Falling Fast

by Neil Broadfoot

  He had snatched the rifle from Derek, knocked the little shit off his feet with one heavy-handed slap to the back of the head. Sam hesitated over the rabbit, swallowed back the bile rising in his throat, then caved its head in with the butt of the rifle. Better that than a slow, lingering death with Derek leering over it.

  ‘What the fuck you thinking, you wee shit?’ Sam had roared, barely resisting the urge to deal with Derek the way he had with the rabbit. ‘Why the fuck would you do something like this?’

  ‘Dunno,’ Derek had grunted, rubbing the back of his neck, dark eyes (so like his mother’s, Sam had thought) glaring back. ‘Wanted to see what it was like firing it, is all.’ The voice the same as the one on the other end of the phone now; disconnected, cold. Defiant.

  ‘Dad? You still there?’

  Sam took a deep breath, blinked away the past. ‘Where the fuck are you? It’s like a bloody circus here. There’re cameras and reporters everywhere. Your mother’s up to ninety.’

  ‘What the fuck you want me to do about it?’ Derek snapped. ‘I didnae ask for this, did I? You want me to say sorry? I’m sorry, okay?’

  ‘Bit late for that, isn’t it?’ Sam winced as he spoke, but he couldn’t help it. He could feel the anger starting to glow again, hot coals being fanned.

  On the other end of the line, Derek sighed, impatient. ‘Look, is there any way you can get away from the house without being seen?’

  Sam’s stomach gave an oily lurch. Here it came. He fought the urge to just slam the phone down, leave his son hanging. After everything, no one would blame him, least of all Rita, but…

  But…

  ‘Dad?’

  ‘Yeah,’ he replied, voice dropping to a whisper as he glanced at the stairs, praying Rita hadn’t heard. ‘Where?’

  ‘They’ve not built on the old railway yet, have they?’

  ‘No,’ Sam replied. The old railway was the former East Coast line that ran along the spine of Prestonview on its way through East Lothian and into Edinburgh. It was once the main way of getting both people and coal from the pits into the capital city. Now it was a tarmacked walkway intended for and mostly ignored by pedestrians, cyclists and all those who thought they could put a little distance between themselves and the inevitable hole in the ground by wheezing their way through a run.

  ‘Great. Remember where you caught me smoking that time?’

  Sam nodded, recalling a gnarled old tree at the side of a railway bridge. It was when Derek was about eleven: Johnny Evans, who’d worked at the pit years ago and now ran the local newsagents, had called Sam and told him he’d seen Derek with a few other kids who had bought a packet of Regal for a fly puff.

  ‘The kid I sold them to was old enough,’ Johnny said, voice sharp with guilt. ‘But when I saw Derek, I thought you’d want to know.’

  Sam had wanted to know. And it hadn’t been hard to figure out where Derek would be. He had loved to climb that tree. Loved to do other things there, too.

  Other things…

  ‘Yeah,’ Sam said, suddenly exhausted. The phone was getting heavy. ‘When?’

  ‘It’ll take me a while to get there. Tomorrow, say about eight o’clock?’

  ‘In the morning?’

  Derek’s laughter grated down the phone. It sounded like the background static that crackled on the line. ‘No, Dad,’ he said slowly, as though talking to a dim child. ‘At night. It’ll be dark then. And quiet.’

  ‘Oh, silly me. Of course.’ Sam’s voice hardened. He’d almost forgotten Derek’s casual cruelty. Almost.

  He was vaguely aware of Derek hissing down the phone. ‘…fer fuck’s sake, Dad, it’s not as if…’

  But Sam had already slammed the phone down. His whole body shook as he fought back the tears. He looked around at the room forced into gloom on a bright autumn day, cursing his son for bringing this on them, and himself for not being able to shut that son out of his life.

  4

  After hanging up on Walter, Doug’s first move had been to finish his pint. He didn’t want it, sure as hell didn’t need it, especially if he was driving. But it was the job. After all, it wouldn’t help to be seen as the type of guy who dropped everything the moment his boss tugged at his leash.

  He drained the Guinness deliberately, just slowly enough to look casual, then returned the glass to bar as he got up to leave.

  ‘That you away, then?’ Mike asked. It never failed to amaze Doug how stating the blatantly obvious could be passed off as conversation.

  ‘Yeah, that’s me, no rest for the wicked.’ He gave a heavy sigh, hoping Mike would understand that leaving his pub was the last thing he wanted to do. ‘Listen, Mike, if you happen to hear anything about…’

  Mike waved the rest of Doug’s words away with a large, pale hand. ‘No problem,’ he said softly, eyes straying to where Denver lay, a pile of matted fur snoring loudly on the floor. ‘If I hear anything about McGinty, I’ll let you know. Don’t think there’s a chance in hell that he’ll come back to Prestonview though.’

  Doug nodded his thanks and headed for the door. In truth, he agreed with Mike – family ties or no, the man would have to be either a complete fuckhead or totally suicidal to return to his home town. But still, there was always the chance. The press pack camped outside his mum and dad’s front door wouldn’t help, but if there was even a sniff of the bastard in Prestonview, Mike would hear about it.

  It was the nature of small towns. As a talking shop and confessional, the local – and in Prestonview’s case, only – pub did more trade than a church. And thanks to a month of afternoon pints, nightly visits and conversations about the state of the local Under 16’s football team, which just happened to have Mike’s grandson Kenny playing centre forward – a fact Doug had been very careful to give prominence when he wrote up a match report on them for the Tribune’s weekend round-up – Doug was now seen as a member of the congregation. An occasional member who always turned up late and sang out of tune maybe, but at least they were talking to him. If Mike heard anything, he’d tell him.

  Outside, the sky’s earlier brightness had given way to a smear of bruised cloud and anaemic sunlight. There was a smell of rain in the air. Doug unlocked his car (which, save Mike’s battered old Cortina, was the only visitor to the car park), got in and dug his phone out of his pocket. He punched a pre-programmed hot key and listened as the phone dialled and began to ring.

  ‘Hello, CID. Detective Sergeant Drummond speaking.’

  ‘Hiya, Susie. How’s tricks?’

  A sigh at the other end of the line. She’d been expecting him to call for most of the morning. ‘Doug. What a surprise. Can’t think why you’d be calling me today.’

  ‘You know me, I love to be unpredictable. Listen, Walter wants me to get something on the Scott Monument diver. Any chance you can fill in some of the blanks for me?’

  A pause on the other end of the line. Then Susie’s voice, quieter than before, more aware of those around her and who could be listening in.

  ‘You must be psychic,’ she said. ‘I’m heading down to the lockup just now about that. If you’re around the Cowgate in about half an hour, we could maybe meet up after that?’

  ‘Love to,’ Doug replied brightly. ‘Give me a call when you get free and I’ll meet you.’

  ‘You could always come in for a tour if you wanted,’ Susie teased, knowing there wasn’t a chance in hell that Doug would ever set foot inside the city mortuary, known by police officers throughout Edinburgh as ‘the lock-up’.

  ‘Nice to see you’re still working on that sense of humour, Susie.’

  ‘Isn’t it, though?’ she shot back. ‘See you soon.’

  Doug clicked his phone off and started his car, enjoying the throaty growl as he over-revved the engine. His parents were right, he knew it deep down. The car, a low-slung roadster with a ridiculously large engine, was painfully expensive to insure and an invitation to rack up even more points on his already colourful licence. But fuck it, it was fun.
At thirty-three, the boy racer in him wasn’t quite dead yet.

  He drove out of the car park, took a left and crawled along the main street, which was a long, grey downhill of newsagents, bakeries and betting shops that gave way to about a dozen old-style granite homes with huge lawns, heavy double doors and white-painted window frames; one of the few lingering signs that Prestonview was once a town with money and success.

  Doug stayed on the 30 mph limit until the road widened and he saw the national speed limit sign. ‘You are now leaving Prestonview,’ the East Lothian Council sign read. Some comedian had scrawled ‘Away tae’ Fuck’ over the sign in spray-paint. Smiling, Doug dropped down into second and hammered the accelerator. The car leapt forward, almost as eager as he was for the narrow, winding roads that would take him along the coast and back to Edinburgh.

  5

  Doug pulled into a space on High School Wynd, a narrow cobbled lane just off the Cowgate and next to the city mortuary. The car’s engine seemed to sigh a little when he pulled the key from the ignition. He wasn’t surprised; after hurtling around hairpin corners on single-track roads at what felt like 90 mph, Doug felt a little like sighing himself.

  He double-checked his phone to make sure he hadn’t missed a call from Susie, then went to retrieve his notes from the boot. With nothing else to do but wait, he decided to go over what he had on Derek McGinty on the off-chance he had missed something – some clue as to what his next move would be – in the first hundred or so times he had picked his way through the rubble that was McGinty’s life.

  In 1990, at the tender age of sixteen, Derek McGinty had been a typical example of the small-town thug. With no real education behind him and little chance of work in Prestonview – now that the mining industry had more or less ceased to exist throughout the Lothians, transforming once-prosperous communities into virtual ghost towns at a stroke – he got to work creating an alternative record of achievement. Breaking and entering, reselling stolen goods, GBH, casual cruelty to animals: all the usual fun activities that made a young man’s parents so proud.

  His record, a copy of which Susie had given Doug on the quiet after a lot of pestering and the promise of work on her car, was peppered with appearances in front of the youth panel and snippets of reports from social workers. Phrases such as ‘chronically demotivated’, ‘socially ill-adjusted’ and ‘set in a cycle of boredom and frustration through which criminal activity is his only release’ kept popping up like rust blisters on old bodywork. To Doug, they all amounted to the same thing: what his own dad would have called a ‘bad little bugger’.

  Two years later, Derek got bored with life in Prestonview and made his way to Edinburgh. He quickly became involved in working on the doors of some of the city’s less fashionable nightclubs. It made sense; cash in hand, no questions asked and a job snarling at people to discourage trouble, or stepping in with fists flying if anything ever kicked off. McGinty’s name appeared a few times in police reports about drug dealing and assaults in those clubs, but there was never enough evidence to prosecute. For some reason, witnesses didn’t seem too eager to talk about him.

  But then, on September 14, 1992, Derek McGinty graduated from small-time thug to Edinburgh’s most wanted man in one sickening leap.

  Her name was Bethany Miller, a twenty-one-year-old originally from Derby who was in Edinburgh to study English literature and history at the university. She was, according to the friends and family who talked to the police and the press later, a bright, vivacious girl who loved Edinburgh and the social life that went with it. She was outgoing, they said, the type of person who lit up a room and made a party.

  Looking at the pictures he’d culled from the Tribune’s library, Doug could see the appeal. Bethany was your typical early-twenties bombshell: tall and athletic, but still with a figure, and an open, inviting face you never got tired of looking at framed by long, dark hair. But, according to her tutors, her most attractive feature was her mind. She was sharp, they all said, always asking questions and ready to challenge established ideas. Her eyes said as much to Doug. In the photograph he had, a hand-out from the family at the time of the court case, she was frozen in mid-stride, a birthday cake in hand. She was smiling from ear to ear, showing off small, white teeth and the type of dimples models killed for. Happiness and confidence seemed to radiate from her eyes, the deepest, purest blue Doug had ever seen. I have my whole life ahead of me, those eyes said. I’m happy here and now. I know what I am and who I am and I’m happy.

  I’m happy.

  Which only made what McGinty did all the worse.

  According to what was reported at the time, Bethany had been on a night out with a few of her friends. They had visited a few student haunts in and around the Old Town, including a club in the Cowgate.

  Doug glanced up from his notes for a moment, staring down the lane. He knew the place, had been in there a few times himself at the tail-end of a night out.

  Naturally enough, Bethany had attracted more than her fair share of attention that night. But one of the people watching her happened to be Derek McGinty. When Bethany and her friends left, McGinty had followed. Doug wondered what was in his mind then, if he had already planned what he was going to do and how far he was going to go. If he did, then the bastard was even more dangerous than he had first thought.

  Bethany’s friends, who lived in the university’s halls of residence overlooking Arthur’s Seat, made sure she got home safely as she lived in a flat in Marchmont that her parents – a doctor and a teacher – were renting for her during her studies. The friends shared a taxi from the club, swinging by Bethany’s flat to drop her off on the way back to the halls.

  ‘She got home safely,’ one of her friends was quoted as saying in the Tribune’s report on the trial. ‘We always made sure we all got home safely. I mean, that’s what you’re meant to do, isn’t it? Make sure your friends are safe?’

  Not safe enough.

  Police reports and forensics – again supplied off the record by Susie – showed that McGinty didn’t have much trouble getting in; the lock on the door to Bethany’s tenement was broken, meaning all he had to do was jog up the stair to her flat on the third floor. Once there, he simply knocked on the door. Doug closed his eyes and saw Bethany, mind addled by booze, ears ringing from the pulsing bass of the club, swinging the door open to see who was there. One of her friends who had forgotten something, maybe? Had she left something in the taxi? He saw her trying to slam the door shut as McGinty pushed his way into the flat, saw her trying to scream as he clamped a hand over her face, suffocating, choking…

  The full extent of what happened next wasn’t reported in the Tribune or any other newspaper – it was deemed too disturbing. Reading through the police reports, Doug wasn’t surprised.

  McGinty had manhandled Bethany into her bedroom, giving her a few hard knocks when she struggled, and had tied her to her bed, gagging her with a pair of her own stockings as he did so. He stripped her and sexually assaulted her for more than three hours. During this ordeal he had taken his time, pausing to consider what torment he could inflict upon her next.

  McGinty ransacked Bethany’s room and found a vibrator, which he used both vaginally and anally. He also forced Bethany to give him oral sex. Repeatedly. And, just to make sure he had a memento of the event, McGinty used Bethany’s own camera to take photographs. Doug skipped a few pages ahead to a transcript of Bethany’s interview. She mentioned the camera repeatedly, and he imagined he could hear her voice rising in panic as she remembered. The flash burning her skin, the harsh snap and click as he circled her, recording every moment of her degradation. Searches of McGinty’s flat – a shithole tenement in the rougher end of Leith – failed to uncover the camera, and he refused to tell police where it was in subsequent interviews.

  Another torment for Bethany to endure. She would have to rebuild her life knowing that somewhere, somewhere, there were pictures of her. Naked and exposed, McGinty’s hands on her, legs forced o
pen, her face a frozen cry of pain and shame.

  Doug paused, eyes wandering across the street in front of him. There was something about the attack that bothered him; something beyond the obvious, that is. He reread the relevant paragraphs, eyes seeking out the key words and phrases: ‘forced penetration with a foreign object’, ‘oral rape’, ‘condoms found in several locations’, ‘victim reports being photographed repeatedly by assailant’. He chewed his lip, considering, then shrugged. Nothing.

  McGinty finally left Bethany at a little before 7am. Doug wondered what had made him leave. After all, he had his victim completely subdued and a flat that was totally sealed off from the rest of the world. At the trial, police and psychologists believed the breaking of the day panicked McGinty, who would have wanted to make his escape when the stairwell was quiet and the streets were empty. Doug could understand this, but part of him knew it was simpler than that. Nightmares and monsters lost their power in daylight. And that was what McGinty was. A monster. And a coward.

  Bethany was found just after noon that day by her friends, who had gone to her flat after she missed her morning lectures and failed to answer her phone. They found her as McGinty had left her – bound to her bed, bleeding and broken.

  But despite this, Bethany was able to give the police a full description of McGinty. She even waived her right to anonymity and made a public appeal through the police to help track down her attacker and help other women avoid the same ordeal. This, coupled with the statement of one of her friends who said she had seen ‘some creepy doorman’ eying Bethany up in the club, and a media baying for blood over such an outrage against an attractive, middle-class girl with ‘her whole life ahead of her’, meant McGinty didn’t remain at large for long. He was arrested three days later, police crashing through the door of his council flat with sledgehammers in hand and the image of Bethany fresh in their minds.