Snow Storm

7

Campbell had sunk one too many now. Earlier, with Sam and the boss, it had all been fine, just a social thing, a morale booster, but now he’d crossed a line, gone via pleasantly inebriated to drunk and he needed a pick me up.

The bar maid, Sophie, had given him her number after a campaign he’d waged ceaselessly. She probably had to endure idiots giving her bad chat all the time, so he’d seen it as a challenge. He’d circumvented her defences by not being that guy, by just talking in a non-look-at-me way to the point of sympathising when other punters who were that guy made their drunken approaches. He’d played the nice guy and now he had her number.

He deleted it from his phone, adding it to the countless numbers he’d deleted and thrown away before.

His supply was running out. It had been good stuff. He wasn’t sure where this stuff was coming from but it was pretty potent. They hadn’t been too stingy when they cut it.

He had the number in his phone. Risky yes but some contacts were invaluable and there were some things you needed to get you through. In any case the number was stored under “Boots” on account of the supplier’s ready access to all things chemical and medicinal. He’d thought about putting it in as ICI but that might require more explaining if anyone went through his phone.

He made the call, took a cab to the foot of Leith Walk and walked along Great Junction Street until he saw her, standing outside the Tam O’ Shanter, smoking a Marlborough Light. She was out of context down here, dressed like a successful business woman in a long black coat and a trouser suit. She stood out here, but not in the places she frequented on a regular basis. Whatever her surroundings it was unlikely anyone knew that her brief case contained the various stimulants and sedatives she supplied to the great and the good, those with the money to pay a bit more for the sanitised well-mannered and well turned out version of the drug dealer.

“What’s with the cloak and dagger stuff?” he asked, shooting her an intentionally wide grin as he walked towards her.

“Walk,” she replied in an icy tone as she fell in step with him, continuing along the road.

“Ok,” he said, doing as he was told but wondering where this was going. “Are you going to tell me where?”

She shoved him left, and he braced for what he thought was a wall but staggered instead into an alleyway, his senses swimming in booze. She launched at him again, pinning him to a bin and he struggled, pushing her away. She was deceptively strong. “Don’t you think I watch the news?” she demanded.

“Wha…”

She lurched forward again, shoving her hands deep inside his suit jacket, frisking him for all he was worth. “Are you wearing a wire? Is that it?”

“No. What? How long have we been doing business? We go back a long way.”

“Not that long,” she replied. “I know all about entrapment you know.”

He held his hands up. “Ok, it’s a fair cop. So you know who I am. I like to keep that on the down low, that’s all. There’s nothing suspicious going on here. Just calm down.”

She looked at him angrily and he decided she could probably take him if it came to a fight, through sheer determination alone.

“Now can I please purchase some of that fine produce of yours?” Campbell laughed nervously hating himself for it. “I can’t not have that stuff in my life.”

“Forget it,” she said, throwing her arms in the air. “You’ve had that. How can I trust you now? You’re too big a risk. Do you know what they’d do to me?” Her eyes narrowed as she regarded him with utter contempt.

“What who’d do to you?” he asked.

“Nice try.”

“Hey. Surely we can work this out.”

“Not likely,” she scoffed, turning on her heels. “I’d rather not end up with my head in a bag.”

He watched her walk away, before pulling out his phone and deleting yet another number.

Burke sat in Gray’s office staring at his feet as he allowed his toes to do the fidgeting, unseen.

The DCI was holding forth on the importance of figures. “It’s a numbers game James, you know that.”

“Yes sir.”

“I mean we live and die by our clear up rate, which is why I’m only too happy for you to palm this one off to SCDEA. Let Edwards brush it under the carpet as he obviously intends to. Oh I know, I dare say at your age I would have been keen to get my teeth into it. Make no mistake about that, but you always have to keep one eye on the politics if you want to get on. And during these stark financial times, God knows everyone wants more bang for their buck.”

“Indeed.”

“These are just the realities you have to contend with in this game.”

That and mastering the dodgy handshakes, Burke thought as he watched Gray stare out of the window in a manner he probably thought conveyed a contemplative general surveying the field of battle, despite the fact the view was of a car park.

Why the DCI thought he had to sell him on this he had no clue, but he’d go along with the charade anyway, just to indulge him. It paid to look keen while silently chalking these things up to experience.

“You’re married, aren’t you Jim?”

“I am,” Burke replied. “Three years.”

“Early days,” Gray chuckled. “Tell me about it when it’s been 20.”

Burke reflected that he hadn’t in fact brought it up.

“You know, my brother-in-law’s in the car trade.”

“Really?”

“Yes, does all right out of it too. Not sure there hasn’t been the odd dodgy dealing and there at times if you know what I mean, and he’s picked up more than a few tricks along the way. In fact I think he could well put Derren Brown to shame.”

“I’m sure.”

“Once told me a story about a time he got a dodgy Triumph Stag from the auctions, just in the early days as he was starting out. He had a mechanic who looked the car over and discovered the suspension was shot. Well, then they decided the only thing they could do was to prop the whole thing up with bits of wood from an old pallet and punt the thing through an ad in one of the trade papers.” Gray chuckled to himself again. “Met the guy down a dark alley or in a layby somewhere so there were no comebacks, flogged it and legged it.” He laughed some more, taking a moment to bask in the glory of what he doubtless thought was a well told anecdote.

“Really,” Burke replied, in a manner he hoped was just the right side of sarcastic.

“Yes, really,” the DCI replied, remembering himself, before nervously clearing his throat and continuing. “Anyway, the thing he always says, and I mean always, at any given opportunity at pretty much every family gathering once he gets a few too many G&Ts into him, is that most cars are not sold to men.”

“I see.” Much as Burke appreciated the words of wisdom, he found it unlikely he would be selling Vauxhall Astras anytime soon.

“Ah but you don’t Jim.” Gray pressed on, “And you won’t until you reach a later stage of the syndrome. My brother in law rarely sells a car to a man, well not one that’s married or otherwise cohabiting at any rate. Even if it’s the husband looking and on the surface buying, you always sell the car to the wife. She makes the decisions everywhere, and I mean everywhere. That’s the point.”

“I hear that.” Burke said absent-mindedly.

“Sorry?”

“Imagine that.”

“You might well imagine it James. Clearly you still harbour some illusion of control, but that’ll fade once, Rachel is it?”

“Yes.”

“Once Rachel has worn you down.”

“Right.” Was Gray trying to justify something he had done at the bidding of his wife, some crime he was about to fess up to following his segue into the mind of the car buying and indeed it seemed general mind-set of the married man?

“Eventually you’ll know what it is to be beaten down.”

“Doubtless.”

“Anyway, that’s my point.”

“I see. Sorry…” Burke struggled to find his words and instead found himself merely squinting as though an altered visual field would allow some new light to shine on the situation as spelled out by his superior, giving some kind of grasp of the situation.

Gray let out a long sigh. “The divisional commander’s wife says we’re not allowed to pass this on to the SCDEA so you’re stuck with it.”

They sat round Davie’s kitchen table draining cups of tea which were swiftly refilled from a giant pot sitting on top of the Aga. Davie’s mum treated him well it had to be said. Legend had it he didn’t know how to make tea and didn’t even choose his own clothes in the morning; just turned up at the Aga where they were waiting, folded over the rail, primed for the boy wonder to fill them.

Andy stared at the sugar bowl, trying to make out his reflection in the dull tarnished concave surface of the teaspoon, anything really to avoid eye contact with the other two. It had all happened before he’d known about it. The toothless Polish guy had recognised him about the time he had done the same. The fact that he was already hanging out of the cab of the John Deere was the thing that really went against him. The guy grabbed him by the lapels of his boiler suit and in one smooth movement Andy was no longer in the cab. The giant jerked back suddenly as he over did it and lost his footing. Andy was thrown further out. He saw the gatepost heading towards him and felt his heart jump, right before everything went black. Everything after that was a bit hazy. He had pieces; some kind of flashback of another voice in a foreign tongue, giving the first one a hard time. He could remember being angry as they tried to move him. He just wanted to be left alone.

He was back in the John Deere when he came to what was left of his senses. They’d filled the trailer with feed. He was on the road to the side of the airstrip, neatly parked up. He was groggy and his head hurt. He staggered down the steps of the tractor and threw up on the grass. He sat for a while trying to muster the wherewithal to get moving, fired up the tractor, knocked it into gear and let out the clutch. He made it to the end of the side road, looked sideways at the junction and got overtaken by a wave of nausea.

He abandoned ship again just in time for whatever was left in his stomach to come up. He stood, leaning over the fence for a few minutes, just listening to the rattle of the diesel engine trying to quiet the jumbled up thoughts going through his head. Something that should be so simple was now nigh on impossible. He gave up after the second attempt, after realising he would never make it out of the junction. He couldn’t move his head to check for oncoming traffic.

He phoned Davie who jumped straight into the car and headed down to get him. He’d abandoned the tractor, hightailed it and ever since he’d been drinking tea in an effort to feel something like normal.

He felt ashamed if he was honest. He’d been taken by surprise, yes, but the Polish guy would have had the better of him anyway. The feeling of helplessness was not a feeling he thought he would ever be able to shake. He shivered thinking about it.

“I say we all head down and sort them,” Davie announced.

“You would,” his brother Colin snapped.

“Aye, I would,” Davie replied. “You’ve got to put your foot down. Cannae let people walk all over you bro.”

“I never do. Sounds like it was a bit of an accident. Saying that, it’s a bit full on though.”

“You’re not kidding, is not like they even phoned an ambulance or anything. His head could be vegetable soup for all they knew and they just him left to choke on his own puke or something.”

“Aye, but what are you really gonna do?”

“I don’t know, bunch of boys, pickup truck, baseball bats, job done.”

“Yeee haw! We’re not in the deep south now Jim Bob.”

Andy laughed and then regretted it, wondering if he was about to see those cups of tea again. “Technically, we are if you think about it.” He groaned.

The other two laughed and Colin poured more tea, spooning more sugar in, to the point where the spoon was liable to stand up on its own.

“What do you want us to do?” Davie finally asked. “Surely you don’t want to let them get away with it?”

“I think all I want is my bed. Besides, isn’t looking for trouble what got me into this position in the first place?”

“They started it.” Davie said, was a petulant look on his face. “But I’ll finish it.”

“I think you just wanted to say that,” Colin chimed in, slowly turning the screw in the back of his brother’s head. Why did brothers seem to enjoy winding each other up so much? Andy didn’t have brothers, though at times he thought it could be handy. They wound each other up these two, but they always had each other’s back.

“In any case.” Davie said, his face hardening suddenly, “Something’s got to be done.”

It was a face Andy had seen pull only once before, and that had ended in tears.