that would calm a savage beast.”
He nodded, and the guitarist started a soft, minor chord sequence I almost recognized. The singer, without a mike, stepped to the front of the stage and began to sing, her high tones echoing around the huge barn of the hall. The song was in a foreign language…maybe Gaelic, maybe Greek, maybe even Norwegian for all I knew. But I knew something…I had heard it before, back on Skye, wafting in the night air over the harbor as I stood at the hotel windows. It spoke to me… of rest from toil, of a simple life in the country, of misty evenings watching the sun going down behind the hills. I had tears in my eyes as she brought the air to a wistful, fading conclusion. Already, I wanted to hear it again.
“See, I told you. Music to calm a savage beast,” the old rocker said. I noticed for the first time that he had a small bronze earring, in the shape of a heavy hammer. He stopped talking, as if he was waiting for something.
“Too retro,” the young man said again. He was starting to get on my nerves.
“Well, I like them. I don’t suppose there’s a CD I can buy?”
“I thought you’d never ask,” the old rocker said, his face suddenly lit in a big smile. He produced a CD box from an inside pocket and passed it to me, putting it in my jacket pocket.
“No charge,” he said. “Track four is the one you want.”
“Too retro, too retro,” the younger man said, and his eyes took on a glassy, far away look. “Too retro, too retro.”
Suddenly he looked less like a man, more like a shop mannequin imbued with temporary life. As I began to back away he kept saying it, over and over. The aging rocker just smiled broadly. The band began to thrash their instruments in time to the chant, and the singer started to squeal the words, staring straight at me as she screamed. “Too retro, too retro.”
I backed away out of the hall. Above the sound of the band I heard the rockers last words to me.
“I’ll see you around,” he said.
And tapped the glass eye.
I was down the corridor and out the door so fast that I was out on the steps, drinking in sunlight, before I noticed I still had almost a full pint of beer in my hand.
“Hey son, are ye going to drink that?”
It was the old guy who’d bummed the cigarettes from me earlier. I gave him the beer. His old companions all started moving towards him, but he raised the glass and downed the remainder of the beer in two gulps, laughing like a maniac as he showed them the empty glass. I moved away in case he threw up, while the rest of the old men hurled enough abuse to turn the air blue.
I turned back to the concert hall doors. They were locked…from the outside…with a huge padlock. I stepped over and peered through the smoked glass. All was dark and quiet.
“There’s been naebody in there for a fortnight,” the old man said. “The Police had it closed down after a drug raid.”
“You didn’t see me coming out?” I asked, but I already knew the answer.
“Round about here, son, naebody ever sees anything.”
Five minutes later I was in a bar just off Argyll Street. Although it was barely ten o’clock in the morning, there were already four middle-aged men downing whiskies with beer chasers as if today was the last day of their lives. And with the rate they were going, it just might be.
The incident in the ballroom was already taking on a dream-like quality in my memory, and I might even have written the whole thing off as a stress reaction to recent events…but when I put my hand in my pocket for my cigarettes, I found the CD case. Right where he had put it. My hands shook as I lit the cigarette, but if the barman noticed he was too polite to comment…men with bruised faces and shaky hands were not uncommon in the pubs round these parts.
I took my beer to a quiet corner. If I’d stayed at the bar I would have got chatting to the others there, would have started on the whisky, and woken up in a pile of waste somewhere three days hence. Much as I was tempted, both Doug and wee Jim Morton deserved more from me than that. Hell, John Mason deserved more from me than that…if there was a spark of humanity left in him, I had five grand of his mother’s money to spend to find it.
As I drank I studied the CD case. Val Kerie and the Shieldmaidens didn’t seem to be signed to any record label. The sleeve art was crude, hand drawn in a runic script. There were five songs in total: ‘Midgard’, ‘The Death of Baldur’, ‘Loki’s Testicles’, ‘The Sea Wives’ Lament’, and ‘Ragnarock’. When I opened the case, I found nothing about the band members or producers, just five long stories; background to the songs. ‘The Sea Wives’ Lament’ told the story of the sea wives in much the same structure as I’d heard it from John Mason, but, seeing as my mind loved anything of a scatological nature, I was drawn to the notes for the third song, ‘Loki’s Testicles.’
It was a long tale of how a fisherwife lost her husband. Blaming the gods, she called down a curse on them. Odin and Loki visited her, and pleaded with her to lift the spell. She replied that she would…if the gods could raise a laugh in her, for she had not laughed since her husband had died.
So Odin took out his glass eye, and pulled faces, then made the eye appear to look out of his ear, his mouth, and even his belly button. And through it all the fisherwife remained stony-faced.
Then it was Loki’s turn. Taking off his belt he looped it once around the horns of one of the woman’s goats. The other end he looped around his testicles. Then he roared, scaring the goat so much that it took off at speed, dragging Loki along behind it by his balls. Loki screamed in pain. The fisherwife laughed for a week.
The curse was lifted. The woman had learned to laugh again, Loki had learned something of the ways of the female mind, and Odin had learned how far Loki was prepared to go to get his own way. None of the three would forget the lessons they learned that day.
I actually laughed out loud. The pub went suddenly quiet, and the four men at the bar turned as one and stared at me. Any chance I might have had of joining them in the pursuit of oblivion was now gone. I was now officially ‘the nutter in the corner’.
I put the CD away in my pocket, finished my beer quickly, and left.
I bought a paper at the tube station and read it on the way back to the office. It gave the official line, about the deranged junkie. There was an old picture of Wee Jim, and one of Jock McCall glowering, but my name wasn’t mentioned. And although the front page had the official line, there was plenty of speculation inside.
“It was an alien. A f*****g alien. Like in the films” said Willie Sands (34) of Southside Place, Govan. “It came oot of the drain,” said Joan Gilbert (63), of Whitelettes Flats, Govan. “A big snake. Ah damn near wet ma knickers.” There was more, from the cryptozoologist who compared the situation to a Chupacabra scare in Brazil, from a self-styled ‘Fortean Investigator’ who said it was obviously an ABC…an Alien Big Cat that was probably a discarded pet. A local Catholic Priest said it might be a visitation of the Blessed Virgin Mary…I hoped it wasn’t her…she wouldn’t last long in Govan. A fundamentalist Christian preacher blamed demons called up by heathen foreign asylum seekers, and a social worker was pleading for understanding for the perpetrator, citing the ‘almost Third World’ housing conditions in the area.
The police were getting it in the neck from everybody. Even though members of the force were being hurt and killed the paper stopped short of calling for t
he army to be called in…but not far short, and it hinted that another ‘night of terror on the street’ would mean heads rolling in high places.
By the time I got back to the office I was surer than ever that I had only the one chance at catching John Mason…and even then, it was probably a slim one.
I was mulling that over as I climbed the stairs to the office, and I was so pre-occupied I didn’t hear the voices until I was nearly at the top. But even when I heard them, they seemed to be talking gibberish.
“William McClay 1775 to 1836, Ceres, Fife,” I heard Doug say.
“Margaret McClay nee Small 1780 to 1855, christened in Crail, Fife 1781. Married 1798, Anstruther,” a woman answered.
“I wonder if they had a reception in the Creel,” Doug said.
“Bannocks, faroch and bedding.”
“Sounds like a fine name for a firm of solicitors,” Doug replied, and they both giggled like schoolchildren.
I walked into the office, and they jumped apart. They looked guilty, as if I’d caught them at something illegal.
“You’re feeling better, then?” I said to Doug.
He blushed. “Derek, this is Joanna Marsh,” he said. “Our latest client.”
I raised an eyebrow. “Doug, I have a client,” I said.
“Yes. But I don’t.”
He got the raised eyebrow treatment again.
“Joanna wants us to trace her ancestry in Scotland. She’s American…”
The woman interrupted him.
“A wealthy American,” she said. “And Doug here is the first person I’ve found who seems to know how to find what I’m looking for. I’m willing to pay whatever it takes.”
Doug was standing behind her, so she didn’t see his puppy dog pleading impression.
“Well, loathe as I am to reinforce a stereotype,” I said. “If you’ve got the money, I’ve got the inclination.”
“As the altar-boy said to the bishop,” she said, then her and Doug burst out laughing, while I looked on bemused.
I sat by my desk and picked up the pile of paper Doug had printed out for me. But I didn’t read any of it…I was too busy watching Doug with his client. They looked like they had known each other for years…bickering like a cozy couple, cheering in unison as they uncovered another piece of her family jigsaw. If Doug didn’t know it, it looked like he’d made a conquest. If so, it would be his first in a long time. After his divorce he’d thrown himself into work, and up until the Johnson Amulet Case he’d always been too engrossed in his studies. After that, he’d been too afraid to say boo to a goose never, mind a woman. Until now, that is.
The Midnight Eye Files: Volume 1 (Midnight Eye Collections) Page 36
