When the Devil Drives

by Christopher Brookmyre

  He had been rebuffed by Darius in all attempts to secure a new interview, but was confident in concluding that the whole thing had been an elaborate publicity stunt, albeit one that had ultimately backfired upon its perpetrator.

  Neither Jasmine nor Fallan were quite so sure.

  There was little doubt Darius wanted the notoriety, but he may have believed it would come at no cost. He didn’t need to tell Neumann how the video had come into his possession, and nor was there any danger the German could identify the location or the girl. They needed to talk to someone who could tell them what went on that last night at Kildrachan.

  It was time for a phone call Jasmine had been very much looking forward to making.

  ‘Hello, this is Jasmine Sharp of Sharp Investigations.’

  ‘Miss Sharp, as I’ve warned you before, I’ve been instructed to consider—’

  ‘Yeah, I heard,’ she interrupted. ‘I’ll be brief. Tell Murray Maxwell I want to talk to somebody about Sammy Finnegan, Hamish Queen, Kildrachan House and a shitload of LSD. My first choice is your boss, but I’d settle for a journalist.’

  ‘Murray wasn’t averse to a bit of experimentation. Used to make me laugh whenever I saw him play that straight-edge Eliot Ness cipher on TV.’

  Jasmine clicked her mouse and stopped the playback, glancing across at her guest. Murray Maxwell was sitting in the cramped confines of Sharp Investigations, looking precisely as comfortable as Jasmine wanted him to be. He was a man who looked like he was used to spacious, uncluttered office suites, broad windows, a view of the Clyde, conversation-piece lobby furniture and fresh-brewed coffee on tap. The absence of all those things was the least of what was making him uncomfortable, however.

  He wasn’t like she had pictured him. Now in his mid-fifties, she was expecting someone who looked like that most familiar of sights to Jasmine: a retired cop. He was businesslike in his attire, but most certainly did not look like a businessman. There were subtle hints of flamboyance about his appearance, the cut of his suit, the shade and style of his shirt. A man who knew what looked good on him and what didn’t. There was no danger of anybody thinking he was an executive in an accountancy firm, for instance.

  He was undoubtedly good-looking, a handsome figure still. You could see the younger man who had been Inspector Kelvin, but there was no suggestion of faded grandeur about him, of his best days being at his back. Jasmine imagined that ordinarily he would exude an easy confidence stemming from being the most important or even just the best-looking man in any given place.

  She’d bet he was an accomplished networker, the hand everybody wanted to shake, an expert at working the room.

  He wasn’t going to do so well working this one.

  He had tried to turn on the charm, complimenting her on the Ramsay case and asking her about her own acting experience. He had done his research, even knew her mum had been an actress. This had threatened to do a job on Jasmine, tempting her off track, until she remembered that one of the broadsheets had included an almost intrusively in-depth background piece on her and it was presumably still available online.

  She stared at him, not challenging him for a response to the recording, just curious to see how he’d react.

  ‘At least I know you must grasp why I haven’t been very keen to talk to you,’ he said. ‘I apologise for that, but you have to understand what’s at stake right now. I have put so much, so much of my life into my work in television. This kind of opportunity doesn’t come around often, and it’s so delicately in the balance. Any hint of scandal and it’s gone. You know what the papers are like.’

  He spoke the truth. She had read up on him and been intrigued by his unorthodox but ultimately astute career path. He had given an interview in which he explained his move into production as being born of an awareness that he had a limited shelf life as an actor, especially when he was so strongly associated with one particular role. ‘I thought being on the production side would allow me to create drama that might offer new roles for me, but I got so engulfed by the process, just too busy. Plus I realised it would just seem so obvious that I’d parachuted myself in.’

  Prior to that, he explained, he had feared he’d struggle to get work elsewhere, and anyway didn’t want to uproot himself and his family from the west of Scotland. That said, he cited a downside to life in his home town that was also a factor in moving behind the cameras.

  ‘Once you’re a fixture in a programme like Raintown Blue, an almost iconically Glaswegian show, you’re no longer an actor: you’re part of the landscape, part of the furniture. It’s the friendliest city I’ve ever been in, but people can act like they own you. That’s why I decided I’d rather find something else to do than end up with an annual pay packet from panto just because I used to be Inspector Kelvin.’

  For someone who had otherwise proven himself a politically smart operator, this had turned out to be a particularly ill-chosen remark, the tabloids seizing upon it and spinning it to sound like he was slagging off all of Glasgow’s esteemed pantorati. It had taken a lot of finessing to put out this particular fire, so Jasmine appreciated why allegations of drug-taking and a long-concealed link to the victim of the most high-profile murder of the year were not complications he wanted to be dealing with at the moment.

  ‘I had no idea Tessa was still missing until you told me just now,’ he stated. ‘I remember the police coming to the house and Hamish being taken in for questioning. I think Finlay was taken in too at one stage. But then it blew over just as suddenly as it had begun and I just assumed everything had been sorted.

  ‘After that, we all went our very separate ways. Not much chance of a cast reunion: it was something we all wanted to put behind us and forget about. And by that I don’t just mean the police or the arguments or the drugs, but the all-encompassing sense of professional failure. I really had barely thought about it again until you got in touch, and then of course that was massively compounded by what happened to Hamish.’

  ‘You never worried over someone blabbing about the drugs?’ asked Fallan.

  ‘It was a very distant, vague fear, a niggling thought in the middle of the night from time to time, but only once the storylines in Raintown Blue became more drug-oriented and Kelvin became what Sam Finnegan so flatteringly described as “an Eliot Ness cipher”. It would be far more damaging now. Actors are allowed a bit of hedonistic indulgence; it’s almost expected of you. But once you go corporate, it’s different rules.’

  ‘Did you have any contact with Russell Darius after Kildrachan?’ Jasmine inquired.

  ‘No. We were working on different things and then he went off to America. I didn’t know he was even living in the UK until that spat over funding.’

  ‘Back in the early eighties, were you aware of the rumours that he was in possession of a snuff movie?’

  ‘Vaguely, inasmuch as it was a story I only paid even cursory attention to because it was about Darius. I thought it was bollocks. Snuff movies were an urban myth, but I do remember thinking that if anybody ever actually had one in their possession it would be him.’

  ‘Do you know what this movie was alleged to show?’

  ‘No. The news stories I read were big on outrage and short on detail. Where are you going with this?’

  From the increasing guardedness in his tone, Jasmine could tell that he thought he already knew.

  ‘According to the German journalist to whom Darius screened the video, the snuff clip shows a woman being stabbed to death by one of two figures in hooded robes, in a big grand room. The reason the police came to question everybody at Kildrachan was that Tormod McDonald told Sergeant Strang he had seen a woman being stabbed and someone dragging a body through the grounds of the house.

  ‘The next day, Saffron refused to answer her door and told Finlay Weir to go away. When asked why she might be behaving this way Darius suggested that what they had done the night before may have gone too far. Saffron’s next move was to tell the police that she had seen Tessa get on
the last bus out of town. She was the only witness to this, and therefore the last person to claim to have seen Tessa alive. She then quit her job, vacated her rented house and left town for good.’

  ‘You’re saying you think this snuff movie is real, that it shows Darius and Saffron killing Tessa? That’s ridiculous. How would you know it was even shot at Kildrachan? It could have been made anywhere, two years later or five years before.’

  He was saying this but the shock on his face said he feared it was true and he was looking for something to cling on to as the deluge threatened to swamp him.

  ‘There were paintings on the walls. An eagle taking a fish from the river, a hunting party, and—’

  ‘Rutting stags,’ Maxwell interrupted, his face suddenly pale and drawn.

  Jasmine gave him a moment, but just a moment. His thoughts were far away, in place and most definitely in time. She had to press him while he was reeling.

  ‘We need to know what you remember about that night. Finnegan said you did drugs with Darius and Saffron, and took part in these rituals.’

  ‘I did,’ he admitted. ‘But not that night. I was with Julian, in the kitchen mostly, other end of the house. Darius was getting increasingly strange and so around Julian was always the safest place to be. A few single malts was as hardcore as it got. I was hiding, really. I’d had enough.’

  ‘Of the drugs, or of the rituals?’

  ‘Both.’

  ‘Were they getting out of hand? Escalating?’

  ‘In a way, but I wasn’t freaked out or anything, I just thought it was all a bit silly. Candles and pentagrams, all that Aleister Crowley crap. It was funny at first, even quite excitingly spooky, but all that black-magic stuff very quickly becomes self-evidently daft. Sitting around, burning incense and chanting meaningless incantations: might as well be in church. That’s why Saffron was the perfect foil for Darius. Any new-age nonsense, or even dark-age nonsense, and she was in there.’

  ‘You’re saying you were at the other end of the house, and so saw nothing, heard nothing,’ recapped Fallan. ‘Convenient.’

  ‘I didn’t see or hear nothing: just nothing pertaining to Darius, as was my firm intention. I saw and heard Tormod: that’s the person you should be pressing on this. He’s the one who was behaving erratically that night, bouncing off the walls and acting like a man possessed. Or perhaps like a man who has just been released from possession and is distraught at discovering what has happened while his conscience wasn’t minding the store.’

  ‘What are you saying?’

  ‘Well, it’s clear you know Tessa was with Hamish, Finlay was with Mhairi, Saffron was with Darius and now I’m telling you I was with Julian. Aren’t you forgetting somebody?’

  ‘Adam Nolan,’ Jasmine replied.

  ‘Adam Nolan. He was the only veteran of the Glass Shoe debacle that I had any real later contact with. We remained friends, and even worked together when I was in a couple of episodes of First Do No Harm. He was tickled when I told him I’d learned young Tormod had become a man of the cloth, and a fire-and-brimstone, morally censorious one at that. As Adam so memorably put it, “For a Presbyterian, he could suck cock like a Catholic altar boy.”

  ‘He was always hanging around Adam, in the thrall of a fascination he either didn’t fully understand or more likely didn’t want to give its true name. Adam didn’t do anything about it. He was experienced and wary enough to know it might come to nothing, with dangerous consequences. The age of consent was still twenty-one in those days. But that night, amid the widespread awareness that everything was falling apart, a sense of abandon was abroad. Tormod finally took a taste of what he wanted, and then, like many males in the possession of lust and ardour, as soon as he came the spell was badly broken.’

  ‘Hence then charging into Finlay’s room,’ Jasmine suggested. ‘Accusing him of corrupting his sister. Major transference.’

  ‘Self-disgust is a hell of a comedown. But it would be wrong to say he sobered up instantly. He’d had a lot to drink, as well as some speed and some poppers too. His head was all over the place. He was wailing like a banshee, pinballing in and out of rooms, totally out of control. He might not have been in a condition to make a reliable witness, but if anybody saw anything that night it would have been him.’

  He wasn’t very forthcoming when we asked him about this stuff before.’

  ‘Oh, I think he might be a little more open once he realises you’re aware that the Reverend McDonald of Balnavon, one of Fleet Street’s professional homophobes, secretly loves the boabby.’

  ‘What a helpful man,’ Jasmine said as soon as Maxwell had departed. ‘Do you think he was lying to us?’

  ‘Yes, but helpfully,’ Fallan replied. ‘I don’t know quite what, but there was something very specific he was lying to us about.’

  ‘He was way too reasonable all of a sudden, for a guy who had been so evasive – and even too keen to explain why he’d been evasive.’

  ‘He was very quick to give up somebody else too: threw us Tormod – something he’s kept his silence on for decades – just like that, which means he wanted the heat diverted away from wherever it was headed.’

  She thought back to what they’d been talking about, searching for what it might have been that had precipitated his emergency manoeuvres. Rather than replay the discussion in her head she remembered she could replay it on the covert recording she’d made. That was when she realised her tactical mistake. And just when she thought she was being clever too.

  Jasmine screws up.

  ‘Shit.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I shouldn’t have played him Finnegan’s recording. It just reminded him that Finnegan wasn’t there that night. That meant Maxwell could say he was at the other end of the house with Julian and therefore had nothing to do with whatever happened. He knows Darius isn’t going to talk to us and that we’ve no idea how to get in touch with Saffron. So he chooses Julian as a plausible alibi, knowing we’re very unlikely to get a second pass at him either.’

  ‘Still,’ Fallan said, ‘he’s tossed us a hell of a chip.’

  ‘Quite,’ she agreed. ‘We can finally find out exactly what Tormod told the police. And maybe what he didn’t.’

  The Gift of Motive

  Catherine didn’t spare the horsepower as she drove back from Cragruthes one more time, determined to make it home before the boys were in their beds, but a series of tailbacks had her revising her hopes downwards in twenty-minute increments. When she drove out of Alnabruich she had estimated that with just an acceptable degree of naughtiness concerning the speed limit she could be home in time to sit and watch them both play in the garden for a while; maybe let Fraser stay up a bit later than usual if it stayed dry. Duncan generally got to stay up longer than his younger brother, but had been made to understand that it wasn’t a hard and fast rule.

  Sitting stationary for ten minutes a time at a contraflow, her aspirations had become more and more modest: be back in time to give Fraser his bath; back in time to tuck him in and read a story; back in time for Duncan’s bath; for Duncan’s lights-out time.

  With Glasgow finally rising in the middle distance she told herself she’d settle for finding Duncan hadn’t yet nodded off, so that she could get a kiss and a cuddle.

  She needed the reassurance of her children’s touch, her family’s presence, being one of the things she could rely upon to make sense and keep everything else in perspective. It was, she well understood, an indication that she knew this investigation was gradually slipping away. Another Moira-ism: ‘When the job’s doing your box in, remind yourself what really matters.’

  And it surely was doing her box in.

  It was no longer, by any definition, ‘early days’, and they were still chasing shadows, searching for anything that might resemble a plausible motive for killing Hamish Queen. They were still waiting to hear somebody say a bad word about him, with even his ex-wives blaming his workaholism rather than any more venal reasons for
their marriages breaking up.

  ‘We were all just mistresses,’ one of them had put it, in an appropriately luvvie way. ‘Hamish was married to the theatre.’

  And in that relationship, it seemed, he had been slavishly faithful. It was his first and only true love, one to which he was devoted above anything else. He made millions but lived to work. One ex claimed their four-night honeymoon had been the only holiday he accompanied her on throughout their eight-year marriage.

  The sharpest tones had come from his second wife, Julia, the mother of his daughter Charlotte. She had bemoaned the fact that Hamish had so seldom been around for their little girl; her anger compounded by the fact that Charlotte, perhaps inevitably, grew up to worship him.

  There was some anger. There was some bitterness. There was no hate. There was nobody who hated Hamish Queen. There was nobody who wanted him dead.

  They had discovered the gun, but that turned out to be something of a mirage. The bullet had been found, embedded in stone at the foot of the castle walls, the hole covered over by ivy. It was a .338, as Mark Brooks had predicted, and ballistics matched it to the rifle from the river, so they had the murder weapon but, crucially, not the means of death. If the killing was the work of a hired professional, then the AX rifle was not the murderer’s instrument. The assassin was, and the trail of this sniper was very cold.

  Catherine knew nobody was blaming her, but that didn’t feel like any kind of consolation. In fact, she’d had a call from Graeme Sunderland while she sat in that interminable tailback, the content of which would have been less disturbing had it constituted a demand for progress and an old-fashioned chewing out.

  He was being unreasonably reasonable, which had set her on edge, because she could tell he was uneasy. And yet he claimed he wasn’t getting leaned on. The political pressure had eased, and that in itself, he said, was indicative of how nobody had a clue what was going on here.

  ‘Sometimes the pressure’s useful because you can trace where it’s coming from,’ he admitted, ‘follow the ripples back to the source of the disturbance. It can point you in interesting directions: suspicions people have, worries, grudges, even plain paranoia. But over this? Nothing.’