Authors: William Meikle
I managed to find the block of flats at only the second attempt...the first time found us turned back on ourselves and heading for the town center. I had Doug turn off the lights and park us towards the far end of the car park, with a clear view of all approaches.
"So, what now?" he said as we sat in the darkness.
"Now we wait," I said. I tilted my seat back and relaxed into it as I lit a cigarette. Silently, I wished for a hat to pull down over my eyes...but felt fedoras were in short supply on the south-side of Glasgow.
Doug started to fidget after less than five minutes. It started with the drumming of fingers on the dashboard, then progressed to playing with the electric windows, then to matching lights and wipers in intricate rhythms.
"Doug," I said softly. He took the hint the first time, but three minutes later he'd started drumming his fingers again.
"The idea is that nobody see us...nobody knows we're here," I said in a whisper.
"Is it always this boring?" he asked. His hand was reaching for the window control.
"Doug, you've been here less than ten minutes. This could take hours. Maybe even all night."
"Oh..." he said in a small voice.
Even before the Amulet case, Doug had badgered me for months about 'running' a case with me. And once I'd been stupid, and let him come with me as I tried to track down a missing teenager. When we found the kid buried in the garden of his parent's holiday home he'd thrown up all over the body. I should have remembered that he just wasn't suited to fieldwork. But I owed him.
I nearly had a life once. It was back when Doug and I were just getting to know each other, and Liz was still alive.
The night my life changed-the 30th of January all those years ago-started like many others. Doug and I left another dull chemistry lecture and had a few pints in the Student Union. I was several sheets into the wind and that was always a recipe for disaster, especially when I hadn't told my girlfriend Liz that I was going to be late.
I got involved in a darts match against a team from Edinburgh University, and I was having fun, even although I was so bad at the game that I was the one who ended up buying most of the drinks. At some point in the evening the barman called me over and offered me the phone handset.
"It's your girlfriend," he said. "She says she needs you right now."
The drink had spoken for me.
"Tell her she needs her head examined. I'll be back when I'm good and ready."
And so help me, I'd enjoyed myself. While she sat in an empty flat and decided on the future course of our lives, I enjoyed myself. I drank a lot of beer, I sang bawdy songs about the Mayor of Bayswater's daughter, and the hairs on her dickie-die-doh, and only have a vague memory of getting back to the flat.
I'll never forget the next hour, though.
I wandered into the kitchen, bumping into tables and knocking over chairs. That took a minute.
I put on the kettle, and stood beside it while it boiled. That took three minutes.
I took the coffee into the front room and watched the end of the late night news. Ten minutes.
The beer told my bladder it needed to get out. I put down my coffee and got out of the chair-slowly. I wasn't very steady. One minute.
She was in the bath, and she had used my razor on her wrists her ankles and her throat. She hadn't wanted to make any mistakes. This wasn't a cry for help-she'd tried that earlier, and I hadn't answered. For the past fifteen minutes she'd been dying.
By the time the police arrived I was nearly sober, but after they found her note and showed it to me, I got drunk again quickly. She had been three months pregnant.
Doug took me in that night. It was him who cleared out the flat and got me somewhere new to live, and it was him I leaned on through the funeral as I tried to avoid the tear-stained eyes of Liz's family. But he couldn't persuade me to stay on in my studies.
The road from there to here was long, and well traveled.
The crisis came on the fifth anniversary of Liz's death. I'd arranged to meet Doug at seven in the evening for a few beers and a curry, but by the time he turned up I was already well to my way to oblivion. He took me home, sobered me up, and told me I'd be dead in a year if I didn't slow down.
"Good," I said, but even then, in my blackest depression, I knew I didn't mean it. Suicide had been big in my mind in the first week after I'd found Liz, but I hadn't done it then, and I knew I never would. Not the quick way, anyway.
"You need to do something, man," Doug had said. "What do you want to do with your life?"
"Fight bad guys, save the world, get the girl, all that happy shit. I want to be James fucking Bond," I growled at him.
"No can do," said Doug. "You're not good looking enough. But if that's what you want, why not join the cops?"
I shook my head.
"Or become a private dick?" he said, and it was as if a light bulb came on over my head-a big one with the word 'IDEA' written on it.
And I had done it. Doug had thought I was joking, but three months later I left the paper and set myself up in the office in Byres Road. My first client was a wee man called Pete Mulville who had lost his wife. He hadn't lost her, she'd run off with an aerobics instructor from Kelvinside called Marco, but he still paid me, and I was off and running.
I'd never have done it without Doug...and for that, I was willing to put up with a certain amount of irritation. Up to a point.
Ten minutes later his hand crept towards the wiper controls again, but he pulled away quickly after only a sharp look from me. Ten minutes after that he was sound asleep, and I was soon in that state between watchfulness and relaxation that was needed on nights like this.
People see the job on the screen and think its all thugs, blondes, bad cops and sudden leaps of intuition. In reality it's hours, days, sometimes weeks of tedium. Over time I'd developed strategies for dealing with it, playing games in my head, sometimes logic puzzles, sometimes compiling lists. Tonight it was 'connections' in films. For example, I was trying to get from
Bringing up Baby
to
Pulp Fiction
in as few steps as possible...I went Katherine Hepburn, Spencer Tracy, Robert Wagner, Natalie Wood to Christopher Walken, but I was trying to get it down to four. It was a game I often played with Doug, and I found it useful if I knew the best answer before I asked the question.
Most of the time it didn't help...Doug had a memory like a computer, and made connections almost as fast...when he was on form, that is. He hadn't been on top form for a while, and before tonight I'd been starting to wonder if he ever would be again. Getting him out of the office was a big step in the right direction. Even when he started to snore I was still glad he was here.
I lit another cigarette and went back to the problem at hand. I was looking for a link from Cary Grant to Cybil Shepherd when a light went on up in old lady Malcolm's room. I checked my watch. It was nine-thirty...we'd been there for nearly two hours. No one had entered or left the flats, and no one had pulled into the car park. It looked like this was one of the few parts of the city that closed down early. I watched the light for two cigarettes, but there was no further movement and I went back to the problem.
I was on Hepburn, Poitier and looking for a link to Samuel L. Jackson when a movement at the corner of the building in front of me caught my eye. In the dark it was only a darker shadow among other shadows. But it moved in a sinuous, careful way that reminded me of a cat stalking its prey. But this was no cat...the shadow was tall, human in size and shape. It came slowly, carefully round the corner, its eyes, almost green, being the only thing I could see in the darkness.
I reached for the car's lights, but I had to lean over Doug to do it. The movement jolted him awake, and he jerked, slamming a hand on the car horn.
The shadow melted back around the corner, so quick that I could barely follow the movement.
"What's happening?" Doug said, rubbing his eyes.
"Nothing now," I said. "Go back to sleep."
Unfortunately that was wishful thinking on my part. He was wide-awake, and fidgeting again within ten minutes.
"How do you cope with it?" he asked after I'd told him off three times.
"Practice," I replied. "And fiendish Oriental mind-tricks." I told him about the
Bringing up Baby
to
Pulp Fiction
game. That was a mistake.
"Ah. Starting me off on an easy one," he said. "Katherine Hepburn links to Henry Fonda then to Natalie Wood and then to Christopher Walken."
"Okay, smart arse," I said. "How about
The Maltese Falcon
to
Highlander
."
I had no idea if it was easy or difficult, but it only took him ten seconds.
"I've got three," he said. "Bogart to Bacall to Connery is the best one."
I'd never keep him quiet this way...I just wasn't smart enough to trouble him...not without a lot of thought. So I turned it back on him.
"Okay. Your turn. Come up with a good one for me," I said. "But make sure it's of Fu-Manchu quality. It has to keep me busy for a while."
It looked like I'd cracked it. He went quiet, apart from the soft sound of his lips pursing and separating.
At eleven o'clock the light went out in the old lady's flat, and by half past all the lights in the block went out. Fifteen minutes later the shadow crept around the corner once more.
"Derek..." Doug said softly.
"I know," I replied. "Let him get inside, then we'll go up and see what he wants to do."
It was a good plan, but it wasn't going to work...the shadow came full round the corner, and I got my first good look.
It might be man-sized, but there was little else about it to remind me of John Mason. It was taller, thinner...and it was naked, the skin a dull grey in the gloom. But even at this distance I could see it was scaled, with thick ridges and plates like an armadillo. It put out an arm against the stone wall, and its fingers stretched...there's no better word to describe it...joints lengthened as fingertips sought for a grip.
It started to climb the wall. And as it did do, the shape of its shadow changed, morphing swiftly until the legs and arms jutted at sharp angles to its body. It scuttled up the wall like a gecko after an ant.
I had been holding my breath, and I let it out in one explosive puff. Most of me wanted to flee...but there was the little old lady to think of. I didn't think the thing that was climbing the wall would have any familial feelings towards her. My sense of duty won out over my flight reflex...but it was a close run thing. I put my hand on my door-handle and had started to push the door open when I realized that someone was crying, in that sort of 'holding it all in' way that kids did when they were trying to be brave.
I looked over to where Doug was sitting, pale white, gripping the steering wheel as if his life depended on it. Heavy tears ran down his cheeks. He looked at me, eyes full of fear, pain, and self-loathing. He gripped the wheel tighter, and shook his head before looking away from me.
I patted his shoulder. "It's okay, Doug. Really, it is. This is my end of the business. Stay here, and lock the doors when I've gone," I said.
I waited long enough to see him nod, then I was out the door and off across the car-park. I was in no man's land between the car and the flats before I realized that something that went up the wall so quickly could be just as quick coming down. I was starting to wonder if I shouldn't let my flight reflex win occasionally.
I didn't dare chance a look upwards as I made for the door...a single glance might have stopped me in my tracks completely. As I approached the porch the light came on to welcome me, and I cursed the fact that I was outside one of the few blocks of flats in Glasgow where the lights actually worked when they were meant to. I felt like a rabbit, trapped in headlights, and I had to make a conscious effort to keep moving...all the while aware that I was lit up for all to see.
But I made it to the porch, despite the crawling in my spine and the expectation of an attack. I pushed the button for old lady Malcolm's flat and waited...and waited. Over at the dark end of the car park I could just make out Doug's pale features, like a ghost mask behind the windscreen of the Land Rover. I waved at him to show him I was fine, but there was no response...he was staring, but not seeing, lost far away in the memory of a dark place from which he couldn't escape. I was beginning to feel the same way...the shadows in the car park seemed to creep towards me, and I pushed the call button again and again. Finally she answered.
"Go away," I heard her say. "Don't you know what time it is?"
"It's Derek Adams, Ms. Malcolm. It's important."
I heard her sigh deeply.
"It's about John," I said, trying to keep growing panic out of my voice. "Let me in...please."
The door buzzed, and I was through it and across the hall before it had fallen shut behind me. I gave the lift a miss and headed for the interior stairwell, taking them two at a time. I burst open the fire door...and gave the old lady the fright of her life. She was standing by the lift, her back to me. She opened her mouth, as if to scream, then realized it was me.
"You shouldnae do that to old folk," she said. "You might have a dead body on your hands."
"That's what I'm here to prevent," I said.
"Well, you've got a strange way of showing it," she said. "I've a good mind to..."
Her voice tailed away. She'd seen something in my face.
"It's John, isn't it? He's here." That wasn't a question, and I didn't answer as I entered the narrow, brightly-lit hall of her flat. A bedroom door was open, a light on beyond, but there were four other doors, all shut.
"Have you got any windows open?" I asked.
"Just in the bedroom," she said from out in the hall
I pushed the door open gingerly and slid in, ready to run at any movement. The room was empty, except for the now-familiar taint of lavender and mothballs. I checked behind the door just in case, before stepping quickly over and shutting the window, resisting the urge to look outside first. I'd seen too many horror movies, and the image of a hand grabbing me by the neck and pulling me out into the night was just too vivid to ignore.