"Why?"

A girl appears behind Mackie now. She's waiflike, with skin as white as porcelain and a sheen on her hazel eyes that tells me she's been using. Her long blonde hair falls about her face in straggly strips. "Who's this?" she says. "Are ye no going to invite him Mackie stands aside. "Come in," he says, like it's a challenge. He's confident, maybe even thinking I don't have the b.a.l.l.s to follow into the hallway. They lead me down to the right and a chipboard door into what must be the living room. a small TV in the corner no video or DVD player.

The TV's tuned to Channel 5; some lurid doc.u.mentary When Carjacking Crime Goes Wrong or some such c.r.a.p. There's a dead couch and several mattresses spread out on the floor. I count four people in here and a baby's cot in a darkened corner.

One of the four people stands up. He's tall and skeletally thin with long white-blonde hair. His bare arms are marked with tracks, but he appears fairly lucid. "Who are you?"

"A friend of Ronnie's."

"Ronnie was here once, man," he says. "That's all. He was here the once and he split because he said he wis better than us." His voice is high pitched and nasal, like he's talking through a broken nose.

"Must have been pretty insulting," I say. "Did you get angry enough to stave his head in?" I looked at him, weighing what damage he could do if he tried to attack me. "You do know he's in the hospital, right?"

Mackie's behind me now, placing a heavy hand on my shoulder. He says, "I have tae hand it to ya, bud. You gotta lot of nerve. No much brains, ken, but a lot of nerve."

"I just want to know what happened."

"You want a beer?"

I follow Mackie into the kitchen. It hasn't been cleaned in a long time, if ever. He opens the fridge and brings out two cans of Tennents. He tosses me one and then opens his own. Neither of us says a word until he's good and ready.

"Ronnie Sweets was a wannabe kid, y'ken what I'm saying? Whit I mean is that he was rich and he wanted to be poor. He spent too much time listening to those eejits who wrote that song, ken, Common People. He wanted to be poor. He wanted to slum it with the likes of me because, ken, I'm an interestin' character."

Not the description I would have used, but I keep quiet and drink from the can he gave me.

"Thing is, with these wannabe eejits, we keep them around cause we can use the cash, ken? And Ronnie Sweets was good for cash. But he was a stupid wee kid. Things got too much for him, or maybe he just got bored of us or something and he took off, like."

"But he owed you money."

"Lots of it," Mackie says, taking another long swig from the beer can. "And he just thought he could go away and back to his rich friends."

"He was middle cla.s.s," I say.

"To people like me, rich is rich and poor is poor. And it doesn't matter who you are, you settle yer debts."

"He scored a lot of drugs from you?"

"Gra.s.s, the rich kids' drug. The tourists' drug." He spits into the sink, then turns and fixes me with a stare. "So he had to pay. Someone had to teach the wee p.r.i.c.k a lesson."

"Tough lesson," I say. "The kid probably won't wake up."

Mackie shrugs. "It's the way of life, right?"

"Just one question. Did you do this?"

"Did I personally take a plank of wood or a golf club or something and crush his head?"

"Yes. That's what I'm asking."

"You're not a friend of the family. I don't know who you are, but I want to know why you're so interested."

"I know his parents. They knew about my past as a copper, so they asked me to investigate. They want closure. They want to know what happened to their baby boy."

He nodded, and put his beer on the worktop. "So whatever you find out gets back to them."

"And no further. After all, even if you give me a full confession it is, in the end, just your word against mine."

He looks at me for a moment. "Empty out your pockets," he says. "The ones on the inside of that jacket too."

I empty out my pockets. Mostly pocket lint, my notebook, my mobile phone. He takes that and examines it, holding it up in front of his face, one eyebrow c.o.c.ked in curiosity. "It's funny," he says, "how we can sometimes leave these on by accident."

I nod. "But it's not on."

"No," he says, putting it on the draining board beside a festering saucepan. "It's not on. But I had to check, understand?"

When he's satisfied I have no way of recording our conversation, he says, "I didn't pan his face myself, you understand. But he owed me money and you ask those people in ma living room, I don't take kindly when people don't pay up."

"You're a businessman."

"That's right. I'm a businessman. Like that Richard Branson, I'm supplying a service that people want and need." I think, very public spirited, but keep the comment to myself. I have to admit that he's surprising me with his lucidity and forthrightness. For a wee schemie who grew up in Fintry he's pretty smart.

"You ask anyone on the estates and they'll tell you what b.a.s.t.a.r.ds most businessmen can be," he says. "If you don't pay up, they'll come round and take your telly away. Sometimes they'll throw you out on the streets. They don't care because all that matters to them is their money. It's the same with me. People who enter into a contract with me, while they haven't signed any wee legal bits of paper, they've entered a contract anyway. And in Scots law, a verbal contract is still a contract. And our contract's pretty simple: They pay up in time and I don't send anyone round to pan their pus."

"So you sent the boys round to teach wee Ronnie Sweets a lesson."

"Aye."

"Did they tell you what they did to him?"

"Nah. I read in the papers that he ended up in hospital." He speaks lightly. Ronnie doesn't matter to him. "It's the way of the world," he says. "Sometimes you just can't predict what life's going to throw at you next."

The doorbell rings. Mackie hollers through to the wee party in the living room, "Would somebody get that?" Then he turns his attention back to me and says, "Now where was I?"

"Sending the boys round."

"Aye. I didn't send them round so much as I put a wee word out for people to keep an eye out for Ronnie, for Chewitt. A lot of people knew ho he was. Most of 'em thought he was a t.o.s.s.e.r, too."

"But a rich t.o.s.s.e.r."

"Who didn't pay."

I hear m.u.f.fled voices at the door.

I say, "Who were they?"

"Who?"

"The guys who did it."

He rattles off three names as though they barely matter. I finish my can of Tennents as he talks.

"They came round after," he says. "And they told me what they did to the wee eejit. Jumped him on Thurso Crescent. Beat the c.r.a.p out of him."

"I know."

"Kinda wish I'd been there," he says. He looks up as a commotion explodes out in the corridor.

"What the . . . ? What's all this rammie about?" he yells, steaming out past me and into the hail.

The "rammie" was a police raid, cunningly executed by Sandy and four other officers. I'd asked Sandy to give me some time to speak to Mackie first before he came wading in with the other officers and their size twelve boots.

Mackie doesn't wade in, however, but comes right back in the kitchen, ranting and swearing at me. Two officers I have not met before rush in after him but they are too late to stop his considerable fist impacting my nose. I do my best to roll with the punch but it's wild and hard. I feel the bone in my nose split as I fail away from him and smack down on the linoleum floor.

My blood spills dark red over the white surface. I see it in horrific stop-motion closeup.

I look up to see the two officers subdue Mackie. They get him in cuffs and knock him down to his knees. He stays there, seething. His eyes are fixed on me and there is a vicious anger in them.

Sandy walks in, stepping past Mackie with barely a glance at the big man, and says to me, "I hope you got what you wanted."

"Yeah," I say. "I did." But it feels hollow somehow.

DAY THREE.

Ronnie Sweets's parents sit beside their son, holding hands and consoling each other. I stand at the door to the private room, just watching.

A pretty nurse asks me if I need any help. I shake my head, take a deep breath, and walk into the room.

"Mr. and Mrs. Sweets," I say.

They turn and look at me. Mr. Sweets stands and says, "Well?"

"Your son's attackers have been arrested," I say. "They were apprehended by the police during a drug raid." I tell them about the events of the previous night. I change a few details, make out like Sandy's raid was a fortuitous coincidence, when in reality it was premeditated and part of the deal we made with each other over lunch.

Mrs. Sweets almost breaks down halfway through, but her husband puts his arm around her and urges me to continue. I feel terrible telling them about their son's life. They look disappointed, almost disbelieving. The worst thing about my line of work is delivering the bad news and, unfortunately, the truth nearly always is bad news.

When I'm finished, Mr. Sweets tells me that their payment will be settled in the next few days. I say that's fine, and then I say that I'm sorry. I don't know how sincere they think I'm being.

DAY FIVE.

Ronnie Sweets dies two days later.

I don't take the call myself. Babs intercepts it. She comes through to my office to tell me, and I feel like crying. I feel as though my work has been wasted, and I'm sure Mr. and Mrs. Sweets must feel the same way.

Babs goes back out, leaving me alone in the office. I never knew Ronnie Sweets. I don't know if he was a bad guy, or if he was simply a good kid who got involved with the wrong people. All I ever really knew of him was a bandaged sh.e.l.l, no better than a corpse.

I'm not a religious man. Sometimes I like to sit in the church, however and try to make peace with the universe. That would be the right move, now. I need peace and solitude and a time to think.

I open the drawer in my desk and pull out a bottle of Jack. It burns my mouth, like paint stripper, but enough of it and I'm sure the world will seem better.

DUDMAN'S WORD

(Alfred Hitchc.o.c.k's Mystery Magazine, December 2004) Around seven o'clock on Friday evening, Ally Dudman was scorted out the back doors of Tayside Police Headquarters and taken to an unmarked car. He was with two police constables who were escorting him to a local hotel Ally Dudman was an important witness. He was a drug-dealing sc.u.mbag, but he was liable to bring down two big fish in the Dundee drug trade were he to appear as a witness in court.

He wasn't testifying out of the goodness of his heart, of course. He was testifying to save his own a.r.s.e, to cut some kind of deal so that they wouldn't treat him so harshly. The police considered the deal worth their while. They'd been after the Kennedy clan for a Robert Kennedy and his brother Jimmy were both in their mid-fifties. They ostensibly ran a successful pub in the city centre. The Flop House had been a Dundee inst.i.tution for a few years and ran as a respectable business. No matter how often the police wanted to catch something going down in there, they failed every time.

The Kennedys weren't stupid; they knew how to play the Their father had, of course, been the same way. Organized crime is a family business.

But now Ally Dudman had the smarts and the information to connect the Kennedys directly to drug shipments coming in and out of Dundee. He could link them to one of the biggest heroin trafficking scams in the country. There was no way the police were going to let this one go.

At 6:45 that evening, Ally had begun getting cold feet. Ally had been talking to D.I. George Lindsay-known informally among his colleagues as Curious George, when he was out of earshot, due to his unnaturally simian features-and had begun to say how he was worried for his life. Curious, being a stubborn b.a.s.t.a.r.d and hardly what you would call a "people person," told him to shut the f- up and be thankful he was getting the deal they were giving him. Warning bells should have rung, but Curious just wanted the stunted little s.h.i.te out of the building, so handed Ally over to the police escort with barely a word.

At 7:20 one of the two escorts radioed in a garbled message. He sounded panicked, and his transmission was cut off quickly. Nearby beat officers were dispatched to investigate.

At 7:24 the escorts were found unceremoniously crumpled on the pavement down Dudhope Street. They had been left under the light of a street lamp. One of them-the one who had radioed in- was still conscious. His head was cut and bleeding. The other guy had suffered severe head trauma and lay unconscious beside his partner.

At 7:45 the escort car was found, abandoned, dumped in an alley, the keys still in the ignition.

At 8:03, Sandy Griggs walked out of a meeting with Curious George and called me from his mobile.

"Sam," he said when I answered. "How're you doing?" He was trying to keep his voice light and cheery "I'm fine," I said. I put my hand over the mouthpiece of the phone and mouthed Sandy's name across the table. Ros smiled at me and nodded her head. I knew I'd have to make it a quick call. "What's up?"

"Ally Dudman.

"Aye?"

"You know him?"

"We met a few times."

"He was in police custody," said Sandy.

"Look," I said. "Is this important? Because, you know, me and Ros, we're trying to have a nice wee intimate dinner and it's a bit hard when..."

"I'm sorry," said Sandy, cutting me off abruptly. "But, yeah, this is important."

I apologized to Ros and took the call outside the restaurant. I watched her through the window but she refused to look at me and ate her dinner slowly, with a deliberation that left me in no doubt I'd be in the doghouse when we got home.

Sandy explained to me about Ally and his escape from police custody. "He's our best shot at tang these b.a.s.t.a.r.ds down," he said. "And now he's gone and p.i.s.sed off."

"What can I do about it?"