Irvine Welsh - Crime

Outside it is hot. He recalls the TV forecaster saying it was unseasonably warm for winter. It was usually only around seventy-five degrees in January, but it has soared into the mid-nineties. Lennox is baking. That is how he feels. Like he is baking in a big oven. His brains a stew in the casserole dish of his skull. It’s too hot to walk far. They sit down on the patio of a bar-restaurant. A flashbulb-smiling girl flourishingly hands them a menu card.

— It’s roastin, he says lazily, from behind his shades as he and Trudi sit al fresco sipping another cocktail, this time a Sea Breeze. They have only gone one block. Collins Avenue on to Ocean Drive. Strutting holidaying youths pass by, enjoying the bounty of their years and wealth; waxed macho boys pumped up with muscle, giggling and pouting girls in bikinis and sarongs, older women trying to emulate them with some help from pills, scalpels and chemicals. Tropically smart Latin men in white suits smoke Cuban cigars the same colour as their girlfriends. Salsa and mambo music fills the air, and a programmed bass pulses out from somewhere. The sea is close, across the busy two-way street. Behind a couple of Bermuda-grass verges, some tarmac and a few palm trees is a strip of sand and then the ocean. You can’t see it, but you know it’s there.

— Ray! Trudi’s hand scalds his forehead. He winces. Like she’d branded him with a heated iron. — You’re burning up!

Rising and skipping off towards the shop next door, Trudi returns with a New York Yankees baseball cap. She pulls it over his head. It feels better. — Sitting frying your brains out! With that haircut you’ve no protection in this sun!

She delves into her straw bag, producing a tube of sunblock and swathing it on his neck and arms, disdainfully regarding his Ace of Spades T-shirt. — A black T-shirt! In this heat! And I don’t know why you won’t wear shorts!

— For wee laddies, he mumbles.

Lennox remembers his mother making similar administrations to him as a boy, at home in the small utilitarian garden with its cut-grass lawn and its paved path meandering down to a ramshackle tool shed. Or in the summer at Dingwall: a rare Highland heatwave when they were staying at his aunt’s. Again at Lloret De Mar, on their first family holiday abroad, with his father’s pal and workmate, Jock Allardyce, and his wife, soon to be ex-wife, Liz. It was also their last, as Avril Lennox’s stomach was swollen with his kid brother, and his older sister Jackie was on the cusp of being too cool for such excursions. He’d met a mangy old dog on the beach and they’d become friends. He’d introduced the animal to his dad, horrified when his father chased it off. — Keep away from that filthy bugger. Rabies, John Lennox had explained in alarm. — Standards of hygiene in Spain are different from Scotland.

He takes the cap off and regards the ubiquitous NY symbol. He reluctantly puts it back on his head, pulling a sour face. Something about it depresses him. It was the sort of hat that might by worn by someone who had been to neither a baseball match nor New York City. The sort of hat Mr Confectioner might have had in his wardrobe.

— What’s wrong with it? Trudi asks.

— I don’t like the Yankees. No Boston Red Sox hats?

— There’s loads in there, I didn’t know what you wanted. I just got it to keep the sun from burning out your brains! It’s New York, she urges.

— This is Florida, Lennox shrugs. He tried to think of a Florida baseball team. The name Merlins seems to ring a bell. The Magical Merlins .

— Yes, but it’s all American and that’s where we are, she says, then sips her Sea Breeze and returns to her notes. — Go and see if they’ll change it if you want… I think Mandy Devlin and her boyfriend should be at the evening do, rather than the church and the meal… what do you think?

— I agree, Lennox says. He gets up, stretches, and steps next door. Some football shirts: Real Madrid, Manchester United, Barcelona, AC Milan. The baseball caps. He chooses a Boston Red Sox number and puts it on. Returning to the patio, he sticks the Yankees one on Trudi’s head. Her hand goes to it, as if he’s messed up her hair, then stops.

She simpers at him, squeezes his good hand. Something rises in him, a surge of optimism, which is crushed when she speaks. — I’m really happy, Ray, she says, but it sounds like a threat. — Are you winding down?

— I need to get the Hearts score. We’re at home to Kilmarnock in the Cup. Shall we find an Internet café soon?

Trudi’s expression is briefly acerbic, then her face lights up. — There’s some stuff I want to show you on this website, some really good ceilidh bands.

She is reading in another magazine about the television actress Jennifer Aniston; her recovery after her divorce from the actor Brad Pitt, now with a different actress, Angelina Jolie. Lennox glances at each magazine on the table. Both were about relationships: one focusing on a day of happiness, the other dealing with a lifetime of misery and uncertainty. He’d glimpsed at it on the plane. Jennifer Aniston was supposed to be with another actor now, whose name he couldn’t recall. Trudi points at her picture on the cover. — It must be so difficult for her. It just goes to show: money can’t buy happiness. She looks at Lennox, who has caught the waitress’s eye and ordered another two Sea Breezes. — We’re okay though, aren’t we, Ray?

— Hmm, he muses to himself, trying to think of the last decent film Brad Pitt was in. Decides that the remake of Ocean’s Eleven wasn’t too bad.

— Well, thank you for that vote of confidence! We’re only going to be spending the rest of our lives together! She looks at him, harsh, shrew-like. He can see the old woman in her. It’s like she’s fast-forwarded forty years. She throws the notepad on the table. — At least pretend to be interested!

Jennifer Aniston and Angelina Jolie. Different women, faces, bodies .

The body had seemed to shrink in death, washed up on the rocks at the bottom of that cliff. It was strange, but it hadn’t bothered him at the time. Well, it had bothered him, but not obsessively. He thinks of his old mate, Les Brodie. How they used to shoot seagulls with their air rifles. How, when you shot a gull, it was different from shooting a pigeon. Les and his pigeons. The gull, though, it just reduced, went into nothing, like it was a balloon, all air. The difference between a dead adult body and a dead child’s (and Britney was the first dead child he had seen) was that sense of reduction. Maybe you were just seeing for the first time how small they really were.

Lennox feels his heartbeat rising again, as sweat coats his palms. He forces down a deep breath. That cyanic corpse and its mysterious, unyielding opacity; it was just a body though, Britney had gone; what counted was bringing the bastard who had done her to justice. But now he can see it as vividly as ever; the eyes popping out of the head, the blood vessels on the lids haemorrhaged where he’d throttled her, while penetrating her, wringing the life from her for his own fleeting gratification.

A human life bartered for an orgasm .

He wondered if it was really like that. It was when he tried to imagine the little girl’s fear, her last moments, that those corporeal images came racing back. But did she really look like that? Was it not his imagination filling in the gaps?

No. The video. It was all there. He shouldn’t have watched the video. But Gillman was present, staring coldly at the images Mr Confectioner had filmed. His act demanding that Lennox, as superior officer, had to sit as implacably as his charge, even though every second of it was crippling him inside.