Samurai and Other Stories Read Online Free PDF Page B

the Twa Dugs said you might be able to help me.”
    I waved him in.
    “It’s about time Jim started calling in some of the favours I owe him. Sit down, Mr...?”
    “Duncan. Ian Duncan.”
    He sat, perched at the front of the chair, as if afraid to relax. His eyes flickered around the room, never staying long on anything, never looking straight at me.
    “Smoke?” I asked, offering him the packet.
    He shook his head.  
    “It might kill me,” he said.
    I lit up anyway... a smell wafted from the man, a thick oily tang so strong that even the pungent Camels didn’t help much.
    Time for business.
    “So what can I do for you, Mr. Duncan?”
    “I’m going to die sometime this weekend. I need you to stop them.”
    I stared back at him.
    “Sounds like a job for the Polis to me,” I said.
    He laughed, making it sound like a sob. He took a bundle of fifty pound notes from his pocket and slapped them on the table. I tried not to salivate.
    “No. This is no job for the terminally narrow-minded,” he said. “I need somebody with a certain kind of experience. Your kind of experience.”
    Somebody put a cold brick in my stomach, and I had a sudden urge to stick my fingers in my ears. I got the whisky out of the drawer. I offered him one. He shook his head, but his eyes didn’t stray from the bottle. I poured his measure into a glass alongside my own and sent them chasing after each other before speaking.
    “And exactly what kind of experience do I need to help you?”
    A good storyteller practices his tale. At first, when he tells the story, he sounds like your dad ruining his favourite dinner table joke for the hundredth time.  
    Oh wait... did I tell you the horse had a pig with him?
    But gradually he begins to understand the rhythm of the story, and how it depends on knowing all the little details, even the ones that no one ever sees or hears. He knows what colour of trousers he was wearing the day the story took place, he knows that the police dog had a bad leg, he knows that the toilet block smelled of piss and shit. He has the sense of place so firmly in his mind that even he almost believes he’s been there. Once he’s done all that, he tells the killer story, complete with unexpected punch line.
    Then there’s the Ian Duncan method... scatter information about like confetti and hope that somebody can put enough of it together to figure out what had happened to whom.
    I raised an eyebrow, and that was enough to at least get him started.
    “It was four years ago we bought the hotel in Largs.”
    “Well there’s your first mistake,” I replied, but he didn’t acknowledge me. Now that he’d started the story, he meant to finish it. The tale he told would have been outlandish to anyone else’s ears, but like he’d said, I knew better, from bitter experience.
    I let him finish—sick customers, ancient curse and all, before asking the important question.
    “And how do you think I can help?”
    Just telling me the story had taken it out of him. I forced a glass of whisky on him—it was either that or watch him die in the chair. He almost choked on it, but managed to keep it all down before replying.
    “Come down for the weekend. There’s a room I need you to see. Maybe you’ll be able to make sense of it where I can’t.”
    I wanted to say no, but he’d put his money on the table, and that got him my attention. Besides, his story had me intrigued, and I hadn’t been doon the watter to Largs since I was a lad.  
    What better time than a holiday weekend?  

    *     *     *

    Largs is where old people go to die—a Victorian seaside resort that is itself dying slowly of neglect. The Vikings tried to sack it eight hundred years ago. Maybe it would have been better all round if they’d succeeded.
    I’d spent many long weekend trips here as a lad. My parents couldn’t afford to go any further afield, and to a young boy one beach was as good as another, even if the weather was rarely good enough to take