Where the Bodies are Buried (42 page)

‘Compared to the shite we were up against, believe me, we were the good guys. Still are. Nothing was black and white in those
days.’

‘Describe the shades of grey for us then.’

McDade dropped down a gear as he approached the off-slip for Royston and Springburn, taking them north of the city, towards
the Campsies. Jasmine thought she saw his left hand hover around his jacket pocket, and worried for a moment that he might
have a second gun concealed there. Fallan appeared to have noted it too, and didn’t seem concerned.

‘There was an accident,’ McDade said. ‘There was this wee ned, right hard ticket. I knew he had information about a supplier
up in Maryhill, but I was getting nothing out of him. I mentioned it to Bob and he said they could help. They being him, your
dad and Bill. Said they’d talk to him in the back of a van, you know?’

Fallan’s face darkened.

‘I’m familiar with the practice. Saw the aftermath getting dumped out up the Spooky Woods in Gallowhaugh plenty of nights.
Sometimes they could still just about walk. Our taxes in action.’

‘Well, this guy was a tough nut to crack. Too hard and too stubborn and too stupid to give it up. It went too far.’

McDade swallowed, genuinely troubled by the memory of a moment when everything had changed and could never go back to how
it was.

‘We’re left there with a deid guy in the van. What could we do? I knew this place, though. A quarry up the Campsies, only
recently closed down. Lot of loose earth, broken stone, and completely enclosed, nobody to see you. We buried him up there.’

‘What was his name?’

‘McGeoch,’ he said softly. ‘Scotty McGeoch.’

‘He wasn’t mourned much, I take it?’

‘He was reported missing, but the folk missing him had a big list of suspects for who might have got rid of him, and we werenae
on it.’

‘Result,’ said Jasmine drily.

‘It was a nightmare,’ McDade retorted.

‘But a recurring one,’ suggested Fallan.

McDade nodded regretfully.

‘Not long afterwards there was this bastard, and I mean utter bastard, Vinny McLellan. You remember the name?’

‘I knew the family.’

‘Well, he was literally getting away with murder because everybody was too scared to testify against him. Raped a lassie who
had been a witness, just to give her a taste. He was an animal and we put him down. Justice was done. Nobody would have blamed
us, though that didnae stop me blaming myself, for a long time. You stop worrying about being caught, but it’s not an easy
thing to live with. You tell yourself you have to, though, that it’s your burden to carry.’

‘I know you never get away with murder,’ Fallan reflected.

‘Trouble is, it gets easier. You must know that as well. Especially when it’s scumbags you’re dealing with.’

‘What about schoolteachers and chemical statisticians?’ Jasmine demanded.

‘It wasn’t like that,’ McDade said again. ‘There was a guy called Jai Kerrigan, did a lot of work for Tony. Became one of
his inner circle. You remember the name?’

‘I remember he disappeared one day and was never seen again.’

‘It’s not true that we got rid of people for Tony McGill. Just a rumour he allowed to fester. But this was different. It was
in a lot of people’s interests. Jai had gone behind Tony’s back and was trying to stitch up a deal with the Cassidy family
to distribute heroin in Gallowhaugh. The ramifications were huge, and the fallout would have been very bloody: we’d have been
up to our knees in corpses. It was a surgical strike, you could say.’

‘A rational transaction?’ Fallan suggested.

‘It made everybody’s lives a lot easier, and in many cases a lot longer. We took him to the quarry: me, Bill, Bob, your dad
and McGill. He insisted on being there. Fannied about, milking the moment, until your dad ended it. Shot Jai through the head.
But then we heard this scream, a woman’s scream. We looked up – it was this really warm, clear night – and saw these two people
looking back down. Don’t know what they were doing there: shagging maybe. Their car was parked close to the edge of the quarry
but we never noticed anything because the lights and the engine were off and because generally you just don’t look up.’

McDade gave another rueful sigh: another moment he couldn’t change.

They were heading out of Bishopbriggs now, on the road to Kirkintilloch.

‘They ran for their car because they knew we’d seen them, and started it up in a crazy hurry; engine over-revved and the wheels
must have been spinning on the grass. We were panicking. Your dad fired a shot. I mean, fucking one-in-a-million shot. You
could never repeat it if you tried for a month.’

He shook his head, his eyes on the darkness and the cat’s-eyes ahead.

‘Must have blown out a tyre at just the right moment – or just the wrong moment. The car slewed to one side, got yanked like
it was on a rope, and went over the edge. Hit the ground bonnet first, flush-on. Neither of them were wearing seat belts;
probably never had time. They were both dead by the time we had run over to the car. Came straight through the windscreen,
the pair of them, on to solid stone.
Never had an earthly. We’re standing there in a daze, not knowing whether to be appalled or relieved, and that’s when we heard
it: the wean, greetin’.’

‘How did he survive?’ asked Jasmine.

‘Carrycot was wedged in that tight, and the wean was swaddled up in a ton of blankets. He was fine.’

‘Apart from having just been orphaned,’ she observed.

‘Aye, well,’ said McDade grimly. ‘There was nothing we could do about that. Or rather, there was. We could make sure he would
be looked after, given to a good home.’

‘And you looked out for him ever after.’

‘Always. Always. A lot changed that night. You cannae just walk away from a thing like that. Well, some folk can,’ he added,
casting a resentful glance at Fallan. It took a moment for Jasmine to deduce that McDade wasn’t alluding to Glen himself,
but to his father.

‘What happened to the car?’ Fallan asked, presumably with a professional eye for such detail.

‘McGill got it towed away and scrapped. Or more likely salvaged for the back half of a ringer. He’s another one that wasnae
exactly chastened by the event.’

‘And you
were?’
Fallan challenged. ‘That’s how you were able to still shoot gangsters and ex-cops nearly thirty years later?’

‘We
were
chastened. We didn’t walk away from it all right away – your dad and Tony McGill were still baw-deep in each other’s business,
and your dad was a hard man to say no to.’

‘Plus you wouldn’t have wanted him thinking you might turn on him.’

‘No, he knew we were all way too scared of him to do that.’

‘Jolly lucky break for you chaps that somebody murdered him, then.’

‘I know nothing about that,’ McDade said, with a vehemence Jasmine instantly believed. ‘Nothing. But after he died, things
changed. It was a fresh start. I did the job: straight. We all did. No more Wild West stuff, no more backhanders.’

They were well into the countryside now, at least a mile from any source of light pollution. Jasmine could see insects dancing
across the beams of the headlights, on full because there were no vehicles coming the other way. McDade turned off down a
single-track road, its entrance concealed by trees, somewhere you’d need to know really well not to miss in the dark.

‘We did a difficult job and we gave it our all, because we owed that. Put in the hours, put ourselves between the scum and
the psychos and the ordinary folk just trying to get on with it. And we watched guys like Stevie Fullerton and Frankie Callahan
and the Cassidys and Christ knows how many others grow more and more rich and more and more untouchable; more and more
respectable,
while we cleared up the bodies and waded through the misery that kept them all there.’

She felt the gradient immediately. They were heading down, the road bumpy and winding. McDade took it slow, as though worried
he’d snap the axle on a hole or a rut. He’d driven this road before, all right, knew its turns, knew its traps. The full-beam
lights picked out walls of scrub and scree either side, crushed rubble and hard-packed earth beneath the wheels.

‘Meanwhile we’re struggling to pay mortgages and tuition fees and respite care, ending up with most of our pensions and savings
spoken for before we even retire. Bill Raeside gave thirty years, lost his wife to cancer, what does he get? Spent my whole
career fighting this supposed war on drugs, and where are we? More people doing them than ever, more people selling them than
ever, and our seizures are estimated to be about one per cent of what’s actually making it through. Was it worth it? Worth
all our efforts, worth so many folk dying, killing each other? Fuck no. So yeah, we decided we were having something back.
A few more dead lowlifes were barely gaunny tip the scales.’

‘What about dead ex-cops?’ Jasmine asked. ‘Jim Sharp put in the time and the hours you did, lost his marriage and missed out
on half his kids’ lives because he was so dedicated. Where’s his slice of this heroin deal?’

McDade brought the van to a very gentle halt. Jasmine could see sheer walls of stone in the headlights fifty or sixty yards
ahead. There were trees and bushes dotted about the fringes where twenty-seven years ago there must only have been earth and
weeds. She wondered what buried sins their roots had tangled around for anchorage.

‘Jim dredged it all up again,’ McDade said, bitterness overwhelming his regret. ‘Just when we were ready to secure our futures,
he had to go and exhume the past. We’d done our penance, served our time. We spent a quarter of a century paying for what
happened to the Ramsays.’

‘Let’s go and ask them if they forgive you,’ said Fallan.

McDade got out of the car slowly, opening the driver’s-side door with exaggerated care to the point of reluctance, Fallan
keeping an eye
on him as he exited. Then, once he was on his feet, McDade just disappeared, lunging to his right so that he was out of sight
behind the metal walls of the van.

At the same time, the van’s rear door was hauled open and Jasmine was confronted with the sight of a man pointing a single-barrelled
pump-action shotgun at her. He looked wide-eyed and jumpy, which made her twice as scared and all the more compliant when
he ordered her out. Raeside, she estimated: never a trigger man, according to Fallan, but because of that, even more dangerous
under these circumstances than somebody who was comfortable with such a weapon in his hands.

She edged her way out, Raeside stepping backwards away from the rear to give her space to walk into, his eyes always on hers.
The moon was full and the clouds few, the van’s headlights bouncing off the horseshoe walls for further illumination.

Once she took a couple of paces on the dusty earth, she could see Fallan. He had a gun to his head, held by a middle-aged
man who’d look tall next to anybody else. Cairns. He must have appeared at the passenger-side window while Fallan was watching
McDade get out.

She could see a car now, tucked away behind some trees. They’d got here first and lain in wait, knowing this was the destination.
She now understood a further reason why McDade had been driving so slowly into the quarry: it was to give his colleagues time
to get into position.

‘We’ve been polis three decades,’ said Cairns, answering her unspoken question. ‘I mean, don’t get me wrong, you’re not the
worst actress we’ve ever come across, but do you think we don’t recognise a trap when we see one?’

She thought of McDade’s hand hovering over his pocket, wondered if his phone had been in there: an open line, letting Cairns
and Raeside hear what was going on and where they were headed. Maybe they had followed the van discreetly from the start,
waiting out of sight as McDade walked into the office and played his part. And maybe it had been McDade’s task to lead them
here to this place one way or the other.

McDade reappeared at the front of the van, a clear plastic bag in his hand. He approached Fallan cautiously and took hold
of the Beretta he was holding out, gripping it through the cellophane and inverting the bag like he was picking up a dog turd.

Fallan let out a grunt of self-reproach.

McDade handed Raeside the bagged Beretta and took hold of the shotgun, keeping it trained on Jasmine.

‘I take it that was the weapon you used to kill Frankie Callahan, Gary Fleeting and Tommy Miller?’ Fallan asked.

‘Aye,’ said Cairns. ‘And now it’s only your prints that are on it.’

‘Quality fit-up. My old man would have been proud.’

‘Nothing personal, son. Just the way things have worked out.’

‘Naw, sure. Fletcher there was telling me all about it on the road up. I was that moved I was near greetin’. It’s almost an
honour to be part of it.’

‘Don’t saddle up the high horse around us, son,’ Cairns hissed. ‘We’d have a long way to fall before we’d even be in sight
of you.’

‘Prove it, then,’ Fallan said. ‘Let the lassie go. She’s got nothing on you. You can move the bodies. She’s too scared to
do anything. Pay her off: she takes some money, she’s part of this.’

‘I don’t need money,’ Jasmine pleaded. ‘I’ll keep quiet, forget about everything. I just don’t want to die.’

There was a painfully tense silence. At least they were thinking about it.

‘He’s got a point,’ said McDade. ‘If she disappears, it’s another missing person that could lead back to the Ramsays.’

‘What?’ asked Cairns. ‘You think “could lead back to the Ramsays” is less of a risk than leaving somebody out there who knows
everything for fucking definite?’

‘At least don’t kill her until she’s told you about Campbell de Morgan,’ Fallan said. ‘Because that might have a strong bearing
on your decision.’

‘About who?’ Cairns demanded.

‘Campbell de Morgan,’ Jasmine repeated clearly, for the benefit of everybody listening. ‘He was a surgeon, gave his name to
these tiny red spots that can appear on your skin. Do you know what they signify?’