Ways to Die in Glasgow

by Jay Stringer

  Then the farting started. A long, low and smelly release of gas from the corpse. It was unusual for this type of stiff to release gas in that way, but dead bodies did unusual things all the time. It sounded wet and nasty, and everyone beat a retreat to the roadside.

  ‘You’re going to try and use this,’ Lambert said to Callum. ‘You’re going to be tempted to say the farting is proof that it wasn’t a suicide somehow. I can see it in your eyes. A guy eats too many baked beans before he goes into the sludge, farts a little when we pull him out, and you’re going to add to my workload by saying it’s a suspicious death.’

  Callum stared at Lambert for a long time before replying in monotone, ‘Another joke? You’re on form today.’

  ‘No, I’m serious this time. Do what you want. Play—have some fun with him—but when the paperwork hits my desk, it says suicide, okay?’

  Lambert walked away before Callum could respond. He’d learnt a long time ago that the key to management was to issue a command and then get moving before anyone could disagree with it. He headed back up to the road, where his car was parked. A few uniforms were directing traffic and turning away the pedestrians. One of them leant over to open Lambert’s car door, like a real suck-up. Lambert nodded and smiled, pretended to have noticed the guy’s face. They were sucking up to the wrong person. Lambert was not in a position to do them any favours. But, hell, if someone wanted to think you’d remember them, fine; you might get something out of it.

  Lambert sat down in the driver’s seat and felt the mistake straight away; he’d been awake for over twenty-four hours, and it all started to catch up with him as he sank back into the cushion. He opened his eyes and took in a deep breath, getting the air pumping around his body. It wasn’t bedtime yet; he had a couple more errands to run.

  He needed coffee.

  He needed bacon.

  He needed a bottle of Talisker.

  Lambert had skipped the chance to clock off an hour ago. He’d been at the end of his shift when the call came in about a floater in the river. He could have passed it off to Cummings or Harper and gone home. But there were certain unwritten rules on the job that never changed. He’d been the one to take the call, so it was on his plate. Break a written rule and people noticed—they judged you; but break an unwritten rule, and they never forgave you.

  Lambert picked up the radio receiver and called dispatch, advised them the floater was out of the river and the case was under his name, that any enquiries should be forwarded to his mailbox. Then he checked his phone and saw two messages from Jess.

  Fucking kids. Ryan Lindsay just bit Sherry Mitchell. Drew blood. Maybe you could come and arrest them, throw away the key? XX

  Can’t reach Ryan’s parents on the phone. He keeps talking about this bike he wants for his birthday. I might be serious about you arresting him, BTW. Want anything from the shop on the way home? XX

  Jess was a primary schoolteacher, spending her day dealing with screaming children before going home to a usually empty house. It was never easy being married to a cop, and Jess caught it worse than many others. They’d been together for seventeen years, married for fifteen of those, and children had never been a factor. Jess always said she spent her days surrounded by kids and didn’t want to fill her nights with them too. That had worked fine for Lambert. He liked the freedom. He’d always seen two kinds of men: those who never had kids and could stay eighteen forever, and those who became parents and turned forty-five overnight.

  No thanks.

  Lately he was seeing a third kind. His kind. The men who never figured themselves out. Sliding into middle age with no plan and no direction, finding alcohol and double shifts at work the best way to fill the silence in their own heads.

  Thinking of life with Jess played another trick on him. It made him think of Sam, and for a moment he felt younger again. He keyed the ignition with his right hand as he dialled Sam’s number with his left.

  Time to go play the good guy.

  Eleven

  Sam answered after a few rings.

  ‘DI Lambert, how can I help?’

  She must have seen his number on the screen. There was tension in her voice. It didn’t suit her. Something was going on. Surely she hadn’t just walked round to the Pit and gone in on her own without calling her brother for backup?

  ‘Where are you?’ Lambert asked.

  ‘Hang on.’ The line got muffled for a second, and Sam could be heard talking to someone else, saying, ‘This is important. I need to take it.’ Then back to Lambert: ‘I’m in the Pit. I believe you know the place?’

  Idiot. She’d really done it. She was just like her father, except smaller and female, and less able to fight. But as far as the stubborn and reckless streaks went, they could have been the same person. Lambert didn’t know whether to be angry or proud. He settled for both.

  ‘Everything okay?’

  ‘Hmmmmmmm?’

  That told him all he needed to know. ‘On my way.’

  Lambert ran traffic lights on both sides of the Squinty Bridge, and then again on Govan Road as he drove around the edge of Festival Park. Every cop secretly wanted to squeal tyres and perform handbrake turns, and as he approached the Pit, he was planning to do just that, but he saw Sam was already out the door and running in the opposite direction.

  She was a good runner, strong and fast, with a sprint that was damn near Olympic. Lambert overtook her and pulled in at the kerb, leaning over to open the passenger door. She dropped into the seat, hardly out of breath.

  ‘Don’t say it,’ she said.

  ‘That I told you so?’

  ‘Yes, don’t say it.’

  Lambert smiled, waited a second before playing it cool. ‘You okay?’

  ‘I was doing okay until you called. I’d got them thinking my phone was a Taser, was about to gather up all my stuff and walk out of there all classy-like, but then you went and ruined it.’

  ‘You’re welcome.’

  She looked at Lambert, out of the corner of her eye at first, then head on, a smile spreading across her face. ‘I’m joking. Thanks. You saved my arse.’ Then she raised a finger in the space between them. ‘Avoid the obvious joke, for once.’

  ‘Sure. As long as you’re okay.’

  ‘Embarrassed, mostly. They’ve got all my stuff. My bag, my purse, my address. At least I left my keys at home. And, shit, they’ve got the legal papers I’m meant to serve on Anderson. I’m going to be fired from a job I only took an hour ago.’

  ‘Look,’ Lambert said, ‘shit happens. Don’t worry about it. I’ll go get your stuff—they know not to mess with me. Can’t promise your purse will have anything in it, though. Wait here.’ He opened the door and started to climb out before hesitating. ‘Sam, I mean it; don’t do anything daft, okay?’

  She gave him an innocent angel look, putting both hands out. ‘Me?’

  Lambert walked towards the Pit. There were smokers outside, hardened old men who’d lived through the rougher days of the city, men who’d maybe been willing to mess with cops when they were younger. None of them wanted to be the first to budge, but there was enough room between them for Lambert to pass through.

  Inside, his eyes adjusted quickly to the dim light. Murdo was at the back, sitting in his usual spot. He was thin these days. There was a time when he’d been built like an athlete, with strong arms and shoulders for beating the crap out of people who crossed him, but now he was a broken-down survivor who knew not to mess with the wrong people.

  ‘She with you?’ Murdo said. ‘Comes round here asking about Rab, thinks she can just walk in and out without a beating?’

  ‘She can.’ Lambert’s voice was calm, unworried. ‘She’s under my protection. And you’ll give me her belongings. All of them.’

  ‘Will I now?’

  Murdo’s tobacco-aged lips turned up in a grin. The room closed in
around Lambert as the smokers stepped in behind him. On anyone else it would be intimidation, but Lambert was a cop and knew it for what it was: angry children trying to pretend they could stare down the adult in the room before looking away.

  He gave them their moment before putting them back in their box.

  ‘You done?’

  Murdo nodded to the bar, and a squat old lady placed Sam’s bag on the counter, and beside it the manila envelope of legal papers. It had been opened.

  ‘I think we need to talk about Rab,’ Murdo said.

  ‘Not here,’ Lambert said. He nodded at the bag. ‘It better all be there.’

  He gathered up what he’d come for and headed back out of the bar, calm and slow. When he got to the car, Sam was in the driver’s seat. She waited for Lambert to sit in the passenger’s seat and turned the ignition.

  ‘Where can I drop you?’ She said it with a sly smile.

  ‘Fancy a quick drink?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘That’s a “no”, isn’t it?’

  She pulled away from the kerb. ‘Uh-huh.’

  Lambert waited a few hundred yards to see which direction she was heading in. She turned along the Clyde River and back towards the city, past the BBC building.

  ‘This is dangerous,’ Lambert said. ‘Can I convince you to drop it?’

  ‘That’s also a “maybe” .’

  ‘Well, at least be careful, okay? Don’t go anywhere without backup. Rab goes to ground whenever there’s trouble, and his friends will hand a beating out to anyone who comes looking. It’s how people like Rab survive so long.’

  They drove through The Gorbals. Lambert had seen these streets change a lot over his years on the job. Old brown tenements and Gothic churches had fallen victim to the Glasgow ‘disease’ and burned down to make way for new developments. Apartment blocks and houses were springing up along the old roads, with bright colours and balconies as if a view of the Clyde added value to anything. They crossed the river at the end of Ballater Street, onto the road that cut through Glasgow Green, and Lambert knew where they were headed but stayed silent.

  They passed through the roughest part of Bridgeton, an old Ulster loyalist neighbourhood, and onto a quiet modern housing estate that was hidden away in the wreckage like a well-kept secret.

  Sam parked in front of her flat.

  ‘Want that quick drink?’ she asked.

  Twelve

  Forty minutes later Lambert pulled the front door closed behind him and stepped back over to his car. If he’d been tired before, he was exhausted now. He had a few extra aches and that pleasant numb feeling you get right after emptying your dick. He should have taken a shower, but he was in a hurry to run his last errand.

  One final thing he needed to do; then his own bed would be calling him.

  He unlocked the car and clicked on the radio, contacting dispatch to sign off for the day. He’d had a voicemail from Callum saying he wasn’t ready to call the floater a suicide just yet. Great. Another problem to fix.

  He drove back into The Gorbals, down Ballater Street to the old train arches. He turned off the road behind a boarded-up pub that had stood empty since the credit crunch, and walked over to a forgotten garage lock-up that was built into the archway of the overpass. He fiddled with the rusted padlock for a moment, having to fight with it before he could unlock it, then slipped inside and pulled the door closed.

  There was a bolt on the inside of the door, and he slid it home to make sure there wouldn’t be any unexpected visitors.

  He felt around on the floor for the lamp he’d left there last night, and fired it up. The batteries were low, and the halogen blinked a little, but the beam filled up the room round him.

  He smiled at Rab Anderson.

  Anderson was tied down on a wooden door that was acting as a bed. He was a faded tattoo of his younger self. A strong man gone soft with age. Even old men can put up a fight when they’re being tortured, though, and he carried the wounds. His kneecaps were broken, and one of his hands was crushed and folded inwards like a dead spider. His mouth was covered with gaffer tape, but with all the morphine in his system he was doing nothing other than breathing and occasionally grunting.

  His grunting started to form into something regular and solid. Lambert knelt down and pulled back the gaffer tape. Anderson didn’t miss a beat as the tape ripped away, but kept on mumbling. He was praying, in slurred, half-remembered words. There was a sing-song element to the way he talked. It must have been difficult not to sound like an idiot, with missing teeth and a system full of drugs.

  Lambert screwed the tape up into a ball and pocketed it. The extra movement snapped Anderson back into the room, and he stared at Lambert with clear eyes.

  ‘Motherfucker,’ Anderson said.

  ‘Good to see you too, Rab.’ Lambert said. ‘No need to get up; I won’t be here long.’

  ‘Try untying me. See how long you last.’

  Lambert nodded. ‘Sorry, Rab.’ He pulled rubber gloves from his pocket and slipped them on, forcing one over the bandage on his hand. ‘You wouldn’t believe how hard I tried to avoid this. Really. But people are starting to ask questions, and I can’t have you waiting around to be found and identify us. It’s nothing personal.’

  He picked up the roll of gaffer tape from the floor and ripped off a fresh strip. Rab’s eyes widened as Lambert leant in, but he had nowhere to pull back to. He mumbled something else and Lambert held off for a moment.

  ‘What was that?’

  Rab’s mouth opened and closed, and another drugged-up prayer started, but then he found the words he was looking for and, like a lost child, whispered, ‘I want my dog.’

  Lambert pressed the tape down over Anderson’s mouth and smoothed it out. The lips beneath the tape were taking up the rhythmic mumbling again. Lambert pinched Anderson’s nose with his right hand while pressing down on the tape, making sure it was sealed. Anderson’s eyes spread wide and he tried to fight back, even through the drugs, shaking his head from side to side.

  Eventually the light started to go out behind his eyes.

  ‘The things we do for family,’ Lambert said right before Anderson died. ‘You know how it is.’

  PART TWO

  ‘Never trust a psychiatrist to treat a bullet wound.’

  —Mackie

  Thirteen

  Mackie

  Lately I’ve been watching a lot of TV shows about crimes. Columbo. Rockford. Quincy. Shit like that. I’ve got a handle on how to do this. Someone grabbed my Uncle Rab and killed his dog. They put a bullet in my leg and killed Jenny T. I’m going to solve this.

  Detective Mackie.

  Every great detective has to start somewhere: I decide on the last place I saw Rab. We were both drinking in the Pit before he suggested I go get my dick wet to work off some frustration. If he stayed there after I left, then maybe the guys who were with us will have an idea what happened to him.

  I tell Beth to pull to the kerb as we drive through Cessnock. She looks over at me with that bit of hair falling across her face again. She looks scared.

  ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘Got a few things to take care of. Won’t be long.’

  ‘But what about’—she nods towards the bundle on the back seat—‘you know.’

  ‘Oh yeah, the wee man. Take him back to yours, aye? I’ll come round later on, and we’ll find a nice spot to bury him, say some words.’ Then I think of something. Fuck-a-doodle-do, I can be an idiot sometimes. ‘Hey, did you pick up the keys at Rab’s flat?’

  ‘What keys?’

  ‘His fucking house keys, what else?’

  She looks at me blank, like I’ve just asked her the capital of Constantipopple. Baws. That means the keys are wherever I left them. And I have no idea where that is. Nothing I can do about it now. I’ll square it all later.
Beth starts to talk again, and she’s still at it as I shut the door and limp away. She’s a talker. That’s the problem with psychiatrists. They want to talk about every fucking thing.

  I’m trying not to let my wound show in my walk—don’t want people to see any weakness—but it’s hard. With every other step, I lose feeling in my leg for a bit, like my body keeps forgetting it’s there. I’m no expert, but I don’t think that’s normal. I duck into the newsagent by the subway to get a pack of cigs and a bottle of Buckie. Didn’t want to spark up or drink in front of Beth; she’d get all upset if I do that after taking my pills.

  Which reminds me.

  I head over to the street at the back, out of sight from the main road, and heave until one of the pills coughs up out of my throat and onto the pavement. Damn, the other one must’ve actually gone in. Ach well, maybe one won’t hurt.

  I walk round to the Pit. The classiest shitehole in the city. Or the nearest anyway. As I push through the door, everyone turns to stare at me, like in a movie. Their drinks are frozen in place at their lips. They don’t half look stupid.

  ‘ ’Sup, dudes.’ I wave. ‘Someone get me a pint.’

  Murdo is at the back, trying to look like he’s still tough and not an old jakey. He’s sat beside some dykey-looking woman. She looks familiar, like maybe I was introduced to her last night, but my memory don’t work right after a few pints. There’s quite a lot of last night that I don’t remember. Either way, it looks like she knows me, because she nods as I walk over. Murdo is mooching through a woman’s purse, which is strange, but then he’s a strange guy.

  ‘Mackie, son, you look like you’ve been shot.’

  ‘Aye.’

  I leave it there, like that, see how he responds. He smiles and hits the table with the palms of his hands before laughing.

  ‘Should have known,’ he says between laughs. ‘You were looking like you wanted to start trouble when you left here. You put a few away last night, son.’