Authors: Christopher Brookmyre
Neither of them said anything, but McShane’s face was getting flushed. Not only was he an inexperienced liar, but he was embarrassed at how obvious it was. Nonetheless, he could clearly still think of worse things he might have to endure than embarrassment. She was going to toss him another.
‘Mrs Chalmers saw you make a phone call, and we know you didn’t dial nine-nine-nine. I don’t know who you called but it won’t take me long to find out, and I’m guessing whoever you spoke to told you to keep your mouths shut and tell the polis nothing. The reason being they’ll be wanting to track down the shooter themselves, conduct their own wee interrogation and exact their own revenge. That is not going to happen, and you should be grateful that it’s not going to happen, because in the extremely unlikely event that it
did
, the first step in our subsequent investigation would be to arrest you two for giving them the information that facilitated it. So either you can tell us here and now as witnesses or you can tell us later when you’re being sweated on charges of obstructing a police investigation, conspiracy to pervert the course of justice and conspiracy towards whatever mayhem is unleashed by the bampot who was on the other end of that phone.’
Their powers of recall improved quite exponentially after that.
They both identified the shooter’s vehicle as a Land Rover Defender, 2004 vintage according to the plates, though they had slightly divergent recollections of the full registration. It would be enough. McCallister would get on to DVLA and discover which green Land Rover Defender bore the closest approximation to that plate. Chances were he would also discover that it had recently been reported stolen, but maybe they’d get lucky: sometimes these gangland headcases forgot to worry about such discretionary measures.
The Only Way is Apple
Jasmine put her foot down gently on the accelerator and squeezed the push-to-talk button on the gearstick with her left hand. It was such a natural action these days that she found herself doing it in her Civic when she was talking hands-free on the phone, even though there was no button to push.
‘Subject proceeding left left left on to Lancefield Quay, two cars cover,’ she reported. ‘Do you have eyeball?’
‘Echo Two. Yes yes,’ replied Martin Grady. ‘Could probably see subject’s vehicle from orbit. Wish all our marks were such attention-seeking fannies. Easy money today.’
‘Foxtrot Five. Speak for yourself,’ Jasmine replied. ‘You’re not the one who has to catch
his
eye.’
‘Delta Four,’ broke in Andy Smith. ‘In that case I hope Foxtrot Five isn’t wearing jogging breeks and an Aran sweater.’
‘Foxtrot Five. Fuck you, Delta Four.’
‘Delta Four. Roger.’
Jasmine wasn’t supposed to be working today, but she was grateful to be busy. She had allocated herself a day off for her mum’s birthday, planning to do some shopping, take in a movie, maybe hit the range later. All of these were intended to keep her occupied and distracted in what she hoped would be a pleasant way, and thus act as a bulwark against what else the occasion might precipitate.
Work, as it turned out, was going to produce the same effect, but it was never guaranteed. She knew that there had been every possibility she would spend the day in a stationary surveillance vehicle in what she had termed ‘condition Godot’. Sitting there waiting for something to happen, with nothing to occupy her thoughts, was precisely when she’d be most vulnerable to the demons of her grief. To that end she had left her work schedule
blank, but Harry Deacon had called her before she set off for Dunfermline the previous night and practically begged her to come onboard. Her reluctance was therefore both genuine and deep-seated, manifesting itself in a contemplative pause so long that Harry was offering triple time by the end of it.
It was a job that had fallen into Galt Linklater’s lap at the last minute, and that Harry was prepared to make it worth so much to her indicated how much it was worth to them. As sub-contracts from the big firm made up a substantial part of Jasmine’s business, there was more than one reason this was an offer she couldn’t refuse.
The subject vehicle veered right to get out of the upcoming filter lane, a manoeuvre Jasmine guessed had been suggested by its sat-nav. The subject wasn’t from around here, which pretty much went without saying given that he was driving a bright yellow Maserati. In Glasgow, even the drug dealers drew the line at that kind of ostentation. There was bling and then there was painting a target on yourself.
‘Foxtrot Five. Lights through to green no deviation Broomielaw. Still two cars cover, but I think I can hear his stereo.’
‘Echo Two. Can confirm audio. Subject’s windows are down and his music is shite. Repeat: subject’s music is shite.’
Foxtrot Five was her call-sign. Harry Deacon had initially assigned her Juliet Six for Galt Linklater work, but she requested the change in honour of her late uncle Jim. Foxtrot Five had been the call-sign Jim gave her when she first went to work for him, and she still recalled with embarrassment how long it took her to get the hang of the radio protocols, starting with the basic one of saying your own call-sign first to identify yourself as the next speaker.
Strictly speaking, Jim wasn’t her uncle. He was her mum’s cousin, but after she died, in that time when everybody told her ‘if there’s anything I can do, just ask’, he was the one person who actually
did
something. Jasmine had been forced to drop out of drama school, and he gave her a job, albeit not one she had wanted or considered herself remotely cut out for at the time. She had assumed he was doing it purely out of his natural generosity and a sense of familial
obligation, but it turned out that there was a less altruistic reason for her recruitment: the same reason Galt Linklater kept her on a retainer and why Harry Deacon had been pleading down the phone yesterday.
Jim had been an ex-cop. Harry Deacon was an ex-cop. Just about everybody at Galt Linklater, in fact, was an ex-cop, and the problem with ex-cops, when it came to surveillance work, was that they looked like ex-cops. Not only did Jasmine look nothing like an ex-cop, the host of people she
could
plausibly look like made her very effective at this game. She was the one they never saw coming, the one the guys at Galt Linklater referred to as their ninja.
They also referred to her as Crash, ever since she had engaged in an uncharacteristically extreme gambit in order to serve papers on a particularly elusive subject. It was a nickname she had encouraged because it helped supersede the use of ‘Jazz’. This had been a predictable informal handle throughout her school and college years, and one towards which she had been entirely ambivalent until a couple of years back. Following one of the most difficult conversations of her life, she couldn’t hear the word without thinking of what it represented, and none of that was good.
Andy Smith’s voice broke over the airwaves.
‘Just got a shout from HQ,’ he reported. ‘Wee traffic bulletin: stay clear of Shawburn Boulevard. It’s a car park right now. Major incident. Polis everywhere. Just so you know.’
‘Thanks for that,’ said Martin. ‘Won’t affect us, though. A tenner says subject is heading for the Apple shop.’
‘No bet,’ said Jasmine. ‘On this guy’s list of places worth visiting in Glasgow, that will be number one. There will not be a number two.’
‘He’s an artist, though,’ Martin replied. ‘Apple tech is for creative types, remember. It’s his creativity that draws him towards it. As opposed to, say, the fact that he’d be baffled by a mouse with more than one button on it.’
The mark was known, these days at least, by the name D-Blazer, a boyband refugee who had successfully reinvented himself as a rap star and was playing two nights at the SECC. In his lip-synch and
choreography days he had been plain old Darren Blake, trading on an Essex wideboy image to distinguish himself from his more clean-cut fellow recruits with whom he had been packaged together by a record label to form the wet and insipid Desire.
However, even plain old Darren Blake had been a calculated construct. D-Blazer’s real name was Darrien Hopscombe-Blanchard, and while it was true that he was an Essex boy, it was fair to say he was trading on certain misperceptions about what was, after all, one of the most prosperous areas of the UK. We weren’t talking Dagenham or Romford here. He had indeed grown up in the county of the three swords, but as his family had owned a substantial swathe of it for several centuries, this was hardly surprising. Martin had suggested that the Blazer in his rapper name referred to his father’s golf-club attire.
Jasmine followed his Maserati through the city, dropping back now and again to let someone else take point. If Darrien had punched the Apple shop’s address into his sat-nav he’d be in for a disappointment, as it was on a wholly pedestrianised thoroughfare.
His journey was taking him further north, past all the obvious routes towards Buchanan Street, before heading east.
They had picked him up at his hotel, the Crowne Plaza, which was just next to the exhibition centre. There was a tour bus parked at the venue, but that was only for the dancers, backing singers and those loser types who actually played musical instruments. D-Blazer preferred to take his own wheels on tour, partly because he liked the chance to drive his toyz around, and partly because he liked to be seen. This made him, as Martin had implied, a private investigator’s dream.
‘Subject proceeding right right right on to Renfrew Street,’ Andy relayed. ‘I should maybe have taken that bet.’
‘You’d be ten pounds down,’ Jasmine told him. ‘Concierge at the hotel will have told him to park at the Buchanan Galleries.’
The reason for Harry’s largesse and for Galt Linklater’s urgency was that D-Blazer was currently the subject of a paternity claim. A nineteen-year-old student from Chelmsford by the name of Nikki Ainsworth maintained that he had fathered her baby girl, Danielle,
during a six-month affair that the twenty-seven-year-old rapper terminated once he discovered she was up the jaggy. D-Blazer, for his part, claimed that she had ‘flung herself at me but I hardly never went near her’, and that she was now ‘just vibing negs into my aura’, by which Jasmine interpreted him to mean that her claims were merely a nuisance act motivated by spite.
Nonetheless, for all he was trying to appear nonchalant in his dismissal, Mr Hopscombe-Blanchard was refusing to submit any DNA for a paternity test. In light of this, the word ‘hardly’ took on a quite pivotal significance within his previous utterance.
‘Foxtrot Five. Subject is a stop stop stop and park at Buchanan Galleries car park level five. I have eyeball and am proceeding on foot.’
Jasmine switched to her earpiece and climbed out of the van as Andy and Martin confirmed their own positions. They would be parked in a matter of seconds, then they would enter the mall at different levels, catching up to inconspicuously commence a three-way foot follow.
Jasmine was soon able to assure them there was no rush. D-Blazer was setting a very easy pace in order to maximise his chances of being recognised.
‘Subject is proceeding south south south and moving as though he is the Pink Panther bursting for a shite,’ she informed them, describing the ludicrous gangsta gait he was rocking.
He was affecting an air of being lost in the music playing through his absurdly encumbering gold Beats headphones, trying to look like he was in one of his own videos.
Jasmine privately suspected he had the music way down just in case somebody called his name and he didn’t hear it, but as she monitored his progress through the mall, she observed that he wasn’t short of attention, and came to understand the real purpose of the headphones. They were a prop so that he could select whose solicitations he had or hadn’t noticed. His hearing was pretty sharp if you were young, female and pretty, though apparently he would settle for big tits as a substitute for this last criterion. The first two were non-negotiable.
Jasmine stopped and had a glance at her reflection in a shop window. She wasn’t wearing jogging bottoms and an Aran sweater, but nor was she looking ready to hit a club right then.
Harry had only secured her services last night: he hadn’t divulged the details until she showed up at Galt Linklater’s offices this morning. She was wearing a reliably flexible (i.e. very lived-in) pair of jeans and a rather shapeless long-sleeved top, chosen both for comfort in the event of sitting for hours in a van, and to prevent anyone being able to peek through gaps in her blouse in the event that she was sharing said van with certain GL personnel.
She got out her phone and called Harry. He took a while to answer, and sounded a little distracted when he finally did.
‘Hello?’
‘Harry. It’s me.’
‘Who’s me?’
‘Jasmine,’ she told him, trying not to sound irritated. Time could be an issue.
‘Jasmine. Christ, sorry. Have you got a new phone? If you have, you should really update us on your—’
‘I don’t have a new phone.’
‘Shite. That means I must have deleted you as a contact on mine.’
‘I hope that’s not a roundabout way of letting me go.’
‘As if. No, just me being a techno-numpty as usual. What can I do for you?’
‘I need budget approval on a couple of emergency items.’
‘Like what?’
She told him.
‘Just as long as you keep receipts for your purchases. And you wear them to the Christmas night out.’
‘Sure, Harry. That’s totally going to happen.’
She hung up then told Martin to make ground and take point.
‘I’ll intercept him on his way back to his car,’ she explained.
‘Why, where are you going just now?’
‘Where do you think? I’m in the Buchanan Galleries and I have no Y chromosome. I’m going shopping.’
‘Delta Four,’ broke in Andy. ‘Where do they sell those?’
She assumed he was joking.
Jasmine engaged in an unaccustomed bout of speed-shopping, quickly scouring the stores for the most pneumatic push-up bra she could find, then hunting for a top that would best showcase the resulting cleavage.
She knew she had to pitch it just right. It wasn’t a question of grabbing something low-cut or popping open a few buttons on a tight blouse. The look was not supposed to suggest she was about to start her pole-dancing shift. She needed to carry off an image that seemed plausible for cutting about the shops at this time of day, but that in D-Blazer’s eyes would be interpreted as ‘I don’t mind showing my tits off at half eleven in the morning, so just imagine what else I must be up for’.
Once she had bought what she needed, she headed back to the changing room she had most recently visited, showing the woman on duty the carrier bags and receipts. Her name-badge said Collette.
‘I need to wear these now,’ she explained.
‘Prêt-à-porter right enough,’ Collette replied, with a precisely pitched combination of dryness and warmth that Jasmine reckoned Glaswegians must learn as a rite of passage.
As Jasmine changed she heard the ongoing commentary from Martin and Andy in her earpiece. The subject was doing his best to hold court in the Apple store and was starting to annoy the management, who were used to all customer adulation being focused exclusively upon their products.
Jasmine was relieved, though not surprised. If it turned out D-Blazer had blanked the Apple store and headed down to the Gallery of Modern Art to look at the latest installations, it would have ramifications for her chances of carrying this off. He was one of those London-centric wankers who thought modern everyday reality stopped at the M25, and with it his cares and woes. Galt Linklater had been given this job because it was assumed that, outside the capital, D-Blazer would be off his guard. This hypothesis would be supported by his gravitating towards regional satellites of his normal frame of reference: the Apple store, certain clothing chains, Nando’s. A trip to GoMA, for instance, might have
indicated that he was engaged with his surroundings and more switched on than they were giving him credit for. It would also have made Jasmine pass out on the spot with sheer astonishment.