One Fine Day in the Middle of the Night Read online

  ‘I was doing interviews, like you asked,’ he said breathlessly. A couple more fugitives scrambled out the doorway and into the yard, one muttering something about ‘fucking mad Irish bastards’.

  ‘I was filmin’ McKelvie. He were carryin’ in a crate, and I got him to talk to the camera a little, you know: name, experience, bit of background. Anyway, another of the Irish blokes must have overheard. McWatt, his name was. He come up to me and asks – fuck’s sake!’ Glover flinched as another shot tore through the corrugated wall, leaving a hole less than six inches above his head. Dawson slapped a mag into his pistol and slid the bolt. Connor pulled his own handgun from the back of his trousers, a relief as it had been no friend to the palinodal sinus he’d been inadvertently cultivating between his arse-cheeks.

  ‘He asks whether the guy I’d been talking to was Antony McKelvie,’ Glover continued. ‘I goes: “Yeah, mate, d’you know ’im?” Cunt says, “Sure, he shot my fuckin’ cousin”, then walks up behind him and blows the back of his fuckin’ ’ead out through his face. So McKelvie’s mate, Dailey, or Mailey, or whatever the fuck his name is, he sees this and has a shot at McWatt. Then McWatt’s mucker joins in as well and suddenly it’s the fuckin’ OK Corral in there.’

  Dawson glared at Connor, who thought for a brief second about shooting him rather than suffer the inevitable onslaught of withering remarks.

  He signalled to Pettifer, the last of the evacuees. ‘Who’s left in there?’ Connor asked.

  ‘Dunno. There was one or two stranded in the crossfire, I think. Apart from that, just the shooters.’

  ‘Right,’ Connor said, standing up and flipping off the safety as five more rounds were loosed inside. There were times when death seemed preferable to sheer embarrassment.

  He dived through the doorway into a practised roll, righting himself against an empty water-storage tank. None of the gunmen was in his line of sight, and presumably not in each other’s either, given the temporary lull in firing. From where he squatted, he could more clearly see McKelvie’s outstretched arms a few yards in front and his brains another few feet in front of that. It was a profligate waste of talent. He’d have McWatt’s balls in a blender for that. Just beyond the cerebral purée, Jackson was lying flat with his arms around his head. He noticed Connor and gestured with his empty hands that he didn’t have a weapon, the look in his eyes communicating further that Connor was a considerable distance from his good books at that moment.

  ‘Yeah, okay,’ Connor mouthed, tutting. Why was everything always fucking his fault? He took a deep breath. ‘All right, this is Connor,’ he called. ‘Cease firing and safety your weapons now. That’s a fucking order.’

  Four bullets drummed into the side of the water tank in instant reply.

  ‘I mean it,’ Connor shouted. ‘Anybody fires one more round and they’re off this team. We’ve got a job to do here – a very lucrative job, I’d remind you – so put your bloody toys away and save your parochial tantrums for your spare time.’

  This time there was no hot-lead riposte, which he took to be an encouraging sign. ‘Come on, guns on the floor, now. Throw them into the middle, there, where Mr Jackson is waiting patiently to collect them. Then we can all walk outside and cool off. DO IT!’

  There followed an age of silence, throughout which Connor tried not to think of phrases like ‘Hume-Adams’, ‘decommissioning’ and ‘Dayton-style peace agreement’. Eventually, a Glock came arcing from the shadows and landed next to Jackson, kicking up a foot-high spray of dust. The motes continued to swirl in the sunlight and silence as the weapon waited for a companion. A Nagan clattered into it a few seconds later, in a Nobel Peace Prize kind of moment. Finally, and with more than a suggestion of begrudging defiance, a Browning automatic was lobbed accurately at Jackson’s head. With the safety still off.

  The Browning discharged a shot into the dust, inches from Jackson’s right temple, causing him to howl in pain and spring reflexively on to his knees, holding a hand to his ear. Blood was trickling out of it by the time the first of the shooters edged tentatively from the shadows. It was Mailey, his hands held either side of his face, his eyes looking to the doorway for assurance that someone was coming in to mediate. Dawson, Pettifer, Glover and others quickly took position around him, while at the other end of the cattleshed, several more men moved swiftly inside to circle McWatt and his fellow loyalist, who turned out to be Kilfoyle.

  ‘All right, children,’ announced Dawson acidly, ‘I want everybody’s firearms on the floor over there and I want all of you standing to attention in three seconds. Everybody,’ he repeated, coldly eyeing a few who hadn’t grasped the newcomer’s role in proceedings. Guns began thudding into the dirt amid a grumbling spate of sighs, shrugs and ‘fuck’s sake’s. Dawson gestured to Connor to collect them, doing so with an I’ll-see-you-about-this-later headmasterly glower.

  ‘And you’ll get them back when you’ve learned how to play with them properly,’ he continued. The disarmed troops eyed Connor balefully as he marched past their dishevelled line, carrying their beloved playthings outside in a wooden box. Dawson began to address them in parade-ground register.

  ‘For those of you who don’t know, my name is Finlay Dawson. I am the man ultimately in charge of this operation, which means in short that I and only I tell you who to kill and when. What you do in your own spare time has nothing to do with me, so if any more of you feel like killing each other or indeed killing yourselves, you’re perfectly free to do so when your shift finishes tomorrow morning. But right now, it’s office hours, got it?’

  There were a few grudging ‘yes, sir’s, their lethargy causing Connor to wince. Dawson was used to a degree more effusiveness, his man-management style being based on somewhat hierarchical principles.

  ‘Okay, which one of you is McWatt?’ he enquired casually.

  McWatt lifted a hand shiftlessly. Dawson took a step towards him and shot him through the forehead.

  Kilfoyle made a lunge for Dawson but found himself nose-to-barrel against his automatic.

  ‘What’s this one’s name, Mr Connor?’ he barked.

  ‘Kilfoyle.’

  ‘Kilfoyle. Well, Mr Kilfoyle, is there any business between yourself and Mr Mailey that you feel can’t wait until after office hours?’

  Kilfoyle swallowed. ‘No,’ he said, his word barely a whisper.

  ‘No what, Mr Kilfoyle?’

  ‘No, sir,’ he corrected, his would-be defiance wilting predictably in the heat of Dawson’s unflinching stare.

  ‘Stand down,’ Dawson told him. Both men took a step back. ‘All right, now that everybody’s “on-message”, perhaps we can get on with unloading the gear. Then, if we pull that off without any further casualties, we’ll maybe move on to the challenge of an inventory. And if we complete that mission successfully, who knows? I might even progress to debriefing you on this evening’s itinerary. But let’s not get carried away with our ambitions, given that fatality-free freight-loading proved beyond us at the first attempt.’

  Connor chose this moment to step in and attempt to recover some remnant of authority. ‘Dobson, Fleming,’ he ordered tartly. ‘I want small arms and ammunition in that corner. Pettifer, Jardine, all explosives over there. Quinn, McIntosh, comms equipment—’

  ‘What about the bodies, sir?’ asked Glover.

  Dawson intervened before Connor could speak. ‘Messrs Mailey and Kilfoyle will place them in the truck once it’s been emptied. We can’t bury them around here – we’ll dispose of them later.’ The pair moved off towards their respective fallen comrades, but Dawson stopped them. ‘No. Back you come. Mr Mailey, I’d like you to take charge of the late Mr McWatt, and Mr Kilfoyle, I’d like you to look after the late Mr McKelvie. If you both pay close attention to the state of the bodies you’ll observe that Catholic or Protestant, a bullet to the head has much the same effect. On you go.’

  ‘What was that?’ Connor asked him. ‘Your attempt at reconciliation?’

  Dawson tutted
. ‘Merely reminding them they’re both on the same side today, seeing as this esprit de corps you were waxing lyrical about has manifestly failed to materialise. Never mind esprit de corps, even plain old mercenary materialism seems beyond these morons. I just hope the rest of your shower turn out to have some idea of what they’re doing. Especially as we’re now two men down.’

  ‘Well you’re the one who shot McWatt.’

  ‘And if I hadn’t, Mailey’d have popped him, first chance he got. Then Kilfoyle would have popped Mailey, and so on. There are more nationalists here, aren’t there?’

  Connor nodded reluctantly. ‘Different faction. Can’t remember which one. But they didn’t get involved back there, I hope you noticed.’

  ‘Yes, but that’s because they’re used to shooting at people who can’t shoot back.’

  Connor had had enough. This prick had breezed in at the eleventh hour needing his help, after all.

  ‘Look, Finlay,’ he said angrily. ‘Don’t fucking kid yourself that I don’t know exactly how many options you’ve got right now. What else are you going to do, eh? Who else are you going to go to? You came to me looking for an outfit, and I got you one. So it’s not been a dream start this morning, so fucking what? Don’t judge me on one screw-up, and don’t judge these guys until you’ve seen what they can do.’

  Dawson shrugged. ‘It’s a fair point, Bill,’ he said patronisingly. ‘Consider my judgement “reserved”.’

  Arsehole.

  Dawson walked off to talk to Jackson, who was squatting on the ground, still holding his ear. Connor headed for the door, reckoning a dose of fresh air was in order if he wasn’t going to punch somebody. He passed Kilfoyle, who was crouched between McKelvie’s corpse and the crate he’d been carrying when he got shot. He was staring at Dawson with emotions not too different from Connor’s own. The Ulsterman looked like he’d dearly love to have his gun back.

  ‘Save it till after payday, pal,’ Connor advised, checking his stride and moving to one side as Pettifer and Jardine approached from the truck, supporting a cumbersome box between them. He noticed Kilfoyle reach a hand into the broken crate and pull some polystyrene shapes from it, staring fixedly at what was beneath. Suddenly unfixed, Kilfoyle pulled out the rocket launcher that had been contained within, momentarily eyeing the tailfins and hefting it to his shoulder to point the other end directly at the man who’d executed his comrade.

  There were several shouts in that moment as Kilfoyle pressed the button, all but two of them too-late warnings to Dawson and Jackson to get out the way. Of the two dissenters, one was Connor’s too-late warning to Glover to get out the way, having noticed that Kilfoyle’s tailfins were in fact forefins and that therefore the launcher was back to front. The other was Glover going ‘Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!’ as the rocket hit him in the chest, picked him up bodily, flew him thirty metres across the yard and detonated against the concrete wall of the barn opposite.

  Connor ran uselessly after him. He made it through the gaping doorway in time to see Glover’s head and arms fly off in different directions, and a few seconds later for his sautéed insides to pay their due respects to the late Isaac Newton.

  Dawson was so intent upon getting to Connor to express his disgust that he almost forgot to stop and shoot Kilfoyle on his way past.

  09:09 kilbokie brae return of the mac

  Former Lothian and Borders Police Inspector Hector McGregor took a deep, satisfying breath of the Cromarty Firth air and looked at his watch, which told him he was officially about ten minutes into his retirement. He hadn’t actually worked a shift for three weeks, but that had, strictly speaking, been holiday time, most of it spent organising and executing his and Molly’s move from Islay. Yesterday had been his last day of paid leave, and he’d toyed with considering himself a gentleman of leisure as of tea-time then, but an August Saturday at nine had sounded far, far more satisfying. Somewhere in Edinburgh right now, a copper was turning up to start that shift, with the Festival in full swing, Princes Street mobbed, and Rangers due at Easter Road.

  The morning was cool and clear, with a warmth in the wind that seemed to promise the sun would get stronger and that a hot summer day was in prospect.

  Lovely.

  Perfect, in fact. Another half an hour’s brisk walk and he’d be at the kitchen table, enjoying one of Molly’s no-holds-barred fry-ups, before deciding how to spend the rest of this momentous day. A leisurely eighteen holes, perhaps, or possibly a seat by the water, meditating in anticipation of the unmatched pleasure of a tug on his line; perhaps even phone his brother-in-law in Portmeddie, see if he was taking his boat out later. Or maybe he’d just sit on his arse in the sun-trap back green, pipe in one hand, can of export in the other, contemplating the fact that if anyone in the vicinity decided to do something unpleasant to anybody else today, it was no longer any worry of his.

  The smell of pine filled his nose, the twitter of birds his ears; that and the wind the only sounds to be heard, it seemed, in the whole world.

  He was due this. Christ knew he was due this.

  His posting on Islay hadn’t turned out to be quite the peaceful valedictory sinecure he’d hoped. First of all, there’d been that horrible stooshie over the wifie in Ballygrant with MS who was growing her own cannabis in her greenhouse. Having spent three decades policing a city whose name had become synonymous with heroin and AIDS, McGregor’s perspective on both drugs and disease had prompted him to be forever too busy to investigate rumours of something that seemed common knowledge throughout the island and something no-one in the community wanted to make a fuss about. Even the occasional pointed suggestion that it was ‘a helluva big greenhoose, right enough’ remained insufficient to pique his professional curiosity, until a ‘concerned citizen’ made a formal complaint and he was obliged to take action.

  The concerned citizen, a Mr Charles McGinty, was not in fact a resident of Islay, but owned a holiday home there, which he visited most weekends. Through a telephone call, he furnished McGregor with the information not only that Stella McQueen was growing cannabis for personal use, but also that she was selling the excess to the island’s impressionable youngsters.

  When he arrested her, the whole thing turned into a three-ring media circus, with reporters, photographers and news crews descending instantly on the place, closely followed by a waftingly stinky mob of longhaired protesters in the most life-endangeringly ramshackle convoy of motor transport outside of a Mad Max picture. The dictaphone-and-flashbulb brigade only tarried long enough to interview Stella and file their ‘senseless victimisation’ stories, buggering off again before the real senseless victimisation began.

  The crusties kept pelting him with lumps of rancid bacon (him being a pig – ho fuckin’ ho), which he thought might have more usefully been fed to the diseased-looking mutts that followed them around. Some farmer friend of Stella McQueen (McGregor had no witnesses, but everyone knew fine who it was) sprayed slurry all over the front of his wee station in the middle of the night, and he was even hit with the time-honoured jobbie-inside-a-blazing-newspaper-left-on-your-doorstep routine. Time-honoured it may have been, but when the bell rang and he opened the door to find flames licking his trousers, he automatically began stamping on it – in his bloody slippers – before remembering.

  As if that wasn’t enough, he also had the islanders on his back, complaining about the mess and general nuisance the crusty encampment was causing, and practically a pitched battle on his hands when the locals decided to confront the visitors over whether Jock Gibson’s missing sheep and the barbecue they’d had the night before might be in some way related. Having been thus aggravated by the indigenous population, the crusties rightly anticipated that the most damaging response would be to announce their intention to stay even longer. McGregor successfully persuaded them otherwise using a phoney ferry timetable, with which he pointed out that if they didn’t piss off on the next boat they were going to be marooned there during Glastonbury.

  Nobody said t
hank you. In fact, the only civil gesture he received came in the form of a cake baked and sent to him by, of all people, Stella McQueen, with a note to say sorry for all the bother he’d had. He and Molly polished it off between them for dessert, and very tasty it was too, but he did begin to fear the worst a wee while later when he realised the pair of them were laughing away at an ITV sitcom. Stella sent another note the next day to tell him exactly how much gear had gone into the cake, her idea of a practical joke. At least someone on the island still had a sense of humour. That sense of humour was doubtless painfully tested when the less-than-understanding sheriff imposed a custodial sentence, but for McGregor at least it seemed to draw some kind of line under the matter.

  Being in jail – on top of being in a wheelchair – meant Stella McQueen therefore had a stoater of an alibi for the night Charles McGinty’s house had all its windows shot out by an estimated three hundred rounds of ammunition, evidently intended to harm more than just glass. Traces of blood were found in several locations along a trail leading from McGinty’s back garden to the Kilchiaran road, despite the inhabitant himself not being injured in the attack. This tended to suggest one of his would-be assassins had come to some harm, but Mr McGinty was unable to furnish McGregor with any explanation as to how this might have come about, nor why the policeman had found a number of spent shotgun cartridges around the premises’ back door.

  It was around this time that McGregor discovered his concerned citizen to be better known around Glasgow as ‘Mad Chic McGinty’, currently holding the strongest hand at the West of Scotland’s drugs-and-doings table. He’d grassed up Stella McQueen partly to maintain his duplicitous public image, but mainly because he didn’t want impressionable teenagers wasting their money on cannabis when his boys could be supplying them with something that was more of a long-term investment.

  The word from Glasgow was that a rival player had attempted to destabilise McGinty’s operation via the direct and often effective decapitation method. For a while McGregor wished they had succeeded, but that soon gave way to wishing plain old murder was all it had been about.