When The Devil Drives (36 page)

He eyed Fallan warily as he took another sip of coffee, as though concerned he might have spoken out of turn. Jasmine noted that for all his measured composure and control, he was very defensive about his own sense of integrity. A man caught between worlds, able to move in the higher one but largely because of what he could bring from the realm beneath.

‘Tessa didn’t need Hamish to fight her battles,’ he said, almost in a hurry to put some distance on his last remark. ‘She was tougher than she looked, very driven. I didn’t like being painted as the bad guy, though. I was a convenient scapegoat for everybody’s excesses, and some were more excessive than others. She found it easier to blame me than to confront Darius. I called her bluff, though. She threatened to phone the police about the drugs and I said go ahead.’

‘Ballsy call,’ said Fallan. ‘Especially when the Highland plods would have found it very easy to railroad a wee Glesca keelie out of town rather than upset the laird’s son and his Oxbridge chums.’

‘A calculated risk,’ Finnegan replied. ‘I got the impression she was more concerned about the law than I was. One of her frequent complaints about the drugs was that they were going to bring the cops down on us all. I called it right: she backed down.’

‘And so she got Hamish to fire you instead,’ said Jasmine, watching carefully for what emotions his recollection might betray.

‘I didn’t bear Tessa a grudge. For one thing, I knew Hamish didn’t fire me because of her: he fired me to try to undermine Darius. They were always at loggerheads, and I reckon in his desperation Hamish convinced himself Darius could be reined in if he got rid of his drug-pushing blue-collar bad influence. It wasn’t me who was the problem, though. I wasn’t
pushing
drugs; that wasn’t why I went in the first place and it wasn’t why I stayed. I was happy enough to be involved with what was going on; I’d never been part of anything like it.’

He stared into his little white cup, a pleasant recollection turning sour like the last gritty dregs at the bottom.

‘When I was fired I wasn’t sad to get out of there. I’d had a good time, but we were well past the point where it stopped being fun. It was all coming to an end, anyone could see that, and it was a relief not to be witnessing the final throes, let me assure you. Darius was starting to scare the shit out of me.’

There it was again: the man with a redundant first name.

‘I notice you refer to him as Darius,’ Jasmine observed, ‘but you called Hamish and Tessa by their first names. Why is that?’

‘I called him Russell when I first knew him. Early days at
Kildrachan, I was still calling him Russell. But I was calling him Darius by the end, like everybody else. To his face, at least. Behind his back they started calling him Dangerous.’

‘Was there a kind of Smeagol/Gollum thing going on with him?’ Jasmine asked.

‘You could say that. Not a split personality, but there were definitely two sides he could choose to show you. Russell was the softer side, the name his mother called him, the name Tessa called him when she was trying to appeal to his better nature. Darius was what he got called at school and I think he embraced it as the name of his more public self. A face he could show to the world, a mask he could wear, and you can misbehave if you’re wearing a mask.’

‘Are we talking about drugs here, or something more?’

‘Let’s just say that Darius is the reason I don’t deal in hallucinogens, but it wasn’t the drugs per se, more what was driving his use of them. He was looking for something within, wondering what might be already hidden inside or what he might will into himself. He was obsessed with the idea of transformation, of different selves that could inhabit the same mind. Drugs were part of that, but not the whole. It was not so much what he was doing as the fact that it evidently wasn’t enough, so what was disturbing me was the worry of what he might do next.’

‘Was his behaviour increasingly erratic?’ Jasmine asked. ‘Volatile?’

‘Did he have a temper?’ queried Fallan.

‘Oh, he had a temper all right, as anyone who witnessed his battles with Hamish would attest, but no, he wasn’t erratic or volatile. He was driven, and that was worse, as far as I was concerned. I have to admit, this is more about me than about him. I liked being part of things at Kildrachan, but the place itself could creep me out sometimes. It was my childhood vision of a haunted house. Add to that the fact that we were spending all our days working on
that
play and the atmosphere could become infused. I’m not a superstitious person, but you spend all day thinking about “reeking wounds, horrible imaginings” and being “from the crown to the toe top-full of direst cruelty” then you don’t necessarily want to be spending your dark evenings with Darius.’

He stared at his cup again.

‘Do you want a refill?’ Jasmine asked.

‘No, I think I could use something stronger.’

He summoned the barman and ordered a large malt.

‘So who did want to spend their dark evenings with Darius?’ Fallan asked. ‘People don’t like to trip alone.’

‘Murray wasn’t averse to a bit of experimentation. Used to make me laugh whenever I saw him play that straight-edge Eliot Ness cipher on TV.’

‘Do you supply Murray Maxwell still?’ asked Fallan.

‘I won’t answer that question.’

‘That’s a yes.’

‘No, it’s an “I won’t answer that question”. You could ask me if I supply Alex Salmond and I’d give you the same response. If I answer it for one person, even in the negative, it compromises me for precisely the reason you’ve illustrated.’

‘“Reputation is an idle and most false imposition,”’ Jasmine quoted. ‘“Oft got without merit and lost without deserving.”’

Finnegan eyed her with a strange mixture of suspicion and admiration.

‘Iago,’ he identified. ‘But then, you were an actress, weren’t you. I Googled you. It came up in the Ramsay reports.’

‘I trained, didn’t finish. I was raised on Shakespeare, though. My late mother was an actress. She had a quote for every occasion.’

‘“Good name in man and woman, dear my lord, is the immediate jewel of their souls.” So if you’re looking for leverage to get Murray to talk, then my name plus Kildrachan should be enough. Especially for a man with designs on the top job at Scotia. He’ll cooperate to keep this quiet. It was thirty years ago, but it was acid. That never plays well.’

‘Anyone else?’

‘Yes, Saffron. She was up for anything. That said, she’d done a lot of drugs in her time so she had kind of seen the show before. She was as much attracted to the other stuff Darius was experimenting with: the rituals.’

Jasmine sat forward involuntarily, primed by her frustration at what Julian Sanquhar and Tormod McDonald had only alluded to.

‘It started off as a laugh – a makeshift Ouija board, chants and candles – but Darius kept taking it further. He was videotaping it all too. He was interested in the theatre of the ritual: of how ritual itself was empowering. He wanted to know what it could unlock within yourself to play certain things out. He was staging these affairs with as much care and planning as putting on a play; arguably more, given that Hamish kept ditching his more
Grand Guignol
stage effects from the production.’

Finnegan took a large mouthful of whisky, about half the glass, letting it play on his palate for a moment, seeming to savour the burn, like the pain of it might be medicinal. He winced a little as he swallowed.

‘I found it distasteful. I didn’t believe the mumbo-jumbo was going to summon anything, but what bothered me was this fascination with evil, with blood, with death. I’m with Mr Sanquhar on this. I don’t like horror movies and I’m instinctively suspicious of people who do.’

‘It’s not every day you encounter a squeamish drug dealer,’ said Fallan. ‘And a prudish one’s rarer still.’

Finnegan allowed himself a small smile, like he was taking Fallan’s remarks as a compliment.

‘I know all too well what people are capable of, and I know what
I’m
capable of. I’m not in denial or retreat from the darker aspects of human nature. But nor do I necessarily want to be reminded of them on a night out. I prefer work that allows me to contemplate how much more we can become, what we can aspire towards.

‘Darius was another little rich kid, same as Hamish and Julian, though not so old money. He never had a grounding in the everyday horrors you and I did, Mr Fallan, of growing up in places where violence can become almost banal. Darius can put an arterial spurt of blood on the screen because to him it’s just an image. He’d never been there to actually smell the stuff when somebody got glassed. It’s easier to fascinate upon it when it’s at a remove. Horror is an escapism for him, just as beauty became an escapism for me.’

‘Would you say he was seduced by the idea of evil?’ Jasmine asked, thinking of the escalating process Sanquhar had described.

When there is a wanton will in man to seek the darkness, then there is something out there that listens, and it whispers back
.

‘The idea, yes: inasmuch as it was a nebulous concept he was too naive to understand. He was seduced by the idea of notoriety too, another little-rich-kid misbegotten aspiration, something he thought he wanted right up until the point when he got it. Notoriety is not such a desirable thing to actually
have
, as myself and Mr Fallan here could attest. Darius learned about that the hard way.’

‘How?’

Finnegan shifted a little in his chair, stealing a glance at his watch, his thoughts still partly on that outbox.

‘It was early in his movie-making career,’ he said, ‘maybe around the time of his second picture coming out. He was living in London in those days, trying to make a name for himself, get noticed. He gave an interview to some foreign underground horror cinema magazine – German, maybe, or Italian – in which he said he was in possession of a snuff movie. The journalist might even have claimed to have seen it, I can’t remember. It gave him a certain cachet anyway, among film-makers and audiences alike. The more you’re in touch with the darkness, the more scary a person you’re perceived to be, then the scarier your movies are going to seem. That was the logic, and it worked for him for a while, but there was a sting in the tail, in the shape of the video-nasties hysteria. You’re too young to remember this, but it had the British tabloids in their element.’

‘I remember it,’ said Fallan with a curious smile. ‘Served me well, in fact. A friend and I had a pirate-video rental racket going on, a dial-a-film deal: used to drive them around to folk’s houses in this dilapidated van. The tabloids were in a state of high dudgeon and suddenly all these cheesy old horror movies nobody previously wanted to rent were like gold dust because the press were demanding they be banned.’

‘It was a convenient distraction for the Thatcher government too,’ Finnegan added. ‘Nothing like a moral panic to take people’s minds off mass unemployment and riots on the streets. I’ll admit I have my own reservations about these films, but I also know what it is to
have the authorities decide what you’re selling for other people’s private recreation is a gross threat to the moral order.’

This was met with a wry smile from Fallan, something Finnegan acknowledged by briefly tipping his glass to him before taking another sip.

‘There was a witch-hunt, and inevitably in the midst of it some hack stumbled upon this foreign article about Darius. The Department of Public Prosecutions had already got involved in the fiasco, so suddenly he had Scotland Yard kicking his door in, searching for this snuff movie.’

‘Did they find anything?’ asked Jasmine.

‘Of course not,’ Finnegan scorned. ‘These days you can find executions and beheadings and all manner of real death with a few clicks of a mouse. Back then, though, the myth of the snuff movie was one of the things that helped drive the hysteria: people are being killed for entertainment! But for all the raids and confiscations, funnily enough, nobody ever produced one in court.

‘That didn’t bother the tabloids, of course. Darius ended up their poster-boy for everything that was evil and depraved about the video nasties. That’s why he doesn’t give interviews and won’t be returning your calls. He got the notoriety he had wished for and found he couldn’t live with it. He went off to make movies in America after that.’

‘Does he still live there?’ Jasmine asked, aware that this would take him out of the equation for recent events.

‘No, he lives down in the Lake District, I believe, out in the wilds.’

‘For the privacy,’ Jasmine suggested.

‘Yes. That and the fur and feathers. I gather his time in the States made him very adept at the hunting and shooting.’

The weapon sat isolated on a sterile worksurface in the forensics lab, like the table was a display plinth for the world’s ugliest cultural artefact. It was a sculpture in black metal, a little over a metre long, resting on bipod legs and a spike at the rear, a study in lethality from its butt to its muzzle. It even looked dangerous to brush against, the serrations of the picatinny and forend rails above and below the barrel looking like razor wire.

‘We found it in the river,’ Laura had explained. ‘About a quarter of a mile from the layby where Andy Philips saw the Range Rover.’

‘Someone was sharp-eyed,’ Catherine replied.

‘Jammy too. The hydroelectric power station a few miles upstream was undergoing a maintenance procedure and they dammed off the water. The river level dropped two or three feet as a result; less churned up as well, so the riverbed was visible. You’d normally see nothing.’

Finally they had caught a break. Now she was going to find out whether it could tell them anything and, given how this case had panned out so far, she wasn’t taking that for granted.

At her request she had been met at the lab by Sergeant Mark Brooks, who had instructed her when she did her firearms training. As well as a police marksman and instructor, he was also the resident weapons anorak, all of which added to the incongruity of Catherine’s previous contact with him outside the job. His two daughters, Amy and Rosie, had gone to the same nursery as Duncan and Fraser. It was going back a few years now, though it felt like a heartbeat. She hadn’t seen Amy and Rosie since Fraser started primary school, but the sight of Mark in civvies, these two delicate little princesses clambering all over him in their lilac-print dresses, was about as far removed as she could imagine from the world of the device that sat before them right now.