Authors: Christopher Brookmyre
Marionettes
By Catherine’s estimate, Fallan’s shoes would barely have hit the pavement before she got the call from the DCC, demanding to see her in his office. She had known that news of this development would get back to him swiftly, as that had been her intention, but she was trying not to think of what this said about how long she might hope to keep certain other undertakings from his notice.
Ordinarily, she would have taken the stairs, giving herself time to clear her head and prepare for the imminent confrontation, but his tone warned her that anything other than the express route would be interpreted as insubordination. Ignoring the logic that making him wait was going to be the least of her transgressions, she opted to take the lift.
She felt an instinctive reluctance to step inside when its doors slid apart, revealing the empty chamber within. The silence of it and the sense of isolation further added to the feeling that she was being conveyed automatically towards her judgment. Keep the heid, she told herself, shouting down the voices that were asking what the hell she was doing, warning her that she was poking a very big tiger.
I’ve poked bigger, she reminded them.
Adrienne had discovered three more numbers deleted from Fullerton’s mobile phone records. One, as anticipated, belonged to Gordon Ewart’s mother, Philippa. A second had been traced to the name Colin Morrison, but as it was a common name and they hadn’t yet been able to get in touch, that was all they had on him so far. But the third deleted number had provided no such impediments. It belonged to one Mitchell Drummond.
Catherine had been peremptorily summoned, but the DCC was
mistaken if he thought she was coming up there for a smacked bottom and a telling off. He was the one who had a lot of explaining to do. She wasn’t holding all the cards, but she had a pretty good bluffing hand, particularly given his knowledge of what might be out there.
She just had to hold her nerve. Same as any interview: you keep the suspect talking and eventually he’ll give himself away.
She knocked on the door and was greeted by a gruff ‘Come in.’
Catherine stepped inside, leaving the door open to imply that she didn’t anticipate being here long, a butter-wouldn’t-melt gambit.
Drummond stood behind his desk with his arms folded. She was struck by the contrast with Abercorn in her office, back straight, head up, taking his licks. Drummond’s head was forward, subtly aggressive, spider to her fly. He had come a long way from the ‘big lanky boy’ Brenda Sheehan had described.
‘Close the door,’ he told her. ‘Sit.’
She complied, keeping her expression neutral, allowing a flicker of confusion to play across her face. She wasn’t doing any of his work for him.
‘You’ve released Glen Fallan,’ he stated, his voice welling up with suppressed rage. He actually had to swallow before he could go on. ‘Would you care to explain why?’
‘The PF’s office has dropped the charges.’
His response was staccato, jaws clenched. Only a few words at a time could escape his bared teeth.
‘And why. In the name of fuck. Would they. Fucking. Do that?’
Catherine thought of the breezy and solicitous manner with which he had greeted her the last time, his considered and precise delivery, those press-conference answers. Despite Sunderland not telling him what it was regarding, he had known it would be about Julie Muir. He’d been ready and prepared: even asked her why she hadn’t looked up the case files.
Played, sir.
But contrast all of that with the way he had responded when she told him Brenda Sheehan was dead, probably murdered. He
hadn’t known that in advance, and it left him genuinely spooked. She was dealing with a frightened man, which meant she might be able to reach out to him.
It also meant he could be all the more desperate and all the more dangerous.
‘Because Fallan didn’t do it, sir. It wasn’t Fallan’s vehicle at the murder scene: it was a similar model bearing duplicate plates. Fallan’s vehicle is a left-hand drive. We re-interviewed the witnesses and they all confirmed that the gunman got out of the right-hand side of the Land Rover, something backed up by CCTV images. It became clear to us that he had been set up.’
‘Fallan was apprehended by armed officers and had a pistol in his possession,’ Drummond argued.
‘But not the murder weapon.’
‘He and Fullerton had a history. The way I heard it, Fullerton tortured him and left him for dead.’
‘We have subsequently learned, from Fullerton’s wife, that the story you’re referring to was just gangland whispers. This case isn’t about Glen Fallan, sir. It’s about Julie Muir.’
Any further protests he wished to make about Fallan’s release evaporated with the mention of this name. The rage subsided too, revealing itself to have been nothing but bluster. He was no longer on such solid ground, and less confident about the wisdom of going on the offensive.
He stared, waiting to hear what she had to say, ready to assess the ramifications.
‘Brenda Sheehan initially told the investigation that her brother was home with her on the night of the murder. She later retracted this alibi, leaving poor Teddy to twist in the wind. We have reason to believe Brenda Sheehan told Stevie Fullerton she was threatened and intimidated into changing her story.’
Drummond gave her a dubious look, as if to say ‘is that all you’ve got?’, but he was over-heavy on the scorn. She could tell he was worried.
‘Brenda Sheehan was a hopeless alcoholic who by her own admission was drunk on the night in question,’ he said. ‘She wasn’t
intimidated any more than you’d pressure any witness into backing down from a lie.’
‘I think telling her she was going to jail for shoplifting if she stood firm, but that all charges would be dropped if she sang your tune, constitutes something more than mere pressure, sir.’
‘Oh, for Christ’s sake, you’re believing that garbage? Brenda Sheehan is the very definition of an unreliable witness. Her testimony would have been as credible in court then as her latter-day revisionism sounds now, especially as it’s bloody obvious she was being coached all the way by Fullerton.’
Catherine gave it a moment, waiting to observe whether he’d realise what he’d just said. She could see the first glimmer of it, the frantic internal reading back of the transcript.
‘So you’ve seen the video, sir?’ she asked quietly.
Drummond stood with his eyes wide, nostrils flaring involuntarily. He seemed paralysed, no longer merely standing behind his desk but trapped there.
‘A man called Gordon Ewart told me that he had been eliminated from my investigation, apparently before I had even learned his name or the fact that he’d been Julie Muir’s boyfriend at the time of her death. This part had been kept out of the court case with the blessing of the investigation. Mr Ewart gave the impression that he had very senior police connections.’
She was expecting anger, even hate, but saw something soulless instead, like he was barely present any more.
‘Gordon Ewart’s number was deleted from the subscriber check I ordered on Stevie Fullerton’s phone records. So was his mother’s and, very significantly, so was yours. Why was Stevie Fullerton calling you, sir?’
Drummond didn’t respond. He continued to stare, but his eyes seemed less intent, as though he was looking past her, or unable to focus.
‘Who is Colin Morrison, sir?’
Drummond sat down behind his desk and sighed. There was something discomfortingly languid about his movement, resigned and yet somehow automated. The energy and fortitude with which
he normally carried himself was gone, and it was as though some emergency back-up system was keeping him in motion.
He rolled open a drawer in his desk and reached down into it. Still saying nothing, he placed a brown folder on to the worktop, flipped it open and turned it around.
Inside was a single sheet of paper and a sealed envelope. On the sheet of paper was a drawing of the symbol that had been daubed on Fullerton’s head, the symbol that had become a gangland meme. The symbol whose origin nobody seemed to know.
Drummond pushed the envelope towards her and tapped it twice. She could see her name printed on the front. His face remained stony, his manner still strangely distant.
Catherine opened the envelope and slid out a single sheet of paper. She unfolded it, revealing it to be a photocopy of an A5-sized handwritten page, the shadows at its edge indicating it to be from a notebook. It was a ledger, listing names, addresses, dates and amounts. About two-thirds of the way up she saw the name McLeod next to the address of the farm where she grew up. The date was burned into her mind.
Above this line, all of the entries ended with the word
PAID
. The most recent of these had been lodged the day before. There had been no collections after that.
Catherine felt the room swim.
‘Who gave you this?’ she asked, as a lifetime’s fears began rattling the gates.
Drummond shook his head in a way that allowed her no hope that he could be prevailed upon to answer.
‘The individual who gave it to me said that you would understand its significance. He wished to stress that he understands its significance also, and that right now he is alone in this regard. This will change considerably in the event that you should prove uncooperative.’
He sounded absent, and she worked out what was going on with his manner, his body language. The revelations of what she knew had moved things out of his control. He could no longer contain the situation, and was now reduced to being the vessel for someone else’s will.
Somebody had the goods on him, like they had the goods on her.
‘You will cease all unauthorised inquiries pertaining to the murder of Julie Muir, which I would remind you was resolved to the satisfaction of this department and of the law courts twenty-five years ago.
‘You will also stand down the investigation into the death of Brenda Sheehan. The autopsy report shows that the deceased aspirated on her own vomit following a resumption of the binge-drinking habits that blighted much of her life. The obvious conclusion is accidental death, and this should not be affected by the understandable dismay of those whose disappointment at Brenda’s return to alcoholism may have led them towards hysterical feats of speculation and projection.’
He kept talking, sounding like he was reading from a prepared statement, in an anaemic imitation of his ebullient press-conference idiom. This stuff almost sounded like it had been lawyered.
‘You will continue to diligently investigate the murder of Stephen Fullerton, pursuing the existing, solid lines of inquiry centred around Fullerton’s former associate, Glen Fallan. This has been an extremely difficult undertaking, complicated by the reluctance of certain criminal elements to cooperate with the investigation, and under these circumstances your failure to ultimately resolve the case would be understandable. It may, however, lead you to reconsider your own position.’
She felt like she was sinking into the carpet and the walls were looming over her. His words faded into the background as her sense of self began to dilute but some part of her mind was still functioning as stenographer.
He was telling her he wanted Fallan for the Fullerton killing, regardless of all she had learned. Acknowledging that this was a tough sell, an acceptable second would be for the case to remain unsolved and go cold due to her incompetence, over which she would resign.
‘Who is doing this?’ she asked him, fighting tears.
He didn’t answer, didn’t even shake his head, didn’t look her in the eye.
Table Manners
She felt her stomach lurch as she saw the BMW approach, hurtling along the single track that led from the main road with a haste that was reckless to the point of nihilistic. It was how Squirrelly always drove that thing: showy, self-important and loud. Too late, she realised how easy it might have been to just roll the tractor into the lane as he took that last blind bend at the usual speed: a tragic accident, a harsh price but a lesson to all those exuberant urban drivers about the dangers of those seemingly empty country roads.
A different lesson would have to do.
She steadied herself, pictured it in her head once more. She felt sick all of a sudden, now that the time had come. It would be so much easier just to hand over the envelope, forget about this. Don’t let him into the house, wasn’t that what her mum had commanded? She pictured that instead, her meekly saying nothing, simply pressing the manila parcel stuffed with bank notes into Cadaver’s hand as he stood on the doorstep, watching him walk away, climb back into his vehicle and drive off. Vividly, she flashed forward to how that would feel, and knew that it would be far worse than this, far worse than any fear or apprehension or self-doubt.
She was doing this.
She walked briskly to the kitchen, where she pressed play on the radio-cassette and turned up the volume. The chorus of ‘Send My Heart’ by The Adventures all but covered the sound of the reverberation of the BMW’s engine against the dairy shed. The doorbell rang a few moments later. She ignored it, firing up a gas burner beneath the kettle. Another ring followed, the angry extended double-push almost funny in its impotence, like Morse code for ‘Don’t you know who I am?’
She ignored that too, and composed herself to appear busy and
distracted when inevitably they arrived at the back door. She took her place at the sink and began to peel a potato. Her hands were trembling.
The back door opened without even a knock. Cadaver entered with his best hard-ticket scowl on his face, by way of registering his displeasure that he had needed to come looking for an answer rather than be received at the front door. Catherine feigned fright and surprise at the intrusion, pretending she had been too caught up in her task to notice his approach. It was something of a method performance, as she was already wan and tremulous in anticipation of his arrival and what might lie beyond it.
‘Get your da,’ Cadaver ordered, the words issuing from between lips that barely moved. No niceties, no faux politeness; there was a violence in his issue, an intent to unsettle and intimidate.
‘Pardon?’ she replied, instinctively bristling at his manner despite her fear.
‘I says get your da,’ he growled. ‘Move.’
‘That’s no’ nice, you,’ Squirrelly interjected. ‘We’d like to speak to your daddy please,’ he said to Catherine with a patronising smirk.
‘He’s not here,’ she told them, putting down the potato peeler and reaching for a dish towel to dry her hands. ‘Nobody is.’
Cadaver took a moment to process this.
‘That’s all right,’ he replied. ‘We’ll just take a wee pew here and wait for him. Come on,’ he said to Squirrelly. ‘The lassie’s getting a brew on. Two sugar and milk in mine.’
They both helped themselves to a seat.
‘Where is he?’ Cadaver asked. ‘Will he be long?’
‘A wee while, yes,’ she said tersely. ‘He’s in hospital. He collapsed yesterday. Doctors say it was exhaustion. Personally, I think he’s been suffering from parasites.’
She felt her voice waver as she spoke this last, her indignation driving the thought but her fear sapping its vocal conviction.
‘Aye, boo hoo,’ Cadaver responded. ‘Where’s the fuckin’ money?’
‘Here, come on you,’ Squirrelly reprimanded, though he was
giggling as he did so. He turned to Catherine. ‘Sorry about the language, doll. That’s pure out of order, so it is. And you about to make the pair of us a cuppa tea as well.’
He was smiling, trying to look friendly, but in it Catherine felt an even greater sense of humiliation. It was worse than being merely patronised: he was underlining her powerlessness, rubbing it in as he smirked and giggled and sniffed.
‘Never mind the tea. She knows what we’re here for. And you better have it, hospital or nae hospital.’
‘I’ve got it,’ she assured him.
‘See? The lassie’s brand new,’ said Squirrelly. ‘He’s murder, in’t he, darlin’? Got to forgive him, but he’s a bit on edge cause he’s got the cold. He’s feeling a little horse, you know what I mean? Or do you neigh?’
He let this out in a whinny. He did this every time he saw her, crowbarring some kind of horse-related jokes into whatever he had to say.
She felt her face redden in hatred.
Something amused Cadaver about this and he emitted a guttural, wheezing laugh, like the winning gag on a TB ward comedy night.
‘Two sugars as well for me,’ he said without looking at her, instead sharing a smirk with Squirrelly.
‘Haw, say please you, ya’n ignorant tube.’
‘Please,’ he acquiesced. It was more calculatedly insulting than when he was merely spitting staccato commands, and her hatred grew accordingly.
She turned her back so that they couldn’t see her face, close to tears, her cheeks burning, and found herself reaching for two mugs from the tree largely because it was a disguise for the real reason she had faced away. The next track started on the cassette player: no less than her favourite song. She tried to concentrate on the music, let it take her somewhere else.
‘Oh, and if you’ve any Abernethy biscuits,’ Squirrelly suggested, hauling her back to the humiliation of the here and now. It prompted a wheeze from Cadaver and a snottery guffaw of delight from
Squirrelly utterly disproportionate to the remark; some private joke between them, her exclusion from it part of the humour, part of the sport.
She made them each a mug of tea, her hand shaking as she poured the kettle, now more from rage than fear.
They were sitting there, in her family’s kitchen, relaxing like they owned the place while the man who truly did was in hospital – put there by these people. Squirrelly had his back to where she stood spooning sugar at the slate worktop. He was sitting at ninety degrees to Cadaver, the pair of them now talking like she wasn’t even there, as though she were a waitress or a skivvy.
The arrogance.
The complacency.
They will try to burn you down
, went the song on the cassette.
But what they say can make you strong
. . .
She was doing this. She knew she wouldn’t be able to reload fast enough after the first shot, once the element of surprise had expired, but she had deduced that she wouldn’t have to.
She placed their mugs in front of them on the kitchen table, along with a packet of Rich Tea biscuits. Neither of them said thanks, continuing to chat away like she was invisible. Squirrelly was telling a story about something that had happened in a pub the night before, acting like every line of neddish patter in an overheard exchange was Oscar Wilde. Cadaver nodded appreciation, emitting his consumptive laugh every so often.
‘I’ll just get you what you’re owed and you can be on your way,’ Catherine announced, ahead of leaving the room.
‘Oh, I don’t know, hen,’ said Squirrelly. ‘This place is spiffing for tea. What’s it like for lunches?’
She went to the living room where she had stowed Harriet’s bag. The cash envelope was sitting inside it, above the pistol, which was primed and loaded. She took them both out, removed another dart and practised the manoeuvre. She tried it first with the left hand, the gun in her right, but it felt weak and awkward. She transferred the gun and tried with her right hand. Yes. That felt strong. That would do it.
She carried the bag back into the kitchen, barely eliciting a glance as she returned to her previous place at the worktop, between the fridge and the range.
She could still back out of this. They would never know what was in the bag. She wasn’t past the point of no return. But as she reached for the envelope full of the money that was tearing her family’s lives apart and listened to Squirrelly’s sneery nasal laughter at her kitchen table she realised the true point of no return would be the one whereby they walked out of here and her chance to act was gone.
She placed the envelope down on the table roughly halfway between the pair of them. Neither reached for it, another arrogant gesture of confidence, further conveying the message that they were in no hurry and would leave only when it suited them.
She turned away from the table and reached into the bag with her left hand, retrieving a dart from her pocket with her right, her body blocking Cadaver’s line of sight to what she was holding.
This was it. She took in a silent breath, large and long but not sharp, then turned on her heel and drove the dart between Squirrelly’s shoulder blades as they stuck up above the seat-back. She struck with a downward stabbing motion, the point thrusting through the synthetic fabric of his tracksuit top like paper and embedding itself right to the chamber.
She then took a step back from the table and raised the gun with her left hand, holding it by the barrel as she brought up her right to grip the stock. She hesitated for only a fraction of a second to steady her aim, keeping her focus on the target of Cadaver’s trunk, consciously avoiding looking into his eyes. He reacted with surprising speed in getting to his feet, but had barely begun to push the heavy wooden chair back from beneath him when she pulled the trigger. The dart’s coloured tail sprung up suddenly upon his left breast like a corsage.
It was as he stood staring at the dart that she realised she had thought through how to strike but neglected to consider an exit strategy. Her position had allowed her to exploit the vulnerability of them both being seated and Squirrelly having his back to her,
but as he climbed also to his feet, she saw that she had painted herself into a corner. Squirrelly was between her and the hall, Cadaver well placed to block her escape to the back door. How long did these things take to work? She hadn’t even checked the strength or dosage: they could have been optimised for bringing down a distressed Highland terrier.
Right at that moment however, neither of them seemed intent on pursuing her. Squirrelly was grabbing around his back with both hands, trying in vain to reach between his shoulder blades, while a darkening shadow on Cadaver’s charcoal trousers betrayed that he had wet himself. She understood: she thought he’d got up to come after her, but he had in fact been trying to flee, because he’d caught one glance and thought she was holding a real gun.
Squirrelly dropped, smacking his head off the slate worktop on his way to the floor. Cadaver slumped back into the chair that he had only partly slid away, his legs evidently having given out, his face drained and his expression disoriented. His head must be swimming, she assumed, as he was grabbing at his upper arm even though she had shot him in the chest. He then rolled over as though turning on his side in bed, and fell to the floor, the chair toppling beneath him. Catherine heard him gurgle and splutter for a few moments, then he was still.