When the Devil Drives

by Christopher Brookmyre

  ‘I just think that clicking on a cursor is a long way distant from pulling a trigger. Nobody’s worried about Gran Turismo making people go out and drive their cars at a hundred and fifty miles an hour, or SimCity making people want to be town planners.’

  ‘But those are representations of racing, or managing resources and designing landscapes. This Trail of the Sniper game is about shooting people in the head, Drew. All these games are about shooting people. I don’t want my sons getting desensitised to the idea of that.’

  ‘That’s your prerogative as their mother, and that’s why I’m content to back you up all the way. I’ll tell Duncan he’s not on, and I’ll make it plain that it’s my judgment, not yours. I’m not arguing with you about this.’

  ‘But you don’t agree,’ she re-stated, not quite sure why this bothered her so much.

  For some reason, Catherine had always assumed she’d have girls. There was no rationale behind this, just the vision she had always enjoyed of being a mother. Instead, she had got two boys, and was frequently dismayed by the insights they provided into their gender.

  She had nonetheless been of the opinion that boys didn’t have to turn out to be feral, hyper-masculine monsters obsessed with the brutal and the disgusting. To that end, theirs was a house that didn’t tolerate violence, raised voices or displays of excessive temper. Duncan and Fraser’s gender role models were progressive, enlightened and far from conventional. Their dad was home more than their mum and did more than his share of the cooking, shopping and other domestic chores; their mum was a police officer, out fighting crime and catching bad guys. Yet none of this had prevented them becoming, well, feral, hyper-masculine monsters obsessed with the brutal and the disgusting. Something in them sought out the horrible, no matter how much you tried to guide them otherwise. They really were made of frogs and snails and puppy-dog tails, and Catherine worried constantly about what was in their heads, and about what might get in their heads.

  ‘I agree partly. I just don’t feel so strongly about it. It clearly means more to you that the boys shouldn’t play certain games than it does to me, so I’m happy to go along with that. It’s no biggy.’

  ‘But I don’t want you just to go along with it. I want you to see what I see here. I want you to understand what’s wrong with the idea of our children learning to kill via a simulator.’

  Drew reeled a little at this, and she thought for a moment she had really struck a telling blow, one that truly altered his perspective. He took a moment then sighed again, which informed her that this was not in fact the case.

  ‘With respect, Cath,’ he began, then paused, considering and perhaps carefully revising what he was going to say. ‘You’re a long way off your patch here. I don’t want to fight about this, but what I will say is that, in my experience, people who disapprove of violent video games have usually never played one.’

  Catherine felt the surge of quite disproportionate anger that came whenever she sensed somebody was trying to put her in her place. So when her mobile rang, interrupting a post-prandial conversation for the several hundredth time in their marriage, it was probably a mercy upon both of them.

  ‘I have to take this,’ she said, given the name that was flashing on her screen.

  Drew gave a resigned and slightly huffy shrug.

  He was generally very tolerant and understanding of these interruptions, acknowledging that he had long since accepted they were part of the package that came with Catherine, but on occasion the timing could test his patience to the limit. This was one of those times, largely because she could tell he was already a little pissed off at her for the evening not going how he’d hoped.

  Catherine, for her part, was usually just as frustrated and resentful when the calls came out of hours, but in this instance some spiteful part of her welcomed it, perhaps because she didn’t have a come-back for Drew’s last gambit.

  It was Sunderland, the Almighty: calling when she was, nominally at least, off duty. This usually meant he was handing her a whole bundle of grief, the true extent and ungodly nature of which would only reveal itself over time.

  ‘There’s been a shooting in Cragruthes, up near Alnabruich,’ Sunderland told her, his voice weary with portent. She could tell there was a fire starting to catch and he wanted her to douse it before somebody got very badly burned. ‘I need you up there first thing in the morning to take charge.’

  Alnabruich, though: that was up in the Highlands, so she didn’t get the angle. Was it related to something else she was working on?

  ‘And DI McSheepshagger of Highland can’t deal with this because …?’ she inquired.

  ‘Because it’s not on his manor. Alnabruich is a long way from Govan, but it’s still Strathclyde’s patch. It’s Argyllshire.’

  Bugger, she thought.

  ‘What’s the script?’ she asked. ‘Murder?’

  ‘Fatal shooting is the line at this stage. Took half his face off. Possibility that it was accidental still to be ruled out.’

  This wasn’t exactly blowing her skirt up so far. A shooting in the back of beyond that might not even be a murder wasn’t the kind of thing you gave to a copper of her rank, especially not when she was off duty.

  ‘Okay, all very unfortunate, but you want to tell me why you’re punting it to me?’

  ‘Because the shooting took place in the grounds of Cragruthes Castle, and the vic was standing two feet from Sir Angus McCready, the laird of Ruthes, when it happened.’

  ‘Ah,’ she replied as all became clear. Everyone was equal in the eyes of the law, and the police treated everybody the same. Apart from the people they treated completely different. ‘So we’re talking major media scrutiny, political interference, connected individuals stomping their footprints all over our investigation, your maxi-zoom deluxe nightmare?’

  Sunderland chuckled darkly.

  ‘Oh, you don’t know the half, McLeod. I haven’t told you who the victim is yet.’

  A few minutes later Catherine disconnected the call, then walked to the sink and poured her wine away.

  ‘I’ll have to call it a night,’ she announced. ‘I’m looking at an early start in the morning and I’ll need a clear head.’

  ‘Why? What’s so important this time?’ Drew asked, not attempting to hide his resentment at how the evening had panned out, and inadvertently inviting a knockout blow.

  ‘Because somebody’s been shot in the head. In real life, Drew. Here in real life.’

  Bad Debts

  Jasmine had already decided that Mrs Petrie’s inquiry might not prove such easy money even before anything started to go awry.

  This sort of case was normally a matter of making a few phone calls and setting certain processes in motion, then profitably getting on with other jobs while she waited for the information to start coming in. Out of sight, out of mind. The biggest source of angst and self-examination was usually over what she considered fair to charge, considering it generally didn’t gobble up a lot of man hours.

  She wasn’t sure whether time spent lying awake thinking about the case was billable, but that hadn’t been a consideration until now.

  If there was a checklist for this genus of client, Mrs Petrie would have ticked most of the boxes, right down to the abruptly altered perspective upon mortality having precipitated a need to forgive and not forget. There was one anomaly, however, and it was major. The subject would be fifty-three years old, which was at least two decades younger than anybody Jasmine had been asked to look for since re-opening Sharp Investigations. It changed the game entirely when there was a far greater possibility that the person being sought might actually be alive.

  Tessa Garrion had been in her head all day and a blearily uncomfortable portion of the night. It had pushed a few buttons to learn that she had been an actress, but not as many as learning that she had suddenly ceased to be an actress some time in her mid-twenties, despite a promising career ahead of her. This bothered Jasmine because she could have been talking
about her mother.

  Mum had seldom talked about her brief acting career, except in the most oblique terms, as though afraid of leaving behind any clues Jasmine might follow that could unlock the secrets of her past. Jasmine had grown up without a father, and been told that he had died between her mum falling pregnant and Jasmine’s birth. Mum never told her anything else about him. From an early age she understood it to be a closed subject and learned not to ask. She got the sense that her mother’s reticence was as much about protecting Jasmine as it was about her reluctance to revisit certain memories and thought that, one day, when she had proven that she was all grown up and demonstrably stable of mind and body, she might encourage Mum to reveal just a little.

  One day.

  What little she did know she picked up largely from chat between Mum’s friends and relatives. Their words were guarded, even when they didn’t know Jasmine was in earshot, as though they were as wary of being caught in such discussions by Beth Sharp as being overheard by her daughter. Through these disparate fragments she learned that Mum had been brought up in a violent area of Glasgow and had made some dangerous friends by way of a desperate survival strategy. It wasn’t a matter of falling in with a bad crowd and being led astray, as it seemed she had been as single-minded and passionate about her vocation as Jasmine would be years later. Rather it was that when her career should have allowed her to move on and move up, she couldn’t extricate herself from certain entanglements of her past. The greatest of those entanglements, Jasmine had to assume, must have been her father.

  She knew nothing about him. The only descriptions she had were individual words, scattered like snowflakes over the years, leaving merely a blurred outline of where this man had been. What was unmistakable was that it was not the outline of a good person.

  Dangerous. Brutal. Ruthless. Terrifying.

  And, of course, deceased.

  Jasmine never heard any details, only allusions to living by the sword and dying by the sword.

  She knew that, following his death but before Jasmine’s birth, her mum had moved to Edinburgh to start again, to create a new life away from the influences of the people she had become involved with. It was only forty miles along the M8, but apparently that was far enough. These were people who didn’t see a broad horizon and wonder what was beyond it. They were busy inside their own little goldfish bowl and Mum knew that she and her daughter would be safe enough as long as they remained outside it. That was why Mum seldom went back to Glasgow, not if there was something she wanted to see at one of its theatres and not even to visit Jasmine at her student digs. It was as though she was afraid even a chance encounter might be enough to corrupt her new life.

  She gave up her acting career to raise Jasmine, working initially with a theatre-in-the-community group until qualifying as a drama teacher. Jasmine knew she had left a job with a rep company based in Glasgow, but it was only recently that she had given much thought to the sacrifice her mum had made and considered how she had given up just as many dreams as her daughter. When she was growing up, Jasmine had heard how her mother used to be an actress, but it meant nothing to a child: Mum was just Mum, a drama teacher who had friends in theatre.

  It was only since making the leap to take on Sharp Investigations and accepting that she was slowly closing the door on acting that Jasmine had begun to appreciate how her mum had gone through the same thing before her. Worse, in fact, because unlike Jasmine her mum had been walking the walk, doing it for real, not merely training in hope. Did she keep the guttering flame alight for a few years, telling herself a second chance might come once her daughter was off to school, perhaps? Did it hurt a little every time she went to the theatre, seeing the art she used to practise and the life she could have had? Did it hurt especially on that unforgettable night backstage at the Lyceum? Was the same perspective that brought forth Jasmine’s epiphany for her merely a cruel reminder of all she had lost?

  If so, she was indeed one hell of an actress, because she had covered it up all Jasmine’s life. She never spoke of regrets, never gave Jasmine the impression she was off roaming in the realms of what if. Presumably, one of the possible answers to what if had been made vividly apparent and she was very grateful for what she had now. Her life as an actress was inextricable from a life in the orbit of dangerous, violent people, one of whom had been Jasmine’s father. Knowing this, Jasmine guessed, difficult as it was, her mother would make the same choice every time.

  But there are always other what ifs, and sometimes hidden layers of complexity within the first.

  When her mum was suddenly forced to confront her own mortality, she had done the same thing as Mrs Petrie and so many others before her: she had gone to a private investigator to find someone she wanted to talk to, one last time, before it was too late. And unlike all the clients Jasmine had worked for, her mother had gotten her wish.

  Jasmine, however, had known nothing about this.

  Then, in the course of the hunt for her missing uncle, Jasmine had come across the name Glen Fallan in Jim’s files.

  She heard him described by a senior police officer.

  Dangerous. Brutal. Ruthless. Terrifying.

  These all applied, but there were others too. Torturer. Debt-collector. Enforcer. Hit-man.

  ‘Ice-cold killer,’ the policeman had told her. ‘And when I say that, I mean like the ice doesn’t feel anything when it freezes you to death.’

  Despite being thus forewarned, Fallan’s name was the only clue Jasmine had to go on at that stage, so she located and confronted him. He was indeed dangerous, brutal, ruthless and terrifying. He also saved her life – twice – and put himself to considerable pains in order to help her get to the bottom of Jim’s disappearance. Nothing she witnessed of him suggested the cop’s descriptions were exactly libellous, but they didn’t show the whole picture either. For one thing, he was a lot less dead than the police believed him to be.

  Following Jim’s funeral, Jasmine learned that despite Fallan reputedly having died two decades back, her mother had requested that her cousin track him down. Jim had done so successfully, and Fallan had subsequently visited Mum shortly before her death.

  Jasmine then discovered that Fallan had been sending money to her mother, every three or four months for twenty years. It wasn’t a fiver a time, either. Looking back, it explained how they had got by at certain times, at ages when Jasmine was oblivious of all financial considerations. Even when she was a student it would never have occurred to her to try to balance the books in terms of what a drama teacher earned and how much she was able to give Jasmine to help with her rent and other expenses.

  All her life this man, Glen Fallan, had been secretly, invisibly supporting her.

  She confronted him once more, driving down to Northumberland to the women’s refuge where he served as a volunteer: gardener, handyman, courier, bodyguard. He was working in the grounds of the house, wielding a leaf-blower in one hand like it was a dust-buster. When he saw her approach there was warmth in his face but he didn’t smile. It was as though he was pleased to see her but not glad that she was there, because he had already deduced why.

  There was a fresh breeze blowing and he was wearing only a sleeveless top above his camo trousers, but she could feel heat coming from him as he stood a few feet away, the smell of the outdoors, fresh sweat and recent ablutions in her nose. His presence was almost overwhelming. He made her feel so small, so weak by comparison.

  She thought her voice would fail her and part of her wanted to turn and run, but she couldn’t run from this. It had already found her. She knew she had no choice but to find it in herself to speak the most difficult four words of her life, a question she only had the strength to ask because she was already certain of the answer.

  ‘Are you my father?’

  She recalled that she ceased to feel the breeze, that though they were outdoors in the rolling grounds of that spooky big house she could have been in a stark white room or a bare stage, nothing else in the
world but her and this man.

  He looked at her with a sadness born of pity and regret, though she remained unsure who it was for.

  ‘I always feared that one day I’d have to answer this question,’ he said. ‘I thought I’d got away with it. Your mum told me to stop the payments once she had gone. Safe to say she didn’t want us to meet. I guess fate took a few decisions for us.’

  He looked away towards the hills, pained, but not as much as she was. Then he turned to her again, that mix of sadness and concern all the more pronounced.

  ‘I’m not your father, Jasmine,’ he said, his normally steady voice faltering like the words were ashes in his mouth. ‘I’m sorry. Nothing here is as it seems.’

  The problem with only asking a question because you’re certain of the answer is that you are blown wide open when that answer is not the one you receive. Jasmine felt like she had been beamed off the planet momentarily, then teleported back to a replica world that looked the same but was strangely, minutely different. She remembered being acutely aware of her surroundings once again, of the wind about her ears, the leaves that were blowing around, more green than brown, the first falls of autumn. It was no longer a white room, an empty stage. She was still standing with this man but he was somebody else, not the man she thought he was, and she felt so very lonely.

  ‘You’re lying,’ she protested. ‘Why are you lying? Some old promise to my mum? She’s not here any more. I’ve got nobody and I need to know the truth.’

  ‘That is the truth.’

  ‘How can it be? Why would you be sending money for twenty years? Why would she send Jim to find you?’

  There were tears starting to run from the corners of her eyes. She was managing to keep her voice steady but there was a desperation to her tone, like she was starting to realise there would be an explanation she hadn’t anticipated, her blockbuster pieces of evidence crumbling in her hands.

  Fallan looked solemnly into her eyes, pain etched deep in his own, pain for both of them.