Where the Bodies are Buried (35 page)

‘Deal.’

It was a spot he knew about because he used to come here on his bike as a kid. The place was only a few miles from his parents’
old house, the one he grew up in, before they moved to the semi in Kilsyth where they lived now. He’d spend all summer out
cycling around with his pals, finding out where every last back road, track and pathway led.

There was more fencing back then, because the quarry was still in use. That was how he and his pals had discovered it, in
fact: the sound of the blasting. He remembered hearing the bangs from his bedroom
at home and wondering where they came from. Then one day he found out, the ‘Danger: Quarry’ and ‘Keep Out’ signs reading like
‘Free Sweeties’ to a bunch of ten-year-olds.

By the time he was taking Eilidh there when they were courting, the blasting had long since ended. There was a farm track
you could get your car down, skirting the broken fences where Stephen and his pals had first worked out what lay beyond the
forbidden boundaries.

Stephen drove slowly. You had to be careful at night because, with whole sections of the fence pilfered for its wood, there
was no barrier to the quarry’s edge.

He and Eilidh had first come here as teenagers, for the tranquillity of the spot, somewhere to sit and talk of a summer afternoon
when they only had the money for a bottle of Irn-Bru by way of entertainment. Then, a little later, it became more favoured
for evenings, not least because his parents were hyper-vigilant about leaving them alone together in the house, terrified
their son would get his girlfriend pregnant.

It was never the most beautiful view: just a wide horseshoe of rock, earth, scrub and puddles. What made it seem spectacular
was the sense of altitude, accentuated by the sheerness of the walls, seeing bare rock plunge so far, so straight.

Stephen and his pals used to lie close to the edge and watch the workies obliviously getting on with it below. As long as
you kept still, they never saw you; it was the place he learned how seldom people ever look up.

Eilidh checked on Charlie while Stephen got out the spare blanket that was in the boot. His mum had knitted it especially
for swaddling the new baby. He wondered what she’d think if she knew they were using it for an outdoor quickie on the same
patch of grass where they’d enjoyed many, many outdoor quickies throughout adolescence.

Eilidh really wasn’t kidding about being hormonal.

‘Just be careful of my boobs, they’re a bit tender,’ was about the only thing she said, then she pretty much launched herself
at him. It was just as much of a quickie as their first excitable efforts. The combination of erotically poignant memories,
the illicit thrill of it being outdoors and the fact that it had been more than a month since the last time meant neither
of them lasted very long.

They lay there afterwards, under the stars, enjoying the warmth. It never felt this warm so late in the evening in Scotland.
It was like
being abroad on holiday. The air smelled different: more aromatic, a hint of barbecue on the breeze even though the nearest
house must be a mile away.

Stephen knew it was one of those moments he’d always remember. They’d talk about it when they were seventy; embarrass Charlie
with the tale of it when he was old enough.

Then they heard an engine, and saw a pair of headlights bobbing and snaking their way into the quarry below.

To her surprise and considerable delight, Catherine found Drew at home when the car Sunderland had organised dropped her off.

He wasn’t long in the door. She found him in the bedroom, unpacking the overnight bag he now didn’t need. His meeting in London
had wrapped up early, and though he was supposed to go out for dinner with friends and crash at a hotel, he had enquired about
changing his flight instead, and got lucky with whoever he spoke to on the BA desk.

‘With the boys at my mum’s overnight, I realised that if I could make the six thirty-five, with a fair wind I could be home
by half eight and manage a quiet wee night in, just the two of us. Maybe phone out for a curry.’

She felt herself just melt. Frantic phone calls and a mad scramble just to have curry from the local takeaway when he could
be relaxing in trendy bars then eating somewhere sophisticated in London.

She loved that about him: that he was impulsive, but only impulsive about her. Mostly what she loved about him rushing home
like this, however, was simply that it was about him unquestionably still loving her, despite what a nightmare she could be.

She stepped into his arms, aching to be held. He would have been naturally expecting a kiss, but she just enveloped him, clinging
on tighter and tighter, tears beginning to stream down her face. Drew was doubtless surprised (and probably a little chuffed)
that his gesture was going down quite this emotionally, but he had no idea just what it meant right then, and nor was she
telling him. Not tonight, and not until she’d got to the bottom of it. He’d only worry.

Eventually she pulled away enough to turn her head and give him his kiss, but he got a lot more than he was expecting on that
score too.

Only moments before, she would have thought that the last thing she could manage right then was sex. She was so tense, so
shaken, so angry, unable to keep a single thought for more than a few seconds.
But as soon as he held her, she felt better, felt calmer, felt centred. And then she felt need.

They hauled each other’s clothes off: hurried, impatient, clumsy.

He made to go down on her. Another nice gesture, but not tonight. She needed him to fuck her. Sometimes what they did together
she thought was best described as lovemaking: tender, delicate, selfless. Sometimes it was erotic, sometimes it was fun. This
was fucking.

Hurried, impatient, clumsy: she accidentally pinched the tip of his penis as she pulled him into her. It caused him to let
out a little howl, but the bonus effect was that it retarded his ejaculation, taking him a long time to come. Good. She came
quite quickly, but she didn’t want him to stop. She wanted him to keep fucking her, and she all but screamed at him to do
so, liberated by the knowledge that the boys were at their grandparents’ overnight.

They both showered while they waited for the takeaway, eating it on their laps in front of
Commando.
They didn’t get to the end. Catherine was lying with her head rested on Drew’s chest, and sometime around Rae Dawn Chong’s
rocket-launcher mishap, his hand moved to rest on her breast. She hadn’t put a bra back on, just a T-shirt, and as her nipple
tightened and rose in response to his touch, she felt his penis do likewise through his shorts. She took him in her mouth
for a while, then told him to fuck her again, right there on the couch, just because they could.

Catherine showered again, briefly, but it was long enough for Drew to be asleep by the time she made it to the bedroom. Giggling
in the afterglow, he had remarked how ‘that must have cleared your head’ and predicted that she would be asleep in no time.

He was the one who went out like a light.

Catherine lay for a while in the darkness: calm, relaxed but her brain still alert. Drew was right about the first part: the
reason she wasn’t sleeping was that her head
was
clear. Very clear.

She had been seeing things that weren’t there, distracted by trying to make connections between phantom elements, although
in mitigation, she’d been given a few nudges towards doing that.

She had been drawn to Fallan by her anger and a long-burning hatred. She’d have put his face on the gunman no matter what
car he pulled up in. Her powers of deduction, judgement and basic police sense had been bypassed by emotion, and now she could
see that it was just plain daft that an accomplished hit man would do everything
but wear a sign identifying himself, while firing a full magazine into a car only a few yards away without hitting either
of the occupants.

Nobody was trying to kill her, but somebody was definitely trying to knock her off track. Somebody wanted her going after
Fallan, not because they had it in for him, but because it would keep her eyes off her true target.

It had to be someone who knew Fallan had resurfaced. More than that, it had to be someone who knew about the red mid-nineties
Civic, and not only knew about it yesterday, but had the wherewithal to quickly locate and steal another one. Finally, it
also had to be someone who knew she had been to see Fallan, who knew that she was aware not only of what he was driving, but
of what he was capable.

Sunderland’s single, cautious, defensive word echoed in her head.

‘Us.’

Who was it that had told her about Glen Fallan in the first place, and thereby thrown a rogue piece into the puzzle so that
she couldn’t make any of it fit? Someone with a lot of hidden connections with organised crime in this city, someone who had
wise old heads like Fletcher wondering at what point the line between gaining somebody’s trust and being in somebody’s pocket
started to blur.

Detective Superintendent Douglas Abercorn.

Jasmine turned over in bed and looked at the clock, its green LED lights reporting that it was twenty past two. Her heart
was thumping in her chest, her body energised and alert, and it was only this sudden start that even told her she’d been asleep.
It couldn’t have been for long either, perhaps the descent into an unconscious state being what precipitated her regression
to the events outside the map shop.

She felt like she’d dreamed about it only for a split second before coming to; the memory of external sounds and images only
a faint echo. It was the internal sensations that had truly jolted her, as though her mind and body were working through feelings
and responses that had been deferred at the time by other survival mechanisms.

Prior to that, she had lain awake and frustrated, tossing and turning as the hours drew on and sleep did not come despite
her exhaustion and the familiarity of her own bed. Part of it must have been down to the shooting, so many mental and physical
systems suddenly supercharged and then only slowly coming down again. Her brain, for one thing, seemed in no state to rest,
but nor was it proving any use at analysing any of the things that had been thrown at it. There were just too many of them,
and she was too tired – and her brain too skittish – to concentrate on any single problem, jumping randomly from one to the
next. It was like trying to sleep while someone was changing channels on a radio.

Two questions in particular kept prompting her for answers that she couldn’t give.

One was that Jim, like she and Fallan, believed the truth might lie buried in a shallow grave somewhere in the Campsie Hills,
where the Ramsays had been in the wrong place at the wrong time to witness something nobody was supposed to see. However,
even if Jim found the bodies, what would this prove that posed such a threat that he had to be killed for it?

A DNA match with Anne Ramsay could identify the bodies and thus demonstrate that their disappearance had been murder, but
that
wasn’t going to offer any clues as to whodunit. Even if Fallan could make a connection between his late father and some cops
still working today, there would be nothing to say that they’d been involved in this.

There had to be something else, but she wasn’t going to find it tossing and turning sleepless in the dark.

The other, more unsettling question concerned the fact that she was even alive to be asking it, and only Fallan could possibly
offer any illumination on that one.

With her heart still thumping and a dryness in her throat, she decided to get herself a drink of water fresh from the cold
tap. As she crossed the hall, she saw from a glow around the door that the kitchen light was on, and entered to find Fallan
still at work with the maps and the magnifiers. The kitchen clock now read two thirty, and he didn’t appear to have moved
from where she’d left him when fatigue had deceitfully enticed her to bed almost four hours ago.

She really wouldn’t want this man as her enemy. He was a machine.

As she let the water run, draining the tepid stuff out of the system first, this last observation prompted her to broach the
subject that was troubling her most.

‘Back at the map shop this afternoon, how did you know we were about to get shot at? That car was behind us when you reacted,
and prior to that you hadn’t given it a second look. Then all of a sudden you’re throwing me out of the way just in time.
It was like you’d eyes in the back of your head. Same as on Wednesday.’

Fallan stared at her, as though weighing up whether she was worthy of a response, and for a long second she thought she’d
come up short.

‘Fear,’ he said eventually. ‘I listen when it speaks.’

Jasmine looked quizzically at him, not understanding, and simultaneously worrying that this was what he’d suspected.

‘I felt fear too,’ she explained herself, ‘but
after
he started trying to kill me, when I knew there was a threat. You seemed to know before. How does that work?’

‘I don’t mean conscious, specific fear, I mean subconscious and strictly non-specific. Something you feel, not something you
think: a peremptory feeling that tells you urgently and unequivocally that you are in danger. You never get that? A sudden,
unarticulated sense that something about your immediate environment is disturbingly wrong?’

Like having a killer sitting in her kitchen, Jasmine thought but
didn’t say. Instead she cast her mind back to the start of all this, and that precipitous assault by a feeling of unease.

‘Yes. Monday morning, when I went into the office. I knew something was wrong but I didn’t know
how
I knew.’

‘That was fear talking. Conscious thought occupies only a small proportion of the brain: most of it is taken up with processing
input from the senses, input you are not aware of processing. Most of our conscious thought is rooted in language, which evolved
fairly late in the day and is like a flashy but clumsily written piece of software compared to the rest of the operating system,
which ticks away silently and makes sense of the information it’s getting much, much faster. The part of your brain that tells
you to run because your early-warning system detected a predator or an avalanche was there a lot longer than language and
responds a lot more immediately.’