Paperboy

PROLOGUE
The king is dead. Paul McGuinn, Paulo to his friends and enemies, his slave girls and lieutenants and errand boys. Fraudster, drug runner, people smuggler, murderer. His wife stood at the head of the stone in an expensive black dress, holding her daughters’ hands. The crowd around them was thick with black suits and Rangers scarves.

Two polis in high-vis hovered near the cemetery gate, tense, as welcome as a fart in a sleeping bag. A woman in office drabs turned her nose up at the hearse parked at the kerb, appraising the floral tributes in the back which spelt out PAUL on one side and DAD on the other. “Tasteful,” she said, as she passed the uniforms into the stone-lined path. One of them recognised her and murmured “Ma’am” with a slight bow of the head.

McCoist was attending because it was her duty—she was the DCI investigating the gangster’s murder, and she was the one who’d put the cunt in the ground.

She could still feel the moment, the screaming rush, then the shocking silence following the thunderclap of the gunshot. Dead ears—a dentist-drill whine and a waterfall of white noise. Squeeze of the trigger, flash of the explosion, so fast it seemed to precede the movement, like it wasn’t even her who did it. Inevitable. A slap in the face with warm blood spray. A black hole in the head, punching through hair gel, skin, bone and brain. In and out the other side. The Clyde Tunnel.

Case closed.

Not that McCoist could let anyone know it was that simple. She watched from a distance as the Rolls-Royce of a coffin was lowered into the earth. The reverend was saying something but she couldn’t hear him. What do you say when you believe the deceased is going straight to hell? Bury him deep, boays, save him the taxi fare.

The wife threw something into the hole. Folded paper. A letter, maybe. The daughters, both of them taller than their mother in bigger heels, did the same. Surrounding them, a who’s who of Glesga’s criminal underworld bowed their heads and clasped their hands like schoolchildren. The impression wasn’t of praying though. It looked more like they were waiting for something. A sign.

Long live the king.

She had only been able to think of two words to write to her husband:

Fuck You

And she’d written them over and over and over again until the page was full. Lottie was never much of a writer. Not her chosen method of expressing herself.

The letters had been Gemma’s idea, and she was so sincere when she came out with it that Lottie had to go along with her. Her elder daughter, Ari, had agreed it was a “wonderful” thought, but her eyes betrayed something, maybe envy, like she wished she’d come up with it. The floral letter tributes had been her suggestion—her little sister’s paper letters were both more heartfelt and cheaper. Paulo would have appreciated that. Rich men are cheap. Never spend when you can steal. Lottie had a fleet of Mulberry handbags in her wardrobe she’d always known better than to ask the provenance of. A lot of lorries turning carelessly.

Ari stepped forward and dropped hers in—God knew what she’d written—then returned to squeeze between her mother and sister, taking one of their hands in each of hers. Gemma had read her letter out to them in the morning, tears in her eyes. Beautiful in that moment, though if Lottie was honest her youngest had too many of her father’s genes to ever be considered so in the conventional way. Ari, however, was her mother’s spit. An unsettling double.

The reverend was droning and the dirt was sprinkled in—a handful at a time at first, later to be finished by the excavator, reversing its earlier work.

The men didn’t know what to say. Not yet. They’d find the words later on, down at the pub after a good scoop. Pints and whiskies, drinking the money she put behind the bar although she didn’t plan on attending. Hoovering up something stronger off the toilet cisterns. Paulo wouldn’t have minded. It’s not disrespectful, it’s what he would have wanted. A night out in his honour. Maybe even a club later. Or the casino. Girls. Violence.

She wondered if talk would turn to revenge. There was no way any of them believed her eejit nephew Colin had killed him as the polis claimed—put a bullet through his uncle’s head after being caught making deals behind his back in a brass-bawed attempt at taking over the firm. No, the only coup young Colin could ever conceive of ate grass and said “Moo”. Though maybe it would be easier for them if they pretended to believe it. Less trouble. She could understand that. She’d had to ask her own sister not to come to the funeral. Appearances needed to be kept up.

For now.

CHAPTER 1
“TRNSMT?! I wonder what else gets transmitted there that isn’t just music.”

“Gads, Alison. She’s only—”

“She’s a teenager. You’ll have to accept that soon.”

“She’s our daughter. We can trust her to be sensible.”

“I can’t trust her to do her own washing or bring the mugs down from her room. Who are you talking about?”

“She’s not silly, when it comes to the big things—”

“Like her exams?”
“Here we go…” McCoist was on the phone to her ex, arguing about the twins again. Not the twins, really, just Tess. Her Nat 5 results had been unexpected. Unexpectedly shite. A good slip down from the prelim results. A sign of trouble, they both knew, but what to do about it they couldn’t agree on. And now she was whingeing about going to TRNSMT Festival with her pals next week and the tickets cost a lung and a pair of kidneys, so McCoist wanted to say no, but Mark questioned if that would seem like they were punishing her and could risk further alienating… and so on and on. Soft touch.

“And you know what else there is at music festivals to go with the sex and rock ’n’ roll?”

“Don’t say it.”

“Drugs.”

“Stop."

“Mountains of the stuff. There are more dodgy pills floating round a music festival than fucking bucket hats. Plus the dodgy geezers who sell them.”

“Hats or drugs?”

“Shut up.”

“Could you switch off your polis-brain for a minute?”

“That’s not polis-brain, it’s parent-brain, you should get one.”

“Nice. Very clever. Very grown up.”

The sight of the corpse stopped McCoist from saying something she might have regretted. “I have to go,” she said instead, hanging up although she could still hear Mark speaking. He was used to it. One of the reasons for the divorce, probably.

The body was on its back, lying in a gulch between the wall of a motorway slip road and the overgrown embankment beside it. A strip of torn fencing separated the two. Beyond a flapping hole in the fence, a path had been trod up the embankment over time.

She almost whistled. “Rats?”

The photographer nodded. The thing that had once been a person had no eyes or face left. The cheeks were hollow in the literal sense, not the sickly avant-garde film-star sense. The sinews had been chewed through, clean to the bone in some places. Stripped of everything else, the former face’s main feature was its lipless teeth. Large, yellow and animal-like in black, receding gums. Quite the smile. Wriggling things were living in it.

“I heard on this podcast—”

“Every time you start a sentence with that it costs me a thousand brain cells,” McCoist said.

The DC tagging along as her gofer, Gaz Travis, grinned, undeterred by the practised weariness in his boss’s voice. “I heard on this podcast, right, that there’s so much coke floating about down there in the sewers in Glasgow—in people’s pish and getting flushed down or poured out and that—that the rats are more geared up than Maradona. Makes them super aggressive.”

The photographer was staring at DC Travis now, eyes narrowed. “Rats on gak…” he murmured, cogs visibly turning in his brain.

“And polis on acid, apparently,” McCoist snapped. “Can I speak to someone sensible about this?” She motioned to the decaying, feasted-upon body. It was in a suit, as if ready for the funeral. Long overdue for it, actually. The suit too—past its fashion sell-by at some point in the eighties.

It reeked and she had to try hard not to pinch her nose. More than just disrespectful, it was amateur, and McCoist would not allow herself to be seen that way. There were enough rumours around her promotion to DCI already. Plenty of sniping and whispered accusations of affirmative action. A leaked WhatsApp chat had recently embarrassed Police Scotland and led to a good number of polis—bicycle bobby and senior detective alike—getting the boot or made to take early retirement, including her former boss, DCI Robson. She wasn’t surprised that fat, baldy shitehawk had been involved—his contributions to the group chat had been racist, sexist and poorly spelt—and she wasn’t sad to see him go, but the truth of her ascension was more complicated than convenient optics. The cost to her had been great too.