The Blade Artist by Irvine Welsh

Author:Irvine Welsh [Welsh, Irvine]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2016-04-06T23:00:00+00:00

Agnes Duncan has a decent hand in her game of trumps with Rita Reilly and Mary Henderson, but she throws it in, having grown bored and exasperated with the activity. This is a condition repeated card games tend to induce in her. Instead, Agnes opts to resume her knitting. She is sure she had left six needles out, but there are only five. Your memory did that when you got older, it played those annoying pranks on you.

21

THE OLD ACCOMPLICE

Franco had a fruitful conversation with Arbie, and then headed to the boxing club. He completed a series of lunges, squats, burpees and push-ups, staple fare from the days in his cell, then undertook some punishing routines on the medicine ball which he knew he would feel tomorrow. Then he climbed into the ring for three rounds on the pads with Mickey. After that, he pummelled the bags for another six cathartic rounds.

Some of the boys said people were looking for him. People being Anton Miller. So he was going to let himself be found. He’d heard enough about Miller, the guns, the drive-by shootings, to believe that if the young gangster really wanted him dead, he would probably already have joined his firstborn. It was time to meet Anton.

He walks into a watering hole in Canonmills, well known to a certain crowd, but usually avoided by the general public. It is an understated pub, hidden down a cobbled side street, and one which several generations of Edinburgh villains have drifted in and out of over the years. It is still early afternoon and the place is deserted, save for two older men playing dominoes for coins, and a barmaid in her early twenties. She gives him a soda water and lime, refusing to charge for it, but he leaves a pound on the bar anyway.

The pub TV features the bland, posh, public-relations man, who has been re-elected. He talks in a conciliatory manner, of one nation, while planning massive cuts in public services for the poor, repealing the Human Rights Act, and bringing back fox hunting for the rich. People were deferential to power. You just had to make the right noises.

He nods to the older guys. They have the tight, studiously neutral, seen-it-all faces of retired cons, and Franco definitely knows one, but can only place the eyes in his generic aged countenance. He winks and gives them the thumbs-up, receiving a similar response back.

Sure enough, a familiar figure with an almost bow-legged gait struts into the bar. Nelly hadn’t even spoken to him at the funeral, but he’d intervened to eject Cha Morrison. Now he is sitting next to Franco on the neighbouring bar stool. He is bigger and heavier than before, Frank Begbie can see that in the mirror, as his old friend removes his leather jacket. A steroid-munching, iron-pumping pit-bull terrier of a man. — Franco.

— Thanks for coming tae the funeral. Frank Begbie turns to face his seasoned comrade. — Sorry I had tae abscond early before we had a chance to chat.

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