When the Devil Drives

by Christopher Brookmyre

  The shorter of the robed figures produced the dagger, its oversized handle intricately ornate, its blade long and grey. Jasmine felt a shudder as he brought it down, physical revulsion coursing through her as blood first sprayed and then pumped in rhythmic cardiac spurts from the wound.

  ‘Jesus,’ she said, and glared across at Darius.

  He stared back with an expressionless, penetrating gaze, one that looked right inside her; the most uncomfortable aspect of which was wondering what he saw.

  The blade struck again, with similar results, and as it did Jasmine forced herself not only to keep watching, but to look for the previous wound. She saw it: a raw slit, red-rimmed, blood smeared all around it.

  The woman strained against the bonds each time the knife went in, then seemed to slip under, her strength failing, until she was still, her head rolling around to face away from the camera.

  The figure bearing the knife stood with his head bowed, his hands raised and spread, a gruesome parody of a priest at his altar. He chanted some kind of incantation over the motionless corpse, then walked slowly away off screen, the body remaining in the centre of the shot.

  Jasmine stared in disbelief and disgust for a few seconds. She wanted to look at Darius, to read his expression, but she had learned that the abyss gazes also into you.

  Then there came another sound from the speakers, a voice on the tape.

  ‘You all right, dear?’ it said.

  The woman turned her head.

  ‘I think my foot’s gone to sleep,’ she replied in a Kiwi accent.

  The two robed figures approached the table once more and undid her bonds. As soon as they were loose she righted herself and hopped off the table, but she made no move to get dressed. Instead she began a conspicuously drunken attempt at dancing seductively in front of the taller figure, before pulling him into a kiss.

  She turned and did the same to the shorter one, tugging back his cowl. It was Darius: younger, clean-shaven but unmistakably the same man who was sitting across the screening room.

  The second figure pulled back his cowl also, revealing himself to be Murray Maxwell.

  ‘It’s a fake,’ Jasmine said with some relief. ‘How did you manage it? It was a single shot.’

  ‘That’s theatre for you,’ Darius explained. ‘You don’t get second takes or multiple angles on stage, so it’s all in the equipment and a bit of misdirection. The initial shot showed Saffron’s skin so that you didn’t see any latex, but it got slapped on there by Murray each time the camera was dwelling on that lingering upstroke of the blade. The knife itself was the real star, though. The blade retracts, and there was a pump system feeding trick blood into it through a tube in the sleeve of my robe.’

  ‘Did you tell them you were planning to pass this off as real?’

  ‘No. I was in an embarrassingly indulgent experimental phase back then. I had a credulous interest in ritual and the occult at the time, and I was doing way, way too many drugs. I wanted to act out the ritual and have an artefact of it that would look real. It was only later I had the idea of generating a bit of mystique. Worst idea I ever had.’

  He shook his head, years of weary regret on his face.

  ‘This is first-generation,’ he added. ‘A digital copy of the original tape. Not what I showed to Neumann. I had to dirty it up a bit, make it look like it had been passed around and copied from a copy from a copy in forbidden circles.’

  ‘But if he knew it was a fake, why would Murray Maxwell be desperate to get his hands on it?’

  ‘Keep watching.’

  Jasmine turned back to the screen, where she could now see the woman Darius identified as Saffron drop to her knees and begin unzipping Maxwell’s fly.

  Darius hit Stop, for which Jasmine was most grateful.

  ‘It gets a bit graphic from here on in. We were all pretty out of it and we got a bit carried away. Very carried away, in fact. So I didn’t make a snuff movie, but I did somewhat inadvertently make a porno. Murray and I both had sex with Saffron, and it’s all on this tape.’

  ‘So why did you lean on Tormod McLeod to recant his story? Why didn’t you just tell him what he’d seen was staged?’

  ‘I tried telling him it was fake, but there was no convincing him once he’d decided what he’d seen with his own eyes was true, especially someone raised on tales of satanic evil. I strong-armed him as a last resort.’

  ‘Couldn’t you have just shown him the tape?’

  ‘No, because I’d already told Murray I’d destroyed it. The day after, we were all aware things had gone too far. I think Finlay Weir went to talk to Saffron at one point and she was so embarrassed she wouldn’t even leave her house. I lied and told Murray the tape was erased. So a few years later, when the snuff story broke, all he would have known about it was what was in the tabloids. He’d no idea the infamous snuff movie was actually the tape we made until you told him about it. Now he’s worried the existence of a skin flick with him in it could torpedo his career.’

  Like it had just torpedoed Jasmine’s investigation. The ramifications hit her hard: what Darius had shown her meant her quest may well have met its final end down a narrow, winding lane in the Lake District. Not only was her snuff-movie theory dead in the water, her one other possible lead had also been wiped out by what she’d just seen.

  The police reports had said Hamish Queen was watching an outdoor play when he was killed. It had taken Jasmine moments online to deduce that the performers must have been the Loch Shiel Players as, according to their website, the amateur company had been putting on ‘Moonlight Shakespeare’ at Cragruthes Castle for almost a decade. One of their leading performers was named Veronica, but even allowing for ageing and theatrical make-up there was no way the woman Jasmine had seen in the website photos was the same person who appeared in Darius’s video.

  ‘Shit,’ she said, which barely began to cover it.

  ‘Bollocksed your little theory, have I?’ asked Darius, less than sympathetically.

  ‘Little bit.’

  He looked puzzled for a moment, as something occurred to him.

  ‘You thought I killed Tessa Garrion at Kildrachan. Are you saying she never appeared again? Because I always assumed she must have pitched up somewhere safe and sound, given that the police just dropped the whole thing.’

  ‘Saffron told the police she saw Tessa getting on a bus that night, but we’re pretty sure she was lying. We just don’t know why any more. Saffron blew town herself shortly afterwards, but none of it adds up now.’

  ‘For what it’s worth I can show you some footage of Tessa, if you like.’

  He sounded apologetic, aware it was barely above worthless.

  ‘Yeah, that would be great,’ Jasmine replied, trying to sound more grateful than she felt. It was a sad little consolation prize: all this way down the line and the most she’d recover from Darius’s house was a digitally transferred replica of a memory.

  He climbed back up to the same shelf and produced another disc, popping it into the machine and carefully replacing its potentially explosive predecessor inside its plastic case.

  ‘This was shot during rehearsals,’ he said as the plasma screen was once again filled with light.

  Jasmine saw the interior of the church hall. She could see the graveyard outside through the windows, recognised the view of the street beyond. Balnavon didn’t look like it had changed much in thirty years, but the same could not be said of the cast.

  The actors were preparing to rehearse, milling around, waiting to be called to order by their director. Jasmine saw all of the people she’d spoken to recently, pictured clearly and in close-up: Finlay Weir, a little more gawky and less handsome than she had assumed; a surprisingly androgynous Tormod McDonald standing next to his very pretty sister (whom Jasmine was relieved to observe looked less likely to get carded on a night out than she did); Hamish Queen, glancing with mild annoyance at the intrusion of the camera; and Julian Sanquhar, a slight and apologetic figure whom
she’d never have taken for a future political heavyweight.

  Then, finally, the camera found the woman Jasmine had been looking for: Tessa Garrion.

  She looked mature for her years: confident about her posture, comfortable in her own skin, unselfconscious; yet she was also clearly young, still girlish, the adolescent within her not buried so deep in her past. She was standing next to Saffron, both of them in medieval dresses. They were of similar height and build, but Saffron was easily picked out with her flowing blonde locks, Tessa’s chestnut hair in a then-trendy crop Jasmine’s mum used to refer to as a Purdey.

  Saffron said something about the first time she saw ‘the Scottish play’ performed in Dunedin, and in response Tessa produced a blonde wig and turned to the camera to repeat what Saffron had said, mimicking her accent. Mimicking more than her accent; she got the intonation, timbre, pace, emphases, the lot, as well as mirroring her body language perfectly too, the way Saffron held herself physically as she spoke.

  She was a prodigious mimic. She would impersonate the voices she heard on the radio.

  She was a suspect?

  No. They thought she might be a witness.

  Tessa was incomparably adept at playing women older than herself.

  She was tougher than she looked. I got the impression she was more concerned about the law than I was.

  When the revelation struck her, Jasmine could barely breathe as the truth of it flooded in and threatened to drown her where she sat. In that moment everything altered. Everything looked completely different.

  ‘“I have deceived even your very eyes”,’ Jasmine said, her voice collapsing into a whisper. ‘“What your wisdoms could not discover, these shallow fools have brought to light”.’

  She had come here to confront Russell Darius as Tessa Garrion’s murderer, but now she understood: she didn’t merely have the wrong killer. She had the wrong victim.

  Point of Impact

  Mark Brooks was waiting for Catherine outside the training range. It was a dry, bright afternoon, the kind of day it felt good to be outdoors, almost like she wasn’t working. The sense of bunking off was enhanced by them having the place to themselves. The school holidays being underway, Drew had taken the boys swimming, but if they had any idea where their mum was headed, then they’d have far rather been with her.

  No pointing and clicking. Real rifles, real scopes, real bullets.

  ‘Where’s the gun?’

  ‘Inside the range,’ Mark answered, opening the gates for her. ‘All set up.’

  ‘Lay on,’ she said, stepping inside and inviting him to take the lead.

  ‘I’ve got some news for you,’ he told her. ‘Big news. I’ve been trying to find out where this rifle could have been sourced. State-of-the-art weapons like this, there’s usually a traceable route from the legal into the grey market, before it goes black.’

  Mark handed her a pair of ear protectors as they marched towards where the AX338 was set up on a dusty and largely denuded patch of turf at the near end of the enclosed field.

  ‘I put out feelers among my fellow gun geeks, went through some delicate back channels, let people know sources would be protected. I was hoping for a lead: know a guy who knows a guy kind of thing.’

  ‘Mark, get to the money shot.’

  He grinned.

  ‘Okay. Guy emailed me last night with his number. David Armstrong, as in the owner of Armstrong Fabrics and Textiles. Family business goes back to the days of dark satanic mills, and he owns about half the Borders. He’s got a vast private estate and he’s into his hunting, into his guns. He reckons the AX338 is his. Stolen.’

  ‘Did he voice any suspicions regarding who took it?’

  ‘No. He only noticed it missing three days ago, but the last time he used it was a week before that, so he doesn’t know when it was taken. Thing is, he didn’t report the theft because he couldn’t admit to owning the weapon in the first place. It’s illegal.’

  ‘Calibre too high?’

  ‘You can own a rifle up to any calibre if it’s single-shot, but semi-automatics are only permitted up to .22 rim-fire, which is a lower-velocity round. The AX338 is a semi-auto shooting .338 Lapua centre-fire high-velocity rounds.’

  ‘What was he doing with it?’

  Mark gave a slight shrug, like it was a daft question.

  ‘He likes to shoot. He’s got a lot of land. Wanted to try his aim at longer distances.’

  ‘Longer distances like nine hundred metres?’

  ‘Not like nine hundred metres. Precisely nine hundred metres, when he last used it. Target practice.’

  Catherine nodded with open satisfaction. This latest development didn’t just back up her hypothesis, it might even bear her a suspect list. How many people would know there were weapons to be had chez Armstrong?

  ‘So, you want to tell me what we’re doing here on this fine day?’ her companion asked.

  ‘Proving that, for once, you were wide of the mark, Sergeant Crackshot.’

  ‘With what?’

  ‘Your expert assassin theory.’

  He looked amused and intrigued, his expression saying bring it on.

  ‘Okay. Let’s say you’re the shooter, and you’re not some military-trained pro, but you know where you can get hold of a rifle and some ammo. You take the gun from the home of David Armstrong and you set yourself up for your shot in the grounds of Cragruthes Castle during the moonlight play. If you’re not an expert, you’re not going to try your hand from almost a kilometre away. You’re going to position yourself much closer. Still under cover, obviously, but as near as you can get: maybe just inside the tree line. That’s a hundred and eighty, maybe two hundred metres tops.’

  She knelt down next to the AX338.

  ‘You’ve used a rifle before, under careful supervision, probably on a range like this one. It was all set up for you, the instructor talking you through it at first, but you grasped the basics and maybe even surprised yourself how accurate you were. So you know what you’re doing as you lie down in the woods, lining up your victim in the crosshairs of this phenomenally powerful, precisely accurate long-range weapon.’

  ‘Through a scope that’s zeroed for nine hundred metres,’ said Mark, letting out a wry and slightly embarrassed chuckle as he got it. ‘Face-palm.’

  ‘The shooter thinks where you’re looking is where you’re shooting. We’re about two hundred metres from the targets there, right?’

  ‘About two-twenty. You know, I could have just worked it out using the tables if you’d said.’

  ‘Never mind the ballistics,’ Catherine replied. ‘I don’t want theoretical. I want to know for sure, using the same rifle as the shooter.’

  Mark got himself prostrate on the ground and took hold of the weapon.

  ‘You’re going to want to put those muffs on,’ he warned, lining up a shot at a concentric-circle target roughly two hundred metres away.

  ‘Aim for the bullseye,’ she said.

  Mark flipped off the safety, took a moment and fired. He shot five rounds to get a consistent grouping.

  ‘You couldn’t hit a coo’s arse with a banjo,’ she told him.

  All of the shots were high, embedding in a tight pattern at twelve o’clock in one of the outer rings.

  ‘I’d put that at forty-five to fifty centimetres,’ Mark estimated. ‘Begging the question why the bullet hit Hamish Queen instead of comfortably clearing his head and cracking into the castle wall.’

  Catherine produced her phone and loaded up the clearest image she had of the fateful group photo, handing it to him.

  ‘It’s because Hamish Queen wasn’t the target. When the killer pulled the trigger, his crosshairs were on Veejay Khan.’

  The Fate of that Dark Hour

  Fallan drove in though the south entrance to the multi-storey at the Buchanan Galleries, parking on the fourth floor before he and Jasmine made their way swiftly downstairs to the second, where the hire car he had parked there first thing that morni
ng was waiting. Roughly four minutes after entering at Bath Street in a green Land Rover, they left again via the Killermont Street exit driving a blue Mondeo, making for the M8 and heading north.

  The subterfuge was necessary to ditch their stalker, the ex-military-looking creep who had decked Fallan down in the Lake District.

  ‘I’m sick of this guy showing up wherever we go and yet we never see him on our tail,’ he had said. ‘It’s like we’ve emailed him our itinerary for the day so he knows where to be before we even get there.’

  Today’s itinerary would take them all the way to the Ardnamurchan peninsula and finally, Jasmine was sure, to the answers she was looking for.

  They made it there by early afternoon, not long after two. The journey took a little less than three hours, the last twenty minutes of which was down a single-track road with passing places, which were largely redundant as the only things they had passed in ten miles were on four legs. The sat-nav on Jasmine’s mobile showed a monotonous solitary line surrounded by nothing, like an asystolic reading on an ECG.

  They’d had to use her phone for navigation as the Mondeo’s cigarette lighter didn’t match the plug on Fallan’s device, and he didn’t have an adapter. She had pre-cached all the maps before they made it out of Glasgow, and her contingency was vindicated by the falteringly weak signal out here; though by the time the signal was flickering between one bar and nothing they were already on this final road with no navigating left to do. It was something she did out of habit, mindful of the possibility that the phone signal might be lost at the same time as she was. The GPS would have tracked them regardless of the mobile reception, but without pre-caching the maps it would have been tracking them across a blank screen. Ironically, even with the maps loaded that wasn’t far from the truth.

  The house came into view as they crested the hill they’d been climbing for the past two miles, the loch shimmering in the middle distance behind it. It was about half a mile from the water, on a plateau that was like a natural half landing midway up the mountainside. The road descended a steep diagonal, skirting a tree line that also snaked part of the way down the slope then stopped abruptly, giving way to scrub, boulders and scree.