Snow Storm

16

Victor thought it had been a fairly simple request; “the sights.” He wanted to know where the locals drank, enjoy a night he might otherwise not and try to forget his woes. Clearly all Edinburgh’s residents lived a lifestyle of decadence and liked to pay a high price for their drinks or the small one, who he now had been ordered to call Billy and the large one who was apparently called Keith had decided to take him to the places he might like to drink in Edinburgh.

“Down that George Street,” Billy had immediately suggested, causing Victor to wonder if there was another.

“Aye,” Keith had added, giving weight, quite literally, to the suggestion.

Victor acquiesced and they made their way a couple of blocks along Prince’s Street, crossed a large square and found themselves on the aforementioned George Street. It seemed alive, even at this time on what he was fairly certain was a Wednesday night. A group of girls walked past, scantily clad for the season and he found himself wondering if it was the junk food that kept them warm. Why weren’t they wearing enough clothes? Was it some kind of act of bravado? It was colder in Vilnius and people were probably harder but no one dressed like that.

They made their way to the bar. It was busy in here and the high ceilings gave the place an echoing feel, the lack of any music serving to amplify this further. Billy ordered them two double rum and lemonades each, Captain Morgan’s finest apparently and they began drinking at a steadily desperate pace.

Though Victor felt a duty to drink them under the table on the grounds of patriotism, he realised it might also be a good move to stand firm on the pace, make them wait to order, stamp his authority on the situation. The rum seemed moreish though and he racked up a few more during the next hour, listening to stories of somewhere that sounded like it was called Site Hell, but that couldn’t be right, surely, could have been Sight Hill.

They moved on with each round of drinks, refused entry here and there, on the grounds of Billy’s appearance or manner as far as he could tell. The doorman clashes seemed set to be a theme of the evening. He could see their point in many ways. He was small, wiry and underweight, the type that often felt they had something to prove, maybe liked to start trouble. He’d seen it before; you looked a certain way and people treated you a certain way. It was a self-perpetuating thing. Still, it was strange, the way some people wore sportswear and looked as though they were out for an afternoon run and others did the same and looked like they were on the run. Not that he was one to judge.

They ended up in the Alexander Graham Bell, having walked the length of George Street. They were hemmed in by a crowd of drinkers, young ones, clearly intent on getting seasonally out of control.

That was where it happened. Thinking about it later, he would have admitted that it had been inevitable; a man with a bad attitude, a belly full of drink and too many others in close proximity. It was a tinderbox.

He was telling a story about something, Victor wasn’t even sure what that something was, and he went a bit too far with the accompanying arm movements, spilling someone’s drink, a student perhaps, bigger in stature but softer in nature than Billy. The boy looked at him with the wrong facial expression for a fraction of a second but that was enough. Billy snapped. All the pent up Napoleonic issues converged. He’d been trying to impress. This was his day in the sun and now this young man had offended him, inadvertently and unwittingly bringing him back down to earth with a bump, in front of the big boss as he saw it. He had lost face and so, in Billy’s mind at least, it seemed right that the younger man should too, quite literally, by way of a bottle.

There was no blood at first, just sudden movement. And then the blood had caught up, spilling out of the student’s mouth and down his nose. Billy looked like he was making to leave as the student’s friends, the ones he hadn’t thought about suddenly came into play.

Retribution was swift in the form of a punch in the face from a big guy in a rugby shirt, at which point Keith waded in and the whole place erupted. The tightly packed crowd surged first one way and then the other and Victor lost his footing, tripped on someone’s shoes, a girl he thought. His body went out from underneath him as his feet became jammed together and he started to list. He grabbed for something shiny, a table maybe, but he couldn’t reach and then he felt his head move suddenly, violently, in one place one second and another the next with no discernable travel. Then the pain hit, along with the realisation of what had happened.

After that it was over. In time honoured fashion the red mist descended. He lost control and before he knew where he was he’d taken down at least four men thirty years his junior.

And now he found himself in the back of a police van, cuffed, game over. When they’d taken him or he’d let them, knowing it was check-mate, he realised he had a broken wine bottle in one hand and a barmaid under his arm.

“Looks like were in the shit now chief,” Billy volunteered, conspiratorially. “Barry night though,” he added.

Victor wondered who this Barry Knight was. Perhaps a cheap lawyer. In any case they were not in this together. He dispensed a look that he knew would leave Billy in no doubt about this and gleefully watched as he shrunk back into his corner.

This was an error of judgement, a potentially costly one. You never let your guard down. Not when the stakes were this high.

Giles Herriot-Watt had enjoyed a fairly pleasant evening, all things considered. Following the press call for the boat launch, he had decided to do some entertaining and invited Jennifer, the local reporter to lunch.

He hadn’t actually known where to go, given that he was not a native of the area, though neither, he discovered, was she. “So what brings you here?” he asked, interested to know why someone would give up on the chance to write for The Herald or The Scotsman, assuming they were good enough, in exchange for going to work for a local paper. He’d seen them, only weeks ago, during research for today’s charade, running a story about three sheep nearly being wiped out on the A75. He thought the headline had been something like “Three sheep in daring rescue from A75.”

“It was,” she confirmed. “I thought I used a more understated turn of phrase, compared to the one my editor wanted to use.”

“Which was?”

“Three sheep in death road shock, or something along those lines.”

“Sensationalist is he?”

She took a sip of her wine and smiled. “Used to work for the tabloids until his wife made him quit his job and take this one in aid of a quieter life. Something to do with his blood pressure. I’d say he might be better off drying out and quitting the fags if it came down to it.”

“Quite. Isn’t that a hazard of the game you are in though?”

“Isn’t being a lying toe rag a hazard of the game you’re in?” She countered, with a grin.

“Touché.”

They were in the Isle of Whithorn, not so much an isle as it was now firmly joined to the mainland and more of a village, she explained. In years gone by smuggling was rife on this coastline. Many of the farmhouses had hideaways under staircases. Many outbuildings had fake floors. One in particular had a limekiln which was movable in order to stockpile rum, brandy, or whatever from the dreaded hands of the excise man. “It was remote,” she explained. “Still is,” she added with a grin.

Giles choked on his white wine as it made a brief detour the wrong way and stared out at the boats as he attempted to recover. They were in the Steam Packet, its windows affording a view of the isle’s harbour, the church seemingly built into the water and the houses on the shore beyond.

“There’s even a rumour that one of the places involved, a farm near Monreith, has a tunnel to the beach from the old abandoned farmhouse. The house itself is in the wrong place. It sits on the far side of the farm, rather than where it should be traditionally, in front of the farm to stop intruders. I’d really love to get some aerial photos taken.”

“Google Earth?” He suggested absent mindedly.

She laughed at this, flicking her hair behind her ears. “I meant infrared photos of the area. If your clients are allowing anyone to fly in and out of Baldoon that might be interested in that kind of thing, you could let me know.”

He felt a bit of a set up at hand. Was this why she’d agreed to lunch?

He dropped her off back in Wigtown and headed back to Kirroughtree and his salubrious digs. The ancient hotel was empty this time of year and he single-handedly kept the bar open for a while, before falling into a fitful sleep.

He woke sharply at three am as the phone blared in his left ear. His head pounded from the effort of reading the display on the screen and answering it nearly brought his stomach contents out along with his words, which in this case were restricted to “Giles” followed by “what!?”

He crawled out of bed and staggered towards the bathroom, sticking his fingers forcefully down his throat in order to get rid of the remaining alcohol. He brushed his teeth, showered and made a cup of coffee, if he could describe instant as such, before donning his best Saville Row suit and doing a cursory check in the mirror. Perfect. Time to go to work.

The people carrier waited by the front door probably disturbing staff and whatever guests were around.

The sheep would doubtless return to the land of nod. Meanwhile, the important people had things to do.

Andy sat on top of a wooden pallet, which in turn sat on top of another bearing an industrial sized bag of lime. He might normally have been relaxing sitting on something like this, probably somewhere in a field, taking a break from spreading the same stuff as fertiliser. Not in this case.

His feet were attached to the pallet below with a cable tie and his hands were tied to the one he sat on with another, close to the small of his back in the most uncomfortable way possible. He couldn’t lean back in the way he wanted to. They’d made sure of that. The only option was to hunch forward like a broken man or try to sit straight. He chose the latter.

This was taking things a bit far surely, wasn’t it? All he’d done was a bit of sneaking around. There was no law against that. On the other hand he was pretty sure those were unlicensed Kalashnikovs and there most definitely was a law against that.

They hadn’t actually done anything to him, save for a bit of a cuff round the ear with the butt of one of those guns when he’d demanded they let him go and started to kick off. He’d got the message. They were serious but he wasn’t sure why. This kind of crap didn’t wash round here. That was what he’d been trying to tell them, but that didn’t seem to wash with them.

He was in a large warehouse with a lot of lime and not much else. He faced a brick wall, cobwebbed probably from sometime around the Second World War. It was quiet in here. The wind whistled and moaned through the aging roof and the only other sound he heard was the scurrying of something, probably rats. He hated rats. It was a toss-up which was more intense; his hatred for rats or for the adders you couldn’t walk a hundred yards without meeting on a sunny day down on the farm. He’d give anything to have that problem now.

The vastness of the warehouse was behind him, so he couldn’t see what was going on but he knew they were gone for now. In a place this big and this quiet echoes travelled. Hitchcock couldn’t have thought up psychological torture better.

The last time he’d felt this petrified it had been his TB vaccination that caused the upset. He’d missed it the first time and the boys at school had taken great pleasure telling him about the long needle scraping the bone as it went in too far. It had been a non-event in the end. That didn’t mean he hadn’t spent days worrying about it, every time the door opened and someone came into or left the classroom. Three days they’d been in school, catching up with the victims they’d missed and three days they’d kept him waiting: hell on earth. Ever since he’d been very much a believer in getting things over and done with quickly; pull the plaster off in one go before you even feel the pain.

He’d be very grateful if they’d just give him a kicking and send him on his way.