Quite Ugly One Morning (15 page)

‘Aw for fuck’s sake.’

There was a sharp tutting noise from the staircase behind where McGregor stood in the doorway.

‘Oh, sorry. Excuse the language, Mrs eh . . .’

‘Kinross.’

‘Aye. Sorry. It’s not a pretty sight.’

‘He’s away then,’ said the wee woman, peering up to the landing where the policeman and woman stood.

‘Afraid so.’

McGregor had instantly regretted releasing the missing digit detail to the press. He had had no idea there could be so many nine-fingered males in the Lothians, and the cooperative public hadn’t let the ‘at least 6’5” tall’ part of the description deter them from reporting every bastarding one of them, never mind the specification that it was the right index finger that was lacking, and not the left pinkie, right thumb or either arm.

The call had come at about ten o’clock that night, after an endlessly irritating day, and he had feared the worst when the switchboard operator told him what it was in connection with and he heard the prim, elderly tones at the other end.

He had listened to the part about the nine-fingered man staying in her guest house with stoic patience, inclining gradually away from professional politeness when she started on about him killing her dog and trying to fake its accidental death in next door’s garden. When she said she had him tied to his bed in a room upstairs, McGregor was about to send a car round to pick her up and let her consider the folly of wasting police time at leisure in the surroundings of a particularly smelly cell. But then she told him about the envelope with the newspaper, the hair dye and the gloves inside, and he was on the phone to Dalziel forthwith, telling her to get in her car and meet him at the guest house immediately.

They had sent Callaghan round the back to cover that escape route as they were met at the front door by the betweeded landlady, Mrs Kinross, who had been looking out for them
there. Then they had ventured silently up to the first-floor landing, where the old lady’s key refused to enter the lock.

‘He’s jammed something in it,’ Dalziel whispered. ‘Which does tend to suggest he’s not tied up any more.’ She advised Mrs Kinross to move back downstairs as there could be trouble.

Then the radio cut in, Callaghan informing them that a first-floor window at the back was both broken and wide open, and that there were what looked very much like blood spots on the flagstones below.

Dalziel received Mrs Kinross’s permission to force an entry, and after a nod from McGregor, broke the lock off the door with two crashingly loud kicks, which precipitated pyjama-clad appearances from several of Mrs Kinross’s other guests.

Then McGregor had switched on the light and surveyed the scene.

There was a big puddle of fresh spew spread out on the carpet, between the radiator and the foot of the bed. The window was indeed open and broken, with blood smeared greasily over the shards that were still in place. And taking up most of the room was the bed, a big, brass-framed affair with the unusual decoration of lengths of rope attached to each of its four supporting posts. Its quilt lay discarded on the floor to one side, below a heavily bloodstained pillow, to reveal a further and larger streaky mess of damp red on the sheet underneath.

‘Do you think it was the man you’re after?’ asked Mrs Kinross from the stairs.

McGregor hit the smirking Dalziel with a glower like stormclouds coming over the Ochils.

‘Don’t say a word,’ he warned her quietly. ‘Not a fucking word.’

Darren was woken from his uncomfortable sleep by the metallic grind of a freight train rolling lumberingly past and slicing his left hand off. His soul-shattered scream of agony and despair was lost to the surrounding buildings amidst the noise of the train’s horn and the heavy rumble of its passing.

He looked at the wasted stump, spurting blood like something out of a cheap video, and burst into tears. His livelihood had just disappeared before he was even awake, and there was
no facility for disability benefits in his line of work. That was his blade hand, his cutting hand.

With the train slowly slouching its way off ahead of him, he stumbled along the track and found it, lying on a sleeper like Thing, palm down and ragged at the wrist, his sovereign rings glinting up at him from each of the four fingers. He bent down and picked it up with his four-digited right hand, then staggered mournfully back to his bag at the edge of the track, where he sat down with it in his lap and sobbed, bleeding steadily from the truncated forearm.

He ripped the sleeve off the jacket of his shellsuit – his fucking favourite shellsuit – to make a tourniquet, as the blood showed no sign of letting up. He wrapped it as tightly as he could around his forearm and tied a double shoelace knot in it. It was agony, but at least it worked, kind of.

It had been her fault. That old bitch at the B&B.

He thought of the men he’d taken in his time. Big men, hard cunts. Kicked their fucking heads in. Bladed them, cut their throats. He thought of that tart, the one Lime had paid him for. That had been his first pro job, his start. She had been fit. He’d fucked her first. Nice. Mostly men after that. Sometimes fights, sometimes just personal, sometimes jobs, once his rep had got round and the work started to come in from all sorts.

But now it was over because he had been well and truly fucked up by some tiny old Jock granny of a landlady.

He had woken up in the semi-darkness, vaguely aware of someone hauling him about, but too fuzzy to quite work out what was going on. Through the hazy mist of his half-shut eyes he could see her little figure, both her hands clasping his left arm across his chest at the right-hand side of the bed. He felt dizzy and uncoordinated, as if something was trying to force him back into unconsciousness.

The quilt was on the floor and his other limbs were already tied securely to the brass bedposts. His legs had been crossed and his right foot was secured to the left bedpost, his left to the right. His right arm was pulled across him and secured to the left post behind his head, and the old cow had looped some rope round the fourth post and was getting ready to tie his wrist to it.

Ordinarily, he could have swatted her away with one shake of that arm, but his limbs all felt unusually heavy, and even
though he got his hand free of her grip, it just swung erratically and slowly around in front of him.

‘Amgifackikillyou,’ he spluttered, still swinging at the trim figure beside the bed. She bent down, not ducking, but picking something up from the floor.

‘Recognise this?’ she asked, but he could only make out a grey shape between her hands. He strained his neck but that just made everything in his field of vision swim lurchingly in front of him.

‘Why don’t you take a closer look?’ she said, and biffed him in the face with it, breaking his nose and burying his head back into the pillow. Then she dropped the heavy object around his middle, crushing his balls, which had been sitting on top of his crossed legs inside his underpants. He gave a choked moan as the blood from his nose ran into his mouth.

Mrs Kinross took his hand again, slipped a loop of rope around it and pulled it tight, fastening him completely to the bed.

‘It’s the stone you placed over my wee Ruffle’s head, to cover up the fact that you had
murdered
him,’ she hissed at Darren. ‘But I know you did it, and I know who you are and what else you did. You’re the one who murdered that young Dr Ponsonby. Well that boy’s father treated my Hamish, God rest him, and so it’s going to give me every pleasure to go down the stairs right this very minute and call the police. You’re going to pay the penalty, my boy. Cross a Kinross and it’s your loss, as Hamish’s father used to say.’

And with that she lifted the stone, went out and locked the door.

He pulled at all four of his bonds, but the knots were strong and efficient. Old cunt must have been in the Girl Guides. Maybe she started the fucking Girl Guides. However, he could get a tiny bit of slack in the ropes securing his arms if he pulled his body up the bed, although it practically cut off the blood supply to his feet.

In his woozy and now pained quasi-consciousness, he remembered his knife, and hoped she hadn’t discovered it and removed it from under the pillow. He leaned to one side and strained his neck, trying to edge his head under the cotton-wrapped foam. At first he merely succeeded in squashing it against the brass frame behind him, but eventually it flipped up and landed on his face, from where he was able to wriggle
it off his coupon and then use his elbow to nudge it out of the way.

The knife was still there, the tip of the blade pointing towards his face as it lay on the sheet. With an almighty effort he was able to strain close enough to it to get the end of the blade between his teeth, unfortunately sharp side in, gently cutting the corners of his mouth.

He needed to get his teeth into the handle, so he pulled his head back around until the knife was sitting at forty-five degrees to the mattress, blade pointing up, then attempted to gently slide his mouth down the metal to the hilt. However, as soon as he tried to do this, he felt the knife slipping backwards, threatening to fall away from his face and maybe even off the bed, from where it would be impossible to retrieve. Therefore, he had to maintain a grip on it with his lips as he drew his mouth along it, slicing deep slits at both corners until he was able to bite into the handle.

Then he swung his head back around and in a nodding, sawing motion, cut through the rope that bound his left hand to the right bedpost, all the time the strain and friction pulling the cuts wider and deeper at the edges of his mouth. Once his hand was released, he gripped the knife and sliced through the rope securing his other hand in barely a stroke, then bent quickly forward to cut his feet free, a movement that made the room spin sickeningly around him.

He rubbed at his burnt ankles and knelt up on the mattress, at which point the revolving motion of his surroundings caused him to fall forward over the bottom of the bedframe and vomit voluminously on to the floor. The acid content of the puke burnt searingly into his cuts, but he had to stifle a cry of pain in case the old bat was listening.

She must have drugged him. That’s what it felt like. Must have been her fucking rotten dinner. He could remember dying his hair – Christ, the smell – then eating his tea, then feeling hellish knackered and deciding on an early night.

Cow.

When he stood up, the room had slowed its rotations, but the hazy, heavy, lethargic feeling was back. He bumped drunkenly against the walls as he put on some clothes and gathered some vital belongings into his plastic satchel, such as his knife, wallet and portable – for fuck’s sake don’t forget the portable.

Then he had staggered erratically to the door and thought about pulling the wardrobe in front of it, but reckoned in this state he’d only pull it down on top of himself. He settled for taking the key from the wardrobe door and jamming it into the lock so that the Filth would have to fuck around outside for that bit longer.

The tiredness came in waves, washing over him and threatening every time to drag him under, but he had to fight it, had to stay awake and on his feet. He trudged sluggishly back across to the window, one foot slipping as another wave crashed into him, and staggered forward, putting his left hand out, palm-up, to steady himself. It crashed through the pane, ripping his shellsuit and the flesh underneath right up to the elbow, and leaving lots of twinkling little splinters sticking out of his palm and his sleeve.

What the fuck. He didn’t even have
time
to worry about it.

He climbed out of the window with his bag over one shoulder, and got halfway down the drainpipe before the next wave shook the world just enough for him to lose the grip of his four-fingered right hand and fall painfully to the ground below, putting both knees through the black material of his shellsuit and grazing them on the stone.

Like an animal crazed by an irrational mix of pain and sheer survival instinct, he picked himself up and charged forward, bouncing off a couple of clothes-poles like a pinball until he made it to the wall at the back.

Darren chucked the bag over and hauled himself up behind it, rolling off the top and on to the mercifully soft mud on the other side.

It was comfortable there, despite the cuts and bruises and his aching bollocks and his broken nose and the sting of puke in the corners of his artificially widened mouth. He felt like he could just doze off, maybe just for ten minutes, then he’d be all right to carry on.

But there’s no alarm clock can beat the sound of sirens for clearing your head and getting you on your feet, and as he heard the wail from maybe a couple of streets away, he was already grabbing his bag and picking his way through the bushes and trees behind the row of prissy little gardens.

After about a hundred yards he came to a metal railing, which ran for about twelve feet where the muddy, wooded
passage came to an end, hitting a pavement at ninety degrees. Directly across the road was a narrow little lane, leading up to some grim and decrepit-looking factories he had seen when he had been walking around trying to find a place to dump Ruffle. There was a gap in the railings where two bars had been bent, probably by kids going through to play on the rope-swings he had passed. Bless ’em. He stuck his head between the bars and made sure there was no one around, then squeezed through the gap and stopped between two parked cars. Another check, then he bent low and scrambled across the street and headed up the lane.

To his enormous disappointment, the decrepit-looking factories turned out to be going concerns, and were securely locked up. One of them didn’t have bars on its windows, but even if he broke in, he didn’t want to be discovered by some fucker on the early shift in the morning.

The lane wound around between the buildings, and he followed it desperately, breathlessly jogging along, occasionally losing his footing on the loose gravel or bumping into a wall as the tiredness nudged the earth a couple of feet to one side for a second.