The Silent Games

by Alex Gray

  The meeting with Dr Jones and the Nigerian girl had given Lorimer much to think about, not least the fact that Leila was to be deported back to Nigeria within the next ten days, something that had raised the young girl’s spirits, according to the psychiatrist. There had been no means of contacting family members: the village where Leila came from was remote and without the modern means of communication that Westerners took for granted. However, a member of the British consulate had undertaken to meet the girl and arrange for her transportation back home.

  The detective inspector closed his eyes tightly, resting his head against clasped hands. There were too many things vying for his attention right now. Asa, Foxy, Drummond’s latest missive about the Glasgow cell . . . For a moment he found himself wondering what life would have been like had he followed his original dream of becoming an art historian. Would he have liked the life of academia? Or would that too have brought the stresses and strains he was feeling right now?

  Recently he had addressed Rosie’s students at one of the weekly meetings that comprised the course in forensic medical science. ‘I’ve got the best job in the world,’ he’d told them towards the end of his lecture, after outlining some of the more celebrated cases where he had been senior investigating officer. And it was true. Though the case that demanded most of his attention right now was one that would never reach the ears of any of those students.

  Both Okonjo and Boro had denied any knowledge of a man called Robert Bruce Petrie, but Drummond persisted in his belief that Petrie and McAlpin were the men behind the plot. And it was Detective Superintendent Lorimer’s task to hunt them down before the date of the opening of the Commonwealth Games, a date that was edging closer with every passing day.

  It was now midsummer, June soon drawing to a close. Next week Maggie would be on holiday from school and then the countdown to the Games would gather momentum.

  The twenty-third of July was a date etched on the detective superintendent’s brain. He had just over a month to track down the members of this terrorist group and take them into custody. Finding McAlpin’s nest had been almost too easy, and he wondered just where the big bearded man had gone in the wake of the Nigerians’ arrests. Would that have scared them off? Would they have abandoned their deadly scheme? Or had they cast McAlpin adrift and changed tack somehow?

  Alistair Wilson was in charge of the Gilmartin case and Lorimer knew that he had to stop himself thinking about the flame-haired woman and the way she had beguiled him so long ago. And the way Maggie still looked sideways at him as if trying to read his thoughts. There had been a distinct coolness from his wife lately that gnawed at the edges of his conscience, something he would have to put right when he had the time.

  There were officers combing the city for Asa and Swanson, every hotel and boarding house being looked into as the tireless search went on. For a moment Lorimer wished that he could be one of those foot soldiers again, a copper like young Kirsty Wilson, not a senior officer who had to delegate so much to others.

  Rooting out the terrorists was one thing that he could not delegate, however. The man from MI6 had made that very clear indeed.

  ‘Not go to Mull?’ Maggie put down the salad bowl that she had been drying and looked at her husband. ‘Oh.’

  A muscle twitched in Lorimer’s jaw. It had been another long day, and breaking the news about cancelling their holiday seemed insignificant against the dangers lurking within the city.

  ‘It’s difficult,’ he told her. ‘To do with the Commonwealth Games.’

  ‘Something you can’t tell me?’ Maggie gave a wintry smile. ‘Security stuff?’

  Lorimer sighed. ‘One day I might be able to,’ he said at last. ‘Oh Mags, come here.’ He buried his face in her shoulder as she stepped into his arms. ‘You must get sick of my job at times.’ There was no reply, just a tightening of her grasp around his waist, reminding Lorimer that he was one of the lucky ones to have such an understanding wife.

  ‘All off,’ the big man grunted, glaring at the reflection of the man in the mirror.

  The tattoo artist nodded. The man seated before him, a hasty towel wrapped around his neck, was the boss and anything he demanded had to be satisfied. Harry Temperland picked up the thin-bladed scissors and began to snip, his eyes trained on the face of the owner of the tattoo studio rather than the locks of red-gold hair that were falling to the floor at his feet.

  McAlpin would have preferred to flee the city, knowing that he was a wanted man, but he had decided instead to call in favours from those who owed him big time, Temperland included. The ageing hippy had been lucky to keep this place on, his gift as an artist his one saving grace. The Celtic designs adorning McAlpin’s body were proof enough of the man’s consummate skills.

  McAlpin had turned up last night on Worsley’s doorstep, the older man’s face turning as white as his hair as he’d bundled his friend inside.

  ‘You know they’ve deselected you?’ he had said as McAlpin had headed into the main lounge, one hand on the blind cord to shut out any prying eyes.

  A grunt was all the big man had been able to muster as way of reply.

  ‘Want a drink?’ Worsley had already opened a cocktail cabinet full of bottles and lifted out a bottle of Glengoyne. ‘Whisky?’

  McAlpin’s glare and nod as he’d slumped into the squashy armchair were answer enough.

  ‘That young guy, Number Six, he’s been given your job with the Aussies,’ Worsley had told him as he’d poured generous measures into two plain glass tumblers. ‘Straight or with water?’ he’d asked.

  ‘Wee drop o’ water,’ McAlpin had said shortly, remembering how his eyes had followed the old man as he’d disappeared into the adjacent kitchen to fill a little brown jug.

  ‘Say when,’ Worsley had murmured, handing the big man his glass and carefully pouring a trickle of water into it.

  ‘Nuff!’ McAlpin had exclaimed, taking the glass and downing the dram in one greedy gulp.

  ‘Another?’

  ‘Just bring me the bottle,’ he’d told him.

  Now, as he watched the hair being shorn from his head, then the foam applied to his beard, McAlpin wondered if Worsley would be as good as his word. He had promised to find the best forger in the East End, someone who would take a new photo and make it look old, give the big man a new identity. It was just a pity about the tattoos, Worsley had said, as the Glengoyne was emptied for the last time; looking at his heavily tattooed arms in the mirror, Kenneth Gordon McAlpin knew he was going to be hard pushed to conceal these intricate blue and green patterns from sight.

  ‘Goes without saying I’ve never been here,’ he said, catching Temperland’s eye.

  ‘Sure, boss.’ Harry Temperland nodded, the razor in one hand. ‘Never saw you today or any other day,’ he agreed as the blade cut through the first springy curls of the big man’s beard.

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  Had anyone noticed the two men walking by the pond in Queen’s Park, they might have been forgiven for assuming that they were Mormons discussing their next missionary visit. Both men were dressed smartly in suits and ties, document cases tucked under their arms, but a closer look would have shown their expressions to be less joyous than the perpetual smiles fixed to the faces of those latter-day saints.

  ‘It’s serious,’ Petrie told the tall, thin man walking by his side, a man known only to the rest of the group as Number Three. ‘That bloody detective’s determined to ferret us out.’

  ‘We could call it off,’ his companion suggested.

  ‘Never!’ Petrie wheeled around, catching the man’s sleeve. ‘I don’t believe you really mean that, Frank,’ he said.

  Frank Petrie made a face. He had been recruited by his cousin a long time ago, perhaps even as a child, listening to Robbie’s fervent stories about Scottish heroes and how they had been deprived of all their land by these foreign incomers. Now the plans they had made to take back what belonged to them seemed to be unravelling and Frank was beginning t
o wonder if they should admit defeat before the police and security services closed a net around them.

  ‘Maybe—’

  ‘Maybe I should have left you to rot in that stinking jail instead of spending thousands on the best lawyer money could buy!’

  The thin man shrugged his shoulders and walked slowly on. It always ended with the same old argument. Robbie had saved him from that hellish stretch. And he owed him. It was as simple as that.

  ‘There’s something we can do to make it all right,’ Robbie said, catching up with the taller man and flinging an arm over his shoulder.

  ‘Oh aye? What’s that?’

  Petrie’s eyes glittered with the fanatical gleam that the other men in the cell had grown to recognise.

  ‘Get rid of Lorimer,’ he said simply.

  The telephone rang in Lorimer’s office and he picked it up, giving his name as usual. It was a normal enough call, one from the Stirling office, a routine call about the initial explosion.

  There it was again. Faint but just discernible, a tiny noise on the line when the officer paused for breath.

  Had it been there before that engineer’s visit? Lorimer thought hard about it. No, he didn’t think so. Should he be concerned?

  Since Drummond’s arrival into his life, the detective superintendent had noticed how he had begun to question every little detail in a case; it seemed natural that having to work with the man from MI6 had heightened his suspicious nature. Should he make enquiries into these noises? Was someone infiltrating his telephone extension? He sat back for a moment, steepling his fingers as he considered what to do. Would their internal security people call him neurotic? He was under enough stress from these cases to make them believe that.

  Then, thinking of Drummond and what he would advise, Lorimer took a sheet of paper and began to write a note, not trusting either to email or telephone in delivering his message.

  He looked at his shoes, then gave them one more rub with the cloth, nodding in satisfaction at the shine on the leather. Everything mattered, he told himself. Looking smart had been dinned into him from childhood by his father, a man who had made a success of bending the rules while appearing to be perfect in so many other ways. Malcolm Black had inherited the old man’s name and dark good looks, as well as his knack of making money from other people’s ignorance. Nobody had ever caught the police constable who took backhanders from the shadier folk who passed his front door. Had any whiff of suspicion come to rest on him, it would have been treated with derision: not Malcolm Black!

  The younger Malcolm looked at the photograph of his father that sat in pride of place on the sideboard. Smiling down on him, the man in full Highland dress was still capable of making his son feel the sense of pride that had been part of their shared heritage.

  ‘“Royal is my race”,’ he’d often said, quoting the MacGregor motto before reminding the young boy of his duties. ‘We need to take it back again, son,’ he’d told him countless times, going over that dreadful time when the foreign incomers had stripped the clan of every vestige of decency. These English king’s men had branded their women, stripped them naked and whipped them through the streets, taken away the children to be sold into slavery, executed the men. And even after these atrocities had stopped, the remnant of the clan had been persecuted by the denial of their human rights. It was not only their names that had been outlawed. They were forbidden to meet in groups of more than two persons, and there was no giving food, water or shelter to a MacGregor for fear of reprisals. Even the Church was ordered to shut them out, denying the clan the holy sacraments of baptism, marriage, Holy Communion and the last rites. ‘We were like rats,’ his father had told him fiercely, ‘hunted down by dogs and bounty-hunters whose humanity had disappeared in the lust for the king’s gold.’

  Malcolm Black stood up and brushed invisible flecks from his well-pressed trousers. He was a trusted employee of Folkfirst Securities, a firm whose reputation had earned them several big contracts in recent years, including Police Scotland and the 2014 Commonwealth Games. That their duties included updating telephone services had been most fortuitous.

  It was during a conference on security that he had encountered the man whose identity badge had borne the name John MacGregor. Meeting the man whose vision held the key to the restoration of the MacGregor lands and fortunes had been a pivotal point in Black’s life. And given his own extensive knowledge of security systems, he had found it possible after much searching to locate the leader’s true identity. Not John MacGregor, but Robert Bruce Petrie, a man of wealth and privilege who had recruited several like-minded men to his cause. Petrie paid them well, but for Black the reward was not the money being amassed in his bank account but the thought of a Scotland freed from the tyrannies of its absentee landlords. Once the bomb had exploded there would be a sense of outrage from the public, and it was their aim to turn that outrage against their foreign masters and rally good honest Scots to the cause. To others the Proscription might be ancient history, but to Malcolm Black it was as if the last four hundred years had nourished resentment in every one of his ancestors, culminating in his own fierce desire for change. Wait for the referendum, some might have told him. But the time for waiting was over as far as he was concerned. The time for action was now.

  Petrie had insisted that getting rid of Detective Superintendent Lorimer was of paramount importance, and Black smiled as he recalled how his own part in that was being played out. They had infiltrated the heart of the man’s working environment, although bugging the offices in Stewart Street had taken months of painstaking work, Black posing as a telecommunications engineer on several occasions. Now it was up to him to reach into Lorimer’s domestic life too. Like most policemen, Lorimer was aware of the need for a home alarm, and today Mr Black from Folkfirst Securities would be at his property on Glasgow’s Southside to check that everything was in working order. By the time he left, there would be eyes and ears secreted in the Lorimers’ house, devices planted to help them bring down one of the people who seemed to stand in the way of their success.

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  Hide in full sight, Worsley had suggested, and McAlpin had nodded his grudging agreement. No one would be looking for a short-haired, clean-shaven man whose shirtsleeves and double cuffs hid his snaking tattoos, the former weightlifter told himself. He’d hail a taxi in Gordon Street outside Glasgow Central Station, he decided, crossing the road along with other pedestrians. A quick trip to that place in Dennistoun should help pick up Shereen and Asa’s trail. He’d find the pair of them, and when he did, there would be two less bitches on the loose to make trouble for him.

  McAlpin sat in the back of the cab, silently looking out at the city he knew like the back of his pale, freckled hand. George Square was awash with banners and flags now, the melee of tourists everywhere adding to the growing excitement of the approaching Games. They were still on for 23 July, Worsley had told him. And it gave the big man looking out at the grand City Chambers no little satisfaction to imagine the shock and horror that would follow the explosion out at Parkhead. Pity for the footie fans, of course, but some insurance company would take care of that little problem, he thought as the cab’s meter ticked on.

  In minutes McAlpin was thrusting some notes into the cabby’s hand and striding away towards the close mouth of the tenement building where the moneylender lived.

  He listened for a reply from the insistent buzzer, stepping back a little to catch a glimpse of the twitching curtain high above the street before a familiar thickly accented voice asked, ‘Who is it?’

  ‘It’s me, Stefan. You know fine who I am,’ McAlpin growled. ‘Probably smelt me coming, you old bugger.’

  He heard the chuckle, then the door was released and McAlpin stepped into the gloom of the close and headed swiftly up the stairs to the top of the building.

  It was the grandson who waited at the open door, and McAlpin thrust past him, deliberately knocking the boy’s skinny shoulder, making him gasp
.

  ‘Right, Stefan, where are they?’ McAlpin grabbed the old man by his arms and lifted him bodily from the chair where he had been sitting in front of the television.

  Stefan Kovary opened his mouth to scream, his gold front tooth gleaming in the light, but no sound came, the breath knocked out of him as he was slammed against a wall.

  ‘Where are they?’ McAlpin repeated, his hands around the old man’s throat. ‘Swanson and the girl. They must have come to you for money!’

  He released the moneylender long enough for the old man to choke out a reply.

  ‘She came, yes, she did.’ He nodded, eyes bulging as he saw the big man’s hands looming over him. He would shake him like a dog shakes a rat before it kills, and the Hungarian knew this, blind terror making him stutter out the words. ‘J-just the fat woman, n-nobody else.’

  McAlpin let him go and the old Hungarian slumped to the floor.

  ‘How much did you give her?’

  ‘Three hundred, no more than that, I swear!’ Stefan squeaked, eyes darting to the open doorway, but there was no slim figure hovering there to effect his rescue, his grandson having made himself scarce.

  ‘Address?’

  ‘She said she was staying at your place,’ Stefan whined in an injured tone that was soon drowned out in a stream of invective from the red-haired man towering above him.

  ‘What about her first payment?’

  ‘Tomorrow,’ Stefan replied quickly.

  Their eyes met, and in that moment it was clear to Stefan Kovary that he would never recover the roll of notes that he had lent to the Jamaican woman. If McAlpin was seeking her, she would know better than to turn up here.

  And as he dropped his gaze, the Hungarian was certain of one thing more: the big man whose facial appearance had changed so dramatically was not only desperate to find these women but was also scared for his own life.