The Dead Don't Boogie by Douglas Skelton

Author:Douglas Skelton [Skelton, Douglas]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Detective
Publisher: Saraband
Published: 2016-05-31T23:00:00+00:00

Chapter Fifteen

I thumbed in the number Ginty had given me and was connected to an answering machine for Elite Security Services. I cut the connection then fumbled my way through the internet procedure, looked up Yellow Pages online and found the company had a city centre office, in Gordon Street. I wheeled the car round and headed for the Gallowgate, passing the Barrowland again on my left then on the right the Saracen Head pub – the Sarry Heid, as we call it, reputedly the oldest pub in the city – and from there to Glasgow Cross. I turned left onto the Sandgate, eventually passing the old High Court buildings on my right and the archway at Glasgow Green on my left, then turned right before I hit the river and carried on to Clyde Street. I hate driving through the city centre, even in a car as opulent as Duncan’s. It’s so stop and go, with traffic lights at every junction. I wished I’d brought some CDs with me, but I had to settle for Radio 2. It was the oldies hour on the Steve Wright Show and when I clicked it on The Legend of Xanadu by Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mitch and Titch was just beginning. At least that was something, a favourite from my childhood.

The song, as music often does, awoke memories. My father sitting quietly while my mother screamed at him because he was half an hour late from work, his features blank, his muscles tightened to prevent any expression, for to react was like throwing petrol on a flame. And my sister and I in the other room, turning up the radio to try to drown our mother’s voice out, her screeching, harpy voice as it told him how worried she was, how he should’ve phoned to say he was going to be late, that she’d phoned the hospitals because he was never late. It sounded like concern, but we all knew different. It was all about her. It was always about her.

I forced the memories back into that locked room in my brain reserved for all the bad things in my life. This was not the time for me to be confronting old ghosts. I’m very good at fighting those memories down. It was never the time.

I parked the car in the St Enoch Centre multi-storey and walked up Union Street to Gordon Street, which runs alongside Central Station. Glasgow’s city centre is not that big a place and can be covered on foot by any reasonably fit person, as long as you’re not attempting any of the steep hills that lead up to Sauchiehall Street from Argyle Street beyond the railway bridge known as the Hielanman’s Umbrella.

I found the doorway leading to the offices of Elite Security wedged between a building society and a cut-price bookstore. The hallway was gloomy and cold, not that it was overly warm in the street. An old-fashioned lift stood beside a wooden board listing the companies with office space in the building.

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