3

At ten a.m. Charles McWhinnie drove his Rover south across Kingston Bridge. The heat haze had already burned out of the sky above Glasgow. It was going to be one of those days when light rose shimmeringly from pavements and tar surfaces melted. The headlines in the Evening Times would invariably read, TEMPERATURES SOAR, CITY SWELTERS.

McWhinnie, born and brought up north of the river, didn’t like the Southside. The city seemed alien over there. Even the neighbourhood names struck him as strange. Crossmyloof. Strathbungo. Ibrox – which he thought sounded like a veterinary ointment for chafed cow udders. A jar of Eyebrox lotion, please.

He glanced at the narrow motionless river as he crossed the bridge. He saw the tall cranes that serviced the Govan Yard, and the George V Docks, but where these huge constructions had once crowded the skyline, they were few now – skeletal souvenirs of the shipbuilding that years before had been the city’s most vibrant industry.

It had been a time, McWhinnie thought, when people took a pride in their work. What did you have nowadays? Social Security and welfare fraud and chancrous housing estates where kids bought and sold drugs with brazen abandon and fried their brains on lethal concoctions; any stray traveller in such places might have thought himself in a suburb of Beirut.

Collar undone, tie loose, he parked his car in a narrow street of black tenements a quarter of a mile from the drabness of Govan Cross Shopping Centre. Govan had always been a shipyard burgh, a company town, vibrant and cocky. Now shops were barricaded behind steel shutters, and graffiti had been spray-painted everywhere, most of it cryptic save for the occasional sectarian slogan. IRA Rules. Bigotry had never truly died here, no matter what claims to the contrary certain civic leaders and flash media guys might make. It was still simmering in segregated schools and uneasy mixed marriages. Prods and Tims. McWhinnie despised this divide, this moronic anachronism in a city alleged to be surging into a glossy European future.

He took a big paper bag from his Rover, then locked the car. He entered one of the tenements, passing a group of very young kids who were smoking cigarettes. The kids glared at him with tribal hostility as he made his way into the building and walked the length of the close, which was dark and clammy, to the stairs.

He climbed. On the first landing he unlocked a door whose nameplate read: A Factor. He slipped inside quickly, nudging the door shut behind him.

‘I want in and out of here as fast as humanly possible,’ he said.

The little man who sat in the room and gazed at the TV said, ‘Aye, I don’t blame you. This place … I wasn’t expecting the fucking Ritz, granted, but this is a bloody slum.’

‘We’ll deal with your accommodation at the appropriate time,’ McWhinnie said. He tried very hard to be non-specific in his utterances. When you were precise, you often found yourself compromised.

He looked round the one-room flat; claustrophobic, faded daffodil paint, a window so grubby it was opaque, a rag of a curtain, a cracked porcelain sink. A single bed faced the window. On paper, the premises belonged to a certain Arthur Factor, who was non-existent.

McWhinnie put the bag on the table and watched the little man open it hurriedly. It contained a loaf of white bread, a packet of bacon, six small eggs, three apples, three oranges, a carton of milk, a box of tea bags, a paperback sci-fi saga entitled Planet of Ice, Tagamet capsules and a bottle of cheap blended whisky.

The little man looked at the label on the bottle with slight disgust, then surveyed the items on the table. ‘How long am I staying here?’

‘I can’t say.’

‘A rough idea.’

‘A week,’ McWhinnie said vaguely. He didn’t have a clue.

‘A week? Christ’s sake. The telly’s shite. You can’t expect me to sit here and go blind looking at a picture as bad as that,’ and the little man pointed at the TV, where a fat woman with big hair, blurred by snowy interference, wept in front of Jerry Springer. The caption on the screen read: MaryLou Says Her Husband Made Love To Her Mother.

Bones picked up the paperback. ‘A science-fiction book. Beam me the fuck up, Scotty.’ He looked at McWhinnie. ‘This isn’t my kind of thing, squire. I like anything by Dick Francis.’

‘Your literary taste is noted. I’ll send round a horsy selection,’ McWhinnie said. ‘And I’ll find somebody to adjust the bloody TV. Do you have any more complaints? Or are we finished now?’

‘You didn’t bring a newspaper. I like the Record. I told you that. In a pinch, I’ll read the Sun.’

‘Tabloids tend to slip my mind. I’ll arrange it.’

‘White bread. I’m supposed to live on this?’

‘Think of it as a starter kit. The duck à l’orange with potatoes au gratin and baby carrots comes later.’

‘You’re a card, son. People would pay to hear you. See, I’ve always watched my diet. I’ve sat hours in sweatboxes to lose a few pounds. And white bread is just not fucking on. As for bacon … fat clogs arteries fastern twenty rats stuck in a drainpipe.’

McWhinnie ran a hand over his straw-coloured hair. He had the look of a sprinter only a year or so past his prime. Women warmed to him instantly, but somehow prolonged relationships failed to happen. He was never sure why. Maybe women thought he was too committed to the job, too anxious to be accepted into the bloodstream of the Force.

‘Right, finished here,’ he said. ‘I’m offsky.’

‘Just a minute, son. What school did you go to?’

‘Beg pardon?’

‘A toff’s school, was it? A fee-paying school, eh? Your accent is posh Glasgow. Not like mine. ’Course, I only went to the local eedjit school with all the other toerags. I wasn’t privileged, you understand. No silver spoon in my gub.’

‘Get this straight. My name, my background – off limits to you. Think of them as protected by live high-voltage wires. Go near them, they barbecue you like a sausage on a hot grill. Is that clear?’

‘You’re a tough guy, eh? I’ll tell you something, sahib. You don’t have the stuff for this work. I can hear it in your voice.’

‘I’ll be sure to keep your opinion in mind,’ McWhinnie said. ‘One last thing. Don’t even think about leaving here and wandering around. You understand me? It’s in your own interests to stay indoors.’

The little man said, ‘Your wish is my command,’ and opened the bottle of scotch. ‘You’ll have one for the road?’

‘On a cold day in hell,’ said McWhinnie. It was insufferably hot in this room, and the trapped air irritated him, and he didn’t like this little fart he had to deal with. In fact, this kind of thing wasn’t in his job description. Nowhere. Buying bloody groceries for scum. How did he get into this? What did this have to do with law and order? He hadn’t signed on as an errand boy.

Somewhat dejected, he stepped towards the door. You don’t have the stuff for this work. The little man’s observation rolled through his head.

‘A wee minute, squire. Did you take care of that, ah, business matter?’

McWhinnie removed a plain brown envelope from his pocket and tossed it to the little man, who caught it.

‘Twenty-six hundred all squared away,’ McWhinnie said.

The little man looked inside the envelope. It was filled with slips of paper. Each was marked Paid In Full. Twenty-six hundred and ninety-seven quid of debts to bookies all taken care of in one swoop.

McWhinnie said, ‘I’ll leave you to your purgatory.’

‘You might have put in a bloody phone,’ the little man said.

‘You don’t get phones in purgatory, Bones. It’s a place of solitude where you contemplate your sins.’

McWhinnie shut the door and went down the stairs two at a time, relieved to be making his exit. Outside, the smoking kids had gone, the front doors of the Rover lay open and where the expensive tape deck had been there was only a black slot, like an unsmiling mouth.

Those little fuckers, he thought.

Those bloody monsters. He clenched his fists and looked up. The bright sky over Govan turned angry black-red in his vision.

From the window of his dreich one-room cell, the little man looked down at the sight of the well-spoken prat in the bright white shirt striding in a spluttering rage around his shiny car, kicking at useless tyres, fuming.

Funny stuff. Ho ha.

He opened the scotch, poured a measure into a cup and sniffed it. Granted, nobody was obliged to provide him with liquor. But if they were going to, why did they have to donate sewage?

Bones took whisky into his mouth and swirled it for a time. Purgatory, he thought. So this is what good Catholics fear.

The waiting room. Where you find out if you’re getting a ticket for the onward journey.

I know where I’m going, he thought.

He stared at the gloomy walls. The faded yellow. The crap TV. The single bed with what looked like an Army-issue blanket, rough as a bear’s arse. It wouldn’t take long before this place spooked the daylights out of him, and then the sheer force of the terrible thing he’d done would kick him, like the hoof of an angry horse, straight in the soft core of his heart.