How To Kill Friends And Implicate People (7 page)

EIGHTEEN

FERGUS

18:30

I have a moment of panic when I walk into the flat. I mean, I know I’ve been fucking things up a wee bit lately, but I definitely remember killing
two
people, and there are
three
stiffs on the floor.

I go for the only response I can think of as I look down at the third body. ‘Huh.’

It’s a bloke. Looks like a Ned. Wearing a trackie and Adidas trainers. Too many stripes. There’s a small bullet hole beneath his left eye, and a much bigger entry wound at the back of his head. None of that surprises me, of course. Once you’ve seen one daft idiot shot in the head, you’ve seen them all.

The odd thing is that it was a damn good shot.

And it wasn’t me.

Joe sits down on the bed. I notice he’s wearing black gloves, which is handy because so am I. Neither of us are going to be leaving prints in this place, we’re not fucking amateurs.

‘Who?’ I point to the third stiff.

‘Cal. Cal Gibson.’

‘Gibson?’ I don’t believe in coincidences in Glasgow. ‘Any relation?’

Joe nods. ‘Son.’

Mike Gibson is a bit of a name. There have been a lot of changes in Glasgow over the last few years. A lot of the old guard have retired, or been pushed out. A whole bunch of them died last year when the media got hold of a cover-up gone wrong. MHW had paid for me to help in the clean-up, I took out a lawyer who was trying to blackmail them. But Mike Gibson survived. He was one of the big men in the Southside when I was younger, before I left for the military. He was a loan shark, and shared in a lot of the prostitution and gambling businesses with Rab Anderson and the Washer Lady. Now he’s semi-legit. He just operates as a landlord in the city centre, with buildings he bought from the council on the cheap, then received grants from the same council to renovate the properties at taxpayers’ expense.

That’s all well and good, but—

‘Why is Gibson’s son here?’

Joe looks like he’s struggling a bit with all of this. His mouth keeps flexing, biting back on emotions. He’s pale, sullen and gulping a lot. I’ve seen this reaction before. Grief. I just about remember it.

‘He was up to something. Some scam. He said this was his Babycham.’ He looks up at me with a face that says,
Yeah, I know, stupid.
‘His masterpiece. He knew Porter was going to be here.’

I don’t like this. Joe’s talking as if he spoke to Cal, which means that Joe was here before the kid died. There are two different scenarios here, and neither one is good.

First, it could mean he bought someone else in to clean up my work. If one pro comes in to fix a mess left by another, then the first guy’s days are numbered.

Second, it could mean that Joe did it himself.

It’s a
really
good shot. Professional.

‘Joe, you got someone else hitting for you?’

He doesn’t answer.

If there’s someone else in the game, I need to find out who. Two contractors on the same turf can lead to problems. Clearly, this other killer isn’t as good at the clean-up as me, otherwise I wouldn’t be here. That buys me some time. Joe still needs me.

But there’s a clock ticking.

‘Uh, Joe? What’s going on here?’

He shrugs. ‘I don’t actually know. This was supposed to be simple. You do Mitchell, we let someone find him, huge press story, and the right people get the message. Porter wasn’t part of the plan. Cal wasn’t part—’ He pauses. I see a light go on behind his eyes. ‘Shit,’ he says. ‘Cal mentioned someone else. Pauline? Paula? Said she was missing, which, baws, he thought she would be here.’

Shitey shitey shite.

If Joe hadn’t dropped Cal himself, I’d be tempted to fess up. Tell the truth and say, crap, sorry man, there was a woman here but I let her go. He knows that hit men tend to leave prozzies alone. Like a code.

But now? No way. He might drop me, and I don’t know where his gun is.

‘There was nobody else here,’ I say.

He stares at me for a second, but there’s no real heat to it. He looks like he’s already moved on to the next thing, to figuring out what the hell this mess is, and to how he’s going to fix it.

That’s what Joe does. He fixes Glasgow’s messes.

Joe looks down at Cal. ‘What did you do?’ Then back at me. ‘This changes the plan. I don’t know why Dom was here, or who else was working with Cal. I can’t have anything unexpected before the ninth.’

‘What’s happening on the ninth?’

He looks up at me. I can see he hadn’t meant to mention the date. He’s let something slip. ‘Nothing,’ he says. ‘Forget it.’

Joe walks around the flat in silence for a while, moving from room to room. His hands in his pockets. He’s doing that thing where his mouth twitches from side to side, like he’s sucking on a sweet. I stand and watch from the bedroom doorway, giving him the time to think. He opens the front door and leans out into the hallway, as if looking for something, then shuts the door and comes back toward me.

‘Okay,’ he says. ‘I need to figure out what happened here. Why the fuck was Dom here? Jeez. Look, clean them all away. Then torch the place. Make sure the fire alarms go off just before the flat goes up, so everyone else in the building has time to get out. I’ll pay you for getting rid of Mitchell and Cal, but Porter’s on you.’

That seems fair.

NINETEEN

SAM

18:30

My gut told me something was wrong with Kara’s case. Phil called this feeling my
Spidey sense.
I couldn’t put my finger on why, but I felt she was holding something back. Kara is slick and professional. Everything she’d said had convinced me her husband was cheating on her, but there was more to it.

Still, it was a paying job, so I told Kara I’d look into it. I didn’t need to quote prices or hourly rates, because she already knew the details. The phone app allows clients to keep track of how many hours I’ve logged on their case.

Chris let me into the office to change back into the cargo shorts, and I rolled my suit up back into the bag. Chris worked really hard at acting like he wasn’t trying to look. I gave him top marks for the effort. I cycled back out onto the canal path and rode for a few hundred yards, enough to make sure I was out of earshot of the stadium. Then I called my brother.

He answered straight away. ‘Take the job?’

‘You don’t even know what it is yet.’

‘True. But I know the client, and they pay on time. So, take the job?’

I shook my head, which was pointless on the phone. ‘It’s not the club. Kara’s hiring me privately.’

Phil didn’t answer straight away. He was thinking it through. ‘Okay. So, there’s gossip, then?’

‘She says her husband is cheating on her. But, I don’t know, something feels off.’

‘She’s good for the money though, aye?’

‘She’ll be good for all the extra hours we charge her, totally.’ It was my turn to pause. ‘But I want to keep my eyes on her for a while. Something feels a little off here.’

Phil saw what was coming. ‘Oh no, no no, nu uh.’

‘Phil—’

‘Not happening. You do the legwork, not me.’

I changed my tone, went for the pleading sister trick. It usually worked. ‘Please, Phil. You can keep all the money for the hours you work. I just don’t like the idea that she’s playing us. I want to see what she’s up to, and you can follow her husband for a while.’

I could hear in his response that my tone change had worked. He hadn’t said
Yes
yet, but he was getting there. ‘Not that you’re letting your previous get in the way here.’

I played innocent. ‘What do you mean?’

‘Well, she did tell your boy toy to dump you, right? In some worlds, that would mean the two of you are now mortal enemies. Locked in a rivalry that can only be settled by a fight to the death. I saw a movie about it,
The Hunger Games
.’

‘That wasn’t a documentary, Philomena.’

‘Aye, I suppose. But what I’m meaning is, I know people who would pay good money to see that. Can we talk about broadcasting rights?’

‘You’re not helping.’

‘No way. The fight would be all down to you. I’d hold the camera, though. Do some commentary.’

‘You know what I mean.’

‘You know what I mean, too. You and Kara have previous. I know you don’t like her, but are you sure that’s not influencing you here? Just because she’s a bitch, doesn’t mean she can’t be right about this. Especially since a man is involved. A man will stick his dick in anything. Well, anything except me, it seems.’

‘Phil—’

‘Sorry.’

‘But I take your point. You’re right, I don’t like her, and I’d love for her to be wrong about this, or trying something on. But, you know, I still think I’m right. My gut says something is off here, and I want to stick close to her for a while.’

‘Jeezo, a girl uncovers one massive conspiracy, and suddenly she’s Jim Rockford. Okay, I’ll play along. But remember, I’m getting the money for these hours.’

‘Thanks, I’ll owe you one.’

‘Yep.’

My phone had vibrated a couple of times while we were talking. The sign of either a voicemail or SMS. My handset was on its last legs, and the screen was prone to freezing. I sat for a couple of minutes while it still said I was on the call to Phil, even though he’d hung up. I used all the skills I would have picked up on an IT course, and switched the phone off and on again. Once it had restarted, I could see the three text messages from Hanya.

Three witnesses describe a woman on a bike.

And:

It’s going to take 24 hrs for me to get all the CCTV.

Also:

Let’s go for a drink tonight.

It was unusual for Hanya to play this game. We’re best friends, sure, but she still has a job to do. Of the few times I’ve strayed into one of her cases, she’s usually pulled me in straight away to get the statement over with. There was only one case when she’d given me the room to do my own thing, and that had been when her old partner, John Cummings, had been in trouble. She hadn’t been sure whose side her bosses were on, and she’d let me snoop around.

Why was she giving me the leeway on this one?

I pushed that away. I had more pressing mysteries to deal with. One, Paula Lucas was dead after handing me some cassettes. The other, Kara Pennan was playing some kind of game.

But she was paying me for it, so this was a game I was willing to play.

TWENTY

FERGUS

19:00

The actual clean-up is pretty easy. Always is. The trick, as with anything else, is to get the professionals in.

Undertakers deal with death every day. Nobody bats an eyelid to them having corpses in their vans, and cops almost never stop them. They’re allowed to go anywhere and everywhere, and they’re experts at making dead people vanish. In every city in the world, if you need to get rid of a stiff, there will be an undertaker that will deal with it. For the right price.

I have a regular subcontractor in central Scotland. They have branches in both Glasgow and Edinburgh, and several towns in between. A couple of quick calls to my contact there, and a half hour wait, and then two guys are in the flat with me cleaning up the mess and carrying the bodies away discreetly in bags, down to a waiting van. They may as well be invisible. If passers-by see paramedics, cops or firemen, they’re going to rubberneck. If they see an undertaker, they look the hell away.

Once the cleaners are gone, I head out into the hallway and set off one of the main smoke alarms. It’s loud and insistent, an electronic beep that pulses around my brain and makes my ears try and shut down for a while.

Back inside the flat, I listen as people in the building start to make their way down the stairs, grumbling that this better not be a drill. Fire crews can take around four minutes to arrive in the city, and a few well-placed flames will take this place up in roughly the same time. Factor in that they’ll need to get up the stairs, identify which flat the alarm originates from, and evacuate the remainder of the building.

I have time.

I don’t start the fire in the bedroom or bathroom, though. That would be amateur hour. The fire investigators will focus on the room where the problems started, and I can’t have that be the same place where they might find forensic traces of death.

I start in the living room. There are two bookcases stuffed with an odd mix: Marxist tomes and spy novels. Everyone thinks that books are a fire hazard. They’re not. They burn, sure, but most things
burn.
What you want is something that will spread the fire. Something like, say, a wooden bookcase. I take my Zippo to the nearest shelf and pull out a couple of books, lighting them, then dropping them back onto the shelf.

Then I look around at the furniture. An expensive-looking leather couch isn’t going to help me much. But the cheaper-looking fabric chairs on either side? Bingo. I take a few seconds to get each one burning. They go up straight away, spilling chemical fumes and smoke into the air around them.

The building is old, but the inside looks to have been renovated more recently, and the flat has fire doors, with small chains that are meant to pull them closed. Fortunately, Mitchell has each one propped open with a small plastic door stop, so the flames will spread.

I watch from the hallway as the walls start to go. Mitchell’s cheap and bland landscape photographs start to curl and blacken. The smoke is climbing out of the living room now and crawling along the ceiling toward me. I need to get out, but I want to make sure the flames are spreading. At the first sign of their red and amber edges eating into the doorframe, I turn and head out the front door.

I pull it shut behind me and feel the Yale locks click into place. This floor is deserted now, but I can still hear people moving about elsewhere in the building. The fire alarm drills into my skull as I stand beneath it, but it doesn’t stop me hearing fire engines out in the city, trying to make their way here through the one-way system.

A different sound makes its way through the electronic pulse in my ears. Someone breathing heavily, struggling to move. I turn to look down the stairs behind me, but can’t see anything. There is another flight of stairs at the end of the small hallway, this one leading up to the next floor. I run to the bottom step and look up. There’s an old lady struggling at the top, making it down one slow step at a time with frail-looking legs. I can see a walking stick on the floor at the top, abandoned. She has a cat carrier in each hand, and is fighting for control of them as the animals inside run around, terrified of all the noise.

What the hell is a woman so frail doing living up so high?

I head up to her, taking the steps two at a time. I start to talk, but she looks at me with a firm squint and shakes her head. ‘Deaf as a post,’ she shouts. ‘Need my kids.’

It takes me a second to realise she’s meaning the cats.

Right.

Okay.

I smile at her and take both carriers, one in each hand. The animals are heavy, and not at all happy about any single part of the current situation. They’re threatening to pull my hands clean off at my wrists, so I don’t know how she was managing. I stick out my elbow, and she takes the hint, looping her arm through mine. I guide her down to the ground floor, taking each step slowly, but quicker than she was managing on her own.

As we hit the lobby, the firemen are coming in. They step aside to let us out, then run up the stairs, shouting out commands and calling for anyone left in the building. There are cops outside. I hand the two carriers back to the woman with a smile, then slip away into the crowd.

Okay.

I’ve killed two people, disposed of three bodies, and torched an apartment.

I think it’s time to go visit my parents.