Bred in the Bone

by Christopher Brookmyre

  Brenda looked a little timorous and unsure, but not uncomfortable, not afraid. Her eyes were slightly bloodshot from crying some time recently, a scrunched-up hanky in her right hand further evidence of this, but otherwise she seemed in good health. She was certainly keen to talk, tripping over herself as she spilled out her recollections.

  Her living room was looking better than the last time Catherine saw it too. It was a tight shot, framing Brenda fairly closely, but she could see enough to be struck by the order and cleanliness of the coffee table. There was no hint of the alcoholic dereliction they had witnessed; no hint of alcohol, in fact. There was a mug of tea and a presentation tin of chocolate biscuits in front of her, perhaps brought by her visitor.

  ‘Take your time, Brenda,’ said a male voice, its tone patient and sympathetic. ‘Just tell me again what we talked about before. Forget about the phone: just look at me.’

  ‘We’re guessing that’s Fullerton,’ Beano said, pausing the playback. ‘He doesn’t appear in the shot, but . . .’

  ‘It is,’ confirmed Catherine. ‘I’ve spoken to him. You found this on the laptop?’ she asked, amazed.

  ‘No, it was remote storage,’ Adrienne answered. ‘Fullerton uploaded it to a site called E-Vault and we found his login details.’

  ‘Did you find anything else?’

  ‘Just this. According to the user settings, he set up the account the same day this file was uploaded. We’re guessing this wasn’t put here to keep it hidden: it was a back-up, in case the original file got lost or deleted. This video might well be why the gunman took Fullerton’s phone.’

  ‘But if he uploaded a back-up from the laptop, why wasn’t there a copy on the laptop?’

  ‘We have a theory,’ Beano said, ‘but it contains spoilers.’

  He clicked to resume play.

  Brenda looked concerned.

  ‘I’m no’ sure where to begin,’ she admitted.

  ‘Doesn’t matter,’ said Fullerton. ‘Just say what you were saying before. Say what you remember.’

  She nodded, taking a moment.

  ‘First thing was, I suppose, hearing about the lassie. You know, hearing that they’d found a body up near the footpath next to the railway. You just wouldn’t expect anything like that here, in the hamlet, especially not back in those days. You always felt safe here. It was that quiet. When I first heard, I thought it must have been somebody hit by a train.

  ‘When I saw the polis car pulling up in front of the house, to the door, I thought they were coming to ask if we’d seen anything. I thought they’d be chapping every door in the street. But they were there to take Teddy away.’

  ‘Who was “they”?’ asked Fullerton.

  ‘Cairns was the one in charge: Bob Cairns. I knew him because I’d had a wee bit of bother before. And there was a younger one, a big lanky boy. He wouldn’t have farted without Cairns telling him to. Cannae mind his name, though. It’s gone right out my head.’

  ‘Was it Drummond?’

  ‘Aye. That was it: Drummond.’

  Catherine was aware of both Beano and Adrienne looking towards her when this name was confirmed. This was why Beano had suggested they take the laptop into her office rather than watch it at his desk. They were all acutely aware that the stakes just went up.

  ‘When they lifted Teddy I assumed it was a mistake. I thought maybe they’d got a description of somebody that looked like him, or there was a mix-up over the name. Teddy’s full name was James Edward Sheehan, so I was thinking there must be somebody called James or Jimmy Sheehan that they’re after, and it would all get cleared up. But no, it was oor Teddy they wanted right enough. They had him away for days. Teddy wouldn’t have known what was happening to him. He didn’t know his rights, so he wouldn’t have known to ask for a lawyer. He’d have been putty in their hands.’

  ‘But you gave a statement, didn’t you,’ Fullerton prompted. ‘You gave him an alibi.’

  ‘That’s right, son,’ she answered, her lips wavering, her expression threatening tears.

  She took a sip of tea and swallowed, finding her voice again.

  ‘I told the police that Teddy couldn’t have done this, because he was here with me that night. I can’t remember who I gave my statement to. It wasn’t the ones who arrested Teddy. I told them Teddy was seldom out of the house in the evenings. Now and again he’d go for a walk in the summer if it was a nice evening, but usually after he’d had his tea he’d be in front of the telly or doing a jigsaw. He loved jigsaws.’

  These last few words came out as a strangled whisper, a fond memory turning to pain.

  ‘I had been drinking that night,’ she admitted. ‘I drank every night, back then. But he was here, Teddy was here.’

  She wiped her eyes with the sleeve of her housecoat, apparently forgetting about the hanky gripped in her hand.

  ‘Do you need . . .?’ Fullerton asked, though they couldn’t tell what was being offered. Perhaps another hanky.

  ‘No, you’re all right, son. I just need a minute.’

  ‘Take your time, Brenda.’

  She gulped at her tea, a tentative sip becoming something more needy, more urgent. In that moment Catherine glimpsed what it might have been like when the vessel in her hand contained vodka.

  ‘They came back,’ she said, putting down the mug. Her expression was grim but stonier, less weakened by uncertainty.

  ‘Who did?’

  ‘Cairns and the other one. Drummond. They got me to change my story. Or to “revise my statement”. That’s the words that’ll follow me to the grave. The words St Peter will read out when I have to answer for what I’ve done.’

  ‘Did they threaten you?’

  ‘No. Well, I suppose they did, but it was more subtle than that. Cairns didn’t challenge me or call me a liar or anything. He said he thought I was mistaken. He knew I’d have been drinking that night, so he told me my memory couldn’t be clear. He started off planting wee seeds of doubt. Then he got talking about my drinking, about the troubles I’d had. My arrests. Shoplifting. God forgive me, son, I’m so ashamed of it now, but back then money was always tight, especially with Teddy’s big mouth to feed, and his clothes and his bus fares.’

  ‘There’s none of us lived perfect lives,’ Fullerton said, prompting a few exchanged glances.

  ‘Cairns was sympathetic,’ Brenda went on. ‘He got me talking about Teddy, about how I’d been landed with him when other women were meeting husbands and making lives for themselves. Said it was no wonder I drank. But he also said it wasn’t fair on Teddy either, having been left in the care of somebody who couldn’t cope. He said the social would have been liable to take him away if they knew the states I was getting myself into, and that’s when Drummond brought up the charges.’

  ‘What charges?’

  ‘The shoplifting. I was due in court in a couple of months, and he said it was likely to be a custodial sentence this time. Teddy would be getting taken into care if I went inside. But Cairns said it didn’t have to be like that. He could make the charges go away, said I deserved a fresh start: a new beginning. He said Teddy had done a terrible thing, and he knew why it was hard for me to believe that, but that Teddy might be dangerous, and how would I feel if I stood by my drunken alibi and Teddy killed somebody else?’

  She looked away, down at the table, and closed her eyes for a painful few seconds. Catherine anticipated another breakdown, but when she opened them again there was something darker in her expression, something that would not allow tears. Tears were a sign of self-pity, and in Brenda’s face Catherine saw only shame.

  ‘It wasn’t the threats, or the pressure. It was me. I was weak. I wanted rid of him. I wanted a life of my own, a new beginning like Cairns was offering. And I didn’t want to go to jail. I couldn’t face the thought of doing without drink for however long I got sentenced.

  ‘I let myself believe it. Cairns made it easy for me. I knew I had been drinking that night, so I told myself my memory could have been
wrong. I knew Teddy had been out for a walk one of the evenings around then, but I couldn’t have said for sure which one, so I told myself that maybe it was the Saturday night. Or Teddy could have been out while I thought he was upstairs doing his jigsaw . . .’

  Brenda put a hand to her forehead and leaned into it, as if her head would roll off without the support. She didn’t speak for a long time, maybe twenty or thirty seconds.

  Catherine could vividly imagine the scene in that same living room, twenty-five years earlier, and in particular she could picture the view from inside Drummond’s head. Brenda wasn’t the only one allowing herself to be seduced by a lie. The witness was confused. She had been drunk, she was being instinctively loyal to her brother; and besides, her alibi was going to be worthless in court anyway because she was a hopeless alcoholic.

  ‘The worst lies are the ones you tell yourself,’ Brenda said, ‘because you’ll never find forgiveness for those.’

  She gazed down again, then looked back at her confessor, for Fullerton was undoubtedly the one she had been referring to when she spoke to her sponsor.

  ‘He told me Teddy would get taken care of in prison, that he would be somewhere special, like a hospital.’

  Brenda’s face crumbled, the self-reproach giving way to uncontainable sorrow. She broke down, the words ‘God forgive me, God forgive me’ repeated over and over until they were swallowed by her sobs.

  The file ended there, the words ‘Play again?’ in the centre of the screen reading like a dare under the circumstances.

  ‘This is toxic,’ Catherine stated.

  ‘No shit,’ agreed Beano, his tone acknowledging that an ordinary day at work was in the first throes of turning into a major crisis with ramifications for all their careers.

  ‘This doesn’t prove anything in and of itself,’ Catherine said. ‘The DCC can plausibly argue that all it shows is that he was present as the junior partner while his senior colleague persuaded a witness, who may conceivably have been lying or mistaken – certainly unreliable – to alter her story.’

  ‘Aye, but given that Brenda Sheehan and Stevie Fullerton are now both dead, and the case files are missing . . .’

  ‘Quite,’ Catherine answered.

  ‘You asked why there isn’t a copy of this video on the laptop,’ Beano reminded her. ‘I think there probably was, until very recently. Paul Clayton said they were getting pressure from upstairs to make sure there was nothing compromising to LOCUST on Fullerton’s computer. I’m guessing that pressure was coming from Drummond in order to get the laptop away from us.’

  ‘But what if they found the video file?’ Adrienne asked.

  ‘LOCUST wouldn’t have looked twice at it, especially if a glimpse just showed an old woman talking. Nor would they have been particularly suspicious if the DCC said he wanted a wee poke through the laptop himself.’

  ‘We’ll never know,’ Catherine admitted. ‘But if it’s true, it’s not the only thing he’s tried to erase.’

  She indicated the printouts sitting beneath the laptop on her desk.

  ‘Stevie Fullerton’s phone records were amended by Drummond. He removed the number of Gordon Ewart, Cautela Group senior executive and son of Campbell Ewart, the former Under-Secretary of State for Scotland. What is less well known about Gordon Ewart is that he was dating Julie Muir at the time of her murder. Ewart told us that Fullerton had been blackmailing him, threatening to make a stink in the press over his coke-sniffing wild years and his connection to the killing, but I’m starting to think Stevie was threatening to expose something bigger.’

  ‘Cairns and Drummond had an educationally subnormal suspect in custody for however long they needed,’ observed Adrienne. ‘No lawyer, no witnesses, no tape recorders back then.’

  Catherine recalled Ciara Flanigan’s words, the conspiracy theory Stevie Fullerton was hawking at Julie’s funeral: Girlfriend of a cabinet minister’s son gets murdered and the polis conveniently lock up the local weirdo for it.

  ‘We all need to take a breath here,’ she warned them, ‘and step extremely cautiously from this point forwards. Like I said, this video proves nothing. On its own, it’s more dangerous to us right now than to the DCC. Especially as we don’t know what his role in all of this is.’

  ‘So how do you want to play it?’ asked Beano.

  ‘I want to light a fire under him and see how he reacts, but I’m not going upstairs to chap on his door. I don’t think I need to stress that we’ll be flying under the radar here.’

  ‘Secretly investigating the Deputy Chief Constable? No boss, you don’t need to stress that. What do you want us to do?’

  ‘I want you to compare both versions of these phone records, find out if there was anyone else Drummond didn’t want us to know Stevie was speaking to. And as it’s unlikely we’re ever going to see the investigation files again, I want you to look through the court records of the case. I’ll ask Dom Wilson at the Procurator Fiscal’s office if he can get somebody to dig them up. I’ll be speaking to him anyway.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because I’m going to get him to release Glen Fallan.’

  Blind Alley

  It was close to noon when he finally emerged from the close, the blue doorway tucked between a late-night kebab shop and a grim-looking computer repair and game-exchange joint. Clearly he had been up at the crack of half-eleven, ambling bleary-eyed along the street at an unhurried pace.

  It was going to be a foot follow, which wasn’t ideal on her own, but less conspicuous than a vehicle pursuit. Jasmine had always suspected it would be a foot follow. Somehow she couldn’t picture Ned Untrusty having his own wheels, other than for the brief period between stealing them and fencing them off at the nearest chop shop.

  She climbed out of the surveillance van and got into step roughly twenty yards behind him. She was dressed in what she considered her Velma costume, intended to make her look inconspicuously dowdy. Her hair was tucked under a beret chosen for its complete lack of aesthetic merit, and she had donned an equally drab overcoat and a pair of glasses to complete the look. This guy had to have studied what she looked like in order to ID her at the Alhambra and make his move. She couldn’t afford to be recognised as she would only get one shot. If he made her, it was over.

  Jasmine was aware that she was disproportionately fixated upon this. It wasn’t some amazing lead, yet she had been almost giddy with the rush when the information came through from Harry Deacon’s contact in print analysis.

  ‘The chancer who stole your phone is called Billy Darroch,’ she was informed. ‘He lives upstairs from PC Clinic at 248 Carswell Road.’

  She finally had a name for the slimebag who had swiped her sim, which meant she had a possible link to whoever was behind the Fullerton shooting. It was tentative at best, but as long as she was pursuing it then that meant the investigation wasn’t over, and she achingly needed that to be the case.

  She had spent yesterday on a shift for Galt Linklater, sitting in a van outside a house in Pollokshields, watching for a subject who never emerged. His curtains didn’t even open. Bastard must have cosied up with a duvet and a DVD boxset while she sat there and stared at a never-changing scene. To be honest, it was a bit of a result: it was money in the bank and she wouldn’t have been on her game had a follow been required. She had been listless to the point of depression, bereft of energy and feeling at best numb, at worst hovering constantly on the verge of tears.

  She felt assailed by a crushing sense of disappointment and anticlimax. This quest she had been on for most of her life had ultimately led her to an empty place, from where there appeared to be nowhere else to go. She had pulled back the curtain and discovered the true nature of the Great Oz. For so long she had been desperate to know who her father was, and to find out the truth about her mother’s life before she was born. She had finally discovered the answers to her questions, but had learned nothing that changed how she felt.

  On top of that, there was the inescapable co
nclusion that she’d been had. When she called Laura Geddes with her findings, if she was being honest, she didn’t know how she expected to feel. She wasn’t looking for a junior sheriff ’s badge and a pat on the head, but as soon as she imparted the information she felt hollow, suddenly aware she had eagerly handed over the fruits of her labours and got nothing in return. Laura had sounded intrigued and grateful, but her manner was markedly different from when she had visited the flat.

  ‘I’ll pass this stuff on right away,’ Laura had said. ‘I’m with Catherine just now. She’ll be very interested in what you’ve just told me.’

  Catherine, not McLeod. She didn’t sound cagey and tense, concerned about her boss going off the rails. She sounded energised and confident, eager to receive her own pat on the head.

  That was when Jasmine sussed that she’d been played. It seemed embarrassingly obvious now, but kudos to Laura for her performance. There was no way she was ever going behind her boss’s back, but Jasmine had bought it, and she’d paid for it with a load of unbillable hours, doing McLeod’s job for her gratis. McLeod must have been in on it from the start, the torn-faced fucking cow.

  This was why she needed to follow Billy Darroch. It was the only angle she had left, the one thing she hadn’t handed over to the cops. This would keep her foot across the threshold of the investigation, just enough to stop the door closing.

  He was not a taxing subject. Short of wearing a hi-viz vest, there was little else he could have done to improve his visibility. He was dressed in a crimson hoodie: Little Red Riding Ned. Not only did it make him easy to eyeball from distance, but the hood restricted his peripheral vision so he was unlikely to catch a sideways glance. Plus there was something conspicuous about his gait, a gallus waddle like he owned the pavement, all elbows and bobbing head. If only all of her marks were this easy.

  A wee bit less slick and sneaky when you’re not the one preying on the unwary, eh Billy?

  He headed into the low-level station just past the new Nando’s, buying a ticket at the window. His nasal voice was horribly familiar as he asked for his ticket, giving her a shudder as it took her back to his disingenuous solicitude at the Alhambra.