Authors: Christopher Brookmyre
Open Wounds
This is what tragedy looks like twenty-five years on, Catherine thought. She and Laura sat in Sam and Audrey Muir’s living room, watching the pair of them grip each other’s trembling hands as they huddled together on their settee, surrounded by the modest mementoes of the life they had led together.
The usual metaphors of wounds and scars could not adequately describe their condition; what she saw was not the remnant of old pain, or enduring numbness where the damage had been so great as to cut off feeling. This was a phantom limb.
They looked afraid, even before Catherine had got past the formalities and broached the subject. They were scared because they knew that was why she was here. They knew what this was going to feel like.
It always annoyed her when the papers described people as ‘brave’ when what they really meant was tragic: ‘Brave widow’s tears for war hero husband’; ‘Brave little Annie loses her battle with cancer’. It was a kind of platitudinous courtesy towards those who had suffered greatly but whose suffering had been appropriated as media property. Bravery implied a choice, and in the above cases, what was the non-brave alternative?
Sam and Audrey Muir were brave. They didn’t need to do this, yet here they were, reliving the worst thing that had ever happened to them.
This wasn’t where they had learned about their daughter’s death. She didn’t know why, but Catherine took some comfort from that. It would have felt that bit harder to ask this of them if they had been in the home where Julie grew up, even the room where they had been told to sit down when the police arrived at their door.
This place was new: a modern semi built this century. She
wondered when they moved, whether there had been another place in between. It seemed smaller than the life the pictures offered glimpses of; retirement down-sizing maybe. There were photographs of grandchildren everywhere: three of them, Catherine reckoned, snapped from infanthood through school years and, in the case of the eldest, a graduation gown. They were on the mantelpiece, on the walls, on occasional tables: haphazard collages, framed triptychs, even a digital display, fading new shots in and out every few seconds. Catherine deduced from some older images of a gangly teen in a mullet and late-eighties Rangers top that the doting father of the three grandkids was the Muirs’ son.
She spied only one picture of Julie. It sat on the mantelpiece, crowded by other photographs. Catherine had once read why it eased the pain to rub a part of your body that had just been hurt: the added sensory information sent to the brain diluted the signal coming from the point of the injury. That’s what was going on here. It was as though they could only glimpse Julie amid an overload of information about the good things that had come later.
There must be other photos hidden away: lots of them. She was beautiful.
‘She was always in such a hurry to grow up,’ Audrey said.
‘Twelve going on twenty,’ added her husband.
‘She always wanted the trendiest clothes, and we used to argue about what was appropriate for a girl her age to wear.’
‘Clothes and records, that’s all she was interested in. And, of course, we never had the money.’
‘Nobody did,’ said Audrey. ‘Not in those days. Julie understood that: that’s why we’d go fifteen rounds over what she was and wasn’t allowed to wear. If we could only afford to buy her something new once in a blue moon, then she’d be determined it was the trendiest thing possible and I’d be concerned about how many times it would survive the wash.’
‘She was a grafter, though,’ Sam said. ‘She always had part-time jobs right through her teens. I remember driving to pick her up at midnight from Safeways at Shawburn every Thursday and Friday night because I didn’t want her walking home at that hour.’
Catherine watched him wince, the memory of his fears coming back to him, the things he had endeavoured to protect her from only for his efforts to be in vain.
‘She couldn’t wait to get away from home.’
‘That’s not true,’ Audrey insisted, as though defending both their honour.
‘I don’t mean away from us. I mean out of Croftbank, where we lived. And if I had been in work more regularly, I’d have got us all away from there, but what could you do? It was the Eighties. Thatcher and her “economic miracle”,’ he added bitterly.
‘Julie wanted to live in a Duran Duran video,’ her mother said with bittersweet recollection. ‘And it would have been hard to imagine anywhere further from that fantasy than Croftbank. She was nineteen when she moved out.’
‘Barely nineteen, though she’d have passed for twenty-five. We couldn’t stop her. She had about three jobs when she was still living here: shifts in different clothes shops in town. Then when she was eighteen she could do bar work in the evenings as well.’
‘What kind of bars?’ Laura asked, looking for where a young Stevie Fullerton might fit into this picture.
‘Only trendy places,’ Audrey replied. ‘Same with the clothes shops. She wouldn’t have worked anywhere she didn’t want to shop, and she wouldn’t have pulled pints anywhere she didn’t want to drink. I couldn’t even tell you the names of them. They’ll all be long gone, turned into other things.’
‘So where was she living, after she left home?’ asked Catherine.
‘She shared a flat with a couple of other lassies,’ Sam answered. ‘They were a few years older than her but she knew them both from school. It was off Victoria Road.’
‘Only twenty minutes on the bus from Croftbank,’ said Audrey, ‘but to her it was another world. She was what she wanted to be, all grown up.’
Audrey suddenly broke down, Sam placing a hand around her shoulder. Catherine could picture the same scene twenty-five years ago, and imagined it played out frequently over the intervening decades. He produced a hanky and she dabbed at her nose and
eyes, apologising for herself, everyone else in the room telling her it was okay.
They all meant that the apology was unnecessary. Little else was actually okay.
‘It’s just the tiniest things sometimes,’ she said. ‘You never know what’s going to bring it back. Even at the time, I remember getting fixated about wee things that just weren’t that important.’
Sam nodded, his face like rainclouds, dark and troubled, barely holding back precipitation.
‘You focus on wee stuff,’ he agreed, ‘because you cannae cope with the rest: it’s too much.’
‘Like the ring,’ Audrey said. ‘Julie had this ring I gave her for her sixteenth birthday. It was my great-grandmother’s, and it got passed down through the family, mother to daughter. It never came back. The police returned her earrings and her wristwatch, and I remember getting completely obsessed by the fact that the ring never came back.’
Catherine had heard similar tales before. The missing item didn’t even need to have that kind of family significance: anything that didn’t return could come to symbolise all that was lost in the eyes of the bereaved.
Audrey shook her head, a couple more silent tears seeping out as she briefly closed her eyes.
Catherine addressed her next question towards Sam, as if to let Audrey know she could take a moment.
‘Do you remember her ever mentioning somebody called Stevie Fullerton?’
‘I know who Stevie Fullerton was,’ Sam replied, something stern and defensive creeping into his expression. ‘What has he got to do with Julie?’
‘He seemed to have taken a recent interest in the case and we’re trying to work out why. He visited Brenda Sheehan not long before his death.’
Catherine opted not to share the fact that Brenda had been murdered. This pair were barely clinging on as it was.
‘That fucking cow,’ Audrey suddenly spat, appearing to almost startle herself with the hatred in her tone.
‘There, Audrey,’ Sam cautioned. ‘Don’t get . . .’
‘I’m sorry,’ she said, more composed. ‘It’s just . . . she tried to cover for him, and I can’t forgive that.’
‘She did the right thing in the end,’ Sam reminded her. ‘Nobody wants to believe that about their . . . their family.’
‘I know, but she lied for him. Said he was at home with her. Doesn’t matter if she admitted it later: she still lied.’
Sam gave Catherine a helpless look. It was a needless apology; she could see what was going on. Brenda’s lie was like the ring: another totem drawing a disproportionate response. In a strange way it was easier to be angry at Brenda for lying than to be angry at Teddy for doing it, as the latter was just too overwhelming an anger to tap into.
‘Just to come back to Stevie Fullerton,’ Catherine said softly. ‘Is there any connection you can think of from back then?’
Sam shook his head.
‘You’re asking the wrong people,’ Audrey answered. ‘She never told us what was going on with her socially, even before she moved out. You’d be better speaking to her flatmates.’
‘Do you remember their names?’ Laura asked, notepad at the ready.
‘Sure,’ Audrey replied. ‘There was Ciara Flanigan. That’s C-I-A not K-E-I. She was training to be a teacher. Somebody said she’s at Croftbank High, back where she started. And the other one, I don’t know what happened to her. Her name was Yvonne Sharp.’
Catherine and Laura looked straight at each other, utterly failing to keep their responses inconspicuous.
Masks
There had been a power outage cutting the streetlights along Shawburn Boulevard. It made the Old Croft Brasserie stand out like a beacon, the floods illuminating its car park apparently fed off a private source. Through the windows Jasmine could see that the place was full, as though the reservations had piled up and the diners been hovering impatiently during its temporary closure.
It was a different crowd from the private function the other morning, fair to say. All that money and effort cultivating an image and a reputation for her restaurant: Sheila knew implicitly what the people she was pitching for wanted, what they expected, how they dressed, how they conducted themselves. Stevie’s crowd were so not it. She wondered how Sheila felt whenever a party of them pitched up of an evening, and how good she was at hiding it.
Jasmine could see her as she stepped though the double doors. She was in hostess mode, showing a party of four to their table, two staff in close attendance to take coats and hand out menus. She was in a neat black shift dress, her appearance smart but not flashy, as though she knew she had to look good for her clients but not more dressed up than they were. Her hair and make-up evidenced time and care, flattering but not overdone. She looked in her element: busy, genial, authoritative; the hostess into whose care the diners eagerly delivered themselves, as much the face of the business as the hot-shot chef was the driving force.
How many of the clientele would know she had just been widowed, or under what circumstances? How many would now be aware that she had been married to a notorious Glasgow crime boss?
There was certainly no evidence of a morally motivated boycott. Maybe it was like Starbucks: the product on offer was sufficiently
tempting that most punters would rather swallow their principles than go without swallowing the fare they had come to crave.
Jasmine watched her smiling, like the place had been shut for a few days over a burst pipe. Nobody at any of the tables would have a clue how she really felt. She couldn’t hide it from Jasmine, though. She hadn’t finished her drama training, but she was enough of an actress to recognise when another one was practising her art.
Jasmine waited to be noticed, standing next to the corralled station where the bookings ledger and the phone sat next to a computer running the table-management and billing systems. A waitress glanced her way, burdened by a tray of plates, looking around to see if someone else could help. She spoke, directing her boss’s attention.
The mask failed for just a second, a look of concern flashing across Sheila’s face, followed by a brief glimpse of the defensive aggression that had greeted Jasmine previously. Then the hostess was back, calm and politely approachable, albeit not smiling.
‘I’m afraid we’re full,’ she said, breezily apologetic, as though she’d never seen Jasmine before. ‘And unfortunately I don’t think I’ll be able to offer you anything for the foreseeable future,’ she added, making play of flipping through the ledger.
‘I get the message,’ Jasmine told her. ‘But I just have to ask you one question, and then I’ll leave you alone.’
‘As you can see, we’re extremely busy just now, and I don’t have time to—’
‘One question,’ Jasmine repeated. ‘Woman to woman, nobody else party to the conversation.’
This time, Sheila got the message.
‘And what would that question be?’
‘What makes you think Glen Fallan didn’t kill your husband?’
Seduced and Abandoned
In keeping with the complexity of the overtures, the buy was no straightforward handover.
‘I told you they were jumpy bastards,’ Stevie told Tony. ‘They’ll accept the payment from me, but they’ll only hand the merchandise to you. I hand over the cash, and once it’s verified they make a call and authorise their man to release the goods to you. Separate locations, that’s the way they like it.’
‘Why?’
‘Means if anybody’s picked up a tail there’s no transaction for the polis to witness. Plus it means no mad rocket gets tempted to try blowing everybody away and walking off with the gear
and
the cash.’
‘So how does that work? You just hand over a case full of money at point A and hope they’re nice enough to return the favour to me at point B? What if they just take a gun to you and piss off with two hundred and forty large while I stand there like a fanny waiting for a bus?’
Tony seemed to think he was the wise old head outlining a legitimate concern. He didn’t realise that even his fears were based on his limited perspective and obsolete thinking.
‘Do you think pulling something like that would be worth the grief to these guys?’ Stevie asked him. ‘For the sake of less than a quarter mill? They’ve got half a dozen buyers giving them that kind of money four and five times a year. This is big-time, Tony.’
‘Well, if you’re happy enough, fine. It’s you that’s taking the risk, and just so we’re clear, it’s you that’s liable for the money if anything goes wrong.’
Stevie assured Tony that nothing would, but nonetheless requested that Glen accompany him to his end of the handover
rather than Tony’s. It was a request to which Tony was more than content to accede. Indeed, before the two vehicles set off on their respective runs, Tony took Glen aside and made sure he understood his job.
‘Protect my money,’ he told him. ‘That chancer’s expendable – my money isnae. If this goes bad, the debt is his, but if he doesnae make it, the debt is yours. Get me?’
Glen thumbed his lapels, letting Tony see the Steyr nine-mill he had recently added to his arsenal.
‘Got you.’
Stevie seemed very nervous throughout the drive. He kept checking his watch and was equally attentive towards the rear-view mirror of his MR2 to make sure Tony and Arthur were still following in the Jag. It was an utterly uncomfortable ride for Glen all round, as he felt like a deckchair folded up inside the cramped little Toyota.
Both cars stopped at a service area outside St Helens for a final check by payphone that everything was still on. The call lasted mere seconds, just a formality. Stevie simply said ‘Yeah, it’s me, we’re set,’ then paused a moment before responding: ‘Okay.’
They had an hour to kill, so the four of them grabbed a coffee and a fry-up, then got in their cars and went their separate ways, to their very different fates.
Tony and Arthur returned to the warehouse at Waterloo Dock for the pick-up, while Stevie’s drop was supposed to be at Lime Street station: public but anonymous, and close to payphones for the authorisation.
Stevie barely uttered a word after leaving the services, which struck Glen as all the more uncharacteristic for a guy with his gab. It wasn’t every day you drove around with that kind of cash in your motor, right enough, to say nothing of what the goods would be worth in the long run. Still Stevie kept glancing at the time – all the more, in fact, now that he couldn’t alternate it with checking Tony and Arthur were still around.
Stevie pulled his MR2 into a multi-storey and switched off the engine. He sat restlessly, fingers fidgeting, then eventually turned
the engine back on so that he could listen to his Simple Minds cassette. His face seemed a little pale, but more noticeable was the fact that the tips of his ears were glowing red, like he’d been outdoors in freezing wind and just come inside to the warm. He stared out of the windscreen at nothing in particular, his fingers now occupied by tapping a rhythm, and seemed to drift away in his thoughts.
Glen checked the clock himself after a while, and noticed that the appointed drop time was only two minutes away.
‘Shouldn’t we be getting a shift on?’ he asked.
Stevie came out of his reverie with a start, then looked again at the clock.
He nodded, almost reluctantly, where Glen would have expected him to spring out of the vehicle.
They walked around to the station, Glen keeping a vigilant watch fore and aft for anything amiss, not least some chancer of a bag-snatcher who might score the spawniest grab of his life.
‘I don’t see Sammy,’ Glen observed, scanning the concourse.
Stevie said nothing, just checked the time yet again and led Glen towards a bank of payphones, where they stood in wait.
They waited two minutes, which became five, which became seven, ten.
Glen kept scanning the entrances, but Stevie only had eyes for the clock. That was when Glen realised that Stevie wasn’t really expecting to meet anybody.
He was about to ask what was going on when one of the payphones began to ring. Stevie dived across to answer it, giving fright to some old dear who had been approaching the thing when it went off.
‘It’s me,’ was all he said.
He stood there gripping the handset, listening intently, his eyes focused on some indeterminate point, a relegated sense.
Stevie listened for only a few seconds, then replaced the handset gently, as though it or the cradle might shatter. He placed a hand on the silver trunk of the payphone, steadying himself, then let out a slow sigh before straightening up.
‘Are we okay?’ Glen asked.
Stevie just nodded, the tiniest tremor of his head, then began to walk away.
‘What’s up? I thought you said we were okay?’
‘Not here. I’ll tell you in the motor.’
Stevie was sweating by the time they were both back inside the MR2, and not from the exertion of a brief walk. His breathing was weird too: he kept letting out these protracted exhales. His hands were gripping the steering wheel even though the engine was off, and Glen could see his pulse ripple the skin on the inside of his right wrist. The guy’s heart was thumping.
‘What’s the script?’ he asked. ‘Why did the drop not happen? Is it still on?’
Stevie swallowed, then turned to face Glen.
‘Tony and Arthur have been lifted,’ he told him.
Glen felt something tighten inside him, a sense of danger, a fear of being trapped. He always felt a twinge of this when he heard someone he knew had been arrested, but this was pure-strain.
‘On their way to the warehouse? What for?’
‘Naw.
Inside
the warehouse. There was a raid.’
‘A raid? So the filth
were
on to these other guys? Nae wonder they said they were getting a polis vibe. Tony and Arthur will be fine, though,’ Glen reasoned. ‘They never made a purchase. Wrong place, wrong time, that’s all.’
Stevie shook his head.
‘They were lifted in possession. Enough H to send them down for all day.’
Glen couldn’t work it out.
‘But you never made the drop.’
Stevie let out another huge sigh, throwing his head back.
Then he saw it: the nervousness, the heart rate, the sweating, checking the time, checking the rear-view.
Glen pulled out the Steyr and levelled it at Stevie’s ribs, out of sight below the dashboard.
‘You set him up, didn’t you? You grassed him.’
Glen cocked the hammer, his thumb unlatching the safety.
‘I asked you a question.’
Stevie turned and looked Glen in the eye.
‘They say it’s not polite to answer a question with a question, big man, but you should indulge me, because this one’s a stoater. Tell me: who puts on a mask to give somebody a doing?’
Glen didn’t follow. He was still reeling from the news, and he couldn’t begin to see where Stevie was going with this.
‘I ask you again, Dram: who in Gallowhaugh, or anywhere else in Glasgow, puts a stocking over their heid, or a balaclava over their face, to give some poor dick the message?’
‘Somebody who doesnae want caught?’ Glen ventured.
‘Naw, Dram. The answer is: nobody.’
Glen was about to counter, which was when he saw it, the mirror he was preparing to hold up turning back into sand.
They had come for him: nylon stockings pulled over faces, reversed balaclavas with eye-holes torn out.
‘
Heard my boys just got there in the nick of time. I’m Tony, by the way. Tony McGill
. . .’
Glen felt the little MR2 come loose from the world and drift, unanchored in time and space.
‘
They’ll come after you again – unless you’ve got friends too
.’
He closed his eyes for a moment, trying to stop his head from spinning, the images and memories from crowding him, all glimpsed in new light, altered meaning. When he opened them, he was back in that Liverpool car park, back in reality, but it would be a new reality.
‘Were you there?’ he asked.
Stevie said nothing, which was a yes.
Glen uncocked the gun and let it rest in his lap.
‘What happened today, Stevie?’
Stevie stared ahead again, across the concrete, where a woman was folding up a toddler’s buggy to fit it into her boot.
‘I beat him at his own game, that’s what happened. Did what he’s been doing for years: fed him to the polis. Scaled it up, though.
I wasnae dealing with CID no-marks and chucking them wee tiddlers. I removed him from the picture and I took him for a hundred and sixty grand in the process.’
‘Why?’
‘He was in the way. He’s a fuckin’ dinosaur. All this “keeping drugs out of Gallowhaugh” pish. He should have retired gracefully and left us all to it, but he still wanted to be the big man. He sealed his fate when he sent Arthur round to Donny Lawson. That’s when I knew he needed tell’t.’
Glen thought about everything that had happened since the re-opening party. Stevie being the man with a contact, dangling the bait, making it look like it might all fall apart so that Tony would be all the more eager to grasp it. He thought of the first trip to Liverpool, the warehouse, Sammy, the guys with semi-autos. Heckler & Kochs. Serious hardware.
Preferred
police
hardware.
‘This has been a set-up all along, hasn’t it?’
‘There’s somebody far bigger than me that Tony’s pissed off,’ Stevie replied. ‘He’s been shagging somebody he shouldn’t. The wife of somebody
very
connected.’
‘There was never a source, was there?’
‘Naw. Tony won’t know that, though. The plan was that there would be a bit of a mêlée: the kiddy-on suppliers get away, but Tony doesnae and he’s left holding all the H. A lot more H than two hundred and forty grand would buy. And in order for them to have handed it over, as far as Tony knows, I had to have made the payment. The suppliers took the cash, handed over the merch, then the roof fell in. Jolly bad luck, old chap.’
‘He’ll know. He’s not daft.’
‘He’s finished. He’ll get thirty years.’
‘He’ll still have reach. Friends on the outside. Tony junior, for one thing.’
‘They’ll be too busy fighting over their share of the carcass.’
‘Even so, Teej will have to come after you if he wants to take over the reins. He’ll look like a nobody if he doesn’t.’
‘Aye, well, that’s why I’m sitting here talking to you, big yin. I
want you on side. I was never meeting anybody at the station today, remember? I didnae need you for protection, Dram. I was keeping you away from the jaws of the trap.’
But Glen knew Stevie too well to accept the purity of this motive.
‘Naw, you were tying me into your side of it. Nobody would believe I walked out of this clean without being in on it.’
‘Aye, you’re tootin’ there,’ Stevie conceded. ‘But it’s a done deal noo, so what are you gaunny dae? You could shoot me here in this motor and prove your loyalty to that two-faced auld prick, or you can come in with me and make some real money. Starting with forty grand right out of that briefcase.’
Glen flipped the Steyr’s safety back on.
‘Eighty,’ he said.