Bred in the Bone

by Christopher Brookmyre

  Stevie always thought ahead, but nobody anticipated just how far ahead.

  He raised a few eyebrows by starting a car-wash business. He rented a disused petrol station in Shawburn on the north side of the dual carriageway, a place that had gone out of business when BP opened a garage half a mile up the road. It must have cost him buttons. Hardest part was probably finding out who still owned it.

  Stevie hired a bunch of wee shavers and a couple of older guys he could rely on to keep them in order, and kitted them out with buckets, sponges and chamois leathers.

  Tony McGill was at a loss as to why an accomplished thief and fraudster such as Stevie thought such a venture worthwhile, and nearly choked when he found out he had set it up as a legit company, declaring profits to the tax man.

  ‘It’s a cash-only business, for Christ’s sake,’ Tony reasoned. ‘Have you gone doolally?’

  ‘That’s how they got Al Capone,’ Stevie replied. ‘Unpaid income tax.’

  ‘Aye, and he died of the clap as well,’ Tony replied. ‘Since then we’ve worked oot ways of avoiding both those problems.’

  ‘Death and taxes catch up with everybody in the end,’ Stevie argued. ‘As you say, it’s a cash-only business. We’re not selling anything in quantifiable units: no stock to account for, and no way of knowing how many folk have come through here and paid to get their motor cleaned.’

  ‘Ahhh,’ said Tony. ‘So the tax man doesn’t need to know how much money you’re really clearing, and you’ve got a legit income if they start asking how come you’ve got a nice motor and what have you. I get it.’

  But he didn’t.

  As Stevie explained to Glen, paying tax wasn’t a problem: it was the purpose of the exercise.

  ‘Once you’ve paid tax on money, it’s legitimately yours, no matter where it came from. All the cash I’m bringing in from jobs, I can put that through the books. Claim my wee car wash is doing a roaring trade, and every last fiver I’ve grafted, even if I rifled it out of somebody else’s till half an hour ago, becomes, in the eyes of the law, officially mine. Or my company’s, rather: corporate tax rate is smaller than personal.’

  ‘But you’ve still got to pay the tax on it,’ Glen pointed out.

  ‘Like any expenditure, it’s not what it costs, it’s what it’s worth. Tony cannae see what I’m buying with my taxes.’

  ‘Whit, Trident?’

  Stevie laughed.

  ‘Naw. Tony McGill is a millionaire yet the man doesnae have a bank account. If the polis had the balls to raid his hoose, they’d find tens, maybe hundreds of thousands in cash stashed aboot the place, and they could do him like Capone because he cannae prove where it came from.’

  ‘Tony’s not afraid of that. He’s paid out his own worthwhile expenditure to make sure he’s protected.’

  ‘There’s no guarantees, though, not with the polis. But it’s not about protection: it’s about restriction, about limitations. You think these yuppies driving Porsches in London have got piles of hard currency hidden under their floorboards? The more money you make, the less cash you physically touch, and there’s things in this world you cannae buy with a sports bag full of fivers.’

  ‘Like what?’

  But Stevie just grinned and tapped his nose.

  Passing Glances

  ‘As I said, I have to stress that at this stage we are merely treating the death as suspicious,’ Catherine told Mrs Lamont, standing in her living room in a spot that afforded a clear view across Miner’s Row to Brenda Sheehan’s house opposite. The number of police and ancillary vehicles parked along what had commonly been an empty stretch of pavement indicated just how suspicious they were treating it, but she had to maintain the distinction.

  Mrs Lamont carefully put down a tray bearing a matching teapot, milk jug, cups, saucers and even sugar bowl, complete with tongs for the neat wee cubes. The little girl still inside Catherine trilled with a daft excitement. There was even a strainer. Loose leaf, no less.

  She had asked if they wanted tea and Laura had looked askance as Catherine said yes. They weren’t supposed to, but Catherine didn’t think there was much risk of Mari here pissing in the pot or trying to poison them. She reckoned they would get more out of her by accepting, reasoning that Mrs L probably didn’t get as many visitors as she would like, and probably became more garrulous when she was showing off the good china. Besides, she didn’t think it would wash to offer the usual polite excuse that they had just had one. Catherine guessed that Mrs Lamont’s eyes had seen plenty, but had the further impression that they didn’t miss much, especially through her living-room window. Thus she would have seen Catherine and Laura when they were across the road, and known there was no way they had got a cuppa at the Sheehan household.

  They had been over there talking to the crime scene manager, DI Tariq Yunnis, and getting early feedback, all of which was supporting Catherine’s suspicions.

  ‘They’ll need to do analysis, obviously,’ he told them, ‘but one of the Forensics techs said just from looking at it, the fluff and dust on the carpet had come from inside a hoover bag; maybe more than one. She reckoned somebody emptied the stuff about the place and then tramped it into the carpet.’

  Catherine had watched an officer cart a big crate of bottles out towards one of the vans.

  ‘We’re getting those dusted,’ Tariq explained. ‘See who else touched them. See whether the deceased actually touched them.’

  ‘Why do you suspect she didn’t?’ Catherine asked.

  ‘Shopping bags,’ he replied. ‘She kept them in a wee dookit in the kitchen: disposable and canvas. There were still receipts at the bottom of some of them.’

  ‘Not taking advantage of those tempting supermarket booze offers our politicians get so exercised about?’

  ‘Not so much as a can of shandy. Time-stamps on the receipts indicated she usually shopped first thing, too, before they’re allowed to sell alcohol.’

  ‘Mrs Lamont, the lady across the street, said she went to the shops after eight o’clock mass,’ Laura told him.

  ‘That tallies. But the clincher is the neighbours on the other side of the semi. They said that three nights ago, about eleven, they heard a jangle of glass, like somebody was taking out a load of empties. My guess is somebody was actually bringing them in.’

  ‘So it’s looking like she was still on the wagon?’

  ‘That would be my impression so far, but if you want it from the horse’s mouth, we found the details of her AA sponsor. Zoe Vernon is away to interview her.’

  Mrs Lamont poured tea through the strainer with practised delicacy and no little pride. It was, as Catherine had predicted, a pleasurable ritual, even in circumstances such as this. Nonetheless, despite being starved of company, it was her guess that Mari hadn’t extended this hospitality to her neighbour from over by. Those remarks about not wishing to be nosy, and seeing her with her shopping of a morning: these depicted two women on polite-greeting-over-the-garden-fence terms, not afternoon-tea-with-the-good-china terms. Given that the alcoholic Brenda may well at one time have been the neighbourhood nightmare, this probably wasn’t surprising, but equally it could have been Brenda who kept her distance during those days. Alcoholics could go to great trouble to hide their habits, which made Catherine wonder how much Mrs Lamont knew.

  ‘Did you know Miss Sheehan well?’ Catherine asked.

  ‘Ach, no,’ she replied regretfully, as though things might have turned out better had she taken an interest. ‘Just to say hello to, really.’

  ‘How did she seem to you recently? Did she appear stressed, worried, different in any way?’

  ‘No. Just . . . normal, I suppose. She was a creature of habit, which was why I got a bit worried when I didn’t see her coming back from mass as usual.’

  ‘Were you aware she had a drink problem?’

  She looked confused for a moment, genuinely taken aback.

  ‘Well, yes, of course,’ she said. ‘But that was a long time ago. She’s
AA now. Has been for years and years.’

  Catherine watched her stumble and pause on her misuse of the present tense, giving a sad little shake of the head by way of correcting herself. They weren’t close, but Brenda had clearly been a fixture in her little world for a very long time. At times like this, your instincts struggled to grasp this wasn’t a temporary absence.

  ‘So you had had no reason to suspect that she was back on the drink?’

  ‘Absolutely none,’ she replied, both adamant and incredulous, as though this was to impugn both Brenda’s honour and her own powers of observation.

  Catherine wasn’t shy about impugning either.

  ‘Do you mind if I ask what you would have been looking for?’

  Mrs Lamont gave her a demonstrably patient look: polite, but unmistakably intended to convey that patience had been required.

  ‘Well, I haven’t seen her being sick in the street or falling down unconscious on her front lawn for at least fifteen years, but perhaps the signs got subtler.’

  And that’s me tell’t, Catherine thought.

  ‘So you saw her at her worst,’ she suggested.

  ‘No, dear. I think I saw her at her most drunk. I don’t think anybody saw her at her worst, as she bore a great deal of difficulty alone.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  She sighed and took a sip of tea, glancing across to Brenda’s house.

  ‘I never knew the family; Brenda and her brother Teddy moved into that house after her mother died. The father absconded way back: he was a no-user, by all accounts. The mother died quite young – I think she was only in her fifties – and that left Brenda responsible for Teddy. He was, you know, mentally handicapped. I don’t know if that’s considered rude these days, so forgive me.’

  ‘Not at all. Do you know what was wrong with him?’

  ‘No. They’ll have a name for it now, no doubt, but back then they’d have just said he was simple. As far as I’m aware, Brenda already had a problem with the drink before her mother died. I think the mother may have too, I don’t know. But it can’t have been easy, burdened with Teddy when other women would have been having families and careers and what have you.’

  ‘Was he, I mean, was she what would now be called a full-time carer?’

  ‘I suppose. Teddy went off to some kind of day centre – you’d see him at the bus stop – and Brenda did some cleaning work in between times.’

  ‘So he had some degree of autonomy?’ Laura asked.

  Mrs Lamont gave them both a pained look. There was a yes and no answer coming, but the level of equivocation was way above the floor model.

  ‘He did. He was out and about on his own quite a lot. Brenda could send him for a pint of milk, you know, but there was no guarantee he wouldn’t give the change away to somebody on the walk home.’

  ‘Was he vulnerable, then?’ Catherine asked, wondering about the unmistakable impression she had developed that Teddy wasn’t around any more.

  Again the pained look, and a long pause.

  Mrs Lamont glanced out of her window, as though worried who might be watching, then dropped her voice to speak.

  ‘He got into trouble with the police. They said he was interfering with himself in front of wee lassies. I must say, at the time I wasn’t convinced it was what they said it was. I’ve no doubt he was maybe footering with himself, because you’d see him do that, but I would have been surprised if he was aware of anybody watching, or even entirely aware of what he was doing. These weren’t primary school girls, you see. I think there was an element of mischief because he was regarded as the local weirdo. And of course after that it got worse. The local kids gave poor Brenda a torrid time. Shouting abuse and throwing eggs, putting things through the letterbox.’

  She looked across at the house again, shuddering at the memory. Or at least that’s why Catherine thought she was shuddering, until Mari corrected her.

  ‘I thought he was harmless. Just shows you how wrong you can be.’

  ‘Why, Mrs Lamont?’ Catherine prompted, as a pause threatened to become a silence.

  ‘He killed that young girl, didn’t he?’ she said, as though Catherine ought to know. ‘But of course, it would have been before your time. You forget as you get older. Twenty-five years doesn’t seem so long any more.’

  ‘It was before my time as a police officer, certainly. Who did he kill?’

  ‘Her name was Julie Muir. She had just got off the train up near the big houses. He strangled her.’

  She put the cup to her lips and stopped, then put it down again. Bad memories, bitter tastes.

  Catherine watched Laura write down the name. They’d find out the details back at HQ.

  ‘If there was any kind of silver lining, you might have thought it was that at least Teddy was off of Brenda’s hands, but I don’t think she regarded it that way. You seldom saw her out and about once he went to prison, and on the odd occasion you did, she’d cross the street or avoid catching your eye.’

  ‘What happened to him?’ Catherine asked, calculating that he ought to have been released long since, unless he was sectioned.

  ‘He died in prison. I don’t know if it was anything to do with his condition, I just know he died. Of course, someone like Teddy, you’d always be afraid one of the other prisoners would do something to him, but that wasn’t what happened.’

  Mrs Lamont seemed to change her mind about the tea and drank down the last of it, as though drawing a line under something.

  Catherine’s phone rang: Zoe. She excused herself and took a walk out into the hall, leaving Laura to take over for a minute. She heard her ask about when Brenda got cleaned up, and the beginning of Mrs Lamont’s answer, something about Teddy’s anniversary.

  ‘Hi, Zoe. I gather you’re talking to Sheehan’s AA sponsor,’ Catherine said, so that Zoe could take a few things as read.

  ‘Yes, ma’am. Sponsor’s name is Agnes Nisbet. She’s a retired teacher. She’s known Brenda for fourteen years, sees her at least once a week, most recently five days ago. Absolutely no hint she was coming off the wagon, and I’m guessing she’d know what to look for.’

  ‘Had she come off before?’

  ‘A few wobbles over the years, yes, but Agnes said you could see the build-up to them from miles out.’

  ‘So I take it she was on an even keel recently.’

  ‘More than that. Agnes said she had been a bit burdened, as she always was at this time of year.’

  ‘Is this about the brother?’

  ‘Yes. You know about that?’

  ‘We’re with the neighbour across the street. Getting filled in on local history.’

  ‘Okay. So she gets kind of burdened when it comes around to “the anniversary”, as Brenda described it.’

  ‘The brother’s death.’

  ‘Except that this year, Agnes said Brenda came out the other side of it early and in good shape. She was religious, wasn’t she? A Catholic?’

  ‘Tim to the brim,’ Catherine confirmed, thinking of all the crucifixes and holy pictures. ‘Why?’

  ‘It’s just that Brenda told her sponsor she was in a good place, mentally and spiritually, because she had “finally made her confession”. Agnes kept using the word “burdened”, so I got her to clarify that this was Brenda’s term. It sounded like there was something she seriously needed to get off her chest, and she felt a lot better about herself afterwards.’

  ‘Aye. Until a little while later she’s surrounded by all this alky debris, having apparently drunk herself to death.’

  Catherine walked back into the living room, where Mrs Lamont was talking with admiration and regret about Brenda’s efforts to literally put her house in order, her endeavours to tidy up her garden being particularly appreciated by the neighbour who had to look at it every day from her own.

  ‘Mrs Lamont, did you notice whether Brenda had any visitors recently?’

  She gave it some thought, gazing across the road as though trying to picture the scene
without all those polis vehicles cluttering it up.

  ‘Not in the past few days, no. Although, hang on, there was a chap maybe a couple of weeks ago. I noticed him because I saw his car going along very slowly, like he was looking for a particular house, and I was very curious to see where he was going to stop. He got out and went in to see Brenda. He was there a while. I saw him coming out again.’

  ‘And did you see Brenda? Did she seem upset or anything?’

  ‘No. They seemed to part on quite polite terms.’

  ‘Do you think you would recognise him if I showed you a picture?’

  ‘I don’t know. I’d be happy to try.’

  Catherine reached into her bag and looked out the mug shot she carried for control purposes. It was of an actor from the Pantechnicon, posing as a con.

  ‘Is this him?’

  Mrs Lamont pored over it for barely half a second and shook her head.

  ‘No. Definitely not. Too young, for one thing.’

  ‘What about this one?’ she suggested, presenting a picture of Glen Fallan.

  ‘The age is closer, but no.’

  Catherine swapped it for a shot of Stevie Fullerton.

  ‘And how about this guy?’

  Mrs Lamont reached for the picture and began nodding enthusiastically, pleasantly surprised at her own certainty.

  ‘Yes. This is him. I wasn’t being nosy. It was just that I couldn’t help but be curious as he had such a fancy-looking sports car.’

  Face Value

  ‘Tick tock,’ said a voice from behind Glen as he jogged along the edge of the sports field, savouring the outside air and maximising his exercise time.

  He turned and, as he expected, saw only a group of inmates standing watching the football match that was in progress, none of them making eye contact.

  It wasn’t the first time he’d heard it, though each time the voice had been different. Somebody was trying to put the fear into him, playing on the facelessness of the place and the fact that he’d never know who to look out for when the time finally came.