Bred in the Bone

by Christopher Brookmyre

  ‘The ring,’ Catherine said. ‘Mrs Muir said it never came back to them.’

  ‘Correct. Morrison found blood and skin on it, consistent with it having scratched Julie’s attacker during a struggle. He sealed it up and kept it safe. He wanted something he could use as leverage against Cairns in the future if he came back asking for him to amend another report. He was also aware of the Ewart factor. He followed the whole case very closely, as you would expect, though he was never quite sure what the real story was.’

  ‘And can you still get DNA off dried blood and skin after twenty-five years?’

  ‘If it’s been stored properly, yes, and Morrison knew how to do that.’

  ‘So why did he finally take it out and ask you to analyse it now?’

  ‘He was skint,’ Beano interjected. ‘His neighbour said his retirement fund took a major bath in the big crash.’

  Cal nodded.

  ‘He decided to turn his insurance policy into his pension plan. He sought out Stevie Fullerton because he knew about the Nokturn connection and he thought Fullerton would be considerably more capable than he was when it came to running a blackmail operation. Another reason he launched this now was that Bob Cairns was safely behind bars. He thought that was where the threat would come from. He was wrong.’

  ‘So who was he blackmailing?’ Beano asked. ‘Gordon Ewart?’

  ‘That was Morrison’s plan, but Fullerton spread the net wider. Philippa Ewart is independently wealthy, and so given that she and Campbell Ewart are divorced, Fullerton thought he could dip into two separate pots.’

  ‘He also knew this would give him leverage over Drummond,’ Catherine said. ‘Whether for money or just clout we don’t know, but certainly when you’re a drug dealer it doesn’t hurt to have a means of putting pressure on the Deputy Chief Constable.’

  ‘What did Fullerton actually blackmail them with?’ asked Adrienne.

  ‘He told them he had evidence that would prove Gordon Ewart killed Julie Muir, and that there was an establishment cover-up to frame Teddy Sheehan. He didn’t tell them what the evidence was.’

  ‘The fact that they didn’t call his bluff speaks volumes,’ Adrienne said.

  ‘No kidding,’ agreed Catherine. ‘If they’d nothing to hide then all he could have threatened them with was what Ewart claimed, regarding his wild years. Instead I got two dead people as testimony to the threat being taken very seriously indeed. But it still begs the question why Tony McGill would be involved.’

  Cal held up the brown envelope.

  ‘I suspect the answer lies within,’ he said. ‘This is the DNA analysis Morrison requested. As yet officially unidentified, obviously.’

  ‘At least it shouldn’t be hard to get a comparison sample from Tony McGill,’ Catherine mused. ‘Just scrape the underside of Jasmine Sharp’s thumbnail. Getting a swab from Gordon Ewart might present more of a problem, though.’

  Cal skewered a chunk of melon with a plastic fork and held it in front of his face.

  ‘We’ve already got Gordon Ewart’s DNA,’ he said. ‘He got done for drink driving two years ago, so he’s on the database. The sample from the ring isn’t his. And though the late Mr McGill isn’t on the database, I can tell you right now it’s not his either.’

  ‘How do you know that without testing?’ Catherine asked.

  Cal popped the melon into his mouth and crunched it with open relish, milking the moment. This turned out to be a tactical misjudgement, as someone beat him to the punchline.

  ‘Because it’s female,’ Beano deduced.

  Flesh and Blood

  Beano leaned over to the cassette recorder and ejected the tapes, popping each of them into an envelope and sealing it across the top. The lawyer let out a troubled sigh but leaned back in his chair, his posture acknowledging that he was relieved the time had come to stand down. Whatever he thought he was here to assist with, he hadn’t been ready for this.

  Philippa Ewart looked up at Beano, then around at her brief, and then across the table at Catherine.

  ‘Is it finished?’ she asked. ‘Is that it over? Can I go now?’

  Respectively yes, yes and quite definitely no.

  ‘There’s an officer here to take you back to your cell,’ Catherine said quietly, nodding to the woman PC who had stepped in and was waiting for her cue.

  The PC helped Mrs Ewart to her feet and turned her towards the door. She looked confused and disoriented, but there was a fearful dawning in her face.

  Catherine had seen this before on many occasions, when a suspect had eluded detection for a long time and then finally been hauled in for questioning. They were so apprehensive about the ordeal of the interview – of finally being confronted with the proof of their crime – that their relief at getting through it temporarily caused them to forget what was coming next.

  The longer they had been holding on to their secret, the worse it was, and Philippa Ewart had been holding on to hers for a very long time.

  Back in the late eighties, when her serial philanderer husband was regularly playing away and the gin wasn’t numbing the pain quite as well as it used to, she decided – working on the ‘sauce for the goose’ principle – to embark upon an affair of her own with one of her neighbours. The way she described it, it sounded to Catherine like Buffy shagging Spike: a mixture of nihilism, self-loathing and sexual chemistry leading her into an increasingly depraved relationship with the neighbourhood bad guy.

  McGill believed it was something more. He was completely besotted, though Philippa thought what he was truly smitten with was the social respectability that she represented. He had daft ideas about the two of them setting up home together, while all she saw in him was an ongoing revenge fuck; albeit it wasn’t clear whether it was herself or her husband she was trying the harder to punish. It was a relationship that she simultaneously needed and detested, creating a self-reinforcing cycle of self-disgust.

  Unfortunately that self-disgust had a disastrous reflection in her beloved son bringing home some good-time girl who worked in a nightclub.

  Her attitude to Gordon’s sex life and recreational habits had been ‘out of sight, out of mind’. He was young and entitled to mess around. A pity his father hadn’t done the same: perhaps that way he’d have got it out of his system. However, the fact that Gordon brought this one to a dinner party at the family home indicated that it was serious, and Philippa was appalled.

  She said nothing at first, aware that it was likely to be counterproductive, and hoped that time would take care of the matter. When it didn’t, she decided to act before things went too far. She got in touch with Julie and asked her to come up to the house one Saturday night when she knew Gordon wouldn’t be around. She was apprehensive about the meeting, and angry too, so she had a few drinks before Julie arrived.

  She’d have been fine on gin, she said, but she had started drinking whisky: another self-reinforcing cycle. She only wanted whisky when she was angry, and the more she drank it, the more bitter she tended to become.

  She explained how important Gordon was, what a career was ahead of him, and how she couldn’t let anything jeopardise that. To that end she offered Julie money to stay away from him, adding that if she had any real regard for Gordon she’d know it was the right thing to do.

  That was when Julie, in her growing outrage, told her she was pregnant.

  Philippa claimed she had no recollection of what happened next, but Catherine didn’t believe her. She’d heard this story a thousand times.

  Drink or no drink, you remember what it is to kill somebody. You remember every last tiny detail, and nothing that ever happens to you afterwards can help you forget.

  She strangled Julie with a dog lead. That was why Cairns came up with the theory of Sheehan using a belt: leather and metal, bruising and abrasions.

  Somewhere in her mortal struggle Julie scratched Philippa’s cheek with her ring, leaving the evidence that would trace back to her a quarter of a century later. Comparison
testing had shown that the DNA on the ring was not Gordon Ewart’s, but a sufficiently near match as to indicate that it had come from a close relative. A close female relative.

  When the rage subsided and Philippa found herself standing over Julie Muir’s lifeless body, she called McGill for help.

  He made it go away.

  He and Cairns moved the corpse, then Cairns handled everything else from there.

  Drummond, as far as Catherine could tell, knew nothing of the truth. He probably did think that they had the right man and that Cairns was simply employing means that would be justified by the end.

  It was soon after this, Philippa said, that she had her moment of clarity. It was not an immediate response: it came when McGill got lifted down in Liverpool and put inside, out of the picture. Eventually she managed to kick the drink, and thereafter dedicated her time and efforts to alcohol and drugs charities.

  ‘I understand what alcohol can do to people,’ she said. ‘How it can take away your will and turn you into a completely different person.’

  To Catherine’s ears, this was another old saw: ‘The demon drink made me do it.’

  Aye, that plus being an over-privileged bitch who saw the likes of Julie Muir as beneath her and Teddy Sheehan as collateral damage.

  When Fullerton started making his threats she contacted McGill again, for the first time since he got out. It wasn’t that the flame still burned: she just let him know that if this went public, his part inevitably would too.

  McGill was out on licence. A conviction for conspiring to pervert the course of justice would put him away for the rest of his life.

  They watched the lawyer make his way out, the door swinging closed on its own weight behind him.

  ‘Some going, Anthony,’ Catherine told him. ‘Great result.’

  ‘Anthony?’

  He was beaming, inordinately pleased that she had called him that.

  ‘Not sure Beano’s got much mileage left in it as a handle,’ she admitted. ‘Can’t see you being DC Thompson for much longer. You definitely get bonus points for closing the book on a murder committed when you were still in nappies.’

  ‘I thought she’d put up more of a fight,’ he confessed. ‘She always comes over in the media as being hard as nails, but I barely had to do anything. She just spewed it all out.’

  ‘All those years keeping a secret like that can take its toll,’ Catherine said. ‘It becomes a relief to finally be able to talk to somebody about it.’

  To anybody, she thought.

  A lonely place to live, Fallan had called it, but Catherine didn’t live there: she only visited. You’re angry on the road to it and you’re unreachable when you get there, Drew told her. That was because she could only go there alone, and she could bear the loneliness better than she could bear sharing that place with her family.

  It would be easier in future, though. She would have to go back, inevitably, but there were people she could journey with.

  Fellow travellers.

  Fellow killers.

  The Nature of the Risk

  It was a cold morning, but it was well worth the early rise and the extra jumper. He had been awake since five anyway, unable to get back to sleep. That’s why he decided to cut his losses. The skies were blue but there was still a wee bit of mist drifting in places. Made you think what this place looked like hundreds of years ago, when it was just moors and woods, long before anybody came up here to blooter a golf ball around.

  Doke knew from experience that he’d warm up enough to take a layer off by about the fifth hole, especially if he kept swinging at this rate. His game was literally all over the place, zig-zagging his way up the first two fairways. He wasn’t sure where his head was at this morning, but then he’d come here to clear it, hadn’t he? Out here alone, that fresh feeling of the morning air and the sense of peace he got when there wasn’t another soul in sight.

  He’d be grand by the back nine. Sometimes you had to look at it that way: write off the bad start and just concentrate on what was ahead. If you worried about your score being knackered after a few holes, it was pointless. It wasn’t like playing on the Xbox: you couldn’t reload and start again.

  Golf was all in the head: that was why he came here when he needed to think. It was a safe place to think too. You could see folk coming from miles off. He remembered how a guy he knew got ambushed on the municipal course over at Burnbrae about twenty years ago. A team turned up with machetes and hatchets and all sorts: hopped over the wall at the fourteenth, where the fairway ran parallel to the back of the scheme.

  That wasn’t happening out here. This was the proper countryside. Plus he had a sawn-off shotty in his bag along with the clubs. When he told people about it he said, ‘I’ve got my woods, my long irons, my nine iron and my shooting iron.’

  He told plenty of people about it. The point was that it got around. The point was that folk knew.

  He hooked another drive: good length but a horrible pull to the left, taking it over the gorse and very possibly into the burn.

  There was just so much on his mind: that’s why he hadn’t been sleeping. Tony McGill was dead, with Teej heading for the jail whenever he got out of the hospital. The rumour was that it was Glen Fallan. The same Glen Fallan Doke had unsuccessfully tried to have taken out while he was on remand, and who undoubtedly knew this.

  Aye, funny he was having trouble sleeping.

  Opportunity was knocking, though. The McGill show was well over: not only was the main man pan breid, but two of his top boys had been lifted at the Spooky as well. There was a very large gap in the market. Doke just didn’t feel sure he had what it took to fill it. He was missing Stevie. Stevie would know what to do. He’d have strategies and contingencies and all that shite.

  He could see his ball. It was in the ditch but not in the burn itself, just nestling shy of the water. He’d need a pitching wedge to get it up, or else he’d need to drop and take two, but fuck that. Dropping was for shitebags.

  He climbed down into the ditch, keeping his eye on his footing. When he looked up again to check where his ball was he saw Glen Fallan standing about five yards in front of it, like Scotty had just beamed him there. That was what had always scared him about Fallan, though: the cunt just appeared from thin air. You never saw him coming.

  He’d made a mistake this morning, though. Doke scrambled back up the banking and reached frantically into his golf bag for the shotgun.

  It wasn’t there.

  When he turned around again, he saw that Fallan was holding it down by his side.

  Doke felt the cold as a layer of sweat formed spontaneously all over his body. Some instinct told him to run, but he knew that he wouldn’t. Something deeper, an inescapable knowledge of his true self dictated that this wasn’t something you could run from. The same knowledge dictated that, despite the lies he told himself, he had always known he would one day have to face this moment. And now it was here.

  He felt fear, but mostly he felt regret. So, so many regrets, too numerous to contemplate individually, apart from one: he should have listened to Sheila. Not just because of the situation in which he now found himself, but because of all the things that would have been better: all the people who might still be here, and all the ugly things he might never have done.

  ‘A good walk spoiled, eh Doke?’ Fallan said. ‘Lovely morning for it, anyway.’

  ‘Just get it over with,’ he replied. ‘Don’t kick the arse oot it. You owe me that much, surely.’

  Fallan glanced away for a moment and shook his head.

  ‘I’m not here to kill you,’ he said evenly. ‘If I was, we wouldn’t be talking. You wouldn’t even see me. That’s what I said to Stevie as well, all those years back, when he woke up in the night and found me at the end of his bed holding a gun, despite all the locks he had fitted and his ten-grand security system. I’m not here to kill you. I’m here to tell you what I told him.’

  Doke’s head felt light with relief, his legs
like jelly and his guts turning to water. He was ready to grab any future with both hands, now that he still had one, though it sounded like Fallan wanted to talk about the past.

  ‘Jazz tried to kill Yvonne. He turned up inside her flat in a state of pure rage. She didn’t realise he had a key; she’d never given him one, so he must have stolen one of the spares. He’d beaten her up before – you know that – because he thought she was going to cave in to the polis about his alibi, but this time he was there for more. He was already upset about something else that night, and after a few drinks and a few toots and whatever else he was necking he decided on a simple solution to both of his problems.’

  None of these things came as a surprise to Doke. Deep down, he knew all of this, or at least could have pieced it together if family loyalty and misplaced anger hadn’t kept him in denial. He had been angry at Fallan all these years because it was easier than dealing with the anger he felt towards his brother. Nonetheless, he couldn’t help thinking he was missing something in what Fallan was saying. Small wonder, the way his head was spinning right then.

  ‘He had a gun. Fuck knows where he got it, because we both know neither you nor Stevie would ever have allowed Jazz and firearms to come together, even before he got slashed. He was there to kill her, Doke: that’s what I need you to understand, same as I needed Stevie to understand.’

  Doke managed a nod, but he was still missing something. Hadn’t Fallan said both problems? Apart from the murder charge, what was the other one? And why would Jazz want a gun to kill a lassie?

  Then it dawned on him.

  ‘He was planning to kill you as well,’ Doke sussed. ‘But why?’

  ‘That was the thing he was already upset about,’ Fallan replied, and suddenly it all came into focus.

  ‘You always were a sleekit bastard, Single. I never realised it extended to your sex life.’