Crow Bait E-Book

Douglas Skelton

• Herausgeber: Luath Press
• Kategorie: Krimi
• Serie: Davie McCall
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Seitenzahl: 383

Beschreibung

They'll all be crow bait by the time I'm finished...Jail was hell for Davie McCall. Ten years down the line, freedom's no picnic either. It's 1990, there are new kings in the West of Scotland underworld, and Glasgow is awash with drugs. Davie can handle himself. What he can't handle is the memory of his mother's death at the hand of his sadistic father. Or the darkness his father implanted deep in his own psyche. Or the nightmares…Now his father is back in town and after blood, ready to waste anyone who stops him hacking out a piece of the action. There are people in his way. And Davie is one of them. Tense, dark and nerve-wracking... a highly effective thriller. THE HERALD This is crime fiction of the strongest quality. CRIMESQUAD.COM A gory and razor-sharp crime novel from the start, Douglas Skelton's Crow Bait moves at breakneck speed like a getaway car on the dark streets of Glasgow. THE SKINNY Skelton has been hiding from his talent for long enough. High time he shared it with the rest of us. QUINTIN JARDINE PRAISE for Blood City The city's dark underbelly complete with knives, razors, guns and gangs... DAILY MAIL You follow the plot like an eager dog, nose turning this way and that, not catching every single clue but quivering as you lunge towards a blood-splattered denouement. DAILY EXPRESS The Glasgow of this period is a great, gritty setting for a crime story, and Skelton's non-fiction work stands him in good stead… he's taken well to fiction… the unexpected twists keep coming. THE HERALD

Leseprobe

DOUGLAS SKELTON is an established true crime author, penning eleven books including Glasgow’s Black Heart, Frightener and Dark Heart. He has appeared on a variety of documentaries and news programmes as an expert on Glasgow crime, most recently on ‘Glasgow’s Gangs’ for the Crime and Investigation Channel with Martin and Gary Kemp. His 2005 book Indian Peter was later adapted for a BBC Scotland radio documentary, which he presented. His first foray into crime fiction was the acclaimed Blood City, which introduced Davie McCall.

By the same author:

Non-fiction

Blood on the Thistle

Frightener: The Glasgow Ice Cream wars (with Lisa Brownlie)

No Final Solution

A Time to Kill

Devil’s Gallop

Deadlier than the Male

Bloody Valentine

Indian Peter

Scotland’s Most Wanted

Dark Heart

Glasgow’s Black Heart

Fiction

Blood City

Crow Bait

DOUGLAS SKELTON

LuathPress Limited

EDINBURGH

www.luath.co.uk

First published 2014

ISBN (PBK): 978-1-910021-29-3

ISBN (EBK): 978-1-910324-31-8

The publishers acknowledge the support of Creative Scotland towards the publication of this volume.

The author’s right to be identified as author of this work under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 has been asserted.

© Douglas Skelton 2014

Contents

Dedication

Acknowledgements

Prologue

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

23

24

25

26

27

28

29

31

32

33

34

35

Author’s Note

Some other books published by LUATH PRESS

Luath

To the memories of Edward Boyd and Roddie McMillan. I never met them, but Daniel Pike showed me that a crime thriller did not need to be set in New York, la or London. Glasgow’s mean streets would do just fine.

Acknowledgements

Thanks go to my ‘Reading Posse’ – Karin Stewart, Sandy Kilpatrick, Lucy Bryden and Alistair and Rachel Neil.

To Big Stephen Wilkie, Joe Jackson and John Carroll for keeping me right. If I’ve made errors, they’re all mine.

To Elizabeth and Gary McLaughlin for their unflagging support in getting the books publicised (here’s another one, guys – get cracking.) And Helena Morrow for keeping Canada supplied.

To Margaret, for keeping me fed while I struggled with the rigours of writing.

To Caron MacPherson and Michael J. Malone for their advice, Alex Gray for saying nice things, and Craig Robertson for the support.

To my editor, Louise Hutcheson, and the team at Luath for making real what always begins as some vague notion as I walk the dogs.

For certain background information on the drug scene in 1990, I am indebted to a series of articles in the Glasgow Evening Times during October of that year by Mike Hildrey and Ally McLaws.

And thanks are due to the Steele boys, Jim and Joe.

Prologue

THE BOY IS running across a field, the long grass around him sighing softly as a warm breeze whispers through its stalks. He is running, yet he moves slowly, like a film being played back at half-speed.

The boy is happy. It is a good day, the best day ever, and his young heart sings with its joy. They have taken him out of the city, away from the black buildings, away from the stench of the traffic, away from the constant roar of engines. A day in the country, where the sun didn’t need to burn through varying levels of grime to warm the land. His first day in the country and he revels in the feel of the soft grass caressing his legs as he runs.

He can see them waiting for him at the far end of the field, the car his father has borrowed from his boss parked under trees behind them. They smile at him as he draws nearer and his father wraps his arm around his mother’s waist. He gives the boy a friendly wave. It is a tender moment and the boy is sorry the day has to end.

But the air cools as the gap between them narrows and the field darkens as if a cloud has passed over the sun. The boy looks up, but the sun is still there, burning brightly in an unbroken blue sky. And yet, the day has shadowed and the grass has lost its colour. The green and sun-bleached yellow is gone, replaced by blacks and greys.

The boy stops and looks to his parents for an explanation, but they are no longer there. In their place is a dark patch, a deep red crying out amid the now muted surroundings, and the boy knows what has caused it.

‘Dad, don’t…’ he hears himself say.

‘Dad, please don’t…’ he murmurs as he backs away, fearful of what he might see in that pool of crimson. His mother, he now knows, is gone, never to return. But he also knows his father is there, somewhere in the red-stained darkness, waiting, watching.

So he backs away and he begins to turn, all the joy replaced by a deep-seated dread. He retreats, for all he wants to do now is get away from that corner of the field, and the sticky redness of the grass, so he turns to run, he turns to flee, he turns to hide.

But when he turns he finds his father looming over him, the poker raised above his head, the love he had once seen in the man’s eyes gone and in its place something else, something the boy does not fully understand, but something he knows will haunt him for the rest of his life. Something deadly, something inhuman.

And then his father brings the poker swinging down…

* * *

Barlinnie Prison

One night in November, 1990

Davie McCall woke with a start and for a moment he was unsure of his surroundings. Then, slowly, the grey outline of his cell, what he had come to call his peter, began to take shape and the night-time sounds of the prison filtered through his dream-fogged brain: Old Sammy snoring softly in his bed; the hollow echo of a screw walking the gallery; the coughs and occasional cries of other inmates as they struggled with their own terrors.

He had not had the dream for years, but now it had returned. The field was real and he had run through it on just such a warm summer day when his mum and dad took him to the Campsie Hills to the north of Glasgow when he was eight. They had been happy then. They had been a family then. It ended seven years later.

Danny McCall vanished when Davie was fifteen.

But the son knew the father was still out there, somewhere.

He had seen him, just once, little more than a fleeting glimpse, a blink and he was gone. It had been ten years before outside a Glasgow courthouse, just as Davie was being led away. He could not be sure for it was just a flash, but the more he replayed it in his mind, the clearer the face became, as if someone had tweaked the focus. It became a face he knew as well as his own, for the son was the image of the father. It bore a smile on the lips yet there was a coldness in the blue eyes.

And then, just as Davie was pulled away, a wave. He had not registered it at the time but as the months passed and he replayed the scene in his mind, he became sure of it. A wave that said I’m back.

1

IT WAS A small room in a small flat and the glow of the electric fire stained the walls blood red. They used to call these one-roomed flats single ends, but that was before the estate agents moved in. Now they were studio apartments, to make them more attractive to the upwardly mobile. Not that the yuppies would be interested in this one. An enthusiastic salesman might call it a fixer upper, but really the only thing that would fix this place up was a canister of petrol and a match. It was run down, on its uppers. If this room had been a person, it would be homeless.

The wallpaper had been slapped on its walls back in the ’70s, when garish was good. Bright orange broken up by black wavy lines and the light radiating from the three bar electric fire made it look like the flames of hell. The furniture – what there was of it – would have given items thrown on a rubbish skip delusions of grandeur: a lumpy, stained two-seater settee, a matching armchair, the back bleeding stuffing, an old kitchen table, two wooden chairs, one lying on its side. A standard lamp, the bulb smashed, also on the floor. An ironing board, open and standing, a man’s shirt still hanging from the edge, the iron itself disconnected from the mains and discarded on the threadbare rug. There was a small kitchen area in the corner – a grime-encrusted cooker, a stained sink, a small fridge that looked incongruously new. The unmade single bed in the recess had clean, if rumpled linen, so someone was choosy about what they slept in.

It wasn’t the decor that obsessed the men and women moving to and fro. It was the woman on her back behind the table. A heavy poker lay in a pool of blood beside her. There was more blood caked on the frayed carpet, spattered on the walls and streaked on the ceiling. The woman’s face was a pulpy mass of battered tissue.

‘For God’s sake, will someone turn off that bloody fire,’ Frank Donovan said. The heat was making him feel sick. A Scene of Crime technician reached out with a gloved hand to comply.

Donovan looked at the body and sighed. The wounds were so ferocious that it was difficult to tell how old the victim was. They already knew she didn’t live here – the flat had been rented to a man called John Keen one month before. Neighbours had never seen him and they had no idea who the woman was. Donovan would have someone check with the letting agent, see if they could pull a description of the guy who signed the lease.

A Detective Constable named Johnstone rifled through a handbag found beside the bed and removed a purse stuffed with five £10 notes and a Strathclyde University student matriculation card dated 1988 in the name of Virginia McTaggart. DC Johnstone handed the plastic card to Donovan, who studied the girl’s face. She’d be twenty-three now, he calculated, dark-haired, pretty in an unassuming way. She wasn’t pretty now, though. The bastard with the poker had seen to that.

He looked up from the card, back to the body, then scanned the room again. Something about this crime scene bothered him, as if a memory had been prodded but had not come fully to life.

‘Frank.’ Donovan looked up to Johnstone, who was holding out a handful of condoms. ‘What do you think – working girl maybe?’

‘Maybe,’ said Donovan, looking back at the card. ‘Get someone to check this card out with Strathclyde Uni. See what we can find out about her.’

Johnstone nodded and took the card back from Donovan. As the DC turned to the door he almost collided with Detective Superintendent Jack Bannatyne who, as ever, looked immaculate. Dark coat over a grey suit, crisp white shirt, muted red tie. Donovan, as usual, felt underdressed in his crumpled blue suit, lighter blue shirt and dark tie, all courtesy of messrs Marks and Spencer. Donovan was surprised to see his old boss here. He headed up Serious Crime now and a solitary murder up a close in Springburn wasn’t usually something that blipped on their radar.

‘Detective Sergeant Donovan,’ said Bannatyne, formal as ever in front of the foot soldiers, as he studied the corpse at their feet. ‘Bad one, this.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Battered with the poker?’

‘That’s what we think, at this stage. The PM will confirm.’

Bannatyne nodded, his eyes flicking around the room. ‘Need a quick word. Can we step outside, away from this heat?’ Donovan hesitated, unwilling to refuse a request from a superior but just as unhappy about leaving a crime scene. Bannatyne caught his hesitation. ‘It’s alright, Sergeant, I checked with your DI downstairs. He’s happy to spare you for a minute.’

‘Of course, sir,’ said Donovan, wondering what brought him to this murder scene. He followed Bannatyne down the winding staircase to Keppochill Road. Blue lights flashed in the night from the variety of police vehicles angled at the kerb while technicians and officers, both plainclothes and uniformed, moved between them and the closemouth. Bannatyne led Donovan a few feet away from the hubbub for some semblance of privacy.

‘Frank,’ he said, keeping his voice low, formality dropped now that they couldn’t be overheard. ‘You’ll’ve heard that Davie McCall is getting out in a couple of days?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘I need a favour.’

‘Okay, sir.’ Donovan hoped he didn’t sound guarded.

‘I need you to make contact with him, once he’s out.’

‘With McCall, sir?’

‘Yes. I think you have a…’ Bannatyne searched for the correct word, ‘connection with him.’

‘Don’t know about that, sir.’

‘You saved his girlfriend from being shot that night. If you hadn’t pulled her out of the way, Clem Boyle would’ve done her for sure. And you caught the bullet. He might think he owes you.’

Donovan resisted the impulse to touch the scar on his chest. ‘Or he might think we’re even because he chased Boyle and helped bring him down.’

‘Maybe, but I’d like you to try anyway.’

Doubts aside, there was no way Donovan could refuse. They both knew it. ‘What is it you need, sir?’

‘You were involved in the Joe Klein investigation. You know there were questions.’

Joe Klein, the gangster they called Joe the Tailor, shot in his own home ten years before. The case was officially unsolved. ‘Yes, sir. But no evidence. As far as we know, it was Jazz Sinclair.’

‘He wasn’t capable of doing an old hand like Joe.’

Donovan shrugged. ‘Everybody gets lucky sometimes.’

‘Frank, someone else was there. I know it. I need you to find out what McCall thinks, what he knows. What he’s going to do about it. Joe was like a father to him and I don’t need him coming out like some lone avenger.’

‘That the only reason, sir?’

Bannatyne looked away briefly, then gave Donovan a long stare. ‘I feel responsible.’

Donovan frowned. ‘For Joe’s death?’

‘Yes. I told Johnny Jones that it was Joe who had put us on to him – remember we visited Jones in his flat that night?’ Donovan nodded. Jones had been credited with kick-starting the big time heroin market in Glasgow, back in 1980. He was shot later that year. Another unsolved killing. There was a lot of that about that year, Donovan recalled. Bannatyne went on, ‘I thought I was being clever but I think all it did was piss Jones off. He sent Jazz in that night but the boy wasn’t up to it. Someone else finished the job, I feel it in my water. I owe it to Joe to find out who.’

Donovan shifted from one foot to the other. He felt he was out of line in saying what he was about to say, but he was going to say it anyway. ‘Joe was a crook, sir. What do you care about him?’

Bannatyne gave him another of his long, hard looks then nodded, as if giving Donovan retrospective permission to ask the question. ‘He wasn’t a bad guy, not compared to what we have now – drug dealers, scumbags, thugs in shellsuits attacking innocent people. He had rules, he had standards. God help me for saying this, but he even had morals, of a sort. We’ll never see his like again.’

Donovan nodded, understanding now. Bannatyne was old-fashioned, too. Tough, sometimes pulled strokes, but always basically honest and with a distinct lack of respect for desk-bound authority figures who had forgotten what police work was all about. There would have been mutual respect between him and Joe the Tailor, even though they were on opposite sides of the fence.

‘I’ll see McCall as soon as I can, sir. I’ll let you know what he says, if anything. But if I remember rightly, he doesn’t say much.’

Bannatyne nodded. ‘All we can do is try, Frank. I appreciate it.’ The DCI inclined his head towards the second floor window of the flat they’d just left. ‘You got a victim ID?’

‘Virginia McTaggart. Could be a tart, we’re not sure. It’s not her flat, so maybe her customer brought her back here. Flat’s rented out to a John Keen.’

Bannatyne thought about this. ‘Want me to ask Jimmy Knight to speak to his touts? He’s got a few who work The Drag – maybe they know this lassie?’

Donovan knew that Jimmy Knight had a number of informers among the prostitutes who worked ‘The Drag’, the grid of streets between Anderston Cross and Sauchiehall Street. He had often walked the rain-swept area with Knight in search of information. Donovan knew that Knight extracted more than intelligence from some of the girls, the big cop being physically unable to keep it in his pants. Normally he wouldn’t want Knight anywhere near an investigation, good and intuitive detective though he was, but as Bannatyne had asked, it would be churlish to refuse.

‘That’d be a good idea, sir, thanks.’

Bannatyne patted him on the arm and walked to his car. Donovan made his way back to the murder room, his mind on Davie McCall. He had thought about the young man often over the past ten years, each memory accompanied by the dull ache in his chest where the bullet had caught him.

Davie McCall.

He was eighteen when he went in. He’d be a man now. He’d had a difficult time in prison, Donovan had heard, though jail was never easy. Donovan wondered how much it had changed him.

2

AROUND HIM THEnight sounds of the prison continued. He had grown used to the coughs and the murmurs and the footsteps. He had even found comfort in them, just as he had in the routines of prison life.

When the judge sentenced Davie McCall, he showed no emotion. It stung that he had been sent away on perjured evidence, even if he’d actually committed the warehouse robbery, but four years inside didn’t worry him. He could handle it. He had never been jailed before, never been to Borstal. Earlier that year he had spent his first night in a police cell following a square-go in Duke Street, but that hadn’t exactly prepared him for life in the Big House. His mind, though, was filled with thoughts of his father’s sudden reappearance, and he wandered through the induction process in a fog. He was aware of orders being barked by stern-faced prison officers, providing his personal details, being given a prison number as well as a striped shirt and jeans, showering then a quick medical – bend over, cough, head raked for lice, and questions designed to assess if he was a suicide risk.

There was no question of non-compliance, he and the rest of the prisoners were herded from one point to the next, making Davie think of the cattle in the slaughterhouse on Duke Street he used to pass on his night-time walks. He was a meat eater, but he always dreaded coming so close to that grey building with its sharp angles and its sense of death. None of the men here were destined for death, no matter how heinous their crime, but they were little more than cattle all the same. That was how prison worked – routine, order, discipline.

Then he was put in one of the dog boxes.

The tiny compartments, little more than a cupboard with a single bench at the back, were a way-station for prisoners while paperwork was being processed. It was only a few square feet and would have been claustrophobic enough if he was the only one in it, but there were two other guys already waiting when the prison officer ordered Davie inside and slammed the door shut. He pressed himself against the door and looked at his new companions wedged side by side on a narrow bench, their shoulders pressed hard against the walls on either side. He had never felt this before, this sensation of the walls closing in on him, and it was a tense two hour wait until they were taken out. Davie had never felt relief like it.

Barlinnie had five wings, each called a hall. Davie’s new home was in ‘B’ Hall and the cell he shared on the second gallery with one other inmate – a petty thief called Tom from East Kilbride – was larger than the dog box at least. However, it was still no suite at the Waldorf, with two slop buckets in the corner that reeked continually of stale urine and shit and a single, slatted window so high up the wall that all he could see through it were ribbons of cold, grey Glasgow sky. His cellmate, his co-pilot as they called them in the jail, was an okay guy, if a bit dodgy, and Davie resolved to keep a close eye on whatever he had, but he generally kept himself to himself, which suited Davie.

Davie resolved to get through his sentence as easily as he could. He would give the screws no trouble, he would be a model prisoner and get out to resume his life. To get back to Audrey.

They had met on a night out in the West End when he had stepped in on her attempted rape by the same young guy who would later kill Joe the Tailor. Davie had taken a beating that night, but it had been worth it. He met Audrey. Audrey, who had almost died because of him but who still cared for him. Gorgeous Audrey, the straight arrow who didn’t give a toss about his past and who saw something in him that he didn’t know was there. Although he didn’t like her seeing him in prison clothes and being ordered around by the screws, she insisted on visiting him as often as she could. She believed he could change and because she believed it, so did he. All he had to do was get through his sentence.

Rab visited two or three times in the early months, but Davie could tell the big fellow was uncomfortable. Rab knew he could leave the visitors room and do what he wanted on the outside, but still Davie could see a thin line of sweat beading on his permanent five o’clock shadow and, even though he tried to hide it, his nervousness was palpable. Eventually, the big guy stopped coming altogether, though he wrote now and again and sent messages via Bobby Newman. One year into his sentence, it was Bobby who told him that Rab was getting married, to a girl from Northern Ireland called Bernadette. She had been staying with relatives in Ruchazie and Rab met her at a party.

‘Shoulda seen him, Davie, arse over tip he went, love at first sight,’ Bobby said, his voice low so that others in the visiting room couldn’t overhear them talking about Big Rab McClymont’s personal business. Rab was a major player in The Life now, thanks to working with Luca Vizzini, Joe’s old friend and business partner.

Davie smiled, ‘Can’t imagine Rab being married.’ He was not as successful with women as Bobby, who merely had to look in a girl’s direction to have her tumbling into bed, but Rab did all right. Now he was about to be married and, Bobby assured him, strictly a one gal guy. Whatever this girl Bernadette had, it was potent.

The match was further testament to the ecumenical nature of their training from Joe the Tailor, for Bernadette was Roman Catholic. Her family back home were far from pleased that she was marrying a Prod.

‘They’re pretty heavy back in Belfast,’ Bobby had said. ‘Don’t know if they’re IRA or anything like that, but they’re a tough bunch. But Bernadette, she’s not taken any shit from them. She just told them she was marrying Rab and if they didn’t like it, they could go take a flying fuck to themselves. Maybe no those exact words, mind you, but that was certainly the sentiment.’

Bobby also brought news of Abe, the plucky wee mongrel dog Davie had rescued from an abusive owner. Joe had always said they must never accept cruelty to women, children or animals, and Davie had taken it to heart. It brought him Audrey and it brought him Abe. When he was sent down, he asked Rab to take care of the wee dog, but in his heart he knew the big guy was not an animal person. To be fair to Rab, he tried, but eventually Abe was rehomed with a young couple in Easterhouse. Bobby Newman had checked them out and he knew the dog was going to a good life. The girl was pregnant and they believed a child should be brought up around animals, which was good. Bobby said he looked in every now and then and Abe was happy, which pleased Davie.

So the months passed and Davie’s release date grew closer as he settled into the routine of being locked down, slopping out, working making concrete slabs, in the cobblers or the laundry, lunch, exercise, work, teatime, lock-down, recreation, supper and lock down. Then the next day it all started again – slopping out, work, meal breaks, exercise, lock down. Every day the same. Every day being yelled at by grim-faced prison officers. Every day hearing the alarm bells go off somewhere and seeing the officers running to contain some trouble, for Barlinnie was full of violent men and the violence within them must boil over. Davie McCall had violence in him, he knew that, but he fought hard to keep it bottled up. And he succeeded.

Until Donald Harris came along.

3

AUDREY FRASER WATCHED the illuminated numbers count down to the ground floor. She was alone in the lift of the Daily Record high rise at Anderston Quay, heading out to interview a drug addict. It was bog-standard stuff, the horrors of addiction laid bare as the sub-heading would no doubt have it, and she wasn’t particularly looking forward to it. There had been a time when she would have given her eye-teeth and one or two of her internal organs for a chance at doing such a piece, but she’d been green and hungry then. Now she was ripe and well-fed, thank you very much. But the interview was part of a larger series about the drug trade in Glasgow and the West of Scotland, and necessary, if she was to give the full picture.

The lift doors opened on the second floor and Audrey smiled as she saw the reed-thin frame of Barclay Forbes. She had known Barc since those green and hungry days as a young reporter on the Evening Times. Barc had proved to be a good friend over the years, teaching her everything he knew about crime reporting. And his knowledge was extensive.

Barc returned her smile and said, ‘Going down, hen?’

‘Buy me dinner first, big boy,’ she said.

He shook his head solemnly as he stepped into the lift and punched the button marked ‘G’, even though it was already lit. ‘Sex on the brain, you.’

Audrey’s smile broadened. ‘What brings you to the dark side?’

Barc had worked for years with the Glasgow Herald and Evening Times, a broadsheet and tabloid respectively owned by a rival publisher. ‘Retired man now,’ said Barc, his voice still bearing the roughness of decades of smoking, though he’d given up two years before. Audrey was glad of that, she had nagged him long enough, and in the end he had given in. ‘I can go anywhere I want. The Sunday Mail’s serialising the book, needed me in to do a wee bit of editing.’

In the year since he’d retired, Barc had been writing his memoirs, stories of Glasgow crime from the 1950s onwards. He said it looked like a trilogy as the first one only came up to the mid-’60s.

Audrey said, ‘Hope they’re paying mega bucks for the rights.’

‘Bloody right they are. No that I’ll see much of it, right enough, once the publisher takes their chunk.’

‘Shouldn’t have taken such a big advance then, greedy sod.’

The lift came to a halt and the doors slid open. Barc gave her a sideways glance as they walked out. ‘Who’s side you on?’

She laughed as they headed for the exit onto Anderston Quay, where Audrey knew a black cab was waiting. Even though she knew he’d given up, she still half-expected him to light up as soon as he was in the open. He didn’t look right without a fag hanging from his lips.

‘You want a lift?’ she asked.

‘Where you headed?’

‘Gorbals, interview with a junkie.’

He nodded. ‘Nice people you mix with.’

‘Present company excepted?’

A smile. ‘No necessarily.’

‘Anyway, you taught me everything I know.’

‘And don’t you forget it.’ His eyes flicked to the taxi idling at the kerb. ‘Nah, thanks for the offer, hen – I’m headed up the West End. I’m keeping company with a lady of independent means in Kelvingrove now.’

Audrey gave him a leer. ‘Keeping company? That what you young folks are calling it now?’

Barc shot her a stern look. ‘Behave yourself, hen, no everything’s about sex. You’re no seeing this junkie alone, are you?’

‘No, meeting a snapper there.’

‘Good,’ Barc nodded, satisfied. Audrey smiled again, glad that he was still looking out for her. He turned away and she was about to step down to the waiting taxi when he swung back and moved close to her again.

‘I hear that guy you used to see is getting out tomorrow,’ he said, quietly. She halted in her tracks.

‘Davie?’

‘You didn’t know?’

She shook her head. It was just like Barc to know something like that. That’s what made him the best, even now. ‘Well, I hope he behaves himself.’

‘Boys like him, they don’t know any better.’

‘I don’t know, Barc, I always told you Davie was different.’

‘That why a four year stretch turned into ten years then? ‘Cos he knew better, ‘cos he was different?’

She looked down at the ground. ‘I’m not sure what happened there.’

‘He reverted to type, that’s what happened. You know it, hen – that’s why you ended it.’

‘I know,’ she said, feeling guilty about the way she had handled things, but something in her voice made the old reporter’s nose twitch. Barc stared at her, his eyes narrowing as he tried to read her. ‘Stay away from him, Audrey.’ Audrey, not hen. That meant he was serious.

‘Barc, don’t worry – I’m over all that, believe me.’ She kept her voice light and airy, holding up her left hand and wiggling her fingers. ‘Respectable married lady, remember?’

He looked at the ring on her finger and nodded. ‘Aye, married maybe. No sure about the respectable…’

He walked away and she watched him go. Davie McCall. She hadn’t thought of him for a long time. That hadn’t been an easy trick to pull off.

*  *  *

The man called the top flat of the high rise ‘The Crow’s Nest’, even though the tower block didn’t quite scrape the sky as much as others in the city. The Gorbals used to be known as Hell’s Hundred Acres, a tag Audrey always thought unfair. But then, she’d never seen the place when the dark tenement was king. Back in the ’60s, these flats had been hailed as the future, but now they were slated for demolition, though no-one knew when that would happen. From what she had seen, it was not before time. Audrey and Big George Gillan, the photographer, had passed a number of boarded up doorways as they walked to this one, the architect’s dream crumbling into a damp, crime-ridden hellhole.

If it hadn’t been for the man sprawled on the couch under the window, the flat would have looked derelict. There was no carpet on the floor and the ratty old armchair in which she sat was ripped and stained with who knew what. She knew she was going to have her trousers cleaned immediately. Or burned, which may be wiser. Big George leaned against a wall smoking a cigarette, refusing to sit on anything in the flat. His camera dangled around his neck, and he’d already snapped off a number of shots of the sallow-faced addict. Every now and then, she heard the click of the shutter as another angle appealed. He’d taken maybe twenty shots but only one would be used, the addict’s face blanked out. Big George could have left any time but he opted to stay, being old school, and there was no way he was leaving a lassie alone with a junkie crook.

Through the grime-encrusted windows overlooking Queen Elizabeth Square she could see the city lying under a sky that looked as if it had been smeared by an oily rag. A gas fire hissed in the wall but the flat still felt cold, thanks to damp walls. There was nothing else in the room apart from the armchair, its neighbour in the corner, and the couch. No coffee table, no telly, no pictures, ornaments or mementos, unless you counted the two or three brown-tinged cigarette filters that lay on the floorboards under the window. She stared at the red-haired man opposite her, unable to shake off the feeling she’d seen him before. He was smoking a thin roll-up, but it was unfiltered. He had other uses for the items on the floor. Even without the usual detritus of habitation, this place had an unlived feel about it. Audrey wondered if it was his home or if it was some kind of Giro drop used by a handful of people.

He told them they should call him ‘Jinky’. Used to be a footballer, he said, a good one. Could jink about with the ball. He’d been jinking about when they first arrived, always in movement and even when he sat, his leg bounced around. If it was nervous leg syndrome, Audrey thought, it was heading for a breakdown. They had talked for a while, but his needs grew too strong and eventually he excused himself and vanished into another room. Big George had raised his eyebrows at her. They both knew what he was doing. Tenner bag into a spoon, heated with a lighter, drawn into the syringe through the filter tip, then into a vein – probably his groin, given the years he’d been mainlining. The residue in the filter tip would be saved for a rainy day. He was more relaxed when he came back, but Audrey knew she was on the clock now. Pretty soon he’d be drifting into a deep sleep, and when he awoke he’d feel the need to jag up once more.

He spoke as if his jaw was stiff, like so many junkies, his voice coming from somewhere at the back of his throat. He spoke about his life, how he’d come from a good family here in the Gorbals but he’d joined a gang, drifted into crime, done time in the Bar-L, then Greenock, for assault with a deadly weapon. When he got out in 1984 he’d started using heroin, got hooked, and now here he was. Still saw his wee maw around the streets, down the shops, but she didn’t want to know him. Ashamed of him, so she was. Couldn’t blame her, he said.

‘Why don’t you kick it?’ Audrey asked, but she knew the answer before he shook his head sadly.

‘Naw, darlin, no easy, that. Tried once, went to one of they addiction service places, Alban House, then did a spell at a rehab unit over in Cardross. It was fuckin hard goin so it was, pardon my language. Almost made it, too, but as soon as I came back here I was right back on the stuff. It’s like bein in love, know what I mean? It’s all you can think of, all you want, and when you’re away from it you can’t wait to get back.’

Audrey scribbled this down. It was a good line and she wondered if he’d read it somewhere. ‘Where do you get your stuff?’

‘Ach, all over, darlin. Here, there. You cannae go nowhere in Glasgow, darlin, without trippin over a dealer. Used to be there was a polis on every corner, or a pub, now it’s a dealer. There’s a couple work the Gorbals here, just down at the shops, fuckin yards away from the polis station, pardon my language. It’s nuts, darlin, pure nuts. They’re there puntin tenner bags and jellies and that and the polis are sittin in their wee office drinkin coffee and eatin doughnuts, you know?’

She nodded. It was a tale told and retold across the city. Gorbals, Saracen, Possil, Blackhill. The police couldn’t stem the flow of drugs on the streets, so it often seemed they tried to ignore it. She had even heard that senior officers had long ago decided they couldn’t stop the trade, so they decided to control it by ‘licensing’ dealers to operate in return for information when it was needed. It was almost an urban legend, but Audrey had never found anyone to corroborate it. She wished she could – what a story that would make. Her husband wouldn’t be happy, though. He was seldom happy with what she wrote. But then, he wouldn’t, being a plainclothes cop.

‘Anyway, darlin,’ Jinky said, his voice sad, ‘I suppose it’s what I deserve. I’ve no been a good person, you know what I’m sayin? My maw would die if she knew all the things I’d done.’

‘Like what?’

His face crinkled. ‘Ach, robbin folk, hurtin folk. See my prison stretch? Was for usin a knife on a fella. Carved him up bad, so I did.’

‘Why’d you do it?’

He stopped and considered her question, his eyes dull and lifeless. ‘Fucked if I know, pardon my language, darlin. I think I was paid to do it. I did that back then, got paid to hurt folk. There was a Tally man around here who used to get me to scare folk who didn’t pay their debts on time. Known for it, so I was. Even in the jail.’

‘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.