Bred in the Bone

by Christopher Brookmyre

  ‘H.’

  Tony nodded, then a strained look came across his face, the expression of someone who has seen this lassie flash her knickers a few times but never given up the goods.

  ‘It’s not local,’ Stevie went on. ‘No pre-cut bags of powder you’d be better off sticking in your washing machine. This stuff’s coming off a boat pure. That’s the problem, in fact. I’ve not quite got my foot in the door because I’m not quoted. I can raise the money, but these guys are looking at the big picture and they’re not interested in doing one-off deals with second-division outfits. Not only is it piecemeal, it’s risky for them too, because I could be anybody. I could be polis. They want regular purchases and they want names they can trust. Names that carry weight. So what I’ve got to ask you, Tony, very politely, with lots of very pretty pleases, is whether I can give yours.’

  It was a couple of weeks before Stevie was able to report back; time enough for Tony to grow sceptical over whether Stevie knew where this door even was, never mind his chances of getting his foot inside it.

  ‘That boy says more than his prayers,’ was how he put it, his growing impatience and disappointment betraying how much he wanted to believe Stevie’s claims.

  Eventually, though, Stevie made a trip to Liverpool and returned with a sample. Tony wouldn’t have known pure from Persil, but for a man who had ‘fought to keep drugs out of Gallowhaugh’ he wasn’t long in getting it into the hands of someone who could analyse it for him.

  The quality was verified, the price deemed acceptable and – eventually – the split agreed. Stevie was fronting eighty grand, Tony a hundred and sixty, with the merchandise to be divided seventy-thirty in Tony’s favour. Stevie was authorised once again to make representation and confirm arrangements down south. However, this time when he returned, there was a major stumbling block.

  ‘They’re jumpy,’ Stevie reported. ‘They’re about ninety per cent ready to back out. They say they’re getting polis vibes from somewhere. My contact says they can be like this; reckons they’re paranoid because they’ve never dealt with anyone in Glasgow before.’

  ‘I thought you said my name would carry weight?’ Tony protested.

  ‘Aye, a wee bit too much as it turns oot. The problem is, the name Tony McGill is synonymous with . . .’

  Tony looked white as he faced the prospect of several decades’ worth of chickens – or should that be stoolpigeons – coming home to roost.

  ‘Polis? They’re getting a polis vibe off my name?’

  ‘I’m no’ saying that,’ Stevie corrected hurriedly. ‘But you’ve carved a fair old reputation for keeping drugs off your turf, and let’s just say they’re finding it difficult to believe you’re willing to buy.’

  Tony sighed with frustration, and no doubt a modicum of relief. It was a misunderstanding: that was all. Nothing that couldn’t be cleared up, especially if—

  ‘What if I spoke to them myself? Can you set that up?’

  ‘I can ask,’ was all Stevie could promise.

  Six days later, Tony travelled down to Liverpool with Stevie, accompanied by Glen for security and Arthur for his counsel. Arthur had moved up the pecking order a couple of years back, when Walter and a headcase called Sweenzo both got found shot dead in a field in Ayrshire.

  Glen drove, at the wheel of Tony’s Jag. They met Stevie’s contact in a pub on Chapel Street and he led them to a warehouse at Waterloo Dock. There were three other vehicles outside: two Granadas and a Merc. The place was disused, the dock itself in its dying days. It looked to Glen like the kind of place they always filmed the showdown scene in The Sweeney. When they got inside, this impression was further enhanced by the sight of two blokes standing at the foot of an iron staircase packing semi-automatic rifles: HKs, serious kit.

  They exchanged uneasy nods of recognition with Stevie’s contact, a Mancunian named Sammy who asked the Glaswegian quartet to wait while he went upstairs. He returned a tense and silent few minutes later, and announced that Tony, and Tony alone, could go upstairs.

  Tony looked to Stevie, as though seeking assurance that this was the standard procedure.

  ‘I’ve never been here,’ Stevie confessed quietly. ‘Never even seen these guys. I told you: I’m not quoted.’

  Tony glanced at the hardware momentarily, then a stony composure settled upon his face before he mounted the stairs. There followed another long, silent and increasingly tense wait, until the sound of laughter rang out from above, replacing the indistinct hum of guarded voices.

  Tony emerged after another half an hour, leading them wordlessly back onto the broken-cobbled street.

  Glen opened the Jaguar’s rear door for him, keeping an eye on the warehouse entrance. Sammy came out not far behind, heading back to his Chrysler Sunbeam as Tony climbed into the back of the Jag.

  Tony waited until everyone was inside and the doors all closed before making his announcement.

  ‘It’s on. Two weeks’ time. They’ll contact Stevie with the time and location, but it’s me that has to make the buy personally. Just this first time, they said. After that they’ll deal with Stevie.’

  ‘Ya dancer,’ Stevie declared. ‘You are some man, Tony. You are some man.’

  Tony just smiled with quiet satisfaction, contemplating his bright new future all the way back up the road.

  Open Wounds

  This is what tragedy looks like twenty-five years on, Catherine thought. She and Laura sat in Sam and Audrey Muir’s living room, watching the pair of them grip each other’s trembling hands as they huddled together on their settee, surrounded by the modest mementoes of the life they had led together.

  The usual metaphors of wounds and scars could not adequately describe their condition; what she saw was not the remnant of old pain, or enduring numbness where the damage had been so great as to cut off feeling. This was a phantom limb.

  They looked afraid, even before Catherine had got past the formalities and broached the subject. They were scared because they knew that was why she was here. They knew what this was going to feel like.

  It always annoyed her when the papers described people as ‘brave’ when what they really meant was tragic: ‘Brave widow’s tears for war hero husband’; ‘Brave little Annie loses her battle with cancer’. It was a kind of platitudinous courtesy towards those who had suffered greatly but whose suffering had been appropriated as media property. Bravery implied a choice, and in the above cases, what was the non-brave alternative?

  Sam and Audrey Muir were brave. They didn’t need to do this, yet here they were, reliving the worst thing that had ever happened to them.

  This wasn’t where they had learned about their daughter’s death. She didn’t know why, but Catherine took some comfort from that. It would have felt that bit harder to ask this of them if they had been in the home where Julie grew up, even the room where they had been told to sit down when the police arrived at their door.

  This place was new: a modern semi built this century. She wondered when they moved, whether there had been another place in between. It seemed smaller than the life the pictures offered glimpses of; retirement down-sizing maybe. There were photographs of grandchildren everywhere: three of them, Catherine reckoned, snapped from infanthood through school years and, in the case of the eldest, a graduation gown. They were on the mantelpiece, on the walls, on occasional tables: haphazard collages, framed triptychs, even a digital display, fading new shots in and out every few seconds. Catherine deduced from some older images of a gangly teen in a mullet and late-eighties Rangers top that the doting father of the three grandkids was the Muirs’ son.

  She spied only one picture of Julie. It sat on the mantelpiece, crowded by other photographs. Catherine had once read why it eased the pain to rub a part of your body that had just been hurt: the added sensory information sent to the brain diluted the signal coming from the point of the injury. That’s what was going on here. It was as though they could only glimpse Julie amid an overload of information about t
he good things that had come later.

  There must be other photos hidden away: lots of them. She was beautiful.

  ‘She was always in such a hurry to grow up,’ Audrey said.

  ‘Twelve going on twenty,’ added her husband.

  ‘She always wanted the trendiest clothes, and we used to argue about what was appropriate for a girl her age to wear.’

  ‘Clothes and records, that’s all she was interested in. And, of course, we never had the money.’

  ‘Nobody did,’ said Audrey. ‘Not in those days. Julie understood that: that’s why we’d go fifteen rounds over what she was and wasn’t allowed to wear. If we could only afford to buy her something new once in a blue moon, then she’d be determined it was the trendiest thing possible and I’d be concerned about how many times it would survive the wash.’

  ‘She was a grafter, though,’ Sam said. ‘She always had part-time jobs right through her teens. I remember driving to pick her up at midnight from Safeways at Shawburn every Thursday and Friday night because I didn’t want her walking home at that hour.’

  Catherine watched him wince, the memory of his fears coming back to him, the things he had endeavoured to protect her from only for his efforts to be in vain.

  ‘She couldn’t wait to get away from home.’

  ‘That’s not true,’ Audrey insisted, as though defending both their honour.

  ‘I don’t mean away from us. I mean out of Croftbank, where we lived. And if I had been in work more regularly, I’d have got us all away from there, but what could you do? It was the Eighties. Thatcher and her “economic miracle”,’ he added bitterly.

  ‘Julie wanted to live in a Duran Duran video,’ her mother said with bittersweet recollection. ‘And it would have been hard to imagine anywhere further from that fantasy than Croftbank. She was nineteen when she moved out.’

  ‘Barely nineteen, though she’d have passed for twenty-five. We couldn’t stop her. She had about three jobs when she was still living here: shifts in different clothes shops in town. Then when she was eighteen she could do bar work in the evenings as well.’

  ‘What kind of bars?’ Laura asked, looking for where a young Stevie Fullerton might fit into this picture.

  ‘Only trendy places,’ Audrey replied. ‘Same with the clothes shops. She wouldn’t have worked anywhere she didn’t want to shop, and she wouldn’t have pulled pints anywhere she didn’t want to drink. I couldn’t even tell you the names of them. They’ll all be long gone, turned into other things.’

  ‘So where was she living, after she left home?’ asked Catherine.

  ‘She shared a flat with a couple of other lassies,’ Sam answered. ‘They were a few years older than her but she knew them both from school. It was off Victoria Road.’

  ‘Only twenty minutes on the bus from Croftbank,’ said Audrey, ‘but to her it was another world. She was what she wanted to be, all grown up.’

  Audrey suddenly broke down, Sam placing a hand around her shoulder. Catherine could picture the same scene twenty-five years ago, and imagined it played out frequently over the intervening decades. He produced a hanky and she dabbed at her nose and eyes, apologising for herself, everyone else in the room telling her it was okay.

  They all meant that the apology was unnecessary. Little else was actually okay.

  ‘It’s just the tiniest things sometimes,’ she said. ‘You never know what’s going to bring it back. Even at the time, I remember getting fixated about wee things that just weren’t that important.’

  Sam nodded, his face like rainclouds, dark and troubled, barely holding back precipitation.

  ‘You focus on wee stuff,’ he agreed, ‘because you cannae cope with the rest: it’s too much.’

  ‘Like the ring,’ Audrey said. ‘Julie had this ring I gave her for her sixteenth birthday. It was my great-grandmother’s, and it got passed down through the family, mother to daughter. It never came back. The police returned her earrings and her wristwatch, and I remember getting completely obsessed by the fact that the ring never came back.’

  Catherine had heard similar tales before. The missing item didn’t even need to have that kind of family significance: anything that didn’t return could come to symbolise all that was lost in the eyes of the bereaved.

  Audrey shook her head, a couple more silent tears seeping out as she briefly closed her eyes.

  Catherine addressed her next question towards Sam, as if to let Audrey know she could take a moment.

  ‘Do you remember her ever mentioning somebody called Stevie Fullerton?’

  ‘I know who Stevie Fullerton was,’ Sam replied, something stern and defensive creeping into his expression. ‘What has he got to do with Julie?’

  ‘He seemed to have taken a recent interest in the case and we’re trying to work out why. He visited Brenda Sheehan not long before his death.’

  Catherine opted not to share the fact that Brenda had been murdered. This pair were barely clinging on as it was.

  ‘That fucking cow,’ Audrey suddenly spat, appearing to almost startle herself with the hatred in her tone.

  ‘There, Audrey,’ Sam cautioned. ‘Don’t get . . .’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, more composed. ‘It’s just . . . she tried to cover for him, and I can’t forgive that.’

  ‘She did the right thing in the end,’ Sam reminded her. ‘Nobody wants to believe that about their . . . their family.’

  ‘I know, but she lied for him. Said he was at home with her. Doesn’t matter if she admitted it later: she still lied.’

  Sam gave Catherine a helpless look. It was a needless apology; she could see what was going on. Brenda’s lie was like the ring: another totem drawing a disproportionate response. In a strange way it was easier to be angry at Brenda for lying than to be angry at Teddy for doing it, as the latter was just too overwhelming an anger to tap into.

  ‘Just to come back to Stevie Fullerton,’ Catherine said softly. ‘Is there any connection you can think of from back then?’

  Sam shook his head.

  ‘You’re asking the wrong people,’ Audrey answered. ‘She never told us what was going on with her socially, even before she moved out. You’d be better speaking to her flatmates.’

  ‘Do you remember their names?’ Laura asked, notepad at the ready.

  ‘Sure,’ Audrey replied. ‘There was Ciara Flanigan. That’s C-I-A not K-E-I. She was training to be a teacher. Somebody said she’s at Croftbank High, back where she started. And the other one, I don’t know what happened to her. Her name was Yvonne Sharp.’

  Catherine and Laura looked straight at each other, utterly failing to keep their responses inconspicuous.

  Masks

  There had been a power outage cutting the streetlights along Shawburn Boulevard. It made the Old Croft Brasserie stand out like a beacon, the floods illuminating its car park apparently fed off a private source. Through the windows Jasmine could see that the place was full, as though the reservations had piled up and the diners been hovering impatiently during its temporary closure.

  It was a different crowd from the private function the other morning, fair to say. All that money and effort cultivating an image and a reputation for her restaurant: Sheila knew implicitly what the people she was pitching for wanted, what they expected, how they dressed, how they conducted themselves. Stevie’s crowd were so not it. She wondered how Sheila felt whenever a party of them pitched up of an evening, and how good she was at hiding it.

  Jasmine could see her as she stepped though the double doors. She was in hostess mode, showing a party of four to their table, two staff in close attendance to take coats and hand out menus. She was in a neat black shift dress, her appearance smart but not flashy, as though she knew she had to look good for her clients but not more dressed up than they were. Her hair and make-up evidenced time and care, flattering but not overdone. She looked in her element: busy, genial, authoritative; the hostess into whose care the diners eagerly delivered themselves, as mu
ch the face of the business as the hot-shot chef was the driving force.

  How many of the clientele would know she had just been widowed, or under what circumstances? How many would now be aware that she had been married to a notorious Glasgow crime boss?

  There was certainly no evidence of a morally motivated boycott. Maybe it was like Starbucks: the product on offer was sufficiently tempting that most punters would rather swallow their principles than go without swallowing the fare they had come to crave.

  Jasmine watched her smiling, like the place had been shut for a few days over a burst pipe. Nobody at any of the tables would have a clue how she really felt. She couldn’t hide it from Jasmine, though. She hadn’t finished her drama training, but she was enough of an actress to recognise when another one was practising her art.

  Jasmine waited to be noticed, standing next to the corralled station where the bookings ledger and the phone sat next to a computer running the table-management and billing systems. A waitress glanced her way, burdened by a tray of plates, looking around to see if someone else could help. She spoke, directing her boss’s attention.

  The mask failed for just a second, a look of concern flashing across Sheila’s face, followed by a brief glimpse of the defensive aggression that had greeted Jasmine previously. Then the hostess was back, calm and politely approachable, albeit not smiling.

  ‘I’m afraid we’re full,’ she said, breezily apologetic, as though she’d never seen Jasmine before. ‘And unfortunately I don’t think I’ll be able to offer you anything for the foreseeable future,’ she added, making play of flipping through the ledger.

  ‘I get the message,’ Jasmine told her. ‘But I just have to ask you one question, and then I’ll leave you alone.’

  ‘As you can see, we’re extremely busy just now, and I don’t have time to—’

  ‘One question,’ Jasmine repeated. ‘Woman to woman, nobody else party to the conversation.’

  This time, Sheila got the message.