Where the Bodies are Buried (40 page)

‘Never mind,’ Jasmine said, glancing towards Wilson. ‘It can wait.’

Catherine wondered why the girl hadn’t made the connection before, then realised they had never referred to him by his surname.
Nobody ever did: he was Fletcher or Fletch to everybody on the force.

Wilson looked grateful for the interruption; all good lawyers knew how to benefit from a recess when they were in a hole.
This was one even he wasn’t digging himself out of, however.

‘Fletcher came to see me in the middle of the night. I thought someone had died. Well, they had, but not the person I was
told. Fletcher said some young girl had taken an overdose, some poor junkie, and they’d found a baby in the flat. He told
me the child was barely a week old, that the girl had delivered it at home, out of her box on smack, and had only left the
house after that to score. The birth had never been registered. The mother was dead and nobody knew about the baby.

‘He said they could fix it so that the baby was registered as ours and nobody would ever know otherwise. It would go to a
good home and we’d have a son and we’d never have to have that talk. He’d never need to know he was adopted and we’d never
need to worry about someone else knowing and telling him. Amazing how simple it looks when it’s the middle of the night and
you’re desperate and deluded.’

‘Weren’t you concerned that people would notice your wife hadn’t been pregnant?’ Catherine asked.

‘Wilma hadn’t been out much in a long time,’ he said. ‘As I mentioned, she had become very withdrawn, very depressed. And
very much larger. I believe they call it “comfort-eating” these days. That night, she came downstairs when she heard us talking.
When Fletcher told her, she didn’t need asking twice. We didn’t think we were doing anything more wrong than skipping the
queue, bypassing the red tape of the adoption procedure.’

‘When did you find out otherwise?’

‘By the end of the week, the story was all over the news about the Ramsays. I tried to deny it for a while, told myself it
was a coincidence,
but inside, I knew. I dug around discreetly, found no record of any woman dying from an overdose that night or even that week.’

‘Did you challenge Fletcher?’

‘Delicately. He eventually admitted there had been no dead junkie, but he said it wouldn’t benefit me to know more. “We’re
just making the best of something that can’t be changed.” That was how he put it. I left it at that; I knew he was right.
I didn’t want to know more, and it
couldn’t
be changed. I couldn’t take the baby back from Wilma by that point, and I never told her. It was my burden to carry.’

‘Put you in a compromising position, though, didn’t it?’ Catherine suggested. ‘Police officers knowing this about you.’

He shook his head ruefully.

‘No. I was the one who had power over
them.
At worst, all I had done was participate in an illegal adoption. I don’t know what happened to the Ramsays, but I knew Fletcher
and his colleagues had more to lose if the truth ever emerged; not that I would ever have allowed that to happen. It would
have been devastating to Wilma and, as time went on, to Dominic.’

‘Is this why the police were so understanding during Dominic’s wild years?’ Catherine asked. ‘Were strings being pulled, favours
called in?’

‘I wasn’t leaning on anybody, not with this. I think Fletcher and certain others felt a responsibility towards Dominic, hence
their intercessions. There was certainly plenty of guilt to go round. It was my fault Dominic was off the rails, though. It
wasn’t an easy burden to carry sometimes. You say it won’t matter that he’s not your own blood, and it doesn’t, it really
doesn’t, but when you’re under stress, you can think unworthy thoughts. There was often tension between us, and I’d vacillate
between riding him hard and overindulging him out of guilt.

‘You might think there’s a certain irony in that he took measures to distance himself from me, publicly rejecting me, in fact.
Maybe there is, but that doesn’t make it hurt any less. We’ve actually been getting on much better these past couple of years,
since his mother … since Wilma died. I think he’d also come to realise that this game isn’t as morally simple as he used
to believe.’

‘Why didn’t the police just leave the baby on a doorstep, or at the hospital?’ Jasmine asked.

‘Because it would have been investigated,’ Catherine replied. ‘Connections would have been made. Stephen Ramsay’s parents
would
probably have been able to identify the child. This way, Charlie Ramsay effectively disappeared from history.’

‘Until now,’ Jasmine stated, causing Wilson to visibly wince. ‘Until my uncle found out the truth. What happened to him?’

‘I thought I had dodged a bullet,’ Wilson said. ‘I saw the piece in the paper a couple of weeks back, about Anne Ramsay hiring
a detective. Not long after that, this Jim Sharp bloke called up and asked if he could come in for a chat. I knew what it
was about, and naturally I feared the worst. I called Fletcher to let him know. He told me it would be okay: that this detective
was an ex-cop and he would have a word, straighten it out. I assumed he had, as I never heard from Sharp again.’

‘Neither did we,’ said Jasmine darkly.

‘Can we trust Wilson not to go and act on this?’Jasmine asked anxiously. ‘He could be making phone calls right now.’

They had adjourned to a nearby bar and restaurant on St Vincent Street where Abercorn had advised they could get a private
room. Jasmine had gone there once for lunch, celebrating the end of term. She’d spent far more than she could afford because
they were divvying up the bill, and Charlotte Queen had been in the group. Jasmine would have been happy with a bowl of pasta
and a pear cider, but Charlotte had been ordering oysters and champagne, forgetting that not everybody’s daddy was a millionaire;
and that not everybody even had a daddy.

Jasmine knew so little about hers, only that he was dead. Her mum wouldn’t talk about him, and steadfastly discouraged the
subject. The most she would say when asked was that she had made some big mistakes from which she was lucky to escape, and
that having Jasmine had been her salvation. ‘My gift from God,’ Mum always called her, even though she wasn’t religious.

Jasmine had tried to piece together a picture from sparse and sketchy clues: overheard remarks among relatives, unguarded
things her mum had said either in distracted moments or later, when the drugs were taking hold, though in those instances,
disinhibition had to be balanced against unreliability. All she knew was that her mum had grown up in a bad area of Glasgow
and allowed herself to become involved with some dangerous people on the rationale that if she was in their camp, they would
protect her from other dangerous people. She had relocated to Edinburgh while pregnant with Jasmine, in order to make a fresh
start. Like Jasmine, she had trained to be an actress, but had settled for the role of drama teacher and, of course, mother.

‘I trust him,’ said Catherine. ‘He can’t contain this, but if he wants some control over when it breaks, and the chance to
sit down with his son in the meantime, then he’ll cooperate.’

Catherine was trying to look reassuring, but Jasmine felt instinctively
wary. The policewoman had always been civil enough towards her, but this constant sense of latent hostility emanating from
her towards Fallan all but crackled like ozone in the air, and Jasmine couldn’t help feeling some of that was coming her way
by association.

‘Cooperate is pushing it,’ said Abercorn. ‘He’ll comply, but he won’t do anything to assist us unless it helps keep him in
the clear.’

‘No doubt,’ Catherine agreed. ‘But at least he’ll be neutral. The one good thing about him being a material witness is that
at least it won’t be him defending the bastards when we get them to court.’

‘We’re a long way from that yet,’ Abercorn cautioned. He turned towards Jasmine. ‘What were you going to tell us about Fletcher?’
he asked.

‘He came to the office last Tuesday,’ she replied, ‘saying he had heard about my missing-person report, and he was looking
into it because he knew Jim from the job. The thing is, now that I remember, he seemed to get a bit of a fright when he first
entered, like he was surprised to find me there.’

‘He was coming to tan the place,’ Fallan opined. ‘Clear out the files connecting Jim to the Ramsays. He – or one of them anyway
– came back and finished the job once you were gone.’

‘His manner was odd, too,’ Jasmine said. ‘Very serious, full of a thousand questions, then all of a sudden getting flippant
and telling me not to worry about it.’

‘He was sounding out how much you knew,’ said Catherine, ‘and must have satisfied himself that you weren’t going to be a threat.’

‘Daft wee lassie that doesn’t know what she’s doing,’ Jasmine said with a shrug.

‘They still followed you, though,’ said Fallan. ‘The next day, to make sure. And it didn’t set their minds at ease when they
saw that not only were you continuing your investigation, but that I was your first port of call. Bad enough the ghosts of
the past rising again, but rising again when there’s a three-million-pound payout in touching distance. I think I’ll take
back my earlier apology. I don’t think either of us would have been collateral damage on Wednesday. When they saw us together,
they needed us both dead.’

‘But why would you be a threat at that stage?’ Jasmine asked. ‘You couldn’t connect them to the Ramsay disappearance, only
to your father.’

‘But my father wasn’t the only person they were afraid of me connecting them to.’

‘Who, then?’ Catherine demanded, her tone mirroring Jasmine’s own surprise and impatience.

‘Three million quid’s worth of heroin isn’t going to be much good to three retired cops unless they fancy spending their autumn
years selling tenner bags in pub lavvies. There’s got to be a buyer lined up.’

Fallan turned to address Abercorn.

‘You’re the organised crime expert,’ he said. ‘What’s Tony McGill up to these days?’

Abercorn grimaced a little, as though having to dig deeper and more obscurely into his mental files than he’d been expecting.

‘Served the best part of two decades after getting busted in Liverpool having just bought enough drugs to service Motley Crue
for a century. He always claimed it was a set-up, but then so did OJ.’

‘He
was
set up,’ Fallan replied. ‘Just not by the cops, as his personal mythology maintains. But that’s ancient history. What about
now?’

‘He got out six years ago. His son, also Tony, you know him?’

‘Teej. Living proof that talent often skips a generation.’

‘Yeah. He took charge of the family business, with Tony senior pressing the remote control from inside. It wasn’t a golden
age, fair to say. After all those years there wasn’t much of an empire for Tony to return to. He was over sixty when he got
out. He’s sixty-seven, sixty-eight now. Not exactly an up-and-comer.’

‘Gangsters aren’t like CID. There’s no statutory retirement.’

‘Certainly old Tony still sees himself as a bit of a player, but everybody else sees him as a bit of a joke. Yesterday’s man.
Still got a lot of connections, but the folk who know his name are getting older and fewer. Still got the same old problems,
too. Doesn’t have a line of his own to a supplier. Worst of it is, his big fears all came true while he was inside.’

‘He who controls the spice controls the universe,’ said Fallan.

This eighties movie reference elicited a tiny smile from Catherine, despite herself, but was evidently lost on everyone else,
Jasmine in particular.

‘Those who did have a direct supply were able to steam in,’ said Abercorn. ‘Even if McGill hadn’t been in jail, he’d have
been helpless to prevent his power base getting swept away. All his old stomping grounds – Gallowhaugh, Shawburn, Croftbank
– he’s still got a name there but no real power.’

‘And who has?’ Fallan asked.

The answer literally gave Abercorn pause. He looked sharply at Catherine for a moment before they answered pretty much simultaneously.

‘Frankie Callahan.’

‘Old-school crooks, old-school polis,’ Fallan mused. ‘Old alliances enduring and old habits dying hard.’

‘Old habits such as covering their tracks and vanishing the evidence,’ said Catherine. ‘We know everything but we’ve got nothing.
These guys are going to be very hard to take down.’

‘Then we get them to take themselves down,’ Fallan said gravely.

‘How?’ Catherine asked, with the cautious curiosity of someone who knows there’s an answer to her question but is less certain
she’s going to like it.

‘Way I see it,’ Fallan replied, ‘you guys can’t go through most of your normal channels because you don’t know where you might
be tripping over one of their connections. So that means you’re going to have to outsource this to Sharp Investigations: let
Jasmine and me handle it.’

Catherine eyed him with admonishing scepticism.

‘This would need to give us something admissible,’ she warned him. ‘It’s not going to take Ruaraidh Wilson to blow us away
in court if your plans involve somebody getting tied to a chair with Gerry Rafferty playing in the background.’

Fallan put on a look of hurt innocence that paradoxically made him look like the most demonic person Jasmine had ever seen.
And that was before he told her what he had in mind.

‘Oh, no, it wouldn’t be just
my
talents that we’d need to make this fly.’

Jasmine could hear footsteps in the corridor outside, and steadied her breathing in response, preparing for her cue. She had
to pitch it just so. There were no rehearsals for this, no retakes, and there would be no second show to get it right.

She could display anxiety but not fear; the time to be scared would come later. Frantic anxiety, rather than despairing. Supplicant.
Contrite. Helpless. Just like on the phone.

‘Mr McDade, I’m so sorry, I’m just so sorry,’ she had said. ‘I didn’t know who else to turn to. I know you told me to leave
it to you, and I should have, I really should have, I know that now. But I just … I was so worried for Jim. I’ve got nobody
else. I had to find out what I could, but, God, it’s just been so awful. People shooting at us and this
Fallan
guy, this
psycho
…’