Murderers Anonymous (19 page)

'So, jump about a year. We're back in the same place. First time since the last, you know. Sure enough, sitting at the same table as before are this wee lassie and her father. No mum, but there's another bairn this time. Really young, you know, maybe just a couple of months old. Didn't really remember them myself, but Janice recognised them. Course, this time Priscilla wasn't bothering her arse. She was two by then, so she was already getting to be bitter and cynical about the hand she'd been dealt. So there's no smiling going on, but the other wee lassie looks happy enough.

'So I wasn't bothering my backside, but this other bastarding bloke comes up and starts chatting away and all that, you know. Nice as ninepence, seemed like a reasonable bloke. The bastard ends up sitting having a drink and all that, and the wife is quite taken with his latest wean and she exchanges names and phone numbers and all the rest of it, and there you are. A pleasant evening had by all, so you might think. Aye, well right.

'The bastard never phones, of course, and we never phone him 'cause we don't really give a shite. We forget about him, and then, a couple of months later, we get absolutely, sure as eggs is sodding eggs, bastarding shafted up the arse something rotten. A pole-axe up the jacksy. You know what it was?'

He stared at Annie Webster; Billy Hamilton fizzed. So she showed an interest in everyone's story? She put herself about, sold her favours so easily. A week ago he'd thought she might be the one for him. Now what? She was a whore, nothing more. A tuppence-ha'penny bitch; spread 'em and bed 'em. Billy Hamilton viciously rubbed the palms of his hands.

'It was a letter from some big-shot lawyer. Julian Cruikshank to be precise. It was a law suit. This bastarding eejit was suing me and the missus. Well, in fact, he wasn't suing me and the missus, he was suing Priscilla. It seems like the previous time we had dinner, their wee girl had been so besotted with our baby that she'd decided she wanted one of her own. So she went off shagging. She was ten years old, and she went out to get whatever she could find. Got pregnant within a couple of months to some fifteen-year-old hackbut who'd been on the brain transplant waiting list since birth. She didn't know what she was doing – Christ, she was ten years old. However, the minute they find out she's up the duff, the bloke decides it's all our fault since it was seeing Priscilla that made their wean want a baby in the first place. So he sues her. Priscilla. Sure as you like, can't bastarding believe it, he sues our two-year-old girl for undue influence, and for inciting his stupid little shit of a daughter into getting herself up the duff. Absolutely bloody incredible. What a litigious society we live in, eh? Can you believe it, Annie, love?'

She shook her head, and their eyes looked across the few yards of floor and became one.

'That's just weird,' she said.

Billy Hamilton's nostrils flared.

'I mean, to be fair to his missus at the time, she thought he was an absolute Spamhead. She was mad about the whole bloody thing, apparently. And it turned out that ever since they'd learned about their wean, he'd brought her to the same restaurant every night waiting for us to return. Which was why the missus wasn't there, 'cause she thought he was a moron.

'Anyway, some things are stupid, and some things are unbelievably, incredibly, bastarding stupid. That the bastard sued at all was the stupid part. The incredible bit of it was that he won. The court ordered that Priscilla, the now three-year-old Priscilla, had to support this other baby, who was two years younger than her, until she was sixteen. And pay over a hundred thousand pounds' worth of damages to the father for emotional distress.'

'You're kidding!' said Annie Webster.

Tart!
Billy Hamilton wanted to scream.

'If I was, love,' said Sammy Gilchrist, 'I wouldn't be here now. So, you know, I did what any father would have done. I knew the bloke was the driving force behind it all, and that the missus probably wouldn't pursue it if he wasn't around. So, I killed the bastard. Took a day off work, waited for him to emerge from his house in the morning, then knifed the guy in the back, as he deserved.

'So that was that. It was broad daylight, a reasonably busy street. I was caught, slammed in the nick, and the bloke's bastarding wife screwed us for everything we had. Janice was broke, so she buggered off with Priscilla to stay with some cousin in Canada. Divorced me in the nick, married her cousin's ex-wife, one of these weird lesbian things, which I'm not even going to try to understand, and now I see Priscilla about once a year. The only decent thing about it was that the judge could see the sense of my actions, and gave me a pretty skimpy sentence. Got out after a few year, and now here I am. Sad, alone, miserable as a bastarding donkey.'

'You poor thing,' said Webster. 'You poor thing.'

'Aye, well, that may be. Anyway, our lawyers suggested we sued him back. Can't even remember what it was he said we should sue him for, but you know what they're like. Self-perpetuating bastards the lot of them. Turn everything to their favour, to give themselves as much work as possible. He said we should sue the father, the mother, the judge, the jury, and the owner of the restaurant. But I wasn't going for all that crap. I just wanted to get out there and get an old-fashioned revenge. You know ...'

The door behind him slowly opened, and he took his eyes off Annie Webster for the first time in ten minutes and turned and looked as Barney Thomson made his first entrance into the Bearsden chapter of Murderers Anonymous.

Barney stood and stared, feeling nervous. Sammy Gilchrist stared back, as did the others. Billy Hamilton, the self-self-self of Billy Hamilton, wondered if this was the Feds come to bust him. But the man before them clearly did not possess the thuggish confidence of the average copper.

'Barney?' said Dillinger. 'Barney Thomson?'

'Aye,' said Barney. 'That's me.'

Glances were thrown around the room. Not
Oh jings, we have a feverish, rabid serial killer in our midst
glances, however. More of a
Here we go again, another Barney Thomson
sort of a glance, seeing this was the third Barney Thomson they'd had visit them in a year. The hardest looks, however, were reserved for Dillinger, as she would have sanctioned the visit.

'Glad you could make it, Barney,' she said. 'Why don't you come in and take a seat. Sammy's telling his story.'

'Aye,' said Barney. 'Aye, right, no bother.'

And so Barney entered the very midst of the group and took a seat between young Billy Hamilton and Fergus Flaherty the Fernhill Flutist. They all looked suspiciously at him, all except for Annie Webster, who embraced him with a huge smile, realising that this might be her chance to associate with a legend. Or even sleep with a legend.

Barney was embarrassed and wondered, even in his nervousness, if she fancied him. There was a bit of the Sean Connery about him, these days, after all. Billy Hamilton decided that he'd probably kill Barney at some point, although he did not yet know if it would be before or after Sammy Gilchrist.

'Where was I?' asked Sammy Gilchrist, not best pleased by the interruption; not when it was another Barney Thomson. He looked at Annie Webster for a reply, but she was too busy staring at the legend across the semicircle.

Sammy grated his teeth.

'The law suit,' said Katie Dillinger. She'd handled worse than the likes of Sammy Gilchrist in a mildly bothered mood.

'Aye,' said Gilchrist, becoming the second of the coterie to look Barney over with a professional eye. 'The law suit. Christ, I don't know what happened at the time, maybe I should just have sued the bastard. But you know what it's like these days. You can't open a newspaper without seeing the story of some eejit suing some other eejit. A bird suing her ex-husband; a bloke with a bad haircut suing the barber.' Barney winced, decided to avoid eye contact with Sammy Gilchrist. 'Some polis who witnessed a crime suing the chief constable for post-traumatic stress disorder. Surgeons suing health authorities 'cause they're scared of blood, pilots suing airlines 'cause they're scared of flying, priests suing the Church 'cause they can't have sex. There was even one where some heid-the-ba' crashed his motor 'cause he didn't take his cardboard sun protector off the windscreen, then sued because it didn't say you had to on the back of it. It's just bloody stupid, the whole thing. So I thought, well, bugger that, I'm not suing any bastard. It just seemed more honest to knife the guy. No arsing about, just a good old-fashioned stabbing. No shite, no law suits, no ridiculous claims for staggering amounts of cash. Honest.' He delivered the last word with a stab of the finger. Not often that murder could be called honest, but in his case he felt it justified.

It took some of the others back. How honest had they themselves been? And none of them thought of prior misdeeds more than Annie Webster, who was no longer looking at Sammy Gilchrist, or the legend that was Barney Thomson. Instead she stared at the floor and thought of Chester Mackay, among others, and of her miserable past.

'So what now?' asked Katie Dillinger. There was nothing any of them said that could make her review her life. She had heard it all before. 'Why has the lawyer been back in touch?'

'Looking for more money, of course,' said Gilchrist. 'Why else? I mean, obviously I couldn't pay everything I was supposed to at the time. So every time I earn so much as a sixpence, the bastard pops up out the woodwork looking for a hundred per cent share in it. And if he hears of me actually spending any money, he shows up with all sorts of criminal henchmen attached.'

'I thought you'd fixed up some deal from a couple of months back?' said Fergus Flaherty.

'Aye,' said Gilchrist, 'I did. But then last week I bumps into that bastarding woman in Marks and Spencer's in Sauchiehall Street. Had just bought myself a two pound thirty-nine sandwich. That was it. She stops and looks at me, then looks at the sandwich, then bursts out laughing. Laughing! Can you believe it? And so off she trots to her lawyer to tell tales, and the next thing you know I'm getting threatened in the usual manner about how I've obviously got more money than I'm letting on so let's all move along to the nearest bastarding judge.'

A few heads shook around the room. Annie Webster looked upon him with a degree of sympathy once more. Even Barney, who did not know the full details of the story, could see the injustice of it.

'And you know the worst thing. I found out last week that the bloody woman is about to get married again to some rich bastard out Aberfoyle way. I mean, she's probably delighted I killed her husband. The guy was a wank. Now she's just doing me for every single penny she can get, even though she doesn't need any of it. Unbelievable.'

'So why don't you do something?' said Flaherty, an edge to the voice, suggesting exactly what it was that he had in mind.

'I'm going to,' said Gilchrist.

'Fergus!' snapped Katie Dillinger. 'Don't encourage him, for God's sake.'

She looked at Sammy Gilchrist and she knew what he meant to do. And maybe this time she could see the point. When you've lost everything, and the instigator of your downfall continues to kick you when you're down, what other way is there for you to act? What else can you do? When you have nothing to lose, why shouldn't you commit the ultimate crime?

'You still coming at the weekend?' she asked. Their Christmas weekend, and two days in which to achieve salvation.

Sammy nodded. 'Suppose so,' he said. 'If I'm not in the nick.'

She let out a long breath. It was more than just a pointless couple of days away, this weekend retreat. In the past she had saved more than one wayward heart from committing further murder. It was a good opportunity to become more closely involved with her group than the rest of the year allowed. The one time when she could devote full nights to the collective.

And just how far would she be prepared to go during those nights to help Sammy Gilchrist? And if she did everything she could, would there not be others who might fall prey to that bitter bastard, jealousy?

'You've been before, Sammy. It's a good weekend. There are a couple of excellent sessions, you know it can help you. You can maybe do some one-to-one stuff, to help you get through it. You never know. It's only two days away, Sammy, so don't do anything stupid. All right?'