GUILT TRIPPER by Geoff Small Page B

Still, they had me fooled as
well. I was the last to know what was going on.”
     “You’ve lost me
Bob.”
     “It’s all a sham
Danny. The Squeaky Kirk — it’s a fraud. Back when we started out, Billy’s old man
ran up a big gambling debt. Rex McLeod’s boys were sent to retrieve or bereave,
but when the Big Man found out that his son had a band he offered him an escape
route. He was willing to wave the full ten grand, pay for Squeaky Kirk
recording sessions and even create a record label for us. The only condition, that
he could launder his ill-gotten gains through spurious sales of records and
merchandise. After our first album I was wandering around Glasgow like I owned
the place, oblivious that we’d only shifted two hundred units of the sixty
thousand sales going through the books. We were playing in front of twenty
people some nights on the continent, yet still managing to shift two thousand
CDs, T-shirts and programmes. The irony is that after my arrest we actually
started selling albums for real, though only about five thousand nationwide.”
     “What about the six
hundred odd thousand sales reported in the press?”
     “Oh come on Danny! Do
you really think McLeod hasn’t got people working in the media, weaving illusions
for him and lending his scams credibility?”
     There was a pause,
during which Danny no doubt tried to digest the extent of the deception, before
interrogating Bob further.
     “So I take it he was
paying you a wage?”
     “Two hundred and
fifty quid a week plus touring expenses. The cars and suits were on credit and
Ingrid was able to fund most of our nights out, after she landed a well-paid TV
commercial when we returned from Italy. Stupid cow believed I was paying
thousands out a week on mortgages, and so thought she was getting the best end
of the deal. Not only did she think I was paying for the apartment and our
retreat up on the coast, but a couple of places I’d invented in St Tropez and
Mauritius too…what a friggin’ joke eh?”
     “How the hell did
you afford those houses then? And what about the little knocking shop over in
Govan?”
     “They all belong to
Rex. Of course, as soon as I attracted the attention of the police he kicked me
out. Do you know where I’ve been living this past year?”
     “Where?”
     “Herman’s.”
     “Friggin’ hell,
after all that’s gone on?”
     “One frosty night, I
was driving round Calton when I saw him with some church group, handing out
cups of hot soup to the hookers. I felt obliged to take him home…though I don’t
know why, not after all the harm he’s done me. When we got there, his house was
lit up like a bloody Christmas tree…there was a friggin’ party going on! There
must have been fifteen of the dirty rotten scumbags in the place — old winos
with beards and smack head louts, supping out of cans from cardboard crates,
neatly stacked up along the living room wall, all the way up to the ceiling.”
     “Jesus.”
     “He’d only been down
to the Great Eastern and invited everyone back to live with him. Said it was an
act of contrition, for what happened to that mouthy little bitch Curran. Also,
he was trying to emulate you.”
     “Me?”
     “Yes. I’m afraid
you’re his new hero. You’re all he ever talks about, ‘Danny this’ and ‘Danny
that’. He’s been trying to do with the down and outs what you’ve done with the
kids…it’s pathetic. At one stage he locked all the booze away until they sat
through his music appreciation classes in the kitchen.”
     Danny blew his
cheeks out, a little spooked at being Herman’s new obsession. “And you moved in
there, with all that lot?”
     “Well, I’d been
living in a bed and breakfast, so I thought, if I can just get rid of the
freeloaders, Herman’s pad could make a good springboard for the future. So I
did, while he was attending an appointment up at the loony bin. I got Rex’s
lad, Jimmy, to come round with a team and scare