Bred in the Bone (21 page)

With that, he walked off towards the changing rooms, leaving Catherine in no doubt that he was telling the truth. It was that look of something close to relief: when she told him they were here about what Brenda might have confessed, he understood that he wasn’t going to be compromised or conflicted, because he knew he couldn’t help them.

She watched him unlock the door and was moved to start after him before he disappeared inside. She trotted up the short flight of steps, leaving Laura down on the concrete.

He heard the sound of her shoes on the stairs and turned around.

‘Father, for what it’s worth, I wanted to say I admire what you’re doing, you know, as a priest getting involved with the football team. I don’t see a lot of feel-good rehabilitation stories in my average week, but that doesn’t mean I don’t think it happens.’

‘So you believe in redemption?’

‘Some days that’s harder than others, but I try.’

‘You and me both, hen.’

She was walking back down the stairs when she heard him call after her.

‘By the way,’ he said, his foot keeping the door from closing. ‘I didnae join the team because I’m a priest.’

It took her a moment to suss what he meant, then it all fell into place.

‘What was that about?’ Laura asked.

‘That’s no shepherd,’ Catherine replied.

‘What?’

‘I’ll tell you another time.’

A Woman's Work

She found herself at the chopping block once more upon another cool, clear morning, the first real frost of autumn underfoot. It was early November, hoar coating the edges of the brown leaves scattered untidily about the place, one more job nobody had time enough to do. They were piled up like snowdrifts against the wooden wall of the stables, its doors bolted and locked. Demetrius had been sold months back, another luxury they could no longer afford. The sacrifice was lessened by the fact that nobody liked going into the stables any more, and Lisa hadn't ridden him after that horrible day.

She placed a short log on the block and hefted the axe two-handed, splitting the firewood with a practised stroke. She wore only a T-shirt despite the cold, knowing that it would be enough once she got swinging. It might be the warmest she felt all day, given the temperature inside the house, where the central heating remained steadfastly off, every drop of oil an extravagance. The wood she was chopping was for the living-room hearth, but that was only ever lit at dusk, leaving the house chilly all day.

It helped to be busy, keeping her hands occupied as a means of distracting her mind, and when that was impossible, at least it passed the time while she waited for news. She got into a rhythm: placing, swinging, splitting. Sometimes this kind of exertion helped work out her frustration. This morning she could feel it having the opposite effect, as though it was instead summoning up more anger as her arms unleashed harder and harder strokes until she felt tears run down her cheeks. She stopped to wipe them away and blow her nose, looking back towards the empty house.

Dad had been doing three people's jobs since he was forced to lay off Donald and Michael, no longer able to pay them due to a
sharp recent increase in overheads. They weren't the only farm to have this problem, they knew. There had been whispers and allusions in certain circles: that was why on that first day her parents had grasped so quickly what it was all about. There were rumours and stories, yes, but nobody admitted that it had happened to them. Money was tight, they just said. These were hard times. Fear and shame kept it secret. They seldom even gave it a name. When it was referred to at all between farmers, it was done so obliquely and briskly, like they were hurrying past a road accident, and there was no question whatsoever of it being mentioned to anyone outside of their own four walls.

The first Saturday of each month, he would come by to collect: the cadaverous grey man in the BMW. The younger man in the polo-neck had only returned once, replaced after that by a squirrelly looking wee guy always dressed in a tracksuit top above a pair of jeans with a tartan-effect pattern through them. They had been trendy for a few months about two years before, but had by then reached the final, irredeemable phase of the fashion cycle whereby they were practically the uniform of the style-oblivious. He was restless and fidgety, constantly sniffing and flipping his too-long greasy side-shed away from his right eye. She reckoned he might as well have the words ‘
SNEAK THIEF
' embroidered on his tracksuit top, instead of
FILA
. Any plain-clothes store detective who didn't stick to this chancer from the second he entered their shop should be sacked for negligence.

He didn't just collect, though. On each visit Cadaver would announce an increase in the rate for their ‘protection'. He was bleeding them dry as ruthlessly and rapidly as a beheaded chicken over a bucket.

Through a combination of wounded pride and desperate bloody-mindedness, Dad was nonetheless determined that the girls continue their education, despite their demands to be allowed to find full-time work or to just stay home to help him run the farm. Lisa had gone on to university, as planned, but remained living at home while she attended Glasgow. Lisa maintained that it was all the same to her, but she still kept her acceptance for Cambridge
in her bedside drawer, a memento of the other life she could – and should – have had.

There was no vet school and no Laurel Row any more, school fees being out of the question. She had failed to get the grades she needed in her Highers, though she did fare better than she initially feared given the state she was in around the time she sat the exams.

Now she was in sixth year back at Calderburn High. The UCCA guide showed that there were some vet schools down south that would take her if she got an A in her Higher physics re-sit and at least a B for SYS chemistry, but how could she realistically think about going away to uni when Lisa hadn't been able to? How, in fact, could she think about the long-term future at all? There didn't seem to
be
a long-term future any more, only an on-going struggle to make payments that went up every time the grey man visited. She knew they couldn't go on like this, yet she kept asking herself where it would end.

An unmistakable pointer towards the answer presented itself when Dad collapsed while cleaning out a feed-trough. He had looked very pale the previous morning, having worked through a very heavy cold during the week, in the face of constant entreaties from Mum that he should be in his bed. She winced to think how long he may have lain out there – and in what condition he would ultimately have been found – had it not been for the vet, Harriet Chambers, who spotted him from where she was working in the dairy shed.

They endured an aeon of not knowing in some grotty hospital waiting area, purgatory with plastic chairs, and when they did finally get to see him he was behind glass, a tube in his mouth. His eyes were open but glazed, unfocused. This was due to sedation, a doctor assured them. His signs were stable, they were getting fluid into him and would maintain observations overnight. It was a polite and well-intentioned invitation for them to go home and get some rest.

She barely slept, though more than Mum, no doubt. Everyone was awake before dawn, even the normally unrousable Lisa, all impatient for information. There had been no phone calls in the
night, at least; she understood that no news was good news, or at least not extremely bad news.

Despite her aching need to see him, to be there to hear whatever the doctors had to say, she also knew she had a duty – a very important duty – to remain behind.

‘There's a thousand things needing done,' she told her mum.

Mum knew she was right. Nothing stopped because Dad was in hospital. In fact, the workload had just multiplied.

‘We'll go in shifts,' she said. ‘Lisa can drive home later to spell me and I can go up in the afternoon. I've got my licence now, remember.'

‘Of course,' Mum nodded. She had passed her test over a month ago: teaching her to drive being yet one more task her dad had taken upon himself rather than fork out for a third party. It was no doting indulgence, though; it was imperative that all of them were able to fetch supplies, and even taking the tractor to the top fields required a stretch along the open road and therefore a licence to do so.

Satisfied that she had enough for tonight's fire, she was carrying the wood inside to the living room when the phone rang.

It was Harriet Chambers, phoning to ask if there was any news and to say that in her hurry yesterday she had left a bag in the dairy shed recess. She told Harriet the situation and said she'd keep her posted. She offered to drive the bag over later, but Harriet said it wasn't urgent; she'd come by on Monday morning to pick it up.

She tramped back outside feeling deflated, trying to block out a pessimistic thought that this had been merely a precursor to a far worse instance of getting her hopes up only to be let down. However, the phone rang again before she had got halfway back to the dairy shed, and this time it was Mum.

‘It wasn't a heart attack,' she said, able to name that fear for both of them now it could be discounted.

‘But how is he?'

‘He's asleep just now. The tube's out. He's on the mend. Well, the staff say it'll take a while, but . . .'

‘What was wrong?'

‘Exhaustion, the doctor said. He's got a viral infection which brought matters to a head, but it's mainly just, you know . . .'

‘Overwork,' she said, her relief that it wasn't a coronary already fading. An infection had precipitated his breakdown, but there were no antibiotics for his true ailment.

‘The doctor says he needs rest. Weeks, he's talking about.'

‘He'll need to write a prescription for battleship chains.'

Mum gave a quiet little laugh, but they both knew it was no joke. He needed to rest, but he couldn't and he wouldn't.

‘Oh, God: there's something else. I forgot, with all that's going on; just remembered when I was talking to the doctor.'

‘It's okay, Mum. I know. First Saturday of the month. That's why I volunteered to stay behind.'

‘Why didn't you say something?'

‘Because I knew you would wait around here when you needed to be up there by his side.'

‘Your father never wanted either of you to have anything to do with—'

‘I know. But we're big girls, Mum.'

She heard a crackle on the line as her mum sighed in resignation.

‘The envelope is—'

‘In the drawer in the kitchen, the one next to the cutlery. I know. Lisa and I both know.'

‘You girls know so many things you shouldn't have to.'

There was an insistent beep on the line.

‘My money's running out. I'm about to get cut off. When he turns up, don't let him in the house. Just hand over the envelope.'

‘Don't worry, Mum.'

‘Lisa will be coming home after and you can come u—'

The line went dead, a click and a moment's silence followed by the dialling tone.

She went back out to the dairy shed to resume her cleaning-out, feeling like she just wanted to lie down somewhere. She decided she'd best retrieve Harriet's bag while she remembered. The lack of sleep and the efforts she had already exerted that morning were
starting to sap her muscles, the thought of the second milking around teatime enough to make her want to cry. There was just so much to do. Even if by some Herculean effort they could hold things together while Dad recuperated for a few weeks, they'd just return to the start of the cycle, and what then?

You'll work yourself into an early grave
. Mum used to say that to Dad all the time, back when it was just an expression. She hadn't said it for months, though. Too close to the bone.

The bag was on a shelf in the recess, as Harriet had said. It was sitting open, a pair of rubber gloves beside it. The vet hadn't even begun her first examination when she saw Dad collapse outside.

She reached inside and took hold of a pair of ear-marking pliers, the first instruments that came to hand. She held them up to the light through the translucent plastic windows, balancing them delicately in her fingers, and thought about where she was supposed to be by now, where they were all supposed to be. Plans and ambitions truncated, shorn off brutally and without warning, the wound still raw. Everything taken away by low-life parasites.

She felt the pain of her dad's impotence. He couldn't stand up to them because they had zeroed in on his biggest vulnerability. If he stepped out of line, they wouldn't go after him, but hurt him through his daughters. She didn't doubt it either. She had seen what they did to Lysander, and knew that anyone capable of that was capable of anything.

Parasites.

Animals.

She felt the rage boiling up inside her again, threatening to turn to tears. She had to stay in control. She would not let any of these scum see her cry.

She placed the pliers back inside the bag, which was when she noticed the tranquiliser gun, along with a flat grey plastic case full of darts.

She took out the pistol and held it in her right hand, cocking it with her left against surprising resistance. Pointing it at the far wall, she found herself wondering whether it might change the picture
if it turned out those daughters weren't as vulnerable as everyone assumed.

She pulled the trigger, feeling the spring drive the bolt back home with a force that trembled right up her arm.

Yes, it just might.

Parallax Perspective

Jasmine had her left eye closed, and through her right she could only see the target: grey and white concentric circles staring back like some mesmerised eyeball, a watery unreality about the image as it was refracted through the optics. She watched the crosshair drift in front and concentrated on her breathing, relaxing into a rhythm, gradually becoming accustomed to the motion. She was using the gas rifle, so she prepared her body
not
to brace itself for the kick.

It had taken her a long time to realise she was doing it, and not just at those times after she had recently been using the spring-powered gun. Going right back to that first experience at the hotel in the Borders, some part of her was always waiting for the recoil. It could affect her breathing, her posture, even her trigger action, all in the tiniest way, but this was entirely about tiny margins, hugely magnified at the other end.

The gas rifle didn’t kick. The only movement she’d feel was the trigger slipping through the hammer release as she squeezed it. Everything had to be smooth, everything had to be fluid.

She could hear the air issues and the impact plinks of other shooters; hear them and yet not hear them. She could block them out, turn them into white noise, like the wind or the drumming of rain. Somewhere nearby she could hear someone’s mobile phone ringing. She blocked that too.

She had talked to Fallan about it once. He seemed to know a lot about the subject. He told her he had learned in the army, but didn’t elaborate.

‘If you need quiet to shoot, you’re useless,’ he told her. ‘Because you won’t
get
quiet to shoot. You need to create your own quiet, and learn to inhabit your own silent place where noise can’t reach
you, even sudden, unexpected sounds. You have to crawl into that place and stay there. Doesn’t matter if it’s seconds or hours: you don’t leave until you’ve taken the shot.’

The mobile was outside her place, as though it was ringing behind thick glass. She could hear a voice too, just as muted, just as detached. Then she felt a hand on her shoulder.

‘Haw, Jasmine, for fuck’s sake, you gaunny answer that or whit?’

It was Eric, one of the other regulars at the range. He was pointing to her shoulder bag, where the mobile was still ringing.

‘You might be in the zone, hen, but it’s doing every other bugger’s heid in.’

‘Sorry,’ she said fishing for it in her bag, though by the time she had located it among all the junk she kept meaning to ‘rationalise’, the caller had rung off.

She hadn’t realised it was her own phone because the ringtone was unfamiliar. She had this crappy wee thing as a substitute while her handset was out of commission, and still wasn’t sufficiently familiar with the sound for it to have established a Pavlovian discipline.

The morning after discovering that Ned Untrusty had performed a secret sim transplant, she had gone to a shop and got her provider to issue her a new card, one that would restore her old number. She installed it in a cheap handset, the other one now quarantined.

She asked the guy behind the counter to take a look at the foreign sim, though he clearly thought she was mental when she explained that he wasn’t allowed to remove it from the clear plastic pouch she had brought it in. He identified it as a pay–as-you-go sim, and when he scanned it into his system it came up as holding ten pounds of credit. This was so she didn’t notice the switch due to a sudden inability to make phone calls.

If it had been another provider, as soon as she looked at the screen she’d have noticed that the network name was wrong. This meant that either Ned had got lucky, or he had turned up with a stack of sims, all bearing credit. He hadn’t looked the type to be regarding such expenses as the cost of doing business. This was a steal-to-order job.

She had taken the phone apart wearing disposable latex gloves, still having a box of them left from one of Fallan’s visits. They had been talking about guns, Fallan explaining how no amount of technical instruction or practise on the range would necessarily empower you to shoot the enemy, as armies worldwide had discovered over the past century.

He told her about the phenomenon of non-firing combatants: how a tiny percentage of individuals had been responsible for shooting fatalities in the Second World War; how in Vietnam it was estimated that millions of rounds had been fired per actual hit; how in the First World War most of the trench warfare kills had been the result of ordnance. Soldiers found it easier to throw a grenade into a hole full of men they couldn’t see than to look a fellow human in the eye and pull the trigger. That was why sniper kills were the easiest, he explained. The further away you got, the less you were confronted by the reality of your actions.

Up close, that was where you found out if you really were a killer.

A little later he went out to the shops, returning with two pumpkins and the box of latex gloves. At the time, she didn’t realise she was under instruction: she thought they were cooking. He cut a number of small circles out of the pumpkin’s skin, then got her to thrust her thumb inside, directing her to twist it upwards then back and forth, pulping the flesh and carving out a channel.

She was very tentative at first, but he made her do it over and over, faster and faster, until it was all one motion, practically a reflex. Her thumb was aching by the time they were through. It would have been worse without the gloves, he explained, as they prevented the pumpkin flesh from getting under her nail.

Then he told her what she was practising. She almost threw up.

The wee shite at the Alhambra had to have left prints, she reckoned. She had handled the phone plenty before discovering that it had been tampered with, but not the places he’d have needed to touch: the back cover, the battery and the new sim itself. All had been removed at her kitchen table wearing latex gloves and sealed in air-tight plastic, as was the phone itself, for what it was worth. Leaving her with this shitey effort.

She hated to admit she was missing functionality that not so long ago she’d have scorned, but that’s how it was. Her phone had become an indispensable personal assistant, a conduit through which she ran almost every aspect of her daily life. However, as she thumbed laboriously through the cheapo handset’s labyrinthine sub-menu system just to see who the missed call was from, she realised that being Thoroughly Wired Millie had brought its own vulnerabilities.

If her phone had been targeted specifically, then the thief would have needed to know she’d be at that concert. Conveniently for him, that didn’t require any feats of mind-reading or even surveillance. All it would have taken was for him to check her Facebook page or Twitter feed, neither of which were protected, as it wasn’t like she was live-tweeting her investigations, just chatting to friends.

Perhaps when she got home she should check whether she’d recently been followed by @badguy.

The missed call was from Laura Geddes. Jasmine switched the phone off in case she tried again. She didn’t want to speak to her. She had nothing to give her; or at least nothing that she wanted to. Almost everything she had discovered so far just seemed to be nailing Fallan’s motive: doing the cops’ job for them, as she’d feared.

She put the rifle to her shoulder once again and took up position, finding the target, relaxing into her breathing rhythm. The outside world faded and dimmed, and she was back in her quiet place. A place she could think.

Why didn’t she want to talk to Laura? Why was it so hard to accept the obvious conclusion that all of the evidence was pointing to? Was it simply because of what they had been through that she trusted him, that she liked him? Was there anything concrete supporting her doubt, or just emotion and instinct?

Tit for tat. An eye for an eye. Family loyalties. Your classic cycle of violence. It all made perfect sense, apart from the timescale.
Beware the vengeance of a patient man
, Stevie Fullerton had said. But could that vengeance truly have waited her entire lifetime? So far every witness statement and every hard fact pointed to this
being the case. The only thing even remotely hinting at anything else was the business with the phone.

She wasn’t giving that to the cops right now though, because it was the only card she had to play and she didn’t trust them with it. If they ran the prints and it only gave them the name of some no-mark ned, how motivated would they be to follow that up?

Instead she had given it to Harry Deacon at Galt Linklater, whose police contacts meant he could get the prints analysed through back channels. It was going to take a while, but it kept the information under her control.

She needed more, though.

The crosshairs steadied, their bobbing reduced to a steady, minute and predictable path. She squeezed: a little too early, a little too low and to the left.

It didn’t help that she hadn’t been able to contact Fallan. He still wasn’t talking, not even to her. The cops had him on remand and he was refusing visitors.

Jasmine reckoned she knew why.

She thought of how she’d spent her morning. That thick-necked gorilla, with his scars and tattoos and his ostentatious, wear-the-price-tag suit, was her uncle. He had sat there simmering with rage, alluding to her mother being a criminal and laying down the very gory details of her unknown family history. This was the world Fallan had sworn to keep her away from; the world her mum had gone to great lengths and great sacrifice to escape.

She took another shot, a hiss of gas followed by the plink as her pellet rattled the back of the catcher. Low and left again. She was still squeezing too early, another hangover from the slower action on the spring rifle’s trigger.

Fallan wouldn’t see her because he didn’t want her drawn into this, and now she knew the reason. It wasn’t just because of what it would expose her to: it was because the risk wasn’t worth the reward. She had finally found out who her father was, but there was no satisfaction in it, no hint of filling a lifetime’s absence. It was just a name. She hadn’t known Jazz Donnelly, and nothing she had learned about him made her feel any kind of a connection.

Heredity was meaningless. It wasn’t about flesh and blood. It was about thought and deed. That was why she felt closer to the man who had killed her father than to a dead thug named Jazz Donnelly.

There must have been more to him than that, though she was never going to know. Her mother had lived a strange and evidently dangerous life once upon a time, but she’d never have been some daft moll hanging off the arm of a gangster.

She guessed he must have been charismatic and exciting, as well as attractive, but Sheila had suggested Mum was wary of getting involved with him until after he was slashed, whereupon he was perceived – wrongly – to have slowed down his normal act. Sheila had also implied that her mum was the type drawn to damaged men, perhaps thinking she could change a guy like Jazz. There must have been something she saw in him: someone like herself, perhaps, shaped by difficult circumstances but who might yet be reshaped into someone who could rise above them. Or maybe that was merely something her mother
needed
to see, something she was projecting.

There was so much Jasmine had merely glimpsed during her uncomfortable morning at the Old Croft Brasserie: matters they weren’t prepared to elaborate upon, and others still about which they clearly didn’t know enough.

It had been suggested that Fallan might have killed Jazz because he had beaten up her mother. Jasmine wasn’t sure she could believe that, but this didn’t matter so much as what lay behind the fact that others considered it a possibility.

Fallan was not merciful in dealing with men who attacked women. Rita had hinted at it, Sheila confirmed it, and made reference to the reason why.

Fallan’s father, a notoriously brutal and corrupt cop, hadn’t just beaten his wife, he had terrorised his family.

‘Everybody in the hoose,’ Sheila said.

That seemed to suggest there was more than just Glen and his mother under his fist. Who else was in that house? Who else had Iain Fallan ‘leathered’? And why had Glen never mentioned them?

Jasmine loosed another shot, ripping through the paper faster than she could blink. It was still low, but wide to the right. Though barely conscious of it, she had altered her breathing, thinking too much about having been early on the trigger.

Just breathe, she told herself.

‘
You’ve nae problem with evening the score when it suits you, eh, Sheila
?’

Sheila had been the barmaid way back when, a few years older than the young drinkers in that photograph. A trawl through online news reports had told Jasmine Sheila’s age, as well as the fact that she was Fullerton’s second wife. Perhaps there had also been a first husband. Had he knocked her about? And had Fallan intervened on her behalf?

Stay with the rhythm. Keep everything fluid.

There was something else there, some element of Sheila’s manner that had gnawed at Jasmine every time she thought back to it. She had been far slower than Doke to accept Jasmine’s story, keeping those shields up, not looking to make new friends. Her pain was bleeding out of her all over the carpet. She was a tough woman who implicitly understood the nature of the world she had found herself in, but that didn’t mean she liked it. She was angry over the death of her husband, but her anger went broader and deeper than that. She was angry at Stevie, at Doke, at all of them, for keeping up their endless rally of vengeance.

Jasmine thought back to Sheila staring at the table as Doke spoke about Stevie and his carefully orchestrated attack on Fallan.

Sheila didn’t want to hear about it. She knew there was no option not to listen, but she looked like she wanted to be somewhere else. Doke had warmed to the subject of Stevie’s ruthless ingenuity, spelling out his clever plan to protect his men from the consequences.

Jasmine thought it just sounded mob-handed and cowardly. Maybe Sheila did too, as well as being aware that it had sown the seeds of Stevie’s death.

That wasn’t it, though. Sheila had been bitterly vocal when she felt scornful of Doke’s pig-headed hard-man ethos, but when he talked about that she hadn’t even wanted to look anyone in the eye.