Bred in the Bone (34 page)

Prisoners

Jasmine could hear a vehicle approaching, the splashing of tyres through puddles audible from somewhere outside. She switched off the solitary bare bulb that hung from the ceiling, the better to look out into the darkness, and moved to the window. There was a faint glow to her right, but she couldn’t see the narrow road as her room was at the rear of the house.

She listened intently to the growing purr of an engine and the crunch of wheels on the loose gravel and broken paving. Then the engine was silenced and a car door slammed shut.

She could hear voices in the hall, low and gruff, fading as they disappeared behind a door downstairs. They were below and to the right, words muffled and indistinct. She thought she could make out the sound of a tap running, a chink of crockery.

Fuckers were sitting down to a cuppa.

They seemed in no rush. This suited her and tortured her at the same time. There was so much fear in not knowing what was going on, yet whenever she sensed movement from below, the possibility that somebody might be venturing upstairs, her heart raced.

Eventually, inevitably, she heard footsteps on the stairs. She got up from her chair automatically, something in her demanding a state of readiness, only for her to become more acutely conscious of her exposure. She shrunk back against the wall beneath the window, furthest from the door, then squatted down, balling herself up.

The footsteps grew nearer, striding steadily along the bare boards of the upstairs hallway. It was only one person. The gait was different from Pudgy: lighter in tread yet noisier in volume. Some reflexively analytical part of her brain told her she should expect to see a smaller man in hard-soled footwear, as opposed to Pudgy in his trainers. It didn’t tell her anything that might make a difference.

The door opened and in walked a wiry figure wearing an expensive suit in a cut that was at least twenty years too young for him. She saw money, she saw vanity and she saw a man unused to having anyone around who might tell him he was kidding himself.

He was early seventies, but not early seventies like somebody’s amiable grandfather. He was early seventies like Jimmy Savile: lean, strong, vicious and predatory.

The only pictures she had seen had been decades old, always from the same paltry selection the tabloids had on file, but she knew who she was looking at. This was Tony McGill.

‘Come and have a wee seat, hen,’ McGill said.

He walked over to the table and pulled a chair out either side, like he was inviting her to sit down in his kitchen. Like she wasn’t his prisoner. Like she wasn’t bloodied. Like she wasn’t naked.

Jasmine didn’t have a choice. She scrambled across the floor like an animal, trying to keep her breasts and crotch covered as she positioned herself on the chair. She knew there was nothing he wasn’t going to see if he wanted to. The point wasn’t to spare her own shame; it was to accentuate his.

McGill looked around at the mouldy walls and ceiling, the bare bulb, the tiny window, and finally at the bowl on the floor, into which she’d had no choice but to finally pee.

He shook his head and sighed.

‘Not nice being shut away in a pokey wee room, is it?’ he asked.

Jasmine didn’t answer, didn’t meet his gaze.

‘You’ve only been here a few hours. Can you imagine what it feels like to hear a judge give you a sentence in
decades
? And can you imagine what it’s like to know that you’ve been set up by people you trusted? People you took under your wing and gave a start in life?’

He didn’t raise his voice. There was even a wry little chuckle in there, but it was hollow, rattling like chains on a wooden floor.

‘Whole life ahead of you. All your plans, all the things you thought you had plenty of time to get around to. And then it’s all taken away. Doesn’t seem fair, does it?’

She couldn’t muster a reply, and that wasn’t good enough. He
reached across the table and cupped her chin, forcing her head up, forcing her to look at him.

‘You’re awfy quiet, hen. From what I heard, I thought you’d have more spunk. Bet you’d more to say for yourself when you were fucking everything up for Bob Cairns and that lot, eh?’

Still she said nothing. She couldn’t think of any words. His eyes burned right through her, not with hate or anger, but something else: something horribly eager, almost elated, yet at the same time joyless and cold.

This was not about her, and for that reason, no matter what he thought, it wouldn’t satisfy him.

‘Have you got plans? A boyfriend maybe?’

As he asked this, he broke off his gaze to stare conspicuously at whatever he could see of her tits.

‘See, when I got banged up, I had somebody I wanted to be with. Somebody I loved. I know people look at me and only see a hard case, but that’s not all there is. I had somebody special. And I don’t mean his mother,’ he said, gesturing below with his head.

She interpreted this to mean that Pudgy downstairs must be Tony Junior, or Teej as he was known.

‘No, that was long over. I’m talking about a woman of class. Somebody who turned heads wherever she went, but wasn’t appreciated where it mattered most. I appreciated her. We were going to be together, and Christ would
that
not have turned heads?’

He grinned, as though inviting her to join him in his reverie, but bitterness was already bleeding into it.

‘Not to be. You can’t ask anybody to wait thirty years minus time off for good behaviour, can you? No, if you love somebody set them free, they say. I set her free, and spent the time we should have had together locked up in wee rooms smaller than this, pissing in pots and wanking into hankies.’

He sat back with his arms folded, staring, lapping up the silence.

‘You’d have to be angry about something like that, wouldn’t you say?’

She didn’t say. She was doing well to breathe.

He cupped her chin again.

‘Do you know what this is about?’

He looked like he’d have been disappointed if she said yes. He needed to tell her.

‘I was set up by the late Stevie Fullerton and by the formerly late but apparently not so late Mr Glen Fallan. And I’ve waited a long time to put things right. Things
need
to be put right, believe me, hen, or else you cannae move on. I wasn’t in a hurry, though. I’d waited all those years inside: I could wait a wee while longer for the right moment to come along, and it did.

‘Stevie gave me a wee problem, and as luck would have it Glen provided me with the ideal solution. A very satisfying solution, I thought, set up by me like I was set up by him. But the best part would be that he’d know he was stuck in there, in prison, where he could do nothing about the fact that I was out here. With you.’

McGill ran a hand down the side of her face, causing her to flinch. Then he sat back again and sighed, almost regretfully.

‘Aye, Glen was always trying to be somebody’s guardian angel, always looking to be the knight in shining armour to make up for that one damsel in distress that he wasn’t able to defend.’

Neither fear nor caution could disguise Jasmine’s response to this. She met his eyes inquiringly before she could even think to stop herself.

‘You think I’m talking about your mammy? Naw, I barely knew her. I’m talking about way back, when he was in his teens. I’m talking about a nasty accident in his house. Well, that vicious bastard Iain swore it was an accident, but when you’re never done laying into your family you cannae be surprised if it ends in tragedy.’

McGill reached into the inside pocket of his jacket, where she was sure she glimpsed the top of her phone in its pink sleeve. Teej had made her speak into it before, got her to say ‘This is Jasmine’. She didn’t get to hear who was on the other end, but she could guess. McGill produced a photograph, keeping the printed side facing him for the time being. On the yellowed back she could read the words ‘Fiona and Glen, Kelburn Park’.

‘Fiona got knocked over. I gather she was trying to stop Iain battering her wee brother. She hit her head on the fireplace. Nobody
in that house was ever the same again. Iain was dead inside even before somebody finished the job. She was a lovely looking girl, too, wouldn’t you say?’

McGill placed the photograph down on the table in front of her. It showed Fallan as a skinny teen, standing next to his older sister in front of a fish pond or boating loch. Jasmine stared at the girl’s face, perplexed by its striking familiarity. For a confused moment she wondered if she was looking at an early picture of her mum, and her mind flashed with ramifications and consequences, tallying up everything Aunt Josie had told her and wondering how it could all be a lie.

Josie hadn’t lied, though. The girl in the picture didn’t look like her mother.

The girl in the picture looked like Jasmine.

A half-gasp, half-sob escaped from her mouth and she placed a hand over it, no longer mindful of covering her breast.

McGill was chuckling with grim satisfaction.

‘Aye, it has to be said that boy Jazz Donnelly was a mad shagger. A
mad
shagger. Flung it about like you wouldn’t believe. I once heard that he fucked three different lassies in the office of that Nokturn place in the same night, and then took another one home later. He must have pumped a hundred lassies before he got around to your mammy, so it’s pretty amazing that none of them ever showed up claiming he got them pregnant. A fucking miracle, you might say. Unless it turned out the bold Jazz was firing blanks. What do you reckon?’

The Satellite

There was no let-up in the rain as Catherine reached the outskirts of Gallowhaugh. They stopped at a set of traffic lights, a wee parade of shops sitting to the left facing a road that ran parallel to the dual carriageway. She recognised it. A mid-level dealer named Jai McDiarmid had been found dead a couple of years back, behind what had then been his own tanning salon. The premises were boarded up now, nobody taking on the let. A couple of doors down there was a group of teenagers outside a chippy, huddled under the cover of an overhang, a scene Catherine guessed she could have witnessed here on any rainy night over the past four or five decades.

She noticed Fallan gazing fixedly out of the passenger-side window towards the parade, and wondered what memories were replaying inside his head.

‘How did you come to be working for Tony McGill in the first place?’ she asked him.

It seemed to take him a few moments to disengage from wherever his mind had been before he could deal with her question.

‘It’s a long story. In the simple version, you could say I was headhunted. Tony was an adept manipulator of people: he understood the many and various things that could motivate them, not just the venal ones. And it’s testimony to his skills that I didn’t realise I had been manipulated until I was already too far down the road to turn back.’

‘You knew who he was, though? Growing up, I mean.’

‘Everybody knew who he was. I knew who all the hard men and players were around Gallowhaugh, and I hated all of them. I had never met Tony McGill, but I hated him the most, because I knew he was in cahoots with my dad. When I was at a sensitive age, the one redeeming feature I believed my dad to have was that he was
a polisman, fighting the good fight. I made a lot of allowances for his behaviour on that basis. Then I found out about him and Tony, and the last piece of façade crumbled. I finally saw what my old man was, but I suppose I must have transferred a lot of blame onto Tony.’

The lights turned to green. Catherine pulled away, staying on the dual carriageway. She still didn’t have a destination in mind, and neither did Fallan. He was waiting for a call, and it felt right to be mobile.

‘So what changed your mind?’ she asked.

‘Learning that nothing’s ever that simple, especially in Gallowhaugh. One day I was walking through the ruins of what used to be a factory, when I saw six or seven guys coming towards me. They had axes, hammers, machetes, motorbike chains. They all had scarves over their faces, up to just below the eyes. That was unusual – round here, if you were going to give somebody a doing the whole point was that the victim, and everybody else, knew exactly who was giving out the message.’

‘They were masked because it was going to be more than that,’ she suggested.

‘Fortunately I didn’t have to find out. A car came screeching up and the back door flew open. Somebody told me to jump in, and I didn’t wait to be asked twice. The driver told me “there’s a man wants a word with you,” and I knew who he meant.’

‘Team Tony to the rescue.’

‘Aye. The twist was, years later I found out what the scarves were for: it was so I didn’t recognise that the blokes with the tools were Tony’s people too. It was a set-up.’

‘So that you felt you owed him from the off, and that he was on your side.’

‘That and the opportunity for him to make an impression. They drove me to meet him, and not in some dingy pub or snooker hall. I got taken to his house, this huge place up in the hamlet. It was so he could come over as the benevolent ruler, show off his stature by putting himself in the context of a different world from the streets that . . .’

But Catherine had stopped listening after one key word.

‘The hamlet?’ she asked.

‘Aye. It’s what we called Capletmuir. Tony had this massive house—’

‘Take me there,’ she interrupted. ‘Right now. Show me where it was.’

She did a u-turn through the first gap in the central reservation and accelerated back towards the junction as though it was an emergency.

It only took a few minutes to reach Capletmuir, the satellite place removed and yet connected to the world once ruled by Tony McGill. The car snaked between opulent new developments, culs-de-sac bending away out of sight either side of the main road, on past Miner’s Row, where Brenda Sheehan had lived and died, towards the railway bridge at the crown of the hill.

Fallan directed her past the station, the road passing beneath the train tracks, then left, inevitably, on to the tree-lined enclave that was Silverbirks Lane. It was a narrow road, laid down long before the advent of the motor car, and the exclusivity of the neighbourhood was underlined by the fact that the subsequent upgrades in tar and concrete had not included the addition of a pavement. Walls, trees and hedges abutted the road, just shy of a narrow strip of grass banking.

The houses themselves could only be glimpsed, each of them set far back from the road and intentionally obscured by greenery. Fallan pointed to a set of huge wooden gates, set into the modern brickwork of a high wall, their automated hinges powered by electric servos.

‘That was the place. The gates have had a revamp, but that was McGill’s house.’

Catherine kept driving. The road bent around to the right as she slowly followed it, taking it further away from the railway line that ran parallel to the properties nearest the main road. On the left-hand side, about sixty yards after the place that had once belonged to McGill, she spied a gap between the tall housing of another security gate and the wall bordering the next property.

This was where the path came out: the path that led to the woodland behind the sprawling plots of Silverbirks Lane, trailing among the trees until it ran alongside the railway and emerged next to the station.

‘What?’ Fallan asked.

‘Julie Muir’s body was found just off that path, somewhere around what I now know to have been the back of Tony McGill’s house. Can you see where he fits into this now?’

‘Starting to,’ Fallan replied.

‘She’s walking along the path towards the Ewart house, but before she gets there, she sees something she’s not supposed to . . .’

‘Don’t rule out McGill’s creepy wanker of a son, Teej. It’s possible he—’

Fallan stopped in mid-stream as his phone began to chime. He fished it rapidly from his pocket and flashed it at Catherine, the screen showing a picture of Jasmine Sharp above the line of text identifying her as the caller.

But they both knew she wasn’t the caller.

‘Put it on speaker,’ Catherine said, cutting the engine.

She didn’t expect Fallan to comply, so the fact that he did told her how desperate he was, how much he was prepared to lay himself open to her.

‘Hello?’ Fallan said tentatively, the uncertainty in his tone betraying how fragile he truly was, and no amount of bitterness inside Catherine could deny how human.

‘Dead man,’ said a male voice, curt and emotionless. ‘Collaton Park. Ten on the dot. You come in through the main gate, you come on foot and you come alone. You don’t show, she dies. You’re late, she dies. Any hint you’ve got friends, she dies.’

The call clicked off, leaving them listening to the endless drumming of the rain.

Fallan was absolutely still, and yet she got a sense of uncontainable energy from him. It was something that could explode forth at any moment, and she knew she didn’t want to be there when it did. All she had to do was imagine for a second that it was Duncan or Fraser being held at the other end of that phone for
her to comprehend the magnitude of the forces that could be unleashed.

‘You recognise the voice?’ she asked.

He nodded. ‘It’s McGill.’

‘Where’s Collaton Park?’

‘I’ve never heard of it,’ Fallan said, sounding frantic, like this might prove to be a disastrous oversight on his part.

Catherine grabbed her phone and keyed the name into its navigation app. The screen resolved into a map and auto-scrolled from the last place she had used it to a point only minutes from where the car sat in Capletmuir. Her instincts had been on the money.

‘It’s in Gallowhaugh,’ she said, showing him the phone.

Fallan pinched to zoom out, getting his bearings.

‘Christ. Collaton Park. I never even knew that was its real name.’

‘What’s real name?’

‘We just called it the Spooky.’