Department of First Stories

An Informant
by Adam Wilson

When you see Jim Tierney walking towards you from across a pub, you run. Or, at the very least, you sidle out unseen before he gets you talking. That’s the general consensus. Unfortunately, looking up from my glass, I realised only too late that he wasn’t a nightmarish apparition conjured by some cruel Freudian corner of my subconscious. By that time, he was taking the seat across from me.

He was a small man with rodential features, who was apt to scurry when a simple walk would do. He had a look about him that suggested he kept a flat file in his bathroom cupboard in case he ever woke up to find his front teeth grown unmanageably long. Sunken cheeks and dark sunken eyes. Hairline retreating faster than the British at Dunkirk. Dressed all in black, the balaclava was implied. He was smiling this curious smile, innocent enough, but that still made one think about cracking him in the jaw.

“Mind if I—,” he said.

I saw little sense in being impolite, even if I felt like it. I waved my hand, permitting him to stay. He looked at my empty glass and then motioned to it.

“Want another?” he asked, looking in the direction of the barman who stood at the bar with a paper spread before him. The rest of the pub was empty except for the lazy fan in the middle of the room which limped around at irregular rhythms. Everything smelled damp. I didn’t feel thirsty. I’d never been thirsty, if I was telling myself the truth, which I sometimes did. If I’d been thirsty I would have spent my afternoon loitering by a water fountain. I shook my head and Tierney seemed to forget about getting himself a drink.

“Detective Sergeant Macintosh,” he said, as if I was a revelation.

“That’s my name.”

“When was the last time our paths crossed?” He was leaning forward with his elbows on the table, just like your granny told you not to, and he was running one hand over what was left of his hair. He was speaking to himself; I was waiting to see what would happen. “Now, it would have been last year, I think. Yes, I think that’s the last time we met.”

I nodded.

“In Bearsden,” I said.

He nodded in earnest, like an old school friend pleased I’d remembered him. Jim Tierney was no school friend. His face was one burned into the retinas of every constable who had ever walked a beat within the central belt of Scotland in the last twenty years. He had developed a bit of a reputation as a serially incompetent housebreaker. The business in Bearsden to which he was referring involved an unoccupied mansion that his rather dubious intelligence told him was being sold fully furnished. This turned out to be wrong, and, worse, he’d let the automatically locking window shut as he slipped through into the house. Without anything suitably solid with which to smash a window, he’d waited two days, vainly hoping an estate agent would show up, before phoning the police himself. You can imagine the laugh the boys had, listening to Tierney’s hysterical panic echo in the empty rooms.

His nodding had become a determined shake of the head.

“A sad series of events, that was. All a misunderstanding, of course.”

That earned a raise of my brow.

“Who was it that misunderstood?” I said. “The operator who answered the call or the boys who came to pick you up?”

“No, no, no. I didn’t mean—”

“What do you want, Jim?”

Using his name was a touch too friendly. His brow had this way of taking a step back, away from the eyes. I couldn’t decide whether it made him looked surprised or worried. The flick of the barman turning his page punctuated the drone of the city outside the opaque glass window. Tierney opened his mouth but I never gave him a chance.

“Actually, first,” I said, “how did you know I would be here?”

Tierney shrugged. “A bit of a coincidence, I’d say. I always drink here.”

I looked around the empty pub. Apart from the barman, the only other life that seemed a possibility within its walls was mould. The carpet was sticky underfoot and turned up frayed at the skirting boards. I had opted for a bottle, having had a premonition that from the taps, presumably unused to being pulled, the liquid would come reluctantly. It was so cold that, though I’d been sitting for thirty minutes, I still had on my jacket. This was nobody’s regular watering hole. I looked him dead in the eye.

“I can walk out of here whenever I want,” I said. “To be honest, I don’t know why I didn’t leave the moment you sat down.”

“Please, stay. Just until—”

“Tell me how you knew I would be here.”

Tierney scratched his cheek and shifted his weight as if only noticing he was sitting on something prickly. Sometimes you can watch, on their faces, people thinking. I could see Tierney’s motors ignite in that moment. He glanced at the door then back at me, smiling sheepishly. He seemed to deflate. The fan buzzed on erratically.

“I saw in the paper that you were giving evidence in court,” he admitted. “I’ve just spent the last hour sticking my head into every pub between Calton and Central.”

He looked at me expectantly, obviously frightened by the prospect of my reaction to this deceit. I nodded and leant back into the cushioned booth, signalling that I wasn’t leaving. How could I go home now? That was a lot of effort for someone like Tierney to go to. Despite myself, I wanted to know what was going on. He seemed relieved that I hadn’t stormed out. I shook my head, laughing.

“Jesus, that’s some effort. Now I really need to know what you want.”

He was right enough. I’d been giving evidence down the street at the High Court on account of my part in the investigation of a gangland shooting. Not a murder. The victim was still alive and well and as far as I knew pushing drugs around Easterhouse, with his competition getting familiar with the layout of Barlinnie Block A. If there was one thing I hated more than murderers, it was attempted murderers. Amateurs.

“I have some information,” Tierney said quietly.

I made a game of trying to balance my glass on the edge of its base. I was doomed to fail.

“Why not phone the police?”

“You are the police.”

I put the glass down. It clinked on the table. I looked into Tierney’s eyes, judging whether he was having me on. Those wee dark beady eyes. How many fellow polis had looked in those same eyes and thought something similar?

“You know what I mean,” I said. “Why not phone nine nine nine?”

He shrugged and I thought he might have gone slightly red but it was hard to tell as his face was already the same colour as an uncooked ham.

“It might sound stupid, but I thought you treated me fairly when they took me in for questioning. I feel like maybe I can trust you.”

At this, I couldn’t help but laugh. I stopped when I saw his face betray a little hurt. We’ll call that my revenge on the behalf of the unoccupied homes of Glasgow.

“Trust me with what?” I felt like getting to the point of this thing.

He became shifty, fidgeting and looking over his shoulders. Unless someone knew how to teleport, avoiding the need to enter by way of the door, there was no one there. I silently cursed as I heard the soft patter of rain on the window. Hopefully, it was just a shower and not the beginning of something heavier. It was always the beginning of something heavier. Tierney leant in and lowered his tone.

“The thing is—I’m not really sure,” he said. “It might be something you’re interested in; it might not be.”

He was getting to the point slower than a clumsy fletcher. I sighed and attempted to look fed up in order to usher him on his way. He looked over his shoulder one last time.

“Well, it’s like this,” he said. “You know Legless Mick?”

I didn’t.

“I can’t remember how I met him. Maybe at a party or something. I’ve known him for a while, anyway. Apparently he gets called Legless Mick because there was a time he was working on a site and he came to work steaming. Whatever happened, he had to go to hospital. They thought the legs were going to have to come off. He got to keep the legs, but the name stuck too. Get it? Legless drunk and legless legless.”

Not that I wasn’t interested in this sort of etymological analysis, but I felt myself falling asleep. I coughed impatiently.

“Sorry,” he said. “Anyway, this guy, Legless Mick, he was at a party I went to the other week. We move in the same circles. I see him now and again. We’re not pals, but we know each other. I just happened to be passing through the kitchen as he was telling this story.”

“Uh-huh.”

“As far as I could make out, he was talking about another party he’d been to the week before. He said he left at some point before midnight. Arranged to meet his dealer somewhere. Some industrial estate, I think. The thing was the dealer didn’t show up. He was ready to leave when he heard a scream.”

He stopped talking in order to glance at my face. He was trying to read my reaction. I gave him nothing.

“Anyway, he went to see what it was.” Tierney paused, like an amateur thespian. “A girl. She was lying against a skip apparently, in the yard of some metals factory. Bleeding out and naked.”

I leant forward so my face was directly opposite his.

“And what did your pal Mick do when he found this woman?”

Tierney sat back. He obviously didn’t like my face much, or maybe it was my breath. He shrugged and then folded his arms. My head was beginning to clear a little, but with that there was a dull pain at one temple.

“I’m not pals with him, I told you,” he said. “Besides, what could he do? Standing over a dead woman. The only one in sight. In the middle of a dead industrial estate. With his record. He ran away and never thought about it again.”

“Until this party.”

Tierney nodded.

“Yeah, until the party.”

His leg began to bounce, the leather jacket squeaking against the material of the seat. When I get to hell, that’s the sound I’ll hear. I’ll be stuck in Primark and that’s the sound I’ll hear.

I thought for a moment. Not about his story, about the walk to my car. The raindrops were battering against the glass and I hadn’t brought a jacket.

“Well?” he said expectantly. He looked like Oliver did after finishing his first plate. I didn’t know what this was about, but I knew I wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction of dancing to his tune.

“Well what?”

His brow furrowed and his face folded in on itself like he’d eaten something sour. I could imagine he made this face a lot. It was a practiced expression.

“Doesn’t this sound like something you should be investigating?”

“Come on, be serious here. I’ve got a story about a story about a crime. Even if both those stories did miraculously turn out to be true, how many industrial estates are there this side of Glasgow alone? And I’m supposed to look for a body that was supposedly in the middle of a work site and yet no one has noticed it for a few weeks? Don’t be silly.”

I might as well have slapped him. He blinked. I obviously wasn’t being cooperative. He should have known better than that. A simple interview with one of my nursery teachers would have told him that cooperation has never been my strong suit. I started to shuffle towards the end of the booth. This brought him back to life. He reached for my wrist.

“Wait,” he said frantically. “You could go and speak to Mick. Interrogate him. Is that not your job?”

He took from his pocket a small piece of cardboard that had obviously been torn from a Rice Crispies box. On the opposite side from snap, crackle, and pop, an address had been written in an illegible hand.

“This is where he lives.”

I studied him, flicking the piece of card absentmindedly. He’d already written out the address. He knew that would be the next step if I agreed to investigate. There was something going on here. Something, I must admit, I now wanted to get at. You might call it my investigator’s instincts. I call it a problem.

“What’s made you such a grass all of a sudden?”

He tried to shrug casually, but the movement was unnatural. Since he had sauntered in, I hadn’t seen him do one thing naturally. Then again, there was nothing natural about Jim Tierney.

“Just a concerned citizen,” he said.

I laughed. I hadn’t been sure whether he was lying before. Now I knew he was doing it through his yellow teeth, and with a straight face too. I stood up. He scrambled out and stood as well. The barman glanced up from his paper. I winced as the wind whistled under the door.

“It’s five o’clock,” I said. “I need to get home.”

It was an excuse, the first one that came to mind. I just wanted to get away but it made me think of home. That’s what I called the two-bedroom flat in Maryhill. What would be waiting for me there? Emptiness, most likely. I hadn’t seen her in a couple of days. She was going out more in the evenings without telling me. I had to sit there and take it, though, like Ali’s sparring partner, because it wasn’t as if I was ever in the flat. So home would be another drink, then forcing myself to stop drinking and cook. Then trying unsuccessfully to stop myself drinking for the rest of the night. When you have a Calvinist conscience and the impulses of Coleridge, nights are interesting.

Interesting but not enjoyable. I looked at the piece of card and then up at Tierney. The address was only in Townhead. Not far. I shook my head in disbelief.

“Right,” I said. “I’ll go and talk to him.”

He nearly jumped with excitement. It flashed, like a stroke, across his face. Then he remembered himself and sobered. But still, he couldn’t get away from me quickly enough. He was almost at the door when I stopped him.

“But you’re coming with me.”

He swivelled and the sheepish look came back. He glanced at the bartender.

“Why?” he asked.

I strode across the pub and steered him out into the rain, just as a bus clunked by and transferred half the dirty water in the gutter onto our legs. Tierney swore. The air was frying with the greasy smell from the chip shop next door.

“Well, this isn’t anything official,” I said as I led him in the direction of the car. I’d parked in the big car park behind the St. Enoch Centre. “So, I’ll need you as my letter of introduction. I don’t have a warrant or anything, so it’s your job to make sure this guy doesn’t shut the door in our faces. Then all your work will have been for nothing.”

We were angled at forty-five degrees into the wind. The rain stung my face. I kept Tierney in front of me in case he did a runner. He was looking in each direction as if he was watching the tennis and he was shrugged against the rain, probably worried in case anyone saw him with the polis. That shouldn’t have been anything new.

We got to the car without me having to chase him. It was an old silver Vauxhall Astra, a mess but I’m no car guy. If you gave me a horse and it took me where I wanted to go, I’d ride it. I climbed into the driver’s seat and Tierney got in, obviously resigned to the fact that he was having to see through whatever it was that he had started. He glanced at me as the car groaned into life.

“You’ve had a drink,” he said. It was an accusation. It was true too.

“What are they going to do? Arrest me? I don’t think so,” I said. “And if we crash, I’ll make sure that we hit something on my side. Don’t worry.”

And with that we were away, windscreen wipers through the rain like machetes in the jungle. As I was turning out of the car park I looked down at Tierney’s hands, which were resting on his knees.

“You hurt yourself?”

Out of his coat sleeve stuck the end of a frayed bandage. Black at the edge with dirt and dust, and discoloured in the middle, a yellowish pink.

“Football injury,” was as much as he wanted to tell me. It didn’t look like a footballing injury and Tierney didn’t look like a footballer.

We passed the rest of the five-minute drive in silence. I watched everyone hurrying along the pavements, umbrellas held against the worst of the rain. It had once been glamourous—policing. Now I was sitting next to Glasgow’s worst burglar on relatively friendly terms and the car smelled of McDonald’s. I tried to remember the last time I had one. I was so busy thinking about this that I almost missed the junction. Tierney made a noise and I managed to make the corner.

The address was the ground-floor flat of a tenement. We sat for a minute studying the building. The two windows at the front belonged to our guy’s place. It was in darkness. The streetlights were on, fighting in vain against that grey dark to which Glasgow succumbs at night. If he was home, the lights would be on. Under one of the windows sat a pile of cardboard boxes and binbags. This heap almost reached the sill.

“Have you been here before?” I asked.

“Never.”

It was still freezing, the sound of the wind in orchestra with the pouring traffic of the motorway, but the rain had softened. The air was a light smir. At the top of the street, an old man was shuffling along behind a small Yorkie, illuminated by the lazy glow of the streetlight. In the opposite direction, I could just about make out the green roof of the cathedral between two high-rise towers. Tierney sauntered round the back of the car. He was being as cool as a cup of tea in the Sahara.

“Does he have a last name, this Legless Mick?”

Tierney shrugged.

“Not that I know of. I told you I’m not pals with him.”

The heels of my now-scuffed shoes clacked against the broken concrete path. I looked up at the building as we submerged into the darkness of the close. There was a light on in the flat above. The buzzing noises of a quiz show drifted through the darkness. In one of the other flats someone was hoovering. Tierney was sticking to my shoulder as if we were the front two in a long-distance race.

When we got to the door, I stepped aside.

“On you go,” I said.

He looked at me with his eyes wide and then at the door. He looked back at me and pointed.

“You want me to—” He didn’t finish his question, probably in the hope that if he didn’t put words to it, he would be less likely to have to do it. I shrugged and tilted my head.

“Well, it’s you that knows him,” I said. “Letter of introduction, remember.”

He shook his head and muttered under his breath, casting one last glance along the close and out onto the street. Framed by the entrance of the passageway, the dark silhouettes of the buildings across the street melted into the equal darkness of the sky. It was not a night to be relieved by moonlight. Somewhere out of sight, trees shivered in the wind.

I watched Tierney take a deep breath, expanding underneath that leather coat and then deflating again. He took a step forward. He lifted his hand. A car drove past.

“Wait.”

His hand hovered, clenched with paper-white knuckles, level with the door number. He turned questioningly, but I ignored him. Putting my hand on his shoulder, I manoeuvred him out of the way. He objected but I didn’t find it difficult to ignore his protestations. There was a thin sliver of metal where the door was supposed to meet the frame, the thinnest of lines, only noticeable because it had reflected in the car’s headlights. The door wasn’t locked, but not only wasn’t it locked, it wasn’t closed.

The quiet frightened me. Lots of things did, it was part of the job. This was getting stranger and stranger.

I thought about pinning Tierney to the wall opposite and throttling him until he gave me a straight story, but he wasn’t worth the effort. He would only obfuscate one lie with another. Besides, I hadn’t been to the gym in a while. There was every chance I would embarrass myself.

“Do you have a torch?” I whispered.

“Why would I have a torch?”

“Well, do you have a phone?”

He nodded and I stuck out my hand.

“Well, you have a torch, then.”

He folded his arms. The scent of garlic made its way between our hunched figures. Probably from the quiz-show family upstairs. What a life. Our hushed argument would have been comical to any onlooker had there been one.

“I’m not giving you my phone,” Tierney said.

“I just need the torch. I’m not going to check your hard drive, don’t worry. Or would you like to go first?”

That did the trick. He was reaching into his pocket so enthusiastically at one point I thought his shoulder was going to disappear into its depths. I took the phone and turned on the torch.

“We’re not going to knock?”

“The door’s open,” I said. “It’s basically an invitation.”

I pressed myself against the wooden board without putting any weight on it. I put my ear as near to the slim crack as possible. I thought I heard a drip, maybe something else—a creak, but the whistling of the wind confused everything. I slowly leant on the door and winced as it squeaked. I waited and almost started laughing when I saw Tierney, bright red and shifting from foot to foot. He’d obviously forgotten how to breathe. He saw me smiling and scowled.

It opened smoothly the rest of the way and I softly stepped around it, keeping the light pointed towards the ground in case there was something there to trip over. Again, I waited, slowing my breath. It was definitely a tap dripping, only a couple of feet away. There was no other noise. I didn’t like it. I reached around the door and waved for Tierney to follow me in. He couldn’t have caused more disruption if he was clay-pigeon shooting in a morgue. He kicked the door and sent it swinging into whatever had been sitting behind it, causing a massive crash. He then swore louder than he should have, considering we were there in place of a guerrilla troop. If that hadn’t alerted anyone to our presence, it was safe to assume there was no one here.

“Try and find the light switch,” I whispered. “And close the door.”

I swung the torchlight around the room while he scrambled against the wall behind me. It was the kitchen. There was a sink and the tap hadn’t quite been shut off. Every couple of seconds, a drop fell onto the grimy collection of dishes in the basin underneath. The place was a mess. Dirty plates and cutlery all over the worktops. A pile of laundry beside a washing machine, pouring from its door and onto the floor like a waterfall. Takeaway and pizza boxes strewn over the floor.

The room flared into light. I wasn’t caring anymore about being quiet. If this Legless Mick had a problem with me being in his kitchen, he shouldn’t have left the door open. The fridge was lying open too. The guy had a habit. The bulb had obviously puttered out a long time ago. Beside the sink, among the piles of dishes, a cigarette was limply perched in a full glass ashtray. I felt its tip. Cold. On top of the tumble dryer, which had been pulled out, a book sat. It was wrapped in a plastic sleeve. I picked it up and rifled through the pages. I held it for Tierney to see.

“Due back three months ago.” I laughed. He smiled too, but it was a semipro effort at most.

In the corner of the room, opposite the outside door, two more doors stood, one on each wall.

“Which one?” I asked.

Instantly, he chose the one that was directly opposite the entrance. He didn’t see the fun in the game. Then again, he didn’t seem to be enjoying the entire situation. I was getting the sense that he had more skin in it than I did.

“Lighten up, mate,” I said, patting him on the shoulder as I strode by, ignoring his choice and opening the other door.

And, out of the darkness, something came. A flurry of limbs, a deep guttural noise. I was on my back without knowing how it happened, cracking my head off the linoleum, and there was a growling weight on my chest. Then, it wasn’t. I heard Tierney scream and saw him in the corner of my swimming vision lashing out at something white. I rolled over and pushed myself onto my knees.

A dog. Muscles bulging under its mangy fur. Through its pointed teeth a horrible grating sound was proceeding. Tears streaming down his face, Tierney was kicking at it wildly, but to no avail. It had latched onto his injured forearm and swung from it. This was certainly a determined mauling. His bandage had unravelled and flowed behind them, suspended in the air as they moved around the room screaming and grunting. It gave the situation a lyrical effect, as if they were enacting a rhythmic-gymnastics routine.

Blood dripped from the corners of the dog’s demonic mouth. As I watched, I noticed that the body of the dog was marked with scars. Some newer than others, all different shapes. Mottled clumps of pink-white tissue. Red lines drawn on its back. Its skin was stretched over its ribs. It was hungry and probably terrified. Neither of which worked in Tierney’s favour.

I stood, took a step, and booted the dog as hard as I could in its abdomen. It whined and let go of Tierney’s arm. I winced, wishing it was Tierney I’d got to thump. I wouldn’t have felt so bad about that. It was thrown on its side against the line of cupboards and lay there for a moment, dazed. I took our chance. Grabbing his coat, I pulled Tierney into the other room. The dog was up again and diving across the room as I closed the door. It crashed into the other side of the wood.

 

Read the exciting conclusion in this month’s issue on sale now!

Copyright © 2025 An Informant by Adam Wilson