Gross Domestic Product: 11

Chapter Eleven.

Connor Yeardley looked at the young, black-haired boy sitting across the aisle with his mother. The kid was filled with curiosity, and his mother was doing her best to accommodate him by answering his increasingly tough “whys?” He had to admire the woman, she was both patient and knew her stuff. It was unusual to see a mother and child on a flight like this, the newly established morning flight from Docklands to Glasgow. All the other seats were filled with business folks, in suits, reading broadsheets. The kid reminded Connor of himself at that age and he smiled as he watched the kid’s wide eyes stare out of the window in wonder. What was he seeing out there, or more accurately, what was he imagining? Conner recalled that it was, for him, always dinosaurs. It was what led him to study archaeology. He’d been doing well at first, ended up part of a dig team in the Philippines while still in college. That was where he had found the anomalous urn. It didn’t look very special, just an earthenware pot, still that rust colour, no ornate design. What it did have was something that no once ever could explain. If you held your ear up close, you could hear voices, the sounds of animals, noises of primitive industry. At first he thought he was imagining it but it turned out to be real. It somehow seemed to have captured the sounds of the era in which it was made. The professor who organised the expedition was however a strict rationalist and materialist and was not the sort of man who was curious, he had all the facts he needed, all he wanted to do was prove them. Well, he had no time for the anomalous urn and so Connor was left with it and suddenly without a position on the dig. The professor had not taken kindly to his discovery. He had no idea what to do with the urn and so destroyed any career he might have had within his field by writing a paper on it.

Despite his thorough work, no one would publish it. They called him a liar, a fraud, a crank, but no one took him, or his meticulous data seriously. No one that was but a kindly old gentleman from Department 23, a government agency that existed to make sure that things, such as an anomalous urn, stayed well out of the thoughts and minds of a skittish public. The old Gentleman, Maurice Whittaker, offered him a job and that came with an invitation into a whole world of strangeness that Connor had never assumed possible, let alone being awkward enough to be real. He had worked for the department ever since, his job, as ever to seek out the unique artefacts and phenomenon that could undermine the rather successful rationalist materialist narrative of statistical averages. Somewhere along the line the OA also offered him a job as an appraiser of those things that were odd but that Department 23 and other agencies across the globe did not demand destroyed or kept in locked vaults for further analysis.

Both jobs worked out quite well together. That was why he was heading to Glasgow. Why else would anyone of sound mind travel to Glasgow if not for work?

He had only been there once before, in the mid-eighties, after a rather vigorous and malevolent possession of a child in an impoverished district known as Drumchapel. The thing had been a disaster. There were gangsters, cultists, the police, the clergy all muddled up in it; all of whom had made matters worse. The lad was finally exorcised by some experienced operatives back at HQ. It had been an ugly business all round.

Now, however, The OA claimed the tragically named art historian Rupert Baird had stumbled across one of the Ghost Lights. So to Glasgow it was. He knew this was mostly an OA job, but the few Ghost Lights that remained loose in the world seemed to be attractors for other odd phenomenon, so he knew he had to keep his wits about him. Glasgow itself was always coming up for one reason or another on the Department 23 reports, mostly due to the antics of the supernatural denizens, which was not his job to deal with. Still, the stories about that Grandfather Clock and the Corpse-Doll kept coming in, they had been coming in since the sixties, but no one could ever pinpoint who owned them or where they were at any given time.

Just the previous year they were said to be responsible for the death and insanity of three individuals involved in organised crime, one of whom, a man called Duncan Sim known as Mental Dunkie had given up crime and fled to Spain. Connor had interviewed him but the man did not wish to speak of what happened.

One day it would end up on his desk but today it was all about the Ghost Light. If it was indeed genuine, Baird stood to make an obscene amount of money at auction but Connor was not convinced it was. All of them had been accounted for except for two Paelben’s Star and The Flames of Iraal, both of which were suspected to be in the hands of private collectors in Eastern Europe. He’d never heard of someone faking one, so this left him wondering if Baird was either mistaken or had discovered another. If it was indeed an undiscovered Ghost Light, the lucky bugger could probably purchase a small country or two if he so desired.

Connor would be paid well in that case, of course the Department would expect it’s cut. Government funding was minimal, since most of the government had not one clue that the Department existed and most who did were either sceptical or treated it like an old fashioned hang over of the Victorian Order of the Rose Cross, it’s predecessor. The captain’s voice came over the speaker announcing they’d be landing in ten minutes. Connor stretched as best he could, preparing to get off and out as quickly as possible. He caught a glimpse out of the window. It was pouring with rain and the sky was still black.

Far below, Skinner walked out through the rickety sliding doors of the Accident and Emergency department and into the cold wet morning, stitched and wrapped up. His back was already itching and throbbing but at least there was nothing serious, a couple of broken ribs. There was a few exhausted looking relatives of patients standing outside smoking. An old man and woman, a young mother and her son. He lit up a cigarette, waited for his taxi to arrive and looked up to see a small aeroplane high above. The morning shuttle from London, he assumed. He’d spent almost sixteen hours in A&E. Three of which had him sitting in the busy waiting room while the staff behind the doors dealt with a sequence of O.D.’s, badly beaten drunks, badly beaten wives and two kids who’d been run over by a bus.

He’d spent another four in one of the little observation units. Two more waiting to get X-Rays. Another two waiting to get the results of the X-rays. He would have been out sooner if someone in one of the other observation units hadn’t flat-lined but that screwed things up. He actually had to wait four more hours, but he’d dozed off so that hadn’t been too bad. They woke him up, plucked out the glass, stitched up the wounds and wrapped his ribs up with a tight bandage and gave him a tetanus and penicillin shot for good measure then sent him on his not so merry way.

He hated hospitals. A taxi drove into the ambulance bay. The window slid down and a tired miserable looking man with clumps of grey hair and heavy eyelids shouted “Skinner.”

Skinner threw the remains of his cigarette into one of the puddles, walked over and got in. “Morning,” he said.

“Where you aff to?” the driver asked, his voice, a rattling and rasping thing that reminded Skinner of the voice of the singer Captain Beefheart.

“Aberdour Street, please,” Skinner replied.

The driver grunted and started off. After they were onto the Govan Road the driver decided to speak “See the game last night?”

“I did not, no,” Skinner answered. “Don’t really follow the football much.”

“Don’t blame you,” He muttered.

Skinner knew the driver was just making idle chit-chat, being personable in the hope of a tip. “You just startin’ or finishin’,” Skinner asked.

“You’re ma last wan, then I’m offski, me an’ the wife, two weeks in Sri Lanka,” The driver bragged.

“Very nice, a special occasion?” Skinner asked.

“Aye, oor thirtieth anniversary, wid you believe?” The driver chuckled.

“Thirty years, that’s a long time, if you’re robbed a bank you’d have been out long ago.” Skinner replied, jokingly.

The driver gave an obligatory laugh. “Whit aboot yerself, son? Got any holidays planned?”

It gave Skinner pause. He’d never been asked that question. He’d never been on holiday either, not that he could remember. His parents might have taken him to the seaside once or twice when he was too young for him to ever recall but certainly he’d never wilfully taken time off. This led him to wonder what it even meant to take time off. He’d never worked a nine to five, he just left school at thirteen and did what he needed to survive, to make money, to get some respect from those weak links in Morton’s empire, maybe some power. He’d fucked up that plan twice before he’d turned twenty. He’d not been in Glasgow long when he and his lads murdered the wrong villains. The Sisters had shown him to what efforts they would go just to ruin those who stepped out of line. Those poor lads, he couldn’t even remember their names. “Nothing planned. You know how it is.”

The driver had already concluded what to make of Skinner. Skinner didn’t particularly care. “Aye, you young lads, always on the go, eh?” The driver replied.

“Something like that, aye. So, Sri Lanka eh? Been before?” Skinner asked.

“Never, this’ll be my first time. It looks stunning,” The driver answered.

That was it. The conversation faded to silence as the car went under the Kingston Bridge and didn’t start up again until the driver asked him whereabouts in Aberlour Street he wanted. It was only a few yards before he told the driver to stop there and after some negotiation on fare, he was out the taxi, up the stairs and right into his bed.

The phone rang and he wasn’t certain if, had he just dozed off? There was a slash of grey light from between his curtains. The phone rang again. It was light outside, he had nodded off. What time was it, he wondered? He checked his watch. The phone rang again. Ten to ten. He’d been asleep for more two hours. The phone rang again. It was beginning to annoy him. He stretched over and answered it. “Skinner here.”

“Alright Gordon?” answered Giddy Allerdyce.

“What is it Giddy?” Skinner asked. He had no time for Giddy’s bullshit.

“Sorry big man, I just thought you were comin’ tae see that lamp fae those boys I told you aboot.”

“Ah shit, was that now?” Skinner said, realising as he said it, that indeed it was. He considered just hanging up and going back to sleep.

“Aye. Daft Pete. He’s here the noo.” Giddy said.

“Right, give me twenty minutes.” Skinner sighed. If this all turned out to be a waste of time, he would not be a happy man. He hated dealing with junkies, didn’t trust them, couldn’t trust them. If this turned out to be some scam, he’d make sure there were two less smackheads by lunchtime. He hung up.

“Daft Pete. Whit sort of name is that? Fuck sake, what are you letting yourself in for Gordon?” He asked himself, but he didn’t need an answer, it was trouble, and trouble was always interesting.