by Claire Askew
Birch raised an eyebrow. ‘Of course,’ she said, thinking again of Toad.
‘For a while he was working with Balkan gangs, smuggling fags into the UK. He made a mint on that. Fucking cigarettes. The early nineties was boom-time for the Solomons of this world, fucking hellish for us. It’s before your time, darlin’, I dare say.’
Birch nodded. It was, but she’d heard tell.
‘We could never get him,’ Rab went on. ‘We’d get the guy in the fishing boat whose so-called catch was all unbranded fags from Bulgaria; we’d get the boys he’d paid to drive the fishmongers’ vans and deliver them – yeah, this job this morning wis classic, his speciality. But we never got Solomon – could never make it stick. No one would grass on him, not ever, not even close. They’d go off to the jail like lambs. We’d raid flats we knew were brothels and nick girls who had no papers, no English in their heads, came all the way here from Ukraine in the back of some refrigerated truck; even they wouldn’t breathe a word. All too scared of the boss man, and rightly so. We’re talking about a guy who’ll go after anyone, disnae gie a hoot fer status, influence, whatever. He’s disappeared bankers, bought politicians all over the Continent.’
Birch’s eyes widened.
‘Dinnae go thinking this is aw embellishment, hen,’ Rab said. ‘No one’s safe. Even us polis, like I say. It disnae matter who ye are, once Solomon sends his boys tae find ye, that’s it. I don’t know where the informant is for Citrine, hen, but I hope he’s disappeared himself good and proper. Greenland maybe . . . that might be far enough. But Solomon will be looking for him now till he draws his last breath. Unless he’s in a cell, a grass like him is as good as dead.’
Birch shivered. She found his informant comment curious, having thought Big Rab would know far more than she did. Perhaps he did, and was testing her. All she knew was no one else was talking: the success of Operation Citrine might hang on this one informant’s testimony.
‘Okay . . . look, Rab,’ she said, ‘I should tell you, this investigation feels pretty tightly sealed. When it comes to that informant, the details of how this all came about, all that, I’m pretty much in the dark. I assumed you’d be the man with the facts.’
She paused, testing him right back. Big Rab didn’t blink.
‘You maybe don’t know,’ she went on, ‘but I just recently went through disciplinary proceedings over Three Rivers. I was cleared, but I think I’m still a bit persona non grata at the moment. McLeod’s keeping me out of sight of the press, or . . . something.’
She realised she was rambling, trying to convince herself. The face of DI Crosbie – a man she had to admit to never having liked – loomed in her mind’s eye.
Rab frowned. ‘Three Rivers,’ he said. ‘That college shooting? Ye gods, that was a shite business. Really got a pasting in the bastard media, didn’t we?’
Birch felt her mouth thin into a line. ‘We did,’ she said. ‘And it drove me so nuts I went a little vigilante on a journalist. Hence the disciplinary.’
Rab raised his eyebrows, a do tell gesture.
‘We had previous.’ Birch gave a little shake of the head to indicate he shouldn’t pry further. ‘And he pushed my buttons. Got me over a barrel. But it could have turned out worse. He’s on remand right now.’
‘Grant Lockley.’
Birch nodded, and Rab beamed. ‘Little weasel, that one. You were the arresting officer?’
She could feel herself blushing, and realised it was with a guilty kind of pride. ‘I was.’
‘Well, fucksake, Birch!’ Big Rab leaned back from the table and smacked his knee with one hammy palm. ‘I’m sure I’m not the first to say you did a fine day’s work that day.’
She tried to swallow a smile.
‘And what’s more,’ Rab added, ‘I’m sure your DCI McLeod agrees.’
He did: Birch knew. He’d made no secret of the fact that he’d seen the disciplinary as a formality – he’d circled the wagons, and sure enough, it had all turned out fine. We only need the smell of due process, he’d said, to appease the press some. Birch hadn’t been fully happy about any of it, but she’d gone along with the due process all the same.
She shook herself. ‘I’m afraid the fact remains,’ she said, ‘that you’ve bought the wrong girl a drink. I’m just doing the grunt work on the Solomon case. DI Crosbie’s your man.’
Rab sat up straight. ‘DI Crosbie is a fine officer,’ he said, in a tone of voice that suggested he thought the exact opposite. ‘But I’m a tight bastard, hen. Ask any one of these lads. I’m very careful about who I buy drinks for.’
Birch frowned. ‘Well, I’m flattered,’ she said, ‘even if I’m not quite sure what you mean.’
Big Rab winked then, and Birch saw Amy – sitting across the room with DS Scott – notice, and raise a teasing eyebrow at her.
‘Like I told you before,’ he said, ‘you’re a smart lassie. You’ll figure it out.’
Birch forced herself to walk to the car without looking at her phone again. Sitting at traffic lights, waiting to turn left onto Queen Street, she fancied she could feel it vibrating in her handbag, but knew it couldn’t be. It was after ten. Anjan wouldn’t text at this hour, it wasn’t his style. No, she was imagining the phantom of Charlie texting her back: finally replying to say, I’ve missed you, too – I’ll meet you at Mum’s. I’m sorry. I’m coming home.
Leith Walk was quiet. As she passed, Birch glanced in at the smudged, lit windows of Joseph Pearce’s bar, La Favorita, the youth hostel. Buses floated by in their lanes like steamed-up fish tanks. The car felt dark and empty, home still far away. Charlie was fourteen years gone. Anjan wanted to talk. Crosbie wouldn’t find anything to stick to Solomon and Operation Citrine would fail. Grant Lockley would walk free. As she rounded the road’s chicane by the Seafield water treatment works, Birch felt tempted to close her eyes and let the car drift: to skid straight through the barriers and down into the sea.
Tired, she thought. You’re just tired. Everything will seem better with some sleep. To keep herself on the road, she counted the hours she’d been awake: more than twenty. Again: the phantom vibration of her phone. Every traffic light switched to red as she approached.
She’d told herself she’d wait till she was inside before she looked, but found she couldn’t. She parked behind her house, next to the Chinese takeaway about ten doors up, then killed the engine and turned on the overhead light. Her throat clenched: those notifications hadn’t been imaginary. The phone lit up with missed call after missed call. She counted seven. And one text from Anjan.
Call me any time, it read. I want to talk to you before tomorrow. Please, Helen. A.
Birch frowned. The message was almost a relief: that please, Helen suggesting a little softness. But there was also an urgency in it. What could Anjan possibly need to say that had to be said at eleven at night?
The calls were not from Anjan, though: they were all from a withheld number, and they’d come at careful fifteen-minute intervals. Seven calls. In her tired brain, Birch thought, Seven times two is fourteen. Fourteen years today he’s been gone. It’s Charlie: it’s Charlie phoning me. The thought hurt. Her eyes stung, too dry for tears.
She heard a noise, somewhere down the street, and her eyes flicked up. In the rear-view mirror, she watched a man hoist himself from behind one of the garden walls along the terrace. Indistinct in streetlight, he balanced at full height atop the eight-foot wall: still, as though listening. Birch fumbled the light off, thumbed the button on her key, and locked herself in. He was a way off, but at the right place in the terrace. The garden he’d come from could be her own.
She watched as the man dropped onto the pavement below, disappearing behind the string of parked cars. She found she was holding her breath. Now he was nearing her: his footsteps close enough to sound on the wet street. A car hissed by. Stop, Birch willed it, suddenly not wanting to be alone. As though the driver had heard her, the car did stop, perhaps twenty yards beyond her bonnet, the brake
lights casting red streaks on the road. Behind her, the wall-climbing man reappeared: visible in the rear-view, his hood pulled up. Walking in her direction. And the stopped car was reversing.
In her hands, the phone vibrated again, and the screen came to life, flooding the car’s interior with light. Birch cursed, flinging it into the footwell. On the screen, that same withheld number: another fifteen minutes had passed.
The car that had stopped was a dark saloon, a Mercedes, she thought. Now it had come up alongside her – crept backward and pulled up cheek to cheek with her door. The windows were tinted. The car had got too close, as though whoever was driving it didn’t want her getting out.
Birch felt adrenalin flood her system: her vision glitched, and her hands and feet went cold. She turned to scrabble in the glovebox for her baton, and almost shrieked in surprise. The wall-climbing man was now standing at the passenger door: upright, not bending to look in at her. She could only see his pelvis: black jeans, the glint of a heavy belt buckle. His hands were crossed in front of him, inches from the car window: gloved, but big as rocks. Birch froze. The phone, now face up under the pedals at her feet, vibrated again.
Somehow, she remembered she was a policewoman, and witness to a possible break-and-enter, too. She bent at the waist and ducked her head to squint up at the wall-climbing man. I’ll report this, she reassured herself, and I’ll need a description for when I do. She found she’d surprised him: as her face appeared below him, he stepped back, and into a patch of orange streetlight.
Birch had microseconds, but she registered buzzed, dark hair. The man’s nose and mouth were covered by a skull bandanna: in the gloom, he was a ghoulish jack o’lantern. But before she could see more, he was gone: she heard rather than saw him skirt round the car, and walk into the road. As she twisted back upright, she heard the back passenger door of the saloon next to her slam closed, and then the engine fired and the car took off into the wet night. She caught half the registration number, but not the useful half: SK65. Or was it 55? Fuck. What just happened, Helen? Fuck. The dark folded back in around her. The phone at her feet had fallen quiet.
Her house was halfway down the prom. The walk there from her car – parked by the comforting lit window of the China Express takeaway – felt endless. The ground underfoot was greasy with frost. She refused to look back, and instead fixed her gaze on the streetlight nearest her gate. One hundred steps more, Helen. Now seventy. Now fifty. Her heart clattered in her ribcage like a useless propeller. The tide was a long way out: a creepy whisper on the edge of hearing. Very few windows were lit: most of her neighbours were older, and went to bed early. Nearing her house, she recalled the dream she’d had when she fell asleep on her desk that morning. The houses all dark, derelict, left behind. Her teeth chattered.
Finally, she reached her rickety gate, and allowed herself to look back. There was no one on the prom. No car parked at the end, no one watching. But the beach at her back was a wall of dark: she felt as though it were rising up behind her, like a net waiting to be thrown. She wished she’d left a light on somewhere, anywhere, inside her house. The streetlight shone on its cracked render, and the dark windows stared back at her like the sockets in a skull. Stop it, she commanded herself. After all, he could have been in anyone’s garden. But he could also have been in yours, Helen. The fear wouldn’t be shaken off. Birch remembered Big Rab’s words in the pub: No one’s safe. Even us . . . once Solomon sends his boys tae find ye, that’s it. She didn’t want to believe it. Maybe it’s just someone you nicked once, trying to give you a fright. But why today, the day they’d arrested Glasgow’s most fearsome mob boss? Her head swam. She felt like she’d spent all night listening to ghost stories, and now she’d seen a ghost.
She reached the front door, cracked her baton, and let herself in. She walked through the ground floor of the house, turning on every light. She checked the back door – still locked – and the kitchen windows. She went upstairs and turned on every light there, too: even the bathroom, whose overhead bulb fizzed and irritated her. From the tiny spare room she looked out over the back garden. The shed looked secure, and she could see the glint on the big padlock in the tall gate set into the wall. The hand holding her baton shook a little, but there was nothing.
Birch pulled the curtains closed in every upstairs room, but left the lights on. She padded downstairs and did the same there, swivelling the venetian blinds in the living room closed. She checked and double-checked the locks on the front door, then walked back to the kitchen and poured herself a half-tumbler of whisky. The liquid jostled and slopped as it fell from the bottle held in a shaking hand. The baton sat on the worktop next to the glass. There’s nothing, Helen, she told herself. You just got a fright. You can calm down now. But the other side of her brain fought back: Rab said Solomon likes to keep an eye on police. Why wouldn’t he have his boys watching senior officers on the case?
She carried her whisky into the living room, let the smell of it singe her nose. She sat down on the couch and laid the baton across her knees, then took a drink, and waited. After a moment or two, the whisky’s warmth began to spread through her chest, and she took another long slug from the glass. Good. Her hands were trembling less. There was nothing. There was nothing. It was fine.
Birch took her phone from her pocket, trying to decide what to do. She could call the station, report what she’d seen, and ask a panda car to come out and do a drive-by. But then, she reasoned, she could technically do that herself – you are a police officer, after all. It would make sense for her to walk out of her own back gate, right now, and do a quick patrol along the backs of the houses. She could look for broken locks, signs of forced entry. But the man had climbed. She was exhausted, liable to miss things, and very much not keen to go back outside in the dark, baton or not. But . . . what would she report, if she phoned it in? She sat with the tang of whisky in her throat, swithering, and doing nothing.
Her phone was silent. There were no new calls, no new texts. The house was silent, too: every so often, a car swished by out beyond the high garden wall. Somewhere near the window, a seagull called, making her jump. But there was nothing else. Nothing wrong. Just that list of missed calls, and Anjan.
Shit: she’d forgotten all about Anjan, and now it was nearing midnight. Well, fuck it – he’d said to call any time. It would help with the brain fog, she decided, to hear a human voice. The whisky was halfway gone now, lighting up her veins like a hot circuit board.
‘Helen,’ he said, as the call connected.
‘Hello, Anjan.’ She tried to sound bright. ‘Sorry it’s late.’
‘It’s all right,’ he said. ‘I imagined it might be a long one today. I’m just glad you called.’
Birch waited. The line between them fizzed. She realised she was still listening for noises in the house, in the garden outside.
‘You wanted to talk to me,’ she said at last.
‘Yes . . .’ Anjan drew the word out delicately, stalling for time: a courtroom trick. ‘There’s no easy way to say this, but I wanted you to hear it from me before someone else came to you with it. Helen . . . the firm. We’re going to be representing Solomon Carradice.’
She’d held it together this long: through the early start, through the long, grinding workday that was also Charlie’s anniversary; through the embarrassment of being sent into interviews with deck-hands and low lives; through the creepy phone calls and the cryptic merriment of Rab in the Kay’s Bar snug. Through – what? Whatever that was just now, with the dark Mercedes and the skull-faced man. A break-and-enter she’d interrupted? An attempted car theft? It might not turn out to be either of those: she might never know what it was. She’d kept her head up for twenty-one wakeful hours. But now it fell into her lap: she bent double, over the baton across her knees, pushed her face into her trousers’ scratchy fabric, and sputtered out a sob.
‘Helen?’
Another sob. Her throat sparked with the whisky.
‘I’m sorry. But
. . . I think you’re overreacting just a bit. I—’
All the day’s sadness and bad mood and weirdness rose up in her chest then, provoked, like a dog on a chain.
‘Fuck you.’ She sat up so fast that her drink splattered onto the couch. ‘Fuck you, Anjan. Overreacting? I’ve just had the world’s worst day, have you any idea—’
‘Please,’ he said, ‘please. Please, Helen, please.’ His voice rose with each repetition.
She stopped.
‘I’m sorry.’ His voice was level again. ‘I’d forgotten – until just now, I’d forgotten about Charlie’s anniversary. I’m sorry about that. But I wanted to tell you tonight. I’m trying to do the right thing.’
‘When you say the firm . . .’ Birch gritted her teeth. ‘You mean you, don’t you? You’re going to be defending Solomon Carradice.’
There was a long pause. Birch imagined Anjan standing in some shiny, spotless kitchen.
‘Representing,’ he said, his voice a little quieter. ‘But . . . yes. Yes, I am.’
Now her ears were ringing. She could see patches on her vision. She was dimly aware that if some skull-masked assailant were to break in now, she’d care less about that than what she was hearing.
‘Do the right thing?’ She was shouting. ‘I’ve never known you defend a guilty man, not ever. What’s happening here?’
On the other end of the line she felt him snap into business mode.
‘Helen,’ he said, the consonants sharp. ‘Like anyone, Carradice must be proven guilty. And frankly, I am not convinced that he can be.’ He seemed to wait for a moment, then added, ‘I don’t think you’re convinced, either.’
