“Busy night?”
“Aye, a good night.”
“Good takings?”
“Six thousand, give or take.”
“Same as last Friday?”
“Aye, that’s right,” he said, and she could hear him smiling. “About the same.”
She smiled too, reaching across for his bed but finding only air and patting that instead. “Well done.”
They settled back, listening to each other’s breathing, Rachel rasping a little sometimes but mostly even, Abraham taking long, deep breaths to set an example. They slept little now but liked to be in bed listening to each other, without the necessity of speech or the need always to be doing things. They lay for forty minutes together in the soft blue gloom. Once, Rachel reached out and patted the air again, moved by some tender memory.
A sudden loud snap just outside the bedroom door made Rachel turn her head sharply.
They both watched as a black shadow fell across the pool of light from the hall, and suddenly the door was thrown open, smashing off the bedroom wall. Two figures, maybe three, came running in. One held a blanket high and flew at Abraham, covering the old man’s head with it. The other stepped on Abraham’s bed and swung himself across the room, making for Rachel.
He grabbed both Rachel’s wrists, wrenching her off the bed and onto the floor on the far side, kneeling on her operation scar, making her cry out with the pain. He let his weight settle on her chest. Retracting his arm at the elbow he shot his fist forward and punched her on the jaw. He could see her in the light from the hall, her toothless mouth, her thinning hair and wiry neck. He punched her again, on the cheek, on the neck, on the jaw again.
Abraham heard his wife from under the blanket and used all of his one-hundred-and-ten-pound frame to wrestle the man who was holding him. He heard the man’s short breaths, sensed his surprise. He had strong fingers from doing the count every night and found the man’s arm, sticking his fingers into the soft armpit, squeezing hard. The man shouted.
“Get this cunt off me, Pat!”
He was from Glasgow, Southside, Gorbals possibly, where Rachel and Abraham both grew up.
Suddenly Rachel breathed normally again and Abraham stopped struggling. He hadn’t managed to shake off the blanket and sat still, holding the man’s arm, listening keenly, wondering what the new swishing noise was. An iron bar swung through the air and made contact with his back, with his legs, his arms, his back again.
They took everything: the money, travelers’ checks, what little jewelry there was, and Rachel’s watch, pulled off her arm as she lay bleeding and crying. When it was all done they tied them up, Abraham black and blue under his blanket, his whimpering wife next to him. He lay under the blanket trying to remember things about the men. They were both Glaswegian, one called Jim or Jimmy, one called Pat; one was big and stocky, the other thin.
The men decided not to leave until the sun came up so as not to raise suspicion. Settling down in the living room, they drank the last of a bottle of fifteen-year-old Glenmorangie Abraham had been keeping for best.
Left alone in the bedroom, Abraham tried to free himself but couldn’t.
“Don’t.” Rachel was struggling to stay awake. “Please. Stay still. They’ll hit us.”
So Abraham stayed still for his wife. He stayed still and listened to her dry breath rattle around the room they had shared for thirty years.
Eventually a watery white light began to seep through the blanket.
“Is it getting light?” he asked, but Rachel didn’t answer.
The men were there again, in the room, walking over to them. Abraham flinched away, but they weren’t there to hit him. They tied more ropes around them, tightening the ones already on the couple. They were standing up to leave when Rachel spoke again.
“Please,” she said, her breath shallow, “send an ambulance for me. Please.”
They didn’t answer. They walked to the door.
She called again. “Please send an ambulance-”
“Shut up, shut up. We’ll send an ambulance. All right?”
The door slammed behind them and they were gone.
III
Meehan and Griffiths were outside Kilmarnock on the deserted road to Glasgow, doing eighty and singing a dirty song about the different-colored hairs on a whore’s cunt, both pleased that they hadn’t taken the risk of robbing the office, when they passed a crying girl in a miniskirt and shiny white boots.
“Stop!” shouted Meehan. “Slow down.”
Griffiths sat upright suddenly, looking around for cop cars.
“Did you see her?” Meehan thumbed behind them. “There was a girl crying back there.”
Griffiths slowed the car and pulled over, squinting into his rearview mirror. He threw the car into reverse and careered backwards towards her.
Irene Burns didn’t have the legs for a miniskirt. She had calves like a navvy but a big chest, and to Meehan’s and Griffiths’s eyes that balanced her out a bit. She had a drink in her but was only sixteen and wasn’t used to it. She was sobbing so hard she could barely explain what had happened. She had been hitchhiking with her pal Isobel when two men offered them a lift home. They got into a white car, an Anglia, and one of the men got out a half bottle of whisky. They were driving along and Isobel started winching one man, but Irene didn’t fancy hers, wouldn’t let him touch her, so the men got annoyed, stopped at the side of the road, and put her out. Now Isobel was all alone in a car with two strange men, Irene was ten miles from home, drunk for the first time in her life, and she didn’t know what she was going to tell Isobel’s mother.
Meehan reached into the back of the Triumph and opened the passenger door. “You get in, pet,” he said. “If anyone can catch that car it’s this man.”
Griffiths grinned out at her. He was missing quite a lot of teeth, and it made her smile a little. He gave her a salute and called “Hello there” in a silly voice, like Eccles from The Goon Show. Irene climbed in the back, feeling better already.
Before he became a thief Griffiths was a racer, and he was a talented driver. Within five minutes they saw the white Anglia in front of them on the road. It was going slow, doing about thirty, weaving back and forth across the road. Griffiths slowed and pulled up, keeping shoulder to shoulder. The other driver was a young country boy spruced up for a night out. In the back of the car a girl with a mashed-up beehive was necking another guy.
“Isobel!” squealed Irene. “That’s her! That’s her with him.”
The driver looked at them and Meehan gestured to him to pull over to the side. He saw the country boy hesitate, his eyes flickering from the road in front of him to their car, trying to work out who they were and why he should comply. Irene wound down her window and shouted for her friend, but Isobel ignored the call and carried on kissing ferociously, her new friend’s hand lost in her candy-floss hair. The country boy slowed and pulled off to the side. Griffiths had barely stopped the Triumph in front of them when Irene pulled open the passenger door and ran out, heaving open the Anglia door and tugging her friend out of the backseat and into the road. Isobel shook her off with a single bat of her hand. She was a big girl who didn’t look like she would ever need saving. Below her miniskirt her tights had made a suspension bridge between her knees.
In the Triumph, Meehan sighed. “What d’ye reckon? Maybe we should just leave them.”
They watched for another minute. Isobel pulled up her tights by the waistband. Irene was howling again. She seemed to be having a drama of her own, as if she was in a completely separate movie.