When The Devil Drives (12 page)

‘It’s beautiful, isn’t it,’ observed Beano Thomson, one of her young DCs. Beano had a fairly dry sense of humour, but could also be boyishly enthusiastic and almost annoyingly positive. Consequently, it wasn’t easy to be sure when he was joking.

‘Yes,’ Catherine replied. ‘If I’m ever going to get shot dead, I want it to be in a place just like this.’

Beano and DI Laura Geddes reported to Catherine as soon as she had stepped out of DC Zoe Vernon’s car. They had been among the first of the Glasgow contingent to arrive, getting there at around two in the morning.

‘What’s the script?’ Catherine asked them.

Laura had already given her the breakdown over the phone while
Zoe drove them north, but she liked a recap whenever she was on site, and not just to keep abreast of updates. The memory could play strange tricks, and the way Catherine visualised things when she was first told them could linger confusingly in the mind if she didn’t hear the same points made when she was actually looking at the scene.

‘Incident happened at around nine-fifty last night,’ Laura said, her soft Edinburgh accent rising towards the end of each sentence, as though framing it as a question. ‘The laird and thirty-five corporate guests were watching an outdoor performance of, ironically enough,
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
by a local amateur dramatics company.’

‘What’s ironic about it?’ asked Beano.

‘It was the twenty-first of June, bawheid,’ Zoe told him. ‘And it was nobody’s idea of a dream evening.’

‘The play was staged at several different settings around the castle grounds,’ Laura went on, ‘and the audience taken around on a seated gantry mounted on a trailer. Catering staff were following on foot, serving champagne between each scene change. At the end of the performance the victim and the laird came down from the audience and joined the cast to pose for a group photo. That was when it happened. Ambulance got here ten thirty-two, and the victim was pronounced dead ten thirty-five, but there wasn’t exactly any doubt about his condition. His brains were on the lawn.’

‘Ouch. Corporate, you said?’

‘Yes,’ Laura replied. ‘A delegation of senior bods from the Royal Scottish Bank, plus their very select guests. Seems it was a very high-class corpie, with the RSB paying the laird five hundred quid a skull. Wee bit more upscale than lunch and a soft seat at the football, so we’re not talking about a group of small businessmen,’ she added pointedly.

Christ, Catherine thought. A wankerfest. This just got better and better. ‘Where are they now?’

‘They’re all in the castle. The theatre company people as well, plus the catering staff.’

‘Have you got everybody’s details?’

Laura held up a list.

‘There are six detectives in there, questioning them all in turn. The lateness of the hour and the booze meant they’d no option but to stay the night as planned. There was one or two of the corporate guests talking about calling drivers up from Edinburgh and Glasgow, but I put the kibosh on that. I asked them all to remain here to assist in our inquiries, but now that the shock is starting to recede, the goodwill and sense of civic duty are wearing off too. They all want to go home and back to their terribly important jobs, and I get the distinct impression that lawyers are going to start being called any minute.’

‘If they haven’t been already,’ Catherine suggested. ‘Okay, make sure we’ve got everybody’s details and then let them go. We’re not going to get much out of them just now anyway. Now, the victim, was he a guest of the bank too?’

‘I don’t think so. I’m sure somebody said he was the special guest of the laird, but I haven’t spoken to him. Not sure anybody has, in any depth. He was being handled by one of the local officers, a familiar face for a bit of reassurance. He was practically catatonic with shock. One minute you’re standing there with a photographer going “Say ‘cheese!’”, and the next …’

‘Your guest suffers a permanent loss of face,’ said Catherine. ‘What about the photo? Do we have it? Who took it?’

‘We’ve got the camera. It was one of the castle staff, an amateur enthusiast taking the snap, but it was for the laird. He always poses with the cast, apparently, and keeps a framed pic as a souvenir.’

‘Well, let’s make sure it’s the only souvenir. Thirty-five guests means thirty-five phones, means thirty-five other cameras. Find out who else snapped anything. Get hold of those phones and sequester every image that was taken over the past twenty-four hours; I don’t care if that includes pictures of their dicks that they’ve been texting to their bit on the side.’

‘We’re already doing that,’ Laura assured her.

‘Some of them had their cameras set to automatically upload photos to online albums,’ warned Beano.

‘In that case, before you let them leave, make sure all of them know that if a “tragic last moments” photo – or something worse – finds its way on to the pages of any newspaper or website, then whoever
leaked it will very soon be left wishing his father had just cracked one off.’

‘You got it, boss,’ said Laura.

Her debrief complete, Laura went back inside the castle to relay Catherine’s order, while Beano accompanied her around the grounds to the locus on the far side of the building.

Because of the distance she had travelled and the unsettlingly picturesque surroundings, it felt weird to see so many familiar faces wandering around out of their normal context. She knew it was Strathclyde’s jurisdiction, and she had made various calls last night to ensure she had her own people on the ground this morning, but some subconscious part of her must have expected to feel like an interloper parachuted in to commandeer a whole load of strangers, not to mention anticipating all the grief that went with that. Instead it was like a school trip, and she was teacher.

There had been a time when Catherine would find herself standing among a mass of detectives and feel grateful that she wasn’t the ringmaster of such a circus. The more bodies you had at your disposal, the more the politics and the pressure to get results must be hellish, she thought. Now that she was the one in charge, she looked at the manpower milling about the place and just felt grateful that she could deploy such resources without any questions being asked. In fact, the only questions would have come had she chosen to deploy less. As anticipated, the political machinations had already begun; not so much a matter of certain people wanting results so much as making sure nobody would be able to say the authorities hadn’t done everything they could.

The question was, was it the victim or the venue that was loosening the purse strings? Probably a bit of each. Both the host and the headshot were of aristocratic background, as well-connected as they were well-heeled, and the tragic loss of the latter had to be multiplied by the embarrassment to the former when it came to calculating the score on the official priority index.

It really didn’t do to have people shot dead in the grounds of fairy-tale castles. Not with the tourist season just heating up; to say nothing of the ramifications of such a tragedy striking somebody
more commonly to be found on broadsheet arts pages than tabloid front pages. In this instance the term ‘victim profile’ had altogether different connotations. He knew everybody and everybody knew him. The news feeds were already buzzing with tributes not just from all corners of the arts world but charities too, calling him a miracle-worker, fêting his tireless endeavour, his generosity and his vision.

‘Hard to imagine we’re going to find a motive when nobody had anything bad to say about him,’ Zoe had observed wryly on the drive north. But it was always like that when the body was still warm. Once the victim was colder, so would be the opinions.

Jasmine took a short drive from her office in Arden on the south side to Eglinton Street, still south of the river, on the edge of the Gorbals. The Civic was starting to make a slightly worrying noise, half gurgle, half rattle, and she had to really rev it a few times going round corners in low gear. She resorted to the standard technical remedy for such automotive issues, which was to turn up the stereo until she couldn’t hear it any more.

She wasn’t sure this was going to cut it for much longer. Jimmy Eat World filled the air, covering the gurgle/rattle noise, but she could still feel the vibrations against the pedals and the occasional surge of complaint from the engine. At least it was her own choice of music that was covering the problem these days, since she’d purchased a cassette-shaped adapter for her mp3 player. Prior to that, she’d been reliant on the radio, the cassette deck having chewed up and spat out its last tape many years ago. She had been meaning to buy a CD player for it, but that had always been a low priority behind the constant replacement of parts that the car actually needed in order to keep running. In fact, she had sent it into the garage so often that, at this rate, she’d soon have assembled an entire new vehicle, but at far more expense than if she just went into a dealership and bought one.

She knew that was the more economical option, as well as the more sensible one. She even had the money these days to be able to afford it. The problem was, she just couldn’t give up this car.

It had been her mum’s car and as such a part of Jasmine’s life since she was seven. It was the car Jasmine sat in the back of while her mum drove her to school on rainy mornings, to the theatre on excitingly dark nights, or just to the supermarket at Canonmills a couple of times a week. It was the car Jasmine practised in while she was trying to get her licence. And it was the car in which she drove
her mum to the hospital: for tests, for checks, for treatments and then for the last time.

It still smelled of her; or at least the smell of the car still made Jasmine feel like her mum was near by.

The little red Civic had meant so much to Mum, as it had been the first new car she’d ever owned; or nearly new, anyway. It was a special deal because although it had barely two hundred miles on the clock it was still second-hand. It had been owned by some well-off academic who normally treated himself to a new car each year with his book royalties, but who had decided to bring his purchase forward when Honda brought out a new model of the Civic.

Jasmine couldn’t understand why he’d want the updated version, as it seemed plain and fuddy-duddy compared to its predecessor: sleek and low-slung like a sports car. But sporty and sleek as it was, as well as being pre-owned, the professor’s Civic was now officially last year’s model, which meant Beth Sharp got a bargain.

Looking back, Jasmine wondered whether Mum felt able to splash the cash because Glen Fallan had been particularly generous with his guilt money that year.

God, was this the start of him corrupting her happiest memories? She could hear his voice in her head right then, saying: ‘See? This is why your mum was adamant that you shouldn’t find out about these things.’

She parked in front of a row of railway arches accommodating tiling and carpet showrooms, then got out and walked the short distance to her destination.

The Pantechnicon Theatre was the smallest of four auditoria either side of a quarter-mile stretch around where Eglinton Street became Pollokshaws Road. None of the four were serving the purposes they were built for, but the Pantechnicon could claim to be closest. It had begun life as a music hall before being converted into a cinema in the 1920s, functioning as such for four decades until the spread of television led to its closure in 1962. Three years later, it was reopened by Peter and Francis Winter, two brothers with the vision – and crucially the finance – to start a small repertory theatre.

Of its three near neighbours, one had been a Victorian theatre
called The Colosseum, once notorious for being the first Scottish venue to stage Ibsen’s
A Doll’s House
. This came a full seven years after its London debut, the outraged response to which left many people under the mistaken impression that the play had in fact been banned. Jasmine considered it an unworthy fate that the walls once echoing to the ‘door-slam heard around the world’ now heard no more dramatic cry than ‘house!’

There were also two purpose-built picture houses: both huge, sprawling venues whose grandeur was testament to the popularity of cinema during its heyday. Neither had shown a film since the seventies, and both had served time as bingo halls. One was now enjoying a new lease of life as a music venue, while the other was a ‘development opportunity’.

All four venues stood out like the last surviving teeth in an aged boxer’s mouth, their size emphasised by the absence of any construction around them. They were surrounded by waste ground, car parks and tree-dotted open space, like abandoned cathedrals to a religion with no remaining followers. It seemed strange that the landscape should be dominated by these places of popular entertainment when there was no evidence of a populace to be entertained. This was because all the tenements that used to stand in between them had been torn down in the sixties. It was, after all, the Gorbals.

Jasmine had found that if you mentioned Glasgow to English people they would often respond by solemnly intoning the words ‘oh yes, the Gorbals’, even though that place didn’t exist any more. The area that carried the name was a strange mishmash of light industrial units, isolated high-rise blocks, the aforementioned open spaces and these grand remnants. It was almost apocalyptic the way they stood so massive against a flat and largely barren landscape. It made Jasmine think of the movie
Delicatessen
, a favourite of her mum’s.

It was too early for the box office to be open, so she was surprised to see the lights on inside. She had thought she’d need to knock at the doors or even phone the office, but Jasmine found one of the sets of swing doors unlocked and entered the Pantechnicon’s modest little foyer. It seemed even smaller when it was empty, difficult to imagine how quite so many people could throng there just before a
show. She heard the wheezy hum of a vacuum cleaner from upstairs, in the lobby to the rear of the dress circle, and was about to make her way up when a young guy in a shirt and tie emerged from the entrance to the stalls. Jasmine vaguely recognised him from previous visits: he was the front-of-house manager, she was sure.