Clip Their Little Wings

By John Callaghan

Mired in the world of errant wives, missing persons fleeing mundane bills, businesses pursuing dishonest staff and petty personal transgressions, Stevie McCabe is suddenly asked to investigate the affairs of a local Labour MP.
Although he knows his client is lying, the commission gets his attention, especially because his unrequited lust for the owner of a jazz club has somehow turned into an asylum appeal for one of her singers and most especially because an old friend he can barely remember is asking him for a pro-bono investigation of the lurid death of his junkie brother.
Through the peeling tower blocks and smart sandstone tenements of the city, from university to squalid bed and breakfast hotels, McCabe pursues the trails of the dead junkie and the questionable MP, knowing that they should be unconnected, yet knowing, too, that the strict limits of coincidence are being bent and broken by the ways in which the stories intertwine.

• Language: English
• Publisher: John Callaghan
• Release date: Feb 6, 2012
• ISBN: 9781465741011

John Callaghan

Vice Principal and English teacher in catholic school in Essex. Born in the East but raised in the West of Ireland. Married with two children. Writer of plays, short stories and two novels.

Book preview

Chapter 1 - Call Me Stevie

My name is Stephen McCabe but you can call me Stevie. All my friends do.

Finlay Matzdorf was sitting opposite me and he was calling me Stevie, although he wasn’t my friend. He was just one of the city’s biggest lawyers.

It’s good to see you looking so up on it, Stevie. Business must be treating you well.

Can’t complain…..Fin. Mind if I call you Fin? My mammy always told me to be a doctor or a copper – said I’d never be out of work, cuz there’s always sick people and bad men. You would know that, being in the legal business yourself.

He caught my drift. I try not to do the wrong thing….which is why I’m here. He smiled.

I had to smile at his smile. Gourlay Matzdorf Allan need some work doing? And you think I’m your boy?

It’s something subtle, something political. We need a safe pair of hands.

I waited for him to go on. In a way, he did. These are very important clients.

I edged forward in my seat. I love the suspense, Finlay…and I love dancing with you this way, but does this thing have a name?

You know, Stevie, before I came here, I looked up ‘discretion’ in the dictionary. It means two things: behaving so as to avoid embarrassment and, then again, acting on your own judgment. That’s what we need here. We need somebody to be discreet for us.

By now, I was sitting back in my seat. Making speeches was Finlay’s job, but with him it was beginning to look like a disease. You looked up ‘discretion’? Before you came here, Finlay, did you also look up ’bullshit’?

Fair enough, Stevie. But this is paying work, really. We need somebody to have a wee look over an MP for us.

That stirred the pot. Ah, okay – see this? This is me lookin’ a bit more interested. Who is it?

He paused, as I knew he would, and I just bit my tongue before I said so. It’s Billy Hutton.

But he’s a Labour MP. He’s my MP, in fact. What’s he done - in particular, I mean?

These clients - I’m sorry, they’ll have to remain anonymous for now - are a large multi-national company with interests in a lot of fields.

But especially in….?

Well…their current interest is in energy.

Energy? What does that mean? Do they want to plant a million wind turbines in the Firth of Clyde? Or just insulate your granny’s loft?

Oil.

Oil? Energy. Okay, a multi-national oil corporation sounds like they might want to talk to you, but why would they waste the oxygen talking to Billy Hutton?

You know him, then?

I read the papers. He’s on the TV often enough….Christ, I voted for him. Like I say, he’s my own MP.

There you are, then. You’ve said it yourself - that’s why we want you to look at him.

If voting for him is the reason, then there’s 30,000 other people you should be talking to as well. You need to give me more toys to play with.

Matzdorf squinted in what I assumed to be an attempt to look annoyed. I told you that you were looking good, Stevie, but – tell me this - is business that sweet you need a marriage proposal from everybody that waves a docket at you?

For my part, I felt the time was right for a slow rise from the chair, followed by a stroll to the window, from which position I would address my next remarks to Matzdorf over my shoulder. But I couldn’t be bothered, so I just swivelled a bit.

I’m not playing hard-to-get, Finlay. But just imagine what you would do…what you did do, when a fancy lawyer walks in and asks you to go raking over Billy Hutton’s middens. Do you just say ‘yes boss’ and start poking? I’m in the same position.

Well, ask yourself some questions - what would an oil multi-national want with Billy Hutton?

Maybe they want advice on good night-clubs in Glasgow - good night-clubs in London, maybe.

Finlay had leaned forward, his body language telling me he was taking me into his confidence. They know they have to deal with a Labour government, they see independence maybe coming, they want somebody on their board to look after them on the political end….he has to be a Labour MP, he has to be Huttonish -

Why is that?

These people’re based in Glasgow, they pay taxes in Aberdeen, their fields are off Shetland - somebody from Bristol or somewhere’s going to smell. The man they want has to have a sensible price-ticket, they don’t want him too honest or too left-wing, he’s got to give value for money.

This smells hooky, I have to tell you. I’m goin’ to get up to my elbows in shite if I try to pick up this thing, Finlay. Am I wrong?

It’s the art of the possible, Stevie, business is business and all that.

And they think Billy Hutton’s the boy?

He gave the faintest shrug. He meets the spec for the job, that’s all. Nothing personal.

Right. So you want me to establish that he’s up to being a so-called consultant…

A director - on the board.

…but that nobody else’s bought him first.

Nobody that would conflict.

When he’s on the board, he would - what? Tell your….your clients….what’s the good word he hears over croissants at Westminster, keep the company in the loop about all flavours of energy? Ha ha, my arse. I mean…what…what, really, Finlay? This is just guff.

I’d imagine he’d pass on whatever was useful to his fellow directors - it’s just normal politics, two-way traffic.

You’d ‘imagine’? Why do I get this feeling, Finlay?

His smile seemed almost genuine. It’s your natural suspicious mind, Stevie. It’s why you’re good and why you can deal with these people. Our usual enquiry agents might as well waltz on stilts as talk to the Labour party.

Well, Finlay, just because I once put a Tory cabinet minister in jail…that doesn’t make me anything to do with the Labour party. And that other stuff was years ago.

I don’t suppose you’ve played peever for years, but you don’t forget the rules, do you, Stevie?

Well, hear this - I never played peever. I don’t buy any old shite about back-in-the-day. It’s all pish. Most of my life’s been in colour and everything. Nobody’s ever going to write a folk song with me in it.

I knew Matzdorf was lying and he knew I knew, but he was sitting back, all the same. He also knew he’d said enough.

********

Mrs Mac was out somewhere on some mission that I didn’t understand, so I was catching my own phone calls. I was faffing and fiddling with nothing mail in the front office, bills and credit card invitations, when the phone rang and my day was knocked through an arsehole sideways.

It was Jimmy O’Mahoney on the line, an okay guy when you meet him but hardly a brother. We had grown up together as kids in the same street and he got in touch again when my face appeared in the papers once or twice, decades later. Nowadays, it’s Christmas cards and a bump-into. He didn’t usually call me at work (or, in fact, at all)and when he asked me if I’d seen the paper, I thought – for no reason – that maybe I’d appeared in it again. I told him the paper would be outside and he asked me to call him back when I’d read it.

Donnie McCutcheon’s brother’s been found dead, was the only other thing he said.

The front page was what had caught his attention. I picked up the Evening Times from the front door and read the headline – Horror of Headless Corpse at Beauty Spot. This wasn’t strictly true in two quite significant respects – first, it was more a case of a corpseless head than a headless corpse and Rutherford Cross was no beauty spot. It was in the hills, granted, but it was a rubbish tip, literally. All the same, the story caught my attention, like it had Jimmy’s. And the sub-strap : drug campaigner’s brother dead. Well, his head was dead, so it was a fair bet that the rest of him was, too.

Donnie McCutcheon had played in the streets of Govan along with Jimmy and me. Primary school kids’ stuff – climbing walls, filling paper pokes with dog-shite, putting them on the doorstep and setting the paper alight, then ringing the bell so that the panicked householder stamped on the flames and got their slippers covered in keich. Or chap-door, run-away – same game, no shite or flames, just the irritated neighbour. Just as good in your head.

Actually……..actually, I don’t know if we really did any of that. That stuff, it’s all just stories and memories, tales and lies, recollection as fantasy, none of it really mattered and maybe none of it really happened either. All I do recall (apart from the football, but that’s different, that’s not play, that’s competition) was sitting on walls, talking a lot and poking at muck with a stick. But you can’t write wistful biographies about muck and sticks. Seems you need shite in pokes, too.

Anyway, Donnie McCutcheon took a long while to develop any better manners. He moved, not far but to another school, and we lost touch for decades, like Jimmy O’Mahoney, but Jimmy would tell me what Donnie was up to, namely…….small business initiatives, which consisted mostly of drug-dealing it seemed. Smack was favourite, but Glasgow had developed a great fondness for the sweet taste of tamazepam, Valium for all the middle-aged bingo-wing crew, but made extra-edgy for actual junkies by mainlining it for that super convenient bliss - in gel form, meant to make it harder to inject but actually just making it harder to avoid thrombosis when you injected it anyway. The McCutcheon’s mammy, Sadie, was a mover, too, shunting tenner deals through the letterbox of the steel door in her tenement on the Summertown Road.

The dear departed brother with the detached head was called Vinnie and the article in the Times said that he was a dealer as well, although only small-time (for which, read user) and it mentioned Donnie, of course. They used to share a flat on the 19th floor of the towers at the top of Broomloan Road, until Donnie cleaned up his act. And what a job he did. Everybody loves a happy ending and the ex-junkie, ex-pusher was now (and I quote) fighting the tide of drugs through his organisation Glasgow Against Drugs.

Glasgow Against Drugs. I bet they didn’t spend much money on a PR agency to think up the name of that one.

Vinnie, though, hadn’t ever learned where the fresh air was and had just come out of Barlinnie Prison, the Bar-L, and was described as a lorry-driver, an occupation connected to his dealing. Eh? An imaginative connection, there – he can drive, so he can, er, move around. Would they have said the same about a train driver? Or a train passenger, for that matter? Anyway and all, Vinnie was well wedged into his role as a junky/dealer.

Now, the truth…….the truth was, I didn’t remember Vinnie at all, and his big brother only in that half-lying, half-imagined way, but I was nearly as struck by the story as Jimmy O’Mahoney was. Things like this do set you thinking, if not about mostly-fictitious pasts, then about your own mortality. The cold elbow of death had reached out and dunted me in the ribs. In my business, mayhem can happen, and for sure it goes on every night in this city, but I defy anybody to read that front page and not go all philosophical.

Ah, sweet mystery of life, at last I’ve found thee.

And, Vinnie McCutcheon’s head was found in an oil-drum, which was unlucky. Not for Vinnie, as such, since he was dead already, but for whoever killed him.

You have to think that a head lodged at the bottom of an oil-drum filled with the dogged garbage of everyday life would never turn up, especially at an unlicensed dump by a woodland edge in the Campsie Fells, never cleared and never attended, festered three feet deep with the sludge of rotting sanitary matter, pallets, cardboard, plastic ginger bottles, shapeless mystery fragments, batteries, bloated slugs and discarded rubber flowers of love.

But, turn up, Vinnie did. A traveller family, stopping by, thought they would improve the area by upending the drum to inspect its contents and – hey-ho – Vinnie rolled out to say hello, ten miles from home and winking with his less perky eye. Bad luck, Vinnie-killer – you could never have thought it would come to this.

And so.

I called Jimmy O back and asked him what he needed. We weren’t great buddies but suddenly we were close. It seemed like Donnie McCutcheon, crusader against drugs, wanted to talk to me.

Chapter 2 - Teachers and Other Pets

Like I say, you can call me Stevie – my parents started it, but that just makes them typical. In Glasgow, you see, we are generous with our syllables, even profligate. Where the Stephens, Davids and Jameses of England’s fair nation go about their business in monosyllabic dedication – Steve, Dave, Jim, concise to a fault with their vowel-sounds – in Glasgow we feel the need to name ourselves in a more relaxed fashion, using the fatherless –ee sound that gives birth to Stevie, Davie and, yes, Jimmy. Think about it, you know it’s true : Stevie Wonder, Davie Crockett, Jimmy Choo and his gallus shoes, yes they were all hometown boys. Sure they were.

I presumed Mrs Mac would finish shuffling the paper, if she ever got back from her mission, so I wandered down to The Three Towers, my workload for the day quite filled by Finlay Matzdorf’s social call and Jimmy O’s version of family fortunes.

Matzdorf’s commission was a crisp, folding one but I was intrigued as well. Why a senior partner in one of Glasgow’s most conservative (and Conservative) law firms chose to make a personal visit to me, a stroppy chancer with too little respect, was not easy to see. I wasn’t the only detective in the book. Maybe he was telling the truth, but that seemed a little too improbable for a day other than Christmas. I had checked the date on the paper and it was nothing like.

In the late afternoon, nobody I knew was likely to be in The Towers, except maybe teachers, but that was okay, because it was Tommy McCafferty I wanted to see. I ordered a pint over the bar and asked if Tommy was in, a stupid question since I could see he wasn’t, but I asked it anyway, as you do.

Maybe another half hour, said Big Charlie the barman, …although it’s a Wednesday…might be earlier…fucked if I know, was his conclusion.

That seemed fair.

These days, I was getting used to the bar being free of smoke, but the fat ginger guy, the lab technician from the university, was amusing himself stuffing a pipe, and he liked to stand just outside the doorway when he smoked, with the door open of course, so we all got a whiff, like looking at a picture through the bottom of a glass. Smoking by implication.

Hey, Charlie I said did you vote for Billy Hutton? The MP?

My mother knows his mother, he answered. Charlie could be oblique.

It took another half an hour for Tommy McCafferty to arrive, a mate since school. If I had been American, I would have hugged him and told Charlie I love this guy!, but I’m not any kind of American so -

I said aye and

he said aye and

I bought him a beer.

Tommy was a teacher for pay but a politician for pleasure – normally, I couldn’t shut him up about it (and everybody longed to) but today, for once, I wanted to listen to him get excited about general committees and votes of censure.

You’re in early, he said.

You have to be, to catch the teachers.

He snorted.

I want to talk to you about Billy Hutton.

I’ll have to kill you, if I tell what you want to know…which is what?

How did he get to be your MP?

Your MP, too.

Aye, well, he represents me, he belongs to you.

That’s the beauty of democracy. He doesn’t belong to anybody anymore, ever since he got to trough down in London.

That bad?

He’s just typical, even now. I haven’t had a sentence with him in…since, since dunno.

But you put him in parliament.

Not me, personally. In fact…

I was starting to get interested. What, in fact?

That’s the funny thing…

Oh, yes – a ‘funny thing’ right off the reel. C’mon we’ll sit in the corner and talk about funny things.

Another beer later : Hutton should never really have been in the final selection list. He only got his union to nominate, two poxy paper branches with no members. It was lined up for Eileen Farrell, it should have been a piece of piss. She had all the support from actual members – most of it, anyway – she collected all the right lapel badges, sounded like a liberal and didn’t frighten anybody’s granny. A real weeble from the candidate factory. Red rose pyjamas.

Plus she’s a teacher.

There’s always that.

So Billy Hutton only had his union?

That and the right-wing, obviously. These old guys, they never do the right thing, give them a secret ballot…

Now you’re getting tedious, Tommy. Who else was in the frame?

Well, Eileen Farrell, as I say…Sandy McDivitt, the Trot, what a tube…Eric Black, you know he works at Scottish HQ, so nobody wanted him but he had to be on the list…Malky Donaldson…

The union guy?

He was the real opposition to Eileen, seemed like. Had most of the unions backing him and because her feet were so far under the table he could look like the interesting outsider, y’know? Fat bastard, but.

Mmm, that’s democracy right enough – even fat bastards get to stand.

So…Donaldson ran second to Eileen on the first ballot, Hutton was next and the numpties got loose change. Then it got a bit strange.

Strange I like even more than funny, but at that exact moment Ruth walked in and Tommy got the chance to make a crap joke and I never got to hear the strange. Anyway, I had already lost track of his bucketload of names beyond Hutton himself.

The joke : Tommy says to Ruth - Here, what does a teacher say on a first date?….enough about me, let’s talk about education!

Ruth was my not-especially significant other, God bless her. She wasn’t even a teacher, she was a social worker, but Tommy seemed to think they shared some mystic underpaid over-stressed public sector worker bond. Ruth didn’t actually agree, but she quite liked Tommy and I quite liked her liking him and we were all three of us sat with alcohol in front of us and I switched off the light on Finlay Matzdorf.

Click.

And Vinnie McCutcheon.

Buzzzz.

Then click.

Chapter 3 - Another Day, Another Dollar

Ruth didn’t stay the night. I wasn’t surprised and wondered idly where that left us, again. I tasted the night-morning fungus in my mouth and pieced together the fragments of the evening. Nothing embarrassing, nothing criminal, nothing to regret or apologise for – call that one in the win column.

Billy Hutton was beckoning to me but first there were others to deal with, set aside and dismiss. I swirled the water in the kettle, decided there was enough in there for tea, rocked the switch and went downstairs. I live, you see, right above the office, a secret that’s not a secret. It’s a paranoid gesture on my part – from time to time, I come into contact with people I think might mean me harm, people who might follow me home, or wait there for me. Not having this kind of home, in my perverse way, I feel better about my prospects. My personal mail goes to an accommodation address, if it doesn’t come to the office, and only my close friends know where I really live. Just because you’re paranoid…

The answerphone was blinking. It was Cathy Mavridis, last night, asking where I was with her daughter. The answer was I was nowhere, just like her daughter, who went missing from her job in a café in Largs. She’d skipped on a life full of problems, most of them with monetary values attached, and while her mother thought her boyfriend had killed her, the police thought it was time to put their feet up and have a cup of tea and so the woman was paying me to prove nothing. Her boyfriend had gone to London and then come back. I thought Cathy’s daughter was still there, most likely building up another pile of trouble to run away from.

The next call was from a housing association that was clearing out a bunch of chancers and neds, squatters and unauthorised occupants, nice phrase, who were fucking up a block of flats. I was creeping about, knocking doors and keeking through letterboxes, delivering non-existent pizza and empty parcels and I had enough to show that just about nobody was who they said they were. What burst my arse was that, when the pond life was gone, the jolly landlord wasn’t going to refurbish the flats for the needy of the parish, ah no, the socially concerned community organisation was going to sell the block, up-and-coming area that it was in. Social entrepreneurs, that made them.

Next and last up was Janice McKechnie. Her husband, she said, was chasing every wee ride in G41 and was nipping most of them. Maybe she was right, trouble was……I followed Don Giovanni McKechnie from work one night, saw him visit a rumpy-bar and tangle down with some blonde through a steamy bar darkly. The two of them left the bar and the blonde gave him a blow-job in the car-park, not in a car but – touch of class – on the bonnet of a BMW. Bingo. All on film and beyond argument. Except…when they were done, Janice McKechnie took off the blonde wig she had been wearing and left her husband to go back into the bar while she drove home in her very own need-to-get-it-valeted-now BMW. And she looked over at me as she drove past. I would give her the pictures and suggest that my work was done.

So, Billy Hutton, MP and would-be oil company director was looking like an attractive date.

I remembered that Tommy hadn’t actually got to the point of telling me last night what was strange about Kelvinbank Labour party’s choice of Hutton as MP – oh all right, politics students, their choice of him as candidate.

I phoned his mobile. What was the chance of a teacher actually teaching in school? He answered the phone and my question.

Tommy! Sorry to bother you at work….aye, I thought you might not be…anyway, your man Hutton, why was it strange you picked him?…last night, it was what you said…yes, about when the party picked him…[come on Tommy, get with the programme]…ah, right…

Tommy told me – his snide wee asides apart – that, although Hutton was an old-fashioned Labour right-winger, not so much New or Old Labour as Jurassic labour, untouched by the passing of the centuries, that the most left-wing party branch had won him the vote over the woman they had originally supported.

Was that it?

Aye. Then Ray Cochrane got to be convenor of housing.

On the city council? And Cochrane was the one that did the strange thing, voted for Hutton?

Organised it, more like. It was his pay-off.

Fuck sake, Tommy, you make it sound like the Mafia. Sounds to me like tuppeny-hapenny stuff.

He’s your MP now. Tommy sounded almost indignant. I wasn’t sure if it was the abuse of democracy that was doing it, or me being unimpressed by his strange.

OK, Tommy. Who is this Cochrane guy?

Ray Cochrane? Er, dunno what to tell you. Life-long party member…respected…councillor for umpteen years…solid enough guy – reliable, old-school type…typical for Kelvinbank, educated, don’t know in what – some kind of white collar guy maybe an engineer or quantity surveyor or something…retired a while back…not the friskiest barrel of monkeys at a party…

I guess you’ve got to have a high threshold of boredom to be a councillor for a wheen of years.

Aye. He was even convenor of planning, it doesn’t get much duller than that.

So, there’s nothing in common between him and Hutton? Apart from they were both councillors?

No – Hutton’s an east end boy…made his bones in the T&G when he was a lorry driver, fronted up that haulier’s strike….he’s flash - got the best tailor in the Scottish labour party….still a schemie in a suit, though - he’s rough as a badger’s arse, so are some of his mates, still. If you had to sum him up in a word or two, nobody would pick honest or sincere….he’s an old-fashioned wide boy and he knows the right things to say.

A bright bloke?

Um, still not the right word – sharp, maybe. Cunning.

Okay, would you go so far as to say dishonest?

Mmmmm….well, he’s a liar, for sure, but that’s maybe just a political thing and, well, his selection was iffy in the first place, that’s why you’re talking to me….but dishonest? I suppose. Maybe aye, maybe naw.

But if you had to write me a list of the corrupt, indictable, things he’s done, you couldn’t?

No.

So, maybe you could just as easily say here’s a working class bloke, looking after Number One, getting by on his shirt-tails and becoming an MP. A bit hairy-arsed but his main crime was to upset the torn-faced West End trendies that think the Labour party is their wee playground? Too much Priesthill and not enough Palestine?

Hey, Stevie, steady on – this is Tommy you’re talking to!

Cool the beans, Tommy, I’m just painting a picture. I’m trying to establish if this guy’s just a wide-o or if he’s really dirty.

I could almost hear Tommy shrug down the line. You could speak to other people in the party – they’d tell you the same thing and you’d be none the wiser.

Aye. Thanks for that, anyway, Tommy. Did the boy Ray Cochrane enjoy his, er, pay-off?

Hardly – it was the end of him. Half the people he hated thought he was a hero and half the people he respected cut him dead…his daughter died as well, just about the same time. He only stayed on as a councillor for a few months more and then fucked off. I think he retired from working as well. I couldn’t tell you where to find him, even.

I rung off, thanking Tommy again, since the phone was beeping with an incoming call. It was an old client, Philomena Devine.

Ah, Philomena. The lovely Philomena.

She owned a small nightclub at the back of Partick Cross, smoky jazz and some chef that got his picture in the glossies. It was a hundred yards from the Towers, but I’d never been there except on business – the first time, years ago, her waster of an ex-husband had skipped on a rake of debts, including maintenance payments for their two kids and she wanted me to find him. It was a stick-on, since he hadn’t even used any imagination, only going as far as Falkirk with his new intended and even finding a proper job – all in his own real name. One garnishee order later, Philomena had her payments and I had a new fan.

The next time we met, it was leakage from her front-of-house staff. The cloakroom attendant (in a proper detective story, she would have been called the hat-check girl) was playing pick & mix with customers’ bags and jackets. Another stick-on, really, and this time Phil made sure she let me know just exactly how big a fan I had in her. In other circumstances, we could have become a real item, but….well, that’s another story.

Now, she had a new problem. Sensibly, I should have told her that I was otherwise engaged, since there were too many hunch-backed hassles looming in front of me, but – call it a weakness, call it a strength – I felt I had a duty to her. Or, if you prefer, I still fancied her. Just as well that Mrs Mac was out of the office, buying envelopes or something. She wouldn’t have approved, although that’s not why I didn’t write any appointment in the office diary. Honest. Instead, I would meet Phil at her club, but I kept some dignity by telling her not until tomorrow. She purred that this would be fine by her, but then, if she’d been reading out a shopping list, she would still have been purring.

Today, though…Tommy had given me nothing about Billy Hutton I could take to the bank, just loose wires. A snappy dresser, Transport & General Workers’ Union background, long history as a councillor, traditionally right-wing, smart but not clever, an uncultured MP out of step with his cappuccino membership, maybe not dirty – just scuffed. None of that was a crime, none of it would interest Finlay Matzdorf.

What I did like was Ray Cochrane. He was hardly as strange as Tommy promised, but there were some questions there. Doing something that lost him all his credibility, ending his own political career – why? And even if Tommy didn’t know where he was, I could find him easily enough.

Where had Mrs Mac got to this time? I looked at the pile of glossy 10 x 6s on her desk and just knew that I had to get the photos of the BMW blow-job off the premises this afternoon.

So, saving the world would have to wait for a bit. I would get right onto it - just as soon as I launched the additions to Janice McKechnie’s porno collection into the Royal Mail.

Chapter 4 - Death By Baking

Morning brought choices.

I could get straight on the phone to Billy Hutton and ask him if he was a crook or just a politician – ha. Tommy McCafferty told me to catch him through his election agent, a man called Eddie Semple, one of Hutton’s own blue-collar crew and therefore also out of favour with the West End politerati. Between elections, Semple ran Hutton’s office, issuing leaflets, organising publicity, running his diary, fronting for the press and generally making sure that democracy ran free. Since Hutton was often in London, Semple was sometimes the only man on the spot.

Choice two was calling Phil Devine and addressing her new problem as the first item of business for the day. For reasons that I couldn’t quite, or didn’t want to, form into thoughts, this prospect had me quite unreasonably stimulated, aroused even. I didn’t even know what her problem was – she could have five boyfriends fighting over her, and maybe she just couldn’t decide which one to pick. In which case, my hope/expectation that things could get significantly personal would look very stupid indeed. Still, she had a voice of slow honey and eyes that said we could, and that made her a better bet than anybody called Billy or Eddie.

Choice Three : chase down Donnie McCutcheon and ask him what he wanted to say to me about his dead, headless brother. Christ, no, far too early in the day for paddling in old, dirty water. Plenty of time for that later.

Then again, Ray Cochrane was my most pressing professional priority. A dull man, by all accounts, who had disappeared off the radar, with no friends left anymore, and probably nothing of