The First Novels: Pay Off, the Fireman (21 page)

       
‘Yes?’ she said in a low, quiet voice, looking through me with the lifeless eyes of a sleepwalker.

       
I wanted to say ‘sorry’ again, to explain why I’d done what I did, to explain how special she was to me, how the only people I’d meant to hurt were Laing and Kyle, but I knew there was nothing I could say, that she’d always love me and be my friend but that it would take a long time before she’d trust and respect me again. Maybe she never would, maybe I’d blown it for good. Talking now would only sound like I was making excuses, the tail-wagging of a guilty dog.

       
‘Thanks,’ I said, and she smiled and tossed her head.

       
‘All part of the service,’ she said and left me on my own with my thoughts.

       
I dozed, drifting in and out of sleep until she came back with the telephone in her hand, one of those remote jobs that you can use in the car, the garden or the toilet.

       
‘It’s McKinley,’ she said. ‘For you.’

       
‘If he starts using bad language I’ll call for help,’ I said and grinned. It felt like a snarl.

       
‘Not funny,’ she said and turned on her heel and walked out of the room, and what the hell she was right, it wasn’t funny.

       
‘How are you getting on?’ he asked and it sounded as if he meant it, but the voice lacked warmth.

       
‘I’m fine,’ I replied. ‘The shoulder still hurts but I’m on the mend.’ If we had been in the same room we’d have been looking at each other warily, a couple of prizefighters who’d shaken hands and were ready to come out fighting. I couldn’t tell from his silence how he felt.

       
‘Did you get the car back?’ I asked eventually.

       
‘Let’s get one thing straight, boss. You shouldn’t have used me the way you did. You used me and you’d have thrown me to the wolves. I could have died, you know.’ The words were tumbling out, running into each other like rushhour commuters pouring off a packed bus.

       
‘When the bastard pointed his shooter at me I honestly thought that I’d had it. If you hadn’t pushed me to one side he’d have blown me apart. I’d frozen, I couldn’t move.’ He dried up, an engine running out of steam.

       
He broke the silence after a few seconds, and this time his voice was bitter and angry.

       
‘I’m not coming back. You’ll never see me again. I can’t trust you, not after what you did to me. I don’t know what I’m going to do, but I’ll do it on my own.’ The sentences came out in short, sharp bursts like bullets from a gun.

       
‘Get-Up, listen to me. I can’t take back what I did, but I can try to make it right, if you’ll let me,’ I said, remembering Tony’s words. Symbiosis. I needed this man.

       
‘No,’ he said, with a finality that left me in no doubt that I would never see him again. But there was one thing I had to know before he cut the connection and disappeared from my life forever. Had he finished the job?

       
He continued. ‘If you hadn’t saved my life I wouldn’t even have phoned,’ he said and then ground to a halt, realizing what a daft thing he’d said, then blustering on regardless. ‘I would just have told Read’s mates what you’d been up to. But you did, so the car’s back where you wanted it. I rang Dancer like you said and he collected it from me. I said you’d send the rest of the money to him. Now we’re even.’

       
‘Get-Up, listen to what I say. Keep away from Laing, right away. Keep your head down. And if you need any help you can come to me.’

       
‘No, I’m on my own now. You won’t ever see me again.’

       
‘Good luck, Get-Up. I mean it.’

       
‘Go to hell.’ Click, and he was gone.

       
Later Tony came and sat on the bed and laid down the law. Shona was to move out of the flat, soonest. She’d go and stay with her parents. That way if McKinley went back on his word – I began to interrupt, to say that Get-Up wouldn’t let me down, but Tony steamrollered over me – then nobody could get to her. Sammy was to be told to lie low, I certainly wasn’t to go near her for a while, at least until we knew what had happened to Laing and Kyle. I was to keep out of the way, Tony would be my eyes and ears in London. Yes sir, no sir, three bags full sir. Tony made me feel small, small and vulnerable, but I accepted the sanctuary he offered, the safe cool sanctuary of the strong, and I remembered Sammy and the polar bear.

Shona and Tony wanted me to go somewhere warm, to lie in the sun for a couple of weeks, to come back suntanned and rested and ready to go back into harness. I agreed.

       
I telephoned Sammy and told her I’d be out of the country for a while.

       
‘How was Paris?’ I asked.

       
‘Don’t ask,’ she said.

       
‘Good, I’m glad,’ I replied, and I was. My stomach had been churning at the thought that she might have enjoyed herself with him. She broke the silence by asking what had gone wrong and I told her, warning her to keep a low profile and to have no further contact with Laing.

       
‘You don’t have to worry on that score,’ she said, and I could picture her white teeth and easy smile as she brushed her long hair behind her ear. ‘How’s Get-Up?’ she asked.

       
‘Vanished. I doubt we’ll see him again.’

       
‘Where are you going?’

       
‘I don’t know yet, but I’ll be in touch, I promise.’ I paused, unsure of how to pose the question. ‘Sammy?’ I asked.

       
‘I’m here.’

       
‘When I get back, will you come up to be with me in Edinburgh?’ Hell, that didn’t sound right.

       
‘On the payroll, you mean?’ she asked.

       
‘You know what I mean.’

       
‘Yes, I know.’

       
‘Well?’

       
‘Well what?’

       
‘If I was with you, young lady, I’d put you over my knee and give you a good spanking.’

       
‘And if you were with me, I’d let you.’

       
‘Stop teasing, Sammy. Will you?’

       
‘I think I might.’

       
‘Is that a yes?’

       
‘It’s a yes. But you knew that before you asked. Now away you go and enjoy your holiday – send me a card.’

       
‘I might.’

       
‘Rat. I love you,’ and that one caught me with my guard down, right under the chin, and it sent me reeling onto the ropes.

       
‘Must go. See you soon,’ I said and fumbled the receiver back on the hook, cursing myself for becoming so awkward with her, and wondering how three words could so quickly turn me back into a gauche schoolboy. And I hadn’t even told her that I loved her.

       
I rang her back. ‘I love you,’ I said.

       
‘I know that, stupid,’ she said, and hung up.

       
The first package holiday Shona could arrange was a fortnight in Malta, and she flew with me to London and put me on the plane at Gatwick, partly out of concern but mainly to check that I actually went.

       
I asked her if she wanted to come with me but it wasn’t on, because I’d done enough damage to the firm over the past few months and someone had to mind the shop.

Shona had booked me into a modern, comfortable hotel overlooking St  Paul’s Bay, just a couple of minutes’ walk through its gardens and across the road to the seafront.

       
The resort had grown up around a picturesque fishing village on the north-east coast, and it reminded me a little of Oban with its work-worn boats bobbing in the sea.

       
I spent most of my time walking around the harbour, stopping off at the dozens of friendly bars and cafés, eating at the local restaurants, resting and exercising my shoulder. The stiffness was going and the scars healing, but it would still catch me unawares every now and again and the pain would make me wince.

       
I did all the touristy things, went on trips around the capital, Valletta, took a boat trip to the island of Gozo where I bought a lace shawl for Shona, and cruised around the Blue Grotto, but most of the time I just lay on a towel on one of the huge flat rocks by the sea and turned brown like a lamb chop under a grill.

       
At the start of the second week the young nephew of the hotel owner came running up and stood over me, blotting the sun from my burning face, bare chested and panting, his cut-off blue jeans several sizes too big and held up with a piece of grubby string knotted at the front.

       
‘Telephone for you,’ he gasped. ‘Come quickly.’

       
I gave him a handful of Maltese cents and patted his dark curly hair, jogged with him back to the hotel and took the call at the reception desk.

       
‘Shona,’ I said, it couldn’t have been anyone else, she was the only person who knew where I was. ‘What’s wrong?’

       
The line was crackling and buzzing and it sounded as if she was talking with a mouthful of potato crisps, but I heard her say: ‘My God, what have you done? All hell’s broken loose here.’ And then she explained what had happened, repeating herself when the line got so bad that I couldn’t make out what she was saying.

       
They’d found McKinley first, in a disused warehouse on the Isle of Dogs. He was naked and covered with cigarette burns and quite dead. The little finger of his right hand had been severed with bolt cutters or something, and he’d been kicked and beaten hard enough and long enough to break most of his ribs and his hip.

       
He’d been chained by the hands to a metal girder running sideways across the warehouse, and his wrists were chafed to the bone where he’d struggled and fought to free himself but there was nothing he could have done because his legs were also chained, to the rusting back axle of a long-scrapped truck and his ankles too were bloody and frayed.

       
At some point he’d been hit repeatedly with a long metal bar and there were weals across his back and stomach, but they were nothing compared with the patches of burnt flesh where lighted cigarettes had been pushed and gouged into the soft, vulnerable parts of his body.

       
It had taken him several hours to die, and he must have begged and pleaded for them to stop every second of every minute of every hour because he’d told them everything he knew and he hadn’t done anything, he’d been used from the start, and please God why didn’t they believe him?

       
There hadn’t been a single thing he could have said to stop them.

       
Whoever had tortured and killed McKinley caught up with Iwanek two days later in Spain, where he’d rented a villa about half an hour’s drive inland from Alicante airport.

       
It was a white-painted building around a cool courtyard that would normally sleep six people but Iwanek lived there on his own, high on a sun-bleached hill surrounded by groves of orange trees.

       
From the side of his private pool he could sit and watch planeloads of pale tourists arriving for their two weeks in nearby Benidorm and then departing with brown skins and suitcases full of sandy clothing and cheap presents.

       
He drank a lot, invited local girls and holidaymakers back to his villa and his bedroom and began to put out feelers, tentatively probing the market for the briefcase of white powder he’d hidden under one of the flagstones in the kitchen.

       
There were plenty of wealthy people in the villas around the east coast of Spain, many of them British villains on the run, and he reckoned they’d be keen to buy and he hoped to make contact with dealers in the Benidorm resort.

       
He thought he would be able to make six figures without trying, but that’s not how it worked out, and the middle-aged woman who cycled up the hill to cook for him each evening found his body tied to the large oak bed in the main bedroom, spreadeagled like a stranded starfish on a white sandy beach, only the sheet she’d so carefully washed and ironed wasn’t white anymore, it was stained with blood and sweat and shit, the flies buzzed around the burns all over his body and the mouth was wide open in a silent scream of agony. When she staggered to the kitchen to get to the phone, she nearly tripped over the stone floor which had been ripped up to get at the hidden drugs.

       
McKinley’s death, macabre as it was, had at first merited only a few paragraphs in the London editions of the nationals, and the discovery of Read’s body at Loch Feochan became a seven-day wonder of the ‘Police Probe Mystery Slaying’ variety, but an enterprising reporter on one of the more sensational tabloid Sundays linked all three murders, cobbled together some spurious background on drugs smuggling between Spain and Britain and the paper splashed it.

       
The story spread north of the border, the
Herald
and the
Scotsman
both following it up and doing extended features on the influx of drugs along the Scottish coastline, and the
Daily Record
did a colour piece on the men who man the coastal cutters. The media’s like that, feeding on itself ad infinitum, one reporter’s throwaway line becoming another’s page lead.

       
‘What about Laing?’ I asked.

       
‘There’s no sign of him. Tony thinks he’s either been killed as well or gone to ground. Either way he says you’ll probably never see him again. What are we going to do?’