Last Orders (a Gus Dury crime thriller) (2 page)

I'd say one thing for him, he had my attention. These
days, my situation, wedded to a bottle of scoosh and forty, scrub that, sixty,
smokes a day, that was no mean feat. I pressed him for some details and made a
mental note.

'I'll need five-hundred in advance and another five when
I conclude.'

'Conclude?'

'That's right ... I don't have a crystal ball, Minister.
If I go digging, what I find is what I find. What I get is a grand for my
trouble. Do we understand each other?'

He nodded and took out a cheque book.

I bit. 'Cash.'

'I'll have to go to a bank.'

'Then, let's.'

I drained my pint and rose from the table.

On the way out the door, Urquhart placed a hand on my
elbow and spoke softly, 'One more thing, I neglected to mention ...'

'Yeah?'

'My daughter, I believe, is ... with child.'

* * * *

The newspapers had been full of scare stories coming
out of the hospitals. We had a swathe of superbugs rampaging through them.
Resistant to treatment, so the red-tops said, it was a new plague. Before I
tired of the endless wanky grandstanding of millionaire comedians — and the TV
set got taken to Crack Converters — I'd watched a rare documentary about the
issue. Doctors were in the clear, apparently, and so were nurses; the blame was
being planted firmly at the feet of immigrant workers. I'd been a hack and knew
a beat-up story when I heard one. Papers played to the gallery as much as
anyone else and the country was bankrupt so we had to find someone to blame all
our ills on. Everyone needs a scapegoat. Welcome to Scotland, scapegoats a
speciality, we've a history littered with them.

The last time I'd been in hospital was far from
voluntary. I'd been drunken insensate and mowed down by a mobility scooter with
a Ferrari upgrade. I couldn't remember being admitted, only waking up with a
drip in my arm and a banging in my head Ringo would have been proud of. I'd got
up and walked. I don't do hospitals as a rule. I didn't make the rule, it was
made for me the day my ex-wife miscarried our only child.

I traipsed through the main doors of the Royal Infirmary
and picked out the maternity ward. It was all depressingly familiar to me. The
memory of Debs's slow, fragile gait towards the door on the day we left,
childless, stung me. She had managed to get all the way to the car without
tears but the sight of the empty babyseat in the back had brought on a gale of
sorrow. I still felt that day's chill wind blowing all around me now.

I shook myself and approached a nurse as she passed me
in the corridor, 'Hello, there ...'

She eyed me with suspicion, the result of my tramp-like
appearance no doubt, said, 'Yes.'

'I was wondering if you might be able to help me.'

I fell into the gaze of a full head-to-toe eyeball, 'Visiting
hours are six till eight.'

'No, sorry, I'm not visiting. I'm just looking for
someone.'

'Looking for someone?'

'Yes, a girl ... her name's Urquhart and she's about
sixteen.' I knew her father must have tried the place already and the chances
of her using her own name were slim to none, but chanced it. And with nothing
else to go on, I needed to start somewhere.

The nurse twisted her face to the side, surveyed me over
slit eyes. 'Are you a relative?'

She was suspicious, likely even onto me. But the boat
was out now so I pushed it further, 'Yes. I'm her brother.'

As soon as the words came out I saw at once she wasn't
buying them. I might have been able to pass for her brother once but the sauce
had added a few years to the dial of late. Knew I should have said uncle;
Caroline was only sixteen, after all.

'Do you have any identification?' said the hard-faced
nurse.

I stalled, reached into the inside pocket of my Crombie.
'Can I show you a picture?' Urquhart had supplied a photo, a few years old I'd
say. Caroline was still in school uniform, one of those dreadful posed,
say-cheese numbers that everyone has tucked away in a sideboard at their
parents' home. Not me, though, all I have tucked away at my parents' home are
skeletons.

The nurse took the photograph from me, looked at it,
said, 'This girl has red hair.'

'Yeah?'

'And bright-blue eyes.'

'You caught that.'

'If you and her are related ... I'm a monkey's uncle.'

I snatched back the picture, there was a line and she'd
just crossed it. 'Are you in charge here?'

'I'm the ward sister.' I didn't know what that meant
exactly, but I sure as hell knew a fucking jobsworth when I saw one.

'Well, look,
sister
, this young lass is missing.
Her father is very concerned and if I don't find her soon who's to say what
might happen to her.'

Hands on hips, I got hands on hips from her. 'I'm
calling the police.'

'
Y'what
?'

A hand came off one hip and a finger got pointed at me. 'If
you're not off this ward, and out of this hospital in the next thirty seconds,
I'm calling the police.'

I focussed on the short, scrubbed fingernail beneath my
nose and slowly pocketed the photograph. 'Nice bedside manner you have there.'

The same finger was pointed to the door. 'Out!'

I turned, and fired out a parting shot. 'Don't worry, I'm
gone.'

As I went there was a torrent of words whipping my back,
I caught only a few but they were enough.

'Come in here stinking of drink ... The state of you, as
well ... Think I was born yesterday.'

I knew in a flicker I'd reached the end of one line of
inquiry.

* * * *

There was a time in my life when I was full of piss and
vinegar. Lately, I'd lost some of the vinegar, if not my craving for the other.
I headed to The Artisan pub on London Road, feeling slightly more comfortable
back in my own neck of the woods.

The Artisan could have been renamed The Utilitarian. It
had no style, which was just my style. I ordered a pint of dark from the dour
barmaid who seemed more than annoyed to have to put her nail file down and
return to the taps.

'Anything else?' She was Polish, that much I clocked
right off. Her countrymen had developed a reputation in town for being as
miserable as the natives — I wondered if they'd brought that with them or picked
it up by osmosis?

'Yeah, put out a wee birdie?'

'A what?'

'Grouse ... double.'

I took my drinks and checked the clock on the way to the
other side of the bar. My Docs were sticking to the carpet with every other
step. When I sat down there was a pair of old jakes to my side, they were
gambling on an iPad — the Paddy Power site taking the place of the ScotBet up
the road.

I was shaking my head and wondering about the state of
the universe, the disruption of chi that showered billions on a few Internet entrepreneurs
and ass-fucked the rest of us, when I caught sight of a familiar face making
his way towards me.

Fitz the Crime stationed himself at the bar momentarily
and then eased himself off his elbow. He was shaking his head as he approached
my table, 'Christ, where do they find them?' he said.

I nodded. 'The city has a great shortage in hospitality
staff, Fitz ... haven't you heard?'

'Hospitality, is that what they're calling it. Christ,
yer wan couldn't bloody spell it.'

He was still shaking his head as his pint arrived,
deposited on a Tartan beer mat, a few millilitres of suppage evacuating over
the edge like a prod for him.

'Fucking hell ... you see that?'

'You could ring out the mat, I suppose ...'

He didn't like that. 'I'll ring your neck if you're not
careful.'

Fitz the Crime and I went way back. In my time on the
paper I'd kept a couple of his indiscretions out of the headlines. Plod tends
to turn a blind eye to its own lot's peccadilloes in private, but seeing them in
print is a whole other matter. There was a time when he was grateful but it
didn't last long. I'd well and truly overstretched the favour with my own
subsequent requests for payback. Fitz had arked up and reminded me just who
carried the weight in the relationship, but to his credit, he also displayed an
unerring sense of justice that seemed out of all proportion with the world we
currently lived in.

'How's the family?' I said.

He put down his pint and thinned eyes. 'What are ye
after?'

I smiled; it forged itself into a low laugh. 'Did
someone steal your toffee today, mate?'

The pint was raised again, a longer draught taken this
time. 'No, I am just what you might call inveterately suspicious by nature ...
especially when the bold Gus Dury contacts me for a fly pint when there has
been no contact since ...'

He trailed off, eyes chasing a ghost about the ceiling.
We didn't need to reference our shared past to know why sometimes it was better
to ignore each other for long periods. Edinburgh was a small city, its Medieval
streets winding and personal, but it was also a topography that favoured the
incognito when they most needed it.

'Look, I need your help ...'

He turned his gaze on me. 'I thought as much.'

'It's not a big favour for you, but it's a big favour for
me and a big favour for ...'

I filled him in on Callum Urquhart and his missing
daughter. I laid it on as thick as I was capable. Fitz was a father, he had the
territory of the heart well and truly mapped from experience.

'By the holy, it's my bollocks in a jar ye want,' he
said. I let him settle, grab a hold of himself.

'I'd be happy enough with you running the girl through
the system ... she's sixteen, Fitz.'

He shook his head. 'I heard you.'

'And pregnant ... did you hear that bit?'

He raised his pint again, the remaining dark liquid was
a mere swirl in the bottom of the glass. His heavy thud shook the table as he
let down his drinking arm. 'I said I heard, didn't I?'

Fitz started to rise, he put a finger in the empty pint
glass and returned it to the edge of the bar. The barmaid watched over her nail
file but didn't move. Fitz was doing up the front of his coat and staring
towards the street as he spoke again.

'Urquhart, you say ...'

'Caroline, yeah. But she might not be using that name.'

He set back his shoulders and exhaled breath. 'She's
sixteen, Gus, in my experience they're rarely the most forward thinking.'

'So, you'll have a squint?'

He put his hands in his pockets, looked like a
car-salesman trotting out on the forecourt to flog Puntos. 'Keep your phone
handy, I'll only call the once.'

* * * *

I schlepped back to the flat via the Booze and News on
London Road. There was a far superior offie on Easter Road but my tastes were
not elaborate, even with the fair wedge in my back-pocket that I'd taken from
Urquhart.

Something wasn't sitting right with me. He was church,
from that section of society that did things by the book. The filth was the
obvious option for a bloke like him but Fitz hadn't heard of a missing
schoolgirl who was up the peg. I wondered where the minister had got my
details, but then I dismissed it: where did anyone?

I put my order in to the chick on the till. 'Case of Sweetheart
and a pack of Silk Cut.'

She looked at me like I'd made a mistake. Did she
remember the night before's order? Surely she was used to me changing my brand
of tabs; I couldn't stick to anything.

'You're on the Silkies, now?' she said.

'Bit of a sore throat ...' It was a lie and I think she
knew it. The letter from the Hypertension Clinic had put a bit of a fright on
me. Maybe the trip out to the Royal was the lolly-stick in the dog turd I
needed to keep me from stepping right in the shit.

'Okay,' she said, smiling.

I took the blue and white striped carrier from her and
headed for the door.

My flat was cold and dark, even the shadeless 100-watt
bulb in the hall wasn't enough to illuminate the grimness of the place. I took
my cans through to the lounge and cracked one open. They were sweet, like they
said on the tin. A tin that hadn't changed since my boyhood, I recalled a time
when Hogmanay meant a sip from a can of Sweetheart Stout. The young woman on
the front with the tight orange sweater was still smiling out like we were all
waiting for the White Heather Club to begin.

I sparked a tab and checked my mobi. No missed calls,
but there was one I needed to make. I selected the number from my contacts and
dialled.

Ringing.

'Hello, is that you, Amy?'

'Gus ..?' she sounded surprised.

'How are you getting on?'

'Is this, like, a social call?' Answering a question
with a question was so Amy.

'Well ... yes and no.'

A little chill entered the line. I took a sip on my
stout.

'Well, it has to be one or the other ... do you remember
what I said to you?'

I suddenly felt the Sweetheart Stout wasn't going to cut
it. 'I told you that was all a lot of bullshit ... Amy, trust me, you were
never going to be just a back-up plan for when things didn't work out with
Debs.'

'Oh, really?' The tone was sarcastic, dipping perilously
close to animosity. If I'd hurt the girl I hadn't a plan to. Jesus, what did I
know about plans?

'Yes, really.'

'Well, you might not have consciously planned to ...'

I cut her short. 'Look, Amy ... Everyone has a plan
until they get punched in the face.'

'Is that a quote or something?'

'Yeah, Tyson ...'

'Do you know any other feminists, Gus?'

She had me. 'Okay, bad example.'
I stubbed out my cigarette
. 'Can we start
again?'

'
What
?' her voice rose like a foghorn.

'I mean this conversation ... just the conversation.' The
line fizzed. I let a few seconds of static collect. 'Amy, how about it?'