Our Little Secrets

by Peter Ritchie

  PRAISE FOR THE GRACE MACALLAN SERIES

  ‘I absolutely LOVE the Grace Macallan series . . . modern, gritty and always a rollercoaster of a read. The crimes are always incredibly dark and the characterisation intense. The author often provides a backstory to characters major and minor . . . offering an insight into what drives or motivates each character, whether it be a cop or a criminal.’

  Anne Bonny Book Reviews

  ‘Ritchie certainly knows how to spin a yarn . . . criminal dynasties, family feuding, ambition, corruption, a fit-up and an investigation of omission, police complicity, informers, low-level enforcers, sexuality, friendship, an empire on the wane, murder, kidnap . . . and after a breathless few hundred pages – eventually some chickens coming home to roost. Ritchie goes onto the list of top Scottish authors I enjoy.’

  Col’s Criminal Library

  ‘A wonderfully gripping story from start until finish! This fast-paced tale of Detective Grace Macallan’s chase after the criminal gangs of Scotland’s underworld leads the reader on a page-turning journey.’

  Jera’s Jamboree

  ‘With a strong and determined central protagonist, tense action and truly dramatic storylines, as a reader you are faced with a very different view of life in two of Scotland’s most iconic cities – Edinburgh and Glasgow.’

  Jen Med’s Book Reviews

  ‘Peter’s books are addictive . . . He sends your imagination into overtime, always making you second-guess your thoughts then pulling a rabbit out of the hat, leaving you wondering where the hell that curve ball came from!’

  Orchard Book Club

  ‘A can’t-put-down book that will have you on the edge of your seat from page one to the end . . . I can’t wait to see where the next book will take us.’

  There’s Been A Murder

  ‘A brilliantly gritty crime thriller that adds to the series perfectly, it examines the bonds between family, loyalty and friends, leaving readers questioning what will happen next.’

  The Quiet Knitter

  ‘Where No Shadows Fall is every bit as masterfully written as the rest of the series and will have you captivated from the start.’

  Everywhere and Nowhere

  ‘Pure dead brilliant . . . This was a gritty, realistic crime thriller from an author that knows his onions – job done.’

  Tangents and Tissues

  ‘Dark, gritty and thoroughly gripping with the reader immediately drawn into Grace’s world.’

  Over the Rainbow

  ‘Ritchie writes a “stonking” crime procedural . . . one of the best writers I’ve read in the last five years of reading crime.’

  La Crème de la Crime

  Also by Peter Ritchie

  Cause of Death

  Evidence of Death

  Shores of Death

  Where No Shadows Fall

  First published 2019

  by Black & White Publishing Ltd

  Nautical House, 104 Commercial Street, Edinburgh EH6 6NF

  www.blackandwhitepublishing.com

  This electronic edition published in 2019

  ISBN: 978 1 78530 272 5 in EPub format

  ISBN: 978 1 78530 241 1 in paperback format

  Copyright © Peter Ritchie 2019

  The right of Peter Ritchie to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  This novel is a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  Ebook compilation by Iolaire, Newtonmore

  For the men and women out there

  in the dark places who keep us safe.

  Contents

  Prologue

  1.

  2.

  3.

  4.

  5.

  6.

  7.

  8.

  9.

  10.

  11.

  12.

  13.

  14.

  15.

  16.

  17.

  18.

  19.

  20.

  21.

  22.

  23.

  24.

  25.

  26.

  27.

  28.

  29.

  30.

  31.

  32.

  33.

  34.

  35.

  36.

  37.

  38.

  39.

  40.

  41.

  42.

  43.

  44.

  45.

  46.

  47.

  48.

  49.

  50.

  51.

  52.

  53.

  54.

  55.

  56.

  57.

  58.

  59.

  60.

  61.

  62.

  63.

  64.

  65.

  Epilogue

  Glossary

  Acknowledgements

  PROLOGUE

  It felt as if the muscles and tendons of both shoulders were being ripped out slowly, the balls forced from their sockets as the men each pushed hard against an elbow to straighten his arms behind him. The pain should have been excruciating, but strangely enough there was nothing, and from that moment he was aware only of the wind whipping through his hair and the deathly quiet. His mind, like his ruined body, had passed that point of no return where fear had been replaced by an almost dreamlike state. He didn’t give a fuck because there was no point, and he realised that they couldn’t hurt him any more. The bastards who thought they controlled him were wrong.

  Despite this state of mind, he was aware of a problem that needed to be resolved, which was that his whole body was hanging forward by about twenty degrees and seemed to be defying the laws of gravity. In fact, that wasn’t really the problem at all; when it came down to it, the problem was that his feet were on a ledge, and the rubbish-strewn ground was way too far below him for Lady Luck to hand out any form of landing that wouldn’t kill him. No chance of an expert parachute roll before springing to his feet like an acrobat and sticking two fingers up at them; with his luck, he’d land in a pile of Doberman shit. He was fucked and had always been fucked; he just hadn’t realised it before. They were five (or was it a hundred?) storeys up on top of a disused industrial building in the middle of a wasteland which seemed to stretch out to the horizon without a break. It looked like those pictures of a World War One battlefield. He thought there would be a few seconds’ flying and then it would all be over. Not so bad after what the bastards had already done to him.

  ‘It’s time tae go, son.’ He said it through the blood that kept filling his mouth. For the first time in his life he was absolutely sure what he wanted to do. That was it: the meaning of life – the moment where you realised it was just another scene from Monty Python. Fragmented thoughts were fighting with each other to make it into the conscious part of his brain and he remembered the old line from The Lion King: ‘I laugh in the face of danger.’ People did it and found strength. There was an old school pal who was a genuine good guy, had never harmed a fly, who just kept smiling and saying ‘fuck it’ before he died of
cancer. He’d hardly ever cursed in his life, so it had real effect. ‘Fuck it’ made sense to him after that. It gave meaning to what was left – he understood it – and the best bit was that the bastards who’d spent the afternoon taking lumps out of him didn’t. How good was that?

  They were so strong they didn’t have to grip him hard, and instead of concentrating they were taking the piss out of him and hee-hawing to each other at his distress. They both froze for a moment, wondering why a man with his coupon rearranged and hanging over the edge of a tall building was laughing.

  Dominic Grainger looked round and discovered it was his brothers holding his arms. Where had they come from? He took them by complete surprise and stepped over the side onto thin air. They weren’t prepared and he slipped through their greasy paws like the wind. He closed his eyes and flew like a bird. No one could touch him now.

  1

  A few months earlier

  Davy McGill, or ‘Tonto’ as he was better known, ran like fuck across Gorgie Road in Edinburgh, his lungs burning with the combination of high-intensity activity and the fact that Pete the Pole was chasing him with a large axe. He’d got the name Tonto from his love of Indian food and his almost encyclopedic knowledge of the cuisine; it was the only thing apart from the Jambos that he’d studied in depth.

  ‘I fucking slice you up!’ The Pole had screamed it a few times now and Tonto knew for certain that if the boy caught him that’s exactly what he’d do. The Pole was nuts and everyone had warned him not to deal with the radge, who was built like Superman and consumed so many steroids that he was in serious danger of exploding one day.

  They were hard times for Tonto, although it was never anything else, and he was dealing to anyone who could boost his wages. The previous couple of years had been reasonable enough by his own shite standards, selling dope or stolen gear around the city or wherever he could punt it. At one time, he’d done a bit of work and bought his gear from the Flemings in Leith, but they’d been sent to gangster heaven, so he started working for the Graingers, who basically ran the west side of the city and were still expanding.

  A bit of part-time dealing supplemented his earnings with them, which never seemed to be enough. It wasn’t that Tonto was any worse off than most of the guys in his position, and his spending habits were limited to a few bets on the nags, bevvies when he could and following the Jambos. The truth was that working at the bottom end of a gangster’s team didn’t really pay that well and all that stuff in the movies about the glamour, well, that was just shite. He wasn’t exactly Prince Charming anyway, pish poor with the ladies and only tended to score when some inebriated female was in a worse state than him. And as for his flat . . . well, it was cold and barely furnished; it certainly didn’t have a ‘home sweet home’ sign hanging anywhere.

  Apart from that, the stair he lived on was inhabited by drunks, junkies and bampots, and sometimes all three wrapped up in the same human form. However, as he was always staggering around the edge of the poverty line anyway, he spent most of his waking hours on the streets hunting for new ways to earn, so his domestic situation didn’t really matter much to him. The Graingers paid him for the odd dope run and dealing, but he was way down the pecking order, and he often wondered if he’d ever get to be a real gangster, whatever the fuck that was.

  The Graingers were okay as long as everything was hunky-dory but seriously violent bastards if there was trouble. Their old man was Dublin Irish, a small-time gangster who’d come to Scotland to try to make a better life. It hadn’t taken him long to discover he was just back in the old one with a slightly different view from the front door. To appease his second wife, who’d said she couldn’t tolerate the idea of living off illegal income, he ended up in a shite job feeding the scaffy’s lorry but determined his boys would do better. That had partly worked: his eldest son, Dominic, realised early on that his father looked old before his time and decided that he preferred success, and quickly. It just wasn’t the kind of success his stepmother had envisaged. But as his generation had been told that greed was good, she tried to believe perhaps it wasn’t all his fault.

  He started to build his own gang and mini-empire in the concrete heroin fields of Broomhouse and Wester Hailes and his stepmother only started to forgive him when he bought them a decent home in Inverleith. She got through life by pretending the boy wasn’t what he was, though his dad was secretly quite proud of him. And although the house was enough for his parents, Dominic wanted nothing less than it all, the result being that by the time he was in his twenties he was respected even by the bad bastards. Something marked him out as different, just a bit savvier than the normal career gangster.

  He’d realised that eventually even the best of them took a fall – they always got that little bit too greedy and stood under a big fuck-off light that shouted, ‘Arrest me!’ He’d seen it and learned the lesson. As quickly as he could turn illegal wonga into legal wonga he invested in legit businesses, and he was good at it. Most of the investments thrived and he had a gift for negotiation with other businessmen, whether they were on the right side or the wrong side of the law. On the surface, he positioned himself squarely in the middle of the legit business and let his younger brothers carry on with the villainy. That way he spread the risks, and although his siblings always came to him for decisions, he’d put firewalls between him and the crime side of the business to keep reasonably safe. It didn’t make him completely fireproof, just safer than most, and it would take pretty determined law to come after him.

  That was the secret – make yourself really fucking difficult to catch and most of the time it’ll put the law off coming after you. He took care of the finances from the crime side for his brothers, and they were happy to leave it to his skills in washing their profits.

  At least that’s how it should have worked.

  2

  For Tonto, everything had been running smoothly for a couple of years, but then a substantial wad of gear he was looking after for the Graingers went missing from a safe stash in circumstances that stank like a jakey’s oxter. He’d constructed a false hide at the bottom of his mother’s coal bunker and some bastard had chored it in the night. He hadn’t told another soul where it was, yet someone knew, and no way was it a lucky guess. The Graingers, well, they weren’t happy because that was one of the jobs they gave him: looking after gear and keeping it safe till it was dealt, sold on or traded. They were even less happy when, a few days later, the cops took out a large stash from another numpty who, like Tonto, was paid to look after it and take the fall if necessary. The numpty had taken the fall for them alright; nevertheless, they’d lost a shitload of money. The problem was that Tonto’s stash had just disappeared, whereas the other numpty was arrested. The Graingers could understand the arrest, but they couldn’t understand how the gear Tonto was minding was just chored. Whatever it was all about, they’d taken a serious hit and they lacked a sense of humour in these kinds of situations.

  The certainty that someone inside was at it always sent panic through a gang because everyone was a dishonest bastard at heart. This resulted in Tonto having to work extra hard to convince the Graingers to give him a break. Their decision to add to all his financial problems by taxing him meant he had to work harder than ever, which was why he ended up selling on the side to people like Pete the Pole. In fact, the tax meant he was earning hee-haw from any work he was doing for the Graingers and so it became almost impossible for him to keep ahead of his debts.

  Tonto’s first couple of deliveries to the Pole had gone okay because the mad bastard had taken his medication. But on the third visit the crazy fuck was off his tits, sitting in a darkened room because he’d smashed everything up, including the light fittings. He badly wanted to hurt someone, so when Tonto came to the door for money the Pole didn’t have, it just made his day, and what followed became a little bit of local history.

  3

  Tonto ignored the car horns and various threats from motorists burning their brakes to a
void him. As often as the Pole repeated his threat to slice him up, Tonto would say ‘Oh God!’ – as if the big man in the sky had any intention of helping him – or could hear him, for that matter. Unfortunately, his leg muscles were starting to burn, and what energy had been available in this young man whose main exercise of the day was pressing lift buttons was fast draining away. The Pole was gaining as Tonto gasped his way down Wheatfield Street towards the gates of Tynecastle Stadium, the hallowed or hated ground of Heart of Midlothian Football Club, depending on which side of the city you saw as yours. By luck, and certainly not by design, the Jambos were playing a midweek game in an hour and the few fans who had started to mill around the area took in the drama. Some were horrified; a couple of the more pished variety screamed encouragement to Tonto and the Pole.

  ‘Ah hope the boy in the front’s a Hibee!’ was one of the more unsympathetic shouts, although Tonto wasn’t taking it in. Instead, he was concentrating on the Police Scotland uniforms gathering at the main gate, who were thinking they were in for just another night as glorified doormen.

  Tonto tried to scream for help, but nothing came out except a feeble ‘Huuuph’. Sadly, the decibel level was way below what would have alerted the forces of law and order, who were probably his only chance of surviving.

  Unfortunately for Tonto the two uniforms at the gate were probably the least likely in all of Police Scotland’s ranks to give a Donald Duck what happened to him. The older of the two PCs was Billy Denholm, or FT as he was better known to his long-suffering colleagues. The handle ‘FT’ didn’t come from a passion for following the business news in the Financial Times but from his attitude to every order or request he received. ‘Fuck that’ was his standard reply, sometimes under his breath, depending on the rank of the officer giving it out. In a way, it summed up his whole wasted life. He was one of those characters who’d made an art form out of avoiding work and yet talked himself up as Edinburgh’s version of Taggart. Those stories were strictly for his civilian friends because the job knew exactly what he was made of.