When the Devil Drives

by Christopher Brookmyre

  ‘Surely you’re not talking about them backing off, trusting our judgment and letting us get on with doing our jobs?’

  ‘I’m more inclined to fear it’s the calm before the storm.’

  ‘I don’t follow.’

  ‘Are you in the car alone?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes. Why?’

  ‘Because this is a conversation we’re not having, about a possibility we didn’t discuss. Understood?’

  ‘Understood. So what are we not talking about?’

  ‘The nightmare scenario.’

  Sunderland didn’t have to spell it out. It had been on the edge of her consciousness in recent days, the thought she wouldn’t entertain. It was one of those fears you didn’t admit to yourself that you’d had until someone else came out and named it.

  The nightmare scenario: the random sniper; the apparently motiveless killer, striking from distance, in darkness, like some god of chaos. Nobody knowing why the target had been chosen, and nobody knowing who might be next.

  As Catherine well understood, delivering a motive was one of the most crucial ways in which the police served the public. Whenever people heard about something dreadful, something horrific, they needed the reassurance of being able to tell themselves there was a reason why it didn’t happen to them; why it wouldn’t happen to them. It was drug-related. It was gang-related. The victim and the accused had been on a three-day drinking binge. The stabbing was in retaliation for a previous incident. And, of course, everybody’s favourite comfort blanket: the victim was a prostitute.

  Most of the time, motive adhered to the tenets of Moira’s Law.

  This is Glesca. We don’t do subtle, we don’t do nuanced, we don’t do conspiracy. We do tit-for-tat, score-settling, feuds, jealousy, petty revenge. We do straightforward. We do obvious.

  Catherine thought of the two cases she had submitted to the Procurator Fiscal just days before the Hamish Queen shooting. They were both horrific crimes, but rendered all the less scary for the public at large once a motive gave them a framework to make their own kind of albeit twisted sense.

  A twenty-nine-year-old woman, Emma McTaggart, was found stabbed and her body partially burned in woods near Bishopbriggs, murdered making her way home from a party. Initially a seemingly random killing, until the investigation uncovered the break-up with her serially abusive boyfriend a few days previously.

  A forty-one-year-old divorcee, Maureen O’Connel, was discovered dead in her home, strangled and naked in the bedroom of her flat in Mount Vernon. Initially it looked like the worst fear of every woman who lived alone: a random assailant who struck in the night once the lights were out and the doors locked. However, there was no evidence of a break-in, and neighbours said they had heard drunken voices in the close, a couple in high spirits.

  Laura Geddes secured the confession of a forty-eight-year-old accountant named Colin Anderson. They had gone out on a date, their second, and in their mutually drunken state, he had been invited back to Maureen’s flat for sex. When they got down to it Anderson was unable to maintain an erection, a recurring problem exacerbated by the alcohol, the consumption of which he found necessary to overcome nervousness precipitated by fear of this chronic affliction. As the porter had it, ‘much drink may be said to be an equivocator with lechery: it makes him, and it mars him’.

  The drink marred Maureen too. She laughed at him, unknowingly making herself the vent for years of pent-up rage at a series of sexual humiliations.

  It was brutal, it was squalid and it was unforgivable, but it made its own kind of sense, and it absolved those single-dwelling women of their fear. They’d never take a comparative stranger home for sex, and if they would, they wouldn’t laugh at him if he couldn’t perform. They’d handle it better. They’d do it differently. They wouldn’t get murdered.

  ‘Is this a conversation you’ve “not had” with other people?’ she asked Sunderland.

  ‘No comment.’

  For which, read ‘yes’.

  ‘It’s a bit early to worry about something as out-there as that,’ she said, trying to make it sound like the thought hadn’t even occurred to her.

  ‘I’m not worrying about it until I have to worry about it; I’m just worried that I might have to worry about it. The longer we go on without any sniff of a motive, the more people start to think the unthinkable. Add to that the fact that it’s now known in certain circles that this shooting involved serious hardware, military training … Nobody’s actually used the words “Washington sniper” yet, but you can tell they’re thinking it. The idea of someone who could strike at any time, just as we hit the height of summer, is a recipe for hysteria. Factor in the profile of the target and the idea of a nameless shooter picking off the great and the good is starting to trouble certain people’s thoughts.’

  Catherine understood what Sunderland meant regarding being ‘worried that I might have to worry’, but despite his admission she was going to persist with banishing this idea from her thoughts until such time as there was a second victim. Meanwhile she was determined to get a grip on the case once more. It wasn’t like they didn’t have any evidence; just that all the evidence they did have wasn’t pointing them anywhere in particular.

  Unlike some laboured investigations, it didn’t feel as though there was something crucial that they hadn’t yet found; more that there was something they simply weren’t seeing. She couldn’t help but suspect it was like some three-dimensional visual puzzle: look at it from just the right angle and it would suddenly resolve itself into a picture that made sense. This concept seemed all the more tantalising given that this was the first murder case she’d ever worked in which she was in possession of multiple photographs of the victim taken a fraction of a second before the bullet struck.

  With that thought, the puzzle twisted just a little in her hands. The picture did not come into focus, but there was one thing she could be sure it wouldn’t show.

  This was not a random killing. Whether he or she had done it personally or paid a hitman, whoever wanted Hamish Queen dead had to know what was going to happen at the end of the performance. The clue was the photograph itself.

  First-hand or from information given to assist the hit, the shooter had to know the target would come down from the audience and pose with the cast, like he’d done in all those previous photographs hung in Sir Angus McCready’s private study. If he hadn’t, surely the assassin would have set up somewhere else, with a black-light scope, and taken his shot while Hamish sat in the audience watching the play. It would be a tricky shot: dozens of people huddled close together in the dark, making the target hard to distinguish among the other infrared blobs. Instead, the killer had known that his mark would stand perfectly still under the spotlights at the end.

  Everybody say cheese.

  Altered States

  This time, Tormod McDonald was not to be found at the Balnavon parish church or its community centre, nor the manse, which they had tried first. Their visit to the last had given Jasmine pause, the possibility of meeting Tormod’s wife forcing her to contemplate the uncomfortable ramifications of ever actually using their leverage. The woman had done nothing to deserve all that this would precipitate, and Jasmine didn’t think it was her place to rain it down on Tormod either. She would be bluffing here and she knew it. That said, she was still entirely confident that her bluff would not be called.

  Venturing inside the church building, having been drawn by a familiar sound, she was confronted by the incongruous image of a cleaning lady vigorously vacuuming between the pews with a Dyson upright. Jasmine had always found it a spell-breaking juxtaposition to see someone hoovering away inside a theatre auditorium, even more so than to see what lay behind the flats backstage, so there was a particularly disarming bathos about the supposed house of God getting its carpets spruced.

  ‘Are you looking for the minister?’ the cleaner had asked.

  ‘Yes. Is the Reverend McDonald around?’

  ‘No, sure he’s a
way to the barracks, but he has a service at six so he should be back in a couple of hours.’

  Fallan walked outside into the churchyard, staring fixedly across the street to where the Balnavon Hotel stood diagonally opposite. He then proceeded forward between two rows of headstones and leaned over the black metal railings atop the grass banking leading down to street level, his head turned to look west. Jasmine joined him to see what he was looking at, seeing only the main road, which bent out of sight as it led back out of town.

  ‘What are you seeing?’ she asked.

  Fallan turned around and gazed back beyond the church building towards the meadowland bordering it at the rear, to the north.

  ‘That’s still the Kildrachan estate there, isn’t it?’ he asked.

  ‘I think so. The grounds go on for a couple of miles all around, far as I know. Why?’

  Fallan gave a noncommittal grunt by way of reply and wandered off towards the far end of the churchyard, in the opposite direction to where he’d been facing. He came to a short stone wall, about chest height on him, and clambered up to look either way along it.

  He dropped back down with the softest thud, the lightness of his impact at odds with the weight of his frame. She really would not want Fallan sneaking up on her. His size didn’t appear to be any impediment to his stealth nor his agility.

  He led her back out of the churchyard, left along the main street and into the narrow lane he must have been looking along.

  ‘I remembered seeing this wee pathway when we came out the hotel the other day, leading up the side of the graveyard. I want to know if it goes where I think it might.’

  She followed him down the lane, moss-covered crumbling concrete giving way to gravel and then hard-packed earth strewn haphazardly with patches of grass and weeds. About a hundred and fifty yards from the main road, past the walls hemming in the churchyard, they came to a stile, flanked by fencing on either side. The fencing was of simple construction, three lengths of steel wire running between regularly spaced upright wooden spars, its purpose really just to denote the borders of the estate than keep in livestock or keep out trespassers. Beyond the stile, the path continued, snaking along the side of a dry-stone dike until it disappeared under cover of trees.

  ‘Shortcut,’ he said.

  ‘Bound to be more than one route in and out of a place like that,’ Jasmine mused, but Fallan seemed more intrigued by it than she could quite appreciate.

  She was concerned for a moment that he was about to lead her forward on to the Kildrachan property, as specifically forbidden by a small weatherbeaten plastic sign next to the stile. It wasn’t the trespassing aspect that worried her so much as the possibility of running into Charlotte while trespassing on her family’s land.

  Fortunately, Fallan proceeded no further, but as he turned around to retrace his steps she saw a familiar sudden alertness about his face that had her fearing she was about to be thrown to the ground amid a hail of gunfire. There were no evasive manoeuvres, however. He simply stood still, his gaze fixed on the path ahead, or something he had seen at the end of it.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ she asked anxiously, still not confident the getting-thrown-to-the-ground part could be entirely ruled out.

  ‘Saw somebody.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘He’s gone now. Gone fast. He didn’t want to be caught looking.’

  ‘Have you seen him before?’

  ‘No, but once was enough to recognise what I was looking at. A pro.’

  ‘Another investigator? Like Rees?’

  ‘No. A different kind of pro.’

  ‘And what kind would that be?’

  ‘The ex-military kind. The kind who’s not going to get caught looking twice, so we probably won’t see him again. That won’t necessarily mean he’s gone, though, which troubles me.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because he’s also the kind who would “really know what he was doing” with a high-powered rifle.’

  Fallan led her back to the main road, Jasmine as reluctant to catch up to this mystery stalker as she was curious to see whether there was a silver Passat parked somewhere near by. She wondered whether they might pop into the hotel again and wait for Tormod there, but Fallan turned right and strode on purposefully past the church.

  He continued all the way along the narrow main street, beyond the last of the tourist shops, until they reached the point where the road broadened to accommodate a layby and an adjacent Perspex shelter denoted the bus stop.

  There was an old punter standing there, plastic bag of library books in one hand and in the other a lead tethering a hairy white Westie.

  ‘Has this always been the bus stop?’ Fallan asked, indicating the modern transparent and graffiti-proof shelter. ‘For Inverness, I mean.’

  ‘Naw,’ he replied. ‘This is the new one. Used to leave from outside the chemist’s, but they changed it to here.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Ach, not long. Would be about seventy-four maybe?’

  ‘Cheers,’ Fallan replied, flashing Jasmine a grin in acknowledgment of the fact that 1974 constituted ‘recent’ in the old man’s perception of Balnavon’s history.

  Fallan looked south, towards where the main entrance to the Kildrachan estate was tucked away out of sight of the road.

  ‘That hotelier,’ he said, ‘Murdo Aitken, told us Saffron lived in one of the wee houses past his premises at the other end of the village, didn’t he?’

  ‘Yes,’ Jasmine agreed. ‘I think it must have been that wee terrace just before the pavement runs out on the road north. What are you getting at?’

  ‘The quickest route home from Kildrachan House to where Saffron lived would be the back way, down that path by the meadow and along the lane at the church.’

  Jasmine got it now, and asked the question for him.

  ‘So how could she have seen Tessa Garrion getting on that bus?’

  They intercepted Tormod McDonald as he made his way from the manse around to the church. He checked his stride, halted for just a moment by the sight of them before proceeding unabated, and conspicuously trying to look unabated. He had an expression of mild irritation, as if he had nothing to fear from them and it was their own time they were wasting.

  ‘I have to prepare for a service,’ he said as he reached them, intending to brush past. ‘I told you as much as I’m prepared to.’

  ‘Adam Nolan’s family were a little more cooperative,’ Jasmine lied.

  That stopped him like a Taser.

  ‘They even let us look through his private diaries.’

  ‘That would prove nothing,’ Tormod ventured, a little hastily.

  ‘True. But it does beg the question, why would he make it up? Nowadays, different story: you’ve a public profile and a reputation to uphold, but back then you were nobody, and apart from anything else, you were underage.’

  ‘Private diaries can be private fantasies,’ Tormod argued.

  ‘Obviously they’re just his word against yours. But we’ve got more than his word.’

  ‘Hell of a story,’ added Fallan. ‘Adam Nolan, the admired and lamented RSC actor turned TV star, practically a gay icon, and Tormod McDonald, the man of the cloth and moralising newspaper columnist. Can’t think of an editor in the country who wouldn’t want this as an exclusive. Apart from yours, obviously.’

  Tormod’s expression withered, his lower lip trembling like he was just a wee boy getting a row from his mum. Jasmine felt sorry for him, but it was pity she couldn’t afford.

  ‘What do you want?’ he asked, his voice wavering.

  ‘You know what we want,’ she said. ‘Tell us what you saw that night.’

  ‘You can take the earlier part of the evening as read,’ Fallan added, drawing a glare. ‘It’s what happened after that that we’re interested in. Like when you barged into Finlay Weir’s bedroom and your sister told you to fuck off. The way he told it, it didn’t sound like she was being taken advantage of, as you put it.’


  ‘My sister was taken advantage of. We both were. We were young and impressionable. We were in thrall to those people.’

  ‘I’ll give you that,’ Fallan replied. ‘They must have seemed very impressive, very sophisticated. They encouraged your curiosities, you and your sister. They let you join in: let you drink, try some drugs, but their company itself must have been intoxicating. Altogether a disinhibiting environment. Maybe brought out desires you never knew were in you.’

  ‘Yes,’ Tormod agreed, looking less adversarial towards Fallan. ‘A lot of that is true. But there was more than intoxication involved. Those were not my desires, don’t you see? They came from somewhere else, somewhere outside. Possession. Through those other indulgences my wantonness cried out and announced my vulnerability to something that is ever-listening. I was weak, and in my weakness I let it in.’

  Jasmine and Fallan shared a look, mutually understanding that they should say nothing, let him speak. Clearly he needed to believe this, or the rest of his world would fall in on itself.

  ‘It truly felt like possession,’ Tormod went on. ‘Something else in control, something that would not be denied. Then suddenly it was gone, and like Adam and Eve I was aware of my own nakedness, of my sin.’

  He looked down at the ground, not wishing to meet anyone’s eyes for a moment.

  ‘I went to Finlay Weir’s room, it’s true. I wanted to intervene before it was too late, to save Mhairi from the moment of awakening I had just suffered. I failed. I was distraught and, I will admit, still very drunk. More than drunk. I was uncontainable. Adam tried to calm me, I think, but I didn’t want him near me. I went staggering through the house in a daze.

  ‘Eventually I stumbled into the doorway of one of the grand rooms downstairs. The door was open, a strange light coming from within. The doorway was as far as I got, though. What I saw caused me to turn and flee. I saw figures in robes. I think there were two of them, but my attention was drawn almost entirely to the one who was holding a knife, a sacrificial dagger. I saw him stab a woman who was strapped to an altar. She was naked apart from the bindings. There were candles everywhere, symbols painted on sheets. I only glimpsed those for a moment, but I can still see them now, imprinted. And I can see the blood. It gushed like a burst pipe, dark red. The woman strained against her bonds but she didn’t scream. It was as though she was in a trance, or sedated.’