The Stone Gallows (25 page)

Maybe it wasn't so hard. It's true that crime has no class barrier, but it's also true that a lot of people with troubled childhoods go on to live troubled lives. Take my two attackers from the previous night.

I wasn't excusing them, or condoning their actions, but it was probable that they had received very little in the way of education or guidance. How can we expect people to respect others and obey the law and each other when we pay footballers and pop stars millions of pounds a year to act like animals?

I was getting too philosophical. Here was I bemoaning society when Susy had a very real, very pressing problem.

‘So what do you think is going to happen?' I asked. ‘You can't justtake her away. She's not some puppy that you can abandon in the wild and fool yourself into believing that you've somehow rescued her.'

‘I know that. I don't know what I'm going to do.' She uncrossed her legs, bringing her knees up to her chin and wrapping her arms around them. ‘That's why I called you. I was hoping you could do something.'

Shit. The last thing I needed in my life was a crusade, but I had a nasty feeling I had been backed into a corner. Susy watched me, her expression an uneasy mix: fear, despair and resignation, but also pitiable, unspoken hope. It was easy to guess what that hope was.

Maybe I could be the one that would make all the bad things go away.

If I agreed to help.

There was a clock on the wall, and every tick of the second hand sounded like the banging of a gavel. Answer the question! Answer the question! Answer the question or I'll hold you in contempt!

‘Mr Stone?'

‘I think we're beyond that now. My first name's Cameron.'

‘I want to go home. I want to meet my baby brother. I've got nobody else.' She paused, then said, ‘Neither does Rose.'

In my opinion, the worst kind of blackmail is emotional. The heart coerces the brain into helping, and when it all goes tits-up (as things inevitably do), you can't even hold your blackmailer responsible because it's not as if they put a gun to your head.

That said, I felt hugely sorry for this girl. She'd made a shedload of bad decisions, one after the other, each mistake compounding the previous until she was up to her neck in shit. And it wasn't as if my hands were entirely clean. I'd made a few quid doing Harper's dirty work. Maybe this was what the kaftan-wearers called Karma.

Universal payback. I owed somebody somewhere, and the bill was due. Don't they say that what goes around comes around?

I sighed. ‘I'll see what I can do, alright? I'm not promising anything.'

Susy flashed a quick smile at me before bursting into tears.

The door opened and a nurse put her head in. ‘Hi Susy. I just wondered if. . .' She saw me and ground to a halt. ‘What's going on?'

Susy wiped her nose on the sleeve of the dressing gown. ‘He's a friend of mine.'

‘Of course he is. I often cry when my friends visit as well.'

I stood up, walked over and offered my hand. ‘Cameron Stone.'

She ignored the hand, giving me a very obvious once-over.

‘Visiting time was over almost half an hour ago, Mr Stone. You'll have to leave.'

I looked to Susan for help, but she was still snuffling on the bed. ‘Please, just a while longer. I've only been here about ten minutes.'

The nurse gave me a wintry little smile. ‘I'm afraid not.'

Susy raised her head. The tears had caused the tape on her nose to start peeling. ‘He really is a friend. He's going to try and help me.'

The nurse folded her arms and gave Susy a thoughtful look. ‘I thought you fell down the stairs?' Her tone was sceptical but not unkind. ‘Why would you need help?'

When Susy didn't answer, the nurse looked at me. ‘What about you, Mr Stone? Any idea? Because I've been doing this job for a long time and I find myself worrying more and more about the increasing number of young women who seem unable to negotiate a simple staircase. Especially when the staircase in question appears to be able to punch people in the face.'

From the corner of my eye I caught Susy shaking her head frantically at me.

‘Um. . . '

‘Sister, please, I promise you. Cameron's a friend. He's going to help me. He's going to make sure that I don't. . . fall down any more staircases.'

I rummaged through my wallet before handing over a business card. The nurse looked at it, then me, for a long time before sighing in exasperation and checking the fob watch that hung from her lapel.

‘Right. Two minutes, then I'm coming back.' She pointed a finger at me. ‘By that time, Mr Stone, I expect you to be on your way.'

We watched as she closed the door behind her.

‘Cow,' Suzy said dismissively.

‘Cow, nothing,' I told her. ‘She's trying to help. You need all the friends you can get.'

‘I just don't like being bossed around.'

‘Yeah, well get used to it. If you want me to help you then you're going to have to do exactly what I say. Besides, I'm the one that's getting the bum's rush.'

‘The what?'

‘The bum's rush. Thrown out.'

‘Is that some kind of disease?'

8.10.

I headed home. Liz came round at half past ten, and we shared a late supper. We made love on my sofa and then sprawled about watching trash television until about one AM. Then we showered and made love again before drifting off to sleep. It was a nice night, right up to the point where somebody tried to kill us.

9.1.

When I woke, Liz was asleep beside me, a huddle under the bedclothes. Somehow, she had managed to wrap the quilt around her top half, leaving my torso bare. I shivered and smiled to myself as she let out a long, trumpeting snore that sounded more like a wild pig snorkelling for truffles than the gentle waft of rose petals being blown through a fan. I leaned in to kiss her cheek, only to notice that she had drooled all over her pillow.

A dribbling, snoring, warmth-stealer. Nobody's perfect. To tell the truth, it was a relief to sleep with somebody who didn't worry about bodily functions. Audrey had been so neurotic she would go into another room to blow her nose.

I lifted my head and looked at the digital clock on the night-table.

Twenty-seven minutes past two. For me, it wasn't an unfamiliar time of night. The only difference was, it hadn't been bad dreams that had awoken me, or the usual guilt that had kept me awake. It had been something else. I listened, trying to figure out what it was.

A noise. A slow, pattering splash, like rain falling onto concrete from an overflowing gutter.

Maybe Liz had left a tap running in the bathroom. The basin could be quite slow to drain; it was easy to imagine the water level slowly rising, spilling over the edge and onto the tiled floor below.

I swung my legs over the side of the bed, pushing myself upright.

‘Waszup?'

She must have felt me shift position. I decided not to blame her for anything. ‘I think I left a tap running in the bathroom.'

‘Oh.'

I was halfway to the door when she said, ‘What's that smell?'

I shook my head, then realised that she probably couldn't see. ‘I don't know.'

‘Maybe you left the gas on?'

‘I don't have gas.'

She sat up in bed. ‘It smells like gas.'

She was right – sort of. Without any form of context, it was just an unfamiliar odour, heavy and cloying in the nostrils. No doubt it would have been just as confusing to try and identify the scent of bacon frying while standing in the middle of a garage forecourt. To my sleep-addled brain, it was just a funny smell. ‘I'll go and check the kitchen.'

She sat up in bed, letting the quilt fall away from her breasts and raking a hand through her hair. In the half-light of the bedroom, she looked amazing. ‘Hurry back.'

Damn right I would. Grinning, I stepped through the bedroom door. The flat was a fairly standard layout, comprising an entrance hall that led off to separate rooms. Yawning, I went into the bathroom on my left, checking the taps, only to find them tightly closed. I got down on my knees and felt behind the washbasin, running my hand up and down the pipes in a fruitless search for leaks. The only thing I found was a combination of dust and bathroom crud, smeared all over my fingertips. I rinsed them in the sink, marvelling at how something so easy to get on your hands could be so difficult to remove.

By now, I was starting to wake up. I drifted through to the kitchen, wondering if perhaps somehow the pipes were leaking underneath the sink. I even peered behind the refrigerator to see if the mystery noise was coming from there.

It wasn't. All I found was a crust of bread so mouldy it should have been contributing to the rent. Meanwhile, the pitter-patter sound continued. Wherever it was, it didn't sound like it was coming from the kitchen.

Maybe a pipe had burst in the flat directly above me, and the sound I heard was of water leaking through my ceiling. Perhaps the Old Lady of a Thousand Cats had finally kicked it while filling the kettle for her seventy-ninth cup of tea that day. The police would force the door and find her only true friends gently nibbling her be-cardiganed corpse as it lay in a pool of water on the kitchen floor. I'm not by nature a vindictive person, but the idea was not without its attractions. She really was a sullen old cow.

Moving faster now, I checked the living room, with no success. I stepped back into the hallway and listened – hard.

Somewhere, somehow, liquid was flowing. I wasn't imagining it.

And the smell was getting stronger.

Something caught my attention. I stared, narrowing my eyes as if that would somehow compensate for the poor light. It didn't, but after a few seconds, I managed to discern what it was had so captivated me.

Had the inside of my front door not been painted a very light shade of brown, I would never have noticed.

Somebody had inserted a length of tubing through my letterbox.

Now that I had something visual to focus on, my hearing followed suit. The sound was coming from that direction. The smell – the eye-watering, mouth-gagging, almost recognisable odour – seemed to emanate from the carpet at my front door.

Time seemed to slow as my brain finally kicked into gear and made a rapid series of connections.

Middle of the night.

The most hated man in Glasgow.

Small, one bedroom flat on the second floor.

With only one door.

The reason I had made the bacon-frying-on-a-garage-forecourt link was because on a subconscious level I had recognised the smell.

Petrol.

Shit.

‘Liz?' I called softly.

No answer. She must have gone back to sleep. I suspected that it would be an extremely short nap.

Options.

Somewhat limited.

I could kick the front door open and barge my way out there, arms flailing, screaming like a banshee, hell bent on kicking ass and taking names.

Only problem was, the front door opened inward. To pass through it, I was going to have to stand in the danger zone, spending vulnerable seconds fumbling with the mortise lock, the chain, and the deadbolt. Knowing my luck, it would be at that moment that my uninvited guest decided to make his presence felt by tossing a match.

I would go up in a puff of smoke. And besides, what if there was more than one person out there? What if there were five of them, or ten, or twenty, all standing there with their zippo lighters drawn? You don't pour petrol through somebody's letter box as a prank. Whoever was out there wanted me corpsified in the most terminal sense of the word. Not just merely dead, but really most sincerely dead. Even if I was able to overpower them, the chances of the petrol igniting were pretty high. If I was on the other side of the door when the flames went up, that would still leave Liz trapped.

I very much doubted that my conscience could bear the weight of another death.

But what else could I do? We were on the second floor. If we had been on the first floor, a pair of broken ankles would be an acceptable price to pay for our lives, but the extra storey was too far to jump. If it didn't kill us outright, the fall would almost certainly fuck us up beyond all repair.

Plan B: hide in bed and die like a man. Take Liz in my arms and try to kiss the fear away from her lovely lips.

Yeah, right. Romantic in theory but probably pretty horrible in practice. We would be squealing, roasted pigs in a blanket.

Besides, I very much doubted Liz would be in a kissing mood.

Even as I dithered over my course of action, fate decided for me.

The letterbox rattled as my midnight caller dragged the length of tubing out. There was the scuffing of a shoe, and then a rattle, followed by the harsh dry scratch, concluded by the guttering sputter of a freshly-lit match.

I watched, horrified, as a hand pushed my letterbox open.

9.2.

‘Fuck!'

It was meant to sound like a shout of combined warning and anger, Neanderthal man to Neanderthal woman,
Come quickly, the
cave's under attack by a giant sabre-tooth
.

Except it didn't quite come out like that. Instead, a pathetic, breathy squeak passed my lips. There was no way in hell Liz could have heard it, especially over the
whoof!
of the petrol sodden carpet at the base of my door igniting. Blue-orange flame raced toward me, stopping less than twelve inches away.

‘FUCK!'

Better, that time. Sudden heat licked at my knees and broke my paralysis. I dived back into the bedroom and kicked the door shut behind me. ‘The flat's on fire!'

‘What?'

‘The fucking flat's on fucking fire!'

‘There's no need to fucking swear at me!'

I ripped the bedclothes off her, wadding them up and pressing them to the base of the door. ‘We're on fire! You hear me? The hallway's on fire and there's no way out!'