Stuart MacBride - A Dark So Deadly

‘Hmm...’ She leaned over the desk and pulled a photo from the wall. Held it out. ‘Is this him?’ Her finger hovered over the central figure in a group of three. It looked like a selfie: three young men, all with grins and tins of lager. Checked shirts and tan braces.

The one on the left had a full-sized Grizzly Adams beard, two squint teeth dominating his smile, all crowned by brown hair cropped close at the sides and floppy on top. He’d got one of those piercings, where they stuck a big round plug in the lobe to stretch it wide — making a dirty big hole. As if he was a Masai tribesman, instead of a peely-wally wee bloke from Oldcastle with a lumberjack fixation.

The one on the right’s arm snaked out of the picture — so he’d be the photographer — a shoulder-to-wrist tattoo of Clangers, Soup Dragon, and the Iron Chicken blurring into a colourful mush where the lens couldn’t focus. Long hair pulled back in a ponytail. A variety of studs spread about his nose, eyebrow, lip and ears.

And the one in the middle looked as if he’d inherited his great grandad’s haircut and glasses. Though where he’d got the massive soup-strainer moustache from was anyone’s guess. He was straightening his bow tie, showing off an oversized steel wristwatch on an oversized leather strap. More piercings.

Ms Carmichael squinted at the photo. ‘No, that’s his friend Ben. Glen’s the one on the left with the ridiculous beard.’ She grimaced. ‘Why these hipsters all want to look like old men from the thirties is beyond me. But there you go.’

‘I see.’ Franklin produced her notebook. ‘Can you tell me what your son was wearing when he left the house this morning?’

A snort. ‘This morning? He’s not been back here for six weeks. Him and his friends have been staying at the flat they’re doing up.’ She sighed, looking around the room with its explosion-in-a-laundry-basket décor. ‘Brett’s got a degree in environmental science, Ben’s got a BA in aquaculture, and none of them can find jobs. Recession.’

Franklin scribbled something in her notebook. ‘And where is this flat?’

‘They bought it at auction. The man who lived there killed himself in the living room — bank was foreclosing on his mortgage.’

‘Yes, but where is it?’

‘Hold on, it’ll be in here somewhere...’ Ms Carmichael rummaged through the piles of paper on the computer desk, before emerging triumphant with what looked like a council tax bill. ‘Flat twelve, one thirty-five Customs Street, Castleview, OC twenty-one, six QT.’ Then she turned and put a hand on Callum’s arm. ‘You’re sure Glen’s... not hurt ?’

He gave her his best reassuring smile. ‘We’ll let you know as soon as we hear anything.’

‘Why did you have to lie to her?’

Callum shrugged, slowing the car at the junction. ‘What did you want me to tell her: we’ve no idea if your wee boy’s dead or not? Think that would’ve helped?’ The bridge over the River Wynd made a graceful cobbled arc above the water, marking the border between Blackwall Hill’s twisted knot of housing estates, the Wynd’s well-ordered Georgian streets, and Castleview’s functional industrialisation. All of it grey and miserable in the drizzle.

He took a left at the next roundabout, down a long drab street — blocks of terraced flats, punctuated by shopping centres with more boarded-up windows than new shops.

‘What if Glen Carmichael turns up dead from a punctured lung, or a ruptured spleen?’

‘Then he’ll still be dead whether she’s panicking about him or not. Let her have... Oh, hold on.’ He slammed on the brakes and pulled their manky Vauxhall into a space between a delivery truck and a skip.

‘What the hell do you think you’re—’

‘I’ll only be a minute.’ He scrambled out of the car. ‘Honestly, five tops.’ Callum clunked the door shut, waited for a bus to grumble past, then hurried across the street and into one of the few shops still open.

The Royal Caledonian Building Society’s carpet was going threadbare in the middle, drawing a straight line from the door to the counter. A large middle-aged lady sat behind the bulletproof glass, reading a copy of the Castle News and Post. She looked up as he reached the counter and pulled on a smile about as natural as a porn-star’s breasts.

‘How can I help you?’

Callum thumped his warrant card on the countertop. ‘Someone stole my wallet and I need you to give me some money from my account.’

She made a face, as if he’d just slapped a used nappy down in front of her. ‘I’ll have to speak to the manager...’

The sharp-faced woman pulled on her glasses and peered at her computer screen. ‘Well, Mr MacGregor, you’ll be glad to hear that we appear to have recovered your cards. Someone tried to use them to redeem a number of items at... let me get this right... at a “Little Mike’s Pawnshop”? In Kingsmeath?’

Little sods were probably trying to get hold of samurai swords, crossbows, and ninja throwing stars.

Callum crossed his fingers. ‘Did they find my wallet?’

Please, please, please, please.

She poked at the keyboard. Frowned. ‘I’m sorry, I don’t actually have that information. But the proprietor has destroyed the cards, and as there’s been no successful purchase made on the account, there won’t be any excess to pay.’ The frown turned into an expectant smile, as if she was waiting for congratulations and a round of applause. ‘We’ll get new cards issued to you in the next couple of days.’

‘A couple of days? But I need to buy—’

‘I’m sorry, but the cards have to be reissued from head office. I’ll flag it as urgent, but it’ll still take a couple of days. Now is there anything else I can assist you with, Mr MacGregor?’

‘Yes: I need to take some money out of my savings account.’

‘Ah. I see...’ She made the same face as the woman behind the counter.

Franklin glowered at him as he lowered himself into the driver’s seat. ‘What happened to “five minutes, tops”?’

‘Don’t start.’ He hauled on his seatbelt and started the car. Pulled away from the kerb. ‘Just been bent over a bank manager’s desk for the last quarter of an hour, being shafted without lubricant. And do you know what for? Fifty-three pounds and seventy-two sodding pence.’ He held up the tiny handful of notes and coins. ‘Because that’s all the money we’ve got.’

Down to the end of the road, and right onto the main road.

‘It’s my sodding money! Why do I have to beg for my own fifty-three quid? How is that fair?’

Franklin shook her head. ‘Do you do anything other than moan?’

‘I’m not moaning, I’m ranting. It’s different.’ He took a right, into another street full of tenements, heading towards MacKinnon Quay. ‘How much did we pay to bail those thieving gits out? Billions. Whole sodding country up to its earholes in debt, people losing their jobs and their houses, all so they can enjoy their bloody yachts and champagne!’

A smile. ‘Do you honestly think the manager of a wee building society sub-branch, in a nasty little shopping centre, in a crappy corner of the mediocre cesspit that is Oldcastle, has a yacht?’

‘That’s not the point.’

Straight through at the roundabout and onto Customs Street. It skirted the edge of the docks, with their large blue cranes and towering tanks of offshore mud, all secured behind a twelve-foot-high fence topped with razor wire.

Just past the harbour, a row of small cottages — jammed in tight as teeth — lined the left side of the road, but the houses opposite were a lot less quaint. They were built into the side of the hill, about six feet above road level: the kind of buildings councils put up to punish people for being too poor to afford somewhere better to live. Long, brutalist rows of grey flats, four storeys tall.