Loss (2 page)

‘Oh, there was a wee incident out at the Meadows, though,’ said Uniform. He turned round to make sure I was listening, that he had my full attention. ‘Some bloke got plugged. They found him about ten bells, got to be a radge walking there at that time. Looks like he was mugged . . . Be some wee schemie with his first shooter – all got them now.’

The uniform guffawed, set his mate off; he slapped the dash then the pair of them high-fived. They laughed me up, but I wasn’t in on the joke. Hoped, by the kip of them, I never would be.

My heart thumped as we reached the station. I saw Fitz standing at the glass-fronted doors, his hands stuck deep in his coat pockets. He looked more like a university lecturer than a copper. It had been a while since I’d seen him and he’d collected some grey streaks at the sides of his hairline. More than a few pounds had been added to the waistline as well.

The flatfoot changed his tone before Fitz: ‘This way, Mr Dury, please.’

‘
Please
 . . . You found the charm manual on the way in, then,’ I said to him. Fair bust his little act.

Fitz removed a hand, held it before the lad. ‘Jaysus, has this little tool been giving ye a hard time, Dury?’

I shook my head, said, ‘As if.’ I was delighted to hear Fitz revert to my surname. Things couldn’t be so bad then, could they?

He flicked back his head. ‘Don’t think about getting yerself down the cannie, Wallace. The city won’t patrol itself.’

The uniform slunk off, his driver coming in at his back and removing his hat at the sight of Fitz, who sparked up again: ‘Go on, the pair of ye . . . Won’t ye be tucked up in your wanking chariots soon enough.’

I watched them retreat, prodded: ‘You been jumping the ranks again, Fitz?’

He smiled; a roll of meat spilled beneath his chin. ‘Holy Mother of God, ’tis a sight for sore eyes ye are, Dury.’ He thrust out a hand, I took it and his other tapped my elbow. It was all a bit of a show. I felt the hollowness in my chest return, shoot up my throat and freeze my jaw. ‘Get away in, Dury.’ He turned. ‘Come on, follow me.’

We moved towards the back staircase. I read signs indicating routes to the morgue and various offices. Fitz yakked away about this and that. Mainly that. It was all avoidance chat, the kind of clatter that I usually switch off to. None of it bore any relation to my current predicament. None of it raised even the slightest amount of interest, except for his uncharacteristic gratitude for my handing him yet another collar from my last case, allowing him to put one over on his number one rival on the force.

‘But still, Dury, that was some name ye made for yerself there, was it not . . . You must have had a power of offers come yer way since grabbing that killer.’

That case had nearly been the end of me. ‘Fitz, I’m out the game.’

‘You’re what?’ His lip curled up – his teeth seemed whiter than I remembered; he’d either had them bleached or been fitted with veneers.

‘I’m out that racket for good. Look, I’m back with Debs and . . . we’re happy.’

Fitz blinked, pushed through swing doors to a small office, sat on the corner of a desk. He took a pewter hip flask from his pocket and unscrewed the cap. ‘I don’t believe it.’

‘Believe it.’

He slugged deep, flashed his teeth again, offered the flask.

‘No thanks.’

‘You what? ’Tis Talisker, Dury.’

I shook my head.

‘Fuck me, you’re not off the sauce as well!’

I nodded. ‘Six months without a drop.’ I still carried a quarter-bottle of Grouse in my pocket, but that was to test my mettle, not for emergencies.

I fired up: ‘Look, Fitz, what the fuck is this about? I’ve been hoicked out my pit in the middle of the night. If I’m on a charge, or there’s something else, it’s time to shit or get off the pot.’

He rose. ‘Okay, okay.’ Fumbling about, fidgeting, hands in and out of his pockets, until he found a packet of smokes, B&H Superkings. He lit up and offered me one. I waved it away. ‘You’re not off those too.’

I took out my Marlboros. ‘I’ll smoke my own.’

‘Suit yerself.’ He paced over to the other side of the desk and removed a black folder, looked inside and then turned back to me. He sighed, closed the folder, then picked it up, tucking it under his arm. ‘Shall we?’ He indicated a doorway marked ‘Morgue’.

Fitz started chattering again, some bullshit about the bigger picture and most of the force’s young hotshots wanting to walk before they could run. ‘’Tis the world we live in, everyone wants something for nothing. They see those feckin’ bankers with their bonuses and the celebrities and footballers and the idea of graft goes out the window . . .
Graft
, feckin’ no clue of it.’

He had a key for the morgue. Inside there was a strip light that took what seemed like for ever to flicker into life, then the grey sterility of the place dominated.

‘We’re heading for the feckin’ abyss this recession, ’tis only the starter – we haven’t brushed the cuff of this feckin’ credit crunch bollocks.’ Fitz fiddled with the black folder again, turning over pages. I saw fag ash falling on the floor; it seemed like sacrilege.

I felt my heart quicken again. My spine grew rigid and a cold line of sweat formed on my brow. I was getting twitchy, then I spotted the stainless-steel table, holes punched in the metal, heavy legs supporting a long drip-tray underneath. On top was a blue-grey cloth: it was clearly draped over a corpse.

Fitz caught me staring, stopped talking.

‘What’s that?’ I said.

Silence.

I dragged my gaze away from the mortuary slab, said, ‘Fitz, what is this? Why am I here?’

He fumbled – for the first time since I’d known Fitz the Crime he fumbled his words. I had a moment of clarity. Suddenly everything became clear. The call. The uniform jokers. Fitz’s fucking stupid avuncular manner.

I walked over to the slab, my hand trembling for a moment. I watched my fingers hover over the blue-grey cloth that hid the face of a corpse. My thoughts danced. I jerked my hand away, wiped at my mouth. I was shocked to feel my lips so cold, so dry. I felt the cigarette fall from my other hand and I looked to the floor to see the head of ash collapse in a million pieces, followed instantly by a shower of orange sparks.

Fitz came over. ‘Gus, I-I . . .’

I turned to look at his face. His brows made an apse above his eyes. He was the image of inscrutability; a shrill scream for answers. I looked back to the corpse and removed the cloth.

My mind filled with mist.

Nothing could have prepared me for this. Nothing in the world.

I drew the cloth further.

The body was white, clean. Not a mark. Except a small grey hole beneath the heart, barely half an inch wide, where the bullet had entered, and taken a life away.

I felt Fitz’s hand on my shoulder: ‘Is it?’

I realised my breathing had stilled. I felt dizzy, drew a gasp of air. ‘This is Michael . . . This is my brother.’

THERE’S A PHRASE,
I was a million miles away
. Were it possible, I was two million miles away. My head felt as if it had been used as a battering ram. Thoughts raced in and out, questions, assumptions. And anger. Fitz spoke at my side, words, all words. I couldn’t access the part of my being that processed communication, it was all sensation to me now. Feelings. The predominant one, hurt.

I saw Fitz out the corner of my eye gesturing to a chair. I didn’t move and he wheeled it over to me, tried to cajole me to sit. I lowered myself into the stiff, hard-backed, office-issue plastic and tried to regain composure. I looked up towards the ceiling; the strip lights hurt my eyes. Fitz offered me some water. I shook my head, tried to say ‘No’, but it felt as though someone else was in charge of me, my somatic nervous system in the hands of a puppet master.

There was a moment, a memory sparking:

‘Gus, is there anything . . .?’ I heard Fitz again.

I found some words: ‘I was just . . .’

Fitz stared at me but I couldn’t comprehend the expression. He turned to the side, walked out to the water cooler in the hall and filled a cup. He held it out. I watched him but couldn’t take it. He crouched, left it on the floor beside me.

‘Gus, I don’t know what to say, it must be an awful shock for ye. I know, I know that.’

I looked up at him. I hardly recognised the face, my mind was still in the schoolyard. ‘I can see it clear as day, y’know . . . I can actually remember it, where I was, how it felt,’ I said.

‘What’s that, son?’

‘I could only have been eight at most, I was only young. I’d ripped the knees out my school trousers in a scrap but nobody said a word. Nobody said a thing.’

I felt Fitz place a hand on my shoulder, ‘I’ll get ye home, Gus. I’ll get a car.’

‘It’s the day he was born – Michael – I can remember it as clear as if I was there. I tore the knees out my trousers, but nobody even noticed.’ I started to laugh uncontrollably. The laughter shook me on the chair, I moved up and down with it.

Fitz left me. ‘I’ll go call a car. Sit tight.’

I laughed harder. I rocked in the chair, to and fro, the high of a great craic upon me. I was in such mirth I hardly noticed the tears begin to roll down my cheeks. Slowly at first, then faster. I cried for my dead brother, laid before me on a mortuary table. I jumped up. The chair skated behind me on the hard floor as I ran to Michael’s side.

I clawed back the cloth again. He looked so cold and pale, his lips blue. He wore no expression I’d ever seen on his face before. It hardly seemed like him at all. I touched his hair. It hadn’t changed, sitting high and wavy as he always wore it. I felt my throat convulse, my Adam’s apple rise and fall in quick succession.

‘God, Michael, what happened?’ I said. I touched his still, dead face and recoiled at the waxy texture. ‘Why?’

I saw my tears fall on his face and I wiped them away, straightened myself and felt a breeze of composure blow in. As I looked down at my brother I wanted to lift him up and hold him in my arms, but I knew at once it was futile. This wasn’t Michael. This wasn’t the brother I had grown up with, had fought and argued with, had watched soar far in excess of any pitiful achievement I had attained on this sorry earth. Below me now was merely the vessel that had once held my brother’s spirit. He was gone.

I pulled the blue-grey cloth over the corpse and stepped back. Leaning onto the table, I felt my breathing return to normal. I wiped at my eyes as I heard the door opening behind me.

Fitz brought in a cup of coffee. ‘You okay, mate?’ I noticed he avoided eye contact, sparing me the embarrassment of admitting to that crime against manliness – crying.

‘I’m fine.’ I took the coffee. ‘Can we get out of here?’

‘Sure, I mean, of course.’

We went through to the adjoining office and I sparked up another Marlboro, offered one to Fitz. The coffee tasted like the standard watered-down office fare, the styrofoam cup giving it the tick of authentic vending machine.

Fitz spoke: ‘I called in a car. Laurel and Hardy are out at Balerno, a break-in, some bastard’s Christmas ruined.’

I shot him a glower. ‘I can sympathise.’

‘Ah, now, I’m sorry . . . I wasn’t thinking. Look, I’ve called you first, Gus . . . thought you might want to break it to his wife. I’m being a bit fast and loose with the procedure but, well, rules are made to be bent at times like this.’

I nodded my head. ‘I’ll do it.’

‘Okay, as ye say . . . we’ll need to, likes as not, talk to her, ’tis Jayne I believe . . . But we can do that later.’

I clawed an ashtray from him, flicked the cigarette filter with my thumbnail. ‘What the fuck happened, Fitz?’

He sipped his coffee, swallowed. ‘Don’t ye be worrying about that now. Get home to Debs and get yerself a bit rest.’

I shook my head. The very thought set a bomb off in my gut. ‘No chance.’

Fitz gave a nervous cough into his fist. ‘I’m just suggesting you take it a bit easy for now, till you get over the shock. It’s a terrible, terrible shock you’ve just had, Gus.’

I stubbed my tab. It was barely smoked past the halfway mark and it snapped in two before I could get the tip extinguished. I left it smouldering, said, ‘Now listen up, Fitz, my brother is lying on a fucking slab because some bastard put a bullet in him – do you think I’m going to go home and make a nice mug of Horlicks, try to get some kip? Fuck that! I’ll be tearing down this shithole of a city till I find who put him there and then . . . then God save them.’

Fitz showed me his palms, waved me calm. I turned away from him, paced the room. I felt like a caged beast. I was ready to run into the street and start interrogating the first person I put eyes on. My anger was off the dial.

‘You have to leave this to the force,’ said Fitz.

I almost laughed at the suggestion. ‘You can’t be serious.’

A sigh, followed by a sharp intake of breath: ‘I’m only saying, you can’t go taking matters into your own hands, Dury. That would be . . . counterproductive.’

‘You what?’

‘We want to find his killer . . . Let the investigation run its course.’

‘Spare me the corporate speak, eh.’

Fitz moved behind the desk, picked up the phone to enquire about the car, blasted someone on the switchboard, told them to get their finger out their arse. I watched him put out his tab, extinguish mine too, then take another sip from his hip flask. He looked on edge, nervy. Didn’t want to be asked for any more favours.