Crime

5 Two Ladies

THE LUNCHTIME TRAFFIC is light on the freeway, as Lennox sits next to Ginger, who has been uncharacteristically cowed and silent. This suits him; he feels good that somebody else is feeling bad. He’s exhausted, but he’d been glad to see the dawn fill the room, delivering him from his sweating torment. He shakily recalls one of last night’s tortuous dreams. He was on Ginger’s balcony. Inside the apartment, through the glass, the grinning Mr Confectioner with a frightened Britney, who then became a terrified Trudi. Lennox’s own mother Avril sat in a chair watching, like she was almost encouraging the Nonce. Lennox had pulled at the door but it wouldn’t slide open. He pounded the glass till both his hands bled. When he looked behind him there was no balustrade on the balcony. And the veranda area had shrunk to become a small ledge.

A horn blares, tearing him from his thoughts.

— Spastic! Ginger roars, as he zooms in front of a big truck that dazzles Lennox with a magnificent chromium blast of reflective sunlight. He turns to Trudi in the back. — Was I out of order last night?

— No, not at all, she says, a little too emphatically. — You were great hosts and it was a good night out, I’m just suffering a wee bit now, with the jet lag and everything.

At the hotel’s rear courtyard – a small jungle of cypress, oak, pine and the ubiquitous palm trees, designed to allow revellers to sneak in discreetly – they say their goodbyes. Lennox and Trudi look obviously wrecked as the concierge dispenses an obsequious and collusive this is South Beach grin.

— I have to lie down, Trudi moans, flipping the plastic key into the room’s lock, delighted when the green light appears first time.

She is bad with hangovers, Lennox considers, as he heads to the bathroom. The sleep he’d gotten at Ginger’s had been non-existent, and the antidepressants are now gone. He can’t tell her. Something is going to happen. He can feel it as he sits on the toilet. But not from his bowels. Nothing will happen in his bowels.

When he comes back into the room, Trudi is lying on the bed. Her arm is draped across her face, covering her eyes from the sun. She wears only a sky-blue thong. It contrasts nicely with her sunbed-tanned skin. Why had she not gone under the covers? The light ribs her body. He can see the hardness in it. Gym and diet. Now he feels something in his gut. Saliva ducts working in his mouth.

He gets on to the bed and grabs at her breast; an awkward and adolescent lunge that surprises him as much as it does her. Trudi pulls away, wincing. — My nipples are sore, she grumbles in protest. — It’s my period coming on.

Lennox feels his body relax in relief. Sex has been avoided again. He can’t believe it; he is actually happy. He is doing everything in his power to avoid shagging her. Usually it’s all he wants. How long has it been? A cold sweat breaks out on his forehead, across his back. He knows that if it doesn’t happen soon, they’ll be finished.

They get under the duvet. She turns away and Lennox wraps himself around her. Spoons her. She used to like that. Made her feel safe and loved, she said. Soon she’s writhing and sweating, pushing him away. — Don’t touch me, Ray. It’s too hot.

Now she’s feeling trapped by him. Confined. He rolls flat. She soon falls asleep. Lennox lies awake, shivering in a private hell. He remembers that boy in Jeanie Deans pub on the South Side of Edinburgh. Just another daft cunt telling sick jokes to his mates: still too young to have learned about hurt, loss and taste. A game of pool in the boozer. Forgot where he was.

A young boy named Martin McFarlane had recently died after a bone-marrow transplant. He was a brave, sweet-faced wee kid and his sad story had been widely reported in the local media. The community rallied round with fund-raising activities for life-saving operations at American and Dutch clinics. But they hadn’t worked; Martin had succumbed to his disease. The young guy in the pub loudly asked a mate, — What’s the difference between Martin McFarlane and Britney Hamil? When his friend shook his head, the boy emphatically contended, — Martin McFarlane died a virgin!

The extreme bad taste and the local, contemporary aspect caused most of his friends to gag or shudder. Lennox, who was sitting in the corner with some Serious Crimes boys based at the South Side station, stood up and walked across to the young man. The youth saw that he’d crossed the line and immediately stammered out an apology.

They knew that Ray Lennox had lost it when he didn’t attempt to strike or even verbally abuse the joker. When he tried to speak, he started to choke. — Ah did ma best… he pleaded to the terrified bar comedian, — ah did ma best for that wee lassie…

It was only when he felt the pull on his shoulder, heard the repetition of his name and focused on a crack in the hardwood and gauged its proximity, that Lennox realised he’d fallen to his knees. His friends picked him up off the pub floor. One took him to Trudi’s flat. She called the doctor and the police personnel department’s welfare people.

Now he’s lying in bed, at their boutique hotel in Miami Beach, thinking about Britney. Trying not to think of the moment when her virginity was taken from her. Compelled to do so, as if turning his back on the magnitude of her terror was in itself a form of disrespect and cowardice.

Maybe that was the lunacy… maybe that was the problem, getting too involved like that…

He trembles from his very core. It only stops when he attempts, instead, to think of her mother. He can see Angela Hamil, a cigarette in hand. The start of the investigation: her daughter missing. The urge to violently shake her and say: Britney’s gone. And you’re just sitting there smoking cigarettes. That’s right. You just sit there and smoke cigarettes and leave us to find your daughter.

The sweat seeps from him, soaking the bed. His heart punches a steady beat in his chest, like a boxer’s jab on a heavy gym bag. His throat is constricted with tension as he tries to fill his dry lungs with the sterile air of the room. His body is in revolt against him and he can hear Trudi snoring; loud, truculent snarls that could be coming from a drunken labourer. Dream demons are forming as his eyes shut, pulling his exhausted soul into their realm. He doesn’t want to go there but his fatigued mind is surrendering.

It’s mid-afternoon when they wake up. They’re both ravenous. Lennox feels like his brain is expanding and contracting in his skull, fraying its outer edges against rough, unyielding bone.

They get ready to head outside, into the heat. Lennox wears his Ramones End of the Century T-shirt. He’d chosen it in preference to a Hearts football top; the material’s too much for this heat. Cotton is a better bet. There was the maroon-and-white BELIEVE shirt. But he decides that he doesn’t want to explain anything to anybody, to talk to Scots abroad and lie about his job, like all cops have to around real people. He puts on another pair of light canvas trousers, dressy enough if they want to go and eat somewhere a bit upscale. The Red Sox cap is pulled back on to his head. Trudi wears a short, white pleated skirt. Her legs are long and brown. A pink vesty top. Her arms also tan, her hair tied back. Shades. Outside, his arm goes to her waist as they walk in silence. It’s the first time she’s worn this skirt without him getting an erection. Unforeseen fear grips him again.

They are hungry but can’t agree on what to eat. The hangovers and the strange location conspire against decision-making; neither self nor significant other is to be trusted with that choice. A wrong call would mean recrimination: brooding silence followed by a row. Both of them know it. But they need to eat. Their brains and guts fizz from last night’s tequila slammers.

They pass a Senior Frog’s Mexican Cantina. Lennox recalled that some of the boys had been to a Senior Frog’s on a polis beano in Cancún. There was a long-running canteen joke about it. He’d wanted to go with them, but it was when he and Trudi had just got back together, and things were in flux. They were always in flux. Besides, Gillman had gone on the Cancún trip, which effectively ruled it out for him. He shows her the restaurant. By now she just wants to sit down somewhere – anywhere – out of the heat. A pretty but severe-looking Latina girl escorts them to seats at wooden tables and issues them laminated menus. The place is half full, some groups and couples dining. At the bar a bunch of white guys wearing red-and-white-striped soccer shirts are drinking. Trudi has a free local newspaper, and mutters something about a show on at the Jackie Gleason theatre.

— Minnesota Fats, Lennox says, recalling Gleason’s turn in The Hustler.

The tables are big. Like the ones in the polis interview rooms. The distance between him and Trudi is about right. He needs a drink. He wants to question her. Instead he questions himself, again.

The rising. The breakfast. The walk. The turning. The snatching. The footage. The pictures.

Now he’s desperate for a drink. He needs one. The waitresses seem busy. — I need a beer, he informs Trudi, pointing at the bar, — my throat’s gaunny close up in a minute. Want one?

— That’s the last thing I want, Ray Lennox. You’re supposed to be in recovery! We’re supposed to be planning our wedding! What if the waitress comes?

— Get me a margarita.

Trudi looks contemptuously at him, then tuts and goes to her white shoulder bag. She produces the copy of Perfect Bride and her small notebook.

Lennox hits the bar and orders a pint of Stella. He is astonished and relieved that they have it on draught. That red background with the white font: it’s like meeting an old friend. Just a sip first, in order to feel that dry, alcoholic taste in his mouth. Then he downs half in a gulp. One of the guys in the football tops catches his eye. They have English accents. West Country. A little bit drunk. The strips are Exeter City Football Club. He asks them if they’ve gotten any scores. They tell him Exeter have won. They hadn’t heard any Scottish results. They chat, the Exeter lads expressing goodwill towards his team, Hearts. Lennox is surprised to hear that Exeter are no longer in the Football League. It’s the Conference now. A crazy chairman. A financial crisis. These things happened.

He traverses back to the table where they are served corn chips and salsa. Then, to his astonishment, two frosted margaritas appear. — Well, we’re on holiday, Trudi informs him, a terse, defeated smile coming as close as she would surely get to levity. The main courses arrive: seafood fajita for her, a steak burrito for him.

Lennox watches her construct the fajita with care. The cheese and refried beans omitted, pushed to the side. The rest wrapped in a low-carb South Beach tortilla. Trudi eats in small, economical bites. He, conversely, bolts down huge chunks of his burrito. At one stage it burns his throat so intensely that he almost blacks out.

At the bar the group from Devon have obviously hit drunken critical mass. They burst out in chant: — OOH, AAR, EX-I-TAHR! AH ZED OOH-AAR, EX-I-TAHR!

A waitress and barman dispense indulgent smiles, before a flustered manager approaches the group, diplomatically pointing out the other customers. The West Country lads gracefully drink up and take their party elsewhere. One gives Lennox a wave, which he returns. — Nice guys, he tells Trudi. — Exeter boys.

— Bet you wish you were with them, she scowls, reading his mind as the Devon crowd depart, — football lads getting pished and acting the goat.

— Don’t be silly, Lennox says, squeezing her hand with his good one.

The meal sits rock-heavy in his belly as they turn on to Ocean Drive. Trudi wants to see the beach but Lennox objects: — Let’s spend a full day at the beach the morn, he proposes, as they pass a jungle-themed dance-bar. The girls outside are clad in leopard-skin bras and pants, dancing on the pavement, trying to entice people in. Lennox doesn’t need much encouragement. He needs another drink.

He wanders in, Trudi reluctantly following him. They find a table and two stools and Lennox orders a couple of Sea Breezes.

— I don’t want to sit around drinking all the time, Ray, I—

— You don’t come to a place like this for culture.

— You don’t come anywhere for anything, other than drinking. You could have stayed in the BMC club!

Lennox’s excited head fills with the notion that our bodies and souls desire the poison, crave the superhuman promise and temporary madness it offers; the chance to throw off all the shackles of decency, surely the prerequisite to real intelligence and love. — At least I’m trying to enjoy myself.

— Is that what you call it?

And it hits him, in her look and tone, just how desperate he really is. He wants to say, ‘I’m dying, help me, please,’ but it comes out in a monotone shrug as, — I’m just doing what I want to do on holiday. If you don’t like it, fuck off.

She looks at him in wide-eyed horror. As he watches her features shrink in tight malevolence, he wishes he could suck the words back into him. — Naw, you fuck off, ya prick! She springs up and, grabbing her bag, charges away.

Lennox sits stuck to his chair, his limbs heavy, watching her incensed departure. He looks at the table, noticing that she’s left her notepad and Perfect Bride behind. A gentle gust of wind flips its pages over in a measured manner, one at a time; it’s as if her spirit remains at the table. But he thinks: she’s not fucking about. One puny consolation pulses in his brain: at least I didn’t criticise her job at Scottish Power. She hates it when I do that.

The embarrassed waitress, who’s observed the scene, arrives with the drinks, sets them down, and hastily departs. Picking up the cocktail designated for Trudi, Lennox quickly kills it. Then he slowly sips at his own. Contemplating its azure, murky beauty, he almost doesn’t want to touch it. A couple at an adjacent table briefly gape at him before turning away. I’m the nutter everybody wants to avoid, he thinks in desperate cheer. Then he summons the waitress and pays the bill. Lennox feels his shoulders shake in a nervous, mirthful laughter, but when he gets up from the table the tears – terrible, thick, salty tears – are running down his face from under the shades, drying on his cheeks in the heat, stinging him.

Scarcely realising he is carrying the magazine and the notepad, he walks down the street. All he can think of is the drink he needs. Not just the drink, the place to drink it. The sun has fallen behind the skyscrapers that line the Biscayne Bay, and murky particles of darkness accumulate in the warm air around him.

He walks on, without any real sense of what he’s doing or where he’s going. It feels good to walk. Look at things. People. Buildings. Cars. Billboards. Shops. Apartment blocks. He walks until he realises that fatigue is setting in with the heat, his leg muscles becoming knotted and cramped. It’s still a holiday and beach area, but he’s passed the colonial low-rise hotels of the art deco district, moved into a zone of uglier, more mainstream tourist accommodation. Big high-rise hotels and apartment blocks have sprouted up around golf clubs and beach complexes.

Lennox wonders how long it would take to walk to Ginger’s place up in Fort Lauderdale. A long time, if, indeed, it was even possible to do so. The whole place seems to be built around the car. Then it twigs that the numerous green-and-white posts he’s walked past are actually bus stops. Most people sitting on the bench by this particular one look non-white and non-rich; different to the occupants of the convertibles that stream by. They seem to regard him uneasily. It doesn’t bother him. A bus comes and he gets on, imitating the stick-thin black man in front of him by putting what he thinks is a dollar bill into a rolling slot.

— That’s a five, buddy… it’s gone thru, the driver purses in disdain, — and we don’t give change. You jus wasted three and a half bucks, man.

Lennox nods and takes a seat. He looks at the blacks on the bus with the same furtive, curious glances they steal at him. The few black people he’d known growing up in Scotland had hith-erto seemed exotic, but he now sees just how Scots they are. The blacks here fascinate him, the way their bodies move to a different rhythm. Their voices so different from the whites and Latinos, it’s as if they’re from Mars. He feels something deep in his bones and prays it’s curiosity rather than racism.

Feelings in the bones. Gut feelings. Instinct.

Procedure. Designed to scientifically eliminate bias. Follow the force of probability. Seventy per cent of murderers know their victim. Thirty-three per cent come from the same family.

The bus jolts over a rough piece of road. Lennox shudders. He needs to be safe. He needs to be dangerous. They are everywhere, the nonces. On this bus there’s bound to be one. He looks around at the suspicious eyes. He can smell them, the stink of them.

The vehicle is going nowhere; after a bit it turns round heading back the way he’s just come. He keeps his gaze hawklike. There is pain to be fought. To be drunk through. Then he sees it, on 14th between Collins and Washington. Where he knows he wants to be. It’s a bar. The Club Deuce.

He gets to the front of the bus, panic rising in him as it accelerates for a stretch, and seems to go a long way past the bar, before it slows down and pulls over at a stop. Lennox alights and walks back towards the cream bunker that is Club Deuce. Outside it, a shopping trolley full of a homeless person’s possessions. The bar blacked out with blinds he guesses are permanently shut. He passes through a wooden-and-glass door and enters the club. It’s so dark that it takes him a few moments to order the objects in his vision.

Club Deuce is dominated by a long bar which meanders like a Formica river with two island lips, snaking in a double horseshoe at the front and running right round the back of the room. In the corner hangs a big plasma screen. Near the pool table at the rear, a homeless woman sits, occasionally peering out from behind the blind, checking on her trolley. It’s a real drinkers’ bar of social design; the bends mean that it would have to be almost empty to enable patrons to sit too far from each other. A mirror runs the length of the pub, making it doubly difficult to avoid eye contact with anyone. He checks the time on the clock framed by green light above the jukebox.

Two neon female forms, both lying prone, boobs and buttocks outlined in the glaring red, impress Lennox. They might have been mermaids, but a leg held up seductively announces both as terrestrials.

The effect is of a slightly seedy but classy joint, with an old clandestine atmosphere of speakeasy sex that its present-day incarnation as a drinkers’ den can’t quite dispel. Lennox sits at the bottom ‘U’ of the horseshoe, close to the door, behind a couple of portraits of Humphrey Bogart and one of Clark Gable. He looks at two old mirrors and their ornate carvings. He realises then that Club Deuce has to be one of the greatest and most beautiful bars of its type, indeed of any type, in the world.

The bartender is a large, tattooed guy, with long hair and a beard and moustache. An ex-biker type, long gone into civvy life, Lennox reckons. He has a big, but slightly shy smile.

— What’ll it be? he asks, arching his brows.

— A Stoli vodka and soda. Lennox rubs at his top lip for the moustache no longer there. He had it for years, and now, like an amputee with a missing limb, he feels it itch in its absence.

The barman looks approvingly at Lennox’s T-shirt as he pours the drinks. — English? he asks.

— Scottish.

— Burns, right?

— It certainly does. Lennox looks at the redness on his wrist that the bar lights have shown up, and takes a swig on the vodka.

The barman studies him, thinks about explaining; changes his mind.

The vodka is a good measure; Lennox liked that about the States, freepour. They didn’t fuck about with all that petty, penny-pinching weights-and-measures shite. That sort of stuff alone made the American Revolution worthwhile. He supplements this with a bottle of drinkable European imported beer.

He eases himself round on the bar stool and looks up at the television screen. American Football; the Bears versus the Packers. Lennox can’t tell if it’s live or recorded. He feels like asking, but reasons that if it’s highlights he’ll find out soon enough. He puts the copy of Perfect Bride down on the bar, and stuffs the notebook and pen into the back pocket of his trousers. The first drink fails to banish the non-specific anxieties that shiver through his mind and body; merely crystallising them into a solid, tumorous lump inside him, which slips down through some psychic highway running in a rough tandem with his intestinal tract, coming to a leaden rest in his lower gut.

The bar is almost empty. Two skinny young white guys, who he reckons are drinking on fake IDs due to the nervous looks they shoot every time the door opens, play eight ball in the corner. Further down from him two women sit at the bar; probably only late twenties, but with life’s pummellings visible. A homeless lady sits in a corner, a hawk-like eye checking her possessions through the window. On the other side of Lennox, a fat guy talks to the bartender in a dissenting squeak about some tax that he reckons is unconstitutional.

Lennox orders another vodka. Then another. His decent tips ensure that the barman fills them up. This man evidently understands that some people, just because they come into a bar alone, and with their drinking heads on, don’t necessarily want company. They want to see if the shit they’ve been trying to think through straight plays any better drunk.

He is contemplating that he’d probably been wrong to walk out on the counselling. But he’d clammed up. He’d tell the sneaky, intrusive bastards nothing about himself, nothing that would go on his personal file, despite their claim that everything was confidential. Lennox had gone twice after they picked him off the floor of the Jeanie Deans pub. The woman, Melissa Collingwood, had only been trying to help, to make a point, but she’d angered him. It was when they had got talking about death. Britney’s death. — I can’t stand the thought of her dying alone, being frightened, he told her. — It’s that that does my nut in.

— But isn’t that how we all die, ultimately? Alone? Frightened? Collingwood had said, her eyes widening in a sincerity that seemed too pained to be anything other than contrived. And he’d reacted to that.

— She was a fuckin bairn, ya spastic, Lennox had shouted at her, and charged out the door, not stopping till he hit Bert’s Bar in Stockbridge. Where he had gone since the case started. Ignoring the messages on the voicemail from his NA sponsor, a cheerful fireman named Keith Goodwin, whose mounting pleas were a voice-over to his descent into oblivion.

Now he has no antidepressants and he wants cocaine.

A country and western song sparks up from the jukebox: a witty number about alcohol. Imperceptibly, the bar has gotten busier. Maybe fifteen people in the room. The homeless lady has gone. Lennox takes a swig of beer. First the talk is louder then the music takes over. It goes back and forth. A few people come and go, but most remain, their elbows on the bar.

From his peripheral vision, he sees one of the women looking at him, being egged on by her friend. He instantly discounts it: his senses are not his to trust. But she slides off her bar stool and approaches him. Slightly built, she wears a short denim skirt and a lime-green top, tied in the middle, supporting her breasts. Her white midriff is bare, and a lip of flab hangs over the waistband of her skirt, a piercing on her belly button drawing attention to it. — Got a light? She pronounces it ‘laht’. Her accent is distinctly Southern rather than the mainstream American that seems to dominate Miami.

— Aye. Lennox pulls out a lighter he picked up in the hotel. It has FLORIDA emblazoned on it, with some palm trees. He clicks on the flame that will draw her closer.

A bottle blonde with skin an almost translucent white, her lipstick-red slash of a mouth is like a gaping wound. Her eyes are sunken, with dark bags under them, which Lennox thinks is bruising until her proximity to the light reveals it as fatigue. Her face is hollowed out. A bit more flesh might have heightened a good bone structure. Its almost total absence makes her look skeletal. Lennox sees a woman chiselled by drugs, though he supposes that bad diet – one based on coffee and cigarettes – could produce the same effect.

— Where’s that accent from? she asks in those smoky, honeyed tones.

— Scotland.

— That’s cool! she exclaims, with an excited verve that animates her to the extent that Lennox immediately feels like reframing his assessment. — Y’all on vacation?

— Vacation… aye… Lennox says, thinking about Trudi. Would she be back at the hotel? Perhaps already on a flight home? Surely not. He can’t tell. His perspective has gone. He looks at the bandaged hand that grips his beer glass. It’s like a foreign body.

— I’m Robyn, she proclaims. — With a y.

— Ray-with-a-y, he retorts. — Funny, it’s only guys that get called your name back home, he tells her. He feels like explaining that it was usually just posh guys, but decides against it. — Are you from Miami?

Robyn-with-a-y shakes her head. — Nobody’s from Miami, everybody jus ends up here. My home town is Mobile, Alabama. She turns to her companion, compelling Lennox to do the same. — That’s my friend, Starry.

He faces a woman about five seven, with an elongated face and long, raven hair that curls down on to her shoulders. She has the classic Latin features he’s quietly appreciated in many of the women here since he’s gotten off the plane; brows sculpted into thinly plucked lines to highlight huge, striking dark orbs that could vaporise the unguarded. Her nose is long and straight, of the kind you rarely see in Scotland.

Age, lifestyle and possibly circumstance has almost driven out a classical beauty, but in its remnants a vivacious power has been retained. She wears her tight blue jeans well and Lennox notices the Converse All Star footwear only because it looks the same as the design worn by people in Oxgangs when he was growing up. His gaze goes back and forth from her eyes to a grey-silvery effect top that just about manages to master the formidable cleavage behind it.

Starry gives him a smile of slow, evaluating grace. It’s obviously manufactured but displays a calculating intelligence that in spite of himself elicits his respect. The woman is as tough as nails but something tells him her power is as much hard won as God-given.

A survivor, Lennox thinks. How cheap and bebased that term has become. I’m a Christmas shopping survivor. I’m a Holocaust survivor. I’m a holiday with the in-laws survivor. I’m a child sexual abuse survivor. He makes his own list: sex crimes, drug addiction, relationship breakdown, career frustration, mental breakdown, life.

It was too much. He’s tired of surviving. It’s time to live. Lennox sees that Robyn is standing waiting in open anticipation.

— Would either of you ladies care for a drink?

They nod in the affirmative and state their choice. As the barman pours, Lennox feels he’s been hustled but his only mild resentment comes from the girls’ apparent belief that he doesn’t realise this. — This here’s Ray-with-a-y from Skatlin, Robyn grins.

— What kind of work you in, Ray? Starry asks.

— Sales, Lennox lies. He never says he’s a cop when he’s in company. Not unless he wants rid of it.

Starry flashes a shit-eating grin as she accepts his drink. She steers Robyn, almost pushing her forward into Lennox. The women smile at each other. There is no doubt as to who’s in charge here, he thinks. The petty victories. He’s seen it so many times before, in so many of the women he’s encountered through his work.

Angela Hamil asked for so little. She was destroyed that her daughter had been abducted, raped, murdered. But there seemed no real anger. Life had long since defeated her; she acted like she expected and even deserved this horror that had been visited upon her, that it was her due. It was just another misery piled on top of the ones she’d already had to endure.

Serious Crimes.

Lennox thinks about the name of the department and the actual activities that gave it its title. Murder. Rape. Serious assault. Kidnapping. Armed robbery. Obviously, most people who committed serious crimes were in a bad way. But so many of the victims shared that characteristic. Too often it was the same set of circumstances that threw the victim and perpetrator together.

— Scotland must be a damn fine country, Starry is saying to him in her more generic American voice.

Lennox pulls a taut smile. — It’s okay.

— Cause it looks like your head’s still over there. Tell ya what I think, there’s usually only one thing makes a strange man come into a strange bar alone and throw back those drinks like you been doin. And that’s a strange woman.

Angela Hamil. Trudi Lowe.

— Strange women. Aye, there’s a few of them around, Lennox retorts.

— So, how are sales these days? Starry asks, imbuing the innocuous statement with cryptic sleaze.

— Oh, not so bad. You know how it is, Lennox enigmatically rejoins, getting into her game.

She looks at him as if prompting him to say more. Then she asks, — So what do you sell?

— I never talk about work when I’m socialising, he says. All I will say is that it’s not the commodity that’s important, it’s the customer.

Starry seems to glow at his bland response. She pulls her friend forward again, and Lennox tries to figure out what the game is as the girls shuffle around him with the nervous energy of punch-drunk, traumatised old contenders in a seedy gym, evidently ready to sing for their supper. — You’re cute, Robyn giggles. Lennox knows that she’s drunk, they probably both are, but Starry is holding it better.

As they chat, his ears quickly become desensitised to the superficial glamour of the American accent, and he can now see these women in any scuzzy backstreet Edinburgh pub. A lifetime of cigarette consumption seems to induce all the bar’s smoke to congregate around Robyn’s grey skin and cheap, flashy clothing like iron filings to a magnet.

— So you know a few strange women, Starry says, her eyes going to his bandaged hand. — Does that make you a strange man? Who am I kidding, is there any other kind?

Lennox has sparred in too many Edinburgh meat markets to be wrong-footed by some apolitical feminist jibes. — We do stupid very well, he says, then adds, — but you girls beat us hands down when it comes to crazy. That’s just the way we are.

Starry laughs, opening her jaws so wide it seems she could swallow up the bar and everybody in it. Lennox stares into the ribbed, pink cavern of that mouth, the protruding red tongue a welcome mat, quickly coiling into a threatening snake. — And don’t you forget it!

— Excuse me a second, ladies, while I answer the call of nature. Lennox slides from his stool and makes for the restrooms in the corner of the bar.

Why did they call it a restroom?

Lennox feels like he really wants to rest. To lie down on the tiled floor covered in men’s pish, shoe leather, dirt, cigarette ash, and sleep like a baby. Instead, he stretches out his bad hand and starts to unwrap the elasticised bandage with his good one. The dressing is discoloured and a stink rises from it. A spasm of fear seizes him, and he almost expects to be confronted by a withered, black and green gangrenous object. In the event his hand is stiff, red and a little swollen and angry-looking around the knuckles, and his eyes water when he tries to make a fist of it. But it’s still visibly his hand, and is probably on the mend. He entrusts it with the holding and pointing of his penis and can’t bear to watch his dark and stagnant urine splash against the metal of the latrine.

Lennox washes his hands with care, welcoming the other back into the family.

It took him thirty-five seconds to grab her, bundle her into the van, gag and secure her with electrical tape and drive off.

Puts his hands under a dryer. Enjoys the heat sensation against the numbed, sore paw.

The two women face Lennox as he emerges back into the pub. Starry has picked up the copy of Perfect Bride and is leafing through it. But now there is someone else on the scene, another man who has emerged from the shadows at the back of the bar and who approaches the women at the same time as the returning Lennox. He looks at Starry in confusion.

Lennox realises that the guy is about the same height as him, around six two, and also in his mid-thirties. — I’m in sales, he beams at Starry and Robyn, ignoring Lennox, who gently seethes. This cunt has been listening in to me talking, and now he’s taking the piss.

Pulling on his shoulder, Lennox pivots him round. — I’ll tell what you’re in if you don’t fuck off right now. Trouble. Big fucking trouble. Is that clear?

The guy blinks, taken aback.

— Hey… Starry begins, laying down the magazine on the bar, — no need for that!

— Listen, buddy… the guy starts, but Lennox can see that any certainties he has are evaporating.

He feels himself smouldering with violence. This guy has rubbed him up the wrong way. — I’m no your buddy. Got that?

— Have it your way—

— I intend tae. Now fuck off.

The man shrugs, raises his palms in appeal and skulks back into the corner of the bar.

— What was that about? Starry says, evidently upset.

— I didn’t like him, Lennox tells her, as he keeps his eyes on the man, who promptly finishes his drink and leaves.

— He seemed a nice guy, she says, looking to Robyn.

— I dunno, I thought he was kinda creepy.

— I guess you would know all about that, honey.

Robyn screws up her face a little and shrugs, turning to Lennox with a tight smile.

Starry seems to relinquish her anger. — Look, let’s move on somewhere else.

They discuss where to go. Lennox thinks that he should head back to the hotel. Make his peace with Trudi. Tiredness is kicking in. But he can’t face her. Better to wait till she’s asleep.

— What’s this? Starry asks Lennox. She holds up the copy of Perfect Bride. — You planning a wedding?

— Aye. Not my own though, he says, surprised how effortlessly falsehoods pirouette from his mouth. The difference between a cop and a villain is that we get paid a salary and make better liars, his mentor Robbo once told him. — That’s what I sell, he qualifies. — Weddings; the whole package.

— You’re a wedding planner? Like the Adam Sandler movie? Robyn squeals in delight.

— Well, yeah. He looks at Starry who is forcing a grim smile, before her cellphone ringtone starts to play ‘Won’t Get Fooled Again’. She apologises, moving to the door of the bar to answer it.

— I guess that must be a happy job. A lot of fun, Robyn says.

— It’s stressful, but it has its uplifting moments.

Starry returns and is keen to go on to a place called Club Myopia, but Robyn is reluctant. — I gotta get back soon for Tia.

— She’ll be okay, Starry says. — Just one drink. I got us a little something.

Robyn’s eyes light up. — You mean you been – She stops herself.

Lennox knows that the little something is coke. It’s what he wants. Needs. One line of white powder. Something to make him strong. To make him not think about dead children. To make him not care. Robyn tells him that Club Myopia is just a few blocks south. It would be on the way back to the hotel. — I’ll keep this safe for you, she smiles, putting the copy of Perfect Bride into her shoulder bag, — it’s getting pretty messed up lying on that bar.

— Ta. Lennox winks in gratitude, and they head out and walk down Washington Avenue to the club.

For ID, Starry and Robyn flash driver’s licences at the doorman. Lennox offers his Lothian and Borders Police Authority pass, replete with an old mustachioed picture of him. The bouncer, a big black man, meets his eye with a downward head motion, minimal, stern. Lennox slips the card back into his pocket, taking care to conceal it from the girls. He badly wants them to get the coke out. Can envision it, sweating in the wrapper, inside Starry’s handbag. So, too, from the focus in her eyes, can Robyn.

Myopia is a dance-music club, and cast adrift amid a sea of toned, fit, beautiful youths, they are the oldest people there. Starry and Robyn waste no time in heading to the restrooms. They are gone for so long, Lennox fears that they might have slipped away. He grows restless then anxious standing at the bar alone, drenched in the pumping music and the strobe lights, with the well-dressed youngsters seeming to scan him in disapproval. The girls wear short, slinky dresses of largely one colour, which cling to their bodies as if by static electricity. The predominantly dressy shirts of the boys highlight the grubbiness of his Ramones tee. He thinks: Michael Douglas in the Basic Instinct nightclub scene, salving himself with the knowledge that he could never be quite that ludicrous.

His edginess heightens. Over by the bar, he is aware that he’s being watched. It’s the guy from Club Deuce, the smart-arse salesman. Letting anger energise him, Lennox hits the floor, snaking through the frolicking crowd to the back of the room, then sharply double-backing so he’s standing behind the guy who’s craning his neck, scanning the floor for him. — Looking for somebody? he shouts above the sound system’s quake, causing the man to jump. — You want tae fuckin dance, or something?

— Look, I – he begins, halted by Lennox’s hand, the one with the power in its fingers, which fastens on to his thin throat, choking him to silence.

— Naw. You look. I don’t know what your fuckin game is, but you turn round and you get your arse out of that fuckin door right now, he demands, his grip tightening further. — You know what I’m sayin?

In the man’s fearful eyes he can gauge the extent of his own murderous rancour. Aware that some people are observing the scene, he releases his grip. The heaving-chested man backs away, rubbing at his neck. A bouncer has partly observed proceedings, but, like Lennox, he’s content to merely track the salesman all the way to the Exit signs.

Ordering another drink to vainly compensate for his leaking adrenalin, he fretfully waits for the girls. He commands himself to stand still and do nothing, telling himself that real composure will boomerang back if he fronts it long enough. When they finally return, Robyn particularly looking flushed and animated, they discreetly present Lennox with the gear, in a small, resealable bag. — Thought you’d run out on me, he smiles.

— No chance of that, Robyn says. He sees the confidence the cocaine gives her. One sniff and she can be the person she’s always wanted to be. He understands. Starry doesn’t really need it. She tosses back her curly mane and grins at him. He heads to the men’s restrooms. The cubicles are flimsy with small doors. Not as private as the UK. You could see right in through the crack of them, or even look over, if you had a mind to. Not to worry. He racks up a big line on the top of the cistern. It looks good gear. Chops it finer with his Lothian and Borders Police ID card. He thinks for a second about Trudi, probably back in the hotel room, then Keith Goodwin at the NA and all the good work he’d done. Was it good work? Now he’ll flush it all away. Britney’s face: cold, blue and bruised. Mr Confectioner’s sickening gloat. He’ll flush it all away.

The line obliterates them and Lennox emerges striding on to the dance floor like a colossus, jaw protruding. Starry and Robyn are dancing, and he moves easily with them, sleazy and invincible. The other dancers, they can feel his power, his radiant contempt for them. They shrink away like the pygmies they are. He painlessly recalls his infidelities of the past, which wrecked things for him and Trudi the first time around; each conquest a trinket on a charm bracelet of fool’s gold, every single one of them executed when he felt exactly like this.

Why is he doing this, he asks, apart from the drive of the cocaine? His fiancée is back at the hotel, or so he assumes. Lennox is always beset with the notion that the big event, the real party, is happening somewhere else. His radar – that distressed feeling under his skin – tells him that this is the case. Then he realises that he is a cop and that the big party is always happening somewhere else, namely in civvy street. And if he finds it, his role is not to join in, but to break it up. Now, though, for these two weeks, he is a civilian. And it’s good here. The world’s crumbling around us and thank fuck there’s people just too new or plain stupid to climb on that dance floor, and act as if the party’s just begun.

Starry sweeps her hair back and meets his predator’s glance with hard, flinty eyes of her own. — We’re gonna go back to Robyn’s. She looks to her friend.

— You’re invited, Robyn says. — Come over and have some more blow?

By blow he assumes that she means coke, rather than marijuana, which he hates. — Okay. Whereabouts? he shouts above the beat.

— I live over in Miami.

— I thought this was Miami.

— No, this is Miami Beach, silly, Robyn playfully scolds. — Miami is across the causeway.

— Right. He recalls how both Trudi and then Ginger had explained it all to him.

They head outside, buzzing from the coke. Lennox goes to flag down a cab, but Starry stops him. — Here’s a bus, she says, nodding to the approaching vehicle. — Cheaper.

This time he pays the proper money. The bus is full of drunks: the ubiquitous mobile theatre of late-night public transport. They find seats at the back, Lennox at the window with Robyn by his side, Starry in front of them. She’s conversing in Spanish with somebody on her cell. Robyn looks agitated, this soon starting to infect Lennox. The bus has no windows at the back, which adds to his unease. It’s unnatural; not to be able to see where you’ve come from.

— Who were you talking to? Robyn asks suspiciously as her friend finishes the call.

— Just some friends from the diner, Starry cossets Robyn, rubbing her friend’s neck, while she expatiates about her workplace hassles. — That Mano, he’s such an asshole…

After courting the coastline, the vehicle suddenly veers, crossing a stretch of water on a long bridge and comes into what Lennox thinks must be Miami proper. Starry’s nail scrapes at some glitter that’s stuck to the bus windows, before she realises it’s outside. The docks come into view with the towering cranes, then the freight tankers. But most impressive are the cruise ships, about a dozen of them, like floating apartment blocks, grandiose yet still dwarfed by the big towers of downtown Miami, massive sentinels guarding the harbour. Lennox is impressed, as the coke pounds his head, making him strong. His teeth grind harshly. He wants those mysterious yellow lights that glisten on the water across that filthy, slithering, black bay. Wants to become part of it all: away from the sunlight and the spotless, white, perfect brides.

6 Party

THROUGH A MURKY shroud of near darkness illuminated only by a peppering of lights from the overhanging skyscrapers of the commerce district, downtown Miami appears to Lennox not only scabrous and bedraggled, but also sinisterly deserted. This impression is confirmed as they step on to the concourse of the bus station at the Government Centre. Many of the tower blocks ahead are under construction. They stand like a silent army of zombies, emerging from the earth in varying degrees of composition but unsure of what to do next. Giant skeletal cranes seem to be feeding off them like monstrous birds of prey.

— Cheaper to get a cab from over here, Starry explains as they swagger with the purpose of the intoxicated across to a taxi rank, adjacent to the bus disembarkation point. The earlier stops at the Port of Miami, Omni Station, the American Airways Arena and the down-at-heel district of small jewellery stores, have been the points of egress for most passengers. Now only one lone drunk staggers ahead of them, his look of open-mouthed bemusement as the bus pulls away indicating that he’s alighted here by accident. Lennox looks up at the support pillars and overhead tracks of the Metromover as it snakes around and through the city buildings; Miami reminds him more of Bangkok than of any American or European city he’s previously encountered. The only older building he’s seen has been the grand, multi-tiered Dade County courtroom, impressive and beautiful with its steps and pillars, a stately home surrounded by tasteless imitations.

They get into one of the three waiting taxis and Robyn coughs on her cigarette, rasping out an address to a suspicious-looking driver, an address which seems all numbers to Lennox sitting in the front passenger seat. A pendant flag hangs from the cabbie’s mirror, which Lennox takes to be Puerto Rico. The cop in him has quickly deduced that Miami’s most dangerous profession wouldn’t be police work or firefighting. Murder would be an occupational hazard for taxi drivers, most of them poor immigrants. The all-night gas stations would now be mainly self-service while convenience-store clerks would invariably be locked in bulletproof booths, the stores probably fitted with drop safes. But working these deserted streets with cold-callers, in cash transactions, seems a particularly risky enterprise.

They continue through what is a barren section of the town; there are no homes down here, everything seems to be cheap and tacky retail. Grubby steel-shuttered shops are in abundance, but Lennox has yet to see a bar or anywhere indicating the possibility of social life. Growing concerned, as he feels he’s come far enough, he senses the taxi driver’s edginess from behind the Perspex screen. By the shrillness in their voices, he’s aware that Robyn and Starry are arguing in the back seat. There is a mention of a dead child. Starry’s son. It burns him. He tunes it out in favour of the city surrounding him. Miami proper seems a very different beast to Miami Beach; the city comprising flyovers like the one they sweep on to, and for a while it appears as if they are going to the airport. Then they suddenly veer from the concrete artery, down a steep slip road and into a neighbourhood off 17th Street. It’s like falling from the edge of one world and landing in another. — Welcome to Little Havana, Starry says, raising a single curved brow, recovering the effervescence Lennox feels has deserted her since the incident with the strange guy earlier.

— This ain’t really far enough south for Little Havana, Robyn says, a little stridently. — It’s more like Riverside.

— Bullshit; you jus don want people to know you live in a Cuban neighbourhood, Starry challenges her, only half joking, her accent changing into Rosie Perez Latina.

— Newsflash, Robyn says. — This is Miami. Every neighbourhood here is Cuban.

Lennox cringes at Robyn’s bland epithet ‘Riverside’. The planners back home had attempted to redesignate Leith and the other river communites as ‘Edinburgh’s Waterfront’. As Leith was associated with Hibernian Football Club and he was a Hearts fan, he’d enjoyed referring to his new flat as being ‘in the Waterfront district’.

— See that, Starry says, looking to Lennox, — you gringos can’t see the difference between the Latino neighbourhoods!

Lennox has to concede that his eyes detect little divergence in the dimly lit streets they drive through, all of which are cut into uniform blocks. This area doesn’t seem hugely affluent, but it isn’t a ghetto either. Most of the homes on these blocks are low-rise dwellings of one storey. When they drive through the backstreets, interior and porch lights illuminate some houses showing him, on closer examination, that no two domiciles are alike. Some fronts and gardens are well kept, to the point of obsession. Others are dumping grounds. Lennox guesses a mix of owner occupancy and rented accommodation. Robyn’s place is different; it’s in a gated apartment block, the stucco-fronted building painted a pastel orange illuminated by uplit wall lamps with a driveway for parking. An aluminium panel of intercom buzzers announces twelve dwellings, confirmed by the number of mailboxes in a chaste, functional hallway navigated by low-level night lights.

He’s used to mounting steep Edinburgh tenement stairs, but chemical impatience and the slight gradient on these tiled platforms compel him to take two at once in long, loping strides. Robyn’s place is on the top floor, two up from ground level. Prospecting a key from the chaos in her bag, she whispers, — Shhh, as she opens the door. Lennox feels Starry’s hand nestling on his arse. He lets it hang for a bit, then moves off down the hallway, passing a table with a phone on it, above which sits a large whiteboard full of numbers and messages. Stung, Lennox quickly turns away, moving into a front room whose chattels suggest a furnished tenancy; the black leather sofa, with fawn-coloured throw and matching chairs belong to some ubiquitous 1980s warehouse that seems to supply rentals in every city he’s visited. These sit on oak hardwood floors, with a rug in the middle that looks more expensive than it probably is. A smoked-glass coffee table is stacked with magazines; the garish glint from the light above reflecting on to that cocaine accessory seems to be issuing a challenge to him. An alcove, fringed by Christmas fairy lights, leads through to a small terracotta-tiled kitchen.

— Nice place, Lennox observes.

Robyn tells him that she’s been here for a year. She’d come from south Alabama and moved over to Jacksonville with her daughter (it sounds like ‘daw-rah’ to his ears) in search of work. After that dried up she’d headed further south, first to Surfside where she’d briefly worked in a residential home, and then down here. She explains that the rent’s cheap and it was convenient for her job in a daycare centre. — But I had to stop working there, she says guiltily, — to spend more time with my daughter.

— How old is she?

— Ten. She flushes with pride, then departs to check on the kid.

Lennox catches Starry regarding her exiting friend with a primal malevolence so poisonous she’s briefly flustered that he’s noticed. Defensively, she tips back her head, pushing out her mouth with its lipstick gleam.

Robyn returns, closing the lounge door behind her. — Fast asleep, she announces with relief. She tells him there have been problems at the school with the daughter. Most of the kids talked Spanish at home and in the schoolyard, so Tianna, that’s the girl’s name, feels isolated. — She’s gotten so withdrawn lately, Robyn says sadly, then catches Starry’s disapproving scowl and quickly switches into breezy mode, — but hey, this is a party. Right?

— Right, Lennox acknowledges, slumping on to the couch, his eye falling on a dark stain on the hardwood floor spilling out from under the rug. About to comment, he hastily corrects himself. It was a party, and he was on holiday. Murder investigating, no. Wedding planning, no. Holiday, yes.

Starry shoots another contemptuous glance towards Robyn, who turns from Lennox to the CD player. He tracks her to avoid Starry’s rapacious gaze, but the thin, distressed back of Robyn’s neck perversely reminds him of his father’s on their last meeting. She inserts a disc and as cheesy pop sounds fill the air, stands up and pulls him to his feet. The music is bland, drenching the room in spineless reworkings of rock ’n’ roll classics, forcing Lennox to think of his old mate Robbo, a soft-rock aficionado, supermarkets, and what Americans call elevators.

Robyn steps into him, and as they dance close, he feels the sewer ebbing from her mind; him suffocating under the confining cloak of sleaze she’s draped around them. In an automated manner he responds to her tight mouth as it bites on his numb lips, the cocaine rendering the tobacco smoke from her breath just about bearable. Her eyes are as glassy and dead as Marjorie’s, his big sister Jackie’s favourite doll. Lennox recalls ‘loving’ and ‘wanting to marry’ Marjorie as a small child, coveting the toy at least as much as his bossy sibling did.

He’d told Trudi this story once. — You like women to be passive toys, she’d snorted uncharitably, before climbing on top of him and riding him raw.

Trudi. He can’t allow himself to be stupefied by Robyn’s kisses. Catching Starry’s eye and a nod to the coffee table, he breaks away and moves over to where some lines are racked up. She has set down the copy of Perfect Bride; it has melded into a pageant of women’s, television and celebrity magazines. Lennox picks up a thick glossy called Ocean Drive, which he suspects is a boutique-hotel freebie. A blonde woman who seemed to be famous for being an heiress and also for not really appearing to enjoy it much as her boyfriend fucked her on camera, was discussing her music, and how it was the thing she did best. Lennox recalls watching the commercially available video at a police stag do. It wasn’t up to much; he hoped the singing was better.

He rolls a note and fills his nostrils, using the generous cavity. The surf comes up inside his head. It’s good gear. He looks up at Robyn, who’s smiling at him. — How’s your voice? Can you carry a tune? he asks.

— Ah guess. She coyly cocks her head, provoking both attraction and nausea in him.

He heads to the bathroom, this time watching his urine, so thick you could stand a spoon in it, stain the water a deep orangey gold. Alone, his critical faculties replace his social ones. Now good intentions and weak wills are signalled everywhere: a dust-covered empty bottle of mouthwash has obviously lain there for months. An unopened tube of sealant sits next to a leaking shower trickling into a puddle of water on the terracotta floor tiles. A rusted gold-top battery hangs out the back of a broken electric ladyshave.

When he returns he sees Robyn seated and his eyes go up her thighs and between her legs. She catches his line of vision and settles back on the couch, smoothing short skirt to thigh in a parody of demure.

She’s a damage case: little-girl voice and vacuous flirtiness. A pathetic victim. Her kid will probably turn out the same way. But I have to watch myself on the gear: I’d fuck the hole in a dolphin’s heid.

Starry has set up the drinks; Millers all round with vodkas and Pepsi, and she’s racking out more lines of cocaine on the coffee table. More is good: first law of consumer capitalism. Second law: immediate is all. Lennox feels a binge coming on. Starry catches the hunger in his eyes. — Go on, Scattie, her manner is coquettish. He thinks of Braveheart the dog, and is about to test the more constricted vent, when a young girl wearing a nightdress appears in the doorway of the room.

Her skin is a tawny contrast to the paleness of her mother, yet the girl still cuts an almost spectral figure. Brown hair hangs down the sides of a longish face on to her shoulders. She rubs sleep from her eyes in a very obvious, theatrical manner. Shamed, Lennox immediately ceases his activity, and stands up. — Hi. I’m Ray, he says, getting between the kid and the stuff on the table.

— Tianna Marie Hinton… you get back to bed, young lady, this is grown-up time, Robyn declares in a panicky voice he can envisage one of the women on the South Beach real-estate commercials privately deploying, perhaps after hearing of a market slump. All the time she looks at Lennox with a stupidity teetering between sheepish and bovine. The kid briefly glances at him for the first time. It’s a cold look. Appraising rather than judging, but referencing that he’s something she’s seen before. Something not good.

It dawns on Lennox that she’s been alone while they were cavorting at the Club Deuce and Myopia over in Miami Beach. It wasn’t right. Kids shouldn’t be left alone like that. Britney Hamil should never have walked to school alone. He feels anger rise in him and fights to swallow it down with a gulp of his beer. All the time he keeps his frame between the girl and the table. As she’s distracted by her mother’s ministrations, Lennox places the copy of Perfect Bride over the white stripes. Catches Starry sneering at Robyn again.

— I couldn’t sleep, the girl says, — I heard you guys comin in. She looks at Lennox again and nudges her mother, seeking confirmation.

— This here’s Ray, honey. Ray’s a friend from Skatlin.

— Where men wear skirts, Starry laughs, — right, Ray?

— Right. Lennox practically ignores her, focusing again on the young girl. Her arms and legs are too long for her body. Her hair is a scraggy mop and she seems all angles. A kind of ungainly ugly duckling. But her eyes… he catches the brief glimpse of a terrible knowledge in her eyes. For a second Lennox has a sinking sense that they are asking the world for help. Then it’s gone, and she’s another tired kid, short-changed on affection, security and sleep.

— Y’all get yourself off to bed now, y’hear, honey, Robyn says.

The girl lopes away mumbling and waving a cursory goodbye without turning round. As she leaves the room, Starry changes the CD and turns up the volume as Cuban music fills the air. Lennox’s knowledge of this genre starts and stops at the Buena Vista Social Club, which he’d seen with Trudi, who had bought him the CD. He’d liked it, though he had been embarrassed when Ally Notman, the energetic young cop on his team with a penchant for womanising, had spied it and slagged him off for being a Guardian-reading liberal. Some of the boys had come back to his place for a late drink. He recollects the cold-eyed presence of Dougie Gillman, his sour and troubling nemesis, who’d tagged along all night. But this music is nothing like that. With its poignant beats, sweeping strings and muted brass, it’s the saddest he’s ever heard. Although with Spanish vocals and purporting to be Cuban, it somehow feels as if it’s been made locally, in this Miami neighbourhood. He stifles the temptation to enquire about the artist; he would be relieved never to hear its terrible beauty again.

Fitfully he wonders about Trudi. What will she be doing now? In the hotel room. Indulging in one of her two bathetic responses: ‘worried sick’ or ‘not giving a fuck’. Perhaps occupying both states simultaneously.

— This is fucked, Lennox whispers, bouncing down on the couch in melancholy laughter before Starry shimmies over and drags him back to his feet. They dance together a little, before Robyn moves in. The women are being sexy. Lennox thinks speculatively about threesomes. Isn’t that what he needs to feel his masculinity again: extremis? It worked last time job and drug had combined to cauterise his body and soul. But a nasty current now hangs between Starry and Robyn. They are harshly and nakedly competing for him. Grinding closer, suggestive eyes expanding with need, their mouths tight with aggression. He thinks about yesterday at the Torpedo. He feels Robyn move into him, her arms reaching up around his neck. Hanging from him like a charity-shop suit in a reckless bid to shut Starry out.

Then the doorbell buzzes and while he’s aware that more people have appeared, Lennox feels his nostrils, even as they bubble with snot, filling up with the scent of Robyn’s hair. The buzz of the coke works in a square throb with the beat, booze and jet lag. A wave of exhaustion, almost breathtaking, hits the back of his eyes. Letting them close for either seconds or minutes, he watches the exploding purple blotches swirl around the universe inside his head.

Then he feels Robyn pull away from him. He opens his eyes to be confronted by a lined ashen face, with short grey hair plastered back over the scalp; gelled and spiked enough to see comb lines. It belongs to a thin white man, yet who looks wiry and strong, and his ophidian eyes burn Lennox, and, he notes, Robyn too. The proximity moves him to take a backward step. Then he sees a denim shirt tucked into jeans of the same material. Looks down at brilliant white trainers, or, on this side of the loch, sneakers. Curtly nodding at Lennox with a smile so slight it would have needed a moving camera to record it, the newcomer then says to Robyn in a low-fi country accent, — You been out shoppin again?

—This here’s Ray, Robyn replies apologetically. Already Lennox scents not only history, but unfinished business.

— Name’s Lance, Lance Dearing. Pleasure to meet ya, Ray, he grins, extending his hand. Lennox strategically takes it in his good left, despite the awkwardness, relieved he’s presented that one due to the power he feels in the grip enclosing it. — Busted a mitt there? Dearing asks, nodding to his dangling right.

— Industrial accident, Lennox boldly retorts.

But Lance Dearing can evidently read the trepidation on his face, as he calmly says, — Don’ you worry none, Ray; you ain’t stepping on no toes here. We all been round the block enough times to know to take our pleasures where we find em. No questions asked. Ain’t that right, gals?

Starry’s pearly teeth flash, her brows arching like a corporate fast-food executive who has sold face as well as soul to the company store. Robyn smiles weakly, dutifully pouring some drinks for Lance and another man present. He’s squat and stocky, Latino, with collar-length, oily hair and a sandpaper chin. His gaze at Lennox is one of undisguised hostility. — This here’s Johnnie, Lance smiles.

— You gotta be the guy from outta town, Johnnie says in a scratchy voice, looking Lennox up and down. His head seems way too big for the features squashed ungenerously into the middle of it. Age, Lennox senses, will enhance this effect, like a ratchet inside his brain will screw the top and sides of his skull and his jawbone outwards to the compass points. The big slaughterman’s hands look formidable; along with the dense body and shifty eyes, they suggest a man prepared to take what he wants without expecting much in the way of debate. This notion is countered by a flabby gut straining at a T-shirt bearing the slogan: WILL FUCK FOR COKE.

— I don’t think he’s the same guy you’re thinking of, Johnnie. Lance grins at Lennox. — But I do hear you’re in sales.

Fucking sales, Lennox thinks. What is this? — Yeah.

— Me too, Lance smiles, eliciting a giggle from Starry.

— But I guess that this fella ain’t the same type of salesman as you, Johnnie laughs.

— I guess he probably ain’t, Lance Dearing says in mock sorrow. — But then again, I reckon that there might just be two types of salesmen: good and bad. Ain’t that right, Ray?

Lennox remains silent, Starry’s capricious grin telling him it was them she had talked with on the phone earlier. Their presence is certainly a surprise to Robyn, and not, it seems, a pleasant one. Lennox moves away, sits down on the settee. Silence is always the best way, he has found, in such situations.

His eyes scan around the room, seeming always to wind up back at Robyn’s legs, hips or arse. He’s aware that he wants to fuck her, but considers, shamefully, this is probably just because the opportunity has receded with Lance and Johnnie’s presence. But now anyone will do. Something has gone off behind his cock.

Instead, he chops out another line from the big rock in a larger packet Starry has placed on the table, all the time on edge against the kid reappearing, and he takes it down. He looks at the print of a semi-nude woman on the wall. Then he considers Johnnie and Lance again. The concern he felt at their intrusion has gone. His fear evaporating, he fancies it kicking off. Now all that’s inside him is a black anger, still and even. He’s not thinking of Britney Hamil any more but he knows that when he does, he can kill anyone for her demise.

And he feels like killing. Just hurting would be insufficient. His dark mood creeps through his veins like a poison. He knows those faces: Dearing’s mocking reptilian smile, Johnnie’s pudgy, vacant stare. If only those men knew the danger they were in. He grinds his teeth till he imagines he hears the enamel crack. But he is a cop. Abroad. Calm the fuck down.

So he goes to the kitchen and gets another beer from the fridge. Dull those coke rushes. Robyn follows him. He wants to fuck her and kill the rest of them. Even Starry. Especially Starry. Something about her has disturbed him. That protean presence: one minute sexy, the next malign and controlling. She changed when those guys came in. He could feel it. See it in her eyes. Maybe it was just the coke. It was good stuff. Not too chemical. Maybe it was because he was doing all her gear. He wonders about offering her some cash. Feels a wad of twenties in his pocket.

He can’t think laterally. His thought pattern is linear, like a high-speed locomotive, careering towards one destination.

All he can do to stop this is to take some more coke. It helps. You can outrun your thoughts. He heads back into the living room, Robyn still pursuing him, ranting something about star signs, and he lifts up the copy of Perfect Bride. The lines he’d hidden from the kid are intact. Starry moves over and augments them for Lance and Johnnie. They are nothing now, the other three, no threat, just a source of drugs. A defiant sense of entitlement fuses him. On holiday. Prudey Trudi. Starry has another big bag of the stuff. A big rock. It might be a long night. A long, long night that lasts half an hour. They take another line each. Lennox needs the drug now more than ever. He recalls how they would sit near the toilet in the Grapes, the young coppers’ bar, or up in somebody’s flat, often his, snorting and boasting of how they had put away this cunt and threatened that cunt and done this cunt and would get that bastard. The real vitriol was not reserved for the criminals though, but the bosses: senior police officials, local and national politicians. It was these spastics that fucked everything up, that fucked up the job.

Lennox has done what he refers to as ‘the rehab thing’, and still goes to regular NA meetings. He knows how the drug presses you like a wild flower into something resembling yourself but a one-dimensional representation of it. Jagged and volatile, all sneers and jeers pushing back your boundaries of verbal and physical and sexual violence.

That lassie in Thailand; she was just a fucking kid.

The lads’ holiday in Bangkok. The girls were very young, but you could never tell with Asian lassies – so slender and petite. And, after all, we were on holiday. Drunk in that Patpong bar, the Thai girl with the dyed blonde hair who’d sat on my lap. Notman drunkenly whispering, — If you want tae ken the colour ay a bird’s minge, look at her eyebrows, no her hair.

Would upright George Marsden with the pressed blazer have behaved like us? Or would he have behaved like cops were supposed to behave? And how were law enforcement officers meant to behave off duty? Work together. Play together.

Then I saw the one with Gillman: she was just a kid. I told him to leave her. — She’s fuckin peyed fir, so she’s gittin it, he said. I was drunk. We argued. I pushed the blonde away. Pulled the other one, the kid, off Gillman’s lap. He got to his feet. Then his head was in my face and I was on the deck, before being helped into a taxi by Notman. Waited ages at the Bangkok hospital to get my nose badly reset. Later on I heard that he’d taken my half-arsed intervention out on the girl. She was just a kid. Once a girl, then made like Britney was, reduced…

You have to stop thought.

The line goes up his nose. Britney’s face dissolves, becomes the attractively sluttish woman opposite him.

Robyn. The cloying, irritating girlish voice somehow grows sexy. A Southern belle: Scarlett O’Hara to his Rhett Butler. Way down in Alabama. Milky tones enquiring, — Y’all wanna go lie down for a while, honey?

And Lennox knows that even feeling like fucking the world, it will take extremity, violent, perverse extremity, to make his floppy penis anything like hard enough to do the job. — In a bit, he says, charging his glass with the bottle of vodka. He feels trapped, in a skanky vortex of his own making.

Lance Dearing has swooped down to rant at him. Ostensibly telling him about fishing, but Lennox knows the charged power of words on cocaine and that Dearing is trying to establish presence, power and dominance. — Pulled a big ol bastard out of the sea yesterday. Took a while and I thought he’d bust the line at one point, but I stayed on his ass. That was the thing: I stayed on his ass. Sucker was goin nowhere once he bit on my hook.

So Ray Lennox kicks back with a skinny smile on his lips and gives monosyllabic answers. As he looks into this man’s leathery face, watches the spittle shoot from the corner of his mouth, he feels nothing now; he neither likes nor dislikes Lance. How can he? They are strangers, on cocaine. Grinding their teeth. Obstacles for each other to navigate: Formula One drivers trying to go round traffic cones at high speed. They rant in short bursts at each other in an ugly intimacy, each exposing the same raw nerve of ego to the other. Then Lance gets up to dance with Robyn, who obviously fears him, and a smiling Starry, as Lennox considers his lot.

He can’t marry Trudi. If they were ever going to get married then they would have been by now. He met her when she was eighteen and he was twenty-seven. Eight years ago. He’d just got his second big promotion. Detective Inspector Lennox. He’d be the youngest Chief Constable in Scotland, they’d only half joked. But after that, nothing. Treading water. Snorting more cocaine. Then Trudi and him had split up.

Three years later, though, they started going together again. He had come back from Thailand and was cleaning up, going to NA, and was back at the kick-boxing. They met at a new gym he was trying out. Unbeknown to him, she was a member. A coffee. Catching up. Both free agents. The spark. Still there. Catching up. Dinner. A film. Coffee. Bed. Catching up. The sex; it was better than before. Trudi: now a sleek, confident mid-twenties gym rat rather than a slightly pudgy teenager. Him: a sober shagging machine; the carnal obsession dominating everything. Shrugging aside the words of several guys on the force: reheated cabbage. Beware. Bad move.

But she loved him. She loved him because he was a lost cause and her own vanity was strong enough to convince her that with her brand of tough love, Ray Lennox, Project Lennox, could be successfully realised. He could become a superannuated superman, a breeder of good Scottish Protestant children who would excel not just academically but at the BBs and school sports, and be model citizens of the world as the Scots always were. Or at least the ones designated for export.

Trudi saw how he’d changed. Matured, was the term she frequently used. The first time she’d touched him again was to run her finger down his nose. — It’s bent a little, she’d said.

— Accident in Thailand. Broke it, he’d explained, looking into her eyes. — That was what made me give up the gear. I realised what it was doing. What I’d lost.

She liked what she saw.

But she’d seen what she’d wanted to see. He was a mess. Affecting a seen-it-all blasé front, when his insides were like chopped liver. Cool Lennox with the shredded nerves. His old associate Robbo always saw through him.

Sometimes punching and kicking the bags helped. Sparring with the gloves. Building up the strength, speed and confidence that came with it. Earning the swagger, knowing other men sensed that it wasn’t empty, that there was something behind it. Sometimes, though, when something really bad happened, only talk helped. But in Edinburgh you only talked in drink and cocaine helped you drink and talk longer. The Britney Hamil case was that something bad. Soon he was struggling at NA, scrambling and sweating half-heartedly at the gym. Every time he flipped through the register with all those nonce faces to deal with he wanted coke more than ever.

— C’mon, honey, Robyn says, cutting to the chase in frustration, — I wanna fuck, her savage desperation reminding him of the stripper in Fort Lauderdale, or Trudi, even. — Does that sound so bad? So selfish?

Lennox thinks: aye it does, ya fuckin hing-oot, your wee lassie’s in the next room. — No. But I don’t want to shag you. I mean, he stalls, grimly savouring the power of rejection for a beat, — I can’t, I’ve had too much coke.

Robyn steals a fearful glance at Lance and Starry, locked in a flirtatious Latin dance. With their swampy grimaces and scornful whispers, they seem to be conspiring to destroy them both. Meanwhile, Johnnie sits in the armchair, broody and splenetic, his eyes bulleting out bad vibes. Lennox looks at Robyn’s shrunken, haunted face. — Let’s just go next door and lie down a little, she whispers in an undisguised plea. — I need to be with someone, Ray. I’m fucked, my life’s going to shit. I don’t know what I’m going to do. If it wasn’t for Tianna… she’s the only good thing I’ve done in my goddamn miserable fucked-up life…

She hasn’t realised that her voice has picked up and that the others have been listening to the exchange. — That sounds like real fun, Starry mocks, — A professional victim and a guy who can’t fuck her!

— You lil’ sweet-talker, you, Lance rolls his eyes and Johnnie laughs heartily. It’s now officially a house divided.

— Why, Robyn squeals as she tugs Lennox on his bad hand, compelling him to follow her to the door, — do people have to be mean like that? Why?! It’s fucking cruel!

— Oh spare us, Starry snaps in disdain. Lennox hears her laugh, — She’ll be back when she needs more blow.

— I reckon ’bout twenty minutes from now, Lance adds, in sagely mocking tones.

Lennox finds himself being led away from the bag of coke, the source of his power. How we love what kills us. He is still everywhere but where it matters as Robyn drags him on to the bed, her skirt ridden up, revealing a flesh-coloured thong emblazoned with the slogan: I HAVE THE PUSSY, I MAKE THE RULES.

She tears this garment to the side, exposing a thick tuft of pubic hair like a punk mohawk, and kisses him on the mouth. He catches the dirty, foul stale tobacco on her breath, feels his own jaw clamping. Robyn pulls away from his tight, unyielding lips, and lies back on the bed. By the light he sees her jawbone sink into her face, melting into the obscene bloated flesh of her neck that seems to have appeared from nowhere, making him think of that exotic frog with its shocking instantaneous expanse of throat. Lennox is frozen, an insect in the proximity of those hypnotic, bulging eyes. So she springs back up and she’s on him, unzipping him, her hand inside his trousers and pants, her urgent fingers asking the same question repeatedly, without getting the reply they crave.

A yawn of exhaustion bubbles up through the cocaine rushes. Lennox tries to stifle it but it tears free from his face, almost sending his jaw into a spasm. He can hear Robyn panting desperately, — Sexy… sexy boy…

It’s probably not that long after midnight, yet he can sense the next morning’s dawn spinning relentlessly over him from space.

A glance at Robyn reveals her eyes still protruding like a mad scientist’s. — I can get you going, Ray. I know what you guys like!

She lurches over to the bedside locker and produces a pair of fur-lined handcuffs from a drawer. — We can do anything you want. You wanna fasten me to the bed? You can do anything you wa—

Robyn is cut short as a terrified shriek fills the air. It doesn’t stop. Lennox’s first thought is that it sounds like a child. Then both he and Robyn realise it’s her daughter. She’s screaming. Lennox zips up and runs towards the noise, with Robyn following. He pushes the door of the kid’s bedroom open. Johnnie is in there, on top of the struggling child, trying to get his hand over her mouth. The covers are pulled back and his other hand is inside her nightdress.

Lennox bounds over and grabs his lank hair in both hands, his weakened grip first struggling to fasten with the grease in Johnnie’s hair, then feeling the sting of pain in his bad hand, as he yanks him off both the girl and the bed. Johnnie screams out, his cries joining Tianna’s regular car-alarm shrieks, as Lennox pulls him along the floor, laying into him with his feet.

Then Lennox feels his left arm being twisted up his back, followed by a blinding, searing pain that spreads out from his shoulder to bruise his soul with sickness. His heel swings back and cracks into a kneecap and the grip weakens. Lennox tears free and is face to face with a grimacing, limping Lance Dearing. — Enough now! he warns, pushing Lennox’s chest, jostling him back into the lounge as Lennox shakes his arm, trying to get some feeling back into it. He turns side-on, putting his weight behind his shoulder, to lock in and stand his ground, his arm, still useless, dangling in front of him. — Get that cunt out of her fucking bedroom! he shouts, and he can hear the girl crying and her mother and Starry arguing hysterically as he springs forward, pushing past Lance Dearing. Dearing grabs him, attempting the armlock again, but Lennox knows what’s coming and the feeling is surging back into his left arm. He slips Lance’s grip and they wrestle, staggering forward, crashing through the glass coffee table.

— My fuckin stash… Starry shouts as the coke and broken glass spill into the rug and on to the wooden floor.

Both men, miraculously uncut, stumble to their feet. Lennox is up first, running back into the bedroom. He smacks Johnnie in the side of the jaw with a right hook, which burns his damaged knuckle. Robyn is pursuing Starry, shouting, and catching a plea on the face of the screaming girl, Lennox takes her by the hand, running into the bathroom and locking the door behind them.

— Keep them away from me! the girl, Tianna, howls at him, sitting cowed on the toilet seat, gripping her hair in balled fists.

— It’s okay, doll, it’s okay, Lennox coos as his right hand throbs and his left arm stings, — everybody’s just had too much to drink. Nobody’s gaunny hurt you.

— He tried to… I told him to lemme alone! Why won’t they lemme alone!?

— S’okay… Lennox tries to deploy soothing tones as he can hear the arguments raging outside; Robyn’s shrill hysteria, Starry’s bullying sneer. Then Lance Dearing’s voice from behind the door, cool and authoritative: — We all gotta calm down. You come outta there now.

— No! Tianna screams.

— Tia, honey, Robyn bleats.

Lennox puts his face up to the door and shouts through: — Listen, youse, get that fat fucker out of here. I’m telling youse, now!

Perhaps the odds with the both of them and that psycho Starry are a little too steep. And he doesn’t want the kid to see any more of this. He’s keeping the door locked.

Tianna looks at this man who is protecting her. Perhaps, though, he’s just like the rest. Wants to do something bad with her. He was full of that crazy powder they all took. She turns away, and looks at the plastic parrot sitting on the tiled window ledge. The one she got from Parrot World, with Chet and Amy. If only they were on the boat now, away from this terrible place.

From the snakepit outside Lennox hears Johnnie dumbly protest something that sounds like, — I just like the taste of young pussy.

— GET HIM THE FUCK OOT! he roars against the door, briefly looking back at the girl sat on the toilet.

Then Dearing’s voice again: calm, conciliatory, in control. — Okay, okay. We do it your way, Ray. We do it your way. We all got a lil’ carried way on the silly stuff. Don’t wanna make things worse. Johnnie’s on his way out. I’m taking him away and I’m gonna get the girls some coffee round at the twenty-four-hour diner. Jus takin a lil’ bitty time out to let us all simmer down. Y’all hear?

— Aye. Get him out.

Some negotiations and the front door slams. Outside: sounds of multiple feet on the steps of the tiled staircase.

Lennox is aware that his heart is thrashing in his chest. He sits on the edge of the bath. The girl, trembling on the toilet, weeps soft and wretched. A kid shouldn’t have to put up with all this shit. — You okay?

She nods miserably, pinched features just visible through strands of hair.

— Did he hurt you?

Tianna tersely shakes her head, obviously in shock, he reckons.

She lets her hair fall in front of her face, watches him from behind its shield. He has those crazy eyes that they all have. It might be the liquor and drugs. But he looks strong: maybe even as strong as the likes of Johnnie or Tiger.

They wait for a while. He is almost convinced that everyone has gone, but he suddenly hears a cupboard door slam, then a solitary set of steps followed by the front door closing.

Lennox cagily opens the bathroom door. As he goes out he hears it snib shut behind him. He looks around the apartment. — Nobody’s here. They’ve all gone, he tells her. After a couple of minutes, she warily emerges from the bathroom. — Your mum’ll be back soon, go to bed. Go on, he urges, — I won’t let anybody else back in the house. Only your mum.

— You promise? Only Momma?

— Yes, Lennox insists. — Please, go to bed.

As she heads tentatively for her bedroom, Lennox goes through to the front room and tries to tidy up the broken glass. Perfect Bride lies amid the wreckage, the saccharine smile on the white bride of the cover picture now spectacularly incongruent in the surroundings. Starry has obviously undertaken a salvage job on the coke but there is still evidence of some on the rug. For a second he considers trying to hoover it up through a dollar bill, but then he kicks and stomps it into the tread with his boot.

Lennox goes to the hall, bolting the front door shut. Anybody who wants in, they’ll have to get past him first. Back in the lounge, he sees the couch and, drained, gratefully slumps on to it.

7 Edinburgh (2)

DESPITE YOUR EXHAUSTION, you tiptoed out of your Leith flat that Friday morning like a novice burglar, guilt-laden at having expropriated a few hours’ sleep. Outside it was taut and crisp with the October leaves turning brown, and you stopped off for a double espresso at the Stockbridge Deli, knocking it back before crossing the road and heading for Police HQ. The police personnel called it Fettes, but for the general populace, it never really wrested that mantle from the old private school across the road. As birds chirped in the growing light that spread thinly across the grey pavements, you thought how that little section of Edinburgh defined not just the city, but the UK in general. The grand educational institution for the wealthy, standing over Police HQ, as if supervising its own elevated observation of Broughton, the state comprehensive for the masses.

Britney Hamil had been missing for two days, but it took the staff at Forbidden Planet bookstore on the South Bridge just five minutes to shatter Gary Forbes’s Britain’s Most Evil Man fantasies. They testified to Amanda Drummond that he was browsing in there, as he did almost every day, when Britney vanished. He was, as you predicted, charged with wasting police time after dragging two uniformed officers around some woods in Perthshire for half the evening.

Ronnie Hamil was a different matter. Still nothing was reported from the observation of his Dalry flat. Locals testified to his erratic wanderings, and a consensus emerged that he was a gruff, dirty-looking character who lived a marginal life and habitually stank of baccy and booze. You knew he’d surface soon, was probably holed up drunk somewhere, and you hoped beyond your expectation that it would be with his granddaughter: alive and well.

Britney’s disappearance hit the national media. In the small, claustrophobic room the investigation team shared, a siege mentality was kicking in as tight faces gaped at Angela Hamil on Sky News, making a tranquillised but emotional plea for her daughter’s safe return. Gary Forbes was always a non-starter but your team’s disappointment was still evident. With the possible exception of Amanda Drummond, they looked at you like a bunch of heavy drinkers are wont to when one of their posse orders an orange juice. They had blood around their mouths. They weren’t going to stop feeding. You couldn’t tell a pride of hungry lions that they had just brought down the wrong zebra. You’d never been in such close proximity to Gillman since the Thailand holiday. Found your fingers tapping your nose nervously on a few occasions.

But the man everyone wanted remained undetected. Accompanied by Amanda Drummond, you’d gone to visit Angela Hamil. Desperation, and your guilt at being less than enthusiastic about the obvious candidate, compelled you to play hardball. You sat on Angela’s worn couch, a cracked mug of milky tea in your hand. — Your dad’s unemployed and you work all day. But he never helps you out with the kids?

In response to your promptings, Angela had lowered her tired, shadowed eyes. — He’s no good with kids, she mumbled, taking another comforting pull on her cigarette, then stubbing it out.

Her passive resignation irritated you, and you really had to fight not to show it. — Why don’t you trust your father to help out with the girls?

Angela’s breaths were short and tight as she lit up another cigarette; it was as if she feared that taking air into her lungs unaccompanied by tobacco smoke might just prove fatal. You could see her one day forgetting to have cigarettes on her and dropping dead through a seizure in the street, on her way to the corner shop. — He’s nae good at that sort of thing, she croaked.

— You’d think he’d be able to take them for a few hours, you’d pushed, briefly glancing at Drummond, her eyes saucer-like. — To help you out.

— Ma sister Cathy helps… he sometimes comes round… Angela Hamil fretted. She was not a good liar. Amanda Drummond looked sympathetically at her.

Your demands grew harsher. — Aye? When was the last time?

— I don’t know. I cannae remember!

You sucked down hard, trying to find some oxygen amid the fumes around you. — I’m going to be blunt with you, Angela. I’m doing this because your daughter is missing, and your father hasn’t been seen for a few days. Do you understand me?

The woman cooked in the silence that hung in the air. The hand holding her slow-burning cigarette went into a spasm.

— Do you understand me?

Angela Hamil nodded slowly at you, then Drummond.

— Has your father ever given you cause to believe that he’d behave inappropriately towards the girls? A brief pause. — Did he behave like that towards you when you were growing up, you’d added evenly, scrutinising the terrible stillness of the woman. Felt her crumbling slowly inside. — Please answer me, you pursued in a low voice, like a dog almost ready to break into a growl, — your daughter’s life could be at stake.

— Aye… she gasped breathlessly. — Aye, aye, aye, he did. I’ve never telt anybody before… Her cheeks buckled inwards under a massive inhalation of the cigarette. You could scarcely believe the speed at which it had burned down. She crushed the butt into a blue pub ashtray and lit another. Panic fastened to the surface of her sallow skin. You watched her wilt under its onslaught. — You dinnae think – and she broke down, — him and Britney… no Britney… no… and Drummond slid across on to the couch and put her arm round the woman’s thin shoulders. — If he’s touched her, her creased face threatened, — when ah git ma hands on him…

Those empty, impotent threats, you’d scornfully thought. — I know this is distressing. Amanda, will you stay with Angela? You nodded, but your sly wink at Drummond added: find out what you can.

You had no inclination whatsoever for the details. You headed outside, calling Bob Toal. The boss was right, you were wrong. Ronnie Hamil was a nonce, and your hunt was now solely for him, forsaking all others. You dug out as much CCTV footage as you could find covering the Dalry area for the last few days, working forwards and backwards from the time of Britney’s disappearance. This time the difficulty lay in the abundance of material; Ronnie’s home was close to Tynecastle Stadium and there were cameras galore in the vicinity. Trying to identify an image of the grandfather from the crowds of football supporters, shoppers and drinkers was like looking for a polystyrene bead on a glacier.

What about the rest of your life? There was Trudi. Back in the office, you opened a locked drawer and pulled out the sparkly engagement ring that had lain there for around four months. There had never seemed to be a right time. Perhaps, you’d thought, it was best to do it at the wrong time, give you a lift you so badly needed. As you sat looking at the diamond, allowing it to mesmerise you, Dougie Gillman poked his head around your office door. — Nae sign ay Gary Glitter yet?

— Nope. Slowly shutting the ring box and placing it on the desk, lowering your head to your paperwork, you could feel Gillman’s eyes still on you for a few cold pulses before you heard him withdraw. The African violet seemed to have withered further. You put the box in your pocket, furious at Gillman’s intervention.

After a brain-bruising but fruitless shift, you went to the pub and had your first drink in a long time. The second compelled you to leave your car at Fettes and take a taxi to Trudi’s. On the way up, a radio station was broadcasting a tepid debate on what should be done to commemorate the tricentennial anniversary of the 1707 union of Scotland and England, some eighteen months away. Nobody seemed to know nor care. Your attention was diverted as you caught sight of Jock Allardyce walking up Lothian Road, and for a second you thought he’d seen your wave, but you were obviously mistaken as he gave no acknowledgement.

When you got to Trudi’s you found her busy with a work report, about a restructuring in her section. She was telling you about it and you weren’t listening. — What is it, Ray? she’d asked. — What are you thinking about? She looked at you in sharper focus. — Have you been drinking?

— Yes, you’d said, with a smile on your face.

— But the NA… Keith Goodwin…

— I’ve had something on my mind.

— The job? This case with the wee girl?

Emotion drowned you as you looked at her. — I was thinking that we should get married.

And then you’d crawled across the floor on your knees and buried your head in her lap, taken out the ring and looked up and asked her. She had said yes and later you’d gone to bed and made love most of the night. It’s bizarre for you to think that that was the last time.

Because when you woke up on Saturday morning Britney had been gone, without trace, for three whole days. The realisation deflated you. It got worse as Trudi paced the living room, talking into her mobile phone, shrieking with excitement as she broke the news to her friends. You could have done without her saying, — I’ve booked Obelisk for Sunday. Just me, you, our mums and dads, Jackie and Angus and Stuart and whoever…

She caught your frozen expression.

— I couldn’t get anywhere decent on a Saturday night at such short notice!

— It’s no that… could we maybe no just keep it a bit low-key for a while…?

— We have to let them know, Ray. It’s family, Trudi insisted as she silenced you with a kiss, — this is meant to be a happy occasion! I’ve called everybody, and I think they know what’s up! Then she declared, — All you need to do is show up at eight o’clock tomorrow, and be nice!

— Okay.

Then a call from Notman came in on your mobile. — Ronnie Hamil’s just shown up at his flat. He looks fucked. Will I bring him in?

— No. I’m just up in Bruntsfield, I’ll meet you there in ten minutes. I want to check out his doss.

Trudi’s pleading gaze, trying to paint in your cold, white spaces.

— Sorry, babe, but I think we’ve just got the fucker, you said, and recalling you’d left the car at Fettes, had to ask her for the keys to her Escort.

Notman was waiting for you in a blue van outside the block of flats. Ronnie Hamil’s place was a top-floor dwelling in a tenement building that had miraculously escaped the renovations of the area that had been ongoing for the best part of thirty years. Rubbish-strewn and with its poor lighting and worn stairs, it seemed, like the grandad, to be a remnant of the seventies.

Two firm knocks brought Ronnie Hamil to the door. He was a shabby, furtive, accordion-faced wee man, his black and yellow teeth exposed in a knowing leer. With his attendant bronchitic wheeze, he seemed central casting’s identikit Minging Old Pervert. You thought of Angela, how his nicotine-stained fingers had violated her as a child. But was he now, you wondered, responsible for the fact that her own similarly marked hands only tucked in one of her kids at night?

— Police, you said, almost gagging on the word; when you stepped into the apartment, you and Notman physically recoiled under the impact of a vile stench, your eyes burning. Amazingly, Ronnie Hamil apparently didn’t notice as he invited you in to take a seat in the lounge.

You found a battered armchair, pushing aside some old newspapers to make room for yourself. You’d never seen so many: in neat stacks and unruly piles, strewn over the floor and furniture, some yellow with what you hoped was age. All seemed to be copies of the Daily Record and the Edinburgh Evening News. It was a fire trap, you considered, but you had more crucial matters to concern yourself with. — Where have you been, Mr Hamil?

— That’s ma business.

— No, it’s ours. Don’t you read the papers? you said without thinking, then looked around the room and raised your eyebrows. Could tell it was only the pungent aroma that was stopping Notman breaking out in laughter.

— An angel, that wee lassie, Ronnie Hamil said sadly. Then enmity filled his eyes. — If ah got muh hands on the bastard—

— Where have you been since Wednesday?

— Went oan a wee tear. The incestuous paedophile allowed a smile to crease his lips. — Dinnae mind much aboot it.

— You’re close to the kids? you said, coughing as the smell grew deeper, acquiring greater density, ripening in your nostrils.

— Aye, I’m ey roond for a cup ay tea n a blether.

— But they never come to you?

His face subsided so violently, it was as if an invisible object had struck his jaw. His voice dropped an octave. — No very often.

— What is that? Once a week? Once a year? You’d think you’d want to see more of them, you challenged, looking around in distaste at the old wallpaper, the mess of takeaway cartons and wrappers, but mostly those newspapers. Worst of all, however, that rank, violent odour! You coughed, then found yourself almost retching again. You noted Notman had opened the top buttons on his shirt and his left eye shivered uncontrollably. The aroma was beyond anything that old rubbish, burned food, stale bread and baccy could produce. Something evil was stinking the place out. It was killing you. A terrible thought grabbed you.

— What’s aw this aboot? Ronnie Hamil growled, still somehow oblivious to your discomfort and its source.

— You’re coming down to the station to help us with our inquiries, Mr Hamil, you said, struggling to effect nonchalance as the pungent odour continued its remorseless, overwhelming assault, filling your mouth. You saw Notman’s eyebrows and hackles raise and you were going nowhere until you found out the answer to another question: the origin of a stink that could burn skin. — There’s a very strong smell in here, and you rose and started looking around. Your first thoughts were the roof space.

— Aye, ah thought it was comin fae next door…

Notman located the source: a dead black kitten, which had electrocuted itself by chewing through a cable running to a lamp, and lay under a pile of newspapers behind the settee. It was covered in what appeared to be rice. At first you thought it had been poisoned by an old carton of Chinese food left out, but then saw that the grains were moving. You bent closer: the dead cat was crawling with maggots.

— Emlyn, Ronnie Hamil gushed in genuine heartbreak. — So that’s where ye went, ya daft wee bugger… He sank to his knees in front of the animal’s decomposing corpse.

You beat a hasty exit, making a note to call both the Environmental Health Office and the RSPCA. On the way out crowds were milling around, heading for the stadium. Bundling Ronnie into the back of the van, Notman turned to you and moaned, — Top of the League and we’re missing the game thanks tae a fuckin paedo.

You climbed into the van – you would pick up Trudi’s car later – letting Notman drive past the asbestos-ridden stand designed by Archibald Leith, the last surviving part of the old stadium. On the field, foreign mercenaries in maroon sandwich boards had replaced local lads. Instead of steep terraces where men roared, drank, fought, hugged and urinated on each other, there were the pink grandstands. The adjacent brewery had shut down, removing the pervasive smell of hops from the area.

Ronnie Hamil provided his own distinctive aroma on the drive down to Fettes HQ, where you carried on the interrogation. On Wednesday morning when Britney vanished, he said he was out for a drink, then took a walk by the canal. No witnesses. All he claimed to remember was waking up this morning on the floor of a drinking acquaintance at Caplaw Court, a tower block of flats in Oxgangs, scheduled for demolition. Again the wagons were forming in a circle. But you had your doubts. The old boy was feeble. Even with the element of surprise, would he be robust enough to overpower Britney so quickly? There was nothing to link the grandfather to what Toal saw as your damaging obsession, the white van. Ronnie Hamil could drive, but he didn’t own a vehicle and no record of him recently having rented or borrowed one could be unearthed.

As well as questioning Angela Hamil, you’d got Amanda Drummond to quiz Britney’s older sister Tessa. The girl, recovered from her food poisoning, confirmed that they’d been told to avoid their grandad. — Mum says we shouldnae go near him. Says he’s no right in the heid.

You and Notman, buoyed by the news Hearts had won two–nil, extending their unbeaten run to eleven games, intensified your interrogation of Ronnie Hamil. As the booze-tainted rivulets streamed down from his face, you had a sense of him dissolving under the overhead strip lights. His vanishing and Angela’s confessing to his abuse of her would almost have been enough for Bob Toal, but there was no body. So no charges were brought against the alcoholic rapist of his own child, but he was put under twenty-four-hour surveillance. You wanted him outside, in the hope that he would take you to Britney, or her remains.

Escorting Ronnie Hamil to the front desk, you watched him shamble off into the early-evening darkness, then went back up to your office. Notman poked his head round the door. — Other news, he said glumly, and for a second you had expected to hear of the child’s body, — Romanov’s just sacked Burley.

You swivelled round in your seat. — You’re fucking jokin!

— Naw, it’s on Sky.

— But we’re top of the League and unbeaten! What the fuck is he playin at?

— Fuck knows.

You were suddenly seething. Your anger wasn’t really directed at Hearts although you were moved to gasp, — The fuckin derby next week as well.

Your football club had shot themselves in the foot again, but you felt they could now appoint anybody and it wouldn’t matter; the glory days of the late fifties and early sixties weren’t coming back. The Glaswegian sides had positioned themselves better, using bigotry to forward their interests, then getting on the right side of consumerism. But they and their fellow-travellers were welcome to it, the hollow glory by proxy. All you craved was to find a child unharmed.

The following day, two Sunday hikers, braving a cold, slashing wind and pinpricking rain, had seen something washed up on the rocks down by a stony inlet in cliffs near Coldingham. They looked down at the naked blue-grey body of a young girl. — It was like a doll, one had said. I couldn’t believe it was a child at first.

You’d been at Trudi’s Bruntsfield flat when you received the news. On the drive down the A1 you’d felt oddly calm. Then you’d looked at the dead child, the water lapping against her cold skin. — Sorry, sweetheart, you whispered under your breath as you felt your own hands freeze and numb. Part of the job you hated most was talking to the victims of sex offenders. Usually they were female, so departmental procedure and protocol often spared you this ordeal. But this child would never be able to tell you who had done this to her. Cupping your hands in front of your face, you expelled your hot breath into them. Some yards away, Britney’s school bag, with its books, had been discarded. As there was no sign of her clothes, it seemed a deliberate rather than careless act, but out of kilter with the rest of the crime.

A helicopter team retrieved the body and they took it back to the morgue. Britney hadn’t been dead for more than fourteen hours, but had been gone for over three days. The murderer had strangled her before he’d thrown her off the cliff, hoping the tides would take her out to sea. Divers combed the coast, but nothing else was recovered. Three hours later, around lunchtime on Sunday, Ronnie Hamil was formally charged with the murder of his granddaughter.

It wasn’t enough for you. The grandad reeked of old drink, he’d obviously been inebriated for days. Would he have been together enough to do all this? Other than the incongruous discarding of the books, it seemed like the work of a meticulous planner. Some traces of lubricant were present on the body, but no sperm. The murderer had used a condom. There was no blood or anything else to evidence foreign DNA, only some tape marks on her wrists and ankles. Nothing on the girl’s body could tie Britney to Ronnie. Some of his prints were found on one of the school books, but so were many others. It was plausible she’d shown it to him when he’d visited last week, as he’d claimed. Instead, it all seemed so much like the Ellis cases.

So you made a call to someone you’d met last year at a training course on the psychological profiling of sex offenders. You recalled him as a tubercular-looking man, with a slouch that indicated a terrible burden, but whose nervous eyes hinted that the invisible escape hatch of impending retirement was in his peripheral vision. Will Thornley was investigating officer on the Stacey Earnshaw case in Manchester. Unlike George Marsden, Will was decidedly a company man. He was off duty and didn’t like being interrupted at his gardening. He was so unhelpful that by the end of the call he’d completely convinced you that Ellis had absolutely nothing to do with Stacey’s murder.

The celebratory mood at Police HQ left you cold. Thankfully, Gillman wasn’t around in Fettes small lounge bar, when Notman had heartily slapped you on the back. — Well, we nailed the bastard, Ray.

— Aye, you’d agreed, — he’s certainly that, glad for the first time to be booked in for this family meal with Trudi tonight.

So you left the team to it, first biting the bullet and heading for Bob Toal’s office. Your boss offered you a Cuban cigar, which you declined. — I don’t like that look, Ray, Toal warned you. — It’s happy-camper time.

— Bob, I know this isn’t what you want to hear, but I’m duty-bound to tell you about the Hertfordshire and Manchester stuff, as it was part of my investigation.

— Pish on our parade, Ray, go on.

There was a frozen moment of dread between you as your eyes locked. He wanted you to stay silent. So did you. But you spoke. — I’m worried about this Ellis business. It’s not safe. It’ll blow up.

— So you want to undermine convictions that involve two police forces?

— If they’ve done the job right then they’ve nothing to worry about, you said, and even as it left your lips it sounded ridiculous to your ears.

Toal was in no mood to spare you. — I wonder what planet you’ve been on, Ray. Cause it ain’t fucking Earth.

— Ellis’s connection to the Earnshaw case is nonsense. It’s a total dustbin job. And there’s no substantial forensic evidence to tie him to Welwyn.

Toal shook his head so violently his jowls flapped, reminding you briefly of a bloodhound emerging from a river. — Did you hear him on that tape, by that wee lassie’s grave? Did ye listen? His eyes bulged. — The things he said he’d done with her?

You squirmed in recollection. — He’s a sick bastard, but he didn’t kill her. There’s nothing to link him to the white van—

— FUCK THE WHITE VAN! Toal bellowed. — Every cowboy in Britain whae’s daein a job on the side, or knocking off some tart he shouldnae be, or having a wank at passing schoolies, they’ve all got white vans! Forget it, Ray! We have our man!

You felt the paranoid tingle of humiliation after this chewing-out. Then, the first person you saw in the corridor was the grinning Gillman.

The Obelisk restaurant was an upscale two-star Michelin joint, dimly lit with copper lamps fixtured on its terracotta walls and placed on the big wooden tables. You weren’t in the best of moods when you arrived. Your mother Avril and sister Jackie had just beaten you to it, the maitre d’ fussing over their coats. Your mother greeting you in bug-eyed trepidation. — What is it? Everything okay?

— Aye, you’d dismissed her agitation. — All will be revealed.

— This is nice, she offered in relieved concession, swivelling and scanning before presenting her face for a kiss, which you dutifully delivered, with another for your tight-featured sister, who was less easily impressed by the surroundings.

— Angus can’t make it, he’s at a conference down in London, Jackie informed you. You’d nodded sombrely, just about managing to keep the smile of your face.

Donald and Joanne Lowe were already seated beside their daughter. Trudi was wearing a blue dress you hadn’t seen before, and she’d had her hair done. You kissed her, complimented her and winked, then greeted her parents. You liked them both. They were a youthful couple of around fifty, but seeming closer to your age than your folks. Donald was a handsome, fine-featured man with slightly thinning, greying hair. He worked as a transport manager for a bus company, and had once been a professional footballer, keeping goal for Morton and East Fife. Joanne was a trim, beacon-eyed woman with a smile like a lottery win, who ran a cards and gift shop in Newington.

The Lowes greeted Avril and Jackie enthusiastically, compelling both women to apologise for the absence of their husbands, Avril stressing that in her case it was temporary. — He’s been down at the office, she rolled her eyes. — Sunday! she added, too loudly for your raw nerve endings.

Your father always worked on a Sunday, he said it was the busiest day for rail freight. John Lennox supervised local operations from a small office in Haymarket, transitioning there after a long-ago heart attack had stopped him driving trains. You liked the hoary, Gothic feel of his dark office and occasionally met him there to take him for a pub lunch in one of the local bars. Even though the operations had long been computerised, your father maintained neat files of hard copies of dispatch orders, delivery notes and route plans, taking pleasure that he could carry on working when the systems went down.

Arriving a few minutes later, he nodded to you, kissed Trudi and shook hands with Donald and Joanne, giving his wife and daughter cursory acknowledgement before sitting down.

— No Stuart? John asked.

Fuck Stuart, you thought, the spoiled wee bastard would make the evening all about him soon enough. — He’ll come when he comes, you said, ordering some champagne for the table. It amused you to watch everyone pretend they didn’t know what was happening. They stole glances at Trudi’s hands, both of which she kept covered with cream gloves. — We’ve got something to announce, you said, determined to get this part out of the way with as little bullshit as possible, — we’re getting married next year, probably September.

Trudi whipped off the gloves, unveiling the ring to delighted gasps and comments. You tried to gauge the reactions: nobody was overtly pissed off. The least enthusiastic responses seemed to come from your own parents, and as Trudi was hugged and kissed by hers, you felt the smack of envy. Your father merely nodded with the same look of quiet vindication he deployed when the Hearts dugout finally obliged with the substitution he’d been calling for all afternoon. You could almost hear the ‘aboot time n aw’ coming from the old man’s lips. You watched something in your mother’s sinewy neck sliding up and down like a pump-action shotgun. She held that motion for a moment before finding her voice:— El Mondo… my wee El Mondo, bleating out your childhood nickname, the one that had graced the bullfighting posters on your bedroom wall, procured from old Spanish holidays.

The meal was well under way by the time your semi-drunk brother arrived. John Lennox moved away from his wife so that their younger son might sit in between them, as if he was a child they had to take turns watching. — Had an audition yesterday in Glasgow, he explained, — Stayed over in the land of the Weedge and my train got held up. Engineering works.

You set your face in a scungy smile, turning to your father. — The decline of the railways, eh, Dad?

John Lennox was a man prone to splenetic discourse on where Britain had gone wrong, invariably tracing it back to the railways. The words ‘Beeching’ and ‘privatisation’ he would pronounce as others might sexually transmitted diseases, but tonight your father was keeping his counsel.

— Your big brother’s getting married, Stuart, Jackie said. Her appeasement of Stuart grated; as a ball-crunching criminal lawyer she never behaved like this with anyone else.

— Well, no shit, Sherlock, Stuart laughed. — I had sort of gathered that was what this wee shindig was about, and he poured himself a glass of champagne. — To Ray and Trudi, he toasted, — may the force by with you!

— Stuart, Jackie warned.

Your brother ignored your sister, looking over at the bride-to-be. — Well, Trudi, I can’t help being the brother of a polisman, he said, — but marrying one? That’s a very brave choice, I shiteth thee not.

You would if you could find one that fancied you, you’d thought, but bitten your tongue. Instead, you contented himself with, — I’m sorry I’ve been such a big trial to you.

— I bear it with dignity, Stuart laughed loudly. He looked over at Donald, who had an eyebrow raised, and Joanne, who seemed to be enjoying his performance. Her eyes fizzed like aspirin in a glass. — You know, years back, a bunch of us from the drama college went every morning up to Dundee to join the Timex factory picket line. I said to my brother, ‘How can you do that job: protect the rich, shit on the poor?’

— I’m sure you’re going to tell everybody what I said. You acted bored, drumming your fingers on the table and looking to the ceiling.

— Aye. You said you asked yourself that every day. Stuart paused, looking around the silent table. — Every day, he repeated.

— Yeah, you tried to affect weariness.

But Stuart had now clicked into actor mode, enjoying his audience. — Naw, I shiteth thee not; you said something like: ‘I do it to get the bad bastards out there. Ask any of the most vulnerable people in Muirhouse or Niddrie who they really fear and they’ll all tell you that it’s the bad bastards in their own midst.’ So I said something to the effect of: ‘Fine, Raymond, but what about the rich bad bastards?’ Then he looked pointedly at you, encouraging everybody else to do the same.

You made an exasperated farting noise by expelling air through your lips. — They get away, unless they’re really careless, you conceded. — That’s Jackie’s department, the criminal justice system. I’m only a gofer.

— Leave me out of this, Jackie said.

You recalled how Stuart was never satisfied with this response. And he was right to not be. While it was the truth, there was another factor, a personal element, that you could never bring yourself to include in your stock speech. Now Stuart, with his open, imploringly sincere eyes, manifestly sensed the omission, and not for the first time, but disclosure wouldn’t be prised from your lips. — Help me out, Ray, he pleaded, — I’m trying to understand you.

The Lowes were now, sensibly, you thought, engrossed in their own conversation with your dad at the other end of the table. As the food and drink went down your mother was trapped, with her children arguing across her.

Then you said, — Remember that doll, what was its name? though you remembered Marjorie very well.

Jackie looked poisonously at you.

— Raymond, Avril pleaded.

— It’s okay, Mum, Jackie said. — This is what happens when we get together as a family. Stuart resents Ray for who he is and Ray resents me for who I am.

You were taken aback by this. All the more so because you realised it was true. You’d been trying to hit back at Stuart in a roundabout way. Preparing to develop the theme that you’d loved that doll so much your dad worried you were queer. By the time Stuart came along (who actually was gay), John Lennox had grown more laissez-faire in his parenting and had forgotten about the Marjorie-and-biro incident, which had so shamed you and your sister.

— He was such a lovely wee laddie, your mother announced in desperation to the gathering. — My sweet wee El Mondo.

You know fuck all about me, you thought bitterly, looking round the table at your family.

Donald Lowe had put an arm around Trudi. — Well, I have to say that this one never gave us a day’s trouble, did she, Joanne? The perfect daughter, he announced with pride.

— I wouldnae go so far as to say that! Joanne laughed, bringing up a trivial childhood anecdote, and you were delighted that it was now Trudi’s turn to squirm. Then, for a second or two, the table vanished and all you could see was a slab with a small blue body on it.

Hyperventilation shook you and you fought it down, staring at a wedge-shaped lamp bolted to the wall. — You okay, son? your mother asked, noting your discomfort.

You switched your stare on to Stuart. The angel-faced wee crawler who’d turned into the opinionated obnoxious wanker, and everyone still made a fuss of him. — I’m lucky having you to tell me how Scotland would’ve been a free socialist utopian republic by now if I hadnae joined the polis.

Stuart raised his hands in mock surrender. — Okay, Ray, I apologise. I was out of order. I’m just a wee bit pissed off that I didn’t get this Taggart part I was up for.

— But you’ve been in Taggart before, son, Avril consoled.

— Aye, Mum, but that was a different role.

But you weren’t going to let him take over this time. — And I’m glad you know my job well enough to tell me that I oppress the poor. Here was me hallucinating, thinking about the dead body of a sexually abused and tortured seven-year-old girl I’d pulled out of the sea. And it was all my fault. She came from a housing scheme: maybe I was oppressing her.

— Enough! John Lennox snapped. — A bit of respect from you two. C’mon!

A worn glance of truce flashed between you and Stuart as the waiter moved to the table to announce the desserts. As you recharged your glass, you heard the conversation drift to Hearts and the sacking of George Burley. You were about to chip in with some gusto when your mobile rang. It was Keith Goodwin. — Hey, Ray. What’s up? Where ye been?

— I’m sitting drinking champagne with my family, you said. — I’ve just got engaged.

— Congratulations, but, eh, the alcohol, is it wise? I mean to say—

— Call ye later, Keith, you said, snapping your mobile shut. A pub bore was a pub bore, with or without alcohol or drugs. You vowed that night to have a decent drink. It was what people did when they got engaged and put child killers behind bars.

It hit everybody in the face that Monday morning. The team were hung-over after their celebration and you were also feeling fuzzy after your engagement meal.

Ronnie Hamil couldn’t provide an alibi but the hospital records of the Western General’s Accident and Emergency Department could. A man had fished him out of the Union Canal after he’d stumbled in drunk following a session on heavily fortified wines the Tuesday night before Britney’s disappearance. They’d kept him in hospital till ten o’clock the next day, when he’d resumed his binge at a friend’s flat, drinking himself comatose, oblivious to being Scotland’s most wanted man. He’d been too inebriated to remember this incident but his rescuer, a passing jogger, very clearly could.

Following the grandad’s release, the first thing you did was phone George Marsden and tell him the situation. — Quite, George had crisply retorted.

Perhaps some of this smugness had transmitted to you. The scent of failure hung in the air that evening, as your Serious Crimes team trooped wearily into Bert’s Bar. You weren’t aware of an I-told-you-so look coming off your face, but couldn’t absolutely swear it wasn’t there. In the bar tension built like a bonfire all night until Ally Notman slurred, — He’s a fuckin nonce. He would’ve done.

— He’s a bag of shite but he’s no a child killer and it would have meant impunity for the real one, you’d sniped back. One or two heads around the table nodded. Most refused to make eye contact with you. You were isolated, and not for the first or the last time, for the crime of not taking part.

The following evening, as you were leaving Police HQ following another lonely night of searching through records, statements and video recordings, a silver-haired figure in a coat shuffled through the automatic doors and approached you. — You okay? your boss asked.

— I’m sorry, Bob. We’ve nothing. Zilch, you said. It was the first time you’d seen Bob Toal since the Ronnie Hamil connection had proved a dead end. Now your boss looked as worn out as you felt.

— Keep at it, Toal nodded, and his shoulder punch, the paternal blow of the football coach, was enough to relaunch you back into the thin darkness of a chilly Edinburgh night.

You felt utterly useless. The cop as Popperian philosopher: disproving every hypothesis your department came out with. As the next few days rolled by, you empathised with the boss. The pension was so close, and Toal wanted to get to the finishing line unscathed. A blaming culture always came to the fore in any police department in which a big case seemed to be going nowhere. Those were the rules. They were operating in a tight financial environment. Cost-cutting measures were already planned. There would be a disciplinary hearing. Charges of gross negligence made. Summary dismissal. The only issue was how far down the line the buck would be passed.

Dissenting voices were starting to be heard. A comprehensive investigation appeared on the Independent’s front page. It raised doubts about the strength of the case against Robert Ellis, affirming your belief that a multiple murderer was on the loose. But pressure from Toal compelled you to keep on at Angela Hamil and the men in her life.

— There’s fuckin shite gaun oan here, she’s covering for some cunt, Toal had said, his Morningside accent thickening to Tollcross, showing you a different set of possibilities for your gaffer. Somebody who, perhaps in other circumstances, could have been a villain. — Ride her hard, Ray, he had said. — I’ve seen it before with weak women like that. They become mesmerised, dominated by some bad bastard. Find out who he is!

So like the rest of Serious Crimes, you became obsessed with Angela’s sex life. Openly scoffing at her in an incredulous manner when she said she ‘never brought men back to the house because of the bairns’. Knowing the woman would be too broken to challenge you. You hated her passivity, saw yourself – felt yourself – becoming a bully, perhaps like many of the other men in her life, but unable to stop. You wormed one name out of her, a Graham Cornell, who worked at the Scottish Office. He was described as ‘just a friend’.

A couple of days later you’d gone back to the office at Serious Crimes and studied the dreaded whiteboard again. After a while Ally Notman invited you for a drink. When you stepped into Bert’s Bar, they were all there. It was a set-up. Relaxed at first, then Gillman and Notman started the ball rolling. — It’s him. Cornell, they harmonised.

It was the cue for Harrower and McCaig to join the chorus. You’re our boy. Our leader. The boss. Don’t let us down. He’s making cunts of us all.

And part of it chimed with you. Because there was something about this man. But then you spoke to Cornell on Halloween evening. You caught him about to leave his flat, dressed in a red costume with horns and a forked tail. Even discounting this attire, Graham Cornell’s bearing announced him as transparently gay. To your mind it was ludicrous to think he’d snatch a female child. But for some of the boys, like Gillman, gay equalled pervert, equalled nonce. You could stick them on as many equal-ops training courses as you liked, but the algebra, long formed, couldn’t be totally encrypted, and was always waiting to return. It came back with a vengeance in the fatigued, desperate group, sweating under the strip lights in that small office, burning their eyes on computer screens, knocking on doors asking the same questions over and over again. You feared that you were the only one privy to the collective psychosis that had them all in its clenched fist. They would fall silent whenever Drummond, the lone female officer on the team, entered the room. Even Notman, who was living with her.

Your response to the voices jabbering at you was to engage with your own increasingly urgent naggings. One bleak early-November afternoon, a train took you over the border to Newcastle. Then, a short taxi ride and you were in a dilapidated tavern in that city’s West End, where, as a Scottish cop, you felt safe enough to score your first grams of cocaine in over four years.

And you needed it like the rest seemed to need Cornell. It couldn’t be admitted that a multiple child murderer was on the loose. The myriad legal and police careers that had been built on Robert Ellis’s arrest and prosecution would be for ever tarnished. And a hated figure would be living the rest of his life in the Bahamas at the taxpayer’s expense. The groupthink of the bureaucratic organisation went into destructive overdrive: Cornell was the man. And in your own way, you did the same.