Where the Bodies are Buried (19 page)

‘Don’t leave me,’ she pleaded, her desperation making her unashamed of her tearful supplication.

‘Keep your bloody head down,’ he retorted. His accent had changed. It didn’t sound put on any more. It did still suggest someone
who had lived in a lot of different places, but more specifically a Scotsman who had lived in a lot of different places.

She sank down in the seat, then briefly reached back up to adjust the rear-view mirror so that she could see the road, her
heart going like a double-kick drum. The Audi was closing in, the whine of its
reverse gear getting louder as it approached. Fifty yards. Forty. She could see the driver and the passenger, both turned
around to look through the rear windscreen. They were wearing latex masks, the driver’s still topped with the baseball cap
he had been wearing to disguise his disguise. Presumably he had guessed that the sight of Richard Nixon’s face behind the
wheel in Northumberland would have been more than enough to tip off somebody as paranoid as Ingrams.

She stuck her head up a little to look for him, expecting that he would be wrestling with the front wheel on her side of the
vehicle. He was nowhere to be seen. Suddenly, though she wouldn’t have considered it possible, she felt worse, more afraid.
Why had he left her? Where the hell was he?

Then she both heard and felt a metallic clunk from somewhere beneath her.

The Audi had stopped about twenty yards away. The passenger-side door swung slowly open and in the rear-view mirror she saw
a figure, also in a Nixon mask, emerge slowly and deliberately, holding a pump-action shotgun.

Jasmine shuddered and screamed as the first of a series of bangs assailed her ears. When she looked in the mirror again, however,
she saw that the figure in the Nixon mask was empty-handed, his shotgun now lying on the road. He scrambled towards it, which
was when Jasmine was shaken by a second bang from close by, resulting in the shotgun flipping and spinning across the tarmac
like it had been yanked on a string.

She sat up a little straighter and turned to look out of the driver’s-side door, where she saw Ingrams alongside the Land
Rover in a kneeling crouch. He was holding an automatic pistol in both hands, his face stony with concentration as his finger
worked the trigger.

She heard a slam as the gunman closed the Audi’s passenger door behind him and a screech of tyres as the vehicle accelerated
away. Ingrams kept firing, taking out the Audi’s rear windscreen and drilling some holes in its bodywork as it zoomed off
like a startled rabbit.

He fired six shots in total, but kept the gun trained on the Audi until it had disappeared around the next bend, maybe quarter
of a mile away. Only then did Jasmine feel she could breathe out.

Throughout the Audi’s retreat, she hadn’t wanted him to fire again, partly because of the jolting shock of the reports, but
mainly in case he hit the tyres. She didn’t want the car to stop, didn’t want the gunman
to have any reason to get out and return fire, just in case they had more than one weapon on them.

Having watched Ingrams train the pistol intently upon the escaping car without his trigger finger twitching again, she appreciated
from the minutely calmer position of retrospect that he had never had any intention of precipitating such an outcome. He was
scaring them off, not trying to draw them back into a fire fight.

Ingrams dropped his aim and walked calmly forward to retrieve the abandoned shotgun, picking it up by the trigger guard. The
stock looked as if it had been shattered by his bullets, twisted and dangling like a broken limb. Jasmine watched all of this
in a state of numb disbelief, like the little rectangle of the rear-view mirror was the screen on a smartphone or a portable
DVD player, showing scenes far removed from her reality. Then she came back to herself, feeling stings and throbbings of pain
that had been anaesthetised by fear.

It suddenly became imperative that she get out of the Land Rover. Despite the danger receding, she felt a compelling need
to escape from this rickety metal box and put her feet down on the ground. She clambered across the driver’s seat and hopped
unsteadily on to the road.

The air outside was hot, warmer than the fan-cooled interior of the vehicle. Jasmine felt her head swim as she stood upright,
the mugginess an unpleasant disappointment. For some reason she had expected to feel cold air like water to the face, sharpening
her up, helping her shake off the effects of what had just happened. Adrenalin was still thrilling through her and her ears
were ringing from the noise of Ingrams’ pistol shots. Once again she felt tears begin to flow, but to her surprise, the upsurge
she was feeling turned out to be as much anger and frustration as anything else.

‘You all right?’ Ingrams asked, thumbing the safety catch on his weapon and tucking it into the waistband of his trousers.

She watched him lean into the rear of his vehicle and flip open a storage bin, into which he carefully placed the damaged
shotgun. His question hung in the air like it was a far more complex query, one Jasmine realised she didn’t have a simple
answer for.

‘What constitutes all right, under these circumstances?’ she asked, struggling to find her voice.

‘Standing on two feet is usually a positive indication,’ he replied.

Something about this infuriated her, quite volcanically so, and she was so shocked by the ferocity of her feelings that it
took her a moment
to realise why. It was that he was so calm, so matter-of-fact. It was that this wasn’t new to him. He had brought her into
his world.

‘I’m standing on two feet, but I’m far from all right,’ she said, a tremor in her voice that was one part aftershock, one
part lingering fear and one part boiling rage. ‘You’ve been acting shifty and evasive since we met and now you’ve almost got
me killed,’ she went on, fighting hard to keep her words coming steady and clear as she spoke. ‘I think you owe me some straight
answers. You’re this Glen Fallan guy, aren’t you? That’s why there’s nothing else in the file.’

He shook his head solemnly.

‘My name is Tron Ingrams. I can show you my passport, my army discharge papers, anything you like.’

‘So who the hell is Tron Ingrams? You go from driving like a pensioner to driving like something out of a stunt show. You’ve
got people in masks shooting at you, you’ve got guns hidden under your car.’

‘
A
gun. Singular,’ he clarified.

‘One gun is lots, okay? To normal people. One gun is plenty.’

She was babbling, but she was well past caring what kind of impression she was making. She didn’t care if she was acting like
a hysterical girl: she had every right to be acting like a hysterical girl, and her previous air of detached professionalism
had got her nothing.

‘What kind of a name is Tron, anyway? How did you know that gunman was even there? Why have you got a gun under your car when
you work at a women’s refuge? Who were those men? Oh yeah, and why were they trying to
kill
you?’

Ingrams made a placatory gesture with his hands, asking her to calm down. She thought for a moment that he was about to touch
her, grab her arms, maybe hold her like she was going to cry. She stiffened, ready to bat away any contact, yet part of her
deeply wanted it to happen.

‘I realise you’re pretty shaken up,’ he said, ‘and I apologise in advance for answering a question with another question:
but could you please tell me precisely why you think they weren’t trying to kill
you?’

Catherine crossed the river on Gorbals Street and proceeded along Bridgegate, heading for the car park at St Margaret’s Place.
It was early enough to get a space, for which she was grateful on a morning like this. A train rumbled across the bridge overlooking
the car park, making her wonder briefly where Drew was by now. Coming up the stairs at Buchanan Street underground, perhaps,
maybe already inside Queen Street, getting a coffee for the train.

She hurried along the pavement and beneath the shelter of the cylindrical plinth that fronted the High Court building. Supported
by half a dozen columns, it always made her think of a gigantic occasional table, the kind of thing her great-aunts might
have sat the telephone upon. Like every public building these days, the entrance was lightly shrouded in smoke, but the real
mystical portals lay beyond. For some, the door they left this place by decreed where their future lay, sometimes for a decade
or more.

Catherine had never been at the mercy of such a fate, but the interior of the building never failed to make her uneasy. It
had been the scene of many satisfactory results, but in the way some people said the mere sight of a police officer made them
feel guilty, court buildings had a similar unsettling effect on cops. It was the same principle: the awareness that you were
subject to a higher power over which you had little control or influence, whose fleeting caprice could affect you disproportionately,
irrevocably and unaccountably. In Catherine’s case, though, it went a little deeper, a little more personal, to an anger that
still simmered and a shame whose flame still flickered in the dark somewhere in her mind, never quite quenched despite the
smallness of the source and the passing of the years.

It hadn’t been this court, but just across the river at Carlton Place. Nonetheless, Sheriff Court or High Court, the memory
could sometimes creep up on her as soon as she saw the liveries, the benches and the briefcases.

She was a little more than two years into the job at the time. Not
a wide-eyed probationer but definitely still finding her feet. They wouldn’t have asked a probationer to do this, and they
bloody well
shouldn’t
have asked her. It was their mess, their pit, and they dragged her down to help them keep digging.

It happened on an otherwise quiet Thursday night, at her first station, Barnes Street over in Braeside. The officers concerned
were Roddy Howard, an authoritarian automaton who was born forty-five, and the willing young Padawan to his Yoda, Mark McLean,
whom even the young Catherine could tell wore his insecurities brightly on his sleeve.

Howard was classic constable-for-life material. Every station needs one: straight as a die, unquestioningly dutiful, humourlessly
literal-minded, and thick as mince. McLean was not so much someone who was bullied at school as someone who had wanted to
be doing the bullying but had never been hard enough. Now that he had the full force of the law as backup, he was fast making
up for lost time.

According to the defendants (and Catherine now unequivocally accepted the three adolescents’ version of events), they were
walking back from the pub at around eleven o’clock when two of them, Anthony McGuire and Allan Reilly, decided they couldn’t
hold back the tide long enough to get home. It was, as stated, a quiet night. The streets were all but empty; indeed, the
street they were walking along – Barnes Street – was completely devoid of life, otherwise they would have kept their legs
crossed for another quarter-mile, what with the polis station being just across the road. However, with nobody in sight, they
both nipped into a narrow passageway between the bank building and the tenement block next door while their stronger-bladdered
mate, Steve Gallacher, waited on the pavement. They were mid-pee when Howard and McLean came around the corner from the Main
Street in a police van. Noticing Gallacher loitering on the pavement, they pulled in to investigate, at which point they noticed
two figures along the dark passageway. One of the cops shouted ‘Hoi!’ prompting the pair of them to swiftly get off their
marks, zipping up as they ran out the back of the passageway and into the bank car park.

As McGuire later told the court, when they heard the shout, they assumed that it was either an irate resident or, just as
plausibly for Braeside, some heidthebaw wanting a bit of late-night action. Either way, they didn’t hang around to find out.
Then, when they saw two polismen enter the car park from the far end, they ceased running. Reilly stated that at the time
he was actually relieved.

This was where it should have ended: a wee word of warning. Any decent cop would have clocked what he was dealing with. They
weren’t blitzed, they weren’t rowdy and, most significantly, they weren’t familiar. Howard, however, decided to lift the pair
of them, then went for the hat-trick when Gallacher made the mistake of expressing his incredulity that they were being arrested
for pissing up a lane already full of dog shit and broken glass.

They all spent a night in the cells before being charged with breach of the peace and resisting arrest. ‘The polis breach’,
the former was known as: a catch-all charge that, with two cops as witnesses, made for a fait accompli, one many folk grudgingly
learned to take on the chin whether they merited it or not. Resisting arrest, also engaging the mutual corroboration, was
often thrown in there to seal the deal.

For the defendants’ part, had they been blitzed, had they been rowdy, and significantly, had they been frequent fliers, they
would quite probably have left it at that: taken the fine and put it down to experience. But they were none of the above:
they were three respectable lads who had never been in bother with the law before. They knew the breach charge was an abuse
of power, but it was the resisting part that really pissed them off, because it was an outright lie.

They disputed all charges and consequently the case went before the Sheriff Court. That was when Catherine became involved.
It wasn’t Howard or McLean who brought her into it, though: it was her sarge, Donald Morrison, someone she had already come
to look toward for guidance. He didn’t ask her to do it; he told her she
was
doing it.

‘We need to nail this,’ he said. ‘Be good experience for you, getting you in the box.’

Catherine was rattled. It wasn’t the end of the innocence, some epiphanic moment of disillusion, but it was still a shock
to the system to be so matter-of-factly told to lie in court. However, the Sarge stiffened her resolve by giving her an unmistakable
impression regarding two things: that to do this was no big deal; but to refuse was unthinkable.