Bred in the Bone

by Christopher Brookmyre

  They hadn’t exchanged a word since that night. The problem was that they said nothing the first time they ran into each other afterwards, and that made it harder to say anything the next time, and so on. It always felt wrong, but he didn’t know what might be the appropriate way to put it right. As he stood there by the coffee machine he was aware that they both knew they’d seen each other, but it had become silently agreed etiquette that they would both pretend they hadn’t. To Anthony, however, it just seemed to compound his discomfort, so for that reason he had mixed emotions as he realised that she wasn’t merely passing, but heading specifically towards him.

  ‘Beano, McLeod tasked me with something but I’m just going off-shift and she won’t want it left hanging, so . . .’

  ‘You need me to pick it up,’ he replied. ‘No problem. What is it?’

  They sounded like two colleagues having a normal exchange, and there was a mutual relief as each understood that the other would remain a willing confederate in this self-deception. It was better than the silence, even if they were still pretending nothing ever happened.

  It felt like progress. He was pleased to be asked for something, more so to have the opportunity to say yes. He wasn’t sure why. It wasn’t as though he had done anything he needed to make up for, but he felt a need to make up for it all the same.

  ‘I’ve started a background work-up on Brenda Sheehan, this new vic. Well, she’s not officially a vic yet, but, you know. McLeod and Geddes found her face-up in her bed, apparently dead from getting seriously jaked and choking on her own vomit, but they’re treating the death as suspicious.’

  ‘Sheehan?’ he asked, thinking out loud because it gave him something more to say. ‘Why do I know that name?’

  ‘Don’t know. It was on Stevie Fullerton’s mobile records.’

  That wasn’t it, though. He hadn’t seen those. It had tugged at something when she said it, a specific emotion. Something sad, irredeemably so.

  ‘Anything interesting so far?’ he asked.

  ‘She’s got a jacket,’ Adrienne replied, handing him a folder, her expression indicating that this didn’t constitute ‘interesting’ to any great degree.

  She turned on her heel the moment he took hold of the folder, keen to extricate herself from the encounter as soon as he had picked up the baton.

  He glanced at her again as she retreated up the corridor, sufficiently distracted by his thoughts that he almost walked away without lifting his drink from the machine.

  He took the folder and the coffee to his desk and, having decided none of his emails were genuinely urgent, got straight to the background check McLeod wanted. Given what Adrienne had said about her having a jacket, he started by looking her up on SCRO, the Scottish Criminal Records Office database.

  Sure enough, Brenda Sheehan had form, though not the kind that would make her a natural fit for Stevie Fullerton’s contacts list. She had a string of convictions for shoplifting, drunkenness and public order offences, though the most recent was more than fifteen years back. He guessed she had been an alcoholic who got clean at some point around her fifties. Prior to that, she had compiled a classic jakey jacket, though surprisingly she hadn’t served any time, just fines and admonishments.

  He wondered about that: she was a repeat offender and yet she had stayed out of jail. Somebody somewhere must have put an understanding word in for her now and then, and perhaps this advocate had also been instrumental in getting her on the wagon.

  Next, he keyed her name into STORM. It stood for Systems for Tasking and Operational Resource Management, but the awkwardness of the wording and the resultant fact that nobody who didn’t already know would understand that it was referring to a computer database gave it the strong whiff of a backronym. It listed all contact a person had had with the police, from giving witness statements right down to phoning up about a car alarm going off and keeping them awake.

  He hit Enter to initiate the search, whereupon his screen promptly hung, leaving him watching an hourglass icon. Only time would tell whether this was down to lag from heavy traffic, a user-end glitch requiring a reboot or a full-on system crash. As he waited, he wondered again why the surname had seemed recently familiar, and why it had resonated the way it did: with sadness, regret.

  He got out his notebook and flipped back through the pages. Names jumped out in capitals from amid black slabs of his careful handwriting – Beattie, Donnelly, Nokturn, Sharp – but Sheehan wasn’t one of them. Maybe it wasn’t the name, he mused uncomfortably: rather, merely the act of talking to Adrienne that had prompted that response, the sound of her saying the word possibly echoing something she said that night, or even just her tone as she said it.

  Christ. They had got on so well before.

  DC Cruickshank was a divorcee and mother of two. She had previously worked in IT, but had jacked it in and joined the police after splitting up with her husband, a surgeon at the Royal. He had done the thing married men supposedly never do by shacking up with the nurse who had previously been merely his bit of fluff, bailing on his wife and kids, the older of whom was two at the time. Adrienne had come out the other side of a near-breakdown by throwing herself headlong into a radically new career. As another product of the ACDP, they had developed an affinity.

  He thought they were both firmly in the friend zone. They could be flirty with each other, but in what he assumed to be the harmless way between two pals who knew it could never mean anything else. She was eight years older: it wasn’t a huge age difference, but with everything she had been through and her raising two kids on her own, he just imagined she must see someone as immature as him as being almost a generation apart. As with many older women who engaged with him that way, for a long time he thought they were flirting with the aid of a safety net.

  However, over time something was definitely beginning to spark between them. He was allowing himself to wonder, and among those wonderings was the crucial question of whether, just maybe, she was beginning to wonder too.

  He should have asked her out, but he was too afraid of the consequences if he’d misread things. He didn’t want to do anything that might make her feel uncomfortable and render things awkward between them in future.

  Yeah, good job there, Beano.

  If he’d just been less of a shitebag about it, it might all have gone differently.

  They ended up sharing a cab after a works night out, a retirement do for somebody in CID. In retrospect, he realised that due to the geography of it, by ‘ended up’ he meant that Adrienne must have actually engineered it that way, as she lived nowhere near him. When the cab pulled up outside his building she invited herself in. He remembered her saying something about her mother staying the night to look after the kids, so she had a late pass.

  She didn’t say ‘all-night pass’; they were both trading on ambiguities, implied invitations and fingers crossed behind their backs in case they needed to tell themselves they didn’t mean it.

  Or maybe that was just him.

  Adrienne was a bit merry, but not pissed. He would never have let it go that far if he’d thought she was.

  Anthony, for his part, was drunk enough to delude himself about what was going on, but not enough to go through with it.

  They started kissing on his couch.

  He went with it, willingly losing himself, still perhaps safely moored by the assurance that there was only so far it was likely to proceed. She had a late pass, not all night. This was the start of something; a little faster than he’d anticipated, but maybe they had earned the right to skip a stage.

  He remembered that she undid a brooch across the neck button of her blouse, and what was understood in that gesture. He didn’t remember who unbuttoned what after that, only that somehow they were both stripped of their top garments, as though they had evaporated. Then she reached behind her back and undid her bra, slipping the straps from her shoulders in a quick, unfussy movement.

  Her breasts were large and full, slightly drooped, fro
m suckling he guessed. He only glimpsed them for a moment before she pressed them against the skin of his chest, but that was when there could be no more delusion: that was when he knew how far this was truly going. This was a real woman, a mother, a divorcee, someone who had lived more life than him, for good or bad, and someone for whom the distinction between all night and late pass had always been immaterial to these purposes.

  Which is to say that he was already getting spooked by the time she slipped a hand inside his belt.

  ‘I’m sorry, I can’t do this,’ he said.

  He had heard it over and over again in his head since, and it never sounded any better.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ she had asked, concerned.

  ‘It’s just too soon. I’m sorry.’

  His MP3 player had shuffled to ‘Tree Bursts’ by Admiral Fallow. He remembered it playing in the horrible eternity of non-communication that followed. He couldn’t listen to it any more without being back there, which effectively meant he couldn’t listen to it any more full stop.

  He saw such mortification in her face, turning to pain and confusion.

  He was still appalled to contemplate what she imagined he saw or thought in that moment the spell was broken. Did she beat herself up about seeming desperate, insinuating her way into his taxi, his flat, then throwing herself at him, lunging for his cock in the hope that she could take things past the point of no return before he sobered up? Please, God, no. It wasn’t her. She didn’t do anything to be ashamed of.

  But more appalling was when he imagined what she might have thought. Would she think it was because of the kids, that he had slammed on the brakes when he realised what he might be getting dragged into? Or even worse, that he hadn’t liked what he saw when she took her clothes off. Oh Jesus: the very idea of her thinking that left him all twisted up inside.

  He should have explained, but how could he explain? While she was pulling her bra back on and wiping away tears of embarrassment was hardly the time to tell her this was the closest he had come to having sex in four years, never mind the reason why.

  The screen finally refreshed itself, the STORM search page replaced by the results for Brenda Sheehan.

  Sheehan was her maiden name: she had never married. He jotted down her date of birth and worked out that she was sixty-three when she died. She had lived at the same house in Miner’s Row since the seventies, and there was a rash of call-outs to the address during the eighties, mostly concerning harassment and vandalism. Notes indicated that the target of these incidents was her brother, one James Edward Sheehan, for whom, rather strangely, she was listed as legal guardian. The incidents ceased around the end of the decade.

  He wondered what changed; perhaps the local neds found something else to do, or the ringleader moved away. Then he found out.

  The next listing detailed a police dispatch, eighteen years ago, to give her what they called the death message. Her brother had died.

  In prison.

  Anthony returned to the SCRO database and keyed in the name, the results appearing this time after a short delay. The brother had a conviction for public indecency, after exposing himself to some schoolgirls. That was probably what led to the harassment, but it was what ended it that answered why the surname had chimed in his head.

  It was James Edward Sheehan who had murdered Julie Muir, in the case he’d read about at the Mitchell.

  He flipped through his notebook again and found the page where he’d written down which months Fullerton had been checking out on the microfiche. That was when he realised he’d screwed up.

  He hadn’t been able to work out what Fullerton was looking for in the first spool, and having found the accounts of the riot at Nokturn and its fallout, he had focused on that instead. However, Julie Muir’s killing had appeared on both: the first spool featuring the discovery of her body, and the second covering the trial.

  Fullerton had been researching a decades-old murder case, and had recently been in telephone contact with the killer’s sister. Now she, her brother and Stevie Fullerton were all dead.

  He reached for his phone and speed-dialled McLeod.

  Guest of the Government

  Glen paced the narrow channel that was his cell and his mind was taken back to the sight of a polar bear he’d once watched in San Diego zoo, shambling up and down the edge of its tiny pool, shaking its head back and forth in distress at its confinement. How long had it taken for the thing to go nuts?

  Glen considered how much he had seen of the world, and what his world had now been reduced to. He could probably paint all four walls and the ceiling without taking a step.

  He remembered the first time he ever had a flat of his own, after he moved out of his mum’s house. All grown up. Sorting out the connection of his phone and other domestic utilities had fallen somewhere between rite of passage and pain in the arse. For the first time in his life he had bills to pay, and ordinary, mundane, adult responsibilities.

  In the movies, you never saw the criminal trailing round the shops to buy dinner plates or a settee. It wasn’t all tedious, though: he could also kit himself out with his own choice of telly, video and hi-fi. No green screens, diagonal lines or knackered vertical hold for him any more. Brand new, best of gear, state of the art, and not because he was flush, but because it was free. During this floundering first encounter with utility paperwork combined with the mandatory labours of nest-building he had identified an opportunity, one which Stevie expertly refined.

  Looking back, it was a wonder the credit crunch took so long in coming. Shops had targets to hit. They needed to shift units, rack up sales, and they didn’t care where the money came from: your pocket, your credit card or a finance company, it was all the same to them. In fact, across a lot of chains, their preference was to sign you up to their storecard, so that not only would you walk out the door with a £250 telly, but £750 in credit should you want to come back for a video, a fridge and a microwave as well.

  All they asked for was a bank card and a utility bill for proof of address.

  These days, with it being computerised, a stolen bank card would flag up the moment you tried to refer it, but back then it was all being done on handwritten forms and sent by post.

  Glen or Stevie would get on to BT, Scottish Gas and the Electricity Board and tell them they were taking up the service at a property they knew to be lying empty, always choosing one in a well-off neighbourhood. Back then, you didn’t need bank details or credit cards to get a service. You signed up, they sent you a bill, and if you didn’t pay it they cut you off.

  They would sign up using names that corresponded with a stolen card or one of the many phantom accounts Stevie had opened using false ID. Then they would give the postie a back-hander to pass on any mail bound for their bogus name at the vacant property.

  Each name and address could bag them a card for several different chains: Currys, Comet, Dixons; to say nothing of department stores.

  It wasn’t as simple as just turning up with the paperwork and a shopping list, however. Stevie knew that how you presented yourself was crucial. You didn’t just need the right image, you needed a story and, in his case, a scene-stealing co-star.

  Her name was Yvonne.

  Glen had no idea how Stevie knew her, as she seemed to belong to another world. It wasn’t just as if she came from a different background socially or geographically, more like she was of a different species. She carried herself with this unique grace, as though she was aware everyone in the room was looking at her and that she was simultaneously invisible. Glen had never seen anyone like her, not up close. When she wanted to, she could seem as glamorous as one of those women on Dallas or Dynasty, at a remove from your reality, yet at other times there was an everyday normality about her that could set you at your ease. It was as though she was unapologetic for her presence, but not brash; cooperative but not compliant; complicit but not beholden.

  She and Stevie would go into the stores pretending to be a recently engage
d couple who were moving in together. Stevie dressed smartly: a suit if it was a weekday and they were making out they had met up for a shopping trip over their lunch hour; expensive but non-flashy gear on Saturdays. It was almost incidental because the shop assistants, male or female, all ended up just looking at Yvonne.

  It was the first time Glen understood what people meant when they said of someone: ‘she wears the clothes, the clothes don’t wear her.’ Weekdays or weekends, Yvonne never looked glammed up; or crucially never like someone trying to glam up. She looked businesslike through the week, and understatedly elegant on Saturdays, with the air of someone who could look smart in bin-liners if you gave her five minutes and some paperclips.

  Glen’s role was confined to heavy lifting and driving the van, but his presence was explained airily by Yvonne as being her brother, along to help with the flitting and ‘to make sure he [being Stevie] doesn’t skimp on the spending’.

  She could probably have said Glen was her indentured servant and nobody would have paid it much heed. All they ever saw was Yvonne, remembering nothing of Stevie or Glen; and if the polis were ever to investigate, the shop assistants would describe a girl who didn’t exist, as outside of those jobs she never dressed that way, wore her hair that way, even walked that way. It was a complete performance, carried off so convincingly that Glen realised he had no way of knowing whether the person she presented to him and Stevie bore any resemblance to the truth either.

  They didn’t merely kit out their own pads, or flog the extras out the back of a van. Stevie had buyers who would come up from Manchester and Birmingham, paying for bulk loads. It would be sold as new on the floors of independent shops, and the prices reflected that.

  They raked in thousands, scoring credit from electrical stores in every retail estate and high street across central Scotland. Stevie kept a log of where they had been and when, as well as the names of the people who served them. Staff turnover – or simply coming in on somebody’s day off – meant they could hit them again once they had worked their way back to the start of the list.