Where the Bodies are Buried (38 page)

‘Which brings us to the purpose of my visit,’ said Abercorn, reaching into his jacket. He produced an A5-size envelope and
pulled from it a stack of photographs. Catherine recognised most of them as cops, with a few villains and a few nobodies thrown
in for control.

Whitaker screwed up his face as he pored over them, looking anxious and frustrated. He dallied over one or two of them, but
was reluctant to commit. Catherine caught Abercorn’s gaze as Whitaker came to the head shot of Cairns’ big buddy Fletch, confirming
their mutual suspicion that he had to be the top candidate, but Whitaker failed to pick him out.

‘I told you,’ he said to Abercorn. ‘I only caught a glimpse. A couple of these guys look vaguely familiar, but that’s all
I could say.’

‘What about CCTV?’ Catherine suggested. ‘The station’s full of cameras.’

Abercorn gave her a sour look, like she was missing something obvious.

‘Drug Squad took all the CCTV files off of Scotrail on Thursday,’ he said. ‘Can’t see them handing them over to Locust in
a hurry, but when they do, you can bet there will be a few gaps. Cairns – and whoever he’s working with – has had several
days to edit them.’

Abercorn directed Whitaker’s attention back to the photos.

‘Come on, think. You were there the whole time.’

‘Aye, hiding, remember? The motor was parked facing away from me, so I never saw the driver’s face at all. The other guy,
I’m telling you, I stuck my heid above that fence for a quarter of a second each time. I’d just tanned a hunner and fifty
grand’s worth of watches. If they’d looked up and seen me, I was fucked. Older guy, that’s all I could say for sure.’

Abercorn looked away towards the partially covered windows. There was nothing to see: Catherine could tell he was just trying
to contain his frustrations.

‘Well, we do have another avenue we can pursue,’ he said.

‘Which is what?’

Abercorn nodded to the door.

‘We’ll leave the pictures with you, Liam,’ he said. ‘Give you time and space, see if it helps not to have us breathing down
your neck.’

They exited the room into the dim hallway, but Abercorn evidently wasn’t speaking further until they were out of the building
altogether. These walls had very interested and very untrustworthy ears.

‘Bob Cairns has been a cop in this city for over thirty years,’ he said quietly, back out on the pavement. ‘He’s got friends
in every division, trusted contacts at every level. We start asking questions and it’ll get back to him in no time. He’s got
at least
two accomplices in this who will also have their ears to the ground and whose identities remain a secret. I’d bet the farm
on one of them being Fletcher.’

‘Me too.’

‘There’s also at least one other, and we don’t know how far or how high this might go.’

‘Please tell me there’s a “but” to this.’

‘Oh, there is. But you won’t like it.’

‘Hit me anyway. What’s your other avenue?’

‘I think we need to go back and play nice with Glen Fallan.’

‘He knows nothing about this,’ Catherine assured him. ‘Trust me, this is coming from someone who would like nothing more than
for him to be implicated.’

‘But this isn’t what we’d be asking him about. I dug a little deeper into his father’s record. Iain Fallan was in CID over
in Gallowhaugh. Wild times: a law unto himself, fair to say. Saw himself like a frontier sheriff.’

‘You going to tell me Bob Cairns was his deputy?’

‘Among others. Including Bill Raeside.’

Catherine felt her cheeks flush with dismay, the anger of having been played coming back for a second pass.

‘Raeside owns an Alsatian dog. He was also the one who relayed the message that Cairns had information and wanted to meet.
I saw his photo in there, but Whitaker didn’t look twice. Anyone else?’

‘Yes,’ said Abercorn, looking weighed down by a burden that was about to be doubled rather than shared. ‘A young DC by the
name of Graeme Sunderland.’

The registry office was on Martha Street, just around the corner from the Strathclyde University student union. Jasmine must
have passed the place twenty times without paying attention to what it was; in fact, she remembered getting off with a guy
up against its locked doors late one night/early one morning, before heading down to George Square for the night bus home.
She’d been at the union with friends to see Twin Atlantic. She had got talking and dancing with him, before having a very
enjoyable snog in which he had acquitted himself well by way of keeping his hands respectably in place around her shoulders.

Scott, she thought his name was, or possibly Sam. She later learned that he was sixteen and still at school: a fifth-year
at Glasgow Academy. Never mind looking like a student, he had looked older than her. The kids that went to the private schools
always did, right enough. Better clothes, or maybe just better breeding: going back several generations without anybody ever
missing a meal. That was a year and a half ago, and Jasmine still got carded now. She’d taken his number and meant to call
him, but it was just before Mum got sick; or rather, just before they got the diagnosis.

Seeing the spot where they’d kissed and the sight of the union building looming above John Street, she realised she had spent
so long worrying about the future that she seldom gave much thought to the world she had lost. It wasn’t just Mum that had
been taken from her. Saturday nights, boys, friends, gigs, the student years, the dreaming years, they had all gone too. She
could have
some
of those things again, though, couldn’t she? If she got through this. If people stopped shooting at her.

Fallan explained what they were looking for, and the man on the desk was friendly and helpful, almost to the point where Jasmine
was starting to become suspicious. Then she realised that she had simply recalibrated her expectations of such things after
several days of dealing with people being awkward, evasive, confrontational, and occasionally murderous.

He looked like he might have been in the place since it was built, someone who fitted into his job and his environment so
comfortably that she expected that anyone familiar with the place would find it hard to imagine one without the other. He
was one of those distinguished old guys who are impossible to picture as young men, and probably wasn’t much different then;
he had a grace about his manner and a lightness on his feet that must have endured for many decades.

He disappeared off to the archives and re-emerged about ten minutes later bearing a couple of slightly yellowed pages. He
was about to place them down on the desktop when he suddenly looked unsure of himself, a searching expression on his features.

‘You’re the second party to be making this inquiry of late,’ he said. ‘I just had a wee bit déjà vu and remembered I had looked
out these same pages for another chap, maybe just a week and a half ago.’

She and Fallan shared a look. Jim.

‘It was the Victoria, wasn’t it?’ he confirmed.

‘Yes.’

‘Aye. Sunday the twenty-first of August 1983. Definitely the same. Eight births: three girls and five boys.’

Jasmine got out a sheet of paper and began writing down the names of the boys and their registered parents, ordered alphabetically.
It was another list to work through, like the one still folded up in her pocket detailing the office phone calls. That felt
like an ancient artefact by now, the first step she had taken on this journey. This new list, however, would be what guided
her to the end. This list contained the answer she was looking for, via one of these names.

Before she had finished copying them out, Fallan put a finger down decisively on the last one.

‘Him,’ he said.

‘How do you know?’

‘Trust me, I know. You don’t work for Tony McGill for years without that name becoming familiar. I’d admit the name isn’t
entirely exotic for these parts, so it
could
be a coincidence, but I seriously doubt it.’

‘It’s not,’ Jasmine realised, pulling out the call log and unfolding it.

It was near the top of the outgoing numbers, and therefore among the last calls made.

‘I assumed it was just another firm Jim did work for,’ she said. ‘Jim must have called him up after seeing his name on this
list.’

‘He wouldn’t have broached it over the phone,’ Fallan reasoned. ‘Not
something like this. He must have made an appointment to see him. That’s why he told Anne Ramsay he’d have news for her after
the …’

Jasmine was faintly aware of movement at her side, someone coming through the swing doors a few yards away. She read the look
of sudden alertness on Fallan’s face and felt something inside turn to icy dread in anticipation of whatever events were about
to rapidly unfold out of her control.

She wasn’t thrown to the floor this time, and nor would any bullets be flying. From the look on Fallan’s face, he’d have been
happier if there were.

They sat around an eight-legged table in a small conference room inside the city chambers, its windows giving on to the continuation
of John Street that ran through the buildings. Abercorn had procured use of the room at zero notice, from some contact of
his at the council. Catherine didn’t know if it was just availability that had dictated his choice of venue or whether he
was hoping to engender some kind of sense of civic duty and spirit of mutual cooperation in their guests.

In the case of Fallan it might be a bit of an ask. He looked like his surroundings were constricting him, a predator in the
zoo, restive and bristling. If they were going to get anything from him, they were going to have to get it fast. The girl
would be a better bet, but Catherine had the impression it would be difficult to isolate her from her companion. His body
language was very protective towards her; hers more trusting of him than perhaps she even realised.

‘Saturday afternoon, back of two, Laura here and myself were shot at several times by a gunman in a red nineties-model Honda
Civic.’

Catherine watched for their responses. Fallan was unemotive; still and calculating. Jasmine Sharp looked a little startled;
surprised and clearly puzzled.

‘We know it wasn’t you,’ Catherine went on. ‘But someone wanted us to think it was.’

‘Funny,’ Fallan said. ‘A couple of hours after that, a gunman in a silver Vauxhall Vectra shot at us. Difference was, our
guy wasn’t doing it for show. He intended to kill us. Someone tried to kill us both on Wednesday too, down in Northumberland,
I’m disinclined to think these incidents were unrelated.’

Catherine had heard nothing about this, and a look to Abercorn confirmed he was equally uninformed.

‘We were unaware of that,’ she said. ‘Why didn’t you report it?’

She wasn’t expecting a guy like Fallan to tell her. He didn’t disappoint.

‘I realise the police are busy people,’ he said with a dryness that lacked all humour. ‘Don’t like to bother them with trivia.’

Catherine ignored this.

‘These two incidents on Saturday
were
connected,’ she said. ‘I think we were supposed to get shot at and then a little later you were supposed to be too dead to
offer an alibi. The intended conclusion was that you were trying to stop us looking into certain matters, only to be gunned
down yourself, taking a number of awkward questions with you to the grave.’

‘What awkward questions? Like who killed those guys you were asking about?’

‘Among others.’

‘How did you survive?’ asked Laura. ‘See, at first I thought our guy was just a bad shot, but he’d actually need to be quite
a good shot to fire off so many rounds without hitting either of us. Were you armed?’

‘Yes,’ Fallan said. He gave the three police officers time to formulate a question before adding: ‘With a mobile phone.’

‘He pretended it was a gun,’ explained Jasmine. ‘It scared the guy off.’

‘I think my reputation preceded me.’

‘Or your father’s,’ Catherine suggested.

Catherine felt Fallan’s reaction like a change in the weather inside the room. She had definitely just plucked the lyre of
Orpheus, but the question was, what would emerge from Fallan’s personal underworld?

‘You know this was cops,’ he said flatly. ‘How?’

‘Among other things, you told me.’

‘The biggest gang in Glasgow,’ he confirmed.

‘Why would they want you dead? You haven’t poked your head out for twenty years and all of a sudden they’re shooting at you.
What have you two been looking into?’

Jasmine began to answer, but Fallan laid a hand on her arm and spoke over her.

‘I’ll show you mine if you show me yours.’

Abercorn gave her a look of assent. Catherine was planning to open up anyway, but it told her how high the stakes must be
if even he thought it was time to lay his cards on the table. Either that or he had already calculated that Fallan and the
girl had more to tell them than the other way around.

‘What do you remember about a policeman by the name of Bob
Cairns?’ Catherine asked, conscious that she was being almost Abercorn-like in turning an apparent disclosure into a request
for information. She hoped Fallan didn’t reciprocate or they could be here all night.

‘A good friend of my dad’s. Used to come round the house all the time, sit up drinking, telling stories. When I was wee, listening
to them talk made me want to be a polisman when I grew up. I liked him.’

He gave a shrug, as if this was all he could say and he needed Catherine to offer more. Then his tone darkened.

‘Of course, this was when I was too young to know any better. Too young to realise that for all he could talk tough, he was
a shitebag who turned a blind eye to what was going on in our house because otherwise he’d have had to stand up to my dad.’

‘Stand up to him over what?’ asked Laura, whose urgency betrayed her suspicions.

‘Exactly what you think,’ replied Fallan, looking her in the eye and holding her gaze for an uncomfortable few moments.