Where the Bodies are Buried (32 page)

‘I did something wrong,’ she said. ‘Something I shouldn’t have, but a victimless crime, you could say. Nobody would have needed
to know, nobody would be any the wiser, eh?’

‘Except?’ Catherine prompted.

‘Except that it meant I found something out, and I now cannae say what without saying how.’

It was like talking to Duncan or Fraser. Promising them they wouldn’t get into trouble because you needed to know, but aware
that a sanction might nonetheless be obligatory.

‘Come on, you can tell me. You’re halfway there.’

Laura made a nervous face, a change at least from the gloomy one that had permeated her day.

‘It was Thursday morning, at that café. After Cairns got his call. You remember you went outside to get a better signal, eh?’

‘Sure,’ Catherine encouraged. It was less about the signal and more about the background noise in the busy café. It had been
her job to call Scotrail to order the closure of the station and demand that they stop the trains: not something you could
afford any ambiguity over resulting from a clatter of crockery or a shriek of laughter in the background, nor something you
wanted to sound like a half-arsed idea you’d just had over a bacon roll and a double espresso.

‘Well, while you were out there, Cairns nipped to the toilet before all the action kicked off. He left his phone on the table.’

Laura bit her lip.

They both knew the next part. She didn’t have to spell it out, though she did feel she had to excuse it.

‘You’d said to me a few minutes before, you know, what you wouldn’t give for that number.’

Catherine withheld a host of unhelpful responses, grateful again to her sons for training her to handle such situations.

‘I know it was wrong, I don’t need any lectures on the ethics of it. It’s just I feel like I’ve been treading water since
I got here. Not living up to anybody’s expectations. I needed something in my locker. I wanted to be able to pull a rabbit
from a hat, eh? Of course, soon after, I realised it was a bloody stupid thing to do, not least because this was a rabbit
I couldn’t show to anybody. But the thing is, I need to show it to you. I saw the report on Tommy Miller yesterday, and the
mobile number listed as being his wasn’t the one that called Cairns.’

‘Did you get a name?

‘No, I just looked up the last incoming call. The phone hadn’t identified it as an established contact: just a number.’

Catherine felt the familiar relief of recognising a squall unlikely to
escape the bounds of its teacup. She wouldn’t be leaving her mobile lying about near Laura, right enough, but still, there
was a simple enough explanation.

‘It’s most likely Miller had more than one mobile,’ she reasoned. ‘Especially if he was playing so many angles.’

‘It’s not so likely he would have been picking up last night, though, eh?’

Catherine felt her eyes bulge.

‘I tried the number from my desk,’ Laura confirmed. ‘Got a hello. I asked, “Who is this?” and they hung up right away.’

‘But Miller was definitely Cairns’ source. Abercorn confirmed they knew he was touting to Locust as well as to Bob.’

‘I don’t doubt he was. But that’s not who phoned Cairns while we were with him in that café on Thursday morning.’

Catherine’s head was starting to implode. If Cairns had a second informant in play, it was a very fly move to let everyone
believe his source was Miller: what better way, in fact, to protect the remaining one than by making people think his info
came from elsewhere? But if it wasn’t Miller who tipped off Cairns about the shipment, how come Miller’s pal Whitaker was
in place ready to tan the jeweller’s?

‘I
am
sorry,’ Laura intoned sincerely. ‘I’m not habitually sneaky, just a daft moment of impulse. I didn’t feel I’d got off to
a very good start here in Glasgow, but this is hardly gaunny rectify that, eh?’

Catherine could see tears forming in her eyes.

‘You’re doing fine. What gave you the idea you’ve made a poor impression?’

‘Just … low confidence, I suppose. Not feeling quite myself.’

‘Is it the change of city? Why did you apply for a transfer?’

Laura paused, longer than it had taken her to fess up to snooping Cairns’ phone.

‘Bad break-up,’ she said.

Catherine could tell the brevity was down to knowing she could only get out a few words at a time without crying.

‘Bad relationship.’

There was bitterness to this second issue: self-doubt, regret, pain, and so much anger.

Laura looked her in the eye, just for a quarter of a second: long enough to let her see it.

Catherine reached out a hand and clasped it around Laura’s clenched fist.

‘You’re doing fine, hen,’ she said quietly. ‘You’re doing fine.’

Then the windscreen shattered.

Catherine shuddered bodily in fright as thousands of pieces of glass suddenly filled the air around them. She looked briefly
at Laura, then behind, aware that the rear windscreen had gone too.

She caught a microsecond’s glimpse of a man in a mask levelling a pistol through the rolled-down window of a red car, then
ducked as he pulled the trigger again.

They flattened themselves as low as they could across the front seats, hearing further rounds zip above their heads, pinging
into metal and smashing the side windows. The Rover lurched on its suspension cradle as two of the tyres were hit, then she
heard the gunning of an engine and the squeal of rubber on tarmac.

Catherine was shaking with fear, pinned to the seat as though the earth had swapped its gravity for Jupiter’s, but she knew
she had to garner what she could witness from the retreat. She forced her head up in time to see the car for a second before
it disappeared around the corner and was lost.

It was enough to notice two things. One, that the number plate had been taped over, and two, that it was a nineties-model
Honda Civic.

They were met in the reception area of the Scottish Gas building on Maxwell Road by a man in a light-grey suit who introduced
himself as Eric McGranahan, head of the Industrial and Commercial department. He was quiet-spoken and friendly, striking Jasmine
as a man at ease with himself, a species that had proven thin on the ground in recent days. He looked early sixties, around
Jim’s age, so it was no great surprise (though privately a little sad) for Jasmine to learn that he and Jim were old friends.

‘Jasmine
Sharp?’
he emphasised when she gave her name.

‘Yes. Jim was my uncle. Well, my mum’s cousin.’

‘Was?’
he asked, looking momentarily concerned.

‘I just mean, my mum’s no longer with us,’ Jasmine clarified, retrieving the situation.

‘Oh aye, I think Jim mentioned that. I’m sorry.’

‘Sure.’

‘Would have been around the turn of the year?’

Jasmine nodded. He was out by a couple of months, but she felt that if she spoke right now, her voice would choke up.

‘Aye, last time I saw Jim must have been not long after. It’s one of those things, you always mean to get together more often,
but what with work and everything … and b’Christ, you know what Jim’s like with work.’

Jasmine gave him a smile of recognition, some little part of her still daring to hope that they were wrong about all of this
and that she’d see Jim again one day soon.

McGranahan escorted them up to the Industrial and Commercial department, which was situated on the third floor. The layout
was mostly open-plan, stretching from the western outer wall to the eastern, with a row of enclosed rooms running the length
of the building, partitioned off with aluminium and glass. McGranahan had his own private office in one of these, but he led
them past it to a double-width apartment four doors along. It had a white screen on one wall
and a data projector suspended from the ceiling towards the other end. Glass ran the length of the room, affording a view
into the open-plan area, with venetian blinds providing the option of darkness and privacy. Opposite the glass on the windowless
facing wall was a deep cabinet split horizontally, an arrangement that reminded Jasmine of the poster bins in a card shop.
The top half displayed dozens of large frames, hinged for browsing, and the bottom half a grid of pigeonholes, each containing
a rolled-up document. The office also accommodated a light-table, a photocopier and two very wide desks, upon one of which
sat eight cardboard tubes.

‘This is the map room,’ McGranahan explained. ‘It’s a bit of a relic now that everything’s all computers and sat nav, but
knowing us, it’ll be another ten years before we get around to finding another use for it.’

He nodded towards the room-length cabinet.

‘We’ll probably donate that lot to the People’s Palace or some other museum.’

‘What are they?’ Jasmine asked. She could only see the outside edges of the frames, but the one at the front looked like a
map.

‘Street maps of Glasgow. The ones on top denote the sections of the grid, and in the corresponding boxes underneath are the
bigger-scale equivalents, showing the layout of all the gas mains. There’s multiple versions of most of them, going back fifty-odd
years, showing where the street layouts have changed.’

Ingrams wandered over to the desk bearing the cardboard tubes.

‘Are these the images?’ he asked.

‘That’s them, aye. I had our poor secretary Josephine down in the bowels of the building looking them out. I couldn’t believe
how long it had been since we started doing them. If you’d asked, I’d have guessed ten years ago. It’s actually more than
thirty, though Jim only wanted the first two.’

‘What exactly are they?’ Jasmine asked.

McGranahan walked over beside Ingrams and popped a red stopper from one of the tubes, pulling a rolled-up sheet of glossy
paper from inside. He unrolled it and laid it out flat, which was when Jasmine noticed the sliding clamps at the edges of
each table, there to hold such large documents in place.

The sheet was roughly a foot and a half deep by four feet wide, and upon it were four dark horizontal strips, each running
almost the full width of the document. When Jasmine stepped closer, she saw
that they were black-and-white aerial photographs, but something about them was very odd. They were almost like negatives,
so much blackness dominating the image.

‘They’re an infrared aerial survey of the Glasgow area, taken in overlapping latitudinal strips. We do them every five years.
It lets us identify premises that are losing heat, which shows up as white on the photographs. If they’re a customer, we advise
them on ways to reduce this and burn less gas.’

‘Is that not a bit turkeys-voting-for-Christmas?’ Ingrams suggested.

McGranahan smiled.

‘Aye, if you were to look at it purely on a raging capitalist running-dog level.’

‘But I suppose this was before “Tell Sid”.’

‘Then or now, waste is never good business.’

‘Did you say it was
two
surveys Jim requested?’ Ingrams asked.

‘Aye. Four of these sheets per survey. Each one took four or five nights’ flying to complete. There’s minor inconsistencies
because of small temperature variations, but you can only see it if you look closely at the overlaps. They do them at the
same time of year, for purposes of comparison. Always December. Needs clear nights, so the view isn’t occluded, and cold so
that you get a stronger heat contrast. The red-stoppered ones are the first survey, from December 1978, green stoppers are
the second, from December 1983.’

Jasmine and Ingrams shared a look. These were the two surveys taken either side of the Ramsays’ disappearance. One five years
before, the other four months after.

‘Did Jim happen to say why he was interested in them?’ Jasmine asked. ‘It’s just, he only mentioned to us to pick them up
if you called while he was away.’

‘No, he didn’t. I’m curious myself. He phoned last week to ask, first time I’d spoken to him in months. When I asked what
he wanted with them, he said it was one of those things he could only tell me about once it was concluded. He did promise
he’d be doing that over a few pints, but he was definitely being a bit coy, which only served to pique my more morbid suspicions.’

‘What’s there to be morbid about?’

‘Now, I don’t want to be giving away my dark secrets,’ McGranahan said with a teasing smile, which betrayed that he’d be crushingly
disappointed if they weren’t interested in him doing just that. ‘I remember
telling Jim about these once, being my rather pitiful offering in response to all the gruesome stories he was able to tell
me about his time in the polis.’

He began scanning the strips, his eyes moving left to right. He didn’t point with his finger, but it was clear that he had
found whatever he was looking for.

‘Identifying the properties on here is a real pain in the arse. You’ve got to cross-refer with the maps and cross-refer again
with the records to find out an exact address and whether they’re a customer. You’re talking about thousands of properties.
So back in the early days, we’d save it until the summer and get a student in to do it as a holiday job. Summer of’89, the
young guy we had in examining the 1988 survey was a right warped individual who happened to notice this.’

McGranahan reached into a drawer below the desk and produced a huge magnifier, the glass inset on plastic runners for sliding
back and forth. He placed it over a section of one of the strips and stepped back to let them view it. In the centre, Jasmine
could see a grid of tiny white vertical lines, set in six or seven long horizontal rows.

‘What is it?’ she asked.

McGranahan gave her a wicked grin.

‘The Necropolis.’

‘I imagine I’d be underselling it if I said you could probably do with a drink,’ ventured Sunderland.

He was waiting outside her office when she got back from being checked out by Samira Arora, the police casualty surgeon. It
was purely procedure, a cursory once-over that would normally have been carried out by the station’s first-aid officer, but
Samira was in the building anyway, and everybody was in a bit of a froth. The only injury Catherine had sustained in the shooting
was a bruise to the elbow where she’d rattled it off the handbrake when she dived for cover.