Big Boy Did It and Ran Away (19 page)

‘Perhaps the printer’s shop was closed when he went to pick up his little cards.’

‘Don’t take the piss, Enrique. It’s a fair question.’

‘I know, but it’s one I cannot answer.’

‘Okay, so here’s another one: don’t you think a civil airliner was a bit ambitious for our boy at that stage of his career?’

‘Ambition is not something he has ever lacked. But by that I take it you really mean it may have been too great a task for someone … inexperienced in his profession.’

‘Pretty much.’

‘That one I can answer. Firstly, we do not know how much or how little experience he had, even by that stage. But as regards the difficulty of the task, I see that as barely relevant. It is you who imagines it as difficult, while nothing has distinguished the Black Spirit’s deeds more than his ability to make them easy for himself. Without knowing precisely how that plane was destroyed, we cannot tell how simple a task it may have been for the destroyer.’

Angelique shuddered as she put the phone down, the ramifications of Enrique’s argument starting to course through her like nerve poison. He was right. She had imagined blowing up a plane to be enormously difficult, willingly seduced by the reassurance of X-ray machines and metal detectors. Airports had more security than any other transport terminus, arguably more than any public place, but she was beginning to wonder whether that really meant anything, whether it mattered. London was one of the most security‐
conscious cities she had seen, but she now knew that the Black Spirit could strike there without setting foot in the place.

There were locations that she had perceived to be well‐
guarded and others that she considered vulnerable, based as much upon conditioning as knowledge or experience. The Black Spirit was aware of those perceptions, aware of how many people held them, and aware of why. But most crucially, he was aware of how to exploit them.

She looked at the bottle on the window‐
ledge, thinking how she would welcome even the annoying gags bound to accompany its opening come Sunday night if it confirmed the week to have been a complete write‐
off.

‘May you live in interesting times,’ was an ancient Chinese curse. The people pictured in the file, lying in the rubble, the people on flight 941, the people in that Strasbourg pile‐
up, they all knew what it meant. Right now, boring sounded pretty good. Paranoid fantasists, stolen fertiliser and Barrhead farmyards sounded pretty good.

McIntosh walked over to her desk, carrying a slip of paper, which he placed down in front of her.

‘This guy called while you were on the other line there. A Sergeant Glenn from over on the Southside. I said you’d give him a ring back.’

‘Cheers.’

Glenn. The apologetic duty sergeant who’d reported the alleged shooting. Probably phoning to say the bloke had bubbled and they were charging him with wasting police time. She wondered whether they could get Thaba for that, posthumously.

She dialled the number.

‘Aye, hello DI de Xavia, thanks for gettin’ back to me. It’s ehm … we’ve had a few reports come in since I spoke to you, folk getting up and finding things, you know?’

‘What things?’ she asked, stifling a yawn.

‘Eh, well, couple of cars on Sinclair Drive had windows shattered. One had the windscreen and rear‐
left side window broken, the other front‐
right and rear windscreen. Owners never heard anything, just spotted the damage when they went out to go to their work this morning. We’re assuming it was last night. And, eh …’

He sighed, much as he’d done earlier, wishing he didn’t have to say whatever he was about to.

‘A wee wummin in Cartvale Road, corner close, a Mrs McDougall. Eh, apparently her budgie exploded last night.’

Angelique burst into laughter, unable to help it. It was the tension from Enrique’s file. Oh, who was she kidding. It was hilarious under any circumstances.

‘Her budgie exploded? Has anyone claimed responsibility?’

Glenn laughed too, but there was a weariness about it, and an impatience that she wasn’t sure she liked. Impatience meant there was more.

‘Naw, she didnae phone us at the time. Didnae phone the vet either, I don’t imagine, from what I’ve heard. Poor wummin got a hell of a fright. She’s a widow, lives on her own. Got her daughter to come round and stay. It was the daughter that noticed it this morning.’

‘Noticed what?’

‘A hole in the window, level with the cage. And another one in the wall behind it.’

Angelique had a feeling this wasn’t going to be funny any more.

‘Thing is, I’ve plotted the locations on the map, and you can draw a straight line from Mrs McDougall’s through those two cars. Know where else it goes through if you extend it?’

‘I think I can guess.’

‘The bridge to Kintore Road, where Raymond Ash said he was shot at. The times match too.’

‘I’d better have a word.’

‘You’ll understand if I’d rather not be the one who brings him in.’

‘Sergeant Sarcastic was on duty last night, then? Don’t worry, I’ll have him picked up.’

‘He’ll be at Burnbrae Academy.’

‘Thanks,’ she said.

Thanks an unflushed bog‐
full.

‘Sir, this Bottom bloke, he’s a bit of an arse, is he no’?’

Oh God.

Ray thought he had dodged a bullet when he spotted an empty desk where Jason Murphy should have been seated. The class wasn’t short of headbangers, but that particular one had proven the most adept at playing to the gallery, and was high on the list of suspects for originating last week’s ‘big wullie’ conspiracy, whereby half the class submitted crudely drawn dicks instead of essays. Thinking back to his undergraduate career, there had been a few times when Ray might as well have done the same, given the marks he got from certain of the more curmudgeonly professors.

The hardest part had been stopping himself from laughing, exacerbated by the almost critical need for something to put a smile back on his face. It seemed a waste to have to suppress it, especially with the weans all having gone to so much trouble in pretending to look busy while they worked on their individual contributions. The sketches themselves couldn’t have taken more than a few seconds, each being the classic line‐
drawn cartoon knob with the mandatory spunk‐
blobs firing out of the top. It was unlikely to be the last time he’d set a composition assignment and get a pile of wank in return.

With the Laughing Gnome AWOL, he thought he might have a better chance of exerting some kind of control, via the recommended expedient of allocating them each a named role and letting them do horrible things to Shakespeare. That way, they tended to concentrate on when their own next line was coming up rather than how they might next disrupt the lesson, though he was kidding himself if he thought it aided their absorption of the text by somehow animating the drama. What was it Olivier used to say? You’ve never truly experienced the Bard until you’ve heard Renfrewshire teenage sub‐
literates monotonally stumbling over their stanzas in between scratching their sprouting pubes and flicking rolled‐
up snorters at each other.

It was going well for a while too, until Ray discovered that there was something worse than a classful of thirteen‐
year‐
old ignorami‐
with‐
attitude; and that was one thirteen‐
year‐
old with attitude and half a brain. Usually the ‘brainy wans’ tended towards the reserved, either through actually having some central‐
nervous‐
system activity to process incoming information, or through the ostracism that stemmed from placing some value upon your own education. According to Ray’s colleagues, there were a few others whose fear of the latter made them play dumb when they were far from it, but nobody had warned him about the unstable cocktail of contradictions that was Ped Brown, recently returned from the school football team’s trip to Gothenburg. He was one of those man‐
boys that seem to tower above their classmates during that randomly unfair staggered‐
start phase of pubescent growth, and as such could apparently flaunt his intelligence without fear of anybody giving him lip. As captain of the Under‐
14s, he was also about as likely a candidate for ostracism as an umbrella salesman on the day it rained shite. Unfortunately, this developing body and mind were nonetheless thirteen years old, same as the others, and Ped found it just as rewarding as his classmates to rip the pish out of his teacher. The difference his having half a brain made was that he was extremely good at it.

‘Sorry, sir, I meant to say “ass”.’

‘Of course you did, Peter. Which means you’ve read on a bit further than the scene we’re at just now.’

‘Saw the film. Her oot Ally McBeal was in it, supposed to be in the buff but you never saw nothin’.’

‘I know,’ Ray agreed regretfully, before remembering where he was. ‘Ehm, Calista Flockhart was in it, yes.’

‘He is an arse though, is that no’ the point?’

More laughter from the chorus. The comedic magic of the word ‘arse’ would never die as long as there were authority figures there to frown upon it.

‘I thought we’d agreed on ass,’ Ray said, trying the disingenuous‐
clarification tactic to avoid acknowledging a moral ruling on the word either way.

‘Naw, I mean he’s a balloon, an eejit. He gets on everybody’s tits.’

Christ. Further hilarity. The king of comedy, Arse, is dead. Long live Tits.

‘Calista Flockhart hasnae got any tits,’ observed one of the girls, who going by her own build was basing her scorn entirely upon optimism for the near future. Maybe she’d a big sister and knew what she was looking forward to.

‘You’re absolutely right.’

‘Who? Me or Carol?’

‘Both, but Peter’s observation was more pertinent. Bottom is an eejit. He’s over‐
full of enthusiasm but has absolutely no awareness of his own limitations.’

‘Like Robbie Williams,’ offered someone in the second row. Ray couldn’t remember all their names, but Gary sounded about right.

‘Shut it you, Robbie Williams is brulliant,’ came an impassioned retort from the distaff side, sounding like she was prepared to back up her opinion with weapons if necessary.

Ray had to close this one down before it degenerated, which would have to be at the price of not congratulating Gary for an inadvertently superb casting suggestion. Robbie Williams could have been born to play Nick the Weaver; just as long as he didn’t bloody sing.

‘Bottom acts like an ass, and that’s why he is later turned into one, as we’ll find out if we read on. Kylie, I think it was your line.’

‘Who am I again?’

Jesus.

‘Hermia.’

‘Sir, was he not turned intae an ass because of Nob and Tit?’

Right. Now it was as bad as it could get, and not just because he was going to have to perform CPR on those members of the class currently approaching asphyxia. The precocious bastard had obviously caught a documentary called Within a Dream, Within a Play, which went out on Channel Four about a month back. Ray had been marching up and down the living room with Martin at the time, but from the subtitles he had gathered that the programme was exploring the psychological and mythical aspects of the play in the context of various noted productions. Nob and Tit had been nicknames for Oberon and Titania, dating from an allegedly more innocent theatrical age, though it was difficult to accept that anything to do with those characters was ever less than charged with sexual significance. That, in fact, was the aspect Ped was now unavoidably going to bring up. The odds of him having watched the documentary all the way through were long, but if he had, it was evens he’d remember one particular fact.

‘’Cause, you know the expression “hung like a donkey”? Is it no’ that Oberon wanted him changed intae an ass so that Titania would, you know …’

God in Govan, was Buffy not on that night or something?

‘What, Peter?’ Ray asked brightly. ‘Shag him? Are you insinuating, perhaps, that Shakespeare was aware of the ass having supposedly the stiffest phallus of the animal kingdom and that it was a kinky prank on the part of Oberon to have his mischievous minion Puck bewitch Titania into taking this creature as her lover?’

There was complete silence throughout the room, but for the sound of pages turning as some of the weans tried to find the bit he was talking about. Ped thought about it, calculating how best to handle the situation now that his adversary was effectively cheating.

‘Eh, aye.’

‘Well you are one hundred per cent correct. This entire play is, yes, about sex. Look at the setting: it’s the night before a wedding celebration, for God’s sake, so humping is high on the agenda, but it’s not just any night, it’s Midsummer’s night, the numero uno pagan fertility rites shagfest on the calendar. As well as Theseus and Hippolyta, you’ve got the four horny and confused young lovers who get drawn deep into the dark forest, which is itself frequently a metaphor for what, Peter?’

‘Eh …’

‘Come on, it’s a bit late for getting coy on me, and I know you know the answer, ’cause I saw the programme too.’

Ped swallowed.

‘A fanny?’

‘Very good. And once inside they become the playthings of Puck, also known as Robin Goodfellow, also known in myth as the Green Man of the forest, the Green Man being a pagan symbol of fertility, fertility being, in other words, Peter?’

‘Shagging.’

‘That word again. And the lord and lady of this arboreal realm are, as you informed us, Nob and Tit, who are having a bit of a tiff because Titania has been concentrating her devotions on an adopted child, with what frustrating consequence for Oberon?’

Ped was beaten to it by Gary.

‘He’s no’ gettin’ his hole, sir.’