“I’ve never been out of Scotland before…I’d never been out of Glasgow except for Gairloch.”

 Judith laughed. “You’re not scared of flying are you?”

 Danny stared forlornly at her. “Ma always said that folk who holidayed abroad were traitors to their community. She reckoned that every penny earned in Glasgow should stay in Glasgow, not be used to subsidise the development of some Mediterranean fishing village, while our own city was rotting and shrinking. Old Annie hated the fact that people spent fifty weeks a year daydreaming about their fortnight in Majorca or the Costa Del Sol, when they should have been living in the here and now and improving one another’s lives. Of course, I inherited this outlook and never hesitated to castigate anyone who was about to embark on their annual, lifesaving break from everything oppressive about Scotland. So, as I’m sure you’ll understand, it would be unforgivably hypocritical of me to jump on a plane now.”

 “Weren’t you going to follow Ingrid to Italy that time, only there was no one to look after your mother?”

 “Not finding anyone to look after my ma was only half the story. Truth is I was as petrified of being sneered at as a hypocrite then as I am now. That’s the real reason I never followed her to Italy.”

 This impossible mind-set was draining Judith, so she left before he could depress her any further and concentrated on Iceland.

 

CHAPTER: 17

 Iceland’s mountains, glaciers and near twenty-four hour daylight erased all things Danny from Judith’s mind, until the flight back to Glasgow, when he re-established himself in the most tragic manner. She’d picked up a Daily Herald on boarding and it was there, in a tiny square at the bottom right hand corner of page-seven that she read the shocking news:

CITY ARTIST’S FUNERAL

Friends of Glasgow painter, Danny White will pay their respects tomorrow morning. White, 43, who will be best remembered for his work with underprivileged local teenagers, was found dead last week after a drug overdose. The service will take place at ten o’clock, in St Teresa’s Church, Possil.

 Numbed, Judith remembered nothing more about the journey, or even how she’d acquired her luggage at Glasgow airport. Somehow she’d managed to find her way to Katy’s parent’s tenement, where, over a bottle of vodka, the youngster explained the gruesome details.

On Wednesday morning, the week before, a warden at the Great Eastern Hotel had discovered Danny kneeling by his bed, head slumped, a syringe stuck in his left forearm. The Police said he’d been dead for approximately twelve hours. As part of their investigation to eliminate foul play, they’d accessed his internet account at Dennistoun library, where he’d browsed sites which described how best to commit suicide using opiates. The only thing which couldn’t be explained though, was how the burnt remains of a thousand fifty-pound notes came to be in a small plastic bin by the wardrobe. Compressed in five tight bundles, a portion from each note had survived the flames, which were unwittingly extinguished when Danny’s foot made contact with the bin, during a spasm just before death.

 Danny always told Judith that, when he died, a pauper’s grave would be fine for him. And this is precisely what he would have got had it not been for Katy, who’d spent a large chunk of the ten grand he’d given her organising a respectable send off. However, despite all the effort she’d gone to, on the day, only a single black Rolls Royce followed behind the hearse. This contained Katy, her parents and Judith, who’d been in town early buying a dark dress for the service. They’d been waiting for Fin, but he’d suffered a relapse since returning from Gairloch and was obviously too heroin sodden to turn up. Unfortunately, the police had given him Danny’s painting of their mother, which he’d then sold to a Bath Street art dealer for a grand, before embarking on a mammoth bender of a heroin-fest.

 St Teresa’s was a rectangular, redbrick church with a lead-spired bell tower, set back from the road beyond green lawns. Much to Judith and Katy’s relief, there were a good fifty people waiting outside in watery sunshine when they arrived, including all twenty-five students who’d ever attended Gairloch College. The turnout should have been much bigger, but, sadly, most people kept away because of a rumour going round that Danny had been a money launderer for big heroin dealers. According to the gossips, he’d been caught stealing from his masters, ostracized and forced to live in the Great Eastern Hotel. Apparently, his demise hadn’t been suicide at all, but a gangland execution which the police were now covering up. Judith thought it a cruel irony that a man so dedicated to doing the right thing his whole life, should be remembered in death by such a slander.

Throughout the service, rain lashed so heavily against the church roof it threatened to thwart the actual burial. But by the time everybody reached the sprawling Lambhill cemetery, on the city’s northern fringe, shafts of sunlight had penetrated the clouds, making the sky look like a translucent big top. As Danny’s coffin got lowered into the ground, a rainbow arced above the vast field of white, stone crosses and a blackbird began singing somewhere in the distance, prompting Judith to sob.

During the wake at The Brothers Bar, Judith was accosted by Ingrid, who looked solemn in full-length, black funeral dress. After a specious display of grief she began snooping to find out what money Danny might have left behind. She proudly recounted how her lawyer had launched a legal claim to the burnt remains from his bin at the Great Eastern, because some notes — eleven-thousand-seven-hundred and fifty pounds worth — where still half intact and so could be exchanged for new ones at the Bank of Scotland. On hearing about Fin’s acquisition and subsequent sale of Mrs. White’s portrait, she couldn’t contain her rage, just as Judith could hardly suppress her delight while telling the tale.

 “What is it with that family of morons?” Ingrid wailed. “That picture’s probably worth at least fifty grand…possibly more now that Danny’s dead! It’s not Fin’s to sell! It’s little Lawrence’s!” And with that she clattered out of the pub to ring her lawyer and start legal proceedings to reclaim the painting.

Over the coming months, Judith would grieve profoundly and struggle to accept she’d never see Danny again. At first, she’d blamed herself, analysing their last conversation, trying to find anything she’d said which might have contributed to his fate. Worse still, she’d thought of all the things she should have said that might have prevented it. Then, once she’d finally convinced herself she wasn’t culpable, she started hating his mother, until it dawned that Annie had inspired all the heroic characteristics she’d admired in him as well the infuriating one’s she’d pitied. However, she concluded that chasing moral perfection could be a very dangerous activity, because when you fail, it often results in self-loathing and sometimes tragedy, as epitomised by the fate of Danny White.

ALSO BY THE AUTHOR

The Dirty Rouge

Book One of The Dirty Rouge Series.

D.C.I Patrick Curzon is the ‘Dirty Rouge’.

A thief, a blackmailer, a ruthless politician, this tough, misanthropic Scotsman is one of the vilest cops to have ever graced the page.  That said, he’s also one of the most dedicated.

While investigating the death of a young ‘schemie’, Curzon paces the streets of his beloved Glasgow, conversing with junkies, small time coke dealers, a millionairess and even a premier league footballer.  The case also brings him back into conflict with his sworn enemy, Fergus Baxter, a highly vaunted though particularly sleazy defence lawyer who acts on behalf of the city’s most lucrative violent psychopaths and any celebrities who happen to fall through the cracks into criminality.