Read Stonemouth for Free Online Page A

forties?
    ‘Ahwell, you’ll save money on petrol, eh?’ he concedes, dropping himself into a chair. He looks me in the eye, glances at the door to the hall and drops his voice slightly. ‘You all right to come back, aye?’
    ‘Met with Powell Imrie. Already been to see Donald,’ I tell him. ‘Reckon I’ll get out of town alive.’
    He still looks serious. ‘They were both okay?’
    ‘Powell was fine. Donald was a bit, well, like Donald. But okay.’
    Dad nods. Another kitchen-ward glance, voice dropping a little again. ‘I told Mike you might be coming back for the funeral,’ he says quietly. ‘He’s been saying for a while it was probably okay. Said if there was any trouble to give him a call, eh? Or one of his boys.’ Mike MacAvett is the other Daddy in town. Though when Al – my dad – says ‘his boys’ he doesn’t mean either of Mike Mac’s sons. On the other hand, he doesn’t mean proper, full-on, tooled-up, Mafia-style gangsters, either. We’re not at that point here, not yet, anyway. All a bit more subtle and low-key than that. The Murstons and Mike Mac run their businesses with the minimum of fuss, and no guns. They have the weaponry, but they’ve broken it out only twice in the last fifteen years, as far as I know, when a couple of gangs from Aberdeen and Glasgow thought they might muscle their way in towards what they mistakenly thought looked like easy pickings amongst us hicks up here.
    Didn’t work; faced with two long-entrenched and now armed concerns working in frankly startlingly close cooperation with the local cops, they quickly disappeared. Mostly they quickly disappeared straight back down the A90, the way they’d come, but there were strong, believable rumours that a couple went over the side of deepsea trawlers somewhere between the Hebrides and Iceland, or into a fishmeal plant, or beneath multiple layers of replaced rock in worked-out, open-cast coal mines, at least one of these unfortunates meeting their end after some very painful attention from Fraser Murston, who, allegedly, had turned out to be quite creative in the unpleasantness-inflicting department.
    Anyway,if you’re talking rival families, the MacAvetts are the Vauxhall to the Murstons’ Ford. Or the Celtic to their Rangers or something … Though not in a religious way; I think they’re both Prods, technically. But you know what I mean.
    I say, ‘Thanks, Al,’ though it doesn’t mean too much.
    Mike MacAvett and his boys wouldn’t be able to save me from Powell Imrie and associates if the word went out. Wouldn’t want to, either: not enough in it. Mike MacAvett would step between Donald and a subject of his righteous ire only for something truly important and worthwhile that promised a serious pay-off at the end, not just to protect a guy who dug his own hole years ago, even if he is the son of his oldest friend. Business, and all that. And keeping the peace, frankly, too; not threatening a whole web of mutually beneficial arrangements by attacking each other and – if things get really out of hand – making it impossible for the cops to keep on turning a blind eye.
    Whatever. Dad sits back, relaxes. He looks at me properly. ‘Lookin well. You doin all right? What you driving? You got a car yet?’
    And with that we’re safely into small-talk, largely about what I do and don’t possess. I don’t possess a car, for example, which Dad seems to think is almost sacrilegious. I keep telling him I don’t need one in London. Dad thinks it’s political and I’m about to go and start hugging trees and blowing up nuclear power stations or refineries or something. He’s worked all his life in oil – he’s harbourmaster at the new docks these days, where the rig supply and support ships hang out – and so he’s sort of defensive on the subject, but at least not an outright denier.
    Mum comes in with a big tray and asks about whether I’m happy, and about girls. I sit holding my favourite old SpongeBob