59 Minutes (15 page)

I had always suspected as much but it didn’t lessen my
anger.

‘You could have run.’

‘Where? Dupree is an evil fucker. Far worse than you or
me ever were. He was onto me hours after you were lifted and laid it on the
line. You or my family.’

‘So who cut the deal with the police?’

‘Dupree. Don’t ask me how, but he did.’

‘And you believed he would keep his word?’

‘It was my biggest fear. I drop you in it and then I’m
history. But he’s a weird one. His word is his bond. He said that not me. From
what I know he seems to hold to that. If I stay away from him he’ll honour our
deal. How else could I have survived? I’m hardly the invisible man. How long
did it take you to find me?’

That was true. I had found out his location from
behind the bars of a prison. Dupree would have found him in seconds.

‘The letter?’ I said.

‘Do you still have it?’

I pulled it out of my pocket and handed it to him. He
rolled it up and threw it in the fire.

‘So what’s in the box?’ I asked.

‘I don’t know. But whatever it is it didn’t come from
me ‘

‘Sorry.’

‘It’s from Spencer. Whatever is in the box is from
Spencer.’

‘Where’s Spencer?’

‘Dead.’

‘Dupree?’

‘No, a car crash on the road to Oban about two years
after you went down. Up until that point Spencer worked for Dupree.’

‘I thought he vanished with you.’

‘That’s what Dupree wanted everyone to think but
Dupree needed someone who knew the way the crockery was laid out until he could
get his feet under the table. So Spencer was shipped back north and moved in
with his mum in Inveraray. Dupree used him as a sounding board and as long as
he kept himself to himself Dupree left him alone.’

I had known Spencer’s mum had roots in
Scotland
but
not where she lived. Inveraray was a tourist stop on the way to the Mull of
Kintyre. Nice enough for the day but not somewhere I would choose for home and
certainly not somewhere for Spencer. He would have gone out of his mind with
boredom. I could see him now – blind drunk at the wheel of some hot rod,
hammering up the road between Inveraray and Oban. On a good day you need to
take care on the road as it either twists and turns through the glens or hugs
the shore. Forty feet artics are frequent and, at points, the road hardly
accommodates a mini. Car crashes were all too common.

‘So what has Spencer got to do with the box?’

‘I was staying with one of Spencer’s friends. She
lived in Fulham. Spencer turns up at the door one day. He looks nervous and
knows he is well outside the safe zone that Dupree has given him. He comes in
but he doesn’t sit down. He shouldn’t be in
London
and he knows it. His eyes are all over the place. Like
he is expecting someone to jump him any minute. He tells me that Stevie at the
Lame Duck has something for me. I look at him as if he just landed from Mars. I
ask him what he is on about. He says he knows some things about Dupree and has
given Stevie instructions to hand it over to you or me. Then he leaves. Next
thing I know he is on the inside page of the Daily Record as one of four that
died in a high speed crash on the road to Oban.’

‘So you went to Stevie?’

‘No.’

‘Why?’

‘You don’t know Dupree. You really don’t. He has
figured out ways to hurt people that wouldn’t seem credible in a Stephen King
novel. I was safe and I wanted to stay that way but I figured you might like a
pop at him. So I scribbled up the letter and sent it to you.’

‘And you never once thought to see Stevie in all those
years?’

‘Oh it passed my mind now and again and I always
reckoned that if I got a sniff Dupree was on the turn I could track down Stevie
double quick.’

Sometimes in life you smell things that just makes
your nose curl up.

‘Are you telling me that you never went to find out
what Stevie had been given?’

‘Never. I wrote you the letter years ago and sent
Rachel to deliver it when I thought you were due out. Then I tried to blank it
from my mind.’

I rolled back in the chair and sipped at the malt.
Martin was looking at me, waiting for a response but I didn’t have one. Not
then anyway. I sipped some more and held up the glass for more. Tonight was
going no further. I either got very drunk or I went home.

I got very drunk.

I haven’t felt like using the digital
recorder for a few days. I know I promised myself to detail everything I did
but I can’t decide if the Drumchapel job is a worthwhile exercise.

I spent the night at Martin’s
and woke up the next morning less sure of my actions
than I had been since I left prison. The last week has been a haze. My cell
mates go on the batter nightly and I have avoided it like the plague. It would
be too easy to slide into the alcohol wagon and tell everyone else to take a
flying fuck.

On the night after my visit with Martin I was in a
different place. I sat next to the Necropolis and stared down at
Glasgow
. Did I
need this shit anymore? Would life be easier if I just dropped to first gear
and wandered through the rest of my natural existence with little more horizon
than the next bottle of booze? How hard could it be? How bad could it be?

I sat with my back against the grave of Hugh Tennent
and looked at his brewery sprawled out at my feet and made a call. An hour later
I was trying straight meths for the first time in my life. One taste and I
threw up. I told the assembled body to sit tight and took off in the direction
of Alexandra Parade. On the way I picked up a chunk of metal from a building
site and entered the corner store with a face that said don’t fuck with me.

I left with six bottles of malt – the store’s entire
inventory of good whisky. I made it clear to the shopkeeper that calling the
police was not an option. I put on the look of a man that had been here a
million times before and the owner let me go quietly. When I returned to my
drinking mates they were gobsmacked but they asked few questions as they tucked
into the booty.

I fell asleep next to Hugh’s grave. I think he might
have understood.

For the next five nights I played the Tesco delivery
van to my drinking companions’ needs. I did in five stores and left each one in
no doubt to the future should they call foul. Last night I drew a line in the
sand and stepped back.

It wasn’t hard to see why. My mates – now up to
fifteen in number - were waiting on me behind the car impound on High St. Six
of them were from the hostel but the others had joined our merry throng as my
supply of drink had grown in notoriety. In the circles I was now mixing in, notoriety
spreads fast.

I had eight bottles of varying sprits on me but after
an hour it wasn’t enough. My friends looked to me for more and, even in my
inebriated state, I knew this was no way to a good place.

I pissed off and went up to the Necropolis to throw
up. As I lay looking at the red tinged clouds above the city I knew I was on a
bad slope and either I changed or I’d end up at the back end of a bottle for
the rest of my life. The next day I went back to Martin’s. This time I wanted
his help and he had no choice over whether he gave it to me or not.

He opened the door and looked at me the way my mum
used to look at me when I had been in a fight. The
Highland Park
was still on tap and I should have said no but I didn’t. I needed something to
kill the hangover.

We chatted and chewed the cud well into the night and
the second bottle of malt was cracked open before I told Martin what I wanted.
He looked at me and stood up. I was waiting for an exit stage left or a ‘yes we
are in this together’. Instead I got a blank and he headed for the toilet. I
felt like a patient in a doctor’s surgery waiting for results of a test. Martin
came back in and looked at me.

‘What’s in it for me?’

Less than six months earlier I would have told him that
keeping his life was a fair bargaining chip but the world moves on and I was in
need of his help. What was in it for him? Why should he help me? After all if
Dupree was such a bastard then a peaceful life in a mock farmhouse was no bad
thing.

I was hardly in a position to offer a deal. What could
I say? I’ll breathe on you if you don’t help? To be fair that was no idle
threat given the state of my dental hygiene at the moment. I could stun at ten
feet. Then I dug deep and went for the nuts.

‘We shake and go home?’

It was a low blow. Not that low blows meant much now.
It was a phrase I had used more than once in
London
.

When I had asked him to come down at first it was more
than a request and he knew it. He had a good life in
Glasgow
and I
was asking him to chuck it on the fire and head for my voice. To his credit he
had done so, but not without a hundred regrets. I had shat on him from a high
place and even though he had done well in
London
he was never happy.

Every time we had to put on the fight mitts I would
tell him that it would soon be over and we could shake and go home. We never
did. And now I was calling in a favour that didn’t exist and he knew it. I
stared at the whisky and was lost for words. My fall from grace was complete.

Martin walked behind me and reached down, grabbing my
shoulders.

He could have taken me by the throat and who would
have cared. Me? Not then. Not right at that moment. I waited on his fingers
around my throat but of course they never came.

‘You can’t offer me home. I’m home but if I help you,
we call it all quits.’

I looked up at him. The thinnest of smiles on my face.

‘Deal.’

We turned to the options for Drumchapel in the same
way we had planned a thousand jobs. As usual the first ideas were of the bog
standard type - they always are.

I went on a creativity training course once – it was
the old man’s idea down in
London
. He had been on it and thought his direct reports
should go. I thought he was kidding but it was a three-line whip and, as it
turned out, a real eye opener.

I’m a cynical bastard about such things but it was
better than I feared and a few things stuck in my head. One of them was what
they call the ‘First Burst’ - the first ideas you come up with. The same old
same old.

The course had told me that this was the norm and to
get fresh thinking you needed to push by these ideas and, as none of the stuff
we came up with answered the brief, we ploughed on. Then Martin threw in a wild
idea and we were home free with added sugar. It always works that way.

We are going for it tomorrow.

So now I know what Spencer left for me. Getting it was
a stroke of genius on Martin’s part and so blindingly obvious that I am
currently thinking about submitting myself for the thick as a plank award.

Martin phoned the Credit Union and asked what the
procedure was for retrieving the contents of a box for someone who was
deceased. The requirements were straight forward enough - a copy of the death
certificate and proof that you were now the legal heir to the deceased’s
property.

The former was easy. A trip to the Martha St births,
deaths and marriages office and we were away. Spencer Cline, deceased
14
^th
March 1996
, cause of death – automobile accident.

The next step was trickier. Martin phoned directory
enquiries and asked for a Cline living in Inveraray. There was one match and he
phoned the number. Mrs Cline answered the phone and things got awkward.

Martin had only met her once before at
Glasgow
Central Station when she had turned up with Spencer in tow after he had enjoyed
a long weekend away from the troubles of
London
.

Martin explained who he was and apologised for not
attending Spencer’s funeral. He told her he had been out of the country for the
last fifteen years and had just come back to find a letter from Spencer that
had been held by a mutual friend. The letter said that Spencer had tried to
return some old photographs that Martin had loaned him but, by then, he had
gone abroad. For whatever reason Spencer had placed them in a safety deposit
box under his own name and he needed her permission to open the box.

Mrs Cline wasn’t stupid and the story sounded weak and
probably sounded even weaker from her end of the phone. Martin tap danced for a
few minutes and said he would be happy to send her the key and, next time she
was in
Glasgow
, she could open the box and send the photos onto him.
This tipped the balance. Mrs Cline was in her late eighties and a trip to
Glasgow
to
open the box of her long dead son was not one she wanted to take.