The Blood of Crows (21 page)

‘Mrs Carruthers, I’m sorry to bother you, I know this is a difficult time for you …’

The others could hear a chit-chat answer down the phone.

‘Can I just ask you if your husband knew a William Andrew MacFadyean? … Oh yes. They met at the police college, did they? We know that they shared a fair bit of time working at Partick.’ Lambie gave Anderson the thumbs up. ‘No, don’t you go upsetting yourself, Mrs Carruthers.’ Lambie’s tone changed, and he pulled the receiver closer to his ear. ‘I’m afraid Mr MacFadyean has passed away, yes. I wasn’t at Tommy’s funeral but Wullie
was, wasn’t he?’ He frowned as the voice at the other end chattered on. ‘Mrs Carruthers, did Tommy keep a diary?’ He was confident he knew the answer to that one. ‘Really? Do you think I could have a look at them? … Yes, they might be useful … Yes, I appreciate that. And one other thing, did your husband ever go near Glen Fruin? … No? It means nothing to you? … OK, thank you, Mrs Carruthers.’ He put down the phone. ‘Well, well, well.’

‘Have you just played a hunch that has come off?’

‘I don’t think she was totally surprised that Wullie MacFadyean is dead. Carruthers and MacFadyean knew each other, and they were killed within fourteen days of each other. Carruthers was fretting about something.’ He tapped his desk with the nib of his pen. ‘But she is happy for me to look at the diaries. I think that might be very enlightening.’

3.20 P.M.

Anderson had spent the last hour going through the paperwork Howlett had given him. He was getting very uneasy about all this. He was telling himself that one murderer was just like another. The end result was the same. But the thought that they might be on the trail of anything international in general, and Russian in specific, made him feel very out his depth. He had no specialist training in or knowledge of any of this. He dropped his head down, letting his forehead lean on a pile of dirty brown files.

‘Is it that bad, sir? I think you just need some sleep,’ said Lambie.

‘I think we are getting caught in the middle of something here. Let’s have a review,’ said Anderson as Mulholland appeared with a tray of hot coffee. ‘For a start, we need a brief history of how Biggart got to be where he was. From the early 1900s – the good old days, some might call them – two families controlled the east and north of Glasgow. By the time we get to the 1980s, things are getting serious, big drugs are moving in, but the O’Donnells and the McGregors are still very much in charge. Over the years they seem to have done a good job of killing each other off. Often with a private joke about killing each other by shooting into various body orifices. They never, ever went for cutting people open up the middle of the ribcage. That is a trick of the Russian mafia. Are we agreed so far?’

Lambie and Mulholland both nodded.

‘But,’ said Anderson, ‘by the end of 1996 all that had gone.’

‘The time of the Marchetti kidnap? Which Moffat was in charge of.’

‘And that’s when the Russian mafia appear on the scene.’ Anderson rubbed the tiredness from his eyes. ‘That’s the theme of all this. Companies being bought by companies who are owned by companies with Russian directors. At the bottom line, they buy taxi companies, sunbed salons and sandwich bars.’

‘Money laundering, then,’ said Lambie. ‘And cutting people open sounds more like them. Eagles, double eagles.’

‘You sound like a golfer,’ muttered Mulholland.

Anderson ignored him; his heart was sinking. ‘Do you also think that human trafficking sounds like them?’

‘You’d be naive to think it doesn’t. People are cheap currency nowadays. Kids even more so. You can buy a kid in the Ukraine for a few hundred, worth thousands over here,’ said Mulholland. ‘And where there is money to be made, organized crime follows.’

‘But I always thought the Glasgow gangs were just a bunch of thugs that went about demanding money with menaces from little old ladies,’ Lambie said, shrugging slightly.

‘That would have got you a stab, if you’d hit a little old lady. They’d rob a post office or nick your car, but not the little old lady thing. Ice cream vans, scrap yards, selling stolen goods at the Barras, that was their sort of game.’

‘Very moral of them,’ muttered Anderson. ‘Eric Moffat is mentioned in this file at an incident Costello attended as a proby, in the city centre. It’s kind of passed into folklore but there was, according to this, a meeting between the McGregors and the O’Donnells – well, the women. They had each had nearly everybody important to them killed by the family of the other. Pauline McGregor had lost her husband and both brothers, and Mo O’Donnell, who was married to Auld Archie, had lost two sons and the third was in the Bar-L. They agreed that the two families would stop fighting between themselves, and keep each to their own territory. The theory was that they were thinking it was the only way to stay strong, to stop the Russians moving in.’

‘Didn’t work, though, did it?’

‘Somebody must have really wanted it not to happen. Pauline was fatally stabbed in the car park coming away from that meeting. She was pregnant. No one ever stood trial for it but Archie – Wee Archie, I mean – was later convicted of chopping the head off one of his own people. Don’t know if they ever got the guy who actually stabbed Pauline, though.’

‘Why? If they were on opposite sides, why should it matter to the O’Donnells who killed Pauline?’

‘Outwith the code? Punishment for acting without authority? Who knows? But after that there were a couple of years of peace. Either they’d listened to their women, or they’d simply run out of men. Everything was quiet for a while. We didn’t know that at the time, of course. But with hindsight, that’s when it all started to quieten down. Post 1996, post Alessandro Marchetti’s disappearance, all hell broke loose, each family accusing the other of kidnapping the kid to make them look bad. In the end, both families fell apart.’

‘I don’t follow,’ said Lambie, intrigued. ‘Surely over the years somebody has come forward? Somebody must have said something.’

‘It’s the sheer silence, the lack of concrete evidence that suggests it was one of them. Only gang families like that can make people look the other way for such a long period of time. But nobody admits anything. Nobody … total silence. If somebody had a shred of solid evidence, it would be out by now.’

‘So, nobody has ever really known who was behind the abduction of the boy? But whoever it was, they had the
organizational skills to take a kid – that was a whole new ball game.’

‘It was a cool hard snatch. In and out,’ Anderson observed. ‘There’d be problems keeping the child and the babysitter in a safe place, and you could argue that only an organized crime family had the means to do that. But then again, they’d certainly never done anything like it before, either lot. They were a bunch of thugs, yes, but they had brains. The bit that doesn’t fit is that neither the boy nor the babysitter were returned. And, despite what Simone Sangster says, no ransom was ever asked for. Either family would have fulfilled their part of the bargain, if a bargain had been made. Because it was business. If they’d taken the money and not returned the child, there’d be no point in doing it again, would there?’

‘So, what age is Archie O’Donnell now? Is he still alive?’

‘He’d be an old man, if so.’

‘I’d really like to know what they’re up to now, in 2010. Those who are left.’

‘Eric Moffat might know. He was at the sharp end of the police investigation into the families for five years – the years that saw their decline.’

‘I think he was even shot at by Archie O’Donnell once,’ said Lambie with some delight. ‘But don’t start him on that story, or you’ll never get away.’

4.20 P.M.

Anderson was trying to resist the temptation to make the Marchetti case active. He could only justify it if there was
a stronger link than Moffat being in charge. But, as much as he liked Dino and felt desperately sorry for Maria, he couldn’t do it. As soon as the Bridge Boy’s DNA came back, and the findings had been communicated to the Marchettis, that would be that.

The report on Melinda Biggart’s finances had come in and been sent off to the fraud squad accountants. They’d had money, those two – it seemed crime did pay – but the initial consensus view was that Mrs Biggart was hiding nothing from her husband. Well, nothing financial, at any rate.

‘Can I talk to you a minute?’ said a familiar voice, and he looked up to see Helena McAlpine standing in front of his desk. She gave a little sideways glance around the lecture theatre. ‘In private?’

Anderson stood up. ‘Those were the days, when I had an office of my own. Or I could borrow my boss’s.’

‘Indeed, those were the days.’ She said it cheerily enough, but did not move.

Anderson dearly wished she would. But there she was, still with that same smile, and that same scent of Penhaligon’s Bluebell – mingled with the aroma of turps or brush cleaner, or whatever it was. And his heart sank. That was the thing about Helena McAlpine – the world around her seemed to change, but she herself stayed the same. Today she was wearing stonewashed jeans and a blue-and-white striped T-shirt. She had not tanned in the summer sun; her freckles had just joined up a little more.

‘We could go out to the canteen,’ he offered.

‘I don’t think so,’ she replied. But still she did not move.

‘You got your car?’

‘It’s across the road.’

‘Good,’ he said. ‘Come on.’

4.30 P.M.

It was a hot afternoon with close airless weather. The wind was stuck elsewhere in the glen; Costello felt the sweat run down the back of her neck, and the skin of her face was moist. The midges were gathering in bundles, sensing that the temperature was ready to drop as the evening approached. Costello sat on the wall at the balustrade, her stomach full with salmon and boiled new potatoes followed by cheesecake. And tea in a cup with a saucer. Howlett had been right, the food here was lovely. She was pretending she was working, listening to the noises around her – gentle noises caught in the summer air. Some pupils were playing tennis, the hollow thump, thump of the ball hitting the dry grass. They scored badly. A fun game. Their friends lay on the low banks of grass that surrounded the courts.

More extracurricular art seemed to be going on on the upper lawn. Sketch books out, pencils and pastels scattered at their feet, young talented hands doing lazy sketches. It was idyllic, listening to the noises of people interacting, but not getting involved. She realized how lonely she had been in the flat. She had enjoyed casual chit-chat over lunch about the difficulty of moving kids from class to class, the problems of the old school – which Costello took to mean the original building – and the new
school with its classrooms and technical block built into the side of the hill on the north-east side of the old house. Costello’s flat was further to the south. She knew they were subtly complaining about the set-up to her, in her position as somebody who was going to report back on how to make it all better.

She watched the Three Graces strolling together. They went over to sit on the stone bench where several boys gathered at their feet in some kind of subtle migration of the beautiful people.

She had sat there for a while, enjoying the sights and sounds, when she saw the little plump girl Elizabeth walk across the lower path, well away from everybody else. She was not walking quickly but there was something about the way she moved that pricked Costello’s interest. ‘Furtive’ was the word that floated into her mind. And the way she was dressed – the trousers, the long cardigan, the flat shoes. Dressed to be out, not to enjoy the summer afternoon. Costello had been told to watch for anything that sparked her interest, and … she had had her interest sparked.

She looked down, watching the figure walk to the bridge over the stream. Was there a subtle look behind to check that nobody was following her? There was a definite pulling of her hand from her trouser pocket, a flick of the wrist and a quickening of the stroll that was not be as relaxed as it seemed. Costello slid from her place and went slowly down the stone stairs, turning round to look at the house every now and again, impressed by its grandeur as a newcomer should be. But she was subtly watching the figure dressed in black.

Costello paused at the bridge, searching for the path where the girl had gone. The path followed the stream running down to the river. The path and the stream twisted in and out of the old forest to reappear further down the glen – which also meant they twisted in and out of sight, Costello realized. Elizabeth had gone into the older forest which, Costello presumed, was out of bounds – if anything
was
out of bounds in this place. But she felt like she was trailing a suspect, and she had always been good at that.

Keeping well back, she entered the subdued light of the old oak forest, staying close to the trunks of the massive trees. The air was cool in here, light dappled on the path, highlighting the clouds of buzzing and whirring insects. She walked on, catching glimpses of the girl in front of her each time the path straightened out for a few yards. She kept well behind, pausing only when the main path went to the left up the hill and towards the Forestry Commission land with its regiments of pine trees. Elizabeth had chosen a much smaller, less defined path that seemed to run down towards the river. Costello could hear the water – louder, gently rolling, as if there was a waterfall nearby. The small path had overhanging branches, which meant she had to protect her face, and she wondered how often people passed this way. But Elizabeth knew where was going, confidently climbing over a fence that had the top wire bent for easier access. There was a sign in faded paint, warning politely that they were now leaving school premises and giving a list of warnings about what might happen to them in the big bad world outside.

Costello followed her over the fence, still keeping her distance, then moved on and trailed her for a good five minutes. She kept looking at her watch in case she was losing her sense of direction in the middle of the trees, thinking back to Hansel and Gretel. There was the sound of a waterfall – not a big one but a gentle ongoing rumble of slow water. Here it may not rain for years and yet the river would still flow, the water draining down from springs high in the hills. She paused, instinct telling her that Elizabeth had stopped. The girl was crossing the river on some stepping stones, arms out for balance, heading for a slight clearing on the far side. Costello hid behind the trunk of a large tree, its bark rough to the skin of her hands and face as she leaned her face against it. She was soaked with sweat as she got her breath back and watched.