Out on the pavement it’s very cold and totally deserted. I look at a tin-foil carton with a discarded takeaway left in it. Someone has pished in its remains and rice floats on a small freezing reservoir of urine. I move away. The cold has slipped into my bones with every step down the road jarring, making me feel like I’m going to splinter. Flesh and bone seem separate, as if a void exists between them. There’s no fear or regret but no elation or sense of triumph either. It’s just a job that had to be done.

The Games

Woke up this morning. Woke up into the job.

The job. It holds you. It’s all around you; a constant, enclosing absorbing gel. And when you’re in the job, you look out at life through that distorted lens. Sometimes, aye, you get your wee zones of relative freedom to retreat into, those light, delicate spaces where new things, different, better things can be perceived of as possibles.

Then it stops. Suddenly you see that those zones aren’t there any more. They were getting smaller, you knew that. You knew that some day you’d have to get round to doing something about it. When did this happen? The realisation came some time after. It doesn’t really matter how long it took: two years, three, five or ten. The zones got smaller and smaller until they didn’t exist, and all that’s left behind is the residue. That’s the games.

The games are the only way you can survive the job. Everybody has their wee vanities, their own little conceits. My one is that nobody plays the games like me, Bruce Robertson. D.S. Robertson, soon to be D.I. Robertson.

The games are always, repeat, always, being played. Most times, in any organisation, it’s expedient not to acknowledge their existence. But they’re always there. Like now. Now I’m sitting with a bad nut and Toal’s thriving on this. I’ve been fucking busy and he’s told me to be here, not asked, mind you, told. I got it all from Ray Lennox who was first on the scene with some uniformed spastics. Aye, I got it all from young Ray but Toal of course needs his audience. Behind the times Toalie boy, be-hind the blessed times.

He paces up and down like one of those fuckin Inspector Morse type of cunts. His briefings are the closest to action the spastic gets. Then he sits back down on his arse, petulant because people are still filing in. Respect and Toal go together like fish and chocolate ice cream, whatever the spastic deludes himself by choosing to think.

I got three sheets last night and this lighting is nipping my heid and my bowels are as greasy as a hoor’s chuff at the end of a shift doon the sauna. I fart silently but move swiftly to the other side of the room. The technique is to let the fart ooze out a bit before you head off, or you just take it with you in your troosers tae the next port of call. It’s like the fitba, you have to time your runs. My friend and neighbour, Tom Stronach, a professional footballer and a fanny-merchant extraordinaire, knows all about that.

Hmm.

Tom Stronach. Not a magic name. Not a name to conjure with.

Talking of timing, Gus Bain arrives, red-faced fae Crawford’s with the sausage rolls. He’s passing them around and looking like a spare prick at a hoors’ convention as Toal starts his brief. Niddrie’s looking on in the usual disapproving manner of the bastard. My fart-gas has wafted over to him. Result! He’s waving it away ostentatiously and he thinks it’s fucking Toal!

Toal stands up and clears his throat: – Our victim is a young, black male in his early thirties. He was found on Playfair Steps at around five o’clock this morning by council refuse workers. We suspect that he lives in the London area but there is at present no positive identification. D.S. Lennox was down at the morgue last night with me, he says, nodding to young Ray Lennox who wisely keeps his features set in neutrality in order no tae flag himself up as a target for the hatred and loathing which floats aroond this room like a bad fart. My bad fart, most likely.

There was a time when we could exempt each other from that hatred and loathing. Surely there was. I feel a bit light, then it’s like my brain starts to birl in my head sending my thoughts and emotions cascading around. I sense them emptying into something approximating a leaky bucket which is drained before I can examine its contents. And Toal’s high, sharp voice, reaching into me.

This is where he starts to play silly buggers. – It seems to have been a fruitless night for our friend. He was in the Jammy Joe’s disco until three a.m. this morning and went home alone. That was when he was last reported alive. We can perhaps assume that our man felt very much an outsider, alone in a strange city which seemed to have excluded him.

Typical Toal, concerned with the state of mind of the cunt that got murdered. Fancies himself as an intellectual. This is Toal we are talking about here. It would be amusing if it wasn’t so fucking tragic.

I bite into my sausage roll. The pepper and the ketchup I normally have with it are up the stairs and it tastes plain and bland without them. That spunk-bag Toal’s wrecked my fuckin day already! Wir only jist in the fuckin place!

As my fart retreats via the airvent I clock Niddrie exiting from the door, improving the room’s atmosphere in much the same way. Even Toal’s sprightlier now. – The man was dressed in blue jeans, a red t-shirt and a black tracksuit top with orange strips on the arms. His hair was cut short. Amanda, Toal gestures to that silly wee lassie Amanda Drummond, who’s doing all that she’s good for, a psuedo-clerical job, dishing oot copies of the description. Drummond’s had her frizzy blonde hair cut short, which makes her look even mair ay a carpet muncher. She has bulging eyes which always give you the impression that she’s in shock, and she’s hardly any chin; just a sour, twisted mooth which comes out of her neck. She’s wearing a long, brown skirt which is too thick to see the pant line through, with a checked blouse and a fawn and brown striped cardigan. I’ve seen mair meat on a butcher’s knife.

That?

Polis?

I think not.

– Thanks Amanda, Toal smiles, and this crawling wee sow coos back at him. She’d suck his fuckin knob right there in front of us if he asked her tae. No that it’ll do her much good; she’ll be away soon, some cunt’ll knock her up the duff and that’ll be her playin at being polis over.

– Our murder victim left the nightclub and . . . Toal continues, but Andy Clelland cuts in on a wind-up: – Boss, a wee point of order. Maybe we shouldnae stigmatise the guy by referring to him by such a pejorative term as victim?

You have to raise your glass to Clell, he always hits home. Toal looks a bit doubtful, and Amanda Drummond’s nodding supportively, completely unaware that he’s taking the pish.

– The cunt’s fuckin well deid, disnae matter what ye call um now, Dougie Gillman says under his breath. I chuckle and Gus Bain does n aw.

– Sorry Dougie? Care to share that with us? Toal smiles sarcastically.

– Naw gaffer, s’awright. It’s nothing, Gillman shrugs. Dougie Gillman has short brown hair, narrow, cold blue eyes and a big, powerful jaw you could break your fingers on. He’s about my height, five-eight, but is as wide as he is tall.

– Perhaps, craving your indulgence gentlemen, Toal says coldly, now trying to stamp his authority on the proceedings in Niddrie’s absence, – we might continue. The deceased was probably making his way towards hotel accommodation on the South Side of the city. We’ve a team out checking the hotels for someone of his description. Assuming that was the case, the route he took to get there was interesting. We all know that there are certain places you shouldn’t go to in a strange city after dark, Toal raises his thick, straggly eyebrows, slipping back into his showboating mode, – places like dark alleys where the ambience of such surroundings might incite even a reasonable person to perpetrate an evil deed.