How To Kill Friends And Implicate People (4 page)

NINE

SAM

16:20

Phil sent the address for the pickup to my phone. We ran both the courier service and a detective agency from the same office, and had phone apps for both.

Basically, we’re Uber for parcels and mysteries.

And I promise, I’ve only used that line about ten times before.

The address Phil had sent me for the pickup was listed as Virginia Street. I knew a lot of the businesses there from previous jobs. There was a publisher’s, a hotel, a place that made corsets and a law firm. A couple of gay bars, too, though they tended not to need a courier.

I followed the numbers in the street. The address I’d been given was the garage for one of the main high street stores. A large sign above the entrance said it was the ‘Collection Point’. The entrance itself was hidden in shadows. I couldn’t see anybody inside. Had to be a mistake, surely? There was a small hotel directly across from the garage. Maybe that’s where I was meant to go?

As I was scanning the address on my phone again, a woman stepped out of the shadow in the entryway to the garage.

‘Are you the courier?’

I looked her up and down. There wasn’t much to her. She was shorter than me, with a narrow frame and short black hair combed flat to her head. She was wearing knee-high boots and a black dress beneath a biker jacket. Her eyes were hidden beneath sunglasses, and I always get defensive when I’m talking to someone who won’t show me their eyes.

‘Who’s asking?’

‘It’s, ah, I ordered you. The delivery, I mean. I ordered the delivery.’

She had a strong Belfast accent, but she was nervous and spoke fast. I got the impression the jacket and glasses were a form of defence against the outside world.

‘I wasn’t expecting
 
.
 
.
 
.’ Her words trailed off.

‘A woman?’

‘A hot one.’ She smiled, and then looked away.

I looked away, too. Then down at the bike beneath me. I smiled and looked back up. We both let out a small nervous laugh at the same time. Just like that, she’d knocked me off my game.

She smiled again. ‘Sorry.’ Then she leaned into the shadow and came back with a large padded envelope. The end was folded over and wrapped in brown parcel tape. I could feel something heavy inside as she passed it to me. There was something off about this job. I knew it straight away. We have some strict rules. We don’t do drugs, we don’t knowingly pick up crime-related goods, and if a rider feels something is wrong, they don’t do it.

Those rules applied to everyone except me.

I’ve always felt that if I turned down a job, then it might send a different message. The other riders might decide I’m not committed, that I think I’m better than them. As a result, there have been a couple of times I’ve taken on a package that I wasn’t comfortable with.

‘Listen,’ I said. ‘We don’t deliver anything dodgy.’

‘No, please.’ She stepped close and put her hand on mine, resting on the bullhorn. She sounded worried at the thought of being turned down. ‘It’s important.’

I looked down at her hand and she pulled it away, self-consciously.

There was no address on the envelope, only a name. Robert Butler. I checked the delivery address on the message Phil had sent me. Blythswood Square. I could cycle there in minutes, but it also wouldn’t take long for this biker chick to get there herself on foot.

She must have read the hesitation in my face.

‘Please,’ she said again.

I looked back up at her from my phone, but only saw my own face reflected back in her black glasses. She turned to look down the street, and then up in the other direction. She was worried about being watched.

This stank. I decided we’d come up with the rules for a reason. I started to hand the package back, but she stepped back and pushed her hands into the pockets on the front of her jacket.

‘I need your help,’ she said. ‘I can’t deliver it myself, and remembered reading about you in the news. Please, just get it there for me, quickly.’ Her right hand came out of the pocket with a roll of twenties. She handed the whole roll to me. The message Phil had sent told me that she’d already paid by debit card, so this was just a nice wee extra. I took the money and looked at it, then made a show of rolling my head, letting her see that I was thinking about it. Then I sighed, put the money into the front pocket of my cut-offs, and slipped the package into my messenger bag.

‘Thank you,’ she said.

I pushed off on the bike and turned away. I headed down Wilson Street and took a left, heading in the direction of George Square. Glasgow is laid out in a grid, like New York, and it has a confusing one-way system to the traffic that I usually tried to obey. I took my time and followed the rules. There was no point busting a gut on this one. I’d been on the bike all day, and there was a meeting lined up with someone who wanted to hire me for an investigation job at 6 p.m. I just about had enough time to deliver the package and get home to clean up.

I cycled up St Vincent Street. I could feel the day in my thighs and calves. As the incline got steeper, I needed to get down closer to the bike and really push myself to keep going. I turned up Douglas Street, where the hill rose again, and promised my body I would give it a long hot bath later on.

Something with amazing bubbles.

Maybe even glitter.

I came to a slow stop at the address I’d been given for the delivery. It was empty.

A large ‘To Let’ sign was bolted to the wall beside the door. I climbed the steps to look in through the door, but it was dark inside. I stepped back and looked up at the windows on the floors above. They were all dark. None of them had curtains or blinds.

I searched the name ‘Robert Butler’ on my smartphone, but got nothing that seemed to fit. I tried again, varying searches with phrases like ‘Law’, ‘Glasgow’ and ‘Solicitors’ added in, but came up blank.

I got back on the bike and headed down the hill, back into the city centre. I love fixed-gear, but there were moments, like this one, when I would have loved the option of coasting. On this bike, the pedals turned even when I was going downhill, and I apologised to my legs with each rotation of the crank.

I cut down Buchanan Street, the pedestrianised area of the city centre. I drew dirty looks from the shoppers as I threaded between them and their heavy loads of plastic, paper and debt, but I didn’t really care. I turned onto Argyle Street and then into the bottom of Virginia Street.

Blue lights bounced off the walls of large old buildings. There were police vans in the street, and an ambulance parked at the kerb, at the entrance to the garage. Paramedics in green jumpsuits were bent over a fallen figure, working furiously.

The motionless figure’s legs were all that I could see. They were covered in knee-high boots.

What the hell had I got into this time?

TEN

SAM

16:45

The blue police lights flashed around the narrow street, bouncing off the brownstone walls of the old buildings. I watched as the paramedics worked away at the body. I saw blood covering their gloves as they moved. The police presence was building up around the scene, with more cars pulling into the road, and uniforms starting to put up tape to keep away the passers-by.

I took a few quiet steps back to allow another officer to start cordoning off my end of the street.

The package in my messenger bag started to feel heavy. What the hell was it? A younger version of me might have believed this was all a coincidence. Maybe she was mugged after handing the delivery off to me, and it all meant nothing. A younger version of me also believed in Santa. I’d seen too many of the nasty surprises this city had to offer, and
coincidence
wasn’t one of them.

More cars were arriving, pulling into the scene from Wilson Street, to the right. One of them was a midnight blue Audi, and I knew who was behind the wheel even before she climbed out.

Hanya Perera.

My best friend.

Hanya was English, but had been in Glasgow for five years, so she now spoke with a hybrid accent like those rich people in Edinburgh. Her parents were Spanish and Indian, and the most accurate way to describe her looks was
interesting.

Hanya had transferred up from London back before the regional Scottish police forces were all merged into one. She’d been part of a specialist armed unit, trained in using guns. After the merger, she’d been shuffled around between departments, finally settling in the MIT.

With a Starbucks in one hand and an E-cig in the other, she headed over to watch the paramedics work. She had a terse conversation with them, quiet enough that the words didn’t carry down the street toward me. She slipped the E-cig into her jacket and set the coffee down on the road before slipping on a pair of plastic gloves and picking something up off the ground. A purse. She looked through the contents, and then glanced around the street. Finally, her eyes rested on the crowd that had gathered at this end.

On me.

She cocked her head to one side and smiled, just a little. She waved for me to come closer, and nodded to the uniform holding the line. He lifted the tape up to let me through, and I stooped to meet it, wheeling my bike underneath to stand with Hanya on the other side. We moved back down the street a little, far enough away from the crowd.

She nodded at my bike. ‘Picking up or dropping off?’

Our friendship was built on many things. Gin. Talking about sex. Watching American TV shows. But, like all good friends, we also lied to each other constantly. ‘Just passing by,’ I said. ‘Caught the whiff.’

Hanya turned and watched the paramedics. She worked murders, mostly. Her being here meant that nobody was expecting a miracle, but she also wasn’t on the clock yet.

‘Looked at vLove yet?’ she said.

When I first started working the detective business, I’d been appalled that cops, paramedics and fire crews could stand and hold such banal conversations so close to tragedy. But that was then. This is now. Violence and blood had become just another thing I was getting used to, like paperwork and flat tyres.

‘Nope,’ I said. ‘Told you, not interested. Swedish car.’

‘Personally, I thought it sounded a little vaginal.’ She gave me a knowing smile. ‘Why I liked it.’

‘I don’t need any help,’ I said.

Hanya fixed me with a look. The same one my brother had been giving me lately. ‘Hon, when was the last time you had a guy between your legs who doesn’t wear cargo shorts and spend all day on a bike? Someone who knows what a utility bill looks like?’

Crap. She had a point. Okay. Change the subject. I nodded at the victim. ‘What’s her name?’

That caught Hanya off guard. She was one of the best people I knew, but she’d been at the job long enough to develop a detachment to death and victims.

She looked again at the purse. Pulled out a driver’s licence. ‘Paula Lucas.’

Then her expression changed. That mixture of suspicion and curiosity that I saw in her whenever she knew I was up to something. I’d achieved three things. I’d changed the conversation away from my love life, and I’d put a name to the victim. But I’d also got Hanya wondering just why I was at the scene.

Hanya’s attention was taken away again when the paramedics stopped working. They were climbing to their feet and packing away their equipment. The motionless body at their feet was now officially a corpse. One of the paramedics nodded at Hanya, and she returned the gesture with a heavy sigh.

We both stood in silence for a long few seconds. There’s a difference between seeing a dead body, and witnessing someone die. A body is just a thing, it’s an empty vessel. It can be creepy to find one, and deeply upsetting if you knew the person, but ultimately there’s a numbness to it, an emptiness. But seeing someone
die
is different. It’s a moment in time, and it brings a sense of responsibility with it to pay respect to what has just slipped by.

‘Well,’ Hanya turned back to me, ‘I’m on the clock now. I’m going to be sending uniforms out canvassing for witnesses. I get the feeling someone might mention seeing a woman on a bike?’

I was already pushing my way back toward the crowd, getting out of the way so they could all get to work. ‘Bikes are getting more common in the city,’ I said.

The sensible thing to do was to just come clean and hand over the package there and then. I’d done nothing wrong, and a quick statement to the police would let me walk away from it. But I’m the queen of stupid decisions. I blame my father. Jim Ireland had been both a cop and a private eye in this city, and he had a way of needling authority, a trait he’d passed on to me. The other thing we had in common was that we both hated a mystery, and needed to solve it.

Paula Lucas had trusted me with something. She’d known who I was, and sought me out. It was the last thing she ever did. That didn’t sit right with me.

I wanted to know what she’d died for.

I cycled down Argyle Street for a few blocks, putting distance between me and the cops, and pulled into an alleyway called New Wynd.

Great name, right?

I pulled the package out of my bag and used my keys to cut through the tape holding the flap closed at the end. I pulled it open, and looked at the contents.

What the hell?

ELEVEN

FERGUS

16:00

‘So, you want me to kill you?’

‘No, I want you to pretend to kill me.’

I’ve spoken to a lot of idiots in my time. Comes with the territory. When you kill people for money, one way or another you end up talking to bampots.

There tend to be two main groups:

People who haven’t thought it through, and will back out.

Guys who’ve seen too many movies and think it’s cool to meet a hit man.

But I’ve never heard anything quite like this. I take a look around the bar, trying to spot if any of my mates are here. This could be a wind-up, with any one of them waiting to jump out and laugh. Except that would entail me having friends.

This isn’t a very sociable profession.

I lean in over my pint glass. ‘Is this a joke?’

‘No.’ The guy looks hurt. The only thing worse than an idiot trying to trick you is an idiot telling the truth. ‘No, I’m serious. I want to hire you to kill me, but I don’t want you to actually kill me. I want to fake my death.’

His name is Alex Pennan. I’ve done my research. He works for MHW, a financial firm, managing investments and savings for a whole bunch of famous people. They also launder money for some pretty serious criminal organisations.

How do I know this?

Who do you think these organisations hire to deal with their enemies?

But I’ve never dealt with Pennan directly, and I don’t know how he got my details. Until I do, I’m playing it dumb.

‘If you don’t want anybody to die,’ I say, ‘why hire a hit man?’

Alex looks around, laughs nervously, makes eye contact with a few people at nearby tables, and then turns back to me. ‘Must you say that so loud?’

‘What?
Hit man
? We’re in a bar, nobody cares.’

It’s true.

I do all of my meetings in pubs and bars. The busier the better. People in bars talk all manner of rubbish, and nobody ever pays any attention.

If you’re going to have conversations about killing people, whether it’s professionally or if you’re preserving your amateur status for the Olympics, the best place to do it is in a crowded drinking establishment. And this place is one of the finest in Glasgow. A microbrewery on the edge of Glasgow Green, all dark wood and lots of beers.

Alex gives me an odd look. ‘But you’re okay talking about
. . .
’

Holy shit.

I get it. He’s not worrying about secrecy. He’s asking if I’m ashamed to talk about what I do for a living.

What a dick.

‘Look,’ I say. ‘Some people take pride in unblocking drains. You’ve made a career out of whatever it is you do. I work for a living, and I’m not ashamed of it.’ I stand up to leave. Forget this rubbish. Take it from me, the first time you kill someone, you realise you don’t need to suffer fools gladly. ‘Thanks for the drink.’

‘Wait. Wait. I didn’t mean anything by that.’ Alex stands after me. His chair scrapes across the wooden floor.

I didn’t mean anything by that.
That’s as close as these people come to saying ‘sorry’. They can’t actually do apologies, because that makes them sound humble, takes them down a peg.

Now people are paying attention. The bouncer by the door, the other one at the back of the room who was doing a slow circuit of the room. The staff. They’re all seeing two men stood up, one apologising. That puts us on a watch list. We’re on borrowed time.

I wave the guy back down, in a way that shows I’m going to give him a second chance. It’s rubbish, of course. But there’s no point creating a scene. I can give him another couple of minutes.

I nod at him. Like,
Humour me
. ‘Go on?’

Pennan’s nervous. There’s sweat on his forehead, and he keeps rubbing at his hands, like they’re damp. There’s laughter in his words, and I reckon this is the first time he’s talked about his master plan out loud.

‘See,’ he says. ‘I need everyone to think I’m dead, and I need it to look real. I don’t want any doubts. In fact, I want it so that a medical examiner could look into the matter and declare me legally dead. Case closed.’

His plan was possible up until that last part.

‘Can’t be done,’ I say. ‘Doctors tend to know what they’re doing. You know that, right? You’d need a body, and they’re expensive.
Really
expensive. You’re competing with the black market for organs, and each one is worth thousands.’

‘Well, I figured you’d probably have a way of getting a fresh body. Being a—’ He pauses, leans in, and whispers the words, ‘hit man’.

Right, okay. He’s not just wanting me to fake his death, he’s wanting me to kill someone else to replace him. It’s a bad idea. In fact, it’s
such
a bad idea that I’m almost interested.

I start to turn my empty glass around on the table, but stop. I don’t want to risk him buying me another drink. ‘Okay, but over and above that, any decent medical exam would show up that it’s not you on the slab. Even if we figured out a way to fool people’s eyes, get someone identical to you, we can’t cheat dental records, DNA, fingerprints.’

Shit. I’m putting too much thought into this.

‘No.’ His words are stronger. Now that he’s got over the initial nerves, he’s confident, and wants to sell his idea. ‘You’d figure it out, do it right, because you’re a pro. But don’t tell me the details, I don’t want to know it’s coming.’

‘Is this meeting here not a bit of a tip off?’

‘What I’m meaning is I don’t want to know the specifics. If I do it myself, or if I’m too heavily involved, there would be a trail. A cop or the, ah, anybody else, might notice. They could figure it out.’ The
anybody else
is interesting. It’s not the cops he wants to kid. There’s a scam he’s playing. ‘If you do it, and you don’t tell me when or where or how, then it looks real. There’s no trail leading back to me.’

‘Alex, have you stolen from the mob?’

He shoots back in the chair, almost taking it off the floor. His act is good. When his mouth says, ‘No, what are you talking about?’ I almost believe him. Almost. But I’ve killed too many scammers to fall for lies and bullshit.

If there’s one thing I can do well, it’s read people.

He almost had me. This job sounds like a fun challenge. But my career is in a bad spot, and the last thing I need right now is to get mixed up in a con job between Alex Pennan and all of the scariest people in town.

That’s a fight he can take on for himself.

I stand up to leave. ‘Thanks for your time.’

On the way out the door, I feel a phone buzzing in my pocket. I pull it out. It’s the one I picked up back at Martin Mitchell’s place. I forgot to dump it, and now it has my prints all over it.

I stare at the number.

Same one Dominic Porter dialled.

Shit.