Big Boy Did It and Ran Away (40 page)

To construct a number of these little deathsicles, he enlisted the unknowing assistance of the Sintek lab, on the premise that he was organising a photoshoot to create a new image for a forthcoming trade ad campaign. Columns of metal suspended in ice, representing the oil locked in stone beneath the North Sea, something like that. No bother, they said. They had a freezer capable of rendering temperatures below minus fifty, so they could not only produce what he was requesting, but make sure it would tolerate the hot studio lights for a good while before there was any danger of it melting. Nor was it too much trouble to supply him with a cryogenic flask to transport the slugs in, keeping them immersed in liquid nitrogen.

Covering all the bases, Simon even went to the bother of organising the supposed photoshoot, and it tickled him that Sintek were still using the image in corporate publicity to this day. ‘Unlock the power’ was the slogan.

Simon unlocked the power at dusk on a balmy late‐
summer Sunday evening. As on his reconnaissance trips, he parked his hired car on the other side of the woods, near the on‐
ramp for the eastbound M8, and made his way on foot to the spot he’d picked, overlooking the rear of the dovecot. The crossbow was an appropriately French‐
made Eigle‐
Hawk, capable of firing its bolt at more than three hundred feet per second, and was fitted with a fifty‐
yard parallax scope, through which Simon viewed Frank Morris’s last living movements. The ned emerged from the house as before in the appalling flannel jacket, and showed his true class as he nipped the fag he’d been smoking, popping it into his pocket before approaching the birds. The guy was a millionaire, but was still saving the rest of the dowt for later.

Simon removed one of the deathsicles with a small pair of plastic tongs and placed it into the slide. Having been practising the shot for weeks from various ranges and angles, he had achieved a one hundred per cent accuracy record from distances of less than forty yards, and he estimated his current range at around thirty. However, those figures had been achieved when his hands weren’t sweating or his heart banging like a Lambeg drummer outside a chapel. It wasn’t fear he was feeling, just tension. As he looked through the scope at Morris’s head, there was no moral dilemma, no questioning the path his life might be about to take. His only worry was that he’d miss.

Simon watched him pick up a bird in both hands and lift it slowly to his face. Morris took a deep breath and so did he.

Morris put his mouth to the bird’s beak and blew, remaining motionless, eyes closed, like it was the tenderest kiss between lovers. In that moment, Simon’s heart was suddenly stilled and his hands steadied.

This was his becoming.

Simon pulled the trigger and Morris was dead before he had breathed out. His head jerked once, his arms each gave an involuntary shake, like a marionette, then he fell backwards and the pigeon took flight.

Simon watched him for a moment, lying flat on his back on the unkempt lawn. It looked as though he might spring back up again any second, but for the blood seeping from his eye socket and the twitching of his feet.

He had done it. It was over. And he felt … he felt …

‘Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?’

Was that it?

No swell of emotion, no rush of catharsis, no euphoria, no regret, no revulsion. Just a dead guy on the grass, whom no‐
one had even noticed yet, and the sounds of birds still tweeting among the trees in the darkening twilight.

It wasn’t right. He had been cheated, and the worst of it was, he had cheated himself. Morris was dead, but that was all. He hadn’t known why, he hadn’t known who, and he hadn’t even suffered. He didn’t deserve this instant, clinical, silent death; Simon should have been in his face, pulling his still‐
living brains through his eye socket with a crochet needle, looking him in his good eye and making sure the last words he ever heard were the name of Francois Darcourt.

After which, he later understood, Simon would still have felt the same. It was just another of the many ways in which murder was like sex. All that effort, all that planning, all that panache in going about the deed, but in the end it all leads to one final moment, after which there is only emptiness. It is then that there is some consolation to be had in knowing that you took precautions, so at the very least your sense of anticlimax won’t be compounded by unwanted consequences.

It being his first time, Simon was naturally paranoid about what clues he might have left, what amateurish mistakes he must have made; concerns that were multiplied on the Monday morning, when his boss ordered photos of the murder weapon blown up to poster‐
size for their stand at the forthcoming OilExpo at the Aberdeen Exhibition Centre. But there were no consequences; not legal ones anyway. Only a hollow feeling and the signs of his depression returning, now that his energising project had failed to deliver what he’d expected of it.

He was soon to realise that nothing could have delivered what he’d expected, because his expectations had been unrealistic. What he ought to do was more accurately evaluate what killing Morris had delivered, which was the best few weeks of his life. More immediately, however, he found insult added to his sense of disappointment when he learned from the newspaper that someone else had bagged the credit – and not just the credit – for his work.

‘It is understood by police that Sunday night’s murder of Glasgow gangland figure Frank Morris was ordered by a rival drug dealer. Police say their sources have indicated that there was a contract out on Morris worth as much as £30,000, which is already believed to have been paid to the hitman responsible.’

Incredible. Truly incredible. If Simon had waited another couple of weeks, someone would have beaten him to it and saved him all the bother. It said a lot about what a tinpot gangster Morris was, too. Glasgow was a small place, its underworld even smaller. Morris was bound to have known there was a price on his head; and yet Simon was able to sneak up on him in his own back garden. Typical narrow‐
minded ned complacency. He was safe as long as he was in the Castle, because in front of it was his scheme, his turf, and no enemy would dare try taking him on there.

But talk about fucking cheek! All that effort, all that ingenuity, just for some chancer to say ‘Aye, it was me, big man. Thirty thousand sheets, soon as you like, please.’ The point was, Simon hadn’t waited another couple of weeks and he hadn’t been saved the bother. He had done it himself, and somebody else was coining it in as a result. It was The Arguments and Chambers of Torment all fucking over again. In both those cases, he’d had all the ideas, all the vision and done all the work: taken a bunch of no‐
hopers and moulded them into something they could never have been without him; only for them to enjoy all their success and take all the credit once he was out of the picture.

Well, it wasn’t happening a third time. This was a matter of honour and a matter of principle. It was also, as it turned out, a matter of thirty Gs, and he was fucked if some ned was tucking a greenback meant for him into his Kappa jogging trousers.

The phrase ‘a rival drug dealer’, to anyone who had read a Scottish newspaper in the past ten years, meant Bud Hannigan: another jumped‐
up schemie, but one with sufficiently more brains and ambition to make him a far bigger player than Morris could ever have hoped to be. If it was true that the contract had been redeemed, there was little question it would have come out of his pocket.

He decided to hire another car and take a drive down to see Hannigan at the snooker club he owned, where he was known to hold court of an evening. Simon told the goon on the door he had information that someone was ripping off his boss, but would only divulge exactly what he knew to the man himself. He was patted down for wires and weapons, but the only thing he was carrying was the cryogenic flask and plastic tongs. It was probably curiosity over these that got him an audience, as Hannigan was too important to be entertaining any scrote who walked in claiming to have information. No doubt these were normally paid off by underlings if their gen was up to much, and given a good kicking by the same if it wasn’t.

Hannigan received him from behind a large mahogany desk in his office, a room preposterously lined with oak panelling despite being in a two‐
storey, Trumix‐
and‐
chip‐
board, Seventies‐
built dump. It was like the castle‐
inside‐
a‐
condo from that Steve Martin movie, with the motif Thirties Gangster rather than Medieval Gothic.

‘Mr Smith,’ Hannigan said, without getting up. ‘Common name in my business. What do you have for me?’

Simon opened the flask, releasing a suitably mysterious plume of smoke as the nitrogen evaporated, then removed the remaining four bolts with the plastic tongs. He placed them on the desk, one by one.

‘What are they?’

‘The question is not what are they, but where is the fifth one?’

‘Do tell,’ Hannigan said impatiently.

‘Well, the water part is long gone, but the mercury part is in the Royal Infirmary morgue, being scraped off the inside of Frank Morris’s skull.’

‘What would Frank Morris’s skull have to do with me?’ Hannigan asked, ever the cagey gangster.

‘I could think of thirty thousand things it had to do with you.’

‘I’m sorry, you’ve lost me,’ he said, with the same smug smile he probably turned on for the cops when they asked him questions they both knew the answer to.

‘Sorry to waste your time, then,’ Simon said, picking up the bolts again and replacing them in the flask. ‘I just thought you might want to know about it if somebody had taken you to the cleaners.’

‘I got what I wanted, Mr Smith. From where I’m sittin’ it looks like you were the wan who got taken to the cleaners.’

‘True enough, but it’s not me who’s got a reputation to consider. I mean, I wouldn’t like to think there were people in this city who thought I was fair game to take the piss out of.’

That got Hannigan on to his feet.

‘What do you want?’

‘My money.’

‘You’re talkin’ to the wrong guy, then.’

‘So who should I be talking to?’

Hannigan sighed, thinking it over. He was trying to remain as confidently blasé as before, but it was obvious the insult and the repercussions Simon had hinted at were starting to boil inside. Hannigan looked at the goon who was manning the door, giving him a steady nod.

‘Come on,’ the goon said, taking Simon by the arm and leading him out of the office into the corridor.

‘Wait there,’ he told him, then disappeared back into Hannigan’s absurd oak‐
lined sanctuary. He re‐
emerged after a couple of minutes.

‘Mickey Fagan,’ the goon said. ‘Used to be quite high up in Morris’s crew. Got his jotters for skimmin’ even mair than the other thievin’ wee wanks that work for him. He tell’t us he was gettin’ his ain back, but the fat bastart just needed the money.’

‘I’m not takin’ the piss here, but what proof did he offer before you gave this chancer thirty K?’

‘He was the first to tell us it had happened. We knew before the polis. Mickey said he stabbed him through the eye, oot the back where he keeps his pigeons. Mickey’s still got friends on the crew, obviously.’

‘Where does he live?’

‘Foxhill Avenue, Nettleston. Number ninety‐
eight.’

‘Alone?’

‘D’ye ’hink anybody would live wi’ that fat ugly cunt?’

‘Takes all sorts.’

‘If he’s gettin’ any, he’s payin’ for it. You plannin’ tae drop by?’

‘Briefly, yeah.’

‘Bud says your money’ll be already spent. It’s been a week. Fagan owes a lot of people. Heavy people.’

‘Aye. He owes me. But it’s not just the money I’m bothered about.’

‘Didnae think it was.’

‘Fat bastard, did you say?’ Simon asked, already deciding how this man he’d never met would die within the next few hours.

‘Aye. Greedy in mair ways than wan. Why d’you ask?’

‘I’m going to need some heroin. About three grammes. Pure stuff, not the shite on the streets.’

‘Pure is expensive. Three grammes of pure is very expensive.’

‘I’ll take it off what you owe me.’

The goon gave him a dark grin. ‘Come back here in an hour. What’s your mobile?’

Simon, still running on balls and brass neck, was about to parrot it out automatically when he remembered that he was just a marketing exec playing at being a hitman, and it was the marketing exec’s name and address on the mobile bills.

‘I’ll be back in an hour for the H. I’ll let you know how to get in touch once my business with Mr Pagan is complete.’

Simon thought the bluff sounded confident enough, but was still worried the guy might start laughing at him as he walked away.

‘You know, you don’t look the type,’ the goon said instead. ‘For your line, I mean.’

Simon turned around. ‘And how long would I last if I did?’

The goon delivered on the smack, which Simon tested for adulteration in his car with a bottle of mineral water. Pure heroin dissolves clear and tasteless in cold water; all that nonsense with lighters and teaspoons was only necessary because of the shit it was cut with. The sample was a little cloudy, but was probably about as clean as anyone in this city had ever seen it.

He drove past Fagan’s house to make sure he was home, looking for the light of a TV against the curtains in the drab wee council semi, sitting in a street of identical drab wee council semis, amid a scheme of identical drab wee streets. Having ascertained that the thieving chancer was home, Simon took a detour to a petrol station and bought a cheap baseball cap (mandatory delivery‐
driver attire), then progressed to the nearest Indian takeaway for a curry. He brought the food back to the hire car and opened the tinfoil container on the dashboard, stirring the heroin into the rich massala sauce before replacing the cardboard lid and putting it all back inside the poly bag.

It took Simon three goes at ringing the bell before Pagan grudgingly dragged himself away from Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? and answered the door.

‘Chicken Tikka Massala, pilau rice, keema nan, Bombay potatoes,’ Simon said, holding up the carryout.