She got off at the first station, dawdling on the platform, then skipped back on again just before the doors closed. The train pulled away and she caught the eye of a middle-aged man in a long coat, staring at her through the windows as the train pulled away. Could have been him, she supposed, or it could simply have been someone having a closer look at the daft lassie who couldn’t seem to make up her mind where she was getting off.
Her station came up next. This time she waited on board as the rest of the passengers disembarked, then hopped off when the urgent bleeps warned that the doors were about to close. The train pulled away, leaving Jasmine the furthest person back on the platform, from where she could see the last of the passengers making their way to the top of the stairs up ahead. Ordinarily, she felt vulnerable when she found herself walking through the station alone when it was late and dark, but tonight she only felt relief at the isolation, that finally she could be sure there was nobody following her.
Jasmine reached the top of the stairs and turned right on to the narrow passageway that spanned the tracks. As she did, she saw that the tree-lined lane leading to the station entrance on the main road was cut off by the figure of a grey-headed, heavy-set man in a long, black raincoat. Pure ancient. In his fifties.
He moved surprisingly fast but it was largely immaterial. Jasmine had nowhere to run but back down the stairs to the platform, and she had just got off the last train of the night. In any case, the paralysis of fear stifled the urge towards flight. She froze against the wall, cornering herself, her legs threatening to buckle.
Never mind run, she was doing well to remain standing.
‘Jasmine Sharp,’ he said. ‘Ever get that feeling when you realise you’re out of your depth to a quite catastrophic extent?’
His accent said London. Not pearly-king cockney; somewhat less of the lower orders than that, but definitely the capital. Quietly authoritative, a voice used to being listened to.
‘Four words. Glass Shoe: leave it. Understand?’
He thrust his face close to Jasmine’s and stared into her eyes. He had a big thick neck and a head so solid-looking she imagined you could hit it with an iron bar and the bar would bend.
She said nothing, her voice too dry to speak.
‘I’ve got four words too,’ said a second voice somewhere behind him. ‘Can I help you?’
This time the accent was local, the voice quiet, a polite inquiry.
Thick-neck didn’t turn around, barely took his eyes off of Jasmine. He glanced to the side only briefly, checking the position of the third party rather than giving him a full up-and-down.
‘This doesn’t concern you, mate. It isn’t what you think. The lady and I are just talking, and I don’t appreciate interruptions, so I strongly suggest you fuck off before you get hurt.’
‘And there was me about to say the exact same thing. What were the odds? You and I are on a wavelength, I can tell.’
Jasmine recognised more than just the accent this time. She couldn’t see past her tormentor but she knew who was standing behind him. Hope and release flooded through her and she issued an involuntary blubbing sound, part nervous giggle, part tears.
Her sense of relief was instantly truncated as thick-neck took a step back and his right hand slipped inside his coat. It emerged again in one swift, unbroken motion to extend in a straight line from his shoulder to the muzzle of a pistol.
Jasmine could see past him now. He was pointing the gun straight at Glen Fallan.
This was strongly contra-indicated.
Fallan looked thinner than she remembered, but perhaps this was because the man in front of him was squat. Fallan was built like a sprinter, the Londoner like a shot-putter. It was speed versus solidity, but it didn’t matter while thick-neck was holding a gun.
Fallan understood this, but seemed unnervingly relaxed. He explained why.
‘You’re not going to shoot me. I know that for two reasons. The first is that you reek of cop. I’m figuring ex, as you’re no spring chicken, and going by that accent you’re a long way off your old manor, so you do not want to end up explaining this to the Glesca polis.’
‘And what’s the second reason?’ thick-neck asked testily.
‘That you’re standing there listening to me talk.’
This was when Fallan demonstrated vividly that unless you’re going to use it, a gun is just something extra to carry. With his arm extended and an unnecessary weight at the end of it, thick-neck was off-balance and encumbered as Fallan made his lightning move. He seemed to hit his opponent in four or five different places in blindingly rapid succession, so quick that he didn’t even have time to reel from one blow before he was sustaining the next.
Fallan pinned him to the concrete face down, a foot on the small of his back, his arm stretched out behind him, locked straight in a strained and twisted-looking hold. The man’s face was pale and dazed, his breathing one elongated, broken gasp. Pain hadn’t fully registered yet: this was still the shock of impact.
The gun lay a few feet away, but Fallan didn’t seem interested in it right now.
‘I’ll give you this much,’ Fallan told him, his voice calm and quiet, ‘you chose your spot and your time really well. Late night, quiet and isolated. Statistically very unlucky you got interrupted. And statistically very unlikely I will either.’
Fallan gave the slightest tweak on the man’s fingers, eliciting a strangulated groan.
‘There are two hundred and six bones in the human body Do you know which one is the most painful to break?’
Jasmine saw the strain on his face as he summoned up a response.
‘Why don’t you tell me?’ he spluttered. It was intended to sound defiant, but his voice was too strained to suggest he had much in reserve by way of stoicism or nihilistic rage.
‘Sure,’ Fallan replied. ‘The answer is none, if you’re the one doing the breaking. As for which one is the most painful to have broken, well, that’s something we’re going to find out together over the next wee while unless you explain in detail who you are and what you want with my acquaintance Miss Sharp.’
‘It’s not me,’ he said immediately. ‘I’m just doing a job. And I wasn’t gonna lay a finger on her, I swear.’
‘Your name,’ Fallan prompted.
‘Rees. Darren Rees.’
‘Who are you working for?’ Jasmine asked.
‘Hardwicke Chambers. It’s a law firm.’
‘You don’t look like a silk to me. Jasmine, fire up your phone and look up that name.’
‘I’m not bleeding lying. It’s a law firm. I’m ex-Met. I do jobs for them, but I’m not going to hospital for them.’
Fallan gave Rees’s fingers another slight twist, causing his spine to arch and his head to rise in pained response.
‘You may have taken that out of your own hands when you started threatening young women in railway stations.’
‘I wasn’t gonna lay a finger on her, on my mother’s life. I don’t do anything illegal. Close to the line sometimes, but I stay inside of it. It’s a law firm, for Christ’s sake. Sometimes I find out information for them, sometimes I find people. Somebody’s making a nuisance of themselves, I let them know it’s in their best interests to back off. Make them think it’s more trouble than it’s worth. I’m not allowed to do anything that’s against the law. Course, the subjects don’t know that, but that’s how it works.’
Jasmine had found Hardwicke Chambers on her phone. They were a major legal outfit based in Holborn. Their official website wasn’t giving much away, but further down the screen she could see search results referring to libel cases and super-injunctions.
‘Nothing illegal?’ she asked. ‘I realise Scots law is different, but I’m pretty sure petrol-bombing cars is against the law in London too.’
A note of confusion found its way on to Rees’s face amid the sweat, strain and ruddy-cheeked agony.
‘I don’t know anything about that. I seriously don’t. I got sent here today wi
th the instructions to find Jasmine Sharp, give her that message and let her know I meant business.’
‘Who are you working for?’ she demanded.
‘I told you: Hardwicke Chambers.’
‘I mean who are they representing: who is the client?’
‘I don’t know. I don’t even know what the message refers to. That’s how it works.’
‘Two hundred and six bones,’ Fallan reminded him, digging a heel into his spine.
‘They never tell me,’ he spluttered desperately. ‘I don’t get told the client’s names. It protects them, it protects me.’
‘Not tonight it doesn’t,’ Fallan growled.
‘He’s telling the truth,’ Jasmine said, to which Fallan responded by relaxing his grip a little. ‘You can let him go. I think I know who the client is.’
‘Who?’
A person who had the connections and the resources so that the normal rules didn’t apply. And when he did get into trouble, there was always somebody who came along and made his problems go away.
Except this time.
‘You fair chose your moment,’ Jasmine told him.
Fallan was sitting at the square pine table in her little kitchen, a stillness about him that was far from reassuring. It was like the surface of the deepest river, concealing a dozen deadly undertows. Once you had slipped beneath its waters there would be no trace of you ever found again.
He was seated precisely where he had sat almost a year ago, back when she had wondered at the mirror-world she found herself in, in which she was dodging the police and inviting a confessed murderer into her home. This time it was worse than that: he wasn’t just a confessed murderer, he was the man who had confessed specifically to murdering her father. It was bloody Star Wars in reverse. She had come to believe that Fallan actually was her father, only to be shattered by the revelation that he was the man who had killed him.
He had denied her the chance to know her father, to ever meet him; and even if he was so bad, the chance to change him.
Fallan had taken from her something irreplaceable, committed something unforgiveable. This latter was immaterial as he had not sought forgiveness for this deed, nor shown any remorse. And yet he was the man she had turned to in her time of need.
That had been the third awkward phone call of a few mornings ago: a phone call she’d sworn she’d never make, back outside the refuge when he told her it was all she had to do if she was ever in trouble.
‘Fuck you,’ she’d told him. ‘When I leave here, you’ll never hear from me again.’
But even in her tears and anger, even as she cursed him to his face and made her vow, she’d kept the number.
As she’d watched the flames consume the inside of her beloved Honda, her mum’s beloved Honda, she had asked herself: if they were responding with intimidation and violence, then what option did she have to return fire?
Only one.
‘I got here earlier,’ he replied. ‘I wanted to get the lie of the land, and it’s easier to watch for who’s watching someone else if you observe from a wider perimeter. I clocked the guy well before he started following you. He was parked along the street from here, chose a spot with good sightlines to your front close. People on surveillance take great care to make sure they’re not seen by their subject, but they can sometimes forget about everybody else.’
‘Were you in the bar tonight?’ Jasmine asked, wondering how she could have failed to recognise him.
‘No. But I knew he was. I’m as patient as I am practised at stalking my prey from a distance. So, you want to tell me who you’ve been upsetting this time?’
Jasmine began to recount the events that had transpired since the morning Mrs Petrie walked through her office door. As she did so, she was surprised and a little dismayed to discover just how much at ease she felt in Fallan’s company, and how quickly so. Despite how she urged herself to detest him, how she tried to think of what he’d taken from her, she felt strangely comforted by his presence. Truth was, he had taken away a man she’d never met, so there was no face, no memory to fuel outrage or bitterness. But most of all, the reason she found herself relaxed enough to open up and confide in this man was that, sitting close to him, she felt safe. Despite all she knew him capable of, and very possibly because of it, she felt more secure than she had since, well, since the last time he’d sat in this kitchen.
She had to admit that at some fundamental, instinctive level she trusted him; her instinct vindicated by the hard evidence of experience. In fact, appalling as it was to consider, given what she and Fallan had been through, she couldn’t name anybody else alive whom she trusted more.
Thus it was only in talking to him that she felt able to bring forth something that had been lurking in her mind for days, growing all the larger the longer she tried to pretend it wasn’t there.
‘She’s dead, isn’t she?’ she said. ‘Hamish Queen killed her back in 1981, but he was to the manor born and it got covered up. Now I’ve threatened to unearth the story all these years later and he’s released the hounds. First somebody starts following me, then they petrol-bomb my car, and now I’ve got some ex-cop working for a major law firm being sent to put the frighteners on me.’
‘Who is this Hardwicke Chambers mob, then?’ Fallan asked.
Jasmine spun her laptop around on the table so that the screen was facing him.
‘They appear to be a firm that specialises in making rich people’s problems disappear. Libel cases, Mary Bell orders, privacy injunctions, anonymity super-injunctions …’
‘And we can assume that’s only for the cases that get as far as legal recourse,’ Fallan said. ‘I wonder how many problems are quietly resolved as a result of warnings from the likes of Mr Rees. Is there a list of their clients anywhere?’
‘Not that I’ve found,’ Jasmine replied. ‘And I can’t imagine there would be, as that would somewhat defeat the purpose of a super-injunction.’
‘True enough,’ Fallan conceded. ‘Which Premier League footballer has been caught shagging the nanny: the press can’t tell you because of a super-injunction issued by Hardwicke Chambers, whose clients include …’
‘The information will be out there, though,’ Jasmine insisted. ‘Google Hamish Queen’s divorces and throw in Hardwicke Chambers as a cross-reference.’
Jasmine watched the reflected glow of the screen play across Fallan’s face, his eyes narrowed in concentration as his fingers tapped the keyboard.
‘It would be nice to have confirmation,’ she said, ‘but even without it, I’m one hundred per cent certain he’s their client.’
Fallan’s fingers stopped tapping and his head moved backwards just a centimetre.
‘Not any more,’ he said, turning the laptop around so that Jasmine could see the screen.
It was showing the BBC website. The story was linked from the top search result, less than thirty minutes old.
Hamish Queen was dead.
PART II
Prelude to a Kill
Tessa was somewhere else, in a place outside her physical form, a spectator upon what was happening to her. So often she’d heard the term ‘out-of-body experience’ and thought it so much mumbo-jumbo. She knew what it meant now: a defence mechanism, detaching you from your present circumstances because you couldn’t bear the view from within.
She had been drugged, she was sure. Something in her tea, most likely. Everything was slightly out of focus, but this effect wasn’t merely chemical.
She wasn’t seeing herself, not her face, but she could see a woman there and she knew the woman was her. She could see what was being done to the woman. She knew the woman’s name was Tessa Garrion, but something inside wouldn’t let her connect Tessa Garrion to herself. It wasn’t happening to someone else, it was happening to someone she once was, and someone she would have to be again, but not someone she was right now.
She had been so many women. Lysistrata, Katherina, Miranda, Clytemnestra. She knew how to step in and out
of all of them. Now she had stepped out of Tessa, because it was the only place to go to.
It wasn’t safe here, outside herself. It wasn’t comfortable. There was not sanctuary and there was not reassurance. There was only nothingness, but this state of oblivion was a temptation. It called to her, offered to soothe, to take away the pain.
Perhaps absenting herself was a form of resistance. It would be her body, but it would be a mere vessel, devoid of what made her Tessa, like she could void it of what made it all the characters she played. It would not be her. She would not be here.
She felt anger at herself for being so foolish as to have trusted him.
She had been seduced. What he was doing to her body was rape, but her trust had been seduced, and she’d been an easy mark. He had manipulated her, manoeuvring her to exactly where he needed her in order that he could do this. There had been others involved too; were they complicit or oblivious, willingly playing their parts or used and manipulated like she had been?
He had talked about his art, talked about his vision and the place he saw for her in it. It made her feel so foolish when she found out what he really saw in her, and that it was all he really saw.
He had been stronger than her; quicker too. She knew further resistance would only bring further violence, and that terrified her, as she had never experienced violence quite like the brutality with which he had subjugated her.
He was inside her already: there was no preventing that now, no undoing it. Why do anything that might prolong the act? She could float further and further away, deeper into this inviting state of delirium, hide there until this was over. Hide this whole event away inside her mind forever.
Except she knew she couldn’t do that. She’d always know where it was kept. She’d always know this happened, always know she had been beaten into submission and treated as meat. She’d always know how the worst of men saw her, and she’d love every man a little less because of it.
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