Snow Storm (14 page)

He looked
round and caught a movement in his peripheral vision. He remembered
his escorts. Dumb and Dumber were his assigned security detail it
seemed. He wondered if whoever had assigned them had done this for
his benefit or their’s. In any case they were not experts in the
ways of stealth. He’d spotted them in the mirrors behind the optics
when they’d shuffled into the bar drooling some ten feet behind
him. Presumably they’d been told to keep a low profile. He exited
via the front door and cut sharply left as soon as he hit the
outside air. It was dizzying and he felt unsteady as he ducked
behind a sandstone pillar.

His crack security team
emerged behind him as predicted. They stood on the steps of the
hotel looking left and right in a state of abject confusion as
Victor laughed for the first time in a long time. When they started
arguing, which seemed a one sided affair whereby the smaller one
aired various grievances against the bigger one, Victor had trouble
following the conversation with the speed of their accents. He grew
bored of it and finally relenting, stepped forward from behind his
pillar.

“
Gentlemen,”
he boomed, rousing them from their now detailed discussion on “the
fuck ups of today.”

“
Eh, oh,” the
small one started. “Sorry boss, I mean sir. We didn’t, I mean we’re
not supposed to ehm.” He was a study in awkwardness.

“
I guessed
this,” he replied.

The small one
looked at him like a salmon he’d just caught and stunned. The
larger one simply regarded the pavement.

“
Clearly
surveillance is not your strong point.”

“
No boss,”
the big one said, eyeing him briefly before casting his gaze back
to the floor.

“
Well then,
you must tell me where your skills truly lie.”

They looked at him
through a haze of collective confusion and he pictured the cogs
inside their heads, or perhaps gambling machine wheels; that was
more like it. The wheels spun as the pair hoped to hit the correct
combination and come up with the correct response.

“
I propose
this. As we are no doubt destined to spend the evening together,
how about you show me the sights of this city of yours?” Victor
eventually said.

“
Aye, I mean
yeah, sure,” the small one agreed, still stunned and perhaps a
little suspicious.

“
I ask, of
course, that you don’t inform anyone else of this. Obviously my
dear friend Oleg has passed away and I would prefer not to be
disturbed by anyone finding out where I am.”

“
No
problem.”

“
Excellent.”

They stood,
nodding in the way only people who don’t know the answer to
something could, as though waiting for a cue. “Where to first then
boss?” the small one finally asked.

Victor shrugged. “You
tell me.”

Burke was thinking of
heading home. It didn’t do, he knew. Higher up heads would
doubtless shake in unison at this; murderer or murderers on the
loose and the D.I. heading home at what could quite sensibly be
called tea time. But higher up heads were often shaken where he was
concerned. That was just the way he worked. Sometimes you had to
step back from the problem and focus on something else for long
enough that the solution might appear in the passing. They said
that about magic eye pictures too though, and he’d never been any
good at them.

He rubbed his eyes, only
to feel them sting more violently. He wasn’t designed for the
indoor life. The controlled environment put everything out of
whack. In this case the heating system, desperately trying to fend
off the effects of the encroaching “big freeze” was overdoing it a
bit and causing his head to sweat, which in turn seemed to be
melting the moulding clay in his hair causing it to run down his
forehead and into his eyes, creating just the right amount of sting
and irritation. In summer the air con would dry out his eyes
causing the tear film to disappear and make every movement of the
eyelids painful. Still, simple linear cause and effect was a thing
to behold.

If only the
rest of the world was as easy. If only this case, or these cases or
indeed whatever the hell it was, could be so easy. And yet it was
in a sense, all just one big mathematical equation, cause and
effect flowing in many different directions all at once. That was
what he loved, hated and got lost in. Like all equations it
balanced, made sense. You just had to stand far enough back to get
a swatch at the bigger picture.

He stared at the I2
diagrams on the big screen in the meeting room. He remembered the
days you had to do this with a board, some pins and a ball of wool.
You couldn’t zoom in and out of that or stick it on a slide and
email it.

Even chance was an
illusion. Burke was a fatalist. They were always going to do what
they were always going to do because of background, circumstance,
genetics, diet, whatever, and he was always going to lock them up
if he could because he needed to solve the puzzle, just as he had
to do things in fours when no one was looking. It was pathological.
He couldn’t help it any more than he could help deciding to help it
because that electrical signal would always take that particular
path that offered least resistance though people liked to allow
themselves the illusion of free will.

He couldn’t moralise
about it. It was just what it was, best treat it as a game, but one
he played to win.

He felt his
stomach churn and realised he hadn’t eaten since breakfast,
electing instead to stave off hunger with caffeine and nicotine,
the super model diet. Rachel had recently read an article about
people being predisposed to types of addiction due to a lack of
dopamine, or was it due to a lack of dopamine receptors in the
brain? He forgot. Whatever. He was a third generation addict. It
might go back even further but no one was around to say. The
previous two generations had expired, though not through their
addictions. He was a first generation teetotaller. That was surely
something.

He had
survived on stimulants for a few years, maintained the svelte
physique of an anorexic snake due to being a lazy instant past
guzzling single man until the point of meeting Rachel. He probably
didn’t realise it but he’d been hungry all along. She filled a void
he hadn’t known was there, emotionally but also nutritionally, to
the tune of two stone. And now he couldn’t stop. Was it better to
die of a heart attack due to fat or stimulants? Either way you got
there in the end.

He hedged his
bets, ordering a Dominos pizza while inhaling the toxins from his
fake fag, just as the mobile buzzed its way along his desktop. Dr
Brown’s number was on display as it plummeted over the edge before
hitting the floor and separating into its constituent
parts.

Brown had decided to
stick around for a while, perhaps due to some misplaced sense of
duty or perhaps the constant jibes about Mrs Brown had a grain of
truth to them.

Burke felt a
sense of deja vu on arrival at the morgue, despite the fact it was
a lot darker and colder than it had been on his previous visit.
He’d cancelled his takeaway, his nose twitching at the prospect of
a sliver of new information.

Doc Brown looked haggard,
slightly doddery compared to his normal self. It could have been
the time of day. He seemed smaller somehow as though he’d wilted as
the sun went down or someone had let the air out of his tyres. What
was left of his hair stood on end reminding Burke of The Prodigy’s
Keith Flint.

He had one and a half
specimens under covers on adjoining slabs. Vlad the Inhaler’s head
could clearly be seen under one cover and the other it transpired
was home to body number two.

“
Something
was annoying me about our friend Mr Petrovsky,” the good doctor
began. “I had some time on my hands. Believe it or not it has
actually been a comparatively quiet week given the time of year, so
I took some time to mull it over and dig a little deeper.” He
uncovered the head which looked to be considerably more shrivelled
than previously and gently moved it round to face Burke. “Note the
slight abrasions to the nose and forehead. I had discounted them at
first if I’m totally honest, thought perhaps they’d happened when
the witness dropped him and he hit the pavement.”

“
OK,” Burke
replied. I’d probably have thought the same.

“
You see
these marks here?” Brown continued as Burke nodded at the spots on
Vlad’s head which had been shaved, revealing more abrasions. “These
are actually where he hit the ground. You see? Less like the grazes
on the nose and forehead.”

Burke nodded again,
wondering where this was going.

“
I had my
suspicions so I took swabs from the grazes along with samples of
the nasal mucus.”

“
And?”

“
Brick
dust.”

“
Brick dust?
So what, he got his face scraped on a brick wall?”

“
He did that.
And looking closer at his scalp,” Brown motioned to an area of what
was left of Vlad’s hair which lay askew compared with the rest of
the direction of growth. “You see how this area is disturbed
slightly?”

“
Think yours
might be like that too after a night like he had.”

“
True, what
there is of it, but the point is that he’s missing a few hairs in
this area.”

“
I see, so
you think someone held his hair by this point?”

“
Now we’re
getting there. And what else can we deduce from this
information?”

“
He was offed
by a left hooker,” Burke answered, partly telling himself this.
“They had him face first against a brick wall so he got scratched
and inhaled some dust. They had to hold the head with the right
hand and hack with the left, assuming it was the same person, which
I’d say it probably was.”

“
Well I don’t
think I’d hold his head while you hacked away at it with a
machete,” Brown agreed. “Much as I trust your steady hand,” he
added pointing at Burkes shaking paw. “Smoke less Jim, exercise
more.”

“
I’ll try,”
Burke agreed, neither meaning it nor taking it too seriously. “Are
you able to find out what kind of brick dust it is? Where it comes
from possibly?”

“
Of course,”
Brown replied matter-of-factly, as though the question was scarcely
worth the effort of answering. “It’ll take some time though, a
couple of days at a civilised time of year, so hopefully we’ll hear
before Christmas.”

Burke scoffed a tired
laugh. “Anything else?” he asked.

“
Regarding
the headless henchman, no, but as for this fellow.” He pulled back
the second cover revealing the body of the garrotting victim.
“We’re still checking for dental records, nothing so far. He has
several fillings, all done the expensive way with the white
stuff.”

“
Everyone’s
paranoid about mercury these days. Even yardies eh?”

“
Indeed they
are, although when it comes to symptoms like memory loss you’d
think they should be more worried about twenty first century living
and its inherent lack of focus.”

********************

Andy checked
the time on his wrist. 21:07. They’d been here for the guts of four
hours now and they weren’t too sure what was going on with their
targets. They’d relented to Davie’s constant whining about wanting
some scran and after winding him up for an hour -they had time to
kill- they’d allowed him to go to Wigtown to replenish supplies at
the Co-op. He’d turned up over an hour later with a couple of big
bags of Doritos and a selection of pre-packaged sandwiches he said
he’d finished up getting from the Shell garage in Newton. He’d
needed to have a cheeseburger fresh from the microwave he said. He
was a lot like a pregnant woman really, constant cravings, an
excess of hormones and a not insubstantial belly. Rumour had it he
had been tested for hermaphroditism on account of the size of his
man boobs. Andy knew it was a rumour as he’d been in the pub when
Colin started it.

Davie seemed a little
more contented having scoffed the cheeseburger, or the two
cheeseburgers it had turned out to be, so much so that after
downing a litre of Powerade, seemingly oblivious of the fact it was
supposed to be a sports drink, he fell asleep. Colin ensured this
didn’t become too deep a slumber by throwing clods of frozen earth
at his beloved car. The big man responded by bombarding the
airwaves with expletive ridden transmissions questioning his
brother’s parentage.

They couldn’t
stay still for long. Despite their being well wrapped up the cold
was bitter, made all the worse by the damp in the air. It was
oppressive and all encompassing. This strip of land had once been
waterlogged. It doubtless soon would be again and the mists clung
to it at the best of times. They moved back and forth between the
car and the airstrip. Emboldened by the peace so far, they walked
at full height, hardly bothering to keep quiet.

Davie’s music got louder
and he decided to demonstrate the perfect handbrake turn to Colin,
regardless of the fact there was a layer of frost on the ground. He
flicked on the not strictly road legal blue neon strip lights under
the car, lighting up the tarmac underneath with an eerie glow.
After some showboating and a few serious claims regarding Colin’s
assertion that his younger brother’s ego was writing cheques his
Peugeot couldn’t cash, Davie was primed for action.