Bred in the Bone

by Christopher Brookmyre

  Josie hadn’t lied, though. The girl in the picture didn’t look like her mother.

  The girl in the picture looked like Jasmine.

  A half-gasp, half-sob escaped from her mouth and she placed a hand over it, no longer mindful of covering her breast.

  McGill was chuckling with grim satisfaction.

  ‘Aye, it has to be said that boy Jazz Donnelly was a mad shagger. A mad shagger. Flung it about like you wouldn’t believe. I once heard that he fucked three different lassies in the office of that Nokturn place in the same night, and then took another one home later. He must have pumped a hundred lassies before he got around to your mammy, so it’s pretty amazing that none of them ever showed up claiming he got them pregnant. A fucking miracle, you might say. Unless it turned out the bold Jazz was firing blanks. What do you reckon?’

  The Satellite

  There was no let-up in the rain as Catherine reached the outskirts of Gallowhaugh. They stopped at a set of traffic lights, a wee parade of shops sitting to the left facing a road that ran parallel to the dual carriageway. She recognised it. A mid-level dealer named Jai McDiarmid had been found dead a couple of years back, behind what had then been his own tanning salon. The premises were boarded up now, nobody taking on the let. A couple of doors down there was a group of teenagers outside a chippy, huddled under the cover of an overhang, a scene Catherine guessed she could have witnessed here on any rainy night over the past four or five decades.

  She noticed Fallan gazing fixedly out of the passenger-side window towards the parade, and wondered what memories were replaying inside his head.

  ‘How did you come to be working for Tony McGill in the first place?’ she asked him.

  It seemed to take him a few moments to disengage from wherever his mind had been before he could deal with her question.

  ‘It’s a long story. In the simple version, you could say I was headhunted. Tony was an adept manipulator of people: he understood the many and various things that could motivate them, not just the venal ones. And it’s testimony to his skills that I didn’t realise I had been manipulated until I was already too far down the road to turn back.’

  ‘You knew who he was, though? Growing up, I mean.’

  ‘Everybody knew who he was. I knew who all the hard men and players were around Gallowhaugh, and I hated all of them. I had never met Tony McGill, but I hated him the most, because I knew he was in cahoots with my dad. When I was at a sensitive age, the one redeeming feature I believed my dad to have was that he was a polisman, fighting the good fight. I made a lot of allowances for his behaviour on that basis. Then I found out about him and Tony, and the last piece of façade crumbled. I finally saw what my old man was, but I suppose I must have transferred a lot of blame onto Tony.’

  The lights turned to green. Catherine pulled away, staying on the dual carriageway. She still didn’t have a destination in mind, and neither did Fallan. He was waiting for a call, and it felt right to be mobile.

  ‘So what changed your mind?’ she asked.

  ‘Learning that nothing’s ever that simple, especially in Gallowhaugh. One day I was walking through the ruins of what used to be a factory, when I saw six or seven guys coming towards me. They had axes, hammers, machetes, motorbike chains. They all had scarves over their faces, up to just below the eyes. That was unusual – round here, if you were going to give somebody a doing the whole point was that the victim, and everybody else, knew exactly who was giving out the message.’

  ‘They were masked because it was going to be more than that,’ she suggested.

  ‘Fortunately I didn’t have to find out. A car came screeching up and the back door flew open. Somebody told me to jump in, and I didn’t wait to be asked twice. The driver told me “there’s a man wants a word with you,” and I knew who he meant.’

  ‘Team Tony to the rescue.’

  ‘Aye. The twist was, years later I found out what the scarves were for: it was so I didn’t recognise that the blokes with the tools were Tony’s people too. It was a set-up.’

  ‘So that you felt you owed him from the off, and that he was on your side.’

  ‘That and the opportunity for him to make an impression. They drove me to meet him, and not in some dingy pub or snooker hall. I got taken to his house, this huge place up in the hamlet. It was so he could come over as the benevolent ruler, show off his stature by putting himself in the context of a different world from the streets that . . .’

  But Catherine had stopped listening after one key word.

  ‘The hamlet?’ she asked.

  ‘Aye. It’s what we called Capletmuir. Tony had this massive house—’

  ‘Take me there,’ she interrupted. ‘Right now. Show me where it was.’

  She did a u-turn through the first gap in the central reservation and accelerated back towards the junction as though it was an emergency.

  It only took a few minutes to reach Capletmuir, the satellite place removed and yet connected to the world once ruled by Tony McGill. The car snaked between opulent new developments, culs-de-sac bending away out of sight either side of the main road, on past Miner’s Row, where Brenda Sheehan had lived and died, towards the railway bridge at the crown of the hill.

  Fallan directed her past the station, the road passing beneath the train tracks, then left, inevitably, on to the tree-lined enclave that was Silverbirks Lane. It was a narrow road, laid down long before the advent of the motor car, and the exclusivity of the neighbourhood was underlined by the fact that the subsequent upgrades in tar and concrete had not included the addition of a pavement. Walls, trees and hedges abutted the road, just shy of a narrow strip of grass banking.

  The houses themselves could only be glimpsed, each of them set far back from the road and intentionally obscured by greenery. Fallan pointed to a set of huge wooden gates, set into the modern brickwork of a high wall, their automated hinges powered by electric servos.

  ‘That was the place. The gates have had a revamp, but that was McGill’s house.’

  Catherine kept driving. The road bent around to the right as she slowly followed it, taking it further away from the railway line that ran parallel to the properties nearest the main road. On the left-hand side, about sixty yards after the place that had once belonged to McGill, she spied a gap between the tall housing of another security gate and the wall bordering the next property.

  This was where the path came out: the path that led to the woodland behind the sprawling plots of Silverbirks Lane, trailing among the trees until it ran alongside the railway and emerged next to the station.

  ‘What?’ Fallan asked.

  ‘Julie Muir’s body was found just off that path, somewhere around what I now know to have been the back of Tony McGill’s house. Can you see where he fits into this now?’

  ‘Starting to,’ Fallan replied.

  ‘She’s walking along the path towards the Ewart house, but before she gets there, she sees something she’s not supposed to . . .’

  ‘Don’t rule out McGill’s creepy wanker of a son, Teej. It’s possible he—’

  Fallan stopped in mid-stream as his phone began to chime. He fished it rapidly from his pocket and flashed it at Catherine, the screen showing a picture of Jasmine Sharp above the line of text identifying her as the caller.

  But they both knew she wasn’t the caller.

  ‘Put it on speaker,’ Catherine said, cutting the engine.

  She didn’t expect Fallan to comply, so the fact that he did told her how desperate he was, how much he was prepared to lay himself open to her.

  ‘Hello?’ Fallan said tentatively, the uncertainty in his tone betraying how fragile he truly was, and no amount of bitterness inside Catherine could deny how human.

  ‘Dead man,’ said a male voice, curt and emotionless. ‘Collaton Park. Ten on the dot. You come in through the main gate, you come on foot and you come alone. You don’t show, she dies. You’re late, she dies. Any hint you’ve got friends, she dies.’

 
; The call clicked off, leaving them listening to the endless drumming of the rain.

  Fallan was absolutely still, and yet she got a sense of uncontainable energy from him. It was something that could explode forth at any moment, and she knew she didn’t want to be there when it did. All she had to do was imagine for a second that it was Duncan or Fraser being held at the other end of that phone for her to comprehend the magnitude of the forces that could be unleashed.

  ‘You recognise the voice?’ she asked.

  He nodded. ‘It’s McGill.’

  ‘Where’s Collaton Park?’

  ‘I’ve never heard of it,’ Fallan said, sounding frantic, like this might prove to be a disastrous oversight on his part.

  Catherine grabbed her phone and keyed the name into its navigation app. The screen resolved into a map and auto-scrolled from the last place she had used it to a point only minutes from where the car sat in Capletmuir. Her instincts had been on the money.

  ‘It’s in Gallowhaugh,’ she said, showing him the phone.

  Fallan pinched to zoom out, getting his bearings.

  ‘Christ. Collaton Park. I never even knew that was its real name.’

  ‘What’s real name?’

  ‘We just called it the Spooky.’

  Court Evidence

  They found Cal playing a singles match on a blue indoor surface. He appeared to be covering more ground than the ball, zinging back and forth along the baseline, charging the net, chasing back lobs and scurrying after seemingly lost causes to keep every point alive. Anthony estimated that at some stage in every match his opponent must want to kill him.

  He spotted them through the window between serves. There was a moment’s confusion on his face as the initial recognition gave way to making sense of them in this context. Then he just looked pissed off, once he’d worked it out.

  Anthony signalled with two fingers to communicate that they just needed a quick word. Cal responded with an identical digit count to communicate how much he welcomed the interruption, but then held up a palm. He was saying he’d be with them in five, or maybe just telling them to hold on.

  ‘This is the longest I’ve ever seen him go without eating anything,’ Adrienne remarked.

  ‘At least now we know why he stays thin. I’m knackered watching him.’

  He served out the game in progress, which turned out to be the last. They watched him shake hands with his opponent, then he picked up his bag and headed off the court, though not before fishing out a banana from somewhere. He was half way through it by the time he emerged into the corridor.

  ‘To what do I owe the considerable ignominy?’ he asked. ‘I’m not on call.’

  ‘Colin Morrison,’ Adrienne stated. ‘What do you know about him?’

  ‘The pathologist?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘He’s retired. Why?’

  Cal was prickly as Anthony expected, but he detected an edge to this that was more than mere annoyance at them showing up here.

  ‘We think he might be in trouble,’ Anthony said. ‘We’ve been to his flat: somebody’s ripped the place apart looking for something, and we think Morrison has fled the country. We’re just waiting on Immigration to find out where he’s gone.’

  ‘What’s the difference between fled and merely left?’

  ‘He had been in telephone contact with none other than Stevie Fullerton quite recently – just a few weeks ago,’ Adrienne replied. ‘He packed and left in a hurry shortly after Fullerton got shot.’

  ‘Colin Morrison?’ Cal asked, his face a picture of incredulous consternation. ‘In touch with Stevie Fullerton?’

  ‘Fullerton was in touch with Brenda Sheehan recently too,’ Anthony told him. ‘She was last seen cooling her heels on your slab. We think Morrison was trying to avoid the same. We’re trying to suss what he was into. Did you know him?’

  ‘Of course. Just as colleagues, though. I didn’t socialise with him. Or rather, Colin didn’t socialise with me. That would never do.’

  Cal allowed himself a regretful little smile.

  ‘Why not?’ asked Adrienne. Cal was clearly opening the door to something. ‘Did he have an issue with your sexuality?’

  Jesus, Anthony thought, glad he wasn’t the one who had come straight out with that. Adrienne could be pretty direct, right enough. Keeping so many plates in the air, presumably it wore down your tolerance for fannying about.

  ‘Oh, certainly he had issues, very complex ones,’ Cal replied. ‘Colin is on the team too, you see: he just doesn’t wear the colours. I think he had some very unpleasant experiences in less enlightened times.’

  Cal said these last few words with arch emphasis. He clearly didn’t consider these times particularly enlightened, but this only served to underline the severity of whatever trials Morrison had been forced to endure.

  ‘When did he retire?’ Adrienne asked.

  ‘Oh, must be a good five years or so now.’

  ‘So you won’t have seen him for a while?’

  ‘Well, that’s the thing,’ Cal replied, looking a little sheepish. ‘I just saw him a few weeks back. He asked me for a favour: wanted me to get the lab to run a DNA sample for him.’

  ‘And did you?’

  Cal gave an odd little shrug. They all knew he was hardly going to get hauled over the coals for it. And if he knew how much shit they were digging themselves into, he wouldn’t be acting coy about doing a former colleague a wee turn.

  ‘Sure. I didn’t hear back from him, so it slipped my mind to chase up the results.’

  ‘What was it he wanted analysed?’ Anthony asked.

  ‘Skin cells and some traces of blood.’

  ‘What from?’

  Cal gave him the finger, which he initially took to mean ‘none of your business’, but he was merely making the most of an opportunity.

  ‘A ring,’ he answered.

  The Vengeance of a Patient Man

  ‘I’m a father myself, so I know you’ll do anything for your children.’

  McGill sounded perversely sincere. Jasmine could make out his words but it was like he was talking to her at a rock concert, his voice almost drowned by sound from a far more powerful source.

  She was fighting to make sense of it until she realised that she was only fighting it because it made sense. It made perfect sense, of everything.

  ‘That makes you like a wee remote control for Glen Fallan,’ he went on.

  His self-congratulatory burbling seemed irrelevant compared to the vastness of what she had just learned, but it wasn’t as if he was going to give her time and space to digest the news. Watching her head spin was part of the rush for him.

  He was right, though: she was Fallan’s remote control, his shock collar. Fallan had understood that from before she was born. That was why he stayed out of her life, out of her mum’s life. He knew that the two of them were his greatest vulnerability, that men like McGill could always hurt them in order to get to him. The only way to protect them had been to pretend that he was dead.

  It must have been his genuine worst nightmare, therefore, when she turned up looking for him after her uncle Jim went missing. That was why he had initially tried to put her off, and made out he wanted nothing to do with her. But developments had taken such choices out of his hands, which had made it imperative that she didn’t learn the truth.

  McGill had worked it out, though. It couldn’t have been too hard for him to piece together, given that he knew what a female Fallan ought to look like.

  All those times Fallan was with her, protecting her, he must have known it was at a greater risk. That was why he had taught her ways to defend herself, taught her to listen to her fear. He knew that one day the time might come when his past would catch up to her, and he wouldn’t be there to intervene.

  ‘You should be flattered that he was prepared to go to jail and keep his mouth shut just for you,’ McGill told her. ‘That was the idea, anyway. But best laid plans and all that . . . So we’ve had to im
provise. It’s all a bit more rushed than I had in mind, but the important thing is that I’ll make sure he knows you and I had a wee bit of time together, before the end.’

  There was something that Jasmine had understood since the moment she was bundled into the van, something that part of her mind had nonetheless been refusing to acknowledge. It was chief among the things that she had sought to rationalise, building up a battery of arguments and explanations that offered reassurance, but only in the same way that anaesthetics offered pain relief. With or without, it would soon be knife to skin.

  They weren’t wearing masks.

  Before the end, he said.

  Hers or Fallan’s, he didn’t specify. He didn’t need to. He couldn’t kill her and leave Fallan alive. He couldn’t frame Fallan and leave her alive.

  McGill adjusted his posture, angling his chair away from the table and spreading his legs. His left hand went down to his waist while his right slipped into his jacket and produced her phone. She heard him undo his zip.

  ‘Right, hen. I think we’ll send the proud father a wee photo to show him how well we’re getting on together. Come on,’ he commanded, his voice low and simmering with threat. ‘Doon on your knees and get this in your mooth.’

  Home and Family

  The trees were offering some shelter, but the rain was spilling off the leaves in huge collected drops, splattering Catherine’s hair and sometimes running down the back of her neck. She had parked at least quarter of a mile away and followed Fallan along a hidden system of tracks and pathways, behind gardens, between garages, away from roads and pavements. This was his Gallowhaugh, he explained: the secret thoroughfares and hiding places he had mapped out growing up here, his status as a particularly detested polisman’s son a permanent target on his back.

  She was unnerved by how he moved, particularly given his height and build. He was swift and silent, blending into the shadows, going from haste to absolute stillness with no apparent effort of deceleration. He would have been difficult enough to see at the best of times, but on a night as wet and dark as this he could render himself almost invisible. Too bad he had her tagging along, then, but it was his choice.