Authors: Christopher Brookmyre
Protection From Harm
They heard the sound of a car driving into the courtyard in front of the house, the engine amplified as it bounced off the stone walls of the dairy shed. It seemed insensitively noisy given the way it broke across the silence around the kitchen table. They had been sitting like that for so long, waiting for Dad to say something that would make sense of what had happened, or at least indicate which way was forward from here, but he said nothing, lost in thoughts that he did not wish to share. She looked to her mum for comfort, but Mum’s expression betrayed the gravest concern at what she read in her husband’s face.
The front doorbell rang: loud and long and brash. It was the spur that finally prompted her dad to speak, but only to order: ‘Ignore it. We’re not at home.’
It rang again following a pause hardly brief enough for anyone to have answered the door under ordinary circumstances.
‘What if it’s . . .’ Mum suggested, ‘I don’t know, the police, maybe?’
The insistence of a third ring cemented this idea in her mind, but it made no odds to Dad.
‘There’s no emergency here. Whoever it is can call back.’
There was not a fourth ring.
‘Shouldn’t we
call
the police though?’ Mum asked, once the growing silence from the front door had extended enough to suggest that whoever it was had given up. ‘I mean . . .’
‘Aye,’ Dad responded. ‘I will. I just need a wee while. I’m in no state to talk to anybody. None of us is.’
As another hush fell she listened out for an engine starting again, followed by the usual sharp cut-off as the vehicle cleared the dairy shed and its wall ceased to echo back the sound. It never came.
Instead there was a sharp three-beat rap at the back door, which was then opened unbidden from outside with the brisk familiarity of a relative or family friend.
They all looked up to see a cadaverous little man stride into their kitchen. He was bird-like in his build, but there was a harshness to his face and an assured coldness about him that warned he could look after himself. He wore a funereal charcoal suit and a plain white shirt with no tie. The shirt looked crisply white, but maybe this was just against the greyness of his complexion.
Behind him stood a younger man dressed in a jeans and a black polo-neck. He was tall, rangy and impassive. Her eyes were drawn to his: analytical, penetrating, examining her for weaknesses.
The older man smiled confidently, like a favourite uncle expecting to be welcomed into the hearth, but as he opened his mouth to speak Dad beat him to it.
‘We’re not at home to visitors,’ he stated, standing up from his chair.
‘This won’t take long,’ the man said, placing his hands on the back of an unoccupied chair. He spoke like a skeleton, a rattling voice devoid of warmth.
‘I said . . .’
‘Apologies, ladies, but I need to ask you to leave us,’ the intruder went on, as though Dad hadn’t spoken. ‘There’s something your father has to discuss with me.’
‘We’re not going anywhere,’ she told him. ‘Who the hell do you think you are, walking into our house?’
He fixed her with a brief but bitter stare then turned to her dad, speaking in clipped tones intended barely to conceal anger.
‘I said I want to talk to you alone. Tell your wife and daughters to leave, and if you’ve the sense, warn the lippy one to keep a civil tongue in her heid.’
Dad looked at the intruder, then at his accomplice, who was leaning against the sink, his hand close to the knife block.
‘Girls, Jean, do as he says.’
‘Actually, tell you what,’ said Cadaver, glancing towards her.
‘Why doesn’t the lippy yin make herself useful? Fix us both a cuppa tea, hen. There’s a good girl.’
She looked to her father, who couldn’t meet her eye.
Mum said she would get the tea, but Cadaver insisted it be her.
She served it from the pot to the two of them, Cadaver giving her an exaggerated smile in response, a sneering skull. The rangy one took his without looking at her, like she wasn’t there any more. It was as though he had assessed the things he needed to concern himself with in his immediate environment and was satisfied that she wasn’t one of them.
Her gaze lingered upon his hands as he lifted the cup. There was an angry scarring across his knuckles, like they’d been in a fire or something.
Once the tea was served, Cadaver told her to leave. Mum ushered her through to the sitting room at the front of the house; Lisa was there already, tearful and trembling.
They could hear only the sound and tone of voices, but could make out no words. It was only Cadaver who was speaking: polo-neck said nothing; Dad little more.
‘Who are they?’ Lisa asked. ‘What do they want?’
‘I don’t know,’ Mum said, but there was a dread stillness about her that suggested otherwise.
Nobody mentioned Lysander. Nobody had to.
Outside the window, she could see the car: it was a nice one, a BMW. It looked new, gleaming and powerful alongside Dad’s Chrysler with its mismatched paint patches and rusted skirts.
After only a few minutes they heard the kitchen door open and footsteps on the tiles. Mum opened the sitting-room door anxiously, in time to see Cadaver stride down the hall. He didn’t even cast them a glance as polo-neck opened the front door and they let themselves out.
Behind them was Dad, a morass of conflicting emotions upon his face, none of them good. He was about to slam the door when Cadaver turned and placed a restraining hand on its outside edge.
‘Just so’s we’re clear,’ he said to Dad, casting a quick glance at
the three women looking on. ‘You talk to the polis, and it’ll no’ be your daughters’
horses
that get cut up. You get me?’
And with that, he lifted his hand from the door and walked away, sauntering with demonstrable absence of haste towards the BMW, where polo-neck was starting the engine.
Dad stared at the intruder’s retreat through the open door for a few moments, then a shudder ran through him and he turned, stomping back towards the kitchen. He returned a few seconds later clutching his rifle, striding along the hall with a look that chilled her more than what she had discovered in the stables.
As one, she, Lisa and Mum converged to block him, all of them in that moment envisaging the same course of events that ended with their father in prison. Mum gripped the barrel of the weapon and forced it upwards towards the ceiling, while she and Lisa barged him against the wall, restraining him with hugs and pleas.
As the engine started up and the BMW pulled out she watched the fury and defiance in her father’s face subside into anguish and defeat. They could all feel his straining recede, and when they stepped away he sank to the floor and broke down, shaking in his tears.
What’s in a Name
It was difficult to imagine a starker contrast between the places Anthony Thompson could be despatched to in doing the same job, even working the same case. From a crumbling former petrol station awash with soap suds and vomit, host of the bullet-riddled corpse of a dead drug dealer, to the wood-panelled halls and green-domed majesty of the Mitchell Library, Glasgow’s cathedral of the written word.
He loved driving past this place at night, the stone walls reflecting its light so that it gave the impression that the building itself was refulgent, a beacon at the heart of the city. And he loved the Glaswegian quintessence of the fact that this beacon was cheek-by-jowl with pubs and curry houses, and thus never seemed an aloof ivory tower isolated from its environment. Working with other squads, it would have been easy to interpret his being the one sent to the library as a joke, a reference to his being a fast-tracked graduate. And by joke, of course, he meant a means of undermining him by once again emphasising the perception that his career path meant he had more experience among the books than on the beat.
Under Detective Superintendent McLeod, he didn’t have to worry about making such an inference. Not only had she never made any digs about the Accelerated Careers Development Programme, but she had little tolerance for the subtle denigrations and territorial pissing that often masqueraded as ‘banter’. Before working with her he had heard her described variously as ‘schoolmarmish’, ‘a snobby cow’ and ‘an uptight bitch’. These descriptions, it hardly needed to be said, had come exclusively from male officers of the sort most inclined to engage in the ‘banter’ she proscribed. The same male officers who joked that he was ‘just one of the girls’ now he was part of her team. This was in reference to the supposed
gender balance under McLeod’s command. It was intended as an insult, but if he was just one of the girls then that suited him fine, because he was rubbish at being just one of the guys.
This didn’t mean he spent his evenings reading poetry before weeping openly over the TV news; more likely, playing
Team Fortress 2
or
Starfire IV
before settling down to a late-night slasher movie. Some people couldn’t equate his enthusiasms with his attitude, but really it was simple. He liked a lot of blokey things. He just didn’t like blokishness.
He could be confident that the boss hadn’t meant anything by despatching him to the Mitchell, but it was nonetheless still a possibility that he had been nominated for a fool’s errand. She had agreed that he wasn’t totally havering when he decided that a library ticket was an unusual – and therefore suspicious – item to have found in the possession of the late Stevie Fullerton, but it wasn’t exactly a severed head in the fridge. He couldn’t help but think nothing was expected to come of it. In essence, he had unearthed a lead commensurate with his own stature, by which he meant that if it had been that good an idea she wouldn’t have entrusted the follow-up to him.
That said, the other thing this assignment reflected was that they were still striking out with regard to establishing a motive. While it didn’t indicate that they had reached the desperate stage, they were definitely moving towards ‘anything is worth a punt’ territory.
Preliminary discussions with the Procurator Fiscal’s office indicated they were confident that they already had enough to convict Fallan, but McLeod wasn’t going to relax until she knew what the murder had been about. She was determined that there be nothing about this investigation that could trip them later, no overlooked element that might jeopardise what was otherwise shaping up to be a straightforward prosecution. They had Fallan nailed to the scene with a gun in his vehicle and a history of enmity with the victim. They had the who, the where and the how, but the absence of
why
yawned like a pit just waiting for them to tumble into.
It was a huge case in terms of the victim’s profile and the resultant
media interest, so he knew there must be major pressure on McLeod, particularly as it looked like an open goal. The boss was determined she wasn’t going to be responsible for a van Vossen.
There was something else going on too, something deeper and more personal. The very calm he had remarked upon earlier had dissipated as soon as Fallan entered the equation.
Even before that, there was something unsettling about the boss’s coolness at the scene, her lack of any compassion for the deceased. Fair enough, nobody was going to be erecting a statue to this guy, but she seemed – if not overtly happy – certainly satisfied that he was dead; and if she had any regrets over Fullerton’s demise they were probably regarding how quick and sudden it must have been.
It was jarring. He liked working for McLeod because she
was
compassionate. There was an atmosphere under her command that he could relate to, that made him want to deliver for her. It was hard to define precisely what it was; easier to pin down what it was not. It wasn’t about putting on the mask of don’t-give-a-fuck, and ‘fighting the battle of who could care less’, as Ben Folds put it.
Obviously, on the downside he had to endure being called Beano, which he hated, but it was a small price to pay, and he never doubted there wasn’t a certain affection in it.
It was always awkward when somebody new used it though, as there was a presumption there if they hadn’t earned their Beano privileges. Other guys seemed to wear their nickname like a badge of pride, craving the group acceptance it conferred. He was not immune to this aspect of being Beano, and down the years there had been nicknames he accepted and enjoyed. As a kid he’d been Ants, and when older, Tico, a handle that endured on the football pitch even now.
Anthony was what his mum always called him. It was what Jennifer had called him, and she used to say it like she loved the feel of it on her tongue. He thought of himself as Anthony, and that was what he wanted McLeod to call him too. However, in a way he felt he hadn’t earned his Anthony privileges from her; he’d be Beano until he gave her reason to see him otherwise.
He made his way through the building to the reception desk
opposite the café, where he gave his name and waited for the woman he had spoken to on the phone.
‘Have you got the card?’ she asked.
He dug it out of his pocket and she scanned it by sliding it along a reader connected to her computer.
‘As I explained over the phone, there’s more than one person of that name on the system, so I couldn’t just tell you what books this Mr Fullerton had been reading.’
‘I think with this guy it was probably more like colouring in, but I remain open to surprise.’
She grinned at the remark without taking her eyes from the screen.
‘Well, he’d have had a tough time colouring these in,’ she reported. ‘He’s been looking up newspapers using the microfiche archives. Old
Daily Record
s.’
‘When?’
‘Twenty-five years ago.’
‘No, I mean when was he in here?’
‘Four weeks back. Same day the card was issued.’
‘Can I see the editions he was looking up?’
‘Sure. Come on and I’ll set you up. You might want to grab a coffee though. You could be sitting there a while. I can’t tell you precisely which editions he was looking at, only the dates covered by each spool.’
She escorted him upstairs to a row of microfiche readers, stopping off to retrieve the appropriate spools en route. She showed him how to load the microfiche then gave him a quick tutorial on navigating and zooming in and out of the pages. Once she was satisfied that he had it sussed, she wished him good luck and left him to it. Fullerton had selected spools from two periods roughly six months apart, but as each spool covered one month, there was no deductive reasoning to be brought to bear in order to narrow the search. It was going to be a BFI job: brute force and ignorance.
He scanned the first few editions quite methodically, taking in the changes in design and typography, the graininess of the photographs and the absence of web and email addresses in the adverts.
He tarried a little over the sports pages, the near-hysterical tone of the sensationalised coverage all the more ridiculous viewed through the prism of time.
He began scanning the news pages, parsing the headlines and trusting his judgment that the most plausible candidates would be recognisable at a glance. He reasoned that if he got through the month without any ideas, he’d go back again and focus on the obits and intimations.
There were a few possibilities on the first spool, but nothing leapt out at him. A bank robbery in Braeside; a drugs seizure in Balornock; the murder of a young woman in Capletmuir; the killing of a passer-by who had intervened in a street fight one fateful Saturday night.
These could be the news pages of today’s edition, Anthony reckoned. Same crimes, same places, and quite possibly some of the same polis, but he needed a tangible link to the here and now, to what the paper would call ‘a gangland slaying’ in Shawburn.
He could probably rule out the murdered woman. He had taken note of it because it was one of the biggest crime stories in that spool, but really it had only got so much play because it had started off as a mystery, the quintessential nightmare for every woman, every daughter’s parents. She didn’t come home one Saturday night, then was found strangled in woodland the next day, on a pathway close to the railway station where she had got off the train. Julie Muir, she had been called. Twenty-one years old.
Though he knew it wasn’t germane, he dwelt a moment upon her name because somehow it seemed wrong to gloss over it. It felt like a kind of prayer, a gesture of thought for someone who once had a life and a world, but who was now forgotten by history, erased by one man’s violence. By that token he did the same for thirty-four-year-old father of two Andrew Leiper, who had tried to save some young bloke from a kicking on Sauchiehall Street and been stabbed to death for his trouble.
A few editions on, the strangling story was updated and effectively ended with the arrest of a convicted sex offender. Poor girl had been in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Julie Muir. Anthony couldn’t help but think what age she would have been now, the life she should have led.
The street-fight story reached its conclusion even sooner, Andrew Leiper’s teenage killer found and named within forty-eight hours. Billy Fergus. Anthony wrote it down, intending to see where else the name might pop up, and whether he or even Leiper had any connections to Fullerton or Fallan.
Then he moved on to the second spool, which was when he hit the jackpot.
WILD WEST GEORGE STREET
Bloodbath as gang battle rages through city nightclub
REVELLERS
fled in horror as carnage erupted inside trendy city nightspot Nokturn last night. Terrified witnesses spoke of
SLASHINGS
, glass attacks and flying chairs amid pools of
BLOOD
as a fight at the bar escalated into a mass brawl.‘It was like a scene from a
WILD
WEST
movie,’ said one witness, who did not wish to be named. ‘One minute everybody’s dancing, and the next there’s about thirty people
BATTLING
it out, joining in from all sides. The violence was indiscriminate. I saw bystanders getting
BOTTLED
. These guys were just lashing out at anybody. Girls were in tears and
SCREAMING
. There were guys in there absolutely
SOAKED
in blood.’
Details were sketchy in this wild-eyed initial report. Given the time of night when it was likely to have kicked off, the story would have broken pretty close to deadline, real hold-the-front-page stuff. A reporter must have made it there in jig time, or maybe been lucky and been in a pub nearby. Anthony guessed the ‘witness who did not wish to be named’ didn’t actually exist; this would simply have been a front for whatever reports the hack had been able to cobble together on the pavement outside before phoning it in.
The next day’s coverage had more meat on it, and more personnel. As well as carrying genuine quotes from named witnesses, it also indicated that a reporter had been despatched to the Royal Infirmary to get verifiable detail on the injuries. These seemed to be listed in
descending order according to the number of stitches, with top billing going to one James Donnelly, who received forty-eight after having his face opened from his temple to his chin.
The witness accounts were chaotic and contradictory: people reconstructing snapshots taken when their judgment was at its least reliable, reassembling fractured memories in the wrong order. It was something he was all too familiar with. Refracted through the lens of tabloid hysteria, it was even worse. Some things were gradually coming into focus, however.
NIGHTCLUB BOSS WEIGHED INTO HORROR BATTLE
THE MANAGER
of a city nightspot that was turned into a bloodbath two nights ago threw himself into the fray, according to eyewitness reports. Nokturn impresario Stephen Fullerton (24) was seen trading blows as chairs, bottles and glasses flew during the carnage that left more than twenty injured, but
DENIES
it had anything to do with a feud between rival gangs.Fullerton, who describes himself as a legitimate businessman, admits that he became involved in the fighting but
INSISTS
he has no idea what provoked the mass brawl.‘I have no clue who these people were, but they were
HELL-BENT
on making trouble. My cousin was
SLASHED
while just standing at the bar. There was no warning, no provocation. When it all kicked off I had to run down there to pull him clear so that we could get him medical attention.’
Twenty-four and he already ran a nightclub, Anthony thought. Bet he never got any shit about accelerated career development.
A couple of days further on, the story flashed up again, with an informed and sober perspective on the matter garnered by the paper’s chief crime reporter. This time, the ‘source who did not wish to be named’ was more plausibly anonymous, clearly somebody who had the inside gen, and perhaps his own agenda for leaking it.