Crow Bait (4 page)

‘In Barlinnie?’

‘Aye, used to do people in there for fags and chocolate and stuff, you know? See if it was now, I’d be doin it for a hit.’

Audrey doubted that. He didn’t look capable of hurting anyone now. He must’ve been a powerful enough bloke in his day, but the drugs had eaten him away. The tenner bag he’d jagged up in the other room was taking effect now. His head was beginning to droop, his speech slowing.

‘There was this one bloke, though. I was told to give him a right going over, do him in if I could. It was nothing to me…’

Audrey suddenly became interested. Now here was a story. ‘You were to kill him?’

‘Aye. I’d be protected, they said. I’d get away with it, they said.’

‘Who’s they?’

He didn’t answer, his chin sliding towards his chest, the forgotten cigarette still burning between his fingers.

‘Jinky!’ Audrey said, her voice sharp. His head snapped up and he focussed on her once more. ‘Who’s they?’

‘The guy that wanted me to do it, right bastard he was. We all hated him. But he came to me one day and he gave me this Bar-L Special…’

‘What’s a Bar-L Special?’

‘Plastic toothbrush with two razor blades melted into it. Carves a right deep double wound, so it does. And he gave me a fork, sharpened to a point. I was to stripe this guy and plunge him. If I couldn’t kill him I was to put him out of action.’

‘Out of action?’

‘Cripple him…’

‘What happened?’

He was drifting again so Audrey clapped her hands and yelled his name. His head raised but his eyes were glazing. She knew she didn’t have long. ‘What happened?’ She asked again.

He thought about the question. ‘The boy gave me a right doin, so he did. Never even got as much as a punch in. Like a fuckin machine he was, pardon my language. Pounded me like a piece of mince.’

Audrey felt her blood freeze. ‘Who was this boy?’

Jinky paused, dredging up the name. ‘I should remember it, so I should. Bastard put me out cold. I got transferred after that, away from Bar-L.’

‘Try to remember…’ Audrey was leaning forward now. At first she had simply sensed a great story, but this was all sounding very familiar. She felt her nerves tingling and she was no longer taking notes. She studied Jinky’s face, trying hard to see the features of the burly, hard-faced convict she’d seen years ago across a courtroom in the sallow cadaver before her. The addict’s eyelids began to flutter again, the hit really taking hold. ‘Jinky,’ she said, ‘this is important – what was the name of the person who beat you up?’

‘A legend, so he was, but I didn’t know that at the time…’ His words were really slurred now, his voice barely a whisper. Audrey leaned forward to hear them.

‘Jinky,’ she pressed, ‘was it Davie McCall? Was the boy you were sent to hurt called Davie McCall?’

He nodded, his head drooping. ‘Fuckin legend he was, pardon my language…’

4

THE MORE DAVIE
thought about it over the years, the more he was certain Harris had been hired to cripple him, or kill him. He’d never met him before, they had no priors, while the use of two weapons meant this was to be no casual striping.  He looked down at the semi-conscious inmate and held his hands up to study them. There was no tremble. He wasn’t even breathing heavily. As ever, he wondered at how calm he had remained throughout. He felt the cold rage that nestled within him lessen and return to wherever it came from. A sound like a faint wind that had risen in his ears began to still and finally died.

A prison officer appeared at the end of the corridor and took in the scene, his eyes flitting from Harris on the deck to Davie standing over him. Lomas, had to be. He had sent Davie to this deserted corridor, after all, had set him up for Harris to pounce. Davie could tell from the look on the screw’s face that this was not the way it was meant to be.

‘Stand back, McCall!’ He yelled, but Davie didn’t move. Lomas was a bastard, but he was a plucky one. He stepped forward, his body tensed for a fight. ‘Back, ya fucker, and face the wall!’

Davie thought about taking him on but knew it would be a mistake. He stepped away from Harris and pressed himself against the wall, hands above his head. He heard Lomas take a tentative step towards the prisoner on the floor and say, ‘Fuck!’ Then Davie felt a sharp pain as the prison officer rammed a clenched fist into his kidneys.

‘Don’t you fucking move,’ Lomas hissed. Davie tried not to give him the satisfaction of showing pain but the officer knew exactly where to hit because a fire was burning through his back. He shot a glare over his shoulder as Lomas stooped to retrieve the Bar-L Special from the floor and slipped it into his tunic. Davie glanced back to where the fork had landed and saw that had been pocketed too. ‘I told you not to move, fucker,’ said Lomas as he landed another blow, and this time Davie went down, his hand clutching the small of his back. Through the pain he fired a defiant look at the prison officer, who merely smirked. As a cadre of officers steamed up the corridor towards them, Davie kept his eyes on Lomas, trying to figure out why he wanted him damaged. Or dead. Two red-faced screws manhandled him against the wall, one pressing his face against the brick, the other pinning his arms behind his back and slapping a set of manacles on his wrists. Once subdued, he was hauled off to segregation.

Davie didn’t really mind being in the Digger, even though the cramped little cell was even less comfortable than the one up on the gallery. Being in solitary got him away from his cell-mate’s snoring and gave him time to think. He was lucky, too, for he only received one visit by the batter squad, sometimes known as the mufti squad. There were different levels of mufti – two-man, three-man, four-man and so on. Officially they did not exist. Davie had heard of them but had never actually witnessed an attack. Now he saw one firsthand. They came in during his first night in the Digger, the three-man team surging through the door of his peter like a black wave. Fists, feet and at least one baton rained down on him before he could move, all of them body hits. He understood what it was about – as far as they were concerned he had broken the rules and had to be taught a lesson. The prisoners came from a brutal world and they understood brutality, so punishment was swift and hard and physical. In prison, it’s survival of the hardest, and some of the screws had to be the hardest boys on the block. Davie understood it, but he did not accept it. He knew it was an abuse of power, knew it was just the kind of behaviour that would backfire some day on the system. However, he did not fight back, even though he felt cold rage steal over him as they beat him, felt the power to retaliate pulsing through his body. But something told him that if he let whatever was inside him take over again, it would only make matters worse. So for the first time he brought it under control and he let them beat him, let them show off how powerful they were, and within a few minutes it was over. As he lay in his cot that night, his body throbbing in agony, he thought of Audrey and imagined her cool hands soothing his bruises and somehow he felt better.

His time alone allowed the bruises and contusions to heal and also gave him the opportunity to think about why Harris had been sent after him. Davie had gone out of his way not to cause any trouble or get in anyone’s face. Violence was commonplace in the jail, but Davie didn’t think it was anyone on the inside. But who? The only two people he could think of who had ever wanted him dead were both lying cold themselves – Johnny Jones had been found shot and Clem Boyle had been taken out by cops. A striping in the jail could be bought for a few packets of tobacco, a killing for not much more. So who hired Harris? Who had enough pull to get the boy to risk a life sentence? Not only that, a screw had set him up. Who the hell was behind it?

Then his father’s smiling face and that little wave came into his mind, as it had many times before. The little wave that said
I’m back
. Davie became convinced that Danny McCall was at the root of this attack, that he wanted his son to leave prison in a wheelchair or in a box. Danny McCall saw his boy as a threat. The thought made Davie smile in the dark solitude of the Digger. It was a grim, determined little smile, and if Danny McCall had been able to see it he would have been fearful.

Harris’s attack did not result in Davie’s death or crippling, but it did lead to an extension of his sentence.

Lomas, the prison officer, lied in court, claiming that he saw Davie attack with no provocation. He also claimed Davie had taken a swing at him, which explained the visit by the muftis. The court, naturally, swallowed everything he said – screws, like cops, being paragons of virtue in the eyes of Scottish juries. Davie denied it but who the hell would believe a convict? He was given another eight years for the assault. He felt his heart sink as the judge handed the sentence down and his body was numb as the guards on either side of him led him to the cells below the court. He had only been months away from early release and then this happened. He had been defending himself but he was the one who was going down and Harris was being treated like a bloody victim.

Another eight years. He wasn’t sure he could handle that. He had been a model prisoner, but the system had turned on him. As he travelled back in the prison van, Davie McCall decided he would show them what vicious was all about.

5

JIMMY KNIGHT LAID
the two plastic bags of groceries on the small formica table in the tiny kitchen of the flat. He’d bought them earlier that afternoon, knowing he was coming to see her that night. Jack Bannatyne had asked him to tap his touts for info on the dead girl and Mary was best one he had. Even if she was dying of the virus.

‘You’re good to me, Mister Knight,’ she said.

He didn’t answer. He’d had a patchy relationship with the woman at best, but ever since she’d been diagnosed as
HIV
Positive, he’d felt sorry for her. He still held an assault charge over her head, but truth was that wasn’t much of a threat after all this time. She didn’t work the streets now, but she still had contacts among the working girls so he used her whenever he could. Naturally, there were no more freebies. The virus put paid to all that. But there was another reason that he kept coming back. He actually liked her.

‘It’s no free, Mary,’ he said as he began to put the food away in cupboards. He knew where everything went. He’d done it often enough. Even so, he didn’t like the cow-like way she looked at him now. He brought her food whenever he could, but it was just to keep her as healthy as possible for as long as possible. She still looked okay, thinner certainly, and she still dyed her hair a deep auburn, but he knew she was dying by inches.
She’ll peg out sooner or later
, he told himself,
but until then I’ll use her.
He may have liked her, but Jimmy Knight didn’t do sentiment. He planned to have that put on his tombstone.

‘What have you got for me?’

He’d asked her earlier to listen to the jungle drums about the Virginia McTaggart murder. Her face turned solemn. Without her make-up, and thin as she was now, he could see the scars of teenage acne clearly. That’s what had given her the street name of Plooky Mary. She was the neds’ favourite tart and that had made her invaluable to Knight over the years. It was amazing what a ned will say when he’s doing the business.

‘Ginny was a poor soul. A nice lassie, didn’t deserve that.’

‘She didn’t live out Springburn way, did she?’

‘No, she dossed up Maryhill Road. Lived with another girl, Patsy something or other, cannae mind.’

Knight nodded. He knew the Baird Street team had already found her address and spoken to her flatmate, another tart. She knew nothing, it seemed. ‘Did she have any regulars?’ 

‘Christ, Mister Knight, we’ve all got regulars, you should know that. You was one of mine…’

‘Aye, but did she speak of any? She wouldn’t go to a bloke’s flat without knowing him, would she?’

Mary nodded. ‘There was one, name of John.’ She rolled her eyes at that. ‘She talked to the lassies about him as if he was Prince Charming.’

‘She say what he looked like?’

‘Blue eyes, just. Older than her. That’s all she ever said about him.’ She slugged from her bottle again. Knight didn’t know what was in it, but she knocked it back like water. ‘Course, it could be a crawler, no this John at all.’ Kerb crawler, a man in a car trawling the Drag for flesh. He’d pull up close by her corner, call her over, a deal made and she’d get in.

‘Could be,’ said Knight, but his copper’s nose told him it was John, whoever the hell he was.

Mary saw the doubt on his face and nodded in agreement.  ‘But it’s more likely this John guy. He’d phone her, arrange to meet somewhere, make it an all-nighter. I’ll ask the lassies again, see if there’s anything else they can remember.’

He had emptied both bags and now turned to face her. He took out his wallet and pulled out a £20 note. ‘Gimme a call if you get anything more.’ He laid the money on the table top. Mary looked at it and bit her lip.

‘I feel bad taking your money, Mister Knight, after you buying me messages and all.’

‘Don’t feel bad. Just get me something I can use.’

‘Aye, I’ll do my best. But do you no want a wee something else, maybe?’

She set the bottle of medicine down and moved towards him, her head tilted in a way she thought might be sexy. ‘I mean, I know we cannae shag but I can give you a hand job. No harm in that…’