Stonemouth (24 page)

‘Ouch?’ I say to him. I can still feel the place on the side of my head where he tapped me. On the other side, I can feel Murdo taking my phone out of my jacket pocket. Following the earbud wires. Well, that made that nice and easy. I turn my head again to look at Murdo, who’s detaching the earbud cables and inspecting the iPhone.

Murdo looks at Norrie. ‘You know how you take the batteries out of these?’ he asks.

‘Naw.’

The
van’s swinging this way and that, not going especially fast. It stops, idling, every now and again before continuing. Just driving through the streets of the town, not doing anything further to attract any attention.

‘Guys, what’s going on?’ I ask. ‘I mean, for fuck’s sake! I saw Donald on Friday. I checked in with Powell first, on Friday, and I saw him again yesterday. They both said it was okay I stayed here till Tuesday morning so I can pay my respects to Joe.’

‘Uh-huh?’ Murdo says.

‘Aye, but ye didnae talk to us, did ye, Stewie?’ Norrie says. ‘Just cos Grandpa thought the sun shone oot yer arse, doesnae mean we all do.’ He looks over at Murdo. ‘Eh no?’

‘Ssh, Norrie,’ Murdo says. He reaches out one boot, taps me on the head. ‘You can sit up, Stewie. Slide back against that wall there.’ He nods.

I do what he says so I’m sitting with my back to the plywood wall, dusting my hands down – they’re shaking – taking out the earbud that remains lodged in my left ear and putting both into the pocket they took my phone from.

‘Guys, come on,’ I say. ‘There shouldn’t be a problem here. I’m back to pay my respects to Joe, that’s all.’

‘Wait a minute,’ Murdo mutters. ‘This button on the top. Turns them right off.’ He keeps the button down, waits for the slide-to-power-off screen to appear, then powers down the phone. He sticks it in the front pocket of his dungarees. He looks at me.

‘What
you
saying?’

‘I just want to pay my respects to Joe, that’s all I’m saying. That’s all I’m here to do. I’ll be gone by Tuesday.’ I look round the dim interior of the van. ‘What the fuck’s all this about?’

Oh fuck, what are they going to do to me? Being in the back of a van with these guys, them turning the phone off. This doesn’t look good. But I talked to their dad! He said it was okay for me to be here, just for a few days. Fuck, is there some sort of power struggle going on? Are the brothers starting to get impatient, disobeying
orders, making their own decisions? What have I landed myself in? And what fucker has spoken to the Murston boys, dropped me in it? Ezzie, probably, though you never know.

The van’s going faster now; you can hear it in the engine note, in the sound of the tyres on the road and the air slipstreaming round its tall bulk. We slow a little, take a long, constant radius, maybe 270-degree corner.

Murdo looks at me. ‘See tomorrow?’ he says.

‘What?’ I say, voice cracking because my throat’s suddenly dry.

‘At the funeral, at the hotel afterwards?’

‘What, Murdo?’

‘Don’t want you talking to her.’

‘But, Murd,’ Norrie asks, though he’s silenced by a glance from his elder brother.

‘Ssh,’ Murdo says, before looking back at me. ‘Just leave her alone, right? Grandpa said he wanted you at the funeral – fuck knows why, but he said it, so fair enough. You get to go. But you just leave Ellie alone. Otherwise we’re going to be on you, understand, Stewart?’

Well, I’m relieved; sounds like I’m going to live, but on the other hand, is that
all
? What the fuck’s all this Stasi-style kidnap shit for, then? The fuckers could just have texted me.

‘Jeez, Murdo,’ I say. ‘She’s her own woman; what if she comes up to me?’

‘Then you’d better walk away,’ Murdo says. ‘Cos we’ll be watchin.’

‘Murdo, come on—’

‘You’re on fuckin dangerous ground, Stewie,’ Murdo tells me. He sounds reasonable, almost concerned. He has changed a bit; there’s less outright aggression, more gravitas. It goes to make a more studied kind of threat.

The van has felt like it’s been going up a straight, shallow slope for a while now. I can hear the sounds of other traffic. Then there’s pressure against my back as the van brakes smoothly and we slow to what feels like walking speed. Traffic continues to rip past, very close. We stop, then reverse, the van making a beep-beep-beep sound.

Oh
fuck, I think I know where we are. A sudden bang-bang sounds from one of the van’s rear quarters, making me jump. A voice outside shouts, ‘Whoa!’ The traffic outside makes a tearing, ripping noise. Something heavy roars past, making the van shake. Is that a slight up-and-down bouncing motion I can feel?

The bridge. We’re on the fucking road bridge.

‘Dinnae fill yer kecks,’ Murdo tells me with a thin smile. I must look as terrified as I feel. ‘If this was for real it’d be dark and you’d be tied up like a gimp.’

Norrie opens the rear doors and there’s a rush of traffic noise. Outside where the sky ought to be there’s white and red stripes. ‘Come and take a wee look,’ Murdo says, and the three of us get out.

We’re on the road bridge all right, somewhere about the middle of the southbound carriageway. The van has backed up to a sort of tall tent structure erected over the roadway, red and white plastic over a metal frame. Whoever banged the side of the van and shouted at us to stop isn’t here now. Two sides and the roof of the tent are rippling in the breeze; the other side thuds and pulses each time a truck goes past.

A square of the road surface, maybe three-quarters of a metre to a side, has been lifted up and out; it sits, a quarter-metre thick, at an angle beyond the hole, lifting brackets still attached. Murdo takes a handful of my jacket at the shoulder. Norrie’s holding my shoulder and elbow on the other side. They march me to the hole.

Looking down, I can see the criss-crossing members of the girder work under the road surface. Straight down, though, there’s just air and then the grey waves, a fifty-metre fall away.

‘Jeez, Murdo,’ I say, trying to shrink back from the hole. There’s a wind from it, coming rushing up and out, cold and laced with rain or spray.

They aren’t going to throw me down there, are they? The line about not shitting my pants and it not being dark wasn’t just a way to get me to comply this far, was it? I guess I could still try to make
a break, to run. They can’t force me down there, can they? It’s not wide enough to just push me; I could grab the sides.

‘Night is better,’ Murdo’s saying. ‘Mist or fog is best.’

I can’t take my eyes off the waves, far below, moving slowly, cresting and breaking.

‘Better yet, if there’s earlier video from the CCTV of the person on the bridge, specially in the same clothes,’ Murdo says.

Oh, fuck. They have that. I was on the bridge waiting for Powell, just a couple of days ago. Wearing this jacket, too.

‘You tear the tape off their mouths,’ Murdo says. ‘They think they’ll get to scream or shout then,’ he tells me, ‘but you just do this.’

His right fist comes whipping round and punches me in the belly. I’m not ready for it and it sends the breath whistling out of me as I double up, folding around the ball of pain in my guts. Murdo and Norrie let me collapse, falling to my knees right in front of the hole, the wind from it buffeting my face. They’re still holding my jacket.

‘Bit harder than that, actually,’ Murdo says thoughtfully. ‘And there’s this really cool knot you can do, with rope, like. You just drop them through and keep a hold of the end. They canny move much or do anythin for the first wee bit but then the slack runs out and the knots come loose and you’ve got all the rope and they’re fallin like they were never tied up in the first place.’

‘Ellie taught us that knot,’ Norrie says proudly.

‘Norrie,’ Murdo breathes.

‘No sayin she knew what for,’ Norrie grumbles. ‘Or,’ he says brightly, like he’s just remembered, ‘you can just whap them over the back of the heid.’

Norrie illustrates his point with a light blow to the back of my head. I hardly notice. I’m too busy wheezing some breath back into my lungs, still convinced Murdo’s ruptured my spleen or prolapsed my stomach or something.

‘Aye,’ Murdo says. ‘No with a bat, though,’ he points out. ‘Injury’s too distinctive.’

‘Aye.
Traumatic-injury blunt-profile object match,’ Norrie says, stumbling over the words and patently relishing getting to display some garbled snippet from
CSI
or
Bones
or whatever the fuck.

‘Old-fashioned lead-shot cosh,’ Murdo’s saying, with what might be professional pride or just outright relish. ‘That knocks them out so you can bundle them through. Chances are the signs won’t show up suspicious among all the other injuries from hitting the watter.’

‘No complaints so far, eh, Murd, eh?’ Norrie says.

‘No too many,’ Murdo says, then his voice alters, coming closer as he bends down, his mouth beside my ear. ‘So just watch what you ask about Callum,’ he says quietly. ‘Okay, Stewie?’ He clacks the iPhone painfully against my nose and lets it drop, sending it tumbling away, a glistening black slab somersaulting towards the grey waves.

I lose sight of it before it hits and its splash is lost amongst the breaking crests. I hear myself groaning. There was stuff in there I hadn’t backed up.

I’m dragged back to my feet, bundled back in the van.

They throw me out in the southern viewing area car park – the place where I sat with Powell Imrie in his Range Rover two days ago – sending me flying into the whin bushes that form one edge of the coach bays.

I don’t really notice the scratches from the whin thorns; just before they kick open the doors, Murdo says, ‘You won’t forget what we said about Ellie, eh?’ and punches me hard in the balls, so it’s a good ten minutes before I care about anything besides the astounding, sickening, writhing gouts of pain heaving out of my groin and wrapping themselves round my guts and brain.

Christ, it’s like being a wee bairn again. I have to waddle, to give my poor assaulted nuts sufficient room to hang without causing further excruciating pain. The last time I walked wide-legged like
this, I was barely out of nappies and I’d just wet my pants getting all excited about being given a new balloon or something.

I make my way, gingerly, to the bridge control office. There’s an entry-phone guarding the deserted foyer on the ground floor of the three-storey building, where the tourist information office used to be, back when we could still afford such extravagance. I press the button. With any luck I’ll know somebody on duty. Ask them to call a taxi. I don’t think I’m capable of walking all the way over the bridge and back into town.

No luck; it’s kind of hard to hear with all the traffic but eventually we establish that nobody in the control room knows me and I’m politely informed it’s not policy to phone for taxis for members of the public, sir. No, there is no public phone available any more. I’m advised there’ll be a bus destined for the town centre available from the bus stop on the far side of the old toll plaza, just behind me, in … twenty-five minutes. I should take the underpass.

‘Thanks a lot,’ I tell the anonymous voice. The ‘fucking’ is silent.

I waddle to and down the steps and then along the underpass beneath the carriageway to the sound of trucks pounding above my head – I swear the subsonics alone are making my balls ache – then struggle up the steps at the far side and along through the newly resumed rain to the flimsy perspex bus shelter.

I sit perched carefully on an angled metal-and-plastic rail no wider than my hand, there to stop anyone doing anything as decadent as falling asleep. The rain rattles on the roof. The wind picks up, blowing in under the walls of the shelter and chilling my feet and ankles. Still the place smells of pee.

You can see why people must be so keen to sleep here.

I should get home to Mum and Dad’s and just fuck off back to London now, today, without waiting for tomorrow and the funeral or the day after and my booked flight back to London.

Only I don’t know that I’d be able to sit down for the hour or so it would take to return the car to Dyce. I’m still in some pain just from the punch to my belly, never mind the tender, jangling
ultra-sensitivity and continuing sensation of nausea I’m getting from my testes. I feel beaten as well as beaten up; defeated, humiliated, worn out. If I did feel I could drive, I think I would: back to the airport for the next available flight or all the way to London, just me and the car, drop it at City airport and let them work out the charges.

I don’t think I want to tell anybody what just happened. I’m ashamed I was so easily huckled into the van, so incapable of resisting or talking my way out of the situation. I’d love to think it couldn’t happen again or I’d be able to take some sort of revenge on Murdo and Norrie, but I’m not like them, I’m not naturally violent or trained in it.

And they do have a point. I was asking about Callum when I guess it’s none of my business – I was just interested after what Grier had said and Ezzie being there seemed like too good an opportunity to miss – and I did hurt their sister and make the whole family look stupid, disrespected, even if it was five years ago. By their standards, I was very much asking for a kicking. Arguably, I’m lucky I got off with a mere punching.

People only resent, and start to hate, gangsters when they do something that seems unfair, or that impacts on them personally unjustly. If there’s a general feeling that people are only ever getting what was coming to them, and if any violence is kept within the confines of people who have put themselves in play, even potentially put themselves in harm’s way, then nobody really minds too much.