Read Fire in the Blood Online

Authors: George McCartney

Fire in the Blood

Fire in the Blood

George McCartney
Copyright © 2014 George McCartney
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study,
or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents
Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in
any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the
publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with
the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries
concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.
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ISBN 978 1784626 846
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Disclaimer

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

Acknowledgement

A big thank you to Moira. For being my muse, confidante and all round good egg.

Chapter 1

Slumped in his office chair, Jack Davidson, the owner and sole employee of JD Investigations, was starting another working day in the company of his new best friend, a nagging fearworm, which had recently taken to skulking around inside his brain, insisting that he was losing the plot. Reluctantly, he had to concede that the worm did have a point. Business has slowed to a crawl and his experience and skills, acquired over a lifetime, no longer seemed to count for very much with prospective clients. And as for making long-term plans and taking sensible decisions, well you can forget that kind of nonsense, Jack. Lately the only decision that still seemed to come easily was deciding when to have another drink and, after checking his watch, he decided that since it was
well
after nine-thirty in the morning, it was perfectly reasonable, sensible even, to reach under his desk and pop a can of Belhaven Best beer, his preferred morning bracer.
He took a long pull from the can and as the foaming brew slid gently down his throat, the fearworm began to slither away and his mood improved further when he discovered an unopened bag of crisps at the back of a desk drawer.
He smiled as he lit a cigarette, inhaled deeply, and raised a toast. ‘Here’s to beer, cigarettes and cheese and onion crisps … the Glasgow breakfast of champions.’
A desultory look at the contents of his in-tray revealed several overdue bills, the remains of a fish supper and an A4 pad with a scribbled list on the top sheet. In the course of his former professional life, as a detective sergeant with Glasgow CID, Jack had always found it useful to write down the key elements of any problem on a single sheet of paper, in order to get his head quickly round the task in hand. The second essential element of his problem solving routine was to have country music playing in the background and, on switching on his old cassette player, Webb Pierce began to sing “There Stands the Glass”
.
The header on his A4 pad on this occasion was clear and unambiguous,
Action Plan to stop my business going down the pan.
Jack wasn’t fooling himself. He knew that his life, never mind his business, was in big trouble. But what he wasn’t sure about anymore, the thing that
really
scared him as he lay awake, sweating and staring at the ceiling in the middle of the night, was whether he still cared enough to do something about it.
Divorced, living alone and due to the nature of his job also spending most of his waking hours alone … well, that’s a
lot
of alone. Living like that for any length of time does work for some people, but not many. And it certainly wasn’t working for Jack Davidson.
He’d also recently experienced a moment that comes to all men in their mid-fifties, when he woke up and suddenly realised that he was no longer a mature silver fox. Someone who could, at least from a distance, in poor light, be a passable body double for George Clooney in one of those annoying coffee machine ads. It dawned that the world had now officially passed him by. It had gone, accelerating fast into the distance and was now a distant, mocking speck on the horizon.
What happened? Well, that’s easy … what happened buddy, is you got
old
. This painful truth had come sharply into focus at the last pub quiz Jack had attended. After almost twenty minutes of questions, he had experienced an extended panic attack realising that he didn’t know the answers to
any
of the questions being asked about the current crop of A-list celebs, television talent shows or soaps, boy bands, blockbuster movies or basically anything else of any significance in popular culture, that had occurred in the last twenty years. The fact that he was the only person in the pub, maybe the world, capable of answering a vital tiebreak question, regarding the year Johnny Cash had performed his famous free concert for the inmates of Folsom Prison, had provided scant comfort. In fact, a youthful member of his own team had even sarcastically asked Jack if he’d been in the audience himself, when the Man in Black rocked the joint way back in 1968.
But, in truth, the signs of creeping isolation shouldn’t have been that hard to spot, if he’d been paying attention. His phone didn’t seem to ring quite as often as it used to, either for work or socially. He had gradually, imperceptibly drifted out of the loop and was no longer invited to nights out with former work colleagues, and he
definitely
went to more funerals than parties. Being ignored in shops had become the norm and even the relentless city centre charity collectors stepped smartly out of the way as he approached, because he was clearly now bracketed in a completely different demographic group, for their pitch to be worthwhile.
Too old, too stupid looking and probably skint.
And, that very morning, he’d experienced the final indignity when a young woman, with a kindly pitying look, had stood up and offered to give Jack her seat on the bus into work. Okay, he was battling a bad hangover, fair enough, and probably wasn’t looking his absolute best. But still, not a good sign.
But the hardest part of coming to terms with this new reality, was forcing himself to take a cold hard look in the mirror and accept that becoming old and
out of touch was not something to rail against. Because there’s no point. It’s just the way of the world, the natural order of things. This is how it’s all
meant
to work. The last of the Mohicans has to gracefully step aside, to allow the young guns to come on through and take their shot at making an arse of things.
So Jack did it. He got up and, for the first time in years, stared objectively at himself in a small mirror, above the wash hand basin in his office toilet. He took in the grey skin pallor and the slightly sagging jowls, the thinning grey hair and the substantial bags under the eyes of the man who was staring back. Nothing good, so far. Two small pieces of blood-stained toilet paper, one on either side of his chin, where he’d nicked himself shaving that morning, combined with a wrinkled shirt collar and several mysterious stains on his tie, accentuated the faded, distressed look.
Turning away from the mirror, he muttered, ‘Get real pal, when people take a look at your coupon, they’re not thinking George fucking Clooney. They’re really not. They’re more likely to be thinking to themselves, is this the crazy old guy with the dog and the blanket, from outside Marks and Spencer, who keeps asking if I have any spare change?’
He freshened his face with cold water and returned to the A4 pad, where he contemplated a short list of options, which he had drafted a week before, in the hope of resurrecting his business. He winced and concluded, rightly, that he must have been completely bladdered at the time of writing. The unconventional business plan read:

1 Buy more lottery tickets, start going to church and pray every night for forgiveness

2 Try to be nice to people, stop drinking and work harder. Tellingly, this line had been double scored through and was now barely legible.

3 Grow tits, get a big hairy jumper and wear tight jeans like the hot Scandi-Noir dames on the television, who make being a top detective look completely effortless and damned sexy at the same time

Definitely no silver bullets here, so far, Jack. Then the final item on the list, which he had circled with a felt tip pen and then added a prophetic side note, which read “
last throw of the dice?
”

4 Find an assistant. An apprentice but not like those obnoxious, self-obsessed twats on the television, who all look as if they would cheerfully murder their parents for a tenner. No, what I need is somebody with plenty of energy, who is smart, street-savvy and willing to do all the hard work for not much money. Someone with really good IT skills, who can help drag my business screaming and kicking into the twenty-first century

Jack grunted in approval, feeling sure that Sir Alan Sugar, another grumpy old sod, would heartily applaud his bold initiative. He had placed a job ad in one of the local free advertising papers.
A Summer Internship is available with JD Investigations. Can you think outside the box, push the envelope and step up to the plate in a fast-paced, challenging, customer-facing role? Driving licence and own safety footwear essential. When it’s gone … it’s gone.
He felt that the wording of the ad struck just the right note of modernity and dynamism, and he was particularly pleased that he’d described the vacancy as an
Internship
, which implied that this was much more than a shit, entry-level job, although he could only afford to pay shit, entry-level wages. He then sat back and waited, ready to be overwhelmed by job applications from the ranks of the desperate, highly qualified unemployed living in the city of Glasgow.
Unfortunately, although a late night drinking session had provided the inspiration for the content of Jack’s ad, it had also resulted in him forgetting to include a contact phone number. On the face of it this should not have been an insurmountable problem for any aspiring private detective in the Greater Glasgow area, who was capable of switching on a computer and carrying out a simple Google search. However, disappointingly, there had been only five responses to date, requesting an interview. So far, three had failed to turn up at the agreed time and the fourth, a smartly dressed twenty-six year old man who had turned up on time and who, initially, had appeared to be exactly the type of assistant Jack had in mind. Until towards the end of the interview, when Jack had asked the guy if he had any questions about the job, the young man had enquired if it would be okay if he brought his mum along to work with him, for the first week. Just until he settled in, like.

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