Deadly Harm

by Owen Mullen

  ‘This is getting us nowhere.’ Mackenzie banged on the glass. Caitlin joined in, shouting, ‘Judith? Judith, are you in there?’

  The cry from inside was distant and muffled, so faint they might have imagined it. Caitlin put her ear to the pane, straining to hear, and turned to Mackenzie. ‘Someone’s in there.’

  ‘We can’t be sure. It could be a cat.’

  ‘Listen.’

  Mackenzie tried and failed.

  ‘Maybe there is and we’ve frightened them? How would we like it if somebody started hammering on the window?’

  ‘If I thought there was a prowler outside I’d be screaming at the top of my voice and threatening to call the police, wouldn’t you?’

  The sound came again. This time there was no mistaking the cry for help. ‘She’s in there. Judith’s in there. We have to get her out.’

  Mackenzie took a step back, her mind racing.

  there would be no more Kirstys

  Beside her, Caitlin was fired up and ready; her eyes were wide and wild. ‘God knows what he’s done to her or intends to do. We can’t just leave her.’

  ‘We aren’t going to leave her.’

  ‘What’re we waiting for? Your hearing’s as good as mine. Mrs Thorne told the truth.’

  Caitlin bent to pick up a stone. Mackenzie grabbed her arm. ‘Listen to me. We’ll get her out, don’t worry about that.’

  ‘What do you want us to do?’

  ‘Wait.’

  Andrew Geddes listened to Mackenzie’s mobile ringing out. After a while he hung up. He tried again with no better luck. Not like her. At the refuge he got Sylvia.

  ‘Hi Sylvia, it’s Andrew. Can I speak to Mackenzie please?’

  ‘She’s not here, Andrew.’

  ‘Do you know where she is?’

  ‘No, sorry, I don’t. She left with Caitlin. Can I give her a message?’

  ‘No message. I’ll catch up with her tomorrow. Wherever she is I hope she’s enjoying herself. Just tell her I called, will you?’

  Geddes was disappointed but not surprised. Mackenzie’s commitment to helping women in abusive relationships took more hours than there were in a day. He guessed she’d be caught up in some drama. Many times the arrangements they’d made had been abandoned at short notice; in her world a crisis of some description was never far away. With anybody else, the irascible detective would blow a fuse. With Mackenzie he accepted it as the price of being in her life: a price he was more than ready to pay. From the beginning he’d understood that everything, including himself, would come a poor second. Since Kirsty McBride’s death, he’d caught Mackenzie staring into the distance and knew she was thinking about the girl. Searching for a way to square the past.

  It couldn’t be done.

  The man responsible for killing Kirsty hadn’t been found. Months on, the odds against catching him weren’t encouraging. The callousness of both attacks had stunned a city where violence was an everyday occurrence. Not one, but two murders – the already-crippled Eddie Dines never regained consciousness and died of massive head trauma.

  Geddes guessed, like so often in the past, that London had swallowed Malkie Boyle and doubted he’d show his face in Scotland, let alone Glasgow, again. No, though nobody would admit it, they’d missed their chance. Putting Dennis Jamieson in charge had been a huge mistake.

  Dennis the fucking Menace.

  Whoever coined that nickname had spoken from experience.

  At the other end of the line, Sylvia hung up. These days she rarely used the telephone – who would she call? – her husband, her daughters and her grandchildren were lost to her. The last real conversation she’d had was with Ian Gordon, a family friend and the solicitor her and Robert had used for thirty years, memorable because it made her sad. In a world where loyalty was old-fashioned and outmoded, three decades had counted for something with the Haymarket lawyer. As a courtesy, he’d wanted her to know in advance about the letter already drafted and on his desk, that the house in Corstorphine had been sold. In due course, once everything owed was deducted, her share would be paid into her bank account. She’d given him the account number and sort code and heard his apology fade as she replaced the receiver, realising the call had been made from expediency rather than the kindness she’d first credited him with; he’d needed the information, hadn’t he?

  For someone her age, with most of her life already lived, friends were few.

  Mackenzie and Caitlin were perhaps the only ones she had.

  25

  Billy Cunningham shuffled from the kitchen with a mug of tea in one hand and his dinner in the other: toasted cheese slathered in HP Sauce. The door of The Boy’s bedroom was closed. He heard music, probably coming from the gadget he’d bought himself. Except they weren’t called gadgets, nowadays they were “devices”. Billy didn’t understand technology – gadgets or devices – and didn’t want to understand it. Every time he’d come out of prison, the world had moved on. New this, new that. So long as the television in the corner worked, so long as he could watch his soaps and his quiz shows, he was happy.

  The old robber wasn’t certain exactly how long The Boy had been in his house. Too fucking long, that was for sure. Billy could have called the police and turned him in. He hadn’t because informing went against everything he believed. Only the lowest of the low did that. He knew. It had happened to him. And his daughter had married the bastard. Loyalty was one of the few things he valued. Family meant nothing to him and hadn’t since his daughter’s betrayal. In their later years, men sometimes questioned how good a father they’d been. Not him. He couldn’t have cared less.

  He didn’t have to be told The Boy was on the run; he’d seen his face on the evening news.

  Billy went into the living room, took a bite from the cheese and put the plate on the table next to his chair. What was left of an almost-empty box of Liquorice Allsorts was scattered on the carpet. He saw the survivors at his feet – the box was new, only opened the previous day. Surely he hadn’t gone through the whole lot? He didn’t have an answer. Last night he’d gone over the score with the booze, fallen asleep in the chair and wakened in his bed with a pounding headache and no recollection of how he’d got there.

  The TV was turned down – he couldn’t hear it. He settled for wolfing the bread and staring at the screen until a voice from behind startled him. ‘I’m off out. Bet you wish you were coming with me.’ Malkie strolled into view, grinning. ‘Those were the days, eh, Granddad?’

  He was mocking him.

  ‘You’re wrong, young fella. I’ve done what you’re doing and better, and stopped when I wanted to stop.’

  ‘Yeah, right. Stopped when you got caught, you mean.’

  Malkie pointed to the sweets on the floor. ‘Got through those double quick, didn’t you? Need to get you some more. Won’t be tonight though. Too much on.’

  ‘You ate them. I was sleeping and you ate them.’

  Malkie shook his head. ‘You’re losing it, Granddad. Why would I do that?’

  The front door banged behind him. Billy leaned forward, picked the Allsorts up and counted them. Six. Only six left. Not possible. Somebody had helped themselves while he was in a drunken stupor and it didn’t take a big brain to figure out who. He lifted the remote control, about to turn the volume up, then thought better of it.

  stopped when you got caught

  Not how it had been. Not how it had been at all.

  Billy put a pink coconut circle in his mouth and closed his eyes. The liquorice would never be a substitute for Capstan, nothing would. He’d been smoking full-strength cigarettes since he was thirteen. As the health risks became better known, fewer and fewer shops sold them. Some people thought that was progress. Billy Cunningham wasn’t one of them.

  Usually he regarded the past as a dead thing not worth revisiting. Tonight, it helped to remember: they’d drawn up outside the sub-post office in Barmulloch shortly after nine o’clock on a sunny Thursday morning – too warm for the great
coat with pockets deep enough to hide his weapon – as the woman inside opened the door. The queue of two dozen stretched down the street. Nobody in it batted an eye at the three men in balaclavas – their attention was on the sawn-off shotguns they held in their hands. From start to finish the whole thing had taken minutes without a shot being fired. The car raced towards Royston Road to be swallowed by the urban sprawl, music blasting from the radio. KC & The Sunshine Band: Give it up. He’d ripped his mask away and laughed with his accomplices.

  Good men. Senior Service and Player’s Navy Cut men. Both dead from cancer.

  The police hadn’t taken long to come looking. They found him mowing the grass at the front of the house, stripped to the waist drinking a can of Tennant’s lager; enjoying the sunshine while his pale body slowly turned a blotchy red. His alibi – well considered in advance – was rock solid. Or at least it had been until his daughter Hannah’s boyfriend had blown it wide open. Billy disliked Tommy Boyle from the moment he’d first set eyes on his weasel face.

  Boyle testified he’d overheard him and two other men planning the robbery in the kitchen. More damning was the assertion under oath he’d seen his girlfriend’s old man getting into a car with the same men at eight o’clock on the morning of the raid. Boyle was older than Hannah by six years. He’d claimed he was trying unsuccessfully to have sex with the underage Hannah on the couch when he heard a car stop outside and got up to make sure her father hadn’t arrived back unexpectedly. Billy Cunningham got out. Asked to estimate the time, Boyle screwed up his face, pretending to search his memory, and answered between a quarter to ten and ten.

  The first was a fantasy – it never happened. The second part was true.

  Tommy Boyle’s motive came out at the trial when the prosecution were forced to admit the deal they’d struck with the scum squiring his daughter – the romance had been a way to get close to the man the police suspected of being behind more than a dozen similar robberies.

  Judas wasn’t in the public gallery when the jury brought in the verdict. Hannah and her mother were. When the foreman answered the judge, she’d cried. Billy almost cried himself.

  Twelve years. Twelve fucking years.

  Added to the time he’d already done, it meant half his life would be spent in prison. And the penny dropped: he’d had enough. Hannah travelled on the bus to Shotts every week even after her mother buggered off. They’d spoken about the future in whispers – what they would do and where they would go once his time was up. That changed when word came to him on the grapevine she’d married the bastard who’d set him up.

  Tommy Boyle: anybody, anybody but that guy. He’d had her name taken off the visitors list. Eventually, she’d stopped coming.

  At night in his cell, Billy turned his face to the wall: his daughter was dead to him.

  Now, to rub salt in the wound, the bastard’s son was living with him.

  Eighteen months before Billy was released, Tommy Boyle quit Glasgow, leaving his wife with a baby in her belly and hadn’t been seen or heard of since.

  Eventually – years later – Hannah came to see Billy asking for money. It was a winter’s day, the ground was hard and it was snowing. Reluctantly, he’d let her in, although that was as far as he was prepared to bend. She’d left empty-handed – the last time they’d ever met.

  Billy let a minute pass before opening his eyes; they were wet. On the table, the roasted cheese had gone cold and rubbery. It didn’t matter; he wasn’t hungry. If he was, there was another box of Allsorts in the bottom drawer beside the bed. The mystery of the almost empty one wasn’t a mystery at all. The Boy had eaten them and lied about it.

  Like father like son.

  The cheese went in the rubbish bin under the sink. Billy got a tumbler. There was enough in the whisky bottle to see him all right, at least until he got to the supermarket. The alcohol was raw in his throat – something else the doctor had forbidden. At his age, what exactly was the fucking point of giving anything up.

  He pushed the table to the far side of the kitchen and bent the linoleum towards him. The floorboard lifted easily. His hand disappeared into the hole. Over the years a lot of things had been hidden here. His fingers trailed the darkness until they touched the canvas bag he was searching for. It was there. The Boy thought he was smart, smarter than an old man.

  Billy pulled a thread from his cardigan and laid it over the bag.

  Smarter than this old man? He didn’t think so.

  26

  Malkie Boyle had come to a decision. He fingered the money in his pocket, thinking, for the umpteenth time about what he was going to do: three thousand pounds. Still eighteen thou left.

  Nobody needed to remind him he was chancing it. Showing himself anywhere in the city was a risk, there especially, but it was a risk he needed to take. Besides, he was sick of skulking through Glasgow. Inside the pub door he scanned the bar for a face and was in luck. The guy he was after was in a booth, huddled over the Evening Times, the oil-stained fingers of one hand wrapped round a pint. If you wanted a car in this town, Vinnie was the man to get it for you.

  Vincent O’Rourke wasn’t like Malkie’s other acquaintances: for starters he read books and not just bestseller trash: histories, biographies, even the occasional political memoir. In the circles he moved in, that set him apart. So did something else. Vinnie had never been in prison. As a time-served car mechanic working in his father’s garage in Carntyne, he’d carved out a nice little sideline doing up bangers bought on the cheap at Central Car Auctions and selling them on. His evenings were spent browsing the current stock on the thirteen-acre site in Easterhouse.

  He looked up from his paper when Malkie slid in beside him. ‘For fuck’s sake, what’re you doing here? Heard you were in the Smoke.’

  ‘Then you heard wrong.’

  ‘Coming to this place isn’t wise.’

  Malkie didn’t do criticism, however well intended. ‘Wise or not, I’m here.’

  ‘They’ll still be after you for Kirsty and the old boy.’

  O’Rourke should stick to what he knew best. Malkie put a hand on his shoulder, friendly and intimidating at the same time. ‘Why don’t you let me worry about that, eh? Got a job for you.’

  O’Rourke felt his mouth go dry. Boyle was bad news. He forced himself to sound relaxed. ‘Oh yeah? What kind of job?’

  ‘I need a car. Want you to get me it. Something decent, not the crap you palm off to punters who don’t know better.’

  Vinnie let the slight go. Boyle was capable of pulling out a Stanley knife and slicing your face off: a crazy bastard on a good day. What he’d done to Kirsty McBride and the cripple had been the talk of the city. Being in a wheelchair hadn’t helped the old man and, once Malkie discovered where the Social were keeping the girl, nothing would’ve saved her. Vinnie folded the newspaper and put it under his arm. ‘How much do you want to spend?’ He scratched his ear. ‘Won’t get anything worth having under two grand. Three’s better.’

  ‘Three it is. How soon?’

  ‘Depends on what comes up. Might spy something nice this week, then again I might not. Usually takes another week to get it purring. Wouldn’t feel I’d done a job if I knocked it out quicker than that.’

  ‘Too long. You’ve got four days.’

  Malkie dropped the money on the table between them. O’Rourke stared down at the bundles of notes and didn’t pick them up. If he was going to concoct a reason for not getting involved, it had to be now, otherwise it would be too late. His brain couldn’t come up with anything and he resigned himself to doing business with this guy.

  ‘Can’t promise. I’ll do my best.’

  ‘Let’s hope your best’s good enough, eh?’ Malkie lifted O’Rourke’s pint, drained it and sighed with satisfaction. ‘Oh, and before I forget, the car will be yours. My name won’t be on the papers.’

  ‘But if anything happens…’

  Malkie grinned. ‘That’s right. One of us will be in the shit.’ He stood. ‘I�
��ll meet you outside here at nine o’clock four nights from now. Saturday. Make sure you’ve got something good to tell me. Always been bad with bad news, even as a kid. If you need more cash, go fuck yourself. That’s it. Take the road tax and whatever else out of your end. And get me a new mobile while you’re at it.’

  When Malkie had gone, Vinnie’s hands were shaking. Over the years he’d supplied wheels to half the bad guys in Glasgow. This was different. Malkie Boyle was different: a genuine mad-arse.

  Sale days at the auction were Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Tonight was Tuesday. Vincent O’Rourke lifted his mobile and called his father to let him know he wouldn’t be at work the next day.

  They sat in the car with the heater gently blowing warm air, doing their best not to discuss what they’d heard from inside the cottage. Whoever was in there had been terrified. Leaving them – even for a minute – took every ounce of resolve Mackenzie had. Calling the police would’ve been justified. So why hadn’t she? Caitlin couldn’t hold it together any longer and started to get out.

  ‘There’s still time to break in.’

  Mackenzie grabbed her arm and pulled her back – Caitlin hadn’t been where she’d been, didn’t know what she knew. ‘It doesn’t matter whether there is or whether there isn’t time. That’s not important. Whatever’s going on in that place ends tonight. Understand what I’m saying. It ends tonight. We need to be as clear as we can be about what we’re up against. You think all we have to do is smash a window and whisk her away.’ She sighed and broke eye contact. ‘If only it were that simple.’

  ‘Isn’t it?’

  ‘It took a year before I felt safe enough to go anywhere by myself, two for the nightmares to stop. Ask yourself, why didn’t she come to the window? The police found them playing Scrabble. Doesn’t that strike you as odd? Judith could’ve blurted out that she was being held against her will. She didn’t. Why not?’ Mackenzie answered her own question. ‘Because she couldn’t.’ Mackenzie chose her words. ‘According to the police her face was unmarked. I’d bet everything I have her body wasn’t.’