The Blood of Crows (26 page)

‘They’re only at DS level. What could they know that would be of any use?’

‘Are you telling me your DS doesn’t know things she shouldn’t? If there’s one like that in each station, and someone can get all the chit-chat, all they need do is put it all together and examine the bigger picture. It’s not rocket science. But, like I said, I’ve come to understand that Moffat is rather further down the food chain than I had supposed. Never mind being a puppet master, he’s
not even a puppet – well, maybe in the sense that he’s always had somebody’s hand jammed up his arse. But whose? I do not know – and that’s what we need to find out.’

Anderson thought for a few minutes. Then he said, ‘As I see it, you had a suspicion amounting to knowing that Moffat was transmitting information, but you had no proof that he was, because you didn’t know how he was doing it. Or exactly where it was going.’

‘Imagine him Down Under, gathering all kinds of info over the phone from his boys. But we know he was back here every three months, taking cops out for lunch, having a boys’ night out. He was the experienced one – they might have thought he was being helpful, giving advice, whereas in fact he was gaining info all the time. Then he put it into some kind of pattern and passed it on. Imagine, there could be a whole team of Moffats out there, getting information just from simple, casual one-to-one chats in a pub. We don’t know. But the conduit from there to the organization is what we need. We cannot find it, so we cannot break it. Saying, “Take out Melinda Biggart,” is one thing. The intelligence behind the speed and the execution of it is another. Moffat was only a link to the conduit, which is somebody in this city – the Puppeteer.’

‘Mick Batten would probably say it was somebody unassuming, somebody we’d just walk past on the street,’ said Anderson, frowning in thought. ‘Moffat was far too flashy, drew too much attention to himself.’

Howlett declined to respond. Instead, he said, ‘Colin, get your team, including DS Costello, to your room at
ten thirty this morning. You ran her out to Glen Fruin, didn’t you?’

‘Last night, yes. Well, Wednesday night,’ he clarified. ‘She can’t drive at the moment, with her head injury.’

‘I know that. And you found the body of MacFadyean?’

‘We didn’t actually witness anything. We just stopped and found the body.’

‘And how did you know the body was there?’

‘We didn’t. We saw the crows.’

Their eyes met.

Howlett smiled sadly. ‘Crows, the most intelligent, most predatory of birds. Never forget that. And now, DCI Anderson, you had better go home and get some sleep.’

A few minutes later, Howlett stood at the window and watched the red tail lights of Batten’s car turn out of his gateway.

Then he lifted the phone.

‘Thanks for that,’ he said, without introducing himself. ‘And Anderson is well. Dr Batten is driving him home now. But there was so much that could have gone wrong. Too much. We can’t take such risks again. Call on other people if you need them. But I want you and the team to keep close to DCI Anderson at all times. Keep him safe.’ He wiped the sweat from his forehead as he listened. ‘Yes, I know, I know. Not long now. Less than forty-eight hours. This is the start of the end of days, the new beginning. Just remember that, Pettigrew. Just remember that.’

Howlett put the phone down, and it clicked on to the handset. He looked at his own hand, nothing but paper-thin skin and old bones.

The end of days.

7.30 A.M.

‘I thought you’d given up the evil weed,’ Anderson said, as Batten opened a packet of Marlboro Lights with the trembling fingers of the confirmed addict. Then he thought about his two hours’ sleep and reflected that his own might not be any steadier.

‘I stopped drinking a month back, and the number of fags doubled. So, I’m back on the booze as well. We’re OK to have a puff here, aren’t we?’ Batten perched himself on the wall and looked around furtively, as if the nicotine police were lying in wait for him.

‘Puff away all you like. The respiratory unit is just across the car park if you collapse.’ Anderson pulled loose the knot of his tie, and joined Batten on the wall. He opened the small brown paper bag he was carrying, and took out two black coffees and two bacon rolls.

‘Cheers, mate,’ Batten said, helping himself. ‘I spent what was left of the night with a few members of the Russian mafia and a paedophile called Cameron Fairbairn.’

‘Night on the files, was it?’ quipped Anderson, glad that somebody else was feeling the strain.

‘How are you feeling?’

Anderson knew that the shock was going to hit him sometime, but at the moment he felt much better just not thinking about it. His brief sleep had been disturbed by repeated images of the second man jerking as the bullet struck him – something he had barely registered at the time – and the flashback was still haunting him.

‘Why didn’t Howlett call this meeting a bit earlier?’ Batten asked.

‘He wanted time to bring Costello back from her country estate.’ Anderson sipped at his coffee, watching a couple of women weave their way through the parked cars.

Batten swung both feet up on to the wall, and blew the smoke of his cigarette directly up at the sun. ‘Unlike Liverpool, you don’t have a real problem here with gun crime, do you?’

‘Not until recently. Up here, used to be that anybody who had a gun put in their hand was far too stupid to know how to use it properly. So, it always tended to be up close and personal, with a blade.’

‘Like being split up the middle, eh?’

‘You trying to put me off my bacon roll, Mick? No, that’s something we haven’t seen till now either.’

‘And what gangs do you have up here?’

‘You’ve read
No Mean City
? Well, that was ages ago. Those days are gone. And it wasn’t in this area. It was in the north and east – Protestant McGregors in the north, Catholic O’Donnells over to the east. Roughly,’ Anderson qualified the statement. ‘But they’re all dead now. Or safely locked up. One of them’s still in the Bar-L, for taking somebody’s head off with a machete.’

Batten raised an interrogatory eyebrow.

‘Wee Archie O’Donnell. Son of Auld Archie,’ Anderson explained. ‘The guy he decapitated was a junior lieutenant in his own gang; it was assumed to be retribution, because he’d stabbed a pregnant woman. One of the other lot. Killed her. Costello was on the scene and so was Moffat. God, I bet he was dirty even then. That’s why he
sent Costello away – she was new to the force, and an unknown quantity to him.’

‘Was that some kind of jungle justice?’ Batten lay down along the wall, face up to the sun, his eyes closed.

‘And in case you’re going to go into your “the Krays loved their mother” routine, just remember it has always been believed that it was either the O’Donnells or the McGregors that took the wee Marchetti boy.’ Anderson pointed to The Works bookshop across the road. ‘There’s the book there, right in the front window. She thinks she came up with that theory, but she didn’t.’

‘That was never proved, though, was it?’ Batten said.

‘It’s what all the intelligence said at the time.’

‘Intelligence implicated both families – but not one or the other, definitively. You can’t have the same jam on two cakes, can you?’

Anderson sighed deeply. It was hot already, and he was very tired. Whatever they had drugged him with, the R2 was making his eyeballs hurt.

Batten sat up to light another cigarette, then lay back down again. ‘There is one thing that will stop a gang in its tracks,’ he said eventually.

‘AK-47? Sherman tank?’

‘Their own society. Gangs – well, Glasgow and Liverpool gangs – live by a code that is agreed, if you like. And dictated by the society they live in. Consent is given to a degree of lawbreaking, because it works for the good of that society. And consent is given to the hierarchical structure.’

‘Forced consent?’

‘Maybe. So, do you know anything about game theory?’

‘The only game theory we have is that in any draw Rangers get a penalty.’

‘Well, consider that. Consider Rangers and Celtic. They win everything, don’t they?’

‘More or less.’

‘So, if you owned, say … a rubbish team.’

‘Partick Thistle.’

‘OK, Partick Thistle. You would be daft to take them on. Your best bet to win anything is to set those two against each other in such a way that they weaken each other, allowing you to take on the winner. The winner will inevitably be inferior to the original, giving you a good chance of success.’

‘Where does this come into anything?’

‘Substitute the MacGregors and the O’Donnells. Families that had ruled Glasgow for a hundred years or so with extreme familial, geographical and religious loyalty.’

‘Loyalties run as deep as the Molendinar in this city.’

‘The what?’ asked Batten.

‘The river that runs underneath Glasgow, right underneath.’

‘And such loyalty, running deep, means a lot in a city like this. That’s why the Marchetti kidnap caused so much mayhem. Drugs, porn, counterfeiting – that’s all allowed. The senseless killing of a six-year-old is certainly not. The Marchetti thing was a can of worms that exploded. They were informing all over the place, on their own people as well as each other. More grasses than B&Q’s seed catalogue. Previous loyalties were shattered. It was the end for them.’

Anderson just grunted, and shifted his rapidly numbing backside on the wall.

‘The question is how much Howlett knows about it. You’ve seen him – the whites of his eyes are yellow, his jacket’s swimming on him, and his belt’s in a new hole. The man is not well. He wants this situation closed before he retires – if he lasts that long. I’m as sure as I can be that this is the last stand of a dying man with nothing to lose. As for this Puppeteer?’ Batten stubbed his cigarette out. ‘It might take one to know one.’

10.30 A.M.

Deliberately or not, Wyngate had arranged the seating in the lecture hall so that no one sat at the head of the long table, and the ACC – who was out of uniform – was simply one person sitting among his peers. Anderson, Batten, O’Hare, Lambie and Mulholland were already present, and there were two empty seats. The room was seething with tension but Anderson couldn’t tell where it was coming from. He hoped Howlett had something up his sleeve to pull the team together.

The door opened and Costello walked in, holding the door open for another woman, diminutive and slightly built, who looked like a typical student in jeans and T-shirt, her jacket tied round her waist and a knitted handbag slung across her shoulder. It was obvious from the banality of the conversation that they had just met. Costello looked pale and tired, but behind her eyes Anderson saw the old familiar spark, and thought she looked more alive than he had seen her in ages. His thoughts were confirmed by the way she banged the chair
back before sitting down. Keen to get on with it, then. He was glad she was back. She wouldn’t let Howlett get away with anything.

The smaller woman pulled out the other seat. ‘Hello,’ she said brightly. ‘I’m Matilda McQueen.’ She opened her bag and took out a file, pulled the cap off her pen with her teeth and sat down, ready, totally confident, totally at ease.

‘She is our forensic science expert, and the Prof here is our forensic medical expert. They are both very much part of this team,’ said Howlett.

‘Whether they like it or not,’ said Anderson, which raised a smile and broke the tension.

Wyngate closed the door, then checked it was securely locked before taking his own seat.

‘I’m not going to talk.’ ACC Howlett stood up. ‘I just want you to sit and watch something. It was bought in a pub toilet for three hundred pounds and handed to us. I’ll show you the edited highlights only.’ His eyes darted from Costello to McQueen, obviously slightly uncomfortable with the thought that women were present. He pressed Play on the remote control for the laptop that was linked to the PowerPoint projector. The screen went dark, and a few coded numbers and letters flashed across. The sound preceded the visuals by a few seconds, a primal scream of sheer terror, and Costello recoiled nervously. Then a girl’s face came into view, her eyes screwed shut, her mouth open, screaming. Two rough hairy hands were holding her down. The screaming stopped, and words spilled out among the girl’s sobs.

‘What’s she saying? That’s not English, is it?’ Wyngate asked.

‘She’s screaming for her mother, in Russian,’ said Vik, without taking his eyes off the screen.

Anderson leapt to his feet, and his chair crashed over backwards. ‘Christ, I’m not watching this!’ he snarled. ‘No way! Open that fucking door!’

Howlett nodded briefly to Wyngate, who jumped up faster than anybody had ever seen him move, key at the ready. Anderson stormed out, banging the door behind him.

No one uttered a word, or looked at anyone else. Wyngate righted the fallen chair on his way back to his place at the table.

On screen, a pillow came down on the girl’s face and stayed there.

Howlett picked up the remote and the screen returned to royal blue. Matilda was in tears, and Costello sat with her arms folded, looking furious.

‘That was by way of showing you why we are here,’ Howlett said. ‘I thought I would spare us the previous twenty-seven minutes. And what came after. The girl wasn’t dead, just unconscious. She was revived from that, to go through it again and again. There are two men involved.

Matilda shuddered.

‘This man with the bracelet tattoo, and a second with a “Rangers No Surrender” tattoo.’

‘Well, that cuts it down to half the blokes in Glasgow,’ said Mulholland with thin sarcasm.

‘Tattoos may be of the same pattern, but they are all
unique. You know that,’ Howlett answered. ‘That is a start, and we need every –’

He was interrupted by Matilda blowing her nose loudly. Batten put his hand out and patted hers automatically, then went back to scribbling away in his notebook.

‘Do we know who she is?’ asked Costello.

‘No. But we call her Rusalka,’ explained Mulholland. ‘It’s the name of the water sprite in Dvořák’s opera.’

‘Dies in the end, does she?’ Costello grunted. ‘What age was she, do we think?’