Big Boy Did It and Ran Away (39 page)

It wasn’t internationally recognisable, like the Forth Rail Bridge, probably because power stations didn’t sell many postcards; in fact, its existence wasn’t even widely known throughout Scotland, never mind beyond. But once Simon was finished with it, it would be the most spoken place name on every television channel, every radio station and every newspaper on the planet.

After about ten minutes, the backshift’s cars began to leave. There would be eight of them. Simon counted them all away and then picked up his radio.

‘May, this is Mercury. Come in.’

‘Reading you, Mercury, this is May.’

‘Okay, they’re all out. You’ve got two coming your way heading for Crianfada; the rest went off towards Cromlarig. A Ford Mondeo and a Honda Accord. Once they’re past, do your thing. Everybody else, that’s your cue too. Mercury out.’

Simon screwed the silencer on to the end of his pistol, eyeing the security guard’s kiosk. A few moments later, a paunchy old man emerged and ambled lazily across the concrete to the gate.

‘Time to rock’n’roll,’ Simon declared.

Taylor put the Espace into gear and drove the last hundred yards to the entrance, causing the security guard to stop halfway through sliding the gate closed for the night. Simon got out and walked towards him, hailing him with a wave.

‘Can I help you?’

‘Aye. Would you mind holdin’ on to these for me?’ Simon said, producing the gun from behind his back and shooting the guard twice in the head. ‘Cheers.’

The man had barely hit the ground before Taylor was out of the Espace, pulling polythene from the backseat to shroud him in. Simon slid the gate open again before bending to retrieve his spent shells, while behind him Taylor rolled the corpse on to the sheeting. Taylor lifted the body into the vehicle, leaving a few drops of blood glistening on the tarmac underneath. They each grabbed a handful of earth from the landscaped flower bed next to the booth, sprinkling it on the ground to absorb the moisture and cover up the stain.

Murder, concealment of the victim and removal of evidence: it was all over in less than a minute, expertly and emotionlessly executed. Simon felt nothing, not even excitement. Well, perhaps a frisson, but nothing compared to what was to come. When you knew you were about to fuck a girl six ways from Sunday, the first grope of her breast didn’t really set the heart thumping, did it?

Not like it did when that was all you knew. Not like it did the first time.

Revenge, they said, was a dish best served cold. Simon would concur, having burned his mouth on his first home‐
cooked effort, which had been thoroughly overheated but still half‐
baked. It was a recipe etched in bile and marinated in poison, a naive attempt to sate a craving that could never know satisfaction if it was fed for a thousand years. Trying to stem an anger like that with one death was like trying to drain the ocean with a sponge.

What restitution could possibly be enough for the death of his father once he knew the hideous truth behind it?

Simon had always understood the symbiosis between the simultaneous failings of both his father’s health and his father’s business; the vicious circle of debt, stress, illness, absence and further debt. But what he only learned at his dying mother’s bedside was that all of it had been precipitated by some wee parasitic ned who was mercilessly bleeding Darcourt’s Brasserie for protection money. His father had requested that Simon never find this out, due to his shame at facing death in failure and ignominy, not wanting to pass such a psychological debt on to his son as an inheritance. Simon’s mother, however, told him she felt guilty that Simon had been forced to sacrifice his aspirations so young in order to bail her out, and was aware how miserable his life in Aberdeen was making him. Her growing fear was that he was nonetheless inheriting the legacy of failure his father wanted to save him from, but because of what he didn’t know, rather than what he did.

‘I don’t want you to think your dreams can only end in failure because of what happened to your dad,’ she said, before telling him the truth.

Frank Morris was the cunt’s name, at the time just another of the pitiful apologies for gangsters Glasgow had to put up with; guys who’d last less than a day in a real underworld, and whose vision barely extended beyond their postal district. He ran protection rackets on half the restaurants in the city (or more accurately half the non‐
Chinese restaurants, as they had their own breed of leeches), and attached himself to Darcourt’s when his dad moved the brasserie from where it started on Victoria Road to a larger prime site on Sauchiehall Street.

Simon’s dad had arrived from France in the Fifties, with just the shoes on his feet and the promise of a chef’s job at the Central Hotel. He worked his arse off and saved every penny until he was able to open a place of his own, and built up his business from nothing over almost thirty years. Frank Morris took less than eighteen months to demolish it.

The protection payments started off huge and got bigger. His dad worked harder to keep up, but according to the first rule of protection rackets, the more money he made, the more money Morris took. In attempting to stay afloat, he pushed up prices, which drove away custom; he laid off staff, which meant service was poor; and he was forced to cut corners in the kitchen, which quickly destroyed the place’s priceless reputation. Three decades of excellence, three decades of skill and endeavour, all eaten away in no time by this piece of council‐
scheme trash and his team of wee hard men.

Because of Frank Morris, his father had died broke as well as broken. Because of Frank Morris, his mother had to face cancer without the companion she most needed. And because of Frank Morris, Simon was stuck in Aberfuckingnowhere, whoring for Sintek Energy, instead of lying in an LA hotel suite, watching some blonde groupie lick coke off the end of his dick after a sell‐
out gig at the Hollywood Bowl.

After his mother’s death, Simon found himself descending into the darkest depression of his life, consumed by thoughts of anger and frustration, compounded as he learned how much kinder the fates had been to Frank Morris over the intervening years. Having already exerted a grip on the city centre’s entertainment sector, he’d been well placed when the drug trade moved from the housing schemes to the nightclubs during the 1990s. It was said by some that he was seeing a slice of every fourth Ecstasy tablet consumed in Strathclyde region; others said every second. And he ran it all from his ‘Castle’, a detached sandstone villa on the periphery of the Marylea housing scheme where he had grown up.

Simon entertained revenge fantasies, naturally, but these only served to reinforce the sense of hopelessness that must have tinged his father’s humiliation. He was an oil‐
biz marketing exec. What the hell could he do to a drugs baron, even if it was only an ageing, neddish, Glasgow one?

His mum had wanted to save him from thinking that his dad’s failure had been his own fault. His dad had wanted to protect him from knowing that he’d been brought to his knees by a wee lowlife he was powerless to fight back against. Both had done so because they didn’t want this knowledge proving a psychological hindrance to the pursuit of Simon’s own ambitions, but it was already too late. His dad’s legacy of debt had banished him to the northern wastes, and by the time his responsibility to his mother was finally lifted, the damage was long done. He was stuck in a wage‐
slave job, watching his life trickle away, and he couldn’t act against the man responsible because he was too intimidated, just like his father before him. His inheritance was therefore complete.

The greatest insult, and surely the one that had stung his father all the way to his grave, was that all of this should be visited upon him by a piece of scum not fit to look him in the eye. Frank Morris was a nothing, a wee toley shat out of an alcohol‐
and‐
nicotine‐
ridden whore of a mother, raised on chip fat and superlager in some council‐
scheme gulag. Anybody can be a hardcase when there’s a whole team of you picking on one guy. Simon’s father was a thousand times the man Morris was, and Simon dearly wanted to prove it.

So dearly, in fact, that it reached the stage where he could barely think of anything else, until one evening, sitting in the life‐
sapping traffic, he asked himself what was really stopping him? The answer, he realised, came down to two fears: death and prison.

Yeah, he thought, what a towering threat: to lose everything he had now. Would killing Morris really be worth sacrificing this idyllic existence?

It was a moment of absolute liberation, when he understood the true value of the choices before him; understood, perhaps for the first time, that he had choices. Even consumed by grief and anger, he had been ready to accept that there was nothing he could do, there was nothing someone living this suburban suit‐
and‐
tie life could do, because people like Morris existed in a different world, beyond the people carriers and the privet‐
bordered concentration camps.

But there was something he could do. He could kill the bastard. If that was what he really wanted, he could kill the bastard. If he was a better man than Morris, and of that he had no doubt, then he could find a way, no matter what the guy’s reputation and no matter how many knuckle‐
dragging neds were under his command.

His depression lifted immediately, leaving his mind like a clear‐
blue dawn after a month of storms. When he woke up each morning, he found himself springing out of bed, powered by the energy of suddenly having a purpose to his life after so many sleepwalking years. Unfortunately, he still had work to go to, but it was a lot easier to get through the days when there was something else beyond them other than the slow drive home, a microwave ready meal and a couple of hours’ mindless telly before bed. Besides, his job was to prove invaluable in realising his plan, devised after several weeks’ research and a couple of weekend reconnaisance trips to Marylea.

The point of greatest vulnerability, he was quickly able to identify, was ‘the Castle’, Morris’s solid stone edifice of self‐
congratulation. The proud old building had stood there for decades before the council planners decided to infest the surrounding area with the vermin decanted by Sixties inner‐
city slum demolition, and the rat colony that was Marylea had gradually expanded to encroach upon it. Morris had grown up there, and, like all the other wee urchins, came to regard the house as the last word in grandeur, unaware that their very presence was decreasing its value at the rate of the altimeter on a nose‐
diving jet plane.

When he made his grubby little fortune, instead of shipping out to Milngavie or Eastwood like the rest of the nouveau‐
riche schemies, Morris bought the home of his pitifully limited dreams (after sufficient vandalism and intimidation forced its previous owners into an unplanned sale). Not for him the upmarket neighbourhood and the veneer of respectability down at the local golf club. He was a ned to the last, and wanted to live in ‘the big hoose’ overlooking the Marylea estate, so that the scum he came from among could see him as the lord of the manor, king of the castle.

The rear of the property backed on to woods, affording some privacy in marked contrast to the uninterrupted view the front offered to the nearest rat‐
cages sitting across Marylea Road. The back garden was where Morris liked to relax by spending time with his pigeons, accommodated in a large dovecot that ran almost the length of the back fence. Everybody’s hobbies seemed silly to the uninitiated, but this one had to be among the daftest. The things didn’t even race. The ‘sport’, if you could call it that, between competitors was for your own birds to seduce someone else’s back to your dovecot, whereupon they became your property until such time as their fickle affections were bought by still another flea‐
bitten doo.

Morris was said to be out there every night, talking to and preening his favourites. Simon’s reccy trips to the woods behind the Castle bore this out, each occasion witnessing Morris stand at the dovecot, holding birds in his hands and, bizarrely, putting his mouth to their beaks and blowing until they puffed up like feathered beachballs. Morris was a scrawny, scruffy little man, wearing a hideous and manky old flannel jacket that presumably had some kind of effect on the birds, because no‐
one above the gutter would even approach the thing without tongs. He looked somehow too small to be all the things he had come to mean to Simon, but that merely served to underline the insult that had to be corrected. This little prick looked like he ought to be cadging the money for a tin of Special Brew in George Square, and yet he had ruined the lives of everyone in Simon’s family.

A rifle would have been easiest, but not ideal, as such weapons could be as difficult to get hold of as they were easy to trace. Noisy, too, unless he could acquire a silencer, something else to put him at the mercy of another crook who could pass on what he knew to the cops or the gangsters, whoever he most needed to keep sweet.

He remembered that during their uni days the little drummer boy had been part of an archery club. Simon’s contention that such weapons were obsolete had kicked off a discussion about the stealth factor and their possible use in the perfect crime. The LDB’s idea for an untraceable murder weapon was a crossbow bolt made of ice, fired through the eye into the brain, as the shot would be silent and the evidence would just melt away.

The flaw, as far as Simon could see, was that unless the shot was perfect, the ice would shatter if it met any substantial resistance. He also remembered reading about a hunter in the States getting a real, steel‐
tipped bolt through the eye but still surviving, having been lucky about which part of his brain it embedded itself in. Simon knew he would only get one shot at this, so he couldn’t afford any such margin of error. The method, however, had a lot to recommend it, crossbows not being so difficult to come by; and while the purchase could still theoretically be traced, that would only happen if the police had a clue what the murder weapon had been.

Simon’s solution was a variant on a technique already well known to the sniping assassin. While hollow‐
pointed bullets had been used to maximise damage since their spectacularly effective introduction by the British Army at Dum‐
Dum in India, an even messier effect was to be had by filling the cavity with mercury. What happened was that, upon impact, when the bullet itself slowed, the mercury didn’t, instead exploding forward and outward with devastating consequences. A shaft of mercury suspended in ice would have the same effect on Morris’s brain as bunging it into a Moulinex, as well as allowing for silent delivery and leaving no explanation as to how it got there.