by Val McDermid
Annoyingly, his older brother Joseph professed a continued commitment to the family faith. He still lived at home and dutifully went to Mass every Sunday with his parents. Danny was pretty sure it was only mouth music, just as he was certain that Joseph only stayed under his parents’ roof because it was cheaper than having a place of his own. It amazed Danny how often Joseph’s job in insurance supposedly took him away from home overnight. Danny couldn’t for the life of him imagine what that involved unless it was an excuse for nights on the razz. His mother had told him it was because Joseph serviced the wealthiest clients who demanded a personal service. It was one of those explanations that explained nothing but sounded impressive. Joseph had always had a knack for those.
Danny couldn’t remember a time when he’d trusted his brother. He thought the Scottish word ‘sleekit’ could have been coined for Joseph. Smooth, sly and non-stick as a Teflon frying pan, that was his brother. His parents were always inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt because he’d been adopted. They’d struggled for years to conceive, but as sometimes happens, no sooner had they taken on an adopted child than Marie had fallen pregnant with Danny. Their determination not to make Joseph feel the lesser child had often swung too far in the opposite direction, in Danny’s opinion. Coupled with Joseph’s cheeky charm, things always seemed to work out to his advantage.
So one Sunday in November they’d all been sitting round the steak pie, mashed potatoes and frozen peas, talking about the ending of the Ford strike. It made a change from his mother’s usual rehashing of Father Martin’s homily. The car workers had originally demanded a 20 per cent pay rise and a shorter working week. The company had tried to hide behind the government’s pay policy and offered 5 per cent. After a crippling eight-week strike, Ford had caved in and settled at 17 per cent. ‘I wish I could get a rise like that,’ Eddie Sullivan had said, tipping a daud of tomato ketchup next to his potatoes. He was a van driver for a local biscuit factory where the owner had refused for years to allow trade union membership. ‘The way things are going, you boys will be earning more than me soon.’
Danny suspected that milestone was long behind them but he had no intention of humiliating his father. ‘The government’s trying to keep inflation down,’ he said.
Joseph chuckled. ‘Some folks don’t have to worry about inflation. The clients I work for, they’re bulletproof.’
Marie frowned. ‘How can that be? We all have to get our messages in the same shops and pay the same taxes. How can they be immune?’
Danny thought Joseph’s smile was condescending. ‘At Paragon, we have ways of getting round the rules.’
‘It’s always the same,’ Eddie sighed. ‘One law for the rich, another for the poor.’
‘The law’s the same for all of us,’ Joseph said. ‘But like I said, there are ways round it.’
‘How?’ Danny asked.
Joseph tapped the side of his nose. ‘That’s something you’ll never need to know, wee brother.’
His words burned, but Danny didn’t want to start a row at his mother’s dinner table. Better to keep his powder dry, and find out exactly what schemes Joseph had going on under the table. If what his brother had hinted at was the truth, there might be a story there.
He’d started by paying a visit to the head office of Paragon Investment Insurance, an imposing Georgian building with a pillared portico at the heart of Edinburgh’s small financial district in George Street. He’d pretended to be the personal assistant of a North Sea oil company director and he’d left with a sheaf of brochures and an earful of claims about PII’s ability to preserve the wealth of their clients. No details, but a definite air of sunny promise.
The language of high finance wasn’t one Danny was fluent in, but he ploughed through the brochures and drew up a list of questions. The Clarion had a financial correspondent, in spite of their readership seldom having more in the way of investment than a £5 Premium Bond an auntie had bought for them at birth. Peter McGovern was a neat little man with a series of neat little three-piece suits and nondescript ties. The only memorable thing about him was a pair of oversized thick-rimmed glasses like Brains in Thunderbirds. Danny had never understood why a grown man would base his style on a kids’ TV puppet show, but it took all sorts. McGovern spent most of his afternoons in the office pub, imaginatively called the Printer’s Pie. It was a low concrete box that squatted on the north bank of the Clyde with high horizontal window slits that looked more suited to a wartime pillbox than a place of pleasure. The clientele was an incongruous mix of well-heeled but badly dressed hacks, and down-and-outs from the nearby Model Lodging House. It was there that Danny had fronted up the office money expert.
He placed a large Famous Grouse in front of McGovern and sat down opposite him at his regular corner table. McGovern looked up from the pink pages of the Financial Times and frowned. ‘What’s this in aid of?’ he asked, pleasant enough.
‘I need a wee bit of guidance,’ Danny said, taking out the notebook where he’d listed his questions.
‘I’m not some kind of racing tipster,’ McGovern said, a disdainful expression crossing his face as if a bad smell had drifted past. ‘I didn’t get where I am today by giving away the fruits of my contacts book.’
‘Not that kind of guidance. I’m looking into something and I don’t have the expertise to understand everything I’ve found out. I thought you might be able to explain?’
‘Is it a story, son?’ Now McGovern was all geniality.
‘I don’t honestly know yet. I need to have more of a sense of what this shite all means.’ He tapped his notebook.
‘You want my help, you cut me in on the story when you nail it.’ He folded his paper, took out a slim tin of Henri Wintermans Café Crème cigarillos and ostentatiously lit one with a gold-and-tortoiseshell Dunhill lighter.
Danny thought about it for a moment. He’d be doing almost all of the work; he didn’t want to share the credit. But without help, he didn’t know what he should be looking for or where to begin looking. ‘Additional reporting by,’ he said.
McGovern shook his head. ‘And, laddie. And.’
He sighed. ‘OK. Sullivan and McGovern.’
McGovern gave him a stern look. ‘Other way around. Alphabetical order.’
Danny grinned. ‘Danny comes before Peter.’
This time McGovern cracked a matching smile. ‘OK, son, let’s see what you’ve got.’
Danny came away from the Printer’s Pie wondering if that had been what students meant when they talked about tutorials. McGovern had listened to Danny’s questions and swiftly read through the brochures he’d brought along, with the air of a man on familiar territory. Then he’d taken Danny through them, point by point. The bottom line was that McGovern thought PII were offering sophisticated tax avoidance advice.
‘That’s not illegal. Some of it sails pretty close to the wind, but they’ll have run their schemes past some expensive Treasury counsel—’ Registering Danny’s confused look, he relented. ‘Lawyers specialising in tax law and how to get round it.’
‘So it’s not a story?’
McGovern drained his glass. ‘On the face of it, no.’
‘But there’s something off-key here,’ Danny persisted. ‘Nothing I can put my finger on, but you know that feeling when you catch something out of the corner of your eye and you turn round and there’s nobody there?’
McGovern nodded. ‘Journalist’s instinct. It’s stood me in good stead over the years.’
‘So maybe worth a wee bit of digging?’
‘Why not? You’ve nothing to lose.’
‘How do I go about that?’
‘Go back to the source who sent you sniffing in the first place. And meanwhile, I’ll ask around about PII.’
Taken aback, Danny said, ‘I wasn’t expecting that.’
‘Neither was I, laddie. Neither was I
.’
5
It had taken the best part of November for Danny to become convinced he really did have the kind of story he’d dreamed of. In his spare time, he’d poked around the newspaper cuttings library, searching for anything he could find on insurance fraud and tax evasion. The bottom line he kept butting up against was that nobody who’d made a pile wanted to pay the Labour government’s high taxes. But he couldn’t find anything dodgy in the cuttings that matched the PII prospectus. If he was going to get any further with this, he was going to have to do some sneaking around.
And so, on the second Sunday in December, when he knew Joseph would be at Mass with his parents, he plucked up the courage to use the door key he still owned and let himself in. He went straight to his brother’s bedroom and opened the wardrobe where he knew he’d find Joseph’s briefcase, a black leather box with brushed aluminium trim along the edges of the lid and the base. It was a badge of pride and Joseph carried it with the same reverence a paratrooper would afford his SLR rifle.
And it was unlocked. Why would it not be? His parents would never dream of invading the sanctity of Joseph’s briefcase. Danny flicked through the contents. A couple of the familiar PII brochures. A car magazine. Then, more promising, a slim black address book. Danny wished he had a spy camera like James Bond in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. He’d come back to it if he had time, he decided, and try to copy some of the contact details. A couple of leaflets from banks about their investment services. He’d almost given up hope of finding anything useful when he came across a single sheet of paper in Joseph’s handwriting.
Brian McGillivray – Jan – 100k
Wilson Brodie – Feb – 125k
Andrew Mutch – March – 130k
It meant nothing to him, but it was something out of the ordinary. Something that didn’t fit with what he understood of the world of whole life and endowment policies. Danny copied the list into his notebook. Then he looked up the names in the address book. Each one had a listing, complete with addresses and numbers for phone and fax. He noted the details, then replaced everything as he had found it.
He hurried from the flat and headed for a café across from Haymarket Station, in the opposite direction to the chapel his family would shortly be leaving. He could kill the best part of an hour in there with a mug of tea and the Sunday papers. That way, he’d arrive at the usual time with nobody any the wiser.
At the start of his shift next morning, the newsdesk had sent Danny straight out on a job with a photographer. A run out to Falkirk to interview a family whose car had been swallowed by a twenty-foot sinkhole that had appeared overnight at the bottom of their driveway. ‘Fucking wild,’ the photographer had said. ‘I’m not parking anywhere near their house.’
In the end, it had been by the numbers. Mystery sinkhole, family wake to find their car floating in a wee lake of sewage, everybody bewildered, water board refusing to accept any responsibility. They were back to Glasgow in time to make it to the pub for a quick pie and a pint before anyone noticed they’d been away too long.
Danny seized the moment to buttonhole Peter McGovern who was, as usual, drinking alone behind the pink barrier of the Financial Times. ‘Do these names mean anything to you?’ he said without preamble. He rattled them off; McGovern’s eyebrows rose progressively higher.
‘Why do you ask?’
‘I got sight of a piece of paper my source didn’t want me to see. These are the names on it.’
‘Interesting.’ McGovern went through his routine with the Café Crème and the Dunhill. ‘Brian McGillivray is the man behind WestBet. He owns somewhere in the order of forty betting shops and he’s a presence on the racecourses too. Wilson Brodie has a chain of seaside amusement arcades on the Costa del Clyde. You know the sort of thing – bingo, slot machines, pinball. And those daft crane claw machines where you never manage to grab anything worth having. Andrew Mutch is a builder. He specialises in local council contracts – schools, old people’s homes, offices. Do you see anything in common there?’
Danny frowned. ‘McGillivray and Brodie, their businesses are all cash. So, they can lie about their incomings and cheat the taxman. But if Mutch is doing council work, that’ll all be done with invoices and payments straight into the bank, no?’
‘You’re in the right area of the forest. Mutch could easily be laying his hands on large sums of cash. Say your project requires a hundred grand of materials. You buy them legitimately, you sell them for cash at a discount then you buy inferior materials with some of that cash. And hey presto, you’ve got a pot of untraceable ready money. And that’s what these three guys have in common. High-profile, respectable businessmen looking for a way to weasel out of their tax liabilities. Any notion of how they’re doing it?’
Danny shook his head. ‘But I think we’re talking big money. Between a hundred and a hundred and thirty grand.’
McGovern paused with his cigarillo halfway to his mouth. ‘That’ll be some story if you can bottom it. So, can you?’
Danny sank the last of his pint of heavy. ‘I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t think I could.’ He wished he felt as confident as he sounded. The truth was, all he had was a very long shot.
After his conversation with McGovern, Danny had pondered his next move. It was possible that drink might loosen Joseph’s tongue at the various family parties over the festive season, but Danny couldn’t rely on that, and besides, he didn’t want to set any alarm bells ringing. His brother had never been inclined to provide details of the life he led outside the four walls of his parents’ flat; he much preferred the sort of oblique hints that made him sound intriguing and important. When pressed, he would never let himself be pinned down. Danny didn’t even know if he had a girlfriend to show off in the passenger seat of his flashy red Triumph TR7.
If Danny was going to dig up anything solid, he was going to have to take a risk and go to the fountainhead. But he’d have to pick his moment to avoid stirring any suspicion in his brother. That year, Christmas Eve fell on a Sunday, which meant there would be an even longer Mass than usual in the morning for starters, with Midnight Mass to follow later.
Danny laid his plans carefully. He phoned his mother late on Saturday afternoon and explained he was having to work on Sunday morning to cover for a colleague whose daughter had been rushed to hospital. A wee tug on the heartstrings always did the trick where Marie Sullivan was concerned.
Early on the morning of Christmas Eve, he drove to Edinburgh, revelling in the empty roads, and parked down the street from his parents’ flat. His Ford Escort was nondescript – he’d chosen it precisely because it would be unobtrusive on the stake-outs he dreamed of doing – and he slid down on the seat so he was barely visible. He waited for the best part of an hour, growing progressively colder, hoping the odd flurry of snow wouldn’t obscure his view.
But finally the three Sullivans emerged, scarved and gloved, collars raised, and set off briskly towards the chapel. Danny gave it five minutes in case any of them had forgotten something crucial, then he let himself into the flat, revelling for a moment in the warmth before going through to Joseph’s room. He went straight to the drawer in the bedside table, hoping that was still where his brother stashed his keys. There was the TR7’s on its leather fob, next to the key to the outside door of the close and the pair that unlocked the flat itself. And underneath them, another bunch. Two Yales, a mortice and a pair of small keys that looked as if they’d fit a desk or a filing cabinet.
‘Ya beauty,’ Danny murmured, pocketing the keys.
Half an hour later, he was walking down the alley that ran alongside Paragon’s building, trying to look nonchalant. When he’d been promoted to having his own office two years before, Joseph hadn’t been able to resist showing off to his wee brother. ‘I bet you’ll never have an office like this,’ he’d boasted, walking Danny up to the third floor and unlocking his door with a flourish.
In spite of himself, Danny had been impressed. OK, the room was pretty small and it looked out on the alley, but it had dark wood panelling to waist height and a big framed print of a sailboat on one wall. The desk was veneered fibreboard, like the one Danny sat at every day. But Joseph had a big wooden chair with a carved back and arms, whereas the Clarion reporters hunched over their typewriters in badly adjusted battered secretarial ones. There were two visitors’ chairs upholstered in dark tweed and a filing cabinet in the corner behind the desk. Two telephones sat on the desk on either side of a leather blotter. He’d muttered something vaguely complimentary and made his escape as quickly as he could, knowing his parents had already had the tour of the office that Joseph would somehow have turned into a vehicle for them all pitying poor Danny.
Today, though, he was planning on turning the tables. If he found what he was looking for – even though he didn’t know what he was looking for – it would be a Christmas present that would shift the balance between the brothers for ever.
Danny let himself in at the side door. There was no security guard. Why would there be? There was nothing worth stealing. No burglar worth his salt could be bothered with second-hand office equipment. Danny ran light-footed up to the third floor and let himself into Joseph’s office. He locked the door behind him and started on the desk drawers. The top two were unlocked and contained nothing of interest – brochures, a pile of Joseph’s business cards, stationery, and the usual muddle of paperclips, elastic bands and pens.
The bottom drawer was locked. Danny sorted through the keys. One of the small ones opened the drawer. The first thing he saw was a sheet of paper with a list of names. The same names he’d seen before, with the addition of one other. And what sounded like the runners in the 2.15 at Musselburgh.