Bred in the Bone

by Christopher Brookmyre

  The only person he at least knew not to look out for had been the first guy to vocalise the threat, because he was the only one who said anything face to face. It was somebody he vaguely recognised from way back when, twenty-five years and in this prick’s case about twelve stone ago.

  ‘You’re deid, Fallan,’ he had said, leaning over Glen as he lay back, using one of the weight-training machines. ‘You’re fuckin’ deid.’

  ‘I’ve been deid before,’ he replied. ‘I’m developing a tolerance.’

  Glen knew he could discount him as a threat because the people he was truly worried about wouldn’t be identifying themselves. Nor would they be giving him any warnings.

  Glen heard a sudden babble of voices from over by the entrance, and saw one of the screws bark orders to his colleagues as he hurried towards the source. This time Glen immediately checked his surroundings, watching for a blindside attack like the one that had claimed the slashing victim in the dining hall. This wasn’t a diversion, however. Whatever was going down had happened inside.

  Exercise time was extended by twenty minutes because they were still cleaning up the corridor when the standard hour was up.

  Word spread fast in a place like this. Before he had even made it back to his cell, Glen had learned that the victim this time was the slasher from the other day. He’d been stabbed in the throat with a sharpened hairbrush. He had been rushed to the infirmary, but the rumour was he was already dead.

  Tit for tat. Back and forth. The endless cycle.

  He thought of Stevie, and a cycle Glen thought he’d ended long ago, but he’d been wrong.

  Nokturn.

  It was a place on West George Street called Night-Tek, which Stevie renamed, after a club he’d been to while on business in Holland. The main interior was square, overlooked by a mezzanine level on three sides, meaning most of the seating areas were secluded beneath the upper platforms, with the dance floor in the centre. Up on the mezzanine, there was a further elevation of two steps at one end, forming a golden-rope-cordoned VIP area. This was where Stevie held court among friends or received special guests, such as the occasional footballer, boxer or model: sometimes comped in, and in other instances paid to put in an appearance.

  Glen didn’t like pubs but he did enjoy nightclubs. He liked the music, the volume and power of it, and he especially liked the fact that it was too loud for anyone to bother speaking much. People seldom tried to make conversation with him, and this made it easier to just melt into the walls and observe.

  Jazz had been at the bar, almost certainly pulling rank to get served ahead of the queue, but that wasn’t what led to the carnage. This was premeditated and carefully planned. An unholy alliance of the Egans, the Beattie mob and assorted other Gallowhaugh miscreants had slipped in, separately and quietly, and on a pre-arranged signal commenced wrecking the joint.

  The pre-arranged signal was Stanley Beattie slashing Jazz, opening his face from his cheekbone to his jaw.

  Downstairs descended into mayhem instantly, as the assailants took advantage of the panic among the revellers to start tearing up the place. They primarily attacked known faces associated with Stevie, but if they couldn’t find one to hand, they just went for anybody who didn’t get out of the way fast enough. Tables and chairs flew, as did fists, boots, bottles and glasses.

  Glen accompanied Stevie as he ran to the balcony. Even amid the chaos, the darkness and the flashing lights, it didn’t take him long to suss what was going on. Doke and Haffa went barrelling into the mêlée, the club’s bouncers also charging in from all sides. The music went off and the house lights came up, but neither prompted a breaking of the spell: they just provided a clearer view of the violence and made the sounds of screams, wreckage and collision seem all the louder.

  Glen tried to restrain Stevie from his efforts to get downstairs.

  ‘Let your boys handle this,’ he urged.

  Glen saw it for what it was: a jealous, impotent act of destructive defiance, like a doomed peasants’ uprising. Stevie should have ignored it, gone back to the VIP area and sipped champagne until the perpetrators had all been chucked out onto West George Street, or even presided over it serenely from above, recognising that it represented a form of triumph.

  ‘They’re just trying to drag you down to their level,’ Glen told him. ‘They want a shot at you, on their terms.’

  Stevie stared at him in consternation, then wrestled his way past. Glen could probably have stopped him, but it wasn’t worth it. Stevie wanted it too much.

  Looking back, Glen’s reasoning hadn’t stood a chance, and the latter gambit had probably been the most counter-productive thing he could say. As he began to understand, gazing down and watching Nokturn’s new owner wade into the fray, Stevie was always on their level. Stevie had been holding court in his new kingdom, sipping champagne in the VIP section, then two minutes later he was brawling in the dirt with nobodies, and what this told Glen was that Stevie, in keeping with all his crew and all the guys they were fighting with, would rather be brawling in the dirt than lording it in the VIP section. They only wanted to be sitting there as a fuck-you to their rivals anyway.

  Despite being ahead in his thinking, and having the vision to see a world beyond Gallowhaugh, when it came down to it, it was still all about face, all about being on top. If somebody wanted a shot at Stevie he couldn’t walk away from it, like he couldn’t stand even thinking they’d put one over on him. He also loved the violence, loved the mayhem, a strange corollary to his meticulous sense of organisation, his command of systems and plans.

  Glen saw nothing he could use or enjoy in this. He watched for a few minutes and then slipped away out the fire exit, the sound of sirens carried on the blast of cold air that greeted him as soon as he opened the door.

  Bad Blood

  The car park outside the Old Croft Brasserie was surprisingly full for this hour of the morning, Jasmine thought. It was just a little past ten and yet it looked like it could be lunchtime; an upscale business lunchtime at that, going by the array of pricey rides lined up across the tarmac. Her beloved red Civic was only a year old and in her eyes still immaculate enough to grace any showcourt, but it looked almost dowdy, not to mention minuscule, alongside so many Q7s, X6s, Cayennes and Range Rovers.

  She had heard the place was very trendy, but hadn’t anticipated that it would be attracting such a crowd for morning coffee. At least this meant it was open, as she wasn’t sure whether the mourning period was officially over.

  She was trying to stem a sense of trepidation as she walked towards the main entrance, and thought of how her mum might have felt as she approached the same building back in her teens. Was she excited about the prospect of a night in the pub? Was she apprehensive about getting knocked back? Was she conflicted about being in the company of the Fullerton brothers, aware of the protection their patronage conferred, but equally conscious of being marked by association? It was impossible to know, and not much easier to picture. They’d spent a fortune renovating the place, so much so that her mum might not have recognised it.

  Jasmine could see movement through the glass doors, hear the hubbub of voices and the clack of heels on a hard floor. Still she couldn’t shake this feeling of exposure and vulnerability, hitting her all the harder for it being so unaccustomed. Doorstepping strangers was what she did for a living. It always put her a little on edge – and arguably that was where she needed to be in order to do it effectively – but she had grown used to how it felt.

  This was something different, and in that action of reaching for the door handle, she understood why. The difference was that normally at this point she was pretending to be someone else. It was both her gambit and her shield: that moment of walking through the door and representing herself as someone she was not was the moment she stepped into character and left the real Jasmine outside. This morning, the only card she had to play was the truth; being herself the only valid passport to the world she needed to explore.

&n
bsp; The door held firm, resisting her attempts both to push and pull. She tried the handle on the other one but fared no better. They were locked. However, her ineffective rattling at least attracted the attention of someone inside. A tall, heavy-set middle-aged man in a suit approached the doors, a tired expression on his face. He looked like a bouncer but she thought it a little early in the day for such personnel, and couldn’t think of ever encountering one at a restaurant.

  He opened the door just a little, certainly not by way of inviting her inside. Close up, she revised her bouncer impression. The suit was too expensive-looking, and in conjunction with the scars and tattoos she estimated she was dealing with management rather than employee; but not necessarily restaurant management.

  ‘I’m sorry, we’re closed the now,’ he said.

  Jasmine made a point of gazing inside, where she could see roughly twenty people seated at tables or standing around the bar.

  ‘It’s a private function,’ he explained. ‘Family only.’

  This was when she had to play her card, and in so doing cross a point of no return.

  ‘I am family,’ she said.

  His features compressed into an expression of terse consternation; not mere puzzlement, but the aggressive certainty of someone who expected to know every face present at this gathering today.

  ‘My name is Jasmine Sharp. My mother was Yvonne Sharp.’

  She could see the whole process in his eyes: information being sourced from some mental archive as he sought to retrieve the name, then the tiny but unmistakable flinch as he deduced the significance and possibilities presented themselves. Nonetheless, he still wasn’t quite getting there, and thus he still wasn’t quite ready to open that door.

  ‘I never met my father, because he died before I was born. But I’m told his name was Jazz.’

  She tried to make it sound like she knew this was her all-access pass, but her voice faltered on the last word, feeble and appellant. This was the conversation her mother never wanted her to have, the world she had gone to extraordinary lengths to protect her daughter from.

  The man on the door didn’t look like someone who was ordinarily rocked on his heels by anything less than a baseball bat, but he seemed slightly dazed by what she had just said. He stared at her, startled for a moment, then turned his head to look inside. Jasmine couldn’t see who he was looking to, but a few moments later a petite female figure emerged from behind a table and began pacing towards the entrance.

  He held the door open for Jasmine now, looking at her as though he couldn’t be sure she was real, as if she might suddenly vanish and turn out to have been an apparition.

  ‘Jazz Donnelly?’ he asked.

  Jasmine couldn’t confirm this, as it was the first time she had heard someone give her father a surname.

  ‘Hence Jasmine,’ she replied.

  ‘Jesus. I’d no idea. I’m Jazz’s big brother, David.’

  He held out a hand, uncomfortable in the gesture as though aware of how inadequate and ill-suited it seemed to the occasion. Jasmine gave it the briefest and most awkward of squeezes. It felt warm against her skin, cold from driving. His hand was large and strong, but the grip was weak, reflecting the uncertainty of what was passing between them.

  The petite woman had made it to the door. She looked early fifties, smart but a little over-dressed, especially for the time of day. She was lavishly made-up, but it couldn’t disguise tired eyes and a harshness to her features. She was smaller than Jasmine but exuded a latent aggression like it was a force field. This, she guessed, was Sheila Fullerton, the person she had come to see.

  ‘Sheila, this lassie says she’s Jazz’s daughter,’ David explained, sounding like he needed somebody else to judge the veracity of it for him. ‘Says her ma was Yvonne Sharp. Mind ay her?’

  Sheila looked Jasmine up and down, cold scrutiny failing to disguise an almost fearful astonishment at what she was being asked to rule upon.

  Jasmine decided to speak before the verdict was in.

  ‘Are you Sheila? Who worked here when my mum used to come in? It’s just . . . she told me absolutely nothing about those days, and I’ve heard you might be able to help.’

  Sheila continued to stare, wide-eyed and a little stunned.

  ‘You say . . . Yvonne . . . Sorry, was . . . Do you mean your mum . . .?’

  ‘She died three years ago. But I gather she was born on the same day as Stevie Fullerton, and they used to come here together. He was your husband, right?’

  The hubbub continued in the background, but in that moment it felt to Jasmine like she and Sheila were entirely alone, and locked in silence. She honestly had no idea whether she was about to be beckoned forth or frogmarched back out through the double doors.

  Sheila glanced to David, then back to Jasmine.

  ‘Come on through,’ she said. ‘We’ll go somewhere quiet we can talk.’

  All The Perfumes Of Arabia

  Glen hefted a beige-coloured grille that he identified as having once been part of a vacuum cleaner, moving it from the chaotic melange in front of him and placing it carefully into a marked hopper. All around him, other inmates were carefully and unhurriedly getting on with the same thing, either side of four long tables piled high with smashed-up stereos, monitors, domestic appliances, toys and packaging.

  All plastic. More bloody plastic.

  Tons of it were delivered to the prison’s recycling workshop every day, to be hand-sorted by the inmates then sold on to a reprocessing firm who would refine it into pellets for re-manufacture. Given the sentence he was looking at, Glen estimated that if he worked here every day, by the time he got out he would have enough carbon offset points for a guilt-free trip to the moon.

  He took in the scene of unfussy diligence all around, imagined what the well-meaning social reformers might make of it. To them it might prove that gainful and dignified employment was what all men needed, that they wouldn’t turn to crime if they were given a useful role and a shared sense of purpose.

  Maybe, Glen thought, but you’d need to get to them early. After all, the gainfully employed didn’t suddenly turn to a life of crime simply because it paid better. Most criminals of Glen’s acquaintance had never known anything else. They were second- and even third-generation, people to whom it would never have occurred to look for honest work. They grew up looking at the world with different eyes, seeing different kinds of opportunities, different kinds of obstacles. They envisaged treasures behind every locked door yet imagined many of the open ones were somehow impenetrable to them.

  These plastics could be reprocessed and turned into something else. It wasn’t so easy for the people sorting them. Glen understood that better than most. Where others had been conditioned by growing up with crime, Glen had been conditioned by growing up with violence. It had shaped him into an instrument that wrought more violence, an instrument from which ruthless men had profited. It shaped him so completely that he had lost sight of any other self he might have been.

  That was until he had his epiphany, watching Yvonne playing Lady Macbeth at the Tron.

  It was haunting, watching her so fully become someone else, an effect that served to further remind him that he had no idea who the real Yvonne was. She looked older, burdened, so dark and so consumed with an inner want, with anger and ruthlessness and a dozen other things that were not Yvonne at all. To Glen, it was spellbinding.

  Then she drifted across the stage like she was disconnected from it, eyes open but dead, face expressionless.

  ‘Lo you! here she comes. This is her very guise; and, upon my life, fast asleep. Observe her; stand close.’

  ‘How came she by that light?’

  ‘Why, it stood by her: she has light by her continually; ’tis her command.’

  ‘You see, her eyes are open.’

  ‘Aye, but their sense is shut.’

  ‘What is it she does now? Look, how she rubs her hands.’

  A sharply focused lighting gel bathed only her h
ands in red, and Glen watched with growing disquiet as he understood what she was trying to wash away: a stain that wasn’t there, and yet could never be cleansed.

  ‘Yet who would have thought the old man to have so much blood in him.’

  As Yvonne rubbed her hands with increasing desperation, he saw the blood pouring from a hundred wounds. He saw it spilling on the floors of pubs, of restaurant kitchens, in living rooms, bathrooms, garages, alleyways, streets, gutters.

  ‘Here’s the smell of the blood still; all the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand.’

  So much blood. So very much blood, all spilled by his hands, his deeds.

  Yet what set him on edge as he sat in the darkness of the theatre was not that he saw his reflection in Yvonne’s horror, but that he felt the scale of its absence in himself. As she rubbed her hands in the eerie red glow he apprehended the horror he ought to be feeling, but simply did not, could not.

  Why did he feel nothing? He could feel Lady Macbeth’s guilt, feel moved by it though it was merely a fiction, but could not feel a revulsion of his own. Yes, there was guilt – a gripping, twisting, unsleeping torture – for what he had done, but not for the deeds themselves, not for any of those he had killed. He knew he could kill again – he knew he would kill again – and feel none of what Yvonne was depicting on that stage.

  ‘What’s done cannot be undone.’

  He couldn’t change what he was, but he could change what he did. He had to put this instrument into the hands of men who might use it constructively. He had to pay the proverbial debt to society, but he chose to do it on his own terms. It was good enough for the big corporations.

  He noticed one of the screws glancing his way a couple of times, then begin to make his way towards him. Glen wondered what kind of petty shit he was about to get picked up on, but instead the guy just told him to go and get a fresh bin for cable offcuts, as the one currently on the go was getting full.