Murderers Anonymous (17 page)

'And did you get him?'

'Oh aye, aye, I got him easy enough. I mean, the guy sweeps the streets every day. How hard is it to find someone like that?'

'And?'

'Oh, it was Elvis all right. No question. Got him to do a couple of verses of
Long Lonely Highway
to prove it. The big guy hasn't lost it. Still got a voice like an angel. Brought a tear to my eye.'

'Is he still a fat bastard?'

'No, no, he's thin. And blond. And he's hardly aged, in fact. Looks as if he's about thirty or so. But it's Elvis all right. Who else is going to know all the words to
Long Lonely Highway
?'

'You sure? By the end, Elvis couldn't remember the words to his own name, never mind his songs. Used to hold bits of paper.'

'Aye, but he was fine after he got out of rehab in the early eighties, he said. Hasn't looked back.'

'And now he can sweep roads with the best of them.'

'That's the King,' he said.

'We're talking shite,' she said.

Mulholland nodded.

'I hated you, you bastard,' she continued. He continued to nod. That sounded about right.

'You want to expand on that?'

He turned at the sudden clap on his back. Was greeted by a jolly face, not yet sodden with drink, a fresh moustache still struggling to come to terms with the rabid pink skin.

Detective Sergeant Ferguson, a smile charging untethered to all parts of his face.

'Boss!' he said. 'Magic to see you, Big Man. They let you out of the loony bin up by?'

'For a limited period only,' said Mulholland, smiling the best that he could these days.

'Brilliant. Good to see you back anyway. You haven't missed much, mate. The usual shite, you know. Stabbings like you wouldn't believe. All that crap. Barney Thomson's back doing the business. Good on the lad, that's what I say. And this place hasn't changed much. The usual sad lot, eh, Erin? Some of us have been doing a bit of shagging lately, of course. You know how it is, eh, boss? You two going to start up hostilities again, are you?'

No answer. Go on, Ferguson, thought Mulholland. Step in faeces and walk it through the house.

'Aye, well,' said Ferguson, 'whatever. You all right for a pint the night, mate? Tell you about the seven Chinky birds I shagged at the weekend?'

'Love to, Sergeant, but I can't. Got work to do, I'm afraid. They didn't call me back to listen to your crap, high on the agenda though it is.'

'Aye, right, boss. See you about, then. Maybe get together later in the week, eh?'

'Aye,' said Mulholland. Why not? No harm in listening to one man's sexual ravings over a couple of pints for an hour or two. No harm in anything when your mind is so screwed up you require brain surgery.

'Brilliant. See you around, then, eh? Presume you're up for the Barney Thomson business?'

'See you later, Sergeant.'

'Aye, right,' said Ferguson, tapping his nose. 'No problem. Need to know, and all that. No bother, mate.'

And off he went, to spread a little gossip. As you do.

They turned back to one another. The name was out there, but they could both ignore it for a little while longer.

'You were saying?' he said.

'I thought you were a total bastard,' she said.

'But not any more, then?'

She stared at him for a while and he stared back. When you're dead inside you can stare out the toughest situations: emotional, physical, violent, they're all within your capabilities. When you're dead inside, you can stare out Lecter.

She'd rehearsed this many times, while never thinking she would get the chance to say it. So, of course, when it came out it sounded nothing like she'd intended.

'Why do I have to explain it? That last night, God, I don't know. We talked about a lot of stuff. We were even going to run off to the Bahamas to get married at one point. Then up you get in the morning, without a bloody word, and walk into the station and get a transfer. Just like that. What a penis. God, I just used to lie awake at night and wish you were dead. I dreamed up at least fifty disgusting ways for you to die. My therapist even recommended I get a dummy and stick pins in it.'

'What kind of therapy was that exactly?'

'The right kind.'

'And did it work?'

'Don't know. Did you feel any of the pins going in?'

'All of them,' he said.

'Good. Anyway, it didn't do me any good, although it helped a bit after I'd put the doll through a mincer, mixed it up with some Kennomeat and fed it to my neighbour's dog.'

'I definitely remember feeling that.'

'Well, after that I calmed down a little. I suppose I realised that none of it was your fault. We were both buggered after what happened. Maybe you just had more guts than me to walk away from it. So then I just didn't want to think about you at all. I thought it would be best if I never had anything to do with you again. A total blank, you know. Pretend you didn't exist.'

'That work?'

She shook her head.

'For a while, but I couldn't stop thinking about you, not when I was trying to be in denial. So then I decided that I should just accept it all for what happened, that life goes on, and if I ever saw you again, then so be it. And here we are, and I'm totally cool about it. Don't really feel anything, except I'm sort of pleased to see you. But not that pleased.'

'Very mature,' said Mulholland, presuming that she was far more perturbed by his arrival that she would have him believe.

'Thanks.'

'I'm still at the hating you stage,' he said.

'You hate me?' she said, sitting up. Feelings aroused. 'What kind of arsehole are you? You were the one who left. You were the tube who talked about pitching up at a beach in the Caribbean one minute and who buggered off for the rest of his life the next. Why the fuck should you hate me?'

He looked down at her. Had talked this moment through his head many times as well. Yet in none of his rehearsals had he admitted to hating her, so he didn't know what to say next.

'Don't know,' he said.

Proudfoot shrugged. Let go of a long sigh and settled back in her chair.

'Maybe I do still hate you after all,' she said.

'Nice to see you back, sir,' said a passing sergeant, whose name Mulholland didn't remember. A tall woman, hair a different colour from that which he remembered. He nodded and smiled and didn't risk saying anything because the name was gone.

'Eileen Montgomery,' said Proudfoot softly.

'I knew that,' he said. 'Married to Ron, the airport guy.'

Brilliant, she thought. In possession of all the facts, just a few seconds too late. Just like they'd been in the monastery.

'So what are you going to do about it?' she asked.

'What? Eileen?'

'The fact that you still hate me.'

'Oh.'

There always comes a time. No matter how much fat you chew, or how long you take to pick the last of the flesh from the carcass of the chicken or however long you worry over the decaying tissue of the dead horse or plunder the carrion of prevarication, eventually you have to get down to business.

'You know what they say when you fall off a horse,' he said.

Proudfoot stared at him, and slowly smiled.

'You think you're going to ride me again, do you?'

He raised his eyes. Face went a little red.

'We're going back to look for Barney Thomson. Or rather, we're going to find the latest killer who every eejit, including our haemorrhoidal chief superintendent, thinks is Barney Thomson, but who bloody well obviously isn't.'

She looked at him and a million things went through her mind. She had been complaining for months about the pointless crap she'd been given to do, but did she really want anything harder on her plate? Did she really want some rabid serial killer to chase? And why on earth, when she'd been spending her working life on routine observation work that would dim the wits of the dimmest idiot, would they thrust her into the middle of the biggest investigation of the year? Why, if not to be part of Joel Mulholland's therapy?

She took her eyes off him and looked back to the book which she had never put down. Obviously Jade Weapon was not going to make it to the other side of Jamaica without being apprehended by at least seven or eight assailants.

Fantasy, fantasy. Much more intriguing and involving than real life. And so the next words in her head were not her own and they were not Mulholland's. They belonged to Weapon. Jade Weapon.

'Listen, fuckface,' said Jade Weapon to the swarthy Italian, who had suddenly leaped onto the back of her motorcycle, 'fuck me or fuck off, but don't fuck with my aerodynamics.'

'Nice enough guy, you know.'

There followed a long silence. A clock ticked. A plane passed by overhead, some 33,000 feet above Milngarvie, the low white noise vaguely penetrating the new but single-glazed windows. Somewhere outside, the posthumous, souped-up version of
Guitar Man
thumped loudly from an open car window. A bird sang. Somewhere a woman screeched as she dragged a shaving system she'd seen advertised on the television down her leg, taking an inch-long gash from just above her ankle. The refrigerator hummed.

Proudfoot tapped the end of a nail on the Formica tabletop.
Mission Impossible
. Felt a twitch in her fingers sitting next to Mulholland again. Out of the blue her life had turned upside down; and what was going to happen when they found Barney Thomson, or when they found the real killer, or when Mulholland failed and McMenemy yanked him from the case? Would he vanish back up the coast, having tossed her world and her neatly wrapped emotions to the wind? Bloody men, she thought, and felt sleepy.

Mulholland hadn't taken his eyes off Allan Watson. Spaceman to his mates. 'Call me Spaceman,' he'd said to Mulholland when he'd arrived.

'Spaceman,' he said. 'About ten minutes ago now, I asked you to tell me everything you knew about Jason Ballater. Is that it? Nice enough guy? The bloke was thirty-three, you've known him since nursery school, you're shagging his sister and, it would appear, his wife, and the sum total of your knowledge of the bloke is that he was a nice enough guy. Don't you think you could elaborate a little, or are we going to have to break it down into idiot-proof, tsetse-fly-bollock-sized,
Who Wants to Be a Millionaire
-type questions?'

'Don't know.'

'Don't know. That's it?'

'I shagged his mum 'n' all. That any good to you?'

Proudfoot took another glance at him to see if there was any possible reason why all these women might be interested in him, and when it was not obviously apparent she looked back at the table. Pink, with a disconcerting brown pattern running through it.