When The Devil Drives (21 page)

He straightened a little in his chair, something resembling optimism suddenly legible in his features.

‘Yes, so I gather. Have you found any …’

‘The truth is, we have no grounds at this stage to rule it in either. So unless and until I receive very strong evidence to the contrary, I am going to proceed upon the assumption that this was murder. I realise this is difficult, but can you think of anyone with a motive, anyone who might have had reason to wish—’

‘No,’ he interrupted, insistent, appalled. It wasn’t just an answer, it was a denial of the reality of what she was suggesting. It was a final futile attempt to shore up the internal defences that had been all but demolished the night before.

‘Why would anyone?’ he asked in disbelief. ‘How
could
anyone? Do you know who this man was? Have you any idea of his contribution to the arts world and beyond? The projects he’s made possible, how many people he’s helped?’

‘Nonetheless, he moved in a world where there can be a lot of jealousy, a lot of resentment.’

‘It must have come with his job, that he’s had to say no to a few people who didn’t want to hear it, but …’ He sighed. ‘No. Just no.’

Catherine wasn’t expecting to hear much of a response to that one. She was really just forcing him to confront the ugly idea by way of preparation before she sprung something worse.

‘Sir Angus, I realise this is very disturbing to consider, but what happened last night involved a shot from distance in the dark. If you are so certain that nobody could have had a motivation for harming your guest, I therefore have to ask whether it’s possible the gunman could actually have been aiming at you?’

Jasmine had plenty to mull over on the drive back up through Ayrshire, her thoughts on the journey down having been dominated by the single question of whether she’d get there before Sanquhar left, occasionally interspersed with a moment’s anxiety about whether her urgency was making a lasting impression on the average-speed cameras. She turned off the stereo so that she’d have peace to think, then turned it on again a couple of miles later because the clunking noise was back, and whenever she could hear it she couldn’t think about anything else.

Her reflections were also derailed by the sight of a silver Passat in her rear-view mirror, spotted slotting into a gap three cars behind as it exited the fast lane. There were too many vehicles between it and the Civic for Jasmine to get a good look, but she had no doubts over the make and model. She thought about pulling out into the fast lane to see whether it followed, but between the yellow vultures monitoring her speed and the clunking sound beneath the bonnet she decided it wasn’t a viable option.

Jasmine was approaching the big roundabout where the roads to Ayr, Prestwick and Kilmarnock converged, so she decided it would be wisest to defer any manoeuvres until she was sure the Passat was taking the same route. She was held at the lights on the roundabout and the curve of the approaching traffic allowed her to confirm that the Volkswagen was in the same lane, still three cars back.

Flooring it was even less of an option now. The first few miles of the Kilmarnock road were restricted to fifty miles an hour, still enforced by the average-speed cameras. People didn’t take chances with those things, not even the boy racers in their souped-up ned-mobiles. So if no one was going to speed up, her only option was to slow down.

She dropped to forty, then let the needle creep further anticlockwise until it was approaching thirty-five. Nobody was going to tolerate that pace driving anything other than a tractor, or maybe a Micra. The Passat was going to have to pass or make its intentions obvious and either way she was going to get a look at the driver, as overtaking was a slow process when you were limited to fifty miles an hour.

She glanced back and saw the Saab immediately behind her begin to indicate, waiting for an opportunity to pull out. When a space appeared, it swung right, followed by as many preceding cars as could fit themselves in before an approaching lorry closed the gap.

Jasmine held her pace steady and kept her eyes front, flitting between the road and the mirror. In her peripheral vision she was aware of a few turned heads in the passing vehicles, as their drivers sought a look at what idiot had been pootling along so unnecessarily slowly. She hoped she lived up to all their prejudices. Then, finally, the Passat was pulling alongside.

Jasmine stepped a little harder on the accelerator, upping the speed to prolong the time spent side by side, and this time it was the slower driver who turned her head to get a look at the passing motorist.

She saw a blonde-haired woman, mid-thirties, eyes on the road, head swaying and mouth wide as she sang a song, presumably for the benefit of the two toddlers perched in child seats in the back. The blonde woman was the only driver in the overtaking convoy who didn’t turn and look at her like she was an idiot, something Jasmine considered profoundly ironic.

At least this particular panic had been precipitated by a Passat, rather than merely a silver car. That was progress but she needed to let it go, and not react until there was something to react to.

In the days since she was followed the truth was that she hadn’t spotted anything further to be genuinely suspicious of. She’d seen a hundred silver vehicles and been wary of all of them, but that wasn’t vigilance, that was paranoia, and it was potentially counterproductive. With her so hung up on this silver Passat, if the guy knew what he was doing he could have been invisibly following her for days via the simple expedient of driving any other vehicle.

The thought of it made her shudder. Why would anybody be tailing her? Her principal suspicion was Hamish Queen, or rather someone working on his behalf. He had lied, he had made the assumption that Tessa Garrion was missing and he had the wherewithal to make things happen quickly. However, according to Sanquhar, Queen had called all of the surviving Glass Shoe players as soon as he’d finished talking to Jasmine. If one of them had something to hide it could have been any of them who had organised a tail, or even followed her themselves. It wasn’t as though she’d have been hard to track down: Sharp Investigations was in the Yellow Pages, as well as linked on a thousand websites following last summer’s press.

From what Sanquhar had said, it sounded like they all might have something to hide, as well as reputations well worth protecting. He had hinted at repercussions, or at least how she wouldn’t be popular for excavating this period of their collective pasts. Finlay Weir was a teacher, Sanquhar had suggested maybe even the head of a school, and in this day and age even trace elements of scandal could be toxic. You could get fired for pretty much anything except being a rubbish teacher.

Murray Maxwell had become a Scottish household name back in the eighties by appearing in Scotia Television’s long-running soap,
Darroch Glen
, then established his acting credentials more seriously during the nineties as Inspector Kelvin in the same channel’s Glasgow-set police drama
Raintown Blue
. It was still going, fifteen years after Maxwell left it, but his character’s name remained the one everybody referenced whenever the show was mentioned. He had moved to the other side of the camera after that, producing new programmes for Scotia and eventually becoming its head of drama. It was said he was in the running for the vacant top job as the channel’s chief executive, his chances of which would not be augmented by revelations of venal excess, even if it had been three decades ago.

Russell Darius, as a horror-film director, was arguably the one who had least to lose from stories of sex, drugs or even Satanism, but he was also known to be fiercely protective of his privacy.

When she was reading the coverage of the spat over ACS’s funding
rejection, Jasmine, who had barely heard of Darius before, was surprised by his list of credits. It turned out that she knew many of his films by reputation, though she hadn’t seen them, and certainly couldn’t have said who directed them prior to clicking the article’s link to the IMDb. According to one sidebar, despite being regarded as something of an auteur, Darius’s reluctance to sell
himself
had contributed to his dwindling commercial success during an era when the cult of personality reigned and selling your films purely on their own merits seemed quaint to the point of naive. He had given precious few interviews in recent years and made even fewer films. It seemed he had gained great notoriety back in the early eighties, when his work fell foul of the tabloids’ ‘video nasty’ hysteria, and this had made him very shy of the British press ever since.

Contemplating this line-up, Jasmine almost laughed out loud at just how staggeringly bare-faced Hamish Queen’s lie had been. The only two names he could be forgiven were Finlay Weir and, ironically, Tessa Garrion. She’d give Hamish this much though: it certainly bore out Dot Prowis’s testament to his talent-spotting ability. Of this small company, all but two of them had gone on to very big things: a West End producer; a film director; two television stalwarts, one of them now a major player at a regional ITV franchise; and the ex-head of Arts Council Scotland, waiting in the wings for a place on the BBC Trust.

However, just as striking was the fact that nobody seemed aware of their common connection. Jasmine hadn’t seen it mentioned anywhere; the link between Darius and Sanquhar was a particularly glaring omission in light of the funding controversy. How many awkward questions would that have posed had it come out at the time, especially for Sanquhar? Was it personal? Was there a longstanding grudge? If so, Darius had been very magnanimous by not revealing a fact that would have mired Sanquhar neck-deep in the brown stuff, restricting himself to a dig about his elitism.

All these famous names had once worked together in the same fledgling theatre company. It should have been a well-known item of trivia, like how everyone knew Billy Connolly had once been in a band with Gerry Rafferty, or that Francis Ford Coppola, Martin
Scorsese and James Cameron had all worked for Roger Corman. That nobody knew the original Glass Shoe Company included Hamish Queen, Julian Sanquhar, Russell Darius, Murray Maxwell and the late Adam Nolan indicated that none of them had ever mentioned it, because it would only have taken one to do so, especially in the Wikipedia age, for it to go viral.

There had to have been a conscious decision never to invoke this connection: either a collective vow or, perhaps more disturbingly, they had each independently reasoned that they had too much to lose. Either way, each must have known his counterparts’ silence was guaranteed by the prospect of mutually assured destruction.

Why?

What had been so awful that Sanquhar still seemed spooked by it thirty years later? As he said himself, he wasn’t some nutter. He was a hugely respected, intimidatingly intelligent and thoroughly sober individual, yet there he was, talking about something that responds to human darkness, something that feeds off the worst in men, and he wasn’t being entirely allegorical.

Jasmine took a detour to East Kilbride and stopped off at Galt Linklater’s premises to fill in some paperwork concerning the job in Perth earlier that day. It was twenty past six by the time she got there, but there was usually somebody around in the evenings, sometimes all night if work required it. She had to buzz to be let in, but she could see lights on inside. When she walked through reception and into the offices there was a small cheer and some applause. She saw Rab Forrest, Andy Smith and Johnny Gibson gathered around one desk, grinning at her. Andy was miming his hands on a steering wheel, then a sudden shudder. Clearly they had heard about this morning’s events. Even Grumpy Gibby looked tickled.

They were eager to hear her version of it and she obliged, not least because she wasn’t going to get peace to file her paperwork until she’d done so. Their attention felt slightly patronising, as the story was clearly all the more amusing to them for it being ‘the wee lassie’ who had pulled this stunt, but nevertheless, the unequivocal sentiment coming from all of them was that the wee lassie had done well.

‘They’ve already started referring to you as “Crash”,’ Rab informed her.

She rolled her eyes, as if to say ‘what are they like?’ and to acknowledge that this die was now cast, but she did so to conceal a degree of relief at having acquired this new nickname. As she became a more familiar face and the barriers of formality started to break down, some of them had occasionally referred to her as Jazz, which had uncomfortable associations, so she was really hoping it wouldn’t stick.

Her paperwork filed, she set off for Arden and the office. It was after seven and she was getting hungry. She’d leave the transcription to the morning, but she wanted the recording of her conversation with Sanquhar copied and backed up. ‘Your day’s work’s never over until you’ve secured the evidence,’ Jim had once said, and she abided by this no matter how tired or hungry she was.

As she drove past a supermarket on her way through Clarkston, she thought about stopping briefly to pick up a take-away salad or a sandwich, but forced herself to keep driving. She knew that if she did that, she’d end up eating it in the office – transcribing the Sanquhar interview. She could already hear her internal logic: might as well while I’m here. Not as though I’ve anything else to do with my evening.

She really would need to get herself a life, and she fully intended to, but chances were she’d probably get herself that new office furniture first.

I
will
do
something
with my evening, she vowed as she slowed to a stop behind the office, a sentiment made all the more compelling by having every space in the car park to choose from. A quick bite and a trip to the cinema. Even if the only thing she’d be showing up in time for was some no-brain blockbuster, she’d force herself to go. This was important.

She switched off the engine and reached down into the passenger-side footwell for her bag. As she gripped it and sat up straight again she felt uneasy, as though she’d done it too fast and made herself light-headed. It was far more than that, though. The hairs on her arms were pricking up, a nauseating sense of unease coursing through her. She felt claustrophobic all of a sudden and reached for the door
by reflex rather than intention. It was what Fallan had described as ‘a sudden, unarticulated sense that something about your immediate environment is disturbingly wrong’. Something told her to run. Not drive, run. It was fear, and Fallan said to listen when it speaks.