by Jay Stringer
Did I really want approval from a rich lawyer badly enough to tangle with one of the South Side’s best-selling authors?
Did I really want to be employed by someone who could do 5K so much quicker than me?
Hunter smiled at me and started talking money, and I decided, yes—yes, I did.
Eight
After leaving the office, I called my big brother. Then called him again when it went to voicemail. Then a third time, and he picked up.
‘I was asleep.’ He sounded like he still was.
‘It’s midday, Philomena. What are you doing in bed?’
‘Sleeping.’
Philip was my younger brother. But he was built like an out-of-shape bouncer, so we agreed that he was my big brother. Technically, he was an equal partner in the business, but he wanted to have as little to do with it as possible. It interfered with his life of comic books, WWE and gay porn. His main contributions were to drive me around whenever and wherever I wanted, because I was probably the only private investigator in the world who couldn’t drive.
‘What’s the job?’
‘Serving papers, what else?’ I paused while a couple of cars drove past, and the sound bounced around the street. ‘You should have seen the woman who hired me, Phil. She probably gets somebody to come and sweep the road before she walks down it, to keep the dust off her feet.’
‘For real?’
‘Different class. Big time.’
‘Then what’s she doing talking to you?’
‘Funny. And true. She says the insurance case has got us a good rep. Wants me on retainer, but I’m being tested out first. Phil, this could be the one. Get this right, and maybe we’ll get an office back.’
I wondered if being on retainer at Hunter & Simpson would come with office space, a nice glass desk and a receptionist—maybe? I’d even feed mine from time to time.
‘Where do you need me to pick you up?’ Phil sounded close to the phone, like it was cradled in his neck or he was lying on the phone in bed.
‘Not yet. I’m going to call Andy first, get a lead on where to start looking. You get out of bed, though. I’ll be needing a ride soon.’
He made a noise that was neither yes nor no. He said something that sounded like call me and hung up. Probably going back to sleep. I dialled another number into my phone, but it rang out to voicemail. I tried again, and this time a very irritated male voice answered, ‘What?’
‘Hi, Andy. Where are you?’
‘Working.’
Andy Lambert was my pet cop. He pretended not to like me, but we both knew he was lying. Or we both knew I was deluded. It was definitely one or the other.
‘Hey, you know what? I’m working too. Actual case. And see, I was thinking—’
‘That you should hit me up for a favour.’
‘Andy, you know what? You should be a detective.’
‘Funny.’ He sighed. ‘What do you need?’
‘I’m looking for Rab Anderson.’
There was a pause. I heard him breathing a second; then he spoke again. ‘Sam, Anderson’s dangerous. You should stick to insurance jobs.’
‘You know that and I know that, but let’s not tell the rich lady who wants to throw money at me to find him, okay?’
‘Fine. I’ll ask around. Call me back in ten minutes.’
‘You in town?’
‘Aye. Down at the Squinty Bridge.’
The Squinty Bridge was one of the many bridges that crossed the Clyde. Officially its name was the Clyde Arc, and it had been opened a decade ago with much fanfare. It crossed the river at an angle, and rising above it was a large silver arch that lit up at night. No matter how impressive a feat it was, the fact that it wasn’t straight would forever leave people assuming the architect had been drunk, and the ‘squinty’ nickname was there to stay. In my heels it would have taken over twenty minutes, but I’d brought a pair of trainers in my bag, and I managed to walk it in just shy of fifteen minutes.
Always racing myself.
I found the police at the base of the bridge’s north side. Where the water, rust and concrete showed an older and nastier side of the city. White tape had already closed off the pathway. The focus of attention was a small inlet in the riverside, broken wooden steps on a metal frame that led down into the water. The lab guys walked round in their white outfits and tried to look important, but I couldn’t help noticing they didn’t seem to be putting in much effort.
In the centre of the non-activity stood DI Andy Lambert. He was a hot mess. Middle age was settling in and turning his Sunday-league footballer frame into something that was preparing itself for a paunch. His strong jawline was starting to get rounder and weaker, and his shoulders were developing the slouch of someone who now knew what he would be doing every day until he died. He never stood close enough to the razor, and he always looked like he had a drink in him. In spite of all that, he still had something. It was that thing that makes you look at a guy three times and then, on the third time, think, Yes, but would it be worth the trouble?
Even though he’d been waiting for me to turn up, he played surprised and annoyed. Well, he played surprised. I think the other was genuine.
He had a bandage wrapped around the palm of his right hand and winced a little as I handed him a warm Starbucks. I made my nicest innocent smile. ‘Hiya. Whatcha got here?’
He stood to one side and pointed down the steps. Tangled up in weeds where the water lapped at the metal was a pallid, meaty lump that had once been a man. The guys in the white overalls were carrying what looked like a large plastic bag down to where the body lay.
‘Floater?’
‘Not sure yet. We’ll know when we get him out, but the techies are creaming themselves in hope it’s a murder. I’ll let them play for a wee bit, then tell them he’s going down on the file as a jumper.’
‘How many of these do you get?’
‘Difficult to say. Most people who go in around here will come out at sea, or broken up further down. By then it’s hard to figure out what happened. Usually, if they’ve gone in upriver, they get caught in the tidal weir.’
‘You make those calls for me?’
He turned to face me fully. He was making a show, pretending that he maybe wasn’t going to help me. ‘And what makes you think I’ll just roll over every time and give you what you need?’
‘Well,’ I pushed back. ‘There is that thing—’
He pointed his finger in my face, Harrison Ford style. ‘Three times.’ His jaw tensed, and he lowered his voice. ‘It was just three times.’
‘More like two and a half, really. But actually I was going to say you should help me because you liked my dad, and you wouldn’t want his business going under, would you?’
He shook his head and then laughed at something in the distance. My father had been on the force before going private. He’d always said that in order to get anywhere as a cop in Glasgow, you needed to know the right handshakes and the right songs. It was a city of football, religion and Masons, in that order. My father had been on the wrong side of each of those divides, but he’d made friends along the way. Lambert was one of them.
‘Yeah. I called Vic in vice. He says Anderson’s a tough one to pin down these days unless there’s a book launch.’ He handed me a piece of paper that I slipped into my jacket pocket. ‘But that’s his last known address, and Vic says you might catch him in one of the pubs at Cessnock: the Park Bar or the Pit. You know where they are?’
I did.
I pointed to the dressing on his hand. ‘Cut yourself shaving? You know you’re meant to hold the razor the other way around, right?’
He looked down at it, then put the hand in his pocket.
‘Accident at home,’ he said.
I turned to leave, but he touched my arm. ‘You’re going to take Phil along with you, aye?
’
‘Philomena? What’s he going to do if things get rough—sing them show tunes as a distraction while I run away?’
‘So he’s camp as Christmas, but he looks like a tough bastard, and that’s what counts with these people. They see you coming on your own and—well, they’ll see you coming.’
I smiled at him as I walked away, asked him to say hi to his wife for me.
Nine
The Pit was a run-down single-storey building in Cessnock. Two streets back from the main road, you only made it here when you’d run out of other places to go. It was in need of either several layers of paint or a wrecking ball. Its real name was the Cessnock Bar, but over time that had become nothing but a technicality. Having Cess at the start of the name was too easy a target for Glaswegians to miss. At some point it had become the Cesspit and then, eventually, simply the Pit.
It said a lot about the people who drank in there that they wore the name like a badge of honour.
It was a Rangers pub and, this close to the 12 July Orange March, it had Union flags hanging in the windows. Even so many years after the smoking ban, I was still hit with the smell of tobacco as I walked in. It was a full daytime crowd, dole monkeys and old men. Each had the glassy eyes that told me he was already past his first drink of the day, and most were holding electronic cigarettes like life jackets. I was hit with a craving but swallowed it down. I tried to keep my smoking to first thing in the morning and when I was out drinking. It messed with my running if I smoked any more than that.
All the men turned to stare at me. It wasn’t a comfortable feeling. I was very aware of how many of them there were and of how long it would take me to get to the door.
‘All right, hen?’
The man nearest to me smiled and shuffled a little on his stool. He had the thin frame of someone who was used to choosing spirits over food. For a second it seemed like he was testing out whether or not he could stand up and sweet-talk me. The shuffle ended in defeat, and he stayed sat down. I nodded at him and got straight to the point.
‘You seen Rab Anderson?’
The room fell silent. Then someone at the back of the room laughed, a gravelly sound slicked over by tobacco and mucus. I looked in the direction of the laugh, but it was too dim at the rear. I took a few steps forward, becoming very aware that each one was taking me further from the door.
‘ ’Sall right—we won’t bite.’ The gravel laugh sliced into words. ‘Who is it looking for Rab?’
I steeled myself and walked over to the back of the room. The speaker was an old man, shorter than me and rail thin. He didn’t look as drunk as his friends, and his clothes were crisp and clean. This was a different class of drinker. I handed him my business card, and he nodded after scanning it; said he’d heard of my dad.
‘Wish we could help, but Rab’s not around. He’s on holiday.’
‘Holiday?’
‘Aye, little bit of R ’n’ R down in London.’
I hated London. ‘Not my idea of a holiday.’
His eyes narrowed a little. Just enough for me to notice it. They flitted away to someone behind me and then back. I felt someone step in close, but whoever it was didn’t do anything other than make his presence felt.
‘And why would you be after Rab, anyway?’
I shrugged. ‘Oh, you know, the usual. I’d like him to sign a copy of the book.’
He pretended to believe me. ‘A bit of a fan, eh? What’s your favourite wan?’
‘The one where he does that thing—you know, with the . . . uh, you know the one?’ Thinking on my feet had always been my strong suit. ‘That one where he’s pretending to be a cripple, and then at the end we see he was really Keyser Söze?’
He sighed and leant back in his chair. He stared down at his beer and turned the glass around on the table a couple of times before he spoke again. ‘You’re funnier than the last person who came looking for him, I’ll give you that, hen. But it always goes the same way.’
He nodded at whoever was behind me. Vice-like hands pulled my arms to my back and bent me forward, over the edge of the bar so that my cheek pressed into the wood. I heard a lot of dirty laughter and felt myself flush with fear and anger. The old man ripped my bag away in one sharp movement and began rifling through it. He tipped items out onto the bar top: my phone, my purse, my notebook, make-up. The chocolate bar that I liked to pretend wasn’t in there. He held up the manila envelope that Fiona Hunter had given me.
‘Would this be your little present for Rab?’
I mumbled something that was close enough to a yes, but I wasn’t released. The old man sat back down in his chair and turned the envelope over a few times, inspecting the seal and making a show of deciding whether to open it.
‘We’ll play a game,’ he said. ‘You like games? Here’s how it works. You tell me what’s inside this envelope, and then I open it. If you’re right, then I’ll maybe tell you where to find him and you can deliver whatever it is.’
‘If I’m wrong?’
‘Then after you get out of hospital, you can limp back to whoever paid you to deliver this and ask them to do their own dirty work.’
That didn’t seem like the kind of game I wanted to play. I tended not to join in if I knew I had no chance of winning.
‘I have no idea what’s in it.’ I tried the honest approach. ‘I’m just delivering it. It’ll be a court summons—he’s probably named the wrong person in a book or something.’
The old man looked disappointed and placed the envelope on the table next to his beer. ‘Hen, you didn’t even give me a chance to start the game. The last person who tried your job at least let us play the game before we fucked him up. Still, you were honest. He wasn’t. I’ll give you that.’
He nodded at whoever was holding me down, and I felt the weight shift behind me as if I were about to take a nasty kick. I pulled myself to the side and managed to twist free while my attacker was off balance. I righted myself and turned round. The man who had been holding me was actually a woman. Short and stocky, with big shoulders. She was like the schoolyard dinner lady from hell. As she turned back to swing at me, I grabbed my mobile phone off the counter and pressed it into her neck. I gambled that I’d been quick enough that all anyone knew was that I’d grabbed something sleek and black.
‘Taser,’ I said. ‘Move and I zap. I’m told it’s pretty dangerous to get someone in the neck, but I’m not a doctor, so who knows, maybe it doesn’t hurt.’
She froze. So did everybody else. The old man sucked on his electronic cigarette and let the water vapour out into the air above him. He watched me and waited for my next move.
I was also waiting for it. I was frankly hoping an idea would be along any second.
That’s when my phone started to ring.
Ten
Lambert
The corpse was pasty and sodden. If someone had a heart attack or a stab wound, Lambert knew, you couldn’t tell straight away whether they were dead. You needed to get down close to them, check the vitals, look for life before assuming death. When you pulled someone out of the water, you knew straight away if they were gone. They were pale and sodden, heavy with water, and they looked more like a fleshy object than a human being. Something essential was missing.
The only catch was that the water could keep decomposition from setting in fully. It could be difficult to tell how long a stiff had been in there. On the plus side, there was also none of the farting you tended to get with dry bodies. Lambert knew from experience that dead people were rude like that.
He knelt down and looked at the stiff as it was laid out on the plastic sheet. The labbies wouldn’t take it further away until they’d had a chance to examine the scene, searched for any other pieces of information in the right context, as if it wasn’t already obvious how this guy had died.
Lambert could never figure out why someone would
want to go that way. Not with a choice of options. Gunshot? Fine. Jump off a building? Okay. At least it would be over in a few seconds, and you would get to experience flying, albeit very badly.
But drowning?
Sinking into cold water, not knowing how long it would be before you died? The human body was a persistent fucker. It fought to stay alive. You could be in the water for a long time before you finally faded to black, and it was going to hurt—you were going to have to fight against your own instincts all the way to death. Worse, maybe you’d live, but your brain would’ve been starved of oxygen for too long and you’d be a vegetable, never able to take a second attempt at ending it all. Living out your days in a hospital bed, someone cleaning out your piss and shit, with you just conscious enough to experience every waking moment of it.
No thanks.
Not for Lambert.
Living into middle age was starting to be torture enough, trying to hold onto a job and keep his father-in-law off his back, without losing the ability to drink or screw.
He looked down into the face of the dead body and shook his head.
‘You stupid fucker,’ he said.
‘What was that, boss?’
Callum, the head labbie, turned round at the sound of Lambert’s voice, assuming he was being spoken to. In his white plastic overalls, with a hood tight to his head, he looked like the ghost of E.T. He was smart in all the wrong ways, in ways that Lambert couldn’t understand. Callum could tell you where you’d been, based on the dirt on your shoes, but he couldn’t tell a joke or understand football.
‘I was talking to him.’ Lambert waved at the corpse. ‘He was just telling me a good joke.’
‘Boss, you know he’s dead, right?’
‘Really?’
‘Oh, wait.’ Callum paused, sensing his mistake, but with no show of emotion. ‘You were joking. Okay.’
