Flesh Wounds (15 page)

Stevie was at most only two years older than Glen, and didn’t even look that, but he had already served a long apprenticeship of thieving and scamming. He was smart and ambitious, with a sharp eye for the details of how shops and businesses operated their security.

At the age of thirteen, when other kids were sticking cassettes down their jooks in WH Smith or grabbing a handful of pick-and-mix and running out of Woollies, he had perfected a distraction technique that brought in hundreds of pounds at a time from big city-centre stores. It was a three-man gig; or more accurately three-teen. Two of them would start arguing on the shop floor, eventually breaking into a fight. They’d really go at it too, making as much noise as possible, screaming and swearing, bashing into clothes racks and knocking things over. This would unfailingly cause the shop staff to abandon their tills and charge over to intervene, at which point Stevie would slip quietly behind the counter and lift every note they had. Some of the big-name stores had started fitting locks to the tills, so where possible he’d grab a set of keys too. It turned out they were often standardised across the whole chain, so a key lifted from Argyle Street in Glasgow would open a till on Princes Street in Edinburgh, making a day-return on the train well worth the dodged fare.

When Glen first met him, it was to hand over a stack of National Savings books that Tony’s bagman, Walter, had mysteriously been accumulating.

Walter was older than Tony – by ten years, Glen would learn – but seemed older still in his manner and appearance. He always tuned the car radio to Radio 2 and knew the words to all these slow songs from before Glen’s parents’ time. He’d sing along quietly to himself, a habit that for a long time concealed the fact that he and Glen never had a conversation. Everything about him seemed to belong in the past, even his name. Glen had never known anybody called Walter. It seemed a remnant from another generation, long since abandoned by modern fashion, like Mildred or Horace. The only Walter Glen could think of was Walter the Softy from ‘Dennis the Menace’, which may have contributed to the name being shunned. Glen didn’t imagine that anybody ever thought of this Walter as a softy. He was short, skinny and pale, but so was a cut-throat razor when it was folded up. He spoke quietly rather than softly, a gravelly rattle together with his staccato brevity giving a rasping quality to a voice he seldom raised. He smoked constantly and never seemed to eat.

Amid their more substantial collection rounds, they kept stopping off at pubs and houses where people would hand over these wee blue books and Walter would pay them twenty quid. Glen had already learned not to ask Walter any questions not immediately pertinent to their next port of call, because it was as futile as it was frowned upon, so it was only when he was introduced to Stevie that he found out what the deal was.

It was the first time Glen ever had the feeling that somebody was regarding him with more than mere caution. He wouldn’t go so far as to describe it as excitement, but Glen got the distinct impression that his reputation had preceded him. There was a palpable sense that Stevie was pleased to be in his company, and keen to impress. Glen had learned fast that people didn’t often appreciate unsolicited questions about their activities, so he had no intention of enquiring after the purpose of the savings books, but Stevie enthusiastically volunteered a detailed breakdown of this latest scam he’d dreamed up, which they came to know as the Three-oh-two-five Tour.

‘You can just walk into a post office and open up a National Savings account with barely any ID,’ Stevie explained, a savings book pinched between his thumb and forefinger. ‘Ten quid down, then a week later they send you one of these. We get dozens of folk to apply, then we buy the books off them, like Walter’s been doing.’

‘But you’ve got books in their name now,’ Glen observed.

‘Aye, but they tell the post office their savings book never appeared and the NSB fire off a replacement. The original book is still live, though, and you can make a deposit at any post office in the country. Pop in, hand over your honk and the lassie behind the counter writes your new balance in the book, then slaps the post office stamp on the end to show it’s legit. Cheque deposits work the same way, except they write “ch” next to it. But here’s the thing…’

Stevie opened the book and held up the first right-hand page for Glen’s inspection.

‘There’s only enough space for five deposits or withdrawals per page, see? So what we do is fire in a bent cheque for three K.’

‘Why three K?’

‘That’s the max they’ll accept for a single drop. So, the next day, you go in somewhere different and deposit a fiver. Day after that, another post office, another fiver. Same again until day six, when the magic happens. You hand over your fiver, and the lassie behind the desk writes in your new balance and stamps it.’

Glen got it. ‘With no “ch” in the margin.’

‘Bang on, the big man. Doesnae matter if the stolen chequebook’s been reported and cancelled: your balance says three-oh-two-five, and now you’re allowed to withdraw fifty pound a day from any post office in the country, then drive to the next post office and lift fifty more. Get a wee team together and a stack of wee blue books, then you go for a drive. Start off Glasgow, through Falkirk, Stirling, Embra, then doon the A1 to Newcastle, work your way across to Carlisle, back up the M74 through Motherwell, Hamilton, Rutherglen.’

As he sat in his cell, Glen allowed himself a sad, regretful smile, still able to see Stevie’s boyish grin as he laid it out.

‘There’s four of us, we’re lifting two hunner pound every stop. It adds up…’

It sure did. Several thousand a day, and Tony would be getting his slice without lifting a finger: his role in facilitating the collection of NSB books meaning that for all it was Stevie’s scam, it was still part of Tony’s business.

Money was always being kicked back to Tony from activities that on the surface he had absolutely nothing to do with. Glen and Walter even picked up payments that had accrued from recent armed robberies. Glen garnered that this was often in respect of crucial information that had come Tony’s way and that he had chosen to share with select individuals on the understanding that they wouldn’t forget who had caused opportunity to knock. Information, in fact, kicked back to him as much as money, but the conduits by which it did so were far more covert and multifarious. Arguably, over the years, Tony’s trade in information had been his most valuable sideline, though it wasn’t an argument many people would make out loud.

People gave Tony money for all kinds of motivations, disclosed or not, but the principal one was to guarantee their future wellbeing.

Protection. It was the foundation stone of organised crime in Glasgow. It came in a number of different guises, evolving over the years, but fundamentally it boiled down to the modus operandi of the playground bully:
geez that or I’ll batter your melt in
.

There was an old tale in Glasgow about the manner in which most practitioners first learned to play this game as kids, namely offering to ‘watch your motor, mister?’ to guys who had just parked their cars on the way to the football. The story went that a bloke once pointed out the Alsatian dog sitting in the back seat of his vehicle and told the two wee boys who had offered their services, ‘
He
watches my motor.’

To which one of the kids responded by saying to his mate, ‘Check that, Charlie. A dug that can put oot fires.’

For decades, Tony and his predecessors had been ‘ensuring’ that business premises and their owners didn’t come to any harm in a notoriously violent city. Occasionally Tony took it further, by ‘doing a Victor’ if he considered a business to be a tempting enough prospect.

‘I liked it so much, I bought the company.’

Glen didn’t know how much Victor Kiam paid for Remington, but he didn’t imagine a delegation of his representatives threatened to kneecap the previous owners unless they dropped the price to a nominal fee, nor that the vendors ended up working at what used to be their own business for the pittance Victor deigned to pay them.

Times were changing, though, and what was simple in the sixties wasn’t so straightforward in the age of the economic miracle. It was way before anybody had uttered the word ‘globalisation’, but even back in the mid-eighties, Tony McGill could have told you that the independent business was becoming an endangered species on Britain’s high streets. Everything from garages to jewellers to pubs and restaurants was becoming part of a chain. You couldn’t go up to Ronald McDonald, hold a knife to his red-pubed bollocks and tell him to pay you a cut if he didn’t want his gaff going up in smoke. However, Tony hadn’t survived as long as he had without knowing when to move on to pastures new, and in one particularly astute development, this was more than a mere figure of speech.

‘You’re gaunny need your wellies for this one,’ was Walter’s overture.

‘How? What’s the job?’

‘Dropping in on Wurzel Gummidge’s boss. With the state of the economy now, it’s getting that farmers are the only buggers left in Scotland with any money. Tony reckons it’s aboot time they shared oot some of those EEC subsidies they get for not growing anything.’

To say they were plundering virgin territory didn’t begin to cover it. They were like the first ship-borne cats to rampage through New Zealand, effortlessly preying on flightless birds that didn’t even recognise a need to run, far less a predator.

Catherine stood up as Graham Sunderland walked in through the open door of her office. She knew he was coming, even before she saw his approach through the glass partition, because he’d phoned a couple of minutes ago to make sure she was at her desk before ‘popping over’. This made her curious, and a little uneasy. The Detective Chief Superintendent didn’t ‘pop’ anywhere. For a man of his status he was far from a self-important individual, but it had been a long time since he’d needed to tread lightly around these parts.

She guessed it was about the Fullerton case, but that was the source of her unease, as she had made sure he was thoroughly up to speed on how it was progressing.

He glanced quizzically down at her desk, his eye drawn immediately to the document that was open in front of her, due no doubt to the thick black bars defacing parts of it.

‘Looks pretty hardcore,’ he said. ‘What is it?’

‘It’s courtesy of the MoD, concerning a Royal Marines commando by the name of Tron Ingrams.’

Sunderland gazed back blankly.

‘Fallan,’ she clarified. ‘He had his name changed legally, got all his documents in order and then signed up to serve his country.’

‘A good way to disappear if you’re trying to reinvent yourself.’

‘I’m not sure how much reinvention there is when your job is still all about killing people.’

Sunderland looked a little shocked at her tone.

‘I know you’re a bit of a peacenik Catherine, but I think that’s a bit of a harsh generalisation regarding—’

‘I wasn’t generalising. He was a sniper. It’s one of the few details that hasn’t been redacted. Look at this: his actual service record looks like a Saudi newspaper, all these black bars.’

‘How long did he serve?’

‘Just shy of twelve years. Long enough for it to be widely assumed that he was dead, but apparently not long enough to let sleeping dogs lie.’

Sunderland grimaced a little, as though reeling from a regrettable truth. She knew that he had worked under Fallan’s father, back when Sunderland first joined CID, and deduced that whatever sympathy he felt was not at the fate of Fullerton.

‘I gather he’s been charged,’ he said.

‘Yes, sir. Dom Wilson at the PF’s office is handling the case.’

‘Too bad Wilson’s old man stepped back from the limelight. It would have been amusing to watch father and son cross swords as prosecution and defence.’

‘Well, technically…’ she reminded him.

‘I know,’ he acknowledged. ‘And did I hear right that Fallan still hasn’t asked for a lawyer?’

‘Strange but true.’

Sunderland took this in while looking away out of the window. Again that regret.

‘Were you aware of him?’ she asked. ‘When he was younger, I mean.’

He nodded gently.

‘Only through his father.’

‘Is there much that you know about him from back then? We’re still struggling to come up with a clear picture for the motive.’

‘I know we failed him,’ Sunderland said. ‘Nothing you’ve heard about Iain Fallan was exaggerated, and he was no gentler with his family than he was with anybody else. I was young and he was my boss. I tell myself I was powerless, that there was nothing I could do, but there
were
things I could have done…’

He looked for a moment like he might be about to elaborate, but no. Whatever he had come close to revealing was hastily covered up again like the black marks on the Ingrams file, as Sunderland’s face became all business once again.

‘I’ve got something for you,’ he said, producing a USB stick from his jacket pocket.

‘What’s this?’

‘You ran a subscriber check with Vodafone, regarding Fullerton’s mobile. Intelligence bureau passed it on to Abercorn by mistake.’

She took it from him, restraining an instinct to snatch. Abercorn’s name could do that.

‘By
mistake
…’ she began, but Sunderland held up a hand. Don’t go there.

And she wouldn’t. Not with Sunderland, at least.

Catherine took a last sip of the coffee she’d been drinking before Sunderland showed. It was tepid and bitter but his visit had left a worse taste, and now she was going to address it. She tossed the cup into her wastebasket and headed for Abercorn’s office.

His door was open and he was typing, his attention so fixed upon the keyboard and the screen that he remained oblivious to her standing in his doorway until she deliberately cleared her throat. She held up the flash drive but said nothing, leaving it entirely in his court so that she could analyse his response.

He stared at her hand and then at her, confusion on his face at being yanked from his immersion giving way to annoyance as he deduced the reason for the interruption.