by Jay Stringer
But Jenny Towler had traced it.
My dad had traced it.
At the bottom of the pile of papers, and so on the outside of the bundle that I’d pulled out of the box, was a small handwritten note from my dad. It said that when the case was finally revealed, the newspaper should carry the byline of Jenny Towler.
I choked again, and this time I couldn’t stop. I let the tears flow out and wiped at them uselessly with the sleeve of my jacket. Phil wrapped his huge arms around me, and I could feel tears on his chin. It wasn’t what I needed. I couldn’t get what I needed.
The front door rattled as someone tried the locked handle. Phil and Fran both turned towards the door, starting to move towards it, but Perera strode in the other direction. She headed towards the door that opened onto the hallway behind us, unclipping the holstered gun from her side.
‘Get down,’ she whispered to us as she passed. She switched the living room light off and then stepped into the hallway, moving on her toes towards the rooms at the back of the flat.
The front door rattled again, but this time we were following Perera’s lead and seeing the bigger picture. I heard the sound of my bedroom window being forced open, and then a second later, loud and unmistakable in the confines of the flat, a gunshot.
Then the calm in the storm. For a second we were all still. Silence gripped the flat. Then we all started to move again. I felt sick, and I looked over at Phil, who was wiping his mouth, holding back a panic of his own. Perera then ran past us, through the living room and towards the front door. She almost ripped it off the hinges as she got it open and stepped out into the street. We heard her shout for someone to stop. Once, twice. The third time was followed straight away by two more gunshots, and then a sound of someone falling over and skidding across asphalt. Sirens could be heard in the distance, drawing near, along with the crackling of a police radio out in the street.
Perera stepped back in, not breaking a sweat, and looking like the coolest fucker on the planet.
‘It’s over,’ she said.
Fifty-Three
I stood on a balcony overlooking Glasgow’s city centre. In front of me was the glass pyramid roof of the St Enoch Centre, a shopping mall that had been expensively renovated to transform this part of the city. I leant over the frosted glass balcony to look down on the corner of Argyle Street and Buchanan Street, where high-street fashion met working-class budgets. It was the tail end of the rush hour, and all the sounds of the city mingled to float up at me. I’d lived in Glasgow my whole life without ever seeing it from this angle. Off to the right I could see the cranes of the dockyards, lit up at night to warn away low-flying pilots. To the left the balcony jutted out over the roof of the next building. If I leant over, I could make out the cathedral sitting atop the hill. I held out my mobile phone and marvelled at the full phone signal, which I never managed to get anywhere else in town, and then snapped off a few pictures of the view.
This was the life.
This could be my life.
Fiona Hunter stepped out onto the balcony with me. She was wearing a spotless combo of a shirt and cream slacks. She handed me a glass of red wine and nodded out at the night air, a gesture that somehow managed to take in the whole view.
‘Well?’ she asked. ‘What do you say?’
‘It’s great.’
She sipped from her glass and looked out at the view as if she was seeing it for the first time. I watched her profile for a moment and wondered how hard she’d practised that look.
‘I’m serious about the offer.’ She turned to me. ‘We own the flat below us as well. It could be yours—just come and work with us, full-time.’
‘You guys must be seriously loaded.’
‘We have good friends.’ Douglas stepped out onto the balcony with us. He was dressed identically to Fiona. ‘And good investment advice.’
I’d met Douglas briefly the night before, or more accurately the early hours of that morning, at the police station before the drive to my flat. After the shooting, we’d had another couple of hours of interviews and paperwork at the station, and then an attempt to piece together what had happened.
McLean and Gilbert had been wise to the fact it was a trap. They’d not shown up at Fran’s office as planned, and Cummings had been ready to call off the operation when Perera had radioed in to say it was over. McLean had been the one rattling our door, a distraction that had worked on all of us except the cop. While we were supposed to be worrying about the front, Gilbert was coming in the back, where Perera ambushed him.
She’d then chased McLean down the street and, deciding she couldn’t let an armed man run through Glasgow with his blood up, she fell back on her old training and put him down. Cummings told me in private she was going to be suspended until the top brass were satisfied she’d done the right thing, and that they were notoriously slow at deciding anything. I’d spent the night at Phil’s, where he had a bedroom window that hadn’t been forced open by a man with a gun. I didn’t know how long it would be before I could feel safe in my own flat again, if ever. And around midday, when I finally convinced myself to get out of bed and face the world, Phil had asked if he could come with me next time I visited Dad. My phone started ringing soon after that, the same journalists who’d been calling me in the past about the insurance case, but now they were calling with huge offers of money, and the national media was pitching in. I ignored each one. It didn’t feel like my story.
Some garbled version of the truth was starting to come out through the online outlets by mid-afternoon, and the radio had it too. None of them had it exactly right, but they all covered the broad strokes. They all cleared Mackie’s name and talked about varying degrees of corruption and scandal. Some threw in sex, some threw in city councillors—everyone threw in the names McLean and Hillcoat.
The only source to get the story the way my dad had put it together in full was a small local paper: The Clyde Evening News. They’d been a paper I’d done work experience for when I was at school, and I still knew the editor. Nobody really read it any more, but back in the day, when a young woman named Jenny Towler had wanted to be a journalist, they’d been one of the city’s biggest and finest papers.
They ran the story with her name on the byline.
There was one question that nobody seemed to be asking. One that only mattered if you needed to make sense of the whole thing, and it didn’t look like anybody much cared about that. But I cared, and I needed to find the answer.
Towards the end of the working day I’d had a call from Fiona. She reminded me of the offer to go to her place for food and future, and I agreed to take her up on at least one of those things. I nursed one glass of red over a plate of souvlaki in their immaculate flat while they talked about how they’d met, what their plans were and how difficult it was to be taken seriously in the city. The flat was white and angular. Every surface was perfect, and every cushion and picture frame looked to be put in place using scientific instruments of precise measurement. Fiona started to get to the point by way of saying one of the other flats in the building was empty and that she could arrange for me to take a look at it if I was interested.
Out on the balcony, she handed me the second glass of wine and then tried again.
They stood on either side of me, leaning on the rails and sipping their wine. I couldn’t figure either of them out as people, but I had a firm grasp on their businesses.
‘Work for us,’ Fiona said.
‘You really impressed us yesterday,’ Douglas said. ‘Fiona was right about you. None of the older investigators in town would have done half of what you did.’
I aimed for the joke. ‘They’d all have known better.’
‘Maybe.’ Fiona leant a little closer. ‘Or maybe they’ve just let their ambition and interest slide with age. I’m told it happens to boring people. I don’t think you’ll ever find out.’
> She actually said that.
‘It doesn’t have to be as an investigator,’ Douglas said. ‘We can find you other work. We’re an emerging business. Plenty of opportunities for a project manager or a ridiculously overpaid assistant.’
They all sounded good. Too good. I already knew that. That was why I’d agreed to the dinner only, but standing on the balcony between them did turn my head for a moment, made me think about the offer.
Fiona brushed my hand with hers, almost casually, like it was an accident.
‘If it helps,’ Douglas said, ‘we’re flirting with you.’
‘If it helps, I noticed.’ I took my first sip from the wine and then laughed at my own joke. ‘Did you flirt with Rab too? He was surely too old for you.’
Fiona swallowed her mouthful and watched me for a long, cold minute.
‘When did you know?’ she asked.
I shrugged off the question. ‘When didn’t I? The bullshit story Andy told me helped it along. Only a mug would believe all of this had been over a book deal. You hire me to find the guy at the centre of the whole conspiracy, the guy who started acting strangely and triggered this whole thing. The guy who ordered his own nephew killed. The way you took charge at the police station? Hell, even knowing I was there—that had to come through the wrong sources because I sure as hell didn’t call you.’
‘I’d hoped you would. That would have made things easier.’
‘And then you orchestrate the whole thing. The shoot-out. You arrange for us to send the cops to Fran’s place, you bully them into letting me go home and you set it up so that there will be an armed cop at the flat. Those phone calls you made at the police station? You called McLean, right? Told him that the meet at Fran’s was a trap and that I was going home? I bet you failed to mention the armed cop.’
‘Might have slipped my mind.’
‘Ballsy move, calling them from the cop shop. Right in the lion’s den.’
‘I like ballsy moves.’ She smiled at me. ‘And we like you. You’re only proving us right here. You’re perfect. And I have to say, you’re not the same person I met yesterday morning. You’ve woken up.’
I had.
‘You went fishing for criminal contacts in Glasgow and found Rab because of his book deal.’ I started to run through the story I’d worked out. ‘He started talking, telling you all about the property scams and the corrupt council, probably bigged himself up and made out like he was behind it all. And then, just when you were getting ready to talk money, his nephew started to figure out he’d been framed, and you told Rab the deal was off if he got found out.’ I turned to Douglas. ‘And you, Gomez Addams, what were you doing while all of this was going on?’
He mouthed Gomez at me with a question on his face while Fiona laughed.
‘Never mind,’ she said. ‘You can get all the answers if you work for us. But you’ve got the important parts down. Well done. When we knew something had happened to Rab, we used you to smoke out the people we needed to talk to. But then you turned out to be a better investment than all of them put together. There’s a lot to do, and the washer lady is looking to retire, hand her side of things over to someone else. Funnily enough, she seems to like you too.’ She waved out at the view. ‘This city. The Commonwealth Games and the referendum were just the start. There are people just waiting to come in here for a piece. Investors, builders, politicians. Everybody who is anybody will be making money off Glasgow for the next decade, and we’re getting in on the ground floor. We’ll be making money off their money.’
‘Is this the same speech you gave to Rab? McLean? Gilbert?’
‘A variation on it. But it’s their own fault they got named in that recording, and that’s changed things. Most of yesterday was about thinking on our feet. The plan kept changing.’
‘You guys can’t be paying for all of this alone.’
‘You’re perceptive. But you have to be all the way in before you get any more.’
This was all carrying the faintest whiff of Scientology. I wondered which level of the conspiracy I needed to be at before they told me about the giant lizards and taught me how to smile in a really suspicious way. Fiona brushed my hand again, and Douglas was in so close on my other side, I could feel his breath.
I pulled back and took a step towards the door.
‘It would be a real shame if you said no.’ Fiona pushed off from the railings and moved after me. ‘A real waste of potential.’
‘I don’t think it would be the first time someone drank too much wine and fell from a balcony, though, in fairness,’ Douglas said. I noticed how strong his muscles looked even in his skinny frame. ‘Especially after such a stressful couple of days, nobody would blame you for finding it all too much.’
They both closed in on me.
I took another step back and felt the glass of the living room window behind me.
Fifty-Four
I’ve been rude,’ I said. ‘I feel bad about this. After you’ve gone to all this trouble and been such good hosts. I’m afraid I’ve used the same trick twice.’
I raised the phone that was still in my left hand. I turned the screen to face them so they could see the call was connected. There really was such a good phone signal up here. They both read the name Cummings at the same time. On cue the doorbell rang. Then the banging started, along with the other sound I’d come to get used to in the past couple of days, someone shouting, ‘Police!’
‘You’ve set us up.’ Fiona’s perfect smooth face twisted into an animal snarl.
‘No shit, Sherlock.’
The banging stopped, and I knew it was only seconds before the cops kicked in the door, but I decided to help them along. I shouted that we were here. Fiona punched me in the gut, really fucking hard, and I started to sink to my knees. In the end, that punch probably saved my life, because Douglas grabbed me by the shoulders of my shirt and tried to haul me over the balcony. If I’d been on my feet and on balance, he would probably have managed it. But I was a dead weight already sinking, and he didn’t have the time to fight against that. He followed in with another punch in the same spot.
I watched from the floor as their feet ran away from me across the balcony. I raised my head to see the two of them climbing over the end and dropping out of sight. For a few moments I thought they’d jumped off the edge of the building, before I sucked in some air and sense and remembered that end of the balcony jutted out over the roof of the next building. The police swarmed out around me, and two of them helped me to my feet. I pointed over the end of the balcony and said the words next and building enough times for them to get the point.
Cummings stepped into my vision and asked if I was okay. I tried to answer that I was just peachy, but the punch had taken all of the sarcasm right out of me. He told me to head down and wait by the cars. I nodded and waddled over to the lift. On the way down I closed my eyes and controlled my breathing, just as I would after a difficult run, and got back in control.
It had been a good day, all told. I wasn’t going to get the riches that Fiona and Douglas had been waving at me, and Hillcoat was dead, so I wouldn’t be getting any further payments from him for solving the case. But I still had the advance he’d given me, and that added up to a thousand pounds. Not bad for two days’ work. I still had Fran’s divorce case to work on too, and that would lead to plenty of billable hours. I’d be fine until the end of the month, and by then, I hoped, all the media attention would have thrown some more work my way.
A crowd was gathering in the street, drawn by the police cars. The cops had parked at the junction between Argyle Street and Buchanan Street. Drunks from the nearby pubs had come to gawk and ask questions. I leant against the police car and started imagining a new office, with my name stencilled on the glass in the door. A bottle of pear cider in the top drawer of my desk and a succession of attractive and scantily clad young men coming in
through my door, looking for help.
Ireland Investigations.
That’s who I was now.
I was going to make this work.
That’s when I saw Fiona. She was skirting the edge of the crowd. I don’t know how long she’d been there, or where her weird little helper had got to, but she was passing by ten feet from me. She’d found a dark hoodie from somewhere, and the cowl was covering her head, but I recognised her. She hadn’t seen me, possibly blind-sided by the hood, but she was taking one last look up at the building. She turned to walk away and, as she did, she locked eyes with me. She kept walking, picking up the pace as she went. Soon she was trotting, and then running. She switched into a full sprint with a fluid motion. On instinct I started after her, breaking up through the gears faster than I should and not giving myself time to warm up. I remembered the previous morning and the anger I’d felt over her being a faster runner than me.
It was on.
She ran past Frasers and the Celtic shop, sidestepping early drunks and women with prams. She was pulling away from me even as I pushed myself. A car turned out of the bottom of Mitchell Street and Fiona had to pause, wait for it to move past and set off again around the back of it. I got within an arm’s length, but again she started to put distance between us. At the junction with Jamaica Street, there was a whole load of people waiting at the pedestrian crossing. Fiona barged straight through them, in a mass of flailing arms and shouting, and jumped out into the traffic. She dodged a taxi and a double-decker bus. It looked like it had clipped her for a second as she sprawled forward onto the road, but it could have just been the wind as it passed her. While she climbed back to her feet, I had to wait for the bus to move on before I could give chase again. I ran out in front of another bus. The driver applied the brakes and the horn with equal anger, but I was out of the way before I could hear what he was shouting. The cars in the other two lanes had got the message by that point and slammed on the brakes, and I made it the rest of the way across.
