Everyone thought there was an endless stream of girls passing through that wee flat. But in truth it was usually just me and Tiny, a six-pack of Tennent’s Lager and Sky Sports on the telly.
He was a good pal, Tiny. You could tell him anything and trust him to keep it to himself. Made me laugh. Big, long drink of water that he was. Always had a running commentary on life. You know, that observational thing that Billy Connolly had. An eye for the absurd. Always saw the funny side, even in the darkest moments.
I can confess to it now, even if I couldn’t admit it to myself at the time, but I was devastated when he met Sheila. Suddenly all those nights and weekends when we’d be watching the game, or down the pub, or off clubbing in town, came to an end. It was like losing a leg. I’d never really thought about the future. I guess I didn’t want to. I was happy with the life we had, the respect we got as cops (usually). Someone to share my thoughts with and have a laugh together. Fuck’s sake, it was almost like we were married!
Then everything was about Sheila. Can’t go to the pub. Can’t go to the game. Me and Sheila are going to the flicks tonight. Sheila’s booked a table at that Chinese in Hope Street. I’d ask you to join us, but, you know...
That’s when I got really serious about the hillwalking. If I was going to be on my own, I’d rather be climbing a mountain somewhere than sitting on my tod fetching endless beers from the fridge and watching a game that was only half as entertaining without the banter.
I was jealous as fuck when he said they were getting married. Of course, I agreed to be his best man. How could I tell him I didn’t really like his Sheila very much? I suppose there was never any chance I would. After all, she’d stolen my best mate.
He and Sheila put down a deposit on one of those four-in-a-block houses in King’s Park, and after the wedding I hardly saw him outside of work. To be honest, I didn’t want to socialise with the two of them, and I’m pretty sure Sheila didn’t like me very much anyway. I stayed on at the flat after Tiny left, but I was spending less and less time there. Every day I wasn’t working, every holiday, I was off up the Highlands bagging a Munro. In Scotland, that’s any mountain over 3,000 feet. There are 282 of them, and I must have clocked up well over a hundred back in the day. In the Mamores, the Cairngorms, the Grampians...
Tiny was still my mate, always will be. But it wasn’t the same any more. We were cops together and that was it. And I was sick to death of him telling me how great it was being married, and how I needed to find myself a woman and settle down, raise a family. Irony of it is, I was the one that ended up having the kid. Tiny and Sheila never could.
It all changed for me one October night, about a year after they were married. Tiny and I were still working out of London Road. We were lucky. We had a BMW 530, which could fairly shift when we needed it to. Tiny usually drove, cos he had these long legs that meant he had to push the seat right back, and I couldn’t be bothered readjusting it every time. I mean, I’m not short. Just under six foot. But my feet wouldn’t even reach the pedals.
A call came over the radio for us to attend a domestic at a block of flats at Soutra Place in Cranhill. Overlooking that tousy wee park. Routine shit. It was pitch when we got there, lights in all three towers burning against a black sky that had been spitting rain at us all night. Seventeen storeys in those blocks. It was just our luck that the domestic was on the fifteenth and the fucking lift wasn’t working.
I was used to climbing, so it didn’t really bother me. But Tiny was well out of puff by the time we got there. And we could hear the raised voices all the way down the hall. It sounded like World War III. The man’s voice dominating, and what sounded like a young girl pleading. A constant stream of exhortations for him to stop. And then a scream when he hit her. There were other residents standing in open doorways as we pushed along to the end door.
‘Took yer fucking time,’ someone told us in a voice that sounded like sandpaper.
‘It’s been going on for hours,’ a woman said. ‘He’s going to kill her one of these days!’
Tiny hammered on the door, and the sound of it reverberated all the way back down the hall. There was a sudden silence inside. A moment. Then a man’s voice shouting, ‘What the fuck?’
Tiny glanced at the nameplate above the bell. ‘Open up, Mr Jardine, it’s the police.’
Another pause. ‘Fuck off!’
My turn. ‘Sir, we need to verify that there is not a criminal assault in progress. If you don’t open up, we’re going to have to call in reinforcements and break your door down.’
The door flew open and Jardine stood silhouetted against the light in the hall behind him, swaying unsteadily. The smell of alcohol off him was rank. He was a big man. Not as tall as Tiny, but built. He had a half-grown beard on a pale face that was oddly handsome in its own way. Green eyes that seemed lit from behind. Sculpted eyebrows and a shock of thick, black hair. ‘There,’ he said. ‘I’m fucking fine. See? Nae blood.’
I peered around him, trying to see into the living room. ‘And the young lady?’
‘That’s no lady, that’s my wife. Ha, ha, ha. Only joking. She’s my bidey-in and she’s fine. Alright?’
‘We’d like to verify that, sir,’ Tiny said, and Jardine found himself looking up into Tiny’s implacable face. Probably something he really wasn’t used to.
Without a word he stood aside, holding the door open, and we went through into a room that looked like a bomb had gone off in it. Chairs were overturned. A burst cushion had sent feathers flying. They were still settling. There was an overturned wine bottle and a broken tumbler on a coffee table that was scorched and pitted by cigarette burns. The place smelled of alcohol and vomit and stale smoke, a fugg of it still hanging in the air. An overhead lamp threw a cold yellow light on to this sad scene of domestic bliss, casting cruel shadows on the slip of a girl who sat on the settee, hunched forward, palms pressed together between her knees.
It was the first time I ever set eyes on Mel. And I guess I knew even then there was something special about her. Can’t say what it was. I mean, she was no beauty. Not in any conventional way. There wasn’t a trace of make-up on a face that was swollen and bruised, blood clotting on a split lip. Her hair was greasy and limp, and hanging down like hanks of torn curtain that she was trying to draw on herself. As if somehow they could hide her shame.
I suppose it was her eyes. I’d never seen eyes that dark. I’d read descriptions in cheap novels of folk having eyes like coal, but it was the first time I’d been able to picture it. Later I understood that while her eyes really were a very deep brown, it was the dilation of her pupils that had made them so black that night. But you could see there was light in the darkness. And something that said there was intelligence there too, even if it wasn’t immediately apparent.
She wore a bloodstained T-shirt and baggy blue jog pants, bare feet revealing pale pink painted toenails with chipped and broken varnish.
I figured she was eighteen, maybe nineteen, and couldn’t work out what she was doing with a man a good ten years her senior. A brute of a man at that. My first instinct was to lift her to her feet and take her in my arms. My second was to beat the shit out of the man who’d done this to her. I did neither.
Tiny said, ‘Big man, eh? Beating up on a lassie.’
‘She fell,’ Jardine said.
I couldn’t bring myself to speak, but the look on my face must have said it all.
He stared back at me. ‘What!’
I said, ‘I think you’d better come down to the station with us, Mr Jardine.’