Bred in the Bone

by Christopher Brookmyre

  The subject vehicle veered right to get out of the upcoming filter lane, a manoeuvre Jasmine guessed had been suggested by its sat-nav. The subject wasn’t from around here, which pretty much went without saying given that he was driving a bright yellow Maserati. In Glasgow, even the drug dealers drew the line at that kind of ostentation. There was bling and then there was painting a target on yourself.

  ‘Foxtrot Five. Lights through to green no deviation Broomielaw. Still two cars cover, but I think I can hear his stereo.’

  ‘Echo Two. Can confirm audio. Subject’s windows are down and his music is shite. Repeat: subject’s music is shite.’

  Foxtrot Five was her call-sign. Harry Deacon had initially assigned her Juliet Six for Galt Linklater work, but she requested the change in honour of her late uncle Jim. Foxtrot Five had been the call-sign Jim gave her when she first went to work for him, and she still recalled with embarrassment how long it took her to get the hang of the radio protocols, starting with the basic one of saying your own call-sign first to identify yourself as the next speaker.

  Strictly speaking, Jim wasn’t her uncle. He was her mum’s cousin, but after she died, in that time when everybody told her ‘if there’s anything I can do, just ask’, he was the one person who actually did something. Jasmine had been forced to drop out of drama school, and he gave her a job, albeit not one she had wanted or considered herself remotely cut out for at the time. She had assumed he was doing it purely out of his natural generosity and a sense of familial obligation, but it turned out that there was a less altruistic reason for her recruitment: the same reason Galt Linklater kept her on a retainer and why Harry Deacon had been pleading down the phone yesterday.

  Jim had been an ex-cop. Harry Deacon was an ex-cop. Just about everybody at Galt Linklater, in fact, was an ex-cop, and the problem with ex-cops, when it came to surveillance work, was that they looked like ex-cops. Not only did Jasmine look nothing like an ex-cop, the host of people she could plausibly look like made her very effective at this game. She was the one they never saw coming, the one the guys at Galt Linklater referred to as their ninja.

  They also referred to her as Crash, ever since she had engaged in an uncharacteristically extreme gambit in order to serve papers on a particularly elusive subject. It was a nickname she had encouraged because it helped supersede the use of ‘Jazz’. This had been a predictable informal handle throughout her school and college years, and one towards which she had been entirely ambivalent until a couple of years back. Following one of the most difficult conversations of her life, she couldn’t hear the word without thinking of what it represented, and none of that was good.

  Andy Smith’s voice broke over the airwaves.

  ‘Just got a shout from HQ,’ he reported. ‘Wee traffic bulletin: stay clear of Shawburn Boulevard. It’s a car park right now. Major incident. Polis everywhere. Just so you know.’

  ‘Thanks for that,’ said Martin. ‘Won’t affect us, though. A tenner says subject is heading for the Apple shop.’

  ‘No bet,’ said Jasmine. ‘On this guy’s list of places worth visiting in Glasgow, that will be number one. There will not be a number two.’

  ‘He’s an artist, though,’ Martin replied. ‘Apple tech is for creative types, remember. It’s his creativity that draws him towards it. As opposed to, say, the fact that he’d be baffled by a mouse with more than one button on it.’

  The mark was known, these days at least, by the name D-Blazer, a boyband refugee who had successfully reinvented himself as a rap star and was playing two nights at the SECC. In his lip-synch and choreography days he had been plain old Darren Blake, trading on an Essex wideboy image to distinguish himself from his more clean-cut fellow recruits with whom he had been packaged together by a record label to form the wet and insipid Desire.

  However, even plain old Darren Blake had been a calculated construct. D-Blazer’s real name was Darrien Hopscombe-Blanchard, and while it was true that he was an Essex boy, it was fair to say he was trading on certain misperceptions about what was, after all, one of the most prosperous areas of the UK. We weren’t talking Dagenham or Romford here. He had indeed grown up in the county of the three swords, but as his family had owned a substantial swathe of it for several centuries, this was hardly surprising. Martin had suggested that the Blazer in his rapper name referred to his father’s golf-club attire.

  Jasmine followed his Maserati through the city, dropping back now and again to let someone else take point. If Darrien had punched the Apple shop’s address into his sat-nav he’d be in for a disappointment, as it was on a wholly pedestrianised thoroughfare.

  His journey was taking him further north, past all the obvious routes towards Buchanan Street, before heading east.

  They had picked him up at his hotel, the Crowne Plaza, which was just next to the exhibition centre. There was a tour bus parked at the venue, but that was only for the dancers, backing singers and those loser types who actually played musical instruments. D-Blazer preferred to take his own wheels on tour, partly because he liked the chance to drive his toyz around, and partly because he liked to be seen. This made him, as Martin had implied, a private investigator’s dream.

  ‘Subject proceeding right right right on to Renfrew Street,’ Andy relayed. ‘I should maybe have taken that bet.’

  ‘You’d be ten pounds down,’ Jasmine told him. ‘Concierge at the hotel will have told him to park at the Buchanan Galleries.’

  The reason for Harry’s largesse and for Galt Linklater’s urgency was that D-Blazer was currently the subject of a paternity claim. A nineteen-year-old student from Chelmsford by the name of Nikki Ainsworth maintained that he had fathered her baby girl, Danielle, during a six-month affair that the twenty-seven-year-old rapper terminated once he discovered she was up the jaggy. D-Blazer, for his part, claimed that she had ‘flung herself at me but I hardly never went near her’, and that she was now ‘just vibing negs into my aura’, by which Jasmine interpreted him to mean that her claims were merely a nuisance act motivated by spite.

  Nonetheless, for all he was trying to appear nonchalant in his dismissal, Mr Hopscombe-Blanchard was refusing to submit any DNA for a paternity test. In light of this, the word ‘hardly’ took on a quite pivotal significance within his previous utterance.

  ‘Foxtrot Five. Subject is a stop stop stop and park at Buchanan Galleries car park level five. I have eyeball and am proceeding on foot.’

  Jasmine switched to her earpiece and climbed out of the van as Andy and Martin confirmed their own positions. They would be parked in a matter of seconds, then they would enter the mall at different levels, catching up to inconspicuously commence a three-way foot follow.

  Jasmine was soon able to assure them there was no rush. D-Blazer was setting a very easy pace in order to maximise his chances of being recognised.

  ‘Subject is proceeding south south south and moving as though he is the Pink Panther bursting for a shite,’ she informed them, describing the ludicrous gangsta gait he was rocking.

  He was affecting an air of being lost in the music playing through his absurdly encumbering gold Beats headphones, trying to look like he was in one of his own videos.

  Jasmine privately suspected he had the music way down just in case somebody called his name and he didn’t hear it, but as she monitored his progress through the mall, she observed that he wasn’t short of attention, and came to understand the real purpose of the headphones. They were a prop so that he could select whose solicitations he had or hadn’t noticed. His hearing was pretty sharp if you were young, female and pretty, though apparently he would settle for big tits as a substitute for this last criterion. The first two were non-negotiable.

  Jasmine stopped and had a glance at her reflection in a shop window. She wasn’t wearing jogging bottoms and an Aran sweater, but nor was she looking ready to hit a club right then.

  Harry had only secured her services last night: he hadn’t divulged the details until she showed up at Galt Linkla
ter’s offices this morning. She was wearing a reliably flexible (i.e. very lived-in) pair of jeans and a rather shapeless long-sleeved top, chosen both for comfort in the event of sitting for hours in a van, and to prevent anyone being able to peek through gaps in her blouse in the event that she was sharing said van with certain GL personnel.

  She got out her phone and called Harry. He took a while to answer, and sounded a little distracted when he finally did.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Harry. It’s me.’

  ‘Who’s me?’

  ‘Jasmine,’ she told him, trying not to sound irritated. Time could be an issue.

  ‘Jasmine. Christ, sorry. Have you got a new phone? If you have, you should really update us on your—’

  ‘I don’t have a new phone.’

  ‘Shite. That means I must have deleted you as a contact on mine.’

  ‘I hope that’s not a roundabout way of letting me go.’

  ‘As if. No, just me being a techno-numpty as usual. What can I do for you?’

  ‘I need budget approval on a couple of emergency items.’

  ‘Like what?’

  She told him.

  ‘Just as long as you keep receipts for your purchases. And you wear them to the Christmas night out.’

  ‘Sure, Harry. That’s totally going to happen.’

  She hung up then told Martin to make ground and take point.

  ‘I’ll intercept him on his way back to his car,’ she explained.

  ‘Why, where are you going just now?’

  ‘Where do you think? I’m in the Buchanan Galleries and I have no Y chromosome. I’m going shopping.’

  ‘Delta Four,’ broke in Andy. ‘Where do they sell those?’

  She assumed he was joking.

  Jasmine engaged in an unaccustomed bout of speed-shopping, quickly scouring the stores for the most pneumatic push-up bra she could find, then hunting for a top that would best showcase the resulting cleavage.

  She knew she had to pitch it just right. It wasn’t a question of grabbing something low-cut or popping open a few buttons on a tight blouse. The look was not supposed to suggest she was about to start her pole-dancing shift. She needed to carry off an image that seemed plausible for cutting about the shops at this time of day, but that in D-Blazer’s eyes would be interpreted as ‘I don’t mind showing my tits off at half eleven in the morning, so just imagine what else I must be up for’.

  Once she had bought what she needed, she headed back to the changing room she had most recently visited, showing the woman on duty the carrier bags and receipts. Her name-badge said Collette.

  ‘I need to wear these now,’ she explained.

  ‘Prêt-à-porter right enough,’ Collette replied, with a precisely pitched combination of dryness and warmth that Jasmine reckoned Glaswegians must learn as a rite of passage.

  As Jasmine changed she heard the ongoing commentary from Martin and Andy in her earpiece. The subject was doing his best to hold court in the Apple store and was starting to annoy the management, who were used to all customer adulation being focused exclusively upon their products.

  Jasmine was relieved, though not surprised. If it turned out D-Blazer had blanked the Apple store and headed down to the Gallery of Modern Art to look at the latest installations, it would have ramifications for her chances of carrying this off. He was one of those London-centric wankers who thought modern everyday reality stopped at the M25, and with it his cares and woes. Galt Linklater had been given this job because it was assumed that, outside the capital, D-Blazer would be off his guard. This hypothesis would be supported by his gravitating towards regional satellites of his normal frame of reference: the Apple store, certain clothing chains, Nando’s. A trip to GoMA, for instance, might have indicated that he was engaged with his surroundings and more switched on than they were giving him credit for. It would also have made Jasmine pass out on the spot with sheer astonishment.

  She exited the changing rooms with her old clothes in the new bags, estimating from the reports that she would have time to hit the John Lewis make-up counters and let the demo girls do their worst.

  Collette gave her a brief assessment as she left, succinctly passing her judgment in merely two words: ‘Hello boys.’

  Jasmine just about managed to keep a smile off her face. Part of her was delighted, while another part told her she was going to hell for this.

  Hidden Content

  Catherine saw Forensics finally pull up at the rear of the forecourt. She guessed they had been held up in the tailback, without the blue light to clear a path. She went outside to meet them, leaving Laura and Zoe to work on Rose Royce.

  Beano was standing out on the pavement close to the exit. Catherine assumed he had walked Mrs Chalmers over there so that the ambulance would spare her – and him – a view inside the Bentley, but he was beckoning Catherine with a wave.

  ‘We might have caught a wee break,’ he said as she approached. ‘Mrs Chalmers was right about what she heard. Look.’

  He squatted down at the end of the dwarf wall, where it resumed on the left-hand side of the exit towards the dual carriageway. It comprised red brickwork beneath a series of light grey slabs, the nearest of which was unique in having been painted white. Presumably this was to denote the inside border of the exit, or perhaps someone had intended to paint the lot and then decided he couldn’t be arsed.

  ‘The paint’s quite fresh, and it’s had a bash,’ Beano said, picking at it with his fingers to illustrate where it was already coming away. ‘So there will be a scrape and a transfer of paint on the left-hand flank of the shooter’s vehicle. Match the samples and we can place it here for sure.’

  ‘Well spotted,’ she told him. ‘And here’s just the people to tell.’

  Beano glanced across to where the pathologist Cal O’Shea and his assistant Aileen Bruce were pulling on plastic overalls.

  ‘Yeah, I’ll direct them to the paint and you direct them to the birthday boy.’

  Poor Beano. As murder scenes went, this was hardly the set of a Rob Zombie movie, but he was suffering all the same. To be fair, it wasn’t as though he had the screaming heebie-jeebies; he’d just be a lot happier once the body was covered by a sheet.

  ‘Officer Thompson, why don’t you take Mrs Chalmers down the road to a coffee shop and wait there until she can get someone to drive her home and sit with her?’

  ‘Oh, no,’ Mrs Chalmers insisted, as Catherine anticipated she would. The straight-arrow types never wanted to make a fuss, even when they were suffering from borderline post-traumatic stress disorder. ‘I can drive myself. I’m fine.’

  ‘I’m sure you are,’ Catherine told her. ‘After witnessing something like this, people are sometimes so fine that they drive through a red at the first set of lights and head straight into the oncoming traffic. Go with Officer Thompson. Call someone who can come and get you.’

  Mrs Chalmers rather feebly nodded her assent. The scenario Catherine had just painted must have struck her as all too plausible and she suddenly didn’t feel quite so sure of herself.

  Beano gave Catherine an appreciative look.

  ‘When does this stuff stop freaking you out?’ he asked quietly, out of the witness’s earshot.

  ‘You’re doing fine, Beano,’ she assured him with a pat on the arm.

  He didn’t point out that she hadn’t answered his question.

  That was because she didn’t like what the answer said about her. She didn’t know when the sight of a murder victim had stopped bothering her, and hadn’t even been conscious at the time of passing through such a watershed, but she knew it had been a very long time ago. Of course, every so often one could get under her skin, but she couldn’t have said when that had last happened.

  The sight of Stevie Fullerton buckled up and buckled over in his Bentley certainly wasn’t going to do it. Her great fear, of course, was that now nothing could.

  She was always more vulnerable to these thoughts when Cal O’Shea was pre
sent. The pathologist liked to joke about how sanguine she was around murder scenes, which was generally interpreted as a humorous play on the gags and remarks he had to endure about spending his days cutting up dead bodies. He liked to make out that he found her intimidating and ‘spooky’. This could also be interpreted as deflection, but Catherine was never sure to what extent he was actually joking. Cal had this penetrating and inscrutable gaze, the kind that felt like he could see beneath the skin of the living as analytically as his scalpel let him reveal the secrets of the dead. It piqued a paranoia that he could see inside her, and she was afraid of what he might have found.

  She thought Aileen was moving a little deliberately and wondered if she’d done her back, then she turned just enough for Catherine to notice the protuberance that was nudging her overalls. Of course: she remembered hearing that Aileen was pregnant, but it had been a couple of months since she’d seen her.

  It briefly struck Catherine as quite jarring to see a bright young woman, blossoming with child, spending her day focused upon a murdered corpse. Maybe that meant she wasn’t totally numbed to the horrors after all.

  It seemed incongruous but, on reflection, imminent new birth around recent death was pure cycle-of-life stuff. The wean was in the womb, for God’s sake. It wasn’t like Aileen had taken along a five-year-old on Bring Your Daughter To Work Day.

  She spent a few minutes catching up, asking how Aileen was getting on, trading a few stories about the debilitating effects of having placenta-brain. Cal left them to it, heading off to get started.

  When Catherine broke off from chatting, Cal seemed to have disappeared. She walked carefully around the forecourt, tracing an imaginary perimeter surrounding the victim, and found him crouched down at the open door of the Bentley.

  ‘Are you going to introduce us?’ he asked without glancing back. ‘He’s rather shy. Perhaps if you broke the ice . . .’