Where the Bodies are Buried (36 page)

She remembered assessing her surroundings in Jim’s office, the tiny clues that she had looked for after the fact in order
to explain what her subconscious mind had deduced in a flash.

‘So what information told your brain we were about to get shot?’ she demanded.

‘I’m not sure. Car not slowing down as it reached a dead end; maybe something else about the way it approached; a glimpse
of what could have been a gun but which my mind ignored until it combined with other information: I don’t know. I could try
to retro-analyse, but that’s the whole point: it wasn’t a response to rational analysis, it was a response to something in
the brain that we tend to ignore
because
of rational analysis.’

‘You sound like this is something you’ve thought about a lot.’

‘Comes with the territory. We don’t listen to fear properly. We feel it, but we try to explain it away, because we relate
it to our conscious thought, render it in language. Most of the time, when we rationalise it, we’re looking for reassurance,
for reasons why that feeling was a false alarm.
We’re looking for reasons why it’s going to be okay.
For a great many people, I’ve been the reason it
isn’t
going to be okay. Listening to my fear is the reason I’ve lived this long.’

Jasmine looked at the strips of landscape mapped out on the table and wondered how many little white lines on subsequent surveys
were down to the man at her table. Then she feared she might well up with tears as she remembered about the littlest white
line of all: tiny, lifeless but still glowing somewhere on those photographs. A four-week
old baby, incapable of witnessing anything and incapable of ever telling anybody.

That was when she saw it: a woman in theatre blues, a laminated badge clipped on to her chest.

‘Bain’s other half,’ she said.

‘The nurse? What about her?’

‘She’s not a nurse. She’s a
midwife.’

‘What difference does that make?’

‘You said it right outside their house: if your father was looking for a stooge, he could have come up with plenty of better
candidates. So what got Bain the gig?’

‘His missus worked in a maternity ward,’ Fallan said, getting it.

‘Bain’s number appears on both the outgoing and incoming lists. It’s not a mobile: it’s the phone in his house. So what if
the incoming call wasn’t
Bain
phoning Jim: what if it was
her?’

Abercorn’s black Mondeo took a left on Albion Street and turned on to the Trongate. Catherine was two cars back, further concealed,
she hoped, by the disguise of being in Drew’s car rather than her own, though she didn’t know whether Abercorn was aware of
what she drove privately.

He certainly wasn’t aware of her presence, but that was the beauty of it: as a police officer, you’re the last person to suspect
that
you’re
being followed.

It was a simple left turn, but one that Catherine always felt as a bit of a jolt, as though too much had changed from one
street to the next for them to meet on the perpendicular. You went from the Merchant City with its upmarket urban digs, trendy
pubs and chic eateries, the aspirational Glasgow of tourist brochures and lifestyle supplements, straight to this neglected-looking
stretch of bargain shops, grotty boozers and greasy spoons, Glasgow’s own portrait of Dorian Gray. It had been like this for
as long as she could remember: like a withered appendage at the end of Argyle Street, where the chain stores and logos gave
way to hand-written posters full of stray apostrophes.

That was Glasgow, though. It scrubbed up well, it knew how to put its face on, but there was always a more gritty reality
just a street away. It wasn’t hidden, but most people could simply choose not to see it.

It was coming up for two. She had been following him for around five hours, but she was good at this: the waiting part. It
wasn’t an easy skill to develop, but once you had it, it never left you. It was a state of mind, a mindfulness of being.

You had to accept that nothing might come of it, that you could be wasting your time. You had to avoid visualising what you
hoped to witness, or even wondering what would constitute an act or sight
worth
witnessing. You just had to wait and see, wait and see.

Of course, this was made a little more challenging by the fact that Catherine was engaged in an unauthorised surveillance
of a fellow
officer, and that there was a limit to how much time she could dedicate to such a one-woman operation, but that again was
something she’d had to make her peace with before commencing. She accepted she might see nothing, and just as important, she
accepted that there might be nothing
to
see.

At the moment, though, she was optimistic that she was finally on to something. When you’ve been watching someone drive all
day, you can notice small tells, subtle changes to how they are handling their vehicle. In the case of Abercorn right then,
it was similar to someone driving over the alcohol limit: he seemed just that bit more careful and deliberate about everything.
Or maybe it was simply that, after a day largely spent around the city centre, he was finally heading into Apache territory.

He drove east along the Gallowgate, past the Barrowland and round the dog-leg up to Tollcross Road. His pace was steady and
careful, keeping his distance from the car in front. He couldn’t have made himself much easier to tail. There were no evasive
manoeuvres, no doubling back on himself or sudden non-indicated turns. Only his route was questionable, and only in retrospect.
He turned left off Tollcross Road before it became Hamilton Road, heading north past Tollcross Park and east again on to Shettleston
Road, only to come back south through Mount Vernon and end up travelling east again on Hamilton Road. Could be he knew about
a traffic issue, could be he changed his mind about his route, but Catherine was aware that if he had any suspicions about
the black BMW two and sometimes three cars back, then an unnecessary U-shaped detour would be a good way to confirm them.

He’d need to have spotted her way back, however, and that didn’t strike her as probable. She had kept a minimum one-vehicle
cover, and with him never getting an eyeball on her face or her plate, if he even noticed that there was a black BMW somewhere
behind him, it was unlikely he’d assume it was the same one.

Certainly, as he continued on his route eastwards, parallel to the M74, he never gave any indication that he had seen something
that was going to make him change his plans. Steady, careful, deliberate, unhurried, anonymous, and quietly purposeful. He
drove on past where Calderpark Zoo used to be, along the dual carriageway until the coarse grass and crash barriers gave way
to pavements, trees and red sandstone on the outskirts of Uddingston.

Catherine felt a tingle in her gut as the Mondeo indicated offside, which would take him down towards the river. There was
an address she knew down there, a handsome property guarded ostensibly by electronic gates and CCTV, but more effectively
by the reputation of its owner. It wasn’t the only house in the street, though.

She told herself, therefore, not to want it, not to visualise it, but a possibility such as this was too tantalising not to
raise her pulse.

She had to pass Abercorn and keep going as he waited for a break in the oncoming traffic. She kept him in her sights, though,
checking her rear-view and preparing to respond. He made his right turn a few seconds later; some obliging driver must have
given him a flash. Catherine executed a swift U-turn in response, the breadth of the road allowing her to pull the BMW around
one hundred and eighty degrees at still a decent clip.

She accelerated eagerly towards where the Mondeo had turned, feeling for the first time a little anxious that her quarry would
not be visible after she made the next left. She’d briefly lost him a couple of times today, but remained calm and played
the percentages, reacquiring him in each instance roughly where she might have expected to. What made this different was that
she had succumbed to the temptation of considering a desired outcome.

Just wait and see, she told herself. Wait and see.

Catherine reached the junction maybe only thirty seconds behind Abercorn, but when she turned the corner, she could see no
vehicles in motion on the road in front of her.

Wait and see. Wait and see.

She kept driving, urging her mind to think of where she might re-acquire him, but conscious that her mind wasn’t going to
listen until she had passed a particular address.

Before she even reached it, she spotted the Mondeo: parked on the left between a big X5 and a two-seater Mercedes, Abercorn
still inside.

Catherine passed him again, carrying on along the street at a little over twenty. She allowed the earlier tingle to become
a thrill, the possibility she had entertained passing from the tantalising to the tangible. It felt like a very long hundred
yards, a very slow ten seconds, but she waited until she had covered what she considered a respectable distance before pulling
in, making sure she could still see the Mondeo in her passenger-side wing mirror.

She recalled Fletcher’s words of a week ago.

I’m just saying, be wary of Abercorn until you know what game he’s really playing. And more importantly, whose side he’s on.

Letting Off Criminals Under Secret Trades.

Dougie Abercorn, head of Locust, had just pulled up outside the home of one Stevie Fullerton.

They intercepted Margaret Bain as she walked towards the hospital’s main entrance, ready to begin her shift. Jasmine felt
like some doorstep-ping journalist, waiting around to ambush an unsuspecting woman on her way into work, which reminded her
that this was what Margaret Bain had believed her to be when she visited her house. Jasmine didn’t imagine her husband would
have told her the truth about her and Fallan any more than he’d have told her the truth about why they were there.

In the event, there was more waiting to be done. Margaret looked askance at their approach, taking a moment or two to work
out why she recognised them.

‘I’m not allowed to talk to reporters,’ she said. ‘You need to go through the trust.’

Jasmine didn’t know whether this was true, but they weren’t there to interview her in her capacity as a trust employee, and
she strongly suspected Margaret knew that.

‘We’re not reporters,’ she said. ‘We’re private investigators. We work with Jim Sharp. We know you spoke to him.’

That got a reaction: the worried look of someone whose fears have just been confirmed.

‘And he’s gone missing since,’ Fallan added.

‘I’m due on shift in two minutes. I can’t talk to you.’

‘We’ll wait for your break,’ said Fallan, in a manner that conveyed she could expect to still find him waiting if she hid
on the ward until midnight. ‘It’s about the Ramsay baby.’

Her mouth opened just a little, but no words issued. Then she made a frantic, frustrated gesture with her hand and walked
off towards Maternity.

‘Could be here a while,’ Jasmine said, once Margaret had hurried out of sight down a brightly lit corridor.

Fallan shook his head.

‘First break, she’ll be here. She can’t
wait
to talk. Her conscience is bothering her: that’s why she called Jim.’

Jasmine could face some more waiting; having spent most of yesterday getting eye strain playing infrared spot-the-difference,
this would be an easy shift. They now had a shortlist of possible locations, some of which admittedly could turn out to have
been sheep or cattle.

Fallan was right. Margaret Bain reappeared after a couple of hours, looking both solemn and anxious, and led them outside,
where she could have a cigarette. They walked a short distance to the edge of the car park, out of earshot of the other smokers
in their hospital gowns, some still attached to drip stands.

‘I didn’t know,’ was the first thing she said, having sucked a couple of times on the cigarette like it was Entonox. ‘Please
believe me, I didn’t know.’

Jasmine wanted to reassure her that they weren’t there to pass judgement, but remembered what Fallan had said while they waited.

‘Let her talk. Don’t fill in any awkward silences. Don’t make her feel better about herself. The thing that’s going to do
that is telling us the truth.’

‘I didn’t even realise there was anything
to
know until Mr Sharp came to the house,’ she went on. ‘I heard him arguing with Willie, accusing him of lying about seeing
those folk at Bothwell services all those years ago. I know Willie was never the most honest man in the world, especially
back in those days, but that was the first time anyone had ever suggested he might not have been telling the truth about that.
I didn’t even connect the two things at the time, never mind as the years went on.’

She took another drag on the cigarette and exhaled it in a drawn-out sigh.

‘Me and Willie weren’t married in those days. We were engaged, but we weren’t living together. The thing is, I didn’t even
know Willie was the witness in that story until years later, when one of the papers did a piece on it. He never said anything
to me about it at the time. Didn’t say anything to anybody, in fact: in Willie’s circles it wasnae a good idea to advertise
the fact that you’d been talking to the polis, you know?’

Jasmine nodded but said nothing.

‘It would have been the Sunday, the day after Willie says he saw them; though bear in mind at this point he hadn’t come forward
to the polis, let alone told
me
anything. He went to the polis a few days
later, claimed he had seen a news report that jogged his memory. This particular Sunday, though, he got me to do him a favour.’

She looked away, towards the hills and countryside to the west, as though she could see there the path she’d taken and wished
she could change it.

‘All right, so I wasn’t the most honest person in the world either in those days,’ she admitted. ‘It was just a fraud, that’s
all. I’d done it before, always swearing off it later. I was terrified I’d get caught, but you can always do with the money,
can’t you, and anyway, I reckoned: what’s the harm? It was a victimless crime. That’s what I told myself, anyway.