by Jay Stringer
What am I doing, again?
Got to concentrate.
Think of Sam.
She needs her dinner cooked. No. Wait. That’s an old memory. Push it away. Focus, Jim, just this fucking once. You can do this, you stupid old man. Stay here. Stay now. Stay with it.
The job.
She needs to quit.
Keep moving. Keep thinking. Keep remembering.
She doesn’t know about the deal I made. She’ll never look at me the same way again if I tell her. I’ll die if I never see her smile again. No. Move. Need to do it. It’s time.
Andy can’t be trusted. Gilbert and Neda—they’re dangerous. They’ll break the deal. They promised to leave Sam alone, but if she goes messing . . .
I get to the phone. What’s her number? What’s her fucking number? Where do I keep it? Is it next to where I put the memory of Sam winning that race on sports day when she was nine? No, why would I keep it there. Maybe—wait! It might be next to the last time I talked to her mum; that was on the phone, right? Keep the number next to the phone. I try and think, but it’s not there. It’s never been there.
I never got to see her face that last time. She sounded so distant. So far away.
Who am I thinking of?
Back to Sam. Her number. Need her number. She’s late home from school, and I’m worried. I need to call her. I always needed a notebook to remember numbers. Where is my notebook? It’s on my desk, in my office.
Where is my office?
Why am I stood by the phone?
Sam. That’s it.
She’s in trouble. She’s going to phone me.
‘Jim? You wanting to call someone, Jim?’ The nurse puts a hand on my shoulder, looks into my eyes.
Hope my mum doesn’t see me talking to a pretty lady. She’ll be home in a minute, and my bedroom is a mess.
‘Come with me,’ the nurse says. ‘We’ll get you settled back down.’
PART FOUR
‘It doesn’t matter the who or the why. All that matters is the dead.’
—Neda
Thirty-Three
Sam
They drove me in a taxi, of all things. The old guy sat in the front, tapping his fingers on the steering wheel to some oldies station playing very polished folk music. The dinner lady sat in the back with me, pressed in close.
We took the M8 motorway, the winding strip of concrete that circles the city like some Victorian torture rack, and dodged between the rush-hour cars. We pulled off at the Govan exit, turned in the other direction, along Bellahouston Park. We came to Dalkeith Avenue, a tree-lined, middle-class road with large houses and gated properties. The taxi eased onto the driveway of a freestanding red-brick house, and someone stepped out from behind us to shut a metal gate across the driveway.
Old Guy and Dinner Lady led me silently to the front door. I wondered, was I supposed to tip them for the taxi ride? The hallway was large, with a tiled floor and wooden staircase, dark green paint above the wainscoting. I was pointed into the first door on the left, which led into a living room that had the same theme as the hallway, but with deep red instead of green. Three leather sofas were arranged around an open fireplace, and there were shelves lined with old leather books either side of the bay window. The sort of books people pose with rather than read.
I lowered myself into one of the sofas and instantly felt like I’d been sitting there my whole life, a comfortable life lined with sleep and relaxation. Dinner Lady asked if I wanted a drink, and I asked for a milky coffee. She was very soft-spoken and friendly, nothing like the person who had almost broken my arms earlier that day. A small dog walked in. I didn’t know the breed, but it was furry and bouncy and looked like a puppy that was doing an impression of a cat. It sniffed around my feet and then pressed up in between my legs, presenting its head for a fuss. I rubbed the top of his head and then his floppy ears.
An elderly man stepped into the room and called out the name Bobby, and the dog ran out of the room. ‘Sorry to summon you out with such short notice,’ he said, ‘but my days are pretty full at the moment.’
He took a seat opposite and smiled gently at me. He looked like Richard Branson, give or take twenty pounds, and spoke with a soft English accent, so I instantly wanted to distrust him.
‘Your father is Jim Ireland, right?’
I nodded.
‘Ah, and you’re that wee girl of his, the one who wanted to be an artist?’
‘Do I know you?’
‘You wouldn’t remember. I came to your father’s house a few times. He was showing people your photographs, talking about art college. Looks like you changed your mind, though, eh?’
‘And your name?’
He stood back up and took my hand again. ‘Oh god, I’m sorry. It’s just been a while since I walked into a room and had to introduce myself. I’m Ryan Hillcoat.’
‘Sam Ireland.’
‘Pleasure. And may I say, you grew up well, my dear. I can see your father in you too.’
He talked like an old head teacher of mine, a gentle professor pose I was trying hard not to be distracted by. Any man who had me invited over at the end of a gun was not someone I wanted to start chatting with.
‘Mr Hillcoat, did you call me here to talk about old times?’
‘You’re direct like him too. I like that. No, I have a wee bit of a problem. And it seems you’re mixed up in it. Tell me, please, who hired you to make that delivery to Mr Anderson?’
When he said ‘Mr Anderson’, I wanted to say ‘Neo’.
Not sure he’d get the reference, though.
‘That was a private business matter.’
‘You like discretion. I saw it shine through in the news item—the insurance case? Yes, you seem to know how to handle things the right way. If we might try this another way, I’ll make a few assumptions, okay?’
I nodded.
‘You were hired by a city solicitor to serve legal papers on Mr Anderson. You don’t know what the papers were or on whose behalf the solicitors were acting.’
I sipped my coffee. ‘Go on.’
‘And you’ve gathered by now that you’re not going to find Mr Anderson alive. I hope you still get paid for your efforts today.’
‘Me too.’
He stared at me for a while, but it was a benevolent stare, patient. Again the professor act.
‘Miss Ireland—or, sorry, is it Ms? Right, yes. You don’t know me, so there’s plenty here that you won’t know. I want to level with you, but I’ve learnt the hard way not to trust people in this city. Can I trust you?’
‘I’m not sure either of us has a pressing motive to trust the other right now.’
‘True enough. Okay. A show of faith, then. I’ll start levelling with you on a few things. For instance, I hired your father a long time ago. He worked a case for me that he never managed to solve.’
‘What was it?’
‘The murder of a young woman—a girl, really—who was working for me. Jenny Towler. Do you remember it?’
I did. There was an era when it was the story that all parents told their daughters to keep them in line. The story about the young woman who went out one night with her high school sweetheart, without anyone else around, and got butchered. My dad had told me about it in those same tones, but he’d never mentioned working the case.
‘They caught the guy who did it, right?’ I searched my memory for a name, but it wasn’t there. ‘It was her boyfriend. They’d been to school together; he had some kind of mental problem?’
Hillcoat neither nodded nor shook his head, but gave a shrug that was halfway between the two. More an acknowledgement that what I’d said was one accepted version of events than an endorsement that it was correct.
‘Malcolm Mackie. He’s a bit of a legend in town off the back of Jenny’s death. Here’s th
e thing, though, Sam—I can call you Sam? Here’s the thing. Mackie is the nephew of Rab Anderson.’ This was the first time he’d said Rab, and he failed at it like most Englishmen. Most will cop out and say Rob. ‘And Jenny—well, she worked for me. She was a sweet young woman.’
‘So you wanted to make sure justice was done. But they got the man who did it, so there was nothing there for my dad to solve.’
‘The case is far more complicated than you know,’ he said.
I heard someone walking down the hallway outside, and Hillcoat stood up and waved through the open door. Another woman stepped into the room. She was shorter than me, with blond hair and curves. She was carrying about ten pounds too much, but between her curves and her broader shoulders, she was getting away with it. She had a nice face, one that I wanted to trust.
‘Dr Elizabeth Carter,’ Hillcoat said. ‘This is Sam Ireland, the private investigator I told you about.’
I stood up to shake her offered hand.
‘Call me Beth,’ she said. Her accent carried the roll and flick of Newcastle. ‘Mackie is innocent. I think he was framed.’
Thirty-Four
Innocent?’
Beth sat down beside me on the sofa. A little too close, like she didn’t understand personal space. Then she said she was a psychiatrist, and I thought, That figures.
‘I don’t think Mackie did it,’ she said. ‘I’ve got to know him well over the last few years, since Ryan got me in as Mackie’s therapist.’
‘I’m not sure any of this is legal,’ I said.
‘No, and that’s why it’s important that we can trust you,’ Hillcoat said. ‘I pulled a few strings to get Dr Carter attached to Mackie’s case, and it would ruin our case if news of that got out there.’
‘And what is the case—you want to prove Mackie is innocent?’
‘I feel responsible for the poor girl’s death. Jenny came to work for one of my Glasgow firms,’ Hillcoat began. ‘She’d some work experience in the office, filing paperwork, answering phones, and everyone seemed to like her, so she was hired on full-time when she left school.’ He scratched his nose between sentences, as if doing so was peeling away a layer of memories. ‘She was a nice girl. Bright, asked a lot of questions. But that was the problem: she was starting to ask a lot of questions. Wanted to know how we worked, what we were doing, what we were investing in. It was brought to my attention, and I had a word with her, a friendly warning, if you like.’
‘Warning?’
‘Bad word. More like advice. You see, I get a lot of people prying into my business. There are a lot of people who stand to gain by finding out my plans. I’m used to having to warn them off before they cause trouble. We all liked Jenny, and so I told her she had a big future with us, but that she was going to need to pick her friends carefully if she was going to stay with us.’ He scratched his nose again. I spotted it for what it was: a sign of guilt. ‘A few days later she was dead.’
‘Mackie has always had troubles.’ Beth took up the story. Still too close to me. ‘All of his evaluations from a very young age talked about him having flights of fantasy and paranoia. Later on he was diagnosed with schizophrenia, and he wasn’t treated properly back then. But there’s nothing to suggest he was violent.’
‘Aside from the dead young girl.’
She gave a patient smile and let that go for a second before starting again.
‘There’s nothing before that incident to show any kind of anger or violence in Mackie. It’s only since then, since he saw her body and then served time in prison, that he’s begun to exhibit a temper. And a pretty extreme one at that. But it goes away when he’s on beta blockers. He calms down, and his pre-existing mental illness becomes perfectly manageable again.’
‘So you think it was Jenny’s death that triggered the anger, rather than his mental illness? Couldn’t it be the other way round, and the murder was just the first episode, his illness getting out of control?’
‘Sure.’ She nodded. ‘That’s one way to see it, and that’s what they said in the court case. His doctors at the time were all assuming he was guilty, so nobody contested that view. But I think it’s the other way round. I think someone used his illness as an excuse, as a way to set him up. I’ve seen the love letters he wrote to Jenny. He still writes them. I think the anger we see in him now is post-traumatic.’
‘You think it’s grief?’
If I took what she was saying at face value, it had a certain logic. If someone else had killed Jenny Towler, it would be a convenient way out to frame Mackie. Nobody would ever think twice about his guilt. Nobody ever does. The press are always running scare stories about psych patients with knives or guns, and it would have been even worse back then.
But that was only if I chose to take them at their word. And there were too many leaps of logic. There was no reason to follow their breadcrumbs into this maze. Above all of that, I was feeling an anger. A young woman had died, been murdered, and we were discussing the case as if it was all about Hillcoat and Mackie.
‘I still don’t see it,’ I said. ‘The easiest and simplest explanation is still that Mackie killed her, and he went down for it. Why would anybody want to kill Jenny over your business affairs? Why is it all about you, and where does my father come into it?’
‘All fair questions.’ Hillcoat stood up and stepped over to the doorway. ‘Follow me.’
He led us upstairs. I wasn’t feeling comfortable. I was alone with two people I didn’t know, locked inside a large house, and they were talking about murder. If he hadn’t made a point of mentioning my father, I’d have found a way out straight away. But I couldn’t help myself. I needed to know.
On the next floor up, which was decorated in much the same theme as downstairs, except with a much deeper carpet, he opened the door onto a small room that had been turned into an office. There were maps across the walls, with pins in them covering half of Glasgow, and the large desk that took up most of one wall was piled with papers. I stepped into the office with him, and Beth stayed out on the landing. I pretended not to notice that she was blocking the door. Hillcoat pointed at the nearest map, which was a close-up of the East End. The development areas for the Commonwealth Games had been circled, and photographs had been stuck around the map, showing the various new buildings.
I looked at the pictures and then back at Hillcoat.
‘You’re a developer?’
‘I’m an artist.’ He laughed. ‘Sorry, I know that sounds pompous. But there is an art to it. I’m more of an investor than a developer. An empty field a hundred yards from anywhere might be worthless for twenty years, but once someone wants to run a motorway across that field, or build a sports arena or a hospital, then it becomes a gold mine. And that’s where the art comes in, knowing the right place and the right time.’
‘So all these sites, they’re yours?’
‘Not all, but quite a few. There’s a lot of money flowing into Glasgow at the moment, if you know where to look. Some places in the UK will never be valuable, and some will never stop being valuable. But Glasgow’s one of the areas that comes in and out of fashion. Every generation or so, it has a period when people want to invest, and I manage to be here when it happens.’
‘It can’t be guesswork. If the money’s coming in through community development grants or through something like the Commonwealth Games, then there are people making the decisions on where to invest. All you need to do is know the right people.’
He smiled at me and gave me a look like an old teacher who was pleased with his student. ‘Yes, and I always know the right people.’
‘So you think this is what got Jenny Towler killed? Someone tried to use her to get information on where to invest or where the next big deal was going to be, and they got mad when she didn’t deliver?’
‘Some version of that story, yes.’
‘Okay. Maybe you�
��re right, maybe you’re wrong; but what does it have to do with me being hired to find Rab Anderson? Just because he’s Mackie’s uncle, that doesn’t have to tie any of this to what I’ve been doing today.’
‘Someone tried to kill Mackie last night.’ Beth stepped into the room to join us. ‘Two men with guns. They shot him in the leg, and he almost bled to death. I just got back from visiting him in hospital. And someone shot Rab’s dog too. I found the body this morning.’
‘This would have to be an epic level of coincidence, don’t you agree?’ Hillcoat turned towards me again. ‘Anderson goes missing on the same night that someone tries to kill his nephew. Do we really think the universe has that good a sense of humour? Find out who took a pop at Mackie, and you’ll find out who killed Rab. Along the way, I think we’ll find who killed Jenny Towler.’
I already had a name. Gilbert Neil. All the signs were that he was behind it. But Neda had mentioned that it went higher, that there were names she didn’t want to give. I had that warning ringing in my ears, and I was going to save Gilbert Neil’s name until I’d covered other angles. I still didn’t really trust any of these people. Having the name gave me power, and giving it away might set me up for a fall.
‘Okay,’ I said. ‘But how does my father figure into all of this?’
‘I hired Jim to find the real killer. He believed my story, believed it enough, anyway. He spent a couple of weeks looking into it while Mackie’s trial was grabbing all the attention, but then he simply quit one day. He said there was nothing to find and that we should all let it go.’
‘My dad was good at his job. If he said there was nothing to find, then there really was nothing to find.’
‘Your father only ever told me one lie,’ he said. ‘Something scared him off the case. What I’m wondering, Sam, is just how badly you want to find out what it was your father knew.’