Tombstoning (17 page)

David almost couldn’t believe he was the same human being now as that teenage boy who went drunkenly skinny-dipping at Elliot Beach, made petrol bombs on the High Common and unearthed other kids’ porn stashes from the railway embankment. It seemed impossibly distant. Not that he was exactly worldly-wise now; he hadn’t been trekking around the globe like Nicola had. They said that travel broadens the mind – well, he had only had to travel the length of Fife to Edinburgh to get plenty of broadening. Having said that, the people he met at uni were invariably like him, small-town kids with wide eyes, pretending they weren’t impressed to be walking around the cobbled Old Town where a thousand years of mischief had taken place. He had gravitated towards people of his own kind, people with the same outlook on life, the same down-to-earth demeanour, as if there was an invisible pull between them all, as if they were all destined for the same kind of life, despite coming from all corners of the country.

These people were different from his schoolfriends. They had got out, like him, from the oppressive emptiness of their small-town origins, they had escaped the mundanity, the mind-numbing boredom of drinking on street corners, vandalizing toilets and bus shelters. His schoolfriends hadn’t. But his uni friends, like him, still carried a little of that with them, they still bridled at cosmopolitan Edinburgh and the university establishment with its swankier (almost always English) students, lecturers and professors. They showed disdain for authority, they lacked respect for, well, for just about everything, including each other and themselves. They had been brought up in a culture of disrespect, and that was something they would take with them to the grave.

Take to the grave. The thought brought him back to Colin, Gary and Neil. Two of them dead, and now the third name kept popping up. It was so clear now that David wasn’t the only link between Colin, Gary and the cliffs. There was also Neil. Neil, who had joined the Marines, fought in the Gulf War, then quit, only to go into the police, quit that too, and who was now, apparently, living as a hermit somewhere up the coast.

He had to find out more about Neil, about what had happened to him in the fifteen years since they’d last seen each other. When, exactly, had they last seen each other? He tried to think back, but his memories weren’t date-stamped and he struggled to piece it all together. They had been together the night Colin died, and then they hadn’t seen each other for a few days, but then there was the funeral – but wait, Neil wasn’t at that, was he? And David had left town a couple of days later. So the last time he had seen Neil was when he watched his and Colin’s backs as they walked unsteadily up the High Street in the early hours of that Sunday morning, the same morning a dog walker would come across Colin’s broken body at the bottom of the cliffs a few dawn-filtered hours later.

He googled the name. What else would anyone do these days? he thought. How the hell did anyone find out about anything before the internet? Now, and surely more so in the future, no one ever had to remember anything ever again, now that the source of all possible knowledge, most of it wildly inaccurate, was only a mouse click away. What would happen to future generations‘ minds, if they never had to retain a single fact?

He got millions of hits for ‘Neil Cargill’, so he combined it with all the obvious things: ‘Royal Marines’, ‘Arbroath’, ‘Tayside Police’. After five minutes he had nothing. Who in the world didn’t have an internet presence? A bit more rooting around and he eventually unearthed a tiny news story from a Dundee newspaper, dated 22 July 1992, a general round-up of army news from the Condor base which ended with a mention of a ‘Private N. Cargill’ who was apparently discharged on medical grounds from 45 Commando. Was that Neil? The dates seemed to match up with having left after the Gulf War. A further five minutes in front of the screen and he had the name of the sergeant major for the regiment and his number at the Condor base. Looking at the sergeant major’s profile, he noted that he had been in charge of the regiment back when Neil had been discharged. He decided to give him a call.

It was all surprisingly easy. Pretending to be a journalist researching the Royal Marines in the northeast (he was deliberately vague), he got through to Sergeant Major Wilkins’ office straight away. Wilkins wasn’t available, but his secretary made an appointment for him to interview Wilkins on Sunday afternoon. Sunday, thought David – didn’t these people have weekends? Apparently not. He put the phone down, buzzing from his little deception. This must be what it feels like to be a spy, he thought. It wasn’t exactly James Bond, but it was pretty exciting all the same. He tried to picture the forthcoming meeting and how he would play it, face to face with a military man, trying to brazenly lie about why he was there. But why was he there? He wanted to find out more about Neil Cargill, that’s why, and there hadn’t been anything else on the internet. How did private detectives track people down? How could he find out where he lived, and what he’d been doing for the past ten years? Wasn’t there a central website for Arbroath-based gossip? Apparently not, which he thought was strange, because there had been plenty of fucking gossip around when he was a kid – it seemed at times as if the town ran on the stuff. It fuelled the conversations in shops, on streets, in offices and pubs. And now he couldn’t find out more than one small fact about the life of Neil Cargill? Strange.

He felt thrilled and a little apprehensive at the idea of the subterfuge involved in his meeting this weekend. He wanted to tell someone all about it. He thought of Nicola and picked up the phone.

‘You’re a daftie.’

Nicola had a point. After David had left the office and headed home, the excitement of his little undercover mission had waned quickly. By the time he’d got home he wasn’t sure at all about why he’d set up the meeting with this Wilkins character, or what he was hoping to achieve with it. A couple of hours later, sitting in the Abbey with Nicola, he had lost sight of any real purpose to the whole thing.

‘You’re probably right,’ he said. ‘Maybe I won’t bother going. I gave his secretary false contact details anyway, so I can just not bother if I don’t fancy it.’

‘What are you hoping to find out?’ said Nicola.

‘Good question.’

David looked around him. Most of the pubs in the Southside were predominantly full of either students or locals, with hardly any mixing of the two. That wasn’t the case with the Abbey, in which both sets of punters coexisted in an uneasy balance, the mutual dislike between the groups usually never boiling over into anything more than the odd muttered comment. The large mahogany circular bar and ornate plate-glass windows were reminiscent of days long gone, when pubs took a certain pride in their appearance, and didn’t get needless facelifts every two years to try and pull in a few more punters. Across the room, at one of the window seats, an elderly decorator, judging by his paint-spattered overalls, was slumped asleep in his chair. A handful of giggling student girls waving Aftershocks in the air were taking it in turns to drape themselves over him, while their friends took quick snaps with their camera phones. The old man woke up finally, to shrieks of laughter, looking utterly bemused like a little boy lost in a supermarket. He frowned at the girls and got up to get a fresh pint.

David turned back to Nicola, and was immediately lifted by the look on her face, a wry, squint smile and an arched eyebrow. It was amazing what the look on a particular woman’s face could do to a man’s insides, he thought.

‘I suppose I want to find out about Neil, find out what the hell he’s been up to for the last decade and a half,’ he said. ‘I don’t know why, except that there used to be four of us in a gang – a stupid little gang, admittedly, but a gang nonetheless – and now the other two in that gang are dead. I can’t really explain it, but there seems to be a bond, something pulling me towards him. I need to find him, speak to him about all this.’

‘You think he’s involved?’ said Nicola.

The suggestion shocked David, but secretly not as much as it might’ve. Deep down he had been thinking the same thing, although he hadn’t voiced it out loud. To hear Nicola say it now it sounded obscene, monstrous – to suggest that there was somehow a connection between Neil and the deaths of Colin and Gary – but if he was being honest with himself, David had had the same thought himself.

‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I don’t really know what to think. It’s all a bit of a mystery.’

‘It’s a real Nancy Drew job, for sure.’

Nancy Drew, thought David – wasn’t that the girly version of those Hardy Boys books he’d read as a kid? Kind of murder mystery adventure things? Pretty dumb, he vaguely recalled.

‘I preferred the Hardy Boys myself.’

‘You would, being a boy.’

‘And what’s wrong with being a boy? I suppose you think it would be better if I was into girly pink Nancy Drew shit, aye?’

‘Nah, I like my men to be all men. Like lumberjacks. Ever sung a song about chopping down trees, David?’

He laughed at the reference. It was easy to talk to Nicola. They made the same references, laughed at the same stupid jokes and drank the same cheap lager. He really wanted to sleep with her. But he also didn’t want to blow it. And anyway, this whole Gary thing – or Colin thing or Neil thing, whatever you wanted to call it, an Arbroath cliffs thing? – was kind of putting a dampener on that kind of action. Having said that, as his eyes drifted involuntarily to the small, firm breasts under Nicola’s tight T-shirt, the thought of sleeping with her brought about a stiffening in his cock, so maybe it wasn’t putting a dampener on anything after all.

‘I have to go soon,’ said Nicola, smiling as if reading his dirty thoughts. ‘Amy’s only staying over at a friend’s for a wee while. I’ve got to get her home and to bed, or she’ll be a right pain in the arse come morning. Speaking of which, are you still OK with giving us a lift up the road? We can get the train or bus, it’s not a problem.’

‘Don’t be stupid,’ said David. ‘It’ll be my pleasure.’

‘Yeah, a talk at our old school, followed by a funeral, a trip to the police station and now an undercover interview with a man trained to kill with his bare hands. It’ll be a hoot, I’m sure.’

David downed what was left of his lager.

‘Gets me out the house, doesn’t it?’

9
Tombstoners

‘
Altiora petamus
’ roughly translates as ‘Let us aim for higher things’. David read the school motto as he drove in through the front gate, an unassuming entrance nestled in a residential area which led to the sprawling complex of crouching, modern, dusty red buildings scattered across Lochlands Hill that was Keptie High School. He swung right into the staff car park and got out.

It was a muggy kind of day, a high-level haze diffusing the heat of the sun and spreading a sticky closeness, a claustrophobic blanket over the land. The buildings in front of him were much as he remembered them, slightly garish and clumsily-built rough brick rectangles radiating out from a central hub which housed the hall and cafeteria.

It was only eleven o’clock and already he’d dropped Nicola and Amy off at Nicola’s parents’ and checked into the Fairport. Gillian with a hard ‘G’ seemed unsurprised to see him, as if strange men naturally kept returning into her life unannounced.

He stood for a moment at his car door and soaked up the sight of the school. He had only spent three years in this place because it was built halfway through his secondary education. The original high school had been down the road, round the back of the Keptie Pond, but when that gloomy Victorian hulk of buildings started shedding masonry on pupils’ heads and sprouting leaks from lead plumbing, it was time to move. David had once been playing with a large storage heater in the old school’s overspill huts, knocked up quickly post-war, when he discovered some asbestos fibres stinging his hands. Another time Gary had badly sprained an ankle when a set of stairs gave way under him. This was before anyone knew about lawsuits so neither of them had profited from the school’s crumbling haplessness.

They moved to the current school at the beginning of fourth year, just in time for the serious business of exams. As a younger kid David had often mucked about in this part of town, running through the long grass playing Japs and Commandos with mates. He could remember when this was all fields, and the thought made him laugh, but also made him feel old for a moment.

As he stood looking at the school a Fiesta skidded round the corner, a blast of hardcore hip-hop causing its suspension to bounce and windows to throb. Two teenage boys covered in Burberry and Nike swooshes sat posing with the windows down, the engine on high revs. After a couple of minutes two girls about thirteen years old in tiny pleated black microskirts and white blouses came hurrying out the school, giggling and egging each other on. They ducked past the staff-room window and into the back of the Fiesta, which screeched off in a show of burning rubber. The weekend starts here, thought David.

He headed towards the official entrance to the school – a door which no pupils were ever allowed to use – at the front of the admin wing, which seemed a damn sight nicer than he remembered the rest of the school being. He thought again about the school motto – ‘Let us aim for higher things’ – and about how he was here to talk about people doing exactly the opposite, plummeting to deadly depths. It was a black thought but it made him chuckle nonetheless.

He checked in at reception and was quickly met by Mr Bowman, who ushered him along a corridor and up some stairs into the library. Every second of the walk was disorientating, memories of his schooldays rushing back. Over there at the bottom of the stairs was where he was once battered by one of the extended Clarkson clan, essentially for being brainy. Round the back of the cafeteria was where Elaine Mackenzie had agreed to go out with him – a date which ended in disaster when he didn’t have enough money to stand her a bag of chips. Further over in the corner was where he and Neil had raided the tuck shop, making off with pockets stuffed full of Wham bars and Rhubarb and Custards, while over at the other side of the hall was where he had whispered a joke about Davros behind the girl from the year below them in the motorized wheelchair. A few of the memories were good, a lot of them bad, most of them embarrassing beyond words, especially the ones which revealed in spotlight what little shits he and his mates had been for large swathes of the time they spent as teenagers. There was no doubt about it, being back here, haunted by the ghosts of a feral childhood, made him feel mostly ashamed.