Hit and Run (18 page)

Billy felt the judder of a new and terrible pain in his leg, a screaming muscular agony he’d never experienced. He crumpled and fell in a heap on top of Wayne.

 Wayne pushed him off. As he rolled, Billy realised the source of the pain, a gaping wound in his thigh, muscle and flesh all ragged and torn, a shy peek of white bone poking out.

‘Fuck.’

He clutched at his leg as he lay there, sweat soaking his brow, the roar of the fire and the shotgun blast leaving his ears ringing.

Wayne lunged for the shotgun. But he was too slow. As his fingers reached for the butt of the sawn-off, there were two cracks and his head jerked back in a spray of blood. His body slumped to the ground and he lay motionless.

Billy looked round. Dean still had the gun levelled at Wayne’s body. He walked over carefully and slid the shotgun away from Wayne’s hand, then kicked the body. Nothing.

Dean looked up and Billy tried to follow his gaze. The pain and tears and smoke were blurring his vision, but he could make out two figures running away. Jamie and the other guy. Jamie had abandoned the crutches and was running with a crazy lolloping stride, the other guy much further away, beginning to disappear in swirls of smoke.

Dean held both of his guns steady and fired twice with each. Jamie jumped then zigzagged sideways, kept running though, not hit. The smoke enveloped him and he was gone.

‘Fuck,’ Dean said. ‘Can’t be helped.’

He turned both guns on Billy.

‘Seems you’ve got yourself a little leg wound.’

‘Boss.’

It was one of the goons. Dean turned. The guy was pointing down Queen’s Drive, beyond the wall of fire and smoke. Flashing lights. The whoop of sirens. Billy couldn’t make out if it was fire engines or police.

‘We’d better move,’ the goon said.

‘Not before I finish this cunt off.’

Dean turned back.

The world seemed to shrink.

Smoke caught in Billy’s lungs and he coughed, sending blades of pain through his body, from his broken head to his tattered thigh.

Dean lifted both guns and pointed them straight at Billy.

‘This is for everything you’ve done.’

‘No.’ Adele’s voice. Strong and clear.

Dean turned. Adele was standing with the sawn-off shotgun pointing straight at him, Ryan pushed behind her.

Dean smiled. ‘What are you doing, darling?’

‘This is for everything you’ve done,’ she said.

The recoil pushed her backwards as the shotgun went off. In a mirrored movement, Dean was knocked off his feet as the blast ripped through his chest. He staggered backwards for a few steps them slumped to the ground, still gripping a gun in each hand.

Adele dropped the shotgun and turned, pulling Ryan into her body.

The sound of sirens filled the air now. Billy looked round. The two thugs were gone, lumbering down the path. Billy’s leg raged with pain. He leaned back and tried to suck in air, his whole body tense with shock.

He lay between the bodies of Dean and Wayne, both still. Adele stared at Dean’s body as she held Ryan’s hand tight. She looked around. Flashing lights mingled with the flicker of the gorse fire, sirens swooping over the crackle of flames. Smoke seeped through everything.

Adele stared at Billy and he held her gaze.

She looked at Ryan, then down the road.

‘Bye, Billy.’

She lifted Ryan up with a heave and began running in the opposite direction from the flashing lights. Billy watched her go, fast and frantic, until she too was swallowed by the smoke.

He gasped and coughed again. It felt like he was in the middle of a funeral pyre. His eyes were foggy, his brain fried. He felt his mind drift as the smoke began to overwhelm him. He closed his eyes.

After a moment he felt something on his face. Wet and rough. A familiar smell. Jeanie. He opened his eyes. She was wagging her tail but looking anxiously at him, pushing at him with her snout. He pulled her close.

‘Good girl.’

He tried to push himself up, but collapsed. The pain in his leg was excruciating. He pushed his hands against the dirt and tried to drag himself, but he couldn’t. He had nothing left, he was empty.

He slumped to the ground. Jeanie came close and nudged him.

‘Go,’ he said, his voice broken.

She didn’t move.

He gave her a half-hearted shove.

‘Go on. Get out of here. If you stay with me you’ll die.’

She whined then crept forward to sit next to him.

‘Fuck’s sake, girl.’

Billy lay on his back. His lungs filled with smoke. His leg was agony, his head too, his body empty. He looked up. Amid the smoke he spotted a sprinkle of stars in the sky. He closed his eyes, felt the soft fur of Jeanie’s body alongside. He seemed to drift upwards, beyond everything, growing wings to swoop above the city, diving over the police station and Rankeillor Street, the Whitehouse place and The Crags pub. But his wings caught fire and he tumbled to the ground, thumping into the tarmac of Queen’s Drive as Charlie and Zoe looked on.

He heard a voice. Someone calling him. A voice he recognised. From a long time ago. His mum? He listened, straining. He tried so hard to make out who it was, what they were saying. He heard Jeanie’s tail thump next to him. Then he felt something else, a hand on his forehead, drawing out all the pain and suffering. He tried to open his eyes but couldn’t. He struggled to speak, but just coughed up smoke.

That voice again. He tried to focus. Finally he made something out, from a million miles away, yet right next to him.

‘Hold on, Scoop.’

The pain felt like an old friend, a part of him he couldn’t live without. He couldn’t remember a time it hadn’t been there.

Click.

The fuzzy glow of morphine, another old compadre, leaching through his body, slipping through the cracks, into his pores, soaking his bones.

He lay for a long time like that, drowning in it.

Then he opened his eyes.

Another hospital ward. Same smells, same light, same washed-out colours.

He couldn’t move.

After a while, a nurse spotted his open eyes and came over. He looked at a glass of water on the bedside table. She lifted it to his lips and he sipped. Cold and shocking. He choked, his brain throbbing in time.

The nurse reassured him, then left.

He closed his eyes and lay still. He didn’t know how long for.

Eventually he was aware of someone nearby. He opened his eyes.

He tried to smile but it hurt too much.

She eased herself on to the bed. ‘Take it easy, Scoop.’

She took his hand. A drip was feeding into it.

He tried to speak but could only croak.

‘It’s OK.’ She patted his hand. ‘You’ve been unconscious for two days, just relax, there’s no hurry.’

Billy tried to push himself up on to his elbows but couldn’t.

‘How?’ he whispered.

Rose smiled. ‘True crime reporter, Scoop, always wanting to know the hows and whys, eh?’

Billy’s body felt like a lead casket at the bottom of the ocean.

‘Not much to fill in,’ Rose said. ‘I got your message just after you left it. The phone ringing woke me up. I tried to call you back but your phone was off. I called DI Price then headed round to the Crags. Arrived just before the police. By the time I got there it was carnage. You injured, Lassie by your side, two dead bodies and a hillside on fire. Very dramatic. Made for a fantastic front page, I can tell you.’

Billy felt Rose’s fingers warm against his limp hand.

‘In fact, the
Standard
has been full of your exploits. We pieced everything together from your message and various police interviews. Stuart has kept me abreast of those. Adele Whitehouse and Jamie Mackie, your brother and Zoe.’

She gave Billy a look.

‘Adele says that Wayne Mackie and Dean Whitehouse shot each other, and you got caught in the crossfire. That right?’

Billy pictured Adele holding the shotgun, the look on her face.

He nodded.

Rose raised her eyebrows.

‘Charlie and Zoe have been suspended from the hospital and paper respectively. I wouldn’t recommend going back to Rankeillor Street any time soon. I would say come and stay with me, but by the time you’re fit to get out of here, I suspect the police will have other plans for you.’

Billy nodded again. ‘Jeanie?’

‘The faithful hound is at my place. I can look after her until . . . well, until you’re better.’ She got up. ‘The police are waiting to talk to you. I charmed my way in first for two minutes, wanted to check you were OK.’

Billy put on a weak smile. ‘Never better.’

‘That’s my boy, Scoop.’

She leaned in and gave him a gentle kiss on the forehead. His head had been re-bandaged. He caught her perfume, that sticky, flowery scent, like gorse blossom.

She put her hands on her hips. ‘You should’ve told me, you know. About Frank.’

‘I know.’

She walked away. At the doorway, she stopped and waved, then she was gone.

In her wake, DI Price and another officer came in.

Billy watched as they walked towards his bed.

He sank into his pillows and felt relieved for the first time in as long as he could remember.

I wish I could explain it, but I can’t really. I am obsessed with car crashes of all kinds, although I think I might have finally got it out of my system with this novel. Before
Hit and Run
I wrote several stories containing car crashes, it was the pivotal moment in
Smokeheads
, and I also wrote a couple of short film scripts and a handful of songs about them as well. I did crash my parents’ car when I was 18, but that was a lifetime ago, so no idea why it’s wriggled to the surface now. I found the central premise of
Hit and Run
compelling though – what would you do in that situation? OK, you’ve been stupid, but it was an accident, and that idea about a split-second decision irrevocably changing your life from that moment on is fascinating. Car crashes are, by their nature, hugely dramatic events, something that makes them ideal for fiction, and they happen all the time all around us, they’re so commonplace we kind of ignore them, something I find very weird indeed. 

The accident actually happens on Queen’s Drive, just below the Radical Road, which is a path that runs round the side of Salisbury Crags, the steep cliffs that run from Arthur’s Seat down to Holyrood Park in the centre of Edinburgh. The road gets its name because it was paved in the nineteenth century in the aftermath of the Radical War of 1820, a week of strikes and civil unrest. As a student, I lived in the shadow of the Crags for many years, and it always struck me as a very dramatic backdrop – I always thought it was mad that a few minutes’ walk from the centre of our capital city you had cliffs and mountains and grasslands that feel like you’re in the middle of nowhere. The part the Radical Road plays in
Hit and Run
is crucial, the whole of the Crags acting as a focus for the action, looming over everything. There’s a sense of danger up there as well, it would be very easy just to step off the path and plunge 100 feet to your death – in fact a teenage boy was found dead at the bottom recently after accidentally falling off. 

I always attempt to create a strong sense of place in my fiction – whether I succeed or not is up to the reader, I guess. But it was very definitely part of the plan – to portray the landscape and psyche of the city I’ve lived in for over twenty years. Edinburgh is, of course, a very familiar landscape in fiction, especially in crime fiction, but I still felt I had something to add. When I first started writing novels, I shied away from depicting Edinburgh a little, but for this book I decided it was time for me to carve out the place for myself. Almost all the action happens in the city’s Southside and Newington neighbourhoods – not necessarily the touristy parts that most people know, and not the Leith of Irvine Welsh, but something different, an area I knew like the back of my hand for a long time and that has its own distinct personality. I’m not really sure what the trick is to portraying that sense of place, though, although I seem to be OK at it – it’s certainly one of the things that reviewers and readers pick up on, so hopefully I can keep it up. 

Yes, absolutely. I’ve had my eyes opened over the last few years by reading a lot of the classic noir canon – Jim Thompson, James M. Cain and all that – and it’s had a massive affect on me as a writer. I just find real beauty in the most stripped-down language possible – there is a subtle elegance in portraying ideas, scenes, characters and dialogue in as clinically concise a way as possible. I find it incredibly hard to read flabby or verbose writing now; it irritates me beyond belief. Any kind of writing that draws attention to itself – ‘Look at me! The terribly clever author!’ – makes me want to puke. 

In terms of subject matter or setting, not really, but in terms of style there were a few of those classic noir stories that blew me away. James M. Cain’s
Double Indemnity
is just a masterclass in clear writing, while Horace McCoy’s
They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?
and Nathanael West’s
Miss Lonelyhearts
are crazy, subversive tales that manage to pack an almighty punch in under a hundred pages each.