Where the Bodies are Buried (30 page)

Christ, enough preamble. He really grudged giving you anything.

‘Spit it out,’ she said.

‘Does the name Glen Fallan mean anything to you?’

She let it ring around her head but it shook loose only the merest fragment.

‘I vaguely remember hearing the name
Iain
Fallan from older colleagues. Wasn’t he murdered?’

‘Iain Fallan worked CID over in Gallowhaugh back in the seventies and eighties. He was found dead in his car one night, killed
by a single stab wound to the back of the head. The killer was never caught. There was no indication of forced entry, so it
was assumed that he was killed by somebody he trusted enough to have them sitting in his back seat.’

‘Another cop?’

‘Fallan was notoriously corrupt. He had allies and enemies on both sides of the law. His son, though, only followed in one
set of his father’s footsteps. He was a debt collector, enforcer and hit man, initially for Tony McGill, but later for Stevie
Fullerton, after Tony went inside. You won’t find much of a file on him. He wasn’t your normal Glasgow gangland bam. He was
as stealthy as he was discreet, and he understood enough about the police to avoid ever being caught. He seldom left a body,
just made people disappear. Made a
lot
of people disappear.’

‘This is all sounding very past tense. If he was so good, what happened to him?’

‘Poetically enough, one day he was the one who just disappeared. It was twenty-one years ago, summer of 1989. He was rumoured
to have been murdered in his home, out in rural Lanarkshire. According to gangland lore, it was Stevie Fullerton and his people
who did it, in revenge for Fallan killing Stevie’s cousin over a girl. Classic criminal infighting.’

Catherine couldn’t see where this was going. Fullerton was a pretty big player these days, but she had found nothing to suggest
he was at war with Frankie Callahan, or even Paddy Steel.

‘So how does this colourful wee snippet of local history relate to my investigation?’

‘Because I’ve got it from very strong sources that Glen Fallan is looking in pretty good nick for a dead guy. He showed up
yesterday at the house of an ex-con and occasional tout by the name of William Bain.’

‘An occasional tout? Couldn’t he just be fishing for a few quid?’

‘My source says Bain was terrified. Claimed Fallan made no secret of who he was, though Bain wouldn’t say what he wanted.
Fallan was with a young girl, late teens/early twenties, driving a red Honda
Civic. He wrote down the plate. We traced it to a Jasmine Sharp, who it transpires showed up at Partick police station on
Monday to report a missing person: her uncle, Jim Sharp, private investigator and ex-cop.’

The state of clarity and purpose in which Catherine had entered Abercorn’s office was a mere memory by the time she left it
again. She felt confused and frustrated, and not a little angry. She wasn’t sure quite what had gone on in there, but had
the suspicion that whatever it was, she had come off worse. That was classic Abercorn. Even though he had ostensibly been
giving her something, she still felt like she’d had her pocket picked. She should have known, though, and that was what made
it worse.

Head games: that was all this was. Abercorn had been blindsided by Callahan’s murder and he was trying to run interference
in order to buy himself time to catch up.

The major dealer he was monitoring – not to mention pulling serious strings to keep him in play – had been gunned down under
his nose, leaving him with nothing else to follow. Was Abercorn worried his jacket was on a shaky nail? If she wrapped up
these murders, and the McDiarmid one that had precipitated them, was he afraid that the brass might think they had been mistaken
to prefer him over her for the Locust job? Was he that paranoid? That petty? Or, in true Abercorn style, was he concealing
some other agenda that she was oblivious of?

Any way up, she wasn’t going to let him derail her. For what else was that Glen Fallan nonsense all about, other than an attempt
to send her on a wild goose chase?

Clark’s Law still stood. The lab report on Cairns’ heroin haul posed some very odd questions, but it didn’t change the dramatis
personae. It was still about Gary Fleeting and Jai McDiarmid, Frankie Callahan and Paddy Steel, Liam Whitaker and Tommy Miller.

She was walking slowly through the car park, taking her time in order to clear her head with some air, when her mobile rang,
heralding a call from Cal O’Shea.

‘I’ve some rather disturbing news with regard to our special fried gangsters,’ he said, his typically arch elocution failing
to conceal a note of concern.

Jesus, what now? Catherine wondered.

‘They’re still dead, I take it,’ she said, figuring if she set the bizarre-bar that high, she could handle anything below.

‘Most certainly, yes,’ he confirmed. ‘But that is just about the only aspect that remains what it appears. The fire broke
out at around two in the morning, isn’t that right?’

‘The fire brigade logged the call reporting the fire at Top Table at around two forty-five. Why?’

‘All three of these men had been dead for several hours before that. Callahan and Fleeting were killed yesterday evening,
around eight; Miller at least two hours earlier than that. Furthermore, they all received most of their wounds post-mortem.
The lack of internal bleeding indicates that Callahan and Fleeting were shot in the back several hours
after
being shot in the head; similarly the stab and slash wounds to Miller, who was long dead before he was tied to the chair.’

‘You’re saying it was staged?’

‘It’s quite possible none of them were alive when they were brought to the warehouse. The place was supposed to burn, but
the perpetrator or perpetrators were better hit men than they were arsonists.’

‘Why stage something if you’re planning to burn it down?’

‘To prevent me discovering what I just have. You were supposed to find a fire-gutted warehouse containing three charred bodies
from which it could nonetheless be deduced that two had been taken by surprise and shot in the back in the act of torturing
the third. And had whoever did it not made a grave miscalculation regarding the flammability of table linen, we’d have been
none the wiser.’

Catherine hung up and stood perfectly still next to her car. It was one of those times when she imagined she could sense the
planet spinning beneath her feet. She felt just a tiny bit less connected to the world, her stature a little shorter, the
surrounding buildings a little taller.

Nothing was what it appeared. Bob Cairns had been led to a suitcase full of dust. Frankie Callahan had not lost a shipment
of heroin. He and Gary Fleeting had not been torturing Tommy Miller. There was a decades-dead assassin walking the streets.
And most bizarrely of all, it could well be that Dougie Abercorn was actually trying to help.

Once again Catherine found herself gatecrashing someone else’s breakfast, though given the time since she’d blearily grabbed
her own, it felt like it ought to be closer to lunch. She smelt freshly brewed,
proper
coffee, saw baskets of croissants and pastries, while waitresses skipped past bearing steaming plates of bacon, haggis, kippers,
scrambled eggs. Diners mostly in business attire were enjoying leisurely chats, sitting with the morning paper if they were
alone, or in the case of one quartet, conducting a breakfast meeting. It all looked terribly grownup and civilised.

Catherine had managed a slice of toast and half a cup of tea in between clearing spilt Ready Brek, wiping faces and mediating
a protracted and passionate dispute over who was getting the free toy that would be so prized as to be lying forgotten under
the fridge this time tomorrow, while her sole ally in all this was standing at the worktop on the other side of the kitchen,
hastily grabbing mouthfuls of cornflakes as he cleaned yesterday’s mud from two junior-sized pairs of trainers.

It wasn’t always quite so fraught and frantic, especially not on a Saturday; normally the chaos level was a constant but the
pace was more relaxed due to the greater flexibility of Drew’s working patterns. This morning, however, he had a flight to
London to catch, which meant departing early enough to account for the M8 traffic, as well as leaving sufficient time to drop
the boys at his parents’ en route. They generally tried to avoid both having work commitments on the same Saturday, but sometimes
it was simply inescapable. At least there was no school pick-up to worry about later.

The atmosphere between her and Drew had been less tense last night. By the time they got the boys settled, they were both
content to sit on the settee in front of the telly for a couple of hours.
Cobra
was on Sky Movies, an irresistibly awful piece of eighties trash, a subgenre they shared a passion for. Catherine found the
moral simplicity and facile resolutions more of an escapist fantasy than any sci-fi movie,
while Drew lapped up the cartoonishness and gratuitous violence because the games he worked on espoused the same guilty-pleasure
ethos.

They had sat and giggled over it like a couple of old friends. Catherine found this both a reassurance and a bit of a disappointment
at the same time, because she didn’t want to settle for it, and certainly didn’t want Drew to think she had. They were old
friends, but they were supposed to be lovers too.

There still wasn’t much she could do about that, even if they hadn’t both needed to be up at dawn. She didn’t mind snuggling
chastely against Drew on the sofa, but she didn’t want to be held, didn’t want to be naked. When she thought of Drew naked,
she pictured him all burnt up like Callahan and Fleeting, sensed his vulnerability, his mortality. And God, that smell had
been about her all day. Even after a shower, she could smell it from the laundry basket, adhering to her clothes.

There were things you couldn’t just wash off at the end of the day.

There’s this dark place you go. You’re angry on the road to that place and you’re unreachable when you get there. But what’s
hardest is you’re numb for days afterwards.

I always come back though, Drew. Please wait for me.

Catherine spotted them in a corner, furthest from any windows. Neither of them appeared to be saying very much. Fallan was
sitting with his back to the wall, with a clear view of all exits. He had noted her entrance but was pretending he hadn’t.
Perhaps he didn’t view her as a threat.

Jasmine Sharp was slight and pretty in a fresh-faced, girlish way. Catherine knew from her details that she was twenty, but
she could pass for a schoolgirl, or maybe that was simply because she seemed so small next to Fallan. Catherine suspected
she could look a lot different if she wanted to. Jasmine wore no make-up and her hair was tied back, something of laundry
day about her. Catherine had wondered why a girl with a flat on Vicky Road would be staying in a hotel only a few miles away.
Now she knew.

She had the look of a fugitive.

Catherine approached the table. The girl turned to look at her, but Fallan remained intent upon his black pudding and scrambled
eggs. Nonetheless, he spoke before she had the chance to open her mouth.

‘How can I help you, Officer?’ he asked, without looking up from his breakfast, and without any hint that he had any intention
of helping
her. The only thing he truly wished to communicate was that he had recognised her for what she was the moment she walked through
the double doors into the room.

‘Glen Fallan, I presume?’ she asked. ‘I’m Detective Superintendent Catherine McLeod, CID.’

She extended a warrant card towards the table, a prompt for him to look at it and by extension herself. He did, his eyes rising
neutrally to take in the card and then to meet hers.

He didn’t acknowledge the name, but he didn’t deny it either.

‘And you must be Jasmine Sharp.’

The girl gave her an uneasy smile and a cooperative nod. She wasn’t so used to playing it cool around the polis.

‘Mind if I join you?’

‘I think it’s residents only,’ Fallan replied.

Catherine ignored this and pulled out a chair.

Jasmine tutted, which Catherine interpreted as proof that she was learning fast from her mentor with regard to the attitude
one presented to the police. Then it became clear that it was Fallan who was the target of her irritation.

‘What?’ he asked.

‘Took me three days to get you to admit that, and now complete strangers are just walking up and calling you it.’

A waitress came over and asked Catherine if she’d like some tea or coffee. The percolated coffee smell was tempting, but she
opted for tea, some wee girlie part of herself still viewing it as a special treat to get a steel pot and a jug of milk in
a restaurant.

‘I’ll bring a fresh pot for everybody,’ the waitress said, oblivious of the tension at the table or simply helpless but to
ignore it.

Fallan glared at her as she withdrew, in annoyance at her unwitting complicity, but only once her back was turned.

‘I take it Mr Fallan has been going by an alias?’ Catherine asked.

‘Tron Ingrams,’ Jasmine said helpfully, a lack of guile in her expression making it hard to tell whether she was too naïve
to be protective of this information or merely trying to discomfort Fallan.

What
are
you two doing together? Catherine wondered.

‘My name
is
Tron Ingrams,’ he said. ‘Glen Fallan is a name I left behind more than twenty years ago.’

‘It’s a lot easier to leave behind a name than it is to leave behind a past. Especially a past like yours,
Mr Ingrams.’

‘How did you find us?’ asked Jasmine, a little concerned.

‘Us
public
investigators have access to some useful resources,’ she replied, intending to put the girl further on the back foot. ‘For
instance, you’d be amazed how many times your number plate gets scanned these days.’

The waitress returned with a large pot of tea and began to pour.