Present Tense

by William McIntyre

  ‘I wouldn’t say that,’ she said sleepily. ‘It was definitely better than amateur.’

  I switched on the bedside lamp and sat up, looking around at a floor covered in scattered clothes. ‘We’re work colleagues. This isn’t how we’re supposed to behave.’ I was hearing myself talk and at the same time wishing I’d shut up about it. ‘In fact, it’s worse. I’m your employer. I should never have allowed that to happen.’

  ‘Allowed?’ Joanna budged me over with a shove of the shoulder so that she could sit up too and share some of the pillow. ‘Would you feel better if I lodged a formal grievance?’

  ‘You know what I mean,’ I said. ‘How are we supposed to work together if—’

  ‘Oh, stop worrying.’ She kissed me on the cheek. ‘These things happen. It couldn’t be helped.’ She made it sound like it had all been a minor mishap. Like we’d bumped into each other, our clothes had dropped off and we’d accidentally fallen between the sheets.

  Joanna jumped out of bed and disappeared through to the bathroom. When she returned a few minutes later she had on my dad’s enormous Paisley-pattern dressing gown that could have contained her and a family of asylum seekers. She walked to the window and threw the curtains open. No effect. Scotland in winter, the sun only made guest appearances during the day and certainly not at seven in the morning. She switched on the big light. The glare was painful and I had to shield my eyes and squint to see her.

  ‘Right,’ she said. ‘I’m hitting the shower. That’ll give you time to decide which white shirt you’re wearing today.’ She picked up my suit trousers from the floor, gave them a shake in the hope it might smooth out some of the creases, and then draped them over the back of a chair.

  ‘Joanna, I’m sorry about what happened.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘I’m not sorry it happened.’

  ‘I thought you just said you were.’

  ‘I’m not. I just think it was a bad idea.’

  ‘Do you?’

  I didn’t. As ideas went, sleeping with Joanna was probably the best idea I’d ever come up with. ‘What I’m trying to say is that this could make things awkward at work.’

  Joanna came to the side of the bed and frowned down at me. ‘So, this was a one-off?’

  ‘I never said that.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘But it has to be.’

  She sat on the edge of the bed. ‘And why’s that?’

  ‘Because… well there’s our ages for one thing. I’m eight—’

  ‘Seven and a half—’

  ‘Years older than you. My business is going down the tubes. I’m a single parent. I don’t even have a house of my own. I live with my dad.’

  ‘There you are, then. At least you know I don’t want you for your money.’ She picked my jacket from the floor and gave it a similar crease-loosening shake. Two wads of cash fell out and onto the floor by her bare feet. She picked them up. ‘Scratch that last remark. How much is here?’

  ‘I can explain.’

  Joanna tossed the bundles of notes onto the bed. ‘I think you’d better.’

  52

  ‘What were you two up to last night?’ were Grace-Mary’s first words as Joanna and I arrived at the office to resume the great search.

  If guilty looks were evidence, Grace-Mary could have hanged me on the spot. Fortunately, she was too busy staring at the mess created the evening before.

  ‘You should have known if Robbie was putting that much effort into finding something, it would have had less to do with solving a crime and more to do with money,’ Grace-Mary said, once Joanna had provided a summary of events so far in the who-killed-Jeremy-Thorn saga.

  ‘I’m trying to run a business here,’ I said. ‘Santa Claus doesn’t pay the salaries.’

  ‘I notice he doesn’t pay a Christmas bonus either,’ Grace-Mary said.

  ‘Find this thing and there might be a New Year bonus.’

  ‘In which case,’ with a bang of her hip, Grace-Mary straightened up her desk, ‘I’ll start looking for whatever it is, after the holidays. There’s no time today. You’ve got your daughter to pick up and then there’s lunch.’ She pointed a finger at me. ‘And we are having lunch together this year. No skipping off to court like last Christmas because one of your clients was caught shoplifting.’

  ‘It was armed robbery of a Post Office.’

  ‘Leaving me sitting there on my own like—’

  ‘The last turkey in Tesco’s?’

  Grace-Mary narrowed her eyes at me. ‘Like a bride at the altar.’

  Joanna put an arm around Grace-Mary, and, with me following, led her through to reception. ‘Don’t worry. We’re all going for lunch.’

  ‘But before we do,’ I said, ‘we’re going to turn reception upside down and if we don’t find what we’re looking for there, your room will be next, Grace-Mary. So the sooner we get started, the sooner we’ll be wearing party hats and pulling crackers.’

  Two hours later and the only thing I’d pulled was a muscle in my shoulder, trying to shift a filing cabinet. At noon I gave up. Whatever it was, it wasn’t on the premises. It couldn’t be. There was nowhere left to look. The thing we were trying to find probably wasn’t that big, but then neither were the offices of R.A. Munro & Co. and I’d been all over them. Twice. I’d even checked inside the swear-box. I didn’t understand. My mind kept going back to the cardboard box Billy had left with me that Friday afternoon.

  ‘You’d better get going,’ Grace-Mary said. ‘Tina’s plane lands in half an hour.’

  I grabbed my keys. ‘Keep looking and phone me if you find anything.’

  I jogged down the stairs, thinking about that cardboard box. Had it been a red herring designed to put the cops off the trail? Why else pay me two hundred pounds to keep a box with contents that were worth a fraction of that?

  Once in my car I phoned DI Christchurch. He answered almost immediately. ‘Mr Munro? Do you have something for me?’

  I started the engine. ‘I’m phoning to ask you the same question.’

  ‘Are you driving while using a phone? I hope you’re hands-free.’

  ‘Yeah, I am,’ I said, ‘I’m steering with my knees. Now listen. The cardboard box. Did you find anything?’

  ‘That’s classified.’

  I pulled out into traffic, phone clamped between ear and shoulder. ‘You must have found something, then?’

  ‘What makes you say that?’

  ‘Because how can nothing be classified? I can understand how something can be classified, but—’

  ‘All right, I get it. No, we found nothing of interest in the box.’

  ‘Are you sure you’ve looked properly?’

  ‘I’m entirely sure. It’s been at the forensic labs for the last ten days.’

  ‘Well, if it’s not there, it’s gone,’ I said. ‘Either that or it never existed, because I’ve just spent the last two days blitzing my office and there is no way there can be anything of interest to you there.’

  ‘Really? Then what would you say if I sent a team round just to make sure?’

  ‘I’ve just told you, I’ve already turned my office inside out.’

  ‘With respect, Mr Munro, I’m talking about people who really know how to search.’

  He made it sound as though I’d have trouble finding my backside with both hands and a mirror on a stick. ‘How many are there on your search team?’

  ‘Six, maybe eight, highly trained operatives.’

  ‘Are they tidy or do they have the same furniture-hurling technique as DC Wood?’

  ‘You’ll never know they’ve been.’

  ‘Then it could happen,’ I said, hurtling down the Blackness Road towards the motorway. ‘On one condition.’

  ‘And that would be?’

  ‘Whatever you find, you give to me.’

  ‘That’s one hell of a condition.’

  ‘Whatever it is, you can take a copy but it’s my client’s property, remember?’

&nb
sp; ‘Yes, it’s your deceased client’s property. Your deceased client with no next-of-kin.’

  ‘And…’

  ‘There’s a second condition?’

  ‘It’s an addendum to the first. I want six hours’ complete radio silence on what is found.’ That would be long enough for me to fulfil my contract with Philip Thorn.

  There was a lengthy pause on the line while Christchurch thought that over. I switched the phone to my other shoulder.

  ‘You’re going to sell it, aren’t you?’ He was good. ‘You’re going to sell it to that woman from Night News.’ He wasn’t that good.

  ‘If you agree to my terms, I promise I will not release the information to any media outlet or otherwise cause it to be published.’

  There followed another long silence while the Detective Inspector considered his options. ‘Tomorrow morning,’ he said at last. ‘Ten o’clock, sharp.’

  The phone slipped from my shoulder and down the side of the seat. By the time I’d retrieved it, Christchurch was gone.

  53

  She’d only been away a week and yet I’d missed my daughter so much. The girl herself was fairly blasé about the reconciliation with her old man, though she did have a lot to tell me and used the journey back to Linlithgow to relay her entire trip, paying great attention to detail.

  Tina’s one regret was the absence of Pyxie Girl at Disneyland, and, rather than try and explain the intricacies of TV franchising and intellectual property rights, I explained that PG was on holiday until the New Year.

  My dad phoned as we were eastbound on the M9. I wasn’t taking any calls while transporting so precious a cargo and so Tina extracted the phone from my coat pocket and the two of them kept blethering until I pulled onto the pavement and into my usual parking space outside Sandy’s.

  ‘The bairn sounds in fine fettle,’ my dad said, once I’d wrestled the phone from Tina’s grip.

  ‘Yeah, she’s had a good time. I’m taking her to the Munro & Co. Christmas lunch. Have a good night at Malky’s Christmas do, did you?’

  He took a moment before replying. ‘Free bar.’ Two words that for most Scotsmen translated, twelve hours later, into one: hangover. I arranged to meet him later back at the cottage, and, since we’d made good time, Tina and I walked along to the office where Grace-Mary was making some last minute adjustments to her hair in the toilet mirror.

  ‘I don’t know who you think is going to type that,’ she shouted through to Joanna, whose voice I could hear dictating an urgent letter. ‘This is me ‘til the third of January.’

  There then followed heated talks between the two which I neatly avoided by way of a detour into my room. I plonked my wee girl down onto the clients’ wooden chair, legs swinging, while I reclined in my big black leather one. Joanna walked in. She’d changed into a clingy black dress and her hair was different somehow. More up than it had been before.

  ‘Is Tina not back from Disneyland, yet?’ she asked, looking around everywhere except on the very chair on which my daughter was seated.

  ‘I’m here!’ Tina yelled, jumping off the chair and giving Joanna a hug.

  Joanna held her at arm’s length. ‘Is that you? Look how much you’ve grown in a week! I thought you were one of your dad’s clients, sitting up there on the big chair. Are you ready? Grace-Mary’s just finishing off a letter for me and then we’re off for lunch.’

  Joanna perched on the edge of my desk while Tina climbed back onto the wooden chair, kneeling, facing the wrong way and rocking backwards and forwards.

  ‘Tina?’ I said, calmly. She didn’t reply. I tried again, this time with an edge to my voice as the rocking became more extreme. ‘Tina?’ She must have heard me. Was this some kind of test? ‘Tina, would you please stop swinging on the chair?’

  She looked at me over her shoulder. ‘No,’ she said, her wee face fixed in a scowl. There was no denying whose granddaughter she was. ‘I like swinging.’

  I got up from my seat as Joanna came to my assistance. ‘Tina, do as your Dad says. You might fall off and hurt yourself.’

  ‘I’m not going to fall off.’

  The chair pivoted backwards. For a second it stayed perfectly balanced and then with a creak and a loud crack it began to topple. I reached out, grabbed my daughter’s arm and pulled her away as the chair crashed to the floor.

  Tina found the whole thing hugely amusing, as apparently did Joanna although she was doing her best not to show it, covering her mouth with a hand.

  I had no idea what to do now. I couldn’t smack my own wee girl, neither did I want to shout and make her cry again, but I was her dad, and she’d disobeyed me. What was I supposed to do? I glanced at Joanna. She shrugged helplessly. I stalled, directing my attention to the chair that was now lying with its back and arms resting on the floor, four legs pointing upwards, one of them at a strange angle.

  ‘Yuk!’ said Tina. ‘What’s that?’

  I looked closer. There was something in a corner of the underside of the seat. What was it? I prodded the blob with the AIDS pen Grace-Mary kept handy for junkies to sign their legal aid forms. The pen sank deep into the grey mass.

  ‘It’s chewing gum,’ Joanna said. ‘A great big blob of chewing gum.’

  I tugged a bunch of tissues from the box, took a grip of the blob and pulled. Strings of grey bridged between my hand and the base of the chair.

  ‘Yuk, it’s all germy,’ Tina said, face screwed up.

  I wrapped the gum in the tissue and shoved the lot in my jacket pocket.

  ‘What are you doing with it, Dad?’

  ‘I’m going to sell it,’ I said. ‘But first we’re all going for lunch.’

  54

  The Munro & Co. Christmas lunch turned out to be a fairly lavish affair. It helped when the boss had twenty thousand pounds in cash stuffed in a shoebox under his bed and the means to acquire twenty thousand more wrapped in a bunch of Kleenex nestling in his suit pocket.

  Around about four o’clock I dropped a slightly tiddly secretary off at her home and took Tina to the cottage where my dad was waiting for her.

  Back at the office Joanna was waiting for me. I retrieved the sticky wad of gum and, using the tissues, carefully peeled it back to reveal a small, black rectangular object. It was plastic, no more than two centimetres long, one centimetre wide, and a couple of millimetres thick. A neat piece of IT equipment and IT was something I left to others when at all possible.

  Joanna took it from me gingerly, using the fingernails of thumb and middle finger. She studied it carefully, cleaning it with the tissue. ‘Sixteen gig nano-USB memory card,’ she said. ‘You can buy these anywhere for a few pounds.’ She examined it some more and, when satisfied the terminals were sufficiently gum-free, slotted it into a port and switched on my PC.

  The computer took an age to boot up. Eventually it was up and running and Joanna went to work while I paced my room like an expectant father, every now and again asking her for an update. Whether it was excitement or three ginger beers and a coffee, I had to go to the toilet. On my return, Joanna was staring at the computer screen, an annoyed look on her face. She lifted the mouse an inch or two off the desk and slammed it down on the mat. ‘It’s no good. It won’t work.’

  I came around the back of the chair and leaned over her shoulder. ‘What do you mean, won’t work?’ I could sense she was counting to ten before answering. ‘Okay, I know what “won’t work” means. Have you any idea why not?’

  She leaned down and ejected the USB. ‘All I know is that it’s got some kind of video file on it, about eleven gigs’ worth. Unfortunately, it won’t run on this PC. I’ve searched the internet and can’t find the right codec to download. It must be some kind of proprietary brand.’

  I pursed my lips and nodded. ‘I see. Just one question... Do you think we could go back to where I asked why it won’t work?’

  Joanna stood up and handed me the piece of black plastic. ‘It’s not broken. It’s just that the video won’t play without the
correct software.’

  ‘Maybe it’s for the best,’ I said. ‘This has to be what Philip Thorn wants. I’ll take it to him, get paid and he can do what he wants with it.’

  ‘And it won’t matter if it doesn’t work?’

  ‘Thorn’s got enough money to pay people to make it work.’

  ‘Don’t you think maybe you should…?’

  ‘Give it to the police? What if it contains evidence that implicates Billy Paris?’

  ‘There’s no conflict of interest. He’s dead.’

  ‘But what if—’

  ‘Stop trying to think up excuses, Robbie. Decide what it is you want the most, the gratitude of the government or hard cash.’

  I knew where Joanna was placing her bet. That’s when I remembered my agreement with DI Christchurch who, accompanied by a team of expert searchers, was due to invade my office on Christmas Eve morning. I tossed the USB stick in the air and caught it again. ‘Why can’t I have both?’

  55

  ‘Because we have an arrangement. That’s why not.’ Philip Thorn wasn’t keen on my have-cake, eat-cake suggestion. ‘The deal was you give me the evidence and I give you the rest of the money. Remember?’ he said, speaking slowly and clearly as though my IQ was a minus figure.

  ‘What’s so bad about the police having it six hours after you?’

  ‘Speak up, the line is terrible.’

  I wandered to the other side of my room. It was dark outside, had been for hours. Gusts of wind shook the window frames, rain spattered against the glass. All I could see in the glow of the fluorescent strip light was my own streaky reflection and Joanna, a shadow in the background, her black dress merging with the leather chair. ‘I said, why can’t I give it to the police a few hours after I’ve given it to you? I could leave it a couple of days if you like. That would give you time to…’ What was he going to do with it anyway? ‘I don’t even need to tell the cops you have it. That information could be kept in strictest confidence.’

  ‘Mr Munro, you either give the video file to me exclusively or we no longer have a deal, in which case I’d expect my money back.’