Stonemouth (17 page)

D-Cup is wittering now, a sheen of sweat on his face. ‘Aye, naw, naw, yer fine, aye, naw, aye.’ He’s saying this to me, though with frequent how’m-I-doin-here-big-man? glances at Powell. ‘Naw, nae problem. Nae danger. Naw, aye. Aye, nae problem, naw.’

Powell’s voice razors through this. ‘D-Cup, isn’t it?’ he says.

D-Cup gulps. ‘Aye, aye, aye, that’s me, aye.’

‘Can I show you a wee trick, D-Cup?’

‘Eh? What—’

Powell moves a few millimetres closer to D-Cup, towering over him. ‘Put your hand down on the table.’

There’s
a lot of white in D-Cup’s eyes now. ‘Aw, shit, Powell, Mr Imrie, please—’

Powell’s voice is honey-smooth. ‘Just put your hand down. On the table. Flat.’

‘Mr Im—’ one of the two heavy-set guys says.

‘Shush now,’ Powell tells him. He spares each of the rest of us a very brief but very pointed look, then he’s back devoting all his attention to D-Cup, smiling at him. He takes the wee guy’s right wrist and places his hand flat on the baize for him. ‘Fingers together,’ he murmurs. He slides the gold sovs off D-Cup’s fingers and leaves them lying on the baize. D-Cup is swallowing a lot and sweating now too, staring at his right hand as though he’s never really seen it before.

‘M— m— m—’ he says.

Powell comes up close to him and lowers his head fractionally, mouth almost touching D-Cup’s nose. ‘Now close your eyes.’

D-Cup’s eyes go even wider. ‘What?’

‘No your fucking ears, son; your eyes. Close your eyes.’

Powell brings his left hand up to D-Cup’s face, index and middle finger extended and moving towards the wee guy’s eyes. D-Cup shrinks back and starts to move his hand off the table; Powell’s right hand flicks down without him looking and traps D-Cup’s flat again with a slapping noise. By now there isn’t an eye in the place not watching what’s going on. The quiet snick of ball hitting ball, the rumble of balls sliding down the channels inside the tables and the mutter of conversation have all died away.

D-Cup shuts his eyes. His eyelids tremble like butterfly wings as they close. I suspect D-Cup wants to whimper at this point but doesn’t dare. I don’t want to watch any of this, but there’s so much tension in the room, you just feel that standing still, saying nothing, and also not conspicuously looking away, is very much the safest, least attention-attracting thing to do.

When D-Cup’s hand is flat on the table without Powell holding it there, and D-Cup’s eyes are as tightly closed as they’re likely to
get – quivering, under sweaty, jerky brows – Powell hooks his left leg behind D-Cup’s knees without touching him, then pushes him quickly on the chest with his free hand.

D-Cup yelps and starts backwards, falling over as he encounters the leg Powell has curled behind him. He falls flailing to the floor and lands with a thump and a strangled scream. He doesn’t bounce back up again immediately but it doesn’t look like he’s hurt himself either.

The whole hand-on-the-table thing was just distraction. Powell’s all grins now, visibly relaxing and winding down. He rolls the ball he was holding along the table. The tension in the room is evaporating. Powell looks round at the wee guy’s pals, then spares me and BB a glance too.

‘Good trick, eh?’ he says to nobody in particular. There is a rather too loud chorus of agreement from us all that it’s just the fabbiest fucker of a trick any of us has ever seen, ever, probably.

I’m still standing very still, half waiting for Powell to stamp forward suddenly and plant a size twelve hard on D-Cup’s nuts, because I’ve seen Powell do this before: seem to defuse a situation, make light of it somehow, then deliver a single, wince-inducing blow to somewhere sensitive just when people – especially the designated miscreant – thinks it’s all sweetness and light again. I wait, but this doesn’t happen. So I start to relax too. Instead, from the floor, D-Cup’s thin wee voice says, ‘Can I open my eyes noo, Mr Imrie?’

Powell laughs, and so we all do. Again, like it’s just the funniest thing we’ve ever heard anywhere anywhen.

‘Aye, fit like yersell, son,’ Powell says, and D-Cup gets shakily to his feet, grinning uncertainly and already, from his expression and body language, starting to look like he knew that was going to happen all the time and he was just playing along. Even so, his fingers are shaking so much he can’t get his sovs back on, so he quickly stuffs the rings in a pocket of his shellies. Powell picks up the red ball he was playing with earlier and lobs it, slow and underhand, to one of the heavy-set guys, who catches it.

Powell
smiles at D-Cup. ‘Aye, all fun and games, but: that happens again and you’re gettin hurt, okay?’

D-Cup swallows, suddenly serious again. ‘Aye, Mr Imrie,’ he says.

Powell swings away from the table. ‘There you are,’ he announces quietly, again to nobody in particular. ‘Man agreein to his own kickin.’ He sort of broadcasts a smile to let us know it’s all right to laugh, or at least grin at this. The last elements of tension seem to drain away. I can hear and see people going back to their own games round distant tables.

Powell comes up to me, puts an arm round my shoulder and we walk off a few steps, his head close to mine. ‘Had a wee word with your car hire company, Stewart,’ he says quietly. ‘Hired the car for a week, that right?’

‘Uh-huh,’ I agree.

‘Aye, well, Mr M wanted me to check that was just for reasons of … cheapness, rather than what you might call signalling an intent to linger in the area after the funeral.’

‘The week was cheaper than Friday evening to Tuesday morning,’ I tell him. ‘That’s still when I’m leaving.’

‘Aye, aye, that’s what the manny I talked to at the hire company said you’d said,’ Powell says. He pats me on the shoulder. ‘If you did need to go earlier, though, you could, eh?’

‘Earlier?’

‘Monday evening, or afternoon, say.’

‘Why would that be, Powell?’

‘Not saying it’ll be necessary, just checking.’

‘Yeah, but why—’

‘Well, you know; the boys.’

‘The boys? You mean Murdo, Fraser, Norrie?’

‘Bit headstrong. Can be. That’s all.’

I look at him. Powell can do quite a good blank stare. ‘Powell,’ I say slowly, ‘I checked in with Don. I—’

‘Aye, well, you didnae really cover yourself in glory there, either, from what I hear, but it’s more the boys …’

‘What
do you mean? I thought we got on fine.’

‘I think Don thought about it and decided you’d been a bit, I don’t know: cheeky.’

‘What?’

‘You probably shouldn’t have mentioned Ellie.’

‘Jesus, I just asked how she was.’

‘Aye, all the same.’

‘Powell, look, are you saying I should be worried here?’

He shakes his head. ‘No, not really. Things are just a bit, you know, funny, with Joe being gone and you being back, and Grier being back. Things’ll settle down. Just a bit of restlessness in the undergrowth. It’ll pass. You can relax.’ He nods at the table behind me. ‘Just enjoy yourself.’

I look at him. ‘Yeah?’

‘Yeah. Sure.’ He pats me on the shoulder again. ‘Hunky McDory. See you later.’ He takes my right hand in his and – holding my right elbow firmly with his left hand – gives me an eye-wateringly firm handshake. I try to do the same back, but my merely average-fit grip is roundly outclassed.

Then, with a final tap-tap on the elbow and a glance and a nod at everybody else round our two tables, he’s off.

BB and me, and D-Cup and his three pals, finish our games quietly, and – for all the interaction we have – as though we’re playing on different continents. At the end of our game BB and I agree the fun’s gone out of the room a little and a pint somewhere else might be in order. We walk away from the table and I’m sort of expecting to hear a remark from D-Cup or his pals, but all there is is that bump, snick and rumble of balls, filling the uneasy silence.

The
Deep Blue IV
is a mega-trawler; its white superstructure seems to sit floating above the buildings and cranes of the inner harbour, dwarfing everything around it. Even before I climb as high as the bridge I can see the windows of my dad’s office in the Old Custom House on the other side of the harbour, but it’s the unaccustomed view of the building’s green, copper-sheathed roof that attracts the eye.

The
Deep Blue IV
is only just able to fit into the old harbour; another half-metre across the beam, or drawing another twenty centimetres, and it’d have to share the New Docks with the rig supply boats and the Orkney–Shetland–Stavanger ferry.
Deep Blue IV
is due to head out in an hour or two, at the top of the tide, on another month-long mission to hoover untold tonnes of fish out of the North Atlantic and into its hangar-sized freezer holds.

Mike MacAvett could probably just sit at home with a cigar in his hand and his feet up and watch the ship depart into the haze from the comfort of his armchair, but he obviously feels the need to be here on the bridge, to check everything’s going smoothly and to content himself all the supplies are on board, and the captain and crew are all happy and motivated men.

The trawler crews are Mike’s main supply of muscle, his forces
in reserve. Neither of his sons showed any interest in the family business, legal or otherwise, so he has one of my old school pals as – supposedly – chauffeur and home handyman, a couple of grizzled, ageing though still useful-looking guys in the docks office of the MacAvett Fishing Company, and he can call upon pretty much any of the trawlermen not actually at sea. Boats like the
Deep Blue IV
have two crews to let them fish almost continually, so there’s never a shortage of Mike’s guys in the Toun. It’s a looser structure than Don and his four – now three – bampot sons, and Mike worries more about informers and infiltration by SOCA or the SCDEA than Don does, but, even there, the local cops have proved useful.

Things are running a little late so Mike phoned me to say come to the docks rather than the house. Partly, though, I think he still feels the need to impress people with the sheer scale of the new boat – the
Deep Blue IV
’s only a couple of years old, and I haven’t seen it before – and remind them that this is where the money came from, this is what made him well off: fishing. He’s not just some number-two player on the shady side of life in Stonemouth; he’s a legitimate and highly successful businessman who came up the hard way, setting out to sea in tiny, deck-heaving, wave-pounded trawlers for the first twenty years of his working life, risking death and mutilation in one of the most dangerous working environments in the world.

Anyway, it’s no sweat for me; always a nostalgic pleasure to visit the docks. My dad’s worked here since school and I always liked coming to soak up the smells and sounds and sights of the harbour. The walk from the centre of town – BB and I had our quiet pint in the Old Station Tavern – took less than ten minutes.

‘Stewart, Stewart, good to see you,’ Mike says when I finally climb to the vessel’s bridge. It’s bright and sunny up here, certainly sunnier than down on the quayside; you’re above most of the remaining mist, which is still settled over the town, the nearby industrial and housing estates and the more distant fields and low hills like a sort of glowing grey membrane. Perched above everything, blinking in
the bright sunlight, the moodily lit darkness of Regal Tables already feels a long way away.

Mike shakes my hand and I try not to wince; these guys all seem to have super-firm, ultra-manly handshakes and my hand is still feeling a bit bruised after Powell Imrie’s parting grasp.

Mike MacAvett is a fairly short, stocky guy with a big bald head and very dark eyebrows. Early fifties. Always bustling, always very bright-eyed and overflowing with enthusiasms.

‘You’re looking great, looking great,’ he tells me. ‘Just let me get things sorted here and I’ll be with you asap. Make yourself at home. Have a look at some of the gizmos; or head down to the galley and get Jimmy to rustle you up something – you hungry?’

‘Good to see you, Mike. No, thanks; I’m good.’

‘Right, right. With you in a sec,’ he tells me and he’s off, across half the width of the very wide, gizmo-crammed bridge to talk to the captain. By common consent ‘It’s like the Starship
Enterprise
’ in here. That’s what everybody says, anyway. Actually, the bridge of the spaceship I’ve seen, stumbling over ancient episodes on obscure channels, has far fewer buttons and keyboards and screens, but there you are. Different series, maybe; I wouldn’t know.

I wander along the bridge, trying to keep out of the way. Besides the captain there are a couple of other officer-class guys in neat blue fleeces with the
Deep Blue IV
’s logo embroidered on them, taking notes: one on a clipboard, one on an iPad, plus there are a couple of guys in yellow hi-vis jackets and pants stamping about talking into radios.

I admire the view through the canted windows and try to look appreciatively at all the bewildering variety of screens and monitors and glitzy-looking clusters of what I’m guessing is comms gear. One screen looks like a sat-nav the size of a plasma screen. Another, square but with a circular display, is radar. On it I can see the shape of the town, the echoes of the tower blocks, church towers and steeples, and the road-bridge towers. Another pair of screens look like they’re linked into the ship’s engines. More screens show nothing
much. They’ve got measurement scales that imply they’re sonar or depth gauges or whatever.