Last Orders (a Gus Dury crime thriller) Read Online Free PDF Page B

a few times but
it's since been boarded up. I don't think anyone's living there. Do you think
it was a squat, maybe?'
    I nodded. 'Yeah, more than likely.'
    The midwife started to tug at the sleeve of her jacket,
she looked nervy now. I could see her demanding I report to Social Work with
her if I gave her any more room for manoeuvre.
    'Look, I really can't tell you any more,' she said.
    I made to move, put my hands in my pockets. 'Just one
more thing ... let me have the address and I'll be on my way.'
    * * * *
    At one time, I'd taken to schlepping up Calton Hill to
sit on a bench and watch the world go by. I admit it, I'd been known to take
the odd tin or two along. On any given day, rain or shine, you could be
guaranteed a host of tourists and locals alike. They were a distraction, but
there was a way of avoiding them. If you got within spitting-distance of the
National Monument you were screwed — and likely to be handed a camera, asked to
take a photograph for someone — but there was a bench overlooking the Old Town
that nobody went near.
    So, I'd sit there, just clocking the sky and the
concrete smear that was the city beneath. I'd become detached, near
alpha-state; and that wasn't the tins.
    It all went tits up for me when they started knocking
the shit out of the place to develop a site next to the Cooncil offices. There
was talk of turfing people out their homes with compulsory purchase orders. A
Save Our Old Town campaign got going. It was Capitalism gone mad and I couldn't
get my head around it. To say it soured the view was putting it mildly.
    I left the bench alone when the diggers went in. The
Scottish Government was putting a stop to cheap tins anyway, so that was gonna
hit my recreational skite right on the head.
    As I reached Leith's Banana Flats I wondered what the
view was like from up there. That was the thing with Edinburgh, the scene was
forever changing. You just never knew what was round the next corner. You
thought you knew the place and then it surprised you with the news that,
actually, you didn't know it at all.
    The midwife had given me an address for a flat that was
on a street I'd never known existed, and I grew up in Leith. When my brother
and I were young enough to go bikes we played boneshaker over the cobbles. I
couldn't see any kids nowadays doing that, unless you could get it on the
Nintendo Wii.
    The address was at the back of a winding row of
properties that the builders had been slap-happy with. It looked like an
Airfix-kit scheme. There were tenements in the city standing the test of
centuries but these boxy hovels looked to have passed their shelf-life about
twenty years ago. The residents obviously agreed, ripping apart the ones that
had already been burned out and chucking their charred contents on the street.
    The walls were covered in graffiti. Tagging, mainly. You
get your school of thought that this kinda thing ruins an area; me, I say, how
much worse can they make it? Scrubbing it off's only turd polishing.
    I took to a stair that smelled of piss. Even with all
the windows panned in, the piss was still rank enough to make me want to chuck.
I stuck my face behind my jacket and waded through the detritus of aerosols,
needles and White Lightning bottles. The place I wanted was the last in the
row; I wondered if it was truly the end of the road.
    I could see why the nurse would think nobody lived here.
I wouldn't — and I'm not the one stopping at The Balmoral. I pressed on the
door's windowpane; there was no give, it wasn't opening up. As I looked in the
letter box, a blast of damp hit me but I also detected some movement.
    'Probably bloody rats ...'
    I banged on the door.
    Nothing.
    Tried again on the windowpane.
    A clang this time. Like a door closing.
    I hollered in the letterbox, 'Caroline, is that you? My
name's Gus, Gus Dury, your father asked me to find you.'
    I put my ear to the slot.
    There was no movement anymore. The place was grave-still
— too still — I sensed