When The Devil Drives (35 page)

Shields seemed to deflate, his head slumping to his elbows on the desk, his face disappearing into his interlocked fingers. He took a couple of breaths, then straightened himself in his chair.

‘This is not what you think,’ he said, his voice barely above an apologetic rasping whisper.

‘That’s not what I asked you. And if the next two words you issue are not—’

‘Francis Wyngarde. Our mystery guest was Francis Wyngarde. Do you get it now?’

Francis Wyngarde. The man who had presided over the Royal Scottish Bank’s tailspin into crushing debt, all the while still lining his pockets in a manner that would have shamed most third-world dictators. He was the poster-child for the credit crunch and, in Catherine’s opinion, along with Fred Goodwin something of an Aunt Sally whom the financial sector were content to abandon to public flogging because hatred of individuals lessened the impetus to attack the system itself.

Several years on, Wyngarde was still fiercely reviled by the public, but apparently retained certain connections in high places. The bank evidently knew it was way too early to begin any attempt at rehabilitating his reputation, but they were dipping their toe in gentle waters at Cragruthes, where he would be in the company of RSB executives and certain highly favoured business people whose
discretion could presumably be relied upon. Perhaps sounding out the latter group’s response had in fact been the purpose of the exercise, knowing that if they disapproved they would do so quietly. And perhaps they just wanted him to know he still had friends.

‘We kept his name secret because all sorts of people see this list,’ Shields explained. ‘This was not a public event. It’s not like we had him in our sponsors’ box at the Scottish Cup Final.’

‘I understand the distinction,’ Catherine said, disguising her growing anger.

‘When Hamish Queen was shot we knew we had to get Francis out of the picture. He was gone before the ambulance or the police even arrived. We had a driver and a limo up there; we always do, in case somebody suddenly has to be somewhere fast. It was already going to be toxic from a PR point of view, but if the media got wind that Francis Wyngarde had been our guest, that night of all nights …’

‘Quite. I can certainly see why that would be your number one priority, with a guy lying dead on the grass near by.’

‘With respect, there was nothing we could do about that.’

Catherine took a moment, making sure she didn’t respond in anger. She forced herself to smile, an invaluable exercise in screwing the nut that Moira had taught her. Not only did it help stem the flow of emotion and allow her to compose herself, but she lost nothing in terms of conveying her dismay. Shields found it all the more disturbing than if she was blazing in rage.

‘You don’t see it at all, do you?’ she said. ‘The arrogance. It’s quite breathtaking. Thinking your business is so important that it doesn’t need to pay its respects to a dead man, and prizing its reputation above the needs of our investigation into that man’s murder. That’s why I could think of no more fitting redress than to make sure this appears on every front page tomorrow; every news bulletin.’

She took in the horror in Shields’ face for a few moments, letting him truly contemplate what that was going to feel like.

‘But I won’t.’

He stared at her, his expression confused and apprehensive, as
though afraid to believe this was for real. Eventually he found his voice.

‘Detective Superintendent, I don’t think I need to say how much I appreciate—’

‘Save it,’ she interrupted. ‘But understand this. One day, Mr Shields, I am going to come to the RSB in my professional capacity to ask for a favour; most likely a very, very big favour. And when I do, you are going to be the bank that likes to say “yes”.’

Catherine was still fizzing with rage as she made her way back across the marble tundra towards the exit. She was so furious she had half a mind to go back on her word and tell the media anyway. Fortunately, professional caution intervened. She knew she didn’t want
that
media nightmare all over what was already a high-profile investigation. Besides, she knew that her real anger was down to the fact that the missing name had turned out to be nothing. They’d all wasted their time over a red herring and up at Cragruthes they were literally scrabbling in the dirt looking for a clue.

Her phone rang as she emerged on to the street, a light drizzle blowing towards her from the east. The display read DI Geddes.

‘This better be good news, Laura, because I just hit a brick wall here.’

‘Then allow me to shunt you back on to the track. We’ve found the shooter.’

Jasmine was waiting in the circle bar of the Theatre Royal, watching Sammy Finnegan and his wife enter for their pre-ordered interval drinks. He’d have been difficult to pick out if she hadn’t seen some recent photographs, as nothing about the man’s appearance said ‘drug dealer’. Indeed, it said it all that the pics were from the society pages of a glossy called
Caledonia Life
, captioned pap-snaps of the great and the good at a black-tie charity fundraiser held inside Kelvingrove Museum and Art Gallery. Not for him the ned-with-cash vulgarity, sun-lounger orange complexion and threads at least a decade too young for him.

In the course of her work Jasmine had seen a few of Glasgow’s bad boys made good, and those who had cultivated an air of respectability tended to look like retired boxers or football players: smartly dressed, nothing to prove to anybody any more but still carrying themselves with a certain bristling edge. Finnegan was known to be able to look after himself, but there were no exterior indicators. He looked like this was where he belonged. His wife did too. She was older than him, dressing elegantly for her age, no evidence of Botox or lip-filler. She looked very much at home, unselfconscious, double-kissing friends as Finnegan headed to the bar.

They were here for an RSC touring production of
Othello
. Jasmine had called her friend Michelle and got her to browse the Theatre Royal’s box-office database, hoping to get an address for Finnegan. Michelle was able to do better than that, informing her that he had bought two tickets for the touring show the following night. In the meantime Jasmine had put in a couple of shifts for Galt Linklater, some very boring bread-and-butter surveillance stuff. She’d spent the best part of two days sitting in a van watching a house, from which the subject never emerged. It could happen like that sometimes. On
one level it was easy money, but she felt the boredom all the more pronounced as it was like being in limbo, suspended in nothingness while she waited to resume her investigation into what had happened at Kildrachan House.

She knew that if Mrs Petrie suddenly phoned up to call it off she’d keep going anyway. She had a need for answers now, rendered all the more pronounced by having so many people evade, stall and outright lie to her. She wanted to know who had torched her car, or perhaps who had ordered it to happen, and not least because she wanted to be able to ram the facts of it down that arsehole polisman’s throat.

The fruitless surveillance had at least given her the time to make some calls to the UK Border Agency. She didn’t have an ‘in’ there, so she was wading through treacle in terms of negotiating the bureaucracy, but she had eventually spoken to someone who had agreed to delve into the archives on her behalf. Roni Simpson, aka Saffron, was a New Zealander, so there had to be record of her entering the UK. Given her well-travelled and rootless lifestyle, Jasmine was conscious she may well have left it again following her midnight flit from Balnavon, and she wanted that confirmed before she started looking in a haystack for a needle that had bailed thirty years ago. The bloke at the Border Agency said he’d see what he could do, but she wasn’t holding her breath.

She sidled up to her mark as he reached the bar, her mobile phone in hand.

‘Mr Finnegan?’ she asked brightly.

He turned, giving her a practised greeting smile, but she could see the flicker of uncertainty in his face provoked by his failing to recognise her. His eyes flitted to one side, perhaps checking for somebody. Fallan had said he would have back-up in the vicinity; nobody conspicuous, nor evidently in Finnegan’s company, but they would be watching. They’d be young, fit, game and probably tooled. She wondered what they made of having to sit through Shakespeare of an evening, but then their job wasn’t to watch the stage.

‘Yes?’ he replied, calm and curious, unthreatened by what he found before him. But that was why she was the ninja.

‘I think you should have a look at this email,’ she said, passing her phone to him.

It was addressed to Detective Superintendent Catherine McLeod, and CCed to several journalists, the subject header stating: ‘Society drug-dealer’s secret link to Hamish Queen’.

The body copy was prefaced by a list of bullet points summing up Finnegan’s involvement in the Glass Shoe Company, his clash with Tessa Garrion, his subsequent firing by Hamish Queen and the troubling fact that Tessa disappeared two days later and had never been seen since.

She could tell Finnegan was a past master at putting a calm face on things, a man who knew that giving way to his base emotions was an unaffordable indulgence, but he still looked rattled.

‘Who are you?’

She passed him a card with a name and address scribbled on the back.

‘My associate and I would like a wee chat after the show. We’ll be at this café-bar on Hope Street. And just so that you’re not tempted to do anything rash, that email is in an outbox scheduled to refresh in a few hours. We can’t stop it from sending if anything happens to us.’

He regained his composure, visibly relieved to learn that these things didn’t have to go public and the price was just some information.

‘A wee chat about what?’ he asked calmly, managing a cold smile.

‘Kildrachan. Summer of eighty-one. People don’t want to talk about this for some reason.’

‘Maybe it’s because it was the Scottish play,’ he replied sardonically.

‘Well, apologies for the ambush tactics, but I’m sick of being stonewalled. Enjoy the rest of the show.’

‘Could have been worse,’ he deadpanned. ‘You could have threatened to tell me the ending.’

Finnegan turned up at the basement café-bar less than ten minutes after final curtain, no longer accompanied by his wife. He appeared
to be unaccompanied by any wingmen either, but a smartly dressed man in his thirties had cased the place a minute or so before, John the Baptist to his Jesus Christ. Finnegan went to the counter, ordering a double espresso and a repeat of whatever the place’s only other two customers were drinking, then made his way across to their booth.

‘How was that ending?’ Jasmine asked as he sat down.

‘“Oh bloody period”,’ he quoted. She waited for a quip in keeping with the line’s capacity for juvenile amusement, but he didn’t seem in the mood for levity. Even if they hadn’t been shaking him down for information the man had, after all, just sat through
Othello
.

‘There’s part of me kind of wishes he’d never written it,’ Finnegan said. ‘I mean, there’s tragedy and then there’s
that
. One poisonous individual bringing out the worst in good people, spreading so much unnecessary suffering. I’ll always go, but I never look forward to it.’

Finnegan was definitely not what she was expecting. He wasn’t some player who had learned to talk the talk merely in order to blend in with his rarefied customer base. He lived this stuff. However, Glen had warned her that it would be catastrophic to mistake a degree of artistic sensitivity for weakness. Plenty were bound to have done before, and he wouldn’t be where he was if he hadn’t put them straight.

With that in mind she thought she’d best remind him that she had her own recourse should things turn less cordial.

‘This is my associate, Glen Fallan.’

Finnegan began instinctively extending a hand and then hesitated as the words hit home. The pause only lasted a fraction of a second, but they were all aware of it.

‘We never had the pleasure,’ Finnegan said, recovering to meet Fallan’s grip across the table. ‘But your reputation precedes you. And, rather confusingly, part of that reputation concerns you being dead for about twenty years.’

‘I got better.’

One of the bar staff brought their drinks. Finnegan took a sip of espresso and sat up straight.

‘So,’ he said, ‘what can I do for you?’

‘Tell us about Kildrachan,’ Jasmine replied.

‘Why don’t you tell me what you already know so that I don’t waste any time. I don’t want you being late back to wherever that email is waiting for a cancel command.’

‘We know you were there, ostensibly as Russell Darius’s construction carpenter, but mainly as his drug supplier.’

‘I would dispute the balance of that,’ he said, taking another sip of espresso. As far as she could tell, he wasn’t being facetious, and despite his awareness that he was on a clock, this was clearly a distinction he felt it important to make. ‘I spent a lot more time building sets than scoring dope.’

‘Nonetheless, I’m led to believe Tessa Garrion thought that the latter activity was impacting disproportionately on the entire production. You had what has been described as a stand-up row with her, after which Hamish Queen fired you. Two days after that, Tessa was gone and the police were investigating reports of someone dragging a body through the grounds of the house. Then, thirty years later, I start digging around these incidents and suddenly Hamish Queen is dead.’

‘I think even the Glasgow polis would consider that thin.’

‘So thin you came running here to prevent us sending that email.’

‘It wasn’t the polis I was worried about, and I’m sure you know that. My business relies upon discretion.’

‘You’re not denying what happened, though.’

‘Why would I? It’s true. Tessa and I did have our arguments, more than one. What’s thin is to imagine I’d be creeping about two days later, killing her in revenge for being given my cards. And as for what happened to poor Hamish, this is the first time I’ve heard it suggested the two things might be related. I’ve never killed anybody, Miss Sharp. Had to do a few things I’m not proud of to protect my interests, but never that. Not everybody at this table can say the same.’