Fire in the Blood (Scott Cullen Mysteries) (35 page)

"You need to sit down!" called Caldwell.

Cullen soldiered on. He grabbed Fraser by the lapels on his polo shirt and pulled him close. "What are you planning on doing with Iain?"

"I was going to make him disappear in a whisky barrel," said Fraser.

"Just like his father?" asked Cullen.

Fraser nodded. "Just like his father," he said.

"What happened that night?" asked Cullen.

There was silence in the room for almost twenty seconds. "After the meal," said Fraser, "me and Iain went to the pub up in Garleton with Dad, then we drove down here to get some whisky for the trip to Glastonbury. We were both drunk and we got into a fight. We were arguing about the takeover. We were in this room and I knocked him out."

"You had planned it?" asked Cullen.

"It was an accident," said Fraser. "We were pushing each other and he tripped over and caught his head on the corner of a workbench." Fraser gave a deep sigh. "I panicked. The whisky was ready to pour the next day, so I poured two barrels. I put him in one, still alive."

"And you smashed his head in with a hammer?"

"I wanted to make him pay," said Fraser. "He'd made my life a misery. It was all his fault, all him and Dad. I wanted to sell to Scottish Distillers. Dad and Iain didn't. Dad just sidelined me. He said I'd never amount to anything. He took me off the board, made me the bloody Cooper. I was left with nothing. Dad would much rather have a legacy than a son."

"Why didn't you come clean?" asked Cullen. His shoulder gave another spasm of pain.

"I needed to get away with it," said Fraser, his voice calm and slow.

"It was an accident," said Caldwell.

Fraser looked over at her. "Yeah, well, it was," he said, "but I thought fuck it. Some luck at last." He scowled at Cullen. "There were two reasons why I stuck with it. The first was to get that bastard brother of mine out of the way. The second was to see my Dad suffer for siding with Iain and sidelining me. That's eighteen years of agony he's been through. I could see his face every day, wondering where Iain was. Every time the door opened he wondered if it was him. And then he'd finally find his precious son rotting in a barrel of that bloody whisky of his and he'd finally know that Iain wasn't coming back."

"It's quite an extreme thing to do," said Cullen.

Fraser shrugged. "I needed to do it," he said. "I don't regret it."

"How does Paddy Kavanagh fit into this?" asked Cullen.

Fraser closed his eyes. "He was working that night," he said. "I didn't know. He heard the machinery going and he caught me at it."

"What happened?" asked Cullen.

"He blackmailed me," said Fraser. "I paid him ten grand to leave."

"And he just left?"

Fraser nodded.

"Where did you get the money from?" asked Cullen.

"Iain and I had trust funds till we were eighteen," said Fraser. "I still had mine but Iain had spent his on that bird of his. Paddy took it away from me. The fucking bastard."

"The photograph of him in 1995," said Cullen. "Did he come and see you?"

"He did," said Fraser. "He wanted more money. Thought that I'd seen the last of him, but no, he turned up at my flat."

"What happened?"

Fraser took a while to answer. "He's in one of the barrels next door."

Cullen lay on a gurney in the back of the ambulance, buckled in. He could hear the rain thundering down on the roof of the vehicle, sounding like it was going to leave a trail of dents. He'd tried calling Sharon, but her phone was off - he left ten voicemails and sent thirty texts, painfully typed with one hand.

"I'm fine," he said to the paramedic, a middle-aged man.

"You are not fine, pal," said the paramedic, smiling. "You've lost a lot of blood and you've been charging around in there - we can tell from the trail of blood. You're lucky you've not seriously damaged yourself. That big hole in your shoulder is going to take some fixing."

Cullen heard a voice from outside the ambulance. "Where the fuckin' hell is he?"

Bain.

The paramedic turned and went to the back. "He is not in a fit state to speak to anyone," he said.

Cullen saw Bain climb up. "I'll be the fuckin' judge of that."

"I really must insist."

"Just give me two minutes," said Bain.

The paramedic shook his head. "Two minutes," he said. "Not a second more. The ambulance leaves in two minutes. I don't want you on it."

"Magic," said Bain. He pushed past and came up to Cullen. Caldwell followed in Bain's wake - she had some bandages on her head.

"You are a fuckin' idiot, Sundance," said Bain, leaning over Cullen's bed.

"Thanks for that, sir," said Cullen.

"I'm serious," said Bain. "That's the last time you go in two-footed. I'm on a sticky enough wicket as it fuckin' is. I don't need to lose two officers in a year."

"Angela is okay," said Cullen, nodding at Caldwell. "Minor injury."

"It's not her I'm fuckin' talkin' about, you fuckin' tube!" shouted Bain. He rubbed at his moustache. "You've got to stop all this shite."

"I had a few questions to ask him," said Cullen. "He attacked us, not the other way round."

"Aye, well, I still would have appreciated being on the inside track on this one."

Cullen looked away. "I told you," he said. "You weren't interested."

"I was going by due process," said Bain, "eliminatin' Doug Strachan from the investigation." He shook his head. "As ever, you knew best, didn't you, Sundance? You just had to ignore me and go in and speak to him."

"Where is he?"

"He's in a meat wagon," said Bain. "We're taking him to Leith Walk."

"Have you spoken to him?" asked Cullen.

"I've just got a confession out of him," he said. "Of course, I'll have to get it properly on tape, but there were eight people there. Still, it'll be a bugger to get all those stories straight."

"What did he say?" asked Cullen.

"He put his brother in the barrel the night before they went down to England," said Bain. "He waited till Marion left, took his brother's keys, packed a bag and made it look like he'd left. He even got the stub torn off at the festival by a security guard so that it would be finger-printed."

"Meticulous."

"That's one word for it," said Bain. "He also pretended to be his brother on the phone calls to Marion."

"You're kidding," said Cullen, feeling woozy.

"No," said Bain. "Still, turns out this Paddy boy was in another barrel. Would have found him a week ago if I'd got my way. Can you believe that it was Fraser that made the fuckin' call about Paddy being at that service station?" He checked his watch. "Still, good result."

"Is that you thanking me?" asked Cullen.

"It's as close as I get," said Bain.

SCOTT CULLEN WILL RETURN IN
 

"DYED IN THE WOOL"

OUT NOW

Detective Constable Scott Cullen finds his professional and private lives at opposite ends of the spectrum. While his career is stagnating - impacted by the jockeying for position ahead of the formation of the Scottish Police Service, as much as by his own inability to push his case for promotion - his relationship with DS Sharon McNeill goes from strength-to-strength, until dinner with both sets of parents is interrupted by a call to action.

A body has been found in a Range Rover at the foot of a shale bing in West Lothian.

Cullen is forced to go back to his old stomping ground, haunted by figures from his past. DS Colin Methven, the latest officer occupying the position that Cullen has long coveted, is intent on straightening out Cullen’s cowboy nature, which has fractured his friendship with DC Angela Caldwell. Lurking in the background is DI Paul Wilkinson, trying to push Cullen back to a recent major case. As the mysteries are compounded, Cullen starts to feel lost among the dyed in the wool.

Amazon UK
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Other territories and formats are available.

OTHER BOOKS BY ED JAMES

THE SCOTT CULLEN SERIES

1
GHOST IN THE MACHINE

2
DEVIL IN THE DETAIL

3
FIRE IN THE BLOOD

4
DYED IN THE WOOL

5
BOTTLENECK (coming 2014)

SUPERNATURE SERIES -

1
SHOT THROUGH THE HEART

2
CRASH INTO MY ARMS (coming 2014)

eBOOKS AVAILABLE NOW FROM AMAZON, BARNES & NOBLE, KOBO, iBOOKS, SONY eREADER AND OTHERS.

PAPERBACKS AVAILABLE NOW FROM AMAZON.

"DYED IN THE WOOL"

Excerpt -
 

He stood back and watched his work, suddenly aware that the breeze was much stronger up here than at the foot of the hill.

The car started moving, slow and unsteady, and then accelerating until it tipped over the edge of the plateau. It raced down the small hill and quickly became an orange blur. Halfway down, it lost its grip on the side of the hill and started listing to one side, before quickly tumbling over. It rolled all the way down to the bottom of the hill but, instead of stopping, continued to tumble across the scrub land beyond.

He couldn't make out the detail from up there but he knew that the car - even though it was a high-end Range Rover - would be as battered as the person inside it.

The screaming as the car started rolling down the hill - before their voice had given out - would stay with him. He was told that they would still be unconscious until near the bottom of the hill - if at all - but clearly they'd come round already. While he was still committing the same crime, he didn't need the constant reminder.

The vehicle came to a halt, crumpled and ruined, sitting on its roof.

He jogged back to his Land Rover, to the grinning face in the passenger seat, ready for his own descent down the hill. He knew that he'd have to call the police in before too long.

Afterword

That's book three done and dusted, and now you've just read it. Thanks for sticking with this series - the reaction to the first two has really staggered me and is fuel to writing more.

This one has had a very interesting gestation.

It started with a competition - Bloody Scotland, the Scottish crime writing festival, had a short story competition with a theme of "Worth the wait" and sponsored by a distillery. Within a minute I had the germ of an idea - the body in the barrel and the motive. I did a lot of research into whisky - unlike Cullen, I cannot stand the stuff, I'm much more of a red wine, real ale and continental lager drinker (okay, so the latter is like Cullen) - and started to understand the process of making whisky, from malting through distillation and barrel-making through to bottling. I wrote the short story called WHISKY IN THE JAR - 3,000 words - and I submitted it in June.

I didn't win.

Given the amount of research that I had done and I had the full Crombie dynasty plotted out (even if I didn't use it), I thought that it would work as a novella to bridge the gap between DEVIL IN THE DETAIL and DYED IN THE WOOL. So I extended it, mostly when I was getting through the editing of DEVIL, bumping it up to 27,000 words. I gave it to my alpha readers (C and Pat) and the feedback wasn't as positive as I'd have liked - the idea and the story were good, but it missed that certain Cullen-ness of the first two - and much Bain nonsense - and focused a lot on the deep history rather than the present. Ultimately, the story wasn't that enthralling.

So, back to the drawing board - I jotted down some ideas and quickly realised that I had enough (and enough good stuff) for a full length novel. I'd started to hate the title, so renamed it to FIRE IN THE BLOOD. I wrote it pretty quickly and got it up to what you see now, 84,000 words.

The big learning for me there is that I'm not a short form fiction guy, but I seem to do okay at long form.

As ever, there are a few things I made up in this book. Dunpender Distillery doesn't exist and is entirely fictional. Garleton still doesn't exist, and I drove up that way at the weekend. The site of Leith Walk station is still a derelict plot.

Thanks again go to C for the amazing cover art and the alpha and beta editing. Also, thanks go to Pat for the editing help from the novella to the final novel.

Now, it's onto DYED IN THE WOOL for me before I get stuck into a vampire thriller I've plotted out and am itching to write. I promise that I won't set in any more books in East Lothian for a while...

Thanks again for buying and reading this - do let me know what you think of my books.

Ed James

East Lothian, January 2013