Bred in the Bone (9 page)

Loyalties

Jasmine was putting some pasta on the boil when she heard her doorbell ring, jolting her into sudden self-consciousness as she sang along to Chvrches just a little too loud. She looked at the clock and noticed to her surprise that it was after nine, so this set her on guard a little. It hadn’t been the light and tentative, sorry-to-disturb-you ring of a neighbour come to ask a favour or hand over a misdelivered letter, but the firm, insistent press of somebody who expected an answer.

Part of her was pleased to see that it was so late. She had been to the range and lost track of the hours, which had largely been the purpose of the exercise. Work had started at just after six, a surveillance with an early start because they had to be outside the subject’s house in Pitlochry before the school run. She had clocked off at four and needed to occupy herself for the remainder of the day. A bout of her new favourite pastime had delivered.

She had first tried air-rifle shooting while investigating a missing person case, she and Fallan tracking down a former police marksman to his current job running the field sports centre attached to a big hotel in the Borders. Fallan and the instructor had remarked that she was a natural, and she assumed they were winding her up until she saw the paper targets they had retrieved. She had enjoyed the experience more than she could possibly have anticipated, and often found herself thinking back to it, remembering the feel of the weapon in her hands and the sensation of the kick against her shoulder. She was curious to know whether her results had merely been beginner’s luck, so when she overheard one of the Galt Linklater guys talking about a range of which he was a member out near East Kilbride, she had asked if she could come along as a guest.

Now she was a member herself, as well as the slightly
self-conscious and enduringly dubious (as opposed to proud) owner of two different rifles. The gas gun was more accurate because there was no recoil and so she could maintain her stance between shots, but now and again she went back to the spring-powered rifle because it was the type she had first used, and because she enjoyed the rhythm and the ritual: break, prime, load and fire.

Shooting had become an invaluable source of peace, calm and relaxation. When she was on the range she could reduce her world to an impregnable little vortex. There was only the target, the crosshairs, her finger, her breathing, her pulse. Time became elastic in the moments before she squeezed the trigger; seconds stretched and minutes compressed. Sometimes she could reach for the next pellet and find the tin empty, discovering that two hours had just dissolved.

Jasmine put her front door on the chain, remembering, as she always did, Glen Fallan asking how likely it was that she’d be attacked by an angry Girl Guide: this being in his estimation the upper limit of the potential intruder this security measure was capable of stopping. She opened the door just a little and spied a female figure in trainers, three-quarter-length lycra running trousers and a T-shirt. Her flushed face was familiar but out of place, so it took Jasmine a moment to recognise her. The authoritative doorbell ring should have helped, she realised.

‘Hi, Jasmine. Sorry to trouble you so late. I’m Laura Geddes, remember? I work with Catherine McLeod. Do you mind if I come in?’

‘No, sure.’

Jasmine undid the chain and led Laura inside to the kitchen, doubly curious as to the nature of this visit given the hour and the dress code.

‘Can I get you something to drink?’

‘Just some tap water would be great.’

Good answer, Jasmine thought. Apart from milk for tea she was down to one can of Irn-Bru and in pressing need of a trip to the supermarket.

Laura gulped down half a pint and accepted a refill before taking
a seat at the kitchen table. She had tiny beads of moisture on her forehead and arms, a fresh smell of the outdoors about her. It reminded Jasmine uncomfortably of how her mum used to smell when she came home on those occasions Jasmine was off school sick and had been indoors, laid up in bed all day.

Laura’s hair was different, which was another reason Jasmine had struggled to place her. It was shorter and she had dyed it, resulting in a blonde bob that was at odds with Jasmine’s residual mental image of her. It made her seem a little brighter, more open. Laura had often given Jasmine the impression she was hiding behind her hair when it fell across her face. She had seemed skittish rather than shy, and a little mirthless. For all that, she always seemed more approachable than her boss, but this wasn’t saying much.

Catherine McLeod was a Detective Superintendent, but in Jasmine’s mind her official rank was Queen Crabbit Cow. If Jasmine tried on bitch every so often to see how it felt, then McLeod must have had it spliced into her genes. She didn’t know what she had ever done to piss the woman off, but Jasmine always got as much warmth from her as a dying penguin’s last fart. It seemed particularly unfair given that Jasmine’s contributions had helped her close two major cases; but rather than gratitude, this only seemed to inspire resentment. Admittedly there was the small matter, in one of those cases, of Jasmine seriously perverting the course of justice, but McLeod didn’t know about this, so that couldn’t be the reason she was so down on her.

It wasn’t about Jasmine though, she knew: it was Fallan she hated. Any time Jasmine had been in McLeod’s company, the big man had been part of the deal. Jasmine had thus fielded her share of suspicion and disapproval in accordance with McLeod’s ‘fly with the crows, get shot with the crows’ principle.

As Laura sat at Jasmine’s table, pasta bubbling on the cooker just behind her, she wasn’t radiating hostility or attempting to intimidate; Jasmine got the impression she was here to share, but there still seemed something about her that was closed off, defensive and even afraid. Laura might let you be her ally but she wouldn’t let you be her friend.

‘I’ve been trying to get you on your phone, but you weren’t answering. I was out for a run and my route took me over this way, so I thought I’d just see if you were home.’

Jasmine didn’t remember ignoring any calls or seeing that she had missed any. She wondered whether Laura had the right number for her; she certainly had the right address. She hadn’t previously given thought to the fact that McLeod and her people knew where she lived, but they were the polis, after all.

‘What can I do for you?’

Laura took another gulp of water and wiped her brow with her forearm. The tiny beads of sweat were starting to pool and run in the warmth of the kitchen.

‘There was a murder yesterday. I don’t know if you heard about it.’

Jasmine had seen something on the front page of someone else’s
Daily Record
, but hadn’t paid it much heed other than to connect it to the traffic congestion Andy Smith had warned about.

‘Fleetingly. Over in Shawburn?’

‘That’s right. It was a guy called Stevie Fullerton.’

Laura stared at her a moment. Jasmine felt she was being scrutinised to gauge any possible reaction.

‘I’ve got an alibi.’

‘Do you know who he was?’

She vaguely remembered the name. It had been one of many thrown accusatorily at Fallan by McLeod the first time she met her, the policewoman gatecrashing their breakfast when Jasmine was lying low at a city-centre hotel. Whether Fullerton had been a criminal associate of Fallan’s or a gangland rival, she couldn’t remember. Even from the context it had been clear McLeod was digging up ancient history.

‘Gangster,’ Jasmine answered. ‘Drug dealer. General malefactor. What do I win?’

Laura didn’t appear to be in the mood for banter, though to be honest Jasmine couldn’t remember there ever being a time when she was.

‘He was shot four times in the chest at a car wash. Several
witnesses plus CCTV gave us the perpetrator’s licence plate and vehicle, which did
not
turn out to be stolen. We apprehended the suspect and have him in custody.’

‘Congrats. Sounds like a quick result. What does it have to do with me?’

‘The suspect is Glen Fallan.’

Jasmine didn’t have a snappy comeback for that.

The mere mention of his name always provoked a confused mix of emotions. This was the man who had confessed to killing the father she’d never met; yet even after that confession she had invited him into her flat again. On more than one occasion he had sat where Laura was now, and while he was at her table Jasmine had felt safer than at any time since the loss of her mother.

Perhaps unable to immediately process the enormity of what she had been told, among her first instinctive responses was a laughably petty disappointment that he had been in town without telling her.

‘He hasn’t been in touch with me,’ she said, growing awkward in the lengthening silence.

‘We know. He hasn’t been in touch with anybody. Since his arrest he’s made no phone calls, refused legal assistance and is answering no questions.’

The same instinct caused Jasmine to wonder why he hadn’t got in touch to say he was in trouble. Then she wondered what gave her any reason to think that he would.

‘Did you know he kept a gun concealed in his car?’

‘I take it we’re off the record right now?’

Laura nodded.

‘I wouldn’t be here talking to you if he didn’t keep a gun in his car. He saved my life more than once. I know the guy’s got a past, but I thought that’s what it was: the past. I can’t believe he would just shoot some gangster, though. Not unless it was self-defence.’

‘It wasn’t. It was execution-style, while the guy’s view was blanked out by foam on his windscreen.’

Jasmine had no response to this.

On the hob, the pasta was threatening to boil over. She turned down the gas a notch, unsure if she was even hungry any more.

‘Do you know what it was about?’ Jasmine asked.

‘No. Nobody’s talking. Not Fallan and not Fullerton’s people. Nobody will tell us anything. That’s why I’m here. I was hoping you might be able to help.’

‘I don’t know anything about Fallan’s history. He knew my mum way back when, but neither of them was ever forthcoming about those days.’

‘Maybe the time has come for you to do some digging, then. There’s questions you can ask that we can’t. People who might speak to you who would never talk us.’

‘So you’re asking me to do your job for you and play my part in helping send Fallan to jail?’

‘We can do that easily enough without your help, Jasmine. Catherine McLeod thinks all her Christmases have come at once: she’s got Stevie Fullerton on a slab and Glen Fallan on a plate. It’s just that, to me, there’s something I can’t place, something about this that feels a little . . . off.’

‘It must feel
very
off for you to be telling tales out of school like this.’

Laura’s expression darkened, a hunted look coming over her, as though she may have misjudged her circumstances.

‘I came here in the strictest confidence,’ she said firmly. ‘I hope that’s understood. I don’t need to tell you how motivated Catherine is about this.’

‘Like a dog with two dicks, I’m guessing.’

‘Eating Winalot laced with Viagra. But that’s why I’m concerned, in case there’s an angle we might be missing. Fallan isn’t helping himself, and we can only respond to what’s in front of us, so if there’s more to this than meets the eye you might be the only person in a position to look for it.’

The Penitent

Catherine pulled her car into the driveway and brought it to a stop, then spent a few moments in silence, performing a little ritual that had become her custom before entering her home. She had read about a mental exercise carried out by certain tennis players in order to prevent self-recrimination over a poor last point seeping into their thought processes and undermining their efforts for the next. They would walk away from the baseline and cross an imaginary barrier before turning around. When they re-crossed the barrier, they left behind whatever had gone before and thought only of the point to be played.

Catherine’s mental exercise was her way of leaving the job in the car, and not taking it with her into the house. She would allow herself a little while to perform a quick audit in her head, creating a list of the things that needed to be addressed
only when she got back into the car,
as there was nothing constructive she could do in between times. During this brief tally she would also force herself to acknowledge what was going well or had been resolved, rather than merely fretting over her to-do list and picking at the scabs of problems.

Drew always said she should never be afraid to share her worries, to unload on him when she needed a sounding board, but she had become increasingly dubious as to whether this ever achieved any kind of catharsis. She seldom felt any better afterwards, and was conscious of having polluted their home, like she had been ankle deep in blood and shit then come home and tramped it through the carpet.

It was Drew’s way of trying to be supportive and understanding, but it was also what he hoped was a bulwark against her periodic descents into a state of emotional isolation – ‘
this dark place you go
’ – that had proven mutually wounding in the past.

‘
You’re angry on the road to that place and you’re unreachable when you get there
,’ Drew once put it. ‘
But what’s hardest is you’re numb for days afterwards
.’

He thought if she could let out a little at a time it would stop the build-up of pressure, but what he didn’t understand was that it wasn’t the pressure of the job that led her there. It was the job that helped keep her away from it.

The job wasn’t easy, it exposed her to some very horrible things, but she knew she needed it. What she didn’t need was its effluent leaking into her family’s home, so she had taken steps to prevent that.

Sometimes she was self-conscious about Drew seeing her through the window, just sitting there with the engine running, as she had never told him about this. She had an excuse prepared – she would say she was listening to the end of something on the radio – but either he’d never noticed or simply had never been curious enough to ask.

She gave herself a little longer than usual on this occasion, aware she was particularly tense. Her audit told her this was not warranted. Things had started very nicely for her, and largely gone well. Murder on the streets was nothing to feel happy about, but when it was your job to deal with it you developed your own scale for measuring these things, and Fullerton’s death was definitely at the sunnier end of the spectrum. So she had one killer dead and another one dead to rights. By any reasonable reckoning, this had been a good day.

So why did she feel like the ground was about to open up?

She turned off the engine. That was the symbolic moment when her working day ended, her line on the tennis court, but even as she did so, she realised that it was another symbol that was disquieting her thoughts. Why it had reappeared, she didn’t know, but what it represented could not be wiped from memory by crossing an imaginary line.

The house sounded unusually quiet as she strode inside and hung up her coat. She could hear the strains of Frightened Rabbit from the kitchen and could smell the curry Drew was cooking, but there was no sound of TV or video games from the living room, nor the attendant shrieks of laughter, excitement or dispute. She wondered
if there had been a banning-worthy incident, and if so, knew she would need to hear Drew’s account of it so that she was on message with the official coalition policy before Duncan and Fraser started lobbying her.

She went upstairs to the loo, then popped her head around the door of Fraser’s bedroom, anxious to make sure everything was okay. He was kneeling on the carpet, poised over the plastic cage and miniature wrestling figures that he’d got for his birthday, staging some elaborate scene and augmenting it with his own sound effects and American-accented commentary. He was so rapt that he failed to notice her, so she withdrew again and had a quick glance inside his big brother’s room, which was empty.

She assumed he would be sitting in the kitchen, probably reading, but she found Drew in there alone. She greeted him with a kiss, anticipating that as they were alone this would probably extend to him squeezing her bum as a nod to what happened that morning, with the implication that he was no longer quite so content for it to remain unreciprocated.

There was no grope though, and the kiss was brief. Something was up.

‘Everything okay?’ she asked. ‘Where’s Duncan?’

He looked at her with an oddly knowing expression and said, ‘In the attic. Reading.’

It took her a moment to catch up to the significance of this, but when she did, Drew’s affirmative nod told her he could read her progress.

‘Pop-up tent?’ she asked.

‘Yes.’

When Duncan was four, he had flooded the bathroom while playing with a deep-sea diver doll; or, more accurately, had started the tap running and put in the plug then gone off to get a toy shark and, during his search for this item, found something else to play with and forgotten entirely about the bath. Drew had been downstairs in the kitchen feeding Fraser his lunch, and was only alerted to the situation when water began to drip through the ceiling and onto the cooker. When Catherine came home from work that
evening she found Duncan in the spare bedroom in the attic, looking through picture books inside his pop-up tent. He had taken himself away up there as a kind of retreat, a confused four-year-old’s act of contrition.

In the years following he had similarly removed himself whenever he knew he had seriously screwed up. It forced Catherine to seek him out and climb inside the little tent in order to speak to him. She came to realise it was his way of saying sorry and acknowledging his fault when he didn’t have the words or the strength to articulate his feelings, or even to broach the subject.

It hadn’t happened in a couple of years, so she assumed he had grown out of it. These days he was mature enough to make his apologies or, just as often, argue his case. Clearly, this was a biggie.

‘What happened?’

‘He got into a fight at school.’

Catherine felt something clench inside her, and tried to bring her rational mind to bear upon rampant physiological instinct. Keep it in proportion, she told herself: he was upstairs reading, not in casualty, and Drew looked more worried about her reaction than about Duncan’s welfare.

‘I got a call just before I went to pick the boys up. Mrs Gardine asking if I could nip into the office for five minutes when I came round to the school. She was very good about it. She was discreet and professional, but in not so many words let me know she didn’t believe Duncan was the instigator, and that the other boy has previous. He’s a P7 and apparently no stranger to the inside of Mrs Gardine’s office.’

‘So how come Duncan’s upstairs eating crow in his pop-up tent?’

Drew’s face bore an awkward mixture of discomfort, regret and incredulity.

‘Because the P7 got second prize.’

If there was also any paternal pride in there, he knew to keep it hidden, but Catherine couldn’t detect a trace. Mostly there was just concern and confusion, as if Mrs Gardine had told him Duncan had started speaking in tongues.

‘Duncan burst his nose. The proverbial blood and snotters
everywhere: mostly blood. He’s very freaked out. I can’t get him to talk about it. Ate his tea in silence then took off up the stairs.’

‘You seem a bit freaked out yourself,’ she observed.

‘I’m astonished. He never got it from me. I couldn’t fight sleep as a wean.’

Catherine made her way up to the attic conversion and found the pop-up tent erected in the same corner as all those times before. Weird how kids’ minds worked: two or three years must be an eternity to them, and yet these fine details came back like they’d been placed in secure storage.

He was taking up a lot more of the tent than last time, and there was little chance they would both fit in there now. She managed to draw him out and they sat together on the end of the spare bed. It took him a while to start talking, but she coaxed him along eventually.

‘He was trying to get me to fight, saying he was going to batter me worse if I didn’t fight him,’ Duncan told her. ‘At first I was just scared. Then he hit me in the face. He kept slapping me, and he kept saying: “Ye gaunny dae anythin’, ye gaunny dae anythin’.” I thought I was going to cry. I hoped that would make him leave me alone, and it did, kind of. He started laughing in my face, going: “Ha ha, check him greetin’.”

‘Then I don’t know what happened. It was like a volcano inside me. It was like being sick: it’s coming and you can’t stop it, it just has to come out. I’m really sorry.’

With that he broke down and buried his face in Catherine’s chest, sobbing quietly. It took her a lot of strength not to join him. He was eleven now, and these days she could see in him the rangy teenager he would soon become, but right then she could more clearly see the four-year-old who flooded the bathroom.

This was the hardest stuff, the heart of all maternal fears. You couldn’t be there to protect them from all the things that might happen to them, and nor could you protect them from the things they might do.

The things that could not be undone.