Authors: Christopher Brookmyre
‘I’m cold,’ he said, then she felt the weight of his head shift slightly, and in that moment she knew he was gone.
She remained there for a time, just in case it wasn’t over, in case he still needed her, and because it delayed the rest of her life that had to follow. Then she gently let his head come down to rest on the earth and crouched by his side. She stared at his face, peaceful and still, a ghost of the cocksure and restless visage that had walked into her kitchen only a few hours before, and she looked at the bloody mess beneath his chest.
She felt the stirrings of panic about how her mind was going to cope with this. It seemed so big, so terrible, so frightening, something she couldn’t contain, like what she had vomited out but so, so much bigger.
Something took control, something deep within. She dabbed her index finger in his blood, held it above his forehead and flicked it, marking him with a short spray. Then she dabbed it again and drew the arc.
Sitting back to look at it, she felt calm and in control. In the ritual she found not absolution, but understanding: the knowledge that this was how it had to be. She had killed him so that her family could survive.
We’re taking this creature’s life to preserve our own. Killing something is a sacrifice – it’s always a sacrifice, and a sacrifice should be solemn. We’ll live off this creature today and tomorrow too. We owe it our gratitude and we owe it our respect, our courtesy . . . and our kindness.
Leverage
Fallan looked tortured and fraught, restlessly animated like a fly bashing itself against a window in confused desperation. He was soaking wet, dressed in jeans, a T-shirt and a light jacket, nothing in the ensemble designed for a night like this. She realised he had to be kitted in the clothes he’d been wearing when they lifted him. No wheels either, as they wouldn’t have surrendered the Land Rover to him yet.
‘Why did you release me?’ he demanded.
He sounded like an anguished ghost, blaming her for his exile from eternal rest.
‘We know you didn’t do it,’ she told him. ‘Jasmine Sharp spotted that the Defender at the car wash was a right-hand drive. You owe her big time.’
‘But why did you bring her into this?’ he asked, in a manner that had Catherine adjusting her grip on the nightstick.
‘That’s not something I can discuss with you. She came through for you, that’s the important part. What’s your problem with it?’
‘Because they’ve taken her.’
‘Who’s taken her?’ Catherine asked, but Fallan didn’t appear to be listening, or didn’t consider it worth an answer.
‘I was keeping her out of this. That was the deal. I take the fall and they leave her alone.’
‘What deal? Who are you talking about?’
‘The day Stevie died I got a text, purporting to be from Jasmine. It said she was in trouble and asked me to get to Glasgow right away. When I phoned, it just rang out. I dropped everything and drove. It wasn’t her, though: it was so I didn’t have an alibi. I was on my own, in my car, when Stevie got shot.
‘They phoned me after he was dead, again using Jasmine’s number.
They were using her as leverage. They wanted me to go down for Fullerton, and if I took the fall they’d leave her alone. That’s why I said nothing, even when I saw the stills of the Land Rover. But now I’m out and Jasmine’s missing. They’ve got her.’
‘Have you told the police?’ she asked, then promptly realised it was a stupid question. There were police in on this, and Fallan had to know that. ‘Why have you come here?’ she added.
‘Because you’re a part of this.’
‘I’m not a part of anything,’ she protested, wondering how crazed and paranoid Fallan might be. She edged a foot against the door, ready to close it if she felt the need.
Fallan reached forward to one of the glass panes and drew a shape in the rain and condensation. It was crude and runny, but she knew immediately what it represented.
‘They’ve got leverage on you too. They hung this thing around your neck like a choke chain from day one, and I’m guessing they’ve started to tighten it. That’s why you’re the only person I can trust.’
The rain continued to batter down, running off Fallan’s hair and on to his face.
‘You know what this means?’ she asked him, indicating the rune.
He nodded.
‘Who’s they?’ she asked again, her insides turning to mercury. ‘Who’s got Jasmine? Who’s doing this?’
Fallan’s face looked like a gravestone.
‘Tony McGill.’
As soon as he said the words she could see that it had been in front of her all the time. Bob Cairns and Tony McGill went way back, and he must have been promoted to McGill’s principal tame cop following the death of Iain Fallan.
What she couldn’t see was how McGill fitted into the Julie Muir killing, given the absence of any known connection between McGill and Drummond. She knew Fallan was right, though: knew it like you know winter is on the way.
‘How can you be sure?’
‘Can I come inside?’ he asked.
‘No,’ she told him. ‘If you know what this symbol means, you’ll
understand why I’m not going to invite you over my family’s threshold.’
‘I’m not a fucking vampire.’
‘No, it was others who did the blood-sucking. You’re something worse.’
She grabbed a jacket and lifted her keys. ‘We’ll talk in the car.’
‘Aye. Cannae be having a killer in the house, can we, McLeod? That would never do.’
Truth and Reconciliation
Anthony feared he was running out of time to say something.
He was driving through the car park of the sports club looking for a space, the Vauxhall dwarfed among rows upon row of SUVs. Reassuringly he spotted Cal O’Shea’s Land Cruiser tucked between an Evoque and a Q7. Cal’s partner David had told them he was down here playing tennis, but he wasn’t sure how long Cal would be or where he was headed afterwards. Fortunately it looked like they would catch him.
The club was in Hamilton, and Adrienne lived nearby in Motherwell. Anthony was going to drop her off at home after this last call, then take the Vauxhall back to Govan where his own car was parked.
They were getting on fine, though it was difficult to say whether this was in spite or because of the situation in which they found themselves. It felt good to be talking again, to be working together. Nonetheless, he couldn’t help but feel they were approaching the point where they either had to acknowledge the elephant in the room or they were mutually accepting that they never would. Beyond that point, they would both be entering another silent pact to pretend it never happened, and for some reason he just didn’t think that was good enough. It felt cowardly and dishonest, and though he knew it would keep things comfortable between them he also knew that it would also keep them at a distance too. It would mean they weren’t past it, and nor would they ever be.
How did you bring up something like that, though?
He had been looking for the right moment, but it never seemed to come. It wasn’t like they had nothing else to talk about. The end of the day seemed an appropriate time, but he wasn’t sure he wanted to do this parked outside her house. It would be too much like he
was making a play, as though he was angling to be asked in or something.
So maybe there would never be a right time; or maybe he just didn’t want it enough.
He pulled into a space at the far end, next to a jogging trail, and killed the engine. The light smir of rain that was blowing around occluded the windscreen now that the wipers were off, causing the world outside to blur.
Adrienne reached down into the footwell for her bag, and it was as she moved to grab the door handle that he forced himself to speak, feeling like it really was now or never.
‘Adrienne, sit tight a second.’
‘What is it?’
He sighed, which felt like such a conspicuous overture that she surely had to see what was coming: the three words neither of them had yet been able to bring themselves to say.
‘About that night.’
‘Oh, God, look, just don’t,’ she said, grabbing the handle and tugging it open.
Anthony reached out with his left hand and gripped her wrist.
‘I need to explain myself,’ he implored.
She looked aghast, like she desperately wanted out of the car. Something kept her there, though, and for that he was grateful.
‘I’m the one who needs to explain myself,’ she protested. ‘I’m just mortified. I was a bit pissed and I threw myself at you. I’m sorry. I must have looked totally desperate.’
‘You didn’t. It was me. I just wasn’t ready for things to move that fast. I thought I was, so I’m sorry I led you on.’
‘I didn’t need much leading.’
‘It’s not that I didn’t want something to happen, it’s just . . . It had been a long time. Not a lot of match practice, you know?’
‘Me neither. Why do you think I was throwing myself at you?’
‘I don’t just mean, you know, the physical. It’s a long time since I’ve been involved at all.’
‘How long?’
He sighed. After so much tension over the months, this
conversation had been surprisingly easy. They were both almost giggly with the relief of getting it out in the open. But now came the truly difficult part.
‘About four years,’ he told her.
‘Four years? But you’re only in your twenties.’
‘I was in a relationship for a long time.’
‘Painful break-up? I hear you. Four years, though. Must have been a pretty bad one.’
‘The worst kind.’
‘What kind is that? Because you’ll have to go some to match me, pal.’
Anthony swallowed. He’d come this far, laid the groundwork. Only a few more words now.
‘The kind where she dies.’
The rain was growing heavier. A gust of wind rattled a volley of drops against the windows, like it had tossed a handful of gravel at the car.
Adrienne squeezed his hand and gave him the look that he’d been praying for: the one that told him he didn’t have to say anything else for now.
‘You win,’ she said quietly.
Fellow Travellers
The lights changed to green and Catherine steadily pressed the accelerator. The beams of her headlights ventured ahead hopelessly like cannon fodder into battle, swallowed by darkness and rain. It was not, by anyone’s measure, a fine night for a drive.
‘Where are we going?’ Fallan asked.
‘Nowhere. I just want to be moving.’
‘Helps you think?’
‘Yes. Inasmuch as previously all I could think about was getting you as far as possible from my house. Now I can think about something else. Like how do you know what this . . . leverage is that they’ve got on me? Have you always known?’
‘No. That time you came to gatecrash me and Jasmine having breakfast a couple of years ago, I realised I recognised you but I didn’t recall from where. All my wee guilt neurones were firing – I do have those, by the way – but all I knew was that you must have been there in the background when I was doing something I’m not proud of.’
‘I’m guessing that didn’t narrow it down.’
‘Not exactly, no. It was when you showed me the symbol in the interview room that it all came together, like it was the primer for a code. Even the name resonated suddenly. You kept it when you married, didn’t you? Until then I had assumed McLeod was your husband’s name.’
‘I’ve always been Catherine McLeod. Except when I was Cassie, which was what my big sister called me when I was a baby because she couldn’t pronounce Catherine.’
‘When I saw the symbol on the page I could picture it on the ground at a farm long ago, blood on frosted grass. I remember stopping to look at it that morning with old Walter. He was Tony’s collector.’
‘You weren’t just there that morning though, were you?’ she stated, stealing a glance across to the passenger seat. ‘You were there the night before too.’
‘No. That wasn’t me. I wouldn’t do that. Christ,’ he added, giving a dry laugh of exasperation.
‘What?’
‘I was about to say I couldn’t harm a defenceless animal, which is true. Just pondering why that is, when I’ve never had a problem harming the higher mammals.’
‘You and the ALF. So who was there the night before? Who was the psycho who slashed my horse?’
‘Sweenzo. Paul Sweeney. A headcase, right enough: like a permanently shaken-up bottle of ginger. Probably a putative serial killer, but we’ll never know, seeing as he was shot dead and left in a field with a weird symbol painted on him in his own blood.’
Catherine changed up, hitting a slip road on to the motorway. She wanted to move faster, and it was better lit.
‘Are you telling me Sweeney did it because you think it will make me feel better, or because it’s true?’
Fallan ignored this.
‘Why did you do it?’ he asked.
‘They were killing my family.’
Catherine had replied before she could even think about it. The words just spilled out, a reflexive response.
‘I didn’t mean to kill them. I wanted to scare them off, let them know we weren’t easy meat. I shot them with tranquilisers and drove them out into the middle of nowhere. But when I opened the boot, the older guy was dead. Then the other guy came at me, and . . .’
Her mouth became dry, though moisture wasn’t going to be a problem for her eyes.
‘I’m not like you,’ she said, struggling to steady her voice. ‘It was self-defence. I shot the older guy as well so that it looked like a hit. I did what I had to in order to survive.’
‘I meant, why did you draw the symbol on them?’ Fallan clarified neutrally. It was like the killing talk was the epitome of mundane to him, but
this
part was intriguing.
‘I needed it to mean something. I needed to connect it to something else. It made some kind of sense at the time, but when I look back it’s like it wasn’t me who was doing the thinking.’
Catherine kept her misting eyes on the road, but she was conscious of Fallan nodding. She wasn’t sure how she felt about getting the impression that a guy like him understood where she was coming from.
‘You’ve never told anybody about this, have you?’
‘Nobody.’
‘That’s a lonely place to live. Not even your husband?’
‘Especially not my husband. I never wanted anyone to know. That’s why I’m vulnerable: I’d do anything to keep it from Drew. But now Tony McGill knows. I don’t know how, but you’re right: it’s being used to keep me in line.’
‘Same as me, he only worked it out recently. He knew about the symbol at the time, but no more than that. The cops must have leaked it to him: Cairns probably. McGill assumed it was one of his rivals making a move against him, guy called Archie Cutler. So when he got somebody to do one of Cutler’s people he was found with the same symbol drawn on him. Then back and forth and back and forth, the Glasgow way.’
‘And was that “somebody” you?’
‘No. I didn’t leave bodies. I think it was Stevie’s brother, Nico; or maybe Nico killed the guy that killed the guy that . . . you get the picture.’
‘I’ve
seen
the picture, Fullerton’s brother lying in an alley with that sign painted on the wall.’
‘Nobody knew what it meant or where it came from, though. When I saw it I never connected it to your farm. Glasgow gangsters are unimaginative wee neds: they don’t get deep into the semiotics. Like everybody else, I assumed it was bam on bam. I thought the symbol must have been in a film, and that whoever drew it on the ground at the farm had copied it from the same source as whoever killed Walter and Sweenzo. That’s until you handed me a copy and it all fell into place.’
‘So how does McGill know?’
‘While I was inside I heard that Walter’s widow died last year, and when his son, Alec, was renovating the house he discovered a hidey-hole behind a skirting board. Apparently Tony was very pleased about something Alec found, but wasn’t telling anybody what or why.’
‘He sent me a page of a ledger,’ Catherine said, ‘showing the date when my family were due to make our next payment. At the time I was terrified somebody would come back, looking for money or revenge. I thought it must be obvious what had happened. They never did, though, and I could never work out why.’
‘Ironically, it was their own system that protected you,’ Fallan told her. ‘Deniability. Walter handled that whole protection business, and Tony never knew who he was collecting from. It was so if the cops ever took an interest he could honestly say he’d never even heard of these people. Problem was, when Walter died nobody knew where he hid the list of ‘customers’, as he called them. Even if they’d had the list, they’d never have guessed it was some civilian fighting back. And besides, Tony had other priorities after that. He found himself fighting on a lot of fronts.’
Catherine came off the motorway and on to the dual carriageway that bisected the sprawling schemes of Croftbank. She hadn’t had a destination in mind when she set out, but the more they talked the more her instinct took her towards Gallowhaugh, where Glen Fallan had grown up, where his father Iain had ruled his own personal fiefdom, and where Iain’s ally Tony McGill had preposterously been credited with ‘keeping the drugs out’. Gallowhaugh, Shawburn, Croftbank: that was the world where this had all started, and something told her that was where it must end too.
That world had a satellite however, connected and yet distant: the hamlet of Capletmuir, where a bright young woman with her whole life ahead of her had been murdered on her way to the home of the Under-Secretary of State. It remained outside the main picture, held in a remote orbit, but like gravity, Catherine couldn’t see the force that was keeping it there.
‘What makes you sure it’s McGill who’s got Jasmine?’ she asked.
‘You’ll have heard about how Tony got fitted up by the cops
when he went down in a big drugs bust? Well, it wasn’t the cops who fitted him up. It was me and Stevie. We didn’t frame him: he
was
there to buy the drugs. We just made sure he showed up where the cops wanted him to. Poetic justice, we thought, given how many folk Tony had dobbed in to the polis as part of his you-scratch-my-back arrangements with the likes of my dad. But he’s been waiting a long time for his revenge. Killing Stevie in his own car wash and having me take the fall probably seems doubly poetic to Tony.’
‘What’s poetic about a car wash?’
‘It’s symbolic. Stevie was something of a criminal protégé under Tony, and the car wash represented him not just him outgrowing Tony, but moving into things Tony didn’t understand. Stevie even tried to explain it to him, but he still didn’t get it. Stevie thought Tony was yesterday’s man, and the car wash must have been a totem of that in Tony’s mind. He has a long memory.
‘The poetic thing about framing me for the shooting is that I was never jailed. I was too careful: the guy who always got away with it. The irony would be in me finally going down for a killing I
didn’t
commit.’
Catherine took a left at the roundabout and pulled on to Shawburn Boulevard. They would soon be passing the Old Croft Brasserie on the left-hand side.
‘This is about more than revenge,’ she told Fallan. ‘There’s an angle to it that you don’t know about. Fullerton was digging around, asking questions about a murder that took place twenty-five years ago. The victim’s name was Julie Muir. She worked at Nokturn. Fullerton believed that Bob Cairns and Mitchell Drummond, who is now the Deputy Chief Constable, by the way, fitted up a special-needs case called Teddy Sheehan for the killing. This ringing any bells?’
‘I remember it happening. I knew who Julie was but I didn’t know her. Any time I found myself in Nokturn, it would be fair to say I was a wallflower. One thing I’ve always done well is blend in to the scenery.’
‘Her boyfriend was Gordon Ewart. His father is Campbell
Ewart, the then MP, and his mother is Philippa Ewart, the drugs campaigner. Gordon’s now a big noise at Cautela Group, and he’s highly connected. Drummond’s been keeping Ewart’s name out of the case, same as his name was kept out of the spotlight when Julie died. Fullerton was in touch with him shortly before he was killed. Ewart says he was blackmailing him, threatening to tell the press about his links to Julie and his coke habit back in the Nokturn days. Do you remember him?’
‘Vaguely. I tended to mentally background the celebs and rich kids because they weren’t the types I had to watch out for. I don’t see what connects Tony to this Ewart guy, though.’
‘Nor I, but McGill’s the one cracking the whip for Ewart’s benefit. He’s squeezing me and he’s definitely squeezing Drummond.’
‘And now he’s got Jasmine,’ Fallan said with finality.
They came up alongside the Old Croft Brasserie and drove deeper into darkness, the streetlights ahead being out of service. Further along the dual carriageway was where Fullerton met his soapy fate. It occurred to Catherine that she hadn’t seen any CCTV footage from this end of the boulevard, close to the restaurant, and wondered whether the power failure was related.
‘Jasmine told us they stole her sim and spoofed her phone number on the day of the shooting. Is it possible they’ve done it again?’ Catherine suggested, though she wasn’t optimistic.
‘No. They’ve got her. They let me hear her voice, told me to stand by, said they’d know if I went to the cops. The day Stevie was killed they just needed to put me where they wanted me. The stakes are higher now. They want to control me, and they know this is how.’
‘Stand by for what?’
‘I don’t know, but making me wait is part of the game. It works best if you give the mark time to ponder what he might lose, because then, when you tell him what you want, he’s only too glad to cooperate. This is textbook Tony McGill. See, Tony’s old school: that’s what people used to say. He might be a crook, but he’s got a code of honour. You’ll have heard the three golden rules of old-school Glasgow gangsters?’
Catherine wondered where he was going with this. She recalled
Moira mentioning it, and she also recalled that the only reason Moira brought it up was to underline that it was bollocks.
‘They don’t grass, they don’t deal in drugs,’ she began, then she understood. ‘And they don’t hurt women and kids. Jesus.’
‘That was always Tony’s true golden rule,’ Fallan said. ‘If you want people to be afraid of you, hurt what they care about.’
She was about to inquire how McGill knew that what Fallan cared about was Jasmine Sharp, but as soon as she asked herself the question she suddenly realised that there was a new front-runner for this year’s Wood for the Trees Award.