I opened it, carefully, again not because I was worried, but because I felt it merited the same care with which it had been put together. (Plus, I’m a Fifer; you never know when you’re going to need a sheet of wrapping paper.)
The tape adhesive wasn’t exactly superglue; it came away easily and the paper lifted clear in a piece, without tearing. Nice one, Oz.
Inside was a large packet of Pampers, two Babygros, age six to nine months, one pink, one yellow, and a teething ring. I picked them up, one by one, looking for a card, but I didn’t expect to find one. I sat there for a while, smiling to myself, looking at my daughter’s presents and wondering what to make of them.
I wasn’t thinking about what I should do next. . I knew that already. . I was just thinking.
Eventually I stood up, slipped on my red Lacoste wind-cheater, and stepped out of the truck. This time, I locked the door behind me.
At a leisurely pace, I walked across the car park, crossed the road at the lights and made my way down past the mosque, to the Pear Tree. We were just short of the start of the university year, otherwise the old pub would have been heaving with students, adding to their loan debts. (Ask yourself, as I do, often; what sort of country is it that doesn’t invest in its brightest and best young people?) It wasn’t quiet, but there was space at the bar for me to order a pint of Eighty. . (How do British publicans get away with their attitudes to their customers? Virtually everywhere else in the world, you pay for what you’ve had when you leave. In Britain they’re not far short of seeing your money before you see their watery overpriced product.). . and a spare table in the beer garden for me to sit.
I sipped my beer and looked around me; some of the production team were gathered around a table in the corner of the garden. I waved to them but didn’t join them; instead I popped open my packet of crisps. . salt and vinegar, I can’t stand any other kind. . and gazed back across the square, taking time to admire the late Victorian grandeur of Atkinson’s McEwan Hall. Parts of Edinburgh are an architectural dream, others, like the St James Shopping Centre and office block, are a nightmare.
I sat and I wondered and I waited. Eventually I found myself pondering upon the wisdom of two pints of Eighty before a Chinese. It was an easy decision to make; I was on the point of rising to go back to the bar, when, as if by magic, another was placed on the table beside me.
‘Thanks,’ I said, without looking up, or round.
He set down his lager, then settled on the bench, facing me. There were flecks of grey in his hair, which came down almost to his shoulders, and in his heavy beard. The sun was long gone, but he still wore his shades. I couldn’t see his eyes, but I knew that he was staring at me, wondering, maybe, why I hadn’t shit myself.
‘Hello,’ I said, evenly. Then I reached across the table, almost lazily, and punched him in the mouth. A girl at the next table looked across and gasped, then looked away again, quickly.
His sunglasses went skew-wiff; he put them back in place then wiped blood from his lip with the back of his hand. ‘What was that for?’ he asked.
‘You know fucking well what it was for. Glasgow. . not last weekend; a while back.’
‘Oh,’ he said, ‘I see. You found out.’ He took a drink, swilled it around in his mouth as if he was washing away more blood, and swallowed. ‘You were expecting me?’ he asked.
‘Of course I was expecting you; I was meant to. Fucking stupid e-mail address.’
‘I thought it was quite clever,’ he said, his crest a little fallen.
‘It was too clever by half; just typical of you. . mzrimnmeal92.’ I mumbled the jumble, as if the Eighty had got to me already. ‘An anagram of Zimmerman; give me a bit of credit, I’d have got that eventually. But to add in the numbers as well; I was almost insulted by that.
‘Zimmerman is Dylan’s real name; now I might be fucking famous these days, but I can’t imagine Mystic Bob wanting to get in touch with me. Apart from him, and the dead poet, I only know of one Dylan.’
‘You’re forgetting Bob Willis.’
‘You’re right; I’m forgetting him. Who is he?’
‘The cricketer; he took Dylan as his middle name.’
‘Big deal. Anyway, even from the anagram I’d have got the link, but you had to put the icing on it by adding the numbers; another anagram, of the day and month Mike Dylan was shot in Amsterdam.’
‘How did you know for sure it was me and not someone pretending?’
‘Two reasons. The first and most obvious was that you knew my e-mail address. The second was the gifts you left for Janet. An impostor wouldn’t have done that.’
He tilted his head back; I could just see that behind the shades his eyes were closed. ‘How did I know that’s what the two of you would call her?’ he murmured.
‘Because,’ I hissed, ‘you’re a clever bastard. . too clever by half, remember. So fucking clever it got you killed. . remember? You’re dead, Mike. I know you’re dead, because I was there. I saw you get shot, I saw you die.’
He shook his head. ‘You saw me cough up a lot of blood and start to choke, then you saw me pass out. Then they got you the hell out of there. What you didn’t see was when they whipped me out of there to the emergency room.
‘If the man they sent had been trying to kill me he’d have blown my brains out. He didn’t; he shot me through the right side of the chest. It got a bit hairy, because he hit my lung, but that served to convince you, didn’t it? They wanted the other guy dead, but not me.’
‘Why not? You were a rogue policeman, and Special Branch at that. Surely they wanted you even deader than him?’
‘No. They wanted the names in my head; I’d never been debriefed before I did my runner. I knew what the guy they killed knew, namely some key links in the chain of drug imports, not just to Scotland, but to the whole of Western Europe and beyond. When I began to recover, they gave me a choice. .’
‘Who were “they”?’
‘Our security services, the Dutch and the American DEA; heavy hitters all of them. They scared the shite out of me, I can tell you. I gave them the names I had, but they said that wasn’t enough, that the list didn’t go far enough. They gave me a new identity and they told me to contact some of the guys I’d been told about, to infiltrate the network, and to stay in until I had the whole chain and could deliver them.
‘I tried to tell them to get fucked. They offered to dump me in the North Sea.’
‘So did you do everything they told you?’
He sighed. ‘Yes. Two months ago there was an international operation starting in Burma and Thailand, and winding up in London, Glasgow, Amsterdam and New York. All sorts of people were taken down; some of them were taken out completely. . like me, for example, I’m dead again.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean they did again what they did in Amsterdam, but in Bangkok this time.’
‘What? They shot you?’
He grinned. ‘Right in the head; but not with a bullet, with a special cartridge filled with blood, like you guys use in the movies. There were witnesses, a couple of the middle-ranking people who were being arrested. The idea was that when they got to jail they would spread the word that I’d been bumped.’
‘Did it work?’
‘As far as I know; but these dealers have tipsters everywhere on the inside. I should know, I used to be one.’
‘So who are you now?’
‘I can’t tell you that. But you’re right, I have a third identity now; I was set up with that, and with a chunk of money. The deal was that I’d go to Portugal and never go near the drugs business again.’
‘As easy as that?’
He gave a grim smile; it was less than a couple of years since he’d gone tits up at Schiphol, but his eyes looked twenty years older. I wondered what they’d seen since then. Of course, he’d been dead twice; that must have an effect on a bloke. ‘Not quite as easy,’ he replied. ‘They told me that they know where I am, and who I am. They may have a use for me in the future.’