They search the car. In the glovebox they find a tin of travel sweets. The lid lifts off with a white puff of magician’s smoke. Inside, translucent pink boiled sweeties are sunk into a nest of icing sugar. These are posh sweets.
Reverently, the boys take one each. They savour the flavour and this moment, when they are in a car, eating sweets, with friends. In the future, when they are grown, they will all own cars because ordinary people will own cars in the future but this seems fantastical to them now. In the future they will think they remember this moment because of what happened next, how significant it was that they found Mr Smart’s car, but that’s not what will stay with them. A door has been opened in their experience, the sensation of being in a car with friends, the special nature of being in a car; a distinct space, the possibility of travel, with sweets. Because of this moment one of them will forever experience a boyish lift to his mood when he is in a car with his pals. Another will go on to rebuild classic cars as a hobby. The third boy will spend the rest of his life fraudulently claiming he stole his first car when he was eight, and was somehow implicated in the Smart family murders. He will die young, of the drink, believing that to be true.
The boys are in the car for quite some time.
‘GET THE FUCK OUT OF THERE, YA WEE SHITES.’
A polis has yanked the door open and his meaty hands are coming for them. The boys scramble out of the far door, spilling the sweets and the icing sugar all over the red leather seats and themselves.
They bomb it across the road, trailing sugary smoke. On the far pavement they run towards the river, their steps punctuated with excited leaps and squeals. They skip sideways past giant prams parked outside a shop. To the cries and burbles of the baby parliament, the boys belt up a close to a backcourt and run around a midden to hide. They crouch, panting and laughing, thinking they are miles and miles from the policeman when they’re really just a few hundred yards away. He could find them if he wanted to.
Out in the street the policeman knows this is wrong. The car is new, clean and unlocked. It has been left unlocked in Florence Street where cars and policemen don’t belong. He keeps his eye on it as he backs away to call it in from the police box around the corner.
The registration says it is a Mr Peter Smart’s car. The police call the man’s registered place of work. The work says Mr Smart is missing. He is the manager there but hasn’t returned to work this morning after the five-day Hogmanay holiday. He hasn’t been seen for nearly week.
A different policeman from Hamilton Police Station sets off to visit the family home in Sheepburn Road, Uddingston. Uddingston is a nice town, far enough away from Glasgow to stay nice. The poor people, mostly Catholics, are corralled into an estate nearby called Birkenshaw. Uddingston is an agricultural area, it is set in a landscape of soft hills, marred by mine works abandoned since nationalisation. Many of the mines were unsafe and inefficient, had dreadful working conditions.
He reaches Mr Smart’s address in Sheepburn Road. It is a bungalow. Mr Smart is an engineer and built the house a few years ago with his own two hands. It looks a bit home-knitted, hasn’t the detailing or finesse of a professional build. There is no ornamentation and the windows are smaller than the facade could support.
Tucked behind the house is a small garage, just big enough for a diminutive Austin A35. The officer walks up to it and finds it unlocked but empty. He feels sure he has the right house.
Though it is daytime both sets of curtains are drawn in the front windows. The policeman knocks. No answer. He tries the door and finds it locked. He walks around to the back of the house.
The kitchen door has a net-curtained window. He peers in.The kitchen is very tidy except for an empty tin discarded on the table. He squints and reads the label. Canadian Salmon in Oil. The lid has been dropped carelessly, odd in such an ordered room. The lid sits over the edge of the table, placed the wrong way down. If he moves his head, he can see light catch where the fish oil has soaked into the wood. They’ll never get that smell out.
He sees a movement. A ginger tail curls lazily through the slightly open door into the back hall. It’s a cat, which makes sense of the tin. The tail flicks and disappears.
He bends his knees and now he can see underneath the salmon tin lid on the edge of the table. A drip of oil has gathered, it catches the light. It is hanging there, threatening to fall onto the floor. Just hanging and waiting for a breeze or a knock, or two more molecules of oil to travel along the underside and join the build-up. Then the fishy oil will drop onto the floor and need cleaning up.
He goes back to the station. He hears that Mr Smart may have gone to visit his parents in Jedburgh on the 31st of December. It is now the 6th of January. The parents do not have a telephone. Mr Smart may have stayed on in Jedburgh, his parents are frail, but this does not assuage the officer’s concern. Mr Smart would have taken his car, surely? The officer is uneasy. Mostly, it’s the ginger tail and the tin on the table that bother him. He’s very troubled by that and he doesn’t know why.
He’s eating his lunch pieces when he realises: if the Smarts had gone away visiting they would have put the cat out. If they forgot to do that then the cat would be trapped with no field mice or kind neighbours to feed it. It should be frantically hungry by now. The tin lid with the oil drip is still on the edge of the table. A hungry cat would have jumped up, knocked off the lid coated in delicious-smelling oil and licked it clean. But the cat hasn’t. Someone is in the house.
With a sudden sense of alarm the policeman abandons his sandwich and hurries back to Sheepburn Road.
A neighbour rushes out to meet him, pulling her coat on over her pinny.
Officer! She runs across the road to him and explains that there is something odd going on in that house. She’s already worried because of that Isabelle Cooke girl disappearing nearby. The lady telephoned the police herself about the Smarts’ house, yesterday. Their car is gone but the curtains keep changing, closing and opening. She becomes more incoherent as she goes on: Doris Smart sets the curtains nicely, do you see? But the curtains are pulled roughly: they cross at the bottom but are open at the top. Doris is very house-proud–
The housewife stops. She touches her rollers and remembers that she is in the street. That is low class for this area. Suddenly aware that she is being seen, or very likely to be seen, she pulls the rollers out without removing her Kirby grips first, yanking at her hair angrily, making her eyes water. The officer feels for her. He thinks there is someone in there too but doesn’t say.
He says he’s going to force an entry to the house. Will she come and witness for him? She’s glad to, even if she doesn’t know what that means, not technically, she just wants someone to do something.