Dead Catch

by T F Muir

  ‘Who said?’

  Izzy hesitated, as if worried that she’d given away too much. ‘Tommy’s friends.’

  ‘The man driving the Audi?’

  Izzy’s gaze flickered wide-eyed at Jessie. ‘Have you been spying on me? Because if you have, you can fuck off right now.’

  ‘I wasn’t spying on you, Izzy. I was phoning from my car,’ she lied. ‘I just happened to see him leaving.’ She smiled. ‘Honest.’ The kettle clicked off, and she said, ‘I’d love that cuppa if you don’t mind.’ She waited while Izzy filled the teapot. ‘So who was he? The man who left.’

  ‘Why d’you want to know?’

  ‘Was it him who said Tommy’d been tricked?’

  Silence.

  ‘Did he say who’d tricked him?’

  That time Izzy said, ‘Didnae need to.’ Then her eyes shifted from certainty to doubt.

  Jessie needed a name. But she had to be careful. She was no longer a member of the investigation team, and any information she acquired could be deemed inadmissible. She eased into it with, ‘So you know who tricked him, Izzy?’

  Izzy lowered her gaze.

  Jessie edged towards her, trying to catch her eyes. ‘Can you give me a name?’

  ‘I don’t know any names. Tommy didnae tell me nothing.’

  ‘What about the man who was here? What’s his name?’

  She shook her head. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Don’t lie to me, Izzy. I’m not stupid. I’ve got his number plate. I can find out one way or the other.’ She hadn’t meant to snap, and she struggled to keep her tone level. ‘But you’ll score some brownie points, Izzy, if you just tell me yourself.’

  Something seemed to pass behind Izzy’s eyes then, and she returned Jessie’s look with the fire of defiance. ‘Look at you,’ she said. ‘What were you to Tommy, eh? What did you ever do to help him?’ She pushed Jessie aside and took hold of a black handle jutting from a block of wood by the kettle.

  Too late, Jessie realised it was a filleting knife.

  She shouted, ‘No,’ as Izzy thrust the knife at her stomach.

  CHAPTER 32

  Jessie’s training kicked in.

  She struck at Izzy’s arm, stepped in, grabbed her wrist and, with a hard twist and a quick turn, folded Izzy’s arm up her back.

  Izzy squealed in pain. The knife clattered to the linoleum flooring.

  ‘Fuck sake, Izzy, I could put you away for that.’

  ‘Why don’t you?’ she gasped.

  That close, Jessie realised how frail Izzy was. She’d felt no weight behind the attack, as if Izzy’s body was hollow. Her arm felt stick-thin, too, and Jessie relaxed her grip for fear of breaking it. As the fire went out of Izzy, she realised that Izzy’s heart hadn’t been in the attack, rather more defiant gesture than attempted murder. It could even be a cry for help.

  Just to be safe, Jessie said, ‘I’m not going to arrest you, Izzy. I know you’re hurting for Tommy. I’m hurting, too. I want to help you. Nothing more. Do you understand?’ She waited for Izzy to nod her head, then said, ‘I’m going to let you go. And you’re going to take a seat. And we’re going to have a wee chat over a nice cup of tea. OK?’

  Tears spilled off Izzy’s chin as she nodded.

  Jessie let Izzy’s arm slide down her back, then she guided her by the shoulders to the kitchen table. No knives anywhere. Izzy sat, then stared at the table in muted silence. Jessie removed two mugs from the draining board.

  ‘Milk and sugar?’ she said.

  ‘I’ve nae sugar. Nae milk neither.’

  Jessie filled both mugs from the teapot, and placed one in front of Izzy. ‘Take a sip,’ she said. ‘It’ll make you feel better.’

  Izzy reached for her tea, and said, ‘I’ve nae biscuits.’

  ‘That’s good. I’m on a diet.’

  Izzy’s eyes took in Jessie’s figure. ‘You look good. Lost a wee bittie weight.’

  ‘I always was the tubby one.’

  Izzy sniffed. ‘Me? I cannae put it on. Eat as much as I like, and nothing happens.’ She hid behind another sip of tea.

  Jessie knew what Izzy’s problem was – smoking, or hard drugs. Stuff like that would kill your appetite. But rather than stir it up, she bunched up her boobs. ‘Wouldn’t mind losing a few pounds off of this lot.’

  Izzy smiled, a change as striking as the sun emerging from thunderclouds. White teeth sparkled at odds with her grey pallor. Deep-set eyes glistened alive. And for just that moment, Jessie had a sense of how Tommy had been attracted to her. Then just as quickly the smile vanished, her face darkened. ‘Tommy was up for the witness thingie. Said we could start a new life thigether. So what happens now?’

  Jessie felt her heart sink. ‘I’m not going to lie to you, Izzy. But without Tommy, it’s not going to happen.’ She watched Izzy’s eyes shimmy left and right, as if some thought was coming to her. Then they settled on Jessie in a firm stare.

  ‘Tommy had a book,’ she said.

  ‘Didn’t know Tommy could read,’ Jessie quipped.

  ‘He did, you know. Have a book. Said it was his key.’

  ‘His key to what?’

  Izzy’s face dropped again. ‘Don’t know. That’s what he said.’

  ‘Do you know where Tommy’s book is?’

  Izzy nodded.

  ‘Can you show it to me?’

  Tears welled in Izzy’s eyes. Her lips trembled. ‘I want to get away,’ she said. ‘Who wants to live like this?’ Her gaze swept around her kitchen, taking in walls that could do with a coat of paint; cracked tiles that needed grouting; cabinet doors with missing handles, every piece of furniture it seemed, fit only for the tip. ‘In this fucking place.’

  Jessie reached across the table and took hold of Izzy’s hands. They felt bloodless cold, bones like nails, knuckles like rivets. She massaged them, tried to rub warmth into them. ‘I’m going to be honest with you. Because I’m Tommy’s sister, I can’t get involved in his murder investigation. So why don’t you let me see Tommy’s book, and if I think it’s of any use, I’ll pretend you never showed it to me, and I’ll call in the team, and you can show it to them.’

  ‘But I want to get away from here.’

  Jessie could curse at herself for ever mentioning witness protection to Izzy. But Izzy was living hand-to-mouth, with nothing more in her life than what she possessed at any one moment. And what kind of life could she expect now Tommy was dead?

  ‘First things first,’ she said. ‘The man who was here earlier. Who is he?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  Jessie held her tearful gaze. ‘If you want away from here, Izzy, you need to do better than that. You’ve given me nothing.’

  ‘Tommy’s book,’ she said, her eyes brightening. ‘I can give you that.’

  But Jessie persevered. The book could wait for now. ‘You said he told you they’d tricked Tommy. Who tricked Tommy? Who, Izzy? I need to know.’

  Then Izzy’s eyes flattened with defeat. ‘The polis,’ she said.

  Jessie almost gasped from the enormity of what she’d just been told. The police had tricked Tommy? Had they known Tommy was to be murdered in some gangland revenge and did nothing to stop it? Or were the police responsible for setting him up – tricking him – to be killed? Or worse, much worse, were they the perpetrators of Tommy’s murder?

  ‘Jesus, Izzy,’ she hissed. ‘Who in the polis? Did he mention any names?’

  Izzy shook her head.

  But Jessie knew from the shifting of Izzy’s eyes that she was holding something back. If the man had stayed long enough to have a cup of tea, he’d likely said much more. But she didn’t want to push for fear of Izzy shutting down. Besides, Jackie could do a search on the Audi’s number plate. ‘OK,’ she said. ‘So this book of Tommy’s. Where is it?’

  ‘Upstairs,’ Izzy said, and pushed herself from the table.

  Jessie followed her up a clatty staircase into a bedroom that stank of stale cigarettes and something more sour. Burn
marks on the carpet told Jessie that Izzy smoked in bed. An image of Tommy lying in that bed with Izzy seared into her mind with a force that caused her to blink.

  Izzy kneeled in front of a chest of drawers against the back wall. She pulled out the bottom drawer and removed folded T-shirts, socks, an unopened box of men’s underwear. It struck Jessie that for Tommy to have evaded the police for so long by hiding here, then Izzy must have been living a double life – a single woman in public; Tommy’s lover in secret.

  ‘Here it is,’ Izzy said, and held up a dog-eared Moleskine notebook.

  Jessie turned it over. Nothing written on either the front or back cover. She opened it. Names of people she didn’t know ran like a waterfall of letters down one side, each printed in ink in child-like penmanship. She turned to the next page – same thing – then flicked through the pages from the end. Many appeared blank at first sight, but a closer look revealed phone numbers written close to the spine. A cursory flip-through the notebook, and you wouldn’t even notice them. All of a sudden, she caught her breath.

  ‘What is it?’ Izzy said.

  Jessie pointed to the name. ‘Do you know him?’

  Izzy frowned at the name. ‘Victor Maxwell?’ she said, and shook her head.

  Jessie didn’t know how Maxwell was connected to the numbers beside his name, but logic told her that for Tommy to keep this notebook hidden, and call it the key, then what she was holding had to be nothing less powerful than dynamite. But she was still missing one piece of that day’s puzzle, which irked her. She faced Izzy, and decided to go for it.

  ‘Does anyone know about this book?’ she said.

  ‘Only me and Tommy.’

  Jessie toughened her tone. ‘I need more than this, Izzy.’

  Izzy looked panic-stricken, as if seeing her dreams of a life overseas vanish like smoke in fog. ‘I don’t have anything else.’

  Jessie held up the notebook. ‘This could go a long way to helping you. But you’ve got to show that you’re holding nothing back.’ She let a couple of beats pass. ‘The man who was here earlier. Who is he?’

  Izzy closed her eyes for a long moment, then opened them.

  ‘He’s nobody,’ she said. ‘He’s just my brother.’

  CHAPTER 33

  As it turned out, Izzy’s brother wasn’t nobody, but a player of sorts who was on Jock Shepherd’s payroll. Despite being off the investigation team, Jessie had Jackie run the Audi’s registration number through the PNC and the DVLA to confirm that it was registered as a company car – Dillanos Loans – and the company secretary, as registered with Companies House in Edinburgh, was Griffiths Sinclair, Izzy’s brother.

  When Jessie called Gilchrist, she said, ‘You need to get down here.’

  And he had.

  Less than two hours after Jessie set foot in Izzy’s house, Gilchrist, accompanied by DC Mhairi McBride, pulled up behind her Fiat 500. They had already agreed on a story of how Jessie had visited Tommy’s girlfriend, Izzy McLure, to give Izzy her condolences, which was when Izzy said she had something of Tommy’s that she wanted to hand in to the police. No, Jessie hadn’t seen what it was. She only knew that Izzy thought it was something the police should have now that Tommy was dead.

  Now Gilchrist was there, he walked up to Jessie’s Fiat.

  Jessie rolled down the window.

  ‘I need you to give me a report on your meeting with Izzy,’ he said. ‘Let me have it first thing in the morning. I want to make sure this is watertight.’

  ‘Got it.’

  He nodded. ‘Right. We’ll take it from here.’

  When Izzy opened the front door, he held out his warrant card, and introduced himself and Mhairi. ‘Please come in,’ she said, as she’d been instructed to say by Jessie.

  Gilchrist followed her along the hallway into the kitchen where two seats were ready for them. Mhairi opened her notebook, and Gilchrist said, ‘You have something you want to show us?’

  Again, as directed, Izzy said, ‘It’s upstairs,’ and together he and Mhairi followed Izzy into the bedroom where she removed the notebook from beneath a pile of folded underwear.

  ‘It’s Tommy’s notebook,’ she said. ‘Tommy Janes. He was my boyfriend. He kept it here. He told me that if anything ever happened to him, that I was to hand it into the polis.’

  Gilchrist took it from her. ‘What’s in it?’

  ‘I’m no sure. I’m just doing what Tommy wanted.’

  ‘Why not hand it into your local police station?’

  ‘Tommy didnae trust them,’ she said, again as instructed by Jessie. ‘He said he trusted you, Mr Gilchrist. He said you would know what to do with it.’

  Gilchrist opened the notebook, and ran his gaze down several lists of names. Some he recognised as crooks and other low-lifers he’d come across over the years, mostly small-time, but still career criminals. He counted nine names with an asterisk next to them, one of whom he recognised as having been killed years ago in a warehouse robbery in Glasgow that went awry, which had him thinking that the other asterisked names might be those who had died, or been killed, too.

  Izzy said, ‘Jessie pointed out Maxwell’s name to me.’

  ‘I thought she hadn’t seen this.’

  Izzy frowned with embarrassment. ‘Oh, that’s right. No, she hasn’t.’

  ‘You’d do well to remember that,’ he said, and flipped through more pages until he came to Victor Maxwell’s name. Christ, he thought, this was it. He scanned the numbers – not mobile phone numbers, but bank accounts, he was sure of that, five in total by the looks of things. And an address in the Channel Islands, which would be convenient for an offshore account if you lived in the UK.

  He gave a silent prayer to a God he didn’t believe in, then slapped the notebook shut.

  His first thought was to have Jackie look into every account number, see if she could confirm the name of the account holder, but just as importantly, if money was flowing in and out of it, and if so, from where and to. Just that thought had him realising they could be about to open not just a can of worms, but an entire field of them. But first, he had to follow protocol, make sure his possession of Tommy’s notebook could not be challenged in any way in court.

  ‘DC McBride will take your statement,’ he said, ‘so that no one can argue you were coerced into handing over this notebook, or that we obtained it by illegal means. She’ll then read your statement back to you, after which you’ll be asked to read it yourself, then to sign and date it. All right?’

  Izzy nodded, but Gilchrist had a sense that something was troubling her.

  ‘You want to ask something?’

  ‘When do I get to go?’

  ‘Go where?’

  ‘To the safe house. Abroad.’ Izzy’s eyes welled. ‘That’s why I’m giving you this. So’s I can get away from here.’

  Gilchrist felt his heart slump. Despite having anticipated this dilemma, having Izzy secured in the witness protection programme was not going to be an easy task. If Tommy had been alive, and his life had been in danger as a result of having turned Queen’s evidence, then they could have put forward a strong case for a new identity for Tommy and his family. But with Tommy dead, having Izzy assigned witness protection alone was a big ask.

  But he needed the notebook, and he needed Izzy on side. ‘First,’ he said, ‘we need to examine the contents and see if these names and numbers mean anything—’

  ‘No,’ Izzy wailed. ‘Tommy said there was enough in that book to put the whole of Scotland away.’

  Gilchrist raised his hand to cut Izzy short. ‘That’s for us to determine,’ he said. ‘If we can’t corroborate anything from this, then I’m afraid it’s more or less useless.’

  ‘Fuck you. I knew youse would screw me. I just fucking knew it.’

  ‘Nobody’s trying to screw anyone, Izzy. But we can’t just take your word for it, or Tommy’s for that matter. If we’re going to put the whole of Scotland in jail,’ he said, and gave a quick smile at her joke, �
�then we need to make sure that what we have is watertight.’ He could see his words were settling her down, but she was far from coming fully on board. ‘I’ll also start the ball rolling on the safe house,’ he added, ‘if that’ll make you feel better.’

  She sniffed, dragged the back of her hand under her nose. ‘Aye, well, I’m no gonnie sit around on my arse if I find out youse’ve been screwing me.’

  Gilchrist felt his hackles rise, the inference being that if they failed to get Izzy into the witness protection programme then she was going to dob them in it, or do something else that could jeopardise his investigation.

  Time to let her know what was what.

  ‘Let me put it this way, Izzy,’ he said. ‘We’ll do what we can to help you, and you’ll do what you can to help us.’ He lowered his head, and toughened his tone. ‘But if I find out that this notebook contains nothing but a worthless pile of names and numbers, then you’d better be well prepared to answer questions about why you’ve been harbouring a wanted criminal on the run.’

  Izzy blinked. Her throat bobbed.

  ‘Do you understand what I’m saying?’

  Silent, she stared at him.

  ‘Good,’ he said. ‘Now give DC McBride your statement. And leave nothing out.’ He turned away, rattled down the stairs, and walked back to his car, Tommy’s notebook in his hand.

  Seated behind the wheel, he switched on the engine, turned the heat up and placed the notebook on his knees. Rather than spend time searching through it, he needed Jackie to look into the account numbers as a matter of priority. Once he had the account holders, he should have a better understanding of just how damning this notebook could be – enough in that book to put the whole of Scotland away. Now that was an interesting thought. He first texted Jackie telling her what he needed, then sent her another text listing the numbers against Maxwell’s name.

  Next, he phoned Dainty.

  ‘Fuck sake, Andy. Just about to put my feet up and watch the footie.’

  Gilchrist went straight in with, ‘What can you tell me about Griffiths Sinclair?’

  ‘Griff Sinclair?’ A sigh so heavy that Gilchrist almost felt it. ‘One of Jock Shepherd’s boys. Handles accounts collections, for want of a better word. Fall behind with your monthly payments, and Griff’s the man they send in to remind you you’re late. He’s been known to break a few arms and legs, that sort of stuff.’