Where the Bodies are Buried (3 page)

‘Yes, but I got mixed up, and the first one, Hayley Williams …’

‘You mean William Hayley,’ he said, almost helpfully.

‘William Hayley, yes, I shouldn’t have been asking about him here, because he lives in Hyndland and that’s where I’m going
next.’

‘After you’ve tracked down your flatmate’s boyfriend.’

Jasmine’s throat went so dry, she couldn’t even mumble a mortified ‘yes’. It must have been the fierce heat radiating from
her cheeks that parched her.

‘Peter Harper, you said his name was?’

She nodded meekly.

‘Never heard of him,’ Harper said, then slammed the door.

Jasmine pulled over into a permit-holders-only space, figuring that a parking ticket constituted a low level of collateral
damage compared to her track record.

‘Delta Seven. Subject just walked past as I was getting out of my car and gave me a definite funny.’

‘Are you burned?’

‘Just a bit warm. I avoided eye contact, but I’ll need to hang well back. Need you to get eyeball ASAP. Subject is walking
still walking along Ruthven Lane in the direction of Great George Street.’

‘Copy that.’

‘You mean yes yes.’

‘Sorry sorry,’ she offered.

Jasmine felt her legs become heavier as she spoke, precipitately burdened by so much responsibility. The subject had looked
at Jim, given him a ‘funny’, and they could not afford to let this guy know he was under surveillance. It was all on her now.
Jim wasn’t burned – the subject hadn’t sussed that he was being tailed – but he would have to keep sufficient distance now
that this was effectively a one-woman follow.

‘It was a partial establish,’ Jim had assured her on Monday as she blubbed in the passenger seat of his Peugeot, parked around
the corner from the Partick tenement where she had so comprehensively failed to get Peter Harper to acknowledge his own name,
while all but spelling out to him that he was under surveillance.

‘We’ve confirmed where he’s living, at least,’ he went on. ‘Albeit he’ll probably now only be living there for the time it’ll
take to pack a bag and make a few phone calls.’

He gave her a smile, letting her know that he was saying this in good humour, although he wasn’t joking.

‘I’m so sorry,’ she told him.

She had fallen apart the moment Harper looked at her. It reminded her of the first time she got called upon by her teacher
to answer a question in primary school. The establish hadn’t gone quite as badly as that, but it clearly wasn’t a great result
when the best thing she could say about it was that at least this time she didn’t pee herself.

Didn’t say much for her acting aspirations either. For what was the job Jim had set her, if not acting? For goodness’ sake,
it was one of the fig leaves he had given her in order that they could both pretend this wasn’t a charity gig: that he needed
someone who could act. He’d even provided a script. Unfortunately, Pete Harper took about half a second to penetrate the fourth
wall, and nothing she had learned in college was able to rescue her.

‘Don’t worry about it,’ Jim assured her, handing her a bunch of paper hankies. ‘It’s early days. Nobody just clicks into this
first time.’

Poor Jim. He was so kind, so generous and so fooling nobody. He kept claiming he needed her, but it was obvious that if he
genuinely did need an assistant, he’d be better with a personnel deficit than with Jasmine on board. She was the one who needed
him: since her mum died, she’d had nobody else.

‘Delta Seven. Subject is walking still walking, approaching Cresswell Lane, and I am struggling to maintain line of sight.
Do you have eyeball?’

‘Yes yes,’ she confirmed, having just turned the corner back on to Great George Street.

Following her mother’s death, Jasmine had spent months living in a state of numb subsistence, losing track of the hours, the
days and even the weeks. She barely left the house and ceased to function according to normal rhythms, finding herself staring
into darkness on the living-room settee far into the night and sound asleep on it throughout the day. She gave no thought
to the future, unable to visualise herself doing anything other than crying, sleeping and staring into the unanswering blackness.

At times she could barely remember being the girl who had once
known what she wanted to do with all the life that was in front of her. Or rather, she could recall the memories, but they
felt like they had belonged to someone else. She felt utterly disconnected from that person, as though she had died too and
now Jasmine was this other being who only shared her past, not her path to the future. In this respect, she believed bereavement
must be easier if you had a job, a career, a husband and kids, as all those clichés about life going on would apply. There
would be a template for how to spend your days: commitments and obligations to supersede the desire to pull the covers back
over your head and stay in bed for ever. You’d know what to do, even if you didn’t much feel like doing it.

She didn’t have a life yet. There was no saddle for her to get back into.

Jasmine had just started her final year at drama college when Mum got her shocking, unreal diagnosis. Pancreatic cancer: late-presenting,
fast-spreading.

Jasmine never knew her father. He had died when she was just a baby, and her mum had never married, never even lived with
anyone else. They only had each other, and suddenly they only had months left together.

Jasmine dropped out. She had to move back in with Mum in Edinburgh, had to be close, had to be home. She didn’t think about
her education or her ambitions. They became instantly irrelevant, abandoned as unnecessary baggage she could not afford to
carry on this most arduous of journeys.

When she contemplated them again, after Mum was gone, it was like happening upon a box of toys that had meant a world of pleasure
and possibility to her as a child, but held no appeal to an adult harshly schooled in the realities of the world. The same
strangeness had assailed her when she re-entered her flat back in Glasgow, the trappings of the existence she had suddenly
suspended all still right where she left them: the
Mary Celeste
two flights up on Victoria Road.

Very gradually, however, she had begun to accept that, despite her devastation, she was nonetheless a twenty-year-old woman
who needed to construct some kind of life for herself. As well as the long-term future, there were the immediate practical
considerations of earning a wage and paying the rent. Mum wasn’t there any more to hold her hand and wipe her tears. Even
if she had been, this was the point
when she had to make her own way in the world, and it struck her harshly that her previous choices had left her in a position
whereby there were very few things she was cut out or qualified to do. Acting, therefore, quickly recovered its lustre, though
she ceased thinking in terms of vague, dreamy ambitions and more in terms of a purposeful way to fill her days and score a
pay cheque at the end of them.

Good job for her nobody else had the same genius idea.

‘Foxtrot Five confirms the eyeball. Subject is walking still walking along Cresswell Lane in no apparent hurry. Stopping to
look in a shop window ahead.’

‘He’s probably looking out for me. Overtake him if you have to, then pause for some window-shopping yourself.’

‘Foxtrot Five. Yes yes.’

She halted and stared into the window of a craft and jewellery shop, her focus on the reflections in the glass rather than
the goods beyond it. She was angled so that she could see the subject, but caught a glimpse of herself, one of those sideways
snapshots that reveals all the more for its brevity and obliqueness. She was attired as smartly as Jim insisted, in a jacket
and trousers like some proper, grown-up professional, but all she could see was a little girl dressing up as something she
was not, for play. Short, slight, a little underfed of late, the clothes wearing her rather than the other way around. Her
hair was swept back by an Alice band for better peripheral vision, but at a cost of more starkly exposing her face, the myriad
sun-prompted freckles upon it making her look about thirteen. She was twenty. When she
was
thirteen, she thought she’d be looking back at a woman’s face, something more like her mum’s: not this eternal teenager who
was going to get carded in pubs until the year 2020.

The subject started moving again, albeit at a dawdling pace, Jasmine about fifteen yards behind. Walking down the street alone,
ostensibly talking to herself, she was grateful for the advent of Bluetooth and hands-free kits, wondering how her predecessors
remained inconspicuous on a follow while updating their colleagues over the radio.

Foxtrot Five: that was the call sign Jim had given her. It was in reference to her birthday, February fifth, but it had taken
on a different significance for Jasmine. It made her think of
Fox Force Five,
the cancelled TV pilot mentioned by Uma Thurman’s character Mia in
Pulp Fiction.
It had been aspiring actress Mia’s one and only role: the big break that came to nothing.

The reality of finding work had nagged at the back of her mind at college, as it did everybody, but it was always a worry
for the future, something she couldn’t afford to dwell upon, otherwise what was the point of training?

Dropping out of the course hadn’t done much to help her chances. Nonetheless, failing to finish a drama degree wasn’t like
dropping out of medical school: if somebody liked her audition, they weren’t going to ask to see any certificates. The problem
was, by dropping out of college she had also dropped off the radar, losing touch and losing contacts. People had heard what
happened – yes, poor girl – but they didn’t just think she had quit her course: they seemed to regard her as having dropped
out of existence, given up for good.

It was slow going to even get auditions. You had to be animated beyond the point of pushy in your networking in order to know
where the openings might be. So far she had notched up four callbacks but no jobs.

The only glimmer of light was a director called Charlotte Queen and her company, Fire Curtain. Jasmine had got a callback
from Charlotte after auditioning for Fire Curtain’s touring production of
Top Girls.
She didn’t get the part, but Charlotte said she might be right for Miranda in the production of
The Tempest
that they were planning for the Edinburgh Fringe in a year’s time. Okay, it would probably be in a converted garage in Newington,
but it was more true of acting than any other job that it was easier to get work when you were in work. If she got the part,
then as well as a pay packet, it was four weeks of exposure, increasing the chance that someone might see her and think she’d
be right for another role.

Charlotte Queen was already something of a legend in Scottish theatre. She had dropped out of drama school too, though in
her case it wasn’t personal tragedy that precipitated her exit, but impatience, as she told interviewers. She felt restricted,
she claimed, and decided to start her own company at the age of twenty-two. She was, by all accounts, a force of nature, though
some observers noted that it didn’t hurt that her dad was Hamish Queen, London West End director and impresario: meaning she
was as connected as she was rich. That said, Charlotte had easier paths open to her that she decided not to take. She had
partly grown up at her family’s Highland retreat, where she saw touring shows by the RSC playing in local community centres
and sports halls. She reasoned that the local
punters weren’t simply turning out because it was the RSC. To an extent they were, but only because the brand guaranteed certain
production values. Charlotte believed there was an untapped provincial audience for live theatre, and after a shaky start
she was vindicated, as Fire Curtain became a popular and critically esteemed touring outfit.

Jasmine knew it was a big deal to have made any kind of impression on Charlotte. She was reputed to be flaky, capricious and
egotistical, but if she took to you, she would draw out the best of your abilities and make you look brilliant on stage. It
was said she truly valued her actors, made them feel magnificent, but that their job was always to be remarkable planets in
orbit around her sun; that she had an indisputable eye for recognising talents, but only insofar as envisioning how they would
augment her own. Jasmine didn’t care. Getting an audition for Fire Curtain had been a boost, getting a callback massive, and
the possibility of a part in their Fringe show so tantalising that she couldn’t allow herself to think about it past ten at
night or she would never get to sleep.

However, it was only a maybe, and it was a maybe for
next
August. She had to get real about the here and now, which was where Uncle Jim had stepped in.

Jim was her mum’s cousin, so not strictly speaking Jasmine’s uncle, but that was what she had called him since toddlerhood.
He and Mum had always been close, but not exactly in each other’s lives all the time. Nobody was in Jim’s life, in fact, largely
down to him letting it become consumed by work. His police career had contributed greatly to the break-up of his marriage,
and when he got maudlin after a few whiskies, he would confess to having failed his wife and in particular his three kids
by always being busy at work when he should have been there for them. He was a grandfather now, five times over, and had vowed
to make himself more available to help out looking after the young ones, but the demands of running a one-man business had
him breaking his promises all over again.

It was therefore a double-edged attempt to do the right thing that had led him to employ Jasmine. He knew she needed a job
and he deeply wanted to help out in his cousin Beth’s absence. If he could train her up, he explained, then once she got the
stabilisers off, it would free him up more often to see his family.

It was an honourable sentiment, Jasmine thought, and a far more
convincing way of selling the job to her than his claim that an out-of-work actress with no experience was just what his business
was lacking.