When the Devil Drives

by Christopher Brookmyre

  Murray Maxwell had become a Scottish household name back in the eighties by appearing in Scotia Television’s long-running soap, Darroch Glen, then established his acting credentials more seriously during the nineties as Inspector Kelvin in the same channel’s Glasgow-set police drama Raintown Blue. It was still going, fifteen years after Maxwell left it, but his character’s name remained the one everybody referenced whenever the show was mentioned. He had moved to the other side of the camera after that, producing new programmes for Scotia and eventually becoming its head of drama. It was said he was in the running for the vacant top job as the channel’s chief executive, his chances of which would not be augmented by revelations of venal excess, even if it had been three decades ago.

  Russell Darius, as a horror-film director, was arguably the one who had least to lose from stories of sex, drugs or even Satanism, but he was also known to be fiercely protective of his privacy.

  When she was reading the coverage of the spat over ACS’s funding rejection, Jasmine, who had barely heard of Darius before, was surprised by his list of credits. It turned out that she knew many of his films by reputation, though she hadn’t seen them, and certainly couldn’t have said who directed them prior to clicking the article’s link to the IMDb. According to one sidebar, despite being regarded as something of an auteur, Darius’s reluctance to sell himself had contributed to his dwindling commercial success during an era when the cult of personality reigned and selling your films purely on their own merits seemed quaint to the point of naive. He had given precious few interviews in recent years and made even fewer films. It seemed he had gained great notoriety back in the early eighties, when his work fell foul of the tabloids’ ‘video nasty’ hysteria, and this had made him very shy of the British press ever since.

  Contemplating this line-up, Jasmine almost laughed out loud at just how staggeringly bare-faced Hamish Queen’s lie had been. The only two names he could be forgiven were Finlay Weir and, ironically, Tessa Garrion. She’d give Hamish this much though: it certainly bore out Dot Prowis’s testament to his talent-spotting ability. Of this small company, all but two of them had gone on to very big things: a West End producer; a film director; two television stalwarts, one of them now a major player at a regional ITV franchise; and the ex-head of Arts Council Scotland, waiting in the wings for a place on the BBC Trust.

  However, just as striking was the fact that nobody seemed aware of their common connection. Jasmine hadn’t seen it mentioned anywhere; the link between Darius and Sanquhar was a particularly glaring omission in light of the funding controversy. How many awkward questions would that have posed had it come out at the time, especially for Sanquhar? Was it personal? Was there a longstanding grudge? If so, Darius had been very magnanimous by not revealing a fact that would have mired Sanquhar neck-deep in the brown stuff, restricting himself to a dig about his elitism.

  All these famous names had once worked together in the same fledgling theatre company. It should have been a well-known item of trivia, like how everyone knew Billy Connolly had once been in a band with Gerry Rafferty, or that Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese and James Cameron had all worked for Roger Corman. That nobody knew the original Glass Shoe Company included Hamish Queen, Julian Sanquhar, Russell Darius, Murray Maxwell and the late Adam Nolan indicated that none of them had ever mentioned it, because it would only have taken one to do so, especially in the Wikipedia age, for it to go viral.

  There had to have been a conscious decision never to invoke this connection: either a collective vow or, perhaps more disturbingly, they had each independently reasoned that they had too much to lose. Either way, each must have known his counterparts’ silence was guaranteed by the prospect of mutually assured destruction.

  Why?

  What had been so awful that Sanquhar still seemed spooked by it thirty years later? As he said himself, he wasn’t some nutter. He was a hugely respected, intimidatingly intelligent and thoroughly sober individual, yet there he was, talking about something that responds to human darkness, something that feeds off the worst in men, and he wasn’t being entirely allegorical.

  Jasmine took a detour to East Kilbride and stopped off at Galt Linklater’s premises to fill in some paperwork concerning the job in Perth earlier that day. It was twenty past six by the time she got there, but there was usually somebody around in the evenings, sometimes all night if work required it. She had to buzz to be let in, but she could see lights on inside. When she walked through reception and into the offices there was a small cheer and some applause. She saw Rab Forrest, Andy Smith and Johnny Gibson gathered around one desk, grinning at her. Andy was miming his hands on a steering wheel, then a sudden shudder. Clearly they had heard about this morning’s events. Even Grumpy Gibby looked tickled.

  They were eager to hear her version of it and she obliged, not least because she wasn’t going to get peace to file her paperwork until she’d done so. Their attention felt slightly patronising, as the story was clearly all the more amusing to them for it being ‘the wee lassie’ who had pulled this stunt, but nevertheless, the unequivocal sentiment coming from all of them was that the wee lassie had done well.

  ‘They’ve already started referring to you as “Crash”,’ Rab informed her.

  She rolled her eyes, as if to say ‘what are they like?’ and to acknowledge that this die was now cast, but she did so to conceal a degree of relief at having acquired this new nickname. As she became a more familiar face and the barriers of formality started to break down, some of them had occasionally referred to her as Jazz, which had uncomfortable associations, so she was really hoping it wouldn’t stick.

  Her paperwork filed, she set off for Arden and the office. It was after seven and she was getting hungry. She’d leave the transcription to the morning, but she wanted the recording of her conversation with Sanquhar copied and backed up. ‘Your day’s work’s never over until you’ve secured the evidence,’ Jim had once said, and she abided by this no matter how tired or hungry she was.

  As she drove past a supermarket on her way through Clarkston, she thought about stopping briefly to pick up a take-away salad or a sandwich, but forced herself to keep driving. She knew that if she did that, she’d end up eating it in the office – transcribing the Sanquhar interview. She could already hear her internal logic: might as well while I’m here. Not as though I’ve anything else to do with my evening.

  She really would need to get herself a life, and she fully intended to, but chances were she’d probably get herself that new office furniture first.

  I will do something with my evening, she vowed as she slowed to a stop behind the office, a sentiment made all the more compelling by having every space in the car park to choose from. A quick bite and a trip to the cinema. Even if the only thing she’d be showing up in time for was some no-brain blockbuster, she’d force herself to go. This was important.

  She switched off the engine and reached down into the passenger-side footwell for her bag. As she gripped it and sat up straight again she felt uneasy, as though she’d done it too fast and made herself light-headed. It was far more than that, though. The hairs on her arms were pricking up, a nauseating sense of unease coursing through her. She felt claustrophobic all of a sudden and reached for the door by reflex rather than intention. It was what Fallan had described as ‘a sudden, unarticulated sense that something about your immediate environment is disturbingly wrong’. Something told her to run. Not drive, run. It was fear, and Fallan said to listen when it speaks.

  As she climbed out of the Civic she saw a man running towards her, his head covered by a hood, all but his eyes obscured by a black scarf. Something twinkled and shimmered in his right hand, a flickering pale blue light.

  Jasmine ran for the building. She had enough of a start to know she’d get there first, but her keys were in a pouch in her bag and there were two locks to the main door. She tripped on the topmost of the front steps as she tried to delve and run at the same time, her eyes on the bag
instead of on her footing. She stumbled for a pace and, unable to brake or recover her balance, slammed into a full-length double-glazed panel next to the door, throwing her arms up to cushion the impact. Her bag fell to the ground, scattering some its contents on the flagstones, but the office keys remained pinched between her thumb and fingers on her right hand. She steadied herself and stabbed the cylinder key into the lower of the locks. As she did so, she saw a flash of colour, a reflection in the glass of something arcing and spinning through the air. She heard a shuddering crash but kept her eyes on the locks and the keys, concentrating solely on getting that door open. She turned the second key, squeezed herself inside through the minimum width of an opening, then turned around and slammed the door shut again, the mortise lock clicking home to secure her inside.

  Through the glass she saw that the small blue twinkling light had been transformed into a big, orange dancing glow.

  The man hadn’t pursued her. He was standing a few yards behind her car, glass fragments sparkling on the concrete from where the driver’s side window had been shattered. He was unmoving, but from that distance, with his eyes beneath the hood, Jasmine couldn’t tell whether he was staring at her or at the Civic.

  Inside the Honda the orange glow continued to dance, then there was a jolt, a pulse of greater ferocity, and she saw flames begin to lick around the interior. The hooded man took this as his cue to depart. He began to run, charging flat out towards the street, ducking to the right at the junction and disappearing out of Jasmine’s sight. Then, a few moments later, she heard an engine gun and a vehicle sped past the car park entrance, headed for the main road.

  It was a silver Volkswagen Passat.

  Jasmine watched as the blaze inside the Civic intensified. She heard the side windows shatter and saw the smoke begin to vent from the openings, the flames burning all the fiercer for the sudden inrush of fresh oxygen.

  She was losing another small piece of her mum. It wasn’t just a car, it was a little time capsule, a place where she could still smell her, still feel her. All those memories, the places they’d gone together, the journeys they’d shared, the conversations they’d had.

  Other people went to gravesides to think about their lost loved ones. Not Jasmine. She’d only been back once since the funeral because there was nothing about that place that connected her with her living mother, only with the empty numbness and the hollow ache of a horrible morning in the drizzle. The headstone was meaningless. Her mum had many memorials that meant far more to Jasmine. The Civic had been the most immediate of them, the most direct, something that transcended life with her and life without her.

  Now it was burning before Jasmine’s eyes.

  She slumped down at the foot of the stairs and cried.

  Jasmine wasn’t sure at which point she realised DI Gormley was insinuating that she may have torched her own car as an insurance fraud, but she was acutely aware of the precise moment when she understood that the situation was irretrievable.

  It was nothing explicit, more a series of questions that seemed irritatingly tangential until she worked out what they were driving at.

  It was rather an old model, was it not? Was it a second-hand purchase? Third-hand? A dealership or a private sale? How did it run? Did you have a lot of trouble with it lately?

  She deduced that these were questions intended to knock you off your guard if you were pulling an insurance job, by subtly conveying that the polis knew you were at it. She didn’t know how an innocent party was supposed to react according to the police’s playbook for these situations; whether they asked these questions every time or only when they had their suspicions.

  She mentioned her connections with Galt Linklater and dropped a few names, hoping at least to put herself in a context other than fraudulent chancer or attention-seeking hysteric, and at most for that brightening of the features that came with the recognition of a common acquaintance.

  ‘I know who you are, Miss Sharp,’ Gormley said darkly.

  That was the moment.

  When a young uniformed PC first arrived on the scene he had begun taking details, then got a call on his radio and was evidently told to hang fire. He informed her that there was someone more senior on their way, someone who had heard about it over the radio and wanted to handle it personally. Jasmine had been pleased, thinking maybe this meant there was a connection to something they were already working on.

  There was a connection all right, but not to anything new. Jasmine didn’t know what version he’d heard, or whether Gormley was one of those cops who would simply have preferred if she’d just let it lie. She hadn’t been an agent of mischief over the Ramsay case, really just the bearer of bad news, but he looked like he would have no problem shooting the messenger.

  DI Gormley’s face was, Jasmine reflected, a development opportunity. He looked like he’d spent much of his life in a bad mood, the lines on his visage indicating a near-permanently sour expression.

  Once he said he knew who she was, she grasped that there was no point in trying to convince him of the truth of her case, because whether he believed her or not was immaterial. He wasn’t going to help her.

  ‘This silver Passat, did you get a registration?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘So you couldn’t be sure if it was the same car as you think has been following you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘And the man had his face covered, that’s right?’

  ‘Yes.’

  He said they’d look into it, in a way that suggested it would be placed on the task list right behind investigating alien abductions and the hunt for Sawney Beane.

  Then as a parting shot, almost as an afterthought, he asked:

  ‘Can you think of anybody you might have upset, Miss Sharp? Anyone who might wish you harm?’

  It was part going through the procedural motions and part a reminder that though she might know a few ex-cops, she hadn’t made many friends on the force.

  She imagined herself answering.

  ‘It could be Hamish Queen, the multi-millionaire West End producer; Murray Maxwell, the big TV star; Russell Darius, the horror-movie director; or maybe Julian Sanquhar, the former head of Arts Council Scotland.’ Why not chuck in Alex Salmond, Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates and slap on a tin-foil headscarf for good measure. Gormley would lap it up.

  ‘No,’ she said, trying to hold back a new onset of tears as she watched him leave.

  She felt all of a sudden very vulnerable and very much alone. Her car – her mum’s car – was gone, and the police weren’t going to do anything about it. She had nobody on her side. It put it into perspective that she was merely one girl confronting some powerful and, it would appear, dangerous people. As she said to Sanquhar, she was just asking some questions: that was all she had in her armoury. If they were responding with intimidation and violence, then what option did she have to return fire?

  Stings and Barbs

  As Jasmine placed the handset back on its cradle she reflected on the unlikelihood of video-call technology ever becoming standard, rather than a novelty allowing people who actually liked each other to gawk into webcams. The inability to see each other’s faces was not something that the humble telephone was missing: it was in fact one of its greatest strengths.

  It seemed to be the morning for awkward calls. So far she’d been involved in three, and it wasn’t yet eleven.

  First Jasmine called Polly Seaton at Centre One, chasing up her request that Polly delve into the PAYE archives and dig out information on who else the Glass Shoe Company had paid a wage during its mayfly lifespan. Polly confirmed that Murray Maxwell, Russell Darius, Adam Nolan and Finlay Weir had been alongside Tessa Garrion on the payroll. Even more helpfully, she was also able to inform Jasmine that Finlay Weir was these days earning a salary from the Logie-Almond Academy Charitable Trust, thus saving her the bother of finding out where he taught. Logie-Almond Academy was a private school in rural Perthshire, and a quick browse of their website re
vealed that Finlay Weir was its headmaster.

  The awkward part had come when Jasmine’s memory and conscience finally combined at the right time to prompt her to suggest she and Polly go out for a drink some time. There was a pause that endured just a little too long to represent Polly carrying out a quick check of her mental diary, followed by a response of ‘… eh, yeah, I suppose. Why not?’

  Even before her unmistakably equivocal words, in those milliseconds of silence Jasmine realised first how stupid she’d been, then how pitiful she must look. Her unease at taking a loan of Polly, of cashing in on her goodwill despite their never being big pals, combined with her reluctance to socialise with the girl had made Jasmine blind to the possibility that Polly might not much fancy socialising with her either. It was a gut-deadening moment as she suddenly realised how unconsciously arrogant she’d been in thinking she’d be doing Polly some kind of favour, but that particular discomfort was soon dispersed as she grasped that Polly’s more likely interpretation was that Jasmine was a sad act with no friends. It was no great consolation that it wasn’t entirely true. Jasmine did have friends, but where she and Polly undeniably differed was that when she clocked off Polly had a life.

  Once more, with feeling: Jasmine screws up.

  There was no way of getting this toothpaste back into the tube, so she had to endure several knuckle-biting minutes of arranging a time and venue for a date that neither of them particularly wanted to keep.

  Jasmine had just about finished beating herself up about it when she got a call from Charlotte, who had recently returned from France and had just heard from her dad how his meeting with Jasmine went. It was safe to say she wasn’t best pleased. At a later date, once Charlotte had calmed down, Jasmine might be allowed to explain that she wasn’t working for Hamish Queen’s third (imminently ex) wife, and might even be able to outline how she hadn’t asked her father anything deceitful, sleazy or impertinent. But even if she managed both, she reckoned it was safe to assume that Fire Curtain wouldn’t be offering her a part any time between now and the heat-death of the universe.