What You Pay For

by Claire Askew

  But no – Birch shook her head. It couldn’t be her mother, for the simple reason that she’d died nearly two years ago. She’d gone to her grave still clinging to a bone-deep conviction that Charlie was alive, that he had to be alive – and despairing of the useless daughter she’d entrusted to go out into the world and find him.

  The screen told her the number was withheld.

  ‘It’s Birch,’ she said.

  On the other end of the line, there was a sound almost like the start of a laugh, cut off. A strangled noise. Then silence.

  ‘Hello?’

  Birch could hear breathing now: not loud, but ragged. The sound of a person laughing, but trying not to be heard. Laughing or crying, she thought, as she listened. It could be crying.

  ‘Who is this?’ she demanded, and then realised she sounded like every person in every film and TV show who got a call from someone who sat on the line and refused to speak. She took a long breath, and listened to the distant, odd wheezing.

  ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘If you’re not going to talk to me, I’m going to hang up. Got it?’ She waited. ‘Okay,’ she said again, and lowered the phone, swiping to end the call.

  0:21 minutes, the phone informed her. Call from Number Withheld.

  Birch looked up again, at her reflection. She pulled a smirk, a what’s-wrong-with-people-eh? sort of expression. But in the look the mirror threw back, she could see a touch of fear. It had been years since she’d had a crank call, and it had never happened on her work phone. Random people shouldn’t have that number. It might have been an accidental dial, she told herself. But something scuttled down her spine like a cold spider. This was already far from her average Monday: the middle-of-the-night start, the dawn raid, then Charlie wandering through her subconscious mind to say, Remember you still haven’t found me. Now this. She was keen to get to the briefing: keen to be out of this dripping, windowless space and among other people. She switched the phone to silent mode. Without looking back at her own eyes, she ducked out of the bathroom and into the comforting strip-lit glare of the corridor.

  McLeod was in his element. Birch had only caught the tail-end of his introduction to the briefing, but had witnessed enough to gather that in spite of his list of thank yous, it was mostly humblebragging and patting himself on the back. As she’d slipped in, she’d eyed the big-I-am types, the ones shipped in from Glasgow. A handful of older DIs – too past it for the smash-and-grab of the dawn raid – the men for whom Operation Citrine could be everything. Men with long memories of Solomon Carradice. Men who remembered a Glasgow that was really fucking mean: meaner than Edinburgh’s streets could ever be. Sure, Birch was stung that she’d been stuck fishing small fry out of the sea, but she could only imagine how these guys felt. She hoped, for their sakes, that Anjan’s prediction about charges didn’t come true.

  ‘Operation Citrine,’ McLeod said, with such a flourish that Birch jumped. She’d been watching one of the Glasgow DIs remove his jacket, his face an anxious pink, his forehead slick. He’d unbuttoned his shirt cuffs and rolled up the sleeves. On his forearm was a dark tattoo, ancient, spread like a beached jellyfish. It looked like a forces tattoo. She’d been trying to make it out.

  ‘An unmitigated success,’ McLeod was saying. ‘You all did what you had to do, and brought in our man. I’m proud to be able to say he’s safely in one of my cells this morning. Now we just need to decide what to do with him.’

  Birch wondered how the older Glaswegian DIs felt, watching McLeod fiddle the arithmetic to turn himself into the man of the hour. Were they angry? Or were they ashamed at having spent so long chasing Solomon, only to have him scooped up by some career-fast-tracked smarm-merchant who wouldn’t know the harsh realities of the street if they jumped up and bit him?

  Birch flinched a little at her inner monologue. Jesus, Helen. She really was in a bad mood today. An anxious mood, she realised, touching her hand to the phone in her hip pocket, and thinking for the five thousandth time about Charlie. She even quite liked DCI McLeod . . . sometimes, and in small doses.

  ‘Solomon Carradice.’ McLeod pressed a button on the remote in his hand, and on the screen behind him, Solomon’s most recent mugshot appeared. ‘Born Alexander Solomon Carruthers in 1942 and still going strong. Various aliases over the years, but most commonly known simply as Solomon.’ McLeod paused, and glanced behind him at the mugshot. ‘Handsome devil, isn’t he? Doesn’t look a day over a hundred and one.’

  A collective snort unsettled the room’s quiet. Birch kept her attention on the screen, that mugshot she’d already spent hours staring at. It was a few years old now, taken the last time Solomon had been brought in. He’d been accused of committing GBH on a lady friend who turned out to be a sex worker, Birch remembered. She’d withdrawn herself from the case and then disappeared. He looked every inch the well-kept, harmless old gent: if you bumped into him in the street, you’d imagine a lifetime of diligent service at the electric board or somewhere, followed by a bungalow and grandkids on weekends. McLeod was right, his face was heavily lined, but there were no old scars, no chips in the facade. He looked like a grandpa. Worse: he looked like a nice grandpa.

  ‘Now,’ McLeod went on, ‘I know this will be familiar to some of you, but this is for the youngsters in the audience.’ Birch watched as he made a sweeping glance around the room, noting that for just a moment he paused and looked at Amy. Birch frowned. He’d had a downer on the young DC for too long, and Birch suspected it was due to her friendship with the woman. McLeod didn’t seem to see work as a sociable place. It was fifty–fifty every year as to whether he’d even attend the Christmas night out.

  ‘It’s important that those of you who are new to this case understand the MO of Solomon and his fraternity,’ McLeod said. ‘It’s likely that, even if you meet only the lowliest of his associates, you’ll encounter a very stubborn kind of loyalty. It’s going to be hard to get these men to talk, but talk they must if we’re going to have any chance whatsoever of making this case stick. I suggest that we approach them with as much knowledge already in place as we can. Forewarned is forearmed, as they say.’

  A couple of the younger officers already had their tablets out on their laps, waiting to take notes.

  ‘Solomon,’ McLeod went on, ‘must have started out well enough, because his first official brush with the law wasn’t until age twenty-one.’

  Before Birch’s eyes, the elderly Solomon on the screen morphed into a hot-eyed, angular young man, sullen in his first ever mugshot, his fistful of curly hair almost as pale as the backdrop of the flecked black and white print. McLeod was still speaking.

  ‘He had a stall down the Barras, selling everything the modern 1960s home might require – most of it procured from the back of a lorry, surprise surprise. He was a keen amateur boxer, and it seems that through his fighting he met enough of Glasgow’s criminal underclass to keep a nice little business going. He also cultivated a reputation for being extremely good with his fists, as many of the women in his social circle discovered to their detriment. Yes, young Solomon was a handy hired thug and wife-slash-girlfriend beater, as well as being a very effective fence. He was nicked a time or two but always seemed to be able to show his nose was clean. Didn’t help that back then, of course, our predecessors had a tendency to take the line of, just don’t aggravate him next time, Mrs Carradice. He did well enough with his so-called business that he bought himself a shopfront and set up as a jeweller and gold merchant.’ McLeod clicked the button again, and a black and white photo of a shopfront appeared.

  ‘Young Solomon’s first property,’ McLeod said, his tone almost that of a proud parent. ‘The first of many . . .’

  A sort of collective giggle had started up in the room. Birch opened her eyes wide, made them focus back on the seated officers in front of her. One of them – someone sitting near the front – had raised a hand. It was a big hand, and the man it belonged to had pointed his index finger straight at the ceiling, like an eager kid in a pri
mary school class. The collective laughter only added to the effect.

  McLeod paused. ‘DI Robson?’ he said. ‘You have a question?’

  The hand disappeared. Birch realised it belonged to the man whose tattoo she’d been staring at.

  ‘A comment,’ the man said.

  McLeod straightened a little. ‘Go on.’

  ‘Well, with aw due respect, sir, we’ve only got this bastard in a cell for so long, an’ for most of us here, whit you’re saying is well-kent history. For the rest of ye, I agree ye ought tae know it, but it’s in yer files an’ ye can read at yer leisure.’

  There was a general sharpening of attention in the room.

  ‘I jist wonder if,’ DI Robson went on, ‘we couldnae maybe skip to the most recent part, then we can aw get on wi’ getting the guy charged.’

  McLeod paused. He looked nettled. Birch wondered how much time he’d spent putting the briefing together – then she realised he’d probably spent about thirty seconds, which would have consisted of asking someone else to do it for him. She had to admit, she disagreed with DI Robson: the more time she could spend here, listening to the chequered life story of Solomon Carradice, the less time she’d need to spend sitting behind her desk, trying to do work while thinking in circles about Charlie. But she could see McLeod was reading the room, and that she was very much in the minority.

  ‘Okay,’ McLeod said, after what felt like a long and somewhat uncomfortable pause. He began to press the clicker in his hand rapidly, and images flashed over the screen. Mugshots in which Solomon got progressively older. A courtroom sketch of him standing in a dock. A map of the Balkans, then one of Russia. Numerous crime scene photos, which flashed by too quickly to really identify, though Birch could see a few of them depicted corpses. Finally, McLeod settled on a slide that read Operation Citrine.

  ‘So.’ McLeod was annoyed, but trying not to look it. ‘Early last month, we began to receive information from a person who identified themselves as an employee of Solomon’s. At this point I must thank our Glasgow contingent – many of whom are in this room – for their hard work in liaising with this informant. His stories were found to be credible, and it was largely upon his evidence that Operation Citrine was built. From our informant, we learned that . . .’

  Birch frowned. McLeod had flicked to another map slide, one that showed the police positions from that morning’s raid. She knew about this – they all did. They’d just done it, for goodness’ sake. It was like McLeod had skipped a step. Who was the informant? What had he told them? How had he ended up in the wind? It was none of her business, of course – the informant belonged to Glasgow, and this was, after all, a briefing about Solomon. But it was typical of McLeod to gloss over the informant’s disappearance rather than admit there’d been a slip-up or share whatever plan might be in place to sort it out. She spent the rest of McLeod’s now rather truncated speech wondering who knew what: was the informant dead, or had he just gone quiet? Was anyone doing anything to find him? And how the hell had he been persuaded to sing in the first place? She knew it was highly unusual for one of Solomon’s boys to break ranks: members of his fraternity never talked to the police. What had happened here? What was different? She cursed the disciplinary she’d emerged from only weeks earlier. Technically, no one had been given command of the ongoing investigation yet, but Birch was pretty sure that the DI selected was not going to be her. This was need-to-know-basis stuff, so she’d likely never find out about the informant, unless he turned up dead: a distinct possibility. As McLeod finished up, she waited to see if any other officers would raise their hands, as DI Robson had. No one did.

  Instead, the room began to blink and stretch. Birch had another sudden memory of primary school: that weird moment right after the teacher switched off the subtitled biology video and flicked all the lights back on. The students, glassy-eyed and rueful. Her colleagues looked like that class.

  The older Glasgow contingent were the first to get to their feet. Their movements developed an urgency that Birch recognised from watching perps leave particularly gruelling interviews: they were in desperate need of nicotine. As they began to file past her, Birch realised she’d been leaning in the same position against the room’s back wall for too long: one shoulder and the arm that hung from it had begun to prickle and ache. She straightened up and rolled her shoulders like a prizefighter squaring up to an opponent. Really, she thought, the only opponent she cared about was the seemingly endless block of hours still left in this particular working day. As she began to think about yet more coffee (and then, that perhaps she ought to eat something before too long), an unexpected face drew level with her own.

  ‘Aye, hen.’ One of the Glasgow DIs had stopped in front of her, and nodded at her limb-loosening exercise. ‘That was a long yin for sure. I’ll need a few bevvies at the end of this day at the office, I’ll tell ye.’

  Birch smiled. ‘You and me both.’ She looked down at the tattoo on his arm. Even close up, it was hard to make out. ‘DI Robson, right?’ she asked. Her questions about the informant were still swirling in her head. Perhaps this man could answer some of them. ‘I was about to get a coffee – care for one?’

  The man tipped back his head and knocked out a laugh. Birch saw the yellowish tongue of a lifelong smoker, and two neat lines of fillings, the colour of mercury, in his open mouth.

  ‘And jist who’re you round here, hen? The secretary?’

  Birch blushed, but she also laughed, and extended a hand. ‘DI Birch,’ she said, ‘Helen.’

  His hand was like a rough, dry paw.

  ‘Aye, I’m Robson,’ he said. ‘They call me Big Rab, folk I like.’ He smiled at her: a smile she knew he must have deployed to devastating effect as a younger man. ‘And I think I like you, DI Birch.’

  She let him study her for a second, his hand still clamped around hers. She tried to guess his age and got no further than a vague decade, but wondered if he’d come out of retirement for Solomon. Come out, she thought, or stayed out: an old grudge.

  ‘Tell ye whit, hen,’ he said, dropping her hand. ‘Bring yersel down to the pub with us lads tonight, aye? I’m keen fer a chat wi’ all the senior Edinburgh officers on this case. Youse have no idea whit we’re dealing with here, all due respect. I’ve some stories about Solomon Carradice that’d make yer hair curl, an’ I plan tae tell them.’

  He gave her a hard look, which she hadn’t expected. She blinked.

  ‘I cannae tell ye,’ he said, ‘how vital it is that we keep this man behind bars, DI Birch.’

  For a moment, Birch felt pinned down by his gaze, but then he seemed to relax a little, stop scrutinising her.

  ‘So aye. Come tae the pub tonight. We’ll maybe have a wee bit of . . .’

  Birch smiled, glad to be free of his stare. ‘Talking out of school?’

  Robson glanced over his shoulder at McLeod, who was fussing papers into a briefcase. He turned back, that devastating smile on his face once again. ‘You,’ he said, pointing at Birch with a crackled finger, ‘are a smart lassie.’

  First book I ever read to the end was The Lord of the Rings. It was kind of a brag: I wanted to be seen carrying it around, that muckle doorstop of a book. I guess I was thirteen or so. Thought it’d make me look smart . . . guess it did make me look smart. Trouble was, I hadn’t done the mental arithmetic far enough to realise that looking smart sometimes gets you your arse kicked. Smart draws attention to itself.

  So I should have ditched the book but found I couldn’t. I got hooked. And the reason being, I loved Elvish. No joke. I loved the idea that you could go off and write your own language out of nothing, not just enough for people to believe in it in a book but enough that it actually worked on its own, and people could learn it. I learned it – learned to write it anyway. It meant no one could spy on anything I wrote. I wrote lists of my enemies on the front cover of my maths jotter and they all took the piss out of my weird code-writing, having no fucking idea. I kept a sort of fair-weather dia
ry and never needed to hide it from Nella. It was good having a world of my own I could go to, and a way of writing that no one else could understand. Boromir was always my favourite character. I felt a bit like him sometimes: trying to do right but always fucking up, because teenage boys always seem to fuck up. I got it. If I’d been in his shoes I’d have tried to steal the ring, too.

  So what got me into all this? Elvish. Blame Tolkien.

  Because of Tolkien I took all the languages when I got higher up the school. I hated sciences and couldn’t wait to drop all that like a hot brick – ditto history. I liked geography but only because we got to draw maps. I took geography, PE, French, German and Spanish. They didn’t even teach Spanish in my school back then – I had to get in a minibus all on my own once a week and get driven to the next town, where they had an academy school.

  PE was absolute shite. I’d become the weird gayboy who read big books and wrote in Elvish and ditched wood tech to go and do frog-speak in a class full of girls. I’d made the mistake once of saying in front of those knuckleheaded guys that I had a natural aptitude for French, and they bollocked me about it for a year or more. I didn’t know the phrase until Ms McLean had said it to Maw at parents’ night. Those cunts. I wish now I’d asked which they thought was more gay: girls leaning over you every five minutes asking you to conjugate verbs for them? Or cuddling six other sweaty pubescent lads in a scrum before all getting naked together? Maw told me to just ignore them, and I didn’t have a da to tell me otherwise, though back then I wished I did. They used to take the piss out of me for that, too – hey gayboy, when ye were born yer da took one look an’ fucked right off. So yeah, I hated PE, but I was all right at it, and it was easy to pass.