The Stone Gallows (4 page)

She studied the picture. ‘She's lucky to have a dad like you.'

The bag was lying at her feet, a battered, lumpy hold-all. She'd stuffed
as many of Sonata Blue's clothes in as she could, as well as the tiny 
stuffed tiger that had been a gift from her one and only trip to
McDonalds.

‘So you're definitely leaving him for good?' Frank asked.

Maria nodded.

‘Good for you.'

He brought the cab to a halt. The girl leaned forward, a worried
expression on her face. ‘Why are we stopping?'

He nodded across the road at the blue outline of a cash machine. ‘The
missus always says I'm a soft touch. I reckon she's right. You're going to
need some cash if you're leaving him.'

She couldn't stop the tears, not now, not in the face of such generosity.

Six months of Gaz had caused her to forget that the world didn't revolve
around casual cruelty. ‘I can't do that. I can't take your money.'

‘I'm not talking much. Fifty quid. Enough for a train ticket.'

Ignoring Maria's protests, Frank stepped out and crossed the road,
fumbling in the back pocket of his denims, an overweight man in his
early fifties whose simple act of kindness would contribute to her death.

7.

Gallowgate, Glasgow. So named because it was where public executions used to take place. Crowds would line the dirt streets and enjoy the wonderful spectator sport that was capital punishment.

Corpses would be left to swing until their necks rotted through as a deterrent to others.

Of course, that was a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. Things were better now. The only thing left from those bad old days was the name: Gallowgate. Abbreviated from Gallow's Gate. Now, it was just another street, lined with banks and cashline points and handy but illegal places to park a taxi while one dives out and dips into one's savings in an act of misplaced charity. Even though the stone hanging tower was still there, nobody had been executed in Gallowgate for over two hundred years.

But everybody knows the old saying: the more things change, the more they stay the same.

8.

London Road. Sixty miles an hour on the speedometer, running the red lights because it was the middle of the night and there was almost nobody there and I'd been on the advanced driving course up at Tulliallen. Coombes had finally managed to belt in and belt up.

No Merc.

There was traffic. Taxis, both hackneys and private hire cars. The occasional civilian enjoying a late night drive. A fire engine. I passed them on the inside, on the outside. Hell, I would have mounted the pavement if I had needed to.

No Merc.

Where was it?

9.

The slam of the taxi door woke Sonata Blue up, and she started to cry.

Maria shrieked, covering the top of her baby's head with frantic kisses.

‘Thank God. Thank God. You're alright. Thank God.' She hugged the
bundle to her, feeling the hot tears on her cheek. ‘I'll never let him hurt
you again, I promise.'

A car rattled past as the baby hollered and whimpered, Maria soothing it as best she could. Her mother, dead for over ten years, said that a
crying baby was a healthy baby, but the sound still tore at her heart.

Then, with a desperate, gulping sound – URK! – Sonata threw up all
over the back of the cab. Her eyes rolled back in her head and her tiny
body convulsed. Maria screamed and clutched the child to her. She
looked frantically for the taxi driver. There he was, still across the road,
still at that bloody cash machine. She opened the door of the taxi and 
lurched toward him. ‘Help her! She's fitting! She's dying! HELP 
US!'

Frank turned in the direction of her voice, his knees tensing as he
prepared to go to her aid. But by then, it was too late.

10.

Coombes pointed a stubby finger. ‘There! Turning onto Farmloan Street!'

I saw it. Black car, Mercedes-shaped. Possibly. . .
hopefully
. . .

Grierson. I was two hundred yards back, still doing sixty. It took me less than five seconds to reach the junction, even accounting for the time it took me to slow down enough to make the corner, although I won't lie and say that I was fully in control. Later on, traffic cops measured the set of skidmarks I left as being thirty-five metres, a little fact that was gleefully reported in the tabloid press. I almost lost it entering the corner, turning in too soon and clipping the kerb, hard, bouncing off and side-swiping a parked car, the sound of metal on metal and shattering glass filling the car, Coombes screaming something unintelligible at me and me screaming back.

Then I had control again. So did Coombes. ‘He's seen us!'

It was Grierson, I was sure of it. He was moving fast now. We'd gained nearly a hundred yards but now the gap was stretching as the Merc flew away. My Bond-style approach to cornering must have tipped him off. Coombes smacked his fist off the dashboard. ‘Floor it!

Floor it! Floor it!'

I tried to jam the accelerator through the carpet. The overworked Ford protested but did as it was told, picking up speed but definitely not gaining any ground on the more powerful Mercedes. We both watched as it turned left onto Gallowgate. My palms were sticky on the wheel, and I could feel my temples pounding. Coombes was just the same, both hands clenched on the dashboard, teeth bared, a vein sticking out in his neck, all reasonable thought drowned in a flash-flood of adrenaline.

Onto Gallowgate, the speedometer needle not dropping below forty, the tyres pleading for mercy, Grierson a hundred and fifty yards ahead of us and leaving us for dead. The smell of burning clutch filled the car, and it didn't take a detective to figure this was one race we couldn't win. It was another basic rule of surveillance – when the subject's lost, back off. All we'd done was tip Grierson off. But because Coombes had been fucking around before Grierson made his move, I'd tried too hard, caught up in the pursuit, my desire not to lose the subject completely obliterating any sense of responsibility. And it was only then, at fifty-five miles an hour on a city street, that it came back, and I thought
slow down, you're being stupid, at this speed you could
hit
. . .

Too late.

11.

Frank turned just in time to see the girl step into the middle of the
road. She screamed and turned, raising the hand that didn't hold the
baby to her chest as if to ward off the oncoming car. The collision was
savage, breaking both legs, flipping her face-down onto the bonnet before
slamming her head into the windscreen, the baby trapped between her
body and the car and taking the brunt of the impact, also striking the
windscreen and then being torn loose from her arms, the cotton bedding
she had wrapped it in unravelling as the child flew through the air.

Maria was thrown over the car like a rag doll, a mess of arms and legs
and blood, landing back on the road, her head a fractured ruin, alive but
not for long, her single remaining eye rolling in its shattered orbit and
filling with blood, looking for her baby, not finding it, which was just
about the only blessing, the lid trembling even as it glazed over in death.

Sonata Blue landed thirty yards away. In pieces.

12.

Coombes screamed. We both did. I slammed on the brakes and twisted the wheel, and it was at that moment that the front right wheel, already weakened from clipping the corner five hundred yards ago, decided to part company from the rest of the car. The axle dug in, flipped us up and over, the car rotating as it slid on its roof. We hit something – a parked car, a traffic island, it didn't really matter what because we were still doing fifty and it wasn't.

Unlike Coombes, I had forgotten to buckle my seatbelt.

There was a hideous, grinding noise and I felt pain in my leg and my arm and my head, three separate explosions of agony, each one a black hole supernova in its own right. Coombes was yammering about how he was bleeding and didn't want to die and all I could think about was how I had seen the blood fly from the girl's legs as the car struck, and how there was now a head-sized hole in the windscreen and I was covered in her brains and how I prayed that the bundle she had been holding hadn't been a baby.

And then I passed out.

13.

It took them an hour to cut me free from the wreckage, and another hour in A & E to diagnose exactly how many broken bones I had. It turned out to be ten. One hip, one kneecap, one shin. One wrist and four fingers. One jaw. Plus a lump on my head the size of a Volkswagen Beetle. X-rays confirmed a fractured skull.

Coombes had a cut on his cheek.

The pen that had been sitting on the dashboard – the same pen that I had idly thought about stabbing him with – had somehow turned itself into a missile and opened a two-inch gash from his cheekbone to his jaw – less than an inch from his eye, he reminded me several times.

Once we had come to a halt, he had crawled out of the passenger side window leaving my poor smashed body in the footwell. I'm told that he then lit a cigarette. The poor soul obviously needed something to soothe his nerves.

14.

I was unconscious for two whole days, and spent the next two weeks drifting in and out of a morphine-induced stupor. For the next two months I experienced massive confusion and memory loss which the doctors assured me was normal. My initial haziness on the events, and the broken jaw, meant that Coombes had free rein to say anything he wanted to anybody. Well used to being the subject of an internal investigation, he came up with a story that Hans Christian Anderson would have been proud of, had old Hans ever written about fatal car crashes. I actually managed to read a copy of his statement, and it went something like this:

Detective Stone and myself were on surveillance duty in an unmarked
vehicle parked outside Grierson Haulage Ltd on Boothe Street. At twelve
fifty-five AM, we saw a black Mercedes registration SD05 XKM leave the
premises. The vehicle turned left and drove past us, and both Detective
Stone and myself saw three passengers. Grierson was driving, there was
an unidentified female in the front passenger seat, and an unidentified
male in the rear passenger seat. The male passenger was holding a gun
to the female passenger's head; as they drove past, we saw him strike her
on the back of the head with it. Concerned for her safety, we immediately
went to follow, but our unmarked car wouldn't start. I tried to phone for
back-up, but my mobile phone would not work properly and refused to
connect. Meanwhile, Detective Stone had managed to get our vehicle
started and we set out to follow the suspect, however, we were already
significantly behind them.

I won't bore you with the rest. Suffice to say that he did a master-ful job of covering his arse, and by association, mine.

15.

The media had a field day. The accident made the front page of every newspaper in the land. I kept the story from the
Daily Times
, and every once in a while I read it.

A teenage mother and child were killed early this morning when they
were struck by an unmarked police car. Maria McAusland (17) died
instantly at the scene of the accident in Glasgow's Gallogate. Her baby,
six month old Sonata Blue, was thrown from her arms and also died at
the scene. Two police officers were injured: Detective Cameron Stone
(30), who is believed to have been driving the unmarked police car at the
time, and Detective John Coombes (46). Detective Stone is said to be
suffering from serious head injuries and remains in hospital, and
Detective Coombes has been discharged after being treated for shock and
a severe facial wound.

So far, so fair, although it was a bit of a stretch to refer to the cut on Coombes cheek as ‘severe'. But from that point onwards, the tone of the story shifted dramatically.

It is believed that the two detectives were involved in some kind of
surveillance operation. Questions are now being asked as to why the
unmarked police car was travelling at high speed through a busy area.

Reports suggest that there had been a car-chase stretching over a mile
through the streets of Glasgow. Of the accident itself, one eyewitness said, ‘It
was carnage. The poor lassie never even had a chance. They didn't really
appear to be fully in control of the car.' Another source who attended the
scene claimed that the two detectives smelled strongly of alcohol.

See what I mean?

The kicker was a side-bar article. There was a picture, a young man sitting next to an empty cot, holding a photograph of his girlfriend and baby.

Tragic dad Gary Tiernan (18) is heartbroken over the loss of his
daughter and girlfriend. ‘Sonata Blue meant the world to both of us. I
can't imagine my life without them.'

That's the part I found myself reading most of all.

16.

The memory of that night didn't return until nearly three months later, and even now there are blank spots. It's like seeing things through a dirty window. I get confused about the specifics of that nightmare drive, and my mind is full of vague questions that become even more vague the more I worry at them. Did we overtake the fire engine before or after London Road? Did I clip the kerb on the last corner, or the second last? Sometimes I think she might have had time to scream, but I can't remember hearing anything. Either way, by then everything had run its course. I wanted to step forward and tell the truth, but the Coombes version had become the official version.