Bred in the Bone

by Christopher Brookmyre

  ‘History?’ she scoffed. ‘The rumour I heard was that Fullerton tried to kill him, and up until two years ago it was widely believed that he’d been successful. I also heard that this was in retaliation for Fallan disappearing Stevie’s cousin. I don’t think that kind of thing is ever ancient enough to be considered water under the bridge.’

  ‘I’m just saying, it was more than twenty years ago, a wee bit before my shift started. I’m not sure I know much more than you do about that stuff, and when I say “know”, I’m just talking about rumours I heard, same as you. Gangland mythology: a mixture of sensationalist gossip, wishful thinking, calculated misinformation, Chinese whispers and revisionist bravado. Twist that kaleidoscope for two decades and you’re not going to see anything you can put much faith in.’

  Catherine had to concede the point.

  ‘I’ve got officers talking to Fullerton’s people but I’m not expecting them to give us anything. I’m sure they’ll all be baffled as to how anybody could possibly wish the slightest harm upon such a gentle spirit and widely respected pillar of the community.’

  ‘All the while quietly making their own inquiries as to who might be behind the hit. That’s assuming they don’t know you’ve arrested Fallan, but even then, they’ll be working on their conspiracy theories.’

  ‘Fallan did used to work for Tony McGill,’ she suggested.

  ‘And so did Stevie Fullerton,’ Abercorn replied. ‘That’s Glasgow bam politics for you: it can be labyrinthine in its complexity and yet staringly obvious at the same time. The further back you go, the murkier it gets, and this particular love triangle goes all the way back to the late eighties.’

  As he spoke Catherine thought of the one element of this that definitely had its roots in a time two decades past, and revisited her unease at how it had resurfaced.

  ‘There was a symbol daubed on Fullerton’s forehead,’ she told Abercorn. ‘We’ll be keeping it out of general circulation because – among other reasons – we don’t know what the hell it means.’

  She drew a version of it on a notepad, her hand trembling a little as she gripped the pen.

  ‘You ever seen this before?’

  Abercorn stared at it for a moment then shook his head, but he tore the page from the notepad and took it with him when he left. So that wasn’t necessarily a no.

  Born in a Stable

  The hen had bled its last. She placed its body delicately on the block and took the bucket over to the drain at the foot of the thickest roan pipe, a few feet to the left of the kitchen windows. The grate was discoloured, stained by thousands of such outpourings as she was depositing now, going back at least a hundred years. She would rinse out the bucket and fill it with water, as hot as the kitchen tap could produce, then immerse the chicken for a couple of minutes for ease of plucking. No great sense of timeless ritual about that, though it had been going on for precisely as long. Just mess and tedium.

  She hated the plucking far more than gutting the bird, had done ever since the yuck factor had abated through familiarity and repetition. There was a precision to removing the hen’s insides contrasting unfavourably with the sense of chaos she felt tugging the clutches of feathers from its skin. The gutting process she regarded as good practice for when she would be a vet: the controlled incision, the separation of the organs, the delicate touch required in excising the liver and bile duct, the rupture of which could turn the bird an extremely unappetising shade of green.

  No, she felt no more squeamish about the prospect of eviscerating a dead chicken than she had about killing it, though it brought a flush to her cheeks to remember the embarrassment it had caused her at school a few weeks back when she made the mistake of mentioning this domestic duty among a group of her classmates. Her words had barely left her lips when she realised they constituted another gift to the cliques who already viewed her with gleeful disdain: an awkward oddity, precipitated upon the perfection of their posh little circles from some stinky rural backwater. A farmer’s daughter, would you believe, a filthy-fingered throwback to a primitive age, presumably existing without running water, television and hairspray.

  As she saw the looks, first of revulsion and then of smirking delight, she understood sharply how what she considered mundane to the point of being a mere chore was so removed from the normal lives of her peers as to seem horrific to them, and she some kind of freak or monster. She got the very strong impression that they thought this was something she ought to feel ashamed about, in some cases because it was barbaric and in others because it marked her out as of a very low caste. They might eat chickens, but didn’t generally mix with the kind of people who were paid to kill and prepare them. However, she didn’t feel ashamed and she didn’t feel monstrous. Instead she saw the rest of them as all the more cosseted, all the more bloody useless.

  She had moved to the new school start of third year. Coming in two years late it was inevitable that she would find it cliquey, and as a private school it certainly didn’t disappoint her expectation that some of her fellow pupils would be demonstrably snobby. However, she had endured cliqueyness and snobbery at her old school too, the difference being that at Laurel Row the criteria for denigration would not include being a virgin or getting straight As in her exams. The teaching was undeniably better than at Calderburn High, assisted in part by the lessons not being constantly interrupted by attention-seeking headbangers, and for that she would endure any amount of immature bitchiness if it served her academic ambitions.

  Not that it didn’t sting to have silly little girls who had never done a hand’s turn think they could look down on her as their socioeconomic inferior because dear daddy was in banking rather than farming. It burned all the more, in fact, given that such snobbery was the very reason she needed to make the switch to Laurel Row if she wanted to get in to vet school.

  You needed an A in both Higher physics and Higher biology in order to be accepted for veterinary medicine at Glasgow University, which was an understandable requirement; however, there was a subtle and nasty piece of social filtering at play in the further stipulation that these must be acquired at the same sitting. It looked innocent enough on paper, to anyone who didn’t know that time-tabling commitments across Scottish comprehensives dictated that physics and biology be taught during the same periods. Schools didn’t have the staff to offer all classes at all times, so there were certain standard conflicts and you had to choose: geography or history, French or art, physics or biology. Nor would the Glasgow Vet School accept an A for one in fifth year and the other in sixth: you had to get both at a single shot, and to do that you had to go private – by which means the Glasgow Vet School could keep out the scruff.

  She recalled her parents railing against the inherent snobbery of it – an acridity to her dad’s anger fuelled by the money he had paid out to vets over the years – but there was no principled stance from them once they realised how deeply she felt her vocation. The only principle they stood by was of striving to give their daughters the best chance in life that they could afford, and so they dug deep and paid the fees (not to mention bought the books and the jotters and the uniforms and the rail tickets and the bus fares) that allowed her to attend Laurel Row.

  So for all their efforts and sacrifices, she was never going to moan about getting sent out to prepare a chicken on a cold Saturday morning while her pampered classmates were no doubt still tucked up in bed, and nor would she nag her sister about shirking her turn, Lisa, who had never made any fuss about the fact that she still went to plain old Calderburn.

  She emerged from the kitchen with a bucket of scalding hot water and a thick pair of rubber gloves. It was as she made her way back towards the block, in the centre of her blood-painted rune, that she noticed the bottom half of one of the stable doors to be marginally ajar. It was the leftmost door of the three-stall barn, where her treasured Lysander was stabled. Lisa’s horse Demetrius was in the centre, with the third stall empty since their mother, Hippolyta, had died the pr
eceding November.

  It was normal for the top section of a door to be left unlatched overnight, but never the bottom half. She strode to the block and immersed the bird, from which closer perspective she was able to observe that the door was in fact not ajar, but only appeared to be so because it was off its higher hinge and consequently hanging askew, the bottom-right corner resting against the ground an inch or so inside.

  She felt something course through her, a wave of deepest dread disproportionate to this small jarring note that had precipitated it. Fear that anything should be wrong with Lysander, perhaps, heightened by a guilty anxiety that any such calamity had in some way been provoked by her occult indulgence over the morning’s kill.

  As she unlatched the top half of the door and pulled it out towards herself, she was further disquieted not to see Lysander’s head emerge in typically immediate response. Then she heard a deep, wheezing sound from within, more like a discordant bray than his familiar whinny. She tugged impatiently at the bottom half of the door, feeling its true weight for the first time as it scraped against the ground. The rectangle of solid wood hauled the also-damaged bottom hinge further away from the frame and then collapsed forward, popping a screw and twisting the metalwork like an arm-wrestler in defeat.

  The low morning sun penetrated where it could inside the stables. Before she entered, the light picked out debris on the floor: a shattered wooden saddle rack, a bridle hanger mangled like a cheap umbrella in a gale, haynets ripped and scattered, stirrups, bits and girths strewn amid broken fragments of salt lick. And beneath it all a dark glistening, turning from black to the colour of a days-old bruise where the sunlight struck it.

  She tried to speak but no words came, only the sound of her heightened, gulping breath.

  Lysander’s head now responded to his awareness of her arrival, lifting meekly from where he lay on his side. His hindquarters were towards her, so at first she could see only the back of his head, that familiar silhouette of his ears and the poll between. Then as he turned his neck she saw that there was only a bloodied hole where his right eye should be.

  Inside her, the desire to run and the desire to be with him fought a mighty duel. The latter prevailed and she swallowed back her horror, scrambling down to the floor alongside him. The straw-strewn stone was sticky with blood, and she felt herself crumble as she saw its many sources. There were gashes all over his body, one as much as a foot long in his girth, another so deep along his barrel that she could see the white of his ribs.

  It was only as she asked herself what kind of beast could have got in and done this that it occurred to her to be scared.

  The Silent Treatment

  ‘Is his lawyer here?’ Catherine asked, catching up to Laura in the corridor outside the interview room. She was impatient to see Fallan braced but was determined there would be absolutely no errors. Experience had warned her that the slam-dunk cases could be the most vulnerable to technical errors; they slipped in due to complacency. Every i would be dotted, every t crossed. She wanted this to be airtight.

  ‘He hasn’t asked for one,’ Laura replied.

  ‘He’s refused?’

  ‘No. He hasn’t said anything.’

  ‘At all,’ added Beano. ‘Not even to confirm his name.’

  Catherine’s nose picked up that horrible antiseptic smell that came off whatever they mopped the floors with down here. She never got used to it. It made her think of Dettol and sick, the way her bedroom smelled for about a month when she had whooping cough as a kid.

  ‘It’s catching,’ she told them. ‘I just spoke briefly to Zoe Vernon. She’s been at the Old Croft Brasserie, talking to the folk Fullerton was with this morning. Emphasis on talking to. Very little coming back.’

  ‘The Glasgow omertà,’ sighed Laura, by way of acknowledging a complete lack of surprise.

  ‘The silence of the bams,’ said Beano. It was a familiar exchange.

  ‘Zoe told me she threw in Fallan’s name,’ Catherine went on. ‘She said there were practically exclamation marks appearing above their heads at that point, but when she asked what they knew about him they were claiming they’d never heard of the guy. Problem is, none of them want to admit to a relationship between themselves and Fallan or between Fallan and Fullerton because of the implications. We’re going to get nothing from these people, so let’s make this count.’

  ‘Do you want to take the lead, boss?’ Laura asked.

  ‘No. I won’t be backseat driving either. I’m just going to watch.’

  Beano held open the door and they filed in. Fallan glanced up briefly, taking in the personnel, then returned his focus to the Formica. Catherine noticed that she was the only one with whom he made even fleeting eye contact.

  Beano and Laura took seats across the table from Fallan, while Catherine stood behind them, leaning against the wall with her arms folded.

  In these confined quarters she was acutely conscious of his physical presence. She wondered how much damage he could inflict on the three of them, even with his hands cuffed, before back-up stormed in and wrestled him to the floor. It wasn’t merely his size, as he was roughly the same height as Beano, but something deeper that her instincts were responding to. He wore a loose dark green T-shirt, faded and sweat-stained. He was wiry in places, muscular in others, his skin tanned to a dirty, weathered-looking shade. He clearly belonged outdoors in a wide open space, and she realised that this was what was piquing her danger sensors. He was a creature out of his natural environment, the sense of power and threat he gave off inversely proportional to the size of the cage that was constraining him; a cage that she and two colleagues were currently sharing.

  She studied his posture as Laura began the interview. Catherine liked to think herself a practised reader of suspects’ non-verbal communication, but in this respect Fallan was talking in riddles. There was a vigilance about him and yet a resignation too, like he knew he was in for the long haul but couldn’t drop his guard. He seemed sullenly resentful and yet anxious, determined but not defiant.

  This was as much as anybody was going to learn, as body language was the only one in which he was prepared to communicate. Laura was firing out the questions, Beano occasionally chipping in with a follow-up, but Fallan’s lips remained completely still.

  ‘How long have you known Stevie Fullerton?’

  Silence.

  ‘When did you last speak to him?’

  Silence.

  ‘The way I heard it, Stevie tried to have you killed way back when. Left you for dead. Revenge is a powerful motive. One that, in my experience, juries don’t require a lot of imagination to get their heads around. Why did you decide to kill him after all these years? Could you just not quite let it go? Or did something change recently that made him a threat?’

  Silence. Silence. Silence.

  His expression remained impassive, never betraying any suggestion that they had laid a glove on him.

  ‘We found a handgun stashed in a specially welded niche underneath your vehicle.’

  Nothing.

  ‘We’ve got three witnesses who saw the gunman drive into the car wash in a green Land Rover Defender, two of them quoting a licence plate registered to your name.’

  Nothing.

  ‘Our witnesses also describe the vehicle as scraping a white-painted slab on the edge of a wall while driving away after the shooting. We observed a scrape and evidence of transferred white paint on the side of your vehicle at exactly the level of the slab.’

  Nothing.

  Fine, Catherine thought. Give us the Sitting Bull routine if you like, but there could only be one reason why none of this was coming as a surprise.

  He glanced up every so often, occasionally making eye contact with one of them, but it was random, sporadic, never in direct response to a remark, far less indicating that any particular words had struck home.

  The closest they came was when Laura showed him a drawing of the sign daubed on Fullerton’s head.

  ‘W
hat does this symbol mean to you?’ she asked, turning it around and sliding it across the table towards him.

  He stared at it for a moment and then looked up, but not at Laura. His eyes went instead to Catherine. She wasn’t sure what she saw in them: curiosity perhaps, and maybe nothing at all, just the projections of her imagination. Admittedly, she wasn’t at her most coldly analytical right then. Her heart was thumping and she could hear her own pulse thundering in her ears. If his gaze had been greater than fleeting he would have gleaned more from her in that moment than they had prised from him throughout the entire interview.

  The only time Fallan registered a response was when Laura showed him the stills. Time-stamped frames of your own car approaching and leaving a murder scene would be a hand to test anybody’s poker face, but Fallan’s was as good as she’d seen. There was no dismay, no oh-shit realisation, but there was something. It wasn’t in his eyes, or even his expression, but in his body language. As he looked at those irrefutable images something resolved, something was implicitly understood.

  ‘So as you can see,’ Laura told him, ‘given what we’re holding, your silence isn’t doing you any favours. You’re covered from all sides. The sooner you surrender, the easier it will be on you.’

  That was when Catherine belatedly deduced what was really going on here: why he was edgy but patient, impassive yet alert. It was like he was cornered, trapped behind enemy lines, but lying low, assessing his situation, getting the lie of the land. She realised that Fallan was the only one garnering any information right now, and that this interview was so far only benefiting him.

  She suggested they all take a break. Laura didn’t need to be asked twice.

  Beano went off to get everybody some tea. Fallan hadn’t responded to the offer, but Beano brought him one anyway, dropping a couple of sugar sachets and a swizzle stick next to the plastic cup.

  Fallan reached for it as Catherine took a sip of her own, the fumes filling her nostrils as her eyes locked on to his fingers closing around the cup. There were marks on all of his knuckles, an ancient scarring that spoke silently and chillingly of brutality but that disturbed her in a manner far disproportionate even to this gruesomely suggestive spectacle.