Bred in the Bone

by Christopher Brookmyre

  Jasmine didn’t need to ask what Stevie had told her. She had worked it out for herself on the firing range.

  ‘For twenty years, there were only two people in the world who knew,’ Sheila said. ‘And the saddest part is that in all that time, nobody questioned it. All that cloak and dagger stuff about envelopes and alibis: eejits like Doke just lapped it up.’

  ‘You believe what you need to,’ Jasmine replied, echoing Sheila’s own words.

  ‘Whereas you heard it one morning and you’d seen through it by teatime.’

  ‘I had a few clues you and Doke didn’t.’

  ‘Don’t sell yourself short,’ Sheila told her, a tiny hint of warmth in her voice for perhaps the first time. ‘You’re smart. It’s well seeing your name’s Sharp, because you never got that from Jazz Donnelly.’

  ‘I had the benefit of context. Sometimes the longer something is staring people in the face, the harder it is for them to see it.’

  Sheila narrowed her eyes and regarded her intently again, examining Jasmine in detail, but no longer with suspicion: it was more like there was something specific she was looking for.

  ‘Maybe not quite as sharp as you think, though.’

  ‘Why, what did I miss?’

  Sheila shook her head, a neutral but implacable firmness to her face.

  ‘Naw, naw, hen. You’ve had all you’re getting from me. Just be very careful what you do with it.’

  With that, Sheila reached for the handle and pulled open the door to the brasserie’s kitchen.

  ‘Please, I’ve just got one last question,’ Jasmine implored. ‘If it wasn’t Fallan that Stevie was talking about, then who’s the patient man?’

  Sheila looked incredulous that Jasmine hadn’t worked this part out.

  ‘Tony McGill,’ she said, like it was self-explanatory. ‘The man was inside for fifteen years. It was Stevie that put him there, to get him out the picture . . . Stevie and Fallan.’

  VIPs

  ‘This is about Stevie Fullerton, isn’t it?’ asked Ciara Flanigan with a weary amusement Catherine found difficult to read.

  Ciara had walked into the reception area carrying a plastic tub of pasta salad and a spork, her decision to take her lunch with her suggesting that she suspected it might not be a quick word. She was around Catherine’s age, maybe a little older, and Catherine had to rein in that unworthy competitive instinct that started looking for evidence that the other woman wasn’t wearing quite so well as herself.

  ‘It’s related to the late Mr Fullerton, yes. How did you know?’

  ‘You’re not the first to ask. I had a private detective in here the other day asking about him. I didn’t think you actually got private detectives except in the movies. She certainly didn’t look like Humphrey Bogart.’

  ‘She?’ Laura confirmed, giving Catherine a glance.

  ‘Yes. They say you know you’re getting old when the police start looking younger, but if the same extends to private detectives then I really am getting on a bit. She looked like she could be dogging school.’

  ‘Why was she asking you about Stevie Fullerton?’ Catherine enquired.

  ‘Mostly she was asking about an old flatmate of mine, Yvonne Sharp. She’s dead now, unfortunately. I didn’t know that. We’d lost touch a very long time ago. We were both at school with Stevie Fullerton: this school, as it happens. She was interested in how Yvonne and Stevie knew each other.’

  ‘So she didn’t mention her surname, this investigator?’

  Ciara searched and came up blank.

  ‘Actually, now you mention it, I think I only heard her first name: Jasmine. How did you know that?’

  ‘Because her surname is Sharp. She’s Yvonne Sharp’s daughter.’

  Ciara’s mouth briefly formed an ‘o’, then she gave a rueful sniff of a laugh.

  ‘I never saw it. She sat in front of me all that time, asking about Yvonne, and I never saw it. To be fair, it’s been twenty-five years, but it’s not like she didn’t jog my memory. She even showed me a picture from back then. So she’s not really a private detective then?’

  ‘Oh, she’s real enough. A real pain in my arse sometimes. What did you tell her?’

  Ciara spoke for a while, recounting their discussion, then Catherine moved on to the main reason for their visit: Ciara’s other flatmate.

  ‘Julie worked behind the bar at Nokturn,’ Ciara said. ‘That’s how she ended up sharing with us. Yvonne recognised Julie from school and they got talking. We needed somebody else to share the rent and she wanted out of her parents’ house.’

  ‘Why was that?’ Catherine asked, curious to hear a different perspective. She didn’t get one.

  ‘Bright lights, big city versus Croftbank? The city’s not that big and the lights not that bright, but everything’s relative. Julie wasn’t to be contained. It could be knackering, to be honest, because although on the surface she was all glam and sophisticated, inside she was still quite immature. I don’t mean that in a bad way – you know, selfish or huffy. I just mean she wasn’t as grown up as she thought she was.’

  ‘Do you mean she was vulnerable?’

  Ciara thought about it.

  ‘She was streetwise, like you had to be in Croftbank, so she wasn’t some ingénue, but there were ways she was naïve. A bit of a dreamer. That was partly why the guys were doe-eyed over her: she wasn’t cynical.’

  Catherine watched the hurt and regret pass across Ciara’s face like a cloud, blotting out the sunshine brought by the pleasure of her recollections.

  ‘So she got a lot of attention from the men?’

  ‘Oh, yes. She didn’t stay behind the bar for long. Stevie made her the hostess for the deck and the VIP area. It was waitress service only up there, with prices to match. Lots of champagne. It was quite a moneyed crowd. Old Firm players, models, pop stars. If a band was playing Glasgow, that’s often where they’d end up. I danced with the guitarist from Effervescence one night and on another I got off with Matt Black, the comedian. Wear the right dress in the right place and suddenly anything’s possible.’

  ‘But equally, you can be wearing the wrong dress in the wrong place too,’ Catherine reminded her.

  Ciara nodded darkly.

  ‘What was Julie doing out in Capletmuir of a Saturday evening?’ Catherine asked. ‘If she lived just off Victoria Road, and Nokturn was in the city centre . . .’

  Ciara looked uncomfortable in a way that had not been precipitated by previous discussion of ostensibly more sensitive subjects. Catherine recognised the genus right away: she was afraid of what she could or couldn’t safely say.

  ‘Don’t you know this stuff?’ Ciara asked, shifting in her seat. Not a practised liar, the teacher squirming like she was a first-year covering for his mates.

  ‘Just assume for this purpose that we don’t.’

  Ciara chewed on a mouthful of nothing.

  ‘Well, that’s tricky for me, isn’t it? Because up until now it’s been me that had to pretend I knew nothing about it.’

  ‘I don’t follow.’

  ‘I’m asking whether you really don’t know or whether you’re just making sure I remember my lines.’

  Catherine sighed with impatient curiosity.

  ‘I really don’t know. We can’t even find the bloody case files.’

  Ciara frowned, as though deciding whether this was a wise idea. She didn’t appear to have reached any conclusions but ploughed ahead anyway.

  ‘She was seeing a guy from out that way. Well, he had a flat in town, but that’s where the family home was. His name was Gordon Ewart.’

  Ciara said this with a note of contempt, and Catherine got the impression that there was supposed to be something self-explanatory about it. There wasn’t, as far as she could see.

  ‘All mention of him and his family was kept out of the court case, and I got an unambiguous warning from the polis to watch what I said. They told me that if it leaked to the papers they’d know where it came from. It wasn’t german
e to the case and it would cause a lot of unnecessary difficulties. It’s a sight to behold when you see the establishment mobilised. Nobody was quite so concerned about the Muirs.’

  ‘The establishment?’ Catherine asked sceptically, conveying to Ciara that she sounded like she was in the hinterlands of tinfoil hat territory here. Then the surname clicked and she remembered who had lived in Capletmuir, in a big posh house on the border of his constituency.

  ‘The establishment, yes,’ Ciara insisted. ‘His dad was Campbell Ewart. He was a cabinet minister: Under-Secretary of State for Scotland. So you can maybe see why I got leaned on not to go blabbing that it was his son Gordon’s nightclub-hostess girlfriend who got strangled and left in the woods.’

  ‘He was one of the rich kids you mentioned.’

  ‘He was a regular at Nokturn. Him and his hooray pals.’

  ‘Champagne Charlies,’ Laura suggested.

  ‘An apposite choice of words,’ Ciara responded pointedly, though Catherine guessed the choice had not been fortuitous. ‘It wasn’t just the fizz and the ambience that kept them coming back, or why Nokturn was the “in” venue for a certain crowd. Back in those days it was the place to score coke.’

  ‘Was Julie doing it?’

  ‘I don’t know. Probably. Julie would try anything.’

  ‘And Gordon Ewart?’

  She looked from side to side, as though checking it was okay to go on.

  ‘For sure. He wasn’t that discreet, and neither were his wanker mates.’

  ‘Risky business when your dad is a junior minister.’

  ‘That’s the thing, though: privileged folk like that think they’re invisible, partly because they’ve got people looking out for them. There’s no way the press didn’t know. I’m sure deals are done to keep that kind of thing quiet.’

  ‘Undoubtedly,’ Catherine agreed. ‘In the press’s eyes though, “MP’s son snorts coke at nightclub” isn’t really a story. It’s a bargaining chip: “We keep this quiet and you give us something else.”’

  ‘It would have been a story if they knew about him and Julie. That’s why I got leaned on. A connection to a murder case, even painting him as the grieving boyfriend, would have been the ideal vehicle for the papers to go to town. And it wouldn’t just have been Gordon they went to town on.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Well, don’t forget about his mum. She was a raging alkie back then: it was the biggest open secret in Scottish politics.’

  Catherine recalled the awkward allusions in the media to Philippa Ewart being ‘unwell’, and the bristling disapproval that met any attempt at humour or innuendo in the public discourse. As a consequence, she had developed the impression of the unfortunate MP’s wife being some feeble and pathetic specimen, her alcoholism debilitating and confining her like a cripple. In sobriety, Philippa had turned out to be a formidable and quite admirable individual, dedicating much of her time to alcohol and drug charities. In these she was not content to merely play the part of fund-raising figurehead; she was also a notoriously pushy lobbyist. And for a Tory wife – or more accurately ex-wife – she was refreshingly light on the judgmental rhetoric, having been down there herself.

  ‘I think the press tend to exercise some discretion on that because alcoholism is recognised as an affliction,’ Catherine suggested, still not inclined towards the idea that the Illuminati were scrambling all resources to protect a mediocrity like Campbell Ewart, even if he did come from aristocratic stock.

  ‘Yes, but what about the reason she was an alcoholic? All those affairs Campbell Ewart had been having, the stories that only emerged after he got turfed out in 1992 – the press must have known about that stuff all along.’

  ‘Probably,’ Catherine conceded. ‘I think the significant part is that it wasn’t open season until he lost his seat. He was being protected before that. You say you were leaned on. By whom?’

  ‘I don’t remember their names. I’m not sure I even heard them. They weren’t the same cops as interviewed me for the murder case. They weren’t Glasgow CID. Whoever they were, they weren’t there because of Julie. They were there because of Campbell Ewart.’

  ‘So was Julie and Gordon a serious thing?’ Catherine asked.

  ‘It was starting to look like it. I thought he was a dick, but Julie said he was different away from his friends. It was never going to last, not that I could see. I’m not sure Julie did, though. That’s what I meant by naïve.’

  ‘And had there been anybody else in the picture? Anybody that might be jealous?’

  ‘The only other person in the picture wouldn’t have been jealous. She slept with Stevie a few times, but it was mutually understood to be nothing serious. There may have been some overlap at the beginning, but that was before she and Gordon got close.’

  ‘So how did Stevie take it when she died?’

  ‘I don’t know. Everything kind of fell apart after that. I couldn’t stay in the flat any more. That was the beginning of the end for me and Yvonne in terms of staying in touch. I never went back to Nokturn. I saw him at the funeral, though.’

  ‘And how did he seem?’

  ‘Glasgow tough guy. How do you think he seemed?’

  ‘We’re just trying to work out why he would be taking an interest in Julie Muir’s murder all these years later. He was looking up news archives, talking to Teddy Sheehan’s sister.’

  ‘I’ve no idea. Julie’s funeral was the last time I spoke to him. He wasn’t buying the official line, though. He thought there was something iffy about it.’

  ‘Iffy how?’

  ‘Girlfriend of a cabinet minister’s son gets murdered and the polis conveniently lock up the local weirdo for it. I gave his speculations precisely zero credence: to a guy like Stevie, everybody the polis put away was a fit-up job.’

  Something must have given him renewed belief in his theory though, Catherine reasoned. Otherwise Brenda Sheehan wouldn’t be lying on Cal O’Shea’s slab.

  The Driving Seat

  Jasmine pulled away from the brasserie car park and stopped at the T-junction, indicating right, where the promise of light a quarter of a mile ahead beckoned her in the direction of home. To her left was blackness, the occasional glow of oncoming headlights only seeming to emphasise how dark the boulevard was, more like a country road at night than an urban dual carriageway.

  To the left was where Stevie Fullerton had gone on that fateful morning, into his own final darkness. She decided to retrace his path, see for herself the spot where this man, whom she had now learned was a relative, had spilled the last of the blood they shared. She endured no belated sense of loss at his death, but she now understood what he meant to Sheila, whose pain was adhering to Jasmine like the smoke from her cigarettes.

  She drove along slower than normal, passing joggers and dog walkers, disturbed by how close she got before she saw them alongside. The road led from Croftbank, through Shawburn and on to Gallowhaugh: the one-time domain of Tony McGill.

  Fallan had worked for him, Stevie too; indeed, according to local myth just about everybody involved in criminal enterprise – and plenty supposedly involved in preventing it – had been on his payroll at one time or another. As Fallan had put it, Tony McGill’s network was like Facebook for criminals.

  Local myth also told that he was the man who ‘kept the drugs out of Gallowhaugh’, but according to Fallan this had been purely a self-serving strategy for shoring up his power base. An old-school gangster who built his broad fiefdom on rackets, robberies and contraband, he didn’t have a supply line for heroin when the game started to change, so he had applied his muscle to the Canute-like pursuit of driving the dealers off his turf. Not only did it slow the consolidation of his emerging rivals (for a while, at least), but it conferred upon him a quite absurd air of civic respectability, with him painted as some kind of redoubtable community leader. Fallan said it was like when Nixon appointed Elvis as an anti-drugs figurehead: those in the know were utterly staggered at t
he ignorance among the well-meaning high and mighty.

  McGill craved respectability as much as he craved money and power, Fallan told her.

  ‘He even fucking voted Tory.’

  This compounded the ignominy when McGill went down for his part in a massive drug deal, the size of the haul testament to how jealously he craved a slice of the dominant new business. The McGill myth maintained that he had been set up, and according to Fallan this part was actually true, ‘just not by the cops’. He hadn’t elaborated, so this was the first Jasmine had learned of what he meant – and how he knew.

  McGill’s sentence was commensurate with the scale of the haul, and he served more than half of it. When he first got out he had found himself yesterday’s bam, and for a few years had struggled to rebuild his powerbase, but these days he was right back at the top of the tree. Same as it ever was; he had climbed up there on the shoulders of some bent cops, who had got rid of a major rival for him and thus opened a gap in the drug market that he was well placed to fill.

  Some said the best revenge is living well, but Jasmine didn’t imagine that memo had reached certain parts of Glasgow. If somebody screwed you over and you ended up in jail for more than fifteen years, living well when you got out was never going to be enough.

  Jasmine reached the roundabout where the boulevard was transected by Capletmuir Road. The streetlights were functioning on the other side, running on a different circuit. A little past it was the ancient, disused petrol station that had been transformed into a car wash by Stevie Fullerton. A cash-only operation, the kind of business where the number of transactions was impossible to audit and thus a facility where it wasn’t just the vehicles that came out nice and clean on the other side.