Bred in the Bone

by Christopher Brookmyre

  She was very tentative at first, but he made her do it over and over, faster and faster, until it was all one motion, practically a reflex. Her thumb was aching by the time they were through. It would have been worse without the gloves, he explained, as they prevented the pumpkin flesh from getting under her nail.

  Then he told her what she was practising. She almost threw up.

  The wee shite at the Alhambra had to have left prints, she reckoned. She had handled the phone plenty before discovering that it had been tampered with, but not the places he’d have needed to touch: the back cover, the battery and the new sim itself. All had been removed at her kitchen table wearing latex gloves and sealed in air-tight plastic, as was the phone itself, for what it was worth. Leaving her with this shitey effort.

  She hated to admit she was missing functionality that not so long ago she’d have scorned, but that’s how it was. Her phone had become an indispensable personal assistant, a conduit through which she ran almost every aspect of her daily life. However, as she thumbed laboriously through the cheapo handset’s labyrinthine sub-menu system just to see who the missed call was from, she realised that being Thoroughly Wired Millie had brought its own vulnerabilities.

  If her phone had been targeted specifically, then the thief would have needed to know she’d be at that concert. Conveniently for him, that didn’t require any feats of mind-reading or even surveillance. All it would have taken was for him to check her Facebook page or Twitter feed, neither of which were protected, as it wasn’t like she was live-tweeting her investigations, just chatting to friends.

  Perhaps when she got home she should check whether she’d recently been followed by @badguy.

  The missed call was from Laura Geddes. Jasmine switched the phone off in case she tried again. She didn’t want to speak to her. She had nothing to give her; or at least nothing that she wanted to. Almost everything she had discovered so far just seemed to be nailing Fallan’s motive: doing the cops’ job for them, as she’d feared.

  She put the rifle to her shoulder once again and took up position, finding the target, relaxing into her breathing rhythm. The outside world faded and dimmed, and she was back in her quiet place. A place she could think.

  Why didn’t she want to talk to Laura? Why was it so hard to accept the obvious conclusion that all of the evidence was pointing to? Was it simply because of what they had been through that she trusted him, that she liked him? Was there anything concrete supporting her doubt, or just emotion and instinct?

  Tit for tat. An eye for an eye. Family loyalties. Your classic cycle of violence. It all made perfect sense, apart from the timescale. Beware the vengeance of a patient man, Stevie Fullerton had said. But could that vengeance truly have waited her entire lifetime? So far every witness statement and every hard fact pointed to this being the case. The only thing even remotely hinting at anything else was the business with the phone.

  She wasn’t giving that to the cops right now though, because it was the only card she had to play and she didn’t trust them with it. If they ran the prints and it only gave them the name of some no-mark ned, how motivated would they be to follow that up?

  Instead she had given it to Harry Deacon at Galt Linklater, whose police contacts meant he could get the prints analysed through back channels. It was going to take a while, but it kept the information under her control.

  She needed more, though.

  The crosshairs steadied, their bobbing reduced to a steady, minute and predictable path. She squeezed: a little too early, a little too low and to the left.

  It didn’t help that she hadn’t been able to contact Fallan. He still wasn’t talking, not even to her. The cops had him on remand and he was refusing visitors.

  Jasmine reckoned she knew why.

  She thought of how she’d spent her morning. That thick-necked gorilla, with his scars and tattoos and his ostentatious, wear-the-price-tag suit, was her uncle. He had sat there simmering with rage, alluding to her mother being a criminal and laying down the very gory details of her unknown family history. This was the world Fallan had sworn to keep her away from; the world her mum had gone to great lengths and great sacrifice to escape.

  She took another shot, a hiss of gas followed by the plink as her pellet rattled the back of the catcher. Low and left again. She was still squeezing too early, another hangover from the slower action on the spring rifle’s trigger.

  Fallan wouldn’t see her because he didn’t want her drawn into this, and now she knew the reason. It wasn’t just because of what it would expose her to: it was because the risk wasn’t worth the reward. She had finally found out who her father was, but there was no satisfaction in it, no hint of filling a lifetime’s absence. It was just a name. She hadn’t known Jazz Donnelly, and nothing she had learned about him made her feel any kind of a connection.

  Heredity was meaningless. It wasn’t about flesh and blood. It was about thought and deed. That was why she felt closer to the man who had killed her father than to a dead thug named Jazz Donnelly.

  There must have been more to him than that, though she was never going to know. Her mother had lived a strange and evidently dangerous life once upon a time, but she’d never have been some daft moll hanging off the arm of a gangster.

  She guessed he must have been charismatic and exciting, as well as attractive, but Sheila had suggested Mum was wary of getting involved with him until after he was slashed, whereupon he was perceived – wrongly – to have slowed down his normal act. Sheila had also implied that her mum was the type drawn to damaged men, perhaps thinking she could change a guy like Jazz. There must have been something she saw in him: someone like herself, perhaps, shaped by difficult circumstances but who might yet be reshaped into someone who could rise above them. Or maybe that was merely something her mother needed to see, something she was projecting.

  There was so much Jasmine had merely glimpsed during her uncomfortable morning at the Old Croft Brasserie: matters they weren’t prepared to elaborate upon, and others still about which they clearly didn’t know enough.

  It had been suggested that Fallan might have killed Jazz because he had beaten up her mother. Jasmine wasn’t sure she could believe that, but this didn’t matter so much as what lay behind the fact that others considered it a possibility.

  Fallan was not merciful in dealing with men who attacked women. Rita had hinted at it, Sheila confirmed it, and made reference to the reason why.

  Fallan’s father, a notoriously brutal and corrupt cop, hadn’t just beaten his wife, he had terrorised his family.

  ‘Everybody in the hoose,’ Sheila said.

  That seemed to suggest there was more than just Glen and his mother under his fist. Who else was in that house? Who else had Iain Fallan ‘leathered’? And why had Glen never mentioned them?

  Jasmine loosed another shot, ripping through the paper faster than she could blink. It was still low, but wide to the right. Though barely conscious of it, she had altered her breathing, thinking too much about having been early on the trigger.

  Just breathe, she told herself.

  ‘You’ve nae problem with evening the score when it suits you, eh, Sheila?’

  Sheila had been the barmaid way back when, a few years older than the young drinkers in that photograph. A trawl through online news reports had told Jasmine Sheila’s age, as well as the fact that she was Fullerton’s second wife. Perhaps there had also been a first husband. Had he knocked her about? And had Fallan intervened on her behalf?

  Stay with the rhythm. Keep everything fluid.

  There was something else there, some element of Sheila’s manner that had gnawed at Jasmine every time she thought back to it. She had been far slower than Doke to accept Jasmine’s story, keeping those shields up, not looking to make new friends. Her pain was bleeding out of her all over the carpet. She was a tough woman who implicitly understood the nature of the world she had found herself in, but that didn’t mean she liked it. She was angry over the death
of her husband, but her anger went broader and deeper than that. She was angry at Stevie, at Doke, at all of them, for keeping up their endless rally of vengeance.

  Jasmine thought back to Sheila staring at the table as Doke spoke about Stevie and his carefully orchestrated attack on Fallan.

  Sheila didn’t want to hear about it. She knew there was no option not to listen, but she looked like she wanted to be somewhere else. Doke had warmed to the subject of Stevie’s ruthless ingenuity, spelling out his clever plan to protect his men from the consequences.

  Jasmine thought it just sounded mob-handed and cowardly. Maybe Sheila did too, as well as being aware that it had sown the seeds of Stevie’s death.

  That wasn’t it, though. Sheila had been bitterly vocal when she felt scornful of Doke’s pig-headed hard-man ethos, but when he talked about that she hadn’t even wanted to look anyone in the eye.

  And suddenly Jasmine thought she understood why

  She let all the parts of her body move as one, a single motion uniting her eye, her lungs, her arms, her index finger.

  Plink.

  Dead centre.

  ‘Beware the vengeance of a patient man. That’s what Stevie always said. Didn’t he, Sheila?’

  Why that prompt? Why her reluctance to agree? It couldn’t have been that Stevie never said it; that would have been simple to dispute.

  She kept with the motion, stayed fluid, held the rhythm.

  Plink.

  Dead centre.

  A sack to blind him and a rope to restrain him. ‘Hatchets and hammers . . . Even a sword.’ Beaten and broken and stabbed until his assailants assumed he was dead: it was hard to imagine such a horrible, brutal, sustained and vicious attack; easy to imagine a thirst for retribution.

  When Stevie learned Fallan had shown up still alive two years ago, he must have been terrified. Sheila too.

  Breathe. Squeeze.

  Plink.

  Dead centre.

  Now Jasmine finally understood what was wrong; what it was about Sheila that hinted all was not as it should be.

  She wasn’t angry at Fallan.

  Throughout their entire discourse, the person she should have borne the most hatred had failed to spark her ire, and Jasmine could think of only one reason why that should be. In light of all that had gone before, and in the face of so much hard evidence, it couldn’t merely be gut feeling or instinct that caused her to harbour any doubts.

  Sheila Fullerton had something more solid than that.

  From on High

  Beano appeared at Catherine’s office door, an apologetic, if frustrated look on his face, and, significantly, nothing in his hands. She checked her watch: it had been a good hour and a half since she sent him on this errand, and if she had been aware of how long had passed she might have sent out a search party.

  ‘I can’t find it,’ he told her.

  Catherine was used to hearing this from Duncan and Fraser, whose efforts to locate whatever they had lost seldom extended beyond the reach of their arms, or looking in more than one place. Beano, she knew, was at the other end of the scale. He was as diligently resourceful as he was boyishly reluctant to disappoint, plus his familiarity with the morgue where old case files were stored was second to none these days. Over the past week, he had spent so much time down in the depths that they ought to start calling him Gollum.

  ‘Shit.’

  ‘I searched among the files from around the time of Sheehan’s death too, in case it had been taken out and put back around then, but no dice.’

  Catherine had only very occasionally seen the inside of the morgue, and had been vaguely reminded of the closing image in Raiders of the Lost Ark. The materials pertaining to thousands upon thousands of closed and prosecuted cases were boxed up and stacked in no particular order, just wherever somebody had found a space. There were clusters and patterns: rows and stacks reflecting some kind of chronology regarding when they were placed there, but there was no preordained system of organisation. Plus, if somebody had for instance taken a 1995 box out ten years later, it would more likely have been returned among the 2005 files rather than put back where it had been found.

  ‘I can go back and keep looking,’ he offered. ‘I just wanted to check whether you’d prefer I did that, because it might be a waste of time and there might be something else . . .’

  ‘No, no, you could be there for ever. And you’re right: there is something else I need you to do. I want you to go back and take another look at Fallan’s and Fullerton’s computers. We weren’t looking for anything related to Brenda Sheehan before, so we might have missed—’

  ‘I’m all over it,’ he replied, scurrying away.

  Dear Lord, she thought, please don’t let Beano ever grow up and get a life. He’s far too useful. But not infallible, unfortunately: she had sent him to retrieve the Julie Muir case files.

  Catherine picked up the phone and dialled Moira Clark. She wasn’t sure whether her old boss had any direct involvement in the Muir investigation, but if not, chances were she’d at least know who did.

  Moira answered after eight or nine rings, just before Catherine was about to give up. Her voice came through against the sound of dozens of voices reverberating in the background, and Catherine pictured her in the main lobby at the Scottish Parliament, fetching her mobile out of that cornucopian shoulder bag she carried.

  ‘Catherine,’ she said. ‘Good to hear from you, my dear, but whatever it is I’m afraid you’ll have to make it quick.’

  Catherine was ready for this. She was just grateful to have Moira even answer the phone these days. The woman was still on the committee for bloody everything, but on top of that was increasingly involved in consultations at Holyrood. Given that the Justice Minister had her on speed-dial, it seemed remarkable she would let Catherine clog up her line, but that was Moira for you. She was the kind of woman who would keep the First Minister on hold while she finished giving advice to a probationer.

  ‘Sorry, I hope I’m not disturbing you. Are you at a conference?’

  ‘No, I’m at Terminal Five going my holidays and I’m in the queue to board.’

  Catherine knew she could skip the small talk.

  ‘I need to know about a murder from before my time. Julie Muir. She was strangled by a guy named Teddy Sheehan. We can’t find the files.’

  She heard Moira let out a dry laugh, recognising the complaint.

  ‘Do you remember the case?’

  ‘Yes. The girl had got off a train at Capletmuir station on a Saturday night.’

  ‘That’s the one. Do you know who I can talk to about it?’

  ‘Well, I know who worked it. Who you can talk to might be a wee tad more delicate.’

  There was a mordant amusement in Moira’s tone, forewarning some complication that invoked her sympathy but which nevertheless, as a connoisseur of police irony, she couldn’t help but savour.

  ‘Oh God. What?’

  ‘It was one of the first murder inquiries to feature the talents of a promising young CID prospect by the name of Mitchell Drummond. Whatever happened to him, eh?’

  Catherine winced. Drummond was the Deputy Chief Constable, and the polar opposite of Moira: the type of self-important autocrat who, even if he did have time to talk to you, might not answer the phone in order to underline just how busy he was.

  ‘Oh God. Please tell me you remember who else was working the investigation.’

  ‘Aye. That’s where it gets worse. Drummond was riding shotgun with Bob Cairns.’

  Catherine was on her way upstairs towards the DCC’s office when she encountered Beano heading down in the opposite direction, carrying Stevie Fullerton’s laptop. By her watch he should have been off shift half an hour ago.

  ‘Where are you going with that?’ she asked. ‘Actually, more to the point, where have you been with it?’

  He arched his brows, like he knew the answer wouldn’t please her.

  ‘Had to get it back from LOCUST. Thought I’d nip u
p so it’s where I need it when I’m back on-shift. They were all over it like, well, locusts.’

  He gave her an apologetic smile, barely hoping that it would stem the tide of outrage.

  Maybe it was Beano’s expression, or maybe it was the realisation she had had this conversation with Abercorn too often already, but something made her decide she wouldn’t rise to it this time. She needed her head to be in the right place for this meeting.

  ‘Did Abercorn give you the “it was sent to us by mistake” patter? Because that didn’t wash the last time.’

  ‘I didn’t see Abercorn. I spoke to Paul Clayton, and he got snotty on Abercorn’s behalf instead. It’s nice to see that they delegate in that department.’

  ‘What did he say?’

  ‘A quality whine about us not sharing with the other children: how we couldn’t expect to have a senior drug dealer’s computer at our disposal without them champing at the bit. To be fair, we’d had the thing for days.’

  ‘Aye, and if we’d found anything of interest we’d have forwarded it. Eventually,’ she added, with a hint of a smirk. ‘Did he put up a fight about handing it back?’

  ‘No. Just seemed peeved that they had needed to come over and thieve it. Understandable, given how generous they are whenever they happen upon resources and intelligence.’

  ‘They must have been finished with it then. I can’t think what they were hoping to find: Fullerton was too careful to store anything juicy on a computer that could be traced to him.’

  ‘It wasn’t anything juicy about Fullerton they were checking for,’ Beano told her. ‘It was anything juicy about LOCUST. Clayton said the brass are always shitting themselves in case anything ever comes out about how they do business.’

  ‘Letting Off Criminals Under Secret Trades.’

  ‘So ever since we went into Fullerton’s house, they’ve been getting pressure from above to make sure nothing damaging leaks out.’