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.They had sent Callaghan round the back to cover that escape route as they were met at the front door by the betweeded landlady, Mrs Kinross, who had been looking out for them there.Then they had ventured silently up to the first-floor landing, where the old lady’s key refused to enter the lock.‘He’s jammed something in it,’ Dalziel whispered.‘Which does tend to suggest he’s not tied up any more.’ She advised Mrs Kinross to move back downstairs as there could be trouble.Then the radio cut in, Callaghan informing them that a first-floor window at the back was both broken and wide open, and that there were what looked very much like blood spots on the flagstones below.Dalziel received Mrs Kinross’s permission to force an entry, and after a nod from McGregor, broke the lock off the door with two crashingly loud kicks, which precipitated pyjama-clad appearances from several of Mrs Kinross’s other guests.Then McGregor had switched on the light and surveyed the scene.There was a big puddle of fresh spew spread out on the carpet, between the radiator and the foot of the bed.The window was indeed open and broken, with blood smeared greasily over the shards that were still in place.And taking up most of the room was the bed, a big, brass-framed affair with the unusual decoration of lengths of rope attached to each of its four supporting posts.Its quilt lay discarded on the floor to one side, below a heavily bloodstained pillow, to reveal a further and larger streaky mess of damp red on the sheet underneath.‘Do you think it was the man you’re after?’ asked Mrs Kinross from the stairs.McGregor hit the smirking Dalziel with a glower like stormclouds coming over the Ochils.‘Don’t say a word,’ he warned her quietly.‘Not a fucking word.’Darren was woken from his uncomfortable sleep by the metallic grind of a freight train rolling lumberingly past and slicing his left hand off.His soul-shattered scream of agony and despair was lost to the surrounding buildings amidst the noise of the train’s horn and the heavy rumble of its passing.He looked at the wasted stump, spurting blood like something out of a cheap video, and burst into tears.His livelihood had just disappeared before he was even awake, and there was no facility for disability benefits in his line of work.That was his blade hand, his cutting hand.With the train slowly slouching its way off ahead of him, he stumbled along the track and found it, lying on a sleeper like Thing, palm down and ragged at the wrist, his sovereign rings glinting up at him from each of the four fingers.He bent down and picked it up with his four-digited right hand, then staggered mournfully back to his bag at the edge of the track, where he sat down with it in his lap and sobbed, bleeding steadily from the truncated forearm.He ripped the sleeve off the jacket of his shellsuit – his fucking favourite shellsuit – to make a tourniquet, as the blood showed no sign of letting up.He wrapped it as tightly as he could around his forearm and tied a double shoelace knot in it.It was agony, but at least it worked, kind of.It had been her fault.That old bitch at the B&B.He thought of the men he’d taken in his time.Big men, hard cunts.Kicked their fucking heads in.Bladed them, cut their throats.He thought of that tart, the one Lime had paid him for.That had been his first pro job, his start.She had been fit.He’d fucked her first.Nice.Mostly men after that.Sometimes fights, sometimes just personal, sometimes jobs, once his rep had got round and the work started to come in from all sorts.But now it was over because he had been well and truly fucked up by some tiny old Jock granny of a landlady.He had woken up in the semi-darkness, vaguely aware of someone hauling him about, but too fuzzy to quite work out what was going on.Through the hazy mist of his half-shut eyes he could see her little figure, both her hands clasping his left arm across his chest at the right-hand side of the bed.He felt dizzy and uncoordinated, as if something was trying to force him back into unconsciousness.The quilt was on the floor and his other limbs were already tied securely to the brass bedposts.His legs had been crossed and his right foot was secured to the left bedpost, his left to the right.His right arm was pulled across him and secured to the left post behind his head, and the old cow had looped some rope round the fourth post and was getting ready to tie his wrist to it.Ordinarily, he could have swatted her away with one shake of that arm, but his limbs all felt unusually heavy, and even though he got his hand free of her grip, it just swung erratically and slowly around in front of him.‘Amgifackikillyou,’ he spluttered, still swinging at the trim figure beside the bed.She bent down, not ducking, but picking something up from the floor.‘Recognise this?’ she asked, but he could only make out a grey shape between her hands.He strained his neck but that just made everything in his field of vision swim lurchingly in front of him.‘Why don’t you take a closer look?’ she said, and biffed him in the face with it, breaking his nose and burying his head back into the pillow.Then she dropped the heavy object around his middle, crushing his balls, which had been sitting on top of his crossed legs inside his underpants.He gave a choked moan as the blood from his nose ran into his mouth [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]