by Lin Anderson
‘What’s wrong, Anya?’
‘Kalinin’s been released on bail. He came to the restaurant. He was very angry. He knows I told you where he lives.’
‘Anya, listen. I’ll contact DI Slater …’
‘No. If you tell the police they’ll kill Misha.’
Rhona was at a loss. ‘Where are you now?’
‘In the ladies’ room at the Poker Club. Kalinin brought me here. He has something planned, I don’t know what.’
Rhona felt the ground open under her feet. ‘McNab’s at the Poker Club.’
There was a whimper on the other end of the line.
‘I have to call the police, Anya, in case Kalinin harms you or McNab. Do you understand?’
Rhona waved down a taxi and showed the driver her ID. He took her request seriously, running three amber lights and a red on his way downtown. En route, she called the station and got through to Janice.
‘Kalinin was released on bail two hours ago.’
‘And no one thought to tell McNab?’
‘DI Slater said he would.’
‘Seems he forgot.’
What had Slater been thinking? Kalinin had taken care not to show his face to McNab, but McNab had identified him by his voice. Kalinin would be even angrier now. Rhona explained her concerns for McNab’s safety and advised they send back-up.
‘Something’s happened?’
‘Anya Grigorovitch called me. Kalinin’s at the club and so is McNab.’
The taxi was passing Jury’s Inn, crossing the river, near to the spot where she and McNab had met Anya.
Rhona recalled how cheerful he’d been when he’d left her flat earlier than evening. The wink he’d thrown her when they’d left.
59
McNab watched as the cab light went out and the vehicle made a wide U-turn, having caught sight of a fare on the other side of the road.
‘I’ll phone for one.’
He tried to keep his voice level, but Chrissy was no fool. She knew enough about Kalinin to know they would be better off out of there, and fast.
‘Stand back out of sight,’ McNab ordered.
She retreated into the shadow of a nearby doorway.
A computerised voice answered his call, and he gave his location and rang off. He glanced back towards the club. The entrance area was deserted. No one had followed them out. Maybe he was overreacting? Kalinin was way too smart to jeopardise his bail by attacking him. Maybe he’d just wanted to scare him.
Maybe he had turned up at the club to put the frighteners on Brogan, not knowing McNab was there. Chances were Brogan had been as freaked as he had. But why was Anya with Kalinin when she’d professed to be terrified of him? An alternative scenario occurred to him. Had Anya set him up when she gave him Kalinin’s address? Maybe Kalinin had expected McNab to appear that night with the food? He dismissed this idea. Anya hadn’t been at the Poker Club through choice, not the way Kalinin was treating her.
A taxi was coming his way, orange light off. He prayed it was the one he’d ordered.
‘Chrissy!’ he called softly.
He stepped out of the shadows, just as a second vehicle turned on to the main thoroughfare. It had probably come from the car park at the rear of the Poker Club. It was a limo, long and dark with smoked windows – Brogan’s best. It drew alongside McNab and, as the back window whirred down, Brogan’s voice called out to him.
‘Heard you and the girl cleaned me out?’ Brogan sounded cheery for a man who had lost a considerable amount of money.
‘We did OK,’ McNab conceded warily.
He heard the click of Chrissy’s heels as she came to join him.
Brogan gave a strangled laugh. McNab turned to tell Chrissy to get back, then saw the terrified look on her face. He swung round. The front passenger window was open and the face he feared most stared out at him. It was the one and only time he had seen Solonik smile. There was a semi-automatic pistol clasped in the Russian’s hand.
McNab turned and launched himself towards Chrissy, trying desperately to put himself between her and Solonik. The first bullet struck a nearby wall and ricocheted off, sparking the pavement, just as he reached Chrissy and pushed her down.
The second round came a fraction of a second later, pumping between his shoulder blades with the force and power of one of Solonik’s fists. For a moment McNab imagined he was back in that room with those fists raining down on him, then his legs softened and he collapsed face down on the icy pavement, air rushing from his lungs as if from a punctured balloon.
He heard Chrissy scream as he slumped alongside her, then the roar of the car as it took off. Then his world began to revolve in a whirl of startling images and frantic sound.
McNab wanted to tell Chrissy to fetch Rhona. He needed to speak to her. He needed to tell her something. Something important. He tried to form Rhona’s name, but his mind was drifting. He was suddenly on a fairground ride, travelling rapidly through the decades of his life. Michael Joseph McNab; the child, the adolescent, the man. He was outside himself looking on, painfully observing his own clumsy endeavours, his stubbornness, his stupidity.
He wondered fleetingly whether he would ever be able to make things right.
Rhona jumped out of the taxi and pushed her way through the gathering crowd. Chrissy had McNab’s head in her lap and her cheeks were streaming with tears.
‘What the hell happened?’
‘They shot him.’
‘Michael!’ She dropped to her knees and began searching for the wound. There was nothing on his shirt front, no freckled pattern indicating residue, no evidence of an entry point. Below him blood pooled on the pavement.
Rhona rolled him over. The back of his jacket was soaked, a hole punched through the silky black material. She slipped the jacket off his shoulders. The bullet had entered his back but hadn’t exited the body. Designed to create maximum damage, it had disintegrated internally.
‘Jesus Christ, Michael, why won’t you ever listen to me?’ She wadded his jacket and pressed it hard against the bullet hole. Chrissy was sobbing beside her. She wanted to yell at her to stop, that McNab was not going to die.
The blood had stopped pumping, which meant one of two things. Either she had plugged the wound or his heart had stopped. There was a gurgle as McNab tried to suck air into his damaged lungs. Rhona placed her mouth on his, tasting blood, willing his chest to rise.
For a moment the green eyes flickered open and he smiled at her as though they were a million miles away from this place and nothing bad had happened. It was the smile he’d often bestowed on her, the smile she’d chosen to disregard.
‘I love you, Dr MacLeod.’
‘Please, Michael, no.’
Rhona drew him to her as his eyes emptied of life, willing her own heart to beat for the both of them. She rocked him there, feeling his warmth against her, the roughness of his face in her palms. She bent and kissed the auburn hair, whispering a thousand sorries for what she had said and not said, hoping that wherever he was he would hear her.
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Rhona hesitated at the door. Stepping inside would be like going back in time. She had worked here as a student, serving behind the bar. The place had an illustrious history. In the seventies it had been the meeting place for Celtic Football Club. Back then, Kenny Dalglish had been a promising young player, and his future wife’s family had run the place. All the Celtic greats had spent time here, including the greatest of them all, their manager Jock Stein. No wonder this was Bill’s favourite watering hole.
Next to the entrance was a plaque, which ignored former famous customers in favour of the resident ghost. Rhona took a deep breath and opened the door. The spacious room was the same yet different. The long bar had changed its position, but the place was familiar enough for memories to come flooding back. She stood for a moment savouring them, then looked round for Bill.
He was sitting on the left in the far corner. He hadn’t seen her come in, so she had the opportunity to obs
erve him unnoticed. He sat alone, a pint of beer on the table in front of him. Many of the other clientele would be policemen, like him. The nearby estate of Simshill was often referred to as Policehill.
Rhona bought a drink and carried it to Bill’s table. She was shocked to see how much older he looked. Old age came swiftly to people in his job. No wonder so many tried for retirement as soon as possible. Being a policeman was a bit like being in the army; hang around too long and you were asking for trouble.
Who would blame Bill for getting out? Maybe she should do the same. Be her own boss, choose her cases, as Roy Hunter had suggested. If Bill wasn’t going to be around any longer, she wasn’t sure she wanted to be either.
Bill freed up a space for her beside him.
‘Hey,’ she said.
‘How are you doing?’ He examined her face.
‘Not so good.’
He nodded.
They sat in silence, their drinks untouched. There was so much to say and yet no words to say it. She fished in her bag and passed the photographs to Bill.
‘They called him Michael.’
The baby’s skin was the colour of creamy milk chocolate, his eyes a surprisingly dark blue. He was staring wide eyed at the camera or at his father who, according to Chrissy, took a photograph ten times a day.
Bill made a small sound of appreciation in his throat.
‘Chrissy’s coming home in a week,’ she said.
‘And Sam?’
‘Now the charges of abduction have been dropped, he can return and finish his medical degree.’
‘A happy ending, then?’
‘More like a hopeful beginning.’ Rhona looked down at the image of a smiling Chrissy. ‘I’ve really missed her.’
Bill threw her a concerned look, knowing that Chrissy wasn’t the only person she was missing.
Rhona had promised she wouldn’t ask Bill outright. It wasn’t her business. She had no right to attempt to persuade him, yet at the same time she would never forgive herself if she didn’t try.
‘Don’t go, Bill. Don’t leave.’
He didn’t answer. His face was shadowed by sorrow. He was in as dark a place as she was herself.
‘We can’t let him down. We have to make it right.’
‘It can never be made right.’ He shook his head.
‘We can try.’
His eyes swept the room. The bar was lined with regulars, mostly groups of middle-aged men talking. A gaggle of young women sat at a nearby table nursing vase-size glasses of white wine, their loud laughter indicating how much they’d drunk already. A couple of young guys with carefully constructed hair stood in conversation near the door. In the blink of an eye, Rhona spotted something change hands between them.
‘I’ve been coming in here for thirty years,’ Bill said. ‘Now when I come I sit with my back to the wall. I drink my pint and I make a point of not noticing what goes on around me.’ He looked at her. ‘There comes a day when you give up the fight and start to live.’
‘But not today.’
He gave her a half-smile. ‘You sound like Margaret.’
Rhona lifted her glass. ‘I’ll drink to Margaret.’
‘You women ganging up on me?’
‘Don’t we always?’
Bill was silent for a few moments, then asked about Swanson.
‘He’s denying everything. Says he didn’t know about the remains in the garden. Insists they must have been there before his family bought the bungalow. Nonsense, of course, and easily disproved. He also maintains he had nothing to do with Mollie’s death. On our side, we can prove the red glass in the grave matches the type he buys. We also have a couple of fibres from Mollie’s grave soil that match a rug in his house. Swanson doesn’t know about that.’ She paused. ‘It was a good idea of yours to have Magnus talk to McCarthy. It seems Swanson has been feeding McCarthy false memories, constantly reinforcing his supposed guilt.’
Everyone knew Swanson was guilty of all five murders, but proving it wouldn’t be so easy. They would have to concentrate on the ones they could prove, like the body he’d taken from the loch.
‘What about the wee girl?’
Rhona shook her head. ‘She’s taking the business with Michael very much to heart.’
The business with Michael. Why could she not say the words?
In the mess after the shooting, Nikolai Kalinin had simply disappeared, as had Solonik. The police suspected they had gone south, been hidden by Prokhorov, then been smuggled back to Mother Russia or to supervise other operations. There were plenty to choose from. The Riviera, South Africa, the United States. Kalinin would fit in anywhere. McNab had almost nailed him. Almost but not quite.
The door opened and a man walked in. Tall, auburn haired, broad shouldered. He glanced towards them and for a moment Rhona believed it was him. She imagined Michael looking over, giving them a wave, miming to ask whether they wanted a drink. He would approach the table and bestow his smile on her. This time she would return it. This time she would acknowledge the man who had loved her.
Having searched the room, the auburn-haired man turned on his heel and let the door bang shut behind him.
About the Author
Lin Anderson began writing whilst working as a teacher, and now writes full time. FINAL CUT is her sixth novel.
Also by Lin Anderson:
Driftnet
Torch
Deadly Code
Dark Flight
Easy Kill
