Final Cut (16 page)

Claire dried her hands and drew the curtains.

25

He took refuge in his workshop. He was too agitated for the garden, or the greenhouse. Plants reacted to his anger. It was better to be among inanimate objects.

He closed the workshop door behind him and switched on the light. In here the splintered gleam of broken glass reflected his mood.

He’d been working on a new stained-glass window for the local church. An American benefactor, one of the great diaspora, had offered the money to replace the current painted window, whose picture was fading. It was not the only project on the long two-and-a-half-by-three-metre work table. There was another, but it was his alone. For the paid job he’d merely to follow the design pattern dictated by the benefactor.

He bypassed the American job and went immediately to his newest project – the memorial to the child. He had long since learned how to disguise an image among abstract swirls and contours of coloured glass. It would take an eye as keen as his to discern the flow of white-gold hair, the rosy flush of a child’s cheek.

Above the table, wall racks held his store of twenty-by-twenty-centimetre art glass. In a variety of colours and textures, it had been created by the careful addition of metals and salts; cobalt oxide for blue, green created by chromium oxide, red made ruby by the addition of twenty-two-carat gold, cadmium yellow, sulphurous amber, white arsenic and finally the purple stain of manganese. He loved to think about the essence of the glass before he chose his colour and texture. Even within each sheet the refraction of the glass differed, because of the density of colour.

He gazed lovingly at the work in progress. He had chosen opalescent glass for the girl’s hair. The result, he decided, resembled oil flowing on water. It seemed appropriate somehow.

He’d known as soon as he saw the child that he had chosen well. Her hair was just as he’d imagined when he found the hairbrush in her bedroom.

It had been easy to mingle with the funeral party that followed the old woman’s ceremony. A disparate group of people from various eras of the deceased’s life, they barely knew one another.

He’d hung around the entrance as the group filed in for the service, easily identifying the child, watching her get into a car with a man and a woman. The woman he’d presumed to be her mother, the tall man perhaps the mother’s current partner. The male presence had concerned him. Alone, the girl and her mother were vulnerable, but with a man to protect them . . .

He’d followed the car, expecting them to attend a funeral lunch before going home, but they’d surprised him by driving to the wood.

Why go back there?

He’d learned the truth near the pool. It had been the child who’d desecrated the grave, and she was looking for another.

The knowledge had shocked him more than the memory of that night when the car had hurtled towards him, shattering his peace of mind for ever. It was no longer only the woman he had to fear. The greatest threat now came from her daughter.

Had the man not been with them, he would have finished it there, beside the deep, dark pool.

He selected a piece of ruby-red glass and used the diamond wheel to score it, releasing the rigid surface tension and showering his hands and the surrounding surface with a myriad of invisible fragments.

He fetched some copper foil, stripped off the adhesive backing and wrapped it round the edge of the three small pieces he’d cut. The red droplets would be tricky to solder into place, but he was excited by the prospect.

He brushed the workbench, feeling the sting where minute shards had punctured the skin. He went to the sink and turned on the tap, placing his hands in the flow and watching as the stream of water turned pink with his blood.

The work had calmed him. He could concentrate now on what had to be done. Now that he knew where they lived, it would only be a matter of time before he cleared up the mess.

26

McNab was drunk. Not mean drunk, nor swaying or slurring drunk. The alcohol he’d consumed had made him as brittle as glass, his despair almost tangible.

He had finally returned her call shortly before midnight. Rhona was sitting by the fire in semi-darkness, watching the flickering screen of the television with no desire to go to bed and lie awake.

She had suggested he come round, preferring to know where he was tonight. In his state of mind she feared what might happen, and at least here he could sober up before he had to face his colleagues tomorrow.

When she opened the door, her first instinct was to embrace him. Only then did Rhona acknowledge how truly worried she had been.

‘Dr MacLeod. You haven’t done that for a long time.’

She drew back to find him observing her with just a hint of the old cynicism.

‘You’re drunk.’

‘No, but I plan to be very soon.’

She led him into the sitting room. He sat down on the sofa and pulled out a half-bottle. When Rhona attempted to suggest he’d had enough, McNab held up his hand to silence her.

‘Michael,’ she said gently.

He looked surprised, then smiled a slow smile. ‘I like it when you call me that.’

Rhona held her tongue.

He took a deep swallow. ‘They’ve suspended him. I got a fucking warning and they suspended my boss. And there’s fuck all I can do about it.’

‘You can give evidence in court. They’ll call you as a witness. You can tell them what really happened.’

McNab wasn’t listening. ‘I phoned
Ms
Morris. Stupid bitch told me to leave it to the disciplinary inquiry.’

‘She was only doing her job.’

‘Only
doing
her job! If Henderson got half a chance he would do Ms Morris like he
did
the others. And she’s defending the bastard.’

‘Not defending, representing.’

‘Would you defend him, after the way he assaulted you?’ McNab’s look seemed to go right through Rhona. He was no fool. He knew what had happened to her didn’t come without repercussions.

‘I’m fine,’ she lied.

He gave her a twisted smile, his expression one of disbelief. ‘Like hell you are.’

He rose and faced her square-on. His green eyes were glittering in anger, his skin pale behind the auburn stubble. He smelt of adrenalin and whisky and male sweat. He searched her face.

‘Let me guess. You can still smell the bastard. I bet you shower all the time just to get rid of his stink.’

Rhona felt the blood drain from her face.

McNab wasn’t finished. ‘You haven’t been with a man since he got to you, right? That’s why you and the Irishman are over?’

Rhona’s anger rose to meet his. How dare he come here and tell her what she felt? How dare he remind her how dirty and violated and frightened she still was?

‘That’s none of your business.’ If her hands hadn’t been so tightly clenched she would have hit him.

Suddenly he registered her distress, and lifted his hand as though to touch her face. When she flinched, his own face creased in pain. ‘I’m sorry. I should never have left you that day. I should have known.’

‘So what happened was
your
fault?’ she railed. ‘Lisa was
your
fault. Bill was
your
fault. What about Magnus? Was what happened to Magnus
your
fault too?’

‘Fuck, no! That was all his own fault!’

There was a moment’s silence as they both digested his reply. He placed his hand on her arm, tentative and reassuring. Rhona didn’t step away this time.

‘I’m sorry for what happened between us. I wanted to control you. It was wrong.’

She said nothing.

‘I hope you’ll forgive me.’

‘I already have.’

McNab lightly touched the top of her head with his lips and made to move away. She stopped him.

‘You were right. I do smell him.’

He pulled her against him, wrapping his arms tightly about her. It was something Sean had never done. He had never asked her what had happened. He had never listened to her fear. His first thought had been revenge. Sean had barely been able to bring himself to look at her, so desperate was he to find someone to blame. McNab was a cynical bastard, but he understood that night and what it had truly meant to her.

They stood like that for several minutes. Rhona knew he would let her go as soon as she attempted to draw away, but she didn’t want to. She wanted to be held like this. She wanted to feel safe, if only for a few moments.

It was she who raised her face and kissed him. It felt natural. A way of laying ghosts to rest. A way to survive the night. McNab looked perturbed.

‘You’re sure about this?’

‘We both need company tonight.’ It was the understatement of the century.

He examined her closely. For a moment she thought he would turn her down.

Later, she would remember his touch as both familiar and new. In the past their coupling had been a competitive game, where both strove to win. Tonight was different. McNab knew what she feared most, and he did his best to replace those memories with something better.

When Rhona woke early next morning, he was gone. She reached out and touched the warm place where he’d lain and knew it hadn’t been a dream.

27

Chrissy separated the three pieces of paper and laid them out on the table.

‘You’re sure they’re significant?’

‘Come on,’ said McNab. ‘A Glasgow gang boss calls me to his gambling club and hands me a licence in full view of his Russian bodyguard and it’s not significant? Call me dumb. Call me George Double-Ya Bush. But I think he was trying to tell me something.’

‘This guy’s a poker player?’

‘The best. Maybe even better than his father,
the
Poker Billy.’

Chrissy regarded McNab blankly.

‘Paddy Brogan is good,’ he said. ‘Maybe even better than his father.’

‘Mmmm.’ She studied the papers again. ‘I can’t see anything unusual.’

‘There’s got to be something,’ he insisted.

‘OK. There are a few italicised and emboldened words, but they look OK in context. I thought there might be a poker pattern in there somewhere, but I can’t see any. Does Paddy Brogan cheat?’

McNab gave her a look that spoke volumes. ‘All poker players cheat. You know that.’

Chrissy stared at him thoughtfully for a moment. He could almost hear the wheels turning.

‘I’ve got an idea,’ she said.

‘What?’

She produced a small forensic torch and began running the powerful beam along the back of the first sheet of paper.

Her face lit up. ‘Bingo.’ She motioned McNab across.

At first he saw nothing, then he gradually became aware that a selection of words appeared marginally brighter than the others.

‘The paper’s been pierced in places with a pin, similar to the marked cards we found in the skip,’ said Chrissy. ‘The puncture holes are invisible to the naked eye. Mr Brogan must have known you were a cheat.’

McNab was impressed. ‘Well done.’

She wrote down the marked words in the order they appeared.

‘They don’t make any sense,’ he said, disappointed.

‘Maybe there’s a pattern in the letters?’ she suggested. ‘Like a flush or four of a kind?’

McNab regarded her with male-poker-player superiority.

‘Don’t look at me like that. You brought this stuff to me, remember?’ Chrissy pondered for a moment. ‘Maybe we need to extract letters from the words to fit one of the patterns?’ She studied the word list again. ‘Let’s start simple and just take the first letter of each of the punctured words.’

She presented McNab with the result.

He misread it at first. ‘Salon Killer? Somebody’s murdering hairdressers?’

‘How come you’re so cheery?’ She gave him a searching look, which he avoided. She corrected him. ‘It says
solonkiller
.’

‘Solonkiller?’ McNab was mystified. He tried pronouncing the word in a variety of ways, then whistled through his teeth as it dawned on him. ‘Brogan’s minder was called Solonik.’

‘Was he, now?’

If the Russians were muscling in on Glasgow gambling, the Poker Club would be high on their list. McNab had gained the distinct impression that Brogan didn’t like having the Russian around. Maybe he had good reason.

‘The guy in the skip ate a Russian meal before he died,’ Chrissy reminded him. ‘
And
he had a deck of cards marked like this in his pocket.’

‘You think Brogan’s trying to set up Solonik for the skip murder?’ McNab remembered the Russian’s huge hands, easily powerful enough to snap a man’s neck.

‘Maybe Brogan just wants him off his back?’

‘Anything in the skip that might link Solonik to the fire?’

‘Apart from skull fragments and bits of brain, you mean?’

McNab grimaced. ‘God, I couldn’t do your job.’

‘No, you couldn’t,’ agreed Chrissy.

He decided they had gone as far as they could on this subject. ‘Your boss about?’ He used what he hoped was a neutral tone. If he could fool Chrissy, he could fool anyone.

‘She’s in the back lab working on the brushwood from the deposition site.’

‘I wondered how she’d got on with the kid?’ When lying you should use as much of the truth as possible, an established rule for policeman and criminal alike. It seemed to work.

‘She wants to talk to you about that. Seems like the girl identified a possible second location.’

McNab frowned. Rhona hadn’t mentioned that last night. True, there had been little opportunity, between arguing and . . . other things.

Chrissy was grinning at him and for a brief moment he thought Rhona might have told her what had happened, then it dawned that Chrissy just liked to be seen to know more than him.

‘
And
,’ she continued in a dramatic tone, ‘Magnus thought they were being followed when they were in the woods.’