Cutting Room

Louise Welsh

Description

'Unputdownable' Sunday Times'I was hooked from page one' GuardianWhen Rilke, a dissolute auctioneer, comes upon a hidden collection of violent and highly disturbing photographs, he feels compelled to discover more about the deceased owner who coveted them. Soon he finds himself sucked into an underworld of crime, depravity and secret desire, fighting for his life.

Sujets

• Central Scotland
• Thriller

Informations

• Publié par: Canongate Books
• Date de parution: 01 novembre 1999
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781847673930
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Louise Welsh is an award-winning author of eight novels. The Cutting Room , her debut novel, won the Crime Writers’ Association John Creasey (New Blood) Dagger Award and the Saltire First Book of The Year Award. In 2018, she was named the Most Inspiring Saltire First Book Award winner by public vote. She is Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Glasgow. @louisewelsh00
Also by Louise Welsh Tamburlaine Must Die The Bullet Trick Naming the Bones The Girl on the Stairs A Lovely Way to Burn Death Is A Welcome Guest No Dominion The Second Cut

The Canons edition published in Great Britain, the USA and Canada in 2022 by Canongate Books Ltd, 14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE Distributed in the USA by Publishers Group West and in Canada by Publishers Group Canada First published in Great Britain by Canongate Books in 2002 canongate.co.uk Copyright © Louise Welsh, 2002 Excerpt from The Second Cut © Louise Welsh, 2022 The author wishes to thank the Scottish Arts Council for a writing bursary which enabled her to spend time on this novel The right of Louise Welsh to be identified as theauthor of this work has been asserted by her in accordancewith the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library ISBN 978 1 83885 090 6 eISBN 978 1 84767 393 0
To Ena and John
Contents

1 Never Expect Anything

2 Say Cheese

3 A Walk in the Park

4 The Final Frame

5 Leslie

6 The Nature of Pornography

7 Camera Club

8 TV Land

9 Caveat Emptor

10 Gilmartin’s

11 The Worm on the Bud

12 Making Up is Hard to Do

13 Steenie

14 The Imp of the Perverse

15 Abandon Hope

16 In the Shadow of the Necropolis



17 Inside the Frame

18 Trophies

19 Downhill from Here

20 Sale of the Century

21 The Reckoning

22 The Final Cut

23 Transcript

Epilogue: Soleil et Désolé

Extract from The Second Cut
1
Never Expect Anything

‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty,’ – that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know .
John Keats, ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’
NEVER EXPECT ANYTHING .
An old porter told me that my very first day. We called him Cat’s Piss. Mr McPhee to his face but always Cat’s Piss, or sometimes C. P. McPhee behind his back.
‘Never expect anything, son. They’ll tell you they’ve got the crown bloody jewels in their attic and all you’ll get’s guff. But sometimes – not often mind, just now and again – you’ll go to the pokiest wee hole, a council estate, high-rise even, and you’ll find a treasure. So keep an open mind, try and filter out the nonsense merchants, sure, but never look at a map and think there’ll be nothing there for us, because you can be surprised. I’ve been here thirty-five years and I’m still surprised at what we find and where we find it.’
‘Yes, Mr McPhee,’ I’d said. Looking all the while at a pile of furniture reaching almost to the ceiling and thinking, You stupid old git, thirty-five years in this place.
I’d not been thinking of McPhee as I drove to the call. I’m twenty-five years at the auction house, forty-three years of age. They call me Rilke to my face, behind my back the Cadaver, Corpse, Walking Dead. Aye, well, I may be gaunt of face and long of limb but I don’t smell and I never expect anything.
I didn’t expect anything driving along the Crow Road towards Hyndland. I hadn’t taken the message myself but the call sheet said, McKindless, three storeys plus attic, deceased, valuation and clearance . I didn’t need to know anything else except the address and that was in my pocket.
I hate Hyndland. You’ll find its like in any large city. Green leafy suburbs, two cars, children at public school and boredom, boredom, boredom. Petty respectability up front, intricate cruelties behind closed doors. Most of the town houses have been turned into small apartments. The McKindless residence was the largest building in the street and the only one still intact. I parked and sat for a while looking at it. It dominated the road, a dark, sober façade intersected by three rows of darkened windows. No clue of what lay inside except you could bet it would be expensive. Tiny casement windows peeped from the slanted roof of the attic. More like five storeys in all including the basement. If we were lucky and the executor took our quote, this call might supply a whole sale. I was getting ahead of myself, there was nothing to say there was anything of use at all in the place – but the odds were for it. I turned the van into the driveway, noting the remnants of a garden. Last year’s crocuses pushing through the long grass – whoever had lived here was well enough last spring to organise their garden, this spring it was them that was planted.
Never expect anything.
Cat’s Piss should have added, ‘But be prepared: anything may happen.’
I slicked back my hair and wondered if I should take Joan-in-the-office’s advice and have it cut short. I had a feeling that perhaps a short-back-and-sides could be the prelude to romance for Joan – well, if Joan had been Joe I might have thought about it but the way things were I might as well keep my locks. Sure they were grey but they went with the look.
I took off my shades – it’s only polite to make eye contact on the first meeting – rang the doorbell twice and waited. I was about to ring a third time when I heard footsteps. I had expected someone in their forties – wealth of this kind usually finds a fair few relations willing to help with the burden of tying up the estate – but when the door was opened it was by a woman who wouldn’t be seeing eighty again. She was dressed like the respectable women from my childhood. Single string of pearls, heather twin-set, long tweed skirt, thick woollen tights and brogues. Her hair, though sparse, was set in stiff egg-white curls. Age had withered her. There was the beginning of a bend to her spine. She leant the whole of her weight, a good seven stone, against a plain wooden walking stick.
There was a crooked man and he had a crooked house .
‘Mr Rilke, Bowery Auctions.’
I handed her my card and let her look me up and down. I could almost hear her assessment: hair bad, tie, shirt, suit good, cowboy boots bad. Well, she had a point, but they were genuine snakeskin.
‘Madeleine McKindless. Come in.’
Her voice was young, with the authority of a schoolteacher.
The stained glass of the front door cast a red glow across the hallway, a staircase with an ornately carved mahogany banister was to our left, the parquet floor laid with thinning Turkish rugs; this family had been rich for a long time. A heavy mahogany table stood to the right of the door. It was bare, none of the usual family photographs, and I guessed she’d been doing some clearing out already.
I knew in an instant there was no way we were going to get the job. It was just too big to trust to a local auction house. She was a fly old bird getting us in to do a valuation then playing us off against the big boys.
‘Let’s go into the kitchen. It’s the only place I feel halfway comfortable in this mausoleum.’
She led me through the hallway and I followed her, slowly, down a set of stone steps worn thinner in the middle, by generations of McKindlesses no doubt. She favoured her left leg. I wondered if she was due a hip replacement and why she was making things hard for herself. Why take these stairs, with a whole house to choose from? The kitchen was on two levels, scullery on the lower level where I could make out an open door leading to the garden. A flask of coffee, some mugs and a plate of biscuits were already laid out on the huge kitchen table.
‘My brother’s home help laid out a refreshment for us. I suffer from arthritis and angina, among other things. I like to save my strength for non-domestic tasks.’
‘Very sensible.’
A smell of burning drifted in from the garden. I walked to the door and looked out onto a well tended lawn at the end of which burnt a bonfire. A gnomic gardener jabbed at the flames with a long rake. He caught my stare and raised his free hand in a half-defensive wave, like a man staving off a blow. He lowered his cap over his eyes and fed papers from a black refuse sack into the flames. Madeleine McKindless’s voice brought me back to the table.
‘You come well recommended, Mr Rilke.’
‘That’s good to know – we’ve been doing business in Glasgow for over a hundred years.’
Her eyes glanced me up and down like the quick click of a camera shutter. A brief smile. ‘I can believe it. My brother Roddy died three weeks ago, neither of us married, so I am left alone with rather a large task on my hands. You’ll be wondering why I’ve called you in – you’re a respectable firm but you’re a small firm and it might have made more sense for me to go with one of the London houses.’
‘It’s an obvious question.’
‘I want it done quick.’
‘I want it done quick.’
Blue eyes that used to be bluer looking straight at me.
I should have stopped right there and asked her why, but I was already making calculations in my head, adding up time, manpower and money, wheeling straight into business as she knew I would.
‘I’ll need to take a look around before I can give you a preliminary estimate of how long it’ll take. I’ll provide you with a rough valuation by the end of the week.’
‘I want the house cleared by next Wednesday. That should give you ample time to pack and warehouse it. I want it empty. If you can’t do it in a week tell me now – I’ve chosen you, Mr Rilke, but there are others that could do the job as well.’
And I believed her. I stood my ground half-heartedly, telling her she’d not get top price, that there was only so much possible in a week, but we both knew it was a useless dance.
‘I’m too old to discuss things, Mr Rilke. Either you can do it or you can’t. I know it’s a big job. I’m asking a lot, so there will be a commission paid directly to you on top of the auction house fee