Flesh Wounds (49 page)

‘To what do I owe the considerable ignominy?’ he asked. ‘I’m not on call.’

‘Colin Morrison,’ Adrienne stated. ‘What do you know about him?’

‘The pathologist?’

‘Yes.’

‘He’s retired. Why?’

Cal was prickly as Anthony expected, but he detected an edge to this that was more than mere annoyance at them showing up here.

‘We think he might be in trouble,’ Anthony said. ‘We’ve been to his flat: somebody’s ripped the place apart looking for something, and we think Morrison has fled the country. We’re just waiting on Immigration to find out where he’s gone.’

‘What’s the difference between fled and merely left?’

‘He had been in telephone contact with none other than Stevie Fullerton quite recently – just a few weeks ago,’ Adrienne replied. ‘He packed and left in a hurry shortly after Fullerton got shot.’

‘Colin Morrison?’ Cal asked, his face a picture of incredulous consternation. ‘In touch with Stevie Fullerton?’

‘Fullerton was in touch with Brenda Sheehan recently too,’ Anthony told him. ‘She was last seen cooling her heels on your slab. We think Morrison was trying to avoid the same. We’re trying to suss what he was into. Did you know him?’

‘Of course. Just as colleagues, though. I didn’t socialise with him. Or rather, Colin didn’t socialise with me. That would never do.’

Cal allowed himself a regretful little smile.

‘Why not?’ asked Adrienne. Cal was clearly opening the door to something. ‘Did he have an issue with your sexuality?’

Jesus, Anthony thought, glad he wasn’t the one who had come straight out with that. Adrienne could be pretty direct, right enough. Keeping so many plates in the air, presumably it wore down your tolerance for fannying about.

‘Oh, certainly he had issues, very complex ones,’ Cal replied. ‘Colin is on the team too, you see: he just doesn’t wear the colours. I think he had some very unpleasant experiences in less enlightened times.’

Cal said these last few words with arch emphasis. He clearly didn’t consider these times particularly enlightened, but this only served to underline the severity of whatever trials Morrison had been forced to endure.

‘When did he retire?’ Adrienne asked.

‘Oh, must be a good five years or so now.’

‘So you won’t have seen him for a while?’

‘Well, that’s the thing,’ Cal replied, looking a little sheepish. ‘I just saw him a few weeks back. He asked me for a favour: wanted me to get the lab to run a DNA sample for him.’

‘And did you?’

Cal gave an odd little shrug. They all knew he was hardly going to get hauled over the coals for it. And if he knew how much shit
they
were digging themselves into, he wouldn’t be acting coy about doing a former colleague a wee turn.

‘Sure. I didn’t hear back from him, so it slipped my mind to chase up the results.’

‘What was it he wanted analysed?’ Anthony asked.

‘Skin cells and some traces of blood.’

‘What from?’

Cal gave him the finger, which he initially took to mean ‘none of your business’, but he was merely making the most of an opportunity.

‘A ring,’ he answered.

‘I’m a father myself, so I know you’ll do anything for your children.’

McGill sounded perversely sincere. Jasmine could make out his words but it was like he was talking to her at a rock concert, his voice almost drowned by sound from a far more powerful source.

She was fighting to make sense of it until she realised that she was only fighting it because it made sense. It made perfect sense, of everything.

‘That makes you like a wee remote control for Glen Fallan,’ he went on.

His self-congratulatory burbling seemed irrelevant compared to the vastness of what she had just learned, but it wasn’t as if he was going to give her time and space to digest the news. Watching her head spin was part of the rush for him.

He was right, though: she was Fallan’s remote control, his shock collar. Fallan had understood that from before she was born. That was why he stayed out of her life, out of her mum’s life. He knew that the two of them were his greatest vulnerability, that men like McGill could always hurt them in order to get to him. The only way to protect them had been to pretend that he was dead.

It must have been his genuine worst nightmare, therefore, when she turned up looking for him after her uncle Jim went missing. That was why he had initially tried to put her off, and made out he wanted nothing to do with her. But developments had taken such choices out of his hands, which had made it imperative that she didn’t learn the truth.

McGill had worked it out, though. It couldn’t have been too hard for him to piece together, given that he knew what a female Fallan ought to look like.

All those times Fallan was with her, protecting her, he must have known it was at a greater risk. That was why he had taught her ways to defend herself, taught her to listen to her fear. He knew that one day the time might come when his past would catch up to her, and he wouldn’t be there to intervene.

‘You should be flattered that he was prepared to go to jail and keep his mouth shut just for you,’ McGill told her. ‘That was the idea, anyway. But best laid plans and all that … So we’ve had to improvise. It’s all a bit more rushed than I had in mind, but the important thing is that I’ll make sure he knows you and I had a wee bit of time together, before the end.’

There was something that Jasmine had understood since the moment she was bundled into the van, something that part of her mind had nonetheless been refusing to acknowledge. It was chief among the things that she had sought to rationalise, building up a battery of arguments and explanations that offered reassurance, but only in the same way that anaesthetics offered pain relief. With or without, it would soon be knife to skin.

They weren’t wearing masks.

Before the end
, he said.

Hers or Fallan’s, he didn’t specify. He didn’t need to. He couldn’t kill her and leave Fallan alive. He couldn’t frame Fallan and leave her alive.

McGill adjusted his posture, angling his chair away from the table and spreading his legs. His left hand went down to his waist while his right slipped into his jacket and produced her phone. She heard him undo his zip.

‘Right, hen. I think we’ll send the proud father a wee photo to show him how well we’re getting on together. Come on,’ he commanded, his voice low and simmering with threat. ‘Doon on your knees and get this in your mooth.’

The trees were offering some shelter, but the rain was spilling off the leaves in huge collected drops, splattering Catherine’s hair and sometimes running down the back of her neck. She had parked at least quarter of a mile away and followed Fallan along a hidden system of tracks and pathways, behind gardens, between garages, away from roads and pavements. This was
his
Gallowhaugh, he explained: the secret thoroughfares and hiding places he had mapped out growing up here, his status as a particularly detested polisman’s son a permanent target on his back.

She was unnerved by how he moved, particularly given his height and build. He was swift and silent, blending into the shadows, going from haste to absolute stillness with no apparent effort of deceleration. He would have been difficult enough to see at the best of times, but on a night as wet and dark as this he could render himself almost invisible. Too bad he had her tagging along, then, but it was his choice.

She had texted Drew before setting off from Capletmuir, told him she’d been called out and would be late. Told him she loved him. He texted back saying he loved her too. He was wrong, though: he loved who he thought she was. They’d both find out his feelings on the true Catherine very soon.

Fallan was right: it was a lonely place to live. And a place where she had to live with protecting Tony McGill from justice was lonelier still. Fallan was good at hiding in the dark. She wasn’t. Her whole purpose was to bring matters out into the daylight, where the things that thrived only in darkness shrivelled up and died.

Fallan was doing an advance reconnoitre, getting the lay of the land in the hope that he might be able to identify some kind of advantage before he walked in there, alone. He had led her along these secret paths in order to make an unseen approach to the place identified only on the map as Collaton Park.

As Fallan had explained, ‘the Spooky’ was the collective local name for this imposing, long-uninhabited mansion house and its extensive grounds; known constituently as the Spooky Hoose and the Spooky Woods. It had been empty as long as anybody could remember, built a couple of centuries back when the surrounding area was still countryside and the south-eastern edges of Glasgow several miles distant. It was boarded up but not derelict, almost as though some immortal owner had taken the huff at what had sprung up around it and would one day come back when Gallowhaugh had been demolished again.

The building itself sat a couple of hundred yards back from the road, unkempt grass meeting broken paving, haphazard hedging and twisted fencing denoting its boundary. It was effectively regarded as parkland by the local youth, a kind of multi-use facility accommodating games of hide-and-seek and soldiers among the younger ones through the day, before transforming by evening into a popular venue for their older peers to partake of cadged fags and sweet cider.

Nobody would be hanging around here tonight, though. The rain would see to that.

‘If you know this place so well, why would they choose it?’ she asked him.

‘I don’t know. That part’s bothering me too. It’s symbolic again, but symbols aren’t worth giving ground over. Maybe they figure they’re conceding nothing as long they’re holding all the cards. The only card that matters, anyway.’

‘Symbolic how?’

‘I witnessed things here. McGill knows this, because we talked about it once upon a time, when he was trying to play the substitute father figure. This is the place I found out what kind of cop my dad was. Him and his crew used to take a van up here and batter fuck out of people. Nobody gave them any shite because everybody knew that was the payback. It’s also where I learned about my dad and McGill. I saw money changing hands as they both sat there in my dad’s car.’

‘Brown envelopes?’

‘Poly bags actually. Nothing so middle-class as a brown envelope. Plus it was always fucking raining.’

Fallan froze, holding up a hand to signal Catherine to stop also. Beams of headlights swept briefly across the trees, dispersed and diluted by distance. The arcing motion was caused by a vehicle turning from the main road onto the twisting track that led to the crumbling building. There were two vehicles, in fact, one tucked closely behind the other.

Rather their axles than mine, Catherine thought, given the cratered conditions beneath their wheels, but as they came into sight between the trees she saw that for these vehicles it wasn’t going to be a problem. The first was a Toyota Hilux, with high-sprung suspension and a flatbed rear.

The second was a Land Rover Defender.

‘I need to get a closer look,’ Fallan said. ‘Stay here.’

He was gone before she could respond, as if he had teleported. She could see the two four-by-fours continuing their approach, but she spotted no hint of where Fallan might be.

Catherine felt a vibration close to her chest and almost jumped before realising it was her phone. She took it out to see who was calling, thinking there was nobody she would answer for right now. She was wrong, though. It was Drummond.

She looked towards the two vehicles, now nearing the house, wondering how much distance sound would carry on a night like this. Their engines sounded muffled by the rain, but she crouched down and turned to face away nonetheless.

‘McLeod,’ she said, keeping her voice above a whisper so as to sound as natural as she could.

‘Detective Superintendent. I’ve got some good news. I believe a resolution is imminent in the Fullerton case.’

He still sounded like somebody was working him from the back. There was a hint of relief in his voice though, and Catherine knew she didn’t like that.

‘What kind of resolution?’

‘Neat and final: the kind we like best. I believe Glen Fallan might be ready to confess. I need you standing by ready to take charge. I expect to know more shortly after ten.’

The vehicles had stopped, both facing towards the road, headlights trained on the approach that Fallan had been commanded to take. She glanced at her watch: it was nine forty-five.

She stood there in the darkness, feeling separate from the scene that was playing out in front of her, like she’d felt disconnected at the dinner table.

I’ve got some good news.

The way he’d spoken, he knew nothing about this was good. But when he said
neat and final
, she could tell he believed that part.

She heard movement near by, and Fallan was at her side again before she could focus on its source.

‘There’s two of them,’ he said. ‘Both armed with automatics.’

‘Do they have Jasmine?’

‘No, and I didn’t think they’d be daft enough to bring her. This was never intended to be an exchange. That Defender’s got my plates.’

He said this with a grave finality. It took Catherine a moment to catch up.

This was the vehicle that had been driven in the Fullerton hit. It was turning up here so that it looked like Fallan had employed a double bluff, using the near-duplicate Defender in order to give the impression he’d been framed. The face mask, the second gun: it would all add up.

‘I got a call from Drummond while you were away,’ she said. ‘He told me to stand by for an imminent resolution to the Fullerton case.’

‘That’s why they’re doing this here,’ Fallan replied. ‘It’s somewhere that carries personal significance, going right back to my childhood. They’re going to suicide me.’

‘Jesus.’

Neat and final, right enough. Apart from one thing.

‘But what plausible reason would there be for you to kill yourself?’

Fallan swallowed, suddenly having difficulty finding his voice.