Free Crime by Irvine Welsh

bad taste and the local, contemporary aspect caused most of his friends to gag or shudder. Lennox, who was sitting in the corner with some Serious Crimes boys based at the South Side station, stood up and walked across to the young man. The youth saw that he’d crossed the line and immediately stammered out an apology.
    They knew that Ray Lennox had lost it when he didn’t attempt to strike or even verbally abuse the joker. When he tried to speak, he started to choke. — Ah did ma best … he pleaded to the terrified bar comedian, — ah did ma best for that wee lassie …
    It was only when he felt the pull on his shoulder, heard the repetition of his name and focused on a crack in the hardwood and gauged its proximity, that Lennox realised he’d fallen to his knees. His friends picked him up off the pub floor. One took him to Trudi’s flat. She called the doctor and the police personnel department’s welfare people.
    Now he’s lying in bed, at their boutique hotel in Miami Beach, thinking about Britney. Trying not to think of the moment when her virginity was taken from her. Compelled to do so, as if turning his back on the magnitude of her terror was in itself a form of disrespect and cowardice.
    Maybe that was the lunacy … maybe that was the problem, getting too involved like that
…
    He trembles from his very core. It only stops when he attempts, instead, to think of her mother. He can see Angela Hamil, a cigarette in hand. The start of the investigation: her daughter missing. The urge to violently shake her and say: Britney’s gone. And you’re just sitting there smoking cigarettes. That’s right. You just sit there and
smoke cigarettes
and leave us to find your daughter.
    The sweat seeps from him, soaking the bed. His heart punches a steady beat in his chest, like a boxer’s jab on a heavy gym bag. His throat is constricted with tension as he tries to fill his dry lungs with the sterile air of the room. His body is in revolt against him and he can hear Trudi snoring; loud, truculent snarls that could be coming from a drunken labourer. Dream demons are forming as his eyes shut, pulling his exhausted soul into their realm. He doesn’t want to go there but his fatigued mind is surrendering.
    It’s mid-afternoon when they wake up. They’re both ravenous. Lennox feels like his brain is expanding and contracting in his skull, fraying its outer edges against rough, unyielding bone.
    They get ready to head outside, into the heat. Lennox wears his Ramones
End of the Century
T-shirt. He’d chosen it in preference to a Hearts football top; the material’s too much for this heat. Cotton is a better bet. There was the maroon-and-white BELIEVE shirt. But he decides that he doesn’t want to explain anything to anybody, to talk to Scots abroad and lie about his job, like all cops have to around real people. He puts on another pair of light canvas trousers, dressy enough if they want to go and eat somewhere a bit upscale. The Red Sox cap is pulled back on to his head. Trudi wears a short, white pleated skirt. Her legs are long and brown. A pink vesty top. Her arms also tan, her hair tied back. Shades. Outside, his arm goes to her waist as they walk in silence. It’s the first time she’s worn this skirt without him getting an erection. Unforeseen fear grips him again.
    They are hungry but can’t agree on what to eat. The hangovers and the strange location conspire against decision-making; neither self nor significant other is to be trusted with that choice. A wrong call would mean recrimination: brooding silence followed by a row. Both of them know it. But they need to eat. Their brains and guts fizz from last night’s tequila slammers.
    They pass a Senior Frog’s Mexican Cantina. Lennox recalled that some of the boys had been to a Senior Frog’s on a polis beano in Cancún. There was a long-running canteen joke about it. He’d wanted to go with them, but it was when he and Trudi had just got back together, and