Bred in the Bone

by Christopher Brookmyre

  Every little boy wants to believe his dad is a hero. Despite being repeatedly beaten and terrorised by him, and despite witnessing all that he’d done to his mum – maybe even because of all those things – Glen needed to believe that his dad was one of the good guys.

  About ten minutes later the man got out, dropping his empty can on the grass. He walked with his head down towards the Jag, Glen still unable to see his face. Then there was a whistle and a flash as a bottle rocket streaked across the sky, launched from a nearby back green. The man looked up for the source and his face was lit by the rocket’s final explosion, those tantalising hints of familiarity about him now made explicit.

  If there was any spark of idealism left in Glen, then it burnt out in the flare of that firework and was equally extinguished by the time its remnants fell to earth.

  And now Glen was standing in his front room.

  He looked mid-forties, older than Glen would have expected, something paradoxically accentuated by the jeans and sweatshirt he was wearing, which looked like they belonged on a younger man. He seemed shorter and slighter of build than Glen had assumed, but this was resultant of McGill being light on his feet, like a boxer, a quickness and energy about him. There was a scar along the left side of his jaw, another on his forehead, but his expression was bright and lively, which gave him the appearance of a retired sportsman rather than a crook.

  He offered a hand, giving Glen a firm but brief grip. Glen was grateful for the brevity. He didn’t like shaking hands with anyone. It was supposed to be a form of mutual politeness, but to him it always felt like they were taking something from him, something he was obliged to give whether he felt like it or not.

  ‘Glen,’ he said uncertainly, pondering the redundancy of telling his name to someone who already clearly knew a lot about him. ‘You sent them? How did you know?’

  ‘You’ve been the talk of the steamie since you ripped the Egans. Doesn’t take much to read the tea-leaves. You must have known it was coming.’

  ‘I should have,’ Glen admitted. ‘I thought I’d given them reason to think twice.’

  ‘Then you don’t understand the game. It’s like the laws of physics: for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction; except in Glasgow it’s a thoroughly unequal over-reaction. The Egans are a couple of heidthebaws, but they’ve got friends. Their old man that’s in Peterhead, he was a pure psycho, but he was always pally with Tam Beattie. You heard of Tam Beattie?’

  Glen looked him sharply in the eye before nodding. It seemed mutually understood that this question and response were an acknowledgment of what Glen knew about McGill as much as what he knew about his rival.

  ‘The Egans do a few jobs for him here and there. What the polis call “known associates”. So if you put doon two guys that do work for Beattie, then his people have to give it back ten times worse. Cannae let it get around that folk can take liberties. Which is why they’ll come after you again – unless you’ve got friends too.’

  Rate of Attrition

  Jasmine had always imagined her mother attending school somewhere that looked like a set from a Dickens adaptation, but Croftbank Secondary had been built in the seventies and must have looked state of the art when her mum went there. It was showing its age in places, but its headmaster, Dan Quigley, was keen to impress upon her how, in certain other respects, it was in far better shape than ever.

  He had insisted on giving her a tour, keen to showcase the place. He may have been under the impression that she was a reporter, a misconception Jasmine had courted on the phone to the secretary by choosing her words carefully and saying she was ‘looking into the story’ of a former pupil. She had added that this pupil was a contemporary of Stevie Fullerton, in order to provide context but so as to stress that the late drug dealer was not the focus of her enquiries.

  ‘The cult of the hard man has been a blight on education in this city,’ Quigley told her. ‘I’m not from round here myself, but I grew up somewhere just like it. Kids need role models they can relate to, and for a long time that was sadly true of Mr Fullerton. When the best-known, and apparently most successful, guy who ever went to your school is a drug-dealing crime boss, it can’t be much of a motivation to get the head down in geography, you know? But that’s all changing now. We’ve got a former pupil who works at CERN. Another who’s a CGI animator: she worked on the Avengers movie.’

  ‘Guess it also helps when the hard men end up getting murdered in broad daylight.’

  Quigley wore a strained expression.

  ‘Guys like Fullerton were let down too,’ he replied. ‘Nobody raised their expectations.’

  Jasmine had found another photograph of Stevie Fullerton with her mum and the other girl. It was loose, down at the bottom of the box, yellowed Sellotape folded over its corners from where it had perhaps once been stuck to a bedroom wall. It showed the three of them, along with another guy, sitting in a pub. Jasmine guessed her mum had been seventeen, maybe even younger, all dressed up to look old enough. They appeared excited, thrilled perhaps to be there: coming through the rite of passage of getting served, or at least not getting chucked out after the oldest-looking one buys the drinks.

  ‘When something like this shooting happens,’ Quigley added, ‘there’s a danger that it can reinforce people’s perceptions of Croftbank, and that filters down to these kids. If you’re writing about Stevie Fullerton, I’d like you to see the wider picture.’

  ‘I’m not writing about anybody,’ she corrected him. ‘I’m trying to track down someone who was at school here with him.’

  ‘So you’re not a reporter?’ he asked, a little confused, but curious rather than annoyed. ‘What are you then?’

  ‘I’m a private investigator,’ Jasmine answered. She didn’t feel so self-conscious saying that any more. It had long since started to fit.

  ‘And who is it you’re looking for?’

  The girl’s name was Ciara. Jasmine had established that from multiple captions in the scrapbook, having initially read her mum’s teenage handwriting as Clara. Given that she had no surname to go on, she was very grateful that it wasn’t Clare.

  Jasmine took an envelope from her bag and showed him the picture from the school trip, telling him the first name. She didn’t mention the other girl in the picture.

  ‘I reckoned there couldn’t have been many Ciaras at Croftbank Secondary back then, so I guessed this was as good a place as any to find out who she was.’

  Quigley took the photograph in his hands and stared at it, fascinated. She guessed the sight of a young Stevie Fullerton was a source of prurient and morbid curiosity, all the more so in light of this week’s events. Then she discovered that it wasn’t Fullerton he was staring at.

  ‘I don’t know what her surname was back then, but I know what it is now,’ he said. He was smiling. ‘This is Ciara Flanigan.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘She’s my head of English.’

  They sat in an empty first-floor classroom during the lunch break, Ciara grabbing bites of a sandwich and apologising, needlessly, for being so ravenous. It was just the two of them, ninety degrees to each other at a plastic-veneered desk.

  Jasmine felt strange to be in her presence after spending so long staring at her image in those old photographs. It was like meeting the actress who had played a character in a decades-old TV show.

  She had introduced herself to Ciara as ‘Jasmine, I’m a private investigator,’ before Quigley could give away her surname. She wasn’t sure whether he would have remembered it from talking to his secretary; he certainly wouldn’t have picked up on the significance, but the same was unlikely to be true of her mum’s school-friend.

  ‘So are you wanting to know about Stevie Fullerton?’ Ciara asked. ‘I was at school here with him, back in another lifetime, but I didn’t really know him. Made it my business to keep out of his orbit, as I’m sure you can imagine.’

  Jasmine placed the pub photograph on the desk and rotated
it until it was the right way up for Ciara.

  Ciara eyed her with a mixture of caution, surprise and self-consciousness. She had been caught out straight off the bat and Jasmine could tell she was rapidly reassessing the assumptions she might have made about the harmless-looking young woman she had agreed to speak to.

  ‘Where did you get this?’ she asked, both wary and curious.

  ‘There are certain things I’m bound by client confidentiality not to reveal, but I can assure you that it’s not your relationship with Stevie Fullerton that I’m interested in. I want to know more about his relationship with this woman. Do you remember her?’

  They both knew she couldn’t lie.

  ‘That’s Yvonne Sharp. My God, I haven’t seen her in . . . Christ, is it really as long as that? Is she who you’re working for? Or are you trying to track her down?’

  Jasmine steeled herself.

  ‘Yvonne Sharp is sadly no longer with us.’

  She managed to say it without her voice faltering. It was easier that she was pretending to be someone else. But it wasn’t over. She still had to watch Ciara Flanigan digest the news.

  Ciara gave a little sigh, this inescapable revelation dropping an anvil on all the thoughts and questions that had only just begun to form.

  ‘Pancreatic cancer,’ Jasmine volunteered, though the question had not yet been asked. She just wanted to get the information out, get past this part. ‘Three years ago now.’

  ‘I always wondered what happened to her. We lost touch and every so often you mean to ask around. Think I even searched on Facebook once, but didn’t find anything.’

  Ciara picked up the picture and held it delicately in her fingers, as though touching brought her closer to the moment and the people in it.

  ‘Spooky thought: I just realised I’m the only person in this photo who’s still alive.’

  ‘So this guy’s dead too?’ Jasmine asked, pointing to the other male in the shot.

  ‘Yeah. He was murdered as well, back in the eighties. Some gangland tit-for-tat thing. So pointless.’

  Jasmine felt her cheeks flush and hoped it wasn’t obvious.

  ‘Who was he?’ she asked, trying to sound as natural and dispassionate as before. She braced herself for what she might hear: the two names she had tried to imagine him fitting as she stared at the picture last night, wondering whether she was looking at her father.

  James.

  Jazz.

  ‘Nico. Stevie’s older brother. I say older rather than “big”, because Stevie was always the one calling the shots.’

  She felt a small sense of disappointment, but a greater relief.

  ‘Does the name Glen Fallan mean anything to you?’

  Ciara shook her head.

  ‘I know I’m in this shot, but I wasn’t lying before. I wasn’t in Stevie and Nico’s circle, but I was friends with Yvonne. We were the two strange girls in class who did weird things like read books.’

  ‘So how come she was in their circle? From what I can gather, they don’t seem a natural match.’

  ‘When you’re living in the jungle, it helps if you have friends among the predators. Yvonne knew she would get less grief from other quarters if it was known she was friends with Stevie. I did too, to be honest. Stevie always had a soft spot for Yvonne. It went right back to primary school, something about them having the same birthday. And I think by the same token, Yvonne never saw Stevie quite how everybody else did. He showed her a different side. She wasn’t ignorant of the fact that he was a headbanger, but she had less reason to be scared of him.’

  ‘Was she . . . involved with him at any point? Were you?’

  ‘Romantically?’ Ciara gave a dismissive laugh. She indicated the photo. ‘Even by those days we were still just wee lassies in the eyes of Stevie and his pals. These guys were already hanging out with older girls – women – and once they’d got used to what they could get from them, they would have seen us as too much hassle for too little payout.’

  ‘Yet here you are, all together, down the pub. Not entirely staying out of their orbit here, are you?’

  Ciara gave a curious little smile: part self-reproach, part despairing amusement at the choices she’d once made.

  ‘They always had money, and they liked to show off. When you’re that age, when you’re dreaming of the high life and the previous best is a school disco or an empty at somebody’s house, you can tell a few lies to yourself. Plus, it should be said, Stevie wasn’t some volatile psycho. He was a crook and a hard case, but he wasn’t a nutter. He was smart. If he’d been brought up in the stockbroker belt instead of Croftbank, he could have ended up a CEO in the City.’

  ‘Except that the average drug dealer has more of a social conscience,’ Jasmine suggested.

  ‘And drug dealers are less likely to waste money,’ Ciara added. ‘That’s what distinguished Stevie. He didn’t mind a bit of mayhem, but he was principally interested in cash. Him and his pals were always into something.’

  Jasmine glanced out of the window, through which she could see across the schoolyard and the playing fields. Kids milled and wandered around the concrete like particles in Brownian motion. Out on the grass, two separate games of football appeared to be in progress, one of which, Jasmine was pleased to note, featured several girls.

  ‘I spoke to somebody who said Yvonne always had money,’ Jasmine said. ‘That her father was worried about where it might be coming from. Do you know anything about that?’

  Ciara looked a little conflicted, like it might be disloyal to answer this, but she realised that the time for such loyalty was long gone.

  ‘I don’t know what she did, but I know she helped Stevie with something. She wouldn’t talk about it. It wasn’t when we were at school, though. It was later. Yvonne moved out as soon as she got accepted for drama school. She had part-time jobs and the like, and there were these insane socialist extravagances called student grants and student housing benefit, but she definitely had more coming in from somewhere.’

  ‘So you still knew her after she left school?’

  ‘Yes. Not so much when I first went to uni, because I still lived at home, but I shared a flat with her later on. There were three of us. Yvonne would pay more than her share sometimes, and that’s when she had been doing whatever it was with Stevie. I think she felt guilty about it, which was why she was spreading the money around, but I don’t think she felt she could tell Stevie she wasn’t playing any more.’

  Ciara shook her head and looked away, out of the windows. For the first time since Jasmine told her about her old school friend’s death, she looked like she might be about to shed some tears.

  ‘Can’t believe it’s been so long since it happened,’ she said, swallowing to steady her voice.

  ‘Since what happened?’

  ‘Since Julie died. She was our flatmate. Julie Muir. She was murdered.’

  Jasmine’s mind whirred.

  ‘Was this anything to do with . . .?’

  Ciara shook her head dismissively, closing her eyes for a second as though blotting out a memory.

  ‘No. It was just some weirdo. Not right in the head. She was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. Poor Julie.’

  Jasmine was about to say how her mum had never mentioned this, but caught herself in time. Besides, she had: Jasmine recalled her talking about a flatmate who had died, though Mum never said she was murdered, and never said her name.

  ‘We couldn’t live in the same flat after that. I moved back home for a while and Yvonne found another place. That’s when we drifted apart.’

  Ciara looked at clock. She was wanting this to be over, and the bell was about to grant her wish.

  ‘Among Stevie’s people,’ Jasmine asked, acting before time ran out, ‘do you remember anybody called James? Or Jazz?’

  Ciara concentrated for a moment, genuinely giving it some thought, but she didn’t find anything solid.

  ‘I don’t really know. I honestly did try not to have muc
h to do with them. There was a Jimmy that he and Nico were mates with, so he’d have been James. Jimmy McKay or McRae, something like that. Stevie and Nico also had some cousins they hung about with, but I never knew their names, just heard about them because they were mental. They didn’t go to Croftbank, though. They were at St Joseph’s.’

  The bell rang and Ciara got to her feet. She was making a show of reluctance but Jasmine knew she couldn’t wait to leave.

  ‘Sorry I can’t be more help,’ she said, sounding relieved that this was the case. Nonetheless, she looked at the picture one more time.

  ‘The person you really want to be talking to about all this is the woman who took this photo.’

  ‘Who was that?’ Jasmine asked, trying to sound professional rather than manic.

  ‘The barmaid at the Bleacher’s Vaults, where this was taken. That’s where Stevie and his mates always hung out, and nothing went on under her nose that she didn’t know about.’

  ‘Do you know where I might find her?’

  ‘I could point you in the right direction, but I don’t think she’ll be in much of a mood for questions right now. Her husband just got shot dead in a car wash.’

  Crimeless Victims

  Anthony could see Adrienne Cruickshank heading in his direction and immediately felt the tense grip of awkwardness and mutual discomfort that accompanied their mercifully rare encounters. The shift patterns had been kind that way, the pair of them rarely working at the same time in recent months. On the odd occasion that they did pass each other in a corridor they said nothing, the sum of their communication being a sheepishly regretful look on his part, and sometimes a flushing on hers; anger or embarrassment, he wasn’t sure.