She had to act, and to act she had to become herself again: had to admit what was happening.
She let it pour in, felt it flood her soul: the fear, the horror; the rage.
It proved futile, though. She was too well restrained.
She had become herself, she had acted and she had failed. Worse, he had seen the fight in her eyes.
He relished it.
He savoured it like nectar.
And that was when she felt his knife.
Enemies
It was the lead item on the news the next morning, but the story was still sketchy and contained little more detail than the earliest reports Jasmine had read on the web. Hamish Queen had been shot yesterday evening in the grounds of Cragruthes Castle in Argyll, where he was attending an outdoor performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream as the guest of the castle’s owner, Sir Angus McCready.
At this stage, according to a statement, the police were ‘not ruling anything out and not ruling anything in’. Among the theories currently enduring this indeterminate status was the possibility that Queen’s death had been an accident. The Cragruthes estate was apparently renowned for its hunting, with corporate clients paying exorbitant prices for exclusive access, but with such prized game to be had, the lands were also known to attract poachers. It had therefore been suggested that Queen may have been hit by a stray shot from someone trying to bag a deer under cover of darkness.
At the less innocent end of the scale, the BBC reporter mentioned that the majority of the audience at this moonlit spectacle had been top-level business executives, there on a corporate-hospitality junket as guests of their bank. It was hinted that the bullet may have been intended for one of them, or perhaps more likely their hosts, given that not everybody shared the banking sector’s belief that the time for contrition was over.
All of these possibilities appeared to be given credence because the more obvious framing of events – that somebody had wanted Hamish Queen dead – was seemingly unthinkable.
‘A popular and flamboyant figure,’ the reporter described him, ‘much-loved in the world of show business and greatly admired beyond it for his charity work, Hamish Queen was not a man known to have enemies.’
‘He wasn’t known to have been questioned over the disappearance of a young woman either,’ Jasmine said to Fallan. ‘And as for enemies, Finlay Weir didn’t look too chuffed when I told him that there was no evidence of Tessa Garrion living happily ever after. They’ve a shooting range at that school. He mentioned the older kids get to use live ammunition.’
She recalled the image of the man carrying rifles, then the presence of Hamish Queen sitting opposite her in the bar upstairs at the Edinburgh Playhouse. She couldn’t only see him, she could remember his smell, his sing-song accent, the almost crackling sense of self-assurance and dynamism that had emanated from him.
Suddenly she thought of Charlotte. Poor Charlotte. She was about to be inundated by the ocean of hurt that Jasmine had spent a long and desolate time adrift upon. Then it hit her that she may have played a part in precipitating this. Yes, it could have been an accident and it could have been a bullet meant for someone else, but what if the shot had been fired by Finlay Weir to exact some belated justice for Hamish getting away with murder? What, indeed, if Hamish hadn’t killed Tessa Garrion, but rather knew too much about who did? Either way, his death lay at the end of a chain of events that Jasmine had set in motion.
She thought of Julian Sanquhar, how scared he’d been, how he had tried to warn her that her actions might have dire consequences.
You will only succeed in disturbing a great deal of long-buried hurt and shame, but what worries me is that you might awaken something worse.
If she had heeded those words, then Hamish Queen might still be alive. Charlotte might still have her father.
Jasmine screws up didn’t quite cover it this time.
‘I have to go to the police,’ she said.
She looked to Fallan for a response. He just stared back, saying nothing, but there was a hint of dubiety in his otherwise stony expression.
‘What?’ she asked. ‘You think I shouldn’t? I know how you feel about them, but this just got way out of my depth. I need to tell them what I know.’
‘You don’t need to tell them anything,’ he finally replied. ‘And if you do, you’ll be dealing yourself out. Your own investigation will be over. You won’t get to find any answers for Mrs Petrie and I won’t get to have a quiet word with the guy who torched your car.’
‘But in all likelihood this is going to turn into a murder investigation and I’ve got information they won’t be aware of. I’ve even got a suspect.’
‘Which is all the more reason to tread carefully and quietly, and find out as much as you can on your own. If you go to the cops now, if they think what you’ve got is relevant you’ll be used and discarded. And if they think what you’ve got is mince, they’ll take action to neutralise you in case you scare off the big game. Either way, you won’t be permitted to pursue your own agenda any more.’
‘Somebody may have just died because of my agenda. Julian Sanquhar was scared, really scared. I’ve got people following me, not just that ex-cop Rees. No disrespect, Glen, I don’t underestimate your capacity for beating people up and I’m grateful for you coming to my aid, but I’d sooner it was someone else’s problem. This game is becoming too rich for my blood, so dealing myself out seems the safest option.’
‘Not as safe as you think. Sure, this shooting might not be about what happened up in Balnavon in 1981. But if it is, given that you’ve reason to believe there was high-level complicity in covering up Tessa Garrion’s disappearance, maybe the police are the last people you want to be telling how much you already know.’
In the Blood
Jasmine had considered Fallan’s advice and ultimately decided that it would be in her best interests if she did speak to the police regarding the Hamish Queen investigation – just not the current Hamish Queen investigation, and not current police either.
It had taken a couple of days, but Harry Deacon had drawn upon his contacts on the force and succeeded in finding out which officers had been at Balnavon nick in the summer of 1981. Finlay Weir had told her how a younger cop had been displeased by the impression of higher-level influence facilitating Hamish Queen’s release, so she was hoping to get a first-hand account of the investigation from someone not bound by covert loyalties. Harry was able to furnish her with contact details for a retired officer by the name of Callum Ross, who now ran the outdoor sports facilities at the Culfieth Hydro hotel down in Wigtonshire.
‘Did he do his thirty?’ Fallan asked, driving them south through Ayrshire in his bashed and bullet-blasted Land Rover. The last time she’d accepted a lift in it things hadn’t gone very smoothly, so she was surprised to feel so comfortable back behind its dashboard, its same scents filling her nostrils and piquing her memory. It smelt of diesel and chopped vegetation, like the inside of an old shed, smells she was surprised to find both pleasant and comforting.
‘Must have. Harry said he retired from the force in 2007.’
‘And he was in one tiny Highland cop shop the whole time? How come he ended up down here at the other end of the country?’
‘No. Perhaps significantly, Harry said he transferred out of Balnavon in October 1981, only a few months after Tessa Garrion’s disappearance.’
‘And where did his transfer take him?’
‘That’s rather interesting too. He became a police marksman.’
Harry had smoothed the way for Jasmine by getting in touch with Ross first and telling him he would be helping out his fellow former officers if he could spare some time to speak to ‘one of Galt Linklater’s associates’. Ross had thus needed little persuasion, and Jasmine had been given the all-clear to come south and visit the Hydro’s outdoors centre.
She had enjoyed no such luck in pursuing the remaining two listed members of the Glass Shoe Company. The closest she had got t
o Russell Darius had been a brief chat with his agent, Wallace Charlton, when her third phone call to Agents United was (perhaps mistakenly) transferred directly to him instead of his assistant. Charlton had been both polite and understanding, and Jasmine believed him when he assured her that he had passed on both of her previous messages to his client. Unfortunately she also believed him when he said, with some weariness, that even as his agent he often found it difficult wringing a response out of Russell Darius, so she shouldn’t hold her breath.
Murray Maxwell was offering neither politeness nor understanding. A little digging had at least got her a direct number for his office, rather than having to take her chances with the lucky-dip that was the Scotia Television switchboard, but on each occasion Jasmine had called, the phone had been answered by Maxwell’s PA. The first time, she had been given a breezy but neutral ‘yes, I’ll pass that on’. The second time she could tell words had been exchanged. There was an unmistakable hardening to the assistant’s tone as she said ‘oh, yes,’ in response to Jasmine identifying herself, followed by: ‘I did pass on your previous message, but Mr Maxwell has been extremely busy of late.’
Third time was most certainly not the charm. Jasmine was told in icy tones that ‘if Mr Maxwell was interested in speaking to you, he would have responded in person. I must warn you that if you persist in making these calls, we will consider it harassment, in which case we are prepared to take vigorous legal recourse.’
‘To be fair,’ Fallan had stated, ‘it’s probably not the best time to be asking him if he wouldn’t mind discussing his hitherto secret past links to the recently murdered Hamish Queen.’
‘But couldn’t I use that?’ Jasmine suggested. ‘You know: talk to me about this or I talk to the press about Glass Shoe.’
‘I wouldn’t play that card quite yet: you don’t know enough. He could call your bluff. And if you did broadcast his connection to Queen, the polis would be all over it.’
The sun was shining on the Culfieth Hydro as Fallan’s Land Rover drove past it, making for the outdoors centre which was situated a mile up the hill. The granite sparkled in the sun, giving the grand Victorian building something of a fairy-tale look, but Jasmine could imagine it would look far more forbidding in clouds and rain. It was all turrets and balustrades, austere and imposing, like an insane asylum in some Gothic psychodrama. It had been an asylum of sorts once upon a time, a place where the Victorian infirm were sent for the fresh air and to take the waters, and later where the Edwardian dipsomanic were sent for fresh air and to take only the waters. As a legacy of those days, the hotel had remained unlicensed until the nineties, but in recent times it had reinvented itself as an all-year, all-weather leisure resort, with the outdoor sports HQ located adjacent to the first tee of the hotel’s nine-hole golf course.
Jasmine didn’t need to ask for Callum Ross or have him pointed out. She was getting good at recognising ex-cops when she saw them, though in his case it probably helped that he was holding a gun. Rather disturbingly, he appeared to be pointing it at a child of around ten. As she drew closer, Jasmine could see that the gun was in fact some kind of laser-tag weapon, the use of which Ross was merely demonstrating. His instruction complete, the child gleefully took hold of his ray gun and went charging off to catch up with a group of children and adults in camouflage overalls, all headed for an area of woodland.
Ross seemed equally adept at recognising his visitors without introduction. She guessed this may have been assisted by their being the only people in the vicinity not dressed in some kind of sports or pseudo-military attire, or it could have been that Harry had provided a few details regarding his young ‘associate’.
‘You must be Jasmine Sharp,’ he greeted her. ‘And this is?’
‘Glen Fallan,’ she said.
‘Are you with Galt Linklater too?’
‘I’m with Sharp Investigations,’ Fallan answered, and Jasmine had to suppress a smile at the conviction with which he uttered it.
‘You look kind of familiar,’ Ross said. ‘I worked with Harry Deacon a couple of times back in my Strathclyde days. I was just wondering if I knew you from the job as well.’
‘It’s possible,’ Fallan deadpanned.
‘What were you? Drugs? Murder?’
‘Bit of both. Glad to be out of it now.’
Ross nodded sagely. He looked like he’d be in agreement. He was dressed in a blue polo shirt bearing the hotel’s logo, the material stretched across a muscular frame, his skin tanned and healthy, his features bright and alert. He didn’t seem like a man who was missing his old job, and God knows Jasmine had seen a few of those, though some of them were probably just as miserable then too.
‘So, I gather there’s something I might be able to help you with?’ Ross asked. ‘Harry didn’t give me any clues, so I must confess I’m quite intrigued. Always a pleasure to take a trip down felony lane, as long as it’s not concerning any incidents in which police shots were fired. I can’t disclose anything about those, you understand.’
‘No,’ said Jasmine. ‘It’s going back a bit further than that. It’s concerning your time in Balnavon, and the recently departed Mr Hamish Queen.’
The easygoing jollity fell from his face.
‘Let’s go somewhere a bit more private,’ Ross said.
Somewhere more private turned out to be the hotel’s shooting range, situated in a disused quarry a quarter of a mile down a dirt track from the outdoors centre. Ross announced that he had been heading there next anyway, as he had work to do in preparation for guest sessions later that day.
He took them there in a Land Rover almost identical to Fallan’s, and it struck Jasmine as remarkable how two such similar vehicles could make her feel so different. The Hydro-liveried four-by-four felt colder, less cosy, more bumpy, and the smell of diesel was cut with that of wet clothes and musty fruit. She wanted out of it as soon as possible, the short trek down to the quarry seeming to take ages. Maybe it wasn’t the vehicle so much as the uncomfortable memory of her last trip down into an old quarry with Fallan beside her and an old polisman at the wheel.
This time, at least, the guns were only air rifles. There were eight of them lined up on a rack inside one of two wooden enclosures at the near end of the quarry, various targets and pellet-catchers dotted about the ground at different ranges. Ross took one of the rifles and began stripping it down, preparing to oil and clean the weapon along with its seven sisters on the rack.
‘I grew up in Glen Kerse,’ he said, slipping a cleaning rod into the barrel. ‘Six miles outside Balnavon. I knew, or rather I was aware of Hamish Queen since I was about four or five. I say aware because he was the laird’s son, and though we were roughly the same age and lived close by we were never going to be round each other’s houses to play, you know?’
‘I can imagine,’ Jasmine replied.
‘It’s weird. Rural life, village life back then – you hear folk talk about how everybody was quite close and knew each other’s business, but not while the class partitions stood so firm. I mean, nothing against the guy, but that’s the point: nothing for him either. I didn’t know him. Like everybody, I knew who he was and who his father was, but I don’t think either of them could have picked me out in a photograph, even when I was one of the local polis.’
‘And what about your boss?’ Jasmine asked. ‘Could they have picked him out?’
‘Dougal Strang? Oh aye. Fergus McQueen always enjoyed good relations with the sergeant, but as long as he was on first-name terms with the organ-grinder, he didn’t need to pay close attention to the monkeys.’
‘Fergus McQueen?’ Jasmine queried.
‘Aye. That was the laird’s family name. Hamish changed his when he became an actor. He was Hamish McQueen right up until his early twenties.’
‘How many monkeys were there?’ asked Fallan, prompting an askew look from Ross as he glanced up from where he was bent over a gun.
‘Just the one, at any given time. It was a real shoestring
operation. The geographical area we covered was so big it was ridiculous, but it wasn’t like we were dealing in gang wars and riot control.’
‘Do you want a hand there?’ Fallan asked, nodding towards the other guns that were awaiting attention.
‘Would you know what you were doing?’
Fallan nodded and lifted one of the rifles, breaking it with barely a flick of the wrist.
‘Cheers,’ Ross said, ripping a rag in two and offering him one half. ‘I’m still trying to place you. Did you do firearms training on the force?’
‘No. It was more of a recreational thing.’
‘Just target shooting, or game too?’
‘I always liked to hunt,’ Fallan replied.
‘Aye. Once it’s in the blood, it’s with you forever.’
Fallan said nothing to this, and Jasmine could only guess at his thoughts. He was trying to put Ross at ease though, so for that much she was grateful.
‘In July 1981,’ she said, ‘Hamish Queen was held for questioning over the disappearance of a woman by the name of Tessa Garrion. What can you tell us about that?’
Ross nodded to himself, as though in confirmation that he had always known this was where the inquiry was headed.
‘Plenty,’ he replied. ‘And very little. That whole business played a big part in my deciding it was time to spread my wings and move on. Something else about village life: different rules for different people, and not just the McQueens. It was young Tormod who kicked it all off. He came in and said he wanted to speak to Sergeant Strang. He wouldn’t talk to anyone else. So Dougal took him into his office and they spoke, but he wasn’t entirely forthcoming with the details of what was said.’
‘Who was this Tormod person?’ Jasmine asked.
‘Sorry. Tormod McDonald. He was always known as young Tormod because his father was Tormod too. His father was the minister.’
‘The Wee Free?’ Jasmine asked, recalling Finlay Weir’s unflattering impersonation of him.
When the Devil Drives Page 22
