Bred in the Bone (10 page)

The Last Kindness (i)

She stood outside the stables waiting for her dad to come back out, hugging herself, suddenly feeling the morning’s cold seep right into her bones. Lysander made that distressed braying noise somewhere within, weaker this time.

Her dad emerged, his face grey, older somehow than when he entered. He seemed reluctant to look directly at her, started to speak, abandoned the attempt, let his mouth emit a sigh instead, carried inside a wispy jet of steam. Then something inside him became taut, and he met her expectant gaze.

‘Demetrius is okay,’ he said.

She waited for him to continue, then when he did not she made her prompt in desperation. ‘Is there anything we can do for Ly?’

He said nothing, but gave a curt nod and proceeded towards the house.

She enjoyed a moment’s hope as she assumed that he was going inside to call the vet, but a moment was all it lasted. She wasn’t a silly little girl who believed the grown-ups could make anything all better. She had seen her dad’s face as he emerged from the stables, and she had seen what lay within.

Her dad strode out of the back door again, this time with a black canvas carrying harness slung over his shoulder. Lisa appeared behind him, a mixture of concern and confusion on her face. He turned around and told her to stay inside, a sternness to his voice that rooted her in the doorway like there was a forcefield in front of it. She would have many questions, but knew that the answers were ones she would not want to hear.

She felt the tears well up in anticipation of the moment he marched past her, which would mark the point at which she had
no role but to mourn. Instead, however, he stopped beside her and unwrapped the rifle from its covering.

‘You should do this.’

She shook her head.

‘It won’t just be giving vaccinations and delivering foals,’ he said, softly enough for it to sound tender, firmly enough for her to understand that he expected her to comply.

‘I can’t,’ she said. ‘Not Ly.’

Her dad took her chin in his right hand, as always a tenderness to his touch despite the rough skin of his calloused farmer’s fingers.

‘This is the last kindness anyone can give him. That’s why you should be the one.’

She looked up into his eyes, saw reflected her pain, her fear, her love, and she understood. She nodded and reached for the rifle.

It was a P14, the one with which her dad had taught her to shoot, and the same one her dad had been taught to shoot with by her grandfather. She had held it a dozen times, but it never felt so heavy, so solid, the rounds so long and formidable. As she slid the bolt and placed one in the breach she eyed the taper of the bullet’s point and thought of it as a hypodermic needle.

She took a breath of cold air and stepped inside. Lysander’s head did not turn, his mercy to her ahead of her mercy to him. She could not look again into that black, ragged hole, and she wanted even less to look into his remaining scared and helpless eye.

She shouldered the butt, levelled the muzzle around two feet from the back of his head and thumbed off the safety catch, but for a moment it was as though there was a second safety catch preventing the trigger from moving. She could feel the heat of his body, hear his laboured breathing, and could not bring herself to pull back her index finger. Then he made that pitiable braying sound again and she knew what was her duty, what mercy she must dispense: the ministration of this last kindness. She swallowed back a sob and steadied her breathing, removing herself to the routine of how she had been trained to take each shot and, detached in the mechanics of technique, she pulled the trigger.

Missed Calls

Jasmine stood at her living room window and watched Laura jog away down the street into the darkness, wondering as she stared at the retreating figure what her visit was really all about. She recalled that Laura had always shown an interest in Fallan, never sharing her boss’s conviction that he was only playing nice to further some darker hidden purpose. Nonetheless, Jasmine also knew that she was fiercely loyal to McLeod, so if she was going off the reservation like this it was more likely to be motivated by a desire to prevent her boss from making a mistake. Either way, it suggested there was something about this apparently simple case that was making her wary.

Jasmine sat down to her plate of pasta, forcing herself to eat despite her diminishing appetite. If nothing else, a full stomach might help her sleep, something that threatened to present a struggle now that her brain had all this to process. She had placed her laptop on the table in front of her plate, and as she waited for it to boot up she asked herself what she truly knew about Glen Fallan.

By his own confession he had been a gangland enforcer and hitman. She had heard him described as an ice-cold killer, ‘like the ice doesn’t feel anything when it freezes you to death’. Jasmine had witnessed first-hand the fear he inspired when he allowed some two-bit chancer to recognise him, in order that the guy would be sufficiently intimidated as to cough up some vital information. There was no question what kind of man Glen Fallan had once been. But having buried that man for two decades and gone to such lengths to become someone different, why would he let himself be drawn back into that world?

After that same gatecrashed breakfast, and on all of the occasions on which their paths had crossed since, he had shown no sign of reciprocating McLeod’s hatred. Fallan was instinctively untrusting
of cops – sometimes downright hostile – but his conduct towards McLeod in particular was measured and deferential. One might even say contrite.

‘She recognised me,’ he told Jasmine, though he confessed he couldn’t remember from where; that, in fact, reflected the enormity of his guilt. ‘I hurt so many people . . . McLeod could have been somebody hiding behind her crying mother while I threatened her father. One of the countless witnesses you don’t see because they’re never going to tell anybody.’

He had murdered Jasmine’s father, and yet even in the final stages of her cancer Jasmine’s mum had engaged her cousin Jim to track Fallan down so that she could see him again before the end. Everyone else assumed he was dead, but her mum knew otherwise; Fallan had been sending her money for twenty years. When Jasmine found out and confronted him about it, he had explained that it was part of his penance for what he had done. However, Jasmine couldn’t imagine her mum accepting a penny, let alone seeking a deathbed visit, if that was all he was to her.

Fallan would only say that they were ‘good friends in very bad times’. This suggested that even back then there must have been a secret side to him that contradicted what everyone else knew.

Either that, or a secret side to her mother.

She keyed in a search on the Fullerton killing and her eye was drawn to a headline two results down, below the BBC report. It took her to the
Daily Record
website.

MANY BLOODY RETURNS

SLAIN
gangland supremo Stevie Fullerton was gunned down on his
BIRTHDAY
, it emerged today. The feared crime boss had turned forty-nine on the very morning he was shot dead at a Shawburn car wash.

A tube of penne tumbled from Jasmine’s fork, missed the side of her plate and rolled across the table, leaving a thin trail of sauce.

The man Glen Fallan had shot, a man with whom he had a history going back more than twenty years, had been born on
precisely the same day as Jasmine’s mother. The significance of this remained uncertain, but she sincerely doubted it could be entirely coincidental.

If there’s more to this than meets the eye
. . .

As she cleared away her plate and placed Laura’s empty glass next to the sink she considered how curious it had felt that the detective should come by in person while out on a run. Then she remembered Laura mentioning having failed to get through to Jasmine’s mobile.

Jasmine retrieved the phone from her pocket and verified, as she had thought, that there were no missed calls. In fact, now she came to think of it, she had received no calls whatsoever today or the day before, an extremely unusual state of affairs that prompted her to recall Harry Deacon’s confusion over his phone not recognising her number.

As an experiment, she called her landline using the mobile, then dialled 1471 to check the incoming number.

It wasn’t hers.

With a horrible surging sensation she thought of the neddy guy at the Twin Atlantic concert, who had been scoping her down in the stalls, then had just happened to appear upstairs as she exited the circle.

She’d been too out of it to notice at the time, but in retrospect certain aspects of his manner didn’t add up. He hadn’t once asked her what was wrong: the guy had found her crying and played the good Samaritan in escorting her outside, but apart from inquiring very generally whether she was ‘okay’, he had not once asked who or what had upset her. Then, once he had given her the drink, he had seemed impatient to get away, no longer the concerned passerby. She had assumed it was because he was missing the show, but he had stayed outside when she said she was going back in. He probably took off the moment she was out of sight.

She quickly slid the backing off the phone and removed the battery to get a look at the sim. It wasn’t hers. She’d had the same one for years, and her provider’s logo had changed recently. This card bore the new design.

Christ. The sleekit, opportunist wee bastard. But why wouldn’t he just steal the actual phone? she wondered.

Because it would get reported, as she was about to do now. This way, he had enjoyed a couple of days’ grace to do whatever he wanted with her sim: selling it off to hackers to be cloned, running up all kinds of bills; she shuddered to think. The damage could be in the thousands.

She phoned up her network provider, hoping they had a human being manning their emergency line at this time of night, and distantly wondering whether she could remember saying yes to whatever insurance package they had offered to cover against this kind of fraud.

Probably not.

She could picture the digits spinning like a fruit machine on her imaginary bill as she was bounced around the system, held in various queues and asked the same security questions over and over again. She must have explained her predicament four times, which only served to reinforce her fear that it was unprecedented and therefore uniquely disastrous in a way that would void her cover even if it turned out she had opted to take it.

Eventually she was put through to somebody who was able to tell her what usage was showing up on her account.

‘Are you sure the card has been stolen?’ asked the girl at the other end of the line, which would have invited no end of acidly sarcastic replies had Jasmine not been in abject need of her cooperation. ‘It’s just that there’s been very little outgoing activity. Just one text and one phone call, both to the same number.’

Relief and confused curiosity flooded through Jasmine in equal measure as she wrote down the number and the times of both the text message and the call. The digits meant nothing to her, but the fact that they had been dialled by someone else, on a different handset, gave her a horribly creepy feeling, like knowing a stranger had been inside her flat while she was out, even if it turned out he had only stolen a paper clip.

As a kid she had learned all of her home phone numbers, and those of her best friends, committing them so indelibly to memory
that she could still rhyme off some of them, years after she last had reason to dial them. By contrast, these days there were people she phoned several times a week whose actual numbers she had only ever seen as she copied them across from a text message to a contact file.

Hesitantly, she began dialling the number on her mobile, wondering how she would phrase the question if somebody answered. She didn’t get that far, however. Before she had entered all of the digits, her phone was suggesting an autocomplete, ready to let her skip the last few keystrokes.

She stared at the device like it was an alien artefact, double-checking against what the girl had just dictated, but there was no mistake. Before and after the shooting of Stevie Fullerton yesterday morning, somebody had been using her phone number to contact Glen Fallan.

Unwarranted Sympathy

Catherine had been inside Fullerton’s house once before, in the company of Dougie Abercorn two years back. Just like now, Stevie hadn’t been around, though on that occasion he had absented himself voluntarily.

It felt empty, and not just through being bereft of its owner. She had been in attendance plenty of times as officers tramped through a murder victim’s property, and developed a poignant sense of who had lived there, of the presence that had been erased. Fullerton’s place lacked any kind of personal stamp, its material opulence expressing nothing other than wealth. It was gaudy but soulless, parts of it suggesting an attempt to recreate a Las Vegas hotel suite in the unlikely environment of Uddingston; others like a transplanted section of a furniture showroom. And like a hotel suite or a shop display, it felt transient, a place to be passed through, not lived in.

There was a superabundance of marble and glass brick, galaxies of inset lighting overhead, a dining suite that looked like it had never hosted a meal and a ludicrous bathroom boasting Roman pillars either side of a staircase leading up to a Jacuzzi. All of it was expensive, and it could be described as merely excessive rather than outright tasteless; tasteless would at least have had a little more warmth.

But maybe this was partly an effect of the welcome.

Fullerton’s wife, Sheila, was monitoring proceedings with a simmering combination of suspicion and resentment, chaperoned by her late husband’s cousin and ‘business associate’ David Donnelly, known to his pals as Doke.

‘You know, Stevie was the victim here, no’ the fuckin’ accused,’ Donnelly had grunted when Catherine showed them the warrant to search the premises.

They would find nothing connected to criminal activity, just the same as if they had searched the place last week. These guys worked hard to put layers of deniability between themselves and their activities. Doke knew Catherine understood this, which was why he was viewing what he anticipated as a futile search as harassment.

It wasn’t, though. It was procedure. They were trying to establish a motive for why Fullerton had been killed, which was why there was also a team searching Fallan’s place in Northumberland.

Sheila Fullerton was about five-two in heels and looked like she’d weigh six stone soaking wet. She reminded Catherine of a girl at school, of whom she had made the mistake of thinking mousy simply because she was slight. The girl had been all the more ferocious in compensation for her stature, and Catherine bet she was a pushover compared to Sheila here.

She was dressed like she was twenty years younger, in a short black lycra skirt and low-cut black top matching her dyed jet-black hair. Her gaunt face was hard-set, a sharp angularity to it that struck Catherine uncharitably as rat-like, though this impression wasn’t helped by the hostility she was giving off like fumes rising from petrol. If she was feeling anything more conventionally associated with the bereaved, such as pain or sadness, then she
wasnae lettin’ the fuckin’ polis see it
.

She stood in her kitchen, leaning against the sink, arms folded, searing her uninvited guests through eyes narrowed to slits.

‘Well seeing you’re all sneaking about here now that he’s gone,’ she said to Catherine, her voice dry and hoarse. ‘There’s none of you would have had the nerve to look him in the eye. Accused him of all sorts but you never pinned anything on him. Now you can write your own version, make up whatever you like, can’t you?’

It sounded like it was intended as a rhetorical question, and Catherine guessed she was expected to tolerate it or to ignore it. Perhaps she should have.

‘I’m sorry, I’m not sure I follow. I was confused by the Glasgow gangster double-think: on the one hand you want to make out Stevie never did anything wrong, and yet at the same time you’re boasting about how badass he was. Which is it to be?’

Catherine saw a shudder pass through Sheila, an anger seizing her so tightly for a few seconds that her breathing became audible across the kitchen. It looked like a retort was thought better of, and when she did speak again her voice was softer, measured, but close to breaking.

‘I know your type, hen,’ she said. ‘You thought he was shite. You think
I’m
shite. Well, let me put you straight. He might have . . . He was . . .’

Now her voice did fail her, breaking down for a moment, and when it returned it was barely above a whisper.

‘He was
my husband
.’

She said it as an appeal to Catherine for compassion, for her to see her as a woman and understand what she had lost.

In that moment Catherine caught a glimpse of herself and didn’t like what she saw. She felt shame upon her cheeks and looked at the floor, wondering how this hate could so diminish her humanity.

When she looked up again she offered Sheila a different face.

‘I’m sorry.’

Tears came now from those narrow, angry eyes. The façade was cracked. She grudged Catherine seeing it, but she was helpless and she knew it. Catherine offered her a tissue, which she accepted.

‘He was my husband. I loved him. And now he’s dead.’

Just for a moment they were what they should have been: a widow recently bereaved and a police woman offering consolation and support. But just for a moment was as long as it lasted.

‘We want to find out why that happened,’ Catherine said softly, but she could see the barricades were already going back up.

‘Why don’t you ask Glen Fallan?’ Sheila replied acidly. ‘I hear that’s who you’ve pulled in.’

‘We already did. He’s not been very talkative.’

‘No, he never was.’

‘Did your husband mention Fallan recently? Did he have any reason to believe he was under threat?’

Sheila’s face was stone-set once more. She was back in character.

‘I’m not letting you bastards use this to dig up shite about Stevie.
If you want to know why it happened, then that’s for you to ask
other
people.’

‘Other people are where we go next, but here’s where we have to start. For instance, your husband’s mobile phone was missing when we found him. We think the gunman took it, though we haven’t found it yet. We need the account details so we can get in touch with his provider and trace who he’s been in contact with.’

Catherine knew that they could get this anyway, indeed might already have it, but if she could get Sheila to volunteer something, to cooperate even just symbolically, then it could be the trickle that led to a torrent.

Sheila folded her arms and stared back like a toddler in the huff.

‘It’s your call, Mrs Fullerton. But sooner or later you’re going to have to ask yourself what means more to you: being the keeper of the flame or finding out the truth.’

Catherine was almost at the kitchen door when Sheila spoke.

‘There’s a concertina file in the walk-in wardrobe, in the bedroom. Stevie keeps all the utility bills and stuff in there.’

‘Thank you.’

Sheila swallowed.

‘Kept,’ she added, closing her eyes.

Catherine relayed the instructions to Beano and sent him upstairs to retrieve the file. She had considered going herself, because part of her was pruriently curious to see the bedroom concerned. However, another part of her knew that the smug amusement factor of tacky opulence was always in competition with a rising anger at where all the money had come from; and still another part felt that she was the tacky one for contemplating this trespass of Sheila’s dignity.

Through the huge floor-to-ceiling windows of the front hall Catherine could see Laura outside on the lawn, talking on the phone. When she caught Catherine’s eye, she pointed to the device to indicate that she had news.

Catherine waited until Laura’s call had finished then strode
outside, meeting her on an expanse of monoblock that ought to have its own postcode.

‘Forensics,’ Laura said. ‘Bit of a good news, bad news package.’

‘I’ll take the bad up front. I always ate my Brussels sprouts first so I could enjoy the turkey.’

‘Fallan’s gun didn’t fire the shots.’

Catherine tutted. This was disappointing, but not a body blow.

‘Ballistics did a test-fire already?’ she asked. ‘Figures: they only make you wait when it’s good news.’

‘It never got as far as a test-fire,’ Laura told her. ‘The gun under Fallan’s vehicle was a nine-mil Beretta and the shell casings turned out to be twenty-twos. Low-velocity subsonic, ideal for a silencer.’

Catherine wasn’t perturbed.

‘Doesn’t surprise me. The Beretta fires high-velocity stopping rounds: that’s the defence weapon he keeps stashed for tight scrapes. He’d ditch the one he used for the hit. What’s the good news?’

‘The transferred paint is a match.’

‘Brilliant.’

‘So that puts his vehicle there for sure. Can’t claim it was fake plates.’

‘Good going,’ Catherine told her. ‘It’s coming together.’

‘A motive would be nice.’

Catherine’s attention was suddenly drawn to the approach of Beano, who was conspicuously unencumbered by a concertina file.

‘Did you not find it?’ she asked.

‘No, no, it was where she said. The concertina file’s at the foot of the stairs. It’s just . . .’

Beano had an odd look on his face, one that reminded her of Fraser when he was about to ask something that he already suspected might be really daft.

‘What?’ asked Laura impatiently.

‘Don’t laugh, but I think I’ve found something.’

‘You’re fair selling it to us with that build-up,’ said Catherine. ‘What is it?’

He grimaced a little, as though bracing himself for a backlash, then presented a small white plastic rectangle on the palm of his hand.

‘This was sitting on the shelf, right next to the concertina file. It’s a library card, for the Mitchell.’

Laura failed to honour his request for no laughter.

‘And what significance are you ascribing to that?’ she asked.

‘Are you kidding? Finding a library card in a gangster’s house is like finding a crack pipe on the space shuttle.’

‘Beano’s right,’ Catherine said. ‘The only books they read are football biographies and true-crime memoirs by other hard men, just to see if they get a mention. And they don’t borrow them from the library.’

‘The card shows that he only joined up last month,’ Beano went on. ‘I think Stevie might have been doing some research.’