Still Midnight

34

Annie was the one person in the world Pat wanted to see less than Eddy at the moment but she wouldn’t be shaken off and she wouldn’t shut up about Malki’s twenty quid.

She stood too close to Pat, so close he couldn’t focus on her face without hurting his eyes. And she wasn’t standing still either, she was reeling towards and away from Pat, peering at him top and bottom through ridiculously thick glasses.

‘I mean if he’s getting money from somewhere it should come through me,’ said Annie, a grasping smile at the corner of her mouth. ‘I pay for everything, he owes me about seven hundred quid or nine hundred quid anyway.’

‘I dunno anything about it, Auntie Annie, honest.’

Pat was waiting to be told the Big Man wouldn’t see him, waiting to be told he should deal with Parki, who was reading a newspaper at the far end of the room and ignoring him. They always made you wait.

Pat didn’t want to see the Big Man really, it was too complicated, too much bowing and scraping. He had knocked them back for job after job, for security positions in the family firm, for one-off muscle shifts. Worse than that, Pat wouldn’t let them use his name on any of the legal papers for the security firm. Relations with his relatives were cold to say the least. That’s how they got everyone involved, freezing them out if they didn’t comply. Pat had been pretty straight his whole life until now, until this. Loyalty to Eddy had made him go along with it.

‘Where’d he get it from?’ Annie persisted. ‘From you? For what?’

Pat shrugged and looked away. He hated this cold house. They’d knocked two into one, knocked down a wall to make a living room that was double the size. It was all wrong, the shape was wrong, ceilings too low to fit with the room, four big windows from the front and back, like a waiting room or something. Impossible to heat. Stupid. The big man had money but no taste, he’d bought expensive stuff, desks and antiques and that, but the stuff was all dotted around the room like a garage sale.

‘Never came from me, Annie, I dunno why he’s got money.’

Big Man wouldn’t let anyone clean it now either, not since his wife died, and everything looked sticky and dirty. Pat focused his eye on a glass display cabinet. It looked like something that should be in a shop, a glass box with three shelves in it and a dead bulb at the top, hanging slightly out of its socket. Inside were three sculptures of Chinese women, one sitting under a brolly, one leaning against a tree, one sitting on a bench. They all had the same face.

‘Mean, everb’y knows I handle his money. If they’ve got anything else to give him they should gae it tae me.’

This was what he had to get away from. All of this. Mothers chiselling money from weans, cold rooms, waiting for knock-backs. He wanted toast and warm and pink and hair on pillows. He wanted family members who cried when one of them was taken away. Kindness.

‘See, Pat, son-’

‘Auntie Annie, he never got that money from me. I don’t know where he got it.’

She crossed her arms and looked him up and down. ‘He’s been hanging about Toryglen. Who lives in Toryglen?’ She was threatening him.

Pat stared at her. ‘Did he tell ye he was going to Toryglen?’

‘Nut,’ she glanced out of the window, ‘polis are looking for him.’ She was looking at a couple in a black Ford outside. ‘He got a cab yesterday and they found out he’d went there.’

The police were sitting in a car outside the house right now looking for Malki. Pat felt suddenly violently sick. He shrugged awkwardly. ‘I dunno anyone in Toryglen.’

‘Shugie Wilson,’ said Annie, flatly.

She was so fucking fly. Pat always forgot. ‘I don’t know Shugie.’

‘Aye, ye do,’ she said, looking at him through the bottom of the lenses. ‘Alki. Drinks in Brian’s. Used to run wi’ the Bankshead buoys.’

Parki coughed a dry bark and turned the page of his newspaper noisily. He was telling Annie to shut up, that Pat was an outsider and not to be trusted. He had been a knife-fighter when he was young. He had a scar across his face, a slash that took his bottom lip apart. They mismatched the slit when they put it together. It still made Pat flinch to look at it.

Annie was standing close to Pat, smiling over at Parki as if they were together. ‘Auntie Annie, do you mind?’

‘What, son?’

‘I want to talk to Parki in private.’

She looked at Parki to overrule Pat but he didn’t say anything, his face didn’t flicker. They both stared at her.

‘Oh that’s fucking nice.’ She stepped back along the room. ‘Tell your old auntie to go fuck herself.’ She stopped, waiting for them to insist on her coming back but they didn’t. Sulking, she sloped off. Gordon, the Big Man’s other heavy, let her out of the front door.

Pat and Parki looked at each other across the football pitch of a room. ‘’S a wonder Malki’s such a nice wee guy, innit?’ said Parki.

Gordon came in from the door. He’d been a body builder in his day. Took steroids but hadn’t worked out since his back injury. All the muscle had turned to fat. Even his fingers were fat now. Rumour was his dick was the size of a cigarette. ‘The big man’ll see ye now, Pat.’

Dumb with surprise Pat followed Gordon out of the room and up the stairs. Gordon’s back was so fat that his neck wasn’t visible from one step down. At the top of the stairs Gordon turned to Pat and smiled. ‘Nice to see you here, by the way,’ he said. It struck Pat as strange that he said it like that, warm, as if Pat was back with them. He motioned to the door, knocked twice on Pat’s behalf and swung it open into a small living room.

The Big Man probably didn’t recognise it himself and Pat only saw it because he’d been away for so long, but the pokey upstairs living room was a recreation of the house he used to live in. A brown armchair faced its twin, empty now that the wife was dead. A small telly sat on top of a lacy doily over a wee chest of dark wood drawers that they’d had in the old house. The sideboard was even running away from the door the way it did in the old room, before he bought the next house and had the wall knocked down. On the walls and dotted around the room were the symbols of his tribe, a big wooden crucifix with a brass Christ writhing on it, novenas propped up against devotional candles, a framed picture of Padre Pio on the wall. School photos of his daughter, smiling, gap-toothed.

The Big Man wasn’t big but he was square, like professional footballers in another age, a terrier of a man. He looked up at Pat from his armchair and seemed old but still vital, still threatening. ‘Son.’ He nodded, almost smiled, and Pat wondered if he’d been missed. It seemed unlikely. The Big Man had a lot of nephews and Pat’s mother had been dead a long time. ‘What’s your business?’

‘Um.’ Pat stood awkwardly by the door, his hands in his pockets, wanting to leave. ‘I’m sorry to come here…’

The Big Man waved his hand, telling him to get on with it.

‘I’ve got a hire car outside, need to get rid of it and get another motor. I didn’t know who else to come to…’

‘Hired in your name?’

‘No.’

‘Model?’

‘Lexus.’

The Big Man nodded. ‘OK. Tell Parki I said it’s OK and you’ve to get a few grand as well.’ He looked at Pat expectantly.

‘Oh. Um, thanks very much.’

‘Yes?’

Bewildered by the non sequitur Pat glanced behind him.

‘No…?’ prompted the Big Man, turning his ear, wanting to hear something. Pat frowned, he couldn’t guess what that was.

‘Sorry?’

Bizarrely, the Big Man chortled to himself and said Pat’s name a few times. He sighed and looked at him. ‘I knew it.’ He stood up and walked over to the sideboard, reached down and took out a bottle of Johnny Walker Black Label. He unscrewed the lid and poured two shots into crystal glasses that looked dusty, smiling all the while.

It hit Pat like a slap on the back of the head. The Big Man knew. He knew about the van, the guns and the pillowcase, and he thought Pat understood or he’d have dragged it out, made him guess.

He handed Pat a glass, and lifted the other to his mouth. ‘How’s it going?’

‘Going?’

‘The thing. With Eddy, how’s it going?’

Pat held the glass to his mouth and breathed in a cloud of bitter whisky.

‘Aye,’ said the Big Man. ‘Ye can see me after – square up then.’

They owed him money. Eddy owed the Big Man money. That’s how they got the van, the guns, the brand new clothes, the fucking face paint Eddy had asked him to put on in the bedsit before. Pat had struggled to stay out of all this and it turned out now that Eddy had gone to the Big Man for capital and betrayed him from the off.

‘Still attending to your devotions?’ He was frowning up at Pat, serious, nodding, as if this was what really mattered to him.

Pat downed the whisky in a oner, gasping, ‘No. I’m not religious.’

The Big Man held his glass but didn’t drink. ‘That’s a shame,’ he said into the glass. ‘That’s a shame. Our faith is what holds us together. Used to be a culture, a family, what kept us together. Now folk go sometimes, don’t do confession, only pray sometimes. It’s not a finger buffet. Ye can’t just pick and choose bits of it to please yourself.’

Pat put the glass down on the sideboard. ‘I better get going.’

‘Aye, tell Eddy I’ll expect him.’

Gordon let him out and leaned in for a silent order from his boss, trotted after Pat down the stairs, into the barn-sized living room and overtook him, whispering to Parki. Parki nodded and put down his paper on the Victorian card table. It was open at a picture of a topless bird. She looked very pleased with herself. He stood up slowly and made his way over to the window, peering out into the street. Pat hoped he didn’t spot the police.

‘The Kia’s a bird’s car but it’s reliable.’

It was a kind offer and Pat appreciated it. ‘That’s good of ye, Parki.’

But Parki brushed it aside. ‘What the Big Man says, goes.’ He reached into an antique wall cupboard sitting on the floor and pulled out a set of keys. ‘Go out the back. Round to the lock-ups, third door in.’

Pat blinked hard as he took the car key. ‘Thanks, man.’

‘How ye keeping anyway?’

Pat shrugged.

Parki pulled a wad of notes out of his back pocket, peeled ten one-hundred notes off and handed them to Pat. ‘How’s your Malki? Never seen him for ages.’

Pat took the keys out of his pocket, the pen torch and Eddy’s house keys were on it, and handed them to Parki, backing away across the room. ‘Ye off now?’ said Parki, still trying to work out what was going on.

‘Have tae, man,’ said Pat quietly. ‘Got somewhere I have to be.’

Morrow was sitting in the car outside Annie Tait’s house with Harris when the call came. The registration was bogus, belonged to another make, another year, another car altogether.

She picked up the radio mike and gave her first order on the case: two squads to come and follow the car, see where it went when it left here. It was a long shot but they didn’t have any short shots so it would have to do.

They waited until they knew the unmarked cars were in position, marking both entrances to the scheme before Harris started the engine and pulled out.