Murderabilia

by Craig Robertson

  ‘It sounds like he doesn’t have any visitors to his garden if he wasn’t worried about it being seen. Was it locked?’

  ‘Yes, bolted from inside. The bolt was rusted pretty stiff, too, so I don’t think it had been opened in long time.’

  ‘You didn’t open the bolt to get back out, did you?’

  He let the silence hang until she apologised.

  ‘Sorry, I’m used to working with halfwits.’

  ‘Yes and they must love being micro-managed all the time.’

  ‘I don’t . . . Anyway, what about the bus stop sign. Could it be seen from the street?’

  ‘No chance. It’s taller than the wall but it’s far enough into the garden that it can only be seen from inside. It’s stuck in a corner, too. The only people that could see it would be by Haldane’s invitation only.’

  ‘And he never mentioned these parts of his collection when he was boasting to you about the other stuff?’

  ‘I think I’d have remembered.’

  ‘Oh, shut up and stop being so precious. I’m just thinking out loud. Just get yourself home. I need someone to make me a cup of tea.’

  She ended the call and Winter picked up his camera, flicking through the images he’d just taken.

  The house, Haldane leaving, the bus stop sign.

  And the headstone.

  The more distant shot with Haldane’s house and conservatory behind it placed it firmly in the location. The close-up was the money shot, though. Beloved son. Loving brother. He doesn’t lie here but in our hearts.

  One day, this photograph would fill a front page. But not today.

  CHAPTER 59

  Nathan hated his doctor. Genuinely, absolutely, utterly hated him.

  Doctor Death. Doctor Doom. The Quack who needed a Smack. Doctor George Jeffries GP. Gormless Prick. Greasy Prat. Gimpy Pisshead. Glorified Pill Pusher. Glib Ponce. Grubby Pig.

  Doctor Jeffries. The bearer of bad news. The incompetent Doctor J.

  He worked out of a practice in Mount Florida. Four of them on the nameplate and yet you still had next to no chance of getting seen. Phone for an appointment, or try to, find the lines jammed and then call back every two minutes, and it’s still engaged. Even if you win the lottery and get through, the odds are still against your actually seeing a doctor.

  You can’t book for more than a week ahead and there’s no chance of getting an appointment for the next few days. If it’s an emergency, then maybe, if you’re lucky, you could go in and wait and see. Is it an emergency, though? What, you’ve been feeling it for a few months? Well it’s hardly an emergency, is it? Try again next week.

  And then of course you finally get an appointment and the quack is fucking useless. What’s the point if they first can’t diagnose it, then can’t cure it. The specialists? Not much better, but at least maybe they’d have had a chance if Doctor Dickhead had read the symptoms right in the first place.

  It took three appointments – each one harder to get than the one before – and four months before it was finally diagnosed. By then it was too late: the bastard had its teeth in him and would never let go till it killed him.

  Sometimes Nathan thought it was partly his own fault. Maybe he could have pushed it harder; maybe he should have complained more, not suffered it, then moaned afterwards. But that was letting them off the hook; it was letting him off.

  Jeffries with his bad breath and smug smile. With his silly little specs and garish ties. With his patronising, nothing-to-worry-about attitude. You’re run down. Just take it easy for a bit. Four or five years training for a medical degree and they tell you to take some vitamins and give yourself a shake. That worked well, didn’t it?

  Nathan hadn’t made too much of a fuss. It wasn’t his way. The whole medical practice, especially old useless Grubby Pig, probably thought he’d taken it really well and not blamed anyone else for it. Just a bit of bad luck, really, nothing they could have done.

  It wasn’t what he was really thinking. He was thinking about a spiked railing going through Jeffries’s head. Or a car knocking him down, then reversing over him. Or maybe tying him to a chair and then letting him experience what pain really was so that just maybe he’d finally realise that a smug smile of sympathy wasn’t going to make anything feel better.

  He’d been thinking about George Jeffries for a while now. Every time made it worse. Every time he thought of him, he wanted to do something worse. He’d been imagining greater and more complicated punishments. Something that Glib Ponce really deserved.

  He could see the doctor’s face when he closed his own eyes. See him when he tried to sleep and when he couldn’t, see him when he paced the floor and in the early hours and when he finally woke from his bloodied dreams. The big, pink, patronising face of Greasy Prat, smiling at him. Always smiling, the grin getting big and wider and cheesier every time he saw it.

  Nathan wondered why the man did that, why any doctor would do it. Smile. Is it supposed to make bad news easier to swallow? To show you that they care? Maybe they teach it at their posh universities. Bedside manner, that was what they called it. How to get the plebs to accept you don’t know what you’re doing but at least you know more than they do, and you’re a nice person. Fuck that shit!

  There was an undertaker’s just five doors down from the surgery on Cathcart Road where the quacks did their stuff. Handy, really. Dr Jeffries and his fellow snake-oil-guessing merchants could mess up but offer a discount with their neighbours on a shop-with-them, shop-with-us basis. From where Nathan sat in his car, he could see the front door of both operations and was studying them in turn.

  At least one of them was honest. R. K. Harkins and Sons did what it said on the tin. They filled you full of embalming fluid, slapped on some makeup so you looked more like yourself than you had done in a long time, dressed you in your Sunday best and sent you on your way to the next world with a quiet smile fixed on your face. A fake smile, a drawn smile.

  The doctors? They’d have been as well sending him to the next-door chemist for an aspirin or to the butcher’s two down to sell himself off as meat. For all the good they’d done him, he’d have been better off going to the curry house next door and taking his chances with them.

  Nathan had no time for people trying to take the piss out of him, and that was what Jeffries and the rest of them had done. Like that kid Calvin who had tried to make out he was selling what was Nathan’s. The trophies that Nathan had earned. He couldn’t let that go any more than he could let Brian Horsburgh get away with making fun of him when he was seventeen. The Brownlie kid had to be made an example of.

  There were double yellows on both sides of the street in front of the surgery but Nathan had found a rare space just before the lines began and sat there and waited. Nobody paid him any attention, sitting low in the driver’s seat with a hat pulled down on his forehead. Instead, the world just shuffled on past towards the bookie’s and the newsagent’s, a pair of old ladies compared complaints on the pavement, and the occasional junkie staggered in for iced doughnuts and yum-yums at the bakery.

  Nathan knew by now that he couldn’t quite be sure when Jeffries would leave the practice. Sometimes he’d make a break for it before seven; others he’d still be there nearer to eight. It was all about getting to know his routine. Wednesdays, as this was, he’d more likely be later. Maybe he did paperwork that night or sent half-arsed apology letters to the patients he failed. Maybe he just practised his smile in the mirror before he went home. No matter, Nathan would wait and then he’d follow.

  There he was. Last man out and locking the door behind him. His collar turned up to the rain and his silly specs already starting to need wiper blades. His fat, pink face glowed under the street light and he looked around as if expecting a burst of applause. He tugged his raincoat tighter to him and began to walk. Nathan already knew the first few turns he’d take, knew where he was going, so he sat tight and waited it out. Let him walk, let him lead the way to his car.

  Jeff
ries’s usual parking spot was on Bennan Square, just ten to fifteen minutes’ walk away, crossing the invisible border into Govanhill. A football-pitch-sized rectangle of green formed an oasis in the middle of the surrounding ex-council housing. It didn’t have much more than two squares of grass, trees and the odd park bench but it was a nice spot on a summer’s day. On a night like this, it was dark, isolated and quiet, making the path through the middle a dangerous shortcut.

  Nathan made his move, trusting Doctor Dickhead to be a creature of habit, and hoping he’d been able to get his spot that morning. He drove slowly, carefully, took his turn off Allison Street and looked for him. Yes, good, good. He was walking close to the tenements, hoping to avoid as much of the rain as he could. As if that were the only thing he had to worry about.

  Nathan passed him without a sideways glance and made his way round to the far side of Bennan Square, his fingers crossed on the steering wheel. Just off the corner, he saw Jeffries’s white Honda Civic and sailed past it, turning into Brereton Street, parked up and got out. Timing, it was all about timing, but he had the length of time it took to cross the park to play with. That was his window of opportunity.

  As he entered the park, the first thing he did was to look around and make sure no one else was daft enough to be in there in the dark and the rain. He was pleased to see the rest of Govanhill had more sense than the doctor.

  He walked slowly, giving him time, and there, sure enough, he saw the tall figure wrapped in the raincoat, hustling along the path. Nathan had his hands in his pockets, his head lowered, doing his best to be as unthreatening as possible. Jeffries had certainly seen him but there was no way he’d recognise him, not with wet spectacles and the gloom.

  He edged towards the left of the path, letting Jeffries take the right, letting him feel secure. He walked half a stride beyond him before slipping his right hand out of his pocket and swinging it through the air, catching Jeffries square on the temple and watching him fold like a wet rag with barely a whimper.

  Nathan slipped the cosh back into his pocket and bent to place an arm under each of the doctor’s armpits. The man’s deadweight stalled him for a moment but, once he got him moving, it was easy to haul him off the path and into the thick bushes that grew just a yard or two away.

  He dumped him there, Jeffries’s head on the wet grass and his mouth gaping like a fish. Alive but out cold. Not for long but long enough for Nathan to go through his pockets, taking his wallet and car keys, slipping off his spectacles and placing them safely in his own jacket pocket.

  Nathan crouched, keeping his knees off the grass and avoiding their getting tell-tale wet, looking and listening to make sure no one was aware of what had happened. Satisfied, he waited, delivering small slaps to the side of the doc’s face to bring him round. It took a few of them, stinging more each time to make the point, before Jeffries began to stir.

  He enjoyed the look of recognition when it finally came. At first it was just a gasp of breath and a muddle of confusion as to where he was. After a bit the eyes focused and then remembered; only then did he know who Nathan was. You? Why?

  Nathan didn’t let him speak the words, only think them. He clasped a hand firmly over the man’s mouth, both holding him down and silencing him.

  ‘You killed me,’ he whispered to him. ‘You sentenced me to death and smiled at me. You shouldn’t have done that.’

  Jeffries wriggled under his hand, protesting with his eyes and doubtless making all kinds of bullshit excuses and apologies. It was all too little and too late. Nathan didn’t want to hear it.

  He swung the cosh again, cracking hard against the doctor’s skull. Jeffries passed out immediately but Nathan swung it once more for good measure, harder this time, hearing bone break as he did so. He needed silence.

  Sure, the easy thing would have been to tape the man’s mouth closed, something he’d done on maybe a dozen occasions before. That wouldn’t work this time, though, not given what Nathan planned to do.

  He brought the Stanley knife from his pocket with one hand and squeezed Jeffries’s mouth into a smile with the other. He looked down at him for a moment, hating him and hating his lips, hating the shape they made.

  He was going to cut the smug smile clean off the doctor’s face. And then he was going to kill him.

  CHAPTER 60

  ‘I’m telling ye. She’s Danny Hamilton’s big sister.’

  ‘No way, man. Danny Hamilton’s got a face like a bag of spanners.’

  ‘Still his sister but. You’ve got it bad for her, eh?’

  ‘Naw.’

  ‘Aye ye huv, Hutchy. Cannae stop talking aboot her. You pure love her.’

  ‘Bolt, ya nugget. I jist fancy her. A bit. Nuttin’ special.’

  ‘Aye, right. Tell ye what. If you dog school with me the day then I’ll no tell Danny that you’re pure wanking off over his sister.’

  ‘Naw. Ah’m no skipping school, Briggo. My dad’ll kill me if he finds out.’

  ‘Aww, come on. How’s he gonnae know, eh?’

  ‘He’s like a walking lie detector, him. Cannae get anything past him. Well, no unless you’re my mam. She’s the only one can con him. Does it all the time.’

  ‘Telling you, he’ll never know. Naeb’dy will. We go into school, register, maybe go to Maths first thing, then we leg it. Spend the day down the arcade. I’m no getting up at the arsecrack of dawn to deliver these papers and then no spending the money. We can go to Mickey D’s as well.’

  ‘Naw!’

  ‘Aye. Ye know ye want tae. Let’s get these bags back to the shop before old man Maan sends out a search party then I’ll see ye after brekkie.’

  ‘Naw.’

  ‘Shitebag.’

  ‘Fuck you.’

  The boys took the path through the gardens on Bennan Square, the same route they took every morning after delivering the papers and meeting up to walk back together to the shop on Cathcart Road. The gardens were a bit close to Hutchy’s house for comfort but the pair were still gallus enough to stop and have a smoke on the benches. It was their ritual, deserved after a hard morning shoving copies of the Daily Record through letterboxes.

  It was barely daylight but, as they turned into the gardens, Hutchy saw the leg sticking out where a leg shouldn’t be. He nearly crapped himself but managed to keep his calm just enough to turn it into bravado.

  ‘Jeezo, man, look. A jaikie sleeping in the bushes.’

  Briggo followed his gaze and grinned wide. ‘Let’s boot him then leg it.’

  ‘Ya mentalist. Aye, awrite then. Bags first kick.’

  ‘Naw, it was ma idea.’

  They edged closer, making sure the man was asleep and seeing his arms spread wide, legs splayed on the grass and his head tumbled back into the flowerbed. Hutchy and Briggo stood over him, the truth slowly dawning.

  They saw his eyes rolled back in his head and they saw the bloody mess in the middle of his face. They saw he was too well dressed to be a junkie or a jaikie. Neither boy found the ability to move his feet but each eventually managed to swivel his head towards the other.

  ‘Fuck’s sake, man.’

  ‘Ah know.’

  ‘Scared, Hutchy?’

  ‘Naw. You?’

  ‘Naw.’

  It was quiet in the gardens. Quiet enough that Hutchy could hear his own heart beating. He’d never seen a dead body before. He didn’t think he wanted to ever see one again.

  From the corner of his eye, he saw Briggo reach into his back pocket and bring out his phone, swiping through the options on the screen.

  ‘You calling the cops?’

  ‘Ma fuck. I’m taking pictures.’

  ‘Whit?’

  ‘Naebody’s gonnna believe this otherwise. This is going on ma Facebook.’

  Hutchy fished out his own phone and followed suit, even though his stomach urged him not to. The pair of them clicked through their fear like whistling through a graveyard. Big baws that’s what they had. Big baws.

&n
bsp; The scream nearly made them crap themselves. It pierced the air and rang round the gardens, shattering the morning calm. The boys turned and saw a little red-haired girl, her eyes as wide as the Clyde and her lungs bursting. It was Hutchy’s little sister, Megan.

  ‘Aw, shite! Shite!’

  Hutchy took a step and clamped his hand over the girl’s mouth, at the same time spinning her away from the body to take it away from her view.

  ‘Dinnae look, Megs. And stop that screaming. Dad’ll kill me.’

  The girl sank her teeth into his hand and bit down with all her strength. Hutchy yelped and let her go. Megan spun on her heels and looked at the body again, screaming louder and longer than before.

  All round the square, doors and windows were opening. Heads sticking out, people emerging to see what the hell was going on. Hutchy and Briggo looked at each other, the pretence of hiding their fear gone. They stuffed their phones in their pockets out of sight and backed away from the corpse as the residents of Bennan Square began to filter through the gates and into to the gardens. They were in for it now.

  This was old-school for Winter. Photographing bodies. It didn’t get old, didn’t get better or worse, neither more nor less exciting. It was what it was.

  The difference from the days when this was what he was specifically paid to do was that he was now on the outside looking in, his lens effortlessly shortening the distance across the railings and into the garden where the man’s body lay spread-eagled.

  He’d got a call from one of the uniform guys, Sandy Murray. A tip-off that would be worth a beer or two and a favour owed in return. It was well worth it, particularly as he got the alert early enough to beat the crowds, including most of the crime-scene guys.

  They were here now and had a hustle on, trying to rig up a tent to keep out prying eyes, but they couldn’t beat his trigger finger. Click. The stricken body. Click. The bloodied face. Click. The hideous, sculpted hole. Click. The ragged flaps of skin and teeth and gums that looked funny where the lips used to be. Click. Click. Click.