When the Devil Drives

by Christopher Brookmyre

  They were here for an RSC touring production of Othello. Jasmine had called her friend Michelle and got her to browse the Theatre Royal’s box-office database, hoping to get an address for Finnegan. Michelle was able to do better than that, informing her that he had bought two tickets for the touring show the following night. In the meantime Jasmine had put in a couple of shifts for Galt Linklater, some very boring bread-and-butter surveillance stuff. She’d spent the best part of two days sitting in a van watching a house, from which the subject never emerged. It could happen like that sometimes. On one level it was easy money, but she felt the boredom all the more pronounced as it was like being in limbo, suspended in nothingness while she waited to resume her investigation into what had happened at Kildrachan House.

  She knew that if Mrs Petrie suddenly phoned up to call it off she’d keep going anyway. She had a need for answers now, rendered all the more pronounced by having so many people evade, stall and outright lie to her. She wanted to know who had torched her car, or perhaps who had ordered it to happen, and not least because she wanted to be able to ram the facts of it down that arsehole polisman’s throat.

  The fruitless surveillance had at least given her the time to make some calls to the UK Border Agency. She didn’t have an ‘in’ there, so she was wading through treacle in terms of negotiating the bureaucracy, but she had eventually spoken to someone who had agreed to delve into the archives on her behalf. Roni Simpson, aka Saffron, was a New Zealander, so there had to be record of her entering the UK. Given her well-travelled and rootless lifestyle, Jasmine was conscious she may well have left it again following her midnight flit from Balnavon, and she wanted that confirmed before she started looking in a haystack for a needle that had bailed thirty years ago. The bloke at the Border Agency said he’d see what he could do, but she wasn’t holding her breath.

  She sidled up to her mark as he reached the bar, her mobile phone in hand.

  ‘Mr Finnegan?’ she asked brightly.

  He turned, giving her a practised greeting smile, but she could see the flicker of uncertainty in his face provoked by his failing to recognise her. His eyes flitted to one side, perhaps checking for somebody. Fallan had said he would have back-up in the vicinity; nobody conspicuous, nor evidently in Finnegan’s company, but they would be watching. They’d be young, fit, game and probably tooled. She wondered what they made of having to sit through Shakespeare of an evening, but then their job wasn’t to watch the stage.

  ‘Yes?’ he replied, calm and curious, unthreatened by what he found before him. But that was why she was the ninja.

  ‘I think you should have a look at this email,’ she said, passing her phone to him.

  It was addressed to Detective Superintendent Catherine McLeod, and CCed to several journalists, the subject header stating: ‘Society drug-dealer’s secret link to Hamish Queen’.

  The body copy was prefaced by a list of bullet points summing up Finnegan’s involvement in the Glass Shoe Company, his clash with Tessa Garrion, his subsequent firing by Hamish Queen and the troubling fact that Tessa disappeared two days later and had never been seen since.

  She could tell Finnegan was a past master at putting a calm face on things, a man who knew that giving way to his base emotions was an unaffordable indulgence, but he still looked rattled.

  ‘Who are you?’

  She passed him a card with a name and address scribbled on the back.

  ‘My associate and I would like a wee chat after the show. We’ll be at this café-bar on Hope Street. And just so that you’re not tempted to do anything rash, that email is in an outbox scheduled to refresh in a few hours. We can’t stop it from sending if anything happens to us.’

  He regained his composure, visibly relieved to learn that these things didn’t have to go public and the price was just some information.

  ‘A wee chat about what?’ he asked calmly, managing a cold smile.

  ‘Kildrachan. Summer of eighty-one. People don’t want to talk about this for some reason.’

  ‘Maybe it’s because it was the Scottish play,’ he replied sardonically.

  ‘Well, apologies for the ambush tactics, but I’m sick of being stonewalled. Enjoy the rest of the show.’

  ‘Could have been worse,’ he deadpanned. ‘You could have threatened to tell me the ending.’

  Finnegan turned up at the basement café-bar less than ten minutes after final curtain, no longer accompanied by his wife. He appeared to be unaccompanied by any wingmen either, but a smartly dressed man in his thirties had cased the place a minute or so before, John the Baptist to his Jesus Christ. Finnegan went to the counter, ordering a double espresso and a repeat of whatever the place’s only other two customers were drinking, then made his way across to their booth.

  ‘How was that ending?’ Jasmine asked as he sat down.

  ‘“Oh bloody period”,’ he quoted. She waited for a quip in keeping with the line’s capacity for juvenile amusement, but he didn’t seem in the mood for levity. Even if they hadn’t been shaking him down for information the man had, after all, just sat through Othello.

  ‘There’s part of me kind of wishes he’d never written it,’ Finnegan said. ‘I mean, there’s tragedy and then there’s that. One poisonous individual bringing out the worst in good people, spreading so much unnecessary suffering. I’ll always go, but I never look forward to it.’

  Finnegan was definitely not what she was expecting. He wasn’t some player who had learned to talk the talk merely in order to blend in with his rarefied customer base. He lived this stuff. However, Glen had warned her that it would be catastrophic to mistake a degree of artistic sensitivity for weakness. Plenty were bound to have done before, and he wouldn’t be where he was if he hadn’t put them straight.

  With that in mind she thought she’d best remind him that she had her own recourse should things turn less cordial.

  ‘This is my associate, Glen Fallan.’

  Finnegan began instinctively extending a hand and then hesitated as the words hit home. The pause only lasted a fraction of a second, but they were all aware of it.

  ‘We never had the pleasure,’ Finnegan said, recovering to meet Fallan’s grip across the table. ‘But your reputation precedes you. And, rather confusingly, part of that reputation concerns you being dead for about twenty years.’

  ‘I got better.’

  One of the bar staff brought their drinks. Finnegan took a sip of espresso and sat up straight.

  ‘So,’ he said, ‘what can I do for you?’

  ‘Tell us about Kildrachan,’ Jasmine replied.

  ‘Why don’t you tell me what you already know so that I don’t waste any time. I don’t want you being late back to wherever that email is waiting for a cancel command.’

  ‘We know you were there, ostensibly as Russell Darius’s construction carpenter, but mainly as his drug supplier.’

  ‘I would dispute the balance of that,’ he said, taking another sip of espresso. As far as she could tell, he wasn’t being facetious, and despite his awareness that he was on a clock, this was clearly a distinction he felt it important to make. ‘I spent a lot more time building sets than scoring dope.’

  ‘Nonetheless, I’m led to believe Tessa Garrion thought that the latter activity was impacting disproportionately on the entire production. You had what has been described as a stand-up row with her, after which Hamish Queen fired you. Two days after that, Tessa was gone and the police were investigating reports of someone dragging a body through the grounds of the house. Then, thirty years later, I start digging around these incidents and suddenly Hamish Queen is dead.’

  ‘I think even the Glasgow polis would consider that thin.’

  ‘So thin you came running here to prevent us sending that email.’

  ‘It wasn’t the polis I was worried about, and I’m sure you know that. My business relies upon discretion.’

  ‘You’re not denying what happened, though.’

  ‘Why would I? It’s tr
ue. Tessa and I did have our arguments, more than one. What’s thin is to imagine I’d be creeping about two days later, killing her in revenge for being given my cards. And as for what happened to poor Hamish, this is the first time I’ve heard it suggested the two things might be related. I’ve never killed anybody, Miss Sharp. Had to do a few things I’m not proud of to protect my interests, but never that. Not everybody at this table can say the same.’

  He eyed Fallan warily as he took another sip of coffee, as though concerned he might have spoken out of turn. Jasmine noted that for all his measured composure and control, he was very defensive about his own sense of integrity. A man caught between worlds, able to move in the higher one but largely because of what he could bring from the realm beneath.

  ‘Tessa didn’t need Hamish to fight her battles,’ he said, almost in a hurry to put some distance on his last remark. ‘She was tougher than she looked, very driven. I didn’t like being painted as the bad guy, though. I was a convenient scapegoat for everybody’s excesses, and some were more excessive than others. She found it easier to blame me than to confront Darius. I called her bluff, though. She threatened to phone the police about the drugs and I said go ahead.’

  ‘Ballsy call,’ said Fallan. ‘Especially when the Highland plods would have found it very easy to railroad a wee Glesca keelie out of town rather than upset the laird’s son and his Oxbridge chums.’

  ‘A calculated risk,’ Finnegan replied. ‘I got the impression she was more concerned about the law than I was. One of her frequent complaints about the drugs was that they were going to bring the cops down on us all. I called it right: she backed down.’

  ‘And so she got Hamish to fire you instead,’ said Jasmine, watching carefully for what emotions his recollection might betray.

  ‘I didn’t bear Tessa a grudge. For one thing, I knew Hamish didn’t fire me because of her: he fired me to try to undermine Darius. They were always at loggerheads, and I reckon in his desperation Hamish convinced himself Darius could be reined in if he got rid of his drug-pushing blue-collar bad influence. It wasn’t me who was the problem, though. I wasn’t pushing drugs; that wasn’t why I went in the first place and it wasn’t why I stayed. I was happy enough to be involved with what was going on; I’d never been part of anything like it.’

  He stared into his little white cup, a pleasant recollection turning sour like the last gritty dregs at the bottom.

  ‘When I was fired I wasn’t sad to get out of there. I’d had a good time, but we were well past the point where it stopped being fun. It was all coming to an end, anyone could see that, and it was a relief not to be witnessing the final throes, let me assure you. Darius was starting to scare the shit out of me.’

  There it was again: the man with a redundant first name.

  ‘I notice you refer to him as Darius,’ Jasmine observed, ‘but you called Hamish and Tessa by their first names. Why is that?’

  ‘I called him Russell when I first knew him. Early days at Kildrachan, I was still calling him Russell. But I was calling him Darius by the end, like everybody else. To his face, at least. Behind his back they started calling him Dangerous.’

  ‘Was there a kind of Smeagol/Gollum thing going on with him?’ Jasmine asked.

  ‘You could say that. Not a split personality, but there were definitely two sides he could choose to show you. Russell was the softer side, the name his mother called him, the name Tessa called him when she was trying to appeal to his better nature. Darius was what he got called at school and I think he embraced it as the name of his more public self. A face he could show to the world, a mask he could wear, and you can misbehave if you’re wearing a mask.’

  ‘Are we talking about drugs here, or something more?’

  ‘Let’s just say that Darius is the reason I don’t deal in hallucinogens, but it wasn’t the drugs per se, more what was driving his use of them. He was looking for something within, wondering what might be already hidden inside or what he might will into himself. He was obsessed with the idea of transformation, of different selves that could inhabit the same mind. Drugs were part of that, but not the whole. It was not so much what he was doing as the fact that it evidently wasn’t enough, so what was disturbing me was the worry of what he might do next.’

  ‘Was his behaviour increasingly erratic?’ Jasmine asked. ‘Volatile?’

  ‘Did he have a temper?’ queried Fallan.

  ‘Oh, he had a temper all right, as anyone who witnessed his battles with Hamish would attest, but no, he wasn’t erratic or volatile. He was driven, and that was worse, as far as I was concerned. I have to admit, this is more about me than about him. I liked being part of things at Kildrachan, but the place itself could creep me out sometimes. It was my childhood vision of a haunted house. Add to that the fact that we were spending all our days working on that play and the atmosphere could become infused. I’m not a superstitious person, but you spend all day thinking about “reeking wounds, horrible imaginings” and being “from the crown to the toe top-full of direst cruelty” then you don’t necessarily want to be spending your dark evenings with Darius.’

  He stared at his cup again.

  ‘Do you want a refill?’ Jasmine asked.

  ‘No, I think I could use something stronger.’

  He summoned the barman and ordered a large malt.

  ‘So who did want to spend their dark evenings with Darius?’ Fallan asked. ‘People don’t like to trip alone.’

  ‘Murray wasn’t averse to a bit of experimentation. Used to make me laugh whenever I saw him play that straight-edge Eliot Ness cipher on TV.’

  ‘Do you supply Murray Maxwell still?’ asked Fallan.

  ‘I won’t answer that question.’

  ‘That’s a yes.’

  ‘No, it’s an “I won’t answer that question”. You could ask me if I supply Alex Salmond and I’d give you the same response. If I answer it for one person, even in the negative, it compromises me for precisely the reason you’ve illustrated.’

  ‘“Reputation is an idle and most false imposition,”’ Jasmine quoted. ‘“Oft got without merit and lost without deserving.”’

  Finnegan eyed her with a strange mixture of suspicion and admiration.

  ‘Iago,’ he identified. ‘But then, you were an actress, weren’t you. I Googled you. It came up in the Ramsay reports.’

  ‘I trained, didn’t finish. I was raised on Shakespeare, though. My late mother was an actress. She had a quote for every occasion.’

  ‘“Good name in man and woman, dear my lord, is the immediate jewel of their souls.” So if you’re looking for leverage to get Murray to talk, then my name plus Kildrachan should be enough. Especially for a man with designs on the top job at Scotia. He’ll cooperate to keep this quiet. It was thirty years ago, but it was acid. That never plays well.’

  ‘Anyone else?’

  ‘Yes, Saffron. She was up for anything. That said, she’d done a lot of drugs in her time so she had kind of seen the show before. She was as much attracted to the other stuff Darius was experimenting with: the rituals.’

  Jasmine sat forward involuntarily, primed by her frustration at what Julian Sanquhar and Tormod McDonald had only alluded to.

  ‘It started off as a laugh – a makeshift Ouija board, chants and candles – but Darius kept taking it further. He was videotaping it all too. He was interested in the theatre of the ritual: of how ritual itself was empowering. He wanted to know what it could unlock within yourself to play certain things out. He was staging these affairs with as much care and planning as putting on a play; arguably more, given that Hamish kept ditching his more Grand Guignol stage effects from the production.’

  Finnegan took a large mouthful of whisky, about half the glass, letting it play on his palate for a moment, seeming to savour the burn, like the pain of it might be medicinal. He winced a little as he swallowed.

  ‘I found it distasteful. I didn’t believe the mumbo-jumbo was going to summon anything, but what bot
hered me was this fascination with evil, with blood, with death. I’m with Mr Sanquhar on this. I don’t like horror movies and I’m instinctively suspicious of people who do.’

  ‘It’s not every day you encounter a squeamish drug dealer,’ said Fallan. ‘And a prudish one’s rarer still.’

  Finnegan allowed himself a small smile, like he was taking Fallan’s remarks as a compliment.

  ‘I know all too well what people are capable of, and I know what I’m capable of. I’m not in denial or retreat from the darker aspects of human nature. But nor do I necessarily want to be reminded of them on a night out. I prefer work that allows me to contemplate how much more we can become, what we can aspire towards.

  ‘Darius was another little rich kid, same as Hamish and Julian, though not so old money. He never had a grounding in the everyday horrors you and I did, Mr Fallan, of growing up in places where violence can become almost banal. Darius can put an arterial spurt of blood on the screen because to him it’s just an image. He’d never been there to actually smell the stuff when somebody got glassed. It’s easier to fascinate upon it when it’s at a remove. Horror is an escapism for him, just as beauty became an escapism for me.’

  ‘Would you say he was seduced by the idea of evil?’ Jasmine asked, thinking of the escalating process Sanquhar had described.

  When there is a wanton will in man to seek the darkness, then there is something out there that listens, and it whispers back.

  ‘The idea, yes: inasmuch as it was a nebulous concept he was too naive to understand. He was seduced by the idea of notoriety too, another little-rich-kid misbegotten aspiration, something he thought he wanted right up until the point when he got it. Notoriety is not such a desirable thing to actually have, as myself and Mr Fallan here could attest. Darius learned about that the hard way.’