She gave herself a little longer than usual on this occasion, aware she was particularly tense. Her audit told her this was not warranted. Things had started very nicely for her, and largely gone well. Murder on the streets was nothing to feel happy about, but when it was your job to deal with it you developed your own scale for measuring these things, and Fullerton’s death was definitely at the sunnier end of the spectrum. So she had one killer dead and another one dead to rights. By any reasonable reckoning, this had been a good day.
So why did she feel like the ground was about to open up?
She turned off the engine. That was the symbolic moment when her working day ended, her line on the tennis court, but even as she did so, she realised that it was another symbol that was disquieting her thoughts. Why it had reappeared, she didn’t know, but what it represented could not be wiped from memory by crossing an imaginary line.
The house sounded unusually quiet as she strode inside and hung up her coat. She could hear the strains of Frightened Rabbit from the kitchen and could smell the curry Drew was cooking, but there was no sound of TV or video games from the living room, nor the attendant shrieks of laughter, excitement or dispute. She wondered if there had been a banning-worthy incident, and if so, knew she would need to hear Drew’s account of it so that she was on message with the official coalition policy before Duncan and Fraser started lobbying her.
She went upstairs to the loo, then popped her head around the door of Fraser’s bedroom, anxious to make sure everything was okay. He was kneeling on the carpet, poised over the plastic cage and miniature wrestling figures that he’d got for his birthday, staging some elaborate scene and augmenting it with his own sound effects and American-accented commentary. He was so rapt that he failed to notice her, so she withdrew again and had a quick glance inside his big brother’s room, which was empty.
She assumed he would be sitting in the kitchen, probably reading, but she found Drew in there alone. She greeted him with a kiss, anticipating that as they were alone this would probably extend to him squeezing her bum as a nod to what happened that morning, with the implication that he was no longer quite so content for it to remain unreciprocated.
There was no grope though, and the kiss was brief. Something was up.
‘Everything okay?’ she asked. ‘Where’s Duncan?’
He looked at her with an oddly knowing expression and said, ‘In the attic. Reading.’
It took her a moment to catch up to the significance of this, but when she did, Drew’s affirmative nod told her he could read her progress.
‘Pop-up tent?’ she asked.
‘Yes.’
When Duncan was four, he had flooded the bathroom while playing with a deep-sea diver doll; or, more accurately, had started the tap running and put in the plug then gone off to get a toy shark and, during his search for this item, found something else to play with and forgotten entirely about the bath. Drew had been downstairs in the kitchen feeding Fraser his lunch, and was only alerted to the situation when water began to drip through the ceiling and onto the cooker. When Catherine came home from work that evening she found Duncan in the spare bedroom in the attic, looking through picture books inside his pop-up tent. He had taken himself away up there as a kind of retreat, a confused four-year-old’s act of contrition.
In the years following he had similarly removed himself whenever he knew he had seriously screwed up. It forced Catherine to seek him out and climb inside the little tent in order to speak to him. She came to realise it was his way of saying sorry and acknowledging his fault when he didn’t have the words or the strength to articulate his feelings, or even to broach the subject.
It hadn’t happened in a couple of years, so she assumed he had grown out of it. These days he was mature enough to make his apologies or, just as often, argue his case. Clearly, this was a biggie.
‘What happened?’
‘He got into a fight at school.’
Catherine felt something clench inside her, and tried to bring her rational mind to bear upon rampant physiological instinct. Keep it in proportion, she told herself: he was upstairs reading, not in casualty, and Drew looked more worried about her reaction than about Duncan’s welfare.
‘I got a call just before I went to pick the boys up. Mrs Gardine asking if I could nip into the office for five minutes when I came round to the school. She was very good about it. She was discreet and professional, but in not so many words let me know she didn’t believe Duncan was the instigator, and that the other boy has previous. He’s a P7 and apparently no stranger to the inside of Mrs Gardine’s office.’
‘So how come Duncan’s upstairs eating crow in his pop-up tent?’
Drew’s face bore an awkward mixture of discomfort, regret and incredulity.
‘Because the P7 got second prize.’
If there was also any paternal pride in there, he knew to keep it hidden, but Catherine couldn’t detect a trace. Mostly there was just concern and confusion, as if Mrs Gardine had told him Duncan had started speaking in tongues.
‘Duncan burst his nose. The proverbial blood and snotters everywhere: mostly blood. He’s very freaked out. I can’t get him to talk about it. Ate his tea in silence then took off up the stairs.’
‘You seem a bit freaked out yourself,’ she observed.
‘I’m astonished. He never got it from me. I couldn’t fight sleep as a wean.’
Catherine made her way up to the attic conversion and found the pop-up tent erected in the same corner as all those times before. Weird how kids’ minds worked: two or three years must be an eternity to them, and yet these fine details came back like they’d been placed in secure storage.
He was taking up a lot more of the tent than last time, and there was little chance they would both fit in there now. She managed to draw him out and they sat together on the end of the spare bed. It took him a while to start talking, but she coaxed him along eventually.
‘He was trying to get me to fight, saying he was going to batter me worse if I didn’t fight him,’ Duncan told her. ‘At first I was just scared. Then he hit me in the face. He kept slapping me, and he kept saying: “Ye gaunny dae anythin’, ye gaunny dae anythin’.” I thought I was going to cry. I hoped that would make him leave me alone, and it did, kind of. He started laughing in my face, going: “Ha ha, check him greetin’.”
‘Then I don’t know what happened. It was like a volcano inside me. It was like being sick: it’s coming and you can’t stop it, it just has to come out. I’m really sorry.’
With that he broke down and buried his face in Catherine’s chest, sobbing quietly. It took her a lot of strength not to join him. He was eleven now, and these days she could see in him the rangy teenager he would soon become, but right then she could more clearly see the four-year-old who flooded the bathroom.
This was the hardest stuff, the heart of all maternal fears. You couldn’t be there to protect them from all the things that might happen to them, and nor could you protect them from the things they might do.
The things that could not be undone.
The Last Kindness (i)
She stood outside the stables waiting for her dad to come back out, hugging herself, suddenly feeling the morning’s cold seep right into her bones. Lysander made that distressed braying noise somewhere within, weaker this time.
Her dad emerged, his face grey, older somehow than when he entered. He seemed reluctant to look directly at her, started to speak, abandoned the attempt, let his mouth emit a sigh instead, carried inside a wispy jet of steam. Then something inside him became taut, and he met her expectant gaze.
‘Demetrius is okay,’ he said.
She waited for him to continue, then when he did not she made her prompt in desperation. ‘Is there anything we can do for Ly?’
He said nothing, but gave a curt nod and proceeded towards the house.
She enjoyed a moment’s hope as she assumed that he was going inside to call the vet, but a moment was all it
lasted. She wasn’t a silly little girl who believed the grown-ups could make anything all better. She had seen her dad’s face as he emerged from the stables, and she had seen what lay within.
Her dad strode out of the back door again, this time with a black canvas carrying harness slung over his shoulder. Lisa appeared behind him, a mixture of concern and confusion on her face. He turned around and told her to stay inside, a sternness to his voice that rooted her in the doorway like there was a forcefield in front of it. She would have many questions, but knew that the answers were ones she would not want to hear.
She felt the tears well up in anticipation of the moment he marched past her, which would mark the point at which she had no role but to mourn. Instead, however, he stopped beside her and unwrapped the rifle from its covering.
‘You should do this.’
She shook her head.
‘It won’t just be giving vaccinations and delivering foals,’ he said, softly enough for it to sound tender, firmly enough for her to understand that he expected her to comply.
‘I can’t,’ she said. ‘Not Ly.’
Her dad took her chin in his right hand, as always a tenderness to his touch despite the rough skin of his calloused farmer’s fingers.
‘This is the last kindness anyone can give him. That’s why you should be the one.’
She looked up into his eyes, saw reflected her pain, her fear, her love, and she understood. She nodded and reached for the rifle.
It was a P14, the one with which her dad had taught her to shoot, and the same one her dad had been taught to shoot with by her grandfather. She had held it a dozen times, but it never felt so heavy, so solid, the rounds so long and formidable. As she slid the bolt and placed one in the breach she eyed the taper of the bullet’s point and thought of it as a hypodermic needle.
She took a breath of cold air and stepped inside. Lysander’s head did not turn, his mercy to her ahead of her mercy to him. She could not look again into that black, ragged hole, and she wanted even less to look into his remaining scared and helpless eye.
She shouldered the butt, levelled the muzzle around two feet from the back of his head and thumbed off the safety catch, but for a moment it was as though there was a second safety catch preventing the trigger from moving. She could feel the heat of his body, hear his laboured breathing, and could not bring herself to pull back her index finger. Then he made that pitiable braying sound again and she knew what was her duty, what mercy she must dispense: the ministration of this last kindness. She swallowed back a sob and steadied her breathing, removing herself to the routine of how she had been trained to take each shot and, detached in the mechanics of technique, she pulled the trigger.
Missed Calls
Jasmine stood at her living room window and watched Laura jog away down the street into the darkness, wondering as she stared at the retreating figure what her visit was really all about. She recalled that Laura had always shown an interest in Fallan, never sharing her boss’s conviction that he was only playing nice to further some darker hidden purpose. Nonetheless, Jasmine also knew that she was fiercely loyal to McLeod, so if she was going off the reservation like this it was more likely to be motivated by a desire to prevent her boss from making a mistake. Either way, it suggested there was something about this apparently simple case that was making her wary.
Jasmine sat down to her plate of pasta, forcing herself to eat despite her diminishing appetite. If nothing else, a full stomach might help her sleep, something that threatened to present a struggle now that her brain had all this to process. She had placed her laptop on the table in front of her plate, and as she waited for it to boot up she asked herself what she truly knew about Glen Fallan.
By his own confession he had been a gangland enforcer and hitman. She had heard him described as an ice-cold killer, ‘like the ice doesn’t feel anything when it freezes you to death’. Jasmine had witnessed first-hand the fear he inspired when he allowed some two-bit chancer to recognise him, in order that the guy would be sufficiently intimidated as to cough up some vital information. There was no question what kind of man Glen Fallan had once been. But having buried that man for two decades and gone to such lengths to become someone different, why would he let himself be drawn back into that world?
After that same gatecrashed breakfast, and on all of the occasions on which their paths had crossed since, he had shown no sign of reciprocating McLeod’s hatred. Fallan was instinctively untrusting of cops – sometimes downright hostile – but his conduct towards McLeod in particular was measured and deferential. One might even say contrite.
‘She recognised me,’ he told Jasmine, though he confessed he couldn’t remember from where; that, in fact, reflected the enormity of his guilt. ‘I hurt so many people . . . McLeod could have been somebody hiding behind her crying mother while I threatened her father. One of the countless witnesses you don’t see because they’re never going to tell anybody.’
He had murdered Jasmine’s father, and yet even in the final stages of her cancer Jasmine’s mum had engaged her cousin Jim to track Fallan down so that she could see him again before the end. Everyone else assumed he was dead, but her mum knew otherwise; Fallan had been sending her money for twenty years. When Jasmine found out and confronted him about it, he had explained that it was part of his penance for what he had done. However, Jasmine couldn’t imagine her mum accepting a penny, let alone seeking a deathbed visit, if that was all he was to her.
Fallan would only say that they were ‘good friends in very bad times’. This suggested that even back then there must have been a secret side to him that contradicted what everyone else knew.
Either that, or a secret side to her mother.
She keyed in a search on the Fullerton killing and her eye was drawn to a headline two results down, below the BBC report. It took her to the Daily Record website.
MANY BLOODY RETURNS
SLAIN gangland supremo Stevie Fullerton was gunned down on his BIRTHDAY, it emerged today. The feared crime boss had turned forty-nine on the very morning he was shot dead at a Shawburn car wash.
A tube of penne tumbled from Jasmine’s fork, missed the side of her plate and rolled across the table, leaving a thin trail of sauce.
The man Glen Fallan had shot, a man with whom he had a history going back more than twenty years, had been born on precisely the same day as Jasmine’s mother. The significance of this remained uncertain, but she sincerely doubted it could be entirely coincidental.
If there’s more to this than meets the eye . . .
As she cleared away her plate and placed Laura’s empty glass next to the sink she considered how curious it had felt that the detective should come by in person while out on a run. Then she remembered Laura mentioning having failed to get through to Jasmine’s mobile.
Jasmine retrieved the phone from her pocket and verified, as she had thought, that there were no missed calls. In fact, now she came to think of it, she had received no calls whatsoever today or the day before, an extremely unusual state of affairs that prompted her to recall Harry Deacon’s confusion over his phone not recognising her number.
As an experiment, she called her landline using the mobile, then dialled 1471 to check the incoming number.
It wasn’t hers.
With a horrible surging sensation she thought of the neddy guy at the Twin Atlantic concert, who had been scoping her down in the stalls, then had just happened to appear upstairs as she exited the circle.
She’d been too out of it to notice at the time, but in retrospect certain aspects of his manner didn’t add up. He hadn’t once asked her what was wrong: the guy had found her crying and played the good Samaritan in escorting her outside, but apart from inquiring very generally whether she was ‘okay’, he had not once asked who or what had upset her. Then, once he had given her the drink, he had seemed impatient to get away, no longer the concerned passerby. She had assumed it was because he was missing the show, but he had stayed outside w
hen she said she was going back in. He probably took off the moment she was out of sight.
She quickly slid the backing off the phone and removed the battery to get a look at the sim. It wasn’t hers. She’d had the same one for years, and her provider’s logo had changed recently. This card bore the new design.
Christ. The sleekit, opportunist wee bastard. But why wouldn’t he just steal the actual phone? she wondered.
Because it would get reported, as she was about to do now. This way, he had enjoyed a couple of days’ grace to do whatever he wanted with her sim: selling it off to hackers to be cloned, running up all kinds of bills; she shuddered to think. The damage could be in the thousands.
She phoned up her network provider, hoping they had a human being manning their emergency line at this time of night, and distantly wondering whether she could remember saying yes to whatever insurance package they had offered to cover against this kind of fraud.
Probably not.
She could picture the digits spinning like a fruit machine on her imaginary bill as she was bounced around the system, held in various queues and asked the same security questions over and over again. She must have explained her predicament four times, which only served to reinforce her fear that it was unprecedented and therefore uniquely disastrous in a way that would void her cover even if it turned out she had opted to take it.
Eventually she was put through to somebody who was able to tell her what usage was showing up on her account.
‘Are you sure the card has been stolen?’ asked the girl at the other end of the line, which would have invited no end of acidly sarcastic replies had Jasmine not been in abject need of her cooperation. ‘It’s just that there’s been very little outgoing activity. Just one text and one phone call, both to the same number.’
Bred in the Bone Page 10