Bred in the Bone

by Christopher Brookmyre

  ‘So Mr Morrison is away at the moment? Do you know where?’

  ‘No, I’m afraid not. I just saw him leaving on Tuesday afternoon.’

  Anthony and Adrienne shared a glance. Tuesday afternoon: when the news had broken about Stevie Fullerton going off in his Bentley to the great car wash in the sky.

  ‘He was on his way down with his suitcase as I was coming up the stairs. I teach a still life class at the Botanics on Tuesdays, you see. He said he was going abroad for a wee break but he didn’t say where. He didn’t stop to speak. I think he was maybe worried he was going to miss his plane. He certainly seemed to be in quite a hurry.’

  The Price

  Catherine sat in the kitchen staring at the rain as it lashed the windows, her barely touched mug of tea long since gone cold on the table in front of her, surrounded by the dishes she hadn’t been able to motivate herself to clear. She had thought she might cry once everyone else had gone out and there was nobody left to hide her tears from, but the truth was that now she was alone she just felt numb.

  Less than an hour ago she had been seated here at the dinner table with Drew, Duncan and Fraser, eating from the same roast chicken, drinking from the same jug of water, listening to the same music on the speaker dock, but she felt like she was observing it all from behind a wall of glass. She could reach out and touch them, hear their conversation, respond to their remarks, but she wasn’t feeling any of it, only pretending to them that she was.

  She was wearing a mask, one that it seemed incredible they could not see through. Every smile she gave them felt conspicuously false, every laugh hollow, and the more she faked the further away the three of them became. Yet she could not afford to let them see that she was in turmoil, that she was clinging on by her fingernails. When she first got home she had sat outside in the car for only a few moments before concluding that the ritual would be futile in this instance: the only way she wasn’t bringing this inside with her was if she stayed out there all night. There was no way to escape from it, only conceal it.

  She thought of all those occasions when she had worn her pain on her sleeve: short-tempered, unapproachable, volatile; or palpably disconnected, uncommunicative and withdrawn. It had been the single greatest ongoing point of tension between her and Drew.

  ‘There’s this dark place you go . . .’

  He thought it was the job that took her there, away from him and from the boys. But the truth was that the dark place had been there long before she joined the force. Doing the job was what had kept the darkness from swallowing her for ever.

  Until now.

  The irony doused salt liberally about her wounds. The darkness had tracked her down, followed her into her house, bared its fangs in readiness to devour her family, and yet she was drawing on her every strength to conceal that there was anything wrong.

  Duncan was losing it at Fraser, a sustained campaign of minor irritations finally breaking through the dam and delivering the reaction his little brother had sought. He bellowed at him, his cheeks reddening, fists and jaw clenched with shuddering forces of pressure. She could see tears of frustration, a familiar sight in Duncan, as he struggled to contain the torrents of emotion that could erupt from within.

  She glanced warily at the cutlery gripped in his hands, ashamed of her own fears and yet unable to prevent herself from feeling them.

  Drew intervened, apportioning equal blame: that time-honoured parental arbitration that was unsatisfactory to both parties but without alternative. Nonetheless, they reined it in with no dissent, as Drew had a nuclear option tonight. He was taking them to see the WWE tour at Braehead; they had been looking forward to it for months – almost as much as Drew wasn’t – and they wouldn’t do anything to jeopardise it this close to the prize.

  The spat was swiftly forgotten. Conversation turned to what their favourites were going to do to each other in the ring, and then to what they had been doing to each other in the wrestling video game they got last Christmas. Their play was all fantasies of violence. Their table talk was of nothing but violence. Then they were going out to watch this absurd pantomime of simulated brutality.

  Catherine had to hide how she felt beneath feigned vicarious excitement, her protests silent behind this wall of glass. She was with her husband and her boys, sitting in the kitchen, present but not quite connected. Was that how it was going to be now? Was that the price?

  What really hurt – what always hurt most about this – was that she couldn’t tell Drew what was wrong. He was the first one she went to when she needed to unload, to pour out her troubles and be shown they weren’t so awful now that they weren’t flapping around manically inside her skull like a bird trapped in an attic.

  She had been missing him, even as he was sitting right beside her. It had been this way many times down the years, but tonight she had experienced a far more acute version of it, and found herself facing an entire future of feeling this way.

  How could she tell him about this, though? And if she couldn’t tell Drew, who could she talk to about it?

  It would not be accurate to say that over time she had made her peace with what she did, but she had learned to live with it. Every so often it crept up on her again, but she drew strength from her family: her need to conceal this providing a constant force, like magnetic repulsion. It was a self-sustaining symbiosis: she endeavoured to repel the darkness from them, but drew the power to do so by bathing in their light.

  Now she would have to live with other crimes, greater sins, in order to continue shielding them from the truth. For what was the alternative?

  What would it do to them if she was taken away?

  What would it do to them simply to know?

  She didn’t want to find out. To be with them, to be here for them, that was all that mattered. And yet she would never fully be present. It would always feel like this. There would be times when it faded into the background and she would almost forget, but it would always come back, always be with her. She would always be afraid. She would always be disgusted with herself. She would always be stuck here, behind a mask, behind a glass wall.

  This was the price now, the hidden price of her sin. To keep her family together she had no choice other than to pay it, but the cost was not merely what she would always know about herself. The greater part was that the men behind this would go unpunished. They would thrive and they would prosper, and inevitably, when the time came, they would ask her for more.

  Was this how it started, she asked herself? Was this how you became Bob Cairns?

  She thought of Drummond in his office today, hostage to his own transgressions, rendered soulless: a vessel for another man’s will.

  Whose will, though? Gordon Ewart? His father?

  Her phone buzzed, skidding sideways along the table like a tiny hovercraft. It was Beano again. She picked it up and hit Ignore, feeling just a little more shitty about it, as she had done incrementally on each of the past three times today. She was leaving him hanging and it was cowardly, she knew, but she couldn’t speak to him because that would formalise a decision she wasn’t yet ready to make. As long as she remained incommunicado, then what she had discussed with Drummond wouldn’t bleed into Beano and Adrienne’s world.

  The rain continued to patter against the window, like a fairytale malefactor drumming his evil claws against the glass. At some point she was going to have to move, get up from this chair and start clearing these plates.

  ‘Just leave them,’ she had told Drew, so that he could get the boys organised and off to Braehead.

  Part of her had wanted them out of the door as soon as possible, so that she could stop pretending.

  The doorbell rang, its benign electronic chimes incongruously unsettling, like the playing of a music box in a horror movie. Surely Beano hadn’t come here, she thought. It was possible, though: she had roped him and Adrienne into this and then cut herself off.

  Worse still, what if it was Drummond?

  As she raced through f
urther possibilities, she rapidly realised that there was precisely nobody she wanted to see right now, not even Drew and the boys. She had only once felt so lonely in her life, and she couldn’t say for sure that this wasn’t worse.

  The chimes sounded again, accompanied by an insistent banging on the door. Whoever was out there knew she was home, and wasn’t going away. She lifted herself laboriously from her seat and walked slowly from the kitchen, through the hall towards the front entrance. There was a shape moving behind the bevelled glass panels, their warped opacity further occluded by the rain.

  She stopped in her tracks and opened the cupboard under the stairs, from which she retrieved an old police twin-handled nightstick that she kept just in case. Then she proceeded towards the door, tucking the baton out of sight. One hint of threat and she’d crush the bastard’s windpipe before he could touch her.

  She undid the lock and pulled the door slightly ajar. Through the narrow gap she found herself face to face with Glen Fallan.

  The Last Kindness (ii)

  The car had surely never been driven so carefully or politely, as Catherine took every precaution to avoid doing anything that might attract the attention of the police. She did entertain a lingering worry that this in itself might inadvertently draw suspicion through the sheer incongruity of a typically ostentatious BMW doing things such as indicating, observing lane discipline and maintaining a distance of more than eighteen inches from the car in front, but it was a smaller risk. Besides, nothing was surer to bring the police into the equation than getting into a prang, so she was proceeding with all caution, and unavoidably extending an unintended and undeserved courtesy to the two passengers locked in the vehicle’s boot.

  It certainly hadn’t looked a comfortable way to travel so much as around the block, never mind a couple of hours down bumpy and winding South Ayrshire back roads, so they ought to be grateful that the car wasn’t being driven in the manner it normally was.

  She was sweating profusely by the time she had managed to heave them both inside, trussed at the wrists and ankles, and having feared that they wouldn’t fit she felt she could give the manufacturer a glowing testimonial regarding the car’s boot capacity. Its occupants might not be quite so glowing in their testimonials, not that either of them had voiced an objection at the journey’s outset.

  The worst moment had been when she first tried to move Cadaver. Rolling him on to his back, she had felt a shock at the dead weight as she tugged at his arm to turn his face sideways out of the puddle of drool that was pooling beneath it on the cold stone floor. She had a moment of panic as she feared the whole plan would fall apart through her inability to move him a few feet, never mind all the way through the house, out the front door and into his car. Then she recalled moving some heavy sacks of winter feed on Wednesday evening, and deduced that the wheelbarrow would do just as well for a heavy sack of something else.

  She had used a wooden board as a ramp at the back steps, then again at the rear of the car. What with the ravages of the board and the metal front edge of the barrow as she tipped its awkward load, she made a right mess of the BMW’s paintwork. Shame. What was it Cadaver had said? Aye, boo-hoo.

  As she drove she heard a bump from behind her, then another, then a flurry of them. The sounds shook her as surely as had they been beating against the back of her seat, but she knew they would cease once their futility had been established. It took a while though, possibly because it would take longer for two people to give up trying to escape than just one alone. What she didn’t want to admit to herself was that she was hoping it was two people trying to escape.

  She was close to her destination. The thumping did indeed tail off after a short while and she resumed rehearsing in her head, as she had been for most of the journey: going over and over what she was going to do, what she was going to say. She’d open the boot and let them struggle their way out, all the time keeping her dad’s rifle trained on them.

  ‘You’re getting nothing more from this family. Tell your boss and whoever else is in on this racket: you ever come back to our farm, it’s this rifle you’ll be getting shot with, not a tranquiliser. We’ll bury you in the fields and you’ll never be found.’

  Over and over in her head. She knew where she’d stand, knew what she’d say, and had worked out her exit strategy this time. She was better prepared than back in the kitchen, yet there was one discordant note telling her that none of what she had pictured would happen. It was a thought she was trying to shout down, drown out with her prepared speech: ‘You’re getting nothing more from this family . . .’

  The puddle of drool on the kitchen floor. Cadaver’s eyes rolled back, not fully closed.

  No. It was just the effects of the drug: tranquilisers hit different subjects in different ways.

  ‘We’ll bury you in the fields and you’ll never be found.’

  Then she was going to drive away, leaving them on the edge of a cliff on the South Ayrshire coast.

  Have fun walking back from there, boys.

  They’d have no money for a bus or even to a call from a payphone, as she had cleaned out their pockets. Their names were Walter Russell and Paul Sweeney, according to, respectively, a bank card on Cadaver and a video club membership on Squirrelly. She’d leave the car on the double yellows at Calderburn Station, where it would get a pricey ticket, maybe even towed away by British Rail.

  These people were bullies. That wasn’t to say they weren’t strong, weren’t dangerous, but their modus operandi was to prey on the cowed and vulnerable. She was letting them know they’d find easier pickings elsewhere.

  She turned the car off the narrow B road on to a sliver of a single track, the turn-off for which was all but camouflaged by a bend in the road and a copse of trees. Ayrshire was full of such isolated arbours, like huddled clumps of daisies that had been missed by some giant lawnmower. The track was paved by crumbling concrete for the first thirty or forty yards, then gave way to compacted earth rutted by tractor wheels. She could see gulls ahead, soaring on the updraught where the sea met the cliffs. Ailsa Craig was a grey blur, shrouded in the clouds that had swept in from the west. There was no sign of human life in any direction.

  They used to come to this place for picnics when she was wee: days out beneath blue sky, her and Lisa drinking Creamola Foam from plastic cups, nothing more sinister to worry about than wasps. It felt like the four of them were the only people in the world. Nobody else ever came here. Her mum knew about it because she had grown up only a few miles from the spot, a farmer’s daughter also, who spent her childhood days walking and cycling every track and path just to see where they led.

  She stopped the car and killed the engine, pocketing the keys. The thumping resumed a few moments later, in response to the vehicle being silently stationary and therefore not merely stopped at lights or a junction.

  Catherine reached into the rear footwell and lifted the canvas bag, from which she removed the rifle. She fed four rounds into the breech and slid the bolt: up, forward, down, back. A shot over their heads or into the vehicle would drive the point home. The noise alone would have them jumping out of their skins: people who had only seen guns on the TV were always literally shaken by the real report of a live round.

  She opened the door and walked around slowly, the rifle’s strap slung around her shoulder and the barrel steadied by her left hand. There was a bracing wind whipping in from the water, a smell of sea and a tang of salt borne upon it. She checked the ground underfoot at the rear of the vehicle, then popped the boot and took a couple of swift but measured steps backward, taking hold of the stock in her right hand and levelling the rifle.

  There was a grunt and a scuffing sound, then the lid of the boot flew upwards with a speed that almost caused it to rebound all the way shut again, that absurd spoiler threatening to crack the rear window. The squirrelly one, Sweeney, clawed his torso over the mouth of the boot and flopped awkwardly to the ground. He had worked loose the bonds around his wrists, but no
t quite disentangled the rope from his ankles.

  When he raised his head and looked up, his eyes were wild, terrified, his pallid face drained of its cheeky assuredness and his body shaking as he hyperventilated in spluttering panic.

  ‘Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ.’ His eyes darted around as he spoke, focusing on random areas of his field of vision. ‘Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ.’ He looked at Catherine a couple of times, but in those first disoriented moments she seemed to be of no greater significance than anything else his restless eyes alighted upon.

  Catherine wasn’t focusing entirely on him either, her gaze constantly drawn to the still-gaping mouth of the boot, from which nothing else had yet emerged.

  ‘Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ.’

  His eyes fixed on her again and this time he finally seemed to see her.

  She was trembling herself now, her mind going blank, the beginnings of a descent into panic. Grasping for a hold on something stable, she remembered what she had rehearsed.

  ‘You’re getting nothing more from this family,’ she tried to say, but her mouth was dry and quivering and her ill-formed words seemed swallowed up by the wind.

  Still she gazed past him into that blank, gaping mouth. Still nothing issued from it but a silent accusation.

  ‘You’re getting nothing . . .’ she tried again, but her throat seemed to swell from within and choke her words. If she could say it, say her piece, she’d be back in the plan, it would all be the way she pictured it.

  ‘You’ve kill’t him,’ Sweeney screamed, as though he sensed her denial like a sheet of glass in front of her and was trying to shatter it with his voice. ‘Ya fuckin’ cow, you’ve fuckin’ kill’t him.’

  The glass disintegrated into a million fragments that could never be put back together. She knew he was dead as she tipped his body into the boot. Knew he was dead as she tied his ankles and wrists. Knew he was dead as she hauled him off the kitchen floor. She had shot him in the heart with a horse tranquiliser. She did know the strength and dosage because she knew where Harriet Chambers was supposed to be going before Dad’s collapse changed her plans: to Garrowfoot Stables, where a yearling colt had gashed the cannonbone of its right foreleg and wouldn’t let anyone near itself.