The beak lifts his head. Hadn’t heard that part before.
‘Now maybe he was just blowing smoke up Lynch’s arse. Maybe. But Lynch was convinced he had him, and the guy was always just that little bit ahead of the game. Just enough, like he knew exactly what he was doing. Which is what happened with us. He played us all along, always one step ahead, set us up the whole way, and at the end of it walked into my hospital room and laughed in my face.
‘I know, I know it proves nothing. And all it does is put us in the same position as the previous two times. If we think he’s the one sending the e-mails, then he’s taunting us and we’re going to have to go after him if we want to prove it.’
Jefferson’s hands are on the table, fingers steady. He looks at Connor.
‘Does he have any sort of police harassment case against us, or anything specifically against the Sergeant that would interfere with us tackling this?’
Glance at Connor. He looks concerned, but then, if it goes tits up this time it’s not going to be on him, so he could probably do with taking the poker out his arse.
‘Nothing specific,’ he says. ‘But then, that might well be because he wants us to blunder in and make total fools of ourselves again.’
He looks at Taylor and me as he says it.
‘Well, gentlemen,’ says Jefferson, ‘when you go and see him later today, you’d better make sure you don’t blunder.’
24
WE DRIVE BACK TO CAMBUSLANG in silence. Since I’m the one at the lowest pay grade, I’m driving. Connor sits sternly in the back, his presence a succubus to the atmosphere. At one point Taylor can see me contemplating sticking Bob on the CD, catches my eye and gives me a just don’t look.
Bob remains silent. Given my balls out performance in there, casually tossing Clayton into the mix for all the world like he was a teaspoonful of cinnamon and the investigation was one of those pumpkin pies people talk about, I consider just sticking Bob on anyway. On this occasion, however, it would be Taylor I’d be pissing off, not Connor, so I don’t bother.
Do we know what kind of music Connor listens to? I don’t think so. I don’t remember ever knowing. Jim Reeves, probably, or some other funeral-music-loving miserablist.
We get back to the office, and as we walk into the open plan Taylor indicates for me to follow him into his room, indicating to Morrow, as he passes his desk, for him to join us. We are aware, as we walk in, that Connor, clinging to us like a ringwraith intent on crushing every last living spark in our bodies, has not been shaken off.
He closes the door and stares daggers at Taylor and me. Morrow might as well not be here. I expect he’s got something of an oh Jesus, what the fuck have I done? look on his face.
Connor looks like he’s having to do some major composing of himself, before letting rip. You can see various sentences and words formulating in his mouth and not quite making it out. Perhaps he’s imagining the puritanical Mrs Connor looking censoriously at him from behind his shoulder.
‘Don’t fuck this up,’ finally shoots from his lips, like evil, black sperm ejaculated from Sauron’s wizened old penis.
Jesus, where did that come from? Not a great image.
He turns and leaves, slamming the door behind him.
We stand in silence for a few seconds, as the atmosphere lightens. Morrow has both eyebrows raised, which is fair enough. It is, without question, a double eyebrow moment.
‘What’d I miss?’ he says, unsure whether or not he ought to be smiling.
‘Detective Sgt Hutton couldn’t keep his mouth shut,’ says Taylor. ‘Fortunately, at least, there were no women in the room, so he managed to keep his trousers on.’
Morrow smiles fully now. I don’t have a lot to say to that.
‘We need to go and speak to Michael Clayton,’ says Taylor. ‘Boss’s orders. The Chief Constable, not him,’ indicating Connor with a dismissive thumb. ‘So, before that happens, the three of us are going to sit here and think of things to say to Clayton so we don’t sound like the fucking Muppets, although I’m pretty sure that’s what’s going to end up happening.’
‘Do we really want to be going anywhere near Clayton?’ asks Morrow. ‘I mean, why are we even thinking about it?’
Taylor looks at me, to allow me to explain myself. I give Taylor the official bugger off look of disapproval, and then turn to Morrow.
‘My dreams are being haunted by crows. I think they’re telling me something.’
Morrow holds my gaze, then looks at Taylor to see what his face is doing – nothing – and then turns back.
‘You said that to the Chief Constable? And you still have a job?’
‘No, I didn’t. Nevertheless, whatever it was I did say, and I can’t exactly remember what that was, it was enough to convince the old man we should be allowed to pursue Clayton in the course of our enquiries. So, it’s happening, and as our good friend Connor said, we better not fuck it up.’
The old man? Ferguson can’t be more than five years older than me. Perhaps the confident man, or the non-wastrel, would be a better nickname for him.
Morrow gives another glance to Taylor, who confirms the fact this is a real thing and not a crappy leftover from April Fools Day.
‘So, sit down, and let’s start going over it,’ says Taylor.
He gives us a moment, the sound of the chairs being dragged across the floor, and then the three of us are around the desk.
‘Right, we’ve got four murders, one of which was a double. All in the Glasgow area, which basically is the only thing to connect them. Which means, of course, they may not be connected at all. We also have to be wary of the possibility that two or three of them are connected, but one of them isn’t. One of them could be completely unrelated, but just happened to fall within the same timespan. Right, Sergeant, first up...’
Standard practice police work. Going over everything you know.
‘Tandy Kramer, pushed in front of the train. We have CCTV, there’s no doubt it wasn’t an accident. We’ve been unable to identify the person who pushed her, just as we’ve been unable to identify any person who might have held a grudge against her. A genuine, straight up mystery.’
Taylor stares blankly at the desk while I talk, then makes a small gesture towards Morrow.
‘Double beheading in a converted church. Looks like a terrorist, or at least, racially-motivated, murder. First victim, Reginald Silvers, forty-seven, unemployed. Second, Claire Hanlon, forty-three, three kids, worked as a phlebotomist at Monklands General, no idea what she was doing in Clarkston. She had a tattoo on her left forearm that exercised the squad for a while. A couple of detectives got quite excited about it. Turned out it was a Radiohead symbol.’
He smiles, Taylor just looks pissed off.
‘Unbelievers written next to the two bodies. They’ve been searching for a connection between the two victims, or a connection between them and the Islamic Centre or the old church as it was. Nothing. The CCTV outside the centre was switched off, which is obviously different from what we have at the train station. As far as we’re aware, there had been no previous threat against either the victims, or the centre itself.’
He pauses, can’t think of anything else.
‘Personally, I’d say if any of the four are unconnected, it’s this one,’ he adds.
‘If it was an act of radical Islam, you’d think at least the killer would have been able to write unbelievers in Arabic,’ I say.
‘And spell it correctly,’ adds Taylor. ‘There’s the thing that makes it look like it wasn’t Clayton. It’s sloppy. That’s what makes it look less like a terrorist, and more like a couple of fuckwits trying to stir up trouble.’
‘Unless that’s what Clayton wants us to think,’ I say.
He gives me a doubtful look.
‘You can ask him,’ he says.
‘Third guy had been at a party. Billy Thomas, regular bloke, twenty-seven, father of eight by six different women. Lived with one of the women and three of the ki
ds. He left the party to walk home on his own – reportedly very drunk – and never made it. Got accosted, beaten to a pulp. First indications are he wasn’t dead at this point. He was then killed by having a massive dose of heroin injected into him. Shit quality too. Here, it’s definitely the latter that makes it suspicious. He was unemployed, moved in an extensive social circle, a lot of interconnections, a lot of rivalry, a lot of small-time hoodlum stuff. Black market fags from Eastern Europe, dope, extortion on various levels. Looks like there might be a queue of people quite happy he’s dead.’
‘The Treasury,’ throws in Morrow.
‘Unfortunately, it’s too late for the gene pool,’ says Taylor.
‘The thing to set this one apart,’ I continue, struggling against my glib colleagues who refuse to take this seriously, ‘is the heroin. The guy was unconscious. If someone had wanted him dead, then why not stand on his throat or cover his nose and mouth for thirty seconds? These people, the ones the plods over in Springburn are lining up as the potential suspects, they wouldn’t waste that amount of heroin. Not even shit stuff. Very weird. It’s like... this is the one, despite it looking like a petty, ugly little gangland-type hit, this is the one that says there’s something else happening.’
Taylor has the same look on his face as before, taking it in, thinking it through, trying to remember if there’s anything I might have missed.
‘Maybe it is significant the heroin was lousy,’ says Morrow. ‘Maybe that was one of his things, maybe that’s why he was killed. Selling crappy shit for too much money. This was someone’s way of getting him back.’
‘They’re looking at it,’ says Taylor. ‘It’s a possibility. There’s a lot of argument going on between the various stations, but it’s not like any of them are doing a shit job within their own area. Still, I’m inclined to agree. It’s a good point for someone to make, but who exactly is it aimed at, since the victim himself would never get to see the point?’ He starts nodding, as if someone, somewhere is pulling him up on the statement. ‘Course, it’s completely out of our patch, it might well be aimed at someone over there. But however lousy this stuff was, it was still of a standard that would’ve been getting sold on the street, so someone was happy flushing several hundred pounds worth of shit away when they could’ve made the same point, with the same result, with a lot, lot less.’
He ends this part of the conversation with a small, dismissive hand movement.
‘We don’t know, but we’ve got the basics... Rob?’
‘Lastly, we’ve got a woman, still unidentified, left lying in a basement, bound and suffocated.’ He pauses. ‘Actually, I’m the wrong guy here, I don’t really know too much more, sorry.’
Taylor looks at me.
‘She was killed by the tape strapped around her head,’ I say. ‘Suffocated. This happened before the body was dumped. Since we don’t know who she is, we can’t begin to say where she was picked up, where she came from, when she disappeared etcetera. She’d been dead over a week, but not much over. The couple who live in the house... they don’t even register on the scale of suspicion.’
Taylor pushes his chair back, gets up and stands at the window. Hands in his pockets, looking down on the car park.
‘Train; religious beheading; petty thuggery and drugs; bound, suffocated and placed in a basement...’
His words drift off. And the words of that first e-mail drift into my head. Have you worked it out yet? Well, it’s a couple of days later, and no, no we haven’t. Haven’t the faintest idea. Not even entirely sure there’s anything to work out.
Normally I’d get up and join Taylor at the window, but the presence of Morrow keeps me in my seat. I mean, if I do that, what’s poor Morrow going to do? Would he feel awkward sitting there, the last one at the desk, or would he feel the need to get up and join us, so there would be three of us standing at the window, looking down on a warm, bright day, three superheroes whose powers don’t extend much beyond being able to light more than one fag with the same match.
Mind’s drifting.
‘Who’s going to see Clayton?’ asks Morrow.
Taylor straightens his shoulders a little at the return of conversation.
‘I had thought about it being you,’ he says, ‘but best not to bring you into it. So the Sergeant is going, which unfortunately means I have to go with him, to make sure he doesn’t make a complete arse of everything, leaving the Police Service open to such an enormous law suit the entire operation has to shut down and go out of business.’
He turns round, looking at me and not Morrow.
‘The very future of policing in Scotland depends on me not fucking up?’ I say.
‘Pretty much.’
There’s a lovely pause in the conversation, as we all think about the consequences. We haven’t even talked about what we’re going to say to Clayton yet, which is probably because none of us has the faintest idea what that’s going to be.
‘Meet you at the Job Centre,’ says Morrow.
25
WE HAVE SOME FURTHER discussion about how this is going to go, but most of the conversation is Taylor stopping himself saying ‘and you keep your mouth shut.’ Into the car, sit in silence for a few minutes, and then I stick Bob on as we hit the M74 to drive to the other side of Glasgow.
Bob’s Christmas album is a gem. No, seriously. This year, if you buy one Christmas album, make it Christmas In The Heart by Mr Dylan. All your Christmas favourites are there. The First Noel, Silver Bells, Winter Wonderland, Must Be Santa, and many more. With a backing track and angelic choir straight out of Bing Crosby, and the sixty-eight year-old Bob croaking his way through a total of fifteen yuletide classics, you can’t go wrong.
Questionable choice in early June, I admit, but sometimes these festive CDs just find their way onto the player.
Bob is rasping his way through Hark! The Herald Angels Sing when Taylor finally voices his vague displeasure at the choice of listening material.
‘What... the fuck?’ he says.
Taylor’s as big a Bob fiend as I am, so I don’t know what his problem is.
‘What?’
‘It’s June.’
I leave it a second as I cut inside one of those bloody women sitting at fifty miles an hour in the middle lane, glance over at her in annoyance, see it’s actually a bloody man and feel a fleeting moment of embarrassment at my prejudice, before moving out in front of him.
‘Bob transcends the months.’
‘Seriously, Sergeant... I know you’ve got fifty Dylan CDs in the car, why the fuck are you listening to this one?’
‘Rebecca was in the car last weekend. Took her to a chess competition.’
‘You said.’
‘She doesn’t like Bob.’
‘I know. No one does. It’s only you and me left.’
‘She agreed I could put him on if it was this, and we just listened to Must Be Santa on continuous loop. So, that happened. And I haven’t removed the CD. On the plus side, I took Must Be Santa off continuous loop.’
He glances at me. Mentioning Rebecca, and the unstated fact I rarely see her, is enough to soften any argument. Nevertheless, it doesn’t quite get him to back off the anti-Christmas music crusade.
He looks in the pocket of the passenger door, digs out Planet Waves, removes the offending Christmas CD from the player, puts it away, and within fifteen seconds On A Night Like This is filling the car.
I let it play for a while then say, ‘This album always makes me sad because of Forever Young. Reminds me how I little I have to do with my kids.’
He looks at me, wondering whether or not I’m taking the piss. He can’t decide, but leaves it on anyway.
STANDING ON THE DOORSTEP. The front gate was open, the car parked at the top of the driveway. A big old Victorian house out past Bearsden. Doesn’t seem so long since we were last here.
We checked to make sure Clayton hadn’t moved, but didn’t alert him to our arrival. For all the conversation and the tension in t
he car on the way down here, it’s entirely possible he won’t be in, it’s entirely possible the guy’s in Australia or China on holiday. Could be anywhere. But the front gate is open, and the Lexus in which he raced away from us over a year ago, the only car he had at the time, is sitting in the driveway.
The fact he hasn’t moved is something that worries me. If these e-mails and the text have come from him, then this could be exactly what he wants to happen. He sits in his big, old fucking house, waiting for us to turn up and walk into his trap. The suits are all scared of him, and he’ll know it.
Standing with my back to the door, looking out at the well-tended garden and the trees bursting forth. Summer sun, that whole thing going on, one moment in the neverending cycle. Leaves grow, they look nice, they die, branches are bare, leaves grow back again.
‘Great metaphor for the circle of life,’ I say.
Taylor gives me a quick, impatient glance.
‘What?’ he says, the question not asking what I meant, but asking why I’m saying anything at all.
‘Leaves. Growing, flourishing, dying, growing again...’
He catches my eye. He looks pretty pissed off. I get that it’s with the general worry of being about to talk to the walking Venus Feds Trap, rather than at my metaphor.
‘That’s not a fucking metaphor,’ he says. ‘That literally is the circle of life. Fuck’s sake, Hutton. Get your head out your arse.’
He looks away. My head is so far up my arse the rebuke bounces harmlessly away, like someone firing a Nerf pellet at a Klingon War Bird.
The door opens. Michael Clayton. Dressed like Roger Moore in a 70’s Bond movie. Sports jacket and slacks. Only the collar of the white shirt is smaller, along with the knot in the tie. My eyes travel all the way down to his shoes, not unlike the way, I’m afraid to say, I have looked at many a woman in the past.
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