One Fine Day in the Middle of the Night (3 page)

Former Lothian and Borders Police Inspector Hector McGregor took a deep, satisfying breath of the Cromarty Firth air and looked at his watch, which told him he was officially about ten minutes into his retirement. He hadn’t actually worked a shift for three weeks, but that had, strictly speaking, been holiday time, most of it spent organising and executing his and Molly’s move from Islay. Yesterday had been his last day of paid leave, and he’d toyed with considering himself a gentleman of leisure as of tea‐
time then, but an August Saturday at nine had sounded far, far more satisfying. Somewhere in Edinburgh right now, a copper was turning up to start
that
shift, with the Festival in full swing, Princes Street mobbed, and Rangers due at Easter Road.

The morning was cool and clear, with a warmth in the wind that seemed to promise the sun would get stronger and that a hot summer day was in prospect.

Lovely.

Perfect, in fact. Another half an hour’s brisk walk and he’d be at the kitchen table, enjoying one of Molly’s no‐
holds‐
barred fry‐
ups, before deciding how to spend the rest of this momentous day. A leisurely eighteen holes, perhaps, or possibly a seat by the water, meditating in anticipation of the unmatched pleasure of a tug on his line; perhaps even phone his brother‐
in‐
law in Portmeddie, see if he was taking his boat out later. Or maybe he’d just sit on his arse in the sun‐
trap back green, pipe in one hand, can of export in the other, contemplating the fact that if anyone in the vicinity decided to do something unpleasant to anybody else today, it was no longer any worry of his.

The smell of pine filled his nose, the twitter of birds his ears; that and the wind the only sounds to be heard, it seemed, in the whole world.

He was due this. Christ knew he was due this.

His posting on Islay hadn’t turned out to be quite the peaceful valedictory sinecure he’d hoped. First of all, there’d been that horrible stooshie over the wifie in Ballygrant with MS who was growing her own cannabis in her greenhouse. Having spent three decades policing a city whose name had become synonymous with heroin and AIDS, McGregor’s perspective on both drugs and disease had prompted him to be forever too busy to investigate rumours of something that seemed common knowledge throughout the island and something no‐
one in the community wanted to make a fuss about. Even the occasional pointed suggestion that it was ‘a helluva big greenhoose, right enough’ remained insufficient to pique his professional curiosity, until a ‘concerned citizen’ made a formal complaint and he was obliged to take action.

The concerned citizen, a Mr Charles McGinty, was not in fact a resident of Islay, but owned a holiday home there, which he visited most weekends. Through a telephone call, he furnished McGregor with the information not only that Stella McQueen was growing cannabis for personal use, but also that she was selling the excess to the island’s impressionable youngsters.

When he arrested her, the whole thing turned into a three‐
ring media circus, with reporters, photographers and news crews descending instantly on the place, closely followed by a waftingly stinky mob of long‐
haired protesters in the most life‐
endangeringly ramshackle convoy of motor transport outside of a Mad Max picture. The dictaphone‐
and‐
flashbulb brigade only tarried long enough to interview Stella and file their ‘senseless victimisation’ stories, buggering off again before the real senseless victimisation began.

The crusties kept pelting him with lumps of rancid bacon (him being a pig – ho fuckin’ ho), which he thought might have more usefully been fed to the diseased‐
looking mutts that followed them around. Some farmer friend of Stella McQueen (McGregor had no witnesses, but everyone knew fine who it was) sprayed slurry all over the front of his wee station in the middle of the night, and he was even hit with the time‐
honoured jobbie‐
inside‐
a‐
blazing‐
newspaper‐
left‐
on‐
your‐
doorstep routine. Time‐
honoured it may have been, but when the bell rang and he opened the door to find flames licking his trousers, he automatically began stamping on it – in his bloody slippers – before remembering.

As if that wasn’t enough, he also had the islanders on his back, complaining about the mess and general nuisance the crusty encampment was causing, and practically a pitched battle on his hands when the locals decided to confront the visitors over whether Jock Gibson’s missing sheep and the barbecue they’d had the night before might be in some way related. Having been thus aggravated by the indigenous population, the crusties rightly anticipated that the most damaging response would be to announce their intention to stay even longer. McGregor successfully persuaded them otherwise using a phoney ferry timetable, with which he pointed out that if they didn’t piss off on the next boat they were going to be marooned there during Glastonbury.

Nobody said thank you. In fact, the only civil gesture he received came in the form of a cake baked and sent to him by, of all people, Stella McQueen, with a note to say sorry for all the bother he’d had. He and Molly polished it off between them for dessert, and very tasty it was too, but he did begin to fear the worst a wee while later when he realised the pair of them were laughing away at an ITV sitcom. Stella sent another note the next day to tell him exactly how much gear had gone into the cake, her idea of a practical joke. At least someone on the island still had a sense of humour. That sense of humour was doubtless painfully tested when the less‐
than‐
understanding sheriff imposed a custodial sentence, but for McGregor at least it seemed to draw some kind of line under the matter.

Being in jail – on top of being in a wheelchair – meant Stella McQueen therefore had a stoater of an alibi for the night Charles McGinty’s house had all its windows shot out by an estimated three hundred rounds of ammunition, evidently intended to harm more than just glass. Traces of blood were found in several locations along a trail leading from McGinty’s back garden to the Kilchiaran road, despite the inhabitant himself not being injured in the attack. This tended to suggest one of his would‐
be assassins had come to some harm, but Mr McGinty was unable to furnish McGregor with any explanation as to how this might have come about, nor why the policeman had found a number of spent shotgun cartridges around the premises’ back door.

It was around this time that McGregor discovered his concerned citizen to be better known around Glasgow as ‘Mad Chic McGinty’, currently holding the strongest hand at the West of Scotland’s drugs‐
and‐
doings table. He’d grassed up Stella McQueen partly to maintain his duplicitous public image, but mainly because he didn’t want impressionable teenagers wasting their money on cannabis when his boys could be supplying them with something that was more of a long‐
term investment.

The word from Glasgow was that a rival player had attempted to destabilise McGinty’s operation via the direct and often effective decapitation method. For a while McGregor wished they had succeeded, but that soon gave way to wishing plain old murder was all it had been about.

As the Islay nights became ever more frequently lit up by small‐
arms fire and, on several spectacular occasions, exploding boats, it became inescapably apparent that some kind of territorial battle was being bloodily fought, with McGregor handed the blue helmet and the role of useless UN peacekeeper. Of course, it wasn’t long before Strathclyde sent reinforcements, followed by cops from London and Amsterdam, plus a small army of customs officials. But his Edinburgh fireside fantasies of being a one‐
man police force with nothing to do evaporated into a blurred haze of gunplay and politics as his poky wee station became the hub of an international narcotics investigation.

McGinty hadn’t bought a holiday home on Islay simply because he liked the place. The knuckle‐
dragging bampot was hardly the scholarly type, but had evidently been a keen student of local history, and of that subject’s incorrigible tendency to repeat itself.

Think Islay, think whisky. Rich, dark, peaty stuff. The place was hoaching with distilleries, and once upon a time there’d been even more. The reason for this was not the excellent quality of its fresh water, the aforementioned peat or any other factor conducive to fine malt‐
making. It was that for a period during the nineteenth century, there wasn’t an exciseman posted there, so every bugger had started his own still.

In more recent times, the customs men’s numbers had been slashed back to save money, with attention centred on certain high‐
profile airports and harbours, ‘intelligence’ rather than diligence relied upon to thwart the smugglers. McGinty had reasoned that nobody would be paying much attention to Strathclyde’s most westward point, and had cultivated links with European exporters to land heroin at a wee jetty just north of Portnahaven. From there the gear was transported to Port Ellen for the ferry to Kennacraig, then driven off the boat, uninspected, on to mainland British soil.

It had been the key to McGinty’s bludgeoning progress through the Scottish drugs underworld, and his local power was such that it turned out the battles on Islay hadn’t been instigated by any native rivals but by a major European firm who fancied making use of his trade route and wanted both ends of the incumbent arrangement out of the way. Hence the small‐
arms fire. And the exploding boats. And the mortar attack on McGregor’s polis station, forcing him to work out of a Portakabin for the rest of his attachment.

But that was over now. It was
all
over now. Edinburgh was behind him. Islay was behind him. The future was the undisturbed tranquillity of the Cromarty Firth, and it had only just begun.

He took another satisfied breath and resumed walking. The sound of gunfire erupted suddenly from somewhere beyond the cover of the trees. One shot, then, moments later, a few more. Then a lot more. He caught himself panicking, peering nervously into the woods, then stopped, remembering both his geographical location and the date. It was August the 12th – the glorious 12th – and here he was in the highlands. The grouse season started today. He laughed aloud, relishing the moment for its timely symbolism. From now on, shooting meant sport. Loud bangs meant hunting. And none of it was his problem.

He strode contentedly down the path for another quarter mile or so, following the trail until it passed close to a couple of rather run‐
down farm outbuildings, occasionally visible through breaks in the trees. Another glance at his watch told him he was still officially less than half an hour into his retirement, and it just seemed to be getting better and better.

A few seconds later, barely preceded by the startling blast of an explosion, a severed arm came hurtling down upon him from the sky, its clenched fist knocking him unconscious with a solid blow to the side of his head.

August 12
^th
. Today. Now. Annette pulled the Audi over about a hundred yards from the entrance to the school car park, where the coach would pick everyone up. She was seriously taking no chances about being seen as she dropped him off. He looked across at her and they both laughed.

‘Last chance,’ he said.

‘Yeah, right.’

The invite had arrived about three weeks back, which at the time had seemed indecently short notice. Not in terms of clearing a space in his social diary, which generally worked on a free‐
form improvisational basis, but in terms of growing up, which was something Ally felt you were optimally supposed to have achieved before attending a fifteen‐
year school reunion. Even if you hadn’t achieved it, you were at least supposed to have given it a shot.

It was Annette’s fault, really. They’d been living together for nearly two years now, throughout which she had been neglectfully remiss about her duty to nag him incessantly on the subject. No whining about his immaturity, no accusations of childish self‐
indulgence, no tutting disapproval of his alcohol and fast‐
food consumption, no arguments about the part his disposable income was playing in propping up the Hollywood studio system, not even a tantrum when her mother had to be rescued by helicopter from the foothills of his sell‐
through video collection. And this woman expected him to marry her?

Still, give the lassie her due, after this growing‐
up deadline came through the letterbox last month, she had done her belated best to assist him by declaring herself irrevocably up the jaggy. That the announcement should have come as a complete surprise had ramifications for his otherwise reliable powers of observation and deduction: Annette drinking Virgin Marys on a Friday night was barely less ambiguous than if she had come home with a Silver Cross pram.

It would be inaccurate to say it wasn’t planned: that would give the impression that it had actually been discussed. They hadn’t even talked about the possibility in a yes/
no/
don’t know/
let’s‐
have‐
this‐
conversation‐
in‐
six‐
months kind of way. That was entirely symptomatic of their relationship to date, right enough. They weren’t much given to state‐
of‐
the‐
union summits, in keeping with the ‘pleasantly winging it’ philosophy that characterised what they had between them. The upside of this was that it always felt new, it always felt like they hadn’t been together long, despite the calendar stating its regular, irrefutable objections. The downside was that Ally occasionally entertained a fear that Annette would wake up one morning with a sudden clarity of vision, take a deck at what was around her, scream ‘Jesus Christ, I’m living with Ally McQuade!’ and run directly for the street in her goonie and slippers, never to return.