Chapter Twenty

Billy Pinnock, the artist formerly known as ‘Neeps,’ muttered under his breath as a stupidly small screw fell onto the magnetic pad on the worktop, failed to stick, then went bouncing away onto the shop floor.

It was, he knew, very likely the last he’d see of it until it went tinging up the tube of the Hoover a week or two from now. He could get down on his hands and knees and hunt for it, of course, but he had boxes of the things for exactly this sort of occasion, and his knees weren’t what they used to be.

His knees weren’t even what they used to be back in the days that he’d first started saying, “My knees aren’t what they used to be.” He’d give anything for those knees these days, never mind the knees he had originally.

He removed the next screw and sighed as it, too, was lost to the floor.

“Fifteen ninety-nine,” he said, shooting a dirty look at the magnetic pad. “Biggest waste of money I’ve ever made.”

That wasn’t true, of course. Not by a long shot.

An electronic bell chimed, and the front door of the shop opened, letting in the morning sun and all the accompanying noise that came with it. The shop stood on Kilmarnock Road, just a few feet south of the official marked limits of the City of Glasgow, so it fell under the jurisdiction of East Renfrewshire Council.

The location was… fine. The shop was one of five in a little sort of strip mall thing, with a Chinese takeaway at one end, and a funeral director at the other. Billy’s place was slap bang in the middle, sandwiched between a beautician’s and, ironically, a sandwich shop.

Would he have preferred to be in the middle of Glasgow, with all its passing trade? Definitely. He’d be an idiot not to.

Did he want to pay the rent on such a location? Maybe.

Could he?

Could he fuck.

He carefully set the mobile phone he was working on down in the plastic tub he’d taken it from, closed the lid, then tucked it away under the counter. He’d learned that lesson in his first week of business. It didn’t matter if a phone had been reduced to its component parts, if some bugger saw an opportunity to grab it and run, they would.

Only when he was sure the device was out of snatching reach did he look properly at the two men who had entered the shop. He recognised them right away. Not their faces—not them individually—but what they were. Billy could practically smell the authority coming off them.

Or, off one of them, anyway. The younger one, not so much.