Hell To Pay (Crime Files Book 1)

by Jenny Thomson

  Tommy indicates that we should leave. “Lean on me. I’ve got an old army buddy. He was a medic in Iraq. He can patch you up, take out the bullet. It’ll be as though we were never here.”

  He’s still calm.

  But I don’t want to leave her. Not here, alone with him. He might manage to talk her round. Get her to free him, and this time when his thugs come for us they won’t mess it up. I can’t risk that.

  Dragging myself closer to where Rosalie’s now kneeling at his feet, I hear her talking about a dead baby. When she sees me, she starts talking to me, but she doesn’t turn around.

  “He told me I was a filthy little whore for getting pregnant. He said they’d need to scrape me out to get rid of the little bastard. I was eleven.”

  She raises the gun, and a gong pounds against my chest. What happens next happens so fast, I don’t have time to react. There’s a pop as though the popcorn’s ready, and a patch of red appears on McNab’s chest. His eyes go wide, then his body buckles and his head slumps forward.

  Tommy leaps at Rosalie, but he’s too late to stop her.

  She shoves the gun in her mouth and pulls the trigger. There’s a pop and a bang like a firework going off, and the wall behind her is splattered with red brain matter as she tumbles to the ground.

  Somewhere I hear sobbing, but it’s only when I feel the dampness on my cheeks that I realize it’s coming from me.

  “Damn,” says Tommy. “I wanted to kill the bastard.”

  Chapter 35

  With McNab dead, we’re left with the kind of loose ends you can’t just snip off with a pair of scissors. We wiped down McNab’s gun and threw it in the Clyde. We also had McNab’s driver and Scarface still tucked up safely in the trunk of his car.

  We thought about driving the car into the River Clyde with the pair inside because they could identify us, but only for a fleeting moment. Unlike McNab and his ilk, we weren’t cold-blooded killers. Besides, we didn’t feel the need, because it wasn’t as though the pair of them would go squealing to the police. It wouldn’t do their street cred much good, and it would lead to the police looking closer into their activities. We doubted either man would want that.

  We opted to phone in an anonymous tip-off, saying we’d seen two men being forced by gunpoint into the trunk of a car.

  When McNab and Rosalie’s bodies were discovered, there was a media feeding frenzy. For weeks, lurid tales of Glasgow’s criminal underbelly filled the news bulletins and newspaper columns. They reveled in retelling how McNab was murdered by his daughter who he’d been sexually abusing for years—a member of a support group she was in for the victims of sex abuse had blabbed to the press. Then her mother had sold her sordid tale of her and Rosalie’s abuse at the hands of McNab to a magazine. Even in death, Rosalie couldn’t trust anyone.

  A week after McNab’s untimely demise, DI Waddell paid me another visit. This time he came without his emu. Maybe he thought if he kept it chummy I’d tell him what we wanted to know. No chance.

  Waddell fixed me with one of his specialty grown-up stares as he sat on my couch. “Look, Nancy, I know you were involved in what happened to Paul Conlan. And, despite all the evidence to the contrary that Rosalie McNab acted alone, this doesn’t smell right to me. How would a wee lassie manage to tie up her father alone? He weighed thirteen stone and she only weighed about seven. There’s just no way.”

  He stopped talking, giving me more time to squirm, but I refused to buckle under the weight of his scrutiny. McNab got what he deserved. Now my family could rest in peace and I could move on.

  Waddell leaned across so our knees were almost touching. “I can’t prove it, but I know you were involved somewhere along the line. As a police officer, I can’t condone what you did, although I do understand it.”

  He paused and met my eyes, searching for any evidence of a lie. “If I do get proof you were involved, I’ll have to arrest you. You do realize that, don’t you?”

  My expression didn’t change. Despite his words, I was calm because I know he couldn’t touch me. If the DI Waddells of this world could arrest you, they would. They wouldn’t mess around.

  “I’m trying to rebuild my life here,” I told him, nodding at my half-painted wall. “I honestly wish I could help you. You’ve always been nice to me, and I appreciate that. I know you have a difficult job.”

  Waddell hauled himself up out of his chair. His disappointment was palpable. “You know how to get in touch with me if you do change your mind.”

  “Take care, DI Waddell.” And I meant it.

  Waddell stopped at the door and turned round to face me. “If you ever need my help, don’t hesitate to call me, Nancy. You have my card.”

  For the first time, I notice his hair is grayer than I remember. How many of those gray hairs have I added?

  “Good-bye, DI Waddell,” I said as his footsteps thudded against the stairs on his way out. “I’m sorry for lying to you.”

  The last sentence was uttered when he was too far away to hear.

  Chapter 36

  After the media had wrung every last drop of out of the McNab story, things died down for a while. They returned to their regular diet of celebrity drivel and reality TV gossip. Then something happened that eclipsed everything that had gone before, even the McNab story.

  Over two weeks, four sex workers had gone missing in Glasgow.

  Nobody paid much attention at the start. These women were “society’s throwaways,” according to one newspaper, with nobody to miss them.

  But when stunning one-time college graduate and part-time model Suzy Henderson’s body turned up in a landfill site, discovered too late to stop the crows from eating most of her eyes, the autopsy revealed she’d been strangled. She’d last been seen in the Anderston area of the city touting for business.

  As was routine with autopsies, they’d done an analysis of her stomach contents. What they’d found was a first for the pathologist, a woman’s finger. The digit matched the DNA of Sheena Andrews, who’d last been seen getting into a silver car in Cadogan Street. Like Suzy Henderson, she had a long record for soliciting. Unlike Suzy Henderson, the rest of her body wasn’t found.

  Tommy and I are in my new place, watching the news, when the dehumanizing word prostitute is banded about like a slur. The implication’s always the same—through their “lifestyle choice,” these women have put themselves in harm’s way, so they deserved whatever happened to them. As if getting hooked on heroin or being forced into sexual slavery was any kind of choice.

  Once the report is finished, Tommy turns to me with a smile. “What do you say? We could get this guy. Get him off the streets.”

  “Do you really think it’s a man?” I say.

  Tommy grins. “I suppose it could be an angry wife killing all the women her husband’s paid for sex.”

  He gets a soft punch on the shoulder for his cheek.

  Despite myself, my lips curl up. “No, you’re right; more or less every serial killer they’ve caught has been male.”

  Tommy raises an eyebrow. “Maybe whoever’s doing this is the new Bible John? Out there bringing down his judgment on the sinners.”

  I give him a funny look.

  There’s a flash of excitement on Tommy’s face. “We can do it, you know. Find this guy, Nancy. Who else will? They’re just prostitutes to everyone else, including the police.”

  Tommy’s serious, but do I honestly want to risk my life, again, especially when this time it’s got absolutely nothing to do with me?

  Images flash through my mind of Rosalie—after she’d eaten her own bullets. Nobody helped her and it was too late now.

  “Okay,” I say. “Let’s get this creep.”

  Epilogue

  “Do you think Nancy Kerr was involved in McNab’s death and the attack on Paul Conlan, sir?”

  Waddell was getting started on the sea of paperwork accumulating on his desk when Brian McKeith appeared in the doorway, making his jaw clench. The last thing he need
ed was to think about a case that was now officially closed. He’d far more pressing matters, such as trying to find the nutter who was going around abducting and killing prostitutes.

  “To be honest, Brian, I don’t know, and at the moment I don’t care.”

  His manner was abrupt, but he’d long ago discovered that the only way to get McKeith out of his office was to be sharp with him.

  McKeith pushed his glasses up his nose. “It makes sense that McNab’s daughter would want to kill him, but who’d attack Paul Conlan? He’s a nobody. A thug for hire.”

  “Who’d made a lot of enemies,” Waddell said, putting a ruler through half of his files and separating them into two bundles. He placed one on top of the filing cabinet.

  “There’s also the brother of Tony McIntyre to consider, sir. He’d have wanted anybody involved in his brother’s murder dead. Maybe he took care of business?”

  Waddell felt his blood pressure rise. “Brian, will you get the hell out of my office. I’m too busy to listen to harebrained theories about closed cases. I’ve got enough on my plate.”

  From behind his glasses, McKeith blushed, and that made Waddell relent. At least the boy was keen.

  “Brian,” he said softly, “at this moment in time, we have a maniac going around Glasgow picking off vulnerable women. If you’ve any theories about that, I’d love to hear them, but anything else keep a lid on it. Besides, Tommy McIntyre was never a viable suspect. Unless he stood up and shoved his guts back in again, there was no way he could have been involved in any of it.”

  McKeith looked puzzled.

  Waddell carried on. “I thought you’d read all the files. He died in Iraq. Killed by an IED. Dead men don’t walk, and they certainly don’t kill anyone. Not even in Glasgow.”

  To be continued…

  Acknowledgments

  Thanks to John for putting up with questions such as ‘How much drugs would it take to knock out a man” to “would curling tongs on a man's genitals hurt” when we're stranded on an island, alone, and the last ferry's has gone.

  About the Author

  Jenny Thomson is an award winning crime writer and features writer who has been widely published in the UK and abroad. She’s a staunch advocate of girl power and that’s why she came up with a strong female lead character in Nancy Kerr.

  She lives on a beautiful Scottish island with her rescue dog and her partner and is the author of seven other books, all with traditional publishers (including some as Jennifer Thomson).

  When she’s not writing about kick ass women, she’s planning how to survive a zombie apocalypse and writing on napkins because she’s run out of paper.

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