Crime

8 Everything But the Girl

TRUDI LOWE SITS in the hotel room, ostensibly watching the television, but immersed in the recounting of incidents, from their ‘last life’, as she habitually refers to it. Years ago, when he’d shown up the self-hating drunk, using crass, fabricated outrage as a crude shield against his own guilt. She knew where he’d been. They’d argued about his behaviour and he’d shouted, — You haven’t got a clue what the fuck guys are like, have you?

Now the last life has come back. And I thought he’d changed. That putrid cliché slithers south into her chest, as a voice sneers back from inside her head: you fuckin mug.

But the rage that brims somehow refuses to overflow. She’s got up to pace around, looks outside. Her anger is stronger seated. So she’s fallen into the chair again and feels the poison flow through her.

Clean when they’d got back together, he’d blamed it all on the cocaine. And NA seemed to work for him. Their new life together felt like a genuine renaissance. They went to the gym, attended French classes, watched movies, enjoyed vigorous sex, engaged in camping and hillwalking expeditions. His job was always there, but he seemed to be treating it as just that: a job, albeit a particularly intrusive and demanding one. But then the drinking started again. He blamed the horrible case of the murdered little girl, and there was obviously his father and the subsequent estrangement from his family. But whatever the causes, the drink was there and would lead to cocaine, and that would lead to other women. And then they’d be finished.

You haven’t got a clue what the fuck guys are like. In the empty hotel room, that hurtful proclamation from the past resonates more acutely than ever. But her dad isn’t like that, and she recalls her child’s gloved hand in his, waiting in the queue for the cinema on Tollcross’s blue-grey streets. Can envision it so clearly, his younger self, his scent, that when she stops she feels a dissonance like she’s reincarnated into the body of a future descendant. And his own father was a kind and decent man. Trying to stop herself picking nervously at the skin around her manicured nails, all Trudi can think is: they are supposed to be here to make love. To get their sex life back on track. She is hormonal and premenstrual, and she needs him. And he’s gone.

She knows his contempt for her career and, thinking of that bundle of services that gives the country its pulse, suddenly finds a way of converting all the anger that has paralysed her into energy. It propels her down to the bar, but it’s empty and she doesn’t stay, stepping out on to the street. Walking for a bit, she entertains the vague notion that she can do anything he can, but isn’t inclined to patronise the local hostelries, raucous with beery, obnoxious males; there seems no acceptable category between boorish youth and sleazy middle age. On Lincoln Avenue, she is becoming more acutely conscious of her solitary status, when the vivid colours of the artwork on display in a gallery window beckon her inside. The place is almost empty. The originals are expensive but she can see a mounted print that’s reasonable. She lingers at it, wonders if Ray would like it. Probably not. Thinks that might be a reason to buy it. Then he approaches her.

Noises in his head, as a white ceiling comes into focus through one eye. The other is held shut by gummy secretions. He rubs at it; feels the springs of an old couch prong his back. A throw pulled over him. He had unravelled in the night and achieved a kind of exhausted peace. The events of last night gatecrash into his head. You’ve fucked up again, keens in self-flogging mantra. The sunshine bursts through the old yellow lace of the curtains as the neuralgia stabs the inside of his skull.

Trudi.

The noises. The television. Pulls himself up into a sitting position. Sees the kid, Tianna, lying on the floor, watching the box and drinking from a can of Pepsi. Tries to stand. Manages it. Stretches and yawns. Looks down at the girl.

She is locked on the telly, but had been watching him in his sleep. His face contorted, like he was still fighting, but in his dreams. His snoring so loud, she’d needed to turn up the volume. But she’d also wanted to waken him. To figure him out.

— Where is everybody? Lennox asks as he registers the glass from the broken coffee table. He recalls trying to tidy it up, but there are still plenty of shards around.

Fuck sake, the kid’s barefoot.

Lying prone on the rug, watching the television, the girl wears a pair of blue shorts and a yellow tank top. Some kind of rash: red, angry burns on one shin. She doesn’t even turn round as her right leg beats out a rhythm on her left. It’s like he scarcely exists. Doesn’t exist or is always there, Lennox wonders. — Where’s Robyn?

— Dunno. Tianna sits up. Swivels round. Her top has BITCH emblazoned on it in gold glittering letters. She regards him briefly, before pivoting back to recumbency by the box.

She isn’t a kid you can take to, Lennox thinks. He wanders around the apartment. It’s empty. He shrugs to an invisible audience and makes for the door. Stops. He can’t leave her alone like that, not without finding out when Robyn will be back. That creepy shitbag might come along again.

He considers Trudi. Will she be worried about him? Possibly. Probably. Once she’d calmed down, would she not think: ‘Where’s Ray?’ Lennox finds it nigh on impossible to conceive of anybody missing him.

But of course she would. She’s his fiancée. He’s been ill. Is ill.

I’ve stayed out all night. What the fuck have I done?

I have the pussy, I make the rules. Jesus fuck Almighty.

No. Trudi would be hurt. She may even have gone home, got a flight back to Edinburgh, perhaps telling his family – what’s left of it – that he’s had another breakdown. Maybe the police are looking for him! Or she might possibly be with Ginger and Dolores.

But he can’t leave the girl here alone.

It isn’t right. Her mother is…

— Do you get left on your own often? Lennox asks the supine figure as he starts to pick up the rest of the glass. The table as fragmented as last night in his mind. His head pulses like a wasp’s nest. Nasal cavities and throat stung raw.

— Dunno, she shrugs.

— When’s your mum due back?

— Like you care? she says, and he almost reacts, but as well as reprimand her tones carry a smidgen of enquiry.

So he gives up with the glass and sits back on the couch. He feels like leaving. But what if they’d gone on to another party and forgotten about her? You take enough coke, you can forget about anybody and anything. And Robyn looked like she took enough coke. An empty cigarette packet on the floor: it makes him miserable.

He rises and goes into the kitchen. There’s some beers left in the fridge, cans of Miller. How he wants one. Just one. But it isn’t right to drink it in front of the kid. It isn’t right because that’s what they all did. They lumbered to the fridge, every guy that had ever come into her mother’s apartment, at all hours. He could see them. Trace that path from the couch like a biologist would a bear’s salmon-fishing route. He wants to show her that it isn’t normal. Not taken as given that a kid would see guy after guy come into her home, into her life, with beer on his breath. Cause if she thinks it is normal then she will grow up and be with guys who have beer on their breath all day, every day. And guys who have beery breath all day, every day, they’re bad news to women. What else can they ever be?

What else?

So Ray Lennox makes himself a cup of coffee and he waits.

And waits.

Minutes stretch into quarter-hour blocks, pulling piano-wire nerves to their tensile limit then swiftly contracting, letting a sharp fatigue leak in pulses from his brain into his sinuses and eyes. Each of these temporal blocks resembles a stretch of ocean and he feels like a manacled, oar-pulling slave in the bowels of a coffin ship trying to cross its choppy expanse. Penance for the drink and drugs, their playful uncoupling of time and space last night. Thoughts of strategy come slowly and tentatively.

He should call Trudi. Feels the plastic room key in his pocket. She has a duplicate. A separate card with the address. She’ll be fast asleep. It’s still early: the digital clock says 8:33. Maybe she won’t thank him. What can he do? There is no excuse. That’s what she’ll tell him. No excuse for that kind of behaviour. What excuses can you make? He has reasons, but at what point do they stop becoming excuses?

When you should be old enough to know better. He was thirty-five on his birthday. Officially middle-aged – if you accept the old three-score-years-and-ten dictum. He sits back, looks at the cartoons on the telly. The Roadrunner humiliates the Coyote for the millionth time.

Tianna occasionally glances back at him. She gets up once, to replenish her cola. The pulsing glow of the narrative – the circumstances that have delivered him to this room – are intermittent in his head, but in someone else’s voice-over. Continued sanity compels action, and Lennox inventories the kitchen. There is no food in the house.

Plenty fuckin beer: but nothing for the kid’s breakfast.

He sits back down and watches Tianna channel-hop. She’s growing restless, Lennox can tell. It isn’t just the chemicals from the cola.

Stretching and bending to test his racked muscles, he picks up Perfect Bride from the floor. Reads about wedding etiquette. Thinks about who his best man might be. His old pal, Les Brodie, how they’d made a pact as kids. Playing on the old Tarzan swing down Colinton Dell. Agreed that they’d be each other’s best man if they ever got married. But then came the incident at the tunnel and they’d stopped going down the Dell. And he hadn’t seen Les in years, not until a few weeks ago: at his father’s funeral. When he’d made such an exhibition of himself. But I was right to, because the bastards in this life: they fucking tore your heart out. They had to be told. But here he was. Marriage. The best man. Inevitable that he’d ask one of the boys from the force, if only because there was nobody else. No Les, no Stuart. It would be Ally Notman probably, on the grounds that he was the least likely to cause offence. That was if getting married remained on the agenda.

He is aware of the mass of Trudi’s notebook in his back pocket. Gripping his arse cheek like her hand used to. He pulls it out and examines it: all one- or two-word entries. Lists. Websites. Her handwriting: slender, curvy and expressive. The vivaciousness of it makes him pine. Then even more as he flips a page and sees Trudi Lennox written several times; the same ‘L’, ‘o’ and ‘e’ in her current surname. Perhaps it’s time to call, to try and explain.

Nothing happened.

But that isn’t true. Plenty has happened. Is still happening.

Tianna glances from the TV set to him, as if steadying herself to say something. Before she can, the splintering ring of the phone lying on the floor skewers them both. They regard each other urgently. Both want the other to pick it up. — It might be your mum, you’d better answer it, Lennox says, shocked at the fearful child in his own voice.

Tianna lifts the receiver. There is a gap in her front teeth; he hasn’t noticed it before. It makes her look like a proper kid.

Rather than a—

It makes her look like a proper American kid. The Waltons. A white picket fence. She is the sort of kid who if she had a different American – what? – ma, mum, mother, mom, she would have braces in her choppers. Suffering the pre- and early-teen years of Hannibal Lecter teasing in order to get that winning infomercial-presenter smile.

— Hi, honey… Tianna is relieved to hear her mother’s voice, but she knows that paltry tone, the one which will deliver a million apologies before she screws up again. And Momma’ll be in big trouble cause that table got broke good.

— Hi… Tianna says. From Lennox’s point of view she seems to visibly relax. Her shoulders, which were tensed forward, now slump back. The voice on the other end, though, is panicky and jittery. He can hear it from where he sits. Knows to whom it belongs. Then Tianna looks over at him, — That guy who talks funny, yeah. Yeah… and she holds out the receiver in one hand and phone in the other in appeal.

As he takes them, Tianna, in sudden, disturbing fleetness, bounds out the door. — Hello?

— Ray… is that you?

It’s Robyn. He hasn’t been mistaken.

— Yeah. Where are you? I should—

— Listen, is Tia okay?

— Aye, she’s been watching cartoons. What time will you be—

She cuts him off again. — Is she listening?

He checks. She’s gone. — Naw, I think she’s in her room—

When she talks over him for the third time he knows her assertiveness is fuelled by desperation rather than cocaine. — Ray, please listen to me, her voice, pleading and urgent, pushes down on him like a dark, ominous cloud, — I ain’t got long to talk. You gotta pen and paper to hand?

— Are you okay?

— No, I’m not okay, Ray, I am not okay. I cain’t come back to the apartment yet, but I need you to get Tia out of there right now! Right now, y’all hear me?

— What is it? Where are ye? Lennox snaps, angry at the further imposition, — If you’re in some kind of trouble we should phone the police. These guys last night—

— No! Promise, Ray, promise me that you won’t phone no po-leece. They’ll take her away from me, they’ll put her into care! Please, Ray, please, she begs in rasping, almost strangulated tones, — don’t you be phonin no po-leece. Just promise me!

— Okay.

— I need ya to do me a favour, please! Do you have a pen and paper?

— What? Lennox says, with a scribbling mime to Tianna, who is entering the front room, but the girl flinches and steps back behind the door. Of course – Trudi’s small notebook, with the pen clipped into the ringed spine. — I’ve got yin. What’s going on here?

— I need you to take Tia somewhere. Right away.

— I – you can’t leave your daughter with me, he protests. — You don’t know a thing about me!

— I trust you, Ray, Robyn whispers urgently, and coughs out the address.

He’s seen the kind of men she’s trusted – incarcerated many of them, those men who have somehow managed to win the confidence of a woman. Until you’ve seen the women in question, and then it all makes perfect sense. Lennox reluctantly scribbles it down. Prepares to read it back to her, when a guttural squawk flares down the line then fades into silence.

A shivery spasm seizes him, along with the notion to dial 999, before he remembers it’s 911 here. — Robyn? A failing gasp as his throat scorches.

From behind the door, Tianna squirms. She can see him through the crack, his face hard, his eyes dancing, as he holds the phone. Maybe he could tell em all, creepy Lance, that Johnnie pig and that mean Starry bitch to just go away and leave Momma and me alone. Tell em all!

Lennox is aware that she’s watching him, but then another voice is on the line. — Hello. Who’s there?

— Who’s this?

The caller coolly answers in kind, by announcing him. — Our Skarrish friend. Ray.

That guy Lance, Lennox recalls in icy tremor, Lance Dearing. They’d broken Robyn’s table. Her landlord’s table. — Aye. Where’s Robyn?

— We got ourselves a lil’ problem, Dearing says calmly. — She’s gone kinda crazy on that stuff. That ain’t right around a kid, you know that.

— Yeah, Lennox says, as his mind does cartwheels. He looks at Tianna, partially lurking behind the door. Half her face and one arm and leg visible to him. Her bottom lip quivering: the goose-bumped skin on her limbs.

— I dunno what you guys were up to in that toilet last night, Lance laughs, and Lennox feels bile rise in his gut, — but you sure as hell wouldn’t open up. Ol Robyn, she was losin the plot real bad. Got herself into a whole heap of trouble.

— It didn’t seem like it was Robyn that was losin it tae me.

— Well, I guess we all kinda lost it. That table sure got broke good, Lance Dearing says, forcing Lennox to regard the cold metal frame and legs. — No hard feelins though, huh, buddy?

Lennox lets the silence hang.

Dearing seems in no hurry to fill it and Lennox almost wonders if the line has gone dead before the American eventually speaks. — I’m gonna come on by real soon. Right now I’m gonna send Johnnie round to wait.

— Are you fuckin crazy? No. No way! Lennox barks. He looks at Tianna, who’s come back and sat down on the couch. She brings her knees up to her chest, resting her head on them. Her hair tumbles down, concealing her face.

— Ol Johnnie was only messin last night. A lil’ too much of the funny stuff.

— I saw his messing, Lennox says evenly, — and if he comes near that kid again, his voice pauses, slow and deliberate, — I’ll cut his fuckin balls off and feed them to the cunt. They’ll be his last meal on this earth, he hisses, then starts, realising that Tianna is present and not wanting to look at her.

— Whoah… hold on, Ray, buddy, what kind of fool talk is that?

— I’m no your buddy, Lennox spits.

Dearing raises his voice slightly, but remains composed. — I think you got it all wrong here. I’m sorry about our lil’ mis-understanding last night, but you must know that Robyn is a mighty troubled lady, and Lennox feels himself being wooed by the rational, reasonable tone. — She attracts trouble and I guess I’m jus a little overprotective, is all. But I can see you got her best interests at heart.

Then he thinks of Johnnie. — It’s whom you’re protective of, that’s the issue here. Now put her back on.

— She’s hysterical, Ray. You saw her last night.

— It’s her daughter, Lennox insists as Tianna pushes her hair back, — put her on.

— I’ll be round there in a short while, compadre. Why don’t y’all just simmer down a little—

— I’m telling you this right now: if you don’t put her on, I’m going to the police.

— Al-righty! Lance chuckles, then Lennox’s mind’s eye sees him turn away from the phone, his voice switching volume and direction, addressing another party, recasting him as eavesdropper. — Hear that, you crazy bitch? Ray’s got himself of a mind to do the same as me and go round to the po-leece with that lil’ gal!

— NOO! Robyn’s vivid scream, crushed to his ear to shield it from Tianna. It dies, and his arm has gone rigid. The receiver held tight in his bad fist. Pulling it away, with a silence at the other end, he settles it down on the cradle with a click.

The girl’s eyes blaze at him. — What’s happened? Where’s Momma?

What can he tell her? — Your mother’s sick. Just not feeling so good.

His words deflate the kid. Her eyes glaze over as she crumples back into the chair. — Is it the drugs? Her voice is weary in resignation. — She cain’t be takin that powder none.

— What do you know about that?

Tianna looks at him in a measured way and asks, — Dunno. What bout you?

— Nothing, his voice weak and faltering.

— The way you’re sniffin and snufflin seems like you know plenty, Tianna says, and he hates the worldly scorn in her tone.

He tries for levity: — I’ve got a cold. I’m from Scotland. It’s not like Florida.

She tugs her hair back from her face again, as her hawklike eyes scrutinise him. — Yeah, sure.

Lennox feels low and nasty. — Has your mum… gotten sick before? You know… He can’t bring himself to say ‘on drugs’.

— She jus got out of rehab.

— Who looked after you when she was in rehab?

— Starry, I guess.

— Don’t you have a gran or grandpa, like your mum’s mother and father?

She shakes her head in the negative and lowers her eyes.

Recalling Ronnie Hamil, Lennox leaves it; the last thing some children wanted was to contact grandparents. — You don’t like Starry, Johnnie and Lance much, do you?

Tianna looks fiercely at him. — They say they’re Momma’s friends but they ain’t no friends of hers.

This convinces him of the urgency of getting away from this place. He doesn’t want to see Lance Dearing or Johnnie again. — What do you want to do? Are you hungry? he asks. Robyn has given him an address. If it’s local, he could make good her request and leave the kid there. Then get back to the hotel. Make his peace with Trudi. Go to bed. Lie out on the beach, even.

Trudi. Jesus fuck Almighty.

— I don’t wanna be here. Tianna evidently feels the same as he does. — I wanna go stay with Chet.

— Who’s Chet?

— Uncle Chet. He’s kinda cool, she says, her smile suggesting that power children have to purify jaundice.

Lennox looks at the scribbled note on the pad. He can barely recognise it as his own writing. CHET LEWIS, OCEAN DAWN, GROVE MARINA, BOLOGNA.

Robyn hadn’t provided a phone number, but at least Tianna knew who her mother wanted to look after her and it was fine by the kid. — Do you have Uncle Chet’s phone number?

— I guess it’s over by the other phone, she points to the hall, — on the big board.

Lennox goes across to where the whiteboard is mounted on the wall. He freezes in panic as it gleams back at him, stark in its nakedness. Before it had been teeming with numbers and messages. — Who wiped this?

Tianna has followed him and looks from Lennox to the board and back. — Dunno.

He recalls Ally Notman, cleaning the whiteboard at work, sweeping a sponge across it in long, loping strokes. Erasing everything. End of investigation. The big, bold name BRITNEY eradicated for good.

He’d shivered as he’d watched that board being wiped clean. Now, in the hall of this Miami apartment, he feels a familiar chill.

In cop mode, he systematically searches the place for letters, notes, bills, bank statements, anything. All gone. Lennox knows that nobody as chaotic as Robyn could be so fastidious. This was a proper clean-up job, even though it had been done in haste while he was locked away with the kid in the toilet. Dearing. The last person to leave had to be him. It would have taken him seconds to wipe down the board and minutes to load her personal stuff into a bin liner if he knew where to look.

Tianna is standing a little bit away from him. Waiting. Her arms folded. — We gonna go to Chet’s?

— How far is it?

— Dunno.

— Can we walk there?

Her withering look indicates there’s little chance of that.

— Let’s go and get some breakfast and work out how far it is. I’m hungry. What about you?

— I guess so.

He looks at her bare arms. Her tank top and its salacious proclamation. — Better stick on a jacket. I think it’s colder than it looks, he says, heading to the lounge and picking up the copy of Perfect Bride.

9 Police

THE SUN RADIATES through a thin mesh of cloud, but a cool, persistent wind steals the heat from the air. Lennox is right; it isn’t as warm as advertised. Tianna, carrying a backpack designed as a flattened sheep, and wearing a light blue denim jacket, kindles some jealousy in him; he could do with something to cover his arms. He’s lost the Red Sox hat and his shades, probably left behind in one of the bars or on the bus. His good hand clutches the bridal magazine. He doesn’t have a clue where he’s going, or why. A white van sets his hackles rising as it pulls up outside the apartment block. A boiler-suited man emerges with a metal canister on his back, and is cursorily greeted by Tianna.

— Who’s that? Lennox asks.

— The exterminator, she explains, his glaikit expression compelling her to add, — They spray all the apartments for bugs.

They walk through the streets of square blocks over huge cracked concrete sidewalks, past houses and yards, coming on to a main road and a strip mall. There’s nothing of interest: a real-estate agent, a security firm and a hairdresser’s. It isn’t a bad neighbourhood, though. He’s seen a lot worse. The girl keeps step alongside him, deep in thought. Her hair blows a little in the breeze, and he imagines her walking to school, like Britney used to.

For Tianna walking to school was always Alabama. Sucking in the medley of forms, sounds and movements along the Tallapoosa River route, the swampy aromas taking the urgency out of the day’s excited voices. It was different in Miami, that mirthless ride in the school bus rambling down the palm-treed avenues. Teased from the start for her rudimentary Spanglish. Her bag seized on her first day by two boys who tossed it back and forth to each other. She knew they’d wanted her to exasperate and humiliate herself by trying to retrieve it. But she’d been suddenly stung by the dire recall of what he’d said to her about being a woman, not a little girl, and she’d simply waited disdainfully till they’d become bored. They’d cursed her in Spanish as they dropped the bag at her feet, but it was half-hearted as they were quickly off in search of a more responsive victim. Pappy Vince, she remembered, had shown her good things too.

The apartment, a palace of functional understated luxury, is a short cab ride from the cocktail bar. A pool and hot tub built into a glass-enclosed patio look out on to the ocean beyond, the inky blue of each almost imperceptibly blending in the night. He’d suggested the nightcap at his place, and when she thought of Ray, out carousing full of cocaine, and probably in the arms of some slut, she was happy to agree.

Aaron Resinger seems as designed as his home. Hair dark and wavy. Body heavy with muscle built and honed in the gym since college years. An admitted workaholic, he tells her that he is one of few native South Floridians. He’d studied Real Estate Finance and Urban Planning at the University of Miami and made his money in the condominium boom of the early nineties. Success has come at a cost, as a few months ago, he’d split up with a long-term partner. — I guess I’ve been licking my wounds since, he sings with a hint of melancholy through a grill of perfect white teeth.

After pouring Trudi a drink, and showing her his art collection, they stand on the patio, looking out to where the Biscayne Bay meets the Atlantic Ocean. — When I built this place I decided that I simply couldn’t find anywhere better to live, he purrs. Trudi feels like a film star, ennobled and exalted by the attentions of this man. When he kisses her, she responds. At first tentatively, then, as she thinks of how Ray Lennox has treated her, with ferocious abandon. When they break off, he sweeps the hair from her face, looks into her eyes, and says with a sincerity she finds crippling, — I would really like to make love to you.

Trudi smiles and allows herself to be led by the hand into a master bedroom. She knows at that moment that when she tells this story to the girls in some wine bar back home, they will all be letting out volleys of uncontrollable laughter. But right now, in this luxury, under the moonlight, with the crashing waves outside and her burned by alcohol and thoughts of a treacherous, uncaring fiancé, it is by far the best show in town.

He beats out an edgy rhythm on his thigh with Perfect Bride as they walk. Lennox had tried to chat but the kid wasn’t forthcoming. It was easier getting information out of hardened cons. He didn’t push it because he sensed she carried the sort of hurt that engendered introspection.

His mouth feels bad, and he thinks about getting some gum. It’s a strain with the American kid, and he’s relieved when they come across a local police station. He doesn’t want to alarm her. Luckily, there is a diner across the street. — I been there before, Tianna says uneasily, pointing at it. — Starry works there.

Perhaps Starry would be able to help sort out this mess. She was a total bitch last night but then she was coked up. And she is Robyn’s friend. Or is she? He’ll soon find out.

Mano’s Grill might have been considered a good place to waitress. A very narrow L-shaped space, there are no tables as such, just a counter that runs along the length of one wall, alongside which chairs are positioned. The customers can almost reach over and touch the short-order cooks: one of whom he believes to be Mano himself. Another counter with more stools underneath runs round the periphery, along some big plate-glass windows. Lennox can envision Starry stretching across to pass the plates to these customers over the heads of the poor stiffs at the counter.

But he’ll bet that she never does that when Mano’s around. An aggressive caricature posted above the counter depicts a younger, hairier, slimmer version, but still instantly recognisable as him. It warns underneath: THIS AIN’T BURGER KING – HERE WE DO THINGS MY WAY.

With Tianna reluctantly alongside him, Lennox watches Mano in action. As he shouts at a waitress, bitterness seeps from him, strong enough to taint every bite of the food he cooks. Then Lennox sees that there is an alcoved passage leading to restrooms, then a bigger dining space. Mano’s empire extends to a busy area of tables, chairs and another counter with a register. Even a separate kitchen seems to be in operation.

Lennox hazily recalls Starry telling him last night that she’d been working there for four years. It was probably a lifetime in a place like this, he considers. In caustic semi-drunkenness, she’d told him somewhere between a boast and a lament that it was the longest she’d ever held down a job in her life. No matter how crazy her own lifestyle got, Starry contended she’d never missed a shift. This had seemed doubtful to him at the time. It’s exposed as nonsense as he asks the waitress – the one Mano chewed out – if she’s due in. The woman glares confrontationally at him. — You know that beetch? Where ees she?

— I was hoping you could tell me.

— Ha! How should I know? I have to cover her sheeft, she spits in uncontrived anger.

Lennox sits down with Tianna who seems relieved at Starry’s absence. He fancies a milkshake. He remembers the ones in the Howard Johnson’s on Times Square in New York with the boys. They were good. But they’d soon turned into Bloody Marys.

They order a chocolate shake for him, with toast and eggs. Tianna gets a Coke, burger and fries. Lennox’s appetite is shot. He dabs at the eggs with toast, dropping an accidental bomb of yolk on Perfect Bride, and sucks on the shake that cools his raw throat. The kid is hungry. There is a quick, methodical single-mindedness about the way she attacks her food. He wonders when she last ate. — You stay here, he tells her, standing up. — I’m just going to get some cigarettes next door, he raps out the easy lie of the infidel cop.

— Uh-huh, she replies and now her eyes seem so big, — That would be way cool.

— For me, he snaps in exasperation. — Wait here, he reiterates.

Striding out of the diner, Lennox marches across to the smart new building bearing the sign indicating Miami–Dade County Police Department. It takes up a good part of a city block. Inside there would be men and women, like his colleagues back home, earning a living through law enforcement. It’s crazy. He’s an experienced cop, but he doesn’t know what he’s going to say. Without authority or status he’s pared down to his essence: a doubter, operating in a world where such luxuries were frowned upon. Lennox stops outside the glass doors. Now is not the time to doubt. Now is the time to act.

The likes of Dougie Gillman would stride in and report the kidnapping, abandonment, molestation and attempted rape of a minor to the desk officer. Not only that, he’d do it with a sneering contempt that said: ‘Where the fuck were youse?’ And that’s what he is steeling himself to do, thinking of his actor brother, Stuart, telling him how he got himself into role.

As he opens the door, he sees a very large woman leaning across the desk. Her outsized rump, encased in pink stretched leggings, sticks in the air and partially blocks his view of the officer behind the reception counter who attends to her. Then the man shimmies to one side and lifts his head and Lennox and the desk cop gaze at each other in mutual shock.

It is Lance Dearing who speaks first, as the flight urge explodes like a starter’s pistol in Ray Lennox, who twists away from the desk.

— Why, you jus hold on a minute there, Ray – Lance begins, but the barrel of a woman is shouting at him: — You gotta get him outta my house! He ain’t got no business to be in my house!

— Ma’am, if you don’t mind… Dearing says, stepping out from behind the counter.

Ray Lennox walks quickly through the glass doors and out of the police station. His jarring staccato descent down the steps evokes a pianist playing chopsticks. At the bottom he breaks into a trot and then a sprint. The lay-off from his sporting endeavours is painfully evident: his weight hangs around his heart and lungs and his leg muscles ache. Under his soles the slabs on the sidewalks are cracked and uneven, and he self-consciously fears for his footing. Then the bilious mass seems to lift, his chest holding the air, lightening him, and Lennox is flying.

Tianna is sitting where he left her, finishing off her food, looking at the wedding magazine. The urgency signalled by Lennox’s entrance makes her pack a few ketchup-laden fries into her mouth before he reaches the table.

— We have to go, he gasps, counting out some bills.

— What about Momma? Tianna asks, making Lennox briefly think of his own mother.

— Your mum’s not well, but she’s gonna be okay. He rests his hands on the counter, shoulders heaving. He is rewarded by a suspicious glance from Mano that reminds him of a scene from some movie. — We have to go now, go and see Chet, he emphasises, picking up the magazine and heading to the register. He pays the clerk and ushers Tianna towards the door. — You have to tell me about those two guys who came by last night. Johnnie and Lance.

— I don’t wanna talk about them. She turns her head in rapid, emphatic movements. — I don’t like them!

— Who are they? he persists. — Have they tried to hurt you before?

The girl’s line of vision shoots past him, her eyes wide with the expectation of impending trauma. She’s gone somewhere and he needs her here. Gently but firmly, he grips her shoulders and she meets his gaze. — I know you’ve heard this bullshit line before in your life and I absolutely guarantee that you’ll hear it again. But now it’s time to believe: trust me.

A spark ignites in her as she glances over his shoulder again. — Quick. She takes him by the arm and leads him through the doors to the restrooms. Following her, he steals a look across the crowded diner. At the other door Lance Dearing has walked in and is scanning the joint. Their eyes meet and Dearing’s brows knot, his bottom lip curling. Guessing that the man would have the balls or the desperation to shoot him dead in a packed diner, then claim he abducted a Florida minor, Lennox lets the sprung door snap shut behind them.

Tianna evidently knew that the restrooms also led to the restaurant extension, the back of which empties out on to a parking lot. They move swiftly across the space, which contains only a few cars and a skip. The terror of a marksman’s bullet in his back pulls him inwards in expectation of impact. His head swivels to Tianna but she’s keeping an even, measured stride with him as they run on to another road. Again, he glances back for signs of Dearing, but there’s nothing. Rather than give chase by foot, he’d be back in his car, trying to track them down. The main road opens back on to one more set of neighbourhood side streets cut into blocks, and they steal down one. To Lennox they seem featureless in their uniformity, as they move swiftly, looking back for pursuing vehicles. It’s hotter now and heavier after the effort he’s expended in this flight from Dearing. The sun spreads across the back of his head and neck, his brain numb and oxygen-deprived as they slow to a trot and then a walk, mute with fear and breathlessness, just waiting to be apprehended.

Yet nothing happens as they continue to trek in zoned-out quiescence, glad of the meagre cover of the trees sprouting from street and garden, affording at least some shelter from both sunlight and passing eyes.

Tianna is thinking about the boys on the school bus. She didn’t mind them calling her a slut. They said the same to the white-socked Catholic Latinas in the plaid school dresses, even when they came out of church. That old stucco one with the crude stained glass, colour weakened by constant sun spitting through the palm leaves. Tianna had even thought about going in there, wondering if other girls had shared her fate, and if they’d found peace inside. But her momma had no time for it, for the dirty old pious-faced men in frocks and bad shoes. The only men she didn’t have time for. Now she’s looking at the tall Scotsman – Bobby, she’ll call him, after Baseball Bobby from Scotland – but he’s talking to himself like a real crazy asshole, his eyes bulging: a loony man for sure. She hears him saying something weird under his breath, about needing to keep walkin, about kids, about how he always has to look after kids, and just who in hell’s name does he think he is, this Scottish creep who knows jack about her. Walkin was always Mobile. Doesn’t he know that?!

One thought in Lennox’s head: I am the uncomfortable silence. Yet he must have been mumbling, delirious in the heat, effort and drugs comedown, maybe said something about needing to walk.

Because now Tianna is shouting at him. At first he can’t hear her, only a noise as uniform as silence. He has to stop, to consciously tune in.

—… and I like to walk and I ain’t no kid, she declares violently, her face creasing in anger, — so don’t you be treatin me like one!

— Right, he says, humbled. They walk silently on for what seems an age, distrustful of each other and 7th Street they’ve emerged back on to, blinking like chain-gang fugitives in the desert. Every cruising police car makes Lennox’s heart pound. The magazine beats in stronger cadence against his thigh.

Gamekeeper turned poacher.

He feels that people are watching him. Dress, bearing, skin tone, he doesn’t fit in here. Perhaps it’s the girl; her slow angel eyes tracking him in his grim mission of mercy. The air thickens in the heat and the glossy magazine sweats in his hand. They seem to be the lone pedestrians: this white man and this young girl. It strikes him then that he can’t even tell from Tianna’s features and colouring anything about her father’s ethnicity. He could conceivably have been black, Asian, white or Latin. He thinks of the golfer Tiger Woods: a new model American. Tries to mentally Photoshop Robyn out of her daughter and see what’s left, but still no compelling image presents itself. The only thing that comes distastefully to his mind is Robyn’s pubic hair.

In Britney’s neighbourhood nobody would have noticed us. Their wars in that scheme were against the Bosnian refugee who was rehoused by the council, or the quiet model-railway enthusiast who lived alone. Or the moonlighting house painter. Maybe the nippy cow who got the last packet of beefburgers from the corner store and the slimy Paki bastard who sold them to her. Or the burly thug who kicked in the door and grabbed the telly and stereo while the scrawny, cadaverous sheriff officer waved the warrant in their bemused faces. Or the guilt-ridden pisshead of a husband who blew another month’s rent on drink and horses. Their wars were with each other and were all-consuming; born out of underemployment, poverty and frustration. Meanwhile, a real monster had slipped undetected through their midst.

Mr Confectioner would never have been casing an affluent middle-class district, with its busybodies and its neighbourhood watches quick to call the police about the white van parked in their street.

Then a sports stadium – a jubilant sight for a Scotsman – bears imposingly in front of them. Tianna tells him it’s the Orange Bowl. Heading towards it, they come upon another short and shabby strip mall. But at this one sits a taxi, and its sign indicates that it’s ready for hire.

In the stifling cab, paranoia has taken a couple of layers of skin from him. Lennox is now determined to keep the girl away from Dearing, Johnnie and Starry; she’s in danger from these people and Robyn can’t protect her. But maybe this Chet guy could. The problem is that she’s gone into a strop. So he shows the cab driver the address. The man speaks poor English and doesn’t know where it is. He explains that he is from Nicaragua. — No from here, he keeps saying.

I’m stuck with retarded people who don’t know this country, Tianna is thinking, but Bobby Scotsman’s trying to help her, to get her to Chet’s, so she relents. — It’s pretty far away.

Lennox first sinks at her words, then feels a spike of elation. It’s the first time she’s volunteered anything. — How far? Out of the state?

— No, it’s in Florida. By the sea, but kinda right across the big freeway.

Lennox considers the airport: the car-hire concessions. It isn’t too far. They head out there, as he tries to gather his thoughts. His head spins. He has no antidepressants. He is scared. Think like a cop, he tells himself, trying to put his scrambled brain back into order. His eyes are full of the phantom grit of sleeplessness and his head throbs.

Lance Dearing. Think like a cop. How did he think? What was his game?

It makes sense that Dearing’s a cop. The armlock is a standard polis move the world over. The voice: full of easy authority.

Lennox knows that he ought to have suspected straight away. Even if it was the first time he’d been the recipient of the lock, the fact he didn’t twig tells him just how ill-equipped he is for this.

Tianna’s lips quiver. — Are we runnin away from the po-leece, or jus Lance?

A good question. — Just Lance, he ventures. — Your mum wanted me to take you to Chet’s, not leave you with anybody else. So I don’t care if he’s a cop; that’s what I’m going to do.

That seems to placate her, so Lennox converses in broken English with the driver who confirms what he’s suspected about the lot of the Miami cabbie. — No way I work nights. I have family. My boss he too goddamn mean to get bulletproof glass fitted!

Lennox hears a roar and looks up, sees a plane coming in to land. Wonders how many men Lance Dearing, with or without his badge, has shot.

10 The Best Shake in Florida

ALL THOSE TIMES she’d sat practising denunciations, honing them to intensify their devastating impact. The number of times you’ve let me down, Ray. Change? You’ll never change. You can’t. You’ve said it yourself: you are what you are. I’ve been taken for a mug again. And now, in the bed of this stranger, all that rehearsal has been laid to waste.

The sleeping man next to her. Breathing lightly, not quite a snore; harmonised with the almost silent air con. He’d gotten up in the night to dispose of the condom. Like he had the first two. As if it would be unseemly for her to set eyes on it. But she had noticed the blood on the last one, when he’d discreetly pulled it off his exhausted dick. Trudi had taken that as her cue to get up, use the bidet and insert the spare tampon she kept in her bag. A corrosive-looking patch of her blood on his sheets; she’d felt its wetness as she’d climbed back in, perceiving herself as soiled. What have I done? Because it dawns on Trudi Lowe, in a violent, uncompromising shock of clarity, that Ray Lennox, her fiancé, is ill.

Mentally ill. In a way that transcends the habitual stupidity, selfishness and weakness of men. Submitting to a rising panic, she slips from this stranger’s bed, struggles silently into her abandoned clothes, and sneaks from the apartment. Emerges into a sumptuously furnished and planted common area of the housing development. An understanding concierge, a small, nimble man, who looks and moves like an ex-flyweight boxer, calls her a cab to take her back to the hotel. They chat for a while, and when the taxi arrives he links arms and escorts her – like a father with his daughter on her wedding day, she fancies – up a staircase to a split-level exit that emerges into a palm-tree-lined street on the other side from the bay. Strangely, it doesn’t feel weird or intrusive, the man moving with a controlled grace and no sense of sleaze. The cab is waiting and she climbs in with gratitude.

Her guilt fades as she thinks of Lennox. Anxious but determined, she will trade him night for night, event for event. Oh, you met some people and went to a party? Funny, so did I. How was yours? Good. Mine? Oh, not so bad.

She needs to be there, to suck down some more pain if that’s what it takes. The wild infidelity she’d enjoyed much of the night excites and repels her. Reaching the hotel room she feels a relief mingled with a horrible sadness and anger that he’s still not in, what the fuck, but she gratefully heads straight for the shower, to wash her real-estate man away. There is no message indicator light on the phone. No note. The bastard hasn’t even called. Hasn’t been back. Good, she thinks as she lies back on the bed and feels a pulse between her legs. A big man, hard and strong. Fuck you, Lennox.

You haven’t got a fucking clue what guys are like.

But what if – if Ray Lennox is in a hospital, or dead in an alley?

Trudi sits up. The room still Rayless. My Ray of sunshine. Even in hushed and sullen depression, his presence makes everything haphazard and chaotic, like an electrical storm without the sound of thunder. His tendency to overcomplicate life makes her sad; that arbitrary switching from sullen alienation to passionate engagement. What is the point?

A lurid sun whites out a section of the pallid blue sky. One eye closed for the glow that hits his profile, his unaligned nose points the other across the street to a row of brightly painted homes with their broken, uneven yards. A fuzzy-haired man, wearing a filthy yellow shirt, pushes a shopping cart at a slow, uniform pace, his head bowed into its contents, only occasionally looking up as traffic zips, roars and grinds along to the intersection. A series of concrete planters filled with eucalyptus trees have been positioned in front of a cinder-block office building, to prevent people parking there. Tianna sits on one of them, legs crossed, reading the magazine on her lap. Lennox tracks the bum with the cart, following the man’s line of vision to a sign:

BARCLAY AND WEISMAN

WE WILL GET YOU COMPENSATION

FOR YOUR INJURIES

Close by the office entrance, a discarded old tyre with a dead pigeon inside its black circle makes Lennox feel somehow cheered, as if it shows local wildlife’s determination to resist the incursion of the ubiquitous temperate bird. He stretches and yawns, pulls his shirt from his skin. Feels his upper body draw breath.

Inside the office: T.W. Pye feels the padded chair creak under his corpulent frame as he collapses into it. He sucks on the super-sized Coke and chomps into the Big Mac as grease runs through his sweaty fingers, down three wobbling liver-spotted chins that sprout like truffles from under his mouth to the top of his chest. Now forty years old, Pye has been chronically overweight since his teens, due largely to an addiction to franchised fast food and cola. He has recently come to see that this has robbed him of health, vigour and sexuality. He’s never enjoyed congress with a woman he hasn’t paid for.

Now his sassy defiance is crumbling in the face of this compulsion, the resulting breathlessness, chest and arm pains, and the soul-crushing depression and anxiety attacks that plague him in the night. Most of all, it is undermined by the relentless flood of information. Coming at him from all angles, telling him in unequivocal voices: the stuff he was reared on is killing him. He can’t switch on a TV without some smug liberal nutritionist notifying him that he’s the draughtsman of his own ruination.

The world, or the part of it that comes into contact with him, will pay for this. The Qwik Car Rental franchise’s reputation as a less stringent operator than the bigger players ensures that Pye’s customers are often desperate people in a hurry. He gets at least one police inquiry per week. But T.W. Pye loves to ask questions; enjoys his sense of power over his more hapless patrons. The phone on his desk rings out shrilly just as Ray Lennox walks into his empty office. An incongruous nightclub-red velvet rope herds the non-existent customers into a utilitarian line. Pye sets down his burger, picks up the phone, cursorily regarding Lennox in petulant disapproval. — Hey! Gus! How’s it hanging? Who in God’s name is this skinny-assed faggot…? — Yeah… sure do, Gus…

Lennox regards the obese man, shifting his stare to the image of a busty girl, obviously silicone-enhanced, who bursts out of the yellow two-piece swimsuit from the calendar on the wall behind him.

— Strange, Gustave, mighty strange. Sure thing, buddy. Bring em by tonight. I’ll be home.

Impatience blazes in Lennox as he meets Pye’s gaze. In the instant that follows a reciprocal abhorrence is conceived.

— Till tonight. See ya, Gus. Pye lets the receiver slide from his hand on to its cradle. Thickset eyes regard Lennox in cheery malice. — Now, he says, breaking into an obsequious grin.

— Need a car. Going to Bologna.

— Nice, smiles Pye, as Lennox hands over his licence. He regards it for a few seconds, holding it up to the light like it was a high-denomination banknote. — Ain’t plannin on crossin the state line, are you?

— No. Bologna, Florida. Just need it for two days.

T.W. Pye dips his head, feels his smile slowly extending out towards the limits of its treachery. — Only we can’t give you no car if you’re planning on crossin the state line, not with you bein a foreigner n’all. New rules: war gainst terror. The big boys, Hertz, Avis, they’ll be able to help you out there.

— No state line. Bologna, Florida, Lennox repeats, uneasy in the role of supplicant. — Two days max.

— Well, I got me this Volkswagen Polo. Pye’s smile holds up, even as a trickle of sweat rolls from temple across cheek, like the slow slash of the psychopath’s razor. — European. Economical. Ought to appeal. Where you from?

— How much? Lennox pulls out his platinum Visa.

Pye sits back, scowls, coughing out rates, terms and conditions. Lennox motions in stony accord, as the door swings open. Tianna breezes in, her jacket hooked round her finger and draped casually behind her. She beats the magazine on her leg in imitation of him. Pye takes in the indigo shorts and mustard tank top with its sparkling slogan. Sees the rangy, bony limbs coming out from them. He responds with a predator’s leer; eyes narrowing, face tightening and draining of blood. Lennox catches that stink of torpid lust, causing his teeth to grind together again.

Pye senses this reaction and turns to him, feigning polite nonchalance as Tianna rocks against the desk. — Your daughter? he enquires.

Lennox glares at him in mute menace. His hands grip the edge of the counter. The bad one beset with an urgent, broken pain, which he fights down.

— He’s my Uncle Ray, Tianna intervenes sweetly, turning to Lennox in a disturbing air of conspiracy, — Uncle Ray from Skatlin.

— Thought you had an accent, Pye unctuously declares, smiling at Lennox, then Tianna.

— Everybody’s got an accent, Lennox says evenly, easing off the grip, enjoying the incremental receding of the pain. — You got the keys?

— C’mere. The obese clerk rises and wheezes round the other side of the counter. Lennox and Tianna follow him across the harsh brown carpet tiles, some bone-breakingly loose, that cover the concrete floor. The frosted-glass door, set in a fake-walnut partition, is grimy and caked with scum at the handle. Lennox is loath to touch it; he senses that doing so would be like removing Pye’s dick from his trousers and pointing it at porcelain half a dozen times a day.

They go down a corridor, through two sets of wedged-open fire doors, out to the lot. On their way, Lennox sees it on the wall, listing returned cars: another whiteboard institutionalising idiocy, pornographically displaying the predictable meanderings of thought. He wants to rip it down.

From a distance, the board snaking round the walls of the Serious Crimes Unit office resembled a nursery-school representation of the Mardi Gras. It had become festooned with data to the point that it almost assumed sovereign sentience. The fluorescent highlighter pens and markers, the photos and Post-it notes, produced a garish effect inconsonant with the grim tale: the death of Britney Hamil. There was a manifold, slightly offensive quality in the way Drummond and Notman kept it so meticulously attractive.

Then the whiteboard at Robyn’s; wiped clean. Despite all the coke, they’d been together enough to remove everything, every contact name and number. Only Dearing, only a cop, could have been so meticulous and premeditated. Only a cop, or a villain.

And now here he is, driving away from a weirdo at the car hire, with a young girl, a kid he doesn’t even know. But I’m fleeing from the nonces and they’re in pursuit. That stoat at the car hire, could he know Dearing? Perhaps it’s a network. Nonces everywhere: a freemasonry of paedophiles. Nonce-craft.

It’s ridiculous. His judgement is shot to pieces. He is in over his head.

But kids need protection. Sex offenders: they have to be stopped. It’s why he’s a cop, the unambiguous, unerring certainty of that particular crusade. Nonces made being a cop real: a workable and justifiable life. This time it isn’t about enforcing ruinous, antiquated laws, or protecting the property of the rich. It really does become the straightforward battle between good and evil, as opposed to that mundane norm of trying to stem the consequences of poverty, boredom, stupidity and greed.

Now they are in the hired Volkswagen, Lennox cagily driving along a wide boulevard in steady traffic. The girl silent next to him, smouldering, chewing on her bottom lip. Stuck in a side lane, they are siphoned on to a freeway. Realising he doesn’t know where he’s going, Lennox comes off at the next exit. — So how far is this Bologna place?

Tianna’s head is in the copy of Perfect Bride, the bride’s dress rendered grubby by his prints. — It’s a long drive.

— How many hours?

— I dunno, maybe two or three. Maybe longer.

Fuck. He had to find a garage. A gas station. Buy a map.

Eminem’s ‘Like Toy Soldiers’ plays on the radio. The chorus sets a shuddering wave of emotion coursing through Lennox. His hands whiten on the wheel. The right one stings again. That cunt is a fucking genius, he thinks, almost choking with emotion. Tears well in his eyes. We all fall down.

Britney’s body, cold and lifeless. Bruises all over it; especially the throat. Bulging eyes, frozen in her last moment of pain and terror. To wrench the soul from a child in that gruesome manner was the most foul, evil transgression he could think of. Mr Confectioner. So cold.

He thinks about Britney in the morgue, looks at Tianna in the car seat. Wonders what Johnnie – and, for all he knows, Lance and Starry – had planned for her. Not the same as Mr Confectioner with Britney, surely. But he’s a foreigner in a hired car with a child who was all but a stranger to him. Shedding light on his actions to a cop if he’s pulled over will be as hard as explaining them to Trudi.

Tianna evaluates the man driving her. Both of them outlaws, on the run from Dearing. Chet would never let Lance put her away though, that was for sure. Neither would Scots Bobby, she thinks. She wonders what would happen if he tried to touch her. Recalls Vince, his doughy-faced kindness, the slowness of his caresses, those reassuring words as she stifled the urge to cry, endlessly welling and dying in his soft, ladylike hands. That’s the sort of monster this one would be, transformed by a black venom seeping through his veins to make his eyes glassy and deafen his ears; not like Clemson, always an inimical force, with that crinkled smile suggesting a swarm of torment, and whose stare could bring a pack of wild dogs to heel. She closes her eyes to see Scots Bobby clearer. Heard around the world. She flicks them open and asks, — So we really gonna go to Chet’s?

— At Bologna? Yeah, I suppose we are.

— Awesome, she says, surprised at her unexpected sparky enthusiasm.

— I’m gaunny find a petrol station, a gas station, get a map of the area.

Tianna chews her bottom lip thoughtfully. — A petrol station, she parrots, finding this amusing.

— Do you know his house number? Your mum gave me this address, but there was no number, he places Trudi’s notebook, with his scribblings, on her lap.

She studies it and shakes her head. — He kinda stays on a boat. It’s pretty awesome.

Lennox looks at the address again. A low clunk of belated recognition in his upper body; there was no house number because it was a boat. It’s there in his own accusing scrawl: marina. For some reason, he’d imagined that term would signify nothing here: just real-estate jargon for a housing development that was at least a few miles from water. Despondency settles on his shoulders; he’s a bad cop, still ignoring the obvious, prone to daft flights of fancy. The ‘getting results’ myth was exactly that, and his distant promotions had been gained through playing organisational politics, choosing the right master to serve at the right time. The sides of his face start to colour. — I also need to find an Internet café, soas I can get the Jambos result for the Scottish Cup, he explains, meeting her blank look. — Hearts. It’s a football team: what you call soccer. Do you like soccer?

— I guess. I used to play.

— Why did you stop?

— I dunno. It’s kinda lame. I don’t get it, all that offside stuff.

— It never fails to amaze me how lassies never get the offside rule. It’s so straightforward; the principal attacking player has to be at least level with the last defender when the ball is played through, otherwise you’re offside. However, if the most forward attacker is deemed by the official not to be interfering with play, as in the case of, say—

— Whoah! My brain’s kinda crumbling!

Lennox laughs and considers American sports. Baseball is the big one. He’s never been to a game. He recalls a drunken conversation in Vegas with an earnest American frat boy and an old Irishman, a GAA stalwart. The Yank kid had proclaimed that the hardest thing in sport was to hit a fast-moving ball with that bat. The old GAA boy had gurgled like a choked drain in dismissal, telling them that in Irish hurling, they had to catch the ball with a stick, control it and run at speed with it while a bunch of nutters tried to chop them down. Lennox thought of the version of the game they played in Scotland, with bigger sticks. Kingussie and Newtonmore battling it out for the Shinty World Series. — What about baseball? The Merlins. Called so because they’re magical, no doubt.

— It’s the Marlins.

— Like Marilyn Monroe?

— M-A-R-L-I-N-S, she spells out, screwing up her face, but she’s smiling a little. — They’re fish, you know, like… swordfish, I guess.

Lennox nods, suddenly aware of his need to concentrate on the strange roads, the traffic and caffeine jangling his nerves. He’s far from comfy changing lanes; trucks clank along, convertibles dart past with an arrogant flourish and SUVs rumble by with slow menace, the unstable nightclub bouncers of the automobile world.

Tianna is thinking of when she played T-ball in the park. Those polyester tops and pants they wore always smelling so good. How she was going to make the softball team. Momma sat in the bleachers, hair pulled through the back of the baseball cap, shirt and jeans tighter than the other moms, busy eyes flirting under the visor. Then one day another face appeared beside her; Vince, with his big easy smile. Then they were in Jacksonville, then Surfside, then down here, heading south all the time, like they’d be driven into the ocean. Pushed into soccer with the enthusiastic Latina girls, the game taking place around her. Momma watching on, hair shorter, face puffier, as she tried to control the ball while looking out for the next other by her lone parent’s side.

On the radio Lennox listens to a recording of Elvis saying how much he loved army life. He recalls hearing this entire speech at a Graceland exhibit; in its respectful antipathy it sounded nothing like this crudely edited propaganda broadcast to motivate today’s impoverished young Americans into joining up for military service. But for the current crop of GIs, there would be no private apartment in Germany or a fourteen-year-old Priscilla. Like the army, her parents cast a blind eye at the King’s noncing of their daughter. He was a gentleman, they said.

Lennox pulls into a gas station. The stench of petrol fumes blends with the deep-fried chemicals from the adjacent McDonald’s. In this heat they are probably more intoxicating than the weak beer a blue neon sign makes him dream of sucking on. The attached shop is a scruffy enduring variety store that sells fridge magnets of several states, various newspapers, convenience food like chips, which mean crisps to him and scary-looking stuff called ‘beef jerky’. Packaged like a bastard child of meat and cheap confectionery, it could never be health food. Pigeon-sized chickens roast on a spit inside a glass case. A bank of cigarettes in vending drawers stack up on the wall behind the counter and smutty mags on high shelving are indicated by uniform, blacked-out covers.

Tianna looks at the magnets of the different states. Her momma collected them in a half-assed way; two of Illinois graced their fridge. It was crazy to collect stuff like that, shit always got lost, you never got no full set.

Lennox buys a map book, covering the Miami–Dade County area, and a fold-out showing the main roads and towns across the state of Florida. — Any Internet cafés around here? he asks the clerk.

— No, I know of nothing like that. Where are you from?

— Scotland.

— Sean Connery!

— Aye. I just wanted to get a football result.

The clerk looks around to ensure the place is empty, then beckons Lennox through into a small room marked STAFF ONLY. He fires up a computer and goes online. — I am from Mexico. Scotland will not be in the World Cup, no? He shakes his head in sad acknowledgement and logs on to the official Hearts website. It was two–one against Kilmarnock. That’ll do nicely, safely into the draw for the next round. He quickly glances over at Kickback, the fans forum. Maroon Mayhem has posted again.

That cunt is criticising, nay, abusing Craig Gordon for one fucking mistake. He won’t let it go.

Lennox posts as Ray of Light.

What is it with some radges? The best goalie Scotland’s produced in decades and he’s somehow not good enough for Hearts, he’s only here to be slagged off by bams like Maroon Mayhem?

He thanks the garage attendant, wishing Mexico all the best in the World Cup, before remembering that they play in Hibernian green. Outside, squinting in the sun, Lennox studies the Miami–Dade County street plan, finding nothing to approximate this Chet guy’s living or mooring location of Bologna. Then he searches the Florida map. Bologna is on the state’s other coast, on the Gulf of Mexico. The table at the back of the book tells him the kid was right. The drive is likely to take at least three hours. — You go back to the car. I’ve a phone call to make.

— You callin Momma?

— You know her cell number?

Tianna shakes her head.

— Why not?

— Just don’t, she frowns. — Look, she ain’t got no credit on it, and she changes it too much for me to be rememberin it.

— Okay, we can call her when we get to Chet’s. He’ll probably know it and she might have things sorted out by then.

— Maybe, the kid says wearily. — I gotta use the restroom.

As Tianna departs to the toilets that adjoin the shop, Lennox heads across the gas station concourse to the mounted phone. A deep breath prepares him to call the room at the Colonial Hotel.

— Hello! comes the sharp cry.

— Trudi, it’s me.

— Ray! Where the hell have you been? I’ve been worried sick! I was going to call the local police, go round the hospitals; I was even going to phone your mother and Bob Toal, she wails. Guilt hits her like a train and she’s glad that he can’t see her face. — Are you okay?

— Aye, I’m fine. Lennox has to mentally punch back another wave of fatigue. — Don’t get in touch with the police.

— Have you taken anything? she interrogates in sharp, urgent panic. — Any cocaine?

He hesitates. Decides to come as clean as he feels he can. — I had a couple of small lines at this party. He pauses, wanting to spit out all the deceit. The pop psychology, the self-analytical tones that chime with her. He’s glad she can’t see his face. — But I was okay. I suppose that I just wanted to know I could walk away. It was a one-off, his tones are grave, — and I know it sounds strange, but I felt I just had to be sure it wisnae for me any more. Be sure I could walk away.

— And that was you walking away, Ray? Staying out all night? Where were you, Ray?

— I know… I’m sorry… I just needed time to think… It was a mistake.

— Time to think? You’ve had time to think, Ray. It’s time to think that’s caused all these fucking problems! Then she desists for a moment. — What’s going on, Ray? Are you in trouble? Where were you, Ray? Where are you? Are you in trouble? Are you?

— No, not me. Somebody else. I got a bit drunk last night. Met some people… this couple, and I went to a party at their apartment. These guys came by, one of them tried to mess with this kid. Her mother’s in some kind of trouble. Her boyfriend left, they fell out, and she wants me to take the kid to her uncle’s place. It’s about a two- to three-hour drive, and we’re on our way now. I hired a car.

— What?!

— I hired a car. I couldn’t leave the kid. She was all alone.

— But where’s the mother? And why are you involved? Listen, they have their own police across here, Ray. It’s nothing to do with you!

— I can’t leave the kid, Lennox protests. — I’m only dropping her off at her uncle’s.

The line was a trail of gunpowder, the receiver at his ear the explosive and her rising voice the approaching flame. — Who do you think you are? This has nothing to do with you. I’m something to do with you. I’m your fiancée! This is our holiday!

— There’s some dodgy shit going on here. I need tae make sure that this kid’s safe. He gazes in sudden urgency across the forecourt. Tianna is talking to a couple of young guys. She looks like a wee lassie. She looks like a truck-stop hooker.

— You need! You need! You’re havering shite! What the fuck! Don’t you hear yourself, Ray? Don’t you ever just stop for a few seconds and actually listen; listen to the crap that comes out of your mouth? Is this to be the pattern of our married life? Trudi moans miserably. — You can’t stop playing the policeman. What kind of an idiot are you?

Those fucking weasels. One kid at the age of realising he’s not somebody’s property, a mutinous twist to his features. With him, an older boy, charged with the hormones of youth, looking for a hole to fill with his nagging self. — I have to go. Everything’s okay, he snaps. The two young guys. Talking to Tianna. They can’t see him watching them.

— Okay!? With you playing Miami Vice? Who the fuck do you think you are? Trudi hisses in loathing. — You stay out all night, getting up to fuck knows what—

— People are in trouble. That might not mean anything to you, but I don’t work for the fuckin lecky board, he roars, keeping his eyes on the girl. Was she going to get in the car with those guys? Surely not!

— That’s right! Demean me and what I do! You self-important, pompous prick! All I wanted was to kick back and plan our wedding. I apologise for that, Ray. Sarcasm whips down the phone line. — I’m genuinely sorry. Sorry that I wanted a holiday with my fiancé. Sorry to be upset that he stayed out partying all night with some woman I don’t know and now has her child in tow. Sorry to be such a big fucking weirdo!

Tianna flirting, provocatively leaning back on the car bonnet like a model, as she flicks her hair. The older boy, stiff-faced: feet slow-dancing on the spot. The younger one: staring at her in open-mouthed awe. — Look Trudi, I—

In the hotel room, Trudi slams the phone down. Then she panics and wants to call him right back. Dials the desk to ask for the ring-back number.

Lennox smashes the receiver on to its hook and walks quickly across the forecourt. The youths take note, alarmed at the speed at which he advances towards them. — Guess what, Tianna? A dry rasp distorts his voice into a growl. — It was two–one for Hearts. At Tynecastle. Didnae get the scorers. But ah telt you that. Did I tell youse? Dinnae think so, he says, now right in the boys’ faces. — Ah didnae tell yis cause ah dinnae ken who the fuck youse are. Gaunny tell me?

— We was just talking, sir, the younger boy says, now just a nice kid. The senior one is harder; flinty eyes look sullenly at Lennox, gaining a sly confidence as an older couple approach. The man, he assumes it’s the boys’ father, is a brawny guy in a short-sleeved shirt and green khaki shorts. A growth on his face hints at a rough night. The mother is clad in a tight dress that shows a pregnant stomach. Her arms are big and flabby. — What’s goin on here? the man asks.

— Ask your boys, Lennox says. He sees dirt under the man’s fingernails. Feels something ring inside his brain.

— We was just talking, the nice kid repeats.

— Is that right?

— Don’t know what you’re getting all high and mighty about, mister. The man looks at Tianna. — You let your daughter dress like that? What age is she? Know what I think? I think you’d better haul your ass outta here before I call a cop. They put sons of bitches like you behind bars, ya know that?

— What—

Tianna blushes in embarrassment. — They were, I mean, we was all jus talking, like he said, and she nods to the young boy.

Lennox looks at the man, then at Tianna. He notices for the first time that she’s wearing make-up: eye stuff and lipstick. She doesn’t look like a ten-year-old. She must have put it on in the restroom. Outrage punctured, he takes a mental step back. — No harm in talking, eh? C’mon, honey, he looks to Tianna, — we can’t keep Uncle Chet waiting.

The couple regard him suspiciously as they walk back to the car. Lennox trembles inside every step of the way. They’ll probably call the police and I’ll get done. I can’t be so stupid. Not with Dearing connected. He thinks about the Edinburgh man, Kenny Richey, kept now for twenty years on death row in an Ohio prison, for a crime even the state acknowledge he couldn’t possibly have committed. The legal system is as medieval here as anywhere, if you didn’t have money and connections and you fell foul of the power brokers. It had a colour, and that colour was green. There was Rodney King justice and O. J. Simpson justice.

Oblivious to the sad, lonely ringing of the payphone, they get back into the car and Lennox hits the gas pedal, watching the outraged family recede in the rear-view mirror. They drive through residential blocks, broken up by parking lots and strip malls with low-yielding enterprises like cheap insurance brokerage, electrical repairs and pet supplies stores.

Taking a wrong turn north on 27th Avenue, they pass through a district full of black youths glowering in brooding menace from street corners, or the porches of fading homes. By instinct he understands their terrible anger; under economic and social quarantine in the ghetto, beset by this need to kick holes in a world so confining and unyielding.

— Try not to stop at no lights, Tianna urges, — I think this is Liberty City.

Complying as far as is possible, Lennox drives west, then south, then west again, as he asks Tianna, — Do you always dress like that?

Sour defiance tints her expression. — I suppose.

— Do the other girls at your school dress like that?

— Sure they do.

Lennox feels himself make a doubtful moue as the network of slip roads begins to fall away, the city thinning out. Tianna pulls something from her bag. They are cards: baseball cards. As she looks through them, he turns the radio back on.

A tinny, wiffling disco groove hisses out from the car speakers. He deft-tunes it, till the sound comes in stronger. The music infiltrates him, sparking his nerve-jangled body like the useless excitement of the cocaine rush. The beat sticking him between his ribs like a blade. Lennox feels like he is doing something illegal, and wonders whether or not he is. He struggles to control a sudden spasm on one side of his face. Craves the blunting edge of his pills. Wants to fast-forward to when the hangover will be gone and he’ll open up like a flower to suck in the world’s goodness.

Tianna knows she’s annoyed him, talking to those kids. The older one, she knew what he wanted. But no way he could’ve made me, or tricked me or nothin. He was just a kid. And the Scotsman, this Bobby Ray, it was like he was jealous of him. Maybe if a girl could be a woman, then a man could be a boy. She winds down the window, tossing back her hair in the breeze, resting the crook of her arm on its edge, wishing she had a cool pair of shades.

After a bit they pull into the parking lot of a large mall. — Why are we stopping here? Tianna asks.

— We get some new clothes for you.

— Awesome!

— I get to pick them, Lennox says, opening the door car, — or at least veto. You’re travelling with me, he says firmly, in response to her disgruntled pout.

Tianna gets out and slams the door shut. She looks at him from across the vehicle, squinting in the sun. The model pose again. — What do I get?

Her pitch is teasing in a way that makes him feel queasy as she moves towards him. — You get a milkshake. He points over at one of the franchises, an ice-cream parlour. — It says they do the best shake in Florida.

Tianna gyrates, sticking out and shaking her backside, proclaiming, — I do the best shake in Florida!

Lennox wants to laugh because the kid is funny. But she isn’t a pole dancer and it’s wrong for her to behave that way. He converts the nervous impulse to giggle into a frown.

She catches his evident distress. — Jeez, lighten up.

He goes to speak but can think of nothing to say. He is just a Scottish cop with a mental health problem and an uptight, controlling fiancée who needs his weakness so that she can play Mother Teresa once in a while. It doesn’t equip him for this. — I’d just like it if you covered yourself up a bit, that’s all.

— Why?

— Well, when people see lots of skin exposed, they react to that. You’re a bright girl, but people don’t see that. They just see skin. They don’t take you seriously, they don’t see you as a person… He hears the most extreme feminisms meet with the Taliban in his tone.

Tianna feels something punch her hard inside her chest. Skin. That was it with Vince and Clemson, all of them. Skin. She contemplates this simple mystery, eyes adroit and pained. — But you see me as a person?

The kid got it. The kid fucking knew. For the first time Lennox senses that deep down inside, she has the stuff. Maybe he’s just seeing what he wants to see. — Aye, of course I do, he smiles, patting her lightly on the back, and quickly withdrawing his hand as if it’s touched hot coals. How many grooming nonces start that way, with normal human contact, before shifting gear?

The mall is bland and sterile from the outside but, as its automatic doors swish open, its air-conditioned superiority to almost any equivalent in the UK is evident. The grime of Salford Shopping Centre, near where Stacey Earnshaw went missing, was a million miles from this brightly coloured mall of pastel oranges, lemons and salmon pinks. There was a record store, across from a rack of phones. Lennox gives Tianna two twenty-dollar bills. — I’ve got a call to make. You go over to that record store and get us some sounds for the drive.

— Awesome, Tianna says again, takes the bills and skips across the mall.

Lennox gets a hold of a phone book from the attendant at the information desk. There are numerous entries for the local offices of the police department under the City of Miami. He is going to see if he can get a reaction from Dearing, the cop who seems to be calling all the shots. He looks first at Allapattah 1888 NW 21st. No. He is so tired now, feeling the jet lag, the coke withdrawal. He wants his antidepressants as waves of panic hit him in irregular pulses. They have to be faced down, but sting his psyche like a bad curry would his gullet. He worries about driving in this condition with the kid. The receptionist tells him that no Lance Dearing works here. So he tries West Little Havana just because Flagler Steet, where the office is listed, sounds familiar. A female, Hispanic voice comes on the phone. — You try North Leel Havana. You find Lance there, she cheerfully informs him. He sees the entry and the address for North Little Havana. Starry’s right about Robyn and her Riverside pretensions. He calls the number and asks for Lance.

— Officer Lance Dearing, North Lil’ Havana Station. How can I help you?

Dearing’s voice creeps him out. But Lennox draws power from his revulsion, and braces himself. It’s time to turn up the heat. — You can pray for somebody to help you, Dearing. That’s all you can fuckin well do at this stage.

— Who the hell is…?

Lennox hears the realisation seep down the phone line. He’s comforted by the fact that Dearing is just a police officer, not a sergeant. An expendable uniformed spastic. But he might be getting his arse covered by some dirty nonce further up the line. Lennox recalls the swaggering typeface of Maroon Mayhem, and his threatening remarks to other posters on Kickback. Although he was obviously a retard who lived with his mother, Lennox finds himself aping his style. — I know you now, prick-face. I know who you are, where you live and where you work. Most importantly, I know exactly what you’re up to and who you’re up to it with. I’m going to take you right down, sunshine.

If Lance Dearing is fazed, his concealment skills are consummate. — Our Skarrish friend. Listen to me, Ray: you are in serious trouble. Let me tell you this: if you do not return that girl to the custody of her mother, a long-standing personal friend of mine, I’m going to issue an APB on you, charging you with the kidnap of a Florida minor. You do not want that, Raymond: trust me on this.

Nice, Lennox thinks. Professional tones. Letting me know the gravity of the situation, but at the same time the use of the Christian name to indicate friendship and acceptance. Attempting to isolate you while simultaneously presenting himself as your only ally. — I take it that means you’ll issue my description to all squad cars, he says. Dearing might not be bluffing.

— That is exactly what I’ll do. I’ve only refrained from taking this action so far as it would jus get Robyn and Tianna into more trouble with social services. Also, and I may be a damn fool, I believe that you got their best interests at heart. But let me tell you one thing, Ray: you are misguided and you will bring big trouble on yourself, and Robyn and that child, should you continue to keep her from her home.

— Home? A place full of fucking paedophiles, he hears himself say, — that’s no home for a kid!

It strikes Lennox that every atom of his body is pulsing with the same sense: that he’s stumbled on to something bigger than a drunken pervert and some coked-up, low-life mother who’d left her kid again. He just doesn’t know what, nor can he elucidate Dearing’s role.

— I think you got it all wrong, Ray. You are way, way out of line.

He has to think, to find out from the kid. And this Chet guy. — I’ll call you back in a while. It can either be here or on your cell. You decide.

— Where are you, Ray? Lance Dearing calmly asks.

Lennox has had enough of telephone interrogations. — Give me your cellphone number. Now. Or I hang up.

After a pause, Lance Dearing seems a little cagier when he speaks again. — Okay, Ray, but jus you take good care of that lil’ girl, y’all hear? Then he deliberately enunciates the number and Lennox scribbles it down in Trudi’s notepad, feeling the flush of his small victory.

— Do the right thing, Ray, Dearing says, — by that lil’ girl, and her momma.

He’s too quick to cede control. Is he bluffing, or holding all the aces? Lennox can’t trust himself to judge.

Then, in savage flashback, his brain sears with an image of Johnnie on top of Tianna, trying to rape her. Guess I jus like the taste of young pussy. Lance’s easy, unperturbed carriage: We all been round the block enough times to know to take our pleasures where we can get em. No questions asked.

— You haul that child across the state line and you are in big trouble –… Lance begins.

— Shut yir fuckin hole, cunty baws, Lennox sneers. — And the trouble will be all yours, that I guarantee, and he slams the phone down. Sees Tianna eagerly making her way towards him. Tries to stop shaking.

— They ain’t got much of a choice. It’s a pretty crummy mall, but I got some good stuff, and she pulls a plastic bag from her sheep’s head backpack.

— Humph. Lennox looks through the CDs. It was going to be a long ride. He shifts his gaze to Tianna. — Let’s get you something to wear. Cover up some skin.

— I guess.

It’s Monday morning and many of the shops are shut, including the Macy’s, which, as a notice informs them, has closed for inventory purposes. — Sears is open, Lennox says, pointing at the big store.

Tianna’s features pinch. — Even Momma’s grandma wouldn’t go in there. It’s true; inside everybody is old. If my ma was American, this is where she’d shop, Lennox mulls. In trying to dress Tianna appropriately, he feels as if he’s been transformed from pimp into fussy old maiden aunt. But she’s just a kid, she cannae be allowed to dress like a tart.

Lennox buys some loose-fitting clothes for her, replaces his lost Red Sox baseball cap and picks up a new pair of shades. Then Tianna heads for the mall restroom, emerging in jeans and a T-shirt. It’s better, but he begs her to wash the make-up from her face and she reluctantly heads back in to comply.

— That’s great, Lennox says, encouraged by the result on her return. She looks like a ten-year-old.

— I look like a geek, she says, but it’s a token protest.

They go to the ice-cream parlour and order. Lennox gets the best shake in Florida, chocolate. Tianna has a strawberry-ice-cream float. He looks at her again, both delighting in the crackle as the bubbled remnants of the dessert rattle up her straw. She’s just a kid. Why is he with her?

I’m a cop.

I’m not a good cop. I’ve gone as far as I can go.

No. Not true.

He’d gone as far as he needed to go. Far enough to hunt the bad fuckers, and lead the investigation from the front. Another promotion and he’d be a Toal: deskbound. His grim lot was that he was drawn to the dark side of policework – anything else would be a waste of his time – but he let it get to him. To do that sort of job, sleep soundly and get up and repeat the process the next day, you had to be like Dougie Gillman. Gillman would never get promotion. He would go before any board of suits and cough back monosyllabic answers to their bullshit questions and quietly judge them. They would feel his contemptuous wrath and scorn. Wouldn’t be able to meet those loathsome gelid eyes. Because Gillman spoke a truth – a particularly dark and brutal truth, but one that still had the power to shame and damn the liars around him.

And like Robbo before he cracked, Gillman was a good cop. The fear he inspired made you happy he was on your team. Lennox would never be like that. In a square go he could kick-box Gillman into a pulp. But he’d never end his life. So Gillman would pick himself up and come for him and snuff him out like a candle. Unlike Lennox, he set no limits. As the superior cop in the hierarchy Lennox was as powerless as a liberal parent who didn’t believe in corporal punishment dealing with a calculating, psychotic offspring.

Strange then, to be thinking of Gillman, while gazing idly at the pretty Hispanic waitress, light and graceful as she hops like a small bird between tables, dispensing coffee.

— Do you think she’s good-looking? Tianna asks.

— I suppose so, he says, musing that the kid missed nothing. It strengthens his resolve never to have children, especially a daughter. Fuck that.

Tianna’s voice goes musical. — I want my hair cut so I get bangs.

Lennox decodes the glint in her eye as sly and the blood ices in his veins. Tianna quickly picks up on his reaction. She pulls strands of hair across her forehead. — Like here, she explains.

— Oh… a fringe. Lennox is relieved, as his heartbeat normalises.

She glances up at him with an unexpected coldness, laying something inside of him to waste. The fond, paternal vibe that was settling in evaporates as he sees himself through her eyes; from the knowing, contemptuous ferocity in her glance, he might as well be a jug-eared rookie cop telling a snooty, rich woman that she can’t park here.

Uncle Chet will be the man, he thinks, his head buzzing. Chet will sort it out. He signals for the bill. The ice-cream parlour is filling up with mothers and children, cops and sales clerks. Tianna tells him about Chet’s big boat on the Gulf coast. Then her conversation abruptly changes. — The men Momma brings home are bastards, she says in a low, quavering voice, like she half expects Lennox to punish her for the profanity.

— Chet’s not like that, though?

Her head twists vigorously.

— Is he your mum’s brother or your father’s brother?

— Just Chet, and she clams up into silence again. The waitress skips over with the bill, looking to the line that has formed at the door. Lennox takes the hint and settles up, they rise and make their way outside.

Another surrogate uncle. But did that have to be a bad thing? He himself was now attempting to fulfil that very same role, and knew practically nothing about young girls. He tries to remember what his sister Jackie was like at Tianna’s age. It was different evaluating someone when looking up at them from a kid’s perspective. Five years his senior, Jackie was the one they thought would do well. Her horse-riding lessons were a big deal in the family, making a powerful statement about them. And she had prospered. Became a lawyer; then married a top one, a man whom Lennox, burdened with an unshakeable belief that anyone who talked for a living was a bullshitter, had to fight every impulse not to openly detest.

He’d sensed Jackie’s contempt for the rest of them growing with every riding lesson she completed. Hated his mother’s perverse pride in his sister’s disdain of them, regarding it as a victory that they’d brought up a child who had learned to patronise and loathe them, simply for their working-class status.

Jackie had her Georgian New Town home and her country place up in Deeside, her successful husband and her polite, Merchant School kids. It was her life and as far as he was concerned, she was welcome to it. But he sensed that Trudi was covetous of this status, like she believed Lennox was essentially made of the same stuff, and with her scalpel-like love she could scrape off the bad bits and put this career policeman back on the right track.

The horse-riding lessons. Horsey, horsey.

While Jackie was on horseback, Lennox and his mate Les Brodie would cycle everywhere. Told to stay off the main roads, they’d take their bikes to Colinton Dell, along the path through the woods by the river, into the darkened mouth of that old stone tunnel.

Lennox suddenly blenches as something spins past his face. His heartbeat normalises: three kids are throwing a Frisbee around in the parking lot, as their mother loads up the car with groceries.

— Sorry, sir, says one fresh-faced, skinny wee boy. With his eager but sad puppy eyes, he’s the sort of kid, Lennox considers, who will always invoke a slight sense of pity, even outside of his melancholy thought stream. He picks up the disc and spins it at the boy, who catches it and throws it back to him with a light in his eye that indicates a bona fide game has started up. Lennox chucks it in Tianna’s direction, but she doesn’t move to intercept as it flies past her.

She wants to join in, but they’re just bone-headed kids. That’s what he told her: Don’t be a stupid kid, you’re a woman, a beautiful young woman. He’d explained to Tianna how numerical age meant nothing; it was all to do with maturity. Some ten-year-olds were ten. Some were like five. Some twenty-year-olds were like four-year-olds. Not Tianna, she was always a woman; strong, proud and sexy – it was nothing to be ashamed of. Vince, Pappy Vince, told her that she should never be ashamed of not being a silly little girl.

And her childhood glided past her like the Frisbee, destined for the hands of another.

11 Road Trip

AS THE MAP shakes in his trembling, swollen hand, Lennox is simultaneously squeezed by the sense that he’s fucking up big time. Trying to drive while reading a Miami street plan and a Florida road map is inviting trouble. To his weary eyes the urban cartography is just badly printed lines of different colour: grid-like black, some reds, a few blues and the odd green. The print is so small he can barely decipher it. What did it all mean? He’s discomforted to find himself driving west on Highway 41, away from his intended route, the 75 Interstate they called Alligator Alley. Worse, it seems to take him back through the district they were fleeing from, where Robyn and Tianna lived. She’s stiff in the passenger seat, back into that silent world to which he’s denied access.

All he can do is keep going west. The two to three hours to get to Bologna on the interstate will be longer on Highway 41, the Tamiami Trail. It comes upon them bearing its frustrating announcement of a fifty-five miles-per-hour speed limit, as a median barrier of aluminium, dispassionately bearing the scars of accidents past, splits the concrete lanes of the highway.

Lennox is surprised how quickly and resoundingly the outskirts of Miami become the swamps of the Everglades. Birds of prey he has never seen before, like giant crows cross-bred with hawks, hover above. Many are splattered beneath the wheels, scavenging for roadkill and ending up victims themselves, smearing the highway in varying degrees of pulverisation. Some forested areas are decimated by what Lennox assumes to be hurricane damage. Trees are bent, buckled and wilted as if warped under intense heat rather than wind, and areas of perimeter fence are ripped aside. In the swamp big white cranes hang unfeasibly in threadbare trees, making him think again of Les and the seagulls.

Tianna has redeemed her old set of baseball cards and is counting them.

— You like these cards, eh. Do ye collect them?

— Uh-uh. I jus keep these ones. They were my daddy’s. She regards him through the shield of her hair, waiting to see his reaction. — They ain’t worth nothin but he did have some valuable ones. Do y’all like baseball?

— Not really. To be honest, I’m not mad keen on American sports. I mean, baseball’s just rounders, a bairn’s game, he scoffs, before realising her age. — I mean tae say, there was never a Scotsman who played baseball!

— Oh yeah? Tianna challenges, handing him a card.

BOBBY THOMSON

(b: October 23, 1923, Glasgow, Scotland)

264 home runs in 14 seasons. Famous for the winning ‘shot heard around the world’, which won the National League pennant for the New York Giants against the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1951.

The ‘Staten Island Scot’ was the youngest in a family of six who immigrated to the USA in his childhood. He played for the Giants, Braves, Cubs, Red Sox and Orioles. Now retired, he lives in Savannah, Georgia.

Lennox steals glances as he holds it tight to the wheel. — That’s me telt!

Tianna laughs, taking the card back, and is suddenly distracted by a passing motor with two racing competition bicycles fastened on to its roof rack. — Awesome, she says, pointing at them. — Did you ride a bike as a kid?

— Aye. Lennox is cut to the quick as he recalls the prized blue-and-white Raleigh he got for his eleventh birthday. How his parents stressed he was to look after it, not give anyone in the scheme a shot of it.

— What was it like?

— Just a bike. His reply curt, as the memory stings home; his gullet acrid with last night’s liquor, his brain razing open old overgrown neural paths. He swallows hard and his sphincter muscle tightens. — What else do you like? he says, changing the subject. — I mean, do you like animals?

Tianna considers this question for a bit. Her grace in giving it the gravity it doesn’t merit paradoxically makes him feel even more of a simpleton for asking it. — I guess I like dolphins. We saw some when we were out on Chet’s boat. And I kind of like seals, alligators, fish and manatees; all the marine stuff.

— You must have seen a lot of that, living here.

— Mostly jus read about em.

— Aye, but you must have seen an alligator.

— Nope, not a real one, she says. — We drove through the Glades a whole buncha times but they always said that we ain’t got time to stop and look at no reptiles. Guess they was jus in a hurry to get to their parties. Momma and Starry and… She turns to the window, unable to finish the sentence.

He could see Robyn and Starry coked up, heading for some soirée, Tianna all drowsy in the back of the car. — Who? he asks. — Who would be driving you? Your mother?

— Momma and some other people.

Lennox watches her chewing her hair and looking towards the floor of the vehicle. — Like Lance and Johnnie?

— I don’t wanna talk about them, Ray. Her face crumples and her voice rises. — Can we please not talk about them?

— Okay, sweetheart, no worries, Lennox clumsily pats the distressed girl’s shoulder. He decides not to push it. It’s a long trip; let her tell him when she’s ready. It’s the first time, he realises, that she’s addressed him directly by his name. Fuck sakes. They won’t even let the kid stop, in the fuckin Everglades, to watch the alligators. Who are these people?

Lennox lets some avant-garde jazz soothe him, but it soon morphs into pan-piped rest-home gloop that saps his mojo and really galls Tianna, whose arm lashes to the dial, killing the sound. — This is grossing me out!

— What about the stuff you bought at the mall?

She digs into the sheep bag on her knee, eagerly producing a Kelly Clarkson CD which she slides into the player. Lennox is relieved as the car stereo keeps expelling it. The others get the same treatment. — This is so lame!

— That’s one to report to the car-hire place, he says, struggling to keep the smile off his face. He fails, and she catches him and play-hits his arm.

— You!

They switch over to 101.5 Lite FM, which announces itself as ‘South FLA’s number-one radio station’. Chicago’s ‘So Hard to Say I’m Sorry’ comes on and he thinks of Robbo.

There follow numerous talk adverts from sincere but excited voices proffering personal loans and credit facilities on just about everything, but mainly real estate and cars. Then a plethora of agencies earnestly offering packages of debt consolidation and reduction services. Probably the same people, Lennox considers, raising a bottle of Evian to his lips, another broadside in the battle against his broiling thirst.

An eerie voice interrupts proceedings hissing: ‘If you’re sitting in a dark room holding your shotgun, thinking bout killing your boss, turn on the light. Turn on Lite FM.’

At Tianna’s urging, he changes channels. The Beatles sing ‘Love Me Do’. Lennox is thinking of Trudi, as they pass a truck with a ‘Support Our Boys’ sticker, and begins singing along in an exaggerated Scouse accent. Tianna joins in, at first under her breath, then with increasing gusto. Long before the end they are cheesily serenading each other.

When the song stops, both are embarrassed by the new-found, gaudy intimacy that has crept up on them. They retreat self-consciously like a couple in a Hollywood musical who have just enjoyed a spectacular dance. Tianna pulls her hair from her face and shyly asks him, — Back at the gas station, I guess that was your girlfriend you was callin, right?

— Aye. Eh, yeah.

— Back in Skatlin?

— Naw, eh, she’s here in Miami. He nods to the magazine on her lap. — We’re getting married later this year.

Tianna falls silent and seems to think about this for a while. Then after a bit she asks, — What’s she like?

— She’s nice, Lennox says, instantly feeling the tameness of his response. He’s put her through so much, and here he is, speeding away from her with a kid he hardly knows.

Tianna stares at him in vigilance. — You ain’t, like, one of Momma’s boyfriends?

— No, he says emphatically, as a vision of Robyn’s caterpillar bush and her hand in his trousers, jerking him, almost makes him squirm, — we’re just friends.

That seems to cheer the kid up. — I kinda like you, Ray, she says with a toothy grin.

— I like you, Lennox smiles, looking ahead, suddenly aware that he does. Then his body stiffens as he feels the girl’s arms wrapping round his torso in a reckless hug. Registering his agitation, she immediately retreats, finding his hand simultaneously pushing her back into her seat. — Don’t do that, Lennox snaps, adding, — I’m driving!

He grips the wheel tightly with his right hand, feeling the small fractured bones dig into his tendons as Tianna sits back in her seat, eyes glowing. She gets the baseball cards back out from her bag.

Lennox realises that he fears this child; fears her physical proximity, the damage she could inflict upon him now that she senses her power. He’s frequently observed the calculating tyrant emerge from those who’ve undergone unfair victimisation; all he can do is try and keep her intelligence and humanity to the fore.

The radio plays ‘Angel of the Morning’ and Lennox snatches at the dial. It settles on a hip-hop urban rhythms channel, where the presenter squeals: ‘This is Beyoncé with the big titties.’

Tianna laughs as Lennox cringes and hits the dial again. As he drives he can feel her evaluating gaze on him. The silence continues, but as they approach a commercialised Indian village, Lennox pulls up. He needs to get out and stretch. Stiffness and languor have been nibbling at him. He puts on the new Red Sox hat, fiddling with the strap, unable to get it as comfortable as the last one. Sees a sign advertising swamp tours. They had been talking about alligators and he’s never seen one, nor has Tianna. It was crazy, a kid living in Florida. Another hour’s stop would do no harm. Tianna leans forward to put the magazine above the dashboard, and Lennox sees his hot breath bending the thin hairs on her wrist. He gets out the car, aware as he rises that his shirt is stuck to his back like a second skin. He gives a shrug and tries to free it, then accepts the futility of it all. He extends his gnarled limbs, letting the lavish sun spray him. — Let’s have a look at those alligators, he smiles, clocking her widening eyes, waiting for her to say ‘awesome’ again, and she doesn’t disappoint him.

They book a ride on a swamp cruiser: an outboard-motored launch with a wire-mesh cage around the seated passenger area that’s both foreboding and reassuring. Apart from the skinny, wild-eyed guide, whom they sit opposite, so close Lennox can feel their knees touch, there are two elderly women and two young couples, one with a toddler. The engine splutters into action and the boat pulls away as the guide, who has introduced himself as Four Rivers, warns: — Keep them fingers inside the cage if you want em back!

As they splutter on to the mangrove swamps, Tianna is impressed by the ubiquity of alligators of all sizes. Some cruise by like drifting logs with only their eyes above the waterline, others lie partially submerged in the shallows. Most bask on the banked mudflats under the mangrove trees, looking quietly sinister. — This is sooo neat! she squeals in delight.

Lennox isn’t too sure about the alligators. Especially when they pass a group of larger ones. These fat, grinning creatures look as contented and conspiring as veteran football hooligans relaxing under the parasols of continental cafés. They aren’t going dart around in search of prey. They’ll wait patiently for the opportunity to arise, before ruthlessly striking. No wonder Lacoste is such a popular thug brand, he considers.

Then a long, throaty, trumpeting sound accosts their ears. Picking up on their disquiet, Four Rivers smiles. — That’s a gator.

— I didn’t know they made noises like that, Tianna says, surprised at the mammal-like resonance.

— I gotta say it’s pretty rare durin the day. But when it gets dark out here on the swamp, you can hear em good enough, callin to each other in the night. I wouldn’t recommend anybody comin out here then, the guide says, and starts telling outlandishly scary stories about the reptiles. His close proximity and spooky eyes have been unnerving Lennox, who feels there’s something not quite right about him. It’s his voice; it seems a fusion of different accents he can’t place, that and the fact that he’s taking a particular interest in Tianna. — What about you, young lady, never seen a live gator before today? And I don’t mean in no zoo, I’m talking bout the wild.

— Well, I didn’t see it cause I was sleepin in the back, but my momma was drivin out along the highway and we almost hit one. Momma said he crawled back on to the verge along the banks into the swamp. We stopped the car, but didn’t get out.

Four Rivers’ laugh exposes a mouthful of rotten teeth and Lennox can smell alcohol on his breath. It makes him think of Scotland and work. — Well, that was mighty wise. Cause gators can grow up to seventeen feet long and over short distances they move as fast as a lion and—

— Seventeen feet, eh? Lennox cuts in. — Have you ever seen one that big here?

— Close on it. Saw one critter, must’ve have been about fifteen feet long, the guileful Four Rivers beams. — So where you from, sir?

That familiar paralysis come over Lennox; what to say when abroad. Scottish? British? European? — I’m from Scotland, in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, in the European Community, he says, taken aback at his own pomposity.

— Well, Brin or Skatlin, or whatever you call it, now that’s jus a tiny little island, and you sure won’t see no wild animals of any size over there, Four Rivers mockingly dismisses him, encouraging some tourists to join in.

— Yeah. It’s not so big in land mass compared to the USA, Lennox concedes. — Mind you, when I was in Egypt along the banks of the Nile, we saw crocodiles that made your alligators look like fish bait.

Some chuckles emanate from the group. They are evidently enjoying the joust, especially Tianna. — Crocodiles are bigger than alligators then, huh, Ray?

— An alligator, as our friend here has stated, Lennox luxuriantly stretches out in the sun as he nods to Four Rivers, who now regards him in brooding silence, — can grow up to seventeen feet. But a crocodile can grow over thirty foot long, twice the size of this boat.

Lennox realises he’s feeling good now, still so tired, but nice tired, as the hangover is receding. He hasn’t vibed with Four Rivers, but has no qualms about this; reasoning that if he liked everybody from a race of once-proud warriors who stank of drink, he’d never have made a single arrest back home. But he can’t believe that he’s pathetically competing with him for Tianna’s attention.

As the launch pulls up to the small jetty, Lennox freezes. A police car is waiting, with two cops and three sharp-suited Native Americans in attendance. One of the men points at him, and he feels Tianna grabbing his arm in panic. They share a missed heartbeat till both twig that it’s the guide they’re after. Four Rivers bows his head, and is led away by the two officers, who deposit him in the back of the squad car.

Relief dripping from him as he watches it depart, Lennox quizzes one of the suited men, who informs him that Four Rivers had no permit to operate that launch, and was trespassing on the reservation.

— He’s not from the Miccosukee tribe, then?

The man snorts dismissively. — He’s not even Native American, he’s just some crazy Irishman who won the boat in a poker game.

Lennox and Tianna’s eyes meet; they settle their nerves with a shared chuckle.

They get lunch at the restaurant adjoining the Indian village. Lennox loves the fried catfish, clarty bottom-feeders like prawns, but there was something about that taste. They’d do a fair turn in Scotland, and he imagines it served at the chippy, with plantain and sweet potato: a good cultural exchange for the mince-pie supper. They follow this with some ice cream and Lennox knocks down a double espresso before the road beckons.

Tianna seems happier. Tells him about Mobile, Alabama. How it’s a miniature New Orleans. As she speaks, her voice grows more Southern. She admits that she misses her old school and her friends. After a spell she becomes contemplative and reads more Perfect Bride.

On one page, a well-dressed groom has his arm around his betrothed. In his joyous expression she can see Vince, and feel that phantom recharge of desperation to prolong his supreme bursts of tenderness, but the transformation to the puppet face lodges in her mind’s eye and she’s thinking about what she had to do to bring the nice Vince back. She’d always pleaded with him that she didn’t like it. That it didn’t feel good. Well, someday it will, honey, he’d reassured her. It’s all new to you, baby, you just need to get used to it, to get used to being a woman. Then later he’d have his arm round Momma, and she’d be starin up at him all lovin and he’d be grinnin at us both like nothin else had happened.

— Look, a voice in her ear, and Ray, Scottish Bobby-Ray, is pointing to a large white crane and then many more in the swamp by the side of the road. Then he stops the car to see some alligators in the waterway behind the highway fence, a whole bunch of them, even more than they’d seen from the boat. Again they are all different sizes, and basking or lying on the banks under the mangroves. Tianna watches him take off his shades and squint at the sun. She’d really wanted a pair, but he’d been good to her with the clothes n all, and she didn’t want to take advantage.

The vegetation, thinned out and browned off since Miami’s outskirts, has grown denser and lusher by the time they get to Big Cypress National Preserve. — This was where Tarzan was filmed, Tianna says.

— Aye?

— Yup. The first Tarzan, the guy from Europe who got the job cause he could yodel.

— Johnny Weissmuller? Lennox says in surprise. He and Trudi are both film buffs and Friends of the Filmhouse Cinema in Edinburgh. Cinemas are sacred temples to him: places of cultural worship. A picture house is the one place that he can just sit in, totally relaxed and engrossed, no matter how bad the film, and not feel the pull of the pub. Sometimes he’ll go to three screenings in one evening, often drifting off into a light slumber, where the soundtrack merges with his thoughts and dreams, occasionally creating a potent, transcendental remix of narrative, sound and image that’s more satisfying than the movie in question.

— I guess so.

It’s bizarre, a kid her age knowing this sort of stuff. — How do you know all this? About Johnny Weissmuller?

— Uncle Chet told me. He knows everything about Florida.

Lennox mulls this over. He wonders how much this Chet guy knows about Robyn. About her drug problems and her disappearance. Or about Starry. Or Lance Dearing and Johnnie. It helps him to think of Chet as a benign force, and he sees an image of his own father. Recalls watching the old man joking with his grandsons when he brought them back home from some museum visit. He’d imagined that being the recipient of that easy, loving kindness was the preserve of him, his sister Jackie and his brother Stuart. For an instant or two he hated Jackie’s young usurpers.

— There, look! Tianna shouts, as the first city road signs appear before them:

Bologna 32

Punta Gorda 76

Lennox feels the kiss of solace. They’d done it, crossed the state: the Atlantic Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico. Florida always looks as if it’s about the same size as the UK on the maps, but it feels smaller. He starts to relax. Lets the exhaustion ease out of his shoulders. Driving in America’s a piece of piss, when you get used to it. The roads are bigger, better and, best of all, straight. He’ll check that this Chet guy is on the level. Then he’ll call Trudi, apologise for his behaviour and head right back.

The need to know what has happened to Robyn nags at him. But that’s Chet’s department; he’s more than fulfilled his obligation. Thanks to him, this wee Tianna was now safe from scum like Johnnie and that Lance character. And he’ll find a way to get at those bastards. There are international contacts in the law enforcement world and he’ll put the word out. There are always ways and means.

That song has come on again: Brad Paisley’s ‘Alcohol’. Now they’re crooning along to it together. He’s a little disturbed by that knowing way she chants the lyrics. It isn’t right for a young girl. But she isnae a bad kid. She’s funny and clever and she’s got spirit and you can take to her. She deserves better.

Tianna is fascinated with Trudi’s magazine. — Will you get married in a castle? How neat would that be!

— It’s awfay dear.

— It is so dear, she says, picking him up wrong. — Madonna, she got married in a castle in Skatlin.

— Aye. Somewhere in the Highlands, Lennox confirms. It was to an English guy who made crime films. Lennox had gone to see one. He’d liked it. It was nonsense of course, like most crime in fiction and on television, but it kept the action moving along. It entertained.

Is crime essential, he ponders, in order to provide such diverting extravaganza? Where would we be without human frailties? Hollywood would be fucked. Perhaps we owe the gangster and the criminal a lot. By supplying the crime they created demand. For security guards, cops, screws, lawyers, builders, administrators, technicians, politicians, writers, actors, directors. Where would we be without them?

He can’t think of the castle’s name though. — It’s a big castle. Up by Perth or somewhere. They have loads of dos there.

— Is it near where you live?

He wonders about that. A three-hour drive? Yes and no. Is Muirhouse near Barnton? Yes and no. — Kind of.

Now Tianna is explaining baseball to him. Takes a notebook from her bag and draws the diamond, elucidating it all with care and patience. Innings: the top and bottom of. Pitchers, hitters and fielders. Four balls. Three strikes. Loading the bases. Home runs. The bullpen. She likes the Braves from Atlanta, Georgia, because they are the nearest Major League team to Alabama.

She shows him the cards. Lennox sees that they are not valuable, all modern reissues with their 1992 Kitemark. Scots Bobby. Mickey Mantle. Joe DiMaggio. Babe Ruth. Reggie Jackson. Willie Mays. Most of them probably dead before she was even thought of. But the names mean little to Lennox outside of the movies. He seems to remember that Marilyn Monroe fucked one of them. DiMaggio. That’s it, the Simon and Garfunkel song. She also shagged the likes of JFK and Arthur Miller. Was she a gold-digger, attracted to powerful men, or a trophy shag for rich sleazebags? Or was it, as the feature writers might gush, the devastating mutual attraction of the charismatic, which both parties were powerless to resist?

— Yeah, I reckon you oughta get married in a castle, Tianna is persisting. — That would be awesome.

Lennox plays with the thought: him in full Highland dress, Trudi in what else but bridal white. Brides all seem the same to him though, especially when they have their hair scraped back; that stern, graven-imaged look. He doesn’t want Trudi like that. She could say something with her hair pinned back that would cut him ten times more deeply than the exact same words would with it down and flowing. He’d read an article in Perfect Bride stating that the average British bride weighs nine pounds above her normal weight at the wedding. The conventional wisdom of the boozer; they starve themselves to look great in the wedding pictures, then pig out on the honeymoon and engage in a lifelong battle against obesity. Not so, apparently. Pre-wedding nerves encourage overeating so they go into the ring overweight. This sounds true: it explains the number of bloaters in the Evening News pictures. — I dunno. It’s a funny thing, Lennox considers, pursing his lips, — Trudi, my girlfriend… my fiancée, he corrects himself, — she wants a big wedding. I’d rather spend the money on a good holiday, you know, a honeymoon.

— Will you try and make a baby on your honeymoon? Tianna’s searching knowingness stings then nauseates him. She’s just a wee lassie, teasing you. Skin tingling, he looks back to the road. A silver car overtakes them, slows down. It was the second or third time. — That’s the sort of thing that the two people involved talk about. It’s not for public discussion. His tone is haughty and he can hear his sister in it.

Tianna is puzzled by his response. — But people do talk about it. Brad Pitt told everybody that Angelina Jolie is having their baby.

— That’s Hollywood stars, but. They want to tell everybody everything because the publicity is like a drug… like candy to them. They need it. A lot of people are into it now, but then they find that it’s too much like candy: it makes them sick afterwards, he reflects, looking at the silver car ahead. Fucking prick. Where was the cunt going?

Tianna turns away and runs a brush through her mane. Scraping it back she secures it with an elasticated band. It feels soft in her fingers, so different from Clemson’s; that hair that grew like spines on his moist skin. Her flesh crawls in recollection of the touch of his putrid lips. Then trembling up in the roof space, ladder pulled to her, and him shouting: Where the fuck you gone, you lil’ whore, her momma asleep downstairs, with the sedatives he’d given her. Thinking that it was better to go down and get it over with than live with that fear.

12 Bologna

TRUDI SIPS AT her bitter coffee as she watches a grinning couple on the television, in workout gear, slowly cat-flexing with two large docile domestic felines. The idea is that this practice gives busy professionals the chance to combine fitness maintenance with quality pet time. The woman has the ginger cat’s chest supported on one outstretched palm, her other hand under its belly. She raises the animal in slow, rhythmic, repetitive motions. — Twenty on this side, twenty on the other, she says.

— Great, Melanie, the man grins, and Phoebe seems to be enjoying it too, as we cut to a close-up of the sleepy cat’s face. As we switch back to the man, he sits down on a bed and lifts the big tabby on to his shins. — This is a tricky one, but remember, if your cat gets uncomfortable and leaves, you’re going too fast, and he slowly raises the animal with a leg extension. — Slooowww… that’s the way, almost imperceptible. Luckily, Heidegger’s a little tired right now. One… two… three… I can’t emphasise enough the importance of keeping it slow and controlled… Melanie?

Trudi Lowe packs her gym gear into a small bag and heads round to the Crunch fitness studio on Washington Avenue. She has remembered Aaron Resinger saying, — I use Crunch. It’s functional and friendly. All shapes, all sizes, but everybody seriously working out. I don’t like gyms where people just go to pose.

The effeminate young man on the desk has attempted lofty indifference, but in response to what he clearly perceives as the exoticism of her tones, decides that gushing theatrics now suit his mood better. — My God, I love that accent, where are you from?

Trudi dutifully explains as she procures the day pass for twenty-four dollars. A self-respecting daughter of Caledonia, she switches back to sterling to assess relative value. Thinks of possible sweet add-ons, but it’s unlikely that Aaron will be around. He’ll be at work, selling high-end real estate. Surely. Fancy meeting you here. Sorry I had to leave without saying goodbye. Forgive me? Coffee? Great.

She has to think of him because when Trudi thinks of her fiancé all she experiences are waves of rage, frustration and despair. He had the nerve – the fucking gall – to ask her about the men she’d seen during their relationship hiatus, which his cheating had precipitated. Now Ray is taking a strange child – a young girl – from here to God knows where.

As she climbs the narrow stair from the reception area to the gym, a cold chill creeps up on her. She recalls Ray sitting on the ground, head in hands, moaning disturbing stuff about young girls in Thailand. The emotion twangs into a reverberating thought, igniting in a dark section of her brain, only gaining potency when she grasps that her fear isn’t for him.

Highway 41 slashes across the Everglades to Bologna, where it becomes a coastal road all the way up to Tampa. Despite the air conditioning in the car, Lennox’s hand greases the wheel’s leather covering. Trudi is getting further away and the kid next to him has fallen mute again, studying her cards. It seems a pattern: she cautiously raises her head above the parapet, then something in the present recalls the spoiled fruit of her own past, and the retreat into herself is unequivocal. No matter: he can play the long-ball game.

The Tamiami Trail, in its south-west Florida section, is a blemished conduit of shopping malls, fast-food outlets and used-car dealerships that alloy into the city of Bologna. Some rudimentary guide notes on the Florida atlas explain that while it was named after one Italian city it was modelled on another: the miracle that was Venice. The similarity was to the degree that both relied on an extensive canal system for transit. This carriage, though, is pretty much of the leisure variety in Bologna, FLA. Retirees and second-home recreational sailors enjoy the watery network, which surges out from back gardens with docked boats into the ten thousand islands and beyond to the Gulf of Mexico.

Lennox contemplates the well-marked roads that lead to planned communities with their guarded security gates, Bermuda-grass vistas and dredged lakes. The advertising agencies have invented pastoral and tropical names like Spring Meadow, Ocean Falls and Coral Reef, unconnected to any geographical reality. But to the retirees of the northern states with their unforgiving winters, the notion of a sanctuary in the sun would have Arcadian appeal on the glossy brochures and websites. So the developers razed bare the lush terrain and threw up their prefabricated house frames, attached the panels and the cinder block, the PVC and plasterboard. Then they wrapped the residences in high boundary walls, despite selling them on the promise that crime in the region was negligible. They’d invariably finish the job by sticking an Old Glory up a flagpole, to flutter in lax entitlement.

Lennox and Tianna drive towards the hub of the community, which is more established than most that have sprung up in south-west Florida. The houses vary in scale of wealth and grandeur, many surrounded by mature palm trees, mangroves and less tropical vegetation. The small downtown area has superior retail outlets clustered under wrought-iron balconies in two-storey buildings, modelled on older Southern towns like Savannah, Charleston and New Orleans. Further down towards the marina it again grows blander; armies of condominiums line the coarse grass verges and lawns. Lennox rolls down the window as they cruise the narrow streets in the sun, the green Volkswagen miscast among the big 4×4s and the swank convertibles that proliferate. The glitzy wealth on parade should preclude crime. Everyone seems to have money here, but people with money often want other things. The most seductive of all being the illusion that it isn’t just their money that sets them apart from the rest of humanity.

The road ends at a wall, with a gated entrance and sign above it: GROVE BEACH CLUB AND PRIVATE MARINA.

— This is it, Tianna says excitedly.

Lennox pulls into the parking lot outside a row of offices and shops. The marina is busy; most of the moored boats are gargantuan, with several pristine ones in adjacent broker’s yards. Tall new constructions of condo blocks tower over the harbour. One is a work-in-progress, scaffolded, with Hispanic workers in hard hats bouncing along the gangways.

The lot is busy. Just as they’ve secured a parking space and left the car, a black Porsche, driven by a red-shirted white man with blond hair and shades, attempts to pull out and instead reverses into a stationary pickup truck. His convertible suffers minor damage at the rear. Furious at his own carelessness, he gets out the car and starts shouting at the man in the truck. — You goddamn idiot! What in hell’s name… my car!

The reluctant recipient of his attentions is a small, stocky Latino man in a hard hat and construction-worker clothes, who makes a flabbergasted appeal. — But… but… you backed right into me!

— I did not – don’t you – what the hell – where do you work? That site over there? The thyroid cartilage in the white man’s larynx bubbles as he points across the inlet to the development under construction.

The builder looks to the rising apartment block and falls silent.

The white man casts his glance towards Lennox and Tianna, who have been watching the exchange. Lennox turns away. — Did you see that? Excuse me, sir? The man’s insistence grates and Lennox stops and faces him. — Did you witness that? His mouth open: a snide air of belligerence invoking someone else.

— I did. Lennox slowly scans the complainant, then glances at the construction worker. He removes his shades and hooks them into the neck of the Ramones shirt and stares harshly at the white guy. — And I’d strongly advise that you apologise to this gentleman. He nods towards the Hispanic builder.

The authority in Lennox’s voice takes the man aback. The dark patches in the armpits of his shirt ebb a millimetre outwards. The skin on his face, around his sunglasses, flushes a deeper shade of red. — But I—

— You’re out of order. I suggest you apologise or I’ll be compelled to take this further.

— Who the hell are you—

Lennox steps closer to the man, so that he can see his eyes wavering and watering, behind the tinted glass of his sunspecs. Ascertains the anger and the dogmatism are leaking from him. Now several onlookers are taking an interest. — I’m off duty. If you put me on duty, then it gets personal between you and me. A simple ‘I’m sorry’ to the gentleman and we walk away and get on with our lives. Or you can see where I’ll take it. What’s it to be?

The blond man looks at Lennox, then to the construction worker, who seems as embarrassed as he is. — I’m sorry… I guess I reversed… I just got this car the other week… this damn lot is always so busy…

— It’s okay, the construction guy says, palm upturning at Lennox in a discomforted gesture of acknowledgement, before he climbs back into his truck.

The white guy skulks into the convertible and drives off.

Lennox looks up at the sun, screws his eyes against the hazy heat and replaces his shades. Looks across the lot to Cunningham’s Lobster Bar; the social hub of the marina.

— You sure told that asshole, Tianna remarks appreciatively.

— That’s exactly what he was, Lennox says, a complicit grin on his face.

— Are you a cop? Back in Skatlin? Tianna interrogates him in some concern. — Was that what you meant by not being on duty?

— Worse than that, Lennox says, slipping back into lying detective mode, — I’m in insurance. That guy in the smart car was lucky. He could have been paying through the nose for years.

— Do you like your job?

A derailed pause. Back in Scotland working-class kids were generally encouraged – often with good reason – to say nothing to the police. It probably wouldn’t be that different in America, and Tianna knows what Dearing does for a living. — Aye, it’s okay, but I am on holiday and it’s good to get a break from it. He cuts himself off to avoid compounding his fabrications. — I’m thirsty. Want to get a drink? He thumbs at the bar-restaurant.

— But… Tianna turns and points to the harbour, — Chet’s boat’ll be jus round that corner there.

— My throat’s gaunny close up, he pleads.

— Sure thing, she smiles. — You got a sore throat, huh?

— Aye.

— Aye, Tianna sings, tossing back her hair. — Aye! I like it when you say ‘aye’. Say it again!

— Aye, Lennox shrugs and she giggles as they make their way across the lot.

His throat is sore and dry – it always is – but he wants to find out what she knows before he turns her over to Chet.

Inside the bar, the wealth hits them like ozone. Humanity had been brushed out of the equation, sucked like a fart into the extractor fan of an expensive hotel toilet. They take a seat. Tianna asks the waitress for a Diet Pepsi and Lennox follows suit, although he really wants a beer. We’re never having kids. I’ll go through the ceremony. I’ll build a nice home. But no kids.

He wonders how Trudi is doing back in Miami Beach. It already seems like days since he’s walked into this. But a terrible elation buzzes inside him, intensified by the encounter with the guy in the lot. Getting better: he’d handled it more satisfactorily than the conflict with the family at the gas station. Fuck it. It’s needed. It’s therapy. He’s starting to feel alive, like he did on the job back home, with that familiar taint of vengeful wrath in his mouth. Fuelling the sense that somebody is going to pay for the crime.

And there was a crime: Johnnie’s assault on the kid. Could they convict him? Would Robyn testify? What would Lance and Starry say if they were called as witnesses? It would be a difficult one. His judgement is shot to pieces, but his gut tells him that it would be hard to get an arrest and conviction with Dearing evidently hell-bent on protecting Johnnie. But why?

Lennox studies the menu. Alcohol withdrawal has produced in him that insatiable demand for bad food. He tries to talk himself out of it. He waves the card around in disdain. — For such a swanky joint the grub seems quite run of the mill. Surf and turf, burgers…

Tianna shrugs off his quizzical stare. — This is an ol-boys-with-money place. They ain’t gonna go for nuthin too fancy.

He looks around and reassesses. The stressed-out, second-home arseholes like the yuppie in the parking lot were actually in the minority. It was mainly older people who had worked all their lives and had a bit put by and had staked their place in the sun. The kid isn’t a dummy. She’s a fuckin bright wee lassie. In the right circumstances she could develop the resources to get rid of her neediness, like most kids did when they became adults. Get an education. Develop confidence, and real social skills. Not just that faux hard-assed sass that would only end her up in the arms of some wife beater. This kid could, given the encouragement, break the cycle of abuse that had possibly gone on for generations in her family. Or possibly not, maybe Robyn had just fucked up because she was the weak link. — Your mother’s not had it easy, eh?

Tianna’s eyes and lips tighten as she rubs a lock of hair between forefinger and thumb. — Momma’s okay… she been real good to me. I guess cause she’s still young she kinda wants to party n all. But she always jus seems to meet the wrong guys. I mean, they start off good at first but they soon change. You’re the only one who’s been okay.

Lennox feels his pharynx shift. He’d left Trudi, gone out and taken lots of coke with two strange women. A shiver crawls up his vertebrae. What the fuck was I thinking of?

— What’s your momma like, Ray? she asks, then adds in raven humour, — Is she as crazy as Robyn?

— She’s a mother. He hears the brusqueness of his retort, thinking about how odd it would be to call her by her first name. Avril. Avril Lennox, née Jeffreys. A mother. What the fuck is that?

— I’ll bet she’s nice, Tianna is saying, pulling Lennox from his thoughts, forcing him to look at her briefly in loose-jawed incomprehension. — Your mom. I can tell, cause you’re nice… not like the other guys Momma brings around… That Vince; he was nice at first.

— Was he a boyfriend of your mum’s?

She nods slowly and falls silent, lowering her head.

Lennox pulls back, he wants to keep her talking, not induce her to clam up. — What about your dad, do you ever see him?

— He died in a car crash when I was a baby, she says, looking up for his reaction.

— I’m sorry, he says. He knows the kid is lying.

— I don’t remember him much.

That is the truth. It was the extremis of her father’s absence that made his presence loom so large. Lennox contemplates the baseball cards as he fights a fatigued yawn. Looks to her squashed-sheep backpack. — That’s why you like the cards.

— The cards… yeah, she says, averting her gaze again.

She deserves more, but first she has to survive. The likes of Dearing and Johnnie have to be avoided. Scumbags, but not lone wolves, like Mr Confectioner. There’s something wrong here. It seems as if nonces are everywhere: it’s like some half-arsed pack of paedos are snapping around Robyn and the kid. It isn’t just my paranoia. This Vince guy; does he know Dearing? Johnnie?

They finish the drinks and venture outside. The sun has retreated across the horizon but is still strong in the cloudless sky. Lennox rubs more grit from his heavy eyes and puts the baseball cap on, adjusting its band, moulding it to the contours of his skull. Tianna can’t recognise Ocean Dawn, but he realises that those gleaming, white, opulent vessels might all look the same to her. Gazing across the inlet to the building under construction, he sees the workers taking a break on a gangway. One of them waves slowly at him: the guy from the incident in the parking lot. He returns the gesture.

The harbour master’s office is in a strip of broker and yacht insurance storefronts. The manager of the marina is a man in his sixties, clad in jeans, boots and a green guayabera shirt, who introduces himself as Donald Wynter. A man of unbridled enthusiasm, with white hair in a side parting, he bears a striking resemblance to the actor-comedian Steve Martin. It’s so strong that Lennox feels like cracking jokes. Instead he asks, — Do you know Chet Lewis?

— Everybody knows ol Chet, Wynter says, taking them outside and showing Lennox and Tianna where Ocean Dawn is usually moored.

Only it’s gone.

Don Wynter reads Ray Lennox’s crestfallen face. — Chet’s gone down the coast, put out a few creels to catch some fresh uns. The good stuff is overfished, gotta cast the net a little wider these days. I dare say that he’ll be back early tomorrow. In fact, I know he will, cause he gotta pick up some stuff he ordered here at the office. Usually goes to see ol Mo over at his place on one of the islands. They’ll be in a card game and drinkin beer. Wynter talks like a man frightened of keeling over before he’s spoken his allotted words.

— How do you get over there?

— You don’t, not less you got a boat and know them waters. Wynter shakes his head. — Yep, probably hooked up down the coast right now.

His help is appreciated by Lennox, but he’s so weary and the man’s verbosity grates as he launches into a spiel about tides and the weather. And a glance at Tianna’s pained face tells him her boredom threshold has been breached. As Wynter rambles on, Lennox finds himself thinking back to the elderly witnesses he’d interviewed in connection with the Britney case. They gabbed twenty to the dozen, talking up their roles as central in the drama of her short life. Of course they were just lonely and initially you couldn’t help but be sympathetic, but they soon contrived to exhaust that well of goodwill. Eventually he would want to crack a brittle old head open and scream: This is not about you, ya selfish cunt. This is a murder investigation.

Ronnie Hamil, Britney’s chimney-stinking grandfather, he was the worst of them all.

Then Angela, and now Robyn. You couldn’t even trust your fucking mother.

Stop this.

The appearance of a well-dressed, middle-aged woman gives Lennox and Tianna the alibi to sneak away from the distracted harbour master. They leave the marina and drive into town, then out on to the highway. Lennox feels at a loss as to what to do. He curses himself. If I hadnae fannied about with alligator boat trips and milkshakes!

— I don’t wanna go back, Tianna’s hushed tones, her eyes big orbs of fear, — I wanna stay with Chet.

It would soon be getting dark and they wouldn’t see Chet till tomorrow. Lennox ponders the options. Her apartment in Miami was out. They’d come here to get away from that place and the people in it. He could take her back to the hotel in Miami Beach for the night, or to Ginger’s place in Fort Lauderdale, then drive her out to Chet’s. Suddenly a truck horn blares and Lennox’s body seems to lose five layers of skin as he slams on the brakes, thanking a higher power nothing is behind him. He was almost into the back of it. This, and Tianna’s fearful response, makes the decision for him. He’s too tired; he needs sleep. In his current state of fatigue, he’s more of a danger to her than anybody. He pulls into the next gas station and calls Trudi again.

— Ray, where the hell are you? You said you’d be back—

— I’m with the wee girl I telt you aboot. She’s ten. Her mother and her are in big trouble. I can’t let them down, Trude, not like I did with Angela and Britney. I just can’t.

— Don’t they have police here?

— Aye. I’ve met one of them. It’s him that’s harassing them. So I can’t risk going to them right now, I don’t know the score with this cop. I’ve got to find somebody that’s definitely kosher. I’m gaunny have tae stay here tonight. The morn I can leave the lassie with her uncle; that’s when his boat’s due back. You know what I’m saying?

— You’re with this young girl now?

— Aye, Tianna.

— You’re going to spend the night, spend the night, with this young girl in a hotel?

— A motel, Lennox says, thinking about the ones they’d passed earlier, stuck alongside the strip malls of Highway 41. — I mean… we’ll be in different rooms, obviously! Fuck sakes, gie’s a break.

— You give me a break, Ray! Trudi says. — Tell me where you are and I’ll come and get you! Ginger’ll come and pick me up.

— It isn’t safe.

— You’re mad. You’re mad and deluded, you – She gasps, suddenly visualising helping him into her apartment, his hand shattered, him gibbering nonsense about the Britney Hamil case, Thailand and God knows what else, and sees her own fingers with his engagement ring, around a real-estate dealer’s circumcised, veiny cock. Her tone softens. — Ray, please listen to me. You… you’ve had a terrible time. I know you haven’t got your pills, Ray. You need them. If you don’t want to come back, let me come to you…

Lennox is blown away by her about-face. When the anger dissipates, she is genuinely worried about him. He’d missed everything she’d done for him. Failed to see that the hiding in the wedding plans was a manifestation of her own personal stress. His voice croaks, pregnant with emotion. — No, baby. Honest, I’ll be back tomorrow afternoon. We’ll go round the dress shops and sit down and finalise the guest list…

— I don’t care about the wedding! I care about you! Trudi says miserably, thinking of that stupid tryst with the smarmy real-estate guy. Ray loves her. He needs her. — I couldn’t see it, honey, couldn’t see you were still breaking apart inside. I thought you were on the mend. Please come back to me, baby, please!

Lennox shrinks and sucks in his breath. — I need you to trust me. I’m begging you to trust me.

You don’t know what the fuck men are like.

— I need you to trust me, Ray. At least tell me where you are, Trudi sobs.

— I’m about three hours’ drive west of where you are, across the Everglades, on the other coast, the Gulf of Mexico. That’s as much as I can tell you. I’ll call soon, I promise.

An excruciatingly long pause follows. Eventually, Trudi’s voice: — Promise?

— Yes.

— Okay. Be careful, she says. — Bye for now. Her voice is flat, and when she adds, — I love you, it almost seems to be coming from beyond the crypt in its tired resignation.

Then the line dies. Lennox stands looking at the receiver, the guts ripped out of him.

She lies back on the bed, her body aching in that satisfied way it does after a good session at the gym when the adrenalin has been spent and a delicious fatigue sets in. There had been no Aaron which was good and bad news for her, but one guy had hit on her; also good and bad news. There is life without Ray; potentially a very good life. She is young. This is her time. Can she afford to waste it on a guy who might never shape up?

This obsession with sex offenders. This obsession about sex. The weirdness about sex.

That stuff he’d said, in the tunnel, when he had his breakdown. About Thailand. About young girls in Thailand.

Ray has secrets. Not silly little secrets. Big ones. Possibly bad ones. Trudi Lowe shivers and sits up. Takes a sip of water. Moves over and lowers the air con.

Earlier on they had passed the American Inn, with its one-storey H-blocks, tatty Stars and Stripes flag, and dull, red neon sign which buzzed the word VACANCIES. Its walls looked like they’d housed all kinds of desperation and broken dreams. Now Lennox fancies he can smell the stale sperm of a thousand beasts impregnated into the building’s fabric. It compels him, challenges him to confront it. Tianna looks blankly at it, betrays no emotion as he says in fake breeziness, — Looks as good a spot as any.

They stop off at a Walgreens to get some bars of soap, toothpaste and toothbrushes. In his weary irritation, Lennox is aggrieved at the discrepancy between the marked and actual price – he still hasn’t gotten his head round sales tax – then they’re back at the motel, ready to check in.

The desk clerk is a cadaverous old white man. His skin is translucent and his face so weary and pained he gives a sense that you’d be able to see the tumours inside him if he removed his shirt. He asks Lennox for some ID. This time he produces his passport. The clerk’s body stiffens like a hangman’s rope under its consignment as he swivels to produce a simple register, which he requests Lennox sign. As he complies, the old man looks at Tianna, who is going through the garish brochures that sit in an ancient plastic mounting on the wall, below a map of the area that looks like it dates back to pre-white settler times. He turns pointedly to Lennox. — Daughter?

Lennox meets his stare. — No, I’m a family friend, he states, adding, — We’ll need two rooms.

The clerk briefly raises his brows, evaluates Lennox for a second, and then lowers a sulky head as he checks them in. Lennox shudders, now feeling that this is not a good idea. But he’s clapped out and desperately needs to rest. He catches a long yawn from Tianna. Wonders how much sleep she’s had over the last few days or weeks or months.

As they head back outside to check out their rooms, an ochre brass-plaque sun like a logo to life lost is falling before Lennox’s stinging eyes. Underneath it, he notes, through the thin fading light, the welcoming glow of a neon sign of a Roadhouse by the strip mall across the highway. It isn’t that late. A couple of beers – no more – would be great, ensuring that he slept soundly. But he can’t leave her, even if she falls fast asleep. Instead, they go to a drinks vending machine back in the reception, getting a Pepsi for her and mineral water for him.

Stressing his exhaustion, Lennox tells Tianna he is retiring for the night and advises that she does the same. She hesitates for a second before heading to her lodgings, two doors down from his.

Lennox’s room is shabby and functional: bed, nightstand with lamp, table and chair, bathroom with toilet, sink and shower. Two battered green easy chairs with yellow cushions containing more tales than anyone would want to hear sit close to a big but venerable television set. Walking across an anaemic carpet scarred with cigarette burns, his parting of the rear window curtains unveils a vista as uninspiring as the freeway to the front. Rows of high-fenced, prefabricated buildings of a storage and distribution estate glisten defiantly in the fading sun, limelight-hogging starlets enjoying their bit-part roles.

He finds the implausibly tatty handset and clicks the TV on. Turning up the volume to drown out the industrial thrashing of the antiquated air-con unit – a big metal box dug into the wall – he picks a glass from the table and holds it up to the light. It looks clean so he fills it with some water from the bottle and puts it down on the nightstand. He sips at the remains in the plastic container, slumping into one of the easy chairs, leg draped over the armrest, as he regards the telly. Surfing the channels he feels his tight mind unwind and empty, thought spooling into nothingness. Trudi had been okay, better than okay. She was loyal, one in a million.

A knock on the door tears him back into the shabby room. He opens it to see Tianna standing before him. Her eyes are big and hopeful. — I ain’t tired. Can I sit here a lil’ while and watch TV with you?

— Sure, Lennox says, — but just for half an hour, cause I’m really beat.

She sits down in the other chair. He can really do without the company, but he reasons that the kid has been left on her own so much, he should try and make the effort. Besides, she might feel relaxed enough to volunteer some more information about the Miami crowd, and this Vince in Mobile. Picking up the handset, Tianna settles on MTV. Queasiness rises in Lennox as he’s confronted with the old Britney Spears school-girl video. She was telling the world she was a virgin when they were shooting that one. He was scornful at the time, but it now made some kind of sense. Tianna is transfixed by it. Eventually she turns to him and says: — Do you think Britney’s still hot? I saw her in my mum’s magazine and she looked so fat and gross. Ugh!

And he thinks of Britney Hamil’s throttled body, lying dead on that table in the mortuary. A child named after a pop star who would outlive her.

— She’s just had a baby, Lennox says, — give her a chance.

He’s not comfortable watching it with her, and urges her to change channels on the remote. — It’s a bit old hat, he lamely explains. Tianna moves through the programmes, excitedly stopping at one show. — Beauty and the Geek! she shrieks.

Lennox finds himself secretly enjoying the dating programme, although he’d’ve preferred to watch it alone. The premise was that these supposed ‘beauties’, most of whom were actually pretty ordinary young, poorly educated lassies, would pair off with the specky, obsessive-compulsive, repressed but intelligent nerds, who usually excelled at business, science or computing.

At first Lennox’s sympathies are with the awkward, tongue-tied boys, who seem easy meat for the vivacious but crass gold-diggers. Then it becomes apparent that all these guys want to do is to refine their social skills so that they can get laid. The women, underneath the superficiality, often appear to be looking for genuine romance. While keen to find a partner with money and prospects, and wanting to make these geeks dress, look and act cool enough to take good wedding pictures, they can generally conceive at least the possibility of something beyond a shag. Eventually, however, the banal predictability of it all begins to depress him. That Tianna is riveted disturbs him. It soon becomes a struggle to keep his eyes open.

— Did you like Beauty and the Geek? she asks, as the closing credits roll up.

— Aye, it was okay.

— Momma and me love that show.

He can see Robyn now, a feckless icon of cool motherhood, luminous with broken promises. Casting herself as Tianna’s surrogate, big-wee sister, subjecting the girl to a litany of such reality TV shows, particularly the ones with a dating element. Battering her neurons with the shit that would, in tandem with Robyn’s own behaviour, forge the template of the kid’s world view. As they channel-hop through similar shows, it seems that the television oozes more ennui than the streets and bars, the presenters struggling to deliver sufficiently high emotions to let their subject matters fly. It is as if the TV companies can’t find people quite thick enough not to be a little embarrassed by the fact that they are managing extreme banality, while the real momentous things are out there, in view, but not up for discussion, as if ringed off by an invisible electric fence. A despondent anger settles in his chest. — You should be watching stuff that other girls your age watch.

— Like what?

— I don’t know. There must be some stuff. Cartoons?

— The Simpsons is funny. South Park is neat. I like Family Guy.

— Yeah, Lennox says. Appeals again: — I’m knackered. I’m going to get my head down. He gestures to the door.

Tianna is reluctant to leave. Lennox has to get up and open the door, then escort her back to her room. But about ten minutes later, there’s a knock. He knows who it is. She is chewing on her hair and smiling strangely at him. — Cain’t sleep, she simpers.

Her grin and her body language have a quality that is making him nauseous. He isn’t going to let her step over this threshold. — Look, just go tae your room and watch the telly.

— Cain’t I get into bed with you? she pleads.

His heart bangs in his chest, in concert with the rhythm of the air-con unit. He holds the door tight, like a bouncer confronted by potentially aggressive clientele. — No. Why would you want to do that?

— I guess cause I like you. Don’t you like me? She widens her eyes in appeal.

— Yeah, but we’re friends. I don’t—

— It’s because of Trudi. You love her! I finally want to really be with somebody and they love somebody else! she moans, stamping her foot in exasperation.

What the fuck—

— No, Lennox says sharply, glancing around outside in panic. The place is deserted. He takes a deep breath. — Look, she’s my girl, but even if she wasnae, you’re a young lassie. Guys my age… he begins, then her years resonate with him, —… guys any age, don’t get into bed with girls your age!

She looks piercingly at him. — Some do.

— Aye, Lennox says, — they call them paedophiles. I’ve met a lot of them. Some are evil, others are just weak and pathetic. But they’re wrong: every last one of them. Because they don’t have the right to do that. Now please, he says with force, — go to your room!

He watches her dejectedly depart and vanish into her billet, then shuts his own door and switches off the air conditioning. The machine winds down in weary, fading clicks of protestation as he climbs into bed. Disturbingly, his thoughts run to Robyn’s lush bush. His brain is at war with itself as part of it, in renegade obscenity, wonders about the daughter, then the hairless genitals of the doomed child in Edinburgh. Although this thankfully offers him no arousal, he curses those thoughts outside of his control. He’s sullied by this baseness and the notion that he’s no better than them.

A couple of doors down, Tianna goes to bed. Her soul is in distress, brow wet on the sticky, discoloured pillow. She discards the torturous, suffocating sheet to let cool air blow over her stomach, chest and legs, but the room is full of shadows from walls that teem with a million nightmares. Her jacket hung over the bathroom door has assumed the shape of a malevolent hunch-back. She hears a squeak rise from within her and pulls the covers back to her chin, hoping she’ll fall into a quicksand of sleep. And this happens, but minutes later she’s drowning and battles back into a gasping consciousness.

A few walls away, Ray Lennox is distracted by a fluttering in his ear. Some fucking insect. A flurrying sound. Again. Then it seems to settle. He takes a drink of water from the glass by his bed. Then Lennox sits bolt upright in mordant panic, unable to draw breath. Something is jammed in his throat. He starts to gag. It’s alive, moving and whirring inside him. He staggers to the spore-laden bathroom, eyes burning and streaming like he’s crying blood. He tries to gag up this invader, but can’t. Then his guts erupt in violence, but the burning blast of vomit seems to hit something in his throat and the acid in his bile burns him as it cascades back down into his belly.

One thought in his head: this is how it ends.

Desperate now, dizzying and fearful, throbbing head about to explode, he retches again and it all comes up in a racking, forceful cough. He looks into the toilet pan and sees it, more flying hamster than moth; the tiny coal-beaded eyes in the furry golden body, struggling in his milkshake vomit, one rattling wing aloft.

— Get tae fuck, he half gasps, half wheezes at the huge moth, and yanks the flush, watching the creature spin and whirl like a dervish before vanishing.

For a few minutes he stays on his knees and pushes his hot face against the cool vitreous surface of the sink.

Rising shakily and climbing back into bed, the whirring noise still going off in his head, like the ghost of the moth would be for ever part of him, Lennox collapses into an exhausted, fuddled sleep where dark, conscious thoughts meld with deranged dreams. Time passes, how much he doesn’t know. After a broken, fevered narrative, he can vividly see Trudi in front of him, by the side of the bed. She is removing her clothes. — I want you, Ray, any way you want, she is saying. He can almost touch her.

He can almost touch her because she is here.

The door of his room has opened. He can see her figure backlit by the moon for a second or two till a breeze slams it shut, plunging him back into darkness. He glances at the display on the clock: 2:46. She is – somebody is – getting into bed with him. — You know I love you, her breathless voice whimpers. — You can do anything you want. I know you won’t hurt me.

Lennox’s body freezes. He jumps up out of the bed and switches on the light. Tianna is there, sitting up, in T-shirt and yellow knickers with a white butterfly stitched on to them. He reaches for his trousers draped across the chair, pulling them on over his underpants. — What the hell are ye playing at!

She looks up at him with a sad pout. — I cain’t sleep.

—You’ll have to try cause you cannae stay here! Lennox shouts. She starts to sob. He lowers his voice. An ugly, desperate fear grips him: if the clerk hears her. He can see Lance Dearing, hear him, ‘Why, I jus took her momma out to calm her down, left ol Ray here with the kid. Didn’t figure he’d grab her and take her clean across the state. Guess I kinda blame myself…’ Terror eats at his gut. — Look, just go back and watch the telly. Please, he begs. — You’ll soon drop off.

She grimaces and shakes her head. She isn’t moving. — I don’t wanna. Please let me stay here, I ain’t gonna try n touch you—

— No! Go to your room. Now!

Tianna pulls her legs and the blanket to herself and looks up at him. In an instant the twisted little predator is gone and she’s a gap-toothed kid again. — But I… I guess… I guess I kinda messed things up. In my room.

Lennox takes a deep breath. — Okay, okay. You stay here. He heads to the door. — I’ll crash at yours and I’ll see you in the morning, he gasps, his throat still raw and burning. — Please. Just try to sleep!

His bare feet step outside on to the cool porch, as he smells the diesel and gasoline. It’s still warm and nobody’s around, the only limited sign of life was the night light that glowed softly from the office. In the distance, the faint hubbub of a convoy of big trucks rattling down the highway, and the lights of the Roadhouse clicking off. A lick of wind chills his naked torso. He yawns, stretches and gets himself another bottle of water from the machine before moving back towards Tianna’s room, this time bolting the door shut behind him. Inside, the blankets look in disarray but everything else seems fine. Removing his trousers, he dives under the covers, quickly pulling his leg back as it plunges into wetness. — Fuck… he growls, as he hastily gets out the bed. — Fuck sakes!

He tugs off the blankets and climbs on to a small settee, cramped and uncomfortable. He gets up again and pulls the mattress from the bed, feeling the other side. Fortunately, her pee hadn’t gone right through. After turning it over, he balls up the soaked bottom sheet, then pulls the blankets back over him. Though exhausted, his nerves are now like piano wire and he can’t sleep. He finds himself rising again, taking refuge once more in the television, channel-hopping till he finds a nature programme on Discovery.

The documentary concerns itself with the growing extinction of the panda in China and the attempts to save it. These mostly seem to involve scientists molesting pandas and their cubs. Separating the young creatures from their mothers, tagging their ears with transmitters, tattooing them inside their mouths. An American woman, who is accompanied by her son, narrates the programme, described as a ‘personal journey’. They assist the Chinese zoologists in interfering with the pandas to the animals’ obvious distress. Lennox thinks that if those creatures could communicate, they’d just say: — Fuck off and let us eat our bamboo and grow extinct in peace.

But it wasn’t the human way. Our greed is killing you, so our vanity demands that we must save you.

Tianna. Is she his own personal panda cub? Is he doing this for her, or because his own ego refuses to allow him to be bested by nonces? The likes of Mr Confectioner or Dearing? Ultimately, he supposes, it doesn’t matter about the motive. What’s important is the action. Doing the right thing.

Lennox clicks off the television and tries to settle down again in the bed. He still can’t sleep. Tianna’s bag sits on the table. The sheep’s stupid face mocks him. He reaches over and picks it up. He doesn’t want to go through her things, but he’s a cop, and she’s in some kind of jeopardy. He needs to know stuff about her. Opening the various pouches and compartments of her bag, he feels the shameful power and acute agony of this newer violation of the girl. The cop and the nonce: brothers in atrocity. Apart from the baseball cards, a hairbrush and some cosmetics, there is the black-bound notebook. On the next page to her illustrative diamond is a scribbled entry:

Hi Nooshka,

I’m sorry that I ain’t had a chance to write you in a while. I guess I’m getting lazy. You’ll never guess what’s happened to me. I met this guy. His name is Ray. He lives in a castle, over in Scotland, way across the sea. I call him Bobby Ray. The big news is that we’re very much in love and we’re going to get married! I want you to be my bridesmaid! In a castle over in Scotland where we both shall live. You can come and visit, come to stay. You and Momma. We’re going to let her live in the cottage in the grounds where we can take care of her. She can come watch TV with us and eat with us in the grand hall.

Ray ain’t like the others, like you-know-who. Ray’s more like Uncle Chet but kind of younger and better-looking. He’s got sort of brown hair, cut real short, like he’s a US Marine or something.

I guess I’m worried about Momma. I pray for her. But I know that Ray will help her. I know that my Bobby Ray and Chet will make everything good. I wish we had stayed in Mobile. But the liar Vince was there and any case I would never have gotten to meet my sweet Bobby Ray.

Your dearest friend,

Tianna Marie Hinton

He lets the notebook fall on to the desk. Gets up once more to try and squeeze the last of the urine from his bladder. Nooshka sounded like an imaginary friend. Part of him, though, is flattered by the way the kid sees him, the trust she has in him. It’s just a silly crush. Like the one he had on his primary-school teacher, Miss Milne, simply because she was nice to him. But then he was a sexless child; she’s been fucked up by nonces, which gives the fantasy a dangerous edge. But even if it comes out messed up, the fact is the kid believes in him, wants to believe in him, so much. He can’t let her down. Yet he’s still sullied by the episode, crawling furtively back into bed on all fours.

Lennox puts the book back in the bag and looks at the cards again. Babe Ruth. Reggie Jackson. Mickey Mantle. Joe DiMaggio. Scots Bobby. He reads the career details on the back. Bobby Thomson wasn’t in the same league as the others, who were obviously giants of the game. His legendary status was based on that one shot, rather than his career record. Yet she’d kept him. He doesn’t get baseball. Maybe you have to be American. A yawn rips open his jaw; sleep is gnawing at him again.

Happy to succumb, he sinks like rainwater into a drain.

13 Edinburgh (3)

YOU THOUGHT ABOUT Britney’s last days as you sat in the Stockbridge Deli, the uncertain silvery sky outside offering you no reassurance. It seemed her body was dumped from the grassy clifftop to the pebbled inlet on that treacherous Saturday night, before the hardy walkers had found it the next morning. The murder though, the coroner had estimated, had been done earlier on Saturday afternoon, through strangulation. Mr Confectioner had kept her prisoner for three and a half days of a hell meticulously pieced together by pathologists and forensic scientists.

An old woman was staring at you in the café; you were rattling the cup of black coffee against the saucer. You stopped, scoured the occupants: a sea of blonde, ginger and black domes fading to a ubiquitous pinky grey. Everyone looked both archetypally North European and slightly shabby, perhaps a trick only the Scots could properly master.

For the Nula Andrews investigation, the Welwyn Garden City police had set up a false grave complete with headstone and attendant publicity in the local newspapers. It was a tactic police forces often deployed. They knew that the confessional urge was strong and that the killer often felt the irresistible compulsion to visit the resting place and talk to the victim. CCTV camera and microphone equipment was concealed in the overhanging trees, filming and recording the disclosures of Nula’s posthumous visitors.

George Marsden had been an advocate of this approach, but now he had reservations, as you found out when you’d gone back to the office to make another lengthy phone call to Eastbourne. — It got the wrong man banged up, Ray.

But you were starting to think that it was the last chance; bar the Graham Cornell dead end, the trail had gone cold. Robert Ellis was just one of the misfits who cheaply ‘confessed’ to the victim at the Hertfordshire grave. Ellis’s tape made sickening listening. Innocent Nula was cruelly derided as a rabid slut who craved all kinds of sexual practices. Though his back was to the camera, it appeared that Ellis was masturbating over her resting place as he gasped out his demented spiel. It confirmed him as a disturbed individual who’d gone badly wrong somewhere along the line, but, the cool heads asked, was he the murderer? Logistically, in the time frame, it would have meant that he possessed superhuman organisational skills and extraordinary focus. But the investigating officers knew that the public scented blood and the bosses would have retired long before the press, who had cheerled the lynch mob, had the inclination or courage to investigate fully. It quickly became unfashionable to be a cool head.

You studied the Welwyn files again, taking particular interest in the one person who hadn’t checked out. He’d made just one appearance, wearing a snorkel-hooded parka, and had stood silently at the grave till he was disturbed – ironically by the appearance of Robert Ellis. He’d crouched down before the headstone, looked at it for a bit, then, as Ellis came into the picture, got up and walked away. They’d briefly exchanged words. Ellis’s comments were picked up, but his back and his elongated hood ensured that nothing was heard from the other party.

You jumped in your car and drove down to Manchester. Ellis was in Strangeways Prison. He’d made a couple of visits to that city, en route from his Preston girlfriend’s place, and now he had got to know a little corner of it very well. You wanted to see if time had improved his memory.

Robert Ellis had fitness’s sheen and his eyes glinted with purpose. You never smoked but always took along a pack of cigarettes when visiting prisoners. Ellis politely declined the offer. You hated that this impressed you, but it was clear that some sort of a journey had been undertaken. Ellis was well aware of the irony of his condition: the prison in which he was wrongly incarcerated, and had spent the last few years trying to get out of, was perversely the making of him. — Even though I shouldn’t be here, this place has saved me, he admitted. — I was a fucked-up idiot. But a child killer? He laughed in derision. — Do me a favour.

— Parka man.

— Didn’t see much of him. He wore a scarf over his mouth. All I got was crazy eyes pointing at me from inside that big hood. I’m normally dead good at staring people out, but I felt the chill in his look, I’ll tell you that for nothing.

— What did he say?

— After I said, ‘It’s a sad thing,’ he goes: ‘Kids die all the time. Malnutrition. Disease.’

— Has anything about his voice come back to you: pitch, accent?

— I couldn’t place no accent. It wasn’t, like, Jock, Ellis smiled at you, then nodded to the silent screw in attendance, — or Northern, or even like mine. It was sort of posh, but not like a toff, just pretty nondescript.

— Why did you say those things about Nula? At her grave?

Ellis’s jaw clenched and something dulled in his eyes. You thought it might have been shame. — Cause I was a saddo. Fucked up, full of anger and desperate for attention. And guess what? He looked around his spartan surroundings and smiled broadly. — It worked! Then his grin receded a little. — But I don’t plan on getting too comfortable here.

— Oh aye?

— Cause you’re gonna get me out, ain’tcha?

Perhaps the journey wasn’t as pronounced as you’d given Ellis credit for. Under the polished facade, you smelt the old incarnation rising to the surface. — I’m gaunny find the bastard that killed Britney Hamil.

— Same thing, mate, Ellis said.

But for an excruciating few days the heat continued to pile on Cornell, who broke down and confessed. But not to Britney’s murder. He revealed the affair he’d been having with a married MSP, which was maliciously leaked to the papers. The MSP had the indignity of having to confirm these liaisons and destroy his career, in order to get the innocent man off the hook. Toal was shattered by this; he agreed then to let you set up the bogus gravestone and the CCTV cameras at Stockbridge cemetery.

Britney’s bogus funeral became an official one. Angela so skint, she’d pleaded, — Could youse no just, like, bury her for real? I’ll never be able to gie her anything like that…

So the local-council taxpayer footed the bill from the police budget. And then, after Britney’s remains were lowered into the earth, you waited in the van, watching on the screens every mortal soul who came close to her place of rest. It was a bleak and frustrating duty for everyone. It was impossible not to get backache or a stiff neck. November was on you and the world beyond the glass window was cold like curved marble.

On one occasion you’d gone for a piss. When you came back you found Notman standing outside, chatting to a woman. Enraged, you ran over to your colleague. — What the fuck are ye playin at?

Notman apologised as the bemused woman quickly walked away. — I just stepped out for five minutes to stretch my legs.

You went inside, played the tape back on one of the monitors. Nothing. Your heartbeat settled down. You thought about your team. It meant nothing to them, outside of their sneering pub and canteen bravado. It was just a fucking job: there were corners to be cut, time that needed stealing back. And you knew this because with anything else you were exactly the same. Notman, too, was now painfully aware of it. — This one’s special to you, right, Ray?

— I want the cunt.

— I hope you don’t think I’m talking out of turn, Notman said, — but you look fucking terrible. Are ye getting any kip?

— Naw. That wee lassie, she’s getting plenty for both of us.

You took double shifts. Tired and psychotic, you popped Benzedrine and snorted lines of cocaine to stay awake in the unmarked surveillance van outside the graveyard. You knew you would only have one chance.

At the same time, another local drama was unfolding. Most of the officers were supporters of Hearts Football Club, and were shocked that popular manager George Burley’s replacement was Graham Rix, an Englishman who had served a prison sentence for having underage sex with a fifteen-year-old girl. It was the afternoon following this announcement in the office at HQ, and you were preparing the Stockbridge surveillance rota. Dougie Gillman came in with a new Scotland coffee mug, discarding his Hearts one into the metal waste-paper basket.

— What’s up wi the Jambos’ yin? Notman asked.

— I wouldnae put it near ma fuckin lips as long as there’s a nonce in charge. Makes a mockery ay everything we stand for, Gillman barked.

Strung-out, you’d looked up and rounded on him. — What do we stand for, Dougie? What did you stand for in Thailand?

— We were on holiday. It’s different.

— Different, my arse.

But Gillman wasn’t at all defensive. — What about you, here? Wi Robbo? That wee lassie?

You fought the impulse to swallow hard. — That was nonsense… Robbo was a fuckin bam!

There had been a time when you and Robbo had been on an investigation and had barged in on a young couple having sex. The girl was underage, the boy not that much older. Robbo had gotten you to question the boy in the other room, while he spoke to the girl in the bedroom. He’d found pills, Ecstasy, in her bag. He’d briefly nipped out to ask you to confirm this. Then he’d gone back into the bedroom and cut a deal with the young girl. You often shuddered when you thought of what kind of deal it was, but no charges were pressed.

— Robbo was aw around the canteen wi that tale. Made the bird gam um, Gillman said. — Heard the wee lassie OD’d after. Stomach-pump job.

— If that did happen ah had nowt tae dae wi it!

— You kent what Robbo was like. Like you sais, a bam. You left him alaine wi an underage lassie. Think aboot that, Gillman sneered, sly and couthie. — Think aboot that when ye get on yir high horse and start telling tales oot ay school. Keep it oot, Lenny boy. Gillman provocatively tapped the side of his own nose. And you felt your eyes water, just as they had done in that Bangkok bar when the forehead of your colleague had smashed into your face.

But there were other things to think about besides your escalating war with Gillman. At almost 4 p.m. on an afternoon already swimming in dreich, nebulous darkness, those lonely, tedious days and neck-cricking nights of sitting in the van finally paid off. You’d been at Greggs, and were enjoying the sharp brief pleasure of solitude en route to bringing back sandy-coloured pies and coffee for yourself and Notman. Out of the blue, you were mugged by hail. The cold white stones stung you like pellets from an air rifle. You dived into the van, where Notman was glued to the monitors. The cantankerous weather drummed on the vehicle’s metal roof. It’ll pass, you’d thought, and it did, but not before intensifying furiously. You gratefully sipped the coffee as you’d talked about Hearts and its new East European owner’s penchant for controversy. The team under Rix was growing as quiescent as the overhanging trees in the graveyard, having their own winter shutdown.

Then you saw him on the screen. The man in the parka. Same parka. Same man. Standing above Britney’s grave. The man who was at Nula’s before being disturbed by Ellis. That snorkel hood of the parka, and the thrashing hail: would the mike pick up anything? It didn’t matter, you were flying towards the front gates, yelling at Notman to get round to the side entrance and head him off.

You bombed down the wet path, at one point almost losing your footing. But the man didn’t sense you advancing from behind him. Slowing down, you closed up on your quarry, creeping so near you could see the frosted breath coming from the side of the hood. — Sir! you shouted, pulling out your ID. — Police!

And Notman closing in from the other direction. You had him in a pincer movement. You anticipated a struggle, perhaps a desperate one. But the man didn’t run. Instead he turned round slowly, as if he’d been expecting this moment.

You knew it was Confectioner. Eyes arresting, yet at the same time strangely dead. Thick brown hair, slightly grizzled at the temples. Ruddy complexion. Small, broad and powerfully built, like he was from farming stock, though he’d probably never seen a farm in his life.

Notman was with you now. The man gazed from one cop to the other. — Had a decent run, he half shrugged, half smiled, as if he’d been done for shoplifting.

That offhand arrogance. The abhorrent, horrendous world he inhabited, how he’d normalised it for himself. By extension, nurtured a contempt and loathing for broader human society that you would feel the unremitting brunt of. It scared you. Made you feel weak and small even though you had a righteous outrage and the whole British state and its citizens behind you. And now Mr Confectioner had a name. — I’m Gareth Horsburgh, he’d smiled cheerfully. — Call me Horsey.

You went to your father’s office in Haymarket; you hadn’t seen the old man in a while. You’d take him out for a pint. This would ensure that you’d just have one: you always screwed the nut in his company. You smiled at Jasmine, the admin assistant who worked with him, and who took you through to his small office, where your dad had just set down the phone. You could hear his ragged breathing. You couldn’t see, through your own shit, just how messed up your father was. Emotionally, he gave little away. But there were physical signs. For a while, you’d been noticing a tightening and reddening of the skin on his face. Age was overcooking and reducing him; the scarlet marks where the cheekbones pressed from underneath had spread and flared.

But when your father spoke, your mind was on ‘Horsey’, the divorced civil servant who lived near Aylesbury with his invalid mother. A consensus through associates and work colleagues soon emerged: Gareth Horsburgh was depressingly ordinary. A pleasant enough man to say hello to, if a little pompous and pedantic in company. He could have been any suburban golf-club bore, the sort you felt comfortable about having one drink with before making your excuses.

You felt you were in the throes of some powerful auditory hallucination, a hangover from the grisly interviews with Horsburgh and the horror of the lugubrious beast’s disclosures, as the gravelly voice of your father informed you, — At least ten years it’s been going on, Ray, he’d said in stunned outrage as he dumped a box file on to his desk, — her and Jock Allardyce. Fucking behind my back for ten years. My Avril – your mother – and Jock Allardyce.

It was the ‘fucking’ that got you. Not even because your dad never swore in front of any of his family, save for an injured ‘bastard’ you’d heard him gasp in grim disbelief when Albert Kidd’s first strike hit the net for Dundee up at Dens Park back in ’86. It was the image of your mother, sweaty and lusty, being humped by family friend and neighbour, old divorcee Jock Allardyce; the man you’d grown up calling ‘Uncle Jocky’. Your skin prickled with the prudishness of offspring confronted with paternal sexuality. Staring into the goat-like eyes of your father, belligerent yet bemused, you had to fight down the desire to laugh out loud. — What will you do? You felt your finger rising nervously to the side of your nose. The cramped office had just got smaller.

— What can I dae? We’d stopped having sex, he said, matter-of-factly, — when I had the heart thing. It was the medication. It thins the blood. Ah cannae… He faltered and shrugged. — I tried Viagra, but they said it was dangerous for me. I even started looking at porn, to see if anything came back, but no use, just twinges. Your mother still wants sex, what right dae I have tae stand in her way?

— She’s your wife, you said, now angry for the first time, both with the old man’s lack of self-respect and your mother’s betrayal.

— What sort of husband am I?

You cleared your throat. This was too much for you to take in. Horsburgh, violently stealing sex from children. Your father, unable to partake in it with his wife. Your mother, banging away with their friend and neighbour. You had no wish to be spoon-fed details. — Have you spoken to Stuart about this?

The old man looked surprised. — Why would I do that?

Try, cause I’ve heard a lot fucking more than I want to, you’d thought. — Stuart’s good on that kind of thing. An actor. Understands people. Their motivations.

— I thought that as a cop—

— We lock people up, Dad.

Your father had nodded in disappointment as you took your leave, telling him you were too busy with this case for a pint, you’d just swung by to say hello as you happened to be passing. And that was to be the last time you’d see him. A few days later he dropped dead, discovered by Stuart on that same office floor. He’d been trying to tell you about a terrible secret that had haunted his life, and all you could think about was a despicable child killer.