Gutted

‘So if we’re secretly investigating the DCC,’ Anthony said, climbing the stairs to Colin Morrison’s flat, ‘is it ripping the piss to be pulling overtime on it?’

‘This could be our last ever pay packet from the force,’ Adrienne replied. ‘Might as well try for a heavy one.’

They were joking about it but they each knew how deep they were in. Neither of them had slept well, and both of them had lied about why, as if a refusal to name their fears would somehow ward them off. Adrienne said it was because one of the kids had woken her in the night complaining of bad dreams. Anthony suspected that it wasn’t her daughter who had been visited in the darkness by demons from her own subconscious.

Anthony claimed his bleary appearance was down to playing Team Fortress 2 online until the small hours. Truth was he had tried, but he couldn’t concentrate. He had logged on to a server and joined the blue team, but he wasn’t sure whether he truly was on the blue team any more.

They were both nearing the end of their shift by the time they had finished up at the Fiscal’s offices and tracked down an address for Colin Morrison, but there was little question of them clocking off. It was easy enough for him, but potentially more of an issue for Adrienne.

‘Have you got to get back for the kids?’ he asked.

‘It’s okay,’ she replied. ‘I’ve got a nanny, and I always check with her before a shift starts, to make sure she can stay on if work gets complicated. This definitely qualifies.’

‘So she scores overtime too. Everybody wins.’

‘Or it’s one more person on the bru if this goes tits up.’

Morrison’s flat was on the second floor of a tenement in Cathcart, two to a landing. The close was immaculately kept, its walls lined with green tiles to roughly shoulder height, above which was crisp and regularly re-coated blue paint. There were planters on each half-stair turn, a bay tree in the first, a healthy ficus in the second. It always amazed Anthony how different one tenement could be from the next. He had shared a flat just around the corner from this place when he was a student. The buildings looked identical, but the only organic life he’d ever encountered on the common stairs was a jobbie laid overnight by some manky bastard who couldn’t wait until he got home.

Adrienne rang the doorbell but Anthony wasn’t any more optimistic about getting an answer than when they had tried Morrison’s landline. The flat had a wooden outer door comprising two halves meeting in the middle. They looked robust, heavy and unwelcomingly closed. Contrastingly, across the landing his neighbour’s outer doors were open, tucked back to form the walls of a shallow porch.

Adrienne tried the bell again and waited a little longer, but there was no sound of movement from within, and no light from the glass panel above the semi-doors. She tried the handle and, to their mutual surprise, it opened.

‘Not locked. Shit, look at this.’

The inner door’s lock had been punched out: a pro-looking job, fast and quiet, probably executed with the outer doors closed for concealment. Whoever had done it had closed everything over again upon exit, not wishing to advertise the fact that the place had been hit.

Adrienne opened it and stepped inside, then promptly stepped back out again, pulling the door behind her.

‘What?’ he asked.

‘We’re going to need face-masks. At least a hanky or something.’

Anthony’s stomach lurched. He wasn’t sure he was ready to be first on scene at the discovery of another body, especially as it would necessitate an inescapable admission of how they had come to find it.

‘Oh shit.’

‘No, it’s not a smell. Not yet anyway. It’s just . . . You ever see that film Sunshine, the bit where they find the spaceship that’s been dead and drifting for decades?’

Adrienne reached into her bag and produced a pack of wet wipes.

‘New use number two thousand, seven hundred and twelve,’ she said, placing one over her nose and mouth and proffering the packet.

Anthony followed her inside, where he was grateful for the wet wipe but could have done with a pair of goggles as well. As the thick clouds of billowing particles stung his eyes, he tried not to think about how in the movie Adrienne just mentioned the dancing dust was disintegrated human flesh.

‘Single men,’ she said disapprovingly. ‘They never think to lift a duster or push the hoover around once in a while.’

Anthony had never seen anything like it, and given that he’d lived in a few student gaffs, this was saying something. The closest he’d witnessed had been when his parents were getting their dining-room floor sanded, and he’d made the mistake of sticking his head around the door while the bloke was running the machine.

‘What the hell is this?’ he asked, but as he looked past Adrienne and further into the flat he could see the answer through every open door.

The place had been torn apart. Anything that could be opened was ripped asunder; anything that could be broken was in a thousand pieces; anything that could be turned inside out had been disembowelled. The air was choked with fibres from every seat cushion, every pillow, every duvet, the stuffing pulled out and dumped on the floor. Picture frames lay broken at the foot of every wall, their canvases slashed and discarded. Skirting had been tugged from the walls, carpets lifted and rolled back, floorboards worried at with tools.

‘Do you think they were looking for something?’ he asked.

Adrienne turned around very slowly. He couldn’t see her mouth over the wet-wipe, but her eyes told him his patter was rotten.

‘At least this means we’re not going to find a body,’ she said. ‘If Morrison had been here they’d have made him tell them where whatever it is was hidden.’

‘Unless he came home and interrupted them,’ Anthony mused, eyeing the one closed door off of the chaotic hall.

‘Flip you for it?’ she asked.

Anthony was having a heated internal dialogue regarding the price and value of chivalry when the doorbell suddenly rang from eighteen inches above his left ear. He had a mental image of himself as Scooby Doo leaping into the arms of Adrienne’s Shaggy, so chivalry probably wasn’t going to edge the debate.

‘Hello?’ said a female voice, following up the ring with a knock on the frame of the door.

He pulled it open to reveal a woman in her late sixties or early seventies, dressed in a paint-spattered smock, further pigment flecking her hair. Behind her across the landing he could see that the front door was open on the flat opposite. This was the neighbour. She had a brush in her hand, a fine, pencil-thin item indicating that she was working on canvas as opposed to slapping a fresh coat of emulsion on the ceiling.

‘Oh my God,’ she said, taking in the sight of two strangers and the devastation at their backs.

Anthony produced his warrant card as quickly as he could, before she might flip out in the fear that she’d caught the bad guys in the act.

‘Police, ma’am.’

‘Oh no. There’s been a break-in. Oh, God, that’s awful. Poor Colin. What a dreadful sight to come back to.’

‘Do you know Mr Morrison, Miss . . . Mrs . . .?’

‘Alva. Margo Alva. Mrs. I live across the landing. But this is just dreadful. Poor Colin, after everything that’s happened. I just hope he’s having a nice holiday.’

She was very precisely spoken, reminding Anthony of his Great Aunt Vera who would not tolerate a glottal stop within the walls of her Kelvinside abode.

‘Everything that’s happened?’ asked Adrienne. ‘Has Mr Morrison had some trouble recently?’

‘Hmm, well, not that recently perhaps. Honestly, where does the time go? He lost quite a bit of money in that credit crunch business. Back when he was still working, he used to joke about retiring to the sun. Now he’s just grabbing it a bit at a time, I suppose.’

‘So Mr Morrison is away at the moment? Do you know where?’

‘No, I’m afraid not. I just saw him leaving on Tuesday afternoon.’

Anthony and Adrienne shared a glance. Tuesday afternoon: when the news had broken about Stevie Fullerton going off in his Bentley to the great car wash in the sky.

‘He was on his way down with his suitcase as I was coming up the stairs. I teach a still life class at the Botanics on Tuesdays, you see. He said he was going abroad for a wee break but he didn’t say where. He didn’t stop to speak. I think he was maybe worried he was going to miss his plane. He certainly seemed to be in quite a hurry.’