A Winter Grave

Chapter Twenty-Eight

After the incident at the Leonardo Inn, I guess I was just sort of paranoid. Couldn’t get those twin pictures out of my head — Jardine lying there on the floor of the hotel room, bleeding all over the carpet and swearing revenge, and Mel sitting in my car with tears streaming down her face, swearing she would never see him again. A lot of swearing going on, and I wasn’t buying it.

I knew that without some kind of intervention by me, the two of them would be drawn together again, like magnets. Opposites attract, they say, and you couldn’t get two more different people than Jardine and Mel. He was just a thoroughly bad piece of work — a ruthless, bullying, self-serving bastard. And Mel was one of the gentlest and most thoughtful people I’d ever known. And yet she couldn’t stay away from him. Or he from her. I’ve never understood it; I never will.

So I set out to make sure that my worst fears would never be realised.

I was able to access his files on the police computer, read the reports of his parole officer. I wanted to know every last detail about the man. Where he lived, where he worked. Who his friends were, where he drank.

Would you believe it, he managed to get himself another flat in the tower block at Soutra Place. He must have liked it there. For my part, it was familiar territory. I knew where to park my car out of sight. Watch him coming, watch him going.

He started drinking in a pub on the south side where Celtic football fans gathered before and after games. The Brazen Head. He went to the home games every other Saturday. He was still driving the same banger he’d arrived in at the Leonardo, but he was careful never to drive when he was out drinking. Always taking a taxi, which must have cost an arm and a leg.

Not that money seemed to be a problem. He got his old job back at the bookie’s, as if he’d never been away. He was getting on with his life, without a second thought for the mother and children he’d killed that night in Mosspark Boulevard. The only thing missing, it seemed — the only thing that would make his life complete — was Mel.

I don’t know how long I followed him for. Must have been weeks. Every time I was off shift, every chance I got to head out east. Mel was very subdued all this time, and perhaps I should have been paying her more attention. I had no idea what was going on in her head, what kind of turmoil she was in. It was like when he was away in prison, he’d stopped existing for her. But now that he was out again, it was all that filled her waking thoughts. And maybe her dreams, too. At least, that’s how it seemed to me. But like I said, I was pretty paranoid.

Anyway, it soon became clear to me that Jardine’s weekly schedule included a rendezvous on the walkway running below the King George V Bridge. Tuesdays and Thursdays. It’s an old bridge, the George V. Runs from Tradeston on the south side across the Clyde to Oswald Street in the city centre, just a spit away from the railway bridge that crosses the river at the same place. Nobody in their right mind would go down there at night, which is probably why it was an ideal spot for drug dealers to do business.

So Jardine had acquired another habit. Whether it was just dope, or something more upmarket like cocaine, I didn’t know. I suppose I could have just tipped off the drug squad. Given them a time and place, and Jardine would have been caught in possession. A clear breach of his licence, and he’d have been back inside in a heartbeat. But he’d have been out again soon enough. Guys like him are no different from the cockroaches in that doctor’s waiting room. Fucking hard to get rid of.

It was raining the night I followed him down to the walkway. Folk in the city were huddling under coats and brollies, so it was easy to stay anonymous. I kept a good distance, and watched him go down the steps and vanish into the dark beneath the bridge. A train rattled past overhead, and by its lights I saw the shadows of men moving around below the arch. I stayed out of sight, a good hundred metres away below the railway bridge, and watched as Jardine’s dealers headed off in the other direction towards the Squiggly Bridge. Maybe they figured business wouldn’t be good on a night like this. But, at any rate, they weren’t hanging about.

Jardine came back along the walkway and up the steps towards me. He was walking slowly, despite the rain. He had no brolly and was getting soaked, more intent on protecting and checking the purchase hidden in his coat before heading back to his car. Satisfied at last, he pushed his hands in his pockets and began walking more briskly, almost as if he’d just noticed it was raining.

There wasn’t another soul around. Well, there wouldn’t be on a night like this. He was almost upon me when I stepped out to block his path just before the railway bridge. He got a fright, I could see that. Then, after a moment, recognition dawned and he relaxed. A smile spread across his ugly coupon, and I could see the gaps where I’d broken teeth, and the crooked turn of the nose that I’d busted.

‘Well, well, well, if it isn’t Mel’s knight in shining fucking armour. What you doing here, Brodie? Gonna bust me? Didn’t know you’d graduated to the narcs.’

I shook my head. ‘No. Not going to bust you, Lee.’

‘Oh, Lee, is it? Very familiar. What you looking for, then? A square go?’

I said nothing, and he must have seen the hate in my eyes as I fixed them on him in the rain.

‘Oh, I get it. This is where you warn me never to cast a shadow anywhere near your precious wee bitch ever again. That it, eh? Cos, let me tell you something, pal, there is fuck all you can do to stop me.’

Which is when something inside of me snapped. I mean, I’d come prepared. But I never really thought I’d go through with it.

He wasn’t expecting it. A step towards him in the dark and the forward thrust of my right arm. I saw the surprise in his eyes as the blade slid up between his ribs and into his heart. But it didn’t last for more than a second or two. He would never cast a fucking shadow anywhere ever again.

The weight of him fell forward into my arms, and I held him in a strangely grotesque embrace as I drew the knife away again. The lights of a train clattering south cast themselves on the dark waters of the river as I tipped him over the rail and watched him fall like a sack of tatties into the west-flowing currents of the Clyde.

He was gone in a moment. The same moment in which I realised just what it was I had done. How he had managed somehow to drag me down to his level, and lower. I threw the knife into the river as if the haft of it was burning my hand, and looked quickly around. But there was no one to witness my descent into hell. The same place to which I had just dispatched Lee Jardine. Not a living soul in sight. Cars rumbled by on the road bridge, headlights catching the falling rain. Folk on their way home, or out for the night. I looked down and saw Jardine’s blood glistening wet all over the front of my coat. I stripped it off and rolled it up to tuck under my arm, and started running. Back towards the lights of the city. Back to the dark side street where I had left my car.

In preparation for the murder I never really believed I would commit, I’d stowed a roll of bin liners and a pack of hand wipes in the boot. I tore a bag from the roll and stuffed my coat into it, having checked the pockets for anything incriminating. Then I cleaned my hands on the disinfectant wipes I tore from the packet. There didn’t seem to be any blood on my trousers or my shoes. But I wasn’t going to take any chances.

It took me less than fifteen minutes to drive home to Pollokshields. I left the car in the drive and went in through the back door. Addie was out for the evening, and Mel had gone early to bed. I stripped off in the kitchen. Everything — shoes, socks, trousers, underpants — and stuffed them into another bin bag. Then I snuck upstairs to the guest shower room and stood under steaming hot water for a good five minutes, trying to wash away the guilt. Mel took up most of the wardrobe space in our room, so I kept my stuff in the guest room. I went in there to slip into clean clothes and tiptoe back down to the kitchen.

I threw the bin bag into the boot alongside the one with the coat and the discarded wipes, and drove west towards Paisley. It was somewhere on the Renfrew Road that I dropped the floor mat from the driver’s side of the car, along with the bin bags, into a large wheely bin whose contents would be destined for landfill. And I sat in the car, eyes closed, drawing the breath that I had just robbed from another human being. My heart was still hammering at my ribs, fit to burst, and all the regrets I would carry with me for the rest of my life came pressing in around me in the dark. The ghosts that would haunt me all my days.

I guess Jardine would have been missed when he failed to turn up for work the next day. Maybe he didn’t show for a meet with his mates at the Brazen Head. But the alarm bells wouldn’t have gone off full gong until he missed his first appointment with the parole officer.

I didn’t know, didn’t want to seem interested. It was only when Tiny told me one day that Jardine had gone AWOL and there was a warrant out for his arrest that I knew it was all going to come to a head soon enough.

I had no idea if he and Mel had been in touch in the time following the debacle at the Leonardo. I knew, or at least was pretty certain, that they hadn’t met. But there must have been some line of communication between them, because in the weeks following that night under the George V Bridge, she became more and more withdrawn. If she had been expecting to hear from him, she must have wondered why he hadn’t been in touch. Maybe she tried to contact him, I don’t know. But the change in her was palpable.

I kept expecting to hear that they’d pulled him out of the Clyde. But it was almost three weeks before they did. Well downriver, near the Erskine Bridge. Of course, the body was decayed beyond recognition by then, but DNA identified him fast enough. The post-mortem located the fatal stab wound, and the traces of cocaine found in the pocket of his jacket led investigators to the conclusion that his murder was probably the result of a drug deal gone wrong. I knew there wouldn’t be much effort made in trying to find his killer.

I suppose I thought then that I was home free. But it didn’t really feel like it. I would never be brought to civil justice, perhaps, but natural justice has a way of finding you. There were other ways I would pay for killing that man.

I never told Mel about his body being taken from the river, or the results of the post-mortem. I was stupid to think that I could keep it from her. And sure enough, she heard. I don’t know where, or how, but she did. Mentioned it to me one night at dinner, and I had to admit that I knew. I mean, she wouldn’t have believed it if I’d claimed otherwise.

She seemed quite philosophical about it. Accepting, in that way of hers. As if she’d just heard that he was back in the Bar-L.

I really did think we were going to come through it, me and Mel. Until the night I got sent home early to find the cop cars and the ambulance in the street, and Mel dead in the bath.