The Blade Artist (15 page)

Franco considers this. There is probably no real reason for him to lie. — Frances Flanagan, she was here, aye?

— Yes.

— Anton Miller?

Fallon visibly trembles at the mention of that name.

— Okay, I’ll take that as a yes, Franco spits, — What about this Arbie gadge, where does he live?

— Gorgie. He just got out of prison.

— Give me his address. Dinnae even think aboot tippin him off or I’ll be back here. Franco lowers the ashtray onto the table. He looks out the window, then rubs the curtains between thumb and finger, talking in detached, matter-of-fact tones, as if he’s addressing the material in his hand. — They
will
be able to put your face back together again after I’m done, he suddenly whips his neck round, his cold eyes evaluating the landlord, — but it’ll be a long and painful process and it’ll never look quite the same again, and his brows raise skyward, as if actually estimating the extent of the task the surgeon will have.

Fallon’s trembling hand picks up a pen and scratches out the address in capital letters on a notepad. He tears off the
page and hands it to Frank Begbie. The address seems familiar.

It takes Franco over an hour to get to Gorgie, through the heavy traffic. Then he is astonished to find himself knocking on the door of a second-floor flat off Gorgie Road, in the same street and the next stair to the one where Sean met his end. Fallon had been easy to intimidate. He’d thought this would be the case as soon as he’d seen the obese, watery-eyed man. He isn’t sure that the same tactics will yield such impressive results with this Arbie guy, whoever he is.

A second heavy knock, and a white-haired man with a beard answers the door. With his porridge-coloured, fibrous skin, he looks like a prison fixture. Franco can’t place the name or the face, but Arbie looks like he has some recognition of him. — Aye?

— Hi, Arbie.

— Dae I know you? Arbie’s face contorts in a threatening sneer.

Franco’s own features remain glacial. — Do you know who your family are?

— Aye . . . Arbie says hesitantly.

A familiar scenario unfolds for Frank Begbie. It’s the type of dominance he has always found seductive; the way he feels himself drawing the power and certainty out of other hard men. Something in his core blazes in affirmation. But it’s important not to succumb to this emotion. Not to raise your voice. Psychotherapists had trained him, not to eliminate this mindset – as he’d led many of them to believe – but simply to channel it.
One . . . two . . . three . . .
He breathes
in steadily through his nose. — Do you know who your good mates are?

— Aye . . . bit . . .

— Well, you’ll ken I’m no one, so if you do know me, we’re no gaunny be close, Franco says, watching the man’s resistance crumble. — I want tae know about Sean Begbie.

Arbie looks over his shoulder into the stair. — You’d best come in then.

Unless he was in a blind rage, Frank Begbie usually picked on bullies. Not because he was some kind of protector or avenger. In fact he hated the sappy cunts who never stood up to them more than he hated the oppressors themselves. He recalls one occasion, when after battering a tormentor, the excitement of the victim indicated he believed that Begbie’s violence was undertaken on his behalf, or for some abstract notion of justice. So Begbie then rammed the nut on the biscuit-erse, in order to ensure he knew that the brutality had been purely for his own satisfaction. That he just preferred to ferociously assault tyrants because
it changed them more
. In his eyes, the sap was already defeated by terror, so there was no real buzz in smashing them. But seeing the bully’s confidence and power evaporate, and bearing witness to that change: that was unfailingly enjoyable.

He is feeling this now with Arbie.

Agnes Duncan has a decent hand in her game of trumps with Rita Reilly and Mary Henderson, but she throws it in, having grown bored and exasperated with the activity. This
is a condition repeated card games tend to induce in her. Instead, Agnes opts to resume her knitting. She is sure she had left six needles out, but there are only five. Your memory did that when you got older, it played those annoying pranks on you.

Franco had a fruitful conversation with Arbie, and then headed to the boxing club. He completed a series of lunges, squats, burpees and push-ups, staple fare from the days in his cell, then undertook some punishing routines on the medicine ball which he knew he would feel tomorrow. Then he climbed into the ring for three rounds on the pads with Mickey. After that, he pummelled the bags for another six cathartic rounds.

Some of the boys said people were looking for him.
People
being Anton Miller. So he was going to let himself be found. He’d heard enough about Miller, the guns, the drive-by shootings, to believe that if the young gangster really wanted him dead, he would probably already have joined his firstborn. It was time to meet Anton.

He walks into a watering hole in Canonmills, well known to a certain crowd, but usually avoided by the general public. It is an understated pub, hidden down a cobbled side street, and one which several generations of Edinburgh villains have drifted in and out of over the years. It is still early afternoon and the place is deserted, save for two older men playing dominoes for coins, and a barmaid in her early twenties. She gives him a soda water and lime, refusing to charge for it, but he leaves a pound on the bar anyway.

The pub TV features the bland, posh, public-relations man, who has been re-elected. He talks in a conciliatory manner, of one nation, while planning massive cuts in public services for the poor, repealing the Human Rights Act, and bringing back fox hunting for the rich. People were deferential to power. You just had to make the right noises.

He nods to the older guys. They have the tight, studiously neutral, seen-it-all faces of retired cons, and Franco definitely knows one, but can only place the eyes in his generic aged countenance. He winks and gives them the thumbs-up, receiving a similar response back.

Sure enough, a familiar figure with an almost bow-legged gait struts into the bar. Nelly hadn’t even spoken to him at the funeral, but he’d intervened to eject Cha Morrison. Now he is sitting next to Franco on the neighbouring bar stool. He is bigger and heavier than before, Frank Begbie can see that in the mirror, as his old friend removes his leather jacket. A steroid-munching, iron-pumping pit-bull terrier of a man. — Franco.

— Thanks for coming tae the funeral. Frank Begbie turns to face his seasoned comrade. — Sorry I had tae abscond early before we had a chance to chat. And thanks for getting rid of Morrison. Water off a duck’s back tae me, but it upset some ay the family.

— He’s aw mooth. Eywis wis.

Franco isn’t interested in discussing Cha Morrison, or much else with Nelly. It’s Anton he wants to meet. — Listen, mate, it’s good tae see ye n aw that, but ah’m no really in the mood tae socialise.

— Neither am ah, Nelly grimly replies. — Tyrone wants tae see ye, Frank.

— Aw aye?

— We kin dae this the easy wey or the hard wey. Nelly stands up, rippling with muscle, as the barmaid takes a couple of discreet steps back towards the till.

— Tell ye what, Frank Begbie says, raising his hands in a surrender gesture, — lit’s dae it the easy wey, ah’m way past the cowboy stuff these days. Besides, he laughs, squeezing Nelly’s biceps, — ah dinnae really fancy ma chances. Lookin good, buddy boy!

— Top man, Nelly grins. — Aye, ah’ve been takin care ay masel. He flushes with pride. — You n aw, he says with an appreciative once-over at Franco. — Nae hurry though, and he looks at the barmaid and orders a pint of lager. – You no drinkin?

— Sacked the peeve a while back. Helps ye tae see things a bit mair clearly, Franco smiles, then nods in the direction of the toilets. — Back in a minute, got tae get a pish.

— Nae sneakin away, Nelly chides.

— Ye’d only find me, Franco chuckles, pointing at him.

— Count on it.

Franco heads off to the toilet. He drains his bladder and thinks about the old days with Nelly. They’d always had a rivalry, sometimes friendly, sometimes not so, since they were boys back in Leith. Then, after that, even working together as enforcers for Tyrone hadn’t quelled the competitiveness between them. Well, he was now out of that scene. That field was all Nelly’s.

At the bar Nelly is settling into his pint of Stella, enjoying the first couple of cold swallows. Something stings his back, like an insect bite. It burns deeper and then he can see the terror in the eyes of the barmaid in front of him. He tries to rise, but an arm has locked round his neck, and the pain grows more intense, ripping into the core of him. As the grip relaxes, Nelly’s head swims and he crashes to the floor, his blood oozing onto the tiles.

Frank Begbie pulls out the bloodied knitting needle, with its sharpened point. — Changed my mind, he sneers at the prostrate, bleeding figure. — Let’s dae it the hard wey.

He looks to the terrified girl behind the bar. — Phone the ambulance, no the polis. Hurry, cause ah spiked his liver, he says, thinking about how easy precision made things. It astonishes him just how much of an amateur (albeit a highly enthusiastic one) he’d been in his previous life, getting through on sheer aggression rather than calculated design.

Then Frank Begbie waves a fifty-pound note in front of the two old guys and winks, placing it in the pocket of the more familiar of them. — Right, Franco, the old villain says cheerfully, as if he’d just purchased a few sweep tickets.

Yes, he wanted to be found, but not by Tyrone, and he glances at Nelly, now semi-conscious and groaning at his feet. —
Adios, amigo
, he says, then quickly steals out the door and heads down the cold, grey street.

After dropping off Melanie, Grace and Eve that morning, Jim had driven straight back to the beach. He had Guns n’ Roses
Appetite for Destruction
on the car stereo, preferring it to Mahler. Their truck was parked in the same spot, and he pulled up about twenty yards to the rear of it. It was unoccupied. Then, scanning down the shoreline from behind the stone-built observation deck, he spied them, down on the still-deserted beach. They were heading away from him, towards the rocky promontory of Goleta Point. Instead of immediately following them, he headed back to their beat-up Silverado pickup truck. He took the Alaskan Alpha Wolf hunting knife from his denim jacket, stuck it in his belt, then removed the garment and rolled it round his hand, smashing through the truck’s side window.

As the glass shattered, he looked over at the cluster of buildings, only about fifty yards away. Melanie had told him that they housed the university’s marine biology facility. But it was Independence Day weekend and they were empty, with no vehicles parked outside. He let himself into the truck. It was full of junk; old wrappings, empty cans of beer and soda. But in the glove compartment there was a handgun. Jim thought that he knew little about firearms, had only once
held one in his hand, but realised from his prison training in the library’s True Crime section that it was a Glock semi-automatic. It was lighter than he thought. He pulled out the magazine. It was loaded with eight bullets. He pointed it at the dashboard, pulled back the safety catch. Then he placed the gun in his jacket pocket, also putting the knife back in with it.

The leg, that wrecked limb that hadn’t healed right, not since the accident when he’d been hit by the car, storming after Mark Renton, held him up as he stole along the clifftop towards the rocks at Goleta Point. By approaching them from above and behind, he’d be able to ensure that the coast was clear of both beachcombers and solitary student stragglers before he engaged. Timing was all. They had turned the corner around the stony headland, and the tide was coming in quickly. Jim walked faster; it seemed that the fleeter he got, the less he noticed the leg. From his vantage point on the cliff above he tracked them moving between two of the bigger rocks at the end of the jagged peninsula, which reached out to the Pacific Ocean like a small, broken quay. It provided perfect cover, shielding them from any eyes above, as the sea swirled in.

He hurried down the beach and along the top of the rocks, until he was standing over them. Jim quickly glanced back above him to the cliffs, then down the beach towards Devereux Slough; all clear, and then his attention was fully on the men, as he stepped forward into their view. They were preoccupied as the blond one had a crab on his knife; he had stabbed it through the shell and it wriggled in its death throes. It looked
like a red rock crab, with its brick-coloured top and rusty blotchings on the white underside. He’d taken to identifying the different types of marine life on these trips with the kids. — Think it knows it’s going to die? He pointed at the crab.

The two men looked up as one, saw him standing over them on the large rock. Took a step back as Jim jumped down, landing in front of them on the soft sand.

— What the fuck? said the smaller, blond man, Damien Coover. — Look, we don’t want no trouble . . .

Jim Francis pulled out the gun. — Too fucking late for that, and he lurched forward and squeezed the trigger. A shot rang out, then a crack, the gulls taking to squawking flight, as Coover toppled over, tumbling to the rocks and sand. He screamed out in agony, against the sound of the sea, the waves dashing on the rocks. Jim gazed out across the ocean; no boats, just Holly, the oil platform, way out on the horizon to his right. The other man, Marcello Santiago, was moving back against the huge black rock face, as the tide swarmed around his shins. — C’mon, man . . . look . . .

Jim ignored him, glancing briefly behind him, still all clear, then back to the men. Coover was moaning softly, clutching his leg. Jim saw he had managed to shoot him above the kneecap. Blood seeped through denim, onto rock and into sand and salt water.