by T F Muir
Again, his attention was drawn to the hefty padlock.
What was stored in the garage? Contraband worth millions? He almost snorted at the absurdity of it. Probably nothing more than a mechanic’s wrench set, or maybe just a pick and shovel. Big Jock Shepherd was more than likely having a laugh. Probably splitting his sides by now. If anything was going to happen here at seven, it was most likely not going to be the something big that they were hoping for. The wind shifted at that moment, throwing a gutter-load of rainwater over the area, as if telling Gilchrist to hurry up and get on with it.
He turned to Jessie. ‘How’s your lock-picking?’
‘Could give it a try,’ she said, and walked towards the garage.
Gilchrist followed her, troubled by the oddest sense of being watched. He ran his gaze along the back of the terraced homes. In the darkness of an early night, light shone from those windows he could see above the boundary wall. Curtains hung open. Blinds were pulled high. He watched a woman fill a kettle from the kitchen tap, before she stepped back and sank out of sight. At another window, a man adjusted a latch. From behind, he heard the scratch of metal on metal as Jessie worked the lock.
‘I hope you realise,’ she said, ‘that without a warrant, anything we find inside would be compromised in court.’
‘We have to get in first,’ he said, and resisted telling her to hurry up.
All he wanted was to check it out before anyone arrived. He had burgeoning doubts about Shepherd’s note, and the last thing he needed was his request for a search warrant to cross Smiler’s desk, only for him to end up with egg on his face. If they found contraband inside, he could show Smiler the note from Shepherd, then apply for a search warrant.
Through the pend, headlights brightened Mid Shore. He held his breath as the shorehead lit up as if from a distress flare, then just as quickly settled into darkness as a car drove past, tyres hissing on the rain-soaked road, exhaust growling in the dying wind. Christ, he thought, if anyone happened to enter the pend, there was nowhere to hide.
Back to Jessie. ‘Any luck?’
She hissed a curse, and said, ‘Bloody hell, Andy. I’m trying, I’m trying.’
‘I know you’re trying. But do you think you can do it?’
‘A key would be nice,’ she said. ‘Or a hacksaw.’
‘Can’t help you there.’ Another glance at the windows did nothing to settle his nerves.
‘Ah, shit,’ Jessie said. ‘That’s it.’
‘You’re in?’
‘It’s snapped.’
Gilchrist caught the sudden whine of a high-revving engine, and felt his heart leap as a single headlight flashed across the mouth of the pend and disappeared along the shorehead, the sound of an engine fading into the darkness. Out on a motorbike on a night like this? Who would be so crazy? Movement above, a shadow of sorts, caught his peripheral vision, and he imagined – rather than saw – a face pulling back from one of the upper windows, two along from the roof of the pend …
Which was when he saw it.
High on the wall. Within arm’s reach of a double sash window.
One through which no light shone from its uninhabited interior. The blinking light of a webcam. Only a fleeting flicker. Nothing more. But enough to tell him that somewhere, on someone’s computer screen …
They were being watched.
CHAPTER 43
It all kicked off quickly after that.
Jessie managed to retract the broken lock-pick from the padlock, then rub the sleeve of her jacket across it, front and back, to remove her prints. Not the best way to do it, but as good as any in the time available.
For they had no time now, Gilchrist sensed that.
What he hadn’t sensed, though, was the speed with which they would be confronted.
He and Jessie strode across the forecourt, intent on returning to his car to wait it out until 7 p.m., and had just entered the mouth of the pend when the blinding beam of a single flashlight stopped them. At the Mid Shore end of the pend, one flashlight beam became two, which ran up and down his and Jessie’s respective lengths and settled on their faces.
Jessie raised her hand to shield her eyes. ‘Douse the lights, boys,’ she said.
Gilchrist thought he heard a snigger, and slid his hand inside his jacket to retrieve his warrant card. The beam slid from his face to his chest, followed by a man’s voice saying, ‘Steady,’ the word drawn out hard and long as a warning, the timbre strangely familiar.
‘We’re with Fife Constabulary,’ Gilchrist said.
‘Hands where we can see them.’
With slow deliberation, Gilchrist removed his hand from inside his jacket.
‘In the air.’
‘Get real,’ Jessie said.
The beam shivered with implied annoyance, but sufficient to show the metallic glint of a gun held in a steady hand. ‘We’re not fooling.’ A pause, then, ‘That’s it. Higher.’
When Gilchrist and Jessie had their hands head-high, a figure emerged from between the two flashlights and walked towards them. As he neared, the silhouette shifted from blacks through greys to settle into the muscular form of DS Fox, holding what looked like a Glock in his left hand, although Gilchrist was never great at identifying makes of gun. The flashlights shivered as Fox’s sidekicks – Gilchrist could count only three – approached and stood behind Fox, still in shadow. In the shivering light, Fox looked resolute, face grim, jaw tight. He was no longer the blasé Detective Sergeant ready to down whisky by the glass-load, but more like a man intent on protecting what was his, and his alone.
Despite that, Gilchrist tried to bluff it. He gave a smile of relief, and said, ‘For a moment there, I thought we were in trouble,’ and went to lower his arms—
‘Up,’ from a voice behind one of the flashlights.
Gilchrist froze. ‘What’s going on?’ he asked Fox.
Fox grimaced. ‘You present us with a problem.’
‘In what way?’
‘The fact that you’re here.’
‘We were trying to leave,’ Jessie said. ‘But you wouldn’t let us.’
Fox’s head swivelled like a robot to take Jessie in, and Gilchrist realised that standing where they were in the open mouth of the pend, whatever was about to happen would not be seen from any of the windows above. To stall what he feared was coming, Gilchrist resorted to the only defence he could think of – talking.
‘Lesley Jennifer Wren Duncan,’ he said. ‘And Wren’s Garage. That’s why we’re here. Which raises the question – why are you here?’
Fox turned his attention back to Gilchrist, and nodded, as if at the cleverness of the question. ‘I’ll tell you why I’m here,’ he said, ‘if you tell me how you happened to find this place.’
‘Googled it,’ Jessie said, which earned her another sharp look from Fox, with the added bonus of the fourth man in the group – the one without a flashlight – stepping forward from the shadows.
‘You always were the cheeky bitch,’ he said.
Gilchrist had never seen the man before, but from the disgusted look on Jessie’s face, he could tell that she had.
‘Well well well,’ she said. ‘Look what the dog’s gone and dug up.’
The man approached Jessie, a glint of anger in his eyes, and pressed in close enough for Jessie to resist taking a step back.
‘Last I heard of Detective Sergeant Brian Wheelan,’ she said – and Gilchrist knew she was giving him a name for future reference, although that future was looking as if it might be shorter-lived than either of them hoped – ‘you’d just been demoted.’
‘No thanks to you, you fucking wee cow.’
Jessie spat in his face, and Wheelan’s hand came up out of the darkness and hit her across her cheek with a punch that thudded her to the ground.
‘Hold it right there, Andy.’ Fox’s voice purred with reason. ‘She’d kept her mouth shut, she wouldn’t be lying on the ground now, would she?’ He nodded to the side, and one of the flashlights
flicked off as a skinny man in a black biker jacket leaned down, slipped his hands under Jessie’s armpits and dragged her upright.
Something about the scene put Gilchrist in mind of a fisherman going about his work, as if hauling limp bodies off cobbled courtyards was the same as pulling fish from a net. A prod in the ribs with the barrel of an automatic machine gun – surely not an Uzi – refocused Gilchrist’s attention.
Fox said, ‘Start walking,’ and the other flashlight clicked off as the man at his side gave another prod.
Weak light from upper windows cast a yellow glow into the night. But at forecourt level, surrounded by three walls and two-storey buildings, the darkness was as good as total. Gilchrist stumbled towards the garage, hands still in the air, conscious that they were now out of the pend and in an area that in daylight would be visible to residents in the terraced homes. Surely one of them would see something suspicious and phone the police. On the other hand, what could they see in an unlit garage forecourt? And even if they did see something, would they know what it was, and could they be bothered to interfere?
Probably not on both counts, he reluctantly reasoned.
But Gilchrist was able to make out shapes in the darkness, and from the way the man ahead of him was carrying Jessie – her head down, feet dragging – he knew she was out cold. The speed of Wheelan’s punch had not only surprised Jessie, but Gilchrist, too. But it was the hard thud as Jessie hit the ground that warned him that she’d been knocked unconscious the moment the blow was struck. A pause at the garage door as a key clinked in the padlock, then a hard metallic click as it was unlocked and removed from its hasp, gave Gilchrist time to pull up what he could recall of DS Wheelan, a name that was coming back to him.
Jessie had once explained to him how she’d reached detective status while still in her twenties. Single-handedly, she’d exposed a father and his three sons as sexual abusers of the youngest member of their family. After she managed to convince the victim – Fiona – to seek help from the police, the matter went to trial, and it was DS Wheelan – who worked out of the Rutherglen Office at the time – who had provided character references for two of the sons, Fiona’s oldest brothers. Jessie had been convinced Wheelan had done so because the sons muled drugs for him, but she’d been unable to find evidence to back up that theory. As it was, Wheelan’s statements almost brought down the case, but ended up being sufficient only to mitigate some of the charges—
The garage door creaked open, its frame scraping the forecourt, and Jessie was carried into its blacker than black interior. A firm nudge in the ribs from that annoying gun barrel had Gilchrist following in short order, his heart pounding at what was about to happen. Several scenarios unfolded in his mind, none of which inspired hope, the most realistic being that they were going to shoot him and Jessie and leave their bodies to rot in the garage. For all he knew, the garage might lie from one year to the next without the door ever being opened.
The garage interior smelled musty dry. Rainwater hit the roof, a constant sound that thrummed in the background. Leather scuffed on the concrete floor as the others entered, and Gilchrist had the oddest sense that sacks of wheat, or bales of straw, were stored there. He slid one of his shoes over the floor, sensing the concrete smooth, with a coating of dust.
A hand with a grip as tight as a vice jerked him to a standstill, and everyone stood in the black silence as the door scraped shut. With a soft click, the world exploded into view. Gilchrist had to lower his head and screw his eyes against the brightness. The garage looked as if it had never been a workshop, but an office. Not much of an office, mind you, but good enough from which to access the internet, make a phone call, store what looked like wrapped and sealed bags of drugs on the floor – heroin, if he had to take a guess; thousands of pounds of it. The hand pressed down on his shoulder, hard, and before he could object he found himself slammed into a wooden chair.
‘Right,’ said Fox. ‘Start talking.’
Gilchrist took hope from the fact that they hadn’t tied his hands behind his back. On the other side of that argument, they hadn’t been expecting to find anyone here, so wouldn’t necessarily have reels of spare rope to hand. Not that he was about to jump to his feet any time soon and take them all on. A glance at the machine gun held in hands accustomed to automatic weaponry stiffened his resolve not to do anything that would give them cause to shoot. He looked down at Jessie on the floor by his side, eyes closed, blood seeping from her nose. The blow had struck her high on her cheek, where a raised bruise was taking shape. He hoped no bones had been broken. Of course, none of that might matter in an hour or so, maybe less.
‘Is Jessie all right?’ he said.
‘Forget her. It’s you I want to talk to.’
‘Not until you convince me that Jessie’s all right.’
Fox nodded to someone out of Gilchrist’s line of sight, and the bulky figure of DS Wheelan crept into view, accompanied by a thinner man, the one who’d lugged Jessie into the garage. Between them, they manhandled her body upright onto another chair, similar to the one on which Gilchrist sat.
Wheelan took hold of Jessie’s face in one hand, squeezing her cheeks, and tried to shake her awake. The other man had more of a clue, and removed a bottle of distilled water from a small fridge under a table, unscrewed the top, and poured it over Jessie’s upturned face.
She came to with a spluttering curse.
‘Satisfied?’ Fox asked Gilchrist.
Gilchrist tried to push himself to his feet, but was restrained by that damn vice-like grip again.
‘Stay put,’ Fox snarled at him.
‘Jessie?’ Gilchrist said, and she managed to turn her head and look at him. ‘Are you OK?’ He thought her eyes were still swimming, but she gave him a half-nod and snorted a spray of blood down the front of her jacket, then sat back and eyed the group with venomous defiance. Gilchrist had to admire her courage. But no amount of glaring of eyes and snorting of blood was going to get them out of this mess anytime soon.
‘Heh. Over here,’ Fox said to Gilchrist, pointing two fingers at his own eyes.
Gilchrist did as he was told, and returned Fox’s gaze.
‘We’ll try this one more friendly time,’ he said. ‘After which, if you’re still playing funny buggers, we’ll resort to less friendly means.’ He jerked a quick smile that failed to touch his eyes. ‘Capisci?’
‘Sorry,’ Gilchrist said. ‘I don’t speak French.’
Someone chuckled from behind Gilchrist, and he had a sense of the air tightening. He caught Fox giving the tiniest shake of his head, a movement that told Gilchrist who was the boss, and warned him that one false move could be his last. All of a sudden his memory cast up an image of Stooky Dee wired to the inside of the hull, and he realised that he could very well be talking to Stooky’s killers. With that thought, a tremor did what it could to shiver his leg, but he pressed his foot hard on the floor and fought it off.
Fox leaned closer, his face no more than six inches from Gilchrist’s, as if enticing Gilchrist to reach up with his free hands and try to choke him to death. And he came to see why they hadn’t bothered to tie his hands behind his back. Why waste the effort? All they had to do was pull a trigger and it was end of the road for Gilchrist and all his memories.
What would happen to Jack and Maureen? What would they think?
The memory of talking to Joe Christie’s wife appeared from nowhere. She’d lived for years believing Joe had deserted her, when in fact he was probably dead, his body never to be found. Would that be his own fate, too? Would Jack and Maureen have his body to cremate? Not buried. No, not buried. He’d written that into his will. And he found it strange how the mind worked at times of extreme stress, how despite the hopelessness of their situation he found himself thinking of a joke, of someone who wanted to be cremated, and being close to death, so close that they said they had one foot on the grate—
‘How did you happen to find this place?’ Fox said.
‘Told
you,’ Jessie said. ‘We Googled it.’
‘Want me to shut her up, boss?’
Fox shook his head, then said to Gilchrist, ‘Tell her if she doesn’t keep her trap shut, we’re going to put a bullet in your thigh.’
With that, one of the trio – a stocky man with hair like rusted wire – removed an automatic pistol from one pocket, a silencer from the other, and screwed the two together.
Fox smiled. ‘Any preference?’
‘Preference?’ Gilchrist said.
‘Which thigh? Left or right?’
Gilchrist turned to face Jessie. ‘For once in your life, Jessie, can you keep that trap of yours shut?’
She nodded, and pressed her lips together.
But even that seemed not enough to satisfy them, for the stocky man stepped forward and pressed the suppressor’s muzzle to the side of Gilchrist’s head.
‘Right,’ Fox said. ‘We’ll try this one last time, shall we?’
CHAPTER 44
Gilchrist struggled to keep his tone light. ‘My preference would be left thigh.’
Fox offered an appreciative smile.
The muzzle pressed harder.
Despite his best efforts at casual bravado, Gilchrist could not stop a fresh tremor from gripping his leg. He held his breath, waiting for the bullet that would end his life. Would he feel it? Would he die in a flash of pain? ‘Even if I tell you what you want to know,’ he gushed, ‘you’re still going to kill us.’ He tried to give Fox his most defiant stare. But he doubted he would have won an Oscar. ‘So why tell you anything at all?’ he reasoned.
Fox frowned, as if giving his words some thought, then said, ‘You know, I’ve got to tell you that there’s some truth in what you’re saying.’ He nodded to the man with the gun to Gilchrist’s head.