The Sound of Pips Being Squeezed

Lawwell was sweating as he held the horse whip under the chin of the boy from the Herald. He’d administered such a thrashing that his body glistened and steamed in the heat of the dungeon underneath Celtic Park. Lawwell had been naked when he began, a habit picked up on the island but the boy from the Herald, and he was only a boy, the experienced old inkies refusing to take the job and sending out a cub reporter, well he was naked now, his clothes having been stripped from his back from the blows of the whip.

‘You understand now, don’t you boy?’ panted Lawwell, breathing like a race horse and the boy nodded, wincing in the process.
‘Now, we’re going to gift your something from our back burner; something we’ve been saving up for a rainy day, a Tory tweeting about the UVF and just to make sure you do the right thing, here’s a spokesman from Nil By Mouth to help you,’ and he nodded towards the man in the Republic of Ireland replica football shirt who was manacled to the wall, his face a mask of blood and snot.
‘Now be off with you and when I look at the Herald in the morning, I want to see this taking the place of any stories you had in mind that may have included the words Celtic, investigation and UEFA, got that?’

The two broken men were led away to do their work and Lawwell showered and climbed into his Wehrmacht combat uniform and motioned for me to join him upstairs in Parkhead proper. He seemed calm now as he sat down behind his great iron desk and he allowed me to sit in the soft chair in front of it, designed to force anyone sitting in it to look up to him. As I sat down it rasped like a fart and I shifted uncomfortably as I noticed Lawwell smirk – I’d heard of this chair, it farted every time anyone sat in it, a favourite joke of Lawwells, especially when he has the First Minister in.

‘Spiers,’ he began, looking me in the eye. ‘I didn’t get where I am today by allowing pip squeaks like you to write what they want about Celtic Football Club so I have something for you,’ and he reached into his desk drawer. Now I’ve been around Lawwell long enough to know when I’m being lulled into a sense of false security and realised that if he wasn’t luring me into a trap, he’d have had me on the floor and not his Salmond chair so I was up and already pounding towards the door by the time he’d pulled his Luger from the drawer and I was out the door just as he let off two rounds one of which stuck in the door, the other going through the thin wall and hitting a passer-by who fell to floor and jerked once before going still. I stopped, appalled at what had just happened – Lawwell had accidentally shot Neil Lennon!