The Dead

26

A couple of days after we told Sharp that Gemma Carlton had slept with Golden Boots and most probably attended his party the next night, when she was killed, the police raided the footballer’s house. Dozens of detectives and plain clothes officers descended on the place mob-handed early in the morning and dragged him groggily from his bed. They shoved the warrant in his face and made him sit on one of his big leather sofas while they went through the place, turning it upside down in the process.

‘I aint done nothin,’ was all Golden Boots could offer as they bagged up everything around him, including small amounts of class A drugs that the Premiership’s finest had been too stupid or lazy to find and dispose of when I warned him the police would be coming to see him.

‘That ain’t mine,’ he protested. Then he added, ‘I just shagged her. That’s not a crime,’ but it got him daggers from the two WPCs who were babysitting him.

‘This is a waste of my fucking time,’ he moaned, when the search had been going on for ten minutes, ‘and yours. Where are you going with that?’ as they marched past him carrying his personal computer, then informed him all of his cars had been impounded.

Golden Boots started to get angry then, ‘Not my wheels! What am I supposed to do without them?’

‘Get a bus,’ one of the unimpressed WPCs advised him.

‘I want to see a lawyer,’ he hissed at her through bared teeth, ‘now.’

‘Could you come this way please?’ asked a Detective Inspector politely and Golden Boots just blinked back at him, then finally rose to his feet and followed the detective upstairs and into one of the guest bedrooms. Four other plain-clothes officers were standing there and there was a box on the bed. It was nothing fancy by Golden Boots’ standards, just a plain storage box from a wardrobe.

‘Is this yours?’ asked the Detective Inspector.

‘Well it’s in my house so, duh,’ answered an increasingly irate footballer.

‘So it is yours?’ the detective persisted.

‘Yes.’

‘What’s it used for?’

‘For putting things in,’ he said, as if it was obvious.

‘What kind of things?’

Golden Boots shrugged, ‘Trainers, bits of kit, old DVDs, I don’t know. I don’t clean up after myself. I have people who do that.’

‘So there’s nothing in here that you want to tell me about before you take a look?’

‘No.’

The Detective Inspector used a gloved hand to raise the lid of the box and Golden Boots leaned forward to peer in. Inside was a purse and a mobile phone.

‘I’ve looked inside the purse. It’s Gemma Carlton’s and I’d be willing to bet the phone is hers too. So would you mind explaining to me how they ended up in a box, which was covered by a blanket and tucked away in a wardrobe in one of your bedrooms, eh?’

Golden Boots went loopy then.

‘You put that there! I didn’t put that there! You bastards! You’re fitting me up!’ Two burly detectives took an arm each and restrained him.

‘Do me a favour,’ answered the detective, ‘you think that two dozen of us got together and decided to plant evidence on you. This isn’t 1974 and we don’t fit people up. We just want to put the right man inside for Gemma’s sake and right now that is looking like you.’

‘Fuck you!’ screamed Golden Boots, as he struggled against the grip on his arms, but nobody was listening to him anymore.

The little lad was only eleven years old but young Tam already had the street smarts. He’d seen the men walk into the lock-up; five of them had gone in but only four came out. That would normally have been enough to alert the boy to keep his nose out of it and at no point would it have occurred to him to phone the ‘Five-O’, as the ‘Polis’ were commonly known on his Edinburgh estate. They could get to fuck. Round here, if a guy goes into a garage and doesn’t come out again he either deserved it, because he was a grass or got too greedy, or he was plain unlucky, because he came up against someone stronger. You never got a square go round here and everyone knew it.

But the guy who didn’t come out turned out to be a bit special. A few days later, Tam learned that one of Jimmy Law’s lads had gone missing and they were supposed to be untouchable, because Jimmy Law ran this patch and everybody knew who he worked for, a fucking Glasgow headcase by the name of Fallon. Tam figured that Jimmy might like to know where his man was and most likely would pay for the news. Young Tam asked around about Jimmy Law and was told he was in the hospital, but Fallon was in town, so he went to Fallon.

Five minutes later, Tam was standing next to the legendary Fallon, flanked by half a dozen members of the big man’s crew, staring at a row of dilapidated garages.

‘Which one,’ asked Fallon and Tam pointed to the middle one of a block of three. Fallon jerked his head and two huge men prised the lock off and swung the garage doors wide.

‘Keep him here.’ Fallon ordered, pointing at Tam.

Fallon walked into the lock-up. There was no car, just a jumble of old furniture; some locked, heavy filing cabinets McGlenn used to store some stash away from his flat, in case the Polis ever felt like dropping by unannounced and an old sofa with a table in front of it and two chairs, one on each side, so if McGlenn ever felt the need to conduct some discreet business, away from prying eyes, he could do it in relative comfort. McGlenn was sitting there now in fact, staring serenely out at Fallon who blinked back at him in the darkness. Once his eyes adjusted to the gloom, Fallon could make out the gaping wound across McGlenn’s throat and the blood that had poured from it, all down the man’s shirt, soaking his trousers and the old couch. Excited flies were spinning around McGlenn’s body in tight little circles.

Fallon walked back out of the lock-up.

‘Close it up,’ he told his men, ‘and see to him.’ He nodded at the young lad. One of his men peeled off a generous number of notes and little Tam ran off home with the fruits of a grand day’s labour in his pocket.

Fallon’s men were all looking at him now, waiting for the word, but first he lit a cigarette and took a long drag on it so he could get the sickly smell of blood out of his nostrils then he said, ‘Some cunt’s gonna burn for this.’