When The Devil Drives (44 page)

‘Through a scope that’s zeroed for nine hundred metres,’ said Mark, letting out a wry and slightly embarrassed chuckle as he got it. ‘Face-palm.’

‘The shooter thinks where you’re looking is where you’re shooting. We’re about two hundred metres from the targets there, right?’

‘About two-twenty. You know, I could have just worked it out using the tables if you’d said.’

‘Never mind the ballistics,’ Catherine replied. ‘I don’t want theoretical. I want to know for sure, using the same rifle as the shooter.’

Mark got himself prostrate on the ground and took hold of the weapon.

‘You’re going to want to put those muffs on,’ he warned, lining up a shot at a concentric-circle target roughly two hundred metres away.

‘Aim for the bullseye,’ she said.

Mark flipped off the safety, took a moment and fired. He shot five rounds to get a consistent grouping.

‘You couldn’t hit a coo’s arse with a banjo,’ she told him.

All of the shots were high, embedding in a tight pattern at twelve o’clock in one of the outer rings.

‘I’d put that at forty-five to fifty centimetres,’ Mark estimated. ‘Begging the question why the bullet hit Hamish Queen instead of comfortably clearing his head and cracking into the castle wall.’

Catherine produced her phone and loaded up the clearest image she had of the fateful group photo, handing it to him.

‘It’s because Hamish Queen wasn’t the target. When the killer pulled the trigger, his crosshairs were on Veejay Khan.’

Fallan drove in though the south entrance to the multi-storey at the Buchanan Galleries, parking on the fourth floor before he and Jasmine made their way swiftly downstairs to the second, where the hire car he had parked there first thing that morning was waiting. Roughly four minutes after entering at Bath Street in a green Land Rover, they left again via the Killermont Street exit driving a blue Mondeo, making for the M8 and heading north.

The subterfuge was necessary to ditch their stalker, the ex-military-looking creep who had decked Fallan down in the Lake District.

‘I’m sick of this guy showing up wherever we go and yet we never see him on our tail,’ he had said. ‘It’s like we’ve emailed him our itinerary for the day so he knows where to be before we even get there.’

Today’s itinerary would take them all the way to the Ardnamurchan peninsula and finally, Jasmine was sure, to the answers she was looking for.

They made it there by early afternoon, not long after two. The journey took a little less than three hours, the last twenty minutes of which was down a single-track road with passing places, which were largely redundant as the only things they had passed in ten miles were on four legs. The sat-nav on Jasmine’s mobile showed a monotonous solitary line surrounded by nothing, like an asystolic reading on an ECG.

They’d had to use her phone for navigation as the Mondeo’s cigarette lighter didn’t match the plug on Fallan’s device, and he didn’t have an adapter. She had pre-cached all the maps before they made it out of Glasgow, and her contingency was vindicated by the falteringly weak signal out here; though by the time the signal was flickering between one bar and nothing they were already on this
final road with no navigating left to do. It was something she did out of habit, mindful of the possibility that the phone signal might be lost at the same time as she was. The GPS would have tracked them regardless of the mobile reception, but without pre-caching the maps it would have been tracking them across a blank screen. Ironically, even with the maps loaded that wasn’t far from the truth.

The house came into view as they crested the hill they’d been climbing for the past two miles, the loch shimmering in the middle distance behind it. It was about half a mile from the water, on a plateau that was like a natural half landing midway up the mountainside. The road descended a steep diagonal, skirting a tree line that also snaked part of the way down the slope then stopped abruptly, giving way to scrub, boulders and scree.

‘Jeez,’ said Jasmine, ‘and I thought Darius lived in the middle of nowhere.’

‘Bugger being
her
postman,’ Fallan agreed.

It was a handsome, mostly wooden building, a Scandinavian-style structure on two storeys, flanked by timber balconies and walkways. The road passed what Jasmine deduced was actually the rear of the property, as it had been built facing the loch. As they approached, Jasmine was assured to spot a four-by-four parked at the near side of the house, meaning someone was home. Then as the Mondeo rose over another undulation in the track, Jasmine saw her, pruning a bush where the edge of her property met the road.

The woman glanced up at the sound of the vehicle’s approach, turning to face it once it became apparent that it was coming to a halt rather than passing through. Jasmine found it amazing that there could be anywhere beyond here that they might be on their way towards. In her case, it was definitely the end of the line.

Fallan parked the Mondeo in the passing place adjacent to the rear of the house, next to a large cylindrical oil tank, another indicator of their remoteness. No gas mains way out here. The back garden was very expansive and there was plenty of room behind the four-by-four, but the long driveway was only one car’s width, so Jasmine guessed Fallan didn’t want to make the woman edgy by boxing in her vehicle.

She walked slowly towards them as they got out of the car, almost as though she was heading them off before they reached her property. The shears in her hands looked pretty threatening to Jasmine’s eyes, but only because she had watched
The Burning
a few nights ago, Fallan having mistakenly picked it up along with his Russell Darius collection.

‘Can I help you?’ they were asked. The tones were firm and polite, Jasmine detecting disguised apprehension. This house was probably Hamish Queen’s first phone call after Jasmine’s meeting with him at the Playhouse. That was why she hadn’t rung ahead.

‘We’re looking for Veronica Simpson.’

The woman narrowed her features in concentration, as though Jasmine had asked for someone who might live at the next house, another five miles into the beyond.

‘That’s you, isn’t it?’ Jasmine added, making it sound like she might have some doubts. She didn’t, but she was playing nice. To begin with.

The woman shook her head, but it wasn’t a denial.

‘Yeah, sorry,’ she said, like she was coming out of a daze. ‘It’s just nobody’s called me that for a very long time.’

Jasmine noted the accent: soft hints of New Zealand, diluted in a region-neutral Scots.

‘We’re actually interested in what you called yourself before that.’

She gave Jasmine a puzzled, almost amused look.

‘You mean Saffron?’

Jasmine glanced past her for a moment, to where the loch was shimmering at the foot of the gentle slope beyond the house.

‘No,’ Jasmine said. ‘I mean Tessa.’

Fallan proved the keenness of his reflexes, responding in a twinkling to cover the ground between them as Tessa Garrion collapsed. It was not some theatrical swoon; more like a sudden draining that began in her head and worked downwards. First her mouth made this wavering, stroke-like expression, which was perhaps Fallan’s cue to move, a fraction of a second before her legs went.

Jasmine had planned to pre-empt any denials by taking out her
phone and displaying a screen-cap from Darius’s rehearsal video: a shot of Tessa and Saffron side by side. It proved everything: who she really was and who she really wasn’t.

Tessa’s reaction indicated it wouldn’t be necessary.

Fallan set her down in a faint-recovery position, resting her head gently on the grass and beckoning Jasmine to elevate her feet. After a few minutes they let her climb slowly upright and made sure she was steady to walk.

‘You’d better come inside,’ she said.

They helped her through the hall and down a broad pine staircase into a split-level open-plan room with vast double-glazed panes affording a stunning view down to the loch. There were toys lying scattered around the floor, evidence of a recent family visit. Jasmine logged the photos on their way through the house and around the big public room: shots of the same person as a schoolboy, as a rangy teen, in graduation gown, wedding portraits, as well as several collages of what she took to be the grandchildren.

Tessa rested herself delicately upon a sofa, putting her feet up as Fallan directed, then he went off to fetch her a glass of water.

She took a sip like it was whisky, cradling the glass in her hands in a way that further suggested she was nursing a spirit. The colour was starting to return to her face, but her hands were still trembling just a little.

‘You want to know what happened to Saffron,’ she said, as though steeling herself for this task. Her voice retained its Kiwi traces despite her admission: thirty years of pretending must have hardwired it.

‘Ultimately, yes,’ Jasmine replied. ‘But first we want to know what happened to Reginald Sutton.’

She saw Tessa flinch. It was a mere glimpse in her eyes, like a subliminal message appearing on the screen for a solitary frame, but if you were looking for it, it was unmissable. Then she nodded to herself, resignation mixed with bitterness, a draught she had no choice but to swallow.

She lifted her head and sat up straight, like a proud matriarch about to direct two generations about their business. When she spoke,
Jasmine understood that she was drawing on her pride to get through her humiliation.

‘Reginald Sutton raped me,’ she stated, her voice strong and unfaltering, a theatrical proclamation from which she was not shrinking. ‘In his grubby little office in a mews in Ladbroke Grove, he raped me. I thought it was a call-back. I had auditioned for him a few days before, for a thriller he was producing, some
Straw Dogs
rip-off. The call came from his secretary, so I thought it was above board. She said Reggie and the director would both be there, but when I turned up there was no secretary, no director, just him.’

She tutted, as though reproaching herself for her naivety over some trivial matter.

‘He started off all nicey nicey, or at least his idea of what passed for charm, but he was phoning it in. I wasn’t the first. I doubt I was even just the tenth. He’d been at this for years, and looking back it was almost like he couldn’t be bothered lingering over the formalities. He made his overtures, told me what I had to do to “nail the part”. He was very practised at what he was about, though. He had already cut off my exit so that I couldn’t “make my excuses and leave”, as they used to say.

‘I said I wasn’t interested in working for anyone who wasn’t hiring me for my acting abilities. He laughed, told me not to give myself airs. He said that, in many languages, the word for actress and the word for whore are one and the same. He told me better actresses than me had been on his couch at one time or other, and I should start to understand the game if I wanted to get ahead in it. He also said he’d make sure I had no future at all if I walked out without giving him what he wanted.’

Jasmine could see her shudder in anger, tears appearing at the corners of her eyes.

‘I told him he was kidding himself if he thought anyone in the British film industry was going to blackball somebody on the word of a sleazy little nobody like him. That was when he hit me, harder than I’d ever been hit before. He wasn’t even angry, though: that was the thing. I’d just given him his cue. He’d done this so many times before. He told me it would be worse if I struggled, reminded me
that nobody knew I was there. He said he’d told his secretary the appointment was cancelled and got her to erase it from the books.’

She wiped away a tear, but her voice stayed strong, drawing on an actor’s skill to deliver the lines despite how they were making her feel inside.

‘I did struggle, but he was strong, and he was brutal. When you encounter that kind of brutality you feel helpless and so scared. Part of me threatened to withdraw into myself, pretend it was happening to someone else and crawl out again when it was over, but as he lay on top of me, something desperate took over, some kind of instinct that knew I had to get him out from inside me.

‘The couch was close to his desk. My hand was scrabbling about and it found something metal. I grabbed it and struck out at him, trying to hit him in the side of the head. I remembered somebody telling me the way to knock someone unconscious was to hit them in the temple. I didn’t hit his temple, though.’

‘You hit his neck,’ Jasmine said.

Tessa nodded.

‘I just wanted him to stop. It went right through, so easily. I thought I’d missed him, or caught him a glancing blow and lost my grip. He fell off the couch on to the floor, and it was only when I got to my feet I saw what I’d done. Even then I told myself it must have looked worse than it was. But it was on the news that night that he was dead.

‘I was so scared. I was twenty-three years old and I was facing life in prison if I got caught. I didn’t believe my plea of self-defence would win me much mitigation, not in those days. This was a year before a judge fined a rapist two thousand pounds because of his victim’s “contributory negligence” in hitch-hiking wearing a short skirt.’

‘So you decided to lay low at the other end of the country,’ Jasmine said, filling her in some more on what they knew, ‘and belatedly took up Hamish Queen’s offer to join the Glass Shoe Company.’

‘I thought I’d be safe, be hidden, among friends.’

‘More than friends, in Hamish’s case.’

Tessa bowed her head a little, shielding her pain from view.

‘Yes,’ she said, swallowing.

‘Were you lovers before that?’

‘No. We were friends, and there was a spark for sure, but he was married and I respected that. When I first got to Kildrachan I spent more time with Finlay.’

‘He told us you were close, but it didn’t come to anything.’

‘Finlay was a dear friend and a decent, decent chap. It helped to have the companionship of such a good man after what happened, but it also helped that it was a chaste companionship. There was no physical chemistry there; perhaps that’s why I initially sought him out. But in time I needed tenderness, to be reminded of a lover’s touch so that it might help erase … Well, no, you simply can’t erase that, but it’s like when you hurt yourself and you rub the sore spot. It works by inundating the nerve with sensory information, so it carries fewer pain signals to the brain. I needed to overwhelm the nerves that carried those signals and I was selfish in my need so, despite his wife back down the road, Hamish and I became lovers.’