Where the Bodies are Buried (33 page)

‘I’m okay,’ she said, the shock having passed and long since been replaced by outrage.

‘Yeah,’ Sunderland mused. ‘I was okay after getting shot at as well; bank robbery back in ninety-seven. Next day somebody
tapped me on the shoulder in a queue at the supermarket and within seconds I had them in an armlock, pinned to the floor.
It was a sixty-five-year-old woman who was trying to tell me another till had opened up. I don’t know what Samira said, but
I’m prescribing you a pint for relief of post-traumatic stress.’

‘I think Laura’s in more need of some TLC than I am. Why don’t you ask her?’

‘I already did. She’s coming too, as soon as the doc’s finished with her.’

‘I’m not going anywhere until they bring in that bastard Fallan, which I can’t believe hasn’t happened by now. Christ, how
hard can it be? We know where he’s staying and we know what he’s driving.’

‘Not going to happen,’ Sunderland said flatly. ‘He hasn’t been found because your orders were countermanded. By me,’ he added,
folding his arms.

‘Countermanded? Why?’

‘That information is strictly on a need-to-be-drinking basis. Come on, get your coat. It’s not as if you’re driving, is it?’

*   *   *

Sunderland set down their drinks, neither of which stayed on the table for a full second. Catherine took an immodest few gulps
of beer, feeling just a little better by the time she had swallowed.

She knew Sunderland was doing this as a courtesy, an acknowledgment of what they had been through. The likelihood was that
he hadn’t even been working today, which added to his personal solicitousness and the gravity with which such an incident
was treated. What didn’t add up, however, was his admitting he had blocked her order to bring in the chief suspect.

‘So I gather you had a wee encounter with the not-so-late Glen Fallan,’ he said.

‘An encounter?’ Catherine snapped back. ‘That’s not the word I’d use.’

‘I was talking about your breakfast meeting.’

‘Oh. Well, forgive me, Graeme, if my impressions were superseded by more recent events. Why is he not being huckled, right
now?’

Sunderland took a long pull on his pint, a little froth adhering to his top lip. Catherine vaguely recalled a moustache misadventure
of a decade back. It hadn’t suited, though in Catherine’s opinion the list of men it did was about the same length as the
list of great Scottish cricketers. The guys in Drew’s office all grew them for ‘Movember’ last year, but Catherine did a deal
to match her husband’s sponsorship if he didn’t join in.

‘Because it wasn’t him.’

‘Wasn’t him? He was in that girl’s car. And he’d taped over the plates too, my own stupid fault for letting slip it was how
I’d found them.’

Sunderland shook his head.

‘On a wee hunch, I made some inquiries as soon as I heard. Turns out a red M-reg Honda Civic was stolen from an address in
Rutherglen overnight. Jasmine Sharp’s motor is an N. That’s why the plate was taped. It wasn’t Glen Fallan shooting at you
this afternoon, but somebody wanting you to think it was.’

‘The theft of a red Civic isn’t hard proof. It could be coincidence.’

‘This is why you need a drink, Catherine. Get the shock and anger out your system and think rationally. It would be a
hell
of a coincidence.’

‘Okay, so what was the rational basis for this wee hunch?’

‘I knew Glen Fallan. Not well, but well enough to know he’s never made an attempt on anyone’s life.’

‘You’re denying he was a killer? He all but admitted as much to my face.’

‘I’m not denying it at all. I’m saying I know it wasn’t Glen Fallan shooting at you today, because you’re still alive. Glen
Fallan doesn’t make
attempts.
If he wanted you dead, we wouldn’t be having this conversation. Come on, Catherine: a guy pulls up behind you in the street,
in broad daylight, in the same kind of motor you already associate with him, and starts shooting holes in your car. Not exactly
discreet.’

Catherine caught up.

‘The shooter wanted to be seen,’ she said.

‘The word is out that Fallan’s back in town, and he was never short of enemies. You spoke to him this morning. How did he
seem? What did you ask him about?’

‘Seem? Big. Guarded. Scary. The strong, violent type. I asked him about Callahan, Fleeting, McDiarmid, Miller. He said he
didn’t know who they were.’

‘Did you believe him?’

‘Yes,’ she admitted. ‘I pretended to him that I didn’t, but it was obvious. He’s here about something else. He’s with this
young girl, as you know, Jasmine Sharp. Works for her uncle’s PI outfit, except, get this,
he’s
gone missing. Retired cop. Jim Sharp. That ring any bells?’

‘Yeah, he was CID over in Clydebank. Good cop. A workaholic, though. No surprise he went private. Guys like that
can’t
retire. And he’s gone missing?’

‘Apparently. She reported it Monday. Says Fallan’s helping her look for him. He’s going by the name Tron Ingrams these days.
I can’t work out what his angle is, but then I know next to nothing about him.’

‘Well, unless you work out what his game is, and unless it affects you directly, I wouldn’t be in a hurry to get involved.
Tread very lightly, and make no assumptions about him: positive or negative. Anybody with a past like his who’s subsequently
stayed off our radar for more than twenty years is either very much reformed or even more dangerous.’

‘There was one thing he mentioned,’ she remembered. ‘Think he was messing with my head, but he made reference to “the biggest
gang in Glasgow”. Said I should ask somebody older about it. Do you know who that is?’

‘Aye,’ said Sunderland, his features suddenly that little bit more alert. ‘Us.’

Jasmine found a space for the car across the road from the little row of shops at the end of the cul-de-sac, occupying the
ground floor of a corner-block tenement. The parking was denoted by white lines at thirty degrees to the kerb, angling the
vehicles like hands of cards either side of the street. It had been rendered a dead end by a phalanx of concrete bollards
terminating its decades-old connection to the adjoining road and necessitating a circuitous approach to reach it. It was a
mostly residential neighbourhood, hence the paucity of free spaces and the greater paucity of life on the street. It was not
so far from Jasmine’s lately unoccupied flat, in a part of the South Side where you did find these isolated wee pockets of
shops like they had broken off from the glacier of the city centre and drifted away.

They were headed for a map supplier, as directed by Fallan. Jasmine couldn’t help but wonder at the irony that he had searched
for the shop using his mobile phone, and then satellite-navigated to the place using the same device, but had assured her
that the humble artefact of non-digital printed cartography was not yet redundant. They were going to pick up Ordnance Survey
maps of the Greater Glasgow area, drawn to a scale that was as close a match as they could find to the heat-loss photographs.
They were also going to purchase a couple of magnifiers and some highlighter pens, then commence what could prove to be the
world’s longest game of spot-the-difference.

Jasmine was not heartened by the information that the students hired by Scottish Gas to analyse the surveys for heat loss
were typically employed for eight weeks, though the number of locations they had to identify was considerably greater. Fallan
reckoned this would take only a couple of days. It would be painstaking, eye-straining and stultifyingly tedious, but Jasmine
was still grateful for the project, as it represented purpose, progress and a greater distance before they ran out of things
they could do. After that lay a place she feared, a place where she was alone without her mum, without her uncle, without
a job, without a goal and without any money.

‘You okay?’ Fallan asked as they crossed the street. ‘You seem kind of spooked.’

‘It’s the idea of all those bodies glowing. I can’t get it out of my head.’

Decomposition, McGranahan had explained: the chemical reactions involved in the gradual breakdown of the bodies gave off heat,
enough to be detectable to the infrared camera through six feet of earth and several thousand more of clear air.

Jasmine checked her stride, walking a little faster in response to the sound of an approaching car, a silver Vectra. It would
have to slow down anyway, she was aware, as it was a no-through-road, but drivers could be complete dicks, like when they
wouldn’t slow to let you out even as they approached a red light. He’d be heading back again
tout de suite
too, as there were no spaces to be had.

‘It gets worse,’ Fallan told her. ‘Some of those cemeteries had been closed for decades when that survey was done, yet they
were only glowing a wee bit dimmer than the rest. It seems your light really does shine longer after death than it does while
you’re alive – but you can only see it in infrared, and it helps if you’re flying in an aero—’

He stopped mid-word, something about him instantly altered to a heightened condition of alertness, like an animal that had
sniffed something on the breeze.

Jasmine was aware of his head turning, then a microsecond later of being gripped around her waist and thrust forward between
two of the angularly parked cars. She tumbled to the ground, clattering her elbow against the side of a Peugeot and her knee
on the tarmac. As she fell, she heard something crack in the air above her head, and the simultaneous sound of an object embedding
itself in the stone of the tenement alongside, dust puffing out in a wispy breath from the resultant hole.

She was being shot at, again, and unlike most things in life, it didn’t get any easier from experience. The fear, in fact,
was cumulative, as though everything she had felt in Northumberland was instantly recalled and everything she felt now was
supplementary to it. She felt frozen on her hands and knees, terrified to move, terrified not to.

Another crack followed, accompanied by a shattering of glass and a second impact in the stone of the building, then another,
and another.

Why was this happening to her? She hadn’t done anything wrong.
Where were the police? Where was her mummy? Where was Uncle Jim? Where was Fallan?

He was gone, no longer alongside her, but she could hear him scrambling close by, and from her perspective, sprawled on the
deck, she saw that he was one car away.

Daring to look behind her, she could see the wheels and skirts of the Vectra that had been heading towards the bollards, now
sitting stationary, engine idling.

The shooting stopped, but Jasmine’s relief lasted only a second and a half before she recognised the sound of the Vectra’s
door being thrust open. The gunman was about to get out and come looking for them.

Before he could, she saw Fallan suddenly spring from the balls of his feet, diving towards the pavement, where he rolled beyond
the last of the parked cars into clear space. He came up into a low crouch, both hands raised, a length of metal glinting
between them in the late-afternoon sunlight.

She waited for the blasts, but they never came. The only bang was that of the door slamming closed again, followed by a whine
from the Vectra’s engine as it commenced a high-speed reverse. Jasmine followed its progress from an ant’s-eye view, seeing
its wheels and chassis retreat backwards for a few seconds, before a squeal of rubber and a new gunning of the engine accompanied
a precise one-hundred-and-eighty-degree spin, allowing the car to make good its escape up the forward gears. It was the manoeuvre
Fallan had attempted in his Land Rover on Wednesday, but this time executed perfectly.

She stayed down until she was sure the Vectra was definitely gone, by which time Fallan had made his way over. She saw a flash
of metal once more as he slipped a hand into an inside pocket.

As he helped her to her feet, she looked around, to the shops, to the junction cut off by the bollards and to the other side
of the road it abutted. She could see a woman walking a dog about forty yards down on the right, well out of sight of where
the action had been, but there was nobody else around: nobody running to ask if they were okay, nobody cowering in doorways,
nobody calling the cops on their mobiles or, more likely, recording the thing on video. A cul-de-sac wasn’t the ideal place
for a drive-by, but that apart, the gunman had chosen his moment perfectly. Once again, it was as though it hadn’t happened,
the world obliviously getting on with itself.

This time, however, she was unambiguously grateful for Fallan’s intervention.

‘So you did lie to me,’ she said. ‘About not bringing a gun. Please ignore me if I say anything daft like that again.’

‘No,’ he corrected her. ‘I said I wouldn’t lie to you, and then you didn’t ask. I didn’t bring a gun.’

He reached to the inside pocket and produced his phone.

‘What, can you get a bullets app for that thing now?’

‘I guessed I was dealing with more shite-bag than shooter. Didn’t like it up them on Wednesday and I figured it was one of
the same folk. Gave him the impression I had a gun and he skited pronto.’

Jasmine was still shaking as Fallan led her into the map shop, though she was unsure whether it was a good or a bad thing
that she felt she was recovering quicker than when she’d been shot at three days ago. She didn’t feel like she was going to
vomit, albeit she hadn’t been spun around in a Land Rover on this occasion, on top of dodging the hot lead. Maybe it was indeed
true of this as it was of everything: there’s nothing like the first time.

She exited the shop before him, stopping around the corner to examine the bullet holes while he paid for the maps and the
magnifiers. They’d been lucky the Corsa wasn’t alarmed, as it had lost its windscreen as well as both driver’s-side windows.

She put a finger to the tenement wall, feeling the need to prove to herself that it had been real, the events of only a few
minutes ago already threatening to fade into unreality via some self-defence mechanism in her subconscious. She felt the edges
of the holes, disappearing deep into stone that had weathered more than a century of Glasgow winters, shuddering a little
as she thought of where else the bullets might have ended up embedded.