Stonemouth (25 page)

The Murstons and Mike Mac’s people aren’t above the law; the cops just turn a blind eye where it’s felt that the two families are effectively doing police business – keeping the Toun running smoothly, preserving professional, commercial, middle-class values and generally maintaining Stonemouth as a safe place to raise your children and do business.

It means that Murdo and his brothers get stuck with parking fines and speeding tickets like anybody else, and Callum didn’t get off on a charge of assault after an altercation in a bar when he was
twenty, plus Mike Mac had to tear down an extension to an extension when he was unexpectedly refused planning permission, but the whole drug-dealing business goes quietly on with barely a ripple of interference and apparently it’s possible for the Murstons to commit murder with relative impunity if they feel they have to, dropping people off the road bridge.

Mike and Donald throw the cops the occasional tiddler every now and again, just to keep the drug-crime clear-up figures looking plausible and encourage the rest of the troops to stay in line, but they themselves are in no danger, providing they don’t get too greedy, or too flamboyant, or too self-important, or think they can do anything they want. They know the limitations, work within them.

Anyway, the trivial is punished while the gross stuff sails through unchallenged, and when you look at it like that, the whole set-up seems perverse and just wrong.

So the trick is not to look at it like that.

I was wearing a jacket and tie. Practically a blazer. Jeez, I’d thought I wouldn’t have to get dressed up to this sort of deeply uncool level for over a week, on the day of the wedding itself. But here I was, in the clubhouse of Olness Golf Club, at the invitation of Mike MacAvett, though apparently entirely with the blessing – and, indeed, probably at the instigation – of Donald Murston.

I stood in the bar, looking out to the dunes, trying to see the sea. Above a line of bushes just in front of the windows, wee white balls sailed into the air and dropped again, as people on the practice greens tried out their chip shots and sand wedges. I was the proud holder of a degree in fine arts and the offer of a job with an interesting-sounding building-lighting company, based in London but very much international. More money than I’d expected to be earning at this stage.

I’d had to concede that my earlier dreams of being a Mackintosh/Warhol/Koons
de nos jours
might have been a little overambitious. I’d found stuff I especially loved doing and got brilliant grades for,
and a lot of it seemed to revolve around the use of light on interior and exterior surfaces. My degree show had been a triumph, a lecturer who was a fan had made some phone calls and people from lighting consultancies had come to have a look. One lot in particular seemed to appreciate what I’d been doing. They took me for dinner and made me the offer that evening. In theory I was still thinking about it but I was going to say yes. I’d talked to Ellie and she was okay with moving to London, once she’d completed the fourth and final year of her inherently complicated course; it’d be a new challenge, a new era, and, besides, there were plenty of flights from City airport to Dyce.

In a little over a week I’d be a married man. It still seemed slightly unreal. Sometimes these days I felt like my own body double – being told to stand here, strike this pose, now walk over here – while the real me, the famous me, sat in his luxury trailer and waited for the call. Other times I felt like I was auditioning for a part in my own lifestory, which would start to take place after these slightly ramshackle, part-improvised rehearsals had been concluded and the producer/director finally pronounced himself happy.

The little white balls rose and fell above the line of bushes in the rosy early-evening light, like especially well-groomed sand hoppers.

That first night by the fire with Ellie seemed a very long time ago.

A group of guys at the bar laughed loudly, as though it was a competition. I hooked a finger into the gap between my neck and my shirt collar, working it a bit looser. I fucking hated ties. I hoped they wouldn’t expect me to wear a tie at work. I was going to wear a clip-on bow tie for the wedding next week. I’d been bought a kilty outfit in the clan tartan by Mum and Dad. The Murstons had been going to set us up in a house locally but were now talking about finding a flat in London for us, assuming I took this job.

I’d already had what had felt like a semi-formal meeting with Don, up at the house.

We
were well past the what-are-your-intentions-young-man? stage. I was marrying his eldest daughter, the wedding was pretty much fully organised and everything was arranged. Mrs Murston had taken over almost from the start after our original idea of running off to Bermuda or Venice or somewhere – either just the two of us or with a very few close friends – had been dismissed as Not Good Enough. Ellie had put her foot down just once, regarding the dress. She wanted, and had had a friend design, something simple; Mrs M had wanted something that wouldn’t have been out of place on
My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding
. (Allegedly; I hadn’t been allowed to see the designs for either. Clearly, a few centuries back, some rule-obsessed, OCD nut-job had been allowed to dream up the absurd ‘traditions’ surrounding weddings, and the groom not seeing the dress was one of them.)

At one point during our chat Donald had asked me what I believed in. I was momentarily stumped. Did he mean religion-wise?

We were having a Church of Scotland wedding, though nobody involved seemed to be especially religious. Including the minister – we’d talked. ‘To be perfectly honest, Stewart,’ he’d told me, tented fingers supporting his bearded chin, ‘I see priests and ministers and so on primarily as social workers in fancy dress.’ And him wearing jeans and a jumper.

I think the potential for spectacle offered by the rather grand Abbey on Clyn Road had had a lot to do with the choice of venue, and Mrs M was treating the need for any sort of religious component within the service as being a sort of slightly annoying non-optional theme, like a rather elaborate dress code.

I hadn’t even been sure the Murstons were Prods at all. I’d known that, like most right-thinking people in the region, they were devout
Press and Journal
ists – of course – but their religious affiliations had never seemed germane before.

‘Well, I’m not really religious,’ I’d told Donald. We were sipping single malts, just the two of us, at the well-stocked bar in what he called his rumpus room, part of the extensive cellar area beneath Hill House. ‘I suppose I believe in truth.’

‘Truth?’
Donald said, brows furrowing.

‘Not as an abstract entity,’ I’d told him. ‘More as something you have to seek out and face up to. Rationalism; science. You know.’

Donald had looked like he really didn’t know at all. ‘Have more whisky, son,’ he’d said, reaching for the bottle.

Now it was a few days later and I’d been summoned to the highly prestigious Olness Golf Club – home of a course worthy of being mentioned in the same veneratingly hushed breath as Carnoustie, Troon, Muirfield and even the hallowed Old Course – to Meet People.

‘Stewart! Here you are,’ Mike Mac said, coming up, pumping my hand and leading me back towards the dining room. ‘Didn’t realise you were here. Come on, come and meet people. Hope you brought a good appetite. You not got a drink yet? Dearie me. We’ll soon fix that.’

We were in a private dining room off the main one.

Fuck me, I was being introduced to the Chief Constable for the whole region, a brace of town councillors and local businessmen, and our MEP. I’d heard of these people, I’d seen them on TV. The Chief Constable looked entirely comfortable out of uniform.

I had no idea what I was doing there. They talked about holidays just past or planned, fishing quotas, trying to encourage planning applications from supermarkets other than Tesco, investments, fly-fishing beats, the next Ryder cup, Donald Trump, the placing of speed cameras and the latest travails of Aberdeen (the football club, not the city).

They all seemed like friends but not friends; there was a sort of polite wariness mixed in with the bonhomie, a reserve that accompanied all the urbane good-chappery. However, they were articulate, intelligent people, with that gloss of power it’s hard not to feel a little excited by. They were quite sure of themselves and they weren’t bad company, especially as we worked our way through the selection of specially chosen wines. Olness Golf Club had a sommelier! Who knew? (I was probably being terribly naive.)

Sitting
in a sort of upmarket version of a snug bar afterwards, I got to talk to the Chief Constable, then our MEP, Alan Lounds. He was very smooth. The Chief Constable had been pretty smooth, but Alan the Member of the European Parliament was smoother still. Apart from anything else he had the sort of deep, resonant, perfectly modulated voice you could imagine women swooning over, the sort of voice you just wanted to listen to, having it poured over you, wallowing in it. A voice so seductive it scarcely mattered what he was actually saying with it.

Technically Alan was an Independent; mostly he voted with the centre left or centre right, depending. Independent politicians are something of a tradition up here; I think we resent the idea of the people we vote for having any loyalty to a party that might compromise their responsibility to us.

He and I got to talking, over some more single malts, forming our own little subcommittee slightly apart from the rest of the guys.

‘Quite a family you’re marrying into,’ Alan said (I’d been told to call him Alan. ‘Call me Alan,’ – that’s what he’d said).

‘Really just marrying the girl, to be honest, Alan.’

‘Hmm.’ Alan smiled and tipped his head just so. I got the impression I’d just said something perfectly charming but completely wrong. Alan was small-to-medium, but he carried himself tall. He was tanned, with dark, tightly curled hair, neatly trimmed. He had rugged good looks and eyes somewhere between seen-it-all and twinkly. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘it’s a family that’s important to the town, to the region, even.’

‘I guess,’ I said.
Important when you want to buy drugs, certainly
, I thought about saying. I didn’t, obviously.

‘You haven’t any reservations, have you?’ he asked me.

‘Reservations?’

‘Well, we all know the reputation Donald and the family have,’ Alan said in his best we’re-all-men-of-the-world tones. ‘The … complicated relationship they have with the more … obvious forces of law and order.’

What?
I cleared my throat to give myself time to double-check with my short-term memory what I thought I’d just heard. ‘You’re saying they’re
part
of the forces of law and order?’

‘Not officially, obviously,’ Alan said, smiling. He sighed. ‘Though, playing devil’s advocate, you might claim they help to keep the peace, so qualify in a sort of honorary capacity.’ He gestured with one hand. ‘Not the sort of analysis
Sun
readers would understand, but it has a certain internal logic to it, don’t you think?’

‘I suppose,’ I said. I might have looked slightly shocked, or just wary.

Alan sat forward, drawing me in towards him as we cradled our whisky glasses. ‘Does it … worry you, knowing the full range of the Murston clan’s business interests?’ he asked, still with a smile. He glanced over towards Mike Mac, who was deep in conversation with the Chief Constable. ‘Not to mention Mike, over there?’

‘Only a little,’ I said.

It was true I’d thought about what would happen if things changed and the Murstons were busted as a family. What would Ellie and I do if Donald and the boys were thrown into prison? How would Ellie be affected? She wouldn’t be implicated, would she? Could I be, just by association? If they bought us a flat, could we lose it? Frankly it didn’t worry me that much because I couldn’t see it happening. But you’d be stupid not to think about it.

Alan nodded, looked serious. ‘Well, I’m glad you say only a little. That’s … that’s very realistic, that’s very mature.’ He laughed. ‘Listen to me; that sounded patronising, didn’t it? Beg your pardon, Stewart. Guess I’m just relieved. Thing is, we live in a less than ideal world, do we not? In an ideal world maybe we’d have a more evidence-led, harm-reduction-based set of drug laws, but the brutal truth is that we don’t live in an ideal world; nothing like it. We have to do the best with what we’re faced with. As long as it remains political suicide to talk about legalisation, we’re all faced with trying to cope the best we can with our current laws, irrational though they may be, and also with the fact that people just like getting
wasted, stoned, out of their heads one way or another, legal or not and whether we like it or not.’ He tapped his whisky glass with one manicured fingernail, grinning briefly before going back to serious mode. ‘One way or another we have to manage the problem. We need, in effect, to emplace our own harm-reduction programme in the absence of one agreed on internationally or even nationally. And that, frankly, is where Donald and Mike come in. Along with the local police, of course – we are all in this together. Forgive the cliché.’

‘You’re a politician,’ I said. ‘Isn’t it up to you guys to start changing things?’

Alan laughed indulgently. ‘Oh, I’m just a humble MEP. My hands are tied. In case you hadn’t noticed, my constituents choose me; I don’t choose them.’ He paused, smiled, as though waiting for the applause to die down. ‘I’d have to wait for a sea-change back here in dear old Blighty before I could join any consensus in Brussels. Sticking your head above the parapet on drugs just gets it blown off, then you’re no good to anyone.’