The Exiled Read Free

he so much as looked like he wasn’t giving the case his full attention.
    He turned his back on the circus and went back to watching the forensics team work.

 
     
     
    2
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
    Alan Grainger knew that he was onto a big story when he saw the detective inspector lean over the balcony and look down.
    Big Brother is watching me. It’s a missing kid for sure. And they think it’s murder—there’s no other reason for John to be here.
    His paper had sent him out on spec—someone heard from someone that there might be a story brewing somewhere in the Albert Flats, and that a kid might, or might not be missing. It was enough on a slow news day for Alan to be dispatched with a notebook, phone and camera. As the junior reporter on a bust city news-desk, he often got sent out only to return empty-handed having pursued a rumor to no avail. This was no rumor—he’d known that even on the way down from the city center when he was passed by both the van of the largest radio station in Scotland, and a crew from the BBC.
    And now he was here there was no way to get close. And with other television crews arriving and the crowd growing ever larger and more vocal, there was little chance to get any kind of story that wasn’t going to be the same one everyone else got.
    Alan had one thing on his side, but it was a big one—local knowledge. Both brothers had been born and raised only a few hundred yards away from the spot where he stood. On another day, another time, they might even have been part of the crowd, standing around waiting for news, hoping that it wasn’t anybody they knew that was in trouble. At yet other times, they, or their small gang of friends and conspirators, might even be hiding from the law—and Alan had a good idea where anyone in that situation today would go. He walked away from the crowd and out of the shadow of the block of flats, leaving part of his past behind to go in search of more of it.
    He couldn’t turn around in this area without dredging up something from where he normally kept it well buried. That corner was where two older lads pelted him with stones as he cycled past, that doorstep was where John beat seven kinds of shite out of the same two lads later the same day, that lamppost was the one he’d hit on his first driving lesson. The hearse had come this way the day Mam died. Too many memories—too few of them happy ones. He put his head down and tried to keep his mind on the job.
    The streets wouldn’t let him. The brothers had a rough time growing up, but no rougher than anyone else who had to live in the area—only two miles from the city center of the Athens of the North but far more than that in terms of wealth, privilege and attention. Big castles, festivals and picturesque streets were all very well, but they meant nothing in the day-to-day lives of folks down here—they might as well be on Mars. Alan knew that when he was fourteen, and knew it even better now. Time was he’d wanted to join John on the force—but that would have meant spending more time in places like this than he could handle.
    As a junior reporter he mainly worked on small stories, and rarely beyond the shiny facile glamor of the town center. Today was an exception—George thought he’d been doing Alan a favor sending him to his old home turf —Alan thought of it more like a sentence.
    Two left turns and a right after a hundred yards took him under the main railway line to Glasgow, where the road opened out into a warren of small business units and factories. That wasn’t why he’d come this way—his goal was right in front of the largest factory gate. The Railway Tavern was the local boozer frequented by most of the residents of the Albert Road flats when they had any money in their pockets… and was the place anyone would head for if they didn’t want to speak to the police.
    Alan hadn’t been inside since his late teens, almost ten years ago—it hadn’t changed much. The