‘Mrs Tait? Who’s Malcolm been spending time with?’
Keeping her eyes on the road Annie seemed suddenly very calm. ‘Just his usual pals. Dealer over in Shettleston. James Kairn, lives near the Tower Bar. Might want to check that out. Could ye excuse me?’ She hurried out into the hall, opened the door and ushered them out into the street. Despite still having her slippers on she grabbed a set of keys from the sill inside and shut and locked the door, bid them a perfunctory goodbye, and scurried across the road.
They watched as Annie opened a neighbour’s garden gate and hurried up the path to concrete steps leading up to the front door. The other side of the road was on a slight hill and the steps were steep. Standing at the top, turning to greet Annie, was a blond man.
He was handsome, square-jawed, slim, dressed in clean jeans and a white T-shirt, no coat. He didn’t look like a local, he looked healthy, had muscled arms and a flat stomach, but he did have a broken nose. Outside the house a brand new silver Lexus was parked at the gate.
‘Have you got the plate of the Lexus we were looking for?’ asked Morrow.
Harris looked at his notebook. ‘VF1 7LJ.’
It wasn’t a match. ‘Unusual car out here, I would have thought. Run that plate anyway. We’ll wait.’
Harris scribbled it down and went back to the car to radio, leaving Morrow to watch. The blond man seemed pleased and surprised to see Annie. He turned to her and kissed her cheek, gave her a chaste cuddle. Clearly fond of the guy Annie couldn’t stop herself smiling up at him, but tried to affect annoyance by frowning hard and putting her hands on her hips, elbows jutting angrily out to the side.
Harris came back to her side.
‘Not that worried about Malcolm, is she?’ observed Morrow.
‘More worried about the twenty quid he had.’
Across the street the door opened and they disappeared inside. Harris was opening his car door but Morrow stopped him. ‘Look.’
The house was bought, the front door had been exchanged for a solid oak thing with vicious bolts studded on it on a Castilian pattern. The windows all had alarm wiring threaded along the glass and cameras were dotted along the wall. But what was bizarre was that Annie was standing at a window in the next-door house, two windows along, as if the houses had been knocked into one another.
‘Fortress Tait,’ said Harris. ‘I knew it was here somewhere, just never got the actual address.’
‘You call that number plate in?’
‘Yeah, boss, they’re checking it out now. Probably bogus, though.’
‘Yeah. What d’ye think she’s doing in there?’
Harris watched and shrugged. ‘Visiting family? Maybe she’s in there setting a firebomb.’
34
Annie was the one person in the world Pat wanted to see less than Eddy at the moment but she wouldn’t be shaken off and she wouldn’t shut up about Malki’s twenty quid.
She stood too close to Pat, so close he couldn’t focus on her face without hurting his eyes. And she wasn’t standing still either, she was reeling towards and away from Pat, peering at him top and bottom through ridiculously thick glasses.
‘I mean if he’s getting money from somewhere it should come through me,’ said Annie, a grasping smile at the corner of her mouth. ‘I pay for everything, he owes me about seven hundred quid or nine hundred quid anyway.’
‘I dunno anything about it, Auntie Annie, honest.’
Pat was waiting to be told the Big Man wouldn’t see him, waiting to be told he should deal with Parki, who was reading a newspaper at the far end of the room and ignoring him. They always made you wait.
Pat didn’t want to see the Big Man really, it was too complicated, too much bowing and scraping. He had knocked them back for job after job, for security positions in the family firm, for one-off muscle shifts. Worse than that, Pat wouldn’t let them use his name on any of the legal papers for the security firm. Relations with his relatives were cold to say the least. That’s how they got everyone involved, freezing them out if they didn’t comply. Pat had been pretty straight his whole life until now, until this. Loyalty to Eddy had made him go along with it.
‘Where’d he get it from?’ Annie persisted. ‘From you? For what?’
Pat shrugged and looked away. He hated this cold house. They’d knocked two into one, knocked down a wall to make a living room that was double the size. It was all wrong, the shape was wrong, ceilings too low to fit with the room, four big windows from the front and back, like a waiting room or something. Impossible to heat. Stupid. The big man had money but no taste, he’d bought expensive stuff, desks and antiques and that, but the stuff was all dotted around the room like a garage sale.
‘Never came from me, Annie, I dunno why he’s got money.’
Big Man wouldn’t let anyone clean it now either, not since his wife died, and everything looked sticky and dirty. Pat focused his eye on a glass display cabinet. It looked like something that should be in a shop, a glass box with three shelves in it and a dead bulb at the top, hanging slightly out of its socket. Inside were three sculptures of Chinese women, one sitting under a brolly, one leaning against a tree, one sitting on a bench. They all had the same face.
‘Mean, everb’y knows I handle his money. If they’ve got anything else to give him they should gae it tae me.’
This was what he had to get away from. All of this. Mothers chiselling money from weans, cold rooms, waiting for knock-backs. He wanted toast and warm and pink and hair on pillows. He wanted family members who cried when one of them was taken away. Kindness.
‘See, Pat, son-’
‘Auntie Annie, he never got that money from me. I don’t know where he got it.’
She crossed her arms and looked him up and down. ‘He’s been hanging about Toryglen. Who lives in Toryglen?’ She was threatening him.
Pat stared at her. ‘Did he tell ye he was going to Toryglen?’
‘Nut,’ she glanced out of the window, ‘polis are looking for him.’ She was looking at a couple in a black Ford outside. ‘He got a cab yesterday and they found out he’d went there.’
The police were sitting in a car outside the house right now looking for Malki. Pat felt suddenly violently sick. He shrugged awkwardly. ‘I dunno anyone in Toryglen.’
‘Shugie Wilson,’ said Annie, flatly.
She was so fucking fly. Pat always forgot. ‘I don’t know Shugie.’
‘Aye, ye do,’ she said, looking at him through the bottom of the lenses. ‘Alki. Drinks in Brian’s. Used to run wi’ the Bankshead buoys.’
Parki coughed a dry bark and turned the page of his newspaper noisily. He was telling Annie to shut up, that Pat was an outsider and not to be trusted. He had been a knife-fighter when he was young. He had a scar across his face, a slash that took his bottom lip apart. They mismatched the slit when they put it together. It still made Pat flinch to look at it.
Annie was standing close to Pat, smiling over at Parki as if they were together. ‘Auntie Annie, do you mind?’
‘What, son?’
‘I want to talk to Parki in private.’
She looked at Parki to overrule Pat but he didn’t say anything, his face didn’t flicker. They both stared at her.
‘Oh that’s fucking nice.’ She stepped back along the room. ‘Tell your old auntie to go fuck herself.’ She stopped, waiting for them to insist on her coming back but they didn’t. Sulking, she sloped off. Gordon, the Big Man’s other heavy, let her out of the front door.
Pat and Parki looked at each other across the football pitch of a room. ‘’S a wonder Malki’s such a nice wee guy, innit?’ said Parki.
Gordon came in from the door. He’d been a body builder in his day. Took steroids but hadn’t worked out since his back injury. All the muscle had turned to fat. Even his fingers were fat now. Rumour was his dick was the size of a cigarette. ‘The big man’ll see ye now, Pat.’