PROLOGUE

I wish I could explain.

Why I am facing a murder charge in Glasgow.

Why I found myself in Switzerland, and quoting The Monkees.

Why I found myself trapped inside other people’s lies, huge lies that made the head whirl and battered belief into a cowed submission.

And why there was a live bomb in my office?

It’s all a conspiracy, you see. Or two conspiracies.

Then again, isn’t everything?

But now, I’m in jail, although it’s not because of the murder. And I’m not in jail in Glasgow…I’m not even in Switzerland.

I wish I could explain.

Chapter 1 – From Russia With No Appointment Necessary

Me and the KGB? It wasn’t an appointment I ever thought I’d find on my dance-card.

After all, here was me, sitting in Glasgow watching the compulsory rain ripple across my office windows and waiting for the phone to ring, a private detective so private, it seemed, that nobody wanted to disturb my privacy.

This all happened a while back, you see, before I made my bones in this city, before I made a mark in this trade, and earned whatever stripes I have. And that, I see now, was one of the reasons that Davie Youll came to see me in the first place – he didn’t want anybody too obvious, nor too expensive, and Stevie McCabe fitted the bill on both counts. I was so low-profile that your dad’s Austin Allegro wouldn’t even have felt the bump as it went over me on the road, and expensive? I couldn’t afford to be expensive.

And so Davie and his American girlfriend walked into my life, trailing the Russian secret police behind them.

That, and death, and blood.

Chapter 2 – Work Is Still A Four-Letter Word

It sounded to me like they needed an employment tribunal, not a detective. But, since the only other person interested in contributing towards my cost of living was Maggie Jackson, she of (allegedly) errant husband and limited financial resources, I wasn’t going to turn them down.

Anyway, it didn’t sound like hard work.

“Mr McCabe, my name is Alison Kumari and this is David -”

“Davie. Davie Youll. We hope you can help us, help me -”

“David’s lost his job and we think there’s something wrong.”

“What was his job, ah, your job, Davie?”

“I was a civil servant in the Department of Trade and they cut my job in a spending review last month. I was made redundant.”

“Well, a lot of people must have…”

“I was the only one in the section that was bagged -”

“ – and he had never had a bad appraisal before.”

“OK, maybe it’s not about you, maybe it’s just that they don’t need the job doing any more – what was it you did?”

“I was a senior trade analyst. I reported on trends in imports and exports, analysed trade prospects, made recommendations on improving British performance. Sound dull, I know, but it’s an important job and there’s no way the department doesn’t want it done anymore. Somebody else is probably doing the exact same job now.”

“If you’ve been replaced after so-called review, then that’s not redundancy, that’s unfair dismissal.”

“They won’t have been that daft.”

“Who is they?”

“David’s boss is a man called Gordon Peterson. That’s who was responsible for him losing his job.”

“Why do you think that?”

“He used to censor David’s -”

“- he used to edit out some things that just made no sense…”

Jesus. They went on for ages in the same vein, at the same pace, like a Punch & Judy show without any amusingly distracting violence. David wrote reports/I wrote reports…I was warned by Peterson/Peterson gave him a warning…papers were moved/somebody was messing with my files…all very irregular/not what should happen…then there was the burglary.

Oh. Wait, back up there. Burglary?

“Yes, just after David and Peterson had an argument -”

“- the same night that he told me I was getting my priorities all wrong. The flat was burgled.”

“Whose flat?”

“David’s”

“Mine.”

“And you don’t think that was just a coincidence?”

“Nothing much was taken – some cash, a couple of bits of jewellery and some work stuff. In fact, all the work stuff that I had was taken – but none of it was important.”

“So somebody burgles your flat, takes a few things to make it look like…well, a wee bit like…a robbery for money, but what they really wanted was work stuff? Not that subtle.”

“It’s all I can think of – everything to do with work was gone, but it was just dull stuff, nothing to do with anything I was discussing with Peterson.”

“So somebody goes in there, with instructions to get anything they see that is to do with the Department of Trade, take a few other things for show. And you think your man Peterson is organising this?”

“Well, who else?”

“He’s your boss, he works for the same department, he can get anythin’ that you have himself, why would he bother? In fact, why would he bother anyway? Are you suggesting that a senior civil servant is organising burglaries of his staff’s homes?”

“That’s what the police said. I mean, what they said was, is that what you’re suggesting, as if it was something mad.”

“When you told them what you were thinking? They told you it sounded crazy?”

“They did – well, it does, I guess.”

“What about inside the department? Do they make it easy for whistle-blowers?”

“Haven’t even tried that. Whatever the police said, anybody inside the department would say ten times as quick.”

“Press, media?”

“I called up that woman -”

“ – David called Sadie McQueen, from the Scottish Tribune?”

“I’ve heard of her – what did she say?”

“She saw our point, David’s point, and she was going to look into it, she said. That was a few weeks back, nothing since then, since -”

“ – since the fire.”

“Whoa, whoa…what’s that now? I kinna get the feeling I’m hearin’ this story back to front – the fire?”

“Last week, my flat was set on fire. Not much damage, just a burning rag, somebody’d soaked in petrol, put it through the letter box, burns on the carpet and door, bit of smoke damage…”

“…David was very lucky – it could have been much worse. The fire put itself out.”

“And the police said…?”

“Local neds. There have been one or two other fires like that in the area – I live up in the high flats at Anniesland Cross? 14^th floor, you can see right across the city and halfway to Edinburgh, no danger. Somebody on the 9^th floor had a fire the same, or like it anyway. Burning cardboard through the door.”

“Not quite the same, is it? Any old strip of cardboard off a box in Safeway’s car-park versus a petrol-soaked rag? But the polis still don’t want to hear anythin’ about your boss? Maybe you’ve got a really bad personality clash? Maybe he doesn’t like your ties.”

“Is that a joke?”

“Nearly. I think I’ve just got to the point where I understand why you’ve come to me.”

“I hope you do. Nobody else will listen to us - you’re our last hope.”

Ah. So they were desperate and they’d already tried anybody who might actually be any good, so now they’d reached the bottom of the barrel and I was occupying that slot. Fair enough.

It was Alison who said that, and I would have been hurt if I’d been more sensitive, more aware and more solvent. Since I was none of the above, I just smiled and told them I’d be happy to take up the case when nobody else would do it. I’d be a knight in shining armour, except the armour would be in the pawn and my horse would be ploughing some spud field near Kilmarnock.

So here’s what I knew – the fire had happened the day after Davie Youll had been “made redundant” (clear your desk right now, don’t let the door hit your arse on the way out) and the redundancy had happened the week after a bust-up between Davie and his boss Peterson about – stifle dwindling interest – another censored report.

“This one was the weirdest of all, and the most obvious, too. I was writing about craft exports and mentioned one company and he took out their name. It was in there three times -”

“In a report how long?”

“Maybe a hundred pages? It was just in the text once and two footnotes, just using this company as an example of good practice in importing and exporting pine furniture to and from Switzerland.”

“And all three references to this company were taken out? Anythin’ else?”

“Sure. Some amendments and checks, editing, clarification, but nothing that was, well, hiding anything. Just this weird edit of the name of Chalet Chic.”

“Chalet Chic? Jesus. What did he say when you pulled him up on it? Assuming you did?”

“Yeah. He said it didn’t need that level of detail, that politicians didn’t need shopping advice, just trade analysis.”

“Were there any other company names in there?”

“Sure, mostly much bigger companies, so he would say they need to be there, household names that have a big impact on the economy, not like this one.”

“So how come you picked out Chalet Chic in the first place? Where did you find out about them?”

“Just from annual returns, and how I picked them out was dumb luck. This dickhead called McGreal, next desk to me? There was a pile of annual returns on my desk one day and McGreal goes, there’s a wee present in there for you. I could see a bump in the file and when I opened it he’s left a Durex in there, unopened, thank Christ. For your new girlfriend, he goes, if you ever get one…see, this was before I met Alison and…anyway, I chucked it back at him and the page where he’d stuck it was where Chalet Chic’s returns were. Dumb luck that they showed spectacular annual growth, year on year, and that’s what I was looking for.”

“So that’s how it started – you owe all this shit to the boy McGreal?”

“You could say. Anyway, aside from that last report that Peterson censored, any other time I wrote about that kind of thing, not even mentioning the company name, he would take it out or change the sense of what I said.”

“And did you ever mention Chalet Chic by name before?”

“Twice, I think. Once just in a list and another time in a throwaway comparison. He took those out, as well – just excised it from the list and made the comparison general. Same argument – too much detail.”

“So you knew what to expect in that last report you wrote, that he would take it out? You were testin’ him?”

“Kind of, I suppose. Didn’t think it would cost me my job.”

“Did you ever contact Chalet Chic? Phone them up? Write a letter?”

“Oh…no. It didn’t really occur to me. My argument was with Peterson, I didn’t really think about the company at all.”

“Fair enough. I guess that’s why I’m the detective and you’re the civil servant.”

I told them they would have my full and immediate attention, which was nearly true. I just had to sort out some small details with Maggie Jackson, who was about to start paying for the self-same attention, except instead of full-and-immediate, it would necessarily be partial and in-due-course attention. I hoped Davie Youll and Alison Kumari would prove more valuable clients, particularly after Alison’s closing remark that “budget isn’t really an issue”. Davie blanched at the statement, but it was obvious that she was paying the bill, so he said nothing. Living on the 14^th floor above Anniesland Cross, out-of-work government number-cruncher Davie was unlikely to be in the market for my services, but Alison was obviously a different prospect.

Of course, that remark also signalled up a whole bunch of warnings in my head, but right now I was too pleased to have two customers to worry about any complications.

Call that a mistake, if you like.

I’d plead guilty.

Chapter 3 – Temps Perdu, Moi Non Plus

One of the advantages (well, aside from cheap housing) of living on the torn-arsed end of what, a quarter-mile away, was a “good” area, was that I lived near the subway. Glasgow’s tiny circular underground railway was a Victorian creation that never quite lost its bewilderment with the modern world. Although a 1970s refit left it looking shinier and smelling less exotic, it was still a weird beast that followed a route which might have taken 19^th century workers where they wanted to go, but left ninety percent of their descendants catching the bus.

Half of the south side stations were, actually, nowhere. Isolated bunkers left behind by the receding tide of slum clearance, they sat in pointless seclusion, islands in an urban streetscape of flat monotony. Where communities once stood, now only empty precincts sat, the terrain loosely smeared with rubble, smashed glass and muck. The outline of roadways could still be discerned on the ground, but the streets they used to be were in the ether, as lost as history, as faint as memory.

These places lived only in the past tense.

But for me, big Stevie McCabe, there was that advantage – I could walk to the subway across the waste ground and jump on the wee orange train and be in the West End in 15 minutes. Now, I don’t want to start endorsing Samuel Johnson when he said that the best thing about Scotland was the road out, but…see, I was born and raised on the South Side of Glasgow, it made me, it was home and it will always be where I’m from, but I’m no good at living in the past, not that way. Everybody in my life had drifted across the river and westwards. It was where I spent my student days and where I lived when I was married, although that marriage was still in the future. It’s not where I’m from but it’s where I went.

None of which exercised my mind as I entered Shields Road subway station, probably the most isolated and bunker-styled of them all, crouching apologetically underneath the looming bulk of the motorway, trying to hide, it seemed. I was thinking only of beer and company.

Sure, these nights often ended with a visit to the past, you get that with old friends, but I wasn’t going in search of it, only venturing where I knew it could sometimes be found.

Tommy McCafferty was chatting to the new barman in the Three Towers when I arrived, pale hands wrapped round a pint of lager, every rising bubble in the glass singing “belch”. The new “barman”, in point of fact, was actually a young woman, which made two of them behind the bar, both called Linda. New Linda looked happy to see me and I wasn’t sure how to deal with that…had we met?

My shout – literally.

“Tommy! I can see you’ll need another one of them in a minute and, Linda, a pint of number 6 for me.” You have to understand the beer wasn’t called “number 6”, it was just the one that happened to be located on the bar between numbers 5 and 7, because the ever-changing range of beers on the bar could lead to confusion for staff and frequent linguistic challenges for the customers that they often failed to meet. A number, however, was always a number. In this case, it was a pint of Coniston Bluebird that was in disguise as number 6.

“Do I see you looking at the television, Mr McCafferty? Thought you didny like TVs in pubs?”

“It’s just the news, come on. Look at that twat Grange…”

“...hey, that’s Sir John to you…”

“…he’s on there giving it ‘national security’ and ‘never submit to terrorists’ demands’ and ‘oxygen of publicity’. All that shite. You’d think he might do something dangerous one day and actually think about it.”

“You’re just biased.”

“’Course I’m biased. I never voted for his party, Scotland never voted for…”

“Whoa, back off the mike, Tommy. I know the speech. And you know as well as I do that Sir John Grange there doesn’t give a fuck what you think, or me, or Scotland. He’s the member for Middle-Englandshire South and he’s Home Secretary and we can all go and take a fuck to ourselves.”

“Or just have another beer. That’s my plan at the minute.”

And that was us, set on our course for the evening. It was “did you see this?” and “have you heard that?”, “did you know what he did?” and “would you believe what happened next?”

Probably, at some point, it got round, ignobly, to “would you shag her?” and that all-lads-in-a-byre mode of conversation (as if the answer to that particular question could ever possibly be “no”, especially in Tommy’s case, if I could be so disloyal; Tommy wasn’t giving out numbers to any queue.)

We had know each other a long time, Tommy and me, and if we were no longer as young as we once were, well – who is? And if we still held the same conversations as we did years before, well this time round it was referential, ironic. We were commenting on our own experiences as third party observers, more or less, acting out the roles of being ourselves.

Tommy said that, and I agreed with him. He was pished, of course, and so was I. We had just agreed that we would not shag that Turner woman off the telly. After a minute, Tommy conceded that, actually…And, both being visions of temptation ourselves, all of this was legitimate and credible and not in the least objectifying to women.

And Tommy, all said and done, was – vaguely and indirectly – the person who introduced me to my future wife, although at this point, the introduction was in the past while the marriage was still in the future.

With substantial amounts of corrective applied to the planet as a whole, the night was over, for us anyway. It was the smothering embrace of cigarette smoke that did for me as much as the drink and we left the Towers behind, with its hot bloom of fumes and light. Tommy went his own way, his bus magically looming into sight on Dumbarton Road as soon as he got within range of the bus stop. Me, I considered my options - the subway, umbilical link the West End that it was for me, being strictly a part-time service that went to its bed before any citizens ventured home to theirs.

The soft, cold rain that was beginning to spatter the pavements convinced me that a walk through the city centre and over the George IV bridge could ruin my night, so it was a fast black for me.

“The bridge is best”, I told the driver, not just because I couldn’t be bothered with correcting any “mistakes” that he might make in thinking that the Clyde Tunnel could be as quick, and not actually twice as far, but also because I enjoyed that view of the city from on top of the Kingston Bridge.

Gradually gyrating around the coiling on-ramp before exploding right out onto the low-parapet bridge, the city winking back at me, spread out 360 in the night. Left, the city centre pulsed and roared, towers of hotels and offices making canyons where a hundred thousand people roamed at midnight, looking for something and – if they found it – usually throwing it away; although I couldn’t hear any, I knew the sirens of squad cars were sounding on those streets, now.

Right, the river frontage and scraps of docks, fragments of shipyards, flakes of industry gone and not replaced; the sober tenements of the West End, its parks, its galleries and its university just out of sight over my shoulder, grand Victorian statements that endured, gazing across the river to the south, the Govan of my youth and my heart. My south side had its heart ripped out in my childhood and youth and I’m not fooling myself that some of that grimy heart, beaten and diseased as it was, didn’t need to be cleansed, but I don’t think that the remedy was meant to end in a patchwork of gap sites, glass-strewn and puddled, scabby corner plots of job-creation cotoneaster snagging the litter output of the western world, rusty unmarked sheds with what-the-fuck happening inside, all punctuating faded streets, walked by beaten people with grey faces…

…said the drunk loser in the back of a taxi, waxing maudlin to himself.

It was still a view to drink in, distant tower-blocks on the dark horizon, sentry-boxes to the city. But, hey, the road that was taking me home, the bridge that gave me the view, they were part of the reason why Govan lost its heart – twenty thousand homes demolished for roads and bridges, so that people from somewhere else could drive straight over the top of it.

But that was where we were, the city disappearing behind me as I told the driver “take the Scotland Street exit”. And he did, good old Thomas Patullo, according to his licence. He took me right home, from West End to South Side, from my glory days right back to my past. And my future.

Glory days? That’s another story.

Chapter 4 – A Complete Absence of Vampire Zombies

Maggie Jackson wasn’t so much smoking for Scotland as trying to engineer a nicotine shortage. She was an almost ethereal figure to me, sitting across the living room, a wraith insinuating herself through drifting folds of smoke like a Calliope sponsored by the Philip Morris Company. And naturally she couldn’t open a window for fresh air – “bad for ma chest, son, the draught and that.”

I hoped her husband smoked.

I had never met Maggie Jackson’s husband, but my juvenile sense of humour found him funny anyway, or at least his name was, because he was called Michael. And Maggie would insist on calling him Michael, too.

Michael Jackson.

“They all call him Micky, but I like to call him Michael. That’s just me all over,” she said in explanation, without explaining anything at all. Or maybe she did.

Micky/Michael, who would never see 50 again, was five foot, three inches, tall, according to his passport, or 1.59m for fans of French revolutionary metrics. His passport photo, and the smattering of others that Maggie pulled from drawers and albums to show me, portrayed a compacted face like a crushed fag packet, wearing an expression that was always saying “can I go now”? He was only smiling in two of them, so far as I could tell, and in both he was holding a beer glass.

Maggie wasn’t in either photo.

At no point was he performing a moonwalk, dressed as a vampire zombie, undergoing dramatic plastic surgery, or dancing with his four brothers while wearing a privet hedge on his head. Of course.

“Our Michael never seemed happy, there was just somethin’ about him. He would go off in these moods, I don’t mean he would actually go anywhere, just sit there, not saying anythin’. ‘Course, sometimes, he did go away, for work and that.”

“How long have you been married?”

“Just five years. I’m saying ‘just’, it’s quite a long time really, s’pose. That’s how come there’s only these few pictures of Michael. We only met after my first husband left me, fuck him and that wee slag he was nippin’. Pardon my attitude.”

“How did you meet Micky – Michael?”

“Friend of a friend, big Jacqueline Houston, do you know her? No, why would ye? Me and big Jacqueline was at the bingo this night, she says one o’ her husband’s old chinas was back in town, he’d been away a while, on the ships and the rigs and that, now he was back to stay, did I fancy having a voddy or two? Sure, says I, what’s his name? Micky Jackson, she says, Michael to his fans, dunno what that was all meant to mean, but anyway I says OK and we get on fine. And that was it, a year later it was up to Martha Street to make it legal, never even got engaged nor nothin’. And then it was aw downhill, he was never as much fun after we did the deed. In fact he was a miserable wee get half the time. Shamed as I am to say it, I let him hang around because I needed the company, plus he was a great wee ride. Does that embarrass you son? Sorry, it’s the truth but, Michael was a real goer. Made up for him being away half the time.”

“And he was a miserable get the other half, you said?”

“I did say that, din’t I?”

“So just divorce him.”

“Well, see, he brought nothin’ to the party, know? His first wife got everythin’, his second wife got whatever he picked up after that and he pished away his cash offshore. So, he had the breeks he stood up in and that was it. So this flat’s mine, was my mother’s actually, so I own it outright and my auntie Gloria’s place, my mother inherited that off of her cuz she had no weans of her own, so that’s mine too. I don’t want some judge saying that Michael’s gonny get half of what’s mine, cuz he never paid for a stick of it.”

“Even though he’s such a great ride?”

“…ye’re a cheeky big bastart, son, but I like your style. Will ye track him down for me, find out what he’s up to?”

“We don’t really need to track him down, do we? Just wait until he comes back the next time and ask him.”

“He’ll no tell me nothin’, except he’s back on the ships, or the rigs, so he’ll tell you the same, but I don’t believe him. How come he’s meant to be on the ships in the Med and he comes back wi’ a face like a half-cooked chip? He’s never seen the sun from one visit to the next, it’s obvious. He’s still hangin’ around here somewhere. Anyway, he’s phoned up and he’s comin’ back the morra, stayin’ till Thursday he says, ye can watch him then.”

Instructions understood.

I stepped out into the (more or less) clean air of Petershill Road, three floors down from Maggie’s tenement flat. Murky with CO2, depleted ozone, pumping hydrocarbons, heavy metals and god-knows-what-all though it was, the air was a huge improvement over the hot, dense, airtight, gas chamber that was Ms Jackson’s living room.

If I had murdered five fast food servers in Texas, the authorities wouldn’t have been allowed to put me in that room. Definitely a cruel and unusual punishment.

I just hoped she lived long enough to pay my invoice.

Chapter 5 – I Felt The Knife In My Hand And She Laughed No More

In the quiet of the evening, dark falling outside my one-bedroom flat in an area that an estate agent would call “off Albert Drive”, I thought about calling Scotty Napier. It had been a year, well, more like 18 months, since he retired after meeting his contractual obligation as a Glaswegian to have a heart attack in his 50s. He had been, at first, the more credible half of our business partnership, not so much because he was a better detective than me, since he emphatically wasn’t, but just because he had spent 25 years more than me in the police service. More years, more contacts for private work thereafter.

Kathleen had called us the Odd Couple, not the most original observation and second only in popularity to Mutt ‘n’ Jeff, which most ex-coppers seemed to prefer. See, Scotty wouldn’t have made much more of an impression on a yardstick than Maggie Jackson’s precisely 1.59m husband, whereas I am a big man, by Glasgow’s undemanding standards. How Scotty of the limited height ever made it into uniform, only advanced practitioners of the Masonic lodge (Scottish Rite) could tell you.

Of course, Kathleen only called us that while we were together. Now, I guess she didn’t call us anything at all. Scotty had liked her, of which fact he never tired of reminding me.

Anyway, despite his fondness for inattentive greyhounds, an unfathomable devotion to Partick Thistle football club and a propensity to take an undue interest in other people’s wives, none of which passions I shared, Scotty and I made a good team. We were big cop and wee cop, good cop and bad cop, young cop and old cop. We met in my short days at G division, when he was a detective sergeant nearing retirement and when he got bored after leaving the police, he set up Napier Investigations. Since I had left the police force and was working as a legal clerk by that time (and hating it), it made a lot of sense for him to call me up to add some numerical strength, youth and (to be frank) better investigative talent to the business.

I saw myself as his protégé, his keen student, while he saw me (in his own words) as “the son he never had”, but since he actually had four real sons of his own, that wasn’t remotely true. Most people would say I was his sidekick.

“Scotty, it’s Stevie, how ye doin’?”

“Ah Stevie-boy, I’m in top form, yourself? How’s business? When are you goin’ to get back with that woman of yours?”

“I’m good, it’s bad, and never. And the last bit is up to her, more or less. If she ever comes back to town.”

“Business bad? I told you, you should buy one of them Sherlock Holmes hats. Always impresses the customers. You still livin’ in that place over by, whats-its-face, by the old transport museum?”

“Sure am, in fact I’m sittin’ here right now, wondering what the fuck, so I thought, OK, I’ll give Scotty a call, been a wee while. You still smokin’, still nippin’ other people’s bidie-ins?”

“Smoke, naw. 73 days today, I’m done with that shite. The quacks told me the ticker was fucked if I kept at it, probably fucked anyway right enough, but still. I feel better - and not just physically, neither. My head’s on straight, an’ all. Which is the answer to whether I’m still creepin’ in back doors after dark – no, sir, not this cowhand. A thing like a heart attack, gets your attention, know what I mean, Stevie? Made me look at Jessie different, know? You don’t know what you’ve to got till it’s gone, kinda thing. That heart attack was my big yellow taxi.”

“Jeez, Scotty, I never knew you could hear a leopard changing its spots down a phone line. 73 days off the smoke? You’ll be telling me you’ve found Jesus next and you’re wearin’ wee pointy turned-up collars to church.”

“Course, if you’d actually phoned us at any time in the last three months, you’d know about all this. Six months, even. You’d know I was plannin’ it.”

“Right back at you, Scotty. I understand your phone makes outgoin’ calls, too?

“Aye. I’m not gettin’ on your back, big fella. Things happen, time moves on, eh? And by the way - the next time I see a church, I’ll be deceased and you’ll be givin’ it How Great Thou Art and singing My Soul My Saviour God to Thee.”

“Is that one of the Church of Scotland’s songs for today and forever?”

“Naw, it’s Elvis. It’ll be that and Jim Reeves, Distant Drums, plus Tom Jones, Delilah.”

“Delilah?”

“Sure – got to keep the holy Joes squirming and give everybody else a laugh. A wee bit high kickin’ in the pews would go down a treat.”

“But you’re not planning this funeral any time soon, there’s not somethin’ else I’ve missed these last few months?”

“No, no, life goes on, as per. The Harry Wraggs are shite, as per – got pumped off Stirling Albion last week, 4-1. Stirling fuckin Albion! My youngest, remember young Philip? He’s graduatin’ this year from Glasgow Uni, law. He thinks he’s Perry Mason but I told him forget that, I know that business, stick to where the easy money is and do people’s conveyancing for them. Wear a suit and cash the cheques, no need to get your hands dirty with wee neds and hoors. Listen…no chance of you gettin’ back with Kathleen, then? I think you two are great together, you just to need to give it a chance.”

“Fucksake, Scotty, you’ll need to buy a better fiddle. We’re done. And the both of us are happier that way. Really.”

“Anybody else on the horizon? And for Kathleen?”

“Not for me, it’s just Stevie here tonight in this wee flat. And her, well, she’s workin’ away, she’s teachin’ somewhere, far as I know. So maybe…I don’t know and I don’t care, Scotty.”

“Aye. Like I said, things happen and time moves on. Just don’t like to see things go up the swanny for no reason. Anyway – I should be talkin’ to you about business, no’ about lonely hearts.”

“That’s not why I called, Scotty –“

“Don’t worry about it, son. I feel a bit of an obligation there, leavin’ you on your todd after my sudden trip to the Western. It wasny how I would have planned to retire, know?”

“Things happen, you said it yourself. See, what’s happened is most of the regulars turned out be really hiring you, not the company, so when it’s only me on the end of the phone, they just lose interest. Nothin’ drastic, nothin’ disastrous, nobody’s fallen out with me, just the phone doesny ring and after a while that adds up to a whole lot of nothin’.”

“Well, listen, let me see what I can do, I’ll call up a coupla people, see if I can rattle their cages and get you a wee bit of business. I know you’re good.”

“Appreciate it, Scotty. And in case you think I’m going soft, next time you should call me, ya old bastart.”

“Fair enough, and you can call your ex-girlfriend and see if she’s busy on Saturday. Mend some fences.”

“I’ll be singing Delilah in the aisles before I do that Scotty, but thanks for the thought anyway. Never be a stranger.”

Three floors up, before I drew the blinds, out in the night I could see hesitant lights flicker in the dark, sputtering over empty streets and casting dull pools of glow across the sweep of shadowed post-industrial gap-sites and car dealerships, joylessly cheerful and cheerfully joyless. Across on the other side of the train-line, the headlamps of the cars on the M8 swooned to and fro, west to the dubious joys of Paisley and the airport, or over the bridge into the city. Yet further away, beyond the looming bulk of the Kingston Bridge straddling the river, the blocks and towers of the city centre winked, lights beaming in all colours, buildings designed for all purposes (and none), dark streets below promising all things to all souls, all the arcane possibilities of the night.

A soft rain began to drift across the panorama, tiny moths of substance in the sodium glow, there and gone in an instant, back into the darkness.

I closed the blinds on home.

Chapter 6 – Doing Business

I can’t say I was surprised when Alison Kumari came to see with no sign of her boyfriend in tow. What did surprise me was that she appeared at the front door of my flat, not the office.

At 8am.

“I hope you don’t mind me showing up like this.”

“Er…no, sure. How did you…?”

“At your office, some of the mail on your desk had this address on it. Guess you took it into work. Sorry about all this, I just wanted to talk to you about David, without him being here, you know?”

“Sure, sit down, I’ll get you coffee. I would apologise for the state of the place, but…actually, I think it looks OK.”

So Alison got to share my view of the M8, traffic moving at the speed of planks warping in the grey morning light, while she sat on my really-not-too-bad couch supping Costa Rica medium blend and I wondered what the fuck she was doing here.

“David is a really nice man, but he’s his own worst enemy at times, that’s why I needed to see you without him.”

“How long have you known him?”

“Not long. We met at a trade seminar. My father – back in Iowa? – has a lot of business interests in this country and I spend a lot of time here, acting for the company. I’m the international VP of the business - that gets you invited to industrial fairs, trade shows and so on. That’s where we met.”

“In Glasgow? To tell you the truth, I didn’t even know that the Department of Trade had an office in Glasgow.”

“No, I met him in London, that’s where I’m based for a few months, he was just down for the day. I needed to talk to him because my father’s company has invested big in places like Greenock.”

“And you followed him up to Scotland? Although you haven’t known him long? And he lives on the 14^th floor of the high flats at Anniesland Cross.”

“What’s your point? I didn’t ‘follow’ him anywhere. I’m senior management in a multi-national business and we have a lot of interests in Scotland, like I said. I’m here for business and I’m helping out a friend while I’m here. I’ll be back in London when I’ve done what I need to do.”

“Friend? Davie Youll is your friend?”

“Yes, did you think we were more than that?”

“Well…I did get the impression that…come to think of it, maybe I was readin’ too much into it.”

“Sounds like you did. I guess that’s your job, coming to conclusions about people. And I guess you get it wrong sometimes.”

“So it seems – but you wanted to explain somethin’ to me about Davie, your friend Davie.”

“OK – David is a nice guy, but he doesn’t make enough of himself. He’s been putting up with this shit from his boss for ages and he just wouldn’t stand up to him. When he told me what was happening, I said to him that he needed to deal with it.”

“And that cost him his job?”

“OK, but there’s an upside to that – we’ve got you on the case now.”

“So it was your idea to come to me?”

“Of course – David doesn’t think in those terms, he’s a bit of a dreamer. This needs a practical hand. And if David was still working at the DoT, you wouldn’t have taken this on, would you?”

“Y’know, I just might’ve? Just for the fun? It’s an interesting bit of business.”

“And you need the work, right, Stevie? Not to put you down, but I don’t think Pinkerton’s are checking your market data any too often.”

“And you said, you said to me – ‘money is not a problem’. That sounds pretty good to any business. You also said I was your last hope.”

“And so what are you doing about David’s problem?”

“I need to look into this Gordon Peterson, find out where he lives, see what his habits are, who he knows, where he goes, what he does. And I’m going to see this Chalet Chic for myself, seems like a good place to start. If Peterson is keepin’ their name out of the public view, seems like maybe he has got something to hide personally. Maybe he’s got interests in the company, maybe his family do, somethin’ like that. And if they’re getting government grants or some other money that maybe Peterson has some responsibility for, then that would be a reason to get all jumpy when Davie starts puttin’ the company name up in lights. I’ve checked Chalet Chic’s address and it’s up near Fort William. I can get the train up today and -”

“Rent a car. Jesus, Stevie, if you don’t have a car, rent one. Bill us, I can afford it. Get up there and get the business done, don’t waste your time on trains.”

“Right, I’ll get up there today.”

“Good. You can call me when you know something, anything. Call me or David, I mean, but you’ll probably get me more easily. I’ve got a cell phone, so you’ll get me pretty much any time.”

“Cell phone? Well, OK.”

A cell phone, you see, was a rarity back then. I’m not going to beat this thing to death, but this was then. Which is why I couldn’t just Google Chalet Chic and check online records on Gordon Peterson, or Alison Kumari for that matter. And why I was forced to go to Companies House in fucking Edinburgh to even see who the directors of Chalet Chic might be.

Anyway, you get the point.

And that was Alison done. She left me with more questions than when she’d arrived. I might be a fool but I could guarantee 100% that Davie Youll thought she was more than just his “friend”. Christ knows how or why he thought that, but he did. And why, anyway, would a friend (of short acquaintance) pile into Davie’s work problems like it was a matter of life or death? And pay for all of it, and tell me that she was in charge, not Davie? I needed know more about Alison Kumari’s “business” and why an American was so bothered about petty staff disputes in the Department of Trade. What was her business anyway?

And here’s another thing - I didn’t get much mail at the office, or at home, come to that, but I wasn’t desperate enough to carry stuff from one to the other.

So, one thing I was sure about – none of the “mail on my desk” had my home address on it.

Chapter 7 – Bad Companies

All the way to Edinburgh on the train, to spend ten minutes in an office with a civil servant. Jesus.

My bureaucrat for the day was a bouncy young guy called Alistair Hacker, according to his name badge. Alastair was doing his best to help, but I was distracted by his frankly inappropriate moustache, a keyboard cleaner on his upper lip that looked quite out of place, like he was storing it on behalf of some much older man.

“Sorry…don’t see anything about this company Chalet Chic at all. Are you sure you’ve got the right company name?”

“Sure, right name, proper spelling. A far as I know, there’s no ‘trading as’, so all their information should be under Chalet Chic.”

“Well, there’s nothing on the system at all. Unless there’s still something in the old conversion file. Hang on a minute.”

Hacker moved from his PC to sit at a different desk where, almost hidden by tumbling piles of paper, an old off-cream monitor sat, round-screened and scratched, like the kind of Bakelite TV people used to watch the coronation. Modern marvels.

“This takes a minute to fire up…just switching itself on now…here it comes…oh, not just yet...wait a minute…it’s nearly there…here you go. This is our old system, from when we used to use mainframes the size of buses. This is an old terminal from those days.”

“Why do you still have it?”

“Funny enough, it’s a kind of technophobia, like people that print off hard copies of everything that’s on the computer? Well, when we switched from mainframe to servers, the old-school guys kept this access to the old system. It’s their version of printin’ off all their files – they didn’t trust new-fangled stuff like servers…and here you go – Chalet Chic.”

There, in what I had to agree was truly old-school green-screen, was an entry for the company. From many years ago.

“This is ancient.”

“Well, it would be. Only stuff like this that was on the old system would be here at all. Anythin’ newer that was recorded since we transferred to the new system would only be on the new one.”

“Except none of it is.”

“Well, maybe the company has ceased trading, changed its name.”

“No it hasn’t. That was its name back then and it still is. The Department of Trade is writing reports about how well the company is doin’.”

“Well I don’t know then. It looks like this is all there is on the company records.”

“The information you have on the screen here - can you tell if it was transferred to the new system at any point?”

“Yes. There’s a tag and a date in the conversion field, so we know this was upgraded to the server system.”

“So this ancient record that was transferred, plus everything else since, has all disappeared from the system you use now? Tell me this, Alastair – if somebody was to go into your system, the one you use now, and delete records -”

“- that’s really difficult. Only a certain number of people would have authority to -”

“OK, but just let’s say. If somebody went into your system and took out all the records on this company – what are the chances they would know that an old record like this also existed on your green-screen?”

“Well, they would know, really it’s only people from this department would ever use the system.”

“But maybe some people elsewhere in, say, the government and the civil service might have access?”

“Possible, in fact yes, some people can access the system, but…”

“…but they wouldn’t go about deleting records? OK, but just say they did, bear with me here a minute, just say they deleted the records that were on the system now, would people outside Companies House know that these old green-screen records existed?”

“No. Unless you’re in this office using the internal system daily, you wouldn’t know that. You would think that the system you could see was the only one.”

“And so, if you were looking to delete all the records, you would miss this one?”

“Sure, if you think that’s what’s happened. But there’s no reason for anybody to be doing that. I could go back into the archives, see if we have old back-ups…only somebody here in this office would know about those as well. That’ll take some time, though.”

“Fair enough - I’ll leave it to you to figure out what happened here, but off your green screen I can see the names of the directors and I can also see that the company made no money that year.”

“Maybe they weren’t tradin’ that year. This might just be the record set up when the company was established.”

“Ah, well, still five names there. Let me write them down and I’ll get out of your way…oh, Alastair – pardon me gettin’ out of line here, it’s a bit personal, but your ‘tache – is it a recent thing?”

“Sure – my girlfriend loves it, was her idea really. Thanks for asking. The Clark Gable look, I’m goin’ for.”

“Y’know, that’s exactly what I thought when I saw it? Clark Gable, was the first thing on my mind. It fair answers you. All the best to your girlfriend.”

On the train back to Glasgow, I made a mental note, if I ever met a young woman from Edinburgh, to ask them whether they knew Ally Hacker, works at Companies House? If the answer was yes, I would make my excuses forthwith, before I was overcome by the onset of indefensible facial hair.

Chapter 8 – Straight Outta Corpach

I could see why Chalet Chic was located in the West Highlands. A lot of plantation trees up there, lots of timber to cut and make into pine furniture, sure enough. I would have thought that there would be a fair few pine trees in Switzerland, too, but maybe they never cut them down, because they were too busy polishing Nazi gold.

What I knew about the company: the story Davie Youll had told me about the way his boss was keen to hide their existence.

What Davie had told me about their amazing export performance - from being a new company not much more than ten or so years ago, they were turning over nearly seven million pounds in foreign exchange annually on the last available figures.

What my search at Companies House (in fucking Edinburgh, did I mention that?) had told me – that their files were missing (leaving aside a lucky-for-me error by whoever had made them go missing), the names of the company directors and their address.

What I found out from phoning the VAT office – that Chalet Chic was not registered for the purposes of Value Added Tax.

What I found out from phoning the buyers in furniture stores, and specialist pine shops and furniture wholesalers – not a man jack of them had ever heard tell of Chalet Chic. Not a one.

In other words, I knew the first cousin of fuck all. And, to be honest, what I didn’t know was also quite intriguing. The trade enquiries were quite helpful – maybe this company only dealt business-to-business, maybe they specialised in mail order, maybe they just re-exported the goods or maybe sold to other regions. That’s what people on the phone said to address my incomprehension.

Aye, maybe…and maybe my auntie has balls and is actually my uncle, but I wasn’t depending on that.

But at least I could stand here, on a brass-monkeys Highland morning, fresh from a bumpy run up the A82 and a roll-and-sausage from Nan’s Café at Ballachulish, marvelling at the way people could insert a wee nugget of industrial dereliction like this in the middle of the land where eagles soared.

Chalet Chic was located in a scabby collection of careworn fibreglass and acrylic panelled factory units dumped loosely behind a battered sign that told me the name of the place and its tenants. Mountain Peak View it said in English and below that Gnìomhachasach Raointean Malairt, in Gaelic. What that meant, I had no clue, being a city boy to my bones, but I hoped it was something rude to visitors, just for the hell of it. I feared, though, that it meant “industrial estate”.

The single central street – alley, almost – that divided the factory units from each other was linked to a single-wide perimeter one-way lane to allow deliveries to the rear of the units. The entry sign told me that Chalet Chic occupied the first-left unit, so I elected to use the delivery lane to check the back before walking through the door…just in case I ended up not being able to do it afterwards.

The yard at the back, enclosed by a ragged barbed-wire fence, hadn’t seen much action for quite a while. Half-a-dozen stacks of pallets sat, slowly crusting with algae in the damp highland atmosphere. On only one, a single packing crate rested, also gently turning green amid the five o’clock shadow of weeds on the ground. If this company was sending seven million quid’s worth of goods out of the country from this yard, and/or importing same, I hoped their customers were enthusiasts for multi-cellular plant-like organisms on their furniture.

That single crate, though – stencilled on the side was Chalet Chic Gmbh, Heinestrasse 21, Zurich, Schweiz. E Russo.

The door to the unit opened when I pushed against it, which was a mild surprise, but not nearly as big a surprise as I was to the guy who was at the desk inside, half asleep (and I’m being generous with that “half”) in his chair. Mercifully, he was fully clothed and buttoned.

“Good morning, my name is Philip Marlowe from the VAT inspectorate?”

“Ah, oh right. I dunno…er, who was it you were expectin’ to see?”

“I don’t have an appointment. We make these visits unannounced. I’d like to see the managing director, please.”

“Aw, there’s nobody here – foreby me, I mean. Nobody works here, I’m just the security guard, just looking after the place, like.”

“So you’re here all the time, on your own, in a place where nobody works?”

“Aye, but just since the last couple of weeks, though. Can I ask, is there some problem?”

“Well, this company doesn’t pay its VAT bill and we wonder why.”

“Canny help you there, sorry. Like I say, I’m just manning the desk. I’m nothing to do with the people that actually own the place.”

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