Quite Ugly One Morning (16 page)

The lane bent hard around to the right for about thirty yards, flanked by the kind of huge, round steel bins he remembered from outside school dinners, and up ahead he could see that it was leading out on to another street. The centrifugal effect of running round a bend combined with the endless waves of nausea sent him sprawling to the floor, where he was wretchingly sick again. But then, looking up, he saw that there was a passage leading off the lane to the left, and more railings at the end.

With a low grunt, he struggled back to his feet and meandered half-blindly down to the railings, from where to his grateful relief he could just make out a grassy bank leading down to what looked like a pathway, twenty or so feet below, which led off optimistically into the distance.

Diamond.

He was saved.

With a burst of renewed energy, he climbed on to the top of the railings, then jumped down on the other side, whereupon he lost his footing and fell backwards, rolling at speed down the grass embankment and off the end of a four-foot wall he hadn’t noticed was at the bottom of it. By the time he
hit the ground and came to a stop he was unconscious, flat out on the gravel at the edge of a council railway, five yards from the mouth of a tunnel, his left wrist resting on the metal line.

Parlabane should have been happy as a pig in shit. He was knee-deep in evidence of extremely unpalatable activities and had a porcine appetite for just such matter.

Anna had called back within an hour. She worked at Companies House in London and still owed him a few favours. If Parlabane was being completely honest they were probably all sexual favours, but what the hell, this was payment in kind. She was an excruciatingly petite bluestocking with a fruitily upper-class accent; intelligent, educated, charming and almost irritatingly attractive, but with the inexplicable flaw of a sexual craving for short-arsed Glaswegian investigative journalists who could break into hotel rooms.

Fortunately, she was way too smart to get involved any deeper than the physical with such a social, emotional – bollocks – all-round liability as Parlabane, for which he was fairly glad too. Anna was clever, sussed, streetwise, connected and going places, but he suspected that she was also – in a quaintly English way – completely fucking bonkers not too far beneath her exquisite surface.

He had met her doing some unusually legit research, just checking out who owned what as he mentally assembled the players in his next front-page tragedy-cum-farce. He had been going through a document at a table in the public reading room when she came over to ask for it back. The librarian who had given him it had failed to notice a message on his computer saying that she required it instantly, and she had come down in person to retrieve it. Parlabane was, of course, suspicious as hell, the old conspiracy glands reflexively kicking in, wondering whether someone would be skewering him with a poisoned umbrella on the tube train home. However, his thoughts were totally sidetracked by what happened when their eyes met and stayed met for a few seconds.

Parlabane believed a little in sexual chemistry; there had certainly been plenty of times he had looked at a woman and felt a primal urge that went way beyond mere aesthetic
appreciation. When he looked at Anna, however, even aesthetic appreciation was tempered by the feeling that she was not only out of his league but unnervingly scary. What utterly derailed him, though, was the sudden awareness that
she
was feeling the primal urges and he was the object. Or should that have been prey?

She said he could keep the document as long as he returned it to her in an hour. When he asked where she would be she told him the name of a bar two streets away.

He couldn’t remember quite how the hotel thing started, even whose idea it was, only that it followed the weirdest conversation of his life and that the first hotel was the one across the road from the bar.

After that they shagged their way around maybe a dozen hotels – different each time – and only got caught twice. Anna would watch at the front desk for people going out for the evening (or afternoon), spotting the room number on the key they handed in. Then she’d go and have a nonchalant drink in the bar while Parlabane nipped upstairs and picked the lock.

The first time they got caught they managed to brass-neck it and convince the astonished elderly American couple that it was
they
who must have mistakenly got off the lift at the wrong floor and intruded on the room above them. Bloody locks must be useless if any key can open them. Watch for your valuables. By the time the oldsters had descended a floor and failed to open the door down there, Parlabane and Anna were in a Covent Garden pub.

The other time was less smooth, and involved a naked sprint down an external fire escape in January and getting dressed in the back of a hackney speeding along Shaftesbury Ave, the lights of Piccadilly Circus briefly illuminating Anna’s elegant little breasts before they were covered up by her inside-out silk blouse.

There was no financial reason for it. Just good, clean fetishism. It happened about once a month, though they met for drinks more often. Anna had two separate, ‘proper’ relationships throughout its duration, about which Parlabane felt vaguely guilty, but as she clearly didn’t it wasn’t worth getting too upset over. It ended when she decided to make the second of those relationships legally legitimate, but as many hotels had started using card-lock systems, Parlabane had observed that there wasn’t much future in it anyway.

He got an invite to the wedding, though. He didn’t make the actual ceremony as he was in court that afternoon on one of his burglary charges, but he did catch the end of the speeches and most of the reception. He also nipped upstairs and broke into the bridal suite to leave his present on the bed.

She liked that.

He had found her in familiarly buoyant form when he called.

‘You only phone when you want something,’ she chided him.

‘Yeah, well so did you,’ he replied.

‘Now now.’

He had fed her the names of all the companies who had won large supply contracts from the Midlothian NHS Trust, plus Capital Properties, and the names of Lime and his colleagues on the board.

‘Well, Jack darling, I’m sure you’ll be shattered as ever to hear that it’s another grim picture of sleaze and corruption.’

‘Talk dirty to me, baby. It hurts so good.’

‘You know I love it too. Anyway, I think I could work out the board’s power structure for myself just on the strength of who’s been awarded which pickings. At the shallow end you’ve got Elliot Michaels, poor lamb, who co-owns Evergreen Indoors – pot plant supplies and “maintenance” – through a holding company called Mainstay Ltd.

‘Up top you’ve got Mr Lime and Mr Winton, who both have large stakes in IT Systems, the computer supplier, which appears to have only begun trading shortly before the contract was awarded. Again, both are too smart to have their names listed directly as owners. Winton holds his share through Churchfield Ltd, Lime at two removes, through Greenbank, which owns Infotech, which holds the stake and which was set up very shortly before IT Systems.

‘In between you’ve got Toby Childs, Cedric Baker and Penelope Gainsborough, who indirectly own or have a major share in, respectively, Ladywell Mercedes, Icon Interiors and Red Letter Stationery.

‘All rather tawdry, really, and disappointingly familiar. That lot might get you a few inches in
Private Eye
or cause a small stir locally if you flog it to the regional rags, but it’s not exactly earth-shattering. It’s not even necessarily illegal. I do hope there’s more to the tale.’

‘Hey. It’s me, remember? What about Capital Properties?’

‘A merry dance, Jack, a merry dance. Four-Square Developments owns half, run by a chap named David Forbes. That part was simple enough. The other half can be traced back to your Mr Lime, but only through a tortuously complicated maze of ghost firms and front companies. I’d be most interested to see this chap’s tax returns, and I’d be rather astonished if he was actually paying any.

‘Basically, Jack darling, you can’t completely hide the fact that you own something – but you can certainly make sure no one notices it by accident. And there are a few tricks you can do to put people like your nosy self off the scent. Mr Lime has engaged a full repertoire of these, to the extent that if you had only given me his name or the name of Capital Properties, I would not have linked one with the other if I was here all night.

‘The other worthies on the board have covered themselves against accidental discovery or speculative angling, but with regard to Capital Properties, Mr Lime is hiding in some very thick undergrowth indeed. I trust you suspect he’s up to something truly disgusting?’

‘Disgusting enough for him to have had one person murdered so far. Look, can you fax the documentation to Duncan McLean at the Edinburgh
Evening Capital
?’

‘Of course. Consider it done. But do be careful, Jack,’ she said softly.

‘It’s me, Anna. I’m always careful.’

‘Hmm. Well just think about what it felt like to be barefoot in the snow in a Soho backstreet and remember that your idea of careful isn’t always enough.’

The problem was Sarah, and another strange look.

Not like Anna’s look, thank Christ, but a moment when their eyes had met that morning over her kitchen table, after he’d made them breakfast. They had returned from the hospital around half-nine, her on-call and his ‘research’ complete, and Sarah had taken a shower while he brewed some coffee and did his worst for their cholesterol levels with the grill and frying pan.

Sarah had wandered back into the kitchen in a fluffy white dressing gown, patting at her damp red hair with a small towel. When he handed her the plate of good, honest, Scottish
heart disease, she had leaned over in her chair, bending down to fetch some salt from a low cupboard. And he simply did not possess the mortal strength not to look as her dressing gown fell open enough to momentarily reveal her right breast. Mercifully, she didn’t catch him, as what he had seen had made him too fragile to even attempt to defend himself.

It had caught him off-guard, had its impact before all his policing and defence mechanisms could kick in and neutralise it. Sticking to the task, concentrating on the matter in hand, trying to be professional and trustworthy had made him blank out how attractive he found Sarah, had denied him any real reaction to it. But now there it was, sneaking up on him and shouting ‘Boo!’.

Breakfast helped him compose himself. He stole a few glances at her face as she tucked into her eggs, enjoying the strange thrill of seeing someone so familiar in a suddenly different light. And with each glance he felt better, more confident that he could deal with it, that it wasn’t going to be a problem.

Aesthetic appreciation.

Huh.

‘So is this it for you, Jack?’ she had asked. ‘Running around, breaking into places, finding out the big secret, catching the villain then disappearing again?’

‘You make it sound so irresponsible,’ he had replied.

It was a clever joke. It made Sarah laugh politely and it deflected the question. Deferred the question? And acknowledged the question.

Maybe it was even two questions: ‘this can’t last forever, so where are you going?’; and ‘who are you, Jack?’

He had glanced up, suddenly found her looking at him and not looking away when their eyes met. The look was there when she knew he wasn’t watching, but she had not desisted when she knew he was. It was a look he had seldom, maybe never seen before. It was a look of interest, concern and affection, but was greater than the sum of these.

Houston we have a problem.

The sudden appreciation that she had feelings for him precipitated the even more dizzying realisation that he had feelings for her. So many other questions had occupied his conscious thoughts all the time they had spent together, but now that most of them were answered, it was as if his brain
had backlogged an array of emotions that were now top of the pending pile.

Nestling among them was the feeling of horrified guilt that he had unthinkingly embroiled her in activities that could leave her exposed before some very dangerous men. But what chiefly occupied his mind were re-runs of moments between them, looks, conversation, and meanings he had missed or deferred contemplating. He had known disastrous relationships that had started through some intensity, working together, misinterpreting a close professional relationship for something deeper and discovering the truth in an uncomfortable unravelling later on. This had been the opposite: working so closely on their investigation had obscured what was genuinely developing between them.

It had been a long moment, that look. A moment of many possibilities. He had a great track record for reckless abandon in emotional and sexual matters. He could have walked around the table and kissed her. He could have acknowledged what might lie before them. Instead he talked about evidence and proof and the torture of knowledge and all that bollocks.

Because in that same moment, when he sensed the possible depth of his feelings for Sarah, he realised that those feelings were also the reason why he shouldn’t pull her in any closer.

She had offered a potential answer to ‘where are you going?’, but it was ‘who are you, Jack?’ that was the obstacle. She had no real idea who he was, and he hadn’t spent too much time contemplating that question himself of late.

That was the other thing he had been too busy running around to think about. Or had kept himself too busy running around to think about.

What was it, less than a fortnight?

Just a matter of days. And another lifetime.

Another city, half a world away. Remembered not as if in a distant past, not even as if it had happened to someone else, but as a scene in a movie, in that city of movies.

Unfortunately the director seemed to have been Quentin Tarantino rather than, say, Zalman King.

A strange scent in the nostrils, stronger all the time. The feeling of being on to something big but not knowing what it was. A lot of corpses and the broken traces of a connection; like discovering short stretches of an overgrown path through a dense forest, but not yet able to see where those stretches came from or were leading to.

Lieutenant Larry Freeman had been nervous. Larry was about seven feet tall with shoulders ‘the size of a Kansas prairie’, as his wife put it, a frightening sight in black shades and a black, bald head. And Larry was never nervous.

‘Something in the air then, big man?’

‘Uh-huh,’ he had said slowly in that rumbling burr you could feel in your own diaphragm. ‘Remember man, cops like the sound of openin’ a fresh can of beer when the case is closed. The sound of openin’ a fresh can of worms don’t fill their heart with joy, know what I’m sayin’? Now I ain’t sayin’ there’s dirty cops in my precinct, but cops gotta talk to snitches and there’s gotta be some give and take. And no news travels faster than a secret.

‘You gotta be careful what yo askin’ and who yo askin’, Scotland. Somebody starts playin’ join-the-dots with a bunch of random stiffs and a whole lotta people get trigger-happy. Maybe you ain’t even connectin’ anythin’ to them or to stiffs they got anythin’ to do with, but they don’t know that and they ain’t gonna stop to ask if they get you in their sights.’

‘You’re saying I should back off? Forget it all?’

‘That’s up to you, man. Maybe it’s too late to back off.
But you better be watchin’ your back. I was you, I’d get me a gun.’

Parlabane shook his head.

‘You know how I feel about guns. I couldn’t carry one of those things around with me, forget about it.’

‘Yeah, but I’d have one all the same. Keep it where I could get to it in a hurry. I got a spare one in the john. In a plastic bag taped under the cistern lid. Someone catches me off-guard at home, I got a chance if he lets me take a leak or I can just make it to the bathroom. Mitch Gacy keeps one in his ice box.’

‘What, so he’s got a chance if the bad guy asks for a beer? You’re all fucking crazy.’

‘You ain’t from LA, Jack.’

In a way, it was the hangover that saved his life.

He had been at Tom and Juan’s place along on Melrose, and a few bottles of red with and after dinner had led to a single bottle of Glenfiddich, three glasses and total carnage.

Once upon a time, whisky made him sleep, but not these days. It would set his mind in motion, counteracting the soporific properties of all that full-bodied Californian bottled blood, and he lay awake for a while on the couch after T and J had retired to their bedroom. He popped in a couple of their videos, looking for distractions to stop the room lurching long enough to let him lie back without feeling sick.

Cheers guys, he thought. How unstereotypical. Gay porn and three hours of the fucking Golden Girls.

He figured he must have dozed off some time after four, woken by the sun through the blinds at about eight. It was a chastising, unforgiving sun with a hard-on for Temperance, shaking him awake to face the consequences of his sinful alcoholic excess, and amplifying his headache with its malignantly cheery brightness.

He grabbed his leather jacket and headed delicately out to the car, which he had no intention of attempting to drive. Instead, he retrieved his shades from the glove compartment and placed them gently over his eyes before engaging in the ill-advised, Bradburyesque deviance of walking home. It took about twenty minutes, and every step was a thudding, throbbing, echoing torture.

He wanted water. Not LA’s desalinated pish, and not mineral water, but
water
water, freezing cold out a Glasgow
tap. Waattur. His joints ached, his hands trembled, his throat stung and his head was undergoing an interior re-fit.

There was a Scotsman, a Mexican, an American and a bottle of whisky.

But it was no joke.

He felt so ill, so delicate, that as he crossed Sweetzer he decided if a car suddenly pulled out he’d just have to let it hit him, as he didn’t have the energy or reflexes to get out of the way.

That was what saved him. Not reacting, not acknowledging.

He pulled out his keys and fumbled at the lock, his stomach lurching a little as if suddenly impatient at the thought of the proximity of a familiar toilet-bowl. He shut the door behind him and slouched half-blindly towards the bathroom.

His limbs were too heavy to leap in fright or run, and his neck was so stiff from T and J’s couch that it had barely started to turn before he was able to stop it and carry on through the doorway. That was the moment that really saved his life, the real act of nerve and courage, not what happened next.

Because there was a figure in his kitchen, a human shape he had sensed out of the corner of his eye as he passed that doorway on the way to the bathroom. A reaction, an acknowledgement would, he later understood, have killed him.

Parlabane peered terrified through the tiny slit at the hinge and had his fears confirmed. There was a pot-bellied, middle-aged, balding and moustachioed white man in a crumpled dark suit and a sweaty white shirt standing now in the hallway before the bathroom door, looking down and tightening the silencer to the end of an automatic. He was just waiting there, silently and patiently, to kill him when he emerged again after his final piss, dump or whatever.

He felt he might pass out but managed somehow to find some fraction of composure. He needed to work out his options but realised that he was on a rapidly ticking time limit: if the hitman got suspicious he’d shoot the door down or just shoot him through it.

Before he had time to evaluate the wisdom of it, he started to sing to himself, to present the relaxed mood of someone just going to the bog in the comfort of their home, oblivious of the impending death that awaits after that last flush.

‘I was sitting in the Hollywood Hawaiian hotel .
. .’

The song had been close to the surface in his mind on the walk home because of the stuff about the angry sun, but as the first line issued from his mouth he was panickedly analysing the remainder of the lyrics in case they contained some kind of give-away Freudian slip. ‘Save us from the powder and the finger’, for instance, would not have been a wise ditty to render. And ‘Thirty years in the bathroom’ might also have betrayed his true thoughts.

He cursed the fact that his bathroom had no windows, but then realised that if it did he’d probably be already dead, as the hitman would have checked for possible escape routes beforehand and just shot him through the door rather than risk him getting away.

‘All the salty Margaritas in Los Angeles .
. .’

He was fucked.

What was the saying? There’s no such thing as an atheist in a foxhole? Something like that.

Typical ignorant Christians. As if the non-belief in God was a posture, a luxury, some kind of decadent modern affectation, rather than a completely irreversible understanding. Truth was, you did get atheists in foxholes; they were just even more acutely, agonisingly aware of the inescapable reality of their predicament.

‘I predict this motel will be standin’
. . .’

And this one knew that if you were down to your last hope and your last hope was God, then there was nothing left. But his last hope wasn’t God, not unless God was a seven-foot bald cop named Larry.

‘Don’t the trees look like crucified thieves?’

That night. That night when Larry had warned him, talking about guns and secrets and snitches. Larry had just shown up at the house, on spec, which he never did. And what had he said as he left, after a couple of beers and some pizza?

‘That gun shit, Jack. Forget it. You’re right. Just crazy LA cops. You don’t need to worry about getting a gun. Hear what I’m sayin’?’

Larry had come round because he was worried, but left telling
him
not to.

‘You don’t need to worry about getting a gun.’

One last hope.

I Don’t you feel like desperadoes under the eaves
. . .’

He flushed the toilet to cover the sound and lifted the cistern lid, barely daring to breathe, almost unable to look.

Jesus. His future – life or death – was metaphorically in his hands, but literally what was in his hands was part of a cludgie. There was an illustrative image about desperation in there somewhere, but he couldn’t really afford to think about that right then.

He turned the lid over to reveal a blue plastic package, sealed firmly air- and watertight, taped to the underside of the vitreous china. He pulled it away and replaced the lid before the cistern began to refill, as that would have made too loud and too odd a sound.

‘I was listening to the air conditioner hum .
. .’

Parlabane turned on both taps and put the plug down in the wash-hand basin, the splashing sound and his humming covering the noise of him removing the 9mm Beretta automatic from the bag, clicking off the safety and chambering the first round, as Larry had taught him on the couple of occasions he had taken him down to the range.

The water still tinkling and splashing, he delicately returned to the slit and saw that the intruder was still standing there, but now legs apart, gun aimed at the door at head-height.

This was not a time for negotiations, and neither did he fancy his chances in a Mexican stand-off.

There had been no God to save him.

Neither would there be one to forgive him.

He lay face-down on the floor, aimed the gun at an upward angle, closed his eyes and fired five times in a second and a half.

He looked up at the door. There were no holes any further up than those made by his own gun. Remaining understandably cautious, he glimpsed through the slit again. The man was lying bloodstained and motionless on the floor. He couldn’t see the gun but he could see an empty hand, and that was good enough.

Parlabane opened the door and emerged, unexpectedly alive, from the bathroom. The hitman, very unexpectedly dead, lay bleeding messily on to the hall carpet from several wounds in the chest area.

Fuck this for a game of soldiers, thought Parlabane.

He packed his essentials and whatever else he could fit into a large suitcase and made some long-distance phone calls.
Then he called a cab, asking it to pick him up in front of the hotel round the corner.

He snuck out the back door, over the fence, down an alley and on to Fountain.

None of the direct flights to the UK left until four or five, flying overnight to arrive around the following lunchtime. He couldn’t afford to wait around LA – and certainly not LAX – until then, so he took the first cheap flight east, which was to Newark, and got a connection to London from there.

He could lie low in Edinburgh, get his head together. Maybe work out how he might use his talents to make a living that did not involve the risk of being set up with drugs by bent cops or shot by hired killers.