When The Devil Drives (16 page)

‘You were going to give me some names.’

‘I’m afraid Mr Queen is needed quite urgently,’ said Melanie, running interference.

‘The only name that leaps to mind is Adam Nolan,’ Hamish said. It sounded familiar, possibly from TV, but Jasmine couldn’t place him.

‘Beyond that I’m struggling. It was another lifetime. I could tell you a couple of first names I’m barely half certain of, but the surnames are gone.’

‘Surely you must be able to remember more than that,’ Jasmine stated, drawing a warning glare from Melanie, who was clearly unused to anyone treating her boss with anything less than deference. Jasmine ignored her. Hamish looked uncomfortable, caught on the back foot, and she had to press while she still could. ‘I realise it was a long time ago, but you worked with these people.’

‘Well, that’s just it,’ Hamish said, slightly exasperated. ‘I didn’t; or at least, I only worked with them very briefly before it all imploded. Following something like that, the aftermath is like a really bad break-up. You’re rather raw and you want nothing to do with anyone who was involved or who even reminds you of it. Before you know it, weeks have turned into months and you’re all on new paths that may never cross again.’

Melanie chose this juncture to remind Hamish once more of the
urgency of her made-up crisis, and they both withdrew. Jasmine thanked him for his help and was given a distracted ‘sure’ in return. Most definitely not ‘you’re welcome’.

She watched him disappear through the door towards the stairs and reflected that Dot was right: Hamish Queen was a competent actor, but he wasn’t good enough. He was lying. He knew more than he was saying; much more.

If you’re trying to find Tessa Garrion, then I’m afraid the history of the Glass Shoe Company is unlikely to constitute a rich seam of information.

She’d be the judge of that. So far it was telling her plenty. For one thing, Jasmine never said she was
looking for
Tessa Garrion. Granted, Hamish could have made this association based on what he knew about Jasmine’s involvement in the Ramsay case, but it was still quite a leap. Why would he assume Tessa couldn’t be found when nobody had said she was missing?

As soon as they were out of sight, she got out her phone and Googled Adam Nolan. Like Hamish, he had survived the wreckage of their failed venture and built a good career for himself. He had joined the RSC in 1983, but the reason Jasmine remembered his name was that he had been in the regular cast of
First Do No Harm
, a medical drama series from the late eighties, a favourite of her mum’s that Jasmine had watched with her on DVD box sets. The other reason his name had a certain significance was that there was an Aids charity named after him, Adam Nolan having died from the disease in 1993.

Tessa Garrion dropped out of existence shortly after working with Hamish Queen’s fledgling theatre company and the only other name he could give her was someone who died eighteen years ago? Aye, right. That meant there were others, and Jasmine was going to find them.

Ideally, of course, this would turn out to be some kind of freak accident. That was the result everybody wanted. Sure, there would be ramifications for hunting safety and the fall-out would provide soundbite opportunities for those Barbour-clad mutants in the Countryside Alliance, but it was far preferable to a murder hunt. So preferable, in fact, and in so many ways, that Catherine doubted she would be so fortunate.

‘What are the chances this was just bad luck?’ she asked the groundskeeper, as they stood on a perfectly manicured but heavily bloodstained lawn before the mobile gantry that had given so many people a perfect view of the fatality.

The groundskeeper was named Roddy Frail. He was a short man in his fifties, someone she could picture stalking silently through the undergrowth, although the smell of loose tobacco would give him away if he didn’t stay upwind. His hands were rough and callused, conditioned by and to the outdoors, and his fingers were stained by no end of roll-ups. He was used to handling thorny vegetation, but thorny coppers not so much. He looked rattled, the place he’d worked for years suddenly seeming altogether foreign. He had been dragged from sleep and dropped into a milieu far more unfamiliar than that which had confronted any of the Glesca Polis bussed in from the big city.

‘It’s a possibility,’ he conceded with anxious reluctance, like he was going to have to answer for it personally if it turned out to be so. Here was one person who was probably hoping it was murder.

‘A substantial part of the estate’s income is corporate shooting junkets,’ he went on. ‘They pay big money to have exclusive access.’

‘Was there hunting taking place last night?’ Catherine asked dubiously, thinking it really would be this guy’s balls if the answer was yes.

He hit her with a look of apparent consternation that he was being questioned by someone either stupid or quite mad.

‘At night? With a play going on?’

‘Just wondering whether someone ended up somewhere they shouldn’t have been.’

‘Never happen,’ he insisted animatedly. ‘I have very strict safety protocols. There’s no hunting at all during the theatre weeks, never mind by night. The whole place is given over to the plays, every room booked out, so you’ve got people wandering about, exploring, walking woodland trails. See, when people are here to hunt they have the place to themselves. It’s fully escorted, well away from the castle. And I only allow night-time stalking for very experienced hunters, who are very few and far between in this place. Most of the corporate guests barely know one end of a gun from the other when they first get here.’

‘So why is an accident a possibility?’

Frail gave a weary grimace, like some persistent back problem was playing up. He was on uncomfortable ground.

‘The thing is, these corporate guests, they’re not going to come back to the fair if they never win a goldfish, you know? We keep the stocks high, which makes sure they at least
see
a deer when you take them out, even if they cannae hit one. But it also makes the estate a honeypot for poachers.’

‘I see. And I take it poachers prefer to work under cover of darkness?’

‘Some are as brazen as you like. They know it’s a big estate, and we cannae be in ten places at once. But some folk get a buzz about hunting in the dark and they kit out for it too. Night-scopes and silencers aren’t unheard of for going after deer without a permit.’

‘Was this a silenced shot?’ she asked Beano.

‘No, ma’am. Everybody heard a bang from back there, in the woods.’

Catherine looked towards the tree line, which was about two hundred yards away, behind the trailer bearing the seats.

‘How close are the game going to be on a night when there’s all this going on?’ she asked Frail. ‘You’ve got a tractor hauling that tiered-seating gantry, music over a PA, dozens of people chattering and applauding, artificial lights flooding the place. I can’t imagine any skittish woodland creatures straying close to the edge of cover with so much human activity going on, nor an experienced poacher taking aim when there was a gathering of people in his field of vision, never mind his field of fire.’

‘I only said it was a possibility. Could have been a ricochet. Could also have been a shot from distance. Some of these rifles are built to take down their prey from a long way off. Some chancer deep in the woods, a kilometre up the slope, could have lined up a shot without realising what was behind it if he missed.’

‘Aye,’ said Catherine, ‘such as a major figure in the world of the arts.’

‘Makes no difference to me who he was,’ said Frail, his eyes wide and bloodshot. ‘I’d never heard of the guy myself. But if this was something I could have prevented …’

He bit his lip, glancing back and forth from the bloodstained turf to the tree line, looking fidgety and confessional.

‘How could you have prevented anything?’ Catherine asked, eyeing him neutrally: neither accusatory nor reassuring.

He sighed, regret and contrition etched as vividly on his face as the nicks and calluses on his fingers.

‘There’s a lot of blind eyes get turned,’ he said. ‘As long as folk don’t kick the arse out of it, sometimes it’s easier to write off a bit of poaching loss than to try and prevent it. People know each other out here, know each other’s business. The point is, I can give you some names, but the local polis are already aware of them. They know which doors to knock. They’ve just never had reason to before.’

Jasmine made it back to the office late afternoon and set about transcribing Hamish Queen’s interview, which she had secretly recorded. In keeping with Jim’s practices, she liked to have a hard copy down in black and white as well as the audio file. Transcribing could be tedious, but it forced a closer examination of what was said, and the act of typing out the words helped commit them to memory. She then backed up both the text document and the recording, after compressing it from wav to mp3 format. Having had the office broken into during the Ramsay case, she had learned not to keep all her eggs in one basket. This had forced her to overcome her assumptions regarding the complexities of using a computer for things other than word processing and web browsing, with the result that she was now au fait with audio and video editing software, and the letters FTP were no longer just something she saw scrawled on bus shelters.

Her work safely copied to two separate remote servers, she was able to clock off for the day, with the rare prospect of a good night out to look forward to. Jasmine’s friend Michelle, who’d been at the SATD with her, had free tickets for Ballet Scotland’s production of
The Sleeping Beauty
at the Theatre Royal. Michelle had been studying dance and now had a job with Ballet Scotland’s community outreach programme Steps Forward. She described it as being ‘where ballet meets social work’, but it was a satin-slippered foot in the door of the company proper. They were planning to meet in town for a bite to eat before heading up to Cowcaddens for the show.

Jasmine never cared much for ballet growing up, and the appreciation she developed of it through her time at the SATD was largely on an intellectual rather than emotional level, but the last time she
went with Michelle she had really enjoyed it. The absence of dialogue and the lack of narrative complexity meant she could switch off parts of her brain that were becoming overtaxed through work, allowing the music and the spectacle to wash over her for a couple of hours. It was almost like a state of meditation and her mind felt much the better for it afterwards.

She had checked the clock as she uploaded the last of the files. Sharp Investigations was based in a two-storey office building in Arden, on a light industrial estate midway between Rouken Glen and the M77. As long as the traffic wasn’t too horrendous, she could make it back to her flat on Victoria Road in about fifteen minutes, leaving her time enough for a quick shower and change before heading into town.

Jasmine glanced in her mirror as she left the car park at the rear of the building and noticed a silver Passat pull away from the kerb just a short distance down the street. Something about it bothered her, though she couldn’t say what. She pulled out on to the main drag of Nitshill Road, heading straight on at the roundabout instead of her normal left as there were temporary traffic lights on Thornliebank Road and she didn’t want to be stuck in a queue for twenty minutes while a crew of workmen got on with the important task of sitting in a van reading the paper. She hung a left at the next roundabout, taking her on to Fenwick Road, which was when she noticed the same Passat two cars behind her.

Harry Deacon had warned her about the onset of paranoia that could come with this job. Spend days at a time following people’s vehicles, becoming familiar with surveillance tactics and pursuit patterns and you could begin to see those tactics and patterns in the behaviour of the cars around you. See the same car behind you after a couple of turns and you could convince yourself you were being tailed, when in fact five out of the next ten cars might make the same turns because they were on the common route towards a particular destination. If the guy in the Passat was going from the industrial estate to the south side or the city centre, wouldn’t he also take Fenwick Road if he knew there were temporary lights on the parallel Thornliebank Road?

Jasmine caught herself rationalising this, and rejected the reassurance her simple explanation was offering. She reminded herself that something had troubled her about that Passat from the moment she saw it, well before she noticed it was still behind her. Harry Deacon’s advice was a useful bulwark against letting the job get too far inside your head, but Jasmine had learned a greater lesson from Glen Fallan: when your mind or your body are telling you to be afraid, you should listen.

Your brain takes in far more information about your environment than you are conscious of it processing, and we frequently ignore danger because we try to rationalise feelings that are not rational but instinctive. We look for explanations for why we feel an irrational anxiety, explanations that always seek to reassure us nothing is wrong, ignoring the fact that, as Fallan put it, ‘the part of your brain that tells you to run because your early-warning system detected a predator or an avalanche was there a lot longer than language and responds a lot more immediately’.

For whatever reason, Jasmine had felt uneasy at the sight of that Passat pulling away behind her, and now it was still on her tail. Her conscious mind was busy looking for reasons why she shouldn’t be worried, a seduction she had learned to resist.

She checked her rear-view again, trying to get a look at who was behind the wheel. It was difficult to see through the moving obstacle of the Mondeo directly behind her. She couldn’t make out a face, just a baseball cap with the visor pulled down low. That alone might have been part of what spooked her.

She slowed down a little, checking her pace so that she would meet a gap in the oncoming traffic just as she reached the junction with Merrycrest Avenue on the right-hand side. She turned without indicating, nipping across the junction before a further convoy of cars barred the route to the Passat. He’d have to wait to turn, and if he did turn it was official: she was being tailed, albeit not by someone who knew how to keep it discreet. Merrycrest Avenue linked Fenwick Road to the parallel Langside Drive, but it was hardly a rat run. The likelihood that he would ‘just happen’ to be going up it was minuscule.