by Smith, Anna
Rosie told him about her tip from Don that the woman in the café had been identified as Ruby Reilly and that she’d been seen with Rab Jackson during a covert police operation eighteen months ago.
‘I like the sound of this. So what’s this bird like?’
‘Striking,’ Rosie said. ‘Very good-looking. Seems a bit hard at first but a lot of that’s just a front, I think. I talked to her for a while last night over a couple of drinks and she basically told me everything. She’s all right. She’s going to work with us on this.’
‘Really?’
‘So she says.’
Rosie had been surprised at how much Ruby had been willing to tell her the previous night, and she described to McGuire how Ruby had confirmed what Mahoney had said in his dossier about J B Solutions.
‘She said that she’s been told that Mahoney was actually there, on that operation. That’s the information she gave me.’
‘How the hell does she know that?’
‘She wouldn’t say straight out. The thing is, I hadn’t said anything to her about what was inside Mahoney’s dossier and yet she was talking about the same stuff. We have to keep her onside. I think she’s a way into the heart of this.’
‘So why is she suddenly being so cooperative? And who exactly is she in relation to Rab Jackson and that bunch of lowlifes?’
‘All she said was that she was an accountant. She said she’d tell me later what it is she does. Her story goes way back, though, to twenty-five years ago, when her mother, Jackie Reilly, was burned to death. It was Jackson and Cameron who did it.’
‘Right. And she goes and works for him? So what exactly does she do as Jackson’s accountant?’
‘Just moving his money around. Making him legit.’
‘So she’s just as bad as them. Another fucking gangster.’
‘True, I suppose. But she’s on our side.’
‘Why?’
‘She’s got this sister. Judy. She was a kid that night when they battered the mother to death. The sister was raped and brutalized by Jackson and Cameron. She’s in a nursing home now, apparently in some kind of catatonic stupor. She hasn’t spoken since it happened. So Ruby looks after her and she says she needs the money so she can get her the best care.’
‘Aw, give me a hanky. I’ve a tear in my eye here.’ He shook his head. ‘So what does she want?’
‘Initially, it was just to inform us that all this crap in the papers about her being involved in the Mahoney murder was nonsense, that she just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.’
‘So why did she get off her mark?’
‘She didn’t want to be there when the cops arrived.’
‘She’s on the run?’
‘So it would seem. From Spain.’
McGuire sat for a moment, his fingers drumming the desk.
‘Wait a minute, Gilmour. She works with Jackson, then fucks off after he dies, comes here, then his cohort Cameron gets torched in his garage. It doesn’t take Columbo to work that one out.’
Rosie nodded.
‘You think she killed them both.’
It was more of a statement than a question. Rosie suspected she had but she’d pushed that thought to the back of her mind.
McGuire’s eyebrows knitted.
‘Does she seem capable of that?’
‘I don’t know. But you know what? I didn’t ask. And I won’t ask. Because right now she’s in a position to help us get an inside track on this story.’
‘She may be a killer – twice over. And that’s an even bigger story.’
‘But she may not be. And that’s not the point.’
‘Yeah? Tell that to the High Court judge. Of course it’s the fucking point.’
‘Yes, I know that. But it is not of any interest to us right now. Leave that to the cops. If they can find evidence on her or anyone else, then that’s up to them. It’s not our job. Our job is to unravel all the stuff about Mahoney’s death. That’s our story, and we’re already halfway there. Ruby can give us the lowdown on who’s who, and she might even be able to get us a proper inroad so we can expose the whole shooting match.’
McGuire sat in silence, his mouth tight.
‘What can she give us?’
Rosie told him about the connection again and that Ruby had mentioned Tam Dunn as being the owner of J B Solutions, and his links to Jackson and Tony Devlin.
He nodded.
‘And afterwards, if we crack the story? What does she want?’
‘I haven’t got that far with her. But I know she won’t work with the cops, and I know that her only priority is to keep her sister safe and alive. She’d assumed everyone who knew them years ago believed that her sister had died a few months later. She was even told that herself for years afterwards, while she was in and out of care. Then a few years ago she discovered her sister was alive, and it took a long time to track her down. So I’m not sure what she wants. But I think she wants to put these bastards away, and she may be in a position to do just that. She can lead us to them. We can’t knock that chance back.’
McGuire took a long breath and let it out slowly.
‘Okay. Then we deal with what we’ve got. We should be looking at these companies.’
‘Yes. I want to go down to London with Matt and have a look at J B Solutions. Discreetly.’
‘Yeah. Discreetly.’ Mick shook his head. ‘I’ve been there before with your “discreetly”, Gilmour. There’s usually a body count in the first three days, and you’re just lucky that so far you’ve not been one of the stiffs.’ He adjusted his tie. ‘I’m wondering about getting the cops involved at this stage. It might make sense to work with them on it. And also, it might keep you a bit safer. I don’t think you can go tiptoeing around a major arms dealer. You really could get your head blown off. If these people can blow the head off an old professor in a busy London café, then a journalist poking her nose in is no problem. I have to think about this.’
‘I hear what you’re saying. But we need to think about an undercover operation—’
McGuire’s phone rang, interrupting her, and he answered, looking irritated as he listened. ‘Tell them I’ll get back to them before the day’s out, Marion,’ he said, putting the phone down.
‘See what I mean?’ He spread his hands. ‘That’s Special Branch already. They want to come and talk to us. Some chappie is on his way up from London.’
Rosie sighed, pushing her hair back.
‘It’s your call, Mick.’
He nodded sarcastically. ‘Thanks for that.’
‘You know what I mean. If we work with them, we give up a lot of our own ground.’
‘Hmmm. We’ll have to see them anyway, see what they’ve got to say. It’ll just antagonize them if we don’t. I’ll give Hanlon a ring and we can talk legalities and how we’re placed. So don’t you dare go anywhere. And that’s an order.’
‘Yes, sir.’ Rosie saluted him as she walked towards the door. ‘But I was thinking if we do a bit of undercover on this J B Solutions, maybe I could bring big Adrian into the mix.’
‘And do what?’
‘Set up a meeting or something. Pose as arms dealers.’
‘You don’t look like an arms dealer.’
‘How do you know what they look like?’
‘I don’t. But I’m guessing they’re not women like you. Do you think you could carry something like that off?’
‘Only one way to find out. Can I talk to Adrian?’
‘Sound him out, then we can discuss it.’
Rosie stood up.
‘Fine. I’m going to work on a follow-up story for tomorrow, and after that I’ll have a detailed look at that dossier. I skimmed over a lot last night.’
She headed for the door, but McGuire was already engrossed in his screen, typing with two fingers on his keyboard.
‘And get an X-ray on that back,’ he said, without looking at her. ‘I can’t afford to have you packing up on me.’
‘Yeah, yeah.
’ Rosie had no intention of having her back checked out. A hot bath and a couple of painkillers would do the trick.
*
In the office off the editorial floor Rosie sifted through the notes on Mahoney’s dossier until she came to the page marked ‘J B Solutions’, which she had looked at briefly last night. Now she scrutinized it, fascinated. It gave the name of the main players, Damar Guns. There were typewritten notes of payments hidden in bank accounts in Liechtenstein. Mahoney was claiming that fake documents and licences had been granted by the MoD. She sat back, taking a long breath and letting it out slowly. How the hell was she going to get to the bottom of this? Deal with what you’ve got, McGuire had said. But all they had was information on who the arms dealers were at the centre of this and some of the papers from Mahoney’s documents. And that Tam Dunn, the owner of J B Solutions, was involved with Rab Jackson, so whatever else he was he was definitely a thug. But there was only one way to get the proof. She sat back and swung her feet onto the desk, massaging the back of her neck. Whoever Tam Dunn was, he had to be slippery enough to obtain a licence to supply arms, so he would be no pushover. She looked up the company address in Pinner, North London. Then she scrolled down her mobile and dialled Adrian’s number.
Chapter Eighteen
Rosie was pleased that Ruby had trusted her enough to invite her to meet her sister in the nursing home, but she was also a little nervous, not quite knowing what to expect.
As she drove through the sleepy village of Bridge of Weir, she reflected on what Roddy Thompson had told her of the night Ruby had witnessed her mother being burned to death and her sister raped. How do you survive something like that and go on to function in the world? Rosie knew what it felt like to be alone and abandoned as a little girl, having witnessed her own mother’s suicide, and after the agonizing years that followed in the children’s homes, waiting, praying her father would come and take her back home. Everything that had happened to her from the moment she’d seen her mother hanging on the end of the rope had made her the person she was. You functioned in the real world as best you could after something like that, but you could never really be the same as everyone else. There was too much damage.
Rosie rang Ruby’s mobile as she turned into the tree-lined driveway leading to the Foresthill Nursing Home, which nestled at the edge of a vast pine wood. As instructed, she parked her car and walked down towards the lake. In the mid-afternoon autumn sunshine, she passed a couple pushing an elderly lady in a wheelchair who stared straight into space in her own little world. She nodded sympathetically to them, wondering what it must feel like to watch your mother grow old and disintegrate before your eyes. Maybe she was lucky she’d be spared the trauma of caring for an elderly parent. The scene brought a lump to her throat, but she had to quickly compose herself, because Ruby was waving at her from a bench at the edge of the lake. A woman in a wheelchair was next to her. Rosie took a deep breath and braced herself.
‘Good to see you again, Ruby.’ Rosie glimpsed at the woman in the wheelchair. Her eyes didn’t even register her arrival.
‘My sister, Judy,’ Ruby said. She crouched down and took her sister’s hand. ‘Judy . . . I want you to meet . . .’ She looked up at Rosie. ‘I want you to meet a friend of mine. Her name is Rosie.’
The woman’s pale eyes blinked once and Rosie thought her head moved just a fraction in acknowledgement.
‘Rosie’s all right,’ Ruby said softly to her sister. ‘She’s on our side.’
Rosie watched the two of them, pondering what it would be like to have a sister, even if she didn’t speak to you and her eyes were miles away. You could still hug her, even if she didn’t hug you back. She swallowed.
‘I see the resemblance.’ It was all she could think of to say.
Ruby sat on bench and motioned Rosie to sit next to her.
‘I wanted to meet you here, away from Glasgow, but also so you could meet Judy.’ She rubbed her hand along her sister’s arm. ‘She’s . . . well . . . she’s everything to me.’
Rosie nodded, glancing at Judy then back to Ruby. ‘Is she . . . I mean, does she . . .’ She was suddenly tongue-tied and awkward. ‘What I’m trying to say is, will she get better in time? Have you seen any improvement over the years?’
‘Yeah. Definitely. And the nurses told me that in recent weeks she’s been a little more communicative. Well, when I say communicative, I mean she’s actually acknowledged their presence and their words when they speak to her. She’s registering things, they think. That’s a big improvement. And she can walk a bit more, although she gets tired. They pumped a lot of drugs into her years ago, because they didn’t know what they were dealing with. For such a long time she was sedated, because that’s what they thought was best. There’s all sorts of damage been done, muscles wasted and stuff. Things are a little better now, but I’m scared to hope that she will ever really come back to me.’
Rosie wanted to ask if there was brain damage.
‘Her brain is functioning,’ Ruby said, as though reading her mind. ‘They’ve done tests and there’s no brain damage there. But it’s the trauma. That, and the fact that for years after it all happened she was left with no proper care.’ She leaned over and touched her sister’s arm. ‘She was shunted from pillar to post, notes getting lost . . . all that kind of shit. Given anti-psychotic drugs when what she needed was a good psychiatrist. They just wrote her off as a hopeless case. At one point they were treating her for schizophrenia. I mean, how the hell does that happen to a kid? There’re probably a lot of people like that in institutions who shouldn’t really be there.’ She gazed out towards the lake. ‘But that all changed a few years ago, when I found her. And now, day by day, things are getting better. I feel I can get to her. I hugged her when I got back a couple of weeks ago and whispered to her and – and she actually hugged me back. That’s the first time that’s happened. So I have to believe that there is hope.’
‘What made her improve?’ Rosie asked.
Ruby looked at her sister for a long moment but said nothing.
They sat watching a flock of birds swoop across the lake, the peace of the countryside filling the silence. Three people, Rosie thought. Surviving.
‘So,’ Ruby said, taking a cigarette out of her handbag and lighting up. ‘You wanted to talk about your investigation.’
‘Yes.’ Rosie turned to her. ‘I want to ask if you will work with us.’
‘Go on.’ Ruby blew a trail of smoke and watched it rise and disappear.
‘Obviously, what I’m going to tell you now puts me in a lot of danger if it ever gets out, Ruby, so I’m placing a whole lot of trust in you.’
Ruby glared at her.
‘Listen, pal. You’re here. With my sister. I brought you here. Who’s trusting who?’
Rosie nodded.
‘Okay. Fair enough. Then here’s the situation.’ She took a deep breath. ‘I have a dossier given to me by Gerard Hawkins – Mahoney’s friend – the one you saw that day.’
Ruby raised her eyebrows.
‘Really? I did see Mahoney pass something to him in the café.’
‘You did? Good. At least that proves Hawkins didn’t make it up. Well . . . I think Hawkins was murdered because he was about to make this information public, which is what he told me Mahoney had asked him to do that day.’
‘Mahoney did look agitated.’
‘The dossier is full of a lot of damning allegations. Some of them we may be able to back up but a lot of them we won’t. That will be the editor’s call, at the end of the day. But Mahoney has written a lot about the arms dealing and this company we talked about, J B Solutions, and the guy who runs it . . . You mentioned him.’
‘Tam Dunn,’ Ruby interrupted.
‘You know him?’ Rosie asked, surprised.
‘I don’t know him, but I know a man who does.’
‘Really? That’s useful. Who is he?’
‘His name is Tony Devlin. He runs the show here for Rab Jackson. Took ove
r when Rab moved to Spain, and now he’s the man in charge.’
‘How well do you know him?’
‘Well enough.’ Ruby shot Rosie a lazy-eyed glance then looked away.
Rosie let the silence hang for a moment.
‘Does he trust you?’
‘Put it this way, I think he’s scared not to trust me.’ Ruby’s lips curled a little. ‘He needs to trust me. I’m the only one who knows where all Rab’s money is, which in turn is his money, and the mob’s money, too.’
‘Right.’ Rosie nodded slowly. This was better than she’d hoped for. ‘Has he talked to you about Tam Dunn?’
‘You bet he has. I was with him yesterday, and he’s spilling his guts on this whole fucking story. He told me a lot of stuff, actually – about the shooting of Mahoney . . . how it was an arms deal that got fucked up. And how one of their men got killed – Billy. He’s from Glasgow but lived down south for years. And another guy was captured.’
‘By who?’
Ruby shrugged.
‘By whoever was on the operation. Cops, MI6? Who knows? But the wee guy captured is called Derek . . . Del Boy. He’s from Glasgow, but he knows Tam’s minder, Billy, who was on the job, so he wanted to take him on the job for a bit of muscle. Tony told me Del got sent down in case the Russians were at the capers. Turns out someone else was at the capers. Tony doesn’t know how it all went tits up, but he said they lost a lot of money and the Russians were not happy. Tam works with the Russians on a lot of deals. It’s how things are these days, apparently. He’s pretty big stuff now – Tam Dunn. Left Glasgow years ago and Rab worked with him while he built things up down south. Rab invested in one of his companies.’
‘Tony told you all this?’
‘Yep.’
‘Did he say the name of the company he invested in?’
‘Yeah. Damar Guns . . . They’re the ones that sell guns to Africa. Dunn has no proper licence. Tony says someone is on the take and issuing fake papers.’
‘Christ! That’s pretty much what Mahoney’s saying.’
‘Great. So you know I’m not bullshitting.’ Ruby sat back, giving Rosie a sideways glance.