The Scotmid Murders

1

“I’m gonna change my middle name to ‘fuck-up’! Walter ‘Fuck-up’ Davis”

This he muttered to no-one but himself rising from a sweat-soaked bed in a room colder than Margaret Thatcher’s pussy.

Experience and an awful case of the shakes told him that the day ahead was gonna be just lousy; as lousy as far too many times before.

He looked out of the window of his third-floor tenement window. If he’d had the guts he’d have jumped out of it long ago. It was only the hope of some so-far illusive redemption coupled with the thought that it wouldn’t kill him and he’d end up just as fucked up only now in a wheelchair that stopped him.

The weather was grey and rainy; the swell from the sea soaked the promenade as he watched parents’ guide their children to warm, cosy schools. He watched with a mournful heart and wished he was one of those parents; even being one of the children would be vastly more desirable. Most children hadn’t yet had time to be this emotionally and physically shattered.

Why did he have to live such a stereotypical life? He wondered as this as he watched the first customers of the day entered Scotmid’s, or ‘the schemie Co-op’ as the locals termed it, as the doors were opened seven o’clock sharp. Such a desperate crew – staff that resented this first influx of saddo’s eager to purchase milk or, more likely, just to mill about the store because it was better than sitting in some damp flat or bedsit where loneliness poured through the pores like moisture through a cheap sponge.

He had turned into an archetype. A lonesome private eye; prone to too much Bourbon in the evening; consumed in a dark corner in the loneliest bar in town. No-one wanted to know a private eye, even if they only suspected that was what he was. He knew too much, suspected too much, was a snoop by nature. Having a conversation with him was like treading through a minefield; who knows what you might give away. Who you knew and everything in your sad little world would be scrutinised as a matter of course.  A private eye had to observe; and the best place to observe was from dark corners where people could forget you were there.

Take this new case he was on – ‘The Scotmid Murders’. Handily his flat faced the front doors of the shop so he could easily eye the comings and goings. No one could understand it, least of all Walter ‘Fuck-up’ Davis. Three killings in two weeks; local police baffled; everyone looked to the private eye to solve it. They’d barely look at him in the street but they all fervently hoped he’d come up with the answer that would put a stop to the terror.

And the manner of the killings? There appeared to be no rhyme or reason. The only common denominators were that all three were irrevocably dead; they had all occurred within the premises and; perhaps more bizarrely; they all seem to have occurred during opening hours; in broad daylight in this typically miserable mid-April on the Scottish east coast.

This meant the murderer, assuming they were one and the same was either a customer, or more likely someone posing as one, or a member of the Scotmid staff. Whoever it was – they had a seriously deranged mind!

Walter pondered this as he shivered down his first drink of the day; a good three-fingers of Aldi’s own-brand Bourbon with a splash of grapefruit squash. A perfectly disgusting concoction; the Bourbon was for his nerves, the grapefruit juice, he kidded himself, gave him much needed vitamins. The last theory of the desperate alcoholic! He accompanied this abomination with a badly constructed roll-up which he drew at hungrily. This made him cough until he vomited violently into the bucket beside the bed.

2

Portobello is a seaside town past it’s time. A one-time popular resort, especially for Glaswegians who would flock in droves to drink and watch the popular variety shows of the day. Pretty much what they do in Blackpool still. The Glaswegian comic Tommy Morgan was a huge star in the town back in the 1920s. The town had changed; the pier and the entertainment had gone. The height of excitement seemed to be the auld wifies sitting and smoking in front of the converted cinema now bingo hall – they had put in special speakers outside so that they could do this. Such is the persistent power of the fag in Scotland.

Walter could remember at school in Glasgow around the age of fifteen when careers officers were showing the extent of their faith in you by taking you to visit potential employers in the area – Belgrove Abattoir (vegetarians weren’t allowed in those days), Tennants Lager factory and, totally off the map in these PC, health-conscious times, WD and HO Wills Tobacco factory where we were all surreptitiously and due to a blind eye turned by the teacher handed a handful of smokes each by the supervisor blokey who’d showed us around. These days he’d have ended up in court!

Portobello was now a changed place; some would say for the better. The plebby types kept to themselves up the west side of town amid the run-down flats and council houses, and the better-off (or English as they would be better identified) kept themselves east where the kayak club was and the little cafes that sold exotic bread and the tea was never PG.

There was little trouble in the town, and it was considered a great place to bring up kids and dogs that ranged and paddled along the sandy beach. To Walter it was idyllic, but it didn’t stop him fucking up on occasion.

The relative placidity of the town made these three murders all the more shocking. The first had been a local hairdresser, or barber as he would perhaps be more properly termed as he still cut hair in a George Formby style no matter what you asked him for. His name was Geordie Taggart and Walter wondered if some disgruntled customer had taken it out on him after he’d left the shop looking like he should head directly to one selling ukulele’s.

The second seemed inexplicable. A thirty-eight year old female treasurer of the Portobello Sailing and Kayak club; by profession, a solicitor in Edinburgh. Her body had been found by a member of staff helping to close up shop. She’d had her head bashed in by a heavy object and dumped in a freezer beside the pizzas and frozen ready-meals. For some reason this had caused greater alarm than the murder Of Geordie Taggart. Walter pondered whether the great and good of the town could get along without a local barber, but the treasurer of the local Kayak Club? Somehow this seemed beyond the pale..

The third though seemed totally baffling. A young unemployed joiner from the local scheme had been found upside down in a large refuse bin at the back of the store strangled by the wire from his own head-phones.

Walter had thought long and hard to work out any linkage between the three killings. He’d discounted the notion that these murders had been committed by more than one person – all three reeked of the same vindictiveness or vengeance. What would incite one person to commit three murders in the same place in such a short period of time?

Someone had reached a breaking point, and Walter had to find out who…

3

“It had to be a male who had committed these murders..!”

Walter was addressing Brian Marker, store manager of Scotmid’s.

“A woman wouldn't have the strength to lift a fifteen stone body into one of those large bins, and the person who killed to solicitor had hit her with a mighty thump with something reasonably heavy. The death of the hairdresser was less clear cut, if you’ll excuse the pun, but still a deep gash in the neck with a steel comb found at the scene and with clumps of his hair scattered around? That’s more confusing, not to say unsettling..’

“Are there any leads..?” the manager enquired.

“Well, apart from the obvious, the murderer was present in the store on at least three occasions in the past two weeks when the killings took place, and, to my mind, the killer was male. All three killings were violent and needed some considerable strength and intent to carry out. Any unusually disgruntled customers or colleagues you can think of who may be capable of this?”

Walter looked around the manager’s dingy office. He may be manager but Walter thought he’d still be earning way less than the twenty grand a year mark. A lot of responsibility for very little pay; the way of the world at the lower end of commerce these days.

“We get customer’s moaning about having to queue at times but, all in all, they are a friendly bunch and stand around chatting. Staff-wise? Odd bit of sniping about some not pulling their weight, etc, but definitely not anything out of the ordinary that I’ve noticed. Actually, come to think of it, we do have one customer who worries some of the younger female staff. He works in the amusement arcade down the front. Some of the girls find him a bit creepy. And, if you’re talking about big blokes, our security guard is six-foot six but he’s very popular with everyone here. I honestly can’t think of any other likely candidate for well….murder”

“What about yourself Mr Marker?” The question had to be ventured. Walter Davis cut a shambling figure but he was nothing if not thorough.

Brian Marker looked like the honest, lowly aspirer he was; maybe Area Manager in a few years and Walter knew his question was a pointless one. Brian Marker was no more capable of murder as he was of insulting his mother.

“Not me Mister Davis. Don’t have it in me”. Walter looked into his eyes and knew his culprit was elsewhere.

4

The amusement arcade was on the west side of town where the poorer people lived. You knew this because there was a Wimpy Bar inside. Why were there still Wimpy Bars? They came from such a bygone age when people bought Goblin hamburgers in tins. Wealthy folk didn’t entertain Wimpy Bars, or amusement arcades for that matter. It was somehow necessarily below them, as if they’d be socially contaminated if they ever entered one.

Walter didn’t have any such reservations – he knew his place.

Entering one of these arcades took you right back in time, although Penny Falls now required two pence pieces, unless you went big time and tried the ten pence one. Cincinnati Kid or what! And that air-football table! Games from the Ark.

These arcades seem always to be empty. Walter was convinced they were fronts for money laundering or drug running, but then, he thought the worst of everything, even himself.

He was here to talk to the man that Marker had fingered as a possible loose-screw. He knew Archie Campbell on sight. Tattoos around his neck and all the way up his arms, and probably other places that Walter couldn’t identify. The ultimate knuckle-head, seventeen stone of muscled danger and an attitude like a hungry Rottweiler. He operated as security guard here, though what he had to keep secure was a complete mystery to Walter as the place was deserted. Maybe he was expecting a tooled-up team from Leith intent on raiding the grab-a-teddy machine that had never actually appeared.

Campbell had a permanent look of disdain on his face as if the world had dealt him a bad hand and had kept dealing it. An ex-con, he’d spent time for petty theft and serious violence. These places were the only places that would employ him.

“You been in Scotmid’s recently Archie?” Walter studied the eyes of this man but they were long practiced to remain blank and unreadable.

“Aye ah huv, why you asking? It’s no aboot the murders is it? Ah cannae believe that if it is” Campbell spoke like Rebus and Begbie combined; as if he’d been to east coast elocution lessons”

“Well Archie! I’ve been told you’ve been a wee bit of an intimidating presence in there on occasions”

“Ach! Thae lassies, they cannae take a joke likesay. Jist my way”

“Were ye in there two Wednesdays ago, last Thursday and Sunday jist gone?”

“Depends whit times yir talkin aboot but I can tell ye that I had shifts those days”

Walter checked the times of the shifts and decided it wasn’t feasible that Campbell could have been in the store that the murders had taken place.

“See youse pokenosers ye draw the wrong conclusions and ye don’t mind who it hurts. I might have done a number of things Mister Davis but I don’t go around killing folk in supermarkets or any place else for that matter. Ye should check yer facts before accusin’”

Walter had little to say in his own defence. In the background he could hear that someone had won big time on the Penny Falls.

5

“There has to be a link between the three murders, has to be”

Walter was talking to the wall; something he’d been doing most of his life but he needed something to bounce off.

“A strangulation with head-phone wires; a slashing with a steel hair comb; someone clobbered with something heavy and dumped in the freezer..”

“A hairdresser, an unemployed joiner and a solicitor who’s also treasurer of the kayak club”

“Why would anyone want to kill a hairdresser, an unemployed joiner and a solicitor? What was the link?”

“Botch jobs!” It came to him through the ether. Bad haircut, bad work from an out of work joiner doing a foreigner, bad representation by a solicitor. Surely nothing to do with the Kayak Club! A member of staff of Scotmid was unlikely ever to apply for or afford to join Portobello Kayak and Sailing Club.

Surely one person had not suffered all three of these fates, but maybe one might lead him to motives for the others.

Then he remembered.

As he’d been wondering around Scotmid pondering clues he’d noticed something. Possibly the worst haircut he’d ever seen on the head of the big chap with the cut-price sticker gun. A haircut of the brutalist school that could only have been performed by an in-patient of Carstairs Mental Hospital or….Geordie Taggart.

The cut price sticker gun!

Heavy enough to break the skull of a respected solicitor and treasurer of the Portobello Kayak and Sailing Club? But, why?

And that still left the unemployed joiner. Where was the linkage there?

6

Donny Brooke had, apart from a name which connoted violence, an unfortunate disposition. This, along with the care home haircut and quite striking acne – one could hardly keep oneself from holding him down and joining the dots with a biro, made him the ideal murder suspect. This man had every motive in the world to kill at least someone.

Walter established that he had indeed suffered a recent haircut from Geordie Taggart but as yet no admission that he had actually killed him.

“I know you done for the solicitor lady” I was bluffing but sometimes you have to start somewhere and hope for a break.

Young Donny looked shook up, his eyes dilated with fear. I knew I had my man.

“I didn’t kill anyone”

“Indentations and bruises on her head correctly match the shape of the sticker gun. The sticker gun you alone were assigned by the store manager the day she was murdered” Again I had no certainty of the veracity of that statement. I was only vaguely aware of the meaning of the word veracity.

“And your haircut, were you a happy with it? Must have made you a wow with the ladies. One of them told me it made you look like Forest Gump on a bad hair day” This wasn’t even remotely true but I was getting his goat, and many murderers have a very low tolerance for that.

“This is just pure harassment” Donny blustered and flustered now like a bird unable to break free of a cage 

“I need a solicitor”

 I swear he failed completely to see the irony of this.

7

So far I’d been sailing my own kayak on this one and the local police had been making their own enquiries and were not coming to anywhere near the same conclusions. Detective Inspector Tam Henderson seemed not be able to make any connections between the three murders and almost seemed to be assuming they were three separate incidents, which they surely were but he seemed not to think committed by the same perpetrator.

This was how he spoke. Trained to speak in front of TV cameras he used words like perpetrators whenever he was given the opportunity.

Indeed, it seemed to Walter that the man was suffering most pressure from the friends and colleagues of the eminent solicitor and treasurer of Portobello Kayak and Sailing Club who seemed to want this case prioritised.

Such is the power of the well-off.

This tended to skew his case somewhat and left Walter to join up some links that he thought had gotten him to the truth. He just needed an admission of guilt, a witness or some form of forensic evidence which would lead to Donny Brooke being sent to where they don’t let you out no matter how often you ask them.

This came from an unexpected source.

He was to learn from one of the female sales assistant that on the day of the solicitor’s murder she had had a contretemps with young Donny Boy.

Now, one thing that apparently annoyed the life out of young Donny was how the well-to-do of the town were the pushiest when it came to insisting that they get first dibs on the cut-price stickers. He wanted the pensioners or the unemployed to avail themselves of the bargains he stickered. The solicitor’s mistake this day was to insist that Donny sticker her items first and kept barging in before the more deferential oldies.

Not grounds for murder you may rightly say.

But, this was a man on the edge. A man with a chronic hair-do laughed at by female colleagues.

This was also the same man who too often sat on the same bus as a tough-looking unemployed/actually employed joiner whose tsssk tsssk tssk from his headphones prevented the actually rather refined and well-read young shop assistant from reading his book and annoyed the living fuck out of him.

These factors combined came to what’s known as ‘The Scotmid Murders’, eventually admitted to by a man who’s nerves had become very frayed by very everyday things and the moral is; if well-off people would leave alone bargains they don’t need to those who do; if people would stop annoying the shit out of people on buses with their shitty music, and, maybe more importantly, if there were a regulatory body preventing shitey hairdressers trading then….these things wouldn't happen.

8

Walter Davis, private eye, looked down from his window at the entrance of Scotmid’s and pondered the case he’d just solved.

Needless murders over needless acts and still we was an unhappy and unresolved man.

Only tonight he was having Morrison’s own Bourbon. That bit more expensive but a little less rough.