Flesh Wounds (9 page)

Jasmine chose her spot carefully, making her approach as the subject was about to pay at the ticket machine in the lobby just off the parking bays on the fourth floor. It was risky to pick a location so close to the point when he would no longer be on foot, but she knew there would be fewer distractions in this enclosed space: for a couple of minutes she would be the only game in town.

She watched him from the corner of her eye as she approached, so that she could pretend to suddenly notice him, but she needn’t have bothered concealing her gaze. His own was locked on to her tension-sprung tits.

‘Oh my God. Oh my God. It’s really you, isn’t it? You’re D-Blazer. I’m coming to see you tonight.’

‘Seery 4 really it me, chicka.’

Jasmine could hear that number. She had also earned a ‘chicka’, D-Blazer’s second-person coinage for female specimens of which he approved.

‘Oh my God. How was the show last night? I bet it was
blazin’
hot. I tried to get tickets for both nights but the first one sold out
sooo
fast. God, listen to me wittering, I just can’t believe I’ve actually
met
you.’

‘Believe it, chicka. Iss realla dan real.’

‘Blazin’ real.’

‘Madass real.’

She giggled and, she would have to admit, jiggled. The effect was like a hypnotist’s pendulum. Christ, were men really like this?

She simpered and talked up his unlistenably dull ‘music’ in a bubbly and effusive way, sounding star-struck but flirty. If somebody had filmed it, she would not have recognised herself. It was sometimes disturbing to consider the ease with which she could inhabit a completely alien persona and yet remain outside it, observing the performance, with particular regard to the audience’s response.

‘I can’t believe I’m asking this, but I’d totally leather myself later if I didn’t while I’ve got the chance. It’s … we’re having this charity auction at college. I just had this pure mental idea. Can I have a couple of your hairs? I could auction an autograph but that would be so old, pure geriatric. Something that actually used to be
part
of D-Blazer would be totally for real.’

‘Pure mental?’ he asked. ‘I love that. Is that proper Scottish?’

She could not and did not believe that he had never heard the phrase ‘pure mental’ before, and inferred from his pretence that she was doing well and he was looking for ways to please her.

‘Totally. So can I really do it?’

‘Do it, yeah. Do it pure mental.’

Jasmine whipped a pair of tweezers out of her bag and yanked a small cluster of hairs from his head before he could change his mind.

‘Oh man, these are going to be worth so much,’ she told him.

‘I’m rockin’ like the Midas boy, chicka. Even my hair turn to gold, you
know
it.’

‘Mad-ass real. Oh, but hang on. Nobody’s going to believe that this was 4 real yours. Tragedy. Tell you what, can you scribble something to verify it?’

‘Yeah. D-Blazer hair come wif like a fishal certificate of offenticity.’

Jasmine produced a sheet of wrapping paper and tore off a scrap, then she attached the hairs to it using a piece of Sellotape. She already had a roll she’d picked up at Galt Linklater that morning, but she had bought another one in John Lewis, along with the wrapping paper, so it looked plausible for her to just happen to have this on her.

D-Blazer obligingly scribbled on the blank side of the wrapping paper: ‘This is to certify that this is a sample of genuine D-Blazer barnet, seary 4 really.’ He added a signature below.

‘That’s
undeniably
real,’ she said approvingly.

‘Realla dan,’ he agreed.

‘Thanks so much. I’ll let you get on now. I must be costing you more parking time.’

‘No, chill a mo, chicka. Tell me some totally Scottish stuff I can use tonight. What make the crowd mental here?’

Jasmine gave it some thought.

‘Tell them they’re bowfin’,’ she replied.

‘Bowfin’?’

‘Yeah. It means they’re really cooking. They’ll love it. Tell them they’re absolutely bowfin’.’

Once D-Blazer was safely out of sight Martin followed Jasmine to her van and filmed her removing the hairs from the ‘authentication certificate’ before placing them in a clear plastic tube.

‘One DNA sample, verified by the subject with his signature,’ she said, dropping the tube and the signed scrap of wrapping paper into a padded envelope.

That was all it took: some live cells from the hair follicles would be enough to establish whether Darrien Hopscombe-Blanchard had ‘never went near’ Nikki Ainsworth, or whether he had ‘
hardly
never went near her’.

If the test was positive, little Danielle would still most likely grow up without her father, but at least she would be afforded some certainty as to who he was.

Jasmine had enjoyed no such privilege. Her mum, her relatives and her mum’s friends had maintained a conspiracy of silence throughout her upbringing, leaving her only with indistinct impressions, like blurred shadows or the ragged outline where a figure had been crudely cut from a photograph.

Despite her efforts over the years, she had established very little for certain. She knew that he was dead, and that this fact was not mourned. She knew that he was a brutal individual and a remorselessly violent criminal. For a while she thought he might be a man called Glen Fallan, for he met all of those criteria, including the widespread belief that he was long deceased.

Fallan had put her straight with the bluntest and most painful of confessions: he was not her father, but rather the man who had killed him.

Despite her pleading and despite his avowed debt to her, Fallan would only tell her two more things: the first was that her father’s first name was James; and the second was that he was more familiarly referred to as Jazz.

Dougie Abercorn was hovering outside Catherine’s office like an anxious relative waiting to speak to the surgeon. His demeanour sported little of his accustomed calm or the unctuous self-assurance that frequently strayed the wrong side of oily.

She had been planning to give him a call at some point, preferably before interviewing the suspect, so this didn’t just save her a job. It told her as much as she had expected to glean from what she had anticipated would be a typically guarded conversation. The main thing she had sought to establish was readable simply by him being here with questions for her, and by the look on his face.

He hadn’t seen any straws in the wind. This was not in the script.

Abercorn was in charge of LOCUST, a unit set up specifically to investigate the activities of criminals such as Stevie Fullerton. The name derived from Organised Crime Unit Special Task Force, losing an acronym-inconvenient F and gaining an L to help it trip off the tongue. Unfortunately it tended to trip off the tongue amid outpourings of scorn and bile reflecting the speaker’s distaste for its perceived ineffectualness and the underhand way it conducted its business. As well as ascribing a symbolic significance to the absence of Force, the abbreviation was widely referred to as standing for Letting Off Criminals Under Secret Trades. The term was supposed to conjure an unpleasant image that would reflect its implied target, but as an entity that gobbled up resources and seemed to contribute nothing but grief, it had proven an inadvertently apposite self-description.

It had often been said that LOCUST had a name longer than its list of convictions. Since certain events two summers ago this was no longer quite so true, but the fact that it had convicted almost as many cops as it had gangsters meant that Abercorn’s team hadn’t won themselves any more friends on the force.

Catherine negotiated her own uneasy and complex working relationship with him, rendered all the more delicate initially in having to overcome the awkward fact that she had been overlooked for Abercorn’s job. To say it had stung was a colossal understatement, but while the injury to her professional pride remained, in the years that followed she had increasingly come to think that she had dodged a bullet.

‘What’s for you will no’ go by you,’ the redoubtable Moira Clark had counselled, when offering herself as a sounding board for Catherine’s rage. The one-time Detective Chief Superintendent had been Catherine’s boss and mentor in the early days of her CID career. She was still the person Catherine sought out when she needed reliable judgment, although getting a bit of face-time was harder now than before Moira hit her thirty, as she was on so many panels, committees and advisory bodies that it was laughable to talk about her having retired from the force.

Back then her words had sounded trite, real granny’s-knee philosophy on a par with telling the newly jilted that there were plenty more fish in the sea. In time, however, Catherine had come to understand the truth of it, particularly in accepting that the post really wasn’t for her. She had wanted it so badly, but the reason she wanted it was also the reason she didn’t get it, and the reason she wasn’t cut out for it.

‘You hate these people, Cath,’ Moira had told her. ‘The Stevie Fullertons of this world, the Frankie Callahans, the Paddy Steels. Don’t pretend otherwise, and don’t kid yourself that it doesn’t go unnoticed.’

She wouldn’t deny it, and nor was she under any illusions about how obvious it was. Quite the opposite, in fact: the brass knew she had a strong record for bringing in bodies, and they were aware of her driving passion for the task. Perhaps naively, she had thought that this same passion would make her the ideal person to head LOCUST, but after Abercorn was promoted over her head, she came to appreciate that it would have been a match made in hell.

Abercorn was a political creature. When people said that, it was often a euphemism for somebody who was good at playing the system, impressing the right people and hell-bent on climbing the greasy pole. In his case, applied to organised crime in Glasgow, Catherine understood that it referred to qualities she simply did not possess. He could play a long and patient game, one riven with unpalatable compromises and least-worst solutions. He cultivated relationships in the underworld, knew that you sometimes had to let them get on with their business so that you could
understand
their business, map their infrastructure so that you could recognise it when it manifested itself elsewhere, on a larger scale. Abercorn could play one operator off against another, or keep the law off a particular dealer’s back because his activities might lead to someone bigger further up the chain.

Catherine would have found it hard to let any of them get away with so much as a parking ticket. She didn’t want to map their infrastructure; she only wanted to take a hammer to it.

It was an open secret that Abercorn had done deals with Stevie Fullerton. She knew this for a fact because she had been party to one of them. It had been a pragmatic necessity, a means to an end and she had found it utterly galling while Abercorn just viewed it as the price of doing business, merely another day at the office.

Abercorn was fly. He understood that Stevie thought this meant he had ‘a polis in his pocket’, and that his vanity prevented him from auditing what was going the other way. To Abercorn he had been part source and part useful idiot, but useful he had undeniably been.

Which was why Abercorn was now hopping around like a wean needing the toilet. He liked to give the impression that nothing that happened in the Glasgow underworld ever came as a huge surprise to those inside his unit – usually before explaining how they hadn’t shared any of this intelligence in advance because it would have infringed upon aspects of another investigation. This, however, had blindsided LOCUST almost as much as it had blindsided Stevie.

‘I was giving a talk at Tulliallan,’ he said. ‘I just got back. I came as soon as I heard.’

‘You must be devastated. You were practically family.’

There was a time when Abercorn would have interpreted this as a dig rather than mere banter – mainly because it would have been intended as such – but their relationship had matured to one of mutual, if mutually cautious, respect.

‘I won’t be sending a wreath,’ he replied, ‘but I won’t pretend this doesn’t lob a very big rock into my millpond.’

Catherine opened the door to her office and beckoned him inside. It was looking unusually neat following a ruthless clear-out, and she felt oddly self-conscious about the impression this might give. She recalled her assumptions that Abercorn’s office would be an antiseptic exemplar of anal neatness, and how they were subsequently blown away by seeing a chaotic firetrap that unambiguously conveyed how hard the guy must be working.

‘Do you know what this might be about?’ She wasn’t expecting much of an answer. Abercorn was always so guarded with his information that sheer habit must occasionally prompt him to reply ‘I’m not in a position to disclose that’ when somebody asked him the time. Even if he knew, he wouldn’t say, but sometimes the way he didn’t say it could give her a few clues; not least as to whether there
was
something he was holding back. If he talked about not wishing to speculate, that meant he had a theory he wasn’t prepared to share. If he gave her something that sounded solid, then the real story lay somewhere else and he wanted to keep her attention away from it.

‘I don’t have a fucking scoob,’ he said, which was a new response and one she was inclined to take at face value, particularly in light of the fact that said face was looking unaccustomedly glaiket.

‘Seriously,’ he went on, ‘our pants are round our ankles here. We picked up no chatter, no rumblings. Something this big, ordinarily you’d detect seismic activity in advance: a rise in tension, a sense on the street that something was brewing. So I have absolutely no idea who might have done this.’

Catherine had to pause for a beat as she considered whether this last remark had been in reference to who might be ultimately behind the shooting, but then she realised Abercorn was speaking literally when he said he had come as soon as he heard. Clearly he hadn’t heard the half of it.

‘We know whodunit,’ she told him. ‘We’ve got Glen Fallan in custody down in the cells.’