A Slim Chance
A Midnight Eye File
By
William Meikle
I smoked too many cigarettes, sipped too much Highland Park and let Bessie Smith tell me just how bad men were.
For once thin afternoon sun shone on Glasgow; the last traces of winter just a distant memory.
Old Joe started up “Just One Cornetto” in the shop downstairs.
I didn’t have a case, and I didn’t care.
All was right with the world.
I should have known it was too good to last.
I heard him coming up the stairs. Sherlock Holmes could have told you his height, weight, shoe-size and nationality from the noise he made. All I knew was that he was either ill or very old; he’d taken the stairs like he was climbing a mountain with a Sherpa on his back.
He rapped on the outside door.
Shave and a haircut, two bits.
“Come in. Adams Massage Services is open for business.”
At first I thought it was someone wandering in off the street. He was unkempt, unshaven, eyes red and bleary. He wore an old brown wool suit over a long, out of shape cardigan and his hair stood out from his scalp in strange clumps. I’ve rarely seen a man more in need of a drink.
Or a meal.
He was so thin as to be almost skeletal, the skin on his face stretched tight across his cheeks. I was worried that if I made him smile his face might split open like an over-ripe fruit.
“Are you Adams?” he said as he came in. He turned out to be younger than I’d first taken him for, somewhere in his thirties at a guess, but his mileage was much higher. “George at the Twa Dugs said you might be able to help me.”
I waved him in.
“It’s about time George started calling in some of the favors I owe him. Sit down Mr…?”
“Duncan. Ian Duncan.”
He sat, perched at the front of the chair, as if afraid to relax. His eyes flickered around the room, never staying long on anything, never looking straight at me.
“Smoke?” I asked, offering him the packet.
He shook his head.
“It might kill me,” he said.
I lit up anyway… a smell wafted from the man, a thick oily tang so strong that even the pungent Camels didn’t help much.
Time for business.
“So what can I do for you Mr. Duncan?”
“I’m being terrorized,” he said. “I need you to make it stop.”
I stared back at him.
“Sounds like a job for the Polis to me,” I said.
He laughed, making it sound like a sob. He took a bundle of fifty pound notes from his pocket and slapped them on the table. I tried not to salivate.
“No. This is no job for the terminally narrow-minded,” he said. “I need somebody with a certain kind of experience. Your kind of experience.”
Somebody put a cold brick in my stomach, and I had a sudden urge to stick my fingers in my ears.
I got the whisky out of the drawer. I offered him one.
He shook his head, but his eyes didn’t stray from the bottle.
I poured his measure into a glass alongside my own and sent them chasing after each other before speaking.
“And exactly what kind of experience do I need to help you?”
A good storyteller practices his tale. At first, when he tells the story, he sounds like your dad ruining his favorite dinner table joke for the hundredth time.
Oh wait... did I tell you the horse had a pig with him?
But gradually he begins to understand the rhythm of the story, and how it depends on knowing all the little details, even the ones that no one ever sees or hears.
He knows what color of trousers he was wearing the day the story took place, he knows that the police dog had a bad leg, he knows that the toilet block smelled of piss and shit.
He has the sense of place so firmly in his mind that even he almost believes he's been there. Once he’s done all that, he tells the killer story, complete with unexpected punch line.
Then there’s the Ian Duncan method… scatter information about like confetti and hope that somebody can put enough of it together to figure out what had happened to who.
I raised an eyebrow, and that was enough to at least get him started.
“It was four months ago. There were six of us then, and it started as a dare. One of those Comic Relief shows was coming up, and we decided to go on a diet for charity. That first week we lost six pounds between us… at least, the five guys did. Wee Annie Gardner struggled though. She just couldn’t take to the exercise and… ”
I coughed politely.
“Is there a point to this Mr. Duncan?”
“I need you for protection,” he said quietly. “Protection against what’s after me.”
It was my turn to sigh.
“And just what is after you?” I asked. “Some big dog? Or a Glesga heavy with an axe maybe?”
The fear lay big in his eyes.
“It’s worse,” he said. “Much worse. Three of my friends died recently. And I might be next,” he said.”
“Tell me,” I said softly.
He started to cry in that holding-it-all-in way kids do when they’re trying to be brave.
His shoulders heaved and tears ran down his cheeks.
Then he really frightened me. He started to wheeze, struggling for air.
He doubled over and broke into a coughing fit so strong I thought his lungs might come up.
I poured a glass of whisky and held it out to him, having to place it in his shaking hand.
He downed it in one. The coughing stopped. But the fear was back in his eyes as he stared at the glass.
“I thought it was water,” he whispered.
Something stronger than just the wind rattled my window behind me.
“Please? I thought it was water,” he shouted. He got out of the chair so fast that it fell with a bang on the floor.
I stood, unsure as to what to do next.
I wasn’t given an option. The window behind me blew in with a crash and a spatter of glass. I felt something grab me at the back of the neck, and my head was thrust down, hard, against the side of the desk. The corner caught me near the right eye. Blood spurted as I fell away.
Duncan screamed.
I tried to wipe my eyes clear. I was partly blinded by blood in one eye, and my sight was blurred but I could make out enough to know that something large and white crouched over the man.
What the hell is that?
Duncan stopped screaming and went quiet. The only sound was a moist sucking like a wet fart. I wanted to stand up straight but my head had other ideas and the room spun until I steadied myself with a hand on my desk.
Now even the sucking noise had stopped.
I looked up as the out-of-focus white thing bounded off Duncan and came towards me.
I just had time to duck as it leaped over the desk like a pony taking a jump.
By the time I’d turned it had gone out the window.
My sight cleared… enough that I was able to pick my way through the shards of glass on my way to the window.
I looked out, but there was only the usual Glasgow skyline.
Duncan lay still on the floor. I staggered to his side. His eyes stared up at me from a face that had dried out like an old raisin left in the sun.
He was dead and already going cold.
I lifted the money from the desk and, closing the door quietly behind me, went to work.
***
My first stop was the Twa Dugs. I told George what I needed and he gave me an Elastoplast, a beer and his promise that he’d get the mess cleared up.
“How did he find you?” I asked George as I sipped at the beer. The urge was to knock it down and get started on the next, but Duncan had laid his money down. That bought him my attention, for a while at least.
George shrugged.
“How does anybody find me? You ken what this town is like.”
I knew only too well.
Everybody knows everything when there’s money involved and nothing when there’s Polis in the frame.
I thanked George for the beer and headed for the Mitchell library.
I thought I’d had a headache to start with, but two hours at the microfiche taught me the real meaning of the word.
But I found what I was looking for. Anne Gardner, 31, from Clarkston, was found dead in her flat on the twenty-second of February.
The cause of death was listed as starvation but the Procurator Fiscal had delivered an open verdict…
she’d been perfectly fit and healthy the night before, and had been seen tucking into a few beers and a curry in a restaurant off Sauchiehall Street.
I found out more than I needed to know about her from the tabloid reports of her death, but I also found out where she had worked.
The office was in the old Merchant area in the town center.
Not that many years ago this had been a place of dark dank tenements with hookers on the corners and winos in the alleys.
Now it stood as a shining market of consumerism with Italian clothes shops, coffee bars and chrome and glass offices for people in expensive suits.
At this time of night it was mostly shut and locked down.
What the suits didn’t know was that the winos and hookers hadn’t gone.
They’d just changed their shift patterns.
Down in the alleys at night the waste from the rich became the tit-bits of the poor as scavengers raked over the detritus of the day.
Nothing really changes.
The security guard at Carnegie Towers wasn’t keen on me until I showed him the quarter bottle of whisky I kept in my coat for such occasions. That loosened his tongue, and a fifty from Duncan’s pile made sure it stayed that way.
“I didnae ken the Gardner lassie,” he said. “But I was there the nicht the other two got deid.”
I handed him the bottle and let him talk.
“Everybody knew about the diet team,” he said.
“They were making fools o’ themselves in the wee gym downstairs every night.
Thirty and forty year old men trying to be boys again, and failing.
The lass dying put a wee bit of a dampener on them for a while, but a couple of weeks later they were back at it as bad as ever.