When The Devil Drives (41 page)

Get a grip.

She thought of Duncan’s words, hoped she could quote them to Drew for the humour without him thinking it was an overture to digging him up.

‘Greg’s had it for like a month and he’s still normal.’

There was her fear in a nutshell, and it looked pretty silly all of a sudden.

She had argued with Drew about this, she had even been desperate enough to probe Beano about his experiences, yet she hadn’t sought the opinion of the mother and time-served police officer whose judgment she respected implicitly. Deep down she understood that this was because she already knew what Moira would say.

‘Are you daft, hen?’

Placenta-brain never wears off: you can’t think straight when it comes to your own kids. Nothing stays in proportion. Catherine had
spent a life garnering first-hand knowledge of what drove people to kill, and of what it took to execute such acts. There were a lot of things in this life that could damage children, that could take away their empathy and their innocence, and ultimately render them capable of brutal deeds in later life. Software was going to be well down that list.

She saved Duncan’s remark until they’d finished dinner, and as predicted, Drew’s laughter was tempered by a look of trepidation that he was about to be taken to task once more.

‘I did tell him that
we
had decided,’ he insisted. ‘I didn’t say “your mammy won’t let you”.’

‘I know, but I’ve been thinking about what you said that night, about people who disapproved of violent games never having played them. I realised it was more than just a polite way of saying I didn’t know what I was talking about. I thought just seeing them over somebody’s shoulder was enough, but the truth is I
have
never actually played one. I’ve never been interested; I’m not particularly interested. But I should examine the evidence.’

Drew grinned.

A few minutes later she was sitting in front of one of Drew’s computers, her husband leaning over her shoulder, launching the game for her.

‘Is this something comparable to
Trail of the Sniper
?’ she asked.

‘God, no. I’m not letting you near anything like that until you’ve grasped a few principles and immersed yourself properly in some gameplay. Otherwise all you’ll see is the blood and gore.’

‘So what is this?’ she asked, before the word
Doom
appeared on the screen, answering her question.

‘Is this the one that had you shouting at the
Today
programme, when John Humphrys was going on about killing people with chainsaws?’

‘No, that was
Doom 3
. This is seriously old-school.’

Drew showed her how to control the cursor and movement with her right hand on the mouse and her left on the keyboard, and she haltingly began manoeuvring around the virtual environment, assailed every so often by a blob of coloured pixels in a vaguely humanoid shape.

‘The graphics are like something you’d play on your phone,’ she observed.

‘I do play it on my phone,’ Drew replied. ‘But these graphics were supposedly so disturbing that the game was given an eighteen certificate at the time.’

He was serious about immersing her in the gameplay. He made her work her way through several levels, saying she wouldn’t be allowed to move on to anything else – or indeed stop – until she could make it through a map without getting killed.

‘Objective achieved, sir,’ she reported once she had lain waste to another onslaught of less-than-disturbing pixel-rendered hell-spawn.

‘Let’s move you forward a few years,’ said Drew. ‘With a wee bit of
Serious Sam 2
.’

This was one of the games he let the boys play, though in the interests of not prejudicing the experiment he didn’t spare her the blood and gore. It was a riot of colour, a romp across a cartoonish landscape through the eyes of a knowingly cheesy macho protagonist. She fired grenades, rockets, laser beams and cannonballs, all a simple matter of pointing and clicking.

‘When do I get to see the under-the-counter hardcore stuff?’ she asked.

‘Keep playing. I chose this because there’s a sniper rifle later in the game.’

‘Where?’

Drew brought down a command console and keyed in some code. A rifle suddenly appeared on the ground in front of her. She moved over it to pick it up, then switched to using it.

Catherine felt a moment’s unease as the wide perspective changed to the bobbing, narrow view through the simulated scope. She thought of Hamish Queen’s head, framed between similar crosshairs, but it was difficult to maintain the image when she was looking at some kind of mutant space zombie. She clicked the mouse and the zombie’s head exploded. It was hardly tasteful, but she had to concede it was unlikely to inure her to the psychological trauma of taking another human life.

She zoomed out, found another target and repeated the drill.

‘How you getting on?’ Drew asked.

It was only when she noticed him place down a refilled wine glass for her that she realised he had left the room and come back. She’d become engrossed, and she had to admit she was enjoying herself.

‘It’s laughably facile,’ she said, administering another long-distance headshot with her sniper rifle. ‘No matter the range, you just zoom in with the scroll-wheel and click. Dead-shot every time without having to bother about zeroing the …’

Christ.

And there it was: the tiny adjustment in perspective that caused the picture puzzle to look completely different.

‘What?’ Drew asked, as she hadn’t spoken, moved or even blinked for several seconds.

‘Nothing,’ she said, getting up from the PC. ‘I just need to make a quick call, then I’ll be right back.’

‘You just worked out Serious Sam is the man who can help you crack the case?’

‘Something like that.’

There was a clanking noise coming from somewhere as Fallan’s Land Rover made its way along the A66 into the Lake District national park. It piqued a moment’s sadness in Jasmine, as she found herself bizarrely nostalgic for the unsolved rattling sound that used to disturb her at the wheel of her lost and lamented Civic.

It was weird to think about how much the noise had worried her, what its consequences might be, what it might ultimately cost her. Every time she turned up the stereo she knew she was procrastinating, running away from a problem that would eventually have to be solved, but she had been wrong. Now the issue was completely moot, and she’d never find out what it was.

She hadn’t found out who the bastard in the silver Passat was either, but she’d stopped worrying about him too, for now at least. Maybe that was another question Russell Darius could answer.

Fallan pulled over into a layby and climbed out of the vehicle.

‘Where you going?’ she asked.

‘I keep hearing a noise, something rattling against the chassis. I’m going to take a look underneath, make sure my wee emergency kit isn’t about to come loose.’

‘Your emergency kit?’ she asked, then realised what he meant. ‘Oh. You mean you still keep a gun stashed under there,’ Jasmine said, trowelling on the disapproval in her tone.

Fallan eyed her sternly.

‘How did you say you got this guy’s address?’ he asked.

‘Police contact, via someone at Galt Linklater. I figured Darius would have rifle permits, so his details would be on file.’

‘And did you figure he would also have rifles?’

She had to concede it was a fair point.

When they were investigating the Ramsay case Jasmine recalled telling Fallan that she didn’t want him carrying guns around her. She also recalled subsequently telling him, once they’d been shot at a few times, to ignore her if she said anything so daft in future.

They were on their way to challenge the man who had killed Tessa Garrion, and most likely Hamish Queen too. It was unlikely that the mere revelation of their knowledge would cause him to cower in shame and surrender. A gun would probably help.

Jasmine had reckoned she would be a very long time waiting for a reply from Darius, far less an invitation to pop round for a chat, and had decided just to brazen it out and confront him. In terms of the investigation, there was really nothing else left that she could do.

She
had
found a possible lead buried amid what little information the police had revealed about Hamish Queen’s murder, but it was tentative, not a matter she was in a position to move on until she had received confirmation of something from an official source. If there was one thing she had learned on this investigation, it was that people wouldn’t talk until you had something on them. Thus she knew she wouldn’t get anywhere by door-stepping someone with a theatre connection simply because her name was Veronica, especially when Jasmine’s next question was regarding her part in a drug-fuelled satanic ritual that ended in murder.

‘Oh no, I think you must have me confused with somebody else, dear.’

Fallan popped back up from under the vehicle, his inspection complete.

‘It’s the exhaust,’ he announced with a frown. ‘It’s ready to fall off.’

Fallan turned the Land Rover around and drove back ten or twelve miles to a town where he’d noticed a Kwik-Fit garage as they passed through. He left the vehicle with the mechanics and suggested they grab a bite to eat while they waited for the exhaust to be replaced.

About a quarter of a mile from the garage they found a pub that looked like a Constable painting with a beer garden. They ordered food at the bar and it was brought to them outside, where they sat at a trestle table, Fallan facing the street, Jasmine with a view of what the menu informed her was an eighteenth-century coaching inn.

They sat and ate, easy in each other’s company. They could have
been two more tourists, enjoying dinner outside on a warm summer’s evening as the sun began to dip. She wondered what they looked like to the people at the other tables. Good friends, perhaps? Lovers? God, no. Please don’t anyone be thinking that.

Father and daughter?

Jasmine was finishing off the last of her lemonade when Fallan’s face did that thing, a sudden alertness to his features, like a dog that’s just smelled trouble long before the humans will see or hear anything. However, he didn’t throw her to the floor or initiate any other dramatic action. Instead, he bowed his head just a little lower over his plate and took a mouthful of food, as though nothing had happened.

‘Look at me and keep looking at me,’ he instructed.

‘What is it?’

‘The bloke I saw in Balnavon. I just spotted him on the other side of the street.’

‘He’s been following us?’

‘Yeah, but I don’t know how. I’ve been keeping an eye out for a tail, and we doubled back to get here.’

‘He’s good, then.’

‘Maybe not that good. I just made him for the second time.’

Fallan waited a few moments and then got up, handing her some cash.

‘Wait five, get the bill and I’ll meet you back at the garage,’ he said, his voice dark with intent.

‘Hang on, this isn’t going to be one of those situations where you come back with blood on your hands and give me a one-liner, is it?’

‘I just want to find out what he’s driving, maybe get a plate.’

‘Oh.’

Jasmine sat in the reception area of the garage and waited, trying not to keep checking the clock, trying not to admit she was worried. Ten minutes passed. Fifteen. Twenty. The guy behind the desk was starting to look antsy, the Land Rover all fixed up in the forecourt and the clock edging nearer and nearer eight o’clock and closing time.

Her mobile rang and she almost leapt in her seat, fishing it hurriedly
out of her pocket. She felt a little sick when she saw the caller wasn’t Fallan.

Her phone didn’t recognise the number.

‘Jasmine?’ asked a male voice. ‘It’s Callum Ross, from Culfieth Hydro. We spoke a few days ago about Tessa Garrion. Listen, I’ve got some new information, if you’re still interested.’

‘Very. Fire away.’

‘Actually, its old information, but it’s new to me and that’s kind of the point. Your visit fair got the old cogs turning. Us retired polis hate it when we remember unanswered questions, especially from the cases when you were told to stop asking them. I made a few calls, looking to dig up what was on file regarding Tessa Garrion.’

Jasmine was doubly curious now, as there had been nothing on STORM, but she had been warned it only went back twenty years.

‘You mentioned she’d gone to London for a while, so I got an old mate of mine in the Met to do a search. She was on their files. They wanted to speak to her as part of a murder investigation, summer of 1981.’

‘She was a suspect?’

‘No. They thought she might be a witness. If she’d been a suspect we may have got a bulletin about it, though communications between different forces was haphazard in those days. It was still the age of steam. These days, if another force was seeking her as a witness it would have been flagged up the second we put her name into a computer, but back then not a lot trickled down to a backwater like Balnavon.’

‘What was the case?’

‘Reginald Sutton, a film producer. Low-budget crap: soft-core
terribly British
sex comedies and cheesy horror films. Found dead in his office, stabbed through the neck with a letter-opener. They arrested his missus for it. Forensics found … I hope you don’t mind me being graphic here.’

‘No, go on.’

‘Forensics found traces of vaginal fluid on his genitals. He was known for playing away, making use of the old casting couch and all that that entails. The Met cops reckoned the wife had walked
in on him shagging some budding young actress and just lost the plot.’

‘So did they do her for it?’

‘No. She had a solid alibi, plus everyone the police spoke to said she was long past being bothered by the fact that her husband was a philanderer. They reckoned it more likely to have been a hit. Turned out Reggie had a lot of dodgy gangland connections. There was bent money pumped into all his films, partly laundering, partly so the villains could go to a few parties and premieres. He owed money to some dangerous people.’