One

“Mind ah wiz sayin’ thit efter Barry’s pairty wee Shona telt us somebody hid lifted her weed?”

Sniffs McKenzie had the room, and he knew it.

This was not unusual. Sniffs could walk into a room full of people discussing funerals, tax returns, the war, the price of fags, or whether that new lassie in the chemist had fake tan or a medical condition, and within ten minutes the room would belong to him. Not because he was wise, exactly. Not because he was handsome, though in certain lights and after enough vodka he had once been described as “no bad if ye ignore the teeth.” Not because people loved him, though some did, against their better judgement.

No. Sniffs got the room because he was a story with legs.

It helped that the room was The Argyle, and The Argyle was in West Calder, and West Calder was in West Lothian, which is a place that does not exist in the same way other places exist. Ask anyone from Edinburgh and they will tell you it is basically Glasgow. Ask anyone from Glasgow and they will tell you it is basically Edinburgh. Ask anyone who actually lives there and they will tell you, at length, that it is neither, that they have never once said “ken” in their life, that they do not support either half of the Old Firm, and that the man who cut them up at the Lizzie Bryce roundabout was definitely from Livingston. Then they will say “ken” twice in the next sentence, order a Tennent’s, and check the Celtic score.

West Lothian is the bit in the middle that both cities drive through on the M8 without looking. It has the patter of one and the prices of the other, the bings of neither, and a deep suspicion of anyone who points any of this out. Sniffs pointed it out constantly. It was one of the reasons people occasionally tried to hit him.

He was sitting in the corner booth, one knee up against the underside of the table, one hand wrapped around a half-empty glass of cola, the other sketching shapes in the air as though he was conducting an orchestra made entirely of bad decisions.

Across from him, Wee Billy was grinning into his pint. Wee Billy was six foot three and had been six foot three since the second year of high school. The name had been given to him at Polbeth Primary by a dinner lady with a caustic sense of humour and had never once been reconsidered. Beside Wee Billy, Davie Donuts was trying to open a packet of dry roasted peanuts with the intensity of a man defusing a bomb. Wee Shona was at the bar, talking to Jules, and pretending not to listen.

She was listening, everyone was.

“Aye well,” Sniffs said, leaning forward, “Ah foond oot it wiz that theivin' prick Johnston.”

There was a groan from the table. Not a shocked groan. More the sound of several men receiving confirmation of something they had already known in their souls.

“Johnston?” Davie said. “Again?”

“Aye, Johnston. aye, again. The man’s a fuckin’ Hoover wi trainers. Anyhin no nailed doon, he’s got it. Anyhin nailed doon, he’ll come back wi a claw hammer.”

“He’s been in Addiewell twice,” Billy said.

“He’s been in Addiewell twice an’ came oot wi mair stuff than he went in wi,” Sniffs said. “Scientists huv looked at it. How can you come oot o' jail wi mair stuff than ye went in wi?”

Wee Billy put both hands up. “Ah never grassed, by the way.”

“Naw, naw,” Sniffs said, turning a finger on him. “You never grassed. Ahm no sayin you grassed. You gave me information in the spirit of community justice.”

“That sounds like grassin,” Davie said.

“It isnae grassin if the cunt deserves it,” Sniffs said. “That’s law.”

“It isnae law.”

“It’s natural law.”

“It’s no even that.”

Sniffs ignored him. “Anyhow, it wiz wee Billy thit telt us. He wisnae grassin or nuthin likes; bit when ye nick somehin fae yer mate’s burd then ye git whit ye fuckin’ deserve in mah opinion.”

At the bar, Wee Shona rolled her eyes but could not quite stop a smile from escaping.

“Anyhow,” Sniffs said, warming to his theme, “Like ah wiz sayin’, ah fired doon tae Johnston’s door an ah battered the daft cunt and goat wee Shona’s gear back tae hur fuckin quick smart likes.”

“You fuckin' battered him?” Jules shouted from behind the bar.

Sniffs looked wounded. “Jules, please, don't shout yer obscenities. This is a family establishment. Whisper them.”

“This isnae a family establishment.”

“It’s got crisps.”

“It’s a pub.”

“A pub wi crisps. Families eat crisps.”

“There’s a man asleep in the toilets.”

“Families sleep.”

Jules gave him the look she reserved for men who had used up the soft edges of her patience. “Did you batter Johnston?”

Sniffs sniffed. The sniff was exactly why he was called Sniffs. A playground at Polbeth Primary, aged nine, a swing that had come back faster than expected, a nose that had never quite been put back the way it came, and a year of sniffing afterwards that had buried the name Alex so thoroughly that only doctors, judges, and his mother ever dug it up.

“Ah administered a brief but educational intervention.”

Wee Billy nodded solemnly. “He battered him.”

“Ah wiz measured,” Sniffs said.

“He went through a hedge.”

“That wiz gravity.”

“He went through it backwards.”

“Gravity’s got a sense ay humour.”

There was laughter, and Sniffs let it roll, taking a drink of cola with the satisfaction of a man whose nonsense had once again been accepted as legal tender.

“Twat hid twinty quid in eh’s wallet in aw,” he added pulling out a crumpled note. “Anywan wantin’ a drink?”

That got more laughter, because that was Sniffs all over. A man who could make a moral argument for theft recovery, assault, and buying a round with confiscated funds before the ice in his cola had melted.

But that was the thing about Sniffs McKenzie. People mistook the noise for the man.

They saw the shaved head gone fuzzy at the edges, the old black hoodie, the battered trainers, the hands that had known fights and jobs and doorframes and hospital waiting rooms. They heard the swearing and the West Lothian vowels and the half-mad stories about schemes, hills, police, ghosts, dogs, ministers, and one memorable evening involving a stolen traffic cone and a youth worker from Falkirk. They smelled the weed on him sometimes, or thought they did, because some reputations hang about a person long after the room has changed.

They did not always notice that Sniffs noticed things.

He noticed, for instance, that Wee Shona had laughed at the Johnston story, but her laugh had been half-hearted. He noticed that she kept looking towards the window, not at herself reflected in the dark glass like most people did, but past it, to the street beyond. He noticed Jules had turned the radio down twice and then pretended she hadn’t. He noticed Christine, who owned the pub and feared no man since the death of her second husband and the banning of karaoke, had been checking her phone every few minutes, and had twice gone to the back door of the pub and stood there with her coat half on, like a woman deciding whether to go and check on something, and twice come back without it.

Christine has left Sniffs in charge of the door on the Friday with Jules on the bar, as her daughter Ella had rang worried about a man in the garden. It had turned out to be nothing, but Christine was still nervous about it.

He noticed, too, without quite noticing, that he had woken that Saturday morning with the feeling of having left something switched on in another room, and had not gone to check.

He noticed that this week had felt different from most weeks.

Mrs Callaghan’s little terrier had been going off its head outside the bookies for three nights running, which was normal for an animal that hated everything with the consistency of a religion. What was not normal was that the big soft Staffie from above the chip shop had joined in, and the collies from the farm road, and the greyhound belonging to the man asleep in the toilets. Every dog in the town had, since roughly Thursday, come to an agreement about the alley beside the bank. None of them would walk past it. Sniffs, who had a lot of time for dogs and very little for bankers, had filed this under things that were definitely suspicious. In Sniffs' opinion people were difficult to trust, dogs tended to know when shit was happening.

He noticed the army trucks too.

Everyone noticed the army trucks, obviously. It was hard not to notice a convoy of green monsters growling through Main street at half eight on the Wednesday morning earlier in the week. But people noticed them the way people noticed roadworks or drunk uncles: loudly at first, then with the grim acceptance of people who had jobs to do and mortgages to pay.

"Is that Johnston's twenty quid?" Jules asked looking at the crumpled note being offered by Sniffs. " "

"Naw ahm only kidding I widnae..."

He was abruptly cut off by a ridiculously loud engine noise from outside. Everyone in the pub was taken aback by the severity of it, and suddenly the subject changed from Johnston and his sticky-fingered proclivities to the current weirdness that has been quietly enveloping their home town.

“That a fuckin' helicopter flying by. Low fuckin level in aw.” Davie said, having stood up at the window, his voice was curiously flat and even. "A fuckin helicopter about 40 foot oaf the bank's roof. Where the fuck it is gaun?" He paused " What do ah mean 'Gaun'? why am ah even askin' that question? Why's thir a fucking low flying helicopter ower West fucking Calder?"

“Breich,” said Billy. “ It'll be heading up tae Breich. Ma cousin’s big in the Territorials. Says they’ve got the auld bing road shut aff. Tents an’ that. Generators. Nae cunt in or oot.”

“Yer cousin’s aboot as big in the Territorials as ahm big in the fuckin SAS,” Sniffs said, but the jibe was half-hearted now.

Sniffs also got up and stood next to Davie at the window. He looked at the evening sky, still bright for half eight in the Scottish summer. He could see more helicopters in the distance, and then there were more green-hued trucks and jeeps racing by the window. Nothing on the sides. No regiment, no numbers, not so much as a badge. Sniffs had watched every film about the army, and he knew that when the army did not want you to know which bit of the army it was, that was the bit you did not want in your town.

The thing about Sniffs was, he kept noticing things long after everybody else had decided to stop.

A fortnight before, there had been a meteor shower over the Breich hills, two and a half miles out to the West and North of the town. That was what the Courier had called it anyway, using phrases like “rare celestial display” and “unconfirmed reports of ground impact” and “Edinburgh University researchers.” Half the town had gone up past the bings to watch. Davie had gone as well and had said it had been like fireworks, except the fireworks had come down instead of going up, and at the end there had been one big one that did not so much land as 'arrive with prejudice'. Sniffs had also read the whole article twice on the toilet and thought, newspapers talking pish again.

Talking pish was one of the few subjects in life in which he considered himself formally qualified.

The Courier had put the meteor shower on page seven, under a dispute over a hedge in Fauldhouse, and Sniffs, who had a professional interest in hedges, had found this suspicious. Page seven, that's a not real page for news, for sure.

Then Dr MacKinnon had gone missing.

She had gone up the hills four days after the shower and not come back down. It had been in the Courier two days after that, and it had made the front page because there is nothing a local paper loves more than a missing doctor. Local GP fails to return from hill walk. Police appeal. Family concerned. Anyone with information...

“Nice doctor she wiz in aw. Soarted mah piles oot nae bother.”

Sniffs had said that line to Billy earlier in the week and Billy had laughed so hard lager came out his nose. It was funny. It was also true. Dr MacKinnon had been one of the few doctors who could look at Sniffs and not see either a future statistic or a current problem. It was a while back now but one day, during an appointment about his septum, she had looked him in the eye and told him to stop drinking, and when he’d said he had, she had believed him. She had asked how many days. He had told her the number,in months. She had said “good,” and nothing else, and he had walked out of the surgery with the peculiar feeling of having been, briefly, a person.

That kind of thing stuck with a man.

So when a well-spoken stranger stopped him outside the chip shop two nights ago, Sniffs had already been carrying Dr MacKinnon about in the back of his head like a stone in his shoe.

“Excuse me.”

Sniffs was halfway through deciding whether he could afford chips and curry sauce or whether his tea would consist of two rolls, cheese slices, and whatever Shona had in her cupboards that looked edible but technically belonged to a cat.

“Excuse me.”

“Eh?” Sniffs turned. “Aw right mate, whit is it?”

The man standing in front of him was neat in a way Sniffs mistrusted. Nice coat, nice shoes, nice teeth. Not rich exactly, but the kind of neat you got in Edinburgh, where people ironed things that did not need ironing. He was smiling. It was a good smile. It was the smile of a man who has been told he will be paid at the end of the evening.

“I wonder if you could tell me where the doctor’s surgery is?”

“Aye sure mate,” Sniffs said. “Yer gaun the wrang wey. Turn roond an’ keep gaun, right through the toon an’ oot the other side. It’s oan yer right jist afore ye run oot ay West Calder. Big new building. They jist moved aboot a year ago.”

“Oh right,” the man said. “I do think I saw that when I was passing. Thank you ever so much. I’m the new doctor here.”

“Nae bother doctor, hae a nice wan.”

“Yes, eh, you too. Thanks again.”

Sniffs sniffed. It was what he did.

A moment later the man sniffed in the exact same way.

It was a small thing. Sniffs would not have noticed it, except that noticing was what he did, and the sniff had come a beat after his own; the way a bad singer at karaoke comes in just slightly too late after the words are highlighted on the screen. The man had also not looked down the street when Sniffs pointed. Not once. People always look where you point. It is one of the oldest things a person does. Dogs even do it. The man had kept his eyes on Sniffs the whole time, pleasant, patient, the way you watch a kettle.

And he smelled of the surgery. Like how you would imagine a doctor would smell after a hard day of writing prescriptions and using two litres of hand gel. Sniffs could smell him from four feet away, in the wind.

Then a horn blasted and Sniffs realised he had started to walk onto the road, away from the watching doctor. He had to run across the rest of the road to avoid death-by-army-truck, one hand raised to the DPM-clad driver in the ancient Scottish gesture meaning both apology and fuck you.

New doctor, thought Sniffs, reaching the other pavement with his heart doing a drum solo. Funny, ah wiz reading somehin in the Courier the other week about Dr MacKinnon goan missing up in the Breich hills, eftir that daft wee meteor shower aw they cunts fi Edinburgh Uni were gettin aw hoat an bothered aboot. Must be hur replacement. That wiz quick. Ye cannae get a plumber in this toon fur a fortnight, bit a doctor goes up a hill an disnae come doon an they’ve got a new wan oot the box inside a week.

He looked back.

The well-spoken man was still standing where Sniffs had left him.

Not walking.

Not heading for the surgery.

Looking at Sniffs.

Then the next set of army trucks slowly rolled between them, and when it passed the man was gone.

“Sniffs?”

The voice pulled him back to the window, the pub, the cola, and the packet of peanuts spilled out over the table.

“You listening?” said the speaker standing at the door to the pub next to where Davie was still keeping shottie at the window. It was another Argyle regular, Stevie the spark.

“Aye,” Sniffs said. “Naw. Whit?”

Stevie pointed down the road through the window, “A couple of big police dudes have just walked into your stair.”

Sniffs blinked. “Whit stair?”

“Your stair, your stair door, yah fud,” Stevie said. “Yours is the stair next to the Chinky, across frae the bank aye? Two big polis, in ah bet thir goin tae yer flat.”

Sniffs looked to the bar. Wee Shona was watching him, "What huv you done noo?” she said.

“Me?” Sniffs put a hand to his chest. “That is hurtful, that. Deeply hurtful. Why is it aye whit huv ah done? Maybe they’re collecting fur charity.”

“They’re police,” Shona said.

“Police can huv charities.”

“No yours.”

“Maybe ah’ve won somehin.”

“Alex.”

There it was. The name. Sniffs pulled himself away from the window, muttering, because when Shona said 'Alex' the conversation was over no questions asked.

He had not done anything recently. Not anything police-worthy. The Johnston incident had been days ago, and anyway Johnston reporting a bit of a slapping, which he earned, would require him to explain the stolen ’teenth and why he had been found lying backwards through Mrs McGhee’s hedge with his jeans halfway down his arse because, according to Johnston, “the branches took them.”

Sniffs dragged his jacket on and exited the pub with as much grace as he could muster.

'Ah'll be back in a bit' he said pushing past Stevie and out of the door.

Outside, the air had that metallic smell it sometimes had before rain, the kind that came off the bings and sat in the street like it was waiting for a bus. Somewhere distant, another heavy engine moved through the town, toward the Breich road, towards whatever it was the Courier had put on page seven.

The walk from The Argyle to his own stair door was 30 seconds if you did not stop: down the street, past the dentist’s in the old house, past the Chinese with its window permanently steamed up, and then his stair, with the bank directly across the road.

Sniffs did not look across the street at the alley as he passed. This was not a decision. It was more like the way you do not look at a man being sick on the last train from Edinburgh. It was an alley. It had a wheelie bin in it and a smell of piss that predated the bank. Sniffs walked past it with his hands in his pockets and the back of his neck doing something it had not been asked to do.

By the time Sniffs reached the third floor, his mind had rehearsed six possible crimes and rejected five of them as either too old or not technically crimes if you understood context.

The two policemen were indeed at his door and were, as advertised, huge.

One was broad and red-faced, with the look of a man who had once played rugby and still believed this counted as a personality. Sniffs knew him, distantly, the way you know everyone in West Lothian distantly: he was from Bathgate, and his mother had once worked with Sniffs’ mother at the Co-op in Polbeth, and neither of them was going to mention it. The other was taller, thinner, and somehow worse. He had eyes that took measurements. Sniffs did not know him, and got the strong impression that he had arrived in the town at roughly the same time as the army trucks.

“Mr McKenzie?” said the broad one, in a fairly large voice. “Can we come in?”

Sniffs looked from one to the other. “Depends.”

The thin one’s eyebrow moved half an inch. “Depends upon what?”

“If ahm in some kind o' trouble”

Thin cop looked at broad cop and then back at Sniffs, “No, at least not in the way you would think of as trouble.”

“That's good then is it?”

“So...may we come in?”

Sniffs shrugged and pushed past, unlocked and opened the door, ushering the cops inside, because refusing entry to two huge cops was the sort of thing innocent men did in films just before becoming very tired suspects.

His flat smelled faintly of toast, weed, and old carpet. RadgeHeid the Rogue was still on the World of Warcraft login screen because Sniffs had forgotten to switch off his computer after his last round with an ogre king. There was a bong on the windowsill which he did not move, because it was too late and they were policemen and not that stupid.

The broad cop stood in the middle of the living room and looked at the bong and then at the ceiling. The thin one went to the window and looked down at the street. Three floors up, Sniffs’ living room had the best view in West Calder of the bank, the cash machine, and the alley beside it. It had never before struck him as an asset.

“So... do you know a Mr Johnston?” the broad one asked, with a slight smile.

“Everybody knows Johnston.”

“When did you last see him?”

Sniffs considered lying, then remembered he was not good at lying to police unless he had practised.

“Couple ay nights ago.”

“Where?”

“At his door.”

“Why?”

“Social visit.”

The broad cop looked at him.

Sniffs sighed. “He stole somehin. Ah retrieved it.”

“What did he steal?”

“Personal property.”

“What kind?”

“Herbal.”

The thin cop turned from the window.

The broad one closed his notebook slowly. “Mr McKenzie, we’re not here about cannabis.”

“Nice change ay pace.”

“We’re here because Mr Johnston has been reported missing.”

Something cold moved in Sniffs’ stomach.

Missing was not unusual for Johnston. Johnston went missing every second weekend, usually because he owed money, had annoyed a boyfriend, or had woken up in Armadale with no shoes and a phone full of photographs he did not remember consenting to. Missing was, for Johnston, a lifestyle.

But the word landed badly all the same. It landed in the same place Dr MacKinnon had landed, and it sat down next to her.

“Missing how?”

“He hasn’t been seen since last night,” said the thin cop. “His sister says he phoned her from outside The Argyle. He sounded distressed.”

“The Argyle?”

“Around ten forty-five.”

Sniffs thought of the pub door last night. The shut door. Christine putting her coat on with her phone still in her hand, saying Ella had rung from the house, saying there was some man in a black coat standing in her back garden, saying you’re on the door, Sniffs, saying nobody in after half ten, and saying don’t you dare, and going as she placed the keys in his hand. Then later, Jules at the far end of the bar with her back to him, rinsing glasses. Johnston outside, slurring and pleading and trying every cheap trick in the book to get in.

He had not let him in.

Something pressed at the back of his memory, but he pushed it away before it could take shape.

“Johnston’s aye distressed,” Sniffs said. “It’s his natural state. But aye, I spoke to him last night.”

The broad cop did not smile. “What did he say to you?”

“No much.”

“Mr McKenzie.”

Sniffs looked at the carpet.

“He was trying to get into the pub and he said there wiz someone watchin him.”

The room became very quiet. The thin cop had gone still at the window in a way that Sniffs, who had been in a lot of rooms with a lot of policemen, did not recognise. Policemen did not go still. This one had stopped like a broken clock.

“Who?” the thin cop asked.

“Dinnae ken. He said someone at the side ay the bank. He wiz trying tae get in the pub efter closing. Ah thought he wiz at it.”

“At it?”

“Trying tae get a pint. Johnston would report a fuckin werewolf if he thought it’d get him a Guinness.”

“And did you look to see if you recognised the figure?”

Sniffs opened his mouth.

Closed it.

Because no. He had not looked, he had not even opened the door.

He had put his hands on the door. Both hands, flat, the way you do when you are about to push a really heavy piece of furniture. And the door had been cold. It had been the last night of July. Doors are not cold on the last night of July, not even in West Calder. And the cold had not stayed in the door. It had come through the wood and into his palms and up his arms like something that had been waiting on the other side for a hand to hold.

He had felt something.

Not heard. Not seen.

Felt.

The summer before last, Sniffs had been up Ben Vorlich with a disposable camera, and near the top he had walked backwards to get the hills to the north into the picture. His heel had knocked a rock. He had looked around, and then down, and then further down, four hundred feet of nothing to the scree at the foot of the south face. He had thrown himself forward onto the grass and lain there with his fingers dug into the turf while a cold knot drove itself into his stomach and something tried to lift the top off his head. The walk back down had taken three hours and he had seen the edge in every step of it.

That was what had come through the door. Not a noise. Not a shape. An edge.

He had pulled his hands off the wood and stepped back so fast his head hit the wall behind him, and his fingers had gone looking for turf and found plaster.

And then, after telling Johnston through the door to go home and sleep it off, he had opened the inner door to the lounge and had stood at the bar smiling like a man who is working hard to not think.

The broad cop watched him as this recollection flew through Sniffs' head.

“Mr McKenzie?” he said eventually, trying to bring him back to the here and now.

But before Sniffs could answer, blue light flickered across the living room wall.

Once.

Twice.

Not police blue. Police blue spirals and has a rhythm to it, and a noise somewhere behind it, and a man who has lost all patience with the world.

And it was not lightning.

It was simply a sudden shock of quiet solid light. Flash, here and gone.

Sniffs turned to the window.

Across the street and three floors down, at the mouth of the alley beside the bank, a man in a black coat stood under the streetlamp.

He was too tall or too thin, neither, maybe both.

He was standing the way the well-spoken doctor had stood outside the chip shop earlier in the week. Not waiting. Not going anywhere.

The thin cop moved first, crossing to the window with a hand at his radio. He did not speak into it. Sniffs noticed that. He put his hand on it the way you put your hand on a dog.

The light flickered again, silent and pale, and for a moment the alley behind the man was not dark but deep, the way water is deep, the way the night is deep.

Then the light flashed again and then was gone, so was the man.

Somewhere down the street, every dog in West Calder started barking. All of them, at once.

Sniffs swallowed.

“Officers,” he said, and hated that his voice had gone small. “Ah think Johnston might be in a bit ay bother.”