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  He slumped back into his seat with the realization and put his head in his hands. He felt exhausted and no longer even had the energy to lift his head up. The boy with his collar up sat down with a satisfied grunt and folded his arms, and a heavy silence rushed in and drowned the room. Mr Bowman started ushering the boys out of the door, then came back to sit opposite him. After a while David looked up.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said.

  ‘Don’t worry about it,’ said Mr Bowman. ‘I suppose I should’ve known it was a stupid idea. But I really thought it might be worth a try. It’s not easy talking to these little shits, they’re so sure about the world all the time, they never listen to common sense. Especially young Derek Clarkson back there, your little pal.’

  So he was a Clarkson as well, thought David; they bred like fucking rabbits in this town. He wondered if the lad was related to Mike Clarkson, if he’d heard about the fight last weekend.

  ‘The trouble is, he was right, wasn’t he? I don’t know what the fuck happened. To either of them.’

  Mr Bowman looked at him for a long time with something resembling pity. Eventually he glanced up at the clock on the wall.

  ‘Sun’s just past the yardarm,’ he said getting up. ‘I could use a stiff drink. Want to join me?’

  Right at that moment, David couldn’t think of anything he’d like more.

  The Lochlands was surprisingly busy for midday, but it was a Friday, thought David, so some folk were clearly getting a head start on the weekend. The handful of punters at the bar looked as if they’d never left the place since David saw them parked on the same barstools a week ago. They grabbed the last free table next to the gents and Mr Bowman got the round in, ordering up a couple of token pies at the same time.

  David couldn’t help feeling bad about what had just happened at the school, not least because that Clarkson kid had highlighted exactly what had been gnawing away at him. The past seemed to be intertwining with the present the more he came back to this fucking place, and he felt like he was getting dragged down by an undercurrent of memory, a rip tide of lives half-formed, people half-forgotten and places that he hadn’t thought of in a long, long time.

  He’d let Mr Bowman down. He didn’t really owe the old bastard a thing, but he had turned up with the genuine intention of trying to help out and he had hardly gotten started when he’d given up, let himself be talked down by a fucking teenager with a haircut that wouldn’t’ve looked out of place on Top of the Pops twenty years ago. Little wank, thought David, although it was hardly Derek Clarkson’s fault that Bowman’s half-arsed idea had been misguided in the first place.

  He thought again about what Clarkson had said. He really didn’t know what had happened to Colin and Gary but he did have a glimmer in the fog, a lead that might shed some light on the matter – Neil. He hadn’t thought of him while he was losing it in front of the school kids, but now, sitting with Jack Bowman in the pub, it came back to him.

  ‘I wanted to ask you about Neil,’ he said, taking a deep swig of lager.

  ‘It’s funny you should mention him, because after I spoke to you on Monday I did a little asking around, in the staff room and such like. I thought it was curious that I’d seen him, and yet he never turned up at your reunion. I was just being nosy, I suppose, but after what you said in Tutties, I got to thinking that it is rather strange for someone to have lived in this area for so long, and yet for no one to really know anything about him.’

  David had drunk half his pint already. He really needed to slow down, but it was nervy drinking, nervy with what had just happened, and what Jack was telling him now.

  ‘And?’

  ‘Well, you know that he served in the Royal Marines, don’t you?’

  ‘Sure, he was in the first Gulf War, then he was dismissed on medical grounds.’

  ‘Ah, well, that was the official line, I gather.’

  ‘And you know differently?’

  ‘Remember that this all comes from the staff room, so it has to be taken with a whole mountain of salt, but one of the other teachers had heard that there was a lot more to it than that.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘A number of the lads came back unwell, suffering from both physical and mental problems. I believe they refer to it as Gulf War Syndrome.’

  ‘I thought that was never proven.’

  ‘It’s still open to debate in the courts.’

  ‘And you’re telling me that Neil had Gulf War Syndrome?’

  ‘One of the teachers’ cousins was a nurse at Ninewells, and a number of squaddies came in with complaints.’

  ‘Wait a minute, wouldn’t they have gone to a military doctor with this?’

  ‘I understand they didn’t trust someone on the military payroll to look into it properly.’

  ‘OK, so he had Gulf War Syndrome,’ said David. ‘That’s still medical grounds, so that’s presumably why he was given his discharge, yeah?’

  ‘I’m sorry, I seem to have misled you,’ said Jack, finishing his pint and looking at David. David got the hint and quickly got the pints in, irritated at Jack for stringing this out.

  ‘As I was saying,’ continued Jack as David sat back down, ‘he claimed to be suffering from Gulf War Syndrome, but that wasn’t why he was discharged.’

  ‘Well why the hell was he discharged?’

  ‘It seems there was a fight, at the Condor base, between two commandos. One of them ended up in a coma. The other was Neil.’

  ‘And you know this how?’

  ‘The nurse again. Apparently it was a matter of life and death, and they had to go to Ninewells for the sake of the other squaddie, to give him a chance of survival. The guys that brought him in told our friendly nurse off the record what had happened.’

  ‘Which was?’

  ‘Neil beat him half to death over next to nothing. It started as an argument over something trivial, I don’t know what, but escalated until half a dozen military police had to drag Neil off the other fellow.’

  ‘And what happened to this other guy? Was he OK?’

  ‘Afraid not. He didn’t die, but he never fully recovered. Brain damage. When his condition didn’t improve, they moved him to Sunnyside after a few weeks.’

  David felt his stomach drop and tighten, like he’d been punched himself. Neil had half-killed someone, a fellow marine. Beat the shit out of him so badly he’d ended up in the local mental home. He took a few seconds to digest the whole thing.

  ‘Surely this would’ve been in the news,’ he said. ‘Weren’t the police involved?’

  ‘The police were given the brush-off, apparently,’ said Jack, obviously revelling in his role of gossip spreader. ‘The military police took over the whole situation. And you know what the army’s like for sweeping stuff under the carpet. They just covered their tracks, acted like nothing had happened. Gave Neil a medical discharge to get him off their hands and avoid any scandal. I mean, they couldn’t have him stay at Condor after what had happened, the other squaddies would’ve killed him.’

  ‘But didn’t this other guy have any family? Didn’t they kick up a stink?’

  ‘According to our nurse, there was no immediate family. There were a couple of cousins, but it’s not always easy to get anyone to listen to you, especially when you’re up against the muscle of the army. They probably figured there was no way they could get this fully investigated, so they gave up trying. Remember, all this could be absolute rubbish, you know what small-town rumours are like. It’s always easier to think the worst of people, and bad news spreads fastest of all. I haven’t heard of anyone corroborating this story, and it was over ten years ago.’

  ‘So, you think Neil became a recluse after what happened?’ Something didn’t quite click in David’s mind. There was something missing here. ‘Wait a minute, someone told me that Neil joined the police after the Marines. How the fuck could that happen, if he had this cloud hanging over him?’

  ‘Maybe no one knew at the time,’ said
Jack, his second pint finished already.

  ‘Come on, everyone seems to know everything about everyone else in this place. And anyway, wouldn’t he need a reference from the Marines when he applied to the police?’

  ‘I assume so,’ said Jack. ‘But then again, if it got Neil out of the Marines’ hair, maybe they thought it would be a good idea if he joined the police.’

  ‘And Tayside Police wouldn’t have a vetting procedure in place to stop violent ex-marines with Gulf War Syndrome from joining their rank and file?’

  ‘How many dodgy coppers do you know?’ said Jack.

  It was a fair point. In a place like this it seemed to be a prerequisite for joining the force that you had to be at least partially fucked up. He remembered his own teenage years, trying to avoid hassle from jumped-up little Hitler cops down the West Port on Friday and Saturday nights, getting lifted and cautioned for nothing much, just because they didn’t like the look of your face or they knew your mate’s older brother and didn’t like him. The outrageous behaviour of Dirty Harry Reid had been legendary amongst them all – happily arresting kids, keeping them in the cells overnight, beating them when he thought he could get away with it. The nickname Dirty Harry had started as a joke, but he had grown into it, grown to live up to it, grown to love it. His daughter Sophie was the year above David at school, and she had copped a lot of flak for being related to Dirty Harry, but in the end most people gave her the benefit of the doubt, since she clearly despised her own father more than anyone else in the whole town, the scars on her wrists were testament to that.

  David didn’t know what to make of everything Jack had told him. He knew how things got exaggerated in a place like this, how rumours and gossip spread, but even so, there was something about Jack’s information that somehow seemed to ring true to him. Neil had always had a quick temper as a kid so he could just about imagine how, after a few years of training as a soldier followed by the stress of actually seeing combat, he might have the capacity to do something like beat a man half to death. But even if he did do what Jack had told him, that didn’t really have any bearing on what had happened at the cliffs, did it? All this would make his trip to Condor on Sunday more interesting, and he was glad that Jack had been nosy enough to ask around. He decided not to tell Jack about his meeting with the sergeant major. He didn’t really know how to explain it, anyway.

  Jack was playing with his empty pint glass. David checked his watch. There was still time for another couple of cheeky wee pints before the funeral, so he got up and got the round in. At the bar, two of the pupils from the debacle at the school earlier came in and ordered pints. When they spotted Jack at the table, a knowing look passed between them. They wouldn’t grass on him if he didn’t grass on them. Jack was clearly in no position of moral authority here, half-past twelve on a school day and already ganting on his third pint. The fact that the boys were still in school uniform didn’t seem to bother the barman. They saw David and smiled sarcastically at him. David wanted to smash their smug little faces in. They reminded him so much of himself at that age he felt sick. He paid for his pints and returned to the table, his mind returning to thoughts of Neil, smashing another man’s head in until he was barely alive. It was an image he could see all too clearly in his imagination, and it sent a shiver through his body as he gulped at his lager.

  10

  The Funeral

  In her sombre black trouser suit, Nicola stood self-consciously amongst a handful of Gary’s relatives at a funeral plot stuck so far up the back of the cemetery it might as well have been in the tattie field over the fence. She was being scowled at by Gary’s father, who obviously remembered her from the hospital. His wife had the glassy-eyed look of the terminally inconsolable. Mourners were taking it in turns to comfort her with platitudes and gentle arm movements, but her silent, raging grief was awesome to behold. She was like a landmine waiting to explode under someone’s feet, and Nicola stayed well away, lurking at the back, almost hidden amongst the hedges.

  Where the hell was David? she thought. He was supposed to be here already, and they were about to start. She’d assumed there would be other people from their year at school here, but she couldn’t see anybody. As far as she could tell there were only a few relatives, presumably aunts and uncles, a couple of cousins and a shellshocked grandmother. There was Gary’s sister, Susan, the brainy one from a couple of years below her. She looked like a media executive or something, in a designer outfit and shades, and Nicola couldn’t help thinking that she didn’t look suitably grief-stricken. That was unfair, there was no reason why people couldn’t look good at a funeral; it just seemed somehow obscene to be so obviously doing well at life when your brother’s body was being lowered into the ground.

  The minister was coughing politely to stop the murmur of the sparse crowd when David appeared panting at her side. He stank of stale lager and his face was a sheen of sweat. His suit was a little dishevelled and his black tie was squint. Nicola was reminded of that joke about what you call a Glaswegian in a suit – the accused. David clearly wasn’t the kind of person used to dressing this way, but he looked sort of haplessly cute despite the fact.

  ‘Sorry,’ he whispered, a little too loudly. ‘Have I missed anything?’

  With no other sound but the twittering of starlings, David’s voice seemed to carry itself off into the atmosphere, and a couple of nearby mourners turned to tut at him. He looked apologetically at them then lowered his voice to a proper whisper.

  ‘I couldn’t find the plot. There was no one at the front gate to ask.’

  ‘Maybe if you hadn’t been to the pub you might’ve been here on time,’ said Nicola. She was surprised at the tone in her own voice, but she was annoyed that he’d left her here alone and conspicuous while he was lagering himself, and she wanted him to know it.

  ‘Sorry, sorry,’ said David, sounding genuinely apologetic. ‘But I was in the Lochlands with Jack Bowman, he had some interesting things to tell me about Neil.’

  Nicola was intrigued, but this shit could wait. They were here to show some respect, so that’s what they would do.

  ‘Tell me later.’

  David took in the scene around him. The sun had beaten through the haze and was blazing through the gaps in the trees. They weren’t too far from Colin’s grave, and David was immediately reminded of that funeral. He’d only been a kid then, confused and disorientated by the weird ceremony of it all, and it had seemed to drift past without him actually interacting with it. Today’s turn-out was tiny in comparison to Colin’s. The pathways had been crammed for Colin’s funeral, a fact which maybe added to his confusion on the day. Apart from that, the two ceremonies seemed remarkably similar, thought David, the banal numbness of the minister’s intonation, the pointless platitudes in the air, the inappropriately warm weather. Back then he had admired Nicola by the graveside from a distance, his teenage lack of confidence preventing him telling her how he felt. Now here she was, standing at his side, half-heartedly tutting under her breath at his late appearance. He remembered seeing that row of marines’ graves near here, the neatness and uniformity of the gravestones as if the bodies under the ground were still on parade. He wondered if any of Neil’s colleagues from the Gulf War were there.

  Gary’s eulogy was short and vague enough that it could’ve been about virtually anyone. Was this all a life amounted to, thought David – a handful of relations showing face, a couple of people you’d been out on the lash with the night you died, and some meaningless generalizations about life and death? Five minutes of platitudes and a handful of dirt thrown onto a coffin? It wasn’t much to shout about. He wondered who might come to his funeral. Daresay it wouldn’t be much better than this, he thought. A few more mates, maybe, but ultimately it would be a day of formulaic misery, acted-out woe. He hated whenever celebrities were asked about their funerals, and they always claimed that they wanted them to be celebrations of their lives rather than miserable displays of grief. Fuck that. When he die
d he wanted women wailing in the aisles, men beating their chests in grief, hair being torn out and teeth being gnashed in unbearable torture. Fat chance. More likely it would be a few tepid sausage rolls at a wake and a raised pint in a pub somewhere.

  He shook his head to try and clear it of thoughts of himself, and as he did so he caught a slight movement at the corner of his vision. He turned to see someone disappearing behind a large monkey puzzle tree, then a shadow passed behind some adjacent bushes. He’d only caught the face for a second but was sure he recognized it – it was fucking Neil! He hesitated for a second. He turned quickly back to look at Nicola, but she was still watching the ceremony in front of them, the minister’s flatlining voice casting a veil over events around the graveside. Then all of a sudden he was off, jogging towards the tree, accelerating into a proper run and instantly wheezing with the effort of it. The sounds of his movements reverberated around the small gathering, so much so that the minister stopped his solemn intonation to look up and see what the cause was. Along with most of Gary’s relatives, he was just in time to see David slip on the greasy grass in his proper black shoes and skid sideways onto his arse with a hefty bump that Nicola, watching slightly agog, couldn’t help thinking would leave one hell of a bruise on his bum cheek in the morning. David quickly scrambled upright again and was round the tree moments later. The minister and the congregation returned to the matter in hand, Nicola silently shaking her head.

  David caught a glimpse of movement up ahead, as if someone had just turned the next corner and was heading along the path perpendicular to the one he was on. He could hear the crunch of gravel underfoot. It was definitely Neil, he thought, as he made for the corner up ahead. What the hell was he doing here? This really meant something, that Neil really was connected somehow to whatever the hell was going on here. His mind was reeling through the possibilities as he felt his legs start to ache with the effort of running. Don’t criminals always return to the scene of the crime? He’d learnt that from Columbo or some other shit 70s show. But then this wasn’t the crime scene, if there even was a crime scene, this was a funeral. But maybe Neil’s guilt had driven him here, if he’d had something to do with Gary’s death, or maybe…