War Games

by Douglas Jackson

  ‘Is that what someone has told you, Mr Savage?’ he said. ‘What are you insinuating? That I had something to do with my own daughter’s disappearance?’

  ‘Not at all, sir.’ I smiled reassuringly, which was difficult because I knew I was very close to seeing my retainer disappearing back into Mr Ali’s wallet. ‘All I’m trying to do is get an exact idea of everyone’s position at the time Gurya vanished. One of the people I talked to mentioned seeing a car similar to your Range Rover on the village road.’

  He gathered himself, but he didn’t smile back. ‘Then they are mistaken. It was exactly as I told you. I was in the house until just before six. My wife will confirm that.’

  I nodded. There’d been no easy way of asking the question, but his denial sounded sincere enough. At least I was still on the payroll. ‘That won’t be necessary. How is Mrs Ali?’

  ‘She is taking it very badly, Mr Savage. I’m afraid she is still unable to speak to you for the moment. I will show you out.’

  *

  Donnie McLeod’s suspicious eyes studied me from the shadows behind his door, reminding me of a rat I once cornered in my garage. I got the feeling I was about as welcome as next month’s gas bill, but I didn’t take it personally. I hadn’t exactly given him much reason to look forward to his old pal Glen’s next visit. The shattered remains of the shotgun still lay in the hallway where I’d thrown them.

  ‘Mr Savage?’

  ‘It’s a nice day, Donnie. I thought we might take a walk, up on the hill there. Talk a bit more about Gurya and a few other things.’

  ‘Ah told ye it all on Saturday. Ah don’t know where she is.’ Even as he said it he was stepping out into the daylight. It struck me that Donnie McLeod was one of those people who are remarkably prone to suggestion. As it turned out, I got that one wrong.

  He led the way across the yard, with its tasteful collection of rusting farm machinery, past a fetid, hundred-year-old rubbish pit and onto a path that led upwards through the broken shadows beneath a broad canopy of beech leaves. The exploded shells of the previous autumn’s nuts crunched beneath my boots as we walked in silence, Donnie suddenly full of energy, his long, skinny legs eating up the slope as I struggled to stay in touch. After about a hundred yards we broke out into the sunlight again and a few curious sheep watched as we crossed into their enclosed world over a wooden stile.

  ‘Tell me about Gurya,’ I puffed. ‘I know who she was, but not the person underneath. The real Gurya.’

  He looked at me as if I was crazy, something which is becoming a predictable feature of my life, and I elaborated. ‘What was it that attracted you to her?’

  ‘She was available,’ he said, which was honest, but not particularly revealing.

  ‘Come on, Donnie, you guys had to have had something more than that to bring her over this hill two or three times a week.’

  He shrugged. ‘She was passionate, about things and about people. Shecared.’

  I noticed that we were both talking about Gurya in the past tense, which is never a good sign.

  ‘What sort of things does she care about? Jimmy Wilson hinted she might not be too happy about her father’s plans for this hill.’

  We weren’t at the summit yet, not by a long way, but far enough up to have a view that took in the curving valley below, with the village at one end and Assad Ali’s big house at the other. The hill stretched away behind us in a shallow, heather-blanketed slope that must have been a grouse murderer’s paradise. I was glad it wasn’t the twelfth of August. These days the sound of flying lead brings me out in a rash.

  Donnie stopped abruptly and I took a breather beside him. He stared out over the hills to the west and I saw Gurya wasn’t the only one who cared. A flicker of white on the far horizon acted like a switch and he suddenly became animated; almost a different person.

  ‘Do you see that, Mr Savage? The wind farm across by Peebles. Just a baby with twenty-four turbines, but you can see it from twenty miles away. Some of the biggest ones have a hundred and fifty turbines. Climb any hill in Scotland and you’ll see a wind farm or somewhere the power companies want to put one. Gurya’s dad has asked a firm to take a look at siting one here. He’ll make a few more millions and this hill will be turned into a big electricity factory. They’ll bulldoze access roads, rip out the peat that’s been here since the Ice Age, replace it with concrete and put up towers a couple of hundred feet high. Right here.’ He turned and waved angrily at the hilltop.

  It was a beautiful spot – remote and untouched – and I could see his point. I also suspected I’d get more out of Donnie McLeod the angrier he got.

  ‘Assad Ali would just tell you he’s saving the planet and he’s got a right to do what he wants with his own land.’ I’m as green as the next man who owns two cars that barely do twenty miles to the gallon, which is to say not that green at all. Don’t get me wrong, I know the polar bears haven’t got an ice floe to stand on and that the weather’s getting wetter, but I also know it doesn’t make a blind bit of difference what I do as an individual. It’s up to governments to save the world and governments are too greedy and too stupid to do it. Basically, we’ve had it. Donnie, on the other hand, was young enough and naive enough to think he could make a difference. He just didn’t believe wind farms were the answer, and definitely not when they were in his backyard. He reeled off a long list of statistics that seemed to prove his point. But what I really wanted to know was what his girlfriend thought.

  ‘Did Gurya feel as strongly as you did?’

  ‘She tried to talk her father out of it, but he only laughed at her. You don’t laugh at Gurya. The first thing she did was start a protest group and Assad became the most hated man in the village. He was furious.’

  ‘Furious enough to send her to Pakistan to get her out of the way?’ The question was out before I knew I was going to ask it. I saw by Donnie’s reaction that although he’d like to be able to say yes, the answer was no.

  I noticed a car driving towards the village below us.

  ‘You’ve got young eyes, can you tell what make that is?’

  He gave me the crazy look again. ‘No. It’s red, but it could be a Post Office van or a Ford Fiesta. Why?’

  I shook my head. We started off back down the hill and I asked him how he was coping. It was plain Gurya’s disappearance was still eating away at him. He looked ill and underfed. His personal situation didn’t help.

  ‘I’m not sure how long I’ll be able to keep the cottage.’ He said it with the weary inevitability of a man thirty years older. ‘If old Guthrie, the farmer, finds out what happened to the shotgun, he’ll fire me.’

  ‘How did you end up here?’

  He shrugged. ‘Got fed up at school, left when I was sixteen. Didn’t want to land in an office or a factory, so I tried to get a job as an apprentice gamekeeper or a ghillie. I suppose I just can’t live without fresh air and open spaces. I got a few temporary things, but no one had any permanent places. Maybe I’ll have to move on. Try my luck somewhere else.’

  I knew a guy with a similar story. Left school at sixteen, didn’t want to get stuck down a mine like his dad. Unlike Donnie McLeod he got lucky. If the Army hadn’t taken me in and given me a job where the hell would I be now?

  When we reached the cottage, I told him to hang on a few minutes while I went to the car. The package I retrieved had been part spur-of-the-moment inspiration and part guilt trip. I’d smashed Donnie’s shotgun for the best of reasons: he was planning to blow his brains out with it. Donnie didn’t hold that against me, but I knew a more diplomatic man would have taken it away for a few days and given him it back once he’d got his head together.

  I’d found the answer in Robbie Carr’s outhouse. Robbie is an aristocrat whose ancestors first came a-pillaging in these parts with William the Conqueror’s blessing. He owns a Georgian pile – when I say pile I mean pile – on the southern shoulder of the Eildon Hills. I count him as my best friend and I love him dearly, but several hund
red years of inbreeding have left him with a head full of Scotch mist and marmalade. The house is packed with shotguns and rifles and when they brought in the new gun registration after Dunblane it was inevitable he’d miss one stuck behind a wardrobe or under the sofa. If the cops found out, it would be goodbye to his collection, including the matched pair of antique Holland and Hollands Papa had given him for his eighteenth birthday. The gun was a cheap, Spanish-made side-by-side he’d been trying to pawn off on me for years, but the last thing I’d needed was another illegal weapon on the premises.

  ‘Promise me you won’t do anything daft with it and it’s yours,’ I told Donnie. ‘Different make, but in better condition than the one you had. Hopefully Guthrie won’t notice the difference.’

  Warily, he looked along the barrel, broke it and checked the action, then gave me a big grin. It was the first time I’d seen him smile and it revealed a different Donnie McLeod. He solemnly promised not to do anything daft with it.

  I suppose it depends on your definition of daft.

  *

  On the way back to the main road I slowed to pass a driver changing the tyre on his van. The writing on the side read ‘Peter Campbell Stonemason’ with a telephone number underneath. I recognised it as the one I’d seen beside the ruined chapel on the first day and my first instinct was to speed up and avoid another pointless confrontation. But the man kneeling over the jack was Pete’s pal Sandy so I pulled up in front of him and wound down my window.

  ‘Need a hand?’

  He looked up and grinned. ‘Every little helps. As long as you don’t mind getting them dirty.’

  It didn’t take us long. I steadied the wheel while he tightened the nuts and replaced the wheel trim.

  ‘There,’ he said, knocking it home on its clips. ‘That should do it.’

  ‘I thought it was Pete,’ I said, indicating the van.

  ‘I doubt you’d have got the same reception.’ He laughed. He had a drinker’s veined cheeks and pale grey eyes. Old man’s eyes, I thought, or possibly ageless eyes, untroubled and grave.

  ‘No, I doubt I would’ve. I confess I thought about driving past.’

  ‘Aye, you would, and no wonder. I’m afraid Peter Campbell doesn’t have a good word to say about Mr Glen Savage. He’s a bitter man, Pete. Not quite himsel’ since . . . well, sometimes you have to make allowances for him.’

  ‘So what made him the way he is?’

  ‘He was a nice lad before he went to the war, just another one of the rugby boys. But when he came back he kept himself to himself. Something about Basra. A young fellow who died when a bomb went off and Pete was close by at the time. He always said afterwards that we should have done what the Americans did and shot everything that looked like a threat – man, woman and child – instead of mollycoddling the . . . well, he calls them the ragheads.’ He gave a little embarrassed grin. ‘The kids just grow up to be terrorists, he said, and the women only spawn them.’

  I shook my head. ‘He must be a hell of a man to work for.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t work for Pete,’ he laughed. ‘Occasionally we work together. Sometimes I borrow his van and sometimes he borrows mine, though it’s a near thing which is the most clapped out. He lives just over the hill from me, which is handy.’

  CHAPTER 9

  Friday, 8 June 2007

  I’d driven Aelish in to Edinburgh for her two-night evaluation at the posh private hospital that monitors her treatment. Gurya Ali had been missing for two weeks now. No phone calls. No ransom demands. No clues. If someone had taken her, the chances of getting her back were reducing by the day. I’d gone over everything I’d got from the people closest to her and I wasn’t one step nearer than I’d been at the start. Did I really think Assad Ali had kidnapped his own daughter? From the evidence I’d put together so far it seemed the most likely of some very unlikely scenarios. Yes, she could have been snatched from the road by a stranger, but it was ten times more likely that, if she had been kidnapped, she knew her abductor. I couldn’t discount the theory that she’d faked her own disappearance to put pressure on her father, possibly with the connivance of young Mr McLeod. It was even possible someone from the village had taken her, hoping to force her father to drop his wind farm plans. Unlikely, but possible. But I kept coming back to Mr Ali. Sure, he’d have to be crazy to pay me to find her, but then he’d have to be crazy to do it in the first place.

  On impulse I flipped open my laptop. Gurya’s friends said she used Facebook to stay in touch with people without her father knowing. When I pointed out she’d have a protected password they laughed at my innocence. ‘Try her boyfriend’s name and her date of birth. That’s what mine is,’ Gemma said.

  I typed in Donnie1991. No access. 1991Donnie. Another failure. Then I realised I didn’t know the exact date of her birth, so I tried an alternative. Donnie1990. Success.

  From what they’d told me Facebook was an American networking site popular with kids who wanted to be ahead of the trend. My experience with social networking was a furtive hour on FriendsReunited that reminded me there are some friends you definitely don’t want to be reunited with. Facebook seemed to be a sort of FriendsReunited for people who still had friends. I flicked through the posts at the top of her profile, but they were all messages from people pleading with her to get in touch. I had to scroll far down before I reached the last one she’d sent just over a fortnight earlier.

  ‘Over my dead body. He can’t make me.’

  There was more of the same, all of them as far as I could see refusing to have anything to do with the arranged marriage her father had planned for her.

  ‘I’d rather live in a tent than in a palace in that place.’

  ‘He keeps trying to force me to say yes, but I won’t.’

  Some of the messages hinted at her relationship with Donnie McLeod, but none were to or from him, which presumably meant Donnie didn’t have a computer. In the midst of a cluster of them was one that said‘He looked at me in a really strange way.’

  Donnie? Her father? Someone else.

  My musing was interrupted by the ring of the house phone. ‘Savage,’ I said tersely when I picked up, praying it wasn’t Sebastian – ‘Call me Seb’ – the agent with whom I am currently in dispute.

  ‘Christ, who rattled your fuckin’ cage? Does a man not at least deserve a little encouragement when he phones an old pal?’ The voice was as coarse as sandpaper, from a throat ravaged by years of cheap drink and strong cigarettes, and my mood lightened as I heard it.

  ‘Hello, you old bastard. I thought you were dead.’ I gave my standard reply when Inspector Willie Dewar makes one of his infrequent calls. Willie has been retired from Strathclyde Police for five years, but he’ll forever be Inspector Dewar to me. He’s a friend these days, but there was a time when we’d hated each other’s guts. He also takes an almost proprietary interest in my career, which I suppose is appropriate, given that he was around when it started. ‘What can I do for you?’

  ‘How’s Aelish?’ he asked, dodging my question in a way I found interesting.

  ‘She’s up in Edinburgh for a couple of nights, but she was fine when I spoke to her this morning. The doctors are pleased with her progress.’

  ‘So you’ve plenty of time for a wee trip?’

  ‘And why would I want to be doing that, Willie?’

  ‘Because maybe I’ve got something for you. On your home patch and a wee bit special, too.’ I could hear his throaty chuckle at the other end of the line.

  Now he had me. And he knew it. Willie Dewar had thrown me into my first cell and it had been a toss up whether he asked me questions or just beat the answers out of me. I’m a big man and I like to think he didn’t fancy his chances even with a couple of his uniformed flunkies to hold me down. Then again I was his prize witness and it wouldn’t have looked good if I appeared in court in a fetching shade of black and blue. Things worked out better than he could have hoped, and the unlikely talent I proved to have won me an unexpected
supporter at a time when I needed all the support I could get. Over the years he found an occasional use for me in small-time murder cases where the body stayed stubbornly missing. He was one of those contrary cops who craved publicity and had the contacts to ensure he got it. The exposure helped my new career prosper, but no matter where I was he always kept in touch. Why, I’ve never figured out, but when he retired I had myself a guardian angel – a guardian angel with a direct line to his former colleagues at Pitt Street.

  ‘Special?’

  ‘The word is he did a proper job on this wee lad.’

  I chewed that over for a second. ‘That doesn’t make him special.’

  ‘Ah, but the wee lad was a Paki.’

  The echo of Pete’s casual racism froze my smile and the silence which followed must have lasted for almost a minute as my mind ran through the possible implications of his information.

  ‘Are ye still there, Savage?’

  I told Dewar about Gurya Ali’s disappearance and the lack of police interest. He whistled at the end of the phone.

  ‘Well, they’ll be all over it like a rash in a couple of days. Two weeks, you said? They reckon this kid could have been missing for more than a month, except no one knew because he’d been living rough.’

  Something he’d mentioned earlier struck me. ‘There’s one thing I don’t understand. You said it’s on my home patch, so why are Strathclyde’s finest involved?’

  ‘Because he was snatched down by the Clyde, but his body was dumped down among you sheepshaggers.’

  I ignored the Glaswegian dig at respectable animal-loving country dwellers. ‘The fact that he’s Asian makes the case interesting, but it still doesn’t make the killer special.’

  ‘The word is. . .’ He paused and I sensed the grin on his face as he drew out the suspense. ‘The word is that maybe the wee lad wisnae the first. Ye understand me, Savage? Hewasn’tthe first.’

  I took a deep breath. ‘How many?’