Flesh Wounds (30 page)

She reached inside and took hold of a pair of ear-marking pliers, the first instruments that came to hand. She held them up to the light through the translucent plastic windows, balancing them delicately in her fingers, and thought about where she was supposed to be by now, where they were all supposed to be. Plans and ambitions truncated, shorn off brutally and without warning, the wound still raw. Everything taken away by low-life parasites.

She felt the pain of her dad’s impotence. He couldn’t stand up to them because they had zeroed in on his biggest vulnerability. If he stepped out of line, they wouldn’t go after him, but hurt him through his daughters. She didn’t doubt it either. She had seen what they did to Lysander, and knew that anyone capable of that was capable of anything.

Parasites.

Animals.

She felt the rage boiling up inside her again, threatening to turn to tears. She had to stay in control. She would not let any of these scum see her cry.

She placed the pliers back inside the bag, which was when she noticed the tranquiliser gun, along with a flat grey plastic case full of darts.

She took out the pistol and held it in her right hand, cocking it with her left against surprising resistance. Pointing it at the far wall, she found herself wondering whether it might change the picture if it turned out those daughters weren’t as vulnerable as everyone assumed.

She pulled the trigger, feeling the spring drive the bolt back home with a force that trembled right up her arm.

Yes, it just might.

Jasmine had her left eye closed, and through her right she could only see the target: grey and white concentric circles staring back like some mesmerised eyeball, a watery unreality about the image as it was refracted through the optics. She watched the crosshair drift in front and concentrated on her breathing, relaxing into a rhythm, gradually becoming accustomed to the motion. She was using the gas rifle, so she prepared her body
not
to brace itself for the kick.

It had taken her a long time to realise she was doing it, and not just at those times after she had recently been using the spring-powered gun. Going right back to that first experience at the hotel in the Borders, some part of her was always waiting for the recoil. It could affect her breathing, her posture, even her trigger action, all in the tiniest way, but this was entirely about tiny margins, hugely magnified at the other end.

The gas rifle didn’t kick. The only movement she’d feel was the trigger slipping through the hammer release as she squeezed it. Everything had to be smooth, everything had to be fluid.

She could hear the air issues and the impact plinks of other shooters; hear them and yet not hear them. She could block them out, turn them into white noise, like the wind or the drumming of rain. Somewhere nearby she could hear someone’s mobile phone ringing. She blocked that too.

She had talked to Fallan about it once. He seemed to know a lot about the subject. He told her he had learned in the army, but didn’t elaborate.

‘If you need quiet to shoot, you’re useless,’ he told her. ‘Because you won’t
get
quiet to shoot. You need to create your own quiet, and learn to inhabit your own silent place where noise can’t reach you, even sudden, unexpected sounds. You have to crawl into that place and stay there. Doesn’t matter if it’s seconds or hours: you don’t leave until you’ve taken the shot.’

The mobile was outside her place, as though it was ringing behind thick glass. She could hear a voice too, just as muted, just as detached. Then she felt a hand on her shoulder.

‘Haw, Jasmine, for fuck’s sake, you gaunny answer that or whit?’

It was Eric, one of the other regulars at the range. He was pointing to her shoulder bag, where the mobile was still ringing.

‘You might be in the zone, hen, but it’s doing every other bugger’s heid in.’

‘Sorry,’ she said fishing for it in her bag, though by the time she had located it among all the junk she kept meaning to ‘rationalise’, the caller had rung off.

She hadn’t realised it was her own phone because the ringtone was unfamiliar. She had this crappy wee thing as a substitute while her handset was out of commission, and still wasn’t sufficiently familiar with the sound for it to have established a Pavlovian discipline.

The morning after discovering that Ned Untrusty had performed a secret sim transplant, she had gone to a shop and got her provider to issue her a new card, one that would restore her old number. She installed it in a cheap handset, the other one now quarantined.

She asked the guy behind the counter to take a look at the foreign sim, though he clearly thought she was mental when she explained that he wasn’t allowed to remove it from the clear plastic pouch she had brought it in. He identified it as a pay–as-you-go sim, and when he scanned it into his system it came up as holding ten pounds of credit. This was so she didn’t notice the switch due to a sudden inability to make phone calls.

If it had been another provider, as soon as she looked at the screen she’d have noticed that the network name was wrong. This meant that either Ned had got lucky, or he had turned up with a stack of sims, all bearing credit. He hadn’t looked the type to be regarding such expenses as the cost of doing business. This was a steal-to-order job.

She had taken the phone apart wearing disposable latex gloves, still having a box of them left from one of Fallan’s visits. They had been talking about guns, Fallan explaining how no amount of technical instruction or practise on the range would necessarily empower you to shoot the enemy, as armies worldwide had discovered over the past century.

He told her about the phenomenon of non-firing combatants: how a tiny percentage of individuals had been responsible for shooting fatalities in the Second World War; how in Vietnam it was estimated that millions of rounds had been fired per actual hit; how in the First World War most of the trench warfare kills had been the result of ordnance. Soldiers found it easier to throw a grenade into a hole full of men they couldn’t see than to look a fellow human in the eye and pull the trigger. That was why sniper kills were the easiest, he explained. The further away you got, the less you were confronted by the reality of your actions.

Up close, that was where you found out if you really were a killer.

A little later he went out to the shops, returning with two pumpkins and the box of latex gloves. At the time, she didn’t realise she was under instruction: she thought they were cooking. He cut a number of small circles out of the pumpkin’s skin, then got her to thrust her thumb inside, directing her to twist it upwards then back and forth, pulping the flesh and carving out a channel.

She was very tentative at first, but he made her do it over and over, faster and faster, until it was all one motion, practically a reflex. Her thumb was aching by the time they were through. It would have been worse without the gloves, he explained, as they prevented the pumpkin flesh from getting under her nail.

Then he told her what she was practising. She almost threw up.

The wee shite at the Alhambra had to have left prints, she reckoned. She had handled the phone plenty before discovering that it had been tampered with, but not the places he’d have needed to touch: the back cover, the battery and the new sim itself. All had been removed at her kitchen table wearing latex gloves and sealed in air-tight plastic, as was the phone itself, for what it was worth. Leaving her with this shitey effort.

She hated to admit she was missing functionality that not so long ago she’d have scorned, but that’s how it was. Her phone had become an indispensable personal assistant, a conduit through which she ran almost every aspect of her daily life. However, as she thumbed laboriously through the cheapo handset’s labyrinthine sub-menu system just to see who the missed call was from, she realised that being Thoroughly Wired Millie had brought its own vulnerabilities.

If her phone had been targeted specifically, then the thief would have needed to know she’d be at that concert. Conveniently for him, that didn’t require any feats of mind-reading or even surveillance. All it would have taken was for him to check her Facebook page or Twitter feed, neither of which were protected, as it wasn’t like she was live-tweeting her investigations, just chatting to friends.

Perhaps when she got home she should check whether she’d recently been followed by @badguy.

The missed call was from Laura Geddes. Jasmine switched the phone off in case she tried again. She didn’t want to speak to her. She had nothing to give her; or at least nothing that she wanted to. Almost everything she had discovered so far just seemed to be nailing Fallan’s motive: doing the cops’ job for them, as she’d feared.

She put the rifle to her shoulder once again and took up position, finding the target, relaxing into her breathing rhythm. The outside world faded and dimmed, and she was back in her quiet place. A place she could think.

Why didn’t she want to talk to Laura? Why was it so hard to accept the obvious conclusion that all of the evidence was pointing to? Was it simply because of what they had been through that she trusted him, that she liked him? Was there anything concrete supporting her doubt, or just emotion and instinct?

Tit for tat. An eye for an eye. Family loyalties. Your classic cycle of violence. It all made perfect sense, apart from the timescale.
Beware the vengeance of a patient man
, Stevie Fullerton had said. But could that vengeance truly have waited her entire lifetime? So far every witness statement and every hard fact pointed to this being the case. The only thing even remotely hinting at anything else was the business with the phone.

She wasn’t giving that to the cops right now though, because it was the only card she had to play and she didn’t trust them with it. If they ran the prints and it only gave them the name of some no-mark ned, how motivated would they be to follow that up?

Instead she had given it to Harry Deacon at Galt Linklater, whose police contacts meant he could get the prints analysed through back channels. It was going to take a while, but it kept the information under her control.

She needed more, though.

The crosshairs steadied, their bobbing reduced to a steady, minute and predictable path. She squeezed: a little too early, a little too low and to the left.

It didn’t help that she hadn’t been able to contact Fallan. He still wasn’t talking, not even to her. The cops had him on remand and he was refusing visitors.

Jasmine reckoned she knew why.

She thought of how she’d spent her morning. That thick-necked gorilla, with his scars and tattoos and his ostentatious, wear-the-price-tag suit, was her uncle. He had sat there simmering with rage, alluding to her mother being a criminal and laying down the very gory details of her unknown family history. This was the world Fallan had sworn to keep her away from; the world her mum had gone to great lengths and great sacrifice to escape.

She took another shot, a hiss of gas followed by the plink as her pellet rattled the back of the catcher. Low and left again. She was still squeezing too early, another hangover from the slower action on the spring rifle’s trigger.

Fallan wouldn’t see her because he didn’t want her drawn into this, and now she knew the reason. It wasn’t just because of what it would expose her to: it was because the risk wasn’t worth the reward. She had finally found out who her father was, but there was no satisfaction in it, no hint of filling a lifetime’s absence. It was just a name. She hadn’t known Jazz Donnelly, and nothing she had learned about him made her feel any kind of a connection.

Heredity was meaningless. It wasn’t about flesh and blood. It was about thought and deed. That was why she felt closer to the man who had killed her father than to a dead thug named Jazz Donnelly.

There must have been more to him than that, though she was never going to know. Her mother had lived a strange and evidently dangerous life once upon a time, but she’d never have been some daft moll hanging off the arm of a gangster.

She guessed he must have been charismatic and exciting, as well as attractive, but Sheila had suggested Mum was wary of getting involved with him until after he was slashed, whereupon he was perceived – wrongly – to have slowed down his normal act. Sheila had also implied that her mum was the type drawn to damaged men, perhaps thinking she could change a guy like Jazz. There must have been something she saw in him: someone like herself, perhaps, shaped by difficult circumstances but who might yet be reshaped into someone who could rise above them. Or maybe that was merely something her mother
needed
to see, something she was projecting.

There was so much Jasmine had merely glimpsed during her uncomfortable morning at the Old Croft Brasserie: matters they weren’t prepared to elaborate upon, and others still about which they clearly didn’t know enough.

It had been suggested that Fallan might have killed Jazz because he had beaten up her mother. Jasmine wasn’t sure she could believe that, but this didn’t matter so much as what lay behind the fact that others considered it a possibility.

Fallan was not merciful in dealing with men who attacked women. Rita had hinted at it, Sheila confirmed it, and made reference to the reason why.

Fallan’s father, a notoriously brutal and corrupt cop, hadn’t just beaten his wife, he had terrorised his family.

‘Everybody in the hoose,’ Sheila said.

That seemed to suggest there was more than just Glen and his mother under his fist. Who else was in that house? Who else had Iain Fallan ‘leathered’? And why had Glen never mentioned them?

Jasmine loosed another shot, ripping through the paper faster than she could blink. It was still low, but wide to the right. Though barely conscious of it, she had altered her breathing, thinking too much about having been early on the trigger.

Just breathe, she told herself.

‘
You’ve nae problem with evening the score when it suits you, eh, Sheila
?’

Sheila had been the barmaid way back when, a few years older than the young drinkers in that photograph. A trawl through online news reports had told Jasmine Sheila’s age, as well as the fact that she was Fullerton’s second wife. Perhaps there had also been a first husband. Had he knocked her about? And had Fallan intervened on her behalf?