Quite Ugly One Morning (4 page)

‘Lovely girl, Jenny,’ Duncan said. ‘I’d never have guessed she was in the police in a billion years.’

‘Apparently not. But against my better judgment I do like her. If I could overcome the threat to my masculinity of her being about four inches taller than me, I think I could quite fancy her. Do you think it would be unwise for me to get involved with an officer of the law?’

‘I don’t think it would be wise for you to get involved with anyone I know. I’ve seen how your relationships develop, remember. Anyway, you’re not really Jen’s type. Believe me, I know at least that much about her.’

‘Oh come on, Duncan, that’s unfair,’ Parlabane protested, trying to sound hurt. ‘I’ve done a lot of growing up in the last few years – even more in the last few days. I’m slightly more sensible and a
lot
more sensitive. These days I’d be prepared to change things about myself to attract the right woman.’

Duncan arched an eyebrow. ‘Yeah? Could you grow tits?’

Parlabane closed his eyes. ‘Fuck.’

‘Sorry, Jack. I tried to be gentle but you weren’t picking me up. I thought as I didn’t tip you off about the police station I should at least let you know that.’

Parlabane stood up and slapped Duncan on the back.

‘Naw, you’re all right, big yin.’

‘Where are you going?’

‘Home. It’s been a very long day and I’d quite like to forget that most of it ever happened. You don’t know a good smack dealer, do you?’

Sarah had expected to feel more scared. Her hand trembled slightly as she gently, slowly, quietly turned the key in the lock, but it wasn’t the thought of being caught, intruded upon that was bothering her. In fact it was the disorientating emotional numbness of the days since his death that she was seeking to dispel with whatever she found within; a feeling of plain old terror would at least be a feeling.

There seemed nothing to make sense of, as if the final reel was missing. It was not a dramatic crescendo or a devastating dénouement. Neither did it feel like a sudden tragedy or a never-expected blow.

The feeling was far worse than of anticlimax; it was one of abortion. Someone had ripped the pages from the back, taped over the last half-hour.

She hadn’t loved him for years, but she hadn’t hated him so much for a wee while either. She needed to feel something for him, one way or the other, but there was just a gap, a question mark. Perhaps in his flat there would be some trace of his presence that she could latch on to; she had long since exorcised it from her own. The police had refused her request to be allowed into the premises, but she still had the keys Jeremy had left with her in case he ever lost his own set. The cops had said she could come back when they were finished there, but she feared they would somehow neutralise the place.

She pushed the door open and stepped between the crime-scene-warning tapes. The smell of disinfectant filled her nose immediately and her eyes filled with tears as she wondered blindly at what it might be covering up, the physical, visceral reality of her ex-husband’s murder hitting her for a vivid, horrific moment.

Sarah closed the door silently and let her eyes grow accustomed to the dark, the hallway illuminated solely by the play of streetlights coming in the living room window. The living room door was off its hinges, propped up against the wall a few feet from where it should hang.

Ironically, the place looked like Jeremy was about to move out. His books and papers and even clothes were all arranged in piles on the floor, items of furniture racked up on top of and against each other along one wall. Most of the floor was bare, and despite the half-light she could still make out a large, dark stain and guess wincingly at what had made it.

She looked down at it but it didn’t precipitate any floods of emotion. She now knew nothing in here could disturb her more than the imagination of what had been cloaked by that disinfectant.

‘Oh, Jeremy. You’ve really screwed it up this time,’ she found herself mumbling.

At the time she had been glad Jeremy’s father had been asked to formally identify the body, but as events unfolded she had felt increasingly excluded from the whole affair. She had gone to his parents’ house in Morningside because she didn’t really know of anyone else she could talk to about it. They had been civil enough, but she couldn’t miss their underlying question of ‘what the hell does anything concerning our son have to do with you any more?’ She had divorced him, hadn’t she? What did she care if he was dead?

The police didn’t seem to think she had any right to know what was going on at all, and what they did tell her just added to the numb sense of nothingness. Killed by some malnourished-looking
Trainspotting
character the police had picked up and charged, with a history of smack and aggravated burglary. Just chance. Plain old bad luck.

She felt there had to be more to it, but had seen enough random tragedy to know that there was no reason why there should be. Why should there be a big answer for her when no one had been able to give one to all the bereaved spouses, parents and children she saw every week?

As divorces go, it had been a pretty clean break. She had forgiven but had learned to protect herself too much to forget. For a long time she still felt something for him, even if it was only pity, but that was always mixed with the kind of relief a sailor must feel when he looks back from the lifeboat at his ship going down.

Perhaps what had so thrown her about Jeremy’s death was that someone had pre-empted the climax of his inevitable self-destruction.

She was right. There was little trace of Jeremy left in the flat.
For a start, the whole place looked too tidy. Even the debris was in neat little piles, splintered wood separated from broken ceramics. She squatted on the floor next to an orderly section of glass shards which she recognised as from the revolting coffee table Jeremy’s parents had given them, one of the things she had gladly let him keep when they split.

Then she found herself doing a double-take; she had seen something uninterestingly familiar and looked away for the half-second it took to realise that it was familiar from an entirely different context. It was a small plastic ampoule, empty and without a label, stuck in between two fragments of glass. It was possible that the police had ignored it or even that it was awaiting inspection along with all the other items ranged around the room, but there seemed a good chance that they had missed it altogether. Now that she had seen it, she couldn’t just leave it, as what if they had missed it or ignored it and it turned out to be important? However, she realised that there was no way she could tell them about it without letting them know she had been in the flat.

She carefully removed it and popped it into the pouch at the front of her bag. She would get it analysed herself and then own up if it turned out to be anything interesting.

Sarah tiptoed back to the front door and peeped through the spyhole to make sure there was no one on the landing. She held her breath and listened for noises in the close, but there was nothing. Then she opened the door, climbed back through the tapes and closed it again, turning the key and releasing it so that the lock didn’t slam.

‘Find what you were looking for?’

Sarah’s stomach made a valiant escape bid but was foiled by her rapidly expanding lungs as she gasped and turned around to see who had spoken.

There was a man standing on the staircase, blocking off her route out of the close. He looked early thirties, about 5’ 7” – her height – and of slim build, dressed in jeans, a black polo-neck and a biker-style leather jacket. He had a shock of fair hair falling over his forehead, and darkish skin that suggested regular exposure to the sun rather than a fortnight’s tan. She figured all that was missing was a skinny roll-up in the mouth and a notebook of dreadful beat poetry in his right hand.

Her first instinct was to kick the shit out of him for creeping
up on a lone woman at night, but she thought she had better establish first whether or not he was a cop.

‘Why, who the fuck are you?’ she offered.

‘I’m someone else who has trouble reading “keep out” signs,’ said Parlabane. ‘There’s a polisman heading over here right now. Do you fancy coming upstairs for a cup of tea or would you rather bump into him on your way out of the close?’

There was a tingle in Parlabane’s nose. It was a familiar one, but no less enjoyable for it, and it made him feel like he was off the canvas again. It was created by sticking the said nose where it didn’t belong; better yet, where someone specifically didn’t want it.

He hadn’t lied to Jenny. After seeing the carnage in Ponsonby’s flat, he genuinely didn’t have any intention of getting involved in the investigation, any more than passing on anything he might happen across. Throwing a decent cop a few titbits was always worthwhile, especially when you were new in town, and Jenny had instantly struck him as a lot more than just a decent cop. The calm, assured and even intrigued manner in which she had reacted to finding him in Ponsonby’s place had told him from the off that she wasn’t standard-issue.

At first he was too jet-lagged, hung-over and shaken up by the LA thing to think about anything more than getting himself out of being arrested, but as he spoke to Jenny later, he began to realise what had been wrong with the picture.

He had seen plenty of McGregors. Decent men made cynical through the constant disappointment of discovering what human beings are really capable of, numbing themselves so that nothing shocked them, nothing surprised them. Problem was, as a result they became too credulous of atrocity; they were prepared to believe anything as long as it sounded authentically sordid. They had lifted some scrote of a junkie in Leith who had a string of burglary convictions and a history of violence. McGregor would have no problem believing the wee runt was capable of doing it, and if the evidence didn’t fit, he’d be off looking for another such smackhead housebreaker.

But Jenny had been looking for something else, and having had time to think more calmly about what he had seen, Parlabane thought he knew why.

*
*
*

His first and most probably last shift at the
Evening Capital
had not gone well. When Duncan accompanied him into the newsroom, one hack had jumped over his desk and darted out of the door, and the news editor had backed up against a pillar and warned: ‘I’ve already called security. They’ll be here any minute.’

‘Donald, this is Jack Parlabane,’ Duncan had said, bewildered. ‘He’s here for a shift, remember?’

The visibly sweating news editor looked back and forth between Duncan and Parlabane, nervous and confused. ‘But I thought . . .’

‘I was the guy you stitched up on the front page the other day? Small world, huh?’

For Donald McCreedie, it ranked among his least comfortable moments in journalism, right up there with the time in Portsmouth when he splashed the front page with an exposé of an adulterous affair between a top local councillor and a pictured mystery woman, who turned out to be the proprietor’s wife. It was all true, but that didn’t make his sacking any easier to take.

‘Er . . . em . . . welcome aboard, I suppose. Em . . . no hard feelings, eh?’

Parlabane stared at him for a long time without saying anything.

‘Look, eh . . . why don’t you eh . . . sort of . . . sit here maybe?’

Parlabane picked up a dictionary and started thumbing through it. McCreedie looked on in gaping fear.

‘There,’ he said, pointing to the word ‘suspect’. ‘Read and remember.’

As a freelance, from out of town and low on local contacts, he was unsurprised to be stuck at a desk all day, landed with exactly the sort of busywork the staffers hated doing. The knowledge that transferring funds from his bank in LA might take a couple of days and that this was a fast way of getting some ready cash kept his professional ego in check, but he was still relieved no one seemed to know who he was.

However, the feeling of being a shark getting fed plankton was starting to get to him, and the editorial style of the paper was grating on his nerves like sandpaper. It seemed to be a mixture of blue-rinsed moral disapproval and parochial couthiness, mixed with a paranoid, negative preoccupation
with all things Glaswegian, an animosity which it mistakenly believed to be enthusiastically reciprocal. He didn’t know how to break it to them. ‘Hey guys, sorry, but through in the West, you know . . . we don’t actually
worry
too much about Edinburgh . . . you know, like,
ever .
. .’

And the more copy he read, the more annoyed he got about the fact that he had been the high-profile subject of it the other day. Finlay Price, the little bastard who had written it, snuck back in quietly after a while, a slimy wee shite with greasy hair and big damp patches under his arms. Parlabane clocked him immediately as a national tabloid wannabe; this gig was just his audition. He wasn’t interested in what the real story was, just what would make the loudest splash below his byline.

Price had taken what the police had told him and gone straight to work on it; the thought that there might be more to discover would never occur to him. His job wasn’t to find things out, his job was to ‘make’ stories. Some innuendo here, some association there and
voilà
:
you had fifteen pars on the front page that suggested much but actually told you fuck-all.

The success of popular reporting since the Eighties had lain in the practice of massively increasing the ratio of column inches to facts. Facts were both expensive and time-consuming to procure, so you had to use them as sparingly as possible.

On last night’s final edition front page, Price had the junkie burglar found guilty by the end of the standfirst. Listening to him on the phone and watching him talk to people around the office, Parlabane was in almost awed disbelief that someone could have so little doubt that the police had the right man. But if they let the junkie go and arrested a different bloke tomorrow, Price would work on the premise that the new suspect was one hundred per cent guilty too. What Parlabane found so hard to understand was the guy’s lack of a need to get his own perspective, to look for anything deeper in the story than ‘Gory murder – police seek baddie – police catch baddie – baddie goes to jail’.

Watching this fucking moron work had him climbing the walls, desperate to get out and get his teeth into finding the real story behind the Ponsonby murder.

The final edition’s front page was going to lead on a story about the police confiscating a stash of hard-core tapes from
a video store in Leith. Just the sort of morally indignant tale to have them snorting over their scones in Murrayfield.

COPS SEIZE PORN was the gleeful banner headline planned in on the chief sub’s computer monitor, but McCreedie, the deputy editor and the hack who had faithfully jotted down the police statement – sorry, written the story – were gathered round trying to improve on it.

Parlabane was wandering relievedly towards the exit, his shift mercifully over, when McCreedie called him across to their gathering.

‘Can you think of a better headline for this?’ he asked.

Parlabane leaned over and read the story on the screen, then stood with his brow furrowed for a few moments as they looked expectantly at him.

‘I’ve got it,’ he finally said. ‘How about: DRACONIAN CENSORSHIP CONTINUES, with a strap saying:
Sexual repression maintains sad climate of dangerous ignorance
?
No? Just a thought. Good night.’