Snow Storm (6 page)

It was a tiny bit ironic,
just how vulnerable you could feel at the wheel of several tons of
metal, especially having a few more tons hitched to the back of the
tractor in the form of a trailer.

It was a cushy job this
though if he was honest; take the John Deere down to Baldoon and
fill the trailer up with feed. Repeat the cycle a couple of times.
Everyone knew you couldn’t exactly haul ass in a tractor, so taking
it easy was the order of the day or at least the
afternoon.

He needed an
easy afternoon after the weekend he’d had. Friday night they’d hit
Newton just for the hell of it. They started playing pool in The
Star, trying to have a quiet one. But then someone said something
about karaoke in The Central and big mental Davie, who’d missed out
on the hi-jinks of the weekend before, had declared himself to be a
black belt in karaoke.

After that
everything went a bit jumpy memory-wise. He remembered The Central,
someone singing Kenny Rogers’ “The Gambler” and Jimmy Walker eating
a pint glass. Why did he always feel the need to do that? Then some
boys from Whithorn had offered to fight everyone, just because
they’d decided amongst themselves that they could.

Saturday was a write off.
This was what happened when the parents went away on holiday and
left him in charge.

They’d headed
up to Stranraer. They’d trudged the mean streets of this insular
tribute to a certain style of seventies architecture looking for
some kind of adventure and accidentally found it in The Royal after
stepping on someone’s toes, quite literally.

He’d been trying to get
the barmaid’s attention. It wasn’t working but he wasn’t a man to
give in easily. As she passed by he tried to make eye contact, a
bit the worse for wear. He was over enthusiastic and despite only
trying to follow her with his eyes he’d ended up doing so with his
entire body as his feet tagged along for the ride.

He walked
straight across the feet of a mean looking skin headed type who
seemed to take exception. The guy’s face was distinctly
bulldog-like. His nose had seen better days and his slow movements
made him look punch drunk more than traditionally
hammered.

Before Andy
could say anything by way of an apology the other man lashed out,
slamming him up against the bar. His movements were so subdued the
way he swung almost looked camp. The man’s head shot forward
without warning, driven by some unforeseen force, rattling his
teeth off the bar. His shoulders slumped down as his body seemed to
give in briefly before jerking fitfully back to life.

Andy looked up and saw
the grinning face of Davie, who as it turned out was blissfully
unaware of the bottle headed straight for the back of his
head.

Everything happened so
quickly; that was what people always said and it kind of did but at
the same time everything was in slow motion. He heard the bottle
holding guy say something in what he thought must have been an
Eastern European language, probably Polish. He looked a lot like
the bulldog but was distinguishable by an unusual tattoo sticking
through the top of his shirt. He could remember thinking all of
this just as the heavy duty bar stool came into contact with the
guy’s jaw and everything underneath that point just seemed to
collapse.

The bulldog
guy seemed to find his balance again. He opened his mouth to speak
but his words were slurred as the air and blood vapour breezed
through the gap where his teeth had been. He rubbed his face,
looked down at his hand and frowned before heading for the nearest
exit as though on autopilot.

His friend lay on the
ground dazed while people crowded around, partly trying to be good
Samaritans partly wishing to be bit players in the
action.

After that
everything died down pretty quickly. It amazed him how that could
happen. One minute you were having a quiet pint on a Saturday
night, the next it had all gone tits up and you were dazed,
spitting blood and wondering where the fuck your incisors had gone.
Meanwhile, everyone went back to normal rules of engagement as the
music kicked off again and you were left to pick up the
pieces.

Sunday night they decided
it was far safer just downing a few cans in front of Call of
Duty.

The consequences of all
of this caught up some time around Monday morning and now he was
paying his debt to the party gods in full.

As he headed
down the track the low hanging branches bounced off the tractors
cab jarring his nerves more than they needed. The flat expanse of
Baldoon opened up before him stretching off into the distance to be
interrupted by Wig Bay, going south to the Solway Firth. Beyond,
the Galloway Hills looking glacial at this time of year, having
received their seasonal dusting of snow, dominated the north and
east of the horizon.

The airfield had been
built in the war, this being a suitably out of the way place to
hide trainees for the RAF’s finest. A good few pilots had ended
their days on those hills due to errors of judgement or just plain
bad luck. Air strips ran east to west and north to south
intersecting each other and the shells of what had once been the
base’s buildings lay like the skeletal remains of what must have
been a much more dramatic world.

To the south of The
Machars, nearer the bottom of the peninsula at Garlieston they’d
built the Mulberry Harbour; a top secret floating construction used
for the D-Day landings and to the west at Knockienam Churchill and
Eisenhower met to formulate plans.

It seemed strange to
think so much had gone on here. Now they didn’t even have a
railway. The creamery had gone years ago and farming had changed
altogether. Now the first thing many people did when they were old
enough was get out. There was a bit of a brain drain going on.
University or college in one of the big cities gave people a taste
for the bright lights and life in the big smoke. Many didn’t
return. It could get lonely if you stayed.

Not that Andy
was worried. He was getting out. That was for sure. He was on a gap
year; that was all. A gap yaaah, Davie had called it in his best
scarf wearing toff accent before asking if he shouldn’t be
somewhere more exotic, volunteering and teaching people the error
of their ways, to which he’d replied he was.

He’d done it to help the
old man out. He knew his dad would never ask him to stay, although
deep down he knew he wanted him to. As a way to cut down on his
guilt he’d decided to stick around for a year, remind the old boy
how nuts they drove each other, chill out and earn some coin before
heading for the bright lights, a place at uni and whatever the
future might hold. The truth was he had no clue what he wanted. He
just knew there was stuff out there. He wasn’t even sure what
stuff, just stuff you could get your teeth into; conversations that
didn’t involve cattle, cars or casual gossip.

He rounded
the airfield and approached the entrance to the feed store. Some of
the old buildings had evolved over time into a mini industrial
complex that now contained a saw-mill and an agricultural supply
store along with some offices and warehouses. Recently the whole
lot had been bought over by a big company and it looked like
security had been beefed up as he drew up to a full-on looking
galvanised gate.

Andy had an
uncomfortable feeling in his bones as he leaned down out of the cab
to speak to the only worker by the gate, a man he now realised had
a familiar toothless grin.

The two officers from the
SCDEA had arrived around half past nine, conspicuously better
turned out than their Edinburgh CID counterparts. It looked like
they spent most of their wages in Urban Outfitters and probably the
rest being seen in the flashiest bars in the Merchant City. Burke
had always been more of a west end man where Glasgow was concerned,
although even that was filling up with hipsters these days by all
accounts.

They could
have passed for students if you dropped them into another context
he thought, before rebuking himself for the kind of lazy thinking
he hated seeing in anyone else. Sometimes he felt he was engaged in
a constant battle to see off the thought processes that signalled
the start of the inevitable decline. Fair play, he was half way to
seventy this year.

The guy, who introduced
himself as DC Black, seemed almost shy, and yet there was something
about his manner, something just the wrong side of assertive;
probably just a sense of entitlement bestowed upon him by virtue of
the fact he was a member of the SCDEA, the institution the media
had taken great pains to describe as a Scottish equivalent of the
FBI. Or maybe it was the fact he was a small man with big hair, as
so many weegies seemed to be.

He wore a
wedding ring which seemed out of place, given his age and wore a
leather bomber jacket, which Burke suspected was less ironic
fashion sense, more playing at being the big movie cop. He wondered
how long he’d spent practising the iron grip handshake: probably
bullied at school.

The girl, DC
Wilson seemed pretty hard-nosed in the sense that she said very
little but had an unrelenting gaze and when she did speak it was
more of a grunting in acknowledgement kind of thing. He got the
sense she was busy taking everything in, mixing it with a healthy
sized pinch of disdain. He could tell she didn’t approve of him; an
old fogey wearing a suit and hiding out here rather than getting on
with the high flyers and busting the big criminals. She too was on
the small side. He wondered if they’d been paired up to make Black
feel more secure. She stood with folded arms, not in a way that
some people seemed to think gave away a sense of discomfort. She
wasn’t hugging herself. She was more intent on projecting the idea
that she couldn’t be bothered standing up straight with her arms by
her sides. This place wasn’t worthy of good posture or standing to
attention in any way. Her hair was scraped back in austere
utilitarian fashion and she chewed on her lip as she scanned the
room and tried to rein in the contempt. She wore a scarf tight
around her neck so that only her face was visible.

This was just
a courtesy call of course; before they identified the Russian or
former Russian’s head officially, as they inevitably would, and
Edwards would put in a courtesy call to give him the soft soap,
tell him it was ok, they’d take the whole thing off his hands while
inwardly gritting his teeth and hoping those parochial Edinburgers
wouldn’t get possessive over a case and an operation they’d
blundered their way into by virtue of just working on the patch the
relevant part of the stiff had turned up on. How much better might
things have been for Edwards if one of the other body parts had
simply turned up elsewhere? A leg in Bishopbriggs perhaps, an arm
in East Kilbride, or maybe a foot in Falkirk could have been a foot
in the door.

He caught up on the news
while he waited to hear the inevitable result. More snow was
predicted. They’d yet to see the results of the last batch other
than in the Yorkshire Dales and a few minor road closures in the
south east where everything seemed to happen.

The phone rang on his
desk. Edwards already? What was the decision to be?

It was
Rachel. Could he, per chance, collect a Christmas tree from Gorgie
City Farm on the way home? He agreed with a heavy sigh that slipped
out and then led to one of those conversations revolving round his
assertion that it was fine and he didn’t mind which they both knew
was not that case.

He would let Edwards take
the case off his hands he had already decided, mainly because he
didn’t have the energy to bother fighting over it, or take it
higher up, much less a Scooby what was going on with the whole
thing. Of course they would weigh in anyway, with the argument that
this was getting in the way of their investigation into god knew
what and the bigger boys and girls upstairs would at least be happy
that these were potentially unsolved cases off their books. Clear
up rates would be unaffected and so on and so forth. It was all
about the politics.

So when the phone rang
again he was more than ready for Edwards’ Oscar winning
performance.

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

Victor had wasted no time
in setting up camp. It seemed the two idiots were intending to act
as his body guards, which would have perhaps been funny if he were
a laughing man. In any case, it wouldn’t do to be seen laughing in
the company of these imbeciles. The underdeveloped one clearly
thought of himself as the brains. No one else would be likely to
make that mistake, though looking at the overgrown one, clearly
typecast as the goon, he supposed it was all relative.

The small one
had repeatedly tried to make conversation, seemingly impervious to
Victor’s lack of acknowledgement or reply. “Ye been tae Embra
before like?” he’d asked and then, realising Victor wasn’t totally
sure what this meant, repeated the same question twice, each time
in a language closer to what Victor guessed passed for English
round here. On the third and final attempt, though Victor admired
the runt’s persistence, he looked him squarely in the eye, saying
nothing, until the effect caused him to wither, his confidence
seemingly draining like someone had let the air out of his tyres.
The car journey had been somewhat more pleasant after
that.