Authors: Christopher Brookmyre
‘You all right there wee yin?’ said a voice.
She couldn’t see properly for tears. It took a moment to focus once she had wiped her eyes.
It was Ned Untrusty. Christ, had he followed her up to the circle?
She wanted to tell him to go away, but she could hardly answer ‘Yes, I’m fine.’
A dozen sarcastic replies failed to reach her tongue. She felt so weak and insubstantial that he could have mopped her up and wrung her out into a bucket.
She could hear other voices now, and became aware that house staff were gathering to enquire and assist.
‘She just needs some air, I think,’ said Ned. ‘Mon outside for a second.’
He put a hand on her shoulder and she let him lead her because she knew that it would make the staff back off, and avoid turning this into a circus.
He had a Glasgow accent, which surprised her, as she had assumed he would be a local.
She felt humiliated by having to accept his help, but she couldn’t say why. Was it because she’d caught him staring and subconsciously rejected him? Or would she have felt humiliated at this point, having to accept the assistance of any stranger? Her desire to settle for him over a clucking assembly of staff indicated the latter.
He held the door for her and escorted her out onto the pavement. The air did help. As soon as she stepped outside she felt an outrush of pressure, a dissipation of everything that had besieged her.
‘Let me get you a wee drink,’ he said.
‘No, I’m okay.’
‘Just some water,’ he insisted. ‘And maybe a hanky, eh?’
Close up she realised he was younger than she had assumed: maybe eighteen or nineteen. The age was right, but little else about him seemed to fit a Twin Atlantic concert. It was easier to picture him stopped at the lights in a souped-up Peugeot, moronic dance beats thumping through the rolled-down windows.
She didn’t want to be fussed over, didn’t want to be in any way
indebted to this chancer, but at least it would get her a moment alone while he went. She sniffed and nodded.
He returned after a few minutes bearing a bottle of still water and some napkins.
‘There you go.’
She accepted the water numbly with one hand and took the proffered napkins in the other.
As she mumbled her thanks she felt gratitude tinged with surprise at his solicitude. Disloyal as it felt to admit it, it was her mum’s fault. She had always been wary of guys who looked like they might be fly men or hardcases, especially if they had Glasgow accents. Growing up in Edinburgh, Jasmine had come to imagine the city along the motorway as being like some lawless frontier outpost, an impression her mother did little to dispel by never, ever going there.
She dabbed at her face, grateful she had decided against mascara. The tears had stopped, the sense of being engulfed lifted, like she had come up for air.
She took a few gulps of water, feeling a light breeze on her face and a pulse of bass in her body as the music throbbed from inside the theatre.
‘That better?’ her unlikely Samaritan asked. ‘You okay?’
He hadn’t said anything, hadn’t asked her what was wrong, for which she was grateful. He seemed a little distracted now though, perhaps impatient to get back to the show.
‘I’ll be fine now, thanks,’ she told him, but he made no move to return inside.
‘I think I’ll go to the Ladies, give my face a splash,’ she said.
It was somewhere he couldn’t follow her, a good way of breaking the connection. She just hoped he wouldn’t be hovering outside the loos, waiting for her when she came out. ‘Thanks,’ she added, by way of hinting that he was dismissed.
‘Nae bother. Look after yourself,’ he replied, remaining where he was.
‘You not coming in?’ she asked, trying to keep the relief from her voice.
‘Gaunny spark up, seeing I’m out here anyway. You want one?’
She declined and went back inside.
After her visit to the loo she returned to the circle and took a seat near the end of a row, where she didn’t need to disturb anyone to get past. Down and to her left she could see the guy she’d snogged, nodding to the beat. She didn’t experience anything weird this time, from seeing him or the band. The spell was broken. She could just enjoy the music.
Sam McTrusty was singing how it was ‘the end of our sweet universe’ but she wasn’t feeling anything cataclysmic any more. She’d been there and come out the other side. Besides, it was a song about getting stronger.
She was okay.
Dead Calm
‘Bloody typical,’ said Beano, braking sharp but smoothly. ‘The sun comes out and everybody wants their car washed at the same time.’
Detective Superintendent Catherine McLeod looked up from her phone and took in the dual carriageway ahead. Both lanes were choked with cars, while on the other side of the central reservation the traffic was at a steady flow, albeit in far greater volume than would be normal for the time of day.
‘Too congested to be rubber-neckers,’ Beano added. ‘They must have closed the lane nearest the entrance.’
‘More likely both lanes,’ Catherine suggested to the young Detective Constable. ‘They’ll be diverting everybody back before they reach the car wash.’
‘Got you. Hence how busy it is on the other side. This must be the queue to do a U-turn. Will I blue-light us through?’
‘I’m sure he’ll still be dead when we get there,’ Catherine replied, yawning and stretching in the passenger seat. ‘But yeah. Quicker we get there, the less time uniform have to trample all over our crime scene.’
Beano switched on the blue light and gave the siren a blast that was brief to the point of polite. In front of them, cars began to edge left and right, slowly clearing a narrow channel between them.
Catherine went back to her phone, thumbing through emails and mentally triaging them. There was nothing urgent, but maybe that was just her current perspective: nothing felt very urgent today. That was the upside of fielding a case like this; she knew she could comfortably forget about all the tuppence-ha’penny stuff for a while. This would be priority number one for everybody, including the brass, until they were all satisfied that it was the end of something rather than the beginning.
‘You’re exuding a Zen calm this morning, boss,’ Beano observed.
‘Am I?’
‘Sure. Something like this comes in, I’d half expect you to be ordering me to drive along the pavement right now, lights and sirens, with pedestrians diving left and right like it’s
Carmageddon
.’
Catherine didn’t reply as this wasn’t really a conversation. Beano was talking too much, and she knew why. He was nervous about where they were going, because he knew the body would still be there.
Beano didn’t like murder scenes. Once the body was bagged, no probs: it just became his place of work, and young DC Thompson loved to work. But today, he was aware that the victim had not been moved, and despite the blue light and his remarks about driving along the pavement, Catherine knew he was in no hurry to reach that car wash.
He hated seeing corpses; in fact, you could extend that to say that he didn’t like seeing the aftermath of violence full stop. No-body did; or at least Catherine hoped not
many
did, but it was an unavoidable reality of the job. Some people hid their revulsion behind bravado, immersing themselves in gallows humour because turning it into a joke gave them an emotional distance. Others simply became desensitised over time, though even the most hard-bitten could be blindsided now and again. Nobody’s defences were impermeable, and none of them could predict what might cause the human truth of it to leak through.
Beano didn’t seem to have any such mechanisms for self-deception, or any great talent for masking his feelings. He was visibly horrified whenever he was forced to clap eyes on a murder victim, and was highly squeamish when confronted with the sight of any kind of physical injury. The irony of how this sat with his appetite for horror movies and ultra-violent video games was the subject of both puzzlement and scorn, depending upon the observer’s own moral hang-ups.
He was the youngest member of the team, and Catherine owed it to him as a professional courtesy to rein in her maternal instincts when they tempted her to view him as some innocent wee boy, but
sometimes when she looked at him that was exactly what she saw. It was what she liked about him too.
A history graduate, he had been fast-tracked via the Accelerated Careers Development Programme and seemed acutely sensitive to the possibility of resentment at not having come up through the streets. The upside of this for Catherine was that he was determined nobody could ever accuse him of needing to be carried, to which end he endeavoured to work harder than anybody else. Catherine had never known a grafter like him. Shortly after joining her department he had broken his leg, falling off a garage roof in pursuit of a suspect. He had allowed himself precisely one afternoon by way of convalescence, then hobbled in on crutches with his leg in plaster from thigh to foot, insisting he be given every piece of desk-bound scut-work that anybody needed doing.
It was inevitable that he’d end up under her charge. Her husband Drew had recently remarked that ‘everybody on your team is a little bit broken’. It wasn’t a criticism. They were discussing qualities in her staff that she described as valuable fragilities.
Beano’s was that he couldn’t stand to see anybody getting hurt. Some people would regard that as a handicap for working in the often brutal sphere of law enforcement, but Catherine’s view was precisely the opposite. Anthony Thompson wanted to protect people from harm, and his very squeamishness served as a reminder that such was the very purpose of their profession.
In that respect, his job was already done for the day, as the harm-reduction dividend of Stevie Fullerton fielding a few bullets was incalculable. Unfortunately, this morning’s anonymous benefactor was unlikely to be much of a humanitarian either, and it was Catherine’s job to identify him.
The car continued its tentative progress between the two rows of largely stationary vehicles, Beano giving the siren a brief burst every so often, whenever it appeared a driver had failed to spot them in his or her mirror. Catherine could see the car wash up ahead, the canopy of what had once been a petrol station visible over the tops of the queuing cars. She was sure her dad had
stopped here once, when she was a little girl, filling up that beloved Wolseley whose wood and leather interior she could still smell.
Their progress ground to a complete stand-still half a dozen car-lengths short of the roadblock. There were several vehicles slewed across their path, angled in tight parallels that made it impossible for them to veer left towards the pavement. They were trying to nudge their way into the right-hand lane, where drivers were impatiently queuing to execute a U-turn through a break in the central reservation whenever gaps in the oncoming traffic allowed.
‘Could do with having a uniform or somebody from Traffic out there regulating the flow from the opposite direction,’ Beano suggested.
‘They’re probably all too busy contaminating my crime scene,’ Catherine replied, more breezily than she had expected.
Held up en route to something this big, ordinarily Catherine would have been fidgeting with frustration by this point, but amid his nervous chattering Beano had been right about one thing: she did feel very calm today. She felt coy acknowledging this even to herself, but she had to admit she knew the reason why.
Drew had an earlier start than her, as he was heading through to Edinburgh for a meeting. He had left her to doze while he showered, dressed and fixed the boys’ breakfasts, then brought her coffee and a croissant in bed. This was fairly normal. As he had placed the mug and the plate down on her bedside table, carefully picking out a spot amid the books, papers, phones and jewellery, she could hear the strains of the Mario Kart theme hailing from the living room, the boys getting in a fix before school. This was also fairly normal, at least since Drew reinstated their privileges on condition that they play only on the same team or in cooperative games. Prior to that they had been serving a ban on early-morning video games due to the sessions regularly ending in a barney, the invariably defeated Fraser reacting to each reverse at the hands of his older brother by descending into tearfully raging accusations of cheating. Duncan, for his part, would react with exasperated outrage,
or sometimes just laugh, both responses equally effective in sending Fraser into the red zone.
Drew had sat on the edge of the bed and brushed the hair from her face, laughing a little at her apparent difficulty in keeping her eyes open. He leaned over and kissed her neck. He smelled lovely, a bouquet of shower gel, aftershave and fabric conditioner. All of this was normal too; standard procedure, even.
He kissed her a little lower, delicately tugging at the strap of her nightie until her right breast was exposed, whereupon he softly kissed her nipple as she lay there in her dopey haze. This, while not an everyday occurrence, was far from out of the ordinary either. They even had a name for it: a rude awakening.
What happened next was a long way from normal, and she still wasn’t sure where it came from. She took his left hand and gently placed it on top of her panties.
Drew stopped for a moment, looked up into her eyes as if to say ‘For real?’ She bent his head back towards her breast by way of answer.
She knew the boys were occupied downstairs, and equally she knew Drew was showered and dressed and about to leave, so maybe she thought she had the safety net that it couldn’t really go anywhere. But it did.
She had to twist around and put her face into the pillow to stifle the screams she wanted to unleash, her orgasm degenerating into flushed and slightly embarrassed laughter. This was followed by a belated concern that she might have mangled his wrist somewhere amid the process, and finally an apology that the circumstances precluded reciprocation.
Drew said she didn’t owe him anything. ‘The thought of what just happened is going to keep me high all day.’
‘High?’ she asked. ‘Or hard?’
‘Bit of both.’
There was no denying the pleasure of it, or that it was responsible for the enduring calmness of mind she was still enjoying, but this was partially offset by a lingering unease over just where this impulse of abandon had come from. That part scared her just a little, as it
had been as though somebody else was driving for a while. God knows she had more reason than most to fear what lurked unseen beneath the skin.
Beano sounded the siren again and finally squeezed through the gap. An officer in uniform stepped forward upon spotting them, lifting cones to clear a way through the roadblock.
‘Is it true Traffic were first to the scene?’ Beano asked, teeing her up.
‘Yeah. Hope Fullerton’s tax disc was up to date and his tyre treads were deep enough. Probably wrote him up for loitering before they noticed the bullet holes.’
Beano drove the car up on to the broad pavement and parked it parallel to the dwarf wall that bordered the forecourt. Three further police vehicles were already lined up in front, two of them blocking the entrance and exit.
They both climbed out of the car and walked around the rear of the strategically parked ambulance that was hiding Fullerton’s vehicle from the gaze of curious drivers on the far side of the dual carriageway. It was a sky blue Bentley Continental GT. But of course. It was the epitome of automotive ostentatiousness, a ‘sports’ car nearly five metres long and weighing more than two thousand kilograms, propelled by an absurdly large engine that was nonetheless unnecessarily powerful even for the task of pushing this enormous lump of metal around. People talked of certain cars being a dick substitute, but the Continental was more than just a penis with wheels, it was a pound sign with power steering. There was no car on the road that said ‘wanker with money’ quite like it, which was why it was so popular with guys like Fullerton.
It sat between two disused petrol plinths, its paintwork strangely blotchy where foam had evaporated without being rinsed. Suds were still slowly dripping from its flanks and collapsing as the tiny bubbles continued to burst, creating a sad little corona, like a meringue mix someone forgot to put in the oven.
Catherine first saw Fullerton in profile through the smeared window on the driver’s side. From that distance he looked like he
could be asleep at the wheel, his head slumped forward onto his chest. Only the hint of a dark stain just inside his jacket collar betrayed that he wouldn’t be waking up. She saw little that ought to trouble Beano, and nothing at all that troubled her.
She should feel something, she told herself. He was a human being, somebody’s husband, somebody’s son. All the clichés, all the stuff she usually drew upon whenever her conscience needed a jump-start in order to give a fuck.
Nothing. Empathy failed her. She knew too much about him, knew that a quick death with no warning, no time to know fear, was a kinder fate than Stevie Fullerton had doled out to his victims.
As she proceeded through the forecourt she observed that there was one other car on the premises, a silver Ford Focus. Catherine guessed its driver was the woman she didn’t recognise, standing next to DC Zoe Vernon and two paramedics inside the kiosk that served as both office and supply room. The front was glass from floor to ceiling, affording an unobstructed view of the Spartan arrangements inside. A cash register and a desk were all that survived from the premises’ previous incarnation. Instead of newspaper racks and rows of confectionary, there were barrels of cleaning products and a small fridge on top of which was perched a filthy and aged kettle. DI Laura Geddes was talking to two guys who looked like car-wash staff: a lank-haired and ashen-looking teen and a burly older bloke sporting a lot of tattoos.
Glancing up, Laura gave Catherine a nod of acknowledgement but then went back to her conversation, taking notes. One of the two males she took to be Traffic also clocked the new arrivals and strode across the forecourt to greet them, checking his stride at one point, as though avoiding an invisible pillar.
A breath of wind blew through the place, suddenly filling Catherine’s nose with sharp chemical scents. There was something nastier in there too.
‘Kevin McCallister,’ the uniform introduced himself. ‘I was first on scene.’
He was straight-backed, with a determined seriousness in his
expression that nonetheless betrayed unease. He looked like he was worried he was about to be told he’d screwed up, but was coaching himself to remain stoic in the face of it. Catherine felt for him. Her jokes with Beano had just been banter, but there was a certain truth in this being out of the guy’s comfort zone.