Dead Catch

by T F Muir

  Gilchrist squeezed his eyes tight. Christ, no. This was it. He held his breath for one beat, two beats, three, then four, but when the pressure of the suppressor against the side of his head relaxed, he opened his eyes.

  ‘Battie here,’ Fox said, and nodded to the man with rust-coloured hair, ‘is ex-SAS.’

  Battie’s lips parted in an imitation of a smile.

  ‘I don’t know if you would remember or not, or how old you would’ve been at the time, but the SAS were called into service during the Falklands War, doing all the usual stuff they’re known for; secret missions, taking out this person, that unit, getting down and dirty in the thick of it all, doing the stuff that nobody liked doing.’

  Gilchrist had no idea where Fox was going with this, but he was conscious of the man called Battie distancing himself from him, or perhaps more correctly, edging closer to Jessie.

  ‘One of the nastier sides of war happens to be the interrogation of prisoners of war. It shouldn’t be, of course, nasty I mean, with the Geneva Convention and all. But we’re realists in the end. And when it comes to whether or not good old Private Francesco Pablova of the Argentinian Army knows something that might prevent Johnny Britain from getting blown up, well, there really are no rules, are there? Although we say there are.’

  Fox reached out and placed a fatherly hand on the shoulder of the man called Battie who, Gilchrist was reluctant to admit, seemed to be perking up at the idea of some possibility that pleased him. ‘And Battie here was one of your SAS interrogators. He never failed. Did you, Battie?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘Not once. Not ever.’ Fox’s attention was back on Gilchrist with a vengeance. ‘So would you like to know how it played out during the Falklands so that Battie boy scored the perfect record?’

  Gilchrist grimaced, and managed to force down a sickening lump in his throat.

  ‘Battie would have the prisoners lined up with their hands tied behind their backs, and he would walk up to the first one, waggle his gun in front of him and tell him that he would shoot him dead if he didn’t answer the nice Army man’s questions.’ He paused for a moment, as if he’d just remembered something. ‘Of course, Battie’s fluent in Spanish. His dear mother married a Spanish bartender, God rest her soul. Did I tell you that?’

  Silent, Gilchrist stared at him, now knowing with sickening dread where Fox was going with this.

  ‘But that’s by the way. So, where was I? Oh, yes, then Battie would stand aside while the nice Army interrogator asked the first question. And without fail, every soldier who was interrogated first, gave his name, rank, and serial number only. Nothing more. Because they’d been commanded to do so by their chiefs, who assured them that we British played the game clean, and by the rules.’ Fox chuckled. ‘This is the bit I like. Tell him, Battie.’

  Battie stepped forward into Gilchrist’s view, positioning himself in front of Jessie. He held his gun pointed at the garage roof, the suppressor long and black and looking clinically deadly. ‘We never gave them second chances,’ he said in a broad Glaswegian accent. ‘We’d ask that first guy once, and if he spewed out his name, rank and serial number, I pressed the gun to his forehead and shot the bastard.’ He laughed at that, a husky growl that flushed his cheeks. ‘After that, the others were falling over themselves and pissing their pants to tell us everything.’

  Fox clapped Battie’s shoulder again. ‘It never failed, did it, Battie?’

  ‘Not once.’

  ‘Show DCI Gilchrist how it’s done, Battie.’

  Battie lowered his gun, levelled it at Jessie’s forehead and—

  ‘No.’ Gilchrist leaped from his chair and dived at Battie’s arm, fearful that he was already too late. But Battie was prepared for the move. He stepped back like a ballet dancer, and thudded the butt of his gun into the back of Gilchrist’s head in the passing with a force that should have cracked bone.

  Gilchrist hit the floor with a heavy thud that pulled a grunt from his throat. But before he could push himself onto all fours, strong arms hooked him by his armpits and dragged him back onto his chair.

  Fox’s face swam in front of him, a Picasso painting that zoomed in close to peer into his eyes. Somebody shouted something, cursed maybe, he couldn’t say. Then his stomach spasmed, and bile burned its way into his throat to dribble from his lips like spittle.

  ‘That’s the problem with the ex-SAS,’ Fox said. ‘They sometimes forget how well-trained they once were.’ He leaned down, almost kneeling in front of Gilchrist, took hold of Gilchrist’s hair and pulled his head back until they were looking at each other eye to eye. Well, Fox was doing the looking. Gilchrist was having difficulty focusing. But with every second he was coming round, although a throbbing pain at the back of his head had him wanting to lie down and just close his eyes.

  ‘So,’ Fox said, and glanced at Battie.

  Battie spread his legs as if to steady himself, then pointed his gun at Jessie.

  ‘I’ve got a son,’ she whimpered. ‘Please. My wee boy. He’s deaf. He needs his mum.’

  ‘Wait,’ Gilchrist managed to grunt. It was now bluff or die. Maybe both. He spat up sputum, tried to lick his lips. But his tongue could’ve been connected to someone else’s brain. ‘Wait,’ he said again, and wiped a hand across his lips, took a deep breath. ‘If you shoot her, I’ll tell you bugger all.’

  ‘We’ll see.’

  ‘I mean it.’

  The words were shouted loud enough for Battie’s attention to be diverted.

  ‘You’ll fuck up your perfect record,’ Gilchrist said. ‘But that’s how it’ll be.’

  Battie stepped back from Jessie at some signal from Fox, which Gilchrist failed to catch. Fox leaned close to Gilchrist again. ‘OK,’ he said. ‘Maybe this time we break the rules and give you a second chance.’

  Gilchrist tried to blink away the pain, but his head felt as if someone was tapping it with a hammer in time with his heart.

  Fox offered a smile of sympathy. ‘I’m waiting.’

  ‘What’s the question again?’ Gilchrist said.

  ‘How did you know to come here?’

  ‘To Pittenweem?’

  Fox let out a sigh of frustration. ‘To Wren’s Garage.’

  ‘Joe Christie’s logbook.’

  His answer seemed to surprise Fox, for he frowned and cut a glance left and right at the others, then said, ‘Joe Christie’s dead.’

  ‘I know he is.’

  ‘So how did you find his logbook?’

  ‘Brenda Girl.’

  Fox scowled at him. ‘Brenda Girl?’

  ‘His boat. It was swept ashore during that recent storm. The name had been changed to Golden Plover. The boat with Stooky Dee’s body on board.’

  Something passed behind Fox’s eyes, calculations of sorts that set his eyes dancing as if his brain was having difficulty understanding English. ‘And you found the logbook in the boat?’ he asked at length.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I don’t believe you.’

  ‘I can’t help you with that.’

  Fox pulled himself upright, and stared down at Gilchrist as if deciding which part of him to chop off first, and where to get rid of the pieces.

  ‘Can I speak?’

  Battie pointed his gun at Jessie.

  Fox raised his hand, a command to Battie not to pull the trigger. ‘Go on.’

  ‘He’s telling the truth,’ Jessie said. ‘Joe Christie’s house was broken into after he went missing three years ago. But the logbook wasn’t there. And it was never found, because no one thought to ask his wife back then. She told us where it was hidden.’

  ‘And no one knew this until you found it out?’

  ‘That’s the local bobbies for you.’

  ‘And where’s Christie’s logbook now?’ Fox asked her.

  Jessie lowered her head and closed her eyes.

  ‘I’m waiting,’ Fox said.

  ‘Heh. Over here,’ Gilchrist said, and pointed his fingers at his eye
s.

  Fox jerked an angry look at him.

  Battie shifted his aim.

  Gilchrist struggled to ignore the gun pointing at him. He had nothing left with which to defend himself. Well, not quite nothing. His brain wasn’t allowing him to think far enough ahead to work out the consequences of what he was about to say. But in a week or so, with big Jock Shepherd dead and a new man in charge, maybe it would mean nothing at all. And there was always the possibility – a ridiculously slim one, he knew – that Fox might just let him and Jessie go, once he’d been told the truth.

  ‘We handed it over to Jock Shepherd,’ he said.

  Fox shook his head as if with irritation. ‘Why?’

  ‘For information.’

  ‘Like an exchange?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Information on what?’

  ‘He told us about this place, Wren’s Garage.’

  If Gilchrist had stirred a hornet’s nest with a red-hot poker he would have received less of a response. Fox removed a phone from his pocket and strode to the back wall of the garage, fingers tapping the screen. Wheelan and the other guy, the skinny one who’d carried Jessie to the garage, ripped a tarpaulin off a short stack of shelves and started pulling sealed packets off them, and placing them on a wooden pallet that Gilchrist hadn’t seen until that moment.

  Meanwhile, Battie raised his gun and stepped towards Jessie.

  ‘Jessie’s got a copy of the logbook,’ Gilchrist shouted at him, and jumped to his feet, the movement so sudden that his world tilted for an awkward moment. Then it righted itself as Battie’s arm swung his way until he was looking into the black mouth of the suppressor.

  ‘We need them,’ Fox snapped. ‘Both of them.’

  Battie lowered his gun and unscrewed the suppressor – if only cats were as well trained. He flipped his jacket wide, slid the suppressor into one leather holster, his pistol into another. Then he pointed two fingers at Gilchrist in imitation of a gun, and mouthed – Later.

  Fox barked into his mobile, ‘They’re onto us. Get out. It’s a set-up,’ and hung up. He then nodded to Battie who stepped behind Jessie, and said, ‘Up.’

  Confused, Jessie tried to struggle to her feet. But urgency had taken hold of the gang, and Battie grabbed her arms, jerked them behind her back and, with the expertise of a police training officer, cuffed her – where had the plasticuffs come from? Then he shoved her towards the side of the garage, and turned his attention to Gilchrist.

  ‘Up,’ he said.

  But Gilchrist was already pushing to his feet, holding his hands behind his back with an almost debilitating mixture of relief and despair – relief that they hadn’t just shot the pair of them; and despair that they were being cuffed. The logical part of his brain had worked out that they were being taken away for disposal off site, to some place where the discovery of their bodies would not connect them in any way to Wren’s Garage. Scotland’s lochs and moors provided an unlimited number of places in which to dispose of a body or two, or worse, to spread body parts around.

  The plasticuffs slipped onto his wrists with a tight tug that brought a grimace to his face, and a Fuck you from Battie. He glanced at Jessie, saw the trail of tears down her cheeks, and a dead look in her eyes that told him she knew everything was over. They were both going to be killed. She would never see her son again.

  And he would never see his children either.

  No one would come along and save them.

  They were on their own. And this was the end.

  Which was when the garage door rattled.

  CHAPTER 45

  The wooden door rattled again, as if someone was trying to break in.

  But if Gilchrist expected the gang to panic, he was sorely disappointed.

  Mobile back by his ear, Fox spat, ‘Stupid bastard. He’ll wake the whole fucking town up.’ Not that anyone was sleeping, Gilchrist knew. Then Fox turned his back to the door and carried on with his phone call.

  Wheelan and the skinny guy continued stacking the pallet, wrapped bundles rising four feet high – which had to be the biggest stash of heroin to hit the British Isles, and put it somewhere in the eight-figure range. Battie strode to the door with grim determination, as if intent on telling the stupid bastard which leg he was going to shoot him in if he didn’t keep the fucking noise down. But when he unlocked the garage door and pushed it open, he was confronted with the tail-end of a white van, exhaust fuming in the cold air, and the driver’s door slamming shut.

  Undeterred, Battie opened the other garage door wide, then stood to the side, in line with the driver’s wing mirror, and guided the van back. Gilchrist didn’t think the garage was long enough to hide the van completely. Not that it mattered, he supposed, as long as it was parked deep enough inside to load the pallet out of view of nosy neighbours.

  The van eased back, edged into the garage and drew to a halt, brake lights casting a hellish glow over the scene, engine thrumming loud in the closed confines, exhaust pumping out grey fumes.

  ‘Tell him to turn the fucking engine off,’ Fox snapped at Battie.

  But in the rumbling din Battie hadn’t heard, or couldn’t be bothered, and reached for the handles on the back of the van. Wheelan had only just lugged the last of the packages onto the pile, when Battie twisted the handle and pulled the van doors open.

  Gilchrist would write in his statement later that it all happened with practised speed, and more terrifyingly, with an eerie, almost clinical silence in its unfolding.

  Battie was dead before his body hit the garage floor, falling stiff-legged and straight-backed, as if his nerves had frozen from the single shot to his forehead. Fox was next, a burst of suppressed automatic gunfire – three rounds, Gilchrist would later recall – that turned the middle of his chest into a bloodied bullseye and blasted him full-force into the corner wall.

  Battie’s body hit the floor with a heavy thump as Wheelan squealed something for the last time, his face exploding from a single shot. The skinny guy managed to raise his hands shoulder-high in surrender before another short burst – two rounds as Cooper would later confirm – took the side of his head off.

  Two men in black jeans, jacket and balaclavas – guns dangling from shoulder straps – leaped from the back of the van, and went about their business as if Jessie and Gilchrist were nothing more than invisible shadows. One of them remotely controlled a two-pronged forklift mechanism that extended from the van’s interior and lowered to the garage floor. The other rolled out a length of plastic sheeting, and ripped off a perforated section. Then he picked up Battie’s body as if he weighed nothing more than a bale of straw, and threw him onto the plastic. The ends of the sheeting were then folded in and over to form a nicely wrapped package. A strip of duct tape torn off a roll secured it.

  He then ripped off another length of sheeting, and strode towards Fox’s body.

  A signal to the driver had the van easing back again, brake lights flickering, exhaust smoking as the driver slipped the clutch. The forklift scraped the floor, then juddered up an inch or so as one of the hitmen guided it into position. The van jerked to a halt, the brake lights vanished. The forklift raised the pallet, wobbling unsteadily from the off-balanced loading. A packet slid off, and split open, spreading a spray of white powder over the floor. Without a word, the hitman picked it up and tossed it into the van.

  Fox’s body was rolled onto the plastic sheeting as the driver entered the garage, all in black like the other two. He headed straight for Wheelan and carried him like a crumpled sack of meat over to another sheet of plastic that had been readied for him. Next came the skinny guy, picked up as if he weighed nothing, brains and blood dripping like wax as the sheeting was placed under him.

  The back of the van settled down on its tyres from the weight of the drugs. The forklift was switched off and the remote control thrown into the back. One of the hitmen jumped in and anchored the stack to the floor with canvas straps that slid through metal rings fixed to the van’s floor
and walls. From the speed with which he accomplished this, Gilchrist could tell that he’d done it many times before. A quick jerk with one of the clamps, then another, and the stack was secured.

  Just then, the two others threw the roll of sheeting that contained Battie’s body into the van alongside the stack. Fox’s body followed, dumped without ceremony on top of Battie’s. Next came the other two, stacked like carpet rolls either side of the drugs.

  With four bodies safely on board, the van doors were closed and the driver and one of the hitmen walked from the garage and jumped into the front of the van. Which left one behind, the largest of the group, who pushed his gun to one side as he fished inside his jacket. Then he walked up to Gilchrist and placed a padded envelope on the desk next to the computer.

  ‘Jock sends his regards,’ he said, then strode from the garage.

  Instead of jumping into the cabin with the others, he slapped the side of the van. The engine revved, and the van eased onto the garage forecourt. As soon as it cleared the garage, he clicked the light switch, stepped outside, pushed the doors shut, one after the other, and snapped the padlock.

  In the thick darkness, Jessie was the first to speak.

  ‘Jesus fuck,’ she said. ‘What the hell just happened?’

  Gilchrist was already shuffling his way across the floor, trying to visualise the layout in his mind’s eye so as not to stand on any blood or brains or God knows what else was lying around. He kicked his shin against a shelf, but bit his tongue as he scuffed along in the pitch black until he reached the corner of the garage where the light switch should be.

  With both hands cuffed behind his back, and in the inky blackness, it took him some time to locate it, and several seconds more before he managed to flick it on with his forehead.

  Light exploded over the scene.

  Jessie was on the floor, lying on her side, arms behind her back, knees drawn up in the foetal position. Her face was tight and chalk-white from shock. In contrast, a dark smear of blood trailed from her nose to her chin and down her neck to disappear beneath her jacket. A bruise was doing what it could to colour her left cheek where Wheelan had punched her.