Flesh Wounds (16 page)

‘What?’ He sounded genuinely irritated, but it was a good gambit if he didn’t want to give anything away.

‘
No chatter
,’ she quoted. ‘
No rumblings. Our pants are round our ankles
. So what are you doing intercepting my subscriber check on Fullerton’s mobile?’

‘I didn’t
intercept
it. It got sent to me by mistake.’

‘Just at random? What, of all the folk it could have been accidentally sent to, by sheer chance it turned out to be the one person with the biggest interest in Stevie Fullerton’s business?’

‘No, of course not at random: that’s the point. Somebody at Intell must have seen Fullerton’s name and assumed the check was for LOCUST. I was going to bring it to you, but I’m up to my eyes here, so when Sunderland came in…’ He held out his palms and sighed with exasperation. ‘Look, Catherine, not everything I do is a fucking conspiracy, okay?’

Catherine belatedly saw the logic in this and was bracing herself for a sheepish moment of apology, but it looked like Abercorn was beating her to it. He seemed aware that he had lost the rag and appeared to be climbing down.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘Just a lot on my plate.’

‘It’s okay.’

‘No, look, I’ve got something for you here.’

He sounded more conciliatory than Catherine could ever remember, and began rummaging in the chaos of his desk.

‘I asked around about your symbol: you know, the thing on Fullerton’s head. A couple of older guys recognised it. Goes back to the late eighties, they said: perhaps significantly, the time when Fullerton and Fallan were partners in crime. It was, among Glasgow bampots, what might these days be called a meme.’

‘A meme?’

‘You know, an idea that replicates like a virus. It was associated with a brief spate of tit-for-tat gangland murders, and from there it kind of bled into the wider bam consciousness. Started off getting daubed on dead guys as a way of saying: “This is payback for the pal of ours that
you
killed and daubed this symbol on.” Before long it’s appearing as graffiti, daft wee neds putting it on folk’s walls as a way of saying: “You’re getting it.” They were copying it because they thought it carried some kind of heavy hard-man kudos.’

‘Tit-for-tat?’ she asked apprehensively. ‘So do they know where it started?’

‘Yes and no. And by that I mean they know whose was the first body it appeared on, but nobody has a clue what it signified, or whether it already had a precedent we don’t know about.’

‘Who was the first body?’

‘Low-level headcase named Paul Sweeney. He had links to Tony McGill.’

Abercorn handed her a brown paper wallet, inside which was a ten-by-eight crime-scene photo. She felt something inside her lurch in anticipation of what she might be about to see.

‘But more significantly,’ Abercorn went on, ‘the fourth and final one in the to-me, to-you cycle was Nico Fullerton, Stevie’s brother.’

Catherine opened the envelope and felt a modest flush of relief. The shot was taken from down low, probably a crouching position, looking up at the symbol spray-painted on a wall. She could make out the bare feet of Nico Fullerton’s corpse in the bottom right of the frame, but was spared any more gruesome details by the angle of the shot.

‘How did you dig this up?’ she asked. ‘Who were the officers you spoke to?’

‘I didn’t say they were officers,’ Abercorn replied, which was when she knew that was all she was getting.

They heard the sound of a car driving into the courtyard in front of the house, the engine amplified as it bounced off the stone walls of the dairy shed. It seemed insensitively noisy given the way it broke across the silence around the kitchen table. They had been sitting like that for so long, waiting for Dad to say something that would make sense of what had happened, or at least indicate which way was forward from here, but he said nothing, lost in thoughts that he did not wish to share. She looked to her mum for comfort, but Mum’s expression betrayed the gravest concern at what she read in her husband’s face.

The front doorbell rang: loud and long and brash. It was the spur that finally prompted her dad to speak, but only to order: ‘Ignore it. We’re not at home.’

It rang again following a pause hardly brief enough for anyone to have answered the door under ordinary circumstances.

‘What if it’s…’ Mum suggested, ‘I don’t know, the police, maybe?’

The insistence of a third ring cemented this idea in her mind, but it made no odds to Dad.

‘There’s no emergency here. Whoever it is can call back.’

There was not a fourth ring.

‘Shouldn’t we
call
the police though?’ Mum asked, once the growing silence from the front door had extended enough to suggest that whoever it was had given up. ‘I mean…’

‘Aye,’ Dad responded. ‘I will. I just need a wee while. I’m in no state to talk to anybody. None of us is.’

As another hush fell she listened out for an engine starting again, followed by the usual sharp cut-off as the vehicle cleared the dairy shed and its wall ceased to echo back the sound. It never came. Instead there was a sharp three-beat rap at the back door, which was then opened unbidden from outside with the brisk familiarity of a relative or family friend.

They all looked up to see a cadaverous little man stride into their kitchen. He was bird-like in his build, but there was a harshness to his face and an assured coldness about him that warned he could look after himself. He wore a funereal charcoal suit and a plain white shirt with no tie. The shirt looked crisply white, but maybe this was just against the greyness of his complexion.

Behind him stood a younger man dressed in a jeans and a black polo-neck. He was tall, rangy and impassive. Her eyes were drawn to his: analytical, penetrating, examining her for weaknesses.

The older man smiled confidently, like a favourite uncle expecting to be welcomed into the hearth, but as he opened his mouth to speak Dad beat him to it.

‘We’re not at home to visitors,’ he stated, standing up from his chair.

‘This won’t take long,’ the man said, placing his hands on the back of an unoccupied chair. He spoke like a skeleton, a rattling voice devoid of warmth.

‘I said…’

‘Apologies, ladies, but I need to ask you to leave us,’ the intruder went on, as though Dad hadn’t spoken. ‘There’s something your father has to discuss with me.’

‘We’re not going anywhere,’ she told him. ‘Who the hell do you think you are, walking into our house?’

He fixed her with a brief but bitter stare then turned to her dad, speaking in clipped tones intended barely to conceal anger.

‘I said I want to talk to you alone. Tell your wife and daughters to leave, and if you’ve the sense, warn the lippy one to keep a civil tongue in her heid.’

Dad looked at the intruder, then at his accomplice, who was leaning against the sink, his hand close to the knife block.

‘Girls, Jean, do as he says.’

‘Actually, tell you what,’ said Cadaver, glancing towards her. ‘Why doesn’t the lippy yin make herself useful? Fix us both a cuppa tea, hen. There’s a good girl.’

She looked to her father, who couldn’t meet her eye.

Mum said she would get the tea, but Cadaver insisted it be her.

She served it from the pot to the two of them, Cadaver giving her an exaggerated smile in response, a sneering skull. The rangy one took his without looking at her, like she wasn’t there any more. It was as though he had assessed the things he needed to concern himself with in his immediate environment and was satisfied that she wasn’t one of them.

Her gaze lingered upon his hands as he lifted the cup. There was an angry scarring across his knuckles, like they’d been in a fire or something.

Once the tea was served, Cadaver told her to leave. Mum ushered her through to the sitting room at the front of the house; Lisa was there already, tearful and trembling.

They could hear only the sound and tone of voices, but could make out no words. It was only Cadaver who was speaking: polo-neck said nothing; Dad little more.

‘Who are they?’ Lisa asked. ‘What do they want?’

‘I don’t know,’ Mum said, but there was a dread stillness about her that suggested otherwise.

Nobody mentioned Lysander. Nobody had to.

Outside the window, she could see the car: it was a nice one, a BMW. It looked new, gleaming and powerful alongside Dad’s Chrysler with its mismatched paint patches and rusted skirts.

After only a few minutes they heard the kitchen door open and footsteps on the tiles. Mum opened the sitting-room door anxiously, in time to see Cadaver stride down the hall. He didn’t even cast them a glance as polo-neck opened the front door and they let themselves out.

Behind them was Dad, a morass of conflicting emotions upon his face, none of them good. He was about to slam the door when Cadaver turned and placed a restraining hand on its outside edge.

‘Just so’s we’re clear,’ he said to Dad, casting a quick glance at the three women looking on. ‘You talk to the polis, and it’ll no’ be your daughters’
horses
that get cut up. You get me?’

And with that, he lifted his hand from the door and walked away, sauntering with demonstrable absence of haste towards the BMW, where polo-neck was starting the engine.

Dad stared at the intruder’s retreat through the open door for a few moments, then a shudder ran through him and he turned, stomping back towards the kitchen. He returned a few seconds later clutching his rifle, striding along the hall with a look that chilled her more than what she had discovered in the stables.

As one, she, Lisa and Mum converged to block him, all of them in that moment envisaging the same course of events that ended with their father in prison. Mum gripped the barrel of the weapon and forced it upwards towards the ceiling, while she and Lisa barged him against the wall, restraining him with hugs and pleas.

As the engine started up and the BMW pulled out she watched the fury and defiance in her father’s face subside into anguish and defeat. They could all feel his straining recede, and when they stepped away he sank to the floor and broke down, shaking in his tears.

It was difficult to imagine a starker contrast between the places Anthony Thompson could be despatched to in doing the same job, even working the same case. From a crumbling former petrol station awash with soap suds and vomit, host of the bullet-riddled corpse of a dead drug dealer, to the wood-panelled halls and green-domed majesty of the Mitchell Library, Glasgow’s cathedral of the written word.

He loved driving past this place at night, the stone walls reflecting its light so that it gave the impression that the building itself was refulgent, a beacon at the heart of the city. And he loved the Glaswegian quintessence of the fact that this beacon was cheek-by-jowl with pubs and curry houses, and thus never seemed an aloof ivory tower isolated from its environment. Working with other squads, it would have been easy to interpret his being the one sent to the library as a joke, a reference to his being a fast-tracked graduate. And by joke, of course, he meant a means of undermining him by once again emphasising the perception that his career path meant he had more experience among the books than on the beat.

Under Detective Superintendent McLeod, he didn’t have to worry about making such an inference. Not only had she never made any digs about the Accelerated Careers Development Programme, but she had little tolerance for the subtle denigrations and territorial pissing that often masqueraded as ‘banter’. Before working with her he had heard her described variously as ‘schoolmarmish’, ‘a snobby cow’ and ‘an uptight bitch’. These descriptions, it hardly needed to be said, had come exclusively from male officers of the sort most inclined to engage in the ‘banter’ she proscribed. The same male officers who joked that he was ‘just one of the girls’ now he was part of her team. This was in reference to the supposed gender balance under McLeod’s command. It was intended as an insult, but if he was just one of the girls then that suited him fine, because he was rubbish at being just one of the guys.

This didn’t mean he spent his evenings reading poetry before weeping openly over the TV news; more likely, playing
Team Fortress 2
or
Starfire IV
before settling down to a late-night slasher movie. Some people couldn’t equate his enthusiasms with his attitude, but really it was simple. He liked a lot of blokey things. He just didn’t like blokishness.

He could be confident that the boss hadn’t meant anything by despatching him to the Mitchell, but it was nonetheless still a possibility that he had been nominated for a fool’s errand. She had agreed that he wasn’t totally havering when he decided that a library ticket was an unusual – and therefore suspicious – item to have found in the possession of the late Stevie Fullerton, but it wasn’t exactly a severed head in the fridge. He couldn’t help but think nothing was expected to come of it. In essence, he had unearthed a lead commensurate with his own stature, by which he meant that if it had been that good an idea she wouldn’t have entrusted the follow-up to him.

That said, the other thing this assignment reflected was that they were still striking out with regard to establishing a motive. While it didn’t indicate that they had reached the desperate stage, they were definitely moving towards ‘anything is worth a punt’ territory.

Preliminary discussions with the Procurator Fiscal’s office indicated they were confident that they already had enough to convict Fallan, but McLeod wasn’t going to relax until she knew what the murder had been about. She was determined that there be nothing about this investigation that could trip them later, no overlooked element that might jeopardise what was otherwise shaping up to be a straightforward prosecution. They had Fallan nailed to the scene with a gun in his vehicle and a history of enmity with the victim. They had the who, the where and the how, but the absence of
why
yawned like a pit just waiting for them to tumble into.

It was a huge case in terms of the victim’s profile and the resultant media interest, so he knew there must be major pressure on McLeod, particularly as it looked like an open goal. The boss was determined she wasn’t going to be responsible for a van Vossen.