Hostage to Murder (12 page)

She doesn't quite trust me yet,
Lindsay thought ruefully as she followed Rory out into the street. Tam Gourlay was leaning against a black cab, waiting for them. As they headed west past George Square, Gourlay leaned forward and frowned at Rory.

“So how come you ended up with a man's name?”

“My mother's sentimental. I was conceived in a field just north of Aberdeen.”

Both Gourlay and Lindsay smiled. “Aurora Borealis. Helluva
mouthful for a wee lassie,” he said, reaching for his cigarettes and lighting up.

“Hey,” the cab driver protested. “Can you no' read? It says no smoking.”

“I've got to smoke,” Gourlay said. “I've got a doctor's line. See if I don't smoke, I lose the place and rip the heads off taxi drivers. OK, pal?”

“It's true,” Lindsay confirmed. “I've seen him. We've had him on tablets, patches, the lot. It's only the fags that keep him stable.”

The taxi driver shook his head in mock disgust. “See Glasgow and die, right enough.”

 

The living room of Tam and Bernie Gourlay's flat spoke of an unpretentious comfort. It felt lived in, with a child's toys piled into a couple of boxes in one corner, shelves that contained a mixture of popular women's fiction and sports videos, Monet's
Water Lilies
on the walls. When they arrived, Bernie was sitting by the bay window in the late afternoon dusk. Gourlay switched the light on as he entered, but Bernie didn't react. She continued to stare out of the window, smoking with an air of desperation.

“Bernie?” he said. “Bernie, this is Lindsay and Rory. They're going to help us find Jack. They're journalists.”

At the word “journalist,” Bernie's head jerked sharply towards them. “I'm sorry,” she said coldly, her flat Belfast accent as strong as the day she'd left. “He's been wasting your time. Everybody's written the story already.”

Rory shrugged and looked at Lindsay, who kept her expression blank. “This is our best chance,” Gourlay protested. “The polis willnae help, they wankers at the Foreign Office willnae help. We need somebody in our corner that knows what they're doing. Somebody that'll no' let them get away wi' it.”

“No, Tam. I said no, and I meant it. A few stories in the papers won't bother Bruno. You don't know what you're getting into here.” Her red-rimmed eyes stared unblinking at him, but her hands were trembling.

“This is Glasgow, no' bloody Sicily. Christ, Bernie. I don't understand you. Do you not want the boy back, or what?”

“Of course I do.” For a moment, her façade wavered and Lindsay could see naked fear in Bernie's eyes. “But what can they do to help? We've already held a bloody press conference, for all the good that did us.”

“Listen, this pair, they investigate things. They expose scandals. It's what they do. And this diplomatic immunity bullshit, that's a scandal if ever there was one.”

Seeing Rory edging towards the door, Bernie said triumphantly, “See for yourself. She knows it's a waste of time. Go on, darlin', away back to the pub.”

Rory shrugged. “I already told your husband what you needed was a private eye. But he insisted.”

This time, there was no mistaking the look of panic in Bernie's eyes. “A private eye?” she gasped.

“They're good at finding missing persons,” Rory said gently. “They've got a lot of experience. I could give you a couple of names if you like?”

Bernie's eyes widened and her mouth opened. But no words came. Lindsay watched Bernie, assessing her. Something was off-key. Bernie Gourlay just wasn't behaving like a desperate mother who'd move heaven and earth to get her child back. Intrigued, Lindsay said, “Of course, a private eye will want to keep everything under wraps. Personally, I think publicity's your best chance of finding out where your son is. And that's the first step to getting him back.”

Bernie snatched at the chance. “You know, I think you might be right,” she gabbled. “All right. I'll talk to you. But don't you ever forget, Tam Gourlay. It was you that set this ball rolling.”

Gourlay looked baffled but clearly wasn't about to question her surrender. “I'll make a pot of tea,” he said, backing out of the room. Rory had the good sense to settle herself in an armchair and try to blend into the background.

“So, Bernie, what exactly does Bruno do for the Italian Foreign Office?” Lindsay asked.

“He's a commercial attaché.”

“And where's he stationed now?”

“The last I heard, he was in Belgrade.”

“Not exactly a place you'd want your six year old son to be, I imagine.”

Bernie said nothing. But Lindsay wasn't giving in so easily. “How would Bruno get him out of the country?”

“Jack has two passports. I've got his British one and Bruno's got his Italian one.”

“Convenient for Bruno. So, how did you two meet?”

“I'd just come over from Ireland. I was working as a waitress in a hotel in town. Bruno used to come in a few times a week. He asked me out, and we just clicked. We were married two months later.” Bernie lit another cigarette.

“So what went wrong?”

“Italian men don't want wives. They want servants. Just because I was a waitress when I met him, it doesn't mean I wanted to wait on him hand, foot and finger for the rest of my days. Besides, I don't think I was smart enough to make the right sort of embassy wife.” There was no mistaking the bitterness now. “So I left him. Jack was only a year old.”

“That must have been tough,” Lindsay sympathised.

“What would you know about tough?” Bernie demanded contemptuously. “Yes, it was tough. I hooked up with one of the women I used to work with at the hotel. I minded her kids in the evenings when she was working, and she looked after Jack during the day so I could get a job. And that's when my luck turned. Tam advertised for a receptionist, and I answered the ad. I thought I'd finally fallen on my feet. It should have occurred to me that Bruno would hate the idea of another man bringing up his son.”

“So Bruno tried to get custody of Jack?” Lindsay asked.

“He tried, and he failed. I thought he'd given up the idea, but clearly I was wrong.” Bernie bit her lip. Now her distress was clearer than at any time since they'd arrived. Taking advantage of it, Lindsay continued to probe for more background details on Bruno, managing to extract from Bernie that he had originally come from the Val d'Elsa area of Tuscany. But whenever she tried to get Bernie to talk about Jack, she clammed up. After half an hour, Lindsay had to concede defeat. She wasn't going to get any further with Bernie Gourlay. She promised to do everything in her
power to track down Jack's whereabouts, then she and Rory made their escape.

“That was seriously weird,” Rory said as they walked down the street, the red sandstone tenements stained the colour of dried blood by the early evening gloom. “You'd think she'd be desperate for help. But it was like she couldn't get us out of there fast enough.”

“Yeah, I know. There's something not kosher there. Maybe our Bruno is something a wee bit more dodgy than a commercial attaché. Maybe he's a spook. Or maybe he has connections.” Lindsay glanced at her watch.

“What? You mean, as in, ‘Respect the family'?” Rory said in a terrible impersonation of Marlon Brando.

Lindsay winced. “I know, I know, you can be Italian without being a Mafioso. But I'm curious, just the same.”

“Maybe there's another reason why she's ambivalent about Jack coming home,” Rory said slowly.

“How do you mean?”

“Maybe it's not all happy families in Kinghorn Drive. Maybe Tam's abusing the boy?”

Lindsay turned the idea over in her mind and dismissed it. “He's not the type,” she said decisively.

“Suddenly there's a type?” Rory demanded.

“Of course not, I'm not that naïve. But Tam Gourlay is possibly the least sleazy guy I've met in years. Besides, abusers don't do
anything
to draw attention to their relationship to their victims, and Tam's hardly trying to hush things up.”

Rory shrugged. “It would explain what we've just seen.”

“I don't buy it. My gut says no.” They walked on in silence for a few yards, approaching the corner where their routes home would naturally separate.

“Hey, you know what?” Rory said suddenly, bright as fresh paint.

“What?”

“This is your very first proper story. We should go out and celebrate. A bottle of champagne, a nice dinner. What do you say?” If she'd had a tail, she'd have been wagging it in supplication.

It was tempting. An evening with Rory would have seemed like an attractive option at the best of times. And whatever this was, it wasn't the best of times. Almost anything would have sounded more fun than another evening discussing conception. But giving in to temptation wasn't the most sensible way to fixing things between her and Sophie. “I'd love to, Rory, but I need to get back.”

They'd reached the corner. “Fine,” Rory said, her nonchalance obviously forced. “Another time, maybe. When you've cleared it with Sophie.”

Before Lindsay could protest that she didn't need to clear her social engagements with her girlfriend, Rory had swung off down the street. Oh well, Lindsay thought as she trudged up the hill towards home. At least she had a story of her own to get her teeth into.

 

Michael Conroy waited for the cover of darkness before he made his latest reconnaissance of the street where Bernadette Dooley lived with her husband. Jesus, Joseph and Mary, but the husband was a big fucker. Michael feared no man, but he liked the odds to be weighted in his favour, preferably with serious hardware. Whatever it was that Bernadette had taken from Patrick, he'd be happy if it could be recovered without a direct confrontation with the big man.

Patrick had gone very quiet when he'd reported back about Bernadette getting her name all over the papers. Michael knew his boss well enough to read the silence, to realise that Patrick was seriously unhappy, not least because Michael's direct warning had proved unproductive. He figured Patrick had maybe been planning to use threats against the boy as further leverage, so his disappearance would be a helluva spoke in your man's wheel.

All the same, it was some coincidence, the lad getting snatched just when Patrick took an interest in the mother. But coincidences happened. Michael knew that. A couple of his best friends had done long stretches inside because of coincidence. It didn't worry him.

At least, it didn't worry him nearly as much as Patrick's instructions
to keep Bernadette under close surveillance. Kinghorn Drive, where she lived with the big fucker, was a quiet residential street. The kind of place where, even if there wasn't an official Neighbourhood Watch, there was bound to be some nosy old bitch twitching the nets day in, day out. If they tried keeping watch from a car, one of the local busybodies would be on to the police within the hour.

Where the hell else could they watch from? There wasn't a single vantage point anywhere in the street that would avoid suspicion.

The answer came on his third pass along the street. A couple of doors down from the Gourlays' flat, on the opposite side of the street, a second-floor flat had a poster in the window announcing it was for sale. Peering up through the dark, Michael could make out the absence of curtains, a sure sign of vacant possession. He'd pulled a stunt like this once before with an empty flat.

Tomorrow morning, he'd present himself at the estate agent's, clean and shaved. A film maker looking for a location. Willing to pay top dollar for the use of an empty flat for a couple of weeks. An empty flat like that one he'd noticed on Kinghorn Drive. Surely the owner would be happy to make a few bob at no inconvenience to himself? It wasn't as if there would be any obstacle to potential viewing. At an hour's notice from the agent, the film crew could be up and away, as if they'd never been there.

Michael walked briskly back to the pub where he'd left Kevin supping Guinness. With a bit of luck, he'd be able to satisfy Patrick without taking any risks. In Michael's book, that made it a very good day indeed.

Even if you wanted to hide from someone on Hillhead underground station in the middle of the morning, it was too quiet for that to be a serious possibility. Not that Lindsay had any desire to hide from Rory, exactly. She just felt it would be easier to handle their relationship if they kept it within professional parameters. Sharing the same journey into work somehow felt a little outside the boundaries. But she could hardly ignore the familiar figure slouched against one of the pillars, waiting for the train. She walked up and tapped Rory on the shoulder.

Her head snapped round, eyes wide, eyebrows arching in surprise. “Oh, hiya,” she said, her face lighting up when she realised she wasn't being assailed by the loony on the train or importuned by a beggar. She gave Lindsay a one-armed hug and a peck on the cheek. “How're you doing, Splash?”

“Good. You?”

Rory groaned. “Sandra turned up with a bottle of vodka and the burning desire to whinge about her boss. So I'm feeling a wee bit frayed round the edges.”

“I should have come out with you after all. Saved you from yourself,” Lindsay said.

Rory's reply was drowned by the arrival of the bright orange train. With its carriages smaller than most public transport systems, it always made Lindsay feel she was travelling in Toytown.
She half-expected Noddy and Big Ears to board at Kelvinbridge, hotly pursued by the golliwogs.