He was sliding slowly to the back of the car, the rough road surface articulated through the metaclass="underline" the car was slowing down. The moment of opening the boot. Three steps at most. No more. Act frightened, cry.
His ear was pressed to the floor and he heard the roar of his own hot blood. He began to sweat.
The car drew softly to the side of the road and stopped. The engine cut out. Through the quiet night Terry heard a whisper of breeze skim the bonnet, the chuckle of a burn. A ditch. There would be a ditch nearby if there was a burn. That was where he was meant to die.
The driver’s door clicked open. A foot hit the gravel at the side of the road, a pause, and then another. He was stiff, perhaps from driving; perhaps he was old. It was good anyway.
Footsteps down the side of the car, not slow but not in a hurry. He might be reluctant, more likely just tired. Feet scrunched into place behind the boot.
Keys chinking, one selected and the scratch of metal into metal. The mechanism clicked.
The boot sprang open; blue-white moonlight filtered through the weave of the sacking to flood Terry’s eyes, making him shut them tight. He forced himself to open them again and took a deep breath, feeling the eyes of his captor on his bare back. Act passive.
A cold, clammy hand grabbed his upper arm, tugging at him to roll over.
“Out.”
“Look, I’m Terry Hewitt. You’ve got the wrong man. I’m a journalist.”
“Out.”
Terry curled tighter over his knees. “Please, for the love of God…” He was glad his face was covered: he was never a good liar. “Don’t kill me. You can’t. I’m a journalist, for Christ sake.”
The cold muzzle of a pistol pressed into his neck. “Get the feck out.”
He sat up unsteadily, banging his head on the inside of the boot, the car swaying slightly beneath his weight. “Please, please don’t do this. My mother… she’s very old.”
Gun still tight against his jugular, his captor leaned into his face. Terry could smell the breath, still smoky but fresh now, not stale as it had been outside his front door. “Your mammy and daddy died ten years ago. Get out.”
“You know me?”
No answer.
“How do you know me?”
The pistol pressed tighter against the soft skin on his neck. “Out.”
Disconcerted, Terry shuffled his naked bum around the boot until he was facing out and dropped his feet over the edge to the ground.
“Hurry.”
“Sorry.” Terry sniffed his dry nose. “I’m sorry. Whatever I’ve done, I’m sorry.”
“Out.”
Terry kept his face to the man. He knew it was harder to kill someone if they were facing you, breathing on you. Even the most hardened assassin asked his victims to turn away.
One bare foot found the rough stones, then the other, and he stood up. Giving a whimper for cover, he staggered, caught his weight, shuffled a step. He was a foot and a half away from the car, he thought, far enough to use his weight against the man’s back.
The pistol pressed a kiss into his neck and left.
Gladness and hope flared in his chest. Terry took a deep breath, adrenaline pulsing through him, fingers tingling with excitement. He listened for the shift of the feet, for the step to close the boot.
He didn’t feel the muzzle on his temple because it wasn’t touching him. He didn’t hear the cold metal crack of the pistol shot as it ripped the thick night air and echoed across muddy fields.
Sharp black gravel scattered where his body fell.
The man looked down, saw the eager rush of blood pool under the sacking, watched it seep into the soil.
Judging him dead, he put a foot on Terry’s hip and pushed, rolling the naked body into the ditch by the side of the road.
Terry’s corpse splashed into the trickling stream. One meaty arm flailed out to the side, the moonlight catching a silver stretch mark underneath. Fingers flexed, twitched into a loose fist, then flowered gracefully open.
His killer reached for his packet of cigarettes, thought better of it, and dropped his hand to his side. He was tired.
The warm summer breeze tickled the tips of the grass on the verge. In the dark field beyond, a small brown bird rose screaming from the ground, circled, and flew away towards the yellow lights of a cottage on the distant hillside.
Terry’s corpse relaxed in the watery ditch. For the briefest of moments a white thigh dammed the stream, pooling it into a miniature lake, until it found a path across his groin, over his hip, and continued its passage to the sea.
Terry Hewitt’s corpse began the long melt back into the earth, and the world went on.
TWO. SAFE HOME
Paddy took a crouching step from her armchair to the television, pressed the button for STV, and sat back down. The adverts were still on. Dub’s long, skinny body was draped across the length of the settee and he smiled a slow, warm grin.
“This is the best point of the entire fucking week for me. The delicious moment just before the music starts and the half-hour car crash begins.” He slid his hand under his T-shirt, lazily scratching the skin on his belly. She pretended not to look at his flat stomach and the soft cushion of his pectorals. She was having to do that a lot.
“It’s getting worse, isn’t it?” she said to the TV.
“No.” Dub raised a finger to correct her. “It’s getting much worse.”
They grinned in unison at the screen as the theme tune started, high-pitched, frantic, followed by the flat titles for George H. Burns’s Saturday Night Old Time Variety Show. The graphics were a rip-off of Monty Python’s Flying Circus but still they were the most original thing about the program.
A knock on the front door startled them. Dub sat up and looked out into the hall. “That’s not him, is it?”
“Doubt it,” said Paddy, acting casual as she got up. “Don’t turn over though, in case it is.”
She pretended not to care whether it was George Burns, but when she was alone in the big hall she straightened her pajamas and fluffed her hair up at the sides. She opened the door.
The man in the close was young, fresh faced behind his John Lennon glasses. His hair was pulled straight back into a ponytail at the nape of his neck, loose, thick. The notepad and poised pen were the real clues.
“Hi, sorry to bother you, I’m Steven Curren-”
Conscious of the loud paint job and messy boxes in the hall, Paddy almost shut the door so they were talking through a two-inch gap. This would be the first of a hundred door stops. She’d better get used to it. “Who are ye with?”
“Sunday Mail,” he said, a little proud. “When’s Callum Ogilvy getting out? Is he coming to stay with you?”
His accent was soft and rounded. Edinburgh or England, Paddy thought, maybe Scottish but educated in England.
“Son,” she whispered for the sake of the neighbors, “fuck off away from my door.”
“Come on, Miss Meehan, you must know when he’s getting released. Where’s he staying when he gets out? Is Driver Sean going to pick him up? Is he staying with him?”
He had a grasp of the basic facts but nothing he couldn’t have found in old clippings or picked up from office gossip. She waited for him to hit her with something else but he didn’t.
“Is that it?”
He shrugged. “Um, yeah.”
“This is a bullshit door stop,” she said. “You’ve got nothing to go on. Do the Mail even know you’re here?”
“McVie,” he explained, eyes dipping in shame. “He said I have to try.”
“McVie sent you to my door on a Saturday night?”
“He said to follow up the leads.”
She felt for him. A more practiced journalist could have challenged her or made up some fact to goad her into talking. Her own door-stop method had always been to wait until a few journalists had rung the bell and been thrown off the step. Then she’d open her eyes wide and pretend to be a rookie, forced to come here by an evil editor. She’d ask the householder permission to wait on the step for a little while, just so that her editor couldn’t sack her. Often they’d side with her against the paper and invite her in. Curren, by contrast, had started combative and then had nothing to back it up. He’d get his face kicked in doing that in Glasgow.