A Taste for Malice (16 page)

‘Thanks for your concern, Alessandra. But everything is fine.’

‘Aye. Right.’ She doesn’t look convinced. ‘You’ve really not been the same since you came back to work.’

I look at her, quietly stunned.

‘You haven’t. Not really. Oh, you do the jokes and the banter as well as the rest of us…’ She looks deep into my eyes, ‘but it’s like you’re …oh, I don’t know…there’s an edge to you, Ray. Even more so than before.’ She stops and looks away at a space somewhere over my left shoulder. ‘Sorry,’ she is now looking at her feet. ‘I’ve said too much.’ She turns away. Then turns back.

‘You’re not over all of that …’ she waves her hand in the air at some nebulous object, ‘stuff yet.’

I’m doing the thousand yard stare. I can feel her eyes on me but I don’t want any sympathy.

‘How do you use this thing?’ I hold the camera out.

‘Give it here.’ She takes it from me. Presses a few buttons. ‘It’s good to go, Ray.’ She holds it before me. ‘All you need to do is aim and press here.’

‘Thanks.’

‘Ray, should you…’

‘I need to be doing something, Alessandra.’ My face is burning as I unlock my car door and take a seat. I brush off feelings of guilt that bunch in my shoulders. Daryl and Alessandra will be in the firing line for my behaviour. Again. I drive away.

The first address is just off Paisley Road West. This Lucy should be coming home off her shift soon. I wait just down the street from her house trying to look as inconspicuous as a man can who is hiding in a car with a digital camera.

It’s a good job that I have a purpose or I would be out of the car and pacing. Peters is bound to go up the line. What will the big boys do with me? The worst they can do now is pension me off.

Get a friendly doctor and have him report that due to stress I am unfit for duty. Maybe they’ll just ignore me? Yeah, what are you worrying about, McBain? Maybe they’ll just let me continue with the administrative duties. Mind you, with Peters on my case that is highly unlikely. He’ll be in Chief Superintendent Hamilton’s office right now bending his ear, telling him what a flake I am.

A woman is walking up the street. She looks like she is in her mid-forties. She is short, two-stones overweight and carrying a bag of shopping. I’ve worked out that I won’t know who the right woman is until she has entered the path to her home and by that stage it will be too late. So I’ll have to take the picture of every woman who walks up this street, watch which door number she approaches and then delete the wrong ones. I’m hoping that this doesn’t take too long. There’s a Neighbourhood Watch sign on a couple of the houses and they’ll soon realise that this is a stranger’s car. The act of using a camera will also set off a few alarm bells. Luckily with a digital, the photographic action isn’t so obvious.

Woman number one goes to door number 81. I want door number 85.

A tone sounds from my mobile phone. I’ve got a text. It’s from Daryl. I’ve to come in and see Hamilton. I reply that as soon as I’m finished I will do so.

He replies that Hamilton wants me to drop everything and come back to the office immediately. I switch my phone off and on again. It’s a shame that the service to my phone in this area is so patchy.

I’ve now been here twenty minutes, taken another four photos and deleted them all. I’ve had another text from Daryl. He told Hamilton I’m driving on the way back to the office and that’s why I am not replying.

The next woman is of average height and build. She has a child with her, a girl of around ten. The woman’s face is etched with strain. The girl is skipping, she knocks into the woman and earns a rebuke. I’m no lip-reader but that was a fuck that was aimed at that wee girl. I take her photograph and hope she goes into 85 and then proves to be the one. In fact I want to get out of the car and throw a few swear words at her.

I hear a knock at my window. I turn in my seat and as I do so I roll my window down.

‘Whit do you think you’re doing, mate?’ An old man says. He has a full head of white hair and is wearing one of those cardigans that they must dish out to Scots men who reach seventy-five.

‘I’m selling double glazing,’ I open the car door and get out.

He measures me with a frank stare. Here is a man who sees it as a virtue to protect his neighbours.

‘Double-glazing my arse,’ he says and sticks a finger in my chest. ‘You’re one of they paedophiles. I saw you taking a photo of that wee girl. I’ve just phoned the police and given them your registration number. So you better piss off, pronto.’

‘Away and check your colostomy bag, auld-yin and give me peace,’ I snarl in his face. He backs off spluttering with righteous fury, then turns and wags a finger at me before going into a house. My attention has already returned to the woman I last aimed my camera at. Yes.

She has gone to the right door. I climb in the car, switch on the car engine, put on my seat belt and prepare to face the music.

Chief Superintendent Hamilton is on my office. Sitting in my seat.

I move towards the same side of the desk as him. I’m thinking that this will be a less adversarial stance to take. He’s not having it and points to the seat on the other side of the desk.

‘Sit.’

Like a good hound I do as I’m told. I open my mouth to speak, but decide against it and close it again. He leans forward so that his elbows are on the desk. He picks up one of my pens. Clicks up the nib. Clicks it shut again. Puts the pen down.

‘I’m actually speechless, DI McBain.’ He cocks his head to the side in the way a dog might do as it looks for understanding. ‘Speechless.’

I lean forward in my seat. ‘Sir?’

‘Just let me get this straight,’ he fiddles with the cufflink on his right sleeve. ‘You’re just back from … three months was it?’ He doesn’t wait for me to confirm. ‘And you are ordered to keep a low profile. What do you do? You trick a young, gullible officer into handing over a semen sample. You make an official visit to a woman who has written more letters to the Chief Constable than the other eight hundred thousand Glaswegians put together. You forget to go to your meeting with a counsellor, which I might add was a condition of your continued service.’ I cringe. Shit. I had forgotten about that. ‘You insult and demean a colleague who tries to help you. Then when I order you to come back to the office you ignore me. And don’t try to tell me the service was poor on your mobile. Don’t kid a kidder, DI McBain. And then we have the icing on the proverbial cake when an active member of a local neighbourhood watch scheme phones in your car registration and claims the driver is taking photographs of young girls.’ All the while he is speaking I watch his face. His nostrils are dilated and the lines round his eyes are tight with the effort of keeping his voice low. ‘Is there any part of this list of actions that might come under the heading of keeping a low fucking profile, Ray?’

‘Sir, there is a crazy woman out there hurting kids. We’re just beginning to get somewhere.’

‘Ah, yes. I forgot about that. You also enlist the help of a couple of your colleagues. Putting their coats on the same shuggly peg as yours.’

There are times when you just have to take the hit, when you have to brace yourself and let the boss ram his indignation up your arse. I chew on my frustration knowing that a huge well of anger is close to boiling over. I study the backs of my hands; trace the line of my veins with my eyes. Keep it down, Ray. Keep calm and let the moment slide.

‘In any case, both of them have been re-assigned. They are on the Kay …’

‘You have got to be fucking kidding me. A dead accountant is more important than a…’

‘McBain, how dare
you
speak to me in that manner.’

I can hear my breath as I exhale through my nostrils in an attempt to keep control.

‘Think about it, Ray.’ He thinks I’m under his thumb now; he’s going for a more conciliatory tone. ‘Would the Browning case ever make it to court? What do you have? A mother’s paranoia and a nasty bedtime story from a child. You have nothing, Ray. Nothing.’

‘Sir, there is a child out there in danger.’ I stand up.

‘Forgive me for thinking that a policeman’s job is to protect the more vulnerable members of our society.’ I’m at the tipping point. There are times when you take the bullet and there are times when you say fuck it.

‘Do not presume to tell me what our job is. A big part of our job is to follow orders. A part that you seem to struggle with.’

‘This is shit. Total fucking shit.’ I am shouting now and I don’t care. ‘This is all about politics and it stinks. The press are all over this gangster’s dead son and the suits are shitting themselves. Let’s fend off some media headlines rather than actually save some lives, why don’t we?’

‘McBain. Sit down and shut the fuck up.’

‘How dare you speak to me like that? What crimes have you actually solved in your career, Hamilton? You get a degree, take a march up the ladder and think that makes you a policeman. You’re an administrator. Away and do some filing and leave the police work to those who know what the fuck they’re doing.’

‘McBain, that’s enough. You’re too much trouble. I don’t want to see you in this office again.’

We are both standing now. Toe to toe. Snarling in each other’s faces. I want to hit him. I swear I want to bury my fist in his stomach. It’s this realisation that calms me down. Without another word I walk out of the room.

In the corridor, I hear someone’s feet hitting the floor as they chase me.

It’s Daryl. He pulls on my arm so that I am facing him.

‘Ray, what the fuck are you doing?’

‘I’m going to the off-licence and I am going to get shitfaced, rat-arsed, deep in the gutter drunk.’

I feel almost untouched by memories of my father, as if they originally belonged to someone else and they became mine in the telling. He was a tall man, with a dark bush of hair and my adult mind translates his physical slightness as the thinness of an addict.

There were times of absence and times when he filled my world with his presence. His voice was deep and warm and I was fascinated by the way his adam’s apple would bob up and down in his throat as he read to me at bedtime. He read from the classics, running his vocal chords across the words of Stevenson and Dickens. Jekyll and Hyde was a favourite of his. Perhaps he saw the parallels between the desperate pain Stevenson’s character doled out to himself and his own attraction to the bottle.

He’d start off a happy drunk, dancing and singing, throwing me in the air and I was a boy flush with the warmth of his father’s attention. Perhaps Mum felt left out as Dad’s focus was on me. Her smile would grow brittle and crack, falling off her face in shards sharp enough to lacerate as they fell around her feet. Then she’d throw accusations at him like lances. Sentences calculated to maim.

The fights could go on for days, or so it seemed to me. When my father picked up a can of beer for his breakfast, my mother would pick up the threads of last night’s fight and weave them into a fog of reason my father could not see through. He was no match for her. His replies, even to me, sounded like faint efforts at vindication. I remember hiding behind a piece of furniture while they roared at each other. From my viewpoint all I could see was my father’s foot, part of his leg and a hand flexing in and out of a fist. Eventually when he ran out of words he walked out.

His disappearances lasted longer than the fights and while he was gone my life was filled with the soft, supportive tones of women. I wanted the growl and rasp of a man’s vocals to circle the air above my head. While he was away I remember being in an agony of waiting until my mother slapped me into the moment.

‘Go out and play,’ she’d say. ‘Uncle Joe’s coming over for his tea and he doesn’t want a wee boy running around and tripping him up.’ I remember a series of silent men coming to visit. In my mind they all share the same face and they all look at me for the shortest of moments and then turn away as if I hurt their eyes. What was the purpose of these men’s visits? As a child I didn’t think it strange that mum had a lot of men friends, at least it made her happy. She always had a smile for a day after each visit and there was always fresh, not tinned food on the table for a couple more. Until once again she stiffened with loneliness and her face creased into furrows of worry.

Once I remember being in bed for three days following a visit from father. It was like I was sickening for his return. Mother’s slaps didn’t work and, desperate for a reaction, she told me he had died. She immediately recanted when she saw the look of grief on my face.

I allowed her to cajole me back to life and pulled my body from the blankets. While I dressed I asked myself which parent I should hate the most.

I name emotions as I recount this time, but it’s the adult who has spliced them into memory. The child wears a distance from them like a shield. One thing I am certain of is the cause of all this pain was alcohol. This was reinforced by the nuns at the convent orphanage who wasted no time in telling me what a sodden drunk my father was and how he had run my poor, sainted mother into an early grave. They then went on to prescribe my future with a harsh tone and with the certainty of an oracle.

‘Mark my words, Ray McBain, one day you’ll turn out to be a worthless drunk just like your father.’

All this goes through my mind as I stand at the supermarket till waiting to be served, a month’s worth of booze in my trolley. I have locked myself on to a course of action and I can no more turn back from it than I can halt the moon’s slow slide up into the night sky. I know I am fulfilling the potential as passed on to me by my father, but reason and emotion have fled into that corner of my mind, behind the shields I built as a boy.

‘Having a wee party?’ the till attendant chirrups. I ignore her and place the bags of bottles back in my trolley.

At home, it takes two runs from the car and up the stairs to my flat to empty the boot. I’m on the second run when I sense a presence at my elbow. It’s Maggie. From her face she knew what to expect and doesn’t react to the clink of the bottles as I continue to walk.

‘What do you want?’ I am gruff with the need to be on my own. I all but march upstairs.