The Chessmen (15 page)

I borrowed Tuckfield’s phone and listened as the number rang unanswered at the other end, until Donald’s messaging service kicked in. There didn’t seem any point in leaving a message. When I hung up I saw murder in Roddy’s eyes.

I tried to be the voice of reason. ‘Now look, Mr Tuckfield, you know why we were late. We saved a man’s life tonight. And we gave you an extra hour of our time to make up for it. Now, we’re not unreasonable people. And I’m sure you’re not an unreasonable man. So we’ll just go and pack up the van, and wait out front. And when you decide you’re going to pay us, we’ll shake hands, and say no more, and be on our way.’ I paused. ‘And if you don’t . . .’ I could feel Roddy’s eyes on me, wondering what was coming next. ‘Well, you can stay in here and rot. I’ve driven two hundred and fifty fucking miles to get here, and I’ve another two hundred and fifty fucking miles to get home, and I’m not fucking leaving till I get my fucking money.’

I wasn’t one to swear much, although Mr Tuckfield wasn’t to know that, but Roddy did. And as I strode back out to the van, with Roddy almost running to keep up, he said, ‘Maybe you should be our manager, Fin.’ I just gave him a look.

We were packed up and ready to go shortly after midnight. Mairead and the other members of the band who travelled in the car wanted to go, leaving me and Roddy to deal with Tuckfield.

But I was adamant. ‘No. We all stay, or we all go. And if
I go without being paid, this is the last gig I drive for you people.’ And they knew I meant it.

So we stood around outside at the end of the pier, smoking, wrapped up in coats and scarves, listening to the sea washing up against the stanchions below us. The streetlights of the town, rising up across the hill beyond the promenade, twinkled in the dark. But the good people of this once popular holiday resort had long since gone to bed, and the houses that lined the hillside stood in darkness. The rain had stopped, but everything was still wet, reflecting street lamps and stars.

I didn’t know how long Tuckfield was prepared to stay in there, but I was ready to sit it out till the following morning, if necessary. By one o’clock the others were getting restless.

‘Come on,’ Strings said. ‘This is pointless. Let’s go.’

Roddy was shaking his head slowly, almost like a man in a trance. He muttered, very nearly inaudibly, ‘This is the end for Donald fucking Murray. He’s finished. Finished!’

All the lights around the pavilion went out, plunging the end of the pier into darkness. Everyone was suddenly alert. Almost at the same time, the distant wailing of a police siren drifted to us across the night, and I turned to see the blue light of a police patrol car heading down the hill towards the front. It was no surprise when it bumped across the promenade and headed straight up the pier towards us.

‘Jesus!’ Rambo said. ‘He’s called the cops.’

I felt indignation welling in my chest. ‘So? We haven’t done anything wrong.’

But as it turned out, the cops weren’t interested in us. The patrol car drove straight past, swerving into a sideways skid on a handbrake half-turn, and coming to a stop right outside the main door. A white-faced Tuckfield emerged, quickly locking the door behind him, and jumped into the back seat of the police car. The car revved and spun its back wheels, and sped off along the pier.

For a moment we all stood watching in disbelief.

Mairead sat in the front seat of the car, face pale and angry, like a full moon reflected on the windscreen. Roddy and Strings were in the back, Roddy sitting side-on, with his legs out of the open door. I don’t really know what possessed me, but anger rose in me like overheated milk and I jumped behind the wheel of the car and started the engine.

‘What are you doing?’ Roddy shouted.

‘Just shut the door!’

He barely had time to get his legs in and pull the door closed before I had spun the car around to accelerate hard along the pier in pursuit of the police car. ‘For Christ’s sake, Fin, you can’t go chasing the cops!’

I saw Strings’ frightened-rabbit face ballooning into my rearview mirror. ‘Jesus, Fin, you’ll get us all arrested.’

I said nothing, and as I pressed my foot to the floor in an attempt to close the gap on the blue flashing light ahead of us, I was aware of Mairead turning to look at me. But she never said a word.

The police car slewed across the promenade and turned south towards a collection of fairground attractions shuttered up for the night. The driver ran a red light, and turned
up the hill. I could feel the tension in my own hands as I spun the wheel and followed. There were no other vehicles around this early in the morning.

At the top of the hill the police car turned right then dog-legged to the left, and I felt my tyres sliding on the wet surface of the road as I followed, losing control for just a moment before finding grip again and picking up speed. I was almost hypnotized by the blue flashing light dead ahead, without a single thought of what on earth it was I might do if and when I caught up with it. But we were gaining on it, and the tension being generated by the others in the car was almost tangible.

Suddenly the brake-lights of the car in front filled our windscreen, blurred and dragged across it by the wipers. I stood on my brakes, feeling the car drifting beneath me, swinging left, and then right as I pumped the brake for grip and swung the wheel one way then the other to right the skid. We stopped, I think, within six inches of the rear bumper of the police car.

There was an almost collective exhalation of relief from Roddy, Strings and Mairead, and I sat clutching the wheel, breathing hard. For what felt like an inordinate length of time nothing happened. Both cars sat there, one behind the other, engines idling.

I could see Tuckfield’s frightened face, half turned to peer back at us through the dark. Nobody moved. Nobody spoke.

Then the driver’s door of the police car swung slowly open. A goliath of a uniformed police sergeant stepped out
on to the street, pulling on his cap and tugging its shiny peak down over his eyes. He stood for a moment glaring at us, then walked slowly towards my side of the car, one hand on his hip, the other touching the handle of the baton that hung from his belt.

I wound down the window as he leaned in to peer at me. His face was impassive, and his dark eyes flickered first towards Mairead, and then Roddy and Strings in the back, before returning to me. I could see a shaving of ginger hair around his head beneath his cap. ‘Are you in the band?’

‘I’m the roadie.’

He nodded and took a black notebook and pen from his breast pocket. He reached past me and handed it to Mairead. ‘My daughter’s got your CD. I figure she’d love to have your autograph.’

Mairead gave him one of her smiles. ‘Of course.’ She took his notebook, found a blank page and signed it. She glanced over her shoulder. ‘Do you want the others?’

‘Are they in the group?’

‘They are.’

He nodded, and Mairead handed his notebook back for Roddy and Strings to sign. Roddy reached over my shoulder to give it to me, and I handed it back. He returned it to his breast pocket, then focused his glare on me once more. To my surprise he thrust his big hand through my window.

‘I’ll shake your hand, son.’ For a moment I couldn’t bring my arm to move, before suddenly it reached up, almost involuntarily, for my hand to be gripped by his. A warm, firm handshake, that he held for what seemed like an eternity.
When finally he returned it to me he said, ‘You’ve got some fucking nerve, boy, I’ll give you that.’ He paused to draw a long breath. ‘Your story had better be good.’

So I told him. He stood and listened in silence, his slow, stertorous breathing pulsing out clouds of misted breath to swirl around his head. When I had finished he nodded and drew in his lips. ‘Well, I’ll tell you, son. And here’s the thing.’ He nodded towards his car. ‘Mr Tuckfield there has friends in high places. And I’m just doing what I’m told, no questions asked. So whatever the rights or wrongs of what’s gone down here tonight, you’ll be going home without your money, and damned lucky not to be spending the night in a police cell.’ I could have sworn then that there was a smile in his eyes that he was doing his best to conceal. ‘In all my years in the force,’ he said, ‘I have
never
been chased in a police car. And I’m damned sure it’ll never happen again.’ He flicked his head back down the hill towards the seafront. ‘On your way.’ He leaned down, then, smiling past me at Mairead, and tapped his breast pocket. ‘Thanks for the autographs.’

We sat in silence and watched as he got back behind the wheel of his car and drove off into the night. I could see Tuckfield’s smug face grinning back at us. I wound up the window and Roddy said, ‘Donald’s fucking dead!’

I never was party to exactly what transpired between Roddy and Donald, but within the week the band had fired him and signed up with an established London agency. And while Donald’s career and life then went into free fall, Amran’s
fortunes soared. They made several television appearances, and Roddy and Strings were commissioned to write a song for a Hollywood movie being shot in Scotland. The producers liked it so much they asked the band to write and record all the incidental music, which then became the basis of their next album. The subsequent success of the film led to even greater success for Amran. The song was released as a single and shot straight into the charts at No. 1, where it stayed for almost five weeks. By the time their next CD was in the music stores, they were riding high on what appeared to be an unstoppable track to the top.

Except that Roddy, for all his talent and all his ambition, never lived to see it.

I remember that it was the following summer, June or July, when I heard. I had got drunk the previous night, on the rebound from a relationship of several months, and ended up in the bed of a girl I’d met at a party. She was a student, living in a bedsit in Partick, on the downmarket edge of Glasgow’s west end. I didn’t wake up till ten or eleven, pretty hungover and with very little recollection of what had passed between us the previous night. She didn’t even seem familiar to me as she leaned over the bed and shook me gently awake.

‘You told me last night you roadied for Amran,’ she said.

I could hardly open my mouth, it was so dry. ‘So?’

‘Roddy Mackenzie’s the keyboard player, right?’

‘Jesus Christ, what about it?’ I screwed up my eyes against the light.

‘It’s all over the morning news. Apparently his plane went missing somewhere up the west coast yesterday evening. Search and rescue have been out all night. They’ve given up hope of finding him alive. They’re just looking for wreckage out at sea now.’

The wind buffeted and bullied Donald and Fin as they walked down through the dying light towards Port of Ness, and Fin told Donald about the discovery that he and Whistler had made that morning. The street lamps were already on, all the way along to the big white house at the end of the road. They turned off before then, opposite Ocean Villa, and followed the winding band of tarmac down to the harbour. Lobster creels were piled up against the inner wall of the jetty. There had been some repair work done where the weather had wreaked its damage. But the far wall, standing against the furious assaults of the north-easterlies, was smashed beyond any redemption. Fin had seen waves fifty feet high breaking over it when he was a boy, white spume rising twice that height, to be whipped away by force-ten gales and carried off across the cliffs.

Tonight, with the wind blowing from the south-west, the harbour was relatively sheltered, although the few crabbers tied up within its walls were rising and falling on the swell, and tugging determinedly at their ropes. When they reached the end of the jetty wall, Donald cupped his hands around a cigarette and made several attempts to light it.
When finally he did so, the smoke was whipped away from his mouth. ‘I still find it hard to believe that he’s dead. Even after all these years.’ He shook his head. ‘Everything about Roddy was larger than life. His talent, his ego, his ambition. Talk about blind ambition! That was Roddy. It consumed him to the point where nothing else mattered. Where he couldn’t see the hurt he was inflicting on the people around him.’

‘People like you?’

Donald flicked him a look. ‘I didn’t kill him, if that’s what you’re thinking.’

Fin laughed out loud. ‘Donald, I never thought for a minute that you did. Whoever killed him could fly an aeroplane and land it on water. Even if you could fly, in those days you were in no state to ride as much as a bicycle.’

Donald looked away, clenching his jaw. It was not something in which he took pleasure of being reminded. ‘He cut me loose without a word, Fin. There was no contract with the band, then. Just trust. And he betrayed that trust. The first I knew about it was when I read in the
NME
that Amran had signed with the Copeland Agency in London. They had some tie-in with CAA in Los Angeles, and that’s what brought Amran the film deal.’

‘Maybe you hadn’t been doing a whole hell of a lot to earn their trust, Donald. Or advance their career.’

Donald pulled on his cigarette and shook his head sadly. ‘Oh, I know. I was an ass, Fin. In almost every possible way. I did things, said things in those days that . . . well, that I
still can’t forgive myself for. It fills me with shame every time I look back on how I was.’

‘I’m sure God knows it was just a passing phase.’

Donald’s head snapped around, anger blazing in his eyes. But all he said was, ‘Don’t be so cynical, Fin. It’s ugly.’

Fin said, ‘So you never actually had it out with him face to face?’

Donald sucked more smoke into his lungs. ‘Never. I probably deserved his anger, though he never had the guts to face me with it. But it was me who got them that first recording deal, Fin. They would just have been another university band otherwise, all going their separate ways when they got their degrees.’ He flicked his cigarette away into the wind. ‘When they signed for Copeland it was the beginning of the end for me. I got the boot from the Joey Cuthbertson Agency not long after that. Went down to London. But that was just tipping myself out of the wee frying pan into the big fire.’ He snorted his self-contempt. ‘Addictive personality, you see. Never could resist a temptation.’ The same addictive personality, Fin thought, which made him cling now to his religion. And then Fin heard the irony in his chuckle. ‘Strange that it was Catriona who proved to be my salvation. Or, at least, a drunken night of unbridled passion and unprotected sex that got her pregnant. There’s nothing like having responsibility for another life to make you start caring about your own.’