– Not the best in the world, but I know my trade. I trace, I snoop, I find out, the way someone else makes chairs or wires a circuit. If a man has nothing else, he can hold to his trade. I'm a good tradesman, if you must talk of pride.
At the last moment, with the satisfaction of having had Heathers turn abruptly towards him, he veered away. In a corner there were doors marked Dames and Hoods.
As he relieved himself, Humphrey Bogart bared teeth at him from the tiled wall. Here's lookin' at you, kid.
'Get him to close his eyes.' The man standing beside him put a large pale hand across the tiles. Murray finished and stepped back to avoid his contact. The man was tall, heavily built, with a well-fed fifty-year-old face under a plumage of white hair. Swaying and looking over his shoulder as he stood into the stall, the big cigar in the corner of his mouth curled blue smoke up into his eyes. The computer in Murray's head unasked rattled cards and placed him, one of the gay couple in the Shot Paid talking about a visit to the States. That time too there had been piss on the air. Unexpectedly, the back of his tongue went down in a hidden spasm of retching. He went to the basin and ran water over his hands.
'It's not fair,' the man said. 'Take this afternoon – I was walking from the Square up to St Vincent's following this beautiful thing in jeans. Oh, incredible. A beautiful tight bum and that perfect little gap between the thighs. And blond hair, shining, and worn long. And then I came level with him and he was a girl. God, I felt so upset. What's the world coming to when you can't tell the difference between the boys and the girls?'
'Mister,' Murray said, 'you must be very drunk or very stupid.' He turned with a sense of release. His hands tightened with the need to hurt, but the first glance told him it was useless. Smiling with shaking lips, the big man was as abruptly sobered as the drunk walking a parapet who realises the ground a few feet below in the dark is the tops of tall trees.
Murray thumbed the button and felt the stream of hot dry air flow over his hands.
Another man had entered unnoticed. He watched them from the door with blank incurious eyes. Automatically Murray checked his memory and was sure he had never seen him before. He would not have been difficult to remember: black hair of the solid colour sometimes given by dyeing, standing up in spikes, and a doughy lumpy face; like a cartoon only there was nothing funny about the effect. He moved aside to let the big man escape, carrying his white hair like a flag of surrender.
The newcomer came forward and leaned over the nearest washbasin. He pulled up his lip and picked between his front teeth with a dirty fingernail. 'Two friends making a quarrel?' He spoke with the accent of the city touched with some original foreignness.
With a streetfighter's eye, Murray saw the breadth of shoulder, the unusual length of the arms, the strange lumpy ridges on the face like folds in dough kneaded with dirty hands. The frustration of that day, of too many days, ached for relief. 'Friends?' he asked and spat into the basin.
The man watched him in the mirror. 'Sorry, pal, I not want to fight you.'
In his muscles disappointed, beyond the disapproval of his mind, Murray released a long breath.
'You're a wise man,' he said contemptuously.
'Sure.'
Murray turned his back on him and the man said, 'You want to fight – you'll find plenty people.'
There was an inner and an outer door with a short flight of steps between. Murray climbed the steps and stepped back into the club through the second door.
In a half ring what seemed at first impression a dozen men waited for him. His reflexes were fast and instantly he threw himself back only to jar against an unyielding resistance. The door he had just passed through was now locked from the inside. The men stood waiting. Beyond them he could see the empty spaces of the deserted club; on the nearest table blue smoke curled up from a cigar left in an ashtray. As he looked round, he saw that the doorman was one of the men on his left. He had tried to give a warning and Murray knew that by his code that was enough.
George would not be an ally.
After the first shock, he stood quietly, his feet slightly apart, his arms relaxed at his sides. He was breathing faster but it was controlled. He saw there were no weapons showing and thought that might mean there was a fair chance he would not be fatally injured. The men facing him were used to a man collapsing with fright or rushing them. Their waiting became wary and dangerously heightened.
On his left, between George and an older man with a boxer's bent nose, there was a blond teenager who let fly with a kick for the head karate style. Marginally, the left was the side from which Murray had expected the first move. It was the side most people expected to be the weaker. He twisted, caught the foot by the ankle and threw it from him. He heard the satisfying crack as the blond head smashed into the wall. A boot from the other side caught him on the back of the thigh. It was a practised kick, not swung but pushed out like a punch and if it had landed differently would have broken his leg. He staggered and the whole pack fell on him. There were so many, they got in each other's way. Three trained men like the one who had numbed his leg would have worked more effectively. Crouched he made an awkward target. Mouth open, heaving for air, he pumped his fists. Anything he hit was profit. A heavy blow struck him on the side of the head. He drove his knee up and a rabbit screamed thinly. He fought his way almost clear by aggression and strength. A space opened round him.
It was enough. Someone, perhaps the one who had caught him at the beginning, kicked him on the thigh. Almost on the same place as before, it paralysed the leg. Spinning like a grotesque bird wounded, as they came again he went down.
Testicles, spleen, kidneys, head – there is no way a man on the ground can protect all of them. The only thing in his favour was their number and eagerness. The time came and passed when it would have been better to lose consciousness.
It took a moment to realise the storm was over. Squinting up he saw blurred and enormous like a shape in fog, the strange lumped face of the man who had barred the door on his escape. Like a black halo of spikes, the hair stood out round it. In his hand over Murray's head, he held one of the ice buckets lifted from a table. 'I fix your barrow, you bastard.' The face grew larger, spit from its mouth fell on him. The figure was taller than anyone he had ever seen, taller even than the bearded fishermen who towered over a small boy.
Too quickly for Murray to protect his head, the bucket swung away into the distance and rushed back.
– You don't know what guilt is. You're just an amateur at guilt, Eddy.
Lights flashed from the bucket's polished sides. It filled the world.
BOOK THREE
13 What the World Is
WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 12TH 1988
The stripper was no girl, maybe even over thirty, but her legs were long and well-shaped and her breasts looked firm under the leather gear that still covered them since she was only into the opening bars of her number. She strutted from one side of the small platform to the other, it was almost prancing, it was almost a march. Wherever she was going, she was in a hurry to get there. She gazed above the head of the audience and with one hand shook the chain that ran from under her armpit to where it was clipped at the top of her thigh. She spread her fingers and vibrated them over her crotch, then marched to the brisk music of her tape back across the platform; leant back and sticking the dog whip through her legs from behind waggled it up and down more or less on the drum beat. For the first time she looked down at them, glancing about as if to catch someone's eye.
'That SM stuff,' Billy Shanks said, gathering a mouthful of mashed potato on to his fork, 'it seems a bit heavy for a working men's club at lunchtime.'
'Poor buggers.' Eddy Stewart looked round at the roomful of men. A blue haze of smoke drifted over the tables. 'A lot of them are having to nurse their beer because they don't have a wage packet. You and me are the working men here.'
'Still,' Billy said, not to be deflected, 'last time you dragged me to this place, it was the schoolg
irl routine, a wee performer squatting on her hockey stick. I didn't like it, but I could see why they would. But this high heels and a whip stuff –’
'You're a snob,' Stewart said. 'Some of these guys have been round the world – and the rest have seen the videos.'
The stripper bent over and showed them her behind. Billy sighed. 'How is Murray?' he asked.
'He could do with someone to visit him. He's depressed.'
'With Murray, how could you tell?'
Stewart laughed. 'He wasn't his usual cheery self.'
'It's a phobia – I can't bear to go and see somebody I know in hospital. I can go as part of the job, but not privately. I mean, if it's for the column, fine. I used to know a bus conductor like that – every time he got into a car he was travel sick.'
'So make it official.' Stewart chewed with relish. He always enjoyed a lunch that came on Billy Shanks' expense account. 'Do your boy reporter bit and ask him what happened. Even if he doesn't cough why, he'll be glad to see you.'
'With Murray,' Billy repeated himself gloomily, 'how can you tell?'
'You can tell.'
'I don't know...' Billy swung an arm in a gesture furtive on his own wild scale. 'He's depressed?'
'They think he might lose an eye.'
'What?' With Billy shock had the unexpected effect of making him go very still.
'That was early on Sunday when I went in. But they couldn't find the eye at that point – it's all gone to pulp. The doctor I spoke to wasn't happy about the way it looked. If he gets away with it, he'll have potted the darky in a black ball final.'
'Ah, for God's sake,' Billy groaned. 'If it has to depend on his luck!'
The big policeman forked food in and said broodingly but not very distinctly, 'What's so different about Murray? Most of us have lousy luck.'
Billy, with the intuition of someone who had been born up the next close; played in the same streets when school was something the big ones went to; was even in some second-cousin-twice removed kind of way related to Stewart; said with only apparent irrelevance, 'I always envied you getting Lynda. She was your luck, Eddy. If she'd had better taste, she'd have married me.'
Like many men born to be bachelors, he had the notion that his state was due to some perfect girl whom he had been denied and who made any other woman second best. Quite often for him, when he thought of her, Lynda filled this romantic niche.
'You're full of piss and wind,' Stewart said, belching himself as if in illustration.
'Probably,' Billy said, 'but I still find it easier at the moment to feel sorry for Murray than I do for you.'
'He might be worse. Jill the Ripper might have got him and cut his balls off.' Stewart snorted, spraying crumbs of aggressive amusement in Billy's direction. 'That's what the old guy who found him thought had happened. The old clown ran up the street with his trousers half up his bum. Slap into Tommy Clarke with his wee notebook for car numbers. All of them standing about every corner in Moirhill with their wee notebooks, only somebody dumped Murray and none of them any the wiser. This silly old bugger had been getting ready for his bed when he looked out and saw Murray on the pavement under the lamp. Corner of Deacon Street – three in a row the old guy thought and away like a bloody fire engine.'
'Very public spirited of him,' Billy reflected. 'Most folk in Moirhill would have kept their noses clean instead of running to look for a policeman.'
'Policeman my arse! He was away to phone the Citizen and collect a sweetener.'
Restored, Billy whinnied and flew out his arms jubilantly. 'That's public spirited too. After me, you'd have been the first to know.' He sobered. 'Which still doesn't tell us who did him over – or what he was doing in Moirhill in the first place.'
Murray, standing just inside the entrance, had difficulty at first in spotting them. It wasn't just that the room was crowded, but that the dark glasses shaded the smoke like mist; the music smashed against him like something physical striking his head; after the drifting isolation of the side ward, it was an assault of people so that what he felt was almost timidity and he had to force himself to walk forward. As he crossed the room, the stripper finished her act, turning her back and shaking her hips in a frenzy until her tight buttocks shimmered in a looseness of the flesh.
It was Billy who saw him first, and reacted spontaneously with dismay that turned at once into relief and concern.
'I signed myself out,' Murray said, answering the question before it was asked. It felt good to sit down; too good, like scurrying into a refuge.
'How's the eye?' Having arrested his fork half-way to his mouth, Stewart completed the movement and started chewing. 'That looks like a bit of raw meat hanging down under your glasses.'
'It's still there.'
'Signed yourself out.' Stewart nodded and sucked a fibre of meat from between his front teeth. 'You're a hard bastard.'
'How did you know we were here?' Billy wondered. 'Phoning.' Murray turned his darkened gaze on Stewart. 'They let Malcolm, my brother, go.'
'Your brother? They let him go home on the Saturday night. Of course, you'd be out of the game by then, you wouldn't know.'
'Standers let him go?'
Stewart blew out his lips in the pleasure of contempt. 'Standers! Forget him. As soon as Merchant was found dead, the Chief Constable hit the panic button. It was too hot to leave for a clown like Standers. Jackie McKellar's in charge now.'
'McKellar?' Murray's years out of the city had left him out of touch with a lot of things; he was still catching up.
'Detective Chief Superintendent McKellar,' Billy took a professional pride in explaining. 'Early fifties. There was a planning meeting at Headquarters on Saturday afternoon. Ness – he's the Assistant Chief Constable (Crime) – chaired it. McKern, Standers' boss for Northern, was there. And Frank O'Hara of Central Division.' On the last name, he looked at Murray questioningly, but saw that he understood. Central was the politically dominant of the six divisions into which the city was divided – in it were the main business districts and the centre of local government – so that although they shared the same rank O'Hara was deferred to by the other division chiefs. His presence was an indication of the kind of pressure they expected Merchant's death was going to involve. 'Oh, and Standers was there, but only to give a progress report. Eddy's right, Jackie McKellar's the man in charge now. And he's good- he's got a record of quick results. McKellar knows what he's doing.'
'Peerse doesn't think so,' Stewart said. 'He believes in your Jill the Ripper, Billy – or at least half believes in her. And he more than half believes he knows who she is.'
'He what?'
'Merchant's girlfriend – Frances Fernie.'
Billy subsided in disappointment. 'Not possible. Murray's brother was with her in her flat from ten o'clock on the Friday evening until seven the next morning. They know the body was dumped between midnight and five in the morning, which means either your brother's in it too or she's in the clear.'
'McKellar believed your brother's story, Murray,' Stewart said.
'But don't be surprised if Peerse turns up on his doorstep one day soon.'
'How can they be sure when the body was dumped?' Murray asked, ignoring him.
'The Crusader pub – you know, the one in Barnes Street? The bar staff locked up and came out of the side door about midnight. The charge hand and another guy walked down the lane to Carnation Street. There was no body there then – they'll swear to that. It was found just after five by a beat copper making a routine check.'
'Only he's not getting any medals,' Stewart said, 'because he skived off earlier in the night instead of doing his rounds, which means they can't narrow the time down more.' He glanced at his watch. 'And it's nearly time I was away. The rest of them are over there working a twenty-hour day and eating sandwiches.'
'Talking about skiving,' Billy said. 'Eddy the fox.'
'I'm tidying up a loose end,' Stewart said with a satisfied grin.
'I've been a long time at this g
ame.'
Murray stopped himself just in time from putting his hand up to press against the pain in his head. He swallowed on a surge of nausea. 'I'm trying to put a name to a face,' he said. 'A guy who has some connection to the casino in Stark Street. That's where I met him.'
'On Saturday night?'
'You know I don't remember anything about Saturday night. I got a bang on the head,' Murray said. 'He's about five eight. Maybe a hundred and seventy pounds. He's got black hair, but it's weird – it stands up in clusters and it looks black enough to be dyed. Sounds funny, but he isn't funny at all. He's, just seeing him, you know he's…a real nutter.' Evil was a word that would have embarrassed them all. 'Very white in the face. He's got a foreign accent – could be Polish, but he's been here a long time. Might be middle fifties, but I think he's older, could be seventy.'
They looked at him in silence.
'One other thing,' Murray said, 'he could take his orders from Blair Heathers.'
Stewart swore abruptly. 'Jesus, Murray, you want to have more sense. Heathers spends more on haircuts than you earn in a year. You do wee jobs – you've only got one coat, and that's the one you were wearing when you got off the train the day you came back. If you hadn't got in tow with that lawyer Bittern, you wouldn't be making enough to keep you in pie suppers. Don't mess with Heathers. That would be like Laighburn juniors putting a team in for the World Cup.'
'It's a while since I've seen you getting so excited, Eddy,'
Murray said. 'You don't want to get so emotional.'
'Nobody's excited,' Stewart wiped a last piece of bread round the plate and pushed it away. The red flush subsided on his cheeks. 'If you had lost that eye, you'd have been too busy looking for a pitch to sell matches to worry about Heathers.'
'Bloody hell!' Billy exclaimed. 'You'd be a great man to say a few words at a funeral. You know how to bury a friend.'
'No use saying one thing and thinking another,' Stewart said, registering a vague discomfort. 'You're a moody bastard, Murray – I reckon we're about the only mates you've got.'
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