Hour Of Darkness

Twenty-Nine

‘What’s going to happen to the wee girl?’ Cheeky’s expression was as serious as Sauce had ever known it. In fact he struggled to recall the last time he had seen her frown.

‘That’s a good question,’ he admitted, pausing his forkful of coiled spaghetti halfway to his mouth. ‘Daddy shot Mummy, so he’s not going to be around to bring her up.’

‘Didn’t you say she has a granny?’

‘No, I said great-granny. They traced her this afternoon. She’s seventy, and she has arthritis, so she’s not going to be any help.’

‘They?’ she repeated. ‘Who are they? Why not you and Sammy?’

‘The head of CID says that we shouldn’t investigate the shooting. We were witnesses to the crime, so she wants an objective SIO. Jack McGurk’s heading it up, with Karen Neville.’

‘Have they got anywhere?’

‘A traffic warden reported Booth’s car, parked on a yellow line, just outside Waverley Station.’ His face twisted into something that might have been a smile, had it been a little less vicious. ‘You might say that was a wee bit of a clue, the first, as it happens. The second was when he used his credit card to buy a rail ticket to London.’

‘Do you know which train he got?’

‘It doesn’t matter,’ he said, his voice hard. ‘It wouldn’t even matter if he gets off at an earlier station. He’ll leave the platform in handcuffs. . and that’s if he behaves himself. The transport cops are waiting for him at every stop, with armed support.’

‘You sound as if you’d like them to shoot him, Sauce. That’s not like you.’

‘It wouldn’t bother me one bit if they did,’ he confessed.

‘Why did he kill the girl? Was it just because she had let you two in?’

‘I don’t think he meant to kill her.’

‘Then. .’ she stopped, and that rare frown returned. ‘Was he shooting at you?’

‘Nah,’ he said, ‘he was probably just firing wild, trying to scare us. That’s what his defence QC will say, I’m sure.’

She reached across the table and turned his face up towards hers, forcing eye contact. ‘I don’t believe that.’

‘Lucky for him you can’t be on the jury, then.’

‘Sauce, he tried to shoot you, didn’t he, but he killed the girl instead. That’s what happened, isn’t it?’

‘It all went off very fast,’ he murmured. ‘Although it didn’t seem that way at the time; the after-effects of a kick in the balls stay with you for a long time.’

‘And now you’re all twisted up because the woman got what was meant for you. I know it, love. I can tell.’

‘Not just that.’ He shook his head. ‘I hit him with my baton as he was trying to aim. I’m chewed up by the thought that if I hadn’t, Vicky might still be alive.’

‘And you might not.’ She squeezed his chin, hard. ‘Now you listen to me, Harold Haddock. That girl lived behind that steel door. She knew why it was there and she knew exactly what was going out through the letterbox. She lived with a dangerous man, she chose his lifestyle and she spent the money it brought in. You live by it, you die by it. Trust me, I’m an authority on the subject; look at my family background. My mother’s a fucking thief, my Aunt Goldie’s a monster, and my grandfather was Dundee’s answer to the Krays, with a wee bit more menace about him than them, so they say.

‘I could have been that girl Vicky, if Grandpa hadn’t kept me out of the life. If I sound hard it’s because it’s in my genes, but if it takes a dead slut to bring you home alive, that’s fine by me.’

‘There’s still a kid left with no parents,’ he whispered.

‘She’ll be better off without them,’ Cheeky retorted. She flashed a small smile his way. ‘Maybe we could adopt her.’

Sauce winced. ‘We may have to, if we want kids. I haven’t been able to bring myself to look at my baw-bag yet.’

‘Oh, you poor love.’ Her eyes twinkled. ‘Don’t worry. I’ll be gentle with you.’

‘It’ll still be like juggling hand grenades.’ He stopped and his expression changed as a recollection came to him.

‘Your grandpa,’ he said. ‘Maybe next time you speak to him you might ask him whether, in that other former life of his, the one we don’t usually talk about, he ever had dealings with a man called Perry Holmes. If he did, it would be useful to know whether he ever met Holmes’s son. He uses his mother’s name; he’s known as Hastie McGrew.’

She rose from the table. ‘I’ll ask him now. You go and switch on the telly, and I’ll call him from the bedroom.’

‘There’s no rush,’ he insisted.

‘Rubbish. You’ve never asked me to get anything from Grandpa before. It must be important.’ She headed for the door.

Sauce polished off the last of his pasta, then cleared the table, loading the used crockery and forks into the dishwasher. He had just switched on EastEnders, when Cheeky came back into the room, phone in hand.

‘He wants to talk to you,’ she said, holding out the handset. ‘Grandpa never asks for anything either, so it must be important.’ She saw his hesitancy. ‘Please, love.’

Unsmiling, he took the phone from her, and muted the television sound. ‘Mr McCullough.’ He felt a shiver run through him. He had never spoken to his partner’s grandfather before, but he might have been regarded as an expert on him, since he had read almost every word that had ever been written about him, in the media and on police intelligence files.

He knew that the man on the other end of the line was seen by many as the most influential person in his home city of Dundee, and by most of those who had known him in his younger days, as its most dangerous.

‘Sauce, is it,’ he asked, ‘or do you prefer Harold? My name’s Cameron, by the way. Only people who work for me call me Mr McCullough, and I don’t expect you to be calling me Grandpa.’

‘Sauce will be fine. I rarely get anything else these days.’

‘First off,’ Cheeky’s grandfather began, ‘it’s good to be talking to you at last, although I understand why we haven’t. Given what people say about me, it’s a brave thing for someone in your job to have taken up with our lass, and I admire your for it.’

‘I love her, Cameron, simple as that.’

‘I know that, and I can see that you’re making her happy.’ Sauce heard the unspoken words, Just as well for you.

‘That works both ways,’ he replied.

‘Good, good. Now, you asked her to ask me about Perry Holmes and his boy.’ McCullough paused, as if words were being chosen carefully. ‘Without going into detail about how we came across each other, yes, I did know Perry. He was what you might call a man of respect. Hugely intelligent and successful in everything he did; his legitimate business empire is still there, run by trustees on behalf of his son and daughter. I’m sure the police file on him is about a foot thick and that it’s still stored in a Black Museum somewhere.’

‘It still exists,’ Sauce confirmed. ‘There’s a book about him too, written by one of our guys after he retired.’

‘I’ve read it,’ Grandpa said. ‘The author didn’t know all the story. Perry only ever made one mistake, and that was to be excessively loyal to his brother. He gave that head-banger Al far too much rope. The man was a liability, an animal, and the things he did got both of them killed eventually, although it took Perry a lot longer to die than it took the brother.

‘It was widely assumed, and maybe still is, that when Perry was crippled, his criminal side came to an end, but in fact that wasn’t the case.

‘He never married the mother of his two kids, so nobody knew about Hastie. When his father got shot he came out of the army, and simply replaced his Uncle Al. He’d be about twenty-five when he came to see me in Dundee about a business deal that Perry and I had.

‘He was a very formidable lad, although he didn’t act hard. He’d his dad’s brains, and as time proved, some of his uncle’s tendencies, but because he was bright he was far more dangerous than Al ever was. I’d tell nobody but you this, but only two men have ever put a chill into me, and Hastie McGrew is one of them.’

‘Who’s the other, as a matter of interest?’ Sauce asked.

‘Somebody you know,’ Cameron McCullough replied, ‘the man who’s right at the top of your game now, in fact.

‘Anyway,’ he went on, ‘young Hastie ran the show for his old man, while the whole word thought he was just his nurse, until their luck ran out. Perry finally used up his extension, and Hastie was put away for killing two guys. His score was actually a lot higher than that, and I’m not talking about his army days.’

‘I see.’

‘So do I. The fact that you’re asking me about him tells me that he must be out. He’ll be due, given that it all happened almost twenty years ago. Let’s see, he must be pushing fifty by now. Has his name come up in this high-profile investigation you’re on?’

‘Possibly,’ Sauce conceded.

‘Then take him very seriously.’

‘We’ve got another name in the frame already, though.’

‘Yes, Cheeky tells me that you had a close call with an idiot today. It’s as well it wasn’t Hastie. He never made mistakes. What makes you so sure the other one might be the right guy?’ McCullough laughed, suddenly. ‘Listen to me, asking a cop about a case. Forget it, son.’

‘It’s okay. I can tell you we found some stuff of the dead woman’s in his flat, a box of jewellery. That, and traces of Class A drugs in the toilet bowl and around the place.’

‘Was he a user or a dealer?’

‘Oh, a dealer, definitely.’

‘And the stuff you found, the jewels, was it valuable?’

‘Mmm. Moderately so; four figures we reckoned, but well short of the five.’

‘In that case are you really sure you’re after the right man? Why would a drug dealer murder a woman just to steal a few baubles?’

Hell, that’s a good question, Sauce thought, but he refrained from answering it.

‘I’ll tell you, lad,’ Cheeky’s grandfather said, ‘. . and this is not me asking an indirect question, mind, because I really don’t want to know. . if this dead woman had any quarrel with Perry Holmes in the past, then don’t rule out Hastie.’