Crime

14 Sea Legs

THE AUCTION ROOMS are stuffy, crammed full of bodies. Lennox looks up at the sad, dropsical face of Bob Toal, who stands behind the lectern, hammer poised in his hand. The lot for sale is a life-sized female figure. It stands upright in a coffin, stiff and dead. It has the same blonde hair as Trudi, but the face of Jackie’s doll.

— From the Victorian era, Toal says gravely, — and such a sad tale. A beautiful young girl kidnapped and murdered in foul circumstances. The corpse has been preserved in formaldehyde and the bones connected by lightweight aluminium rods… He moves over to the doll, taking its hand and shaking it. The wrist remains in the extended position. — As you can see, our tragic young miss has been rendered perfectly pliable. Will make an ideal companion for the sick and lonely, or anyone who values the time-old feminine qualities of passivity and obedience…

Lennox turns a stiff and heavy neck to catch Amanda Drummond in the crowd, brushing a tear from her eye. —… I would like to start the bidding at one thousand pounds, Toal continues, then looks to a raised hand at the back of the room. It belongs to Ronnie Hamil. — One thousand pounds. Do I hear fifteen hundred…?

Another raised hand. It’s Mr Confectioner.

— Stop this auction, Lennox shouts. — Ye cannae sell her tae them! Ye ken what they want her for!

Nobody seems to hear him. One more hand goes up. Lance Dearing, wearing a Stetson and cowboy suit, flanked by a grinning Johnnie. — Two thousand, Toal smiles, — and I’ll take this opportunity to remind our friend Mr Dearing from the USA, that remuneration is in pounds sterling rather than US dollars, he jokes to polite laughter from the floor.

Lennox tries to move towards the stage but his shins suddenly have the density of metal bars.

— It’s my fiancée… it’s my…

Something sticks in his windpipe, rendering his cry a soft, frustrating gasp.

All he can do is look at the profile of Dearing, bathed in a green light, giving him a gator-like cast. — I am aware of the currency of transaction, Mr Toal, and he turns and winks at Lennox, — but I’m sure if I find myself somewhat short then my ol buddy Ray here will be pleased to help out for such a purty lil’ prize.

— Let’s up the stakes, a voice shouts in a thick Midlands accent from the back of the hall. — Two million quid.

Lennox looks round, but the man seems to be moving to correspond, always just out of his line of vision. There are others, but they remain in shadow. Exasperation and fear eat at him.

Toal is about to close the bidding when Lennox sees his old mate Les Brodie as a young boy, looking at him, tugging his sleeve, urging him to bid. — Say something, Raymie!

But his throat has seized up and Lennox can’t speak. Toal’s hammer comes down with a strong bang. It pulls Lennox into another, better place. Again.

A better place.

For a few brief seconds Ray Lennox thinks he can see flamingos, shrouded in soft white mist, dancing in the mangrove bushes. Blinking, it becomes evident that he’s merely woken up into a gorgeous pink sunrise, the room bathed in a coral flush almost neon in its intensity.

That soft tap-tap-tapping on the door: cagey but insistent. He realises that the baseball cards are still in his hand. Quickly puts them back into the sheep bag on the bedside table. It’s hot and he’s drenched in sweat. His ravaged throat just about manages to squeeze out, — One minute, as he rises to the door, opening it up and peeking round.

It’s Tianna. She has his End of the Century T-shirt on. — I borrowed this, she says, her mouth turned down in the self-loathing, apologetic manner of the morning-after drunk. — I gotta get my stuff.

— Right. Give me a second.

He shuts the door and pulls on his trousers, switching on the air-con unit before letting her in. — Okay, he says to the shame-faced girl, assailed by his own mendacious guilt as he steals a parting glimpse at the bag and considers the secrets it contains. Lennox goes outside, waits a spell, before furtively grabbing the T-shirt her extended arm passes out to him. Heading to his original room, he pauses in its doorway to marvel at the salmon-and-grenadine sky, and briefly enjoy the soft blare of truck horns from the distant freeway.

In his room he locks the door and discards the T-shirt and trousers in a heap at his feet. There is still a tiredness about him, behind his eyes, in his limbs, but he feels stronger and more together. He does a full range of boxer’s stretches and, mindful to put the weight on the balls of his hands, one hundred press-ups on the worn carpet, feeling the satisfying burn in his muscles, before jumping under the shower jet, luxuriating there till the water gets tepid. Towelling quickly, he gets dressed, catching the dusky, honeyed scent of the girl on his Ramones tee as he pulls it on.

A short time later, Tianna returns to his room. Her hands clutch the sheep bag chastely in front of her. — I wanna say sorry for last night.

— You shouldn’t behave like that, it isn’t right. Because somebody’s done bad stuff to you, you don’t make up for it by doing something bad to somebody else, he says. — Do you know what I’m saying?

Tianna sits on the bed, still gripping her bag. — I’m sorry, Ray, she says wretchedly. — You been real good to me. Her eyes go watery before they rapidly fuse in panic. — You won’t tell Momma?

Lennox looks at her. — You were wrong to do what you did, but I’m accepting your apology. I won’t be saying anything to anybody.

— Like it’s our secret?

Secrets between adults and children: nonce currency again. Lennox bristles. — Like I said, it’s between the two of us. You did a bad thing, but you were big enough to apologise, so I’m being big enough to accept your apology, end of story.

Tianna sets the bag down on the bed. She forces a strained, kindly smile at him. — See, Ray… when he, when Vince, when he touched me and kissed me n stuff… it didn’t feel right, y’know?

Lennox nods tightly.

— It felt all kinda dirty. But I thought that if I got to do it with somebody I liked, then it would feel right. Like it wouldn’t be dirty, like things wouldn’t be all weird.

— No. It’s meant to feel all strange and nasty, because you’re too young, Lennox states. — Good things’ll happen to you, but they’ll happen when you’re ready for them. Don’t let them take your childhood away. He thinks of himself at roughly her age, with Les Brodie, pushing his bike into that dark tunnel.

— There ain’t nuthin wrong with bein a kid, she says, halfway between a declaration and a question.

— Of course not. Not if you are. That’s the point of it, he says. — We start off as babies, we like certain things. You wouldn’t expect a baby to like catfish or chocolate malt or Beauty and the Geek, would you?

Tianna’s mouth forms a smile as she nods in agreement.

— But there’s nothing wrong with being a baby if that’s what you are. Then we grow into kids, we like different things. Then into adults, and it’s different things again. He watches her nod in understanding. — This Uncle Chet, can you tell me a bit about him?

— He’s my mum’s… she begins, before conceding, —… friend. He’s a friend. His granddaughter Amy is my friend. She’s real nice. Chet ain’t my real uncle. But he’s been good to us. He ain’t like Vince.

— Who’s Vince?

— I don’t like to talk about him to nobody, she says, then looks pointedly at him, adding, — only to Nooshka.

She knows that I’ve been going through her stuff. Or at least she thinks I might have and she’s covering all bases. — Who’s Nooshka? he asks coolly, in spite of the sinking feeling in his gut.

Tianna regards him cautiously before replying. — My best friend.

— She at school with you?

She shakes her head.

— A different school?

Tianna slumps back on to the bed, looking up at the ceiling fan. — I guess so. She’s just always there when I need her most. I can write her bout things.

— Like a pen pal?

She seems not to hear him, as if mesmerised by the circling fan. When she finally speaks it’s in a flat but sing-songy voice, as if she’s going through the ritual of a game she’s bored with. — You know, when I write her, things ain’t so bad after. You know, when things don’t go well and you ain’t got nobody to talk to. I can talk to Momma sometimes, but only bout certain things.

— Did you ever tell your mum about Vince?

She twists round till she is prone on the bed, then props herself on her elbows. Her front teeth push down on her bottom lip. Then she looks at him and nods slowly.

— What happened? Lennox asks, fighting to keep his voice from slipping into cop-interrogation mode.

Tianna sits up and pulls her knees towards her, holding her shins tightly. She lets her hair tumble in front of her face. After falling silent for a spell, when she finds a voice, it’s small and haunted, belonging to a younger child. — The first time I told Momma bout him, she just started to cry. Then she got real pissed at me. Said that I was wrong, and now there’s anger in her voice, — that I was a bad girl. I was jus jealous and tryin to stop her bein happy. So I couldn’t talk to Momma none. She loved those guys, I guess she needed them to love her, a bizarre, almost sanguine authority now seeping into her tones.

Them. Unease slithers under Lennox’s skin.

— What was he like, this Vince? Lennox feels his voice assume that disembodied characteristic, like it’s another self, separating from a common physical source.

That mechanism has served him well in distancing himself from unpleasantness on the job; she’s deploying a version of it too. — Vince was real nice at first. He and Momma met on the computer. He used to treat her real good, and first he treat me good too. He told me that he loved my momma. Then he told me that I was a special girl and that he loved me too. Sometimes he would buy me things or take me out to a movie. It had to be our secret as Momma would yell and think that he was spoilin me. These were the best times, she says, actually glowing in the memory. — I used to call him Pappy. He liked that, but he told me never to say it in front of Momma. Then one day he said he had to confess that he loved me more than anyone, even Momma. Said he didn’t like showin it too much in front of her in case it caused her hurt. Sometimes when we was out together, at a diner, if a waitress asked, ‘Is that your little girl?’ he would smile and look at me and say, ‘It sure is.’ It felt so good and I would have done anything for Pappy Vince. There are dark shadows under her eyes, though it’s probably just the light.

Please stop…

Lennox can’t bear to hear Tianna’s words. Yet he can’t protest; his own voice rendered silent in his starched trachea. Needs her to talk and wants her to stop. Sitting still in the green chair, paralysed, in a seemingly oxygen-free room, all he can do is wait for her to continue.

Holiday…

— Then he got us playin the secret games. Hide-and-seek, catch-and-chase. He started giving me kisses. Different to the ones he gave me before. Wet kisses that went on a long time, with his big tongue in my mouth. It didn’t feel right and I didn’t like the way he changed, her face creases in pain, — became all serious, like he was in a trance. Not like Pappy Vince at all. And the only way I could make him come back was to touch him; touch his boy parts until what he called the bad stuff came. Then he was fine again. But then he got to doin different things… like man and woman things.

Different things…

Wedding…

— Then I guess Momma got sad with Pappy Vince and wanted to move. That’s when we went to Jacksonville and she met Clemson and then we came here and met Starry and Johnnie and Lance. Her eyes suddenly bulge in rage. — I hate them, Ray! I hate them all!

Lennox has listened impassively, his guts and mind churning. Clemson. He can’t ask. He finds his voice. — You don’t need to tell me any more just now.

— Ray?

— What is it?

— Can I get a hug? she asks, standing up and moving towards him.

— Course you can, princess. Lennox rises and takes the child in his arms. Wants to tell her that he’ll make sure nothing can hurt her but then elects to remain silent. How many beasts had said that before?

Beasts like Mr Confectioner. They know all the weaknesses.

Even when I had him in custody. Interrogated him.

I interrogated him: that smirking, evil, arrogant, nonce cunt. I should have crushed him, hurt him, made him feel like he’d made them feel.

— Oww, you’re kinda squashing me.

Lennox’s mind shoots out from that interrogation room, crosses an ocean and thuds into his skull like an arrow. He lets go of the girl he has in his arms. — Sorry… He steps back.

She forces a grim smile as she rubs her shoulder.

He looks awkwardly at her. — Listen, Tianna, I’d really like you to be a bridesmaid, at my wedding back in Scotland. Would you do that for me? He gulps in horror at his own words. He’s overstepped the mark with the kid, now he’s bribing her. Just like them. Just like the dirty nonces.

— That would be awesome! she shouts, dancing ecstatically on the spot. — I get to wear a dress, right?

— Yeah… I mean… if it’s okay with your mum.

— And go in a plane?

— Aye. He tries to calculate the cost of a plane fare in September.

She puts her hand up and they give each other the high-five. — Aye! she mimics. — You’re the coolest, Ray Lennox.

I’m no the coolest but I’m no like them, Lennox thinks. I’ll never, ever be like them. He hopes she’s never had that perspective of him. But it’s how the motel clerk views him that’s pressing: he’s disinclined to hang about and arouse suspicion. Each time his body threatens to relax, the enormity of the situation spears Lennox in the chest; he’s a thirty-something man in a motel in a strange country with a young girl, who isn’t his daughter. They check out at around nine forty.

Looking at his face in the car mirror, he notices a bit of grey coming in at the temples where the hair is growing back. Trudi had warned him about shaving it so closely. But he’s oddly elated. There he was, depressed, lonely and hung-over in a strange place, without his medication and possibly more vulnerable than he’d ever been in his life. Well, almost. And with someone who trusted him, his sex drive returning as the pharmaceutical administrations ran down. He knew, though, that he would rather have cut off his dick than put it near Tianna or any other child. Ironically, her inappropriate and sad behaviour has helped him. Helped to show him that no matter how far he’d fallen he had a line below which he’d never submerge. The bar wasn’t raised very high. But it was there. Now he has to help her. He can raise it by helping her.

He finds himself contemplating some of the men he knows; men he calls friends, a few who had been abusive in relationships, others who’d went with prostitutes, who’d flown out to places like Prague and Kiev and Bangkok for sex holidays. What would they have done if they’d been in his shoes?

A sudden deluge of inky darkness smothers the light in seconds, followed by a crackling yellow vein in the sky ahead. Then an explosion of thunder rumbles in his ears, causing him to start and click on the headlights. Now the rain’s thrashing down, beating a frantic, dread tattoo on the roof of the car. The wipers can’t keep up; Lennox is about to pull over in desperation when it stops like a faucet being turned off, and the pinky-blue sky reappears.

There’s no telling when Chet’s boat will come in, but it might not be for a while. Breakfast is on the agenda, and the 107 Intersection delivers them to yet another suburban mall full of fast-food outlets. The International House of Pancakes is Tianna’s breakfast choice, Lennox agreeing that it seems the least offensive of the franchise hell village they pull into.

The waitress approaches, a middle-aged, portly Latina woman, brisk and efficient. — Can I take your order?

— I’d like orange juice, two eggs over easy with hash browns, bacon and some coffee, Lennox says with a tight smile and a glaze in his eyes. The woman has given him the horn. He looks at her strong thighs and wonders what rubbish might spill from his lips if he were between them.

— You gat it, the waitress snaps sassily, scenting something in his aura. — What about you, Miss? She turns to Tianna.

— I’ll have the same.

The waitress departs, soon to return with two big pint glasses of orange juice. — Enjoy, she threatens.

Lennox does. He has never tasted orange juice like it. The Florida sunshine explodes in his taste buds and a small glass would never have been enough. The food is a mass of congealed, saturated gunge; it’s standard obesity fodder and he picks at it. — They don’t do freshly ground pepper in the States, just this powdery stuff. There’s no spicy food culture here.

— Stop complaining, Ray Lennox, Tianna says, the use of his full name reminding him of Trudi, — at least your Skarrish cold sounds better!

Lennox succumbs to a grin. It’s good to see her happy, to find the kid back after the twisted nymphet of last night and the troubled old soul of earlier this morning. — The Florida sunshine is working its magic, he says, rising. — Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to visit the boys’ room.

As he departs, he wonders exactly how much she knows. How many ‘Scottish colds’ has Robyn suffered from over the years?

Inside the men’s room: sink, toilet and urinal with plastic grate in it emblazoned with the slogan SAY NO TO DRUGS. Now people could line up and piss on the message. His urine is looking clearer; free from the drugs prescribed by self and others. The action of peeing, though, has made him realise he needs a more extensive toilet, so he sits down on the pan, finally relieved to be able to execute that business. He reads some graffiti above the toilet-paper dispenser:

He feels satisfaction tighten his lips as they leave the diner and get back on to the road. They pass a pickup truck with a yellow ribbon and a ‘Honk If You Support Our Troops’ sticker.

— Ain’tcha gonna honk? Tianna asks, as sunlight showers like sulphur grains across her face.

— No. What business have American and British troops got being in Iraq? I haven’t seen any Iraqi troops in our countries, dropping bombs on us, he says.

Tianna contemplates this for a few seconds. Then she looks evenly at Lennox and says, — I guess it’s jus plain wrong to interfere with somebody smaller than you, jus cause you’re bigger and stronger than them… and can try and trick em with words.

— Yes, he replies, feeling himself croaking up again. So he glances to the window at a banner fluttering outside a church: NO HIGH LIKE THE MOST HIGH.

His eyes are drawn upwards to more white fluffy clouds in the pale blue sky. Lennox’s sinuses are clearing. His hangover is definitely receding. The long sleep has helped him. He doesn’t crave cocaine any more, or even a drink. The sun is doing it all for him.

They listen to a country station as they pass a long strip of used-car dealerships on the way back to Bologna. Once more Brad Paisley’s ‘Alcohol’ comes on the radio.

As they get back down by the marina, a large boat is sailing in. It has a black-and-white fibreglass hull and carries the name Ocean Dawn. It isn’t the biggest vessel in the harbour, but it’s substantial enough, about forty foot, Lennox estimates. Then a man waves from the bridge and Tianna starts fervently gesticulating back at him. — Uncle Chet!

— Why, hey there, Tianna Marie! the sailor booms. — What are you up to? He looks suspiciously at Lennox, then back at her. — Where’s that crazy momma of yours?

— She’s kinda sick, I guess.

— Now, that’s too bad, Chet says, as he backs the boat in. Don Wynter, who has emerged from his office, helps him to tie it securely to the mooring posts. As the younger, and presumably fitter, man, Lennox feels it appropriate to offer a hand. Takes a step forward but then hesitates; they seem to know what they’re doing. Don slaps Chet on the back and they exchange brief pleasantries before he heads back to the office, explaining that he has some calls to make.

Thank fuck for that, Lennox thinks, as Tianna and Chet embrace. He feels the genuine warmth in it; there is no stoat-the-baw sleaze coming from Chet Lewis. So he looks out across the harbour. A white-chested osprey swoops and soars off with a struggling fish in its claws. But there is no sense of human threat here. Chet is benign decency personified. It is over, and Tianna is now in safe hands.

Those hands belong to a man in his sixties, with a strong, fine face under a long-billed fishing cap, which he removes to reveal a salt-and-pepper crew cut. Some slight jowling is evident in his close-shaven face, but there is a youthful enigmatic spark in his blue-grey eyes. He has a casual, easy manner and a gentle strength that Lennox associates with the small-town America of the movies, though an undercurrent of dynamism seems to fuse his frame, packed around his strong shoulders. He’s a contradiction; his accent and bearing suggest money, but his muscular build and flat stomach seem to indicate that he’s no stranger to physical work. Wearing a tropical shirt, white flannels and sneakers, he sticks his hand out. — Chet Lewis.

As Lennox coughs out his title, another sabotaging frog jams in his throat.

— Pleased to know you, Lennox, Chet says, obviously failing to pick up on the given name.

Chet stares at Lennox. Normally he wouldn’t take kindly to anybody evaluating him in such a blatant manner, but in the circumstances it seems entirely appropriate. He tells Chet the story, omitting once again his true occupational status. The old insurance tale does the trick.

The sailor listens patiently. He seems on the level and Tianna likes him, but Lennox needs to be one hundred per cent certain so he is happy to accept when Chet invites them aboard. As they climb on to the rear deck, the host says, — Thank you so much for looking after this young lady, as Tianna explores, going down into the cabins. His voice drops, to remove her from earshot. — I’m not sure I know this Lance character, although I think I may have heard Robyn mention him. He and his cohorts seem very unsavoury. Robyn’s a nice girl, but she does have… issues.

Lennox’s expression accedes that irrefutable truth. — So how do you know her and Tianna?

— I have my granddaughter, Amy, to thank for that. Last summer she was staying with me for a week and we met Robyn and Tianna, who’s the same age as Amy, at the Parrot World in Miami. The kids hit it off, but Robyn seemed a little distressed. So I invited them on to the boat the next day. We had a fine time and they were good company. The friendship just blossomed, Chet beams, before his jaw abruptly moves south. — But I have to say that she seems to attract a rather dubious sort of male companion. I’ve had a few tearful calls from her on that subject.

Lennox nods in agreement.

— So I’m sorry if I might appear a little suspicious.

— Perfectly understandable. I met those guys.

— Tianna will be safe here until I can find out what’s happened to her mother. But now I have to check on some crab pots and lobster creels I put out a few days ago, which I stupidly forgot to pick up, so please, join us for a short trip out to sea.

— I’d love to, but I’ve got to get back to Miami Beach.

Tianna comes back up the steps and stands in the doorway. — Please stay a while, she begs. — You gotta come for a sail in Chet’s boat, hasn’t he, Chet?

— I think Lennox is busy, honey.

— How long will it take?

— Oh, about an hour, Chet says.

— Okay, he responds breezily, — I’d like to see a bit of the Gulf. He thinks of Trudi. Things seemed fine again. — I’m on holiday, right?

— Yes! That’s so fucking awesome, Tianna says, then puts her hand to her mouth as Chet winces and moves up to the top deck.

— Aye, mind the language, Lennox says, — it shows lack of imagination and vocabulary.

— Sorry…

— I mean saying ‘awesome’ all the time.

— You don’t mind me saying ‘F’?

Lennox looks up towards Chet, then winks at her. — Next time maybe just say SFA. It’s a term of endearment we use back in Scotland. After our much loved Scottish Football Association.

— SFA… she says before her eyes mercurially luminesce. — Did you really mean what you said about me being a bridesmaid?

— Aye. He grants with a wink. Another thing to square with Trudi.

Chet’s distaste at the kid’s expletive was real enough, but he recovers sufficiently to give Lennox a quick tour of the boat. — This is a 410 Express Cruiser. Good for both fishing trips, and cruising longer distances. I occasionally go to the Caribbean islands; and sometimes down to Key West.

— It’s a fair old size.

— Forty-four foot.

Not a bad guess, Lennox considers as they move from the rear deck’s open seating area. It leads to a door on one side, which takes you down to the cabins. Next to the door, a few steps ascend to the boat’s helm. Lennox follows Chet up, and is shown the controls and the craft’s satellite navigation systems. He’s never been on a boat in his life, bar a police launch, which had been taken out to intercept The Lassie of the Forth, an old ferry ship booked for a private party that they’d busted for drugs. He hadn’t enjoyed the experience much, being on a brutal cocaine comedown at the time.

Stretching out in front of them is the main deck area, bordered with a metal railing. It has three skylights cut in it to provide natural light to the quarters below. Two more skylights are dinted into the canopy above the helm. Lennox notices that on top of this roof there is a radio transmitter-receiver with an aerial, and a box and disc he assumes to be part of the navigation equipment.

Gripping the handrail in his good fist, he follows Chet on an arse-first descent down a small series of oak steps. The cabin smells of oiled wood and diesel, but it gleams in pristine opulence as they emerge into an oak-panelled kitchen and dining area, fitted with expensive-looking units, appliances and fixtures. The seating area opposite is decked out in white leather.

— Had the boat long? Lennox enquires.

— Just four months. A part trade-in on my last one. The broker’s a personal friend, so I got a good deal.

— Bet it set you back, though.

— You do not want to know, my friend, Chet laughs.

Aye I do, Lennox thinks, I’m a nosy cunt of a bizzy. The kitchen is at least as big as the one in his flat back in Leith. It leads to what Chet a little pompously refers to as the formal stateroom, the main sleeping quarters under the front deck. It’s dominated by a king-sized bed and plasma television, and there are more oak-panelled cupboards, done out in the same style as the rest of the boat.

There’s a smaller bedroom at the other end of the vessel, with a lower ceiling as it lies directly below the decked seating area to the bow. It contains a bed and a long seat that runs the length of the cabin and which could be used as a bunk for a kid or a small adult.

— Sweet, Lennox says, as he peeks in the toilet with its handbasin, jacks and full shower. — It’s bigger than my flat, eh, apartment, he corrects himself. — Do you live here full-time?

— Almost. Chet’s aura expands. — I have a small place in a development close by, but it’s a glorified storage place and mailbox. We’re gonna cast off in about half an hour or so, and I gotta refuel and check on some things at the office. As I said, the trip should take about an hour, an hour and a half if we stop for lunch. You sure you can spare the time?

— Aye, Lennox says, checking a digital clock built into the units. It’s still early, so he decides he’ll call Trudi and let her know that everything is okay, before another thought gatecrashes. — Is there an Internet facility out here?

— Best bet’s the café a few blocks back from the harbour road.

Lennox climbs out the boat and heads across the lot towards the car. Tianna comes running after him. — Where you goin, Ray?

— Just to find an Internet café. I’ll be back in half an hour; then we go sailing and get some lunch. You stay here.

— Okay, she says, skipping away for a couple of steps, before turning round. — You will come back though, huh, Ray?

— Aye! I’m just going to make a phone call and then get the Scottish Cup draw, ya donut!

— Aye! She taps her eye with her index finger. — You’re the goddamn donut! she shouts before bounding over to the boat.

— SFA! he laughs, watching her depart as he climbs back into the Volkswagen. He winces as the hot seat burns his bare arm. As he starts up the motor, maxing up the cold air, he can’t help but think of the contrast with the freezing surveillance van parked outside the cemetery in Edinburgh, only a couple of months ago.

Lennox finds the Net café easy enough and checks out Jambos’ Kickback. The discussion on one thread is ongoing, now eighteen pages long. It centres around whether it is desirable to have a man who has been convicted of unlawful sex with an underage girl as the coach of Heart of Midlothian FC.

The club’s board appointed a nonce as team boss. He had a great coaching pedigree, they said.

Lennox can’t decide. The cunt made a mistake. If she’s fifteen you’re a nonce. If she’s sixteen you’re a lucky bastard. But no, you can say that when you’re twenty but not when you’re forty. He knew the score. He was a predator. But the boy was split from his wife and family. He was lonely. He made a human mistake. Fuck sake fuck sake fuck sake—

He hits the next thread.

Did anyone feel, in all honesty, that there was a suspicion of offside at Skacel’s winner against Kilmarnock on Saturday?

Then he saw that Maroon Mayhem was online. The Craig Gordon thread; a reply to his last point.

Who do you think you are to criticise my opinion? You should watch what you say, my friend. You’re getting a bit personal. I’d watch that if I were you.

Who is this cunt?

Lennox signs in and batters the keys.

I’m not your friend. You are a ****ing muppet. Is that personal enough?

Then he switches over to the BBC Sports site. Hearts had drawn Aberdeen at home. Astonishingly, Celtic had lost to Clyde! Hibs had drawn Rangers at Ibrox, so their Scottish Cup nightmare would inevitably continue. It was shaping up nicely. He flicks back to Kickback.

This cretin had gotten back in touch.

You don’t know who you are messing with here. I know a lot of the people. Watch yourself. You can be easily found.

Lennox feels a rage burning inside him; this loser has been known to make threats on the web before.

I’ll save you the bother, and tell you exactly where I am. Miami. But I’ll be back in Edinburgh on the 21st of January. On the 22nd I’ll be at the Vodka Bar in Shandwick Place at 1 p.m. wearing a black leather jacket. I’ll even tell you my name: Raymond Lennox. My season ticket number is O52 in the Wheatfield. Please make yourself known to me so that I can rip your head off. I’ll be very surprised if you do. You and anybody else who gets their rocks off acting hard in this way are usually fourteen-year-old virgins or other antisocial retards who live at home with their mothers. But I’d be delighted if you were to prove me wrong. C’mon. Give me your name and where you want to meet up for a quiet little drink. Anywhere. Name it. I’ll be there.

It takes time to check, send and post his message. Then, as he clicks refresh the board administrator comes on.

Okay, you two, it’s time to call a halt to all this.

Lennox suddenly registers the clock in the corner of the screen. He is late. Panic rises in his chest. What if—

I shouldn’t have left her. Not till I was totally sure. But Chet’s… No, how plausible Confectioner had seemed too! They could be away now, her tied up downstairs, him taking the boat to a secret perverts’ lair. And she’d wanted to come with me and I’ve fucking well left her!

Ray Lennox slams a twenty-dollar bill on the counter in front of a perplexed sales clerk as he tears out the café.

15 Fishing for Friends

LENNOX SCORCHES THE tyres for the block’s drive, ripping into the marina and parking the Volkswagen as close as he can to the moored vessels. Jumping out, he sprints round the corner to the brokers’ shopfronts, his heart thrashing and the tint of metal in his mouth. Britney… Tianna… I’ve fucked it again… the fucking boat…

They all look the same, these iridescent symbols of wealth: that opaline glow against the black water of the harbour, the sleek sterility. Then his eyes register a familiar figure and a huge gasp explodes from him as he stops and bends, letting his hands rest on his knees. Chet.

It’s still there. The boat. Chet is leaving the harbour master’s office. Tianna is…

She is over on one of the gangways, watching a big pelican standing on a mooring post that protrudes from the water.

Chet sees the breathless Scot first. — Come on, Lennox, we’ve been waiting on you. Thought you’d run out on us!

Just as he savours the palpable relief on Tianna’s face, Lennox realises that he hasn’t called Trudi. The whole purpose of going was to call her, he ticks in self-flagellating remorse as his respiratory system regulates. I sometimes think you care more about Hearts than me, Ray. She knew not to say that again after the way he’d responded the last time: I care more about Hibs than you. It was a shabby old joke handed down through the generations, but the humour was lost on her. Perhaps Chet would have a phone on the boat or a cell he could borrow.

Climbing on to the craft, they cast off, Lennox this time assisting Chet, who informs him that the birds crushed on the road and which patrol overhead are black vultures. There is a funereal beauty to their languid circling and sudden, explosive swoops. Chet provides a band with crocodile clips on each end, for the purpose of attaching the Red Sox cap to the back collar of Lennox’s T-shirt. — Old sailor’s trick, he explains, — you lose a few of these at sea otherwise.

Lennox gratefully accepts the offering as they head on to the canal system, rather than traversing straight across the harbour to open sea. — It’s a short cut, Chet, at the helm, says. They coast past glass-fronted homes with big orange-treed gardens backing on to the labyrinth of waterways. The water is a muscular greeny blue. The shade-splotched route is lined with palms of various shapes and sizes; cabbage, royal and coconut. Huge pelicans sit in mangrove trees, easily supported, Chet informs him, due to their slight mass. Again, Lennox thinks of the gulls he and Les Brodie had blown away in that spirit of adolescent cruelty that some are never quite able to shed.

A beam of white light falls under the Red Sox visor into his eyes, briefly obliterating the deific comedy. As his vision is restored, the birds’ noises and colours make him think of romance and he wishes Trudi was here to share this with him, to see how good it all worked out. He thinks back to Edinburgh, the ornithological experience generally limited to scavenging seagulls, oily cooing pigeons and cheeping sparrows bouncing like shuttlecocks along slate pavements.

Chet Lewis is telling Ray Lennox how he and his wife Pamela, who died two years ago, retired to Florida from Long Island. They’d always loved to sail and had purchased a plot of land, building their own home on it. It was partially destroyed by Charlie, he explains. Lennox, thinking of cocaine, is about to say ‘it happens’ before realising that Chet is referring to the hurricane.

In spite of his superficial good cheer and health, Lennox can now discern that Chet’s withering in the void left by his wife. There is a hollowed-out aspect to him, denuded by a terrible sadness that has settled in his eyes.

The banked homes and gardens are soon supplanted by the mangroves, which thicken to form a dense swamp. Chet explains that the bushes actually live on fresh water: rain, dew and the stuff in the earth, their roots going down deep. Then Lennox is startled as, only a few feet from the boat, a diving duck suddenly slams head first into the canal.

As they approach open water, a group of men are fishing from a pier. Lennox envies their easy camaraderie, envisions them getting older and fatter without bothering too much. Maybe age gives you that grace, where, with mortality looming, you really do learn not to give a fuck about anything other than the sun coming up and you and yours being able to draw breath every morning. Or perhaps they’re miserable suffering bastards inside, and death pounces when we finally see the futility of fronting it. He’ll find out soon enough, God willing. For the first time he wants to fast-forward into old age, at least how he perceives the good version of it; to drive out the vestiges of desire, ego, bullshit and insecurity. To have found that well of contentment that you want to drink from, and to just do that each day.

Tianna is sprawled on the front deck’s lilo, reading Perfect Bride. Ray’s here and Chet’s here, and they are on the boat and at sea, away from Johnnie and Lance and the rest, but there is unease in the sunken well of her guts. It’s not Ray, it’s not Chet, but it’s the boat itself. Ocean Dawn is making her sick, for the first time.

Chet yells for her to come down. — Gonna kick things up now, he says, sly and knowing. Tianna shakily joins them at the enclosed rear deck, while Lennox wedges himself in the seat next to Chet as per the skipper’s instructions. Chet pulls the throttle forward and the motor roars into action as the boat tears over the water.

They surge away under a white and hazy midday sky, while Lennox looks back to the dwindling marina, baking and shimmering at the water’s edge. White boats sit immobile in their slips, like racks of training shoes in a sports store. An ibis flock glides over the bay as if they are formation jets, combusting into an ethereal magnesium glow as the sunlight hits their plumes. Then it’s suddenly dark, as the boat passes under thick, swirling clouds. Chet explains that the light is often murky from late morning to early afternoon. He cuts the engine, plunging them into an eerie silence, and drops anchor. Lennox has been keeping an eye on the navigation device and the sonic scanner, which reveals the distance between the hull of the boat and the seabed. In the strip of water between the Florida coast and the Ten Thousand Islands, he’s noticed that the gap from the bottom of the boat to the briny floor could fall to just over one foot, and seldom exceeded thirty.

Chet hoists up his creel and seems pleasantly surprised that it contains only lobsters and his pot just a variety of crabs: spider, horseshoe, blue, calico. He turns to Tianna and Lennox, who are watching his activities, delighting in the satisfaction moulding his weather-beaten face. — Usually you get the whole darn lot gushing out; sea horses, pinfish, tunicates, parrotfish, jellies. I even had a ray in my creel once.

Tianna points at Lennox as laughter peals from her. A reciprocal chortle works its way out of him. Chet appears a bit nonplussed, but figures it’s a private joke and sets about boxing his catch and throwing the smaller ones back. On completion, Tianna opts to go downstairs with the magazine as he restarts the engine, and the vessel rips across the sea. Soon, what appears to be an island comes into view.

As they draw closer, Lennox can just about make out the remnants of an old village, which lies on the right-hand side of the bay, next to yet another new marina and planned community. Chet moves the boat away from the lights, coming into an unmarked and barely posted inlet. It opens up to a concealed, antediluvian harbour and it’s like sailing into a lost world. As they cruise past the old wooden homes and jetties, a decrepit boatyard with some grubby fishing vessels and an aluminium boat shelter lie to the fore, and some shacks behind rising to the higher ground. From the left, the big condos of the new community look ominously over a small hill, a giant ready to devour everything around it.

Tianna has emerged from down below, holding a solitary baseball card. She wears an intense frown of concentration. Her expression disturbs Lennox. He is going to say something, but Chet needs help to moor the boat. As he ties up his end, he watches her pull the rest of the cards from her woolly bag and stick the lone one in the pack. The ibis birds hang around the boatyard. From an overhead tree, an osprey cheeps like a budgie.

In a pondering silence Tianna steps from the boat on to the wooden walkway. Her hand forms a fist as she bites on her knuckle. Lennox feels something swimming inside him. Thinks he’s perhaps imagining things. He looks around, the air appreciably warmer after being out at sea.

The grizzled encampment gives off a sense that its days are numbered. The bar-restaurant, a tin-roofed, grey-painted wooden structure, and the hub of the creaking settlement, is propped defiantly on stilts, on a semicircle of mudflats that form the harbour. With its adjoining glitzy sister, the aged bay curves away towards the dark grey mist of the Ten Thousand Islands that buffer Florida’s mangrove coast from the Gulf of Mexico.

The restaurant is an old school Florida cracker joint, the sort of place Lennox has heard much about but which are now almost as impossible to find, without a guide, as good fishing grounds. As they climb up the steep wooden steps, Tianna dragging behind, lost in thought, Chet says that, despite its island ambience, they have actually docked on a peninsula. — Although it might as well be. All the proper roads lead to planned communities and marinas full of swish boats. Apart from the sea, some of these old places can only be reached by dirt tracks. It’s so easy to drive past those turn-offs on the highway.

Inside the restaurant, a large white woman greets and seats them at a table. Lennox takes the tendered garish, colour-clashing laminate and reads the welcome at its masthead.

‘If seafood tasted any fresher we would be serving it on the ocean bed.’

The choices on the menu dance in front of their eyes. — What do you fancy, Tianna? Lennox asks her, wondering if he can manage some more catfish. Then the red snapper catches his attention.

— Reckon I’ll have chicken, she says, without enthusiasm.

Chet scowls at Tianna and shakes his head at Lennox. — That is sacrilegious in a place like this, young lady. My God, you can take the girl out of Alabama…

Lennox feels like protesting on Tianna’s behalf, but he’s only joking; trying to impart some grown-up sophisticated ways. Chet catches his scrutiny and is gracious enough not to take offence and spare his embarrassment. — So what line of work were you in? Lennox quickly asks him.

— Not very popular work, Lennox, Chet confesses in glum cheeriness. — I was an investigator at the IRS. Corporate stuff. A much-hated man on Wall Street.

Lennox squints at the thick forearms and powerful biceps. — You don’t look like a desk man.

— Ah, well, I was a powerlifter for many years. Competed all over. Chet’s jovial reminiscence dissolves into a lament. — Missed out on the Munich ’72 Olympic team by a whisker, which was probably a blessing. I got selected for Montreal the next time round, but I busted my shoulder and had to withdraw. He raises and massages it for effect. Perhaps it still bothered him. — Guess it wasn’t to be. I still try to get to the gym at least twice a week, and usually manage it, the fates and the tides willing. You look in pretty good shape. Do you work out?

— Kick-boxing, Lennox replies in some guilt, thinking Chet is being generous in his assessment, — although I’ve let myself go a bit recently.

— I’m not saying I’ve lived like a monk, but I try to keep in shape. You realise in your later years that you get the pay-off, he smiles, putting down the menu and scanning the board for the specials. — I think I’m going to have the dolphin.

Lennox winces at him, disgusted at the idea of eating dolphin. Those poor cunts have sonar power. They’re not thickos like sheep or cows. It’s worse than eating a dog. The Septics are crossing the line here.

Chet senses his disquiet. — Don’t worry, Lennox, not the mammal dolphin. It’s an old name for a large green fish, commonly called mahi-mahi but we refer to it as dolphin here. That was the Spanish term before the English-speaking settlers came by and gave the intelligent mammal the same name. It causes no end of confusion with British visitors. Not that we get that many on this side of the state. So tell me, how is the insurance game?

— It’s a job.

Chet’s baleful half-smile indicates acceptance of that gallows camaraderie that implicitly bonds those who work for bosses. — Is it as lucrative in the UK as it is here?

Before Lennox can answer, his host has, in an instant, launched into a spiel about hurricane damage, and the ineptitude, venality and avarice of the Federal and State governments. Both Bush brothers, particularly Jeb, are being slated. —… the corruption; the greed of their profiteering associates. Is it the same in Britain, Lennox? Is it?

Lennox gives a non-committal shrug. His job has made him averse to discussing politics with strangers as his own were generally out of sync with those expressed by everyone else. But then a single, simple motion from Chet ices his blood. He touches Tianna. Only smoothing out a tangle in her long brown hair, but it makes him sit in upright rigidity on his chair. Because he catches the sting of tension creasing her face and the brief glimpse of appeal towards him before the laminate rises to conceal her.

Both reactions have escaped Chet, a prisoner of his own concerns. — I fear for the children. I really do, he continues. — What a legacy we’re leaving them, Lennox. People like you are still young enough to change the world for the better, but I’m an old fella now. I just want to sail my boat, do some fishing, and at the end of the day put my feet up with a good book and a nice glass of red wine. Not so wrong, is it?

Lennox concedes that it isn’t, but this doesn’t seem to satisfy Chet. — What can we do, Lennox? he asks sadly.

The food has arrived but Lennox, while ravenous, has taken heed that Tianna is barely touching hers. Her fork distractedly jostles a leg of chicken around her plate. — Wish I knew, he says, passing off the question with another shoulder feint, reassessing the situation by the second. Adjusting and fine-tuning; correcting, with the regularity of Chet’s satellite navigation system. He can’t figure it out. His Scottish polisman’s reductive and misanthropic view of the world seems an inadequate lifebelt. The old certainties he’s entertained: the morally bankrupt, malevolent rich; the ignorant, feckless poor; the fearful, petty, repressed bourgeoisie – even aggregated they don’t appear impressive enough in their cretinism to fuck up the world to the extent it now seems to be. And he is too tired to even think about God. What was Robbo’s world view? Fifty per cent of people are honest. You could forget all about them. They might commit minor misdemeanours, but they basically lived their lives toeing the line. The other 50 per cent were divided between the evil, around 10 per cent, and the weak and stupid, the other 40. Again, the evil weren’t that important in the calculation; they were just there to be hunted down. The key group was the weak and stupid. They were the main perpetuators and victims of crime.

The older he gets, the more inclined he is to cling to such banal paradigms, as someone drowning might with a piece of soggy driftwood. It depresses him and he’s aware that he wants a line of coke again. For a heartbeat or three it’s all he wants.

— Can I get some more Coke? Tianna asks the waitress as ‘Home Lovin Man’ plays in ringtone, signalling a call coming up on Chet’s mobile, reminding Lennox again that he needs to phone Trudi.

— Excuse me, Chet rises quickly, heading outside. His haste gives Lennox and Tianna the impression that the call is an important one; they track him through the windows of the restaurant as he wanders by the quay, past the aluminium boat shelters, phone talk underscored with feral gesticulation.

Lennox notes her face reflected alongside his in the glass. He becomes aware that she is mirroring him, copying his actions. He feels both troubled and honoured to be a mentor. Is he any better than Robbo had been to him? Because it has to stop now: this suspicion of Chet. Like the guy in the car hire, or Four Rivers on the boat; they cannae all be nonces. Everybody in the world with a cock – or with a minge, cause there was Starry – they cannae all be beasts. The poor kids in the garage! Trudi was right. He is tired. Jaded. Not himself. Scared even. Seeing things that aren’t there. The ghost of Britney. His hands shake. He needs his antidepressants. He’d been a fool to discard them. He’s ill, clinically depressed, and no amount of winter sun can fix that. Chet is kosher. Surely. He turns to Tianna. — He seems a nice guy. I just had to be certain, given the company we were in the other night. You understand?

— Thanks for looking after me, she says to him, but in a voice so small, her face a younger child’s now – a surfeit of emotion over calculation – that he feels his essence vaporising. Something isn’t right; hasn’t been since she went below deck.

— Aye. Lennox swallows some saliva down. A terrible, poignant vision of taking her to Scotland floods his mind. She should be at a good school, with proper mates, having a laugh at Murrayfield Ice Rink or the Commie Pool, gearing up for Standard grades, doing family things. Not with him and Trudi. Not his Scotland; that would be out of the frying pan and into the fire for her. Lennox is realistic enough about his own circumstances, but he enjoys the Uncle Ray tag. Jackie and Angus have the two boys. He likes them, had taken them to Tynecastle, but they weren’t that interested. Once she’d told him, before Angus got the snip, that she’d really wanted a girl. He doesn’t have the stuff for the twenty-four/seven, but he could be a positive influence; the fun uncle, taking the kid on the odd outing. They could be pals.

He jerks himself out of his storybook fantasies. The best Tianna could hope for was a good set of foster-parents here in Florida. Even then, she has a lot of work to do if she isn’t going to turn out a miserable wreck like her mother.

Chet returns, with a sombre nod to Lennox. He counts out some quarters and hands them to Tianna. — Put something good on the jukebox, honey, before the place fills up with crazy ol Crackers and their mad country songs. Maybe some Beatles or Stones.

Tianna silently takes the money and goes to the big Wurlitzer by the restrooms.

— That was Robyn, Chet now grim, but wild-eyed. — She got herself in a whole heap of trouble and ended up being detained. But I got my lawyer on the case, and she gets out tomorrow morning. So I’ll take care of Tianna tonight and get her to Robyn tomorrow.

Lennox feels a trickle of unease from breastbone to belly. Cop instinct or drug-fiend paranoia, he doesn’t know or care. He’s just less than convinced by what Chet has said. — Robyn… I want to speak to her.

Chet’s face adjusts to civil-servant archetype. — I’m afraid that’s not possible.

— Why? Why can’t she speak to me or Tianna?

Chet’s expression is now etched with impatience. — Because she’s in police custody back in Miami, Lennox. She got one phone call. But I got right on to my lawyer in Fort Myers; his buddy’s on the case, a Coconut Grove smartie. She’ll be out on bail tomorrow. He blows hard in exasperation. — Such a stupid woman. It was a damned cocaine bust. If the community care find out about this, she could lose that child.

Wasps crawl and buzz in the honeycomb of Lennox’s brain. He knows next to nothing about the American criminal justice system. But common sense dictates that it isn’t adding up. Detention would surely mean one night in the drunk tank, sleeping it off without being charged. It couldn’t mean spending around thirty-six hours in a cell. And Lance Dearing had supposedly taken her there. What was his role in all of this? And if it had been a cocaine bust, she’d have been formally charged.

Then Chet’s hand is on his shoulder, and in it, the submerged force of the powerlifter. That and the tone dropping an octave are enough to put jitters into Lennox’s frame. — You done a good job, son. Not a lot of fellas would have gone and put themselves out of their way like that, not for a stranger. But I can take over now. Chet withdraws his grip, the breeziness back in his voice. — You have enough to do, with a fiancée to look after and a wedding to plan!

And it made sense. Lennox had intervened enough. You had to let go, to know when to let go. He’d kept Tianna away from Johnnie and Lance, which was his objective. He’d delivered her to the safety of Chet’s boat, which had been her mother’s wish. He’d saved Tianna, but only Robyn could rescue herself, by developing the sense to keep out of bad situations and the skills to look after her daughter. — I’ll go over and say goodbye, he says, wandering across to the jukebox.

He pulls out Trudi’s notebook, freeing the pen from its spine, scribbling two phone numbers and terrestrial and email addresses. Rips out the page and hands it to her. — This is where I am, if you ever need me. You got email, right?

— Momma has, Tianna says in doleful affirmation, taking the paper, looking at it and turning back to him, just as the sun comes in through the window and frames her in a golden stream of light. — I’m gonna miss you, Ray Lennox.

He can see the timeless humanity in her. She could be any age and is genderless. It feels like a religious experience. — Ah’m gonnae miss you.

She has the baseball cards. The one on the top he hasn’t seen before. He looks at it. Hank Aaron. Tianna glances at the card, her finger slowly tracing round its edge. Her voice is small and lisping again, making his blood heat drop degrees. — I thought I wanted to go on the boat with Chet, she says in a whisper he can barely hear, — but I don’t like that boat no more. I wish I could stay with you.

A voice tells Lennox: you can’t leave her. But another says: let go. You’re doing this for you, not the kid. The words of his fiancée resonate: you’re a self-indulgent prick. She’s not Britney Hamil. But then he’s looking back at the smiling Chet who’s heading over and he’s saying to her, — You can come with me if you like. Stay at my friend Ginger’s in Fort Lauderdale, meet his wife and Trudi, then we’ll go and get your mum tomorrow morning.

Tianna nods in grim relief.

Chet is now standing by them, and he has heard the proposal. — I think she’s fine here, he says forcibly. — You’ve been more than helpful, Lennox, and we really couldn’t impose any further.

Ray Lennox looks him in the eye. — I can assure you, it’s no imposition at all, he replies, his voice level, cop-like again.

— I guess I wanna go with Ray, Tianna says in appeasing tones, and now Lennox notices that she isn’t making eye contact with Chet Lewis. Something happened on the boat. He couldn’t have touched her; he was with him. She’d seen something downstairs. Found something. The other baseball card.

Then Lennox catches the abrupt change in Chet’s expression; he’s seen it before, in countless other people. Features pushed outwards, a reflex smile; all mouth, the eyes remaining dulled and calculating. — Sure. If that’s what you want.

— We seem to have a consensus, Lennox provocatively declares. He hasn’t yet sniffed the beast in Chet, but if it’s there, he’ll flush it out. He breezily insists on picking up the tab, before they go back on to the boat. He helps Chet untie the vessel and cast off. They chug wearily out of the harbour, but on clearing its jaws, Chet hits the throttle to transform Ocean Dawn into the machine that rips across the bumpy green water.

Tianna is sitting back in the lower deck, staring out to space, her tense jaw vibrating in concert with the boat’s chopping motion over the rippling surface of the Gulf. Hank’s back, she thinks, then in the glare of the sun and with the engines roaring, her fingers skim the slick, moulded hull of the boat and her stomach feels six inches higher. She’s sick, not seasick, but sick like Momma; stupid and feverish and not knowing where in hell’s name she is.

On the bridge Chet has taken note of the doubtful furrow on Lennox’s brow as he scrutinises the instruments. — We’ve gone a different way as I’ve another creel to check. It won’t take a second, he explains as he cuts the motor and drops the anchor.

The creel has catch. Lennox feels for the lobster, operating innocently in its own environment, only to be kidnapped, boiled alive and devoured by aliens.

Tianna goes down into the cabin, pursued by Chet. Concerned, Lennox is about to follow, but notices Chet’s cellphone sitting in an indent on the console. He picks it up and investigates the calls list. There it was; he hadn’t even needed to check the digits against the ones he’d scribbled down in Trudi’s notebook. The caller ID announced: LANCE D.

Lennox slips the phone back into the holder. There was no lawyer, probably no arrest. Robyn’s cottoned on to something and Dearing and his cohorts are keeping her hostage until they’ve decided what to do with her. And he is probably on his way to the Grove Marina right now.

Outside the stateroom Tianna quivers as she looks in and gapes at the big bed. Closes the door and sits at the table, staring at the grinning bride on the magazine’s cover, as Chet’s flannelled ass comes down the steps. He turns to her with a tired smile. — I spoke to Amy on the phone last week. His croaky voice is heavy with loss. — She was asking after you. She’s thinking of coming down soon. Don’t you think you might be better here, on the boat?… I mean, Lennox seems nice, but your mother did say to bring you here so I really can’t let you go with him.

— I wanna go with him!

— Put yourself in my position, darling, Chet begins, bushy white brows arching, — your mother—

— I don’t wanna stay here!

— But you always liked—

— Can we get going, Chet? Like now? My fiancée, as you say, will be waiting, Lennox shouts as he half descends the steps.

— Yes, of course. Forgive me. Chet turns to him. — You are in a hurry, and he looks vainly back at Tianna before following Ray Lennox up the steps to the deck.

They reach the helm, and a supplicating Chet starts the boat. — But are you sure you don’t want to leave Tianna here?

— I don’t think she wants that. Do you? Lennox looks at the older man’s stern profile. Sees that the knuckles of his big hands are white on the wheel.

— As you wish.

The outward journey had been a clear line across the bay from one harbour to the next. But now Chet is taking his time. — Can we go straight to the marina, instead of hugging the coastline?

— The tides have changed. We need to avoid the shallows or we could run aground, Chet points at the navigation system and the sonic depth meter. — It’s only a foot deep in some places and this is a very heavy boat.

Lennox turns back to the screen. There was a route straight through where the water level was at its highest. — That way, he says, grabbing Chet’s hand in his strong left and bending two fingers back. A searing pain lights up the skipper’s face like the jukebox. Chet forces a smile at Tianna who is now on the deck at the back of the boat as the harsh, clipped tones of the Scottish polisman rasp in his ear. — Don’t fuck me about, you cunt. You don’t know what you’re messing with here. Do I make myself clear?

— Crystal, Chet gasps, as Lennox relinquishes his grip. He resets the course and they are back within twenty-five minutes.

Ray Lennox knows that he hasn’t broken Chet’s fingers. But something in him has splintered as he sits miserably, painfully waving them off from the boat at Grove Marina.

Lennox and Tianna climb into the car and drive away. He’d spurned the temptation to use Chet’s cellphone to call Trudi; it would mean the number of the hotel would come up, and he didn’t want her anywhere near this. Now he isn’t messing around with the Tamiami Trail. He has worked out exactly how to get on to Interstate 75: Everglades Parkway, or Alligator Alley.

16 Alligator Alley

THE TRAFFIC IS sparse and sinister as they drive down roads lined with narrow homes and green signs that herald street numbers and the names of distant cities. This, in turn, becomes another strip mall of bad-intention businesses. The Red Sox hat lies on the dashboard. He’s given up on it, two depressions still visible on his temples. Lennox looks to Tianna, sitting silently beside him, the cards in her hand. — Did Chet ever mess around with you?

— No. She shakes her head, then frowns in tortuous bewilderment. — I don’t reckon so, but I jus cain’t figure it out, I felt all kinda weird bein on that boat.

— Well, you’re okay now. Lennox paints a stretched smile over his angst. — It’s good that you found that card, the one your dad left you.

Her gaze seems to cast him as just another collaborator against her, but her anger isn’t for him, it’s the precursor to another revelation. — My daddy didn’t leave me no cards.

— Oh.

— I never knew him. He left Momma way before I was born. That’s if they was ever really together in the first place. I found them cards in the roof space at this place we stayed at in Jacksonville. I used to go up there to get away from… she can barely say the word, —… Clemson.

Clemson. Who is this fucker—

Lennox feels his words freeze in the now infinite void between thought and speech. By the time he finds his voice Tianna’s resumed talking, her tone now high and hopeful. — But I kind of felt that he would like baseball and they sorta make me feel part of him. I guess that’s crazy, huh?

— No, says Lennox, — not at all. He remembers collecting Esso World Cup coins as a boy, his dad helping him. Looking at the sad lower lip of the American girl, he experiences a moment drenched in such pathos that it might have choked him had he not snatched an insistent breath. — Who’s Clemson?

— Tiger Clemson; his real name’s Jimmy, Tianna says, her eyes charged with an electric ferocity. — He was Momma’s boyfriend. He was always nice to her but real mean to me. I was real scared of him. He knew all about me… with Vince. Said that’s just how I was like; that a man could smell it on me. She suddenly gasps in terrified panic. — When he did it to me, he used to say that this was what I was put on God’s earth for. That he was doing me a favour, givin me a head start on all the other girls. But he was different to Vince; I know he didn’t care nuthin for me. So it was easier to just think about other stuff, n let him do what he wanted. But he hurt me sometimes. Sometimes he made me bleed. He’d wait till Momma was asleep with her pills, then come for me. Told me if I said anything to Momma she would believe him n not me. Cause I know what you was up to before, he’d tell me. I used to run up to the roof space, hide away from him.

Lennox has slowed down and pulled off an asphalt exit that segues on to a concrete flatland, designed as a parking lot, but which has remained customless, plant life breaking through its cracked surface. He’s stopped for his own sake as well as hers. His stinging hands still grip the wheel as the blood pounds in his ears. — How did he know? About what Vince did to you?

— I dunno… the girl shrugs. — Used to say that he knew girls like me, the type I was. That he could tell a mile away I was no virgin. That was what he said.

Bile scours his innards.

— Is it true, Ray? Can men jus tell what you’re like? Is that what I am? Her eyes bulge in desperation.

Lennox grips her hands softly. — No. No, they can’t. Listen to me, I think you’ve been really unlucky and you’ve met some very, very bad people. You’ve done nothing wrong. You’re a nice girl. They’re the ones who’ve done wrong and they’ll pay for that. I promise you. Do you understand what I’m saying? He looks into her eyes.

— Yes.

— Okay, Lennox says, and starts up the motor.

Tianna.

She should be waking up on Christmas mornings in a house like Jackie’s to presents and—

Lennox can’t believe that he’s having hopes for this girl’s future, unlikely dreams. He plays comforting scenarios in his head, only to reprimand himself that they are foolish: miles away from how she’ll probably end up. The balance of probability. But that’s the trouble with dreams: they willnae fucking shift. And the more vivid they get, the more action they compel.

As he thinks of his own future and Trudi, an abrupt spasm flares in his chest: he realises that he’s left the copy of Perfect Bride on Chet’s boat. — You didn’t pick up that bridal mag, did you?

— No, Tianna says in concern, — I guess I left it downstairs. Was it important?

— Nah, I can get another copy, he says evenly, but he’s unable to stop his molars reflexively cracking together. Trudi had filled out some attached coupons. The address. They have her address.

It will mean nothing. But the thought taints him. Let them try anything back in Edinburgh, he grinds his teeth harder, galvanising himself with scenarios of violence until he genuinely relishes the prospect. Then his displaced, protective glance falls back on Tianna as they pull up outside a gas station with a phone box.

Lennox searches for the phone card in his pockets, can’t find it and curses, then his fingers mine for some change, eyes set in peripheral sweep for the approaching calamity of Lance Dearing. Logic tells Lennox that it’s unlikely to the point of impossible that their paths could cross by chance on the road, at a place like this. Paranoia, the stronger force, is simultaneously informing him of its inevitability.

The quarters tumble from his greasy hands, rattling into the machine. When Lennox estimates they’ve reached the requisite critical mass, his stiff finger punches the metal keys. A gruff voice scratches down the other end of the line: — Eddie Rogers.

— It’s Ray. I need a favour. You and Dolores, he says, reasoning it would be easier to leave Tianna with a woman. He tries to steady the map his sweaty fingerprints have smudged up. — Can you meet me at the truck stop on Exit 49 on Interstate 75?

— That’s right on the Everglades, Ginger’s voice goes high, — at the Miccosukee Indian Reservation. But why do you–

— Reservations are for yuppies and Indians, remember? I need a favour, Lennox repeats.

Ginger purses a long breath of static into his ear. — Okay. I can be there in an hour and a half. Trudi called and told me you’ve gotten into bother. You need to get a fuckin grip, son. You think this is CSF: Miami?

Lennox exhales a small gasp at Ginger’s joke, then tells him, — I hear ye. But just be there. Dinnae let me down, Ginger.

A silence grows in Lennox’s head. Then its puncturing feels sharp enough to perforate his eardrums. — I won’t, Ginger snarls, — and for the last fuckin time it’s Eddie!

— Right, Eddie, Lennox says, the name like sour fruit in his mouth. — It’s appreciated, mate.

— Okay, I’m leaving right now. Screw the fuckin nut, Raymie, he warns and hangs up.

On his return Tianna sits puffy-faced in the car, eye-whites pink with blood where she’s been rubbing at them. Lennox thinks about saying something, but nothing comes to mind, so he elects to let it ride. He sparks up the engine and they leave the station.

They approach the toll at the start of Interstate 75. A sign indicates that Miami is 127 miles away, Fort Lauderdale 124. The rendezvous point at Exit 49 seems about halfway, so they should get there around the same time as Ginger. Lennox regards the toll clerk, a small, black man with a grey beard, who has his name on a badge above the title LABORER.

— Bastards, Lennox says as he pulls away, then he apologises to Tianna, — I mean, they know people get that they aren’t the CEO of the toll company. Why do they have to rub their faces in it?

Tianna looks back at the man, then at Lennox. — You’re a really nice guy, Ray, I mean, doing this for me, n all. She pauses, then asks, — Why are you helping me?

— We’re mates, Lennox shrugs, — buddies, he qualifies.

— But you don’t even know me really.

— I know enough to realise that you need a friend right now. He points to the radio. — And I need a tune.

Taking the hint, Tianna grabs the dial and twists it on to a disco station. A gutsy, pumping remix of Sister Sledge’s ‘Lost in Music’ rocks the Volkswagen. The line caught in a trap, no turnin back causes them to look at each other in grim synchronicity.

It might have been an interstate with a 70 rather than a 55 mph speed limit, but otherwise Alligator Alley is much the same as Highway 41: a two-lane freeway with a big scrubbed verge in the middle. Fewer signs of hurricane damage are in evidence along the almost deserted road. Fences on both sides keep back dense vegetation, as desperate to engulf the concrete as a mob of teenage girls are a pop star. Lennox barely allows the Volkswagen to dip under 90 mph. Ginger wouldn’t be hanging about and now he really needs to get back to Trudi.

The passing trees become a blur, her eyes blinking as they flash by. Then Tianna can see him, Tiger Clemson, standing in the doorway of her room. Looking down at her in bed. Your momma’s fast asleep, he’s saying, in his soft, gloating tones. She squirms in the hot leather seat of the car, feels the heat on the back of her neck, hears the sounds of the engine ticking over, so loud, like Chet’s boat. But part of her is in the bed and Clemson is telling her that he’s gonna do her real good this time, show her some ol tricks she’ll never forget, but it isn’t Clemson, it’s somebody else and she screams…

Lennox is so shocked he almost loses control of the car. — Jesus, fuck! What’s wrong? He slows down and pulls over on to the hard shoulder. Her screaming abates as she leans into him, forcing him to comfort her.

— I keep seein a face. A man’s face. She looks up him, her features tight and crinkled.

— It’s okay, he says, stiff and awkward as he pats her back, — it’s just a flashback, like a bad dream when you’re awake.

She buries her head in his chest. — Do they ever stop? her muffled voice asks.

— Course they do, he says, his hands now on her shoulders, making her sit up and look at him. — Who did you see? Was it this Clemson guy?

— No… and she straightens and pulls away, wiping a snottered nose on her sheep bag, looking apologetically at him until he dismisses her concern. — I thought it was, but it ain’t.

— Okay. Whoever it was, they won’t hurt you.

— Promise?

— Aye, he smiles, and she tries to return it but fear has frozen her face muscles. He starts up the engine.

They maintain an edgy silence as they eat the miles, content to let sounds coming from afar fill the vehicle. Call-in voices blast out, citizens as proud to demonstrate their intellect in radio’s anonymity as they are to display their stupidity in front of TV cameras. Then Lennox turns the dial and a throbbing hip-hop bass rattles through the Volkswagen, building so steadily that it seems to be propelling the accelerating vehicle. Soon a road sign announces the impending presence of Exit 49.

They step giddily from the car, taking a few seconds to adjust to the abrupt curtailment of velocity, and are walled by the hot, muggy air. The murky darkness is diluting the everyday miracle of the brown and green light that bounces off the great expanse of sawgrass and water. There’s no sign of Ginger and Dolores. The old gas station, a rusted corrugated shack with three pumps, has a moribund neon Coca-Cola sign that pulses sickly in the window. It betrays no sign of life: most likely it kept irregular hours. The stillness is eerie; a pervasive silence, with no songbirds in the trees or cars on the highway. Tianna moves over towards a broken area of fencing that borders the mangrove swamp.

— Don’t go too far from the car, Lennox warns. Four Rivers comes into his mind, probably because the turning for the reservation is nearby.

She moves over and leans on the bodywork of the car, fingering the solitary card. Catching him watching her, she looks up, brushing the hair from her face and says, — I found this card I figured I’d lost. It was on the boat. Hank Aaron. He was from Mobile too, y’know. But I cain’t remember losin it there. I had it when I was last on the boat, and I sorta remember… it was like I was sick… I could see the water. It was like a dream.

The surrounding silence is crumpled by a rustling from the mangrove bushes, followed by the brief, snuffed-out shriek of some animal and a raucous bellow of triumph. Lennox looks nervously to the swamp, then back at her, as if to dismiss it. It heralds a brief cacophony of bird sounds from the dense growth, which settles back into silence. — What do you mean? Like you were on the boat and seasick? he asks, smelling the saltiness in the gathering breeze.

— Like it was on the boat, and it was a dream… but it kinda wasn’t, she says in a dizzying moment of realisation.

Lennox’s pulse quickens and he swallows down more nothingness in his throat. — It was probably just a bad dream.

Tianna is far too eager to agree. Sensing she needs mental space, Lennox falls silent, allowing her to ask him, — Do you ever get bad dreams, Ray? I mean dreams so really, really bad that you just cain’t talk to anybody about em?

Now Lennox is stunned. He looks above. Expects to see dark stone instead of mottled blue. Seconds pass. — Yes, he finally says, his voice wavering and weak. — Yes, I do.

— Would you tell me them?

— Maybe later, pal.

She sweeps her hair from her face again. In the shaft of pale moonlight that filters through the trees behind the fence, she carries the gravity of a spectral prophet. — Y’all promise?

— Aye… Lennox hears his voice hover between a whisper and a gasp. Anxious for a diversion, he gestures to her to pass the baseball card and he reads:

Lennox recalls the name. Vaguely remembers reading about some steroid juggernaut’s joyless pursuit of Aaron’s record. — He seems some man. Sort of guy who’d never let anything hold him back. The arseholes who smashed these plates, who told him he was nothing, where are they now? Who cares what they think? He pauses, hands back the card. — You know what I’m saying?

She meets his gaze with a fixed stare of her own. — I guess so.

— Remember that. Always remember that.

He leans into the car to start the engine and fire up the car radio. They listen to Big 105.9 Miami’s classic rock station; Duran Duran’s ‘Is There Something I Should Know’ plays. Then they go on to the bouncy mayhem of a Spanish dance-music channel; fast, intoxicating fun that makes him want a tequila or mojito.

They are both glad of the distraction, but then a sad ballad commences and Tianna speaks again. — Nobody will ever marry me, she says in a tentative sorrow, her brows rising. — Supposin, just supposin, I was older and you was younger, would you marry me, Ray?

Lennox smiles tightly. — You can’t ask me that. You don’t know what I was like when I was younger, and for some reason he has an image of himself in a pair of Falmer jeans, a hooded top, and a long, floppy fringe. And that moustache. That daft, stupid thing they’d all slagged him off for, even in the polis. It had grown in correspondence with the cocaine habit. Trudi had loved it when he’d shaved it off, but he’d instantly regretted it. He felt exposed without it: naked and dirty. A lip dripping with spit.

He’d joined the force a few years after working as an apprentice joiner with a house-panel building firm at Livingston. The vectors of educational opportunity and youthful excitement crossed over on the Police Graduate programme, and he was sent to Heriot-Watt University, sponsored for a BSc in Information Technology. His boyhood mate Les Brodie, along with his plumbing apprenticeship, had taken up with the Hearts casuals as his outlet for the testosterone bubbling up inside him. But the police was a means rather than an end. Lennox had a mission; a buried, ill-defined quest that was pulled into sharper focus in the last few months than ever before.

The copper’s life had been difficult for him. The antisocial loner tag he’d developed at school, then as a young carpenter, seemed intent on relentless pursuit. He was the first of the new breed, the educated cop who saw policework as a bundle of sciences – psychology, sociology, criminology, information technology, forensics and public relations – and incurred the wrath of the old school types, to whom it would always remain a street art. And then there was the isolating nature of police life. One of Ray Lennox’s most excruciating moments came as a rookie on duty at Haymarket Police Station. Les Brodie got pulled in with some other guys after a minor footballing affray. Their eyes met briefly, then the estranged friends both turned away in shame, but not before they’d been witness to the other’s humiliation. Lennox hid back in the office for the rest of shift, squirming with embarrassment, relieved that Brodie had been released when he came in to work the next day.

Now, by the side of the freeway that cuts through the moonlit swamp, Tianna is looking at him in an unsettling expression of coy indulgence. — I’ll bet you was sweet when you was younger.

— A lot of people would disagree with that, he says gruffly. — Anyway, we don’t know what you’ll be like when you’re older. Maybe you’ll go to college and get a good job and a career, he hopefully speculates, then looks pointedly at her and asks, — What makes you think nobody is going to marry you?

— Vince… then Clemson. Said that if I told anyone what I’d done… what happened, then I’d be ruined for being married.

— You did nothing. It was those bastards who did wrong, not you. He slaps the car bonnet, livid with rage. — You never forget that, he says, — never.

Tianna’s big eyes are contemplative in the silver light, but Lennox knows that his anger is scaring her as much as his words are affirming. Softening his tone, he adds, — When you do think about getting married, and you probably will, it’ll be to a nice guy who loves and respects you.

— Like you love and respect Trudi, right?

— Aye, he gasps.

— Does Trudi have a good job and a career?

— Aye, I suppose she does, I mean, yes, Lennox concedes, weak in the face of his own selfish arrogance. He belittled Trudi’s achievements. She’d done well at Scottish Power, got a couple of promotions, was regarded as successful. He’d got so up himself about his work, bleeding self-importance and radiating contempt for others. He feels regret’s tender ache and if she had been there he would have said sorry, and meant it from the bottom of his heart.

The conversations with Tianna, though minimal, are like bursts of intense fire from an AK47. They leave him full of holes: far more disconcerting than when he talks to victims of sexual abuse as a cop. Here there’s no role to play, no badge to hide behind. But as long as she’s with him she isn’t in the hands of monsters like Dearing, Johnnie and, for all he knows, Chet. He considers the Hank Aaron card.

— When your mum was sick and you went to stay with Starry, did she treat you okay? His head twists as a solitary car tears past on the freeway.

— I guess, says Tianna doubtfully. — But that Johnnie, her brother, he was always round. Always makin dirty talk. I hated it when he came round Momma’s or Starry’s.

— Johnnie is Starry’s brother?

— Uh-huh. I guess I felt for Starry, her boy bein shot dead outside that 7–Eleven n all. But I didn’t like Momma hanging out with her n Johnnie.

He’d detected no resemblance at all between Johnnie and Starry. — What about Lance?

— Lance is a policeman. You sorta think he gotta be a good person, right?

— Right, Lennox says weakly, looking up as the wind rustles in the trees. Where the fuck is Ginger?

And the magazine is back there. It is waiting. Perfect Bride. His calling card: his excuse to go back into that vipers’ nest of nonces. He has all the reasons. It isn’t just about Tianna now. Let them try to stop him. Let them try.

— Do you love Trudi?

That simple question kicks the wind out of him. His head spins. — I know that I used to, he says after a bit, — but sometimes I wonder if our time might be up. It’s… well, we’ve got so much… history. Now, I don’t know if it’s love, or just a certain kind of life we’ve got used to. Sometimes I think…

— What?

— …that it might be time to walk away. It’s not easy.

Then a vision of Trudi fills his head. When they took him to her place after his breakdown in the pub. Again, when she saw the state of him in the tunnel after the funeral: the tears in her eyes. Oh my baby, my Ray, she’d cried. Lennox feels something climb inside of him. — I do love her, he says with a certainty coated in sadness, because what he is really choking on is his own sense of unworthiness, — I always will.

— The worst one that Momma brought back was Vince, Tianna says, straining as she sucks in her breath, cause he told me that he loved me. It was all lies, but I believed it, and it ain’t right to say that to somebody when it ain’t true. She rolls her bottom lip south. — So if you love her, you got to treat her right.

— Yes, Lennox agrees, almost sick with melancholy, — I have to treat her right.

The dancing bushes with their shadows, and the strange sounds from the swamp, drifting in and out of earshot, gnaw at his nerves as they wait at the deserted stop. Before he realises it he’s thinking of his pills again: the capsules, so smooth, sliding down the throat of a man who hates to swallow anything. He recalls his mother shouting at him when he couldn’t eat his stew, the fat on the bits of meat reminding him of snot, the meat reminding him of meat. Keeping it in his mouth, excusing himself and going to the toilet to spit it out or retch it up. Jackie grassing him up, — It’s disgusting, she would say, genuinely revolted. The tired compassion in his father’s eyes, — Just eat some, son. You have to eat. Then his mother rounding on him, rendered witless by his behaviour, — It’s best stewing steak!

Even then he wondered how steak only good enough for stewing could be described as ‘best’.

Another infrequent car passes, and Lennox is at first elated, then paranoid. It’s getting late. Where is Ginger? Perhaps he won’t show. He should have explained, emphasised how crucial it was. Dolores would have said no. She’d think it was a drunken rendezvous.

Unless…

Unless the paedophile cops network ran right across Florida and Ginger was in on it too. The way he’d looked at that young lassie in the strip club.

Get a fucking grip.

Lennox feels his breath catching. He’s snatching at gulps of air again. It’s heavy like it’s full of iron particles, pulverising his lungs. He wants to be away from Tianna. She can’t see him this way. He’s doing her more harm than good.

Then a vehicle slows down and pulls up. Lennox can’t make it out in the soupy darkness of the swamp. It looks like a 4x4. He feels every muscle in his body tense up as it stops a bit away from them. It doesn’t look like Ginger’s motor: it’s Dearing, he’s certain. — Get back in the car, he shouts at Tianna. She complies and he quickly follows. Those windows in the darkness and the shadows cast by the trees; he can see nothing.

Then there’s a rap on the windscreen. — Lennox! What the hell are ye playing at?!

Ginger’s big round face pulls into focus. Tianna gasps in shock, Lennox in relief, as he climbs out. — Ginger! Thank fuck… He wraps his arms around the barrel frame. Ginger is with Dolores. The dog, Braveheart, has jumped out the car behind them and is barking frantically. He is answered in kind by a long, throaty groan coming from behind the dark screen of mangroves.

— Ginger? Dolores asks, smiling in intrigue, before shouting after Braveheart, who is sniffing around the side of the gas station.

— How many fuckin times – Eddie Rogers snaps in annoyance, turning to the retreating Dolores, who is in pursuit of the dog. — Just a joke, hen, he says, then looks back at Lennox. — Sorry we’re late. We had to pick up—

Lennox looks over to see Trudi emerge from the back of the Dodge. She wears a long dark blue skirt and has her hair down. Her vague air of reproach vanishes as he staggers towards her. — Ray…

— I’m sorry, he groans, compelled to close the distance between them and take her in his arms, feeling his own body shake as her thin, sinewy, but python-strong limbs envelop him, her scent seeping through his shut eyelids into his brain. — I had to try and help. I had to get involved. I don’t know why, he says, and repeats, — I don’t know why.

Trudi’s soft voice in his ear, Lennox realising how much he loves her tones, her middle-class Edinburgh habit of enunciating every word. — It wasn’t your fault with Britney Hamil, Ray. It wasn’t your fault.

— Whose fault was it then? And he thinks of the time when he’d gotten suspended from school for flooding a corridor with a fire hose, his distraught mother saying in response to his lame protests, ‘Whose fault was it then if it wasn’t yours?’

— The beast who killed her, Trudi coos, like she is reading a child a bedtime story, — it was his fault.

Now remembering Britney’s mum, Angela Hamil, telling him, — It’s okay. You did your best…

Then Ray Lennox, in a terrible honesty, had admitted to that destroyed woman, — I didnae… I made a mistake. I didnae cause I made a wrong judgement about you. I thought… I could have done better! He had her for over three fucking days… I could have saved her.

And Angela’s face was pinched and riddled with pain as she turned away from him. — No, she quietly insisted, — you did your best. Ah kent you really cared aboot Britney fae the start.

He can now hear a small, persistent voice. — What? Tianna says. — What wasn’t your fault?

Guilt leaks from him. He can’t look at the young American girl. If he does he knows he’ll see a Scottish one in her stead. He holds Trudi tighter. — He was scum, he hisses into her slim neck. — He didnae, couldnae, know any better. Tae expect him to be better is to expect him to be the human being he can never be. I was the one who should have known…

— No. You did your job, Ray. You tried to help, Trudi says.

Then she feels a tug on her arm. It’s Tianna. She looks tearfully at Trudi. — Ray helped me, she says softly. Trudi smiles, and puts her arm around the young girl. — He said you were beautiful, Tianna observes, causing Lennox’s face to pain further, as he can’t recall saying anything of the kind.

— Hi, er, Tianna, isn’t it? She looks at the sheep clinging to her back. — I really like your bag.

— Ray helped me, Tianna repeats, thin tears glistening in her eyes. — He helped me.

Lennox feels his throat constricting. Tianna’s face seems to radiate with all the world’s possibilities. She could grow into somebody strong, vivacious and beautiful, or shrink in on herself, pasty and haunted. And she has so little time to decode the cruel puzzle others have malignly made of her life. — It’s okay, sweetheart, it’s okay. This is Ginger and Dol—

— Eddie! Ginger spits, and he sees Dolores playing thoughtfully with the name.

— Sorry… Eddie, Lennox forces a weak, defeated grin. Bad habits, they are so very hard to stop, so very, very hard. — Tianna, these are good friends of mine, Eddie and Dolores Rogers. I want you to stay with them and Trudi. I’ll be back later.

— I wanna stay with you, she says, standing her ground.

Lennox’s palms out-turn in appeal, mimicking a hundred Scottish con men he’s put behind bars. — I’ll be back before you know it.

Doubt and distrust colour Tianna’s face: she could be his mother now. He’s relieved that Trudi’s here, and Dolores, who asks Tianna, — Do you like dolphins and marine life?

— I guess so, she says as Braveheart approaches, sniffing at her leg, tail wagging.

— Trudi and I were gonna take a trip to Ocean World tomorrow morning.

— And you can help me look at dresses, Trudi says, taking Tianna’s hand as they lead her to the 4x4. But the girl looks back to Lennox. — Lance is a cop. He’ll put you in jail! Be careful!

— Of course I will.

Trudi disengages and hastens back over to him. — It’s time to let go, Ray. To get the local police involved, she urges, as Braveheart follows his nose over to the verge by the waterway.

— I cannae, I need tae—

— You need to sort out your own life. Trying to sort out other people’s won’t save you, Ray.

— But I—

They are distracted by a growling noise. The dog has gone sniffing over into a clump of mangrove bushes by the fence. An exasperated Dolores gets out of the car and follows after him. — Look, buster, I’ve had it with you!

Then something happens so quickly, they almost believe it to be a hoax. The emerging alligator looks like a plastic toy as its snout protrudes from the bushes, but it lunges out at speed and its jaws, in one terrible snap, seize the dog. — BRAVEHEARRTTT! Dolores screams, and runs towards the fence and swamp, only to be restrained by Ginger. — Don’t, Dolly, for fuck sakes!

At first it seems as if the reptile is going to gorge the small mammal whole, then it bites down in bone-crushing repetition on the screeching dog. It semi-swallows, regurgitates and slaps the dog, now like a rag doll, against the ground twice, and then shoots over a large hurricane-flattened section of fence, the limp body in its jaws.

Lennox and Trudi head over in cagey pursuit. She halts at the edge of the swamp, Lennox takes a few steps into it, but stops as he can feel its leafy, boundless darkness multiplying around him. They draw back to where Dolores, straining against Ginger, screams in anguish. Lennox takes hold of her as Ginger runs to the back of his vehicle, telling Tianna not to move and swiftly returning with a flashlight, but both creatures have vanished into the night. Silence is restored to the swamp, though Lennox fancies he can hear a sweet, victorious groan coming from the glades. A shaken Dolores crumpled into the Dodge, where Trudi and Tianna try to comfort her.

— That’s that then, Ginger observes, nervously looking back towards the gap in the fence.

— I’m so sorry, Eddie, Lennox says wretchedly. — I feel responsible. It was me who brought you out here.

Ginger drops his voice and sidles close to him, eliminating the others from earshot. — Don’t be, he hisses in barely repressed glee. — Dinnae say anything tae Dolores, but that wee fucker was the bane ay ma life. I always wanted a bigger dug, like a German shepherd, a proper dug. Look, I’d better get the lassies hame. Ye comin?

— No. I’m going back. I’ll be along later.

— Ray, Trudi has got out of the car again, — please come with us.

— Get back in the car! It’s dangerous! Lennox snaps. But Trudi doesn’t move.

— She’s right, Ginger says. — You’ve done your bit. From here on in, all you can do is make a total cunt of yourself. And by that I mean an even bigger one than you already have.

— No way, Lennox says. He’s thinking about Robyn. And Dearing, Johnnie, Starry and Chet. She knows something and they are keeping her quiet till they decide what to do with her. What will they do, given the resources they have? Now, out here in those swamps, it is so chillingly obvious to him. The sea. They’ll lose her at sea. Lance and Johnnie are taking Robyn to Chet’s boat and they’ll dump her somewhere in the Gulf of Mexico. It’s high risk, of course. Coastguards, terrorist alerts, illegal-immigration control teams, DEA helicopters. But they might now be desperate enough to try it.

But not as desperate as him. Because he wants them: Lance, Johnnie, Starry, that trinity of bad intent. Chet too, though the nature of his embroilment is harder to fathom. And the terrible possibility of Robyn’s culpability won’t dislodge itself from his overheated mind. The music in his head is winding down, because his part in Tianna’s terrible ballad is over. Now there’s a new song striking up, or a remix of an old forgotten one. And it isn’t about Britney. It’s about a frightened boy trapped in a dark tunnel. And despite Dolores’s cries and Trudi’s protests, it’s all he can hear.

— C’mon, Ray, Ginger pleads.

Lennox thinks of Perfect Bride with Trudi’s address in it. — I’ve left something, and he climbs back into the rented Volkswagen.

17 Edinburgh (4)

YOU SAW POLICE Headquarters at Fettes as a factory, one which measured and allotted the requisite units of humanity to everyone that came through its doors. The suspects. The members of your team: Gillman, Drummond, Notman, Harrower, McCaig. You.

Through his entire processing by the state’s law enforcement and criminal justice systems, Horsburgh displayed only arrogance and disdain. The searches of property and assets. The intimate forensic tests. The interrogations. The psychiatrist’s reports. The official charges. He enjoyed it as a game; savoured the embarrassment all round when he confessed to the Welwyn Garden City and Manchester crimes. It all meant so little to him. But it meant so much to you, and Mr Confectioner knew it.

It came to a head on a mid-November Wednesday, three weeks after Britney had been taken. You’d spent hours with this man, trying to find out what made him the way he was. Looked into his soul. Saw nothing. Exasperation got the better of you. — Why? Why did you do it?

— Because I could, Confectioner had replied in offhand candour, removing his reading specs, waving them gently to underscore a point. — It was the sport of it mainly. Oh, don’t get me wrong, I got a lot of pleasure from the sexual side, but that wasn’t the main motivation. Very fleeting, that sort of thing. Besides, this one was a little too young. I prefer them to have some sort of awareness of what’s going to happen to them. His lips trembled in delight, knowing he’d got to you. — It was more the thrill of the chase, stalking them, building up the dossiers, evading you lot. We’re thrill-seeking creatures, are we not?

You had fought to maintain silence and an even stare; to keep looking dispassionately for the clues. We studied our serial killers, nonces and murderers in the same way we did our scientists, intellectuals and artists, looking for answers to the mystery of our nature.

And Confectioner recognised that in you, this fatal curiosity; used it to toy with you. — You’re different from the others, he’d pompously declared. — They just need to know how. How did I lure, overpower, fuck, kill and conceal. But you’re really so desperate to know why. You want me to tell you that I was buggered by my father or the local parish priest or whoever. In your dwarf mind, there must always be cause and effect. But you’re only protecting weaklings like yourself, Lennox. You can’t accept that man is a hunter, a predator. Civil society’s set up to protect the weak and the cowardly – be they rich or poor – from the strong and virtuous who have the courage to fulfil the destiny of their species. Who have the guts to take what they want.

The grimly cheerful smile. That rubbery mouth you wanted to tear from his face.

— You know, I had every police force in Britain looking for me for the best part of five years and you didn’t have a fucking clue as to who I was. All this time I’d be lodging complaints at my local station about vandalism or noise coming from pubs, and you’d bend over backwards to help.

It was true. Mr Confectioner, ‘Horsey’, the pedantic Home Office civil servant nobody wanted to be stuck beside on the morning commuter train from Aylesbury to Marylebone, had conned them all. His whole persona was an act, concealing a warped but calculating mind. Photography was his supposed interest, but the darkroom upstairs in his home, out of reach from his crippled mother, was really a laboratory. All his weekend and holiday time was spent planning his abductions and murders. His true hobby was kidnapping, beasting and killing.

Horsburgh would hire a cottage within a couple of hours’ driving distance from his intended target area. Nula Andrews was taken to a place in the Fenlands, Stacey Earnshaw the Lake District, and Britney Hamil to the Berwickshire coast. Horsburgh also told them where the body of a young French girl was buried in Normandy. — A holiday romance, he’d chirped, meeting your seething rage with a television game-show host’s smile. — They never last.

This disclosure resulted in the release of a farm labourer who had been in a French prison for seven years. Crucially, though, Confectioner refused to cooperate when you showed him pictures of other missing children. — Not quite ready to help you there, he’d said genially. But you knew there were more victims.

None of the missing kids was on Horsburgh’s comprehensive database of young girls, or featured in his detailed notes. But also absent were records for Nula, Stacey and Britney; he’d obviously erased them on completion of each abominable mission. How many others were there?

You did find the white van. Horsburgh also had a black one, keeping both in a lock-up garage a mile from his home, using them solely for his crimes. He selected his victims at random, trying for a geographical spread. He also had the tapes he’d made.

If there was one thing more unsettling to you than talking to Confectioner, it had been watching the Britney tape earlier that morning with Dougie Gillman. — That’s five times, his frozen, mordant observation, — he’s fucked her, choked her unconscious, then brought her back for another shot. That’s his thing.

Gillman’s voice and those images snapped back into your head as you stared at Horsburgh’s hands. You buckled under a sharp intake of breath, as you heard the soft, childlike plea escape from somewhere deep within you. — She was only a wee lassie.

The killer looked at you as if you were simple: with pity as well as contempt. Then you realised that Bob Toal had come into the interview room. He nodded for you to follow him outside, steering you into an empty office and closing the door. — You’re losing it, Ray, he warned. — Go and get some lunch. I want to give Dougie a shot at him this affie.

You gripped his forearm. — Just one more session, you begged.

Toal looked over your shoulder into the middle distance. — Okay, Ray, he said finally, — you pulled him, you deserve the chance to see it through. Then he looked down at your hand, shaming you into withdrawing your grip. — But it’s against my better judgement: you’re a mess.

And you couldn’t contradict him. Last night you’d turned up at Trudi’s, a rambling drunk. There was an argument and you’d woken up on her couch, and gone straight into work. — I’m sorry, you told your boss, — I’ll sort myself out.

Toal looked doubtful. — Leave the whys for the shrinks. Find out about those other kids.

— Thanks. I’ll stick to the details, like you said, as you glanced at each other in impasse, both unsure of what to say next. You eventually managed to wheeze out your intention of getting some lunch, and you trooped down to Stockbridge.

Then, in Bert’s Bar, as you watched Sky News, Robert Ellis appeared on the screen. Out of prison, self-educated, well read. Enjoying the new-found status of being the articulate good guy. — I feel sorry for the families of Stacey Earnshaw and Nula Andrews. They deserved genuine closure but instead they were forced to live a lie all those years. Most of all, though, I really feel for the family of Britney Hamil. While I was rotting in jail, this monster was out there, free to do these unspeakable things to that child. Heads will roll, he threatened. Ellis now a hero to those who forgot his vile rant at the grave of Nula Andrews. But you harboured the uneasy sensation that had he been as eloquent several years back, Ellis, instead of instigating bar-room brawls, might have been a man who led nations into war.

You couldn’t stand it: you went to the toilet and snorted a line of cocaine.

When you returned to Fettes, you savoured the cold burn in your veins. Felt that you now had the measure of the beast. In the interview room you had distance back in your voice. — You’d have been pretend-tinkering in the back of the van, looking out for signs of life at the windows. Waiting till Britney had walked past and was blocked by the body of the van from any prying eyes on the other side of the road. You grabbed the kid, bundled her into the back, shut the door, secured her, probably with duct tape, maybe forced some Rohypnol or chloroform on to her, then climbed into the front, right?

— And tore off to my evil lair for the slow devouring. Horsburgh smiled. — You’re a smart one, DI Lennox. Probably an IT background, I’m guessing. A 2:1 at some second-rate, but still decent uni. Perhaps even a master’s—

— Shut the fuck up.

Horsburgh looked offended, then somewhat disappointed as he disdainfully raised his brows. — But you missed stuff. The CCTV footage of the grave. You’ve probably looked at loads of it. Kills the eyes, that sort of thing. How’s your vision?

You sensed you were being played. Were suddenly very aware of your colleagues through the mirror. — What?

— Did you ever look at Parka Man’s debut appearance?

— In Welwyn…

— Sorry, I meant my debut appearance in Edinburgh. He paused for effect. You felt the room grow bigger, Horsburgh receding from you. — The security footage from Burger Palace, at that dreadful shopping centre… you missed it, didn’t you?

You battled to retain your composure. — Go on.

Mr Confectioner laughed like a waterfall, all shoulder-shaking shushes. — I suppose I overestimated you. Check it. The night before I took her, when she went with her mother and sister to that grotty fast-food place. Had you checked the footage, you’d have seen me there. Sporting the trusty parka. You were remiss, DI Lennox.

You could feel the eyes of the others – Toal, Gillman – through that mirror. Knew they wouldn’t be on Horsburgh.

— I’d dumped my little device in the rubbish bin outside the window. A small bang to attract them all, then that blazing bucket. How children love a fire! So easy for me to swap Tessa’s drink with my spiked concoction; I knew she’d go for Sprite, she always did. I hoped that Britney would walk alone to school the next day, and sure enough… He basked in self-approval. — The rest played out roughly as you described it. My discarding of the school books and bag was basically just to mess around with you. A little tease. It thrilled me to think of you earnestly pondering the deep significance of these completely playful actions. But… you didn’t think to check the burger bar’s CCTV from the night before? Shabby policework, Lenno—

You’d sprung across that cold distance between you and him and had your hands round Mr Confectioner’s throat. But although his body went limp and he offered no resistance, fear was absent from his bulging eyes. Instead, a sick smile played upon his rubbery lips; he was like a terrifying ventriloquist’s dummy. And you heard him rasp in a thin, ghostly voice, — Feels good, doesn’t it?

Then, in a slow caressing movement, Gareth Horsburgh’s hand went up to your genitals. You stopped, froze under the nonce’s touch on your penis; that contact when you realised, with horror, that you were erect. You loosened your grip and backed away, just as Gillman and Notman burst through the door. — Now you’re beginning to understand, Mr Confectioner said, rubbing at his throat.

Then you saw how it should be done. Saw Gillman move slowly behind Horsburgh. Watched apprehension replace the hauteur in the beast’s eyes. Saw the unnerved nonce try to steel himself, and he was about to speak when Gillman said in an even, neutral voice, like he was talking about the weather: — You’re mine now.

— No marks, Doug, Ally, you’d said softly, trying pathetically to maintain an authority you knew had left you as you closed the door, squeamished by the mutual information that hung adhesively between you and your brother officers, as cosy and wily as clandestine sex.

You went to the anteroom, slumped down in a chair next to Toal. Watched defeatedly through the screen. There are many ways you can hurt somebody without leaving marks. Every interrogator in every police force in the world gets taught them, either formally or informally, depending on the nature of the regime. You were sure that Gillman, standing behind the now disquieted Mr Confectioner, a white towel in his hands, knew every one of them. — All that stuff aboot being a hunter, he smirked as he snapped the ends of the towel tight, — made me laugh, that yin.

By his silence, Gareth Horsburgh recognised that true terror would now be visited upon him, by someone who really did understand punishment.

— Ye know, ah don’t see that. Gillman shook his head. — Ah see a middle-aged guy who lives at hame with ehs ma.

You couldn’t stay. You sprang to your feet, headed out and down the stairs, shamed again by the beast. A pursuing Toal caught up with you on the path outside. In the biting cold air, your boss gave you the spiel about being a good man, who’d done a good job. About not taking the Robertson route and going down. Then he’d whispered, — You were caught on camera, leaving a bar in Newcastle frequented by drug dealers.

— Boss, I—

— Don’t say anything, Ray. Toal’s head whipped back and forth. — It’s been taken care of. Don’t speak to anybody about this. I’ve made an appointment for you to go and see Melissa Collingwood in counselling. You are officially on leave till further notice. Go to Trudi’s, Ray.

You nodded, walked down into Comely Bank Avenue and jumped in a taxi up to the Jeanie Deans pub. All you could think of was: I didn’t consider the camera in the centre, at the burger bar. They had one there, to check who was going in and out of the toilets, and over the counters for robbery and staff assaults. I just didn’t think about the night before. Why? Because all I thought about was Angela, what a dirty, lazy cow she was, who’d poisoned her own kid with her crap food.

So you went to the bar you used to frequent with Robbo and several other burned-out dissaffected cops. Met a few of the boys there and drank a lot of vodka, before being felled by a sick joke.

18 Decked

LENNOX DRIVES BACK towards the Gulf Coast at a steady eighty; air con off and windows down, taking in the scent of the night, as he vacates the freeway for the connecting fork to Highway 41, passing on to the curving slip road for Bologna.

At thirty-five he feels suddenly older, sensing the seasons quickly chasing him down. Twenty-eight to thirty-four seemed static, a welcome hiatus after two decades of almost overwhelming volatility, but then his thirty-fifth year had delivered a quantum leap into middle age. Smitten by angst, he wonders about his next cataclysmic anniversary, and the urge to savour almost overwhelms. Lennox feels he should be looking at the eminence of the flickering stars through the dark, naked treetops, but he’s too intent on steering down this winding drive, treacherous after America’s breezy highways and waiting to claim him for its own. His need to concentrate is a response to his fatigue, but also because he feels an uneasy seduction lurking in those heavens; the stars seem closer down here, frozen detonated fireworks clustering in the air with a judging, perilous aspect.

The air at ground level is still almost gossamer in its humidity, but the swishing palm trees overhead signal a building wind as the road snakes even more keenly. Then, to his right, lights of varying intensity shimmer through the trees as the town rises out from the mangrove swamp.

As he drives towards the harbour, the marina is on the left: moon-globe street lamps beam in ripples over the water, the stars now a pallid glimmer in the inky sky above, and he can see thunderhead clouds glowing ominously through the mottled darkness to the north. Passing over the swamplands, they draw winds from the mangrove bushes as they loom in menacing approach.

Pulling into the near empty lot, he sees Chet’s boat moored under a burning lamp. As he exits the car, a solitary figure emerges from the office on the brokerage strip. — You’re sure lucky to catch ol Chet. Don Wynter twirls a set of keys, glancing to the berthed boat. — Reckon he’s plannin on takin a long trip. Down to the Keys, or maybe even the Bahamas. Plenty supplies; I know that cause I sell em to him, the old boy laughs. — Pretty tight-lipped about it all. Reckon he got some sweet thing tucked away.

— Anybody else on the boat? Lennox asks.

— Don’t reckon so, the loquacious harbour master says, and begins to expand, but Lennox has turned abruptly and stolen off towards the vessel. Stepping on to the gangplank, he looks down at the oily water before hopping on to the pristine craft. It’s dark, but light emanates from the cabin below. However, Chet is on the bridge, and both men are startled by the unexpected presence of the other. — Lennox. What… what are you doing here?

— I left something, he says gruffly and heads without invitation downstairs to the galley kitchen and dining area. The dog-eared Perfect Bride lies on the table where Tianna left it; apparently untouched. He picks it up, the beaming visage of the model bride strangely welcoming. Then he notes that the door of the larger bedroom is shut. He opens it and looks inside. Empty. So he heads up the four oak steps and back to the rear deck of the boat.

Chet stands trembling in front of him, but although a breeze is mounting, it hasn’t yet shifted the humidity from the air and it isn’t cold. He regards the magazine in Lennox’s hand. — Must be valuable, for you to come back for it.

— Aye, Lennox acknowledges, — it is. Then he looks up at the sky. — Weather’s turned a wee bit.

— Forecast isn’t too bad though. The rain clouds should blow over us, Chet says, distractedly. — Tianna nice and safe?

Lennox’s antenna tingles. Tianna’s safety has become an afterthought. — Aye. She’s with friends of mine.

— Good, Chet says uneasily.

Lennox feels something spike his arm. He lashes out with the magazine in his other hand, slapping sunburn, but crumpling the mosquito that has bloated on his blood. — Bastard, he snaps.

— You become immune and they don’t carry malaria here.

— I don’t intend to stick around long enough to become immune, Lennox says. — Just one question, although he knows, in cop tradition, that others will follow, — has Lance Dearing ever been on this boat?

As the words leave his lips, he becomes aware that Chet is actually looking over his shoulder. And then he hears a scrambling on the steps behind him. But Lennox can’t react in time as he feels something collide with him at force and it’s as if his teeth are being pushed out of his face from behind. He stumbles forward, fighting to stay conscious, but an explosion of orange in his head is fading to black. Fight through this shite. Fight. He feels no sensation but sees a mess of mashed-up red snapper and fries sloshing from him on to the deck. Then somebody is on him, forcing him down into his own vomit. He can’t resist; he’s a puppet with the strings cut. Immediately he thinks Dearing and Johnnie, as he feels his wrists being bound with something – he suspects fishing twine – followed by his ankles. Lennox slams his eyelids shut and grinds his teeth together. He’s aware of a spasm in his gullet now, and counts silently, hoping for a lull that will enable him to either swallow or expel his partial regurgitations. Then he seems to be breathing cool air through a hole in his chest.

As his vision clears, he draws up his knees and examines his ankles, confirming his suspicion as to the nature of his bondage. Then a pole dancer in silhouette and a slogan I SUPPORT SINGLE MOMS comes into vision, and Johnnie is crouching over him. As well as the T-shirt he wears a pair of polyester slacks. Lennox’s bleary eyes pan in jagged survey: no sign of Dearing. He sees the blue logo of Perfect Bride as the magazine lies face up in his vomit.

Johnnie holds a big, rusty shifting wrench, and he’s barking something at Chet. Lennox can’t make out the words. His skull throbs and the stink of his own vomit lodges in his nose and throat. His breaths have gathered the velocity of a steam locomotive. Each one demands attention. Resting his head on the deck, he shuts his eyes and lies in a stupor for what might have been hours, but on opening them the distance from the harbour lights indicates the passage of only a few minutes.

He tries to swallow. Saliva won’t come together in his arid mouth and throat. His head bangs, his eardrums pop, the acrid stench of his own puke rises from his shirt. The tendons in his neck are strained, as if his skull is lead. The tight binding on his wrists prevents him wiping the stinging sweat from his eyes. He considers his location, propped up against the deck seating at the rear of the craft. He can see Chet at the helm as the boat surges forward. The old taxman can’t look at Lennox, as if witnessing his humiliation is too big a cross to bear.

A deep fear grips him. Dealing with people who had been murdered in suspicious circumstances has made him even less disposed to joining their ranks. Cops wanted to know what the dead person on the table ate, what they wore, drank, read, who they knew, who they fucked, and how they liked to do it. They’d poke around under your fingernails, in your mouth, up your arse, around your genitals and inside your stomach. Then they’d pore over your mail, diary, emails, bank accounts and investments, till they knew you better than you’d known yourself. Lennox has always been tormented by the mortifying sense that his spirit self would be compelled to bear witness to the ignominious abuse of his worldly remains.

The last thing he wants is to be touched but it’s strangely comforting as a hand under his armpit yanks him upright. Then his skull hurts so bad, he envisions his head as physically split open, brains pouring from the back of it, slopping across the slick, white fibreglass of the boat into the sea. Sickness sinks through his body like a dropped anchor. He digs in his trainered soles, trying to get traction on a deck made slippery by his own puke. — It’s okay, a voice says in his ear. His arse feels the moulded seat and he swivels his hips to assist the force guiding him on to it. — You okay? Johnnie asks, the genuine concern in his voice surprising Lennox.

— I think you fractured my skull. He stares at the thick stubble on Johnnie’s chin. — I need to go to a hospital.

— If you’re sharp enough to talk like that, then you don’t need no hospital. Johnnie’s manner is now contrary and childlike.

— So you’re a doctor, then?

Johnnie has lost the wrench, but Lennox sees a sheathed diving knife attached to his belt, incongrous against the polyester leg. — I didn’t wanna hurt you, he says, shaking his head, — but why you gotta go poking your big fucking nose into other people’s business?

— It goes with the territory, he says, flexing against his bounds. The unyielding nature of the constraints induces a panic he struggles to fight. He’s going to drown. To be cast overboard. To have his breath crushed from his lungs by the force of the sea. He can picture the last air he will expel, a bubble rendered tangible and measurable by the water around it. See it explode in liberation to the surface, while his lifeless body floats below.

— What territory is that? Johnnie asks.

Lennox can’t think of what to say. Then Chet stalls the boat, cutting the engine to slow cruising speed. Thinking of the moth, Lennox shudders. As terror dances behind his eyes, he realises his notions of a dignified death were fanciful.

How did I get here?

— Mr Confectioner, he was the one that fucked my heid. Every time Lennox encountered Horsburgh, he wanted the world to swallow one of them up. Afterwards, he’d repair to the pub; drinking to try and obliterate the stuff he’d heard spill from this man’s mouth. A line of cocaine helped. Was it Horsey, Mr Confectioner, who’d led him here?

— What’s the fucking hold-up? Johnnie roars at Chet. — We ain’t here to look at no fuckin dolphins!

A seabird squawks, and Lennox feels the spray made by the boat cleaning his face. An astonishing calm descends on him, his thoughts seeming to become abstract. A strange but urgent consideration hits him: the missing piece in the jigsaw has to be a twenty-plus-goals-a-season striker. At present there was far too big a goal-scoring burden on Skacel and Hartley in the midfield. Then he sees that Chet is losing it, giving Johnnie the fear-of-running-aground routine. — We are in the goddamn shallows and this boat weighs twenty-three thousand pounds, and that was before your lardy ass stepped on to it. Unless you want me to run aground and have the coastguard out to us, I suggest we proceed with fucking caution!

Johnnie aims a sulky gape at Chet; he goes to say something then stops. Instead, holding the boat’s peripheral rail, he turns to Lennox. — Right, asshole. Who the fuck are you?

Lennox still thinks of Mr Confectioner, Gareth Horsburgh. The arrogance of the taunting beast: like it was an act he’d run through on many private occasions. He recalls asking Stuart how he prepared for his acting roles; the corrupt young solicitor in Taggart, the intern vet in Take the High Road, the drug-addled ned in The Vice.

Find the character’s essence. Become one with it, harness it.

What would Horsburgh do if he were the captive? He would be derisive, sneering his contempt at those insects. The supercilious civil servant, with his briefcase and sandwiches, would delight in being the biggest, brightest, most evil beast in this jungle.

— I never intended to get involved in all this, Johnnie. He hears his tones clipped and precise. — Now I’m going to ask you to do something for me.

— What… what the fuck do you want me to do for you?

— I’m going to ask you to get rid of me.

And Ray Lennox, Mr Confectioner, tries to rise. His arse gets an inch from the seat, before the boat’s motion thumps him back, jarring his spine.

— Hold it right there or that is exactly what I will do, Johnnie says, — throw your miserable interfering ass overboard!

— But I want you to. I want to make it easy for you, Lennox the Confectioner urges, trying to thrust himself up again. — Just help me up and I’ll jump.

— Not from my boat you won’t, Chet blusters above the engine’s growl. — I’ve never lost anybody at sea yet and I don’t intend—

— Shut the fuck up! Johnnie bellows, then pushes Lennox back on to the seat with one hand, gripping the handrail with the other. — I’m warning you, asshole!

Lennox looks at Johnnie with his now deliciously half-shut eyes, feeling the throb of power in his constrained limbs. — You know what I want. Because you know that I’m like you and there’s only room for one of us.

Chet’s shoulders bristle and his back stiffens as he grips the wheel. When he turns, his eyes have the protrusion and burn of the death’s head. — What in hell’s name are you saying…?

Johnnie gazes in stupefaction at Lennox, then there’s a spark of interest.

— When I stumbled on your little nest of vipers I was so excited, Lennox expounds in a low lisp, his senses now merely a conduit to the voice of another: someone hated. — You see, I’d been emailing back home to my own organisation, trying to get in contact with like-minded souls in America. But no luck. I was prowling freelance when I met her, by accident. The mother. I could smell it off her; you always can. And the girl. You know what they called me back in Britain, Johnnie? Mr Confectioner. But I never tempted a child with candy. Their mothers though, oh, they could be bought off with a few drinks and some sweet talk.

He can see his own ugliness reflected back in Johnnie’s eyes. Like he did looking at Horsburgh.

How he’s marked me, how they always mark you.

— A dopey, negligent woman with low self-esteem, and a delightful little nymphet, taught how to give pleasure and say nothing. I was making my move when you, Johnnie, he tersely nods at him, — you almost ruined everything with your ham-fisted approach. But really I should thank you. It was your action that delivered her into my care. I had a wonderful night in that hotel room, Johnnie. That was a result, and much appreciated.

— You’re full of bullshit, Johnnie says, both hands white on the rail, but his weak sneer can’t conceal his entrancement.

— Shut up, Chet barks. — Shut up, you fucking perverts, and he disintegrates into an agonised howl. — I’ve had enough of this. All your fucking blackmail! IT ENDS NOW!

Johnnie looks from Lennox to Chet. — If I tell Dearing about this, you are fucking finished, old man!

— So to the victor the spoils, Lennox gasps, pulling Johnnie’s attention back to him. — She’s yours and I’ll never know the beauty of a hairless minge again.

— We saw her first, you fuck: we staked that dumb-ass bitch of a mother out for months… you think I enjoyed balling that stretch-marked hag? He points at the pole dancer on his chest. — I’m into young pussy, is all. I did the fucking dirty work and then Dearing breezes in… Johnnie stops, as if realising he’s said too much.

— Fair enough, Lennox says as Chet moans something he can’t make out. — So fuck it: throw me to the fishes. I like young pussy too; in fact, I can’t live without it. It was a good run while it lasted!

Johnnie’s head wobbles with vigour. — Nobody’s goin to no freakin fishes—

— But Lance is calling the shots. He’ll want rid of me, then he’ll destroy you, long before you need to go down, Johnnie.

— You know nuthin about us—

— I know from what you’re saying that you’re doing the dirty work and he’s getting the pay-off.

Johnnie stiffens, puts one hand on his hip. — Damn straight, he acknowledges.

— And I know that I could give you more options than this. Lennox looks out over the dark, still waters. — America’s finished, Johnnie. It’s crawling with Feds and DEA agents. Drugs, terrorism, illegals: all this crippling paranoia about borders. Over my way, we bring in some really beautiful girls: East European, Asian. The border controls are limited, the terror alerts almost zero. Most of them can’t even speak English. Those Thai girls, Johnnie, he says as his adversary licks his lips, — they are something else. They come from nothing so they’re happy to get anything. Not MTV-saturated brats who expect stuff; they’re silent and obedient, just the way we like em, right?

A hatchet grin cleaves Johnnie’s doughy face in two.

Lennox fights to return the complicit smirk. — I could get you sorted out, Johnnie.

— Sounds finger-fuckin good to me, Johnnie says. Then his face tightens again. — But Dearing—

— Forget Dearing. He’s a cop. If you start getting rid of bodies, and it looks like this whole thing is going to shit, then who’s going to carry the can? The cop or the stooges? He shouts over at Chet: — What about you, Lewis? You aren’t a killer. Are you going to let Dearing lead you up the garden path?

— SHUT UP! SHUT UP, YOU FUCKING TWISTED PERVERTS!

Johnnie turns and looks at Chet. — Fuck you!

— Get onside with me, Johnnie! Lennox shouts, — and I won’t let you down!

Johnnie nods in dim complicity, and Lennox can’t believe it. The fucking simpleton. And now he’s reaching behind Lennox and is cutting at his twine bounds with a serrated knife. He’s no right in the heid. As his face is squashed into Johnnie’s flabby breast, he almost feels sorry for Dearing, stuck with such a blundering sidekick.

— I could sure use a little help, Ray. Things have gotten a bit out of control. Dearing thinks he knows it all but—

Johnnie gasps as his eyes expand then roll in his head and he slumps forward, crushing Lennox, who vainly tries to slide out from under him. Standing above, holding a fire extinguisher, is Chet. Lennox is immobilised with Johnnie’s stunned, heaving bulk on his lap, unable to free his wrists from the last of the twine. Disordered by fury, Chet keeps the extinguisher poised. — You fucking scumbags! I’VE HAD ENOUGH OF YOU ALL! He raises the metal cylinder above his head, as Johnnie slides off Lennox, rolling on to the deck with the slap of a landed fish.

— STOP! Lennox screams. — I’m NOT what you think!

Chet pauses, wobbles, but keeps his balance, as Lennox realises nobody is operating the boat.

— I made that shit up to buy time with that arsehole. He looks down at the groaning Johnnie.

— Nobody playing fucking fair, Johnnie wheezes deliriously, — only ol Johnnie here tryin to play fair…

Chet won’t relinquish his hold on the extinguisher. — I’ve had enough bullshit and deceit—

— CHECK! For fuck’s sake, check my ID in my wallet. I’m a cop! Lennox screams. — Tianna’s safe, she’s with my fiancée, Trudi. I’ve a number in my wallet with my ID, you can contact her there!

Chet finally lowers the canister. His powerlifter’s mitt grabs Lennox’s neck. — I should… he starts as Lennox feels his throat constricting, but the sailor’s other hand is pulling the wallet from his pocket. He unleashes the grip and reads a card as Lennox rasps an intake of air. — Lothian and Borders Police? What the hell is that? That isn’t even Alaska… or Utah… you have no jurisdiction here! What the hell has this got to do with you?

— Nothing, Lennox heaves, struggling to fill his lungs. — Absolutely fuck all. I’m a cop on holiday with my fiancée. We’re planning our wedding. We had a big fight and I went off in the huff and met Robyn and her friend in a bar. Then, well, you know the rest. He nods at the moaning Johnnie, still spangled on the deck.

Chet looks at him for a few seconds. — I believe you, he says finally, — I’ll cut you free and then—

But Johnnie suddenly springs up, the blood cascading down his back, grasping the blade from his belt. He swings it at Chet and misses, — YOU FUCKIN IDIOT! COULD’VE FUCKIN KILLED ME!

Chet shrieks and runs up on to the top deck, with Johnnie in pursuit. — Dinnae run away fae that fat cunt, you’re a powerlifter: break ehs fuckin neck! Lennox roars. Then an irresistible, clattering halt, and he shoots off the seat under its impact, as he sees Chet and Johnnie vanish from the deck like magician’s assistants. There’s no time to work out what’s happening; still trussed up, he’s propelled across the lower deck, slamming back-first into the steps that lead up to the bridge.

Things slow down after that jarring loss of momentum; Lennox shakes his head to try and clear it. A wrenching racket from the engines, like a food mixer amplified through a sound system, tells him the boat has run aground. He tries to catch his breath. He can’t determine Johnnie and Chet’s fates as propulsion mechanisms continue to snarl and wheeze in impotence, but it seems likely that the impact has thrown them both overboard. He pulls himself along towards the steps that lead down into the cabin, letting his legs swing over. It’s a steep fall and he’s bound at the ankles, but he’s no choice. Swallowing hard, he takes a deep breath to drain himself of everything superfluous to the jump. His body seems to leave his essence behind as it falls the distance, but they reunite as Lennox hits the deck feet-first before crashing on to his side, a brutal signal of agony making him believe he’s broken his arm. Forcing himself up against a kitchen worktop, he hops into position, sticking the fishing twine that binds his wrists into the teeth of the electronic can opener. Unable switch it on, he saws crudely. As it snaps free, the pain in his arm almost causes him to black out. Balancing himself with his pulped right hand, Lennox breathes in deeply, trying to force down his heart rate. Then he rummages through the opened drawers, finding another serrated knife and taking it to his ankles, wincing as he hacks himself free.

All around him the now twenty-degree-angled edifice emits wind-blown moans and whines, juddering and creaking as if its hull is being rent apart. Cupboard doors have sprung open on one side, sending provisions tumbling on to the craft’s floor.

Lennox rubs at the back of his head with his throbbing right hand. There is an egg-shaped swelling, tender to the touch, but no blood. The left arm hurts unbearably; he can’t lift it above chest level. Nonetheless, he feels adrenalin’s charge and hoists himself up the steps, springing on to the bow. Johnnie is above him; top deck, starboard side, knife poised, threatening, but not striking at Chet, who is holding on to the railing, trying to climb back on to the tilted boat. — Let me on, or the engine will burn out, he warns.

Thank fuck they’re amateurs who don’t know what they’re doing, Lennox consoles himself. Disgusting paedophiles, yes, but different from a deranged killer like Horsburgh. Noncing is their game, pure and simple; they have no contingency plans, no exit strategy. Things are going wrong for them, as he found eventually happened with all criminal activity. It was like the bookies or the casino: the occasional big win only hastening your next devastating loss.

But revulsion bubbles in him, and he craves violence’s release. — C’moan then, fat boy, he shouts. — Let’s fuckin have ye!

Johnnie turns and moves towards Lennox, the knife in his hand, struggling to negotiate the sloping deck. Despite his bulk, Lennox can see that the fear is ripping out of him. He’d miscast this masturbating stoner as bully of the barrio, but Johnnie’s as out of his depth as the beached boat.

Lennox adopts the fighter’s side-on stance and though his left arm still pains him, he is able to raise it into the blocking position. He gets in a couple of feeble jabs that hurt him more than his opponent, but the very shock of contact all but disables Johnnie. He manages a weak and wide swing of the blade but this puts him off balance, allowing Lennox to step inside, elbowing him with his right, to protect his damaged fist. He follows up by catching Johnnie with a roundhouse kick, sending him blindly flailing to the deck. After a few more blows, Johnnie has dropped the knife and is slowly being worked over. — I came on holiday with my fiancée to GET THE FUCK AWAY from scum like you. And this Dearing cunt is a fucking cop. His foot whacks into the fat man’s face, extracting a doglike yelp. — Where is she, Johnnie? Lennox punctuates his questions with blows. — Where’s Robyn? Where’s Dearing? Where’s fucking Starry?

Johnnie’s groans can barely be heard above the noise of the engines. But when they abruptly cut out, he hears him howl, — I DUNNO!

Lennox looks to the top deck starboard. Chet had climbed back on the boat and got on to the bridge, shutting the power down.

Johnnie now snivels puplike as Lennox sits on top of him, injured fist round his throat, the other ready to hammer him more. Eventually he miserably concedes, — Robyn’s at her place; Starry’s with her. Lance is meeting some people… at the Embassy Hotel tonight… in Miami.

Assisted by Chet, Lennox reciprocates the treatment Johnnie meted out to him, binding his wrists and ankles in fishing twine.

— We wasn’t gonna hurt nobody, Johnnie says meekly.

— Shut the fuck up, Lennox spits, striking him across the face with the back of his left hand. A yellow puddle spreading out from under the polyester trousers encourages him to stand up. Its slow path towards Perfect Bride makes him aware that the boat’s angle has almost righted itself since Chet cut the engines.

Lennox kicks the magazine from the piss and gestures to Chet, and they head downstairs. They sit as he rubs at his arm, then massages his nipping eyeballs through closed lids. — I need to know the score.

Chet nods and looks at the mess on the floor, then he rises to a locked cabinet, producing a bottle of malt whisky and two cut glasses. Lennox grimaces at the volunteered liquor, nauseated by the smell. — I don’t drink that stuff.

— A Scotsman and you don’t drink whisky?

— That’s the way it is, he says, but he certainly needs a drink. — Anything else?

— I’ve some Ukrainian vodka.

— That’ll do.

— With soda?

— Fine, Lennox says, wondering why he is drinking with this man, even as he instantly imbibes the spirit, extending his glass for a refill.

As he replenishes it, Chet coughs out his understanding of events. — They’re keeping Robyn at her place with Starry. They seem to believe she’s cottoned on to what their game is, but I think they think she knows more than she does… if you follow me.

Lennox nods, pressing him to carry on.

— I need to get out of this, Lennox. These people are sick and evil. They are paedophiles and God knows what else. Dearing told me that you were one of them, an outsider trying to muscle into their sex club—

— No. I’m certainly not.

— Sorry. I couldn’t be sure.

— But what about you? How did you—

— They were blackmailing me. I didn’t know where to turn. Dearing is a cop, for chrissakes.

Lennox slowly blows out some air. As soon as he’d learned about Dearing, he knew he could never have gone to the police in Miami. It would be like some cop from the Fiji Islands wandering into Fettes HQ and saying to an officer on the desk, ‘One of your polismen is running a paedophile ring.’

— Once they found my weakness—

— Aw aye? Lennox spits in threat. — And what weakness is that?

Chet looks sadly at him. — It’s not what you think. I swear to you I never touched Tianna or any other child, nor did I make them do anything. He says it so emphatically that Lennox can see he is disgusted at the thought. — I didn’t make anybody do anything. I just liked to watch, not with the kids obviously, I knew nothing about that. Please believe me! he pleads.

— Go on.

— Pamela had gone, Lennox, and I was lonely. This was to be our retirement paradise; I’d worked and saved and invested carefully all my life so that we could have this dream together. We lived it for about eighteen months till she got sick and she was dead five months later. I was at a low when I met Robyn and Tianna.

Lennox raises his eyebrows.

— There was nothing between Robyn and me. She made it clear that she wasn’t interested, and to be truthful, neither was I. But through her I met Johnnie and Lance. I knew they were lowlife, especially Johnnie, his head twists towards the bow, — and that they would do what they do. It was just women at first. All I ever did was let them use the boat, and watch the odd tape they made. But they’re devious sons of bitches; they shot the stuff in a way that everybody would know it was being filmed on my boat. They knew this was my life and that I’d be finished here if it came out.

— So you got in so deep you felt you had to carry on, Lennox says. This was commonplace. People being blackmailed often capitulated, thinking they could buy time, but usually ended up compounding the problem by compromising themselves even more.

— Yes, Chet moans, — I would never do anything. I would never betray my Pamela’s memory. I was just so lonely and fed up. I only watched a couple of times! He looks at Lennox in appeal.

That’s the problem. Too many people like to watch. — When did you learn they were paedos, rather than just stag lads making gonzo porn?

Chet swallows a mouthful of malt. — I knew it was going to lead somewhere bad, but I had no conception that they’d involve children. Then, when I saw a tape they’d done with a young girl, that was the last straw for me. I started making copies of the ones they kept here, for evidence. I was going to bring the animals down before they got their hands on Tianna. She’s my granddaughter’s friend, Lennox!

Lennox’s index finger shoots up and caresses the knot of twisted bone at the side of his nose. — I think you were too late.

— What? Chet gasps, his face falling south.

— Where are the tapes?

— I have them here. Chet feverishly glances back to the stateroom.

— Anything else?

— Oh yes, he says, — I’ve got a list of names. Of those monsters and their intended victims. I got on to their website. Johnnie was sloppy. He started coming here with six-packs of beer, lording it up. Demanding I took him out fishing. He’d sit downstairs and watch the tapes, or go on to the website. I encouraged him, waited till he was drunk and left the window open on his computer. It’s all coded, of course. They have their own language; everything’s couched in business jargon. It’s all ‘sales’, ‘marketing’ and ‘closing the deal’. But what they’re really talking about is entrapment. He springs to his feet. — If that bastard has done anything to that child…

— Aye, Lennox agrees, but rises and grabs Chet by his wrist. — Later, he’s going nowhere.

Lennox thinks back to the Club Deuce and Club Myopia and the guy he’d told to take a hike. Starry had obviously taken him for a nonce and tried to set him up with Robyn. — I get the picture. He taps the glass on the table. — I’ll need a copy of these lists as evidence.

— I’ve plenty of that, Lennox, Chet says, heading through to the stateroom. Lennox follows, watching Chet produce some keys, open a locked cupboard and extract a box full of disks. There’s a printout with a list of names; another has dates of events. Lennox looks them over. They are presented like sales conference documents, denoting task forces of ‘agents’, ‘potential customers’ and ‘leads’. One of the ‘local sales managers’ that stands out from a list is: VINCENT MARVIN WEBBER III, MOBILE, AL.

Then he sees a listing for: JAMES ‘TIGER’ CLEMSON, JACKSONVILLE, FLA.

And: JUAN CASTILIANO, MIAMI, FLA.

— There’s nothing for Lance Dearing. He’d be too smart to have his own name on record, Lennox says, noting a training session scheduled for tonight at the hotel where Johnnie had said Lance would be.

— Yes. With Dearing being a cop I knew I’d be crucified unless I had hard evidence. That’s why I was building up a dossier, Chet says eagerly, the IRS investigator in him now to the fore. — With his police connections, who could I trust?

— Aye, Lennox admits, — sometimes it’s hard to know who you can trust.

But there are urgent issues to consider. Chet explains that they’re stuck on a sandbank, and that to get off, they must enlist Johnnie’s assistance. They head up to the bow and retie his arms in front of him, then free his legs. He starts to kick out in panic when Lennox gestures at him to climb down into the water. — No way! he shrieks. — No way! You’re gonna drown me!

— We should fucking drown you, Chet snarls.

— I don’t wanna die!

— Fuck it, Lennox says, and he removes his socks, trainers and flannels and heads down the ladder into the waters of the Gulf. The shock of cold almost takes his breath away. He looks down to his underpants and braces himself, and is relieved to feel his feet touch the silty bottom a few inches before the water level reaches his groin. — Right, you, he shouts up to Johnnie, — get your fuckin arse down here!

Johnnie, with Chet’s heavy-handed assistance, reluctantly follows. Chet climbs back up the boat as Lennox and Johnnie take hold of the ropes, pulling at the vessel on either side of the stern. As the cold fuses through him, Lennox feels his strength draining. His left arm throbs; his right hand is useless. Nothing is happening; the boat seems stuck fast. Johnnie’s querulous, self-pitying Spanish soliloquies grate on his jagged nerves. — Shut the fuck up or we’ll leave you right here, he threatens. Johnnie sees that he isn’t joking, and redoubles his exertions.

With no previous indication that it was going to happen, the boat mischievously slips free of the sandbank and starts to drift past them. They drop the ropes and watch the vessel slide across the broken shards of moonlight blinking on the cold, mauve surface of the water. Then the engines roar into life and Lennox feels his heart sink as the vessel imperiously chugs away. He sees Johnnie standing waist-deep about twelve feet away, and both men instinctively look for the ropes, but they’ve gone into the dark water, out of sight and reach. Chet has left them on this bank, stranded until the tides changed and they drowned. He isn’t a strong swimmer and he doubts he’ll be able make the shore, especially with the condition of his arm. Johnnie has no chance unless he can be untied. Lennox’s neck swivels, his gaze frantically seeking the lights of other boats, then helicopters above. But there’s nothing through the murky darkness besides the tired moon and the dim and distant illuminations of Bologna.

He catches Johnnie’s eye, just in time to be ridiculed by the kinship of fear that flashes between them. Then he sees the boat is circling back towards them. His heartbeat steadies as he ascertains that Chet’s only manoeuvring the craft away from the sandbank into deeper water before dropping anchor. — Come on, he shouts, and they splash across the cold, tired yards through the thin sea and scramble aboard. Chet grudgingly hauls Johnnie on, and they secure him in the downstairs back bedroom. Lennox dries off and pulls on his trousers and shoes before they get under way.

He sits up at the helm with Chet. He’s very cold, in spite of the cagoule Chet’s given him. It’s almost pitch dark at sea now, and he can hear nothing beyond the engine of the boat. But Lennox is distracted; there’s something he needs to do.

Down in the stateroom he removes the box of tapes, fast-forwarding through them. Johnnie is among several men featured having sex with various women in standard home-made porn flicks, shot on two cameras and edited between mid-shot and close-up. The locations seem to vary but the boat features widely, the stateroom and the upper deck sharing prominence. In one he sees Robyn’s face, spaced, yet intense as Johnnie fucks her from behind. But the next one features a Latina girl, who looks around twelve or thirteen years old. She performs fellatio on two men, one of whom is Johnnie.

Then Lennox sees a dirty black rucksack lying by the bed. He picks it up and looks inside. Some personal effects identify the owner as Juan Castiliano. Then he pulls out a drum holding several digital videodiscs. All have names and dates inscribed on them by Magic Marker. Flipping through them, Lennox’s soul refrigerates as he sees: Tianna Hinton.

He inserts it and presses play, but switches off after just seconds of seeing Tianna, naked, in a heavy-eyed stupor, sweating on the bed where he now sits. Coming into shot and bearing down on her with lecherous menace is Police Officer Lance Dearing.

But the pictures clicking into blackness only spark up another set in his head. Horsburgh’s dreadful show: he’d had to watch it in full. In the age of digital video, everything was recorded; sins more than triumphs, on phones and cameras, to be exhibited to the world online. Why would sex criminals, of all people, be immune to that narcissism? Murderers were the biggest divas: the Raskolnikov tendency heightened by accessible recording technology and the confessional culture. The criminal, the artist, the citizen, all driven by the compelling need to have their deeds recorded, to get a slice of digital immortality. And Horsburgh had his audience, when a frozen-faced Gillman had turned to Lennox, nodded and switched on that tape.

Horsburgh’s video, in the rented Berwickshire cottage, had been poorly made. One mid-shot from a camera on tripod at two figures on a bed, the smaller one secured there, bound at the wrists and ankles to the iron bed frame. Mostly you just saw his body, thrusting on top of her, but then he’d turn his cold, cruel face and look into the camera, popping his eyes and licking his lips in a sickening theatrical caricature. At first only the horrendous mantra of terrorised disbelief informed you that the child was still alive. Her cries were less a plea for him to stop his relentless assault, and more an attempt to stoically deny what was happening to her. Then she’d started to whimper: — It’s sair, you’re hurting me, I want my ma, I want my ma…

It was unbearable to witness, but he had to stay put. Struggling to breathe, he stared at the brand plate of the monitor just below the bottom of the screen, trying to turn down the sound in his head, to concentrate on incidents beheld from the Wheatfield Stand at Tynecastle Stadium, to think of what the outcome of recent uninspiring results would have been had George Burley stayed in the manager’s chair…

Then Confectioner had slapped Britney’s face and forced her to focus, shouting, — Look at me! Fucking look at me, before twisting her head to the camera, compelling Lennox to gaze into the doomed child’s terrorised eyes, — Look at the camera! Let them see who’s doing this to you!

Gillman’s finger jabbed the air. — That ring he’s wearing. That’s how he tore the bairn’s vagina, right? It’s aw been swabbed, right? Was it Eddie Atherton did that? He missed quite a bit in that Conningsburgh case, mind.

It was as if Gillman was seeing on-screen the highlights of the dull football game Lennox had been trying to picture in his mind’s eye.

And now Britney is Tianna and he can’t look. But he has to look. He can’t not look. He presses play again.

It’s different. Horsburgh is Dearing. It’s well shot; there is even a soft elevator-music soundtrack. The pan pipes. He thinks about the car ride. That music is kinda creepin me out. Dearing’s smiling face, his benign concentration. Like he was making love. The girl, the stunned, sleepy child, made vacant and toylike by drugs; it was Tianna he was doing this to. Gap-toothed wee Tianna with her sheep’s bag and her baseball cards, and his hands grip the quilt on the bed and he feels the tears on his face he could never show when he’d watched the Confectioner video. But then a fingertip to his dry skin reveals them as phantom.

Lennox stops the machine. Rage grips his throat like a vice. He feels something in his chest going in and out of spasm. He rises unsteadily, removing the DVD, looking at the simple unmarked silver disc, seemingly so innocuous. Over the buzz of the engines, he can hear shouting coming from the other bedroom. This cuts out abruptly when its source sees Ray Lennox in the doorway. — Carry on, please. I actually want you to keep shouting, he says to Juan Castiliano. — To just say one more fucking word. Cause that’s all it would take for me to cut your fuckin heid off, and his cold, murderous black eyes hold the paedophile, who shrinks back in fear.

Bologna draws close as Lennox appears on the bridge behind Chet. The marina, as they pull ashore and tie up the boat, is almost deserted though the Lobster bar is still open. They go back to the stateroom, where Lennox shows Chet in fast-forward a selection of Johnnie’s discs, though not the Tianna one, which he’s kept. There are three other young girls: from their soon-to-be-removed clothes they look poor, mostly, he suspects, Central American immigrants.

Chet is dazed and zombie-like as he carries the box of tapes into the Volkswagen. They drive for two blocks, stopping at a building announced by a backlit white-and-blue sign as the Bologna Police Department.

— You made me drive to an Internet café when you had all those facilities on board, Lennox said.

— It’s very expensive at sea. Johnnie was bleeding me dry.

— Any Scottish blood?

Chet bends his mouth a little as Lennox’s fingers drum at the box on his lap. — Take all this into the station. Tell them the lot. How you got to know Robyn. How Lance and Johnnie were blackmailing you. Take them to the boat; they’ll ID Johnnie from some of the videos. A good cop’ll break him down in seconds.

A flexing of his shoulders shows Chet’s relief that his terrible burden has been lifted, but the uncertainty in his eyes betrays the knowledge of a new ordeal, of uncertain outcome, yet to be faced. — You’ll come in and vouch for me, Lennox? Tell them I was being blackmailed?

— I’ll be happy to do that, Chet, but not right now. I have to go.

— What are you going to do?

— I have to get Robyn away from Starry and Dearing before the police get there. She needs a fighting chance to keep Tianna and get her life together. She deserves it, on that evidence you have here. He waves a copy of the lists. — I didn’t think so before, but I do now. The courts and child welfare people, however, might take a different view. The paedophiles are meeting at the Embassy Hotel right now. You can direct the police there.

— Okay, Chet frets. — But you will back me up?

— You have my word.

Chet rubs his salt-and-pepper dome. — She had no chance, Lennox. They targeted her: right across the state line from Alabama.

— I know. Lennox pats his shoulder. — And Chet, he produces a strained smile, — my first name is Ray. Raymond Lennox.

— Is it? Oh… I beg your pardon… Ray… he stammers, as he climbs out the car with the box. Then he regards Lennox as if remembering something. — Your magazine; the bridal one. I think you left it on the boat.

— I’ll pick up another copy. That one got a bit messed up.

— Right…

— Good luck, Lennox shouts as he watches the spectral-looking sailor making his way to the steps of the police station like he is walking the plank.

Lennox starts up the Volkswagen. Robyn can wait. He’s going to bring them down first. His hands tingle on the wheel, as he recalls why he hates those bullies, and why he does what he does.

19 Edinburgh: Two Dark Summers

1981

NOBODY LIKES BULLIES. Even other bullies – often especially – feel obliged to at least profess a hatred of them. Yet we’ve all been bullied and bullied others. It’s in all of us; with nations we call it imperialism. You start to wonder about yourself.

Who are you? Your name is Raymond Lennox and you’re eleven years old. It’s summer, and you’re excited because you’ve got your new birthday bike, and your football team, Hearts, have been promoted to the top division. You’re looking forward to the new season, and you’ve been studying hard for a scholarship to a good secondary school.

Although it had rained a lot, the summer had, with customary Scottish reluctance, finally yielded to a heatwave. It was a bright July Sunday afternoon, two days after your birthday, 07.07.70, which Curtis Park, your Hibs-supporting pal, was prone to rubbing in the significance of, as Hibs had once beaten Hearts by seven–nil in a famous Edinburgh derby. The wooded Water of Leith walkway at Colinton Dell was lush with all shades of green as you and your best pal, Les Brodie, clad in T-shirts and khaki shorts, pushed your bikes along. You still couldn’t take your eyes off the sleek beauty of the blue Raleigh as you grip its handlebars. Les had earlier picked up a flat tyre, hampering your progress, but you’d gone a greater distance than usual, seduced by tales of a spectacular new ‘Tarzan’ swing further up the river. Now the long, dark tunnel loomed ahead, not that far from the main road above you, but the submerged nature of the valley and the dense cover of trees hid the noise of the traffic, though you could hear the swoosh of the river below.

But you are Ray Lennox.

And who is he? Was he always scared? Always angry? No, but maybe Ray was just a wee bit fretful as a boy. Certainly, he was nervous of the big tunnel. He knew it from old Sunday walks with his father John and sister Jackie. That spot in the middle where it kinked, plunging him into total darkness; no light visible from either the exit ahead or the entrance behind him. He always panicked at that point, as if the omnipresent gloom could swallow him up. His dad and sister liked to stop there, enjoy the silence of it all, also sensing Ray’s apprehension, and dallying to tease him. He soon realised that with just a few steps forward or back – depending on where the sun was – he could rejoin the light and break the tenebrous spell.

At the mouth of the tunnel, Ray and Les looked up at the tendrils of ivy that dangled above them. — The Tarzan on the other side’s meant tae be barry, Les said with enthusiasm, although the sun had now sloped behind a manky cloud. Then they heard dirty voices and laughter coming from within. The boys looked at each other, first in apprehension, then ball-bearing resolve as they continued; neither willing to cede their fear. Ray wanted to say: let’s just go back and check your pigeon loft. But Les would know he’d bottled it. He knew Ray didn’t like the pigeons he and his dad kept. Then the growls from inside rose a little, obviously all male; he wondered how many there were, and their ages.

How quickly, how terribly he’d learn the answer. On registering their tentative approach, the voices dropped to ominous silence. Ray Lennox looked at the overhead lights, set about thirty feet apart, giving a weak, orangey-yellow glow which showed up the wet, gravelly ground under their feet. As they approached the dead black zone, they could make out the dark shapes in the shadows. Three men: early thirties, late and early twenties. At first Ray had been relieved that they were adults rather than older boys. He could hear the mechanical click of his bike’s gears turning over on the wheel as he pushed it along. A quick, nervous glance revealed that the trio stood smoking cigarettes and drinking from a small bottle of whisky. Not that badly dressed, certainly not destitute. But then one of them, he had a hooked nose and wispy, thinning hair, gave the boys an abominable grin from his big, unshaven face. That smile would never be forgotten: it pulled them into another world. He stepped forward and stood in front of Ray in the dark tunnel. — Nice bike, he’d said in an accent the boy couldn’t place.

Ray was silent. The man took the blue Raleigh by the handlebars, then pushed him aside and climbed on. He pedalled it a few yards, into the tunnel’s black spot, Ray following him, hoping that he’d stop once he’d had his laugh. Then he heard a shout and looked behind him. One of the other men, thick dark crew cut, had gripped Les by the hair and backed him up against the wall, muttering dreadful threats. Then Les swung at him, tried to fight back but the man wrestled him to the ground. — Gie’s a hand! he shouted, although he was easily overpowering Les. — Fuckin lively one here, his raucous laugh scalding the extremities of young Ray Lennox.

Still holding the whisky, the unshaven man quickly jumped from the bike and let it crash to the ground, then grabbed Ray by his hair, forcing him on to his knees. They ground painfully bare in the gravel and dirt, as the boy looked ahead into a wall of total blackness. — Grab his shoulders, he instructed the youngest man who sported a wedge of blond hair. He stepped in and complied as the unshaven man loosened his grip. Lennox looked one way, then the other. From where he was no light revealed itself at either end of the tunnel.

The unshaven man capped the whisky bottle and stuck it in his pocket. His eyes adjusting under the insipid overhead glow, Ray Lennox could see thick, black crescents of dirt packed under long nails sprouting from nicotine-yellow fingers. The man then unfastened his belt and unbuttoned his flies. — You fookin want this, he hissed as Les’s screams and shouts echoed in the tunnel. — Naw… I have to get back for my tea… Ray pleaded, praying for somebody to come by. The man laughed. — You’ll get your fookin tea awright, and he lowered his trousers and pulled his cock out of his underpants. It was large and floppy, but was stiffening before the boy’s eyes. A beastlike, serpentine creature, with a will connected to, yet distinct from its host, like a devil’s familiar. That was Ray’s sense of what faced him.

— Open yawr fookin mooth, the man snarled.

Ray Lennox shut his eyes. Then felt the back of the man’s big, heavy hand as it rapped across his jaw. Fireworks went off in his head, pursued by a brief but almost liberating numbing of the senses.

— Open yawr fookin mooth!

He shook his head, staring up at the man in the shadows, trying to locate his eyes with his own beseeching orbs. — Dinnae, mister, please dinnae… I need tae get back tae my ma’s.

There was nothing in the man’s gaze but a fearsome, burning indifference. He took the whisky bottle from his pocket, slugged back the last inch, then battered it against the wall of the tunnel, breaking off the base. He held the jagged bottle in front of Ray’s face, then rested the smooth, cold glassy side against his cheek. — Open yawr mouth or I’ll carve your fookin face up.

Ray Lennox opened his mouth. The man packed his stiff penis into the boy’s face, making him gag first on the taste and smell of urine, then again as he drove it to the back of his throat. All Ray could think of was his nose, to keep breathing through his nose. His small teeth tried to threaten, but the man showed him the bottle again and he let his jaw fall slack as burning tears of salt stung his cheeks and the hands on his shoulders crushed his knees further into the dirt.

Gagging and struggling for air, he almost passed out. Too weak to understand the instructions the mocking voice conveyed, a torturous soundtrack to his ordeal, he could only try to comply as renewed hair-wrenching threatened to separate scalp from skull. The man’s accent he would later think of as Birmingham. Play back every syllable in his head. Cast the net wider; West Midlands, Black Country.

Then the shouts from the other guy, the one fighting with Les, became more urgent. — Ah said gie us a fuckin hand! We’ve got a lively yin here! Help ays break him in, and he said a name that sounded like ‘Bill’ or ‘Bim’: a nickname of sorts, perhaps.

The unshaven man promptly withdrew, leaving Ray gasping and choking, struggling to fill air into his lungs. His shoulders ached, his knees were torn and his scalp throbbed. Looking around, he saw that the crew-cut man was on top of Les, struggling, trying to pin him down. Les was screaming and swearing, shouting, — FUCK OFF! FUCK OFF! RAYMIE!

His own adversary looked at Ray and punched him hard on the nose, causing his head to spin again and his eyes to gush. He let out a long squeal of a prayer as he saw his blood hit the ground in droplets. — Keep a hold of this bitch, Unshaven Man told the young blond guy. — He’s getting done big time after this other little stallion gets broken in!

Then he sauntered over to his friend.

In a doe-eyed overture for mercy, Ray scanned the young man for traces of humanity. — Please let me go, mister. I’ll no say nowt tae naebody. Please, he begged. He saw that the youth’s eyes were soft, watery and hesitant, and he continued in desperation. — Ah just need tae get hame. Ah’ll no say nowt. Ah promise!

They both looked over to where the two men were with Les. It was dark but Ray could see Les’s bare leg kicking out. We’re going to die, he thought. He looked back at the blond guy, who nodded, released his grip and Ray staggered to his feet. Suddenly, all he could think about was his bike and the consequences of its loss. He picked it up, climbed on it, pedalling manically as he heard the defiance ebb out of Les’s screams, become pleads, — Stoap it, stoap it, then a disbelieving, — naw… naw… Raymie…

— You fookin idiot, get after him, one of the men, it sounded like Unshaven Man, who was holding Les’s face down in the dirt, screamed at the blond. The young man gave chase, as Lennox pedalled for his survival, calf muscles exploding and lungs thrashing as he emerged from the dark tunnel into sunlight filtering through towering trees. He tore on frantically, not looking back until the tunnel and all its inhabitants were out of sight. When he stopped it was at a platform that overlooked the angled breakwater in the river below. Shouting for help along the deserted path, he searched for something that might serve as a weapon (although he knew he would be too scared to go back alone). Picked up and dropped a couple of weak pieces of wood, useless in his small boy’s hands. After screaming in impotence, he headed on towards the road.

Then he saw them climbing up the green metal stairs that led from the wooden bridge over the river up to the walkway; two men, a woman and a dog. — MISTER! he screamed, as they ran up the steps towards him, out of breath as he frantically explained that some men were hurting his pal in the tunnel.

There followed a nervous discussion about whether they should proceed to rescue Les or find a phone and call the police. Eventually, they headed back down the walkway, Ray shaking with fear, his stomach flipping as he tried to work out what use this party of well-meaning people would be against the terrifying gang that had seized them. The tunnel was further than he thought. And just as he got to its mouth Les emerged, pushing his bike and hobbling. His face was cut and streaked with tears and dirt.

As he advanced towards them, Les seemed in shock, almost as if he couldn’t see them. — Are you okay? one of the men asked.

— Aye, Les said.

There was no sign of the attackers. Ray was relieved that they’d retreated in the other direction. The adults wanted to get the police, but Les insisted he was okay. They escorted the boys back on to the main road, before leaving them to the short walk home.

— What did they dae? Ray asked fearfully, looking at his friend in profile, his tears smearing with the muck on his cheeks as Les phlegmatically stared ahead in silence. — Did they batter ye?

Les halted abruptly, and turned as if seeing Ray Lennox for the first time. — Aye, but ah didnae let them get the bike, Raymie.

— Is that aw they done? Cause ah thought—

Then Les’s face contorted with rage. — They battered ays! They battered ays, right, he briefly sobbed, before fury burst through again. — N you’d better say nowt tae nae cunt aboot this, Raymie!

— Ah’m no gaunny say nowt, he protested.

— No tae Curtis, or yir ma or dad even, Les urged. — Promise?

— Aye… but we should get the polis ontae them.

— Fuck the polis! Les shouted in his face. — Promise, Raymie?

— I promise, young Ray Lennox had said.

That night he sat in his room staring out the window. His school books lay in front of him on a small table where he normally did his homework. There were also two pieces of paper: an application form for one of Edinburgh’s more prestigious Merchant Schools, and a reading list of the classic novels he was expected to have completed before sitting the entrance exam to this institution. He ripped the form up into tiny pieces, and crushed the list of books in his fist, putting it into the pockets of the shorts he then stuck in the bottom drawer of his wardrobe, never to wear again.

He didn’t sense his dad entering the room as he gazed outside, just heard John Lennox’s cough and saw him pointing at a pile of his school books and saying, — These are your windaes, son. Nothing out there but tatty hooses and snottery beaks.

1986

The promise to Les was kept; they never went back down Colinton Dell, or talked to anyone about the incident. Only once was it ever mentioned between them. It was 1986, a Friday, in early May.

Les’s family had recently moved out to Clermiston, another scheme. The Lennoxes had bought their council home, sold it at a profit and moved to a modest private development at Colinton Mains. The boys were almost sixteen and had been drinking concealed vodka in their Coke with Shirley Feeney and Karen Witton, two girls from Oxgangs, whom they had met and got off with at a teen disco at Buster Brown’s nightclub earlier. They went down by the canal to kiss and fondle. Dissatisfied with his rations, frustrated that there was nowhere else to go, Les started to pressure Karen, demanding that she perform fellatio. He became more insistent, working up to outright bullying and threats. The girl’s obvious fear took Ray Lennox back to the tunnel. He’d realised he and Les were growing apart, held together only by the football. His behaviour scared and nauseated Lennox, while Les was angry with him for not colluding and subjecting Shirley to similar harassment. Manoeuvring him away from the increasingly distraught girls, Lennox said, — Mind that time down the Dell? Those three nutters?

— What aboot them? What the fuck’s that goat tae dae wi anything?

But Lennox saw the shame that fuelled his aggression. He’d looked steadily at Les, till his friend’s glare weakened.

— Cunts, Les Brodie said in a low growl. — Ah’d really like to meet those fuckers now.

It wasn’t an empty boast. They had remained friends since that day at the Dell, but Les had changed. An unbridled aggression became part of his make-up, and the mark of the bully began to taint a previously playful soul. The seagulls. He loved to shoot the gulls. But Ray Lennox had also changed. They said he was antisocial at school. Not a burgeoning gang member, like Les. More of a loner. Withdrawn. Weird even.

Lennox felt intimidated by Les’s new Clermiston pals; they seemed like the semi-feral bams of predatory cast that they’d studiously avoided back in Oxgangs. And the following day he was on the train to Dundee with some of them.

That morning he’d looked at the crushed booklist he’d kept secret all those years. He’d never read the books back then. He couldn’t say why. Couldn’t explain he wanted to so much but needed to find them for himself. Didn’t want anybody giving them to him. He was currently enthralled by Melville’s Moby-Dick, and wished that he could stay locked in the book instead of heading to Dens Park. When he put it down, he felt sick with nerves.

There were about two dozen loosely connected groups of friends who’d come up on the train. Like all mobs of fifteen-year-old apprentice hard men, it contained those just along for the laugh as well as others gripped, if fleetingly, by the excitement and the possibilities that such a scene might offer them. A few were already immersed in that life, evidenced by the dull, cold stillness in their eyes and the tightness around their mouths and jaws. Les had seemed to be avoiding Ray Lennox, surrounding himself with the more dangerous element. There was a hierarchy, which Lennox sensed he’d have to work his way up. But he did get to ask his old friend about his pigeon loft.

— Gittin rid ay it, Les had spat tightly, barely making eye contact. — Fuckin seek ay they things.

Ten thousand Hearts supporters had match tickets and packed on to the terracing behind one goal and the enclosure along the side of the pitch. All were looking to the tunnel under the stand, as their nervy team, clad in an away strip of silvery-grey shirts and maroon shorts, took the field to explosive applause. They believed that the League Championship flag was on its way to Tynecastle. After all, Hearts had now gone twenty-seven League games undefeated, thirty-one, if you counted the Scottish Cup.

Scotland’s legendary commentator, Archie MacPherson, had perched on gantries even more rudimentary and less salubrious than the one he stood on at Dens Park, microphone in hand. No pundits to assist him, it was a lonely furrow to plough, but always the pro and enthusiast, he went for the big opening to do the occasion justice. — Well, who, way back in August, blessed with a second sight, the seventh son of a seventh son, could have foreseen Hearts on the very last day of the season, playing for the championship, requiring only one point…

As ten thousand voices sang ‘Hello, Hello, We are the Gorgie Boys’, the club chairman, Wallace Mercer, took his seat in the directors’ box, giving the stage smirk of the man resigned to the fact that he’d never be as loved as he felt was his due. But something had evaporated inside Mercer. Almost before anyone else in the stadium, he believed that his team would not triumph. There had been a dressing-room virus precipitating the absence of Craig Levein, a key defender. Mercer had detected a lethargy about many of the players. When he had looked into their eyes before they went to change, they did not seem to him like men willing to take the prize. They looked as if they felt their work was done and now craved a long rest, resenting this further imposition.

Down on the terraces, the smell of Bovril, pies. Stale lager and whisky and tobacco. Of swaying men, intoxicated by alcohol and nerves. The referee’s whistle blows and Dundee make the early running, as a shaky Hearts defence clear an effort over the bar. The first half flies by, then time slows down. Lennox can perceive it during the break. That sense of the speed of life fading like autumn light. Hearts have held their own against a lively Dundee, but no more than that. A feeling takes root that the day of celebration is turning into something else. If there is to be glory, there will be pain first. Disappointment, then a barely repressed anger are suddenly hanging in the air.

At half-time Mercer’s gut is in such turmoil that he can’t touch the food in the directors’ hospitality or imbibe another drink. He’s heard the news from Paisley, where St Mirren are tamely capitulating to Celtic, who are eating into the Hearts goal-difference advantage. Now one strike for Dundee will lose the Edinburgh side the flag. Like every other Hearts supporter in the ground, Mercer feels they need to score to be sure of the draw. He’s heard from the dugout that Alex MacDonald has hooked midfielders Whittaker and Black, both of whom are spent. Feeling the sweat on his brow, Wallace Mercer heads to the washroom to wipe it off and move his thinning strands of hair back into place. He urinates, washes his hands and curses as boiling water from the red tap scalds him. He belatedly notes a sign that says WARNING VERY HOT WATER above the sink.

Shaking off the discomfort, he looks into the mirror, resets his face to its trademark grin. Mercer’s spent enough time in front of cameras and in the business world to know that fear and anxiety are emotions best kept hidden. He straightens the tie he was unaware that he’d tugged out of place during the first forty-five minutes. An advocate of the power of positive thinking, he considers: we were ninety minutes away from the flag, and now we’re only forty-five. So it’s so far, so good. But other emotions intrude: he’s seen enough games to be aware of how sport inflicts temporal distortions, how a goal conceded early gives you time to regroup and fight back. But a late strike… He knows the sense of entitlement success confers on those who have enjoyed it; doubts that Celtic, or Rangers, or even Aberdeen under Alex Ferguson, would falter at this point.

Worst of all, the businessman, a logical risk assessor, starts to whisper in his head: if you’re unbeaten in thirty-one consecutive games, does that not make the probability of losing the thirty-second one even greater? He thinks of that fantastic undefeated run, comparing performances, trying to compile a balance sheet between the devastating victories where the opposition had been brushed aside, against the occasions where luck was ridden. It hits him that the team are short of class. They have Robertson’s predatory strikes, Colquhoun’s electric runs, the absent Levein’s elegance and judgement at the back, but the rest are journeymen and old pros playing out of their skins in a well-organised side built on efficiency and work rate. And the virus has taken its toll on the team’s engine. A silent prayer spilling from his lips as he leaves the toilets, Mercer heads back out to the box in the stand. Les Porteous, the club secretary, says something he doesn’t catch, but registers its good intent with a nod and smile. The second half kicks off.

In a crowd of surly, youthful acquaintances, Raymond Lennox feels suddenly guilty that he’s not here with his dad. The unspoken inference is that it would be fitting for father and son to watch the game together; the history-making match that wins Hearts the flag. He announces his intention of going to look for the old man. As he departs, he hears a derogatory remark passed. Turns to see some of the boys, including Les, laughing at him, but his momentum has carried him down the steps and he continues snaking through the crowd, not looking back. He touches the bumfluff under his nose. Mutters a curse on the treacherous Les, the hard man with his new hard-men mates. Continues his search for his father. In a sea of ten thousand, he knows he will easily find him behind the goal to the left. Somewhere.

Lennox looks at his watch. Sixty minutes now up. Two-thirds of the game gone. St Mirren folding like a broken deckchair in Paisley, but Hearts still in pole position. If we could only get to seventy minutes, he pleads to a higher power. Dundee are going for it. Hearts are starting to look sluggish, even downcast. Lennox fears that too many players don’t want to be out there. They’ve come close a couple of times on counters, but Dundee are pressing. Hearts have won only two out of eleven against their bogey team. In the media build-up, Archie Knox, Dundee’s combative manager, has taken great delight in making this point.

Knox sends on the mustachioed Albert Kidd, a dead ringer for comedian Bobby Ball from the Cannon and Ball duo, replacing Tosh McKinlay. Lennox breathes a little sigh of relief, as McKinlay is one of Dundee’s best players. But still the home side swarm forward. Then Henry Smith makes a brilliant save for Hearts, pushing aside a drive from Mennie that came through a wall of players. Lennox yells in relief and delight as he and a stranger next to him embrace. He scents destiny in that stop. He’s not the only one. The stadium lights up with the relishing chant of ‘here we go’, and the seventy-minute mark has been navigated. Then more nail-biting, and a terrible stillness descends on the crowd as we get to ten minutes between Hearts and the championship flag. Ray Lennox close to choking as he sees his cousin Billy first, then his uncle. His dad is to the left of them. He sidles up to John Lennox and touches his shoulder.

In the eighty-third minute, Robert Connor’s corner kick from the right is flicked on by Brown. Albert Kidd is unmarked and clips a right-foot shot past Smith from close in. It’s his first goal in the League championship this season. Lennox hears a series of gasps in the crowd and a curse coming from his father, the first time he’s heard the old man use that particular word. — Seven minutes left, his cousin Billy moans. Lennox thinks of 07.07.70. Across Britain, the Videoprinter results service on the BBC will erroneously designate the goal to Hearts and their captain, Walter Kidd.

Latest… Dundee 0… Hearts 1 (Kidd, W.)

Then:

Correction… Dundee 1 (Kidd, A.)… Hearts 0

Lennox feels the loss of the flag at that moment. The crowd bellow in defiant support, urging them on to get the equaliser, but the players look ready to succumb to exhaustion. Then John Lennox feels something tugging at his chest as his arm goes numb. He wants to tell the people around him, his son, brother and nephew, to stop jostling and give him room.

Ray Lennox sees his father easing himself down on to the terrace, as if he’s going to sleep. A few guys shout— What the fuck – but they make space for him.

— THAT’S MA FAITHER! Lennox screams at nobody in particular, hunkering down by John’s side. — Dad, ye okay? He looks to his Uncle Davie, to his cousin Billy and back to his father. John Lennox gives him a slow, enervated smile. — It’s awright, he says in patently shallow tones, seeing the man he was, carefree and strong, able to enjoy, or at least bear hearty witness to afternoons like this, spilling indelibly into the past.

Albert Kidd scores a wonderful solo second goal four minutes from time. He storms down the wing, passes several Hearts players, plays a one–two and smashes a volley past Smith. He is not to know that he’s reached his nadir as a professional sportsman; put on this Earth to torture Hearts and deny them this flag. These few minutes will be the longest in the lives of the players in the silver and maroon, who now just want to be anywhere but on the Park. Billy Lennox pushes through the crowd to summon trackside paramedics.

Some people head off. Many more stay, unsure of what to do. In tandem with the pain of defeat, a shared acknowledgement slowly ignites within the supporters. The sense of having lived through a significant event. The unarticulated but almost tangible realisation that this is far more crucial than the clichéd rituals of glory hunters in Paisley, celebrating another League win in front of the cameras. There is a sense that this drama they are all implicated in at Dens Park is an approximation of the life that so many people follow sport to actually escape from. Reality has bitten them hard and they have to share this moment, but there is no way to express it. All they can do is stay on to cheer Hearts, praise the team for a valiancy they know in their souls the side has not shown; they are bottle merchants who’ve blown it on the last day. But what the crowd is really trying to express is a much deeper communion with nothing less than the beauty and terror of life itself. But Ray Lennox misses this. He is in an ambulance with his stricken father, and his uncle and cousin, heading for Ninewells Hospital.

A consoling touch on his arm by Ian Gellatly, Dundee FC’s chairman. Mercer nods in sober, dignified appreciation. With sadness, he thinks of team manager Alex MacDonald, whom he saw head dejectedly into the tunnel at the final whistle. Internally debates whether he should go down to the dressing room and be with the players, or give them a little space. Retreats somewhere briefly to reprogramme the smile. The businessman calculates the loss in economic terms, before re-emerging with a sparkling grace.

Ray Lennox rose on Sunday, having slept fitfully. His father had suffered a minor heart attack and was still in Dundee. He would be transferred tomorrow to the Royal Infirmary in Edinburgh. A new regime would be undertaken; diet change and medication, anticoagulants for the blood. There was a sense of revenge afflicting Ray Lennox. A need for justice. Emotions battled within him. He was determined to have it out with Les. To get clarification: friend or foe. He didn’t care which any more, he just wanted to know.

He got on the bus to Clermiston and ducked down the side lane to Les’s back door. But as he headed down the narrow paved passage that ran between the houses, Lennox was accosted by that stillness he now knew so well; the foreboding sense of something being not quite right. Then the calm was desecrated by urgent shrieks of terror filling the air. Ray Lennox could see a flash of fire, and it was hurtling towards him. Unable to avoid the burning projectile, he shut his eyes, giving thanks that it missed his face, though coming close enough for him to feel the sooted flesh in his throat, and the hair under his nose singe. He turned to watch it ricochet off the pebble-dashed wall of the house behind him, and fall on to the paving. The ball started dancing frantically and a terrorised eye in the flame begged for mercy as the stink of burning flesh and filthy feathers filled his nostrils.

Lennox backed away as the creature toppled, crumpling into silence. In the direction of the loft, Les Brodie’s eyes seemed as small and reasonless as the burning pigeon’s as he held another bemused bird at arm’s length and was dousing it with petrol from the spout of a small can. Lennox felt his skin burn under the heat of his gaze. Turning quickly, he fled back up the side lane and into the front street, his boyhood friend’s mocking laughter following him all the way.

Another squealing, flaming comet shot into the sky above him, clearing the rooftop of the house, before the ball of flame plummeted and bounced along the road. Lennox didn’t look back; he headed swiftly towards the bus stop as a maroon-and-white double-decker drew near. Les had given him the answer he needed.

20 Sales Conference

THE NIGHT HEAT swarms out of the mangrove swamps as Lennox takes the Interstate 75 east. He drives touching the 100 mph mark, the Volkswagen resonating dangerously as it bullets along the almost deserted Alligator Alley, heading for a hotel by Miami airport, and a training course.

He’s read about groups of guys, usually nerds, who get together in seminar settings, sharing techniques on how to pick up women. They draw on a mixed bag of behavioural and situational approaches: transactional analysis, neurolinguistic programming and pop and pseudo psychology. Most are simply wanting to increase their drawing power in the sexual marketplace; bright, obsessive losers, they are trying to circumvent their social unease with females. For others, the women are practically incidental; it is more about inter-male bonding and competition, the schoolyard boasting of sexual conquests – real or imagined – taken into adulthood.

For some of the more extreme members of these groups, the thrill of picking up women and sharing in techniques and triumphs soon becomes passé. Many are openly dysfunctional; obvious victims of abuse, with an embittered and displaced vengeful aspect to their character. They are chickenhawks who’ve flocked together and their raison d’être is to seek and befriend vulnerable lone parents with prepubescent children.

The seminar is a house of paedophiles, at least one of whom is a copper. Lennox had become a policeman because he hated bullies. Then he’d been disillusioned to find out that, like everywhere else, the police force had its share. Right across the world, men like Dearing, attracted to wielding power over others, would hide behind the badge of service. He could do nothing to stop them, so, in his cynicism, had almost become one himself.

Without the righteous fire of his anti-nonce crusade, Lennox was too sensitive to cope with the savagery that surrounded him in Serious Crimes. Only through booze and cocaine could he talk its language, understand its dumb code on the requisite emotional level, even if the substances which gave him the zeal for the culture of violence curtailed his effectiveness at its practice. The martial arts, the kick-boxing, they only helped when he was physically capable of training three times a week. Then the gloved fists of other men in his face were reduced to annoyances, to be caught, blocked, sidestepped, countered.

Lennox freezes as a rhythmic slash of propeller blades overhead signals a helicopter closing in. Its searching light beam lasers the road behind him. Surely Dearing couldn’t… But the sound is fading away over the Everglades, the biggest uninhabited roadless land mass in the United States. Of course choppers would scan its lush density; taking photographs, looking for drug smugglers, illegals, terrorists or just civilians behaving unconventionally.

Dedicated swampland becomes uncompromising city within the toss of a Frisbee, and Ray Lennox, the displaced Scottish cop who knows he can never do this job again, pulls into the Embassy Hotel car park, the seminar already an hour in. After the grimy functionalism of airport-zone Miami, to step into the hotel’s ornate pink-marbled and gold-leafed courtyard of fountains and pillars is to enter corporate Eden. The diverse flora are so thoughtfully planted and meticulously maintained, through his glassy eyes they look like a shiny Photoshopped brochure. He studies the black felt-ribbed board, almost expecting to see NONCE CONFERENCE indicated by the white plastic lettering.

CONFERENCES AT EMBASSY AIRPORT HOTEL

Thursday, January 12

JONES BOATYARD INC.

Palm Beach Boardroom

8 a.m. – 5 p.m.

2005 HISPANIC JOB FAIR

Key Largo 3 & 4

10 a.m. – 8 p.m.

SONY ELECTRONICS DEALER TRAINING

Upper Atrium

11 a.m. – 1 p.m.

SUNDANCE MEDIA

Binini

3.30 p.m. – 9.30 p.m.

FEUER NURSING REVIEW

Key Biscayne

3.30 p.m. – 4.30 p.m.

SUICIDE SURVIVORS

Key Largo 2

7 p.m. – 9.30 p.m.

SALES FORCE 4 TRAINING SEMINAR

Key Largo 1

8 p.m. – 11.30 p.m.

Key Largo. Lennox thinks of the film. Bogart and Bacall. Asks a receptionist to point the way. She reminds him of Trudi in her body language and wary, slightly artful smile, to the extent of oblique but poignant arousal, as she indicates a flight of stairs. Climbing them quickly, he arrives at a mezzanine floor, clocks Key Largo. Head surreptitiously craned round the door, he looks inside from the back of the small room: five men seated round a table. Dearing isn’t present, but the others look furtive and traumatised. He steps inside to confront them. — So this is the place, is it?

One bespectacled man in his thirties, sweating in spite of the air con, regards his approach. — I’m sorry, Mr…?

— Lennox. Where’s our friend Dearing then?

— I’m Mike Haskins, the man offers. — There’s no Dearing here. He puts his glasses on to his head and studies a folder. — And I’m afraid I don’t seem to have your name down here, Mr Lennox…

— No. You won’t have. I just want you to tell Dearing—

The man has put his specs back on his nose and is focusing on Lennox. — I think you might have the wrong room. This is the Suicide Survivors group.

— Eh… Key Largo… Sales… Lennox says timidly.

— This is Key Largo 2, the man patiently informs him, — Key Largo 1 is across the way.

— Sorry… sorry. Lennox skulks out into the corridor. Guzzling some deep breaths, he composes himself, elects to play it softly. Let the police have the big showdown. He ducks his head round the door of what is a bigger seminar room. A man standing at the front makes a PowerPoint presentation. He can see the backs of eight heads, in a semicircle. Only one turns, glancing at Lennox, squinting, then looking back to the presenter. Lennox withdraws. He’s seen him before, in South Beach: the Deuce and Myopia. Close to him, another recognisable figure. He hasn’t turned round, but there is no mistaking the denim back of Lance Dearing.

Lennox swiftly concealed himself behind some stacked chairs in the hallway. He can hear the speaker clearly. — What do I do when I get a lead? Nothing. I sit back and plan. I find out everything I can about the customer, before I present the product. The initial product is not your own wants and desires. This is crucial: the product is completely tailored to the customer, at first. Only when the customer is completely hooked do we start to think about modifying client behaviour.

Then familiar tones set him on edge: Lance Dearing. — An ol dog knows you gotta hunt the fattest, juiciest lil’ fleas with a wet tongue rather than a sharp tooth.

— Amen, another voice endorses.

He has heard enough to know that confrontation will be useless, and the lack of any obvious police presence makes him wonder about Chet’s alarm-raising capabilities. But he has the evidence, and Chet and Johnnie. He decides to get Robyn and leave them to it.

Then he hears the announcement of a coffee adjournment, and the gratified sounds of men stretching and rising eagerly, as chairs slide along the polished wooden floor. Instead of going downstairs, he quickly heads to the restroom, bolting the small cubicle shut, sitting and waiting. Two men enter: urine blasts against porcelain and the salts in the bottom of neighbouring latrines.

— How ya doin, Tiger?

— Ah’m good.

Tiger. Lennox sweats, feeling his blood pounding as if his heart is where his brain should be. He pulls the flush and moves out of the cubicle; stands alongside one of the men, who is washing his hands, while the other still pees. He looks at the delegate badge on the man’s lapel: C.T. O’HARA. He’s a big, full-faced guy with a benign smile. Wedding ring. Looks like a regular dad. Away from home a lot, working hard in sales to generate a college fund for his kids. Who married this monster, slept with him every night? Wouldn’t they just know? Why would they?

The big guy gives his hands a cursory blast under the electric dryer and in departure teases his colleague who has advanced to the basin by Lennox. — You’re gonna miss those chocolate-chip cookies, Tiger.

— Don’t I know it. Them boys got appetites, Tiger grins, displaying a row of capped teeth, as his friend departs.

Lennox looks at his oily black hair, the snidey, reptilian cast of the features and the name tag confirming: J.D. CLEMSON. He could envisage him buying Robyn drinks in a bar. See him alone with Tianna…

He pulls his arm behind his back to scratch at his shoulder blade as he steps closer to Clemson. Sees the beast look up with a faint, vaguely uncomprehending smile on its lips, before he shoots the elbow forward at speed into Clemson’s face. A satisfying crunch is followed by a screech and blood erupts, splattering across the white sink. Lennox pivots behind Clemson and forces his face down on to the edge of the unit, hammering it repeatedly, as teeth and bone crack and the man grows limp in his now painless hands, emitting nothing other than a low, gurgling groan. — Savour this moment, Lennox says to him, — cause this is as good as it gets for you from now on in. Your old life is over. This is what you were put here for.

Lennox releases his grip. As the bloodied Clemson falls slowly, sliding down, drunkenly trying to cling on to the unit, Lennox kicks him in the face, assisting his sprawl to the marble floor. He can’t cease stomping Clemson, can’t end the intimacy, yet he makes himself halt. But not before his senses have been assailed by that brief insight all men might be permitted before they become killers, that the achievement of that goal will produce an irreperable emotional downshift.

Phantom-like and serene as he opens the door and looks down the mezzanine’s narrow hallway, he feels as if he’s watching himself in a dream, where narrative perspective shifts from first to third person, usually when the nightmare becomes unbearable. He walks past the seminar rooms. Key Largo 2’s door is closed. He glides by the half-open Key Largo 1 without looking in, the buzz of men chatting over coffee never changing in register as he passes. Then adrenalin shoots into him with the realisation that the police might just arrive to witness his brutal assault. He scoots down the stairs, across the hotel lobby, vaguely aware of KC and the Sunshine Band’s ‘Don’t Go’ playing in piped music, and runs across the lot to the green car.

As he drives past the airport, he thinks again about what Les endured, wondering how he would have coped with similar treatment. As a copper he was drawn to Serious Crimes, and he would often look through the sex offenders database, to see if he could recognise their three assailants. His mind played tricks; sometimes he was convinced he had identified one of them, only later to be certain it was someone else. But he knew that he hated all sex offenders: every one of those terrible, wretched specimens. Bringing them to book was the one and only thing he believed to be true policework. The system was played solely for the leverage to get to them, the real villains. This power was craved because he’d declared war on paedophiles. Never a policeman, Ray Lennox is a beast hunter and now that he has their scent he’s compelled to take this as far as he can.

21 Showdowns

LENNOX REALISES HIS fraught and hasty retreat from Dearing has confused his mental map of Miami. He finds himself heading east on the Calle Ocho strip of SW 8th Street at Little Havana, past the Cuban bakers and furniture shops, where groups of old men chat and smoke in the cooling air, as the central business district’s skyscrapers glow in the distance.

The colour and word ‘orange’ burn in his head: the Orange Bowl Stadium and the exterior decoration of Robyn’s apartment block. Pulling up outside the Latin American Art Museum, he asks a youthful couple for directions. They tell him to go left on 17th Avenue, and the faded grandeur of the college football arena contiguously comes into sight. But in the featureless rack of streets, locating Robyn’s apartment reminds him of trying to find Notman’s lost contact lens on an Edinburgh Parks Department football pitch. As he feels himself going in circles anger gnaws at him, unleashing a bilious frustration in his gut. It would be easier to eat fresh sushi in Brigadoon. He’s ready to hammer his car horn in exasperated despair when the orange building seems to step out in front of him. — Thank fuck, he gasps in gratitude, parking across the street.

He hesitates in exiting the car; inspects his bloody fingers, throbbing like toothache. Driving through Little Havana, that sense of alienation and despondency has swept back over him. He is not a cop here. Thankfully, he can see no sign of police in the quiet street. But they would arrive soon, either Chet’s testimony or his battering of Clemson would ensure that.

So Lennox steels himself, gets out and walks up the path, presses some buzzers that aren’t Robyn’s, shouting, — Pest control, and waits for the crackle before pushing the front door. He climbs the stair and bangs on the entrance of the apartment he visited two nights ago. Starry pulls it open in agitation. Her eyes widen in shock as she beholds Lennox. — What the fuck do you—

She never gets to finish the sentence as he rams his forehead into her face. The crack of bone splintering followed by a red spray tells him he’s snapped the bridge of her nose. Starry screams, bending forward and teetering back, uttering curses in Spanish, as insistent bombs of thick blood fall through her fingers on to the hardwood floor. Lennox grabs her hair in his left fist and jumps into the apartment with a twist, smashing her head against the door frame. She collapses to the deck, where she lies stunned and moaning as he closes the door behind them.

Robyn runs in from the lounge, leaky-eyed and halting. — Ray! Where’s Tia? Is she safe? She looks down at Starry in trembling bewilderment. — What have you done?

— Something you or some other cunt should have a long time ago. Anybody else in here?

— No… but what happened? Where’s Tianna?

Lennox realises that he’s never had violent contact with a woman before, if you discounted the obese lassie he’d had to sit on at the South Side station, after she’d freaked out and bitten off part of a uniformed spastic’s ear. But this one didn’t factor, because she was a beast, like the others. — Are there any firearms in the house?

— No… Robyn’s eyes are like a Halloween mask. It’s as if she’s been caught in a cycle of crying and applying more eyeliner without thinking to wash her face. It nauseates him to consider that he could have had sex with her: more so, when he thinks about her daughter and his own fiancée. Robyn bunches her fists in front of her chest. — Where’s Tianna?

— She’s okay. She’s with friends. What the fuck have they done to you? Where did they take ye?

— It was Lance… he said my drugs problem had gotten outta hand… an intervention, she rambles, then paralysis seizes her face as she’s smitten by the ineptitude of her own words. — They were my friends… they knew what was best. I… she begs, halting as her flimsy conviction deserts her. She’s a grotesque tear factory to him; afflicted by the strange notion that if she cried enough, she’d eventually excrete the source of her pain. Unlike Starry’s face with the Latin cheekbones and engorged lips, which grew more alluring in rage, Robyn’s small, fine Anglo-Saxon features become pinched; petty and ungenerous. Stiff-upper-lipped stoicism is the way for our race, ostentatious anger always demeans us, Lennox considers. It is fear that diminishes Starry. He grabs her and hauls her to her feet, jostling her into the lounge and shoving her on to the chair. — What have you done to her? Robyn asks again.

— You know what I’ve done and why I’ve done it, jabbing a finger at her, before turning back to his quarry in the chair. — You fuckin move a muscle and I’ll throttle you to death with my bare hands. Got that?

She forces a defiant sneer, still holding her nose.

Lennox’s face contorts as he takes a step closer to her. — HAVE YOU FUCKIN WELL GOT THAT?

And he thinks of when he lost it at his last interrogation, but now there’s no Horsburgh, only Starry’s abject shell, nodding in miserable deference. He charges through to the toilet, grabs a soiled towel and thinks of the uses it could be put to before he throws it at her. Then, remembering Robyn’s cuffs, he goes to the bedroom and removes them from the nightstand. He experiences Robyn’s presence as a background bleating sound as he snaps Starry’s hand to a radiator pipe behind her. — It’s fucking hot, she squawks through the towel.

— Good, Lennox says, as he looks back at Robyn.

— What’s going on, Ray? Robyn asks, nervously picking burrs from her faded green top — Where’s my baby? Did you take her to Chet’s?

— I’ve told you, she’s fine. Don’t give me any performances, Robyn. I’ve seen one of your performances, and he pulls the disc from his pocket.

— You found the tapes… Her hand goes to her hair, and Lennox has to repress the urge to scream at her.

She thinks I’m fucking jealous! The daft cunt actually thinks that’s what this is about! — Yes.

— Johnnie and I met through Starry. He liked to video when we… were together.

Lennox nods, thinking about guys who wanted to become porn stars until they realised that they couldn’t get wood on camera. In a couple of generations, he considers, we won’t be able to get wood unless there’s a camera.

Robyn whines, — Then he got Lance involved.

— Lance was my boyfriend, bitch, Lennox hears Starry’s muffled hiss from behind the towel.

Robyn seems not to register, —… and it just got crazier and wilder. Then I found out that there were other women, other videos.

— Oh yeah, there were others, he caustically agrees.

Robyn looks to a broken-nosed Starry, holding her head up with the towel, groaning in agony, then back to Lennox. — Who… who are you, Ray? Who? Robyn’s rasping sobs are punctuated only by the sound of mucus sliding down her gullet in heavy swallows.

— Later, he says, wondering if he’ll ever be able to answer that question to his own satisfaction. — Did you see any of the other videos?

— No, of course I didn’t—

— Chet’s boat was where some of them were made.

— No, Robyn gasps. — No. No! I don’t believe it… not Chet… where’s Tianna?!

Lennox inserts the disc into the DVD player. — Here’s one you missed.

— What?! We’re going to watch one of these films? Now? What the hell—

— You need to see this. Need to see what the people you choose as friends are really about.

He didn’t want to watch it again, and instead sits studying her reaction as the images appear on the screen. The voice of her drugged daughter: — I feel sick… I wanna go home… Dearing’s kindly reply: — It’s okay, honey, jus you relax…

— NO! Oh my God… No! Robyn’s chest heaves. But her terror is real: he knows she wasn’t part of Tianna’s abuse.

— I’m sorry. He stops the disc with the remote. — I had to be sure that you weren’t involved in this.

— What? What do you… who… Robyn’s eyes bulge, her chest heaving as she struggles for breath.

Shame’s mass aggregates in him and his eyes fall to the floor. — They probably gave Tianna something, some kind of sedative. Not on the boat, most likely in the car on the way out there, on Alligator Alley. He looks back to her. — While you were in rehab.

— But she was with Sta— Robyn starts, looks to the couch and the face covered with the towel. — No… NO! WHAT DID YOU DO TO MY BABY, YOU FUCKING EVIL BITCH?!

— Robyn, Lennox says, — do you remember Vince, back in Alabama?

— Yes. Robyn is barely audible as her hate-filled eyes screw into Starry, who holds the towel in front of her face like a mask.

He squeezes her hand to get her to focus on him. — You left Mobile to get away from him. Took Tianna, cause you knew what he was like? She told you, and you believed her, didn’t you?

— I… yes… He told me he loved me!

— Vince was involved in an organised paedophile ring: the same one as Lance and Johnnie. The same one that Jimmy Clemson in Jacksonville was part of.

— No… how can that be…? she cries, but a terrible understanding is starting to settle in her eyes.

— The deal is that they identify single women: marginal, lonely, with young children. They exchange information mainly through a website, but also on these sales training functions. I got the list of members from the computer. They devise a control strategy, pass the info around to other paedophiles, one or more of whom then stalk the woman and attempt to manipulate her into entering a sexual relationship with them. Once that goal’s achieved, they quickly move on to the child. If the mother develops any suspicion about what they’re up to, they simply withdraw, passing the woman’s contact details on to the next member who steps in and attempts to groom them again.

— Oh my God… Robyn whines through hands that cover her eyes. — Tianna… what have I done… what have they done to my Tia?

The ball in his throat burns again, but Lennox forces himself to carry on.

— The code of the group is not to take risks. Gaining the mother’s trust, they befriend the kid, taking an interest; becoming the surrogate father the child wants to have around, slowly building up the emotional intimacy and the physical contact. Take my hand. Give me a hug. A wee kiss. Then they declare love, but tell the child it must be a secret. All the time they praise the kid, singling them out, so they believe the love they share is special, thus rationalising the need to keep it secret and exclusive. That’s how it ends up, Lennox nods to the screen.

Miserable, low, rhythmic sobs emanate from Robyn, her eyes still covered by her hands. Her pores seem to have opened up, as if in order to absorb everything out of the fetid air. Then she glares in seething rage at Starry, who sits silently, bizarrely, with the towel now over her head. — PUT IT BACK ON, I WANNA FUCKING SEE WHAT THEY’VE DONE!

— No, Lennox says. — If you want to watch more, it’s on your own time. He looks to Starry, reminding him of a hooded falcon, a predator made passive by the cover. — This paedophile ring had a handover strategy. Once you worked out Vince’s game in Mobile, he got in touch with Clemson in Jacksonville.

— I didn’t know… how could I have known…?

— You couldn’t. When you sussed there was something dodgy about this Clemson guy, he got in touch with Johnnie and then Lance in Miami.

— He was a pig, Robyn spits. — Vince I would never have figured… but Clemson was a lousy fuckin pig!

— And some. So when they start getting more and more kinky, by this time, through the sheer process of erosion, you’re thinking: ‘That’s what guys are like, maybe I’m just a little hung-up.’ By now you’ve been isolated from all your girlfriends and family back home. And they have this fucker here, he points at Starry, — working for them, telling you it’s all hunky-dory. You were starting to get suspicious, but they’d already gotten everything they wanted from you. He nods to the videodisc.

— They got me so fucked up, gave me all that free shit: the coke, the meth, the grass, the downers…

— Starry had you in that specific bar the other night, to meet someone, who, all being well, would have been your next beau. Remember that guy I had the run-in with?

A miserable nod, followed by a bloodcurdling, — WHY? at Starry. — Just tell me why!

Starry, sequestered by the bloody towel, is murmuring what sounds like a prayer in Spanish.

Lennox talks over them: — She mistook me for him. Then, when the real deal came along, she realised she’d fucked up. After trying to throw us together, she then started to vie with you for my attention, remember?

— I can’t believe it. All of them… Vince, Jimmy, Johnnie, Lance… all in on it… Her eyes widen in stark horror. — Chet! Is Tianna with him!?

— No, she’s safe. Anyway, Chet was different. He was a lonely old guy who missed his wife. They befriended him in order to get use of the boat. They used him like they used you. Employed similar tactics. Became his buddies. Dearing was a cop; like a lot of people, Chet trusted cops, he says, and she’s so greedy for his words he feels like a parent bird feeding its fledgling. — They showed him some stag movies as buddies sometimes do. Lennox recoils at the thought: sometimes buddies do more. Then it was, ‘We like to film our own shows. Can we use your boat?’

For a while Robyn can’t speak. When she finally finds her voice she mutters, — My baby, my baby, my baby…

— She’s safe now. She’s a strong kid, he says briskly, — and she needs you, we need you to show some strength now. The cops’ll be here soon.

She nods in assent, but her face is crumbling as Lennox continues. — Chet liked to watch the home-made stag videos. When he saw you appear in one, he drew the line and left them to it. But then Johnnie and Lance started getting more outlandish. The women became younger. Sometimes they weren’t women. Chet was freaked out at those visitors to his boat, but by then it was plain blackmail. He’s a proud, straight old guy. He didn’t want the law or his respectable neighbours at Grove Marina thinking he moved in such circles. But they grew sloppy and careless, especially Johnnie. They started storing the videos on his boat.

Starry rattles the cuff against the pipes.

Lennox draws a deep breath. Clenches the fist that had pummelled itself into fragments. Never to be the same again. Shards floating around in cartilage and tendon. — Chet found their website. It wasn’t incriminating, but it posted their membership list and a meetings timetable. There’s eight of them, including Dearing, at the Embassy Hotel right now, or more likely by now on the run from the Miami–Dade PD. The subject of their conference was probably you and a few other single mothers in South Florida.

Robyn exhales in a long gasp, holding her shoulders and rocking. — Why did Chet…?

— He was planning to go to the police. He was working up the bottle, the courage, he elaborates in response to her confusion, — gathering the evidence: Dearing’s a cop, remember?

— So Chet’s still my friend…

— In a sense, Lennox concedes, and recounts an old phrase his father often used, — but you’re always better with a cunning enemy than a stupid friend, before permitting the cop in him to take over: — However, he was inadvertently assisting them and he’ll have to live with those consequences.

Robyn’s hands go back over her face. Then her voice wheezes through her fingers: — What have I done, Ray?

— You’ve been a victim of a particularly fucking evil scam, he says, as another holy recitation in Spanish comes out from under the stained towel.

— But why… why me?

— You’ve a young daughter. Your lifestyle makes you vulnerable. Exposes her, and you.

— I ain’t a bad person, she pleads, — I jus—

Lennox waves her down. — I can’t criticise your lifestyle, because it’s pretty much the same as my own. The crucial difference is that I don’t have a kid to look after. Get it together, while there’s still something left.

— You… you’re FBI?

— No. I’m from Edinburgh, on holiday. Planning a wedding, like I told you.

Robyn’s baffled face again finds its focus by narrowing on Starry, now peering through her towel, like a burka. — You set the whole thing up. You! She looks at Lennox. — She hates me! Hates me cause I’ve got Tianna!

— My son was sixteen when he was shot dead, Starry groans.

— It was some gang thing! He deserved it! Angel was no good! Robyn screams, then tears across the room, her bunched fists flying at Starry. It’s only when she goes to pick up a large tiger-striped glass vase that Lennox feels moved to restrain her. — LEMME GO, I WANNA KILL THAT FUCKIN EVIL BITCH!

It’s not easy to hold on to her; fury has given Robyn a power supernatural to her slight frame. Eventually the fight leaves her and she dissolves in his arms, allowing herself to be led back across the room and on to the couch. — She’ll get it, no worries. He crouches down and takes her hand in his. Guilt pours from him. I let Britney down by misjudging Angela Hamil. Now I’ve let down Robyn by misjudging her – or judging her; it’s the same thing.

For some reason he recalls the time when, in twelve-year-old rage, he’d inexplicably barged into his sister Jackie’s bedroom, unintentionally interrupting her as she performed fellatio on a boyfriend. There had been a family row afterwards. Not about his intrusion or her indiscretion, but later when she’d found her old doll Marjorie in the attic, the one that was both their favourites. COCKSUCKING SLUT was scribbled on its plastic face in big biro letters.

He regards Robyn’s pitted countenance, desecrated by mascara and tears. — Now we should go and get Tianna before the police come by.

Robyn is about to nod in agreement when she sees the door swing open behind Lennox. — They’re right here already, a voice tells them.

Lennox turns to face Lance Dearing who dangles a spare key. — Lover’s trust, he smiles. The second thing that Lennox registers is that there is something different about Dearing: bifocal lenses slice his eyes into an impenetrable dark section and a cloudy lower part. The third thing is that Dearing is pointing a handgun at him.

— Who the fuck are you, Ray? And don’t gimme that wedding-planner shit. You sure got ol Tiger real good. Found him pretty bust up on that restroom floor: blood, shit and teeth everywhere. His head nods in wary admiration. — So who the fuck are you!

— Does it matter now? It’s over, Lance.

— For you and me both.

— Lance baby, lemme go, honey, let’s just take off, Starry begs.

For some reason Lennox looks Dearing up and down, suddenly contemptuous of his black, stonewashed denim shirt, tucked into off-white canvas trousers, with those showroom white sneakers. — You’re no gaunny shoot me. You’ve never shot anybody, he says calmly, thinking of Bill Riordan, the retired New York cop. But this was the South. Was Florida the real South? Was it a hunting state? Fishing, surely.

Dearing scowls and something dulls in his eyes, behind the lower halves of the bifocals. — And how in hell’s name would you know that?

In despair, Lennox realises that he has no way of knowing. He thinks about his father. About Britney. Wonders, in an instant, if he’ll see them over the other side: if death really is like that.

— Lance, Starry implores.

— MY LITTLE GIRL, YOU FUCKIN MONSTER! Robyn roars, rising.

Dearing points the gun at her. — Sit on your dumb ass, you crazy bitch, or I’ll make a fuckin orphan outta her!

Robyn shrivels up and falls back into the couch, her arms wrapped around herself, a trail of snot dripping from nose to chest.

— It’s over, Lennox repeats, looking to the disc sticking out of the DVD player under the TV set. — Johnnie’s in custody. Try calling him if you don’t believe me. Or rather you might try Chet. He’s turned himself in, and you too, obviously. I thought you’d have been busted at the hotel. Doesnae matter, the local cops will have circulated the list to the FBI. He points at the sheets of papers on the couch. Your name isn’t on it, but they’ve got a copy of you starring in your own show. Johnnie was careless. Carried those DVDs everywhere: a veritable Blockbuster on legs. It’s finished, Lance.

Dearing’s jaw quivers a little.

Starry still wretchedly entreating: — Let me go, Lance, please! Let’s get the fuck outta here!

Lance Dearing ignores her and looks down at the papers, then at the DVD. His eyes pop and a white incandescence seems to light him from within. — Never figured it would turn out this way. Jus wanted to do a good job, is all. Had some fun that got a lil’ outta hand.

— It wasn’t fun, Lennox says.

— Perhaps not, Dearing wearily concedes. — I guess we can all fall from grace.

— The best thing you can do now is—

Lennox is jolted into silence as Lance Dearing raises the gun and pulls the trigger.

22 Clean-Up

ATHUNDEROUS BOOM, AND for a second Lennox thinks he’s been shot. Then he sees Dearing leap backwards, hurtling through the doorway and partially into the hall, blood pouring from his chin. Lennox advances quickly, grabbing the throw from the couch and dropping it over Lance Dearing’s face, though not before he witnesses that the exit wound has come out of his cheekbone, shattering part of his top jaw. Teeth spill out across the floor like pearls from a broken necklace.

Robyn sees little, shielded by the door opening from the hall into the lounge. All that’s visible to her are Lance Dearing’s legs, writhing slowly on the floor. Lennox takes her by the hand, hauling her from the couch. She’s in shock, almost as incapacitated as the spreadeagled Dearing; he knows his own shutdown is in the post. He pulls the disc from the DVD player and picks up the list.

He glances back at Starry. The bridge of her nose is swollen and her eyes are starting to blacken. Lennox can barely look at her; his own diminishment evidenced in her wreckage. In panic she thrashes at the fur shackle that fastens her to the radiator. — Don’t leave me!

Lennox ignores her; she can stay till the police arrive and try to explain everything to them. He holds Robyn’s head up, forcing her not to look at Dearing or the bloodstains on the wall or the stuff running down the door frame as he steps over the bespattered beast cop. — Now we’ll go and see Tianna, right? he says as they cross the threshold. She’s bewildered and feral, zoological-looking against cinder-block wall and cold metal banister. — Just wait here a wee minute, Lennox says, going back inside and closing the door behind him.

He crouches over Lance Dearing, astonished he still has the gun in his hand, dragging it along the floor, manoeuvring it towards his own head. The throw partially spills off his bloody face. He fires again before Lennox is able to react. The bullet grazes the top of his skull and ricochets down the hall, sticking in the bottom of the bathroom door.

Dearing’s next shot whistles into the skirting board. Lennox pulls back the remainder of the throw to expose the whole of the broken face. — Help me, Lance Dearing croaks softly, — finish it…

Lennox slowly shakes his head. — I already have, Dearing. But I’m fucked if I’m finishing you. No way, he says, stepping on Dearing’s wrist, then, with his other foot, kicking the gun from his weak grip. — I’m no helping a fuckin nonce. With the blood you’re losing, I just hope that the ambulance gets here in time and can patch you up. I don’t want you to die, because you don’t fuckin deserve it. You should be made to live with what you’ve done. Lennox feels gripped by a terrible energy. — Help a cunt like you? A stoat? A beast polisman? I look fuckin sweet, he spits, knowing that Miami’s cons will be harder on Dearing than any bullet, and he wants this man to have the same fate as Confectioner: to live in fear of being stabbed, bummed, bullied, and he’s shamed by this realisation. They’ve won. Diminished us. Dragged us down to their level with our pathetic bloodlust. You could wipe them all off the face of the Earth, and you would still lose.

Starry’s screams and Dearing’s throaty groans fill the apartment in a dread orchestration of misery. — SHUT THE FUCK UP, Lennox roars cathartically, and for a few seconds the noise abates. — Just shut the fuck up, ya nonce cunts, and think about how totally fucked youse are now, and he hears the burning growl of angry satisfaction come from deep within him.

He steps outside to see Robyn. Shivering, and self-cradling, she now looks about the same age as Tianna. But the crucial thing is that she isn’t.

A young guy in a vest and tracksuit bottoms comes bounding up the stairs as Lennox shuts the door. — I thought I heard noises, he says. — It was like gunshots, I—

He sees the blood on Lennox. Looks at him in slack-jawed shock.

— It certainly was, Lennox agrees. — Somebody’s just shot himself. Might be an idea to call the police, and an ambulance, he says, ushering Robyn down the stairs, his arm round her thin shoulders.

— Sure thing! The guy eagerly bounces back down the stairs ahead of them.

They get outside and into the Volkswagen and Lennox drives to the car hire. On the way he hears sirens, wonders if they might be for Dearing. Perhaps not. The shock is kicking in, and he feels a pervasive numbness swamping him. Then, as he sees the signs for a gas station, the mundane thought hits him: fill up the tank. — I need to bring back a full tank of gas, he astonishes himself by saying to a perplexed Robyn, as he pulls into the forecourt.

T.W. Pye is working the graveyard shift. He looks suspiciously at Lennox as he walks into the office. Then his eyes expand bulbously as he notices the blood and dried vomit down the foreigner’s front. They go outside to the returning lot where the German car stands. Pye shuffles round it, lowers his great perspiring bulk inside, and pokes about for a bit. Lennox notes that a rash of oxide blight, like spots breaking out on someone’s face after an alcoholic binge, has spored on the green body along the rim above the wheel. This has either escaped the clerk’s attention or has no relevance to him. — Well, the car looks okay, he says, hoisting himself up and looking at a trembling Robyn. — And you got a full tank, he gripes at Lennox. — But you seem in a bit of a mess there, buddy.

— The other guy would kill to be in my shoes.

The sides of Pye’s face burn. — Righty, I’ll just… ehm… He waddles back to the office, followed by Lennox, and fumbles in the till, nervously counting out five hundred dollars.

— Great car, by the way, Lennox says as he takes the money and pockets it, starting to feel sorry for the fat man, who would head home to his one deadly friend, silent, white and immutable; the refrigerator that was killing him every time it greeted him with a big, brash light-bulb smile. He and Robyn head for the taxi rank. Thinking of Starry and Clemson, he can feel his adrenalin leaking, and the depression setting in, the penny-wise gain followed by the pound-foolish debit: the emotional mathematics of practising violence or abuse. They climb into a taxi. — Fort Lauderdale.

In the back of the cab he explains the situation to Robyn, leaving her in no doubt that he’s calling the shots. — Here’s the deal; you come and see Tianna in Fort Lauderdale with me. Then we go to the police station and tell them everything. Tianna’ll stay with my friends for a week or so, until this shit’s cleared up.

— But I need her with me—

— It’s got fuck all, sweet fuck all, Lennox emphasises, thinking of Tianna and So Fucking Awesome, — to do with what you need right now. That wee lassie isnae gaunny be your sister any more. She’s just a kid and you’re a grown woman. If you don’t start acting like it, I’ll tell the authorities you’re a slut and a cokehead, and believe you me they will listen. You’ll do time for child endangerment if I show them that tape. Believe.

Her face buckles further under his onslaught. — But I thought you were our friend…

— I’m her friend, not yours. You have to start earning friendships and respect. Lennox’s tone softens as self-reproach filters through him. — Get yourself together and you’ll come out of this as a heroine in Tianna’s eyes. Make her believe in you, Robyn.

She nods through her tears. And then he finds himself rambling; telling her that he’s just a Scottish cop who wanted to be with his fiancée in Miami Beach and recover from a bad time. And plan a wedding. Maybe do a bit of sunbathing, with some fishing and sailing thrown in. Then Robyn tells him her tale, and it humanises her, as all stories do, and he sees a person of great misfortune, victimised and pulled apart like carrion by hyenas. And he remembers the trinity of bullies that made him a cop.

You can get better. He’d been as wretched as Robyn when they pulled him off that bar-room floor in Edinburgh, slain by the pub comic’s sick joke. More so, when found lurking in the tunnel after his dad’s funeral, hand pulped, ranting like a madman, protesting he had cocaine under control, as a wrap burned his jeans’pocket and his nose’s cavities. Trudi, though, had taken charge; de facto moving him into Bruntsfield, going to his Leith flat to pick up his mail. She’d been in touch with Toal, agreeing sick leave, and signed him up with her doctor, not the police one, as he’d never bothered to register. He was prescribed the antidepressants. She’d already booked the Florida sun, now the holiday would have the added agenda of executing the matrimonial plans. But first there had been his father’s funeral.

The day before he’d gone round to his sister’s place: a dull, wet and cold afternoon with progress down the leafless, grey avenue a turgid war of attrition against a vicious wind. Jackie had stayed strong during the period leading up to the funeral. She took charge of the arrangements, handled everything in her usual practical manner, displaying scant emotion. That morning when he called round at her home she flabbergasted Lennox by grabbing hold of him in the hallway, the one with the bottle-green Axminster that always smelt slightly of damp, though it had been lifted, aired and cleaned several times. — Ray… my wee brother. You know I’ve always loved you, she’d said.

This came as a shock to him, even more when he smelt the gin on her breath. — I hadnae suspected a thing, he told her, and she thought he was joking.

— You should go and see Mum, Ray. She needs us all.

— Has Jock been round looking after her? he asked quietly.

— Thank goodness for Jock, he’s a star.

So she didn’t know. Lennox fought his rage down. — Aye.

— You should go and see her, she repeated, this time with the assertion of a barrister.

— Aye, ah’ll mibbe go n see her later oan, eh? he said in his cop voice, shot with the harsh vowels and scheme argot he habitually used around Jackie, to counterbalance her posh affectations. It killed the last of the intimacy between them. He then made his excuses and left, back to the order of Trudi’s.

Sometimes a benign despot is more suitable than self-determination, he considers, particularly if you’re a hopeless fuck-up. He looks at Robyn, sees her staring ahead, focused on something invisible. — It’ll be okay, he says to her, and he hopes that he’s right.

The reunion in Fort Lauderdale is emotional and tearful, as is the subsequent parting. Lennox informs Tianna that her mother is going to be helping the police put away bad guys like Vince, Clemson, Lance and Johnnie. Which is probably the biggest truth he’s gotten to tell her.