Bred in the Bone

by Christopher Brookmyre

  Catherine had replied before she could even think about it. The words just spilled out, a reflexive response.

  ‘I didn’t mean to kill them. I wanted to scare them off, let them know we weren’t easy meat. I shot them with tranquilisers and drove them out into the middle of nowhere. But when I opened the boot, the older guy was dead. Then the other guy came at me, and . . .’

  Her mouth became dry, though moisture wasn’t going to be a problem for her eyes.

  ‘I’m not like you,’ she said, struggling to steady her voice. ‘It was self-defence. I shot the older guy as well so that it looked like a hit. I did what I had to in order to survive.’

  ‘I meant, why did you draw the symbol on them?’ Fallan clarified neutrally. It was like the killing talk was the epitome of mundane to him, but this part was intriguing.

  ‘I needed it to mean something. I needed to connect it to something else. It made some kind of sense at the time, but when I look back it’s like it wasn’t me who was doing the thinking.’

  Catherine kept her misting eyes on the road, but she was conscious of Fallan nodding. She wasn’t sure how she felt about getting the impression that a guy like him understood where she was coming from.

  ‘You’ve never told anybody about this, have you?’

  ‘Nobody.’

  ‘That’s a lonely place to live. Not even your husband?’

  ‘Especially not my husband. I never wanted anyone to know. That’s why I’m vulnerable: I’d do anything to keep it from Drew. But now Tony McGill knows. I don’t know how, but you’re right: it’s being used to keep me in line.’

  ‘Same as me, he only worked it out recently. He knew about the symbol at the time, but no more than that. The cops must have leaked it to him: Cairns probably. McGill assumed it was one of his rivals making a move against him, guy called Archie Cutler. So when he got somebody to do one of Cutler’s people he was found with the same symbol drawn on him. Then back and forth and back and forth, the Glasgow way.’

  ‘And was that “somebody” you?’

  ‘No. I didn’t leave bodies. I think it was Stevie’s brother, Nico; or maybe Nico killed the guy that killed the guy that . . . you get the picture.’

  ‘I’ve seen the picture, Fullerton’s brother lying in an alley with that sign painted on the wall.’

  ‘Nobody knew what it meant or where it came from, though. When I saw it I never connected it to your farm. Glasgow gangsters are unimaginative wee neds: they don’t get deep into the semiotics. Like everybody else, I assumed it was bam on bam. I thought the symbol must have been in a film, and that whoever drew it on the ground at the farm had copied it from the same source as whoever killed Walter and Sweenzo. That’s until you handed me a copy and it all fell into place.’

  ‘So how does McGill know?’

  ‘While I was inside I heard that Walter’s widow died last year, and when his son, Alec, was renovating the house he discovered a hidey-hole behind a skirting board. Apparently Tony was very pleased about something Alec found, but wasn’t telling anybody what or why.’

  ‘He sent me a page of a ledger,’ Catherine said, ‘showing the date when my family were due to make our next payment. At the time I was terrified somebody would come back, looking for money or revenge. I thought it must be obvious what had happened. They never did, though, and I could never work out why.’

  ‘Ironically, it was their own system that protected you,’ Fallan told her. ‘Deniability. Walter handled that whole protection business, and Tony never knew who he was collecting from. It was so if the cops ever took an interest he could honestly say he’d never even heard of these people. Problem was, when Walter died nobody knew where he hid the list of ‘customers’, as he called them. Even if they’d had the list, they’d never have guessed it was some civilian fighting back. And besides, Tony had other priorities after that. He found himself fighting on a lot of fronts.’

  Catherine came off the motorway and on to the dual carriageway that bisected the sprawling schemes of Croftbank. She hadn’t had a destination in mind when she set out, but the more they talked the more her instinct took her towards Gallowhaugh, where Glen Fallan had grown up, where his father Iain had ruled his own personal fiefdom, and where Iain’s ally Tony McGill had preposterously been credited with ‘keeping the drugs out’. Gallowhaugh, Shawburn, Croftbank: that was the world where this had all started, and something told her that was where it must end too.

  That world had a satellite however, connected and yet distant: the hamlet of Capletmuir, where a bright young woman with her whole life ahead of her had been murdered on her way to the home of the Under-Secretary of State. It remained outside the main picture, held in a remote orbit, but like gravity, Catherine couldn’t see the force that was keeping it there.

  ‘What makes you sure it’s McGill who’s got Jasmine?’ she asked.

  ‘You’ll have heard about how Tony got fitted up by the cops when he went down in a big drugs bust? Well, it wasn’t the cops who fitted him up. It was me and Stevie. We didn’t frame him: he was there to buy the drugs. We just made sure he showed up where the cops wanted him to. Poetic justice, we thought, given how many folk Tony had dobbed in to the polis as part of his you-scratch-my-back arrangements with the likes of my dad. But he’s been waiting a long time for his revenge. Killing Stevie in his own car wash and having me take the fall probably seems doubly poetic to Tony.’

  ‘What’s poetic about a car wash?’

  ‘It’s symbolic. Stevie was something of a criminal protégé under Tony, and the car wash represented him not just him outgrowing Tony, but moving into things Tony didn’t understand. Stevie even tried to explain it to him, but he still didn’t get it. Stevie thought Tony was yesterday’s man, and the car wash must have been a totem of that in Tony’s mind. He has a long memory.

  ‘The poetic thing about framing me for the shooting is that I was never jailed. I was too careful: the guy who always got away with it. The irony would be in me finally going down for a killing I didn’t commit.’

  Catherine took a left at the roundabout and pulled on to Shawburn Boulevard. They would soon be passing the Old Croft Brasserie on the left-hand side.

  ‘This is about more than revenge,’ she told Fallan. ‘There’s an angle to it that you don’t know about. Fullerton was digging around, asking questions about a murder that took place twenty-five years ago. The victim’s name was Julie Muir. She worked at Nokturn. Fullerton believed that Bob Cairns and Mitchell Drummond, who is now the Deputy Chief Constable, by the way, fitted up a special-needs case called Teddy Sheehan for the killing. This ringing any bells?’

  ‘I remember it happening. I knew who Julie was but I didn’t know her. Any time I found myself in Nokturn, it would be fair to say I was a wallflower. One thing I’ve always done well is blend in to the scenery.’

  ‘Her boyfriend was Gordon Ewart. His father is Campbell Ewart, the then MP, and his mother is Philippa Ewart, the drugs campaigner. Gordon’s now a big noise at Cautela Group, and he’s highly connected. Drummond’s been keeping Ewart’s name out of the case, same as his name was kept out of the spotlight when Julie died. Fullerton was in touch with him shortly before he was killed. Ewart says he was blackmailing him, threatening to tell the press about his links to Julie and his coke habit back in the Nokturn days. Do you remember him?’

  ‘Vaguely. I tended to mentally background the celebs and rich kids because they weren’t the types I had to watch out for. I don’t see what connects Tony to this Ewart guy, though.’

  ‘Nor I, but McGill’s the one cracking the whip for Ewart’s benefit. He’s squeezing me and he’s definitely squeezing Drummond.’

  ‘And now he’s got Jasmine,’ Fallan said with finality.

  They came up alongside the Old Croft Brasserie and drove deeper into darkness, the streetlights ahead being out of service. Further along the dual carriageway was where Fullerton met his soapy fate. It occurred to Catherine that she hadn’t seen any CCTV foot
age from this end of the boulevard, close to the restaurant, and wondered whether the power failure was related.

  ‘Jasmine told us they stole her sim and spoofed her phone number on the day of the shooting. Is it possible they’ve done it again?’ Catherine suggested, though she wasn’t optimistic.

  ‘No. They’ve got her. They let me hear her voice, told me to stand by, said they’d know if I went to the cops. The day Stevie was killed they just needed to put me where they wanted me. The stakes are higher now. They want to control me, and they know this is how.’

  ‘Stand by for what?’

  ‘I don’t know, but making me wait is part of the game. It works best if you give the mark time to ponder what he might lose, because then, when you tell him what you want, he’s only too glad to cooperate. This is textbook Tony McGill. See, Tony’s old school: that’s what people used to say. He might be a crook, but he’s got a code of honour. You’ll have heard the three golden rules of old-school Glasgow gangsters?’

  Catherine wondered where he was going with this. She recalled Moira mentioning it, and she also recalled that the only reason Moira brought it up was to underline that it was bollocks.

  ‘They don’t grass, they don’t deal in drugs,’ she began, then she understood. ‘And they don’t hurt women and kids. Jesus.’

  ‘That was always Tony’s true golden rule,’ Fallan said. ‘If you want people to be afraid of you, hurt what they care about.’

  She was about to inquire how McGill knew that what Fallan cared about was Jasmine Sharp, but as soon as she asked herself the question she suddenly realised that there was a new front-runner for this year’s Wood for the Trees Award.

  Prisoners

  Jasmine could hear a vehicle approaching, the splashing of tyres through puddles audible from somewhere outside. She switched off the solitary bare bulb that hung from the ceiling, the better to look out into the darkness, and moved to the window. There was a faint glow to her right, but she couldn’t see the narrow road as her room was at the rear of the house.

  She listened intently to the growing purr of an engine and the crunch of wheels on the loose gravel and broken paving. Then the engine was silenced and a car door slammed shut.

  She could hear voices in the hall, low and gruff, fading as they disappeared behind a door downstairs. They were below and to the right, words muffled and indistinct. She thought she could make out the sound of a tap running, a chink of crockery.

  Fuckers were sitting down to a cuppa.

  They seemed in no rush. This suited her and tortured her at the same time. There was so much fear in not knowing what was going on, yet whenever she sensed movement from below, the possibility that somebody might be venturing upstairs, her heart raced.

  Eventually, inevitably, she heard footsteps on the stairs. She got up from her chair automatically, something in her demanding a state of readiness, only for her to become more acutely conscious of her exposure. She shrunk back against the wall beneath the window, furthest from the door, then squatted down, balling herself up.

  The footsteps grew nearer, striding steadily along the bare boards of the upstairs hallway. It was only one person. The gait was different from Pudgy: lighter in tread yet noisier in volume. Some reflexively analytical part of her brain told her she should expect to see a smaller man in hard-soled footwear, as opposed to Pudgy in his trainers. It didn’t tell her anything that might make a difference.

  The door opened and in walked a wiry figure wearing an expensive suit in a cut that was at least twenty years too young for him. She saw money, she saw vanity and she saw a man unused to having anyone around who might tell him he was kidding himself.

  He was early seventies, but not early seventies like somebody’s amiable grandfather. He was early seventies like Jimmy Savile: lean, strong, vicious and predatory.

  The only pictures she had seen had been decades old, always from the same paltry selection the tabloids had on file, but she knew who she was looking at. This was Tony McGill.

  ‘Come and have a wee seat, hen,’ McGill said.

  He walked over to the table and pulled a chair out either side, like he was inviting her to sit down in his kitchen. Like she wasn’t his prisoner. Like she wasn’t bloodied. Like she wasn’t naked.

  Jasmine didn’t have a choice. She scrambled across the floor like an animal, trying to keep her breasts and crotch covered as she positioned herself on the chair. She knew there was nothing he wasn’t going to see if he wanted to. The point wasn’t to spare her own shame; it was to accentuate his.

  McGill looked around at the mouldy walls and ceiling, the bare bulb, the tiny window, and finally at the bowl on the floor, into which she’d had no choice but to finally pee.

  He shook his head and sighed.

  ‘Not nice being shut away in a pokey wee room, is it?’ he asked.

  Jasmine didn’t answer, didn’t meet his gaze.

  ‘You’ve only been here a few hours. Can you imagine what it feels like to hear a judge give you a sentence in decades? And can you imagine what it’s like to know that you’ve been set up by people you trusted? People you took under your wing and gave a start in life?’

  He didn’t raise his voice. There was even a wry little chuckle in there, but it was hollow, rattling like chains on a wooden floor.

  ‘Whole life ahead of you. All your plans, all the things you thought you had plenty of time to get around to. And then it’s all taken away. Doesn’t seem fair, does it?’

  She couldn’t muster a reply, and that wasn’t good enough. He reached across the table and cupped her chin, forcing her head up, forcing her to look at him.

  ‘You’re awfy quiet, hen. From what I heard, I thought you’d have more spunk. Bet you’d more to say for yourself when you were fucking everything up for Bob Cairns and that lot, eh?’

  Still she said nothing. She couldn’t think of any words. His eyes burned right through her, not with hate or anger, but something else: something horribly eager, almost elated, yet at the same time joyless and cold.

  This was not about her, and for that reason, no matter what he thought, it wouldn’t satisfy him.

  ‘Have you got plans? A boyfriend maybe?’

  As he asked this, he broke off his gaze to stare conspicuously at whatever he could see of her tits.

  ‘See, when I got banged up, I had somebody I wanted to be with. Somebody I loved. I know people look at me and only see a hard case, but that’s not all there is. I had somebody special. And I don’t mean his mother,’ he said, gesturing below with his head.

  She interpreted this to mean that Pudgy downstairs must be Tony Junior, or Teej as he was known.

  ‘No, that was long over. I’m talking about a woman of class. Somebody who turned heads wherever she went, but wasn’t appreciated where it mattered most. I appreciated her. We were going to be together, and Christ would that not have turned heads?’

  He grinned, as though inviting her to join him in his reverie, but bitterness was already bleeding into it.

  ‘Not to be. You can’t ask anybody to wait thirty years minus time off for good behaviour, can you? No, if you love somebody set them free, they say. I set her free, and spent the time we should have had together locked up in wee rooms smaller than this, pissing in pots and wanking into hankies.’

  He sat back with his arms folded, staring, lapping up the silence.

  ‘You’d have to be angry about something like that, wouldn’t you say?’

  She didn’t say. She was doing well to breathe.

  He cupped her chin again.

  ‘Do you know what this is about?’

  He looked like he’d have been disappointed if she said yes. He needed to tell her.

  ‘I was set up by the late Stevie Fullerton and by the formerly late but apparently not so late Mr Glen Fallan. And I’ve waited a long time to put things right. Things need to be put right, believe me, hen, or else you cannae move on. I wasn’t in a hurry, though. I’d waited all those years inside
: I could wait a wee while longer for the right moment to come along, and it did.

  ‘Stevie gave me a wee problem, and as luck would have it Glen provided me with the ideal solution. A very satisfying solution, I thought, set up by me like I was set up by him. But the best part would be that he’d know he was stuck in there, in prison, where he could do nothing about the fact that I was out here. With you.’

  McGill ran a hand down the side of her face, causing her to flinch. Then he sat back again and sighed, almost regretfully.

  ‘Aye, Glen was always trying to be somebody’s guardian angel, always looking to be the knight in shining armour to make up for that one damsel in distress that he wasn’t able to defend.’

  Neither fear nor caution could disguise Jasmine’s response to this. She met his eyes inquiringly before she could even think to stop herself.

  ‘You think I’m talking about your mammy? Naw, I barely knew her. I’m talking about way back, when he was in his teens. I’m talking about a nasty accident in his house. Well, that vicious bastard Iain swore it was an accident, but when you’re never done laying into your family you cannae be surprised if it ends in tragedy.’

  McGill reached into the inside pocket of his jacket, where she was sure she glimpsed the top of her phone in its pink sleeve. Teej had made her speak into it before, got her to say ‘This is Jasmine’. She didn’t get to hear who was on the other end, but she could guess. McGill produced a photograph, keeping the printed side facing him for the time being. On the yellowed back she could read the words ‘Fiona and Glen, Kelburn Park’.

  ‘Fiona got knocked over. I gather she was trying to stop Iain battering her wee brother. She hit her head on the fireplace. Nobody in that house was ever the same again. Iain was dead inside even before somebody finished the job. She was a lovely looking girl, too, wouldn’t you say?’

  McGill placed the photograph down on the table in front of her. It showed Fallan as a skinny teen, standing next to his older sister in front of a fish pond or boating loch. Jasmine stared at the girl’s face, perplexed by its striking familiarity. For a confused moment she wondered if she was looking at an early picture of her mum, and her mind flashed with ramifications and consequences, tallying up everything Aunt Josie had told her and wondering how it could all be a lie.