‘Look at me and keep looking at me,’ he instructed.
‘What is it?’
‘The bloke I saw in Balnavon. I just spotted him on the other side of the street.’
‘He’s been following us?’
‘Yeah, but I don’t know how. I’ve been keeping an eye out for a tail, and we doubled back to get here.’
‘He’s good, then.’
‘Maybe not that good. I just made him for the second time.’
Fallan waited a few moments and then got up, handing her some cash.
‘Wait five, get the bill and I’ll meet you back at the garage,’ he said, his voice dark with intent.
‘Hang on, this isn’t going to be one of those situations where you come back with blood on your hands and give me a one-liner, is it?’
‘I just want to find out what he’s driving, maybe get a plate.’
‘Oh.’
Jasmine sat in the reception area of the garage and waited, trying not to keep checking the clock, trying not to admit she was worried. Ten minutes passed. Fifteen. Twenty. The guy behind the desk was starting to look antsy, the Land Rover all fixed up in the forecourt and the clock edging nearer and nearer eight o’clock and closing time.
Her mobile rang and she almost leapt in her seat, fishing it hurriedly out of her pocket. She felt a little sick when she saw the caller wasn’t Fallan.
Her phone didn’t recognise the number.
‘Jasmine?’ asked a male voice. ‘It’s Callum Ross, from Culfieth Hydro. We spoke a few days ago about Tessa Garrion. Listen, I’ve got some new information, if you’re still interested.’
‘Very. Fire away.’
‘Actually, its old information, but it’s new to me and that’s kind of the point. Your visit fair got the old cogs turning. Us retired polis hate it when we remember unanswered questions, especially from the cases when you were told to stop asking them. I made a few calls, looking to dig up what was on file regarding Tessa Garrion.’
Jasmine was doubly curious now, as there had been nothing on STORM, but she had been warned it only went back twenty years.
‘You mentioned she’d gone to London for a while, so I got an old mate of mine in the Met to do a search. She was on their files. They wanted to speak to her as part of a murder investigation, summer of 1981.’
‘She was a suspect?’
‘No. They thought she might be a witness. If she’d been a suspect we may have got a bulletin about it, though communications between different forces was haphazard in those days. It was still the age of steam. These days, if another force was seeking her as a witness it would have been flagged up the second we put her name into a computer, but back then not a lot trickled down to a backwater like Balnavon.’
‘What was the case?’
‘Reginald Sutton, a film producer. Low-budget crap: soft-core terribly British sex comedies and cheesy horror films. Found dead in his office, stabbed through the neck with a letter-opener. They arrested his missus for it. Forensics found … I hope you don’t mind me being graphic here.’
‘No, go on.’
‘Forensics found traces of vaginal fluid on his genitals. He was known for playing away, making use of the old casting couch and all that that entails. The Met cops reckoned the wife had walked in on him shagging some budding young actress and just lost the plot.’
‘So did they do her for it?’
‘No. She had a solid alibi, plus everyone the police spoke to said she was long past being bothered by the fact that her husband was a philanderer. They reckoned it more likely to have been a hit. Turned out Reggie had a lot of dodgy gangland connections. There was bent money pumped into all his films, partly laundering, partly so the villains could go to a few parties and premieres. He owed money to some dangerous people.’
So that explained why Tessa had apparently changed her mind and taken up Hamish’s offer to join his fledgling touring company. She wasn’t the future star sought by Man United, playing out the end of the season at Elgin City to get his head straight. She was sought by the police – and, more worryingly, quite probably the mob – because she had seen something that held the key to a murder.
That was why Finnegan had been able to call her bluff. She wasn’t going to phone the police about his drugs because she didn’t want them hearing her name, didn’t want them learning where she was. Tessa didn’t know that her name actually meant nothing to the cops in Balnavon, or at least she wasn’t taking any risks. If she came forward as a witness in a gangland murder investigation, then she knew she’d be a target; and if she had actually seen this bloody slaying first-hand, then she would have a gruesomely vivid picture of what might happen should the perpetrators ever catch up with her.
Finally, Jasmine saw Fallan come around the corner and into the forecourt. There was blood on his hands. And his nose. And his mouth.
She hurried outside to meet him.
‘What happened to you?’
‘He made me. Must have got too close. He doubled back without me seeing. I came around a corner and bang, there he was waiting for me. Put me down. Fair to say I didn’t get the plate.’
‘Are you all right?’
‘I can take a beating,’ Fallan replied sourly. ‘It’s one thing I can thank my late father for teaching me.’
The sky was turning to dusk as they reached Blackwater Cottage, the location Jasmine had been given as Darius’s address. It was signposted from the main road, but as the main road was barely worthy of its ‘B’ status, she was glad of the sat-nav to have got even this far.
Inside, she was cursing the Land Rover, as she would very much have preferred to be making this approach two or three hours ago, with the sun still bright in the sky.
Despite the modest-sounding classification of its name, the cottage looked a fairly sizeable property, sheltered in the cleft of a steep and narrow valley. They could see it nestled below them, once they had turned, past the Private signs, on to a tight single-track road that wound down the incline in switchbacks. Fallan guided the Land Rover cautiously on its descent, aware that the hedges and trees flanking both sides might make it hard to see if something happened to be approaching around the next corner.
In the event, something was, and when it did they could hardly miss it; in fact, missing it was going to be the main problem. They heard the sudden gunning of an engine and the crunch of tyres on a loose surface, and turned the final bend in time to see a black BMW coming head-on at speed.
‘He’s not going to stop,’ Jasmine realised in alarm.
‘Get the plate,’ said Fallan, braking and turning the wheel.
‘What?’
‘Get the plate!’ he repeated, slewing the Land Rover as far into the side as he could manage, making room for the BMW to pass, which it only managed at the cost of a wing mirror to each vehicle.
The dazzle of headlights prevented Jasmine getting a bead on the plate before the car crunched along their flank, but she managed a good look from the rear, repeating the registration to herself until she could get out her phone and key it into a note.
‘I hope that wasn’t Darius,’ Jasmine said.
‘I doubt it. Didn’t you see that guy?’
‘No, I was looking for the plate, remember? What about him?’
‘Ski mask. I suspect naughtiness.’
Jasmine phoned Rab Forrest at Galt Linklater with the plate and requested he get her a PNC check post-haste.
Fallan drove the Land Rover slowly and softly as he covered the rest of the distance to the cottage. The four-by-four rolled over the final few yards at walking pace, the engine already off.
‘Get out quietly,’ he said in a near whisper. ‘Don’t close the door.’
Jasmine climbed delicately from the vehicle, watching where she put her feet, holding the door carefully so that it didn’t fall shut. As she looked towards the cottage she heard a creak and saw the front door swing inwards, then froze to the spot as a figure emerged on rapid but unsteady feet, h
olding a shotgun. He was male, short, slight of frame, bearded, wild-eyed, jumpy and bleeding.
Russell Darius.
Jasmine turned to look across the Land Rover and saw that Fallan wasn’t there any more. He had disappeared from view as surely as he had just teleported out of there.
It took Darius a second to see her, as though in his frantic and enraged daze he had been so intent upon the person he expected to find that he needed a moment to register the one who was actually there. Once he’d clocked her, though, he had eyes for nothing else. He levelled the shotgun in his hands, his eyes glaring down the barrels.
‘Who the blazes are you?’ he demanded. ‘What do you want?’
Jasmine couldn’t speak, couldn’t move, other than to raise her hands in surrender.
Blood was trickling from his hairline. It ran into his left eye and he raised a hand to wipe it, cradling the shotgun in the crook of his right arm. The barrels dipped a little, then jerked upwards sharply as the gun was wrested from his grasp and a pistol placed at the back of his head.
Fallan.
‘We’re private investigators,’ he said, sliding the shotgun away across the earth with his foot and beckoning Jasmine forward to take it.
She found the catch and broke the gun, pulling out both rounds. Fallan moved away from Darius, stepping around to face him but keeping the pistol trained, thumb on the safety. Darius looked threatened but less manic, as though it was easier being the one under the gun than waving it.
‘We’re looking for an actress named Tessa Garrion,’ Jasmine said, finding her voice. ‘She disappeared thirty years ago from Kildrachan House near Balnavon, where she was part of the Glass Shoe Company.’
Darius looked quizzically from her to Fallan.
‘You came to talk about Shakespeare but you brought a nine-mil?’ he asked, his well-travelled accent betraying just the subtlest remnant of Geordie. ‘They take theatre seriously where you come from.’
‘Glasgow audiences are pretty merciless,’ Fallan replied. ‘Bear that in mind when the lady starts asking you questions.’
‘Can’t we discuss this civilly, inside?’ he pleaded. ‘I’ve just had somebody break into my house and I’ve taken a very nasty bang on the head. I’d like to clean up the wound, maybe have a seat, make sure my brains aren’t falling out.’
‘No,’ ruled Fallan. ‘Let’s stay as we are. I’d say a bit of moonlight theatre would be appropriate.’
Darius put a hand to his bleeding scalp.
‘And I’d say that was in rather poor taste.’
‘You would know,’ said Jasmine.
‘Not a big horror fan, then?’ Darius replied sardonically.
‘Horror, I don’t mind. Snuff movies, not so much.’
Darius seemed guardedly contemplative in response. He had lost the look of wild-eyed fear, but he was still on edge, and this remark had clearly got a lot of wheels moving behind the scenery.
‘Assuming you’re not from a new paramilitary wing of Mediawatch,’ he said wearily, ‘can I ask what you think snuff movies might possibly have to do with me?’
‘You know fine,’ Jasmine fired back. ‘You made one, at Kildrachan House, summer of 1981. You and a woman named Veronica Simpson, a drifter from New Zealand who called herself Saffron. You killed Tessa Garrion. You drugged her, stripped her naked, stabbed her to death and filmed the whole thing. Then when Tessa couldn’t be found, Saffron lied to the police about seeing her get the bus out of town, while you blackmailed Tormod McDonald to change his story about what he saw. It’s over, Mr Darius.’
He looked to Fallan, then back at Jasmine, fixing her with a particularly penetrating gaze. If it was possible to be bemused and amused at the same time, then Darius was pulling it off.
‘And if I admit to this, do you feel my confession would have greater or lesser veracity through having been obtained at gunpoint?’
Fallan took a step further back and lowered the pistol.
‘You came at us first,’ he said. ‘With a shotgun.’
‘I had just discovered an intruder in my home, for God’s sake. I don’t habitually go around waving guns at people.’
‘Did he attack you?’
‘No. Yes. Sort of. I disturbed him. I came home and saw this car outside. I wasn’t expecting visitors. I saw that there was nobody in the car and nobody waiting for me in the garden. I noticed that there was a light on inside, so I was a bit concerned.’
‘So you went for your guns?’
‘No. Not at first. I opened the front door pretty carefully, I’ll say that. Then I called out, asked if anyone was there, precisely because I didn’t want to startle him if there was an intruder.’
‘Especially if he’d got to your guns first,’ said Jasmine.
‘No. I keep them in a secure room with a six-digit PIN on the lock, so I wasn’t worried about that. I heard no response, so I began to suspect I’d left the light on myself, but then the door to my viewing room opened and suddenly I’m staring at this six-foot guy in a ski mask.’
‘Your viewing room’s soundproofed, yeah?’ suggested Fallan.
‘Indeed. That’s why he didn’t hear me. I don’t think he was here to attack me, he was looking for something. But suddenly I’m between him and the exit, and he just barrelled into me.’
Darius rolled his eyes a little in self-recrimination.
‘Looking back, I may actually have got in his way by trying to dive out of it. We grappled in the hall and he threw me off. I rattled my head pretty hard against the edge of a radiator.’
He gave his head another delicate pat, blood sticky on his fingers. Fallan’s eyes remained vigilantly monitoring his movements.
‘I lay there in a daze for a little while. At first I was relieved, but then I felt this combination of fear and boiling rage, so I went for my shotgun. If he’d still been there I wouldn’t have fired, though. I just wanted the bugger on his knees, with his bloody mask off, telling me who he was and what he wanted.’
‘What do you think he wanted?’ Jasmine asked.
‘He was rooting through my library.’
‘He was after a book?’
‘Films. DVDs and videotapes. I don’t know why. I have a few rarities but nothing you’re going to be able to put under the hammer at Sotheby’s. Look, sincerely, can we go inside? I need some painkillers.’
‘Maybe he was looking for a snuff movie,’ Jasmine stated.
Just then, her phone chimed, alerting her that she’d received a text. A glance at the screen showed it was from Rab, and Jasmine’s eyes widened involuntarily as she read the succinct datum it conveyed.
‘What?’ asked Fallan.
‘It’s the BMW. It’s registered to Murray Maxwell.’
Darius’s head lifted sharply in response, his eyes briefly narrowed in thought before his look of concentration was replaced with one of grim satisfaction at whatever he’d concluded.
‘You’ve been talking to Murray about my snuff movie, haven’t you?’
‘Yes,’ Jasmine confirmed. ‘He dismissed it as an urban myth until we told him a little more. He became considerably less sanguine when we shared some of the details from Jan Neumann’s account.’
‘I’ll bet he did,’ Darius said with bitter amusement. ‘Sufficiently that he came charging down here looking for it. He didn’t find it, though. So why don’t you both come inside and I’ll show you my snuff movie.’
Horror Show
Darius led them through his house to the viewing room towards the rear of the property, past testament to his various enthusiasms. Serious outdoorwear hung on hooks above walking boots and waders; fishing tackle lay on the wooden floor between bookshelves heaving with philosophy volumes and collected works of film criticism. Upon the walls there were framed posters of his movies, many with the translated titles of foreign-market releases, interspersed with photographs of his son and daughter, from infanthood through to wedding shots. Some even showed his ex-wife Margaret King, a one-time ‘scr
eam queen’ who was these days a regular on an American detective series. Jasmine had read that they were still on fairly amicable terms, and that Darius had directed a few episodes of the show.
Fallan stayed with him as he helped himself to painkillers and fashioned an ice pack for his head, while Jasmine took a seat in the viewing room. Three of the walls were lined with literally thousands of videotapes and DVDs, the fourth accommodating a huge plasma TV and a pull-down screen for cine-projection. There were dozens of cassettes and empty cases scattered about the floor, evidence of Maxwell’s apparently fruitless search.
‘He’d have been here a while,’ Darius said, taking an elephant stool from the corner and climbing to reach one of the topmost shelves. ‘But happily I know precisely where the needle he was looking for sits in this haystack.’
He picked a single black DVD case from the shelf and placed the disc into a player underneath the plasma screen.
‘He was looking for a tape. The original is on Betamax. Far superior quality to VHS, better enduring too. The tape itself was in perfect condition, but with the player becoming obsolete I transferred all my cassettes to DVD because I knew that once my machine packed in I wouldn’t be able to replace it. All the originals are in a box in the attic.’
Jasmine watched as a screenful of static suddenly resolved itself into a crystal-clear picture, showing the grand room at Kildrachan as described by Neumann.
It was so unnervingly sharp that it looked like it could have been taken yesterday. She saw the paintings, the furniture, the wood-panelled walls, curtains so long and so plush they probably weighed more than she did. The camera then picked out two figures in robes, one a good six inches taller than the other, and finally the woman.
It focused first upon her face, partially obscured by long hair that was thrown about by her writhing movement, then moved down her body, lingering voyeuristically on her naked breasts and tarrying again when it reached her pubic mound. It panned out to show her bound to a makeshift altar, though her spastic motion indicated delirium rather than struggle. Jasmine looked for tell-tale lines on her naked flesh: borders where latex overlapped skin that should have been easier to see on this huge, blown-up image and with such crisp picture quality. She saw none.
When the Devil Drives Page 33