Where the Bodies are Buried (7 page)

Raeside wrinkled his nose, a sour look instantly coming over his face.

‘Abercorn,’ he said with a scornful hint of laughter and a slight shake of the head, simultaneously an answer to her question
and an indication that he found the very notion absurd.

She stiffened a little inside, as she did any time a colleague mentioned Abercorn to her in less-than-respectful terms, since
their scorn bore a tacit acknowledgement of her having been overlooked for his position. Unfortunately, Abercorn was seldom
referred to in anything
but
less-than-respectful terms, so every mention of his name was like a little aftertaste of the disappointment and shame she
had felt when she didn’t get the nod.

Abercorn was the head of the Organised Crime Unit Special Task Force, set up almost two years ago specifically to target gang-related
criminal operations. He had been preferred to Catherine for the post despite her greater experience, higher conviction rate
and then superior rank. All of the reasons she considered herself the better-qualified candidate therefore became the reasons
her rejection felt all the more humiliating, and it served to remind her that her colleagues were aware of that humiliation
whenever they disparaged Abercorn.

The Organised Crime Unit Special Task Force was often decried as having a name longer than its list of convictions. It was
officially known as Locust, a quasi-acronym that ignored the final F and added an L at the front in order to accommodate a
word invoking parasites and pestilence, presumably to describe its targets rather than itself. This being the Glesca polis,
the cops weren’t long in coming up with their own alterations and definitions. It was frequently claimed that the missing
F was to represent the complete absence of force the unit had proven to wield, while the redundant, makeweight
L was variously suggested to stand for lame, lazy, lackadaisical, lamentable and languorous, among others. However, the most
damning slight in circulation was in the ‘backronym’ that had been coined to suggest what Locust really stood for: Letting
Off Criminals Under Secret Trades.

‘We want bodies for this,’ Raeside said. ‘Not bargaining chips.’

‘So who do you reckon? Frankie Callahan? Stevie Fullerton? The Cassidys? Maybe the McLennans?’

‘Take your pick. It’s been brewing, though. Anybody could see that.’

‘They’ve all taken some hits lately,’ Catherine agreed. ‘Trouble is, we put a few of them away and the others just think that
means there’s more of the pie up for grabs. Could be a show of strength by somebody to demonstrate that they’re back off the
canvas. Could equally be the strongest of them making a play while their rivals are vulnerable.’

‘If it’s the latter, I’d be looking at Callahan,’ Raeside suggested. ‘Word is he’s the only one whose supply lines haven’t
been disrupted in recent months. If he fancied muscling in to Gallowhaugh, now would be the time. The former is the nightmare
scenario. Wounded animals taking bites out of each other. That’s when you get weans hit by stray bullets and folk stabbed
because they look like somebody else. Either way, we need to nail this down quick with proper police work: show these bampots
that we’re in charge before it escalates.’

Catherine glanced again at what used to be James McDiarmid. Raeside was right: the aftershocks would be seismic. Nothing said
‘game on’ quite like somebody abducting your right-hand man, beating him into submission, blowing his brains out and then
bringing his corpse right back home for everyone to hear about. Paddy Steel would have to strike back.

Raeside said they wanted bodies for this. It was polis-speak for arrests, but either way, from where Catherine was standing,
bodies were guaranteed.

Jasmine was only moments in the door of Jim’s office when she was beset by a shuddering sense of unease.

Out of nowhere, she went from her usual Monday-morning condition of mild anxiety at how she might screw up today, mixed with
the growing comfort she was starting to enjoy at having a wage-earning purpose to her days and weeks, to being blindsided
by a quite startling feeling of certainty that something was very wrong.

It wasn’t transient or merely some disturbing passing thought: it had physical symptoms, like she’d just received an injection
or eaten something to which she was allergic. She felt a twisting, hollow sensation in her stomach like she was inside a falling
elevator, all her hairs prickling on her skin and a frightening awareness of being fragile and vulnerable. She had an urge
to lock the door, offset by an equally unfocused concern that whatever was scaring her might be inside the office.

She immediately began trying to rationalise and deconstruct it, knowing from experience that finding sources for this sudden
onset of fear would help it to dissipate. The first, albeit the least specific, explanation was simply recurrence. Since Mum
had died, she had been prone to these sudden feelings of the floor having dropped from under her, accompanied by an acute,
vertiginous insecurity deriving from having nobody left to turn to. Once in a while, some part of her remembered that she
was all alone, that the person she had always been able to rely upon in times of anxiety, of trouble, of precisely this kind
of scared vulnerability, was no longer there. It was as though the sense of devastation had been so large that her mind would
only admit a little of it at a time. One of the things it had deferred was the fear, but the valve was loose from pressure,
and every so often there was a leak that left her feeling this way.

On this occasion, it was more than mere insecurity. She was rattled by a profound fear that something had happened to Jim.
It was absurd, she knew: totally unsubstantiated. In fact, it was probably just what her greater fear had latched on to: with
Mum gone, he was the person
she could least do without. The fact that he wasn’t in yet this morning had sparked off a paranoid dread of losing him too.

He was usually here by this time, which must have piqued her sense of something being askew. Jasmine had keys to the office,
but she had never had to open the place first thing in the morning. Jim was always there before her, even though he lived
on the other side of the river. He usually closed the place too, returning to write up all the paperwork no matter how late
or how far the field work had stretched. Perhaps there was heavy traffic; there was work starting at the Kingston Bridge to
do with the M74 extension, so maybe that had led to increased volume through the tunnel, which was Jim’s preferred route across
the river from Hyndland.

No,
that
was it, she thought. Not traffic: Jim’s flat. He wasn’t coming into the office this morning because he was waiting in to
film the not-so-disabled Robert Croft showing up with all his gear in expectation of carrying out a plastering job.

She worried for a moment that she was supposed to be there too, but then remembered Jim telling her it was safest she stay
at the office in case Croft got nasty. Despite her excitement at successfully drawing their subject into a sting, she had
all but forgotten about the subsequent arrangements, because it had been several days ago and she hadn’t spoken to Jim since
Thursday. He had told her he didn’t need her to come in on Friday as he was working on something ‘a wee bit sensitive’ that
for reasons of discretion he had to handle alone. Jasmine had tried not to interpret this as actually meaning that it was
something he couldn’t afford to have her ballsing up, and gratefully welcomed the prospect of an extra day of doing anything
other than blundering around feeling hopelessly out of her depth.

She felt a vibration through the handles of her bag a moment before her ringtone began to play, and reached in to retrieve
her phone, expecting to see Jim’s name on the screen. She didn’t: it was an unrecognised number.

Her voice was a little shaky and quiet as she answered, still feeling the effects of being spooked. They didn’t ease at hearing
Robert Croft on the other end, and in fact worsened as she learned that the plasterer was calling because he had turned up
to the address she had given him only to find there was nobody at home to let him in.

She felt her previous relief contract into a hard little knot. There’s nothing worse for your peace of mind than an irrational
spooky fear
being given substantive grounds by unfolding events. At least if it turned out she had a sixth sense, it would constitute
one
thing that might qualify her for being an investigator.

‘I’m really sorry,’ she replied. ‘It’s my uncle … There’s been an emergency and I’ve had to come here and I forgot about
waiting in for you.’

Croft’s tone changed from challenge to concern.

‘Is everything okay?’

‘I don’t know yet,’ she answered honestly.

‘Well, don’t worry about me. You just let me know when would suit. I take it the job’s still on?’ he enquired, obviously thinking
of that thousand-pound bait she’d dangled.

‘Yes. I’ll give you a ring in a few days. I’m really sorry.’

‘Never bother. I hope everything, you know.’

‘Yeah,’ she said, hanging up.

He had bought it, which she could hardly congratulate herself upon, as it was something of a Method performance. Trembly voice,
near-apologetic absence of certainty, authentic sense of events having overtaken her schedule. No acting required.

It was one thing Jasmine forgetting that Jim was supposed to be waiting in to film Croft, but there was no way it would slip
Jim’s mind. Unless
his
schedule had been overtaken by events, perhaps on another investigation, more important than this. Maybe that was it: there
was a late-breaking development on whatever he’d been working on over the past few days and he had decided that the tape of
Croft accepting the job would be good enough for Hayden-Murray.

Her mobile still gripped in her left hand, she speed-dialled Jim. The ringing tone pulsed in her ear for a few seconds, then
stopped for a brief moment, just long enough for her to excitedly anticipate the sound of his voice. Unfortunately, the ringing
tone resumed after its short pause, accompanied by the trilling of the office phone, which she was on her way to answer when
she realised she would be talking to herself. Jim’s phone was on divert back to here.

He could be on a follow, she reasoned. A van surveillance could sometimes require silence. If the subject was walking past
or out in his garden, you didn’t want him realising that the van with the tinted windows parked close by was actually occupied
by a PI with a video camera. Had she seen the van parked outside on her way in? She couldn’t remember.

She walked out of the office and looked through the window in the back stairs. Jim’s van was sitting in its usual spot in
the car park. Shit.

She returned to the office, where she was acutely conscious of its emptiness, its unaccustomed stillness. She began to deduce
that this was what had unsettled her in the first place. It wasn’t the first time she’d been in here alone: she’d manned the
phones a couple of times and been sent back to retrieve equipment or paperwork (possibly as a means of getting her out of
the way for a couple of hours while Jim calmed himself or repaired the damage she had just done). The place hadn’t felt like
this then, though. Something was different. She wasn’t simply conscious of being the only person here: she was subconsciously
aware of being the only person who had been here in days.

Whenever you returned to a place, there were changes that let you know instinctively that someone else had been there, things
that you didn’t even consciously register but which your brain took note of and compared to its equally subliminal record
of your last visit. It could be big things, like an item of furniture having moved or tea cups having been rinsed out at the
sink; more subtle changes, such as which folders were open on a desk, which newspapers were in the bin; maybe even right down
to the water-level indicator on the kettle. Rather like when she had first returned to her flat on Victoria Road after having
temporarily gone back to live with Mum, in the office that morning she had been confronted by a sense of absolute stasis,
of nothing having changed.

Despite taking her on ostensibly to allay his workaholism, she knew that Jim still usually put in a few hours over most weekends.
A quick look around showed her that the bin hadn’t been emptied and the most recent newspaper in it was Wednesday’s.

She looked at the files and paperwork on his desk while she waited for his computer to boot up. Jim logged everything by date
and time, in keeping with decades of police work. Nothing had been added since Thursday. It was possible he hadn’t been back
here since taking off and leaving her to complete the Croft follow in the West End.

She ran a file search by date on the PC. No files had been accessed more recently than Thursday morning. The cold, unambiguous
certainty of the digital figures seemed to lock in her sense of dread.

Time passed slowly, every minute stretched out like an unceasingly extending corridor in a dream. The hollow feeling of restless
worry
refused to fade, nor did she have any means of distracting herself from her concerns. Without Jim to tell her what to do,
there was nothing to occupy her, no autonomous tasks to get on with while she waited for the phone to ring or the sound of
his feet on the stairs.

Her loneliness was exacerbated by the burden of being the only person who suspected that something might be wrong, but she
knew she ought not to phone Jim’s family in case she worried them unnecessarily. Perhaps there was a simple explanation she
had overlooked, some message that maybe hadn’t been passed on.

Her resolve on that score held out until about lunchtime, after a call from Harry Deacon at Galt Linklater. Jim hadn’t dropped
in at eleven as arranged to discuss the details of a new subcontract they had for him. That was as concrete as the evidence
from the PC. Galt Linklater was Jim’s biggest source of work, and no late-breaking lead, no silent surveillance or any other
professional circumstance would cause him to blank a meeting there without getting in touch to say why.