No luck; it’s kind of hard to hear with all the traffic but eventually we establish that nobody in the control room knows me and I’m politely informed it’s not policy to phone for taxis for members of the public, sir. No, there is no public phone available any more. I’m advised there’ll be a bus destined for the town centre available from the bus stop on the far side of the old toll plaza, just behind me, in … twenty-five minutes. I should take the underpass.
‘Thanks a lot,’ I tell the anonymous voice. The ‘fucking’ is silent.
I waddle to and down the steps and then along the underpass beneath the carriageway to the sound of trucks pounding above my head — I swear the subsonics alone are making my balls ache — then struggle up the steps at the far side and along through the newly resumed rain to the flimsy perspex bus shelter.
I sit perched carefully on an angled metal-and-plastic rail no wider than my hand, there to stop anyone doing anything as decadent as falling asleep. The rain rattles on the roof. The wind picks up, blowing in under the walls of the shelter and chilling my feet and ankles. Still the place smells of pee.
You can see why people must be so keen to sleep here.
I should get home to Mum and Dad’s and just fuck off back to London now, today, without waiting for tomorrow and the funeral or the day after and my booked flight back to London.
Only I don’t know that I’d be able to sit down for the hour or so it would take to return the car to Dyce. I’m still in some pain just from the punch to my belly, never mind the tender, jangling ultra-sensitivity and continuing sensation of nausea I’m getting from my testes. I feel beaten as well as beaten up; defeated, humiliated, worn out. If I did feel I could drive, I think I would: back to the airport for the next available flight or all the way to London, just me and the car, drop it at City airport and let them work out the charges.
I don’t think I want to tell anybody what just happened. I’m ashamed I was so easily huckled into the van, so incapable of resisting or talking my way out of the situation. I’d love to think it couldn’t happen again or I’d be able to take some sort of revenge on Murdo and Norrie, but I’m not like them, I’m not naturally violent or trained in it.
And they do have a point. I was asking about Callum when I guess it’s none of my business — I was just interested after what Grier had said and Ezzie being there seemed like too good an opportunity to miss — and I did hurt their sister and make the whole family look stupid, disrespected, even if it was five years ago. By their standards, I was very much asking for a kicking. Arguably, I’m lucky I got off with a mere punching.
People only resent, and start to hate, gangsters when they do something that seems unfair, or that impacts on them personally unjustly. If there’s a general feeling that people are only ever getting what was coming to them, and if any violence is kept within the confines of people who have put themselves in play, even potentially put themselves in harm’s way, then nobody really minds too much.
The Murstons and Mike Mac’s people aren’t above the law; the cops just turn a blind eye where it’s felt that the two families are effectively doing police business — keeping the Toun running smoothly, preserving professional, commercial, middle-class values and generally maintaining Stonemouth as a safe place to raise your children and do business.
It means that Murdo and his brothers get stuck with parking fines and speeding tickets like anybody else, and Callum didn’t get off on a charge of assault after an altercation in a bar when he was twenty, plus Mike Mac had to tear down an extension to an extension when he was unexpectedly refused planning permission, but the whole drug-dealing business goes quietly on with barely a ripple of interference and apparently it’s possible for the Murstons to commit murder with relative impunity if they feel they have to, dropping people off the road bridge.
Mike and Donald throw the cops the occasional tiddler every now and again, just to keep the drug-crime clear-up figures looking plausible and encourage the rest of the troops to stay in line, but they themselves are in no danger, providing they don’t get too greedy, or too flamboyant, or too self-important, or think they can do anything they want. They know the limitations, work within them.
Anyway, the trivial is punished while the gross stuff sails through unchallenged, and when you look at it like that, the whole set-up seems perverse and just wrong.
So the trick is not to look at it like that.
I was wearing a jacket and tie. Practically a blazer. Jeez, I’d thought I wouldn’t have to get dressed up to this sort of deeply uncool level for over a week, on the day of the wedding itself. But here I was, in the clubhouse of Olness Golf Club, at the invitation of Mike MacAvett, though apparently entirely with the blessing — and, indeed, probably at the instigation — of Donald Murston.
