BB & Heather

Part 10: Back To The Old Life

He saw the car as soon as he turned onto the street. A white BMW M5. It was parked down the street from BB’s building, but it could only be there for him. BB sped along the road and stopped in the first empty space he could find, getting quickly out of his car. He walked back to the M5 and looked inside. Nobody there. He straightened up. If Clark wasn’t in the car then he had to be in the building.

BB sprinted along the pavement and up the stairs. The front door of the flat was slightly open. She had let him in, or he had forced his way in. BB could feel his heart bounce off his ribcage, trying to force its way out. He shoved the door open and ran along the corridor. He stopped in the living room.

Heather was sitting on the couch. Her top had been ripped at one shoulder, pulled down to expose a tangled bra strap. Her trousers had been pulled off, and there was a long scratch and cut on her inner thigh. Blood was running slowly down her long leg onto the leather couch. When she looked up at him and her hair swung back from her face he could see that her nose was bleeding and her bottom lip was split.

There was a dull moment, when the air became heavy and thick, he couldn't hear or move. He looked her in the eye, and then the world snapped back into place. He turned quickly, walking out of the living room and going through the flat. Looking for Clark. Looking for a man to kill. Never wanted to do it before, never even considered it. Now there was nothing in this world that was going to stop him.

Clark wasn’t there. He had been and gone before BB arrived back. He’d left the car behind for God knows what reason. Didn’t matter, because BB knew where he lived. He sprinted out of the flat, down to his own car. It started with a growl and screeched out of the parking space.

He had no idea how long the drive took, how fast he went, how many laws he broke on the way. None of that mattered. He was about to kill a man, so speeding wasn't a concern. No weapon. Didn’t need one. He would take pleasure in killing Clark with his own hands. It would be personal; it would be satisfying.

He pulled into the cul-de-sac and raced to Clark’s house. He stopped the Subaru in the driveway, but he was already wary. The front door of the house was wide open. Like an invitation. Like a setup. He slowed to a walk, looking back down the street before he dared approach the door. There was nobody there, ready to pounce on him.

He stepped into the slightly familiar corridor. Nobody around. He wasn’t going to say anything, shout to Clark to show himself. He moved along the corridor, looked into the large lounge and found nothing. Noticed that the family pictures that had lined the mantelpiece last time he was here were gone. Along the corridor to the kitchen door. He pushed it open.

Clark was swinging from the small chandelier that had hung over the dining table. The table had been pushed back out of the way. His face was red, his bulging purple tongue pushed out of his mouth. He looked ridiculous. Then the smell hit BB. Gas, enough to give him an immediate sickly feel. He looked behind him, saw the kitchen door open, knew the front door was wide open too. Most of the gas would drift harmlessly out. Whatever Clark’s grand plan had been with that wasn’t going to work. BB left him swinging.

By the time BB got back to the flat she was dressed, had cleaned off the blood. They sat and tried to talk about it. He hadn’t raped her. He’d forced his way in and tried to, but she had fought him off. They could talk about what happened, but not about how it affected them. It just wasn’t something BB knew how to discuss. Work crashing into the woman he loved and harming her like that.

He told Marty about it. Told Marty that Clark had managed to get his address from somewhere and had gone looking for revenge.

“If it was someone in the business,” Marty told him solemnly, “that gave that prick your address, I’ll have them buried. No fucking around. You’ll be burying them BB.” He meant it, but he knew he would never have to live up to the promise of death. There were any number of ways Clark could have gotten his address without needing help.

 Marty did some digging around. Found out that Clark’s wife had walked out and taken the kids with her shortly after the last beating. That had tipped him off the edge. He’d attacked Heather to try and get revenge on BB. Nobody was sure why he left his car behind.

“Must have just gone mental and forgot about it,” Marty said with a quiet shrug.

It had helped settle some of the old debt. Last thing they wanted was the car of a suicide victim being found outside an employee’s flat, too many awkward questions would be sitting in the passenger seat. Marty had sent one of the boys round to move it. It still had the keys in the ignition. They took it to a garage, re-sprayed and re-tagged the thing and sold it down south.

“Found out from a police contact that he left a suicide note,” Marty told BB later. “Some badly scrawled shite about not wanting his wife to get anything from him when he was gone. That she had abandoned him and stolen his kids at the first sign of trouble. Said she only wanted him for his money, that sort of thing. That must have been what that bollocks with the gas was for, trying to blow up her inheritance. Didn’t work, the dopey prick.”

BB and Heather tried to make it work, but it was never the same. After the attack, she started to ask more questions about his work. Questions that he didn’t want to answer. She couldn’t accept his attitude, running out of the flat to chase revenge before he’d even asked her if she was okay. He couldn’t accept that he was to blame for the harm that had come to her.

They drifted silently for a couple of months afterward, and then gave up. Heather moved in with a couple of friends, BB carried on living as he had been before he met her. Back to the old life. For a long time he told himself that it would be fine, that he would meet someone else and have what he’d had with Heather again. He met other women, sure, but he would never rediscover the joy that had swept into his life with Heather.

Publisher's Note: That's the end of "BB & Heather," but if you're hooked on Malcolm Mackay's noir style and the hard-boiled milieu of Glasgow's criminal underworld, we've got good news. The three books in Mackay's Glasgow Trilogy—The Necessary Death of Lewis Winter, How a Gunman Says Goodbye, and The Sudden Arrival of Violence—will be released simultaneously in the U.S. on April 21st. Visit mulhollandbooks.com for more information.