The cops could hold the crowd back as best they could but they could do nothing about the air. It and the burning coke went where it pleased, like rumours disappearing into the night. Luckily for those in the city centre, or maybe unluckily for some, the burning cocaine didn’t give anywhere near the hit that it would have if it had been snorted or smoked. One of the forensics later told her that when you burn powdered cocaine you lose about half of the potency. It still burns and smokes, just very inefficiently. It was still enough to put a smile on a few faces for half an hour. Some of the locals were sniffing at the air like rabbits twitching for signs of a fox, taking as much of the free hit as possible.
She saw Tony walking between the crowds, photographing as many as he could. Inevitably some of the fuckwits thought he was getting evidence of them taking drugs and a few of them covered their faces while others looked like they were threatening to rearrange his. Any risk was worth it for Tony, though, she knew.
She saw him capture two teenagers grinning at each other like idiots while sticking their tongues out as if they were catching snowflakes. They’d probably never had any more than bottles of Buckfast or White Lightning, so graduating to cocaine was a big step for a Wednesday afternoon when they should have been in Double Maths.
A wee old wifie with blue-rinsed hair obviously thought it was the funniest thing she’d ever seen, giggling away to herself and pointing at the sideshow even though no one was paying her much attention. Maybe it was the nose candy in the wind, maybe it was the lunchtime sherry or maybe she was just a bit crazy to start with but the old girl was in fits. Tony captured her weather-beaten face as she screwed her eyes up and howled with laughter.
A pink-faced bank manager type in an overstuffed overcoat and a peppered beard looked horrified at the events around him and seemed desperate to avoid breathing in even a whiff of the coke. He had pulled out a white handkerchief and held it over his mouth as if he’d been bombarded with tear gas. He’d clearly never taken drugs in his life, as long as you didn’t count nicotine or industrial quantities of whisky, and wasn’t about to start now.
Other bampots were just welcoming the wind with open arms, quite literally, wafting it towards themselves with as much gusto as they could muster. Fuck the polis, fuck the CCTV cameras. Breathe it in, man, pure magic. They were even fighting for their share of the air, elbowing each other out of the way to snort a bigger nostril-full of next to nothing. These eejits didn’t need much encouragement to be off their heads and their stake in twenty-odd kilos of cocaine floating over George Square would certainly do the job.
Addison and Monteith were by Narey’s side now and for that moment there was little for them to do but watch and wonder what was going on, a state of affairs they were all well used to. None of them could take their eyes off the cocaine snowstorm; it was as if someone had turned the city upside down and shaken it hard.
‘Burn,’ Monteith was muttering angrily. ‘Go on, burn, you fucker. Burn. Better off with that stuff up in flames than up someone’s nose.’
Addison turned to look at the DS, seemingly amused at Monteith’s rage.
‘Moral righteousness, Colin? It’s not Sunday, is it?’
Monteith’s eyes darkened but never left the free show that was falling over the square. ‘I just don’t find it funny, sir,’ he replied. ‘I’m fed up having to clean up the mess this stuff makes.’
‘Well you’ve got to laugh sometimes, Col. Otherwise it will eat you up.’
‘Thanks for the advice.’
‘No problem, sergeant. Oh aye, what have we got here then?’
A burly PC in high-vis yellow was leading a terrified-looking young guy towards them by his arm.
‘DI Addison. This is Douglas Charlton. He says he drove the car onto the square.’
Dressed in faded denims and a blue waxed jacket, Charlton was in his mid-twenties and looked like he was near to shitting himself and was shaking like a leaf. Surely this guy didn’t have the nerve to pull the trigger or hold it steady long enough to hit a barn door. He was attempting to blurt something out and Addison was trying to calm him down so he could get some sense out of him.
‘I didn’t have any choice,’ he was stammering. ‘No choice.’
His eyes were nervously darting left and right, he was moving from one foot to the other and it was a safe bet that his arse was going like a threepenny sponge.
‘I didn’t have a choice,’ he said again.
‘Aye, we get that,’ said Addison with his usual diplomacy. ‘What didn’t you have any choice about?’
‘He made me drive that van to George Square. Said he would shoot me. Made me drive it the wrong way down the one-way street. Said he would kill me if I didn’t.’
‘Okay, calm down and talk us through it from the top. Where was he? Tell us everything that happened.’
‘I was in Livingstone Tower. You know, the Strathclyde Uni building?’ The student pointed back up George Street where the corner of a high-rise structure could just be seen in the distance.
‘Okay, hang on a second. Was that the last place you saw him?’
‘Yes. He said he’d be watching me from there. Said he’d see.’
‘Inspector Begley!’ Addison roared above the chaos. ‘Livingstone Tower. Get everyone you’ve got there now! Rachel, go with them and make sure they don’t fuck things up.’
The remark got him a sharp look from both Narey – who doubly made up her mind not to tell him about her conversation in the Criterion – and Begley, but their reaction clearly didn’t bother Addison in the slightest.
‘Okay, Mr Charlton, as quickly as you like, tell me the rest of it,’ he said hurriedly.
‘He said he’d see all the way down the street and would know if I stopped,’ the young man continued, almost babbling. ‘Said he could hit anything between there and George Square. I’d been going up to the fifth floor and someone stepped out from the stairwell behind me. I didn’t see him at all. First I knew, what felt awfy like a gun was pushed into my neck and he asked me if I could drive. I said yes and the barrel of this rifle slipped past my ear so I could see it. He dropped keys in front of me, told me there was a white transit parked out front and that I was to get in and drive it to George Square. The one thing I wasn’t to do was look round.
‘I didn’t have any choice, man. He said if I tried to turn off the road or get out then he’d put a bullet through the fuel tank. He was making me go the wrong way on the one-way, said I was to go at full speed with my horn to clear cars out of the way. I was shitting myself. Had to do it.’
‘Aye, okay. Whatever,’ interrupted Addison, turning to the cop that had brought Charlton over. ‘Take him somewhere quiet and get every detail you can. What height did the voice come from, what angle was the rifle barrel at, did he have an accent? Everything. Tony, come with me. We start on the fifth floor and work our way up. That fucker must have left something behind that we can use.’
It turned out that he hadn’t. By the time they got to the tower, Narey had already ordered a floor by floor search and found that a door to an office on the seventh floor had had its lock picked. A window had been left open with a clear line of sight to the smouldering remains of the white van but forensics didn’t fancy their chances of lifting anything worthwhile. There were a hundred and one fingerprints and various hair samples snagged on the back of chairs but they were sure they belonged to anyone but the shooter. The area around the open window was meticulously wiped clean and it looked like he had covered whatever tracks he’d brought into the room. They’d file and test anything and everything but whoever did this knew exactly what he was doing.
So Winter photographed a near-empty office knowing that the scene examiners were right. He also slipped on his biggest zoom and shot the car on the edge of George Square, just as the sniper had done. Easy peasy. One click.
He heard footsteps behind him and looked at the window to see Rachel’s terse reflection looking back at him.
‘What i
s this guy up to?’ he asked her without looking round, seeing just a shrug of the shoulders in return.
‘He’s taken a van full of coke off those mules,’ he continued. ‘Beaten the shit out of them then shot them as they ran at Harthill. He’s done all that to get hold of that cocaine. And it’s worth how much?’
‘A million is what the drug squad is guessing,’ she answered. ‘Twenty-four kilos, about £40 a gram.’
‘A million quid’s worth of cocaine. He’s driven it into town, forced that poor sap to park the van in the square then blown the whole fucking lot up. He couldn’t have made it more public if he had burned it in the centre circle at Celtic Park on a Champions League night. What’s he up to?’
Narey shrugged again but this time offered up an answer.
‘Whoever he is and whatever he’s doing, he wants to make sure everyone in Glasgow knows about it. Us, the bad guys, the media, Joe Public, the lot.’
‘No such thing as bad publicity?’ Winter suggested lamely.
‘Not buying that,’ she said with a shake of her head. ‘He’s not trying to take over the Glasgow trade. If that was his game then he could have flooded the market with this, given it away free to every junkie in the city and put the opposition out of business. This headcase is not trying to become number one. And he is certainly not trying to make money because he’s just smoked a million pounds of it in public.’
‘Well, there’s one thing you can be sure of,’ said a voice from the doorway. It was Addison. ‘The press are going to have a field day with this. Bad enough that he kills gangsters, now he burns seven figures worth of drugs. They are going to make this guy a poster boy for vigilantes.’
Winter couldn’t help thinking that maybe wasn’t such a bad thing but he knew it wasn’t what his pal wanted to hear.
‘So what do you think, Addy?’
‘I think I’m going back over to Harthill to see the Temple and then grab some food before the game tonight. I take it you’re still going?’
‘Well, aye, but are you not going to be a bit busy with that lot out there?’
‘Wee man, you know the score. There’s murders, there’s shootings and there’s the Celtic. Glasgow can manage fine on its own for a couple of hours. This shit isn’t going to get any shittier tonight. Get you in the Oak sometime the back of seven?’
‘No, I’ll see you in the ground. C’mon though, what do you think is going on?’
Addison looked beyond them and through the window to the last flurry of the snow scene on George Square.
‘An hour ago, I didn’t have a clue but now, now I think I might at least know what this fucker is up to.’
‘Care to share?’ Narey asked him.
‘DS Narey!’ Addison replied with a wide grin, as if seeing her for the first time. ‘Is my mind playing tricks on me or did we not speak about you working full-time on the Wellington Lane case?’
‘We did, sir. You were very clear on the matter.’
‘Ah, I thought so. So why . . .’
‘I was in the area, sir. Just passing.’
‘Really? Keep on passing then, Sergeant. We’ve got this under control.’
Aye, it fucking looks like it, she thought.
CHAPTER 17
At Harthill Services, word about the bizarre scenes in George Square had filtered back to those still meticulously poring over the scene in search of evidence. Shirley and Baxter had both demanded that their officers concentrate on the job in hand and not let their minds wander to the city centre.
Numbered yellow photo evidence markers dotted the scene showing where Winter had started the process and, following the news of the white van and the cocaine, the crime scene examiners had finished it. The examination was structured and sequential, by the book, and they would gather every available piece of physical and trace evidence.
Amidst the scrupulously organized fury of the examination, no one noticed Jan McConachie edge quietly to the perimeter of the crime scene to take the phone call that had been buzzing angrily in her pocket for several minutes. She had already seen the name on the phone’s screen and there was no way she could take that call within earshot of anyone else. Not that she wanted to take the call at all. There were four missed calls by the time she was safely out of anyone’s range. She could imagine his rage rising with every failed attempt to talk to her and knew that could never be a good thing.
‘About fucking time,’ he shouted at her when she picked up. ‘Do you know how many times I’ve called you?’
‘Yes, I know,’ she answered quietly. ‘There’s been another two shootings. Well, three. Two of Quinn’s guys, Stevie Strathie and Mark Sturrock plus an old boy who just happened to get in the way. I’m at the scene now.’
‘Fucking hell.’
Jan could hear the shock in his voice and was relieved to hear that he hadn’t known about the killings. That was at least one weight off her mind.
‘What the hell is going on?’ he continued. ‘I’ve been watching Sky News and some fucker has just blown a shitload of cocaine up in the middle of George Square.’
‘Yes, I know.’
‘That’s not much fucking good to me, Sergeant. I don’t pay you to know things that I already know. I pay you to tell me things that I don’t know. Who’s doing this? And more to the point, who the fuck is he intending to knock off next?’
She hesitated. She had nothing to tell him.
‘I don’t know,’ she finally admitted. ‘We don’t know.’
‘That’s no fucking use,’ he raged. ‘Things are crazy out there right now and I need to know who’s behind this. I’m shedding no tears for Quinn or Caldwell, far from it, but this is all bad for business. Do I need to remind you of our arrangement?’
‘No, you don’t. All I can tell you right now is that it was the same gun that killed both of them. It was almost certainly the same person who shot the three in Harthill today. When I get more I’ll tell you.’
‘Immediately.’
‘Immediately,’ she agreed.
He hung up and she closed her eyes and made a silent prayer for all this to go away. Right at that moment, there was nothing that Jan wanted more than to be at home with the door locked and she and Amy safely behind it watching cartoons on television. Her mind raced to school finishing time and she prayed again, this time for Amy to be standing safely inside the school gate when she went to collect her.
CHAPTER 18
Winter was in his seat at Celtic Park by twenty past seven, kick-off still twenty-five minutes away. The old place was pretty full already and the atmosphere was building up nicely. That familiar sense of expectation and togetherness was buzzing through the ground and he liked to be in there in plenty of time to soak it up.
Not Addison though. His mate was doubtless still supping in the Oak, the nearest pub to the stadium and guaranteed to be wall-to-wall packed with sweating bodies trying to fuel themselves for what was to come. The Oak faithful would stream in at the last minute or beyond, pushing apologetically past people in the middle of ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’, ducking under scarves and stepping on feet. It was always the same and unless Winter dragged him into the Lisbon Lions Lower early then Addison would be one of those guys.
Winter loved European nights at Parkhead and always had. Ever since his Uncle Danny first led him by the hand through crowds of giant drunks to watch Celtic draw 2-2 with Ajax in 1982. McStay, McGrain, Burns, Nicholas, McGarvey, these were his first heroes. Them and Uncle Danny.
It was a couple of minutes before kick-off and everyone was on their feet as the teams trooped out onto the pitch. At the end of the row, fans began stepping back reluctantly as someone pushed by them towards his seat. With a huge grin and regular apologies, he edged along until Winter could feel Addison’s beery breath on his face just as the team went into their pre-match huddle and a huge roar erupted around them.
‘About time,’ Winter remarked.
‘Hey, this is early for me, wee man. Anyway, I’ve h
ad a busy day in case you hadn’t noticed.’
‘You and me both. So what happened this afternoon?’
The referee blew his whistle for the start of the game and another huge, extended shout drowned out any reply that Addison could have made. Instead, he shook his head and leaned in towards Winter as they both sat down.
‘Later. One thing though, I know what this fucker’s game is.’
‘Aye? So what’s that then?’ Winter shouted back, trying to be heard above the noise of the crowd.
The DI just looked down at him, winking and tapping the side of his nose, and then turned back to the game as Celtic immediately launched into an attack down the right wing. People were on their feet around them and the pair were forced to stand as well. Winter was bursting to ask more but knew he wasn’t getting anything until Addison was ready.
There was wave after wave of attacks on the Bulgarian side’s goal but Celtic didn’t manage to score until five minutes before half-time. A cross from the left was met by a header down in front of them and when the ball hit the back of the net, Celtic Park erupted. Everyone was on their feet, Winter and Addison hugged each other and were clapped and bumped into by those around them. Songs soared round the old stadium and minor chaos ruled. The place was still jumping five minutes later when the half-time whistle blew, another mighty roar filling the night sky, and fans began streaming towards the toilets or the food outlets.
There was suddenly a bit of space round them and both men knew they could now talk without having to shout at each other.
‘So what’s happening?’ Winter asked.
Addison hugged himself into his jacket before answering in as low a voice as he could get away with.
‘Nothing good. Is it not your turn to go and get the pies?’
‘Forget your stomach for a minute,’ Winter countered. ‘What’s going on?’
‘If I tell you, then you’ll go for food?’
‘Aye, okay. Spill.’
Addison looked around and moved closer.
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