Bred in the Bone (37 page)

The Nature of the Risk

It was a cold morning, but it was well worth the early rise and the extra jumper. He had been awake since five anyway, unable to get back to sleep. That’s why he decided to cut his losses. The skies were blue but there was still a wee bit of mist drifting in places. Made you think what this place looked like hundreds of years ago, when it was just moors and woods, long before anybody came up here to blooter a golf ball around.

Doke knew from experience that he’d warm up enough to take a layer off by about the fifth hole, especially if he kept swinging at this rate. His game was literally all over the place, zig-zagging his way up the first two fairways. He wasn’t sure where his head was at this morning, but then he’d come here to clear it, hadn’t he? Out here alone, that fresh feeling of the morning air and the sense of peace he got when there wasn’t another soul in sight.

He’d be grand by the back nine. Sometimes you had to look at it that way: write off the bad start and just concentrate on what was ahead. If you worried about your score being knackered after a few holes, it was pointless. It wasn’t like playing on the Xbox: you couldn’t reload and start again.

Golf was all in the head: that was why he came here when he needed to think. It was a safe place to think too. You could see folk coming from miles off. He remembered how a guy he knew got ambushed on the municipal course over at Burnbrae about twenty years ago. A team turned up with machetes and hatchets and all sorts: hopped over the wall at the fourteenth, where the fairway ran parallel to the back of the scheme.

That wasn’t happening out here. This was the proper countryside. Plus he had a sawn-off shotty in his bag along with the clubs.
When he told people about it he said, ‘I’ve got my woods, my long irons, my nine iron and my shooting iron.’

He told plenty of people about it. The point was that it got around. The point was that folk knew.

He hooked another drive: good length but a horrible pull to the left, taking it over the gorse and very possibly into the burn.

There was just so much on his mind: that’s why he hadn’t been sleeping. Tony McGill was dead, with Teej heading for the jail whenever he got out of the hospital. The rumour was that it was Glen Fallan. The same Glen Fallan Doke had unsuccessfully tried to have taken out while he was on remand, and who undoubtedly knew this.

Aye, funny he was having trouble sleeping.

Opportunity was knocking, though. The McGill show was well over: not only was the main man pan breid, but two of his top boys had been lifted at the Spooky as well. There was a very large gap in the market. Doke just didn’t feel sure he had what it took to fill it. He was missing Stevie. Stevie would know what to do. He’d have strategies and contingencies and all that shite.

He could see his ball. It was in the ditch but not in the burn itself, just nestling shy of the water. He’d need a pitching wedge to get it up, or else he’d need to drop and take two, but fuck that. Dropping was for shitebags.

He climbed down into the ditch, keeping his eye on his footing. When he looked up again to check where his ball was he saw Glen Fallan standing about five yards in front of it, like Scotty had just beamed him there. That was what had always scared him about Fallan, though: the cunt just appeared from thin air. You never saw him coming.

He’d made a mistake this morning, though. Doke scrambled back up the banking and reached frantically into his golf bag for the shotgun.

It wasn’t there.

When he turned around again, he saw that Fallan was holding it down by his side.

Doke felt the cold as a layer of sweat formed spontaneously all over his body. Some instinct told him to run, but he knew that he wouldn’t. Something deeper, an inescapable knowledge of his true self dictated that this wasn’t something you could run from. The same knowledge dictated that, despite the lies he told himself, he had always known he would one day have to face this moment. And now it was here.

He felt fear, but mostly he felt regret. So, so many regrets, too numerous to contemplate individually, apart from one: he should have listened to Sheila. Not just because of the situation in which he now found himself, but because of all the things that would have been better: all the people who might still be here, and all the ugly things he might never have done.

‘A good walk spoiled, eh Doke?’ Fallan said. ‘Lovely morning for it, anyway.’

‘Just get it over with,’ he replied. ‘Don’t kick the arse oot it. You owe me that much, surely.’

Fallan glanced away for a moment and shook his head.

‘I’m not here to kill you,’ he said evenly. ‘If I was, we wouldn’t be talking. You wouldn’t even see me. That’s what I said to Stevie as well, all those years back, when he woke up in the night and found me at the end of his bed holding a gun, despite all the locks he had fitted and his ten-grand security system. I’m not here to kill you. I’m here to tell you what I told him.’

Doke’s head felt light with relief, his legs like jelly and his guts turning to water. He was ready to grab any future with both hands, now that he still had one, though it sounded like Fallan wanted to talk about the past.

‘Jazz tried to kill Yvonne. He turned up inside her flat in a state of pure rage. She didn’t realise he had a key; she’d never given him one, so he must have stolen one of the spares. He’d beaten her up before – you know that – because he thought she was going to cave in to the polis about his alibi, but this time he was there for more. He was already upset about something else that night, and after a few drinks and a few toots and whatever else he was necking he decided on a simple solution to both of his problems.’

None of these things came as a surprise to Doke. Deep down, he knew all of this, or at least could have pieced it together if family loyalty and misplaced anger hadn’t kept him in denial. He had been angry at Fallan all these years because it was easier than dealing with the anger he felt towards his brother. Nonetheless, he couldn’t help thinking he was missing something in what Fallan was saying. Small wonder, the way his head was spinning right then.

‘He had a gun. Fuck knows where he got it, because we both know neither you nor Stevie would ever have allowed Jazz and firearms to come together, even before he got slashed. He was there to kill her, Doke: that’s what I need you to understand, same as I needed Stevie to understand.’

Doke managed a nod, but he was still missing something. Hadn’t Fallan said
both
problems? Apart from the murder charge, what was the other one? And why would Jazz want a gun to kill a lassie?

Then it dawned on him.

‘He was planning to kill you as well,’ Doke sussed. ‘But why?’

‘That was the thing he was already upset about,’ Fallan replied, and suddenly it all came into focus.

‘You always were a sleekit bastard, Single. I never realised it extended to your sex life.’

‘It wasn’t like that. And you know Yvonne didn’t belong in that world. She was looking for a way out of it. We both were.’

‘And this is what you told Stevie? From what happened next, it doesn’t sound like he was very understanding.’

‘I knew he would be left in a difficult position. That’s why I gave him a solution that worked for everybody. What do you think all that carry-on with the envelopes was about?’

‘Stevie thought it up to protect us from—’

‘It was my idea, Doke. And it was so that none of Stevie’s team would ever know that
nobody
got the instruction to kill me. I promised Stevie I would disappear, and I did it in a way that would serve him well. I made him look ruthless, powerful and loyal to his family. I owed him that.’

Doke’s brain was running to catch up, rapidly reassembling his
picture of the last twenty-odd years to fit the new reality he’d been hit with.

‘I know you set up that thing in the jail,’ Fallan said. ‘And I’m telling you that’s the end of it. No comebacks.’

Doke was nodding before he was even aware of doing so. He knew he wasn’t a smart guy, but he wasn’t fucking stupid either. Fallan was telling him the same thing Sheila had been, and this time he was listening.

‘No comebacks,’ he confirmed, unable to prevent a long sigh of relief from venting after he spoke.

His fingers were shaking. He needed a pint. He caught sight of a flag fluttering in the middle distance and realised he had forgotten he was in the middle of a round.

‘One last thing,’ Fallan said, sounding, if it were possible, that wee bit more steely than before.

‘Whit?’ Doke asked, having stopped himself from saying ‘Fire away’.

‘Tony McGill used Jasmine to get to me.’

‘How come?’

‘Because he’d worked out that I’m her father.’

Doke reeled again. At this rate he was going to have to check his own name when he got home.

‘But she came to the restaurant and told us she—’

‘Think about it, Doke. If Jazz had fathered one wean he’d have fathered twenty. You ever hear of any other wee Jazzlings back in the day?’

He thought about it.

‘Jesus.’

‘Jasmine’s my daughter. It’s out there now: people know. So I want you to get the word out in case anybody else is stupid enough to make her a target.’

Doke nodded, eager to convey his assent.

‘I hear you, Single: mess with her and they mess with you.’

‘No, David. That would be to gravely misunderstand the nature of the risk, in the same way Tony McGill did, before Jasmine
killed him with her bare hands then put his bawbag son in the hospital.’

Doke gawped like a fish, but any seeds of disbelief were crushed by the look on Fallan’s face telling him this was exactly how it went down.

Something inside him sang. Get the word out? He’d pay for a fucking billboard.

‘See, Jasmine and I are making up for lost time,’ Fallan explained. ‘We want to see more of each other, so we’re going into business together. She’s bringing me into her detective agency. She inherited it from her uncle: that’s the Sharp family business. But I want every bam, rocket and heidthebaw in this town to know that Jasmine’s a Fallan as well, and she’s been learning
my
family business.’