Flesh Wounds (21 page)

She stepped into the living room for a clearer view, bracing herself for the possibility of finding Miss Sheehan lying dead behind the couch, out of sight of the windows. She saw nothing she hadn’t seen when she spied through the gaps in the blinds. In keeping with the kitchen and the hall, she got the impression of a well-kept little home whose owner had recently undergone an unfortunate change in priorities.

‘Partying solo,’ Laura observed, noting the presence of only one glass on the coffee table, next to an empty vodka bottle.

Catherine took in the crucifix on the wall and the framed photos of the last two popes.

‘I’m not getting a rock’n’roll vibe, though,’ she observed.

They retreated back into the hall, where they stopped at a miniature holy water font mounted on the wall just inside the front door.

‘Had to hold off dipping that and blessing myself,’ Laura admitted. ‘Pavlovian response. Not actually been to church other than hatches, matches and dispatches since I was about twelve.’

‘I think it might be too late for prayers, though,’ Catherine said as she began to notice the odour. ‘You smell that?’

Laura wrinkled her nose then nodded grimly.

It got stronger as they climbed the stairs, and so did Catherine’s resigned sense of dread. Being around dead bodies had long since ceased to bother her, but not knowing what sight was about to confront her didn’t get any easier. Similarly, the smell was something she had become swift to identify but never got used to.

Sometimes she could smell it for hours later, imagining it must have adhered to her clothes. She couldn’t help worrying what might adhere to her brain when she saw the source; how long might she have to sit outside in the driveway tonight in order to leave this sight in the car.

There was a bathroom at the top of the stairs, the door slightly ajar to reveal a lino floor and the edge of a towel rail. Catherine nudged it open with outstretched fingers, having to push harder than she had anticipated against a stiff hinge. It revealed a lemon-coloured bath suite, the tub dry, not even a hint of condensation on the surrounding tiles. It hadn’t been used recently.

They proceeded slowly, reluctantly, along the narrow top hall, where three further doors were closed tight.

Laura opened the nearest, Catherine bracing herself for the olfactory onslaught. It revealed only a boiler cupboard.

Catherine stepped across the dusty carpet and gripped the handle of the door opposite, turning until she heard the click. Mindful of the stiff hinge in the bathroom, she gave it a good shove, but either it had been better oiled or had been planed in the past to accommodate a deeper carpet, as it flew open and bounced most of the way back.

This was a mercy, the brief glimpse affording her and Laura a kind of thumbnail preview of the scene inside. There was less mercy afforded their noses.

Brenda Sheehan was lying on her bed, face-up with her head on her pillow. Her mouth was open, twisted into an endless silent scream, and her lifeless eyes bulged in terrified astonishment.

Catherine’s eyes searched her for signs of injury, some physical testament to whatever had provoked this permanent gaze of horror. There were no wounds, no bruises, but there was dried sick on her chin and chest, with more spattered about the duvet.

‘I’m not the expert,’ Catherine admitted, ‘but I think she may have choked on her own vomit.’

‘And there was you saying you weren’t getting a rock’n’roll vibe.’

Catherine glanced around the bedroom but neither of them stepped any further inside so as not to contaminate the scene. It was a modest little place, sparse and lonely: almost cell-like. There was very little in the way of personalisation, with a framed black-and-white photo on the wall the only item Catherine had so far spotted that didn’t have religious or AA connotations. It showed a woman and a man standing next to what she recognised as the Astraglide chute at Blair Drummond Safari Park. Having spent many hours waiting at the foot of the thing over the years, she had little difficulty identifying it. The woman could have been Brenda Sheehan, she didn’t know. She looked around forty, her hairstyle and clothes suggested it was the early eighties.

At first glance Catherine thought it wasn’t a very flattering shot of the man, until a longer inspection indicated that his awkward and glaiket expression wasn’t down to the camera catching him at a bad moment. He looked about forty, but was wearing a Yogi Bear T-shirt and getting his picture taken at the Safari Park with no kids in the shot. ‘Learning difficulties’ was the phrase these days. Special needs. Catherine wondered who he was to Brenda, and why this was the only picture of him on display.

More pressingly, she wondered what Stevie Fullerton could possibly want with an ageing spinster who, until her relapse, appeared to have lived like a nun. She looked again at the photo, thinking she could see a resemblance between the pair: was he a brother?

Her eyes were drawn briefly to the dressing table close by, against the wall. Something about it bothered her, but she couldn’t yet pin down what. Maybe it just reminded her of one a relative used to have: an old-fashioned piece with curved legs and a glass top.

In contrast to her own at home – not actually a dressing table, merely the top of a chest of drawers serving the same purpose – it bore very few items: a hairbrush, a hair-drier, a roll-on deodorant and a tub of talcum powder. Catherine had so much crap scattered on hers that Drew frequently complained about how long it took to move and replace everything when he was dusting.

That was it: there was no dust.

The carpet beneath looked as manky as downstairs, suggesting somebody whose retreat inside a bottle had not permitted any sorties to push the vacuum cleaner around.

Catherine looked at the skirting. There were grey clumps at the carpet’s edges, same as in the top hall, but the tops of the boards themselves were spotless.

She got down on her knees and had a look under the bed. It was cleaner there than anywhere else: also, she would have to admit, in radical contrast to her own bedroom.

‘What is it?’ Laura asked.

‘I’m not sure, but I think the late Miss Sheehan might not be the only thing around here that’s starting to smell.’

‘Heard my boys just got there in the nick of time,’ Glen’s host said, striding across an expanse of carpet in his vast front room. ‘I’m Tony, by the way. Tony McGill.’

Glen knew who he was. Everybody did. He’d only been anything like this close to him once before, however. It had been at the Spooky Woods, back when Glen was about twelve. He had been out there one November night, wandering around just to stay out of the house, when he recognised his dad’s Rover parked behind a black Jag.

He saw a man get out of the Jaguar’s passenger side, a second figure remaining at the wheel. The man came around the rear of the car, removed something from the boot and then ambled around to the Rover, a polythene bag clutched in one hand, twisted at the neck so that the contents weren’t dangling. His head was down, his face obscured. Glen knew he seemed familiar, just couldn’t place him. Definitely not a polis, certainly not one of the usual crew anyway.

He climbed into the Rover on the passenger side and shut the door behind him. The inside light had come on in response to the door opening, then Glen saw an arm go up to the switch to ensure it stayed on once the door closed again.

He watched his dad lean forward, checking something on top of the dashboard. Money: he was counting money. Glen still couldn’t see the other guy properly because he was turned around to face Dad.

The counting complete, the money went back into the poly bag and the light went out. Glen waited, expecting the man to exit, but he stayed in place. Glen saw his dad reach into the back seat and a few moments later they were both opening cans. They chinked them together – cheers – then began supping: big pals together, or perhaps toasting some kind of deal.

Glen believed in the polis back then. He needed to. At that stage he still wanted to be one. He knew his dad was a tyrant, but if there were criminals out there, then surely Dad was the kind of guy you’d want out there fighting them: hardline, punitive, uncompromising. It was the equation that made sense of his home life. Dad was the way he was because he had a difficult job: it made him tough at home because he needed to be tough out there on the streets. He held everybody to the letter of his law at home, just like he held the bad guys to the letter of the law.

Every little boy wants to believe his dad is a hero. Despite being repeatedly beaten and terrorised by him, and despite witnessing all that he’d done to his mum – maybe even
because
of all those things – Glen needed to believe that his dad was one of the good guys.

About ten minutes later the man got out, dropping his empty can on the grass. He walked with his head down towards the Jag, Glen still unable to see his face. Then there was a whistle and a flash as a bottle rocket streaked across the sky, launched from a nearby back green. The man looked up for the source and his face was lit by the rocket’s final explosion, those tantalising hints of familiarity about him now made explicit.

If there was any spark of idealism left in Glen, then it burnt out in the flare of that firework and was equally extinguished by the time its remnants fell to earth.

And now Glen was standing in his front room.

He looked mid-forties, older than Glen would have expected, something paradoxically accentuated by the jeans and sweatshirt he was wearing, which looked like they belonged on a younger man. He seemed shorter and slighter of build than Glen had assumed, but this was resultant of McGill being light on his feet, like a boxer, a quickness and energy about him. There was a scar along the left side of his jaw, another on his forehead, but his expression was bright and lively, which gave him the appearance of a retired sportsman rather than a crook.

He offered a hand, giving Glen a firm but brief grip. Glen was grateful for the brevity. He didn’t like shaking hands with anyone. It was supposed to be a form of mutual politeness, but to him it always felt like they were taking something from him, something he was obliged to give whether he felt like it or not.

‘Glen,’ he said uncertainly, pondering the redundancy of telling his name to someone who already clearly knew a lot about him. ‘You sent them? How did you know?’

‘You’ve been the talk of the steamie since you ripped the Egans. Doesn’t take much to read the tea-leaves. You must have known it was coming.’

‘I should have,’ Glen admitted. ‘I thought I’d given them reason to think twice.’

‘Then you don’t understand the game. It’s like the laws of physics: for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction; except in Glasgow it’s a thoroughly
un
equal
over
-reaction. The Egans are a couple of heidthebaws, but they’ve got friends. Their old man that’s in Peterhead, he was a pure psycho, but he was always pally with Tam Beattie. You heard of Tam Beattie?’

Glen looked him sharply in the eye before nodding. It seemed mutually understood that this question and response were an acknowledgment of what Glen knew about McGill as much as what he knew about his rival.

‘The Egans do a few jobs for him here and there. What the polis call “known associates”. So if you put doon two guys that do work for Beattie, then his people have to give it back ten times worse. Cannae let it get around that folk can take liberties. Which is why they’ll come after you again – unless you’ve got friends too.’

Jasmine had always imagined her mother attending school somewhere that looked like a set from a Dickens adaptation, but Croftbank Secondary had been built in the seventies and must have looked state of the art when her mum went there. It was showing its age in places, but its headmaster, Dan Quigley, was keen to impress upon her how, in certain other respects, it was in far better shape than ever.

He had insisted on giving her a tour, keen to showcase the place. He may have been under the impression that she was a reporter, a misconception Jasmine had courted on the phone to the secretary by choosing her words carefully and saying she was ‘looking into the story’ of a former pupil. She had added that this pupil was a contemporary of Stevie Fullerton, in order to provide context but so as to stress that the late drug dealer was not the focus of her enquiries.

‘The cult of the hard man has been a blight on education in this city,’ Quigley told her. ‘I’m not from round here myself, but I grew up somewhere just like it. Kids need role models they can relate to, and for a long time that was sadly true of Mr Fullerton. When the best-known, and apparently most successful, guy who ever went to your school is a drug-dealing crime boss, it can’t be much of a motivation to get the head down in geography, you know? But that’s all changing now. We’ve got a former pupil who works at CERN. Another who’s a CGI animator: she worked on the
Avengers
movie.’

‘Guess it also helps when the hard men end up getting murdered in broad daylight.’

Quigley wore a strained expression.

‘Guys like Fullerton were let down too,’ he replied. ‘Nobody raised their expectations.’

Jasmine had found another photograph of Stevie Fullerton with her mum and the other girl. It was loose, down at the bottom of the box, yellowed Sellotape folded over its corners from where it had perhaps once been stuck to a bedroom wall. It showed the three of them, along with another guy, sitting in a pub. Jasmine guessed her mum had been seventeen, maybe even younger, all dressed up to look old enough. They appeared excited, thrilled perhaps to be there: coming through the rite of passage of getting served, or at least not getting chucked out after the oldest-looking one buys the drinks.

‘When something like this shooting happens,’ Quigley added, ‘there’s a danger that it can reinforce people’s perceptions of Croftbank, and that filters down to these kids. If you’re writing about Stevie Fullerton, I’d like you to see the wider picture.’

‘I’m not writing about anybody,’ she corrected him. ‘I’m trying to track down someone who was at school here with him.’