When the Devil Drives

by Christopher Brookmyre

  ‘Hello, I’m looking for …’ she started uncertainly. ‘Would you be Jasmine Sharp?’

  ‘Yes, I am,’ Jasmine replied, pitching her tone at solicitous. ‘Why don’t you take a seat?’

  Jasmine beckoned her further into the office and pulled a swivel chair across on its castors, positioning it in front of her desk. It struck her, as it always did, that she really ought to get hold of something more grand or at least formal-looking for seating clients, but it remained on the growing list of things she hadn’t got around to yet.

  The woman settled herself gingerly into the chair, as though concerned the wheels might cause it to skite out from under her, while Jasmine went to put the kettle on. The kettle, the sink and a small fridge were in a partitioned area that formed a box within one corner, creating an L-shaped layout in the rest of the office. Jasmine found that if she just went off and filled the kettle before asking these older clients were more likely to accept the offer of a cup of tea or coffee as it looked like she was making one anyway. She wanted them to settle in and feel unhurried, as she knew they were probably feeling nervous, awkward and a bit dubious about even saying why they were here.

  Jasmine already knew why this woman was here.

  They always turned up in person, they didn’t phone ahead. Was it a generational thing, she wondered: you don’t go online, you don’t call up, you just go round to the local optician, local travel agent, local private investigator? Was it that they didn’t quite believe anything would be initiated if they merely spoke over the phone, even if – perhaps especially if – they were paying for it? Was it that they feared they’d be told she couldn’t help and they believed they’d have less chance of being turned down if she met them personally and saw their angst? On the other hand, it could be that they all wanted a look at Jasmine before deciding to engage her services. In that case, she was surprised they never recoiled at what they saw. Perhaps when you got to a certain age everyone below a particular threshold looked equally young, but most likely her appearance simply wasn’t a surprise because they’d remembered her age from the newspapers.

  That, after all, was why they were here.

  ‘I’m trying to track down somebody I lost touch with a long time ago,’ the woman said, offering a nervous smile that was all about seeking approval and nothing about happiness or warmth. ‘Would that be, you know, something you could …’ she tailed off, visibly retreating into herself in the chair.

  Jasmine nodded sincerely and solemnly. Yes, this would be something she could …

  ‘What’s your name?’ Jasmine asked, getting out her notepad.

  ‘It’s Alice. Alice Petrie. Mrs,’ she added, as though it was a point of honour.

  That was definitely a generational thing. Women of a certain age could stress their married status in a way that made it sound like an OBE. Right enough: given Jasmine’s relationship history, or abject lack thereof, if she ever did manage to get married, she’d regard it as an achievement too.

  ‘And who is it that you’re trying to get in contact with?’

  Jasmine liked to phrase it this way. Partly this was because terms such as ‘track down’ and ‘get hold of’ carried the rather stalkerish implication that the subject didn’t wish to be found, but mainly because to ‘get in contact with’ was something one did to people who were still alive. It was polite and reassuring to make the client think that their quest was one commenced in hope, even if its resolution was almost invariably the confirmation that the person they sought was long-since deceased.

  This was the mixed blessing bestowed upon Jasmine in the wake of the Ramsay case: part dividend and part curse, like a two-headed spirit set loose by her disturbing the earth covering a long-buried past. A lot of people had played their part in finding out the truth of what happened to Jim, but the media had to frame the narrative in a way that simplified the story. In trying to find her missing uncle, Jasmine had played her part in uncovering the fates of three people whose disappearance had haunted and baffled police and press alike for twenty-seven years. Thus Jasmine became, in many people’s minds, someone who could find the missing relative they hadn’t heard from in decades.

  They weren’t wrong, either. She had a one hundred per cent record so far. Unfortunately, they were one hundred per cent dead.

  It was never people who had been missing for a month or a year, because people who were genuinely worried about someone wouldn’t go to a novice. They would go to the police, and if they had no evidence of foul play they’d go to an outfit like Galt Linklater, which was full of salty ex-cops. Whereas the people coming to Jasmine had probably never considered hiring a PI until they read about her in the paper. They were always in search of the long-lost, usually relationships severed in anger and bitterness that took too many years to transmute into regret.

  At first she thought the law of averages ought to start pitching her a few happy endings to shape the bell curve, but Harry explained what was skewing it. If people are coming to a private investigator to find someone they lost touch with decades ago, it’s because all their own channels have proven fruitless. Most of the time – not all, he stressed, but most of the time – this will be because the subject died years ago, way before the client thought to start looking.

  Jasmine now had contacts that allowed her to access information by means not immediately open to her clients. Through these she was able to establish, usually with very little effort and no greater time, where and when the subject had died. Sometimes she was even able to furnish them with the address of the cemetery where they were buried or commemorated.

  It brought in money, but it was very depressing. Despite answering their uncertainty, it seldom brought closure, other than that of the door to their last hope of healing a wound that had been seeping for years. She saw it in their eyes when she showed them her findings. Inside, they had known this was the most likely explanation, but there was always that last ember still burning and she was not only extinguishing it, but charging for the service.

  It always felt a little wrong, but she knew the alternatives were worse. Either they would go on, possibly to their graves, haunted by never finding out, and by never having tried hard enough to do so, or they could go to a less scrupulous investigator who might bleed them slowly of as much as he could squeeze, drip-feeding hints of progress to keep the money coming before ultimately giving them the same news.

  ‘Her name was Tessa Garrion.’

  That was common too, the use of the past tense. They spoke like they were talking about someone they used to know, but the other implications hung in the air like ghosts.

  Jasmine wrote the name down.

  ‘And how did you know her?’

  Mrs Petrie’s mouth quivered a little, which told Jasmine the answer wasn’t going to be ‘childhood friend’. Anger and bitterness transmuted into regret, and throw in not a little shame at how long the process took. This was family.

  ‘She was my sister.’

  Mrs Petrie’s speech threatened to falter as she began, but she recovered.

  ‘My younger sister,’ she added. She sounded guilty, as though these simple words were an admission of her fault in the estrangement.

  ‘When did you last speak to her?’

  ‘It was at our mother’s funeral.’

  ‘I see. And when was this?’

  ‘February 1981.’

  Jasmine paused for a beat, letting the significance have its moment.

  ‘That’s a long time,’ she said, pitching her tone as neutral as possible; too heavy might sound judgmental, too light potentially flippant.

  Mrs Petrie nodded sombrely, eyes down.

  ‘Were there words?’ Jasmine asked.

  Mrs Petrie gave a sad little shake of her head.

  ‘No. Not harsh ones, if that’s what you mean. But not many words of any kind.’

  There was the rub. Whatever was wrong had been wrong before this funeral.

  ‘We weren’t very close. Not as close a
s we should have been, certainly, but the circumstances were …’

  She dried for a moment, looking out of the window behind Jasmine, her face strained. She was trying to find a simple way of expressing something almost infinitely complex.

  ‘What you have to understand is that Tessa was a lot younger than me. I was fifteen when she … no, sixteen, in fact, when she was born. I left home to get married when she was six.’

  ‘And what age would she be now?’

  ‘Fifty-three. She was twenty-two when my mother died.’

  ‘And your father? Is he …?’

  ‘No, he died when Tessa was twelve. He was a good bit older than my mother. Seventeen years, give or take a few months. He had been married before but his wife died in childbirth. Lost the baby too.’

  ‘Tessa would have been very close to your mother, then,’ Jasmine observed, knowing a lot about growing up in such circumstances.

  ‘Close to both of them. She was their wee pet.’

  ‘Late additions get spoiled rotten,’ Jasmine suggested, nudging Mrs Petrie towards where she thought she needed to go.

  ‘Yes,’ she agreed regretfully, contritely even. ‘Looking back, I wouldn’t say she was spoiled; definitely not compared to kids these days. But at the time, I certainly thought so. I was resentful of the things she was allowed to do – and to get away with – because my parents had never been like that with me. I always felt I was on a tight leash, whereas Tessa was allowed to get away with murder. She wrapped them round her pinkie. Always knew how to grab the limelight.’

  Mrs Petrie gave a bittersweet smile, some pleasure in the memory tinged perhaps with regret about how it had made her feel at the time.

  ‘I wasn’t the most tolerant big sister, I’d have to admit.’

  ‘I guess when you’re in your late teens and adolescence you don’t want a toddler cramping your style,’ Jasmine offered.

  ‘No, you don’t,’ she replied, once again looking towards the window, as though it was a widescreen TV and scenes from her life were playing on it.

  ‘So after you got married and moved out, did you stay in touch? I mean, did you move far away? Where are you from?’

  ‘Dumfries,’ she replied, causing Jasmine to repress a self-reproaching tut. She normally had a very precise ear for locating accents, but there was a certain middle-class Scottish neutrality to this one that had flummoxed her. Most times when she found herself unable to place this accent it had hailed from the western side of the Borders – Wigtonshire or Dumfries and Galloway – yet whenever she encountered it again, it failed to pop into her head as an option.

  ‘I grew up in Dumfries, I should say. When I got married I moved to Cornwall, where my husband is from.’

  ‘Not handy for an afternoon visit,’ Jasmine noted.

  ‘No, I didn’t see a lot of my family. The odd weekend, Christmas, that sort of thing. So by the time my mother died, Tessa and I really didn’t have a lot in common. I barely recognised her, to be honest. Hadn’t seen her in a few years as she’d been away at college any time I came back to Dumfries, then moved out altogether after that. At the funeral, I was in my late thirties with two children and a job teaching at a local primary school, while she was this rather bohemian young creature from a completely different world. We just didn’t find much to say to each other, and after that, with both my mum and dad gone, we lost touch.’

  ‘And neither of you made an attempt to get in contact before now? A letter, a phone call, a Christmas card? Facebook?’ Jasmine added, then wished she hadn’t, given Mrs Petrie’s expression. It was an ill-judged note of levity, prompted by a desire not to sound too accusatory, but the joke fell flat and the note of accusation had clearly been struck.

  ‘You’re young,’ she stated, not retaliatory, just matter-of-fact, even accompanied by a dry chuckle. ‘Right now you probably think six months ago was another era. You’ll be amazed how fast time passes as you get older. And the things you mean to do, the things you know you ought to do, it becomes so much harder to do them the longer you leave it. Plus you always think you’ll have time.’

  Which, Jasmine knew, obviated the need for her to ask ‘why now?’.

  Mrs Petrie had been sipping politely at her tea, but now she pushed it away with a grimace, as though it had turned cold.

  ‘I don’t have time,’ she said, working very hard to keep her voice steady. ‘Do you understand?’

  Jasmine nodded.

  ‘My mother died of pancreatic cancer. It was very late-presenting. Months. I’m hoping for a little longer than that. It’s my colon. I could have three years, five, seven. I could live longer than you, for all we both know, but even at my age you never accept life is finite until you get something like this. It changes everything, when you no longer have forever. Once the doctor has shown you your best-before date, the world never looks the same. Drastic change in priorities, in what’s important. In what matters. Family matters. Nothing matters more.’

  Mrs Petrie began filling up.

  ‘Years I’ve wasted,’ she went on. ‘Thinking my own wee world was complete. Thinking she ought to be the one to get in touch: I’ve never moved house. Decades. She could have kids of her own, kids I’ve never met.’

  Now she broke down, the composure of her neatly made-up face cracking in a contortion of grief.

  Jasmine got up from her chair and moved around the desk, tissues proffered in her fingers.

  Mrs Petrie waved her away, cradling her head in her right hand but holding up her left, her index finger aloft. A teacher’s gesture.

  ‘I’ll be okay. I just need a moment.’

  Mrs Petrie produced a hanky of her own and dabbed delicately at her nose and eyes. True enough, in a short while she was composed enough to speak steadily once again.

  ‘I realise there’s a possibility that I’m starting this too late,’ she admitted, before betraying that she wasn’t really admitting it. ‘But I have to assume that if she’d died, then I’d have heard. We drifted apart, but it’s not like we had some feud that meant I’d be barred from her funeral. Someone would have been in touch.’

  Not necessarily, Jasmine thought but didn’t say. Instead she moved Mrs Petrie on to practical matters, the ‘can do’ part. She wasn’t in the business of selling false hope, but she understood that in these cases all hope was sacrosanct until it was gone.

  ‘The more you can tell me about her, the more I’ll have to work with. What was the last address you had for her?’

  ‘I’m sorry. That’s long gone from the memory. I very much doubt I’d have it written down anywhere after all this time.’

  ‘That’s okay. I really just want to know where she went after she left home.’

  ‘Glasgow,’ Mrs Petrie replied. ‘That’s why I came here to hire somebody. That and …’

  She looked sheepish, clearly feeling a little stupid and slightly embarrassed by this, which was far more self-conscious than most of Jasmine’s previous clients.

  ‘That and the fact that I’d read about you. Well, rather, a friend of mine did. When I mentioned I was thinking of hiring an investigator she told me about what you’d done.’

  ‘Cornwall is a long way to travel on spec. You could have rung ahead.’

  ‘Oh no, it’s not like that. I’m staying here for a few days. My son lives in Paisley. I was visiting my friend there at the weekend. I think the cowardly part of me was hoping you wouldn’t be in, so that I could dismiss the idea, but now that I’m here I realise I should have done this years ago, done everything in my power.’

  ‘Well, you’re here now,’ Jasmine said, trying to head off any further self-recrimination. ‘And you were telling me Tessa was living in Glasgow.’

  ‘Yes. She went to college there, and stayed on when she got a job.’

  ‘What did she do for a living?’

  ‘She was an actress.’

  Jasmine skipped a beat, hoping her moment of mild gaping passed unnoticed. It was a daft reflex she couldn’t
quite shake. Whenever she heard about someone being an actress, she felt this unsettling mix of envy and curiosity: what kind of work, how did she get there, where did she train?

  Mrs Petrie could have read her thoughts.

  ‘She studied drama in Glasgow, at the SATD. Sorry, that’s the Scottish Academy of Theatre and Dance,’ she explained, assuming Jasmine would never have heard of it. ‘Then, after that, she got a job in the Pantechnicon. I remember when my mother told me, I thought she meant a part, but it turned out the theatre was something called a rep, which means they put on several plays a year and so the same people act in each show.’

  Jasmine said nothing, nodding politely as Mrs Petrie so helpfully explained the practice of a repertory company.

  Straight out of the academy and into a job in rep. It was a dream as common as it was unlikely, such that a friend from the Academy once referred to harbouring such a fantasy as being like masturbation: nobody would admit to it, but everybody did it. It was so improbable as to be a joke, yet for this Tessa Garrion it had apparently been a reality; not just any old rep either, but the Pantechnicon, which begged a number of questions, most of them deeply unworthy.

  Catch a grip, girl, Jasmine warned herself. Here she was, impugning the three-decades-past sexual integrity of an actress she’d never even heard of just because she’d got a part in a company. It told her that, for all she was starting to settle into her new career, she still wasn’t quite ready to admit to herself that she’d given up on her first choice. It happened every so often, something that would precipitate a glimpse of her old dreams, enough both to keep the flame burning and to torture her a little over whether she was making the right choice by sticking with Sharp Investigations.

  Most recently, the cause had been a chance meeting with Charlotte Queen, whom she bumped into in the Tron Theatre bar when they were both there to see a revival of Swing Hammer Swing! Jasmine had feared it would be an uncomfortable encounter: that at best Charlotte would make play of ignoring her, or that she would be subject to much faux-polite sneering with regard to their respective career trajectories. The last time their paths had crossed, just before Jim disappeared, Jasmine was eyeball on a foot-follow of a surveillance subject when she passed Charlotte having coffee at a pavement table outside a West End café. Even though they had seen each other and Charlotte called out to her by name, Jasmine could neither stop nor take her eyes off the subject. Effectively, she had completely rubbered the notoriously egotistical Ms Queen in front of her friends. It had come as no surprise when Charlotte never got back in touch about that mooted production of The Tempest.