Blackstone's Pursuits Read Free Page A

it’s the only thing they’ll think. If these blokes see any easy answer, they don’t spend a hell of a lot of time looking for a difficult option. They’re not trained to be clever, they’re trained to be logical.’
    The old tongue was really running away with itself now. I suppose I could have stopped it, but I wasn’t prepared to bite it that hard.
    ‘Look Prim, I find it difficult to believe that anyone could do something like that next door, especially someone with a sister as ...’ I gulped, but I had run straight off the cliff, like Wiley E. Coyote, and all I could do was keep on running and hope that I didn’t hit the ground. ‘... as downright tasty as you, but the boys and girls from the Leith Polithe won’t dithmith the idea. And like it or not, we’re going to have to call them.’
    She nodded. Her blonde hair was cut fairly short, and more than a bit untidy after her journey. Suddenly I found myself wanting to smooth it.
    ‘I know we are,’ she said, ‘but how about if we have a shooftie round to see if we can find that fiver before we do? Your clients would like that, wouldn’t they.’ Until that moment, I’d never grasped what ‘askance’ meant, but when I looked at Prim, I knew for sure. ‘Well,’ she said, picking up my expression. ‘If it’s there, all of it, it’ll mean that Dawn ... and we don’t know for sure she was here ... didn’t kill him for the money. Won’t it?’
    I saw the sense in that. But I saw even more in the forty-five thousand good reasons I had for wanting to find the fiver too. ‘Aye, okay. Let’s look, at least.’
     
    Policemen are like buses. When you need one, they’re nowhere to be found. But when you don’t ...
    I’ll never know why anyone could call a game ‘Postman’s Knock’. I mean, when it comes to knocking there’s no-one in the same league as a polisman. We had just stepped out of the kitchen when the thump on the door echoed around the hall. Prim’s flat was on the first floor of the tenement. I’ll swear that I heard at least three doors open as the sound swept through the building. She stepped up to the door and peered through the spy-hole.
    ‘It looks like a traffic warden,’ she said. ‘But his uniform ... !’ The second knock sent her reeling backwards. ‘Okay,’ she shouted. ‘Keep your hair on.’ She swung the door open. The be-fouled traffic warden was there, all right, flanked on either side by two of Edinburgh’s finest. One of them, I recognised. When I did my probationer spell at Oxgangs he had been the senior constable and chief barrack-room lawyer at the station. He was one of those guys who was determined to see it out to pension time and sod all the rest. Wherever they go they infect the whole station, whingeing and bitching until they’ve pulled morale down to rock bottom. Eventually they’re rotated to start all over somewhere else. This one’s name was McArthur, but at Oxgangs everyone, from the Chief Inspector down, had called him McArse.
    His sidekick could have been me seven years earlier. He was a fuzz-cheeked probationer, so spick that I guessed his Maw still did his laundry, and so span that I guessed she pressed his uniform for him as well. I shook my head at the thought of what could happen to the poor wee bugger on the beat in Leith.
    McArse stared right over Prim’s head, straight at me. I could see something stirring behind his eyes, but his sort have trouble putting a name to their chief constable, let alone a short-serving wet-ear from almost a decade earlier. He gave up as soon as he started and went straight into Chapter One of the training manual, ‘The Policeman as a Public Servant’.
    ‘Hey, youse. Mister. What the fuck about this then?’ He thrust Exhibit A into the hall, with the evidence of the outrage drying on his cap and shoulders. ‘Another fine mess you’ve got yourself into, Oz,’ I thought.
    When you’re as thick as McArse very few things will stem the tide of your