Where the Bodies are Buried (29 page)

‘What are heat-loss images?’

‘I don’t know, but the ones Jim requested are twenty-seven years old. I don’t think he was buying a new boiler, do you?’

‘How do you like your drug dealer?’asked Cal O’Shea. ‘Rare? Medium?’

‘
À
point,’
Catherine replied.

‘You’re in luck, then.’

Everything was soaking. Catherine stood in a puddle an inch deep stretching all the way across the floor of the Top Table
depot. It was a single-storey but high-ceilinged industrial unit on the outskirts of Hamilton, close to the East Kilbride
expressway. The tableware side of Frankie Callahan’s catering supply company used it as a central distribution point: tablecloths
and napkins were brought here after being laundered, then racked up in hoppers ready for resupply.

It was a testament to the quality of Top Table’s linen that it had proven sufficiently fire-retardant as to have played its
part in preventing the place burning to the ground, despite petrol having been liberally doused about the premises. According
to one of the firemen, the collapse of several hoppers and subsequent spillage of hundreds of yards of cloth had smothered
a significant proportion of the flames and prevented serious structural damage to the building.

Clearly they were going to have to ditch most of this stock due to fire and smoke damage, but Frankie wouldn’t be losing any
sleep over it. What with being dead and all.

There were three corpses inside the building; the firemen had discovered two of them partially buried under piles of linen.
They were all charred and wet, but Cal declared the burns largely superficial. ‘Which will be a big comfort to them,’ he added.

The two partially buried bodies belonged to Frankie Callahan and Gary Fleeting. They were discovered face down, each having
been shot several times.

The third body sat upright, tied to a chair with bungee cord. He looked like some macabre king of fire, surveying the scene
before him from his metal throne.

‘Stab wounds to the thighs, more shallow cuts to the chest, several slashes across either cheek,’ Cal informed them. ‘Looks
to me like they
were torturing him when they received a surprise interruption. Callahan and Fleeting were both shot in the back to bring them
down, then took two each in the back of the head to finish them off. Professional. Execution-style. The guest of honour took
a double tap to the head also, so it wasn’t a rescue mission. We found his wallet in the pocket of a jacket dumped over in
the corner by the back door. According to the driving licence, his name was Thomas Miller. That ring any bells?’

Catherine looked at the blackened and ruined face, exit wounds having blown his features apart. His own mother wouldn’t recognise
him, God help her.

‘Tommy Miller,’ she said. ‘Quintessential Glasgow fly-man. All things to all men.’ She turned to Laura. ‘One might even say
an adept at playing both ends against the middle.’

‘You reckon this was Bob Cairns’ source?’

‘Frankie and Gary here appear to have believed so. I think this may answer the question of whose heroin we confiscated yesterday.
Bad day all round for this pair. Lose three million quid’s worth of drugs in the morning, then get shot dead and set fire
to later on.’

‘Aye. That would fuck me off,’ Laura said, mimicking Callahan’s intense sincerity. ‘It would fuck me right off.’

She looked down with contempt at what was left of Gary Fleeting. Sure didn’t look so pleased with himself now. There would
be no more ‘wee durties’ happy to ‘take it all ways’ from him.

‘Who would have done this?’ she asked. ‘The wholesaler, maybe? Could be the drugs got lifted before payment was made and they
weren’t prepared to just write it off against tax.’

‘Can’t see it. It’s too soon, and too extreme. The amount of heroin Frankie Callahan was moving each year, it would be bad
business sense to react like this. They’d want to work something out, a compensation payment or some other make-good. When
your handover strategy involves leaving the merchandise unattended, you’d have to think there would be some kind of agreement
in place to cover this sort of scenario.’

‘This happened with no questions being asked. Both of them shot in the back before they could even speak, then Tommy here
taken out because he was a witness. Whoever did this just wanted them dead. That suggests a simpler motive.’

That was when Laura noted the significance of the supply firm’s delivery fleet, pointing out two of them parked on the depot’s
forecourt.

They were both dark blue Transit vans.

There had been a dark blue Ford Transit seen entering the lane where Jai McDiarmid was abducted, and a similar vehicle seen
exiting the same place around twelve hours later when his body was dumped. Paddy Steel’s people had been looking for a black
one, but it was hardly a stretch to imagine they would eventually make that small chromatic leap.

Catherine was starting to hear Moira Clark’s voice in her head.

‘The press talk about gang wars, drug wars and turf wars,’ Moira once told her. ‘And gangs, drugs and territory
are
factors in these incidents, but they’re never the primary cause. Round here, folk don’t plan very far ahead when it comes
to violence. They don’t go in for campaigns and strategies. Vendettas, aye. Feuds, absolutely. Tit-for-tat. Grudges. Vengeance.
Always remember: this is Glesca.’

As if she needed any further confirmation of this hypothesis, her phone began to ring, its screen identifying the incoming
caller as Detective Superintendent Dougie Abercorn.

‘I’m not trying to piss in your chips here,’ said Abercorn. ‘I realise you think you’re close to a result on this, a big result,
but I’m getting a very strong vibe that something about this may not be quite what it appears. I’d advise you not to rush
into anything.’

But then he would say that, wouldn’t he, given the way developments had left him floundering. Something not what it appeared?
More like something wasn’t in Abercorn’s script, and he wanted to stall her while he got back on to the right page.

He told her they needed to talk, urgently, and dangled the intrigue carrot by requesting that they do so at his office, ‘for
reasons of discretion’. If she hadn’t been to the High Court the other day, she’d have told him to stick it, but given what
she now knew about Abercorn pulling strings for Callahan, she decided to play along, reckoning that for once she might get
more out of the exchange than he would.

She would confess to a guilty satisfaction at seeing that his office was smaller than hers, but then she realised this was
probably an optical illusion arising from the fact that it was so claustrophobically cluttered.

She was almost disappointed in him. She had this image of Abercorn as being such a sleek operator that his office would be
pristine beyond the point of anal: not a paperclip out of place, not a single stray sheet on his desk, just a state-of-the-art
laptop and a framed photo of a wife and kids that weren’t actually his, just there for show to make him look more human.

‘I’m not rushing into anything,’ she replied. ‘Especially with my prime suspects in the McDiarmid murder currently lying on
slabs down in Cal O’Shea’s laboratory.’ She wrinkled her nose in distaste, realising she could smell on her jacket an odour
unsettlingly redolent of barbecue. ‘Suspects, I would add, that you made a point of trying to ward me away from earlier in
my investigation.’

Abercorn ignored this and directed her attention to a mugshot among the piles of documents scattered about his desk. There
was a
black-and-white computer image clipped to it, showing a CCTV still from yesterday’s robbery.

‘This is the partial shot we’ve been circulating of the guy who robbed Coruscate,’ he told her. ‘He’s been identified as this
man, name of Liam Whitaker. He’s a time-served thief and housebreaker, but the clincher is that he’s a known associate of
Tommy Miller.’

‘We brought him in yet?’

‘He’s gone to ground.’

‘With a hundred and forty grand’s worth of jewellery, no wonder.’

‘Not jewellery,’ said Abercorn. ‘Watches.’

‘What’s the difference?’

‘These extremely upmarket watches are very popular among the higher echelons of the criminal fraternity.’

‘The blingest of the bling?’

‘No, you won’t find them actually wearing one. Way too valuable for that. They
hold
their value; in fact even appreciate sometimes. They’re an investment, for money-laundering purposes. Instead of having two
hundred grand sitting around the house waiting for the Proceeds of Crime Act to come along and swoop it up, they have it sitting
there in the shape of high-class watches worth ten and twenty grand a pop. Collector’s items. And when they want to liquidise
some capital, they can sell them, legitimately.’

‘This isn’t telling me anything new. I had already worked out that Cairns’ tout must have planned to exploit the evacuation.
This just gives us an idea of how much it was worth his while.’

‘He wasn’t only Cairns’ source,’ said Abercorn quietly, almost confessionally. ‘That’s the whole thing. He was our tout too,
one of our CHISes. We were quietly keeping tabs on Callahan’s operation, but unbeknown to us, Miller was double-dealing the
information. Guess it gives new meaning to the term
Covert
Human Intelligence Source.’

Catherine felt her eyes widen and tried not to indulge a sense of perverse satisfaction.

‘Which he knew he could get away with because he had sussed that you weren’t acting on it,’ she said. ‘Not directly, anyway.’

‘Well, that’s one way of looking at it, yes. We didn’t realise until today, and Cairns remains none the wiser.’

‘Is this why you got the charges against Gary Fleeting dropped?’

Abercorn’s mouth flapped silently for half a second, betraying his
disquiet that she should know this. He tried to regroup but she could tell he was rattled.

‘We have to make some unpalatable choices and swallow down some very bitter pills. I know what gets said about us, about me.
Letting Off Criminals Under Secret Trades. Guys like Cairns are everybody’s hero because they swat a few mosquitoes. It takes
a lot more work for a lot fewer plaudits when you’re trying to drain the swamp.’

And there it finally was. But he wasn’t finished.

‘We’re after the big players. Gary Fleeting doesn’t even register, and Frankie Callahan is a speck of dust. Folk here think
the world starts and ends in Glasgow. We’re developing a picture of a massive, highly complex distribution system, not just
UK-wide, but cooperating with forces overseas from Moscow to Marrakech.’

He indicated the mountains of files and documents threatening to collapse and swamp him like those tablecloths swamped the
flames consuming Callahan and Fleeting.

‘Look at this shit. What do people think we do all day? Dream up new ways to get in the way of “real” police work? We’re trying
to map the reach of a supplier who is a major node in this network. I couldn’t afford to have Callahan’s operation derailed
at that point for the sake of putting a nothing like Gary Fleeting away for a five-stretch. What would that achieve?’

‘I think James McDiarmid’s mother might have a forthright take on that question.’

‘That’s making the assumption that Fleeting killed him. I’m just not as convinced as you that this is all quite what it looks
like.’

‘What it looks like to me is pretty simple,’ Catherine retorted. ‘Gary Fleeting killed James McDiarmid over a girl, or who
knows, there was no love lost: maybe the girl was just an excuse. A few days later, Tommy Miller tips off Bob Cairns and he
intercepts Frankie Callahan’s next heroin haul. Frankie and Gary suss the source of the leak and go all
Reservoir Dogs
on Tommy Miller, but while they’re at it, one or more of Paddy Steel’s people shoot them and set fire to the place in revenge
for McDiarmid. What part doesn’t add up?’

Abercorn produced a clear plastic document wallet from a drawer beneath his desk and handed it to her, a white A4 sheet visible
within.

‘It’s the early lab analysis on yesterday’s heroin seizure,’ he said. ‘The stuff’s pure shit.’

‘Pure shit, as in totally uncut?’

‘No, as in shit. Garbage. Worthless. It’s mostly talcum powder and gypsum. There was only enough heroin in it to attract the
sniffer dog.’

Catherine skim-read the report, confirming what he was saying.

‘So this wasn’t Frankie Callahan’s shipment?’

‘There was a shipment due, according to our sources, and previous shipments have been transferred using the left-luggage store
at Central, but clearly that’s not what Bob Cairns intercepted yesterday.’

‘So was it just a decoy left by Tommy Miller to clear the station for the robbery?’

‘I don’t think so. Cairns would have cut his balls off, and Miller would have known that. Miller believed he was giving Cairns
good intel.’

‘But then if no heroin shipment went missing, what were Callahan and Fleeting doing cutting lumps out of Tommy Miller?’

‘I don’t know. Like I said, something here is not what it seems. Add to that what you know about Paddy Steel, who by your
account was out jogging with a bulletproof vest on earlier this week. At a stretch, I can maybe see him sanctioning a revenge
hit on Fleeting, but taking out someone as prominent as Frankie Callahan as well? Why would he want to escalate things to
that level? I think there’s something else going on here, something we’re not aware of.’

There was also, Catherine was sure, something he wasn’t saying either. He had this torn look, like he was unsure whether to
give anything away. Abercorn was normally more poker-faced, but lately the game was threatening to get out of his control.

‘What else do you have?’ she demanded. ‘Come on, you’re standing there like a wean that’s shat his nappy.’

He gave an uncertain sigh, biting his lip for a moment.

‘Okay,’ he conceded. ‘I know you think that we’re always cadging information without giving anything back. I wasn’t withholding
this, I just wasn’t sure it was relevant; I’m still not. Could be unrelated, though working here, you stop believing in coincidences.’