Where the Bodies are Buried (15 page)

‘Okay,’ Catherine said, once they were on the forecourt cum disabled ramp leading to the main entrance. ‘How come you’re street-side,
Gary?’

He smiled.

‘Wouldn’t you like to know.’

‘Quite. I’m curious. Was it a wee technicality? A lawyer deal? Curious as to why you’re being coy, too. You’d normally be
crowing about it. Did you grass somebody? Is that it?’

‘Let’s just say it concerns matters way above your pay grade, hen,’ Fleeting replied.

Having succeeded in keeping her emotions largely in check so far, Catherine could feel her anger rising, all the more so because
it was largely at herself. She should have let her question in the bar hang unanswered and left it at that; left Fleeting
to sweep up the damage. Instead she’d tipped her hand, let him see there was something he knew that she was out of the loop
on, and given away just how much this was bothering her.

Callahan wasn’t slow in registering it either.

‘That must fuck you off,’ he said, his eyes burning with that penetrating, bloodless sincerity. ‘Does it not? You do your
bit, try your hardest, and some decision gets taken above your head … It must really fuck you off.’

Neither his tone nor his expression betrayed any sense of satisfaction. It was almost as though he was concerned for her.
There was no hint of goading in his face, and yet that made it all the more effective, for goading it unquestionably was.
At least it let her know she had riled him that much.

‘The only thing that fucks me – off, on, up, down or in any other manner – is my husband,’ she replied.

‘Rather him than me,’ said Fleeting, under his breath but intentionally loud enough for everyone present to hear.

‘I don’t doubt it,’ Laura responded. ‘If a silly wee lassie like Lisa Bagan’s more your type, you must be shit scared of a
woman who isn’t shit scared of you. And yet you weren’t enough even for a silly wee lassie like that. She had to go to Jai
McDiarmid to get some proper service.’

Fleeting just laughed: a smirking, spurting, snottery effort.

‘Need tae try harder, hen. You think I was that bothered aboot her? She was the one kidding herself there was still anything
going on. Far as I was concerned, that was over. A lassie that’s shagging somebody else isnae worth a fuck any more, and a
fuck was all she was worth in the first place.’

‘Well, she was certainly a fool to pass you up, you silver-tongued devil,’ said Catherine, drawing it to a close, acutely
aware that there was no profit to be had in tarrying any further. ‘I’ll be speaking to you both again,’ she added, by way
of taking her leave.

‘I doubt it,’ said Fleeting, predictably seizing the last word as a waiter rushed to hold open the doors for him and Callahan.

Laura was fizzing as they crossed the street to their car, her face flushed and thunderous.

‘Quite the Renaissance man, Mr Fleeting, isn’t he?’ Catherine remarked, trying to defuse the mood.

Laura simply shook her head, as though too mad to speak and attempting to shake off how she was feeling. She got into the
car and closed the door with a slam.

‘Prick,’ was as much as she could manage.

‘Prick with a bastard of an alibi,’ Catherine reminded her, bringing it back to business.

The thought seemed to clear the fog of anger and focus Laura’s thoughts.

‘It’s a
complicated
alibi,’ she opined. ‘In bed with some lassie who might not have woken up until after the time of the abduction. Then he’s
down the Nutters and Cutters all afternoon,
he
says, but let’s face it, aside from the reliability of the witnesses, he can make sure he’s seen at the bar around kick-off,
then again at full-time, and that still leaves a big gap to get busy in between. He was way too eager to account for his time.
They both were, eh?’

Catherine couldn’t disagree. Callahan might be disconcertingly
unreadable up close, but when she took a step back, there was definitely something to be gleaned from his demeanour, from
his unread-ability itself. That impression of dispassionate, functionary cooperation, that very air of indifferent tolerance
and unemotional disengagement: there was more to all of that than the manifestation of his stony and disciplined single-mindedness.
He was a career criminal, someone who had been taking shit from the polis since he was in short trousers. They had turned
up to question one of his main men and he knew either that Fleeting was totally covered or totally innocent. Both ways, the
cops were facing the custard-pie treatment. That should have been a sweet wee interlude for him, yet never mind milk the moment,
he didn’t let a smile of satisfaction cross his lips, didn’t ‘lay the smack down’, as she had recently overheard Duncan say
to one of his toys, when the polis were there on a plate.

Why wouldn’t he?

Because he wanted them gone. He didn’t want to do anything that would draw out the visit or engage them unnecessarily. The
only tiny hint of provocation had come when he had the assurance of knowing they were already out the door. Whether or not
he was covering up McDiarmid’s murder, Frankie Callahan had something else in the pipeline, something far more important.

Something way above her pay grade.

Jasmine was almost simperingly grateful for the sat-nav programme Jim had politely insisted upon installing on her phone,
not least because her Glasgow geography was sketchy at best, especially outside her comfort zones of the West End and South
Side. Understandably, her Northumberland geography was non-existent, and she very much doubted she’d have found this place
with a road map. Even using her phone, she had driven past it twice, assuming the software was wonky or the triangulation
off track.

The address said 14 Hexham Road, Tolheaton, a town or village that appeared to be a good couple of miles away yet. At the
device’s insistence she had doubled back on herself, but twice failed to put her faith in the flashing dot that appeared to
be sitting in the middle of a field off the north side of the road. On her third pass she saw the narrow gate, little more
than a single car’s width, among overgrown hedgerows and a canopy of trees. There was indeed a rusted number attached to the
weather-worn right-hand gatepost, identifying it as number fourteen. Number twelve was presumably not exactly a next-door
neighbour in friendly cup-of-sugar-borrowing distance.

She switched on the hazard lights and checked her mirrors before climbing out of the car. It was a narrow little B road, on
which she had barely seen another vehicle for the past few miles, but the gate was in sight of a bend, and in her mind’s eye,
the quieter a road, the more easily she tended to imagine rally cars hurtling along it.

She had driven down in her beloved red Civic, keeping a worried eye on the fuel gauge and specifically the rate at which it
was descending. She had gone to a cash machine first thing that morning, and though she hadn’t quite used the last of her
drawings filling the tank, if she had to top up again before she got home, it could have serious ramifications for what she
would be eating by the end of the week.

She was already considering how she might raise some cash in the short term, mercilessly triaging which possessions would
have to go
on eBay. She hadn’t even looked up what she might get for the Honda, however. She’d go on the game before she gave that up.
She’d run it until the wheels fell off. It had been a comfortable, dependable part of her life longer than most people, longer
than any school or college, longer than any house or flat she’d lived in.

It had been her mum’s, the closest Beth Sharp ever came to owning a new car. She had bought it when Jasmine was seven, this
sleek, low-slung mid-nineties model that Jasmine considered as exotic and sporty-looking as any Ferrari. It was second-hand,
but barely a year old and with a mileage suggesting a quarter of that. According to the dealer in Abbeyhill, along near Easter
Road, it had belonged to an English professor at Edinburgh University, one of whose books was a prescribed text up and down
the UK. This meant that he got a healthy royalty cheque with each year’s new intake of students, part of which he spent annually
renewing his car. In this particular year, however, they had changed the model, which greatly devalued its predecessor.

Jasmine couldn’t understand why they’d changed it. The new one looked nondescript and fuddy-duddy, while she was in agreement
with her mum that theirs was the most beautiful car in the world. It was built to last too, conscientious servicing and maintenance
keeping it going all these years until eventually it outlasted its owner.

Mum had left it to her, and the first time Jasmine sat behind the wheel, she collapsed in tears. She could smell her mum all
around the interior, like she had just nipped out of the vehicle to get something and would climb back inside any second.
It wasn’t Mum she smelled, though, just that she had come to associate the smell of the car with her.

After all these months, it still felt like her mum had recently been in it. Sometimes that caused her to weep again and sometimes
it was a comfort, but either way it was a feeling she wouldn’t be without.

She unlatched the gate and dragged it open, revealing a single track of compacted dirt. It led through a short belt of mature
woodland, then opened out to reveal a large house across an expanse of coarse but well-managed grass.

It was a gloomy and forbidding structure, too big to be the home of an individual or even a family, surely, but insufficiently
grandiose to constitute any kind of stately manor. The word ‘convent’ came to mind, but only because it was the first one
she could think of to dislodge its
predecessor, which was ‘asylum’. It certainly looked like the kind of place that would have a mad woman in the attic, though
this thought was probably coloured by having seen signs for Rochester on the drive here. Her impressions were doubtless also
coloured by the awareness – wilfully suppressed for most of the journey but growing irresistible over the final miles – that
she was approaching this place in order to doorstep someone who was somehow connected to an infamously brutal and prolifically
murderous criminal.

What kind of person lived in a place like this? she asked herself as she stopped the Honda, trying not to dwell upon how much
‘a deranged serial killer’ sounded like the right answer. It really didn’t help that she could hear a mechanical buzzing from
somewhere beyond the building that could well have been a hedge-trimmer, but in her imagination was undoubtedly a chainsaw.

As she walked up the steps to the front door, it occurred to her that nobody knew she was here. She could be murdered and
buried in the grounds by teatime – right alongside Jim, perhaps.

She rang the doorbell and felt an enveloping sense of relief when she heard a rapid beating of feet accompanied by the exuberant
energy of children’s voices. They sounded Scouse. Jasmine had a keen and reliable ear for accents, and could often detect
traces of multiple dialects in just a few moments of conversation, not that such subtleties were required for the voices behind
the door.

She heard them called back from the entrance and told to go upstairs by an older-sounding woman with a more neutral middle-class
English accent, though Jasmine detected a base of Brummie lightly flavoured with a more local hint of Tyneside.

She waited as the sounds of the children’s voices receded. They weren’t just being told to keep their distance; the woman
was waiting until they were well gone before opening the door. Jasmine was reminded of a friend’s house where the family’s
Alsatian had to be locked in the back room before they could let in any visitors. In this case, however, she soon understood
whose protection the exclusion was in aid of.

The door was opened by a woman in her late forties or early fifties. She was about Jasmine’s height and build, but Jasmine
had the impression the woman could pick her up and throw her like a wrestler if she needed to. She wore her hair tied back
behind a headband; her face bore not a mote of make-up, yet it was undeniably attractive in a
distinguished, unashamedly mature kind of way. It was the kind of face that Jasmine imagined people meant when they said ‘handsome’
of a woman. It was also, she inferred, not a face to be argued with.

‘Can I help you, dear?’ the woman asked. ‘Do you know where you are, or are you lost?’

It was an oddly worded question, even for out here in the back of the Northumberland beyond, almost like a code. Jasmine picked
up a conflict of nuance in her tone and expression. The woman came across as guarded but not wanting to sound guarded; protective
without wishing to thus betray that there was something here worth protecting.

‘I’m not lost, no. My name is Jasmine Sharp. I’m a private investigator.’

Jasmine felt like she was delivering a line, except that she tended to feel less self-conscious on stage, where you weren’t
trying to kid anybody that it was true – least of all yourself.

The woman’s face dismissed any conflict of nuance, all defences mustered and the drawbridge pulled up in response to these
last two words.

‘What do you want here?’ she asked.

‘There’s someone I need to speak to, and this is the address I’ve been given.’

The woman said nothing. There was no overt hostility, but Jasmine could feel suspicion trained on her like arrows through
cross-slits.

‘His name is Tron Ingrams,’ she explained.

At this, the defences came down, though only a little. The suspicion remained, but not the defensiveness. Whoever this Tron
Ingrams was, it wasn’t him the woman was protecting.

‘What do you want to speak to him about?’

‘I’m looking into a missing-person case, and I believe he was helpful when my colleague made an earlier inquiry, back in October.
I’m hoping he wouldn’t mind answering a few more questions.’

Jasmine had gambled that by making it sound like a rapport had already been established with this Ingrams character, she would
get the green light, but the woman still looked intractable.