Where the Bodies are Buried (23 page)

There didn’t appear to be much wrong with him today, though. He had his phone sitting on the table next to a steaming mug
of black tea, an alert, slightly restless air about him as he tucked into his breakfast. It was a look Catherine recognised:
a cop who knew that something was in the wind and was impatient for his cue.

He didn’t smile when he noticed them; just gave a subtle nod of the head by way of beckoning them to join him. He wouldn’t
necessarily have known they were coming here this morning, but he would have been expecting Catherine at some point. Bill
Raeside had relayed to her that Cairns had some fresh information regarding the McDiarmid murder, but in typical Cairns style,
he preferred to pass it on face to face rather than over the phone, and preferred to do so in a place like this rather than
anywhere so boringly convenient as a police station.

Catherine knew she had to indulge him. As she explained to Laura, on the surface it might appear unnecessary, but when you
looked a little deeper, there were many subtle ways in which it was quite the opposite. For one thing, with old-stagers like
Cairns and Fletcher, you had to play their game a wee bit in order to keep them sweet, especially when you outranked them.
Guys like that needed their due, and respected you more if they believed that you genuinely understood what they brought to
the table. If you didn’t know what they were worth, they thought you were an idiot, and generally they’d be right. So if they
asked you to meet at a grotty caff rather than just give you the gen over the phone, you didn’t moan about it.

‘A little deference goes a long way,’ she told Laura. ‘And the corollary is doubly true. Officers with that much experience,
that many contacts and that level of understanding of the system have an unofficial rank, regardless of what it says on their
warrant card, and you’ll pay a heavy price if you don’t recognise it. Get on the wrong side of them and while they might not
make it their job to screw you over, they would certainly regard it as one of the perks.’

In an age of electronic policing, there was also much to be said for meeting colleagues from other squads and other divisions
face to face whenever the opportunity presented itself. Loath as the likes of Cairns would be to call it that, it was a valuable
exercise in networking. It meant you didn’t just pass on little discrete quanta of information pertaining only to specific
inquiries, like worker ants meeting in a line. And perhaps most importantly, it was more conducive to a little quid pro quo.
When Cairns had goodies to hand over, he liked to sound you out for what might be available in return.

‘Glad to see you’re feeling better,’ Catherine told him, having ordered up a couple of coffees. ‘When I heard Bob Cairns had
called in sick, I thought it was one of the signs of the end of days.’

Cairns looked quizzical for a moment, then realised what she was on about.

‘Naw, I’m fine. It wasnae a health thing: more a kind of family emergency. My youngest had a problem with her digs. She’s
at uni in Preston, starting final year. She stayed on over the summer doing a research project. Anyway, the wee place she’s
in is right by the river, which is lovely until the fuckin’ thing bursts its banks. Ground floor is under two feet of water
noo.’

He took a mouthful of tea. Catherine noticed him eyeing his phone as he did so.

‘You expecting a call?’

He rolled his eyes as if to say ‘and how’. He wasn’t for giving anything away yet, though.

‘Heard you had the bold Abercorn trying to peek at your homework over the Jai McDiarmid murder,’ he said. ‘Have you worked
out his angle?’

‘I’m wary of even thinking so,’ she replied. ‘It’s often when you reckon you’ve worked out Abercorn’s angle that he’s got
you exactly where he wants you.’

It was a calculatedly neutral reply. Catherine wasn’t giving away to anybody that she suspected Abercorn was protecting Frankie
Callahan, and certainly not to a stalwart of the Drug Squad. Never mind Abercorn’s angle, she wondered: what’s yours, Bob,
and what are you hoping I’ll toss back in return for this morning’s tip?

Relations between the Drug Squad and Locust were as strained as they were complex. Cairns and Fletch were enjoying an Indian
summer to their long careers – Starsky and Hutch meets Jack and Victor, as Raeside put it – and earning plenty of plaudits
from their peers. But their boss, Gerry Milligan, was almost as adept at posturing and politicking as Abercorn, so they were
getting free rein while it suited him. The head of the Drug Squad knew that having them bring in bodies and make seizures
was making his outfit look as good as Abercorn’s long game was making Locust look bad, but that didn’t mean he was kidding
himself that it was effective or sustainable. There was a lot of strategy in play, and Catherine wasn’t passing either side
a chip unless she knew precisely how it would affect the game.

‘He give you the mosquito speech?’

‘No. I’m starting to feel left out.’

‘Or maybe he thinks you’re twenty-first-century enough to understand. His kind of polis.’

He had a devilish glint in his eye, which gave away that he was trying to wind her up. She fixed him with a stare that warned
him he’d have to try harder than that.

‘I believe you thought you might have something for me?’ she suggested, albeit doubting he’d hand it over quite yet.

He glanced at his phone again and surprised her with a widening of his eyes and a slightly distracted preface of ‘A-a-a-y-y-ye’,
drawn out to last several syllables. It was as though he was so intent on whatever he was waiting for that he’d forgotten
to dangle her on the hook for the usual duration.

‘I gather you’ve not had a stirring public response to your appeal for witnesses regarding the late Mr McDiarmid?’

‘You’ve got to buy a ticket,’ she said, by way of acknowledging that her expectations had been low. ‘What can you do? It’s
Gallowhaugh. Somebody can get slashed in broad daylight in front of thirty folk but no bugger saw a bloody thing.’

‘Witnesses do talk to
some
people, though,’ he replied enticingly. ‘I’ve got a source – a good source – who tells me that Paddy Steel’s people are out
shaking the trees. Seems someone came forward to tell Paddy they saw a black van emerging from the Langton Drive end of the
wee lane parallel to the Shawburn Road on Sunday night at around the time McDiarmid’s body was dumped.’

‘This’ll be the Paddy Steel who made out to me that he and McDiarmid were barely nodding acquaintances and he had no idea
what the murder was about.’

‘Aye. And I heard he was wearing a bulletproof vest at the time.’

‘A black van,’ she said. ‘Anything more? A guess on make or model?’

‘Ford Transit.’

‘Of course,’ said Laura. ‘Had to be the vanilla of vans. At least it wasnae white, eh?’

‘Ah, but the thing is, it wasnae black either.’

‘What?’

‘Paddy Steel’s numpties are out looking for the A-Team, but my source spoke to another witness, who remembered a
dark blue
van going into the same lane at the Capletburn Drive end, around midday.’

‘Dark blue would look black near midnight under the street lights,’ Catherine observed. ‘Thanks, Bob.’

‘For what it’s worth,’ he acknowledged.

He resumed work on his bacon roll, his eyes straying to the phone briefly once more.

‘You’re looking at that thing like it’s going to lay an egg,’ Catherine said.

‘Or blow up in my face,’ he admitted.

‘How so?’

Cairns took a gulp of tea.

‘I’ve got this tout, an
extremely
well-placed tout, who’s been an invaluable asset but precisely the high-maintenance, pain-in-the-arse Pandora’s box you’d
expect as the price. He’s as fly as he is ambitious, and let me tell you, this boy takes the piss out of playing both ends
against the middle. It’s always a good rule of thumb that it’s okay being used as long as you know you’re being used, but
in his case you can never be quite sure
how
you’re being used, and that makes me nervous. Anyway, he’s due to call. Overdue. It’s something big, I’m pretty sure. The
more he fucks you about, the bigger it is.’

‘Any hints?’

‘Just that it’s something he’s expecting to go down today. It’ll be drugs; it’s
always
drugs. He wouldn’t give me any more, made out he didn’t have the details yet. The bugger knows fine, but he loves keeping
you on tenterhooks. Gives him a stiffy to think you’re hanging on his every word. Coy bastard as well: likes to keep things
ambiguous until the last possible moment, probably so he can keep changing his story as the situation—’

Cairns cut himself off at the sound of his phone finally ringing. It barely got through one chime before it was at his ear.
He got up from the booth and wandered out of the café, away from the sounds of chatter and the hiss of the coffee machine.

‘What I wouldn’t give for that number,’ Catherine remarked, watching Cairns as he nattered in the doorway. ‘Not that his source
would talk to anybody else, but I’d love to know who it is.’

‘Not as much as Dougie Abercorn,’ suggested Laura, prompting Catherine to smile.

Cairns ended his call and returned only a couple of minutes later, looking as animated as Catherine could ever remember seeing
him.

‘Could have a situation,’ he said, breathing heavily through his nostrils. ‘Could be fucking with me, but could have a situation.
In fact, he’s double fucking with me because he knows I know he could be
fucking with me, and he also knows I cannae ignore the fact that we could have a situation.’

‘Bob,’ she said firmly. ‘You’re havering. What’s the script?’

‘He said there’s a package in the left luggage at Central station. Said it was likely to prove explosive.’

‘A bomb at Central?’ Catherine said. ‘Is he placed to know something like this?’

‘This bastard? You never know. But he didn’t say it was a bomb. “Likely to prove explosive”: those were his exact words. I
told you, he never gives you anything straight. It’s always wrapped up in shite and barbed wire. Whatever it is, I’m not taking
any chances. We need to evacuate.’

Evacuating Glasgow Central station on a weekday morning was no trivial matter; it wasn’t like you could just hit an alarm
somewhere and get everybody to muster at an assembly point. Not only did they have to close the station, but they had to stop
all the trains heading into it. This took the cooperation of the Transport Police, as well as authorisation from Scotrail,
which Catherine, as detective superintendent, had to procure using her sternest yes-I’m-serious telephone manner.

Nobody who had regularly travelled into Central by train would be particularly surprised or alarmed at finding themselves
sat there unmoving, parallel to Bridge Street, a frustratingly few hundred yards from the platform. However, what might tip
them off that something extraordinary was afoot was the fact that they couldn’t pass the time as usual staring across towards
the Citizens Theatre and reminiscing about childhood trips to the panto, because their view was blocked by half a dozen other
stationary trains. And those were just the ones on final approach; further services were being halted at every major junction,
with trains held at commuter stations all the way down each line.

Catherine didn’t have to worry about them, though: they were somebody else’s problem, safely contained by the simple expedient
of switching a few signals to red. Clearing several hundred people out of the station itself was a bit more logistically complex.

With no time to waste, they had to pull in every officer who could get there inside five minutes, which meant there was no
room for egos or quibbles over rank and demarcation. They were all bobbies now, Catherine and Laura stewarding passengers
towards the exits and checking for strays alongside the uniformed PCs.

As the PA system urged them to vacate the premises and follow the instructions of the police, Catherine noted that the travelling
public had become ‘passengers’ again. She recalled the time during her late-eighties adolescence when, literally overnight,
the announcements began referring to them instead as ‘customers’, in a conspicuously ideological manipulation of the language.
‘Customers boarding the train’; ‘Customers awaiting the express service to Carlisle’. You didn’t tell kids that people on
a train were customers. It was such a cumbersome distortion as to make it an insultingly obvious and rather craven act of
Thatcherite compliance. She couldn’t recall when they went back to being passengers again, but was glad that they had. You
could tell passengers to get their arses out of the station in case it got blown up; ‘customers’ suggested that if they’d
paid their money, they could take their chances.

Their task was more than just a matter of clearing the platforms and sweeping everyone out from the main concourse. There
were now more shops, pubs and restaurants in Central station than there had been on Calderburn High Street when Catherine
was growing up. There were sandwich shops, newsagents, hairdressers, chemists, a currency exchange, fashion accessories, a
florist, a greeting card store, an M&S food hall and even a jeweller’s. It was an upscale one at that, rather pretentiously
called Coruscate, and found itself the subject of some rather jaundiced speculation on the part of Laura as they approached
the premises.

‘A jeweller’s in a railway station? One-stop guilty conscience shop for the man with more to atone for than the florist can
cover. Fleeting moment of thinking about the missus on the way home that’s supposed to make up for never thinking about her
the rest of the time.’

This would normally have provoked curious speculation as to what misadventures had coloured Laura’s past love life, but right
then Catherine couldn’t think past how it might apply to herself.

A few months back, she had come perilously close to forgetting Drew’s birthday. She had been away overnight, at a meeting
in London, so she’d unknowingly dodged the awkwardness of not having a card or present for him first thing that morning. It
only occurred to her when she was killing time in Terminal Five, waiting for her flight home. She saw this gadgety watch and
reckoned Drew would love it. She was aware she hadn’t been wife of the year of late, so thought she should buy him it just
to prove she was thinking of him. Mind you,
she thought, his birthday was coming up soon, so perhaps she should buy it and wait until … Oh God.