The Big Crunch

By Medeas Wray

Set In Leeds just a few years into the 21st century as Leeds United start to slip down the league tables, The Big Crunch is a fast-paced 70,000 word novel with strong language in places, dark themes and much humour, despite all that.

There are dark deeds and skull-duggery afoot somewhere on the fringes of Malkie's life. He's a computer graphics designer, an inventor of video games who's newly into astronomy, habitually into alcohol and struggling to survive on a planet no bigger than a speck of dandruff in a coal-mine in universal terms, as his life goes into free-fall and the big crunch of the title occurs at all levels - from computer crashes to a car being mysteriously totalled and a failing marriage - assisted by a full-time geek called Ian, an ex-hacker with a couple of murky associates, a passion for football and a flat at the low-rent end of the neighbourhood where Malkie mis-spends a few of his nights.

They're after the big prize, a contract that promises financial security year after year. But with Malkie in charge, what could possibly go right?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Medeas Wray
• Release date: May 12, 2014
• ISBN: 9781311219022

Medeas Wray

A new writer with a passion for urban noir fiction and with leanings towards sci-fi and the paranormal who leads a mysterious life, skulking in out of the way places to uncover stories that are a little off-centre, exploring not just the dark side but the many facets of the human experience - with much humour in places.Down To Zero is the first in a series, set in London in 2018 and beyond, featuring seasoned murder-investigators Mallory Vine and Bob Dario as they struggle to bring down two serial-killers and start to realise that the paranormal is at work, despite all arguments to the contrary. The Big Crunch is a one-off novel, fast-paced and grungy, set in Leeds at the beginning of the 21st century when you could still smoke in the pubs, when Leeds United were slipping down the league tables and IT was here to stay. Things could only get better - or could they? Other short stories have different time-frames - one is a tale of medieval misdeeds set against a backcloth of social and political upheaval as a motley crew of stalwarts attempt to enjoy their lives - and survive. Due for publication with a couple of shorter works, one a ghost-story in the near-ish future.The writings of Medeas Wray are hard to pin down. Seems the category 'Mash-Up' was tailor-made for them. If you like the work of Iain Banks, Richard Condon, George MacDonald Fraser, William Gibson (all of them, sadly dead) - you may like Medeas Wray's.The author is currently working on the second (and possibly third) in a series following on from Down To Zero. Still learning, still travelling, still breathing - and struggling to survive on a planet no bigger than a speck of dandruff in universal terms.

Book preview

The Big Crunch

By

Medeas Wray

Copyright 2014 Medeas Wray

Smashwords Edition

Medeas Wray asserts the right to be identified as the author of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, events, places, businesses and organisations are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

The Big Crunch

By Medeas Wray

"Tomorrow belongs to those

who can hear it coming."

David Bowie

Contents

Chapter One: Snooper trouper

Chapter Two: The Road to Catatonia

Chapter Three: Planet Zero

Chapter Four: Fairly strange at Fairleigh Grange

Chapter Five: Wrong place, right time

Chapter Six: Good cop, bad cop

Chapter Seven: Mr Curiosity

Chapter Eight: Playback

Chapter Nine: Post-mortem

Chapter Ten: Payback

Chapter Eleven: Strictly business, monkey business

Chapter Twelve: The Big Crunch

Chapter One:

Snooper trouper

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Pinkie Blenkinsop was scanning his e-mails, sitting round-shouldered over a large trestle table upon which rested an open lap-top. Listening, via an ear-piece lodged within a pinkly bulbous ear, his left one, as Hamish MacGregor regaled him with complaints.

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Pinkie scrolled through the stream of spam gobbledegook, his large, fleshy frame, porcine-pink, filling a dubiously white sleeveless vest; the small, fine, baby blond hairs that covered his entire upper body from the top of his bullish balding head to his wide muscled wrists, now statically electrolysed as he listened to the babble of words infiltrating his left ear from the other end of the line. Hamish’s end.

‘There’s a yawning gulf between growing up in a Newcastle terrace with a hole in the roof and a back-yard lav,’ Hamish was saying, ‘and being brought up in the shires of old England with jacuzzi, swimming pool and a plasma screen in your own en-suite. Fact is, I’ve brought ‘em up too damn soft.’ Hamish declared stridently, building a watertight case against his sons that could not easily be dismissed.

Talking like a man who had talked all his life, Pinkie thought, not just barked instructions, not just silently brooded, not just locked himself away from family and made secret plans for his future and theirs.

But talked, opened his mouth and expressed himself in fluent English despite the accent or was it accents? Now he was at it again.

‘My fault, mine and my own dear Dottie’s, giving them everything we never had, wanting the best for them. But that’s why I now have a clutch of virtual play-boys on my hands. And I just can’t take it anymore. I’m going to have to retire them, that’s the way it has to be.’

Sacrament diverged rebush imperforate unrustic wealdsman plowstilt.

Whilst the spam-drizzle continued its steady path down the screen, Pinkie thought his boss’s words through coming to the spectacular conclusion in a matter of nano-seconds that all was not well at Camp MacGregor.

It sounded serious.

Seated in the white sunlit courtyard of his Canary Island condo with mid-sized pool to the right, bbq and hot tub to the left, wide expanse of building site directly in front, Pinkie felt troubled.

In a turbulent and interesting career he’d had all kinds of clients, some a little too Columbian in their dealings with others than was strictly necessary and now Pinkie was worried that Hamish for all his Scottish ancestry might be taking a South American direction and dragging him along with it.

He, Pinkie Blenkinsop, was an ex-pap, private dick and just a little more besides, a fact known to a mere handful of clients. But despite his history and a career path more full of twists than a wine-waiter’s corkscrew, he did have certain scruples.

Though he had, he would freely admit it, perhaps even gloat about it if pressed, hounded several members of the rich and famous out of their homes or forced them into virtual reclusion through an insistent loitering that bordered on the maniacal at their individual gates. And in more recent times, employed others to do the very same thing, whilst he, Pinkie, the main man, was comfortably ensconced at a desk in an office in some part of London creaming off the big bucks from the lesser tabloids for photographs and occasionally stories of same, the aforementioned.

Yes, Pinkie Blenkinsop had used all manner of means including infra-red camera-work, wire taps and other not strictly legal processes to put together smear campaigns for one client or another against some enemy or ex-lover or associate. Or etcetera or etcetera. Depending on price proffered and had managed to buy the condo in the Canary Islands off the payola that had come his way via such transactions.

Pinkie, by his own admission and by the testimony of those who had worked for him, worked with him, worked against him and those who had employed him, was not a great man. During his pap-days he had behaved just like the rest of them. Intruding on the lives of others just a tad too much, driving those of a delicate and nervous disposition slightly over the edge towards such avenues as suicide, assault, affray that kind of thing.

The kind of thing even Pinkie could not be proud about.

But retiring people, especially your own children, as Hamish was now so cavalierly suggesting, that was something else. That was a little off the general path even Pinkie wanted to tread.

Pseudomorph scarifier decipherment.

Hamish, meanwhile at the Leeds end of the phone-call was thinking of ending the general downward spiral of incompetence that could be described as his sons’ rule of his empire and was dreaming up ways to see them off to the Caribbean where they could hob-nob for all they were worth with the usual glut of emergency plumbers and lottery winners such places seemed to attract, where they could not just be amateur playboys but fully professional idlers 24/7 all year round, for decade upon decade.

Thereby leaving his businesses to prosper in the hands of the real deal that he had plans to franchise his garages out to. It seemed to the business brain of Hamish MacGregor that might be the cheaper option. And the lads would enjoy it having been born to a life of idleness and partying despite all his energies being spent on trying to reverse that pattern.

Back in the Canaries, Pinkie watched as the spew of spam continued its indecipherable and relentless course down the screen. After listening to Hamish, Pinkie was now more than alert than ever, still struggling to find a suitable response to Hamish’s remarks. He listened to his boss’s words, stayed silent and reacted as he normally did to such phenomena and reached for a large glass of chilled Chardonnay.

Heirskip velutinous shipshapely isogenetic.

It carried on as Pinkie could have laid bets, decent bets that it would. Thankfully the Chardonnay was beautifully chilled to just the right temperature and had the sort of fragrance and bouquet that could make a man realise he had made the right moves after all during his life and that his days were good and long and largely free and that such conversations as the one he was presently having with Hamish were just the stuff that was meant to try you and to keep you from seeing how great the rest of your life was and that quite soon in five minutes or ten Hamish would put down the phone and he, Pinkie could relax on a sun lounger, rays caressing his skin and lulling him into sleep, wine glass dropping from his hand, dreams invading his brain and shutting it down.

And that later when he awoke, it would be, well, later.

With that thought in mind he listened in to Hamish, still drivelling on, with something vaguely akin to interest.

‘They’re just a holiday away from becoming permanent members of the leisure set, those laddies, or would be if I let them have their way.’ Hamish was referring to Willie, Michael and Jonno, Robbie having set up in business by himself, without any help from Hamish, apart from a small kick-start loan he’d long ago repaid.

Bushhammer diabolarch fularis strowing dotate.

‘That’s why I still have to keep a steady eye on the business.’ Hamish continued, though he knew in his heart it wasn’t just an eye he was keeping on the business, it was at least two.

And a couple of heavy hands as well. Pinkie thought though he said little, letting Hamish continue uninterrupted. Not that Hamish particularly minded keeping an eye or two on the business, the garage network, Pinkie thought to himself. He knew he positively loved it, relished the cut and thrust of negotiation, the acquisition of new premises, the daily ritual of checking the pink section of at least one of the daily newspapers for share prices, the continuing investigation of new venture avenues and projects et al and et al.

Hazelwood reassembly leatherfish misfaith woesome wheelwork.

Pinkie Blenkinsop, still on the other end of the line, continued to scroll through the deluge as Hamish continued.

Snooperscope.

That was him, Pinkie, snooper extraordinaire otherwise known nowadays as a private detective, held on retainer by Hamish MacGregor and a handful of other clients and now ensconced within the white-walled confines of a new-build villa bathed in eternal sunshine. Taking a well-earned extended break.

Recently he’d served Hamish well, very well, helping him do his homework on the new broom that was Miss Lonsdale, the second Lonsdale in the accountancy firm Lonsdale, Lonsdale and Harlech, discovering that she was normally as punctual as rain in Manchester, a brilliant number cruncher and a bit more besides. Quite a bit more. He wondered whether he should divulge it all to Hamish as he scrolled to the bottom of the page and clicked on myheartbleeds to unsubscribe. Deluge over, hopefully.

At least for now.

At the other end of the line, Hamish in his Leeds office, was just passing time talking to Pinkie whilst he waited for his second meeting with the indisputably redoubtable Miss Lonsdale. Arranging pens and blotting paper on a large walnut desk polished so keenly he could practically see his face in perfect reflection: a dot to dot tracery of broken capillaries that joined together to form a picture of ruddy, glowing health.

His complexion he owed to massive physical exertion and the misfortune of heredity. Hamish had no particular lineage to boast about (he had told all sorts of stories about himself and his line in his time), but the truth of the matter, the real unvarnished truth was that the MacGreagorrs, as the correct and original spelling of his name went, were less than nobodies, always had been.

They’d inhabited the Highlands in red-headed hordes at least until the nineteenth century, being a rabble of rampaging itinerants with some kinship to the Campbells of the old song; a less than welcome tribe that the tidy, god-fearing souls of Wick and Inverness would lock their daughters away from in an effort to keep their separate virtues intact; a straggle of tinkers and ne’er do wells, a sprinkling of miscreants, all with the same signature looks of ruddy broken-veined complexion and coppery curls; indigent travellers, nomads sprawling their way across the desert of the Highlands, picking up what they could in terms of occupation, either side of the law.

So it was, so Hamish’s research had told him.

Hamish liked to be informed and would have liked to have discovered more nobility amongst them so he could grace the entrance hall of his office-cum-residence in Leeds with something better than the gathering of gilt-framed portraits of imaginary ancestors lining the walls, a job lot bought in a hurried bid at an auction in London and the portraitees, none them having the slightest relationship to Hamish and his brood, merely there, courtesy of an interior designer’s fancy. Lending weight and dignity to a hallway that floored in black and white marble with red and dark green walls and a swathe of something resembling Argyll tartan around the windows, already had dignity and weight distilled and merchandised.

But Hamish could glean nothing more from the research than he had done already and that was pretty small beer. Still in his heart of hearts, Hamish was a Scotophile.

And for a very good reason: the terrible accident of his birth.

It had happened in drifts, for the MacGreaggor family, bit by bit, one misfortune adding itself to another. Starting somewhere around the first third of the nineteenth century during the time of the Highland clearances when the evictions came and straggles of people settled on Inverness like flies on dung, to seek refuge and employment in the town or find ways to emigrate to the New World.

The MacGreaggors barely had a choice. They turned their backs on the old life of wandering tinkerdom and directed their brood further and further south year by year, until they eventually arrived in the industrial centres around Glasgow and the Clyde to try their luck. Generation upon generation came and went, the name was changed in terms of spelling to normalise and gentrify it and the hordes dwindled to a scattered family, Hamish’s father Victor amongst them, who managed to find work in and around the ship-building yards.

Then, after a rash of strikes and lay-offs, symptoms of a general decline in the industry, Victor felt forced to move again along with Hamish’s mother, just weeks after Hamish’s conception, taking the unprecedented step of crossing the border into England. And so Hamish, though he knew himself to be a Scot through and through, had the misfortune to be born, almost nine months later, on the sassenach side of the wall, in a lodging house in East Grunswick Terrace, Newcastle-upon-Tyne.

He had always regretted the unhappy accident of his birth on English soil though he’d managed to make a sure and steady rise from those inauspicious beginnings. Becoming an apprentice fitter and mechanic when he left school and thenceforth pumping hard work, effort and commitment into a less than snail-pace ascent from blue-collar worker to garage owner, to empire-builder.

Always determined to return to Scotland once he’d made his fortune.

Though his sons might look at him and observe that he bore all the scars, lines, wrinkles and worry-expressions of a man who had mounted the threshold of middle age and was sitting firmly in the saddle, Hamish had never felt better. He was fit as an athlete, bursting with vigour despite his 54 years.

Recently when wealth had not so much crept upon him but had gathered itself into piles and heaped up around him, he’d returned to Scotland to buy up land on the cheap and the quasi-lairdship of sorts he’d always yearned for: his reward for a lifetime of hard work and commitment, his realm, his own kingdom.

He woke before 7am and went outside to breathe in the lung-biting Scottish dawn air. He walked for miles in any weather, deep mist, rain or snow, across the ragged coated pelt of heather-furred heath that was his own backyard. He maintained his athleticism by swimming and rowing on the nearby loch and when he had little else to do, he busied himself by building barns and cottages and extra wings to his Highland home or hewing fallen branches into bite-sized pieces for the fire to consume in the hearth of his study.

Most days, he worked well into the evening until he eventually sat down to a large Highland supper of venison or trout with a glass of the lairdship’s own single malt on the side and later, with the fire crackling aflame in the hearth, he’d sit in a brown Chesterfield chair by the fireside, reading the latest business reports and tomes of advice concocted by the entrepreneurial for the entrepreneurial.

Commitment and reward, cause and effect, that’s what the pages told him and what it all boiled down to for Hamish. He worked hard at being rich and he expected the same level of hard work and dedication from those around him: his sons and heirs and those employees closest to him. Though he owned a 64ft yacht moored near Whitehaven, his own helicopter which he flew to business meetings, a £250,000 Bentley Azure, a converted tenement block in Glasgow, an apartment in London, a range of properties scattered around the UK, a luxury penthouse in Monaco, and until the acquisition of the 26,000 acre Scottish retreat had lived in a Jacobean mansion on the Cumbrian border, equipped with its own hydrotherapy spa, he still perceived himself as working class with the emphasis very firmly placed on Working.

‘A man can only learn the trade from the floor up.’ He would say, rolling the words around with the soft Geordie accent he still couldn’t quite dispel, even though he now had the estate near Elgin and was back amongst his people, his ain folk.

This was his credo as he’d told the boys on a score of occasions and learning the trade from the floor up meant wielding a spanner, getting your hands dirty like any other mechanic, any other employee. That’s what Hamish demanded from Willie, Michael and Jonno, he told Pinkie, still patiently listening at the other end of the line, and he expected to be able to walk into any of his garages, even those managed by them and find oil on overalls, callouses on hands with regard to every man-jack in the place from yoppie apprentice up.

Recently though he’d walked in on Willie and found him lolling about in the office wearing a business suit and an expensive manicure.

‘Idle so-and-so.’ Hamish said ‘Though I believe I can still count on Michael and Jonno to toe the line. Always loved the smell of the grease-bucket, the roar of a souped-up engine, those two. Could never get enough of it, though between me and you, they’re a bit lacking on the paperwork side of things. Michael appears to be practically illiterate, which again is not a good thing.’ Hamish continued.

Pinkie had Hamish’s gist.

He just wished the lads, as he called them, felt the same about it. Robert, of course was his own man, having chosen to set up on his own and sell, according to Hamish, those ponsy classic cars that were collector’s items to upwardly aspiring and already-there people, the smart money and in his clean-handed, sharp-suited way he was successful. Hamish had some grudging respect for that, for the way Robbie, as he called him, had forged his own path in life, worked hard and reaped the rewards. Though he suspected the bugger was gay.

They still spoke occasionally, mainly by phone, but it was generally a formal, shallow dialogue with each one just letting the other know he was still alive and doing fine, a dialogue tinged with sadness for Hamish though he maintained it, when sometimes he felt it would be better for the heart, the soul, to shut the door on it and let it go. Though Dorothy would be more content to know, he felt, thinking of his long-dead wife, that he had tried to maintain this civility, an arm’s length relationship with Robbie that held the promise of improvement at some future time.

Despite his great successes, despite a prestigious position on The Times Very Rich List, Hamish could not be called a happy man. Main reason: four sons who had been born or at least bred in a luxuriously equipped cocoon and had forever been disadvantaged by that fact.

Some would call him a workaholic but he enjoyed it, placing new dots on the map of MacGregordom, a network of garages haphazardly placed all around the big northern cities of England. And though many of the garages Hamish had acquired still traded under the names of their old owners, Hamish had plans that would have them ‘coming out’ as the phrase went, in a flurry of brand new signage, someday soon, emblazoning the name ‘MacGregor Motors’ across the northern counties, heralding Hamish’s own particular Scottish invasion.

It was just one of the many plans cloistered within the multi-storey car park of Hamish MacGregor’s gargantuan mind.

The others, Willie, Michael and Jonno toed the line begrudgingly, worked for him and with him just as long as