Connor watched it, then let his eyes drift to Jonny’s, trying to read his next move.
Jonny danced forward, like a boxer in the ring, shaking his head. Connor feigned left, avoiding a clumsy stab, then ducked down and pivoted right, bringing the spine of the book down on Jonny’s wrist like a cosh. The knife clattered to the ground, an oddly musical sound, and Connor was on him.
The gun was in his hand before he knew it, robbing Jonny of his bravado, stripping him down to the coward he was. Connor blinked back a sudden memory of a playground years ago, and whipped the barrel across Jonny’s cheek, making sure the sights cut into his flesh, then jammed the muzzle into his face. ‘I swear to fuck, you don’t tell me what I want to know, I’ll end you here and now,’ he said, his voice as cold and final as the bullet in the chamber.
Jonny’s eyes widened, terror pulling his face into a waxy, blood-streaked grimace. His voice was a high, fast tremor, hysteria lurking in the sharp crash of consonants and vowels. ‘Look, it’s nothing. I was only playing, honest, man. I followed you, saw you pick up that bint in town, followed her to school the next day. Piece of pish to look at the website, find her on the teaching staff, wasn’t it?’ He held up shaking hands, eyes straining to see the barrel of the gun. Connor studied him. His fear was genuine, and he knew what lying would lead to. But still . . .
Still . . .
He smashed the gun across Jonny’s face, rocking it to the side. Three blows in quick succession, blood slicking the grip of the gun. Then he ground the barrel deep into Jonny’s cheek. ‘How can I trust what you’re saying, Jonny? Lying wee shite like you? How do I know you’re not just saying that to get yourself off the hook?’
His voice was a begging whine that hurt Connor’s ears. ‘Please, man, please. I mean it. Honest. Look. I’m sorry. But you embarrassed me in front of Amy and the boys and, oh, God, I—’
Connor slashed the gun into his face again, his hand moving as if it was divorced from his mind. The wet, crunching thud of bone was sweet music, reverberating in his heart. The smell of blood burnt his nostrils and he lashed out again. And again.
The fury faded gradually, washed away by the exhaustion in his arms. He pulled back, looked at the diseased lump of flesh in front of him, sickened by what he had created, his father whispering in his ear: You’ve got the Fraser temper, son. Keep it in check, like I have.
Connor rocked back. ‘If you ever go near me or mine again, we won’t have this chat beforehand. I’ll pull the trigger before you even know I’m there. Understood?’
Jonny mewled agreement. The sound was barely human.
‘Oh, and, Jonny, one last thing. You tell anyone about this, anyone, I’ll paint you as a tout and let your pals in the UDA deal with you. Clear?’
Jonny nodded enthusiastically, rodent eyes following the gun. Connor saw the hatred try to take hold again, make him a man, but it was swamped by the fear and the pain.
He had seen that look before. In the eyes of Stephen Franklin.
He got up slowly, looked around, found the gate set into the wire fence, took a second to burst the lock and swung it open. ‘Fuck away off then,’ he said, as Jonny got to his feet shakily. ‘And remember, Jonny. One word, and I will fucking end you.’
Jonny edged past him into the alley, then ran. Connor thought he was going to stumble, but he found his stride and bolted. Connor watched him go. It was only when he was sure that he was alone that he doubled over and retched, the fear and revulsion churning inside him, clamouring to be free.
The mobile rang suddenly, startling him out of the past. He fumbled for it. Almost dropped it. Saw a number he didn’t recognize. Hit answer. Waited.
‘Hello?’ the caller said, something familiar about the hesitant voice.
‘Who is this?’
‘Is that Connor Fraser?’
‘Who is this?’
An impatient sigh. Someone obviously not used to being messed around. ‘Mr Fraser, I believe you were told to expect my call by a . . .’ a soft rustle of paper down the phone, the voice becoming stiff as a note was read ‘. . . ah, Lachlan Jameson. My name is Malcolm Ford, and I think you and I should talk.’
CHAPTER 38
After the unwelcome call from Mark, Donna had found Gina, then headed home. She presented her plan as an ultimatum, hating herself for her selfishness even as she told her parents she was only back for a couple of hours, and would need them to stay with Andrew while she covered the late show at the station. Didn’t matter if Matt Evans turned up or not. Tonight, the show was hers.
Her mother had been ashen, the anger and disbelief etching itself across her face, making her look somehow younger, as though constant disappointment in her daughter was a source of nourishment to her. It was only when Donna mentioned that she would be paid double time for the shift, and get the following day off, that Irene relented, and agreed to stay at the flat with Andrew until Donna got home.
Sitting in the near-silence of his room, Andrew sleeping in her arms, Donna felt doubts and fears creep in on her from the shadows. The glass eyes of the bear her dad had insisted on buying Andrew – ‘I bought the biggest one I could find for you the day you were born, only fair I should do the same for him’ – turned dark and accusatory in the gloom. She was being utterly selfish, asking her parents to shoulder the burden of looking after Andrew, putting the job before her son. Her mother was right: she was a failure as a mother and a daughter.
But she wouldn’t be a failure as a journalist. She would build something that would support her and Andrew. No matter what.
She looked down at him, felt a tug of something purer and deeper than any word as feeble as love could describe, even as the shame rose in her.
When she had found out she was pregnant, and Mark had scurried back to his wife, like the frightened child he was, she had considered an abortion, had gone as far as making an appointment. But the night before, alone in her flat, the tears long since exhausted, she felt a giddying, terrifying resolve. It would derail her career. End her life as she knew it. But she would have the child growing inside her.
Seven months later, Andrew was born at the Forth Valley Royal Hospital in Larbert by emergency C-section, Donna having moved back to Stirling a couple of months earlier. She hated to admit it but, with Mark out of the picture, she would need the help of her parents who, despite her mother’s disapproval at Donna’s single-mother status, made no secret of their excitement at becoming grandparents.
And now here she was, preparing to abandon them all again for the job that had led her there in the first place.
She left it as long as she could, reluctantly slipping Andrew into his cot when she couldn’t delay it any more, the ghost of his warmth clinging to her arms and chest even as she pulled on her jacket and headed for the car.
The show ran five days a week, and was a popular addition to MediaSound’s broadcasting arm. Matt Evans was on a short leash following his meltdown in Edinburgh, but he could still be relied on to throw in some calculated controversy now and then to keep the tabloids interested and him in the headlines, so the listening figures were good.
For Donna, the content of the show wasn’t a problem – everyone wanted to talk about the murders and, as she had led the story on both TV and radio, there wasn’t a shortage of callers. Still, she found it exhausting – the constant juggling of calls, the timing of segments to hit ad breaks, news updates or traffic reports, the need to keep the conversation casual but informative, entertaining but relevant. She tried a few diversions into other topics – the latest sex-abuse revelations in Parliament, the tweet storm whipped up by a man with all the integrity of a comb-over in a hurricane, the news that, yes, Brexit would be even more of a catastrophe than previously advertised. But no matter what she did, call after call dragged the debate back to the murders. Was a psycho on the loose? A serial killer? Was there a pattern? Would there be more killings? How badly mutilated was the body at Cowane’s Hospital? As it was so close to the graveyard, was
there an occult link?
Donna tried to snag some of the more rational thoughts to follow up later, but it was like trying to grab a twig from a raging river. The calls were moving too fast for her to do more than dive in and hang on.
She signed off at just after two, mentally and physically exhausted. Gina gave her a thumbs-up from the production office and Donna twitched her a smile. As she hung up the earphones, an autoplay of songs taking over until the station started broadcasting again properly at six a.m., she felt a grudging respect for Matt Evans. Yes, he was a self-serving wanker who traded on clichés, bigotry and populism, but he did it five days a week without breaking a sweat.
Mostly.
She went back to the main newsroom, cradling a cup of tea she didn’t want but needed to revive her for the drive home. Gina followed a moment later, having checked all was well with the autoplay system. ‘That was great,’ she said, perching on the corner of Donna’s desk. ‘You’re a natural. Thanks, Donna, you really helped me out tonight.’
‘No problem,’ Donna said, eyes drifting to the main door and the sound of squealing tyres beyond. It was a routine occurrence: with the station being in an industrial estate heading out of town, it was the perfect venue for the local boy racers to congregate in their souped-up bangers and hot hatches to practise their skills. The roads outside the office were constantly tattooed with tyre rubber from the night before, while a couple of the lampposts and street signs had been left at odd angles. They’d complained to the police, and Donna had run a story, but the truth was it suited the coppers for the kids to be racing around there rather than on the roads where they could hurt someone other than themselves.
She dragged her eyes, now gritty with exhaustion, back to Gina. ‘I take it you’ve still not heard from Captain Fantastic?’
Gina gave a smile as tepid and grey as Donna’s tea. ‘No. The great Matt Evans has yet to check in. Fuck knows what’s happened to him. Nothing minor, I hope.’
Donna gave a small laugh that made something hurt in the small of her back. Too long sitting hunched over the production desk: time to go home. ‘Any chance you can use this to get shot of him?’
‘I wish,’ Gina replied. ‘He’s a useless bastard, but he’s a popular useless bastard. And the bosses seem to have plans for him. I hear they’re thinking about a TV slot on one of the late-night regionals.’
Donna hissed breath out between her teeth. Typical, she thought. Shit always floats.
She lingered for another ten minutes, flicking through her notes from the show, highlighting possible angles to explore on the story tomorrow. Then she sighed, rubbed her eyes and headed for the door, her mind filled with thoughts of Andrew asleep in his cot.
She pushed through the double doors, turned left past the bin where she had taken the call from Mark earlier that day, heading for the car park beyond. She was checking her phone for emails from Fiona or Danny, only looked up when the path gave way to the car park.
She stopped dead, her brain fleetingly unwilling and unable to process what her eyes were telling it. A mannequin had been propped up beside her car, its back against the driver’s door, the legs spread wide, turning at impossible right angles at the knees. It was topless, the pale, mottled skin peppered with splashes of something that glistened like burnished oil in the orange glow of the streetlights overhead. But there was something wrong with the figure, something missing that . . .
The revelation hit her like a physical blow, grabbing her lungs and squeezing. She felt the phone slip from her hand as she lurched back on legs that suddenly felt boneless, disconnected. The sound of the phone shattering was like a gunshot. Her hands flew to her temples as though her head was about to explode, a growing scream clamouring in her mind, like an old kettle coming to the boil. Her eyes, unblinking, seemed to bulge at the horror of what was in front of her. She remembered Mark’s words from earlier in the day.
Her gaze was dragged up, something wrenching free of its moorings, like the popping of a tendon or the tearing of a muscle.
She understood what was wrong with the figure in front of her. Why the shape refused to make sense. It was obvious, really. She should have seen it sooner.
See, Donna, the police found the body had been mutilated. Badly. It had been . . .
She gave a sudden, hysterical cackle, felt the growing scream scrabble up her throat on icy, spidery legs.
. . . decapitated . . .
She looked up to the roof of the car. Matt Evans stared back at her, eyes empty marbles shining in the streetlights, blood dripping from his neck, snaking down the driver’s window, as though reaching out to reconnect with what was left of his violated and discarded body.
The dam broke. Donna fell to her knees and screamed. But she couldn’t take her eyes from Matt’s head, and its silent, accusatory glare.
CHAPTER 39
The picture seemed to scream at him from the phone’s screen. He stood open-mouthed, shock and revulsion squeezing his vocal cords shut and denying the scream that ached in his chest.
He blinked, his eyelids feeling alien and foreign, which did nothing to blot out the vision of Matt Evans’s ruined body. Forced himself to look again: Evans’s body was propped against a car, the gloom of the night doing nothing to hide the blood that covered, like a shroud, the wounds that had been inflicted, the legs bent at sickening angles, knees obviously shattered. He focused on that, seized on the lesser horror as he swallowed burning bile, not wanting to see what was perched on the car’s roof.
The phone buzzed in his hand, a text popping up below the picture: Thought you would appreciate this. Will give you something special to talk about today. Enjoy Stirling.
He stared at the message dumbly, its casual tone almost as shocking as the picture above it. Did he answer? Should he? And if he did, what would he say? ‘Thanks for beheading the loudmouthed little prick and slaughtering two other people, just what I wanted’?
No. No. He put the phone down on the coffee-table in front of him, pushed it across the table, out of his reach. Then he sat back, looked up at the ceiling. It was done. With Griffin and Russell dead, he was safe, his legacy assured. He could retreat into the life he had created for himself, go back to his – no, their work – make the difference he had always dreamt of.
There were always casualties in war, always collateral damage as innocents got caught in the crossfire. And Evans was hardly innocent. After all, it had been his greed and avarice that had started all this.
No. Better he was out of the picture. And the caller was right: it would divert the focus of today’s meeting from other matters. He sighed, dropped his eyes back to the table and the phone that lay there, like an unexploded grenade. He reached for it, unlocked it, then forced himself to look at the picture one last time. Stared at it until the horror abated, replaced by the cool indifference he had honed over the decades.
He thumbed in a text, then considered. Glanced at the clock on the wall, seeing it was almost two-thirty a.m. He needed to sleep. Rest. Be ready for the meeting with the chief constable at Randolphfield in a few short hours.
He stood, and the phone buzzed again. He read the message – A pleasure doing business with you.
He felt a chill finger trace a path across his calm. He had done what was necessary to protect everything he had worked for, ensure his secrets stayed buried in the past. To do so, he had contacted a professional whose discretion was assured, whose credentials he knew were impeccable. It was a business arrangement, nothing more, and he had paid handsomely for the service.
He had met the caller in person only twice, the first time years ago, the second less than a fortnight back to agree terms and be given the phone they now used for contact, a phone he was assured was untraceable. He had seen in that meeting someone who reflected himself, a man living behind a façade.
But he had known. It was in his eyes. While he was hiding from his past, the caller was hiding something uglier, darker.
The contract was comple
te, but would the caller be satisfied? Or would he come looking for more blood, having decided there was one more loose end to be dealt with in Stirling?
And if that happened, would he be ready?
CHAPTER 40
The station was a riot of activity when Ford arrived just before six a.m., the air electric with the nervous energy, trepidation and excitement that a major case always brought with it. The paper-pushing and bureaucratic bullshit were swept aside by the brutal, visceral reminder of what they were facing, what they were trying to protect people from.
Chaos. Utter chaos.
He was halfway to the incident room when Doyle caught up with him, his skin pale and waxy, eyes sharp and glittering in dark sockets that spoke of a long, broken night.
‘DCI Ford,’ he said. ‘Let’s take a walk.’
Ford glanced up the corridor, felt the tug of the incident room.
‘Now, Malcolm,’ Doyle repeated, heading off down the corridor.
A minute later they were in Doyle’s office, the smell of stale cigarettes doing nothing to mask the sour tang of whisky that hung in the air. Looking again at Doyle, Ford wondered how much of his appearance was down to exhaustion and how much to a hangover.
‘Have you managed to speak to our contact yet?’ Doyle asked as he settled behind his desk, the chair seeming to engulf him.
‘Ah, not yet, sir. I mean, I spoke to him, and we arranged to meet later today, but now, with what happened at Valley FM . . .’ He gestured to the window and the bustle of activity outside.
Doyle nodded slowly, his eyes not leaving Ford. ‘Keep that appointment, Malcolm,’ he said. ‘And do us both a favour, lie low today.’
Ford felt as though he had been slapped. ‘Sorry, sir, but I don’t understand. If there’s been another murder, and by the sounds of it, it followed the same MO of the previous two, then surely it’s my responsibility to . . .’
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