The Blood of Crows (22 page)

Then Elizabeth seemed to look around her, waiting or watching for something. Her dealer? Was this what Howlett had been talking about? The girl turned to look back in Costello’s direction. She withdrew, her back to the tree and waited. Nothing. She looked out again; Elizabeth had moved along the path a few feet and was kicking something with her shoes – some dead pulled grass covering a small hole that had been dug in the ground. She muttered something as she kicked the grass away. It sounded like ‘fucking maddie’ or ‘fucking saddoe’.

She seemed infuriated by this, and raised her voice, calling out with her face turned away from Costello so she only heard the end of the word … the ‘ewe’.

Was she calling for Drew? The
fucking maddie
?

Elizabeth spun round, calling again. Then she screamed and stumbled back. Costello stepped out on to the path to see the girl rolling on the ground, holding her ankle. Elizabeth was in agony.

Costello ran towards her, nimbly jumping over the stepping stones, getting her toes wet. ‘God, what happened to you?’

The girl looked up in surprise – mild surprise, she had expected somebody but not Costello. ‘I fell down that fuckin’ hole, didn’t ah, went right over on ma ankle.’

Costello was now close enough to see the black-lined eyes and the pockmarked skin that was almost white with make-up. On the ground the girl looked like a bad clown. She knelt down to look; a spike of wood had gone through the girl’s trouser leg and the sock and had broken the surface of her skin badly, in a dot-dot-dash-dash pattern. Even as Costello watched, it started to bleed.

‘Where did you spring from?’ asked Elizabeth, recovering her Glen Fruin accent.

‘I was exploring that wee path. I thought you had gone up the other way – sorry if I frightened you.’ She leaned over to help the girl up.

Did she imagine that Elizabeth looked into the forest, worried that whoever she was expecting might appear? Drew? Her dealer? Was she expecting to score? And just for herself?

Then Costello looked behind her to the two perfect holes cut into the earth, the second one filled with pieces of cut wood, sharpened to spikes and stuck into the earth to remain upright. ‘Bloody hell! What on earth is that – a trap of some kind?’

‘Bugger if I know, but I fell right into it.’

‘But that first one was badly disguised – so you walked round it, almost forcing you to step right into this one.’ She knelt down. ‘This one was well disguised and –’ Her attention was caught by a movement in the trees, somebody in black, darting from the cover of one tree to another. ‘Did you see that?’

‘Who?’

Who?

Elizabeth sounded scared, and just for a minute Costello realized how young she was. ‘Nothing, just the shadows playing tricks on my eyes … Let’s get you up, the damage seems to be only skin deep. Hop to that tree and see if you can stand on that ankle.’

As she gave Elizabeth some support, the young girl swore. Costello was aware of the constant rumble of the water; she was able to talk to her companion at close quarters but it would be hard to hear anybody creeping around. She looked back at the two small pits, each a perfect rectangle, and noticed the way they were lined up. She looked around her – at the trees and the dark, deep forest.

She registered the feeling that they were being watched, something dark moving in the trees alongside them.

Something to report.

‘Come on, let’s get back. Just lean on my arm.’

The girl did so, holding tighter than was necessary.

‘So, why were you down here? It was a bit of a trek.’

‘Why were you?’ came the easy reply.

5.00 P.M.

When he first got into the Beamer, balancing coffee in a tray, Anderson tried to press the switch to roll down the window.

‘Well, you can do that if you want,’ said Helena dryly, turning down an opera aria on the CD. ‘Or we could put the air con on.’

He laughed. ‘I’ve been demoted to a Jazz, remember?’

‘I know. Bad days.’

Anderson took a sip of coffee, and felt himself relaxing as a cool refreshing draught came through the air-conditioning vent. ‘So, what do you want?’

Her fingers curled round the steering wheel. ‘Colin, I need to know the truth. About Alan. Was he bent?’

Anderson’s head jerked round. ‘Alan? Bent? No! He was a good copper; he was DCI at – what – thirty-eight? Alan never did a bent thing in his entire career! Or do you think Fairbairn was innocent? Because he wasn’t, he was guilty. Some lawyer’s making a play of the new disclosure law, that’s all. And no, again, Alan was not bent.’

‘And you would know.’

‘Yes, I would,’ he answered without hesitating. ‘OK, I don’t have proof, but I don’t need any. Full stop.’

‘Not a single doubt in your mind?’

‘Not an iota. Alan was too much of an upfront in-your-face little shite to be taking any backhanders. He might go to bed with the bad guys but he’d tell everybody about it. Not orthodox, but not illegal.’

Helena bit her lip and nodded. ‘It’s just, with this
Fairbairn business, people have started talking. Denise said –’

‘She would. She’s another criminal lawyer, and a man-hater.’

‘She happens to be my best friend.’

‘If she was your best friend, she wouldn’t be talking shite about your late husband.’

‘I guess not,’ Helena said quietly.

‘The fact that she’s Terry Gilfillan’s sister might have something to do with it.’

Anderson watched her face. There was no reaction to Gilfillan’s name, no hasty, ‘Oh, I meant to tell you, we’re getting married.’ He wondered what it would be like to go out to dinner with Helena, properly. He lifted his coffee to his mouth, thinking about how to phrase an invitation, to make it sound casual …

‘There’s something else,’ Helena said after a while.

‘Yes?’ He was grateful that she had interrupted. Better that than hear her say no.

‘I think somebody is watching me. I’m not imagining it.’

‘I’m sure you aren’t.’

‘I think it’s Fairbairn. I’ve seen him three times now, on the grass up at the terrace, and in the street outside the gallery. But it was when I saw him yesterday, outside the gallery again, that I realized he wasn’t just somebody out in the street having a fag; he was following me. He does this little trick, flipping the lighter before he lights up – I remember Alan trying to do it.’ She spanned her fingers, palm down, jerked her hand palm up then closed her fingers. ‘And it dawned on me who it was. It
is
him.’

‘OK, I’ll see what I can do.’

‘Apart from the fact that Alan arrested him – you’re sure there’s nothing else?’

‘If there was, I would tell you.’

‘So, it might just be coincidence. Even if it isn’t, I can look after myself.’

‘And can I ask you – did Alan ever have a working relationship with either Archie O’Donnell or any of the McGregors?’

Helena ran her fingers through her hair, checking it in the rear-view mirror. Then she looked directly at Anderson, the significance of his question sinking in. She was offended. ‘He wasn’t on the take from them or anybody else. I’m surprised you have to ask that.’

‘It’s not what I meant. Top cops, organized crime. There’s often a subtle relationship. That’s all.’ He realized his hand had slid on top of hers. He removed it.

‘It’s a long time ago, Colin. I know Alan thought William McGregor was as tricksy as a box of monkeys. He did meet Archie O’Donnell a few times. This is Glasgow and I’m not naive enough to think there wasn’t a sectarian side to that.’

‘O’Donnell would talk to a Catholic cop if he wanted to talk to a cop at all,’ agreed Anderson.

‘And I think there was a degree of mutual respect, if that’s what you mean.’

Anderson nodded and sighed. It was bloody hot in the car. ‘Talking of Terry …’ He turned to Helena.

‘Which we weren’t.’

‘You never told me you were engaged.’ By some miracle his voice sounded quite normal, even congratulatory.

Helena levelled the rear-view mirror with her fingertip. ‘I’m not sure that I am.’

Anderson couldn’t help feeling as if a knife had been stuck in his stomach.

She smiled at him. ‘I remember Terry asking me to marry him, but I do not remember giving him an answer. I certainly didn’t say yes. Where does this come from?’

‘I just heard a rumour.’

‘And you were annoyed that I hadn’t told you?’ She smiled that rather mocking smile. ‘That’s rather touching.’

‘But none of my business.’

‘No, it’s not really, is it?’ She placed her hand on the back of his. ‘But there’s something that is. You were the next most senior investigating officer in Fairbairn’s case, weren’t you?’

‘Yes.’

‘And how long do you think it’ll take Fairbairn to figure out that the girl who comes to the gallery to show me her pictures is your daughter?’

5.10 P.M.

‘Elizabeth? Are you OK?’ asked Costello as her companion slumped on to the wall at the far side of the school garden.

‘Please don’t call me that, I’m not the friggin’ queen. It’s Libby, and I’m going to stop for a fag before we go any further. I know you won’t tell.’

Costello frowned slightly. ‘And how do you know I won’t tell?’

‘Because you think they’re a bunch of wankers. I can tell. Fag?’ Libby Hamilton slumped to the ground and pulled her trousers up above her knee, laying plump white legs bare to the sun, exposing the angry red dash on her calf. ‘It must be some kind of curse, to have such dark hair and not tan. Why is that?’

‘Curse of the Celt, I think – or is it the Bretons? There’s one lot that have dark hair and blue eyes and don’t tan.’ Costello sat down beside her, drawing her knees up and closing her eyes. The light of the sun made the veins dance in her eyelids. She could smell Libby’s cigarette smoke wafting across her face. ‘Are you OK?’ she asked again.

‘Of course.’ There was an unconscious wipe of the thumb under her eyes, as if to remove any sign that she had been crying. ‘Why are you here?’

‘I’m casing the joint,’ Costello said, half in jest.

‘I don’t think that’s so far from the truth,’ said Libby with a total lack of humour. ‘You struck gold with a body on your first night.’

‘Could have done without that. So, do you like it here?’

‘As I have no experience of any other type of school, I can’t really say.’ There was the sound of a quiet kiss as Libby took the cigarette in her lips and drew hard. ‘As prisons go, this is nice enough. Warm, great food, and the company is
endlessly
amusing. But none of it’s real. Like you.’ She flicked her cigarette ash with some anger.

‘Like me?’

‘You’re real; you don’t belong here. And the fact that you’re real means that you are, by definition, fake. Like
finding a sane person in a lunatic asylum – they must be there for a reason.’ She let out a long plume of cigarette smoke. ‘The staff view you with some suspicion, yet you’re not a school inspector – if you were, you’d have had a fit the minute I lit up. And I’ve seen you bite your lip at a few things.’

‘At people who don’t need mortgages because they inherit?’ Costello mused.

The rear wheels of an approaching car spun up some grit from the drive, which bounced across the lawn like hail. The gardener stood upright from his wheelbarrow and lifted out a rake. ‘Bet his language is choice.’ Libby moved along the stone wall a little and turned to look at Costello. ‘Anyway, why are you prowling around like Miss Marple in the midnight garden? Looking for clues?’

‘It seems a very lax kind of place. I thought it would be more regimented,’ said Costello, standing up as the chill of the stone started to eat through her trousers.

‘Yes, but it’s a business,’ Libby said baldly. ‘They have to give us a certain degree of freedom or everyone would just tell Mummy and Daddy that they don’t want to be here. And for all he’ll huff and puff, the Gruppenführer knows that. It’s not a good school in the sense that it turns out geniuses – academically it just scrapes through inspections, though they say it used to be good – but it does have its advantages.’

‘Like what?’

‘It’s near the airport.’ Libby smiled at her little joke. ‘And the cheesecake is good.’

7.30 P.M.

The minute David Lambie appeared on the landing where Mary Carruthers lived, Rene came beetling out from her door, practically helping him press the doorbell, repeating, ‘Oh, you’re back again already. Mary will be pleased …’

When Mary opened the door she didn’t seem pleased to see her sister, but she dutifully replayed the same routine with the tray and the tea, saying nothing about the money. She watched as Rene took an empty cup off the tray and sat down with it. Mary took it back and placed it on the tray, shaking her head. ‘She picks up everything and moves things around. Teapot in the fridge, my glasses in the bin.’

Lambie’s eyes were fixed on the diaries, which had all been stacked neatly. There was a used envelope stuck between 1976 and 1978 – that meant there was one missing. Lambie wondered if that made it all the more important.

‘Wullie MacFadyean?’ Mary said, once Rene had settled down and Lambie could get a word in edgeways to ask her. ‘Oh, I don’t recall much about him. Quite a shock to see him at the funeral.’ She was trying to hold back the tears, while Rene nibbled away at a scone like a demented rabbit, smiling eagerly at Lambie, who just smiled back.

‘You know Wullie left his first wife,’ Mary went on, ‘and he got married again, to a girl who worked at the station – a high-up cop, well promoted, you know. I can’t remember what she was called, but she had a strange job. I think there was a bit of an age difference. Tommy didn’t approve of that kind of thing. Wullie was sent to Shawlands, and Tommy stayed at Partick. He liked it there.’

‘Would you happen to have a photograph of Wullie, even an old one?’ Lambie asked. Wullie’s face hadn’t been that much use for ID, not after the crows had finished with him.

‘There was one of them all out on the hills. I saw it recently, but …’ she shook her head, thinking.

Lambie didn’t want to pressurize her but his big problem was that nobody seemed to know where Wullie lived. They were trawling all the MacFadyeans on the electoral roll and the council tax register, and hoping that somebody, at some point, would report him missing. The ex-cop had been dead for twenty-four hours now and it was as if nobody had noticed.