Bred in the Bone (19 page)

Bad Blood

The car park outside the Old Croft Brasserie was surprisingly full for this hour of the morning, Jasmine thought. It was just a little past ten and yet it looked like it could be lunchtime; an upscale business lunchtime at that, going by the array of pricey rides lined up across the tarmac. Her beloved red Civic was only a year old and in her eyes still immaculate enough to grace any showcourt, but it looked almost dowdy, not to mention minuscule, alongside so many Q7s, X6s, Cayennes and Range Rovers.

She had heard the place was very trendy, but hadn’t anticipated that it would be attracting such a crowd for morning coffee. At least this meant it was open, as she wasn’t sure whether the mourning period was officially over.

She was trying to stem a sense of trepidation as she walked towards the main entrance, and thought of how her mum might have felt as she approached the same building back in her teens. Was she excited about the prospect of a night in the pub? Was she apprehensive about getting knocked back? Was she conflicted about being in the company of the Fullerton brothers, aware of the protection their patronage conferred, but equally conscious of being marked by association? It was impossible to know, and not much easier to picture. They’d spent a fortune renovating the place, so much so that her mum might not have recognised it.

Jasmine could see movement through the glass doors, hear the hubbub of voices and the clack of heels on a hard floor. Still she couldn’t shake this feeling of exposure and vulnerability, hitting her all the harder for it being so unaccustomed. Doorstepping strangers was what she did for a living. It always put her a little on edge – and arguably that was where she needed to be in order to do it effectively – but she had grown used to how it felt.

This was something different, and in that action of reaching for the door handle, she understood why. The difference was that normally at this point she was pretending to be someone else. It was both her gambit and her shield: that moment of walking through the door and representing herself as someone she was not was the moment she stepped into character and left the real Jasmine outside. This morning, the only card she had to play was the truth; being herself the only valid passport to the world she needed to explore.

The door held firm, resisting her attempts both to push and pull. She tried the handle on the other one but fared no better. They were locked. However, her ineffective rattling at least attracted the attention of someone inside. A tall, heavy-set middle-aged man in a suit approached the doors, a tired expression on his face. He looked like a bouncer but she thought it a little early in the day for such personnel, and couldn’t think of ever encountering one at a restaurant.

He opened the door just a little, certainly not by way of inviting her inside. Close up, she revised her bouncer impression. The suit was too expensive-looking, and in conjunction with the scars and tattoos she estimated she was dealing with management rather than employee; but not necessarily restaurant management.

‘I’m sorry, we’re closed the now,’ he said.

Jasmine made a point of gazing inside, where she could see roughly twenty people seated at tables or standing around the bar.

‘It’s a private function,’ he explained. ‘Family only.’

This was when she had to play her card, and in so doing cross a point of no return.

‘I
am
family,’ she said.

His features compressed into an expression of terse consternation; not mere puzzlement, but the aggressive certainty of someone who expected to know every face present at this gathering today.

‘My name is Jasmine Sharp. My mother was Yvonne Sharp.’

She could see the whole process in his eyes: information being sourced from some mental archive as he sought to retrieve the name, then the tiny but unmistakable flinch as he deduced the significance and possibilities presented themselves. Nonetheless, he
still wasn’t quite getting there, and thus he still wasn’t quite ready to open that door.

‘I never met my father, because he died before I was born. But I’m told his name was Jazz.’

She tried to make it sound like she knew this was her all-access pass, but her voice faltered on the last word, feeble and appellant. This was the conversation her mother never wanted her to have, the world she had gone to extraordinary lengths to protect her daughter from.

The man on the door didn’t look like someone who was ordinarily rocked on his heels by anything less than a baseball bat, but he seemed slightly dazed by what she had just said. He stared at her, startled for a moment, then turned his head to look inside. Jasmine couldn’t see who he was looking to, but a few moments later a petite female figure emerged from behind a table and began pacing towards the entrance.

He held the door open for Jasmine now, looking at her as though he couldn’t be sure she was real, as if she might suddenly vanish and turn out to have been an apparition.

‘Jazz Donnelly?’ he asked.

Jasmine couldn’t confirm this, as it was the first time she had heard someone give her father a surname.

‘Hence Jasmine,’ she replied.

‘Jesus. I’d no idea. I’m Jazz’s big brother, David.’

He held out a hand, uncomfortable in the gesture as though aware of how inadequate and ill-suited it seemed to the occasion. Jasmine gave it the briefest and most awkward of squeezes. It felt warm against her skin, cold from driving. His hand was large and strong, but the grip was weak, reflecting the uncertainty of what was passing between them.

The petite woman had made it to the door. She looked early fifties, smart but a little over-dressed, especially for the time of day. She was lavishly made-up, but it couldn’t disguise tired eyes and a harshness to her features. She was smaller than Jasmine but exuded a latent aggression like it was a force field. This, she guessed, was Sheila Fullerton, the person she had come to see.

‘Sheila, this lassie says she’s Jazz’s daughter,’ David explained, sounding like he needed somebody else to judge the veracity of it for him. ‘Says her ma was Yvonne Sharp. Mind ay her?’

Sheila looked Jasmine up and down, cold scrutiny failing to disguise an almost fearful astonishment at what she was being asked to rule upon.

Jasmine decided to speak before the verdict was in.

‘Are you Sheila? Who worked here when my mum used to come in? It’s just . . . she told me absolutely nothing about those days, and I’ve heard you might be able to help.’

Sheila continued to stare, wide-eyed and a little stunned.

‘You say . . . Yvonne . . . Sorry,
was
. . . Do you mean your mum . . .?’

‘She died three years ago. But I gather she was born on the same day as Stevie Fullerton, and they used to come here together. He was your husband, right?’

The hubbub continued in the background, but in that moment it felt to Jasmine like she and Sheila were entirely alone, and locked in silence. She honestly had no idea whether she was about to be beckoned forth or frogmarched back out through the double doors.

Sheila glanced to David, then back to Jasmine.

‘Come on through,’ she said. ‘We’ll go somewhere quiet we can talk.’

All The Perfumes Of Arabia

Glen hefted a beige-coloured grille that he identified as having once been part of a vacuum cleaner, moving it from the chaotic melange in front of him and placing it carefully into a marked hopper. All around him, other inmates were carefully and unhurriedly getting on with the same thing, either side of four long tables piled high with smashed-up stereos, monitors, domestic appliances, toys and packaging.

All plastic. More bloody plastic.

Tons of it were delivered to the prison’s recycling workshop every day, to be hand-sorted by the inmates then sold on to a reprocessing firm who would refine it into pellets for re-manufacture. Given the sentence he was looking at, Glen estimated that if he worked here every day, by the time he got out he would have enough carbon offset points for a guilt-free trip to the moon.

He took in the scene of unfussy diligence all around, imagined what the well-meaning social reformers might make of it. To them it might prove that gainful and dignified employment was what all men needed, that they wouldn’t turn to crime if they were given a useful role and a shared sense of purpose.

Maybe, Glen thought, but you’d need to get to them early. After all, the gainfully employed didn’t suddenly turn to a life of crime simply because it paid better. Most criminals of Glen’s acquaintance had never known anything else. They were second- and even third-generation, people to whom it would never have occurred to look for honest work. They grew up looking at the world with different eyes, seeing different kinds of opportunities, different kinds of obstacles. They envisaged treasures behind every locked door yet imagined many of the open ones were somehow impenetrable to them.

These plastics could be reprocessed and turned into something else. It wasn’t so easy for the people sorting them. Glen understood that better than most. Where others had been conditioned by growing up with crime, Glen had been conditioned by growing up with violence. It had shaped him into an instrument that wrought more violence, an instrument from which ruthless men had profited. It shaped him so completely that he had lost sight of any other self he might have been.

That was until he had his epiphany, watching Yvonne playing Lady Macbeth at the Tron.

It was haunting, watching her so fully become someone else, an effect that served to further remind him that he had no idea who the real Yvonne was. She looked older, burdened, so dark and so consumed with an inner want, with anger and ruthlessness and a dozen other things that were not Yvonne at all. To Glen, it was spellbinding.

Then she drifted across the stage like she was disconnected from it, eyes open but dead, face expressionless.

‘Lo you! here she comes. This is her very guise; and, upon my life, fast asleep. Observe her; stand close.’

‘How came she by that light?’

‘Why, it stood by her: she has light by her continually; ’tis her command.’

‘You see, her eyes are open.’

‘Aye, but their sense is shut.’

‘What is it she does now? Look, how she rubs her hands.’

A sharply focused lighting gel bathed only her hands in red, and Glen watched with growing disquiet as he understood what she was trying to wash away: a stain that wasn’t there, and yet could never be cleansed.

‘Yet who would have thought the old man to have so much blood in him.’

As Yvonne rubbed her hands with increasing desperation, he saw the blood pouring from a hundred wounds. He saw it spilling on the floors of pubs, of restaurant kitchens, in living rooms, bathrooms, garages, alleyways, streets, gutters.

‘Here’s the smell of the blood still; all the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand.’

So much blood. So very much blood, all spilled by his hands, his deeds.

Yet what set him on edge as he sat in the darkness of the theatre was not that he saw his reflection in Yvonne’s horror, but that he felt the scale of its
absence
in himself. As she rubbed her hands in the eerie red glow he apprehended the horror he ought to be feeling, but simply did not, could not.

Why did he feel nothing? He could feel Lady Macbeth’s guilt, feel moved by it though it was merely a fiction, but could not feel a revulsion of his own. Yes, there was guilt – a gripping, twisting, unsleeping torture – for what he had done, but not for the deeds themselves, not for any of those he had killed. He knew he could kill again – he knew he
would
kill again – and feel none of what Yvonne was depicting on that stage.

‘What’s done cannot be undone.’

He couldn’t change what he was, but he could change what he did. He had to put this instrument into the hands of men who might use it constructively. He had to pay the proverbial debt to society, but he chose to do it on his own terms. It was good enough for the big corporations.

He noticed one of the screws glancing his way a couple of times, then begin to make his way towards him. Glen wondered what kind of petty shit he was about to get picked up on, but instead the guy just told him to go and get a fresh bin for cable offcuts, as the one currently on the go was getting full.

The guard seemed strangely apprehensive about giving this order. It wasn’t as if Glen could refuse.

He put down the smashed computer printer he had just lifted and made his way towards the fire doors that led outside to a partially covered courtyard. This was where the empty hoppers and bins were returned to once the reprocessing firm had dealt with their contents. The big hoppers ran on castors, but various colours of wheelie bin were used for collating smaller items, such as discarded circuit boards and, in this case, lengths of wire and cable.

Glen was ambushed moments after the doors swung shut at his back. They converged from behind as he entered a narrow channel between two rows of skips full of unsorted plastic, appearing all at once, as though from nowhere.

Glen recalled his first real kicking at the feet of a young team in Gallowhaugh. ‘Polis boy,’ they had called him, in reference to his dad. They were led by a sadistic wee piece of work called Joe McHaffey, whose oldest brother ended up one of Stevie’s trusted lieutenants.

He remembered lying on the ground, cowering in a ball, the repeated impacts of his forearms being driven against his head. That wasn’t satisfying Joe, though.

‘His nose isnae burst yet.’

Glen would never forget those nasally wee words, as he instructed his mates to grab his arms and expose his face.

Joe wanted to see blood.

These guys were after much more than that.

Last Man Standing

Jasmine was led through the restaurant, conscious of a drop in the volume of discussion as those gathered noted the new arrival. She felt almost every eye in the place take her in, and from this rapidly deduced that everybody here knew everybody else. They were all similarly over-dressed for the time of day, though the women’s colours were generally sober. It looked like a wake, but she knew that Fullerton’s body would not yet have been released. This was some kind of informal memorial that was being hosted in the meantime.

Despite the upmarket décor and the name of the award-winning chef boasted on the menu she still couldn’t picture her mum in this place, even in its present incarnation. To put it politely, these were not her mother’s kind of people. It was a strangely paradoxical effect that to put a suit or a posh frock on certain individuals only served to emphasise the less presentable elements of their appearance. It was like prefixing the term ‘businessman’ with the word ‘legitimate’.

There were women drinking glasses of wine and men downing pints, and it wasn’t yet half-ten in the morning. Jasmine could smell the alcohol off the spillage traps on the bar and felt queasy. She recalled Josie’s voice whenever she encountered jakeys on the street supping Special Brew or Buckfast while she was still digesting breakfast: ‘I can’t say the sun’s quite over the yardarm.’

The mum who brought her up belonged to Josie’s world. How the hell did she ever end up in this one?

She was led to the brasserie’s compact but high-ceilinged private dining room, where several mirrors contributed to an artificial sense of space around the single long table. It was a neat trick, important not to make a group paying through the nose for the VIP treatment feel like they were being shoehorned in. Nonetheless,
Jasmine feared she was going to be feeling pretty claustrophobic in here before the end.

Sheila pulled out a chair for her, significantly on the other side of the table from the exit, then sat down opposite. David, or ‘Doke’ as Sheila called him, remained standing against the wall, close to the door. Jasmine got the unmistakable impression that she was very much under scrutiny, and quite possibly under their guard.

Jasmine produced the photograph of her mum with Sheila’s late husband.

‘I believe you took this,’ she said, placing it on the table and turning it around to face her hosts.

She watched Sheila place a hand over her mouth at this ancient artefact that had found its way to her here and now as though through a wormhole in time. Doke leaned over to examine the photo also, letting out a surprised chuckle.

‘Jesus. I remember her right enough,’ he said, a tinge of pleasure creeping into his voice. ‘That’s Stevie and Nico.’

Sheila looked a little more haunted by the image, the sight of her late husband in his youth perhaps cutting a little too deep right then.

Her eyes lifted from the picture to regard Jasmine once more.

‘You don’t look like her,’ she said, but it sounded more like an observation than a scorn upon her claim.

‘She often said that. I’ve seen pictures of her as a younger girl: there’s more of a resemblance in those. People would sometimes say I must look like my father, but to be honest that usually led to her getting off the subject.’

Jasmine tried to picture Doke as a younger man, searching for a sense of what her father might have looked like.

‘We had no idea Yvonne was pregnant,’ he said. ‘She just disappeared.’

‘Aye. “Just disappearing” was catching back then,’ Sheila said pointedly, though Jasmine couldn’t tell whether the jaggy end was aimed at her or Doke.

There was a light knock at the door, and a waitress appeared
carrying coffees for the three of them. Jasmine took a sip in silence, wondering whether her cheeks were as red as they felt, with two pairs of eyes still examining her so intently. She had little doubt that they believed her, but knew that wasn’t the biggest question on their minds.

‘She needed to get away,’ Jasmine said, aware there was no point in sugar-coating this. ‘She didn’t want Jazz knowing she was pregnant. She wanted a clean break from her life in Glasgow.’

‘Where did Yvonne go?’ Sheila asked. She glanced down at her side, where Jasmine guessed her phone sat in her right palm.

‘Edinburgh. Not exactly the ends of the earth, but far enough.’

‘And she raised you herself, or . . .?’

‘On her own, yeah.’

‘Did she work?’

‘She was a drama teacher.’

‘And what is it you do yourself?’

Sheila’s eyes narrowed just a little more as she spoke, and Jasmine couldn’t help but feel she had just been checkmated.

‘I have my own business. I’m a private investigator.’

Sheila sat back in her chair and sighed with a grim satisfaction. She held up her iPhone, on which a web page was visible.

‘Private investigator, Jasmine Sharp. You’re the one who helped put away those bent polis who were working for Tony McGill.’

‘That’s right.’

Doke’s face darkened.

‘You’re the lassie that was cuttin’ aboot with Glen Fallan when he showed up back from the dead two years ago?’ he demanded, his voice low, like storm clouds rolling in. Jasmine could tell it wouldn’t take long for them to break. ‘The same bastard that just shot oor Stevie? The bastard that . . .’

‘Doke,’ Sheila cautioned. ‘Keep the heid. The lassie’s no’ done nothin’.’

‘Do you have any idea who Glen Fallan is?’ he asked, incredulous. ‘Did he tell you about the good old days?’

‘He told me enough,’ Jasmine replied. ‘I know he killed people, but—’

Doke leaned over, slapping a hand on the table.

‘He killed your fuckin’ father. He killed Jazz. Did the cunt fuckin’ tell you that?’

Jasmine looked up at the boiling anger in his face, then at her coffee. She picked up the cup and had a long pull at it, swallowing slowly. She wasn’t trying to look nonchalant, she just needed something to physically occupy herself for a few moments while his anger receded, as she feared any kind of immediate verbal response would be incendiary, regardless of the content.

She didn’t answer his question, reckoning her lack of surprise was answer enough.

‘Nothing about this is straightforward,’ she said. ‘Yes, he killed my father. And yet, when my mother was in her last days, she had Fallan tracked down so that she could see him again before the end.
That’s
what brought him “back from the dead”. Was it to forgive him? I don’t know. Was it to ask him why he did it? I don’t know. I want to find out what happened back then. Like it or not, we’re related, all three of us, but unlike you, I’ve never seen my father’s face. I’ve never even laid eyes on a photo.’

Doke let out a very long sigh, the sound of a storm blowing itself out, if perhaps only temporarily. He sounded frustrated, like this would have been a lot easier to deal with if it fitted into the paradigms he understood. Sheila remained harder to read, still shutting herself inside and assuming the weather outdoors was bad.

‘There’s not many pictures of Jazz,’ Doke said, sounding more reflective. ‘At least, not from around the time he was seeing Yvonne.’

He looked at Sheila as he said this. There was clearly something unspoken in his latter remark.

‘Didn’t like getting his photo taken,’ she agreed. ‘He had this scar, right the way down his face, from forehead to jaw.’

She touched her own face as she spoke, looking away as though she could see Jazz in one of the mirrors.

‘How did it . . .’ Jasmine inquired tentatively, feeling she was on delicate ground.

‘This sneaky wee cunt Stanley Beattie slashed him one night in a club, out of nowhere,’ said Doke. His voice was tinged with an anger that still sounded raw, decades after the fact. It drew a warning look from Sheila: keep a lid on it.

‘Jazz was a looker, and he knew it,’ she said. ‘He had a face that would get a jelly piece at any door, as my mammy used to say. Always had women wrapped around his pinkie, and he took a few liberties.’

She and Doke traded a look, Sheila telling him not to bother denying it.

‘Aye, he flung it aboot,’ Doke admitted. ‘He was different after the slashing, though. Quiet. He’d calmed doon.’

‘He wasn’t calm, he was angry,’ Sheila countered. ‘Suffering in silence.’

‘Either way, he did change,’ Doke said. ‘Yvonne wouldn’t have went near him before that. Not that way, I mean: she’d known him for years, like, but she knew he was too much a Jack the lad to get involved with him. She must have thought he was calmer.’

‘Some women are drawn to a damaged man,’ Sheila said. ‘They think they’ll be able to put him back together in a way they prefer. Doesnae work out like that, though. We all thought Jazz was calmer. Truth is, he was just bottling it all up and eventually it was gaunny explode.’

There were a few seconds of quiet, which in this context Jasmine knew not to mistake for a moment of calm. Something hung in the air between these two that was not precisely blame or accusation, but definitely a cousin of both. Sheila seemed to be leaving it to Doke to continue, but he remained silent, his eyes straying to the photograph and back to Jasmine.

‘Jazz killed Stanley Beattie as soon as he got out the jail,’ Sheila said.

‘He didnae mean to kill him,’ Doke stated adamantly. ‘He went to slash him and the guy put up his arm; Jazz ended up opening his wrist. It was an accident.’

Sheila said nothing, just gave Jasmine an arch look as though to say, ‘How do you respond to that?’

It was a first glimmer of a different alliance that might emerge here, between the two women against a male mentality rather than between Stevie’s two relatives against the interloper.

‘He never moved on from the slashing, that’s the point, Doke. We thought he had changed but the whole time he was just waiting to even up the score. It’s why he’s no’ here any more. It’s why Stevie’s no’ here any more.’

‘Naw, that cunt Fallan’s why they’re both no’ here any more,’ Doke thundered, glaring at Jasmine.

‘Aye, because
none
of you can ever move on,’ Sheila retorted. ‘Look at this photo: what does it tell you? Nico, Stevie, both gone. You should be happy, Doke: under these rules you’re the winner if you’re the last one left standing.’

‘Fallan’s still standing,’ he reminded them darkly.

‘Why did Fallan kill my father?’ Jasmine asked quietly, almost apologetically.

‘What did he tell you?’ Doke replied.

‘Nothing. Only that my father’s death made it easier for my mum to escape. He wouldn’t tell me why he actually did it.’

‘Nobody knows for sure,’ Sheila said, ‘but it happened after Jazz battered her.’

She gave Doke a look, warning him against any denial based on misplaced filial loyalty.

‘He thought she was swithering about being his alibi,’ Doke admitted.

Finally Jasmine was seeing something other than defiance and anger in his expression when talking about his brother.

‘She had been with him when he killed Stanley, but she told the polis he was with her somewhere else at the time. The polis were leaning on her because they knew she was lying and she was the weak link.’

‘So he thought beating her up would engender a deeper loyalty?’ Jasmine asked, barely masking her outrage.

‘He wanted her more afraid of him than she was of the polis,’ Sheila explained. ‘But Fallan found out, and it never went well whenever Fallan found out about a guy beating up a lassie.’

‘Well, you would know,’ Doke muttered. ‘You’ve nae problem with evening the score when it suits you, eh Sheila?’

Sheila stared down at the table for a moment, then continued as though Doke hadn’t spoken.

‘Fallan’s da used to leather his maw,’ she said. ‘Used to leather everybody in the hoose. But because his da died before he could stand up to him, Fallan was always looking for surrogates, you know?’

Jasmine thought of the place she had first found him, at a domestic violence refuge where he was handyman, gardener and courier, among other services. Rita, the woman in charge, had alluded to what happened when abusers turned up at the place. The police would warn the blokes off, escort them from the premises, but once they knew their wives or partners were there, they always came back; except when Fallan was around.

‘When he warns them off,’ Rita told her, ‘they never come back.’

‘Jazz just went out one night and was never seen again,’ Doke said, his lips thin, eyes narrowed too. ‘That bastard killed him, dumped him somewhere and then lied to us about it. We never got to bury him, never had a proper funeral.
That’s
what Fallan did to your father.’

The waitress who had brought the coffees returned looking for the empty cups and perhaps to see if anyone wanted anything else. She got as far as popping her head into the doorway and very swiftly read the atmosphere, hurriedly turning on her heel.

‘He told me he owed me,’ Jasmine said, feeling like it was incumbent upon her to respond, though she didn’t know who appointed her Fallan’s spokesperson or apologist. ‘He said he owed me a debt.’

‘You’re not the only one he felt he owed something,’ said Doke. ‘It just wasnae so much settling a debt as payback.’

‘For what?’

He and Sheila shared a look, like he knew she wasn’t going to be happy but he couldn’t be bothered with her disapproval any more.

‘Fallan tripped himself up, for once. He told us he helped Jazz
pack and fly away to Spain to lie low. Problem was, Stevie had contacts in the polis, and he found oot that Immigration had no record of Jazz leaving the country. That’s how we knew he’d killed him.’

‘What did you do to him?’ Jasmine asked, steeling herself.

Doke rolled his shoulders, his posture straightening. All of a sudden he looked like he was answering in court.

‘What happened after that, I cannae say for sure, because Stevie was fly, a born schemer. Unlike Jazz, he didnae just blaze in and worry aboot the consequences later.’

Doke’s face shone as he warmed to the tale.

‘There was a few of us he knew he could rely on. He gave each of us an envelope, which we werenae to open until we were alone. In it was a message telling us a time and a place. Some folk turned up to wherever it said and found one other member of the crew. Their instructions were just to stay there until they got the shout that it was done. Other boys had instructions for getting Fallan.’