When the Devil Drives

by Christopher Brookmyre

  ‘So why is an accident a possibility?’

  Frail gave a weary grimace, like some persistent back problem was playing up. He was on uncomfortable ground.

  ‘The thing is, these corporate guests, they’re not going to come back to the fair if they never win a goldfish, you know? We keep the stocks high, which makes sure they at least see a deer when you take them out, even if they cannae hit one. But it also makes the estate a honeypot for poachers.’

  ‘I see. And I take it poachers prefer to work under cover of darkness?’

  ‘Some are as brazen as you like. They know it’s a big estate, and we cannae be in ten places at once. But some folk get a buzz about hunting in the dark and they kit out for it too. Night-scopes and silencers aren’t unheard of for going after deer without a permit.’

  ‘Was this a silenced shot?’ she asked Beano.

  ‘No, ma’am. Everybody heard a bang from back there, in the woods.’

  Catherine looked towards the tree line, which was about two hundred yards away, behind the trailer bearing the seats.

  ‘How close are the game going to be on a night when there’s all this going on?’ she asked Frail. ‘You’ve got a tractor hauling that tiered-seating gantry, music over a PA, dozens of people chattering and applauding, artificial lights flooding the place. I can’t imagine any skittish woodland creatures straying close to the edge of cover with so much human activity going on, nor an experienced poacher taking aim when there was a gathering of people in his field of vision, never mind his field of fire.’

  ‘I only said it was a possibility. Could have been a ricochet. Could also have been a shot from distance. Some of these rifles are built to take down their prey from a long way off. Some chancer deep in the woods, a kilometre up the slope, could have lined up a shot without realising what was behind it if he missed.’

  ‘Aye,’ said Catherine, ‘such as a major figure in the world of the arts.’

  ‘Makes no difference to me who he was,’ said Frail, his eyes wide and bloodshot. ‘I’d never heard of the guy myself. But if this was something I could have prevented …’

  He bit his lip, glancing back and forth from the bloodstained turf to the tree line, looking fidgety and confessional.

  ‘How could you have prevented anything?’ Catherine asked, eyeing him neutrally: neither accusatory nor reassuring.

  He sighed, regret and contrition etched as vividly on his face as the nicks and calluses on his fingers.

  ‘There’s a lot of blind eyes get turned,’ he said. ‘As long as folk don’t kick the arse out of it, sometimes it’s easier to write off a bit of poaching loss than to try and prevent it. People know each other out here, know each other’s business. The point is, I can give you some names, but the local polis are already aware of them. They know which doors to knock. They’ve just never had reason to before.’

  Just Because You’re Paranoid

  Jasmine made it back to the office late afternoon and set about transcribing Hamish Queen’s interview, which she had secretly recorded. In keeping with Jim’s practices, she liked to have a hard copy down in black and white as well as the audio file. Transcribing could be tedious, but it forced a closer examination of what was said, and the act of typing out the words helped commit them to memory. She then backed up both the text document and the recording, after compressing it from wav to mp3 format. Having had the office broken into during the Ramsay case, she had learned not to keep all her eggs in one basket. This had forced her to overcome her assumptions regarding the complexities of using a computer for things other than word processing and web browsing, with the result that she was now au fait with audio and video editing software, and the letters FTP were no longer just something she saw scrawled on bus shelters.

  Her work safely copied to two separate remote servers, she was able to clock off for the day, with the rare prospect of a good night out to look forward to. Jasmine’s friend Michelle, who’d been at the SATD with her, had free tickets for Ballet Scotland’s production of The Sleeping Beauty at the Theatre Royal. Michelle had been studying dance and now had a job with Ballet Scotland’s community outreach programme Steps Forward. She described it as being ‘where ballet meets social work’, but it was a satin-slippered foot in the door of the company proper. They were planning to meet in town for a bite to eat before heading up to Cowcaddens for the show.

  Jasmine never cared much for ballet growing up, and the appreciation she developed of it through her time at the SATD was largely on an intellectual rather than emotional level, but the last time she went with Michelle she had really enjoyed it. The absence of dialogue and the lack of narrative complexity meant she could switch off parts of her brain that were becoming overtaxed through work, allowing the music and the spectacle to wash over her for a couple of hours. It was almost like a state of meditation and her mind felt much the better for it afterwards.

  She had checked the clock as she uploaded the last of the files. Sharp Investigations was based in a two-storey office building in Arden, on a light industrial estate midway between Rouken Glen and the M77. As long as the traffic wasn’t too horrendous, she could make it back to her flat on Victoria Road in about fifteen minutes, leaving her time enough for a quick shower and change before heading into town.

  Jasmine glanced in her mirror as she left the car park at the rear of the building and noticed a silver Passat pull away from the kerb just a short distance down the street. Something about it bothered her, though she couldn’t say what. She pulled out on to the main drag of Nitshill Road, heading straight on at the roundabout instead of her normal left as there were temporary traffic lights on Thornliebank Road and she didn’t want to be stuck in a queue for twenty minutes while a crew of workmen got on with the important task of sitting in a van reading the paper. She hung a left at the next roundabout, taking her on to Fenwick Road, which was when she noticed the same Passat two cars behind her.

  Harry Deacon had warned her about the onset of paranoia that could come with this job. Spend days at a time following people’s vehicles, becoming familiar with surveillance tactics and pursuit patterns and you could begin to see those tactics and patterns in the behaviour of the cars around you. See the same car behind you after a couple of turns and you could convince yourself you were being tailed, when in fact five out of the next ten cars might make the same turns because they were on the common route towards a particular destination. If the guy in the Passat was going from the industrial estate to the south side or the city centre, wouldn’t he also take Fenwick Road if he knew there were temporary lights on the parallel Thornliebank Road?

  Jasmine caught herself rationalising this, and rejected the reassurance her simple explanation was offering. She reminded herself that something had troubled her about that Passat from the moment she saw it, well before she noticed it was still behind her. Harry Deacon’s advice was a useful bulwark against letting the job get too far inside your head, but Jasmine had learned a greater lesson from Glen Fallan: when your mind or your body are telling you to be afraid, you should listen.

  Your brain takes in far more information about your environment than you are conscious of it processing, and we frequently ignore danger because we try to rationalise feelings that are not rational but instinctive. We look for explanations for why we feel an irrational anxiety, explanations that always seek to reassure us nothing is wrong, ignoring the fact that, as Fallan put it, ‘the part of your brain that tells you to run because your early-warning system detected a predator or an avalanche was there a lot longer than language and responds a lot more immediately’.

  For whatever reason, Jasmine had felt uneasy at the sight of that Passat pulling away behind her, and now it was still on her tail. Her conscious mind was busy looking for reasons why she shouldn’t be worried, a seduction she had learned to resist.

  She checked her rear-view again, trying to get a look at who was behind the wheel. It was difficult to see through the moving obstacle of the Mondeo direc
tly behind her. She couldn’t make out a face, just a baseball cap with the visor pulled down low. That alone might have been part of what spooked her.

  She slowed down a little, checking her pace so that she would meet a gap in the oncoming traffic just as she reached the junction with Merrycrest Avenue on the right-hand side. She turned without indicating, nipping across the junction before a further convoy of cars barred the route to the Passat. He’d have to wait to turn, and if he did turn it was official: she was being tailed, albeit not by someone who knew how to keep it discreet. Merrycrest Avenue linked Fenwick Road to the parallel Langside Drive, but it was hardly a rat run. The likelihood that he would ‘just happen’ to be going up it was minuscule.

  Jasmine accelerated gently, staying under twenty, glancing in the rear-view mirror every few seconds. The near-side traffic heading southbound on Fenwick Road blocked her view of whether the Passat had kept going past the junction, but so far he definitely hadn’t turned into it.

  Okay.

  The other thing about irrational reactions, as Fallan had admitted, was that much of the time nothing precipitated from them and you’d seldom discover quite why you’d felt spooked. Nonetheless, these false alarms constituted a modest premium for such a vital insurance policy: when it paid out, the stakes could be very high indeed.

  Jasmine hung a left at the end on to Langside Drive, figuring she could follow it all the way around Queen’s Park to where it met Victoria Road, not far from her flat. It occurred to her that this was actually a quite valuable alternative route to have in the bank, her Glasgow geography still very much a work in progress.

  She glanced in her mirror as she approached the roundabout at Muirend Road, which was when she saw the silver Passat emerge from Merryburn Avenue two junctions behind her. He had taken a parallel road and reacquired her, waiting for her to pass and then pulling out with two cars’ cover.

  Shit.

  She was definitely being tailed and it did look like he knew what he was doing. Now she wasn’t merely a little spooked but genuinely rattled.

  He had been waiting for her close to the office. That meant he knew where she worked. At this time of day, from his point of view, the greatest probability was that she was heading home, so that suggested he was trying to find out where she lived. This would double the number of pick-up points he could use for future surveillance, and that was only the most palatable of the reasons he might want to know this.

  She had to lose him. She went through the roundabout and proceeded towards the junction with Merrylee Road, where she knew there were traffic lights. They were green as she came in sight. She was willing them to turn amber so that she could slow down on the approach then speed through as they changed, with at least one of the two cars between them preventing the Passat from following her. The lights did change, but she was thwarted by the Nissan Micra in front, its white-haired driver braking well before the amber turned to red.

  The Micra was just as cautious about getting under way again, showing no signs of movement until the signals were fully green. It was long enough to make most drivers consider a peep on the horn in case the old dear had failed to notice the lights had changed. In Jasmine’s experience, this was often counterproductive as the inevitable fright tended to result in the driver stalling their vehicle in a panicked hurry to get going.

  With this thought, she devised a new stratagem for losing her tail. As the Micra finally began to move she allowed the Civic to stall, then feigned an authentically flapping response, turning the ignition with the car in gear to eat up a few more seconds.

  She gave an apologetic wave to the driver behind, pretending she was having trouble re-starting the Honda, then when the lights turned amber again she zipped through at speed. The car immediately behind her followed across the junction, but its successor didn’t risk it, leaving the Passat stranded. She sped on, waiting until the junction was out of sight in her rear-view, then turned right on Newlands Road, followed by two lefts. This allowed her to double back along Earlspark Avenue and take a snaking route through a number of quiet residential streets.

  As she reached Pollokshaws Road she took a long, careful look to her left before pulling out. There was no sign of the silver Passat, but her relief almost instantly gave way to a depressingly familiar feeling of failure.

  She had panicked at the thought of being followed home and in her desperation to lose her tail urgency had triumphed over judgment. She should have pulled a reciprocal: gone all the way around the roundabout at Muirend Road and doubled back to eyeball the bastard. She’d have got his registration and maybe even a look at his face if he wasn’t sharp enough to suss what was going on and get his head down. Either way, the tail would have ended then and there because he’d know he’d been burned.

  Instead, she’d learned nothing about him, meaning she’d be looking over her shoulder from here on in, every glimpse of a silver car putting her on edge.

  ‘Jasmine screws up,’ she muttered to herself.

  Collision Course

  Not that Jasmine had any real doubt Hamish Queen was holding out on her, but two days later she received hard evidence that firmly resolved the issue, while at the same time posing a number of new questions concerning why he’d be so blatantly lying about this.

  It came in the post, the black Companies House logo distinguishing the envelope from the usual pile of paperwork, junk mail and the occasional cheque. She had requested it almost a week ago, well before she’d firmed up a meeting with him, and she had been hoping to receive it before their interview, just in case he claimed to know nothing about the earlier company. At that point she had been reasonably expecting their meeting to yield at least a few more names, if nothing else. Instead, Hamish Queen was claiming that he couldn’t remember the names of anybody involved in the original Glass Shoe, other than the one she had given him – Tessa – and that of an actor who had died in 1993.

  To be fair, thirty years was a very long time. How many people might such a successful theatrical producer have worked with over that period? Hundreds, from London to New York, Sydney to Moscow, Tokyo to Paris. It was perfectly conceivable that he couldn’t remember the names of some actors he hired and just as quickly fired without a single play making it to the stage. It was also understandable that this was not an episode he cared to revisit, which would further consign its details to some oubliette of the mind, locked away so as not to rise to the surface unbidden. If those actors had never subsequently made anything of themselves, then it was all the more plausible that their surnames would fade from his memory. Could Jasmine remember the surnames of all the kids she had worked with in youth theatre, or even those of the students she’d performed with at the SATD a mere three years back?

  But by the same measure, could Hamish Queen forget the name of his partner in setting up his first company, especially when that man had gone on to become head of Arts Council Scotland?

  There it was, staring up at her from the desk: the official memorandum and articles of association:

  The Glass Shoe Company. Incorporated 18 May 1981.

  Managing director: Hamish Queen

  Company Secretary: Julian Sanquhar

  Jasmine checked online to make sure the document was referring to the same man. There was, understandably, no reference to his being a partner in the short-lived Glass Shoe Company, but Jasmine quickly learned that Julian Sanquhar had enough in common with Hamish Queen to leave no ambiguity. They were born in the same year into wealthy rural land-owning Scottish families – Queen in the Highlands, Sanquhar in Roxburghshire – and had both been educated at Gordonstoun. Queen had gone on to Cambridge to study history, Sanquhar to Oxford to read law, but upon graduation both initially sought careers in theatre. Queen, being of the more extrovert nature, had successfully established himself as a repertory actor, but the reputedly introspective Sanquhar, despite acquitting himself quite capably on stage as an undergraduate, had proven more drawn to meeting administrative rather than thes
pian challenges.

  On paper, and particularly in retrospect, it seemed an ideal pooling of talents: Hamish Queen, the man of grand vision and flamboyant audacity, augmented by Julian Sanquhar, the quietly ambitious facilitator. To Jasmine, this all the more keenly begged the question of what went wrong and, just as pertinently, why Queen was so determinedly lying about it.

  Whatever had happened, they didn’t work together again and, in keeping with what Queen told Jasmine, their paths had so seldom crossed thereafter that nobody seemed aware they had once had a professional relationship. No journalist or blogger appeared to have picked up on their Gordonstoun link, but unless you were specifically looking for it you wouldn’t think there was a connection. While Queen was raking in the millions putting on his glitzy musicals, Sanquhar was proving adept at making far smaller sums stretch as far as they’d go in a series of positions with regional theatres, arts funding bodies and charities.

  He wasn’t always just the man behind the scenes, although he had more of a public voice than public face. Sanquhar was an accomplished radio broadcaster, contributing to coverage of the arts and humanities for both Radio Four and Radio Scotland, with his two documentary series from Afghanistan, Voices of Camp Bastion and Voices Beyond Camp Bastion, garnering particularly high accolades. He worked in television also, but didn’t present any of the programmes he had written or produced.

  His stock was high at the BBC, and since standing down from his position as head of ACS it was widely believed he was imminently going to be appointed to the BBC Trust. This would be in addition to the various committees, boards and advisory bodies he sat on, all of which made Jasmine less than optimistic about the chances of being granted an audience.