Murderers Anonymous (5 page)

He would not go quietly; he would not go slope-shouldered to his grave. He would die like a man ...

And so, not knowing what lay out there beyond the limited horizon of his headlights, he floored the accelerator. Better to go flat out than to die in some desperate rearguard action. And with that extra acceleration, as the car left the road it partially lifted off, clearing the low wall it would otherwise have smacked into; and consequently hit a tree, some twenty yards away, more than ten feet off the ground.

The car bent and buckled and fell broken to the ground, where it landed directly on the top of the corpse of Wee Corky Nae Nuts, whose body had lain undetected for over nine weeks.

The car exploded in a stupendous ball of flame, the tree burned, the bodies burned, the night came alive with fire.

And although the police would eventually be able to identify the corpses of Stevie Grogan and Corky Nae Nuts, and they would know that Wee Corky had been dead for over two months, the cause of his death would remain in ashes, and they would not know to add him to the list of victims of that year's serial killer. A list which was about to begin to grow.

And as the flames tasted the cold night air, off ran Blue Hawaii the cat, in search of another victim.

'Good afternoon, everyone.'

The 'hellos' and 'good afternoons' were returned to him from around the room. He steadied himself, tried not to think too hard of what he was about to do. He had been coming to the group for more than a year and had yet to talk. At every meeting Katie Dillinger had asked quietly, with no hint of coercion, if he was ready to speak. At every meeting he had balked and hidden behind the jokes and the forced good humour.

Finally, though, he was ready. If any of them had asked him to explain what was so different about that afternoon, he wouldn't have been able to answer; but none of them would, for they had all been there in that blighted place, where truth would out and the past would be faced. Perhaps it was the proximity of Christmas, that great embellisher of every negative emotion, that multiplier of sadnesses. But for whatever reason, it was the turn of Socrates, and so urgent was the need to talk, now that it had come, that he could not wait for the next meeting and Dillinger had called a surprise session of the group. Not all of them had been able to attend, but there were enough to hear his cry.

'My name is Socrates and I'm a murderer,' he said at last, and the room was filled with applause.

Socrates McCartney smiled. Katie Dillinger clasped her hands and waved them at him, a huge smile on her face.

'Well done, Socrates,' she said. 'Well done.'

He smiled again, but then the applause died away and he was left with a silence that he himself had to fill.

'Youse have probably all been wondering for ages how I got my name. People usually do. There are two options, of course. They think it's either 'cause of the philosopher geezer or yon Brazilian fitba' player with bad hair and a fusty beard. And you know, there's a possibility about both, 'cause I have been known to spout some amount of philosophical shite in my time, and I can also blooter a ball into the net from thirty yards if I've got half a bottle of J&B down my neck. Even had a trial for Albion Rovers when I was a lad, but I couldn't be arsed. Truth be told, I was beginning to think I might be a bit of a poof in those days and I thought the communal baths might tip me over the edge. So I jacked it in and started hanging out in aerobics classes with a bunch of women.'

'Did it work?' asked Paul Galbraith. The Hammer.

'Oh aye, no bother. I think I was just confused due to some post-pubescent crush on David Cassidy in
The Partridge Family
. Anyway, I chucked the fitba'. If it's no' for you, it's no' for you. There you are, a philosophical thought to take home with you the night,' he said, smiling at the daftness of the last remark and being rewarded with a few smiles in return. A brief pause and he was back in the flow.

'Anyway, it's nothing to do with fitba' and it's nothing to do with philosophy. Socrates was a horse that ran in the two-fifteen at Ayr on the twenty-third of October 1981. Nothing special about the lad, just a wee horse. Fourteen to one, bit of an outsider. Now I wasn't a gambling man or anything like that, just had a wee bet every now and again. Never had a problem with it. I had a friend in the business but, and he used to sling sure things my way every now and again, you know. I never asked how he knew, I never queried his business or the horse-racing business, I wasn't interested. So I started slowly, you know. The first time he told me, I stuck a wee fiver on. Gradually, as I began to trust the guy, I upped the bets. And here's the thing. He was never wrong. Never. By the time it came to wee Socrates, I must've been paid out on more than twenty bets. I was never extravagant, you know, so I hadn't made millions, but I had a few thousand by then. Had spent it all, of course. Anyway, I meets this bird. Nice enough looking bit of stuff. Different class. You could tell. Didn't shag me on the first night. Took me nearly a week to get into her knickers, so I knew she was for me. Decided to get married, and you know how it is, one thing led to another, and it ended up we were going to have the biggest wedding since Elizabeth the First…'

'She was never married,' said Morty Goldman, a man of compulsive obsessive personality, and the most dangerous in the room. A quiet lad, you might have thought, however. The sort you'd take home to meet your folks. Bearsden born and bred, unlike some of these other interlopers.

'Aye, fine, whatever. Some other rich bastard, then. It was going to be huge. But, of course, my dad couldn't afford it, and she didn't even know who her dad was, so where was the money going to come from? Especially, you see, since I'd promised the lassie a nice house up in these parts, and a honeymoon in Bermuda. She was all excited, and I didn't like to tell her that I couldn't afford a tenement flat in Govan and a honeymoon in Montrose. But I loved her,'n' all that, so I had to get the money from somewhere. So, along comes my mate with this horse. Socrates. Good fucking timing, so's I thought. Fourteen to one. What a chance. He gave me three days' notice, don't put the bet on till just before the off, the usual thing. So's in that three days I borrowed and collected as much money as I could. Put myself in debt with about five different bastards. All sorts that youse just wouldn't want to mess with. The sort of eejits that make Billy's Sammy the Buddhist bloke look like, I don't know, a Buddhist. These were bad men. But I did it. Got together about ten grand. Suspicious, I know, but I just thought, sod it. This is my chance, I've got to do it.'

He stopped to take a breath. He was coming to the crunch, and they all knew what was going to happen next.

'And sure enough, the horse won,' he said eventually, confounding all expectations. 'I had a hundred and forty grand, I paid back all the bampot moneylenders, and I was sitting pretty. Life was a bed of roses. I was made, you know. Blinking made. Started calling myself Socrates in honour of that fine beast. I could've shagged that horse, no question.'

A few puzzled looks around the room, the temporary pause in the narrative finally filled by the inevitable question, voiced by The Hammer.

'What's the score, then, Big Man? I thought you were going to say the horse lost and you killed your mate?'

Socrates shook his head, and stared ruefully at each member of the group in turn. Now that it came to it, he was quite enjoying being the centre of attention. He'd got them hooked. A natural storyteller. He could be on Radio 4.
Book at Bedtime, with Socrates McCartney
.

'I made an arse of it,' he said. 'I mean, I only needed about thirty grand to be going on with. I could've paid for the wedding, booked the honeymoon, and put a down payment on a decent enough house, you know. But I had too much cash, I couldn't handle it all. I was twenty-two and I couldn't cope. I freaked, no other word for it. Booked myself a first-class ticket to Las Vegas and went and stayed in some posh gaffe. For two weeks I played all the big casinos, shagged hundreds of birds, did all sorts of drugs, totally went for it, you know. Right in there. The big time. Best two weeks of my life. Blew the lot. I mean, after a week, I might even have been ahead of the game, I'm no' sure, but by the end I'd blown the lot. And of course, I'd walked out on the work without a word, thinking I was some sort of big shot with no need for a job. And I didn't tell wee Agnes where I was going. So I gets back to Bridgeton, and what do I have? Fuck all. I've lost all my money, I've no job, I've nothing. I have to tell Agnes, of course, and you can't blame the lassie, she's fucked off.'

'What exactly did you tell her?' asked The Hammer.

'The works. I just went for it. Told her everything. The money, the gambling, the shagging, the drugs.'

'And?'

'She dumped me. Told me to sling my hook, and buggered off with my wee mate Billy Milk Teeth.'

'You can't blame the lassie,' said Katie Dillinger.

'Oh, aye, I didn't. I'm no' saying that. To be fair to the girl she did the right thing. I'm no' saying any different. Not at all. Billy was a decent enough lad, I wasn't blaming him either.'

'So what happened?' asked Dillinger.

'She sent her three brothers round to do me in and I killed them.'

'Oh.'

'I mean, I didn't mean to. It wasn't as if I was blaming them for what happened. It wasn't as if I gave a shite. But they turned up to kick my head in and I lost my rag. Went a bit off my napper. Started smacking them about a bit, and ended up wellying the living shite out of them all. Felt bad about it, you know, when it was all over. I'm a bit of a philosopher, like I said, and I've thought about it long and hard. Rage, you see, is just like any other human need. Once it's sated, well, it's done, isn't it? It's all a matter of control. It's like when you're gasping for sex and you hitch up with some stankmonster just for the sake of it; but as soon as you've emptied your sacs you look at her and wonder what you were doing. Or when you're hungry and eat any old mince just to fill your belly. It might leave a bad taste in the mouth, and you can't believe you were so hungry that you needed to eat some shite like that, but you did. Same with rage. After I'd done it, I was a bit embarrassed. Felt really guilty. Even phoned the polis.'

He stopped and looked around the room; slowly shrugged. They were all staring at him; some with wonder, some with sympathy. But they were all killers here, and none of them stared in judgement. That was not their game.

'That's it, really. Don't know what else to say. Got some amount of years in the slammer. Can't even remember how many the old bastard of a judge sent me down for. Anyway, got out a couple of year ago. Thought I was OK at first, but I have to admit I still feel rage. I think the jail's made it worse. Can't be sure. They probably shouldn't have let me out, but you're no' going to say no, are you? So when I heard about youse lot I thought I'd give it a go. And youse've been a big help to me. I mean, it was a bit intimidating at first, what with being in Bearsden, but I think I fit in.'

There were several nods around the room. One or two of the company thought he fitted in like a forest fire in the Amazon, but they nodded anyway in case he decided to kill them.

'So why do you keep the nickname?' asked Dillinger. 'Doesn't it always remind you of what happened?'

Socrates shrugged.

'It's a really cool name. Birds love it. Course, most of the birds I hang out with have never heard of the fitba' player, and they're too thick to know about the Greek bastard, but it still makes me sound all exotic and foreign, you know.'

'Don't you think you'd be better off just being yourself?'

Socrates McCartney stared at Katie Dillinger. He rested his back against the chair, and for the first time in his entire life considered that question. Was it not just better to be yourself? It was a question he'd heard asked within this group before, but he never thought that it applied to him. But of course it did, and now this baring of his soul, this outing of his past and telling of his secrets, was forcing him to think about it. Was it better to be yourself, laid naked and bare to the world, hidden behind no sophistry and no tricks, than to put up a front, a brick wall of deceit and subterfuge?

'Nah,' he said, after giving it due thought, 'I'm a total arsehole in real life.'