The Dark Remains

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All cities are riddled with crime. It comes with the territory. Gather enough people together in one place and malignancy is guaranteed to manifest in some form or other. It’s the nature of the beast. In the awareness of the citizens the condition usually lies dormant. The preoccupations of our daily lives obscure any dramatic sense of threat. It’s only intermittently (when, say, an Ibrox disaster occurs or a Bible John hits the front pages) that people may focus on how close to random risk they have been living. They can sometimes experience a renewed awareness that a kind of ubiquitous, threatening strangeness is haunting the edges of apparent normalcy. They realise again how thin the membrane is on which we walk, liable to fall through at any moment into darker places. They may wonder if they are as safe as they thought they were.

Commander Robert Frederick of the Glasgow Crime Squad was thinking of these things. He was aware of a potential risk that his city might be about to have that comfortable sense of security disturbed. A man called Bobby Carter had disappeared. His family had that afternoon informed the police that he hadn’t been home for the past two days. This in itself, as far as Frederick and his squad were concerned, wasn’t exactly a cause for deep mourning. Bobby Carter was a career criminal. Or rather, a venally clever lawyer who didn’t so much rub shoulders with criminals as steep in the same polluted bathwater as them. Well educated and from a decent family, Carter had chosen to spend his professional life protecting and guiding the scum of Frederick’s particular patch of earth. His job was to move dirty money around, putting it out of reach of the taxman.

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