by Lesley Kelly
And the dolce vita didn’t stop there. Lachie had a bedroom and a playroom to himself, stocked with the finest toys that a five-year-old could aspire to: on top of the spacehopper, Pong, and the seventeen-inch colour portable, there was a wide selection of Dinky cars, vans, planes and tanks, an Action Man Soldier with moving Eagle Eyes and a talking Action Man Commander, and a jumping battery-powered Evel Knievel Stunt Cycle.
Yet there was more. No two weeks in Scarborough in July for Lachie. His family went on holiday twice a year to Benidorm! To the best of my knowledge Benidorm was in a whole other country, and getting there involved going on an aeroplane (an experience that in my opinion would have been even more exciting than the holiday itself).
But did this abundance of material goods make Lachie happy? Did it buggery. He rarely went into the garden, never mind climbed the branches to his treehouse. Even when his father nailed a ladder to the side of the oak, Lachie still couldn’t be bothered dragging his tubby little arse up the steps.
New toys appeared and were discarded or broken with a callous disregard for their expense. The previous Christmas I had been given an Action Man Adventurer, one of the lesser Action Men as I was now beginning to discover. My dad had gone on at such length about how I was to treat it properly or he wasn’t forking out for a toy for me ever again that my mother had found Action Man still in his box two months later never having had a single adventure. She’d enquired if I didn’t like it and I’d burst into tears and said I was too scared to play with it in case I broke it. Such was life in Balfour Street.
The holidays were similarly taken for granted. I’d press Lachie for details of what it felt like to fly. He shrugged his shoulders with all the boredom of a seasoned traveller.
‘You know.’
This infuriated me. ‘No I don’t, I’ve never been in a plane.’
Lachie snorted at this, as if he found this very unlikely. ‘What – never? How do you go on holiday then?’
I didn’t feel inclined to share details of the four of us setting off to Scarborough in an overloaded Hillman Avenger, so I tried to steer the conversation back to the wonders of flight.
‘Isn’t it scary?’
‘Naw.’ And then he gave me one clue to how the other half lived. ‘You get a meal served in a wee plastic tray, and it has the meat in one section of the tray, and the potatoes in another, and your pudding in another.’
I shook my head in disbelief.
There were other less material advantages of my friendship with Lachie. Nobody bothered us in the playground because everyone had more sense, even at age five, than to mess with the son of Guthrie Stoddart. Guthrie ran a tight ship, with interests in (in no particular order): prostitution, debt collection, drugs running, smuggling, and any other opportunities that living in a port presented to him.
I suppose he was a scary man; he was followed everywhere by laddies with muscles and pit bulls, and bad things tended to happen to people that got in his way. My dad visibly paled when I told my parents about my new friend Stoddart.
‘Not Guthrie Stoddart’s laddie?’
I shrugged. ‘I dunno. He lives down by Leith Links and he’s got a spacehopper and Pong AND a colour TV.’
There was a long silence as my dad tried to process whether having your son befriend the hardest family in Leith was a good thing, or a bad thing. Eventually my mother spoke.
‘Well, Alec, at least he’ll not be bullied at school.’
Guthrie Stoddart didn’t scare me though. With my limited frame of reference, it was inevitable that I’d compare Guthrie to my own dad. Where Guthrie was tall and muscular, my dad was short and slight. Guthrie had a mop of curly black hair and sideburns that made him look like an exotic gypsy. My dad had short brown hair and a moustache with a hint of ginger that made him look just like everyone else’s dad. And, of course, Guthrie was providing a life of unimaginable excess for Lachie, whereas I had Balfour Street and Scarborough.
In later years I could rationalise that at least my dad was providing what he did by the honest means of ten-hour days working for the Council, but my five-year-old self had weighed and measured my dad with my Fisher Price Junior Kitchen Scales, and found him severely wanting.
And to be honest, Guthrie didn’t give me any reason to fear him. I never met him without my hair being ruffled, and Lachie and me being given ten pence to go to the shop. He always went out of his way to talk to us, teaching us several rude songs that would have had my father’s eyes popping out of his head in fury had he known. He provided us with sugar-heavy snacks that my mother would never have allowed at home. In short, he was a perfect gentleman in all our encounters, and as such held no terrors for me.
The Stoddarts’ was always full of people, all of them more exotic than my parents and their friends. There were dark-skinned men who winked at us as they came and went, laddies with white-blonde hair who spoke in a spiky foreign language, and lassies who wore short skirts and swore a lot. Human flotsam and jetsam that floated on a high tide from Leith docks to the Stoddarts’ house, and at the centre of it all, Guthrie Stoddart: ringmaster of his seaside circus, prince of the promenade.
For all that I loved the bustle of the Stoddarts’, and for all that I loved being near Guthrie, there were still things I saw and heard that confused me. When Lachie and I were playing in his room we’d often hear shouting: sometimes Guthrie himself, sometimes his laddies, other times voices we didn’t recognise. Lachie didn’t seem frightened by this and I took my cue from him.
There were other things that I couldn’t so easily shrug off. One day Lachie and I came bursting through the front door to see a man kneeling at the foot of the staircase. He was weeping and rocking back and forth, as the usual Stoddart traffic manouvered round him, ignoring his anguish. My dad was quite adamant on the issue that men didn’t cry, for any reason whatsoever, so I was quite surprised to find that a grown man actually could turn on the waterworks. I turned my face away as we passed him and ran up the stairs as fast as I could.
Another time when Lachie and I were playing in his room we heard the sound of a man screaming.
‘What was that?’ I said, although Lachie didn’t look quite as surprised as I did. We heard another scream.
‘We should go and see who it is,’ I said. We were deep in our hero worship of Spiderman and Batman at the time, so it seemed only natural to go and investigate. We pelted down the stairs as fast as we could; I was running toward the batcave and from the jerky movements Lachie was making I’m pretty sure he was swinging on a spider’s web.
On the bottome tread we found our path blocked by the short but solid form of Mrs Stoddart.
‘Away back upstairs and play, boys.’
We didn’t argue with her. That day I went home early and sat in our kitchen, watching my mother prepare mince and tatties for my dad’s dinner.
Much as I loved Guthrie, I didn’t get off to the best of starts with Mrs Stoddart. When I’d been palling about with Lachie for two, maybe three months, there was an incident that set the tone for our relationship. I was on my way back to Lachie’s room from the bathroom when I heard a strange sound coming from the kitchen. I’d not yet developed the ability to ignore bizarre goings-on chez Stoddart, so I pushed open the door. There, loud and proud, standing on the kitchen table was a chicken. Now even at five years old I understood that chicken drumsticks didn’t grow on trees, ready-coated in breadcrumbs, but my first thought wasn’t that this was Lachie’s dinner. No, I was jealous that on top of everything else Lachie’s parents had now bought him a pet.
I stepped into the kitchen to get a closer look at the squawking beast, and saw Isa Stoddart step forward, take the bird’s neck in both hands, and twist it firmly. The squawking stopped abruptly. I let out a scream and burst into tears. Isa looked up in surprise, then did something that I’d never seen her do before or since.
She laughed.
For the first few years I knew Mrs Stoddart, she wasn’t all that involved in the
business, with most of her time spent as a full-time mammy to Lachie. The kitchen was the hub of the Stoddart empire, and Mrs Stoddart would sit in her favourite chair, watching everything that was going on but not saying much. Nobody gave her any trouble though; Lachie never answered her back, the laddies with dogs never gave her any lip, and I never heard Guthrie raise his voice in her direction. Years later, when Guthrie disappeared suddenly and Isa took over the family business, I don’t think anyone was entirely surprised.
I didn’t subject my Ma to the comparison with her Stoddart counterpart that I put my dad through. There was no need – Ma so obviously beat Mrs Stoddart hands down. Ma was pretty and kind, and smelt of peppermint. She was always hugging my wee brother Col and me, and saying how much she loved us, and if she occasionally sat in the kitchen crying for no reason that we could see, or took to her bed of an afternoon, or threw a couple of plates across the kitchen, well, these were just quirks.
The only other comparison I made was a further one between Guthrie and Dad. Guthrie treated Mrs Stoddart like a queen. In fact, everything I know about how to treat women I learned from watching Guthrie run around after Isa. The man never came through the door without flowers or chocolates for her, which maybe helped to explain the size that she ended up. My dad never came through the door without a list of complaints about my Ma and her housekeeping, and I bet Lachie never lay in bed listening to his dad shouting and swearing at his mother.
My Ma was right about me not being bullied, but there were downsides to palling around with Lachie. For one thing, he didn’t like me having other friends. I obviously hadn’t understood the terms of our friendship, that the access to the Stoddart riches was a deal for me, and me alone, in return for my exclusive loyalty. In the early days of our friendship I was keen to bring the Stoddart fun factory to a wider audience. It didn’t seem fair to keep the treasures all to myself, and anyhow I was keen to see the inside of the treehouse, which didn’t seem imminent if left up to the host to suggest it, so I raised the issue.
‘Lachie – is it all right if Jonno comes round with me to your house tonight?’
He stared blankly at Jonno as if he’d never seen him before, instead of having sat a couple of seats away from him in the classroom for the past three months.
‘Naw.’
Jonno and I exchanged glances. I hadn’t thought of this. I assumed that Lachie would be as happy as me to have a few more pals.
‘How not?’ said Jonno, with more than a hint of aggression in his voice.
Lachie pushed his glasses back to the bridge of his nose and said, ‘’Cause I say so.’ He wandered back into the school.
‘What did he say that for?’ said Jonno, looking aggrieved.
I shrugged.
‘Are you still going to go?’ I wasn’t sure what to do, but Jonno made me an offer. ‘You could come to the Links with us.’
I wrestled with my conscience for a minute but to be honest, for all his worldly goods, spending every afternoon with Lachie was a bit of a bore. I had a fantastic afternoon with the lads in the Links, which was only marred by the look on Lachie’s face the next morning.
‘Where were you yesterday?’
‘In the Links.’
‘I thought you were coming round to mine?’
I didn’t say anything.
‘Are you coming round this afternoon?’
Again I didn’t say anything. I’d enjoyed my afternoon of freedom and I didn’t really want to give it up.
‘’Cause my dad’s bought me something I want to show you.’
In spite of myself I was intrigued. ‘What?’
‘A rocket that you can set off in the back garden.’
Space travel! He had me back.
And we settled into our friendship, forsaking all others. Not that making friends would have been an option with Lachie around. So, why did I hang around with the useless bastard? Well, the joys of accessing Pong and colour TV gave way to the joys of accessing Transformers, video games and illicit cigarettes. Why did he hang around with a freeloading bastard like me? Simple – he needed me.
Lachie was never going to strike terror in the hearts of the primary school children of Leith, but he was enough of his father’s son to feel that he should be top dog in the playground. So he cast his eye around for a sidekick, and, using the superb judgement that characterised his later life, chose the only child in school less likely to be able to land a punch than himself.
We were the crappest bullies in the world, the Keystone Cops of playground enforcement. Most of Lachie’s attempts to assert his authority took the form of him deliberately bumping into someone, then trying to make something of it. Lachie had the common sense not to push it too far: he wasn’t wandering around bumping into Primary Sevens or anyone like that. His usual targets were the quieter members of Primary One, with his favourite target being George Thompson.
George was a bookish laddie, no good at sport, and with a tendency to cry if he got hit. He was way brighter than the rest of us, and ended up a Professor of Surgery at some teaching hospital in England. I often wonder if it was his early experiences at Lachie’s hands that gave him the will to succeed and get the hell out of Leith.
The deal was this. Lachie would seek out George at lunchtime. I’d do my best to distract him onto other pastimes, but it was a hard job, seeing as Lachie had no interest at all in football, chasing lassies, or watching the bigger laddies smoking, all of which appealed to me. Poor George would be sitting on his own, reading whatever Ladybird book he’d borrowed from the Library that week. The book would start shaking when he saw us appear but he never looked up.
‘Oi, George.’
He always ignored Lachie, who would then up the ante by knocking the book from his hand.
‘Leave me alone.’ George, mindful, no doubt, of what his mammy and daddy had told him about the Stoddarts, would try desperately not to escalate the situation, but Lachie wouldn’t have it. He’d turn to me and say, ‘You get him, Stainsie,’ as if I was his equivalent of Guthrie’s laddies with pit bulls. I’d always refuse to fight, which would lead to him calling me all the names, allowing his quarry to make a run for it. And even George got the better of us; the teacher appointed him classroom monitor and he got to spend lunchtimes tidying up the classroom instead of mixing with the hoi polloi in the playground. Our reign of terror was over.
So, Lachie had none of the brains required of a criminal mastermind and I had none of the brawn required of a henchman. In fact, the only person that thought I had something to offer to the world of crime and extortion was Guthrie Stoddart, and he was very clear about what I could do for him.
Tuesday
Next morning I’m up well before Father Paul. I’ve had a sleepless night going over and over what’s happened but two things are pretty clear to me:
I know who killed Lachlan Stoddart.
And I know who’s been spreading rumours about my homicidal tendencies.
Bruce.
He’s got the motive – get Lachie out of the way so that he can take over the running of Mrs Stoddart’s empire and get me fingered as the likely culprit. After all, no one was expecting me to reappear. He’s got the form – he as good as said to me that he’s done in the other laddie-with-the-dog, who is, no doubt, currently the body-in-residence at my new home. And he’s got the brains. Well, this is maybe the weakest part of my theory but you can’t spend all that time with Mrs Stoddart without picking up an idea or two about ruthless business practices.
The trouble is that I can’t prove this, which leaves me open to a kicking if I stick around, or Marianne in danger of finding out if Bruce is a natural blonde or not, if I don’t.
I’ve no idea what I’m going to do. As I go down to get my breakfast my mind changes with every tread of the stairs. Creak. I’m out of here. Creak. I’ll stay and face the music. Creak.
Then, when I get to the landing, it hits me. I’ve got seven days until Bruce comes knocking on my door. Seven da
ys to find something concrete that links Bruce to the killings. Then I point Danny Jamieson in that direction, the pony-tailed prick ends up in the slammer, and Marianne and I ride off into the sunset. Or something like that.
I clean the table up as best as I can, but there’s no mistaking the fact there’s been a woodwork massacre. Father Paul arrives for his breakfast at the back of eight.
‘What on God’s earth happened here?’ He points at the mess with his spoon.
The gesturing cutlery reminds me of last night and I give an involuntary shudder. ‘Sorry, Father, I was chopping some vegetables and the knife got away from me.’
He runs his finger along the battered surface. He doesn’t look convinced at my explanation but reaches past me for his muesli.
‘I am sorry, Father. I’ll pay for the damage once I’m sorted with a job.’
‘Don’t bother about it,’ he says with a wave of his hand. ‘We’ve more important concerns, like minimising the fallout of you being back in town.’
‘I’m not here to cause any trouble, honest. But I ran out of money and…’ I’m still not sure how that sentence should end. I only came back to see Miss Spencely. My plan was to be in and out of Leith in 24 hours, right until I ran into the business end of a kitchen implement wielded by Bruce. I’m not inclined to share the news of my potential inheritance with a priest though; I don’t want guilt-tripped into giving it to the widows and orphans of the parish.
Father Paul is choking on a mouthful of oats and raisins. ‘You got through £1,700 in six weeks? Did you have some help?’
Aye and she wasn’t worth it. A man of the Lord is not going to be impressed at me spending his parishioners’ cash on loose women so I start prevaricating.
‘No. But £1,700 is not a lot of money to start a new life, what with accommodation, and, eh, finding somewhere to stay, and…’
He holds up a hand. ‘Save it, Staines.’ He reaches into his pocket and pulls out a crumpled envelope which he puts in front of me.
