Bred in the Bone (7 page)

Suspect Motives

Glen looked in the rear-view mirror again. The BMW was still two cars back behind his Defender. He had suspected it was following him for the past five miles, and now that he had come off the motorway onto an A road, there was little question.

He changed gear and accelerated. As he returned his right hand to the wheel, he realised he was trembling: physically trembling. He felt shock, fear and anger: anger at himself first and foremost, because he had fucked up and was now paying the price.

When had he last felt like this, felt so afraid? Not since childhood, when he had known enough fear to last two lifetimes.

Since then, he had made a friend of fear: he had learned to listen to it, to draw power from it and to retain control when it was threatening to flood his senses. This was not the fear of which he had made himself a pupil, however. This was something different, something paralysing and debilitating, shot through with helplessness and doubt.

Nothing was under control, and he was just plain scared.

He felt the impulse to reach for the phone, an impulse he had felt twenty times in half as many minutes. On each occasion it was stayed by the knowledge that it was futile, and yet that knowledge wasn’t enough to stop his instincts from suggesting it again.

He kept his foot steady on the pedal, accelerating gradually, trying to be inconspicuous, trying to look normal. But nothing was normal any more. He knew this road so well, must have driven it a hundred times, but it looked different today. Everything looked different.

Arable fields lay either side of the tarmac, bordered by hedgerows. A river snaked in s-bends down the slope to his left. A couple of miles ahead he could see woodland, human-planted
evergreens in their regimented rows hugging the hillside, punctuated by firebreaks and pylons. He knew there were Forestry Commission tracks snaking through there. He could take the Defender offroad, lose the BMW on the axle-breaking trails hidden beneath the canopy of pines. It would buy him time, but time to do what?

He had no game plan here. He was lost and blind. This was what happened when you broke your own rules.

He had been stupid, let impulse seize the reins and ride off at a reckless pace, leaving judgment trampled in its wake. He had been listening to fear, as he always did, but his emotions had caused him to misinterpret what it was telling him.

Up ahead he saw a helicopter rise above the trees, banking as it crested the hillside. Then he caught a flash of blue light in his rear-view mirror and saw the BMW pull out to overtake the Skoda that was sitting between them.

There was no question now. The blue light had been placed on the dashboard and the police car was closing on the Defender. Behind the Skoda he could see three more vehicles similarly identifying themselves and joining the chase. Instinct had told him what that BMW was, way back on the motorway, just as instinct had told him he was making a mistake a few hours before that. In both cases it was now far too late to do anything about it.

Christ.

He remembered about the gun, still secured in its hiding place under the chassis. There was no way of getting rid of it now.

Another glimpse in the mirror showed the BMW gaining. Something inside urged his right foot down, though it was laughable to think of trying to outrun the thing in this battered Land Rover; not on the open road anyway. The BMW had plenty more in reserve; it wasn’t readying itself to overtake or cut him off, just closing in and watching to see what he would do. Behind it, two of the other cop cars were slewing across the tarmac to form a roadblock, stopping any following traffic from passing that point. Something was about to happen, and soon.

He stared forward again as the Defender approached a bend, the
road curving steeply to the right, mirroring the course of the nearby river. The woodland was still a long way off.

He tried to recall whether there was a break in the hedgerow coming up, a route over fields that would take him into the forest. The BMW was close enough that if its driver read his intentions, he might well be able to floor the accelerator and cut the Defender off. Glen would need to be absolutely committed to it, prepared to risk flipping the vehicle by making the turn at the latest possible moment and the highest possible speed, and that’s why it wasn’t going to happen. He didn’t see what hiding could achieve now, didn’t really understand why he was still driving. Flight was an instinct, not a plan.

It was over, then, even before he rounded the bend and saw the two police cars nose to nose, a van tucked sideways behind them, blocking the road less than two hundred yards ahead. Not just cars, either: it was an Armed Response Unit, two men in position on either side of the roadblock.

Glen knew there were four Heckler & Koch G36 assault rifles pointed at his vehicle, capable of firing at a rate of seven hundred and fifty rounds a minute. Even if he slammed on the anchors for an emergency stop, the Defender would come to a standstill at a distance of roughly an eighth of the carbines’ effective range.

He braked steadily and deliberately, the BMW and the Vectra behind it decelerating in response, maintaining the same distance.

The Defender came to rest roughly fifty yards from the roadblock, at which moment two more armed officers leapt from the Vauxhall, each packing HKs. There were now one hundred and eighty rounds primed to come at him at nine hundred metres per second. The response team from the roadblock began to move forward in formation, keeping him covered at all times, while the two behind took up kneeling positions on the ground.

Glen thought once more of the pistol stashed under the chassis, momentarily entertaining a grimly fatalistic thought. That would be giving them what they wanted, wouldn’t it? That would end all of this: cut off the tentacles reaching out from his decades-old
misdeeds to the people he loved. But would it protect them? Would it keep them safer than he could if he were still alive?

No.

Glen put his hands in the air, high and wide and highly visible. He heard a voice scream at him to get out of the vehicle and lie down on the ground. He climbed out of the Defender, felt hands upon him before he could even drop to his knees. His face rattled the tarmac, forced against it by a boot on the back of his neck while someone else wrenched his arms up his spine and slapped the cuffs on him.

‘I am arresting you on suspicion of the murder of Stephen Fullerton. You do not have to say anything . . .’

He watched the erstwhile roadblock part slowly as the two police cars reversed away from each other in order to let the custody van drive through. Glen’s head swam as they picked him up and dragged him towards it.

You do not have to say anything
.

What was there to say? He was at their mercy now, and he wasn’t expecting much of that.

There was only one way left for him to play this, a way he had learned a long and very dark time ago. He would not resist. He would let them have their way, let them dole out the damage until they themselves were tired from the blows. Then, once they were satisfied that he couldn’t take any more, he would strike.

Elementary, My Dear (Crick and) Watson

Jasmine chose her spot carefully, making her approach as the subject was about to pay at the ticket machine in the lobby just off the parking bays on the fourth floor. It was risky to pick a location so close to the point when he would no longer be on foot, but she knew there would be fewer distractions in this enclosed space: for a couple of minutes she would be the only game in town.

She watched him from the corner of her eye as she approached, so that she could pretend to suddenly notice him, but she needn’t have bothered concealing her gaze. His own was locked on to her tension-sprung tits.

‘Oh my God. Oh my God. It’s really you, isn’t it? You’re D-Blazer. I’m coming to see you tonight.’

‘Seery 4 really it me, chicka.’

Jasmine could hear that number. She had also earned a ‘chicka’, D-Blazer’s second-person coinage for female specimens of which he approved.

‘Oh my God. How was the show last night? I bet it was
blazin’
hot. I tried to get tickets for both nights but the first one sold out
sooo
fast. God, listen to me wittering, I just can’t believe I’ve actually
met
you.’

‘Believe it, chicka. Iss realla dan real.’

‘Blazin’ real.’

‘Madass real.’

She giggled and, she would have to admit, jiggled. The effect was like a hypnotist’s pendulum. Christ, were men really like this?

She simpered and talked up his unlistenably dull ‘music’ in a bubbly and effusive way, sounding star-struck but flirty. If somebody had filmed it, she would not have recognised herself. It was sometimes disturbing to consider the ease with which she could inhabit
a completely alien persona and yet remain outside it, observing the performance, with particular regard to the audience’s response.

‘I can’t believe I’m asking this, but I’d totally leather myself later if I didn’t while I’ve got the chance. It’s . . . we’re having this charity auction at college. I just had this pure mental idea. Can I have a couple of your hairs? I could auction an autograph but that would be so old, pure geriatric. Something that actually used to be
part
of D-Blazer would be totally for real.’

‘Pure mental?’ he asked. ‘I love that. Is that proper Scottish?’

She could not and did not believe that he had never heard the phrase ‘pure mental’ before, and inferred from his pretence that she was doing well and he was looking for ways to please her.

‘Totally. So can I really do it?’

‘Do it, yeah. Do it pure mental.’

Jasmine whipped a pair of tweezers out of her bag and yanked a small cluster of hairs from his head before he could change his mind.

‘Oh man, these are going to be worth so much,’ she told him.

‘I’m rockin’ like the Midas boy, chicka. Even my hair turn to gold, you
know
it.’

‘Mad-ass real. Oh, but hang on. Nobody’s going to believe that this was 4 real yours. Tragedy. Tell you what, can you scribble something to verify it?’

‘Yeah. D-Blazer hair come wif like a fishal certificate of offenticity.’

Jasmine produced a sheet of wrapping paper and tore off a scrap, then she attached the hairs to it using a piece of Sellotape. She already had a roll she’d picked up at Galt Linklater that morning, but she had bought another one in John Lewis, along with the wrapping paper, so it looked plausible for her to just happen to have this on her.

D-Blazer obligingly scribbled on the blank side of the wrapping paper: ‘This is to certify that this is a sample of genuine D-Blazer barnet, seary 4 really.’ He added a signature below.

‘That’s
undeniably
real,’ she said approvingly.

‘Realla dan,’ he agreed.

‘Thanks so much. I’ll let you get on now. I must be costing you more parking time.’

‘No, chill a mo, chicka. Tell me some totally Scottish stuff I can use tonight. What make the crowd mental here?’

Jasmine gave it some thought.

‘Tell them they’re bowfin’,’ she replied.

‘Bowfin’?’

‘Yeah. It means they’re really cooking. They’ll love it. Tell them they’re absolutely bowfin’.’

Once D-Blazer was safely out of sight Martin followed Jasmine to her van and filmed her removing the hairs from the ‘authentication certificate’ before placing them in a clear plastic tube.

‘One DNA sample, verified by the subject with his signature,’ she said, dropping the tube and the signed scrap of wrapping paper into a padded envelope.

That was all it took: some live cells from the hair follicles would be enough to establish whether Darrien Hopscombe-Blanchard had ‘never went near’ Nikki Ainsworth, or whether he had ‘
hardly
never went near her’.

If the test was positive, little Danielle would still most likely grow up without her father, but at least she would be afforded some certainty as to who he was.

Jasmine had enjoyed no such privilege. Her mum, her relatives and her mum’s friends had maintained a conspiracy of silence throughout her upbringing, leaving her only with indistinct impressions, like blurred shadows or the ragged outline where a figure had been crudely cut from a photograph.

Despite her efforts over the years, she had established very little for certain. She knew that he was dead, and that this fact was not mourned. She knew that he was a brutal individual and a remorselessly violent criminal. For a while she thought he might be a man called Glen Fallan, for he met all of those criteria, including the widespread belief that he was long deceased.

Fallan had put her straight with the bluntest and most painful of confessions: he was not her father, but rather the man who had killed him.

Despite her pleading and despite his avowed debt to her, Fallan would only tell her two more things: the first was that her father’s first name was James; and the second was that he was more familiarly referred to as Jazz.

Maps and Legends

Dougie Abercorn was hovering outside Catherine’s office like an anxious relative waiting to speak to the surgeon. His demeanour sported little of his accustomed calm or the unctuous self-assurance that frequently strayed the wrong side of oily.

She had been planning to give him a call at some point, preferably before interviewing the suspect, so this didn’t just save her a job. It told her as much as she had expected to glean from what she had anticipated would be a typically guarded conversation. The main thing she had sought to establish was readable simply by him being here with questions for her, and by the look on his face.

He hadn’t seen any straws in the wind. This was not in the script.

Abercorn was in charge of LOCUST, a unit set up specifically to investigate the activities of criminals such as Stevie Fullerton. The name derived from Organised Crime Unit Special Task Force, losing an acronym-inconvenient F and gaining an L to help it trip off the tongue. Unfortunately it tended to trip off the tongue amid outpourings of scorn and bile reflecting the speaker’s distaste for its perceived ineffectualness and the underhand way it conducted its business. As well as ascribing a symbolic significance to the absence of Force, the abbreviation was widely referred to as standing for Letting Off Criminals Under Secret Trades. The term was supposed to conjure an unpleasant image that would reflect its implied target, but as an entity that gobbled up resources and seemed to contribute nothing but grief, it had proven an inadvertently apposite self-description.

It had often been said that LOCUST had a name longer than its list of convictions. Since certain events two summers ago this was no longer quite so true, but the fact that it had convicted almost
as many cops as it had gangsters meant that Abercorn’s team hadn’t won themselves any more friends on the force.

Catherine negotiated her own uneasy and complex working relationship with him, rendered all the more delicate initially in having to overcome the awkward fact that she had been overlooked for Abercorn’s job. To say it had stung was a colossal understatement, but while the injury to her professional pride remained, in the years that followed she had increasingly come to think that she had dodged a bullet.

‘What’s for you will no’ go by you,’ the redoubtable Moira Clark had counselled, when offering herself as a sounding board for Catherine’s rage. The one-time Detective Chief Superintendent had been Catherine’s boss and mentor in the early days of her CID career. She was still the person Catherine sought out when she needed reliable judgment, although getting a bit of face-time was harder now than before Moira hit her thirty, as she was on so many panels, committees and advisory bodies that it was laughable to talk about her having retired from the force.

Back then her words had sounded trite, real granny’s-knee philosophy on a par with telling the newly jilted that there were plenty more fish in the sea. In time, however, Catherine had come to understand the truth of it, particularly in accepting that the post really wasn’t for her. She had wanted it so badly, but the reason she wanted it was also the reason she didn’t get it, and the reason she wasn’t cut out for it.

‘You hate these people, Cath,’ Moira had told her. ‘The Stevie Fullertons of this world, the Frankie Callahans, the Paddy Steels. Don’t pretend otherwise, and don’t kid yourself that it doesn’t go unnoticed.’

She wouldn’t deny it, and nor was she under any illusions about how obvious it was. Quite the opposite, in fact: the brass knew she had a strong record for bringing in bodies, and they were aware of her driving passion for the task. Perhaps naively, she had thought that this same passion would make her the ideal person to head LOCUST, but after Abercorn was promoted over her head, she came to appreciate that it would have been a match made in hell.

Abercorn was a political creature. When people said that, it was often a euphemism for somebody who was good at playing the system, impressing the right people and hell-bent on climbing the greasy pole. In his case, applied to organised crime in Glasgow, Catherine understood that it referred to qualities she simply did not possess. He could play a long and patient game, one riven with unpalatable compromises and least-worst solutions. He cultivated relationships in the underworld, knew that you sometimes had to let them get on with their business so that you could
understand
their business, map their infrastructure so that you could recognise it when it manifested itself elsewhere, on a larger scale. Abercorn could play one operator off against another, or keep the law off a particular dealer’s back because his activities might lead to someone bigger further up the chain.

Catherine would have found it hard to let any of them get away with so much as a parking ticket. She didn’t want to map their infrastructure; she only wanted to take a hammer to it.

It was an open secret that Abercorn had done deals with Stevie Fullerton. She knew this for a fact because she had been party to one of them. It had been a pragmatic necessity, a means to an end and she had found it utterly galling while Abercorn just viewed it as the price of doing business, merely another day at the office.

Abercorn was fly. He understood that Stevie thought this meant he had ‘a polis in his pocket’, and that his vanity prevented him from auditing what was going the other way. To Abercorn he had been part source and part useful idiot, but useful he had undeniably been.

Which was why Abercorn was now hopping around like a wean needing the toilet. He liked to give the impression that nothing that happened in the Glasgow underworld ever came as a huge surprise to those inside his unit – usually before explaining how they hadn’t shared any of this intelligence in advance because it would have infringed upon aspects of another investigation. This, however, had blindsided LOCUST almost as much as it had blindsided Stevie.

‘I was giving a talk at Tulliallan,’ he said. ‘I just got back. I came as soon as I heard.’

‘You must be devastated. You were practically family.’

There was a time when Abercorn would have interpreted this as a dig rather than mere banter – mainly because it would have been intended as such – but their relationship had matured to one of mutual, if mutually cautious, respect.

‘I won’t be sending a wreath,’ he replied, ‘but I won’t pretend this doesn’t lob a very big rock into my millpond.’

Catherine opened the door to her office and beckoned him inside. It was looking unusually neat following a ruthless clear-out, and she felt oddly self-conscious about the impression this might give. She recalled her assumptions that Abercorn’s office would be an antiseptic exemplar of anal neatness, and how they were subsequently blown away by seeing a chaotic firetrap that unambiguously conveyed how hard the guy must be working.

‘Do you know what this might be about?’ She wasn’t expecting much of an answer. Abercorn was always so guarded with his information that sheer habit must occasionally prompt him to reply ‘I’m not in a position to disclose that’ when somebody asked him the time. Even if he knew, he wouldn’t say, but sometimes the way he didn’t say it could give her a few clues; not least as to whether there
was
something he was holding back. If he talked about not wishing to speculate, that meant he had a theory he wasn’t prepared to share. If he gave her something that sounded solid, then the real story lay somewhere else and he wanted to keep her attention away from it.

‘I don’t have a fucking scoob,’ he said, which was a new response and one she was inclined to take at face value, particularly in light of the fact that said face was looking unaccustomedly glaiket.

‘Seriously,’ he went on, ‘our pants are round our ankles here. We picked up no chatter, no rumblings. Something this big, ordinarily you’d detect seismic activity in advance: a rise in tension, a sense on the street that something was brewing. So I have absolutely no idea who might have done this.’

Catherine had to pause for a beat as she considered whether this
last remark had been in reference to who might be ultimately behind the shooting, but then she realised Abercorn was speaking literally when he said he had come as soon as he heard. Clearly he hadn’t heard the half of it.

‘We know whodunit,’ she told him. ‘We’ve got Glen Fallan in custody down in the cells.’

‘Glen Fallan? As in . . .?’

‘We’ve got three witnesses describing the shooter as driving a green Land Rover Defender. Between them, they gave us a plate that matched Fallan’s vehicle. A couple of hours after the shooting a motorist down near the Borders phoned in a report of a green Defender driving erratically, almost running them off the road. We scrambled an ARU and intercepted Fallan near Hawick. The vehicle clipped a wall on the way out of the car wash, and I observed the damage myself at the scene. I’m informed there is a bash on the left-hand side of the Land Rover and white flecks of paint consistent with possible transference. We’ll need to wait for Forensics to test the samples, but I’d put the house on them matching up.’

‘Jesus,’ Abercorn said, eyes wide.

‘But better still, we’ve got tape. Traffic cameras filmed the Defender on Gallowhaugh Road just before the shooting, and on Shawburn Boulevard just after it. We can put him at the scene, time-stamped, unless he’s got a great explanation for how come someone else was driving his motor at that point yet he was back behind the wheel by the time it reached the Borders. Believe me, the “who” is well covered. I was hoping you could help with the why.’

Abercorn puffed his cheeks, slightly over-selling the look of somebody who had been put on the spot. He was still reeling from her revelation, and looked like he was trying to buy himself time while he decided what it was politic to reveal.

‘Glen Fallan? That’s before my time. I know he and Fullerton had history, but I would have categorised it as
ancient
history.’

‘History?’ she scoffed. ‘The rumour I heard was that Fullerton tried to kill him, and up until two years ago it was widely believed
that he’d been successful. I also heard that this was in retaliation for Fallan disappearing Stevie’s cousin. I don’t think that kind of thing is ever ancient enough to be considered water under the bridge.’

‘I’m just saying, it was more than twenty years ago, a wee bit before my shift started. I’m not sure I know much more than you do about that stuff, and when I say “know”, I’m just talking about rumours I heard, same as you. Gangland mythology: a mixture of sensationalist gossip, wishful thinking, calculated misinformation, Chinese whispers and revisionist bravado. Twist that kaleidoscope for two decades and you’re not going to see anything you can put much faith in.’

Catherine had to concede the point.

‘I’ve got officers talking to Fullerton’s people but I’m not expecting them to give us anything. I’m sure they’ll all be baffled as to how anybody could possibly wish the slightest harm upon such a gentle spirit and widely respected pillar of the community.’

‘All the while quietly making their own inquiries as to who might be behind the hit. That’s assuming they don’t know you’ve arrested Fallan, but even then, they’ll be working on their conspiracy theories.’

‘Fallan did used to work for Tony McGill,’ she suggested.

‘And so did Stevie Fullerton,’ Abercorn replied. ‘That’s Glasgow bam politics for you: it can be labyrinthine in its complexity and yet staringly obvious at the same time. The further back you go, the murkier it gets, and this particular love triangle goes all the way back to the late eighties.’

As he spoke Catherine thought of the one element of this that definitely had its roots in a time two decades past, and revisited her unease at how it had resurfaced.

‘There was a symbol daubed on Fullerton’s forehead,’ she told Abercorn. ‘We’ll be keeping it out of general circulation because – among other reasons – we don’t know what the hell it means.’

She drew a version of it on a notepad, her hand trembling a little as she gripped the pen.

‘You ever seen this before?’

Abercorn stared at it for a moment then shook his head, but he tore the page from the notepad and took it with him when he left. So that wasn’t necessarily a no.