Where the Bodies are Buried (34 page)

‘What kind of gun did he have?’ she asked as Fallan came back around the corner, a cardboard cylinder under his arm. ‘It sounded
weird, quieter than before but as if the sound was right above my head.’

‘I didn’t get a long enough look to ID the piece, but he was using a suppressor.’

‘Is that the same thing as a silencer? What were the noises I heard then?’

‘Sonic boom: bullets breaking the sound barrier. Chose a quiet spot for the hit, put a muffler on the automatic, but he didn’t
know to use
subsonic ammunition. Knew his limitations, though; or at least knew enough about me not to fancy his chances if I was returning
fire.’

‘He knew how to drive better than you, I’ll give him that.’

‘That didn’t escape my notice,’ Fallan said, gazing back thoughtfully towards the tyre marks the Vectra had left during its
handbrake one-eighty.

‘So,’ she ventured, ‘given that you don’t have to explain away having a gun, can we call the police this time?’

‘Are you kidding?’ he replied. ‘I thought you said you noticed how he drove.’

‘What’s that got to do with it?’

‘That
was
the police.’

‘I owe you an apology,’ Fallan told her, as Jasmine brought the Civic to a halt, having reversed into a neat little space
just outside her tenement with practised expertise and not a little relish. It was a small comfort, the reassurance of something
familiar, and she’d take her re-assurance wherever she could get it right now.

It was the first thing Fallan had said since shortly after getting back into the Civic, when he had told her she might as
well go back to her flat as to the hotel, on the grounds that the latter was no safer now. If McLeod could find them, he reasoned,
then so could anyone else in the police.

What he hadn’t said was how he knew that it was cops who were stalking them, beyond the fact that their would-be killer back
outside the map shop had been pretty tasty behind the wheel.

Jasmine wasn’t going to argue. Staying in the hotel was adding to this sense of her life being on hold, that she had been
pulled away from everyday reality into some sort of limbo beyond which her future was unclear. She wanted to stand under her
own shower, even though it alternated between just too hot and just too cold; wanted to wrap her hair and her body in her
own towels, even though they never felt quite dry during the months when the radiators were off. She wanted to eat a microwave-baked
potato and drink half-flat fizzy water from the two-litre value bottle sitting in her kitchen.

‘For what?’ she asked, turning off the engine and withdrawing the keys.

‘Well, not an apology: a clarification. It isn’t you they’ve been trying to kill. It’s me. Though I think you’re the bonus
ball.’

‘How do you know this?’

‘Same reason Jim had pulled out my file and was planning to come looking for me again. Whoever’s behind this knew my father,
and both they and Jim believed I can connect them to this.’

‘Would “this” be one of those UXBs you talked about?’

‘A very big one, yes. Something I said to McLeod came back to me
when I saw that guy pull his handbrake turn. I was being facetious at the time, as I tend to get a bit petulant around self-righteous
polis, but I think that’s what this is actually about: the biggest gang in Glasgow.’

Fallan gathered up the heat-loss scrolls, the OS maps and the magnifiers and followed Jasmine into the close. As she put her
key into the lock of her third-floor flat, she paused a moment to wonder just how badly the world had fallen out of kilter
since the last time she crossed this threshold, that she was now purposely avoiding the police while inviting a self-confessed
murderer into her home.

Fallan made straight for the kitchen and began unrolling photographs on the table, weighing down the corners with cutlery.
Jasmine put on the kettle and was relieved to see that the one-third-full carton of milk in the fridge was still in date.
It had only been three days, but it felt like she’d been gone a month.

‘My dad’s nickname was Nine-Bob,’ Fallan said. ‘Not among the polis: that’s what the villains called him.’

‘Nine-Bob?’

‘As in note. As in “bent as”.’

‘I see.’

‘Except, well, there’s bent polis and there’s bent polis. It’s not an easy job, I’ll admit that. It can be a non-stop war,
in fact, so you have to choose your battles. You fight the fights you can win, and you fight the fights that most need fighting.
You can’t fight on every front, and what the more pragmatic cops soon grasp is that you don’t have to make every thief and
fly-man your enemy. You need treaties. You need alliances.’

‘Some crimes being worse than others,’ Jasmine said.

‘They’d never admit it publicly, but they understand that if they’re cracking down on one thing, then that means a blind eye
might need to get turned to something else. Of course, they’ll complain that the top brass keep changing their minds about
the league table of badness. Back in the early eighties, drugs had just started to top the charts.

‘As I told you, I worked for a gangster in Gallowhaugh by the name of Tony McGill. The Gallowhaugh Godfather, the papers called
him, and he loved that. He saw himself as old-school, liked to indulge in the notion that he had some kind of code of honour
that the new breed didn’t observe. It was a tripartite code. One: don’t hurt non-combatants.’

He gave her an arch look, acknowledging that they’d covered the truth of this one.

‘Two: never grass to the polis; and three: don’t deal drugs. Tony made an ostentatious virtue of observing number three, but
only out of necessity, because he couldn’t source a supplier. Those who could were a threat to his power base. Hence he tended
to be flexible in his interpretation of number two. His golden rule was more along the lines of “don’t let anyone
know
you grass to the polis”.’

‘He informed for your dad?’

‘It was a mutually beneficial arrangement. Above all, polis need results. They need numbers: arrests, seizures, convictions.
Tony helped my dad and his colleagues keep their figures high. He gave him bodies, stashes and weapons that he could present
to his superiors to show what a good job he was doing. But the benefit to Tony wasn’t just in my dad ensuring that the polis
turned a blind eye to his own activities. It was in my dad’s interests to keep Tony top of the heap and his competitors at
bay. I thought that just meant locking them up.’

Fallan stared down at the strips of images. His thoughts seemed far away, perhaps back in the time that was reflected there
in infrared, a map upon which he might well see the sins of his own past picked out in tiny white lines.

‘You should be aware,’ he said quietly, regretfully, ‘that I was once kinda Luke Skywalker to Tony McGill’s Emperor Palpatine.
Difference was, I did take my father’s place at McGill’s right hand, a few years after my father was dead. That’s how I know
about this, although it’s never easy to sort the fact from the fiction. Among criminals, folk are tight-lipped about the big
truths and garrulous with bullshit. Tony didn’t like talking to me about my father, but he let slip a few things, and there
were stories I’d hear from folk who never knew my dad had been in the polis, far less who he was.

‘A recurring rumour was that the polis had got rid of people. Both sides of the law were aware of these stories, and actually
some reckoned it was the polis who started them. If the cops were trying to put the wind up some wee shaver, they’d allude
to this, make him think he had worse things to worry about than a night in the cells, and all of a sudden they got a lot more
cooperation. Similarly it served Tony well to let his enemies believe that he had polis in his pocket who could make you disappear
if you became a problem. Like I said, it’s hard to sift the truth from the bullshit, and I’m not sure I believed any of it
back then, but here’s the thing.’

Fallan gave a burdened sigh and glanced again at the heat-loss photographs, his eyes focused near the top of the sheet.

‘Polis and crooks alike – and your uncle Jim would have known this – when they alluded to this rumour, they always couched
it in the same terms: “a one-way trip to the Campsies”. Now, for two points and a Blue Peter badge, which range of hills would
you have to drive along the foot of to get from the Campsieview Hotel in Lennoxtown to Stephen and Eilidh Ramsay’s house in
Bishopbriggs?’

‘Is he still asleep?’ Stephen asked his wife.

He had rolled the window down, since the Audi’s fan was doing nothing but circulate warm air. The air outside was no cooler,
but it just felt less stuffy inside, and on such a full stomach he’d been wary of feeling sleepy. The problem was, as he knew
from experience, opening the front windows mostly blasted air into the back seat, and he didn’t want Charlie caught in his
own private wind tunnel.

Eilidh leaned around to check, one knee on the passenger seat, her shoulder bumping his on her way past.

‘He’s sound,’ she reported.

‘Just worried about the draught.’

‘It’s mostly above him. Plus the hood of the carrycot is deflecting it.’

‘Noisy, though.’

‘You know Charlie. He could sleep through anything.’

‘He’s a wee star that way,’ Stephen reflected with a smile. ‘Night and day’s difference from his big sister.’

Annie had been murder. It was probably exacerbated by their stumbling incompetence as first-time parents, but they just could
not get that wee lassie to sleep for more than a couple of hours at a time, or stop crying for even a quarter of that, until
she was about three months. She was hardly the most passive-natured wean even now, which had undoubtedly been a factor in
the four-year gap before they had another. Stephen had often worried that a second child would get short shrift, Annie having
eaten substantially into her sibling’s allocation of parental patience before he got there.

Charlie, however, was the kind of baby that probably made other first-timers convince themselves they were parenting geniuses.
He went off to sleep easily, stayed zonked out for hours at a time, and sat there contentedly when he was awake. Stephen would
have said Charlie was happy to just watch the world go by if it wasn’t that he knew his visual acuity was insufficiently developed
for him to see much more
than blurred blobs, but damn if those blurred blobs didn’t seem to hold his attention.

Eilidh had breastfed him in the car before going into the restaurant, their hope being that he would nod off shortly afterwards
and allow them to enjoy their dinner together in peace. Instead, he had lain there in his carrycot on the floor by their table,
gazing in quiet fascination at whatever his little eyes were making out, before finally dropping off sometime around dessert.

‘What did we do to get such a contented baby?’ Eilidh asked, settling back into the seat, her elbow resting on the open window.

‘Maybe we were due it as compensation after the last one. I mean, I love her more than life itself, she’s the apple of my
eye, but there’s no denying she’s a hard shift.’

‘The more complex and high-functioning the machine, the more maintenance it needs,’ Eilidh replied. ‘That’s what I tell myself
anyway. If it turns out she’s a wee dafty, I’ll be feeling very short-changed.’

‘I’ll be feeling astonished. She’s as smart as she is argumentative. Remember that time we were out for a walk and you pointed
out a horse, and she was insistent that it was called a cow.’

‘She was about eighteen months,’ Eilidh recalled, laughing. ‘She’d got confused because they were on facing pages on that
picture book I used to read with her, but there was just no way she was backing down.’

‘She’s going to be a lawyer, that one,’ Stephen said. ‘Either that or the dictator of some small Central American republic.’

‘And what about her wee brother?’

‘Charlie’s in no apparent hurry. He’s watching very carefully before he makes any decisions.’

Stephen glanced over at Eilidh, who was smiling contentedly to herself.

‘It’s been a lovely evening. Just hope your parents haven’t been run rings around.’

‘They love it. They’d have her to keep. But yeah, it’s been just what we needed. Could do with a pint, right enough. Maybe
have a can when we get home. That peppercorn sauce on the steak was lovely, but a bit salty.’

‘Should have drunk more water.’

‘I know, but I get bored of it. Bit of a scunner that you can’t drive when you’re not drinking anyway.’

‘Them’s the rules after a Caesarean.’

She put her hand on his thigh, reaching across the handbrake.

‘It’s not without its benefits, though.’

‘You serious?’ he asked, perhaps just a little too eagerly. It had been a good couple of months after Annie’s birth before
they’d had sex again, though the fact that Eilidh had had an episiotomy was in practice the least of the reasons. For all
Charlie was a good baby, he was still a baby, which meant Eilidh was knackered much of the time, and to be honest so was Stephen,
meaning he had all but forgotten that this time there was no physical restriction why they couldn’t.

Eilidh responded by drawing her hand further along his thigh towards his groin.

‘You sure you never drank anything?’ he asked.

‘I’m a bundle of hormones,’ she said, giggling. ‘Far more disinhibiting.’

Stephen stepped on the accelerator for a moment.

‘Right. If we get a speeding ticket, it’s your fault. I cannae wait to get you home.’

‘And I don’t think I can wait that long.’

‘What?’

‘Look where we are,’ she said. ‘Must be two minutes away. Why don’t we, just for old times’ sake?’

‘But Charlie’s on the back seat. I don’t want to move him. It’s always murder wedging that thing in there.’

‘Not on the back seat. It’s a warm night. There’s a spare blanket. Like we used to.’

‘We’ll be home in twenty minutes.’

‘Hormones, remember? I might have changed my mind in twenty minutes.’