See That My Grave Is Kept Clean Read online

  ‘There was silence for a while, and so I put my hand up. I don’t know why I did that. I was fourteen. I played Jesu. Much too slowly, and several mistakes later, I retreated. And then, suddenly, Adam Pearson walks to the front of the class, looking shy. Shy. As if. Played the piano like, I don’t know, some 1940s bluesman. Jesus. Looking back... he owned the room. Magnificent playing. Truly magnificent.’

  ‘Surely it needn’t have impacted on you,’ she said. ‘Your classmates must just have, I don’t know, ignored you. And it soun...’

  ‘They were laughing. Not out loud, but they were laughing.’

  Fingers are tensing, getting annoyed. She knows the signs. Now he’s started, he won’t stop.

  ‘So, then fucking Pearson, or someone, I don’t know who, gets Gillian Thompson to come up and speak to me in the common room. Asked me what book I was reading, as though –’

  ‘What book were you reading?’

  ‘What?’

  He turns and looks at her, his brow furrowed at the interruption.

  ‘What book were you reading?’

  ‘The Shining. What difference does it make?’

  She shakes her head, indicates for him to go on.

  ‘I barely spoke to her. Just showed her the book. She goes back to her friends and they start laughing. I mean, what was she doing, talking to me? Gillian Thompson? Seriously? She was taking the piss.’

  ‘Who was Gillian Thompson?’

  ‘The class bike. She was pretty, mind. Pretty. No business talking to the likes of me.’

  ‘And the third thing?’ she asks.

  Classic case, she thinks. Such trivial grievances. So often the way.

  ‘I asked her out. I thought about it, I thought about why she came to speak to me, and I asked her out. She said no. And then Pearson, who I’d hardly, I don’t know, hardly noticed before then, he laughs at me. He tells everyone. They’re looking at me, this overweight, unattractive nerd, with his Stephen King novels, and buried in his algebra books. They were laughing at me. It was him. Pearson. I knew it was. It was like... when he played the piano in class, he wanted some dweeb to get up there first, somebody rubbish, so he would look even better against them. I mean, it wasn’t like he needed it. He was good enough.’

  He stares straight ahead. His eyes are looking at a picture on the wall in front of him. A pale wall, the picture a still life, fruit in a bowl, a brace of partridge on a kitchen table.

  ‘Pity,’ he says.

  She waits for him to continue, but at the same time knows he’s come to a natural break in the narrative.

  ‘What is?’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘What’s a pity?’

  ‘That he died, of course,’ says Clayton.

  A beat.

  ‘How did it happen?’ she forces herself to ask.

  Clayton smiles, waves one of his dismissive hands, catches her eye for the first time in a while, and then rests his head back on the settee.

  ‘He lived up near the school, the house backed onto some old fields. The fields are a housing estate now, of course. There were trees on the other side of the field, a nice wood. I think it’s still there. Had a lovely feel to it. A small stream. Probably full of used needles and condoms these days, but it was decent back then.

  ‘I watched him for a while. Adam Pearson. I hid in the woods and watched him. It was the following school year, perfect time. Late September. The nights were getting shorter, but the leaves were hanging onto the trees, and there was plenty of cover in there. I could see his bedroom window. He would have the curtains open, the light on. Played guitar, did his homework, listened to music. So fucking normal.

  ‘When he’d been in town, he’d often come home across the field at the back...’

  He lets the words drift away. Taking himself back. She swallows. Strangely, despite everything, she hadn’t actually seen this coming. What story had she thought he was going to tell from his childhood?

  ‘I honestly... honestly didn’t think I was ever going to kill him. That wasn’t what this was about. I was going to break his fingers. That was all. Break his stupid, long, thin, fucking, piano-playing fingers.

  ‘Came up behind him in the dark. Oh, I was nervous, nervous all right. Shitting myself. Had a brick in my hand. Shitting myself he was going to turn round, but it was raining and windy. The trees were moving. Perfect cover. In my dreams I’d imagined taking a movie moment. You know, pausing just behind him, saying, ‘Adam?’ and seeing the look on his poor, pathetic little face when he turned round, just before I fucked him over the forehead with the brick. But I admit it! I’m no film star! No hero! I chickened out, and hit him over the back of the head.

  ‘He fell. I hit him again to be sure, and then dragged him by the legs into the woods. He’d had his hood up, and for a second I thought how wonderfully funny it would have been if it hadn’t been Adam. If I had just skulled some poor innocent passer-by!’

  He laughs, shaking his head in amusement, and then the laughter dies, and he stares melancholically back at the picture of the dead partridges.

  ‘But no, it was Adam, poor Adam right enough. And so I did what I set out to do. I broke his fingers. I thought they would snap easily, you know, just bending them back.’

  He turns and gives her a curious stare, not quite understanding. She swallows again. Feels the hair standing on her arms.

  ‘I couldn’t even do that. I was pathetic. Oh, I think I managed one little finger. Just one. So, I attacked them with the brick instead. And... well, that’s all. That was how it happened. Maybe if I’d been able to break his fingers easily, I could have done it and left it there. But I got carried away. Started hitting his fingers with the brick, and then one time I missed his hand, it was up here, you know, his arm bent so it was up by his shoulder, and I hit his face, his stupid, pretty fucking face, and he flinched and I thought, shit, he’s going to wake up. So I switched from his hands to his face and head.

  ‘I don’t mind admitting I was crying. Quite upset by the whole sad affair. Some would think it was me who should be pitied. And there I was. Couldn’t stop. I kept hitting him in the head with the brick...’

  His voice drifts off again, as if swallowed up in sorrowful remembrance. The tone, she thinks, would not have been unlike someone describing the last time they saw their father alive. A lament to a lost time.

  ‘No,’ he says, ‘he never did wake up.’

  With those words, the memory is snapped, he frees himself from it and says, ‘Ha!’

  Clasps his hands together again.

  ‘There you are.’

  ‘Didn’t the police come to the school?’

  ‘Of course!’

  ‘Did they interview you?’

  ‘They interviewed everyone. I was just another kid, just another quiet kid, who sat at the back of the class and didn’t really have any friends, and didn’t say much. No one noticed me.’

  ‘You thought a minute ago everyone was laughing at you.’

  His eyes rest on her, his face impassive. The look that goes right through her. The look that explains why he’s sitting there, now, in front of her, and she’s got a notebook in her hands. The look that chills her right down into the pit of her soul.

  ‘I think we’re done for the day,’ he says.

  3

  STANDING AT THE WINDOW in Taylor’s room, waiting for him to get off the phone. He’s speaking to Connor, who’s spending the day through in Edinburgh discussing budget cuts. And when I say discussing, he’ll be getting told the score. The title of the lecture by the Chief Constable of Police Scotland is “How Bad It Is, And By How Much Are You All Just About To Be Fucked”. Or something. They’ll be drawing lots to see who’s out of a job by the time they get to the door of the lecture room.

  Connor said before he left he’d been told his job is safe, so we don’t even have that little piece of hope. All we can cling to is that someone was lying to him because he’s a dick.

  Taylor isn’t saying
much, so I’ve tuned out. Looking out at the day, a warm late morning in June. I can see two of our lot standing outside having a fag. There’s a young couple across the road on the way to the pub. They are familiar to us, which is why I know they’re on the way to the pub. As time goes by, we will play a bigger and bigger part in their lives. Not that it’s usually detective work. There’s never much detecting to do with the likes of them.

  Taylor hangs up. I don’t immediately turn round. There’s an attractiveness about the day. The sort of day that makes you want to be up a mountain, or by a river. Or both. A packed lunch, a cool drink. Peanuts. Maybe a flask of tea for later.

  ‘What’s so interesting?’

  I turn, dragged away from my passing daydream.

  ‘What’s the news?’ I ask.

  ‘They haven’t really got started yet,’ says Taylor. ‘They’ve had the introductory speeches, then they had a break. The superintendent felt the need to check in during his spare twenty minutes, for which I’m grateful, because obviously we’ve all been running around like headless Muppets in his absence, waiting for some direction.’

  ‘Perhaps he was doing it to demonstrate to all the other knobs how vital he is to the station.’

  Taylor stares with some resignation at the floor.

  ‘Probably bang on.’

  He looks up. He’s tired. Everybody’s tired.

  ‘You were late,’ he says. ‘Again.’

  ‘Sorry,’ I say.

  ‘If it’s alcohol –’

  ‘Just not sleeping. Lying in bed, a total basketcase. This morning I turned my alarm off because I was wide awake, but made the rookie error of not getting out of bed when I did it.’

  ‘At least you picked the morning the boss was in Edinburgh, but, you know –’

  Hold my hand up.

  ‘I’m on it. Two alarms tomorrow, one on the other side of the room.’

  ‘Anyway, I want you to realise I gave you the guy with the photographs as punishment. And you’re going to follow it to the death.’

  Well, that serves me right.

  ‘Have you been round to talk to the happy couple yet?’

  ‘Just about to,’ I say. ‘My original plan was to come up here and try to get out of it, but I see now...’

  He waves his hand to the door.

  ‘Can I do some proper work when I get back?’

  ‘If you can find some.’

  I stop at the door.

  ‘What d’you think about the cuts? They’ll look for volunteers, or there’ll be compulsory redundancies?’

  Taylor holds my stare. Can tell right there he’s been wondering about it himself.

  ‘Don’t know how it’s going to go,’ he says. ‘But this time, well, as they say in American movies, this shit is real. Maybe Connor will have something to tell us tomorrow.’

  Small wave of the hand in acknowledgement, then turn and off out the door.

  SITTING IN THE FRONT room, looking out over Gunville Road, taking tea with Mr and Mrs Hartwell. Thought I might as well. It’s lunchtime and I’m hungry, and they weren’t offering food. Tea and biscuits will have to do.

  ‘My wife is an attractive woman,’ says Hartwell.

  I nod in agreement, although really, what the actual fuck? The only way that sentence makes any rational sense is if the woman sitting on the sofa holding his hand isn’t his wife.

  ‘Yes,’ I say, obviously hoping no one’s recording the conversation, ‘but you realise you can be charged for this. If Mr Gregson pursues his complaint, there’s a fair amount of shit could come your way. You could be in a lot of –’

  ‘Oh, Jesus, don’t get us started,’ she says.

  Her hand parts from her husband’s and she leans forward. The top she’s wearing is low cut, and suddenly the great chasm between her breasts is presented for my analysis. I look up as quickly as possible. As if I don’t have enough mental scarring.

  ‘That man is an egregious little prick.’

  Lovely.

  ‘So, why –’

  ‘We’re not harassing him, Sergeant, he’s harassing us!’ explodes the bloke. ‘He’s been pestering Lucinda for years. Well, fuck him. Really, fuck him. If he wanted to see my wife’s tits, I thought, well here you fucking go.’

  It’s hard to know where to start.

  Lift the mug up to my face, and decide to hide behind it for a while.

  BACK AT MY DESK, THE case of he said she said to write up. Neighbourly disputes, even ones with added porn, are just a gigantic pain in the arse. Give me a straightforward, drunken chibbing any day.

  Morrow’s not as his desk. The place seems kind of quiet. We all know the axe is coming, and it’s affected the building. It’s like there’s less work to do, the Crime Gods looking down and saying, you can’t complain about cuts, yous’ve got fuck all on.

  Taylor walks past, slows down.

  ‘All well?’

  I give him the look, but don’t reply.

  ‘Did they put on a show for you to demonstrate the simple naivety of their actions?’

  ‘Where’s Morrow?’ I ask, by way of moving the conversation on.

  ‘Down at the station,’ he says. ‘A woman flung herself in front of a train.’

  Again? Crap. Feel the weight of such a depressing thought.

  Our train station is one of those that makes a perfect suicide spot. The Glasgow to London trains fly through without stopping. Fuck knows what speed they’re doing, but Jesus, there’s something innately terrifying about them. So much power. Puts the shit up me, I have to say. I always stand well away, like I feel the force of it is going to suck me on to the track.

  Other people seem to not give a shit.

  Taylor stands for a second, as we both contemplate what was going through her head in the moments before she took the step, then he double taps the desk and walks on.

  4

  HAVING COFFEE ACROSS the road with Sgt Harrison. She’s my new go-to guy for intimate conversation. My gay best friend. She’s a bit messed up, and I’m a complete fuck up, so we kind of get along. And, of course, she’s damned attractive, coupled with the fact I never even make the effort of trying to get her into bed, so it all works out.

  Everyone at the station thinks I’m playing some sort of long game, believing I can wear her down, make the score, and then move on. And when I say everyone, I mean Taylor. I doubt anyone else cares. All those constables these days, they’re all twenty years younger than Eileen and me.

  When I think of the two of us sitting at a table, I see the attractive fortysomething lesbian and the office stud. The constables will see two old fuckers clinging on to each other like sad, middle-aged has-beens in a Woody Allen movie.

  ‘So, this happened,’ I begin, as we settle down across the table, a coffee and a muffin each. My turn to download, given that yesterday she owned the conversation with a fantastic tale of a couple of hours in bed with a nineteen year-old student who, when lying back naked at the end, smoking a joint, had told her it had been like having sex with her mum. Eileen hadn’t hung around long enough to establish whether that was a simile arising from actual experience, but thinking back, she wouldn’t have been surprised.

  ‘Tell me you’re having sex again,’ she says. ‘I can’t be the only complete tart left at the station.’

  It’s been eight months. Haven’t had sex since the night I spent with Philo Stewart. It’s not that, after her murder, I made some sort of vow of celibacy. Just haven’t felt like it. Haven’t gone looking for it, and it hasn’t happened.

  ‘I spend all my time with a lesbian,’ I say, ‘how is it I’m going to get laid?’

  ‘I manage, despite spending time with you.’

  ‘Well, yes, but people probably think we’re both gay. Which works for you, because you are.’

  ‘No one thinks you’re gay.’

  ‘Whatever. Can I tell you what happened, or do you not want to hear it because it’s not got sex in it?’

  She laughs, break
s off a piece of muffin. Recently had her teeth whitened. Nice job. Let’s hope she doesn’t get her face punched in by one of our clients. That’s the kind of thing that happens, after all.

  ‘Sure,’ she says. ‘But, you know, I thought when we started hanging out, I was at least in for some vicarious hetero-sex. I mean, I’ve given you a lot – a lot – of lesbian stories, so one of these days you’re going to have to start pulling your weight.’

  ‘OK, I’ll have sex, just to keep you happy. But can I tell you the thing?’

  ‘Tell me the thing.’

  ‘Thank you. So, I was up at Philo’s grave at the weekend. Sunday afternoon.’

  She’s nodding, knows I go up there. One day she might look concerned at me and tell me I have to get over it and move on, but not yet.

  ‘And, her husband shows up.’

  She lets out a low whistle.

  ‘Uh-oh. First time that’s happened?’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘Did you see him coming?’

  That, of course, cuts straight to it. If I’d seen him coming, there wouldn’t have been half the trouble.

  ‘You didn’t see him coming, and you were talking to her. Out loud.’

  ‘You’re very perceptive,’ I say. ‘You should be a detective.’

  ‘So, how did it play out?’

  ‘Well...’

  Break off a piece of muffin, take another mouthful of coffee.

  ‘What exactly were you saying?’

  ‘Hmm... that’s the thing. It was... I think... he implied what I was saying was worse, because it was just general chitchat. I mean, obviously it would have been bad if I’d been pouring my heart out about how much I missed her, and what a great life we could have had together. But I wasn’t. Well, not at that particular moment. I was just having a chat.’

  ‘And was she talking back?’

  ‘In my head...’

  ‘And were you leaving gaps for her to talk back?’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘Hmm, not great. And what... were you standing over the grave, kneeling down beside it...?’

  I laugh, but not in a butgusting, just heard Frankie Boyle use the word cunt sort of a way. Just laughing at myself, because I know how this all sounds.